What is unfolding right now in California—with hundreds of Marines deployed domestically; thousands of National Guard troops federalized; and military weapons, tactics and equipment on full display—is intended to intimidate, distract and discourage us from pulling back the curtain on the reality of the self-serving corruption, grift, graft, overreach and abuse that have become synonymous with his Administration.

Don’t be distracted. Don’t be intimidated. Don’t be sidelined by the spectacle of a police state.

This is yet another manufactured crisis fomented by the Deep State.

When Trump issues a call to “BRING IN THE TROOPS!!!” explaining to reporters that he wants to have them “everywhere,” we should all be alarmed.

This is martial law without a formal declaration of war.

This heavy-handed, chest-thumping, politicized, militarized response to what is clearly a matter for local government is yet another example of Trump’s disregard for the Constitution and the limits of his power.

Political protests are protected by the First Amendment until they cross the line from non-violent to violent. Even when protests turn violent, constitutional protocols remain in place to safeguard communities: law and order must flow through local and state chains of command, not from federal muscle.

By breaking that chain of command, Trump is breaking the Constitution.

Deploying the military to deal with domestic matters that can—and should—be handled by civilian police, despite the objections of local and state leaders, crosses the line into authoritarianism.

When someone shows you who they are, believe them.

In the span of a single week, the Trump administration is providing the clearest glimpse yet of its unapologetic, uncompromising, corrupt allegiance to the authoritarian Deep State.

These two events—the federalization of the National Guard deployed to California in response to protests and the president’s lavish, taxpayer-funded military parade in the nation’s capital—bookend the administration’s unmistakable message: dissent will be crushed, and power will be performed.

Trump governs by force (military deployment), fear (ICE raids, militarized policing), and spectacle (the parade).

This is the spectacle of a police state. One side of the coin is militarized suppression. The other is theatrical dominance. Together, they constitute the language of force and authoritarian control.

Yet this is more than political theater; it is a constitutional crisis in motion.

As we have warned before, this tactic is a familiar one.

In times of political unrest, authoritarian regimes often invoke national emergencies as a pretext to impose military solutions. The result? The Constitution is suspended, civilian control is overrun, and the machinery of the state turns against its own people.

This is precisely what the Founders feared when they warned against standing armies on American soil: that one day, the military might be used not to defend the people, but to control them.

It is a textbook play from the authoritarian handbook, deployed with increasing frequency under Trump. The optics are meant to intimidate, broadcast control, and discourage resistance before it even begins.

Thus, deploying the National Guard in this manner is not just a political maneuver—it is a strategic act of fear-based governance designed to instill terror, particularly among vulnerable communities, and ensure compliance.

America is being transformed into a battlefield before our eyes.

Militarized police. Riot squads. Black uniforms. Armored vehicles. Pepper spray. Tear gas. Stun grenades. Crowd control and intimidation tactics.

This is not the language of freedom. This is not even the language of law and order.

This is the language of force.

This transformation is not accidental—it’s strategic. The government now sees the public not as constituents to be served but as potential combatants to be surveilled, managed, and subdued. In this new paradigm, dissent is treated as insurrection, and constitutional rights are treated as threats to national security.

What we are witnessing today is also part of a broader setup: an excuse to use civil unrest as a pretext for militarized overreach.

We saw signs of this strategy in Charlottesville, Virginia, where police failed to de-escalate and at times exacerbated tensions during protests that should have remained peaceful. The resulting chaos gave authorities cover to crack down—not to protect the public, but to reframe protest as provocation and dissent as disorder.

Then and now, the objective wasn’t to preserve peace and protect the public. It was to delegitimize dissent and cast protest as provocation.

It’s all part of an elaborate setup by the architects of the Deep State. The government wants a reason to crack down, lock down, and bring in its biggest guns.

This is how it begins.

Trump’s use of the military against civilians violates the spirit—if not the letter—of the Posse Comitatus Act, which is meant to bar federal military involvement in domestic affairs. It also raises severe constitutional questions about the infringement of First Amendment rights to protest and Fourth Amendment protections against warrantless search and seizure.

Modern tools of repression compound the threat. AI-driven surveillance, predictive policing software, biometric databases, and fusion centers have made mass control seamless and silent. The state doesn’t just respond to dissent anymore; it predicts and preempts it.

While boots are on the ground in California, preparations are underway for a military spectacle in Washington, D.C.

At first glance, a military procession might seem like a patriotic display. But in this context, it is not a celebration of service; it is a declaration of supremacy. It is not about honoring troops; it is about reminding the populace who holds the power and who wields the guns.

This is how authoritarian regimes govern—through spectacle.

By sandwiching a military crackdown between a domestic troop deployment and a showy parade, Trump is sending a unified message: This is about raw, unchecked, theatrical power. And whether we, the people, will accept a government that rules not by consent, but by coercion.

The Constitution was not written to accommodate authoritarian pageantry. It was written to restrain it. It was never meant to sanctify conquest as a form of governance.

We are at a crossroads.

Governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed. Strip away that consent, and all that remains is conquest through force, spectacle, and fear.

As I point out in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, if we allow the language of fear, the spectacle of dominance, and the machinery of militarized governance to become normalized, then we are no longer citizens of a republic—we are subjects of a police state.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by John W. Whitehead and Nisha Whitehead.

One of seven people transferred to mainland France almost a year ago, following the May 2024 riots in New Caledonia, has been allowed to return home, a French court has ruled.

Frédérique Muliava, a former Congress staffer, was part of a group of six who were charged in relation to the riots.

Under her new judicial requirements, set out by the judge in charge of the case, Muliava, once she returns to New Caledonia, is allowed to return to work, but must not make any contact with other individuals related to her case and not take part in any public demonstration.

• READ MORE:  La militante indépendantiste Frédérique Muliava autorisée à quitter l’Hexagone
• Other Kanaky New Caledonia reports

Four days after their arrest in Nouméa in June 2024, Muliava and six others were transferred to mainland France aboard a chartered plane.

They were charged with criminal-related offences (including being a party or being accomplice to murder attempts and thefts involving the use of weapons) and have since been remanded in several prisons across France pending their trial.

In January 2025, the whole case was removed from the jurisdiction of New Caledonia-based judges and has since been transferred back to investigating judges in mainland France.

This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

The image was captioned, “Lol” Salam, Comrade,” a pun on communists’ usage of the greeting “Lal Salam” or red salute.

“Lol” Salaam, Comrade!! https://t.co/WkzYoHIOUQ pic.twitter.com/ngYyVKYCll

— BJP Karnataka (@BJP4Karnataka) May 23, 2025

On May 21, 2025, the District Reserve Guard unit of the Chhattisgarh police, a special force created to combat insurgency in Chhattisgarh, carried out an anti-Naxal operation in the state’s Narayanpur district. 27 Maoists, including the general secretary of the banned Communist Party of India (Maoist), Nambala Keshav Rao, alias Basavaraju, were neutralised in this. Named Kagar, this operation sought to neutralise Maoist presence in the  Karreguttallu hill range along the Telengana-Chhattisgarh border region. 

The May 23 post by the BJP handle was in response to a statement by the Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist) Liberation (@cpimlliberation) condemning “the cold-blooded extra-judicial killing of the General Secretary of CPI(Maoist) Comrade Keshav Rao and other Maoist activists and Adivasis in Narayanpur-Bijapur.” Calling it a massacre, the communist party said, that “celebratory” posts by Indian leaders made it clear that the state was carrying out “an extra-judicial extermination campaign and taking credit for killing citizens and suppressing Adivasi protests against corporate plunder and militarisation in the name of combating Maoism.” The party was likely referring to X posts by Shah and Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who hailed the Maoists’ deaths as a “landmark achievement in the battle to eliminate Naxalism”.

In the past 16 months, under the BJP’s governance, more than 400 alleged Maoist insurgents have been killed in Chhattisgarh, a state with a significant Adivasi population.

While the two parties and their ideologues are on two opposing ends on how they view the Naxal movement, the troubling part is that BJP Karnataka’s X post used a trope—the cauliflower—that is a horrifying reminder of a genocide.

Rooted in Bloodshed

To an unsuspecting viewer, Shah holding a cauliflower on the tombstone of the Naxal movement might strike as odd, but harmless. However, the cauliflower here is a deep-rooted symbol of bloodshed. It is a reference to the 1989 Bhagalpur riots in which over a 100 Muslims were killed.

Over 35 years ago, a series of brutal riots broke out in the city of Bhagalpur, Bihar. In October, 1989, rumours of Hindu students being murdered by Muslim mobs amid the cultural furore of the Ram Janmabhoomi movement began spreading. This gave way to a protracted period of organised communal violence, lasting around two whole months. The Bhagalpur riots, as they are called, saw more than 250 villages razed to the ground, leaving well over a thousand people dead, majority of them Muslims.

But something far more sinister took place in Bhagalpur’s Logain village. On October 27, 1989, a mob, allegedly led by police officer Ramchander Singh, killed 116 Muslims. Their bodies were buried, and cauliflower saplings were sown on their mass graves to cover up the killings.

Nearly 25 days later, on November 21, the then-Additional District Manager of Bhagalpur, AK Singh, on a relief mission to a nearby village, overheard conversations between villagers about cauliflower plants sprouting over buried dead bodies and unearthed the massacre. Another account suggests that Singh found out that bodies may be buried under the ground because he saw vultures hovering above the cauliflower plantations.

For more details on the happenings in 1989 and what triggered the clashes, read our earlier report here. You can also read the Bhagalpur Riot Inquiry Commission Report here.

The Cauliflower Imagery

While the Bhagalpur riots took place over three decades ago, in the past few years, the cauliflower symbolism has found its way through graphical representations, imagery and memes. Each time, a minority or non-Right group is targeted, supporters who identify with Hindutva groups or the Right-wing ideology have openly made references to the cauliflower as a ‘solution’.

In March 2025, after communal clashes broke out in Maharashtra’s Nagpur, Right-leaning social media users referred to cauliflowers, as a potential ‘solution’.

In February last year, similar cauliflower references were used in several social media posts after riots broke out in Haldwani.

Several memes were made and shared on social media platforms glorifying the Bhagalpur massacre, subverting a horror as a feasible remedy.

Read | Nagpur clashes: Cryptic cauliflower memes referring to mass killings in 1989 Bhagalpur riots resurface

Not only does such symbolism trivialize the horrors of what unfolded in Bhagalpur but glorifies the action as an acceptable ‘solution’. It’s hard to determine which is more troubling, that the state wing of a party that governs the nation shared this or that “eliminating Naxalism” is being equated to a genocide. As of May 24, despite several social media users pointing out the gory undercurrents to the image, BJP Karnataka’s X handle has not taken the post down.

The post After Maoist deaths, BJP Karnataka shares ‘cauliflower’ meme, a reference to the 1989 Bhagalpur riots appeared first on Alt News.

This content originally appeared on Alt News and was authored by Ankita Mahalanobish.

Stuck in a state of disbelief for months, journalist Coralie Cochin was one of many media personnel who inadvertently put their lives on the line as New Caledonia burned.

“It was very shocking. I don’t know the word in English, you can’t believe what you’re seeing,” Cochin, who works for public broadcaster NC la 1ère, said on the anniversary of the violent and deadly riots today.

She recounted her experience covering the civil unrest that broke out on 13 May 2024, which resulted in 14 deaths and more than NZ$4.2 billion (2.2 billion euros) in damages.

• READ MORE: France tightens security for riots anniversary after aborted Kanaky New Caledonia political talks
• Other Kanaky New Caledonia riots reports

“It was like the country was [at] war. Every[thing] was burning,” Cochin told RNZ Pacific.

The next day, on May 14, Cochin said the environment was hectic. She was being pulled in many directions as she tried to decide which story to tell next.

“We didn’t know where to go [or] what to tell because there were things happening everywhere.”

She drove home trying to dodge burning debris, not knowing that later that evening the situation would get worse.

“The day after, it was completely crazy. There was fire everywhere, and it was like the country was [at] war suddenly. It was very, very shocking.”

Over the weeks that followed, both Cochin and her husband — also a journalist — juggled two children and reporting from the sidelines of violent demonstrations.

“The most shocking period was when we knew that three young people were killed, and then a police officer was killed too.”

She said verifying the deaths was a big task, amid fears far more people had died than had been reported.

‘We were targets’
After days of running on adrenaline and simply getting the job done, Cochin’s colleagues were attacked on the street.

“At the beginning, we were so focused on doing our job that we forgot to be very careful,” she said.

But then,”we were targets, so we had to be very more careful.”

News chiefs decided to send reporters out in unmarked cars with security guards.

They did not have much protective equipment, something that has changed since then.

“We didn’t feel secure [at all] one year ago,” she said.

But after lobbying for better protection as a union representative, her team is more prepared.

She believes local journalists need to be supported with protective equipment, such as helmets and bulletproof vests, for personal protection.

“We really need more to be prepared to that kind of riots because I think those riots will be more and more frequent in the future.”

Social media
She also pointed out that, while journalists are “here to inform people”, social media can make their jobs difficult.

“It is more difficult now with social media because there was so [much] misinformation on social media [at the time of the rioting] that we had to check everything all the time, during the day, during the night . . . ”

She recalled that when she was out on the burning streets speaking with rioters from both sides, they would say to her, “you don’t say the truth” and “why do you not report that?” she would have to explain to then that she would report it, but only once it had been fact-checked.

“And it was sometimes [it was] very difficult, because even with the official authorities didn’t have the answers.”

This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.

France preaches one thing and practices another.

France declared a state of emergency in its colony of New Caledonia after an anti-colonial uprising broke out there

New Caledonia has long sought independence, hoping to support itself through mining. The French sent in the… pic.twitter.com/g7RKXKaXNM

— Chay Bowes (@BowesChay) May 16, 2024

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

Fresh, stringent security measures have been imposed in New Caledonia following aborted political talks last week and ahead of the first anniversary of the deadly riots that broke out on 13 May 2024, which resulted in 14 deaths and 2.2 billion euros (NZ$4.2 billion) in damages.

On Sunday, the French High Commission in Nouméa announced that from Monday, May 12, to Friday, May 15, all public marches and demonstrations will be banned in the Greater Nouméa Area.

Restrictions have also been imposed on the sale of firearms, ammunition, and takeaway alcoholic drinks.

• READ MORE: New Caledonia’s political talks – no outcome after three days of ‘conclave’
• Other Kanaky New Caledonia reports

The measures aim to “ensure public security”.

In the wake of the May 2024 civil unrest, a state of emergency and a curfew had been imposed and had since been gradually lifted.

The decision also comes as “confrontations” between law enforcement agencies and violent groups took place mid-last week, especially in the township of Dumbéa — on the outskirts of Nouméa — where there were attempts to erect fresh roadblocks, High Commissioner Jacques Billant said.

The clashes, including incidents of arson, stone-throwing and vehicles being set on fire, are reported to have involved a group of about 50 individuals and occurred near Médipôle, New Caledonia’s main hospital, and a shopping mall.

Clashes also occurred in other parts of New Caledonia, including outside the capital Nouméa.

It adds another reason for the measures is the “anniversary date of the beginning of the 2024 riots”.

Law and order stepped up
French authorities have also announced that in view of the first anniversary of the start of the riots tomorrow, law and order reinforcements have been significantly increased in New Caledonia until further notice.

This includes a total of 2600 officers from the Gendarmerie, police, as well as reinforcements from special elite SWAT squads and units equipped with 16 Centaur armoured vehicles.

Drones are also included.

The aim is to enforce a “zero tolerance” policy against “urban violence” through a permanent deployment “night and day”, with a priority to stop any attempt to blockade roads, especially in Greater Nouméa, to preserve freedom of movement.

One particularly sensitive focus would be placed on the township of Saint-Louis in Mont-Dore often described as a pro-independence stronghold which was a hot spot and the scene of violent and deadly clashes at the height of the 2024 riots.

“We’ll be present wherever and whenever required. We are much stronger than we were in 2024,” High Commissioner Billant told local media during a joint inspection with French gendarmes commander General Nicolas Matthéos and Nouméa Public Prosecutor Yves Dupas.

Dupas said that over the past few months the bulk of criminal acts was regarded as “delinquency” — nothing that could be likened to a coordinated preparation for fresh public unrest similar to last year’s.

Billant said that, depending on how the situation evolves in the next few days, he could also rely on additional “potential reinforcements” from mainland France if needed.

New Zealand ANZAC war memorial set alight
A New Zealand ANZAC war memorial in the small rural town of Boulouparis (west coast of the main island of Grande Terre) was found vandalised last Friday evening.

The monument, inaugurated just one year ago at last year’s ANZAC Day to commemorate the sacrifice of New Zealand soldiers during world wars in the 20th century, was set alight by unidentified people, police said.

Tyres were used to keep the fire burning.

An investigation into the circumstances of the incident is underway, the Nouméa Public Prosecutor’s office said, invoking charges of wilful damage.

Australia, New Zealand travel warnings
In the neighbouring Pacific, two of New Caledonia’s main tourism source markets, Australia and New Zealand, are maintaining a high level or increased caution advisory.

The main identified cause is an “ongoing risk of civil unrest”.

In its latest travel advisory, the Australian brief says “demonstrations and protests may increase in the days leading up to and on days of national or commemorative significance, including the anniversary of the start of civil unrest on May 13.

“Avoid demonstrations and public gatherings. Demonstrations and protests may turn violent at short notice.”

Inconclusive talks
Last Thursday, May 8, French Minister for Overseas Manuel Valls, who had managed to gather all political parties around the same table for negotiations on New Caledonia’s political future, finally left the French Pacific territory. He admitted no agreement could be found at this stage.

In the final stage of the talks, the “conclave” on May 5-7, he had put on the table a project for New Caledonia’s accession to a “sovereignty with France”, a kind of independence in association with France.

This option was not opposed by pro-independence groups, including the FLNKS (Kanak Socialist National Liberation Front).

But the pro-France movement, in support of New Caledonia remaining a part of France, said it could not approve this.

The main pillar of their argument remained that after three self-determination referendums held between 2018 and 2021, a majority of voters had rejected independence (even though the last referendum, in December 2021, was massively boycotted by the pro-independence camp because of the covid-19 pandemic).

The anti-independence block had repeatedly stated that they would not accept any suggestion that New Caledonia could endorse a status bringing it closer to independence.

New Caledonia’s pro-France MP at the French National Assembly, Nicolas Metzdorf, told local media at this stage, his camp was de facto in opposition to Valls, “but not with the pro-independence camp”.

Metzdorf said a number of issues could very well be settled by talking to the pro-independence camp.

Electoral roll issue sensitive
This included the very sensitive issue of New Caledonia’s electoral roll, and conditions of eligibility at the next provincial elections.

Mesures administratives

À l’approche de la date d’anniversaire du début des émeutes de 2024, le Haut-commissaire, en lien avec les élus et responsables du monde économique, annonce les mesures suivante du 12 au 15 mai 2025 :

Interdiction de vente d’alcool à emporter… pic.twitter.com/LzoFuiqgRj

— Haut-commissariat en Nouvelle-Calédonie (@HC98800) May 10, 2025

Direct contacts with Macron
Both Metzdorf and Backès also said during interviews with local media that in the midst of their “conclave” negotiations, they had had contacts as high as French President Emmanuel Macron, asking him whether he was aware of the “sovereignty with France” plan and if he endorsed it.

Another pro-France leader, Virginie Ruffenach (Le Rassemblement-Les Républicains), also confirmed she had similar exchanges, through her party Les Républicains, with French Minister of Home Affairs Bruno Retailleau, from the same right-wing party.

As Minister of Home Affairs, Retailleau would have to be involved later in the New Caledonian issue.

Divided reactions
Since minister Valls’s departure, reactions were still flowing at the weekend from across New Caledonia’s political chessboard.

“We have to admit frankly that no agreement was struck”, Valls said last week during a media conference.

“Maybe the minds were not mature yet.”

But he said France would now appoint a “follow up committee” to keep working on the “positive points” already identified between all parties.

During numerous press conferences and interviews, anti-independence leaders have consistently maintained that the draft compromise put to them by Minister Valls during the latest round of negotiations last week, was not acceptable.

They said this was because it contained several elements of “independence-association”, including the transfer of key powers from Paris to Nouméa, a project of “dual citizenship” and possibly a seat at the United Nations.

“In proposing this solution, minister [Valls] was biased and blocked the negotiations. So he has prevented the advent of an agreement”, pro-France Les Loyalistes and Southern Province President leader Sonia Backès told public broadcaster NC la 1ère on Sunday.

“For us, an independence association was out of the question because the majority of [New] Caledonians voted three time against independence,” she said.

More provincial power plan
Instead, the Le Rassemblement-LR and Les Loyalistes bloc were advocating a project that would provide more powers to each of the three provinces, including in terms of tax revenue collection.

The project, often described as a de facto partition, however, was not retained in the latest phases of the negotiations, because it contravened France’s constitutional principle of a united and indivisible nation.

“But no agreement does not mean chaos”, Backès said.

On the contrary, she believes that by not agreeing to the French minister’s deal plan, her camp had “averted disaster for New Caledonia”.

“Tomorrow, there will be another minister . . . and another project”, she said, implicitly betting on Valls’s departure.

On the pro-independence front, a moderate “UNI” (National Union For Independence) said a in a statement even though negotiations did not eventuate into a comprehensive agreement, the French State’s commitment and method had allowed to offer “clear and transparent terms of negotiations on New Caledonia’s institutional and political future”.

The main FLNKS group, mainly consisting of pro-independence Union Calédonienne (UC) party, also said that even though no agreement could be found as a result of the latest round of talks, the whole project could be regarded as “advances” and “one more step . . . not a failure” in New Caledonia’s decolonisation, as specified in the 1998 Nouméa Accord, FLNKS chief negotiator and UC party president Emmanuel Tjibaou said.

Deplored the empty outcome
Other parties involved in the talks, including Eveil Océanien and Calédonie Ensemble, have deplored the empty outcome of talks last week.

They called it a “collective failure” and stressed that above all, reaching a consensual solution was the only way forward, and that the forthcoming elections and the preceding campaign could bear the risk of further radicalisation and potential violence.

In the economic and business sector, the conclave’s inconclusive outcome has brought more anxiety and uncertainty.

“What businesses need, now, is political stability, confidence. But without a political agreement that many of us were hoping for, the confidence and visibility is not there, there’s no investment”, New Caledonia’s MEDEF-NC (Business Leaders Union) vice-president Bertrand Courte told NC La Première.

As a result of the May 2024 riots, more than 600 businesses, mainly in Nouméa, were destroyed, causing the loss of more than 10,000 jobs.

Over the past 12 months, New Caledonia GDP (gross domestic product) has shrunk by an estimated 10 to 15 percent, according to the latest figures produced by New Caledonia statistical institute ISEE.

What next? Crucial provincial elections
As no agreement was found, the next course of action for New Caledonia was to hold provincial elections no later than 30 November 2025, under the existing system, which still restricts the list of persons eligible to vote at those local elections.

The makeup of the electoral roll for local polls was the very issue that triggered the May 2024 riots, as the French Parliament, at the time, had endorsed a Constitutional amendment to push through opening the list.

At the time, the pro-independence camp argued the changes to eligibility conditions would eventually “dilute” their votes and make indigenous Kanaks a minority in their own country.

The Constitutional bill was abandoned after the May 2024 rots.

The sensitive issue remains part of the comprehensive pact that Valls had been working on for the past four months.

The provincial elections are crucial in that they also determine the proportional makeup of New Caledonia’s Congress and its government and president.

The provincial elections, initially scheduled to take place in May 2024, and later in December 2024, and finally no later than 30 November 2025, were already postponed twice.

Even if the provincial elections are held later this year (under the current “frozen” rules), the anti-independence camp has already announced it would contest its result.

According to the anti-independence camp, the current restrictions on New Caledonia’s electoral roll contradict democratic principles and have to be “unfrozen” and opened up to any citizen residing for more than 10 uninterrupted years.

The present electoral roll is “frozen”, which means it only allows citizens who have have been livingin New Caledonia before November 1998 to cast their vote at local elections.

The case could be brought to the French Constitutional Council, or even higher, to a European or international level, said pro-France politicians.

This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

New Caledonia’s territorial government has been toppled on Christmas Eve, due to a mass resignation within its ranks.

Environment and Sustainable Development Minister Jérémie Katidjo-Monnier said he was resigning from the cabinet, with immediate effect.

Katidjo-Monnier was the sole representative from Calédonie Ensemble (a moderately pro-France party), one of the parties represented at the Congress.

• READ MORE: Other Kanaky New Caledonia reports

He also said in a letter that all other people from his party’s list who could have replaced him, had also resigned as a block.

The letter was sent to government President Louis Mapou and copied to the French Pacific territory’s Congress President Veylma Falaeo.

The government of New Caledonia is made up of the parties represented at the Congress, under a proportional principle of “collegiality” — implying that all of its members and the parties they represent are supposed to work together.

In his letter, Katidjo-Monnier elaborated on growing tensions between Mapou’s government and the Congress MPs.

The tensions came to a head over the past few months, following the deadly pro-independence riots that started on May 13.

One particular point of contention was Mapou’s efforts to secure a loan of up to €1 billion (NZ$1.9 billion) from France, under a “PS2R” (reconstruction, refoundation and salvage) plan to rebuild New Caledonia after the riots damage estimated at some €2.2 billion (NZ$4 billion) and the subsequent thousands of job losses.

Congress vs government: two opposing recovery plans
At the same time, the Congress has been advocating for a different approach: a five-year reconstruction plan to secure funds from France.

A bipartisan delegation was last month sent to Paris to advocate for the plan — not in the form of reimbursable loans, but non-refundable grants.

The bipartisan delegation’s “grant” approach was said to be supported not only by Congress, but also by provincial assemblies and New Caledonia’s elected MPs in both houses of the French Parliament

The delegation was concerned that the loan would bring New Caledonia’s debt to unprecedented and unsustainable levels; and that at the same time, funds for the “PS2R” would be tied to a number of pre-conditioned reforms deemed necessary by France.

Katidjo-Monnier said neither the “obligation” for Congress and the government to act in “solidarity”, nor the “spirit of the Nouméa Accord”, had been respected.

Approached by local media on Tuesday, Mapou declined to comment.

‘Lack of solidarity’
The block resignation from Calédonie Ensemble entails that the whole government of New Caledonia is deemed to have resigned and should now act in a caretaker mode until a new government is installed.

The election of a new government must take place within 15 days.

One of the initial stages of the process is for the Congress to convene a special sitting to choose how many members should make up this new government (between five and 11) and then to proceed with their election.

The cabinet then elects a president.

Several governments have fallen under similar mass resignation circumstances and this “mass block resignation” ploy.

It has now been used 11 times since 1999, each time causing the downfall of the government.

Louis Mapou’s government was the 17th since New Caledonia’s autonomous government system was introduced in 1999.

He came to office in July 2021, months after the list of government members was chosen on 17 February 2021.

This was the first time a local territorial government’s leader belonged to the pro-independence camp.

This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

Figures for violence against women in New Caledonia have increased due to the post-riots crisis, according to local NGO SOS Violences president Anne-Marie Mestre.

Mestre has told local news media that the recent upsurge was mainly due to the riots over independence that broke out on May 13, which resulted in a rising number of jobless people due to the destruction by arson and looting of more 600 businesses.

She stressed that all ethnic communities in New Caledonia were affected by domestic violence and that the trend existed even before the riots-triggered crisis.

• READ MORE: Fiji police have ‘patriarchal mindset’, lack training over gender violence, says Ali
• Other reports on Pacific gender-based violence

New Caledonia’s domestic violence statistics are 2.5 times higher than in mainland France.

In 2023, 3012 cases were reported in the French Pacific territory, a staggering increase of some 91 percent compared to 2019, the French Auditor-General’s office reported in its latest survey published in April 2024.

New Caledonia’s curfew extended to December 2
Meanwhile, New Caledonia’s curfew introduced after the rioting remains in place until December 2, according to the latest advisory from the French High Commission.

The restrictions still include the curfew per se from midnight to 5am, and most notably the ban on transportation, possession and sale of firearms and ammunition.

Public meetings remain banned in the Greater Nouméa Area and will be maintained until December 20, when the ban will be re-assessed with a possible relaxation just before Christmas.

Although opening hours for the sale of alcohol have now returned to normal, the authorised quantity per person per day remains controlled — up to four litres of beer (under 10 percent alcohol), or two litres of wine (10 to 22 percent), or one litre of spirits (above 22 percent).

This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

Imagine this scene, if you can. For several days, violent mobs have massed in the centre of British cities and clashed with police in an attempt to reach synagogues to attack them.

Draped in England flags and Union Jacks, and armed with cricket bats and metal rods, the trouble-makers have dismantled garden walls to throw bricks.

Gangs have swept through residential areas where Jews are known to live, smashing windows and trying to break down doors. The rioters attacked and torched a hotel identified as housing Jewish asylum seekers, an act that could have burned alive the occupants.

For days, the media and politicians have chiefly referred to these events as far-right “thuggery” and spoken of the need to restore law and order.

In the midst of all this, a young Jewish MP is invited onto a major morning TV show to talk about the unfolding events. When she argues that these attacks need to be clearly identified as racist and antisemitic, one of the show’s presenters barracks and ridicules her.

Close by, two white men, a former cabinet minister and an executive at one of the UK’s largest newspapers, are seen openly laughing at her.

Oh, and if this isn’t all getting too fanciful, the TV presenter who mocks the young MP is the husband of the home secretary responsible for policing these events.

Look at how @edballs & @kategarraway treat @zarahsultana.

So hostile.

pic.twitter.com/BqwnM62owS

— James Foster (@JamesEFoster) August 5, 2024

The scenario is so hideously outrageous no one can conceive of it. But it is exactly what took place last week – except that the mob wasn’t targeting Jews, but Muslims; the young MP was not Jewish but Zarah Sultana, the country’s most high-profile Muslim MP; and her demand was not that the violence be identified as antisemitic but as Islamophobic.

It all sounds a lot more plausible now, I’m guessing. Welcome to a Britain that wears its Islamophobia proudly, and not just on the streets of Bolton, Bristol or Birmingham, but in a London TV studio.

‘Pro-British protests’

Islamophobia is so bipartisan in today’s Britain that BBC reporters on at least two occasions referred to the mobs chanting anti-Muslim and anti-immigrant slogans as “pro-British protesters“.

BBC reporter has just described rioters as "a pro-British march" pic.twitter.com/IR8695kGWF

— Ted Booth (@tedgbooth) August 4, 2024

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Jonathan Cook.

Imagine this scene, if you can. For several days, violent mobs have massed in the centre of British cities and clashed with police in an attempt to reach synagogues to attack them.

Draped in England flags and Union Jacks, and armed with cricket bats and metal rods, the trouble-makers have dismantled garden walls to throw bricks.

Gangs have swept through residential areas where Jews are known to live, smashing windows and trying to break down doors. The rioters attacked and torched a hotel identified as housing Jewish asylum seekers, an act that could have burned alive the occupants.

For days, the media and politicians have chiefly referred to these events as far-right “thuggery” and spoken of the need to restore law and order.

In the midst of all this, a young Jewish MP is invited onto a major morning TV show to talk about the unfolding events. When she argues that these attacks need to be clearly identified as racist and antisemitic, one of the show’s presenters barracks and ridicules her.

Close by, two white men, a former cabinet minister and an executive at one of the UK’s largest newspapers, are seen openly laughing at her.

Oh, and if this isn’t all getting too fanciful, the TV presenter who mocks the young MP is the husband of the home secretary responsible for policing these events.

Look at how @edballs & @kategarraway treat @zarahsultana.

So hostile.

pic.twitter.com/BqwnM62owS

— James Foster (@JamesEFoster) August 5, 2024

The scenario is so hideously outrageous no one can conceive of it. But it is exactly what took place last week – except that the mob wasn’t targeting Jews, but Muslims; the young MP was not Jewish but Zarah Sultana, the country’s most high-profile Muslim MP; and her demand was not that the violence be identified as antisemitic but as Islamophobic.

It all sounds a lot more plausible now, I’m guessing. Welcome to a Britain that wears its Islamophobia proudly, and not just on the streets of Bolton, Bristol or Birmingham, but in a London TV studio.

‘Pro-British protests’

Islamophobia is so bipartisan in today’s Britain that BBC reporters on at least two occasions referred to the mobs chanting anti-Muslim and anti-immigrant slogans as “pro-British protesters“.

BBC reporter has just described rioters as "a pro-British march" pic.twitter.com/IR8695kGWF

— Ted Booth (@tedgbooth) August 4, 2024

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Jonathan Cook.

Liberation “must come” for Kanaky New Caledonia, says one of the few New Zealand journalists who have worked consistently on stories across the French Pacific territories.

Journalist David Robie was arrested at gunpoint by French police in January 1987, and is no stranger to civil unrest in New Caledonia.

Writing his first articles about the Pacific from Paris in 1974 on French nuclear testing when working for Agence France-Presse, Robie became a freelance journalist in the 1980s, working for Radio Australia, Islands Business, The Australian, Pacific Islands Monthly, Radio New Zealand and other media.

• READ MORE: Liberation for New Caledonia’s Kanak people ‘must come’, says media educator — Audio
• President Emmanuel Macron to fly to New Caledonia within hours
• ‘You are not alone’ Pacific messages of solidarity for Kanaky
• Other Kanaky New Caledonia crisis reports

The Asia Pacific Report editor, who has been on the case for 50 years now, arrived at his interview with RNZ Pacific with a bag of books packed with images and stories from his days in the field.

“I did get arrested twice [in Kanaky New Caledonia], in fact, but the first time was actually at gunpoint which was slightly unnerving,” Robie explained.

“They accused me of being a spy.”

Liberation ‘must come’
Robie said liberation “must come” for Kanaky New Caledonia.

“It’s really three decades of hard work by a lot of people to build, sort of like a future for New Caledonia, which is part of the Pacific rather than part of France,” Robie said.

He said France has had three Prime Ministers since 2020 and none of them seem to have any “real affinity” for indigenous issues, particularly in the South Pacific, in contrast to some previous leaders.

“From 2020 onwards, basically, France lost the plot,” after Édouard Philippe was in office, Robie said.

He called the current situation a “real tragedy” and believed New Caledonia was now more polarised than ever before.

“France has betrayed the aspirations of the indigenous Kanak people.”

Robie said the whole spirit of the Nouméa Accord was to lead Kanaky towards self determination.

New Caledonia on UN decolonisation list
New Caledonia is listed under the United Nations as a territory to be decolonised — reinstated on 2 December 1986.

“Progress had been made quite well with the first two votes on self determination, the two referendums on independence, where there’s a slightly higher and reducing opposition.”

In 2018, 43.6 percent voted in favour of independence with an 81 percent voter turnout. Two years later 46.7 percent were in favour with a voter turnout of 85.7 percent, but 96.5 percent voted against independence in 2021, with a voter turnout of just 43.8 percent.

Robie labelled the third vote a “complete write off”.

France maintains it was legitimate, despite first insisting on holding the third vote a year earlier than originally scheduled, and in spite of pleas from indigenous Kanak leaders to postpone the vote so they could properly bury and mourn the many members of their communities who died as a result of the covid-19 pandemic.

Robie said France was now taking a deliberate step to “railroad” the indigenous vote in Kanaky New Caledonia.

He said the latest “proposed amendment” to the constitution would give thousands more non-indigenous people voting rights.

“[The new voters would] completely swamp indigenous people,” Robie said.

‘Hope’ and other options
Robie said there “was hope yet”, despite France’s betrayal of the Kanaks over self-determination and independence, especially over the past three years.

French President Emmanuel Macron is under increasing pressure to scrap proposed constitutional reform by Pacific leaders which sparked riots in New Caledonia.

Pacific leaders and civil society groups have affirmed their support for New Caledonia’s path to independence.

Robie backed that call. He said there were options, including an indefinite deferment of the final stage, or Macron could use his presidential veto.

“So [I’m] hopeful that something like that will happen. There certainly has to be some kind of charismatic change to sort out the way things are at the moment.”

“Charismatic change” could be on its way with talk of a dialogue mission.

Having Édouard Philippe — who has always said he had grown a strong bond with New Caledonia when he was in office until 2020 — on the mission would be “a very positive move”, said Robie.

“Because what really is needed now is some kind of consensus,” he said.

‘We don’t want to be like the Māori in NZ’
New Caledonia could still have a constructive “partnership” with France, just like the Cook Islands has with New Zealand, Robie said.

“The only problem is that the French government doesn’t want to listen,” New Caledonia presidential spokesperson Charles Wea said.

“You cannot stop the Kanak people from claiming freedom in their own country.”

Despite the calls, Wea said concerns were setting in that Kanak people would “become a minority in their own country”.

“We [Kanak people] are afraid to be like Māori in New Zealand. We are afraid to be like Aboriginal people in Australia.”

He said those fears were why it was so important the controversial constitutional amendments did not go any further.

Robie said while Kanaks were already a minority in their own country, there had been a pretty close parity under the Nouméa Accord.

Vote a ‘retrograde step’
“Bear in mind, a lot of French people who’ve lived in New Caledonia for a long time, believe in independence as well,” he said.

But it was the “constitutional reform” that was the sticking point, something Robie refused to call a “reform”, describing as “a very retrograde step”.

In 1998, there was “goodwill” though the Nouméa accord.

“The only people who could participate in New Caledonian elections, as opposed to the French state as a whole, were indigenous Kanaks and those who had been living in New Caledonia prior to 1998,” something France brought in at the time.

Robie said a comparison can be drawn “much more with Australia”, rather than Aotearoa New Zealand.

“Kanak people resisting French control a century and a half ago were executed by the guillotine,” he said.

To Robie, Aotearoa was probably the better example of what New Caledonia could be.

“But you have to recall that New Caledonia began colonial life just like Australia, a penal colony,” he said.

Robie explained how Algerian fighters were shipped off to New Caledonia, Vietnamese fighters were also sent during the Vietnam War, among other people from other minority groups.

“A lot of people think it’s French and Kanak. It’s not. It’s a lot more mixed than that and a lot more complicated.”

The media and the blame game
As Robie explained the history, another issue became apparent: the lack of media interest and know-how to cover such events from Aotearoa New Zealand.

He said he had been disappointed to see many mainstream outlets glossing over history and focusing on the stranded Kiwis and fighting, which he said was significant, but needed context.

He said this lack of built-up knowledge within newsrooms and an apparent issue of “can’t be bothered, or it’s too problematic,” was projecting the indigenous population as the bad guys.

“There’s a projection that basically ‘Oh, well, they’re young people… looting and causing fires and that sort of thing’, they don’t get an appreciation of just how absolutely frustrated young people feel. It’s 50 percent of unemployment as a result of the nickel industry collapse, you know,” Robie explained.

When it came to finger pointing, he believed the field activist movement CCAT did not intend for all of this to happen.

“Once the protests reached a level of anger and frustration, all hell broke loose,” said Robie.

“But they [CCAT] have been made the scapegoats.

“Whereas the real culprits are the French government, and particularly the last three prime ministers in my view.”

Dr David Robie’s updated book on the New Caledonia troubles, news media and Pacific decolonisation issues was published in 2014, Don’t Spoil My Beautiful Face: Media, Mayhem and Human Rights in the Pacific (Little Island Press).

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

Police have used tear gas and stun grenades on rioters at an airport near Nouméa as the chaos in New Caledonia stretched into its sixth day.

Five people, including two police officers, have died and hundreds of people are injured amid clashes between authorities and pro-independence protesters.

They were sparked by anger at a proposed new law that would allow French residents who have lived in New Caledonia for more than 10 years to vote — which critics say will weaken the indigenous Kanak vote.

• READ MORE: Kanaky in flames: Five takeaways from the New Caledonia independence riots — David Robie
• Other Kanaky New Caledonia crisis reports
• Full Amnesty International report
• Kanaky – put a stop (really) to the time of colonies!
• Blood on their Banner: Nationalist Struggles in the South Pacific – David Robie

Last night, local media reported rioters on the field at Magenta Airport had thrown hammers and stones at police.

Officers responded with tear gas and stun grenades.

Police warned that if that was not enough to control the situation, the military was authorised to use lethal weapons.

Nouméa is under a nightly curfew, with anyone who violates it warned they could face six months in prison or a fine of up to 895,000 French Pacific francs (NZ$13,000).

A New Caledonia government crisis unit spokesperson said there was enough food in the country to last two months.

However, there was a restocking issue, with some roads impassable due to debris.

A 71-year-old woman who missed out on dialysis treatment this week due to the blockages has finally been transported to Nouméa by boat for treatment.

Meanwhile, cars have been set on fire at Dumbéa town hall. Mayor Yohann Lecourieux told the public television station NC La Première he was “worried about the future”.

Journalists attacked
La Première is strengthening security surrounding its journalists after an incident where a reporting team was attacked by about 20 hooded men.

A reporter said she and a camera operator were attacked yesterday morning near the centre of Nouméa.

The men ordered them to leave, then smashed the windows of their car, the reporter told AFP news agency.

They also snatched the camera operator’s camera from his hands and threatened him with a stone.

The journalists were not injured and were rescued by a passing motorist.

La Première news content director Olivier Gélin told AFP the station’s journalists would be accompanied by security agents until further notice.

“We will now take people to protect the teams during filming, in addition to the classic protections in this type of situation — helmets and bulletproof vests,” he said.

Meanwhile, Coralie Cochin said her husband, a reporter for AFP, was photographing the burnt ruins of a shop when a man started throwing rocks at him.

An intern who had been working with Cochin at the local media outlet, La Première, was also attacked yesterday.

She was also rescued by a passing motorist, but lost her belongings in the ordeal.

END FRENCH SETTLER COLONIALISM IN KANAKY, IN MELANESIA, IN PACIFICA !

WE’RE PEOPLE FROM PACIFICA! https://t.co/6rAyyHLycj

— Rsy (@rosymakalu) May 17, 2024

‘A complete war zone’
A resident of Portes de Fer, in the centre of Noumea, said it was terrifying to witness the chaos unfold.

Hari Simon told RNZ Pacific that businesses, houses, car companies and factories in the area had all been burnt.

It was “a very frightening scene punctuated by the sound of gunshots that broke the silence of the night,” he said.

There was “a threatening sense of danger looming in the air,” he said.

At night, people roamed the streets with guns, burning down buildings and exchanging fire with police officers.

However, since the arrival of the first batch of military police officers (gendarmes) on Wednesday, the situation had died down a little, he said.

Residents did not expect the violence to escalate so quickly and were caught off guard, he said.

“When we became fully aware of the gravity of the situation that Monday night and, more specifically in the early hours of Tuesday morning, road blocks had already been erected.”

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

Police have used tear gas and stun grenades on rioters at an airport near Nouméa as the chaos in New Caledonia stretched into its sixth day.

Five people, including two police officers, have died and hundreds of people are injured amid clashes between authorities and pro-independence protesters.

They were sparked by anger at a proposed new law that would allow French residents who have lived in New Caledonia for more than 10 years to vote — which critics say will weaken the indigenous Kanak vote.

• READ MORE: Kanaky in flames: Five takeaways from the New Caledonia independence riots — David Robie
• Other Kanaky New Caledonia crisis reports
• Full Amnesty International report
• Kanaky – put a stop (really) to the time of colonies!
• Blood on their Banner: Nationalist Struggles in the South Pacific – David Robie

Last night, local media reported rioters on the field at Magenta Airport had thrown hammers and stones at police.

Officers responded with tear gas and stun grenades.

Police warned that if that was not enough to control the situation, the military was authorised to use lethal weapons.

Nouméa is under a nightly curfew, with anyone who violates it warned they could face six months in prison or a fine of up to 895,000 French Pacific francs (NZ$13,000).

A New Caledonia government crisis unit spokesperson said there was enough food in the country to last two months.

However, there was a restocking issue, with some roads impassable due to debris.

A 71-year-old woman who missed out on dialysis treatment this week due to the blockages has finally been transported to Nouméa by boat for treatment.

Meanwhile, cars have been set on fire at Dumbéa town hall. Mayor Yohann Lecourieux told the public television station NC La Première he was “worried about the future”.

Journalists attacked
La Première is strengthening security surrounding its journalists after an incident where a reporting team was attacked by about 20 hooded men.

A reporter said she and a camera operator were attacked yesterday morning near the centre of Nouméa.

The men ordered them to leave, then smashed the windows of their car, the reporter told AFP news agency.

They also snatched the camera operator’s camera from his hands and threatened him with a stone.

The journalists were not injured and were rescued by a passing motorist.

La Première news content director Olivier Gélin told AFP the station’s journalists would be accompanied by security agents until further notice.

“We will now take people to protect the teams during filming, in addition to the classic protections in this type of situation — helmets and bulletproof vests,” he said.

Meanwhile, Coralie Cochin said her husband, a reporter for AFP, was photographing the burnt ruins of a shop when a man started throwing rocks at him.

An intern who had been working with Cochin at the local media outlet, La Première, was also attacked yesterday.

She was also rescued by a passing motorist, but lost her belongings in the ordeal.

END FRENCH SETTLER COLONIALISM IN KANAKY, IN MELANESIA, IN PACIFICA !

WE’RE PEOPLE FROM PACIFICA! https://t.co/6rAyyHLycj

— Rsy (@rosymakalu) May 17, 2024

‘A complete war zone’
A resident of Portes de Fer, in the centre of Noumea, said it was terrifying to witness the chaos unfold.

Hari Simon told RNZ Pacific that businesses, houses, car companies and factories in the area had all been burnt.

It was “a very frightening scene punctuated by the sound of gunshots that broke the silence of the night,” he said.

There was “a threatening sense of danger looming in the air,” he said.

At night, people roamed the streets with guns, burning down buildings and exchanging fire with police officers.

However, since the arrival of the first batch of military police officers (gendarmes) on Wednesday, the situation had died down a little, he said.

Residents did not expect the violence to escalate so quickly and were caught off guard, he said.

“When we became fully aware of the gravity of the situation that Monday night and, more specifically in the early hours of Tuesday morning, road blocks had already been erected.”

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

Jean-Marie Tjibaou, a revered Kanak visionary, was inspirational to indigenous Pacific political activists across Oceania, just like Tongan anthropologist and writer Epeli Hao’ofa was to cultural advocates.

Tragically, he was assassinated in 1989 by an opponent within the independence movement during the so-called “les événements” in New Caledonia, the last time the “French” Pacific territory was engulfed in a political upheaval such as experienced this week.

His memory and legacy as poet, cultural icon and peaceful political agitator live on with the impressive Tjibaou Cultural Centre on the outskirts of the capital Nouméa as a benchmark for how far New Caledonia had progressed in the last 35 years.

• READ MORE: Other Kanaky New Caledonia crisis reports
• Kanaky – put a stop (really) to the time of colonies!
• Blood on their Banner: Nationalist Struggles in the South Pacific – David Robie

However, the wave of pro-independence protests that descended into urban rioting this week invoked more than Tjibaou’s memory. Many of the martyrs — such as schoolteacher turned security minister Elöi Machoro, murdered by French snipers during the upheaval of the 1980s — have been remembered and honoured for their exploits over the last few days with countless memes being shared on social media.

Among many memorable quotes by Tjibaou, this one comes to mind:

“White people consider that the Kanaks are part of the fauna, of the local fauna, of the primitive fauna. It’s a bit like rats, ants or mosquitoes,” he once said.

“Non-recognition and absence of cultural dialogue can only lead to suicide or revolt.”

And that is exactly what has come to pass this week in spite of all the warnings in recent years and months. A revolt.

Among the warnings were one by me in December 2021 after a failed third and “final” independence referendum. I wrote at the time about the French betrayal:

“After three decades of frustratingly slow progress but with a measure of quiet optimism over the decolonisation process unfolding under the Nouméa Accord, Kanaky New Caledonia is again poised on the edge of a precipice.”

As Paris once again reacts with a heavy-handed security crackdown, it appears to have not learned from history. It will never stifle the desire for independence by colonised peoples.

New Caledonia was annexed as a colony in 1853 and was a penal colony for convicts and political prisoners — mainly from Algeria — for much of the 19th century before gaining a degree of autonomy in 1946.

Here are my five takeaways from this week’s violence and mayhem:

1 Global failure of neocolonialism – Palestine, Kanaky and West Papua
Just as we have witnessed a massive outpouring of protest on global streets for justice, self-determination and freedom for the people of Palestine as they struggle for independence after 76 years of Israeli settler colonialism, and also Melanesian West Papuans fighting for 61 years against Indonesian settler colonialism, Kanak independence aspirations are back on the world stage.

Neocolonialism has failed. French President Emmanuel Macron’s attempt to reverse the progress towards decolonisation over the past three decades has backfired in his face.

2 French deafness and loss of social capital
The predictions were already long there. Failure to listen to the Kanak and Socialist National Liberation Front (FLNKS) leadership and to be prepared to be patient and negotiate towards a consensus has meant much of the crosscultural goodwill that been developed in the wake of the Nouméa Accord of 1998 has disappeared in a puff of smoke from the protest fires of the capital.

The immediate problem lies in the way the French government has railroaded the indigenous Kanak people who make up 42 percent pf the 270,000 population into a constitutional bill that “unfreezes” the electoral roll pegging voters to those living in New Caledonia at the time of the 1998 Nouméa Accord. Under the draft bill all those living in the territory for the past 10 years could vote.

This would add some 25,000 extra French voters in local elections, which would further marginalise Kanaks at a time when they hold the territorial presidency and a majority in the Congress in spite of their demographic disadvantage.

Under the Nouméa Accord, there was provision for three referendums on independence in 2018, 2020 and 2021. The first two recorded narrow (and reducing) votes against independence, but the third was effectively boycotted by Kanaks because they had suffered so severely in the 2021 delta covid pandemic and needed a year to mourn culturally.

The FLNKS and the groups called for a further referendum but the Macron administration and a court refused.

3 Devastating economic and social loss
New Caledonia was already struggling economically with the nickel mining industry in crisis – the territory is the world’s third-largest producer. And now four days of rioting and protesting have left a trail of devastation in their wake.

At least five people have died in the rioting — three Kanaks, and two French police, apparently as a result of a barracks accident. A state of emergency was declared for at least 12 days.

But as economists and officials consider the dire consequences of the unrest, it will take many years to recover. According to Chamber of Commerce and Industry (CCI) president David Guyenne, between 80 and 90 percent of the grocery distribution network in Nouméa had been “wiped out”. The chamber estimated damage at about 200 million euros (NZ$350 million).

4. A new generation of youth leadership
As we have seen with Generation Z in the forefront of stunning pro-Palestinian protests across more than 50 universities in the United States (and in many other countries as well, notably France, Ireland, Germany, The Netherlands and the United Kingdom), and a youthful generation of journalists in Gaza bearing witness to Israeli atrocities, youth has played a critical role in the Kanaky insurrection.

Australian peace studies professor Dr Nicole George notes that “the highly visible wealth disparities” in the territory “fuel resentment and the profound racial inequalities that deprive Kanak youths of opportunity and contribute to their alienation”.

A feature is the “unpredictability” of the current crisis compared with the 1980s “les événements”.

“In the 1980s, violent campaigns were coordinated by Kanak leaders . . . They were organised. They were controlled.

“In contrast, today it is the youth taking the lead and using violence because they feel they have no other choice. There is no coordination. They are acting through frustration and because they feel they have ‘no other means’ to be recognised.”

According to another academic, Dr Évelyne Barthou, a senior lecturer in sociology at the University of Pau, who researched Kanak youth in a field study last year: “Many young people see opportunities slipping away from them to people from mainland France.

“This is just one example of the neocolonial logic to which New Caledonia remains prone today.”

5. Policy rethink needed by Australia, New Zealand
Ironically, as the turbulence struck across New Caledonia this week, especially the white enclave of Nouméa, a whistlestop four-country New Zealand tour of Melanesia headed by Deputy Prime Minister Winston Peters, who also has the foreign affairs portfolio, was underway.

The first casualty of this tour was the scheduled visit to New Caledonia and photo ops demonstrating the limited diversity of the political entourage showed how out of depth New Zealand’s Pacific diplomacy had become with the current rightwing coalition government at the helm.

Heading home, Peters thanked the people and governments of Solomon Islands, Papua New Guinea, Vanuatu and Tuvalu for “working with New Zealand towards a more secure, more prosperous and more resilient tomorrow”.

The delegation is now heading home

Many thanks to the people and governments of Solomon Islands, Papua New Guinea, Vanuatu & Tuvalu for their kind hospitality – and for working with New Zealand towards a more secure, more prosperous & more resilient tomorrow.

pic.twitter.com/ZciN70cNP6

— Winston Peters (@NewZealandMFA) May 16, 2024

His tweet came as New Caledonian officials and politicians were coming to terms with at least five deaths and the sheer scale of devastation in the capital which will rock New Caledonia for years to come.

News media in both Australia and New Zealand hardly covered themselves in glory either, with the commercial media either treating the crisis through the prism of threats to tourists and a superficial brush over the issues. Only the public media did a creditable job, New Zealand’s RNZ Pacific and Australia’s ABC Pacific and SBS.

In the case of New Zealand’s largest daily newspaper, The New Zealand Herald, it barely noticed the crisis. On Wednesday, morning there was not a word in the paper.

Thursday was not much better, with an “afterthought” report provided by a partnership with RNZ. As I reported it:

“Aotearoa New Zealand’s largest newspaper, the New Zealand Herald, finally catches up with the Pacific’s biggest news story after three days of crisis — the independence insurrection in #KanakyNewCaledonia.

“But unlike global news services such as Al Jazeera, which have featured it as headline news, the Herald tucked it at the bottom of page 2. Even then it wasn’t its own story, it was relying on a partnership report from RNZ.”

New Zealand Herald finally catches up with the Pacific’s biggest news story after 3 days of crisis #CafePacific #kanaky #newcaledonia #nzherald #media #insurrection #stateofemergency #franceinpacific @KanakySuport @cpcflnkspt @westpapuamedia @anaisduongp https://t.co/TZZ2JDE6nr pic.twitter.com/52bJDECU2g

— David Robie (@DavidRobie) May 16, 2024

Also, New Zealand media reports largely focused too heavily on the “frustrations and fears” of more than 200 tourists and residents said to be in the territory this week, and provided very slim coverage of the core issues of the upheaval.

With all the warning signs in the Pacific over recent years — a series of riots in New Caledonia, Papua New Guinea, Solomon Islands, Timor-Leste, Tonga and Vanuatu — Australia and New Zealand need to wake up to the yawning gap in social indicators between the affluent and the impoverished, and the worsening climate crisis.

These are the real issues of the Pacific, not some fantasy about AUKUS and a perceived China threat in an unconvincing arena called “Indo-Pacific”.

Dr David Robie covered “Les Événements” in New Caledonia in the 1980s and penned the book Blood on their Banner about the turmoil. He also covered the 2018 independence referendum.

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by David Robie.

New Caledonia’s capital city, Nouméa, has endured widespread violent rioting over the past three days. This crisis intensified rapidly, taking local authorities by surprise.

Peaceful protests had been occurring across the country in the preceding weeks as the French National Assembly in Paris deliberated on a constitutional amendment that would increase the territory’s electoral roll.

As the date for the vote — last Tuesday — grew closer, however, protests became more obstructive and by Monday night had spiralled into uncontrolled violence.

• LISTEN TO RNZ CHECKPOINT: Latest on unrest in New Caledonia
• Expats worried about families in New Caledonia
• READ MORE:NZ families worried as loved ones shelter from violent unrest in New Caledonia
  France declares state of emergency in New Caledonia – four die in riots
• Other Kanaky New Caledonia crisis reports

Since then, countless public buildings, business locations and private dwellings have been subjected to arson. Blockades erected by protesters prevent movement around greater Nouméa.

Four people have died. Security reinforcements have been deployed, the city is under nightly curfew, and a state of emergency has been declared. Citizens in many areas of Nouméa are now also establishing their own neighbourhood protection militias.

To understand how this situation has spiralled so quickly, it’s important to consider the complex currents of political and socioeconomic alienation at play.

The political dispute
At one level, the crisis is political, reflecting contention over a constitutional vote taken in Paris that will expand citizens’ voting rights. The change adds roughly 25,000 voters to the electoral role in New Caledonia by extending voting rights to French people who have lived on the island for 10 years.

This reform makes clear the political power that France continues to exercise over the territory.

The current changes have proven divisive because they undo provisions in the 1998 Noumea Accord, particularly the restriction of voting rights. The accord was designed to “rebalance” political inequalities so the interests of Indigenous Kanaks and the descendants of French settlers would be equally recognised.

This helped to consolidate peace between these groups after a long period of conflict in the 1980s, known locally as “les événements”.

A loyalist group of elected representatives in New Caledonia’s Parliament reject the contemporary significance of “rebalancing” (in French “rééquilibrage”) with regard to the electoral status of Kanak people. They argue after three referendums on the question of New Caledonian independence — held between 2018 and 2021 — all of which produced a majority no vote, the time for electoral reform is well overdue.

This position is made clear by Nicolas Metzdorf. A key rightwing loyalist, he defined the constitutional amendment, which was passed by the National Assembly in Paris on Tuesday, as a vote for democracy and “universalism”.

Yet this view is roundly rejected by Kanak pro-independence leaders who say these amendments undermine the political status of Indigenous Kanak people, who constitute a minority of the voting population. These leaders also refuse to accept that the decolonisation agenda has been concluded, as loyalists assert.

Instead, they dispute the outcome of the final 2021 referendum which, they argue, was forced on the territory by French authorities too soon after the outbreak of the covid pandemic. This disregarded the fact that Kanak communities bore disproportionate impacts of the pandemic and were unable to fully mobilise before the vote.

Demands that the referendum be delayed were rejected, and many Kanak people abstained as a result.

In this context, the disputed electoral reforms decided in Paris this week are seen by pro-independence camps as yet another political prescription imposed on Kanak people. A leading figure of one Indigenous Kanak women’s organisation described the vote to me as a solution that pushes “Kanak people into the gutter”, one that would have “us living on our knees”.

#NewCaledonia: At least four have been killed during riots in the French territory of New Caledonia after #France introduced new constitutional reforms. The reforms allow French residents of the island voting rights after 10 years of residence, with indigenous Kanak people… pic.twitter.com/QVG7fLFybp

— POPULAR FRONT (@PopularFront_) May 15, 2024

Beyond the politics
Many political commentators are likening the violence observed in recent days to the political violence of les événements of the 1980s, which exacted a heavy toll on the country. Yet this is disputed by local women leaders with whom I am in conversation, who have encouraged me to look beyond the central political factors in analysing this crisis.

Some female leaders reject the view this violence is simply an echo of past political grievances. They point to the highly visible wealth disparities in the country.

These fuel resentment and the profound racial inequalities that deprive Kanak youths of opportunity and contribute to their alienation.

Women have also told me they are concerned about the unpredictability of the current situation. In the 1980s, violent campaigns were coordinated by Kanak leaders, they tell me. They were organised. They were controlled.

In contrast, today it is the youth taking the lead and using violence because they feel they have no other choice. There is no coordination. They are acting through frustration and because they feel they have “no other means” to be recognised.

There is also frustration with political leaders on all sides. Late on Wednesday, Kanak pro-independence political leaders held a press conference. They echoed their loyalist political opponents in condemning the violence and issuing calls for dialogue.

The leaders made specific calls to the “youths” engaged in the violence to respect the importance of a political process and warned against a logic of vengeance.

The women civil society leaders I have been speaking to were frustrated by the weakness of this messaging. The women say political leaders on all sides have failed to address the realities faced by Kanak youths.

They argue if dialogue remains simply focused on the political roots of the dispute, and only involves the same elites that have dominated the debate so far, little will be understood and little will be resolved.

Likewise, they lament the heaviness of the current “command and control” state security response. It contradicts the calls for dialogue and makes little room for civil society participation of any sort.

These approaches put a lid on grievances, but they do not resolve them. Women leaders observing the current situation are anguished and heartbroken for their country and its people. They say if the crisis is to be resolved sustainably, the solutions cannot be imposed and the words cannot be empty.

Instead, they call for the space to be heard and to contribute to a resolution. Until that time they live with anxiety and uncertainty, waiting for the fires to subside, and the smoke currently hanging over a wounded Nouméa to clear.

Dr Nicole George is associate professor in Peace and Conflict Studies, The University of Queensland. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons licence. Read the original article.

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

French President Emmanuel Macron has declared a state of emergency in New Caledonia after several days of civil unrest in the capital.

Four people are dead due to the unrest and violence in the capital, Nouméa.

France TV reports that a 22-year-old gendarme who had been seriously wounded has become the fourth death. The other three were reportedly Kanaks killed by vigilantes.

• LISTEN TO RNZ MORNING REPORT: Tourists stuck in New Caledonia as riots continue
• Period of instability on cards for New Caledonia, says former Australian consul-general
• READ MORE: Nouméa ‘was on fire’ – New Zealander in New Caledonia tells of unrest
  France declares state of emergency in New Caledonia – four die in riots
• Other Kanaky New Caledonia crisis reports

Macron posted on X, formerly Twitter, a message saying the nation was thinking of the gendarme’s family.

Hundreds of others have been injured with more casualties expected as French security forces struggle to restore law and order in Nouméa amid reports of clashes between rioters and “militia” groups being formed by city residents.

According to local media, the state of emergency was announced following a defence and national security council meeting in Paris between the Head of State and several government members, including the Prime Minister and ministers of the Armed Forces, the Interior, the Economy and Justice.

In a press conference last evening in Nouméa, France’s High Commissioner to New Caledonia, Louis Le Franc, told reporters he would call on the military forces if necessary and that reinforcements would be sent today.

Local leaders called for state of emergency
The state of emergency declaration came after the deteriorating crisis on Wednesday prompted Southern Province President Sonia Backès to call on President Macron to declare an emergency to allow the army to back up the police.

“Houses and businesses are being burnt down and looted — organised gangs are terrorising the population and putting at risk the life of inhabitants,” Backes said.

“Law enforcement agents are certainly doing a great job but are obviously overwhelmed by the magnitude of this insurrection . . . Night and day, hastily formed citizen militias find themselves confronted with rioters fuelled by hate and the desire for violence.

“In the next few hours, without a massive and urgent intervention from France, we will lose control of New Caledonia,” Sonia Backès wrote.

She added: “We are now in a state of civil war.”

Backès was later joined by elected MPs for New Caledonia’s constituency, MP Nicolas Metzdorf and Senator Georges Naturel, who also appealed to the French President to declare a state of emergency.

“Mr President, we are at a critical moment and you alone can save New Caledonia,” they wrote.

More than 1700 law enforcement officers deployed
During a press conference on Wednesday evening, French High Commissioner Louis Le Franc said two persons had died from gunshot wounds and another two were seriously injured during a clash between rioters and a local “civil defence group”.

He said the gunshot came from one member of the civil defence group who “was trying to defend himself”.

Other reliable sources later confirmed to RNZ the death toll from the same clash was at least three people.

High Commissioner Le Franc said that in the face of an escalating situation, the total number of law enforcement personnel deployed on the ground, mainly in Nouméa, was now about 1000 gendarmes, seven hundred police, as well as members of SWAT intervention groups from gendarmerie (GIGN) and police (RAID).

Le Franc said that a dusk-to-dawn curfew had been extended for another 24 hours.

“People have to respect the curfew, not go to confrontations with weapons, not to burn businesses, shops, pharmacies, schools.”

Armed groups formed on both sides
All commercial flights to and from the Nouméa-La Tontouta international airport remained cancelled for today, affecting an estimated 2500 passengers to and from Auckland, Sydney, Brisbane, Nadi, Papeete, Tokyo and Singapore.

The situation on the ground is being described by local leaders as “guerrilla warfare” bordering on a “civil war”, as more civilian clashes were reported yesterday on the outskirts of Nouméa, with opposing groups armed with weapons such as hunting rifles.

“We have now entered a dangerous spiral, a deadly spiral . . .  There are armed groups on both sides and if they don’t heed calls for calms — there will be more deaths,” French High Commissioner Louis Le Franc warned.

“I sense dark hours coming in New Caledonia . . .  The current situation is not meant to take this terrible twist, a form of civil war.”

Le Franc said if needed, he would call on “military” reinforcements.

Also yesterday, a group of armed rioters heading towards Nouméa’s industrial zone of Ducos, prompted an intervention from a RAID police squad.

As Nouméa residents woke up today the situation in Noumea remained volatile as, over the past 24 hours, pro-France citizens have started to set up “civil defence groups”, barricades and roadblocks to protect themselves.

Some of them have started to call themselves “militia” groups.

Political leaders call for calm
On the political front, there have been more calls for calm and appeasement from all quarters.

After New Caledonian territorial President Louis Mapou appealed on Tuesday for a “return to reason”, the umbrella body for pro-independence political parties, the FLNKS, yesterday also issued a release appealing for “calm and appeasement” and the lifting of blockades.

While “regretting” and “deploring” the latest developments, the pro-independence umbrella group recalled it had called for the French government’s proposed amendment on New Caledonia’s electoral changes to be withdrawn to “preserve the conditions to reach a comprehensive political agreement between all parties and the French State”.

“However, this situation cannot justify putting at risk peace and all that has been implemented towards a lasting ‘living together’ and exit the colonisation system,” the FLNKS statement said.

The FLNKS also noted that for the order to be validated, the controversial amendment still needed to be put to the vote of the French Congress (combined meeting of the Assembly and the Senate) and that French President Macron had indicated he would not convene the gathering of both Houses of the French Parliament immediately “to give a chance for dialogue and consensus”.

“This is an opportunity FLNKS wishes to seize so that everyone’s claims, including those engaged in demonstrations, can be heard and taken into account,” the statement said.

The President of the Loyalty Islands province, Jacques Lalié (pro-independence) on Wednesday called for “appeasement” and for “our youths to respect the values symbolised by our flag and maintain dignity in their engagement without succumbing to provocations”.

“Absolute priority must be given to dialogue and the search for intelligence to reach a consensus,” he said.

Paris vote which sparked unrest
Overnight in Paris, the French National Assembly voted 351 in favour (mostly right-wing parties) and 153 against (mostly left-wing parties) the proposed constitutional amendments that sparked the ill-fated protests in Noumea on Monday.

This followed hours of heated debate about the relevance of such a text, which New Caledonia’s pro-independence parties strongly oppose because, they say, it poses a serious risk and could shrink their political representation in local institutions (New Caledonia has three provincial assemblies as well as the local parliament, called its Congress).

New Caledonia’s pro-independence parties had been calling for the government to withdraw the text and instead, to send a high-level “dialogue mission” to the French Pacific archipelago.

The text, which is designed to open the restricted list of voters to those who have been residing in New Caledonia for an uninterrupted 10 years, has not completed its legislative path.

After its endorsement by the Senate (on 2 April 2024, with amendments) and the National Assembly (15 May 2024), it still needs to be put to the vote of the French Congress (a joint sitting of France’s both Houses of Parliament, the National Assembly and the Senate) and obtain a required majority of 60 percent.

The bigger picture
The proposed constitutional amendments were tabled by the French Minister for Home Affairs and Overseas, Gérald Darmanin.

Darmanin has defended his bill by saying the original restrictions to New Caledonia’s electoral roll put in place under temporary measures prescribed by the 1998 Nouméa Accord needed to be readjusted to restore “a minimum of democracy” in line with universal suffrage and France’s Constitution.

The previous restrictions had been a pathway to decolonisation for New Caledonia inscribed in the French Constitution, which only allowed people who had been living in New Caledonia before 1998 to vote in local elections.

Those principles were at the centre of the heated discussions during the two days of debate in the National Assembly, where strong words were often exchanged between both sides.

More than 25 years after its implementation, the Accord– a kind of de facto embryonic Constitution for New Caledonia — is now deemed by France to have reached its expiry date after three self-determination referendums were held in 2018, 2020 and 2021, all resulting in a rejection of independence, although the last vote was highly controversial.

The third and final referendum — although conducted legally — was boycotted by a majority of the pro-independence Kanak political groups and their supporters resulting in an overwhelming “no” vote to Independence from France, a stark contrast to the earlier referendum results.

Results of New Caledonia referenda

• 2018: 56.67 percent voted against independence and 43.33 percent in favour.
• 2020: 53.26 percent voted against independence and 46.74 percent in favour.
• 2021: 96.5 percent voted against independence and 3.5 percent in favour. (However, However, the third and final vote in 2021 — during the height of the covid pandemic — under the Nouméa Accord was boycotted by the pro-indigenous Kanak population. In that vote, 96 percent of the people voted against independence — with a 44 percent turnout.)

Since the third referendum was held, numerous attempts have been made to convene all local political parties around the table to come up with a successor pact to the Nouméa Accord.

This would have to be the result of inclusive and bipartisan talks, but those meetings have not yet taken place, mainly because of differences between — and within — both pro-independence and pro-France parties.

Darmanin’s attempts to bring these talks to reality have so far failed, even though he has travelled to New Caledonia seven times over the past two years.

From the pro-independence parties’ point of view, Darmanin is now regarded as not the right person anymore and has been blamed by critics for the talks stalling.

This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

France has declared a state of emergency on the Pacific territory of New Caledonia — New Zealand’s closest neighbour — after four people, including a police officer, have been killed in pro-independence riots over voting changes that further marginalise indigenous Kanaks, news agencies report.

The move came as the French government confirmed an additional 500 members of the French national police and gendarmerie were being sent to the territory to reinforce the 1800 already there and to try and quell the violence.

The state of emergency will last 12 days and give authorities additional powers to ban gatherings and forbid people from moving around the French-ruled territory.

• READ MORE: Three killed in riots after France backs New Caledonia vote changes
• Flashback explainer: Betrayal of Kanaky decolonisation by Paris risks return to dark days – David Robie
• New Caledonia violence ‘unfortunate’ but ‘not surprising’, says Pacific Forum chief
• Other Kanaky New Caledonia crisis reports

The last time France imposed such measures on one of its overseas territories was in 1985 —  also in New Caledonia in the middle of a similar upheaval known as “Les événements“, the Interior Ministry said.

Rioters torched vehicles and businesses and looted stores and this video below (in French) from the local Caledonia TV shows the destruction in the wake of the protests.

Deaths amid the third day of rioting.               Video: Caledonia TV

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

French authorities have imposed a curfew on New Caledonia’s capital Nouméa and banned public gatherings after supporters of the Pacific territory’s independence movement blocked roads, set fire to buildings and clashed with security forces.

Tensions in New Caledonia have been inflamed by French government’s plans to give the vote to tens of thousands of French immigrants to the Melanesian island chain.

The enfranchisement would create a significant obstacle to the self-determination aspirations of the indigenous Kanak people.

• READ MORE:  ‘A lot of fire, violence’: Nouméa erupts as protests halt New Caledonia
• NZ foreign minister Peters cancels New Caledonia visit as unrest erupts
• Botched prison mutiny, protests ahead of New Caledonia constitution vote
• Other New Caledonia reports

“Very intense public order disturbances took place last night in Noumea and in neighboring towns, and are still ongoing at this time,” French High Commissioner to New Caledonia Louis Le Franc said in a statement today.

About 36 people were arrested and numerous police were injured, the statement said.

French control of New Caledonia and its surrounding islands gives the European nation a security and diplomatic role in the Pacific at a time when the US, Australia and other Western countries are pushing back against China’s inroads in the region.

Kanaks make up about 40 percent of New Caledonia’s 270,000 people but are marginalised in their own land — they have lower incomes and poorer health than Europeans who make up a third of the population and predominate positions of power in the territory.

Buildings, cars set ablaze
Video and photos posted online showed buildings set ablaze, burned out vehicles at luxury car dealerships and security forces using tear gas to confront groups of protestors waving Kanaky flags and throwing petrol bombs at city intersections in the worst rioting in decades.

A dusk-to-dawn curfew was imposed today and could be renewed as long as necessary, the high commissioner’s statement said.

Public gatherings in greater Noumea are banned and the sale of alcohol and carrying or transport of weapons is prohibited throughout New Caledonia.

The violence erupted as the National Assembly, the lower house of France’s Parliament, debated a constitutional amendment to “unfreeze” the electoral roll, which would enfranchise relative newcomers to New Caledonia.

It is scheduled to vote on the measure this afternoon in Paris. The French Senate approved the amendment in April.

Local Congress opposes amendment
New Caledonia’s territorial Congress, where pro-independence groups have a majority, on Monday passed a resolution that called for France to withdraw the amendment.

It said political consensus has “historically served as a bulwark against intercommunity tensions and violence” in New Caledonia.

“Any unilateral decision taken without prior consultation of New Caledonian political leaders could compromise the stability of New Caledonia,” the resolution said.

L’Eau vive semble aux mains des manifestants pic.twitter.com/6qAuW4hMYI

— Charlotte Mannevy (@CMannevy) May 13, 2024

French Interior Minister Gérald Darmanin told his country’s legislature that about 42,000 people — about one in five possible voters in New Caledonia — are denied the right to vote under the 1998 Noumea Accord between France and the independence movement that froze the electoral roll.

“Democracy means voting,” he said.

New Caledonia’s pro-independence government — the first in its history — could lose power in elections due in December if the electoral roll is enlarged.

New Caledonia voted by small majorities to remain part of France in referendums held in 2018 and 2020 under a UN-mandated decolonisation process. Three ballots were organised as part of the Noumea Accord to increase Kanaks’ political power following deadly violence in the 1980s.

Referendum legitimacy rejected
A contentious final referendum in 2022 was overwhelmingly in favour of continuing with the status quo. However, supporters of independence have rejected its legitimacy due to very low turnout — it was boycotted by the independence movement — and because it was held during a serious phase of the covid-19 pandemic, which restricted campaigning.

Representatives of the FLNKS (Front de Libération Nationale Kanak et Socialist) independence movement did not respond to interview requests.

“When there’s no hope in front of us, we will fight, we will struggle. We’ll make sure you understand what we are talking about,” Patricia Goa, a New Caledonian politician said in an interview last month with Australian public broadcaster ABC.

“Things can go wrong and our past shows that,” she said.

Confrontations between protesters and security forces are continuing in Noumea.

Darmanin has ordered reinforcements be sent to New Caledonia, including hundreds of police, urban violence special forces and elite tactical units.

Copyright ©2015-2024, BenarNews. Used with the permission of BenarNews.

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

“We want grants and not concessional loans,” is the crisp message from Papua New Guinea businesses directly affected by the Black Wednesday looting four months ago.

The businesses, which lost millions after the January 10 rioting and looting, say they need grants as part of the government’s Restock and Rebuild assistance — and not more loans.

This is the message delivered by the PNG Chamber of Commerce and Industry on Monday after news that the national government has so far given K7 million (NZ$3.2 million) in funding to several affected companies to pay staff salaries.

• READ MORE: The Black Wednesday riots

President Ian Tarutia said the business coalition representing impacted businesses would be meeting with the Chief Secretary and his inter-agency team this week to find out when the assistance will be given.

Their message at this crucial meeting will be the same — no loans!

“The real impact assistance that is truly beneficial is rebuilding and restocking,” Tarutia said.

“We will meet with the chief secretary hopefully this week to get an update on this component of the government’s relief assistance to affected businesses.

Concessional rate loans
Tarutia explained that an initial National Executive Council decision was to provide loans at concessional rates and managed through the National Development Bank.

“Business Coalition’s response was grants and not loans are the preferred assistance. Meeting with the Chief Secretary this week hopefully can resolve this.”

He also indicated that in the initial impact by businesses compiled in late January, the estimated cost for rebuild and restock covering loss of property, cost of clean up, loss of goods was K774 million.

“This was for 64 businesses mainly in Port Moresby but a few in Goroka, Rabaul, Kundiawa and Kavieng,” he said.

“Out of this K774 million, an amount of K273 million was submitted as needed immediately.

“Business Coalition met last Saturday morning. Business houses are looking forward to meeting Chief Secretary Pomaleu and his inter-agency team this week to find out when the assistance for rebuilding destroyed properties and restocking looted inventory will be given.”

Tarutia acknowledged that so far, the government had paid out approximately K7 million in wage support for businesses which includes eight businesses including CPL.

Businesses acknowledge the wage support to date and are appreciative on behalf of their affected staff.

Dale Luma is a PNG Post-Courier reporter. Republished with permission.

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

Papua New Guinea’s rising voice as opposition candidate for prime minister, East Sepik Governor Allan Bird, has pushed back after addressing recent death threats.

Bird told RNZ Pacific he has declined police protection and is opting to use his own security after his nomination as opposition candidate for prime minister resulted in alleged threats to his personal safety.

“I was informed about 10 days ago of the threats against my life. I’ve heard a few more threats are in fact active,” he said.

• READ MORE: Opposition MP Allan Bird claims his ‘life under threat’ after PM nomination
• Other PNG politics reports

“So I thought, probably the best way to declare it would be to put it out in the public domain.”

He said three senior government ministers informed him about the death threats and were no longer contacting him, due to concerns his phone was “being monitored”.

Bird was confident in his security to keep him safe and said whoever was behind the threats had picked on the wrong person.

“My people served with the allied forces in the Second World War. So my grandfather did that. He was uneducated. So picking on me is not a smart thing to do.”

RNZ Pacific has contacted the PNG police for comment after Bird accused authorities of illegally monitoring his phone and looking for dirt to charge and arrest him.

“I have nothing to hide. So, apparently, they haven’t found any dirt.”

PNG riots aftermath
“I do understand that they’re trying to connect me as one of the masterminds behind the Black Wednesday day events in Port Moresby.”

He said it would be “almost impossible because I was out of the country prior to that happening. And then I understand they’re looking now at all my travel allowances, so they’re looking at that to see what they can find.”

Regarding the threats, he said: “I’m not too stressed. These are some of the things you expect in PNG, otherwise you wouldn’t be in PNG.”

Bird said he did not trust the country’s police and declined their offer for protection, opting to use his own personal security instead.

“If things get pretty bad in the capital, I will just go back home. But for now, I’m just keeping a low profile, not really moving around, just restricting movements.”

He addressed sceptics who criticised him for attempting to boost his profile to become PNG’s next prime minister.

Bird said he had accepted the nomination as candidate out of “respect to his colleagues.”

‘Asked by my caucus’
“I didn’t put my hand up. I was asked by my caucus.”

He said, the country needed change, even if it was at the expense of his safety.

“Who wants to run around with security guards all the time?

“Whoever gets into the hot seat, whether it’s me or someone else, in all seriousness and honesty will soon to have to deal with these problems, the problems that are begging for solutions, and these are personal criticisms of Prime Minister Marape.”

He said supporters of the nation’s current leader James Marape lacked proper education and said it was “like a cult following”.

This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

Papua New Guinea’s prime minister was backed by three quarters of legislators in a parliamentary confidence vote Thursday, following riots last month that highlighted the Pacific island country’s tenuous hold on stability.   

The motion of confidence in Prime Minister James Marape was introduced by a government lawmaker and supported by 84 of the Parliament’s 111 members. Opposition parliamentarians, who had been attempting to get the legislature to debate and vote on a separate motion of no confidence in Marape, stormed out of the chamber.

“If you have the numbers [to defeat me], produce your numbers,” Marape said after the vote. Lawmakers who walked out were “imbeciles and cowards,” he said.

Papua New Guinea’s capital Port Moresby was engulfed by chaos on Jan. 10 after its police stopped work to protest a cut in the pay of government employees that was purportedly caused by a payroll system glitch.

At least 16 people died during the looting and arson that caused a severe blow to an economy already failing to provide sufficient jobs and incomes. 

Several government lawmakers defected to the opposition in the aftermath of the riots. Criticism of Marape’s administration has also mounted recently because of alleged corruption in crucial infrastructure projects, as well as the perennial failure to create jobs and lift living standards. 

The opposition could still get Parliament to vote on a no-confidence motion and Marape said the government wouldn’t stand in the way of the processes. A new government would need to be formed by lawmakers if Marape lost a no confidence vote, which currently seems unlikely.

Separately, the country’s attorney-general has asked the Supreme Court to review whether the no confidence motion sought by the opposition is consistent with the constitution or a “vice through which political instability is promoted through opportunistic machinations outside the electoral cycle,” according to a court filing. 

Papua New Guinea is the most populous Pacific island country with an estimated 12 million people and endowed with significant mineral and other resources. But it has struggled to develop economically because of corruption, poor infrastructure, frequent tribal violence and deep inequality for women.

It has one police officer for about every 1,800 people, nearly four times less than the level recommended by the United Nations to ensure law and order, according to a Griffith Asia Institute report released last year. The ratio of police to people has declined substantially in the past half century as Papua New Guinea’s population tripled.

The country is increasingly the focus of China-United States rivalry for influence in the Pacific. It signed a wide-ranging defense cooperation agreement with the U.S. last year that could bolster the U.S. military presence in the region, but doesn’t help the country address challenges such as tenuous law and order and grinding poverty.

Marape became prime minister following national elections in 2022 that were marred by violence and dozens of deaths. His PANGU party is the largest bloc in the governing coalition. 

New governments in Papua New Guinea have an 18-month grace period during which motions of confidence can’t be introduced – a convention intended to reduce political instability. The grace period for Marape’s government ended earlier this month. 

Marape on Thursday said the government has crucial challenges to address including lack of jobs for the burgeoning youth population.

BenarNews is an RFA-affiliated online news organization.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By Stephen Wright for BenarNews.

Papua New Guinea’s Police Commissioner David Manning has been reinstated after being stood down following riots and looting on January 10.

That rioting — branded as Black Wednesday — was sparked by a police protest after unannounced deductions from their wages, which the government blamed on a glitch.

The protest led to a riot causing the deaths of more than 20 people, widespread looting and hundreds of millions of dollars of damage to businesses.

• READ MORE: Long term plan needed for underlying PNG problems, says academic

Amnesty International called on authorities to protect human rights in response to the riots.

The 14-day state of emergency following the violence has now ended.

The National newspaper reported Prime Minister James Marape announced Manning’s reinstatement, and that of Taies Sansan as the Department of Personnel Management Secretary, after administrative preliminary investigations concluded.

However, Treasury Secretary Andrew Oake and Finance Secretary Samuel Penias remained suspended “due to their failure to update the salary system, which led to the events of Jan 10”, Marape said.

Marape also said Deputy Police Commissioner Dr Philip Mina was being suspended.

A commission of inquiry will be appointed to look into the police force.

“The commission of inquiry will be headed by a judge from the Supreme Court and National Court, and will be concluded as soon as possible, to look into the structure, the operation, and their ethics of conduct,” Marape said.

“The country deserves to have a police force that is effective and efficient. We will leave no stone unturned as we recover, reboot and restore.”

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

The United States and Britain on January 23 followed Australia in imposing sanctions on Russian citizen Aleksandr Yermakov, who was designated for his alleged role in a cyberattack that compromised the personal information of 9.7 million Australians.

The U.S. Treasury Department announced its sanctions against Yermakov after Australian authorities said their investigation tied him to the breach of Australian private health insurer Medibank in October 2022.

The department said in a statement that the United States and Britain imposed sanctions on Yermakov because of the risk he poses. The U.S. action freezes any assets he holds in U.S. jurisdiction and generally bars Americans from dealing with him.

“Russian cyber actors continue to wage disruptive ransomware attacks against the United States and allied countries, targeting our businesses, including critical infrastructure, to steal sensitive data,” said Brian Nelson, U.S. undersecretary for terrorism and financial intelligence.

"Today’s trilateral action with Australia and the United Kingdom, the first such coordinated action, underscores our collective resolve to hold these criminals to account," he added in a statement.

Yermakov, 33, who used the online aliases blade_runner, GustaveDore, and JimJones, resides in Moscow, according to the U.S. Treasury Department.

The Australian government imposed its power to sanction an individual for cybercrime for the first time, applying the law against Yermakov after Australian Federal Police and intelligence agencies linked the Russian citizen to the Medibank cyberattack.

"This is the first time an Australian government has identified a cybercriminal and imposed cybersanctions of this kind and it won't be the last," Home Affairs Minister Clare O'Neil told reporters.

The cyberattack on Medibank, Australia’s largest health insurer, involved sensitive medical records that were released on the dark web after the company refused to pay a ransom.

O’Neil said it was “the single most devastating cyberattack we have experienced as a nation."

The leaks targeted records related to drug abuse, sexually transmitted infections, and abortions.

"We all went through it, literally millions of people having personal data about themselves, their family members, taken from them and cruelly placed online for others to see," O’Neil said, calling the hackers “cowards” and “scum bags."

The Australian sanctions impose a travel ban and strict financial sanctions that make it a criminal offense punishable by up to 10 years imprisonment for anyone found guilty of providing assets to Yermakov or using his assets, Foreign Minister Penny Wong said.

Australian Deputy Prime Minister Richard Marles said the sanctions are part of Australia’s efforts to expose cybercriminals and debilitate groups engaging in cyberattacks.

“In our current strategic circumstances we continue to see governments, critical infrastructure, businesses, and households in Australia targeted by malicious cyberactors," Marles said in a statement.

With reporting by AP, Reuters, and AFP

This content originally appeared on News - Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty and was authored by News - Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty.

East Sepik Governor Allan Bird says Papua New Guinea Prime Minister James Marape must take responsibility for the Port Moresby riots two weeks ago.

The National reports Governor Bird saying the police cannot be punished for the looting and burning, the government is totally responsible for what happened.

“You can’t just pass the buck, we’ve got to take responsibility for that,” said Bird, a government MP.

• READ MORE: Marape reshuffles PNG cabinet – Treasurer demoted, Tkatchenko back
• Other PNG politics reports

He said the rioting — dubbed Black Wednesday — was a stain on PNG’s history, a stain on all members of Parliament, and a stain on all of decisionmakers, who for many years had failed to deal with the underlying issues in the country.

Governor Bird said the lack of employment and increases in living costs had contributed to the buildup of frustrations that led to the riots in which lives were lost, women raped, and businesses destroyed.

Last week, Morobe Governor Luther Wenge said a change in leadership would restore confidence in government, and called for Marape to put his leadership of the Pangu Party on the table.

Wenge said he was not going anywhere, that he was a Pangu Pati member, but a change in leadership was necessary.

This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

Papua New Guinea’s Communications Minister Timothy Masiu has announced stringent measures to control social media in the country for the next 10 days of the State of Emergency.

The government’s threat drew a sharp rebuke from former prime minister Peter O’Neill who called the move a “sinister fear campaign against the people” and “a threat on the media freedom” of ordinary citizens.

Masiu, a former journalist before becoming a politician, warned that the government would not hesitate to shut down social media applications and sites if there was continuous abuse and misuse of social media in spreading fake news, misinformation and disinformation in the country.

• READ MORE:  PNG political fallout from deadly riots stirs call for vote over Marape
• PNG Post-Courier editorial – Draconian and dangerous move
• PNG’s Gerehu became a ‘ghost town in the blink of an eye’ after riot
• Marape accuses ‘rogue police’ of being part of Port Moresby’s riots
• ‘Uphold right to life’ says watchdog in aftermath of deadly PNG unrest

He issued the warning citing significant evidence of serious abuse of social media spreading false information that led to destruction of properties in the capital Port Moresby and parts of the country in last week’s Black Wednesday resulting in deaths.

Masiu said people who engaged in such bogus activity would lose their social media accounts and they could be arrested and charged for fomenting acts of violence.

He said: “I have statutory power under the National Information and Communication Technology Act 2009 to restrict access to social media sites and applications if this continues.

“The Ministry of ICT has observed a sharp spike in the use of social media from Wednesday, January 10, 2024, and many are misinformation and disinformation and we now give 10 days effective from today for people to adhere or face a complete shutdown of social media sites and applications for the duration of the State of Emergency. ”

‘Monitoring of false information’
He said discussions on social media that incited violence, destruction, spreading of false information or confidential government information, opinions that were wrong, or sending false information would be monitored and legal action taken immediately.

Masiu said national security, public emergency and public safety was critical to a secure nation and a “happy and safe country”.

“I have instructed the agencies under my ministry to strengthen monitoring and report any abuses of social media to the police cybercrime unit to begin investigations, arrest and prosecute and also take down fake accounts and sites.”

Last Friday, when introducing the two-week State of Emergency following Black Wednesday, Prime Minister James Marape announced draconian emergency measures including searches of private homes, property, vehicle and phones by government agents.

Masiu said PNG was a civilised country and citizens must abide by rules and laws. Every citizen had a duty and obligation to ensure “we progress to be a better country”.

However, an irate O’Neill said: “It is not surprising that we see intimidating armoured personnel carriers on the streets today in Port Moresby and now threats that our freedom of speech will be removed with the potential cancellation of social media.

“The government is doing its very best to shut down our constitutional rights in a fear campaign.”

Government ‘fears people’s voices’
O’Neill continued to counter the government plan by suggesting the government now feared the people’s voices.

“It seems that the government is in fear of the voice of its own people when it should instead be listening to the struggle of the people who discuss online the bad governance practices of this government; high unemployment; budget in a mess and crippling cost of living,” he said.

“That is what people are talking about on the street, in their homes and on social media. Will they next enter our homes and monitor conversation’s between family members?

“Government should listen up and stop this nonsense of trying to control our vibrant democracy.

Get back to basics and build our country; live within our means and develop jobs and provide quality healthcare and education. Get back to old fashioned policing not intimidation.”

Opposition Leader Joseph Lelang and his deputy Douglas Tomuriesa did not respond to PNG Post-Courier questions last night.

Republished with permission.

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by Pacific Media Watch.

The political fallout from the deadly riots in Papua New Guinea continues, including calls for a vote of no confidence against Prime Minister James Marape.

Seven MPs in Marape’s government have resigned following last week’s riots in Port Moresby and Lae — dubbed “Black Wednesday” — and the current death toll has reached 22

Belden Namah, representative for Vanimo-Green, is the latest government MP to resign.

• READ MORE:  PNG’s Gerehu became a ‘ghost town in the blink of an eye’ after riot
• Marape accuses ‘rogue police’ of being part of Port Moresby’s riots
• ‘Uphold right to life’ says watchdog in aftermath of deadly PNG unrest

Namah is a senior MP and a former captain in the PNG Defence Force. He was involved in removing Sandline mercenaries in 1997 after similar rioting and looting. As such, his resignation is a significant blow to the Marape regime.

Last Friday, Morobe Governor Luther Wenge called for an emergency sitting of Parliament to address urgent issues including a vote of no confidence.

Marape still has the majority and may announce a possible reshuffle in the coming days.

It is expected that there will be ministries that will be reworked so that the main base of power will still be contained.

Normalcy has returned on the ground the only tension is within political circles where people were preparing for a vote of no confidence or calling for a vote of no confidence.

Property returned
After several days of intense rioting in Port Moresby, Lae and other regions of Papua New Guinea the current death toll has reached 22.

However, it is suspected that the actual death toll, as order is restored, will be higher.

Acting Police Commissioner Donald Yamasombi asked people to return stolen property.

Yamasombi told looters to leave stolen items outside their homes for the military and police to pick up, on Saturday and Sunday.

His request was met with reasonable compliance.

A couple in Lae were arrested for abusing police over social media. The couple were “made an example of” for supporting the looters.

Videos of looter protests
There were also videos of looters expressing their dissatisfaction and telling the government why they were looting.

There is a feeling that something needs to happen. There are underlying frustrations among the population like the lack of opportunity for young people and the youth problems not dealt with.

The public’s frustrations are mirrored by PNG police, concerning their poor housing, work and pay conditions. Officers are expected to go into tribal fighting zones without body armour for protection.

This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

Rogue police officers have been alleged to be part of last Wednesday’s uprising of opportunists leading to looting and ransacking of more than 20 shops and loss of businesses in the capital of Port Moresby.

Prime Minister James Marape said last week’s “Black Wednesday” unrest had led the government to consider the Vagrancy Act and complete the national Census.

Marape said the 14-day State of Emergency orders included “no movement of large crowds”.

• READ MORE: ‘Uphold right to life’ says watchdog in aftermath of deadly PNG unrest

“There is no curfew and limited movement of large crowds will be stopped,” he said.

“Police will be supported by the PNG Defence Force and they will be allowed to stop anyone and check them.

“We are taking a soft approach to the SOE for the next 14 days,” Marape added.

Meanwhile, Brian Bell Group chair Ian Clough has made an impassioned plea to the government for assistance to rebuild its business because the company’s losses suffered in the Black Wednesday plunder were not covered by insurance, reports Claudia Tally.

He said that all businesses which suffered the “indignity of huge losses” through theft, arson and looting were not covered by insurance companies.

Brian Bell suffered losses of 50 million kina (NZ$21.5 million) million) after its warehouse in Port Moresby’s Gerehu Stage 6 was completely emptied by looters during the citywide plunder of businesses on January 10.

An emotional Clough said all businesses were not covered by insurance for civil unrest. This situation needed to be treated as a “natural disaster” where the government
must step in to assist.

Gorethy Kenneth, Miriam Zarriga and Claudia Tally are PNG Post-Courier reporters. Republished with permission.

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

A political crisis is starting to brew in Papua New Guinea as calls are made for Prime Minster James Marape to step down in the wake of deadly riots in parts of the country.

Violence broke out with shops and businesses being set alight late yesterday, after public servants, including police and army personnel, went on strike over a pay roll issue.

At least 10 people have been confirmed dead — eight in Port Moresby and two others in the northern city of Lae. [Al Jazeera reports 15 dead while ABC Pacific says 16 have been killed].

• READ MORE: At least 15 dead in Papua New Guinea rioting and looting – China lodges protest
• At least 10 dead after looting, fires on Port Moresby’s ‘darkest day’
• Violent riots in PNG leave 16 people dead, as PM declares state of emergency for 14 days
• Café Pacific’s report on the rioting as death toll rises
• Looting breaks out in PNG capital during police and military strike
• Contingent of Highlands Mobile Squad expected in Port Moresby
• Kavieng town under siege

On Thursday morning, Marape appealed to citizens not to take to the streets and “do anything and everything they feel”.

“Ill-discipline in the police force will not be tolerated, ill-discipline in the defence will not be tolerated, you can have one moment in the sunlight but this moment won’t last forever,” he said at a news conference on Thursday.

There has been widespread anger over Marape’s handling of the dispute as the violence and looting continues.

Police and defence personnel are trying to restore order, with 180 additional police flying into Port Moresby today.

‘Complete breakdown’
Six MPs have resigned from Papua New Guinea’s government. They are Sir Puka Temu, David Arore, James Donald, Maso Hewabi, Keith Iduhu and James Nomane.

Chauve MP James Nomane and Hiri-Koiari MP Kieth Iduhu made their resignations public via social media.

Both blamed Marape for the riots in Port Moresby, and which are now spreading to other parts of the country.

Nomane and Iduhu are members of Marape’s ruling Pangu Pati, and have called on him to resign.

“Today, I have tendered my resignation from the Marape-Rosso government due to my lack in confidence in the Prime Minister’s leadership,” said Iduhu in a Facebook post.

“I join the call of my colleague MPs in asking for the Prime Minister’s resignation based on the complete breakdown of our societal values and welfare,” he added.

Iduhu went on to accuse Marape of failing to address the grievances raised by Papua New Guinea’s police and military.

Core issue
“The core issue surrounding the grievances raised by the disciplinary forces was completely avoidable had it not been for bureaucratic negligence, and ensuing events even after the government was made aware of the situation displayed a lack of care for the potential for the situation to spiral of control,” he said.

Nomane’s statement of resignation was much harsher. He steps down from a senior role as PNG’s Vice Minister of National Planning.

He accused Marape of failing to run the country.

Violent riots in PNG leave 16 people dead, as PM declares state of emergency for 14 days https://t.co/AzxcX2MUXP

— The Pacific Newsroom (@newsroom_the) January 11, 2024

“I, now on this 11th day of January 2024, resign from the Marape-led government. I have no confidence in the prime minister,” Nomane said.

James Nomane, MP for Chuave District. Photo: Papua New Guinea Parliament

“Do the honourable thing and resign as the Prime Minister of Papua New Guinea. Resign for being indecisive and weak … resign for the country slipping into a Banana Republic, and for this crisis happening under your watch.

“What happened in Port Moresby yesterday was absolutely unacceptable . . . and warrants the immediate resignation of James Marape as the prime minister.

“The time has come for James Marape to stop pretending and step aside as the prime minister to put the nation’s interest ahead of his own . . .  This facade must stop.”

RNZ has approached the prime minister for comment.

This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

A political crisis is starting to brew in Papua New Guinea as calls are made for Prime Minster James Marape to step down in the wake of deadly riots in parts of the country.

Violence broke out with shops and businesses being set alight late yesterday, after public servants, including police and army personnel, went on strike over a pay roll issue.

At least 10 people have been confirmed dead — eight in Port Moresby and two others in the northern city of Lae. [Al Jazeera reports 15 dead while ABC Pacific says 16 have been killed].

• READ MORE: At least 15 dead in Papua New Guinea rioting and looting – China lodges protest
• At least 10 dead after looting, fires on Port Moresby’s ‘darkest day’
• Violent riots in PNG leave 16 people dead, as PM declares state of emergency for 14 days
• Café Pacific’s report on the rioting as death toll rises
• Looting breaks out in PNG capital during police and military strike
• Contingent of Highlands Mobile Squad expected in Port Moresby
• Kavieng town under siege

On Thursday morning, Marape appealed to citizens not to take to the streets and “do anything and everything they feel”.

“Ill-discipline in the police force will not be tolerated, ill-discipline in the defence will not be tolerated, you can have one moment in the sunlight but this moment won’t last forever,” he said at a news conference on Thursday.

There has been widespread anger over Marape’s handling of the dispute as the violence and looting continues.

Police and defence personnel are trying to restore order, with 180 additional police flying into Port Moresby today.

‘Complete breakdown’
Six MPs have resigned from Papua New Guinea’s government. They are Sir Puka Temu, David Arore, James Donald, Maso Hewabi, Keith Iduhu and James Nomane.

Chauve MP James Nomane and Hiri-Koiari MP Kieth Iduhu made their resignations public via social media.

Both blamed Marape for the riots in Port Moresby, and which are now spreading to other parts of the country.

Nomane and Iduhu are members of Marape’s ruling Pangu Pati, and have called on him to resign.

“Today, I have tendered my resignation from the Marape-Rosso government due to my lack in confidence in the Prime Minister’s leadership,” said Iduhu in a Facebook post.

“I join the call of my colleague MPs in asking for the Prime Minister’s resignation based on the complete breakdown of our societal values and welfare,” he added.

Iduhu went on to accuse Marape of failing to address the grievances raised by Papua New Guinea’s police and military.

Core issue
“The core issue surrounding the grievances raised by the disciplinary forces was completely avoidable had it not been for bureaucratic negligence, and ensuing events even after the government was made aware of the situation displayed a lack of care for the potential for the situation to spiral of control,” he said.

Nomane’s statement of resignation was much harsher. He steps down from a senior role as PNG’s Vice Minister of National Planning.

He accused Marape of failing to run the country.

Violent riots in PNG leave 16 people dead, as PM declares state of emergency for 14 days https://t.co/AzxcX2MUXP

— The Pacific Newsroom (@newsroom_the) January 11, 2024

“I, now on this 11th day of January 2024, resign from the Marape-led government. I have no confidence in the prime minister,” Nomane said.

James Nomane, MP for Chuave District. Photo: Papua New Guinea Parliament

“Do the honourable thing and resign as the Prime Minister of Papua New Guinea. Resign for being indecisive and weak … resign for the country slipping into a Banana Republic, and for this crisis happening under your watch.

“What happened in Port Moresby yesterday was absolutely unacceptable . . . and warrants the immediate resignation of James Marape as the prime minister.

“The time has come for James Marape to stop pretending and step aside as the prime minister to put the nation’s interest ahead of his own . . .  This facade must stop.”

RNZ has approached the prime minister for comment.

This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

In the early afternoon a man stabbed three children and a care assistant (who were taken to hospital). He was stopped by a 43-year-old Deliveroo driver who intervened and hit him with his helmet.

Then, “after the stabbing incident, rumours spread that the alleged perpetrator was an illegal North African immigrant ‘fresh off the boat’, along with false rumours that the children had died. Agitators fostered anti-immigrant sentiment online, urging people to assemble at the crime scene and protest.”

Parnell Square East, Dublin. Site of Gaelscoil Cholaiste Mhuire closed off as a crime scene.
(Photo: Caoimhghin Ó Croidheáin, 24 November 2023)

However, it turned out that the perpetrator was originally from Algeria, who had lived in Ireland for 20 years and was naturalised as an Irish citizen in 2014. The Deliveroo cyclist is from Brazil and the school is an Irish-medium primary school, of which there are many in Ireland, and these schools attract many children of Irish and non-Irish people living in Ireland who are interested in Irish traditional culture and the Irish language.

On social media the far-right urged people to go to the scene and “make your feelings known”, using the hashtag #Irelandisfull.

Parnell Square East, Dublin. Site of Gaelscoil Cholaiste Mhuire closed off as a crime scene.
(Photo: Caoimhghin Ó Croidheáin, 24 November 2023)

However, the rioters themselves seem to have been mainly young men from the ages of 18-25 who were not particularly ideological and in some cases had already been in trouble with the Gardai. Thus, the rioters seized the opportunity to cause trouble egged on by a small number of people who were reported to be shouting anti-immigration slogans at gardaí, some holding Irish flags and signs reading “Irish lives matter”.

Since then two of the victims have been released from hospital and the Justice Minister has confirmed that 48 people have now been arrested.

O’Connell Street, Dublin (Photo: Caoimhghin Ó Croidheáin, 24 November 2023)

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Caoimhghin O Croidheain.

Photograph Source: David Rovics

In these days of a genocidal bombing campaign in Gaza and a widespread blackout in both the mainstream media in the west, and on social media, the choice between a news blackout on Facebook and a polarized, all-or-nothing “discourse” on X, trying to make sense of anything happening in the world that you’re not directly witnessing yourself can in many ways be more challenging than ever, oddly enough, in this epoch of supposed “connection.”

Following events taking place in Dublin, Ireland, since November 23rd, all the same sorts of factors are at play in trying to make real sense of anything, it seems to me.  I’m not sure if it’s any different for people who live there, at least judging from the sorts of things we’re hearing from the Irish politicians or Irish media outlets.

So although I know many Irish people in Ireland who share my take on recent history there and ongoing developments in Irish society that have been taking place on the island in our shared lifetimes, perhaps my vantage point as an outsider who is also a frequent visitor with an interest in sociology might be of use.

For the many people out there in the world with Irish ancestry or just anyone with a deep sense of connection with various themes from Irish history or with Irish music, dance, poetry, etc., it’s easy to paint the Irish past and present with broad brushes and unhelpful generalizations.  I’ll just admit right here that I’m one of those people apt to make such generalizations, being a history buff with a bit of an obsession with Irish traditional music.  But I’ll endeavor to avoid any inaccurate pronouncements, even if I may make a few broad historical statements along the way.

For those who missed it, an Irish citizen with an immigrant background seems to have lost the plot and began attacking small children with a knife, on one of Dublin’s busiest streets.  One of the children’s teachers and a quick-thinking Brazilian immigrant on a motorcycle were able to put a stop to the man’s stabbing spree.  What then followed were large groups of young men engaging in the torching of city buses and police cars and apparently the chanting of xenophobic slogans (“get them out”), the targeting of a refugee asylum center, it seems, with one of the burning vehicles on fire directly in front of it, and then larger groups of people taking the opportunity created by the chaos to loot some downtown shops.

Politicians and pundits are saying these riots are unprecedented, in a number of ways.  They’re very understandably expressing revulsion.  But just as often, they seem perplexed.

If they are actually perplexed, and not just faking it for the cameras, it could still be understandable.  The politicians are usually around my age or older, unlike these young rioters.  The politicians grew up in something more along the lines of the Ireland I first visited in the 1980’s, and then again much more in the 1990’s.

The Irish Republic they grew up in — and the Irish Republic I first visited — was overwhelmingly white, Irish, Catholic, and poor.  It was the first country to be colonized by the British Empire, and one of many to throw off the yoke of imperial domination only to replace it with a partial independence that had a lot to be desired, and still does.

But the Ireland they grew up in also had, at least by my recollection, certain consistencies about it that many people found comforting.  Most people were poor, but then that was true of most people you knew, and there were very few ostentatiously wealthy people of any description, even in the center of the biggest cities, flaunting their riches and wearing mink coats and staying in fancy hotels back then.  Many people were on the dole — probably half the young people I met back when I first visited — but rent was cheap in most of the country, and most everyone could at least squeak by under the circumstances.

Although many people had complaints about the two-party duopoly that had been (and still is) running the Republic of Ireland for most of its existence since independence, there was also a widespread feeling that a lot of people in the world had it worse than Ireland did at the time.  There was, and still is, a widespread sense of solidarity with other formerly colonized lands and peoples around the world, whether they were other former victims of the British Empire or victims of other empires.  There was a widespread and frequently-expressed revulsion for the racist attitudes many Irish people associated with Irish-Americans, and as an American visiting Ireland I was often told by people that “we’re not like that here.”

To say what is overwhelmingly obvious to anyone my age or older who grew up in Ireland, the whole foundation of Irish nationalism was that it was a nationalism of a colonized nation against an imperial one.  And to the extent that most of the island became independent in 1921, Irish nationalism maintained this internationalist, anti-colonial, anti-imperialist, and also fundamentally anti-racist and anti-xenophobic character, as it was rooted in all the colonized people uniting against their common oppressors, and very rooted in socialist notions generally.  As any Irish person passingly familiar with Irish history knows, the leaders of the Irish independence struggle were also socialists.

Ireland was thus also not only an island with a disproportionate number of great musicians, but its population on average was one of the most generous in the world, in terms of donating to and volunteering for humanitarian organizations, which is just one quantitative measure of the attitude of the average Irish person.

So many aspects of this Ireland I’m describing began to change in the 1990’s, with the “Celtic Tiger” phenomenon.  Overnight, it seemed, Ireland became a country of immigration rather than emigration.  Suddenly, jobs were plentiful, but they were being taken not only by Irish people but my immigrants from other EU countries and beyond.

IT companies were moving in in droves and setting up their European headquarters in Ireland.  This was good for Irish IT experts, but for everyone else, as in places like San Francisco, it meant skyrocketing rents and other skyrocketing expenses for so many other people.

Ireland was obviously at a crossroads, in the 1990’s, and in a situation where really big decisions desperately needed to be made about regulating the housing market under the circumstances, lest the cost of living become completely disconnected from what the average person earned.  Despite efforts to increase social spending to keep up with rising inequality, inequality has continued to rise in Ireland, by my observation and also according to something I just read from the International Monetary Fund.  Where this is most apparent is within the ranks of the top 10%, and particularly the top 1%, of Irish society.

As with the US and so many other countries, although perhaps it would be a stretch to call the Irish Republic a failed state, it is a state that, like the US, has been completely unable to rise to the occasion that is demanded by the situation, and effectively control the housing market, which is of course one of the biggest reasons the wealthy keep getting wealthier, and so many other people can’t pay the ever-increasing costs.  The average apartment rental in Dublin is now well over $2,000, and getting worse all the time.

And who are the beneficiaries of this growing divide?  Some of the biggest are those who own the land — the land, and the buildings, that once were only moderately profitable to own as a landlord, which have become tremendously profitable.  Which has led, in Ireland as with the US, to a further concentration in ownership of the housing stock, by investors with ever less connection to the society whose basic needs it is their business to profit from.

This kind of untenable situation might give rise to lots of people identifying their problem as being all caught up with capitalism and things like the housing market being woefully insufficiently regulated.  People might demand that all the landlords in the Dáil resign!  People might recognize Ireland for the terribly divided class society that it is, now more than ever, and they might try to address this problem head-on.

While there are people trying to organize renters in Ireland, of course, what has characterized the Irish left by my observation over the past two decades or so has been the same sorts of division and atomization that has been easy to witness here in the United States.  Identity politics has largely taken over political discourse in the Republic of Ireland, unlike reality on the ground in Northern Ireland, where the same phenomenon has not taken hold to anything like the same degree, though it’s evident there, too.

I don’t know what the various motivations are for the different actors involved here, but what is very evident to observe on social media in the wake of the riots, and generally on social media consumed by Irish people for many years, are people constantly promoting the same kinds of nominally anti-racist arguments that are steeped in a sort of white guilt and anti-working class sentiment very familiar to Americans, but which seems especially alien in the Irish context.  Or at least it used to.  Now, it seems to have taken root.

After years and years of people in Ireland expressing nationalist sentiments being told by anonymous actors on the internet — some of whom may actually be fellow Irish people, who knows — that their patriotic pride or nationalistic sentiments were nothing more than expressions of racism and xenophobia, that they were uneducated people, that they were scum, eventually this kind of message being driven home continually on corporate, American-owned social media platforms managed to take root.  Eventually, some combination perhaps of their ever-more-stressed circumstances, of the unfamiliar displays of ostentatious wealth that are now so easy to find in the center of every Irish city, of the direly precarious and ever-worsening housing market, and of the competition for jobs and housing with an ever-growing population of immigrants and refugees, created the xenophobic outburst that was being socially engineered for so many years, in so many ways.

When I look at the kinds of messaging I’m seeing on social media platforms using hash tags like #DublinRiots I see organized, professional trolls who have an agenda in mind to foment division within Irish society and to foment racism and xenophobia in it.  Of course it doesn’t need to be professional to appear to be organized or to have terrible consequences.  The right algorithms can create that appearance and have the same effect.

But whether professional actors are involved or not, who might they be and what interests might they be promoting?  The possibilities are endless.  The ones that first come to mind to me would be anyone who might have an interest in de-socializing Irish nationalism, and turning it into a racist, rightwing phenomenon.  Up to this point, Ireland has had no far right party.  It is definitely in the interests of various actors, such as MI5, just to take a less-than-random possibility, to divide the Irish nationalist community as much as possible.

It would also be in the interest of the Irish ruling class — the 1% of Irish society that owns a third of the wealth there — which is profiting at a heretofore unprecedented rate from the basic need of the island’s population to have a place to live.  Much better to have the nationalists and the refugees competing with each other for a place in Irish society, rather than having them unite against their common class enemy.

The post Dublin Riots: the Social Engineering of Xenophobia in Ireland appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by David Rovics.

These criminal cases rest on the assumption that Trump knew his claims of election fraud were false, making his actions to overturn the election an illegal conspiracy. However, what anti-Trumpers declare disinformation is what Trumpers and others consider their First Amendment free speech right to speak the truth. So far, the US has no official 1984-style Ministry of Truth or “science” that declares what is misinformation – though Biden sought to create one with the Nina Jankowicz Disinformation Governance Board.

Trump challenged the election results in some states and asked officials there to find evidence of fraud. Later he asked Vice President Pence to reject the Electors from those states. A candidate in any election has the right to challenge the vote count. The Constitution presents some procedures for doing this, which Trump followed.

Yet, in 2000, 2004, and particularly in 2016, when Democrats lost the election, they also challenged the final vote. The US clearly has undemocratic presidential elections, where winning the popular vote does not mean you win the election, a consequence of the Constitution giving us no right to vote for president.

In 2000, the Supreme Court did intervene to stop the recount of votes for president in Florida that would have made Al Gore the president. In 2004, Democratic Senator Barbara Boxer and others objected to certifying the Ohio elector votes for Bush, which would make him the victor. In 2016, after the Hillary Clinton-CIA-FBI Russia collusion hoax – the biggest national security state hoax since their WMDs in Iraq – had failed to stop Trump, Democratic activists tried to convince electors to switch their votes from Trump. Two did. Some even received death threats if they voted for Trump. No one was charged with obstructing an official proceeding in either case.

Trump stands accused of violating the Espionage Act, treason, by possessing classified documents in his private mansion – something we know Biden did as Vice President and Clinton did as Secretary of State. Trump – unlike Biden or Clinton at the time – was President of the United States, the highest official of the Executive Branch of the government. Even the American Bar Association states the President has “broad authority to formally declassify most documents.”

Glenn Greenwald asked:

What is it that Donald Trump did exactly that was illegal? He definitely sued in court multiple times and lost, which is absolutely his right to do. He told Mike Pence what he heard from his lawyers was Mike Pence’s ability to do, even if it wasn’t, which was act as that vice presidential role and reject as certified results, ones that he regarded had evidence of fraud and send them back to the states. He arranged for an alternative state of electors to be ready to be anointed in the event he could prove that there was a fraud. But what about this is criminal? Which of these steps is illegal?

In Georgia state court Trump was charged with 13 felony conspiracy counts under their RICO anti-racketeering law used against mobsters. The law makes everyone who did anything as part of the conspiracy a full member of the criminal ring and equally responsible for crimes committed by others, as long as they were committed as part of the conspiracy. The prosecutor outlandishly claimed this conspiracy began one day after the 2020 election, when Trump gave a speech saying he won. This is criminalizing our First Amendment free speech rights.

National Security State Lawfare to Fix 2024 Election for Biden

The Biden administration is using the Department of Justice to eliminate his only serious challenger in the presidential race. This lawfare election fixing is unprecedented in US history, though presidents have been “elected” in underhanded ways, as in 1824, 1876, 1960, 2000. Even more ominously, this lawfare is being engineered by the national security state. They have opposed Trump since he first condemned US wars in the Middle East during the 2016 Republican primary debates, and called out the national security state hoax of weapons of mass destruction to instigate the war on Iraq.

It now looks like the 2024 presidential election will not be decided by our vote, but by the national security state intervening beforehand to remove Biden’s most formidable challenger.

Trump could have brought the same charges against Biden in 2020, when Biden, years after no longer holding a government position, had secret documents in his house. However, there would have been national outrage and popular mobilizations against “fascism” if Trump’s Department of Justice had indicted Biden for treason in the run-up to the election. But today, progressive people either approve of lawfare against Trump, or are silent.

In 2020, during the Black Lives Matter mass protests, people called for defunding the police and prison network, and regarded prosecutors as covering for police brutality. Now, the left and liberals champion the prosecutors of Trump, not questioning their credibility. Greenwald noted, “They really have come to be a political movement that reveres institutions of power because they regard them as being their political allies.”

Voters for Democrats now Trust the FBI and CIA

A Gallup poll a year ago, before the indictments of Trump corroborates this: 79% of Democrat voters say the FBI is doing an excellent or good job; only 29% of Republican voters do. And 69% of Democratic voters say the CIA is doing a good job; only 38% of Republican voters do. We live in a different era from what we grew up in, even 20 years ago at the start of Bush’s war on Iraq. Now most Democrats like the CIA and FBI and most Republicans don’t. Now all the Democrats in Congress vote to continually fund the war in Ukraine, while only Republicans vote against.

It’s a bygone era when Republicans were the war hawks and a wing of the Democrats were pro-peace. Unfortunately most leftists and progressives still live in that era.

Today many who want to defend free speech, stop endless war, stop censorship, oppose the “deep state,” find a hearing with Trump Republicans, while the Democrats have become advocates of war and state censorship.

Lawfare Indictments against Trump will be directed against us

These lawfare charges to remove Trump from the presidential race, presented by the national security police agencies along with the Democratic Party and neo-con Republicans, will be used against viable future third parties. They will be a threat to our constitutional rights and our ability to organize against the 1%. Already, in part thanks to the absence of progressive outcry, the RICO law prosecution of Trump in Georgia is used against Stop Cop City protestors in Atlanta.

We should protest the indictments against Trump and the harsh criminal sentences against his January 6 supporters because if the left would ever move off the sidelines and become a force, they will be subject to similar prosecutions, only in an even more draconian way. Working class forces who effectively take on the bosses will suffer the same treatment.

McCarthyism of the Left

Unfortunately, anti-Trump sentiment infects and blinds much of the left milieu. Very few oppose these national security police state attacks on Trump or the lawfare manipulation of the 2024 election. We protest the New York Times’ McCarthyite attack on anti-war activists, but McCarthyism also exists in the left, where people are baited, and fear being baited – not as Reds, but as Trump supporters often simply for not condemning him enough. Consequently, they either participate in Trumper-baiting themselves or are intimidated into not standing up to it. This left McCarthyism is widespread and functions to push people towards voting for the supposed “lesser evil” Democratic Party and towards defending the actions of the national security police state.

We see this left McCarthyism with cheering the harsh sentences of January 6 defendants, most of who were non-violent. We see it in progressives’ not demanding answers for what the 100-200 undercover FBI and other police agency undercover agents in the crowd were actually doing that day. We see it in their not demanding answers about what the federal agents who had infiltrated the Proud Boys and other groups months before January 6 actually knew of January 6 plans. Stewart Rhodes, leader of the Oath Keepers, was in regular contact with the Secret Service for months prior to January 6. We see it in progressives’ failure to question the reasons behind the deliberate lack of defense of the Capitol. We see it in progressives not standing up for Rhodes and Proud Boys leader Enrique Tarrio, who were non-violent on January 6, and did not even enter the Capitol, but were given 18 and 22 years for a charge often used against radicals: “seditious conspiracy.” These sentences are precedents that will be used against us. But left McCarthyism, fear of being baited as soft on Trump, makes progressives keep their mouths shut.

Unfortunately, as the Democratic Party shifted far to the right, and now is in open collusion with the FBI and CIA, becoming increasingly owned by the national security state, more and more of the left has capitulated to the identity politics ideology of that Party and the belief that it represents the “lesser evil” to Trump “fascism.” How far this left will degenerate, and how long until there is a national reaction to national security state fixing the 2024 election is unclear. The left is digging themselves into a hole, and giving the police state the opportunity to cover them up when they try to get out of it.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Stansfield Smith.

Many youth, particularly in France, have channeled this hopelessness into rage. For the past several months the country had been seeing a series of strikes and riots in response to the raising of the retirement age, and these riots intensified in late June after the police murder of 17-year-old Nahel Merzouk during a traffic stop. As the dust settles, inept politicians blame bad parenting and TikTok.

Meanwhile in Peru, protesters from around the country have gathered in Lima calling for the resignation of President Dina Boluarte and the dissolution of congress.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by subMedia.

The death of a French teenager of African descent shot by police during a roadside confrontation has sparked public clashes with police and riots across France. 

Coverage of the riots by Chinese language Twitter accounts are rife with misinformation accompanied by misleading videos not taken during the riots and fake images “corroborated” by other fake images. 

Asia Fact Check Lab (AFCL) checked and disproved four such widely circulated stories about the riots. 

In Depth

Are animals running wild on the streets? 

An article published by Liu Hong, the former deputy editor-in-chief of the Chinese news outlet Huanqiu magazine, for the Wechat news column Jinri Toutiao on July 2 mentions that “several lions and elephants” were released from a zoo during the riots, without providing any visuals to support the claim.

After running keyword searches for “riots in France” and “zoos” across both Twitter and Facebook, AFCL found several accounts making similar claims that included various videos as evidence. Two of the most widely circulated clips were of a zebra and lion escaping from the zoo. Image searches using screenshots taken from both videos provided no results due to poor image quality. 

However, a follow-up search for related stories using the phrase “zebra escape france” showed that a similar video clip of the zebra was published in a report by the UK news outlet Daily Mail on April 13, 2020. 

The report states that the zebra escaped from a zoo in the Paris suburb of Ormesson-sur-Marne during a COVID lockdown in 2020 before being filmed running on the road. 

A separate video spread on Twitter and TikTok with the phrase “saint denis” in the title also purported to show lions let loose during the riots. AFCL searched Google using the phrase “saint denis lion” and found that a user had posted the same video on YouTube in 2020.

Despite the edited version of the video showing only the top half of the original video’s frame, both versions have an identical name of “mardi” located in the lower left frame. The two videos’ identical lighting, framing and content confirm that they come from the same source.  

Did armed French teenagers hijack a police car?

The same article on Jinri Toutiao that mentioned the animals also included a photo of armed youths driving a police car while holding a French flag, accompanied by a warning to all Chinese tourists in France to avoid areas already hit by the riots and to report any emergencies to the police. 

This same photo was separately posted by a Chinese language Twitter account accompanied by a description that the protesters were armed with military weapons and had hijacked a police car during the course of the riots.

Several accounts on the popular Chinese social media site Weibo also reposted the photo, claiming that the police have turned into bandits during the riots in France.

After searching the photo through Google, AFCL found it had originally been posted online in January 2023, before the riots began. One of the results from the search was a link to the Chinese video sharing platform Douyin, where a suggested keyword “Athena movie” and a final search using the phrase found revealed that the photo was actually a still taken from the 2022 Netflix movie Athena.

The same image appears at 1:26 in the film’s official trailer, proving that the photo was not taken during the recent riots in France.

Were French youths shooting like snipers from the tops of buildings?

A separate photo circulated by Chinese netizens on Twitter shows a young man in a black down jacket aiming down from a tall building while holding what appears to be a sniper rifle, with captions added by the netizens describing the person as a teenage sniper in the riots.

AFCL searched the photo on Google and found a video uploaded by a Twitter user on June 9, 2023 among the search results.

The search also returned sources dated as early as 2022, however the links to these older search results were broken. AFCL was unable to further verify whether the video features a real sniper or is merely a prank. Regardless, the earlier posting dates of all these results verify that this image is unrelated to the recent riots in France. 

Do French people enjoy sipping wine even during a riot? 

Several Twitter accounts posted the same photo of a man and woman sipping wine on a street with a fire burning directly behind them, accompanied by nearly identical comments that read “French people have big hearts. ...... Find a good spot to watch the action.” 

Asia Fact Check Lab (AFCL) is a branch of RFA established to counter disinformation in today’s complex media environment. Our journalists publish both daily and special reports that aim to sharpen and deepen our readers’ understanding of public issues.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By Dong Zhe for Asia Fact Check Lab.

Although they never fail to take us aback, French riots have followed the same distinct pattern ever since protests broke out in the eastern suburbs of Lyon in 1981, an episode known as the “summer of Minguettes”: a young person is killed or seriously injured by the police, triggering an outpouring of violence in the affected neighbourhood and nearby.

Sometimes, as in the case of the 2005 riots and of this past week’s, it is every rough neighbourhood that flares up.

Throughout the past 40 years in France, urban revolts have been dominated by the rage of young people who attack the symbols of order and the state: town halls, social centres, schools, and shops.

• READ MORE: France unrest appears to be ebbing but more than 700 arrested
• Slain teenager’s grandmother calls for end to riots in France
• Other reports on French police and racism

An institutional and political vacuum
That rage is the kind that leads one to destroy one’s own neighbourhood, for all to see.

Residents condemn these acts, but can also understand the motivation. Elected representatives, associations, churches and mosques, social workers and teachers admit their powerlessness, revealing an institutional and political vacuum.

Of all the revolts, the summer of the Minguettes was the only one to pave the way to a social movement: the March for Equality and Against Racism in December 1983.

Numbering more than 100,000 people and prominently covered by the media, it was France’s first demonstration of its kind. Left-leaning newspaper Libération nicknamed it “La Marche des Beurs”, a colloquial term that refers to Europeans whose parents or grandparents are from the Maghreb.

In the demonstrations that followed, no similar movement appears to have emerged from the ashes.

At each riot, politicians are quick to play well-worn roles: the right denounces the violence and goes on to stigmatise neighbourhoods and police victims; the left denounces injustice and promises social policies in the neighbourhoods.

In 2005, then Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy sided with the police. France’s current President, Emmanuel Macron, has expressed compassion for the teenager killed by the police in Nanterre, but politicians and presidents are hardly heard in the neighbourhoods concerned.

We then wait for silence to set in until the next time the problems of the banlieues (French suburbs) and its police are rediscovered by society at large.

This is what started the French Riots!

Police eventually shoot the driver who is a 17 year old Algerian pic.twitter.com/eShWGHEfHC

— Redneck Azn (@LMFireSystems1) June 29, 2023

Lessons to be learned
The recurrence of urban riots in France and their scenarios yield some relatively simple lessons.

First, the country’s urban policies miss their targets. Over the last 40 years, considerable efforts have been made to improve housing and facilities. Apartments are of better quality, there are social centres, schools, colleges and public transportation.

It would be wrong to say that these neighbourhoods have been abandoned.

On the other hand, the social and cultural diversity of disadvantaged suburbs has deteriorated. More often than not, the residents are poor or financially insecure, and are either descendants of immigrants or immigrants themselves.

Above all, when given the opportunity and the resources, those who can leave the banlieues soon do, only to be replaced by even poorer residents from further afield. Thus while the built environment is improving, the social environment is unravelling.

However reluctant people may be to talk about France’s disadvantaged neighbourhoods, the social process at work here is indeed one of ghettoisation – i.e., a growing divide between neighbourhoods and their environment, a self-containment reinforced from within. You go to the same school, the same social centre, you socialise with the same individuals, and you participate in the same more or less legal economy.

In spite of the cash and local representatives’ goodwill, people still feel excluded from society because of their origins, culture or religion. In spite of social policies and councillors’ work, the neighbourhoods have no institutional or political resources of their own.

Whereas the often communist-led “banlieues rouges” (“red suburbs”) benefited from the strong support of left-leaning political parties, trade unions and popular education movements, today’s banlieues hardly have any spokespeople. Social workers and teachers are full of goodwill, but many don’t live in the neighbourhoods where they work.

This disconnect works both ways, and the past days’ riots revealed that elected representatives and associations don’t have any hold on neighbourhoods where residents feel ignored and abandoned. Appeals for calm are going unheeded. The rift is not just social, it’s also political.

#France #AFP
Police arrest 1,000 in French riots ahead of teen’s funeral. pic.twitter.com/p24dtYtkUu

— AFP Photo (@AFPphoto) July 1, 2023

A constant face-off
With this in mind, we are increasingly seeing young people face off with the police. The two groups function like “gangs”, complete with their own hatreds and territories.

In this landscape, the state is reduced to legal violence and young people to their actual or potential delinquency.

The police are judged to be “mechanically” racist on the grounds that any young person is a priori a suspect. Young people feel hatred for the police, fuelling further police racism and youth violence.

Older residents would like to see more police officers to uphold order, but also support their own children and the frustrations and anger they feel.

This “war” is usually played out at a low level. When a young person dies, however, everything explodes and it’s back to the drawing board until the next uprising, which will surprise us just as much as the previous ones.

But there is something new in this tragic repetition. The first element is the rise of the far right — and not just on that side of the political spectrum. Racist accounts of the uprisings are taking hold, one that speaks of “barbarians” and immigration, and there’s fear that this could lead to success at the ballot box.

The second is the political and intellectual paralysis of the political left. While it denounces injustice and sometimes supports the riots, it does not appear to have put forward any political solution other than police reform.

So long as the process of ghettoisation continues, as France’s young people and security forces face off time and time again, it is hard to see how the next police blunder and the riots that follow won’t be just around the corner.

Dr François Dubet, professeur des universités émérite, Université de Bordeaux. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons licence. Read the original article.

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

This content originally appeared on openDemocracy RSS and was authored by Emma DeSouza.

The documentary, released in January 2023, created a huge row in India as it probed the role of Narendra Modi, then chief minister of Gujarat, in the communal violence that erupted in the state in February and March 2002. On January 21, the government banned the documentary and asked YouTube and Twitter to remove all links. “The bias and lack of objectivity and frankly continuing colonial mindset are blatantly visible,” Arindam Bagchi, spokesperson for the foreign affairs ministry, said in a statement referring to the documentary.

At the 53.07-minute mark in the ANI show, after a brief discussion on the minister’s JNU days, the interviewer asked Jaishankar about his stance on the practice of banning a documentary or a book or asking a channel not to broadcast something in India. In reply, he said, “I don’t think you are asking the right question… What is it we are debating? We are not debating just a documentary or a speech that somebody gave in a European city… We are debating actually politics which is being conducted ostensibly as media… There is a phrase ‘war by other means’… think of it, this is politics by other means”.

Alluding to the BBC documentary, Jaishankar added, “You do a hatchet job and say this is just another quest for truth which we decided after 20 years to put out at this time! Do you think the timing is accidental?”

Then, around the 55-minute mark, the discussion came back to the documentary. Jaishankar said at 56.21, “Okay you had to make a documentary… many things happened in Delhi in 1984. Why didn’t we see a documentary on that? If you say I am a humanist and must get justice for people who have been wronged… This is politics at play by people who don’t have the courage to come into the political field…”

In other words, external affairs minister S Jaishankar suggested that there was a political motive behind the release of the BBC documentary on the Gujarat riots. He backed this hypothesis by alluding to the 1984 anti-Sikh riots in Delhi and saying that the BBC did not make a documentary on that, thereby indicating a bias.

BBC documentary on 1984 riots

A simple keyword search on Google reveals that the BBC has an hour-long documentary on the Sikh riots in Delhi that broke out in the aftermath of former Prime Minister Indira Gandhi’s assassination on October 31, 1984. It is titled ‘1984 — A Sikh Story‘. it was released in 2010 when the Congress-led UPA was in power at the Centre.

The documentary is shot in the first-person narration of a journalist named Sonia Deol, who was then with the BBC, and is a Sikh by faith. Some parts of it are extremely personal but much of it seeks to look at the events of 1984 with an objective distance.

When @theJagmeetSingh says issue of ‘84 is complex and people look confused, let me share #bbc doc I did. I had an hour..still wasn’t enough. The hurt many Sikhs feel still very real. #JagmeetSingh #cdnpoli 1984 A Sikh Story BBC Documentary https://t.co/p7QcfxBAOI via @YouTube pic.twitter.com/B3AKm3KYiq

— Sonia Deol (@soniadeol1) March 16, 2018

She says that she was guided in the assignment by Mark Tully, who was BBC’s chief of bureau in Delhi for 22 years. “Throughout 1984, his reports were a lifeline for British Indians anxious for news,” she adds, suggesting that the BBC had covered the events of 1984 extensively. But more on that, later.

What does the BBC documentary show?

The documentary starts by saying, “It was Indira Gandhi who gave the order to capture Bhindranwale and began a chain of events that would lead to thousands of deaths, including her own.”

“Neighbours became enemies” and “a sacred shrine became killing ground,” it adds.

To shoot the documentary, Sonia visited Amritsar and the Golden Temple in particular, where Operation Blue Star had taken place in the first week of June 1984, authorized by then PM Indira Gandhi to capture Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale, who had taken refuge in the shrine. It records the testimony of witnesses and survivors. Gyani Puran Singh, a priest who was inside the Golden Temple complex on that fateful day, describes on camera how army tanks entered the Golden Temple compound and ‘all but destroyed’ the ‘Akal Takht’, where Bhindranwale had stationed himself.

The setting of the documentary then changes to Delhi, where close to 3,000 Sikhs were killed in the first 3/4 days of November 1984, according to the report of the Justice Nanavati commission. This was done in retaliation to the assassination of Indira Gandhi by her two Sikh bodyguards, Beant and Satwant Singh, at her residence at 1, Safdarjung Marg, on October 31, 1984.

The documentary narrates in detail how things went out of control in Delhi, once the news got out that Indira was killed by two Sikhs. It features a photojournalist who had seen the riots first-hand. What he saw was appalling. The mob was not only beating up Sikhs but killing them as well. At this point, the documentary shows newspaper clippings with headlines such as ‘Mob burns Sikhs alive’. He also narrates how he managed to save one of his Sikh friends, by hiding him in his darkroom.

“The attacks didn’t just happen in central Delhi… but the mobs wanted to kill in greater numbers so they headed to the outskirts of Delhi in areas like Trilokpuri and Mangolpuri. That’s where the Sikh communities lived,” the presenter says at the 44.12-minute mark.

Again, at 44.22, she goes to a gurudwara, where a survivor tells her that the riots were not a disorganized rampage, but a planned attack against the Sikh community. He recollects how in his locality police had first asked Sikh youths who had taken shelter in a Gurudwara to go back to their homes, and then burnt down the Gurudwara and allowed the mob to run amok in the blocks where the Sikhs lived. Police, who were supposed to protect the helpless community, were allegedly complicit in the riots, the presenter says.

So, it is fact that BBC did make a documentary on the 1984 anti-Sikh riots in Delhi, which minces no words to narrate how Sikhs were butchered in the national capital. S Jaishankar’s rhetorical question — “many things happened in Delhi in 1884. Why didn’t we see a documentary on that” — is not based on facts.

BBC has more than one documentary on 1984

A keyword search on the BBC’s official website reveals that the broadcaster has actually made more than one documentary on 1984, Delhi. Besides, there are several reports which look back at the events of that year.

In November 2009, the BBC published a long-form feature by an Indian journalist who had covered the 1984 riots from the ground. Titled ‘Indira Gandhi’s death remembered‘, the piece presents a blow-by-blow account of the violence, described in the story as ‘ethnic cleansing’.

In January 2014, on the 30th anniversary of the Sikh riots, BBC Radio made a documentary where a survivor goes back to the localities where violence had broken out and recollects those days. It is called ‘Assassination: When Delhi Burned‘.

In February 2014, the BBC published a long-form report titled ‘Delhi 1984: India’s Congress party still struggling to escape the past‘. It says, “At least 3,000 Sikhs were killed in Delhi, and members of the ruling Congress party were widely accused of encouraging the violence. The spectre of 1984 is all the greater because no-one of any significance has been brought to justice.” It is worthwhile to note that this too was published while the Congress was in power. Harvinder Singh Phoolka, a Sikh lawyer who has spearheaded the legal fight of the 1984 victims’ families, says, “Whenever any victim named a Congress leader, or a police officer, they didn’t register the case…no large-scale violence happens in India without the patronage of people in power,”

In April 2013, BBC Hindi published a feature written from the perspective of the victims titled ‘84 दंगे: ‘आगे भी मौत थी, पीछे भी मौत‘. A survivor reminisces how Delhi police refused to help him even as he was helplessly staring at death. “The headquarters of Delhi Police falls on the way at ITO intersection. I got there. I told the policemen about the situation in the area and sought permission to meet an officer. But I was not allowed to meet anyone,” Mohan Singh, who lost two of his brothers, says.

In November 2015, the BBC World Service’s ‘Witnessing History’ section released an audio documentary titled ‘India’s Anti-Sikh riots‘.

In November 2017, the BBC published a photo feature on the 1984 riots. It’s titled ‘How the 1984 riots spread across Delhi‘.

In January 2021, the same ‘Witnessing History’ segment of the BBC World Service released another audio documentary on the subject titled ‘Fighting for justice for India’s Sikhs‘.

BBC’s coverage of the events of 1984

Nearly two weeks after the Operation Blue Star was over, the Indian government allowed a handful of journalists to enter the Golden Temple. The BBC’s widely respected India correspondent Mark Tully was one of them. One of his dispatches can be watched here:

An October 2017 article in The Tribune calls BBC’s dispatches by Tully from Amritsar after Operation Blue Star ‘riveting’.

In fact, the BBC had reported extensively and reliably on the events of 1984. The most undeniable proof of that is the fact that on October 31, Rajiv Gandhi came to know of his mother’s assassination from a BBC World Service bulletin. And there is a tinge of irony in the fact that when Indira stepped out of her Safdarjung Marg home on that fateful morning, she was headed towards her Akbar Road office just across the lawn for an interview with journalist Peter Ustinov for a BBC documentary on India. That was Indira’s first assignment on the day she died. She was shot right in the middle of the garden path.

Katherine Frank’s book ‘Indira: The Life of Indira Nehru Gandhi’ (HarperCollins, 2005), considered the ex-PM’s most authoritative biography, corroborates both these facts. Frank writes:

“On the morning of 31st October, 1984, Rajiv Gandhi was in a remote area of West Bengal traveling from village to village on a whirlwind pre-election tour. More than 100 miles south of Calcutta on a dusty rural road in the middle of nowhere, Rajiv’s white Ambassador car was intercepted by a police Jeep. An officer got out and handed Rajiv a note with a message: “There has been an accident in the Prime Minister’s house. Cancel all appointments and return to Delhi immediately.” Rajiv and his entourage hastily abundant their ambassador for the faster Mercedes follow-up car and roared off towards Calcutta. As they speed along the potholed road, the driver turned the car radio to BBC World Service. When the 10 o’clock news bulletin came on, they heard that Indira had been shot by her bodyguards and had been taken to the All India Institute of Medical Sciences.” (Page 495)

The interview for the BBC documentary is mentioned on Page 491. it can be read below:

Postscript: BBC’s relationship with Indira Gandhi & Congress

Journalist Coomi Kapoor’s book ‘The Emergency: A Personal History’ (Penguin Viking, 2015) describes the torrid time the BBC had in India under Indira Gandhi’s prime ministership, particularly during the Emergency.

Mark Tully recounted to Kapoor that on June 26, 1975, the day after the declaration of the Emergency, Mohammad Younus, a family friend of the Gandhis who enjoyed enormous clout, called up information and broadcasting minister IK Gujral in rage and “claimed that BBC had reported “that some members of the government such as Jagjivan Ram, Swaran Singh and Gujaral himself did not support the Emergency and had been put under house arrest. Younus wanted Mark Tully, BBC’s New Delhi correspondent arrested. “Pull down his pants and give him a few lashes and put him in jail,” was his advice… Later on investigation, it turned out that it was not the BBC, which was monitored by AIR, that had broadcast the offending report, but a Pakistani news programme.” (Page 50)

Tully did have to leave India shortly, though. A few months after the Emergency, the government came up with a censorship programme for the foreign correspondents in India. The BBC was one of the organizations that refused to sign the agreement. As a result, Delhi bureau chief Mark Tully was given 24 hours to leave the country. Loren Jenkins of the Newsweek was another journalist who was asked to leave. He later wrote, “In 10 years of covering the world from Franco’s Spain to Mao’s China, I have never encountered such stringent and all encompassing censorship. Even after the BBC no longer had a correspondent in India, it continued to broadcast. The radio station got its news from Reuters… The BBC became a byword for anti-government news… ‘BBC mein suna hai’ was a common refrain to claim authenticity for anti-Emergency stories, Tully recalls.” (Kapoor, Page 59)

To conclude, not only did the BBC publish several documentaries, podcasts and features over decades on the 1984 Delhi riots, but during Indira’s rule it was one of the most consistent critical voices in the media fraternity, as far as governance is concerned. And it had to bear the brunt as well. External affairs minister S Jaishankar’s insinuation of bias, therefore, doesn’t stand the test of recorded history.

The post EAM S Jaishankar gets it wrong; BBC made several documentaries, podcasts on 1984 Sikh riots appeared first on Alt News.

This content originally appeared on Alt News and was authored by Indradeep Bhattacharyya.

Outgoing Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro fled the county just before his term of office ended on January 1, apparently fearing legal prosecution for multiple wrong-doings once he lost presidential immunity.

Bolsonaro had long predicted that if he were to lose the Brazilian presidential election, which he did, it would only be due to fraud. While fraud allegations have been refuted, his rightwing followers – some 49% of the electorate – believe the vote was a steal.

Once Bolsonaro lost the Brazilian presidential runoff election on October 30 to Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva (aka Lula), he largely disappeared from public view. Reporting from Brazil, Leonardo Sakamoto speculated that the petulant lame-duck president had been “shredding documents, erasing hard drives, renewing his passport, or analyzing ways to avoid answering for the crimes he committed.”

For weeks after Bolsonaro lost, rightwing truckers blocked Brazil’s highways in protest, and evangelicals preyed outside military bases calling for the army to overturn the vote. While his followers ran amuck, for the longest time Bolsonaro neither conceded, nor commented, nor even appeared in public.

His Vice President Hamilton Mourão offered the excuse that his chief was reclusive because he had a skin disease preventing him from wearing pants. However, many other guys appear on Zoom with no such compulsion about their below the belt attire.

On December 30, Bolsonaro bolted to the home of Disney World. Although Orlando is the reputed venue of the “Happiest Place on Earth,” Mr. Bolsonaro apparently has not found it so. Reporting on his holiday, Bolsonaro complained: “I came to spend some time away with my family but these weren’t calm days” after being hospitalized for stab wounds in the stomach incurred in 2018, which acted up.

Bolsonaro has been staying at the home of ex-pat Brazilian mixed martial arts fighter José Aldo. Considered to be among the best MMA combatants, Aldo has been implicated in illegally receiving handouts from the former Bolsonaro government.

At the same time that Bolsonaro was chilling in the Sunshine State, thousands of his faithful had bused in from all over Brazil to Brasilia and had temporarily laid siege to the congress, supreme court, and presidential buildings on January 8.

Comparing the January Riots in the Brazilian and US Capitols

Many parallels are being drawn in the liberal media between the January 6^th US capitol riot by Trump supporters claiming election fraud in 2021 and the storming of the Brazilian capitol two years and two days later by Bolsonaro’s supporters also claiming election fraud.

There were, however, some differences regarding the two events and its public perception. Progressives in Brazil don’t believe the Bolsonaro won in 2018 because of Russian interference as do the majority of Democratic voters regarding Trump’s successful bid for the US presidency in 2016. Nor did the capitol police in Brazil shoot and kill any of the unarmed protesters.

Most notably Bolsonaro’s staff cooperated in the transition to Lula’s new presidency. And Bolsonaro mildly rebuked his violent followers. In contrast, Trump fanned the flames of discontent when Bolsonaro quietly retired leaving his angry movement leaderless.

Meanwhile, liberal pundits like Timothy Snyder are giddy in praise of the Brazilian government’s subsequent crackdown of the rioters. Note how strongly putative liberals in the US have embraced punitive law enforcement. Democrats have learned to love the security state at home (not to mention their romance with war abroad).

US liberal media is in an absolute frenzy linking the two events, which are both blamed on Trump as if the Brazilians themselves had no agency. The implied conspiracy is bolstered by Bolsonaro’s undeniably close ties to Donald Trump. MSNBC pontificates: “After this weekend’s events in Brazil, the parallels and connections to Trumpism, we must now wrestle with being an exporter of right-wing extremism.”

Implicit is MSNBC’s absurd notion that the US once exported democracy. Conveniently forgotten is the US collusion in framing Lula, who sat out the very election in jail that allowed Bolsonaro to get into office in the first place. Recall, too, the 21 years of US-backed military dictatorships in Brazil from 1964 to 1985.

The left-leaning presidents in Latin America have also condemned the rightwing attacks in Brazil but from the perspective of being on the receiving end of so-called US democracy exportation. Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro commented: “We categorically reject the violence generated by Bolsonaro’s neo-fascist groups that have assaulted the democratic institutions of Brazil.”

Maduro likely reflected on similar rightwing destabilization events that led to unsuccessful US-backed coup attempts against him and the 2019 coup in Bolivia. In the latter, leftist President Evo Morales was deposed with the connivance of the US working through the Organization of American States.

Calls to Boot Bolsonaro

Predictably, many Democratic politicians have demanded that Bolsonaro be expelled from the country in light of the brawl in Brasilia. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who speaks truth to power as long as it is not her party’s leadership, has called for Bolsonaro’s expulsion. Democratic representatives Ilhan Omar and Mark Takano have echoed the sentiment along with Senator Sanders. They all decry “fascist” influences in Brazil (while funding them in Ukraine).

In response to the mounting pressure from his party to banish the unwanted Brazilian guest, President Biden has done nothing or, as the AP euphemistically reports, “has proceeded cautiously.” State Department spokesman Ned Price has done what he does best by “sidestepping questions about Bolsonaro’s presence.” US national security adviser, Jake Sullivan, has been “similarly circumspect.”

Although the new Lula administration in Brazil is investigating potential offences by Bolsonaro, no formal extradition request has been made to Washington. Further, an extradition request from Lula is unlikely. With all the challenges that his fledgling presidency faces, having his chief rival – especially one whose party swept the legislature and key states – quietly ensconced in self-exile is best.

However, Bolsonaro could still be legally deported under US law if the secretary of state finds his continued presence here “would have potentially serious adverse foreign policy consequences for the United States.”

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Roger Harris.

The Department of Justice subpoenaed documentary filmmaker Alex Holder on Nov. 18, 2022, as part of an investigation related to the Jan. 6, attack on the U.S. Capitol in Washington, D.C.

Holder was filming that day at the Capitol for his documentary film “Unprecedented,” of then-President Donald Trump’s 2020 reelection campaign. In the subpoena, first obtained by Politico, federal prosecutors demanded that Holder testify before a grand jury or turn over all raw footage by the end of November. According to Politico, Holder received an extension and now has until Jan. 30, 2023, to comply with the order.

Holder’s spokesperson did not provide comment by publication, but told The Hill that the filmmaker would cooperate with the latest DOJ order.

“As we did with the other two subpoenas, we will 100 percent comply,” Holder’s spokesperson said.

Holder previously complied with a June 2022 subpoena from the House Committee investigating the Capitol attacks to produce footage from his documentary, including filmed interviews with Trump, his children and former Vice President Mike Pence. In July, Holder appeared before a special grand jury in Georgia after the Fulton District Attorney subpoenaed him for footage related to the documentary as part of an investigation into election fraud during the 2020 election.

This content originally appeared on U.S. Press Freedom Tracker: Incident Database and was authored by U.S. Press Freedom Tracker: Incident Database.

Twitter user Shwetank tweeted the video and wrote, “What was this? Such a big mistake?”. BJP Delhi spokesperson Nighat Abbas retweeted Shwetank’s tweet, writing, “Sisodia Ji spoke the truth for the first time”. (archive link)

सच बोला पहली बार सिसोदिया जी ने https://t.co/dTxRFUCFXt

— Nighat Abbass (@abbas_nighat) May 8, 2022

Bhartiya Janata Yuva Morcha Delhi spokesperson Gaurav Verma tweeted the video, writing that Manish Sisodia has spoken the truth for the first time. (Archive link)

Rashtriya Yogi Sena state minister Jitendra Singh mocked Sisodia and wrote that he was “inebriated”. (Archive link)

Another user tweeted the video, writing that Manish Sisodia is stating facts that Kejriwal doesn’t allow him to state otherwise. (Archive link)

This video has become viral on Facebook and Twitter with the same claim.

Fact-check

Upon carefully watching the video, we noticed several jump-cuts and a watermark that says “#funcut”. We conducted some keyword searches on Twitter to gather information relating to the topic. We found a tweet from May 4 by Manish Sisodia related to a survey conducted in Delhi. All survey-related information was given in this tweet. A video of Sisodia’s live press conference was included in the tweet as well. Listening to the video in its entirety, we found that the viral video has been edited. In fact, Sisodia had quoted the survey during the press conference and said that 91% of the people described BJP as a party “spreading riots and hooliganism”, 89% of the people believed that most “goons and illiterate” people are in BJP and 73% of the people described the Aam Aadmi Party as a party of “decent and educated” people.

दिल्ली में 11.5 लाख लोगो के survey का नतीजा:

दंगे और गुंडई कौन फैलाता है?
91% BJP, 8% Cong, 1% अन्य

किस पार्टी में सबसे ज्यादा गुंडे?
89% BJP, 5% Cong, 2% AAP, 4% अन्य

शरीफ शिक्षित लोगो की पार्टी कौन?
73% AAP, 15% Cong, 10% BJP, 2% अन्य

सब मानते है – BJP गुंडों की पार्टी है। https://t.co/R8an4KqsAS

— Manish Sisodia (@msisodia) May 4, 2022

We also found that the video was live-streamed on May 4 on AAP’s YouTube channel. The part used in the viral video comes after 1 minute and 19 seconds.

The viral video was edited to show Manish Sisodia saying ‘Bhartiya Janata Party’ where he actually said ‘Aam Aadmi Party’ and vice-versa. He did not state that a survey conducted in Delhi found that most people regard AAP as a part of “goons” and BJP comprises of “decent” people.

The post Manish Sisodia didn’t say ‘’AAP caused most riots in the country’’; edited video viral appeared first on Alt News.

This content originally appeared on Alt News and was authored by Abhishek Kumar.

Orientation

As I was looking at images to place at the beginning of this article, I was struck by how many images and quotes there were of Le Bon. It is pretty amazing for someone whose first work was published in 1895 and whose last works are still around 100 years old. It is especially strange given how unscientific his methods were and how recent empirical studies of crowds like David Miller’s Introduction to Collective Behavior and Collective Action contradicts virtually everything Le Bon claimed. Why is Le Bon’s work still circulating despite lack of scientific rigor? Why have the last fifty years of research on crowds that have a solid scientific basis been ignored?

Purpose of this article

The purpose of this article is to:

• Expose the propagandist roots and branches of our biases against crowds while showing some of the scientific evidence that supports the actual behavior of crowds.
• To outline what historical events occurred that supported the prejudice against crowds.
• Propose that it is ruling-class fears of crowds that fuels the perpetuation of unscientific theories about crowds.
• Propose that ruling class fears that working-class people mobilized into crowds will seize their resources, destroy their property and enslave them.

Crowds vs Masses

Crowds are large collections of people who meet at the same place at the same time and are large enough that it is difficult to have a central conversation. A loudspeaker, microphone or some external device is necessary to have a single central discussion.  There are different kinds of crowds. There are casual crowds like those that meet by chance at the scene of an accident or a fire. They may congregate to watch a building go up or be torn down. A second kind of crowd are long lines that form to buy tickets to ball games or musical concerts.

An audience is a more formal crowd with a more deliberate focus. Examples are attending a musical concert or a sporting event. Lasty, there are unconventional crowds which can lead to riots, lynchings, protests and demonstrations. Mass behavior involves large numbers of people who are spatially dispersed but participate in common activities like fads or fashions.  Mass behavior involves the use of radio (Orson Wells, War of the Worlds) television, movies which often lead to rumors or urban legends.

Questionnaire on Crowds

In order to understand the purposes of this article, I ask that you spend about 25 to 30 minutes answering the following true-false questions. For the answer to be true, it simply means most of the time, not all the time.  For the answer to be false, it just means it rarely happens, not never happens. Follow your answer with a one sentence justification. Feel free to draw from your experience as well as what you’ve read. It is important to answer quickly and spontaneously and not dwell on the answers. One purpose of the questionnaire is to see if you think there are any significant differences between how people in crowds behave (collective behavior) as opposed to how small groups or individuals behave.

Here are the True – False questions:

• Most crowds consist of strangers, rather than family, friends or acquaintances.
• The percentage of violent behavior is higher in crowds than in small groups such as a musical band or a baseball team.
• The behavior of crowds is more likely to be unanimous than the behavior of small groups.
• Crowds of people are more likely to engage in unusual or extraordinary behaviors than either groups or individuals.
• The behavior of individuals and small groups is more likely to be rational than the behavior of a crowd, which is more likely to be irrational.
• There are certain kinds of personalities that are drawn to crowds that you could predict would join a crowd if you knew enough about their personalities.
• There is a disproportionately higher number of working-class people in crowds compared to other social classes.
• Compared to people without legal convictions, there is a higher percentage of criminals in crowds.
• Individuals and small groups that are more likely to deliberate and plan their actions are less likely to be spontaneous.
• You could predict that most individuals are more likely to lose their personal identity in a crowd rather than alone or in small groups.
• Emotions are more likely to spread by contagions in a crowd rather than in a small group.
• Groups are easier to disperse than crowds because people in crowds want to linger longer.
• There has been more research done on crowds than on groups because the behavior in crowds has greater social impact.
• People conform less to norms in crowds than they do in groups or as individuals.
• Most violence in crowds is caused by the participants in the crowd rather than the police.
• There is a higher degree of unpredictability of behavior in crowds than there is in small groups or within an individual.
• The goals of a crowd are more extreme and unconventional than the goals of groups or individuals.
• Riots are equally likely to happen regardless of the season of the year.
• The most typical reaction to a natural disaster or emotional shock is panic – that is, uncontrolled individualistic flight as opposed to a rational, deliberate response.
• There is a correlation between which people will engage in a protest and their political beliefs before the protests.
• The most likely group to join a movement is the group who has absolute deprivation of resources as opposed to relative deprivation or no deprivation.

 The last three questions are about mass behavior, not crowd behavior:

• Fads are less predictable than fashions.
• Rumors begin mostly because people lose their ability to investigate before coming to a conclusion.
• Fashions exist in all societies, tribal as well as industrial.

Myths vs Facts About Crowds

In their book, Social Psychology, Delamater Myers and Collett, citing the research of Carl Couch, Clark McPhail, David Schweingruber and Ronald Wohlstein argued that there are seven basic myths about crowds. They are:

• Irrationality
• Emotionality
• Suggestibility – mindless behavior
• Destructiveness
• Spontaneity
• Anonymity
• Unanimity of purpose

Through these seven myths we are likely to see why all the answers in relation to crowds to the True-False questions are false. The only true answers are the first two questions about masses. Rather than explaining why every single question on crowds is false, I will speak generally and then answer a few questions specifically.

Are crowds wholes that are less than the sum of their parts?

One of the great underlying beliefs about crowds is that terrible things happen in a crowd that somehow would not happen in a small group and especially at an individual level.  Individuals are seen as rational, non-violent and prudent, but once the individual is surrounded by enough other individuals, things turn sour. The belief is that while individuals and groups may have differences with each other, those differences melt away in a crowd as individual members turn into a group hive. In fact, differences between individuals and small groups are maintained in crowds. To cite one example, in riots, crowds rarely act in unison. Some throw rocks and break windows. Others climb telephone poles and smash statues. Others disapprove and try to talk the others out of armed conflict. Still others are altruistic and help protesters who have been injured by cops.

Who is orderly and disorderly in crowds?

Speaking of cops, research on mass psychology has shown that most of the time, contrary to Le Bon, riots are started by the police, not the crowd. Furthermore, crowds assemble and disassemble at ballgames and concerts without any police necessary. Once gathered crowds do not stick together like honey. They easily disperse and really do not need the police to do so. I have been to many a Yankee and Knicks game in which the crowd, anywhere from 15 thousand to 30 thousand people leave the game, peacefully get on the train and talk about the ballgame. There is no need for police because nothing controversial happens. For conservatives like Le Bon, they cannot imagine that crowds regulate themselves. For them crowds are filled with animalistic, hedonistic barbarians who need the police to whip them into order.

Are working-class people more likely to be disorderly?

There is some truth to the fact that a higher percentage of working-class people will be in crowds. This has more to do with the reality that middle-class or upper-middle class people can afford to take a taxi to a ball game or a concert instead of taking the train. But this has little to do with the behavior of working-class crowds. Furthermore, plenty of protests are filled with upper-middle class anarchists who torch police cars and topple monuments. There is no clear relationship between social class and crowd violence.

How unpredictable are crowds?

Another one of Le Bon’s mistaken generalizations about crowds is that people in crowds act without rhyme or reason. This demonstrates, as an upper middle-class doctor, Le Bon has no understanding of all the deliberation and planning that goes into protests on the part of the organizers. This planning goes on weeks before the event. It is true that unpredictable things happen in protects, but they are exceptions to the rule. Furthermore, individuals act in unpredictable ways, as in the case of mass shootings. Individuals get caught up in cults and act in unpredictable and astonishing ways. Cults are large groups, not crowds.

Are emotions in crowds contagious?

People are every bit as emotional in small groups as they are in crowds. There is nothing contagious about emotions in crowds. People maintain emotional judgement while in the crowd. In fact, the leaders of protests harangue people to sing and chant as a way to unify the group. Just being in a crowd does not automatically unify the individuals. It takes work to do so. When faced with members of a crowd who become hysterical, rather than mindlessly joining in, other members of the crowd will distance themselves and exercise the same prudence that individuals or people in small groups will.

Is the crowd to social life what Freud’s id is to individual life?

Le Bon, Freud, Bion and the rest of the crowd psychologists we will soon meet think that at the social level the crowd is like the id, lurking on the margins of society waiting for a chance to jump out and wreak havoc. This is exemplified in the movie Lord of the Flies, by William Golding. In natural disasters these crowd psychologists imagine that the socialized ego is swarmed by the individualistic dictum, “every person for himself”. They imagine the results are pillaging and raping. The trouble is that research on behavior in natural disasters shows that people are consistently heroic and cooperative.

One hundred years of neglect of scientific research on crowds

Lastly, unlike individual psychology and group psychology the scientific study of crowds and masses lags way behind. It wasn’t until the late 1960s that the first research was done. Why is this? On the one hand, studying crowds is far more difficult because crowds are so large and their life-times short. But something else was going on. Why were Le Bon’s, Tarde’s and Sighele’s, speculations allowed to stand unchallenged and repeated mindlessly in social psychology textbooks for almost 100 years? In large part it was because their theories served the interests of the ruling class.

Historical Reasons for the Biases Against Crowds

Growth of cities

One of major changes in European history and geography was the gradual reversal of numbers of people living in cities compared to those of people living on farms.  People move to cities in part because there is more work, but also, as the saying goes, “city air makes you free”.  Some people felt trapped by the nosiness and stifling customs of rural life. Non-conformists to religious traditions, artists and hustlers with big dreams were drawn to cities for a chance to start fresh. Living on a farm, the general expectations was that you would engage in the same occupation as your parents. Moving to the city broke that tradition and it raised expectations. Especially those living in coastal cities who were exposed not only to people coming from different cities within Yankeedom, but people from other countries were also looking for work. Different languages, different religions, and different political traditions converged.

There are rarely, if ever, crowds in rural areas. While farmers may get together on holidays, everyone knows everyone else and rarely are strangers invited.  Even when farmers would go to town to get supplies, the overwhelming number of people knew each other and greeted each other. There were no stadiums or concert halls in which large numbers of people could congregate to watch professional sports or music. Long before the Industrial Revolution, crowds in cities would gather to hear political speeches. So, what we have in pre-industrial cities are relatively rootless people with raised expectations, surrounded by strangers from different cultures for whom being in a crowd is becoming normal.

The Great French revolutions

As most of you know, the French Revolution of 1789 overthrew both the king and the aristocrats as the merchants rose to power on the backs of artisans and peasants. The revolution was also anti-clerical. Churches and chateaux were burned to the ground. The aristocrats never forgot this. As if your memory needed any jogging, there were more revolutions in Paris in 1830 and 1848. In all these revolutions, crowds are violent and know where the upper classes live. Doesn’t it start to make sense that the study of crowds would never be objective so long as the upper classes were threatened by them and therefore controlled the research on crowds? In this case they made sure no research was done.

Industrialization

At the end of the 18th century and throughout the 19th century, cities became industrialized.  People were forced off the middle of streets to make way for wheeled vehicles accompanied by horses and later, trolley cars. Grid systems of streets were built which sped up transportation and the circulation of goods. Industrial capitalists built factories in cities as opposed to artisan shops in the countryside (the putting out system). The emergence of factories had enormous revolutionary potential because it brought large numbers of people working under horrible conditions together. For 12-15 hours a day, at least six days a week, people have a common experience while all in the same place and the same time.

Formation of unions

It is no accident that unions first formed in factories. When common experience is concentrated at the same place and same time, people are likely to compare experiences and accumulate grievances. Some workers begin to recognize that they have collective power if they can organize themselves. They can strike for better working conditions and better wages. Unions made crowds more dangerous because crowds can, in an extremely chilling way, stop and start the work process itself. This is like cutting off the blood supply for vampiric capitalists.

Emergence of socialism

The first socialists were theoretical. William Godwin was the first theoretical anarchist, writing Enquiry Concerning Political Justice. In the early 19th century, there were utopian communities set up by Robert Owen, Charles Fourier and others but none of these communities were connected to unions or workers movements. It wasn’t until the writings of Marx and Engels that socialism was really connected to worker’s struggles. The socialism of Marx and Engels or the anarchism of Bakunin both said to workers, “it is not enough to have tiny little pieces of pie. You create all the wealth; you deserve the whole pie.”

In order to gain the whole pie, workers in crowds had to move in a mass, take over factories and run them for themselves, while confiscating the private property of the upper classes. For the upper classes, socialism and the prospects of crowds burning down their houses, and peasants taking over their land was their worst nightmare. The Paris Commune of 1871 was the first revolutionary situation that was inspired by socialism as a movement.

Stock Market instabilities

Crowd instabilities also came from the capitalist side, between 1873 to 1896 when the stock market was very unstable creating panics and depressions. This meant stock market traders were wheeling and dealing on the floor of the stock market at the same time that people who had money in banks were worried about their savings and, in some cases, making runs on the bank.

Crowd Psychologists

Origins of Crowd Theory

Crowd theorists were social Darwinists whose ideas of a liberal society were of individuals who took care of only themselves. Beginning about 1870, crowd psychologists claimed that Darwinian evolution demonstrated that progress was a slow process, and any sudden changes based on violence were throwbacks to premodern times. Crowds were looked upon as akin to Herbert Spencer’s undifferentiated matter.

According to H. Stuart Hughes, (Consciousness and Society), beginning in the 1890s intellectuals became obsessed with the prospect that unconscious, primitive, and emotional forces were driving things. Crowd psychologists were united in rejecting sociological theorists such as Durkheim and Marx because they ignored emotions and unconscious motivation. What was really driving crowds, they thought, was below the level of consciousness. For crowd psychologists, individuals were both more than and less than the sum of their parts. The four major crowd theorists were Hippolyte Taine, Scipio Sighele, Gabriel Tarde, and Gustave Le Bon.

Crowd Theorists

Taine

Taine’s Origins of Contemporary France (written between 1876 and 1894) was a conservative attack on the Enlightenment. Taine blamed the Enlightenment ideas, including Rousseau’s, for what he considered the bloodbath of the French Revolution. Taine believed that the line between normal cognition and hallucinations, dreams and delusions, was closer than we might suspect. He cited evidence from research on organic lesions of the brain, hypnotism, and split personalities. He determined that the dramatic transformation of humans into savages is caused by what he called “the laws of mental contagion.” With the exception of the hypnosis model, Taine’s book embodies all the rudiments of French crowd psychology. For Taine, all leaders were the crazed dregs of society.

According to Taine, the Enlightenment failed to factor in the amount of time it took for humans to develop from barbarity to civility. Enlighteners weren’t interested in how people really were, but only as they could be measured by an abstract, ideal humanity. Taine thought the French Revolution was a relapse into primitive barbarism. Like Hume, Taine thought that reason was the passive servant of the passions. Bodily needs, animal instinct, prejudices which Taine thought were hereditary, were really driving people.

Criminalization of crowds (Sighele) 

Theories of hypnosis were split in two directions. Followers of Charcot claimed that being suggestible was a sign of psychopathology and only certain types of people could be hypnotized. The Nancy school of Bergheim argued that anyone could be hypnotized. The criminal school of Sighele sided with Charcot, arguing that crowds were composed of criminal individuals who were naturally suggestible. He followed the work of Lombroso who was a medical scholar of deviants in the military. Lombroso measured the skulls and anatomical characteristics of 3,000 soldiers.

According to Serge Moscovici (The Age of the Crowd), mass psychology was treated simply as part of criminal anthropology. Crowds were seen as mobs, scum, and made up of men who were out of control and would destroy anything in their path. Sighele claimed that hypnotism can explain the process by which individual minds become susceptible to outside forces, leading to actions that are carried out automatically, unconsciously, and then spread to others by contagion. The conservative hand Sighele played was transparent in his labeling of social revolutionaries such as socialists, anarchists, or even striking workers as part of the criminal crowd. The hysteria of stock market traders was never seen as criminal.

Tarde

More than Taine or Sighele, Gabriel Tarde placed the crowd on a broader social spectrum. All social life, according to Tarde, is based on imitation, and the process of crowd formation and reproduction simply comes from the laws of imitation sped up. He described the crowd as the first stage of association—rudimentary, fleeting, and undifferentiated. From this foundation, more stable and ongoing groups form, including corporations, political parties, and religious bodies such as churches or monasteries. Unlike other crowd psychologists, Tarde thought that literacy, newspapers, and mass communication would replace the crowd with what he called “the public.”

Tarde also thought that the extremes of behavior demonstrated in crowds are unique to cities. Unlike his right-wing crowd theorists, Tarde thought the madness of crowds is a product of civilization. He argued that crowd madness was uncommon in rural areas and among pre-state societies. Both Tarde and Le Bon supported the Nancy school, which suggested that there were social-psychological processes that any individual could fall prey to, if exposed to them. They believed that the solitary individual was superior to the group in all ways.

Le Bon

Le Bon concocted a mix of anthropological, social Darwinist, and psychological theories, which were in the same family as Taine and the racist Joseph Gobineau. He thought that cranial size could be used as an accurate measure of intelligence and he believed that people in primitive societies had small skulls. Le Bon thought the European race was superior, and only Caucasian males could transcend the constraints of biology.

Like Sighele and Tarde, Le Bon thought that what happens to an individual when in a crowd was analogous to what happens in hypnosis. All crowd theorists up to Le Bon agreed that the crowd was no more than what was already inside the psychology of individuals. They also believed that whatever destructive behavior transpired in a crowd was due to the lower-class origins of its members. Le Bon was the first to say that all personalities, regardless of class and intelligence, are susceptible to the pull of the crowd.

According to Serge Moscovici, Le Bon directly challenged Locke’s theory of the mind. As was par for the course in the Enlightenment, Locke believed that as the mind of humanity was gradually ridding itself of religious terrors, there would be fewer and fewer secrets. Le Bon, in contrast, said that revolutions shake the mind from its perch, sending it tumbling and howling into the abyss of the primitive world, which is driven by heredity, instinct, custom, and race. For Locke, visions and dreams were overridden by simple and complex reasoning. For Le Bon, crowds could not follow reason but instead learned by association, just as individuals do in dreams.

Furthermore, crowd theorists claimed that people in crowds do not deliberate, but are mesmerized by leaders through the power of hypnotic suggestion. When Locke argued that the truth can be seen with open eyes, he neglected to note that crowds are driven by unconscious primitive animalism, which takes over and spreads by what Le Bon called “contagion.” This contagion does not lead to prudent, rational judgment but instead can lead to cruelty or heroism. These extreme reactions are amplified by the feeling of anonymity that grips individuals, allowing a sense of individual responsibility to evaporate.

Le Bon belonged to a liberal middle-class tradition that argued against both revolution and the weakness of liberal parliamentary systems. Despite his argument’s mediocre quality, rhetorically flattering the reader and lacking depth, Le Bon must have struck a nerve. According to Moscovici, no French thinker other than Georges Sorel and Alexander de Tocqueville has had an influence as great as Le Bon. Le Bon published The Crowd in 1890 and it was a best seller. Why was this? He mixed the disciplines of politics and psychology in an age of growing disciplinary specialization. Le Bon probably tapped into the fears that the middle and upper class and upper classes had about what would happen eventually if the new “democracy” was to expand.

Distorting the work of Alfred Espinas

It is worth noting that crowd psychologists distorted the work of Alfred Espinas on wasps and hornets to create an analogy between human crowds and insect societies. Espinas argued that societies were more than an aggregate of individuals and pointed out that alarm and danger were transmitted by visual contagion. Far from viewing this intensely social life of insects as a liability, he saw it as a strength in building bonds through cooperation.

Crowd psychologists seized on his discussion of the invisible communication of wasps and hornets when confronted with an enemy to draw an analogy to crowds. Just as insects communicate collectively when faced with danger, so crowd behavior becomes contagious among spectators in a theater or when aroused by a great orator. Unlike Espinas, they saw very little, if anything, constructive in this. Crowd psychologists thought the communicability of emotions beyond the individual was proof of the primitive mentality of the crowd.

Crowd Psychologist Distortions

Here are Susanna Barrows’ (Distorting Mirrors) damning conclusions about crowd-psychologist theories:

• Taine, Sighele and Le Bon did not do any empirical research (Tarde was a possible exception).
• Taine’s work contains grave errors in the scientific method. The idea of empirical investigation was wholly alien to him.
• What evidence they collected was extremely selective to support their case (again, with the possible exception of Tarde).
• Statistics indicate that women committed many fewer crimes than men, yet women were blamed for a disproportionate amount of the violence that occurred.
• Le Bon indiscriminately lumped together socialists and anarchists with common criminals.
• Crowd psychologists distorted the work of Espinas on wasps and hornets to make an analogy between human crowds and insect societies.

The Legacy of the 20th Century

The events of the 20th century hardly provided a break for poor conservatives hoping for a return to religion, God, kings and aristocrats. The Russian revolution, the stock market crash in 1929, Fascism in Germany and Italy and Spain, the Spanish revolution, the Chinese Revolution and the Cuban Revolution vanquished those hopes. This does not even count the Zoot Suit race riots in 1943, Watts in 1967 or the Rodney King riots in 1992.

Mass Media Propaganda Towards Crowds and Riots Carries Forward Obsolete Crowd Psychology

Check any newspaper or TV news program in Yankeedom and watch how the crowd and the rioters are treated when they describe a protest or a natural disaster. If it is a riot, does the paper ever show the variety of responses that go on during the riot? No, they focus only on the rioters and assume everyone in the crowd was complicit. When they describe the origin of the riot, do they consider the research which says the police are usually the perpetuators of the riot? Not on your life! The police are depicted as restoring order rather than as being the perpetuators of disorder. Lastly, in a natural disaster do the newscasters show the overwhelming instances of cooperation, compared to natural disaster participants helping themselves in supermarkets and sporting goods stores? No, they don’t. Rather the echo chamber of capitalist media blares out “looting, looting, looting” just like they declared “weapons of mass destruction” in the lead-up to the attack on Iraq twenty years ago.

Conclusion

I began this article with a questionnaire designed to expose your prejudices against crowds. I contrasted these biases against what research on mass psychology actually shows about crowd behavior. The heart of my article is to show why these biases continue in spite of scientific research to the contrary. I identified the growth of cities, the revolutions in France in the 19th century, the process of industrialization, the formation of unions, the rise of socialism and stock market instabilities in the 19th century. What do these events have to do with biases against crowds?

The answer can be found in the theories of mostly right-wing crowd theorists who wrote in the 2nd half of the 19th century. These theorists and their ruling class masters were terrified that crowds of working-class people would take their land, confiscate their resources and burn their chateaux to the ground. There was a great deal at stake for them. To call the people in crowds enraged, childish, criminal, beastly, stampeding, savage, irrational, impulsive, uncivilized, primitive, bloodthirsty, cruel and fickle is to dismiss, embarrass and mock anyone who participates. It is also a warning to future workers to stay away from crowds.

We socialists have been the victims of a 150-year propaganda campaign that was started by crowd psychologists in the 1860s and has been perpetuated by all sources of media throughout the 20th century. Amazingly, social psychologists who pride themselves on filling their textbooks with empirical evidence, have given this discredited crowd theory a pass. There is so much money for research on what sells products and little or no money is available to study what moves crowds and masses. It is vitally important for the ruling classes to forestall the great day of reckoning by scaring people away from joining crowds that will be one of many vehicles for overthrowing them.

• First published at Socialist Planning Beyond Capitalism

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Bruce Lerro.

Orientation

As I was looking at images to place at the beginning of this article, I was struck by how many images and quotes there were of Le Bon. It is pretty amazing for someone whose first work was published in 1895 and whose last works are still around 100 years old. It is especially strange given how unscientific his methods were and how recent empirical studies of crowds like David Miller’s Introduction to Collective Behavior and Collective Action contradicts virtually everything Le Bon claimed. Why is Le Bon’s work still circulating despite lack of scientific rigor? Why have the last fifty years of research on crowds that have a solid scientific basis been ignored?

Purpose of this article

The purpose of this article is to:

• Expose the propagandist roots and branches of our biases against crowds while showing some of the scientific evidence that supports the actual behavior of crowds.
• To outline what historical events occurred that supported the prejudice against crowds.
• Propose that it is ruling-class fears of crowds that fuels the perpetuation of unscientific theories about crowds.
• Propose that ruling class fears that working-class people mobilized into crowds will seize their resources, destroy their property and enslave them.

Crowds vs Masses

Crowds are large collections of people who meet at the same place at the same time and are large enough that it is difficult to have a central conversation. A loudspeaker, microphone or some external device is necessary to have a single central discussion.  There are different kinds of crowds. There are casual crowds like those that meet by chance at the scene of an accident or a fire. They may congregate to watch a building go up or be torn down. A second kind of crowd are long lines that form to buy tickets to ball games or musical concerts.

An audience is a more formal crowd with a more deliberate focus. Examples are attending a musical concert or a sporting event. Lasty, there are unconventional crowds which can lead to riots, lynchings, protests and demonstrations. Mass behavior involves large numbers of people who are spatially dispersed but participate in common activities like fads or fashions.  Mass behavior involves the use of radio (Orson Wells, War of the Worlds) television, movies which often lead to rumors or urban legends.

Questionnaire on Crowds

In order to understand the purposes of this article, I ask that you spend about 25 to 30 minutes answering the following true-false questions. For the answer to be true, it simply means most of the time, not all the time.  For the answer to be false, it just means it rarely happens, not never happens. Follow your answer with a one sentence justification. Feel free to draw from your experience as well as what you’ve read. It is important to answer quickly and spontaneously and not dwell on the answers. One purpose of the questionnaire is to see if you think there are any significant differences between how people in crowds behave (collective behavior) as opposed to how small groups or individuals behave.

Here are the True – False questions:

• Most crowds consist of strangers, rather than family, friends or acquaintances.
• The percentage of violent behavior is higher in crowds than in small groups such as a musical band or a baseball team.
• The behavior of crowds is more likely to be unanimous than the behavior of small groups.
• Crowds of people are more likely to engage in unusual or extraordinary behaviors than either groups or individuals.
• The behavior of individuals and small groups is more likely to be rational than the behavior of a crowd, which is more likely to be irrational.
• There are certain kinds of personalities that are drawn to crowds that you could predict would join a crowd if you knew enough about their personalities.
• There is a disproportionately higher number of working-class people in crowds compared to other social classes.
• Compared to people without legal convictions, there is a higher percentage of criminals in crowds.
• Individuals and small groups that are more likely to deliberate and plan their actions are less likely to be spontaneous.
• You could predict that most individuals are more likely to lose their personal identity in a crowd rather than alone or in small groups.
• Emotions are more likely to spread by contagions in a crowd rather than in a small group.
• Groups are easier to disperse than crowds because people in crowds want to linger longer.
• There has been more research done on crowds than on groups because the behavior in crowds has greater social impact.
• People conform less to norms in crowds than they do in groups or as individuals.
• Most violence in crowds is caused by the participants in the crowd rather than the police.
• There is a higher degree of unpredictability of behavior in crowds than there is in small groups or within an individual.
• The goals of a crowd are more extreme and unconventional than the goals of groups or individuals.
• Riots are equally likely to happen regardless of the season of the year.
• The most typical reaction to a natural disaster or emotional shock is panic – that is, uncontrolled individualistic flight as opposed to a rational, deliberate response.
• There is a correlation between which people will engage in a protest and their political beliefs before the protests.
• The most likely group to join a movement is the group who has absolute deprivation of resources as opposed to relative deprivation or no deprivation.

 The last three questions are about mass behavior, not crowd behavior:

• Fads are less predictable than fashions.
• Rumors begin mostly because people lose their ability to investigate before coming to a conclusion.
• Fashions exist in all societies, tribal as well as industrial.

Myths vs Facts About Crowds

In their book, Social Psychology, Delamater Myers and Collett, citing the research of Carl Couch, Clark McPhail, David Schweingruber and Ronald Wohlstein argued that there are seven basic myths about crowds. They are:

• Irrationality
• Emotionality
• Suggestibility – mindless behavior
• Destructiveness
• Spontaneity
• Anonymity
• Unanimity of purpose

Through these seven myths we are likely to see why all the answers in relation to crowds to the True-False questions are false. The only true answers are the first two questions about masses. Rather than explaining why every single question on crowds is false, I will speak generally and then answer a few questions specifically.

Are crowds wholes that are less than the sum of their parts?

One of the great underlying beliefs about crowds is that terrible things happen in a crowd that somehow would not happen in a small group and especially at an individual level.  Individuals are seen as rational, non-violent and prudent, but once the individual is surrounded by enough other individuals, things turn sour. The belief is that while individuals and groups may have differences with each other, those differences melt away in a crowd as individual members turn into a group hive. In fact, differences between individuals and small groups are maintained in crowds. To cite one example, in riots, crowds rarely act in unison. Some throw rocks and break windows. Others climb telephone poles and smash statues. Others disapprove and try to talk the others out of armed conflict. Still others are altruistic and help protesters who have been injured by cops.

Who is orderly and disorderly in crowds?

Speaking of cops, research on mass psychology has shown that most of the time, contrary to Le Bon, riots are started by the police, not the crowd. Furthermore, crowds assemble and disassemble at ballgames and concerts without any police necessary. Once gathered crowds do not stick together like honey. They easily disperse and really do not need the police to do so. I have been to many a Yankee and Knicks game in which the crowd, anywhere from 15 thousand to 30 thousand people leave the game, peacefully get on the train and talk about the ballgame. There is no need for police because nothing controversial happens. For conservatives like Le Bon, they cannot imagine that crowds regulate themselves. For them crowds are filled with animalistic, hedonistic barbarians who need the police to whip them into order.

Are working-class people more likely to be disorderly?

There is some truth to the fact that a higher percentage of working-class people will be in crowds. This has more to do with the reality that middle-class or upper-middle class people can afford to take a taxi to a ball game or a concert instead of taking the train. But this has little to do with the behavior of working-class crowds. Furthermore, plenty of protests are filled with upper-middle class anarchists who torch police cars and topple monuments. There is no clear relationship between social class and crowd violence.

How unpredictable are crowds?

Another one of Le Bon’s mistaken generalizations about crowds is that people in crowds act without rhyme or reason. This demonstrates, as an upper middle-class doctor, Le Bon has no understanding of all the deliberation and planning that goes into protests on the part of the organizers. This planning goes on weeks before the event. It is true that unpredictable things happen in protects, but they are exceptions to the rule. Furthermore, individuals act in unpredictable ways, as in the case of mass shootings. Individuals get caught up in cults and act in unpredictable and astonishing ways. Cults are large groups, not crowds.

Are emotions in crowds contagious?

People are every bit as emotional in small groups as they are in crowds. There is nothing contagious about emotions in crowds. People maintain emotional judgement while in the crowd. In fact, the leaders of protests harangue people to sing and chant as a way to unify the group. Just being in a crowd does not automatically unify the individuals. It takes work to do so. When faced with members of a crowd who become hysterical, rather than mindlessly joining in, other members of the crowd will distance themselves and exercise the same prudence that individuals or people in small groups will.

Is the crowd to social life what Freud’s id is to individual life?

Le Bon, Freud, Bion and the rest of the crowd psychologists we will soon meet think that at the social level the crowd is like the id, lurking on the margins of society waiting for a chance to jump out and wreak havoc. This is exemplified in the movie Lord of the Flies, by William Golding. In natural disasters these crowd psychologists imagine that the socialized ego is swarmed by the individualistic dictum, “every person for himself”. They imagine the results are pillaging and raping. The trouble is that research on behavior in natural disasters shows that people are consistently heroic and cooperative.

One hundred years of neglect of scientific research on crowds

Lastly, unlike individual psychology and group psychology the scientific study of crowds and masses lags way behind. It wasn’t until the late 1960s that the first research was done. Why is this? On the one hand, studying crowds is far more difficult because crowds are so large and their life-times short. But something else was going on. Why were Le Bon’s, Tarde’s and Sighele’s, speculations allowed to stand unchallenged and repeated mindlessly in social psychology textbooks for almost 100 years? In large part it was because their theories served the interests of the ruling class.

Historical Reasons for the Biases Against Crowds

Growth of cities

One of major changes in European history and geography was the gradual reversal of numbers of people living in cities compared to those of people living on farms.  People move to cities in part because there is more work, but also, as the saying goes, “city air makes you free”.  Some people felt trapped by the nosiness and stifling customs of rural life. Non-conformists to religious traditions, artists and hustlers with big dreams were drawn to cities for a chance to start fresh. Living on a farm, the general expectations was that you would engage in the same occupation as your parents. Moving to the city broke that tradition and it raised expectations. Especially those living in coastal cities who were exposed not only to people coming from different cities within Yankeedom, but people from other countries were also looking for work. Different languages, different religions, and different political traditions converged.

There are rarely, if ever, crowds in rural areas. While farmers may get together on holidays, everyone knows everyone else and rarely are strangers invited.  Even when farmers would go to town to get supplies, the overwhelming number of people knew each other and greeted each other. There were no stadiums or concert halls in which large numbers of people could congregate to watch professional sports or music. Long before the Industrial Revolution, crowds in cities would gather to hear political speeches. So, what we have in pre-industrial cities are relatively rootless people with raised expectations, surrounded by strangers from different cultures for whom being in a crowd is becoming normal.

The Great French revolutions

As most of you know, the French Revolution of 1789 overthrew both the king and the aristocrats as the merchants rose to power on the backs of artisans and peasants. The revolution was also anti-clerical. Churches and chateaux were burned to the ground. The aristocrats never forgot this. As if your memory needed any jogging, there were more revolutions in Paris in 1830 and 1848. In all these revolutions, crowds are violent and know where the upper classes live. Doesn’t it start to make sense that the study of crowds would never be objective so long as the upper classes were threatened by them and therefore controlled the research on crowds? In this case they made sure no research was done.

Industrialization

At the end of the 18th century and throughout the 19th century, cities became industrialized.  People were forced off the middle of streets to make way for wheeled vehicles accompanied by horses and later, trolley cars. Grid systems of streets were built which sped up transportation and the circulation of goods. Industrial capitalists built factories in cities as opposed to artisan shops in the countryside (the putting out system). The emergence of factories had enormous revolutionary potential because it brought large numbers of people working under horrible conditions together. For 12-15 hours a day, at least six days a week, people have a common experience while all in the same place and the same time.

Formation of unions

It is no accident that unions first formed in factories. When common experience is concentrated at the same place and same time, people are likely to compare experiences and accumulate grievances. Some workers begin to recognize that they have collective power if they can organize themselves. They can strike for better working conditions and better wages. Unions made crowds more dangerous because crowds can, in an extremely chilling way, stop and start the work process itself. This is like cutting off the blood supply for vampiric capitalists.

Emergence of socialism

The first socialists were theoretical. William Godwin was the first theoretical anarchist, writing Enquiry Concerning Political Justice. In the early 19th century, there were utopian communities set up by Robert Owen, Charles Fourier and others but none of these communities were connected to unions or workers movements. It wasn’t until the writings of Marx and Engels that socialism was really connected to worker’s struggles. The socialism of Marx and Engels or the anarchism of Bakunin both said to workers, “it is not enough to have tiny little pieces of pie. You create all the wealth; you deserve the whole pie.”

In order to gain the whole pie, workers in crowds had to move in a mass, take over factories and run them for themselves, while confiscating the private property of the upper classes. For the upper classes, socialism and the prospects of crowds burning down their houses, and peasants taking over their land was their worst nightmare. The Paris Commune of 1871 was the first revolutionary situation that was inspired by socialism as a movement.

Stock Market instabilities

Crowd instabilities also came from the capitalist side, between 1873 to 1896 when the stock market was very unstable creating panics and depressions. This meant stock market traders were wheeling and dealing on the floor of the stock market at the same time that people who had money in banks were worried about their savings and, in some cases, making runs on the bank.

Crowd Psychologists

Origins of Crowd Theory

Crowd theorists were social Darwinists whose ideas of a liberal society were of individuals who took care of only themselves. Beginning about 1870, crowd psychologists claimed that Darwinian evolution demonstrated that progress was a slow process, and any sudden changes based on violence were throwbacks to premodern times. Crowds were looked upon as akin to Herbert Spencer’s undifferentiated matter.

According to H. Stuart Hughes, (Consciousness and Society), beginning in the 1890s intellectuals became obsessed with the prospect that unconscious, primitive, and emotional forces were driving things. Crowd psychologists were united in rejecting sociological theorists such as Durkheim and Marx because they ignored emotions and unconscious motivation. What was really driving crowds, they thought, was below the level of consciousness. For crowd psychologists, individuals were both more than and less than the sum of their parts. The four major crowd theorists were Hippolyte Taine, Scipio Sighele, Gabriel Tarde, and Gustave Le Bon.

Crowd Theorists

Taine

Taine’s Origins of Contemporary France (written between 1876 and 1894) was a conservative attack on the Enlightenment. Taine blamed the Enlightenment ideas, including Rousseau’s, for what he considered the bloodbath of the French Revolution. Taine believed that the line between normal cognition and hallucinations, dreams and delusions, was closer than we might suspect. He cited evidence from research on organic lesions of the brain, hypnotism, and split personalities. He determined that the dramatic transformation of humans into savages is caused by what he called “the laws of mental contagion.” With the exception of the hypnosis model, Taine’s book embodies all the rudiments of French crowd psychology. For Taine, all leaders were the crazed dregs of society.

According to Taine, the Enlightenment failed to factor in the amount of time it took for humans to develop from barbarity to civility. Enlighteners weren’t interested in how people really were, but only as they could be measured by an abstract, ideal humanity. Taine thought the French Revolution was a relapse into primitive barbarism. Like Hume, Taine thought that reason was the passive servant of the passions. Bodily needs, animal instinct, prejudices which Taine thought were hereditary, were really driving people.

Criminalization of crowds (Sighele) 

Theories of hypnosis were split in two directions. Followers of Charcot claimed that being suggestible was a sign of psychopathology and only certain types of people could be hypnotized. The Nancy school of Bergheim argued that anyone could be hypnotized. The criminal school of Sighele sided with Charcot, arguing that crowds were composed of criminal individuals who were naturally suggestible. He followed the work of Lombroso who was a medical scholar of deviants in the military. Lombroso measured the skulls and anatomical characteristics of 3,000 soldiers.

According to Serge Moscovici (The Age of the Crowd), mass psychology was treated simply as part of criminal anthropology. Crowds were seen as mobs, scum, and made up of men who were out of control and would destroy anything in their path. Sighele claimed that hypnotism can explain the process by which individual minds become susceptible to outside forces, leading to actions that are carried out automatically, unconsciously, and then spread to others by contagion. The conservative hand Sighele played was transparent in his labeling of social revolutionaries such as socialists, anarchists, or even striking workers as part of the criminal crowd. The hysteria of stock market traders was never seen as criminal.

Tarde

More than Taine or Sighele, Gabriel Tarde placed the crowd on a broader social spectrum. All social life, according to Tarde, is based on imitation, and the process of crowd formation and reproduction simply comes from the laws of imitation sped up. He described the crowd as the first stage of association—rudimentary, fleeting, and undifferentiated. From this foundation, more stable and ongoing groups form, including corporations, political parties, and religious bodies such as churches or monasteries. Unlike other crowd psychologists, Tarde thought that literacy, newspapers, and mass communication would replace the crowd with what he called “the public.”

Tarde also thought that the extremes of behavior demonstrated in crowds are unique to cities. Unlike his right-wing crowd theorists, Tarde thought the madness of crowds is a product of civilization. He argued that crowd madness was uncommon in rural areas and among pre-state societies. Both Tarde and Le Bon supported the Nancy school, which suggested that there were social-psychological processes that any individual could fall prey to, if exposed to them. They believed that the solitary individual was superior to the group in all ways.

Le Bon

Le Bon concocted a mix of anthropological, social Darwinist, and psychological theories, which were in the same family as Taine and the racist Joseph Gobineau. He thought that cranial size could be used as an accurate measure of intelligence and he believed that people in primitive societies had small skulls. Le Bon thought the European race was superior, and only Caucasian males could transcend the constraints of biology.

Like Sighele and Tarde, Le Bon thought that what happens to an individual when in a crowd was analogous to what happens in hypnosis. All crowd theorists up to Le Bon agreed that the crowd was no more than what was already inside the psychology of individuals. They also believed that whatever destructive behavior transpired in a crowd was due to the lower-class origins of its members. Le Bon was the first to say that all personalities, regardless of class and intelligence, are susceptible to the pull of the crowd.

According to Serge Moscovici, Le Bon directly challenged Locke’s theory of the mind. As was par for the course in the Enlightenment, Locke believed that as the mind of humanity was gradually ridding itself of religious terrors, there would be fewer and fewer secrets. Le Bon, in contrast, said that revolutions shake the mind from its perch, sending it tumbling and howling into the abyss of the primitive world, which is driven by heredity, instinct, custom, and race. For Locke, visions and dreams were overridden by simple and complex reasoning. For Le Bon, crowds could not follow reason but instead learned by association, just as individuals do in dreams.

Furthermore, crowd theorists claimed that people in crowds do not deliberate, but are mesmerized by leaders through the power of hypnotic suggestion. When Locke argued that the truth can be seen with open eyes, he neglected to note that crowds are driven by unconscious primitive animalism, which takes over and spreads by what Le Bon called “contagion.” This contagion does not lead to prudent, rational judgment but instead can lead to cruelty or heroism. These extreme reactions are amplified by the feeling of anonymity that grips individuals, allowing a sense of individual responsibility to evaporate.

Le Bon belonged to a liberal middle-class tradition that argued against both revolution and the weakness of liberal parliamentary systems. Despite his argument’s mediocre quality, rhetorically flattering the reader and lacking depth, Le Bon must have struck a nerve. According to Moscovici, no French thinker other than Georges Sorel and Alexander de Tocqueville has had an influence as great as Le Bon. Le Bon published The Crowd in 1890 and it was a best seller. Why was this? He mixed the disciplines of politics and psychology in an age of growing disciplinary specialization. Le Bon probably tapped into the fears that the middle and upper class and upper classes had about what would happen eventually if the new “democracy” was to expand.

Distorting the work of Alfred Espinas

It is worth noting that crowd psychologists distorted the work of Alfred Espinas on wasps and hornets to create an analogy between human crowds and insect societies. Espinas argued that societies were more than an aggregate of individuals and pointed out that alarm and danger were transmitted by visual contagion. Far from viewing this intensely social life of insects as a liability, he saw it as a strength in building bonds through cooperation.

Crowd psychologists seized on his discussion of the invisible communication of wasps and hornets when confronted with an enemy to draw an analogy to crowds. Just as insects communicate collectively when faced with danger, so crowd behavior becomes contagious among spectators in a theater or when aroused by a great orator. Unlike Espinas, they saw very little, if anything, constructive in this. Crowd psychologists thought the communicability of emotions beyond the individual was proof of the primitive mentality of the crowd.

Crowd Psychologist Distortions

Here are Susanna Barrows’ (Distorting Mirrors) damning conclusions about crowd-psychologist theories:

• Taine, Sighele and Le Bon did not do any empirical research (Tarde was a possible exception).
• Taine’s work contains grave errors in the scientific method. The idea of empirical investigation was wholly alien to him.
• What evidence they collected was extremely selective to support their case (again, with the possible exception of Tarde).
• Statistics indicate that women committed many fewer crimes than men, yet women were blamed for a disproportionate amount of the violence that occurred.
• Le Bon indiscriminately lumped together socialists and anarchists with common criminals.
• Crowd psychologists distorted the work of Espinas on wasps and hornets to make an analogy between human crowds and insect societies.

The Legacy of the 20th Century

The events of the 20th century hardly provided a break for poor conservatives hoping for a return to religion, God, kings and aristocrats. The Russian revolution, the stock market crash in 1929, Fascism in Germany and Italy and Spain, the Spanish revolution, the Chinese Revolution and the Cuban Revolution vanquished those hopes. This does not even count the Zoot Suit race riots in 1943, Watts in 1967 or the Rodney King riots in 1992.

Mass Media Propaganda Towards Crowds and Riots Carries Forward Obsolete Crowd Psychology

Check any newspaper or TV news program in Yankeedom and watch how the crowd and the rioters are treated when they describe a protest or a natural disaster. If it is a riot, does the paper ever show the variety of responses that go on during the riot? No, they focus only on the rioters and assume everyone in the crowd was complicit. When they describe the origin of the riot, do they consider the research which says the police are usually the perpetuators of the riot? Not on your life! The police are depicted as restoring order rather than as being the perpetuators of disorder. Lastly, in a natural disaster do the newscasters show the overwhelming instances of cooperation, compared to natural disaster participants helping themselves in supermarkets and sporting goods stores? No, they don’t. Rather the echo chamber of capitalist media blares out “looting, looting, looting” just like they declared “weapons of mass destruction” in the lead-up to the attack on Iraq twenty years ago.

Conclusion

I began this article with a questionnaire designed to expose your prejudices against crowds. I contrasted these biases against what research on mass psychology actually shows about crowd behavior. The heart of my article is to show why these biases continue in spite of scientific research to the contrary. I identified the growth of cities, the revolutions in France in the 19th century, the process of industrialization, the formation of unions, the rise of socialism and stock market instabilities in the 19th century. What do these events have to do with biases against crowds?

The answer can be found in the theories of mostly right-wing crowd theorists who wrote in the 2nd half of the 19th century. These theorists and their ruling class masters were terrified that crowds of working-class people would take their land, confiscate their resources and burn their chateaux to the ground. There was a great deal at stake for them. To call the people in crowds enraged, childish, criminal, beastly, stampeding, savage, irrational, impulsive, uncivilized, primitive, bloodthirsty, cruel and fickle is to dismiss, embarrass and mock anyone who participates. It is also a warning to future workers to stay away from crowds.

We socialists have been the victims of a 150-year propaganda campaign that was started by crowd psychologists in the 1860s and has been perpetuated by all sources of media throughout the 20th century. Amazingly, social psychologists who pride themselves on filling their textbooks with empirical evidence, have given this discredited crowd theory a pass. There is so much money for research on what sells products and little or no money is available to study what moves crowds and masses. It is vitally important for the ruling classes to forestall the great day of reckoning by scaring people away from joining crowds that will be one of many vehicles for overthrowing them.

• First published at Socialist Planning Beyond Capitalism

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Bruce Lerro.

Orientation

As I was looking at images to place at the beginning of this article, I was struck by how many images and quotes there were of Le Bon. It is pretty amazing for someone whose first work was published in 1895 and whose last works are still around 100 years old. It is especially strange given how unscientific his methods were and how recent empirical studies of crowds like David Miller’s Introduction to Collective Behavior and Collective Action contradicts virtually everything Le Bon claimed. Why is Le Bon’s work still circulating despite lack of scientific rigor? Why have the last fifty years of research on crowds that have a solid scientific basis been ignored?

Purpose of this article

The purpose of this article is to:

• Expose the propagandist roots and branches of our biases against crowds while showing some of the scientific evidence that supports the actual behavior of crowds.
• To outline what historical events occurred that supported the prejudice against crowds.
• Propose that it is ruling-class fears of crowds that fuels the perpetuation of unscientific theories about crowds.
• Propose that ruling class fears that working-class people mobilized into crowds will seize their resources, destroy their property and enslave them.

Crowds vs Masses

Crowds are large collections of people who meet at the same place at the same time and are large enough that it is difficult to have a central conversation. A loudspeaker, microphone or some external device is necessary to have a single central discussion.  There are different kinds of crowds. There are casual crowds like those that meet by chance at the scene of an accident or a fire. They may congregate to watch a building go up or be torn down. A second kind of crowd are long lines that form to buy tickets to ball games or musical concerts.

An audience is a more formal crowd with a more deliberate focus. Examples are attending a musical concert or a sporting event. Lasty, there are unconventional crowds which can lead to riots, lynchings, protests and demonstrations. Mass behavior involves large numbers of people who are spatially dispersed but participate in common activities like fads or fashions.  Mass behavior involves the use of radio (Orson Wells, War of the Worlds) television, movies which often lead to rumors or urban legends.

Questionnaire on Crowds

In order to understand the purposes of this article, I ask that you spend about 25 to 30 minutes answering the following true-false questions. For the answer to be true, it simply means most of the time, not all the time.  For the answer to be false, it just means it rarely happens, not never happens. Follow your answer with a one sentence justification. Feel free to draw from your experience as well as what you’ve read. It is important to answer quickly and spontaneously and not dwell on the answers. One purpose of the questionnaire is to see if you think there are any significant differences between how people in crowds behave (collective behavior) as opposed to how small groups or individuals behave.

Here are the True – False questions:

• Most crowds consist of strangers, rather than family, friends or acquaintances.
• The percentage of violent behavior is higher in crowds than in small groups such as a musical band or a baseball team.
• The behavior of crowds is more likely to be unanimous than the behavior of small groups.
• Crowds of people are more likely to engage in unusual or extraordinary behaviors than either groups or individuals.
• The behavior of individuals and small groups is more likely to be rational than the behavior of a crowd, which is more likely to be irrational.
• There are certain kinds of personalities that are drawn to crowds that you could predict would join a crowd if you knew enough about their personalities.
• There is a disproportionately higher number of working-class people in crowds compared to other social classes.
• Compared to people without legal convictions, there is a higher percentage of criminals in crowds.
• Individuals and small groups that are more likely to deliberate and plan their actions are less likely to be spontaneous.
• You could predict that most individuals are more likely to lose their personal identity in a crowd rather than alone or in small groups.
• Emotions are more likely to spread by contagions in a crowd rather than in a small group.
• Groups are easier to disperse than crowds because people in crowds want to linger longer.
• There has been more research done on crowds than on groups because the behavior in crowds has greater social impact.
• People conform less to norms in crowds than they do in groups or as individuals.
• Most violence in crowds is caused by the participants in the crowd rather than the police.
• There is a higher degree of unpredictability of behavior in crowds than there is in small groups or within an individual.
• The goals of a crowd are more extreme and unconventional than the goals of groups or individuals.
• Riots are equally likely to happen regardless of the season of the year.
• The most typical reaction to a natural disaster or emotional shock is panic – that is, uncontrolled individualistic flight as opposed to a rational, deliberate response.
• There is a correlation between which people will engage in a protest and their political beliefs before the protests.
• The most likely group to join a movement is the group who has absolute deprivation of resources as opposed to relative deprivation or no deprivation.

 The last three questions are about mass behavior, not crowd behavior:

• Fads are less predictable than fashions.
• Rumors begin mostly because people lose their ability to investigate before coming to a conclusion.
• Fashions exist in all societies, tribal as well as industrial.

Myths vs Facts About Crowds

In their book, Social Psychology, Delamater Myers and Collett, citing the research of Carl Couch, Clark McPhail, David Schweingruber and Ronald Wohlstein argued that there are seven basic myths about crowds. They are:

• Irrationality
• Emotionality
• Suggestibility – mindless behavior
• Destructiveness
• Spontaneity
• Anonymity
• Unanimity of purpose

Through these seven myths we are likely to see why all the answers in relation to crowds to the True-False questions are false. The only true answers are the first two questions about masses. Rather than explaining why every single question on crowds is false, I will speak generally and then answer a few questions specifically.

Are crowds wholes that are less than the sum of their parts?

One of the great underlying beliefs about crowds is that terrible things happen in a crowd that somehow would not happen in a small group and especially at an individual level.  Individuals are seen as rational, non-violent and prudent, but once the individual is surrounded by enough other individuals, things turn sour. The belief is that while individuals and groups may have differences with each other, those differences melt away in a crowd as individual members turn into a group hive. In fact, differences between individuals and small groups are maintained in crowds. To cite one example, in riots, crowds rarely act in unison. Some throw rocks and break windows. Others climb telephone poles and smash statues. Others disapprove and try to talk the others out of armed conflict. Still others are altruistic and help protesters who have been injured by cops.

Who is orderly and disorderly in crowds?

Speaking of cops, research on mass psychology has shown that most of the time, contrary to Le Bon, riots are started by the police, not the crowd. Furthermore, crowds assemble and disassemble at ballgames and concerts without any police necessary. Once gathered crowds do not stick together like honey. They easily disperse and really do not need the police to do so. I have been to many a Yankee and Knicks game in which the crowd, anywhere from 15 thousand to 30 thousand people leave the game, peacefully get on the train and talk about the ballgame. There is no need for police because nothing controversial happens. For conservatives like Le Bon, they cannot imagine that crowds regulate themselves. For them crowds are filled with animalistic, hedonistic barbarians who need the police to whip them into order.

Are working-class people more likely to be disorderly?

There is some truth to the fact that a higher percentage of working-class people will be in crowds. This has more to do with the reality that middle-class or upper-middle class people can afford to take a taxi to a ball game or a concert instead of taking the train. But this has little to do with the behavior of working-class crowds. Furthermore, plenty of protests are filled with upper-middle class anarchists who torch police cars and topple monuments. There is no clear relationship between social class and crowd violence.

How unpredictable are crowds?

Another one of Le Bon’s mistaken generalizations about crowds is that people in crowds act without rhyme or reason. This demonstrates, as an upper middle-class doctor, Le Bon has no understanding of all the deliberation and planning that goes into protests on the part of the organizers. This planning goes on weeks before the event. It is true that unpredictable things happen in protects, but they are exceptions to the rule. Furthermore, individuals act in unpredictable ways, as in the case of mass shootings. Individuals get caught up in cults and act in unpredictable and astonishing ways. Cults are large groups, not crowds.

Are emotions in crowds contagious?

People are every bit as emotional in small groups as they are in crowds. There is nothing contagious about emotions in crowds. People maintain emotional judgement while in the crowd. In fact, the leaders of protests harangue people to sing and chant as a way to unify the group. Just being in a crowd does not automatically unify the individuals. It takes work to do so. When faced with members of a crowd who become hysterical, rather than mindlessly joining in, other members of the crowd will distance themselves and exercise the same prudence that individuals or people in small groups will.

Is the crowd to social life what Freud’s id is to individual life?

Le Bon, Freud, Bion and the rest of the crowd psychologists we will soon meet think that at the social level the crowd is like the id, lurking on the margins of society waiting for a chance to jump out and wreak havoc. This is exemplified in the movie Lord of the Flies, by William Golding. In natural disasters these crowd psychologists imagine that the socialized ego is swarmed by the individualistic dictum, “every person for himself”. They imagine the results are pillaging and raping. The trouble is that research on behavior in natural disasters shows that people are consistently heroic and cooperative.

One hundred years of neglect of scientific research on crowds

Lastly, unlike individual psychology and group psychology the scientific study of crowds and masses lags way behind. It wasn’t until the late 1960s that the first research was done. Why is this? On the one hand, studying crowds is far more difficult because crowds are so large and their life-times short. But something else was going on. Why were Le Bon’s, Tarde’s and Sighele’s, speculations allowed to stand unchallenged and repeated mindlessly in social psychology textbooks for almost 100 years? In large part it was because their theories served the interests of the ruling class.

Historical Reasons for the Biases Against Crowds

Growth of cities

One of major changes in European history and geography was the gradual reversal of numbers of people living in cities compared to those of people living on farms.  People move to cities in part because there is more work, but also, as the saying goes, “city air makes you free”.  Some people felt trapped by the nosiness and stifling customs of rural life. Non-conformists to religious traditions, artists and hustlers with big dreams were drawn to cities for a chance to start fresh. Living on a farm, the general expectations was that you would engage in the same occupation as your parents. Moving to the city broke that tradition and it raised expectations. Especially those living in coastal cities who were exposed not only to people coming from different cities within Yankeedom, but people from other countries were also looking for work. Different languages, different religions, and different political traditions converged.

There are rarely, if ever, crowds in rural areas. While farmers may get together on holidays, everyone knows everyone else and rarely are strangers invited.  Even when farmers would go to town to get supplies, the overwhelming number of people knew each other and greeted each other. There were no stadiums or concert halls in which large numbers of people could congregate to watch professional sports or music. Long before the Industrial Revolution, crowds in cities would gather to hear political speeches. So, what we have in pre-industrial cities are relatively rootless people with raised expectations, surrounded by strangers from different cultures for whom being in a crowd is becoming normal.

The Great French revolutions

As most of you know, the French Revolution of 1789 overthrew both the king and the aristocrats as the merchants rose to power on the backs of artisans and peasants. The revolution was also anti-clerical. Churches and chateaux were burned to the ground. The aristocrats never forgot this. As if your memory needed any jogging, there were more revolutions in Paris in 1830 and 1848. In all these revolutions, crowds are violent and know where the upper classes live. Doesn’t it start to make sense that the study of crowds would never be objective so long as the upper classes were threatened by them and therefore controlled the research on crowds? In this case they made sure no research was done.

Industrialization

At the end of the 18th century and throughout the 19th century, cities became industrialized.  People were forced off the middle of streets to make way for wheeled vehicles accompanied by horses and later, trolley cars. Grid systems of streets were built which sped up transportation and the circulation of goods. Industrial capitalists built factories in cities as opposed to artisan shops in the countryside (the putting out system). The emergence of factories had enormous revolutionary potential because it brought large numbers of people working under horrible conditions together. For 12-15 hours a day, at least six days a week, people have a common experience while all in the same place and the same time.

Formation of unions

It is no accident that unions first formed in factories. When common experience is concentrated at the same place and same time, people are likely to compare experiences and accumulate grievances. Some workers begin to recognize that they have collective power if they can organize themselves. They can strike for better working conditions and better wages. Unions made crowds more dangerous because crowds can, in an extremely chilling way, stop and start the work process itself. This is like cutting off the blood supply for vampiric capitalists.

Emergence of socialism

The first socialists were theoretical. William Godwin was the first theoretical anarchist, writing Enquiry Concerning Political Justice. In the early 19th century, there were utopian communities set up by Robert Owen, Charles Fourier and others but none of these communities were connected to unions or workers movements. It wasn’t until the writings of Marx and Engels that socialism was really connected to worker’s struggles. The socialism of Marx and Engels or the anarchism of Bakunin both said to workers, “it is not enough to have tiny little pieces of pie. You create all the wealth; you deserve the whole pie.”

In order to gain the whole pie, workers in crowds had to move in a mass, take over factories and run them for themselves, while confiscating the private property of the upper classes. For the upper classes, socialism and the prospects of crowds burning down their houses, and peasants taking over their land was their worst nightmare. The Paris Commune of 1871 was the first revolutionary situation that was inspired by socialism as a movement.

Stock Market instabilities

Crowd instabilities also came from the capitalist side, between 1873 to 1896 when the stock market was very unstable creating panics and depressions. This meant stock market traders were wheeling and dealing on the floor of the stock market at the same time that people who had money in banks were worried about their savings and, in some cases, making runs on the bank.

Crowd Psychologists

Origins of Crowd Theory

Crowd theorists were social Darwinists whose ideas of a liberal society were of individuals who took care of only themselves. Beginning about 1870, crowd psychologists claimed that Darwinian evolution demonstrated that progress was a slow process, and any sudden changes based on violence were throwbacks to premodern times. Crowds were looked upon as akin to Herbert Spencer’s undifferentiated matter.

According to H. Stuart Hughes, (Consciousness and Society), beginning in the 1890s intellectuals became obsessed with the prospect that unconscious, primitive, and emotional forces were driving things. Crowd psychologists were united in rejecting sociological theorists such as Durkheim and Marx because they ignored emotions and unconscious motivation. What was really driving crowds, they thought, was below the level of consciousness. For crowd psychologists, individuals were both more than and less than the sum of their parts. The four major crowd theorists were Hippolyte Taine, Scipio Sighele, Gabriel Tarde, and Gustave Le Bon.

Crowd Theorists

Taine

Taine’s Origins of Contemporary France (written between 1876 and 1894) was a conservative attack on the Enlightenment. Taine blamed the Enlightenment ideas, including Rousseau’s, for what he considered the bloodbath of the French Revolution. Taine believed that the line between normal cognition and hallucinations, dreams and delusions, was closer than we might suspect. He cited evidence from research on organic lesions of the brain, hypnotism, and split personalities. He determined that the dramatic transformation of humans into savages is caused by what he called “the laws of mental contagion.” With the exception of the hypnosis model, Taine’s book embodies all the rudiments of French crowd psychology. For Taine, all leaders were the crazed dregs of society.

According to Taine, the Enlightenment failed to factor in the amount of time it took for humans to develop from barbarity to civility. Enlighteners weren’t interested in how people really were, but only as they could be measured by an abstract, ideal humanity. Taine thought the French Revolution was a relapse into primitive barbarism. Like Hume, Taine thought that reason was the passive servant of the passions. Bodily needs, animal instinct, prejudices which Taine thought were hereditary, were really driving people.

Criminalization of crowds (Sighele) 

Theories of hypnosis were split in two directions. Followers of Charcot claimed that being suggestible was a sign of psychopathology and only certain types of people could be hypnotized. The Nancy school of Bergheim argued that anyone could be hypnotized. The criminal school of Sighele sided with Charcot, arguing that crowds were composed of criminal individuals who were naturally suggestible. He followed the work of Lombroso who was a medical scholar of deviants in the military. Lombroso measured the skulls and anatomical characteristics of 3,000 soldiers.

According to Serge Moscovici (The Age of the Crowd), mass psychology was treated simply as part of criminal anthropology. Crowds were seen as mobs, scum, and made up of men who were out of control and would destroy anything in their path. Sighele claimed that hypnotism can explain the process by which individual minds become susceptible to outside forces, leading to actions that are carried out automatically, unconsciously, and then spread to others by contagion. The conservative hand Sighele played was transparent in his labeling of social revolutionaries such as socialists, anarchists, or even striking workers as part of the criminal crowd. The hysteria of stock market traders was never seen as criminal.

Tarde

More than Taine or Sighele, Gabriel Tarde placed the crowd on a broader social spectrum. All social life, according to Tarde, is based on imitation, and the process of crowd formation and reproduction simply comes from the laws of imitation sped up. He described the crowd as the first stage of association—rudimentary, fleeting, and undifferentiated. From this foundation, more stable and ongoing groups form, including corporations, political parties, and religious bodies such as churches or monasteries. Unlike other crowd psychologists, Tarde thought that literacy, newspapers, and mass communication would replace the crowd with what he called “the public.”

Tarde also thought that the extremes of behavior demonstrated in crowds are unique to cities. Unlike his right-wing crowd theorists, Tarde thought the madness of crowds is a product of civilization. He argued that crowd madness was uncommon in rural areas and among pre-state societies. Both Tarde and Le Bon supported the Nancy school, which suggested that there were social-psychological processes that any individual could fall prey to, if exposed to them. They believed that the solitary individual was superior to the group in all ways.

Le Bon

Le Bon concocted a mix of anthropological, social Darwinist, and psychological theories, which were in the same family as Taine and the racist Joseph Gobineau. He thought that cranial size could be used as an accurate measure of intelligence and he believed that people in primitive societies had small skulls. Le Bon thought the European race was superior, and only Caucasian males could transcend the constraints of biology.

Like Sighele and Tarde, Le Bon thought that what happens to an individual when in a crowd was analogous to what happens in hypnosis. All crowd theorists up to Le Bon agreed that the crowd was no more than what was already inside the psychology of individuals. They also believed that whatever destructive behavior transpired in a crowd was due to the lower-class origins of its members. Le Bon was the first to say that all personalities, regardless of class and intelligence, are susceptible to the pull of the crowd.

According to Serge Moscovici, Le Bon directly challenged Locke’s theory of the mind. As was par for the course in the Enlightenment, Locke believed that as the mind of humanity was gradually ridding itself of religious terrors, there would be fewer and fewer secrets. Le Bon, in contrast, said that revolutions shake the mind from its perch, sending it tumbling and howling into the abyss of the primitive world, which is driven by heredity, instinct, custom, and race. For Locke, visions and dreams were overridden by simple and complex reasoning. For Le Bon, crowds could not follow reason but instead learned by association, just as individuals do in dreams.

Furthermore, crowd theorists claimed that people in crowds do not deliberate, but are mesmerized by leaders through the power of hypnotic suggestion. When Locke argued that the truth can be seen with open eyes, he neglected to note that crowds are driven by unconscious primitive animalism, which takes over and spreads by what Le Bon called “contagion.” This contagion does not lead to prudent, rational judgment but instead can lead to cruelty or heroism. These extreme reactions are amplified by the feeling of anonymity that grips individuals, allowing a sense of individual responsibility to evaporate.

Le Bon belonged to a liberal middle-class tradition that argued against both revolution and the weakness of liberal parliamentary systems. Despite his argument’s mediocre quality, rhetorically flattering the reader and lacking depth, Le Bon must have struck a nerve. According to Moscovici, no French thinker other than Georges Sorel and Alexander de Tocqueville has had an influence as great as Le Bon. Le Bon published The Crowd in 1890 and it was a best seller. Why was this? He mixed the disciplines of politics and psychology in an age of growing disciplinary specialization. Le Bon probably tapped into the fears that the middle and upper class and upper classes had about what would happen eventually if the new “democracy” was to expand.

Distorting the work of Alfred Espinas

It is worth noting that crowd psychologists distorted the work of Alfred Espinas on wasps and hornets to create an analogy between human crowds and insect societies. Espinas argued that societies were more than an aggregate of individuals and pointed out that alarm and danger were transmitted by visual contagion. Far from viewing this intensely social life of insects as a liability, he saw it as a strength in building bonds through cooperation.

Crowd psychologists seized on his discussion of the invisible communication of wasps and hornets when confronted with an enemy to draw an analogy to crowds. Just as insects communicate collectively when faced with danger, so crowd behavior becomes contagious among spectators in a theater or when aroused by a great orator. Unlike Espinas, they saw very little, if anything, constructive in this. Crowd psychologists thought the communicability of emotions beyond the individual was proof of the primitive mentality of the crowd.

Crowd Psychologist Distortions

Here are Susanna Barrows’ (Distorting Mirrors) damning conclusions about crowd-psychologist theories:

• Taine, Sighele and Le Bon did not do any empirical research (Tarde was a possible exception).
• Taine’s work contains grave errors in the scientific method. The idea of empirical investigation was wholly alien to him.
• What evidence they collected was extremely selective to support their case (again, with the possible exception of Tarde).
• Statistics indicate that women committed many fewer crimes than men, yet women were blamed for a disproportionate amount of the violence that occurred.
• Le Bon indiscriminately lumped together socialists and anarchists with common criminals.
• Crowd psychologists distorted the work of Espinas on wasps and hornets to make an analogy between human crowds and insect societies.

The Legacy of the 20th Century

The events of the 20th century hardly provided a break for poor conservatives hoping for a return to religion, God, kings and aristocrats. The Russian revolution, the stock market crash in 1929, Fascism in Germany and Italy and Spain, the Spanish revolution, the Chinese Revolution and the Cuban Revolution vanquished those hopes. This does not even count the Zoot Suit race riots in 1943, Watts in 1967 or the Rodney King riots in 1992.

Mass Media Propaganda Towards Crowds and Riots Carries Forward Obsolete Crowd Psychology

Check any newspaper or TV news program in Yankeedom and watch how the crowd and the rioters are treated when they describe a protest or a natural disaster. If it is a riot, does the paper ever show the variety of responses that go on during the riot? No, they focus only on the rioters and assume everyone in the crowd was complicit. When they describe the origin of the riot, do they consider the research which says the police are usually the perpetuators of the riot? Not on your life! The police are depicted as restoring order rather than as being the perpetuators of disorder. Lastly, in a natural disaster do the newscasters show the overwhelming instances of cooperation, compared to natural disaster participants helping themselves in supermarkets and sporting goods stores? No, they don’t. Rather the echo chamber of capitalist media blares out “looting, looting, looting” just like they declared “weapons of mass destruction” in the lead-up to the attack on Iraq twenty years ago.

Conclusion

I began this article with a questionnaire designed to expose your prejudices against crowds. I contrasted these biases against what research on mass psychology actually shows about crowd behavior. The heart of my article is to show why these biases continue in spite of scientific research to the contrary. I identified the growth of cities, the revolutions in France in the 19th century, the process of industrialization, the formation of unions, the rise of socialism and stock market instabilities in the 19th century. What do these events have to do with biases against crowds?

The answer can be found in the theories of mostly right-wing crowd theorists who wrote in the 2nd half of the 19th century. These theorists and their ruling class masters were terrified that crowds of working-class people would take their land, confiscate their resources and burn their chateaux to the ground. There was a great deal at stake for them. To call the people in crowds enraged, childish, criminal, beastly, stampeding, savage, irrational, impulsive, uncivilized, primitive, bloodthirsty, cruel and fickle is to dismiss, embarrass and mock anyone who participates. It is also a warning to future workers to stay away from crowds.

We socialists have been the victims of a 150-year propaganda campaign that was started by crowd psychologists in the 1860s and has been perpetuated by all sources of media throughout the 20th century. Amazingly, social psychologists who pride themselves on filling their textbooks with empirical evidence, have given this discredited crowd theory a pass. There is so much money for research on what sells products and little or no money is available to study what moves crowds and masses. It is vitally important for the ruling classes to forestall the great day of reckoning by scaring people away from joining crowds that will be one of many vehicles for overthrowing them.

• First published at Socialist Planning Beyond Capitalism

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Bruce Lerro.

A new radio play by Tayo Aluko based on events surrounding Paul Robeson’s concert in Peekskill, New York in 1949, and the racist, anti-communist riots that came before and after it, drops on Paul Robeson’s birthday — April 9th — and it seems more timely than ever.

One of the artistic projects I’ve been involved with as a minor participant since early autumn is a radio play.  It’s a fictional depiction of real historical events, and as I read the play, participated in the online rehearsals and recording sessions with the playwright, the director, and the other actors involved, the history we were bringing to life seemed to be getting more and more relevant by the day.

If I weren’t paying close attention, it would be easy to dissociate and forget what time zone I was in.  Racist, anti-Semitic mobs laying siege to an event, attacking participants indiscriminately as police were completely absent, or stood by and did nothing.

Their explicit aim was to lynch someone — musician, activist, athlete, linguist, and African-American, Paul Robeson.  Though they failed in this effort, they injured many people, and destroyed a lot of property in the form of cars and buses as people were trying to leave town — succeeding in the latter efforts particularly because of the active cooperation of the local authorities in directing traffic their way, down narrow roads.  They succeeded in creating an atmosphere of terror that resulted in events being canceled across the country soon afterwards, among many other consequences.

The mob was not only protected by the police, but they were very actively encouraged by the local press, which had a familiar, one-sided orientation — if you didn’t believe in capitalism, you were a communist, the enemy within, out to take away our freedom and prosperity.

And it wasn’t just the local press.  Although it may not have been necessary to lie in order to make people look bad, the most incendiary claims that motivated the mob to act as they did were fabricated from whole cloth, with parts of a speech that soon became globally infamous being sent across the wires before the speech was delivered — and inaccurately.

But it wasn’t just the right wing, racist, anti-Semitic mobs motivated by ideologues, assisted by fake news put out by some combination of press outlets and politicians, with the active collusion of the local police, laying siege to established, annual, local events that seemed so familiar.  There were so many other things.

While it was a prosperous period for many, for many others it wasn’t.  Especially for those struggling to find a job after so many industries were in transition in the years following the Second World War — in Peekskill, New York, and across the country.

Before Westchester County became the extremely wealthy New York City suburb that it is today, it was the nearest rural area north of New York City where people from the big city could have weekend and summer getaways.  Before it was that, it was a river valley dotted with factory towns and farms.

That combination of radical ideologues with control over huge propaganda machines, spouting lies, egging on mobs to create an atmosphere of terror, in the context of rapid societal transformation, with so many people sacrificing so much to live such precarious lives, is not a new one.  And it is a combination that has caused so much damage in the past.

I don’t pretend to have all the answers for salvaging this society, but I’m sure wherever those answers lie, they must probably involve first understanding what led to the events of August and September, 1949, in Peekskill, New York.

•  Tayo Aluko’s radio play about the Peekskill Riots, Paul Robeson’s Love Song, drops on Paul Robeson’s birthday, on April 9th, 2021.  More info about the launch will be up on Tayo’s website soon.

This article was posted on Saturday, March 13th, 2021 at 6:05pm and is filed under Arts and/or Entertainment, Racism, Radio, Riots.

Barbara Lee: I’m very terrified with regard to what we see taking place. And the signs are there. When you talk about shutting down the media, putting out their alternative facts, banning dissent and opposition, criticizing people who are exercising their First Amendment rights; trying to get people to believe, really, the distortions that they’re putting out there. That, to me, is very scary. It’s very dangerous. And you see also the corporate and military consolidation of the public sector. You see efforts to privatize schools. When you just look at the nominees, you see very few people with experience in the public sector. And so when you have the corporate sector merging with the military sectors, and when you have cabinet officials who have historically said they want to dismantle the cabinets and the agencies that they’re running, that I’m very terrified that we are beginning to see an erosion of our democratic values and an erosion of the public sector.

The new normal is of course abnormal, antithetical to being a human being, or at least a being that is Homo Sapiens before say, errr, the industrial revolution, or in the new parlance, before the Fourth  Industrial Revolution, or before the internet of all things . . . .

Schooling was bad, for decades, for sure, but redeemable in some sense. Things like educational systems are fixable, or they were before the Zoom Doom decade has begun to unfold. Face to face discourse was always discordant, yet the only way for some sort of consensus or arbitrated whole, but now, with Zoom Doom, etc., and especially now that many western (whites) people want to isolate, stay at home glued to this evil screen, as if glued to some sordid 6-hour daily soap opera, really  want to do things on line, do things sheltered, well, the new species of Western (white) Adam and Eve is, well, not the people I want in my trench if the revolution ever happens . . . .

Which will not unfold, this “revolution,” if this generation and the next one is bred to take a $1000 a month UBI, takes the pink and blue pills/vaccines, and continues to listen to the putridity that is commercialism-retail-PR-spin mixed in with the noise of the day, the propaganda of them all – 2,700 billionaires pointing their antennae in all the right directions for more and more control, overlording and alas gouging the economic and socio-economic and political power from the super majority, us.

So many people I talk with, gentrified with a bit of a retirement, or at-home income, plus the house paid off, more or less, and fairly good health, they are blaming the victims, blaming the poor, blaming the kids who got the wrong degrees and who are now in debt.

The divide and conquer is subtle with democratic voters, and overt with MAGA mutts.

This is the scam of capitalism – the people who have “made it” have done so on the backs of people, and many in capitalism make money on people who are struggling, who are lower income, who are not part of the 20 percent. Divide and conquer. Classify us. Put us on a spectrum. On a scale. Rate us. Give us a score, some detailed credit report, educational report, health report, activity report. Google and the other gulag thinkers, they have the tools to put us all on dashboards, even as I type out this screed, the data and the nanoseconds of my moves will be recorded.

Making money on fines, penalties, arrests, convictions, probation, and then all those middle-middle-middlemen making money on turning this financial screw or flipping this toggle or that investing switch to exact more and more economic pain, more and more generalized anxiety disorder pain. You can’t just do things without added-on layer after layer of people and systems taking a penny here, a dime there, a dollar over there, and a 20 percent or more cut there and there.

The reality is this country is threadbare, and county governments do not have the resources for that D-minus nationwide infrastructure that needs tending to. Counties and states do not have the money for sustaining public health, safety and well-being. We are in a system of money that banks have “loaned” communities putting them into bankruptcy. The loan sharks are large and sophisticated, repo experts of the highest order, foreclosure kings on a grand scale.

Imagine the concept of no clinics in communities, no diabetes clinics, public school nurses and counselors doled out like rare truffles (like one nurse per five schools, one counselor per 400 kids!). Imagine now in Oregon, the current college enrollment is down 20 percent. Think. Where does that go, where do we make up the work people have at community colleges? How do those worthy students move forward? Fulfillment centers? Two college degrees and working in a warehouse at $15 an hour (if you are lucky to be in a few states with that minimum wage) and praying for a universal basic/bumbling income?

And that discourse of a UBI is insane, no? No talk about public ownership of utilities, pharmaceuticals, medicine, hospitals, clinics, state banks, guaranteed housing, food security, and public transportation that can only be imagined by Phillip K. Dick. And I am not talking flying taxis, but clean trollies and constant schedules. Imagine, the end of the car for many people – that internal combustion disease maker, the thing that sits 90 percent of the time in a driveway or parking space. Imagine.

Nope. It’s the transfer of $1,200 a month basic income to the rich and the richest. A basic income in super predatory capitalism. Imagine. That is the paradigm. Sort of the same insanity of a Bill McKibben or Liz Warren saying a cleaner military – one running on biodiesel and one that recycles missile parts, on that repurposes medical waste and builds global bases at a net zero waste LEED Platinum level. Solar panel-wind turbine air force drone bases. All ships and carriers running on forever fuel, nuclear energy. Imagine that insanity. From the greenies.

The democrats and republicans are vicious, are psychopaths, and Americans on both sides of that manure pile who believe this is an exceptionalist society will believe anything to hold up their version of reality. They will wrap themselves up in the red, white and blue in varying ways. Voting is their emancipation from actually doing and acting.

Listen to this freak of a man, Trump, and watch the media just flatten down. Think about how impotent ” rel=”noopener nofollow ” target=”_blank”>mainline media is:

AMY GOODMAN: So, by April 2017, just three months into his presidency, Trump launched a Tomahawk missile attack on Syria in retaliation for an alleged chemical weapons attack on civilians. Jeremy, you say in your series, “Like Pavlov’s dogs, the bipartisan war machine responded accordingly.” Let’s go to some of the media coverage of Trump’s attack on Syria. This is MSNBC anchor Brian Williams referring to a Pentagon video of U.S. missiles fired at Syria as “beautiful” three times in 30 seconds.

BRIAN WILLIAMS: Go into greater detail. We see these beautiful pictures at night from the decks of these two U.S. Navy vessels in the eastern Mediterranean. I am tempted to quote the great Leonard Cohen: “I’m guided by the beauty of our weapons.” And they are beautiful pictures of fearsome armaments making what is for them a brief flight over to this airfield. What did they hit?

AMY GOODMAN: That was MSNBC’s Brian Williams. And this is CNN’s Fareed Zakaria.

FAREED ZAKARIA: I think Donald Trump became president of the United States. I think this was actually a big moment, because candidate Trump had said that he would never get involved in the Syrian civil war. He told President Obama, “You cannot do this without the authorization of Congress.” He seemed unconcerned with global norms. President Trump recognized that the president of the United States does have to act to enforce international norms, does have to have this broader moral and political purpose.

And yet, this country is waxing poetic about the “clear skies over our cities,” and how the lockdown has “given me space to think, to reflect, to evolve,” and “we are really getting closer to our roots” THANKS to Covid-19.

Dangerous-dangerous thinking. This is it, though … as more and more people (sic) who can work from home (not real work) accept permanent correspondence school-work-medicine-business. No big questioning of the motivations of the tech world, the billionaires, the pigs of AI and Surveillance. No bigger demands for this shit-hole country. No demands for holding all corporations accountable. No pitchforks and tar and feathers for the politicians, the cops, the multimillionaires, the billionaires and their evil seeds.

It is a passive culture, a giant joystick, operation, a couch potato citizenry. The Covid-19 plan-demic fit the narrative so-so well.

It is now rubber-necking to the tenth power. Almost everyone in the United Snakes of BlackRock and then those fleas on the tail of that US dog, Canada, UK, and Australia, is generally looking like a giant cast in a Jerry Springer outtake. The celebrity culture, the thugs of politics, the billionaire lizard class, the entire mauling media, the incompetence of the general population who self-identify as MAGA deplorables and/or middling liberals who believe in Manifest Destiny and Exceptionalism with a little bit of LGBTQA spin, it is the seeding of more and more weeks, months and years of stupidity. To mask or not to mask, to listen to this group of scientists, or that swath of virologists, that is the question.

No deep discussion about how broken the system(s) was/were way back when, and then this rewritten history covering up the bulldozing through the Regan years and up to now. Gutting rights, gutting checks and balances for Wall Street, Banking, Real Estate, oligarchs, polluters, thieves in suits, and the thuggery of cops and troops. Shock and awe, with this crappy media and amusing ourselves not to death but to neutering and spaying glee.

Imagine over 200 rural hospitals shut down just since 2006. Imagine simple compound fracture medical bill of $80,000. Just imagine, brand new aircraft carriers and supersonic jets, football stadiums filled with shiny bullets, and entire shipping ports filled with drones and bombs. This country has no checks and balances to demand human and township/city/state assistance during fires, hurricanes, floods and flu pandemics. No safety nets, no massive shut downs of the perpetrators of fire, poison, imprisonment, shock and awe on the streets by the murdering cops.

Then, we argue how much the thieves are hiding, ripping us off for, and on and on, the broken system.

Some of the most despicable people now are on mainstream media and in the odd-ball media, and the academicians are scurrying like the careerists they are, and then the homegrown extremists, the pussy Trump (not a man’s man or a woman’s man), the murder incorporated men and women on the thin blue line, and on and on. We make those old “banana republic” epithets against our brethren south of the border seem tame. We are a thug nation, a new gilded age society of 18-carrat 5,000 square foot bathrooms for the Botox, and a 1988 Chevy van for the fulfillment worker families parked in an alley.

It all seems like a giant mental anguish experiment.

The news-news-news is a constant drone of national and international frayed stories, and in the eye of the storm, we have community after community in the USA broken, breaking apart, sliding and of course it never was meant to be a system that is for, by, with, because of the people.

This all brings me to the deplorables, the across-the-street neighbors, whose boys decided my 12 by 14 inch sign that states we believe in a woman’s right to choose and black lives matter, etc., should not only be stolen, but that my car’s window bashed in because of that sign.

Yeah, two deputy sheriff calls, two citations, and then two separate no trespassing citations, and then more and more of my time spent on tracking these cases. So many moments of my mental state thrown into the criminal injustice system. How many phone calls from county courts folk and victims rights folk telling me in their 20 or 30 or 40 years they have never seen such a backlog, a cluster fuck.

Oregon’s lockdown measures, and now property crimes – this putrid 39-year-old boy-man, all 6’5” of him, caught by a neighbor throwing a 10 pound paving stone in my car window and then prancing around the street with hands up and juking as if he just made a dunk.

Then my spouse and I start digging into this “family,” this upstanding MAGA family, and lo and behold, the mother has been evicted from two homes, and she and her current husband filed for bankruptcy in CA more than five times. The perpetrator of the criminal mischievous also has a fine white boy, blued eye semi-man rap sheet – DUIs in CA, and felony charges for, err, animal abuse, AKA cock fighting. This guy’s CA record shows he failed to appear, failed to do court-mandate classes in animal abuse. Charges dropped.

As you peel back layer after layer in America – the blond mother, prancing around the neighborhood telling anyone who will listen how upstanding she and her breed are – the dirty laundry comes flying in your face.

So these anti-Chinese, pro-MAGA mutts, they have some ridiculous business of beach footwear (whatever that is) and they stamp a sea turtle on them, and on their web site, they say “from every purchase we support the sea turtles.” Imagine that, no sea turtle environmental group listed, and alas, these anti-Chinese/China MAGA get those loafers and flipflops from, well, you guessed it – China.

The court systems are super blogged. The property crimes are going unpunished. Cases are being tossed out. Retraining orders are not being followed up on. And this is just one small slice of the angle in America where things are falling apart. Under lockdown. Before lockdown. Beyond lockdown.

Too much on the American mindset’s bandwidth. Again, the mess of crap that comes into Facebook, on Twitter, on those hate channels, on MSNBC, Fox, et al. The paraded queens of stupidity, and the kings of crime, every minute of the day, dragging any attention span left in the American collective intellect/consciousness, pulled out.

This is America. I have former colleagues who are retired, who have their little house on the gentrified hill in this or that town. They believe in this shit-hole country. They think Trump is aberration. They think that all he’s done will go on in perpetuity (lifetime appointments of judges). They believe in this shit-hole system, just putting a few new lipstick shades on the predatory-parasitic-disaster pig that is capitalism left of center, center or right.

You get a chunk of cement thrown into your car window, and you are thrown into the morass that is/was/will be the dead pool of America. All systems no-go. All entertainment zones displaying all those sacrifice zones. All those Netflix documentaries, all those mini-series, all those years and years of drama and soap operas. It’s here, the lobotomy, the collective lobotomy.

A nation of 160 million and counting developing one or more  chronic diseases. One out of five (easily) with recurring depression. A middle manager class and intellectual class stuck in the inertia of cynicism. The gilded age that pushes more and more people into poverty and learned helplessness. This is the country of proud to be stupid . . . proud to be overweight, diabetic, hypertensive and yet, “lock them up . . . give ‘em a good beating . . . shoot them on Pennsylvania Avenue . . . give them a good dump into the east bay with a sack of cement.”

This wimp of a human (bully of that species), Trump, and his suits and ties that are warped (every single GOP before, during and after his death) and who  hold up the violence and extrajudicial beatings and murders this un-man Trump and his un-man Stephen Miller and his Sessions and Barr, putrid puffer fish in Florsheims, demand, we are there, man.

Chris Hedges: We’ve personalized the problem in Trump without realizing that Trump is the product of a failed democracy. Trump is what rises up from the bowels of a decayed and degenerate system. And you can get rid of Trump, but you’re not going to get rid of what the sociologist Émile Durkheim called that “anomie” that propels societies to engage in deeply self-destructive behavior.

Thanks to Mr. Fish and his incredible mind and drawings/art! Watch his documentary — https://www.mrfishmovie.com/

This article was posted on Sunday, October 25th, 2020 at 10:23pm and is filed under Courts and Judges, Disinformation, Hate Speech, History, Hypocrisy, Identity Politics, Impeachment, Imperialism, Justice, Martial Law, Media, Militarism, Murder, Nationalism, Neo-Nazis, Populism, Poverty, Protests, Racism, Resistance, Right Wing Jerks, Riots, Ruling Elite, Terrorism (state and retail), Violence.

If there is a point at which we realize we are taking our lives in our hands by just going downtown and marching in the streets, this might be it.

Last night a man was shot to death near the Justice Center in downtown Portland, where protests have been taking place every night for over three months. Details are still coming in, but it appears the deceased was a heavily-armed member of the far right. Another member of the far right was just arrested this morning in the working class Portland suburb of Milwaukie. He was arrested for having fired into a crowd the day before with live ammunition, apparently, in a separate incident from the killing at the Justice Center.

For those of you who might just be tuning in here, I’ll try to set the stage.

Prior to Trump, prior to the pandemic, Portland was a city experiencing multiple crises, as with many other cities across the country, but perhaps more so. Between the last two censuses Portland lost more than half of its Black population due to gentrification, a phenomenon known to many as ethnic cleansing. During that time, Portland also achieved #1 status in the nation in terms of the numbers of Black people killed by the police, per capita. Portland also achieved the status as the most rent-burdened city in the country, as determined by the cost of rent relative to the average income of renters in the city. For many comfortable homeowners living in the hills of west of downtown and shopping in the malls of Beaverton, the reality that they were living in a city that was experiencing multiple acute crises may have passed them by. We live in a very divided city, in so many ways. Just take a day-long walk down Burnside Boulevard from the hills west of downtown to the desolate trailers in outer southeast, and you’ll get the picture of the class structure of this society.

Prior to Trump, prior to the pandemic, groups like Don’t Shoot PDX and a multiplicity of other networks focused on police brutality, institutional racism, gentrification and the unaffordability of housing for most Black and working class people were active on the streets, online, and in electoral politics. While the state government is dominated by the interests of big landlords, like the Democratic Party everywhere, in local government on the city and county levels, increasing numbers of solidly progressive people have been getting in, in the city council as well as among elected officials in the judicial branch, such as the District Attorney who just dropped the charges of so many protesters who have been arrested over the past months.

Long prior to Trump, Portland was a hotbed of conflict between fascists and antifascists, between militant believers in white supremacy and militant antiracists. As with cities like Minneapolis, there is a lot of history to this conflict. The streets of Portland, as with the streets of Minneapolis and other cities, were contested ground. Oregon was founded as a white homeland, and Portland was a national home to organized racism for a long time, until relatively recently, and the supporters of these groups have not all moved to Idaho.

The combination of Trump’s election and the social forces he continually strives to unleash, the pandemic, the growing numbers of blatantly racist police murders across the country, the economic crash, the apparent withdrawal of any more real help from the federal government, and the complete incompetence and/or captured-by-the-landlords nature of the state authorities in Oregon and elsewhere, have altogether created a massive powder keg. Add to that a tremendous increase in gun sales over the past several months across the country, very much including Oregon. Add to that wannabe vigilantes speaking at the Republican National Convention, and real vigilantes in Wisconsin being praised by the president, with the blood still fresh on the streets of Kenosha.

OK, stage-setting over.

It’s always been mythology that in the USA the First Amendment gives people the right to peacefully protest. It’s always been mythology that when people commit acts of civil disobedience, such as marching or sitting down in the street, that they will generally be gingerly carried off with one cop taking each limb, carrying the arrested to an awaiting vehicle, and carefully placing them inside it. It’s always been mythology that when there are two opposing groups of protesters, the police are there to act as a neutral party to keep them from hurting each other. Under certain circumstances, peaceful protests go off without a hitch, police escort marchers in the streets, and they keep protesters from killing each other, but there’s nothing predictable about any of these things going that way. In fact, most often, they don’t go like that at all, in Portland, or in most US cities.

And yes, most US cities are Democrat-run, as Trump is so fond of pointing out. There are reasons for that. Unfortunately, these Democrats, like their Republican counterparts, are largely also wealthy landowners, such as Mayor Ted Wheeler, and/or politicians paid off by corporations, incapable of doing anything more than mouthing progressive slogans while they screw the entire working class over and over again with their actual actions. And what is especially telling is that in these progressive hotbeds, the police forces are full of unaccountable human rights abusers and members of the far right, and most of each city’s budgets goes to them every year. And despite the fact that these police departments are constantly losing lawsuits brought against them by the citizens they kill and maim, their killer cops not only almost never go to prison, but they almost all keep their six-figure jobs as our armed protectors.

While it is mythology that there’s anything like a set of rules to adhere to for proper protesting etiquette, to avoid getting attacked by police or fascists, for example, or to get positive media coverage, or any media coverage at all, it is true that there are general tendencies in a given country at a given historical moment in terms of how things will go the vast majority of the time. And to the extent that it was generally the case that you didn’t used to have to worry about people shooting at each other with live ammunition at protest rallies in front of a federal courthouse in the center of a city in this country a few years ago, this expectation is increasingly not valid.

Whoever shot the heavily-armed member of the far right downtown last night, the context was that other members of the far right were spraying crowds with gunfire, a massacre of protesters had just been committed in Wisconsin by a member of the far right, and hundreds of beefy white people with big flags throughout downtown Portland were involved with vehicular assaults on pedestrians and other vehicles, and lots of people were spraying each other with bear mace, hitting, and kicking each other.

Although no one has been killed by a politically-motivated left-winger or anarchist in the United States in decades to my knowledge, while members of the far right kill us regularly at this point, if it indeed is the case that this man was killed in the course of a conflict with a counter-protester, this really shouldn’t come as any surprise. Many people we might broadly define as antifascists embrace armed self-defense and do shooting practice regularly, from Anti-Racist Action to the John Brown Gun Club, and new groups like that seem to be forming daily, along with neighborhood associations forming for people to defend one another from the coming waves of evictions.

Knowing that the police are either unwilling or unable to effectively police events such as the Trump Cruise and ensuing urban combat that we saw last night, given that going downtown to protest, whether you’re protesting in a way that the authorities deem to be “peaceful” or “violent,” you are risking your life by being there.

Of course, you’re also risking your life every time you cross a busy street, or ride your bicycle down one. And when you’re in a crowd of enthusiastic, community-minded protesters from all walks of life, of all ages, catching up with each other, playing music, shouting at the mayor, and taking over the streets, it’s easy to feel invincible. At least for me it is. It’s easy to rationalize away fear, and perhaps for some of us more than others, easy to feel like these bad things can’t possibly happen to me. But if they happen more and more often, people start to change their orientation.

That was the best gig, serenading the mayor, while occupying the entire block in front of his condo. https://t.co/VSS9lLtyY1

— David Rovics (@drovics) August 29, 2020

Standing on the precipice we’re all standing on right now here in the USA, my mind delivers me historical parallels, as a sort of desperate measure, trying to make sense of it all. I’m not sure how relevant any of them are, but any of them might be. There are too many different factors that go into creating the future.

But at least in retrospect, some things seem clear. Retrospect is good like that. The massacres at Kent State and Jackson State, along with so many more killings by the authorities of Black radicals especially, in no small part gave rise to networks such as the short-lived Black Liberation Army and the Weathermen. Developments like these tend to reinforce the maxim that violence is made inevitable through the suppression of more peaceful means.

Similarly, in Northern Ireland there was a civil rights movement, that sought equality for the oppressed Catholic minority in the Occupied Six Counties. The movement was consciously modeled after the civil rights movement in the US. Like its counterpart in the US, it was met with tremendous violence, which ultimately took the forms of racist pogroms in 1969, the burning of hundreds of homes by anti-Catholic mobs, a massive propaganda campaign of fake news brought on by the authorities, vilifying the largely Catholic movement, and ultimately a massacre of movement organizers by British troops. All of these events of 1969 and 1970 ultimately led people to conclude that peaceful marches were not working if they would just end in massacres. And this understanding gave rise to the armed resistance movement that followed, which in turn gave rise to a conflict that took the lives of thousands of people over the following quarter century.

There are those examples of fires being fueled by the authorities. Then there are other examples, when governments with intelligent leaders who know they’re in a race against time act decisively. A somewhat random example that comes to mind is how at the end of the Second World War, after years of a terrible occupation that involved a famine and many thousands of deportations and executions, with many more shipped off to work as forced laborers, after the Netherlands was liberated by Allied forces from Canada, the US, Poland and elsewhere, but also in no small part including by Dutch resistance forces as well, the first thing the government did when it came back from exile was collect all the guns that were now all over the country. They were desperately concerned that after all these years of Nazi occupation, there could be terrible conflict in society between those who resisted in some form, and those who collaborated to one degree or another. If there were to be such conflicts, they wanted to make sure that they did not involve firearms.

My orientation is admittedly Eurocentric. I’ve spent most of my adult life somewhere between North America and Europe, and much less of it anywhere else in the world. One of the guests I interviewed for one of my livestream shows/podcasts recently, an Argentinian anarchist and professor at the University of Massachusetts, Graciela Monteagudo, says the fascist comparisons aren’t so relevant, that the divisions in US society and the incompetent, corrupt state ostensibly at the helm of it are much more like a typical kleptocratic banana republic than a well-oiled fascist fighting machine.

Either way, if there is a point at which we realize we are taking our lives in our hands by just going downtown and marching in the streets, this might be it. What comes next, I don’t know that anybody knows – I sure don’t. I only know a little, mostly selective tidbits about what has happened before. The time and place we’re in now is not like those other times and places, however. It’s new, and in so many ways, as they never tire of pointing out in the news, unprecedented.

A death of just one single man can, under certain dreadful circumstances, put into motion the entire avalanche of events. It can smash the whole regime into pieces. It can fully rewrite history, and even change the identity of a nation. It can… although it not always does.

George Floyd’s death became a spark. The city of Minneapolis is where the murder occurred, and where the ethnic minorities rose in rage.

But it is also where white extreme right-wing criminals, and some even say, entire regime, perpetrated the uprising, kidnapped what could have become a true revolution and began choking legitimate rebellion by a stained duvet of nihilism and confusion.

Here, we will not speculate. We will not point fingers at “deep state” or some multi-billionaire families, and to what extent they have been involved. Let others do this if they know details. But this time, I simply came to listen. And to pass to the world what I discovered first hand and what I was told.

This time I simply went to Franklin Avenue and Lake Street, both in Minneapolis.

I spoke to Native American people there. To those who joined forces with the African-American community during those dangerous days after May 25, 2020. To people who dared to defend their neighborhoods against brutality, against  white gangs, which came to loot, infiltrate, and derail the most powerful uprising in the United States in modern history.

*****

Bob Rice is a Native American owner of Pow Wow Grounds, a local entrepreneur, and a ‘community protection organizer.’ His legendary café is located on Franklin Avenue. During the COVID-19 pandemic, it has been reduced, for the time being, to a takeaway business, but even as such, it is enormously popular among the Native Americans, as well as others.

At the back of the cafe is huge storage, full of food. Everyone hungry, in need of help, can simply come here and take whatever he or she needs.

We grab some freshly brewed coffee from the shop and take it to the public benches outside.

Author with Bob Rice on Franklin Avenue

Bob Rice then begins his story:

There has been police brutality for a very long time, against people of color. Not only talking about Minneapolis but in all these other places, since the 1991 Rodney King incident. Things were boiling and building up – leading to a big blow up.

And all this discrimination did not start here; it came centuries ago from Europe.

After the George Floyd murder, I wanted to show solidarity. Native Americans were experiencing an even higher degree of persecution than Black people. We had to stand together. I went down to the site of the murder of George Floyd, in order to support protests.

For a while, we talked about the mass media in the United States, an official and even some ‘independent one,’ and how it quickly and violently turned against the left, as well as against those who have been daring to expose endemic racism in the United States.

But soon, we returned to the events that took place here, in May and June.

I noticed the presence of strange elements right from the start. I was watching guys breaking windows. At about 6 am, the morning after, I traveled down to South Minneapolis.  There were piles of rocks in front of the rioters.  Flash hand grenades.  I kept on moving around the areas and kept on seeing rocks. I noticed the Minneapolis Umbrella Man, dressed all in black, with mask and black umbrella and black hammer smashing things – at the end being stopped by black guys. People were walking out of the store with car parts, and I thought, “why stealing those things”? These guys didn’t seem to be as part of the protest. I started moving and going away from the area, thinking that these guys would burn down stores and places soon. I even called up my insurance company the following morning to see if my policy covers civil unrest. That night they burned a lot of stores – auto stores, liquor stores, all types of businesses. I thought that if we do not do something ourselves to protect our neighborhoods, they will burn down all of our areas, too.

From what I saw, I couldn’t tell you who these guys were, but they were not from here.

So, we put up our protection zone calling out people on Facebook. We became the Headquarters of protection of Native American businesses and nonprofit organizations, as well as banks, shops, investment properties, etc. all belonging to the Native American community around here.

I noticed there were Caucasian people, driving cars very slowly with no license plates, yelling racial slurs out of the windows. We formed a human shield, chain, along Franklin Avenue, to protect ourselves and our people.

At a high point, about 300 people were protecting the area all night long for about eight days in a row. It had to be done, because here we had people from all over, including Wisconsin, descending on us — we had white supremacist group Proud Boys here. They arrived wearing masks. We had young white kids – 16 and 17 years old — coming from Wisconsin, looting liquor stores.  We caught them. Obviously, they came out here because they thought it was an exciting thing to do.  They didn’t even know where they were – this area is very dangerous with drug dealing and gang violence at night. Lucky, they got caught by us.

And the coverage? I wanted to know whether these events, in the heart of Native American neighborhoods, were described in depth by media reports.

Bob Rice replied readily:

There was no media reporting on these matters – mass media blamed everything on the Black Lives Matter movement.  When liquor stores and tobacco shops were on fire, no police or fire trucks were around. Then the National Guard took over – using tear gas.

 Mr. Rice sighed, still in disbelief:

 Just incredible how our so-called President has done all the mess going and even made it worse!

*****

Robert Pilot, Native Roots Radio host, drove me for days all around the cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul, explaining what really took place on both Franklin Avenue and Lake Street.

George Floyd Murder Site

But before, we visited an provisory, impromptu monument where the murder of George Floyd took place. There were flowers, graffiti, works of art; there was grief, and there was solidarity. Native American people clearly supported the plight of the African-Americans.

The area was safe; it was well organized. People of all races came here to pay tribute to the murdered man, and centuries of atrocious history of the United States.

As we drove, Robert Pilot explained:

Native American neighborhoods armed themselves after the Floyd murder. But not only that: economic hardships ensued after the murder; food banks have come up.  The Pow Wow Grounds used to be a food distribution deport but ended up becoming a food bank for anyone to donate and get what they need.

Protesters were everywhere; the young generation got fed up.  So different from other murders. The last straw was the murder of George Floyd. Four years earlier, in 2016, Philando Castile, an African American man, got murdered by police. He had worked in a school cafeteria. His murder was broadcast live on Facebook. It was a buildup. 10,000 people protested on 38th Street and Chicago in Minneapolis – the site of the murder of George Floyd. Combination of racial and overall frustration.

 We drove by burned stores, services, gas stations. Everything was resembling a war zone, and in a way, it was.

If you are there, things are extremely raw, emotional. It is not like analyzing things from a distance from the comfort of one’s home.

Robert continued explaining, as we drove by block after block of the Middle East-style combat destruction:

There is a small percentage of African American people as compared to White Americans.  We need allies, too. We have to support each other. Signs everywhere in my neighborhood, ‘Black Lives Matter.’

Some young white people have woken up. They see the truth. The opinion of the masses is moving to the left; they are feeling fed up with what is happening around them and what it is that the country is doing to the world because of oil.

What is interesting is that there is a protest every single day, which is something new and mind-blowing. The media is misreporting, minimizing the enormity and magnitude of protests, CNN, MSNBC, etc.

Robert Pilot is not only a radio host, but he is also a teacher:

White teachers are still teaching history; they are teaching it to black and Native American kids! Political standing of my students – a few are engaged, but definitely not all. Perhaps 10 percent of people are engaged and doing the work for 90 percent.

The white guilt now and then… But many of us feel: You should stand behind us and with us but not in front of us. Revolution is happening in that sense. Everything is changing since protests are happening.

Not everyone likes the changes; definitely not everyone. The establishment is fighting back, trying to survive, in its existing, horrid form.

Robert Pilot concludes:

Generally, Black and Native Americans are together, supportive of each other.

It is symbolic that the Native American movement started on Franklin Avenue, where protests began in 1968. We would never burn down our own stores like grocery stores and hospitals. Why should we?

But we had to mobilize and stop members of the KKK and Proud Boys type of guys.

 *****

We drive some 100 miles north, in order to meet Ms. Emma Needham – a young Native American activist. Emma was kind enough to bring traditional medicine from her area. We met halfway at the Sand Prairie Wildlife Management Area.

Before our encounter, along the highway, we are surrounded by true ‘Americana’: endless open spaces, half-empty highways, more than 100 car-long cargo train pulled by two monstrous engines, while pushed by yet another one. We pass by St. Cloud Correctional Facility – an ancient-looking prison that bears the resemblance of some massive medieval English mansion surrounded by an elaborate system of barbed wires and watchtowers.

Trump Shop in the sticks

In one of the towns along the road, there is a big makeshift market selling posters, T-shirts, and other memorabilia, all related to the current President. It is called Trump Shop. Big banners are shouting at passing cars: “Trump, Make America Great Again,” “Trump 2020 – No More Bullshit,” and “God, Guns & Guts Made America. Let’s Keep All Three”.

Ms Emma Needham, young activist and write

Emma is a storyteller, a writer. She is an intelligent, outspoken, sincere, and passionate person:

Where we were, we did not see a lot of white men with masks attacking, but what we did see were two young white kids, around 16, from Wisconsin, looting a liquor store which was run by Native Americans.

I stayed over Friday and Saturday nights around the Indian American Cultural Center in Minneapolis. On Friday night, within half a mile to a mile in all directors, we could see and hear the riots and looting. There were gunshots, helicopters hovering all around us. But nobody came to rescue us.

On Saturday night, we could see white people on Jeeps, waving flags, cruising around the neighborhood. “The white kids from Wisconsin were there, it appeared to me, opportunistic grabbing whatever was available.

Majority of those who came to protest and loot were outsiders, not from the neighborhoods. It does not make sense for people in Minneapolis to burn down and loot stores they rely on.

I wanted to know whether the Native Americans and African-Americans were helping each other in that difficult hour?

Emma did not hesitate:

There was big solidarity between Black people and Native American people; there was empathy.

It has been lifelong degradation for many of us growing up poor and severely marginalized in reservations, but we had never seen anything like this, so close to what resembled a war.

Those of us who were down in North Minneapolis those nights – Friday and Saturday – could not find words to describe what was happening. But we had a strong sense that what has been happening to us Native Americans was happening to Black Americans, too – 400 years of surviving in a system of oppression. Enough is enough! Shared horrors – same for both groups!

I asked whether everything changed, and this is a new beginning for the nation? As many, Emma did not sound overly optimistic:

A black American female artist once said, ‘I love my white friends, but I don’t trust you because I know when the time comes, you need to choose your skin color. You count on the freedom and safety which you have. Whether you make that conscious decision or not, it will be there for you.

*****

On my behalf, Robert Pilot asked Brett Buckner, his fellow radio host, and an African American activist, whether he could confirm that the majority of rioters were whites and not from the community. He replied:

I would say so. Based on police reports and accounts from the community members, most of the damage was done by outsiders. Unfortunately, their actions will cause our community pain for years and even decades to come.

*****

Before I finished writing this report, “Umbrella man” got ‘identified.’

On July 29, 2020, Daily Mail wrote:

Masked “Umbrella Man” who was seen smashing windows of Minneapolis AutoZone that was later burned to the ground during George Floyd protests is identified as ‘Hells Angels gang member with ties to white supremacist group’… The Star Tribune reported the 32-year-old man has links to Aryan Cowboy Brotherhood, a white supremacist gang based in Minnesota and Kentucky.

He was one of many, but the most notorious one. Looking at his photos when in action, he was bearing a striking resemblance to ‘ninja’ looking rioters — right-wing hooligans – who were unleashed in order to bring chaos to Hong Kong, people who have been supported and financed by Western governments. I know, because I work in Hong Kong, since the beginning of the riots. Coincidence? And if not: who really ‘inspired’ whom?

*****

Before I left Minneapolis, Robert Pilot and his wife Wendy interviewed me on their Native Roots Radio. What was supposed to be just 30 minutes appearance ended up being a one-hour event.

They showed me their city and their state, sharing sincere feelings and hopes, unveiling suffering of both African American and Native American communities.

This time, I traveled to the United States in order to listen. But I was also asked to talk, and so I did.

During the interview, I took them to several parts of the world, where black people still suffer enormously, due to Western imperialism and corporate greed. The world where Native people of Latin America, Canada, as well as other parts of the Planet, are brutally humiliated, robbed of everything, even murdered by millions.

We were complimenting each other. Our knowledge was.

I am glad I came to Minnesota. I am thankful that I could witness history in the making.

I am also delighted that I observed solidarity between the African American and Native American people. For centuries, both went through hell, through agony. Now, they were awakening.

Minnesota is where the latest and very important chapter of American history began. But I also went to Washington, D.C., Baltimore, New York City, Massachusetts. I witnessed protests, anger, despair. But there was also hope. Hope, despite tear gas and riot police, lockdowns, despite mismanaged COVID-19 and increasing poverty rates. Something was ending, something unsavory and brutal. Whether this could be considered a new beginning was still too early to tell.

In Minnesota, I chose to see events through the eyes of Native Americans, people who were here ‘forever,’ to whom this land used to belong. People who were exterminated by the “new America,” by European migrants, in a genocide that claimed roughly 90% of the native lives. These were people who were robbed of their culture and their riches. I am glad; I am proud that I chose this angle.

True peace, true reconciliation can only come after history as well as reality are fully understood, never through denial.

Now, both African Americans and Native Americans are speaking, and the world is listening. It has to listen. At least this is already progress. These two groups are forming a powerful alliance of victims. But also, an alliance of those who are determined to make sure that history never repeats itself.

• First published by NEO – New Eastern Outlook (a journal of the Russian Academy of Sciences)

• All photos by Andre Vltchek

This article was posted on Sunday, August 16th, 2020 at 4:03pm and is filed under Black Lives Matter, Civil Unrest, Donald Trump, Media Bias, Original Peoples, Police brutality, Protests, Racism, Resistance, Riots, Solidarity, United States, Violence.

The American idea of progress is how fast I become white. And it’s a trick bag. Because they know perfectly well I can never become white. I have drunk my share of dry martinis; I have proven myself civilized in every way I can. But there is an irreducible difficulty: something doesn’t work. Well, I decided: I might as well act like a nigger.

— James Baldwin, UC Berkeley, 1979¹

A dangerous individual.

— F.B.I. field report²

Grandson of a slave, the eldest of nine children in a Harlem family rooted in bitter poverty, he grew up amidst junkies, winos, pimps, racketeers, pick-pockets, and con-artists.

Surrounded by despair, he took refuge in literature, reading with such focused intensity that his mother took to hiding his books.³ He knew the Bible so well he became a teen sensation in the pulpit, luxuriating in Old Testament rhetoric and poetry. By then he had devoured everything he could get his hands on close to home. “There were two libraries in Harlem,” he remembered, “and by the time I was thirteen I had read every book in both libraries and I had a card downtown for Forty-second street.”⁴

His brilliance stood out. One of his teachers, a Communist with a Theatre Project job thanks to the WPA, began giving him books and taking him to plays and movies and museums, nurturing his keen mind while teaching him an ironic lesson about the supposed master race: “She gave me my first key, my first clue that white people were human,” Baldwin said.⁵

Racism affected everything, often in unexpected ways. Baldwin, for example, had learned from his mother to always offer his seat to a woman when he rode the subway. But in church some preachers taught that he should never surrender his seat to a white woman, because that would be “an act of servility.” Baldwin solved the conundrum by never sitting down on the subway.⁶  But other racial dilemmas were not so easily side-stepped, such as when two police officers beat him “half to death” when he was but ten years old.⁷

Somehow emerging literate, self-assured, and honest in a world that defined him as but a half-step removed from jungle savagery, he found himself perpetually in danger of doing or saying something that would trigger disaster. At 18, he lost control of his suppressed rage and hurled a glass of water at a waitress who had refused him service in a segregated New Jersey restaurant, watching along with the astonished patrons as it shattered against the mirror behind the bar. The following year Harlem erupted in a race riot as he buried his father, whose rage had consumed him long before the tuberculosis that finished him off. Five years after that, young James had had more than enough of the brutalities of American life and fled the U.S. “about five minutes before being carried off to Bellevue.”⁸

Reaching Paris with $40 to his name and no French, he spent his nights there on park benches consoling the victims of France’s Algeria campaign, while his pent-up bitterness at all he had endured in the U.S. came spilling out.⁹ For an entire year he was busy “breaking up bars, knocking down people,” he later remembered, eventually ending up in jail. “You’ve been taught that you’re inferior,” he explained, “so you act as though you’re inferior. And on the level that is very difficult to get at, you really believe it.”¹⁰

When the chaos subsided, Baldwin discovered that his life had at last become personal, allowing him a detached look at the crippling racial obsession ravaging his native land. Like an Old Testament prophet he sounded the alarm in the pages of The Fire Next Time: “This is the crime of which I accuse my country and my countrymen, and for which neither I nor time nor history will ever forgive them, that they have destroyed and are destroying hundreds of thousands of lives and do not know it and do not want to know it.” He saved his richest contempt for the willfully blind: “It is not permissible that the authors of devastation should also be innocent. It is the innocence which constitutes the crime.”¹¹

Brilliant, driven, deeply troubled, he warned that time was running out to atone for slavery. “If we do not now dare everything,” he wrote, “the fulfillment of that prophecy, re-created from the Bible in song by a slave, is upon us: God gave Noah the rainbow sign, No more water, the fire next time!”¹²

Baldwin’s soaring rhetoric landed with a sickening thud against the deaf ears of the liberal establishment, which was busy dragging its feet in response to a civil rights movement that Baldwin more accurately called America’s latest “slave rebellion.”¹³ Embarrassed by the screaming headlines and distressed at the propaganda coup the USSR was reaping from racial upheaval in the U.S., the Kennedy administration moved only reluctantly and belatedly to support the black freedom movement.¹⁴  While blacks were set upon by mobs, clubbed with lead pipes, and shot, bombed, jailed, and killed, Attorney General Robert Kennedy’s FBI agents took notes and filed reports, but made no general move to enforce the law against rioting police and KKK vigilantes. Concerned about losing support in Congress, JFK opted to shore up his southern political base, appointing racist judges to the bench, including one in Georgia who sought to prevent “pinks, radicals and black voters” from overturning segregation, and another in Mississippi who saw no point in registering “a bunch of niggers on a voter drive.”¹⁵

In the midst of all this, Baldwin sent Attorney General Robert Kennedy a telegram taking the Kennedy administration to task for the siege of Birmingham, and Kennedy responded by inviting him to assemble a group of black luminaries for a meeting in his New York apartment. It didn’t go well. Baldwin’s brother David shook a fist in Kennedy’s face. Playwright Lorraine Hansberry blasted the “specimens of white manhood” portrayed in a recent Time magazine photo: Alabama police pinning a black woman to the ground with a knee to her throat, better known today as the George Floyd maneuver. Lena Horne suggested sarcastically that Kennedy try promoting his policy of Jim Crow collaboration to Harlem residents, but warned that “we ain’t going, because we don’t want to get shot.” Freedom Rider Jerome Smith, crippled for life from a Mississippi beating, said he was nauseated to have to meet with Kennedy at all (in order to have his rights respected). He told the shocked Attorney General that he could no longer conceive of fighting for his country in uniform, but was nearly ready to pick up a gun against it.

Baldwin and his guests pleaded with Kennedy to have the president send troops to quell racist violence in Birmingham, and demanded to know why he himself hadn’t escorted James Meredith when be became the first black student to register at Ole Miss.

Kennedy laughed.

Failing to see anything funny, Baldwin and his group demanded a demonstration of moral commitment by the White House. The President, they insisted, should escort a black child into a Deep South school, so that any racist who spat on that child would also be spitting on the nation.

Kennedy dismissed the idea as a meaningless moral gesture. Son of a bootlegger, helped into office by Mob connections, he recommended that blacks pull themselves up the way his family did. With luck, he concluded brightly, one of them might be president in forty years.

Forty more years and blacks might get relief from racist terror — on top of the 400 years they had already endured – and then only if they behaved themselves! Baldwin told Kennedy his comment was absurd. The point was, he said, that a Kennedy could already be president, while blacks, who had arrived in America long before the Irish Catholics, were “still required to supplicate and beg for justice.”

When Kennedy remained unmoved and unmovable, Baldwin emerged from the meeting profoundly depressed, pronouncing him “insensitive and unresponsive to the Negro’s torment.”¹⁶  The FBI marked him down as a “Communist,” and though he flew all the way from Paris, he was not allowed to speak to the March on Washington three months later,¹⁷ where Dr. King delivered his “I Have A Dream” speech. Eighteen days after that speech a bomb exploded in Birmingham, blasting four black girls attending Sunday school into eternity.

Dreams are one thing; change, quite another.

Though Baldwin regarded himself as “at bottom an optimist,”¹⁸he gradually gave up hope that the United States would change, as a string of assassinations (Medgar Evers, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, Fred Hampton, Mark Clark) made it increasingly obvious it had no intention of doing so. To the extent the country defined itself as white, he thought, to that same extent it was irrelevant. Change would come, but from elsewhere.

When Black Power emerged and Baldwin expressed sympathies for a new generation of black radicals, white liberals often expressed consternation at what they saw as his retreat from integration and reconciliation. Baldwin took a certain pleasure in setting them straight:¹⁹ white people had long ago (forcefully) integrated the country, he reminded them, the facts not being subject to dispute, as “my grandmother never raped nobody.”²⁰ Furthermore, the “negro problem” was actually a “white problem,” as it was they who invented the “nigger” fantasy, and they who were continually tormented by it. The burden was on them to discover why.²¹ Until they did, all talk of racial reconciliation was premature, if not consciously diversionary.

Such relentless honesty proved hard to handle even for the most balanced and resourceful minds. In a three-part discussion with Baldwin in August, 1970, Margaret Mead’s detailed anthropological and historical knowledge checked Baldwin’s tendency toward poetic exaggeration through seven fascinating hours of wide-ranging conversation. But when Israel-Palestine came up, Baldwin’s passion for truth proved more reliable than Mead’s faltering reason. “I have been the Arab, in America, at the hands of the Jews,” he said, denouncing Israel’s 1948 displacement of the Palestinians by “an entirely irreligious people” based incongruously on “something that is written down by Jehovah on a tablet.” Mead lost her composure at this, and accused Baldwin of making a racist comment, “just because there have been a bunch of Jewish shopkeepers in Harlem.”²²

But there was no trace of anti-Semitism in Baldwin then, or at any other time in his career. He was just telling the truth.

And he never stopped. In 1974, he won the Cathedral of St. John the Divine’s centennial medal for the “artist as prophet,” and was invited to address a congregation for the first time since his teen years. Using the Old Testament story of David slaying Goliath and the Philistines, the diminutive Baldwin let loose a blast of hyper-articulate fury at the U.S. “betrayal” of its black brethren, and thunderously dismissed President Nixon as a “motherfucker.”

The sub-dean of the cathedral, unhappy with the tone of the service, confided to the dean: “No one ever before has said ‘motherfucker’ from the pulpit of St. John the Divine.”

The Dean replied that times had changed: “It’s about time someone did.”²³

Thirteen years later, Baldwin’s funeral took place in that very same church, and mourners celebrated his wildly improbable and incredibly abundant life. Maya Angelou called him a “great soul.”²⁴  Toni Morrison remembered that “the season was always Christmas” when he was around, and thanked him for replacing evasion and hypocrisy with clarity and beauty in his 6895 pages of published work.²⁵  Amiri Baraka praised his “insistent elegance” and ranked the importance of his work with Dr. King and Malcolm X.²⁶

Of course, taking fair measure of a life lived on three continents, and dedicated to human liberation by embracing every vulnerability, probing all weaknesses, and excavating the most deeply buried truths is an impossible task. Perhaps all one can say is that — by the power of his spoken and written words — Baldwin transformed a horrifying legacy of pain and rage into grace and light.

It’s hard not to be grateful for that.

Had he lived, Baldwin would have turned 96 years old today. Happy Birthday, James, and well done!

1. Reflections of James Baldwin, C-SPAN, March 3, 2007.
2. William J. Maxwell, James Baldwin – The FBI File (Arcade Publishing, 2017) Chapter 21, p. 167.
3. W. J. Weatherby, James Baldwin – Artist on Fire, (Donald I. Fine, 1989) p. 15.
4. James Baldwin and Margaret Mead – A Rap on Race, (J. B. Lippincott, 1971) pps. 45-6.
5. Ibid., p. 31.
6. Ibid., p. 55.
7. Ibid., p. 213.
8. Ibid., p. 56.
9. Ibid., p. 242.
10. Ibid., p. 57.
11. James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time, (Dell, 1962) pps. 15-16.
12. The Fire Next Time, p. 141.
13. Reflections of James Baldwin, speech at UC Berkeley, January 15, 1979 (broadcast on C-SPAN 3 March 3, 2007).
14. Howard Zinn, A People’s History of the United States, (Harper, 1980) p. 445; Baldwin, The Fire Next Time, pps. 117-18
15. Tom Hayden, Reunion – A Memoir, (Random House, 1988) p. 59.
16. The account of the Bobby Kennedy meeting is from: James Campbell, Talking At The Gates – A Life of James Baldwin, (Viking, 1991) pps. 163-5; David Leeming, James Baldwin – A Biography, (Henry Holt, 1994) pps. 222-6; W. J. Weatherby, James Baldwin – Artist on Fire, (Donald I. Fine, 1989) pps. 221-4.
17. Leeming, p. 296.
18. A Rap on Race, p. 88.
19. Leeming, p. 185.
20. Baldwin 1965 Cambridge Union debate with William F. Buckley Jr.
21. I Am Not Your Negro (film).
22. A Rap on Race, pps. 215-16.
23. Leeming, p. 322.
24. Maya Angelou, “When Great Trees Fall,” bookpatrol.net, May 29, 2014.
25. Toni Morrison, “James Baldwin: His Voice Remembered – Life In His Language” New York Times, December 20, 1987.
26. Amiri Baraka, “James Baldwin, “His Voice Remembered – We Carry Him With Us” New York Times, December 20, 1987.

Of course, when Democratic politicians like Obama and Wyden say ‘vote,’ they don’t simply mean ‘participate in the electoral process.’ They mean, vote for Democrats.

Perhaps nowhere in the country has this advice been taken to heart quite like the state of Minnesota and the city of Minneapolis. The state is led by a Democratic Governor and has had a Democratic Attorney General, that is, a Democrat as its chief legal officer, since 1971. The Mayor of Minneapolis is a Democrat, and has been since 1978, while 12 out of 13 seats on the Minneapolis city council are held by Democrats (the final seat is held by the Green Party).

‘Minnesota Nice’ may or may not involve booing, but it has certainly included voting for Democrats.

The results of this approach are well documented. A 2015 study revealed Minnesota to have “some of the worst racial disparities in the country,” gaps larger than most or all other states in education, employment, household income, home ownership, and poverty. African Americans in Minneapolis are nearly five times more likely than their white counterparts to live in poverty, and nearly three times more likely to be unemployed. They are nearly ten times more likely to be arrested for low level offenses and 13 times as likely as white Minnesotans to be killed by police, a disturbing fact born out in the high-profile killings of Jamar Clark in 2015, Philando Castile in 2016, and now, George Floyd.

It is telling to note that the state’s current Democratic Senator, and, perhaps until this week, the presumptive vice-presidential frontrunner to join Joe Biden atop the Democratic ticket, has been an integral part of the construction of the way Minneapolis functions today. From 1999-2007, Amy Klobuchar was the chief prosecutor for Hennepin County, encompassing the city of Minneapolis. During this period, Klobuchar declined to bring charges in over two dozen cases where people were killed by police, instead, focusing her attention on aggressively prosecuting low-level offenders, disproportionately people of color, for whom she sought longer-than-recommended sentences. Summed up by longtime Minneapolis community activist Michelle Gross, “she’s a racist who basically made our prisons the blackest place in this state.”

As part of her agenda, Klobuchar declined in 2006 to bring charges against six Minneapolis police officers who had shot and killed a man. Among those let off the hook was an officer Derek Chauvin; the same Derek Chauvin who murdered George Floyd.

Incredibly, over his 19-year career, Chauvin has been the recipient of no less than 17 official complaints, all closing without discipline, but for one letter of reprimand. In 2008, he was involved in an altercation during which he shot a man twice, though the man survived, and then again, in 2011, he was placed on a three-day leave of absence after a non-fatal shooting of an indigenous man. Many police officers say they never use their gun over the course of their entire career; Chauvin had been involved in three questionable shootings in five years. And yet still, in a city run by a Democratic Mayor, in a state overseen by a Democratic Attorney General, this dangerous individual was left to prowl the streets, until finally, he killed an innocent person.

Perhaps here, a step back should be taken before things get too heated. Perhaps President Obama’s 2016 calls to vote rather than boo, echoed now by Democratic politicians in the face of an uprising, were more innocuous than they seem. The booing in question, that which precipitated Obama’s famous remark, was, in fact, in response to mention of Donald Trump. Most literally, Obama was saying, in his usually charismatic way, don’t boo Trump, vote for Hillary. It was a continuation of “when they go low, we go high,” the same unsubtle mandate as always – stay away from uncouth Republicans, a Democrat must be President!

It goes without saying that Republicans are not the answer; unlike Democrats, they do not even pretend to be. When protesters took to the streets after the murder of George Floyd, they were called “thugs” by President Trump, that familiar racist dog whistle, consistently used to mute the anguished voices of the oppressed.

A Democrat must be President. No one has followed this suggestion more doggedly than the good people of Minnesota. Literally, no one – they are the only state in the nation won by the Democratic candidate for President in each of the last 11 elections, the only state to go for Mondale over Reagan in 1984. And yet, their current plight, like that of the rest of the country, has grown under Presidents Democrat and Republican.

Consider, after the murder of Freddie Gray by police in 2015, then-President Obama called protesters in Baltimore exactly the same thing as President Trump called those in Minneapolis – “thugs.” While in the White House, the proprietor of ‘don’t boo, vote’ oversaw the continuing militarization of American police forces, and stood idly by while the jackboot of the state hammered down on the people of Ferguson and Standing Rock and elsewhere.

In 2016, President Obama was insisting that we didn’t boo Trump, but rather vote for Hillary Clinton, a woman who, while championing arguably the most racist piece of legislation in the modern history of the country – the 1994 crime bill – called African American youth “superpredators,” a woman whose racism permeated her career up to and beyond when her campaign used racist literature against Obama in their 2008 Democratic primary. Now, President Obama insists that we should not boo, but vote for Joe Biden, a former segregationist who literally wrote the racist 1994 crime bill, a man who casually used racist remarks as recently as last week.

In order to satiate the unheard, Obama suggests a vote for the architects of the current situation.

There is a curious quote in a recent Politico article on the shocking levels of racial inequality in Minnesota:

It seems illogical that inequality could thrive in one of the country’s most liberal states.

Yes, it does seem illogical, but only for those still clinging to the fantasy that Democrats are somehow the opposite of Republicans. The state of Minnesota, to say nothing of the careers of people like Obama, Biden, Clinton and Klobuchar, has quite clearly shown that this is simply not the case.

If a vote for either party delivers the same results, then ‘vote’ is removed as an option for the oppressed to have their voices heard.

That leaves ‘boo.’

As Martin Luther King Jr. said, “a riot is the language of the unheard.” Over 50 years later, a younger generation might say, “fuck around and find out.”

This article was posted on Thursday, June 11th, 2020 at 7:22am and is filed under Barack Obama, Democrats, Donald Trump, Joe Biden, Police, Police brutality, Racism, Resistance, Riots, Surveillance.

Had demonstrators not turned out in massive numbers on the streets and refused to be corralled back home by the threat of police violence, the US legal system would have simply turned a blind eye to Chauvin’s act of extreme brutality, as it has done before over countless similar acts.

Without the mass protests, it would have made no difference that Floyd’s murder was caught on camera, that it was predicted by Floyd himself in his cries of “I can’t breathe” as Chauvin spent nearly nine minutes pressing his knee to Floyd’s neck, or that the outcome was obvious to spectators who expressed their growing alarm as Floyd lost consciousness. At most, Chauvin would have had to face, as he had many times before, an ineffectual disciplinary investigation over “misconduct”.

Without the current ferocious mood of anger directed at the police and sweeping much of the nation, Chauvin would have found himself as immune from accountability and prosecution as so many police officers before him who gunned down or lynched black citizens.

Instead he is the first white police officer in the state of Minnesota ever to be criminally charged over the death of a black man. After initially arguing that there were mitigating factors to be considered, prosecutors hurriedly changed course to declare Chauvin’s indictment the fastest they had ever initiated. Yesterday Minneapolis’s police chief was forced to call the other three officers who stood by as Floyd was murdered in front of them “complicit”.

Confrontation, not contrition

If the authorities’ placatory indictment of Chauvin – on the least serious charge they could impose, based on incontrovertible evidence they could not afford to deny – amounts to success, then it is only a little less depressing than failure.

Worse still, though most protesters are trying to keep their demonstrations non-violent, many of the police officers dealing with the protests look far readier for confrontation than contrition. The violent attacks by police on protesters, including the use of vehicles for rammings, suggest that it is Chauvin’s murder charge – not the slow, barbaric murder of Floyd by one of their number – that has incensed fellow officers. They expect continuing impunity for their violence.

Here is the overhead… pic.twitter.com/US6Qqhkz3O

— Rob Bennett 🤠 (@rob_bennett) May 31, 2020

Similarly, the flagrant mistreatment by police of corporate media outlets simply for reporting developments, from the arrest of a CNN crew to physical assaults on BBC staff, underlines the sense of grievance harboured by many police officers when their culture of violence is exposed for all the world to see. They are not reeling it in, they are widening the circle of “enemies”.

This was before curfew and our cameraman @p_murt clearly a member of the press, a block away from the White House this evening… pic.twitter.com/X7oQqZm8eW

— Aleem Maqbool (@AleemMaqbool) June 1, 2020

Nonetheless, it is entirely wrong to suggest, as a New York Times editorial did yesterday, that police impunity can be largely ascribed to “powerful unions” shielding officers from investigation and punishment. The editorial board needs to go back to school. The issues currently being exposed to the harsh glare of daylight get to the heart of what modern states are there to do – matters rarely discussed outside of political theory classes.

Right to bear arms

The success of the modern state, like the monarchies of old, rests on the public’s consent, explicit or otherwise, to its monopoly of violence. As citizens, we give up what was once deemed an inherent or “natural” right to commit violence ourselves and replace it with a social contract in which our representatives legislate supposedly neutral, just laws on our behalf. The state invests the power to enforce those laws in a supposedly disciplined, benevolent police force – there to “protect and serve” – while a dispassionate court system judges suspected violators of those laws.

That is the theory, anyway.

In the case of the United States, the state’s monopoly on violence has been muddied by a constitutional “right to bear arms”, although, of course, the historic purpose of that right was to ensure that the owners of land and slaves could protect their “property”. Only white men were supposed to have the right to bear arms.

Today, little has changed substantively, as should be obvious the moment we consider what would have happened had it been black militia men that recently protested the Covid-19 lockdown by storming the Michigan state capitol, venting their indignation in the faces of white policemen.

(In fact, the US authorities’ reaction to the Black Panthers movement through the late 1960s and 1970s is salutary enough for anyone who wishes to understand how dangerous it is for a black man to bear arms in his own defence against the violence of white men.)

Brutish violence

The monopoly of violence by the state is justified because most of us have supposedly consented to it in an attempt to avoid a Hobbesian world of brutish violence where individuals, families and tribes enforce their own, less disinterested versions of justice.

But, of course, the state system is not as neutral or dispassionate as it professes, or as most of us assume. Until the struggle for universal suffrage succeeded – a practice that in all western states can be measured in decades, not centuries – the state was explicitly there to uphold the interests of a wealthy elite, a class of landed gentry and newly emerging industrialists, as well as a professional class that made society run smoothly for the benefit of that elite.

What was conceded to the working class was the bare minimum to prevent them from rising up against the privileges enjoyed by the rest of society.

That was why, for example, Britain did not have universal health care – the National Health Service – until after the Second World War, 30 years after men received the vote and 20 years after women won the same right. Only after the war did the British establishment start to fear that a newly empowered working class – of returning soldiers who knew how to bear arms, backed by women who had been released from the home to work on the land or in munitions factories to replace the departed men – might no longer be willing to accept a lack of basic health care for themselves and their loved ones.

It was in this atmosphere of an increasingly organised and empowered labour movement – reinforced by the need to engineer more consumerist societies to benefit newly emerging corporations – that European social democracy was born. (Paradoxically, the post-war US Marshall Plan helped subsidise the emergence of Europe’s major social democracies, including their public health care systems, even as similar benefits were denied domestically to Americans.)

Creative legal interpretations

To maintain legitimacy for the state’s monopoly on violence, the legal establishment has had to follow the same minimalist balancing act as the political establishment.

The courts cannot simply rationalise and justify the implicit and sometimes explicit use of violence in law enforcement without regard to public sentiment. Laws are amended, but equally significantly they are creatively interpreted by judges so that they fit the ideological and moral fashions and prejudices of the day, to ensure the public feels justice is being done.

In the main, however, we the public have a very conservative understanding of right and wrong, of justice and injustice, which has been shaped for us by a corporate media that both creates and responds to those fashions and trends to ensure that the current system continues undisturbed, allowing for the ever-greater accumulation of wealth by an elite.

That is why so many of us are viscerally appalled by looting on the streets by poor people, but reluctantly accept as a fact of life the much larger intermittent looting of our taxes, of our banks, of our homes by the state to bail out a corporate elite that cannot manage the economy it created.

Again, the public’s deference to the system is nurtured to ensure it does not rise up.

Muscle on the street

But the legal system doesn’t just have a mind; it has muscle too. Its front-line enforcers, out on the street, get to decide who is a criminal suspect, who is dangerous or subversive, who needs to be deprived of their liberty, and who is going to have violence inflicted upon them. It is the police that initially determine who spends time in a jail cell and who comes before a court. And in some cases, as in George Floyd’s, it is the police that decide who is going to be summarily executed without a trial or a jury.

The state would prefer, of course, that police officers don’t kill unarmed citizens in the street – and even more so that they don’t carry out such acts in full view of witnesses and on camera, as Chauvin did. The state’s objections are not primarily ethical. State bureaucracies are not overly invested in matters beyond the need to maintain external and internal security: defending the borders from outside threats, and ensuring internal legitimacy through the cultivation of citizens’ consent.

But the issue of for whom and for what the state keeps its territory safe has become harder to conceal over time. Nowadays, the state’s political processes and its structures have been almost completely captured by corporations. As a result, the maintenance of internal and external security is less about ensuring an orderly and safe existence for citizens than about creating a stable territorial platform for globalised businesses to plunder local resources, exploit local labour forces and generate greater profits by transforming workers into consumers.

Increasingly, the state has become a hollowed-out vessel through which corporations order their business agendas. States function primarily now to compete with each other in a battle to minimise the obstacles facing global corporations as they seek to maximise their wealth and profits in each state’s territory. The state’s role is to avoid getting in the way of corporations as they extract resources (deregulation), or, when this capitalist model regularly collapses, come to the aid of the corporations with more generous bailouts than rival states.

Murder could prove a spark

This is the political context for understanding why Chauvin is that very rare example of a white policeman facing a murder charge for killing a black man.

Chauvin’s gratuitous and incendiary murder of Floyd – watched by any American with a screen, and with echoes of so many other recent cases of unjustifiable police brutality against black men, women and children – is the latest spark that risks lighting a conflagration.

In the heartless, amoral calculations of the state, the timing of Chauvin’s very public act of barbarity could not have been worse. There were already rumblings of discontent over federal and state authorities’ handling of the new virus; fears over the catastrophic consequences for the US economy; outrage at the inequity – yet again – of massive bailouts for the biggest corporations but paltry help for ordinary workers; and the social and personal frustrations caused by lockdown.

There is also a growing sense that the political class, Republican and Democrat alike, has grown sclerotic and unresponsive to the plight of ordinary Americans – an impression only underscored by the fallout from the Covid-19 pandemic.

For all these reasons, and many others, people were ready to take to the streets. Floyd’s murder gave them the push.

The need for loyal police

In these circumstances, Chauvin had to be charged, even if only in the hope of assuaging that anger, of providing a safety valve releasing some of the discontent.

But charging Chauvin is no simple matter either. To ensure its survival, the state needs to monopolise violence and internal security, to maintain its exclusive definition of what constitutes order, and to keep the state as a safe territorial platform for business. The alternative is the erosion of the nation-state’s authority, and the possibility of its demise.

This was the rationale behind Donald Trump’s notorious tweet last week – censored by Twitter for “glorifying violence” – that warned: “When the looting starts, the shooting starts.” Not surprisingly, he invoked the words of a racist Miami police chief, Walter Headley, who threatened violence against the African-American community in the late 1960s. At the time Headley additionally stated: “There’s no communication with them except force.”

Trump may be harking back to an ugly era of what was once called “race relations”, but the sentiment lies at the heart of the state’s mission.

The state needs its police forces loyal and ready to use violence. It cannot afford discontent in the ranks, or that sections of the police corps no longer identify their own interests with the state’s. The state dares not alienate police officers for fear that, when they are needed most, during times of extreme dissent like now, they will not be there – or worse still, that they will have joined the dissenters.

As noted, elements in the police are already demonstrating their disenchantment over Chauvin’s indictment as well as their sense of grievance against the media – bolstered by Donald Trump’s regular verbal assaults on journalists. That sentiment helps to explain the unprecedented attacks by the police on reliably compliant major media outlets covering the protests.

Minnesota police arrest CNN reporter and camera crew as they report from protests in Minneapolis https://t.co/oZdqBti776 pic.twitter.com/3QbeTjD5ed

— CNN (@CNN) May 29, 2020

Ideological twins

The need to keep the security forces loyal is why the state fosters a sense of separateness between the police and those sections of the populace that it defines as potentially threatening order, thereby uniting more privileged segments of society in fear and hostility.

The state cultivates in the police and sections of the public a sense that police violence is legitimate by definition when it targets individuals or groups it portrays as threatening or subversive. It also encourages the view that the police enjoy impunity a priori in such cases because they alone can decide what constitutes a menace to society (shaped, of course, by popular discourses promoted by the state and the corporate media).

“Threat” is defined as any dissent against the existing order, whether it is a black man answering back and demonstrating “attitude”, or mass protests against the system, including against police violence. In this way, the police and the state are ideological twins. The state approves whatever the police do; while the police repress whatever the state defines as a threat. If it is working effectively, state-police violence becomes a circular, self-rationalising system.

Throwing the protests a bone

Charging Chauvin risks disrupting that system, creating a fault line between the state and the police, one of the state’s most essential agencies. Which is why the charging of a police officer in these circumstances is such an exceptional event, and has been dictated by the current exceptional outpouring of anger.

Prosecutors are trying to find a delicate compromise between two conflicting demands: between the need to reassure the police that their violence is always legitimate (carried out “in the line of duty”) and the need to stop the popular wave of anger escalating to a point where the existing order might break down. In these circumstances, Chauvin needs to be charged but with the least serious indictment possible – given the irrefutable evidence presented in the video – in the hope that, once the current wave of anger has subsided, he can be found not guilty; or if found guilty, given a lenient sentence; or if sentenced more harshly, pardoned.

Chauvin’s indictment is like throwing a chewed-dry bone to a hungry dog, from the point of view of the state authorities. It is an act of parsimonious appeasement, designed to curb non-state violence or the threat of such violence.

The indictment is not meant to change a police culture – or an establishment one – that presents black men as an inherent threat to order. It will not disrupt regulatory and legal systems that are wedded to the view that (white, conservative) police officers are on the front line defending civilisational values from (black or leftwing) “lawbreakers”. And it will not curtail the state’s commitment to ensuring that the police enjoy impunity over their use of violence.

Change is inevitable

A healthy state – committed to the social contract – would be capable of finding ways to accommodate discontent before it reaches the level of popular violence and revolt. The scenes playing out across the US are evidence that state institutions, captured by corporate money, are increasingly incapable of responding to demands for change. The hollowed-out state represents not its citizens, who are capable of compromise, but the interests of global forces of capital that care little what takes place on the streets of Minneapolis or New York so long as the corporations can continue to accumulate wealth and power.

Why would we expect these global forces to be sensitive to popular unrest in the US when they have proved entirely insensitive to the growing signals of distress from the planet, as its life-support systems recalibrate for our pillage and plunder in ways we will struggle to survive as a species?

Why would the state not block the path to peaceful change, knowing it excels in the use of violence, when it blocks the path to reform that might curb the corporate assault on the environment?

These captured politicians and officials – on the “left” and right – will continue fanning the flames, stoking the fires, as Barack Obama’s former national security adviser Susan Rice did this week. She denied the evidence of police violence shown on Youtube and the very real distress of an underclass abandoned by the political class when she suggested that the protests were being directed from the Kremlin.

More of Susan Rice speculating on CNN that Russia is fueling US protests: “I would not be surprised to learn that they have fomented some of these extremists on both sides using social media. I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that they are funding it in some way, shape, or form.” pic.twitter.com/qLGdZuxBuo

— Aaron Maté (@aaronjmate) May 31, 2020

This kind of bipartisan denial of reality only underscores how quickly we are entering a period of crisis and revolt. From the G8 protests, to the Occupy movement, to Extinction Rebellion, to the schools’ protests, to the Yellow Vests, to the current fury on US streets, there is evidence all around that the centre is struggling to maintain its hold. The US imperial project is overstretched, the global corporate elite is over-extended, living on credit, resources are depleting, the planet is recalibrating. Something will have to give.

The challenge to the protesters – either those on the streets now or those who follow in their wake – is how to surmount the state’s violence and how to offer a vision of a different, more hopeful future that restores the social contract.

Lessons will be learnt through protest, defiance and disobedience, not in a courtroom where a police officer stands trial as an entire political and economic system is allowed to carry on with its crimes.

This article was posted on Wednesday, June 3rd, 2020 at 7:25am and is filed under Activism, Capitalism, Civil Disobedience, Corporate Globalization, Crimes against Humanity, Disinformation, Donald Trump, Europe, Global Inequality, Human Rights, Media, Police, Police brutality, Propaganda, Protests, Racism, Repression, Riots, Ruling Elite, Surveillance, Transparency/Secrecy, United Kingdom, United States, US Hypocrisy, Violence, White Supremacy.

The corporate media and corporate politicians are paralyzed with indecision.  Which fake myth do we adhere to?  “Black people burning down their own neighborhoods” or “outside agitators”?  What if it’s both, and more…?

Media coverage of the past few days and nights of the multiracial uprising that is currently taking place in various forms in cities small and large across the United States has been confused and misleading, as usual.  Media coverage of such events is usually either confusing, misleading, or both, because of the influence of the media owners, and because of the implicit biases, insufficient resources, and/or ignorance of the journalists who work for them.  So, it begs for a bit of helpful clarification.

But, first of all, they keep saying these are the biggest urban disturbances in the US since 1968.  This sounds huge, and while it’s certainly impressive, the basic phenomenon taking place, and the various dynamics within it, are not new, not unprecedented, and, in fact, are very commonplace.

Most people, from my experience, never go to protests.  Among those who do go to protests, many people only go to one big one in their lives, if any.  At pretty much every big protest I’ve ever been to, which is a lot, I’m surrounded by people of all ages who tell me and others around them that they are attending their first protest.  Whatever got them out — a racist police murder, a massacre, an imperialist war, a massive bank bailout — they say they just had to come out this time, even though they never went to a protest before.  The hardcore protest-hopping crowd like me is a very select group, for a lot of different reasons.  We are not representative.

As a consequence, at every protest I have been to, there are participants who are under the impression that the tactics the protesters are employing were just invented yesterday, and that the militarization of the police is a new phenomenon.  In Ferguson in 2014 I remember hearing many local people of all ages saying things that made it abundantly clear that they thought large groups of riot police rioting in their town and making use of tear gas, stun grenades, and tank-like vehicles was something that had not been seen since the Civil Rights movement in the 1960’s.  They were under that impression simply because that was the last time anyone remembered tanks on the streets in Ferguson, and for many older people in town, that was also the last time they attended a large protest.

Before I start contextualizing the current situation, let me say that although me and many other radicals did certainly predict most everything that is currently taking place, I have no idea where this is going.  Predictions made by people like me are usually wrong.  If they’re right, it’s because they were obvious — everyone knows powder kegs eventually explode, but nobody really ever knows exactly when this might happen, or what will be the spark.  But the keg is now burning.  It may have started with one spark, but the lynching of George Floyd, although horrific, is only symbolic of what this is all about.  Justice in this situation most certainly does not begin or end with the sentencing of all four of those cops with murder.  They’re certainly guilty, but there’s a lot more of that to go around, at far higher levels of authority than the local cops, fascist as they may be.  (To anyone who was not literally born yesterday, living in the US today, who is aware of who the president is, this is a very obvious statement.)

The main question I want to focus on here is a burning question in the minds of the corporate media and for many regular people from all walks of life across the country — who is smashing, looting and burning buildings, torching police cars, and throwing projectiles at the riot cops all over this country?

The “Peaceful Protesters” Myth

It is probably the case that the vast majority of the people assembling during the day and during the evening to hold protest rallies against the tendency of the police in the US to lynch black people on a regular basis are not the same people who are engaging in some of the other aforementioned activities.  But it would be very wrong to put them all in this fake “peaceful protester” box.

What the media calls “peaceful protesters” are people who stand around in a public space with signs and make speeches.  They can be angry speeches, that’s OK.  This is what they call “peaceful protest.”  If they don’t have a permit, it might not be “peaceful” anymore, in the media’s eyes.  If the police attack peaceful protesters and a single person from within the ranks of the protesters responds in any way that can be construed as violent — such as if someone raises their hand to attempt to block a billy club that’s about to come down on their face — this will be labeled a “clash,” such as, “there are now clashes taking place between the police and the protesters.”

When people occupy an intersection and stop traffic, or block the entrance of a building, this is what people from within social movements generally refer to as civil disobedience, or direct action.  It is considered by anyone involved with a social movement anywhere to be solidly within the “nonviolent” category, and it is often referred to by its full name, “nonviolent civil disobedience.”  People like Gandhi and MLK popularized these sorts of tactics, which were pioneered long before, by other social movements that were also led by oppressed people, such as the labor movement, very much including the multiracial movements of tenant farmers and sharecroppers in the early part of the twentieth century.

The corporate media, however, will often start referring to protests as “violent” as soon as any law is being broken, such as traffic laws, when an intersection, highway, or building entrance is blocked.  This use of the term “violent” is very confusing for many, because it’s patently inaccurate, when people learn enough to understand what the reporters actually mean — if they are allowed to get to that point, which is generally not the case.  If people are looking to the media to understand what’s happening around them, this is very unhelpful.  One of many very unhelpful aspects of their coverage.

The “Black People Are Burning Down Their Own Neighborhood” Myth

As soon as a police murder or the acquittal of a killer cop lead to anyone setting fire to a building, the media will tend to shift into a different gear, where they start focusing on the popular response to the racist, elitist system, rather than on the problems that led to the response.  This happens, again, partly because this is what the corporate propagandists who own most of what remains of the press want to focus on, not just because it’s sensationalist and keeps eyes glued to the screen, but because it is consistent with their perspective, and that of most of their reporters, who were generally raised in totally different circumstances from most of the folks currently burning stuff down.

Thus, for different reasons, but amounting to the same effect, the media will talk about people burning down “their own” neighborhoods.  It’s unfashionable these days to refer to them as “animals,” which was a common refrain during the national uprising in 1991 that the media refers to as the “LA riots.”  Trump prefers the racially loaded term, “thugs,” which is just a slightly updated version of “animals.”

No rent-burdened renter who has been evicted multiple times, which is the case for millions and millions of people in the US, feels like the neighborhoods they live in are “their own” neighborhoods.  Most working class people in urban America are struggling to stay in “their own” neighborhoods.  They are constantly being evicted and driven out of “their own” neighborhoods.  Yuppies flip houses and sell them at impossible prices, and “their own” neighborhoods become quickly unrecognizable and unaffordable.  There is a massive rate of displacement and what can accurately be described as ethnic cleansing taking place in cities throughout this country, that has been going on for centuries now.  It has only been interrupted for periods of time through strong rent control legislation, which used to exist in states like New York and Massachusetts.  But multi-generational, real communities are fewer and farther between, because of the fact that housing is an investment for capitalists in this country, not a right, not at all.

So no one is burning down “their own” neighborhood.  To the extent that local people are involved with these activities — which lots of them are, let’s be very clear about that, and this is nothing new, not at all — the neighborhoods they are burning down are not their own.  They are owned by people that often feel like invaders.  However, these invaders may be “mom and pop” business owners, or “mom and pop” landlords.  The media will refer to any business as a “small business” if it’s not a big corporation.  But someone running a restaurant that serves food that many people in a given neighborhood can’t afford to eat, while easily fitting the media’s description as a “mom and pop” small business, is not often seen by local people as part of “their community” or as particularly distinguishable from a chain store like Target.  Either the “mom and pop” establishment in this instance, or the chain store, will have the same impact, of raising the cost of housing in the now more “desirable” neighborhood.

The “Outside Agitators” Myth

Traditionally, when there is a major protest that involves some forms of civil disobedience or other forms of direct action, so that business as usual is sufficiently interrupted to the point where the protests can’t be ignored, the media will adopt one of two tropes.  If it’s not people “burning down their own neighborhood,” then it’s some kind of “outside agitators” who did it.

The “outside agitator” is generally someone like me, who cares about society, and other people in it, so much that they want to leave their own homes and even their own home towns or states or countries, to go to another place to practice what is known as solidarity or mutual aid, depending on the situation.  It’s easier for the media to blame “outside agitators” when there’s a national or international meeting of the elite taking place, say a G8 or G20 meeting, and tens of thousands of people show up to protest against or try to shut down those meetings.  This scenario has been played out many times in the US, Canada, and many other countries, and I’ve personally been to many such events throughout the world since I’m more or less an outside agitator by profession.

From my experience, even at a big international event in Washington, DC or New York City, most of the people involved with the protests will be from the local area.  They may not be from the actual city the protest is taking place in, but most of them will be from a nearby state.  Locals, by a broader definition than the media likes to use.  So when they say that 20% of those arrested in Minneapolis were not from Minnesota, they don’t mention that of those 20%, the vast majority were from the state of Wisconsin, a short drive away.  (I don’t know this to be true, I’m just guessing based on past experience.)  Of course, if they came from further afield than Wisconsin to show solidarity with people in Minneapolis, this still does not make them bad people.

One of the wonderfully confusing things going on right now with media coverage and the reactions to events by politicians trying to spin the picture the way they want us to see it is they can’t decide on which false trope to fall back on here.  Is it people burning down their own neighborhoods, or are these outside agitators?  Obviously, it’s both — and so much more.

The outside agitator theory also becomes very hard to maintain in this situation, because they are everywhere at the same time.  Traditionally, outside agitators have to come from outside.  By outside, usually they’re talking about select groups of highly committed young anarchists going from supposed anarchist hubs like Seattle, San Francisco and New York City, to places where big, pre-planned events are taking place, such as the G20 meetings in Pittsburgh in 2009 or the Free Trade Area of the Americas talks in Miami in 2003, to name a couple random examples.  In the face of protests happening in every major city at the same time, the “outside agitators” now must have come from a nearby suburb, which doesn’t seem all that “outside” to me.

The fact is, the city of Minneapolis has thousands of people in it who probably identify explicitly as anarchists.  There are many other cities in the US that have a high concentration of radicals.  Minneapolis has been one of them for a very long time.  The radical tradition in Minneapolis is a multiracial one, like this uprising, and includes prominent people from every major ethnic background, very much including white, black, brown, Asian and indigenous resistance in many forms.

Within the ranks of all of these communities, and within the ranks of radicals within all of these communities, there are many different opinions on effective strategies.  While many people understand how folks might not differentiate between burning down a locally-owned upscale restaurant and a big chain corporate store, many would be critical of burning down anything, ever.  And those who think burning down buildings is a good tactic might distinguish between these two targets, intellectually.  Where radicals of all backgrounds tend to unite is around the understanding that oppressed people will tend to rise up, and those uprisings will tend to be messy, especially in the absence of a radical labor tradition, and in the absence of any kind of viable third party option to the two capitalist, imperialist ruling parties who are largely responsible for the terrible disparities in society in the first place.

The “You’re Just Being Paranoid” Myth

In their efforts to confuse people and manage the situation from their corporate elite vantage points, the stenographers of CNN and NPR will rarely mention that local, state and federal police forces have a long and terrible history of infiltrating, undercutting, planting evidence, sowing division and otherwise destroying social movements in any way possible, including killing activists and then blaming others for the killings.  Dozens of leaders of the Black Panther Party and the American Indian Movement were systematically killed by the authorities at various levels of power, and no one has ever been brought to justice for these many crimes against these immensely popular organizations.  If you familiarize yourself with the public record on the FBI’s Counterintelligence Program or Cointelpro — which has never ended, to be sure — you will find they have committed every crime imaginable, both very overt and extremely underhanded, to cause movements to implode or explode, depending on what works best.

So, are FBI agents and undercover cops among those who are attacking the police and burning down buildings across this country?  While we may not yet have any concrete proof of this, we can assume, based on massive amounts of concrete proof of past activities of these so-called law enforcement agencies, that their agents are involved with many of the most egregious cases of small or ethnically-owned businesses being burned down.  This has been their modus operandi for a very long time in order to sow division.  You would have to be completely ignorant of recent history to think it’s not happening now.  Yet on the off-chance anyone might suggest on a mainstream media outlet that this sort of thing is probably happening, they would likely be lampooned as a conspiracy theorist.

Currently, it appears right-wing actors who may or may not also be cops are trying to start a “race war” by targeting certain buildings for arson attacks and by firing into crowds of protesters.  This adds another level of complexity to the situation, obviously.

Collateral Damage

In a war, many innocent lives are lost.  If you have ever known a person who participated in a war that they even thought was completely just, you will find just one more person who is traumatized by the things they have seen, and the innocents who have died in the course of the conflict they participated in.  If you meet someone who participated in a war that they realized at the time, or later, was unjust, this trauma will tend to be even more intense.

In an uprising like what is currently taking place, this is no different.  When you set about to burn down a police station, this is a difficult task that involves many challenges.  Without going into all the details, suffice it to say that if you’re burning down a building, neighboring buildings might also catch fire, whether you wanted them to or not.  If the fire department were assisting the arsonists, as with a controlled burn of a forest or building, to make sure nearby trees or houses didn’t catch fire, it would be different, but that’s not the situation here.  If it were the military accidentally bombing the wrong house, or a hospital, or a wedding party, as the US military has so often done in recent years in so many parts of the world, they’d just say oops, it was collateral damage.  But if a small business gets torched by accident, or on purpose, by people in the course of an urban rebellion, then it’s a different story you’ll hear from the media and others that these wackos are burning down very nice nonprofit centers that no sensible person would want to harm.  The collateral damage angle, though obvious from a logistical standpoint, will rarely be mentioned — as rarely as the possibility that a particularly destructive action might have been carried out by an FBI agent posing as a protester, despite the abundant evidence of this kind of systematic behavior over the course of past decades.

In Conclusion

Rebellions, uprisings, and revolutions have some things in common, regardless of the outcome:  they are messy, they are dirty, they smell bad, people get hurt, people get killed, buildings get burned, and a lot of innocent people suffer.  They don’t happen unless conditions were completely untenable to begin with.  And as they grow, for some there are rays of hope amidst the flames.

This article was posted on Tuesday, June 2nd, 2020 at 2:22am and is filed under Activism, Anarchism, Civil Disobedience, Donald Trump, Fascism, FBI, Fearmongering, Media, Opinion, Police brutality, Protests, Racism, Resistance, Riots, Solidarity, Surveillance, United States.

BEIRUT — Police fired volleys of tear gas and rubber bullets in Lebanon’s capital Saturday to disperse thousands of protesters amid some of the worst rioting since demonstrations against the country’s ruling elite erupted three months ago. More than 150 people were injured.

Thick white smoke covered the downtown Beirut area near Parliament as police and protesters engaged in confrontations that saw groups of young men hurl stones and firecrackers at police who responded with water cannons and tear gas. Some protesters were seen vomiting on the street from inhaling the gas.

The violence began after some protesters started throwing stones at police deployed near the parliament building, while others removed street signs, metal barriers and branches of trees, tossing them at security forces.

The clashes took place with the backdrop of a rapidly worsening financial crisis and an ongoing impasse over the formation of a new government after the Cabinet headed by Prime Minister Saad Hariri resigned in late October.

Lebanon has witnessed three months of protests against the political elite who have ruled the country since the end of the 1975-90 civil war. The protesters blame politicians for widespread corruption and mismanagement in a country that has accumulated one of the largest debt ratios in the world.

The protesters had called for a demonstration Saturday afternoon with the theme “we will not pay the price” in reference to debt that stands at about $87 billion, or more than 150% of GDP.

As rioting took place in central Beirut, thousands of other protesters arrived later from three different parts of the city to join the demonstration. They were later dispersed and chased by police into nearby Martyrs Square that has been a center for protests.

Lebanon’s Internal Security Forces called on all peaceful protesters to “immediately leave the area of riots for their own safety.” It added that some policemen who were taken for treatment at hospitals were attacked by protesters inside the medical centers.

As clashes continued, some two dozen men believed to be parliament guards attacked the protesters’ tents in Martyrs Square, setting them on fire. A gas cylinder inside one of the tents blew up. The fire spread quickly and charred a nearby shop.

The bells of nearby St. George Cathedral began to toll in an apparent call for calm, while loudspeakers at the adjacent blue-domed Muhammad Al-Amin mosque called for night prayers.

Later in the evening, hundreds of protesters chanting “Revolution” chased a contingent of riot police near the entrance of the mosque, forcing them to withdraw. Inside the mosque, several men were treated for gas inhalation and some families were said to be hiding inside.

“We call on the security forces to be merciful with women and children inside the mosque,” a statement blared through the mosque’s loudspeakers.

President Michel Aoun called on security forces to protect peaceful protesters and work on restoring clam in downtown Beirut and to protect public and private property. He asked the ministers of defense and interior and heads of security agencies to act.

“The confrontations, fires and acts of sabotage in central Beirut are crazy, suspicious and rejected. They threaten civil peace and warn of grave consequences,” tweeted Hariri, the caretaker prime minister, who lives nearb y. He called those behind the riots “outlaws” and called on police and armed forces to protect Beirut.

The Lebanese Red Cross said it took 65 people to hospitals and treated 100 others on the spot, calling on people to donate blood. As the clashes continued, more ambulances were seen rushing to the area and evacuating the injured.

Late on Saturday most of the protesters were forced out of the area by police firing tear gas and sometimes rubber bullets. Still, security remained tight as more reinforcements arrived.

Panic and anger have gripped the public as their local currency, pegged to the dollar for more than two decades, plummeted. The Lebanese pound lost more than 60% of its value in recent weeks on the black market. The economy has seen no growth and foreign inflows dried up in the already heavily indebted country that relies on imports for most of its basic goods.

Meanwhile, banks have imposed informal capital controls, limiting withdrawal of dollars and foreign transfers.

Earlier this week, protesters carried out acts of vandalism in a main commercial area in Beirut targeting mostly private banks.

Prime Minister-designate Hassan Diab had been expected to announce an 18-member Cabinet on Friday, but last-minute disputes among political factions scuttled his latest attempt.

Associated Press writers Sarah El Deeb, Hussein Malla, Hassan Ammar and Bilal Hussein contributed to this report.

First of all, I want to ask: Why?

Why all this smoke and fire, wrath and violence? Were your lives, before the so-called “protests”, or “riots”, really so dismal?

You have been living in one of the richest cities on earth. Even according to Western evaluations, Hong Kong has one of the highest “freedom indexes”, higher than that of most of Western countries.

Water that comes from your taps is clean, the Internet is extremely fast, public transportation is cheap and one of the best in the world. You can enjoy an exciting cultural life, as well as great public spaces constructed along your impressive coasts.

Naturally, Hong Kong is not a perfect place, as there are no perfect places on this planet.

Your housing is some of the most expensive in the world. Job opportunities for college graduates are not really excellent. Some cities on Mainland China are now more exciting places to live, to create and to dream, than ‘good old’ Hong Kong. But still, it is a fascinating, solid city, with its own culture, mindset and complex history. And in many ways, it is a beautiful city; beautiful and unique.

So, why? What happened? Why suddenly such anger, and such frustration?

Should we talk? Please let’s.

*****

I have worked in around 160 countries and territories on all continents. I have written about and I have filmed many wars and conflicts. I have been covering revolutions and rebellions, but also terrible riots ignited by Western countries. You probably have heard about the so-called “Color Revolutions”, or the “Arab Spring”.

I have witnessed, first hand, the fate of countries that have been occupied and then thoroughly destroyed by the United States and NATO: Afghanistan and Syria, Iraq and Colombia, to name just a few. I have seen millions of ruined lives in nations where the West overthrew left-wing governments, and then injected fascism: places like Indonesia (1965), and Chile (1973). Now there is nothing left of Indonesia; its nature is thoroughly ruined and the great majority lives in misery. In Chile, people have stood up, and are proudly fighting and dying for socialism which was stolen from them by Western governments and corporations.

I have lived and worked all over the African continent, the most devastated part of the world, colonized and terrorized first by Europe, and later by the United States, for many centuries.

lat-love for the US

In Hong Kong, I see you waving flags of the United States. You want that country to “save you from China” (from your own nation, in essence). I have read a translation of your school curriculum. It smears China, and it glorifies the West. Were you told, ever, that in the name of that flag, consisting of the stars and stripes, tens of millions of people, worldwide, were murdered, democracies were raped, and freedom of expression horrendously oppressed? Or are you only reading what is brought to you by Reuters and other Western press agencies?

When waving the U.K. flags, nostalgically recalling your British masters and their rule over Hong Kong, do you even think about some of the most monstrous crimes committed in the history of humankind? On all continents of the world, the British Empire murdered, humiliated, violated and plundered; hundreds of millions of people. Human beings were reduced to slaves. Their lives, identities, were reduced to nothing.

Were you told this? Do you realize it? When you wave these flags, when your leaders are taking bribes from the U.S. and the E.U. establishment, do you ever think what kind of money you are touching? Do you ever consider that this money is soaked in blood?

I saw several of you demanding “independence from China”. I even witnessed some of you calling China a “terrorist” state.

Have you ever, seriously, compared the Chinese political system to that, so-called, “democracy” of the West?

Let me give you a simple quiz: In the last decades, how many countries have been attacked by China, and how many by the West? Just do a simple calculation, please. It is so simple; so clear. How many countries have been bombed to the ground, and thoroughly ruined by China, and how many by the West?

And democracy? In China, the government listens to its people. In reality, democracy means nothing more than the direct translation from Greek – rule of the people. In PRC, the government is working to improve the lives of its citizens, while building a global infrastructure for all (BRC). Now, look at the West: most of the citizens in North America and Europe hate their system, but cannot get rid of it. Some of you regularly travel to the West: don’t you hear what the people are saying there?

In the last two decades, China has lifted up hundreds of millions out of poverty. In the West, the governments have buried billions of people in misery in all their colonies. Despite of the terrible plunder of the world, tens of millions are destitute at home, in both North America and Europe.

Despite of the not too high GDP per capita, China has almost no misery, while tens of millions of the U.S. citizens are living in poverty. There are many more prisoners (per capita) in the U.S. prisons, than in the Chinese ones.

Many U.S. prisons are now privatized: it is a big business. The more that are held behind bars, the bigger the profit!

Is this a system in which you’d want to live? Is it, really?

I know the West very well. And I know China. These days, in Hong Kong, some of you are waving Western flags, while insulting Beijing.

The West has the most powerful propaganda on earth. It has the ability to twist everything; to call black – white, and vice versa.

But frankly, it is Beijing, which has the ability and desire to help solve the problems of Hong Kong.

Do you really think that Washington, London or Berlin are genuinely interested in helping your city? I am convinced that they only want to break China, and to continue ruling over the world.

To conclude this letter, let me say what has to be said: After speaking to people that are now angrily waving black banners, as well as U.S. and U.K. flags, I realized that they know very little about the state of the world. And, they do not want to listen to different points of view. When confronted intellectually, they become violent.

That is not a democratic approach; not at all.

I suggest we talk. Publicly. Let us debate the very definitions of democracy. Let us discuss who has done more harm to the world: China or the West? I am ready, anytime.

If the leaders of Hong Kong riots, or “protests” are confident that they are correct, let us face each other, in front of microphones and cameras.

I love your city. I love Hong Kong. I love China. And I strongly believe that China and Hong Kong are one beautiful, inseparable entity.

I am ready to give my best, proving that point.

• Photos by Andre Vltchek

* First published by China Daily/Hong Kong

This article was posted on Monday, January 13th, 2020 at 5:26am and is filed under “The West”, China, Colour Revolutions, Europe, Fascism, Hong Kong, Media, Militarism, NATO, Opinion, Protests, Riots, United Kingdom, United States.