Riots in Greece and Italy
Primary tabs
Hat tip to Jon Larson at Real Economics, for staying on top of the growing resistance to austerity in Europe.
Riot footage from Athens.
Riots began in Iceland in November of last year, and it seems to me are becoming more frequent. The riots in Rome yesterday were precipitated by Berlusconi surviving yet another vote of no confidence. The Greece riots broke out during a confrontation between a previously peaceful protest march of 20,000, and -- what else -- police.
A few thoughts I've been mulling the past few weeks and days.
First, there appears to be very little coverage in the U.S. news media - even on the "liberal" blogs of the tubez - of the protests sweeping Europe. Kind of scary how controlled "news" seems to be in the U.S. now. The massive reaction against Assange and Wikileaks I suspect is in no small part driven by a level of outrage among certain of TPTB that their media monopoly would be challenged. I suspect that in the wake of Wikileaks, TPTB are quietly accelerating plans to get rid of net neutrality and impose their control on information flows on the tubez. Good places to look for evidence of this would be some of the think tanks that "studied" 1) how the Palestinians were able to get news of the Intifada to the outside world past the Israeli information choke holds, and 2) more recently, the aborted protests in Iran last year.
Second, there really has been an amazing amount of protest and strife in Europe for over a year now, and there is no sign whatsoever that international elites are backing down from their attempts to impose austerity and accelerate the demise of the welfare state. As much as we may be cheered by scenes of actual on-the-ground resistance, we must always keep in mind that if said resistance does not eventually push policy making and implementation toward more progressive outcomes, then we need to seriously study alternatives. More and better organized violence? I think at this point, any violence will only be used by elites as justification for imposing ever more severe police state measures.
Assange's tactics may be the viable alternative to violence. As Ian Welsh wrote last week, Assange and Wikileaks have won this round. The problem I see is that what Assange and Anonymous are doing requires a high degree of technical skill with information technology, and is therefore an act of insurrection that only a relatively few can fully engage in. Ways must be found to draw in large numbers of people that do not have the skills to contribute to this first global information war between the people and the oligarchy.
But the sad fact is that when societies have become as thoroughly corrupt and unequal as the West has, ruling elites very seldom respond to popular will. They almost always need to be swept out of power after some intense civil strife, or just outright killed. Sadly, I think the historical record on this is clear, despite the Freedom House study of the revolutions and uprisings tracked in the Freedom House database from 1973 to 2002. Do you remember the picture of Boris Yeltsin standing on a tank in Red Square? The really interesting question that Freedom House failed to even ask, was: when the Soviet bloc was finally brought down, how were the military forces brought around to side with the protesters and revolutionaries?
The Romanian Revolution, December 1989 Source: Wikipedia
A Romanian sub-officer gives the peace sign on December 31, 1989. He has removed the insignia of communist Romania from his headwear.Source: Wikipedia
Ghandi's non-violent protests succeeded because of when they occurred: immediately after World War Two, when the United Kingdom was literally exhausted by six years of fighting for its very life against the Nazis and fascists. That exhaustion completely precluded any response by the British along the lines of how they brutally and bloodily put down the Sepoy Rebellion of 1857, when troops of the British East India Company, and "Army of Retribution" (they actually called it that) slaughtered hundreds of thousands almost with impunity.
Martin Luther King's goals were not really realized, even after Bobby Kennedy, Malcolm X, and King himself had been assassinated, and Newark, Detroit, Philadelphia, and other cities had gone up in flames. In Oxford, North Carolina, it was only after a group of black Vietnam War veterans planned and carried out a para-military operation in the summer of 1970, that succeeded in burning down the largest tobacco warehouse in the town, that the white power structure began to make concessions. (This event, and the events that precipitated it, are movingly recounted in Timothy B. Tyson's semi-autobiographical book, Blood Done Sign My Name.)
- Tony Wikrent's blog
- Log in or register to post comments
Comments
Fixed your code...
... so it doesn't destroy the layout.
In an interesting little demonstration that Big Data is not our friend, the first thing I did was go to YT get a resized version -- and YT wanted me to sign in, ostensibly to prove I was over 18. Yeah, right.
Interesting question
Well, for starters they were conscripts and therefore somewhat more likely to identify with the civilian populace than a professional, all-volunteer (tm) military would be. Perhaps getting rid of the draft wasn't such a good idea, after all. TPTB have apparently been playing the long game here in the Empire.
Throwing rocks in the streets isn't going to disturb our masters in the least, no matter how well organized it may be. As the Chinese proved at Tienanmen Square, a few thousand impassioned protesters are no match for a modern military.
Notice the guy the bottom right
Holding a camera.
Remember the photographs of the British riots, framed in exactly the same way? (All the tabs used the same identical, and heavily cropped, photo).
It makes no sense whatever to romanticize this shit. Or to fight one's opponent exactly where they are strongest.
(There was a great phrase for what happens to farmers when they lose the sense of how "their" animals think, through factory farming -- which I forget. It's what's happened to our elites -- they're not close enough to the proles any more. That's the consequence of income inequality. So they're poking and prodding and looking for a reaction. Experimenting. Chaos is opportunity for them, a la Shock Doctrine. To borrow Stirling's metaphor, which I wish he write up soon, we need a spherical defense against the pyramid. Is there such a thing?
But it's like Hollywood: Nobody knows anything.
Astute observation -- and scary.
And even if this is not the work of provocateurs, I do not see how it achieves anything useful. Wikileaks is a much more powerful threat to the elites because it is so tightly focused on actually impairing the elites.
Think of it as a deke
Here (the hockey reference being for my good Canadian friends).
Like a head-fake, designed to get one's opponent to make the first move.
I mean, we're dealing with people who traffic in fraud and deceit, who have been promoted for that, who have evolved for that, so that's what you should expect. No?
Individual
members of the elite have to be personally scared for their own well being.
Are you sure this isn't romantic bullshit?
... one could also make the argument that acting on this (a) is exactly what they want you to do (IOW, Big Media's coverage is a deke), that (b) it's going to FAIL, since that attacks the opponent's strength, and (c) a lot of people are going to get killed, and for no good purpose.
If this were Harlan's World, and you or I were Takeshi Kovacs, and there were a Quellcrist Falconer, then "make it personal" might work. But this isn't, I'm not, you're not, and there isn't.
Now, I freely admit that I'm not courageous, and "that's going to happen anyhow" is the easy riposte that may even be true.
Of course, this is all academic and historical, since nobody serious would discuss such things in an open forum, and a child of six knows that the first person to advocate violence is always a cop.
Fearing for their well-being
need not imply violence. It may, in fact, merely involve depriving them of rent.
Regardless, throwing rocks and setting cars on fire isn't going to change things for the better.
Not how I read it, at least in this context
I'm all for depriving them of rent, and dittoez on cars, rocks, entartisme, etc.
Indeed.
n/t
Italy and Greece are part of
Italy and Greece are part of a pattern of growing instability. Economic structures around the globe have been hollowed out. It's important to realize it isn't just us. The big eurobanks are as insolvent as ours. Austerity is killing growth and destabilizing governments. China has been caught in a cycle of blowing bubbles all to avoid a catastrophic political backlash. Japan is where Japan has been for the last 20 years. Everywhere we have failed, deeply entrenched kleptocratic elites. They couldn't fix this even if they wanted to. And they don't. They don't know how. It is all going to go at some point. It is not a question of if but when. Somebody is going to make a mistake or a miscalculation that can't get papered over in time, and the contagion will spread. Things will start falling apart. People will start heading for the exits, trying to be the first out, and that will start a stampede as everyone tries not to be the one left holding the bag.
From Adbusters: What’s Wrong
From Adbusters: What’s Wrong with Being No. 2? Japan may be the first nation to opt for a no growth, steady state economy.
Economic growth for the sake of economic growth is clearly not sustainable. The most important process in an economy is scientific progress. Because what an economy is: is how a society organizes itself to gather and transform natural resources into what's needed to sustain and recreate the human population, physically, mentally, and emotionally. The problem is that natural resources are rather strictly finite at at one point in time according to the technological capabilities of a society. This is the point that most people miss in Jared Diamond's work. It is not a question of not using natural resources, but of using them ever more efficiently, and wisely, and finding new ways to use other resources to replace them. That means new scientific knowledge has to be created, then disseminated into the society as technological progress. (Side note - basically, almost everything neo-liberal economists believe and teach is secondary and tertiary to the healthy functioning of a real economy).
And there's an interesting discussion at EuroTrib:
Japan has not chosen a
Japan has not chosen a no-growth path. Rather the government's failure to cleanse the balance sheets of its banks thrust stagnant growth upon it. It is still a major exporting nation, and in any general downturn will be hit hard, harder in some ways because it will still be competing with its lower wage, also exporting neighbors, especially China.
I'm not so sure
the assertions made about the draft are correct.
If we had a draft over the last ten years it's easy to imagine our standing army would be double in size or much much more. The fact so few volunteer says so much, imo. And so many of those in service now are from poor underprivileged backgrounds. One has to wonder just how willing they would be to oppress or murder fellow citizens for the elites.
There used to be very historically informed deates
about the dangers of a professional standing army. Umm, two and a half centuries ago. Now? We wish . . . And some people want to change the U.S. Constitution by applying the "wisdom" of our modern age?