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Originally Posted by roachboy
the government is threatening to start arresting people who are involved with a blockading the oil refineries (which is why they're shut down).
it has no such legal status in the u.s. of a., particularly not since taft-hartley.
if a strike in the states were to mess with the flow of vital petro-capitalist lifeblood, the military would be called down on it.
"national security" dontcha know.
in the states, to loop back to the o.p., protest movements are theater. the state has nothing to fear from the beyond maybe loss of legitimacy. but that's typically temporary.
the worst that can happen, really, is violent confrontations between the cops and protestors that get on tv. control over access to tv time is key--we know this from watching fox news create lay astro-turf around the tea party. anyway, protest is theater. the state of things is never threatened by them.
'politicians' (fixed that to remove your obvious bias and replace it with truth) and police learned during the vietnam period (a) that it's better not to confront directly and (b) if you do, keep it off camera.
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The reasons why governments fear little from the people is because they've spent centuries in conditioning them to accept the premise that 'non-violence is more effective', which is complete bullshit in reality. It has to be otherwise politicians wouldn't continue to support it while letting police have the monopoly on violence.
non-violence is for civilians only
The fact of the matter is that not a single nonviolent movement challenging a government has convinced said government to actually come around and adopt the philosophy and practice of nonviolence itself. Not Gandhi, not MLK, not a one. For throughout virtually all of the inhabited land on Earth, there is some form of government in place exercising authority. And for all of the governments on Earth, not a one of them practices nonviolence in the tradition of Gandhi or MLK.
But there are plenty of pacifist civilians claiming that nonviolence is “the most powerful weapon.” If this is so, wouldn’t some professional in some government, by now, have come up with the ingenious idea of using this “powerful weapon” to defend its borders or keep its citizenry in line?
Of course not, because nonviolence is for civilians only.