This is the self-declared “Michigan State Militia” who only a few weeks ago were allowed to walk freely right up to and inside a federal building armed with an array of automatic weapons. Once inside they shouted abuse at state officials and what were they so upset about?
Lockdown. See, they are Free Born (White) Americans and as such can disobey government restrictions, even during a pandemic that could if not controlled wipe out millions of their fellow citizens.
Now, Imagine if they were all black men carrying such weapons and a very real grievance that those supposedly employed to “protect and serve” their communities keep on, week after week, year after year, decade after decade, century after century, brutalising and murdering people of your own colour AND are supported in this by the white power structures that benefited from the enslavement of your ancestors.
How far do you reckon they’d have got before the police opened fire?
That’s the difference. Of course during a riot when for a few hours the normal laws and power structures and economic systems of oppression are no longer there, people will loot and take what they can.
Yes people will say “what if they trashed or torched your business then Mr Bleeding Heart Liberal?”!and i’d deffo be pissed off because ours is a community project but still i think i’d understand the motivation and justified rage manifesting itself in the only way it can: destruction.
Riots are not just acts of chaotic criminality, they are symbolic. Some would argue that violence achieves nothing and that all riots burn themselves out, the state elites will continue to rule, poor people will stay poor and the police will keep in protecting and serving people like them and brutalising and murdering people who they despise.
Poverty breeds crime. Simple. Power breeds crime. Simple. It’s all subjective. The President is a criminal on a whole different scale to that poor black kid grafting a pair of trabs.
Yet there is a feeling that THIS time the power elites aren’t so powerful as they once were and that the old orders both in the US, UK and Europe – ya know “The Free West” are crumbling away before our eyes.
usually when faced with a crisis of this magnitude the capitalist class will engineer a war of “nations” – flag waving, calls for patriotic duty against enemies real and imagined and then the circus keeps on moving along to the next town.
Send in the clowns. When there’s an accident, a tight rope walker falls to their death, a lion bites the head of its tamer, the circus master with his big whip sends in the clowns to distract the audience from the shit show.
Trump and Johnson are just a sideshow even if they don’t know it themselves.
Holywell Street 
As Dr Luther King once said: “Rioting is the language of the unheard”.
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