“The media’s the most powerful entity on earth. They have the power to make the innocent guilty and to make the guilty innocent, and that’s power. Because they control the minds of the masses.” - Malcolm X
“Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable.” - John F. Kennedy
“I and some colleagues came to the conclusion that as violence in this country was inevitable, it would be wrong and unrealistic for African leaders to continue preaching peace and non-violence at a time when the government met our peaceful demands with force. It was only when all else had failed, when all channels of peaceful protest had been barred to us, that the decision was made to embark on violent forms of political struggle.” - Nelson Mandela
The JFK quote here is perfect. A single line that evaluates exactly what is happening. And if violent protests are to occur, everyone will shake their heads and go “this isn’t America!”
“This isn’t the USA!”
They said about a country built on a violent revolution against the Empire that controlled it and a civil war that was never finished.
Don’t forget about the genocide on the actual North American people!
Worth noting that the Malcom X and Nelson Mandela thought processes were what eventually led to the formation of the Black Panthers during the civil rights era, and subsequently led to gun control laws being started by republicans. During the civil rights protests, people quickly realized that peaceful protests were violently broken. But heavily armed peaceful protests had police nervously watching from across the street.
Because police had no qualms about firing into an unarmed crowd to get people to disperse. But when the entire crowd is armed to the teeth and can immediately return fire, the police are suddenly okay with watching from afar. This was the start of the Black Panthers; a group who organized heavily armed protests.
When conservative lawmakers saw a bunch of heavily armed black people (and allies) on their front steps, and saw the police unwilling to break the protests, those conservative lawmakers got really fucking sweaty. So instead, they gave the police tools to arrest individual protestors. The Mulford Act was drafted and quickly passed. At the time, it was the most restrictive gun control law the country had ever seen. It was written by Ronald Reagan (yes, the same Ronald Reagan that the right uplifts as a paragon of conservative values,) and was supported by the NRA, (yes, the same NRA that lobbies for looser gun control laws in the wakes of school shootings.)
This gave the police the power to arrest individual protestors after the fact. Instead of firing into the crowd to disperse the protest, they would wait for the protest to end, follow the protestors home, then kick in their front doors while they were having dinner with their families. (Remember all of the “don’t bring your cell phone to protests because police will arrest you a week or two later if your phone was pinged nearby” messaging during the pandemic protests? Yeah…)
This led to the Black Panthers diving underground. They realized what was happening after protests, so they took efforts to guard their members’ identities. They pulled tactics straight out of anti-espionage textbooks. Randomized meeting places, so police couldn’t set up stings ahead of time. Code names, so arrested members couldn’t rat even if they wanted to. Fragmented info, so no one person (even the leaders) could take down the entire operation if busted. Coded messages. Dead drops. Et cetera, et cetera…
We’re on a rocket trajectory straight down that same pipeline now.
Thank you for taking the time to teach us the history of what brought about the Black Panthers and the history behind certain laws being passed to make protesting more difficult!
Plays “baby shark” on repeat.
The state of education in America 55 years ago.
The best thing about America is that the music always stays relevant.
Wonder if we’re going to get any World War 3 bangers soon.
Here’s a whole album full, from around the same time - KMFDM - WWIII
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Don’t worry, you can still have plausible deniability - listen to their song Kunst and you’ll see the Depeche Mode meaning has been co-opted and muddied by the band. You know, for fun!
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Were there any popular Afghanistan invasion songs? I recall many songs such as Fortunate Son for the Vietnam war but I can’t really recall popular 2010-2020 anti war music.
Pretty much any punk song from 2001 onwards was anti-war on terror/Bush.
I’d personally recommend the album Mobilize by Anti-Flag, but that’s just my nostalgia talking, fucking banger album though.
Nice song. But that’s from 2002, just like the other user which linked a 2006 song. They all seem to be before 2010.
Where did anti war music go from 2010 to 2020? Did being anti-war become unpopular or were they just less featured in our media? Or did people stop making anti war songs?
After the death of Bin Laden, a decade of constant warfare, and the machinations utter crushing of the leftist movement re: occupy, anti-wot protests, the GFC, etc., etc. we were all just burnt out. You still have generic anti-war songs here and there, but it wasn’t as pressing an issue for people.
That makes sense. I was wondering if this could somehow be blamed on Justin Bieber and the Swifties but war fatigue is probably the cause.
Wonder if things will change or people are still in the “tired” phase.
America forgot it was at war in Afghanistan until the disastrous pullout. You gotta have awareness of a thing to rage against it
From my recollection, Afghanistan wasn’t singled out in pop culture music; rather the entire “war on terror” was lumped together.
Audioslave did some but they weren’t “mainstream” popular.
This one is more about Bush and the lame response to the Katrina disaster but Tom Morello said it’s a “finger-pointing song” and includes lyrics about trading lives for oil.
The whole album Ashes of the Wake also about half of Rise Against’s discography.
Oh, also can’t believe I forgot, obviously American Idiot and Holiday by Green Day
American Idiot by Green Day comes to mind.
People were applauding this at the time too.
What’s this?
Kent State Massacre.
Anti-Vietnam war rally at a university saw the national guard called in to stop it, and they ended up killing 4 people.
Yikes.
But props to the Columbia U staff for walking out. In other universities this was just par for the course, and the faculty stayed put as students were arrested
Or was it just not reported?
I would imagine media would have loved to report on an additional element of the story, but
https://www.cbsnews.com/amp/news/yale-students-demonstrators-detained-amid-pro-palestinian-protest/
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Or if homeless people are committing a crime by being homeless
You’re allowed to be homeless, you’re just not allowed to sleep.
Well if you were a real American homeless person you’d just pull yourself up by your bootstraps and learn to sleep sitting upright with your eyes open while saying “yes sir” to the officers who consistently harassed you
Just hang upside down from the underside of a bridge to like a bat.
Well, not as much as Russia yet. But you have worse healthcare than even Uzbekistan. Not that Uzbek’s healthcare is bad, just that you have worse than in Asia.
Manufactured incident. If you read what those young adults on the ground are saying its clear this is the all being inflamed by the media and school officials. Not the students of which many are Jewish in support of Palestine.
This feels so our of context. Like, what is the link between the state of education and a picture of 20 police people standing on top of a stair?
They’re at a university. Arresting students who are protesting against the genocide in Gaza. They want the university to halt collaborations with Israeli universities.
University students have been protesting the genocide happening in Palestine. This is Texas’ response. Republicans recently called on Biden to send the National Guard to break the protests, hoping for another Kent State scenario which would tank his ratings even more. When Biden refused, Texas sent state police instead.
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whats the context? im ootl on this one.
There’s massive student protests for Palestine going on at American universities right now. The universities are calling in the police to arrest their students. Some have locked down their universities and moved to online-only lessons to ignore the protests.
Why do they care so much about the protests that they are having the students arrested? I don’t get it. Just let them protest
Protest is generly seen as criminal or crime adjascent behaviour in the US in my experience. The average person is unable to see the bigger picture that protest slot into and even in cases like this where nobody is inconvenienced somebody or some institution will cry about it.
Yep. A lot of people are uninformed and see protest as a disruption. Most people, even educated have tunnel vision sometimes. The people that get the big picture are empathetic or considerate and usually the ones who protest.
Protest is generly seen as criminal or crime adjascent behaviour in the US in my experience.
US is not a freedom country, it is religious country. France is freedom country. “Liberté, égalité, fraternité”.
I guess the graduation ceremony is coming up or something. At least that’s the excuse I heard.
Students are walking out of class and “occupying” spaces, joined by non-campus outsiders sometimes. Police are calling it trespassing and arresting them if they don’t disperse.
Students once again standing up for a populace having war brought to them courtesy of the US of A.
The Land of the Free*
* Unless you disagree with the mainstream narrative, in which case you should not be free.
“Courtesy of th US of A” is more anti-US fluff than bare truth. Netanyahu and those of power in Isreal are due far more credit. Everyone involved is shite.
i mean, the us of a is literally financing and enabling all of it…
No, political officials are enabling it. The majority of Americans do not support it, myself included. My initial point is that pointing the big fat finger at the US, while not mentioning the people LITERALLY killing eachother, is typical anti-US fluff. I get fed up with people doing that, even if I detest our involvement.
thats literally what we mean we we say the US is doing it.
the fact you support it or not doesnt currently bear any weight on what is happening, and will continue to happen in there.
My gripe comes from that first part, where the latter I agree with. The countries at war are to blame moreso than the enablers and profiteers …Technically. I am not saying the US is innocent… but this isn’t the US “doing it” we’re aiding a crooked ally. I’ve read comments so often that seem to wholly blame the US. We’re a super easy target to criticize, thus my calling the first statement anti-US fluff. Even if I’m arguing semantics.
the war on gaza literally could not happen if the US wasn’t arming israel to the point they can be uncontested.
We deserve plenty of credit and i think passing it off as fluff is pretty disheartening to be frank.
What about this whole debacle ISN’T disheartening? Blaming the US, pointedly, for something we’re involved in IS moreso fluff… believe it or not, Isreal and Palestine are to blame. All other actors are just playing the same fucking role, as always, in the ever grinding meat-wheel of warfare. There are no “heartening” tales from this. I would LOVE to see the US have no involvement, for a change, but that’s not how “allies” work. Geopolitical fuckery will ever stand in the way of true peaceful avoidance for any country tied to ones at war.
blaming the us in something the us is involved in is perfectly reasonable.
If you hadn’t said “finanacing and enabling ALL of it”, I’d agree. We aren’t the country to bear the crux on all of this, even if we are playing second-banana. Palestinian extremists did a fucking awful thing, and then Israeli officials made it, somehow, worse.
i’m sorry but you are, the US has singlehandedly destroyed so many countries its not even funny.
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Liberal Nazi? The fuck are you smoking?
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Admin at this school is suspending students based on their political beliefs. They use the bad faith arguments that opposing Israel is equivalent to antisemitism. The same tactics that the Chinese government has uses.
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Ah, yes, the famous American right to free speech
No no, free speech is when you can say slurs on social media.
Amidst a statewide Texas push to cast parents of trans children as child abusers, a pair of fraternal twins heading up the Young Conservatives of Texas (YCT) are under fire for using student-group resources to push transphobic campaigns at their respective colleges.
The twins, Kelly and Jake Neidert, manage communications for YCT chapters at the University of North Texas and Baylor, respectively. Kelly, who has been at the center of several anti-trans controversies on her campus, faces growing calls from her fellow students to be expelled for allegedly making the environment inhospitable to trans students.
Kelly has also received support from former Proud Boys lawyer Jason Lee Van Dyke, who has his own long history of anti-LGBTQ comments.
…
Van Dyke’s desire to help a far-right student group is not out of character for him. Back in 2007, years after having been kicked out of Michigan State University for weapons charges, he lent legal aid to the now-infamous chairman of MSU Young Americans for Freedom, white nationalist lawyer Kyle Bristow. (Leading up to and after the tragedy in Charlottesville during the violent Unite the Right rally, Bristow helped construct a network of white nationalist lawyers around the country aimed at bringing white supremacists to speak on college campuses. He founded the now defunct Foundation for the Marketplace of Ideas, of which Van Dyke was named the Director of Legal Advocacy in 2016.) In 2007, MSU YAF became the first student group in the United States to be designated as a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center.
With Bristow’s support, the MSU YAF chapter carried out strikingly similar tactics of activism and provocation as YCT is doing today at the University of North Texas. They chalked up sidewalks, distributed provocative flyers for events aimed at capturing undocumented students, and turned lecture halls into makeshift culture-war zones that required their escort by police through angry crowds.
On Saturday, during a meeting with the Young Conservatives of Texas, Gov. Greg Abbott stated that trans and gender nonconforming (GNC) teachers must be “ended” in the state. This statement follows crackdowns on transgender teachers in various Republican-controlled states in the United States. Book bans, “Don’t Say Gay” legislation, and anti-drag laws have increasingly been weaponized against all transgender and GNC individuals, especially within educational settings. In Texas, many of these laws have been blocked due to being likely unconstitutional; however, this has not prevented the governor from making one of his strongest statements yet in support of overt discrimination toward transgender people.
The statement, first reported by journalist Steven Monacelli, addresses a teacher in a small town in Texas. Abbott, who repeatedly refers to the teacher as a “man dressed as a woman,” states that the teacher’s mere presence “normalizes the concept” of being transgender or GNC—a concept Gov. Abbott then asserts the state should try to prohibit. He states, “This kind of behavior is something we need to end in the state of Texas.”
Context? What’s a bunch of cops standing next to each other got to do with education? Thanks!
Students in America are protesting the genocide in Israel and American military aid for Israel. The response of their schools and local authorities has been to arrest them.
You know the last time a bunch of poorly trained idiots were handed guns and told to stand around while students protest, they ended up shooting the students.
Actually the military and National Guard completely reformed the way they handle protests because of Kent State. It’s the police who are the problem in protests now. Even to the point of dressing as close to the national guard as they can so people blame the wrong organization.
Kent State and several other similar incidents. But yeah, that’s kind of my point
This is Texas. They are afraid of 20 year olds.
Students are protesting the Palestinian genocide. Texas sent state police to the campuses, to attempt to break the protests.
4 dead in Ohio starts playing…
Yeah, conservatives originally demanded that Biden send the national guard to break the protests. They were obviously hoping for another Kent State scenario, which they could then leverage against him. When he refused, Texas sent the state police instead.
That’s certainly a fucking dumb move…
It is, depressingly, a very savvy and effective move with a proven history of success.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_Hat_Riot
The Hard Hat Riot occurred on May 8, 1970, in New York City. It started around noon when around 400 construction workers and around 800 office workers attacked around 1,000 demonstrators affiliated with the student strike of 1970. The students were protesting the May 4 Kent State shootings and the Vietnam War, following the April 30 announcement by President Richard Nixon of the U.S. invasion of neutral Cambodia. Some construction workers carried U.S. flags and chanted “USA, All the way”, and “America, love it or leave it”. Anti-war protesters shouted, “Peace now”.
The riot, first breaking out near the intersection of Wall Street and Broad Street in Lower Manhattan, led to a mob scene with more than 20,000 people in the streets, eventually leading to a siege of New York City Hall, an attack on the conservative Pace University, and lasted more than three hours. Around 100 people, including seven policemen, were injured on what became known as “Bloody Friday”. Six people were arrested, but only one of them was a construction worker associated with the rioters. President Nixon then invited the hardhat leaders to Washington, D.C., and accepted a hardhat from them.
See Also: The Brooks Brothers Riot
The Tea Party Movement
The COVID protests
Phyllis Schlafly and the Protest Against the Equal Rights Amendment
Any historical article on lynching
It sure as hell isn’t an elementary school in Texas
Yeah, there aren’t enough guns and dead children in this photo for it to be an elementary school.
USSA: “Education shall not pass!”
USSR:
"Take good care of book"
In top right corner “Love book - the source of knowledge” by Gorky.
"Excelling in our duty"
"To build you should know, to know you should learn"
Book in hand “technology of metals”, books on table are “construction works” and “integral calculus”.
"Our country should be most literate and culural country in the world", "Learn and work! Work and learn!", "To have more you should produce more, to produce more you should know more"
"...the task is TO LEARN!", reference to Lenin's quote "...to learn, to learn and to learn"
"Work at day, learn at evening"
For context this is worker with medal “For Labour Valour”
In modern Russia even vandals are pro-education. But this is not thanks to, but despite current regime.
It’s a bit of fake news, blown totally out of proportion because of “Israel First.”
But still, ACAB.
The police crackdowns on pro Palestine demonstrations are pretty big right now I wouldn’t say this is “out of proportion”. Colombia shut down their entire school
This is the riot police showing up at the University of Texas today
And going into the school to cancel the protest
Yikes!
I mean the media characterization of “antisemitism” and the subsequent response is blown out of proportion.
To my knowledge the vast majority of protesters have welcomed Israelis into their ranks, and the few agent provocateurs from the first few days are gone now. Which makes sense, considering how much Bibi’s genocidal actions are undermining Israeli interests.
Yeah that is just the same old lie that governments use. Demonize any protestors by twisting their message and bonus points for planting a few false flags. Zeteo wrote a pretty good article about it:
I Am a Jewish Student at Columbia. Don’t Believe What You’re Being Told About ‘Campus Antisemitism’
Gee, I wonder why tuition is so high and yet class sizes keep getting bigger and courses are increasingly stripped down to standardized testing format.
Where could all of that money gone?
Learning is fundamental
Learning is fundamental
ly against the goals of the capitalist