If you were at a protest that was starting to get a bit rowdy and somebody used one of these on you, what would you do? I'd either come back prepared for actual violence, or switch from protest to sabotage.
You cannot fight against violence without violence. Violence is most effective when it's implied/threatened, before it is materialized.
The goal of protests are:
1) To serve as a show of force (they are literally called demonstrations in some languages because you demonstrate your ability to organize and act - large numbers of people are capable of large amounts of violence).
2) To paint your side as the victim by provoking an overreaction.
Westerners often think that 2 is sufficient because they live in democracies where a large part of the government is also unwilling to use violence and become the aggressor. But against a dictator who is willing to use as much violence against the people as is available to him, 2 alone is worthless.
Goal 2 only serves to maximize the number of people willing to rise up but the real goal is to break the enemy's will to fight. Either to make the dictator lose his nerve and flee or to kill him because corpses don't have a will.
The point is it's a delicate balancing act to paint yourself as victim/weak to get more support and angry/strong to make the dictator back down. Westerners focus on the first part because it works against their governments but against greater oppression, you will not get anywhere without actual will to fight and kill.
You might enjoy reading Rules for Radicals if you haven't already. If your riot can provoke a worse response from the authority, it can help your cause. The reaction is the action.
It may be that this protest in Serbia got a bit rowdy and riotous (see "diversity of tactics") and now the headline is about the government's use of a disproportionate weapon against protestors, not about a riot.
> You might enjoy reading Rules for Radicals if you haven't already. If your riot can provoke a worse response from the authority
One motif of Allinsky's message is the importance of organisation. Triggering tear gas against your peaceful protest is one thing. Losing control of it such that stores start getting looted is not.
> It may be that this protest in Serbia got a bit rowdy and riotous (see "diversity of tactics") and now the headline is about the government's use of a disproportionate weapon against protestors
This is the first-order effect. They got a tweet. (Not a headline.)
I'm sceptical they'll get a second because this isn't a clear case of a nonlethal weapon being used against a peaceful crowd, it's something more muddled, and as a result there are zero comments in this thread discussing what the protesters are protesting.
Just for the sake of the thread, these are "anti-corruption" protests. It is essentially a mass vote of no confidence in the government. The immediate inciting incident was the collapse of a railway station in Novi Sad that killed a bunch of people, but it has turned into much more.
It's been going since November. I wouldn't be surprised if this is the prelude to a civil war.
Rules for Radicals is one of my favorite books and I don't think this an accurate summary of what Alinsky says, at all. It's a short book, you can get it for free online, people should just read it.
The people who have the state-sanctioned monopoly on violence are the ones who get to decide when a protest becomes a riot or unlawful assembly.
I’m not saying they’re always wrong but when only one group gets to pull the card that allows them to shut down protest it creates perverse incentives.
Practically, the media and the public at large. I forgot the source, but you can pretty much directly see the negative effect of e.g. bridge blocking on public sympathy for a cause.
I think it's pretty much a useless protest if everyone leaves the moment it become "a bit rowdy". Not to mention that if you meditate for long enough of time ( which is like the most peaceful kind of protest ) the Police will Spray / LDAR you anyway.
I don’t think this is true. In order for the media to consider something a riot there has to be some violence. Gone are the days of print media, we expect videos now.
But it’s trivial for police to incite violence. We saw it all the time in the US during BLM protests. A protest starts peacefully, then the protesters are pushed by riot control, then rubber bullets are fired into the peaceful protest, and now it’s not peaceful. Sometimes the protesters would even get surrounded and flanked so they can’t escape the descent into a riot.
Yep, if you are depending on perception by media you have already lost. They will manipulate it to look however they like, trivially and convincingly.
If change does occur, what will happen is they will repaint history to make it seem as if the most cowish placid of the protests brought the change, to fool the public. And people actually believe it.
> what do you do when you get home? Now that your right to assemble has been effectively revoked
Your right to assembly remains. You just made a risk-adjustment decision about not participating in a riot. The correct thing to do is go home, regroup and join the protest leadership to help plan another protest where the hooliganism is kept in check.
When deciding whether to pull the trigger on such a thing, what matters is whether it will make things worse, regardless of whether that worsening counts as correct behavior or not.
Also, not being in Serbia myself I'm reluctant to make judgements from afar about what degree of hooliganism is justified in this case.
> what matters is whether it will make things worse, regardless of whether that worsening counts as correct behavior or not
Correct. Escalating from peaceful to violent protest shouldn't (I'd argue cannot) be responsibly decided in the moment.
If you went to a peaceful protest "that was starting to get a bit rowdy," the situation clearly changed from underneath you. Go home. Take stock. Decide if what you saw was random rioting or targeted violence. If the latter, decide if and how you can help and if it will make things better or worse.
I'm struggling to imagine non-Hollywood scenarios where someone showing up to peacefully protest is useful when it effectively escalates to civil war.
> the moment a single cop lobs a tear gas can at a peaceful protest, is the moment when the protest starts doing damage to its cause?
No. The trigger was "a protest that was starting to get a bit rowdy." Not a peaceful protest that gets gassed. The latter is extremely effective at generating public sympathy.
> they have literally built a catapult on Maidan to throw molotov cocktails at the police. And used said molotovs to set fire to an APC
I guess I wouldn't characterise such focussed use of violence as "starting to get a bit rowdy." Rowdiness specifically implies unruliness, a lack of discipline. I'd also say that escalating from peaceful to violent protest is not a decision one should take in the moment--catapults and molotov cocktails imply preparation.
At protests cops purposefully escalate things by having a cop undercover in the crowd to do something violent enough to justify police attacking the crowd.
They lob a rock in the general direction of their buddies and Bob's your uncle.
Years ago someone caught some campus cops tossing some bricks into the bed of one of their pickups behind their station.
They claimed they'd removed them from a section of sidewalk where they'd come loose and become a hazard. First time I've ever heard of a cop doing something like that...
They're suggesting that the point of an authority using this weapon on a mass of people may be to cause those people to become violent so that the authority can use the subsequent fear to justify further abuses.
Which I think is likely, but also a bad decision. Generally speaking, the job of a legitimate government is to make violent protest unnecessary. So depending on the situation, the best action may indeed be to back down and rethink how things got there in the first place, rather than continuing to provoke more violence. Continuing to escalate is not a sustainable strategy for anyone that intends to maintain power for long, as the numbers are not generally on their side.
Yeah but the problem is with mass movement people like this, there are good chance people that can take advantage of these protest (looting,rob etc)
the point of these weapon is not "defeat" but mostly to crowd control right because you cant rule out if there is no crime even in peaceful protest, both things can be true at the same time
also if such weapon is not permanently injure or harm people, I can see why this weapon is in need like pepper spray
As it turns out, part of maintaining that "public support" is not taking advantage of it. The very idea of a stable monopoly on violent escalation is obviously meant to deter violence. When it instead makes violence more likely (because the monopolist is suddenly planning to abuse its monopoly) that's quite a big change and people can be expected to react accordingly.
That is correct. It really depends on the temperature of public sentiment .
Many protests get a charitable assumption in the US as a legacy of civil rights and the Vietnam anti-war movements. However, I think a lot of that good will is eroding.
Each country has different perceptions, and ultimately, each protest is different (e.g. who shot first, is it abuse, ect)
Are chemical irritants preferable, then? Or just LEOs in riot gear with rubber batons? There's no amount of pushback or repercussion that a rioter will feel is fair or humane, and the mindset of "I'll turn violent and/or destructive if my participation in civil unrest is punished" is a perfect justification for these systems to exist.
Absolutely. You can heal from those. LRADs are maiming weapons designed to cause permanent damage. Under any reasonable legal system their use would be considered a war crime.
LRADs are not designed to cause permanent damage. They are explicitly designed under the intention of being a way to disperse a crowd without long term harm.
There hasn’t been much research on long term health impacts, but it’s not a tool to maim people.
I don’t think you need to be a rocket scientist to realize loud noise = hearing loss.
Just intuitively, I know many people with degraded hearing from concerts. And that hearing is gone, that’s how hearing loss works.
I think the people who designed these weapons aren’t anywhere close to stupid enough to think these won’t cause long term damage. Which means that the only explanation is they INTEND for them to cause long term damage.
Check out the link I posted. It’s from a physicians group focused on human rights.
> I don’t think you need to be a rocket scientist to realize loud noise = hearing loss.
Being a doctor and understanding that the levels people are exposed are not maiming if the thing is used “by design” should carry some significant weight in how you think about this.
They are designed to produce sound pressure levels that cause permanent hearing damage from short exposure, which makes them maiming weapons. There is no safe way to use an LRAD. Anybody who uses an LRAD is evil. Stop making excuses for despicable behavior. Deliberately causing hearing damage is no better than smashing people's fingers with hammers.
Risk of instantaneous noise-induced hearing loss: 120dB(SPL)
A sonic weapon must cause pain to be effective. Any sound that reliably causes pain is capable of causing instant hearing damage. Therefore any sonic weapon is necessarily a maiming weapon and is designed as such. There is no hyperbole.
As LRADs are less ethical than CS gas, the true design intent is likely to produce something that looks insignificant on video recordings so it can be used as extrajudicial punishment of undesirables with less risk of public outcry.
this. and let's not forget that these....officers always receive the best, most top notch training to use these things safely. (/s)
yet another reason to ensure footage looks like 'nothing terrible happened to these people' as expertly trained cop uses a weapon of war against civilians.
> There's no amount of pushback or repercussion that a rioter will feel is fair or humane
I mean you're talking about using violence against people to stop or prevent property damage. Most options are off the table in the moment, in the same way you can't execute someone if you catch them vandalizing your car. Smashing their fingers with a hammer wouldn't probably kill them but you can't do that either.
After-the-fact repercussions like criminal charges or civil liabilities, well, it doesn't matter how they feel about it? That's not how court works.
This reads like you suppose the only thing to do is let rioters vent their outrage against whatever objects happen to be in their way at the time, and hope that there exists some legal comeuppance after the fact.
Why can't some reasonable degree of force be used to prevent property damage? What moral dilemma exists that makes protecting property deserve a comparison to executing someone?
> Why can't some reasonable degree of force be used to prevent property damage?
It can, of course. If a police officer sees an individual engaging in property damage, that officer may walk over to that person and arrest them. If that person resists arrest, the officer can use appropriate force.
If you're talking about using force against innocent individuals who happen to be nearby, of course that is both outrageous and out of the question.
> Why can't some reasonable degree of force be used
No one said that. It was suggested that physically injuring someone in direct retaliation for property damage wasn't appropriate. Add to that the fact that riot control measures are hardly targeted.
There are many non-violent options available. Sometimes rioters will escalate violently against the officers carrying those out. It's far less likely anyone objects to proportionate and necessary use of force in such cases.
If threat of injury is what stops someone from destroying your car, then it's appropriately leveraged.
I'm also curious, what kind of effective, 'non-violent' means are there to control the initial mob-martyrs, and ensure level-handed justice is served? Those looking to escalate will use any police activity against them or their group as justification to do so.
Your disagreement essentially amounts to "it's appropriate because it accomplishes my goal", or do I misunderstand? In a discussion of ethics that seems specious to me.
> Those looking to escalate will use any police activity against them or their group as justification to do so.
As I previously pointed out, once rioters escalate against the officers themselves most people are unlikely to raise objections to targeted use of force. That's quite different than a paramilitary force lashing out violently at anyone perceived to be up to no good.
Also important to note, most of the riots I have seen don’t start with the protesters escalating. It depends on the country, but based off of what I have seen, it is almost always the authority who escalates. Often, there is preemptive and disproportionate riot control.
> Your disagreement essentially amounts to "it's appropriate because it accomplishes my goal", or do I misunderstand? In a discussion of ethics that seems specious to me.
My disagreement is that the ongoing or imminent unlawful destruction of property should be allowed to be met with _appropriate_ deterring force, whether by law enforcement or by the property owners. I argue that because in a system of individual rights that include property ownership, the position that an impassioned crowd has more right to that property than the owner (by damaging or destroying it in this case) is morally indefensible.
> once rioters escalate against the officers themselves most people are unlikely to raise objections to targeted use of force.
That is untrue for at least the last decade or so. After the 2015 Baltimore riots, President Obama couldn't even popularly get away with referring to rioters as "thugs"[1] after ~300 businesses were damaged, 60 buildings set on fire, 113 police officers injured and 27 drugstores looted. Since then, there have been plentiful riots and mass demonstrations that either turned violent or otherwise sheltered violent activity, including the moment in 2020 that spawned the "mostly peaceful protests" meme of the reporter with a building burning down behind him because of the rose-tinted glasses public analysts used in their coverage. Mayors and governors gave lip service to violent demonstrations like CHAZ/CHOP [2] while violence was taking place, and only tepidly supported law enforcement's presence to curtail it after the fact.
_To this day_ those actions are routinely and popularly dismissed as racial outrage, justified, etc. largely along political boundaries, all to the detriment of the thousands of individuals whose livelihoods were damaged or destroyed as result. The idea that good consciences will win the day and protestors will distance themselves from n'er-do-wells among them is, as a standard, irreconcilable with the countless recorded hours of protest footage that exist.
Rights aren't trumped by implicit public vote to destroy your property, any more than two thieves can vote that they need their victim's wallet more than them, or a gang of rapists can hold a 5-1 vote for consent. QED, immediate and active threats against property should, morally and legally, warrant an appropriate amount of force to defend it.
> the position that an impassioned crowd has more right to that property than the owner
That is a blatant straw man. The original position is more or less that nonviolent enforcement action must precede use of force. You are arguing to start off with violence, and even to apply that to perceived precrime ("ongoing or imminent" in your words).
To be fair regarding your wording, depending on your definition of "imminent" and the crime in question I might be able to agree. But that doesn't appear to be the case here.
To the rest of your comment, you seem very politicized. Most of what you wrote is non sequitur to the point that it doesn't seem feasible or worthwhile to respond. An outraged minority on social media is not the "most people" I was referring to (indeed they are a clear minority). The mainstream media exhibiting an agenda about a particular event has approximately nothing to do with the general principles we were supposedly discussing here.
Why should your interest in asserting property rights be permitted to trump human rights and due process?
It's a weapon meant to deny the use of an area by threatening non-selective permanent physical damage. There are very few legitimate civil use cases for something like that.
You could outfit the front steps with crewed machine guns, but apparently they only do that if they expect people protesting in favor of liberal values.
You really believe the security of those windows in the Capitol comes down to the glass? That you're even willing to accept this proposition says something.
Anyways, to my point, clearly observable in that picture are security shutters, on the sides of the window, left open and unlocked. I might have closed and locked those.
