Assuming that a powerful nation has not deeply owned every large-scale protest is in my experience extremely naive. Either the protest has no teeth or it's penetrated all the way to the top with either government agents or extensive surveillance. This means that action outside of what the government feels like dealing with means arrests (no matter how temporary) and that any action that is taken means that the government does not care or will use it with an ulterior agenda.
It sort of bothers me how conspiracy theorist this sounds, but I know for a fact that this is the case.
I'm kind of surprised. Usually, only protests against (a) Police brutality, (b) War and (c) surveillance get monitored, as those 3 things are the very basis of autocratic government. Maybe because the protests against family separation were organized openly they got spied on. I mean, spies are lazy, too, so why bother to snoop on people who organize privately.
Big media often play down the positive effect of protests against government and underestimate the numbers in attendance. They feign objectivity but subtly undermine.
You're right about something. But civil and peaceful protests cannot be so well organized and take place so quickly and occupy so many significant places. It looks too organized and therefore suspicious. Perhaps people are dissatisfied with the authorities and living conditions, but perhaps someone is trying to use the protests to their advantage and manage them.
It's not super rare. We see how it plays out all the time. Protestors protest, government comes down on them hard - mass arrests, mass killings, mass civil destruction of liberties.
We literally saw a version of this in Canada a month ago, where actually peaceful protesters were declared terrorists and got arrested and their money seized.
It's not always about some other country's government coming on you hard, your own can be just as rotten.
That's because the government doesn't believe these demonstrations (4 weeks now) are legitimate and they will do everything they can to minimize it and/or suppress it. Not surprising.
If you go to protests in the US, you will become a surveillance target. That by itself has a chilling effect. Protest organizers get visits from the FBI, and the NSA feeds information to the FBI to be laundered through "parallel construction." misuse of information to stifle dissent isn't theoretical, it's practiced all the time.
This is the only thing that makes sense. The people, governments, and institutions being protested only know one language: violence. Otherwise, they will hold onto their power no matter what, as long as they can. People often forget or never learn this. There are lots of parents teaching their children all sorts of fantasies about government, armies, and police, that these are institutions that should be respected and trusted rather than feared, disbelieved, and toppled. Attitudes like that lead to the ineffective protests we've seen lately. The people being protested do not care if there are millions in the streets if those millions will never pose a threat and those millions cannot pose a threat if they have delusional misconceptions about their role and the role of the people they're protesting. A lot of power and responsibility lies with parents and many of them are too clueless to see the world for what it is, let alone teach their children to react to it properly.
It is? I'm not saying you're wrong, but I haven't seen legally organized protests (yes, you do have to file the appropriate paperwork) recently which have actually been shut down by an enormous governmental show of force. Do you have any examples?
We should never discount the idea that a hostile state-level power could be involved in our politics. And we pay a huge number of people in government to be paranoid about that.
That said, I doubt these protests have much effect. It's kind of like people standing on corners waving signs, or the pro-antifa vs anti-antifa stick-fests. Amusing or mildly appalling and worth a click-bait article, but does anyone really care?
If there's any real effect, I suspect it'll be just to mark that there are people suffering, people who have lost their livelihoods, can't make their rent, and just want to go back to their okay-but-not-great jobs so they can live their lives.
That's a point; there is a tendency to some protest. But that wasn't really what I meant. I mean that, to control a government, they must fear that the people will remove them in the time-honored fashion.
I think there is a world of difference between protests (usually over eminent domain related concerns, not always) and an "uprising." I've tracked to track down some of these claims of 180,000 protests a year (following the links) and it's been hard - I find it hard to believe that these are very large protests.
Because organised dissent against a government would be deemed a matter of national security. That might be fine and dandy now, but I think it's incredibly risky to say that there's no conceivable event in the future that would make you feel strongly enough to join a protest against the government.
Oh really, how do you know this? Given the scale of protests over time, I bet it is likely someone has. And if someone hasn't already, someone eventually will. Saying something has never happened so therefore it won't happen is ridiculous.
This is not theoretical grandstanding, this is recognizing a potential threat.
It sort of bothers me how conspiracy theorist this sounds, but I know for a fact that this is the case.
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