Dear G0D
Are you saying that both sides did not wish for violence, but because of the 'mob mentality', it started off anyway?
That's one way to take it, and perhaps the most accurate way to view the situation. I've been through it before at protests, too. As the sides square off, you start to develop personal sentiments toward your opposition; I've never been in a violent protest; I even sat out WTO because I could see the riot coming. But it does happen that it clicks in your mind, of a certain person on the other line:
Okay, if this turns ugly, I'm coming for you .... Any two people at the catalyst only intend to settle issues 'twixt themselves. Of course, Johnny comes to Sam's aid, and Baruk comes to Abdel's aid, and suddenly we've got four people in the fight. Usually at this point, the people who are going to fight do so.
How people settling their differences blows up into a looting riot is hard to say. But a lot of people speak out at protests--especially in such countries--because the protest offers you a certain degree of safety. To stand alone on the streetcorner and voice such sentiments might, indeed, get one arrested or shot by the authority. The notion of solidarity, indeed, is a powerful one; in my life I watched solidarity take Lech Walesea from obscurity to conflict to triumph to downfall. People will hang together, for otherwise they shall surely hang separately.
Once the fighting starts, though, that infectious mob mentality provides a brilliant psychology. On the one hand, people who come to arms during wartime do not necessarily wish for war; merely that the invaders are in the streets and the children are not safe. After rioting starts, the people at the center--the catalysts who might merely be settling their own score--would be amazed that their conflict has infected hundreds. Seeing neighbors in distress, people submit to the mentality: they will stand for their neighbors before they even know what's going on. It almost happened at a concert I was at last night--security was, in fact, good. But the show fell apart because it was a British band in Seattle thinking we like to dance, and by the end, more was permissible at the show because security was aware that, lacking anything better to do, we would revolt at some point. Nobody wanted to fight, but I've seen it before at shows that when a security team gets out of hand, a bunch of people throw down and stand for the "us" of the audience versus the "them" of security. (Gorge shows at Champs d'Brionne--I think, we just call it "The Gorge"--are an interesting keystone comedy, watching three hundred security people try to supppress drug use in a crowd of fifteen thousand while everyone is consciously focused on
not getting violent about it ....)
When the Muslim, then, assures me as a gentlemen that Muslims do not want this, I look to the center, toward those individuals who do have a score to settle. That he can, by God, assure me that his Hindu neighbors, his opponents for the day, are better people than this, is all the statement I need on their behalf. I know this condition: the rabble have stood off to settle their score with each other, yet the innocents are involved. How do the innocents get involved? As the hymn says,
He ain't heavy, he's my brother. Doesn't matter who started it; you stand for your own on those occasions.
I can't give an exact thesis on how such things happen, but of the thousands who clashed with police at WTO-99 in Seattle, none of them were actually in for a riot. The provocateurs, suspected pseudo-anarchist activists (I refuse to dignify them with capitalization) were allowed by police to tear up a number of places. After the damage was done and the space-monkeys off to the mother ship, the police descended on everyone else in attendance and began riot suppression without a riot. Nobody wanted to fight, but within thirty minutes, a thousand people had gathered in the center of a street in a literal pile in order to block the traffic flow; the fire department refused, by the nature of their mission, to surrender their trucks to the PD for a massive downtown hosing. Tear gas did not work; the police took the battle into residential areas, even hitting local residents in the head with tear-gas cannisters as they fled the streets before the advancing force. One guy was deliberately hit in the back of the head by a police officer with a tear-gas cannister: he was returning from the market when the riot blazed up the hill; he was unlocking his front door, some twenty feet off the sidewalk, when the policeman fired on him. Cops stopped traffic on sidestreets and assaulted the drivers with tear gas, smashing windows and attacking both the injured and their aid. By the middle of the night, it was over; round one had passed. The next day, the people came to the streets again: they were determined to win. Thousands of people with bruised egos, wronged by a force that will never have to answer for it, and ready to stand side-by-side and take back their city. Thousands descended on the jail and staged a vigil at the county jail--the police had suspended people's rights to phone calls, attorneys, and medical attention. Skirmishes flared up throughout the city.
The people felt justified, and this was just a trade show. In the beginning, nobody wanted a riot. Can you tell me that the mayor really and intentionally set his town up to be destroyed? Yet, sadly, that preliminary accusation seems to have proven true. But the marches and the protests were going fine until the SPD knowingly allowed anarchists to tear up shopfronts amid the thickest part of the protest, Once it was on, everybody submitted to the Us v. Them mob mentality which they feel was wished upon them, and nobody's responsible according to the law. The law says that it is legal for police officers to attack people without wearing badges or identification; in this country, we don't hold well with unmarked "law enforcement" pointing weapons at us while saying they're not armed. (Our mayor said, "We don't have rubber or wooden bullets. We don't even have the devices to fire them." At the time he made that statement to the public, he knew full well that agents of his police department had flown to Boise and, at that moment, were loading riot gear into an airplane. When the rubber and wooden bullets came, everything got way out of hand.)
But the repeated nature of offense is what kept drawing more people down. Did the mayor want a riot? Yeah, I think so. Did the police chief? I don't think so. He was the first sacrificial lamb to resign in the wake of WTO. Did John Q Officer? Christ, no. You can't put holes in 'em, tear gas don't stop 'em, and the riot guns just seem to piss 'em off.
To compare that process to what takes place in India, it's part of the reason why the violence was so deadly. Both sides merely seek
change. They should definitely stand for the change they seek. And then two sides seeking different changes stand off, and begin to argue with one another, for each is the agent of the other's difficulty, perhaps.
For most of the people involved in the violence in India, I would apply the phrase,
It was already on fire when they arrived. If you have a split-second decision between coming to the aid of your neighbors in times of trial, and turning your back on them and letting your oppressors destroy them, is it really going to occur to you that your actions are part of a riot/siege/revolution/whatnot, or are you just standing for your neighbor?
Sometimes I think we miss the point in the US because we're so quick to draw weapons. Violence of this sort should be a
last resort, and in that light, of course the Muslims and the Hindus don't want it. Nobody wants to fight, but why is the only solution then to let the state hurt you again? If we look in history at, say, the Irish conflict, during the famine of the mid-nineteenth century. Do you think those who revolted did so because "they wanted to", and were ingrates, as British and American newspapers admonished, or was it the fact that their landlords were forcing them to starve? (Sure, the potatoes are blighted, but that's your problem, tenant; you're not allowed to grow corn or anything else; you're a potato farmer ....)
Does one wish to destroy many people? Or does one merely wish to cleanse their ears of the sound of their own children dying slowly and painfully?
There are a million ways Mr Shaikh's words ring true to me, and in all those ways they are apt. Violence between humans is symptomatic; the people wish to be free from the illness that brings it. And there's an apt metaphor: do I look forward to vomiting? Do I look forward to a city ablaze?
thanx,
Tiassa
