Why don't they go shoot up Beverly hills/Wall Street/police stations/court room/federal agencies etc.? Rich and powerful people rarely get hurt.
Why don't they go shoot up Beverly hills/Wall Street/police stations/court room/federal agencies etc.? Rich and powerful people rarely get hurt.
Because it’s easy. Criminals seek the target of least resistance, like how old cars are stolen a lot compared to luxury sedans with a bunch of tracking and security vehicles.
A lot of the shooters are racist towards black Americans but they would never try a mass shooting in some Bloods infested neighborhood because they know the residents will shoot back. Others are racist towards Hispanics but they wouldn’t dare step foot in Juarez to do a mass shooting because they’ll end up headless on a sidewalk. So they go after people who have never caused any problems to anyone
Not to mention, like many serial killers, they’re have delusions of grandeur and believe they’re on a mission that can only be achieved through violence. Not to mention, they also want to achieve maximum shock value. Eviscerating a woman’s guts and leaving her in the sidewalk for joggers to find is old fashion. Targeting old people and elementary school children and live-streaming it is the new normal.
This is why leftist terrorism is rare. We have seen it in the past during the Cold War. The RAF killed politicians and fascist leaders and foot soldiers. The Japanese Red Army killed some civilians and hijacked planes, but they were part of a larger political goal that was immediate (I.e. the civilians were Israeli, the plane was going to North Korea). The Italians went on bombing and shooting campaigns during the Years of Lead because fascists targeted them with the help of NATO and the CIA. Most leftist terrorists target actual people with influence and power. That’s why they’re prioritized more than fascists when it comes to repression.
The ugly truth that liberals don’t want to acknowledge is that there are only two ways for gun control to happen in the US. 1, if minorities start to become not only armed, but also resistant to the American institution. The conservative minorities who own guns don’t do squat to threaten any power. Or 2, rich people and their children are targeted by mass shooters. The rich will always prioritize themselves so if things get out of hand, they have no problem violating any gun rights. 2 will be unlikely to happen, but 1 is quite literally how gun control came to existence in the US, so it might happen again.
the weather underground did a little bit, and there was some anti-war sabotage in shipyards and that bombing in wisconsin but overall it didn't amount to much. If we go back to the "propaganda of the deed" days and Czogolz's assassination of president mckinley i'd say it even backfired pretty hard as that lead somewhat directly to the creation of the FBI.
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and these institutions don't blip into existence out of a vacuum, they have costs: economically, socially, politically. dismissing adventurism simply because "revolutionary actions only lead to counter-revolutionary reactions" is too idealistic.
not that all actions are good because reactions have costs. but we have to do a comprehensive material analysis when examining violent actions and the state's reactions. repression in response to revolution can be a good or bad thing depending on the details.
as much as i
for some new righteous john brown to emerge in the imperial core and run where
i'm of the same opinion, we just can't pretend the crackdown doesn't come at a cost. everything is interconnected, and pulling resources from, say, imperial repression to focus on domestic repression could in some contexts be a useful outcome. or if repression is the straw that radicalizes the masses it may be useful. it's an equation looking at how many resources can be extracted from people compared to the cost of controlling them through entertainment/treats/violence. violent repression is more expensive than cultural control, and parasitic to it.
but we don't have an organized left to seize opportunities on a macro scale, so i'm not convinced individual acts of violence can be expected to do anything productive at that scale yet.
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yeah that's worth keeping in mind, violence for the sake of terrorism or propaganda of the deed doesn't seem likely to have much revolutionary potential. unfortunately it seems to have a lot of reactionary potential in the form of mass shootings
Honestly I forgot about the weather underground. The only things I know about them is that one of them blew themselves up and another was supposedly friends with Obama (or that’s what conservative conspiracy theorists say anyway)
I read Burrough's Dayd of Rage and although the author's ideology is terrible it's a good historical chronology of Weather and some similar groups.
If they didn’t disavow each other, he could’ve taught Obama some theory to impress the long legged socialist girls in college
I’m very curious how one becomes more liberal later on in life after bombing several buildings in the name of anti imperialism. Is it just the pessimism of getting older and seeing nothing change? Or did they just become rich
yeah I don't want to slander Ayers, I don't know much about his modern politics. I'm just assuming (a) he and Dohrn are wealthy now (probably bought a Hyde Park house) (b) he and Obama wanted broadly the same things when they were on that nonprofit board.
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This is the reason. The Mass Shooter is the suicidal serial killer, egged on by a cast of conservative commentators, performed by the manifesto-wielding failsons of the supposedly supremacist group. It mirrors the suicide bombers in other parts of the world ideologically.
Hardly suicidal; most of these mass shooters get arrested and have people speaking up in their defense. The cops will gladly shoot a black person without seeing a weapon, but with a white supremacist mass shooter they'll be very careful not to shoot the guy. Most mass shooters who get shot aren't shot by the cops, but by bystanders.
All of those things are true, but I'm talking about why these young men turn to violence in the first place.
I say suicide because Fascism's death cult promotes self-negating martyrdom. It drives the person into a social death before throwing them into actual carnage. The shootings themselves are incidental; they cement the break with their old social self and a baptism into their new martyred self precisely because they see their old self as unworthy. Both offer ideological1 respite from further action and self-hatred.
1 (sniff)