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0 pointsSwellJoe12y ago0 comments

While I think such a documentary is a great idea, I think this will never happen:

"Ideally the protestors in the film should represent the entire range of the political spectrum (right wing to left wing. gun rights to animal rights. pro-life to pro-choice. etc)."

Ideal is hard to find in the real world. This is a very one-sided battle, and pretty much always has been in the US. The powerful and rich are aligned against the powerless, and have the police, courts, and lawmakers, on their side.

You'd be very hard pressed to find right wing protesters being abused in the same way as environmental protesters (or, at all, for that matter). Because the right wing protesters aren't fighting for anything that oil companies, for example, would find threatening. It takes a combination of vast wealth and state/corporate collusion to get the kind of violence we've seen in the environmental activist community.

I've been amused to note that Alex Jones-sponsored gun rights rallies are vastly less likely to be harassed by cops than anything I would be involved in.

The kind of dissent that is most likely to be quashed is that of the powerless against the very powerful. White guys who support the death penalty don't fall into the category of "powerless" and their opponents are not the powerful (the powerful like having more tools to keep poor people in line and to give teeth to their threats, so are unlikely to worry about someone supporting the death penalty).

Pro-life vs. pro-choice? This one I'm really familiar with. Take Texas as an example...during the recent battle over womens reproductive rights here, the surprisingly peaceful pro-choice side had their heads smashed in (http://www.dallasvoice.com/watch-12-arrested-tx-senate-oks-s...), were aggressively searched , had tampons removed from their purses (http://www.thedailybeast.com/witw/cheats/2013/07/12/texas-co...), were falsely accused of trying to bring feces and urine into chambers (http://www.elpasotimes.com/ci_23960175/el-paso-times), were spied on by DPS officers. No pro-life proponents were arrested, or detained, or harassed, despite the occasional actual assault on pro-choice protesters. All of this, despite the fact that pro-life supporters have literally murdered people in support of their cause...I'm not suggesting that DPS should have been harassing pro-life folks the way they were harassing pro-choice folks; just that it's clear which side the power was aligned on, and to what end.

Most right-wing "dissent" is manufactured outrage over imagined slights (or wealthy white people being pissed off that poor brown people could possibly want to be treated equally). I lean libertarian, some days, and so I'm sympathetic to some "right" causes...but, it's clear that when business and the poor go to war, it is a one-sided battle and nearly all the violence is being initiated by police. If we have to find examples of right wing protesters being abused in the ways that those on the left are being abused, we'll never see anything resembling the documentary you've imagined.

Anyway, I went looking to see if such a documentary existed, since I'd like to show such a thing at one of the Revolution in the Park movie nights I host in Austin. Couldn't find anything exactly along those lines, though it looks like someone was planning to make one last year, but seems to have stopped updating: http://examplesprotestdoc.wordpress.com/

But, most documentaries about protest cover the outsized response of police, because that's always a big part of the story. Of recent films, We Are Legion, 99%: The Occupy Walls Street Collaborative Film, Blockadia Rising (which is about an earlier stage of the Keystone XL fight, and includes some of the folks I know who've been charged with felonies), all cover how government responds to peaceful dissent.

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bmelton12y ago· 2 in thread

> I've been amused to note that Alex Jones-sponsored gun rights rallies are vastly less likely to be harassed by cops than anything I would be involved in.

I've never been to anything remotely related to Alex Jones, but having organized and attended a number of civil rights rallies, it's probably just an issue of demographics. Cops, Sheriffs and deputies tend to be more staunch second amendment advocates, except in larger cities. Also, and bear in mind this is anecdotal, but second amendment supporters tend to be the most respectful of the police tasked with keeping the peace at the rallies, and go far out of their way to keep from making those cops' jobs more difficult. Conversely (and again, anecdotally, but with lots of experience), anti-second amendment protestors seem to be far more unruly, with a contingent (at least in Maryland) that seem intent on trying to make the cops feel bad for their ambivalence.

With regards to fourth amendment rallies I've attended, the cops are decidedly more hostile, because they likely feel like they're the target of some of the protest. Also, in my experience, most of the cops justify their own fourth amendment violations as justified, or rationalized in some other way. Surely, they trust their own instincts, and they likely don't have any problems violating the fourth amendment rights of someone __if it leads to their arrest__ for some other crime that they initially suspected them of. On top of that, as the fourth amendment is typically violated by those in power, and the cops tend to be in power, the protestors there tend to harbor animosity.

I could go on forever, but I don't think you're far off the mark, except that you drew the line between left wing and right wing, and I think you're undervaluing how much a factor police bias plays in the issue.

mlangdon12y ago

The bias of the police against leftwing issues is part and parcel of the power structure that makes life pretty sweet for mildly affluent white males.

Look into the history of gun control. When the Black Panthers were talking about the second amendment, Ronald Reagan, et al, were for control.

bmelton12y ago

I'm an avid civil rights supporter, and unlike the ACLU, for me, that includes the second amendment. I've studied the second amendment extensively, and you're completely right. Gun control has primarily been a tool for oppression, in this country and before.

Maybe (being neither Democrat nor Republican) I just don't think in terms of left vs. right, but I definitely see your point. Having been involved with both left and right-wing protests though, at least a part of it is how the officers are treated. I've been at fourth amendment rallies and had pleasant conversation with cops, despite being there for a 'left-wing' purpose, and without giving any secret Republican handshakes or anything.

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