The right to protest has come under sustained attack across the west, according to a report highlighting the growing criminalisation of pro-Palestinian demonstrations.
The study by the International Federation for Human Rights (FIDH) pays particular attention to the UK, the US, France and Germany, where it says governments have “weaponised” counter-terrorism legislation as well as the fight against antisemitism to suppress dissent and support for Palestinian rights in Gaza and the occupied West Bank.
Banning protest could be a huge blunder by western states, the way i see it peaceful protest are useful for the statis quo to serve as a release valve for pressure and rarely achieve anything. Without protests, pressure will keep building up and eventually explode into either disorganized violence or organized violence.
Peaceful protests fulfill a very important role: organizing people. and giving moral legitimacy to any “less legal” means of protesting such as blocking highways.
The peaceful protest is a very important part of the subsequent not so peaceful protest.
The western states have the sterilization of protest down to a science, granting permits along preestablished routes and promoting liberal reformist types as the “real” leaders as well as using other civilians as disruptors instead of going in with the cops as a first recourse.
Banning protests and going for naked repression is pretty much exactly how you get protestors gravitating toward organizations that aren’t permit fetishists with NGOs.
as always with the Empire, it is all projection. for every hundreth post or news you read about china being authoritah, the west did it 100 times worse and painted it in freedom colors
It’s so frustrating that people just seem to not understand that it’s a spectrum.
What is happening now is not like anything that has happened during my lifetime, in the West.
It’s just ignorant to pretend that it has always been this bad.
it is not something new, after 9/11 it has gone disgustingly in the Western Empire, I have been seeing it unfold consciously for the last decade at least and I don’t live there
Yes, I have been watching it unfold too. Meaning it has been steadily getting worse and worse. It is not the same as it was. It has never been like this for at least the past 40 years.
Yes it has lmao. Trump and his imitators are just too stupid to understand that protest is largely illegal already unless it is rendered sterile through the “proper channels”.
What do you think Kent State was? What do you think happened to Anti War protestors during the Iraq invasion? Were cops just singing songs and drinking Pepsi during the Ferguson protest or did they murder all the organizers? What did the DHS do to the Occupy Wall Street organizers?
This is how it’s been, it’s just that more people are restless now and they’re deciding to do away with subtlety.
Oh yea I remember when they rounded up hippies and put them in concentration camps.
Not since the internment of Japanese Americans during WW2 has things been even close to that.
I’m curious to understand how something like fascism can “unfold” yet not get worse?
It’s nice to have confirmation that the world is heading in the “RIGHT” direction. The capitalist system is doing what it can to maintain profits and authoritarianism is the only way forward for it. As is said, we are living in “interesting” times. What an absolute cluster fuck.
