Comment by paganel
11 hours ago
> than political grassroots activists have today in places such as Western Europe and North America
That (2021) from the title is on the mark, as I think that by now, 2025, it has been made quite obvious that political protests in the West can only get up to a certain point, after which you risk prison, job loss or a combination of the two (even bough January 6 and the associated political repression took place in early 2021, so maybe the author should have already been aware of it)
That looked more like an attempt to overthrow a democractically elected government by a mob of primitive brutes than 'political protest' to me tbh.
If anyone was attempting to overthrow anything, they would have been well armed. Not strolling around as if on a guided tour. Nobody overthrows a government by carrying protest signs. And grandmas aren’t using hanging out on the “front lines” taking photos with their iPhone. The leftist rioters that attacked police stations and burned courthouses — that looked a lot more like an insurrection to me.
https://youtu.be/Y6Apmdeoxys
Where the hell does this revisionist history come from?
1. Many of them were armed.
2. A mob of people doesn't need to be armed to be a deadly threat. In fact, just the prior year, someone - successfully - made the same argument for killing two unarmed people at a protest. The courts ruled in his favor.
3. Not a single person among those prosecuted has been acquitted by a jury. Only two were acquitted at bench trials. But I'm sure your opinion on this matters more than the findings of the courts... It's strange how juries of their peers kept voting to convict them.
> Not strolling around as if on a guided tour.
Is it common for guided tours where you come from to be trying to break through a doorway, on the other side of which is an armed policeman, warning them that they'll be shot if they come any closer? Or to attack policemen with flagpoles? Or to climb the walls of a building?
Or to smear human shit over the walls of someone's office? Steal documents from them?
What do you think Trump would order done to a mob of a thousand people climbing over the fences and breaking into the White House, in an effort to overthrow him? Think he'd be smiling and directing them to the gift shop?
January 6 was an attempted coup de etat and high treason, not a protest.
It was not persecuted nearly enough - participants would've deserved the death penalty.
The part of it that took place at the rally was a protest. A lot of people attended it, and went home.
The fraction of them that went on to break into the capitol was a failed coup.
I see it as a modern day equivalent to Mussolini's March on Rome.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/March_on_Rome
> even bough January 6 and the associated political repression took place in early 2021
Repression for a coup attempt is the expected and wanted outcome.
Also, please stop mixing the US, maybe Canada and UK with "the West". Political protests in France remain quite powerful, even if they haven't managed to force the government to go back on some long promised and long needed reforms (pensions).
> Political protests in France remain quite powerful,
Political repression against the gilets jaunes was quite powerful, too, thanks for reminding me. It was surreal to be stopped in the middle of no-where, Pays de la Loire, by a bunch of gendarmes who were holding submachine guns, and all that because it was still gilets jaunes season (early autumn of 2019, if I remember right).
Heavy handed policing is not political repression.
And yes, police, gendermerie and the army patrolling in France are armed. There have been enough terrorists attacks in recent memory that this is the norm. None of those weapons were ever used against protestors of any kind ("less lethal" ones have been, sometimes to lethal or crippling effect to innocent bystanders or protesters).
It was, of course, quite unfortunate that the footsoldiers carrying out an illegal coup faced sanction, while their leaders got off scot-free. (Well, most of them, Guiliani seems to be deeply fucked, and now that he's no longer useful to the regime, has been thrown overboard.)
(I'm sure someone will now chime in to explain to us how no, it's quite normal for a mob that's trying to overturn the results of a democratic election to break into a capital building while congress is in session, putting it under lockdown. And then someone else will chime in how it's exactly like a bunch of college students protesting by sitting down in the hallways of a campus building that they on any normal day have full access to and refusing to leave.)
Incidentally, the organizers of that putsch are now imprisoning people without trial in foreign concentration camps, and are refusing court orders to have them released. This is also, of course, above-board behaviour, and demonstrates that they have nothing but the deepest respect for both the law, the democratic process, and the checks and balances that safeguard us.