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Jun. 30th, 2024 11:14 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
kradeelavOn a rainy afternoon, days after the election, I took a Trailways bus to Syracuse for my first-ever protest. (It’s legal for soldiers to attend protests out of uniform.) Join the Impact had planned events in four hundred cities that day, with an estimated million people in worldwide attendance. I’d read about the protest on Facebook and reached out to the local organizers—a lesbian student and an older gay man—to see what I could do to help. Even with the nasty weather, nearly two hundred people showed up at city hall—mostly younger queers, but a few older couples too. We had rainbow flags and posters that read no h8 and married with pride. I carried a sign that said, in rainbow lettering, equality @ the house, @ the workplace, @ the battlefield. Seeing other people feeling just as hurt as I did restored my sense of being recognized as fully human.
But as I counted the crowd, I suddenly thought of the insurgency and counterinsurgency tactics I spent all day studying. Peaceful protest got the Iraqis nowhere. Our soldiers would more or less laugh at the Iraqis who tried civil disobedience. The people with the signs could just be mowed down; they were docile. It was the people who fought back, who refused to move, who even pushed the crowd out of the way as a way of taking a stand and showing political agency—those were the ones who concerned the military. As one major (who worked in operations, not intelligence) had succinctly explained at the base: “We don’t negotiate with protesters—but we sure as hell negotiate with mobs.”
- readme.txt (Chelsea Manning)
But as I counted the crowd, I suddenly thought of the insurgency and counterinsurgency tactics I spent all day studying. Peaceful protest got the Iraqis nowhere. Our soldiers would more or less laugh at the Iraqis who tried civil disobedience. The people with the signs could just be mowed down; they were docile. It was the people who fought back, who refused to move, who even pushed the crowd out of the way as a way of taking a stand and showing political agency—those were the ones who concerned the military. As one major (who worked in operations, not intelligence) had succinctly explained at the base: “We don’t negotiate with protesters—but we sure as hell negotiate with mobs.”
- readme.txt (Chelsea Manning)
