Why the Media Loves the Violence of Protesters and Not of Banks

[marmar]

from TomDispatch:



Rebecca Solnit, Why the Media Loves the Violence of Protesters and Not of Banks
Posted by Rebecca Solnit at 9:40am, February 21, 2012.


In December 2001, 110 of 112 revelers at a wedding died, thanks to a B-52 and two B-1B bombers using precision-guided weapons to essentially wipe out a village in Eastern Afghanistan (and then, in a second strike, to take out Afghans digging in the rubble). The incident got next to no attention here. It wasn’t, after all, a case of American “violence,” but a regrettable error. No one thought to suggest that the invasion of Afghanistan should be shut down because of it, nor was it discredited due to that mass killing.

It had been a mistake. As would be the case with those other weddings obliterated by U.S. air power in Iraq and Afghanistan in the years to come. As were the funerals and baby-naming rites blasted away in those later years. As have been, more recently, the more than 60 children killed by CIA drone strikes in the Pakistani tribal borderlands, the funerals hit by those same drones, and the recently documented secondary strikes -- as in that December 2001 attack -- on rescuers trying to pull the wounded out of the rubble.

......(snip).....


Mad, Passionate Love -- and Violence
Occupy Heads into the Spring

By Rebecca Solnit


When you fall in love, it’s all about what you have in common, and you can hardly imagine that there are differences, let alone that you will quarrel over them, or weep about them, or be torn apart by them -- or if all goes well, struggle, learn, and bond more strongly because of, rather than despite, them. The Occupy movement had its glorious honeymoon when old and young, liberal and radical, comfortable and desperate, homeless and tenured all found that what they had in common was so compelling the differences hardly seemed to matter.

Until they did.

Revolutions are always like this: at first all men are brothers and anything is possible, and then, if you’re lucky, the romance of that heady moment ripens into a relationship, instead of a breakup, an abusive marriage, or a murder-suicide. Occupy had its golden age, when those who never before imagined living side-by-side with homeless people found themselves in adjoining tents in public squares. ..............(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/175506/tomgram%3A_rebecca_solnit%2C_why_the_media_loves_the_violence_of_protesters_and_not_of_banks/