Riot Review of 2019: Resistance and The Western Gaze
From Trump impeachment hearings to ballot smashing in Algeria, Western media is not selling us information about the world, they are selling a sense of development and superiority about ourselves. Thus preventing us from rebelling where we are, and guaranteeing the continuation of the system we live in, which sustains unrest elsewhere.
We’ve plowed our way through 2019 and found ourselves in the same place where we’ve started. All around the word, protests sprout up over a wide range of issues under the “this system sucks” umbrella, and it’ll still very much suck in 2020. That is not to say that the riot porn isn’t beautiful and inspiring, or that staying in the same place isn’t better than allowing things to get much worse. This piece won’t have the pretence of analyzing the myriad of global uprisings and their effectiveness. It will deal critically with the Western gaze over Southern and Eastern movements — without promoting deradicalization. In this morphing capitalist landscape of digital media strategies, international solidarity and radical resistance are beautiful, but we must try to stay ahead of the curve. Riots were ours, but no more. Now they are also used to rile up support for policies, re-brand problematic people and institutions, and co-opt other states without having to use coercion. More often than not, mass media has been used to manipulate public opinion, and we must be critical, above all, of that which seems to have been catered for us.
It’s a tough time to be a politician, somehow a teenager gets to publicly yell at you at a UN summit, you’re called lame for attending a protest, and deep fakes have taken mocking to the next level… Most importantly, more and more people are starting to see that voting the “right” people into office isn’t the solution. So, one solution people are attempting around the world is to pressure those already in office into listening to certain demands.
USA
This year, Trump impeachment hearings have dominated the U.S. American news. Democrats are trying to buy time in an attempt to even the odds, since they aren’t getting any closer to finding a candidate, and their strategy has been less than media savvy. Being media savvy is paramount to Soft Power. And, nowadays, Soft Power is paramount to sustaining the economic chokehold the United States has on most of the world.
After listening to endless hours of talk about impeachment on NPR and taking the whole thing less and less seriously — it passed in the House of Representatives. Even if this helps the Democrats in the next election, what difference will it make? In order to win, the candidate with the best intentions will have to make concessions that undermine efforts to bring about the fundamental changes we so desperately need. What we’ll get are crumbs that only prolong the life of the system we are trying to revolt against.
“Bernie getting far enough in the electoral process would mean that some very, very severe compromises would have to be made. (…) Even the most modest reforms posed by Bernie would be an affront to the sensibilities [of the] most brutal economic/political/social regimes in human history.” Patrick Farnsworth
Hong kong
The people of Hong Kong have pressured authorities beautifully, and their creative riot strategies have left Western radicals mesmerized. Most people in the West being exposed to stories about HK know close to nothing about the political conjuncture and culture of the region. And yet, we received massive amounts of riot porn from mainstream platforms we never expected would glorify radicalism. That media savvy soft power strategy creeps into our psyches without us noticing, and before we know it anarchists and communists are praising Hong Kong’s calls for “Freedom” and “Democracy” alongside Trump supporters in Fox News. This happens because Western anarchists, communists and Trump supporters can be more interested in understanding what freedom and democracy means to them, than in what it might mean to those who are on the streets fighting for it at home. We can try to understand the plurality and nuance of local rebellion, be critical of all media regardless of its positive outlook on riots, and still be inspired by and support the struggle abroad.
Chile
Of all protests that sprouted up around Latin American this year, Chile’s stood out in intensity, size and endurance. It started over a rise in the price of public transportation and soon spread to general dissatisfaction with the system (much like the Brazilian uprising in 2013). Western media has covered it sporadically, if at all. Unsurprisingly, this coverage either paints the picture of a rebellious, unruly mass of people provoked by either their own tendencies toward underdevelopment, or by foreign influence of the last standing forces of the second world (or both). Neither is true. People aren’t rebelling because they are backward or haven’t caught up with Western societal standards. They are resisting the structure adopted from the West which exploits the most vulnerable: Neoliberalism.
Brazil
The Amazon caught fire, and protests sprouted up across Brazil and the world. Westerners got concerned, but in Brazil we couldn’t help but feel that perhaps they were more concerned with themselves and their own future than with the well-being of people down here. In this case, the exotified tropical landscape merged with the urge toward self-preservation. Preserving the Amazon wasn’t about people in the Amazon, but about ensuring Europeans can still breathe. What they seem to not have realized is that the Amazon was burning, again, as it has been for a century, so that Europeans can eat.
Kurds and Rojava
This year, the USA’s retreat from Rojava caused uproar across the board, even from those who would usually demand their retreat from the Middle East. Even before the USA’s relationship with Rojava was finally made public, Western activists fetishized beautiful Kurdish women with large weapons, and, as I’ve said before, this rhetoric is islamophobic. “Claiming Rojava represents a feminist oasis in the Middle East implies anti-feminism in its surroundings.” (Notes on Rojava) Ironically, turning feminist fighters into postcards when they fit a Western beauty standard is sexist, and reduces revolution to a tourist attraction. It's important to support uprisings across the world, but it's also important to look around in our own communities and instigate movements where we are — instead of exotifying the other and practicing resistance by proxy.
India
In northeast India, a hunger strike against institutionalized Islamophobia was met with stun grenades and shots. People have reported seeing “blood and brains on the ground”. Let’s make it clear: people are saying no to an anti-Muslim bill, not only to discrimination against “non-Hindu” minorities. Islamophobia kills, and we need to start acknowledging how the process of “Westernizing” is responsible for these deaths. There are regions where protests are motivated by other reasons, such as ethnic divisions and so on, but that’s not what people in the West need to worry about in terms of having a stake in it. Do you live in a place where hearing “Allahu akbar” provokes fear instead of inspiring a profound sense of respect? Then resistance needs to start there.
Palestine
Here, the protest is peaceful, though met with violence from Israeli forces. And the conflict is not religious, it’s political. The Great Return March represents an ongoing struggle the West has become desensitized to — colonization in the 21st century, and the Palestinian’s right to return home. “The events are continuous,” and, as Joe Sacco puts it in his preface to “Footnotes in Gaza,” “Palestinians never seem to have the luxury of digesting one tragedy before the next one is upon them.”
This year, however, new protests arose — Israelis for and against Netanyahu. How long can a PM get away with bribing media sources for favorable coverage? All I want to say about that is: happy 10th year in office...
South Africa
There are two movements in South Africa I’d like to call attention to. One is from students demanding universities become financially accessible in order to bridge the racial wealth gap, which still exists decades after the end of the apartheid era. And the other is a wave of crime, curiously labeled a xenophobic protest, essentially motivated by the same problem — the misery of inequality. It’s not necessary to interpret the attacks against foreign shop owners as misguided, while the right to education as righteous. This is the rhetoric that shames police brutality when it’s against students, but not when it’s used against a contingent of the population that’s unable to adequately participate in capitalist society. The decisions you make when you have almost nothing to lose, and no other choice, are not the problem we need to address. What needs to be addressed is how we’ve nurtured a global economic system that is unable to provide the most basic needs to massive amounts of people.
Algeria
New revolution! Algerians took to the streets for weeks celebrating the anniversary of the end of French colonial rule, and protesting against their current corrupt and repressive government. This resistance, directed at the farce of democracy, was beautiful because it doesn’t fall into the quicksand mentality of “at least it’s not as bad as before.”
“No vote! We want freedom!”
The question is — why does Western media need to frame this movement as “Arab Spring 2.0,” a “Pro-Democracy” protest, in order to grab the attention of westerners? The videos of Algerians smashing ballot boxes doesn’t exactly scream pro-Democracy. They are not selling us information about the world, they are selling a sense of development and superiority about ourselves. Thus preventing us from rebelling where we are, and guaranteeing the continuation of the system we live in, which sustains unrest elsewhere.
There were many more protests we can talk about here, and all have been one way or another misrepresented by Western media and its consumers (even lack of coverage is misrepresentation). I highlighted the resistance in these places not to make examples out of them, but to make examples out of the western coverage of them. And to critique that. Some can try to use this coverage to their advantage, and perhaps rely too heavily on treacherous partners (as was the case of Rojava and the United States). But who are we to judge such desperate measures? We too must engage daily in dubious relationships in order to survive, such as with a landlord, a boss, a governmental water supply company or the ingredient list on a package.
May 2020 be the year we exotify less and organize more… at home.
Mirna Wabi-Sabi
is a writer, political theorist, teacher and translator. She is an editor at Gods&Radicals, founder of the Enemy of the Queen megazine and of the Plataforma 9 media collective. Her work orbits around Capitalism, White Supremacy and Patriarchy, and the proposals involve resistance to Eurocentrism and Western Imperialism.