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Governments should be terrified of riots. Unless you’re capable of sending in the troops and shooting to kill (like China or North Korea) no government has the ability to stop a riot when it gets large enough. 100 police cannot stop 1,000 rioters, much less 10,000. I believe that many in government on the left treated left wing protests with kid gloves partly out of knowledge of how difficult it is to control riots, but mostly from ideological commitments that favored the rioters cause. Now those same officials think they can crack down on right wing rioters successfully, and they will find they’re sorely mistaken. The best way to stop rioters is to stop the riot from beginning in the first place: if you let it get this far, with this much built up resentment, and having shattered the cultural value that rioting is wrong (which might have otherwise kept normies from jointing in), there may be no way to put the genii back in the bottle. At this point there may be nothing they can do but hunker down and try to mitigate the damage until the riots burn themselves out.
nonsense
tear gas, water cannons, rubber bullets exists
you can arrest people
Absolutely. If this was true France would have a revolution every second month. It’s really not that difficult to stop rioting and modern states got scary good at it.
The fact that riots can be easily contained is proof by negative: rioting farmers and strikers are easily corralled and contained, so why are pro-palestine and blm protests allowed to run unchecked.
There will ultimately be a very severe reckoning about visible disparities in police actions within western countries: Jan 6th and Charlottesville rioters are ground to the dirt, but BLM and Hamas protests goes unimpeded. The left wing media ecosystem can pretend it didn't happen and keep its adherents in the Guardian-MSNBC-Vox-Slate-Newrepublic bubble of liberal comfort, but the images get circulated out regardless. This disparity will be taken as proof of institutional capture by traitors who embolden disruptive actors, and riots will give way to rebellion in due time.
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Most governments are capable of sending in the troops and shooting to kill if it becomes necessary. And they have a whole arsenal of lesser options. That includes the US and the UK. The only time it's not possible is when the troops might not be reliable (e.g. Venezuela). They can indeed pretend to be powerless in the face of riots for things they like, and crush riots for things they don't like, January 6 style.
The British police were able and willing to contain the 2011 London riots within 72 hours - for those positing political motivations, that was despite the 2011 riots over-representing blacks and nominally being against racist policing (the police had shot a black gangbanger who was wanted for illegal gun possession and who had, but did not fire, a gun when he was shot).
The anti-immigrant riots we are seeing now have been the first thing since 2011 with close to that level of destruction. So unless we see a dramatically harsher response (which is unlikely - the sentences handed down in 2011 were notoriously harsh, as they should be) I don't think this is a case of obvious two-tier policing. Both the UK BLM protests and the recent Palestinian protests were an order of magnitude less violent than 2011 or the last few days.
Right-wing media claimed that the Southend machete fight was an example of minorities being allowed to run riot by the police, but in fact the participants were arrested and at least one has been charged with attempted murder.
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I'm not actually sure the British army would be willing to use live ammunition against protestors that aren't currently storming Buckingham palace, and I definitely don't think the US army would- they waited until the J6 protestors went home before arresting them, after all.
The national guard is regularly deployed during large riots. The marine were deployed during the LA riots. Though that was prior to the Navy and Marine Corp being added to Posse Comitatus in 2021.
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The British army has 30+ years of experience acting as a supplementary police force from their time in the Troubles in Northern Ireland, not to mention the Northern Irish police who still deal with at least one riot a year (the last one was yesterday iirc).
If the rioting in England gets serious they've got plenty of institutional experience and lots of active Northern Irish policemen to call upon. They're more equipped than most to employ the military against rioters without jumping straight into shooting people.
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Except Ashli Babbitt. They shot her. If they'd needed to shoot more, they'd have shot more.
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Should be, perhaps, but what I suspect will happen is the full hammer of the state will be brought down upon these protests while they are small, pour encourager les autres. This is possible pretty much only because white Brits are an acceptable target for state violence in a way that no other group would be; the same people who were bemoaning the kicking of a muslim suspect (who later turned out to be the aggressor once video was released by police, another case of withholding relevant information making things worse) in the head at MAN last week are practically begging the police to bring out the shotguns this week. The people bemoaning 5-year sentences for JSO disrupting a national motorway will be calling for life sentences for these folks.
Two-Tier Kier's tactics only work because there's a large enough contingent of -- and I don't use this word lightly -- traitorous whites who will sell out their own race for a headpat from a minority, to feel like "one of the good ones".
The contingent isn't large, except for where it matters: in the civil service and universities. Look at Young Labour to see the threat that Starmer is facing: the man is basically a reformed socialist and he managed to annihilate Momentum and Corbyn to FINALLY kick out years of dysfunctional Tory government, and Starmer STILL has to keep in mind a militant left that wants to open the borders entirely and drown out the UK in a sea of loyal muslim socialists.
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