20 De Diciembre..dia De Saqueous??

[nicoenarg]

I might be wrong but I wouldn't expect "grassroots" to just BOOM one day and come into existence as a formidable force. It takes time. Sometimes it takes a long time. Anyway, my goal is not to promote overthrow of government so that is that.

As for expecting the government to name call people who disagree with them. Its precisely when the government forgets that they serve the people is when people take actions such as burning couches on streets. And no one's trying to dismantle the government, people are demanding the government get their house in order. Lets see...I pay taxes on which the government survives and then they steal all the money and what I should protest the way they're happy with?

Anyway, when people are constantly not getting heard, they will take measures that seem illogical. Like for example, 2001, Que se vayan todos!! And here we are again, with the same group lording over the people. Like I said, they haven't been heard.

Most of these problems that we see today are paranoia. But that paranoia is exactly because of the thug government this country's had for the last 70 years in one form or another.

Civil Rights movement in the US...I don't recall there having repeated Civil Rights movements in the US every decade or so. I seem to recall from history that at the culmination of the one Civil Rights movement, the government tried to fix the problem.

Imagine having a Civil Rights movement in the US once or twice every decade and then you see the government not giving a crap, and then come talk to me about grassroots and organizing in peace.

EDIT:

Lest I'm misunderstood. I don't support the saqueos or the union strike. I am only talking about the people doing cacerolazos against power outages.

 

[EdRooney]

The civil rights movement is a perfect example. It's precisely because it hasn't been repeated and reinforced that the dream of MLK is mostly unfulfilled. Today there are more black men in chains in the US than there were under slavery. Poverty, (the fight MLK died trying to improve) is on a downward track in the US since his death in 1968.

The same is true in Argentina or anywhere else. The achievements of 2001 were not about putting the "right people into power" (the Kirchners were Menemists for crissakes!) It was about the community movements forcing their agenda on the governing class. That is a fight that will always continue; there is no finish line, because power systems will always fight back.

I would take huge issue with your "70 years" comment, because 70 years ago Argentina was at the tail end of a horrendous spate of military coups, one of the darkest times in its history. I would say its more like 213 years, or much further back since those struggles have always been there and will always be.

Otherwise I couldn't agree more with your point about the time for action being when the government forgets it serves the people. But in history up to this point there is not a government on record that does not constantly need to be reminded of that simple fact. The way to do so is through organisation, not through random exp<b></b>ressions of frustration.

 

[nicoenarg]

BTW on the note of overthrowing the government. Id never support that. I personally saw the egyptian people commit collective suicide by clamoring for change. They just wanted to replace the guy in power at the time without knowing what they wanted to replace him with. In contrast, these people protesting have clear demands, fix the power situation.

If there comes a time when the government is so utterly corrupt that they have the people as their slaves (ala North Korea) then i might change my mind about the whole government overthrow. At this point, the government sucks, but it doesnt suck enough to deserve to be overthrown.

 

[nicoenarg]

I dont intend to argue with you on this point until the end of time so I'll just say this once more. Groups organize to take action only after smaller groups express their frustrations. This isnt the movies where everything miraculously falls into place perfectly from one day to another.

Id welcome groups organizing to remind the goverrnment who's boss but if there are folks waiting to organize but dont do it because there are peopple protesting in frustration, then id rather those groups just go to bed instead and leave the organizing to someone else.

The argument "whoops cant organize today, six peopple lit a couch on fire" isnt really a viable one.

PS: 70 years ago wasnt the tailend of military coups, you might have your dates off by some 40 years or so.

 

[EdRooney]

I don't get how we suddenly jumped to overthrowing the government. You stated the basic principle: democracy means the government is part of the people, there to serve it. Any government that loses sight of this needs to be reminded. The government of De La Rúa was forced out of office because the vast majority of the country organised and made it clear that it had lost (in fact never had) this popular approval. I don't see any significant part of the population wanting to overthrow this government because of the power outages (this was my original point comparing it to 2001).

If we learned anything from 2001 it was that governments do not take action because they are benevolent, or have the right philosophies, or because they truly love the people. Rather they take action because they are forced to: either by small minorities of economic/power interests or by the vast majority of the population. This is why dissent does not mean overthrowing the government, it means the people exercising their true power to effect the government they want.

 

[EdRooney]

The argument "whoops cant organize today, six peopple lit a couch on fire" isnt really a viable one.

This is why organisation is the key. Democratic organisation means getting people together and finding out what they really want. Last night, everyone really wanted to sleep, so the vociferous minority really should have had more respect for the vast majority. Otherwise it becomes, "I want to overthrow the government because I'm angry so I'm going to convince everyone to follow me." That's not organisation, it's Stalinism.

 

[nicoenarg]

I mentioned overthrow of government and was clarifying what i meant. Calm down, no one's accusing you of anything.

No one says dissent is wrong except for the current government. In fact now that i think about it, it was cristina's people who claimed that people protesting against their policies wanted their government overthrown.

Anyway, 2001 was an overthrow of sorts. Replaced by the same folks a couple of years later.

 

[Napoleon]

Good thing, as a tour guide, I plan on being in the microcenter nearly every day for the rest of the year.

THIS is why I bring my pepper spray with me on tours. (Well, actually it all started after the French guy got stabbed for his camera in Plaza San Martin in front of the War Memorial.)

Yesterday, in addition to it being hotter than Hades, there was a nice collection of gutter dwellers making a mess in front of the Casa de Cultura de La Ciudad. They basically dumped a bunch of trash at the base of the closed door and then would occasionally slip empty plastic bottles through the rot iron work of that beautiful building. (I like to go in that building on my tours, but it's not-so-fun to explain why people are acting like animals as we pass them on the tour and that it's a normal occurrence. The doors to the mayor's building were also closed, so there were no cute little toy soldiers with feathers in their caps to be seen. :-( )

 

[nicoenarg]

This is why organisation is the key. Democratic organisation means getting people together and finding out what they really want. Last night, everyone really wanted to sleep, so the vociferous minority really should have had more respect for the vast majority. Otherwise it becomes, "I want to overthrow the government because I'm angry so I'm going to convince everyone to follow me." That's not organisation, it's Stalinism.

LOL here we go with name calling again. People did something you didnt agree with so you compare them to a government responsible for the murder of some 70 million people. Bravo!!!

 

[EdRooney]

Nico,

Sorry I thought we were getting somewhere in a constructive dialogue, but I now see that I must have been unclear in my point if you think my reference to "Stalinism" was name calling. Let me give it another try, and to reiterate, I don't think we're that far apart on this issue.

We were talking about organising popular resistance and the difference between what happened in 2001 and last night's caceroleros. My contention is that the difference is while the first came from a groundswell of grassroots support organised into community action, the latter is just an outburst of frustration with no chance of changing anything.

The difference then is the community organisation: democratic consensus of a community group getting together and democratically deciding which actions to take for the best of all. This is democracy in its purist form. The latter is the opposite, because it is individuals taking their own paths and screw what everybody else thinks. In this context I used the word Stalinism as a technical term, not some random name calling, because Stalinism implies obediently following somebody's decisions (i.e., I decide to make noise, everybody do what I'm doing!) instead of getting together as a community and taking organised action. By no means do I think that the couch burners want to send us all to gulags, and I never referred to them as Stalinists, but rather made a distinction between the two types of thinking, thus I wanted to draw a distinct line between the mentality behind the difference in tactics.

Last night I couldn't respond because the power went out (irony!), but I went to bed thinking we had had a good constructive dialogue, but now it bums me out to see that perhaps I didn't communicate what I was trying to say.