[Peace-discuss] What he saw in the riots (excerpt)

[Brussel, Morton K]

This seems pretty bad, but just as I am suspicious of reports from the NYT on how bad things are in Russia and China, so I am suspicious and skeptical of the reporting from The National Review. The Economist didn’t relay such a report. Did the NYT or WP report on these things?
I wasn’t there, so I don’t know what transpired, but I didn’t get such views of scenes of destruction from CNN or PBS—curious. Also, I don’t know if provocateurs were involved, as well they might have been. Also, I don’t know what provocations emanated from police actions, and then federal  militia actions.

—mkb

On Aug 1, 2020, at 2:49 PM, David Green via Peace-discuss <peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net<mailto:peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net>> wrote:


https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/07/interview-journalist-michael-tracey-riots-protests/

In terms of targets and patterns of destruction, it varies somewhat by city. Minneapolis and St. Paul are what set off the nationwide convulsion and underwent the most extreme destruction, so the patterns there may be most instructive. The initial target was the Third Police Precinct building, which Minneapolis police ultimately fled upon orders from the mayor, Jacob Frey — allowing protesters/rioters to seize it for a time. A nearby Target store was then bombarded. But one fallacy that was often heard in the early days of the riots was that the “targets” were merely corporate chains that could easily cover the damage. It’s plausible that the insurrectionary activists, many of whom came from out of town, did initially “target” corporate chains to some degree. But once the chaos breaks out, it’s impossible to contain.

One block away from the Third Police Precinct building, a resident named Rick told me about an Indian restaurant and a brunch restaurant that had been burned to the ground. Was the initial target some “corporate” chain? Maybe, but it’s not as though that could be strictly adhered to as some kind of clearly delineated rioting ethos. In the Lake Street area of Minneapolis, entire blocks are boarded up and/or destroyed. Elsewhere in the region, individual parcels of land are reduced to rubble, almost without rhyme or reason. For instance, it’s not clear to me why an Ethiopian restaurant in St. Paul was subjected to an arson attack and reduced to rubble. Or why a Goodwill’s windows were smashed. It could simply be that many of the rioters were so amped-up (and probably intoxicated) that they had no ability to discern what they were going after.

Elsewhere, such as the heavily black areas of cities like Chicago and Milwaukee, “looting” broke out when there was a vacuum of municipal resources caused by the mass protests and other riot-like activity. I would distinguish this form of opportunistic “looting” from the ideologically driven insurrectionary rioting that initially sparked the unrest. If you are a black 16-year-old and there’s no police around, and all your friends are rushing into a busted-up streetfront store to take sneakers, it’s understandable why you’d follow suit. According to residents, the “looting” in heavily black areas like Chicago’s West Side started in earnest at apparel stores like Foot Locker and branched out from there. Police had generally stood down. In Philadelphia and the Bronx, I was told by residents that the acquired goods ended up being sold in black markets, such as the K&A (Kensington and Allegheny) intersection in Philadelphia.

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