The demonstrators arrived late at night with a plan to set off fireworks as part of a noise demonstration to show solidarity with those detained inside. A few of the protesters spontaneously broke off from the main group and vandalized cars in the parking lot, a guard shack, slashed the tires on a government van and broke a security camera. When a police officer arrived on the scene and drew his weapon, one of the activists fired an AR-15 from the woods, hitting the officer in the shoulder. The officer survived.
Zachary Evetts, Autumn Hill, Savanna Batten, Elizabeth Soto and Meagan Morris were sentenced to 50 years in prison. Maricela Rueda, another demonstrator, was sentenced to 70 years in prison. Benjamin Song, who fired the gun at the police officer, was sentenced to 100 years in prison
The ninth defendant, Daniel Sanchez-Estrada was not at the protest, but was convicted of corruptly concealing a document or record after prosecutors said he moved leftwing zines and other materials at the request of Rueda, his wife, after she was arrested. Sanchez-Estrada was sentenced to 30 years in prison on Tuesday.
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30 years for moving some pamphlets.
I’m not fully sure I understand what you mean, are you saying that since the state will crack down so hard on them regardless of what they do, these groups shouldn’t waste time with these sorts of “solidarity protest” actions and just actually start doing genuinely revolutionary action, since the punishment is the same either way?
Correct, in part.
If they truely believe that the bourgeois state is the monstrous entity that they portray it as (which btw it is), then there are two rational options, either ducking your head down and going about your life hoping that if you stay in line the state will not come for you OR commiting to a truely revolutionary actiom that actually shakes the foundations of state apparatus. Anything in-between means that they don’t actually think the state is as monstrous or as dangerous as they portray it as. It’s not a fallacy of maximization, it is a matching of rhetoric with rational action.
Proletarians, no matter their education level, but particularly for the factory-educated, are extremely sensitive to this kind of stuff because they live this disconnect between rhetoric and action from ownership on a daily basis. Ownership will come out with a huge display of rhetoric and then never actually act in accordance to that level of rhetoric.
I remember hearing how during the Civil Rights Movement, those organizers that so-called revolutionaries think they’re too radical for would not allow people to participate in those protests until they wrote their will. Any potential protestor had to seriously content with the fact that even with the mildest protest that they could fucking die and their affairs had to be made in order should they be murdered by the state.
Yeah, this, exactly this. Those were some people whose actions matched their rhetoric.