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Here's my take on this dynamic:
WEF, WTF demonstrators are demonstrating, as a community of concerned individuals who may not have an immediate, direct stake (but of course a long-term, more civic-minded stake), against multinationals that are deliberately exploitative and proceed with the air of having a right to just about anything they can lay their hands upon and get away with, which these meetings of theirs are more and more about making sure they can get away with it. There are small eruptions of mob rule which think it's a good idea to smash up locally-owned franchises of these MNCs, but these are not officially condoned, and on the whole the demonstrations are more about ideas than actions. The police interfere in this dialogue (or really, two separate monologues) because, as paid enforcers of the status quo, it is perceived to be in their own best interests, in their identity as cops, that the way things are currently arranged be allowed to continue for their own fiscal security.
Blackshirts are demonstrating as individuals disguised as groups, thus while their rhetoric may speak more about the detriment to society that female-initiated divorces (which I'd wager a good majority are), their actions are more about their personal feelings of disempowerment, which they counteract through intimidation that only the bravado a mob mentality affords them. In this case, the official policy is to feed the sense of personal disenfranchisement by telling them that they are victims of a societal pandemic in which the wimminfolk feel free to break up the family unit (ignoring, of course, their own role in bringing the unit to that point), and falling back on marriage as a contract under which the wife is property of the husband (though there is no true exchange anymore, thus that assumption is invalidated) it is therefore the wife who has violated that contract. The police, who more often than not represent "the establishment" which created that dynamic in the first place, may not actively participate in such unpopular behavior, but neither will they prevent it, since they agree with what it stands for.
The politics of victimhood are tricky, and altogether too relied upon in the world. However, what sets one group apart from another is whether the status of victimhood defines their lives, in which case it is often used as a way in which not to approach personal defects or to patly explain away what has gone wrong with their lives without themselves being in that equation. WEF demonstrators are actually preventing themselves from being further victimized, whereas Blackshirts feel they have been victimized already and wish to "even the score" (a horrible meme which pervades history in the belief that somehow avenging history changes history, when in fact it creates more history which the new victims themselves intend to avenge, and so on, and so on...). The politics of victimization are those of the U.S. right now, at least on the surface, which is why there is not a sufficient public outcry (yet) against an unprovoked attack on Iraq. They are the politics of placebo, and the politics of Western medicine (treat the symptoms but not the cause), and I'm beginning to get REALLY FUCKING TIRED of its pervasiveness. |
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