Chaos
in Charlottesville: No One Gave Peace a Chance,
Including the Police
By John W.
Whitehead
“What has
violence ever accomplished? What has it ever
created? …No
wrongs have ever been righted by riots and
civil disorders
... an uncontrolled or uncontrollable mob is
only the voice of madness, not the voice of
the people ... Whenever any American's life
is taken by another American
unnecessarily—whether it is done in the name
of the law or in the defiance of law, by one
man or a gang, in cold blood or in passion,
in an attack of violence or in response to
violence—whenever we tear at the fabric of
life which another man has painfully and
clumsily woven for himself and his children,
the whole nation is degraded.” —
Robert Kennedy
August
21, 2017 "Information
Clearing House"
- Let’s be clear about one thing: no one—not the
armed, violent, militant protesters nor the
police—gave peace a chance during the August 12
demonstrations in Charlottesville, Va.
What
should have been an exercise in free speech
quickly became a brawl.
It’s
not about who threw the first punch or the first
smoke bomb.
It’s
not about which faction outshouted the other, or
which side perpetrated more violence, or even
which group can claim to be the greater victim.
One
young woman is dead because of the hate,
violence, intolerance, racism and partisanship
that is tearing this country apart, and it has
to stop.
Lawful,
peaceful, nonviolent First Amendment activity
did not kill Heather Heyer.
She was killed by a 20-year-old Neo-Nazi who
drove his car into a crowd of pedestrians
in Charlottesville, Va.
Words,
no matter how distasteful or disagreeable, did
not turn what should have been an exercise in
free speech into a brawl.
That was accomplished by
militant protesters on both sides of the debate
who arrived at what should have been a
nonviolent protest armed with sticks and guns,
bleach bottles, balloons filled with feces and
urine and improvised flamethrowers, and by the
law enforcement agencies who stood by and
allowed it.
As the New York Times reported,
“Protesters began to mace one another,
throwing water bottles and urine-filled balloons
— some of which hit reporters — and beating each
other with flagpoles, clubs and makeshift
weapons. Before long, the downtown area was a
melee. People were ducking and covering with a
constant stream of projectiles whizzing by our
faces, and the air was filled with the sounds of
fists and sticks against flesh.”
The
madness is spreading.
People
I know—good, decent people who value equality,
reject racism, and believe strongly in
tolerance—in their grief and dismay and disgust,
threatened violence, acted like a mob, and
adopted similarly violent, intolerant,
disorderly tactics as those they claim to
oppose.
Those
who defend free speech were castigated by those
who believe that only certain views should be
allowed to be heard.
Those
who cling to nonviolence were outnumbered by
angry mobs intent on inciting violence.
Those
who normally advocate a message of tolerance
gave into the temptation to spew hate and
intolerance.
The
Rutherford Institute and the ACLU, two
organizations who repeatedly stand up for the
Constitution and the rights of all
people—no matter how disagreeable their views
may be—have been cursed at, denounced and
threatened with violence for daring to remind
government officials (and members of the
community) that the First Amendment applies to
all people equally.
The
threats of violence have come from people who,
while rightfully disgusted by the racist
rhetoric and actions of the Neo-Nazis, wrongly
decided that the answer to bigotry, intolerance
and violence is mob justice, intolerance and
more violence.
Glenn
Greenwald gets it.
In a
resounding rebuke of those who would opt to
employ the tactics of fascists in order to
silence fascists, Greenwald writes for The
Intercept:
Demonizing lawyers and civil liberties
advocates by depicting them as “complicit”
in the heinous acts of their clients is a
long-standing scam that is not confined to
the U.S… Needless to say, none of these
legal organizations or individual lawyers
condone violence. They all vehemently oppose
the ideology and worldview in the name of
which this violence is committed. Yet they
are all blamed for the violence and accused
of complicity in it because they defend the
free speech rights and civil liberties of
people who express views in the name of
which violence is committed.
The
flaws and dangers in this anti-free-speech
mindset are manifest, but nonetheless always
worth highlighting, especially when horrific
violence causes people to want to abridge
civil liberties in the name of stopping it.
In sum, purporting to oppose fascism by
allowing the state to ban views it opposes
is like purporting to oppose human rights
abuses by mandating the torture of all
prisoners. One of the defining attributes of
fascism is forcible suppression of views...
You can’t fight that ideology by employing
and championing one of its defining traits:
viewpoint-based state censorship…
The need to
fight neo-Nazism and white supremacy
wherever it appears is compelling. The least
effective tactic is to try to empower the
state to suppress the expression of their
views. That will backfire in all sorts of
ways: strengthening that movement and
ensuring that those who advocate state
censorship today are its defenseless targets
tomorrow. And whatever else is true,
the impulse to react to terrorist attacks by
demanding the curtailment of core civil
liberties is always irrational, dangerous,
and self-destructive, no matter how tempting
that impulse might be.
In
other words, silencing unpopular viewpoints with
which the majority might disagree—whether it’s
by shouting them down, censoring them, muzzling
them, or criminalizing them—only empowers those
in the minority.
We are
walking a dangerous road.
And
then there’s the role police are supposed to
play in upholding the law and preventing
violence.
It’s a
thankless job most of the time, and police must
walk a fine line between respecting peaceful
First Amendment activity and maintaining the
peace, while not overstepping the limits of the
Fourth Amendment.
For whatever reason—which only the police and
government officials are privy to—the
police failed to do their job at the
Charlottesville demonstration,
a charge levied by both the Alt Right and the
counterdemonstrators.
The
same police who in the past have responded to
any acts of disorder or disobedience with the
full power of their uniform and weapons were
curiously lax in the face of outright violence.
As a Rolling Stone reporter recounted,
“Unlike other events I've covered where
anti-fascist protesters face off with white
supremacists,
the police make no effort to cordon the two
groups off from each other to prevent violent
clashes before they happen.”
Despite the fact that
1,000 first responders (including 300 state
police troopers and members of the National
Guard)—many of
whom had been preparing for the downtown rally
for months—had been called on to work the event,
despite the fact that police in riot gear
surrounded Emancipation Park on three sides, and
despite the fact that Charlottesville had had
what reporter David Graham referred to as “a
dress rehearsal of sorts”
a month earlier when 30 members of the Ku Klux
Klan were confronted by 1000 counterprotesters,
police failed to do their jobs.
In fact, as the Washington Post
reports, police “seemed to watch as groups beat
each other with sticks and bludgeoned one
another with shields… At one point,
police appeared to retreat and then watch the
beatings before
eventually moving in to end the free-for-all,
make arrests and tend to the injured.”
“Police
Stood By As Mayhem Mounted in Charlottesville,”
reported ProPublica.
“Could
Police Have Prevented Bloodshed in
Charlottesville?”
asked The Atlantic.
“Police
Response Inadequate at Charlottesville Rally,”
concluded U.S. News.
“There
was no police presence,”
a peaceful activist explained. “We were watching
people punch each other; people were bleeding
all the while police were inside of barricades
at the park, watching. It was essentially just
brawling on the street and community members
trying to protect each other.”
Cornel West echoed this sentiment. “The
police didn’t do anything in terms of protecting
the people of the community, the clergy,”
he told The Washington Post.
So what
should the police have done
differently?
For
starters, the police should have established
clear boundaries—buffer zones—between the
warring groups of protesters and safeguarded the
permit zones.
Instead, as eyewitness accounts indicate, police
established two entrances into the permit areas
of the park and created barriers “guiding
rallygoers single-file into the park”
past lines of white nationalists and antifa
counterprotesters.
This is
where the worst of the violence between
protesters took place.
By 8:40
am protesters had already started gathering in
the downtown area. Police failed to separate
them.
By 10 am, a “mob
of white supremacists formed a battle line
across from a group of counter-protesters.”
Police looked on and did nothing.
By 11 am, the general unrest had dissolved into
all-out disorder.
Police did not step in.
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All the while protesters were throwing
urine-filled water bottles, pepper spray and
smoke bombs, and clobbering one another with
flag poles and shields, Brian Moran, Virginia’s
secretary of public safety and homeland
security,
watched from a
command post overlooking the downtown area and
did nothing.
Moran
watched while
fights broke out and police stood by and failed
to intervene.
Only at
11:22 am, after hours of brawling and
confrontations between the protesters,
did Moran take action by calling on Governor
Terry McAuliffe to declare a state of emergency.
Only then did police mobilize to declare the
gathering an unlawful assembly, “cutting
off the rally before it officially began,”
and begin clearing demonstrators out of the
park.
There
were other models that could have been followed.
As investigative reporter Sarah Posner notes,
“At a neo-Nazi rally in Harrisburg,
Pennsylvania, just days before the November
election, police employed this tactic with
success – while the rally attendees and
anti-fascist protesters taunted each other over
a barrier of police,
they were blocked from coming into physical
contact. But in
Charlottesville, the police inaction creates a
sense of pandemonium.”
A
good strategy, advises former federal prosecutor
Miriam Krinsky, is to make clashes less likely
by separating the two sides physically, with
officers forming a barrier between them. “Create
a human barrier so the flash points are reduced
as quickly as possible,”
she said.
In Cleveland, the site of the GOP presidential
convention, “Trump diehards, Revolutionary
Communists, Wobblies, and Alex Jones disciples”
faced off in a downtown plaza. Yet as The
Atlantic reports, “Just as confrontations
between the groups seemed near to getting out of
hand, police swooped into the square in huge
numbers,
using bicycles to create cordons between rival
factions. The
threat of violence soon passed, and no pepper
spray or tear gas was needed.”
For that matter, consider that Charlottesville
police established clear boundaries just a month
earlier in which they maintained clear lines of
demarcation at all times between KKK protesters
and counterprotesters. Indeed, the primary
violence at the July 8 Klan rally came when
police
used tear gas and pepper spray
to force protesters to disperse.
The
question, as always, is where do we go from
here?
It’s a question that Martin Luther King Jr.
wrestled with and addressed in the last book he
wrote before his assassination,
Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos
or Community?
As King
pointed out repeatedly, hate begets hate.
Violence begets violence.
And as I make clear in my book
Battlefield America: The War on the American
People,
tyranny begets tyranny.
The day after King was assassinated, Robert F.
Kennedy delivered these
remarks:
This is a time of shame and sorrow. It is
not a day for politics. I have saved this
one opportunity to speak briefly to you
about this mindless menace of violence in
America which again stains our land and
every one of our lives. It is not the
concern of any one race. The victims of the
violence are black and white, rich and poor,
young and old, famous and unknown. They are,
most important of all, human beings whom
other human beings loved and needed. No one
- no matter where he lives or what he does -
can be certain who will suffer from some
senseless act of bloodshed. And yet it goes
on and on…
Too
often we honor swagger and bluster and the
wielders of force; too often we excuse those
who are willing to build their own lives on
the shattered dreams of others. Some
Americans who preach nonviolence abroad fail
to practice it here at home. Some who accuse
others of inciting riots have by their own
conduct invited them. Some looks for
scapegoats, others look for conspiracies,
but this much is clear; violence breeds
violence, repression brings retaliation, and
only a cleaning of our whole society can
remove this sickness from our soul.
For
a broad and adequate outline we know what
must be done. When you teach a man to hate
and fear his brother, when you teach that he
is a lesser man because of his color or his
beliefs or the policies he pursues, when you
teach that those who differ from you
threaten your freedom or your job or your
family, then you also learn to confront
others not as fellow citizens but as enemies
- to be met not with cooperation but with
conquest, to be subjugated and mastered. We
learn, at the last, to look at our brothers
as aliens, men with whom we share a city,
but not a community, men bound to us in
common dwelling, but not in common effort.
We learn to share only a common fear - only
a common desire to retreat from each other -
only a common impulse to meet disagreement
with force.
The
lesson for all of us is this: remember, when you
strip away the politics and the class warfare
and the skin color and the religious ideology
and the gender differences and the sexual
orientation and anything else that can be used
as a source of division, remember that
underneath it all, we are all the same.
As
Nelson Mandela recognized, “No one is born
hating another person because of the color of
his skin, or his background, or his religion.
People must learn to hate, and if they can learn
to hate, they can be taught to love, for love
comes more naturally to the human heart than its
opposite.”
Constitutional attorney and author John W.
Whitehead is founder and president of The
Rutherford Institute.
His new book Battlefield
America: The War on the American People (SelectBooks,
2015) is available online at www.amazon.com.
Whitehead can be contacted at johnw@rutherford.org.