James Lindsay [Tweet him] has a video called Mid-Level Violence, NewDiscourses, March 16, 2023
On the New Discourse website it says
New Discourses Bullets, Ep. 41A key tactic in the Woke Marxist activism toolbox is an unconventional warfare technique known as “mid-level violence,” or, in other words, strategic provocation. In this strategy, agitators will engage in behavior that, if accepted, moves one of their mass-line agendas along or that, if resisted, provokes a reaction that can be framed as an unjust overreaction (“wound collecting” or “crybullying”). They are masters at this. In fact, it’s Antifa’s bread-and-butter tactic, and its goal is always to put its target into a dilemma of giving in and demoralizing themselves or reacting and thus being portrayed as having overreacted. Join host James Lindsay in this episode of New Discourses Bullets as he explains how this malicious tactic works.
This is a good point, but what it doesn’t say is that the most successful such provocation was Martin Luther King’s march on Selma, Alabama at the Edmund Pettus Bridge.
MLK’s nonviolent tactics of civil disobedience were based on Gandhi’s—he and his followers would do something illegal, provocative, and not overtly violent, and then blame the authorities for the reaction.
Selma Bridge was the classic example. As I wrote a while back, when protesters were streaming (illegally) across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in 1965 to face badly outnumbered state troopers, they were backed by the President of the United States (Lyndon Johnson) and led by a Nobel Peace Prize winner.
And of course, that pacifist movement was followed within two years by massive city-burning riots of which these are only a few of the 159 acknowledged riots of the Long Hot Summer:
So dealing with this stuff when it starts is important.
Buffalo riot of 1967
