What Standing Rock Tells Us About Civil Disobedience

By Melissa Hellmann, YES! Magazine

16 November 16

The militarized response to communities of color signals a possible double standard in law enforcement’s acceptance of civil disobedience.

he history of social reform in America is inextricably tied to civil disobedience. Women used it to advocate for their right to vote during the women’s suffrage movement. Civil rights activists held sit-ins and marches to demand the end of discriminatory policies and racial segregation during the 1960s. Just in the last week, marchers shut down streets across the U.S. to protest the election of Donald Trump.

In some cases, acts of civil disobedience—nonviolent violations of the law against a perceived injustice—are met with stern but level reproach from the state. Henry David Thoreau spent a night in jail after refusing to pay six years of back taxes. The Delta 5, who blocked a BNSF railway in 2014 to protest the shipment of fossil fuels, were sentenced to two years probation and acquitted of more serious charges.

It was surprising to many, then, to watch a video of militarized police flanked by armored vehicles bear down on the protesters resisting the controversial $3.7 billion Dakota Access pipeline at the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation in North Dakota in October. Such an aggressive response to peaceful protest raises concerns and questions regarding the state’s tolerance of civil disobedience as a classically American expression of dissent. And many worry those concerns will become all the more real under a Trump presidency and Republican-controlled Congress.

To quell the largely indigenous resistance and protect the pipeline’s economic interests, North Dakota called upon the Emergency Management Assistance Compact, a 1996 program that enables interstate aid during crisis situations. Law enforcement agents from seven states used chemical spray, rubber bullets, and stun guns to forcibly remove protesters. More than 140 people were arrested and camps were destroyed in the sweep.

EMAC, called upon to assist with natural disasters, the 9/11 terrorist attacks, and Pres. Obama's 2009 inauguration, was also issued to mollify protesters during the Baltimore, Maryland uprising following the death of Freddie Gray. The prolonged armed standoff at the Malheur Wildlife Refuge in Oregon did not receive this response.

“I think that’s what makes the government and law enforcement’s reaction to the protest really shocking,” notes Candice Delmas, an assistant professor of philosophy and political science at Northeast University who writes extensively on civil disobedience. “[The protesters] undertook the protest in a really acceptable, respectable way, and they’re treated as just thugs and enemies.”

A worthy consideration is whether the protectors, as the protesters refer to themselves, were engaging in acts of civil disobedience or rioting. According to Delmas, they followed all of the tenets traditionally associated with civil disobedience: a nonviolent and collective refusal of governmental demands in exchange for concessions. Riots, on the other hand, are outbursts of collective violence that are usually destructive. The mostly Native American activists had a clear, motivated aim of halting construction of the pipeline and were nonviolent in their approach.

But the distinction is one made in the moment. As was shown in the case of journalist Amy Goodman, who faced an arrest warrant and was subsequently absolved of criminal trespass and rioting charges for her coverage of the DAPL conflicts, the evidence doesn’t always fit the state’s narrative.

“Whenever you have laws [EMAC] that are intended for one purpose used for another—and especially to monitor what very well may be First Amendment-protected activities—that always should give the American public pause,” said Jennifer Cook, policy director of the American Civil Liberties Union of North Dakota. “Greater scrutiny should be used for how law enforcement is using this particular law and whether they should be using it at all for this purpose.”

Painting a protest as a riot is a form of silencing, Delmas said, that shows the government’s unwillingness to engage with activists or view them as political agents with legitimate concerns. “You’re really putting it far on the opposite side of the spectrum from civil disobedience. I think it’s a way of ending the conversation to label it riots,” she said.

The First Amendment protects individual rights to freedom of religion, speech, press, petition, and assembly. But the legal waters are murky at Standing Rock, where protesters were pushed off private property that some argue belonged to the Standing Rock Sioux tribe under the 1851 Treaty of Fort Laramie. Individuals generally don’t have First Amendment rights on others’ private property, according to the First Amendment Center. The Bill of Rights provides individual liberty protection from actions by government officials, but private property, of course, is not government-owned.

“When you get a scenario where you have private land and public land all intermixed and you have such a heavily militarized police force, it’s very hard to determine sometimes where First Amendment protections lie and where they have diminished,” says Cook of the ACLU.

But what she finds most alarming is that EMAC was requested to deliver heavy-handed militarized crackdown against primarily people of color at Standing Rock and in Baltimore.

The militarized response to communities of color signals a possible double standard in law enforcement’s acceptance of civil disobedience, said Judith LeBlanc, a member of the Caddo Nation of Oklahoma and director of Native Organizers Alliance, an organization that provides training and support for Native activists.

“[Racism] is built into the system and it has specific, very specific impacts on communities of color in general and Indians in particular. We’re actually being called trespassers on land that historically has been our land,” she said in reference to the 1851 treaty.

Civil disobedience has also been integral to the fight for indigenous rights. Native Americans used peaceful protest to defend themselves from European settlers. They hid their children from government officials who wished to assimilate them into White American culture through boarding schools. In 1969, a group calling themselves Indians of All Tribes began a 19-month-long occupation of Alcatraz Island to demand better treatment and bring public awareness to Indian termination, a 20-year national policy designed to acculturate Native Americans and end recognition of tribal sovereignty.

In August, the Native Organizers Alliance continued the tradition by holding a national training in Seattle. It explored how to build a grassroots base in Indian communities, and taught different forms of direct action as well as how to judge what would be most effective in the moment of struggle. For example, soft direct action involves dropping a banner, while hard action includes locking down construction equipment. A majority of the training’s 25 participants went on to join the Standing Rock protest.

In blocking the DAPL, Native protesters are calling on the government to phase out rather than increase fossil fuel development and consult with tribes prior to launching infrastructure projects.

“We either save Mother Earth together or she will perish,” LeBlanc said, adding that the protest at Standing Rock isn’t only about fighting for Native American rights. “When we fight, it is not simply for our land, our air, and our water. It is for all of the people.”

Don't Call Clinton a Weak Candidate: It Took Decades of Scheming to Beat Her

By Rebecca Solnit, Guardian UK

15 November 16

Years of Republican plots, an opponent deified by television, and FBI smears stood in her way – and she still won the popular vote by more than Kennedy did

ometimes I think I have never seen anything as strong as Hillary Clinton. That doesn’t mean that I like and admire everything about her. I’m not here to argue about who she is, just to note what she did. I watched her plow through opposition and attacks the like of which no other candidate has ever faced and still win the popular vote. To defeat her it took an unholy cabal far beyond what Barack Obama faced when he was the campaign of change, swimming with the tide of disgust about the Bush administration. As the New York Times reported, “By the time all the ballots are counted, she seems likely to be ahead by more than 2m votes and more than 1.5 percentage points. She will have won by a wider percentage margin than not only Al Gore in 2000 but also Richard Nixon in 1968 and John F Kennedy in 1960.”

You can flip that and see that Trump was such a weak candidate it took decades of scheming and an extraordinary international roster of powerful players to lay the groundwork that made his election possible. Defeating Clinton in the electoral college took the 2013 gutting of the Voting Rights Act by Republican appointees to the supreme court. It took vast Republican voter suppression laws and tactics set in place over many years. It took voter intimidation at many polling places. It took the long Republican campaign to blow up the boring bureaucratic irregularity of Clinton’s use of a private email server into a scandal that the media obediently picked up and reheated.

It took James Comey, the director of the FBI, using that faux-scandal and his power to stage a misleading smear attack on Clinton 11 days before the election in flagrant violation of the custom of avoiding such intervention for 60 days before an election. It took a compliant mainstream media running after his sabotage like a golden retriever chasing a tennis ball. It took decades of conservative attacks on the Clintons. Comey, incidentally, served as deputy GOP counsel to the Senate Whitewater committee, that fishing expedition that began with an investigation in a messy real estate deal in Arkansas before Bill Clinton’s presidency and ended with a campaign to impeach him on charges related to completely unrelated sexual activities during his second term.

It took a nearly decade-long reality TV show, The Apprentice, that deified Trump’s cruelty, sexism, racism and narcissism as essential to success and power. As the feminist media critic Jennifer Pozner points out: “Everything Trump said and did was framed in a way to flatter him, and more importantly, flatter his worldview.” The colossal infomercial fictionalized the blundering, cheating businessman as an unqualified success and gave him a kind of brand recognition no other candidate had.

It took the full support of Fox News, whose CEO, Roger Ailes, was so committed to him that after leaving the company following allegations of decades of sexual harassment of employees, he joined the Trump campaign. It took the withdrawal of too many Americans from even that calibre of journalism into the partisan unreliability of faux-news sites and confirmation-bias bubbles of social media.

It took the mainstream media’s quarter-century of failure to address climate change as the most important issue of our time. It took decades of most media outlets letting the fossil-fuel industry’s propaganda arm create the false framework of two equally valid opinions rather than reporting the overwhelming scientific consensus and tremendous danger of climate change.

To stop Hillary Clinton it also took Julian Assange, using WikiLeaks as a tool of revenge, evidently considering his grudge against the Democratic nominee important enough to try to aid the campaign of a climate-denying racist authoritarian. Assange now appears to have so close a relationship with Russia that he often appears on the state-funded TV channel and news site RT. He tweeted protests when Russian president Vladimir Putin’s information was included in the Panama Papers hack and has been coy about where his leaked information on the Democratic National Committee came from.

Many intelligence experts say it came from Russian hackers, and Putin made it clear that he favored Trump’s win. The day Comey dropped his bombshell, the New York Times ran a story reassuringly titled Investigating Donald Trump, FBI Sees No Clear Link to Russia with its own astounding, underplayed revelation buried inside: “Investigators, the officials said, have become increasingly confident, based on the evidence they have uncovered, that Russia’s direct goal is not to support the election of Mr Trump, as many Democrats have asserted, but rather to disrupt the integrity of the political system and undermine America’s standing in the world more broadly.”

And it took a shortsighted campaign of hatred on the left, an almost hysterical rage like nothing I have ever seen before about any public figure. Some uncritically picked up half-truths, outright fictions, and rightwing spin to feed their hate and rejected anything that diluted the purity and focus of that fury, including larger questions about the other candidate and the fate of the Earth. It was so extreme that in recent weeks, I was attacked for posting anti-Trump news stories on social media by furious people who took the position that to be overtly anti-Trump was to be covertly pro-Clinton. If the perfect is the enemy of the good, whose friend is it? The greater of two evils?

A lot of people seemed to think the Sanders-Clinton primary ended the night Trump was elected. I saw that stuckness from climate activists, anti-racist journalists, civil-rights champions, and others who you might expect would have turned to face the clear and present danger of a Trump presidency. I heard, for example, much about Clinton’s failure to address the Dakota pipeline adequately – which was true, and bad, but overshadowed by what we heard so little about: Trump’s million dollars or so invested in the pipeline and the guarantee he would use presidential powers to push it and every pipeline like it through.

It’s impossible to disconnect the seething, irrational emotionality from misogyny, and the misogyny continues. Since election night, I’ve been hearing too many men of the left go on and on about how Clinton was a weak candidate. I’ve wondered about that word weak, not only because it is so often associated with women, but because what they’re calling her weakness was their refusal to support her. It’s as if they’re saying, “They sent a pink lifeboat and we sent it back, because we wanted a blue lifeboat, and now we are very upset that people are drowning.”

Or, as my brilliant friend Aruna d’Souza put it Wednesday: “At some point soon we need to discuss whether Sanders would have been able to win, but helpful hint: today, it just sounds like you’re saying: ‘The Democrats should have cut into Trump’s lead in the misogynist vote and the whitelash vote by running a white man.’ Let’s come to terms with the racism and the misogyny first, before analyzing the what-ifs – because otherwise we’re just going to replicate it forever. And if you think that the angry anti-establishment vote won (hence Sanders would have fared better), let me remind you that patriarchy and white supremacy are the cornerstones of the Establishment.”

I know that if Clinton had been elected there would not be terrified and weeping people of color all over the country, small children too afraid to go to school, a shocking spike in hate crimes, high-school students with smashed dreams marching in cities across the country. I deplore some of Hillary Clinton’s past actions and alignments and disagreed with plenty of her 2016 positions. I hoped to be fighting her for the next four years. But I recognize the profound differences between her and Trump on race, gender, immigration and climate, and her extraordinary strength, tenacity and courage in facing and nearly overcoming an astonishing array of obstacles to win the popular vote. Which reminds us that Trump has no mandate and sets before us some of the forces arrayed against us.