Demonstrations and Riots

The difference is of degree rather than kind, and it is easy for one to turn into the other.

There is something odd about a crowd of supposedly peaceful people marching on a line of soldiers or police. Do they really expect to be allowed through, do they intend to fight their way through, or are they just pretending ?

I have reservations about applying ‘peaceful’ to any large gathering of people that blocks streets or obstructs access to public buildings. Even if no force is actually used, force is implicit in such demonstrations, because such demonstrators are creating a physical obstacle to other people’s access.

Such demonstrations are justifiable only as part of an attempt to remove the government, or to change government policy, by non constitutional means. That is only justifiable if there are no constitutional means for achieving the same ends because the government is a tyranny.

Police and troops defending a constitutional government against coercion by a large group of people are justified in firing, whether or not members of the crowd fire first.

Soldiers defending a tyranny are likely to fire, because that is what the servants of  tyrannies do.

In neither case is it sensible to be shocked or outraged by the event. It is indeed reasonable to be outraged by the existence of a tyranny, but having recognised it for what it is, there seems little room for further indignation because it behaves as we should expect.

Those observations were prompted by the recent discussion of the so called ‘Bloody Sunday’ shootings of 1972.

It appears that soldiers fired without being given orders to do so. That is a serious failure of discipline. The deaths seem to have been counter productive, that is a good reason for the soldiers having not been ordered to fire. Therefore the soldiers should not have fired. However that does not show that those who died were innocent victims. The good reason for not shooting them is that their deaths were very inconvenient. The fuss and bother on the part of friends and families is quite unjustified.