Protests around the world in 2011 gave riot-gear dealers a three-fold increase in sales of tear gas. In 2013, Turkey used up an entire year's supply of tear gas in just two days, before promptly ordering more. 2015 was the year Kenyan police fired tear gas into a group of schoolchildren as young as 7, and its use is so popular in Uganda that a girls rugby team named themselves the Police Teargas Rangers. Such profligate use of tear gas tempts us to take for granted the conflicts between unruly protesters and the police who demand order. Indeed, Israeli Defence Forces have employed tear gas for close to 90 years against Palestinians.
But tracing the history of tear gas tells the story of a tool that did not simply emerge naturally, but was created from the ground up for the singular purpose of domination. Of countries opposed to the use of gas against citizen on ethical grounds, but eventually caving from the economic necessities of colonial empire; of industrial owners, rich from the poison gas arms race of global war, determined to drum up new demand for their banned products; and finally, of the creeping association of protesters with criminality. More than anything else, the history of this weapon is a revelation into the relationship between the state and her citizens, and the many ways status quo hierarchies are maintained in the face of public outcry against overt expressions of violence and power.
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(This is a machine translated transcript, but we'll fix it soon)
Thank you Alexey for this incredible transcript!
[0:06] Somebody’s just crashed outside my house. As is hit “record”, some like like motorcycle-truck drove by, it’s pretty amazing.
[0:12] Well one day we can ask Alice Friedman is when the trucks stop running, does that mean that the noise outside David's window will stop?
[0:21] Well, it’s like, well, the silence will be nice at first from the trucks but then there’ll be just like riots and murders outside my window instead so.
[0:36] I'm David Torcivia.
[0:38] I'm Daniel Forkner.
[0:40] And this is Ashes Ashes, a show about systemic issues, cracks in civilization, collapse of the environment, and if we're unlucky, the end of the world.
[0:50] But if we learn from all of this, maybe we can stop that. The world might be broken, but it doesn't have to be.
[1:04] You know, David, a couple years ago, I decided to travel a bit, you know, hitchhike around Europe, do the whole backpacking thing. And I found myself in Bordeaux, France – that beautiful wine country, you know – and I was in Bordeaux, the city walking through it, just commenting to myself how peaceful it was, and all of the sudden, I found this army of police facing off against a disorganized chaotic mass of people, civilians. The police were yelling at the people, the people were yelling at the police and this was in an alleyway, right, like the commercial district of the city: anywhere outside this – you have no idea this is going, I just kind of stumbled upon it. And I was just the, you know, happy tourist-like “oh, this is what they do in France”, you know, and I'm just walking around all these people like running around. And at a certain point I guess the police fire some gas into the crowd and people start running, there's people down, 1/4 who are like throwing up on the street, people with that, you know, water running down their eyes and just in a lot of pain.
[2:11] This is pretty dramatic, Daniel, what happened to you? Where were you in this?
[2:15] I was just, I was an observer, I didn't know what they were, you know, I didn't know what was going on, didn't know what the protest was about. I was just watching all this happen, eventually went about my day. But I think back to that sometimes, about the feeling, cause there was a moment where I'm in this crowd and, all of the sudden, it's like this visceral, instinctual feeling that something has changed. And I don't know what that feeling is but it's this very deep fear kind of where: something's not right in. And that's about the time that people started running away from this poison gas or tear gas or whatever it was. And I think about that sometimes in terms of, you know, of the mob, the danger of a crowd and how when a large group of people find themselves in conflict or danger this other fear can take form and almost compel people to act in erratic ways, you know what I'm talking about?
[3:12] Authorities, Daniel, I think might call that mob mentality, but where does that fear, that chaos or the anxiety of that situation come from? It oftentimes not from the mob itself but from the people dispatched to try and control it, it feels like, at least in my experience.
[3:28] That's a really interesting question you raise there. I want to come back to that because this is something, the reason why I brought up that story cause I think back to it sometimes in the context of the things that we are going to talk about today. And particularly what I want to talk about is a little bit of a history of what was making that crowd go crazy, David, do you know what that is?
[3:49] Wine. It was Bordeaux. Well, let's talk about tear gas a little because I don't think there's anything these days that is more associated with or ubiquitous in terms of protest. We’ve seen a lot of protests recently, especially in France actually, with the yellow vests protests that are still going on there after 25 plus weeks of it. And there are plenty of photos coming out of those protests of protesters, “the mob” as the stable call them, being surrounded by tear gas fired by police officers trying to control them or push them back or prevent them from advancing in different parts of the city. And these have become the standard goto protest photo, you see it all the time here in the United States. So notably a few years ago with the Ferguson riots. But even all the way back to the Civil Rights era.
[4:40] And even much further back than that, David, and this topic’s so interesting to me because you're right, the image of teargas with protesters conflicting with police is so ubiquitous now, we see it all around the world that if we didn't think about it, it would come across as this is just, you know, always been the case, this is how the relationship between protesters and police have always been but, in fact, this is something that has evolved over the past 100 years or a little bit less than a hundred years and something that has really radically transformed movements for social change all around the world. And today there's a huge consortium of international riot gear companies that supply this everywhere from Brazil's Condor Non-Lethal Technologies, France’s SAE, ALSAY techs, Vernon Karen and Nobel Sport. Germany and South Africa have big companies that export this gear. Israel, of course, is a huge one. The United States were famous for our companies Combined Systems inc., NonLethal Technologies, Safariland and Sabre.
[5:48] There’s something comical to me, David, about a company that puts the word non-lethal into its name. You know, "I'm a sales rep, Daniel, from NonLethal Technologies, can I interest you in some right gear equipment? Don't worry it's not lethal! You don't have to worry about the PR backlash, we are.”
[6:11] Definitely not lethal, “it's in the name,” you think that's what the salesperson said? “We're NonLethal Industries, it's in the name!” And then they kill someone.
[6:20] Yeah exactly.
[6:22] Well, I guess they sort of have to do that in a way, right, because today we associate tear gas with these protests and stuff but when the product was first introduced into these nations, it was directly coming from the trenches of Europe, of World War I – that's where this gas was developed. And people still very much at the time associated any sort of gas with these horrible travesties of war that took so many lives in such a grim and disgusting way. And we'll talk about this a little bit more in a second, but I want to go back to one point in a second ago where you mentioned how we just have sort of assumed that this stuff is always been around, that it has been here for forever, that this is the nature of protest – but actually tear gas, it does have a long history, it's over a hundred years at this point, but the way that we've managed protest very much involved along with this technology, it hasn't always been this way. And the same way you know the police itself, how they operate, their tactics have changed dramatically over even the past couple of decades, we’ll get into that in a little bit. But police themselves, if we're going farther enough back and I'm not going to get too deep into this rant, well, they’re less than a hundred fifty years of their own history.
[7:31] Depending on where you are in the world.
[7:32] Depending on where you are, yeah, absolutely. All these things that we do very much take for granted: this is the way the world is, this is the way that it's always been – are not. This is the way things have evolved because of various reasons, we’ll get into it, various motivations which we hope you'll come away with by the end of this episode understanding. But let's dig in with all that said, and I'm already getting distracted, and we’re only a couple minutes in.
[7:56] You're absolutely right: the tear gas traces its roots directly to the trenches of World War I, and we’ll talk about that history, but even recently this has evolved significantly. And it's important to point out that like those companies I’ve mentioned there's a profit behind the development and sale of riot gear equipment like tear gas, and 2011 was big in terms of realized profit for these companies, that was the year...
[8:25] This was the Arab Spring year, right?
[8:27] Yeah exactly, the Arab Spring, but also we had Occupy Wall Street in the United States, countless protests around the world. And tear gas companies saw a three-fold increase in sales during that year, in sense, it has been the weapon of choice for governments around the world to use against their own people. Tear gas, you know, historically, it's been used non-stop for the past 90 years by Israeli Defense Forces at the Palestinian territory, it's been used countless times in India and Pakistan, Brazil, Indonesia, Thailand, China, and South Korea – they are also major exporters. Tear gas is used so extensively, David, in East Africa that a Ugandan rugby team ironically named themselves the Police Teargas Rangers. That's how, that's how common it became. [Laughs]
[9:22] That's a... that's sort of sad. But before we immediately jump into the history of it, I don't know if everyone is entirely familiar with what tear gas is, most people haven't been tear-gassed, fortunately, I haven't, I don't know if you have, Daniel, maybe got some residual tear gas from your experience in Bordeaux. But it's not a fun experience, to say the least. So modern tear gas is typically dispersed through a couple different mechanisms, they'll be fired from what are essentially grenade launchers, there are grenades that are hand-thrown, sometimes there are drone dispersion methods, this has been tested a lot in Israel against Palestinians recently, and Israel is a hotbed of testing technology against protesters and then the process of turning that into a profit and shipping it around the world, which again, we’ll get into. There are several different strains of tear gas, there's stuff called CS, CN, CR – they are all different mixes and each one is slightly unique, some are stronger than others. But typically tear gas works in a couple of ways.
[10:29] David, here's a quote from Anna Feigenbaum from her book Tear Gas. “Tear gases are designed to attack the senses simultaneously producing both physical and psychological trauma. In medical terms, tear gas operates on multiple sites of the body at once, primarily affecting the mucous membranes and respiratory system. It can cause excessive tearing, burning, blurred vision, redness, runny nose, burning of the nostrils and mouth, difficulty swallowing, drooling, chest tightness, coughing, a choking sensation, wheezing, shortness of breath, skin burns, rashes, nausea, and vomiting. Tear gas has also been linked to miscarriages and to long-term tissue and respiratory damage.”
[11:16] Yeah, exactly. She puts it much more eloquently than I was going to but yeah, tear gas, it disables you, it makes you blind, it makes you unable to see, it makes you unable to breathe, it disorients you, you just want to get out of an area and so it is used…
[11:32] Which is the appeal.
[11:32] For exactly that purpose, exactly. It is less-lethal, it's not supposed to, allegedly, kill people though the people do get injured and die from various parts of it, which we’ll get into. But now that we have at least a basic understanding of what tear gas is, what it does, and the knowledge that you don't want to be caught up into tear gas because it sucks. Let's talk about where it came from.
[11:56] We have to go all the way back to World War I to begin this history and it's possible that the French were the first to use chemical weapons in war. With one account that they fired gas grenades into a German trench in 1914 with Germans then firing back with their own even deadlier gas a year later in 1915. And this kind of sparked an arms race so to speak that involved both the Germans and the Allies who rushed to convert their universities, their chemistry experts to basically full-time chemical warfare researchers. And I have to admit, David, this kind of surprised me because I got the impression, I guess from my basic history education in primary schools that, you know, we were fighting World War I, the Germans, the evil Germans attacked us with mustard gas, and everyone immediately realized: this is terrible, it's unethical and so we banned it. And maybe this, maybe this reveals how poorly I paid attention in school.
[13:00] No, I think that's like the story most people have in their head and especially, “the evil German” part, that's a very big staple of the way Americans teach World War I, which is basically just in passing. Franz Ferdinand was assassinated for some reason, a bunch of people fought and get confused with all their alliances, Americans came in and we saved the day like we always do and then flappers.
[13:27] Yeah, well, that's not how it happened at all, this was an arms race that went on for years, they were at one point over 5,500 scientists worldwide all working on developing lethal gas. It was not until after World War I that poison gases for warfare were banned under the Geneva Protocol which was signed in 1925. So that's 11 years, 11 years after the first chemical attack that any international treaty was designed to ban that. And this wasn't even the ultimate treaty that took care of chemical weapons, the Geneva protocol only banned the use of poison gas in war but it was not until 1993 that the chemical weapons convention outlawed the production and stockpiling of chemical weapons.
[14:18] One of the things that I thought were really interesting too, Daniel, was reading the justifications for the use of the gas. They were a lot of proponents that said, you know, this gas is great, look at it, you know, when we come through and we're killing people with artillery, it's awful, way more people are killed with this, it's loud, it like destroys people's bodies even if they don't get directly blown up by an artillery shell, you know, they get maimed, they get shrapnel, they're going to be disabled for the rest of their life; the scientists were like, gas is clean and efficient, this is the future of combat, it just rolls through, you're either dead or you're not, it is much more humane way of killing and that was a phrase that was used a lot to justify this stuff. And, of course, it ignores the horrible suffering, the emotional trauma that occurred for all of the people who were scared of gas all the time, that got to try and survive it in these very primitive gas masks, that maybe would work for a while but not long enough, and you slowly suffocate in it or you go crazy, rip off your mask and then your lungs would burn up and the agony of a chlorine gas or mustard gas attack or something. And the traumas of war were just really made that much more dramatic by these gas attacks and that was partially why they got eventually banned. But there were so many extremely educated, well-regarded researchers including somebody that we talked about on the show, Fritz Haber, who invented the nitrogen fixation process that allowed us to have the Green Revolution that gave birth to seven and a half billion people that live on earth right now because of the ability to use this nitrogen for fertilization. Well, he was also one of the first proponents using this mustard gas on the battlefield, I think he might have been the guy who actually turned the knobs and started this whole thing. That is like very brilliant people asking for this just awful, awful thing.
[16:08] And we'll get into how this gas is repurposed for domestic and colonial use but it's not just that, you know, there is debate about is this ethical or not. But there are major players in the development of and the deployment of tear gas, generals in the US Military and so on, who used it as evidence of the western model of civilization and as a way to contrast the West with what many called the savages of these colonial projects that were managed by Empires around the world, right? And so as it becomes deployed for colonial use you see these arguments of like, look: the degree to which a country is civilized can be measured by its use of chemistry and these chemical weapons. And yes there’s arguments about being humane in the treatment of different people but it's really wrapped up in this kind of racist ideology of like, look: we are the superior beings here, we are the Americans, we’re the British and these people of Africa who we are colonizing are the savages, and the chemicals that we use against them to control them are simply the evidence of our superiority. You know, they fight with sticks and stones we fight with modern industrial products.
[17:30] All that being said, so Geneva protocol was signed in 1925, but like you mentioned: yes, there was still debate going on about the ethical use of poison gas in war, but eventually this gets phased out in war. And it turns out that economic reasons may have been what kept this technology alive since so much industry was built up during the war that it became nearly impossible to get rid of it, and these factories, you know, these chemical production plants needed, you know, an outlet for their production process. And Anna Feigenbaum in her book argues that we see the early formation of modern public relations taking place in the chemicals industry as companies sought to position themselves as the answer basically for two of the new leading priorities of empires like Great Britain and the United States at the time which was, number one: how do you keep peace at home within your border? And that primarily meant: how do you prevent all these labor strikes and how do you prevent all these workers from organizing to resist their bosses? We need a tool to break them up and suppress them. And then that the secondary goal of these empires was: how do you keep peace in colonial territories, like I mentioned. And this is because it's not great for PR when, as the British did in 1919, you surround a group of people in India in this case and just surround them with soldiers and just shoot them, right?
[19:05] I don’t remember the name of the massacre.
[19:08] Yeah, I don't remember the name of the massacre, but it was 1919, 1500 people died by local accounts. The British admitted to 350 people. But this is a PR nightmare. And so, there's this goal of, well, we still want to dominate these countries, we still need their resources and obviously, the people are not happy with that, but now that we have newspapers and journalists who are reporting on the fact that we're just, you know, shooting people in the streets, is there a better way that we can maintain these relationships, maintain the structure of power while avoiding the public relations nightmare? And this is the void that the chemical companies inserted themselves into and they began advertising poison gas as tear gas or tear smoke as a solution to civil unrest and protesters, arguing: “it is easier for men to maintain morale in the face of bullets than in the presence of invisible gas.” And that “tear gas isolates the individual from the mob spirit.”
[20:15] I want to interrupt one second here, Daniel, and just point out, we’ve talked about this before way back in episode 11 - Designing Deception, where we kind of had to create a large shift in the way the economy functioned to deal with all this excess capacity that industry had been able to create after the war was over. So World War I, we're creating all these things for war: guns, tanks, chemicals like this – whatever; and now the war ended and we don't want to just shut down all this stuff, we want to turn it to something. So PR was created, we tried to shift to a consumer-based economy, we were trying to create this idea of people having wants and they’d go out and they’d buy these things. And this will really change how the entire economy works and how we target people with the psychology of advertising that started getting going. But I think that really illustrates just how ridiculous it is when you're thinking about these people who were making these poison gases, and I guess tear gas is a poison gas even if it's not technically fully lethal like something mustard gas is.
[21:15] But say, how can we take this horrible gas that we're making that’s used to torture or kill people in the trenches of Europe and make that into an industry that we can keep these factories running domestically here in the United States or in Great Britain or wherever but not for war specifically? And the fact that we’re asking that question at all is insane, right? How can we take these weapons of war and then profit off of them outside of that war? But a huge amount of our current world is because of this, how can we take these things that we're designing for war, preparing for war and spin it around and make it profitable when we’re not in war, right? That's a whole way that the economy looks like it is now, we’ve talked about this with shipping containers – those exist because of this stuff – and it really makes you wonder just how much of the world is the way it is right now because of war. And not because like these are the new border lines that we’ve drawn and stuff but just sheer manufacturing and way that we interact with each other, and the way that the economy is and our political structure – all this because we are designed around war. But I'm getting a little off-topic again.
[22:18] No I think that's, that's absolutely true is, you know, like you said, in Designing Deception we talked about the remaking of the American economy, the Western economy to consumer needs above the needs-based economy precisely because of the factors that have been built up during the war. And so this tear gas campaign was ultimately two-tiered, in which the chemical industry owners and the military officers of the war collaborated together to manufacture and test new gas products, so we see the early emergence of the military-industrial complex occurring at this time where companies are profiting off of relationships with military officers who had to pretend there was this distance between them, but in fact, they are meeting for lunch, they're discussing, you know, how can we test your product, and giving the ability of these companies to succeed through their relationship with the military. And then on the other end of that was the positioning of this product for private consumption with salesmen visiting and distributing these products to prisons, private security firms, military branches and even put on stunts for police departments to entice them to purchase from them. They even sought out companies who could use the tear gas against their own employees: one journalist wrote in 1936, “Firms engaging in this sort of business do not wait for strikes to commence, they go after the business before trouble breaks out and persuade industrialist to arm regardless of the consequences to the workers.” And so that's also an interesting part of this history, which is at one point in time companies were purchasing tear gas directly from these chemical corporations to deploy against their own work, cause I don't think this is legal today.
[24:15] I actually was curious and I went and I tried to find if you could just like buy tear gas if you were me. And I couldn't find any bulk things, I didn't contact manufacturers directly cause I didn't have time to in terms of the show, maybe I still will do that. If anybody knows for sure, let us know and we'll add it on the web page. But you can buy tear gas grenades like one-off grenades, and I guess the legality is questionable depending on what your state rules are or whatever, but you can still sort of buy tear gas. But I don't think like Coca-Cola is buying tear gas to break up strikes in South America anymore, I think they just pay death squads to do that, it's easier.
[24:57] Yeah everything these days is layered in contractual relationships, right?
[25:01] That's a great diplomatic way to put it.
[25:03] Yeah, no one ever does anything directly: if US military wants something done in Venezuela, we likely just, you know, funnel the cash to some local militant group there and then if anything goes wrong it's their neck on the line in the media, right? There's always these layers, you know, just like companies have shell corporations I feel like governments also have shell organizations, right?
[25:24] Yeah, so if anyone is looking for a shell organization and they want to pay us to do that, reach out to us.
[25:31] But I'm sure it's fairly easy to acquire tear gas but the deployment of that – this is something that in the 1930s a company could just deploy against their workers, right, but today I don't think that would fly.
[25:41] I can't just throw tear gas at people, I think I get in trouble.
[25:48] Okay, so that's the domestic front, I want to talk, I just want to touch briefly on the colonial side of this. And what I think is particularly interesting is that the US is the one that embraced tear gas primarily, the United States was the one that was manufacturing the stuff and pushing it around the world trying to get other governments to adopt it, trying to get their own domestic organizations like police and military to use it. But Great Britain actively opposed the use of tear gas for quite some time on the grounds that it was unethical and uncivilized so that it’s completely different from the United States, it took a long time for Great Britain to come around. And I think that's really important, again, going back to the fact that today it's so ubiquitous everywhere, every single country where there civil unrest going on today is likely deploying tear gas. And so we take it for granted perhaps as just being a normal component of domestic riot gear arsenal.
[26:48] I wonder how much of that at the time was specifically also because a lot of these police officers who were asked to fire the staff had been in the war and had had this trauma with gas and we're not so sure that we should be firing gas at civilians, at least that's what I would like to think, that there was a moral question there. And especially in a lot of these colonial situations where they didn't exactly see the people that they were trying to subdue as equal or even entirely human at times, maybe that's not the case, but let me cling to this little bit of fantasy here, Daniel.
[27:21] Well, it's hard to say, David, because those aren't really the people who are, you know, at the table of these debates, right? Is the 3-star generals or whatever, right, that are having these debates in the first place. But regardless, it's very likely that economic pressures is what helped Great Britain change its mind on the deployment of this, again, going back to the 1919 massacre in India, well, Great Britain was having economic issues with other colonial projects, for example, the copper mines in North Rhodesia were very important to Great Britain. And they had problems with their workers who I just didn't want to be slaves for the Empire. And one panicked police officer actually wrote to the crown in the 30s that “there is always a likelihood of trouble in the mining areas round about Christmas time.” And that was his reason for requesting tear gas as a way to keep the mines productive. David, I wonder why it's hard to keep mines productive around Christmas time, what might be the reason for that?
[28:30] Why would mines, why would people not want a mine around Christmas time?
[28:36] Yeah, I know, this is just kind of curious to me.
[28:40] Well, I mean if it's a coal mine, they definitely don't wanna be mining coal so little kids don't get coal in their stockings.
[28:46] I know that's true, David, if no one's mining coal, what is Santa going to use to deliver to all those naughty children?
[28:56] Do you think that the...
[28:58] Or no, wait, maybe it's the parents who are naughty, right? They're the ones that don't want the coal.
[29:02] I think I know who's naughty, but I don't think we need to say. But do you think that coal in stockings is pro or anti-climate change? Is this paid for by Big Coal or is this like anti-Big Coal.
[29:17] Oh, like saying like: if you're bad, you deal with coal, but in order to get that coal, you have to extract it.
[29:23] You're like funding Big Coal. Yeah, so I don't know, maybe it’s a wash.
[29:29] Yeah, we’ll have to do the research on that and maybe do another show. All right, so I want a fast forward real quick, David, to the 60s United States because this is kind of where things take a turn. And, you know, we can derive some main points from this little history. And that's that with a lot more civil unrest in America during this time there was a reactionary approach to policing that was a lot more aggressive, right, there was huge violence between police and people who marched in the Selma marches in the 60s. And this is where things started to change because police started using tear gas more offensively and punitively.
[30:18] Right, so punitively being that, you know, during the Civil Rights protests like Selma's marches there were accounts where to escape the tear gas, to escape the police brutality that was going on, many people would run home. And there were times when police would chase them to their home, and then once they were inside, fire tear gas canisters through their window. And there was one man's house that caught on fire for that reason. And, of course, police were starting to use this more offensively by preparing to use it no matter what before something even happened. And there's one I want to draw your attention to, David, which was what happened at People's Park California in 1969, the University UC Berkeley had purchased the plot of land to turn it into something but they never did, it became dilapidated. And so some students in the area and also some other people in the community got together and said: well, let's turn this into a park, let's beautify it ourselves. And, of course, the university didn't like this, this was their private property, after all, doesn't matter if they are not doing anything with it at the moment, I'll dare you, you know. So there was a protest that came about from this. And Ronald Reagan was the governor of California at the time and he responded with such force, he called in helicopters, he had police come into the area and shoot buckshot into the crowd in one instance killing James Rector.
[31:44] And this was a major paradigm shift because it was a scene of complete brutality, right, that was against these defenseless students, but Ronald Reagan justified it by calling these protesters essentially enemies of the state, he accused the students of being “bent on destroying our society and our democracy.” And through that, he justified this use of force that the police used that resulted in the death of James Rector and injuries of others. And so I want to end the history of tear gas here and kind of reflect on the changing relationships of people to their governments and what it means when the government, let’s say here in the United States, looks at a group of students who are, you know: they have an issue, they have a grievance, they want to take care of a park, they want to do this or do that – looks at those people and says, look: they're destroying our democracy, this is anti- American, these are enemies of the state and we're going to use force to destroy them. What do you think, what do you think about that?
[32:52] I think you're really hit on a point that was some of the motivation for doing this show for me. This show isn't just about tear gas even though we’ve rambled on about it for like 30 minutes at this point, but like a larger discussion of protest and the way that we interact with the state. Because usually when you're protesting, it's always going to come in contact with the state, whether you're protesting a specific company or something of the country’s doing itself. The state is going to intervene at some point and that's where it goes from a protest to a tear gas situation or one of the other less-lethal techniques or sometimes the lethal techniques that are used to try and control it.
[33:31] I don't want to sit here and say or even like half pretend that every protest is good because they're not. Like you know, we see things like Charlottesville couple years ago which was a protest by neo-nazis, that is obviously not good. It ended in tragedy, unrelated to this. But a lot of times, I would say the vast majority, at least in my experience, a protests are people out there who just say: this world sucks, this thing sucks, this way of life right now, it sucks, I want something better, I can imagine something better and I'm willing to go out there and ask for something better even when I know that that might risk myself, that I might end up arrested, I can lose my livelihood because of that, I might get injured or in some situations, I might even die. And the way that we react to that, that the state reacts to that isn't to say: okay, you know, I'm listening to what you're saying – it's get the fuck out of the streets, what are you doing, go back home, return and stop complaining, citizen. And that has been the standard response for forever.
[34:37] These are people out here asking for something better and we respond by shooting teargas designed in World War II to murder people, to force them out of trenches so they could be shot and killed and that's our response. That is the situation of protest right now. We look at France and the situation that has been going on for months at this point, these are people saying, you know: this world can't keep on going like it is right now. And what do they get? They get tear gas in their face. You look at UK right now with Extinction Rebellion, people saying: if we continue doing what we're doing now, the world will burn, billions of people will die. And they're getting tear gas shot in their face, they're getting locked up by the thousands. When people go out and ask: I want a better world! The state’s response is to say: well, too fucking bad, I’m going to use violence on you. Whether that violence is intended to kill you or just to get you out of the streets, it's about controlling people, and that really is the core thing you should take away from this: protest is a battle between people who want a better world and those who say, “Too bad. This is as good as it gets right now. If you want the change, go to your voting booth once a year. That’s the only acceptable way for you to do it. Change can't happen when you ask for it, I have to let you do that.”
[35:50] Yeah, that's really one of the main points I take away from this history which is that protesting is seen in of itself as a threat to power. It does not matter what the people are protesting for. The act of demanding change, any change is seen in the eyes of our governments, most of them anyway, as a threat. And I think it's the height of irony for Ronald Reagan to call that anti-democracy when it’s the complete flipside, right? The people crying out for something is how we should channel democracy, not through this top-down, you know, shut up, go to the voting booth, that's the only way you're allowed to express yourself. And as another example to that point, you mentioned all these different types of things people are protesting for, a lot of those are these global movements. But we can also think locally, on January 12th of 2015 school children as young as seven, all wearing their green sweater uniform, grouped up behind a fence that had been constructed around their playground in Nairobi, Kenya. What had happened is they had come back to school after Christmas and, to their surprise, a private developer politician had taken the land beneath their playground and close it off so he could profit from the sale. And so the children responded by protesting, you know, they got in front of this fence, they started chanting and dancing and they beat on the metal fence. And you can watch a video of this online, just search: “schoolchildren Nairobi Kenya 2015 protest”, you'll find it. And the response was: police showed up in riot gear and then they fired tear gas into a crowd of students. And several of these children were hospitalized by what one witness described as brutality beyond words and beyond description.
[37:44] Well, this is what I’m talking about, this is the violence that is inherent in asking for something. These kids want a playground which already belongs to them and there they weren't like asking for something new: just give me back what we've already been using. But somebody's property rights got in the way, this politician who is able to use the violence of the state to his own personal profit, he comes in, redefines the rules, takes this thing. And instead of any rational world where we would say: well, of course, the children are the ones using this, the children are the ones that deserve the land, not some guy who can come in here. And even if it's a legal process, it's wrong. It's always important to remember that just because something is legal, does not make it anything even remotely ethical or proper or moral or whatever. And twist that even further by using this violence to control these kids, to teach them not only like: oh, you wrong, get out of here – but if you ever act up against the state or property or anything again, you will face what is essentially the threat of death.
[38:44] Another thing that occurred to me about this where any type of protest is seen as anti-whatever government you are, there's this flattening of the concept of protesting in general, right? Just the way we use language in modern society has this effect of flattening issues a lot. Very often to the benefit of power. But just consider, David, like the word protest and protester and how this is used in media anytime a group of people has a grievance.
[39:14] But there are so many diverse reasons why someone would be “protester.” But the media's use of this single word, this very flattening language, has the effect of cementing associations in people's mind with the word “protester”, which can then be used to shape how people feel about anyone who might be labeled that word which totally obscures the fact that label is covering up a number of issues that might look nothing like that, you know, what one protester, you know, has a grievance against versus another, a child in Kenya protesting against the land grab of their playground is totally different in terms of issues and other idiosyncrasies with, let's say, someone protesting police brutality in Ferguson, which is completely different from a teacher in California who is protesting budget cuts to her school that are being led by their billionaire superintendent. These are totally different issues, but when we can simply criminalize everyone under this umbrella of, look, they are disturbing the peace, they need to go home – then what we have in effect is in the same way tear gas physically dispurses people in the streets, this language dispurses the issue so that we don't see what's really going on.
[40:36] Well, I think that this language thing is a really great point, Daniel. And I know we talked about language a lot in the show, we want to devote more time to it. But even the nature of what protest is – that is such a large word, but it's really been defined down to a very narrow bit of acceptable types of protests: protests that don’t interfere with people's day-to-day life. People have labeled that, you know, non-violent protest. But nonviolent protest which was created initially or popularized by Gandhi, which was an idea that they really ran with and it inspired others too like Martin Luther King and others, was the concept that they called satyagraha – I'm sorry for all the Hindi and Sanskrit speakers out there that I butchered that, but – this is the nonviolent protest that we consider today but it wasn't what we would recognize necessarily as nonviolent protest: it involved a lot of economic violence, blockading roads, making sabotage so trucks and military things can’t get by – anything that could disrupt the sections of power in a way that would not hurt individual people but would lessen the attack that's happening on the people protesting or whatever issue there is there. But now, if you went out and you blocked the road, people would call you a violent crazy protester but this is literally what Gandhi was calling at the time.
[41:53] But because of language, because the way that power has tried to redefine what protest is and what type of protest is acceptable, our ability to protest his got narrower and narrower into finally something that more or less doesn't matter. If you ever been to a protest in a major city, you’ve probably seen that you're basically allowed just on a sidewalk, you probably have to get a permit, you're not allowed to disrupt anything, you’re there to have a sign and maybe make some noise if you have a noise permit. And that's it. And people can just pass by and ignore you. But the second you step off that road, then the tear gas is going to come out and they're going to come out with the LRADs and all these less-lethal tools that are going to be used to try and kick you out of that space because state has decided: you can complain as long as it's not disrupting anything or threatening any economic powers or private property or whatever. We saw this with the emergence of the ideas of free speech zones, I don't know if you've seen these Daniel, where you're allowed to protest, like if you want to protest a political convention or protest at the university or something, but only in a small fenced off caged area. And that's where your free speech is allowed to exist. But anything outside of that, they're going to zip tie you in threw you in the back of the van. And, of course, these free speech zones are always heavily controlled by police. They're usually out of the side of media, usually have big walls and fences around you. And oftentimes you’re not even close to the thing you're protesting. Like if I want to protest the Democratic National Convention or the Republican National Convention, the free speech zone is probably like half a mile away, not even close where they can just make you stand over there you have your signs, but everyone's ignores you because you're basically in a cage until you decide to leave.
[43:32] Yeah one of them, I think it was the DNC, where they stuck protesters under like a highway, you know, like just stuffed under a bridge with chain link fence, it literally looks like...
[43:44] Yeah, they looked like little concentration camps. And that is what the powers-that-be have decided is the acceptable form of saying: I want something better. Do it out of sight, out of mind where you can't make any difference. And if we try to do this non-violent protest that the state has decided we're going to allow at least in word and celebrate in the likeness of Gandhi or Martin Luther King, well, if you try and actually follow the things they said they do, you know, sabotage things economically, well, then you're going to go to prison.
[44:14] I want to take a step back real quick, David, because there's another main point I want to come to, but first I just want to talk real quick about the danger of tear gas. Because look, yes it's a non-lethal technology, but as pointed out, it can cause miscarriages, people do die regularly from it.
[44:31] Those school children were hospitalized because it's more sensitive if you're a child if you have asthma it can trigger that. And one of the benefits from the government standpoint of tear gas is its non-discriminatory, right? So, if there's a crowd of a thousand people and there happens to be two, three, four babies in there, the tear gas doesn't discriminate, so maybe it only causes someone pain who's a healthy 30-year-old person, but maybe for that baby that has lasting and damaging effects. In 2013 more than 8,000 people were injured by police in protests across Turkey. And at one point police use upwards of 130000 canisters of tear gas in just 20 days which before that had been a year supply. One woman who was injured by tear gas had to receive two brain surgeries and although she has a master's degree, she's a professional dancer, she knew four languages and actively volunteered in her community, this damage left her unable to read, to write and to speak. You mentioned Ferguson, David, where we saw massive protests spark after police shot and killed Mike Brown, this was what led up to the Black Lives Matter movement. And police responded heavily to protest with the violent deployment of tear gas. I want to read for you just what one person, this person who participated in the protest, the name’s Tori Russell, this is what they have to say about what the experience is like.
[46:10] “You’re no longer feel American. It does something to you first mentally before it even hits you. You smell the tear gas, as it goes in. It’s not even air when you breathe it in, so you are actually choking. Right? And then you don’t know and you panic. Mentally, you don’t know what to do. It takes away your reasoning, instantly. You don’t know what to do. Then you try to scream, you can’t breathe. It goes into your lungs, your chest, it constricts. You can’t breathe ... And all this is in like ten seconds. Then you just start crying. Tears just ow down, you start sneezing, coughing. If you don’t get out of that five-yard ratio, then you’re instantly going down to the ground..”
And so one thing I want to say is that going back to that language and how we paint protesters and these movements as violent, it's undeniable that more often than not it is the police who are using these tactics that are themselves the instigators of violence.
[47:15] Consider Tory Russell's visceral reaction to tear gas. And in the context of what Tory is protesting against, the fact that police in America regularly and indiscriminately murder innocent black people in the street, in their backyards, in their own beds, and the excuse is always that the police officer feared for their life because the victim moved too quickly or put their hands in their pockets when it was just a cell phone. Well, I wonder how many people have been killed because of police officer fired teargas at someone who then panicked, just as Tory Russell describes, which then provided the officer the justification for unloading a full magazine of bullets into their body.
[47:57] It reminds me of a story I told on this podcast a while ago when I went to a peaceful protest in Atlanta to show our support for the families who are being separated by immigration officials. And the police responded by driving motorcycles through the crowd of people. Before they did that, we were peacefully on the sidewalk, but once they started ramming their motorcycles to the crowd, we were in the streets. But it was the police that incited that violence, they were the ones physically ramming their bikes into people. And it makes me wonder: how close might some of us, some peaceful protesters have been to, let’s say, involuntarily reacting with, you know, extending their arms, responding in anger, maybe pushing a police officer. And all of a sudden, just like that, that's the justification the police need to start pulling the triggers. And again, tear gas, this non-lethal technology. It plays this double role in shaping the public image of protesters when violence does occur: on the one hand, it creates chaos. The deployment of tear gas is what causes crowds to panic. But then that panic, that chaos is what visually justifies the presence of police. We see images of protesters running, going crazy, and all the sudden that images used to justify this line of police officers in riot gear.
[49:21] But then if protesters try to cope ahead by, let's say, wearing gas masks or something like that, well, then it's very easy for public relations standpoint to point at those protesters as violent agitators. You know, look! They brought military gear to a so-called peaceful demonstration! And so, all of this plays into the criminalization of protesters in multiple ways.
[49:43] Of course, you know, when it's not the protesters who were throwing the tear gas or any of these chemical weapons, but it's just there to try and resist that the attacks they know will come from the police as the police choose to escalate the situation in order to be able to arrest the protesters and get them out of the way. Cause if you can get them out of sight, off the streets, then you can shut down whatever it is they're actually trying to ask for.
[50:05] And then, there's one other point I want to make, David which kind of goes back to the history of tear gas. But in the 20s when and maybe the 30s when tear gas was being developed by these companies and being marketed to police agencies there was an early model of this that was designed from the ground up to be shot point-blank indoors. And it was marketed as such. And it highlights the point that tear gas is not a tool that has been repurposed, right, for, you know, this riot gear equipment, it's not a baseball bat that has then been repurposed to, you know, as a billy club, right. The sole purpose from its conception in a factory somewhere is to be used by a government against its own people, that's its only function, it has no other purpose.
[50:59] In fact, it's been banned from war, you can only use it against your own civilians, it's the only place that it's allowed to be used internationally.
[51:07] Yeah. And it brings up a question of my mind: what is our relationship here to power?
[51:25] What is the relationship of people to its governments when these governments stockpiling, producing and planning to use a weapon against its own people? Why would a government ever in a million years, ever need to defend itself against its own people? Under what circumstances would a government ever be in a defensive position against its citizens? It can only be when the government is not serving its people, why else would anyone oppose their own government? If this is democracy and we are represented then why would we ever oppose those who represent us unless they are not doing that job?
[51:55] One more example, David, and then we can move on, there's a long history of protest surrounding Headwaters Forest in California in which people have been fighting to keep loggers from destroying the old-growth redwood forest. In 1997 peaceful sit-ins by protesters were attacked by police who have soaked Q-tips in pepper spray and then swabbed protesters' eyes with them. Then the police took canisters of pepper spray and sprayed them directly in people's faces and eyes from just a few inches away. This occurred at least three times and just a month or two. And a suit against the Sheriff's Office was created, the first judge threw the case out, the victim's attorneys appealed. And on a third case, the jury found the sheriffs to be guilty of using excessive force. David, do you want to guess what the victims were awarded from this very damning charge against the sheriff's use of this pepper spray?
[52:55] Based on what I know of the justice system, I would guess that they were actually forced to grovel to the police officers and beg their forgiveness and wash their cars.
[53:07] No, David, the victim's won this case.
[53:12] I know, I know what I said.
[53:13] They won the case!
[53:14] I understand 100% what I said. They won and that was what the court let them get away with.
[53:21] So what's your guess?
[53:22] Like $4 or $5? Not enough for like a Big Mac, but the dollar menu.
[53:27] What about a sad Big Mac, isn’t that their thing now? For mental health awareness?
[53:30] That's Burger King.
[53:34] Okay, well, anyway, you're five times too much, it is $1. They got $1 each.
[53:37] Jesus. I thought I was being funny, but.
[53:44] They got $1.
[53:49] OK, Daniel, we've been rambling about tear gas for a while and we’ve crossed over to some protest things. I know we keep talking about like: we'll get to this part of the show and we'll get to that. And actually, I don't know if we will, cause I don't know how long we’ve been running at this point.
[54:02] Remember, tear gas is one of the many tools that are being used to control people today, the other less-lethal weapons, if you've ever been in these situations, you’ve probably seen them: bean bag guns, rubber bullets, LRAD is the new cool tech in town – it’s called the long-range acoustic device and it's basically a giant speaker that blast a very painful sound at you at a very high-volume enough that you have to run away or to risk hearing damage – they are testing microwave guns that will heat up your skin and basically burn you from long distance to try and get you to get out of an area, those are two very exciting technologies for police departments which I’ll talk about why in just a moment. Pepper spray is, of course, ubiquitous, pepper spray is not the same as tear gas, they are sort of similar in their function but they have different specific uses. For example in New York, we don't really use tear gas here in the city because it's too hard to control within the city and they don't want to just gas people in their buildings, though they do have plenty of tear gas if they ever felt like they needed it. It's not standard operating procedure for NYPD to utilize tear gas even in large protest situations but they do use plenty of pepper spray both as pepper spray bombs, pepper spray bullets and also just the handheld pepper spray fire extinguishers, for lack of a better way to put it, it's not like your little mace can, it is basically a fire extinguisher filled with pepper spray that they just liberally shoot around at everybody’s face. Those along with the animals, tasers, to much lesser extent batons – batons are really falling out of favor, but riot shields are often used for beating people – this is the standard protest makeup today. But a problem with a lot of that is, as we’ve talked about tear gas, it's a very visual thing. And tear gas, you pointed out Daniel, was actually used to cover up crimes quite a bit, especially in situations like it happened in Selma, where they can fire these tear gas, and then in the confusion of the gas, while your police officers have gas masks on, while the poor civilians can't see anything, you take that chance in the dark to beat people away from the cameras’ prying eyes. Well, now people have associated just a vision of gas as something that is negative and scary against the police, so they really are trying to think about public perception with the new technology that’s being deployed which is why you're seeing things like these LRAD systems where you can disperse the large crowd, who doesn't want to hang out and go deaf, but there's nothing to take a picture of, there's nothing there. It's just people running away. The same with these microwave guns, they don't even really look like a gun, they don't leave any mark, you're not going to shoot somebody and leave them with a bruise so they can take a picture of earlier, maybe they have a burn but it's just a red spot on their skin.
[56:44] This is the future of protest because police departments have gone savvy and realized it's not just enough to be able to disperse this stuff, we have to do in a way that doesn't spread on social media. And I think that's really where the industry is heading so tear gas will always, always be part of the arsenal and it'll always be the last choice that they make, but I think the future is moving away from tear gas which is in some ways even more insidious.
[57:09] Yeah, absolutely, it is kind of unnerving to me because tear gas just represents, look, the need was we need something that is not as visually violent as shooting somebody. So in a way tear gas, the function is maintaining status quo in terms of our relationship to power, right? It goes back to, we have our colonial slaves to mine copper for us and we need that status quo to continue. And if it becomes intolerable to the public to see the violent means we use to keep that mine productive, we’ll switch to a different tool that's not quite so violent, at least visually. And I think you're absolutely right with the proliferation of surveillance, facial recognition, that predictive policing technology like we talked about in episode 9 - Nothing Left to Hide, we're seeing power moved towards these tools that, like you said, can control people without physically controlling them.
[58:12] Snd that is a deeper insidiousness. But why don't we talk about maybe some ways we can fight back?
[58:20] It's funny that you mentioned that, Daniel, because this really is a show at its core about fighting back, right? A protest is when people decide, you know, I've had enough, it's time to fight back. And we can warn you about some of these tools people are using, I can give you some protest tips, as well as street medic tips if you're in a situation where you are being assaulted by these tear gas or pepper spray things. And I guess I’ll get to that in a moment.
[58:45] I think at its core thinking about our relationship to state power, thinking about our relationship to corporate power, thinking about our relationship with the community when we do want to ask for something. Whether it's protest, what that protest might be, and not limiting ourselves to that very specific media image of a bunch of people on the side of the street with signs, and on the other side of street or in the street there's a bunch of cops making sure they don't do anything out of line. Or the image of a hundred cops and 20 protesters there which we keep seeing more and more after the WTO protests in Seattle really changed the way that police interact with protesters which is an interesting story, maybe we can touch on that a little bit today, Daniel. But thinking about the ways that we can take action, the ways that we can make a difference, the way that we can ask for something or achieve that something, not even just having to limit ourselves to that: can I have this? But actually going out and getting that, I think is what we really want people to start thinking about and to take away because, yeah, we're been talking about a lot of failures in this protest world because of this state power, because of these tear gas techniques and other things, but there are a lot of victories at the same time.
[59:50] Just briefly, I read another book, David, called Direct Action by L.A. Kauffman. And want to touch on what you just said about the failures and the victories because we mentioned Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Gandhi earlier, and I think they represented something in protesting that has changed. So we think about the type of civil rights protest that was going on in the sixties, the type of protest that Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. lead. You're absolutely right about the civil disobedience meant to disrupt. But there was also this kind of, you know, central leadership, there was a lot of planning around many protests.
[1:00:35] There was a lot of violence happening not in the nonviolent protest that enabled the nonviolent protest to work too. I don't want to give an entirely sanitized story of history that we like teaching, especially in Western schools and particularly in America, where Martin Luther King and Gandhi were able to change the world for the better by just being peaceful, because both of their successes were absolutely enabled by the violence of others: either the state itself in other parts of the world with military actions which is sort of what led to the end of colonialism in India for the British or by other parties who were directly involved in the same struggles alongside these charismatic nonviolent leaders – people like Malcolm X – whose actions were just as important in getting eventually to that change, but again, that's another topic.
[1:01:21] And Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. actually even wrote from jail at one point on the need for direct action among people and he said, “direct action seeks to create such a crisis and foster such attention that a community which has constantly refused to negotiate is forced to confront the issue. It seeks so to dramatize the issue that it can no longer be ignored.” I think that those goals of disrupting in order to make change have always kind of been there, but I think in terms of tactics, at least as L.A. Kauffman writes, there’s a bit of a shift in the 60s and the 70s in which protest movements and the goal and the way the people went about getting that change moved from a more centralized structure, a kind of top-down, you know, national leadership plans it, then promotes it, lets everybody know and everybody across the nation shows up, to something that was more decentralized that included way more voices in these smaller groups that then fought to enact change in their local communities. And this kind of shift as she writes takes place after the May Day Protests of May 3rd, 1971 in which 25,000 protesters showed up to organize an anti-war direct action protest to block traffic going into DC at more than 20 bridges and different traffic chokepoints.
[1:02:50] And the U.S. President Nixon at the time saw it as such a threat that he had troops from the Army and National Guard conduct mass arrests of practically anybody in the streets of what was the largest mass arrest in US history: 7000 people were arrested on the first day and 13,000 were arrested total in the span of this protest. And what was different about the tactics of this protest, although it was a failure in immediate goals, it had the effect of inspiring activism across United States to change to a more decentralized direct action tactical approach in ways that focus on outcome, that is, you know, action rather than congregation, disruption rather than display. You know, which is the total opposite of the typical protest that is planned with a preset path. There was a big protest in DC not long ago, David, that I know had to get a permit from the state just to occupy, so this is very different from that.
[1:03:52] And then on the decentralized structure, there was something introduced called affinity groups in which there are no central organizers, no national leadership, but the action is organized around geographic regions with each region having their own tactical autonomy. And this is where the affinity group structure comes in where people organize themselves, these activists into groups of say, between 5 and 15. And these are people that all know each other, all trust each other and these groups are what then make their own decisions about how to participate in a given action given a specific goal. And I think going forward, this is a really important change in tactics because something we haven't talked about, I don't think, but one thing that came to light in the sixties and seventies was the way the FBI and even the CIA in the United States actively targeted its own citizens by disrupting groups from within. This is one of the things that helped to destroy the Black Panther Party at the time with the FBI infiltrating them with informants, sending letters to Fred Hampton and Eldridge Cleaver to create relational discord between them and kind of break the party up. But when there is no organizational structure like that, there is no easy way to disrupt what people are doing, because there's no one leader to target. And so, as L.A. Kauffman writes in her book, after this May Day try and after this kind of shift in the way the US government responded to protest, there was this change because those who were protesting in civil rights movement of the sixties and seventies and those who were protesting the Vietnam War – they had done all these demonstrations, all these marches, all this sign-carrying, but they looked around and realized: wait, poverty is just as bad as it always has been, the Vietnam War still raging as hard as it ever has been. And as a result, activism in the United States turned inward and introspective and local during which, according to her, “Movements became smaller and weaker than they had been, but there were more of them and speaking in a greater array of voices.” And so, in terms of introspection, many activist groups shifted their focus from building mass movements to building better structures of organizing themselves, there was a ton of work put into experimenting with new structures to ensure every voice could be heard, that affinity group model was augmented with a spoke model for maintaining constant communication between groups. And so as this focus shifted towards these new models of participation, actions tended toward the local and immediate whether that were anti-nuclear protests of the 70s and 80s, whether it was the Women's March on the Pentagon, the movements in the 80s against South African Apartheid, the Occupy Movements of 2011 and beyond.
[1:06:47] And I'm really trying to do summarize this down, David, but the main takeaway from this history of a changing protest landscape in America and abroad is that: yes, we should support and be a part of these global movements like XR Rebellion.
[1:07:05] But at the same time, we should recognize that there is tremendous power in organizing at the local level with just a handful of people you trust to target things in your area that need immediate attention, direct action to get your mayor to make a change or your community to rally against a specific issue. Because as L.A. Kauffman points in her book, oftentimes the greatest transformations on a national landscape have occurred from these instances of small resistance. As one example, she cites the 1977 Seabrook Occupation in which just 2,000 people occupied a site for the new construction of a nuclear power plant. But to even participate in this, activists required each participant to attend 7-hour long training, organize themselves into affinity groups. And this action alone inspired similar actions across the nation and many people point to this movement as responsible for the enormous reduction in planned nuclear power projects in the US, you know, for better or worse, depending on how you feel about nuclear power. But the point being that fighting back in your local area can sometimes be the most powerful thing you can do.
[1:08:25] And yes, we need the mass movements, but so often it's just that spark at the local level that can inspire people around the world to take your example, it doesn't take much. And we can all do that.
[1:08:38] There's so many ways these days, Daniel, to reach out and to try and take this action into your own hands. It doesn't have to be going out into these streets with thousands of other people, you don't have to wait for these events to be publicly organized on Facebook and click that little attending button for whatever bizarre reason we decided as a community that is the way we want to organize this stuff up for the sake of surveillance. Don't get me started. These types of things can be small and action can be, we talked about this on the show before, just going out there with your community, with your neighbors, getting to know them saying: hey, there's a problem here, let's see what we can do about it. And sometimes it's as simple as like: let's go out and plant a tree, let's do a little bit of gardening. And that can be the little step that takes you in that process of making a difference and planting a tree somewhere can absolutely be an act of protest. It doesn't have to be in the streets battling with police officers. And I think in a way the state sort of wants us to think about the protest in those terms because that is where the state has the most control, that is where they have all these tools to subdue us with these less-lethal techniques. And if they're not using less-lethal techniques, they can always up it to lethal techniques. And then they have the final say in the type of violence and they can lock you up, they can take away your livelihood – that is their battleground and that's why they want you to fight it. But if you turn to other places and these small little nooks that the state power doesn't quite reach, then you can really start pushing back.
[1:10:03] You can take in your hands these things that people like Gandhi were talking about with economic sabotage. And I don't think I can actually say anything here without putting myself in legal trouble but there are lots of options available to people who want to make a difference, not in the way that the media has decided that we're going to define the word protest. Protest is anytime you say: I want something better and then you do something about it. Because you're protesting the situation that you find yourself in and you're making a difference in that process, you're taking action and that's the important part to do there. A couple of traditional protest tips I just want to make real quick.
[1:10:37] These may vary based on where you are and I don't want to scare people from attending protests because the vast majority of protests do not end violently, they do not end in tear gas, but a couple of things to keep in mind I guess, is one, be very aware of your arrest ability. If you can't get arrested, don't get in a situation where you will be. If things are starting heating up, get out of there. This is especially important if you're an immigrant if you have to take care of people, if you have a job you can't lose. There's no need to be a hero, there are people out there who can be arrested and they will do that. And furthermore, you know, let people know this too so they don't accidentally get you into situations where you can be arrested because they're not paying attention. On the same flip side, if you can be arrested, and you want to be arrested for some reason like Extinction Rebellion is planning on doing: to try and get as many people as possible to be arrested.
[1:11:28] Don’t put people who can't get arrested in danger in your attempts to be arrested. Because yeah, you might be fine, you might have bail money, you might have somebody who's there to come and get you out, you might not get fired. But if you accidentally get somebody arrested who can't be, they might be deported, they might end up homeless – these are things you need to keep in mind, it's not just about you, it's about the people around you. And so knowing who those people are important in making sure that you yourself don't make things worse. And I say this a lot to people who are new in protest, who are excited to really get out there: be mindful, you're part of a crowd, you’re part of the community and that should be first and foremost in your head, not some martyr or hero thing or whatever.
[1:12:08] Safety stuff, it depends on what the season, we're coming up to protest season right now, it's going to get hot around the country, make sure you have plenty of water. Most protest injuries I see are because people are not drinking so make sure you have water, make sure you have snacks if you're diabetic or whatever, make sure you have things to keep your blood sugar up. Know the local laws: if you can't step on the streets and you don't want to get arrested, don't do that. If you can't mask yourself in your district, don't wear a mask. All of these things are important. Wear your sunscreen that is always important, make sure you’re dressing properly: hats are great, hats with bills are even better cause they can slightly hide your face. I recommend bringing a backpack because not only can you store stuff in it, but you can also spin around and use it as a sort of shield if the cops ever bring out bean bag guns or something. The move is: turn your back to the cop, put your hand over your neck, drop your head down and walk away. And that is the most secure you can be. Your protest will probably have street medics if it's well done, find them and they will help you, they have water and snacks and whatever other things you need. Don't be afraid to run away from situations you don't feel comfortable in. If you do get pepper-sprayed, we’ve run lots of tests on pepper spray including a lot of people who volunteered to be pepper-sprayed with a lot of different types of spray to figure out what is best. The online myth about milk is not true as far as we can tell, it just makes you gross. So the best way to do it is take a bottle of water, do not wear contacts to protests, if somebody has contacts in their eyes, get them out before you flush them. But basically squirt the bottle of water from the inside of the face to the outside of their face repeatedly to flush them, hold their eye open, the person doing this should be wearing a glove or else you're just going to get more pepper spray all over their face. Do this to both eyes, also sort of rinse off the rest of their face, make sure the person does not touch their face, make sure they do not touch their hair, cause they're just going to get pepper spray back in their face if they do that. Go home if you've been pepper-sprayed, wash your hair immediately cause you're going to sweat and get more pepper spray in your eyes. And wash your head when you shower by backing up slowly into the shower with your head back so that the water from your hair doesn't run down your face or else you’re just going to re-pepper spray yourself. Wash your hair with shampoo, get clean, whatever.
[1:14:22] Of course, again, I don’t want to scare people, that hardly ever happens. But it is good to know sort of what to do, I'm giving you a very very quick basic rundown of that, maybe at some point, Daniel, we can go into more detail about this. If anybody has specific questions, feel free to email me, I'm happy to help. But there's probably also a street medic collective in your city that can give you this type of information. And take care of whatever fears you have when it comes to getting involved in these types of situations, don't be scared, they're fun, you'll meet great people and you can have a very visible way that you're making a difference, but don't limit yourself to solely these types of protest like we mentioned, there’s lots of different actions you can take, little-big, all in different parts of your life, that can be acts of protest. Acts of protest where you are saying: this is not good, I want something better and I'm going to do something about it. And that's all anybody ever expects from you.
[1:15:10] Well said, David, I know you have a lot more to say on this. So, you know, if people are interested in the whole show on this topic maybe, what it's like to be in a protest, what to expect. And, you know, David, you can talk a lot more about how to prepare given different situations, maybe we could do that if people are interested.
[1:15:30] Yeah, let us know, we love hearing show suggestions, we love hearing from the community as a whole. We’ve got a large great community and we love all of you. So don't ever be scared to reach out, you can email us, you can message, you can join our Discord and we'll tell you all those details in just a second. But this is where community starts so we have to begin somewhere, we hope we can make a difference together. And, as always, Daniel…
[1:15:54] Let me guess, David, that's a lot to think about?
[1:15:56] You got it. But think about it and do something about it we hope you will. You can learn more about everything we’ve talked about today, you can find the books that we've mentioned and maybe even that video on our website as well as a full transcript of this episode at ashesashes. org.
[1:16:14] A lot of time and research goes into making these episodes possible and we will never use ads to support the show. So if you like it and would like us to keep going – you, our listener can support us by giving us a review, recommending us to a friend or visiting us at patreon.com/ashesashescast. We also have an email address, its contact at ashesashes. org. We encourage you to send us your thoughts, we read them and we appreciate them.
[1:16:44] We are also on all your favorite social media networks at ashesashescast. And we are in fact looking for people to help us manage our Twitter, we're going to hand it off to people weekly in the near future, so if you're interested in that you can join our Discord which you'll find at the top of our website, the invitation link to that, just click Community – Discord and you'll be on here. It’s a great group of people and there's a chat room set up for social media. If you’re interested in helping us run a Twitter for a week or two or whatever, pop in there, say hey, and we will start getting that sorted very soon. We're also on Reddit at r/ashesashescast. Next week, we'll be digging into that IPBES global assessment report that we mentioned last week. The full report isn't quite out yet, it'll be coming out later this year at this full 1500 pages, but there are 50 or so pages of summaries for media and policymakers that we will be digging into because this is a very important thing is that we want to make sure that our listeners and everyone else in the world are all caught up on this, this is just as important as the IPCC report, so we absolutely hope that you'll tune in for that. But until then, this is Ashes Ashes.
[1:17:54] Bye.
[1:17:55] Bye-bye.
{blooper}
[1:17:58] But when there is no organizational structure like that, there is no easy… [Metal clank sound] there is no easy way to disrupt what people are doing… [dog sounds] what people… [dog barks] are what people are doing because there's no one to target, there's no… [dog barks, Daniel sighs] [Dog starts barking again] Hey! Hey!
{blooper ends}