On July 9, in an unprecedented takeover of a modern regime in a time of strenuously guarded neoliberal globalization, protestors in Sri Lanka occupied seats of government power without the use of weapons. Those in power were left alive despite their goons attacking protestors and journalists. In the aftermath, confused international media outlets continue to create far-fetched narratives that fail to capture cultural nuances while the powerful call for the protection of the right to peaceful protest.
Peaceful. Why must they so insist?
For months, daily life here in Sri Lanka has been marked by rolling power cuts and medicine and fuel shortages. People have turned to wood burning stoves. People sit in the dark sweltering heat to pass the time. People on the street cry out loud in desperation. Their screams reverberate. All this is compounded by exponential increases in food prices. Somehow the culprit has become “inflation” rather than also including the partner-in-crime that is the greed of companies to maintain status quo profit margins (are we all pretending the Indian Oil Corporation did not make record profits this year as they priced the poor out of fuel affordability?). Capitalism, after all, seems to always know how to survive near fatal bouts of impending collapse.
Regardless, stories float through the local news of people dying while waiting in line for days in endless cues. People are dying without access to basic medication. People are trying to survive on one meal a day. Nearly a third of the country is food insecure, according to the UN. People are going without because they simply have nothing. This is economic policy gone wrong, they say. However, despite the fact that the root causes of the current crisis are directly traceable to arrogant and corrupt politicians, rather than say karma or the Holy Ghost, it is still not considered violence in media narratives locally or internationally. Economies collapse, they say. It’s the cycle of nation-states and capitalism.
Yet a house on fire incites harsh rhetoric against “violent” protests. Protests must be peaceful, they condemn while airing scenes of smoke and fire for ratings. The house owner mourns the loss of his books while claiming journalists outside were “allegedly” beaten. State actors can kill or try to kill with their actions and inactions but those who fight back against this must do so peacefully. How can we live in a time when the brutal attack on journalists and protestors is placed side-by-side with a house on fire regardless of whose house it is and regardless of who set it alight? Are we saying both are equally “violent”? What about this notion of the sanctity of private property that has media consumers tightly bound in a daze of overtly self-conscious classism?
Whose sensibilities need to be protected?
It may have to do with how property links to ideas about freedom. In their monumental work, The Dawn of Everything, Graeber and Wengrow write, “In the [Native] American view, the freedom of the individual was assumed to be premised on a certain level of ‘baseline communism’, since, after all, people who are starving or lack adequate clothes or shelter in a snowstorm are not really free to do much of anything, other than whatever it takes to stay alive. The European conception of individual freedom was, by contrast, tied ineluctably to notions of private property. Legally, this association traces back above all to the power of the male household head in ancient Rome, who could do whatever he liked with his chattels and possessions, including his children and slaves. In this view, freedom was always defined – at least potentially – as something exercised to the cost of others.” Property means having something another does not and being able to use the state to protect it. Like a collection of 2,500 books.
Are the media portrayals regurgitating this age old Eurocentric obsession with property and freedom? If so, perhaps we can clarify what the defense of private property actually means in the modern world of globalization. The defense of private property is the defense of inequality couched in the safe and secure language of meritocracy and legality. It is the defense of systemic injustices and outrageous inheritances of wealth that have enlarged the gap between social groups. It is the defense of a few living in castles while millions live nowhere, their lives, stories, and struggles slowly erased by tides of exploitation rushing ashore. It is the defense of the system that produces brutally violent outcomes where hundreds of thousands of children starve to death while a few take joy rides to space. It is the defense of violence itself.
Perhaps then there should be less insistence on the nature of protest. If anything, the nature of protest should directly correlate to the object of protest. If the object of protest is a system that produces and reproduces violence perhaps it is time to quell the insistence on peace and insist on destruction. Mike Davis once reminded us in Planet of Slums, “If the empire can deploy Orwellian technologies of repression, its outcasts have the gods of chaos on their side.” Let the outcasts protest by any means necessary. Peaceful, be damned.