situationists on the watts uprising

[Don Antenen]

Apologies if this has already been posted.

"AUGUST 13 - 16, 1965, the blacks of Los Angeles revolted. An incident between traffic police and pedestrians developed into two days
of spontaneous riots. Despite increasing reinforcements, the forces of order were unable to regain control of the streets. By the third day
the blacks had armed themselves by looting accessible gun stores, enabling them to fire even on police helicopters. It took thousands of
police and soldiers, including an entire infantry division supported by tanks, to confine the riot to the Watts area, and several more days of
street fighting to finally bring it under control. Stores were massively plundered and many were burned. Official sources listed 32 dead (including 27 blacks), more than 800 wounded and 3000 arrests.

Reactions from all sides were most revealing: a revolutionary event, by bringing existing problems into the open, provokes its opponents into an
unhabitual lucidity. Police Chief William Parker, for example, rejected all the major black organizations’ offers of mediation, correctly
asserting: “These rioters don’t have any leaders.” Since the blacks no longer had any leaders, it was the moment of truth for both sides. What
did one of those unemployed leaders, NAACP general secretary Roy Wilkins, have to say? He declared that the riot “should be put down
with all necessary force.” And Los Angeles Cardinal McIntyre, who protested loudly, did not protest against the violence of the
repression, which one might have supposed the most tactful policy at a time when the Roman Church is modernizing its image; he denounced “this
premeditated revolt against the rights of one’s neighbor and against respect for law and order,” calling on Catholics to oppose the looting
and “this violence without any apparent justification.” And all those who went so far as to recognize the “apparent justifications” of the
rage of the Los Angeles blacks (but never their real ones), all the ideologists and “spokesmen” of the vacuous international Left, deplored
the irresponsibility, the disorder, the looting (especially the fact that arms and alcohol were the first targets) and the 2000
fires with which the blacks lit up their battle and their ball. But who has defended the Los Angeles rioters in the terms they deserve? We
will. Let the economists fret over the $27 million lost, and the city planners sigh over one of their most beautiful supermarkets gone up in
smoke, and McIntyre blubber over his slain deputy sheriff. Let the sociologists bemoan the absurdity and intoxication of this rebellion.
The role of a revolutionary publication is not only to justify the Los Angeles insurgents, but to help elucidate their perspectives, to
explain theoretically the truth for which such practical action expresses the search..."

the rest of it is here:http://www.cddc.vt.edu/sionline/si/decline.html

all the best,
Don