LogFAQs > #962880204

The_tall_midget posted...

They're just mostly "peaceful protestors".

Throughout this whole thing, I've made a point of trying to keep an open mind and believe that the literal Nazis and those assaulting people and trying to burn down apartment buildings are not necessarily representative of the entire protest. I'm sure a good many of them have not participated in any of the more deplorable behaviour (though they also didn't kick out the Nazis, which is itself pretty deplorable), and characterizing the entire protest as being a bunch of violent Nazis to discredit it is no better than similarly characterizing all the BLM protests as riotous vandalism to discredit them.

That said, this is fundamentally a terrorist act: The core goal of this protest was to force political change by disrupting the economy and supply chains to enough of an extent to cause a logistical crisis. That is, by definition, terrorism. When it turned out (to the surprise of nobody outside of the convoy) that the convoy did not, as they hoped, end up being large enough for the simple act of striking to have an appreciable economic impact, they instead forcibly occupied a chunk of Ottawa and tried to use the threat of making citizens' lives miserable as leverage, as well as resorting to forcibly blockading border crossings. Those are also terrorist acts, committed well within the core mandate of the protest, and that means nobody involved can really claim to be peacefully protesting.

By contrast, while burning stuff down to stop police violence is also a terrorist act, that was entirely ancillary to the core approach of every BLM protest. The vast, vast majority of BLM protesters protested with no intent to cause any harm, and those organizing the protests did not plan for anything more than simply making the message heard. That's the fundamental difference here, and why it's valid to say that the BLM protests were mostly peaceful and that this one is not. That some BLM protesters chose to be violent at a small handful of protests (remember, 97% were completely peaceful) doesn't change that.