Rage against Rage Against the Machine

finishing Vincent Bevin's If We Burn

Reading this book and has been an emotionally draining experience for me. I was in a slow burn rage while reading it because Bevins’ observations about the decade of protests around the world confirmed many of my reservations and even disgust with the movements for which I had such hope. (The only exception was Hong Kong, about which I had a better sense and where I saw early on that most of the protest leaders fetishized by the West were quasi racists, colonial nostalgists and irresponsible rich kids hoping for a U.S. intervention by Donald Trump.)

Vincent Bevins was the target age of the horizontalist protest movements that sprang up all over the world in 2011. He tries to capture a global picture of their formation, their conseequences and their mistakes, but he is most invested in Brazil, where he was a reporter for the Los Angeles Times and was witness to the very beginning of the street protests and mass demonstrations sparked by some of his friends and acquaintances. He is both observer and participant in Brazil. Despite his sympathy for his friends and acquaintances who unleashed a wave of mass protest over public transportation rates hikes, he tries to offer a measured assessment about how their commitment to leaderlessness and their inability to imagine a day after their victories in the streets led to the far right takeover of those streets and eventually of Brazil’s Presidency. It’s not a straight line from one place to another, but the dots do connect.

But where, oh where Vincent is your rage? Or perhaps you are too young to understand that these moments of revolt are few and far between. Maybe you are so young that the squandering of such moments of popular unrest by a bunch of anarcho punks who imbibed the countercultural propaganda about spontaneity from the “Global North” is simply an irony of history that will make you chuckle because you’re sure that things can be ironed out in the future when the time to take the streets comes again.