6 ms·
Met Police smash down door of Quaker meeting house to arrest activists
- jjani 2y agohttps://archive.is/Ndh1z https://archive.is/Ndh1z
- lisper 2y agoKristallnacht writ small.
- locopati 2y agoWhat hapoened is bad. Bad analogies are also bad. This is nothing akin to Kristallnacht.
- lisper 2y agoIt certainly doesn't compare to the scale of Kristallnacht (hence "writ small"). And Kristallnacht was just government-sponsored vandalism whereas in this case people were also arrested, so in that respect this was actually worse. But all that is neither here nor there. Kristallnacht was a harbinger of much worse to come, and that was what I intended to convey: I was making a prediction that this is a harbinger of much worse to come.
- locopati 2y agoI think yd have been better off going with harbinger and no analogy here. This was a government agency acting on behalf of the government in a targeted arrest, not the government saying to citizens it's a free-for-all on targeting an entire group's businesses and homes (which is why "writ small" still fails here). There's real levels of Naziesque behavior happening in the US and UK right now, but it's also not exactly the same and bad comparisons make it easier for many people to dismiss genuine concerns as hyperbolic (especially when one is in a targeted group, which i am, and trying to point out how bad things are getting).
- lisper 2y agoFair enough. Thanks for the feedback.
- SoftTalker 2y ago“The only resistance I could put up was to make tea and drink it in front of them without offering them any.” The most British thing I’ve read this year
- diggan 2y agoTo add additional context, Quakers are also famously non-violent, even when met with violence against themselves: > Quakers are one of the three historic peace churches and therefore have taken seriously the call to loving enemies and the practice of non-violence. https://quaker.org/peace-and-nonviolence/ https://quaker.org/peace-and-nonviolence/
- y33t 2y agoOne notable exception to this was Jeremiah Dixon, of the Mason-Dixon line. From Wikipedia: > "Jeremiah Dixon, happening upon a slave driver mercilessly beating a poor black woman. 'Thou must not do that!' he shouted. 'You be damned! Mind your own business,' came the reply. 'If thou doesn't desist, I'll thrash thee!' > Tall and powerful, Jeremiah seized the slave-driver's whip and gave him a soun thrashing. When he returned to Cockfield, the whip came too, and was one of the Quaker family's treasured possessions."
- sitkack 2y agoExcept Nixon. http://www.oldchathamquakers.org/blog/was-nixon-really-a-quaker http://www.oldchathamquakers.org/blog/was-nixon-really-a-qua...
- megous 2y agoSome more context https://x.com/youth_demand/status/1905635104057425922 https://x.com/youth_demand/status/1905635104057425922
- ThrowawayTestr 2y ago[flagged]
- talideon 2y agoYou can thank the Tories for that. It's a law they put in place so that they wouldn't have to put up with the poors protesting.
- teaearlgraycold 2y agoBrexit was for the best
- dang 2y ago"Eschew flamebait. Avoid generic tangents." (Nationalistic flamewar is particularly avoidable and important to avoid) https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- readthenotes1 2y ago",Only sustained mass resistance can put an end to genocide." That doesn't sound very peaceful does it
- augzodia 2y agoWhich part of this suggest violence to you?
- b800h 2y agoThe Quakers are fairly heavy politically invested, and most of them aren't even theists any more. There's no right of sanctuary in the UK, and if a group is sheltering criminals or providing them with premeses to plan criminal actions, it's damned right they should have their door busted in.
- teraflop 2y agoIf you give police the right to invade and arrest any group that is "sheltering criminals", and you define "crime" broadly enough to include "suspicion of conspiracy to cause a public nuisance" i.e. encouraging protest, then you have given up on living in a free society.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- blackguardx 2y agoWhy does it matter if they are theists or not? Would you afford more leniency to a catholic church?
- b800h 2y agoI'm suggesting that the organisation is not the one that existed 100 years ago, even by a very large stretch of the imagination. The title is emotive largely because of the reputation of the organisation. If the headline was "police raid house to arrest criminal activists", it wouldn't have made a blip.
- megous 2y agoIt's just indicative of a wider trend in some western countries to punish and threaten people protesting their complicity in genocide. Same thing or perhaps worse is happening in Germany, US, etc. One can just as well ask why would a democratic country arrest and threaten young people for protesting actions of a foreign country, when such actions include things like mass killings of children, or targeted attacks on healthcare and rescue workers, where said country sometimes just murders 15 of them while on a rescue mission (destroying 5 ambulances and a fire engine, basically killing all of the teams), like recently. It's a worthy question that such an article can elicit regardless of who's being arrested for activism.
- flettcher 2y ago"The women, aged between 18 and 38, were sitting in a circle eating hummus and bread sticks on Thursday evening as part of a “welcome meeting” for Youth Demand, which calls itself a non-violent protest group." Eating hummus and bread sticks.
- auselen 2y agoYou dip bread sticks to hummus, if anyone is having hard time to visualize this…
- redwall_hp 2y agoUK breadsticks are also not typically like the Olive Garden ones Americans probably imagine. They're pencil-thin and crispy.
- deadbabe 2y agoWell now it’s clear why they were arrested.
- ben_w 2y agoThe most subversive of all the hors d'oeuvres. /jk
- jmyeet 2y agoEuropeans like to look down on the rise of fascism in the US but even a superficial analysis shows that the US is simply Europe in 5-10 years. For the UK in particular, people may point to how Labor swept the elections last year but they'd be wrong to say that there was left-wing momentum in the UK or even that it was another example of people voting against incumbent governments. Neither is true. All that happened in the UK is the right-wing vote got split between the Conservatives and the even more right-wing Reform party. That's it. Come next election, that won't be the case. At the current rate, Conservative/Reform will merge or ally and sweep in a landslide. Starmer actually got fewer votes than Corbyn did in his previous two elections by a substantial margin. The UK Labor party is playing the same role as the US Democratic Party. That is, they make occasional meek noises about institutional norms but they really don't oppose fascism at all. In fact, both parties are way more concerned with the rise of leftism than they are with fascism. We've seen this exact same scenario play out in France. You have grooming victim [1] Macron who has tried to occupy some mythical "center" with Le Pen's National Front, the brainchild of leaders of Vichy France, playing the role of fascist party. But in France there's actually some leftist opposition. And what does Macron do? Routinely side with the fascists to keep the leftists out of power. In the US, the role of Gestapo is being played by ICE. They take their marching orders from the Canary Mission to black-bag people who simply opposed Israel's genocide. This is quite literally picking up political dissidents and putting them into concentration camps. The UK, France and Germany are well on their way to the same fate. [1]: https://www.cnn.com/2017/05/06/politics/emmanuel-macron-wife-marriage-france/index.html https://www.cnn.com/2017/05/06/politics/emmanuel-macron-wife...
- zozbot234 2y ago[flagged]
- Tostino 2y agoWho on the left is calling for jail for speech? Legitimately asking.
- michaelmrose 2y agoCentrism has always meant too stupid or milquetoast to stake out a proper position. Damned few on the left want to arrest people for giving offense whereas the overwhelming majority on the right support an actual fascist regime on this side of the pond. You know this and you still made this comment.
- crimsoneer 2y agoI mean, worth pointing out this group is pretty explicitly focused on conducting unlawful civil disobedience, and plenty of the members have previous convictions for doing just that. This is hardly the police just rounding up your local reading group. https://www.standard.co.uk/news/london/met-police-arrest-activists-quaker-meeting-shut-down-london-b1219641.html https://www.standard.co.uk/news/london/met-police-arrest-act...
- DanAtC 2y agoSo? Were they conducting "unlawful" civil disobedience when raided?
- ranger_danger 2y ago[flagged]
- DanAtC 2y ago[flagged]
- dang 2y agoPlease don't break the site guidelines like this, no matter how wrong someone is or you feel they are. It only makes everything worse. It also discredits your position, which isn't in your interest. See https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sort=byDate&type=comment&query=truth%20discredit%20by:dang https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor... for past attempts to persuade commenters about this dynamic. It usually doesn't help, but there's a chance it might. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- DanAtC 2y ago[flagged]
- 2y ago
- reramuyc 2y ago[dead]
- reramuyc 2y ago[dead]
- dtj1123 2y agoSome context: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hummus https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hummus https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breadstick https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breadstick
- penguin_booze 2y agoI don't see how that information can be complete without https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eating https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eating.
- tremon 2y agoHow to radicalize a generation, in just a few easy steps.
- WarOnPrivacy 2y agoMore than 20 uniformed police, some equipped with Tasers, forced their way into the Westminster meeting house [of worship] and arrested six people at the meeting on suspicion of conspiracy to cause a public nuisance. [police] arrested five other people for the same offence on Friday Based on the given charge, Police had a feeling that some Quakers might be talking about being a public nuisance. If we assume the best of the Met police, they first considered sending an officer over to talk to the Quakers and maybe offer some counsel. And being the Met police and being faced with the potential of a non-violent resolution to a non-violent issue, the police instead opted for an approach that mirrors violent police raids. That's if we assume the best of the Met police. They might not have ever considered a non-violent solution for Quakers.
- arresin 2y agoDey didn’t have their noosence loicence.
- nothercastle 2y agoOn the plus side their protest is already enormously successful and it hasn’t even happened yet.
- draw_down 2y ago[dead]
- ShonT 2y ago[dead]
- kazinator 2y agoWhy did this country bother issuing a travel advisory against going to the USA?