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Today media reports on how several riots occurred in Rinkeby yesterday night. According to media claims several shops have been looted, cars set on fire, a journalist and a shop owner battered and cops attacked with stones. The cops are claimed to have felt so threatened, that they shot live ammo to hit. What really happened, only those that were there know.

What’s clear is that several individuals chose to attack several of the institutions that control and rule our lives. The looting attacked the capitalist property rights and the conditions that drive us to slave to be able to afford survival, instead of taking what we need. The journalist that was battered, was an attack on the ideological cornerstone that the media constitutes, in the maintaining of the existing conditions; against the fact that the journalist wasn’t there to listen to and pass on the revolters’ stories, but to sell its own spectacular story expensively – a story that in no way relates to the reality that life in Rinkeby means. The rock throwing against the police, whose task it is, to using violence maintain the state’s rule over every individual. To ensure that poor remain poor, that those that try anything else are thrown in the slammer, that undocumented live under constant threat against their lives, that subversives remain passive. They protect not only the stat’s laws but the morality that holds us back from revolting against society. The morality that gets the neighbor to call the cops, when it hears crushed windows in the street or says shady people “loitering”. Regardless the intentions that existed behind every individual’s acts, those institutions were attacked and the cops tried to protect them (and themselves).

When the cops say that it felt so threatened, that it fires live ammunition, it is often just a half truth. The other half of the truth is that they usually have been in an area or a context, where they more easily can get away with it. Thanks to media’s work over many years to establish a narrative for the rest of Sweden of the suburbs and a deeply rooted racism (and classism) in society, they can more easily talk themselves out of the situation. The trust for the police, as a neutral state body, of course plays a role for a large part of the population but if the cops would fire live ammunition on youth in Danderyd or a middle class area in Karlskoga, they would not as easily get away with it. As long as a white cop, or a PoC-cop with white ambitions, shoot a person of color, poor, subversive or lifestyle criminal, everything is as it should be, according to society’s unspoken norms.

If they indeed felt threatened, and didn’t just see an opportunity to extinguish an, in their eyes undesired, life, it is also a sign that the insurrectionists really challenged the existing conditions.

When the cops choose to use firearms to intervene in the social warfare in general (which they do constantly) but against insurrectional acts in particular, then it is important to see what it means for us, that are in solidarity with insurrectional acts and revolt. Two things it should not lead to, but usually does, is to either ramp up the violence and answer with the same, that is, with firearms or more severe violence, or to let oneself be frightened and pacified, when facing the risk of being shot. When cops shoot, we should instead look at the acts that “provoked” the shots, and be in solidarity with the acts. Distribute and develop them, make them uncontrollable and unpredictable. Without either walking into the trap of armed struggle against the state, which is doomed from the start considering the distribution of resources, or to let the cops get a stronger grip around our will to revolt, so we can use the exposed weakness of the monster that we are constantly guarded by.

Looting, car fires, attacks against journalists and cops/the state; attacks against the democracy that is “the best of ways to be oppressed”.

In deep solidarity with all insurrectionary acts in Rinkeby,

there are no better circumstances to wait for, there never was.

Barbar

Translated from Gatorna by @b9AcE.