“What do you mean ‘started’?”
Now that we’ve gotten that out of the way, I want to clarify that I’m talking about open mass-killings in the vein of Sharpeville or Bloody Sunday.
Reading and seeing the public’s reactions to things like the gassings and beatings at pro-Palestine encampments, BLM protestors getting run over, Kyle Rittenhouse’s victims, etc. it seems like the American people take an open and ghoulish delight in protestors getting brutalized, maimed, and killed. Go to any video or article about these things happening, and the comments section is an endless parade of the worst people imaginable cheering and hollering for it with extremely little or no pushback. It’s depressingly consistent.
It just gives me this horrible feeling that one day the police are going to unload into a crowd of protestors and leave a mass of bodies in their wake, the American people will hoot and clap and cheer about how the victims got what they deserved, and that’ll become the new MO. The only reason they aren’t already doing this is fear it might make them look bad, and if it doesn’t end up making them look bad in the eyes of the public, then there isn’t a single thing stopping them.
Hard to say but I lean towards no. I think about the civil rights marches of the 50s and 60s, where everyday Americans (who were racist as hell, c’mon) watched police brutalize little Black church ladies crossing a bridge, setting fire hoses and attack dogs loose on Black WW2 veterans. In liberal circles, they say that this “voluntary victimization” of the nonviolent movement kept them sympathetic in the eyes of the population.
Kent State is actually a great counter argument because it has a lot of differences, and how it was viewed by the public reflects how American perception of protest changed from the 50s to the 70s. By the time Kent State occurred, so much had changed (Kennedy, Vietnam, civil rights) and the American public was experiencing what I’ll call “protest fatigue status quoism.” White hippie college students throwing rocks at national guard troops to protest a war was nowhere near as sympathetic as Black church goers getting their skulls split by cops so they could vote.
What also comes to mind is the Tlatelolco Massacre in 1968 in Mexico, though I don’t know much about the public perception of that event.
In conclusion, if it’s “wall of moms” getting blasted by cops, people will care. If it’s antifa, they won’t.
Mexico swept that massacre under the rug very quickly. Thousands of people killed or missing after that massacre and the town square was swept clean in two weeks in time for the games