IF I am emotionally affected by someone else's situation, it is because I am mixing their emotions with mine. Once I have recognised this, the goal cannot be that the emotionally wounded person should be able to take revenge on his opponent or impose his will on him.
However, as it is I myself who wants to take revenge or impose my will, but I don't have the courage to confront my perceived opponent directly, I take the diversions via a substitute victim. A person or a group. I misuse this person or group for my intention of wanting to win or achieve a privilege, but do not put myself personally in danger of losing.
An activist, acting as a private person, takes no risk, since what he avoids is to act, for example, as a lawyer, who argues cases on the bases of expertise and protocol. An activist, who has no profession in years whatsoever, cannot be held reliable for whatever mistake he conducts outside profession (that's the "funny" thing about it).
Because he follows no protocol. One cannot be an "activist" without any attached profession. If one DOES attach to oneself "activism" and one professes nothing in combination with it, one could as well say: "I am acting but whatever I act out, I am not responsible".
although "activism" does usually carry some personal risk
Some additional thoughts:
It depends what kind of topic is chosen by the activist and how much violence potential the activist wants to live out/does not want to use.
It is safe to demonstrate against people who can be expected to react moderately rather than intemperately anyway. Therefore, the moderate is the dishonest target for intemperate protest or resentment against him. Since it is mostly safe to act as an ‘activist’ against rather peaceful people, because one proceeds with a greater certainty that there is hardly anything like an over-potentiated readiness for violence in the sum of the moderates.
Of course, individuals can be provoked and if a mob knows how to isolate individuals, the likelihood of violence increases. Which then puts the provocateur in the (desired) situation of using fists or other weapons. Since he has created this situation, which now gives him the justification to use physical force.
With regard to the Antifa, for example, I would say that they are mainly loudmouths and non-rebels. Because they either take action against individual speakers, podium stage users or against legitimately positioned party officials who can't afford any physical assaults because of the bad publicity and who are already the made culprits from MSM.
On the side of the activist who attaches a profession to his activism, the risk is to lose his job, or his reputation, or both, or go to prison. ...
On the side of the antifa-folks, for example, there is risk involved in being caught in the act of destroying objects or injuring people, I guess. Or, to meet someone who uses his fists or other weapons.
https://www.britannica.com/biography/Nat-Turner
https://www.britannica.com/biography/Nat-Turner
Thanks for the source.
That says a lot about how people who don't want to deal with their personal history incite others to take that personal struggle as ‘their own’. You could say that under this premise, those who didn't want to kill their inner demons/ideas and instead picked people as their targets to murder went along with it. Killing a family in their sleep is about the most mangy thing a man can do.
Ultimately, it can probably also be considered a suicide mission as far as Nat Turner is concerned, who presumably wasn't unaware that the cavalry would be sent after him, but in his fanaticism chose to ignore it. Since he was a slave, he probably realised that his actions would hurt his fellow blacks, but he apparently didn't care and preferred to indiscriminately murder whites for personal revenge. Ergo, he didn't give a shit about ‘the black cause’.
To call him "deeply religious" as it were in the text, I think, is injustice towards being religiously educated.
On the other hand, the whites acting hysterically, might also be something to investigate critically. As it seems, hatred and fear were the winners and rationalism was not.
it's a little funny to me that when one group enslaves and murders and slaughters
it's sort of dismissed as a "systemic tragedy"
but when a few individuals try and do the same thing on a much much smaller scale
somehow they're "monsters"
See by case and not by race.
Who slaughters but could have done otherwise, is not excused.
Murder is not excused, only because it happens on a smaller scale than the murder on a greater scale. Murder is murder.
it seems to boil down to
when a powerful group murders
it's heroic
You must be talking to someone else, not to me.
I neither "dismiss" murder as "systemic tragedy" nor do I see anything heroic in one group killing the other.
what disturbs you in my answer, if so?
True. It should carry risk. LoL :D