RAGE AGAINST ELON MUSK TURNS TESLA INTO A TARGET
Tesla’s charging stations were set ablaze near Boston on Monday. Shots were fired at a Tesla dealership in Oregon after midnight on Thursday. Arrests were made at a nonviolent protest at a Tesla dealership in Lower Manhattan on Saturday.
New York Times, March 8, 2025
TESLA SHARES PLUNGE 15%, SUFFERING STEEPEST DROP IN FIVE YEARS
Since peaking at $479.86 on December 17, Tesla shares have lost more than 50% of their value, wiping out upward of $800 billion in market cap. Monday marked the stock’s seventh worst day on record.
CNBC, March 10, 2025
How do the powerless take out their wrath against the powerful? Sometimes by engaging in violence. Sometimes by making their fury known by violent acts deliberately intended to destroy, literally or metaphorically. The destruction has two purposes. First to do harm, second to draw attention. The second is as important as the first because without drawing attention to their cause, their cause will never be addressed.
Franz Fanon was born in Martinique, educated in France, and buried in Algeria. He studied philosophy, trained as a psychiatrist, but is best known for what he did toward the end of his short life. He became a militant political activist, primarily against imperialism, against colonialism. In his famous book, The Wretched of the Earth, he extolled the use of violence as a political tool, specifically to be used by those without power against those with.
Decolonization is the encounter between two congenitally antagonistic forces …. This explains why decolonization reeks of red-hot cannonballs and bloody knives. For the last can be first only after a murderous and decisive confrontation between the two protagonists.
If Fanon’s words seem to you too radical, too violent, if you dismiss them too quickly as the words of an extremist, how about this language, from none other than Nobel Peace Prize winner Nelson Mandela? (He shared the prize in 1993 with his white South African counterpart, F. W. de Klerk.) This was part of a speech Mandela gave in a South African courtroom in 1964, just before being imprisoned for over 27 years.
It was only when all else had failed, when all channels of peaceful protest had been barred to us, that the decision was made to embark on violent forms of political struggle…. We did so not because we desired such a course but solely because the Government had left us with no other choice….
Even America’s apostle of civil disobedience, Martin Luther King, Jr., made clear in his masterful “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” that as a political tactic, nonviolence could be counted on for only so long.
We know through painful experience that freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed…. There comes a time when the cup of endurance runs over, and men are no longer willing to be plunged into the depths of despair.
None of what I write is to advocate violence. Neither is it to predict that the United States will become more violent than it already is. Instead it is to point out that as history testifies, when the powerless feel ruthlessly and relentlessy oppressed by the powerful, when the former sees no other recourse, violence can be seen as a necessary political tool. Which is how Tesla became a target.