Baltimore, Chilpancingo … and…Bagdad, or Karma quotations

In Baltimore, it was the spinal fracture that broke the camel’s back.  Here, the people have endured much more:

Reuters/Emiliano Torres

Yesterday, as Baltimore restaged the intifada, protesters in Mexico, in Chilpancingo, the capital of the state of Guerrero, rammed a flaming truck into the glass-fronted congressional building, and set fire to at least six other vehicles. They had taken to the streets to mark the seven-month anniversary of the disappearances of the 43 students, who have come to represent the hundreds of thousands of dead as a result of US-Mexico’s drug, immigration, and trade policies (a number of the relatives of the disappeared are currently in New York, where they are appealing to the United Nations to end Washington’s so-called Merida Initiative, or Plan Mexico, which sends billions of dollars to Mexico to supposedly fight drugs but which the relatives of the 43 say goes to “suppress dissent”).  [Greg Grandin in The Nation, 28 April 2015]

Photo by Samuel Corum/Anadolu Agency/Getty Images

It should have been perfectly obvious, though in the US (and here) it’s only when it happens to some other repressive society:

… while no one condones looting, on the other hand one can understand the pent-up feelings that may result from decades of repression and people who’ve had members of their family killed by that regime, for them to be taking their feelings out on that regime

[Donald Rumsfeld, justifying looting in Bagdad, 4/11/2003]

Which of the two above had anywhere near the destructive power of this event?