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Comment by ftl64 | Hacker News Reader

Things aren't actually as clear-cut as you say. While protests started out peacefully things quickly escalated into violence, especially in Almaty. Most notably, armed bandits captured the city's airport, burned most of the government buildings, tried to assault multiple law enforcement agency offices, tried to go live on multiple TV channels, robbed ATMs, etc. The government has promised a large-scale investigation into the events, but is is already clear those people didn't want either freedom nor democracy and were quite probably influenced by criminal and illegal armed groups.

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A good account about why it isn't so clear cut: https://www.palladiummag.com/2022/02/24/what-happened-in-kaz...

In a video from January 5th, people can be seen snatching up rifles offloaded by a truck. Some were likely convinced on the spot to grab one of the firearms being handed out, but who was responsible for acquiring them?

Simplest theory:

- weapons were owned by the military or LE

- Weapons were stolen from storage or armory by corrupt officials and put somewhere less secure for later sale

- someone who knew where they were and wanted to support the rioters stole them and shared them out quickly

- or criminal elements stole them and spread them to seed more chaos and tie up LE while they focused on robbing something more substantial

Highly factual and well-written. Thanks for sharing the link.

Escalation into violence does not discredit a revolution while it IS extremely regrettable and perhaps discredits the people involved. If escalation into violence was able to discredit a revolution, the regular every-day violence inflicted on the civilian population by bad cops, etc would discredit the government or at least policing.

At the point where rioters are being killed instead of merely arrested it's hard for me to look negatively at the rioters choosing to strike out with violence of their own. They aren't using the tools and backing of the state to oppress.

This happens even in my US city.

When there is a major protest that keeps the Police busy, criminals take the opportunity to loot stores while there is no law enforcement to stop them.

Seems pretty clear cut to me. Rioting implies violence. The examples you noted are bound to happen durring such times.

The top comment implies that the protestors who demanded lower gas (propane, not gasoline) prices and later political reforms were the ones responsible for violence, or involved in it. There's plenty of evidence that this isn't the case.

People who started the violence were clearly trained for this and very organized, they were shooting police on the streets, looting firearm stores, giving away firearms to random people to encourage chaos. Also the government ordered police and SWAT teams to leave the cities for 1-2 days which hints at some officials being involved in this.

Russian army wasn't involved in fighting on the streets and certainly wasn't "killing" anyone. Russians were invited mainly for a political and morale effect.

I don't know what the top commenter was reading to get these conclusions, but they are clearly not representing any of the mainstream hypotheses explaining the events. I'm saying this as someone who has his family there when it happened and followed every single piece of news from there full time. And after everything was over I went there and talk to some people who witnessed the events.

> The top comment implies that the protestors who demanded lower gas (propane, not gasoline) prices and later political reforms were the ones responsible for violence, or involved in it.

What section are you refering to? Must have lost something

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