FW: [ASDnet] Are the Black Bloc police agents?

[Christopher Rhoades Dÿkema]

Carrol cites a few good examples. Another is the outlandish career of Yevno
Azev, the Russian Socialist Revolutionary Party's assassin, who was a
clear-cut police agent. His comrades finally began to suspect him, though he
was extremely plausible (typical psychopathic feature) and held a meeting to
discuss the issue. He convinced them to let him go down the street to get
definitive evidence of his innocence and never came back.

Similarly, there were the double agents who assassinated Plehve, the Russian
Interior Minister. Also, Father Gapon, who founded the police-dominated
labor union whose demonstration, and its violent suppression, set off the
Revolution of 1905.

Many of these people probably were sincerely unclear about just where their
loyalties lay and just what they were doing. We have to consider that when a
left includes groups that are clandestine, there is a great tendency towards
grandiosity of thought among their members, and a corresponding
vulnerability to flattery by agents.

On the other side, police agents can form an impression of themselves that
also is grandiose, a mirror on the right of the clandestine left. They are
capable of concluding that right-wing politicians are just petty
compromisers and bumping them off in service to a higher cause is no big
deal. Also too, some cops have a distorted class ressentiment, and justify
their partial alliance with terrorists on the left along those lines.

I used to know old eastern European communists who had had to grapple with
those issues early in the twentieth century, and these are still similar
problems. Neither pacifism, nor its twin, armed struggle is a complete
strategic approach for the left, though one seems more conventionally
acceptable than the other.

Christopher Rhoades Dÿkema

Carrol Cox wrote:


> I haven't followed this thread, so I don't know about this event
> specifically, but it has often happened that police killed their agents
> or each other. An amusing case in Detroit 30 some years ago. The cops
> raided a private poker game -- in which the participants happened to be
> police, who naturally shot back at what they thought were thugs breaking
> in, etc. etc.
>
> But I still tend to believe that the SLA was at its core police agents
> who got double-crossed by their masters and slaughtered to prevent
> exposure. And I believe that the Russian group who assassinated the
> Grand Duke consisted mostly of Czarist secret police, whose motive was
> to maintain a sufficient threat to justify their own existence. Cops are
> untrustworthy in all directions.
>
> Carrol
>
> Carrol