It's police disinformation.
> It's both- the focus on violence detracts from the message of the protest
> while justifying any repression.
Liberal nonsense. This assertion has been made alot lately without anything t back it up. If you really care about getting a message out to the public, you have to admit that violence and militant protest is the only thing that the corporate media will cover. I've been involved in a range of protests of late, The media doesn't give a shit about nonviolent protests.
Not everybody who engages in "violent" protest is interested in spinning positive PR spin. This is something that NGO liberals and academic activists don't understand. You are pretty far removed from having to work shitty jobs under capitalism. All your talk about Zizek and Foucault aren't going to help you understand the working class young person who gets fucked by Greenpeace as a door-to-door canvasser. Throwing rocks at cops can quickly become attractive to a young person who makes a pittance begging for money so some soft NGO flacks can put their feet up in their Washington office suites.
> Last night, there was a roundtable on the Black Panther trial and May Day
> actions from 1970, with a number of Black Panthers including Bobby Seale and
> a former New Haven chief of police who was on the force back then. What was
> made clear was how much the threat of violence was used to hype conspiracies
> and even (through fake "intelligence" supplied by J. Edgar Hoover) to
> frighten the cops to the point of making violence and repression an
> inevitability.
No kidding. I bet this tactic has been used on armies of the powerful throughout history to justify bloody repression against dissent. The fact is that the cops hate all varieties of protesters, including the pacifists. One of my anarchist friends, who is on this list, used to work for the Army near the Pentagon. He's told me stories about hwo the guards there would kick pacifists at protests when nobody was looking. They didn't give a shit about the message and the tactics didn't make any difference to them.
> And one thing all the former Panthers on the panel made clear was how
> protesters lose if they give into a spiraling escalation of violence against
> forces that have a lot more guns and repressive surveillance technology.
I agree. But I don't see any interest in spiraling into an escalation of violence. Yeah, rock throwing is more violent than those boring Lefty demos we've been subjected to for all these decades, but I haven't heard anybody talking about guns or escalating the level of violence. Most of the activists I know simply want to embarass the cops in more creative and humiliating ways. They aren't under any illusion that a revolution is about the break out, unlike those Leftists during the 1960s who became disconnected from reality.
> There is I think a somewhat stupid and unstrategic confidence among
> protesters post-Seattle. The Seattle cops were unprepared and played into
> the propaganda goals of the protesters. As Philadelphia and Gothenberg
> showed, the cops are no longer unprepared and are developing both the
> repressive technology and propaganda to crush the Black Bloc-style
> protesters if they don't develop some new strategies to control the
> escalation of violence.
Let those of us who take the streets figure this out. Why don't you give rank-and-file activists more credit for creating strategy? What is really fascinating is how many of the moderate and liberal activists have become more militant after Quebec City.
Wait a minute. Who is supposed to control the "escalation of violence?" What exactly are you worried about? Protests here in the U.S. are still much tamer than the rest of the world. The protests in Sweden may have been more violent than Sweden s used to, but they weren't that much different than protests in other European cities.
Frankly, the pictures from Gothenburg reminded me of the pix I've seen from Paris '68.
> For all the propaganda value of protests and even trials, as the roundtable
> noted last month, the imprisonment and trials of leaders like Bobby Seale
> ended up taking them away from tending to movement building for literally
> years, even as the cops were using subtler methods to tear the movement
> apart.
So, we should just sit on our asses, take no risks, an go back to being marginalized? Are you suggesting that we can get rid of capitalism by holding hands, singing Kum-bayah, and voting for the next Al Gore?
<< Chuck0 >>
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INTERNATIONALISM IN PRACTICE
An American soldier in a hospital explained how he was wounded: He said, "I was told that the way to tell a hostile Vietnamese from a friendly Vietnamese was to shout ‘To hell with Ho Chi Minh!’ If he shoots, he’s unfriendly. So I saw this dude and yelled ‘To hell with Ho Chi Minh!’ and he yelled back, ‘To hell with President Johnson!’ We were shaking hands when a truck hit us."
(from 1,001 Ways to Beat the Draft, by Tuli Kupferburg).