> I find this cartoon characterization of the black bloc to be extremely
> offensive and totally inaccurate.
I agree with Fred Woodworth, maker of The Match!, when he calls Black Bloc'ers "violentists" instead of anarchists.
The Match! is the oldest anarchist zine still in print in the US (began in early 60s). From the Summer, 2002, issue of The Match!, on the subject anti-technologists and Black Block-ing:
"It's another in the divorced-from-reality line of pseudo-cave dweller radicalism lately so popular in circles where concepts like Science, Medicine, and even true Civilization are righteously jeered - right up to the point where one of these people needs dental work, an appendectomy, eyeglasses, or a ride over to the Internet Cafe to coordinate building 'puppets' for the next ceremonial raging against the machine.
"If any ten modern 'primitivists' (or people who prefer the 'unspoiled' ways of pre-technological, pre-civilizational mankind) will go and live barefoot in some rainforest for five years with no access to real medicines (eat all the fucking plants and 'herbs' you want!), all ten will be crying and pleading for something to clear up the skin infections, get relief from the ravenous and sleep-destroying attacks by hordes of vicious mosquitos, banish the torment of itching, crawling lice, and chemically yank out of their bodies the roundworms, liver flukes, tapeworms and a few other horrors like those that essentially bring intellectual life to a halt and confer upon the resistant the status of leaders, shamans, witch-doctors, or revered deliverers from suffering.
"'Group decisions by consensus' - honestly that just makes me want to puke.
"This ceremonial indoctrination, 'radical culture,' is like a parasite of the mind, which has eaten and wriggled its way inside and now spawns clouds of eggs that circulate all over the body: 'gender conferences,' spray-painted jargon-graffiti and circle-A signs, posters of shirtless youths in ski masks, gleeful in-group braggadocio about shoplifting, liturgical language of piety on 'globalization,' or 'people of color,' with obligatory spelling like 'womyn.'"
"I hate it all.
"I used to think that the creation of a separate radical culture would be a healthy sign. Now it only seems like a sad mockery, a caricature of a sick culture that had redeeming features, by smarmy, posturing ignoramuses with none.
"See, the society I want is one with comfort, good food, art, literature, good medical care, friends, safety, and, most of all, freedom and opportunity. Why can't I have this? Because authoritarianism and repression stand in the way.
"[But] primitivists COULD, unlike me, have what they want _right now_. Go for it, for Christ's sake. Live by 'foraging.' Abandon the hated technology. Enjoy the huge of amount of 'leisure time' (if you weren't bored to tears without your Internet, your ski masks, dumpster fires, giant street demonstrations, adraneline-rushing brick smashing through windows, ad nauseam). Watch your foot fall from gangrene after you get bit by a rattler (if you live that long). Do it! Do it!"
Brian
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"And Mr. Block thinks he may / Be President some day." - Joe Hill, "Mr. Block"