Color of Anarchism Re: Protest ISO...

[Chuck0]

Yoshie Furuhashi wrote:
> At 7:46 AM -0800 1/4/03, Brian O. Sheppard x349393 wrote:
> 
>> But the black bloc'ing tactic isn't 1) particular to anarchism, seeing 
>> as that it wasn't even invented by anarchists but by the left-commie 
>> autonomen and antifa groups in europe
> 
> 
> Wasn't the point of militants (be they anarchists or communists or just 
> trade unionists) originally to stand up as marshals to the police, 
> including doing street battles with cops, in order to _protect_ the 
> demos and pickets from the cops (as in workers' self-defense militias), 
> rather than using the crowd for cover to do direct action (as in the 
> black bloc tactic)?  I wonder if those who mythologize the black bloc 
> can't wake up and come back to the original spirit of collective self 
> defense.

Ahem. Let me point out again that the black bloc tactic does not involve 
using the crowd as cover for doing direct action. This is becoming a popular 
myth being spread by anti-anarchists in activist circles.

The black bloc tactic, when practiced in recent years, has been about 
protecting those in the black bloc from police harassment and violence. It 
involves tactics such as masking, holding arms, and unarresting. From what 
I've seen, the people doing black blocs are usually attacked by the police 
when they are either standing around, or marching down the middle of a street 
illegally. I can't think of any black blocs I've seen that used the bigger 
crowd as some kind of shield. This is just a false accusation.

Black blocs here in Washington have done things in conjunction with bigger 
crowds and have also served as reinforcements for another action and as a 
shield for other activists. During the A16 black bloc, it provided a buffer 
at one point between the police and nonviolent activists who had locked down 
in an intersection. The police had come up to the activists who were locked 
down and were hitting them with batons (with one woman possibly losing 
several teeth). The black bloc came along and threw a big orange traffic 
barrel at the cops, driving them back, giving everybody time to get activists 
between the cops and the locked down activists. The black bloc then drove the 
cops back several blocks.

Erlier that day, the black bloc was marching around and we got word that an 
RTS-type blockade at 14th adn New York needed numbers, because they thought 
that the police would force delegate buses through that weak point. We 
hustled the bloc around the police perimeter and joined up with the 
intersection blockade, with some in the block adding stuff to the blockade 
from a nearby construction site.

In January 2001, there was a black bloc for the Inauguration protests. A 
bunch of people joined with that bloc as it knocked down the police security 
perimeter along Pennsylvania Ave.

The black bloc allows you to do lots of things that normal protest tactics 
fail to accomplish.

Chuck0

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