On 7/11/05, Chuck0 <chuck at mutualaid.org> wrote:
> Pretty ridiculous garbage. The police really don't use agent
> provocateurs in activist movements. This idea that the cops use agent
> provocateurs is a fantasy spread by people with little working
> understanding of activism and radical movements.
FWIW, in the 1960s/1970s COINTELPRO days, there were agents provocateurs. They often claimed to be more "revolutionary" than everyone else, encouraging sectarianism and worse. But people on the left sometimes f*cked themselves up in the same way. There was a dialectic of sorts: the presence of police agents made leftists more paranoid, which encouraged infantile and unproductive behavior, which drew more attention from the police...
BTW, what good does it do to break a window of some store (e.g., Starf*cks)? How does this change the world for the better? how does it mobilize the anti-capitalism movement and attract new members? how does it raise popular consciousness concerning the nature of the system? -- Jim Devine "Segui il tuo corso, e lascia dir le genti." (Go your own way and let people talk.) -- Karl, paraphrasing Dante.