>On Sun, 2011-11-13 at 18:57 -0800, Nicholas Roberts wrote:
>
>> Black Bloc style street fighting, property damage and general political
>> violence was used as a "valid excuse" in 2001 to smash the left on an
>> institutional and a personal level for hundreds of thousands of activists
>
>This is nonsense, and is basically cheerleading for Berlusconi.
It appears you being deliberately obtuse.
Flatly refusing to acknowledge the reality that the extreme tactics of the BB were a necessary pretext for the assault on the protestors.
The state would not otherwise have bothered to encourage and assist the BB to riot? Even swelling their numbers with masked police.
Surely you can grasp that? Yes, I know the Black Bloc tactic is good means to reproduce the Black Bloc itself, so it must be hard to admit that it is disastrously counter-productive to the bulk of the other protesters you are trying to recruit. And of course to the larger demonstration.
But spare us the desperate obfuscation. The sanctimonious accusations that those who complain about the masked rioters hijacking their protest are "cheerleading" for the enemy. Objectively, the BB are the enemy. The state and the cops think so and need to do little to use them.
The despicable thing is that the BB have no objections to being used by the police and the state as a pretext for repression. As it not only suits their strategy for the police to exercise extreme means, it is absolutely vital, if the Black Bloc is to achieve its goal of recruiting a small percentage of the victims of the repression they deliberately incite.
Bill Bartlett Bracknell Tas