Forum Post: OMG Please stop whining about anarchists!!
Posted 13 years ago on Nov. 4, 2011, 9:49 a.m. EST by LaughinWillow
(215)
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God, you don't see the right turning on its "extremists." If they do, they keep it on the downlow. This is why you never succeed at anything - because you have no solidarity and you're ready to turn traitor on people in your movement who use tactics you don't like. Read some Derrick Jensen, please. Nonviolence may be the tactic you employ, but nonviolent protest as leftist dogma is just entitlement crap. The Indian people didn't throw off colonialism solely with Ghandian pacifism - they employed a wide range of techniques, some of them violent.
To be clear, I'm not calling for violence, but attacking black bloc for spraypainting some stuff (which is NOT violence, btw, and it's gross for you to say so when you pay taxes to a country that just slaughtered a quarter million human beings in the middle east) is really pathetic. It's like leftists who act as if it's wrong to monkeywrench a bulldozer or rescue an animal being tortured - because "property" is so much more important than saving actual lives. Just really read a sad commentary.
"people in your movement who use tactics you don't like." Oh, lol. They DON'T agree with some of the people who are Using this movement to futher OTHER agendas. Oh Noes.
"Read some Derrick Jensen, please." = I don't think for my self but here is some of my favorite propaganda
"nonviolent protest as leftist dogma is just entitlement crap." That's a leap.
"It's like leftists who act as if it's wrong to monkeywrench a bulldozer or rescue an animal being tortured - because "property" is so much more important than saving actual lives." Huh? So you don't want to be told what to do, but it's ok to tell other people what to do. LAWL!
I have anarchist friends. I have had loooong conversations. They are blinded by dogma and idealism, and are the highest order of hypocrites. I have put my self in their shoes, I once called myself an anarchist. I was really just a stupid self righteous child at the time. Get over yourselves and open a book that doesn't participate in your dogma engine.
To be clear, I am not an anarchist. I've read Derrick Jensen, but I also read Cornell West, Chomsky, Howard Zinn, Daniel Quinn, and even some Rush Limbaugh now and then. I have no investment in anarchist ideas, per se. What I do agree with - when it comes to Derrick Jensen - is that the left is unique in that it will turn on people in their own movement who don't adopt the dogma of nonviolent protest as the "messiah" of activism, as if no other forms of protest or resistance have EVER been successful. Jensen also points out that nonviolent protest in the west is almost a cop-out (and an extention of privilege), because it rarely involves the kind of direct action used by poor and indigenous peoples in most of the world where nonviolence is used, including taking direct action to provoke the police or military to serious physical violence against protesters. I don't see a willingness to work at that level with OWS or anyone else in the american mainstream left.
I will point out again that the Indian people did not only use nonviolence against the British - and in India, many revolutionary leaders are far more revered than Gandhi (I lived and studied in India, fyi). In South Africa, the South Africans fought brutal physical battles with the police in the effort to gain their freedom. And again, I am not calling for this behavior. What I am calling for is an examination of the DOGMA of nonviolence that has permeated the american left and damaged solidarity within the movement since the 1960's. Nonviolence should be a choice - not some dogma forced on everyone in a movement out of your own fear.
First off, not keeping its nuts in line is the goddamn problem with the right; moderates in America typically outnumber extremists by a lot and if you let the extremists run the show you drive off the moderates. The only time letting extremists run things doesn't immediately carry a penalty in popular support (assuming you're not a Republican) is when nonviolence is for whatever reason categorically impossible. Nonviolence is quite possible right now, and we just got away with a major nonviolent protest in Oakland. Even better would be throwing Occupiers into HoR primaries over the course of this next election so that we can make a greater impact on what's going on on Capitol Hill.
The problem we have with black bloc is not a matter of squeamishness; it's a matter of not getting ourselves attacked and tear gassed (or getting so much popular support when we do that it becomes a Pyrrhic victory for the LEOs). The role and the goal of OWS is to spread awareness of the continuing growth in income inequality and the continuing atrophy of many sectors of our economy due to corporate profit-chasing, and to mobilize voters to work to combat these problems. If we're running around spraypainting things dressed all in black we become scary to the majority of the people and an easy caricature for any who disagree with us, and we thus lose our ability to influence the national dialogue or get voters to listen to us.
You're right that in cases like India and South Africa nonviolence was only part of the equation and acts of vandalism and violence were a major part of the decision to change things. That only worked because you were talking about a military occupation in which popular support or lack thereof was pretty much either going to be there or not be there and the movements had no risk of losing momentum because of such actions. Prove to me that violence and vandalism are more expedient than nonviolence and political activity in this particular situation and then I'll consider listening to you.
Incidentally, vandalism my not be violence per se but it's a big damn mess to clean up. Here's why I don't like vandalism; it gives the cops and others a great excuse to point to us as a threat to law and order without us actually doing really radical or dangerous.
But this makes the assumption that everyone interested in seeing OWS success is a leftist. There are a hell of a lot of centrists in support. Violence will only make you look foolish and not deserving general support. If SUPPORT is the goal than violence is counter to the movement.
So deal with it by working with these people. I very strongly object to demasking people or turning people into the prison industrial system. Especially since anarchists are some of the main folks who originally started the entire occupy movement. It's obnoxious - I'll come in, co-opt your movement, then attack you because I don't like you. I've seen this happen a lot with leftist movements (and while, yeah, there are centrists in support, I think the overwhelming majority of these folks are on the left), and it doesn't help. It just creates discord and helps the whole thing fall apart.
Why can't those people just not wreck stuff. Wouldn't that be easier? No prison, and no being pushed out. Why can't they work with the majority rather than the majority just accept something they don't want. This is nonsense.
No, and - no offense to you? But - fuck that noise. This approach to "solidarity" is unspeakably dumb. It's no better than the blind patriotism that gets people to support nonsense wars of aggression. It's no better than the blind allegiance of gangs and mobs. It's just that: blind.
If you don't know what your principles are - and if you don't defend those principles - you have no moral legitimacy. And if you have no moral legitimacy you've lost before you even started. So get your shit together.
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You get YOUR shit together. I think it's fine to attempt to convince anarchists that your point is correct. But all this public whining about the anarchists is just pathetic. You're like, "whine...we would NEEEVVVVEEERRR spraypaint something - that's VIOLENT...whine whine whine." If these anarchists are physically attacking passersby, physically attacking women in camp, physically attacking the cops even, then you have a case. But I've seen jackasses on here talking about forcibly removing people's masks (not because they are committing any particular act, but just because they are anarchists) - which, by the way, is a far, FAR more violent invasion of personhood than spraypainting or "vandalism." If you are just going to act like the cops, then it is YOU who have no moral legitimacy.
Really? Your definition of moral legitimacy is "not acting like cops?" Think harder.
Enforcement - whether it is of law or of mutual contracts or of base principles - is not by itself a moral or immoral act. Vandalism is violence; destroying other people's shit is violence. Just because it isn't as bad as assaulting a person doesn't make it ok. You don't back people just because they say they're your friends. You back people because they do right, and you fight people who do wrong. This is not scientific rocketry. Fucking think harder.
I don't think anyone should get demasked just for being an anarchist. (They should get a bitchslap and a lecture just for being an anarchist, but that's different.) But once they lose control and pull their dicks out to bust up some shit, then you demask them for accountability.
But, but, anarchists want to tell people how to live in a drastic fashion. They ARE the leftists. They don't want to use what remains of our system because they want it gone so they can become communist leaders...and that is all that would happen if they got what they wanted. Shit life if you ask me you tool.
Damage to property is violence.
Liar. Objects cannot be victims of violence. A bulldozer does not give a shit if it exists or not.
The violence is not done to the object but by the owner who is harmed by having to undo the damage.
can't you reply in a civil manner when someone disagrees with you? being civil will keep us together.
When you spraypaint a building, someone has to pay to remove that. When you monkeywrench a bulldozer, that's expensive to fix. Destruction of property in any form is violence. Don't lecture us that your not calling for violence.
You're a fool if you think that you can commit violence against an object. Especially if you're committing an act in order to save an actual living being. Man, fluoride really works, huh?
this kid is like 15...it's cool. lol
Lol. I'm a 40 year old mom of 4 with a master's degree in counseling, actually.
Spoken by someone who has probably never paid for anything. Are you able to get your welfare checks sent to your tent?
See above, genius.
lol. Right. I don't have a job, don't pay taxes and live in a tent. OR I have a job, ran my own biz, have a household and have worked as much as I fucking could. You guess.