Older Peaceniks and Anarchy Kids

It's all in PR. If middle america sees young punks knocking in store windows and starting fights, they will likely write off the youths trying to change the world as a bunch of rowdy punks who know nothing, and ignore them. But, if you get it on camera that someone on the other side of the protest tried to start something, than the people watching the evening news will see people's voices muffled by injustice. Then they will be more inclined to support you. Remember, the camera is a revolutionary's best friend.

Case in point: During the protests this year in Washington, there were fights between protesters and pro-war hawks. A lot of the news programs described it so it sounded like it was the protesters fault. In reality, the fights were started by the pro-war hawks. When they showed pictures on the news showing that it wasn't the protesters, it put them in a good light with people who otherwise wouldn't have had an opinion about the war. Same goes with protests around the country a few weeks ago. During the WTO protests, the youth looked like they were just there to cause trouble, and no message got through. Hell, some people didn't even know what they were protesting against, since all that was seen on the news was destruction.

In the 1960s, the FBI would implant agents into the protests to start fights or to start any kind of disruption to cast the protesters in a bad light. They even had a department just for this: the COINTELPRO (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cointelpro). Now, with all of the things that the Patriot act has made legal, They don't even have to hide behind a secret oganization anymore.

See if some of this doesn't feel like what's going on today:

Violence doesn't get anyone anywhere except in front of a gun.

 

Uh huh. And oral sex isn't sex.

 

Actually, some people think oral sex is not really sex...

Do you smoke pot if you don't inhale?

 

This is so obviously a troll and some kind of cia plot to route out those who have anarchist sympathies here - All I can say is that article will be wedged up its writers arsehole one day and then lit

wowwee Wasteland you are PURE ROCK N ROLL dude !!!! wow life sure is one white-knuckle ride straight to the brink with your attitudes - gee I wish I was your buddy it would be like knowing someone really cool ! we could go to protests together so that we could moralise about the bad behaviour of the rough boys near the police lines. Instead of following the crowd and fighting our way into the presidential palace to pull the aristocracy to their knees

 

Hi!! my name is Manque, i´m 17 years old, i live in Argentina in a city call Bariloche (on the patagonia) and this is the first time that I write on one of this sites. Well i would like to tell to all of you that here in Argentina we got a law that abilities to students in schools to create a group called "Center of students" (in spanish:"Centro de Estudiantes) that represents all the students in a school. This mean that the group is the visible face of the students, for example if a kid have a problem with a teacher he can come to us and we regulate the comunnication between him and the headmasters. This example that I give is a simple function of the "Center of students", cause later I would tell all the things that we are figthing for, but fisrt I want you to understand by complete what is this "Center of students". Well every year we got elections at school to dicide wich group is going to manage the "center", so we have to make like a political group (there can be several groups formed) : We look for people interested on participating (i´m always talking about the students of the school), and we got to put a student on the charge of "president", another on the charge of "vice president", another on "secretary of acts" , another on "information secretary", etc. Then we must prepare projects to develope over the year. When we finish with the conformation of the group we got to present our projects to the students. There is a special day to do this and if there is more than one group conformed we can have two or three days. After this, it comes the elections, so students have to vote (as when you vote for president) for the group that they file and think that would represent them better. Once that all the students vote, the votes must be counted, the one that have the bigger number of votes gets the magament of the "Center of Students". ¡We don´t touch money! the work that we do is only by self compromised. This year we got the managment of our "center of students" and we decided to take out the structure that make us put a President, vicepresident,etc. and we create a kind of cooperative center were nobody has more power than the other, there is no president. So with this new structure we got the participation of more students tha others years. The projects that we are working on are : 1)"Movie debate" this consits on that we put a day to see a movie and then we create a space to argue about it, this is on extra hours school (inside the school but not in class hours, at 6 or 7 on the afternoon).
2)Rock festival for a girl that gets paralitic and needs money for the treatments.
3)Students diary, a diary with political writings, poetry, short sories, all created by the students.
4)A grafitti group to paint the walls of the school.
5) And we are preparing a students protest cause this is the third year that we don´t have gym cause here in Bariloche politicians don´t use money for education so we don´t have a place in condition to make gym, With this protest we will demand the construction of gymnasiums on Bariloche.
This are the most developed projects, we have lots of them. But apart from this we are always creting spaces of siscusion about the system, the educative system tha we have, about represive forces, about capitalism and globalisation, etc. We got the lucky of being in a really liberal secondary school, we got lost of marxists teachers that shows to us the other face of the world.
Well know that i got myself in context I would like to say that anrchy kids are not violent at all, Is the system and his governors the one that applyes violence over us, and the worst is that they do it in really differents ways most of them in a concealed way. I don´t know if every body knows how does the governments works, if you don´t, i explain, in order to stay still on they use the hegemony, the hegemony is the domination of the people, this is generated by means of concensus and repression. The concensus is the way they controled the mass media and how they impose the capitalist way of thinking by controling the eduction systems. And the repression is the one that we all suffer by the police and the army every day. So this is too much violence in comparison with a broken window, a grafitti or a broken statue.
I defend the way that real anarchist fight, but i agree that there lots of them doesn´t know the theoric parts of the fight and they do it just for creating an image.
But here we are really pacifist, I´ve been to ptrotests since I born cause my parents are artists and teachers and here the teacher has a reaally miserable sallary, so they have been fighting fon an increase for a decade, and we never broke anything, and with the students protests (that they were lots)we also never broke anything and the mass media consider us "violent boys" so we got to take care of what we watch and listen.
well I hope I haven't bored you, greetings from south

 

When Buddhist monks traveled throughout ancient China, many people tormented and attacked them, knowing that the monks wouldn't fight back on principle. In response, the monks learned martial arts which taught them to use the aggresors own momentum and attacks against themselves.

Here, through the media, protestors have taken the fist of these instigators and shoved it back into the face of oppression.

This works better than smashing glass to satisfy some self-congratulatory notion of rebellion. By the same token, it is more effective than the symbollic (and largely ignored) act of chanting with pickets when nobody is watching.

Think of the images of dogs attacking black protestors or British colonists wailing on the peaceful Indians. When the media published these images, they shocked and horrified the populace to such an extent that change was inevitable.

Understand that the state would crush under the weight of its own evil if the public ever became aware. The state already knows this, which is why they censor soldier's coffins from the media and conduct no civilian body counts.

We do not need to manufacture incidents of violence for attention, they are already there.

 

LOL LOL A LOT ! I agree

 

Good!

If I was an American revolutionary and lived in Boston during those days, I would have cheered and supported it.

The tax from those tea would have gone to King George and perpetuated the oppression of the colonists anyway.

So, the Boston Tea Party was a relatively small act of civil disobedience that eventually culminated in the American Revolution.

 

That, and British soldiers firing on civilians.

I still find it weird that the first person to die for the American Revolution was a black guy, and they didn't even get any real rights until the 1960s.

 

what if you were an american revolutionary of today? how is smashing windows and looting stores that support sweatshops and slave labor any different?

 

Gap and Nike are notorious for using and sweatshops and exploiting child slave labor to increase their profits.


Personally, I just don't buy items from these companies. It creates less broken glass splinters this way.

 

The young should continue with the good fight. But they should resist physical violence, it only answers with more of the same. Most of us weren't looking to piss off our parents or meet chicks, we were looking to protect our asses during a time of draft.

 

If you mean by extremes violence or destruction of property, you are only inforcing the other side's goal. Maybe you think it makes you feel more like a man, but in the long run it diminishes the goal of the movement. Find your manhood elsewhere.

 

im not looking for manhood anywhere. i dont care about being a "man." or whatever. its taking your hatred out on them.

seriously. they enslave people or pay them just enough for them to survive and thast it. then a bunch of old hippies and liberals go out in front of one of their stores and chant "shut it down." what do you think the CEO is going to do? probably giggle.

now imagine all of that. but instead of moderate liberals. its a group of radicals who dont view destruction of property as immoral. theyre willing to go to many extremese short of murder to get their point across. they will steal, sabotage, and destroy things to show the board of directors that there are people who are willing to increase the pressure. boycotting meat wont end factory farms. firebombs will.

 

You stoop to their level and they'll have the upper hand. If you can affect the marketplace that is more powerful that some young jack going off and creating moderate havoc on some one site at one time. And the more often they can point out that you stooped to violence the more they can prove their point. Because they don't have to, they enlist the armies of the world to do their bidding. Can you conteract that? Firebombs and casualities incurred even secondarily by your cause only weaken it's point.

It you slip into the hatred thing, you are slipping into their trap. They want that, it's easy to fight and avoid. It's rational questions they fear and the power of the market. If they can't find a buyer for their products...shit they are out of the picture, because most of them are so heavily indebted on the promise of their product, that if it doesn't sell, neither does their viewpoint.

They are only powerful as long as they can sell us on their dream...when we go after our own and turn our backs on what they think is important, shit they'll have to work to maintain their own dream. And since they were only interested in the short term financial gain...they'll probably lose out in life as well (Because they have no real dream, only financial gain.). While those of us that value family, life and humanity will have each other.

 

I've been promised reduced health care, taxes and expenses. I haven't seen any of those materialize. But I still have my family and friends. And I will stand by them here and overseas before I stand behind empty promises of financial gain. NAFTA and Gat didn't increase my standard of living. This war has causesd me increaded charges at the gasoline pump. And I watched as victims of Katrina sat on roofs waiting to be rescued while we were paying more for homeland security. It's time to demand answers to what's in it for me and not buy into the empty promises that it will be good for the market. Who's market is that, it doesn't seem to be mine.

Think about Katrina...who really cared. The American public donated, but what really has the government done to rescue those people. But we are off spreading democracy...the military contractors keep benefitting from this push for democracy but what about those of us that live here?

 

i find that i agree with you on quite a few points. Malcolm X (one of my heros) said had a slogan: Ballot or Bullet. and he said "well lets try the ballot first." and while i dont really feel voting realyl gets things done, the same principle can be applied to protest. try peaceful protest unti lthey push you to violence. but it just seems that peaceful protest is so part of the status quo now. they expect you to go and picket and their meetings and forums. they want you to feel like you have freedom of speech.

 

They do push towards violence, but only because if a movement stoops to violence it can be discredited. They can only push you to violence if you see it as an option.

It's not about ego or macho..it's about what serves the movement, and getting your balls in a bunch and flying off the handle doesn't serve anyone. Want to react violently join up and serve in Iraq and Afghanastan.

In the sixties we were pushed also. Kent State saw some of our protesters killed by undertrained national guard. Who do we have in Iraq right now? Want to join them in Iraq...keep up the violence and the draft will probably be reinstated.

 

haha if any signs of a draft come about ill leave america. ive always wanted to be labeled as a draft dodger.

 

You can accomplish more by setting the example! Maybe it won't get your manhood excited at the time, but in the long run fewer lives will be lost and more/greater support will be accomplished and those in power will hear the noise, and not have a way to react quickly and cheaply to conteract you macho posing.