From: violentanarchists.wordpress.com
Is the Black Bloc a police tool?
Rioters in Egypt throw back teargas.
From the Arab Spring to the student protests in Montreal to the Plaza occupation movement in Spain to the Occupy movement in the US, people are giving up on pacifism.
Now that more people are participating in protests and social movements and seeing for their own eyes that nonviolence doesn’t work, that sitting down and raising your hands doesn’t change anything, and that there’s no dignity in letting yourself get beaten by cops, those who want to hold us down have come up with a new lie to keep us from getting stronger.
The lie is this: that the Black Bloc is full of police infiltrators, even led by cops, and that those who mask up and riot in the streets are state agents, “provocateurs.”
If people give up on pacifism, what’s the next best option, from the perspective of the government?
If they’re going to be doing illegal things in the streets, at least they should be unmasked, so they can all be arrested later on the basis of photos and video evidence. They should be suspicious and distrustful of their fellow protestors, especially those who fight back the hardest. And they should be divided from those who have more experience defending themselves from the cops and taking over the streets.
Egyptian protestors don the V for Vendetta mask
In the last few years, there have been more and more rumors and false accusations that the Black Bloc, or masked anarchists in general, are police provocateurs. These rumors have been spread by Hollywood and the mainstream media, they have gotten fellow protestors arrested, they leave us defenseless when we decide to take the streets, and they ignore a history of struggle in which people have commonly masked up to protect themselves.
It’s sad that people have become so pacified and confused that they think fighting back against the system makes the system stronger. Nowadays, people can only think of themselves as victims. Anything more than sitting down in front of a cop to get beaten strikes people as a provocation.
But the fact is, the powerful want us to remain peaceful. They don’t need excuses to repress us, they are perfectly capable of inventing excuses or attacking us without any excuse. What was Columbus’ excuse for invading the Americas and starting centuries of genocide? What was the excuse of European merchants for kidnapping hundreds of thousands of Africans as slaves? What was the US government’s excuse for invading Iraq?
Marginalized youth in Manchester attack the cops.
By fighting back, we don’t make the system stronger, we make ourselves stronger. The countries with the most peaceful populations (in terms of social movements, riots, and the like) tend to have the strongest systems of social control, the most video surveillance, the most government powers for spying on the population. Look at the UK or the Netherlands. People in those countries are tracked in their every movement from the moment they step out of their house. And in the last twenty years, with few exceptions, those populations have been very peaceful. The greatest advances in police powers and government surveillance did not occur in response to riots and uprisings—they occurred in years when those populations were pacified.
Governments that have to fear their populations are much more cautious about granting themselves new powers or increasing their security measures. In contrast to the UK, people in Greece have been throwing rocks and Molotov cocktails at banks and cops for decades, and they have never let their government get strong enough to regulate their powers of protest or implement effective spying and repression.
If governments really wanted us to mask up and riot, why do they dissuade us from doing it? Property destruction is punished more heavily than civil disobedience, sometimes even with anti-terrorist laws, and masking up is illegal in dozens of countries and many parts of the US.
A protestor in Mexico attacks riot police with a homemade blowtorch
The purpose of this website is to counteract the manipulation and stop the pacifist ideologues who are working with the cops to get people arrested.
We’re facing serious problems as a society. While more and more of us are coming out into the streets to fight back, we need to learn how to sharpen our struggle, to take back our streets and our cities, and to defend ourselves.
If you like what this website has to say, please spread it among your friends and post the link every time some conspiracy theorist, journalist, blogger, NGO activist, or cop tries to tell you that our friends in masks are working for the system.
Please help. This website has been put together by just a few people who personally participate in the struggle for a better world. We took time off from our jobs, our responsibilities, and our other projects to counter the lie that is being spread about those who fight back. The information in this website comes from our own research, our personal participation in some of the movements and struggles mentioned, our witnessing firsthand the use of this lie, and correspondence with people who have taken part in other struggles around the world. The pacifists, journalists, NGOs, and conspiracy nuts who are spreading these false accusations have way more resources than we do. We don’t want your donations and we don’t want followers like they do, we just want the truth to get out and our struggles to get stronger. Please spread the word and pass this website along to anyone who has been fooled.
