"Where else would you go when you have an ax to grind?"

Friday, July 02, 2010

Let me be perfectly clear

A few commenters and correspondents have accused me of supporting or at least giving aid and comfort to the Black Bloc Anarchist protesters who grabbed so much attention in Toronto during the G20 summit. Such accusations are, to use the mot juste "crap."  My parents raised me much better than that.

I am most certainly NOT defending the brain-dead attention whores in the so-called Black Bloc, I think they are childish tantrum-throwing clowns. I am criticizing the ham-fisted police response to them, which is not the same thing.
As far as I can see the police played right into the hands of this tiny group of dingbats in Toronto by letting them run wild on Saturday smashing windows and giving them patrol cars to burn and then turned around let the frustrated riot cops off the leash to arrest and even beat innocent peaceful protesters. Entire blocks were surrounded by the police in a strategy called "kettling" in which they seal off an area and arrest everyone in it, protesters, reporters, residents - anyone and everyone on the street. This is a violation of the constitution. Add to that the Ontario government passing last minute laws of dubious constitutionality, in secret no less, and the Toronto police chief adding his own illegal addendums and lying about what the law allowed his officers to do and you a have the results of the G20 on Canada. Previous use of agent provocateurs by the police, such at the Montebello summit two summers ago, have lead to a situation where anytime the there is violence of this nature at a major event, there will always be some question of whether the police were involved. Public trust in the police has been drastically eroded, and not without cause. And THAT is what the anarchists really want.
In that sense, the Black Bloc were very successful. The police - who bragged they had infiltrated the group prior to the summit - did nothing to stop them, but fueled their antics by giving them free rein on Saturday and then used the damage they could have and should have stopped to justify an unconstitutional, heavy-handed response the rest of the weekend and as an object lesson to defend the ridiculous amount of money spent on security.
For the most part the television media lapped it up--pictures of burning police cars were all over the news and no one initially questioned any statement the police made.
One of your favorite journalists, Christie Blatchford, has been pushing this emotional story from Toronto Police Chief Bill Blair about how the black bloc protesters disrupted the repatriation ceremony in Toronto for a Canadian soldier killed in Afghanistan. Except that video taken at the event shows absolutely no indication of any kind of disruption occurring. This further erodes the credibilty of both the police and the mainstream press -- another win for the forces of stupid black bloc anarchist wannabe revolutionaries.
I am not a fan of the black bloc hooligans by any means at all. I think they are dangerous, have no agenda except breaking the system and offer no alternatives. Mostly, I think they are bunch of self-important grandstanding assholes and petty vandals. They consider themselves revolutionaries and the job of a revolutionary is to provoke a response by the state, to get them to crack down on the population and thereby provoke antigovernment sentiment and expand support for the revolution. This only works if the state panics and gives the revolutionaries what the want by cracking down and pissing people off -- and that is what happened in Toronto this weekend.

If the cops had just done their job instead of playing PR and political games to serve their own ends, there would be about 50 of the Black Bloc  in jail for variations on the charge of aggravated jackassery, most of them with scrapes and bruises, the rest of the weekend would have gone smoothly and we'd be talking about how badly the government overspent on the summits. Instead, the police and government have sowed the seeds of increasing public distrust in authority and undermined the foundations of civil society--which is just what the Block Bloc wants.


http://www.wikio.com

9 comments:

ck said...

You don't owe any explanation regarding your thoughts on Black block.

As I've discovered this past very difficult week, most of these cons who drank the kool-aid are going to think whatever they like in the end and it doesn't help when wildly popular radio hosts like redneck Ryan Doyle of Newstalk 1010 CFRB think all protesters and passersby and yes, even media who got arrested not only deserved whatever happened to them, but they're all anarchists; scum; inhuman. Furthermore, they think all of us who don't support even Bill Blair's lies and creativity never worked a day in our lives, are spoiled rotten and live in our parents' basements.

I finally did catch your show. Loved the Johnny CAsh song at the beginning. Very apropos lyrics.

I too believe that that these at least some of these black bloc were fulfilling many agendas: Blair's, and not the least of which, Harper's. Don't ever change that conspiracty theorist part of you. Many mysteries of life have been solved by folks like conspiracy theorists.

Oh, and I do read the Blogging SupposiTories. I don't have the gift that Canadian Cynic did, but I do things in my own way.

I read them and listen to Astral Talk radio so I know what propaganda is being pushed for Harpercon; what kool-aid du jour is being served up.

Keep up the good work!

Pale said...

I think the black bloc crap is just a convenient bunch of gits who play into the authoritarians hands.

And ya. I do think the authorities "help" them along.

Plain old bullshit. If people all just got up one day, walked into the streets and just started marching, with no destructive crap, we could send a message.
We need to take to the streets.
See how badly they want to scare us out of it? They are willing to do anything to stop that.

croghan27 said...

I am not so quick to condemn the Black Bloc members.

I can see without them a very condescending pat on the head for the well behaved protesters - who are then studiously ignored.

"Now that you have done your protest thing, we can get back to the important matters at hand."

Yes, it does show a certain incompetence on the part of police - they knew something like that would happen and they either allowed it or could not handle the reality of it - but I think what they did is important.

It does distract the MSM into reporting on the (when all is said and done) the trivial actions of a few and ignore the more profound violence being done to people by the G20 leaders - but that would happen anyway.

I am a bit too old and the body is too rotten to participate - but I really do not have a big problem with the Black Bloc antics.

Jane2 said...

Amen. What a bunch of hooey...the best the TO police could come up with was black clothes and spray paint cans? Good Lord.

Not like it should have been a surprise to them...waiting for the cry to ban black clothing.

Anonymous said...

In 2007 some of us at "A Creative Revolution" posted on the RCMP's killing of Robert DziekaƄski. We were immediately criticized, by the police I think, for not knowing anything about policing and the appropriate use of force.

It is part of a campaign to discredit any criticism of the authorities.

p2p

double nickel said...

I'm not even sure there is such a thing as the BB. Has any member ever been arrested? Charged? Publicly identified? Not to my knowledge.

ck said...

No DN;

Even more suspicious now; I read about some of the merchants on Yonge Street who sustained some damage.One of whom, one of those high end Chinese Gift shops. Anyhow they swiped two large items from the display window; both priced around 300$ a pop. They continued lumbering up Yonge Street with a large and cumbersome crystal ball under the watchful eye of the cops. Furthermore, with the size of that thing, ti must have slowed them down considerably, yet the cops made no effort to catch him before going off to smash some jeweller's window with said crystal ball.

You'd think that someone in black hoody and face covered in bandanas lugging a large crystal ball would look somewhat strange even for them. I mean; since when are crystal balls part of an 'anarchist's' war chest?

Smartpatrol said...

This was a straight-up smear campaign designed to tarnish progressive social activists by association. Police in "Black Bloc" threads were allowed to run amok for 2 hours in dt TO, given free reign to smash widows & torch police cars so that the photographs of broken glass & burnt-out cruisers could be taken & put into circulation far & wide.

Has anything been heard from the peaceable activists? No. Has any of their concerns re: the axing of social programs that don't cause deficits been addressed? No. Legislated poverty? No. Corporations that were bailed out w/ taxpayer $ that's now being lent back by these same Corps. at interest to the same govt.'s that forked over the taxpayer $$ because these Captains of Industry were too stupid to know when not to be greedy in the 1st place? Nothing. Nada. Zip-iddy-doo-dah. Because the antics of the Cops in Masks gave the Cops in Helmets free license to grab anyone w/ in an arm's reach & slap the zip-cuffs on them & shuffle them off to parts unknown for "processing" (read: detain w/o charges until the whole thing blows over & nobody cares 'cuz everyone's too worn out to give a shit). What was on the front covers & in the editorials of the major papers (& dishrag dailies) Monday morning is how EVIL! & HATE-FILLED! & TERRIFYING! these THUGGISH SOCIAL-JUSTICE-TERRORISTS! are & how they JUST! DON'T! GET! IT! & how the economy/society is TEETERING! ON! THE! BRINK! unless the police DO SOMETHING! & assert themselves & CRACK! DOWN! even harder than they are already. But they can't. Because 100 balaclava-wearing window-smashers are just too EVIL! & HATE-FILLED! & TERRIFYING! for 20 000 fully-armoured, fully-armed, fully-trained riot police to deal with. *raspberry*

I realize how horribly negative & mildly paranoid this sounds, but what's happening in TO is a smaller part of what's happening elsewhere: the Criminalization of Dissent. What the police are doing in TO are what they were up to in Seattle, Montebello, Quebec City, Genoa, Miami, etc. Crooks & Liars(1) & Hullabaloo(2) have the scoop.

1: http://crooksandliars.com/john-amato/miami-model

2: http://digbysblog.blogspot.com/2010/06/is-g8g20-protest-movement-dying-just.html

Smartpatrol said...

Has anything been heard from the peaceable activists? No. Has any of their concerns re: the axing of social programs that don't cause deficits been addressed? No. Legislated poverty? No. Corporations that were bailed out w/ taxpayer $ that's now being lent back by these same Corps. at interest to the same govt.'s that forked over the taxpayer $$ because these Captains of Industry were too stupid to know when not to be greedy in the 1st place? Nothing. Nada. Zip-iddy-doo-dah. Because the antics of the Cops in Masks gave the Cops in Helmets free license to grab anyone w/ in an arm's reach & slap the zip-cuffs on them & shuffle them off to parts unknown for "processing" (read: detain w/o charges until the whole thing blows over & nobody cares 'cuz everyone's too worn out to give a shit). What was on the front covers & in the editorials of the major papers (& dishrag dailies) Monday morning is how EVIL! & HATE-FILLED! & TERRIFYING! these THUGGISH SOCIAL-JUSTICE-TERRORISTS! are & how they JUST! DON'T! GET! IT! & how the economy/society is TEETERING! ON! THE! BRINK! unless the police DO SOMETHING! & assert themselves & CRACK! DOWN! even harder than they are already. But they can't. Because 100 balaclava-wearing window-smashers are just too EVIL! & HATE-FILLED! & TERRIFYING! for 20 000 fully-armoured, fully-armed, fully-trained riot police to deal with. *raspberry*

I realize how horribly negative & mildly paranoid this sounds, but what's happening in TO is a smaller part of what's happening elsewhere: the Criminalization of Dissent. What the police are doing in TO are what they were up to in Seattle, Montebello, Quebec City, Genoa, Miami, etc. Crooks & Liars(1) & Hullabaloo(2) have the scoop.

1: http://crooksandliars.com/john-amato/miami-model

2: http://digbysblog.blogspot.com/2010/06/is-g8g20-protest-movement-dying-just.html