Antifa -- Is the Vanguard Ready?

The Incident at Berkeley has caused much hand wringing and hair pulling, "pearl clutching" in a word, throughout the law'n'order/"non-violence" -- except by the state -- crowd.

Ohnoes!!! Broken windows! "Molotov cocktails!" Disruption! Black clad anarchist!!!

This attitude toward disruption, inconvenience and broken glass (black clothing too) is one of the reason why we're in the pickle we're in. The fear of actually doing something that might-could get someone in trouble, change the narrative, prove disruptive, inconvenient, or break a window  has been so ingrained in the American subconscious that when it happens -- as at Berkeley, but many times before -- there is a reflexive recoil. "Ohnoes!"

Well, stop.

While I don't find the Black Bloc to be a particularly effective tactic -- never was -- it exists, it happens, it's going to continue, get over it.

Yes, really. Get the fuck over it. I think I said much the same during Occupy, whenever the Pearl Clutchers went into their periodic -- and idiotic -- hysterics over someone breaking something somewhere or burning trash in the street. Come on, it's a tiny thing when compared to the outrages of the ruling class. If it gets attention paid to some of those outrages, great. If not, it's not the end of the world.

Welp, here we are now, and Antifa is a rising thing as people start to recognize that Fascism has evolved and the Trump regime is its New Model avatar. If we really don't want fascists to rule us, we'll have to accept a bit of vanguardism from the Antifa.

Don't worry about it so much.

If you don't want to participate, don't. Is that so hard?

Of course I've heard plenty of reports that there are provocateurs sent by the state in every Black Bloc action we know of. Could be. I did encounter provocateurs during Occupy, but to my knowledge they were not included in any Black Bloc action I had personal knowledge of -- which wasn't all of them, by any means.

Any movement is going to be infiltrated. That's just the way it is, and it's another thing to get over and get used to. Infiltration will happen and authorities will attempt to decapitate any nascent movement -- at least any nascent movement on the Left -- before resorting to naked force. It's Iron Law.

We've seen, however, up at Standing Rock in particular, a remarkable level of resilience and continued resistance, despite the efforts of the authorities not just to decapitate but to violently confront and kneecap defiance.

Defiance, in fact, seems to be what puts the militarized police into an absolute frenzy. Hello. Clue stick. This is how you bring the system of rule to a halt and eventually bring it down.

Surprise: it's not a straight path to victory, and the Resistance makes many strange bedfellows along the way.

A key understanding is so far missing from the Resistance: this is Class War, and it is necessary to place Trump in the Ruling Class category and let it be known that the class he represents is in most ways just like he is.

In order to reach victory the entire 1% must feel the effects the defiance of the masses.

Their rule can be brought to a halt by making it impossible for them to govern.

The Antifa vanguard is already taking the risks, though it doesn't look coordinated -- yet. Interestingly, the RevCom agitators are right out front. Communists and Anarchists ordinarily don't get along -- and I'll leave to another time speculation on just who and what RevCom is -- but perhaps the danger is so great now that tired old animosities must be set to the side.

The Antifa vanguard is active but so far it is uncoordinated. Perhaps that will change with  the next ukase from the Winter Palace. We'll see.

But for now, I am surprised -- and impressed -- at the number of Antifa activists at the Disrupt J20 inauguration events.

 

Meanwhile in Berkeley:


And then there's this from WSWS:

Why is the New York Times promoting the “black bloc”?

By Bill Van Auken 
4 February 2017

The New York Times, the semi-official voice of the Democratic Party establishment, published an extraordinary article in its Friday edition headlined “Anarchists Vow to Halt Far Right’s Rise, With Violence if Needed.”

The piece, which ran across four columns of the newspaper’s front page under a huge photo of a black-masked individual preparing to break an office building window with an iron bar during Wednesday night’s protests at the University of California, Berkeley, amounted to free publicity and promotion of the violent protests organized by elements identifying themselves as the “black bloc,” anti-fascists and anarchists.

So there ya go. Chaos ensues...

Sow the wind, reap the whirlwind...

(Note: the Trotsky-ites at WSWS are great at analysis, but they tend not to get involved in anyone else's uprising. They field political candidates though, so there is that...)

Summer Slaughter Season

Map of Europe, c. 1940. The Summer Slaughter Season was under way and wouldn't end for years to come...

[Note: I found the map above in my collection of maps and atlases a couple of weeks ago. The map is in a Rand-McNally Atlas that was published in 1936, but the interesting thing to me was that the owner of the Atlas had taken a pink colored pencil to it and shaded in the then-current conquests of Nazi Germany. They include Austria, Czechoslovakia, Poland, Denmark, Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg and Norway. Albania had been invaded and occupied by Italy in 1939, and it is included in the conquests. Also indicated as partially absorbed into the Fatherland are Lithuania, Estonia, Latvia and Finland... We know that the Axis wasn't by any means satisfied... Don't forget Spain and Portugal...]

The sharks are in the water. Have you noticed?

The Summer Slaughter Season is upon us, and the various conflicts in the Middle East and elsewhere are in full swing. Bloodlust is catching.

Of course the slaughter in Gaza rivets the attention of many among us -- partly because it is so telegenic, what with the constant exploding shells, the running, screaming Arabs, holding the broken bodies that once were their children, and of course the breathless "terror" of the Israelis dashing to their shelters if by chance one of the Gazan "missiles" gets through the protective Iron Dome. (Actually, according to statistics I've seen, most get through. It's just that they land and explode -- or not -- where they have no effect.)

It's telegenic, too, because of the massive propaganda campaign Israelis undertake when they go to slaughter Arabs, a campaign that has only been matched recently by the coup-regime run by the Freaks in Kiev (h/t Saker) as they go to slaughter in the Donbass and along the Black Sea coast, committing atrocity after atrocity, but none as telegenic recently as the slaughter of Arabs in Gaza.

What became of this Ukrainian slaughter? It's still going on, with sieges under way, villages destroyed, hundreds then thousands of dead, millions made refugees. But the news is practically nil. The businesses that bring us the "news" are almost entirely focused on the slaughter in Gaza, for that's where the real action is.

Word has it that the ethnic cleansing an extermination campaign in Ukraine is perhaps going better than planned -- assuming it was planned, and I'm not sure it was -- partly because "Putin blinked" and refused in the end to send more than token assistance (if that) to his Russian/Russian speaking comrades in the Donbass and southeast. The rebels are on their own.

And so, recognizing that they cannot hold out indefinitely, and there's probably no profit in trying to do so, many residents, targets of the coup-regime run by the Freaks in Kiev, are leaving. By the tens of thousands.

Slaviansk fell to the Kiev coup-regime last week, and reports from there have practically ceased. We don't know how many executions there have been, in other words, but given previous indications, we can rest assured that the wet work is proceeding with all due diligence and speed. The armed rebel faction may have abandoned the city, but their collaborators are everywhere within it, no? And how does a bogus government like the Kiev coup-regime establish its authority over resistant areas and peoples? By killing rebels and their collaborators on a massive scale.

See the coup-regime in Cairo for a not-too-long past example.

The killing goes on in Syria unabated, and now the Syrian slaughter -- they say -- has spread to Iraq with the conquests of the ISIS Caliphate which has abolished the border between Syria and Iraq, and is -- they say -- intent on reestablishing the historic rule of the Caliph from Baghdad where once he held forth.

It's an interesting idea. No, really.

There was a time of relative peace and prosperity throughout Araby. It was much more recent than the Caliphate. It was during Ottoman times. Barely a century ago, within the historical memories of most of those in Arab lands today. Anglo-Euro-Americans have no memories of it, because in their histories, they created the Arab nations out of nothing at all; the Ottoman period barely registers.

The arrangements the Ottomans made among the various Arab peoples (and with the Jews too) seemed to work out fairly well all in all, limiting tribal conflict, resolving disputes, providing a reliable sense of security and safety throughout the region for peoples to do pretty much as they wished.

If that or something like it is what the ISIS Caliphate party is trying to re-establish, who am I to say "no?" Except, from reports, it's not. The Ottomans were progressives compared to the Caliphate. Or so we're told. The Caliphate would be going backwards a thousand years, and it would be terrible for the well-being of the people and the region. No, really.

 So we, or rather they, can't have that. Must be crushed. And so the anti-ISIS campaign is supposedly under way to re-take the various cities in Iraq that have fallen...

Deja-vu all over again.

We've done this before, haven't we? Wait, wait. We've been on this road so many times.

Fascism/Nazi-ism back in the day was a means of coordinating/uniting fractious Europe's elites and common herd to oppose the Dreaded Communists of the Soviet Union. A rightist form of populism, if you will, intended to do physical battle with the Soviet Bear, which it did with not a lot to show for it.

The Soviet Union dissolved on its own decades after the disaster of the Fascist/Nazi expansion period (with a nudge or two, to be sure).

But now we're in a political/ideological situation where it seems Our Betters believe that the Fascists and Nazis were too advanced, too progressive. Too organized.

Disruption and chaos are now the operative principles of global elites. Disruption in the Middle East and South Asia has been going on for many years, the idea apparently being to prevent any sort of comprehensive -- or even localized -- organization among the Arabs and to disrupt/dismantle any organization among the non-Arabs (such as Persians, Afghanis, and so forth).

Chaos and disruption serve the interests of the High and Mighty, but they cannot do so permanently. At least not historically. At some point, a new status quo has to settle in, but for some reason that is not allowed to happen in the Middle East and adjacent lands.

The current slaughter in Gaza is part of Israel's ongoing attempts to maintain chaos and disruption in its almost-conquered dependencies of Gaza and the West Bank. To what object is the question. How are Israeli interests served by such tactics?

But we can ask the same questions about Iraq or Syria or Libya or Ukraine or pretty much anywhere chaos and disruption -- and slaughter -- are the current ruling principles. How is anyone's interest served more than temporarily, indeed more than momentarily?

There have been more than a few suggestions that the ISIS advance in Iraq is a false flag engineered by the United States in order to disrupt/overthrow the corrupt regime of al-Maliki who was previously installed by the US. That would be par for the course given the way the Great Game has been played from the bunkers of the West for some time now, but there's no telling whether it's true -- or even relevant if it were true -- at this point.

The indications are that the Ukraine Thing was engineered by the US and EU over a long period, indeed over decades, and came to fruition by "accident" when Yanukovych said "no" to EU/IMF demands that would have caused domestic chaos and disruption in order meet them. Chaos and disruption ensued anyway.

Much the same can be said for Syria, Libya, and anywhere else the neo-imperial project is being implemented.

There is no escape apparently; there is no way to avoid the impositions and social/political/economic destruction that ensues.

Much the same was the case in Europe and the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere in prelude to the American entry into WWII.

While Americans were content to sit back and watch things spiral out of control in 1940 and '41-- at least until the attack on Pearl Harbor -- today, it appears the US Government, or a faction of it, is leading a global campaign of disruption and chaos.

We have become the enemy we once fought against...

Disrupting OccupySacramento -- "Diversity of Tactics" as Practiced by the Mayor

When you operate in the public square, disruptions are a fact of life. OccupySacramento has faced all kinds of disruptions on an ongoing basis, including having to break camp every night and prepare for arrests for failure to disperse that are a nightly occurrence at Cesar Chavez Plaza.

Live video of these arrests is streamed on the internet every night. Thousands of people around the world watch these arrests as they happen. They watch the arrival of dozens of police vehicles, the assembly and deployment of scores of police officers in riot gear, the busy to and fro of police commanders and assistant commanders and police videographers within the Plaza. They watch the march of a double column of riot police through the Plaza and they hear the orders to the Occupiers to disperse. They watch the riot police surround that night's volunteers for arrest -- anywhere from one to 20 or so, each night -- as the volunteers sit on the pavement, holding signs saying "People's Need Not Corporate Greed" and the like, and they watch as brothers and sisters in Occupation stand in witness, chanting now familiar slogans ("We. Are. The 99%! You. Are. The 99%!" among others) of solidarity.

They hear the volunteers for arrest speak out at the officers as they prepare for the arrests: "Your rights and pensions are in as much jeopardy as anyone else's. You're being robbed of the future just like everybody else. Why are you doing this to us? You are our brothers and sisters, we are your sons and daughters, we are your cousins, your aunts and uncles, we are you mothers and fathers, we are you, and you are us. Why are you doing this to us? Who are you serving? What are you afraid of? We are peaceful people."

They may hear a chant go up from the crowd of witnesses: "Where's the riot? Where's the riot?"

The volunteers preparing for arrest may continue to speak out to the police who are surrounding them: "Why are you arresting us for exercising our constitutionally guaranteed right of peaceful assembly? Why are you arresting us for exercising our constitutionally guaranteed right of freedom of speech? Why are you arresting us for exercising our constitutionally guaranteed right to petition the government for redress of grievance? Why are you arresting us? Why?"

And then the Livestream viewers around the world will see the demonstrators arrested -- gently to be sure -- one by one, lifted from the ground by two officers, placed in plastic restraints, hands behind their backs, marched away for processing and transport to the jail. Some of the volunteers may shout at this point, "I am a criminal! I am a criminal for exercising my rights as an American citizen! I am a criminal! I am a criminal!"

And sometimes the police -- who are both actors and audience in this nightly drama of disruption -- will be brought to tears by what they are witnessing and what they are doing.

Night after night, it's the same. Night after night.

But there are other disruptions as well. Some are simply part of the chaos of urban living, such as the police officer who got dogbit the other day, or the homeless wanderer whose incoherent ranting even he can't fathom. There is always a police presence in the Plaza, and there are occasional arrests of people passing through the Plaza whose presence is "suspicious" in the eyes of the officers. They will ask for ID and run the person's name for warrants. Often, they will find their target has missed a court date and will take him or her into custody. These events are so common, they're almost not disruptive any more (although perhaps they should be.)

Sometimes the disruptions involve actions by Occupiers themselves. A young man in the Plaza has been on a hunger strike for many days. He is becoming thinner and weaker and more delirious, and sometimes he has agonizing outbursts of despair that affect everyone. This is not the ordinary chaos of urban life; this is purposeful direct action, mindful of the man whose name graces the Plaza and whose image in bronze watches over us. This is Cesar Chavez Plaza, after all, named, as many civic plazas in California and throughout the West are named, for the farmworker organizer who brought hope and strength and determination to the people whose work in the fields of the West is the foundation on which empires of agriculture and commerce have been built.

Sometimes, like yesterday afternoon and evening, the disruption is due to the visitation of "dignitaries." The Mayor came to call, along with a troop of staff, and several council members in train. We knew he was coming. He said on Tuesday he would cross the street to the Plaza sometime later this week to visit and watch and listen and learn. And he said on Tuesday that he would work with our representatives to craft a Resolution that he would take to Washington with him when next he traveled to the seat of national power.

So he arrived. An Occupant greeted him. "Hello. Stop the arrests, drop the charges, open the Plaza 24/7." His smile couldn't have been bigger, "How are you? Good to see you. Yes, I'm here to hear your concerns. Thank you." He moved on to the next knot of Occupiers. And the next and the next and the next, shadowed by staff and joined by a television crew. Some of the Occupiers turned their backs or continued with their business as if there was nothing out of the ordinary going on. Others were expressing more and more dismay at the Mayor's clearly disruptive intrusion into the life and work of the Occupation. He went all around the Plaza with his staff and the television crew, while many Occupiers followed along. He spoke to everyone who came up to him, he was always smiling, always pleasant, always gracious, "reaching out."

The people he spoke with were disarmed. The Mayor knew what he was doing.

General Assembly was called, somewhat late, but it was called, and though the Mayor continued to hold court off to the side, with perhaps 25 or more people surrounding him, a sufficient number of Occupiers were assembled to begin the GA. All went well for the first few minutes, and then the Mayor and his staff and the council member for the Downtown district joined the Assembly. Announcements were being made, and as a courtesy, the Mayor's presence in the Assembly was announced as well.

He was offered an opportunity to speak. An opportunity he took full advantage of. He spoke at length about why he was at the Plaza: to "dialogue" with OccupySacramento. To listen to concerns. To take them back to the council and to have his staff follow up. Were there any questions? He started calling on people. The GA facilitator said, "Wait. Please. We have a procedure. We will open stack. [To the Assembly:] Please, if you would like to ask the Mayor a question, join the stack over there." And so a score of people "joined stack" and the Mayor took their questions one by one. Periodically he would say, "I would like to learn. I don't want to interfere with your process. I am so impressed with what you are doing." Then his disruption would continue. He was asked many questions having to do with how he and the council and the Occupation could work together to improve services and conditions for the least among us. He was always ready with an answer. He was asked a few questions about how to end the nightly arrests, questions which he did not answer, he launched into a campaign speech instead -- about how proud he was of this endeavor and so on and so forth, blah-ba-blah. He was challenged several times, "You haven't answered the question." Ba-blah-ba-blah-blah." Someone spoke very firmly to him, "You say you're here to listen, but you haven't heard us tonight any more than you heard us on Tuesday. Stop the arrests. Open the Plaza for our continuing use."

He smiled his biggest smile. "I hear you. I understand that you want the camping ordinance overturned, and I have pledged to you that I will work with staff and the council to see what can be done."

The crowd murmured. "We are not camping! We are occupying!"

"Stop the arrests!"

"The city has already made accommodations for you by extending the park hours, and we are working with staff to see what else can be done. We hear you."

"Stop the arrests!"

"We understand that you want to be able to camp here overnight..."

"We are not camping!"

"Occupy, occupy, that's right. We understand you want to stay here overnight. I understand that. We are working to see what can be done. There is a process. The process is under way. It's just begun. Please give us a chance to dialogue with you and see if we can come up with a solution."

"Stop the arrests!"

Someone got up and said, "What makes you think the city has any authority to interfere with citizens' rights to assemble, to speak freely and to petition. Is the city really prepared for the lawsuits that are inevitable? Do you realize the city attorney gave you very bad advice on Tuesday and demonstrated she has no idea of the case law involved? Do you realize the legal jeopardy she and you are putting this city in?"

The Mayor, for once, lost his aplomb. He claimed that he has to rely on the city attorney's opinion, and as far as he knows, she was offering her best assessment of relevant law. But clearly was made aware there... may... be a legal problem.

Another questioner asked: "When was the last time you or any other council member read the Constitution?"

"We are not camping!"

"I hear you."

"We want this park opened around the clock. We've been told many different stories about how to do that. We should go through Parks, we should go through the Council, we should go through the City Manager, we should ask the Police Chief. What should we do?"

He called up another council-member to answer.

"There's never been an official request to use the park around the clock, so the procedure is somewhat difficult to determine. Ordinarily a request would go through the Parks department, and they can issue a permit. But in this case... since there's never been a request, Parks can't act to grant it."

"Who has the direct final authority to make the determination of whether or not the arrests will continue? "

For once a direct answer from the Mayor: "The city manager."

"The mayor and council have no authority to make that determination?"

"That's right."

Murmuring in the crowd. Apparently, it was the first time many of the Occupiers had heard or realized that.

He was asked if he thought he was a member of the 99% or the 1%. "I like to think of myself as part of the 99%.... I pulled myself up by my bootstraps..." Kevin Johnson, multi-millionaire from professional sports, real estate investments, and privatizing public schools (among other endeavors). He was challenged on his privatization of Sacramento High School, with his private company, St. Hope, now running it as a charter school. "It's a public charter school!" he said defensively. "I'm very proud of the accomplishments of the school and its students."

"Yes, you are. That's because the teachers have no defined benefit pensions, they are paid less than public school employees, and they have no protection from arbitrar..." and he was cut off.

He was asked to take his money out of banks like Chase, Citi, or BofA, and put it in local banks or credit unions. Disingenuously, he asked: "Which ones are they?" He was asked again to take his money out of predatory banks, and he said that people have a choice in this country and he doesn't choose to do that.

He was challenged on the cost of the preliminary studies for the new arena the NBA is demanding be built for the Kings, especially given the fact that the city is always crying poor about social services. He said the new arena will bring 4,000 jobs. He was called a liar for that. (Net, there would be essentially no new jobs, and conceivably, given the proposed location in the Railyards, there could be fewer jobs than the current arena in the northern suburbs. And yet the project is slated to cost $350,000,000 just to construct an arena.) "No public money is going into this project," he insisted -- after conceding spending half a million dollars of public money for a consultant's report.

By this time, it was getting late, people were getting crankier and crankier, and so Question Time with the Mayor concluded, but as he went off into the night, practically everyone followed him, pestering him with more questions, personal statements, unresolved issues, and he continued to hold forth at the side of the Plaza while the GA facilitators tried to restart the aborted meeting. There were only a handful of people remaining for the GA, though, and many of them were very angry at what had just transpired.

Some were clear about what had happened. The Mayor got what he wanted: he successfully disrupted the Occupation and shifted attention from the purposes of the Occupation to his own wonderful self. And he kept the attention on himself no matter how much the GA facilitator tried to get things back on track.

There were many tears and much fury in the next few minutes. Accusations were flung willy-nilly, loud and very angry voices were raised. All this while the Mayor and his staff held court, surrounded by supplicants. Pleading their case. Kissing his hem.

At one point during Question Time, one Occupier asked, "Why are we on our knees before this man, asking, pleading with him? He works for us. We don't work for him."

When the Mayor wearied of treating with the rabble, he finally left the Plaza, and the tattered shreds of what was left of the GA were braided together into the semblance of order. The remaining items of business were covered as quickly as they could be. The anger and tears only partially defused.

He got what he wanted, the Mayor.

He's a master at it.

He will represent our voices. Make sure they are heard... Thank you. Thankyouverymuch.