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Sunday, December 13, 2009

Black-bloc anarchists in Copenhagen (video) -- who are these people!?! Part I

VIDEO BELOW SHOWS THE PEACEFUL MARCHERS, THEN A CONTINGENT OF THE BLACK BLOC.  JOURNALIST SAYS AFTER THE ARRESTS, THE MARCH BECAME PEACEFUL AGAIN


Link to YouTube video:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kBpS0QtXHYM
From EarthKeepers:  "Environmental reporter, Olivia Zaleski, and filmmakers, Gabriel London and Peter Buntaine, report as violence erupts during an otherwise peaceful protest at the United Nations Climate Summit in Copenhagen. An unidentified anarchist group of several hundred--most covering their faces with ski masks and hoods--began to converge, shooting explosives at nearby buildings and police. One homemade cannon launched cobblestones over the crowd, breaking the window of a nearby police van."

UPDATE:  After watching this video several times, it finally penetrated that these young fools were using "cobblestones" as projectiles.  There is a shot of one on the the sidewalk.  These things are deadly.  

Dear Readers,

Yesterday, Saturday, December 12, 2009, some 30,000 to 100,000 people marched peacefully in the center of Copenhagen.

Well, almost all of them, anyway.

Many years ago, I lived in Europe (1977-1986:  two years in Greece and seven years in Holland).  I was born and raised in a very small town in deep southern Illinois, so obviously 9 years in Europe were an eye-opener.

In the States (at least before the Cheney/Bush years), my generation didn't think all that much about anarchy. Times were reasonably good.  The middle class was strong.

But Europe has always been different.  There has always been a radical, albeit small, undercurrent of anarchism going back more than a hundred years.

I can't go into a history lesson of the 19th and 20th centuries, so let's just look briefly at one of the latest incarnations of this undercurrent -- the Black-Bloc, self-professed anarchists, intent upon uprooting capitalism, and overturning the "system."

[I have to admit that I have never understood what they meant to replace the "system" with, once it had been overturned.]

I do have some sympathy for radicalized youth in Europe.  I grew up in a place so small that you could walk out to the countryside in 5 or 10 minutes from almost anywhere in town, and it was the largest town in the county.  Now, I live in Brazil, and in an area where it is still possibly to throw out your arms and stretch.

Europe, on the other hand, is cramped.  It lacks adventure, space to create new things, to stick your elbows out.  I felt sorry for the young Dutch -- everything in Holland was already done, organized, arranged, efficient (mostly).  I was back there for a visit in 1996, and it had only gotten more crowded, but worse, it had become very commercial.  Germany can't be much better.  If you want to stretch out your arms in Scandinavia, you have to move up to the Arctic Circle (they give you wonderful tax breaks for living up there).

So, in spite of wonderful national health care systems, great public schools, a highly literate population, and an incredible standard of living (that would make most Americans keel over if they knew about it), the youth are dissatisfied.

I am not excusing them -- I'm just trying to give a little background.

These radical groups were very, very much a tiny minority at the march in Copenhagen, yesterday, but the press being what it is (oops! capitalist, thus need to make money), the reports of violence during the march were blown way out of proportion.

Press reports said there were 700 to 900 marchers arrested.  By all accounts, almost all of those arrested were marching legally and peacefully. (The fact that innocent, legally marching citizens were arrested has disturbed quite a few people.)

In Part II, I will post up some videos, photos, and links with more information about the Black Bloc.  For now, it is time to rest my sorry eyes a bit.

Tenney
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2 comments:

Anonymous said...

(Note to blogger: excuse me for the long historical background , but it is needed to best explain my point.
If you like edit my post to reduce is lenght)

Comment part 1(historical)
---
Well in Europe the Socialist Movement was born against the Capitalist exploitation.

We first began with the "utopian" socialists, that imagined a world were such injustices doesn`t exist.
Those worlds were just, as the name "utopian" suggest, purely "sci-fi" worlds.

But the hope it inspired was enough to trigger the first Socialist Revolution in History, the 1848 Revolution, wich began ,as usual, in France.

It was Socialist just in the Industralized France, and elsewere the Revolution was a burguois one against the Old Absolutist Regime.
The Revolution was crushed as the divide between the two emerging classes(burguoesie and industrial "proletariat") leaved the way for the counter-revolutionary alliance of Aristocrats and Big Business (so these Big Business "bad guys" began so early trashing every step towards an equitative progress...)

Well in 1848 also emerged the "modern Socialism", inspired by two people.
-One was Proudhon, that was the first Anarchist thinker.
-The other was Karl Marx, that togheter with Friedrich Engels began the so-called "scientific socialism", now renamed "Marxism" by his followers.

They both have the same objetive: a Stateless and Classless system, called "Communism", but disagree in the path needed.
_Marx and Engels developed the theory of class struggle based in the Dialectical process deviced by Hegel. This in turn lead to the formation of a Revolutionary Party that should lead the workers toward revolution, the Social Democrat Party(SPD in German).

_Proudhon and later his Russian follower Bakunin thought that Marxism likely can likely degenerate into a Jacobin-like One-Party Dictatorship (which is precicely what happened in Russia and China in XX century), so they rejected any Party Centralism, and tend to prefer a Peasant Revolution rather than a (industrial)Worker Revolution. The key point is that any step toward Communism should be given by People's Councils , not by a Centralist Party in Government.

Well, after WWI, the SPD changed towards a "reformist" path that ultimately lead them to abandon their original objetive(Communism) and choose a "Reformed Capitalism". The revolutionary faction led by Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Lieibchitz was brutally suppressed in 1919 by pro-Kaiser militias.

In Russia, the Bolsheviks followed the Jabobin-like path that the Anarchists feared, and while They are widely known as "communists" they actually build a State-Capitalistic System that lead to the dead-end of Stalinism (or the so-called "Marxism-Leninism", I would call it "Neo-Jacobinism)

Anarchists tried to do Revolutions in Ukraine(1918-1920) and Spain(1936-1939) but there were brutally crushed by Leninist-Stalinist regimes.

December 13, 2009 at 7:32 PM
Anonymous said...

Comment part 2(SITUATION NOW)
--------------

So here we are, after the defeat of Socialist Movements(thanks to their bad leadership), with a Globalized Capitalism of the "free market" type (as opposed to the failed "Central Planned" type followed by the USSR Block) that is exploiting people(or "human resources" as are known) and Natural resources with a so rapacious need for richness that the entire Bio-Geosphere is at the brink of a catastrophe by the combination of :
Global Warming +
Ocean Acidification +
Pollution +
Overfishing +
Over exploitation of Land and Deforestation

That is heading us toward the worst Extinction Event in Earth(this time Earth and not Human History).

And the cause is the same rapacious need of weath accumulation that characterized Capitalism from its very beginning.

So , here are the protests.
The governments, allied (as always) with Big Business have fear of people's movements, because they know that the situation is really bad. They fear revolutions like in 1848. And now we are far worse than then.

Europeans are particularly upset as they did big fights in the pastv to obtain improvements like the Welfare State, and now the current Globalized Economic System put that gains in peril. And now there is the menace of mayor environmental disruptions that will sent them back to the Middle Ages.

So they are back to the streets against this system that treathens to destroy everything.

Now there come those STUPID BOYS , so-called "Black-Block" giving police exactly what they wants: an excuse to began the repression of the people's movement.
(Proudhon and Bakunin should be turning over their graves as those groups call themselves "anarchists")

You should go ahead, in PEACEFUL demonstrations, reclaiming a BETTER SYSTEM.
But everytime REJECT VIOLENCE, as it always in history lead to brutality and repression that will either crush the Revolutions(as in 1848) or degenerating them and allowing its leaders to betray it and become the new exploiters(as happened in the French and Russian Revolutions).

WE CANNOT PERMIT THAT VIOLENT GROUPS MAKE THE PEOPLE'S MOVEMENT FAIL, AS IT WILL MEANS THE DESTRUCTION OF THE ENTIRE BIOSPHERE.

IT IS OUR LAST CHANCE.

Or we take it, or we will R.I.P alondside DINOSAURS.

December 13, 2009 at 7:34 PM

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