Tuesday, September 18, 2007

The Battle for St. Paul: 1 Year Away

This is a trailer for the Republican National Convention Welcoming Committee, a group of anarchist organizing protests against the Republican Convention coming to St. Paul August 31st.

These are the guys at protest who will be lighting shit on fire and grabbing canisters of tear of gas with their bare hands and throwing it back at the cops.

Side Story: At the last protest I was at I stopped a group of these guys from taking apart this huge float-like puppet thing so that could use the wooden support beams as weapons against the cops. See, while the rest of us are protesting peacefully these guys start shit with the cops and then everybody gets tear gassed and shot with salt pellets. Not very fun.

Point: These guys are nuts. However they do have a sense of humor:



I guess some of these guys were involved in the recent clash between police and the activist group Critical Mass.

The Star Tribune reported that the normally peaceful monthly bike protest was "infiltrated" by protesters who sought to provoke police. I will put money on it that it was some of these guys. However the City Pages write up about the incident made it seem pretty clear the cops where out to beat some ass (anarchist or no anarchist).

While I have political sympathies with them I don't buy into the anarchist ideology or their methods. If I am going to swallow the pill of any radical ideology its going to be Marxism. Meanwhile I will just stick with my incoherent jumble of ideas I lazily call "democratic socialism" and stick to non-violent direct action (no Molotov cocktails for me...)

When a group is vastly out-gunned, be it by the cops on the street or society at large, it is their moral authority that is their source of power. Engaging in violent direct action only allows the authorities to strips us of our liberties beyond legal doubt and strip us of our moral authority in the eyes of the masses. To think one can engage in direct action with out consideration to how it is perceived by the sheepish masses watching us get our asses beat on television is to be either naive or to be a "True Believer"

True Believers: people who want to escape a flawed self by creating an imaginary self and joining a compact collective whole to escape themselves.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

I am getting too old for tear gas. And I won't be bringing my children.

Anonymous said...

Anarchists dont usually know what the hell they are talking about and few of them realise they sound exactly the same as neoliberals. I think I hate anarchists more than neoliberals because they can't even admit to what they truely are. BAH!

Anonymous said...

Probably that made little sense... we will discuss this at a later date, I guarantee.