The anarchists + other individuals that smashed bank windows + tagged Whole Foods delegitimize the entire Occupy Oakland movement + need to be held accountable for their actions. I suspect that much of the media will not differentiate between the protesters. No doubt conservatives will do so.
There needs to be a serious concerted effort to purge these criminals from the movement because they will chip away at our credibility. Suggestions on how to do this?
3341
I like the idea of a curfew or ‘day event’. There’s something maybe psychologically to do with day + night activities in the regard that more positive events occur during the day than at night when the environment is more anonymous + inhospitable such that the kids in black reek havoc.
However I highly doubt Black Bloc would do their own protests/events when its so easy to hide amongst the protesters + even recruit them into vandalism.
Agreed, David. They represent a danger to the people of our movement when they provoke police involvement. I don’t stand for the ideologically pure non-violent position that we cannot prevent them from violence/vandalism but I question police intervention if infighting becomes more commonplace. Oakland doesn’t want this either.
You’re doing a good job here with the post by Jenny about the ‘kids in black’ – get the word out on all networks/via other Occupy groups about the fact that a few hijacked or claimed they were part of the protest when they’re just silly kids in masks wanting to wreck stuff under the Occupy flag. I’m guessing not anarchists at all, as Jenny’s post points out they would have more than a passing knowledge of the ideas of what they were doing if so. Or they’re undercover cops. Certainly attacking locals is not going to provide support or unity; or terrorising people will not bring them to the cause.
Well – take their fun away. Only have peaceful protests during the day; make sure everyone knows peaceful protest is allowed and move away/shun anyone who does anything more than peaceful civil disobedience, and make sure that publicly shared that the protest is from X time to Y, thus disassociating anything after as being nothing to do with you….
Yes cops and others will use any violence (even if provoked), and use it as a reason to clamp down even more, so keep cool under fire. Organise fun events, use humour, take the anti ‘vibe’ away and keep it Gandhi style. Involve various groups (my first thought is the diverse groups involved – like the queer community I’m involved in for instance) thus putting out a wide message to various networks of people, humour, humour, humour! and local unions, school kids, workers. The kids wanting a ruck will get bored and go elsewhere, and any provocateurs won’t have fuel for their fire.
Just a few thoughts…
p.s. you asked for specific ways to battle them… it’s difficult when somebody tackles one of them, like that guy did at Whole Foods. They gang up on you. That’s what they did to me when I tried to stop that guy from gathering rocks in the lot next to the Fox Theater. 5 or 6 of them came at me, and one of the women called me a snitch because I tried to identify him to the crowd. Not to the cops. So in these people’s mind, self-policing is just as bad as policing. Anyway, I have only come up with 2 tactics:
1. Expulsion — In the 1930s, the Okies were allowed to set up in Federal camps while they earned a tiny pittance from the big agri-concerns in the Central Valley. The locals would call the cops, and the cops would surround the camps and wait for some of the Okies to provoke them; then they would shut down the camp. So eventually the Okies had to adopt rules where if anybody threw a punch at a cop, the rest of the Okies would grap him and throw him out of the camp. They had to do that, because otherwise their women and children were in danger. Now, we have women and children in large numbers at these latest Occupy Oakland events. Do we need to allow teenage poseurs to expose them to danger?
2. If you throw a rock at a cop, I’ll stand in front of the cop and you have to throw a rock at me. We have enough numbers of people in this movement trained in non-violence who can do this, and we can use the same tactics against the violent people in our own crowd as we have used against the most violent cops. Sometimes shame is the most powerful weapon. But I’m not going to stand in front of a rock to defend a building. So there is a difference, at least tactically or practically, between property damage and outright violence.
I am in agreement with you. I posted along those lines here last week, just trying to get the message out. I have also been down to the camp on nights when we aren’t marching, and had these interesting arguments/discussions with some of the anarchists who advocate violence. Not all of them do, but some. The people who are actually occupying, I respect. They would probably advocate violence, but only in self defense. We can have these kinds of arguments; the movement isn’t about some kind of purity of any extreme non-violence.
But if you initiate violence, and if your vandalism isn’t at the very least done in some kind of creative way (like the sculptures built out of the metal barricades last Wednesday night), then you just add nothing to nothing and expect something to come of it. Violence is not an answer to violence. Whole Foods didn’t do anything to foreclose anybody’s home or manipulate currency or collude with government to initiate wars with foreign countries. It’s all about the BANKS and it’s all about DERIVATIVES. It’s not about breaking stuff, it’s about educating ourselves about the thievery that’s going on, internationally. Occupy Oakland is part of a global movement. We need to represent our specific and well justified complaints about the local police and the foreclosure problems in West and East Oakland and put them in the context of the national movement. These people who tagged the Whole Foods, they are the same losers who I have seen at every march for the last 15 years. They run away when they’re confronted. I tried to stop a guy who was gathering rocks to throw at the cops last Tuesday night, before our brother Scott Olsen got struck down by the cops. I think the cops would have done what they did anyway, but just the few people who were actually throwing things made it all seem “justified” to a certain part of the 99%. We still need to reach that part of the 99%, and the violent people are hurting the cause even though they think they are “hardcore.” They remain anonymous and they remain cowards.