Weird. It’s almost as if there is some well organised and well financed political force that is managing to organise similar supporters across the Western World. And yet our modern media seems to try to ignore this angle, a bit like stories involving under age working class white girls.
I can believe that meme theory explains how people in farflung parts of the world can adopt the methods and dress of each other in a digital age. And it’s relatively inexpensive to obtain the means of breaking glass and smashing up shops. And anarchists and enforced boredom us probably a bad combination.
But it’s probably a dangerous mistake to rule out some kind of organized support structure prodding them on.
Of course. We see norms of dress all over the place, it’s how people display what tribe they belong to. But when you are able to co-ordinate and organise protests with legal representation, first aid officers, photographers and friendly media reporting, along with the strange lack of action by politicians in charge then it does look rather odd.
See how lockdown protests are dealt with, and how these protests are reported and how ‘organised’ they are. Very different indeed.
I mean, you can copypasta the kind of organizational structure they’re using. The legal defenses are mostly crowdfunded, the “medics” are trained via manuals published online (based on information in anarchist manuals published via Xerox and distributed on college campuses years ago), and it doesn’t take a puppet master for people to figure out that breaking cameras of unapproved journalists and demanding that if they do intend to have journalistic access, they’d better be sympathetic to their cause (or else). And politicians are largely just showing their cowardness by trying to curry the mobs favor lest they be next.
My issue with the puppet master theory is that this doesn’t benefit anyone, and any entities with money and power enough to provide material support would see that. It looks like an organic quagmire to me.
Not to bend an old saw, but as I see it the only conspiracy that makes sense to me is Putin. In 2016 people framed that story as Putic taking direct control of American democracy. That was not the case, but that doesn’t mean he didn’t run a disinformation campaign to nudge our democracy. Where I diverge from my former leftie friends is that I don’t believe he was necessarily trying to get Trump elected. He was just trying to sow discord in our system to limit are ability to organize opposition to his goals. And if that’s the case, I don’t believe he would have stopped there. Or for that matter started. I think he has nudged and is still nudging these protests with a decentralized, cell-based manipulation campaign that is merely planting a bad idea here, a bad idea there, and stoking preexisting flames in discrete and subtle ways.
Remember back about twenty years ago when people used to virally post unfactual and poorly written Pravda stories online? After awhile the internet started to catch on that this was not reliable news. Later Pravda tried to claim that they were a parody site (just without any jokes), but I think that was an experiment that Russia was conducting on the ability to manipulate opinion online. And they don’t seem to have stopped doing this. There are fake viral cooking technique videos in the past few years that have been traced to Russia (check out Anne Reardon’s How To Cook That YouTube channel for her research and debunkings.) Again this is an experiment to see what people can be made to believe. But I don’t think the knowledge gained from this has been used to favor any party in particular. It has been used to pit us against each other so we aren’t looking at what Putin is doing to take back former Soviet territories.
I may be out on a limb on this, but I don’t think it’s too irrational or far fetched.
Hahaha call something a conspiracy theory to discredit it. Well done. And then talk about the whole Russian collusion with a straight face. Do yourself a favour and read what Glenn Greenwald and Matt Taibbi have to say on that particular subject. You might learn something.
Of course, your later part in your comment, mention money and power people. But there are organisations that love to de-stabilise democratic countries. But for all that, an interesting comment.
… oh ! … a surprise reference to the ongoing Rochdale, Rotherham, Oxford, Telford etcetera Anglo-child rape-gangs flourishing amongst the Asian incomer clans in these and 35 other towns where that curse has been tolerated … the supposedly sainted Jo Cox – nearby constituency – didn’t lift a finger : wrong sort of victims, right sort of protected perps.
Not to mention no prosecutions for FGM for over thirty years.
The French, to their eternal credit, were and are far tougher on this revolting practice.
‘Our’ excuse (Social Services, Police, & CPS) was “Oh it’s cultural we mustn’t interfere” Pathetic!
Alex Lekas
3 years ago
the more that violence is tolerated, the more violence there will be. That’s basic human behavior. Eventually, there will be death. There were dozens of murders across the US after the BLM crowd started rioting. Ironically, the victims were almost exclusively black but none of those lives seemed to matter much, not even the ones of children.
Absolutely. Death counts in big cities like Minneapolis, the epicenter of the Floyd riots, have hit new highs. And the response from city councils? Cut funds for the cops. Of course, the cops did very little during the riots to actually arrest rioters. Many many stories of cops sitting on their fat butts watching rioters trash and loot. But you do need cops.
The problem is that when the police arrested people in Seattle, Portland and Minneapolis, the very left-wing prosecutors and judiciary etc simply released them back on to the streets. Arresting them became pointless.
Wasn’t it true though that those lives didn’t seem to matter much in those locations even before the riots? In places where mob violence was tolerated, some lives are and have always been politically expendable. But there are lots of places in the US where 1) rioting isn’t tolerated 2) will be prosecuted and and 3) lives are considered to be worth more from a political perspective. Cities where rioters are not prosecuted are populated by people to whom that is acceptable. But it is not acceptable everywhere. France may be the same with differing attitudes towards mob riots in different locations.
Sidney Falco
3 years ago
It’s astonishing how left-wing vandalism and violence is glamourised.
… a smaller scaled version of the leftist failure to ‘have a problem’ with the millions killed by Mao, the millions by Pol Pot and by Red Stalin ” or to allow the proles to be educated about these. To mention them derives from WrongThink. An inherent failure in humanity, of course, as the end is all. How Hobsbawm would have loved this.
Even the Times gave a fawning obituary to the monster Hobsbawm, who was incidentally a regular member of the dinner table where the Milliband boys grew up, (their father being a Marxist Scholar) and they remembered him fondly.
Look at ‘Urban 75 Forums’ for the biggest anarchist talk forum. I get banned from it right away, so watch your un-wokeness or you are gone. But if you wish for a dark canyon to rant into this is a good one. Also you get to see some anarchists ‘in the wild’.
regnad.kcin.fst
3 years ago
Shopkeepers need to arm themselves with clubs, put on masks, and respond in a coordinated manner. By breaking knees.
He is safety tucked away in a gated community somewhere far from mob violence.
stephen f.
3 years ago
It is clear that the pros of the Black-Bloc are a problem, as is non-enforcement of laws against willfully destructive acts, but I am stuck on trying to figure out what an “anti-establishment pony tail” is…
Anarchy simmers just below the surface. I recall the situation in 2011(I think) in the UK when a man was killed by police in Tottenham and the next thing we know there are riots, fires and looting all over the country. Our civil society is a fragile beast that can easily and quickly get very ugly indeed.
Yes, but only if the “wrong” person is killed. I remember a Scotsman shot in the back in the 90s for carrying a table leg home. Someone in a pub apparently said to police that an irishman was in there with a weapon in his bag. He wouldn’t stop when shouted at, so was shot. No riots then; hardly reported in fact.
As I recall, the poor guy was guilty of being deaf (which is why he did not respond to the police challenge) and carrying a table leg in a plastic bag.
… in October 1985 a black crowd in Tottenham, North London, hacked PC Keith Blakelock to death – the Wikipedia entry incorporates a Forensic diagram indicating the 40 machete wound locations.
Peter Lockyer
3 years ago
Another great and informative article. So many young people suffering from feelings of despair greatly exacerbated by COVID. Worrying times indeed.
Well I don’t think this lot have any genuine feelings of despair. As the writer says, they are generally white and quite privileged – just like the Antifa mob in the US. For the most part they are just ‘larping’ (live action role play).
There are many people right now who have genuine feelings of despair, be they moral, intellectual or material. (I despair at the lack of morality and intellectual capacity displayed across the West’s governing and corporate classes, although I have no particular material despair). However, I don’t go out smashing up shop windows and bus shelters.
Not the poor unemployed but the bachelor underemployed – raging while waiting on the state to pick up the bill for their parents social care so they can squander their inheritance.
ralph bell
3 years ago
I think the increased following of these BlackBloc protesters could also be a backlash against the increase in the state trying to parent their populations like the increasing number of parents do with their ‘helicopter parenting’ their own children. Following Corona restrictions with the likely destitution and isolation, I would expect to see a lot more of this need for an outlet of anger and resentment..
France has suffered from very high youth unemployment for a very long time. This has top be a significant factor. I remember the early 1980s well and we are still living with the fallout. There is nothing more corrosive than high unemployment
This unemployed youth is totally the cause of the MENA chaos and destruction of the region. Young men need to work to dissipate their energies or they turn to antisocial or self destructive ways. In the Islamic lands the youth told their duty is to raise a family, but have no work, or prospects of affording a family are unbelievably destructive. I am always amazed at the peacefulness of Sub Saharan Africa as they are totally in this demographic. I think much of Mexico, Central and South America, is from exactly this same thing, the unemployed young man.
That’s almost certainly the real motivation on a subconscious level. But I don’t think they understand it that way.
Frederik van Beek
3 years ago
The riots are there because of the despair pumped up by corona-measures. If you want less riots than stop spreading stupid fear for some meaningless virus.
Kevin Ryan
3 years ago
The current title of this article (13,30 GMT) is “How the Black Blocs seized French Streets – a new wave of anarchist violence is threatening the country”
Only 6 people have commented so far . I’m curious too see if there’s a new headline by close of play.
Weird. It’s almost as if there is some well organised and well financed political force that is managing to organise similar supporters across the Western World. And yet our modern media seems to try to ignore this angle, a bit like stories involving under age working class white girls.
#Soros
I can believe that meme theory explains how people in farflung parts of the world can adopt the methods and dress of each other in a digital age. And it’s relatively inexpensive to obtain the means of breaking glass and smashing up shops. And anarchists and enforced boredom us probably a bad combination.
But it’s probably a dangerous mistake to rule out some kind of organized support structure prodding them on.
Of course. We see norms of dress all over the place, it’s how people display what tribe they belong to.
But when you are able to co-ordinate and organise protests with legal representation, first aid officers, photographers and friendly media reporting, along with the strange lack of action by politicians in charge then it does look rather odd.
See how lockdown protests are dealt with, and how these protests are reported and how ‘organised’ they are. Very different indeed.
I mean, you can copypasta the kind of organizational structure they’re using. The legal defenses are mostly crowdfunded, the “medics” are trained via manuals published online (based on information in anarchist manuals published via Xerox and distributed on college campuses years ago), and it doesn’t take a puppet master for people to figure out that breaking cameras of unapproved journalists and demanding that if they do intend to have journalistic access, they’d better be sympathetic to their cause (or else). And politicians are largely just showing their cowardness by trying to curry the mobs favor lest they be next.
My issue with the puppet master theory is that this doesn’t benefit anyone, and any entities with money and power enough to provide material support would see that. It looks like an organic quagmire to me.
Not to bend an old saw, but as I see it the only conspiracy that makes sense to me is Putin. In 2016 people framed that story as Putic taking direct control of American democracy. That was not the case, but that doesn’t mean he didn’t run a disinformation campaign to nudge our democracy. Where I diverge from my former leftie friends is that I don’t believe he was necessarily trying to get Trump elected. He was just trying to sow discord in our system to limit are ability to organize opposition to his goals. And if that’s the case, I don’t believe he would have stopped there. Or for that matter started. I think he has nudged and is still nudging these protests with a decentralized, cell-based manipulation campaign that is merely planting a bad idea here, a bad idea there, and stoking preexisting flames in discrete and subtle ways.
Remember back about twenty years ago when people used to virally post unfactual and poorly written Pravda stories online? After awhile the internet started to catch on that this was not reliable news. Later Pravda tried to claim that they were a parody site (just without any jokes), but I think that was an experiment that Russia was conducting on the ability to manipulate opinion online. And they don’t seem to have stopped doing this. There are fake viral cooking technique videos in the past few years that have been traced to Russia (check out Anne Reardon’s How To Cook That YouTube channel for her research and debunkings.) Again this is an experiment to see what people can be made to believe. But I don’t think the knowledge gained from this has been used to favor any party in particular. It has been used to pit us against each other so we aren’t looking at what Putin is doing to take back former Soviet territories.
I may be out on a limb on this, but I don’t think it’s too irrational or far fetched.
Hahaha call something a conspiracy theory to discredit it. Well done. And then talk about the whole Russian collusion with a straight face. Do yourself a favour and read what Glenn Greenwald and Matt Taibbi have to say on that particular subject. You might learn something.
one word, Soros
Of course, your later part in your comment, mention money and power people. But there are organisations that love to de-stabilise democratic countries. But for all that, an interesting comment.
… oh ! … a surprise reference to the ongoing Rochdale, Rotherham, Oxford, Telford etcetera Anglo-child rape-gangs flourishing amongst the Asian incomer clans in these and 35 other towns where that curse has been tolerated … the supposedly sainted Jo Cox – nearby constituency – didn’t lift a finger : wrong sort of victims, right sort of protected perps.
Not to mention no prosecutions for FGM for over thirty years.
The French, to their eternal credit, were and are far tougher on this revolting practice.
‘Our’ excuse (Social Services, Police, & CPS) was “Oh it’s cultural we mustn’t interfere” Pathetic!
the more that violence is tolerated, the more violence there will be. That’s basic human behavior. Eventually, there will be death. There were dozens of murders across the US after the BLM crowd started rioting. Ironically, the victims were almost exclusively black but none of those lives seemed to matter much, not even the ones of children.
Absolutely. Death counts in big cities like Minneapolis, the epicenter of the Floyd riots, have hit new highs. And the response from city councils? Cut funds for the cops. Of course, the cops did very little during the riots to actually arrest rioters. Many many stories of cops sitting on their fat butts watching rioters trash and loot. But you do need cops.
The problem is that when the police arrested people in Seattle, Portland and Minneapolis, the very left-wing prosecutors and judiciary etc simply released them back on to the streets. Arresting them became pointless.
Wasn’t it true though that those lives didn’t seem to matter much in those locations even before the riots? In places where mob violence was tolerated, some lives are and have always been politically expendable. But there are lots of places in the US where 1) rioting isn’t tolerated 2) will be prosecuted and and 3) lives are considered to be worth more from a political perspective. Cities where rioters are not prosecuted are populated by people to whom that is acceptable. But it is not acceptable everywhere. France may be the same with differing attitudes towards mob riots in different locations.
It’s astonishing how left-wing vandalism and violence is glamourised.
is it? The left is the same group that worked mightily to sanitize the likes of Stalin and Mao.
… a smaller scaled version of the leftist failure to ‘have a problem’ with the millions killed by Mao, the millions by Pol Pot and by Red Stalin ” or to allow the proles to be educated about these. To mention them derives from WrongThink. An inherent failure in humanity, of course, as the end is all. How Hobsbawm would have loved this.
Even the Times gave a fawning obituary to the monster Hobsbawm, who was incidentally a regular member of the dinner table where the Milliband boys grew up, (their father being a Marxist Scholar) and they remembered him fondly.
Look at ‘Urban 75 Forums’ for the biggest anarchist talk forum. I get banned from it right away, so watch your un-wokeness or you are gone. But if you wish for a dark canyon to rant into this is a good one. Also you get to see some anarchists ‘in the wild’.
Shopkeepers need to arm themselves with clubs, put on masks, and respond in a coordinated manner. By breaking knees.
Look up the Korean shopkeepers in Los Angeles during the Rodney King riots…
Or Turkish Cypriot shopkeepers in Green Lanes during the 2011 yob riots.
Has anybody seen a man called Soros, who funds many of these ‘movements’?!
He is safety tucked away in a gated community somewhere far from mob violence.
It is clear that the pros of the Black-Bloc are a problem, as is non-enforcement of laws against willfully destructive acts, but I am stuck on trying to figure out what an “anti-establishment pony tail” is…
A pony tail on a man?
Don’t you mean a t**t
“My little pony tail”
Haven’t had a haircut since February . My kids all think that’s what I am aiming for. Fat chance . See E R. below!
An antiestablishment ponytail is something that hasn’t existed since the early 90s.
Even worse, it should be “Les Blocs noirs”, the Académie will be apopleptic.
Anarchy simmers just below the surface. I recall the situation in 2011(I think) in the UK when a man was killed by police in Tottenham and the next thing we know there are riots, fires and looting all over the country. Our civil society is a fragile beast that can easily and quickly get very ugly indeed.
Yes, but only if the “wrong” person is killed. I remember a Scotsman shot in the back in the 90s for carrying a table leg home.
Someone in a pub apparently said to police that an irishman was in there with a weapon in his bag. He wouldn’t stop when shouted at, so was shot. No riots then; hardly reported in fact.
As I recall, the poor guy was guilty of being deaf (which is why he did not respond to the police challenge) and carrying a table leg in a plastic bag.
Can your recall his name?
… in October 1985 a black crowd in Tottenham, North London, hacked PC Keith Blakelock to death – the Wikipedia entry incorporates a Forensic diagram indicating the 40 machete wound locations.
Another great and informative article. So many young people suffering from feelings of despair greatly exacerbated by COVID. Worrying times indeed.
Well I don’t think this lot have any genuine feelings of despair. As the writer says, they are generally white and quite privileged – just like the Antifa mob in the US. For the most part they are just ‘larping’ (live action role play).
There are many people right now who have genuine feelings of despair, be they moral, intellectual or material. (I despair at the lack of morality and intellectual capacity displayed across the West’s governing and corporate classes, although I have no particular material despair). However, I don’t go out smashing up shop windows and bus shelters.
It is existential despair. Anarchy stems from this.
Amazing how these days people in despair, having mental problems etc. Baby Boomers and earlier were just “pissed off”.
How many unemployed where needed to kick start Adolph & Co?
Not the poor unemployed but the bachelor underemployed – raging while waiting on the state to pick up the bill for their parents social care so they can squander their inheritance.
I think the increased following of these BlackBloc protesters could also be a backlash against the increase in the state trying to parent their populations like the increasing number of parents do with their ‘helicopter parenting’ their own children. Following Corona restrictions with the likely destitution and isolation, I would expect to see a lot more of this need for an outlet of anger and resentment..
I think you’re wrong. These hate-filled fascists have been on the ‘march’ for a long time, now.
could be both !
France has suffered from very high youth unemployment for a very long time. This has top be a significant factor. I remember the early 1980s well and we are still living with the fallout. There is nothing more corrosive than high unemployment
This unemployed youth is totally the cause of the MENA chaos and destruction of the region. Young men need to work to dissipate their energies or they turn to antisocial or self destructive ways. In the Islamic lands the youth told their duty is to raise a family, but have no work, or prospects of affording a family are unbelievably destructive. I am always amazed at the peacefulness of Sub Saharan Africa as they are totally in this demographic. I think much of Mexico, Central and South America, is from exactly this same thing, the unemployed young man.
That’s almost certainly the real motivation on a subconscious level. But I don’t think they understand it that way.
The riots are there because of the despair pumped up by corona-measures. If you want less riots than stop spreading stupid fear for some meaningless virus.
The current title of this article (13,30 GMT) is “How the Black Blocs seized French Streets – a new wave of anarchist violence is threatening the country”
Only 6 people have commented so far . I’m curious too see if there’s a new headline by close of play.
??
A proper war would sort them out. Sharpish.
Against us over Fishing in the English Channel perhaps.
“Down with capitalist bus shelters !”
It would be hilarious if it wasn’t so pathetic.
‘Black’ and ‘Noir’ do seem to have taken on negative connotations this cycle, no? Words mean something.