Part One: The Black Bloc: It’s a Tactic, Not an Organization

Margaret talks with Molly Conger about the history of protestors wearing black and masks while fighting neoliberalism and fascism. 

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Cool Zone Media.

Speaker 2 (00:04):
Hello, and welcome to Cool People Did Cool Stuff. You're
a weekly reminder that when there's bad things happening, there's
people who try well, actually, you have a lot of
reminders of this right now, but there's people who try
to do good things in response to bad things, or
even sometimes not in response to bad things, just anyway,
they just try and do good things. And I think
we should remember that. We should also remember that I'm
your host, murder Kiljoy. You actually can forget that, though,

(00:25):
you don't need to remember that. But what you do
need to remember is that we have a guest this week,
and you need to know that our guest is named
Molly Conger. Hi.

Speaker 3 (00:35):
Hey, thanks so much for having me. I'm excited.

Speaker 2 (00:37):
Yeah, so I've never heard of you before. Do you
Do Anything? Molly is the host of one of my
favorite podcasts called Weird Little Guys that honestly, if you're
listening to the show, you've probably heard. But if you haven't,
you don't have to pause this and go listen. But
after this is done, you should go listen.

Speaker 3 (00:54):
It's sort of the opposite of this show, like tonally,
it's about bad people who did bad stuff.

Speaker 2 (01:00):
Yeah, and I like that. It's like not at the
like the Hitler scale, it's at the like I don't
think you've covered anyone I've heard of, and I have
spent a lot of time doing anti fascist work.

Speaker 3 (01:11):
No, just like weird little freaks trying to be like
Junior Hitler.

Speaker 2 (01:15):
Yeah, but no, I have no good transition for that.
But we have a producer whose name is Sophie Hi Sophie,
that's me Hi, And we have an audio engineer named
Eva hi Eva hi Eva, Hello Eva. And our theme
musical is written forced by unwoman. And Molly has no
idea what we're going to talk about today.

Speaker 3 (01:34):
It's always so nerve wrecking, like what if it's something
I can't be funny about.

Speaker 2 (01:38):
What if it's something you hate? I have no idea.

Speaker 1 (01:40):
Well, I actually have some news through even when you're
trying not to be funny, you're still funny.

Speaker 2 (01:48):
So I've been doing this series that people might have
or might not been listening to of the previous episodes,
where I've been covering neoliberalism and the people fighting against neoliberalism.
And I just finished a four parter kind of about
this app Batistas and an intention to move into the
alter globalization movement. But I thought, let's talk about another
player in the alter globalization protests today, Mollie, we're going

(02:12):
to talk about the boogeyman of militant street protests. We're
going to talk about a polarizing tactic that is regularly
mistaken for a group or an ideology. It's a tactic
that has escaped containment to get used by terrible people
as well, though usually not under the same name. I
don't know whether you can guess yet or not, or

(02:32):
I'll just tell you.

Speaker 3 (02:33):
Is it the black block?

Speaker 2 (02:34):
It is, we're talking about the black block.

Speaker 3 (02:37):
When you were talking about fighting globalism, I was worried
you were to talk about Alex Jones, But then I.

Speaker 2 (02:41):
Remember globalization, very big difference. Okay, sorry, let's actually get
that out of the way real quick.

Speaker 3 (02:47):
I just got over I just got over COVID.

Speaker 1 (02:50):
Oh yeah, your brain's not back yet.

Speaker 2 (02:53):
So there's this terribly named movement from the late nineties
early oughts. I'm not on script right now. I'm just
telling you all things. It was often at the time
called the anti globalization movement, but that was a name
given to it by the media, and some people within
the movement would call themselves anti globalization activists, but very
quickly people were like, no, that's actually not the thing
at all. We are a global movement that is about
tearing down borders. We are just against the neoliberalism that

(03:17):
is only tearing down economic borders of ways to extract
money from developing nations to give to rich people.

Speaker 3 (03:22):
So they're anti globe emoji, guys.

Speaker 2 (03:25):
I don't know whether globe emoji is. So the problem
is is that anytime someone says globalism, they're actually just
doing an anti Semitic dog whistle.

Speaker 3 (03:32):
That's why I was confused. Yeah, I'm on track now.

Speaker 2 (03:35):
Yeah, No, it's so hard to talk about alter globalization
movements like when right now the problem is fascism and tariffs. Right.

Speaker 3 (03:42):
But okay, so we're back to black Block. I'm with it.

Speaker 2 (03:45):
You ever heard of the black block? You clearly have
you guessed what we were talking about.

Speaker 3 (03:48):
I've seen them around.

Speaker 2 (03:50):
Yeah, all right, coming into this, what's your conception of
the black block?

Speaker 3 (03:54):
Well, one time I was getting beaten over the head
with a bicycle by a Boston police officer and someone
from the block who I will never know, whose face
I never saw, pulled me out of there. And helped
me wash the pepper spray out of my eyes. So
in my heart all they are heroes.

Speaker 2 (04:09):
Fuck yeah, I feel like there's the heroic mode of
black block, and that's that's what it does, is it
helps the people around.

Speaker 3 (04:16):
I just kind of like wander around process zones like oblivious,
just like I don't know, like Mannic Pixie dream girl
at the protest, like nothing back could happened to me
because I'm just a little girl, Like I'm so fucking dumb.
So I had my ass like yanked back out of
the line of fire by a stranger in a mask
several times. Cool, So thank you strangers.

Speaker 2 (04:39):
The shortest possible version that I could come up with
of the black block is that it is a street
protest tactic developed by the anti authoritarian left in which
everyone wears all black and masks and gathers together in
a group, a block, as it were. And if you're
listening to this in audio format and didn't look at
the title, there's no K in block. This is more
like block like the Soviet block. That's the only other

(05:00):
block I know of.

Speaker 3 (05:01):
A clocks, voting blocks, vote voting blocks, just what they see, Yeah,
people doing stuff together.

Speaker 2 (05:08):
It's not a word we use very often, but by
everyone doing that, not voting together, but by wearing masks
and the it creates anonymity which allows individuals to do
things that they might not want to be known for doing,
like breaking laws. Most famously, the black block is known
for smashing corporate property with hammers and bricks, spray painting

(05:28):
graffiti onto walls, things like that. It is also known,
i think, more by participants for things like what you're describing,
of keeping people safe from police violence. When everyone does this,
when everyone dresses all in black, or rather when a
significant portion of people do this, it makes it hard
to single people out for arrest, and it makes it
hard for individuals who are arrested to be convicted because,

(05:51):
as the cliche goes, no face, no case, which is
not legal advice.

Speaker 3 (05:57):
But you know what, it's a none of the sh
interpreted as advice or encouragement.

Speaker 2 (06:02):
Yeah, there's a lot of me trying to explain that
this is not encouragement. Despite if you stick around a
part too, I'll tell you how to do historical reenactments
of black blocks and how you can make it make
your loss choices.

Speaker 3 (06:12):
But this is not incitement.

Speaker 2 (06:13):
Right, black blocks allow for people who might otherwise be
more targeted for arrest for skin color reasons, gender presentation reasons,
or some other reason to participate in rowdy actions with
a comparable level of safety. Black blocks also regularly de
arrest people. They defend peaceful protesters from police violence, and

(06:35):
they can distract police away from more vulnerable targets. It
is a contentious tactic, largely because it is usually accompanied
by property destruction, which is itself a contentious tactic at protests.

Speaker 3 (06:47):
You can't look at a burning waimow and tell me
you don't think that's sexy. Those people are liars.

Speaker 2 (06:52):
Oh yeah, no, I know that's okay. This is one
of the things that would come up all the time,
right is people would always be like, oh, this alienates people,
and I'm like, think so man, A lot of people
are like that's pretty cool, Like I hate the cop
car and now the cop car's on fire. This seems nice,
but you know, teach their own. Okay, wait with the

(07:13):
burning weymo. Are either of you all got Speedy Black
Emperor fans, the band from the late nineties early odds. Okay, well,
this is important to approximately neither of you and some
small portion of our audience. There is a song called
the Dead Flag Blues and it starts with this long
poem that's very like apocalyptic anarchy stuff. Right. This is

(07:34):
a big band at the time, I swear, and the
first line is the car is on fire and there's
no driver at the wheel.

Speaker 3 (07:41):
Oh my god. They predicted it.

Speaker 2 (07:42):
They predicted it.

Speaker 3 (07:43):
They predicted the burning weymo.

Speaker 2 (07:45):
I know, which means the flags are all dead at
the top of their polls, and it means the skyline
was beautiful on fire, all twisted metal stretching upwards, everything
washed in the thin orange haze, the prophecy, and we're
going to open up our wallets and be full of blood.
So just to give everyone a heads up about what's going.

Speaker 3 (08:02):
To happen, I mean, parts of revelation are coming true.
So it only makes sense that there would be modern
day prophecy.

Speaker 2 (08:07):
Yeah, exactly, a bunch of post rock people from Canada.
So black block isn't always an appropriate tactic, but it's
a sexy one, and sometimes people make use of it
in moments when it might not be the best tool
available in the toolbox, Partly because when people are drawn
to it. They're drawn to it, you know, but it's
an important tool that's available for people want to participate

(08:30):
in militant street demonstrations. And I swear I actually did
plan this as my topic before the actions of the
last week two weeks ago for you all listening Synchronicity Baby,
and this week we're going to talk about the history
of the Black Bloc from its roots in West Germany
before it's spread across the world. And we're talking about
the Black Bloc today in the context of talking about

(08:51):
the ultra globalization movement, where it was a fairly major
social force. And I have a few different anecdotes I'm
going to use to start this story. This is gonna
be one of those episodes where Margaret is vaguely like,
I've heard of this allegedly from a long time ago.
I don't know Statue's limitations are, but it's at least.

Speaker 3 (09:09):
That I mean, as long as it's more than five
years ago, you're probably good in most states federally for sure,
unless it was terrorism.

Speaker 2 (09:16):
And also, like, genuinely it would be stolen valor for
me to claim that I am much of a frontlines
activist these days, but I mus start with some anecdotes.
One the video I saw this weekend from ongoing anti
ice demonstrations where people seemingly from all walks of life
are putting their safety and liberty online to materially stop
the functioning of the state and its deportations.

Speaker 1 (09:41):
Kidnapping people from their home. Yeah, business is the street.

Speaker 2 (09:44):
Children, Yeah, parents, It's a nightmare and it's bad, and
it's good that people are trying to store neighbors. Yeah.

Speaker 1 (09:53):
Fuck ice.

Speaker 2 (09:53):
Fuck Ice. Demonstrations that are happening, at least right now
as we record. I don't know, you know, you all
in the future, we'll have a different sense of what's happening.

Speaker 3 (10:01):
It's probably worse by the time they hear this, Yeah.

Speaker 2 (10:04):
Or continuingly exciting.

Speaker 1 (10:06):
I mean, I hope better.

Speaker 2 (10:08):
Yeah. Demonstrations seem to be aware of the weight of history,
of the fact that if we don't stop authoritarianism, there's
actually no limit to how bad things might get. Right. Yeah,
And there's a video, and I honestly don't know what
from what city. I'm literally just guessing Seattle of some
riot cops trying to grab someone who's wearing all black

(10:28):
and arrest this person. There are maybe eight cops. In
this video, the person being grabbed, a couple of their
friends come forward, take a hold of their friend, and
under a hail of less lethal munitions escape with their
friend pull their friend of freedom. All three of them
were dressed more or less identically, and they disappeared into
a crowd that presumably you can't talk as of the

(10:49):
angle of the shot, but presumably there's a crowd with
many more people dressed identically to them. So it seems
quite unlikely that the police would be able to single
out the same person or the rescue ever again. And
I don't know that there's a single action I can
point to that communicates the idea of solidarity and shared
risk more than de arresting people. Two people went at

(11:12):
it against eight cops and got away and rescued their friend.

Speaker 3 (11:17):
It always looks like a miracle.

Speaker 2 (11:19):
I know, you look at it and you're like, but
there's this kind of thing sometimes we just want it
more than them.

Speaker 3 (11:26):
Because they're just at work. I mean, some of them
have this like horniness for blood, and they really just
like they love hurting you. A lot of them like
to be honest, but like they're just at work, and
like if it becomes too hard. Sometimes they will just
give up.

Speaker 2 (11:37):
Yeah, and they're like, well, we can just go beat
another person soon, or like like literally in this case,
they just like fall back and start shooting people with stuff.

Speaker 3 (11:44):
I'll just go beat somebody that doesn't fight back.

Speaker 2 (11:46):
Totally well, And that actually even gets to what's so
useful about these demonstrations is that they're like, oh, people
fight back when we do this. That's hard. We don't
like when things are hard, you know. And to me,
this is the kind of heroism that fantasy books are
built on. I feel non hyperbolic when I say this.

(12:07):
And what allowed them to do this in this particular
context of this particular video was black block attire. Sometimes
the black block is not perfect, or it might not
be the right move on any given day. Not everyone
who does any given tactic is a good person even
or a sint or a hero, but it is a
powerful tool and is one of many tools available to
people when downtrodden people are fighting against the people doing

(12:30):
the trotting. And I like this way of phrasing it
because I'm currently obsessed with words that are derived from
other words that are no longer used. Trotting. No one trods,
but down trodden. We know what that means.

Speaker 3 (12:44):
Oh, there's a word for that, for those like when
like every form of the word doesn't survive.

Speaker 2 (12:49):
Oh.

Speaker 3 (12:49):
I was just reading about that the other day.

Speaker 2 (12:51):
My favorite is overwhelmed. Do you know what whelmed means? No,
it means overwhelmed.

Speaker 3 (12:57):
Fuck, it's like flammable and inflammable.

Speaker 2 (13:00):
I know, I know. Anyway, language nerds trying to talk
about history. Okay, another anecdote. I'll give you some anecdotes.
I I'll tell you the history. When I was a
baby author, I put out a book about anarchist fiction,
and for it I interviewed my hero Bursula Lquin and
we did a talk together. But this is literally just
like I can shoehorn in that I once got to

(13:21):
do a talk with Liquin. That's not actually the purpose
of this, but I know right exactly, and it's all
been downhill from then. But doing a talk together was like,
honestly one of the highlights of my life. We talked
about the role of anarchism in fiction for an hour
or so and then took questions. And this was interesting,
right because people came out who wouldn't have just come
out to see Margaret talk about anarchism and fiction, right,

(13:45):
And one man in the audience he raised his hand
and he said, and I'm paraphrasing from memory here, why
do you anarchists show up at anti war protests and
ruin them? And this is a question I had heard
a lot before, because I lived in Portland for a while.
I cut my teeth there as a protester during anti
war protests of like two thousand and two and three.

(14:06):
And I thought about the man's question for a second,
and I told him, what you don't realize is that
when you have these big anti war protests are honestly
protests about almost anything. The ones that you think that
anarchists have ruined were often organized by anarchists in the
first place, and maybe not solely anarchists, and not necessarily

(14:29):
by people who are then in the black block, right,
But people who believe in direct action are everywhere and
do an awful lot of the behind the scenes work,
way more behind the scenes work than on the groundwork,
just because literally in already to get anything done, you
have to do more behind the scenes work, which is

(14:49):
why we thank Sophie approximately once a week.

Speaker 3 (14:52):
Thank soph You're welcome.

Speaker 2 (14:55):
I actually literally, that's what we were talking about before
we got on this, talking about like, we are so
grateful that all we have to do is spend hours
and hours and hours researching things we don't have to
then also do administrative back end work because we have
producers and editors and amazing teams.

Speaker 3 (15:10):
I can't send an email.

Speaker 2 (15:12):
Imagine sending an email. No, I also don't.

Speaker 1 (15:15):
Like sending an email, but I do it.

Speaker 2 (15:18):
Because you're so brave and strong. Yeah.

Speaker 1 (15:20):
Total, every time I do it, I'm like, oh, you
can do it. If you do that, you can pet
a dog. You can pet a dog. Oh it works.

Speaker 2 (15:28):
That makes sense. And so when I answered to this
man that there's all this behind the scenes work, I
don't think it helped him, but it was the best
I could do in terms of an answer. I think
he kind of came at that. You probably guessed by
the way I read that question.

Speaker 3 (15:39):
I don't think that was a good faith question.

Speaker 2 (15:41):
I'm not convinced it was. But the thing is is
that black Block was for years and I don't know
if this is still the case or not. I don't know,
but it was the most visible component of the anarchist movement.
It had black bloc, often have people with black flags,
and you know it could be easily recognized. But this
is only the tip of the iceberg, and not just

(16:01):
of anarchism, but of militant street demonstrations and things. And
if you thought regular protesters have a lot of thoughts,
pro and con about the black Block, wait till you
hear anarchists discuss it.

Speaker 3 (16:16):
Because nobody has more opinions about the tactics of anarchists
than anarchists.

Speaker 2 (16:22):
I know, I know, I read so much discourse so
that you all don't have to. So many scenes were
written in two thousand and two about.

Speaker 1 (16:30):
This, But like, I'm so tired thinking about how much
you had to create.

Speaker 3 (16:35):
I can't go back in time and get in that
man's face and interrogate this bad faith question that he asked.
But my feeling is is a lot of people who think, like, oh,
like the block ruined this protest, Like what what do
you mean by that? Because to my mind, a lot
of people who feel that way they saw that, like
the black Block was involved in what the newspaper would

(16:56):
call a clash with the police. It's like, well, who
started it?

Speaker 2 (16:59):
Did that happen?

Speaker 3 (16:59):
Because the block was there or was it going to
happen regardless, and the person who took that baton hit
was wearing a mask and.

Speaker 2 (17:05):
Not you Yeah.

Speaker 3 (17:07):
Right, Like we had, you know, rounds of this discourse
here in Charlottesville where I live. About eight years ago,
there was a lot of talk about the block right,
and people who had never had this experience before were
radicalized by it. In favor of the block, in favor
you know. I think a lot of people are used,
like you know, Antifa and the block interchangeably, because those
are the people who are visibly anti fascist, visibly anarchists,

(17:29):
visibly experienced protesters, and you have like middle aged soccer
moms getting up at city council and say, don't you
dare speak ill of those people. They saved my life. Yeah,
like that protest was going to get ruined either way.
The block didn't ruin it. They saved people's lives.

Speaker 2 (17:48):
I think that that's actually one of the most important
things that comes up, is that discourse about it that's
had by people who aren't present. Looks really really different.
When I was young, I was wearing all black at
a demonstration and had a group of older women come
up and be like, we love you all. We have
developed a system to help hide you from police if

(18:08):
you need sweeties. And like they were like all had
costumes with like wings so that they could hold them
open and stuff, you know. And it's like, yeah, like
because actual solidarity is built in the streets together, you know,
and being brave together. And I'm going to tell one
more anecdote about the block, and this one I think

(18:29):
you'll have more information about than me, so that's why
I put it in. On January twentieth, twenty seventeen, Trump
had his first inauguration and there was a man named
Richard Spencer. You ever heard of Richard Spencer?

Speaker 3 (18:43):
Molly Oh, Richard the name I haven't heard in a
long time.

Speaker 2 (18:47):
And the reason we haven't heard his name in a
long time for anyone who doesn't know, there's this prominent
at the time right wing influencers, one of the more
important parts of the alt right. And he was giving
a speech to some media on the street when someone
in all black and a mask punched him in the
face and then ran off. That's incredible. The puncher was

(19:09):
never caught, remains anonymous to this day. One of the
most perfect crimes that's ever happened just.

Speaker 3 (19:15):
On camera in Washington, d C. And heavily surveilled cops
everywhere on camera. Yeah yeah, I hope we never find
out who it was, and I hope that he never
pays for a drink.

Speaker 2 (19:26):
I know. I like, there's this thing where sometimes you're like, oh,
that random, annoying ponk Hou's staying on my couch or whatever,
and you're like, you know what.

Speaker 3 (19:34):
It could be him.

Speaker 2 (19:34):
It could be him because he can't tell anybody. Nope,
can't tell anyone. Sucks so bad, I know, And Richard
Spencer being decked became a meme. My personal favorite is
the Blue Monday remix, And best as I can tell,
there's a direct correlation here to his star fading and

(19:56):
him becoming a joke instead of a figurehead. Is that
a So?

Speaker 3 (20:00):
I wish that that narrative felt true to me.

Speaker 2 (20:03):
You should fuck up that narrative.

Speaker 3 (20:05):
That's fine, because it's so satisfying to me to say that, like,
getting punched on camera is what ruined Richard Spencer, but
it's unfortunately it's.

Speaker 2 (20:11):
Not Oh great, no, no, yeah, because that happened.

Speaker 3 (20:14):
In January of twenty seventeen, Unite the Right was in
August of twenty seventeen, So this is before Unite the
Right was even contemplated, right, Like, yeah, the event had
not even been dreamt up at that time, so the
planning and implementation of that rally all took place after
this moment. I think it certainly hurt his feelings very badly,
but ultimately what ruined him was getting sued into oblivion

(20:37):
and also his divorce. Oh okay, but he did deserve it,
and it is fun to look at, and I think
it still hurts his feelings to this day.

Speaker 2 (20:46):
I also suspect it hurt his image among his peers.

Speaker 3 (20:49):
Yes, yes, because he looked like a sad little dandy,
like he didn't take the punch.

Speaker 2 (20:54):
Well, I mean he looked like what he was. I
hate to talk shit on dandy, but but you know
what I mean, like he didn't.

Speaker 3 (21:02):
Take it like the Hilarian figure he imagines himself to be.

Speaker 2 (21:06):
Right totally. Do you know what's completely unrelated to any
of that?

Speaker 3 (21:11):
Is it products and services?

Speaker 2 (21:13):
It is I hope they have no relation to any
of that unless it's positive, unless it's buy a drink
for random people, because they might have punched Richard Spencer
that's what this podcast is brought by.

Speaker 3 (21:23):
You know, I think just live your life as though
every stranger you meet is that hero.

Speaker 2 (21:29):
Yeah, it's like that parable Jesus, where like it's every
person I mean Jesus. Yeah, exactly. The Bible says you
should be nice to everyone because they might have punched
Richard Spencer. Here's ads and we're back, Molly. I can't
believe you were worried that there would be a topic
that you wouldn't be able to find a way to

(21:49):
make funny. I know, I was like, well, I don't know.

Speaker 3 (21:52):
What if it was like some important historical event that
everyone knows about and I just had to pretend I
knew about it, because like, what if it was like
my secret blind spot and then I felt stupid for
an hour. That'd be horrible. That's like my greatest fear.

Speaker 2 (22:02):
Oh my god. But now I have this terrible intrusive
thought where I want to write a fake event, oh
my god, and act like everyone knows it, and then
have you on as the guest and tell oh, that's
gonna be my villain arc is when I start telling.

Speaker 3 (22:15):
You stories, see some fake war that I have to
be like, oh yeah, that war was like, that was bad.

Speaker 1 (22:20):
I don't want to do that to Mollie. But some man,
oh totally.

Speaker 2 (22:25):
No. The best is we'll get some man who will
be like, oh, yeah, totally and then like also claim
and make up facts about the fake war.

Speaker 3 (22:33):
Just just yes, and your way into some like obscure
seventeenth century European war.

Speaker 2 (22:38):
Yeah totally, but that doesn't actually exist, Like you remember, right, Yeah,
the papal states were just in disarray.

Speaker 3 (22:45):
I remember love that for us.

Speaker 2 (22:48):
I feel like I was like caught in a terrible
trap earlier today because I was talking to a friend
at a coffee shop and they were like, actually, I
don't really know much about the Spanish Revolution, like what
was the Spanish Civil War? And I was like, am
I on camera? What's happening here? Am I?

Speaker 1 (23:03):
BEI? PI of my Like you're like, boy, how did
you come to the right?

Speaker 3 (23:06):
Yeah, you just sweep everything off the table and just
put down a banger.

Speaker 2 (23:11):
But then halfway through get very self conscious about taking
up space and conversation anyway. I know how to socialize
off microphone. I'm a socially competent person. Doesn't live alone
in the mountains. By and large, the Black Block had
its roots in the German squatter scene the seventies and eighties.
We haven't talked about this particular culture before on the show,

(23:32):
but we've talked about a lot of parallels, like the
anarcho punks of the UK. People want to listen to
our episodes about the band Crafts for more information about that,
or the squat scene of the Netherlands, which you can
listen to an episode about the squat scene of the
Netherlands that turns vacant property into housing and vibrant cultural centers.
These are related scenes to the German scene that we're
going to talk about, but we can go back even

(23:54):
further if we'd like, and if you know me, that
means yes, I would like. There is an anarchist group
called Black Mask in New York City in the nineteen sixties,
which we also tied a bunch of episodes about in
the episodes about Up against the Wall Motherfuckers, because that's
what they later became. Black Mask was a group of
direct action like art pranksters basically who later became the
famed and fabled anarchist street gang Up Against the Wall Motherfuckers.

(24:16):
The only podcast episode where we couldn't put the subject
in the title, and Black Mask, true to their name,
wore black masks to protests. It is hard to say
if there's a direct line between those protests and German
squads and the next like fifteen years later or so.
But I can tell you I've traced Black Mask and

(24:37):
Up against the Wall Motherfuckers and like two UK radical journals,
and like the conversation was happening, right, this is not
an isolated thing. These are large communities.

Speaker 3 (24:48):
I mean, we know the fascists have international connections. There's
no reason to believe the anarchists wouldn't too, right.

Speaker 2 (24:53):
Totally, and while the tactic is widely adopted by and
associated with anarchists, although actually, as you point out out now,
it's more of like antifa. I'm sure you've talked about
this before. What a great semantic trick they pulled when
instead of saying like antifa and they turned it into
antifa to make it so that it's not we're against phuh,

(25:15):
but instead we're just a thing.

Speaker 3 (25:18):
And they always write it in all caps to like
it's an acronym or something.

Speaker 2 (25:21):
Yeah, totally, like what is the FA short for buddy? Yeah?
Say it? Yeah, The answer, by the way, if you're curious,
is fascism. It's an anti fascist organization.

Speaker 3 (25:30):
So when people say they're anti antifa, it's like, well,
why don't you say the whole word.

Speaker 2 (25:34):
Yeah, Like, I didn't do great in math, but I
learned enough math you can.

Speaker 3 (25:38):
Cancel a little bad boys that you can reduce that fraction.

Speaker 2 (25:41):
Yeah, yeah, and I have I've seen at least one
anti anti Antifa sticker, but I think at that point
it's a joke.

Speaker 3 (25:50):
It has to be.

Speaker 2 (25:51):
Yeah. So the group that this grew out of, Black
Block were out of, is inspired at least as much
by autonomous Marxism or autonomism as it was by anarchism.
The late sixties was kind of lit all over the place.
One of the places it was lit was Italy. Starting
in nineteen sixty nine, you have this new social movement,
the autonomists, and these are autonomous Marxists, And what that

(26:14):
means is like it's hard to conceive of in the US,
where like Marxism is a bad word, right.

Speaker 3 (26:21):
Not my house, fair enough, have.

Speaker 2 (26:24):
You far enough? Left becomes a bad wordy and not
really on it anyway. Whatever, So.

Speaker 3 (26:29):
But I got my husband an original English printing of
the Little Red Book for Valentine's Day last year. So
just to give you a taste of what's going on
in our house.

Speaker 2 (26:37):
Oh hell yeah. So in Italy and a lot of
other places, you have these very institutional communist parties. They're
parts of government. They're like, you know, they're not a
thing to be radical around, right, and so people who
had no interest in communist party bullshit but are interested
in Marxism developed autonomous Marxism. And we'll probably talk about

(26:59):
more about them as some other times. But if if
you ask me more questions, I would immediately start running
out of things that I can claim to know about this.

Speaker 3 (27:05):
That thing I was afraid of happening, Like would be
talking about theory.

Speaker 2 (27:09):
Oh great, No, we're doing the tiniest bit to big
questions about it. That's totally fine. In some ways, this
is more of a like to like show that there's
this diversity of ideological stuff that created as cultural movement.

Speaker 3 (27:23):
These are anarchist Marxists. I'm on board.

Speaker 2 (27:26):
I have moralized right, I definitely. At one point I
met this older anarchist from Japan who was at a
squad I was at in the US, and he didn't
speak much English and talking to him and he's like, oh,
you're anarchists, and I'm like yeah, and he was like
me too, and he thinks and he goes autonomist. And
I love that that's one of the only English words
he knew.

Speaker 3 (27:43):
That's beautiful.

Speaker 2 (27:44):
Every other conversation we had to sit there with a dictionary.

Speaker 3 (27:47):
But I see, like anarchist Marxists, Like, I don't even
care that that's a contradiction because like the average person's
politics are incoherent and it doesn't matter totally.

Speaker 2 (27:57):
Like all of the random words that people have described,
it's the thing that comes up constantly where you're like, oh, yeah,
the like uh, you know, social libertarians or the you know,
like republican, Like are you talking about nineteen thirty Spain,
you're talking about nineteen sixteen Ireland, you're talking about the US.
Now you're talking about the US thirty years ago, all different,
completely different ideologies with the.

Speaker 3 (28:19):
Party in other countries. That doesn't mean what I thought
it meant.

Speaker 2 (28:22):
Yeah, but then the Liberal Party in Mexico isn't metted
by Ricardo Flores mcconne the anarchists, So I don't know.

Speaker 3 (28:28):
I'm never going to read a book. I don't even care.

Speaker 2 (28:29):
It's all meaningless. Labels. Fuck them. Sometimes they're nice, shorthand.
I don't want to walk into a cafe and be like, oh, yeah,
I'd like that food that doesn't have dairy, or like,
oh do you want dairy? Be like no, do you
want eggs? You want no? Like do you want meat? No?
Oh you're vegan. Be like, oh, I don't like labels,
You're like. Shorthand is sometimes useful, but also then people

(28:49):
get really hung up on them, and then all the
problems in.

Speaker 3 (28:52):
SOO, but no, two anarchists have the same definition of anarchism.
So cares.

Speaker 2 (28:57):
Yeah, it's great. So you have all these youth and
they're like doing a big social movement in Italy in
the nineteen sixties. But then the state starts This is
a cycle that we've seen a million times. The state
starts fucking with them real bad, and they start breaking
up their connection of mass movements and they're like, oh,
if we do anything above ground, we're going to get
caught and go to prison for the rest of our lives.

(29:17):
And so they go where many social movements go to die.
They went to Clendestinity, They went to smaller and smaller,
more isolated clicks of people doing more and more militant action.
They started involving guns in their things, and you know, like,
that's just a thing that sometimes happens, especially the late
sixties movements.

Speaker 3 (29:34):
To be fair to these Italian anarchists in the sixties
and seventies, they needed those guns.

Speaker 2 (29:39):
That's also true. Shit was dark. Yeah, I know, I
was saying that, and I was like, I'm very grateful
for the people who hold rifles in front of Drag
Story Hour right now.

Speaker 3 (29:48):
Italian black shirts were just beating communist organizers to death
in the streets.

Speaker 2 (29:52):
Yeah, yeah, it's true. So it's a completely understandable thing
that they moved into more isolated groups. The problem is
that when you get more isolated, you get more echo chambery,
you stop being able to bring in new recruits, and
you just become less and less of an impactful social force.
And anyway, I'm not even trying to put a moral
judgment on any of this. They started doing some terrorism,

(30:15):
these autonomous Marxists, and you had all these urban guerrillas,
and then this big growing scene instead became increasingly isolated,
paranoid and militant to that is the best I've.

Speaker 3 (30:23):
Again, they weren't the only ones doing terrorism in Italy.

Speaker 2 (30:25):
It's true. I'm just gonna be very fair to them.
It's true. And before they did any of that, they
inspired some folks. They inspired folks in West Germany by
the nineteen eighties who had also taken inspiration from the
Dutch squatter scene and I believe anarchist punk rock. Basically,
the German youth were ready for this. Suburbanization had gutted

(30:47):
German cities. So it's all these empty buildings, like basically
like not white flight out of the cities, but like
flight out of the cities, German flight out of the
German cities. I don't know, and all these buildings, and
people are like, yeah, we'll move into those, and we'll
fight for activist causes like stopping nuclear proliferation and fighting
for the legalization of abortion. These are the two biggest

(31:09):
causes that they were fighting for that I'm aware of.
And so people are like, yeah, fuck yeah. Autonomy and
squatting this is what it's about. They started squatting empty
buildings for housing and social centers that has housed bookstores
and coffee houses. This is one of those words. I
have literally no idea, Like, here's thing, it's called infoshops.

Speaker 3 (31:28):
We have one here it is you've been there.

Speaker 2 (31:30):
Yeah, that's a very nice infoshop. Infoshop is like a
blurry word for a place with like zines and books
and shit you can go to and learn about radical
causes and things. This word very likely has its origins
etymologically in these German info loden infoshop.

Speaker 3 (31:48):
Oh that does feel very German. Now these I just
never questioned the term. It makes it knows, but like, yeah,
that makes perfect sense. It feels German.

Speaker 2 (31:56):
I'm a because I can be trusted with my use
of time. I'm part of a large signal loop of
anarchist history nerds, and we had a recent discussion about
the history of the word infoshop, and I was fully
expecting it to be like one hundred years old. And
the oldest that anyone that I've seen has currently attracted
back to is nineteen ninety two in English in the
United States.

Speaker 3 (32:16):
Oh, I love that.

Speaker 2 (32:17):
But in nineteen ninety two there was like a conference
of all of the info shops, so clearly it goes
back before then. And that's besides the point. But I
like words, so they started building all of this infrastructure.
The German West German punks. The reason I say West
German for folks who there was a Cold War and
there was East Germany and West Germany and there were

(32:38):
different countries. So they started building all this infrastructure in
these abandoned buildings before the fall of the Berlin Wall,
before the reunification of Germany. This was a massive counterculture
and one that really pulled people out of regular German
ways of life. All of these young folks had very
few social prospects because of this massive economic downturn, and

(33:00):
so they started just being like, fuck it, let's just
do some shit. Let's well to quote an article by
Daniel Dylan Young quote. Similar initiatives for alternative living as
resistance were percolating in the nineteen eighties and in some
places much earlier and Holland, Denmark and elsewhere throughout Northern Europe. Eventually,

(33:20):
all of these Northern Europeans living in decentralized social groups
dedicated to creating non coercive, non hierarchical society, they became
collectively labeled as autonomen.

Speaker 3 (33:30):
I wonder how much of this is influenced too, So
this is just like what the seventies early eighties we're
talking about. How much of this is influenced that, Like
these people in their twenties and thirties are born in
the immediate aftermath of World War Two, so like they're
being raised by parents who are shattered in a landscape
that is just bleak.

Speaker 2 (33:48):
I think there's a lot of that, and I think
that also specifically, one of the things that I've read
has said that like one of the cultural impacts here
is that they didn't get to see the late sixties
early sets these radical stuff, so instead they're in this
like really banal time of just like one type of
like super pacivism isn't always banal, but like one particular

(34:11):
model of this is the way that non violence needs
to be done, and it's a very non confrontational version
of non violence. And you know, like this is kind
of a like bored and poor generation because you have
this massive recession and they're like everything from before us
is boring and shitty. Let's become punk rockers and you know,

(34:31):
do weird shit. Just honestly, that's probably a lot of fun.
So they're doing all of these protests and shit, they're
taking over nuclear power plants.

Speaker 3 (34:39):
Oh hell yeah, Okay.

Speaker 2 (34:41):
Yeah, no, it's so funny too, right because the things
that are like important issues change generationally a lot, right,
Like anti nuclear power plants isn't like a major issue
for a lot of people right now, you know.

Speaker 3 (34:52):
I'm not interested in that at all, but yeah, time
period it felt urgent.

Speaker 2 (34:56):
Right exactly, And it's just so interesting to me though,
like EBB and Low of these things that, like, like
the alter globalization movement was trying to combat free trade agreements,
right and right now our problem with tariffs. You know,
bad people will do bad things with like any hand
you give them, you know.

Speaker 3 (35:12):
Right, It's not that they were wrong to have had
that opinion, then, it's just that like the thing that
is bad changes.

Speaker 2 (35:17):
Right totally. In the winter of nineteen eighty, West Germany
was like, man, we can't handle these fucking altonomen We
got to fucking do something about this. Fuck it, We're
going to evict all the squads fuck them. And this
seems like a very run of the mill thing to
do in the US because you're like not allowed to
live in other people's houses, right, But in the US
you're can evict someone if they don't pay rent in Germany.

(35:39):
This is pretty serious and offensive to the German idea
of justice. Is that there was an empty house and
someone was living in it because they need somewhere to live,
and how you're going to make them be homeless.

Speaker 3 (35:48):
Yeah, it sounds like they had the right idea.

Speaker 2 (35:50):
Yes, that is the way to understand that. It also
meant that the West German government mobilized police at levels
that you hadn't seen in Germany since Germany did the
one thing it's kind of famous for having done that
at one hundred percent should not have done.

Speaker 3 (36:07):
Rounding up a bunch of people with a large scale
mobilization of it probably looked pretty pretty bad to a
lot of Germans.

Speaker 2 (36:12):
Yeah, people weren't into it fucking middle of the winter.
So West Germany started trying to evict the squats, and
so squatters started defending themselves and defending their squats. Also,
people did this through massive nonviolence sit ins and things
like that, but they also got rowdy, and every building
that was evicted meant several more squatted for years. Mass

(36:32):
arrests were met with nationwide protests. One protest saw fifteen
thousand Germans destroying an entire wealthy shopping district because of
repression of the autonomen God and return. I know, well,
there's this way in which it's like culturally normalized in
a way that you know, I was gonna say it's

(36:53):
hard to understand the US, but I actually think as
time comes on, I actually think that these sorts of
tactics make more sense to more Americans.

Speaker 3 (37:00):
I mean, that's what I'm seeing anecdotally, just like in
the comment sections on things.

Speaker 2 (37:04):
Yeah, so there's all this repression against the autonomen in Germany,
and so they invent the black block. If they all
go in matching clothes, they could do what they felt
needed to be done to defend themselves against police attack
without being singled out for arrest. Their uniform the first
black blocks was a black motorcycle helmet and or black

(37:24):
ski masks and all black clothing. I think black leather jackets,
but I actually am not one hundred percent.

Speaker 3 (37:29):
And if they had motorcycle helmets, they probably had cool
leather jackets, but.

Speaker 2 (37:33):
It might have been bomber jackets, That's what I don't know.
They would have looked cool either way. Yeah, don't get
me wrong. Many of them wore steel toed boots, people
brought shields and batons to fight the police off. And
for better or worse, being dressed this way and the
anonymity of the crowd brings out a certain magic. I

(37:55):
don't know how else to describe this as a crowd magic.
It's a dangerous and powerful and beautiful magic what people
can do in crowds. And it's not like what people claim.
It's not this herd mentality, it's not this it's like
a leader full thing in a really interesting way. Anyway,
it makes people feel powerful. And so the Black Block

(38:16):
started doing what it eventually became famous for. It would
smash up banks and bougie stores and shit like the
you know, fifteen thousand people who trashed a boogie shopping
district to quote Daniel Dylan Young again quote. In this way,
the black Block is a form of militants that mitigates
the problematic dichotomy between popularly executed nonviolent civil disobedience and

(38:39):
elite secret of guerrilla terrorism and sabotage. So you have
this problem right in Italy where you're like, oh, we
have these big peaceful movements or even like we have
this kind of routy movements and the beating us all
up right, So we're all going to go underground, and
that has its other problems. So the Black Block was
developed kind of organically grew out of needing to find

(39:01):
a solution to that, needing to be able to do
mass demonstrations that are actually direct action in a way
that is harder to repress, and you get clandestinity without
the really high stakes that are escalated through gorilla groups.

Speaker 3 (39:22):
That makes sense. They bridge the gap.

Speaker 2 (39:24):
Yeah, I had never thought about it that way until
I was reading that particular analysis of the block, and
I'm like, oh, that's actually that's pretty cool.

Speaker 3 (39:32):
Yeah, it's just another one of those things that you're
just so used to seeing that you don't really think
too hard about where this came from or what it means.

Speaker 2 (39:38):
Yeah, you're like always people always did this.

Speaker 3 (39:40):
You see the way that it functions, But like, yeah,
that's yeah interesting.

Speaker 2 (39:45):
And tactics are tactics. They are not imbued with moral weight.
They just you know what it's like, it's like ads, hmmm.
I think that people should make their own decisions about
which ads or any that they you like supporting or
listening to. But now you have that choice. I have
given you choice and tim much like when you walk

(40:09):
into the grocery store and there's a million types of oreos.
That's the freedom that you all have. Here's here's ads
Andrew back. Do you a favorite Oreo?

Speaker 3 (40:24):
I have sea like disease, so they only Yeah, there's
just the one kind for me and I love it.

Speaker 2 (40:29):
Are they like.

Speaker 3 (40:31):
Oreo makes one and they're good?

Speaker 2 (40:33):
Oh cool?

Speaker 1 (40:33):
Do you like original Gooden fra Ario or do you
like the yellow ones?

Speaker 2 (40:38):
Regular?

Speaker 3 (40:39):
It's like when you go to Wendy's and you see
what a frosty and they say chocolate or vanilla, and
it's like, I Am going to set this place on fire, Like,
what are you talking about? Chocolate? I said a frosty?
I don't know what vanilla? Soft serve the Trader.

Speaker 1 (40:49):
Joe's Gluten free, JoJo's aka oreos are really good.

Speaker 2 (40:54):
It's good.

Speaker 3 (40:54):
It's just the one, just the one.

Speaker 2 (40:56):
Well, let's see.

Speaker 3 (40:59):
I think we were at diversity of tactics.

Speaker 2 (41:01):
Yeah, ieah, And so people were embracing this tactic. The
tactic to quote Liz Hileyman who said, quote coming out
of the stultifying political climate of the Reagan and Bush years,
many young activists had gotten sick of protest as usual,
mostly in their teens. Throughout through thirties, few Black blockers
remembered the glorified nineteen sixties. They grew up on a
diet of well choreographed rallies, permitted marches, and planned mass arrests,

(41:25):
and there's like not having it. So the autonomen regularly
started winning considerations from the government. They would get this
or that squat legalized if the state just found it
not worth evicting it. Although actually the legalization and recognition
of squats in Europe is actually part of a divide
and conqueror strategy from the state too, so it's kind

(41:46):
of a little of a It's complicated, and the Black
block held a lot of symbolic importance. By dressing identically,
you become leaderless and therefore much harder for the state
to disrupt, both in the moment and later. Anyone who
pays attention to American history knows that they sure like
killing protest leaders. I think that that's probably happening these days,

(42:06):
and it's just not then a lot of the people
involved in like the Ferguson uprising just kind of die.

Speaker 3 (42:11):
Yeah, like some suspicious suicides, some obvious unsolved murders.

Speaker 2 (42:16):
Yeah, yeah, just like whistleblowers. So anyway, I would say
there's no flag bears to the black block except actually
marching bands with flag communication. There's definitely a guy with
a flag. Yeah. Yeah. And there's like ways of doing
semaphore and stuff that people use to communicate, like hey,
police that way, or like we think we may want
to go this way. It's fun. People developed this, and

(42:40):
there's a symbolic dropping of who you are in your
regular life. There's this conception of the black blocker. It's
one that's encouraged by the media that every black blocker
is a white, middle class, troubled young man with nothing
better to do. And to me, what this ties into
is how people are marginalized in others by society in general.

(43:01):
If a person is unmarked by society, you know, if
they're an unmarked person, truly normal within our society, then
they assume to be white, middle class, able bodied straight men,
because anything else is different, even though god, what tiny
percentage of the world is white, middle class, able bodied
straight men. Right?

Speaker 3 (43:23):
The default is actually not too common, is it.

Speaker 2 (43:25):
No, especially since a lot of those things are absolutely temporary.
Everyone is only able bodied temporarily, and you know, many
people are only straight men until they meet. So people
assume that if you remove identity, you put everyone in masks.
They're like, ah, that's just a white man, right.

Speaker 3 (43:44):
And it's also a way of like undercutting their commitment
to any kind of social justice cause like, oh, they
couldn't possibly sincerely care about the rights of black people
or Hispanic people or immigrants, or this is just because
they have a fetish for violence, right.

Speaker 2 (43:57):
Like, so they go out and risk prison time on
a regular basis and get PTSD because it's fun.

Speaker 3 (44:03):
None of these lies hold up, right, Like, oh, paid protester,
how much would you have to pay me?

Speaker 2 (44:08):
Yeah?

Speaker 3 (44:08):
What is the number of zeros on the check? Where
you risk death in permanent imprisonment?

Speaker 2 (44:13):
Yeah, god damn it.

Speaker 3 (44:15):
It doesn't make sense.

Speaker 2 (44:17):
Yeah, Like even the fascists probably aren't paid protesters, you know, Like.

Speaker 3 (44:21):
I have found a vanishingly small number of instances where
that does appear to have happened. Like, it's not that
it's impossible, is that it's not likely and it's not practical.

Speaker 2 (44:29):
I will say I've been a paid picketer for a union,
but that's different.

Speaker 3 (44:33):
That's a job, I know.

Speaker 2 (44:35):
So these early black blocks, they were in marches with
like to use one example from nineteen eighty six, ten
thousand people marching, of whom a solid fifteen hundred were
in block. These are bigger than we see in the
United States. Yeah, and they would drive back to the police.
This was the same year as Chernobyl, and so the
anti nuclear movement was like, see we told you so,

(44:58):
and anti that's fair, Yeah, totally nearby and bad. When
Ronald Reagan came to Berlin, he's a big, famous neoliberal.
Fifty thousand people, that's what he's only famous for. Uh,
fifty thousand people marched against him, with three thousand of
them in block. And in its way, this is interesting

(45:21):
to me because in the last series of episodes I
did about Zapatistas, I'm largely saying that the anti neoliberal movement,
the alter globalization movement, started with Zapatistas, and I think
that you can say about a lot of the groundwork
does come from the Zapatistas. But these actually do predate
the uprising in Chiapas of nineteen ninety four, although doesn't

(45:42):
predate the apatist is getting ready for that uprising. But
whatever for folks who haven't listened to the explainer I've
done on neoliberalism. Well, earlier we talking about how words
are meaningless when they're in political contexts. Neoliberalism sometimes people
think that just means like a liberal, it's liberalism, that's new. Yeah,
it's more or less unrelated. They have the same etymological route.

(46:04):
But if you start with one, you're not getting to
the other. I mean, like many people are both, but
it's just a fucking unrelated think of them separately. And
Neoliberalism is a set of policies and ideas that prioritize
creating a global free market with which to extract value
from developing nations to make specific groups of rich people
and developed nations much richer. Basically is a way to

(46:24):
steal money from the global self. Sounds bad, It is bad.
It means destroying unions and environmental protections in order to
maximize profit. And maybe the first people who really felt
its effects were the British working class under Margaret Thatcher,
who systematically gutted workers protections and organizing. Then the model

(46:44):
soon exported all over the world. Roald Reagan did a
whole lot of it here and then therefore a whole
lot of it throughout the American Empire, and everything bad happened.
And one of the means by which it destroyed places
is predatory lending through the World Bank and the International
Monetary Fund. That are two groups that are really annoying

(47:05):
to disinvaguate. So I'm not going to. I did a
little bit of it in some other episodes. They're like,
all right, your country's in trouble, we'll bail you out. Now.
You just need to accept these structural adjustment programs. It's
the fucking mafia. Is what a shark? Yeah, it is
loan sharks on a global scale with armies involved. You

(47:26):
need to accept these structural adjustment programs to restructure your
entire economy to pain back not the loan, but the
interest on the loan of what you owe to us,
and it removes country's abilities to develop stable economies and
decent standards of living all at once. Trying to build
a stable economy after being forced into structural adjustment programs

(47:47):
is like trying to heat a house where a wall
is missing.

Speaker 3 (47:49):
Yeah, because the cool aidue man keeps smashing through it
to demand more structural adjustments.

Speaker 2 (47:56):
Stop unionizing your bricklayers. Boom.

Speaker 3 (48:00):
Oh, yeah, that's what he says, right, I think, so
why does he say that?

Speaker 2 (48:04):
Because he has kool aid neoliberalism. I'm not a big
fan of it. It was spreading unchecked for quite some
time into a worldwide network of activists from Mexican peasants
to German squatters to Indian farmers banded together and stopped
it spread, which is a pretty fucking cool thing that happened.
And that's the ultra globalization movement, generally seen as having
kicked off formally in Seattle in nineteen ninety nine, but

(48:28):
the Zapatistas in Chiapas, Mexico were building that worldwide network
that became it starting at least nineteen ninety four and
in nineteen ninety eight. The World Bank and the International
Monetary Fund, those two groups that are hard to disambiguate
and are generally bad. They like both loan money and
are friends with each other, but they like loan money
in slightly different ways. It's really annoying. They had their

(48:50):
meetings in Berlin. Eighty thousand protesters showed up from at
least Europe in the US and fought the cops tooth
and nail I don't believe that they stopped these meetings,
not one hundred percent certain, but the groundwork was laid.
If you want to have secret meetings of all the
behind the scenes world leaders, which is another thing that
always made about conspiracy theories, like some of it's real well,

(49:11):
and it's also it's behind the scenes, but it's not
hidden like these people are like, oh yeah, I'm like
the world leader does all this stuff. They just don't.

Speaker 3 (49:17):
You don't need to make stuff up about these organizations,
like the bad stuff they're doing, like you can see it.

Speaker 2 (49:22):
Yeah, like like all secret pedophiles, Yeah, we know about them.
We don't need to invent new ones. Like you're on
the right track, but like focus on the stuff that's real. Yeah. Yeah,
eighty one thousand people did, and they went to Berlin,
you know, and they're like, all right, if you try
to have these kinds of meetings, you're gonna have a
nightmare of a riot that people will not forget. And

(49:45):
to make sure that most cities want to have nothing
to do with this kind of summit, and in this
big protest, there's an awful lot of black block I
don't have the number of it blocks in these protests.
Another thing that they would do is that they would
take perimeter positions at the front, back, and or sides
of these big marches and basically exists as a shield
that protects the rest of the march from snatch squads

(50:07):
and police harassment. They would build reinforced banners, which are
like more literal shields, but several people long, and sometimes
you just have like a giant flag or banner that's
like eight feet tall and it's just literally to block
view of you know. The alto nomen of Germany were
largely gone by the late nineteen nineties. Most of the

(50:28):
squads were eventually evicted, although if you became legalized and legalizing,
some of them pulled pressure off. Was like a pressure
release valve thing. Legalized squatters were sometimes, but not always,
afraid to work in solidarity with non legalized squatters because
they're like afraid of losing their styles.

Speaker 3 (50:43):
Yeah, so it's like it's good that you won that concession,
but like was that given to you because you won
or because they knew it would break you?

Speaker 2 (50:52):
Right, Which is actually a really important way to understand
reform as any political movement, is that there's this quote
from Malatesta my favorite man who's ever hidden in a
creative sewing machines to escape Italy to radicalize the bakers
of Argentina.

Speaker 3 (51:06):
Not a competition there, I know, but he's.

Speaker 2 (51:07):
The best one. Malatus as a quote when he's talking
about reformism where he's like, we must take all possible
reforms as an army marching forward, taking ground, like we
need to see this as like we won this, not oh,
they gave this to us, like and so it's not
how do we appease them to be get given more crumbs?

(51:28):
We say, great, you've given us crumbs. Now we want
the whole fucking cake. And it's still the same act,
Like we want gay marriage, we got it. We hope
we keep it, you know, but don't go home. Yeah, exactly.
So when the Berlin Wall fell, the German left moved
from this sort of squadron activism into anti fascism because

(51:51):
of a large neo Nazi scene that developed in East Berlin.
And it's been a long time since I've been in Berlin,
but there was very clear delineations. I would state these
anarchist squads and they'd be like, hey, this is an
anarchist neighborhood. Don't go into that neighborhood at night alone.
Maybe just don't even go into that neighborhood period. Anyone
from one factor and another is caught and the others

(52:11):
would likely get beaten or hospitalized.

Speaker 3 (52:13):
Oh like gang turf.

Speaker 2 (52:15):
Yeah, that sometimes the problem when you're like, oh Antifah
and regular Fu just sometimes if they stay in stasis
with each other, create history is messy.

Speaker 3 (52:25):
It's complicated.

Speaker 2 (52:26):
Yeah. While I was there talking to people about this,
this is the first time that I heard people talking
at length about one major problem of the black block tactic.
Tactics can be used by anybody. Anybody can slip in, well,
anyone can slip into a black block. But that actually
doesn't happen much that I'm aware of, right, because there's
always the like, oh, the police instigators are going to

(52:48):
get in there, and I'm like, a person through the
brick was an instigator? No, it wasn't. And the reason
I can tell you this is that enough people get
caught throwing bricks and then they go to prison and
I know them, yeah, like I am friends with them,
and they were not cops. They were just there and
like they might not even have thrown the brick. They
just you know, you could disagree with what they're doing, but.

Speaker 3 (53:09):
That doesn't mean they were a part of it.

Speaker 2 (53:11):
Yeah, but the German neo Nazis would just have black blocks.
They should have to wear a different color.

Speaker 1 (53:18):
Just what.

Speaker 2 (53:18):
It's not confusing you would think that, but think about well,
one American fascist group does do the all white but
I mean, like, what is the modern cop uniform but
fucking black block. Yeah, I'm Patriot Front.

Speaker 3 (53:34):
They all dress alike. I mean, it's a stupid outfit.
It's not as cool as black block, but they all
dress identically. That's very intentional. Yeah, they invented like Uncle
Sam block because they're wearing like khakis in blue.

Speaker 2 (53:46):
Like, yeah, it's so Jesus, imagine taking yourself seriously. It's
like not they are we the Batti's sketch? Which everyone
loves the are we the battiest sketch? But I don't
because I also wear all black all of the time
and like not afraid to put skulls on stuff. But
if you're like, are we the dorks, you.

Speaker 3 (54:06):
Know, make sure you get the right matching windbreaker.

Speaker 2 (54:11):
Yeah, Paul, that's not the right windbreaker. Yeah, grow up. Yeah, God,
the fucking boat shoes kill me. Oh. So that's the
origin of the black block, How it's been used elsewhere
over the decades, and how anyone at home who would

(54:32):
like to just do some costuming for fun to go
to anime conventions. How to put those together we'll talk
about in part two.

Speaker 3 (54:42):
Are we going to get into what kind of dye
you should be using to make sure your blacks match.
I think that's a huge point of contention.

Speaker 2 (54:50):
I see you hung out with goths. My strongly held
opinion about black and how it changes color. This is
really as a goth and not as an anarchist. Black
looks better and it fades in the sun, then in
the wash.

Speaker 3 (55:02):
Okay, that's good advice.

Speaker 2 (55:04):
It fades to brown in the sun, and it fades
to blue in the wash.

Speaker 3 (55:08):
I hate a green faded black.

Speaker 2 (55:10):
Yeah, And so if you pair the two it fades
nicely too. You can still wash your clothes, Margaret says,
you can wash your clothes, but looks good if it
fades in the sun. No, it's not actually going to
be a very like. This is not gonna be a
how two episode, and people are gonna have to do
their own research and or talk with folks. Actually, it's funny.
I was gonna say, go to someone and block and
just ask him how to do it. But that's actually

(55:32):
literally how I got into radical politics. I went up
to someone out of demonstration and was like, what's this about,
and explained anarchism, I know, explained anarchism very succinctly, and
I was like, oh, that's kind of interesting. I was like,
do you have an extra mask? And he was like,
I do, and he gave me a mask.

Speaker 3 (55:46):
Oh that's really cute and not usually how it would go.

Speaker 2 (55:49):
No, probably not, but I was like, I don't know,
already wearing all black, but that's just again goth. But
Molly got an thinking of all my plug.

Speaker 3 (56:00):
Yeah, listen to my podcast We're Little Guys anywhere you
get your podcasts. It's like this show but opposite, and
it will make you sad.

Speaker 2 (56:09):
Yay, I it doesn't make me sad. I like laughing
at these people. Yeah, well, I mean, yeah, the subjects
of your episodes are jokes.

Speaker 1 (56:20):
Plenty of hahaha.

Speaker 2 (56:22):
Yeah. People should listen to that. I listen to it
while doing the yard work and building things in my garage.
This sounds sketchy woodworking. I do it while the woodworking,
so people should listen to it also people should Okay.
My other plug is that the way to not let
movements get divided is to not let people divide them,

(56:42):
not to try and stop people from doing divisive things,
because people are going to do what they feel drawn
to do. But nothing scares the state more than when
not only are people taking militant action to stop people
being kidnapped in their homes, but when people who aren't
doing that militant action vocally support or materially support, although

(57:02):
not in a criminal way. The people taking those actions,
the people who are bringing lunch and sunscreen to people
who are out there risking themselves, or the people who
just to say no, matter what I would think of
the tactic, I care a lot more about my neighbors
than I do about whether or not someone threw something
at an ice agent.

Speaker 3 (57:22):
And you know what, when people say, oh, that just
gives the police an excuse to they were going to
do it anyway. If they had to invent an interviews,
if they had to fake an excuse, if they had
to recreate one out of their ass later on, out
of thin air. They're going to do it anyway. I've
been at protests where I got beat by a cop
after somebody broke a window. The cop didn't beat me
because somebody broke a window. I'm not mad at the
guy that broke a window. That cop wanted to hit me. Yeah, yeah,

(57:46):
live your life, don't try to control other people.

Speaker 2 (57:48):
Yeah, and don't support people. If you're listening to this
in your ice, quit your job.

Speaker 3 (57:53):
They don't even make that much money. I looked at us.
If they're doing this.

Speaker 2 (57:56):
For they're doing it for the love of the game.
I thought they make cop money, which is ridiculous, not
that good.

Speaker 3 (58:00):
Honestly, you joined the SS for fifty k, grow up?

Speaker 2 (58:04):
Yeah, fuck that, You get a nonprofit job making that
money anyway. See Old Wednesday.

Speaker 1 (58:11):
Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff is a production of
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