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

Margaret continues talking 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 Media.

Speaker 2 (00:04):
Hello, and welcome to Cool People. Did cool stuff? Your
weekly reminder that I have a podcast, You're twice weekly
reminder that I have a podcast. I'm your host, Margaret Kiljoy,
and I have a show, and it's about people who
do good things from my perspective, and you should just
all agree with my perspective. That's the whole point of
the show.

Speaker 3 (00:21):
That's why you're here.

Speaker 1 (00:22):
One of your best intros.

Speaker 2 (00:23):
First, thank you, thank you. And someone who doesn't have
to agree with my position, but so far we seem
to be on a similar page is my guest Molly.

Speaker 3 (00:33):
Conger, Hi, Hey, glad to be back.

Speaker 2 (00:37):
And someone who is also on the call and is
my friend is my producer, Sophie Hi.

Speaker 1 (00:44):
Hi.

Speaker 3 (00:44):
Sophie Hi not.

Speaker 2 (00:47):
On the call, but listening before you, dear listener, is
our audio engineer Eva hi Eva.

Speaker 3 (00:53):
Wow, yeah, she gets the first listen. What a treat,
I know, I know, that's first for it. Yeah, that's
uncut file is full of burps.

Speaker 2 (01:02):
Coughs, Yeah, actionable crimes.

Speaker 3 (01:06):
I didn't hear anything like that.

Speaker 2 (01:07):
I don't know what you're talking about. And our theme
music was written for us by unwoman and not listening
to her music would be a crime.

Speaker 3 (01:14):
That's true. I think it's a federal felony.

Speaker 2 (01:16):
Yeah, so be a rebel and don't listen it.

Speaker 3 (01:19):
No wait, oh no, I backed us into a corner.

Speaker 1 (01:22):
Oh no.

Speaker 2 (01:23):
Anyway, This is part two of a two parter about
the Black Bloc, a controversial and interesting tactic that has
existed since at least the very early eighties that is
worth paying attention to and worth understanding. And you know,
I actually need the history in order to do that.
But I find it neat and you probably do too,

(01:45):
or you wouldn't be listening to history podcast.

Speaker 3 (01:47):
I'm learning a lot.

Speaker 2 (01:48):
Yeah, and if people don't know Mally conger Is, they'd
be very confusing, because then you're listening to part two
without part one. But Molly has a podcast called Weird
Little Guys.

Speaker 3 (01:56):
It's the opposite of this show, and it would make
me so happy if you would listen to it, or
at least download it on multiple apps.

Speaker 2 (02:02):
Yeah, there's no reason not to. So the Black block tactic,
we talked about how it expressed itself in Germany before
there was an ultra globalization movement. The tactic looks different
in different places at different times. The Dutch squatters of
the nineteen eighties. They were like they we're not fucking
my ski masks. That's too much for us. They formed
the Black Helmet Brigade and showed up to every March.

(02:25):
For a while, Dutch squatters were pretty limited in how
they'd fight cops. They were like pretty like not quite
at the German level of intensity or whatever. And then
in nineteen eighty five, a squadron named Hans Kock was
mysteriously found dead in police custody, and this was widely
believed to be police murder and at the very least
was neglect. They were like, ah, he was like drunk

(02:48):
or drugs or I don't know, he's just dead.

Speaker 3 (02:50):
Having absolutely zero information about the situation, I'm comfortable saying
that the police murdered him.

Speaker 2 (02:55):
The Oukham's raiser here, based on all of the times
this happens all over the place, is that they murdered him,
or they murdered him through a neglect.

Speaker 3 (03:04):
They're responsible for his death. And I'm very comfortable with that. Yeah,
with saying that, not with that it happened. To hate
that it happened.

Speaker 2 (03:10):
Yes, So squatters were like, all right, you killed us.
Were mad and they're like, we're not bringing out guns
because you don't want to just stand in the street
and shoot at each other. That's just like never a
good day, you know. But they sure started bringing out
molotov cocktails and things got spicier.

Speaker 3 (03:28):
Although okay, wait a second, hold on, So you said
they didn't want to bring guns, so they brought molotov cocktails.
If you were listening to this in the United States
of America and did the National Firearms Act, a molotov
cocktail is a destructive device that was charged the same
as having a gun, So legally, a molotov cocktail is
a gun.

Speaker 2 (03:48):
Well, it's also worse than a gun because there's no
legal way to have one.

Speaker 3 (03:51):
Right, So just think about that. Yeah, just know that
that it is a federal gun crime.

Speaker 1 (03:57):
Well.

Speaker 2 (03:58):
See, this is important because the next pairgraph I have
is I'm really not trying to paint. This type of
escalation is inherently good or situation situationally appropriate in every environment.
While the use of molotovs is illegal probably everywhere, I
feel like most states probably have a don't throw molotovs
at cops rule somewhere on the books.

Speaker 3 (04:16):
You know, I imagine there's probably half a dozen different
statutes you could charge that under.

Speaker 2 (04:20):
Yeah, the level of punishment for the act of throwing
a molotov is not the same around the world. When
I first went to Amsterdam, I met someone who got
out of spending seven months in a low security prison
for throwing a molotov at cops.

Speaker 3 (04:39):
I mean, if you're doing a cost benefit math, everyone's
math is different.

Speaker 2 (04:43):
Everyone's math will be different. And if you're in the States,
your math is real different.

Speaker 3 (04:48):
There's a lot more stuff on one side of that
equal sign.

Speaker 2 (04:50):
Yeah. Meanwhile, back at home, when I went to the
Netherlans for the first time, I met this person, a
non white anarchist named Roblos Ricos, which is a very
clever name, was spend seven years in prison for throwing
a rock at a cop. And so I'm like, yep,
because every now and then the European anarchists will be like, oh,
you American anarchists don't do anything.

Speaker 3 (05:10):
I like, yeah, so, uh, it's different here.

Speaker 2 (05:13):
Crime is different here. Yeah. And also like I don't
know whatever, I'm not telling anyone what to do, but
I suspect that if people through all those that comps,
it would.

Speaker 3 (05:23):
What I mean, the Marines are already at play, okay, right.

Speaker 2 (05:26):
So I'm literally saying nothing about this. I'm just saying
the crime is a crime, and there's a.

Speaker 3 (05:32):
Different Streen saying this thing from the past was very
cool and me saying it would be so cool if
you did it now, right, just if the cops are listening.

Speaker 2 (05:40):
It's different. It's a serious cost benefit analysis that anyone
would need to make, and it might not be the
most effective way to try and solve problems. Okay. So
that's probably the most caveati section of this. Score a coward, no, no, no.
But it's like, okay, just simply be transparent about it.
It's it's not just to like I don't want to
get in trouble, right, But it's true, I don't want

(06:00):
to get in trouble. But it's also like I don't
want to get people in trouble. I do not want
to suggest to people what they should do. And that's
like almost why I was like, oh, I don't want
to talk about it because I don't want to say
anything about it, because I don't want to tell people
it's cool and good or that it's bad and counterproductive.

Speaker 3 (06:21):
You don't want to be the Jodie Foster to somebody's
John Hinckley. I get it.

Speaker 2 (06:24):
Yeah, makes nice symbolism when you draw it in art.
We'll go with that.

Speaker 3 (06:29):
I have it on a shirt.

Speaker 2 (06:30):
Yeah. Yeah. So I've read in one place that the
anarchist punk scene of the eighties and nineties in the
US made occasional use of the black Block before it
broke on the world stage in nineteen ninety nine. I've
also read that the first one was nineteen ninety one,
so not the eighties. I don't know which it's true,
but at first when I can tell you about it's
nineteen ninety one. It was assembled during the anti Desert

(06:52):
Storm protests in DC in nineteen ninety one, and they
were organized through the Love and Rage Anarchist Federation, which
put out a call for affinity groups, which we'll talk
more about later, but it's it's you and your friends
making your own decisions together, group to come in block.
This was presumably inspired by the Autonomen's attack on neoliberalism,
because that block, when they got together to protest Desert Storm,

(07:15):
went to the World Bank Building and smashed all its windows.

Speaker 3 (07:18):
Had it coming, I mean, what was the building wearing
I know, and it's like.

Speaker 2 (07:22):
One of these things where you're like, oh, it wasn't
even related to the protests, and like no, but they
sure are stripping all of the resources out of the
developing world.

Speaker 3 (07:30):
Which I think actually does have a lot to do
with the causes of war.

Speaker 2 (07:33):
Yeah, totally. And just to get a taste of how
political discourse and terminology has and hasn't shifted, I read
a lot of communicats and stuff and discourse from the
early nineties about this I was saying, and the early aughts,
but I read an internal communicating not like an internal
like never published, you can find it online, but like

(07:54):
meant for discussion within people doing this. A communicate from
nineteen ninety two about a second block that had been
attempted on April fifth, either as it was a women's march,
but I don't know if it was an anti war
march or not, if it was just a women's march.
This block, one comments or felt, had not been as
much of a success. One reason behind it was the

(08:16):
lack of solidarity from male block organizers. There was also
women block organizers, and specifically the male block organizers didn't
have solidarity enough with the women organizers. Women in this
case spelled wimyn.

Speaker 3 (08:29):
Oh hell yeah, that's so early nineties.

Speaker 2 (08:31):
And the best part about it, from my point of view,
is that this word is both women and women because
it'll say A women came up and said the following
women and women are spelled the same es.

Speaker 3 (08:45):
They're taking man and men out of it, right, So
it's like, but then there's no distinguishing between singular and plural.

Speaker 2 (08:51):
Right besides the article that precedes it. And what's also funny.
I was like, I was telling this to my friend
while I was getting ready for this, and they were like, yeah,
why did we hate the O? Like, I get the
E in the A, but what's our problem with the O?

Speaker 1 (09:04):
Wait?

Speaker 3 (09:05):
What are they a place to O with?

Speaker 2 (09:07):
I w I M y N.

Speaker 3 (09:10):
Why did they do that?

Speaker 2 (09:11):
I don't know.

Speaker 3 (09:13):
I guess if you're gonna make up a new word,
you might as well go all in.

Speaker 2 (09:16):
But like, that's true, it looks kind of cool.

Speaker 3 (09:18):
Okay, now I need to know.

Speaker 2 (09:19):
I know, and someone listening knows right in.

Speaker 3 (09:23):
If you're familiar with the etymology of these feminist neologisms
from the early nineties.

Speaker 2 (09:29):
Because there was another one that I ran across more,
which was w I M M I n oh. I
used to know more about the etymology of the words
like a woman and man and stuff because man used
to literally I think there was a different word. Where
was the word for man?

Speaker 1 (09:44):
Right?

Speaker 3 (09:44):
Like where wolf?

Speaker 2 (09:45):
Yeah exactly?

Speaker 3 (09:46):
Or where geld which is the money you had to
pay to someone's family if he murdered them.

Speaker 2 (09:50):
Oh shit, anyway, a more civilized time, So.

Speaker 3 (09:56):
We'll find out more about this situation.

Speaker 2 (09:58):
Yeah, get to the bottom just another time. So this
protester was like talking about how it was and wasn't
organized effectively.

Speaker 3 (10:08):
And honestly the men not pulling their way same as
it ever was.

Speaker 2 (10:11):
No, I know totally, and I like, I'm not even
trying to be like, oh they spelled words funny. I'm
like I'm trying to say, like everything's the same, right.

Speaker 3 (10:16):
And it's just like such a time capsule of the
early nineties, Like if you see women spelled that way,
like you know where we are.

Speaker 2 (10:22):
Right totally, and like specifically they were like, hey, you
know there was a women's caucus that was you know,
part of this, and then like the organizing wasn't quite
structured enough in a way that it helped make the
men actually pay attention to the women's caucus.

Speaker 3 (10:36):
Said, oh, the men weren't interested in the consensus based
decision making that involved the women. That's crazy, Margaret, that's
never happened.

Speaker 2 (10:44):
I know, but these are radicals, so I must have
been misreading it.

Speaker 3 (10:47):
I bet the men participated equally in making sure the
logistics like bathrooms and food and water were handled as well.

Speaker 2 (10:52):
Well. Those actually just take care of themselves.

Speaker 3 (10:55):
That's right, especially if you don't go to the women's
caucus where they meet about it. Nothing change diapers when
that zine got written and nothing has changed.

Speaker 2 (11:07):
Nope, nope. So they talk about the structure in this.
It's not just a like complaining about the following. They
talk about the structure. Block of any size is built
from affinity groups. An affinity group is basically a very
small organizing body, one that might easily be understood as
you and your few friends who make decisions together. Affinity
groups generally operate on consensus rather than voting what to do.

(11:30):
The group does what everyone in the group agrees they
want to do together, which makes a lot of sense,
like for crime, right, if you're four or five friends.

Speaker 3 (11:37):
This sounds like a conspiracy.

Speaker 2 (11:40):
Yeah, well, if you're hanging out with your friends, you
all have to eat, and you're like, what do you
want to do? You want to go to the beach
or do you want to go set that building on fire?
You can't vote that one, right, everyone has to be
down for the crime.

Speaker 3 (11:54):
If it's like, you know, four to one, we have
a majority, we're going to do the crime. The guy
who wanted to go to the beach, each.

Speaker 2 (12:00):
Like should probably be able to leave and go back.

Speaker 3 (12:03):
You should leave.

Speaker 2 (12:04):
Yeah. This is not a democracy, Yeah, exactly, it's a consensus.
It's a we all want to agree to do this
or not. And so that's like how you build a
larger group that is made up of people operating on consensus,
but not consensus of the larger group necessarily, but the
individuals involved are organized into smaller groups. And also makes

(12:26):
it really funny when they're like, who's the leader of
this and you're like, you fucking morons. Is this your
first day at work?

Speaker 3 (12:31):
Do you charge of Antifa?

Speaker 2 (12:33):
Yeah? Yeah, So you have three to fifteen people or
so who agree to go to a demonstration, to have
each other's backs, to go where the others go and
to not get broken up. These affinity groups then coordinate
with the other affinity groups on the street, and clearly
by the fact that they caucuses and stuff. They also
sometimes will have like representatives from affinity groups come and
talk about what they might want to do, which really

(12:54):
does sound like conspiracy. I actually don't think that that's
the way these are organized anymore. Like, really and genuinely
I don't think that this is time capsule shit.

Speaker 3 (13:00):
I was just saying, this is this is a relic
of things past. I mean, I've heard of things like this,
but like in my understanding of this level of organization,
those group representatives aren't coming together to then form consensus.
They're just like letting y'all know, this is our hardline.

Speaker 2 (13:19):
Yeah, totally, this is like kind of direction we're thinking
about taking things. Where's everyone else feeling? Yeah, And one
demonstration with a black bloc, the nineteen ninety nine Carnival
against Capital in London, nine thousand masks were distributed ahead
of time. That's some infrastructure and that had a theme,
and the masks had printed inside each one a message,

(13:42):
and that message quote those in authority fear the mask
for their power partly resides in identifying, stamping, and cataloging,
in knowing who you are. Our masks are not to
conceal our identity, but to reveal it. Today we shall
give this resistance a face. For by putting on our masks,
we reveal our unity, and by raising our voices in

(14:03):
the streets together we speak our anger at the facelessness
of power.

Speaker 3 (14:08):
That's a long message to be on the inside of
the masks.

Speaker 2 (14:10):
There's also multiple ellipses, and the version I found I
suspect it was longer.

Speaker 3 (14:15):
How was this like a piece of paper tucked inside?
Was it like sewn in? I need the logistics here,
Like what was the manufacturing process for nine thousand masks
with a whole paragraphic.

Speaker 2 (14:28):
The way it was described it was like printed inside.
I'm like, was it like are they printing with like
a therma print where you can print.

Speaker 3 (14:35):
On a tag?

Speaker 2 (14:37):
Well, I was thinking like almost equivalent silkscreen, you know,
like a way to print onto fabric. It could have
been as.

Speaker 3 (14:43):
Somebody would have to be like manually turning these inside
out to get the message, like this is a process. Yes,
I've never met an anarchist who could have pulled this off.
I'm so sorry.

Speaker 2 (14:52):
Late nineties built different into weird projects.

Speaker 4 (14:56):
Magpie just SAIDU them kids, No, at least a dozen
people had to have the same idea that they remained
committed to without disagreeing for like several weeks.

Speaker 2 (15:07):
That's true. I will say one. I've been to a
demonstration where people took their school's resources to make thermoplastic
clear riot shields, to make hundreds of them by using
like industrial manufacturing processes. And there's also just the fact
that like on some level, like some people are actually

(15:28):
just like working class at work at factories and shit, you.

Speaker 3 (15:30):
Know that's true. But like usually when you work at
a factory, you don't have access to just like using
the factory.

Speaker 2 (15:36):
That's true.

Speaker 1 (15:37):
I'm necessarily enjoying all the side comments.

Speaker 3 (15:41):
I need to see a picture of this. Is there a.

Speaker 2 (15:43):
Picture I not that I have found?

Speaker 3 (15:45):
There might be one, please, if you are a sixty
year old punk show it to me, please.

Speaker 2 (15:51):
I also think the Okham's raiser here is even though
it says printed on the inside, it might be that
there is a piece of paper inside.

Speaker 3 (15:58):
Right, there was like a little hand bill that was
handed to everyone as well.

Speaker 2 (16:01):
That's that is the most likely situation.

Speaker 3 (16:04):
That's still very impressive that they were able to do this.
I'm still very impressed, but I have questions.

Speaker 2 (16:08):
Yeah, fair enough, and also to walk back my kids
these days, the way that we're built different now is
substantially more confrontational and interesting to me. The twenty twenty
uprising was the most beautiful thing I've ever seen in
my life.

Speaker 3 (16:22):
I don't want the anarchist to think I'm making fun
of them. I am making you can make fun of
Them's fine, We're having a good time, though it is
out of love. Like I said, Yeah, oh.

Speaker 2 (16:29):
No, I'm just afraid of being like the old grouchy person.
You were better in the anti globalization eraic we were.

Speaker 3 (16:34):
It's different. Things are just different now.

Speaker 2 (16:36):
Yeah, And do you know what, I don't have a
transition for it ads.

Speaker 3 (16:44):
I hope that this ad is for some kind of
home screen printing setup where I could make nine thousand
masks with a weird poem inside.

Speaker 2 (16:51):
Hell, yeah, what poem did you picked?

Speaker 1 (16:53):
Well?

Speaker 3 (16:53):
I don't know. That had a sort of a poem
energy to it that like the message, the little sort
of beef vendetas sort of situation.

Speaker 2 (16:58):
It does have a very vief for Vendeva, although before
the movie came out, I would do with the and
or speech of soger Era being like, we are the
thing that explodes when there's too much friction in the air.

Speaker 3 (17:07):
It's beautiful. Yeah, I hope it's an advertisment for something
I can use to make nine thousand masks.

Speaker 2 (17:13):
Yeah, and here's that ad and rebec. I'm actually particularly
excited about the way that you can use someone gambling
to print onto masks.

Speaker 1 (17:25):
Mine would be from this pub that I just googled
that is called.

Speaker 2 (17:29):
I Like Dogs.

Speaker 1 (17:31):
I like dogs, big dogs, little dogs, old dogs, puppy dogs,
a dog that is barking over the hill, a dog
that is dreaming very still, a dog that is running
whenever he will.

Speaker 3 (17:45):
I like dogs.

Speaker 1 (17:47):
And it's by a person called Margaret wise Brown, who
I have no idea who they are and if they're
good or not.

Speaker 3 (17:51):
Who Margaret wise Brown is?

Speaker 1 (17:53):
No am I supposed to so be am. I supposed
to like good?

Speaker 3 (17:59):
Naight, move.

Speaker 1 (18:03):
That makes sense, you know, I do know how much
person is. You're right, I'm not good at remembering names
unless it's basketball players.

Speaker 3 (18:11):
I don't know if she hooped.

Speaker 2 (18:13):
Yeah, but the poem about it would be pretty cool.

Speaker 1 (18:16):
I liked that her name was Margaret and the poem
was about dogs.

Speaker 2 (18:20):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (18:21):
Also, anybody who has a dog that dreams still not mine?

Speaker 2 (18:25):
Oh my dog dream my dog.

Speaker 3 (18:26):
Dreams not still. I'm sorry. It's big red bar not
little Red Bar. What am I fucking thinking?

Speaker 1 (18:31):
Yeah, Jesus, fake fan, Yeah I know I got fully shamed.
You're out here not knowing your facts.

Speaker 3 (18:39):
Okay.

Speaker 2 (18:39):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (18:40):
When I was five, me and my sister we got
cats for Christmas with the shelter, and so I got
to name my own cat. I'm five years old, Like,
what am gonna name this cat? And I decided to
name her after my favorite page from my favorite book
from when I was little. You know, I was. I
was five years old. I was a big girl. I
didn't love good Night Mood. I was too big for that,
but it was my favorite book when I was little.
So I named my cat good Night Kittens, like the

(19:03):
entire phrase good night kittens. That's pretty good from good
Night Moon, because good night kittens, good night mittens, you know,
good night bull of mush et cetera. So for fifteen years,
we just had a full grown cat whose name was
kittens plural. So much. What do we where? Where the
World Trade Organization?

Speaker 2 (19:23):
Yeah, we're talking about next yeah oh hell yeah yeah.
Well then we're not going to do the deep dive
on it, because that's a future series of episodes.

Speaker 3 (19:28):
Were going to Seattle, Baby.

Speaker 1 (19:30):
This person is like a good person. Will somebody message
me and let me know, because I've seen fabulous pictures
of her with a dog, and I would like to
know if this is a person.

Speaker 3 (19:39):
I should like?

Speaker 2 (19:41):
Is this the poet?

Speaker 1 (19:41):
Yes? I would like to know if this is a
person I should like or if this is a problematic
person which I should hate. And I refuse to do
my own research because I'm really, really, really tired.

Speaker 2 (19:50):
I'll just do an episode on it. So November nineteen
ninety nine, the Black Block hit the mainstream in a
way that it never had in the US and probably
hadn't anywhere in the world, even though as substantially smaller
Black Blocks than the ones in Europe, because it participated
in dramatic rioting against the World Trade Organization in Seattle,
the famed Battle of Seattle. And We're going to talk

(20:13):
about the actual alter globalization protests soon, So I'm not
going to give a blow by blow of the Battle Seattle.
But the core of why the Seattle protests against the
World Trade Organization, another one of these neoliberal organizations. The
reason these protests were so effective they successfully shut down
the meeting of the World Trade Organization was not because
a few hundred people wearing all black broke a bunch

(20:34):
of Starbucks windows, but that a coalition of environmentalists and
labor progressive and radical like used from the bottom and
the left tactics and organization to borrow a phrase from
the Bapatistas, this idea from the bottom and the left,
it means like the bottom a little bit class wise,
but it means like organizing from the bottom up instead
of from the top down. They coordinated mass direct action

(20:58):
to shut down downtown Seattle and shut down these protests.
It was a movement of movements, and it brought together
all sorts of different people to fight alongside one another.
And if you're thinking, Molly, I know Sophie's thinking this.
That feels like when the free peoples of Middle Earth
banded together at the end of the Third Age in
the Battle of the Ring to defeat Saron.

Speaker 1 (21:20):
That's exactly what I was like.

Speaker 3 (21:21):
Oh, I was just thinking that like, to be honest,
one of the only things I know about the nineteen
ninety nine Seattle World Trade Organization protests. So what I'm
writing about a we're little guy. I write like a
full timeline of his life, like every djil I can
find about, just like I don't even use ninety percent
of it, but I make this like full robust timeline
of a person's life. So the only thing I know

(21:41):
about the ninety ninety nine Yettle World Trade Organization protest
is that a guy who was convicted of a federal
crime for lying on his background check form when he
joined the military. His parents met there because his mom
was making soup. She was like a food not bombs girl.

Speaker 2 (21:58):
Oh that's so heartbreaking, I know.

Speaker 3 (22:01):
And his parents met there and then he was conceived
shortly thereafter, and he is a Nazi. Oh my god,
we're not our parents, you know.

Speaker 2 (22:09):
No apple was caught by the wind and taken to
the Nazi grove, fell far from the tree. That's so sad,
I know. I mean. Also, people who's George Orwalls's great
piece on nationalism where he, like everyone, redefines words whenever
he feels like it, and he talks about it as
like an allegiance to the idea of being very about something,

(22:32):
and he uses it to talk about how many leftists
became Nazis, because so many leftists became Nazis.

Speaker 3 (22:38):
You know, sometimes you see a guy and you think, oh,
one of these days we're going to be on opposite
sides of the line, aren't we.

Speaker 2 (22:44):
Yeah. Anyway, during these protests, before they fucked and made Nazis,
some of the anarchists, not all the anarchists, got together
to form a black bloc to attack symbols of neoliberalism
and capitalism, like the aforementioned Starbucks windows sort of the
most famous part of this, but.

Speaker 3 (23:01):
I forgot Starbucks was that old Starbucks?

Speaker 2 (23:03):
Oh yeah, oh yeah, oh breaking Starbucks windows was like
that was like the thing. There's a against me song
about throwing bricks through Starbucks windows that's about Seattle.

Speaker 1 (23:12):
Because it started in Seattle. Yeah, which you can't go
into Seattle without somebody telling you that.

Speaker 2 (23:20):
Yeaeah. Totally. And these protests. The destructive part of the protests,
which is a smaller portion of it but got a
lot of the media attention. It directly and materially contributed
to the escalation of the conflict, which was likely necessary
for the tactical victory of shutting down the protests, is
my argument. If things hadn't gotten spicy, they probably would

(23:43):
not have caused enough chaos to stop the meeting from
being able to happen. It was also pretty much the
reason why the press was unable to downplay the demonstrations
like they've been doing to every demonstration they could find
for so long, and the reason that these protests got
so much press us, almost all of which was negative.
All press is good press, maybe hard to say. And

(24:07):
it also sparked a debate that goes on in radical
movements to this day about the appropriateness of black block
and the appropriateness of property destruction of demonstrations. The black
block makes for a powerful media image, one that is
regularly villainized by both the press and by some advocates
for strict nonviolence policies. This powerful image is a double

(24:28):
edged sword. Protests that would have scarcely made the news
at all get a ton more attention when things are
on fire or broken. Militant action is always polarizing, and
maybe it always will be, but there are people who
are turned off by this. It is worth remembering that
in twenty twenty, when someone burned down the third Police

(24:50):
Precinct in Minneapolis in response to the police murder of
George Floyd, a Monmouth University survey revealed that fifty four
percent of a Americans supported the arson of the police station,
which means burn the fucking cop shops down. Hold higher
than either presidential candidate at that time.

Speaker 3 (25:12):
And don't let Atlantic magazine tell you fucking otherwise, I.

Speaker 2 (25:16):
Know because this one the source for that in this
is Newsweek. That's like, that's a conservative publication. Yeah, direct action,
including militant direct action, is actually apparently less polarizing than
electoral candidates are. That's my spiciest take of the day.

Speaker 3 (25:37):
You know, you may not, I don't know, you may
not like the look of a broken window, but do
you like it more or less than you like looking
at a four year old child crying as she's being
snatched from the arms of her mother.

Speaker 2 (25:51):
Right, And you could say to yourself, why are they related?
And then you have to say, well, even if they aren't,
is one person against that and another person doing it?
You know, is one person trying to stop that by
a means that they consider appropriate In which case, your
problem is not ethical, it's strategic, and people get really
hung up on that difference and think that strategy is

(26:11):
ethics and it's not. Got wild eyed and glad there's
an audio medium. But you're right, Thank you, thank you.

Speaker 3 (26:17):
You know, I personally, I'm not going to break a window,
but I'm not going to take a picture of it
when someone else does.

Speaker 2 (26:24):
Yeah, the same people who are doing that are often
the same people who will physically stop the police from
beating people and grabbing people who are trying to do things.

Speaker 3 (26:34):
I'm not going to tell you to break the window.
I'm not going to tell you to not break the window.
But if you break the window and you get arrested,
I will wait in the parking lot for you to
get out.

Speaker 2 (26:42):
That's a good way to put it. Yeah, totally, Because.

Speaker 3 (26:45):
When we do jail support, it doesn't matter what you did.
We're just waiting here in the parking lot for you
to get out. So this is not an endorsement of
the window breaking. I'm just saying we'll be out here
with snacks.

Speaker 2 (26:53):
Yeah, there was people waiting outside with snacks after I
got out of jail. When the night you got arrested,
wearing all black.

Speaker 3 (27:00):
Yeah, yeah, we do.

Speaker 1 (27:02):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (27:05):
The WTO protests got negative press attention, but this didn't
stop any activists, partly because I think this is an
interesting tangent about media. The argument during the altra globalization
era was that mainstream media is structurally part of the
state apparatus of control, that, to paraphrase Nom Chomsky, the
state isn't powerful enough to control everyone with an iron fist,

(27:26):
like we're seeing this now right, like we're actually literally
more of us than there are of them, because the
run of the mil conservative voter is not willing to
get out on the streets to protect ice.

Speaker 3 (27:37):
Much getting up off your gouge to protect the police.

Speaker 1 (27:41):
I know.

Speaker 2 (27:43):
Because the police aren't powerful enough to control everything with
an iron fist, they use media apparatus to manufacture the
consent of the governed. This is the argument, and it's
I'm going to explore that tangent more depth one day.
But the anarchist Noam Chomsky saying this about the manufacturing
of consent in nineteen eighty nine was part of what
led the alter globalization movement to develop its own media infrastructure,

(28:05):
much of which was built around a brand new idea,
a decentralized way for people to post news, indie media,
which more or less invented citizen journalism in the Internet era,
and as a direct precursor to Twitter, which is of
course not specifically a leftist project, but it was at

(28:26):
least interesting until that was captured by fascism and rebranded
as x which is to say, capitalism could fucking recuperate anything,
and it's a nightmare. But I find that through line
very interesting that radicals critical of the coverage of these
sorts of things invented a worldwide infrastructure of direct communication.

Speaker 3 (28:51):
Sometimes. You know, in my research into sort of fascist
movements of this era of the you know, the seventies, eighties,
and nineties, come across old primary source leftist and anarchist media, right,
so like old Marxist newspapers, old anarchist zines and sort
of capturing these moments in time. And it is striking
how different the coverage is, because I mean some of

(29:13):
them are fairly professionalized. These like little newspapers that came
out quarterly or this or that or the other. It's
real journalism, it's a real newspaper. But it's so different.
You can read coverage of the same protests from an
old New York Times archive and then from the anarchist newspaper,
and it is it's a different story.

Speaker 2 (29:31):
It's a different reality that people are creating, and both
are biased.

Speaker 3 (29:35):
And these histories get buried and lost.

Speaker 2 (29:37):
Yeah, and that's yeah, I mean that's like literally what
keeps me going with doing the show constantly. That and
my desire to feed my dog on a regular basis.

Speaker 3 (29:46):
See those histories alive. And yeah, sure of course they're
all both biased. The Anarchist newspaper and the New York
Times are both if you read both, and that's a
lot of what I do, right as you sort of
read these primary sources that were written by nazis, right,
So you can't take them at face value. You're not reading, yeah,
for truth, but you can piece together what the truth
probably is. Yeah, And I have found that the leftist
and anarchist newspapers are closer to it.

Speaker 2 (30:09):
I have largely found that to be the case. It's
also it's more transparent when they go into their like
now I'm soap boxing mode, which any listener of this
show is fully aware of. I try to get all
the facts right, and I digress and my opinions are
very clear, you know. But there's an interesting thing. I
think the idea that mainstream media is inherently pro status

(30:30):
quo is an out moded idea. And maybe I say
this because I produce a podcast for iHeartMedia.

Speaker 3 (30:37):
I try not to think about it, like.

Speaker 1 (30:40):
I was, like, huh, sounds sur reilier.

Speaker 3 (30:43):
To be fair, I've never even met anyone who works
for iHeartMedia except for Sophie, and I don't clam them.

Speaker 2 (30:50):
Well, that's the thing is I am a freelance contractor
and they put ads into the content that I make,
and they don't control that content, and so I say
what I believe, and they can make money from me doing.

Speaker 3 (31:05):
That, and I bank on the fact that they just
don't listen to my show.

Speaker 2 (31:09):
Yeah, it's pretty much what to count on.

Speaker 3 (31:10):
Yeah, all the time.

Speaker 1 (31:12):
I'm like the less people that know we exist but
keep signing our checks like the.

Speaker 3 (31:16):
Better Yeah, yeah, listening to our shows now.

Speaker 2 (31:20):
But I think that a thing that has happened, and
I'm using us and a lot of my friends who
work in media as an example, and also like shows
like and Or where there's a generation of people that
are genuinely anti capitalists largely anti authoritarian that has become
media professionals. The fact that some of the best labor
reporting consistently is from teen Vogue, right, and often they're

(31:43):
doing it actually with more nuanced than some of old papers,
like old leftist papers and stuff. Anyway, this is like
a thing that I think about a lot, is the
way that our relationship to media has shifted dramatically over
the decades.

Speaker 3 (31:57):
And I think it's something really importantly going back to
what you're talking abot with the manufacturing consent, it is
important to interrogate the viewpoint of the author of the
publication totally, because, like you said, burning the precinct pulled
higher than the president, and that's not what the newspaper
tells me.

Speaker 2 (32:14):
Yeah, totally, because you're like, oh, we want to show
both sides, so you like, well, they don't show the
pro burning side usually anyway, Oh no, it's ads.

Speaker 3 (32:24):
Oh god, and we're back.

Speaker 2 (32:33):
So media presented a certain image of the black block
and it was not a sympathetic one. Black blockers only
care about destruction and have nothing to offer the movement.
It's just purely negative and they are the ones responsible
for the violence of the police. Which is always an
amazing thing. Like the headlines are like the violence started
after someone throw a water bottle.

Speaker 3 (32:51):
And you're like, seems like an unnecessary escalation.

Speaker 2 (32:55):
Yes, the violence was when people started hurting people, which
was the police hurting or like the violence started when
people yelled at the police. You're like, no, it was again,
it was when they hit people with sticks. And yeah,
somehow police hospitalizing people's responsibility of an angry kid wearing
all black. I think The Onion nailed this the other
day with the headline protesters urge not to give Trump

(33:18):
administration pretext for what it already doing a.

Speaker 3 (33:21):
Right because like, oh, don't give them any excuse. They
don't need an excuse. Plus, it's already happening. It's already happening.

Speaker 1 (33:28):
That's great, well done, the Onion.

Speaker 2 (33:30):
I would never be able to write Onion headlines because
I don't grammatically understand why headlines will say things like
for what it already doing instead of for what it
is already doing. I don't understand it. I think it's
a way that headlines are written.

Speaker 1 (33:44):
It is a way that headlines are written.

Speaker 2 (33:46):
And I think that the Onion is always satirizing headlines
so they're going to like play into sort of an
old timing journalisty.

Speaker 3 (33:54):
Journalism school.

Speaker 2 (33:55):
No, I mean, I'm totally professional. Oh wait, I'm not
even pretending to be a professional tru I do pop history.

Speaker 3 (34:01):
So now I've been pepper sprayed by enough cops in
enough situations to know it was always their fault.

Speaker 2 (34:07):
Yeah, totally. Yeah, even when cops get pepper sprayed, it's
their fault because it's them doing it to them.

Speaker 3 (34:12):
They love doing it to themselves.

Speaker 1 (34:14):
I know.

Speaker 2 (34:16):
Within the movement of movements, opinions about block were a
lot more nuanced, and you saw a rise of what
I might call the heroic black block, where black blockers
work in solidarity with people with other tactics and outfits.
And actually, you mean that's kind of how it started, right,
It's like as a spiky exterior to a larger march.
But people realized, if you're aware of how your presence

(34:37):
attracts police attention, and if you ever want police attention
out of protest where black block, the police will pay
attention to you. And you're good at staying mobile in
this situation, right, And so rather than smashing bank windows
near people doing nonviolent civil disobedience in the middle of
an intersection, like people like locking the lock boxes in
the middle of intersection. You don't run up and break
the window right near them and then leave. That's a move.

Speaker 3 (35:00):
You just go somewhere else.

Speaker 2 (35:02):
Right, And then you're actually helping because the police are
now drawn away from your allies, and you're much better
equipped to fight back and to get away then other
people might be. And because of that, and because of
interpersonal relationships and years of intense organizing, and we talked
about this as the opening bonds of solidarity arose between

(35:24):
the block and other groups. And during the entire ultra
globalization movement, the Black Bloc continued, and so did the discourse.
The discourse was actually fairly nuanced. It wasn't like is
everyone doing this tactic evil or good? Right? It was like, hey,
in what context is this appropriate? How much are we
simply acting out our pre assigned role within the same

(35:47):
story over and over again? Right? You kind of like
fetishize a tactic and then you're like, we're just going
to do it, and you're like, is it the right one?
Do the cops know you're going to do it? Because
if you if the cops know you're going to do it.
It's not what we should do like overall, you know.

Speaker 3 (36:01):
Well, and the president said that all those people have
to go to prison.

Speaker 2 (36:04):
Oh yeah wow. An anonymous zone from the time from
two thousand and two, I think had a really good title,
if you ask me, the black Block a disposable tactic.
I like that, and that piece describes the state's way
of responding to anarchists and the block during the ultra
globalization movement and talks at length about how the state's

(36:26):
strategy is to criminalize all the militant protesters as terrorists.
It's the same shit, right like Trump is different. But
Bush did this too, right, and especially in the wake
of nine to eleven. Everyone's a terrorist now and specifically,
the state strategy at the time, at least according to
this analysis and I fully agree with it, was to
try to convince the rest of the movement to distance

(36:46):
themselves from the block Banko and people started moving away
from black block tactics were rather diversifying into different types
of blocks within radical mass mobilizations. We'll talk more about
this one seeing because I really like it, and so
I have to throw it in. Have you ever heard
of the padded block. No, no, it comes from these
like Italian tute Blanche White Overall's movement, I think is

(37:11):
how you say it, I'm cute.

Speaker 1 (37:13):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (37:14):
Well they start off being like, we're gonna wear white
overalls to protests and if I get this history wrong, sorry,
later they will be the subjects of a thing. But
then they started wearing padding, and specifically they turned a
block style formation into a purely defensive thing where you
would be silly as hell covered in like pillows and

(37:34):
pool floaties and like helmets, and you would just be
like the Michelin man, like lumbering up to the cops,
and you'd have hundreds of people doing this and you
would literally just push the police out of the way.

Speaker 3 (37:48):
I need to see this with my eyes.

Speaker 2 (37:51):
This there is video of there's so much good riot
porn from this has mostly happened in Europe in like
ninety nine, well I guess mostly two thousand, two thousand
and one.

Speaker 3 (38:00):
Looking this up immediately after we're done.

Speaker 2 (38:01):
Yeah, no, the padded block is fucking amazing. They'll hit
cops of pool noodles and shit.

Speaker 3 (38:07):
An American cop would just shoot you if you hit
them with anything.

Speaker 2 (38:10):
I know, it's like one of those things where was like,
there's that footage of some protesters recently, and I think
California where the cops are trying to evict I think
a Palestine occupation at a campus and someone is just
like bonks the cop with an empty five gallon water
drum and you can hear the bonk noise.

Speaker 3 (38:26):
Oh god, yeah that was all. There was a music
video then somebody made a song.

Speaker 2 (38:30):
I hope that person is free, is all I feel.

Speaker 3 (38:33):
But yeah, I just feel like I don't know, maybe
the European cop has a sense of humor but the
American cop does not.

Speaker 2 (38:39):
I will say there's a moment of some European cops
being real and cool about some stuff.

Speaker 3 (38:44):
I mean there's still cops.

Speaker 2 (38:45):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (38:47):
Uh.

Speaker 2 (38:48):
And the padded block is a great media image and
it can be just as radical, especially when your goal
is storm the hotel of world leaders. It's a fairly
effective way to move through a police line. It's not
good for causing havoc and rich shopping districts, but that's
that's not always the goal, right And to quote author
Mark Levine about this quote, simply put routinized violence against

(39:10):
property costs. The anti corporate globalization movement significant support in
the US and Europe, precisely because the vast majority of
people in these countries were not suffering enough under the
existing system to support the level of chaos and disruptions
such violence was intended to generate. And it's a mouthful,
but it's basically it's like, look, people's lives aren't hard
enough that like, most people aren't necessarily going to look

(39:33):
at a smashup shopping district and be like, hooray, tack capitalism.

Speaker 3 (39:37):
Because they have the crumbs and they went.

Speaker 2 (39:39):
Home, right, And I don't think that's a universally applicable thing.
I'm not just meaning as a condemnation of property destruction
in all contexts, but it was a way in which
people saw that that was happening within the movement and
started shifting.

Speaker 3 (39:53):
What it's interesting to think about in the present moment,
right like, have things shifted enough where there is enough
visible suffering the balance has changed. I agree that people
are not going to look at that property damage the
same way they would have ten years ago.

Speaker 2 (40:06):
Right Like, if you read anti capitalist stuff from the
late nineties, like Adbusters magazine, the problem that they present
that their reader might have is that they're bored, Like
Fight Club is a movie about being bored by capitalism
and problems dealing with homosexuality and pent up Maile Anger.
But people's problems isn't that they're bored anymore.

Speaker 3 (40:29):
You know, the cost of food is getting out of control,
like there's going to be a breaking point.

Speaker 2 (40:34):
Yeah, And not that everyone was having a good time
in the nineties, but it was a substantially more up
and coming time, and when you look at the larger
picture of the economy, it's just a very different time. Well,
an intense thing that happened in July two thousand and
one the Group of Eight, which is a neoliberal decision
making body of the leaders of the eight richest countries.

(40:54):
I think it's the eight richest countries plus Russia. I
don't remember off the top of my head. It was
like Russia, you have nukes, so you're like in, even
though you're not like next, you know, I think that's it.
I might be wrong whatever, I'm never going to find out.
I used to know all of this. I used to
write zines about it, like talk to people at demonstrations
about it. I just like don't remember all the Shelffs
on my head. In two thousand and one, the Group

(41:15):
of Eight, the G eight, was meeting in Genoa, Italy,
and the police shot and killed a twenty three year
old anarchist named Carlo Giuliani. Carlo at the time was
armed with a fire extinguisher when cops fired live rounds
at him and then ran him over. And his death
has been filmed and it was very impactful on the movement.
A few months later, planes hit the World Trade Center.

(41:38):
I don't know if you knew that this happened.

Speaker 3 (41:39):
Oh, tell me more about that.

Speaker 1 (41:41):
What is that?

Speaker 2 (41:42):
I can't remember. I lived in New York City at
the time. I will absolutely remember it a scarred on
my brain.

Speaker 1 (41:47):
Never forget all of us traumatized.

Speaker 3 (41:49):
Yes, yeah, totally, except Garrison, who wasn't born.

Speaker 1 (41:53):
Fuck so real.

Speaker 2 (41:57):
The US mobilized for war, and it started rounding up
Muslim and without due process, and suddenly everyone was a terrorist. Supposedly,
at this point, the ultra globalization movement fell apart. That's
always the version of the story, including within the movement.
I joined the movement months later in February two thousand
and two at protests in Manhattan, and I did not

(42:17):
feel like I was joining a failing movement. I felt
more alive than I ever have in my life. By
that point, the movement did indeed still exist, and I
came up in the middle of the movement awash in
Zine's self critique about everything we did wrong. You know,
we were like, oh, our movement fell apart? Why And
it just turned into this like discourse. Hell, And what

(42:40):
I think we did wrong was assumed that winning is
a static thing. We accomplished an amazing amount of things.
We thought that smash neoliberalism was a like static thing,
like done, you beat the boss, The little cheering music happens,
and then it's never over. Yeah, it's never over, and
that's beautiful. The alter globalization movement ended eventually, and in

(43:06):
the US the anti war movement began, which imported tactics,
if not activists, directly from the previous movement. By two
thousand and eight, a lot of the discourse around the
Black Bloc and diverse tactics within protest movements felt settled.
Because it didn't stay settled, but it should have been.
And everyone, this is my opinion. I'm now in a
soapbox because in two thousand and eight, when people agreed

(43:29):
to disrupt the Republican National Convention in Saint Paul, Minnesota.
They got together all these different movements. How are we
going to do this? We all have different ideas, abouw
we should do this? And it came up with a
four point program called the Saint Paul Principles. You heard these?

Speaker 3 (43:44):
Oh we still use those?

Speaker 2 (43:46):
Cool. The Saint Paul Principles are One, our solidarity will
be based on a respect for diversity of tactics and
the plans of other groups. Two, the actions and tactics
used will be organized to maintain in a separation of
time or space. Three, Any debates or criticism will stay
internal to the movement, avoiding any public or media denunciations

(44:10):
of fellow activists or events. Four. We oppose any state
repression of dissent, including surveillance, infiltration, disruption, and violence. We
agree not to assist law enforcement actions against activists and others.

Speaker 3 (44:27):
Good rules, yeah, rules to live by.

Speaker 2 (44:29):
Yeah. People are going to do the shit in different ways.
No one way is right. Make sure we don't step
on each other's toes directly, it's never going to be perfect.
And try to keep a united front against the enemy.
And the press alike, especially once we step on each
other's toes, which we will.

Speaker 3 (44:44):
Like, whatever disagreements you have within the movement, it's not
worth getting the cops involved. Is not worth letting the
cops in.

Speaker 2 (44:53):
Yeah, because your problem is with other people who share
your goals and not your tactics, and so talk about
that amongst each other, not with people who have completely
different goals that are counter to yours.

Speaker 3 (45:06):
Really, the state is not a mediator here. They just
want you both to die.

Speaker 2 (45:11):
Yeah, totally.

Speaker 3 (45:11):
I do love that. You know, it's Saint Paul because
of like Saint Paul Minnesota. But it makes it sound
so religious. It gives it like a biblical haft. Oh, yeah,
this is the Bible.

Speaker 2 (45:20):
Yeah. I was reading this like I hate the Saint
Paul's Principle piece the other day and it was like,
Saint Paul, what is this Catholicism telling us what we
have to do? And I love they use anti authoritarianism
to justify authoritarianism, you know, because they're.

Speaker 3 (45:34):
Like many such cases with an anarchists.

Speaker 2 (45:36):
Yeah, well, this person wasn't an anarchist. Oh I think
this person was. I'm rudely assuming that this person was
a Marxist Leninist.

Speaker 3 (45:43):
Okay, that's fair too. I'm just saying that there are
more authoritarians and a room full of anarchists.

Speaker 2 (45:47):
It's true than you would want them to be.

Speaker 3 (45:49):
Yeah, yeah, than you would ever suspect.

Speaker 2 (45:51):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (45:52):
Consensus based decision making means we're going to sit here
until you all agree with me.

Speaker 2 (45:58):
Oh god, I am kind of glad that we learned
that not everything needs to be consensus decision making.

Speaker 3 (46:03):
I'm talking a lot of shit for somebody who doesn't
leave her house, don't listen to me.

Speaker 2 (46:06):
Oh that's the other thing that every now and then people
are like, come give talks about organizing. I'm like, yeah,
I'm going to take a time machine back to what
I knew what was happening. I read history and talk
about pop history.

Speaker 3 (46:16):
For my safety and the safety of others. I'm not
in those rooms. I haven't been in years.

Speaker 2 (46:21):
Yeah yeah, oh real.

Speaker 3 (46:22):
So right.

Speaker 2 (46:23):
All Then, during a series of global uprisings started in
twenty eleven with Arab Spring, the Black Bloc found a
new and maybe more fertile ground, places where people had
been suffering enough with the existing system to be down
with a more destructive method of confronting that system and
you get a really major black bloc movement in Egypt.

(46:45):
And again, it was a way to have these huge,
spicy protests without turning to actual armed urban gorilla clandestinity.
The protests around Tarrear Square and Egypt made extensive use
of black block tactics, largely introduced through soccer hooliganism.

Speaker 3 (47:02):
I mean they're already organized, you know, they have matching outfits.

Speaker 2 (47:06):
Yeah, and they like fighting, they love fighting. Yeah.

Speaker 3 (47:08):
God, we were just those horrible videos coming out of
La of the police horses trampling people, right, Yeah, we're
looking at those, and my husband was reminding me of
the Interior Square. There was that moment where you can
see the idea occur to a man that you can
if you walk up from behind or the side, like
when the cavalry is in a dense crowd, you can

(47:31):
just pull him backwards off the horse and there's nothing
you can fucking do about it.

Speaker 1 (47:36):
I just want to point out that Anderson fucking hated
those police cop horse things.

Speaker 3 (47:41):
Like cavalry is frightening when it's facing you. Yeah, but
you can pull him down.

Speaker 2 (47:46):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (47:46):
They used to just like prance around in the Hollywood,
near where the old ieart office was, and when Anderson
was out doing her concrete shit, which is what I
used to call it. Sanderson's like I'll drop heat anywhere
Los Angeles, and so we'd be doing the concrete shit dance. Sorry, Anderson,
I'm really like outing your life, really putting her own blasts,

(48:07):
really put No, I'm proud of that. Okay, my dog
could ship on concrete, thank you very much.

Speaker 2 (48:12):
My dog can not sh on concrete.

Speaker 1 (48:14):
My other dog absolutely not. She's she loves having her
little on sweet bathroom at my house. Anyway, we would
see those exact horse cops and Anderson would let them know,
like you we include you an.

Speaker 3 (48:27):
A cab horsey horse behind this look. As a former
horse girl, I'm looking at their form. They're not stable
on those horses. They are at risks. Also a former
horse girl, I have questions.

Speaker 1 (48:41):
This is great.

Speaker 3 (48:43):
The deep lore. So yeah, I love this.

Speaker 1 (48:46):
We did upset Anderson.

Speaker 3 (48:48):
She did leave the room when we started. Oh yeah,
there's some incredible, incredible videos from Treer Square. Yeah, oh yeah,
I know. You're just like interested in what you should
do if there was mount to Cavalry.

Speaker 1 (49:01):
Yeah yeah, continue Magpipe please.

Speaker 2 (49:03):
Yeah, yeah, no, And and one of the things I
really like, because I really like when everything is connected globally.
And a lot of the Black Block activists in Egypt,
or presumably their supporters as well, would change their Facebook
pages to list their university background as u NAM, which
is the National Autonomous University of Mexico. It's a way
of saying we're related with the Zapatistas, and I think

(49:26):
that's cool.

Speaker 1 (49:27):
That is cool.

Speaker 2 (49:28):
Black Block was also contentiously part of Occupy Wall Street
and the broader occupy movements. Once again people presenting and
almost amusing ignorance on the part of some of the critics,
where they're like, where do these anarchists come? Ruin everything
at Occupy Wall Street. Occupy Wall Street was built by
alter globalization veterans, including the late anarchist author David Graber

(49:49):
and many other people, not just anarchists, but very heavily,
and soon those ideas generalize across the country and people
would get involved without knowing.

Speaker 3 (49:58):
The orgas can you shull up late to the party,
mad that the host is there?

Speaker 2 (50:01):
Yeah, exactly exactly. Movements come and go, but discourses forever,
which is why I want to remember always the litany
against discourse, which is me rewriting the Litany against fear,
which is a piece by Frank Herbert. It's a way
to remind yourself not to discourse. I must not discourse.

(50:23):
Discourse is the mind killer. Discourse is the little death
that brings total obliteration. I will face the discourse. I
will permit it to pass over me and through me.
And when it has gone past, I will turn the
inner eye to see its path. Where the discourse has gone,
there will be nothing. Only I will remain.

Speaker 3 (50:43):
That's beautiful, Margaret.

Speaker 2 (50:45):
Yeah, thanks, Yeah, you just replaced the word fear, and
that's the actual thing.

Speaker 3 (50:48):
I just mind my business. Yeah, I see someone I
don't like it, a protest, I mind my business.

Speaker 2 (50:52):
Yep, that's not about me. Yeah. Yeah. I want to
talk about this today because I don't want people to
get caught while they're trying to stop fascism. And the
black block is one way to avoid getting caught or
things like it. And it is not just for people
who want to commit crimes. It is very good for
people who want to make sure that people who do
commit crimes, rather that people who do physically interfere with

(51:14):
the state apparatus, for example, don't get caught because you
are part of a crowd that they can disappear into.

Speaker 3 (51:20):
You know, even if crime is just totally off the table,
Like that level of anonymity is useful to you for
a variety of reasons, state surveillance, arrest after the fact,
just for having been there, being docks by right wing groups, Like,
there's a lot of reasons why. Maybe you just want
to be a little anonymous, Yeah, totally. And if somebody
wants to break the window, it's not your fucking business.

Speaker 2 (51:39):
Yeah, that's not you.

Speaker 3 (51:40):
Oh and if you were the massed anarchist who grabbed
me by the collar and pulled me back because I
was looking down at my phone while walking and tweeting
into a riot line, thank you.

Speaker 2 (51:53):
And So if you want to go to an anime
convention dressed in the following style ways to do it,
just real quick. This is not your actual guide, but
I promised you some some fashions.

Speaker 3 (52:02):
It's just like a costplay.

Speaker 2 (52:03):
Yeah, yeah, you want a costplay in groups affinity groups.
We discussed them earlier. You put on normal clothes that
don't attract police attention, and then you put black block
clothes on over that. As much as there's different ways
of doing it, this is one way to do it,
and you want that as uniform of your group at
the anime convention. So avoid logos, patches or anything else
identifiable unless everyone has the sailor moon. Don't put sailor

(52:23):
moon on it. And be willing to get rid of
this clothing, especially if something happens while you're out. And
some people like raincoats because they're thin and light and
easy to take on and off. You might want to
put another layer on on top of this, which is
your get there layer. A bandana mask is not adequate
in the modern era. Do not look at old black

(52:44):
blocks and think that is how to do it because
they had different threat model around surveillance. A ski mask
or a T shirt is a much better way at
the anime convention to make sure that no one knows
what you know that you're secretly. It's the way I
go to avoid getting mobbed by crowds.

Speaker 3 (52:59):
And anime because you're so famous, yeah with.

Speaker 2 (53:02):
The anime fans. Tie a T shirt mask. The way
that you do that is you hold the neck hole
over your eyes and then you tie the sleeves around
the back and people like to cover tattoos. Be friendly
as hell with the other people at the convention who
aren't in block. Your goal is to make their lives
better and have a more enjoyable convention experience, and be brave.

(53:25):
Courage is instead not the absence of fear, but the
willingness to act despite it. And before you leave the convention,
you d block where others can't see. This can be
accomplished by bringing together a large group of people, especially
with umbrellas to hide from overhead cameras. But also if
you're able to scout the convention area ahead of time,
you can figure out alleys and camera blind spots and

(53:47):
such inside the convention center and ideally talk to people
who have experience and go with experienced people. But if
that's not possible, read about it. Crimeting dot com has
a lot of different guides on this matter other places
due to I'm sure and always remember this is not
the best or only way to be militant or radical
or whatever. This is one that I find the history

(54:08):
fascinating of and wanted to present. It's just one way
that you can help yourself and other people stay safe
doing what you might want to do when you're getting
those signatures, you know, you can go into line as
many times as you want if you're in block, because
they're going to be like I've never seen you before,
and you're like, that's right, please sign a lot of
better things for me, and then you can sell signed

(54:30):
copies of the books. That's what I got. That's the
history of the Black Blog.

Speaker 3 (54:35):
Make your own choices, mind your own business, and be brave.

Speaker 2 (54:39):
Those are some good maxims. Yeah, the Molly maxims. Well,
if people can, well, you can do your own plug.
I don't have to do your plug.

Speaker 3 (54:47):
Oh gosh, yeah. Listen to my podcast We're Little Guys.
It's about the opposite of this show, things that are bummers,
bad people who did bad things. You can listen to
it wherever you listen to podcasts. As a matter of fact,
loads several podcasting applications on your phone and download it
on all of them.

Speaker 2 (55:04):
What could go wrong? Literally, nothing, nothing will go wrong.

Speaker 3 (55:07):
If you do that, no more downloads, and Sophie will
be proud of me.

Speaker 1 (55:10):
Always right, it's not downloads based downloads help.

Speaker 2 (55:15):
And if you like ad transitions but not ads, you
can and you have an iPhone, you can subscribe to
Cooler Zone Media and just give us money to do
this directly instead of it going through ads instead. That's
the thing you can do. You can also take care
of your friends. Shit's hard.

Speaker 3 (55:34):
Yes, I would like to plug the idea of having
solidarity with your friends and neighbors.

Speaker 2 (55:38):
Yeah, and remember that community and neighbors doesn't mean the
people you like, like sometimes it's just literally the people
who are there. Whether or not you like your neighbors,
they should not be disappeared. And well, actually I have
no problem with any neighbors who would be in that
kind of throat, but like whatever, Like, it's not about
like just your friends. It is about the people around
you and the people who aren't around you what could
be around you. It's just take care of each other,

(56:00):
all right. Hi, roond bye.

Speaker 1 (56:04):
Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff is a production of
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