To the black bloc "anarchists", F*** OFF! This is "Occupy", NOT "Destroy"

To the black bloc “Anarchists”, I would like you to listen closely to the gentleman in this video at the 3:17 mark of this video … he has something important to say . .

You can see people in this video trying to prevent the destruction of property, and my hat goes off to them.

And I use quotation marks on the word Anarchist for a reason, because real Anarchists believe in breaking up corrupt power structures, not smashing windows. Any mindless clown with a brick can smash a window, that doesn’t make you an anarchist, just a vandal. Though I am NOT an anarchist myself, the anarchists I have met do NOT endorse this idiotic smashing of property, and nor does Occupy Wall Street. I denounce this type of bullshit. It has NO PLACE in our peaceful movement.

More below the fold

To the cowards in masks who just want to break shit, you aren’t helping at all, in fact, you are making things worse for EVERYONE. I have no idea what you have to offer anyone, you basically have nothing positive to add to the conversation we’d like to have. In short, F U, because your idiotic acts of violence and senseless damage of property is certainly going to be used to smear every peaceful person in the Occupy Wall Street movement, so not only are you not adding anything positive, the only thing you are adding is negative.  

UPDATED:

hat tip to Kossack Mindtrain, from the comments …

An excerpt from An Open Letter to the Black Bloc and Others Concerning Wednesday’s Tactics in Oakland

“The setting on fire of the barricades was totally unnecessary, and may make it necessary for the city to call for the camp to be cleared; the breaking of windows and vandalizing of businesses which supported the strike was utterly stupid and counterproductive; and watching black bloc-ers run from the cops and not protect the camp their actions had endangered, an action which ultimately left behind many mentally ill people, sick people, street kids, and homeless folks to defend themselves against the police onslaught was disturbing and disgusting in ways I can’t even articulate because I am still so angry at the empty bravado and cowardice that I saw.”

In fact, by engaging in violence and the destruction of property you are giving the police and corrupt Mayors exactly the excuse they need to shut down Occupy protests.

So, speaking on behalf of all of the peaceful people who would stand with us that you are putting at risk, we’d appreciate it if you’d knock this bullshit off, or if you are incapable of that, just get the fuck out.

Please help support my friends, TheOther99. OllieGarkey and HankNYNY have been making sure that the chant “The Whole World is Watching” is true. They’ve been Ustreaming from New York this entire time, and they’re keeping an eye on smaller occupations like Houston, Fresno, and Mobile. They need your contributions to stay operational.

You can follow me on twitter at @JesseLaGreca

Occupy’s Asshole Problem: Flashbacks from An Old Hippie

Note from Nicole … This post was written by my friend Sara Robinson, a senior fellow at the Campaign for America’s Future.   I hope that any assholes who think they’re acting as part of the Occupy movement will read it and take heed….

Eric Thayer/Getty Images — Anarchists in Oakland, Calif., smash the windows of a bank Wednesday during an Occupy demonstration. The group called for a general strike Wednesday and marched on the city’s port later in the day, halting operations there.

 (Blogger’s note: we know not all anarchists are like this, it’s not fair to lump them in like this, FYI.)

Occupy’s Asshole Problem: Flashbacks from An Old Hippie

By Sara Robinson

November 4, 2011

I wish I could say that the problems that the Occupy movement is having with infiltrators and agitators are new. But they’re not. In fact, they’re problems that the Old Hippies who survived the 60s and 70s remember acutely, and with considerable pain.

As a veteran of those days — with the scars to prove it — watching the OWS organizers struggle with drummers, druggies, sexual harassers, racists, and anarchists brings me back to a few lessons we had to learn the hard way back in the day, always after putting up with way too much over-the-top behavior from people we didn’t think we were allowed to say “no” to.  It’s heartening to watch the Occupiers begin to work out solutions to what I can only indelicately call “the asshole problem.” In the hope of speeding that learning process along, here are a few glimmers from my own personal flashbacks — things that it’s high time somebody said right out loud.

1. Let’s be clear: It is absolutely OK to insist on behavior norms. #Occupy may be a DIY movement — but it also stands for very specific ideas and principles. Central among these is: We are here to reassert the common good. And we have a LOT of work to do. Being open and accepting does not mean that we’re obligated to accept behavior that damages our ability to achieve our goals. It also means that we have a perfect right to insist that people sharing our spaces either act in ways that further those goals, or go somewhere else until they’re able to meet that standard.

2. It is OK to draw boundaries between those who are clearly working toward our goals, and those who are clearly not. Or, as an earlier generation of change agents put it: “You’re either on the bus, or off the bus.” Are you here to change the way this country operates, and willing to sacrifice some of your almighty personal freedom to do that? Great. You’re with us, and you’re welcome here. Are you here on your own trip and expecting the rest of us to put up with you? In that case, you are emphatically NOT on our side, and you are not welcome in our space.

Anybody who feels the need to put their own personal crap ahead of the health and future of the movement is (at least for that moment) an asshole, and does not belong in Occupied space. Period. This can be a very hard idea for people in an inclusive movement to accept — we really want to have all voices heard. But the principles #Occupy stands for must always take precedence over any individual’s divine right to be an asshole, or the assholes will take over. Which brings me to….

3. The consensus model has a fatal flaw, which is this: It’s very easy for power to devolve to the people who are willing to throw the biggest tantrums. When some a drama king or queen starts holding the process hostage for their own reasons, congratulations! You’ve got a new asshole! (See #2.) You must guard against this constantly, or consensus government becomes completely impossible.

4. Once you’ve accepted the right of the group to set boundaries around people’s behavior, and exclude those who put their personal “rights” ahead of the group’s mission and goals, the next question becomes:  How do we deal with chronic assholes?

This is the problem Occupy’s leaders are very visibly struggling with now. I’ve been a part of asshole-infested groups in the long-ago past that had very good luck with a whole-group restorative justice process. In this process, the full group (or some very large subset of it that’s been empowered to speak for the whole) confronts the troublemaker directly. The object is not to shame or blame. Instead, it’s like an intervention. You simply point out what you have seen and how it affects you. The person is given a clear choice: make some very specific changes in their behavior, or else leave.

This requires some pre-organization. You need three to five spokespeople to moderate the session (usually as a tag team) and do most of the talking. Everybody else simply stands in a circle around the offender, watching silently, looking strong and determined. The spokespeople make factual “we” statements that reflect the observations of the group. “We have seen you using drugs inside Occupied space. We are concerned that this hurts our movement. We are asking you to either stop, or leave.”

When the person tries to make excuses (and one of the most annoying attributes of chronic assholes is they’re usually skilled excuse-makers as well), then other members of the group can speak up — always with “I” messages. “I saw you smoking a joint with X and Y under tree Z this morning. We’re all worried about the cops here, and we think you’re putting our movement in danger. We are asking you to leave.” Every statement needs to end with that demand — “We are asking you to either stop, or else leave and not come back.” No matter what the troublemaker says, the response must always be brought back to this bottom line.

These interventions can go on for a LONG time. You have to be committed to stay in the process, possibly for a few hours until the offender needs a pee break or gets hungry. But eventually, if everybody stays put, the person will have no option but to accept that a very large group of people do not want him or her there. Even truly committed assholes will get the message that they’ve crossed the line into unacceptable behavior when they’re faced with several dozen determined people confronting them all at once.

Given the time this takes, it’s tempting to cut corners by confronting several people all at once. Don’t do it. Confronting more than two people at a time creates a diffusion-of-responsibility effect: the troublemakers tell themselves that they just got caught up in a dragnet; the problem is those other people, not me. The one who talks the most will get most of the heat; the others will tend to slip by (though the experience may cause them to reconsider their behavior or leave as well).

This process also leaves open the hope that the person will really, truly get that their behavior is Not OK, and agree to change it. When this happens, be sure to negotiate specific changes, boundaries, rules, and consequences (“if we see you using drugs here again, we will call the police. There will be no second warning”), and then reach a consensus agreement that allows them to stay. On the other hand: if the person turns violent and gets out of control, then the question is settled, and their choice is made. You now have a legitimate reason to call the cops to haul them away. And the cops will likely respect you more for maintaining law and order.

Clearing out a huge number of these folks can be a massive time suck, at least for the few days it will take to weed out the worst ones and get good at it. It might make sense to create a large committee whose job it is to gather information, build cases against offenders, and conduct these meetings.

And finally:

5. It is not wrong for you to set boundaries this way. You will get shit for this. “But…but…it looks a whole lot like a Maoist purge unit!”  No. There is nothing totalitarian about asking people who join your revolution to act in ways that support the goals of that revolution. And the Constitution guarantees your right of free association — which includes the right to exclude people who aren’t on the bus, and who are wasting the group’s limited time and energy rather than maximizing it. After all: you’re not sending these people to re-education camps, or doing anything else that damages them. You’re just getting them out of the park, and out of your hair. You’re eliminating distractions, which in turn effectively amplifies the voices and efforts of everyone else around you. And, in the process, you’re also modeling a new kind of justice that sanctions people’s behavior without sanctioning their being — while also carving out safe space in which the true potential of Occupy can flourish.

99% Legion is Awakening.: How to Identify an Agent Provocateur

Time for self-education and collective discussion on police, disruption, tactics, and what it means to enter serious conflict with powerful forces.

Inform yourself. Be alert without being paranoid. Don’t be naive. Don’t rush into things. Help train others. When suspicious gather facts.

Kasama has run a series of articles on police infiltration: We have documented an important example in Britain, and one FBI infiltrator in Minneapolis (several articles appeared).

Further: In a discussion of the following article, CWM made the important point that not all police infiltrators are agent provocateurs, some are informants. Their profile, activity and goals can be very different. CWM wrote:

“The undercover police are mostly there to gather information and they gravitate towards tasks where there is information.”

While it is true, that  gathering information quietly is often the main activity of police agents — it is also true that provocateur activity happens to two levels:

 One, police agents seek to provoke street movements to take actions that they believe will both alienate the public and pull people across the line to facilitate arrests.

Second, police agents (especially since 2001) have carefully worked to enable the government to declare they have uncovered “terrorist sympathizers” – and a special “entrapment” tactic in a growing number of cases has been to encourage often-unknowing youth and activists to engage in “material support” of targeted international groups in ways that allow the police to develop major legal charges.

Third, there is a long history of police themselves throwing charges of “police agent” on innocent activists — such “bad jacketing” is a way of sowing disunity (and even causing inner-left violence), and of creating a general fearful and paranoid atmosphere that weakens resistance movements.

The charge of police agent should never be made casually or lightly. Gathering facts and the experiences of others are extremely important. A discussion of agent provocateurs is not a tactical argument against all militancy, nor is it an argument that those advocating militant or illegal acts must be secretly cops.

How to Identify an Agent Provocateur

As governments around the world, including our own, face more and more popular resistance, we’re witnessing a revival of the use of agent provocateurs. An agent provocateur is the well-used tactic of using undercover military or police to join a dissenting group or protest in order to provoke others in the group to carry out illegal actions and violence. The goal is to discredit the group from the inside. Sometimes the group gets discredited with those outside. Other times the group is enticed into internal divisions and collapses.

The most recent and clumsy attempt was the Egyptian government’s use of plain-clothes police officers to incite violence amid the largely peaceful anti-Mubarak protests. They tried to resemble the genuine protesters at first, but then the Mubarak agents showed their true colors. They rode horses and camels, carrying weapons and throwing fire bombs. Even the international media wasn’t fooled. For the first time, mainstream media started using the language of agent provocateurs.

In decades past in the U.S., the FBI was exposed for using agent provocateurs to pose as members of right wing groups and the Black Panthers. This was the infamous COINTELPRO program that operated from the 1950s into the 1970s. It was thought to have been shut down in the early 1970s, but another version of it came to light during the Reagan years.

Italian police were caught using agent provocateurs during the G8 financial meeting in 2001, and the British police did the same during the 2009 G20 meetings in London. In 2007, a Canadian police force in Quebec first denied and then admitted it used disguised officers during a protest of a Security and Prosperity Partnership meeting. The police denied that the disguised officers were inciting violence, though they were carrying rocks.

New York City police officers were accused of using agent provocateurs during the 2004 Republican National Convention, and the Denver police were discovered using undercover detectives during the 2008 Democratic National Convention. In this case, police officers ended up using riot-control chemicals against their own officers. In recent years, the FBI has used a growing number of agent provocateurs to infiltrate Muslim communities in the U.S., the most notable being exposed agent Craig Monteith in Orange County, California. He said he had been paid between $2500 and $11,000 a month to help radicalize Muslims.

As the paranoia common to governments grows, the question arises: will your group or church or political action committee be targeted with agent provocateurs at some point? Why not? The targets have been quite various, with government certainly not always focused on so-called radicals. At the same time, governments’ definitions of what groups are risky can change quickly and silently. It certainly wouldn’t be advertized. Many groups haven’t discovered their agent provocateurs until years after their activity.

Would you be able to spot an agent provocateur? They try to blend in and make friends. They appear to share your interests.

Drawing from several sources, experienced observers have suggested some tips for identifying such agents. They’re not foolproof, but they’re a start.

• Agents will often lack background connections or references. No one in your circles or related groups will know them.
• Agents try to keep discussions and action unproductive and still. They’ll spend plenty of time debating issues, with little action. They focus on ideas over people.
• They tend to create messes in groups and between group members. They leave chaos in their wake.
• They tend to gravitate toward people in the group who are dissatisfied. Once relationships with those folks grow, the dissatisfaction spreads.
• Some agents have been former prisoners who do this work as part of a deal. These folks tend to jump from organization to organization in a relatively short time.
• Agents don’t have known sources of income. They might have a job that doesn’t match their spending or claim their money comes from prior savings.
• They tend to provide gifts for key figures at first. This helps them build trust with the group.
• When confronted, they will get defensive and start making their own accusations.
• They act like zealots, but they don’t have the fruit of it. They have passion but don’t truly care.

Of course, good but immature people can do all these things. Discernment involves sound judgment calls. Protection from agent provocateurs increases as your group matures. If your group has rich relationships and trust, you won’t as easily fall prey to cheap provocateurs. (source)