If you've taken a history class or an anthropology course, you should know that first-hand accounts and documents are the most valuable to any story. What the Mercury News did was get testimony from the captain of the police force and utilized a video provided by ABC 7 with participant footage and next day thoughts from Santa Cruz students and business owners. The whole thing was sensationalized, pitting the "violent" protesters against the victimized businesses. Several things were misrepresented:
1. It was not a protest, like the Merc and ABC 7 say it was, but a street party, in a Reclaim The Streets fashion.
2. The "fire" on the patio was protesters putting their torches down, with no visible sign of burning seen by the workers the next day.
Well, my friend took the face-value information, from the Merc, and announced his feelings about anarchists based on his ill-informed opinions. Several things should be learned from this:
1. In reading an article in corporate media, dig deeper to find the source. My friend didn't do this, so he assumed the anarchists were endangering children and immigrants, when really the party was billed as a dance party at night with an ambiguous notion to either have a lot of fun partying or fucking shit up.
2. After finding the source, check out what other people have to say. From the following link, you can read other peoples' responses as well as follow other links to other accounts.
3. After you have a general idea of what happened, remember that the people in the story you read about don't represent everyone who share a similar identity, or title. My friend stated that he's fed up with anarchists since they do this shit all the time. That is a blanket statement, where one specific group of people are used, usually very stereotypically, to define a whole variety of groups. For instance, all white people are greedy. You know this is not true as long as you know me, and of course there are others. I could have just as easily said that socialists are elitist, but I know that that is not always the case. In this specific instance, these anarchists that performed destructive acts (note how I do not say "violent") against property are insurrectionary anarchists, and really don't help in the anarchist cause unless there does come a day when the government decides to make the USA a police state, which some feel it is already. Although I recognize we are living in a semi-police state, I also recognize the need for structure and coordination among anarchist groups in order to build an international solidarity base.
4. Finally, once you've identified the specific group who are the actors in the story, it relies on you to fill in the missing links in the story based on informed opinion. So basically, this step is to emphasize asking "Why?" On this note, we need to look a lot deeper into the reasons behind specific actions and tactics.
In this instance of insurrectionary anarchists, what drives them to destroy property, without distinguishing between local, family-owned businesses and the corporate chains?
Because I share similar feelings - albeit different tactics, mind you - and a similar world view, I believe I can answer this based on my own feelings. Private property, ever since its inception, has put people out of work and displaced people from a place in which to dwell. Before private property, people held the land and worked the land in common. Granted, the land belonged to royalty, but at least they had a place to live and food to eat. Now, people who own property use up all the resources on the land, they horde it all to themselves, or they sell it for profit. This makes property owners those with the most power and voice ("vote with your dollar" bullshit) in this society, as it is the working class that must sell their labor to these property owners in order for them to survive and pay for necessities. When one has this view, it would be easy to engage in destructive acts against property without distinguishing between corporate and family-owned.
Also, why would the insurrectionists choose to veil themselves in a street party and engage in property destruction then?
As I mentioned earlier, some people already believe we are in an all-out police state. With that said, most insurrectionary anarchists will veil themselves with bandanas and dress all in black so identifying features do not stand out to cameras and can't be reported to police. Because we live in an age of mass misinformation, these anarchists feel it is also necessary to veil themselves from the general public because the general public, in their eyes, are most often sheep to the slaughter, and therefore corroborators to the police. When engaged in acts of liberation, against property and non-consensual authority, many anarchists adopt this masked and blacked out costume. In terms of doing it during a street party, their aims may have been to disguise their destruction of property as a celebration of free space, or they really felt inclined to just take the party a step further. The street party was already breaking the laws of obstructing property and being an unpermitted march, so breaking windows of the institutions that keep people powerless wouldn't be much of a leap. What's true of any act of liberation, is that it snow balls. When one person demonstrates that they can cast off the shackles of society, or unjust laws that favor the property owners and not the dispossessed, then what generally happens is that others follow suit. When done as a solitary act, as in an assassination or arson attempt, it doesn't have much power and usually becomes discredited as an act of terrorism. But when people do it in crowds, it has the possibility of invoking revolt, insurrection, and even revolution. The problem with the black bloc, as the blacked out and masked anarchists are called, is that their costumes often alienate the rest of the crowd, who aren't likely to follow suit when the individuals they see performing the action isn't someone with whom they can identify.
As you can see, the situation is more complex than one makes it out to be. Thoughts?
