....LMB: "More Anarchist Bashing"....

July 12, 2004

Sigh.

The tabloid the New York Daily News has another politically stifling scare story:

Yes, ANARCHY THREAT TO CITY.

The entire article is goofy, really. If you look at the "substance" of the article, the NYC police commissioner claims that anarchists have posted ideas for disrupting the Republican National Convention to the internet. What website? He doesn't say. How do we know that this stuff is posted by anarchists? We don't. As we all should know, posting stuff to the internet anonymously, or while misrepresenting your identity, is pretty easy. Watch.

This is Jaleel White, but you probably know me best as the lovable TV nerd "Urkel". I want to urge you all to turn into giant sea monsters and destroy the Australian coast.

Thank you, good night

(I'd like to take this moment to condemn Jaleel "Urkel" White for his evil terroristical plot to destroy Australia. Thank you.)

And even if you look at these alleged anarchist ploys, you won't come away real scared. The "threat" that this "shadowy, loose-knit band of traveling troublemakers" pose is that some of them might make their clothes smell like gunpowder to so that bomb-sniffing dogs stop and smell them, wasting police officers' time. Or, if the officer was particularly paranoid, and the place was public enough, it could result in delays of subway trains or something (although I want to re-iterate, there's not even any evidence here that any anarchists posted these ideas, or plan to carry them out).

The article also claims that anarchists plan to throw marbles under the hooves of police horses to make them fall, or to use slingshots to shoot marbles at the horses. This sounds completely bogus. Just about all anarchists believe in animal rights (it's a byproduct of the political philosophy. Once you start thinking that it's wrong to use force on a person to get your way, you start believing that it's wrong to use force on any creature to get your way), which makes it very unlikely that they're going to try to harm horses.

The article concludes with a quick history re-write, in which all of the major protests in the past 5 years are tales of heroic cops fighting devious protesters.

So, in response, another "anarchist" (no real way of knowing, right?) posted this FAQ-ish response. Here's an excerpt:

What about all those police claims of violent or terroristic behavior?

Time after time police have made similar claims. Time after time they have been proven to be lying.

Just look at the hard facts, compare police predictions before and during protests with what actually ends up happening. Again and again, police spokesmen predict terrible violence. They predict goons with molotov cocktails, anarchists setting off bombs, protesters throwing acid or slabs of concrete at policemen, or even more bizarre fantasies - during the last Republican Convention, for instance, Philadelphia police claimed anarchists were preparing to release poisonous snakes and reptiles all over the city. During the protests, they often claim such things are actually happening. But every time, when it's all over, police are either forced to grudgingly admit they were "mistaken" (the molotovs turned out to be paint thinner used in making puppets, the van full of reptiles turned out to be owned by a pet store), or they just stop talking about it and hope nobody notices that none of these things ever actually occurred.

Real terrorists try to create terror. They threaten to do terrible things, to kill and maim innocent people, if governments do not agree to their demands. Then they go out and do it. Afterwards, they boast about it and threaten more. Here we have the exact opposite. The anarchists who help organize protests in America have never threatened to hurt anyone, never claimed to have hurt anyone, and in fact, in four years of protests, have never have hurt a single innocent bystander in any way. Despite that, every time there's a major protest, the police keep trying to terrify the public by predicting mayhem, and the anarchists keep desperately trying to reassure the public that there's nothing to be frightened of, that the last thing we'd ever want to do is to harm them.

In other words, it's the police spokesmen who keep trying to create a climate of terror. We keep trying to diffuse it.

So we've got two things working in tandem here: police who want to scare the public so that they'll accept repressive police behavior to "save" the city; and news organizations that draw more audience and sell more papers when they have scary stories to tell. Gotta love the synergy.