Wear Clean Draws  (because there’s 5 million ways to kill a ceo)

I wonder what it is about David Graeber that seems to make some folks on the left go off the rail?

Last night, M Pollak posted an article about black bloc on facebook. I didn’t read it at the time. I just did now. Wow. What a ridiculous article. There have been exactly two ‘black blocs’ at Oakland — I don’t count the ongoing Fuck The Police marches as black blocs (or street fighting). Yet, the author seems to think that the entirety of OWS – apparently, everywhere an Occupy exists — is incapable of thinking of anything else but using black block tactics. Which, mind, is reduced to street fighting as tactic — which is patent bullshit. It would be nice to advance some evidence of all the black blocs that have been central to Occupy in order to make silly claims like this. Or, at least, show how you are in the realm of rhetoric, the realm of –say– opinionator obsessions as opposed to what’s happening at direct action planning meetings, etc.

Anyway, I had just finished up reading Graeber’s account of the movement from Ghandian non-violence to black bloc tactics among environmentalists (and other activists) in the Northwest, prior to the infamous Seattle.

Dork that I am, completely outraged by the horrible history that I’d just read in Graeber, I posted a short summary thinking, mistakenly, that the article was more along the lines of a tempered, insightful piece. Since the piece was supposedly about the history of black bloc in the u.s., Graeber naturally came to mind and I assumed my summary would just buttress the article. I tend to trust Michael’s judgement and level-headedness.

Anyway, my summary was of Graeber’s chapter which was about the events that lead environmentalists in the NW to decided to abandon the Ghandian non-violence that they’d been committed to and sign up for black bloc during the “battle in Seattle.” The NW environmentalists saw acitivists in lockdown tortured with liquid pepper spray, methodically poured or swabbed directly on their eyes, all done methodically and clinically with one cop holding the activist still and pulling back her eyelid, the other pouring or swabbing, all the while clinically describing the activities as if narrating surgery for an audience of interns. In addition to the torturous handling of lockdowns, a tree sitter was murdered by a logger. When proof that the police and media lied about the murder emerged in the form of video revealed the logger in an altercation with protesters just before the murder, nothing much happened.

Protestors had adopted Ghandian non-violence because they believed that they could present themselves as pure and just and deserving of public sympathy when cops inevitably used violence on them. This, Graeber says, worked for the Civil Rights movement, but hasn’t much since then. One reason is that there’s a sense that the media systematically ignores protests of any sort believing that to give voice to protest is to give air time to an illegitimate or non-institutional entity staging protests just for the press attention. Another reason is that its wildly believed that journalists think they contributed to the discontent of the 60s by covering protests. Graeber also suggests that people saw the South as another country. To see cops violently putting down civil rights struggle was to see the police of another country doing so, which meant people could identify with the protesters and object to the cops. Today, the situation isn’t the same. People see the cops as part of the country. They also think there are real alternatives to protest that should be used before anyone uses protest. Hence, there isn’t a lot of sympathy for protesters most of the time.

Anyway, I assumed that this understanding of the media and the police was a given – that both lied and both distorted what goes on during protests. I gave a quick synopsis, talking about how Earth First was once committed to Ghandian non-violence but, in the face of police abuse and media mendacity and lack of coverage, they gradually lost faith in Ghandian principles. Some gave it up entirely and participated in black bloc during Seattle 1999.

Now, granted it was a short paragraph. It relied on too much assumed and shared assumptions about media and police. But I don’t realy think my poor summary was the reason for the hostile response. Hostile to Graeber in so far as MP claimed that, while he intitially thought it made sense, I was wrong about Earth First: ostensibly they committed violence (tree spiking) and that it made no sense to complain about lack of media attention around tree sitting since it was such a solo activity there wouldn’t likely be much media attention.

Well, I was talking a wider set of circumstances, but mostly simply assuming that if I said that the media and public didn’t pay attention, the reader on the left would basicallly agree. I think most would but in the context of Graeber? apparently not.

In fact, MP went on to suggest that Graeber fabricated most of what I summarized, suggesting not only that they were lies but that Graeber had a knack for lulling the reader into believing what he’s saying. Luckly, MP caught himself and came to his senses before being manipulated by the likes of the mendacious Graeber.

Seems that some folks just can’t handle what Graeber says on this particular ntopic. I think they believe that no good and decent person would ever advocate violence of any sort, not even property destruction, so they simply don’t believe Graeber on the topic.

This is the kind of thing, though, that Graeber was pointing out that was so wrong with the kind of scumbag article Hedges wrote. They poison the wells making it impossible to believe a black bloc participant is rational, worth listening to, does what she does for reasons, that it’s not just punk kids, etc. Graeber offers a direct counterexample to their lies and stereotypes, yet they lies and stereotypes continue.

The latest in Viewpoint magazine, above, is another good example of bullshit on stilts walking around, posing as “intellectual” and “scholarly.”