red-and-anarchist-black-metal:
i-need-to-vent-the-stress-away:
Those that destroy property at protests do it because they recognize that the only language capitalism speaks is profit. Protest songs or banners mean nothing to the leaders of capitalism, only the price tag of suppressing protests and fixing the damage registers on their radar. Only when public resistance to their policies becomes so expense that it isn’t worth it do they change their deadly policies. That is what activists mean when they say capitalism values property more than people and that is why activists target property.
The cost of fixing a local resident’s car does not register on the pricetag for the state, only for the local resident who will blame the protesters.
Merkel has already confirmed that all the yuppies whose posh cars* got burned will get their money back. Which was always expected because there is no way the current government could do anything else this close to the German elections.
* The media keeps ignoring that activists specifically targetted expensive cars in working class neighbourhoods threatened with gentrification. Curious that.
I thought it was obvious that these protesters would focus on expensive cars, if you know anything about the ideology of the antifacist movement, or any leftist movement.
Yet I see so many so called leftists just believing the mainstream media without any critical thought.
Yes! So many people keep speaking about ‘random destruction’ and it shows just how little they understand about these sort of actions. Every destructive act is intentional. It takes a lot of effort to get into Hamburg and locations like this and the actions people do involve a lot of personal risk to themselves. So of course it’s thought out. The location, the object, none of it is random.
But every time the media is going to ignore that and focus on some small local store that got trashed, even if it was a gentrification hub, the owner was a snitch or undercover cops had to trash the place themselves to get a good story.Do you have any links or resources? I desperately need it to shut people’s mouths :3
You could run this article through google translate: http://www.grutjes.nl/2017/07/welcome-to-hell/
Or check activist news outlets and google recent articles on ‘Hamburg + gentrification’ or ‘Hamburg + human rights’, ‘Hamburg + police brutality’, ‘Hamburg + illegal cavity searches’ and similar keywords that the media engaged in a moral panic about property destruction like to avoid.
From what I percieved it really wasn’t only private property of big companies but also stores of people who depend on it and also struggle with gentrification. However when the riot started the first targets were banks and chain stores like the supermarket “Rewe” and the phone provider “O2″. The social center “Rote Flora” distanced themselves in an open letter from people who even set fires in stores which were beneath housings and risked that way the live of people. Also they point out in the same letter that some people had to protect their small stores. Also people of a former squat helped defend some smaller stores. Now there are different arguments for that result. For example Lower Class Magazine points out, that the alcohol in the supermarket wasn’t destroyed (like earlier in riots in germany) and holds accountable blokes without political motivation who found themselves within the situation and also the access to alcohol. Another important aspect was the strategy of the police which was pure escalation. When talking about the german police it’s also important to point out that after the G8 in Heiligendamm and the protests against the train station “Stuttgart21″ a cop admitted that they tend to use agent provocateur in bigger events to justify their violent strategy and repression. And last but not least it wasn’t only leftist groups rioting, also besides the blokes without political motivation neonazi groups were in Hamburg too: a journalist reports that he even was insulted with slurs used by the far right.
Finally, after 20 ‘but I saw an anarchist burn a Toyota’ replies, I get this reply from someone who recognizes that cop ‘provocateurs’ and nazis rioting specifically to make the left look bad are a thing. Thank you.
Another thing is that the police and media strategically use these instances, finding and filming the most sympathetic little shopowner ‘victim’ they can find (and cops will definitely organize for such a shop to get trashed if they have to) and then offering the footage to uncritical media around the world. Words like ‘random’ and ‘mindless’ destruction are then attached to those images and repeated over and over again, regardless of how random the acts really were.
So yeah, nazis, opportunists, cops pretending to be activists and media all play a part in twisting the image of events that people see. Whenever I hear the words ‘random destruction’ associated with activists I role my eyes.
Reports from the activists coming out of Hamburg right now confirm that but also point out the role of local activists in making sure many destructive targetted gentrification and big bussiness, acts that intentions that were largely ignored by the media. It will take a while for activists to have time to get a full picture, reflect and analyse just how much destruction was targetted and how much was meant to undermine the message of activists.
QueerAnarchism 