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Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message.
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Louis, you've been quite gentle when it comes to my own transgressions
of Marxmail etiquette, thanks.
However, I do feel Mikhail Rodsky, from Toronto, has done no real harm.
Should he not be given another chance at posting, after explaining the
no-extraneous text rule ? He obviously thinks that the "Black Bloc" (and
this is an increasingly hazy term, lumping together those in favour of a
more "confrontational" attitude towards Security Forces at G-20
meetings) are not to be condemned out of hand. Maybe he is right, maybe
he is wrong, and more importantly, how do you decide if someone is
"right or "wrong" on such a question ?
There is a worrying tendency to try and project a "clean, responsible"
image of anti-Capitalist protest as simple social-democratic unhappiness
with the way things are going, while hounding all those that might smash
the windows of a Barcley's bank as "beyond the pale".
Maoists might shoot 80 cops in the jungles of Eastern India, Bangladeshi
workers could set fire to 125 workshops, Chinese demonstrators are wont
to lynch 14 policemen, and this would be seen as an excusable example of
working class anger. But breaking fifty windows, that is seen as
unnecessary "violence", given that in "the West", we have
Social-Democratic parties to legitimately channel waking class anger in
a "responsible" direction.
While smiling, clean-shaven, tuxedo-wearing "elected" representatives
from the US, Europe, Japan, Russia and China are discussing austerity
measures, a few dozen tattooed "black block" adherents, who would seek
to break a dozen corporate windows and burn down a few cars ("Utter
mayhem !", "Chaos in the streets !", "Hooligans destroying society !"
being the reactionary presses' interpretation) are treated as enemies of
civilization. "Civilization" as a rallying cry against subversion has a
long, very long (from the condemnation of the first riots in
revolutionary France) tradition.
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