Agnapostate
4th December 2010, 00:46
I was reading the "Rumors/Street Stories" section of an issue of the Anti-Racist Action newspaper Turning the Tide, and was somewhat dismayed about what I regarded as the arbitrary and unproductive nature of random attacks, what some people might call "adventurist." Here are a few examples:
New Brunswick, NJ: Anti fascists and pro-choice individuals have been striking back against anti-abortion fundamentalists in their community. Anti-choicers picketing a local clinic during the "40 days for life" were struck by fruit and obscenities by passerby, and a long-standing fake clinic run by anti-choicers had its locks glued and a security camera damaged.
Chicago, IL: Chi-town antifa lured the leader of the city's most active neo-nazi group and one of his crew 3 hours from home after posing as a potential recruit looking to buy a t-shirt. The two Nazis were greeted by a handful of antifa, who treated them to a proper greeting before making a quick escape, leaving the Nazis, who were arrested afterwards, reeling.
[...]
Chicago, IL: Chicago gets a second mention this issue for turning out some hard nose antifa to an outing of local National Socialist Movement (NSM) member Suzy Lenner at her workplace, ironically a head shop called Secrets. A man claiming to be her boss jumped out of a taxi and accosted the antifa, but was met with a barrage of eggs against him and his store. Against, the antifascist ninjas melted into the street and evaded authorities.
Along with this problem has existed indiscriminate attacks that are often the result of mob outrage against racist actions: http://www.splcenter.org/get-informed/intelligence-report/browse-all-issues/2006/winter/indian-blood
Chili Yazzie, president of the Shiprock Chapter of the Navajo Nation (the equivalent of the mayor of the closest reservation town to Farmington), was himself victimized back in 1978, when a white hitchhiker blew Yazzie's right arm off with two blasts from a .44 Magnum. The first bullet shattered the bones in his arm and continued into his rib cage. "The whole world was the color of a really bad sandstorm," Yazzie recalls. "Out of his poncho I saw a hole and some smoke coming out. I realized that he had a pistol pointed at me all this time from under his poncho." "I asked him, 'What are you doing, you crazy son of a bastard?' Then he shot me again." Yazzie spent a month in the hospital. The shooter served less than five years.
Back then, Yazzie was a member of the radical American Indian Movement as well as the famous rock-and-roll protest band X-IT, which provided the soundtrack for the Red Power movement. Now 56, his black hair is woven with wisps of grey. His tactics have mellowed and his rhetoric has softened, but he remains a dedicated advocate for his people.
In 1974, four years before he was shot, Yazzie took part in a series of dramatic marches organized by Farmington Navajos in response to a brutal triple-murder. Last September, 32 years later, Yazzie found himself leading a similar march of 1,500 Navajos protesting racism and violence after the attack on William Blackie, which occurred just two weeks after an assault on a Navajo undercover police officer by a white man with a knife. Yazzie says tempers ran hot among Navajos.
"There were guys that wanted to come in here and take an eye for an eye. There are people capable of doing that," he says somberly. Yazzie likes to call himself a "reasonable radical," and his cool head calmed an explosive situation.
[...]
The most notorious hate crime in Farmington history occurred in April 1974, during Webb's first term as mayor. Three Navajos, Benjamin Benally, John Harvey, and David Ignacio were found bludgeoned, mutilated and burned in Chokecherry Canyon. "They were tortured. Firecrackers were placed in their noses and anuses," says Yazzie, the Navajo leader. "As they were dying, they were burned. They tried to burn off their privates. Then these young guys got big boulders, basketball-sized, to make sure they were dead."
Three white Farmington High School students were arrested for the murders.
"We wanted to come in and burn the place," Yazzie, then a member of the American Indian Movement (AIM), recalls. "The desire for payback was very strong. People were needing and demanding that something be done."
Something needed to be done, yes, but Yazzie is a person that learned not to indiscriminately attack people that he perceived as his enemies through hasty generalization (i.e. whites), a problem that has existed in modern race relations from the Nat Turner rebellion to the beating of Reginald Denny. The nature of mob outrage is that it's a spontaneous uprising that cannot be predetermined and coordinated (as with the 2000 Ramallah lynching of two IDF reservists), but apart from its immorality in many circumstances, some of these coordinated attacks seem like thrashing and flailing at a well-fortified defense without strategy, when a quick and precise blow at a keystone can bring down the entire enemy structure.
For example, the neo-Nazi Tom Metzger was found to be civilly liable for the hate crime beating death of an Ethiopian immigrant by white supremacists after an incident of racially motivated road rage, and was made to pay substantial damages. Popular opinion was behind the idea that this was not a sufficient punishment, however. In the theoretical sense, a vigilante action against Metzger that involved assaulting and injuring him (but not so severely as to permanently disable him), likely would have drawn widespread public support at the time, though it would do little now. In the sense of describing a theoretical scenario, violence organized along those lines might be productive.
New Brunswick, NJ: Anti fascists and pro-choice individuals have been striking back against anti-abortion fundamentalists in their community. Anti-choicers picketing a local clinic during the "40 days for life" were struck by fruit and obscenities by passerby, and a long-standing fake clinic run by anti-choicers had its locks glued and a security camera damaged.
Chicago, IL: Chi-town antifa lured the leader of the city's most active neo-nazi group and one of his crew 3 hours from home after posing as a potential recruit looking to buy a t-shirt. The two Nazis were greeted by a handful of antifa, who treated them to a proper greeting before making a quick escape, leaving the Nazis, who were arrested afterwards, reeling.
[...]
Chicago, IL: Chicago gets a second mention this issue for turning out some hard nose antifa to an outing of local National Socialist Movement (NSM) member Suzy Lenner at her workplace, ironically a head shop called Secrets. A man claiming to be her boss jumped out of a taxi and accosted the antifa, but was met with a barrage of eggs against him and his store. Against, the antifascist ninjas melted into the street and evaded authorities.
Along with this problem has existed indiscriminate attacks that are often the result of mob outrage against racist actions: http://www.splcenter.org/get-informed/intelligence-report/browse-all-issues/2006/winter/indian-blood
Chili Yazzie, president of the Shiprock Chapter of the Navajo Nation (the equivalent of the mayor of the closest reservation town to Farmington), was himself victimized back in 1978, when a white hitchhiker blew Yazzie's right arm off with two blasts from a .44 Magnum. The first bullet shattered the bones in his arm and continued into his rib cage. "The whole world was the color of a really bad sandstorm," Yazzie recalls. "Out of his poncho I saw a hole and some smoke coming out. I realized that he had a pistol pointed at me all this time from under his poncho." "I asked him, 'What are you doing, you crazy son of a bastard?' Then he shot me again." Yazzie spent a month in the hospital. The shooter served less than five years.
Back then, Yazzie was a member of the radical American Indian Movement as well as the famous rock-and-roll protest band X-IT, which provided the soundtrack for the Red Power movement. Now 56, his black hair is woven with wisps of grey. His tactics have mellowed and his rhetoric has softened, but he remains a dedicated advocate for his people.
In 1974, four years before he was shot, Yazzie took part in a series of dramatic marches organized by Farmington Navajos in response to a brutal triple-murder. Last September, 32 years later, Yazzie found himself leading a similar march of 1,500 Navajos protesting racism and violence after the attack on William Blackie, which occurred just two weeks after an assault on a Navajo undercover police officer by a white man with a knife. Yazzie says tempers ran hot among Navajos.
"There were guys that wanted to come in here and take an eye for an eye. There are people capable of doing that," he says somberly. Yazzie likes to call himself a "reasonable radical," and his cool head calmed an explosive situation.
[...]
The most notorious hate crime in Farmington history occurred in April 1974, during Webb's first term as mayor. Three Navajos, Benjamin Benally, John Harvey, and David Ignacio were found bludgeoned, mutilated and burned in Chokecherry Canyon. "They were tortured. Firecrackers were placed in their noses and anuses," says Yazzie, the Navajo leader. "As they were dying, they were burned. They tried to burn off their privates. Then these young guys got big boulders, basketball-sized, to make sure they were dead."
Three white Farmington High School students were arrested for the murders.
"We wanted to come in and burn the place," Yazzie, then a member of the American Indian Movement (AIM), recalls. "The desire for payback was very strong. People were needing and demanding that something be done."
Something needed to be done, yes, but Yazzie is a person that learned not to indiscriminately attack people that he perceived as his enemies through hasty generalization (i.e. whites), a problem that has existed in modern race relations from the Nat Turner rebellion to the beating of Reginald Denny. The nature of mob outrage is that it's a spontaneous uprising that cannot be predetermined and coordinated (as with the 2000 Ramallah lynching of two IDF reservists), but apart from its immorality in many circumstances, some of these coordinated attacks seem like thrashing and flailing at a well-fortified defense without strategy, when a quick and precise blow at a keystone can bring down the entire enemy structure.
For example, the neo-Nazi Tom Metzger was found to be civilly liable for the hate crime beating death of an Ethiopian immigrant by white supremacists after an incident of racially motivated road rage, and was made to pay substantial damages. Popular opinion was behind the idea that this was not a sufficient punishment, however. In the theoretical sense, a vigilante action against Metzger that involved assaulting and injuring him (but not so severely as to permanently disable him), likely would have drawn widespread public support at the time, though it would do little now. In the sense of describing a theoretical scenario, violence organized along those lines might be productive.