Anarchists broke windows and generally trashed parts of San Francisco’s Mission District Friday night in a protest against the G8 summit, seriously injuring a police officer in the process (San Francisco Chronicle story here).

The organizer’s web site had called for

… solidarity with those descending upon the streets of Scotland to face the G8 head on. We act in solidarity with revolutionaries taking to the streets to defend working peoples’ lives all around the world: the struggle against neoliberal privatization in Bolivia; against transit fare increases in Brazil, Chicago, and San Francisco; against the Minutemen along the border; and against the PG&E power plant in Hunter’s Point.

Wow! It’s a protest against the G8 and transit fare increases! It’s seven protests in one!

And lest anyone not get what was supposed to happen, that page had a picture of a crowd watching … metal things … being burned in a street.

But things went a little awry … or perhaps it’s more accurate to say things went as could be expected when you gather a bunch of anarchists at 8pm on a Friday night. According to a post at SF’s lefty IndyBay.org site,

Although many saw last night as some kind of victory, others see it as another mentioned earlier, a setback. People need to step back and truly think about what was done, mission is a working class neighborhood…and change should come by helping people out not trashing their neighborhoods.(oops! – ed.)

… Look I see a buncha of people coming to protests, simply for the rebelious feeling, chanting “build a community” and they’re not working towards it other than building punk communities and getting wasted at shows (i’m not generalizing, i’m just clearly stating a fact of reality that many of you are well damn aware of but don’t want to admit, i even encountered a young guy saying, that everyone was invited to his house to get drunk that night in the middle of the protest …).

Moreover, I encountered some folks last night that did not know anything about the G8 (If you were a hot looking anarchette, you bet they would have taken a guess — isn’t a G8 that vegetable drink? – ed.), and heard a lot of redundant, generic chants, that the community didnt comprehend. Remember this was a G8 solidarity march, what happend to the anti-capitalism, anti-globalization, anti-free trade chants? okay everyone got the idea you want to smash the state, and you have the conscious ability to spot the corporate elites exploiting the masses, and from that conclude a class war..but i did not see any speeches prior to the march in regards to the G8, i barely heard 1 or 2 G8 chants, and again encountered numerous people who did not know what the G8 was.(Thirty-five years ago they would have chanted a few antiwar slogans, looked for the hottie from Chemistry class, then gotten stoned – ed.)

The writer goes on to wonder why the Maoists and Stalinists are better at organizing than the anarchists. Perhaps it because they believe in ruthless central control of all power, and you believe in no central control at all? Just a guess.

This has to be an early entry into our “Friendly Fire” competition, awarded to those people or groups doing the most damage to their own cause. Has trashing a neighborhood been a successful membership drive tactic in the past? Perhaps they’ll realize the mistake inherent in that approach … but then, that would take analysis and then management initiative … better subcontract that out to the Stalinists.

The organizer’s web site did note that free housing would be available. From the posts at the IndyBay site, it sounds like some of it was provided by the San Francisco Police Department.

(hat tip: Michelle Malkin)

(Michelle Malkin visitors: you may enjoy some of our other work here.)

Technorati Tags: anarchists, California, San Francisco

This entry was posted on Saturday, July 9th, 2005 at 11:00 pm by A Senior Administration Official and is filed under California Schemin', Funny ... to us. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.