'70's political violence and lessons for now

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Very detailed blog looks at a lot of mostly forgotten American '70's political violence discusses how left and right voilence come from totally strenghth and weaknesses and makes prediction about political violence in the upcoming year

https://status451.com/2017/01/20/days-of-rage/

I read that article earlier in the week and ordered the book, it sounds like some crazy times.

It was and it was not. A lot of it has been forgotten because unlike the 60's protests, this stuff was on the fringe. By the '70 it was mostly small scale and had become routine. There was no internet or cable news to dramatize every attack. If you were in New York you did not read or see on TV about the hundreds of bombings in Frisco. The Patty Hearst kidnapping and the SLA was a major major story because of celebrity.

In my High School we were constantly, pretty much every day having bomb scares which was some kids looking to get out of class. Nobody actually set anything off and it was not even reported in the local papers (same was true with the Swastikas that were painted on my temple most holidays).

Regular crime muggings etc were much more publicized than terrorism. The American terrorists were called "radicals", terrorists were PLO people hijacking planes.

in the news, Patty Hearst, Bader-meinhoff-RAF, Italy, Munich, hijacking of trains(holland) and airplanes, Nicaragua & sandinistas, Watergate, the ayatolla on the balcony in Paris, oilcrisis, some murderous sectes made fame, S-africa, Israel-Palestines as usual, Rhodesia(war), Congo-Zaire, Salvador Allende, Pinochet, Belfast & Ireland-IRA, Spain-ETA, surely that's not all, and not in the news but important, the Cultural Revolution still going on

-as for lessons look into that last one carefully

I read that post to the tune of "We Didn't Start The Fire". It doesn't quite an and it certainly doesn't rhyme.

I know the site of that explosion on the cover so well. I lived and went to school in that neighborhood and walked by it thousands of times. When they rebuilt the destroyed building, the built a large part of it askew, as a sort of architectural memorial to the bomb factory accident. It also seems like a good memorial to how askew people's thinking can get when they go too far down the rabbit hole of special identity construction/self-indoctrination/self-hypnosis.

Well worth reading to the end. My head is spinning slightly, though.

The Hell's Angels and other outlaw bikers tend to lean right, and don't mind violence or arrest. Putting this together with the cancelled Trump visit to Harley-Davidson in Milwaukee made me cringe at the potential disaster averted.

I read up a little on the Black Bloc, and they don't seem to have a coherent agenda beyond raging against things they dislike. Their justifications sound as convoluted as anything I read on these boards, but the clearly aren't all just dummies.

The more I mulled over their comments and behavior, the more familiar they sounded. I turned 18 in Austin in the late 80s, and found the people I liked in the punk scene. Anyone who got a beer at a party met the skinheads, since they most often hung out near the keg. These were mostly racist skinheads, although I did meet others. Most of them seemed to have lower than average intelligence and verbal skills, but some were very smart and eloquent. One guy reminds me a lot of someone here; it was my first exposure to argument by voluminous distraction.

Why, I asked myself, why would someone with those kinds of analytical skills buy into scientific racism? That was a huge trend, that only got bigger over the next decade. I never figured it out, but it seemed like they were a bunch of guys who had in common that they liked fighting and a group to hate. One was of Mexican heritage, but didn't want to discuss it.

The stuff they said uses the same logic as the Black Bloc. I'm glad the skins were not that organized. It's possible that the same people could have gotten into either scene depending on whom they met, and which ideas they absorbed first. Maybe it comes down to which ideas your parents would hate most. I met skinheads with hippie parents, and I'd wager a lot of these BB folks have shallow, materialistic parents.

The level of organization is a little surprising and troubling. The violence appears to miss the intended targets about as often, nonetheless. The worst kind of person to use violence is one who is good enough to accomplish it, but so erratic that they hurt a lot of uninvolved parties.

I'm about half way through the book, it's weirdly timely, with young people angry over the election of an unpopular president with authoritarian tendencies as well as police violence against minorities becoming radicalized and turning to violence, some of the rhetoric could have come from Twitter last week. It should be noted how spectacularly these tactics backfired, driving moderate Americans into the arms of Nixon and his war on crime and giving the police and FBI cover to use even more aggressive tactics and methods to stop the bombing and murders of police officers.

Having grown up then, I definitely have a sense of deja vu in the last few years. The experience of having grown up in a neighborhood where "America Love or Leave It" banners and bumper stickers were common is one reason why I always said Trump had a chance. "Liberals" portrayed "conservatives" as racist bumpkins then too - See Archie Bunker. I recommend seeing the 1970 movie "Joe" starring Peter Boyle. It is eerily prescient in dealing with working class conservative backlash and Boyle is fantastic in his role.

Working my way through the article and all I can say so far is HOLY SH!T, BATMAN!!

Right? The book is pretty incredible, it's truly shocking how much the people in it sound like today's angry left, albeit with much funnier clunky Marxist proclamations and more actual violence. There's even some 1970s SJW types tearing the militant groups apart from the inside for not being inclusive enough to women or being too white, it really does sound remarkably contemporary.

The Who "Won't Get Fooled Again" 1971

know your operation gladio (just a short overview)

but thinking certain factions are prone to x and others not,

Funny thing is that Iv'e never actually seen Batman, just heard that expression.