Watched the police charges tonight live. Portland protesters need to wise up and stop scattering which leads to easy dogpile arrests by the cops and no group to threaten dearrests. Then the scattered protests just go along with the forced-march tactics being employed. It's embarrassing watching it work over and over again. No group solidarity whatsoever, in the UK with the cops employing fucking horse charges it doesn't scatter the crowd as much as 10-20 american cops running at disparate disorganised americans.
It shouldn't be this easy for them anymore. They've been at this for weeks now. Portland need to wall up, wise up and trust being a group more. They will charge and hit the group but get no arrests if you STAY GROUPED. The threat of a large group prevents arrest attempts and these group dogpile beatdowns from happening.
Honestly really painful to watch. I have no idea why protesters here in the UK that have literally never protested before don't scatter like flies as much as they do.
Not if you're in a group of a hundred people they won't. Get slapped with a stick maybe but it's way too dangerous to yank out individuals from an angry group due to the threat the crowd poses. Yeah of course they're going to kill you when they can dogpile 5 cops on top of one fool on their own because a massive crowd of people just scattered to the wind when like 10-15 cops charged for literally the first time of the night... Every night.
i dont think people from other countries get how dehumanizing cops here are towards other people. its true youre safer in groups but people know if they resist or fight back even slightly theyll get the shit beat out of them and if they really fight back and resist theyre putting themselves in a situation they may very well not come out of alive. like police doesnt give a shit here and theyre well armed and equipped and these people just havent ever really had any sort of direct confrontation experience with police so its hard to train groups of random people in any meaningful way on the spot. these organizers should definitely teach these tactics tho
Have you ever been hit by a horse? Those fuckers weigh a tonne, kick and bite. Our cops come in swinging batons, headwounds from baton attacks is not uncommon.
https://youtu.be/hLWm60hEgRU
Horse charge. Oh, people haven't actually scattered? Horse charge fails miserably to achieve its intended purpose and one cop is paralysed from the event.
Police charges in Paris:
https://youtu.be/4cgnEQ3Nf8Y?t=48
Foiled by not scattering. Having barricades. Actually fighting back. Don't tell me the French cops are soft, they're absolutely not, they beat people to death whenever they get the chance.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7isLhaNYgkU
This charge/scatter attempt half-works but because protesters are actually fighting back and mounting a real defence the police are unable to continue pressing without reforming their line and protesters didn't realllly scatter, they just retreated in on single direction.
One thought I'm having is that I can't actually tell who the hell is there to seriously protest and who just wants to have some fun shouting at police and recording video, this results in the protesters who are actually there on the scene not really knowing who is going to stay grouped -- the result of not knowing if you have group solidarity or not is that everyone scatters in self preservation. There's a whole lot of gawkers.
Either way from what I've seen spectating often is that Seattle and Washington seem way better at their shit than the Portland crowd. Portland is out there every single night but when Seattle and Washington are out there they're out there for reals. I'm just dead surprised Portland don't seem to be getting better in any way or paying attention to how they're getting wrecked by the same tactic night after night with zero adaptation. Put up a small barricade they have to run around/split during a charge and they'll think twice about charging or something. Be more prepared, it's the same scatter over and over.
This! Us police doesn't use any new tactics. There is a reason for black block tactics.
Portland has struggled to keep numbers up. The city is much smaller than DC, Seattle, NYC, or just about any other metro area. Small numbers plus nightly dozens of arrests means fewer veteran protestors to hold the line.
I'll remember this for the future and pass it on to my comrades on the ground, thanks comrade o7
I've watched it happen again and again and it's so painful. You see these people with 3 cops on top of them and if there was a group there:
- Wouldn't be 3 cops on top of them because they're be too scared of the group going for a dearrest.
- If there were 3 cops on top of them, there would be a dearrest by the group.
Getting scattered is what is handing initiative to these cops every night and then they take groups of them on these forced marches that I can only assume is intended to scatter them in multiple different directions over wide distances. Once spread across wide distances by these scatter tactics there's very little opportunity for them to regroup and the crowd disperses within the next hour or so.
I don't know if it has something to do with the environment or something (wider streets? Idk) because we simply don't have those absolutely massive width roads but crowds just don't scatter here like that which is why our cops force us into containment via kettling instead.
American leftits need to get their shit together organization wise
I'm not even sure it's this. I just don't understand what is causing the scattering over anything else. They get so easily dispersed it's like none of them are actually there to be a group, it's like a bunch of individuals instead of a group.
I'm just trying to figure out what it is that causes them to be this way after many nights of experience that should have resulted in people sitting down and asking themselves how to adapt each day.
source
https://twitter.com/dougbrown8/status/1302139657816141824
video
https://twitter.com/_WhatRiot/status/1302139057518960640
lots of arrests being made
https://twitter.com/1misanthrophile/status/1302146863512997894
https://twitter.com/MrOlmos/status/1302142304623321088
This is what the state wants. They will disappear revolutionaries to support the status quo
Bootlickers on every twitter thread jacking off to the brutality, cheering on the violence, mocking the protesters. Like... they aren't even fighting back or resisting. If they were the cops would get wrecked just by the sheer numbers. There aren't enough cops in the country to control the situation if people decided to actually resist instead of sucking it up and hoping that by exposing the injustice, someone will do something: the "nonviolence" strategy. Though I don't see anyone willing to do much of anything. Starting to think the whole "nonviolence" thing is just a load of bullshit, and Mao was right about political power.
At what point do we assess whether or not the protests have failed, and find some new tactic? Six months? A year? After everyone has racked up so many bullshit charges they'll never get out of jail? So many sentences they have to build makeshift mass prison camps? I couldn't speculate on what those tactics might be in polite company, but if you are going to get brutalized and charged with felonies, quite possibly disappeared or murdered in the following weeks or months, you might as well go for the gold, baby!
Starting to think the whole “nonviolence” thing is just a load of bullshit
how could it not be?
I think in the Civil Rights era, where you have a small minority of the population trying to appeal to the morality of the majority, it was a reasonable tactic. Had they tried to resist they would've been slaughtered. But even then, the nonviolence movement was only possible due to peripheral armed organizing.
But the situation today is that the police are the minority, and the protesters would be the superior force if they organized even a little bit. I don't honestly believe very many of the pigs are ready to die for their cause. But they can act with impunity because virtually no one actually resists.
Yeah the non-violence professed by people like MLK was only effective because there was an underlying understanding that shutting them down would only push people into more militant organizations.
Not only that, but there were plenty of armed people on the sidelines, ready to jump in if anyone messed with the nonviolent demonstrators. You read the stories, and it's like, the nonviolence group of students would come into today, and the local hosts would take turns sitting in the window all night with a loaded rifle, in case any klan or the like wanted to come by and cause trouble. I read This Nonviolent Stuff'll Get You Killed: How Guns Made the Civil Rights Movement Possible and recommend it highly, great book if you are interested.
if people decided to actually resist instead of sucking it up and hoping that by exposing the injustice, someone will do something: the “nonviolence” strategy.
Apparently no one has tried any actual strategy like MLK or Gandhi. You can't complain about a strategy being bad when you're all just passive libs who do anarkiddies "praxis" that doesn't have any actual political project to change anything specific.
At what point do we assess whether or not the protests have failed, and find some new tactic?
- Have you read Marx?
- Have you actually read Marx?
- Be honest!
It seems that the protests haven't even gotten past the zeroth level, sad!
