Basically, I’m just asking questions. I’m not really trying to “push” anything on you, I’d just like to get your thoughts. Sorry if I seem “pushy.”

I’m out of touch with all this stuff that you write about.

Just know that I stand with you,I’ve felt proud of you for some years now.

I know you are not any kind of terrorist, you stand for the good of this planet. I know you would not do harm to any creature on this planet human or animal.

Black Sheep rule! LOL

re: your question about punk kids who like to smash things showing up and calling themselves anarchists, yeah, it’s a problem. It’s a feedback loop, really. the media drones on about anarchists bent on chaos and destruction, so anti-social kids with anger issues who actually do want to break shit and aren’t at all interested in actual anarchism start calling themselves anarchists, which in turn feeds the media buzz. and it’s a big problem when your trying to do actual organizing as an anarchist and throw events, only to have a bunch of dumb kids show up, trash the venue, draw graffiti all over the place, and piss off the people who made their space available. Thankfully that doesn’t happen very often , but I have had venues refuse to let me throw events because it’s happened to them in the past. i think the solution is to reach out to those kids and educate them as to what anarchism really is. some of them will decide they’re not interested and piss off, but some of them will dedicate themselves to the cause become solid revolutionaries for life. hell, i started out as an angry kid myself. just look at my first album cover. anger is completely normal. If the state of the world doesn’t piss you off you’re not paying enough attention, but if we want to get anywhere we’ve got to move beyond anger and start building for the future. as for whether any of that applies to the kids in your picture, i don’t know. Maybe, maybe not. I’d have to talk to them and get to know them as people instead of just looking at a random photo to make that kind of judgment.

covering your face at protests is a good idea if you don’t want the cops to be able to ID you from photos, regardless of your political ideology.

sure cops are victims too. everybody is a victim. so what? they’re still responsible for their actions. Personally, I don’t buy the typical lefty “it’s all society’s fault! i’m not responsible!” crap. If we excuse people from responsibility for their own actions we might as well pack it in and all go home because nothing is going to change. Revolutions happen when people take responsibility for themselves and their communities and take action to make things better.

re: are things better now – yes and no. mostly no. but that’s a topic for another post, i don’t want to do an in depth comparative analysis of the anarchist movement at the turn of the last century compared to now in a comment.

Son – the standard definition is that violence to intimidate and coerce people for political gain = terrorism. that’s not the definition that’s actually used in political discourse, however; if it was then every government on the planet would have to be classified as a terrorist organization since every single one of them uses violence for political gain. which was part of the point i was trying to make in paragraph 5. In any case, the ELF has never killed anyone, and their targets tend to be government and corporate institutions. They’re not firebombing people’s houses. Which is why i think it’s so ridiculous to overtly conflate them with Al Queda and other organization that commit mass murder on a regular basis.

In any case, the point of the post wasn’t to defend their tactics – you’ll notice I explicitly said I don’t think they’re tactics are very effective – it was to say that all the government propaganda about what a big ‘terrorist threat’ they represent is ridiculously overblown. Eric McDavid was sentenced to 20 years in jail for hanging out with his friends, smoking pot, talking shit, and completely failing to ever actually build a bomb. That’s just stupid. It’s even more outrageous that members of The Family who are accused of keeping watch while someone else set a fire that harmed no one are facing multiple life sentences, meanwhile no one but no one is willing to even consider filing formal charges against our Butcher in Chief for starting an illegal war that’s killed over 4,000 americans and uncounted iraqi’s.

I don’t have to agree with the ELF’s tactics to know that that’s fucked up.

Anywho, onto my thoughts on this entry.

You post at a lot of places, right? Probably places that are more explicitly anarchist than a stand-alone blog, right? I’ll just assume “Yes” and continue.

It’s nice to see things from the inside, but if it’s true what you say about the Feds, then it’s very plausible that they are reading this blog and are thinking of ways to disrupt these movements. You mentioned as much near the beginning, talking to whichever agents may be reading.

With all that in mind, was it smart to make this public? If you can’t choose whether or not an entry is public or private, then maybe you just shouldn’t post it here. Actually, come to think of it, there’s no such thing as “friends” on this blog, are there? Then I guess all entries are automatically public.

I guess a decent counterargument would be that, even if this stuff were private, the FBI (or whoever else) would find some way to read it anyway if they really thought it was important.

Do you view cops as victims of government too? I think Zinn hinted at this in “A People’s History of the United States,” but I can’t remember. It’s been too long, I suppose.

I guess that you mostly focus on the anarchist movement on the west coast, but what do you think about the anarchist movement in general (meaning the United States)? I’ll make that question a little more specific.

OK, I found a picture that precedes my next question very nicely: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/58/S24_Black_Bloc_1.jpg

These are “anarchists” from the anti-war protest on 9/24/2007 in Washington, D.C. (I’ll actually be going there in a week or so, should be very interesting.) Anyway, when I saw this picture while reading through a bunch of anti-Iraq War stuff, I immediately thought of the “anarchists” (read: middle-class goths) from my high school that I used to hang out with. It seems that these types have labeled themselves “anarchists” because their parents don’t like it, and it’s naturally going to cause problems in the household. Is this an actual problem (kids showing up that don’t know anything), or am I just not “in the know”? That big banner seems to read “RECLAIM DEMOCRACY,” so maybe they actually know what they are talking about. Apparently anarchists tend to cover up their faces to avoid being spotted, so perhaps I am wrong after all.

Do you think that things are “better” for anarchists nowadays? I mean, back in the Haymarket days, the cops could just round up some “bomb-throwing anarchists” and nobody would bother questioning it. But nowadays you’ve got Chomsky, Zinn (who apparently live pretty close to each other), and whole slew of other “Ivory Tower” anarchists who can’t be blacklisted as easily as the average anarchist, and these middle to upper-class anarchists tend to very local in defending the lower-class dudes who usually get in trouble. Organizations like the NAACP have a legal defense fund that people can donate to so they have good legal representation instead of just crappy “public defenders” who don’t know your name. Is there some kind of “legal defense fund” for anarchists?

Obviously I would never mean “better” in the sense that their goals are more reachable than they have been in past, however.

But just from a quick scan of your title and section about ELF members not being terrorists, I just thought Id throw in my 2 cents. I am not agreeing or disagreeing. Before you judge me know that I am a pagan, ex catholic. I have seen the beauty of the earth and majestic spirit of it. I respect and love nature, and I personally feel that humanity is simply cancer on this beautiful planet. Due to the fact of civilization, monotheism, and capitalism we are destroying the planet. If we had stayed in a hunter gatherer lifestyle of old, I feel we would be much better off in our relationship with nature.

But from my understanding and from what I have read in dictionaries, a terrorist is anyone who imposes harm/fear on others. Someone who uses terror as a form of coercion. Terror being violent or destructive acts (as bombing) committed by groups in order to intimidate a population or government into granting their demands.

Although it may not be seen as terror in their eyes, but to the peoples whose homes/families that they may impact, it is terror. If they burned down my home it would be terror, even though I love the earth and wish humanity would right its wrongs it is still nonetheless destruction to my property. By definition what they are doing is terrorism, as a personal opinion it may not be. I’m all for society to stop destroying the planet, but do so in another manner, burn your own homes, not others. Peacefully protest, educate people, and do not resort to violence. You gather much more support if you can peacefully make a change, rather than gathering more opposition, because people who may have supported you, do not agree with your means of operation.