Hella Nation - Evan Wright [42]
No one was really sure how exactly they should act on the flyer and “take back the streets.” According to Wingnut, the anarchists milled around the park for an hour or so watching the police beat up nonviolent protesters down the street. Wingnut says “a kid in black” finally broke the tedium by slashing the tires on a nearby news van. When a driver leaped from the van and grabbed the kid, several anarchists pulled him from the man’s arms. The tiny melee grew as several anarchists smashed open newspaper-vending boxes and threw papers in the air.
Wingnut says a girl of about sixteen, a peaceful protester—or in his words, a “peace Nazi”—ran up to the anarchists, shouting at them to stop throwing newspapers in the air. She attempted to shame the anarchists by picking up the newspapers and stacking them on the sidewalk, telling Wingnut, “I live in this city. It’s a beautiful city!”
Wingnut tried to explain to her that he and his fellow anarchists were merely trashing Seattle to help prevent gentrification. Wingnut believes gentrification is bad for the working classes. Therefore, littering in cities is good because it lowers rent. His debate with the “peace Nazi girl” ended abruptly when a fight broke out nearby.
According to “Carlos,” a Eugene anarchist also on the scene (whose day job is to make phone calls for a company that does polling for the Republican Party), a security guard from a nearby office building ran over to an anarchist kicking open a newspaper vending box and bashed him in the head with a walkie-talkie. Carlos says a quick-thinking anarchist spray-painted the security guard in the face. When I asked him if assaulting and possibly injuring a security guard with spray paint violated anarchist principles of focusing their efforts on property destruction, Carlos argued, “That’s not really being violent. That’s like protecting each other and being unified as a movement.”
The fracas by the newspaper boxes energized the Black Clads. They formed into a black bloc—perhaps thirty of them, a third of whom were female and several of whom were as young as sixteen—and left the park. Wingnut claims they marched right past groups of riot police. He says police didn’t stop them because they were afraid. “They [the police] beat up people who weren’t willing to defend themselves. They like weak targets.”
This far into the riots, Wingnut had observed that whenever police began to assault groups of nonviolent protesters, surrounding crowds would go haywire, running in all directions. The anarchist black bloc timed its first direct action off an assault by riot police. When police started clubbing and gassing a group of nonviolent protesters, the black bloc took off down an adjacent street. The anarchists ran through a shopping district throwing monkey wrenches, rocks and bricks through the windows of stores such as Gap, McDonald’s and Starbucks. Other corporate targets, from bank branches to oil companies to lumber companies, were on their hit list. On several of the streets that they targeted for anticorporate vandalism, Wingnut claims, “There were cops just around every corner, but none came near us.”
Wingnut says, “We had more trouble from peace Nazis.” When the anarchists attempted to destroy a Niketown shoe store, a half-dozen peaceful demonstrators broke off from a parade on the street and formed a human shield in front of the store’s imposing plate-glass windows. They prevented the anarchists from throwing rocks through the windows; however, a group of local toughs sensed a golden opportunity to stock up on their favorite Nike goods. They rushed the peaceful protesters defending the store, punched a few and looted the place. Disappointed that he and his friends hadn’t been the ones to smash the windows on Niketown, Wingnut returned later in the day and graffitied the shattered storefront with tags that read “Fuck you, Nike.”
The afternoon’s black bloc