Rioters using Google Maps for real-time information. For some, anarchy is a full-time job.
The nature or cause of the event is a far secondary issue to the opportunity to disrupt people’s lives, destroy property, and flip the bird at authority. These folks devote their talents to devising new ways of creating quickly-constructed blockades of streets and buildings, improvising protective gear, and manufacturing weapons to use against riot police. Organizations such as the Direct Action Network, which played a major role in the 1999 “Battle in Seattle” riots, provide instrumentality for the riot-inclined. Fortunately, anarchists don’t organize well (imagine that), so the networks come and go. These professional anarchists travel the globe to lend their skills at whatever demonstration might be handy, ranging from World Trade Organization meetings to student protests like London is experiencing.
Historically, police have had the upper hand in tactical information during public order events. The protesters are preparing already. Brutalcops.net: DO NOT accept any leaflets...
London. Manchester. Nishma Doshi's photos - Feel like people standing here have so much passion asking for freedom and for #Mubarak to stand down. #demo2011 #Egypt. Share photos on Twitter. Share photos on Twitter. Student protest against cuts and fees 29/1/2011 - Images. Protests around London « Harpymarx. 'Travesty' of education changes. Liberal Democrats: Say goodbye to broken promises. Nick Clegg on student funding fairness. Austerity cabinet has 18 millionaires - Times Online. Students and unions hold protests. Escalate This is Actually Happening. Protest students: 'Police tried to turn us into informants' - Scotsman.com News. PEACEFUL student protesters have criticised heavy-handed police tactics and claim officers are trying to cultivate them as insider informants.
After further protests in London at the weekend, it emerged officers have been targeting Scottish students involved in the protests. A campaign has now been set up to help students being monitored by police, many of whom have been pinpointed after their pictures appeared in newspapers. Graeme Kirkpatrick, 30, president of the student association at Aberdeen College, told how police attempted to recruit him as an informant on fellow protesters. He was at the sit-in protest at Conservative Party headquarters in November but was not involved in any illegal behaviour. He said: "They made out they were doing standard inquiries but I felt they were trying to intimidate me into not doing anything in future. "They were quite adamant about asking about future actions and would I let them know.
"I'm just an ordinary student. No sex. No drugs. And no leaders. "No sex.
No drugs. And no leaders", the New Statesman's cover story this week, tells the intimate story of the winter student uprisings of 2010, putting human faces to the mob that has so terrified the right-wing press. It is the longest and most high-profile feature I've worked on to date, but that's not the only reason it's been so difficult to write. Over the past few months I have become, and remain, deeply embedded in the student movement in the UK and Europe. Many of the young people who feature in the piece – on whose activities I've been keeping meticulous notes, and who are of a similar age and political attitude to myself – have since become as close to personal friends as observational subjects ever can be. The trajectory of journalistic dispassion is fraught with misunderstanding and lies. This movement is deeply romantic. The glorious row that shows why student revolutionaries will never take over the world. The People's Front of Judea - ancestors of today's student revolutionaries BAD LANGUAGE WARNING – Please don't click on the following link if you want to avoid bad language.
But, if you can put up with it, the most marvellous row has developed between Laurie Penny, the journalist and student fees activist, and her fellow protester, Jacob Bard-Rosenberg – a Cambridge graduate, now doing an MA in Cultural and Critical Studies at Birkbeck, specialising in 'representations of forgetting in art and literature from Benjamin through to Kundera, and its relationship to negative dialectic'. Lessons from Saturday’s march.
AC: The anti-cuts protest in central London on Saturday 29th continued the trend we have been witnessing at the most recent student demos away from the formulaic A to B march and towards a decentralised form of civic swarming. At various points throughout the afternoon, groups of 50 to 1000 people broke off from the planned route of the march with no clear aims or direction other than to avoid kettles, stretch the police, shut down roads, carry out direct action where possible and generally have fun whist spreading our message across the city. Visibility - Some have criticised the demo for lacking clarity and direction, pointing out that smaller crowds of protesters have less visual impact and that the politics of the day was obscured by the games of cat and mouse. There may be some truth to this. Dispersed protests are seen across a wider geographical area, of course, but there’s something forceful about seeing a single big march.
Masks – Lots of people wore them.