A thousand times
Should ever one require a measure as to if a situation has truly opened the floodgates, if the social fabric isn't strained but rent, if the clarity of who is supposed to comport themselves how is obscure, if we have left behind a simple face-off of easily divisible forces, if, in short, the shit and the fan can no longer be told apart from one another, then this should do nicely. If it looks like this, the answer is: yes, oh yes, indeed.
A thousand times more heartening than a thousand pictures of property aflame.
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2 comments:
Hi there. I'm an extremely random though steady reader - I think I got here for the first time by something linked from Lenin's Tomb.
When I look at this clip, I find myself wondering what happened to that women over her whole life to bring her to this point - was she a communist in her youth, does she have a history of radical work, did she teach in a working class school, are her children protesters? Has she been a radical all along? Is she a retired anarchist? I feel like sometimes we position older folks, especially older women, as blank slates, or as political innocents..."when even the old women are throwing stones at the cops!" But my experience of old people is very different - people who are not innocent, not naive, who maybe have been throwing stones at the cops for their whole lives, unknown and unlauded.
I mean, maybe this is a woman freshly disillusioned with the system who has always supported the state and the cops, who knows? But if she's a political innocent who is motivated by the troubles, she's no more an innocent than any other younger person.
Yes, that's a key point, regarding both the false ascription of "innocence" to older folks (as if they couldn't possibly be those who also wish to dismantle the world, as if even had they plenty of "radical" experience in the past they surely must have given it up) and the false assumption that "political innocents" are "innocent" and without lifetimes of experience of the contradictions of capital, even if they haven't been going about it "politically," and necessarily don't know damn well what they are doing.
For my money, though, I prefer to think that she has been out there from day one, throwing down and teaching the kids advanced tactics: it's just that normally she puts on a black hoodie and camouflages herself as a young unemployed man. Just so happened this time they caught her while on her way home from stealing groceries for the insurrection.
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