So, the anarchists are running a few city blocks in Seattle, renaming it the Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone, or #CHAZ. #SeattleAutonomousZone #seattleprotestcomms 1/14
It got me to thinking of the city of my birth where, a little more than a mile away across Lake Union sits a statue of Vladimir Lenin, the Soviet Union’s first dictator and mass murderer. 2/14
In fact, Lenin and anarchists had an “interesting” relationship. 3/14
During the Russian civil war that broke out at the end of World War I, the various regions of the Russian Empire rebelled. Ukraine was one of the first and most important republics to declare independence. 4/14
But in Ukraine a group of anarchists arose under the leadership of Nestor Makhno. They called themselves the Revolutionary Insurrectionary Army of Ukraine. Or, simply, the Black Army. 5/14
Nestor Makhno’s Black Army of anarchists had a terrifying pirate-like flag. 6/14
The Black Army also invented a new weapon that in some ways foreshadowed how tanks would be used in WWII, the Tachanka. 7/14
But none of that really matters for our purposes today. What matters is that Makhno’s Black Army tied down the anti-communist White Army just as it was marching on Moscow in September 1919. 8/14
After the Black Army did its damage to the anti-communist White Army, the communist Red Army moved back into the Ukraine. 9/14
Under a ruse to coordinate with the Black Army against the White Army, the Red Army invited anarchist leaders to a joint planning conference in Nov. 1920. 10/14
As the anarchist Black Army officers showed up, the Reds arrested them on the spot and immediately executed them. (Harsh, I know, but that's how the communists roll.) 11/14
Nine months later, a wounded Makhno (also suffering from tuberculous) slipped across the Dniester river to Romania with his last 77 men. 12/14
Makhno died in Paris in 1934, having worked as a stage-hand at the Paris Opera among other jobs. Somehow, the “Anarchist of the Opera” was never made into a Broadway play. 13/14
The moral of the story? Those #SeattleProtest anarchists need to be suspicious of the local Marxist-Leninists – DON’T SHOW UP TO ANY JOINT PLANNING MEETINGS WITH THE COMMUNISTS! 14/14
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