PeterGelderloos Profile picture
Writing and fighting for a world without prisons, borders, clearcuts, or strip mines, a world of care, imagination, and mutual aid. he/they

Aug 29, 2020, 10 tweets

A fair model for what's happening now is the "Strategy of Tension" in Italy in the '60s and '70s. Police used the far Right to attack the struggle, killing people and exhausting the movement, media and politicians portrayed it all as a clash between equally violent and...

unreasonable "extremists," the Communists kept encouraging ppl to engage in peaceful, legal reform. The end result was to neutralize the revolutionary movement and present centrist democracy as the only legitimate form of politics. Though hundreds were killed and thousands...

...arrested, tortured, or exiled, the "Years of Lead" produced a middle class society immersed in consumerism, in which politics was little more than a soap opera. Never underestimate how many murders a democracy is willing to carry out in order to maintain its illusions.

Make sure to support the prisoners of the #GeorgeFloyd and #Kenosha revolts! #BLM related orgs that don't talk about the people facing serious time are probably just lining some politician's pockets.
A movement that doesn't support its prisoners is no movement at all. #Amnesty !

Since it seems some people drew the wrong conclusions from this, the moral is not that "fighting is bad" nor is it that "the CIA controls everything". Without the fight there is nothing. Ppl with very little were taking on those who own everything, trying to create a fairer world

Yes, plenty of the tactics of the vanguardist groups can be rejected; they can all be examined critically. But the two "extremes" had nothing in common. The ONLY ones who set off bombs in crowds were the fascists, supported by the police, supported by a democratic state.

The powerful are in power precisely because they don't care who they have to crush to get on top. Faced with this, it is LEGITIMATE to fight back, like the person in the first photo. But the majority of what people were doing in this movement were widespread acts of...

...sabotage, protest, self-defense, and theft, in order to resist exploitation at the workplace, reduce abusive rent, electricity, and transportation costs, stop politicians from selling them out, and defend themselves from police violence. Fighting back didn't kill the movement

...and they didn't walk into some magical CIA trap by fighting back. What killed the movement was exhaustion from 100s of murders, torture and arrests, and isolation as all the stupid ones bought into the media narrative of all "extremists" being equally bad.

Remember: the extremists from the Right were the only ones to murder hundreds of people, and they were working for the Center, the ones who supposedly have a monopoly on legitimacy, reason, and the future.

Share this Scrolly Tale with your friends.

A Scrolly Tale is a new way to read Twitter threads with a more visually immersive experience.
Discover more beautiful Scrolly Tales like this.

Keep scrolling