ZiaNitori @ZiaNitori@masto.anarch.cc

"any state would do this if they were in the same position" is a condemnation - not a justification

One day there was a big march against fascist conspiracies.
It was to start at the university, and all the left-wing intellectuals had been invited to take part.
Magnificent police presence, but apparently the tacit understanding was to let things take their course.
Typical of those days: the demonstration had no permit, but if nothing serious happened, the police would just watch, making sure the marchers didnt transgress any of the unwritten boundaries drawn through downtown Milan (there were a lot of territorial compromises back then). The protesters operated in an area beyond Largo Augusto; the fascists were entrenched in Piazza San Babila and its neighboring streets. If anybody crossed the line, there were incidents; otherwise nothing happened. It was like a lion and a lion tamer.
We usually believe that the tamer is attacked by the lion and that the tamer stops the attack by raising his whip or firing a blank.
Wrong: the lion was fed and sedated before it entered the cage and doesnt feel like attacking anybody. Like all animals, it has its own space; if you don't invade that space, the lion remains calm. When the tamer steps forward, invading it, the lion roars; the tamer then raises his whip, but also takes a step backward (as if in expectation of a charge), whereupon the lion calms down. A simulated revolution must also have its rules. - Foucault's Pendulum, Umberto Eco

Marx's "The Civil War in France" has a lot that is still very relevant today. change some words here and there and it's identical. like we've been trapped in a loop.

"The government cries, “Incendiarism!” and whispers this cue to all its agents, down to the remotest hamlet, to hunt up its enemies everywhere as suspect of professional incendiarism. The bourgeoisie of the whole world, which looks complacently upon the wholesale massacre after the battle, is convulsed by horror at the desecration of brick and mortar!
[...]
The Commune knew that its opponents cared nothing for the lives of the Paris people, but cared much for their own Paris buildings.
[...]
If the acts of the Paris working men were vandalism, it was the vandalism of defence in despair, not the vandalism of triumph, like that which the Christians perpetrated upon the really priceless art treasures of heathen antiquity;and even that vandalism has been justified by the historian as an unavoidable and comparatively trifling concomitant to the titanic struggle between a new society arising and an old one breaking down. It was still less the vandalism of Haussman, razing historic Paris to make place for the Paris of the sightseer!"

https://marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1871/civil-war-france/ch06.htm

they would rather call you all violent terrorists for standing up to genocide while amassing organized terror forces to pry into every private part of your life, violently rip you from your home, and force you to pay them for the honor of them judging whether you deserve prison

people will really be like "you believe in the power of self-organized, coordinated social living? that pales in effectiveness to my strategy, building working class power in the democratic party" and then not build any working class power in the democratic party

you really think there was a time when a malicious actor could brighten and darken a room without the occupant noticing? gaslighting was never real. technology went straight from medieval, torch-bearing sconces to the tungsten electric lamp. you're remembering history wrong.