The Black Bloc protestors in hoodies started in Germany in the late 1970s
‘It is simply a tactic’
Where there’s a protest these days, there are black hoodies and ski masks.
Black Bloc agitators, with their sweatshirts, balaclavas, and creepy rubber masks, have been showing up at progressive protests in America for more than a decade now. They’re known for smashing windows, throwing rocks, and clashing with the police. They stole the spotlight in protests ranging from 1999’s mobilization in Seattle against the World Trade Organization to 2012’s Occupy movement in Oakland. Their interactions with police — who responded with tactics including flash-bang grenades and tear gas canisters — catapulted both cities into an unfortunate international spotlight.
Black Blocs started in West Berlin during the social unrest of the late 1970s and early 1980s. A recession had hit the country hard, young people had trouble finding work, and the city teemed with abandoned buildings. People squatted in those abandoned buildings, formed anarchist collectives, and took to the streets to protest the many social ills of the decade, from high unemployment to nuclear proliferation. The anarchist squatters in the first black bloc wore lettermen jackets and black motorcycle helmets to face off with the police without being picked off — or later identified — for arrest.
The term Black Bloc is often associated with anarchists, but it actually does not refer to a political affiliation. It’s a strategy where a group of people wearing black hoodies cover their faces and march together to form a faceless, anonymous block within a protest. Or, as a video from submedia.tv put it when Sean Hannity of Fox News garbled the distinction, “there are no black bloc anarchists, you thick no-shit rocket. It is simply a tactic.”
The tactic took off in a big way in countries across Europe in the 1980s, showing up in protests from Italy to Holland. More than 2,000 masked protesters greeted Ronald Reagan at his famous “tear down this wall” speech in Berlin in 1987. Black Blocs were somewhat slower to arrive in the United States, not making a real impression here until the so called “Battle of Seattle” WTO protests in 1999. About 40,000 showed up all together, including about 100 people who donned masks, pulled up their hoods and broke windows, drawing attention away from the people who came from all over the country to demonstrate peacefully or commit acts of civil disobedience. “A massive nonviolent blockade was overshadowed by attacks on stores like Niketown, Starbucks and the Gap,” Salon summed up at the time.
Often the most controversial — and visible — protestors at any given gathering, the Black Bloc takes “advantage of the legitimate protesters to destroy things and emphasize their anarchist roots,” David Gomez, a former senior FBI counterterrorism official in Seattle, told The Washington Post.
Black bloc tactics are usually a downer for protest organizers as well. “Actions such as these can potentially create a space for the police to justify a crackdown on all protesters,” lamented one article on Occupy’s website, disturbed that Black Bloc tactics had shifted attention away from Eric Garner and Michael Brown, the African American men whose deaths at the hands of police had prompted the protest.
Undeniably, Black Blocs are thuggish. But they are not mindless, according to Francis Dupuis-Déri, professor of political science at Université du Québec à Montréal. “Smashing a window is nothing in terms of violence,” Dupuis-Déri explains, “if we look at the history of the 20th century, for instance, the violence of the state itself.”
Nevertheless, Black Blocs have turned off many demonstrators since 1999, particularly in the Occupy movement. Journalist and leftist Chris Hedges actually called Black Blocs a cancer on the Occupy movement.
That’s not a mistake on their part; it’s the point. Black Blocs only form a group during a protest and then they disperse, but they do largely share a point of view, one where the only remedy for the world’s problems is to completely disrupt the world order. Dissenters who participate in Black Blocs are critical of the very idea of a nation state and believe that humanity has to form smaller, autonomous, and cooperative communities to thrive.
Mostly, they don’t like liberal protesters, who are asking, in their view, for modifications to a terrible system instead of trying to destroy it. They must be understood, according to the Black Bloc Papers, “as persons who either do not understand the subjective dynamic of revolt, or ones who are so weighed down in indecision and tacit acceptance of the status quo that they must be considered ignorant at best, or the enemy at worst.”
