oingoz writes: "The institution of domestic police is a distraction meant to keep us further stuck than we already are, in my view.
Below are two proposals for dealing with the situation I will discuss, the second one quite long (originally published in "Anarchy, A Journal of Desire Armed" #43 in the letters section.
This rant/article is anti-copyright. Feel free to pass it around and publish it freely.
Cops are fooled pawns in a larger meta-game of virtual chess played by policymakers who aren't in their positions for no reason. Like almost everyone else, cops are often originally "sold" on the idea of "doing a service" to society. Basically, they are similar to military soldiers, in this regard: Going into the job with ideals in mind, shortly to learn, like in probably every other sector of government (or work in general for that matter), that ideals are mostly thrown out the window.
Cops are a kind of soldier. And they are often uncritical, authority-trusting *tools* used as a type of live bait for people who never get it that they should be engaging the REAL *enemy*--our collective bigoted and individual-reducing MINDSET which allows for such alienated institutions as cops in the first place.
At worst, we should seek to entirely AVOID interacting with professional domestic soldiers called cops. At best, we should be actively messing with the formal divisions which keep them and us alienated from them as individuals!
Me, I'd rather have no more to do with cops than I'm now forced. Still, I see the value of promoting interaction and community where informed interaction is the method of choice, instead of these big wastes of time in actually throwing our energy into engaging them in any formalized way (including at demos which turn ugly).
Two proposals:
A) A "food not bombs"-type freefoodforall, yet called "DOUGHNUTS FOR COPS". Give store-bought doughnuts to cops and freefoodforall to houseless/homeless, etc.
B) GOOD PEASANT, BAD PEASANT
Good Peasant, Bad Peasant: Some considerations about "traditional" anarchist tactics and some possible alternatives.
I'd like to respond to the view that seems to be quite uncritically prevalent in left and Anarchist circles these days: The idea that there can only be a limited view of what "militancy" means in order to be "successfully" "revolutionary". And, along with that, the idea of what kind of thinking and action constitutes "realistic" responses to official injustice.