But perhaps sometimes the friction produces not just conflict but hybrids.
Beginning in the 1960s and the ’70s, with the Weather Underground terrorists, and continuing in the 1990s, with “black bloc” vandals traveling around the world to smash office and hotel windows at global financial meetings, there has been a violent subculture on the radical left in the United States and Europe. For the most part, the members of groups like Antifa, the latest incarnation of the violent left, have always been the pampered children of the white overclass. Twenty-somethings who are poor and working class lack the money to buy fancy black ninja outfits and the leisure to spend time plotting in advance of demonstrations....The article is generally down on these spoiled children playing ninja, but sympathetic to the working class that's being supplanted. For those who remain on the fringes of the gentrifying areas, police are used intensively to protect the Cat Cafes owned by children of the overclass. This produces occasional brutality, which produces protests, which the children of the overclass feel very proud about joining and supporting. But they're the ones who are stealing, in the analysis of the poorer members being run out of those neighborhoods. The overclass children are stealing not just the neighborhood itself, but also the right to speak about these issues -- framing them instead in ways that are about the overclass' children's own issues.
What is new about the nationwide riots of the last week that have followed the death of George Floyd is the convergence of these two previously separate streams—traditional urban riots in poor neighborhoods triggered by police-related incidents, and the ideologically motivated vandalism by young white members of the overclass in downtown districts. This convergence is the result of hub city gentrification....
Gentrification explains why there are so many white young adults, both ordinary protesters and anarchist vandals, compared to African Americans in the videos we see of protests and riots in big cities across the United States, compared to images of urban riots in generations past. Thanks to rising rents, young white leftists and liberals have been displacing the nonwhite working class and poor, many of them social conservatives, in places like Brooklyn and Oakland and Austin.
The black poor and working class first had their urban industrial jobs taken away from them by corporate executives in the white overclass who offshored them to Mexico or China. Then they were replaced in their former urban neighborhoods by the hipster children of the white overclass. Now even their grievances like protests against horrific police brutality are stolen from them by their supposed allies in the white overclass and turned into an occasion for virtue-signaling or vandalism by the elite.They're sure too that they're the ones on the right side, the very side of justice.
4 comments:
"The black poor and working class first had their urban industrial jobs taken away from them by corporate executives in the white overclass who offshored them to Mexico or China."
I would argue that the industrial jobs were taken away not by American corporate executives so much as by American political leaders. Once China was admitted to the low-tariff club...and the regulations and tax policies imposed on American manufacturing continued to become more unfriendly...then many of those products were going to be made in a non-US location by *somebody*...a European company operating in China, or an indigenous Chinese company...and most American consumers would have bought those cheaper products. American companies who declined to do offshoring would--in cases where they couldn't improve productivity enough to make up for their labor and regulation cost disadvantages--would simply have been crippled or destroyed.
We shouldn't allow blame to bypass the political classes by focusing on the eevil capitalists.
Granted.
White Antifa radicals piggybacking onto black protests. That is a clear case of cultural appropriation. I suspect that many Antifa folk have criticized whites for cultural appropriation. Pot, meet kettle.
Never thought of them as ninjas.
There are ninja arts and techniques but.... I don't see them being used.
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