Familiar?

 

        As the lock-down continues, frustration will mount and tensions will grow. It is a tinder box and it will only take one incident of heavy handed police activity to light the fuse. There has been sporadic outbursts of anger here and there, the latest in Belgium. Though different circumstances, it does ring familiar with the riots that erupted in Greece, December, 2008, after the police shooting of 15 year old Alexandros Griroropoulos. 

 This from 325:

Belgium:
   Riot in Anderlecht area of Brussels after 19 year old killed by cops

      Enraged youth from the Anderlecht area of the capital city Brussels, Belgium rioted yesterday, attacking cop vehicles and hurled missiles at the cops, injuring one and beating up another. The riot was triggered when a cop patrol pursued a 19 year old on a scooter because he refused to stop for a curfew check. He hit an oncoming cop vehicle head on and died on the spot. Hundreds of angry youth from the local area instantly took to the street after a callout on social media attacking the cops who had arrived to reinforce those involved in the killing. Several cop vehicles were set on fire, one youth liberated a gun from a vehicle, shooting it in the air as he ran off.
       The local youth has been named as Adil and already the media is doing the state’s dirty work by sending out its appeal for calm, using his family as a weapon to suppress the anger of a local youth’s murder and against the curfew. The cops have further reinforced the area today (Sunday), even with water cannon because they fear that the area will breakout in further rioting. Belgium has been in a four-week curfew in an attempt to stem the spread of the coronavirus epidemic.
       This is a clear sign of the riots and insurrection to come that has now arrived in fortress Europe, after other outbreaks of rebellion in other parts of the world, we are even aware of scum media clearly attempting along with the authorities to suppress any outbreaks of rebellion against the coronavirus curfews*. It is only a moment of time before the global backlash erupts.
     First Wuhan, Now Brussels, Insurrection Everywhere!

    *Riots have erupted in Bristol, China & Palestine, even telephone towers burnt around prison island UK, along with reported raids on supermarkets in the South of Italy in response to ‘lockdown measures’ (curfew!)

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Greece, December 2008.

       Let's Disappear, is a summary/critique of the events in Greece around December 2008, by the Invisible Committee, and is certainly worth a read. I was in Athens on that December 2008, and was filled with a strange array of mixed emotions, there was apprehension and exhilaration, I was awestruck by the shear volume of anger and camaraderie, of united people on the streets, a feeling that I have never forgotten to this day. I sometimes wonder if I will ever find myself in a similar situation that will re-kindle those powerful emotions, that feeling that something wonderful and new was about to happen. Of course it hasn't--- well not yet.

Let's Disappear:

    Anyone who lived through the days of December, 2008 in Athens knows what the word “insurrection” signifies in a Western metropolis. The banks were in pieces, the police stations under siege, the city in the hands of the assailants. In the luxury shops, they were no longer repairing the windows, which would need to be done every morning. Nothing that embodied the police reign of normality was untouched by this wave of fire and stones whose bearers were everywhere and representatives nowhere—even the Syntagma Christmas tree was torched. At a certain point the forces of order withdrew, after running out of tear-gas grenades. Impossible to say who took over the streets then. They say it was the “600 euros generation,” the “high schoolers,” the “anarchists,” the “riffraff” from the Albanian immigration, they’ll say anything.As usual, the press blamed the “koukoulofori,” the “hooded ones.” The truth is that the anarchists were overrun by this faceless outpouring of rage. Their monopoly on wild, masked action, inspired tags, and even Molotov cocktails had been taken from them unceremoniously. The general uprising they no longer dared to imagine was there, but it didn’t resemble the idea of it they had in their minds. An unknown entity, an egregore, had been born, a spirit that wouldn’t be appeased till everything was reduced to cinders that deserved to be. Time was on fire. The present was fractured as payment for all the future that had been stolen from us.
    The years that followed in Greece taught us the meaning of the word “counter-insurgency” in a Western country. Once the wave had passed, the hundreds of groups that had formed in the country, down to the smallest villages, tried to stay faithful to the breach which the month of December had opened.
     At one spot, people might empty the cash registers of a super-market, then film themselves burning the loot. At another, an embassy might be attacked in broad daylight in solidarity with some friend hounded by the police in his or her country. Some resolved, as in Italy of the 1970’s, to carry the attack to a higher level and target, using bombs or firearms, the Athens stock exchange, cops, ministries or perhaps the Microsoft headquarters. As in the 1970’s, the left passed new “antiterrorist” laws. The raids, arrests, and trials multiplied. For a time, one was reduced to militating against “repression.” The European Union, the World Bank, the IMF, in agreement with the Socialist government, undertook to make Greece pay for the unpardonable revolt. One should never underestimate the resentment of the wealthy towards the insolence of the poor. They decided to bring the whole country to heel through a string of “economic measures” more or less as violent, although spread over time, as the revolt.

Read the full article HERE

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