The Awakening.

         Portland USA is not on our mainstream media news very much at all. The media have a habit of reporting rioting in places our lords and masters call "enemies" but seldom report much when it is happening on the streets of our "friends". So continuous riots being brutally attack in a "friendly" nation is just not news.  
        However, Portland USA has seen it citizens on the street in violent clashes with the authorities and the police since the daylight, public execution, by a police officer, of George Floyd, and it is still going on, getting met with ever greater military style police violence. This is surely worthy of reporting.

The following report from It's Going Down:

 A report from the front lines of Portland from Defend PDX.

by Misanthrophile
      In the beginning, we were many. We were thousands. Exploding into the street after watching a video of horror both strange and all-too-familiar: a video of a nine-minute murder, of a killer indifferent to the pleas of the bound man he choked and crushed to death. Broad daylight, on film, unprosecuted. Another police murder. Another black person dead.
     As the video circulated, things began to shatter. Hearts. Trust. Restraint. Patience.
     We marched through these streets–our streets–to the sound of shattered windows. We screamed the names of the dead to the heavens as though they might be able to hear, as though we might rouse them and reverse the brutality that ended their lives. From above: silence. Some crimes are unforgivable, irreversible. But the future is not yet written: we could stop this from happening again, we must stop it by any means necessary. Voices united in a pledge, a pact: “No Justice, No Peace.”
     There was no justice, and so there was no peace. The police quickly set aside their PR platitudes and came for us in force. The cacophony of flash bang grenades rattled windows, nerves, teeth. Thick, sputtering clouds of tear gas choked downtown and incapacitated passersby as the protesters scattered, terrified by this sudden brutality. The pain is unbearable. Your eyes swell and burn: you become blind. Fire in your lungs, your mouth, your stomach. You retch and spit. Every instinct screams that you are dying, panic fills you: you flee.
     We could not withstand it, at first. Mass protests disintegrated into terrified individuals, scattered to the winds.
     “We have to do better,” we told each other, clothes rank with mace and sweat. Sheltering with a friend, a stranger, a new comrade. Sharing a beer, watching Hong Kong YouTube videos. Thinking. Learning.
     Not all the protesters returned, but the ones who did learned quickly. With one voice we sang our lessons. “Slow in the front, protect the back!,” we chanted as we learned to march at a steady pace. “Walk, don’t run!” we called out as we learned to fight back panic and remain calm in the face of fire. “Stay together, stay tight!”: a song we knew from the start, soon augmented with a second line: “We learned to ride the terror. “Be Water,” we said to each other as we regrouped after the police broke the group with gas and fear. We learned painfully that debates on direction had to be conducted carefully to avoid splitting and quickly to avoid police attention. Hand signals I had learned in the Army discovered again by an army of Gen-Z warriors: stop, regroup, left, right, quiet down.
     After a week of this, the city passed an ordinance against tear gas. The cops now needed new tools to hurt us and so we learned the brutality of the police line. Of charging cops with batons. Of an entire canister of crowd control mace emptied into the faces of protesters. We learned that cameras save lives and so every phone became a weapon. The police knew this too. They began to target journalists.
      The police made the mistake all authoritarians and cowards make: because they are driven by fear, they believe others are too. We learned to ride the fear, live with it, transmute it into rage and commitment. We learned in lock step, we learned together.
     As we became accustomed to their tactics, the police tried new ones. Every time they escalated, we learned to become more resilient, creative, unpredictable. We went to their police union. They instantly declared a riot and drove us away with batons and thick clouds of gas. We went to the North precinct. They drove us into the residential streets and claimed we tried to burn them alive. Lies and lies and lies, mainstream media eating it up; we existed in a world no one seemed to know about or believe, we were alone but we had each other. We did not stop
    And then the feds arrived.
    We do this every night.” Same shit, different day. Nothing to be afraid of.

Read the full article with videos HERE:

Visit ann arky's home at https://radicalglasgow.me.uk

The Potentiality Of Storming Heaven.

        Because of the manipulation of information by that babbling brook of bullshit, the mainstream media, many people failed to grasp the extent of the uprising in Greece in December 2008. The sudden explosion of anger at a system that had fed the population on illusions, attempting to paste over the cracks that exposed growing poverty, unemployment, injustice, corruption and alienation. As I have said on many an occasion, nobody knows the spark that will ignite the fire. On the 6th of December, 2008, the spark that ignited the fire in Greece was the spark from a psychopathic cop’s gun, that killed a 15 year old youth, hanging out with his mates an a Saturday night in Exarchia. That spark set alight the tinder of years of pent up anger and frustration, that simmers under the surface in all our cities and towns, I’m sure you have felt that same anger and frustration.

 

This video was first Published on Dec 3, 2015

          6 December 2008, few minutes after 9 pm - Time Zero of the December Revolt. Two policemen shoot against a group of youngsters hanging out on a Saturday night, at the heart of the Exarcheia district of central Athens, an area with a long history of insurrection against authority and riots for socio economic and political grounds, inhabited mainly by anarchists, anti-authoritarians and liberals. The police bullet finds in the heart and kills 15 year old Alexandros Grigoropoulos.
         As soon as the news of Alexis' murder spreads mainly through the internet, hundreds of people from the rest of Athens gather at Exarchia, which is circled by hundreds of riot policemen and that in turns infuriated people and the neighborhood quickly goes "on fire" with flaming barricades and stone attacks against the police, that lasted all throughout the night.
        Almost from the same night, the Exarcheia riot spreads all over Greece, with attacks against police stations, even in greek villages. Protests and demonstrations, which escalate to widespread rioting rock Greece every day and night for the weeks to come, while public buildings are being taken over and occupied by protesters in dozens of cities and towns around the country.
        Outside Greece, solidarity demonstrations, riots and clashes with local police also take place in more than 70 cities around the world, including London, Paris, Brussels, Rome, Dublin, Berlin, Frankfurt, Madrid, Barcelona, Amsterdam, the Hague, Copenhagen, Bordeaux, Cologne, Seville, Sao Paulo, as well as Nicosia in Cyprus, and Paphos proving for the first time before the "Arab Spring" that people could spread the news and react through protests for the same matter around the globe, from San Francisco to Wellington and Buenos Aires to Siberia.
      While the unrest was triggered by the Alexis Grigoropoulos murder by police, the reactions lasted for so long simply because they were rooted in deeper causes, like the coming economic crisis a year later, which was already being felt by poorer classes and younger generations through rising unemployment rate and a feeling of general inefficiency and corruption of the authorities, institutions and right wing politicians of the Greek state (mainly New Democracy and PASOK political parties).

December 2008 | The Potentiality of Storming Heaven 

Visit ann arky's home at www.radicalglasgow.me.uk