Black Blocs, Autonomen militance, and popular resistance to the police-state and the New World Order spread among European youth in the 1980s.
Though Dutch radicals did not begin calling themselves “Autonomen” until around 1986, earlier Dutch counterculture activists shared tactics, organizing structures and militancy with self-proclaimed autonomists. Holland’s squatting movement really got started around 1968, and by 1981 more then 10,000 houses and apartments were squatted in Amsterdam, and there were around 15,000 squats in the rest of Holland. Squatted restaurants, bars, cafes, and information centers were commonplace, and the organized squatters (usually referred to as “kraakers”) had their own council to plan the movement’s direction and their own newsradio station.
Although some Dutch autonomists rejected wearing ski masks while in Black Block, the movement was no less militant. One book about the Dutch squatters movement reports that “Ever since the beginning there had been a ‘black helmet brigade’ which felt it had joined battle with municipal social democracy.”
Battles at the evictions of Amsterdam squats often featured the construction of huge barricades and walled-in squatters tossing furniture and other projectiles of all shapes and sizes out the window at riot police below. In the early years there were certain limits to the violence which Dutch squatters would use to retaliate against police attacks. However in 1985 when a squatter named Hans Kok died in police custody after being arrested during a particularly brutal raid and eviction, the ante was upped.
Following the news of his death a night of fiery destruction reigned in Amsterdam, with even police cars set on fire in front of many different precincts. Said one squatter: “Everyone had the idea, now we’ll use the ultimate means, just before guns anyway: mollies…Everyone went around with mollies in their pockets, everyone had full gasoline cans…it was the new action method.” Though Hans Kok’s death and the fiery retribution that followed had a negative effect on!
the popular squatters’ movement, the new militancy of tactics proved useful in some activist circles. In 1985 the Dutch Anti-Racist Action Group (RARA) mounted a successful campaign to force the Dutch supermarket chain MARKO to divest from South Africa: the campaign was accomplished through a series of extremely expensive and damaging firebombings of MARKO’s stores and offices.
In Germany in 1986 mounting police attacks and attempted evictions against a complex of squatted houses in Hamburg called the Haffenstrasse were met with the counteroffensive of a 10,000 person march surrounding at least 1500 people in a Black Bloc, carrying a huge banner that read, “Build Revolutionary Dual Power!” At the march’s end, the Black Bloc was able to successfully engage in street fighting that put the police on the retreat. On the following day fires were set in 13 department stores in Hamburg, causing nearly $10 million in damage.
That same year, the disaster at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant brought new militance to demonstrations against nuclear power plants under construction in Germany. Once account of these anti-nuclear demonstrations reported, “In scenes resembling ‘civil war,’ helmeted, leather-clad troops of the anarchist Autonomen armed with slingshots, Molotov cocktails and flare guns clashed brutally with the police, who employed water cannons, helicopters and CS gas (officially banned for use against civilians.”
In June of 1987 when Ronald Reagan came to Berlin, around 50,000 people demonstrated in the streets against this Cold War-mongering old man, including a 3000 person Black Bloc.A couple of months later police antagonism against the Haffenstrasse intensified again. In November 1987 residents and thousands of other Autonomen fortified the complex, built barricades in the streets and fought off police for nearly 24 hours. In the end the city chose to legalize the squatters’ residence.
Over ten years before Seattle and the American WTO protests, the Autonomen mobilized a similar event with a greater number of resisters. In September of 1988, the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund met in Berlin.
Autonomen used this meeting as a focal point for worldwide resistance to global corporate capitalism and government’s destruction of grassroots autonomy and community. Thousands of activists from throughout Europe and the U.S. were mobilized, and 80,000 protesters met the bankers (at least 30,000 more than in Seattle).The totally outnumbered police and private security at the event attempted to maintain order by banning all demonstrations and brutally attacking any public assembly, but riots still ravaged fashionable upper class shopping areas (as was tradition).
via ainfos.ca
Part A: Hardline Oppression, Militant Resistance, And the Origins of the BLACK BLOCK
