Crime & Punishment

from Derry Anarchists

It's hard to image the damage caused to the lives and the mental health of those subjected to 'punishment attacks' in working class areas of the North unless you or your immediate family members have been directly involved themselves.

The majority of those shot or beaten are said to have been targeted due to anti social, anti community behaviour such as drug selling, joy-riding, breaking into houses or robbery. Over the last few months punishment attacks have once again become common practice in our communities resulting in numerous people being hospitalised or physically damaged due to these actions.

What is for certain is that the various armed organisations involved have and do at times come under a certain level of pressure to 'deal with' elements from either communities in order to stamp out anti community activity from joy-riding to drug dealing.

The role of armed organisations has also to be questioned as with the absence of any political stability or direction, power and control comes to the fore as many jockey for dominance and position within any giving locality.

Who best can be seen as having the stamina and tools to get things done the 'right way'?

Similarly those involved within anti community activity are of course easy prey for the cops and subject to different levels of entrapment.

Vulnerable young adults are said to be routinely used by the state forces to target, spy upon or inform on their own communities.

To that end, many believe those involved can receive 'a slap on the wrists', 'lesser sentences' or even financial rewards due to their vulnerability.

Without doubt many have reported similar stories, which has become common knowledge within communities as the 'new' and approved police seek their own foothold and approval ratings.

For the act of punishment attacks itself, have proved over the past half century to have achieved nothing only the continual marginalisation and brutalisation of our youth, each of us have to ask ourselves, what type of society do those involved in carry out punishment beatings on a communities behalf hope to build or achieve when the workers republic eventually arrives?

Will they continue to deal working class communities with the same type of justice system or can we expect something completely different?

How will their new society deal with community criminality, drug taking, burglary, theft even murder?

Going by what many have witnessed more recently in the back streets of Creggan or North Belfast, the type of justice system would be more reminiscent of what is witnessed in Saudi Arabia, or some other similar caliphates throughout history. As anarchists we are completely opposed to the use of punishment beatings or shootings just as much as we're opposed to anti working class activity that blight our communities.

We have for years spoken out against this type of barbarity brought upon working class communities and have instead called for community alternatives to be put in place by and for the communities themselves.

To date various initiatives have been put to use, however all of which have been connected to ‘this or that’ community group and subjected to specialised funding. All infact have been funded by the state, tied up with red tape, not to mention financial stings and entitlements for those directly involved.

Such projects are from the outset doomed to failure as it rules out any genuine working class community involvement as they seek to appease political and governmental statistics rather than achieving true community justice.

Many have set out to monopolise the fears and concerns of communities for their own political and financial gain merely adding to the growing sense of working class alienation and abandonment. Many opposed to the actions of armed organisations have asked, ‘if they're so opposed to anti community behaviour then why are they not attacking things like loan-sharks, off-licences who sell products that blight the lives of working class communities or even bookmakers or gambling arcades?’

What is for certain is that working class communities throughout the country will continue to feel the devastation of not only anti working class activity but the brutality of punishment attacks for the foreseeable future.

That is unless the communities themselves feel they can gather the strength and confidence as a class to discuss and debate different ways to genuinely address all the issues involved.

To that end we will continue to speak out against these actions and demand we that we attempt to find and create our own alternatives to them.

A justice all of our class so rightly deserves.

There are 16 Comments

Besides these guys abysmal bad taste in clothing that makes them look like off-duty cops, and their questionable martial arts skills, I don't see what is wrong with the guys above?

Selling drugs and robbery is also a very working-class thing.. and what is wrong with "joy-riding"? Fun is now oppressing the working class!

But then again... this really might have been posted a day too late.

#SaveTheWorkers

so demonized and rare that i strongly recommend a heavy risk-assessment analysis before burglarizing a house or beating anybody up.

I actually think it's just a bad idea to beat someone up in general...you could still convince me to commit a burglary under the right circumstance but i reserve all rights to back out at any time. Bring doggy treats. Let's have a lock picking class.

Yeah but like gun or not there will still be folk higher up on the status foodchain who don't clean their weapons everyday, or do target and fast draw practice. The fastest gun in the neighbourhood is the king!

Who the fuck is still using Blogspot in 2021... then using it to appeal to Western anarchists about doing something to defend the Workers against petty criminals?

This shit is so fucking absurd.

most anarchists over the course of the pandemic outted themselves as defenders of capitalism, id-pol, medical tyranny, isolation, etc.

Laughin' at the criticism of the article here. Most of you are probably ancaps. Paramilitary gang control is a big problem in Northern Ireland. Communities should defend themselves but how is gun ownership going to solve that - get real, the paramilitaries ARE a surrogate police force that took over the Falls / Bogside / Shankill etc. so don't pretend that sh*t works. What the hell is medical tyrrany supposed to be... you lot sure you're not just fash?

clear about whatever the fuck they are talking about:

"A justice all of our class so rightly deserves."

so what class are we talking about here?? Paramilitary gang control was not mentioned once in the entire article. Ireland was mentioned in the tags, thanks to whoever posted this here for actually mentioning specifics. To the writer: there are many Norths.

I am amused how little you understand the typical internet user. Let me post all that i said:

"in the year 2020 petty crime has been made so demonized and rare that i strongly recommend a heavy risk-assessment analysis before burglarizing a house or beating anybody up.

I actually think it's just a bad idea to beat someone up in general...you could still convince me to commit a burglary under the right circumstance but i reserve all rights to back out at any time. Bring doggy treats. Let's have a lock picking class."

How in the world was my post fascist? Now that I'm reading the article again (btw, i was responding to a comment just for the hell of it, not the article), the writers of the article were actually on board with everything i was saying:

"It's hard to image the damage caused to the lives and the mental health of those subjected to 'punishment attacks' in working class areas of the North unless you or your immediate family members have been directly involved themselves.

The majority of those shot or beaten are said to have been targeted due to anti social, anti community behaviour such as drug selling, joy-riding, breaking into houses or robbery. Over the last few months punishment attacks have once again become common practice in our communities resulting in numerous people being hospitalised or physically damaged due to these actions. "

They are also upset with the beatings that have occurred through "punishment attacks". Think before you post. Stop flailing around pointing fingers at everyone.

If you can't figure out that the Derry Anarchists might be talking about Derry, then that's on you, not them.

If someone calls me a fascist then that's on them.

Here we go again: treat people who write articles as superior to those who comment on them! Just go ahead and continue with the fucking finger pointing. It makes the internet so interesting, all the moralism.

to your gun question, I don't think theyre "just fash" but you know what's american as apple pie? assuming guns magically solve social problems. I say this as someone who likes guns but yeah...

WHAT IS STEEL COMPARED TO THE HAND THAT WIELDS IT?

As I said before, but with an empirical certainty, these things wouldn't happen if everyone had a gun. Most of Western society before the 20th Century existed without a police force and everyone carried a weapon during their everyday existence.

oh you've said it before?! well in that case, I guess it's still kind of an asinine observation unless you're arguing with liberals about assuming the cops should exist or not.

"these things wouldn't happen" <--- wtf does this even mean? are you seriously arguing there wasn't violence in the ancient world? you're either trolling or dense. pick one.

I'm neither a troll, as I've said countless times before, nor am dense, whatever that means. In the context of substance and depth, dense would otherwise be a compliment.
The whole desire for autonomy and independence requires that one deals oneself with injustices that harm and impoverish one's life and friends. In the Art of War, something liberals abhor, it is said that the free person projects the image of invincible and deadly force, and the most efficient means of achieving this is to possess guns.
And for the Yemen argument, these folk aren't individualists, but rather fanatical religionists in a proxy binary war.

Main problem with this piece: the idea of "anti-community" activities. I've always said with this kind of anti-crime bigotry (which is functionally very similar to other forms of bigotry): it's mistaking social problems as moral problems. Drug selling and stealing are distributive justice problems; drugs are also a problem of personal/lifestyle freedom; and joyriding is a kind of thrill-seeking which could easily be contained by providing facilities for it. Instead we end up with working-class people brutalising other working-class people to enforce bourgeois morality. BTW this kind of bullshit has been standard in the UK and Irish ancom scenes for awhile now. Many in Southern Ireland actually supported community vigilantism against drugs. The IWCA ran on an anti-crime bigot agenda and the ancoms denounced the 2011 riots as "anti-social" (while also supporting fights with police).

I also think the article is referring to paramilitary gang control. In Northern Ireland these kinds of gangs have evolved out of the paramilitary groups on both sides of the divide (historically the Catholics would be vaguely leftist and the Protestants semi-fascist, as there was a Jim Crow-like structure before the 60s), and they also sometimes act as a check on state power (in related news, there's been riots in Derry recently, apparently due to police raids on a Protestant faction involved in drug dealing - at least one pig van burnt). It's a similar situation to the gangs in Mexico or Brazil, where they de facto control particular areas, and locals use them like a police force (except they're not no-go, there's also a regular "cross-sectarian" police force set up after the Good Friday Agreement). In many cases the gang also controls the local drug trade, so the punishment attacks will target people encroaching on their turf. In the past a lot of these community attacks went along sectarian lines, targeting people living in the wrong area (Catholics in Protestant areas or vice-versa), suspected snitches, dissidents opposed to the main paramilitary faction, etc. "Kneecapping" (shooting someone's kneecap so they're maimed) was a particular favourite. The Good Friday Agreement was meant to dissolve the paramilitary groups and produce a power-sharing system, the paramilitary-linked parties were recuperated and are now the ruling parties locally, but it never really worked because (surprise surprise) capitalism didn't bring a peace dividend and lift all ships, it just split the corrupt elite on both sides from its popular base.. A lot of the unemployed youths long for a return to the pre-GFA days when kids like them could get power, money and status in armed groups. Now the situation's destabilised because of Brexit and local corruption scandals.

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