Block Cop City: A View From Afar

Source: Scenes from the Atlanta Forest

The following was written by an anarchist not in Atlanta who has been follwing Stop Cop City closely, but not contributing much. Take it for what it’s worth.

Despite the (lack of) final result, the organizers of the Block Cop City demo did do a few things right. Their celebrated 80-something city speaking tour was straight out of the old summit hopping playbook, and did a lot to raise awareness of the mobilization. And despite rumors to the contrary, BCC had a robust legal support structure in place, although it didn’t end up having much to do. BCC’s voluminous rhetoric even convinced the cops to halt construction at the site for a day, although they might not have bothered if they’d known how harmless the action would be. That’s about it, though. After months of planning, organizing, and speaking appearances, a few hundred people marched toward the Cop City construction site, were met by a massive wall of cops, made a brief but valiant attempt to push their way through, were repelled, and called it a day. If it weren’t for a few unannounced and spontaneously organized acts of resistance, the entire week would have been a complete bust.

Starting with tactics, it’s obvious from videos of the march that somebody anticipated some potential difficulty in getting to the construction site. Two reinforced banners were prominently placed at the front, followed by a cluster of umbrellas, equipment that would hardly have been necessary if marchers thought they could just stroll on to the site and immediately lock themselves to something. The banners worked pretty well, for all the good that did. As the march approached the riot line, the banner-holders formed a wedge and and unhesitatingly charged the cops, backed by the full weight of the marchers behind them. This avoided the classic mistake of rearward marchers hanging back and expecting the front line to do all the work against cops twice their size. The riot cops held their ground for a few seconds, shoulders pressed against the banners, but were shoved back. For a moment it looked like the march was breaking through, but then a tear gas grenade went off in the middle.

An opportunity was wasted here. The cops weren’t prepared for their own gas and retreated hastily to pull on masks – but the march, inexplicably, wasn’t prepared for it either. Instead of advancing triumphantly through the haze, masks firmly affixed to every face, the march froze, with marchers retreating back down the road or dispersing into the woods on either side. Why, if they knew they would need reinforced banners, didn’t BCC organizers also hand out respirators, and even splurge on a couple leaf blowers? Maybe they blew the rest of their budget on the giant puppets? Regardless, even an N95 mask and a pair of shop class goggles for every participant would have let the march advance another few yards, and put it in a better position to resist whatever else the cops had in store. They still wouldn’t have gotten much further, especially since they had no reinforced banners on the sides of the march, but the oversight still seems odd.

We shouldn’t focus on tactics to the detriment of strategy, however. That march’s worst problem wasn’t a lack of PPE, it was that the cops had known it was coming for weeks. After the debacle in March, the last thing the Georgia State Patrol was going to do was allow themselves to be put in a position where they might have to close a gate. When the enemy knows what you want to do, misdirection is essential, but BCC organizers refused to do any. It wasn’t for lack of options. They could have pulled the classic heist movie trick of going a day early – calling the demo for Tuesday and instead invading the construction site on Monday. They could have chosen a different target while all the cops were concentrated near the forest. Maybe the Atlanta Journal-Constitution building? They could at least have attempted to infiltrate lockdown teams on to the site from the back while the march distracted the cops.

Better yet, the organizers could have simply called for a convergence, arranged for logistical support such as food, medics, and housing, and invited other organizations to pull together actions. This is the model employed at the 2008 RNC protests in St. Paul, MN, one that centers a diversity of tactics and gave us the St. Paul Principles. By all accounts diversity of tactics was never an option for BCC’s organizing cabal. Multiple reportbacks from the speaking tour, public and otherwise, emphasized that BCC would countenance no deviation from The Way of Nonviolent Civil Disobedience, and anybody who didn’t like it could just stay home. (I don’t know how many people took this option who might otherwise have traveled to Atlanta.) Note that the RNC Welcoming Committee in St. Paul also developed an elaborate action strategy, but did not insist that every anarchist who showed up follow their plan. Their flexibility was rewarded when a cluster of anarchists came prepared to march instead of set up the blockades that the cops had been preparing for for months. BCC displayed no similar tolerance for experimentation. A BCC spokesperson did extoll diversity of tactics in a podcast interview with IGD, but the phrase appears nowhere on the group’s web site. An allegedly Frequently Asked Question on the site is “What About Other Protest Tactics?”, the answer to which is basically a disclaimer that BCC does not in principle object to other kinds of tactics. There’s a difference however, between actively promoting an idea and simply declining to oppose it. Certainly the organization never proposed anything like the St. Paul Principles.

Despite all BCC’s peripatetic preemptive protest policing, nonviolent civil disobedience is not what they got. While the final result would have been no different, that doomed banner charge had to have been at least slightly less disempowering than the NVCD equivalent of sitting down in the middle of the road and linking arms. Later that evening, a noise demo at Dekalb County Jail in support of the handful of arrestees also took a decidedly not-nonviolent turn, with prisoners smashing out their cell windows (oh, the humanity!) and lowering DIY ropes to receive bags of forbidden snacks from the demonstrators below. Better yet, sometime in the night some people who definitely hadn’t gotten the nonviolence message snuck into a facility owned by Ernst Concrete, Cop City’s foundation contractor, and torched seven cement mixers. Replacing those trucks will very likely eliminate any profit Ernst stood to make on the project, sending an unmistakable message to future contractors about the dangers of working on Cop City.

But of course it doesn’t take hundreds of out-of-towners with a marching band and giant puppets to burn construction machinery and hold noise demos. Locals could have done that just fine on their own. It’s hard to avoid the conclusion that everybody who went to Atlanta for BCC would have been better off staying home and raising money for the Atlanta Solidarity Fund.

There are 12 Comments

they basically alienated most of the people able to deal with a couple tear gas canisters and some pepper balls.

If a round country tour could only solicit so anemic a response, what does that say about the true state of radical movements as a whole? Personally I found it surreal and infuriating for the likes of Natasha Leonard & Co's radical chic reporting. It's a reflection of the tide that in 2020s radicals downplay riots and right wingers fixate over them, and in 2023 it's the reverse. Am I the only one getting this? If you have a movement, you do not focus in the most radical part because that undermines it, while the state and right wing hype them up because they think it might turns people off. If, on the other hand, you are just a bunch of delusional cells tilting at the nearest windmills (think palestine), you would grab what few microphones you can and scream at the top of the lung because you're so macho that the thought of appearing docile and weak drives you banana and this is your way of coping. With the pro palestine protest, this is just pathetic.

What is your grievance really? That protests don't turn riotous enough? I think that's somewhat agreeable, but rioting amongst a sea of national flags or in league with a bunch of racist hooligans like with that recent rioting in Dublin... that's doesn't look like anarchy at all. More same-old rowdy protests that only support brutish authoritarian bullshit.

Anarchy is qualitative accordingly to its own premises. You don't have anarchist uprising starring your big sausage-faced wart dogs with Neonazi or KKK regalia yelling about a stolen vote while storming the Capitol. Just like... molotov'ing or smashing shit aren't anarchist activity by default.

If that's what your definition of anarchy is all.about then perhaps you gotta read a few books?

the only real issue i have with this write up is the lack of acknowledgement at the end of how big(gish) public events relate to smaller private ones. put simply (and it's not a given by any means) people are more likely to do private things when there are big public things.

that is all.

It fucking blows my little pea brain mind that after a 70+ city tour and a shit ton of grandiose statements about thousands of ppl are gonna save the forest, you just run up against a totally predictable police line, get predictably tear gassed, flee, and then claim that "Forest Defenders Prevail" in a communique crying about the police teargassing people. Some holy shit levels of liar politician energy on that IGD communique: https://itsgoingdown.org/police-attack-protesters-as-hundreds-march-agai... " Despite the violent response by police, activists minimized arrests and harm through careful planning, extensive preparation, and close attention to lessons learned from generations of revolutionary struggles against repression and authoritarianism." HOLY FUCK.

Says the person whose idea of anarchist activity is shitting on IGD articles. I think the kids who turned out for this action were braver than the trolls crying about it, and I don’t think whining about igd or organizers or people bravely charging police lines has much to offer.

No for sure. Long live our most sacred of churches -IGD- and our most holy of people, The Organizers. Good ole calling anyone with criticisms armchair trolls. Couldn't possibly be engaged *and* have opinions contrary to a main narrative. Nopeity, nope. Leader would not be pleased.

Responding to are armchair activitists...they pretend to be strong/brave but they just have an inferiority complex and can't tolerate people who disagree with them. They see their phone as the gateway to anarchy, and my how they react if someone smashed their phone...

Remember when those trash talking the planned CD on more grounds than force protection were told to stop talking and do it if they wanted something spicier? Well, someone did, and Ernst Concrete got enough of their trucks burned to drive them off the project. Now a second concrete contractor has been hit too?

I think the site being shut down for two days, the uproar about the protests, the videos, and then the burned concrete trucks on top of all else were enough to convince Ersnt Concrete that Cop City isn't worth the money. Alternately, they may have decided there was no way to turn a profit working on a project that draws so much fire.

Not only that, Brentt Scarborough had threatened to withdraw from the project if more of their shit gets torched, and that might be enough to kill it.

I cannot say for sure, but I suspect that if the combative march originally planned as a CD had not been planned and then taken place on November 13, the fires at Ernst Concrete would not have taken place either. Everyone involved in this victory has earned my utmost respect.

Cop City will never be built, and "If you build it we will burn it" is not just a chant, not just a threat-it looks more like a promise to me.

This seems totally right. Fucking incredible to watch all these different actions compliment each other.

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