This piece is by an old anarchist friend of mine whom I knew in Richmond during the early years of ARV-ATS. It sums up everything that really needs to be said about the current crop of “anarchists” in North America.

” All of these different incidents at big public anarchist events that I mentioned lead me to a conclusion – the anarchist milieu as it exists today is just too immature to be able to have big public events that are meaningful and productive. The basic mutual respect and tolerance that is necessary to be able to successfully pull something like that off is just not there. With things being the way they are now, continuing to organize these kinds of big public events is just providing people a public forum to “act out” their own unexamined personal neuroses and dysfunctional relationships, and essentially it is “enabling” unhealthy patterns to repeat themselves. Maybe this will all change sometime in the future, when the current crop of young anarchists “grows up”, or when most of them eventually burns out and gives up on the anarchy thing, and are then replaced with the next generation of anarchists.

As it stands now, though, the unfortunate general trend within anarchist circles is for one to mock, yell at, threaten, and ultimately use physical force against those whom one disagrees with. All meaningful dialogue between people is gone as soon as people start breaking things, using physical violence or calling the police on each-other. One of the basic claims of anarchism is that human beings can live together in healthy harmonious communities without the presence of a state or other authorities. The kind of behavior that is popular now in anarchist circles works directly against this claim. One does not build solidarity by intimidating those whom one wants solidarity with. And likewise, one does not build trust and cultivate the desire for mutual aid by habitually insulting and threatening people in various ways.”

http://parenthesiseye.blogspot.com/2013/05/public-affairs.html