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Comment by consp | Hacker News Reader

Funny thing with those violent protesters is ... Sometimes they are not protesters. I had the opportunity to be with a peaceful protest against canceling student financing and the people who started violence after it finished were neither part of, nor affected by, the issues or organisation.

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>Sometimes they are not protesters

I don't have the source at hand but I remember reading that in Germany, plain clothes police inserted themselves into the group of climate protestors and start throwing rocks at the riot police, in order to give them legal justification to engage the protestors.

Don't know if this is the truth, but since this has also happened in my country in the past, I wouldn't be surprised that it is. Governments and the ruling elite can and will always find ways to legally justify their actions against citizens they consider a threat. The US had the Pinkertons (who stil exist today) who did similar actions but for the private sector.

Agent provocateurs! I hate that police have been caught doing this crap before because now at every single protest, if there's any stupid violence like a random innocent businesses having their windows smashed, the knee jerk reaction is "It was Agent provocateurs!". There's kids out there who live in some magical fairytale land where every protestor is always 100% innocent and isn't open to even discussing what's happening in reality because in their mind, all the bad stuff that happens is under cover bad actors. It's like the let's version of how January 6th was "antifa".

Unfortunately when crowds go berserk and riots happen, it's very difficult to get solid proof on who exactly started it and identify that person since the tend to cover their faces.

And even if by a miracle you do manage to get the face of that person and submit it to law enforcement, if they happened to be part of one of the intelligence agencies like it was in my country, the government would turn a blind eye and pretend they cant identify that person in order to protect them.

Throwing LEOs under the bus, even if they're guilty of something, is not something most government leaders are rushing to do since they need LEOs on their side in order to enforce the laws and maintain their positions in society, and it's not a good idea to piss off those in charge of the guns and surveillance capabilities and turn them against you.

Yes, sadly this is a common tactic by the incumbent corruption (politicians, corporations, otherwise) to make the protestors seem dangerous. Nothing new, but maybe it hasn’t been exposed at home as much as it has been abroad.

There is no need to bring in agent provocateurs in this day and age. Both anti-fa and fa are a bunch of meth heads looking for an excuse to bash someone's head in. They are perfectly happy to start violence if the police doesn't actively stop them.

I'm an antifascist and not a meth head. Nearly every protest I've been to has been peaceful. Sometimes the cops try to instigate violence by kettling or shoving people around really aggressively, but well trained protest leaders have people prepped for this and push hardline pacifism - well all know what happens when the cops "get the green light."

Typically when shit kicks off, it's an agent provocateur. Not always, but typically: https://abcnews.go.com/US/man-helped-ignite-george-floyd-rio...

There was similar in Oakland, some white kids from who tf knows where were trying to break windows, and everyone around was shouting for them to fuck off and knock it off.

Recently nazis and right wingers were allowed to do whatever they want as cops stood by and watched them beat up college protesters. https://edition.cnn.com/2024/05/16/us/ucla-student-protests-... At one point one shouted "we're here to finish what Hitler started" https://www.bostonreview.net/articles/uclas-unholy-alliance/

Agent provocateurs are going to become more and more necessary to "justify" the violence against protesters as protesters become more educated on pacifist strategies.

The Anarchist Cookbook (new version) https://www.foodnotbombs.net/anarchist_cookbook.html is free to read and gets into the effectiveness of peaceful protest and direct action, and the counter-effectiveness of violence.

How to Blow Up a Pipeline https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_to_Blow_Up_a_Pipeline takes a slightly different perspective, analyzing the possible necessity of extremely limited, targeted destruction of property, that strives to be completely disassociated from the greater movement so that the benefits of the destruction (such as disrupted oil supply, plus attention) can be combined with the opportunity for the greater movement to condemn the action.

To use a real world example: of the three men that were shot by Kyle Rittenhouse all were felons with extensive records of drug use and prison terms for everything from domestic violence, statutory rape to false imprisonment.

If you randomly shoot at a anti-fa rally and hit 100% meth heads and felons there's an issue with anti-fa rallies.

The issue at antifa rallies is fascists. Hope that helps.

> If you randomly shoot at a anti-fa rally

So, Kyle Rittenhouse was shooting randomly into the crowd? Interesting, I wonder what his goal was in doing so.

Statistically speaking? Given the convictions of all involved: killing pedophiles. The one who wasn't only got an arm blown off.

Fascinating. So in his mission to hunt and kill pedophiles, he managed to kill one while in a crowd, leading to everyone thinking he was an active shooter, which led to him then killing someone else who thought they were stopping an active shooter (which, to be fair, he was), and then shooting someone else who also thought they were stopping an active shooter.

Seems only one of the three people shot was a pedophile. That's ok, though, 1/3 is certainly a majority, I agree with you, it indicates that basically everyone at the protest was a pedophile. Except Kyle and his friend. And anyway, the other person killed had a criminal record of violence - I wonder how Kyle was able to identify that when he shot him in the middle of the crowd? We could potentially leverage this technique in a new machine vision model. Luckily Kyle killed him before he could commit more crimes. Once someone commits a crime, they might commit more, and should be shot by unelected strangers without a trial.

As for the third, a notorious anti-cop creep that would frequently get arrested for doing weird things like photographing police stations and the cars parked there. Degenerate behavior, he's lucky police never harass and frequently arrest those weirdo first amendment audit types. If they did, there would be obvious signs, such as a huge list of overturned convictions and dismissed court cases. Anyway the guy was probably a pedophile, because the first guy was.

Thank god a child brought a rifle to a protest.

Wait, you seriously think that agent provocateurs are a hoax? Literally not sure how to reply, you could just google it?

I'm sure they were needed in the 90s and 00s.

Today there are enough meth heads that the only thing police need to do for violence at a rally to explode is nothing.

So you’re gonna write off any question of illegitimate interference by governments/corporations as “meth heads looking for violence”?

I think the claim isn't that agent provocateurs don't exist, it's that jumping to it as first explanation is lazy and slightly cranky. Just because the government has killed civil rights activists in the past, doesn't mean the next civil rights activist who dies was a government assassination.

Of course, and the Boeing whistleblower and Epstein really did commit suicide amid some of the most high profile cases of the decade.

I think this is a common problem in the UK during peaceful protests. I've witnessed masked young men clearly getting messages on their phones to go somewhere. They'll suddenly hustle off together. I figure they're there just to cause trouble. If the EU is serious about democracy then they ought to make it clear that this kind of thing goes on during peaceful protests instead of justifying dubious legislative changes in the name of 'protecting people'.

This is a common tactic used by the police or secret services in all countries, not only in the UK.

Wherever there are truly peaceful protests against governments there is a very high probability that governmental agents infiltrated among the protestants will attempt to cause violent incidents in order to provide justification for the police to attack the participants with excessive force.

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