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When Leah talked before a grand jury in 2012 many of her immediate friends leaped to her defense. Thankfully it was rather easy to box largely apolitical kids only passing through the punk scene out of anarchism forever. I worry the coming wave of repression will be far messier.
Today many folks see social media spaces like twitter *as* the movement or scene. And many folks less committed AFK can be louder on here, which means the housemates and buds of a snitch might create giant flamewars online, also making it harder for onlookers to discern norms.
Further, the next wave of state repression is probably going to look more like the 00s Green Scare than the 2012 Grand Jury, that is to say, *many* trials simultaneously. And *a fuck ton* of people snitched in the Green Scare.
I chalk the mass snitching in the Green Scare up to 1) many of the targets and their circles being only loosely ideological / firmly in the scene, and 2) the sheer scale of the repression, which sometimes let snitches bond together.
In contrast situations where Grand Juries failed usually involved highly ideological, highly committed people, with intense binds to the anarchist AFK scene. Folks for whom "I guess we're just going underground / serving time" was not a surprise development.
One additional element I fear might get particularly nasty in this day and age is the weaponizing of shallow social justice card playing that might actually swing serious support from pseudo-woke liberals. eg "expecting people not to snitch is ABLEISM"
There's, not to put too fine a point on it, a lot of "radical" young folks these days who are primarily oriented around radicalism as an excuse to duck personal responsibility or moral obligation, whether in a toxic tenderqueer or toxic edgelord direction.
If your whole orientation towards "radical politics" is that it provides justifications or excuses for you to do whatever, then you're gonna recoil pretty fucking hard when the entire community is like "snitches get stitches." cf all of Bob Black's snitch antics and defenses.
And since a lot of folks -- less so in anarchist circles proper, but in huge numbers in the broader 20something semi-radical milieu that surrounds us -- see "politics" as just an aesthetic adornment or fad or phase they're self-consciously passing through...
Basically when repression hits you learn Really Fast who among you secretly has a comfy home and career track to run back to. They evaporate.
Well and also some great folks just permanently seize up with trauma. RIP friends who left this world for shitty land projects.
Well and also some great folks just permanently seize up with trauma. RIP friends who left this world for shitty land projects.
Anyway, I have to really struggle now not to derail by talking about all the super edgelords who danced up to shit like ecofascism in preening militancy and then when shit got mildly spicy retreated to a life of tennis practice, yachts and boat shoes we never knew they came from.
My general point is this: friendships and circles gonna crack like you've never imagined. People gonna evaporate. People gonna snitch. And then people are gonna scream bloody murder and draw knives on one another over whether someone's particular snitching "was that bad."
Even if you survive unscathed you're gonna go years and years wondering if that former friend who evaporated for a cushy lawyer job or who defended a person who snitched under torture is gonna talk about what yall did together.
