A Series of Unfortunate Events

April 15, 2017

Saturday's primate dominance display/violence was not particularly clearly delineated, organized, or effect-based. There was, however, one event there that appeared climactic, and after which the nazis loosely held one intersection and completely blockaded an important Berkeley thouroughfare. One was Milvia and Center. The other more important one was Shattuck and Center.

The incident that precipitated this successful blockade on the part of the fascists was a sudden charge by them against antifascist groups easily identified by their black garb and face masks. Here’s what happened.

All afternoon someone or other had been throwing what sounded like M-80’s similar in sound to those used by antifa at the Milo Yiannoupolis [I don’t care if I spelled his name right] at UC Berkeley in February. There were also star-shells which sounded similar but threw out red sparkly bits. These have little ability to hurt people unless someone is unlucky enough to be in contact with them as they explode, as far as I understand. I don’t know where to buy things of this nature, but I recall that the black market in smaller firecrackers when and where I grew up to be of a casual nature. I assume the M-80’s, etc., were thrown by antifa. Other objects thrown by them included bagels. I find this to be a waste of food, and practically an invitation to anyone to throw more substantial objects, things that could injure.

Both sides milled in the intersection of Milvia and Center, much as they had for hours. Then, a smoke bomb or perhaps tear-gas grenade, was thrown. I saw it clearly. It came from the geographically antifa side, though partisans of both sides milled about through the area. It came from about 20 feet outside of the middle of the crowd, and landed in the middle of the crowd. Just after this, violence broke out over the whole intersection. Some antifa with food began evacuating, and I picked up a cake to help them depart. It quickly became clear that we were far past cake-eating conditions, as in front of me a man in black was being kicked bloody on the ground not 10 feet from where I stood. This was another 10 feet from where Nathan Damigo was filmed punching a woman in black in the head, and simultaneous to that blow.

Presently, the brawlers withdrew. I gave such assistance to the man who had been being kicked as I could until his friends showed up.

The violence I saw was largely non-decisive, and, as I wrote above, more for impression than for effect. Perhaps this is the effect of the violent groups lacking cohesion and unified command. This one charge, though, could easily have been engineered by, say, 10 people. What stands out is the smoke bomb.

This looked like military hardware, and was thus much, much more likely to have been acquired by the right wing groups than by someone in a side alley in Oakland.

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