By last night [Sunday June 27] Canada's media had learned the difference and had switced to correctly calling the black bloc a tactic instead of a group. The US media, at least MSM, still calls them groups, though most call them domestic terrorists too. Words matter. Today i searched ' black bloc strategy', hoping to find a statement about the overarching startegy that this tactic was being used to accomplish. What i found was that the two words 'startegy and tactic' are used interchangably in the media, in search engines, everywhere. There were 11,200,000 for 'black bloc strategy' at Google but none of them contained any actual startegy they all were about the tactic.
From any perspective it seems that clearly defining your terms is essential to any real communication. The well educated staffs of the major news rooms understand the definations, or should. Could it be that confusion about the definations underlying the startegy/tactic usage serves well when trying avoid disscussion about goals, the meta level of this heirachy. The goal here is the overthrow of capitialism but the MSM are owned by corporations and make all their money from advertising by other corporations. Overthrowing capitialism isn't a topic that increases their bottom line and does sound like terrorism if you're the evil child of it-a corporation.
It seems the black clad kids themselves are missing this point too. They and lottsa others, including me, agree on the goal: getting rid of capitialism. The tactic of the black bloc works, the cops use pretty much the same one, uniform dress disguise to hide individual responsibility for actions both stupid and violent. What's missing is a good and all important middle idea between a goal and a tactic: a strategy. This is a big problem for the lefty paradigm of all color persuations, mine too, no clear strategy. The religous right has built a powerful movement in large part because of they effectively use and share: goals-strategies-tactics. The second rule in the Art of War is 'know your enemy'...
So, a strategy for the anti-capitialist left... tomorrow.
