black bloc

For people sitting at home and watching TV news last night, Toronto was burning.  The same police car on Queen St W. burned and blew up over and over again.  The same image of a young man very violently smashing Starbucks windows appeared over and over again.  Windows smashed all along Yonge St.  None of us had ever seen Toronto like this.  It was shocking. 

Lucas Oleniuk, Toronto Star

The first time I ran into people who believed that breaking windows was a revolutionary act was in 1972.  We had just had 21 people arrested for occupying the campus at University of Toronto to set up a tent city for transient youth.  We called it Wachea, a place where everyone was welcome, or so we thought.  A radical new left group called Red Morning tried to convince the assembled masses that going back to the University and "trashing it," in the parlance of the day, was the best way to protest the arrests.  It was the moment I stepped into leadership, debating them for hours, saying that more violence was counter productive and would give more strength to the arguments against us.  Instead we should protest on the grounds of Queen's Park and demand that the government give us land for our transient community.   In those days we didn't have the notion of "diversity of tactics."  We believed in the group who was organizing the demonstration deciding democratically what to do.   Red Morning withdrew their proposal since they couldn't convince us.