Current Shareware 1994 January/SHAR194.ISO/textfile/new_hope.zip/NEW-HOPE.TXT

Text File | 1993-11-09 | 15KB | 281 lines

Subject: Nazis in New Hope
From: [e-mail] (Love and Rage)
Reply-To: [e-mail] (Love and Rage)
Date: Tue, 09 Nov 93 01:03:55 EST

Via NY Transfer News Collective * All the News that Doesn't Fit

Nazis in New Hope:


NAZIS' BLUFF CALLED IN NEW HOPE MARCH;
COPS PROTECT RALLY

by Todd Prane and Elizabeth Bright
Love and Rage Production Group


Yesterday, Nov 6, 1993, anti-fascists from all over the Northeast
confronted cops and Nazis in New Hope, PA. The USA Nationalist
Party, a small Nazi bonehead organization based in northern
Philadelphia, had announced that they would hold a march in New
Hope and a rally in nearby Washington Crossing park, a day of
activities they called "Gay Bash '93." New Hope is a town in
Northeastern Pennsylvania on the shores of the Delaware river with
a strong queer community and much of its economy is based on queer
vacationers from New York City and Philadelphia. Anti-fascists
from New York came on two buses organized by Love and Rage and
three vans organized by the International Socialist Organization
(ISO). In addition to Love and Rage and ISO, groups in attendance
included Mayday RASH skins (anti- racist skinhead crew mostly from
Brooklyn), ACT-UP, QUISP (Queers United In Support of Policital
Prisoners), and several Troskyist organizations. Many unaffiliated
individuals went to confront the Nazis as well.

Nazis Defeated Before Counter Organizers Arrive

The Nazis were defeated in large part before we even arrived. On
Thursday they held a joint press conference with the cops
announcing that they were withdrawing their request for a permit
to march in the town of New Hope.  The reason given was safety
(presumably theirs), given police estimates of 2000 - 3000 counter
demonstrators decending on the town to confront the Nazis. On
their hate-line in Philly the nazis claimed that they had never
really wanted to march anyway, and called the whole affair a
propaganda victory due to the major television, print and radio
coverage in Philly and New York. They struggled, however, to find
bravado in the face of this obvious cowardice and defeat, however,
talking about machine-gunning queers in the streets of New Hope.

Residents of New Hope and anti-fascist organizers alike claimed
the cancellation of the march as a victory for anti-fascist
organizers. By creating the possibility of hundreds or thousands
of counter-protestors willing to physically confronting the Nazis,
we made it impossible for them to march. This strategy, of
organizing for the possibility of physical confrontation, and
bringing hundreds of people willing to carry it out, is clearly a
successful one and needs to be pursued in the future.

The Rally at Washington Crossing

The march was cancelled, but the rally at Washington Crossing park
went on as scheduled. Busses from Philadelphia and New York full
of rowdy anarchists, queers from around the region, Trotskyists of
various stripes, several crowds of ACT-UP folks, and others
arrived in the downtown area shortly after 10am to hold a
mini-victory celebration prior to the day's events. It quickly
became obvious that all of the activity was south of the town in
the park, and so several busloads of counter-demonstrators headed
towards the scene of the confrontation, more or less cancelling
the planned vicyory celebration. By the time the second New York
bus and Philly busses headed south, cops had blocked off access to
route 32 in anticipation of trouble. Several crowds of people
decided to walk around the road block and four miles down the road
to the park.

Washington Crossing park is divided into two sections on the
Pennsylvania side and they are separated by over four miles of
road. A "Stop the Hate" rally was being held in the southern
section and was sponsored by a loose coalition including
Peacekeepers' Network and Sane-Freeze. The Nazi "Gay Bash '93"
rally was being held in the northern section. The "Stop the Hate"
rally was billed as "non-violent and non-confrontational" and
seemed calculated to draw attention and people away from any real
confrontation with the Nazis, and succeeded to some extent. Around
50 demonstrators interested in confronting the Nazis were stuck at
the bottom section of the park, unable even to walk up the road to
the northern section because of police road blocks. 300 people
attended the "Stop the Hate" rally, most of whom were uninterested
in even seeing the Nazis, much less confronting their hatred.

Most of the action occurred at the northen section of the park
where the Nazis and counter-demonstrators converged poised for a
confrontation. About 400 riot cops including a contingent on
horses were determined to allow little or no contact between us
and the Nazis, though, and the geography of the site was in their
favor. A canal, 20 or so yards wide, separated the section of the
park where the Nazi's rally was taking place and River Road (rte
32) where the anti-fascists had gathered. The bridge connecting
the two was blocked by a line of 80-100 cops and 14 horses;
anti-fascists at the site numbered approximately 300. While the
cops were able to prevent almost all interaction between
anti-fascists and the Nazis, the details of the confrontations
that did occur may be useful for thinking about ways of dealing
with similar situations in the future.

Rocks across the River

When the first bus from New York arrived at the northern park, we
quickly realized that there were very few anarchists there - most
of them were on the two "lost" (to our knowledge) Philly buses and
on the other NYC bus.  The NWROC "leadership" (their word) was
controlling the crowd, leading them in chants while developing no
plan of action for the day. The cops were lined up along the park
entrance in front of us, and while they seemed willling to
tolerate us, it was only because they had effectively cut off the
anti-fascists from the nazis (barring a cold swim in the canal
into the waiting arms of more riot cops). The anarchists from New
York decided that until the other anti- authoritrians got there,
the best thing to do was to develop a relationship with the people
from NWROC and think about possible strategies for the day.

Soon after that, the nazis down at the canal started to chant and
became visible to us through the woods. The NWROC plan for
"confronting" them was to stay up at the road, almost out of
visible distance, and chant loudly enough to drown out the nazis
at the river. This would, according to them, make their presense
less effective.  The general feeling of the anti-authoritarians
was that this chanting idea was silly, and finally everyone,
including NWROC, went down to the river.

There were about 50 visible nazis on the other side, maybe 200 or
so of us. We chanted "death, death, death to the nazis," which,
considering the fact that we couln't even get a few licks in,
didn't seem to be particularly threatening. Some of us taunted
them, calling them chicken, trying to see if they'd try the canal.
There were about 6 cops on horses on the nazi side (who left
during this "confrontation" at the canal to block entry into the
site for the other anarchists) and a large formation of riot cops.
The cops on our side left us alone, so we stayed at the canal.
People started throwing rocks at the nazis, scoring several direct
hits which caused tham to retreat from the edge of the canal and
back up the banks to the cops.  About 5 Klansmen arrived then,
white hoods and all. The press went up to them and seemed to be
interviewing them. We found out later that the Klansmen called the
USANP people cowards for not confronting us directily.  The crowd
then went back up to the road where we stayed for most of the rest
of the demo.

On The Road Again

Most of the rest of the confrontations were with the line of cops
on the road to the bridge separating us and the Nazis. As the
crowd returned from the confrontations at the bank of the canal, a
group of people who had walked from town, including anarchists and
others from New York and Philadelphia arrived at the scene. Those
who missed the first spate of confrontations because they had been
blocked by the cops were treated to a barrage of lectures,
sectarian rhetoric, and authoritarian communist propaganda, all of
which was totally inappropriate and unrelated to the situation we
faced and how we wanted to react to it. Arguments about how to
build a fighting labor movement, who was the "leadership" at the
demo and what that leadership said eventually gave way to a series
of different Trotskyist groups arguing over their bullhorns.

The anarchists and most of the unaffiliated crowd became
immediately frustrated with the rhetoric which was preventing any
tactical discussion of our current situation.  Anarchists gathered
away from the NWROC bull horn to discuss tactics. A hasty (and
perhaps ill-thought out) decision was made to link arms and
face-off against the cops who were standing across the road which
led to a bridge across the canal. The idea was to show the people
there how to link arms, to demonstrate what militancy involved,
and to organize ourselves and other members of the crowd more
thoroughly so that we could create and react to possibilities the
cops might leave open. The face- off was aborted fairly quickly as
cops on horseback pushed us back. It certainly created a premature
confrontation with the cops, but it did succeed in demonstrating
that sort of physical unity to the crowd and raised the overall
level of militancy. After this confrontation the crowd
consistently linked arms whenever a confrontation with the cops
seemed likely.

The Trouble with NWROC

One of the greatest difficulties of the day was organizing and
communicating between groups with very different organizational
styles, backgrounds, politics, and committments to action. Love
and Rage, Philadelphia Troublemakers and Anarchists, and a large
number of individual anarchists, when taken as a single group
formed the largest contingent at the bridge, followed by the ISO
(International Socialist Organization), NWROC (National Women's
Rights Organizing Committee, a front-group of the Revolutionary
Workers' League), each with 25 or so people, and a host of much
smaller contingents of several other Troskyist groups. While many
of the participants, including the ISO, were principled in their
committment to acting in coordination with others, and
uninterested in spending time and effort with in-fighting during
the confrontation, the RWL lived up to its already-bad
reputation.

During the beginning of the action, the RWL behaved in fairly
principled manner, working in coordination with other groups at
the site, and even sometimes sharing access to their bullhorn.
They helped communicate information with other groups and, to
their credit, had arrived at the site about an hour before other
people had and therefore had more information to contribute.
Unfortunately, the character of almost all of their activity was
to tell everyone else what to do.

Some of the worst rhetoric and crap we were forced to listen to
was from the NWROC folks. The most frustrating incidents involved
them spouting rhetoric from the fence on the side of the road
while most other people were confronting the cops. They had the
nerve to lecture us on how "the left" needs to get its shit
together and be more like NWROC while we were down on the streets
trying to get at the Nazis and they were on the hill unwilling to
do anything which might risk arrest (according to one of their
organizers, their ability to mobilize people to actions like these
depends upon none of them ever getting arrested-- so much for
militancy). In the end the crowd got fed up with them and chanted
"Act, not Talk" loudly enough to drown out the rhetoritician on
the bull horn.

Three Spotters Spotted

Three white supremacist spotters were observed throughout the
morning and in the end they were confronted by a section of the
crowd made up of roughly ten NWROCers and ten other people. With
the exception of one Black NWROCer, the NWROCers preferred
militant posturing to actual fighting. The white supremacists were
eventually chased off and several kicks and punches were gotten in
before they got away. For all the "death to the Klan" sloganeering
there was too little willingness to really kick their asses when
the opportunity arose. Most people seemed satisfied just to have
chased them off.  What was interesting, though, was that most of
the crowd had noticed these three men earlier and no one or group
of people had the will or the skills to confront them. All three
were quite big men and this certainly had something to do with it,
but it also spoke to the overall militancy of the crowd.

Wrap-up

The Nazis left, more or less safely under heavy police protection,
heading south away from the larger number of counter-demonstrators
and they were not spotted by the demonstrators at the south until
it was too late to do anything about them. The cops dispersed, and
we all went home. The event was certainly a statement about the
increased ability of anarchists to organize for events such as
this. Both in New York and in Philadelphia, anarchists had the
experience of being the main, or only, set of people organizing
for Nov 6. The experience of the coalition of folks that
eventually went down and of coordinating efforts with the folks in
Philly will improve our ability to bring off these events even
more successfully in the future. This particular conflict
presented particular organizational difficulties (the park divided
into two parts, the road blocks, the canal) which in the end were
major obstacles to a truly successful presence (which would have
included running the Nazis out of town). Political differences, a
lack of agrred on tactics, and a lack of militancy also made the
action much less effective than it might have been. There were a
number of mistakes made in organizing for this action.  The most
significant was our failure to build a participatory coalition far
enough in advance of the action to work out some of the
differences in tactics and political perspectives so that we could
go in with a╦ Mffective overall plan of action But on the whole it
was a strong showing for our first effort to build a regional
anti-fascist action in the Northeast.

For more info about working with Love and Rage on anti-racist or
anti-fascist work contact:

Love and Rage Anti-Racist Working Group
PO Box 44563
Detroit, MI 48244

-30-

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