Provocateur: Reading the Anti-Insurgents' Handbook

Agents Provocateurs Are Still A Real Threat To Our Movements 

by TRNN

June 8, 2020

Mysterious, all-black-clad white window smashers with umbrellas in Minneapolis. Mysterious, all-black-clad white women tagging businesses with Black Lives Matter and being run off by an actual black woman protestor for their trouble in another city. Mysterious pallets of bricks, allegedly showing up on city streets. Is it Antifa? Is it white supremacists? Is it the police? 

Whoever is behind these curious actions, the issue of agent provocateurs is real and is an ever-present challenge for organizations, movements, and protests.

But first, we have to understand what we’re talking about. An agent provocateur is a person who commits or acts to entice another person to commit an illegal or rash act or falsely implicate them in partaking in an illegal act. And this is done to ruin the reputation or entice legal action against the target or a group they belong to. And we have to be clear. 

 

There is a long history of agent provocateurs, interfering in movements and protests, smearing activists, and ruining peoples’ and organizations’ lives and reputations and worse. This has been documented as far back as at least a century to czarist Russia through the 60s and the 70s anti-war and black power movements and even through to Occupy Wall Street. 

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'Outside agitators' aren't the cause of last week's protests, but they are one of the forces that threaten to derail movements.