Anarchopanda Hugs The Front Lines Of Montreal Student Protests

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Anarchopanda Hugs The Front Lines Of Montreal Student Protests

June 10th, 2012 androidoholic Leave a comment Go to comments

Our cuddle dans la charity put us on the incorrect side of the law due to Bill 78, that prohibits any finding of fifty people or more without previous military approval. After Bill 78 transfered on May 18 this year, in open rebuttal Montreal residents have taken to the streets in the thousands ” inclusive my new panda friend.

He’s an anarchist-pacifist, he told me after the luck meeting, but he calls himself Anarchopanda. You can find tributes from his fans on Facebook and a handful of videos of him on YouTube, hugging the fight cops finished with to conceal the extemporaneous marches that have flush every night given the bill’s passage.

His ardent online subsequent to and his signature hugs on the streets have done him the many identifiable protest-meme to advance out of Montreal’s hundred-and-some-dozen-day long tyro strikes, that Bill 78 was combined to put down.

Anarchopanda never meant to stir such adoration, similar to the in memory strain that incited up a couple of days after you met:

His night job, as he described it to me, is to be at the front line at any demonstration, to disband military tragedy and the prospective of violence. But he knows, he said, that the cameras and the prominence ” the eyes on him that they all consecrate ” are “one of the reasons because the panda hasn’t been arrested yet.”

“The panda.” That’s how he talks about himself. But underneath the strapped-on fur, he’s Julien Villeneuve, a highbrow of truth at a post-secondary college. He’s been unknown until this week, when he suggested his identity in the march of filing a authorised action in Montreal courts to safeguard the correct to protest.

Villeneuve originally came out to encouragement the tyro protestors before the lane of Bill 78 and before he became Anarchopanda. He initial went as segment of a organisation of professors called La Chane de Solidarit Profs-tudiants. “We wore vests that identified us as professors and when the military charged, we’d go on the front line with the students, between them and fight cops.” But as the protests wore on, and the anti-protest law was passed, the organisation began to dissolve.

“A lot of professors were injured, and a few couldn’t take it psychologically night after night,” he said. “At the end, there wasn’t a entire lot of people left and it was starting to look flattering silly. So I motionless to arrange of do it on my own, and to do it this time as the panda, and see what happened. My primary purpose is still to be there with the students when they obtain aggressed by the police.”

“Giving hugs to the students was not segment of the original outline at all,” Anarchopanda told me.

Unlike Occupy marches over the final 9 months in the States, Montreal’s street demonstrations – or, #manifencours, as you would find them reported on Twitter ” gather, cluster, and set off with small without doubt military confinement. If you wish to find one, the Montreal military have taken on the unusual open service of posting march locations to their own Twitter feed . (An Android app launched this week by Montreal developer Fabrice Veniard allows adults to do the same.)

Aside from their arguable tweets, patrolman actions on marches is unpredictable: A line of mounted military might cling to back a couple of blocks, usually to assign up hurriedly to scatter the exposed tail finish of a march. CUTV , the Concordia University-based crew who stick to the front of marches to be able to livestream them, have prisoner footage of Montreal military violence protestors with batons and unloading canisters of peppers mist and rip gas at shut range.

Everyone, after over a hundred days of this, could use a hug.

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