Leadership Quote by John Blair

Order is the headline here, and admiration is the tell. Blair frames the march as a success story of restraint: “planned” signals premeditation, “gladly” signals relief, and the paired negatives - “non violent and non confrontational” - read like a checklist for respectable protest. The sentence isn’t just descriptive; it’s prophylactic. It reassures nervous onlookers that dissent stayed within the boundaries the state and polite society can tolerate.

Then comes the loaded pivot: “What really impressed me…” The focus isn’t the cause, the grievances, or the message. It’s behavioral compliance, and specifically the “self discipline of the Black Block.” That phrase does two things at once. It concedes that this group was expected to be the problem, and it congratulates them for not fulfilling the stereotype. Praise becomes a kind of soft surveillance: you are admirable insofar as you are controllable.

The subtext is classic politician’s calculus. By spotlighting a group often coded as radical, Blair can claim even the “dangerous” elements behaved, which lets him launder the event into a civic-friendly narrative: protest as orderly performance rather than disruptive leverage. It also subtly shifts responsibility onto protesters to prove their worthiness, implying that any disorder would be a moral failure of discipline, not a reflection of political desperation or state response.

Context matters, because Blair (1732-1800) sits in an era that prized public stability and feared crowds as volatile political technology. The quote reads like a governing class learning, grudgingly, that mass politics can be managed - and preferring it that way.