"Stop the Violence!"?
Policing the antiglobalization movement
The antiglobalization movement will continue to build in numbers, coherence and effectiveness as evidenced by the recent events in Gothenburg, Sweden and Genoa, Italy. (This will happen despite the currently overwhelming mainstream-media focus on Bush's crusade against non-US- and non-Israeli-controlled terrorism.) Just as importantly, more and more people around the world are increasingly sympathetic with the range of messages and goals associated with the antiglobalization movement. As a direct result, the establishment media around the world continue to work overtime to put a negative spin on the movement, while the national and international forces of repression are also becoming increasingly active, violent and deadly. This isn't unexpected for all those who understand that no government in the world, nor any multinational corporation seeking to steal and exploit the world's resources, will sit by and allow such a potentially powerful and even potentially revolutionary movement to develop unhindered.
Violence has always been the last-though in many places and times also the first-resort of the rich and the powerful when confronted by growing legions of protestors resisting their rule. The responses are predictable. The people who have gained riches all out of proportion to the value of their contributions (if any) to society have rarely made their fortunes without large doses of theft, payoffs, lies, intimidation, or the fruits of other forms of corruption and violence. And the people who occupy positions of official power in government don't generally get there by practicing honesty, sensitivity, justice and nonviolence; they get there by giving exactly what is demanded to the large corporations, powerful institutions and rich families who bought their elections (or otherwise installed them in power). This means that from the minute the first radical activist even thought about protesting global summits, there were already teams of intelligence agents, secret police (FBI, CIA, DIA, BATF, etc.) and local red squads at work to defend their masters. Most of these agents and police carry deadly weapons for a good reason-they are ready to imprison or kill anyone who threatens the status quo of concentrated political power, concentrated wealth, concentrated media, the corporate rape of the earth for the extraction of resources, industrial production and consumption, wage slavery and submission to law.
So who are always the first people to call out to those who protest to "Stop the Violence!"? Is it the people who are being assaulted and beaten by cops, gassed with chemical weapons, shot with "non-lethal" as well as deadly weapons? The people who are suffering the brunt of the violence? Of course not. This call almost always comes from those who support the great mass of violence that is always aimed at the protestors by police, their provocateurs and other government-controlled armed forces. All the opponents of antiglobalization protests are quite happy and eager to join in calls to stop the violence of both already self-proclaimed "non-violent" protestors as well as of those protestors who reserve the power to fight back in self-defense when attacked, herded or corralled by cops. At the same time, the ubiquitous police violence remains invisible to these people. Why is this?
State authorities, corporate leaders and their bought-&-paid-for mass media have one major aim-to hobble, confuse, and eventually disperse and destroy the current antiglobalization upsurge. Their range of tactics will include anything that works without causing too many other problems for them. This means that police violence and judicial repression, along with lies and the sowing of mass confusion will remain their favored set of weapons. Since the truth about capitalism and globalization is their enemy, they will make every effort to obscure it. And since an informed, concerned, and active populace is also their enemy, they will take every opportunity to intimidate, harass, beat, jail and terrorize protestors whenever they can get away with it.
This means one thing above all others for those sympathetic with the aims of antiglobalization protests: Anyone who calls on antiglobalization protestors to "Stop the Violence!" without much more pointedly and vocally calling for an end to violence by cops is playing into the hands of the cops, their governmental masters, and the corporate mass media.
The more liberal arm of the establishment, corporate media will rarely fail to encourage and praise the liberal, progressive and pacifist globalization-reform elements for their "responsibility" (read: "ineffectiveness at fundamentally challenging the powers-that-be"), while demonizing the radical anticapitalists among antiglobalization protestors. This is obviously because the liberal arm of the corporate media understands the importance of recuperating radical resistance. The more conservative arm of the mass media, like the "bad cop" of the "good" and "bad cop" routine, will generally denounce any protestors anywhere who aren't explicitly demanding more power to the corporations and state.
Thus, the liberal media will always eat up statements like that of Anne Summers, the international board chair of Greenpeace, who wrote in the Sydney Morning Herald (7/23/01) that "...the violent part of the [antiglobalization] movement is to be condemned," even as she expressed (what she obviously considers an uncontroversial opinion) that people should seriously consider the criticisms of the antiglobalization movement by Henry Kissinger (a man responsible for nothing less than mass murder in a number of countries!). By such statements people like Anne Summers make themselves the enemies of the antiglobalization movement and must be treated as such. Any genuine movement criticisms of protest violence must always be framed in the explicit context of the condemnation of the (always much more brutal and illegitimate) violence of the forces of state and corporate repression.
Jason McQuinn, Editor