[News] Anarchists Plan Mayhem! Then Hold Press Conference

[News at freedomarchives.org]

<http://www.thenation.com/protest/index.mhtml?bid=12&pid=1713>http://www.thenation.com/protest/index.mhtml?bid=12&pid=1713
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08/27/2004 @ 6:22pm

Anarchists Plan Mayhem! Then Hold Press Conference
by Nation contributors

The New York Times may believe, misguidedly, that it's doing its civic duty 
when it warns us that the anarchists are coming to town, a "shadowy group 
of protesters" known for "throwing rocks or threatening officers." But 
surely no such benign motives lie behind the appearance of a similar story 
in the ultraconservative, and partisan, Washington Times, which quotes an 
FBI counterterrorism chief to the effect that "violent anarchist groups" 
are "'planning to do more than protest.'"

Local tabloids did their part to amp up the hysteria by naming 
names--names, that is, plucked randomly from some dusty red file. According 
to the New York Post, "extremists with ties to the 1970s radical Weather 
Underground have recently beenreleased from prison and are in New York 
preparing to wreak havocduring the Republican National Convention." The 
Daily News's piece of fantasy, which ran under the headline "Anarchists Hot 
for Mayhem," claimed that a former Black Panther named Kazi Toure was 
training young militants in weapons use. None of these stories bother to 
mention that almost every anticapitalist protester accused of violence over 
the past five years, from Seattle to Philadelphia to Montreal, has won 
acquittal or seen the baseless charges dropped. (Check out David Graeber's 
Nation piece on lies the police tell, and the press believes, about 
anarchists.)

Yesterday I spoke with several of the instigators singled out in these 
recent articles, which, it turns out, is more than the reporters at the 
Daily News and the Post bothered to do. "Wreak havoc?"asks Laura Whitehorn, 
now a Manhattan editor and one of the only members of the Weather 
Underground to serve time. "The most dangerous thing I'm planning for next 
week is to do yoga in the park. I'm on parole--so I'm not going anywhere 
near a demonstration."

According to the News, Jaggi Singh, a Canadian activist who organized 
anti-FTAA demonstrations in Quebec City in 2001, was one of Toure's 
trainees. But Singh says he's never met the man, never had arms 
training--and anyway, he isn't even making the trip to New York for the 
RNC. I also spoke with Janet Yip, of Refuse & Resist, listed by the Post as 
one of five "extremist" groups singled out by the NYPD in a manual titled 
"Executive Resource Handbook on Radical Groups." Yip says R&R did have RNC 
plans: an awards ceremony for activists last night and the permitted United 
for Peace and Justice march on Sunday. "What's extreme," she says, "is 
what's being done to our country."

Several of the inflammatory tabloid pieces have been posted to officer.com, 
a website for police officers, and activists fear that they'll influence 
police response. "They've been so pumped up with fear about us," says 
anarchist Eric Laursen, "that they may feel justified in snatching people 
off the streets at any excuse, caging protesters up and doing mass 
arrests." On Monday night Laursen gathered together Graeber, an 
anthropologist; author Starhawk; and half a dozen other anarchist thinkers 
at St. Mark's Church in the East Village for a media briefing to respond to 
the misinformation.

Though the speakers made a good-faith effort to explain what anarchism 
means to them (egalitarianism, nonhierarchical social structures) and why 
they're protesting the RNC, the reporters asked only about property 
destruction. Laursen, who's a member of the A31 coalition, which is 
coordinating a day of direct action for next Tuesday, says various 
collectives have sit-ins planned, and die-ins, and even dance-ins, as well 
as street theater good and bad (one group will dress in flight suits and 
play golf; another will walk the subway cars dressed as dead Iraqis), but 
he says no one's planning any property destruction that he's heard of.

"If the Post or the News thinks that direct action is always violent, then 
they probably think Rosa Parks was violent when she sat down in that 
Montgomery bus," Laursen says. "Direct action is when you stop supplicating 
for things that are rightfully yours, and instead take them. A huge part of 
Manhattan has been cordoned off and given to Republicans for their cocktail 
party, and significant public services are being devoted to making sure 
they don't even hear a pin drop outside. It's essential for us to truly 
reclaim the streets instead of being shoved off into some distant protest pen."

Esther Kaplan


The Freedom Archives
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