[Ppnews] Supporting the Prisoners of the G20 Police State
Political Prisoner News
ppnews at freedomarchives.org
Wed Jul 7 14:22:53 EDT 2010
http://www.counterpunch.org/gelderloos07072010.html
July 7, 2010
The Toronto Sixteen
Supporting the Prisoners of the G20 Police State
By PETER GELDERLOOS
This week, my mind is with the sixteen Canadians
who will be transported between their maximum
security jail cells and the court to determine
whether they will be held in prison until trial
or released on extremely restrictive bail
conditions. They are accused of organizing the
protests against the elite G20 summit of world
leaders that took place in Toronto at the end of
June. At these protests, thousands of people took
to the streets in opposition to specific policies
of these twenty leading world governments or in
negation of the global political and economic
system in its entirety. Protestors enacted their
disagreement and outrage in a variety of ways
that included protest, counterinformation, and
property destruction targeting the summit
security forces and several major corporations.
In all, over 1000 people were arrested during
three days of protest, many of them detained
based on their appearance, put in cages, sexually
harassed or assaulted, injured, denied food,
water, legal and medical attention, and
<http://vimeo.com/12925239>otherwise abused. Of
those thousand plus detainees, these sixteen are
facing the
<http://www.thestar.com/news/gta/article/832173--sixteen-people-still-in-custody-on-g20-charges-lawyers-say>heaviest
charges, accused of conspiracy as the supposed ringleaders of the mayhem.
Some of them were arrested in early morning
raids, forced half-naked out of bed at gunpoint,
assembled on their lawns and handcuffed in the
pre-dawn darkness, and hauled off to jail. Others
were picked up while biking or walking around
town, sometimes by plainclothes cops making
lightning grabs, a tactic perfected by the
Stalinist police (the cops are internationalists,
you see, and their methods for control travel
across borders with much greater ease than they allow the rest of us).
None of this should be surprising. Powerful men
in suits convening to discuss world problems;
heavily armed police kicking down a door and
sticking a gun in your facethis is the most
ordinary juxtaposition imaginable in a democratic society.
The G20, just like the G8 and just like the
International Monetary Fund or World Trade
Organization and just like capitalism as a whole,
is an act of exclusion, and when the stakes are
this high, exclusion is always a violent thing.
The governments that compose the G20, like all
governments everywhere, base their power on
forcibly excluding anyone else from making
decisions that affect their lives. When the G20
convene to talk about global warming or financial
crisesproblems which they largely created, which
they profit from immensely, and which they will
escape the worst effects ofthey are not making
decisions in any positive sense, so much as
preventing all the rest of us from addressing teose problems
Unfortunately, the policies of the G20, and the
tactical question of the protests against it,
generally appear as separate issues in the
progressive alternative media. But in reality, it
is impossible to draw a line between the harmful
consequences of governmental and corporate
policy, the elitist way in which they determine
that policy, and the extreme level of police
control that accompany their summits.
The fact that the global economy functions simply
to keep capital moving, regardless of who is
harmed in the process, the fact that elite
institutions and politicians can respond to
capitalist crisis by funneling billions to the
banks and kicking normal people out of their
houses, and the fact that people who protest this
are surveilled and brutalized through a program
of counterterrorism, are all aspects of the same
truth: being robbed of our ability to live with
health and dignity and being prohibited from
intervening in our own lives are the same thing.
The gun in the face and the televised speech are
two motions in the same process.
Because this kind of authority always provokes
resistance, another fundamental process of
authority is not to beat down resistance so much
as to discipline it to follow the rules. So, RBC
can fund gentrification and oil drilling, British
Petroleum can kill their workers and destroy the
Gulf of Mexico, border guards can murder
immigrants, cops can torture youths, the normal
functioning of the Canadian economy can murder
over three times as many people through workplace
accidents as are claimed by homicides, but if
protestors smash a bank window or light a cop car
on fire, they are denounced as violent.
And above all, this operation is carried out by
fellow protestors, who echo the media and
Canadian politicians in describing the property
destruction that occurred in downtown Toronto as
a tragedy. But downtown Toronto already was a
tragedy. What more human response could there be
to a financial districtan urban space devoid of
life, deprived of affordable rents, scoured of
autonomous livelihoods, subordinated to the needs
of traffic and commerce, held under the eye of
surveillance cameras, occupied by police, and
plagued with corporate outlets and banksthan to destroy it?
Yet curiously, a chorus of liberals are
reproducing the tired lie that only agent
provocateurs could possibly be audacious enough
to attack the system, that the Black Bloc is
comprised partially or entirely of infiltrators.
I can assure these liberals that there are
thousands of anarchists in North America who
would love to trash a police car or a bank. There
are millions of other people who would love to do
these things as well. The fact that so many
liberals denounced these actions would suggest
that liberals, along with rich people, are one of
the few demographics who don't harbor any rancor
for cops or banks, or that they are the political
equivalent of Victorians, suppressing their
appreciation of something that is both healthy
and necessary. This level of denial reminds me of
the hacks who decried the violence in the
Canadian newspapers, speaking of provocations by
an irresponsible minority, while the accompanying
photographs, careful to always to show only
individuals or small groups damaging property,
could not hide the huge crowds gathering around
the delinquents, composed of unmasked, normally
dressed people, taking pictures and smiling as
they watched the destruction. Those bystanders
knew what anyone who is still human knows well:
that a burning cop car is a beautiful thing.
Anarchists are great organizers: some of us
participate in the community groups you admire,
set up the alternative media you rely on, arrange
housing and logistics for the protests you
attend, carry out the direct actions that
revitalize the campaigns that are important to
you. It should be safe to assume that at least
sometimes we could manage to commit a little
property destruction without the help of police infiltrators.
It might also be safe to suggest that those
dissidents who mirror the police and politicians
in their sycophantic denunciation of violence
share some other points in common with the
authorities. Namely, they assist in the same
project of democratic government, which is to
convince people to participate in their own
exploitation, whether through elections or
profit-sharing or whatever other gimmick, and to
insist on the validity of rules that will always
be applied more harshly to us than to the elite.
The pragmatic justification is that the violence
distracts from the real issues, but it is long
past the point where we have to recognize that
the media will never talk about the issues,
except to allow them to be reframed for the
benefit of the economy and the government. This
police operation only works if dissidents
participate. If we continue to focus on the
reasons for fighting back against the system by
whatever means, and there will always be an
uncontrollable diversity of means in a diverse
struggle, then there will be no distraction,
except for the distraction of the corporate
media, which is ever present. Either the media
will pull their hair out about our violence, or
they will turn the spotlight on the latest
celebrity news, the latest politician's speech.
To talk about anything else, anything real, is up to us.
To talk about broken windows when the G20 come to
town is to participate in a policing operation
that has our doors broken in and guns pointed in
our faces, regardless of whether we justify this
collaboration with a discourse of nonviolence or
one of security. It is to contradict even that
most tepid of progressive clichés: people over profit.
To consider questions of guilt or innocence in
the case of these sixteen people facing
conspiracy charges is to indulge in all the
hypocrisy of a judge, a prosecutor, or a cop. It
doesn't matter that most of these people were
already arrested when the property destruction
occurred, and it doesn't matter that they didn't
lead any conspiracies because we anarchists don't
have leaders, and we certainly don't need them to
carry out a little bit of vandalism.
What matters is that when all those workers died,
when all those people were evicted, when all that
money was taken from us by the banks, when all
those bombs fell, when all that air and water
were poisoned, no one in power was punished and
it didn't matter whether rules were broken or
followed. To speak of rules and laws is to
perpetuate one of the greatest lies of our society.
What matters is that a great many more banks and
cop cars will have to be thrown on the trash fire
of history before we can talk about a new world,
so we'd better stop getting so upset by such a modest show of resistance.
What matters is that the $1.3 billion security
budget that accompanied the G20 summit is not a
concern of the past. The police still have all
that new crowd control weaponry and training, and
they still have yet another experience of
grinding their boot in our face and getting
rewarded for it, while we have yet another
experience of putting up with total surveillance
and control, of being disciplined to get used to it.
This is their vision of the future: cops and
security cameras everywhere, preemptive arrests
for simply planning or talking about resistance,
people with masks or spraypaint or eye wash for
the teargas being treated as terrorists. We can
either get used to this future, and continue to
believe in the validity of their rules, or we can
fight back. For just as there is no difference
between dispossession and disempowerment, there
can be no line between opposing what the G20
stand for and showing solidarity to those who
have been arrested for fighting against it.
One of the best ways to keep up the pressure on
the banks, the oil companies, the war profiteers,
the media, and the politicians, is to support
those who are facing charges for organizing resistance.
Because none of us are free until all of us are free.
Peter Gelderloos is the author of
<http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0896087727/counterpunchmaga>How
Nonviolence Protects the State.
Freedom Archives
522 Valencia Street
San Francisco, CA 94110
415 863-9977
www.Freedomarchives.org
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