[Ppnews] Supporting the Prisoners of the G20 Police State

[Political Prisoner News]

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.




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