Cypherpunk Agitprop.

[mattd]

http://www.anarchymag.org/52/violence.html

"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