I hate this photo. I hate that this photo continues to be the media’s face of protest, nearly a decade after the Battle in Seattle. I hate that these black bloc anarchists fail to see that their tiny, worthless vandalism effectively neuters the voices of thousands upon thousands of others.
The MSNBC headline: GOP delegates attacked by protesters. It was “a violent counterpoint to an otherwise peaceful anti-war march”, but you don’t hear any more about the peaceful stuff.
There’s a double-blind here, in fact. While the media covers the violence and transgressions of a tiny minority of protesters (see also CNN coverage, Fox News), the peaceful masses are pushed down the page and easily dismissed as a non-story; and deeper still, the efforts of the St Paul police and the FBI to stifle protest with a series of unlawful raids and arrests of protestors goes mostly unexplored, buried in the tenth paragraph of the stories above and told from the police POV.
Glenn Greenwald, always essential reading, has been on this story since the start (in one of the raided houses, proof of FBI involvement; the story develops with a range of photos and video.) While excoriating big media for burying this story, he draws a comparison with China – everyone was ready to look darkly upon the suppression of protest in China, but no-one has much to say about the exact same thing taking place in the US.
This is what corrupt state oppression looks like. This isn’t hypothesising some future dystopia – this is living in one right now, where the biggest and most powerful democracy on the planet can criminalise its citizens as it pleases to stifle dissent during a political campaign. The bleak future has happened, is happening, right now.
Perhaps the stories of those raids resonate with me because down here the trial of the arrestees from New Zealand’s own “terror raids” is quietly moving along, to general apathy. Does anyone take those ominous warnings of terrorseriously any more? I would like to think not, but sadly I think that would be too optimistic.
8 thoughts on “RNC Protest”
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My visceral reaction on seeing these black-clad clowns is to want the cops to put the boots to them. The sight of them hurling Edinburgh benches – and any Edinburger knows that’s akin to hurling a gravestone – made me want to smash their little faces up myself.
And the genuine cause for protest is lost in the mess.
I like the way the protestor appears to be using the dark side of the force to break the window. Unless he’s Return of the Jedi black-clad Luke using the force to rescue gold-bikini Princess Leia from Jaba’s new downtown hideout.
“I hate that these black bloc anarchists fail to see that their tiny, worthless vandalism effectively neuters the voices of thousands upon thousands of others.”
I think they do see it. They just don’t care what you and your fat scaredy-pants soft-cock mates think.
Besides, smashing things is fun; smashing things with righeous indignation is even more fun.
If you think about it, your problem is explicitly with the lazy, biased media coverage, not people fighting on the same side as you in a different way. Masked people smashing things is more dramatic than a thousand people holding hands and singing. What pushes buttons gets on the page. A balanced, useful and accurate consideration of the issues does not get on the newspaper page, or television news. We slide towards the abyss because those who control the discourse have a vested interest in a) preventing change to the status quo, and b) controlling what change occurs.
Faced with a range of seemingly ineffectual options to deal with that, it is a question of perspective as to what is considered an appropriate response to our circumstances.
Perhaps all I am pointing out here, before people get too much holier than thou, is that the masked anarchist stereotype can also legitimately claim that if we were doing as they are, things would be better.
If all the peaceful masses of protestors were also willing to get out and smash stuff, the movement as a whole would quite possibly be much more effective in achieving its goals. Ten thousand people can destroy a lot more than ten. That would provoke a genuine response, be it outright suppression, or actually getting attention paid to the issues at hand on the terms of the protestors. “Raising social costs for elites.” Classic Chomsky, in a sense.
Put forward better actions/solutions that result in actual positive change, and you can turn the energy of those, in a sense, more committed and willing to put themselves on the line for “the cause”, to a better use.
One argument I just encountered, is that the “black bloc” ties up police and keeps them away from the peaceful majority.
You’re right that there’s a double-bind, but I think you misidentify it. What I see is that if there *is* this kind of violence, the media focus on that to the exclusion of the serious protest; whereas if there *isn’t* violence, merely peaceful protest, it’s a non-story, and the media still don’t report the serious protest. Choose how you want to be ignored: “otherwise peaceful” footnote, or no mention at all.
I think the crux of my position is this. Billy says “your problem is explicitly with the lazy, biased media coverage”, and I do have many huge problems with that, but that’s not the perspective I adopt here. I see the media as the environment that must be negotiated. Whether you like it or not, you have to plan your manoeuvres with this environment in mind – to protest strategically, you account for and take advantage of the media as effectively as you can. If you fail to do this, then you are failing at protest.
Ivan and Billy both point out that action of this kind at least generates a response; and that’s uncomfortably accurate. But the only reason that ten thousand broken windows would achieve more than ten is that the social conditions surrounding would be quite different; it isn’t the broken windows that cause a social cost to the elite, its the fact that masses of people are willing to rampage instead of just an aberrant thrillseeking few.
I think it goes even farther than media ratings, the media reports these methods of ‘protest’ (direct action really, while there’s a legal parade going on) because they realize that, at least here in the US, that is all people will bother ‘tuning into’. The peaceful protest has turned into a liberal ‘resume’ padding for budding young baristas, either that or old ‘hippies’ reliving the delusion that peaceful protest has ever worked without the threat of more serious tactics (weather underground, Panthers, etc). If these issues are so serious, when will you treat them as such? The media is responding to the response made by the public in 99/01 to all the brilliant protests. I think the greatest was Prague, when each bloc, three of them, split up and took on matters in their own methods, not selling each other out (as happened in seattle by ‘liberals’ and ‘unionists’). To each their own, but do you really think that media coverage is what qualifies your actions? As far as peaceful progressive action, what you do on a day to day basis is what really counts, not a blurb on the news, get over it. You are being fed the idea that peaceful protest is effective because it is not, you are contained, its a sick parody and half the time you pay for permits to do it! Freedom of assembly indeed.