...I've heard quite a few people, in talking about the G20 Protests, make statements that go something like “After the police told people not to come downtown, anybody who did knew what they were getting into.” and “I'm okay with people marching, but once you start breaking windows, then the police have to shut things down and arrest a lot of people.” Once again, I want to take these statements seriously and answer them honestly.
My opinion on this stuff is based on my understanding of the history of government and police reaction to movements demanding change, and also my direct experience – and the experience of people I'm close to – of participating in such movements.
First, my reading of history. It's really pretty simple. Having read a lot of the history of movements for social change, it's clear to me that the institutions that people are demanding change from always resist that change. Always. Not forever. But every single time.
It's not much more controversial than the general idea that powerful institutions and people tend to want to preserve and increase their power, and tend not to want to share it or give it up. From the peasant uprisings throughout history and around the world, to the French or American revolutions, to the end of British colonial rule in India, to the American civil rights movement, the struggle for women's equality everywhere, or the struggles for safety, respect, half-decent pay, some security, and a weekend for workers (and the broader population), the people and institutions in power always resist. And though they are often eventually convinced or overthrown, they always resist with force, and coercion and repression. Sometimes it's less brutal than other times, or less long-lasting, sometimes political accommodations come more quickly and peacefully than others. But the state fights back every time.
Many examples of this fight back, which I'll refer to as the repression of movements for change, are common knowledge. Think about it. The British government didn't just agree with the American Revolutionaries that taxation without representation wasn't fair, and that self-determination is the right of all people. (Those revolutionaries of course said “men”, and most of them meant “white men with property”, underlining the fact that those same revolutionaries were in turn seen as oppressors by yet other people.) The British imprisoned the rebels, legislated against them, and then killed as many of them as they could in a war, in order to resist the movement for change. It is widely known that in resisting the Civil Rights movement in the United States, the authorities used fire-hoses and dogs and imprisonment to repress the freedom riders and lunch-counter sit-ins and other demonstrations, while the unofficial authorities used beating and lynching. It is widely known that the government of South Africa kept Nelson Mandela in prison for 27 years for his work against apartheid.
Less common knowledge is the broad pattern of often unpublicized repression that generally happens away from the spotlight of large protests or boycotts or campaigns. This repression is aimed at the most vocal advocates of change and at the organizations they are a part of. For any change movement you can think of, there is usually a long period in its history when its advocates and participants were being harassed, imprisoned, attacked or even killed. Though Martin Luther King Jr. is now regarded as an American hero, he was the target of a long, covert and hostile campaign by the FBI, designed to neutralize him as a civil rights leader, while he was actually alive and working for change. Movements for change take a long time to build, and the institutions that they are trying to change fight back the whole time, targeting those individuals who are kicking up a fuss and organizing other people to do so.
In talking about repression generally, I'm trying to challenge the idea that protest happens and the authorities are fine with it, until it turns “violent” and then those authorities have to “respond”. My brief sketch of political repression, combined with my thoughts about people fighting back against the violence and other mistreatment they experience daily in their societies, is designed to share my understanding that forces for change and the institutions and people that are hurting them are involved a long-term and often violent process of responding to each other. Before any demonstration or boycott or riot happens on the street, two things have been going on for years: the basic mistreatment and injustice that people are upset about, and the individual targeting of the most vocal advocates to change things.
The reason I'm sketching all this out is to try to influence your perception of the chain of events that happened at the G20 protests in Toronto, which gets simplified to “a protest happened, it got violent, and the police responded…” I'd like to convince you that the chain of events is much longer, that it is normal and has a history, and that police action can be best understood as not trying to curb violence in the moment, but as trying to repress protest generally over the long haul...
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