Protester Shot in Head, Run Over in Genoa

[/ dave /]

This is a perfect incident with which it's easy to separate the
courageous activists who are wisely committed that their cause should
rest on a solid bedrock of verifiable, supportable information from the
always-inevitable group of others who are either a) under- or
ill-informed, perhaps somewhat understandably given the circumstances,
or b) prone to engage in haphazard assumptions and/or willful
obfuscation owing to the fact that they imagine (perhaps rightfully)
that they won't be held to account and can engage in the same kind of
tactics that they routinely decry in their foes.

This last is a problem endemic to large-scale situations where certain
individuals who feel they have an unquestioning body of mass support
behind them begin to get careless and sloppy with the facts, owing to
general laziness or in the interest of "hastening their cause." What
happens instead is that the masses - not being as stupid, or easily
duped, or content with suspiciously half-baked incidents to rally
behind, as the aforementioned individuals seem to think they are - begin
to fall away in their sympathies for the cause, because although they
may be inclined in their hearts to support the the overall aims of the
movement, they intuitively shrink from getting behind something that
they feel can't stand up to scrutiny. Who wouldn't?

Is the shooting in Genoa an example of this kind of situation? Having
looked at many of the photos from the incident, most of them taken by
Dylan Martinez who just happened to be where the incident occurred and
was able to document the unfolding events second-by-second, it seems to
me that many of the rhetorically-charged statements floating around are
a bit precarious, or at the very least premature. As far as I can tell
there were maybe two cops trapped inside the police vehicle, the driver
and a man in the back, with a concrete barrier blocking them in front
and a throng of protestors around the back and sides - at least a few of
whom seemed to be clearly disinclined to settle for mere property damage
and instead were going for blood:

http://dailynews.yahoo.com/h/p/nm/20010720/wl/imdf20072001155102a.html
http://dailynews.yahoo.com/h/p/nm/20010720/wl/imdf20072001155306a.html
http://dailynews.yahoo.com/h/p/nm/20010720/wl/imdf20072001143144a.html

In the first photo, where the windows are already completely broken out,
it seems obvious that anyone - whether cop, capitalist, anarchist,
Catholic, lesbian, pacifist, grandmother, uncle, steelworker, whatever -
is going to react in-kind when hemmed-in inside a trapped, isolated
vehicle while a seemingly enraged, muscular aggressor rams a rigid
wooden plank in one's face and his compatriots do the same with
reinforced metal pipes and similar implements while a group of
like-minded individuals closes in. Disregarding whether the cop's life
is worth the consideration for the moment, not out of callousness but
because it will only provoke tangential discussion, it would appear from
the above that any resulting injuries on the protestor side are going to
be largely as a result of a last-ditch effort on the part of the vehicle
occupants to preserve their very existence. It follows therefrom that
the protestors cannot then turn around and claim yet another incident of
state aggression in this case. There are plenty of others to hold up as
examples before we would need to begin resorting to the ones that reside
on such shaky terrain.

It seems that the overarching conflict between "might and right" was
reduced in this instance to four or five individual human beings engaged
in an isolated life-and-death struggle with the aggressors, momentarily,
arising from the side of the good. So then the question needs to be
asked: what was the concrete aim of the protestors, or at least that
contingent of same who were, seemingly, trying to inflict mortal harm on
the two officers? It's a question we're most often compelled to ask when
the forces of state/corporate aggression are directed towards us,
perhaps exemplified by the following image:

http://dailynews.yahoo.com/h/p/nm/20010721/wl/imdf21072001124104a.html

But when mortal aggression, uncharacteristically, flows in the opposite
direction, one has to ask if a) there are justfiable aims (which is
entirely possible) or b) the practices of the oppressor class are being
carelessly or thoughtlessly reproduced by the oppressed. We would be
engaging in laughable self-deception to assert the latter wasn't
possible, and we would be fools to discount it as unimportant.

In any case, it would be an act of supreme cowardice to shrink from a
sober analysis of the evidence in any given situation. There seems to be
a wide gulf between the actuality of this incident and some of the
statements about state power which are being bandied about in relation
to it, statements which would otherwise be well-taken but which in
context seem grandiloquent and not a little out of place. And Joe's
comment that, "In that context, any violence used at this protest is
basically self-defense by the working class against the exploiting
class" is all well and good, but you've got to convince untold millions
that the images they're seeing on TV and the internet of two human
beings in a small vehicle being set upon by others correlate with that
and "sit right" without unspoken contradictions rising to the surface.

The bottom line is, it's a pity, as always, that so many individual
human beings have been compelled to fight out such battles against each
other in the streets while the real culprits and instigators of woe
convene safely behind closed doors. Would that some of these conflicts
and issues could visit them in a more immediate fashion sometime soon.

--

/  dave  /