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.
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/ dave /