In the run-up to the deadly G-8 summit in Genoa, Time Magazine published an article entitled “Chaos Incorporated” that took a look at the “groups getting ready to rumble” in the Northern Italian portside town. Violence, at least that allegedly committed by protesters, is the subject of the article.
The subtext, though, is that there are "bad" protesters who are delegitimizing the movement because of their violence. The solution according to Time? Maybe it's time for protest groups to “suspend large-scale demonstrations." The editors of the former Soviet Pravda would swell with pride at such a well-crafted piece of propaganda.
That is what capital would love to see. Of course Time Magazine, full of ads for oil companies, consumer products, financial behemoths, would never suggest that Shell suspend its drilling operations in Nigeria because of its role in the arming and funding of death squads, that Coca-Cola stop selling soft drinks in Colombia because it reportedly used right-wing death squads for "the systematic intimidation, kidnapping, detention and murder" of workers in its plants there, or that Chase Manhattan stop its Mexican operations because of a memo it sent to the Mexican government demanding that they "crush" the rebellious Zapatistas.
The biggest problem with this screed, is that it's so willfully one-sided. Not one word about police repression, violence, provocateurs. Nothing about the hypocrisy of globalizers who wail about their misunderstood commitment to democracy while suspending civil liberties, engaging in mass arrests, and snatching peaceful protesters off the street. (John Sellers in Philly, or Jaggi Singh in Quebec City, who was seized by undercover cops jumping out of an unmarked vehicle. That doesn't sound very democratic, so let's act like it never happened.)
Are Time Magazine editors the most uninformed journalists in the world? Seems like they weren't aware of public forums documenting hundreds of accounts of orchestrated police brutality during the 1999 WTO protests in Seattle. They must be blind too, because then they would have seen numerous videotapes of unprovoked police violence there, like the police officer who approached a car, asked the driver to roll down the window, and then pepper-sprayed the car's occupants. Time also seems incapable of acknowledging, along with virtually all of the corporate media, that the "riotous unrest" in Seattle it mentions was perpetrated by police against peaceful protesters blockading streets. (As many know, except maybe Time’s pencil-wielding overseers, the window smashing by anarchists happened long after the police violence started and was unconnected to it.)
Time’s editors must have been on vacation last August during the Democratic convention in Los Angeles. Otherwise they would have noted the well-documented police riot in L.A., including the rubber bullet shootings of many professional journalists. The newsweekly’s editors are apparently in need of a geography lesson. Nothing about the nearly 5,000 canisters of chemical weapons fired during the FTAA protests in Quebec City in April. (Chemical weapons? Heaven forbid that we mention that governments use weaponry against peaceful civilians that are expressly forbidden for use during wartime.)
There probably isn't anyone at Time who speaks Spanish, because they would have examined the reams of videotape showing the brazen use of violent police provocateurs in Barcelona. Then again, they must not speak English either, since the A.P. had a well-detailed account of this naked police aggression. They must have also missed the eyewitness testimony and video footage of police provocateurs in Prague, Quebec City, Gothenburg, Philadelphia, Los Angeles, and Washington, D.C.
Time's editors must think Papua New Guinea is the latest addition to the Pokemon bestiary. How else to explain their failure to mention that security forces opened fire, killing four and wounding many others, on students who had raised their hands in the air and were trying to surrender to police during anti-IMF protests in June?
Time's reporter in Sweden must have enjoyed the sights and sounds of beautiful Gothenburg. Nothing in the article about how cops surrounded a school full of peaceful activists with almost a hundred sand-filled freight containers before the summit there even began, and the subsequent use of attack dogs and mounted police against nonviolent crowds despite police assurances that nothing of the sort would happen. The reporter must have been too busy to see the videotape showing the Gothenburg cop shooting the still-hospitalized protester in the back.
Maybe Time's editors could use a Journalism 101 refresher. They might stumble across the concept of "background." What's becoming routine at these gatherings is the trashing of democracy. Six hundred illegally arrested during a legal march before the IMF-WB protests in April 2000 and the authorization of “shoot-to-kill” orders to the D.C. police. Or the arrest of 420 people during the Republican convention in Philadelphia, and the subsequent dismissal or acquittal of virtually every defendant. Or the raids on “convergence centers” at every protest. Or the suspension of civil liberties. Nary a word of how Italian authorities declared large parts of Genoa off-limits to flyering, postering and demonstrating (just like in Quebec City). The pattern was established in Seattle, where the city declared downtown “a no-protest zone” following the first tumultuous day of demonstrations.
Time’s editors must have lost their date book, too. Nothing said about the bio-tech convention in San Diego in June that drew a few thousand protesters and a stifling police response. During a march of over 1,000 activists, police arrested demonstrators for the flimsiest of charges, like jaywalking or carrying signs with wooden sticks that didn’t meet the city code. A police spokesman gloated that if the repressive atmosphere kept people from protesting, then they were happy with that.
But the suppression of basic democratic rights doesn’t fit neatly into the narrative about violent protesters, so it gets excised completely.
There’s also the pattern of hysterical police claims of weapons that get hyped up by the press right before the protests, and then when the frenzy has passed, the subsequent mumbled official acknowledgement that it wasn't quite so. (A smoke device seized in Canada becomes an explosive; puppets and cell phones become weapons in Philadelphia; a bottle with paint thinner for poster making is a Molotov cocktail in D.C.; a penknife is a weapon to Canadian border guards.) In Genoa, a letter bomb that exploded prior to the summit is cast as exhibit A in the protester’s arsenal of mayhem. Never mind that police now say the bomb had nothing to do with the summit and is connected to a local feud.
Time Magazine could also use a lesson in "attribution." The “Chaos Incorporated” article contains the following line: “ ‘In Italy the police can't fire on the protesters,’ says a security official. ‘The problem comes if one of the protesters fires on the police.’ " Who is this unnamed security official making this unsubstantiated assertion? Now that a protester has been shot—and killed--in Genoa, will Time’s reporters now go back to this mysterious source and ask them who did the shooting? Maybe their source will say, “The demonstrator’s head clashed repeatedly with bullets of unknown origin.”
The media will typically report the most outrageous allegations from often unnamed police sources. During the IMF meeting last year, the Washington Post quoted a high-ranking D.C. cop who claimed that demonstrators were dressing up as cops and attacking other protesters in a bid to make the police look violent. Or the USA Today report from the same demonstrations that asserted protesters threw broken bottles ... and used their own cans of pepper spray on police.” Then there was the Boston Globe article last year quoting local police alleging that Seattle protesters used “chunks of concrete, BB guns, wrists rockets and large capacity squirt guns loaded with bleach and urine.” And last August, the Philadelphia Daily News asserted that activists “tossed smoke bombs and balloons filled with urine at officers, and threw acid into several cops’ faces.”
Never mind that no one was ever arrested for any of these reputed acts. Nor was any evidence ever produced. The purpose in reprinting these hysterical police fantasies is to prepare the public to see the impending police violence as measured and appropriate.
And when the police violence becomes extreme, it gets blacked out. In the case of Time Magazine, though, maybe it isn't familiar with an obscure humans right group by the name of Amnesty International. Otherwise they certainly would have mentioned the rampant police torture Amnesty documented during the Prague protests last September.
This is just a tiny sampling of documented state-sponsored violence against the new protest movement. Just like the FBI’s war against domestic activists in the 60s and 70s, it will take decades for a more thorough accounting.
It seems appropriate that activists should contact the editors at Time Magazine and ask them why they deliberately ignore, downplay and justify state-organized violence. And if they ask those in the pro-democracy movement, which is really the best way to describe the various forces involved, about the violence, they should be unequivocally clear: "We condemn the violence called for by politicians, perpetrated by police and justified by the corporate media against those fighting for a just, humane and democratic world."
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Arun Gupta is a member of the New York City Independent Media Center ebrownies at hotmail.com ************************************************* Alternative Press Review - www.altpr.org Your Guide Beyond the Mainstream PO Box 4710 - Arlington, VA 22204
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