In Genoa's Wake

by Geov Parrish

For some 20 months, from Seattle through Washington and Melbourne and Windsor and Philadelphia and Los Angeles and Prague and Davos and Quebec and Goteborg, tactics have been escalating on both sides as the protests against gatherings of the world's political and economic elites have gotten larger and more raucous. In Seattle, some 50,000 nonviolent protesters and blockaders, enraged by international institutions that, they claim, exacerbate global poverty, environmental destruction and the loss of democracy, were overshadowed by a few dozen window-breaking vandals. By the time of Quebec and Goteborg, large blocks of protesters had come to tolerate property destruction and the hurling of everything from teddy bears to Molotov cocktails, as a means to make a point.

On the police side, the brutality that shocked the world in Seattle was actually a step removed from what it could have been. National Guard troops with live ammunition stood by but never opened fire. As the protests have escalated, the wholesale use of chemical warfare against protesters -- whether they were breaking any laws or not -- has, at least in the public eye, become old news, and to many people an acceptable price to pay to keep the "hoodlums" at bay. The media has surely helped; in Quebec and Goteborg, the worst of the police mayhem was best reported not by the combined resources of the world's elite media, but by Indymedia.org. The U.S. networks almost uniformly ignored it, blaming the victims of police violence for the violence itself.

And now, in Italy, a man is dead. It was coming to this.

Carlo Giuliani A sequence of photographs and captions showing his killing is available for download in a Microsoft Powerpoint presentation

Perhaps more telling, even, than the death of a 23-year-old Genoa anarchist, Carlo Giuliani, at the hands of a terrified paramilitary conscript three years his junior, is the hundreds of serious injuries that also occurred as Italian security forces launched repeated, unprovoked attacks on G8 Summit protesters. Of the 150,000 or so estimated to have gathered on the streets of Genoa, all but about 2,000 are thought to have been committed to the nonviolence pact agreed upon in advance by the Genoa Social Forum, a coalition of some 1,300 groups that was an umbrella group for many of the protests. It didn't matter. Italian authorities, working closely with U.S. and other police agencies, made a calculated decision to dramatically escalate the level of violence with which these protests, now inescapable at international summits, would be met.

There are numerous chilling accounts of the contempt for civil liberties and human rights that marked security during the Genoa summit, but the image that has circled the world is the prone body of Carlo Giuliani. He died, in part, because he and his comrades cornered terrified young paramilitary officers in a tactically foolish way. He died because he and his comrades identified the police, rather than the policies protesters abhor, as the enemy to be fought. But he also died because Italian police weren't carrying rubber bullets, only live rounds. And beyond Giuliani, hundreds more people -- anarchist black bloc, "pacifisti," journalists and bystanders alike -- were seriously wounded, not because of their actions or tactical mistakes, but due to intentional, premeditated attacks by militarized police. It was a bloodbath. War.

Genoa is reminiscent of nothing so much as Kent State, where, after hundreds of thousands (at least) of deaths in Southeast Asia, it took the deaths of four young, privileged American students on a Midwest campus in May 1970 to galvanize opposition and transform the U.S. anti-war movement into a force that shut down campuses across the country for a full season. At the time of Kent State, the general public's opinion, shaped by contemptuous politicians and a judgmental media, was that the Guardsmen acted properly and that the Kent State students were anti-American thugs who had it coming.

This time, unlike at Kent, the violence was planned and approved by the highest levels of government. In tandem, the Italian constitution was thrown out the window, starting with the government's suspension of EU rules allowing free passage of citizens among European countries, all the way through overtly fascisti, Mussolini-invoking cops who brutalized thousands without provocation. Such dangerous, menacing behavior -- intended as much to dissuade future demonstrators as to control crowds at Genoa -- is likely to continue to escalate until it proves either politically ineffective or no longer necessary.

And, as in the Third World, the threat will not suppress the movement. For each of the many issues involved, things are neither getting better nor even staying the same. George W. Bush's smug platitudes notwithstanding, they are getting worse, at times rapidly, even irreversibly. And since the global justice movement itself is essentially leaderless -- or full of leaders -- and transcends so many different issues and places, it cannot easily be either coopted or repressed. Yet politicians can't satisfactorily address any of its core demands without damaging at least some of the corporate and economic interests which put them in power.

This leaves policymakers with three generally unworkable options: 1) dramatically change policies; 2) use reforms to split or coopt the movement; or 3) repress the movement, violently if necessary.

In the face of escalating security measures, global justice advocates have managed to disrupt summits exceedingly well, repeatedly drawing the attention of the world's media and the ire of paramilitary state forces. They have also, in some arenas (especially around debt relief), won reform-oriented gestures that are grossly inadequate but still far better than could have been imagined two years ago. They have broad public support in some parts of the world (especially the South). In George W. Bush, like Ronald Reagan before him, the world sees an ignorant American fool with terrifying power; and Dubya, unlike Bonzo's buddy, has no competing superpower to either slow him or scare allies into submission. Bush's friendly, arrogant, clueless face may turn out to be the best recruiting tool global justice activists could ever have wanted.

But is public opinion enough? As enraged activists rightly charge, supranational institutions like the G8, the WTO, World Bank, IMF, APEC, NAFTA, FTAA and so on have no provisions for democratic input on policies that are literally shaping the world. And the spectrum of changes demanded by advocates is so sweeping, and the principles invoked so counter to the perceived short-term interests of the corporatocracy, that they are literally revolutionary. The global justice movement, so far, has been a spectacle, but hardly the stuff of such changes.

We saw, 12 years ago, how rapidly a popular movement can take hold and shake a world. Over 30 countries experienced nearly entirely bloodless revolutions in the span of a few months in 1989-90, and nobody saw it coming. The people in those countries were often responding to generations of cruel repression, but they were also rebelling against forces thought to be impervious, and which proved (except in Beijing) to be deadly but paper-thin. And in 12 years, there have been vast changes in the speed with which the planet can be circled by information, tactics, inspiration and images like a dead Genovese man in the street.

The global justice movement may be on the cusp of something, but nobody seems to know what. It is far too multifaceted and scattered to "lead," or even steer. The possibility for entropy or violent repression is very real. Less real -- so far -- is the possibility for sweeping, positive change from either existing or new institutions. But once the rhetoric is stripped away, that's the goal. Such changes almost certainly cannot happen, let alone happen soon, unless protesters can propose paths for how, from our current set of circumstances, a new, previously unimaginable world might unfold.

Here at home, a majority of the public knows that these protests are occuring, but doesn't even have a clear idea of what the protesters are upset about, let alone want. Clearly, the global justice movement is not going to get any signioficant help from mainstream media or politicians in popularizing either its greivances or any possible solutions. Even as American activists point towards IMF/World Bank meetings in Washington DC Sept. 28-Oct. 4, they must start envisioning beyond the street warfare.

What must emerge are not ideologies or utopian blueprints, but practical, just, achievable, and necessarily imaginative solutions to vexing problems and conflicting needs -- and ways to make those solutions visible, comprehendable and desirable to the public. It's a tall order. But if activists show that an entire constellation of global policies is fundamentally flawed, and don't give others a clear idea of what they want instead and how to get it, somebody else will fill that vacuum. And it won't be good.