Comment 42530

By Undustrial (registered) - website | Posted June 28, 2010 at 18:31:13

If peaceful protesting worked, raised issues effectively, or actually got the positive media attention that "violent" protesters prevent, then why are we still in Iraq and Afghanistan? We've seen the largest protests since the Vietnam Era, some with hundreds of thousand of people, and virtually all peaceful. The coverage we got were token human interest stories at best. There is a fundamental unwillingness to cover radical issues or perspectives within the media, no matter how they're being brought up, or how much evidence they have. Read a bunch of newspaper articles on crime policy, then 10 academic papers (hardly the "radical lunatic fringe"). You'll see

I'd be a lot more moved by the whole "peaceful protest" argument if so many of the people who've lectured me about it in the last week weren't virtually all people who made a solid policy of ignoring or bashing all the peaceful protests I've been involved with (probably 10 to 1, numerically, versus the rowdy ones I've witnessed) too. Anarchists spend almost all of our time on simple community work - community gardens, bookfairs, or getting involved with virtually any mainstream social struggle you could name (poverty, the environment, labour, First Nations etc). For this we get virtually no media recognition, especially when the activist cause has a convenient liberal critique which the newspapers would prefer to cover, which fit much more nicely into a 300-word column.

Everything I've heard out of Toronto at the moment is absolutely terrifying. I know the relevant laws VERY WELL (having had to help friends get out of them many times over the last decade), and what the police have been doing is illegal in the extreme. I can't talk about many of them quite yet (other people's pending legal charges etc), but they're laughable and break basic police guidelines (like officers refusing to give their badge numbers after kicking in a door and handcuffing everyone in the house). And then there's that nasty video of all those peacenik kids getting their asses kicked while singing "Oh Canada".

If some broken corporate windows de-legitimize a march of 10 000 people, then what are we to say of the actions of the police?

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