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Dead, 80 Injured in Genoa by John Nichols The slaying by Italian police of a demonstrator outside the Group of Eight summit in Genoa was not the first killing of a protester against corporate globalization. Dozens of activists have been killed in India, Nigeria, Bolivia and other countries where anti-globalization movements are, for reasons of necessity, more advanced and impassioned than those now taking shape in Europe and the United States. The difference is that the killing of one protester and the wounding of more than 80 others in Genoa -- like the shootings at Ohio's Kent State University campus in 1970 -- took place in front of the cameras of western news organizations and independent reporters who transmitted the story to the world. That is a big difference indeed -- especially when the images raise profound questions about why Italian police thought it necessary to escalate the violence to a level that resulted in a death and in so many injuries. As a result, the clashes between civil society and the mandarins of corporate capital that for some had come to seem routine have now taken on a new character. Issues of development and democracy that demonstrators have long identified as deadly serious are now more obviously so. And the dismissals of religious, labor, farm and student campaigners for economic and environmental justice by powerful political and business elites sound all the more crude and desperate. No action by this G8 summit, no matter how noble in rhetoric or intent, will erase the fact that the economic policies promoted by the leaders of the United States, Great Britain, France, Germany, Italy, Canada, Japan and Russia are now so unpopular that their gatherings must be "protected" with deadly police violence. In Seattle in 1999, when tens of thousands of anti-globalization demonstrators prevented the launch of a new round of World Trade Organization negotiations, Global Trade Watch organizer Mike Dolan noted the irony of WTO officials hailing free trade's benefits from behind legions of armed riot troops. "If what the WTO is doing inside those closed meetings is so great, how come they need all this muscle to protect them?" asked Dolan. Now, his question must be updated. If the croupiers of corporate capital really believe that restructuring the global economy to limit protections for workers, the environment and human rights represents a positive development, why must they employ deadly force to defend the meetings at which they plot their warped vision of "progress"? The answer, of course, is that the politicians gathered in Genoa are not "leading." They are being lead by corporate interests that are, by their very nature, at odds with enlightened and pragmatic public interest. And the public is rapidly awakening to this fact. Despite the police violence, the demonstrations in Genoa are already some of the largest protests in history against the neo-liberal, corporatist model of development. An estimated 100,000 activists from around the world have made their way to Italy to echo the sentiments of former Italian Prime Minister Massimo D'Alema, who announced prior to the summit that the place for those who seek a just world is in the streets of Genoa. A former G8 participant, D'Alema would have been welcome on the "European Vision" cruise ship where most visiting dignitaries will be resident, or at the "Jolly Hotel" to which the U.S. president has been moved "for security reasons." But D'Alema has taken the side of the future, as dangerous as that can be -- politically and physically. George W. Bush may say -- as he did Wednesday -- that the activists pouring into Genoa from around the world are "no friends of the poor." He may claim that global poverty can only be addressed by freeing corporations to exploit workers, pollute the environment and reject regulation. But the numbers of those who disagree with Bush's simplistic and wrong-minded calculations are growing. Peaceful protests against corporate globalization may now be the routine. But they are routinely larger. And the intimidation, the arrests and the violence ordered by those who cling to free-trade fantasies will never be sufficient to silence the cry that has gone up from the streets of Genoa: "Our world is not for sale."
Genoa Date: Sat, 21 Jul 2001 by Michael Albert As most recipients of ZNet Updates likely know, July 20 began a series of demonstrations in Genoa Italy against the G8 (major industrialized nations) meetings. As with demonstrations in Seattle, Prague, and Quebec, activists seek to explain and reveal global institutions like the IMF, World Bank, and WTO and to reverse worsening rules of international cultural and economic exchange, as well as address domestic sexist, racist, statist, and capitalist injustice. And, indeed, our steadily growing opposition to "globalization" has brought world leaders and corporate heads to fear for their most revered agendas. Bush, Berlusconi, and cohorts know that if a huge mass of humanity gains sufficient knowledge, hope, and confidence, we will force new and more participatory relations against the tide of their preferred elitist globalization. Bush, Berlusoni, et. al. have therefore decided to try their usual recourse, violence. In Genoa they sought to send a message. Oppose us and you will pay a high price. And the simple fact is that we need to recognize that if the context of our actions leaves world rulers the option to do so, they most certainly have the military means to make good their threats. In Genoa they set loose their police, aroused beyond even normal levels of violence by grotesque fascist imagery, to brutalize dissent via torture and shooting. They seek to intimidate not solely the dissenters on the scene from even conceiving of disobeying further, but also the broader public. Bush, Berlusconi, et. al., are trying to ensure, for example, that in the next go around in Washington DC, from September 28 to October 4, there will be a small showing of manageable proportions rather than the feared immense outpouring of dissent and resistance they fear. Corporate elites want to reverse our momentum, pure and simple. So what is our response to their violence? Fear will exist. It is human. To read about what the police have done in Genoa can't help but arouse concerns about safety. And it ought to. We should not be ostriches about their vile capacities. But trembling should also not exist. Passivity should not exist. And we should not do their work for them, dwelling so insistently on our physical pains as to disrupt our mental focus and interfere with our broader messages. Nor should we react in a kind of dance of danger, thinking we must escalate our actions in the same terms they think about escalating theirs. The compelling and powerful answer to addressing state violence rarely varies from a simple logic. Given our resources and means, we must educate about the issues at stake more widely. We must attract and sustain ever wider and more lasting support. Our demonstrations must include so many people, with so many backgrounds, from so many parts of society and so many societies, that the effect of elites utilizing wild and intimidating repression will not be to diminish our size and capacity, but to enlarge both. We must make Bush and Berlusconi's favored tatics benefit us, not them. That is the road to victory. If the state can enter our organizational centers, like the Italian Indymedia and organizing offices, and can beat to physical submission our members, if the state can assault our marches and rallies, and if it can do all this with impunity and without a cry of outrage not only from us but from much wider circles threatening to join us, then the state will do so. In coming days and weeks, our discussion about tactics at our demonstrations needs to keep forefront a simple logic. What choices on our part will best widen our base of support and thereby grow our size and deepen our commitment and knowledge, entrenching our dissent and even threatening its percolation into other dimensions of social life? And what choices, at the same time, will best restrain the military capacities of the state by creating conditions under which for them to unleash their dogs of war costs them more in lost public support then it costs us in harshly broken bodies? This is not a pretty nor even a humane calculus, but it is the logic of dissent against monstrous violaters of human civility. We need to make known the state's violence against our dissent, of course. But we need to retain our priority focus on globalization and capitalism, and on the vastly more widespread and deeper violence of these ubiquitous systems. We have to achieve growing popular support, growing morement commitment and insight, and to simultaneously saddle the state's preferred repressive options. Z Magazine / Znet sysop@zmag.org
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