Do They Think We’re Stupid? (That Was A Rhetorical Question)

Although it keeps getting taken down from Youtube for unspecified terms of use violation, here’s footage of peaceful protesters stopping police provocateurs from starting a riot at the Stop the SPP protests in Montebello Quebec. CEP President Dave Coles confronts men armed with rocks and sticks:

Black bloc my ass.

The police say they know nothing and have launched an internal investigation and that the police officer was given the rock by a protester. Ho hum.

It’s good to see the bastards shown up for what they are for once but this sort of thing makes me begin to seriously doubt the efficacy of set-piece protests. The Heathrow Climate Camp, for instance, may have generated lots of publicity and I’m sure it was invaluable for networking and movement building – but I bet it was also one of the best intelligence-gathering events that Special Branch (or whatever the latest euphemism is) has had in a long time.

Protests are now like dissident window shopping for the police; anyone who protests in public these days is permanently recorded as having done so – do it more than once and you’re a potential terrorist. “I’ve got a little list…”

On the other hand protest is useful agitprop: they do security theatre, we do protest theatre. It’s all circus and gets media attention, provided there are no missing white girls to occupy their airtime.

But circus was most useful in the nineties when it was a new tactic-we’re now in the time of the ‘war on terror’ and as this incident and those at the recent G8 in Germany show even sleepy provincial PC plods now ape the tactics of their US peers and treat even peaceful, legitimate protesters as terrorists.

Daily Mail hysteria notwithstanding, protest isn’t a cushy option for hippy middle-class gap year students stick-on dreads or benefit scroungers with piercings, tatoos and mysterious habits; these days it takes guts to protest. But terrorists?

When you protest publicly, however legitimate your grievance, you are automically presumed to be a criminal. You’ll have a record, although you’re a perfectly law-abiding person. For speaking your mind in public you’ll be followed, CCTV’d, videoed and/or arrested, so that as much info about you as possible can go into an intelligence dossier (spooks have performance targets too). Subsequent to this you may well find your own communications and that of your colleagues, associates and friends monitored. You may even find yourself banned from all UK airports and environs merely for having a subscription to a conservation charity.

That’s quite a lot to ask of people, however noble and peaceful the cause, particularly in times when anyone can be arrested and held incognito and without charge for months on end, without anyone knowing where you are or what happened.

The left arned that the ‘war on terror’ would be used to label protest as terrorism. That the police and intelligence services act as agents provocateurs is nothing new: these suspiciously well-dressed ‘anarchists’ (those bandannas still have shop-bought creases) turn up at every antiglobalisation event, bent on disruption and aggression, the general idea being to get a spurious “attack” on police onto news footage, so that legitimate protest can then be described as violent riot and protestors as terrorists, so peaceful protesters can be attacked with impunity by armed riot police.

Protest isn’t all pink tutus, dogs on strings and rainbow flags: it can be fatal. Remember Carlo Giuliani, shot in the face, his head split like a melon by the wheel of a police landrover at Genoa? That’s what our democratic police are capable of when governments and elected representatives won’t listen and citizens feel forced to take to the streets to exercise their right to protest. The Canadian cops in the video above were particularly inept, but it still took a lot of courage for Dave Coles to face them down.

As I’ve said before, I’m becoming more and more enamoured of entryism as a practical political tactic as time goes on and state repression against all forms of democratic expression other than those officially approved by the state gets even heavier. “Is discretion the better part of political valour? Discuss.”

Nevertheless, despite the increase of international surveillance and repression of peaceful dissidence the fact that political change is happening is undeniable; political positions that we anticapitalists took and were derided for holding only five years ago are now so ingrained in the public conciousness as to be thought common wisdom – fast food bad, Bush BAD, sustainability good, slavery bad, climate change BAD… we’ve always thought that way haven’t we?