Manufacturing Chaos: How the press legitimizes police violence
By A.K. Gupta
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@hotmail.com
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