----- Forwarded message from Erik Wesselius <erik225@ision.nl> -----
G8: Are You Happy?
Opinion, By Susan George -- Special to CorpWatch -- July 24, 2001
Originally published on
<http://www.corpwatch.org/issues/grassroots/featured/2001/g8sgeorge.html>
To the reader: This isn't a description of what happened in Genoa --
most people already know that, or can find out on Indymedia. It's better
described as a [bad] "mood piece", as I was and am feeling pretty
traumatized and angry after the events. I'd been there since Monday,
July 16 for the Genoa Social Forum, participating in various debates,
doing a lot of media work and left Thursday before all the trouble
started (the demonstration on Thursday, centered around immigrants'
rights was perfectly peaceful).
Are you happy, G-eighters? Happy to get together in these palaces in
cities emptied of their inhabitants, with all that luxury and your
"security" that costs ordinary citizens a fortune? Happy with your
unchanging and catastrophic neo-liberal policies imposed with impunity
on behalf of transnational corporations and financial markets? Happy to
make sure that the injustice on this planet gets worse with every
passing year and G-8 meeting? To announce your miserable little health
fund amounting to just a tenth of what poor Kofi Annan asked for last
month for AIDS alone? To show off your eight impeccable suits-and-ties
and your self-referential gesticulations, because the only remaining
purpose of your meetings is to reaffirm that you are indeed the G-8.
Are you happy, cops? Happy you finally took out a protestor? You didn't
manage that in Gothenburg but you did this time. A big premier in Genoa,
a legal murder. That'll teach the little bastards. Tear-gas, water
cannon, anti-riot gear, that's for amateurs--bullets are for real men.
Blood on the pavement. Crushed bodies. Nice work. Happy too you could
raid the alternative media center and the convergence center in the
middle of the night, smash the computers, confiscate the cassettes and
club people who were sleeping, so there wouldn't be any trace of your
activities? Bravo.
Are you happy, protestors? Not the huge majority that backed the Genoa
Social Forum--I know you're devastated and some of you bloodied--nor
those many "members" of the Black Bloc who were in fact police
infiltrators; but you, the genuine Black Blockers, who never
participated in any of the preparatory meetings that went on for months,
who don't belong to any of the 700 responsible Italian organizations
that had decided democratically to practice creative and active
non-violence. Are you happy with your unilateral actions, to have
willfully infiltrated groups of peaceful demonstrators so that they too
got gassed and clubbed; happy to have responded to police provocations
which were both foreseeable and foreseen? Are you happy we've finally
got our martyr?
His name was Carlo Giuliani. He was 23 years old and he went to the
demonstration with his own convictions, that's enough, they weren't
ours, but we protest his execution, peace be with him.
The fact remains that this movement for a different kind of
globalization is in danger. Either we'll be capable of exposing what the
police are actually up to and manage to contain and prevent the violent
methods of the few, or we risk shattering the greatest political hope in
the last several decades. Whoever bears responsibility for what happened
in Genoa--and it is massively on the side of the G-8 and the police,
this broad, powerful, international movement, as irresistible as the
tide; this movement of peoples united in solidarity that we've dreamed
about can no longer go forward in the same way. It can no longer accept
that anybody can do anything. A man has died.
If we can't guarantee peaceful, creative demonstrations, workers and
official trade unions won't join us; our base will slip away, the
present unity--both trans-sectoral and trans-generational--will crumble.
We, the immense majority with serious proposals to make; we who believe
that another world is possible, have got to act responsibly. Faced with
the escalation of State-sponsored terror, we must figure out how to
continue our demonstrations and direct action without endangering our
people; how to avoid abandoning the terrain of the public space to the
explosive ultra-minority. One thing is certain: we can't give up this
struggle and we will not stop fighting against the huge injustices of
present globalization, but we shall have to find new democratic avenues
to wage this fight.
Twenty-five hundred years ago, the great Chinese strategist Sun Tzu
said, "Do not do what you would most like to do. Do what your adversary
would least like you to do." I fear that today our adversaries are
happy. As for me, I'm just trying to surmount the events of Genoa and
not give in to despair.
Susan George is Vice-President of ATTAC-France (Association for Taxation
of Financial Transaction to Aid Citizens) and Associate Director of the
Transnational Institute in Amsterdam. She is author of nine books, most
recently, of The Lugano Report, Pluto Press. Interested readers can
visit the Transnational Institute website <http://www.tni.org/george/>.
----- End forwarded message -----
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