Column by Richard Becker
When I arrived in Pittsburgh last Wednesday, a post-rain mist had settled over the abandoned steel mills and many bridges that stretch across the city’s three rivers. Below, in the streets, silence abounded. But something was amiss.
Above, the sky was streaked with black helicopters swarming the city like venomous wasps. The bridges lay hauntingly bare, their entrances blocked by camouflaged Humvees and paddy wagons. On each street corner, National Guard troops recently returned from Iraq stood ready in riot gear to quash what they were sure would be a violent uprising of the people.
In short, Pittsburgh had been transformed into a police state.
But it wasn’t the typical, run-of-the-mill police state to which we’ve all become resignedly accustomed. This was bordering on martial law, and it cast a pall over the activities to come. The occasion for my visit was the meeting of the Group of 20, or G20, a group of several dozen (more than twenty) world leaders from the planet’s richest nations. Their gathering always draws protest, and when I was given the opportunity to go, I took it.
I journeyed to Pittsburgh at first simply as a political tourist. However, after being surrounded by so many diverse and politically engaged citizens as I was among the gathered protesters, I was swept up by the energy of it. For weeks the mainstream media had devoted themselves to ginning up the locals into believing the arrival of protesters was tantamount to the arrival of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. They painted a macabre portrait of anarchists amassing in suburban streets to destroy the city. While there was some property damage, it was far from widespread, and, when compared to the amount spent on security, the ridiculousness of the police-state setup was revealed.
Though I felt I had little in common with many of the constituency groups gathered in Pittsburgh, I wanted to go to stand in solidarity with them as they took to the streets in much the same way as our founders did hundreds of years ago as they similarly confronted injustice and repression.
While the response from the traditional media was less than uplifting, the real slap in the face came from President Obama, who dismissed our dissent last week as being based on “abstractions.â€Â I would like to remind the president there is no such thing as abstractions for the billions of working people all over the world who are affected by the policies of the G20. Hunger is not an abstraction. Poverty is not an abstraction. The enormous profits gleaned from the blood of dead civilians the world over is not an abstraction.
These are real issues that affect real people. These are issues with faces.
As we marched through the streets of Pittsburgh past lines of faceless police in riot gear, abstractions were not on our mind. We were marching for the people whose lives are unjustly held in the hands of a few dozen world leaders from the planet’s richest countries. But we were also marching for our rights; marching because we believe that, as Robert F. Kennedy once said, “each generation must win its own struggle to be free.â€Â We live in a society that is wary of dissent and even more suspicious of those who would dare to take the streets in defense of what they believe.
If we are to preserve our liberty to assemble and raise our voices in dissent, we must recognize, as activist and writer Naomi Wolf writes, that we have “a duty to protest injustice and overthrow tyranny.â€Â It is in our blood to do so, but it will not long remain if we allow ourselves to be subdued by the subtle forces which are, at the very least, ignoring our right to assemble — through delay tactics for permits and other regulations — or at the worst, enforcing, with the use of riot police, roadblocks, tear-gas and pepper spray, their assertion that we do not have the right to protest.
I have no doubt that I will be castigated as a result of this column. This is to be expected. Some will say the suggestion of repression in a country like the United States is melodrama or hyperbole. I firmly reject that notion … but with one caveat: as activist scholar Noam Chomsky says, “whatever repression … we have to confront (in the United States) is nothing compared to what people face anywhere else (in the world).†The fact we were prevented at nearly every turn from marching on whichever streets we wanted and that many of the gatherings in Pittsburgh were loudly declared “unlawful assemblies†warranting police brutality and mass arrest, lends credence to the suggestion of repression in the United States. This repression takes many subtle forms, and through the forces of the mass media and other information outlets, we have been conditioned both to not recognize these forces, or if we do, to lack the will to do anything about them.
We must fight for our freedom of assembly and freedom of speech, and that’s why I took the streets last week in Pittsburgh.
Richard Becker is a history senior. E-mail opinions@kykernel.com.
Thanks for the report Richard. The “Battle in Seattle” is ever at the forefront of the minds of the “authorities.”
It’s interesting that while Bush was pResident, many peace groups involved in protests had been infiltrated by said “authorities.” Interesting that these very “under cover” authorities were the ones advocating violence and property destruction. Makes one wonder about what really happened in Seattle.
As people directly effected by how our economy is run, we have a right and a duty to confront those who are making decisions that will impact our lives.
Richard,
I appreciate the questions you raise in regard to the duties of American citizens to voice their concerns and President Obama’s, who invoked the Civil Rights Movement during his campaign, absurd dismissal of those protesters who peacefully exercise those rights.
What was more insulting was later in his statement he said that if “we” could have been in the meetings we would have “known” they were operating in “our” best interest and that “we” should have waited to read the G20 communique.
The problem:
1) Maybe President Obama was teleported into the G20 Summit and missed the fact there was a five block perimeter all around it in Downtown Pittsburgh of concrete barriers, barbed wire, riot police, national guard, secret service, guard dogs and military vehicles. This makes it very difficult to attend a meeting. Since they obviously do not trust the peasants to enter their economic sanctuary, perhaps they could conduct a live broadcast of the proceedings in which we could actually “see” and “hear” for ourselves what is going on in these meetings.
2) We received the communique and all we noticed were a few “abstract” regulations with no penalties for the countries violate these new regulations. In a democracy, do we encourage our people to sit back and wait to be told what to think?
Solidarity!
“I journeyed to Pittsburgh at first simply as a political tourist. ”
Yeah right. IMHO, quoting Noam Chomsky makes you an unrealistic activist who went to Pittsburgh to light fires and break windows.
I was in Pittsburgh, too, and Richard Becker’s article is dead-on. What I witnessed in Pittsburgh was that the authorities are prepared — in fact, have a blueprint for — intimidating and suppressing those who have the “audacity” to invoke their constitutional right to free speech, peaceable assembly, and to “petition the Government for a redress of grievances.”
I understand that for many people claims such as this, that the authorities suppressed the free speech and right to assembly of citizens in Pittsburgh constitutes an exaggeration. But when the police block dozens of streets (nowhere near the Conference Center where the meeting was taking place), stand three deep with horses and billy clubs, declare any gathering of people (no matter what they are or are not doing) an “unlawful assembly” and subsequently attack those groups with tear gas, pepper spray, and “long-range acoustic devices” (sound weapons) before arresting anyone in their way — as they did in Pittsburgh — the effect, whether intentional or not — is to discourage, by intimidation and violence, the right of people to exercise their First Amendment rights.
This should make all of us, regardless of our political persuasion, both angry and scared. We should all be in the streets right now as the economic elites of the world run rampant over the peoples of the planet and the planet itself. Becker is right… we need to protest both against destructive economic policies AND against the use of state violence to protect them.
Michael M.: Great comment
Seth: Perhaps you could outline what is that you fear in regards to Noam Chomsky’s “words” and to anyone else I would encourage you to explore Noam Chomsky’s writings in order to decide whether it is legitimate to quote him, or, as Seth would like democratic citizens to do, to dismiss people’s arguments for having read Chomsky’s works.
Think for yourselves and decide for yourselves:
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=noam+chomsky&aq=f&oq=&aqi=g10
Thanks Richard for this wonderful piece!
@Seth: To side with your own oppressors and antagonists is common in human experience. It’s important, however, to try and open yourself to the reality of the situation: thousands of police were payed VERY handsomely to batter, gas, and abuse American citizens. The reason: these citizens oppose the economic policies that render the vast majority of our world poor and that will perhaps soon destroy the planet as we know it. That’s the reality. No one cares about a few windows – you don’t and they don’t.
Also, the criticism of protesters always centers on this idea of “property destruction.” But, it is important to be critical about this abstract word “property.” There’s a difference in kind between owning a pair of shoes and owning a factory. There’s a difference in kind between paying a 45 year mortgage on a small home or business and being the CEO of Wells Fargo. To pretend that “property” is the same thing regardless of whether the thing in question is a Star Bucks storefront or someone’s only means of transportation, is a dangerous kind of obfuscation. As an aside, my guess is that corporations commit more “industrial sabotage” on a daily basis than all the erstwhile anarchists have been able to do in the history of anarchists.
Seth Thomas is a corporate shill.
@ Brandon & Michael:
You activists are trolled way too easily. Kind of takes the fun out of it.
I have only agreed with Thomas Friedman once. About a year ago, as he was dropping his daughter off to college in Alabama, Friedman was baffled by the complete lack of a student movement around climate change and environmental politics. Without getting into particulars, Friedman wondered whether this was an effect of dissent’s appropriate by technological mediums (e.g., facebook). Friedman concluded by making a poignant point: “Virtual politics are just that: virtual.”
Now, move on to G-20 (which I regrettably missed despite having plans to attend). Following closely the reports I read (including Richard’s here), there are two primary themes: (1) the police *know* how to manipulate and organize potential protests and make them ineffective, and (2) the number of protestors was far below expectations. These are two devastating trends, both of which are intimated in Becker’s piece.
For me, I find the latter point much more disturbing. Not that I wish to undermine Richard and my very good friend Michael’s thesis of “Pittsburgh-as-police-state,” because there was no doubt *repression* there (and the use of weaponry). But, I think something much more insidious and deeper is going on that renders the situation far more complex than a “police-state” analogy. Police states usually have a counterpoint: strong popular protest that either (a) must be repressed openly, or (b) must be forced underground. One thing from G-20 is clear: there is not a strong popular movement in the U.S. The question is why? I’m not going to answer the question, but I’m going to suggest that we consider two things: (1) that the notion of democracy has been rendered so utterly meaningless that people don’t know *how* to participate. I think has lead movements to become uncreative (and safe) replications of themselves, and are so predictable that the police can manipulate them, and the media can ignore them. (2) The U.S. left has generally bought into neoliberal ideas of self-realization and satisfaction via “action” to the degree that when short-sighted demands are not met, people feel unfulfilled and bored rather than committing one’s self to the long duree. I think this latter point is symptomatic of the larger general problem in the U.S. to focus on “pragmatic” political action rather than working towards alternative cultural formations and different modes of being, which requires thoughtful deliberation and fostering new forms of creativity. In other words, it may be time that we have courage and (temporarily?) invert Marx’s eleventh thesis…
“This Is What Democracy Looks Like”:
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-2007206186362541122#
1:08:28
“This film, shot by 100 amateur camera operators, tells the story of the enormous street protests in Seattle, Washington in November 1999, against the World Trade Organization summit being held there.
Vowing to oppose, among other faults, the WTO’s power to arbitrally overrule nations’ environmental, social & labour policies in favour of unbridled corporate greed, domestic & international protestors assembled in force to make their views known & stop the summit.
Against them is a brutal police force & a hostile media as well as the stain of a minority of destructively overzealous comrades.
Against all odds, the protesters bravely faced fierce opposition to take back the rightful democratic power that the political & corporate elite of the World is determined to deny the little people. Please support the makers of this documentary.”
==
“this is what democracy looks like” [69m VTV xvid] (seattle 1999 “DEMOCRACIA EN LAS CALLES” Spanish subs) IndyMedia
Well said, Richard. Thanks a lot for your first hand report and your remarks about the subtle and-not-so-subtle oppression that protesters frequently confront in our nation.