My stepmother called from Massachusetts on the weekend. She was under the impression that Toronto was in flames. “Are you all right?” she asked. I assured her we were. The only excitement in our neighbourhood was a peaceful protest by a bunch of cyclists who want more bike lanes.
You couldn't blame her for being worried. TV news always prefers flaming police cars to men in suits. So that's what they showed – one police car burning, over and over again. That footage must have aired a thousand times. The media even found some victims of police brutality. One young woman related how she'd been held in detention for hours and hours, and all she got to eat was a couple of lousy sandwiches and some bottled water. She called the police “fascists.” Another young woman complained: “I only eat vegan food, so I was hungry for a long time.”
Well, what did they expect? Non-fat soy lattes from Starbucks?
This being Canada, we have no clue what genuine police repression looks like. It’s true the police arrested too many innocent bystanders (including a fair number of journalists). They roughed up a few people they shouldn't have. But there were no bodies, no serious injuries. Most of the police and protesters comported themselves well. If this is the worst it gets, then we don't have much to worry about.
Our city is usually so peaceful that we were shocked by a few whiffs of tear gas and a few dozen smashed store fronts. As usual, Starbucks was a target, though vandals also trashed other bastions of global capitalism such as Money Mart, Foot Locker and Tim Hortons. “In Montreal, there’s more destruction than this after a hockey win,” said one friend after a tour of the weekend scene. In Paris, he reminded me, rampaging soccer fans burned 30 cars after the French team was defeated in the World Cup.
“Wave of political repression sweeps Toronto in wake of summit,” said a press release issued by several activist groups. They promised to reveal the “cruel and brutal conditions” under which people were being detained, arrested and imprisoned. The Canadian Civil Liberties Association was also upset. “People are being denied access to lawyers, and we have heard that there are no plans for prompt release,” it warned, even though, by Monday morning, at least three-quarters of the detainees had been released.
None of these groups bothered to mention the Black Bloc, a loosely organized group of black-clad vandals who were responsible for nearly all of the weekend violence. They show up to smash and burn at every global summit. One of their members is Alex Hundert, who recently defended property violence by writing that Black Bloc acts as “a wrecking ball” that clears the way for other protest groups to state their various cases. “It is a zealous adherence to dogmatic ‘non-violence’ that shuts down any meaningful dialogue.”
The Black Bloc is seldom, if ever, denounced by other protest groups. They're hard to catch because they take off their masks and fade into the crowd. Their modus operandi is to divert police to one location while they prepare to storm another. Naomi Klein calls them “kids.” Actually, they’re “thugs.” As they began their smashing spree in Toronto, they chanted: “This is what democracy looks like.”
Lots of folks are blaming the weekend violence on everyone but the people who committed it. A surprising number believe that Black Bloc members are actually police provocateurs whose job is to divert the media and justify a brutal crackdown on civil rights. But we media don’t need double agents to sucker us. We’re perfectly capable of suckering ourselves. We gave the thugs everything they wanted – above all, an exaggerated sense of their power and importance. We totally ignored the 10,000 peaceful protesters who behaved responsibly. And we gave Stephen Harper an excuse to say, “I told you so.”
