G20 madness
So much has been written and said already about the events at the anti-G20 demonstrations in London that it feels a bit redundant to be writing this now. The beauty of the medium of blogs is that they provide a means to post instant, up to the minute responses to events as they unfold. What do you do, however when an event you’ve witnessed has been so demoralizing and soul destroying as to make you not want to get out of bed for a week, let alone post some some futile ramblings on the internet about it?
This is the situation these G20 ‘riots’ have left me and many others in – the police overkill, constant searches, raids on squats and two days spent penned outside the bank of England by aggressive thugs have left many involved in the protests feeling weak, powerless and basically pretty depressed, which I’m sure was the main intention of the tactics used by the police in the first place.
In a way though I’m glad I waited a little while, as now the dust is settling and a clearer picture is emerging of exactly how messy those days were and how obscene, and indeed deadly, the methods of policing demonstrations in this country have become.
For the last few days the papers have been full of the news, uncovered by the Guardian, that Ian Tomlinson was assaulted by police immediately prior to his death on April 1st. In case you haven’t seen the footage yet here it is -
As this video clearly shows, the police assaulted an unarmed man while he was walking away from them with his hands in his pockets. Sure, the camera work’s a bit wobbly and we don’t see the events prior to this (ie what Tomlinson may have said or done to the policemen) but I think it’s fairly obvious this attack was unprovoked and unneccasary.
As for the much publicised police claims that the protesters showered them with glass bottles as they tended to Tomlinson, in this video we see protestors rushing to help him while the police stand back and watch, then one plastic bottle thrown at the police in the second section of the video. When this happens the instant reaction of the crowd is to tell people not to throw anything. The way certain sections of the media reported this story in the first few days following the event leant heavily on this unfounded claim, and painted the demonstrators in a very negative light.
Perhaps the saddest irony of the death of Iam Tomlinson (a man who had not even meant to attend the protests), is that through their own thug tactics the police have inadvertantly added weight to what otherwise was a pretty shambolic and dissapointing affair. From the beggining these G20 ‘riots’ had been as much about media hype than any real popular movement, with the press and police working together to get people into a tizzy with their talk of this so-called “summer of rage” and reports of highly organized and tooled up European anarchists dead set on the destruction of our nations great capital.
In reality for every one person doing anything at the protests there were at least five taking a photo of it, and far from rage most of the people I spoke to down there had come down out of a mix of curiosity, vague digruntlement and the fact they thought it might be laugh to get whacked by a copper.
I won’t go too far into my various conspiracy theories surrounding RBS getting smashed, but it seems a bit odd to me that the windows weren’t boarded over (like many in the area were) and most of the people responsible made no attempt to conceal their faces. The cops stood by and watched, letting the press get their nice photo’s before smashing some heads.
So where were all these hardcore euro-anarchist black bloc types we were all promised would be there to entertain us all? Looks like they all went along to the NATO summit in Strasbourg instead . . .
(also, just in case you haven’t seen enough photo’s of cops in riot gear, my friend Janos has posted a good photo essay on Indymedia documenting the goings on – check it.)
