Genoa and Its Aftermath

"...[Italian police] came into the rooms where people were sleeping. Everybody raised up their hands, calling out 'Pacifisti! Pacifisti!' And they beat the shit out of every person there. There's no pretty way to say it. We went into the other building; there was blood at every sleeping spot, pools of it in some places..." -- Starhawk, American author and activist reporting from Genoa.

It's official. It's a war.

For some 20 months, from Seattle through Washington and Melbourne and Windsor and Philadelphia and Los Angeles and Prague and Davos and Quebec and Goteborg, tactics have been escalating on both sides as the protests against gatherings of the world's political and economic elites have gotten larger and more raucous. In Seattle, some 50,000 nonviolent protesters and blockaders, enraged by international institutions that, they claim, exacerbate global poverty, environmental destruction and the loss of democracy, were overshadowed by a few dozen window-breaking vandals. By the time of Quebec and Goteborg, large blocks of protesters had come to tolerate property destruction and the hurling of everything from teddy bears to Molotov cocktails, as a means to make a point.

On the police side, the brutality that shocked the world in Seattle was actually a step removed from what it could have been. National Guard troops with live ammunition stood by but never opened fire. As the protests have escalated, the wholesale use of chemical warfare against protesters -- whether they were breaking any laws or not -- has, at least in the public eye, become old news, and to many people an acceptable price to pay to keep the "hoodlums" at bay. The media has surely helped; in Quebec and Goteborg, the worst of the police mayhem was best reported not by the combined resources of the world's elite media, but by Indymedia.org. The U.S. networks almost uniformly ignored it, blaming the victims of police violence for the violence itself.

And now, in Italy, a man is dead. It was coming to this.

Perhaps more telling, even, than the death of a 23-year-old Genoa anarchist, Carlo Giuliani, at the hands of a terrified paramilitary conscript three years his junior, is the hundreds of serious injuries that also occurred as Italian security forces launched repeated, unprovoked attacks on G8 Summit protesters. Of the 150,000 or so estimated to have gathered on the streets of Genoa, all but about 2,000 are thought to have been committed to the nonviolence pact agreed upon in advance by the Genoa Social Forum, a coalition of some 1,300 groups that was an umbrella group for many of the protests. It didn't matter. Italian authorities, working closely with U.S. and other police agencies, made a calculated decision to dramatically escalate the level of violence with which these protests, now inescapable at international summits, would be met.

There are numerous chilling accounts of the contempt for civil liberties and human rights that marked security during the Genoa summit, but the image that has circled the world is the prone body of Carlo Giuliani. He died, in part, because he and his comrades cornered terrified young paramilitary officers in a tactically foolish way. He died because he and his comrades identified the police, rather than the policies protesters abhor, as the enemy to be fought. But he also died because Italian police weren't carrying rubber bullets, only live rounds. And beyond Giuliani, hundreds more people -- anarchist black bloc, "pacifisti," journalists and bystanders alike -- were seriously wounded, not because of their actions or tactical mistakes, but due to intentional, premeditated attacks by militarized police. It was a bloodbath. War.

Genoa is reminiscent of nothing so much as Kent State, where, after hundreds of thousands (at least) of deaths in Southeast Asia, it took the deaths of four young, privileged American students on a Midwest campus in May 1970 to galvanize opposition and transform the U.S. anti-war movement into a force that shut down campuses across the country for a full season. At the time of Kent State, the general public's opinion, shaped by contemptuous politicians and a judgmental media, was that the Guardsmen acted properly and that the Kent State students were anti-American thugs who had it coming.