Organizing street theater with real blood

By Gwynne Dyer

LONDON (JP): They had already canceled the World Bank meeting in Barcelona later this month. Fears that what British Prime Minister Tony Blair recently called the "anarchists' traveling circus" might combine with the killers of the Basque separatist group ETA to overwhelm the Spanish police made them call the meeting off even before last week's violence at the European Union summit in Gothenburg.

So the circus's next stop will be at Salzburg for the World Economic Forum meeting on July 1-3, if they don't cancel that too. They probably won't cancel the Global Climate Change conference in Germany on July 16, since so many countries feel the need to give a firm collective reply to President George W. Bush's brutal repudiation of US commitments under the treaty, but pitched battles in the streets of Bonn may overwhelm the message about climate change that they want to send out.

Then comes the G-8 summit of the world's major industrial countries in Genoa on July 20, for which the Italian government has already declared an almost total blockade of the city. The vast majority of the anticipated 100,000 demonstrators will be peaceful, of course, but the hard core of street-fighters also shows up every time.

"Genoa is clearly going to be very difficult with all those little twisting streets," said one diplomat, and already there is speculation that the summit will be moved to a ship in the harbor. In effect, the anarchists have won: Open summits in normal places are now a dying institution. All future EU summits, for example, will be held in Brussels, which the Belgian police can lock up tight. Other summits just won't happen at all.

Why have the rioters won? Because in Sweden last week, for the first time since the series of anti-capitalist, anti- globalization demos kicked off at the World Trade Organization summit in Seattle in 1999, rioters actually got shot. One was gravely wounded, the bullet damaging both his kidney and his liver, and after much surgery he is barely clinging to life in a Gothenburg hospital.

The street-fighters will loudly mourn his death if he doesn't survive, but they would also privately welcome it as a huge propaganda victory. They want somebody to get killed as proof of police brutality. The only surprise is that it took over two years before we had any gunshot victims, but even before this the repeated spectacle of civilians fighting armored police was changing the way the world works.

None of this excuses the conduct of the Swedish police. Knowing that every international summit these days attracts a hard core of organized street-fighters, they still did not rethink rules of engagement that banned riot-control devices like tear gas and water cannon. They found themselves with no options between simple riot shields and live gunfire.

"We've no plans to stop using live ammunition," said an unrepentant Swedish police spokesman after the Gothenburg shootings. "This kind of trouble is accompanying all summits and there seems to be no tactic that works." That is not true: only in Sweden has anybody been shot. But the police presence and tactics that are required to protect the summits without giving the rioters a martyr have become so large and politically embarrassing that they are simply not worth it any more.

Many of the international meetings that will now not happen were just glorified photo ops anyway, and will be no great loss. If there was any urgent business, phone and e-mail will do. Others, however, like the climate change conferences, were events where the moral pressure of world opinion could be brought to bear on recalcitrant leaders.

As they dwindle in scale and number, so will the pressure of public opinion, and that is a real loss. But the world will continue to rotate, and we are left to contemplate the remarkable squeamishness of the modern consciousness.

We have already seen it at work in the acute "casualty aversion" of Western armed forces. They know that public opinion will turn against them instantly if "our boys" get killed in any conflict that is not about sheer national survival, regardless of the justice of the cause -- which explains the bizarre tactics NATO adopted in the Kosovo conflict to avoid any casualties.

This is not a terrible thing because (a) most causes for which soldiers get sent to fight are not just, and (b) at least the modern media make us care more about the lives of those we send into battle. Where the moral imagination usually failed, graphic pictures are filling the gap. Military intervention has become more difficult even for humanitarian purposes, but on balance it is probably a change for the better.

Does the same logic apply, however, to the choreographed riots that now assail every international gathering of note? When every act of violence and every victim's suffering is taped and shown around the world, it has a huge impact on public opinion. People don't like what they are seeing, and gradually governments are just going to stop providing the occasions for it.

The few hundreds or thousands of anarchists, Trotskyists and Maoists who go to fight at these summits want to smash the state, while the majority of the protesters basically want to strengthen the state against what they perceive as overweening corporate power: their aims are fundamentally divergent. The rioters are ruthless and manipulative, and they are closing down some useful venues for political action.

The rioters are winning only because we are horrified by the violence they practice and provoke -- even though we know that it is street theater deliberately designed to horrify. So should we celebrate the public's new aversion to violence, or deplore our squeamish avoidance of confrontation?

Both at once, perhaps, but it is wrong to let the thugs win.