slackbastard

A brief survey of the response of a ‘liberal’ Melbourne institution to the public protests in London which accompanied the April G20 Summit.

To begin with, ‘Man died of heart attack in G20 protest’ reads the article of April 4 (produced by AFP).

The article places Ian Tomlinson’s death in the context of the “epicentre” of “violent protests” which lead to 86 arrests, repeats police claims that Ian died of a heart attack, and notes that “Scotland Yard had previously said that police medics had bottles thrown at them by protesters as they tried to save Tomlinson”.

All lies, as it happens.

On April 3, The Age (re-)published another AFP report, ‘UK police detain dozens over G20 riots’ by Prashant Rao. It describes what has become standard police practice before/during/after major anti-summit protests: raids, arrests, sometimes jailings and sometimes beatings, of individuals in ‘convergence’ spaces. (Perhaps the worst example of this took place during the G8 summit in Genoa in 2001.)* It also repeats police claims regarding the circumstances surrounding Ian’s death. Thus: “One resident died during Wednesday night’s violence after suffering a heart attack, with the authorities saying they came under attack while they tried to help him… The police said demonstrators rained a hail of missiles on officers trying to revive a dying man who collapsed at the protest site on Wednesday.”

*The Diaz school was the place of residence for the Genoa Social Forum, which had coordinated the demonstrations. After midnight the school was raided by 150 heavily armed and disguised police officers, who proceeded to systematically assault the hundreds of sleeping youth. They were beaten for hours by clubs, with many later requiring hospital treatment. The group’s computers were destroyed, hard disks confiscated and many arrests were made. The actions of the police at the school have long since been confirmed by testimonies from a number of sources. ~ State violence at 2001 G8 summit in Genoa goes unpunished, Marianne Arens, wsws.org, July 25, 2008

On April 9, The Age (re-)published an article from The Guardian and AFP by Paul Lewis: ‘London man who died at G20 protest attacked by police, video shows‘. The production of video footage of a police assault upon Ian minutes before his death marks the beginning at which the police version of events began to unravel.

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The chief Europe correspondent for The Age (and the Fairfax corporation as a whole) is Paola Totaro. Paola authored a dozen or so articles prior to and during the summit — most of which concentrate upon the plans world leaders have to deal with the financial ‘crisis’ — but only returned to the subject of G20 — and Ian’s death — several weeks after the event.

Of the protest at which Ian died, Paola writes: “The great majority of the police, seemingly ever-patient and self-controlled, stood for hours as kids baited and yelled, shoved and provoked. A handful of officers used well-placed elbows while batons were raised only in response to the vandalism” (G20 protesters strike at London’s heart, Paola Totaro, April 2, 2009).

News Corporation blogger Tim Blair took note of Paola’s report, and especial, and sadistic, delight in reports that police had given protesters ‘A Bit of Stick’. In addition to police bashings, Tim also seizes upon another aspect of Paola’s reportage, which is that some protesters urinated in public:

[Paola] Unfortunately, the walls of the banks and every available corner were also used as urinals.

[Tim] Typically, these carbon-hating clean-earth types trashed the place:

[Paola] Protesters were still in the square burning effigies as night fell. The cesspool they would leave behind, however, was probably the worst damage of the protest.

[Tim] That cesspool says more than a million essays.

As previously noted, Paola’s reportage on G20 is seriously flawed, demonstrating an acceptance of police claims as fact, ignorance of police procedure (and law), and the infantilisation of protesters. It raises questions of perspective, bias, and selectivity. But it is in many ways unexceptional, and serves to illustrate the more general functioning of the mass media as a source of corporate/state propaganda. Reliance upon the pronouncements of authority, for example, is standard, and a systematic feature of the production of ‘news’:

Robert McChesney, a professor of communications at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, points out that ‘Professional journalism relies heavily on official sources. Reporters have to talk to the PM’s official spokesperson, the White House press secretary, the business association, the army general. What those people say is news. Their perspectives are automatically legitimate.’ Whereas, according to McChesney, ‘if you talk to prisoners, strikers, the homeless, or protesters, you have to paint their perspectives as unreliable, or else you’ve become an advocate and are no longer a “neutral” professional journalist.’ Such reliance on official sources gives the news an inherently conservative cast and gives those in power tremendous influence over defining what is or isn’t ‘news’. McChesney, author of Rich Media, Poor Democracy, warns: ‘This is precisely the opposite of what a functioning democracy needs, which is a ruthless accounting of the powers that be.’

As for Paola’s later reportage, on April 18 she writes ‘G20 death result of police attack: report’. On April 19, ‘Tests finger police over G20 bashing death’.

In both of these articles, Paola fails to mention that, while the existence of ‘independent’ video footage has been crucial to uncovering the truth of the circumstances surrounding Ian’s death, in February the UK Government introduced legislation which makes it a criminal offence to document police action. (She also fails to note that the first police post mortem was conducted by a pathologist with a record of (unofficial) police service: Pathologist in Ian Tomlinson G20 death case was reprimanded over conduct, Paul Lewis, The Guardian, April 11, 2009.)

Is it a crime to take pictures?
Victoria Bone
BBC News
February 16, 2009

From today, anyone taking a photograph of a police officer could be deemed to have committed a criminal offence.

That is because of a new law – Section 76 of the Counter Terrorism Act – which has come into force.

It permits the arrest of anyone found “eliciting, publishing or communicating information” relating to members of the armed forces, intelligence services and police officers, which is “likely to be useful to a person committing or preparing an act of terrorism”.

That means anyone taking a picture of one of those people could face a fine or a prison sentence of up to 10 years, if a link to terrorism is proved.

The law has angered photographers, both professional and amateur, who fear it could exacerbate the harassment they already sometimes face…

See also : Printing Police Lies, George Monbiot, Dissident Voice, April 22, 2009.

Books are a funny thing. I love ’em; always have. But sometimes, when I walk into a (good) library or a (good) second-hand bookshop, I have a momentary feeling, and that feeling is that I could wander forever in the Vast Realms of human knowledge contained in these millions upon millions of precious pages — and still remain a slack, dumb, bastard.

Ah well. As US philosopher Mike Brady famously put it, ‘Wherever you go, there you are’. And here I am.

And I can has…

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Haymarket: A Novel by Martin Duberman (Seven Stories, 2003), made available to this slackbastard courtesy of PEte (and by way of Owen). A novelisation by a US labour historian of The Haymarket Affair (1886), a torrid period in US history what gave birth to the modern May Day, an occasion the significance of which persists despite over 120 years of denial and historical revisionism.

In addition to providing an account of the class war in late nineteenth century Chicago, Martin, moreover, imagines the lives of two of its key players: Albert Parsons and Lucy Gonzalez (Lucy Parsons).

The relationship of Albert and Lucy forms the centre of the novel. Even without the drama of the Haymarket affair, theirs is a remarkable story: An ex-Confederate soldier who first became a Republican, then labour agitator and anarchist, and an African-American woman who forever maintained she was of Spanish and Native American origin, a political militant in her own right who was prepared to call for class violence against the rich. So, there are plenty of political arguments in the book, along with debates on sex and, inevitably, race. The radical culture of the Chicago anarchist movement, from beer halls to workers’ militias, is also shown.

May 1, 1886 also marks the birth of the anarchist movement in Australia with the formation of the Melbourne Anarchist Club. In 1894, Red Rosa wrote:

The happy idea of using a proletarian holiday celebration as a means to attain the eight-hour day was first born in Australia. The workers there decided in 1856 to organize a day of complete stoppage together with meetings and entertainment as a demonstration in favor of the eight-hour day. The day of this celebration was to be April 21. At first, the Australian workers intended this only for the year 1856. But this first celebration had such a strong effect on the proletarian masses of Australia, enlivening them and leading to new agitation, that it was decided to repeat the celebration every year.

‘May Day’ is still ‘celebrated’ in Australia, although it might be fairer to characterise the assembly — in Melbourne, by the trades union movement and the remnants of the left, on the first Sunday following the First of May — as more closely resembling a funeral procession.

(See also : The ONLY Spies I trust!, May 9, 2006.)

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After several years of pestering by LK, I also finally gots me a copy of Talkin’ Up to the White Woman by Aileen Moreton-Robinson (University of Queensland Press, 2000) (reviewed by Carolyn Hughes). In the period since its publication, an ‘Australian Critical Race and Whiteness Studies Association’ (an academic network) has been established, which further explores the relationship of feminism to whiteness, indigenous women, and — obviously — much more besides. Like, whiteness. (See also : Why Whiteness Studies?, b o r d e r l a n d s e-journal, Vol.3, No.2, 2004).

Both Michael Connor @ Quadrant and the meatheads on Stormfront Down Under hatesss the nasssty ACRAWSA, which is a big plus in my book. Curiously, an article in the ACRAWSA e-journal (Vol.4, No.2, 2008) by Denise Cuthbert on ‘FORBIDDEN KNOWLEDGE? THE POLITICS OF VOICE, WHITE PRIVILEGE AND THE ETHICS OF RESEARCH’ cites my blog [PDF].

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Speaking of race and stuff, Constituent Imagination: Militant Investigations // Collective Theorization (Edited by Steppven Shukaitis + David Graeber with Erika Biddle, AK Press, 2007) gots an essay by Ashar Latif + Sandra Jeppesen what looks ‘Toward an Anti-Authoritarian Anti-Racist Pedagogy’ and n-n-n-n-nineteen other explorations of the rocky road ‘from the ivory tower to the barricades’ (and back again).

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Speaking of anarchy, I also picked up a copy of 21st Century Dissent: Anarchism, Anti-Globalization and Environmentalism by Giorel Curran (Palgrave Macmillan, 2006). I haven’t penetrated the text much further than the back cover, but as elsewhere it raises what, to me, is the rather thorny question of the relationship between the anarchism of crazy kids like Albert and Lucy and the more recent wave of ‘post-ideological’ anarchy.

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‘Classical anarchism’ is well and truly buried, it seems, and certainly not for the first (or the last) time by Julián Casanova in Anarchism, the Republic and Civil War in Spain: 1931–1939 (Routledge, 2004 (1997)); or: ‘classical anarchism’ rendered as an unhealthy excursion, propelled by Latin temperaments, and constituting a detour in the otherwise implacable progress of capitalist development in (a temporarily backwards) Spain. Funnily enough, the scientific socialists of the wsws.org have a crack at Professor Paul Preston (who may be blamed for the publication) as:

British Trotskyists challenge falsification of Spanish Civil War history
April 21, 2009

The Spanish Civil War “remains very much a burning issue of contemporary political significance,” an audience at the British Academy heard Professor Paul Preston of the London School of Economics say introducing an evening discussion entitled “Civil War and Foreign Intervention in Spain” on April 2.

Professor Preston was chairing a panel made up of Professor Angel Viñas of the Universidad Complutense de Madrid and Professor Helen Graham of Royal Holloway College, London. The meeting was to commemorate the end of the Spanish Civil War on March 31, 1939.

“Political debate today in Spain still rages around issues of the Spanish Civil War and particularly,” Professor Preston noted, “that has been the case over the last six or seven years.”

“The generation of what one might call the grandchildren of the Civil War have started to ask questions,” he stressed. Scarcely a village in Spain is now without a Group for the Recovery of Historical Memory who are excavating unmarked mass graves. (See video: “‘So many thousands of unknown nameless people’—Franco’s mass graves”.)

“The controversy,” he continued, “has been an important part of the political tension that surrounds elections in Spain and it’s as burning today as it was at the death of Franco.”

From the start, the discussion at the British Academy took on an explicitly political character and reflected the highly polarised character of contemporary Spanish politics.

Preston set the tone by condemning George Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia, a book which gives an account of the Spanish Civil War based on Orwell’s personal experiences in Spain and particularly of the May Days or May Events in Barcelona. Orwell wrote his book to expose the role that the Stalinists were playing in suppressing the Spanish revolution. The Stalinists and their allies tried to prevent the book’s publication at the time. Over half a century later, the discussion at the British Academy demonstrated that the question of Stalinism’s role in Spain and the events in Barcelona remain as controversial as ever…

Two things.

One, on this question, both Stuart Chrsitie’s We The Anarchists!: A Study Of The Iberian Anarchist Federation (FAI) 1927–1937 (AK Press, 2008 (2000)) and the rather lengthy section of the Anarchist FAQ on ‘Marxists and Spanish Anarchism’ are useful:

In this appendix of our FAQ we discuss and reply to various analyses of Spanish anarchism put forward by Marxists, particularly Marxist-Leninists of various shades. The history and politics of Spanish Anarchism is not well known in many circles, particularly Marxist ones, and the various misrepresentations and distortions that Marxists have spread about that history and politics are many. This appendix is an attempt to put the record straight with regards the Spanish Anarchist movement and point out the errors associated with the standard Marxist accounts of that movement, its politics and its history.

Hopefully this appendix will go some way towards making Marxists (and others) investigate the actual facts of anarchism and Spanish anarchist history rather than depending on inaccurate secondary material (usually written by their comrades).

With the crowd of commonplace chatterers, we are already past praying for: no reproach is too bitter for us, no epithet too insulting. Public speakers on social and political subjects find that abuse of anarchists is an unfailing passport to popular favour. Every conceivable crime is laid to our charge, and opinion, too indolent to learn the truth, is easily persuaded that anarchy is but another name for wickedness and chaos. Overwhelmed with opprobrium and held up to hatred, we are treated on the principle that the surest way of hanging a dog is to give it a bad name. ~ Élisée Reclus (March 15, 1830–July 4, 1905)

Woof!

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Also: my bro gave me a copy of what is now certainly the biggest book in my library: a copy of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four: The Facsimile of the Extant Manuscript, edited by Peter Davison (Secker & Warburg, 1984). Apparently, it’s one of only 275 copies published by the company.

Woof! Woof!