[Fwd: [sixties-l] Fwd: Organizing in the Face of IncreasedRepression]

[Carrol Cox <cbcox@xxxxxxxxx>]

-------- Original Message --------
Subject: [sixties-l] Fwd: Organizing in the Face of Increased Repression
Date: Thu, 07 Dec 2000 12:43:25 -0800
From: radman <resist@xxxxxxxx>
Reply-To: sixties-l@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
To: sixties-l@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx


Organizing in the Face of Increased Repression

by Starhawk <stella@xxxxxxx>

Since the very first morning of the Seattle blockade a year ago, the
police forces of the world have greeted the antiglobalization movement
with a high level of violence and repression.  As the international
movement has continued on, the repression has fallen into a pattern
discernible from DC to Prague and beyond.  This pattern involves:

1. A concerted media campaign by the police and government forces that
begins long before the demonstration, painting the activists as violent
terrorists.  All previous demos are equally characterized as violent,
regardless of the actual facts.

2. Surveillance of meetings, email lists, phones, listservs, etc.

3. Attempts at pre-emptive control, which range from mass illegal
arrests in DC the night before the action, shut downs of
convergence centers and IndyMedia centers, and border closures,
to declaring a 5-kilometer no-protest zone five months before
the planned action in Quebec.

4. Less obvious violence on the street.  Seattle taught them that tear
gassing whole sections of the city was a bad idea.  However, tear gas,
pepper spray, beatings, projectile weapons, water cannon and concussion
grenades, etc. are routinely used now from Prague to Cincinnati.

5. Random arrests and targeting of peaceful protestors, while those
throwing rocks are often let go.  Maybe nonviolent protestors are
easier to catch? Or maybe this is a concerted effort to discourage
wider participation in these actions?

6. Use of provocateurs.  I am not saying that all who throw rocks are
provocateurs.  However, there is a growing body of eyewitnesses and
stories of 'protestors' seen one moment throwing a rock at a window
and the next, being sheltered behind a police line to indicate that
provocateurs are being used.  Along with them, we can suspect the
whole range of fun Cointelpro tactics.

7. Intimidation and brutality in jail, which reached levels of outright
torture in Prague.

8. Some sporadic attempts to identify and neutralize 'leaders' i.e.
holding John Sellers of Ruckus on a million dollars bail for charges
that were all later dropped.

What fun!  It?s enough to make you think we?re being effective,
especially when, as in Prague, the protestors still managed to
disrupt the meeting and send the banksters home a day early.

What can we do about it?  Are we doomed to have these actions become
more and more dangerous, and smaller and smaller?  Or can we succeed
in building a mass movement in spite of repression?

1. The greatest restraint to police violence during an action is the
organizing and alliance building we?ve done before the action ever
happens. We need to counter their disinformation campaigns with our
own community outreach, to leaflet, to talk to people, to go door
to door, to explain to the community what we?re doing and why long
before we do it.

2. We need to build alliances with labor, churches, NGOs, all the
groups who are fighting the same vested interests.  We don?t have
to do the same work they do, we don?t have to change our hairstyles
or analysis to accommodate them, but we do need to build bridges
so that we can call on them to defend our.

3. We need to train and prepare as many people as possible.  The more
people have had a chance to play out a dangerous situation, to think
out possible responses and try out different tactics, the calmer
and more resilient they?ll be on the streets.  Even a few centered
people in a crowd can be enough to prevent panic and spark an effective
moment of resistance. Trainings need to stress flexibility and
developing a range of possible responses to widely varied situations,
so activists are prepared in the moment to make choices about what to
do.

4. We also need ever more flexible and creative tactics.  The more we
can plan for orchestrated spontaneity, the harder we?ll be to stop.
For example, in Prague part of the plan was for smaller marches led by
flags of different colors to break away from the main march and go in
different directions.  While this tactic had been discussed at open
meetings for at least a month before the action, it still seemed to
confuse the authorities.

5. We may need to focus more on preparation for surviving jail, for
resisting intimidation and being prepared for interrogation, than on the
classic jail solidarity tactics we?ve used in the U.S.  Those tactics
focus on attempting to stay in jail where our strength of numbers allows
us to pressure the system to drop or lower charges, and helps to protect
individuals at risk.  These tactics were developed, however, in a very
different time, when the authorities often were interested in releasing
most and when jail experiences were often hard and uncomfortable but
relatively decent.  At times those conditions still prevail and that
kind of jail >solidarity has been effective in Seattle and DC.  However,
if people are being chained to the wall and beaten, the focus needs to
shift to getting them out of jail.  Solidarity then becomes what people
outside jail do to put political pressure on the system, from calling
on allies, phoning, faxing and emailing the authorities, to blockading
the jail itself.

6. Organizing an action needs to include planning post-action and
post-jail support, debriefing, trauma counseling, etc.

7. We need to continue building a broader, larger movement, to find ways
to encourage participation at varied levels of risk, to support a wide
variety of forms of protest that can mobilize different groups of
people, to confront the racism, sexism, classism etc. in our own groups
and reach out to more diversity.  Most of all, we need to clarify our
vision of the world we want to create, so we can mobilize peoples? hopes
and desires as well as their outrage.  And we need to be creative,
visionary, wild, sexy, colorful, humorous, and fun in the face of
the violence directed against us.