|
Comment on this article |
View comments |
Email this Article
|
|
News :: Miscellaneous |
|
What Did We Win in Quebec? |
Current rating: 0 |
by Sarah Kanouse
Email: skanouse (nospam) eudoramail.com (unverified!)
Phone: 217-384-5346
Address: 604 S. Race Urbana IL 61801 |
09 May 2001
|
|
What did last month's anti-FTAA protests in Quebec City accomplish? One protester gives her perspective. |
Since returning from Quebec City, I’ve spoken with members of my group who felt frustrated that the anti-FTAA protests lacked a clear goal. Were we there to prevent the meetings from taking place? Were we there to take down the wall? Were we there to raise awareness of and opposition against the FTAA and corporate globalization? Were we there to prevent other cities from ever hosting a free trade summit again? Were we there to get tear gassed, drenched with water cannons, and shot by rubber bullets only to retreat, recover and advance to get gassed, drenched and shot some more? What had our presence accomplished? How should we define ‘victory’ or ‘setback?’
The tactics employed by the protesters were as diverse as the groups opposed to the FTAA. Reformers, radicals and revolutionaries marched in clusters without clear boundaries between different groups and different agendas. Cries of \"So, So, So, Solidarité!\" rang out, by far the most popular chant of the weekend. We were perhaps as many as 50,000 people, special only because we were people, who were able to unite despite ideological differences and force our voices to be heard by those who purport to represent us. If our tactics seemed scattershot or internally contradictory, each action was unified by its refusal to remain invisible to power.
In evaluating what we accomplished, I hesitate to look forward to the political change that may or may not come as a result of our insistent and very visible presence. Our success occurred even before we arrived. Our refusal to remain an invisible opposition or to self-destruct through sectarian strife has built a movement so powerful that corporate globalization had to be protected by 6,000 police from three different police forces plus the Canadian army and a score of secret service brigades. While it is an outrage that so many protesters were gassed, injured, and arrested, we all witnessed first-hand the extreme measures condoned to protect those who work injustice. The massacres in Chiapas, the killings of union organizers, the death squads and desparecidos no longer seem remote tragedies, safely impossible in our North American democracies. Those events are only an arm’s length away now—warnings of how much worse repression can become and radicalizing, visceral experiences of solidarity.
In North America, systems of force and control usually do not need to show themselves. Our society usually gets by without riot police patrolling each street (though paramilitary police units nightly terrorize the inner cities). Each day, millions drive to work, parking their cars between the white lines; scuttle indoors keeping to the sidewalks; buy food to consume politely at tables or silently before TVs; and pay pay pay for clean water, heat, food, health care and child care without ever questioning why our lives are so ordered and so orderly. We’ve internalized the system of control that keeps the economy humming along and makes us forget to even ask if we’re getting what we want.
In Quebec City last week, internalized authority was disrupted. We walked, danced, napped and sat in the middle of the street—why not? After all, people made streets presumably for people’s convenience, and perhaps we don’t always need to make room for cars.! Protesters scrambled up bus stops and stoplights—they are excellent vantage points, and climbing is fun exercise! We turned poles, guardrails and plastic tubs into musical instruments. We allowed strangers give us free food, to wash out our eyes when we were in pain, to share stories, advice and anxieties. Despite being almost constantly physically threatened, I have never felt safer in any city. The internalized controls that pattern our behavior and infect us with suspicion of others evaporated as the system of force became visible, confrontational, and violent. Instead of authority existing as a constant and unnoticed force—like air pressure or gravity—it became physical and starkly separate from us.
On Sunday, the day after the largest protests, I wandered through the city, choking on the leftover tear gas and pepper spray. I witnessed one of the infamous \"kidnappings\" of organizers, (undercover police leaping on a protestor and hauling him or her into an unmarked van), was nearly trampled by a phalanx of riot police and was shoved hard by a cop. But as the day wore on, the police became less and less visible; by evening they allowed protesters inside the perimeter fence. I felt a disorienting and eerie stillness as I visited the places I had been gassed all weekend. Cars glided through intersections held by protesters only 24 hours earlier. We began walking in lines on narrow sidewalks again, and we spoke less often to strangers. As the threat of force retreated from view and became again a force exerted evenly upon all our skins, we again began to pattern our movements according to that invisible authority. I felt myself and witnessed everything around me—citizens and protesters, buildings and traffic—absorb the police state as it made itself invisible once more.
Yet I consider the protests successful because we freed ourselves of that internalized authority for two days. We ‘won’ because we were able to craft temporary spaces of safety, solidarity, trust, and genuine pleasure in the face of tear gas, rubber bullets, water cannon, surveillance and intimidation. We ‘won’ because our presence ‘forced’ violent authority to show its cards, to remind us of the ways it operates and what it is willing to do to maintain power and control.
|
|
A News Junky's View |
by Joe Futrelle
(No verified email address) |
Current rating: 0
09 May 2001
|
As someone who didn't go to Quebec, it's very clear to me what the protestors accomplished on the global media stage. They dominated the news coverage of the event, and though their message wasn't articulated clearly in the mainstream media, it was articulated no less clearly than that of the FTAA-backers who the police were protecting.
Since Seattle, protestors and their concerns have been taken much more seriously by the mainstream news media. I remember during the gulf war when large protests were essentially hidden from the public by being hugely unreported and dismissed by the mainstream media. After Seattle we find ourselves in a position where this isn't possible. The mainstream media know that if they don't report these protests, organized independent media will beat them to the scoop and to the eyes and ears of their listeners.
So we've made the initial breakthrough. Now comes the less exciting part: keeping up the pressure and tending our independent media. There is nothing expedient or glamorous about this kind of sustained effort, but it's the only way forward. |
|
Internalized Controls vs Civil Society. |
by Eric Merth
emerth (nospam) powersurfr.com (unverified) |
Current rating: 0
27 May 2001
|
The meaning of "internalized controls" qua not questioning government or police 'authority' is quite different from it's meaning qua not driving down the wrong side of the road.
People can legitimately hold their governments & police to account (or at least try to do so). We certainly have the right to do so. Sometimes, unfortunately, doing so involves events like took place in Quebec in April.
And certainly the gov'ts and police forces in Canada like to try to cultivate somewhat more respect in the minds of the public than they are due as public employees. Given that the police are an arm of the gov't, I'm only going to use the word "government".
Not holding the gov'ts accountable and excusing it behind talk about 'authority' or 'the authorities' certainly suggests internalized control. When I went to Quebec I was quite nervous on the way there and at the root of my fear was certainly the idea of being face to face with the riot police. So I grant the validity or value of the phrase "internalized controls" in regard to the degree to which more people do not challenge governments.
That people tended to become more inward after the main protests were over is true. I recognised it in myself. And that is an internalized control, and I hate it.
However the phrase can be taken too far. I own a 21 speed touring frame bicycle which I use for transportation around town. I drive my bike like a car - I use turning lanes, on busy streets I drive in the center of the outside driving lane. But I never ride my bike against traffic, and I generally observe traffic lights. Does this behaviour amount to internalized controls, or does it indicate that I don't want to hit or get hit by a moving automobile? It's fair to suggest that people generally park their cars between the painted lines because they recognise that a degree of organization in the parking lot lets everyone get in & out of the parking lot in a faster and safer manner, not because some fearful entity compels them. I've heard the approach to everyday life that recognises other peoples right to use the parking lot, or not get hit by cyclists or motorists called "civil society".
An experience like I & 50K other people had in Quebec can change ones outlook, can even radicalize a person. I want to suggest that despite the intensity of being at or participating in a protest like Quebec, one has to try to keep an eye on the prize. The prize might be defined as a society where power is not the sole deciding factor in decision making (I've heard that called civil society too).
I think that despite the existance of internalized controls, applying an analysis of life based solely on the idea of internalize controls leads one straight into a mindset based around power and little else. Maybe I'm reading more into the essay than is there. If so, take my comments with a big grain of salt.
Walking on the quiet streets outside & inside the forbidden city on Sunday night without teargas or the threat of violence was a very surreal experience.
It almost made me nostalgic for the time 14 or 16 hours earlier. |
See also:
http://nara.powersurfr.com
|
