-Caveat Lector-

Future Hope column, April 23, 2001

On Winning Hearts and Minds

by Ted Glick

A year ago, on April 17th, 2000, I wrote a Future Hope column which
likened both the forms of action and the relative organizational
coherence of the April 16th actions in D.C. against the IMF/World Bank
to a regular army without violent weapons, a "non-violent army." After
being in the middle of the April 20 (and A21 and A22) Day(s) of Direct
Action against the FTAA in Quebec City, I think some questions must be
raised and addressed as to if that description is still accurate, and
the political implications.

Make no mistake about it: the battle we are waging against the global
capitalist order is a political battle, first and foremost, far and
away. It is not a military battle because if it were we'd be snuffed out
in a New York minute. It's not an economic battle because, even with all
of our coops and alternative economic institutions, as important as they
are, our "economy" will never just grow and grow to the point at which
the corporate economy is supplanted; it's not in the cards. Our primary
work, the touchstone of all of our discussions concerning tactics, must
be about winning the hearts and minds of literally tens of millions of
North Americans. It is only that broad base of support, out of which can
grow a bigger and bigger movement of organizers and activists, which
will make the changes we seek possible.

Based upon my experiences in Quebec City, as well as in D.C.,
Philadelphia and Los Angeles last year, I don't think all of those
involved in this righteous struggle share the view that it is primarily
political, that we need to develop and adjust tactics with the hearts
and minds of those tens of millions in the forefront of our thinking.
I'm referring specifically to many-not all, but many, it seems-of those
who are commonly seen as making up the Black Bloc.

Don't get me wrong. I view the Black Bloc and individual members I know
as friends and allies. As I have gotten to know some of them
individually over the past year, I have come to respect their
commitment, their courage, their willingness to be on the front lines in
the confrontations with the police and the military. I cheered on April
20th in Quebec City when young people (all young men, from what I
observed), often dressed in black and wearing gas masks and insulated
gloves, repeatedly pounced on the tear gas canister shells shot by the
police and hurled or kicked them back from whence they came. When one
young person dressed in black, standing 10 feet from me, was hit
directly by a canister and knocked in great pain to the ground, so badly
hurt that he had to be carried away by others, the angry language I used
would not have made my parents proud.

Yet I saw other things involving Black Bloc members.

After our huge march arrived at the Wall of Shame close to the FTAA
meeting site, and after portions of the fence were torn down and tear
gas began to be used, I watched as young men on the front lines threw
snowballs, bottles, sticks and stones at heavily padded police guarding
the now-open area. As the battle went on, it turned uglier, and not just
on the police side. Our front-line warriors picked up foot square paving
stones, broke them in half and threw these chunks at the cops. I saw
none do any observable damage; the cops' clear plastic shields, and
their helmets and padding, seemed to frustrate any direct hits. But what
if there had been direct hits?

Early the following morning, during a temporary lull in the battle for
control of the hilltop plaza close to the FTAA meeting site, I checked
out the situation. I took a picture of the area where the paving stones
had been picked up and broken. As I did so a man who talked and looked
as if he were a local Quebec City resident said to me, "Those stones
could have badly hurt one of the police, and what if he were a father?"
I agreed with him, while also commenting on the violence of the FTAA.

Or what about this: toward the end of the afternoon, I watched as a
young man from within our ranks, without gas mask, bandana or any other
protection, courageously moved within ten feet of the police lines at
one point, saying something to them, then turned to walk back to where
hundreds of people were sitting. Before he got back he was hit by a
large stone with a glancing blow to the side of the head. The stone was
thrown at the police by one of us, someone who had little common sense
and a not very accurate arm. The young man who was hit staggered for a
few yards, then sank to the ground. He had to be helped away by others.

And others have told me about seeing the use of molotov cocktails by
those from within our ranks. Whether these were Black Bloc'ers or agent
provocateurs is unknown.

Which brings us back to the "hearts and minds" issue.

It may be that individual Black Bloc'ers wouldn't have been bothered if
serious injury had been done to one of the cops as a result of their
actions. I don't think that is a good thing, but I can at least
understand it. But they should care if the tactics they use are directly
responsible for injury to those of us who are also out there putting our
bodies on the line, and they should care about the effect of their
tactics on those broad masses of working-class people who know little
about either the FTAA or us and who, unfortunately, rely on the
corporate media for their information. And although we don't control
that media, we can have some influence over how and what they report
depending upon what tactics we use.

I can just hear what some would say in response: pacifism and
non-violence aren't militant enough. We can't trust the media. We need
to kick ass, let them know of our anger, provide an example to oppressed
people of willingness to fight the agents of repression.

I think of something Dave Dellinger once said about non-violence. He was
referring to the Cuban Revolution, and he described it as "essentially
non-violent," even though Fidel, Che and his compatriots were armed and
attacked the military forces of the Batista dictatorship. Dave explained
this by talking about how, after a battle, the Cuban revolutionaries
would take care of the wounded Batista soldiers, bandage up their
wounds, encourage them to support the revolutionary cause. Although
armed, they understood that their struggle was primarily political, and
they did not have a macho, militaristic mindset.

Che Guevera himself, according to an article by Dellinger in a recent
issue of Toward Freedom, is quoted as saying that in the U.S., "the most
heavily armed nation in the world. . . the only way to succeed was
through nonviolent protests, including civil disobedience."

And look at the Zapatistas! This is a present-day example of a movement
that understands clearly the limits of violence and use of arms, that
comprehends at the core of their being the overwhelmingly political
essence of their struggle and acts accordingly.

But we don't have to look beyond our shores for examples of militant
alternatives to Black Bloc tactics. All we have to do is look at what
was really the most impressive and politically powerful-if it could get
through the media spin of "violent protests"-aspect of the FTAA battles
this past weekend: the heroic, unarmed, non-violent persistence of the
overwhelming majority of the direct actionists.

For upwards of four hours on A20 we held onto significant portions of
the Boulevard Rene Levesque hilltop plaza area. Despite repeated use of
tear gas, and though we often had to retreat, thousands of us kept
coming back. We kept moving closer and closer to police lines, using the
weapons of non-violent mobility, music, drumming, frisbee-playing, to
reclaim, little by little, lost ground. One police line area, near
Avenue Turnbull, was essentially taken by us through the use of these
tactics. It was at this point, around 6 P.M., that the police must have
decided that more was needed from their side, and they unleashed a
massive barrage of tear gas while advancing with dogs to force us off
the plaza and down into the side streets.

How did we accomplish this limited, tactical victory of holding at least
some of the plaza all afternoon?

1) We had massive numbers, in the many thousands, possibly as many as
20,000 people at the height of the action.
2) Many of those thousands were organized into affinity groups that had
gone through training in non-violent action.
3) There were people willing and prepared to risk themselves by
immediately picking up the tear gas canisters and throwing them away
from our ranks, minimizing the tear gas effects. And there were people
willing to go up to the front and tear down the fence, risking arrest or
police attacks.
4) There were medics available to help with injuries, and there was a
spirit of cooperation and mutual support within our ranks when someone
was injured.
5) There was extensive media presence with lots of cameras.
6) We had drummers, whistlers, musicians, chants, radical cheerleaders,
dancers, frisbee players and flags and banners to keep our spirits up.

None of these elements involved violence against people.

We need to look a little more deeply into this question of non-violence
as it applies to our movement against global capitalism.

As I have observed and experienced it, non-violence can mean one of
several things:

It can be a lifestyle, a conscious effort to, as much as humanly
possible, make one's day-to-day thoughts, actions and living patterns do
no damage, physical, emotional or spiritual, to any living thing. This
means everything from refusing to engage in physical fighting, to
serious reflection on racism, sexism, heterosexism, class privilege and
other forms of domination/oppression, to vegetarianism and veganism. The
aim is to practice what we preach, in a wholistic way, to be a
love-and-life-centered person.

It can have to do mainly with the tactics used in campaigns and
movements for social change, as referred to above.

Or it can be seen as a strategy for revolutionary change, THE way that,
over time, we will overcome and replace an unjust and oppressive social
order. Alternative economic institutions, boycotts, strikes, non-violent
direct action are the main ways this would happen.

It is important that we separate out these different aspects of what
people mean when they say "non-violence." It is important because we
need clarity when we are discussing the question at hand, how to win the
hearts and minds of millions.

Personally, I don't see "non-violence," non-violence alone, as a
potentially winning strategy. There is much more that we have to be
about, including the formation of an alternative to the Democrats and
Republicans, one which runs independent candidates and is grounded in
and accountable to grassroots, broadly-based social movements. On the
other hand, I do believe that we should all be striving to become as
non-violent as possible in the way we live our personal lives, and I
believe that, in the United States context, creative, militant, mobile,
non-violent direct action is the appropriate set of tactics we should be
using in situations like A20.

What might this have meant in Quebec City? What if, in advance, there
had been an agreement that only those types of tactics would have been
acceptable? What might have happened?

The fence would have been torn down. Non-violence, to me, does not
foreclose a limited amount of focused property destruction. Some
property should not exist or should not be used in the ways it is.

In response to the police use of tear gas, instead of throwing
increasingly dangerous projectiles at them, we would have done what we
did later in the afternoon: throw the tear gas back, hold our ground as
much as possible, come back from the tear gas attacks, use creative
tactics like music and dancing to "calm the savage beasts" in their
Darth Vader uniforms, and get up close to police lines. We would have
talked to the cops-and been overheard by the many reporters and
cameramen swarming all around-about why we were there, how they also
stood to gain from our efforts to prevent the destruction of our
environment and to end poverty and starvation. If those would have
worked, at some point we might have begun moving in an organized way to
attempt to push through those lines, determining the best place to do so
based upon the responses we were getting from the other side. If, for
example, one of the police smiled at us, or indicated in some other way
a sympathy for what we were saying, that would probably be the place
where we would make our first effort to deliberately break through.

Almost certainly, once we did this, or before things got to this point,
those higher up in the police would react. They might well react
aggressively, either arresting or beating us. They might use tear gas in
massive quantities, although they would be somewhat constrained by the
mass media being so close. Indeed, they would probably have difficulty
deciding what to do. Whatever they did, they would be seen as the "bad
guys." More than likely, a good bit of the media spin would be not about
"violent protests" but, instead, "violent cops."

Throwing dangerous stones, glass and sand-filled bottles, molotov
cocktails, using sling shots-these are tactics our enemy welcomes.
Indeed, it is an established fact that historically, agent provocateurs
have infiltrated movements like ours and done whatever they could to get
the rest of us to use violent tactics. This allows them to more easily
obscure our message, come across as anti-violence themselves.

Disciplined, militant, creative, non-violent tactics, in contrast, make
it much more likely that our basic message will not be as distorted. We
will gain more sympathy from neutral observers who will want to learn
more as they see us being willing to face tear gas, pepper spray, water
cannons, plastic bullets, arrests, beatings, dogs, horses or whatever
else the rulers decide to use. Less militant and partial allies will be
emboldened to speak up and take stronger action themselves.

What does this mean as far as our relations with the groups/individuals
who make up or relate to the Black Bloc?

We need to separate our personal friendships with individuals within
this sector of our movement from our strategic and tactical views of
what is necessary if we are to be ultimately effective in our
objectives. Families have internal differences, even fights, and they
still stay together. They work out arrangements.

But we do need more conscious back-and-forth over these questions:

-How can we convince tens of millions of people of the justice of our
cause?
-How can we integrate growing numbers of those tens of millions into our
organizations and actions?
-How can we build upon our tactical experiences since Seattle and make
adjustments?
-Is mimicking the tactics of the U.S. military and police consistent
with the goals we have, the new society we are striving to bring into
being?
-How should those of us who believe that, yes, a "non-violent army" is
what we need get ourselves connected so that our views can be put out
more broadly within the overall movement?
-How should we relate to the Black Bloc?

Quebec City was a victory for our movement. It could have been a bigger
victory, but it was a victory.  Bush, Cretien, Fox and their ilk were on
the defensive because of the hard work of thousands of people and the
depth of support for our basic message. But this was only one battle in
an on-going war. Before the next battle, let's check ourselves out. The
need is urgent.
------------------------
Ted Glick is the National Coordinator of the Independent Progressive
Politics Network (www.ippn.org) and author of Future Hope: A Winning
Strategy for a Just Society. He can be reached at [EMAIL PROTECTED]
or P.O. Box 1132, Bloomfield, N.J.  07003.

<A HREF="http://www.ctrl.org/";>www.ctrl.org</A>
DECLARATION & DISCLAIMER
==========
CTRL is a discussion & informational exchange list. Proselytizing propagandic
screeds are unwelcomed. Substance—not soap-boxing—please!  These are
sordid matters and 'conspiracy theory'—with its many half-truths, mis-
directions and outright frauds—is used politically by different groups with
major and minor effects spread throughout the spectrum of time and thought.
That being said, CTRLgives no endorsement to the validity of posts, and
always suggests to readers; be wary of what you read. CTRL gives no
credence to Holocaust denial and nazi's need not apply.

Let us please be civil and as always, Caveat Lector.
========================================================================
Archives Available at:
http://peach.ease.lsoft.com/archives/ctrl.html
 <A HREF="http://peach.ease.lsoft.com/archives/ctrl.html";>Archives of
[EMAIL PROTECTED]</A>

http:[EMAIL PROTECTED]/
 <A HREF="http:[EMAIL PROTECTED]/";>ctrl</A>
========================================================================
To subscribe to Conspiracy Theory Research List[CTRL] send email:
SUBSCRIBE CTRL [to:] [EMAIL PROTECTED]

To UNsubscribe to Conspiracy Theory Research List[CTRL] send email:
SIGNOFF CTRL [to:] [EMAIL PROTECTED]

Om

Reply via email to