If it makes anyone feel better, I happened to surf onto channel 7 news and the guy they had defending capitalism and the current way of doing things was some obese guy with a thick redneck accent saying something along the lines of, “These kids are opposing all the things that make America great. America is the most generous nation on the planet, we give foreign aid to all these poor countries and, you know, try to develop them.”
Ay. Apparently intelligent arguments are ignored on both sides of the issue by the media.
I was in Philly. The group I marched with, and the groups with which my group marched with, kept to the route and didn’t throw rocks at anything. If you can come up with one actual group where you can prove they issued a statement of peaceful intent and then caused actual disruption, I will concede that some groups probably lied. Otherwise, my personal experience in Philly proves you quite wrong.
tramp Oh yeah, the Starbucks that used to be the Washington Telephone Credit Union. I’m in the building that has the First Union where Neurotik goes.
Which leads to the obvious question: How come you guys never came to the Lunch Bunch?
Ugh, I hate armchair protesters who want to turn the world vegan and live on small agrarian communes. These rich college kids pick a pet political cause and toot it around as if to say “I care! I am educated! I am better than you!” Sorry kids, but the way America is set up, we can’t have massive public transportation everywhere in your lifetimes. If we free all of the cows, they destroy our prarieland. And if we get rid of all globalization, we shoot ourselves in the foot.
I am a big supporter of the EZLN, a Mexican guerilla army/political rebellion. I even consider myself a Zapatista at heart. And I like the Zapatistas because they don’t have legions of college kids donning black ski masks and quoting Marcos. If there is a protest that draws the attention of the Zapatistas, it is a big friggin protest, as they don’t come out for some vague “anti-globalization” shit. The EZLN is opposed to NAFTA because it puts 4 million indigeonous farmers out of work. However, they don’t come out and put bricks through windows to express their bottled up Oxford-cloth white boy rage and angst. If I had the chance, I would go the Lacondon jungle for a year and live in Chiapas to see the situation. More than these kids probably would. I don’t think that they realize that their anti-gun ideals go against how the EZLN, or the FARC (the hip new pet of the college kids) gained initial power. All you have to do is read about New Year’s Day in 1994 to see what the EZLN did to take the power back.
Either that, or the police completely ignore the Black Bloc and content themselves with teargassing the peaceful ones. They’re usually an easier target since they’re not moving or moving in an orderly fashion, chanting slogans, and not attempting to defend themselves, and they scatter entertainingly when shot at. Certainly my experience all over Quebec City.
What you have to understand is that these protests are large events with no direct central administration covering everybody. In Quebec, we had groups from McGill, Concordia, Dawson, Laval, UQAM, UdeM, schools all over, Greenpeace, indigenous rights groups, the NDP, the PQ, unions, fair trade organizations, and a raft of civil society organizations and individuals from two continents, joined only by the event itself and the desire to make common cause. There are no “ranks” to “purge”. (How would we purge them anyway, even if we could? Send them to gulags?)
If the Black Bloc show up, there is precious little we can do about it, other than avoiding and denouncing them in situ.
Hell, in Genoa the Black Bloc showed up and started beating the shit out of peaceful protesters. (Of course, then the carabinieri showed up and started beating the shit out of everybody.)
Nonsense. The EZLN never cared that much about NAFTA. If they did, they would have staged an uprising when Congress was voting on whether to ratify it. That would have killed any chance whatsoever that NAFTA would be implemented and confirmed Congress’ suspicions that Mexico’s instability made it a bad trading partner. The EZLN’s problem is the land distribution situation in southern Mexico, and the way the ejidos tend to be distributed and then annexed by the large landowners later on.
The whatnow with the who?
I’ve always wanted to try that burrito cart, tramp, but there’s always such a massive line and it looks like it doesn’t move all that fast. I’m actually in the SEIU building on L Street between 13 and 14. I generally just satisfy my bourgeois tastes at the Subway
The Lunch Bunch was a (now sadly defunct) bi-weekly lunchtime meeting set up by SqrlCub and dcnewsman two year ago, augmented by the occasional special out-of-town guest. We had a fairly regular crowd of five or six show up, but Montfort moved to Sweden and Aguecheek moved to Seattle with their respective spouses. You two, tramp and Neurotik, are in the locality and never made it out.
The burrito cart is a dandy little place and the line does move fairly quickly, to be honest. Of course, if you get out there at a quarter to twelve there’s rarely a long line, or you could wait until after 1 when it dies down. It’s worth the wait in any case. Tasty!!
End hijack.
As for the nature of anti-globalization protests and the relations of individual groups to each other and to the Black Bloc - what matt_mcl said. I have comrades who went to both QC and Genoa and their experiences closely match his.
I am also curious as to what you think would be “true” communism or socialism, or whatever you feel would be the solution to the world’s problems. Would you care to enlighten me, being sure to deliniate how you would prevent the abuses of past “communist” or “socialist” governments- in other words, tell me how you would prevent human nature from taking over and leading to totalitarian systems. I ask this honestly, I really want to know.
Rilchiam - keep an eye on the protests today. We marched from Dupont Circle to Cheney’s residence at the Naval Observatory to protest just that. (I couldn’t be there myself, though I very much wanted to.)
Dave and all those asking “What do you think is real communism?” - I advise you to check out any and all GD threads on the subject in which I posted. I’ve been through this territory before, and I certainly don’t want to derail this thread to go over it.
“Two men and two women who refused to identify themselves were arrested Saturday evening on illegal weapons charges. They were found with an explosive device that the police described as a coffee can filled with nails and an explosive ordnance. They also had smoke bombs, authorities said.”
This, coupled with masses of prank 911 calls, should piss anyone in their right mind off. Just imagine had they detonated that thing. My guess is that most of the victims would’ve been innocent co-demonstrators who were standing in the path of searing hot nails travelling very quickly…
“Two men and two women who refused to identify themselves were arrested Saturday evening on illegal weapons charges. They were found with an explosive device that the police described as a coffee can filled with nails and an explosive ordnance. They also had smoke bombs, authorities said.”
This, coupled with masses of prank 911 calls, should piss anyone in their right mind off. Just imagine had they detonated that thing. My guess is that most of the victims would’ve been innocent co-demonstrators who were standing in the path of searing hot nails travelling very quickly…
