Welcome to BASE21

Compilation and Commentary by Amy Levine (GKU Volunteer)

"More than 150,000 demonstrated against policies of the G8 (Group of 8 Leading Industrialized Nations) during a summit meeting in Genoa, Italy last week. Many clashed with police in the streets, one was left dead, and during a late night police raid, dozens were hospitalized."

"Late Saturday night, Italian police clubbed people as they slept, beat others into unconsciousness, smashed computer equipment and confiscated film and legal documents in a raid on the offices of the Genoa Social Forum (GSF) (a group which organized some of last week's G-8 protests in Italy), the Independent Media Center (IMC) and an activist legal defense office."

"According to eyewitness accounts, when police arrived they grabbed the first people they could outside and beat them heavily. British freelance journalist Mark Covell, 33, was thrown to the gound and held by the neck while four or five police kicked him and beat him with clubs, witnesses said, adding that Covell was left lying unconscious in a pool of blood."

"The police assault lasted 45 minutes resulting in 94 arrests with at least five brought out unconscious and 61 people taken to area hospitals-three required surgery."

"A spokesman for the GSF said, 'They took away documents, witness statements of police brutality, lists of lawyers, video evidence collected against people for the violence in the past few days."

"According to US activist/author Starhawk, "We watched for a long time out the windows. They began carrying people out on stretchers. One, two, a dozen or more. A crowd had gathered and were shouting 'Assessini! Assessini!' They brought out the walking wounded, arrested them and took them away. We believe they brought someone out in a body bag."

"Police claimed that the school building had been occupied by the 'black bloc' of protestors they claim caused much of the damage in Genoa for the past three days. But at an impromptu press conference they refused to answer allegations of brutality or illegality. 'We have no comment,' a spokesman said."

"The Forum is a large network of people and numerous Italian and international organizations that came together manifesting against the G8 summit in Genoa and criticizing today's world order as unequal and unjust."

"The GSF organized many meetings and educational events in search of alternatives and was also a major planning base for protests. It was inspired by the World Social Forum, which met in Porto Alegre, Brazil in January, a meeting for planning another world through democratic approaches to global society."

"For weeks preceding the G-8 meeting, authorities turned Genoa into a setting its mayor could only describe as 'surreal'-placing 20-foot concrete and wire fence barricades on the perimeter of a 'red zone' (where free speech was not allowed), and setting up patrols in the air and on the sea."

"According to a press release from the GSF, people were demonstrating because, '20% of the world's population- in countries with advanced capitalism- waster 83% of the resources of the planet; 11 million children die every year of malnutrition and 1.3 billion live on less than one dollar per day. This situation does not improve; it is worsening continuously."

"Barely 500 yards away from the clashes, at a round table in a vaulted hall of the palace, the leaders of the G8 defied the demonstrators with a fierce defense of 'free markets."

"We have said together that globalization is good, globalization is an advantage for all, there is a need for more globalization to ensure more democracy, more freedom, more well-being and jobs for all of the people of this earth,' said Silvio Berlusconi, the right-wing Italian prime minister."

"[U.S.]President Bush says the protestors are wrong to reject trade and capitalism, criticizing 'some who will try to disrupt the meetings, claiming they represent the poor."

"French President Jacques Chirac said the violence was evidence that leaders should listen more closely to the demonstrators' call for reduced globalization of trade."

"Berlusconi has said that such gatherings of world leaders, now constantly assailed by ever more determined pro-democracy demonstrators, should be 're-thought."

"This one could be the last,' he told trade union leaders. He said the next G8 meeting, 'if there is another G8,' should be more open and provide the chance for meetings with trade unions and other social groups." - compiled by Sean Marquis, "Tens of thousands march against G8 in Italy," Asheville Global Report, July 26- August 1, 2001.

"The slaying by Italian police of a demonstrator outside the Group of Eight summit in Genoa was not the first killing of a protestor against corporate globalization. Dozens of activists had been killed in India, Nigeria, Bolivia and other countries where anti-globalization movements are, for reasons of necessity, more advanced and impassioned than those now taking shape in Europe and the United States."

"The difference is that the killing of one protestor and the wounding of more than 80 others in Genoa-like the shootings at Ohio's Kent State University campus in 1970-took place in front of the cameras of western news organizations and independent reporters who transmitted the story to the world."

"As a result, the clashes between civil society and the mandarins of corporate capital that for some had come to seem routine have now taken on a new character. Issues of development and democracy that demonstrators have long identified as deadly serious are now more obviously so. And the dismissals of religious, labor, farm and student campaigners for economic and environmental justice by powerful political and business elites sound all the more crude and desperate."

"No action by this G8 summit, no matter how noble in rhetoric or intent, will erase the fact that the economic policies promoted by the leaders of the United States, Great Britain, France, Germany, Italy, Canada, Japan, and Russia are now so unpopular that their gatherings must be 'protected' with deadly police violence."

"In Seattle in 1999, when tens of thousands of anti-globalization demonstrators prevented the launch of a new round of World Trade Organization negotiations, Global Trade Watch organizer Mike Dolan noted the irony of WTO officials hailing free trade's benefits from behind legions of armed riot troops: 'If what the WTO is doing inside those closed meetings is so great, how come they need all this muscle to protect them?"

"Now, his question must be updated. If the croupiers of corporate capital really believe that restructuring the global economy to limit protections for workers, the environment and human rights represents a positive development, why must they employ deadly force to defend the meetings at which they plot their warped vision of 'progress?"

"An estimated 100,000 activists from around the world have made their way to Italy to echo the sentiments of former Italian Prime Minister Massimo D'Alema, who announced prior to the summit that the place for those who seek a just world is in the streets of Genoa."

"George W. Bush may say-as he did Wednesday-that the activists pouring into Genoa from around the world are 'no friends of the poor.' He may claim that global poverty can only be addressed by freeing corporations to exploit workers, pollute the environment and reject regulation."

"But the numbers of those who disagree with Bush's simplistic and wrong-minded calculations are growing. Peaceful protests against corporate globalization may now be the routine. But they are routinely larger. And the intimidation, the arrests and the violence ordered by those who cling to free-trade fantasies will never be sufficient to silence the cry that has gone up from the streets of Genoa: 'Our world is not for sale." - John Nichols, "One Dead, 80 Injured in Genoa: The Violent Defense of Indefensible Policies," The Nation's Online Beat, July 21, 2001

"Plenty of old hands were saying someone would die at Genoa. The signs were clear in the escalating militarization on both sides. But the members of the Landless Movement of Brazil (MST) could tell you that Carlo Giuliani, the young man shot dead as he protested at the G8 summit, is not the first casualty of the movement challenging neoliberal globalization around the world."

"Those who run the global economy still seem to think their worst problem is that they can't find a secure place to meet. Instead of addressing the root causes of the protests, the World Trade Organization is fleeing to the Qatar desert, beyond the reach of even the most determined activist... The regime it is implementing is so destructive that it is sparking off a global uprising against neoliberalism."

"Broadly, these struggles can be described as struggles against the commodification of every aspect of life-water, genes, atmosphere, healthcare, culture, public spaces, land. For each locality, the moment when the people cry "Enough!" is different- but it is usually the moment when something regarded as central to the culture becomes privatized."

"For the Zapatistas of Mexico it was the signing of the NAFTA agreement, which outlawed the common ownership of land which Emiliano Zapata, folk hero and revolutionary of 1911, had fought for."

"For much of southeast Asia it was the IMF austerity measures imposed on their shattered economies after the financial crisis of 1997. In Britain, it may be the slow sell-off of the NHS to private healthcare multinationals. Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt, in their seminal work, Empire, call this grassroots network of struggles 'the multitude.' It is the opposite of a concentrated strata of power from above, in which decisions that affect billions of human lives are made at a transnational level."

"The multitude embodies the real world below: humanity, nature, culture, diversity-all those factors not reducible to a commodity to be bought and sold in a global marketplace. In fact, the movement is not 'anti-globalization' at all. If anything, it embodies 'globalization from below'-an international multitude which challenges the idea that 'the global surfaces of the world are interchangeable." - Katharine Ainger, "Stay Home for a While," The Guardian of London, July 23, 2001

"Asking the G8 leaders to decide what to do about the developing world's debt is like asking the inmates of Wormwood Scrubs to decide what to do about crime."

"The problem is not the decisions the G8 makes. The problem is that it's the G8 making the decisions."

"My bewilderment has been compounded by a recognition, painful and reluctant as it is, that the G8 leaders, the press and the millions of people for whom these issues were meaningless just a year or two ago, are now discussing them only because of the fighting in the streets."

"By contrast to the hundreds of thousands of people who, like me, spent their working lives making polite representations, [Carlo Giuliani] was acknowledged by the eight men closeted in the ducal palace. They were forced, as never before, to defend themselves against the charge of illegitimacy."

"This discovery is hardly new. I have simply stumbled once more upon the fundamental political reality which all those of us who lead moderately comfortable lives tend occasionally to forget: that confrontation is an essential prerequisite for change."

"The great Islamic activist Hamza Yusuf Hanson distinguishes between two forms of political action. He defines the Arabic word hamas as enthusiastic, but intelligent anger. Hamoq means uncontrolled, stupid anger."

"The important thing about hamas is that, whether or not it's popular, it is comprehensible. People can see immediately what you are doing and why you are doing it."

"Hamas explains itself. It is a demonstration in both senses of the word: a protest and an exposition of the reasons for the protest. amoq, by contrast, seeks no public dialogue. Hamas is radical. Hamoq is reactionary."

"On Friday, though they were armed to the teeth and greatly outnumbered the looters, the police stood by and watched as the black block rampaged around Brignole station, smashing every shopfront and overturning the residents' cars."

"Then on Saturday night, on the pretext of looking for the people who had caused the violence, the police raided the schools in which members of the non-violent Genoa Social Forum were sleeping, and started beating them to a pulp before they could get out of their sleeping bags. The police, like almost everyone else in Genoa, knew perfectly well that the black block were, at the time, camped in a car park miles away."

"It is not hard to see which faction Italy's borderline-fascist state feels threatened by, and which faction it can accept and even encourage."

"If Carlo Giuliani did not die in vain, it was because the Genoa Social Forum had so clearly articulated the case he may have been seeking to make. His hamoq forced a response because other people were practicing hamas."

"Hamas instructs us to choose our enemies carefully. And if there is one thing upon which all the diverse factions whose members gathered at Genoa can agree, it is the identity of some of our enemies."

"Almost everyone agrees that the world would be a better place without the companies which are lobbying against action on climate change, building Bush's missile defense system, producing fragmentation grenades, demanding control over health and education services, privatizing water in third world cities then selling it back to their people at inflated prices, ripping up virgin forests, designing plants with sterile seeds."

"Ours is, in numerical terms, the biggest protest movement in the history of the world. We have a better opportunity for generating progressive, democratic change than at any time in the past 50 years." -George Monbiot, "Raising the Temperature," The Guardian of London, July 24, 2001

"Genoa, that Renaissance city known for both openness and shrewd political sophistication, is in crisis this weekend. It should have thrown its gates wide for the celebration of this summit of the world's most powerful leaders. But instead Genoa has been transformed into a medieval fortress of barricades with high-tech controls. The ruling ideology about the present from of globalization is that there is no alternative. An strangely, this restricts both the rulers and the ruled."

"The leaders, however, seem detached somehow from the transformations around them, as though they are following the stage directions from a dated play. We can see the photo already, though it has not yet been taken: President George W. Bush as an unlikely king, bolstered by lesser monarchs. This is not quite an image of the future. It resembles more an archival photo, pre-1914, of superannuated royal potentates."

"Those demonstrating against the summit in Genoa, however, are not distracted by these old-fashioned symbols of power. They know that a fundamentally new global system is being formed. It can no longer be understood in terms of British, French, Russian, or even American imperialism."

"The many protests that have led up to Genoa were based on the recognition that no national power is in control of the present global order. Consequently protests must be directed at international and supranational organizations, such as the G-8, the World Trade Organization, the World Bank, and the International Monetary Fund. The movements are not anti-American, as they often appear, but aimed at a different, larger power structure."

"If it is not national but supranational powers that rule today's globalization, however, we must recognize that this new order has no democratic institutional mechanisms for representation, as nation-states do: no elections, no public forum for debate."

"The rulers are effectively blind and deaf to the ruled. The protestors take to the streets because this is the form of expression available to them. The lack of other venues and social mechanisms is not their creation."

"Antiglobalization is not an adequate characterization of the protestors in Genoa (or Goteborg, Quebec, Prague, or Seattle). The globalization debate will remain hopelessly confused, in fact, unless we insist on qualifying the term globalization. The protestors are indeed united against the present form of capitalist globalization, but the vast majority of them are not against globalizing currents and forces as such; they are not isolationist, separatist or even nationalist."

"The protestors themselves have become global movements and one of their clearest objectives is for the democratization of globalizing processes. It should not be called an antiglobalization movement. It is pro-globalization, or rather an alternative globalization movement-one that seeks to eliminate inequalities between rich and poor and between the powerful and the powerless, and to expand the possibilities of self-determination."

"But those in the streets today are foolish enough to believe that alternatives are possible-that 'inevitability' should not be the last word in politics."

"We see seeds of that future already in the sea of faces that stretches from the streets of Seattle to those of Genoa. One of the most remarkable characteristics of these movements is their diversity: trade unionists together with ecologists together with priests and communists. We are beginning to see emerge a multitude that is not defined by any single identity, but can discover commonality in its multiplicity." - Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, "What the Protestors Want in Genoa," The New York Times, July 20, 2001

These five excerpted articles offer a kaleidoscope of progressive views on the G-8 summit protests in Genoa, Italy from July 20-22, 2001. They recount events, analyze intent and response, and generally contextualize the alternative globalization movement blanketing the world. Unfortunately, such news is difficult to come by in most media outlets. Most members of the press worldwide are not motivated to report the at times ugly and confrontational details of massive protests like the one in Genoa because of government and/or corporate influence. Consequently, most citizens are left to believe the voices of resistance are scattered, few, violent, and weak. Thus, the "inevitability" of neoliberal globalization is assured and the status quo secure.

Secure is precisely what many people in the world-in both "developed" and "developing" countries-are not. The issues of environmental destruction, lack of adequate medical care and treatment, lack of food and affordable housing, inhumane labor practices, and the felt increased gap between the rich and poor offer reasons to question the present security of some and the promised future security of all under the auspices of unfettered global neoliberal economics. Never mind that we are all to just take the word of a few (eight or so) wealthy white men, the IMF, WTO, and World Bank and dismiss the notion of democracy. Where would the world be today if our human ancestors had been so obedient?