Written By: Naomi Wolf // Aljazeera English
Posted by: Alter Net
America's politicians, it seems, have had their fill of democracy. Across the country, police, acting under orders from local officials, are breaking up protest encampments set up by supporters of the Occupy Wall Street (OWS) movement - sometimes with shocking and utterly gratuitous violence.
In the worst incident so far,
hundreds of police, dressed in riot gear, surrounded Occupy Oakland's
encampment and fired rubber bullets (which can be fatal), flash grenades
and tear-gas canisters - with some officers taking aim directly at
demonstrators. The Occupy Oakland Twitter feed read like a report from
Cairo's Tahrir Square: "they are surrounding us"; "hundreds and hundreds
of police"; "there are armoured vehicles and Hummers". There were 170
arrests.
My own recent arrest,
while obeying the terms of a permit and standing peacefully on a street
in lower Manhattan, brought the reality of this crackdown close to home.
America is waking up to what was built while it slept: Private
companies have hired away its police (JPMorgan Chase gave $4.6m to the
New York City Police Foundation); the federal Department of Homeland
Security has given small municipal police forces military-grade weapons
systems; citizens' rights to freedom of speech and assembly have been
stealthily undermined by opaque permit requirements.
Suddenly,
the United States looks like the rest of the furious, protesting,
not-completely-free world. Indeed, most commentators have not fully
grasped that a world war is occurring. But it is unlike any previous war
in human history: for the first time, people around the world are not
identifying and organising themselves along national or religious lines,
but rather in terms of a global consciousness and demands for a
peaceful life, a sustainable future, economic justice and basic
democracy. Their enemy is a global "corporatocracy" that has purchased
governments and legislatures, created its own armed enforcers, engaged
in systemic economic fraud, and plundered treasuries and ecosystems.
Around
the world, peaceful protesters are being demonised for being
disruptive. But democracy is disruptive. Martin Luther King, Jr argued
that peaceful disruption of "business as usual" is healthy, because it
exposes buried injustice, which can then be addressed. Protesters
ideally should dedicate themselves to disciplined, nonviolent disruption
in this spirit - especially disruption of traffic. This serves to keep
provocateurs at bay, while highlighting the unjust militarisation of the
police response.
Moreover,
protest movements do not succeed in hours or days; they typically
involve sitting down or "occupying" areas for the long hauls. That is
one reason why protesters should raise their own money and hire their
own lawyers. The corporatocracy is terrified that citizens will reclaim
the rule of law. In every country, protesters should field an army of
attorneys.
Protesters should
also make their own media, rather than relying on mainstream outlets to
cover them. They should blog, tweet, write editorials and press
releases, as well as log and document cases of police abuse (and the
abusers).
There are,
unfortunately, many documented cases of violent provocateurs
infiltrating demonstrations in places like Toronto, Pittsburgh, London
and Athens - people whom one Greek described to me as "known unknowns".
Provocateurs, too, need to be photographed and logged, which is why it
is important not to cover one's face while protesting.
Protesters
in democracies should create email lists locally, combine the lists
nationally and start registering voters. They should tell their
representatives how many voters they have registered in each district -
and they should organise to oust politicians who are brutal or
repressive. And they should support those - as in Albany, New York, for
instance, where police and the local prosecutor refused to crack down on
protesters - who respect the rights to free speech and assembly.
Many protesters insist in remaining
leaderless, which is a mistake. A leader does not have to sit atop a
hierarchy: A leader can be a simple representative. Protesters should
elect representatives for a finite "term", just like in any democracy,
and train them to talk to the press and to negotiate with politicians.
Protests
should model the kind of civil society that their participants want to
create. In lower Manhattan's Zuccotti Park, for example, there is a
library and a kitchen; food is donated; kids are invited to sleep over;
and teach-ins are organised. Musicians should bring instruments, and the
atmosphere should be joyful and positive. Protesters should clean up
after themselves. The idea is to build a new city within the corrupt
city, and to show that it reflects the majority of society, not a
marginal, destructive fringe.
After
all, what is most profound about these protest movements is not their
demands, but rather the nascent infrastructure of a common humanity. For
decades, citizens have been told to keep their heads down - whether in a
consumerist fantasy world or in poverty and drudgery - and leave
leadership to the elites. Protest is transformative precisely because
people emerge, encounter one another face-to-face, and, in re-learning
the habits of freedom, build new institutions, relationships and
organisations.
None of that
cannot happen in an atmosphere of political and police violence against
peaceful democratic protesters. As Bertolt Brecht famously asked,
following the East German Communists' brutal crackdown on protesting
workers in June 1953, "Would it not be easier ... for the government to
dissolve the people and elect another?" Across the United States, and in
too many other countries, supposedly democratic leaders seem to be
taking Brecht's ironic question all too seriously.
A version of this article previously appeared Project Syndicate.
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