While the whole truth about the confusing circumstances that surrounded the police crackdown at the G20 in Toronto on the weekend of June 26/27 will likely never be unravelled without a serious public inquiry, enough evidence has emerged for me to draw my own conclusions. What happened at the G20 was an ambush, a set-up, entrapment, a sophisticated bait and switch operation in which the anarchist elements of the protest were led to do exactly what the police wanted them to do: raise hell and give them justification (and it doesn’t take much when spin-doctors are at work) for a general crackdown on dissent.http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p5G7aCgXtWg&feature=player_embedded
As a volunteer for the Real News Network, I was at the corner of Queen and Spadina on Saturday June 26 when a flare, which I initially mistook for tear gas, went off behind me – the signal for the anarchists to break away from the main march. I could see a lot of commotion at the intersection and a group of about six cops run down Queen, presumably chasing the anarchists. However, by the time I got over there, riot police had sealed off Queen and the anarchists were gone. It was only when I got back to the bus terminal later that evening when I heard from people there about the wholesale acts of vandalism being committed on Yonge Street, which was all over the news by this point – totally eclipsing the march, which had been entirely peaceful, earlier that day. When I got back to Guelph I saw Toronto police Chief Blair’s infamous speech to the media, justifying a police crackdown as being necessary to curb the actions of “violent criminals” against law-abiding citizens. Images of burning police cars and of black clad anarchists smashing windows were played again and again.
The police protested that they had not been prepared for this “breakaway” black bloc action, despite admitting that they had infiltrated the anarchist groups involved and had been monitoring them closely for over a year. However, no attempt was made to stop them. I personally witnessed the police let the anarchists pass down Queen street when they could have easily blocked them at any point (they had every one of the side-streets off Queen blocked off with lines of riot police and could have easily moved to cordon off Queen itself – going down Queen would be like running the gauntlet), but they let them through and only closed ranks behind them – preventing any other protestors from following them and sealing Queen off only after the black bloc had passed. In light of subsequent events it is increasingly clear that the police intended to use the black bloc to their advantage.
I will be blunt: anarchists are fools and I’ll give some history later to back up this point, but their actions at the G20 more than prove that their so-called “diversity of tactics” was a disaster. Effectively they were led by the nose by the police throughout the day: unguarded windows were provided for them to smash, police cars were left unattended for them to burn, and continuous media coverage provided them with a massive audience for them to alienate through their actions. The police, with one billion dollars worth of resources (helicopters, informants, surveillance equipment, vehicles, enough personnel to flood downtown Toronto in a sea of blue and black etc.), stood by and let them do it all while the mainstream press dutifully covered it – apparently they couldn’t even stop the anarchists from breaking a few windows and torching a few police cars. The anarchists took the bait every single time: thus giving the police the ammunition they needed to justify a general crackdown to the general public.
If the police had launched a general crackdown anyway, without letting the anarchists through Queen to cause mayhem on Yonge and without using the justification of protecting law-abiding citizens against anarchist “thugs”, the crowds protesting the crackdown later that week would likely have been ten times the size they actually were and the cry for a public inquiry would have been deafening. Preparations for a crackdown must have been made, the detention facilities, the equipment, the obscure Public Works Protection Act of 1939 (originally intended to protect public buildings against non-existent German saboteurs in WWII) was in place, practically placing Toronto under martial law, everything was there and there had already been beatings, arrests, and harassment of journalists (The Real News Network’s Jesse Freeston was punched in the face twice by an officer on Friday the 25th while covering a small protest) – the police just needed to justify themselves to the press and make themselves look good on TV, the anarchists did that for them – with a little help of course. The anarchists allowed themselves to be played by the police (a process that was helped, no doubt, by the police agents who had infiltrated them and who no doubt urged them to break stuff and to commit acts of vandalism – I have talked to a number of people who described police agents, like the one who attempted to infiltrate the Hanlon Creek protest last year, are the ones trying deliberately to stir up trouble and turn things violent) and now everyone is suffering from the consequences.
I was impressed when I heard from a fellow protestor how, long before the black bloc breakaway, that he and a group of protestors had broken through a police barricade on a side-street off Queen and actually made it to the security fence – which one of them even climbed – before being forced back. The protest should have remained focused on the security zone. If it’s true that the anarchists were trying to create a “diversion” by drawing police resources away from the perimeter then it failed miserably and with far-reaching consequences. Apparently in their mad rush down Queen Street and their window-smashing romp down Yonge Street, none of them stopped to think “is this too good to be true? Why are the police letting us through? Why are they not guarding that police car? Why are they not guarding those shops? Why are they not trying to stop us?”
Anarchist actions, which divided the protest and left it open to police attack, are hardly unprecedented. In 1871 the Paris Commune, deeply divided and uncoordinated in part due to anarchist demands, was unable to muster an effective defence against the conservative government which crushed the Commune and killed tens of thousands in mass executions. In 1872-73, anarchists seized power in municipalities across Spain but, due to their refusal to act in concert in a centralized way, they were picked off one at a time by the weak Spanish army. Similar events occurred in the Spanish Civil War in the 1930s where the anarchists refused to side with the Republican Government to make a coordinated stand against Franco and his fascist allies. Anarchists shouldn’t ridicule socialists, which they did during the G20, considering that socialists have made ACTUAL revolutions – not by breaking windows, but by building bridges, mobilizing the people against injustice, and standing together in solidarity. Every successful revolutionary from Lenin to Mao to Castro learned to do this, and won. Anarchists by contrast have never inspired a revolution and, if they keep thinking that breaking stuff leads to change, I doubt they ever will. As I said to an anarchist who tried to heckle me at a rally outside Guelph City Hall, breaking a few windows ain’t exactly subversive. It isn’t subversive to be just plain stupid.
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