Breaking the law with a commitment to getting away with it: after the G20 : Melbourne Indymedia

Ever since a bunch of us threw some things, plastic rubbish bins mainly, and broke the window of a police van, and had a bit of push’n’shove with the cops, everyone has gone crazyworld. All of these respectable anti-globalisation people said we were bad, as did a few socialist groups and of course the police and politicians. The media have printed images of us to help the cops track us down, police have raided our homes and seized our property and charged us with riot and affray and such, people have even spent time in remand with sometimes substantial delays in getting bail. We have been marginalised by most and condemned by many, even by Community Legal Service lawyers and others who presume to adjudicate the legitimacy of our actions.

I hadn’t really paid that much attention since the actual events – I was sick for a few weeks afterward – and now it is like I’ve woken up and the world has gone nuts. I read the Arterial Bloc statement before I turned up at the G20 thing. Those Arterial Bloc people were talking pretty radical before the G20 and during, and now people are being hunted down all the ‘defence’ stuff seems like people are terrified and yapping apologetic nonsense. Because people are mad at them. For throwing a bin!

Where is your sense of proportion? The G20 are mass murderers, and now we’re being hunted down. Hunted down! For throwing a bin!

I know Arterial Bloc doesn’t equal those who took action or those charged. And I wasn’t in Arterial Bloc and I haven’t been arrested and my photo is not on display on wanted posters decorating newspapers and media websites, so I guess so far I’ve got away with it. Unlike the thirty odd people charged by now, I suppose. This could change, but so far I’ve avoided their attentions. I don’t speak for anyone except myself, of course.

But really, people charged now have lawyers who seem to have already said all over the place that they condemn everything that Arterial Bloc types and other radicals said they were about. Lawyers who made these statements not just as general principles but specifically in relation to the anti-G20 events.

And if I get arrested, I really think the odds of doing time are pretty small, even if I did throw a bin.

The hysteria of our critics all over the spectrum was revolting but not all that surprising – but I guess it provided the soundtrack for the police taking repression a bit further than had previously been experienced by some of the kind of people at the protests. Some of whom were, not to put too fine a point on it, white and middle class and not notable amongst the participants at Palm Island or Redfern. (All but the ‘middle class’ bit is true of me too, of course.)

We – whoever ‘we’ is - need to resist this repression for so many reasons. So we can do similar things in the future being one. So it is accepted that antagonistic people acting together can have the social weight to prevent some exacting enforcement of law. Because we should be able to attack the G20, and what the hell the police too.

Because the G20 is a club of governments who are mass murderers many times over. Because these governments and the capitalist system they further are one face of the status quo, and the status quo, the state of affairs that is this world, doesn’t require some extra reason to justify disobedience, some new ‘crime’ to make legitimate an active contempt, a destructive criticism.

Because in the world these people defend and recreate all the time, every day has its holocaust. Because they seek to control us and when people don’t want to be controlled by them this is fine, to be encouraged. Because their efforts to control us should inspire our hatred.

If you want reasons why not: Because Australia has been at the cutting edge of creating new types of concentration camp. Because Australia helped to enforce the ‘sanctions’ on Iraq in the nineties which killed over a million people and now pretends the hatred of Iraqis for the military might of their saviours is shocking. Because Australia keeps throwing its weight around ‘the region’, Because ‘our rights at work’ are not something I want to be told is ‘worth voting for’.

Because everyday life in Australia for people who aren’t rich is getting worse not better and I expect this trend to continue. Because the police are the violent defenders of the local version of our collective global hell, the army policing our lives as occupied territory.

For all these reasons and many more, I reserve the right to not be polite, to not obey, to use what is but a tiny fragment of the force and violence used by those within the G20 every day.

And really, compared to the more powerful psychopaths condemning our barbarity, what have we done? I threw a rubbish bin, maybe. I shoved a cop, possibly. Someone damaged a police car, it seems. In most countries this would rightly be regarded as trivial. In any rational society it might be seen in its actual context: the never-ending horror show that is our world.

I’m not sure what is the appropriate response to this horror show, but it sure isn’t giving money to Make Poverty History, voting for the ALP or Greens, beaming positive energy into the G20, praying to the sky god, trying to ‘get our message across’ over the corporate media through ‘non-violent protest’, signing a petition or sending an angry e-mail to my local member. And more to the point, if anyone doesn’t want to or can’t obey anymore the horrible rules that are supposed to make up our lives, and make up the limits of what we do, and what the hell throws a rubbish bin or two, damages some cop property, damages some cop whose very existence is a provocation, I for one am not going to spend my time tut-tutting their naughtiness.

They are mass murderers, they maintain their positions with exploitation and oppression. We threw bins at their violent stooges.