G20: $1 Billion? What a waste of taxpayers’ money…

With that much money spent on the Globalist agenda you would think that the organizers would be able to afford a security force that can differentiate between law braking offenders and journalist including citizens that are exercising their democratic right to demonstrate peacefully.

Vandalism, a dead-end tactic at Toronto G20 demonstrations
by Bryan Farrell, WagingNonViolence.org

“During Saturday’s nonviolent protest of about 5,000 activists outside the conference center in downtown Toronto, where leaders of the G20 were meeting, several hundred masked figures dressed in black broke away from and started torching police cars and smashing store fronts. Not only did this steal the attention away from the peaceful protesters, but it got a lot of them hurt and arrested. By the end of the day’s events, the police had beat activists and journalists, fired tear gas and rubber bullets and arrested more than 560 people.

Just about anyone following the G20 could have seen this coming. In the weeks before, Canada was busy building what The Guardian called “the toughest security cordon in the history of the summit,” spending an estimated $1 billion dollars and bringing in 19,000 police officers. So, clearly it was ready to use them. But more importantly, why was it so ready to use them?

A month before the summit, a group of Ontario anarchists announced its plan to stage “militant protests” and to “humiliate the security apparatus.” The group, known as the Southern Ontario Anarchist Resistance (SOAR) asked that its members support “a variety of tactics”—a common phrase used by anarchists who perceive nonviolent action as ineffective. But as is so often the case, such dismissal stems from a complete lack of knowledge as to the dynamics of nonviolent action.

In what sounds like a reasonable appeal, SOAR told its members, “Respect for diversity of tactics also means not smashing things while we’re part of the labour child-friendly march, and remembering that although we might think certain tactics are pointless/annoying, we should not needlessly antagonize those people.”

What these anarchists don’t seem to realize is that nonviolent campaigns lose their power and are generally rendered pointless when they are associated with people who act violently.

This is why governments are always eager to paint their critics as violent, and sometimes, as police in Quebec did two years ago, plant saboteurs to incite violence. In fact, there’s been some speculation that the security forces in Toronto encouraged acts of destruction. In regards to the three police cars that were set on fire, The Guardian wrote:

Questions are being asked as to why the police chose to drive the vehicles into the middle of a group of protesters and then abandon them, and why there was no attempt to put out the flames until the nation’s media had been given time to record the scenes for broadcast around the world.

If this is true, it doesn’t really say much for SOAR and the effectiveness of its “variety of tactics” approach. It suggests that they are considered more of a convenient pawn than a serious threat. In fact, the real threat is a strong nonviolent movement able to appeal to the public by exposing the illegitimacy of the G20.

Also:
Sticking the public with the bill for the bankers’ crisis
Naomi Klein, The Globe and Mail

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