Anarkids and Hypocrites.

• Author: Ehrenreich, Barbara
• Position: Hypocratical reaction against rock-throwing demonstrators in Washington, DC

In retrospect, it looks like a case of false advertising. Posters for the April 16 anti-IMF actions in Washington, D.C., promised a "nonviolent demonstration." But what actually happened was that thousands of demonstrators were teargassed, pepper-sprayed, and/or beaten with police batons.

The Midnight Special Legal Collective, which provided legal support for the demonstrators, reports that one protester had three ribs broken during his arrest. Another was beaten bloody, then tossed into a paddy wagon with the instruction that he be driven around for a few hours before being taken to a hospital. In jail, hundreds of protesters were denied food or water for twenty-four hours, leading in at least one case to a severe hypoglycemic reaction. According to the legal collective:

"One group of men was taken into a basement, put into a cage, and told by a U.S. marshal, `There are no cameras here. We can do whatever we want.' Anyone who looked up while the marshal was speaking was punched in the face. People were being released from prison in the middle of a cold, rainy night, without jackets, shoes, in some cases without shirts, and without any money to take a bus or cab anywhere--all had been taken from them by officials."

If this is nonviolence, you'd be better off taking up extreme boxing.

The anti-IMF posters were, of course, promising that the demonstrators themselves would behave in a nonviolent fashion, but nonviolence on one side is, at least in theory, connected to nonviolence on the other. If the protesters are civil and predictable in their actions, then, it is generally hoped and believed, the police will be moved to emulate them. And if the police should fall short of perfect nonviolence, then--the reasoning goes--the poor, martyred, demonstrators will at least have the moral upper hand. Hence, in no small part, the excessive reaction by organizers of the Seattle anti-WTO protests to the black-clad anarchists who threw rocks through the windows of NikeTown, Starbucks, the Gap, and a few other chain stores last November.

No humans were harmed in the rock-throwing incidents--the stores were closed at the time. Yet anti-WTO organizers from the Direct Action Network reacted as if their protest had been taken over by a band of Hell's Angels. Instead of treating the young rock-throwers like sisters and brothers in the struggle--wrongheaded, perhaps, but undeniably enthusiastic--protest organizers swept up the broken glass. They hinted that...