Suppression, Police State Tactics, And The Innovation Of Uprisings

At my Labor Day barbecue, I was mentioning the police state tactics going on in Minneapolis right now, and one of my guests dismissed it as nothing compared to a country under authoritarian rule, like, say, China. Take a look at journalist Amy Goodman being detained for asking a question of the police and you may be disabused of that notion:



Goodman was aiming to help two of her producers get out of jail, after they were subjected to police brutality simply for filming in the middle of a protest. And she was one of nearly 300 people arrested yesterday amid a peaceful protest in St. Paul, where the police used rubber bullets, tear gas and water cannons to disperse the crowd. Those detained were held without charges for up to 36 hours. While there were scattered incidents of property damage from some protesters, the law enforcement response was simply disproportionate and deliberately intimidating, essentially creating a Green Zone around the RNC. There are Humvees in the streets and conspicuous National Guard officers. This is what our political conventions have become.

The FDL crew is doing a great job of raising awareness of these civil liberties and free speech crackdowns. And Jane Hamsher says that the police presence has forced activists to innovate in exciting ways:

What happened on the streets of St. Paul yesterday was something else altogether. Whereas Denver was the site of young people clutching their blackberries and hustling passes to more and better parties, in St. Paul they were creating a whole new model for communication, documentation and activism.

Members of the Coldsnap legal collective fanned out across the city and communicated with each other (and the world) openly on Twitter about what was happening during the protest, and were thus able to alert and steer journalists, observers and anyone else with an interest immediately to what was happening on the street throughout the day. Nothing that law enforcement did happened in secret, and ACLU lawyers and other observers were able to be quickly alerted to anything that was happening. When we first arrived we started following their bulletins in the wake of the weekend raids, and as more information came in verifying their reports it became clear that they were a highly trustworthy source of information.

Meanwhile, the Uptake provided an army of video journalists with Qik cameras that broadcast live on the internet. You could track their whereabouts on a Google map, and they provided on-the-spot coverage of what was happening in real time. Really, I can't recommend enough going to their main page and taking a look at what they managed to do yesterday. They also provided a lounge where visiting bloggers could have internet and video editing space, and that's where we were headquartered yesterday. We were able to not only hear about what was happening all across the city virtually instantaneously, but see their reporters quickly diverted to anything that was happening and watch as their cameras went into action.

It was like a million ants scurrying around the city, passing back bits of information that formed themselves into a whole in a completely decentralized manner. Its very nature defied efforts to control and spin and propagandize.

This is how 21st century politics and activism will be waged. Twitter is now in the toolkit of activists, and in a year or two there'll be something else even more amazing. Participatory engagement is back and it's completely different from the 1960s. The traditional media may not be televising it, but it's new and vital and means a lot for how we encourage movement politics going forward.