2001-04-24 - 12:24 p.m.

NO ENTRY DEPUIS LONGTEMPS

I don't know why - it's not like diary writing is anathema to getting school work accomplished. In any case, here I am having just returned from the la bataille de Quebec.

I AM NO LONGER A PACIFIST

Two guys pull down their pants and bare ass to the riot cops 'protecting' the crowd. One woman turns around and starts wailing on the guys not to do this, and that "..[the cops] are just doing their job." Just doing their job? So does the president of Nike, so let's leave him to building more sweatshops in developing countries. So does Ernst Zundel in Toronto spreading neo-Nazi materials all over the world, so let's leave him in facsist peace. The cops are there acting in a longstanding tradition of social control and domination and, really, they should be questioning their own position on the other side of the wall while launching tear gas, rubber bullets and water canons without provocation. If they can't question it themselves, they must be forced to. The fact is, you cannot reason with police: they don't talk.

The fact that those two guys were showing their bare asses to the cops is both a sign of defiance and also a recognition by the protestors that those cops are human. It is a dialogue of sorts - the only dialogue possible given the situation. Given the assumption that humans are reasonable thinkers, so are the cops. And so it is necessary to question their authority and encourage them to question structures of authority that they propigate by continuing to be part of something that is violent.

It is not violent to defend oneself against a tear gas attack by launching those same gas canisters back at the armed, bullet-proofed, gas-masked, shielded, billy club-wielding, standing-behind-a-chain-link-fence cops. Furthermore, it is not violent to throw projectiles, paint bombs, rocks or bricks at a protected member of the security forces.

IT IS however violent to allow the enforcers of oppression to continue their domination by not treating them as a human by ignoring their presence. It is violent to tell other protestors that they are "only doing their job". It is violent to assume that other individuals tactics are wrong without a hint of active resistance or questioning. It is violent to allow oneself to be involved in homogeneity. A wall is violent, a cop is violent, and state-enforced power is violent even without provoked action and all merit resistance taking any form possible.