Anarchists Plan Mayhem! Then Hold Press Conference

The New York Times may believe, misguidedly, that it's doing its civic duty when it warns us that the anarchists are coming to town, a "shadowy group of protesters" known for "throwing rocks or threatening officers." But surely no such benign motives lie behind the appearance of a similar story in the ultraconservative, and partisan, Washington Times, which quotes an FBI counterterrorism chief to the effect that "violent anarchist groups" are "'planning to do more than protest.'"

Local tabloids did their part to amp up the hysteria by naming names--names, that is, plucked randomly from some dusty red file. According to the New York Post, "extremists with ties to the 1970s radical Weather Underground have recently beenreleased from prison and are in New York preparing to wreak havocduring the Republican National Convention." The Daily News's piece of fantasy, which ran under the headline "Anarchists Hot for Mayhem," claimed that a former Black Panther named Kazi Toure was training young militants in weapons use. None of these stories bother to mention that almost every anticapitalist protester accused of violence over the past five years, from Seattle to Philadelphia to Montreal, has won acquittal or seen the baseless charges dropped. (Check out David Graeber's Nation piece on lies the police tell, and the press believes, about anarchists.)

Yesterday I spoke with several of the instigators singled out in these recent articles, which, it turns out, is more than the reporters at the Daily News and the Post bothered to do. "Wreak havoc?"asks Laura Whitehorn, now a Manhattan editor and one of the only members of the Weather Underground to serve time. "The most dangerous thing I'm planning for next week is to do yoga in the park. I'm on parole--so I'm not going anywhere near a demonstration." According to the News, Jaggi Singh, a Canadian activist who organized anti-FTAA demonstrations in Quebec City in 2001, was one of Toure's trainees. But Singh says he's never met the man, never had arms training--and anyway, he isn't even making the trip to New York for the RNC. I also spoke with Janet Yip, of Refuse & Resist, listed by the Post as one of five "extremist" groups singled out by the NYPD in a manual titled "Executive Resource Handbook on Radical Groups." Yip says R&R did have RNC plans: an awards ceremony for activists last night and the permitted United for Peace and Justice march on Sunday. "What's extreme," she says, "is what's being done to our country."

Several of the inflammatory tabloid pieces have been posted to officer.com, a website for police officers, and activists fear that they'll influence police response. "They've been so pumped up with fear about us," says anarchist Eric Laursen, "that they may feel justified in snatching people off the streets at any excuse, caging protesters up and doing mass arrests." On Monday night Laursen gathered together Graeber, an anthropologist; author Starhawk; and half a dozen other anarchist thinkers at St. Mark's Church in the East Village for a media briefing to respond to the misinformation. Though the speakers made a good-faith effort to explain what anarchism means to them (egalitarianism, nonhierarchical social structures) and why they're protesting the RNC, the reporters asked only about property destruction. Laursen, who's a member of the A31 coalition, which is coordinating a day of direct action for next Tuesday, says various collectives have sit-ins planned, and die-ins, and even dance-ins, as well as street theater good and bad (one group will dress in flight suits and play golf; another will walk the subway cars dressed as dead Iraqis), but he says no one's planning any property destruction that he's heard of.

"If the Post or the News thinks that direct action is always violent, then they probably think Rosa Parks was violent when she sat down in that Montgomery bus," Laursen says. "Direct action is when you stop supplicating for things that are rightfully yours, and instead take them. A huge part of Manhattan has been cordoned off and given to Republicans for their cocktail party, and significant public services are being devoted to making sure they don't even hear a pin drop outside. It's essential for us to truly reclaim the streets instead of being shoved off into some distant protest pen."

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