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Back in July, the City of Vancouver passed a bunch of bylaws to suppress free speech before, during, and after the Olympic games. Last week, we learned how the people in charge will be enforcing those bylaws:

Organizers of the 2010 Vancouver Olympics will send roving teams of observers with the power to confiscate material that infringes on the Olympic brand outside the venues, CBC News has learned….

The Vancouver Organizing Committee’s 20 observer teams are intended to enforce its agreement with the International Olympic Committee that the local organizers must ensure the venues are “clean” of commercial, political or religious publicity.

That’s right: political speech has been deemed to “infringe on the Olympic brand” and is therefore forbidden.* Never mind that this policy directly violates your rights as expressed in the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. Larry Campbell took away those rights back in 2005 when he signed Vancouver’s agreement with the International Olympic Committee, which actually requires host cities to suppress their citizens’ civil liberties in this manner for the duration of the Games. (Campbell was Mayor of Vancouver then; now he’s a Senator, proving once again that it pays to watch out for elite interests.)

Of course, if you plan to ignore Vancouver’s illegal bylaws and exercise your rights of free speech and free assembly during the Olympics, VANOC’s Special Higher Police roving teams of observers are among the least of your concerns. The cops have been busy these past few months harrassing anyone who voices opposition to the Olympics — not just activists, who have been subjected to surveillance, interrogation of themselves and their friends and neighbors, and intimidation by the cops, but ordinary people like the 73-year-old man who wrote a letter to VANOC and got a visit from the authorities by way of response. There is also some legitimate concern that the cops are planning to infiltrate protest groups and use agents provocateurs to discredit anti-Olympic activists, just like they tried to do in Montebello in 2007. And then there are the “free speech zones” designed to keep protesters out of sight during the Olympics — in the proud tradition of such bastions of liberty as the People’s Republic of China, which set up its own protest cages during the Beijing Games in 2008.

In response to all this nonsense, the folks at the BC Civil Liberties Association and Pivot Legal Society are training volunteers to act as legal observers during the Olympics:

Like many of you, Pivot and the BCCLA are concerned that when the more than 7,000 police officers, 5,000 private security guards and 4,500 members of the Canadian armed forces arrive in Vancouver this February, their presence may get in the way of citizens’ constitutional rights to freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, and the right to be free from unreasonable searches and seizures. Bylaws recently passed by the City of Vancouver suggest that we have good reason to be worried.

We plan to be ready, with dozens of people prepared to act as eyes and ears on the streets. Legal observers will be trained to watch for violations and to document and report them.

The first BCCLA/Pivot training session was this past Sunday. More sessions will be offered once a month for the next three months. If you’re concerned about your rights being violated, I’d recommend checking them out.

Or you could, you know, hook up with the anti-Olympic movement, since crackdowns on civil liberties are one of the reasons they’re opposed to the Olympics in the first place.

I’ve already shared my thoughts on the rioting and protests in Greece. If you want to know what the participants think, you should read CrimethInc’s interview with an anonymous Greek anarchist, which focuses on how the actions were organized and who was involved in them. Here are just a few points from the interview:

• Actions have been undertaken mostly by affinity groups, While these groups are often affiliated with larger  federations (which makes it easier for different groups to communicate and coordinate), they’ve been acting under their own initiative rather than taking orders — making them flexible, responsive to the situation “on the ground,” and difficult to suppress.
• There have also been daily General Assemblies in occupied spaces. These assemblies build on a 30-year history of collective discussion and decision-making, not to mention a lot of recent work around creating neighborhood assemblies.
• The majority of the participants in the rioting have been anarchists (the interview subject claims there are 20,000 of them in Greece). But there are also plenty of high school and university students, who have been radicalized — and influenced by anarchist ideas — through years of struggle against the privatization of education, and who are following a tradition of successful student revolt in Greece. They’re taking action because they’re angry with the police, fed up with a failed political system and the exhaustion of mainstream political ideas, disenchanted with a culture that talks down to them and excludes them, and excited by the empowerment of taking to the streets and taking control of their own lives.
• Greek anarchists have worked hard to reach out to the broader community — for example, by organizing neighborhood assemblies and participating in struggles that already mean something to non-anarchists, rather than symbolic, ineffectual protests. They’ve also learned to cooperate with one other despite their differences, and to overcome the “subcultural identity politics” that too often dominates North American anarchism.

In its response to the CrimethInc interview, the Center for Strategic Anarchy (which has done a great job covering the news from Greece day-by-day) is talking about what the Greek riots can teach anarchists in the US. It’s aimed at anarchists, of course, but still worth reading for anyone interested in creating anti-authoritarian social change in North America.

When Alexandros Grigoropoulos was shot, the uproar in Greece started instantaneously, and it has been going strong for over two weeks. As CrimethInc. points out, that has only been possible because Greek anarchists were already organized:

Thanks to a network of social centers, a deep-seated sense that neighborhoods such as the one in which Alexandros was killed are liberated zones off-limits to police, and a tradition of resistance extending back through generations, Greek anarchists feel entitled to their rage and capable of acting upon it. In recent years, a series of struggles against the prison system, the mistreatment of immigrants, and the privatization of schools have given innumerable young people experience in militant action. As soon as the text messages circulated announcing the police killing, Greek anarchists knew exactly how to respond, because they had done so time and again before.

The general public in Greece is already sympathetic to resistance movements, owing to the heritage of struggle against the US-supported dictatorship. In this regard, Greece is similar to Chile, another nation noted for the intensity of its street conflicts and class warfare. With the murder of Alexandros, anarchists finally had a narrative that was compelling to a great number of people. In another political context, liberals or other opportunists might have been able to exploit this tragedy to their own ends, but the Greek anarchists forestalled this possibility by immediately seizing the initiative and framing the terms of the conflict.

It’s not that everyone on the streets is an anarchist. Rather, anarchists had the social infrastructure in place to channel widespread discontent with the  social and economic system into action on the streets. They’ve spearheaded a massive popular mobilization against state violence, economic injustice, and coercive social relations.

That’s an impressive accomplishment, and one that the Greek anarchists can rightly be proud of. But in a sense, it’s also the easy part. The really difficult work involves transforming the current mobilization into lasting social change. Eventually, things will die down — and when that happens, if everything goes back to the way it was before, then I don’t think the anarchists will have achieved their goals. We’ve seen some really exciting things happen (a general strike, occupations, broad popular engagement), and I suspect there’s more stuff like that going on, only we’re not hearing about it in North America because our media can’t look past the violence and confrontation. Hopefully the people in the streets will be able to preserve and build on their successes. Hopefully, they’ll be able to keep on building a new and better society in the weakening shell of the old.

Again, what we’re seeing in Greece is not about amoral thugs with “nihilistic goals of wreaking havoc.” The violence we’ve seen is a response to oppressive social conditions, and a reaction to ongoing violence and oppression initiated by the state. (There is talk of holding some of the arrested protesters in pre-trial detention for up to a year, which used to be a violation of people’s civil rights here in Canada.)

Most importantly, violence is only one facet of a much broader social movement:

In its immediate context, the uprising of the last 10 days comes on the heels of a rising oppositional movement: recently, the Greeks managed to achieve a general strike with support from 80-90% of the working population against privatization of national industries and other neoliberal policies, and for doubling the minimum wage. A broad hunger strike among Greek prisoners, with mass solidarity from Greek society, has also compelled the government to agree to the release of about half the prison population (and the movement declared that this would not be enough).

The “spontaneous” anger of young people against police violence has beneath and alongside it long-standing movement structures that are allowing it not simply to “discharge” and dissipate, but to grow, strengthen itself and expand into new political areas. It is taking place in a population that is highly politicized and has a history of resistance to draw from.

But it’s extraordinary to see the mass mobilization of very young people — high-school students between the ages of 11 and 17, taking to the streets, taking over their schools, developing a politics that addresses their lives directly. It’s not just resistance to police repression now, but a wider discussion is taking place about education social organization — with students holding mass assemblies in their occupied schools, trying to decide what the meaning would be of an education that is part of the life they want for themselves, and not the life that is being prepared for them by the existing society. [...]

At this point, hundreds of schools, colleges and universities have been occupied and are being transformed into centers of organizing. They are running their own radio stations, some of which are private stations now under occupation. They are occupying public buildings; attacking police stations and government ministries.

Yesterday, students occupied the central state-run television station during its news broadcast of the Prime Minister’s speech and stood with a banner saying, “Stop watching and go out into the streets!” Two smaller placards read, “Freedom for all those who have been arrested,” and “Immediate release for all the arrested.” (Video here.)

In a separate action, another group attacked the central Athens headquarters of the MAT, burning vehicles and a portion of the building. The MAT (Monades Apokatastasis Taxis “Units For Restoring Order”) are the “riot police” — a specifically political branch of the police force developed to suppress “civil unrest.” They were developed by police who received training in the US. (Greece has been a central recipient of US police training and technology for repression.) The dissolution of the MAT is one of the central demands that has come out of the assemblies of occupied schools and universities. [...]

At the center of the battle in Athens is the historic Polytechnion — the university famous for the events of November 17, 1973, when the junta attacked protesting students with tanks. As a result of that history, the police are constitutionally unable to enter the university, making it a protected enclave for political organizing and a tactical base of operations. Every evening now, after the protests and street battles, students and other active members of the movement gather for a general assembly. The Coordination of the General Assemblies and Occupations in Athens has given the movement both a political face and a structure of continuity for building, planning and deepening its political consciousness. (Website and blog.)

The uprising in Greece has a particular relevance at this moment in history. If you read the military manuals and strategy papers of the US architects of empire, Greece is a centerpiece of “counterinsurgency” doctrine. In the immediate postwar period, the US and England fought an extended counterinsurgency war to suppress the left (communist and anarchist), which had become the most powerful political force in the country through the years of resistance to the German occupation. The strategy was to brutally repress the armed resistance (80,000 British troops and the arming of domestic fascists to kill, imprison, and torture left guerillas), while at the same time promoting elections and including a legitimate “socialist” opposition, which supported surrendering arms and using the parliamentary system.

This is the “handbook” which the US uses in its imperial wars of conquest and occupation. It’s called “promoting Democracy.”

Yes, there is violence. But it grows out of a (US- and UK-sponsored) history of state and paramilitary violence against the left; out of anger and frustration with the current neoliberal regime; and above all, out of a broad, organized movement of ordinary people seeking to change their lives for the better, for themselves.

Here’s a statement from a group that interrupted a television broadcast on the 16th:

We believe that the media systematically cultivates a climate of fear, promoting misinformation as information, and portraying a multi-faceted uprising as an outburst of reckless violence.

The explosion of civil unrest is explained in criminal rather than political terms. Crucial events are selectively brushed under the carpet. The uprising is served up as entertainment, something to watch until the next soap opera comes on. The media are being used as a means of suppressing free and original thought on a daily basis.

Let us organise ourselves. No authority can provide solutions to our problems. We must rally together and turn our public spaces – streets, squares, parks, and schools – into areas of unhindered expression and communication. Let us come together, face to face, side by side, to formulate our cause and our course of action as one.

Let us overcome the fear, switch off our television sets, come out of our houses, continue to assert our rights, and take our lives into our own hands.

We condemn police violence and call for the immediate release of all protesters held in custody.

We stand for emancipation, human dignity, and freedom.

The workers who occupied their trade union’s headquarters have similar goals:

WE DECIDED TO OCCUPY THE BUILDING OF GSEE

– To turn it into a space of free expression and a meeting point of workers.

– To disperse the media-touted myth that the workers were and are absent from the clashes, and that the rage of these days was an affair of some 500 “mask-bearers,” “hooligans” or some other fairy tale, while on the TV screens the workers were presented as victims of the clash, while the capitalist crisis in Greece and Worldwide leads to countless layoffs that the media and their managers deal as a “natural phenomenon.” [...]

– To open up this space for the first time -as a continuation of the social opening created by the insurrection itself-, a space that has been built by our contributions, a space from which we were excluded. For all these years we trusted our fate on saviours of every kind, and we end up losing our dignity. As workers we have to start assuming our responsibilities, and to stop assigning our hopes to wise leaders or “able” representatives. We have to acquire a voice of our own, to meet up, to talk, to decide, and to act. Against the generalized attack we endure. The creation of collective “grassroots” resistance is the only way.

– To propagate the idea of self-organization and solidarity in working places, struggle committees and collective grassroots procedures, abolishing the bureaucrat trade unionists.

All these years we gulp the misery, the pandering, the violence in work. We became accustomed to counting the crippled and our dead — the so-called “labor accidents.” We became accustomed to ingore the migrants — our class brothers — getting killed. We are tired living with the anxiety of securing a wage, revenue stamps, and a pension that now feels like a distant dream.

Radicals? Yes. Hooligans in love with destruction for destruction’s sake? Hardly.

Who is to blame for the crisis: the architects of a repressive and failing socio-economic system, or the people who want to toss that system aside and create a better world?

I was talking to my parents over the weekend, and they asked me what I thought about what’s going on in Greece. I told them that I don’t like the violence, but that the people in the streets have some very real complaints about the situation in their country. I think it’s worth elaborating on that.

The present unrest was touched off by the brutal and unprovoked police murder of a 15-year-old boy, but police brutality is only part of the problem. 60% of the Greek public sees the current situation not just as a reaction to Alexandros Grigoropoulos’s murder, but as a broader social uprising — and for good reason. There’s a huge gap between the rich and the poor in Greece which plays out in all kinds of ways. Neoliberal reforms have concentrated wealth in the hands of a few, eroded public services, and created a dismal economic climate. Young people in particular have few prospects: 21% of recent university graduates are unemployed, not to mention all the working-class kids who can’t afford post-secondary education. The cost of living is extremely high, with “700 euro a month wages [going] towards 600 euro per month rents in the cities.” The current government is deeply corrupt and unresponsive to the needs of the people it purports to represent.

In a situation like that, social unrest is inevitable. Heck, the riots and protests coincided with a one-day general strike that was planned long before the cops killed that 15-year-old kid. And in a country where a student uprising helped to end 25 years of (US-backed) authoritarian government, it’s no surprise that young people are taking to the streets. They have no prospects and no voice in the existing system. What else are they supposed to do?

That’s not to say I approve of every action taken by every single person involved in the riots and protests. Throwing rocks at riot cops is one thing, but looting stores and firebombing police stations are ineffective tactics for creating social change. And for what it’s worth, many of the people on the streets seem to feel the same way. The anarcho-syndicalists who occupied a TV station the other day blamed the violence on “a small minority” and would prefer a strategy of “strikes and occupations,” and the student vigil for Alexandros Grigoropoulos was a peaceful event until the cops started bombarding the attendees with tear gas.

Ultimately, I sympathize with the protester who said, “Speaking as an anarchist, we want to create those social conditions that will generate more uprisings and to get more people out in the streets to demand their rights. In the end, the violence that we use is minimal in comparison to the violence the system uses.” I think he’s right. The violence we have seen so far is the natural and predictable consequence (albeit occasionally extreme and counterproductive) of an economic and political system that has failed to provide for those who are subject to it, leaving tens of thousands of people powerless, poor, and disaffected.

It’s that system — not the burnt cars and broken windows — that is the real problem.