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Monday, March 12, 2007

This Is What Democracy Looks Like

posted by on March 12 at 13:05 PM

Here’s some video from last week’s busted-up anti-war protest at the Port of Tacoma. From “Give Peace a Chance” to a hail of tear gas canisters in less than a minute.

(Thanks to Slog tipper Matt Hickey.)

RSS icon Comments

1

i hate singing hippies as much as the next guy, but what set off all of the tear gas?

Posted by konstantconsumer | March 12, 2007 1:28 PM
2

Halliburton requested the tear gassing from their new HQ in Dubai.

Posted by Will in Seattle | March 12, 2007 1:33 PM
3

@1 who cares about what set it off. it's the dramatic video that needs to be commended. "Don't swallow!"

Posted by what democracy LOOKS like | March 12, 2007 1:42 PM
4

#3: If the answer is 'nothing' (as appears to be the case) then the question is very relevant indeed.

Posted by gfish | March 12, 2007 1:56 PM
5

Meh. Generally speaking I'd rather be gassed and shot with rubber bullets (both of which happened to me at WTO) than arrested (which I managed to avoid). It's certainly less time consuming, and I don't have to get strip searched or fingerprinted.

As far as the dramatic video-- yes, tear gas cannisters are dramatic. But if I'm not mistaken the protesters were sitting down to block access to the port. That's a very powerful tactic, but any protester who makes a decision to block access to anything-- port, recruiting center, abortion clinic, whatever --and doesn't expect to have the cops to either arrest them or gas them is deluded. Arrest is certainly the more civilized response but, like I said, I prefer to be gassed. It's upsetting, but I get to keep my clothes on.

Posted by John Lilburne | March 12, 2007 2:00 PM
6

Jesus Christ. That's a pretty impressive video.

Does anyone know if a painter's gas mask filters out tear gas? Just wondering.

Posted by Carollani | March 12, 2007 2:13 PM
7

Seriously, time to update the "we're protesting" songs. Can't this generation come up with something that was written, say, within the last couple of years? Frankly, I'm impressed that those in charge cared enough to send their jackbooted thugs AND use gas.

Posted by Col. Kilgore | March 12, 2007 2:18 PM
8

John Lilburne #5 - thanks for your post. Looks like you've got a nice blog started. It's refreshing to read a rational take on the immigration question.

Posted by larry | March 12, 2007 2:26 PM
9

Too bad these cops aren't on the streets of Baghdad right now "spreading freedom and democracy".

Posted by DOUG. | March 12, 2007 2:30 PM
10

No, this is what stinking traitorous hippies getting what they deserve looks like.

Posted by help me rhombus | March 12, 2007 2:46 PM
11

Welcome to Bush's "North American Republic" Brought to you by the same guys who introduced the "bend over America " style of government . So.... dissent has finally become illegal ? If this latest outrage doesnt make you want to find your "voice " nothing ( I fear ) will !

Posted by Barbara | March 12, 2007 2:51 PM
12
So.... dissent has finally become illegal ?

No, blocking access to a federal port has become illegal. Oh, no, wait-- it's always been illegal.

That's not to say it's immoral. I agree with what the protesters are doing here. But if you expect to be effective in changing the behavior of the American government, you have to respect it enough to understand how it works and what its guiding principles are. The concept of equal protection under the law implies that all violations of the law require a uniform response from law enforcement personnel. So when you sit down and block a port to stop weapons from being shipped, you have to hope that the cops are going to respond to you the same way they'd respond if you were sitting down in front of a women's health clinic. The courts might treat you differently, but those kinds of decisions are within the court's mandate; we specifically don't want cops making decisions about right and wrong on their own authority. We want the rule of law. If you respect that, then you know you're going to get arrested or gassed when you block the port.

Again, that's not to say that blocking the port is immoral-- just that you have to be some kind of idiot to think the cops aren't going to attack you when you do it.

Now, there's another problem here, obviously, which is that the cops don't actually respond uniformly to all violations. They tend to be much harsher with war protesters than they do with abortion protesters. But wanting the cops to go easy on war protesters because the war protest is somehow "right" doesn't mean you have a justice agenda. It just means you wish the sympathies of the cops who act outside their mandate were more in line with your values. Something along the lines of, "Illegal arrests are okay as long as they arrest people who annoy me."

I've done my share of protesting. When my protest breaks the law, I expect law enforcement officers to respond. In fact, I'd insist on it in order to protect the underlying ideal of equal protection.

Posted by John Lilburne | March 12, 2007 3:13 PM
13

John Lilburne, I agree with your thoughts, and your penultimate paragraph has me wondering: have abortion protesters indeed EVER been tear gassed (or bully-sticked, or shot with rubber bullets)? Not in my memory.

Posted by DrewVSea | March 12, 2007 3:26 PM
14
Again, that's not to say that blocking the port is immoral-- just that you have to be some kind of idiot to think the cops aren't going to attack you when you do it.

What makes you think the protesters didn't know this? Effective protest requires a direct confrontation of business as usual, and any protesters who are not completely naive recognize this and use it to their advantage.

This protest was a success. They made their point, disrupted the shipments briefly, and maintained non-violent discipline in the face of a strong police reaction. It got media attention, which while undoubtedly slanted against the protest, is likely to be more sympathetic than if they'd just stood around at a rally in Seattle, SF, NYC, or DC (*yawn*). Even the Fox News attempt at a hatchet job on two of the protesters pretty much failed.


Part of maintaining that media reaction is for protesters to reinforce complaints about a police overreaction, even if privately they knew or suspected this would happen. Do this often enough, and even people who hate hippies start wondering why the cops are wasting time with this instead of chasing criminals, and why the country is wasting time on this war.

Posted by Cascadian | March 12, 2007 3:43 PM
15
What makes you think the protesters didn't know this? Effective protest requires a direct confrontation of business as usual, and any protesters who are not completely naive recognize this and use it to their advantage... even people who hate hippies start wondering why the cops are wasting time with this instead of chasing criminals, and why the country is wasting time on this war.

Interesting theory.

You know, about two weeks after the Ohio National Guard opened fire on a crowd of unarmed protesters at Kent State, killing four people, Newsweek did a poll to test pubic response to the incident. They found that, in placing blame for the shootings at Kent State, 10% of Americans blamed the Guard; 58% blamed the students; and 31% were undecided.

Now, the two situations aren't totally analogous, obviously. The Kent State protesters weren't actually breaking any laws, they were protesting an invasion that had been explicitly outlawed by an act of Congress, and the cops shooting at them used live ammunition instead of tear gas. But, you know, I can't help noticing that even when every variable present in the recent incident was amplified by a power of 1,000, the public response was still in favor of the guys in uniform.

I guess another example of this would be Rachel Corrie. If one were actually to sit down and try and come up with an incident that would change American attitudes about the Israeli occupation, it would be hard to come up with something more provocative than an Israeli bulldozer running over a little blond girl. And yet, public reaction, not so much against the Israelis. In fact, a lot of people were perfectly comfortable calling Corrie a traitor in public after she died.

I could go on and on with examples like that. American public reaction to the 1968 Democratic National Convention was generally anti-demonstrator, in spite of all the authorities that came out against the behavior of the cops. Likewise WTO, though there we had other goals that were achieved beyond raising public awareness.

The movements where public reaction has come down more on the side of the protesters have, historically, been much more disciplined than what I saw in this video. So you take Ghandi-- his 9 rules for civil disobedience. Or King and his people, who clearly knew what to expect and were willing to walk right into it.

So I see what you're talking about as a concept and I acknowledge that it can work. I just didn't see it in the Tacoma protest. I really doubt the responses to the police reaction in that protest changed anyone's mind against the war. Though I can also see you and I might disagree on that point.

Posted by John Lilburne | March 12, 2007 4:51 PM
16

It's the inappropriate response, stupid!

If they were breaking the law by blocking the road, cuff them and haul them off. That's the way you normally do that.

Firing on them like this is, well, un-American, and lazy, or should I say crazy, police work.

Posted by Cufford | March 12, 2007 5:25 PM
17

#5, #12, the protesters were most certainly NOT blocking access to the Port. I was present to record the event for an independent media group, and both witnessed and recorded the event. The police had been blocking that street since before the protesters arrived, early in the evening; I arrived at 9:30pm, and the barricade was clearly up. The barricade was maintained even in the absence of protesters throughout the night (people spent most of the time at a different location). The protesters who sat in front of the police were not blocking the street any more than the police were. Had the protesters left, the street would still have been blocked by the police.

I realize that it is difficult to get the facts straight with all the disinformation out there, but what I describe above is most certainly what occured.

Posted by Erick | March 12, 2007 5:27 PM
18
The protesters who sat in front of the police were not blocking the street any more than the police were. Had the protesters left, the street would still have been blocked by the police.

Um... so, I'm willing to believe that the protesters weren't blocking the port. Like, maybe the road they were blocking wasn't the port road. Maybe it was just a service road or whatever.

But otherwise, the text of your comment doesn't seem to prove what you think it proves. 'Cause, see, the difference between cops and protesters is that cops will move to allow shipments of military supplies through. The protesters, by sitting down, indicated that they intended to block the street. So the fact that the cops were standing in a line to block the protesters... well, whatever. You see where I'm going here.

Posted by John Lilburne | March 12, 2007 5:32 PM
19

Painters masks will filter out tear gas.
You have to select the right filter (combination) though.
Sometimes helpful sales staff will help you pick out the correct filters.
The nice folks at Seattle Safety Supply have done this for me more than once. (they were out of the one piece filters i had used for that purpose in the past and helped me pick out a combination substitute)
If you aren't comfortable asking for help picking out the right filters, SSS has posters up detailing what each type of filter blocks, and educated guesses can be made. I imagine 3M's website has the same info contained on the posters as well.
It can be a little difficult finding goggles that fit right with the painters respirator though.

Posted by K X One | March 13, 2007 8:56 AM
20

Sweet! Thanks.

Posted by Carollani | March 13, 2007 7:13 PM
21

John -

You're still working off an incorrect assumption. The protesters were not blocking the street, in fact the police were blocking the street. The protesters just sat down in front of the police line.

The military vehicles were being moved about a half mile away from where this took place.

Just wanted to clear those things up.

Posted by Liam | March 14, 2007 12:43 AM
22

In the first part is anyone able to catch why the female voice was telling them to sit "so they can't" something?

Posted by Nos | March 18, 2007 1:11 AM

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