One dead, 80 injured in Genoa: The violent defense of indefensible policies

July 20 @ 11:20pm

The slaying by Italian police of a demonstrator outside the Group of Eight summit in Genoa was not the first killing of a protester against corporate globalization. Dozens of activists have been killed in India, Nigeria, Bolivia and other countries where anti-globalization movements are, for reasons of necessity, more advanced and impassioned than those now taking shape in Europe and the United States.

The difference is that the killing of one protester and the wounding of more than 80 others in Genoa -- like the shootings at Ohio's Kent State University campus in 1970 -- took place in front of the cameras of western news organizations and independent reporters who transmitted the story to the world.

That is a big difference indeed -- especially when the images raise profound questions about why Italian police thought it necessary to escalate the violence to a level that resulted in a death and in so many injuries.

As a result, the clashes between civil society and the mandarins of corporate capital that for some had come to seem routine have now taken on a new character. Issues of development and democracy that demonstrators have long identified as deadly serious are now more obviously so. And the dismissals of religious, labor, farm and student campaigners for economic and environmental justice by powerful political and business elites sound all the more crude and desperate.

No action by this G8 summit, no matter how noble in rhetoric or intent, will erase the fact that the economic policies promoted by the leaders of the United States, Great Britain, France, Germany, Italy, Canada, Japan and Russia are now so unpopular that their gatherings must be "protected" with deadly police violence.