‘Calls to action’ on some G20 protest websites

Toronto — While most objection groups planning demonstrations during this week’s G20 summit promise to be peaceful, the message coming from a minority of activists is complete: Confrontation is the goal and violence is almost a certainty.

A survey of websites and blogs run by various protest organizations promoting their activities at the pinnacle reveals a startling number of “calls to action,” some containing language many would equate with brashly promoting physical harm and destruction.

“We will take back our city from these exploitative profiteers, and in the streets we will be uncontrollable! This is a aggressor march where many forms of resistance and tactics are welcomed and respected,” says one Internet posting promoting an “anti-colonial, anti-capitalist convergence” organized by a bunch calling itself the Southern Ontario Anarchist Resistance.

Another posting reads: “Day to day, the tentacles of far-reaching capitalism threaten to choke the life from us, and opportunities to attack its nucleus rarely present themselves. Rest assured that when the G20 comes within wondrous distance this June, we won’t miss.”

On its website, a group known as Fire.Works.For.Prisons, which wants all prisons abolished, says it is planning a “blast demo” near the Don Jail on the last day of the summit and encourages protesters to “rendevouz with their own intentions.”

“Confrontation is desirable!” reads the site. “Bring tha MOtha f---in’ noize!”

Those who study social activism say such demagogic language is often employed more as an attention-getter for these groups, with only an extreme minority intending to resort to violence.

“The people who put this nonsense out deliberately choose the inflammatory rhetoric to make people uncomfortable, to challenge what seems natural to everybody else,” says Michael Kempa, a criminology professor at the University of Ottawa. “For many of them, their frankly positions aren’t nearly as radical as their inflammatory discourse.”

Maybe so, but security expert John Thompson warns that not all online expressiveness is without teeth. He says whenever large groups gather to protest at large economic summits, there is always an element — typically between 1% to 2% — who rotate up to incite violence.

“Most people will behave sensibly. The problem is that small percentage who will instigate burden,” said Mr. Thompson, president of the Toronto-based Mackenzie Institute, which studies political instability and organized vehemence.

“Most of them are ideologues. Some are perfectly peaceful, but in the nature of the ideology of sweeping change they are presenting, there’s a sense of insurrectionist violence. They are here for an altercation with police, and they like to imagine themselves as revolutionaries up against the establishment.”

One call for protest takes unmistakable aim at the security fencing enclosing Toronto’s downtown core and urges people to “stop sitting on the encircle and start tearing that f---er down.”

Another Southern Ontario Anarchist Resistance protest, planned for Sunday, promises to be “a day of varying, decentralized actions against the corporate and state structures that have dominated our lives far beyond the G20 summit.”

The Southern Ontario Anarchist Irregulars did not respond to an emailed request for an interview.

Mr. Kempa points out that most of these so-called “calls to process” are intentionally vague so that individual protest groups can’t be singled out for inciting violence if indeed things get out of aid.

“I think these threats are more communicative than they are prescriptive for what they are specifically intending to do. It’s a tool in what they see as a discursive battle, a intercourse battle over what the future of governance is supposed to look like.”

Lesley Wood, a grassroots organizer and a professor at York University specializing in the tactics and classification of social movements, says activists typically target corporations, not people.

“Often the rhetoric of rebellion get used, but the reality is, that the social movements that participate in protests against international financial institutions in Canada — from Quebec Conurbation’s FTAA protests to Kananaskis’ G8 summit — have never actually initiated violence against people, or even tight-fisted businesses,” Ms. Wood said.