Angry in the Great White North

I know I'm coming rather late to the party, but really, I've been trying to say something about the rioters and vandals we saw in action in Toronto over the weekend during the G20 summit that hadn't been said already.

Yes, they're thugs.  Clearly, they don't have jobs.  Of course, they won't be punished to the severity they deserve.

Then it struck me just how Orwellian all this is.  In fact, if you look, you can see layers and layers of Orwellian imagery in the G20 violence.

On the top, and most obvious, is the bitter irony.  In George Orwell's 1984, the government was vicious and violent and act without restraint on a captive populace who had nowhere to go to avoid that viciousness and violence.  In Toronto at the G20, the police were trapped, forced to defend a fixed position, while the "populace" exercised far more freedom of action, and decided where to get violent and when.

Another Orwellian aspect to the weekend was just how the violent demonstrators whipped themselves into a fury, not unlike the "two-minute hates" that Winston Smith witnessed, and participated in.  From the G20 Toronto Community Mobilization Network, you can almost hear the breathless excitement as the author discusses using violence six weeks ahead of the summit:

An affinity group is a small group of people, about 3-10 or so, who are interested in similar tactics and have similar levels of comfort. They can be thought of as the basic building block of the larger, decentralized group that we will form during many of the actions. In a demonstration, affinity groups are able to communicate and make decisions quickly and autonomously, and can act with greater efficiency and safety.

We've got a month and a half to get ready for this! Let's gather in the secret, quiet places, and discuss with our trusted buddies what would excite and inspire us. Then, once we share a vision, let us scheme how to create it. Here are some things to think about when preparing as an affinity group:

• Comfort level - what sort of things are you willing or not willing to do?
• Legal preparations - How will you deal with arrests?
• Getting used to working as a group - In the coming weeks, make some time to go adventuring together.

All SOAR events celebrate a diversity of tactics, meaning that we support all the many different ways that people choose to resist our common enemies. We will not condemn or attempt to prevent or control actions being taken by others, and will vigorously resist state repression against anyone. That said, respect for diversity of tactics also means not smashing things while part of a child-friendly march.

Then there is the Newspeak.  The previous extract is full of it.  Euphemisms bumping up against each other.  "Diversity of tactics" to mean whether to use a brick lobbed at a distance to smash a window, or to use a two-by-four wielded by hand for that more personal touch.  These people don't conspire, they "scheme".  They aren't participating in a riot, they are part of an "action".

Newspeak pops up in the media reports as well.  Words like "thugs" and "rioters" and "criminals" only appear in blogs and columns, which makes sense, since independent-minded communication by the masses is the antithesis of the complete government control of all media in 1984.  Thankfully, we don't have government control of media, but we do have something more insidious: political correctness.  Where editors take control, the vocabulary changes, and that is pure Newspeak at play.  We are reminded at how the rioters were somehow different from the larger mass of demonstrators, ignoring the fact that they all organized using the same websites, and that if the demonstrators had desired to do so, they could have ejected the rioters from their midst, or pointed them out to the police before the violence began.  The mainstream media stories talks about how a "protest got out of hand", as if the violence was an accident, and not the original intent.

And finally, and I find this fascinating, there is the Duckspeak.  Duckspeak is one of those Orwellian concepts that is less well known.  It is related to Newspeak, which is broadly understood.   Newspeak is a form of thought control.  In 1984, words are eliminated in the government-controlled vocabulary so that seditious thoughts cannot be formed.   I mentioned above how that happens in the mainstream media all the time.  It is especially prevalent, though, words puts out by the rioters.  For instance, they talk about "disAbility rights", with the capital "A" in the centre of the word.  Hey, no one likes it that people who suffer from a disability have it harder in life, but as a community, we make an effort to ease that burden because we recognize the disability.  But for the rioters, having a disability is just one more thing to rail against, so they alter the word to as if to somehow attack the concept of a disability in the first place.  At least, I think that's what they're doing.  In 1984, the changes to the vocabulary made a certain evil sense.  When the rioters alter the vocabulary in a clear attempt to alter your way of thinking, it's often hard to figure out just what it is that is supposed to be changing.

But to Duckspeak.   Duckspeak is George Orwell's term for speaking without thinking.  This is not "thoughtless" in the sense of saying something hurtful but not realizing it was hurtful until it was too late.  This means, literally, "not thinking".  The approved party line just pours out of the speaker's mouth, and his higher brain functions are not even engaged.  Lots of the writings from the rioters have that Duckspeak quality:

With power and vision, people of colour, indigenous peoples, women, the poor, the working class, queer and trans people and disabled people will create and lead alternatives; will decide for themselves; will transcend the systems that oppress them and keep them from talking to one another.

Oops, "disabled" with a small "A".  Drop and give me twenty reasons to hate capitalism before you even think of picking up that phone and calling your parents for money to pay the rent this month.

OK, I couldn't resist.

Just look at that paragraph, which ends the "About Us" page and so ought to really drive the point home, and figure out what it says.  It doesn't really say anything.  They will use "power and vision".  Specifically what power?  What is the vision?  How does the "system" keep them from talking to one another?  Is that the same system that has given them cell phones and the Internet?  And then there is the standard list of victim groups, a list that just gets cut and paste from paragraph to paragraph and from page to page. 

Most of it doesn't really say anything, and where it seems to say something, it's demonstrably untrue.  It is just the standard rhetoric of the anti-globalization vandal that they use to justify the violence.

I doubt they even think about it all that much when they write it out.  They just do.  It's what they say.  It doesn't mean anything, really.  It's boilerplate.

Duckspeak.

So there you go.  My take on the summit violence.  It's 1984 turned on its head, with the horrors of Ingsoc not in the ranks of the police, but found in the milling crowds attacking them.

I think George Orwell would have appreciated the irony.