Apparently, the revolution will be televised. And apparently, people will sit down and watch and then bitch about what they saw the next morning.
According to a just released Angus Reid poll, the majority of Canadians believe that the police's actions against G20 protesters were justified.
Now "majority" is a funny word since for this poll 1,003 Canadians and 503 Torontonians were interviewed. Now, doing a little math here, that equals a total of 1,506 Canadians, which is actually less than the number of activists and bystanders who were arrested over the weekend.
I'm not a psychic, but I can certainly tell you what 1,090 people think of the police's conduct over the G20 Summit weekend.
And why the choice to only interview 503 Torontonians when they were the most impacted by the G20 protests in the first place?
Anyway, back to the results:
-- 73 per cent of Torontonians and two-thirds of Canadians believe police treatment of protesters was justified during the G20 summit.
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-- Two-thirds of Canadians are disgusted with the G20 demonstrations in Toronto. Fifty-nine per cent are ashamed, 57 per cent are angry and 54 per cent are sad.
-- In Toronto, 81 per cent said they are disgusted with the G20 protests, while 74 per cent are angry, 65 per cent are sad and 61 per cent feel ashamed.
Considering the media coverage Torontonians and Canadians were subjected to over the weekend, I can't blame them for feeling the way they do.
Apparently -- and I say apparently because I was not at home watching the protests on TV myself but am relying on the trusted feedback from family, friends and colleagues (left, centre, right wing and libertarian) -- all the major media networks were covering the protests, with CP24 and CTV covering the events live.
In order to catch the viewer's attention, the major networks all had promo loops playing during commercial breaks that featured images of Black Bloc anarchists setting a cop car on fire.
But these promo loops played so often, and on every channel, that it looks like there were actually a thousand cop cars burning in the streets, set alight by a million strong army of anarchists (in total, only four police vehicles were burned). One friend even likened the media coverge to that of 9/11 where people were similarily fixated in front of the TV, watching the same horrific violence play over and over.
It honestly looked like nothing else was happening in the city but the riot. And by "nothing" I mean the 25,000 strong Labour/NGO/Peace march that rallied at Queen's Park to protest the G20's policies.
Of course, people did eventually hear about Queen's Park through the media, but only in relation to what occurred after the official Labour/NGO/Peace march when police began using their horses as weapons to charge through the crowd they trapped there.
Please note that the Canadian government designated Queen's Park as the official free speech ("safe protest") zone.
Back to the Angus Reid poll, it found:
-- Fifty-three per cent of Canadians and 86 per cent of Torontonians watched the protests closely or moderately closely.
Hey with MSM friends like that, who needs enemies? I can see why average Canadians thought the whole city was burning.
Ironically, if the MSM was trying to buy nice from the police(=state), not every journalist reaped the rewards. Some got owned: G8/G20 Communiqué: Journalists attacked by police at G20 protests
Here's a link to the actual poll results.
The interviews were conducted Monday and Tuesday, before the stories started coming out about how the provincial government and police had lied about the legal powers conferred by the secret regulation; before the cops had been exposed as lying about the so-called "weapons" seized; and before the released detainees' stories of police brutality and sexism got widespread publicity.
This leaked military document is critical to understanding militaristic tactics being perpetrated upon innocent civilians on Canadian soil. The tactics used by US special forces abroad, as laid out in this booklet, are virtually the same tactics that are now progressively being utilized by our police forces. To understand and expose their tactics is to render them useless. Must read and please pass this on!
Wikileaks:
"US Special Forces Foreign Internal Defense Operations, FM 3-05.202, Feb 2007
FM 3-05.202: Special Forces Foreign Internal Defense Operations is the 110 page manual for US Special Forces support, including undeclared support, of foreign governments against internal revolt or insurgency, such as in El Salvador, Colombia, Somalia and the post occupation governments of Iraq and Afghanistan. The manual was made US military doctrine (policy) in February 2007. It supersedes the 1994/2004 version FM 31-20-3: Foreign Internal Defense Tactics Techniques and Procedures for Special Forces, which Wikileaks described as follows:
The document, which is official US Special Forces policy, directly advocates training paramilitaries, pervasive surveillance, censorship, press control, restrictions on labor unions & political parties, suspending habeas corpus, warrantless searches, detainment without charge, bribery, employing terrorists, false flag operations, concealing human rights abuses from journalists, and extensive use of "psychological operations" (propaganda) to make these and other "population & resource control" measures palatable."
Document freely accessible here: http://bit.ly/aUgVij
People in their homes didn't see the protest, they only saw the violent acts of attacking police cars and later the vandalism on Yonge St. What the people saw was ugly and they are right to be disgusted with it. I hope the people's "disgust" is channelled into demands to catch those who perpetrated the violence. Since the media is not helping with this, we should write them and ask that they display some of the pictures. Some in the public may recognize these people and help identify them to police.
Nice little witch hunt you've got going there, turtle. Now you want to enlist the left into ratting on our neighbours to the police. Whom do you imagine you are helping, anyway?
It's not our responsibility to help the police protect the economic interests of corporations and their insurance companies. If we were going to point the finger at criminals, there are many highly placed politicians and businessmen who cause far more economic damage to far more people every day of the year.
Identifying the couple of unmasked thugs who were smashing the police cars with sticks is a witch hunt??
Another masked thug with a hammer senselessly breaking the glass of store fronts is somebody you would embrace??
Let the cops spend their billion dollars doing their own job.
The fact that you choose to focus on people causing minor economic damage to big insurance companies' bottom line rather than the personal violence of the police and the enormous economic violence of their masters against us all speaks volumes about where your sympathies lie.
You are a useful tool of the police - the same repressive police force that was used against hundreds of innocent people last week in Toronto. There is no functional difference between what you are doing and what a police infiltrator of the protest movement would do.
bravo rabble. as a new member, and long time peaceful activist I was appalled at the images on youtube and stories in rabble. I was in Paris in 1868 when the police thugs looked like SS officers. I was at UC Berkeley when 800 plus students were arrested for a peaceful sit in. This is THE WORST and we must deman a recall of Harper, Bully Blair's resignation and a stronger NDP voice. If Layton won't do it let him free Libby Davies who seems to be temporarily muzzled.
Good article, especially the point about the tv news station looping the same clips over and over; I was watching for a long time before I realized they were in fact the same handful of clips being repeated. But the author needs to take a course in statistics!