Like all confabs of the world’s mighty, the recent Hamburg G-20 summit hasn’t produced anything memorable—except perhaps for the secretive one-on-one where Donald Trump might have given away Syria to Vladimir Putin by intimating the end of U.S. aid to anti-Assad rebels. If confirmed, the G-20 palaver would have served as the stage on which Big Boy collusion trumped the politics of global goodness—world peace, climate, development, and all.
The real action, billed by the organizers of the anti-G-20 protests as “Welcome to Hell,” unfolded outside the conference hall, with burning cars and looted supermarkets, and masked guerrillas hurling Molotov cocktails from rooftops and unleashing deadly steel balls from their slingshots.
About 20,000 police from all over Germany could not contain the mayhem that raged over three days, echoing the bloody anti-globalization battles of Seattle in 1999 and Genoa in 2001. This unheard-of deployment of state power may yet go down in the Guinness Book of World Records. But cultural historians will fasten on another first—on the brand-new iconography of urban warfare.
Take this photograph, plastered across German newspapers and speeding across the Net. In the foreground you can admire a young woman, her face artfully shrouded in a Palestinian-type keffiyeh, her torso bare but for her elegantly covered chest, her arm stretched out in a gesture of triumph. But wait! She is not balling her fist to demonstrate defiance. That would have been so yesterday. She was holding up her iPhone to click away at herself and the blazing wall of fire behind. So did countless others.
The emblem of the French revolutionaries was the republican cocarde in red, white and blue, that of the Bolsheviks the five-pronged yellow star. Today’s would-be revolutionaries sport a latest-generation smartphone. They roar “Down With Fascism!” or “Solidarity Without Borders,” as the posters on Hamburg’s university campus had it. But first, let’s get a selfie.
In academic terms, this is not revolutionary, but “expressive politics,” with myself at center stage. To put it more harshly, it is narcissism posing as heroism. Decked out in street-chic clothes, the lady and her comrades-in-clicking have spawned a new meme: the “riot hipster.” In Google, it gets over 100,000 entries.
In their retirement homes, folks in their seventies who once battled the “pigs” over civil rights and Vietnam from Berkeley to Berlin must marvel at this spectacle of “How Cool Am I” self-admiration. They will fondly recall that the old student movement—even the Weathermen—had not only grass and rock, but also a theory of sorts. It explained the world and guided collective action. Picture-taking was left to the domestic security services.
The pillars of the doctrine were Marx, Lenin, and Mao—the Eighteenth Brumaire, Imperialism: The Latest Stage of Capitalism plus What Is to Be Done?, and The Little Red Book. For a wholesale critique of Western culture, the avant-garde carried Herbert Marcuse’s One-Dimensional Man and Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth in their jeans pockets. (There were no backpacks then.) Those interested in more carnal matters tried to penetrate Wilhelm Reich’s The Function of the Orgasm and The Sexual Revolution.
Their children don’t seem to care about proper ideological grounding, especially since reading takes too much time away from texting. Yes, they do have their phrases down pat. The planet’s enemy is capitalism-cum-globalization, which impoverishes the many and enriches the one percent. This Satan goes to war for oil and profit, ruining the climate. “Make Capitalism History” runs one battle cry. Let’s do away with walls and borders, with the state itself. Since democracy cannot purge injustice and exploitation, political action is useless. Instead, it is “Bring Down the System!”
Now, anti-globalization rallies always start out peacefully. The kids and the grizzled veterans of protest may be angry, but they don’t come armed with crowbars, let alone bottles of gasoline. But in Hamburg, as in Genoa, they unwittingly provided the setting where, as Mao famously lectured, the guerilla can “move amongst the people as a fish swims in the sea.”
In German, these folks are known as Die Autonomen and Der Schwarze Block (Black Bloc); in Italy as Autonomi, who had dispatched fighters to Hamburg. They came from as far away as Greece. They had prepared for the G-20 for months, training how to best the “bulls.” Like creatures of the sea, a thousand or so did swim among the ten thousands on the march. If they can’t breach the police lines around the conference center, they will tack where the “bulls” are not. Disperse, regroup, and strike.
No “riot hipsters” they. Their tactics provoke comparison with contemporary Islamicist warfare. During Israel’s forays into Gaza and Lebanon, Hamas and Hezbollah concealed their fighters and rocket ramps in hospitals, mosques, and schools. It was win-win-win. Either the Israelis could not locate the threat in time, or, unlike the Russians in Chechnya, they were deterred from attacking civilian structures—or they did unleash their missiles, invariably killing the innocent. The dead were priceless assets in the war of images, proving the bestiality of the “Zionist entity” round the world.
Of course, the Autonomen and the Black Brigades did not pack AK-47s, nor did they wear suicide belts. So in this respect the analogy is off the mark. But they did employ the same tactics, hiding among the demonstrators and pelting the cops with rocks and homemade incendiaries until these charged into the crowd. Great! The liberal state had dropped its mask in an orgy of “police brutality.” Quod erat demonstrandum. Naturally, the liberal media, as elsewhere in the West, had a field day, subtly shifting the discourse against the authorities. The charges covered the waterfront from “incompetence” to “provocation” and “excessive force.”
Europe’s homegrown terrorists also use the population as cover. Recall the Manchester arena bombing, the slaughter in Paris’ Bataclan music hall, the truck attacks on Nice’s Promenade des Anglais and Berlin’s Christmas market. Swim like a carp and kill like a shark.
There is yet another suggestive parallel. Contemporary terrorists, unlike the anarchists of yore, don’t churn out manifestoes or long-winded rationalizations. ISIS and al-Qaeda murder in silence and spread the images of carnage on social media. So do countless outfits that bomb the mosques of the heretics on the other side of the Sunni-Shi‘a divide.
It’s the “propaganda of the deed,” the sheer horror, that counts, as the ur-anarchist Mikhail Bakunin had it. Violence, even if only with cobblestones and slingshots, is not the means, but the end, and devastation the motive. Demonstrating power against the liberal state, which must fetter itself, delivers an instant rush and the ultimate kick. Ask the black-clads what they want and how they propose to get there, and they will pull down their balaclavas or reel off boilerplate.
But what do pillaged shops and blazing cars have to do with poverty and climate? Now talk to a youthful bystander and his mate who are watching at a safe remove from the battle. If they were honest, they might smile happily and cheer a wonderful party, complete with beer and improvised fireworks (if the burnt-out car is not theirs). This is the postmodern version of Rome’s bread and circuses—almost no risk and lots of fun. And selfies.
The game is global attention, not improvement. The real-time stuff is better than Netflix. So G-20 warfare à la Hamburg will erupt again, unless these meetings are staged in Russia or, as in 2016, in China’s Hangzhou. There, a third of the population was sent packing, and the streets were as empty as they are in post-apocalyptic movies. The media faithfully toed the regime’s line.
Democracies cannot and must not unleash the kind of ferocity that deters. Nor can they concede such summits to the authoritarians. Add to China such emblematic democracies as Turkey, South Africa, and Saudi Arabia—G-20 members all. So let’s do it by Skype or on a luxury cruise ship off the coast of Madagascar. A small flotilla of fast patrol boats and a couple of gunships overhead will suffice for security—at a discount, to boot. For the Hamburg party, the government had to drop €130 million (U.S. $150 million), not counting compensation for property damage. Plus medical costs for 250 injured police.
Alas, attention is what the world’s greats crave, as well. So on to the 2018 G-20 in Buenos Aires. The Black Brigades, and the groupies of urban warfare, will be there, too.
