20Mar - Photos from Large Answer March

Reports and pics of the M20 protests in the Philippines are at imc-qc: http://qc.indymedia.org/

I would like to apologize for the following reflexion. I live in Europe and I was suprised to see that in your demonstrations, there was people wearing uniforms. How can you "preach" for NO WAR with militarism in the demo'. The second thing is the arrested people (2-3 photos): How can people all around stay like that without doing anything? The crowd is much more numerous than the Police. Do you like to watch in the USA?
If anyone can answer this stupid question of a little froggy on my email...

Um, I think it has to do with the nonviolent tradition that the U.S. middle class has for politics inside its borders. You might point out all sorts of violence against the underclass of course, but I became convinced of this phenomenon when I visited Europe and it seems like Germany has many more demonstrations, and more people aware of the fundamentals of geography and world history, and it seems like every demonstration has to involve police with water cannons. If you want, I'm sure I could find a dozen events in the german newswire where they have water cannons this year. The Greeks are twice as intense and use fire. What is weird is that in the bigger picture, they can actually be more civil overall. In 1995, I wandered into 'Chaos Days' in Hannover, and it completely didn't make sense to me as an american. Apparently all these anarchopunks make a yearly ritual with thousands of them going to Hannover to engage in streetfighting with cobblestones and burning barricades against the police, but not for a specific reason - it just happens every year. Meanwhile, you see all these lines of police driving around, and they don't have guns! I took pictures of them rounding up a hundred anarcho punks, but there was no hitting or fighting, and they didn't even put handcuffs on them. They just rounded them up and walked them to the train station to try to send them out of town. I watched senior citizens who deliberately came out to gawk at the spectacle.

A more violent yearly ritual happens on mayday in Berlin and other locations, and this isn't even for a specific cause like Iraq, but Germans have all had to intensely think and discuss the concept of authoritarianism in government since 1945, and a lot of them decided that it is important to flex their muscle.
Just look at the pictures in the newswires of the european IMCs.

Anyway, in the U.S., the police have guns and are much more likely to shoot you with a wooden bullet gun when protesters haven't done a thing.

Well Gus, I believe that one of the main reasons is that American police are REALLY baton happy, and will use it quite often. Another explanation is how you can catch a really hefty jail-sentence for attacking an officer. You dont even have to attack him/her either, they could count an accident bump a direct attack, its all the same in the eyes of the law. Another is the fact that most 'police misconduct' charges are simply dropped by courts, even the most obvious case of police brutality.

The Democratic Association of the Youth (SDK) Congratulates our comrades from the Filipino Community all over the U.S. for standing up against Bush led war and occupation of iraq.