I was talking to a friend last night who was at the protest in Plaça Catalunya last Wednesday. He was differentiating the protest from what normally happens in Greece.
The long and the short of it was that the protests in Spain (we’re going to generalise here) are less violent and that the violence that inevitably occurs has far less support from the majority of the protest.
He spoke of how, in Greece, when part of a protest go and smash up the foyer of a bank, the bulk of the protesters are generally supporting the actions, even if they aren’t participating.
Yet one thing remains the same, police beating up protesters, peaceful or not. I think that some of the actions of the police caught a lot of american’s by surprise during the Wall Street protests last year, but from speaking to people from around Europe, it seems to be pretty much par for the course here.
Of course, these days everyone carries camera phones around with them and so there is much more proof, or at least something close to it. Yet, despite police brutality probably being a hit with media audiences, there seems to be a blind eye turned when the victims are smelly, badly dressed protesters.
These days, media pressure can achieve just about anything in politics, there are enough people willing to believe the their media’s version of the story that the right media outlet can force issues that would otherwise remain untouched.
So, walking home last night I was thinking about this, obviously the hundreds of videos of police brutality against protesters are doing the job. Of course, most are just as out of context as the news, you can’t say what happened before the video started, just cause and the police being provoked could easily be claimed.
Yet, imagine if you could get video cameras, always on, strapped to the front of the shoulder of a reasonable number of the protesters. Hook them up to run constantly and then synch them up afterwards.
Mulling this over in my head I decided that even this probably wouldn’t help, if there’s one thing that all civilisations are good at it’s not seeing what they don’t want to see. But it would make one hell of an interesting video if you tiled them across the page.