If you followed the progress of the last G20 meeting in Toronto, you’ll recall the street theatre it gave rise to. The politicians meeting behind barricades, barbed wire, and thousands of police and soldiers weren’t the story — the story was the protest. In turns, it was peaceful, randomly vandalistic, and then violently suppressed. I was generally against the whole thing, both the G20 itself and the protests that were generated by its presence.

Christopher Hume has been attending the Canadian Civil Liberties Association public meetings about the events of that weekend:

In anticipation of the violence that has become de rigueur at such gatherings, South Korea has mobilized 50,000 police officers and put its armed forces on the highest security alert.

Sound familiar? It should. We did exactly the same thing — and in the process revealed ourselves to be oafs. And not just oafs, but nasty oafs.

Just how nasty is being documented by the Canadian Civil Liberties Association. It’s holding public meetings this week in Toronto and Montreal to hear from victims of police violence at the G20. Their stories were at once riveting and tedious. Riveting because the pain is so obviously real; tedious because they’re all the same.

The fact is that G20 summits have no place in the city. The gatherings, which come with full imperial trappings, are a contemporary version of the Field of the Cloth of Gold. That was the legendary meeting in 1520 between King Henry VIII of England and King Francis I of France. As the name implies, it was a diplomatic extravaganza where fountains flowed with wine, where palaces were constructed — and where nothing was accomplished.

[. . .]

A city is its infrastructure. That infrastructure is what we inhabit, and what enables us to inhabit the city. But because of security concerns, G20 organizers and their uniformed henchmen feel they must shut down that infrastructure, and with it, the city.

The tales of police callousness and brutality being heard at the CCLA are a disturbing reminder of the lengths to which the state will go to ensure its safety even at the cost of ours. It’s like the old line from the Vietnam War about having to destroy a village in order to save it. In this case, Torontonians, and by extension all Canadians, had their right to security suspended so as not to compromise the participants’ security — or, more to the point perhaps, not to inconvenience these terribly important people.

Earlier posts on the G20 idiocy here.