How Not to Dismantle a Pacifist Bomb

Last Friday, May 25, 2011, I arrived at Barcelona’s main square, Plaza de Catalunya, too late to witness the police injure nearly 100 young protestors by beating them with rubberized metal truncheons and shooting them with rubber bullets.

When I got there the municipal garbage trucks were already in the square, cleaning out debris and the collected belongings of “the Indignants,” the 300 Spaniards camped out since May 15 demanding fundamental changes in Spain’s political and economic system.

The police, called the Mossos D’escuadra in Catalan, had the Indignants circled tightly as the scrub-down continued. Cleaning the square was the point of this dawn operation, the police said. But no one believed them. Hence the second cordon of Mossos on the square’s perimeter, holding back thousands of other protestors – and perhaps more importantly for Barcelona’s politicians, thousands of curious tourists.

Overhead, a police helicopter hovered loudly at about 500 feet. It was not there, I wagered, to help the municipal workers pinpoint the scraps of garbage they’d missed.

I showed my official Spanish press badge – issued by the Public Ministry in Madrid – to three different Mossos so that I might enter the inner ring to interview some of the Indignants. I was passed off three times and finally told by one senior-looking Mosso (I could find little to no identifying information on their black uniforms) to just wait until an official “press escort” would come take me in.

“Who are the escorts?” I asked.

“Just wait there,” he said.

“What are their names? What are they wearing? When will they come?”

Silence.

“Can you give me a phone number? Can you escort me in? Can you send an officer to find the press escorts? Are you saying that the media does not have free access to this public square?”

“Just wait there,” he said.

So I waited. No press escort ever appeared. An hour later, when it seemed there was no end in sight to this stand-off, I went back to my office.

Already in my email inbox was a four-minute-long video from earlier that morning of those same Mossos thumping on seated protestors with their batons, the young people screaming and most not standing up at all, some rolling over or just holding up their arms to protect their heads which when struck with truncheons tend to bleed a lot. At least one person in the video is seen bleeding a lot.

Throughout the entire video not one protestor is seen acting in an aggressive manner. Though they lacked the discipline of Ghandi’s followers during similar thrashings more than 60 years ago by mounted British soldiers, the young Spaniards showed admirable restraint.

As I watched the video I thought two things: First, how can the cops just beat on people like that? It’s spring but this isn’t the Arab spring. We’re already in a democracy. And the second thing I thought was, Uh, oh …

Uh, oh, because while the Mossos – ordered in by Catalonia’s relatively new, tough-talking Interior Counselor Felip Puig – might have been having fun with their sticks they were only going to set off a backlash.

And so they have. The Barcelona protestors, who were going to leave the square anyway in two day’s time, have decided to stay. They’ve brought in new tents and new placards and tons of other stuff and there are suddenly a lot more of them. Same thing happened in Madrid. Same thing happened in Cairo, come to think of it.

Shake a relatively quiet bees nest and bees come out. How politicians fail to understand this process is beyond me. Unless the hope is that they can destroy the nest altogether.

But these bees have evolved genetically since the last great social upheavals in Europe in the 1960s. Besides their stingers, today they are armed with, and arouse their ire, via social media. We all know the names by now, even if don’t all use them: Facebook, Twitter.

The protestors are still in Plaza Catalunya as I write, and they’re still in Madrid and in other major cities. They say they won’t leave until they get politically organized enough to move their myriad committees intact into the surrounding neighborhoods to continue protesting.

How will the Mossos beat on them then, if Puig orders another attack?

This blog was going to end here, in praise of a disciplined if idealistic collective cry for the end of political privilege, economic speculation and painful cuts in social spending during an economic crisis that has seen unemployment rise to 45 percent among young people.

But things of course are more complicated. This weekend I was with a friend who works near Plaza de Catalunya. She said that before the Mossos began physically hurting people, protestors were taunting the police in provocative and humiliating ways. Pouring bottles of water over their helmeted heads. Throwing (non-lethal) stuff at them and generally heckling them from point blank range. She said as she watched she considered it a miracle of self-restraint that the police kept their cool.

There’s a famous photograph from 1967 of a Vietnam War protestor inserting flowers into the rifle barrels of American National Guardsmen. The photo, by Bernie Boston, nearly won the Pulitzer Prize for its juxtaposition of force and love, its portrayal of peace in the face of mechanized violence.

Except that maybe it wasn’t so peaceful. I read once that the photo told the wrong story, the exact opposite story of what was really going on in that precise moment.

One of the guardsmen, who years later had become a peace activist himself, allegedly recounted how the act of having a flower stuck in his gun was the most aggressive act he’d ever been on the losing end of. It was insulting and it hurt him because the supposed peacenik doing the planting did not recognize and acknowledge him as a fellow human being. The Spanish have their very own verb for this utter negation of the other: Ningunear.

In Plaza de Catalunya on Friday I watched a young girl dressed as a clown trying to hand out flowers of her own to the boot-clad, helmeted Mossos. She was doing a cute little mime routine, holding out a flower to the motionless cops. And each time her offering was ignored, she’d pretend to cry and turn and smile at the crowd and the crowd would cheer her on and then they were all chanting something about peace with their fists and arms pumping the air like truncheons. Ninguneando.

I don’t know if the victims in the police brutality video I received were the hecklers my friend talked about. But I do think that if you want to maintain the high road, the respect of fellow citizens – even those who disagree with you – then you can’t humiliate others like that.

You have to win them over. You win them over with your humanity at its most generous. By respecting them as people even if you are in direct confrontation with them. Even as you hold your ground.