LONDON — The belligerent actions of the Italian state at Genoa last month were a declaration of war against young anticapitalist protesters. That, anyway, is how they were understood.
The symbolic isolation of the Group of Eight leaders, contrived by great artifice, broadcast their remoteness. The measures taken to preserve that isolation made all those outside into sans-culottes; at a stroke, this isolation of the elite and exclusion of the lobbies for the poor turned the protesters into the leaders of all the world's excluded, silent, barefoot masses. It made the poverty and powerlessness of most people in the world appear to be a deliberate artifice, contrived by the capitalist elite so that the G8 elite could preserve its comfortable isolation.
It's hard to think of anything more that could have been done to give the protest a coherence, a political spirit and a resolute moral appeal. The tens of thousands of middle-aged Christians, earnest charity workers, veteran socialists, youthful anarchists, who poured into Genoa for the G8 meeting had had little in common except a focus on the economic and political power of the G8 leaders.