A tour of the world's protests. To tell what goes unsaid: the demonstrators are peaceful and are fighting for a better life, against inequality.
The planet is burning, says Greta Thunberg, who has reignited the peaceful spirit of the environmental struggle. The world watches with bated breath as Hong Kong sees the extradition bill definitively shelved, after months of protests it had triggered. For more than a week, people have been demonstrating in Lebanon "to change the system". After Quito, in Ecuador, Santiago de Chile is now aflame against inequality and the privatisation of natural resources and services. In Barcelona, ancient Catalan grievances have flared up again, with the occupation of the airport "as in Hong Kong". The great feminist wave is on the move, reaching places far apart from one another — from Seoul to Belfast and New Delhi. In London, for decades a hub of European mobilisations, people are also marching for their own fate, hanging in the balance because of Brexit. And the cry of the poorest is rising, in countries ravaged by conflict and misery such as Haiti and Iraq.
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Despite the differences in context, young people are not the only ones demonstrating, but they are on the front line. They are rebelling against inequality, corruption, the suppression of freedoms, and climate emergencies. And a distinction seems to be emerging almost everywhere between pacifists and the violent, idealists and nihilists. On one side, the human and positive icon of Greta; on the other, the nihilistic metaphor of Hollywood's latest Joker. Who, watching the enraged crowds in Todd Phillips's film, did not fear a return of terrorism in real life too? "This is what a mentally ill person can do when wronged by society," the clown tells the audience. Nevertheless, in the majority of the ongoing revolts, a resolute commitment to non-violence has prevailed.
Young demonstrators of the post-global era seem to prefer radical but peaceful dissent. The Hongkongers — citizens who want to preserve Hong Kong's autonomy from China — have held firm. Despite rubber bullets fired at head height, tear gas, beatings and police arrests, most of the protesters have marched peacefully. Some have worn the Joker mask. Others have thrown stones and objects, but the majority have managed to maintain a defensive stance.
In a Chile marked by some of the most extreme inequality and privatisation (of water, for example), at least 21 people died in eight days (from 18 October) of protests and repression. The government of conservative Sebastián Piñera deployed soldiers and tanks in the streets, something that had not happened since 1990. The worst was feared: the return of the ghost of dictator Augusto Pinochet, who held power from 1973 to 1988. In Lebanon, exhausted by economic crisis and the corruption of its leaders, young people organised creative protests, using art and music as vehicles for dialogue. And peaceful but tenacious, fighting against the climate emergency, are the students of Fridays for Future, the "disobedients" of Extinction Rebellion and the American members of Sunrise Movement.
For at least fifteen years there had not been so many protests, so intense, in so many parts of the world at once. Anyone who was young between the 1990s and the early 2000s inevitably thinks back to the Seattle riots of 1999, during the summit of the World Trade Organization (WTO). It was then that the economic model now known as "turbo-capitalism" began to be sharply criticised. What followed were the peaceful gatherings of the World Social Forums (World Social Forum) in pursuit of an alternative globalisation, but also the violent reactions of black bloc extremists. Hundreds of associations defending human, civil and environmental rights converged on the international forums from every corner of the globe. From 2001, their motto was "another world is possible" — a world governed by democratic policies rather than the interests of multinationals; a world that was fair, environmentally sustainable, solidary and pacifist. Indeed, people marched against wars that had been sold as "just" but proved to be founded on lies, as in Iraq, or dramatic failures, as in Afghanistan.
And then? Following the repression of "new-global" demonstrators at the G8 in Genoa, the flame of the movements gradually dimmed. Denialists paid by Big Company interests in oil, hydrocarbons and agri-food drowned out the scientists denouncing climate change. The Arab Springs very quickly turned — almost all of them — into very long winters. Democratic voices were crushed under the yoke of dictators, coalitions of powers lacking both vision and scruples, armies of Islamic fundamentalists and mercenaries from every corner of the world — the so-called foreign fighters.
As political scientist Olivier Roy argues, we have partly sunk into nihilism. From Mexican gangs to Isis executioners, psychological and social malaise has been exploited to recruit young people for whom nothing matters, not even life itself.
On the other hand, as the late Hungarian philosopher Agnes Heller maintained, even in the West people have stopped fighting for democracy. In the 2010s, the most widespread movement against inequality was Occupy Wall Street, which launched the slogan: "We are the 99 per cent", aimed against the one per cent that holds the world's wealth. Yet it is precisely in recent years that the cyclone of the extreme right and populism has swept through the wealthiest democracies, even those afflicted by the great financial crisis of 2008–2010. With the election of Donald Trump as president of the world's leading economic power, and the advance of neo-fascists, supremacists and sovereigntists, republican values have wavered before the eyes of all. We must remember — as Heller argued — that democratic foundations can come under attack at any moment. The foundations of our house of rights require active maintenance.
A Chilean journalist who has worked for media outlets and environmental NGOs, Andrea Nuñez, helps us analyse the revolts. Having lived between Santiago, Barcelona and Milan, she explains the coexistence of good and evil in social protests as follows: "In all large demonstrations there can be violent elements. In Chile, we call them 'lumpen'. These are working-class sectors with no social consciousness, which include common criminals, vandals and drug traffickers. They take advantage of the chaos to loot, steal or start fires. They believe in nothing, but the response to these violent elements must be systemic."
As the film Joker illustrates, Nuñez adds: "Violence is never justified, least of all against innocent people. But it is worth remembering that these are groups the state has marginalised, rejected, and indirectly helped to create. In Chile (as in Hong Kong and elsewhere, ed.) what is happening is, above all, a very broad and diverse peaceful citizenry protesting. Middle-class people, students, pensioners, families with children. While they were rebelling by banging pots and pans, the police were beating 12-year-old children. That is the story that should be told."
Non-violence makes less news than violence. "Yes. And one has to take into account the use — typically Chilean — of infiltrators. They have always been there, going back to the days of the dictatorship: plainclothes police officers with orders to unleash chaos. They burn cars, they stir up trouble. I remember them well during the protests of the 1980s against Pinochet."
The flame of the movements seemed to have gone out, but the embers were still there. And now, fifteen or twenty years on, we find ourselves once again in a "society in crisis," as journalist Naomi Klein writes. Indeed, compared to 2001, when her book "No Logo" — the manifesto of the no-global movement — was published, the gap between rich and poor has widened, and the exploitation of human and natural resources has increased. "So were we right? Yes, but you had nothing else," Mauro Biani wrote in a famous cartoon about the events in Genoa. And, as Nuñez explained, the media bear responsibility for spreading partial and distorted, if not outright false, information.
On this subject, in her latest essay "Il mondo in fiamme," Naomi Klein offers a little-known yet emblematic portrait of Greta Thunberg, beginning with her psychological distress: "Like many of her peers, Greta first learned about climate change when she was around eight years old… and it became an obsession […] At eleven she was severely depressed. Many things contributed to her suffering, some connected to being different in a school system that expects all pupils to be more or less the same ('I was the invisible girl at the back of the class').
But there was also the profound grief and sense of powerlessness about the state of the planet, and the inexplicable inertia of those who had the power to do something meaningful. Greta Thunberg stopped eating and speaking. She was very ill. She was eventually diagnosed with selective mutism and obsessive-compulsive disorder, as well as a form of autism known as Asperger's syndrome." But Greta, like other different and special young people, found support in her family — the very thing that the marginalised young Jokers lack. From Hong Kong to Chile, the web is full of images of minors in the streets. There have never been so many. The spark of the Greta archetype has transformed into an incendiary enthusiasm that, this time, creates rather than destroys.