When I read the obituary of Bill Hudson, the photographer who took the photo above– of a policeman in Birmingham, Alabama, letting his police dog attack Walter Gadsden, a non-violent demonstrator against the city’s racial segregation in 1963– I couldn’t help contrasting the dignity and bravery of people like Gadsden throughout the southern US in the 1960s with the self-indulgent “Black Bloc” clowns who trashed dozens of businesses in downtown Toronto during their “protest” of the G20 summit. (It should be noted that the vast majority of protestors in Toronto were peaceful.)
Of course for all their destructive fury, they did not move capitalism perceptibly closer to collapse. And the possibility that non-wealthy employees of those businesses may lose badly-needed wages as a result obviously did not trouble them– or more likely, did not even occur to them.
