Police Violence, Ideology and the Myth of Representation

The protesters must widen the discussion and attack the fundamentals, not the symptoms – with an eye not only to Greece, but to the world.

Most people are familiar with Jan Vermeer, one of the most famous painters in history. What is perhaps less known is that up to a point in his career, so the legend goes, Vermeer was hardly an outstanding artist. It is assumed that he developed his unrivalled mastery of light and colour through the use of a camera obscura, a device that projected images on a surface through a lens. Now, what is even more interesting is that Delft, the city where Vermeer lived and worked, was home to yet another 17^th century innovator, the lens-maker Antoni van Leeuwenhoek. Reclusive and secretive to the point of paranoia, Leeuwenhoek never allowed much information to leak out about how precisely he achieved such staggering results in optics – serious stuff for a century that was taking an increasing interest in the observation of the natural world. As for art historians, they will probably never know how much of Vermeer’s success in art is owed to Leeuwenhoek’s technology. We know that Leeuwenhoek was listed as an executor of Vermeer’s estate, after the latter’s demise, but no optical device has been found among the painter’s belongings. So, we can assume, but we do not know…

The point of this apparently unrelated introduction is to illustrate that history and experience teems with associations and arguments that produce convenient and attractive analyses – if only we could be sure they are true. These analyses may well point to actual events, then again they may not. We should take the lesson into the present.

The Greek Police attacked protesters in Athens, who have been demonstrating peacefully on Syntagma Square for 27 days now, with unspeakable violence and mostly without provocation on Wednesday, June 15^th. I say “mostly” without provocation, because there were riots. These riots, however, were relatively isolated and did not include the main body of protesters at Syntagma, who for the most part were singing and dancing, as tear gas started exploding in their midst.

Was this a preplanned turn of events, a targeted effort by the Greek Government to suppress the protests? There are reasons to believe so. Many are aware – this writer being an eye-witness – that there are secret Police among the demonstrators, disguised as rioters, often carrying petrol bombs and other material. (One of them was actually found out by demonstrators on the 15^th, carrying, rather stupidly, police identification.) Did the Police, then, provoke the riots?

Read more at The Press Project (beta) English language version…