Crikey

News Ltd. papers breathlessly report this morning that “a Melbourne group has announced its intention to violently disrupt next week’s APEC summit and has issued a call to action to recruit more people for a ‘mass, strategic intervention’.”

The Australian carries the headline “Protesters warn of violent challenge.”  Unfortunately, for those hoping to avoid a repeat of last year’s dull G20 riots, the articles fail to deliver on these promises. From The Oz:

The group, AC/DC, which is believed to be aligned with the anarchist political movement, plans to act as a “mobile disruption” unit during APEC, which will be held in Sydney for a week from Sunday.

AC/DC’s open letter, posted on a number of internet forums, said APEC “promotes exploitation, inequality and the destruction of the planet” and acknowledged the group’s actions might be seen as violent.

“By the very praxis of stepping out and challenging their control of space, we are committing what is regarded as a violent act,” the letter reads.”It is the violence of articulating resistance; it is a violation against their understanding of our lives.”

At a meeting of AC/DC (Alliance for Civil Disobedience Co-ordination) attended by Crikey last week, members did not give the impression that they were planning much in particular, let alone the alarmingly dubbed, ahem, “mobile disruption unit.”

Discussion largely centred around whether APEC was to be used as an election rally (It, apparently, was not) and under which metaphorical banner AC/DC would march - it was proposed that their united distaste for capitalism would do, as that was something all could agree on.

The meeting became most heated when an elderly (and quite possibly inebriated) anarchist began a diatribe about “Statist sh-ts.” His state-smashing days appeared to be behind him.

A member of AC/DC told Crikey this morning that the article contained a number of glaring inaccuracies:

It’s quoted the sections where the words “violence” are used, and we’ve explained exactly what we mean by that, that just by saying that we’re going to challenge APEC, that will be construed as violence [by the media and the police].

The Acker Dacker also noted that AC/DC was not an anarchist group - though some members were anarchists - but was actually made up of people from a variety of political streams of thought: Socialist, Anarchist, Environmentalist, etc.

It seemed that the violent rioter was about to further slander the journalistic standards of The Australian, when the realisation dawned upon both your fearless Riot Reporter and the fearsome AC/DC rioter that the article in question did not actually quote from AC/DC’s open letter at any point, but was in fact quoting from a different group entirely, Shared Intent.

“I can’t really speak on their behalf” said the problem child in question, before they had to rush off - possibly to procure explosives which will be used to dismantle global capitalism.