Given the focus on singling out anarchists and lefty political types and the profound lack of safety I've felt since...

the media and the police joined forces to encourage the general public to pathologize, criminalize and rat on people perceived to be anarchists, lefties, feminists, queers, young men of colour, hippies, "black bloc"...pretty much anyone who visibly, verbally, photographically and/or politically protested and thereby manifested as counter the oppressive agendas of the G20...
this abstract description sheds much more light on what has happened and on what might eventually happen than many would like. everyone scrabbling all over themselves to point out that they're not that extreme, they're not violent, they're not really political, they're not radical, they're not extremists.

why are so many desperately trying to publicly disassociate themselves from the public face of lefty organizing?

maybe it's because they smell something foul approaching and want to make sure they don't get caught when the shit hits the fan.

they want to make sure that they separate themselves from a class of people that is in the process of being created, identified, singled out, demonized and criminalized so that the government and it's police can better identify them, pursue them, jail them...
kill...them...?

if they're beating and shooting at people who are literally just hanging out in the streets chanting mostly, if they're jailing activist/organizers and if they're publicly exposing the names and faces of people they define as dangerous so that even their neighbours draw away from them in fear and loathing...
what will the powers that be do when the resistance really gets moving?

The Genocidal Continuum: Toward a Theory of Effacement

Abstract:

Addressing the question “What makes genocide possible?” anthropologist Nancy Scheper-Hughes argues that “genocide is part of a continuum, and that it is socially incremental and often experienced by perpetrators, collaborators, bystanders—and even by victims themselves—as expected, routine, even justified.” The continuum is driven by a politics of oppression that expresses itself in systematic control over the bodies of a community of people marked as foreign, other, inferior. But, because genocide itself occupies only an endpoint of the continuum, then obviously Scheper-Hughes must identify those other points that, as she says, may seem “expected, routine, even justified.” Bravely, she locates some of those points in prisons, nursing homes, and mental hospitals. Acknowledging the “tradition of genocide studies that argues for the absolute uniqueness of the Jewish Holocaust,” she maintains that the way for scholar-activists to predict and even prevent future genocides is to recognize early warning signs in the “routine” parts of the continuum. Readers uncomfortable with her linking of nursing homes to death camps must concede that an argument for the uniqueness of each genocidal event faintly—and unintentionally—echoes the very exceptionalism that perpetrators invoke in defining their superiority. At the very least, Scheper-Hughes provides a way to contextualize genocide, giving it a setting.

I propose to modify the argument for a genocidal continuum, citing several examples from U.S. history such as slavery, Indian removal, and the wartime imprisonment of Japanese Americans. In 1986 historian John Dower characterized the rhetoric on both sides of the Pacific War as exterminationist, and a few critics have linked the internment to the racial consequences of Manifest Destiny. Because all points of the genocidal continuum are linked by a systematic oppression of bodies, and because racism presumes to mark certain bodies as inferior, then all manifestations of institutional racism have a place on Scheper-Hughes’s continuum. The living bodies of the excluded can even be exploited for cheap labor—a sad fact that may even, ironically, save some of them from execution. Within months of being imprisoned, young Japanese American men were further humiliated by military conscription, to fight for the very government that had incarcerated them.

Effacement is the name I apply to systems by which racial communities are marginalized and banished to the genocidal continuum. The term recognizes the body as the site of oppression, but it also names a process. It links the loss of honor, of face, to the invisibilities of the marginalized and the “disappeared.” Furthermore, it reinforces Scheper-Hughes’s idea of the continuum by linking the living marginalized to the executed. Perhaps most important, it makes more realizable, simply by hinting at “saving face,” the goals of redress for, and prevention of, genocide. Finally, it can be applied to both the surgical processes by which the marginalized have transfigured themselves, as in Michael Jackson and the Hiroshima Maidens, and the social processes by which they have mainstreamed themselves, as in “passing.”