Bilderberg 2010: “Between The Sword And The Wall” And “Why The Protester Is Your Best Friend”
Jun 6, 2010 2 Comments ›› Pat Dollard
BETWEEN THE SWORD AND THE WALL:
The enormous bald detective in beach shorts took the camera from my wife. “Let me see.” He scrolled through the photographs, just taken, of me being detained at the campsite gates. He scrolled past, to see a photo of a limousine convoy, whooshing up the hill to Bilderberg. “I don’t like this,” he said, and waved a huge, disgruntled hand towards the conference hotel.
“Do you know how much this is costing?” asked Hannah. “Do you think the Spanish economy can afford all this?” Grimly, the enormous bald detective started deleting images of his comrades with his giant thumb. “Your opinion,” he growled, “is right.”
He handed the camera back to Hannah. “But you’ve deleted my best shots!” The detective whistled to his comrades, who were busy sniffing a jar of salted olives they had found in my car boot. He had them turn around, facing away from the camera. “Go head,” he rumbled. “Take photographs.”
What a difference a year makes. Last year in Vouliagmeni when I tried covering the 2009 Bilderberg meeting, I had Greek policemen yelling “No fotografia!” at me at every turn. I was arrested, tailed, harassed, rearrested, yelled at, bundled into squad cars, lied to, intimidated, wrestled with and hounded round Athens like I was John Dillinger.
This year, the police have been deployed in the same extraordinary numbers, but they are smiling, rolling their eyes at the rigmarole; the riot police are giving the thumbs-up to protesters and honking their horns as they come round the “awareness roundabout” at the foot of the hotel.
“The police have been laughing and chatting,” says Daniel Turon, a Spanish psycho-sociologist, here in Sitges to psycho-sociologise Bilderberg. “One of them said he had read a book about Bilderberg; another said, ‘Yes, we understand.’” The Catalan police, he says, “have a different sensibility” from what you may expect. “They are Catalan. Their minds are independent.”
Their minds, perhaps, have been focused by recent pay disputes. Two days ago, the police were on strike in Barcelona: they are facing a pay cut next month, as part of Spain’s “austerity measures” (what the IMF calls “fiscal consolidation”) – and disgruntlement abounds.
Yesterday, the Spanish newspaper El Público quoted the Catalan police union’s estimate, that “the mere deployment of the Mossos d’Esquadra entails costs of €150,000 for each of the four days of the Bilderberg meeting”. This union has lodged a formal complaint about the misuse of resources in guarding Bilderberg.
El Público shares the union’s concern: “The members of the Bilderberg club have not been elected by the citizens [of this country] in a democratic process, but the costs of the meeting is being met by them.”
Ageing Bilderberg sleuth, Jim Tucker, says the Bilderberg group always reimburses the host nation for costs incurred. But if that’s the case, the police are simply an army for hire.
Turon is keen to humanise the officers facing him: “Look at the eyes of the police,” he says. “Look at the person who is there. They want to be with us.”
“Your position is hyper-naive,” laughs his friend, one of the organisers of the Spanish protests, DÃdac S.-Costa. “They are puppets. They are nothing. They are a distraction. They are the cashiers at the supermarket; we need to confront the supermarket itself. This is a systemic problem.” DÃdac is a sociologist.
“We need to use the tools of the system against it. We need a brave judge, a brave lawyer. We need another Garzón” (Baltasar Garzón is the Spanish judge who issued the extradition request for General Pinochet). “We need to use the legal weapons at our disposal; to find a way, as the Spanish say, between the sword and the wall.”
Ivan Torres, from Maresme (whom we met yesterday, near his roundabout bed), found himself caught last night between the sword and the wall, up in the hills above the Hotel Dolce Sitges. He was out with Rafa Palacios, the founder of the Stop Secrets Movement, trying to stop some secrets. A spotter on the hotel roof saw them crawling along; minutes later a police helicopter arrived, and officers swarmed the hills to arrest them. The policemen looked at the cameras, looked at the footage, then handed it back undeleted.
Ivan and Rafa were brought before the comisario of the Sitges police. The comisario told them frankly what he thought of them. “We admire you,” he said. “We are really sad because we don’t want to have a confrontation here.” And, like his giant bald underling from earlier, he gestured to the hotel. “I don’t like these people. All I want is a smooth operation in Sitges. The people up there,” said the comisario, “I really don’t like.”
Rafa says that on Thursday, as police and activists squared off for the first time and as Rafa took the megaphone, it was this same comisario who stood in front of the cordon. “You have a heart under your badge”, cried Rafa, “you have a brain under your hat. You are the ones we will be drinking with after the football, not the ones up the hill!”
Rafa reached out his hands towards the cordon. People who witnessed his speech say this moment defined the subsequent dynamic between the protesters and the police. “You should be protecting us, not them!” Rafa implored. “We are the people. You are the people. You are one of us!”
Rafa says he spoke directly to the comisario when he said: “A time is coming when you may be asked to use violence against us. A time is coming when you will have to choose sides. You will have to decide.” And Rafa says he saw tears in the eyes of the comisario.
“I think, my friend, that I touched his heart.”
WHY THE PROTESTER IS YOUR BEST FRIEND:
Ivan was alone on the roundabout. He had been left in charge of the banners while everyone else ate breakfast.
He slipped an empty bottle of red wine into a binliner and stretched. At his feet was a chalk-drawn pyramid showing the structure of society, the word “pueblo” at the bottom, and the tip pointing up the hill towards Bilderberg. It’s a short pyramid today, maybe half a heavily-armed mile from Rockefeller down to Ivan.
Ivan’s bed last night – is it had been the night before – was the scrub by the roadside. “It’s not so cold in my bag,” he said. “A lot of times I travel in the mountains – in the mountains, you can sleep anywhere.”
A lone Catalonian in green trousers, he clutched a leaflet and stood in the Sitges sun as, up the hill, billionaires and finance ministers ate kiwifruit patisseries.
The shame, the awful poignancy of Bilderberg, is that, for much of the time, there are more delegates up the hill than there are protesters at the foot of it.
On that point, there’s something I’d like you to do. I’d like you to extend a grateful thought, a prayer of thanks, an idle nod of acknowledgment – a something, an anything – towards Ivan and all the others who have come to Sitges to bear witness to Bilderberg 2010.
These people are on your side, they are fighting your corner. And if you don’t think it’s a corner that needs fighting, or if it’s a corner you think is being fought by the people up the hill … well, good luck to you.
I want you to know, though, that the people who are crawling around on pine needles with long lenses, trying to identify delegates (and doing pretty well, by the way), the people who are being detained, searched, questioned, then heading out again into the hills, the people who are sitting late into the night at the campsite bar, talking about distracted populations and central banks, are not lunatics.
They are your very best friends. They’re not feeble-minded or playing some kind of game. They are deadly serious, and they are worried to death.
These people look at the state of the world and they pack a rucksack and sleep at the side of a roundabout.
The head of the IMF (and Bilderberger), Dominique Strauss-Kahn, looks at the world and declares: “Crisis is an opportunity.” He sees the precarious global economy and floats the idea for “a new global currency issued by a global central bank”.
Now, if you think that’s a good idea – if you think yet more centralisation of debt (and interest payments), and more unelected financial control is a good thing – then good luck (what are you? The chairman of Barclays?)
We already have a world, says Daniel Estulin, the arch Bilderbotherer, “where unelected bodies like the IMF can tell sovereign nations like Greece what to do”.
Estulin is here in Sitges, wearing the fanciest trousers I’ve seen in a long time. He says the Bilderberg endgame is “one world company ltd”. And the board of directors is sitting half a mile away.
And they’re being watched. I can’t say from where – I don’t know where the guerilla camerafolk are out crawling today. And I can’t ring them, because they’ve turned their mobiles off and taken out the sim cards so they can’t be triangulated by the signal.
They’re out getting sunstroke on your behalf, on my behalf. I’ll publish some of their photos, and some of their spottings, tomorrow.
Later today, a bunch of Spanish activists are providing paella for everyone in a mountain restaurant. Some of us won’t make it. Some of us will be under arrest, or lying in a ditch holding our breath until the footsteps pass.
One last time: if you think what they’re doing is ridiculous, you’re wrong. It’s the fact they’re having to do it at all that’s absurd.
This morning, a policeman screeched up beside me as I went for a stroll and told me to take the recording device out of my pocket. I did. It was a bit of driftwood from the beach. Yesterday, I had my car searched (and was detained for 50 minutes while the Mossos d’Esquadra checked and rechecked my passport).
They asked me what was in the boot. I dug them out a T-shirt. The patrolman radioed the station and read out the slogan on the shirt in heavily accented English: “I went to Bilderberg 2010 and all I got was this lousy new world order.” His partner asked me why I was laughing. I couldn’t really explain.
BIlderberg is an absurdity. The secrecy is absurd. The lack of a relationship between the event and the mainstream media is absurd. Ivan standing alone by his roundabout bed is absurd. The paranoia of the participants is more than absurd – it’s pathetic.
This year, most of the delegates were whisked into the hotel through an underground entrance, dodging the lenses, like a bunch of James Bond baddies, like a dieter creeping downstairs at midnight to eat chocolate cake from the fridge.
But the good news is that not everyone has dodged the cameras (John Elkann, the heir to Fiat, was spotted by the German blog Schall und Rauch looking particularly dapper this year). And the even better news – the very best news – is that the press seems, finally, to have woken up to Bilderberg.
We have had camera crews from Spanish TV and Spanish newspapers both local and national (Javier from El Mundo is currently up a tree with a camera). French journalists, Portuguese documentary makers and al-Jazeera are picking up the story. Russia Today has sent a film crew.
We’ve had articles in the Independent and the Times, and on the Today programme on Radio 4. Daniel Estulin has been doing interview after interview. He’s getting quotes from inside the meeting. The veil of secrecy is looking decidedly tatty. It might be time to bin it.
And yet the veil of ignorance is still holding up pretty well. As Ivan says, handing me a leaflet from the Anwok collective, “it is difficult to talk about the Bilderberg agenda if people don’t even know about the group”.
I know what he means – I’ve spoken to countless news agencies and outlets in the last few weeks, and the most common response, from journalists, editors and commissioners, is: “I’m sorry, the Bilderberg what?”
But seriously, if you work on the foreign desk of a major news corporation and you’re at the “Bilderberg what?” level of political awareness, you need to think about getting a different job. Take a sabbatical. Take up carpentry, or read a book. It’s like calling yourself a porn star and not knowing the reverse cowgirl. “The reverse what…?”
Get with the programme. Shimmy up a pine tree. Take a leaflet. Resign. You’re not helping anyone.
