Happy J18 — Ten Year Anniversary — Pics + Links

June 18th 2009
Ten year’s ago today and a glob­al Car­ni­val Against Cap­i­tal was erupt­ing across the world with co-ordi­nat­ed protests tak­ing place in over 40 coun­tries on June 18th 1999.

Direct­ly tar­get­ing finan­cial cen­tres the J18 day of Inter­na­tion­al Action was stun­ning in its scale and ran along­side the G7/G8 meet­ing in Koln Ger­many. It fol­lowed the Glob­al Street Par­ty that had been held along­side the G7/G8 meet­ing in Birm­ing­ham in 1998 and co-ordi­nat­ed through Reclaim The Streets.

To remem­ber it, here’s a set of 23 pic­tures from Lon­don J18 cour­tesy of a pho­tog­ra­ph­er who was there for the morn­ing and the par­ty, but who missed the ensu­ing riot as police fought to regain con­trol of the City of Lon­don.

The rea­sons for strug­gle are greater now than then, and cli­mate change and eco­nom­ic melt­downs threat­en the lives and liveli­hoods of us all.

There’s too much to men­tion about J18, from the sheer joy of tak­ing the City to the full-on bat­tles, from the danc­ing and the masks to the spoof FT paper to pirate radio broad­casts, from the brick­ing up and storm­ing of the Lon­don Inter­na­tion­al Finan­cial Futures Exchange to the knock­ing out of CCTV cam­eras, from the elec­tron­ic dis­tur­bance actions to the begin­nings of Indy­media, from the exhaus­tion to the recrim­i­na­tions and the state back­lash against RTS and every­one else protest­ing for a bet­ter world.

But most of all it was GLOBAL: “Our Resis­tance is as Transna­tion­al as Cap­i­tal”

See this col­lec­tion of 2 pages of web links to orig­i­nal reports, web­sites, analy­sis, pic­tures and video:

http://www.delicious.com/directmedia/j18

Enjoy.