Creating community: longterm lessons?

I’m not sure what to make of the riots in Copen­ha­gen. For those who haven’t heard, the Danish police entered a squat­ted build­ing that had been used as a youth centre for more than 25 years, and evicted the squat­ters. Why? Because, in 2000, a “Chris­tian organ­iz­a­tion” (that’s all the news said, I’m not sure who they are) bought the build­ing, and now wants to use it.

So, what happened? The day that the evic­tion was due to take place, there was a large, peace­ful demon­stra­tion out the front of the build­ing. The evic­tion took place anyway. Then, there were viol­ent clashes. There have now been more than 600 arrests. The foot­age shows a burn­ing city, cops in riot gear and the whole usual, hor­rible spectre.

I’m saddened: by more viol­ence, rather than the les­sons of the non-viol­ence move­ments of the Cam­paign for Nuc­lear Dis­arm­a­ment; by the lack of government/police response to enorm­ous peace­ful demon­stra­tions of what people want (ie: stop­ping the evic­tions) that mean that young people feel that viol­ence is their only option; by the idea that a group of Chris­ti­ans thinks that evict­ing people run­ning a youth centre instead of work­ing *with* them makes sense. 

And it makes me pess­im­istic about cre­at­ing longterm altern­at­ive com­munity when police and gov­ern­ments come down and smash it arbit­rar­ily, not in the ser­vice of cap­ital or gov­ern­ment, but sup­posedly in the ser­vice of another more “accept­able” form of organ­iz­a­tion that has “legit­im­acy” both in its public accept­ab­il­ity and its own­er­ship of the build­ing. I’m sure it’s inten­ded to have this effect, to be dis­heart­en­ing. I’m left with the ques­tion of how to engage with gov­ern­ments and police to con­vince them to legit­im­ize such altern­at­ive sys­tems when they are so longterm. Do we want such recog­ni­tion? Is that the same as de facto rela­tion­ships having “the same” recog­ni­tion as State-blessed mar­riages? I think I do want some­thing that says: if squat­ters have been run­ning a com­munity ser­vice from a squat­ted space for more than five years (replace with arbit­rar­ily agreed figure) then the space shall be deemed to be under their con­trol until such time as they vacate it vol­un­tar­ily. Or something.

Guess you just have to keep going in cases like this: think what would have happened to queer rights if every­one just gave up after Stonewall!