It's as if the militarised shutdown of the northern Central Business District by federal and state governments – with its fences and barricades and ubiquitious squads of police reminiscent of East Germany in the bad old days - is supposed to banish the ghosts of hundreds of thousands of killed, maimed and jailed Iraqis, Chechens, Tibetans, Papuans and Chinese and Indian workers.
Certainly the great leaders responsible for these deaths, and now assembling in Sydney, are not to be reminded of the victims of their misrule and tyrannies. The local millionaire businessman who booked billboards along the leaders' route from the airport to the CBD for a series of human rights advertisements has had them rejected – and the leading television network has also refused his ads.
As for protesters, who might remind the leaders of their crimes and shortcomings, they are to be kept out of sight and earshot – banished to at least 12 blocks from where the presidents, prime ministers and their entourages are meeting.
As David Marr suggested in his column in the Sydney Morning Herald on Tuesday, protests are now as much about free speech and civil liberties as a show of moral repugnance. On that last point, somebody has to say it: there has rarely been such a cabal of war criminals assembled in any one place anywhere on the planet as in Sydney this week.
On the civil rights issue, there is a blacklist of people not even allowed to approach within a kilometre of the Sydney Wall. The list is secret and there is no appeal to the courts to challenge your inclusion if you discover you are on it. The fairy story, perpetrated by Howard and Premier Iemma, that all the police state stuff is necessary because violent anarchists and nihilists are loose in the land, just doesn't wash. Australia doesn't have such a tradition. This is not France or South Korea with their insurrectionary legends.
We do have a tradition of marching in the streets – and it's one worth keeping alive. It doesn't just stretch back to the '60s and the Vietnam War. Students demonstrated for Indonesian independence in the late 1940s. The unemployed marched in the Great Depression. And so it goes, all the way back to the 1850s, when there were marches and rallies in Sydney for the eight hour day, self-government and universal male suffrage. (This decade was celebrated recently in Peter Cochrane's remarkable history of insurgent, democratic Sydney, Colonial Ambition).
Outdoor political activity is clearly a weapon not to be given away lightly.
Anatole Kagan is 93 and understands this. He told me a week ago that he wants to march on Saturday, September 8. He's going blind but says he can see what "Howard and the authorities" are up to; his wife Dawn reads him the newspapers and his favourite blogs in the morning and he listens to the radio and television. There's no way he is going to be frightened away by talk of terrorism, police searches, water cannon, robocops, emptied prisons, and mobile holding cells.
"The real terrorists are going to be on the other side of the wall," he says. Anatole is a life member of the Labor Party, an old Trotskyist whose father was a St Petersburg Menshevik, expelled with his whole family from the new Soviet republic in 1922. The family settled in Berlin where Anatole's father set up as a publisher – Trotsky and Freud were two of his authors. During his teenage years, Anatole witnessed the rise of the Nazis and left Berlin forever after Kristalnacht in 1938.
So Anatole is politically savvy - or, following Kevin Rudd and Morris Iemma, should that be feral? You might recall the way de Gaulle's government reacted to the presence of the young Germans and Jews, like Danny Cohn-Bendit, among the leaders of the French student uprising of 1968 – they condemned them as 'foreign scum'. From then on, marching students reacted by chanting 'we are all foreign scum'. Is it too much to hope that respectable citizens will chant 'we are all feral scum' as they march on Saturday?
We can take some heart from the changes that have taken place over the past 40 years. In 1966 when President Johnson visited Sydney – hundreds of thousands lined the streets to welcome him. Now it would be difficult to assemble hundreds to welcome George Bush. But the challenge of the age is to convince these now absent citizens to become active citizens, part of a movement to stop the endless wars and the real threat to the conditions of life on the planet. Only they can do it.
In the meantime, large and determined numbers are the best antidote to attempt by leaders to intimidate citizens into quiescence. Let's hope the rally and march on Saturday are an unmistakable rebuff to the latest attempt.