March 26th
Note: The truth is the last thing anyone wants to hear. I'm expecting to get abuse for this, if certain people end up reading it.
The march 26th demonstration was... interesting: Very dull, very boring but very neccesary. There was a desperate, depressed atmosphere in the crowd. They were led along, often corralling themselves behind arbitrary barriers in the road. Several times I went into the unoccupied side of the road as it was becoming dangerously overcrowded in the main march. They were just so depressing.
Then there were the anarchists. At first I liked the cut of their jib as they had a bit more life to them; while the criminal damage seemed fairly minor and tokenistic, but then after I got home I saw the footage. I noticed, not for the first time, the way the so-called Black Bloc were always surrounded by camera crews and strangely inactive police officers, and I thought: SET-UP.
Why do smart people do stupid things? Usually it betrays deep-seated emotional problems. My guess is that their leaders are almost certainly secret policemen- like Mark Kennedy - and they are generally a bunch of cops and messed up kids with Daddy issues, total patsies. So why didn't the ordinary demonstrators eject them or restrain them or anything? See above - we were all so cowed that we barely scraped it together to turn up. Violence from our own ranks would simply make us more apathetic. I include myself in this - I like to think I would have got angry, but what would I say? There was no sense of unity like there usually is on demos; we were all just alone in a crowd.
For comparison, this is how to deal with provocateurs:
So you've got the crazy rioters led by the secret police, and then you've got the great mass of depressed and repressed ordinary people. This isn't going to change a thing.
Conclusion: Politics is entering its final phase of degeneration. The fact that such obvious police provocateurs as the Black Bloc can infiltrate peaceful demonstrations at will and then set the entire media tone for a march of 500,000 people, shows just how cowed and apathetic most ordinary people are, even those who demonstrate.
Prediction: Very soon, new police powers will manage to completely stifle all dissent, except the pumped-up pseudo-dissent of the fake anarchists / secret police. The State needs something to put people off demonstrating and a sponge for popular rage, and these people are both. They are so contemptible as to defy description.
Prediction 2: Tory economic policy is so bad, and the world in such bad shape, that the economy will soon go into free fall. While millions will become unemployed and homeless, there will be no way to help them. They cannot help themselves as they are too cowardly and fucked-up, and nobody else wants to help them even if they could- resources just won't exist to deal with the economic tsunami that's going to hit this country.
Prediction 3: Even without the economic shitstorm, so many of the merely poor will become utterly dispossesed as to create a new class of people. This is the so-called "underclass" beloved of, and created by, right wing social theorists. Many things will happen next, none of them good: The dispossed will turn to crime, creating a crime tsunami to go with the economic one, they will also turn to shit politics and religion (boom times for the EDL, BNP, radical Islam and Christian Fundamentalism), which in turn will make further activism and other emergency repair jobs on the body politic impossible, while dividing people from each other even more than they already are.
If you want to know what the future looks like, it is this: A mass of crazy hysterical people running around smashing their own stuff up, punching themselves in the face and trampling each other in the desperate desire to escape themselves while the rich look on, amused. Another bunch of totally desperate slaves toiling away to keep the whole bullshit edifice from falling apart, which it inevitably will. Indeed the only good thing about the new order that is being created by the Tories is that it is inherently unstable - massively polarised societies like theirs just cannot exist for long, and the ruling class will have to either elect themselves another New Labour - likely too little, too late - or be swept away in the chaos they themselves have created. In the long run though, this is just another moment in the collapse of our society, like a snapshot of a falling building.
The march 26th demonstration was... interesting: Very dull, very boring but very neccesary. There was a desperate, depressed atmosphere in the crowd. They were led along, often corralling themselves behind arbitrary barriers in the road. Several times I went into the unoccupied side of the road as it was becoming dangerously overcrowded in the main march. They were just so depressing.
Then there were the anarchists. At first I liked the cut of their jib as they had a bit more life to them; while the criminal damage seemed fairly minor and tokenistic, but then after I got home I saw the footage. I noticed, not for the first time, the way the so-called Black Bloc were always surrounded by camera crews and strangely inactive police officers, and I thought: SET-UP.
Why do smart people do stupid things? Usually it betrays deep-seated emotional problems. My guess is that their leaders are almost certainly secret policemen- like Mark Kennedy - and they are generally a bunch of cops and messed up kids with Daddy issues, total patsies. So why didn't the ordinary demonstrators eject them or restrain them or anything? See above - we were all so cowed that we barely scraped it together to turn up. Violence from our own ranks would simply make us more apathetic. I include myself in this - I like to think I would have got angry, but what would I say? There was no sense of unity like there usually is on demos; we were all just alone in a crowd.
For comparison, this is how to deal with provocateurs:
Click to viewSo you've got the crazy rioters led by the secret police, and then you've got the great mass of depressed and repressed ordinary people. This isn't going to change a thing.
Conclusion: Politics is entering its final phase of degeneration. The fact that such obvious police provocateurs as the Black Bloc can infiltrate peaceful demonstrations at will and then set the entire media tone for a march of 500,000 people, shows just how cowed and apathetic most ordinary people are, even those who demonstrate.
Prediction: Very soon, new police powers will manage to completely stifle all dissent, except the pumped-up pseudo-dissent of the fake anarchists / secret police. The State needs something to put people off demonstrating and a sponge for popular rage, and these people are both. They are so contemptible as to defy description.
Prediction 2: Tory economic policy is so bad, and the world in such bad shape, that the economy will soon go into free fall. While millions will become unemployed and homeless, there will be no way to help them. They cannot help themselves as they are too cowardly and fucked-up, and nobody else wants to help them even if they could- resources just won't exist to deal with the economic tsunami that's going to hit this country.
Prediction 3: Even without the economic shitstorm, so many of the merely poor will become utterly dispossesed as to create a new class of people. This is the so-called "underclass" beloved of, and created by, right wing social theorists. Many things will happen next, none of them good: The dispossed will turn to crime, creating a crime tsunami to go with the economic one, they will also turn to shit politics and religion (boom times for the EDL, BNP, radical Islam and Christian Fundamentalism), which in turn will make further activism and other emergency repair jobs on the body politic impossible, while dividing people from each other even more than they already are.
If you want to know what the future looks like, it is this: A mass of crazy hysterical people running around smashing their own stuff up, punching themselves in the face and trampling each other in the desperate desire to escape themselves while the rich look on, amused. Another bunch of totally desperate slaves toiling away to keep the whole bullshit edifice from falling apart, which it inevitably will. Indeed the only good thing about the new order that is being created by the Tories is that it is inherently unstable - massively polarised societies like theirs just cannot exist for long, and the ruling class will have to either elect themselves another New Labour - likely too little, too late - or be swept away in the chaos they themselves have created. In the long run though, this is just another moment in the collapse of our society, like a snapshot of a falling building.