Brief (sadly way OT) de-lurk

[John Peacock]

I'm just a lurker/reader here. Not really learned or articulate enough to add anything useful
most of the time. I do have a couple of observations, though.

1)

Someone who appears to be called "Kurt-Werner P=F6rtner" said:

> "Reclaim the Streets" ... is in GB a relatively powerful movement.

Nope. No they're not. Well, relative to whom? I'm sitting here in London, and I actually know
some of these people. As far as the general public are concerned they are an irrelevance, unless
your journey or afternoon is interrupted by one of their little games in which case they're an
annoyance. There was a media profile for people who were opposed to the the road-building
industry a few years ago, but that has subsided as the road-building itself has. There are
scares about May Day Anarchists, as there are anywhere else, but on the whole, people are more
aware of Animal Rights activists. This is England, after all.

Anti-capitalists, anti-roads activists, "Reclaim the Streets", Hunt Saboteurs and other
protesters are largely drawn from the same pool of people. I have no idea how many of them there
are, altogether, but not that many, really. All the ones I've met have been, at heart,
blamelessly bourgeois in everything except their career profile. I know that's a stereotype, but
it's one that fits with my experience of living, working and rubbing shoulders with people who
are part of "The Movement". I'm not sure that it is a movement, though. Whilst a particular
issue - Hunting or Roads or whatever - might  draw in some people from outside the lifestyle
with a particular interest in that issue, it does not translate to across-the-board commitment,
and is highly localised (*this* road extension, *that* dog-breeder), constituting a number of
specific complaints (some successful, even) rather than a general movement.

Ultimately, though, other than being an occasional irritant and useful straw man for the right
wing press, I cannot see how they can be construed as powerful in any normal sense of the word -
their proclamations are incoherent and often self-contradictory (so their statements have no
power), they certainly have no political influence, and their ability to develop a genuine
grass-roots base in the general population is limited by the fact that they evidently believe
that everybody, at heart, just wants to smoke hashish and listen to Ozric Tentacles very loud.
And if they appear in the public arena largely through the mediation of the right-wing press and
police press-releases, then they have no power at all over what perception the public have over
them. This "movement" has been going for at least thirty years in my direct experience. You'd
have thought they'd have got somewhere by now.

And they are overwhelmingly white in an increasingly diverse culture. An abiding image of the
shindig last year (the one that resulted in the Cenotaph being spray-painted and the statue of
Churchill being given a turf Mohican) was of the protestors attacking the McDonalds on
Whitehall. Now, I personally don't eat at any of the Burger chains. I think the food is vile,
and I don't like the Companies. Nonetheless the sight of a mass of white people attacking a
business staffed and patronised by non-white people did give me pause for thought. The "meaning"
isn't the obvious one - I don't believe that they are actively racist, it's just a coincidence
based on hippy and McDonalds recruitment patterns - but within the social group from which the
above-mentioned "movements" are drawn, there are a number of contradictory, largely unexemined
assumptions about culture and cultural diversity. It was certainly after that incident that I
noticed that the tremendous cultural diversity that I see in the city around me (which I think
is a Good Thing- immigration has been the driving force of British History, perhaps even more so
than that of the U.S.) isn't reflected within these "movements", and the attitudes that people
from those groups (or at least the ones that I've met) have towards other cultures tend to be
those of mystification, sentimentalisation and romanticisation. Generally it results in a lot of
drug-taking holidays in India, bad digeridoo playing and excrable drumming. In the wrong hands,
the djembe is the tool of the devil.

Bit of a rant, but... no. Hardly anyone gives a toss about Reclaim The Streets in the UK,
whatever they'd like you to think. Unless it's a very slow news day indeed. The police might
want you to believe otherwise too, though, since some of their budget depends on being able to
produce a viable adversary. So it goes a bit Vinelandy there, then.

And let me restate - I do know (and like and admire) individuals who do all of these things, and
I'm a bit of a Radiohead fan, too, come to that. I just don't think they're as serious,
politically, as some people would like us to believe.

2)

Mr Millison, I think:

>as a system (and one of the worst), capitalism falls within that danger zone

Genuinely? One of the worst? Compared to what? This isn't intended purely as a rhetorical thing,
but which actual existant systems are you setting Capitalism up against? Pax Romana? The rule of
the Pharoahs?

on the other hand:

3)

I quite like Castro. A tyrant, yes, but a tyrant with a sense of humour. And how much of a
tyrant compared with your friend and ours Mr Suharto? Or Gen. Pinochet? Or all those other
grubby mass-murderers we got into bed with? Compared with even the most benign of our "friends"
(Saudi Arabia, anybody? China, recent hiccups notwithstanding?), a regime like the late and
hotly opposed Sandanistas are, frankly, not really tyrannical at all.

At the same time as all the above, I do think we ought to know about and take responsibility for
all the unpleasantness that is committed in our name and from which we benefit. And it's
impossible to deny that that unpleasantness exists. We are all implicated. No one is innocent,
as the Sex Pistols song has it. But. I can't shake the feeling that what calls itself opposition
isn't a viable opposition at all, but rather a grander kind of denial, a way for someone to give
themselves a kind of moral purity.

And the techniques that some capitalist states or organisations use to root out and eliminate
competition do not do their argument any good, it has to be said.

Oh, and Whilst I'm here:

4)

A while ago Ms Sweet implied that the EU was a Nation. You could get shouted at quite badly
claiming that sort of thing around here. It's a hotly contested issue. Probably best to think of
it, even at this late stage, as a trading bloc.

This post has take so long towrite, that it's probably redundant by now.

Oh well. Throw mud. Return to shadows. Wait for return of fire. Ignore it.

Terrible, cowardly behaviour.

Bye bye,

John