Well, it’s not looking good for our species, is it? (And not so hot for most of the other species we ‘share’ this planet with – those microbes that eat sulphur in the deep ocean might make it through unscathed, but as for the rest of it…).
Here I am going to bash out – while distracting myself from Other Work I Must Do – four examples of reasons to be cheerless, in little more than bullet form. All four are UK-centric, and to do with the possibilities of pushing back against The System (man). The first two are to do with the ending of two print publications, the third is the announcement that JSO is just stopping and the fourth is the recent raid by the Met on a Youth Demands meeting in a Friends Meeting House. There’s more to say on each of these (by me and others!) and especially on the third – JSO – I have longer pieces brewing.
Peace News
Peace News had been around forever (since the 30s? 40s anyway). I’d been reading/subscribing for decades, and more recently writing for it occasionally. Last year some long-brewing shit hit the fan, and it now appears to be defunct (though, of course, next week it will spring back to life just to spite me). Was PN perfect? No, of course not. Was it useful – well, it should have been. it was the closest the mainstream progressive movement got, afaik, to something that was constructively critical, thoughtful, historically informed etc. You knew in PN that there’d be things you would learn about what was going on in the world that you were unlikely to get anywhere else, things you’d disagree with but learn from, and also brilliant features (I wrote for them, you see). It is missed.
Red Pepper
Red Pepper had been going since the mid-1990s, and tried – with mixed success- to create fertile space for exchange of ideas, tactics etc between “red” (including the light pink of Labour) and “green”. Occasionally it succeeded in this, but more often it told you that there was a Brave New Campaign, or that The Cat Should Wear A Bell. It had some good writers, but often they clearly had to write at speed because other gigs paid more and took up more of their time/bandwidth. Far too often RP was unreflective, and pretty much the house-organ for the Smugosphere. But there was value in it (especially in its culture sections) and it, too, will be missed as a dead-tree format publication.
Just Stop Oil
There are brave people in jail or with criminal records or bad cases of burn out, and their courage should be honoured. That is not to say JSO was above (serious) criticism. It has now run up the white (orange?) flag of surrender – turns out police repression works. The question is then, what do those people who were involved go on to do? (How) is what they learned – practical, emotional etc – stored, shared etc, or is it scattered to the four winds, and the big wheel has to be re-invented again? I have much more to say on all this, soonish (betcha can’t wait).
The raid on the Friends Meeting House
A couple of days ago, while also conducting raids on houses, the Met also nicked six young people at a meeting in a Quaker Meeting House. More to say on this, but for now
a) from social media comments its obvious that most people didn’t seem to understand that it wasn’t Quakers getting nicked, merely that the meeting the YD people were having was AT a Friends Meeting House. This may have been down to too-quick reading of a press release/tweet, but more likely to do with people never having GONE to a meeting in a Friends Meeting House
b) there can have been no serious operational need to nick those people there. The forces of Lawn Order could easily have waited till the meeting was over. So, I suspect a) a show of force was demanded by senior officials (elected or much more likely unelected) for a demonstration effect (demoralisation/fear etc b) also enthusiasm from within the operational ranks for this kind of stunt – makes you feel powerful, raises morale on your side.
It is sinister af
So is it all over, red-rover? It’s never “over” per se. The boot never stamps on the human face forever. It just feels that way. But the longer “we” fail to sustain dissenting infrastructure and the longer “we” fail to learn lessons, the longer the boot does its stamping, I suspect.
Oh well.
Meanwhile we get litanies (well-written, but still just litanies) of why the cat should wear a bell. Nothing from these “public intellectuals” on the how of belling the cat, and the why previous bell-placing efforts haven’t worked so well (beyond ‘it’s neoliberalism, man’).
This no longer baffles me as much as it used to, thanks to Cher; I have deprogrammed myself, at least superficially, from the programming I received in the 1970s and 1980s at smug elite schools about the wisdom of the elites etc. Or the wisdom of anyone, for that matter. I remain grateful and relieved that I didn’t breed, and that the horror and misery to come (already here for many, obvs, but it is going to concatenate) isn’t something I have to try to teach anyone to cope with.
marchudson.net 
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