C.J. Stone's Blog, page 5

Chapters from an unfinished book: The Lords of Misrule by CJ Stone

Chapter 6: Before the War

“Enemies are necessary for the wheels of the US military machine to turn.” – John Stockwell, former CIA official and author.

“Never forget that everything Hitler did in Germany was legal.” – Martin Luther King, Jr.

Someone once said that the tragedy of Germany in the 30s wasn’t that one man had the courage to be evil, but that so many people didn’t have the courage to be good.

Everyone wants a quite life.

Sometimes it is easier to go along with the prevailing norms than it is to look at the truth, to see evil, and to accept the pain that that brings.

Most people spent most of the war thinking that nothing much was wrong. Most people still think that nothing much is wrong.

One thing you can say in the German people’s defence is that they were working on faulty information. They thought they were under threat from the Jewish-Communist conspiracy. They were told this again and again. Documents were forged (like the famous Protocols of the Elders of Zion) to give this impression. The Nazis had a spectacular propaganda machine at their disposal, which they wielded to great effect. They were experts in the art of mass psychological control, in mind manipulation. “Enemies” were created, both at home and abroad, to keep the people in a state of fear, and to justify the repressive measures being doled out to some sections of the population. Meanwhile Goebbels churned out an unending stream of jolly Busby Berkeley style musicals in which gorgeous Aryan lassies in spangled costumes kicked their long legs in strict formation and sang.

How things have changed.

I was in Bristol to visit an old friend of mine, Ornella. We went on a sponsored walk around the MOD site in Abbey Wood, Filton, to protest against the secret war being carried out against the people of Iraq, by the UN, Britain and the US, through sanctions and continuation of the bombing. The bombing currently costs the British taxpayer in the region of £4.5 million a month, according to the MP Alan Simpson. Over 100 deadly missiles rain down upon them, month in, month out, wreaking more havoc to an already beleaguered and exhausted nation. I don’t remember being consulted about it, do you? When the Labour opposition gave out its list of pledges before the last election, I don’t seem to remember “We promise to bomb the people of Iraq back into the Stone Age” being one of them. Well, not the Stone Age in any case. People in the Stone Age had fresh water to drink, whereas the people of Iraq have to drink sewerage, due to the effects of the bombing of the Iraqi civilian infrastructure, such as water plants and sewerage and electricity sub-stations and radio stations and gas works. Obviously these are vital components in the formidable Iraqi war machine.

It’s hard to tell a story when you have such facts as these at your disposal. 6,000 children under the age of five die every month of the effects of sanctions.

6,000.

Children.

Under the age of five.

Every month.

All of us in this nation felt the naked anguish of the parents of Sarah Payne when they discovered that their child had gone missing. We saw their drawn faces as they made their heartfelt appeals on TV: we saw the pain written into the very flesh, the confusion, the hurt, the awful, heart-wrenching sense of loss. We felt this, and cried for them, didn’t we? We cried and we thought about our own children. How close the tragedy seemed to us all then, as we looked upon them and saw our own potential suffering, the suffering of all suffering people everywhere.

In Iraq this scene is carried out 6,000 times a month, as a whole nation’s children die, of easily preventable diseases, of malnutrition, of the cancerous after-effects of a war the Iraqi people did not choose. A whole nation of mothers borne down with the burden of loss. A whole nation of Sarah Paynes.

The MOD site is a complex of blank-faced, white marble buildings surrounded by an artificial lake. Ducks and swans play on the lake. What you see from the perimeter fence are the staircases. All the buildings point outwards from their mysterious centre in a series of fingers ending in a round, glass-fronted staircase. The buildings are startlingly uniform, disturbingly anonymous. Like ghosts or clouds they lack definition. Wherever you look, they appear the same. The same glassy-featured anonymity. The same gleaming uniformity. The same hollowness and mystery.

It was Sunday, and all the workers were at home. The lack of people only added to its sinister atmosphere.

Ornella said, “I can’t stand this place. Look at me, I’m shaking.” And she showed me her hands, which were, indeed, visibly shaking.

She’s Italian, and very passionate.

I was more interested in its practical use. “What’s it used for?” I asked, practically.

One of the other marchers said, “Procurement,” which had a pornographic ring at that moment.

“Procurement of what?” someone else said. And he put on a snivelling, nasal, dirty-old man’s voice. “Do you want to buy my dirty small-arms, mister?”

But you wonder at the meaning of all this. This huge nest of buildings, all marble and glass and blank-eyed defensiveness. The Ministry of Defence, they call it. The Ministry of Offence, more like. How many workers does it house, to do their daily procurement? How many people trudge these echoing stairwells with lists of requirements for this and that Military purpose, and all at the tax-payers expense; to provide the infrastructure to bomb children in their beds and farmers in their fields; to wipe out an entire nation for the socially embarrassing faux-pas of having ended up with a leader they didn’t choose, who momentarily forgot how to take orders.

Saddam Hussein was free to murder and terrorise and torture, to bomb and gas his own people, as long as he was a faithful client. As one Whitehouse spokesman put it: “He’s a son-of-a-bitch, but he’s our son-of-a-bitch.” But he’s the devil incarnate when he threatens Western interests by marching into Kuwait. And he’s a useful example to the rest of the world. “See? This is what we’ll do to you, if ever anyone questions our authority again.”

It is the politics of the Mafia, writ large. A protection racket on a grand scale. You smash up one client’s business to set an example for all the rest. That’ll teach them to stay in line.

And how much is all of this costing? How many millions? What would be the increase in the minimum wage if we scrapped all of this? How many hospitals could we build? How many play-parks? How many Mother-and-Toddler centres? How many affordable houses for the socially excluded?

The Welfare State is alive and well then. It provides for the welfare of the Mafia-inspired State arms industry.

There were 16 of us on the march. 18 if you counted the kids. 20 if you counted the dogs. 20 beating hearts on a jaunt around the MOD. But it makes you puzzle. I mean, everyone is up in arms about GM crops and the perceived health hazards they bring. But no one seems to care that Iraqi children drink poisoned water – a proven health hazard – because the British Air Force continues to fly bombing sorties to eradicate militarily threatening sewerage plants.

The truth is, no one knows. These things are not reported in the news.

Half way round the site (it was about a mile all round) we saw a security guard hiding in the trees. He was talking frantically into his walkie-talkie. You could see him clearly amongst the foliage.

“We can see you,” called Ornella, in a sing-song voice.

The man peeped out, and Ornella waved. “Hello!” she called. “Peek-a-boo!”

Later he was walking towards us on his rounds. He hadn’t seen us as yet. He turned a corner and caught a glimpse and then speedily turned around and walked the other way.

A couple of policemen drew up in their squad car. “What’s that you’re carrying,” they asked, winding down the windows, and indicating Ornella’s banner. We held it open for them. It said “6,000 children a month die in Iraq because of sanctions.”

“Oh. I see,” the policeman said. “Good on you.” And he winked.

Finally we got to our destination. It was on the main road by a roundabout with traffic lights, so people would have to stop and look at us. People were on their way to do their regular Sunday shopping. One of our group, an old lady, had already made herself comfortable. She was sat upon a picnic chair, with a flask of coffee and plenty of snacks.

I said, “I’m hungry Ornella,” watching the old lady tucking in.

She said, “yes, I always forget the practical things. I get so caught up with the emotion I forget about bringing sandwiches.”

We began draping banners. There was the main banner, the brightly coloured one the policemen had looked at, and another which said, “Stop Bombing Kids,” in black and white. Ornella had painted both of them. And there was a couple of visual display boards plastered with photographs of women with dead or dying children in their arms. The look of resignation on their faces – the look of hopeless despair, of abandonment, of loss – sang out in a kind of tired dirge, like an opera composed of all the misery in the world. Also, someone had interwoven foliage into portable sections of green galvanised wire fence to make a four figure number. “6,000” it said, quietly and evocatively. And people had lain flowers by the fence, and lit candles in jars, which flickered and blew out in the gusty wind.

Ornella had prepared some laminated A4 sheets, which she was tying to the fence. There were about 40 of them. They were the names of Iraqi children who had died, collected by Felicity Arbuthnot, one of the few journalists in Britain to continue visiting Iraq to report the story.

Sulenam Aged 6

Loukman Aged 7

Mortaza Aged 10

Older Brother Aged 13

Their Father And Grandfather

Killed In A Bombing Raid

30/4/99

*

A Baby Boy Called Hope

Died At 2 Hours Old

In Need Of Oxygen

*

Hussein (Beautiful)

Who Died Of Malnutrition

Aged 5 Months

*

Rahab Aged 7

Who Had Two Brothers

Sarouk Aged 4

And Ahmed Aged 11

All Of Them Died Of Cancer

*

Ezra (Virgin)

Died Aged 17

Crying For Three Weeks

Because She Wanted To Live.

These are the simple human stories behind the spin and the news manipulation, behind the self-serving talk of Iraqi aggression and weapons of mass destruction (non-existent, of course). These are the stories you are not supposed to hear. Just ordinary kids, like Sarah Payne, murdered in the UK that same year, who wanted to live. Just ordinary kids dying for a cause which has nothing to do with them, nothing to do with their families. Kids of poor farmers and poor workers. Kids with mothers who suffered alongside them, silently watching as they died. Just kids.

What’s the difference between these kids and Sarah Payne? Really? Only that the newspapers thought it worthwhile to tell us, in gory detail, about the death of the one, a pretty, while English girl, while the others were considered of no value whatsoever.

After that we waited and watched traffic. Mostly people pointedly ignored us, driving by with pinched looks of disapproval, as if they thought they’d just caught a glimpse of a monkey fucking a horse by the roadside and would rather not look to find out. Those who did acknowledge our presence either honked their horns and did the thumbs-up, or honked their horns and did another sign. Like this. Hand held up appearing to grasp an invisible object, possibly long and round. A few deft flicks of the wrist in a repeated motion. I’ll leave you to work out what he meant.

One person rolled down his window.

“Bomb Iraq!” he shouted, holding his fist up, middle finger evocatively pointed, the blare of the horn swinging into a low note as the car swished by. At least he was acknowledging us.

I’m not sure what the percentage of those for us and against us was, exactly. I guessed about 1/3 for, and 2/3 against. Someone else thought 50:50. Some people were with us. It was more than I had expected.

A couple of teenage girls came over to talk. They were local kids, out on their bikes.

“What’s this for?” they asked.

“It’s in protest against sanctions against Iraq,” I told them.

“It’s to bring it to people’s attention,” Ornella said.

“You’ve certainly done that,” one of the girls said, indicating Ornella’s gorgeous banner. “Very striking.”

And Ornella continued to talk to them, telling them about the children who were dying, and the use of Depleted Uranium during the Gulf War (the cause of untold deaths): the way the Military and the Government were fighting a secret war against unarmed civilians; the bombing campaign; the protests; the MOD buildings and what they meant; the sinister truth at the heart of the British Establishment: giving them an extended political lecture by the roadside, showing them the awful photographs and the horrifying statistics ranged across the visual display boards, reading out the names of children on those fluttering laminated sheets, like bleached leaves blown against the fence.

“Maybe I shouldn’t be telling you all this,” she said. “You’re a bit young.”

“But we’re fifteen,” the girls chorused. “Tell us more.”

And of all the people who saw us that day, these were the only ones to stop and ask why we were there. The only ones to ask serious and relevant questions. The only ones to show curiosity and concern. Two teenage girls on a bike ride. The future generation.

Maybe there’s hope for us all yet.

They said they lived in the area, and they often passed the site. There was a glass covered walkway over the road from the MOD to the car-park. They said they often saw policemen with machine guns walking over it.

“MOD police,” someone else said. “They’re the only police force in Britain to carry guns as a matter of routine.”

In the end I got so hungry I had to get a MacDonald’s from the trading estate across the road. MacDonalds and the MOD in close proximity, like happy bedmates. The burger cost 99p and tasted of soggy cardboard.

And after that we all packed up and went home, leaving the one newly painted banner between two lampposts. “Stop Bombing Kids!” it said.

“I wonder how long it will stay up there?” I asked.

“Hopefully till tomorrow,” Ornella said.

“Hopefully,” I said.

I read it in the Sunday Telegraph a few weeks later. It was blazoned across the front page beneath the masthead. Saddam Hussein is planning to send death-squads into the West disguised as belly-dancers, it said. Apparently women are less suspect than men, and belly dancing groups make a good cover. You wonder where they get their information from? But I believed every word. I’ll never trust a belly dancer again. I expect they’ll be carrying shopping bags full of raw sewerage to poison our water supplies. It’s about the only chemical weapon they have left.

As I said earlier: faulty information. Not the Jewish-Communist conspiracy these days. The Ba’ath Party and Belly-Dancers instead.

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Chapters from an unfinished book: The Lords of Misrule by CJ Stone

Chapter 5: The Opposite of Love.

The opposite of love is not hate. The opposite of love is indifference.

Hate, in fact, is a form of love, since you cannot hate what you have not previously loved, or which has not hurt or wounded or threatened that which you love. Hate is love bent out of shape. Hate is love which is itself wounded. Hate is love broken or betrayed, tortured or defiled, raped or murdered, molested or mutilated. Hate is love when confronted by injustice, or by violence, or by cruelty or by hate. Hate breeds hate, just as love breeds love. Hate is love grown bitter. It is love roused to anger. It is love forced to witness the destruction of innocence. It is love in shackles. It is love enslaved. It is love deprived of hope or freedom or a say over its future. It is love humiliated, made to crawl, love whose spirit is broken. It is love’s ache at the loss of a loved one. It is love’s rebellion at the corrosion of liberty. It is love’s stand against the darkness of repression.

Hate is love’s wound.

It was about a fortnight after MayDay and the guerilla gardening demonstration. Paul and I were going to a protest in support of the Kurds. It was against the building of the Ilisu Dam, which at the time was still in the planning stages. The demonstration was taking place at the Department of Trade and Industry. The British government were helping the Turkish government by means of financial loans. Were the dam to be built, it would flood a vast area of territory in the Kurdish regions, and, in particular, destroy Hasankeyf, an ancient Kurdish settlement dating back to the Bronze Age. (Since the writing of this, in fact, the dam has been built and Hasankeyf has been flooded.)

The Kurds had been at war with Turkey ever since the allies had split Kurdistan apart after the First World War, leaving the Kurds without a country. Kurdistan was divided between Turkey, Iraq and Syria. In Turkey the very existence of a Kurdish identity was denied. Kurds were categorised as “Mountain Turks”, the Kurdish language was banned and Kurdish culture suppressed. People weren’t even allowed to sing their own songs. Kurdish children were being forcibly re-educated in Turkish schools.

There had been a long-running guerilla war going on in the region since the 80s, lead by Abdullah Öcalan of the Kurdish Worker’s Party, the PKK. Öcalan himself was in a Turkish gaol.

One of the most striking images to come out of MayDay was the one of Winston Churchill with a turf Mohican and blood dripping from his mouth. The rumour was that it was the PKK who had done this, in revenge for Churchill’s use of poison gas against the Kurds in the 1920s, when he had described them, variously, as “uncivilised”, “turbulent” and “recalcitrant”.

Paul was staying at his Mum’s house at the time, in Eltham, South London. It’s where Paul was brought up, on a huge council estate on the outskirts of London, and I travelled up to the city to meet him. The demo was planned for the following day, so that gave us the opportunity to grab a few pints in advance. We hit the town.

I don’t remember much about that evening, but a couple of things do stand out. The first was that Paul was constantly writing little slogans with a marker pen on a lot of the adverts he saw, particularly ones in bus shelters. It was his small bit of daily protest. Most of the slogans were quite mundane, and I wondered why he was doing it. Did he really think he could change the world with that? On reflection I think that it’s probably not a bad thing to remind the general public that there are different ways of looking at the world than the one portrayed by all these glossy corporate images.

The second was on the train going home. A group of people were singing Jerusalem at the tops of their voices, and I joined in. I didn’t sing it however, I chanted it like a prayer, or a spell, in order to emphasise the words:

And did those feet in ancient times/ Walk upon England’s mountains green/ And was the holy Lamb of God/ On England’s pleasant pastures seen?

I’m sure I don’t need to remind you how it goes. It is a series of questions to which the answer is—implicitly—always yes! It is actually a revolutionary hymn, though most people don’t know it. It was written by William Blake, a Londoner who lived not many miles from this spot, though, had he been able to look into the future, he would have been surprised at how fast we were travelling. He had probably walked along lanes and pathways crossing or running parallel to this track, even while he was composing these words in his head.

Bring me my bow of burning gold/ Bring me my arrows of desire/ Bring me my spear, oh clouds unfold/ Bring me my chariot of fire!

Blake saw his life as a war taking place in Eternity. Jerusalem is a rallying cry for the armies of the dispossessed to rise up against the spirits of darkness and oppression.

I will not cease from mental fight/ Nor shall my sword sleep in my hand/ Till we have built Jerusalem/ In England’s green and pleasant land.

It is a rousing battle hymn for the heart of our nation. It reminds us that the true soul of England is not this passive, regressive, feeble consumerist paradise that appears to have taken over our country in the last few decades, but is something much more glorious: rebellious, energetic and defiant, it is a cause given to us by God, which we shirk at our peril.

The fact that ordinary Londoners on their way home from the pub could sing this rebel song with such gusto, such conviction, such whole-hearted joyousness, gave me hope for our future.

We carried on drinking when we got to Eltham and, later on, went for a walk.

Eltham Palace was nearby, commonly known as King John’s palace. It turns out that the King John in question is John II of France, who was held captive here, although, naturally, we thought it was the King John of Robin Hood fame. We were on to the spliffs by now, walking along an ancient pathway as Paul was showing me the Palace. It was one of his childhood haunts. We passed a hoary old oak with overhanging branches laden with spring blossom, and I started quoting something I’d written about Robin Hood:

“Robin Hood is not a man, though many men have used his name. He is the spirit of the wildwood in its budding time. Jolly Robin in the Green, the force that makes the green shoots grow, that hisses in the foliage like love’s electricity, that sizzles and crackles with the laughter of life, with the joy of the blossoming of the Earth’s goodly store. He is the spirit of the Maytime in its fruitfulness and splendour, the spirit of England, the Summerlord, King of the Summerlands, where summer’s sun always shines. The spirit of mirth and playfulness, of sport, of dance, of jest, of love. He is there with the lovers in their secret tryst, with the dance of the birds in the merry air, with the players of sports in their triumphs and losses, with all that is light and lively and fanciful and free. His day begins on the first of May and continues through to Whitsun, White Sunday, and is accompanied by music and laughter, games, feasts and festivities. Dances and plays are performed in his honour, jests and japes and buffooneries. Not for nothing is his name Jolly Robin. Jolly as the sunshine. Jolly as the Noontime. Jolly as the Moon in May.”

It was Jo who had inspired me to write this. She’d said that at this time of year, if you closed off your chattering mind, and listened to the plants, you could feel the forces of nature as they come alive in the world. “It’s like electricity,” she said.

I leant against the oak and told Paul about the Little Gest of Robin Hood, which I had not long since read, how Robin had leant against an oak tree just like this, and told his Merry Men to go kidnap someone from the high road because he was bored and wanted entertainment. So they would kidnap their victim, then ply him with drink and food and entertainment, after which they would ask for money in payment. And if the victims pretended not to have money when they had, had tried to conceal their money, then the outlaws would take all that they possessed. But if the victim had no money, but were themselves victim of some crime, some dispossession by the forces of oppression, then the Merry Men would set out to avenge that crime, to return that person’s property to them, to serve as the agents of justice in the land.

It seemed to me then that Robin Hood is the true spirit of England, not St George. His day is Mayday, which was always a day of love and heathenism in the English calendar: a day of secret trysts and greenery, of folk lore and fellowship, of rebellion and romance. The trip to Parliament fields was fresh in my mind. I was still in the throes of my love affair with the spirit of English resistence I had seen that day.

But seeing me there, leaning against an oak like Robin Hood, talking about Robin Hood, a little shiver of recognition went through Paul. I could see it in his eyes. It was as if the spirit of Robin Hood had visited us there, in that moment, as if he had come alive in that stance, in that story, and it reminded us that these old spirits live on, whether we are aware of them or not, and that it is through living human beings that they can make their presences known.

In some versions of the story Robin Hood is known as “The Lord of Misrule”.

I had a terrible night at Paul’s, sleeping in his Mum’s bed. It was like I was fighting some psychic battle in my dreams, as if the whole world was now in a state of permanent war; or as if the walls of this council house had absorbed some great violence in the past and was now exuding it like poisonous smoke into the atmosphere. It felt like the house was in psychic pain.

On the landing the dogs were pacing and squabbling with each other, growling in their sleep. They would prowl about, then lie down with a groan against one of the doors which would shudder with the impact. Then Paul would wake up and shout: “Shut the fuck up!” The dogs would groan and turn again.

At a certain point I woke from some nightmare about chasing ghosts, dying to go to the toilet, only I found that I was locked in. The yale lock on the door was stuck and wouldn’t move. Why was there a yale lock on the bedroom door in any case? I had to call out to Paul to open the door for me. I put the door on the latch to make sure I wouldn’t be locked in again and a cushion against the inside to stop the dogs getting in.

This went on all night. Prowling demons, dog’s groans, shuddering doors, ghosts, waking and sleeping in fitful, disturbed bursts.

I had a peculiar dream. I was outside one of those pubs in Eltham we’d been at the evening before. Eltham is a very racist area; or rather, to be absolutely precise about this, there are strong racist pockets. I’m sure not every resident is a racist. Paul isn’t. But Stephen Lawrence was murdered here, and his killers came from the area. The place is a bastion of right-wing political thinking, most of it hidden, but still stirring under the surface.

In the dream I was sitting at a long table with a bunch of young, white football casuals, with gelled hair and football shirts. We all had pints of lager in front of us. “Come on lads,” I was saying, in my usual liberal manner, “we’re all the same.”

“He’s not,” they said, indicating with a nod of the head. And I turned and looked, and at the end of the table, separated from the rest of us, there was an Hasidic Jew, all dressed in black, with his hat and his beard and his curls falling either side of his face. “Oh no, he’s not,” I thought, realising that the Jew was deliberately making himself different by his dress.

When we got up in the morning there was no milk, so we had to make do with black coffee. And nothing to make breakfast with. We decided to go to a cafe.

Paul was dressed all in black, looking sinister as usual. He said, “I was a soldier in a past life. I’m making up for it now.”

And he was right. There was a very powerful military air about him I realised. I hadn’t thought about it before. It’s like he was a member some psychic black ops team of the SAS, dropped behind enemy lines. He has an aggressive and edgy air, as if he’s about to pick a fight with the world.

There was a small cafe near the station. It was run by Turks. I said, “don’t mention the Kurds.” Then Paul noticed the name of the cafe. It was written on the menu. “Marmara” it said.

“That’s the name of the prison where Öcalan is being kept,” he said.

Later we found out it was slightly more complicated than that. Marmara is the name of a sea. We were eating at a Turkish cafe in Eltham, named after a sea, in which there is an island, on which there is a prison, in which Öcalan was being kept. We were just about to get on a train, to attend a protest by Kurdish people about the cultural genocide which they said would be caused by the building of the Ilisu dam in occupied Kurdistan, but we were eating breakfast at a cafe which commemerated, in a roundabout way, the incarceration and humiliation of the Kurdish leader.

On the train Paul was neurotically playing with his hair, trying to cover up his bald patches by moving his hair around. Lack of sleep and a bad hangover was making me feel unusually irritable. The sight of his fingers twisting strands of hair into gel-soaked ribbons was getting on my nerves. I wanted to slap his hand and tell him to stop fiddling.

The Department of Trade and Industry is a glass and steel building on the approach to Parliament Square. I’d probably passed it when coming to the demo before. It was shimmering in the sunlight, reflecting the street and all the buildings around it, looking suitably anonymous, almost as if it wasn’t really there.

There was a knot of people on the pavement outside, maybe 20 or 30 of them, with a couple of policemen looking fairly relaxed. Mark Thomas, the comedian, was climbing up a lamp post with a digital camera in his hand trying to get pictures from every angle. One of the policemen asked him to get down. He paid no attention.

There was some drumming going on, and some dancing. They had their arms linked in a line and were doing this elaborate stepped dance involving handkerchiefs being waved in the air. I remember it very clearly: the kicking and the dancing and the trills and whoops of excitement. There were a few cars lined up by the side of the road including an old VW van. Paul took me over to it and introduced me to one of his friends. He was putting up slogans on the van. He smiled and said hello, and shook my hand formally. He had gentle, kind eyes.

Paul said, “show him the pictures.”

And the gentle-eyed Kurd opened a folder, and showed me the first picture. He said, “these are photographs taken by Turkish soldiers as trophies. They sell for a lot of money in Istanbul.” It was an enlarged colour photocopy of an ordinary snapshot, laminated for protection. It showed a Turkish soldier in a snowy, mountainous landscape wearing a blue beret. He was kneeling down on one knee, grinning triumphantly, holding up a pair of objects in his hands. It was hard to make out what they were at first. They were about the size of footballs, and, indeed, that’s what I took them to be. But then my eyes focused on the detail, and I saw what they really were. They were severed heads.

The Turkish soldier was holding them up by the hair as trophies. The snow was stained with patches of blood, as blood dripped down from the ripped tendons of the neck, as blood stained the soldier‘s hands. I had never seen anything like it before in my life. The eyes in the two heads were rolled backwards into the skulls. Open-mouthed, they seemed to be screaming some unimaginable blasphemy to the sky. I immediately began to cry. The picture was like a jolt of extreme violence, like something from a nightmare. Ordinary Londoners passed by in motorcars, blissfully unaware.

Paul was looking at me pointedly, while the quiet-eyed Kurd spoke to me in a gentle even voice.

“Yes,” he said, “I have seen 23 of my family killed. My brother was killed. The Turks came to the village and called everyone out of doors. They took ten of them and shot them in the head while the others watched. The people were made to clap. If they didn’t clap, they too were shot. My brother was 14 years old.”

There were several more of these photographs, of soldiers holding up severed heads, sometimes one head, sometimes two. Sometimes a number of soldiers would be standing in front of the headless corpse while one of the soldiers held up the head.

Then my Kurdish friend showed me another photograph. This, too, was like a snapshot. It was even arranged like one. It showed a family ranged around in someone’s living room, on their knees, posed, looking at the camera. There were family trinkets displayed on shelves, and pictures and wall-hangings on the walls. Before them a dead body. The body is naked, and has long white gashes along the legs. You can see the bone. The family consists of a woman and several children. The woman’s eyes are wild, though her face is held in a taught mask. The children just look towards the camera, eyes as deep and unfathomable as the night.

My friend said, “this is the dead-man’s family. They are being made to pose by the corpse. Those wounds on his legs are where he has been tortured.”

I was utterly speechless. There weren’t any words. In the whole universe there wasn’t a single word I could say that meant anything anymore.

I’ve never forgotten that moment. I remember going into a shop soon after to go to the toilet. There were all the products lined up in their various displays, looking shiny and new. But I couldn’t help seeing the blood that seemed to flow from the photographs underlying this conspicuous display of opulence all around me. I couldn’t help thinking of the murder of innocence.

So, now, imagine those children made to sit before the corpse of their beloved father while an enemy soldier takes a photograph. Their faces betray nothing of their feelings. But what will be seething in their hearts? What rage, what anger, will have been born there that day? What hatred? What acts of revenge? What future violence? Do we really expect them to forgive?

Hate breeds hate breeds hate breeds hate, but hate is born from love.

Now imagine that on a world scale: in Palestine, in Iraq, in Afghanistan, in Pakistan, in Yemen, in Syria, in Somalia, in Libya, in Bahrain. All over the world. Everywhere there is a war.

Thousands of corpses. Tens of thousands. Unimaginable numbers. Who knows how many corpses or how many children there are, just like these children, being tortured by the horrors of war? Who knows the scars on the heart of the world or how much blood has been accumulated there? How much sorrow, how much anger, how much violence, how much pain? How much love seeking revenge?

So why don’t we know this? We’ve all been brought up on stories about the Second World War, about the Nazis taking men from the village and shooting them arbitrarily, killing ten men for every German, things like that. So why don’t we know it is still happening, that fascism still infects our world? Not only that, but that our governments are supporting it, with grants and loans and sale of arms? Why do we only hear about the atrocities of official enemies – and only then when its time for war – but not the atrocities of our official friends which are going on all the time? Why isn’t this on the news? Why aren’t these photographs seen by everyone?

They should be on the front page of every newspaper, I thought: the consequences of war. We should see the bodies ripped apart, the innards spilling out of the wounds like the human meat they are. We should see the mothers screaming for their dead children. We should see the fear in a father’s eyes, the fear for their children, whom they cannot protect. We should see the children’s naked fear. We should see the broken bodies in the hospitals, the bloodstained sheets, the body parts. We should see the broken homes and the broken lives. We should be made to feel their pain. We should all be made to feel the consequence of our own indifference.

Because the opposite of love is not hate. The opposite of love is indifference.

Read the next chapter here: https://christopherjamesstone.wordpress.com/2021/03/21/chapters-from-an-unfinished-book-the-lords-of-misrule-by-cj-stone-6/

Chapters from an unfinished book: The Lords of Misrule by CJ Stone

Chapter 4: Priestesses of the Revolution in Parliament Square

I spent the Sunday trying to recruit some companions for my May Day excursion. Various people said they’d like to come, and we’d arrange to meet at the railway station.

“What time?” they’d ask.

“Well I reckon about 9 o’clock. The action starts at 11 and I want to be sure I get there before they close off the square.”

No one said anything, but I could read it in their eyes. “9’oclock. That’s much too early. I’ll still be in bed at 9 o’clock.”

Someone called Pete Promise had promised to come with me. In fact it had been Pete who had alerted me to the event in the first place. But in the end, Pete Promise’s promises turned out to lack promise. Where did he get his name from, I wonder?

In the end no one else came, and I went by myself.

I met a friend at the station. He was on his way up to the May Day celebrations in Rochester: a traditional May Day event, with Morris dancers and May Poles, blacked up faces, and plenty of beer. Maybe I wished I was going with him.

I got a cup of coffee from the man pushing the drinks trolley on the train. I asked him who he worked for.

“Swiss Air,” he told me.

“Don’t you think that’s strange,” I asked, “working for Swiss Air? Since when did Swiss Air get into the coffee-trolley business and start moving onto British trains?”

He said he did find it strange, but it was a job.

Globalisation is everywhere.

I walked from Victoria Station towards Parliament Square. There was a small Police presence halfway up: a Motorcycle cop in the middle of the road, talking idly to a yellow-jacketed constable. They seemed in good spirits.

I veered off the main road, mainly to get myself a cup of coffee from a small cafe. I still had a hangover from two days before. The waitress was Russian, young and pretty, with huge round spectacles. The chef was chatting her up. They mentioned the demo in passing. “Hope there’s no trouble,” the chef said, before suggesting I might like a breakfast. “Cheapest in London,” he said. “One ninety nine. A bargain.”

“Maybe later,” I said.

After that I zigzagged through the back roads. Not that I’m paranoid. But I was keeping my head down, trying to look like a normal citizen.

The back roads were full of police vans, lined up against the kerb. You could see them all in there in their riot gear, easing the tension with bantering conversation. And there was a workman’s lorry on the corner of an approach road to Parliament Square, a flat-back full of grit covered in tarpaulin, with men in overalls and workman’s helmets standing on top. Also another couple of lorries with barricades and traffic cones piled up.. One of the workmen had a walkie-talkie. “So you want us to block the road, right? Yes, yes. When you give the order. Right.”

They were plain clothed policemen.

After that I went into Parliament Square. There were no cordons. Big Ben shadowed us benignly.

The green space of Parliament Fields was already filling up with anarchists.. Most of them were hardly more than children. They had that air of excitement about them, like a bunch of kids on the sands at Margate. They even had their buckets and spades with them (this was a guerrilla gardening action remember: they were here to plant seeds for the future.) Around the space the darkened statues of obscure British Army Generals observed us with cool indifference, looking down upon us from their tired platforms. Only Winston Churchill had any real presence.

Actually, I must admit that I was feeling a little paranoid. Not so much about the police, as the anarchists. I’m a middle-aged man. My clothing style is M&S cast-offs and pullovers my Mom buys me for Christmas. Cool I ain’t. I kept thinking people were looking at me funny, like they all suspected I was a plain-clothed policeman in their midst: or, worse still, a journalist. Also I’d just had my hair cut: short-back-and-sides. I’d reasoned that I was less likely to get hit with a short-back-and-sides.(The barber had said, “it’s a mistake, you have such an interesting face.” After the haircut I’d said, “see? I still have an interesting face.” “I’m not saying anything,” the barber said, while taking my money.)

So I was wandering around in my best second hand M&S woolly, with my short-back-and-sides, amongst the colourful crowd all milling about like anarchist peacocks in season, feeling paranoid and middle-aged. This might have had something to do with the hangover too. It was still early yet. Nothing much was happening.

I wanted to sit down and start taking notes, but I thought, “no, someone will attack me.”

So I stayed on the move.

There was a TV crew on a wall overlooking the scene, with a TV reporter (quite famous, with red hair and freckles) looking suitably detached and superior. He had a clip board and a pen, and was taking notes.

Someone else was making sketches, sitting by one of the monuments. I envied him his art. At least no one was going to jump to conclusions about his intentions.

There is a perhaps quite justifiable suspicion about the media amongst anarchist circles. They’ve had a bad press over the years: sometimes downright lies, as when, for instance, before J18 the press had reported that RTS were stockpiling weapons. It’s a joke, of course, but not a very funny one. But the process had gone far too far. Now they wouldn’t talk to anyone, not even normally sympathetic reporters.

I later heard that people had attacked the veteran Stonehenge campaigner, Tash, for taking photographs. Tash has been the main photographer and archivist of anarchist culture and politics for nearly thirty years. So some people were now attacking veterans on their own side.

Black propaganda and suspicion had become rife.

Eventually I caught up with Warren, handing out copies of SchNEWS. I told him what I’d overheard the workmen saying on the corner of a sidestreet approaching Parliament Square. It was one more paranoid observation to throw into the turmoil of the day. And meeting up with Warren, of course, meant meeting up with the rest of the SchNEWS collective, all those bright young people from Brighton I kind of know, and kind of don’t know. We lurked around on the edge of the anarchist inaction for a while, on the raised beds beside the green. Warren made his usual observation about Trotskyite papers sellers. “I wish they’d fuck off,” he said. “I wish they’d sell their papers somewhere else.”

SchNEWS, of course, is given away for nothing.

Someone told me that there were 3,000 people from Critical Mass on their way from Hyde Park. Critical Mass are the anarchist cyclist group.

Later we were wandering in a sort of snake-line through the crowd when I saw Jo. I mean—Jo! I sort of slid along beside side her without at first knowing she was there. Then I looked up. There was a moment of recognition. This face in the crowd. I know you! I more than know you. I fucking love you!

“Jo!” I said.

“Chris!” she said, startled into recognition.

And we gave each other a long, comfortable, friend’s hug, before standing back and looking at each other again.

“I thought I’d lost you,” she said. There was something about the way she said “you” which made me feel special.

“Never. You can’t lose me,” I said.

“Well how do I look?” she said. “Have I grown?”

She’s 6’1″.

Well you could call this a coincidence or you could call it something else. Maybe if you were a hippie, you’d call it synchronicity. Or providence: that’s another word worth remembering. Providence provides. Or Fate, even. If you said it was weird, you’d be using the word as it was originally conceived, in the Anglo-Saxon, as a mysterious force that impels the human world, that directs men and women of calling to their fate. Another hippie word I’ve heard used is Pronoia. It’s the opposite of Paranoia: a state where the intricate workings of the World Mind conspire to make things work just right.

Which is how it felt in that moment, meeting Jo: just right. Standing there on that day, on that strange May Day (on that day of all days) looking at my old familiar friend, feeling that everything was just right.

I’d shared a house with Jo years before. It was the most crowded house I’ve ever lived in. There was me and my son in the front living room downstairs, Jo and her bloke, John, in the back bedroom upstairs, and another John in the front bedroom. We distinguished the two John’s by calling Jo’s John “Lost”, and the other “Blonde”. Sometimes Jo called Lost John “Dark-Eyed John” or “Dark John”. But, then again, she wanted to be able to distinguish him with a more romantic sounding name than “Lost”. All three of them are over six foot tall. I developed a permanent crick in the neck from looking up at them, while they developed permanent stoops from ducking through the doorways in this Wendy House sized space.

Then there was a homeless couple sleeping on the settee in the living room: Remi and Miranda. Miranda was pregnant. And Lost John’s Dog, Jude, who used often to chew up the rubbish bin. You’d come down stairs to find chewed paper and tins and potato peelings scattered all over the kitchen floor. And Rhiannon, Jo’s daughter, still a baby at the time, who I’d occasionally baby-sit for. It was a two-up, two-down Victorian terrace, with a long, slimy kitchen tacked on like an afterthought at the back, with a bathroom tacked even more tenuously onto that. A two-up, two-down with eight and a half people (including Miranda’s bump) and a dog living in it.

Blonde John was going quietly mad at the time. He’d been an archaeologist, but was now out of work. He’d done his knee in. He spent his time tracing maps, missing out the modern features so that the world looked as it would have in Roman times. Or he’d design imaginary Cathedrals on scraps of paper. Or he’d spend hours on the settee reading cheap thrillers while downing bottles of British sherry or—when he was feeling flush or in need of culture—G’n’Ts, with ice and a slice. He was always very refined in his tastes. Lost John was darkly handsome, muscular, with tanned features and a sharp, bird-like nose. He was much less refined. You’d imagine a gruff, dark brown voice to go with his dark-brown features. Only his voice broke whenever he became excited—or drunk, same thing—and then he sounded like a little boy.

One day I was baby-sitting Rhiannon while drinking Blonde John’s bottle of Gin. Jo was at the pub with Lost. I got so drunk I could hear the complete score of a never-before-heard Hollywood Musical in my head. It was very clear, with a complete orchestral arrangement, and deeply meaningful lyrics. Afterwards one of Jo’s friends came back. She was staying with Jo for the weekend. She went up to Jo’s bed, and then I followed her. I was making obscene propositions to her as she lay in the bed, naked and annoyed, while I was off my head on Gin and Musical Comedy. She told me to go away several times, but that musical score was so intense I couldn’t hear her. I think it took Jo a day or two to forgive me that particular indiscretion.

The First Gulf War was on at the time. We listened to the triumphalist propaganda on the radio all day, and drew our own conclusions about the real meaning of it. The news was on 24 hours a day. Blonde John painted pro-Iraqi graffiti on our outside wall, while the relentless voices of jingoism echoed in every pub.

And I’d had my vasectomy done while I was living there. I went up to London for it. It was done under local anaesthetic. There was no pain, but the smell of burning flesh (my flesh! my own delicate, internal flesh!) made me feel sick. On the train back the anaesthetic started to wear off. Then the rattling of the train and the bumping of the seat began to feel like torture. Clackety-clack, clackety-clack. Testicular wrack, testicular wrack. After that I had to walk home. I was walking like a cowboy, keeping my legs firmly apart, while shudders of nausea troubled my every step. I got as far as a friend’s house and had to go in for a lie-down. Later I caught a taxi back home. I hobbled into the house, all green and shaky, and Blonde was there. He laughed when I told him what was wrong. I persuaded him to go and get me a Chinese, because I couldn’t walk around the corner.

That night I dreamt of teenage boys stamping on my testicles, and my penis being turned inside out with the delicate precision of a surgeon’s knife. Weeks later I had to masturbate into a plastic bottle, and send it up to the clinic to check its sperm content.

But the house was full and lively. Full of life. My son and I would settle into our shared room and watch videos. Or I’d read him stories (it was The Lord Of The Rings) before he went to bed. He’d nestle into the crook of my arm getting sleepy, and I’d miss out all the poetry and arcane stuff, sticking strictly to the story-line. Moments like that stay with you forever. I still have the psychic imprint of his head getting sleepy in the crook of my arm. And afterwards I could go to the pub. There was always someone in the house, so there was always a baby-sitter, so I could always go to the pub.

One New Years Day I looked after Rhiannon while Jo spent the day in bed with Lost. They spent the whole time making love. Jo was positively operatic in her pleasure, arias of trilling ecstasy cascading down the stairs. I was watching telly. I can’t remember what was on, though it might have been The Sound Of Music.

“The hills are alive

with the sound of music

with songs they have sung

for a thousand years!”

That was how Jo sounded as she made love, like Julie Andrews in The Sound Of Music, skipping gaily through the mountains with her arms in the air.

After that she’d gone away, to live in West Wales, though we’d still remained in contact. I’d gone to visit her in a cool, sturdy cottage in a little village there: spent several weeks writing and keeping out of the sun. She was doing a Biology degree, for which she got a First. Then she moved to Devon, where her parents are based. And after that she was gone: who knows where? I’d heard rumours that she was in Bali, or she was in New Zealand, or somewhere equally distant and strange. I never expected to see her again.

And now here she was, Jo, towering above me as usual, all elbows and legs and belly-button, with this wild, electric tangle of red hair, looking at me with the same sense of shared history I had with her. A friend.

It’s good to meet a friend on May Day.

We spent some time talking about this and that. What she’d been up to. What I’d been up to. She had indeed gone to Bali. It had been something of a disaster, she told me (I won’t talk about it here). And she’d gone to New Zealand too. She’d been all over the place, but she was back in Wales now. We talked about Lost John and Blonde. Lost was now living in France, apparently, with some glamorous, amorous beauty, who kneeled at his feet and lit his cigarettes for him. He’d gone there to do some building work, but had lunched out all the money on alcohol. Blonde was still in Wales, and getting more obscure by the day. He’d given up the drink and disapproved of anyone who still indulged.

And as we were talking, suddenly there was someone else we both knew, standing beside us. Mary. She kind of filtered from the crowd like a vision resolving itself. It was like a meeting of True Minds, here in this green space in the middle of London. Mary and Jo, two (in their own way) powerful women.

I’m not sure when the phrase came to mind. Sometime during the day, I suppose. I was thinking of all the women I knew and most admired. Like Jo. Like Mary. Like Bev. Like (people you will meet later) Bunny and Ornella. All these gorgeous, powerful, integral women. All with a certain poise. All with a certain Presence.

I thought, “these are my Priestesses of the Revolution.”

I mean, I like men. I spend most evenings down the pub, where I’m surrounded by men. And we talk of this and that. But the quality of men is that they often skirt around the matter. They hide their feelings behind displays of banter and bravado. They might offer you a game of Pool, or buy you a drink, and that means, “I like you”. They might talk about the allotment, or fishing, or football. And that means “I want to talk to you”. But they hardly ever talk about themselves, what really matters to them. Or maybe that’s all that does matter: fresh vegetables, fishing and football. I can never have a conversation with men like I can have with women.

To me women are the embodiment of the Earth. They are the Earth’s consciousness, in our midst. Men are more like the mammals that roam upon the Earth, seeking out its fierce delights. But women are the Earth iself.

Part of the fragmentation of consciousness that has occurred in our time has been the divorce of religion from the Earth. Religion has become a thing of air, looking up into a vague, misty sky, instead of across and down at what lies around us. This has been achieved by removing women from the institutions of religion. So Priests and Bishops rule, by dogma and codification, by bureaucracy and lies. It’s no wonder no one wants to go to church any more.

And it’s interesting, too, that in this time when the church is becoming increasingly irrelevant, increasingly moribund, that Priestesses are arising all over the place. Outside the church, in the new religions. Wiccan Priestesses, creating new forms of ritual without dogma, seeing religion as a celebration rather than as a duty. And inside the church too. Like Bev. Criticising the church from a new perspective.

But it’s more than that. Priestesses, yes. But why “of the Revolution”?

Because (and I’ve thought all this out since the phrase first came to mind) it is women who must lead the next Revolution, when it comes.

We’ve had two hundred years of Capitalism, which has brought our Earth to the edge of destruction. But we’ve had two hundred years of revolutionary movements too. Two hundred years of opposition and dissent. We’ve seen revolution after revolution after revolution, and where have they all ended up? In the same place they began. The Immortal Corporate Person of corporate capitalism replaced by the Immortal Corporate Person of the Party, the Dear Leader and the State. And meanwhile so much blood has been spilled. So many women have lost sons, husbands, fathers. So many men have lost their comrades. So much grief and destruction, and all of it led by men.

It’s no wonder so many people have lost faith. Why should we give up our lives if all that is offered is more of the same? The same terror. The same authority. The same destruction.

Women bring a new perspective to the idea of revolution. It’s a personal thing. It has to do with personal relations. It has to do with how you behave with other people. It’s an act of consciousness. It arises here, in the body, and here, in the heart. In the end, maybe, it has to confront the forces of terror and destruction; but not with weapons. Not with guns and missiles. With consciousness. With the truth.

At least that’s how I’d like it to be. I can’t put my faith in God any more. I can’t put my faith in the Party. So I’ll put it into women instead. Into women I can trust.

Things were starting to happen.

There was a leaflet going about. “Essential information to enhance your Guerrilla Gardening Experience” it said. There was a picture of Bill and Ben. It was signed Reclaim The Streets.

And on the back it said:

“LOOK OUT FOR THE FLAGS.

“Red is for the pulse of life—follow the red flags when it’s time to flow through the streets.

“Green is for ecology—converge on the green flags to Guerrilla Garden.

“Black is for freedom—gather round the black flags for non hierarchical decision making.”

Up till now the traffic had still flowed on the tarmac around the green space of the square. It was a normal London day. But suddenly there was movement in the road. A crowd of brightly dressed people were emerging from some corner, headed by a woman in a golden mask. There was a trumpet band playing. People were dancing and waving their arms in the air. They went round the square several times. They were carrying branches and other greenery, and a number of other mysterious items. Probably to do with the guerrilla gardening. People inside the square were running to the edges to look into the road to see what was going on. There was an air of excitement in the crowd, of anticipation. Then people were running around with tape—the same kind of tape that the police use to cordon of a scene of crime, only this was yellow and green, and had Reclaim The Streets written on it. It went around the entire square, round lamposts, across roads. It was the scene of another kind of crime. Then banners were going up, strung up between lampposts and monuments. Let London Sprout. Under The Concrete The Earth. Resistance Is Fertile. Capitalism Is Pants. Reclaim The Streets. Horticultural Anarchy. And the best one (hung outside the Treasury, appropriately enough), a quote from Gerard Winstanley of the Diggers, or True Levellers, of the English Revolution: The Earth Is A Common Treasury For All.

That one sent shivers down my spine and started me singing the World Turned Upside Down by Leon Rosselson:

“In 1649

To St George’s Hill

A ragged band they called the Diggers

Came to show the people’ s will

They defied the landlords

They defied the laws

They were the dispossessed

Reclaiming what was theirs.”

How appropriate.

The police, meanwhile, stood around doing nothing. It was as if they wanted it to happen.

Jo began her guerrilla gardening. First of all she wanted to rip up a paving stone, but I persuaded her against this. “You’ll get arrested,” I said. So she was pulling up the turf instead, to make a space for her plants. She was ripping it from the ground it great strips like it was perforated paper. It came up so easily. Interestingly, the sandy soil beneath the turf was entirely waterlogged. (We didn’t know this at the time, but we found out later that the police had hosed the square thoroughly the night before).

I asked her what she’d brought.

“Willow cuttings,” she said. She was pressing them into the ground and adding compost.

“Why willow cuttings?” I asked.

“Cos it doesn’t matter if they die. I know they won’t survive.”

Someone else, who was also planting in Jo’s newly de-turfed space, said, “yes, I got these from my allotment this morning. I was thinking they’d be so much happier being left where they were.”

“So what’s the point, then? Isn’t it a waste of time?” I asked.

“You’re very cynical, Chris,” Jo said. “It’s symbolic isn’t it? We’ve got to do something, haven’t we? We’re bringing life to the dead city.”

By now everyone was busy, doing this and doing that. Digging and dancing and having fun. Someone came up to me and asked where Winston Churchill’s statue was. “I dunno,” I said, looking round. “There,” I pointed, having seen the ponderous man’s unmistakable rear end.

“Jo,” I said, hesitantly, once she’d finished her gardening bit: “you know what I fancy…?”

“I know what you’re going to say,” she said.

“What’s that?”

“You want to go to the pub, don’t you?”

“You know me so well, Jo.”

Mary said, “I’ll come with you. I want to go to the toilet, and I don’t fancy doing it behind a tree or something. Or in a smelly compost toilet.”

So Mary and I went to the pub. It was The Finnegan’s Wake, just off Victoria street, a proper Irish pub, with dark wood alcoves and a nicotine-stained ceiling. There were pictures of Irish writers all over the walls. I saw Oscar Wilde and Samuel Beckett. But—despite the name of the pub—no James Joyce. I asked the barmaid who was serving our drink. “Where’s James Joyce?” I said. She said didn’t know.

So I began quoting from Finnegan’s Wake instead: “riverrun past Eve and Adam’s, from swerve of shore to bend of bay,” I said, swilling back the pint.

“Pardon?” said Mary.

By the time we got back, the square had been completely transformed. All these little gardens all over the place, several dozen of them. And people were ripping up turf and laying it across the road. I saw one patch of turf that looked like Australia. The person making it seemed to be doing this on purpose, as some sort of design. He was rushing over from the green with his bits of turf, and then laying them down ever so carefully, to make a shape that looked like Australia. Why would anyone want to lay turf across the road in the first place, let alone wanting to make it look like Australia?

There was a goddess figure made from sand at the end of a newly-formed paddling pool on the green. She had pointed breasts. The soil was completely waterlogged, so when they dug down it immediately filled with water. Several children were paddling their feet, and one determined anarchist had taken off his clothes to bathe in it. A compost toilet had been built on one of the flowerbeds, while a group calling itself Indymedia had set up a public access terminal, so that people could record their live impressions directly onto the net. One of the Indymedia people had painted the hair at his temples white to give the impression of sageness and middle age; which I took to be an insult to my very genuine grey hair and middle age. He was wearing a dark suit and a tie and trying to look like a TV news presenter. And there was some sort of a turf sculpture, a kind of spiral mound, with things growing on it.

There was also large patch of turf laid across the road opposite the Houses of Parliament, where people were holding a Mad Hatter’s tea party. Several people dressed as characters out of Alice in Wonderland were sat around a makeshift table (an old pram with a board laid across it) drinking tea and eating cucumber sandwiches. I later heard that the “tea” was actually tequila. And, in the middle of the same road, a May Pole was set up: a stripey pole set in an oil drum, with ribbons dangling from the top. Someone began to give instructions about how to do the dance. So they were skipping around the May Pole, in that fey English style, like Julie Andrews, waving their arms in the air—all these mad, manic anarchists with dreadlocks and tattoos—bumping into each other, tripping over each other and getting into knots. They had several attempts before they were successful.

At a certain point I met up with Ian Bone, and we went for a wander. As we approached Whitehall we could see a sudden surge in the crowd. Lots of people were moving in that direction, with flags and banners waving. Ian went back to find his crew (this was obviously where things were happening) while I went to find Jo, Mary having left by now.

Whitehall too had been transformed. All those stagy statues of obscure Generals in heroic poses, standing manfully astride, legs apart, hips thrust forward to show grit and determination: they all had plastic phallus’ strapped to them. One of them had a plastic nose. They looked like clowns or buffoons. It was the perfect May Day statement. Classical May Day buffoonery.

None of this was shown on TV later, of course. It was clearly just a joke. All anybody wanted to hear about was the Cenotaph.

Just passed Downing Street the barricades were up. There was a line of riot police, shields and batons at the ready, faced by a line of protesters. Some of the protesters were drunk, and shouting abuse at the policemen. The policemen observed them with cool indifference, wrapped up in their armour, with their visors down. Beyond the line of police you could see the dark ruin of the smashed up MacDonald’s (this is one of the images that made it into the newspapers the following day) and beyond that again, on the edge of Trafalgar Square, another line of police, with a sea of red banners and flags in the Square itself. I could see an SWP banner up there, and thousands of people.

I went up to one of the policemen.

“Who’s that, up there?” I asked.

“Dunno.”

“Is it the TUC? I can see an SWP banner. Is that the Trade Union march?”

“Dunno.”

“Can I go there?”

“You could try the back streets. Down there. But you can’t go through here, mate. Orders.”

Here is the official Police press release for MayDay:

MayDay summary and update as of 1730 on Monday May 1:

At 08:45 a 20 year old man was arrested in Victoria Street, SW1, in possession of a pair of long bladed scissors, and taken to Charing Cross police station.

At 10:15 a 25 year old old man and a 29 year old man were arrested at Cromwell Road, SW5, for alleged possession of articles to cause criminal damage, and taken to Charing Cross police station.

At 11:45 approx. 1,000 people had gathered in Parliament Square. All peaceful.

Approximately 300 cyclists had left Hyde Park and were then at Bressenden Place, SW1

At approx. 12:00 a 24 year old man was arrested for suspected possession of CS gas and possession of cannabis, and an 18 year old man was arrested in possession of a lock-knife, at Westminster Bridge, SE1. Both were taken to Walworth police station.

At 12:45 3,000 people had gathered in Parliament Square.

By 13:30 protesters were removing turf from Parliament Square, and relaying the strips in the road.

By 14:00 approximately half of the protesters had moved away from the Square and were moving up Whitehall. There were 200-300 outside Downing Street. Some items were being thrown and officers with shields were deployed.

At approximately 14:10 approximately six police officers came under attack from protesters throwing missiles in Whitehall, and protesters were attacking MacDonald’s in Whitehall.

A 45 year old male police constable, based at Plumstead police station, was attacked with a brick in the face in Whitehall by the crowds that attacked the six officers, and he remains in a central London hospital. He sustained swelling to the right hand side of his face, and also suffered swelling and bruising to his leg .

Eight other police officers—including a male police constable based at Charing Cross police station who suffered a dislocated shoulder—were treated by a forensic medical examiner and did not require hospital treatment. The MacDonald’s in Whitehall was seriously damaged. The staff managed to make off from the rear and are all safe and accounted for.

The Bureau de Change in Whitehall also came under attack. There has been considerable damage. All staff were shaken, but are safe and accounted for.

Mounted officers were standing by at Northumberland Avenue, SW1. At 14:15 a man was arrested in St Martin’s in the Field, WC2, for possessing article for criminal damage and possession of cannabis, and taken to Charing Cross police station.

At approximately 14:15 a 22 year old man was arrested in Charing Cross Road, WC2, for being drunk in a public place and taken to Charing Cross police station.

There have been a further eight arrests (bringing total through the day to 15) but we await further details and clarification about whether any/all relate to the disorder seen outside MacDonald’s.

Approx 1,000 people remain in Trafalgar Square and are being contained by police. They are being allowed to leave in small groups.

Parliament Square is now virtually empty. Protestors have moved from Parliament Square along Millbank, across Lambeth Bridge and remain in that area south of the Thames. Deputy Assistant Commissioner Michael Todd has said that only a minority of protesters were causing criminal damage and violence—he estimated the figure of those involved near MacDonald’s as 100.

Meanwhile, on Bondi beach, Sydney, Australia 150 activists prevented the beginning of the construction of the Olympic volleyball stadium. The action continued on this rainy Monday morning at the Sydney Stock exchange, shadowed by a heavy police presence. By the time they had gathered at the courtyard of the exchange, in the heart of the city’s business centre, their numbers had doubled.

The Peace bus, a mobile sound system in a tank, failed make it, having been pulled over by Police. The Police called on the roads and traffic authority to inspect the vehicle, presumably in the hope of failing it, but they came and gave it a clean bill of health. There was a bit of pushing and shoving when police tried to divert the crowd away from the Westpac bank. According to activists: “This bank is bankrolling the Jabiluka uranium mine development in the Northern territory; green slime was delivered to their doorstep to highlight what the toxic nightmare their supporting.”

On April 28, in Leiden, Holland, a socialist party senator was pied “because of his nationalism.” At the same time, a railway-spokesperson was pied, “against the Betuwe freight railway line project.”

And the following day another 350 people held a demonstration called the first “March on the Oranges” (against the Dutch royal family). A “People’s Tribunal” convicted a Beatrice look-alike, of inciting nationalist conflicts and being a symbol of capitalist oppression. There was a fake guillotine on hand, but in the end it wasn’t used. She was pied instead.

On May 1st an occupation of a building site of the Betuweline-freight rail project, connecting Rotterdam and the Ruhr, was begun. The occupation lasted for two days, delaying the railway company from launching a huge tunnel drill.

Also on May 1st, in Utrecht, Anti-capitalists targeted several temp-agencies, making a claim for the hours the agencies keep from their wages.

All over the world things were happening on this day. Best of all were the reports which came out of the United States. Imagine: US citizens, celebrating International Worker’s Day!

Here is the report from New York, the city where the concept of guerrilla gardening was born:

“For two and a half hours last evening, nearly 200 guerrilla gardeners reclaimed a fenced in, garbage strewn lot under the Manhattan bridge on the Brooklyn side. With garbage bags, plants, seeds, puppets and maypoles, they turned the lot into a garden and made a MayDay demonstration into a party.

“MayDay activities began earlier in the day, centred around the Undocumented Workers March from Union Square to City Hall. The NYPD was on full alert, outnumbering the protesters at Union Square, shutting off whole areas of Wall Street (“Because the WTO is going to march and shut down the Stock Exchange” one officer explained) and somewhat mysteriously occupying Tompkins Square Park, removing trash cans in a 2 block radius.

“The police acted aggressively early, arresting 18 men and 1 woman black bloc anarchists, ostensibly for wearing masks; two others for openly carrying Leatherman tools (I’m not joking); a 16 year old boy for writing with chalk; and two more later at Battery Park for walking/riding their bikes.

“As the Immigrants March made it to City Hall, guerrilla gardeners began meeting at Battery Park… as did the police. Leaving in small groups to shake off the NYPD, the gardeners reconvened in the subway station and took the subway (after the usual chaos and confusion) over to the action site. Another group of protesters, with large puppets from the SF group Art & Revolution, headed over the Brooklyn Bridge, with police and news vans in tow. Amazingly enough, both groups reached the site at about the same time, around 6:30, with the puppeteers brilliantly managing to shake their auto bound escort.

“Underneath the Manhattan bridge, in a Department of Environmental Protection site long promised (and never delivered) as park land, the marchers met the RTS advance crew who “opened” the site. Gardeners were greeted by a 40 foot banner emblazoned with “Free the Land” that hung from the Manhattan Bridge, facing the site.

“Then the fun began. Garbage bags were passed out and people filled over 25 of them with garbage. A vegetable patch was dug and seeds planted. Maypoles went up and a maypole dance began. A bulldozer pinata was knocked down. Drummers drummed. People danced. And squad after squad of riot police surrounded the site.

“After a pretty tense stand off, we asked our lawyer if she could talk to the police, letting them know we were peaceful and planned to leave before 9pm. Perhaps because they were out of site of Rudy and Wall Street, perhaps because news crews were there and they would have looked ridiculous arresting a bunch of folks picking up garbage, perhaps because the threat of the “WTO marching on Wall Street” hadn’t materialised, and perhaps because—at some level—they approved of what we were doing, the NYPD agreed to our request and promised not to arrest anyone if we left in small groups by 9pm. The white shirted officers even posed for pictures with protesters and offered to arrange with the Sanitation Department to pick up the bags of garbage we had collected.

“As the sun fell over the site, and the lights of the Manhattan skyline came up, the garden party wound down. By 8:45 we had all left and made our way to a local bar where we drank beer with undercover cops who cheered our arrival.

“What we left behind were seeds that will sprout and grow. What we took with us was that great spirit that comes from a hope filled, creative demonstration that everyone made happen. My last vision of the liberated site was the NYPD EMS squad brilliantly lighting up the banner with their searchlight as they tried to figure out how to get it down.

“‘Free the Land’ it read.”

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Chapters from an unfinished book: The Lords of Misrule by CJ Stone

Chapter 3: Anarchy Inaction

Spiritual matters and economic matters cannot be separated. Economics too is a form of spirituality, though a dark form. The pain that the poor and the dispossessed feel is real, their hunger, their insecurity, the violence they suffer, all of this is fed into the World Soul, as it were: all of this feeds into our dreams. It disturbs our sleep. It keeps us awake at night. It haunts us like an unconscious ache. No one can rest easy in his bed any more. No one is perfectly happy. The comfort and security we feel is like a veneer over rotting wood. It cannot hide the infestations stirring beneath. The violence of poverty is the reality we can no longer hide from.

If we could shrink the earth’s population to a village of precisely 100 people, with all the existing human ratios remaining the same, it would look something like this:

57 Asians

21 Europeans

14 from the Western Hemisphere, both North & South America

8 Africans

52 would be female

48 would be male

70 would be non-white

30 would be white

70 would be non-Christian

30 would be Christian

89 would be heterosexual

11 would be homosexual

6 people would possess 59% of the entire world’s wealth

80 would live in substandard housing

70 would be unable to read

50 would suffer from malnutrition

1 would be near death;

1 would be near birth;

1 would have a University education

1 would own a computer.

Small world, eh? That kind of puts it into perspective.

My friend Dave (an old Marxist-Leninist) gave me another illustration. He said, imagine that the whole world was lined up to pass in front of you in the space of one hour, all sixty billion of us. Now imagine that everyone is measured economically according to their wealth, so that the average wealth (total world wealth divided by total world people) corresponds roughly to average height, say 6ft. For the first 45 minutes the people passing by would be the size of cigarette butts, rising to matchsticks. That’s the world’s poor. After that their height begins to rise, to the size of small children. That’s us, the majority of ordinary working people in the Western world. Only in the last ten minutes or so are people of average height and getting bigger. That’s the professionals: the lawyers, doctors, university professors and the like. Then they grow to the size of houses and beyond. Those are the one’s we think of as rich, the millionaires, the pop-singers, the film-stars, the Captains of Industry, the ruling elites of the Third World. No, not the Third World any more: the Forgotten World. And then, in the last 30 seconds it’s the giants who are strutting by, the real rulers of our World, the size of sky scrapers, the size of mountains, brushing the clouds with their coiffured locks: the Pharaohs of our modern age, just as cruel, just as despotic, because just as separate. And these are the one’s who, though physically the size of men, are economically the size of gods, who have come to believe that they are gods, and that they can do anything they like, no matter how vile, because nothing outside their Olympian World matters. No one matters but them.

The last century was the most violent in the history of the World. The present one is beginning even worse. The forces of genocide are massing. In Turkey, against the Kurds. In Chiapas, Mexico, against the Mayan indigenous tribes. In Columbia, against the U’wa. All over the world the forces of economic repression are in a feeding frenzy of greed. They want everything. They will have everything. They will own the Earth and all its store. They will patent Life itself. No one will stand in their way.

A war is being fought against the people of Iraq, while her Dictator is being strengthened. A war is being fought against the people of Serbia, while her Dictator is being strengthened. Wars are being fought all over the world, so that Dictators may be strengthened. Who can doubt the presence of fascism at the heart of our economic life?

No one can dare believe what they are told any more. The news is infrequent and brief and merely slides over the surface of things. No one knows what’s going on.

Protest is the only answer.

Protest is self-empowerment. If everyone protested about everything they saw that was wrong—against child abuse in our institutions, against quackery in our health service, against crimes of the State against innocents around the World, against broken pavements even—there would be no more wars, there would be no more crime, there would be no more lies. Real protest is a sacred duty, no less. It is obligatory, for the soul. Real protest comes from a sense, at the deepest heart of the Universe, that life matters, that human beings matter, that all of Creation matters. A sense of the sacredness of Creation makes protest against its desecration inevitable and absolute.

I said that fascism is still with us. It is the face behind the Clown’s mask. It is the eternal enemy of the sacred. It says that life does not matter, that human beings do not matter. It says that Creation—this gorgeous complexity, this profusion of living forms, this infinitely varied abundance of joy and expression, this Nature, our Earth—that all of this is no more than a commodity to be bought and sold on the stock exchange, to be privatised, fenced-off and owned by the few, to be packaged and patented, and sold for a profit.

At the heart of the Universe lies a Beauty so breath-taking, so awe-inspiring, so wondrous, that you would die for it. It has no Name. It has no Purpose. It does not tell you what to do. It lies beyond all categories, all forms, all explanations. It is just Love, that’s all. Just pure, simple love. Like the kindness of a stranger who shares his bread, like the look in the Mother’s eye when she first beholds her child, like a melting of opposites in a blissful sea of contemplation, like the breath of a cool wind from the ocean, that Beauty, that Love, suffuses all of Creation. It is God’s Choral Symphony of all Time and all Space, and we are the choir.

The first act of the revolution is an act of consciousness. It is the act of recognising the sacredness of Creation, of recognising the beauty that sings Life, Life, Life and more Life! Life is for Life. No less.

MD2K was billed as a four-day festival of anarchist ideas and action. Later that got changed, to a four day festival of anti-capitalist ideas and action. That way perhaps other groups could get involved. Not that they did. It was a four day festival of anarchist ideas and action masquerading as a four day festival of anti-capitalist ideas and action, masquerading as a book fair.

Actually the anarchist book fair has been going for years. There’s a lot of obscure anarchist literature out there, varying from the very strange, to the very boring, to the very perverse, to the occasionally awe-inspiring and inspirational. I’d been to one of these events before. This previous one had been billed as “Ten Days That Shook The World”, the title lifted from an American writer’s book about the Russian Revolution. His name was John Reed, and it must stand as a source of happy embarrassment to the US authorities, that the most famous book about a communist revolution happens to have been written by an American author. Who says Americans can’t be communists? John Reed was.

It was at this previous anarchist book fair that I first met Ian Bone.

Ian Bone, in case you don’t remember, was once justifiably famous as the creator and main contributor to one of Britain’s most controversial newspapers, Class War. It was full of violent rhetoric about killing and maiming Rich Scumbags and the like. Actually it was very funny at times, being an exact send-up of a tabloid newspaper. Page Three was a Beat-Up Copper Of The Month.

Ian is a great tabloid writer. The methods he uses to further his own cause, are the same methods the Sun uses to further its cause. The reason he winds people up with his frenzied propaganda is cos he knows he can do it. He knows how the Sun reader thinks.

I was there to interview him for a BBC Radio 4 travel programme. The angle was supposed to be “Protest as a leisure activity”.

We went to the pub. Ian likes pubs. So do I. He told me a story, about when the tabloid press used to follow him around. They were reporting things like, “Bone was holding strategy meetings with a variety of people in a variety of pubs.”

“No we weren’t,” he told me. “We were on a pub crawl.”

So while we were downing our pints, someone came in with the news that some squat around the corner was being busted. Ian banged the table with his glass and announced it to the pub. Soon there were all these spikey-haired punks marching out in a squadron to rescue the squatters from the massed forces of State Oppression. Only when they got there nothing was happening. So they all marched back in again.

After a while we went out to do our interview. It was in a doorway. I began a long-winded introduction, referring to Ian (as he was known by the tabloid press) as “The Most Evil Man In Britain”. He interrupted me. He said, “I thought you were supposed to be interviewing me, not talking to yourself.”

Obviously that irritated me and we began to squabble about violence as a political tactic. I have to admit that he out-manoeuvred me on every point, which irritated me even more. It was not a good interview.

Later I got to know him better. Just before the Notting Hill Carnival one year we met up. It was Ian and his girlfriend, Jane, and a few of their political associates. We were in a pub, as usual, and got completely sloshed. I got so sloshed I have no idea how I got home that night. That’s all I remember of that occasion. Except that, despite our political differences (which were, and are, legion) he kept on making me laugh. As a politician he makes a great stand-up comedian. I’ve always got a soft spot for people who make me laugh. I’d probably have liked Hitler if he could have come up with some good jokes.

He’s the son of butler, so he grew up listening to people calling his Dad “Bone” while he had to refer to them as “Sir” or “Madam”. That probably explains Ian’s politics more than anything else.

Actually, his Dad was a communist, so Ian saw a lot of demonstrations when he was growing up. He says he saw that the anarchists amongst them were having the most fun. That’s when he decided to be an anarchist too.

There’s something of the Restoration Man about him, something oddly old-fashioned, despite his punk following. Often he carries a stick or an umbrella, which he leans on in an 18th Century manner. That is his constituency: the punk movement. He knows how to talk to the disaffected urban youth in their own language. He holds his pint and leans on his stick and twitches his right leg while launching into obscure tirades on obscure subjects in the manner of some feathered freeman with a ferret down his pants. There’s even something faintly aristocratic about him. The true aristocrat is the aristocrat of the revolution.

Another time I went down to Bristol to celebrate his 50th birthday. Yes: he’s a Granddad! The Most Evil Granddad In Britain.

He’s in a punk band. So there’s this little bald-headed, faintly aristocratic, middle-aged man with granny glasses launching into howling tirades about the blood that will flow in the streets come the revolution, while being backed by raging punk discordance. A bit like his conversation really.

Somebody bought him a dirty magazine for his birthday present. He promised he’d wank to it later.

I was living in a van at the time, which was conveniently parked in the pub car-park next door, so I could make my escape fairly easily. Nevertheless, I still managed to get excruciatingly drunk.

The following day I drove over to see him. His house was like a morgue. Like a morgue where all the corpses have hangovers.

Someone came blearily to the door to answer. He went blearily into the kitchen to make coffee. We sat blearily down to drink it. We had some bleary conversation. The party had gone on till the bleary wee hours.

Eventually Ian and Jane came down and I think we drank more coffee.

I was in the toilet when it happened. I was just having a quiet pee, listening to the jolly tinkle of piss against pot, looking up at the wall, when there was a commotion in the other room. Everyone was cheering. I went into the living room to take a look. They were dancing round in circles holding crossed hands, like in a barn dance, singing, “Better red than dead! Better red than dead!”

“Wha’? What’s going on?” I asked. I thought they’d all lost their marbles.

“It’s Di,” they declared happily. “Di’s dead!”

“No.”

“Yes.”

“No. I mean—no!—how? I mean, no it’s not… it can’t be…”

“Yes, and Dodi too. It was in a car crash. Serves them fucking right, the rich cunts. Ha!”

And then they danced around in circles again. The news was Ian’s best birthday present.

After that we went to the pub to celebrate. I mean, they went to the pub to celebrate. I went to the pub to watch and to cringe. The pub was the Princess of Wales, aptly enough. I’m not even sure we didn’t choose it because of its name, though it was the nearest pub. Either way, it was a singular moment. We sat under a photograph of Diana. The whole pub was in a state of shock, watching the news on TV. That’s all there was on TV, just Di, Di, Di, and occasionally Dodi too. Various people’s reactions to the event. The whole Nation in a state of shock. Funereal waves of desperate sadness and confusion. People crying on camera.

Meanwhile I’m sitting next to Ian Bone and his anarchist crew while they’re laughing and making Dead as a Di and Dodi jokes and threatening to turn the photo on the wall around.

“Don’t, Ian,” I said. “You’ll get us killed.”

How does he do it? I mean, he comes out with all this violent rhetoric. He gets followed by the tabloid press who call him The Most Evil Man In Britain. Everyone knows who he is. And yet he can sit in a pub called the Princess of Wales on the day the actual Princess of Wales dies in a tragic accident, when everyone is a state of shock and bewilderment and grief, and he just openly laughs about it. And no one comes near to even touching him. Not even a cross word, let alone a punch in the eye. He’s charmed. He definitely is.

Finally, and several pints later we got up to go.

Back at the house a record came on the radio. It was San Franciscan Nights, by Eric Burden and the Animals.

Old Child, Young Child, feel all right,

On a warm San Franciscan Night.

“Listen to that Ian,” said Jane. And she began singing along with it.

Ian embraced her from behind, and then he was singing along with it too, his head on her shoulder. They were embracing and swaying and singing a sweet hippie love song together. Love and peace and flowers, not blood and death and the revolution.

“Wait a minute Ian,” I said, mildly bemused, “you mean—have I got this right? – you were hippies were you? Not punks, hippies?”

“Of course,” he said. “It was such an optimistic time. We really thought we were going to change the world.”

This is the e-mail I got just before the events of MD2K were due to unfold:

MAYDAY 2000

A festival of anticapitalist ideas & action

The Resistance is Growing!

MayDay 2000 is a four-day series of events in central London exploring the diverse facets of our struggle against exploitation and environmental destruction. From Friday 28 April to Monday 1 May, actions, parties, gigs and discussions will take place across London. This will coincide with events all over the world generating solidarity and resistance to global capitalism… from Lagos to London, Sydney to Seattle.

Mayday has been a festival of life, renewal and pleasure since ancient times. Later as International Workers’ Day, the 1st of May celebrated oppressed people rising against systems based on profit and domination. On MayDay 2000 we’ll look at how these these strands are intertwined; a celebration of the earth, the ruled standing against their rulers for a vision of freedom and plenty throughout the world.

The emphasis of MayDay 2000 is on reclaiming our lives so we can thrive in a global community without politicians and bosses, based on equality and cooperation. It’s about learning from each other and our past to create the future.

Events over the weekend include:

Massive Critical Mass (bicycle demo) on Friday 28th April

Film festival

Football tournament

Active open art exhibtion

Bookfair

Walking tour of the East End’s alternative history

The debates are diverse as:

Internet activism

Capitalism and revolution in the 21st century

GM crops

The myth of globalisation

Workplace, local and international networking

Women speak out

Education, housing, sexuality, historical and recent world events

Banner and screen-printing workshops

RESISTANCE IS FERTILE

Start planting seeds now for Mayday’s Guerrilla Gardening actions in cities around UK. Transform the cities into places where we live rather than work to live.

I’d arranged to meet an old friend of mine at the conference on the Saturday before Mayday. I also wanted to meet Ian Bone, and maybe a few of my other anarchist friends. I get along with anarchists. Not always their politics, not always the divisions they seem to create whether they want to or not. I just like the fact that they can have a laugh. It’s the sense of freedom they carry. That nothing much matters. That all the lies we are fed—and which other people take so seriously—are just chaff in the wind, irrelevancies, pointless issues of debate. I can relate to that, having endured endless pointless issues of debate at endless Labour Party meetings over the years. It’s a particularly pompous form of personality who wants to sit in meetings and have his (or her) voice heard, on every issue, on every topic, at every opportunity. Sometimes you just want to go to sleep. But there’s a personality type who loves that. Who loves all the “Point of order Mr Chairman” type stuff. People who are addicted to a legalistic interpretation of what our role on this planet actually is.

The anarchists just subvert all that. They say, “This is what I want. This is what I will do.”

Unfortunately it can also make them extremely stupid at times. It makes them unwilling to co-operate with other groups. They become pompous, but in a different sort of way. They start to believe that they are more important—because more spontaneous—than all the other dumb fucks who are only striving for democracy, for some sort of order or intelligence. They scorn the normal rigours of debate, preferring to go their own way. They set their own agendas, and meet up in private “affinity groups” to discuss tactics. Anarchist politics means that the “insider” always wins. It’s who you know that matters.

But I wasn’t here to discuss anarchist politics. I was here, like most of us were, to meet up with old friends.

The conference was taking place on the Holloway Road in London. I arrived at the tube station and—more by instinct than by judgement—started in the direction of the conference centre. Actually I was following all the sticky-up hairstyles and nose-rings and sloganed tee-shirts, guessing that they must all know where we were supposed to go. There were a few policemen about. I had no idea what to expect. It was a gorgeous sunny day, hardly a cloud in the sky. I was keeping my head down, pretending not to be an anarchist.

You could tell immediately where the conference centre was. All these colourful people lined up on the pavement outside, basking in the sunshine, showing off their tattoos. A few stalls set up. Mostly these were the Marxist-Leninist groups, relegated to the outside. I took a poster from someone from the Clean Air society urging me to vote for Ken Livingstone for Mayor (it was 6 days before the Mayoral election) and a Che Guevara badge from the Cuba Solidarity Campaign. Someone from the Socialist Party sold me a newspaper, while a car belonging to the London Socialist Alliance (in support of Ken Livingstone) ranged up the road with a huge communist flag floating from the window, shouting slogans. It sent a shiver down my spine to see it. I’m still an old commie at heart.

The conference centre itself was unexpectedly modern. Most anarchist gatherings take place in squatted buildings where dyed hair and piercings kind of blend in. But this was brand-new, all red brick and polished wood, with a reception desk and carpets and a bank of sweeping stairs. It seemed odd and out of place to see all these scrawled notices stuck with blue tack on the doors and walls, announcing various meetings, “Zapatistas this way –>” with arrows to point the direction.

I was wandering around in a daze, not sure where to go. There were rooms all over the place, most of them filled with attentive people listening to activists from other parts of the world bringing fraternal greetings and highlighting the issues. The rooms were very quiet, and if you opened the doors, everyone turned to look at you.

Really I was just looking for a face I knew.

Eventually I found one. It was Warren from the SchNews collective.

SchNEWS is one of the most important resources the activist network has. It’s a simple double-sided A4 sheet which comes out weekly (or when they can get it together), which you receive by sending them stamps, or by e-mail if you have access. All the work is voluntary and collective. There’s no strict editorial line. The front page is usually a feature story, on events around the globe, or highlighting certain issues. Sometimes the politics is decidedly green, as when it reports on environmental actions; sometimes it has a red flavour, reporting on strikes and Labour issues; sometimes it is black, giving information about anarchist actions and events. It depends who’s writing that week. There are a number of regular features, such as Crap Arrest Of The Week, and a regular update on all the parties and protests taking place around the country. The writing is straight forward and precise (there’s not much room on an A4 sheet) but always witty and with an edge. It’s a remarkable piece of work, professional, concise, readable and packed with information, most of which you would never read in your daily newspaper. It’s all the more remarkable considering it comes out of a loose collective of individuals in the Brighton area—from all sorts of backgrounds—none of whom have been trained in any way. It goes to prove just what people can achieve when they are motivated enough. It has no regular income of any kind, is given away for free, and yet it contains more detailed information, more reliable news, more independent analysis and coherent debate, than all the newspapers, all the TV networks, and all the radio stations put together.

Warren was manning the SchNEWS stall.

I’d met Warren a few times, here and there, around the activist network. We’ve downed a pint or two together on more than one occasion. He’s a tight, fit, skinny individual with a kind of gnawing tension in his bones. He’s also down-to-earth and unpretentious with a varied and highly advanced sex-life. I get the feeling that most of the women even remotely connected to the activist network or to SchNEWS have been favoured by his attentions at one time or another. Luckily most of them know what they’re in for. He freely admits to being a “tart” (that’s his word, not mine). There’s a kind of aggressive/dismissive quality to his manner, particularly when it comes to talking about the Trotskyite groups. He calls them “paper-sellers”. “Fucking paper-sellers” is his usual disparaging line.

We exchanged a few words, and then I carried on with my circuit of the building.

Eventually I ended up in the cinema, where they were showing grainy sixties film-footage shot by the Black Panthers. Scary stuff.

It was some time later when I finally caught up with Ian Bone. I’d not seen him for a couple of years, not since his birthday, in fact, the day that Di and Dodi had died, when I’d spent my time cringing, while Ian made bad jokes, and I was in fear of my life. His new enterprise is called Movement Against the Monarchy (MA’M), so his table was scattered with suitably contentious material with all the usual disparaging slogans. One of the posters said, “Queen Mum, Hurry Up And Die!”

“Controversial as usual, Ian,” I said.

“CJ!” he said, greeting me with a hand-shake, while I kissed him on top of his bald head.

Kissing violent revolutionary anarchists is one of my many traits.

We arranged to meet in the pub later.

Someone else I wanted to meet was Paul. I’ve known Paul for some years. We’ve been involved in a number of subversive activities together, including masterminding a road-protest a few years before. I’d actually arranged to meet him at the conference, and had rung him before I’d set out that morning. Only he didn’t seem to be here, so I went to the pub.

So I was sitting in the pub reading a copy of Fight Racism! Fight Imperialism! the newspaper of the Revolutionary Communist Group. There were a number of other obvious revolutionaries in there. We were all members of the Revolutionary Drinkers Group. We produce no newspapers, rarely hold meetings (except in the pub), have no constitution, pass no motions, never campaign on any issue whatsoever, but our sense of solidarity is awe-inspiring, and boy should you hear the speeches. They usually involve questions of who’s going to get the next round.

Two pints and a nice warm glow later I was heading back to the conference. And there was Paul, sitting on a street bench, drinking lager and smoking spliffs, dressed all in black and looking like some deranged undercover agent as usual. The way he looks can sometimes be a problem. Most people think he’s working for the CIA, or for some other, even darker institution, so secret no one knows its name.

He’s a taut, tense, excitable soul with a great sense of purpose: very direct, very pointed in his manner, with piercing blue eyes. There’s something demonic about him. Not only his features—you can see all the bones in his skull—but also in his movements, like some fierce avenging angel with wings of fire.

His is my preferred wing of the anarchist movement, the spiritual anarchists: guided by portents and signs, by numbers, by wind-blown messages from the Cosmos, rather than by ideology or economics.

He’s from South London.

He was with a friend, called Chris, also all dressed in black. I got a can from the nearby shop and sat down to join them.

So we’re sat there on this baking hot late-Spring day, on a street bench in the middle of London, with anarchists of every variety passing up and down in front of us, the occasional policemen with yellow jackets, strolling along in twos, truncheons dangling; with a MacDonald’s just up the road to the right, with a scared looking black guy on the door (they’ve obviously deployed him there for the day, expecting trouble), leaning around the doorway nervously and talking frantically over a two-way radio. One of the strolling police patrols stops for a chat.

A brightly dressed rainbow hippie passes by looking self-conscious and lost. He has multi-coloured dyed hair. He looks like he’s auditioning for a part in the teletubbies.

Chris, meanwhile, is doing walkie-talkie impressions, bringing his hand to his ear, thumb and little finger extended, and making crr-crr-crackling noises with his throat.

“Hippie alert, hippie alert! Hippies approaching at four o’clock, crr-crr, over!”

All of this goes on for quite a long time.

Later a very drunken woman passes by and asks for a light. Then she asks for a drink. We pass her a can. She’s one of the Revolutionary Drinkers Group I’d seen in the pub earlier. There’s a bloke following dutifully behind. You can see he’s hoping that—in her drunken state—she might have some favours to offer. He’s shrugging his shoulders and tutting at her flaunting state, but hopeful nonetheless. She’s clearly not in the slightest bit interested.

But Paul and I catch up on our news, like the old-timers we are, remembering events from the past. I have a huge affection for Paul. For all his stern looks and aggressive South London manner, he’s a true being. His talk is all of angels, and bringing the light back into the world, but cross-referenced with quotes from Monty Python and The Return of the Jedi. That’s one thing I don’t share with him, his affection for the Star Wars trilogy. “Let’s talk about angels again Paul, eh? I prefer angels to Jedi Mind Tricks.”

But he goes on anyway.

We all agree that the conference is boring. So we get more cans and continue to bask in the sunshine on this revolutionary away-day city break in London.

London seems unconcerned at our presence.

Meanwhile, in the same month that all this was going on, in Sonoma County, California, an anti-biotech activist group calling itself the Petaluma Pruners was destroying grape plants grown by the biotechnology corporation, Vinifera.

Their communiqué stated, “With pruning shears in hand and a vengeance against GE and the patenting of living beings, concerned farmers called the ‘Petaluma Pruners’ conducted a non-violent direct action against the grape biotechnology corporation Vinifera Inc. We snipped, snapped, and hacked up Vinifera’s grape plant starts, fuelled by a vision of a safer farming environment, free of the runaway-train science of GE.“

And in Bolivia, after protests following the sale of water rights to a private company (Aguas del Tunari, owned by International Water Limited) which then doubled water rates for poor families, Martial Law was declared. Several people were killed (including a 17 year old boy) and many more transported to a mysterious location in the Bolivian Jungle, for some nefarious purpose.

There was a Roma rights public meeting arranged in the UK, speakers to include Jeremy Hardy, Jeremy Corbyn MP, Ladislav Balaz (Europe-Roma Organisation), and Donald Kenrick (author ‘Gypsies under the Swastika’), while all around the country different groups were preparing for the forthcoming MayDay events.

And in the US Bruce Silverglade of the Centre for Science in the Public Interest

managed to get himself invited to a day-long high-level seminar on “After Seattle: Restoring Momentum to the WTO.” Speakers included Clayton Yeutter (former US Secretary of Agriculture), Robert Litan (former Associate Director of the White House Office of Management and Budget), Lawrence Eagleburger (former Secretary of State), and Luiz Felipe Lamreia, (the foreign Minster of Brazil). This is Bruce Silverglade’s report:

“I was disappointed that only one representative like myself from a non-profit organisation concerned about the impact of the WTO on food safety regulation was invited. But I was pleased that the door had been opened and I looked forward to it.

“As it turned out, I got a lot more than I bargained for.

“The seminar turned out to be a strategy session on how to defeat those opposed to the current WTO system. Apparently, no one knew who I was (perhaps my greying temples and dark suit helped me blend in with the overwhelming older male group of attendees) and I did not speak up until the end of the meeting.

“The meeting was kicked off by a gentleman named Lord Patterson who had been Margaret Thatcher’s Secretary of State for Trade and Industry. He began by stating that our number one job is to restore confidence in the WTO before embarking on any new rounds of trade negotiations. So far, so good, I thought.

“But he then proclaimed that non-profit groups have no right to criticise the WTO as undemocratic because the groups themselves do not represent the general public. (I wondered which groups he was talking about because organisations that are gravely concerned about the impact of the WTO on environmental and consumer protection, like the Sierra Club and Public Citizen, have hundreds of thousands of members). He then stated ‘That we must never have another WTO meeting on US soil because it was too easy for advocacy groups to organise here and security could not be assured.’

“He added that President Clinton’s speech during the WTO meeting in Seattle, in which the president acknowledged the protesters’ concerns, was ‘disgraceful’ and stated that it was also disgraceful that delegates to the WTO meeting in Seattle had to survive on sandwiches and couldn’t get a decent meal during three days of social protest. The Lord finished his speech by recalling better times having tea with Maggie, and stating that the staff of the WTO Secretariat should not be balanced with people from developing countries just because of the colour of their skin. After a few words with the chairman of the meeting, Lord Patterson added ‘Oh, I hope I have not offended anyone.’

“The largely American audience of trade officials and policy wonks took the Lord’s pronouncements seriously. The first comment by an American, picked up on the criticisms and asked ‘How can we de-legitimise the NGOs (Non-Government Organisations)?’

“The questioner claimed that these groups are usually supported by just a few charitable foundations and if the foundations could be convinced to cut off funding, the groups would be forced to cease operations. Mr. Litan, the former White House budget official, had another approach. He asked ‘Can’t we give the NGOs other sandboxes to play in and have them take their concerns to groups like the International Labour Organisation?’ (A toothless United Nations sponsored-group). The representative from the US Trade Representative’s office said nothing.

“Under the banner of rebuilding public confidence in the WTO, (former Agriculture Secretary) Yeutter concurred with his British colleague’s suggestion that the next WTO meeting be held in some place other than the US where security can be assured. He further suggested that the WTO give the public little advance notice of where the meeting would be held to keep the protesters off balance. He said that the protesters’ demands for greater transparency in WTO proceedings was a misnomer because the protesters didn’t really want to participate in WTO proceedings—all they wanted was to get TV coverage and raise money for their organisations.

“The day ended with the usual Washington reception. During desert, the foreign minister of Brazil lamented that if the next WTO meeting had to be held in an out of the way place, he preferred that it be held on a cruise ship instead of in the middle of the desert. He then gave an impassioned speech in which he opposed writing core labour standards into the WTO agreement and defended child labour by describing how in one region of Brazil, more than 5,000 children ‘help their families earn a little extra money’ by hauling bags of coal from a dump yard to a steel mill. He stressed, however, that the children do not work directly in the steel mill.

“He was greeted by a hearty round of applause.”

Afterwards me, Paul, Chris and I met Ian Bone in the pub. I don’t know how I got home that night. I never do after a session with Ian Bone. I was on automatic pilot, clutching a bunch of newspapers to my chest, bag over my shoulder, stumbling down the Holloway Road to the tube. Stumbling onto the tube. Stumbling off again at Victoria Station, and onto my train. Sleeping fitfully all the way home, then stumbling back to my flat. And all without a touch of intelligence or awareness. My usual state. How did I manage it?

I let my boots do the walking.

I woke up the following morning, in bed with my boots on. My boots had carried me all the way to my bed.

Read the next chapter here: https://christopherjamesstone.wordpress.com/2021/03/19/chapters-from-an-unfinished-book-the-lords-of-misrule-by-cj-stone-4/

Chapters from an unfinished book: The Lords of Misrule by CJ Stone

Chapter 2: Mayday! Mayday!

MayDay 2000, or MD2K as some people preferred to call it, using the telescopic style popular on the net, had all the makings of a wild affair. There had already been a J18 and an N30 (that’s June the 18th, and November the 30th to all those not familiar with the style) the last one having hit the headlines in a spectacular way when protesters in Seattle managed to close down the Millennium round of talks of the World Trade Organisation. This was probably the first time that most people on the planet had ever heard of the World Trade Organisation, let alone understood its significance. MD2K was meant as a follow-on from this.

The activist network had been going on about it for months. Flurries of information on the internet. A veritable snow-storm of digital energy whirling about in cyberspace.

I’d joined an e-mail discussion group. My earliest mail came on December 10th 1999, at 3.29 PM, from Mindstar Hardliners. I had no idea who the Mindstar Hardliners were, though I liked the name. The e-mail was labelled (MayDay 2000) Re: Targets. It said:

there’s been a lot of negative feedback from my people.

we don’t want to riot.

you give all of us a bad name and put off many.

you need a little research on the ethics of NVDA

Some 5 months before the event, there was a growing consternation amongst activists that something was likely to go wrong, precisely because the British versions of J18 (in the City of London) and N30 (outside Euston station) had both turned into riots.

After that, e-mails from the discussion group started coming in hard and fast. 10, 12, 15 e-mails over a weekend sometimes. Much discussion, much debate, most of it tetchy. The group had the air of a bunch of hyperactive children fighting over the Wendy House after a heavy dose of sugar. The MayDay 2000 slogan was: OUR RESISTANCE WILL BE AS TRANSNATIONAL AS CAPITAL. Right from the first it was a case of “my revolution is better than yours.”

Or as Space Bunny from the Autonomous Centre said: “The event is described as a festival of anarchist ideas and action. I would be more inclined to participate if it was called a festival of revolutionary ideas and action. I understand some of you want to push anarchism as the solution and as I have said people are going to want to define their ideas more. But despite having been active in the anarchist milieu for 10 years and probably for many to come, and though I think there are lots of constructive elements amongst anarchists and share much with many but not all anarchists, I am not an anarchist myself (although if someone wants to label me one I won’t bother to disagree). Don’t worry I avoid Leninist, trots, national revolutionaries as much as I hope most of you do. But anarchism doesn’t itself offer much in my eyes now, and is more of a hindrance than a help to overthrowing capitalism, bringing about a classless society without wage labour and property. I am happier with the ideas of left communists and the ultra left. MayDay 98 (Bradford) and Easter Rising 99 (Glasgow) were more inclusive not just anarchist.”

So we’ve got left-communist, ultra-left and anarchist, not to say, Leninist, trot and national revolutionary, all vying for position. It’s like a game of football, and we’re all rooting for our team. Or we’re on a visit to the ideological supermarket, and we have to choose which brand to buy. “Communism: formulated by Laboratoire Lenin to wash capitalism right out of your hair.” Or: “Anarchism, for that REVOLUTIONARY FEELING!”

It’s easy to join a Party, for whatever reason. It’s easy to find out what the key words are and to mouth them ritually in a way that gets other people’s trust. These are abstract things, and easy to exploit, for dumb, crazy, inhuman or provocative reasons. What matters is the look in the eye. What matters is the meaning behind the words. What matters, in the end, is loyalty and trust. And you can’t buy those in a Supermarket.

Also, you’ll note, there is a clear aim to all this: “overthrowing capitalism, bringing about a classless society without wage labour and property.” Not modest, these people. After 200 years of more of revolutionary activity, Space Bunny and his comrades believe they can overthrow capitalism. Well why not? If we didn’t think we could do things, we’d never want to try, would we?

It’s just that there’s a little more to revolution than playing a game of football, or going to the shops.

It’s just a little bit more serious than that.

The success at Seattle had already thrown up a number of contradictions. The first—and most important – was a question of tactics. NVDA—non-violent direct action—was generally the chosen course, but there were various interpretations of this. For some this meant passive resistance, merely linking arms to create an obstruction and allowing the police to arrest you. Wearing silly costumes, dancing and singing, doing agitprop theatre on the street: these were other fairly harmless tactics. One such group were doing their theatre in front of a CCTV camera in downtown Seattle linked up to the internet, so you could see what they were up to from any part of the world.

For others the question of violence was a moot one. Did action against corporate property constitute “violence”, for instance? Didn’t the violence inherent in the corporate system far out-weigh the perceived violence of a brick thrown through a plate-glass window? That was the argument.

One prominent group, known as “the black bloc”, were very articulate in their defence of this particular view. To quote from their bulletin:

“On November 30, several groups of individuals in black bloc attacked various corporate targets in downtown Seattle.

“This activity lasted for over 5 hours and involved the breaking of storefront windows and doors and defacing of facades. Slingshots, newspaper boxes, sledge hammers, mallets, crowbars and nail-pullers were used to strategically destroy corporate property and gain access. Eggs filled with glass etching solution, paint-balls and spray-paint were also used.

“The black bloc was a loosely organised cluster of affinity groups and individuals who roamed around downtown, pulled this way by a vulnerable and significant storefront and that way by the sight of a police formation. Unlike the vast majority of activists who were pepper-sprayed, tear-gassed and shot at with rubber bullets on several occasions, most of our section of the black bloc escaped serious injury by remaining constantly in motion and avoiding engagement with the police. We buddied up, kept tight and watched each others’ backs. Those attacked by federal thugs were un-arrested by quick-thinking and organised members of the black bloc. The sense of solidarity was awe-inspiring.”

The black bloc were highly effective in other ways too. They wore the best uniform—black hooded tops, black bandannas as masks and black sun-glasses—had the best rhetoric, and generally looked and sounded cooler than the other activists. I mean, what’s the comparison: a bunch of middle-aged, meusli-eating hippies in print dresses and sandals, linking arms and singing “we shall overcome”, or these hip, cool-looking dudes, all tooled up to frighten the citizenry?

But their justification for the attacks on corporate property was even more sophisticated:

“We contend that property destruction is not a violent activity unless it destroys lives or causes pain in the process. By this definition, private property — especially corporate private property — is itself infinitely more violent than any action taken against it…. Advocates of ‘free trade’ would like to see this process to its logical conclusion: a network of a few industry monopolists with ultimate control over the lives of the everyone else. Advocates of ‘fair trade’ would like to see this process mitigated by government regulations meant to superficially impose basic humanitarian standards. As anarchists, we despise both positions. When we smash a window, we aim to destroy the thin veneer of legitimacy that surrounds private property rights. At the same time, we exorcise that set of violent and destructive social relationships which has been imbued in almost everything around us. By ‘destroying’ private property, we convert its limited exchange value into an expanded use value. A storefront window becomes a vent to let some fresh air into the oppressive atmosphere of a retail outlet (at least until the police decide to tear-gas a nearby road blockade). A newspaper box becomes a tool for creating such vents…. The number of broken windows pales in comparison to the number of broken spells — spells cast by a corporate hegemony to lull us into forgetfulness of all the violence committed in the name of private property rights and of all the potential of a society without them. Broken windows can be boarded up, but the shattering of assumptions will hopefully persist for some time to come.

Against Capital and State,

the ACME Collective.”

What chance has “we shall overcome” against this level of rhetoric?

But here again is the fractured nature of the activist alliance: the black bloc actually “despise” (that’s their word) one of the other groups involved in the anti-WTO protests, the fair-trade lobby; they go so far as to accuse those people who want to see humanitarian rights extended as a limit to trade, of being exactly the same as the globalising moguls who would put the rights of corporations above and beyond any humanitarian concerns. In other words, what the black bloc effectively do is to split the alliance.

Who or what is the World Trade Organisation? Why are so many disparate groups (including groups of Capitalists) opposed to it? What is it, exactly, that these people are all protesting against?

J18 had been billed as “A Carnival Against Capitalism”, and the British strand of the N30 protests had been specifically aimed at the partial privatisation of the London Underground, which, of course, would seem to have very little to do with the World Trade Organisation.

The specific aim of the WTO Seattle meeting had been to begin the millennium round of international talks, which were expected to last 3 years. That hadn’t happened. Partly this was due to the protesters managing to shut down the talks, partly to the Third World delegates expressing their dissatisfaction with the overall aims of the talks. This represented an assertion of independence by Third World countries. But the WTO is still intact. It has not been changed in anyway way by the protests. More like a juggernaut hitting a bump, since the purposes and the power of those who created the WTO remain exactly the same.

This is the Party of The Ultra Rich: and they have one main goal: an integrated global economy unencumbered by government restrictions. Globalised. Unencumbered.

This globalisation of the world’s economies is continuing and it may not be possible stop it happening. The world’s economies are being yoked together by various technologies (radio, TV, telephones, fibre optic cables, satellites and computers etc.) This so-called Information technology is drawing the world’s economies into a single huge network.

Maybe no one can stop globalisation from happening. However, there are things that national elected governments could do to reduce the harmful consequences for people. Unfortunately the Party Of The Ultra Rich are fundamentally opposed to any government involvement, as this risks the possibility that people might actively object to being impoverished in this way. They have their own vision, a globalised economy free of government interference: global free trade. Historically this form of economy was called LAISSEZ FAIRE. In a LAISSEZ FAIRE economy, the Party Of The Ultra Rich are free to make all the real decisions—they decide what to make, how to make it, where to make it, who to employ (in any manner they see fit), and where to sell the commodities. In a LAISSEZ FAIRE economy, the role of government is limited to enforcing property rights (the property rights of the Party Of The Ultra Rich), tinkering about with the currency, maintaining a justice system for dealing with disputes, and maintaining a military apparatus to enforce civil and international peace.

So the WTO has nothing to do with trade. It’s only purpose is in creating and maintaining a world-wide economy, in which those who already own most things, will get to own it all, making all decisions without reference to any form of democratic interference. The key institution of the Party Of The Ultra Rich is the corporation, so the aim of the WTO is to ensure that corporations are able to make their decisions freely.

Free trade is freedom for capitalists to exploit, not freedom for the rest of us to be free of exploitation.

The purpose of the WTO is to block the work of governments, who might want stop wage reduction, to improve conditions for working people, to be free of pollution and exploitation, to redistribute wealth. All of these humanitarian notions are described as ‘restrictions on trade’, by which they mean ‘corporate freedom’.

The black bloc anarchists might not agree with this analysis, given that they are against all governments too. Perhaps, even, the black bloc anarchists should support the WTO since it appears that they share the same aim.

So the argument, in effect is about globalisation: or rather, since globalisation may well be inevitable, what form exactly globalisation should take. Do we want a global economy based upon the needs of the many, or upon the demands of the few? A corporate globalisation, or a human one? Ice-cream for the kids or the latest in high tech weaponry for the Military-Industrial Complex?

How many ice-creams would an F22 fighter pay for?

It doesn’t bear thinking about.

Meanwhile on the 8th of December five besuited business men, members of the Struggle Against Financial Exploitation—all of them in their fifties, and none of them anarchists—had sealed themselves into the revolving doors of the Treasury building in Whitehall by lashing bicycle chains around the handles. They claimed that their businesses had been ruined by excessive bank charges. One of them, Keith Whincup, speaking to a Daily Telegraph reporter by mobile phone, said that not only had his business been wrecked, but he had also lost his marriage as a result. He said: “We have locked ourselves in the Treasury. We have barricaded ourselves. We want Tony Blair or Gordon Brown to authorise a full inquiry into our cases. I have got £23,000 of overcharging by one bank and can’t get the police to look at it. This is the only way we can make our point because no one wants to listen.”

And at Stanton Moor in Derbyshire a protest camp was being set up to bring attention to the potential desecration of the Nine Ladies stone circle under threat from a proposed quarry.

A spokesperson from the group put out an appeal over the internet. It said:

“Stanton Moor is a site in Derbyshire, of amazing natural beauty, with a lot of archaeological significance. The Nine Ladies is an ancient stone circle. For years this has been a place to celebrate. In recent years peoples ashes have been spread on the site. It has a lot of significance for people in the surrounding area. The site is now under threat from a proposed quarry that received its planning permission in 1952. This permission would never be granted now. The quarry if carried out will destroy a beautiful area of the valley and go within two hundred yards of the stone circle.”

In Russia, meanwhile, a bunch of anarchists climbed up on top of the Lenin mausoleum in Moscow’s Red Square, where they unfurled a banner, somewhat negatively, proclaiming, “Against Everyone!” This is the place that the old Soviet leadership used to stand to watch the tanks and missiles of the Red Army parade by on MayDay each year. Russia’s NTV television told their audience that the youngsters were radical anarchists while showing pictures of the youngsters scarpering across Red Square and scrambling to the top of the monument unhindered. They stood for several minutes before a police officer managed to get near enough to tear the banner out of their hands.

And in Mexico about 500 students demonstrated in front of the US embassy, saying they wanted to express solidarity with the WTO protests in Seattle (several weeks gone by now) and also to urge the liberation of Mumia Abu Jamal, an American journalist currently on death row in the US. After the speeches stones were thrown at the embassy smashing a number of windows. Fights broke out between the riot police and the students. The police were vicious in their attempts to control the situation. There were 98 arrests, 10 injured students, 6 injured policemen. Two journalists were also hurt. There was a follow up demonstration in support of the 98 arrestees, which almost lead to a second riot. The FZLN (Zapatistas) sent out a press release expressing solidarity with the students and condemning police brutality.

Their slogan was: “We Are Everywhere!”

Then I got a very interesting e-mail. All sorts of things were coming from the group. All sorts of people were writing. It got very confusing at times. This is what the e-mail said. It began with a question:

“Hi this is my first mail to this list, I’ve not been on it very long and I’m not exactly sure what it’s for.”

But continued:

“It’s about talking about the M ay 2K demo but it should be made clear that this list is heavily monitored both by police and by journalists. That’s the whole point of it. The great strength of e-mail and the net is that its open, totally free for anyone to access. So the idea is to let everyone know that next year there will be a big event and its going to happen in London and a lot of people are talking about it.

“It’s an interesting tactic. Essentially, its like putting up a load of posters all over the place saying there’s going to be, say, an RTS party. If enough people tell enough people, then it will happen, or at least the powers that be will have to assume it will happen and make plans accordingly, and that’s the important bit, it makes ‘them’ spend the money and deploy their resources.

“Thing is, no-one on here is planning anything, all we’re doing is talking about the issues around doing this thing. So fine, a scumbag journo from a Murdoch gutter rag can read this if they like and get some ideas for a shock horror story—great! let them write about it and give even more publicity to the movement.”

I wondered if it was me they were talking about.

Read the next chapter here: https://christopherjamesstone.wordpress.com/2021/03/19/chapters-from-an-unfinished-book-the-lords-of-misrule-by-cj-stone-3/

Chapters from an unfinished book: The Lords of Misrule by CJ Stone

“First of all, the wilde heades of the parish flocking together, chuse them a graunde captaine of mischiefe, whom they innoble with the title of Lord of Misrule; and him they crowne with great solemnity, and adopt for their king.”

Philip Stubbes: Anatomie of Abuses (1583)

Chapter 1: Oh I Do Like To Be Beside The Seaside.

It all began, for me, in Margate, Kent, at an Anti-Nazi League demonstration called in opposition to a National Front march. My first protest.

Well actually it wasn’t my first protest at all. I’ve done a lot of protests in my time, like a lot of people my age. CND marches, anti-apartheid rallies, the Poll Tax protests, the Miner’s strike, a road protest or two. But all that was a long time ago. There comes a time when a veteran protester has to hang up his Doc Marten’s, slip on his slippers and settle down to the good life in front of the box. I mean, I’d done my noisy bit. CND may never have persuaded NATO to give up it’s Nuclear offensive capabilities, but the anti-apartheid movement had certainly played its part in the downfall of apartheid South Africa. I was one of the many millions of assorted political persuasions who regularly lent their feeble voices to the resounding chants of the eighties. “Maggie, Maggie, Maggie, out, out, out!” we would cry, emboldened by the presence of so many of our peers, enjoying the camaraderie, the closeness, the raucous, rebellious, carnival jollity of life on the march. London was all ours for a day. For a succession of days.

Anyone who wants to know what the atmosphere on a large march is like: imagine a crucial football match, the play offs for the second division, say. Now imagine your side is playing. Now imagine that your side has just scored the winning goal, in the last minute of the game. Imagine the roar that goes up, the roar of raw humanity. And then the march from the ground to the station where all the special trains are waiting. That’s it: the cat calls and chants, the blare of trumpets, the colourful costumes (your colours, your team), the feeling of belonging, of being part of something greater than yourself, all heading in the same direction, banners blazing, the feeling that you are all, young and old, black and white, Christan, Moslem or Jew, on the same side, the right side, the winning side. That’s the feeling.

I remember one march in the eighties, either CND or anti-apartheid, I can’t remember now. I was with a few friends. It was massive, maybe a half million people. My friends and I joined the march about half way along and marched for half an hour or more before going to the pub. We spent two hours in the pub, getting drunk, and then when we went out, the march was still passing by. That’s one huge football match.

“Maggie, Maggie, Maggie, out, out, out!” we sang as we joined the tail end.

I can’t remember any other slogans. The “Maggie!” chant did us for the lot. It served to rid the world of apartheid. “Maggie, Maggie, Maggie, out, out, out!” It was a barrier against the nuclear threat. “Maggie, Maggie, Maggie, out, out, out!” It kept the Miner’s in their bitter struggle for more than a year. “Maggie, out! Maggie, out!” Finally, and to everyone’s consternation, it served to oust the woman herself, when the Nation’s outrage over the Poll Tax took it’s toll on the unswerving woman’s popularity. Finally even the Tory party agreed with us. “Maggie, Maggie, Maggie, out, out, out!” they joined in, sneakily, behind her back, before politely telling her to her face that she would have to go. And then she was gone, in a welter of tears, in the back of a black limo, and it was over. Another good slogan lost.

Actually some friends and I revived it briefly later, during a road protest in our town. One of our company was on remand and was likely to be jailed, the first person to be caught breaking the notorious Criminal Justice Act. This was in 1994. His name was Iggy. So we marched to the courthouse through the streets of this medieval cathedral city, crying, “Iggy, Iggy, Iggy, out, out, out!” People were looking at us as if we were nuts. It was a slogan gone ironical, chanted entirely for our own amusement.

Yes, I’d done my bit. Maybe I’d not been at the forefront of CND, but I’d collected for the Miners on the streets of our town. I belonged to a club, with a spare back room, and we began to put on benefits for a number of causes. Our anti-apartheid money went directly to the ANC. We gave money to the Nicaraguan Solidarity Campaign, to the Miners, to the James Connolly Society (an IRA front, as we later found out). We had a “Russian Night” where we fed people Borsch and invited the Communist Party to attend. They were wonderful people: earnest, sincere, intense old men, with beards and waistcoats. We sang the Red Flag and the International, once, twice, a dozen times (such rousing songs) and put “Glasnost” and a hammer and sickle on our noticeboard outside.

Such was my total, absolute and unswerving commitment to the International Proletarian Struggle for World Revolution and the Dictatorship of the Proletariat (such ringing phrases demand capital letters), such was my undying commitment to the overthrow of capitalism, that I even vaguely (for about ten minutes) considered joining the Communist Party. The trouble was in deciding which Communist Party, exactly, I should join. There were about two dozen by this time, each one resolutely declaring itself to be the one, true and only vanguard party of the working class. There was the CPGB (Communist Party of Great Britain), the CPGB [M-L] (the Communist Party of Great Britain [Marxist-Leninist]) and the New Communist Party (this one distinguishing itself by being made up entirely of Old Communist supporters of the Soviet Union). Then there was the Morning Star group, which went on to form the CPB (Communist Party of Britain), the Democratic Left (the rump of the CPGB in the eighties), the CPGB (Provisional Central Committee), a tiny grouplet who jumped in and grabbed the CPGB name when they saw it hanging around without an owner, the RCPB (Revolutionary Communist Party of Britain) and the RCPB [M-L]) (Revolutionary Communist Party of Britain [Marxist-Leninist]). Finally there was the B&ICO (The Britain and Ireland Communist Organisation), which, having an unusual number of members of northern Irish background, used Stalin’s work as a basis for arguing the Two Nations Theory re. Ireland – i.e. north and south Ireland were two distinct nations and should stay that way. They also managed in a similar convoluted way to support Thatcher’s war with Argentina over the Falklands. No matter what the position, they would try and find a “Marxist” way of supporting it. If they weren’t actually conceived by some joker in MI5 then they ought to have been.

And this is not to speak of the numerous Trotskyite factions, the RCP, the SWP, the Militant Tendency (the Revolutionary Socialist League), the WRP, the IMG, the Sparticists etc. etc. etc.

So many to choose from. Like trying to pick out tins of soup in the Supermarket.

In the end I joined the Labour Party instead. Which would be a joke if I could think of a punchline.

Then what?

Then I continued the struggle. Firstly with the Poll Tax protests. Our little group marched to London by way of Rochester, following the line of the original peasant’s revolt. It took three days. We made it on to the front page of the Morning Star. We marched glumly through the empty Kent countryside till we came to a sleepy village, and then shouted and sloganed our way through that. It took a while to realise that, actually, the villages were empty too, this being commuter country. A few startled dogs were impressed, however. Maybe I even imagined myself to be Wat Tyler for a time (there’s a Tyler Hill nearby where we started our march), except that I didn’t really want to be executed. We made it to the main march in London, singing songs we’d made up along the way, then I did a quick shifty slip when I saw the police horses gathering and knew that there was riot on its way. Got the train home with two of my friends.

The Police horses are always brought out when they want to engineer a riot. The police are trained experts on crowd control. They’re also trained experts on how to get a crowd out of control if they want. Police horses work every time.

Then there was the Criminal Justice Act of 1994, which was aimed at suppressing the lifestyle choices of New Age Travellers, ravers, squatters and road-protesters. The march and rally against the Criminal Justice Bill (as it was) on May 1st 1994, was in the name of the Advance party. That was an auspicious day. Brilliantly sunny, we managed to gather maybe ten thousand people for a march from Hyde Park to Trafalgar Square, where, to the music of the Rinky Dink bicycle-powered, mobile sound system, we ekkied and drank and danced in the fountains for hours. Why aren’t all revolutions like this? And somewhere in everyone’s mind that day, an idea was formed.

Maybe they could be. Maybe the revolution is a party in the street.

But, as I say, all that was years ago. There’s something a little unseemly, perhaps, in the sight of a middle aged man with a beer-belly pretending he’s all at one with the revolutionary youth. There comes a time when dignity demands some patient reserve. We can’t all be fired-up with indignation at all the injustices of the world all the time. Or, if we are, there are other ways of going about curing them. Like becoming a bar-room philosopher, maybe. The revolution can wait till closing time.

Then something brought me back. Something was calling me.

It’s part of the dark charm of this vile, violent world we live in that so many of us can be so disengaged. We live, those of us in the West, in comfort and with the illusion of security. We hear stories of massacres, of torture, of great simmering hatred but that’s over there, in another country. Those are other human beings. What can any of us do? What’s the point of a march and rally through the streets of London over massacres in East Timor, or racial hatred and ethnic cleansing in the former Yugoslavia? What has that got to do with us?

And the problem is, of course, in trying to identify the culprits. Is it something abstract and obscure, like “human nature” or capitalism? Despite my years hanging round on the periphery of left politics, despite having chanted the stirring indignant poetry of the Communist Manifesto to everyone, and reading, and being entirely unable to absorb, about two thirds of the first volume of Capital, I still had no idea what capitalism actually was. It’s some sort of a system, isn’t it? Something to do with money? It makes some people very rich, and… er…. some other people poor. With that level of political analysis at my disposal, it’s a wonder I never stood for Parliament. Parliament is full of people with the same level of political sophistication as me.

Capitalism is an attitude of mind, a form of consciousness, a form of believing. Call it what you will. It has its institutions in the IMF and the WTO and the World Bank. Its army is NATO. Its cabinet is the G7 meeting of the seven most industrialised nations. It is a One World Government run by, and on behalf of the Party of the Ultra Rich. It meets in secret to discuss its plans. Its specific goal, its long term plan, is to own everything. To do this, it creates separation, it creates lack, it creates need, it creates desire. The need and the lack, the separation and the desire are all part of the same system. It recreates its processes in everyone, as a mindset, reinforced by fear, and it rewards people’s compliance by giving them money. Buying into the money system is buying into a process of abstract death. The power resides, not in people, not in living, breathing, walking, talking, laughing. crying beings of flesh and blood and bone, but in a number of abstract entities called corporations. The corporations are administered by living beings, who come and go, who live and die in the normal way, but the corporations go on forever. They are, to use a phrase I picked up from Noam Chomsky, “Immortal Corporate Persons”.

A chilling phrase. It reminds me of the Emperor in Rome, or the Pharaoh of Ancient Egypt: god-like beings with the power of life-and-death over the populace, institutions rather than individuals, passing on the rights of the institution from Father to Son, so remote, so abstracted from the normal thoughts and feelings of human beings that they don’t care if others live or die.

No subject in Egypt was allowed to look at the Pharaoh on pain of death. He was god, the personification of the natural order. His statues were immense.

It was the Pharaoh’s job, by ritual magic and by sacrifice, to ensure that the waters of the Nile rose every year to flood the plain, to make it rich with life-giving nutrients. And then one year the Nile didn’t flood. Instead it shrank. And again the next year. And again and again and again, over a succession of years, until all the stored grain was used up, and the population was desperate. And then they looked at the Pharaoh, and instead of this god-like being of impossible height and power, they saw a scrawny, wizened human being, painted like a whore, dolled-up like a statue.

Like citizens of ancient Rome or of Egypt, we are enthralled by the logic of their institutions. They make images of themselves, like gods. Coca Cola or McDonald’s or Nike. We believe them when they tell us that globalisation is inevitable, that poverty and want are inevitable, that the world-economic system is like a tide that cannot be reversed, that it is a force of Nature, not the work of men.

The Empire never ended, as Philip K. Dick used to say.

Isn’t it time that we looked at their faces?

Just another sunny day in this cheerfully run-down sea-side town. Bev and I (she’s training to be a Church of England Priest) go for a cup of tea on the balcony of an octagonal cafe on the promenade overlooking the beach. A cool breeze means we have to keep our coats on. There’s a few other protester types in and around the cafe. You can tell by their shaved heads and crombies, the ear-piercings, the air of knowing superiority: the Socialist Worker’s Party are in town. Still in the same costumes I remember from years back. A whole new generation, but they look exactly the same. Everything about them speaks their state of mind. The intensity of debate, huddled over a cup of tea, the mystical/elemental truths of Marxist Leninist theory dressed up as hard-nosed political realism: dreams of the barricades and armed insurrection between drags on a roll-up. What romantic young man, the fires of indignation still burning in his heart, hasn’t thought like this from time to time? Revolutionary fighters for justice, guerrilla theorists of the Class War, all of them, every one imagining that he might be Che Guevara one day. Che Guevara in a crombie and Doctor Marten boots. I like them. I’ve always liked them. I like the way they call each other comrade and even—for a while—believe it. Comrade is one of my favourite words.

But Margate is full of its own kind of garish frivolity, all the fruit machines in the amusement arcades on the front chiming out their jingles: all the light, the colour, the happy screams of kids on the switchback rides in Dreamland; people strolling arm in arm along the promenade engrossed in quiet conversation, or just taking in the sights. There’s a trendy vicar who keeps passing us, in mirror shades, making a show of his dog collar. And up ahead, the Anti-Nazi League banners are starting to gather, and, on the opposite side of the road, the Union Jacks and George Crosses of the National Front supporters. We spend some time on “our” side of the road, meaning, we’re with the Anti-Nazi League and the SWP, but, after a while I suggest we move over. I want to hear the conversations on the other side. We’ve got our stickers on. Mine says, Black and White Unite and Fight, while Bev’s says, Smash The National Front. So we take the stickers off, and then we’re just a middle-aged couple strolling across the road to get a hot-dog. I decide that my hot-dog will serve as a magical talisman of protection.

There’s a couple of brave young women on that side too, trying to hand out stickers, but no one wants them, and a gaggle of shaven heads in a shop doorway, looking serious but mean.

The differences between the shaved heads of the NF and the shaved heads of the SWP are subtle, but noticeable. It’s odd how they ape each other. The hair cut is the same, but there’s just a touch more detail in the accoutrements: an extra earring here or there, a badge or two. I’d say that the SWP are a little more stylish, but that’s probably my prejudice. I’m impressed for all that, at the enduring quality of the skinhead style, born on the football fields and council estates of England, when hippie was the fashionable norm, with its odd mix of rude-boy cool and Mod aggressiveness. Fighting clothes. And I’m pointing all this out to Bev as we move on up the line towards the centre of action.

I have to add, at this point, that the vast majority of working class people—for whom the skinhead style is merely a convenient haircut—are neither fascist not communist. Most of them couldn’t give a damn either way.

I wield my magic hot-dog to ward off the air of crackling violence. No one would dare come near me with this in my hand.

And then we’re standing there, watching and listening near a road barrier, and there’s three blokes looking at us through the corners of their eye. “Plain clothes policemen,” says Bev, and we move away again.

And now another observation. The National Front will be coming from the station ahead. They will pass down the road with Union Jacks on the right, and Anti-Nazi League banners on the left. Somehow we’ve all ended up in our proper places in this radical melodrama.

Back on the other side—the sunnier side, I feel—we’re approached by one of the organisers who wants us to sign a petition against Fascism. “Well all right,” I say, “I can’t argue with that. But I can’t see it making much difference. Who’s going to listen?” He invites me to an SWP branch meeting in the town. Someone from the local rag is interviewing an old Jewish man about the holocaust. He is very quiet and dignified as he speaks. Someone else sells me a copy of Searchlight, the radical anti-fascist magazine. All of this goes on for a very long time. The Anti-Nazi Rally started at one o’clock. The Fascists won’t be here till three.

Bev and I take another walk, to find a pub. All the pubs are shut.

Honestly, all this political activism can be very wearing at times.

In the end, though, the National Front turn up. We can hear them up by the station, chants and banners streaming in the wind, and the atmosphere begins to heat up. A woman comes up, whispering frantically. “Pass it on, we’re going to block the road, stop them getting through.”

“Where are they marching to, exactly?”

“To the clock tower.”

It’s about five hundred yards.

And now they’re moving in a tight-knit gaggle, police vans in front and behind, surrounded by riot police, with a Union Jack, a Welsh Dragon, and several George Crosses, singing Rule Britannia. There’s about a hundred and fifty of them. And, on the other side of the road, about a hundred and fifty of their supporters, and on our side about the same number of ANL, with, another hundred and fifty or so ranged across the road now, stopping the march moving forward.

Bev says, “they make me so angry.”

I say, “why? This is a National Front national rally, and they can only get a hundred and fifty to come. That’s pathetic.”

I’m fascinated. Fascinated in the way you can be fascinated by a peculiar disfigurement. Unpleasant, but you can’t take your eyes off it. They’re like an organism that’s risen out of the subliminal sea full of all the despicable deposits of human hate. They’re huddled together in this strange lump, all legs and arms and ears, like some many-headed, many legged, mutant being, heads severely shaved, with the ideologues (older men in smart suits with grey hair) under the banner in the front, and when they’re not singing Rule Britannia they’re shouting threats and abuse at the opposition. “Kill the reds, kill the reds, kill the fucking reds!”

They are hemmed in by riot police, shields and batons at the ready. The Nazis are trying to be chummy with the cops, calling them “officer” and the like, but the cops just look away. It wouldn’t do to be seen being friendly with any Nazis.

One young woman keeps leaping into the road, screaming “Nazi scum!” at them. The police keep shovelling her back. And then she’s pushing forward again into the road, leaning her trunk forward and dangling her arms: “Nazi scum! Nazi scum!”

“Go fuck yourself,” someone shouts back at her.

“Shut up, yer ugly,” she replies.

“Can you stay on the pavement please,” says the policeman.

“Oh, yes, sorry,” she says, politely, in the English manner, before leaning back into the road and starting again: “Nazi scum! Nazi scum!”

Bev and I are both Brummies, so we’re ashamed to learn that most of them are Brummies too. There’s a large George’s Cross at the back, with Birmingham City Skins scrawled across in black letters.

Someone else shouts, “go away, we don’t want you round here, this isn’t your town. Why don’t you go back to Birmingham?”

This woman has acne. One of the Nazis notices. “Er look, spots!” he says. Such is the nature of the political debate.

Someone else, a burly fellow with a square cut chin, like a 60’s comic Batman, is winding up one of the NF people by making a little waving motion with his hand and looking him in the eye. He’s saying, “come on then, if you think you’re so hard.” He is doing this repeatedly while his NF opposite number is getting in a frenzy. A policeman notices and tells him to pack it up. But there’s no law against looking at someone, and the little waving motion, low down, from his hip, is subtle but unmistakeable. “Come on, come on, I could take you out any time.”

Meanwhile it’s stalemate at the front. The police vans are inching forward, but making very little headway. A high ranking officer with a megaphone arrives and asks people to clear out of the way.

No one does.

Scuffles break out.

Riot police move forward, shields and batons raised.

Someone gets his shirt ripped.

The line gets broken but then reforms a few yards further down the road. And on and on like this. Every inch, every yard being fought for.

The three slogans are: “the National Front are a Nazi front, smash the National Front”, “Black and White unite and fight” – this one being singularly inappropriate, having nothing to do with Kosovar Albanians (but then, I don’t think any one could come up with a rhyme for Kosovar Albanians) – and the last one: “Police protect the Nazis,” said in a sort of nyer, nyer kids chant.

I tried, “Maggie, Maggie, Maggie, out, out, out,” but people were giving me funny looks.

And then the best line. Someone is standing on the pavement, looking at the sad spectacle of all these jobless Brummies, with their harder than hard stance, their childish aggression, like a confused fit of pique, having to stand so close to each other to gain a sense of identity, having very little else in their lives, and he says, “Hey look everybody” – pointing at them and laughing – “that’s the Master Race!” Everyone laughs with him.

Bev notices that one of the NF supporters on the other side has a kid on his shoulders. She’s being encouraged to scream hate abuse at the commies.

We’ve also both noticed that the police look exactly like the Roman battalions, and that they use the same tactical moves. The whole thing begins to take on a timeless air, as if this was a war being fought out in eternity. It’s even more appropriate, as this is Mars Gate, an old Roman port and garrison town.

The struggle goes on, inch by painful inch, down the parade of this out-of-season seaside town, until it gets to within about 20 yards of the clock tower, when the police decide that a tactical retreat is in order. A cheer goes up from the ANL front line. The NF never made it to their final destination. We’ve turned them back in their track. It is, at least, a symbolic victory.

Bev and I go for sausage and chips in a cafe. Then the pub across the road opens up, and we go for that pint I’ve been gagging for.

The pub is full of middle-aged leather boys, the Margate chapter of the Celtic Warriors, dressed in neat leathers, with their hair tied back in pony tails. One of them smokes a pipe. And it crosses my mind, for a second, that, had they been real Celtic Warriors, as opposed to a Motor Cycle Chapter merely bearing the name, it should have been them fighting the Roman Battalions.

Haven’t things changed?

Read the next chapter here: https://christopherjamesstone.wordpress.com/2021/03/19/chapters-from-an-unfinished-book-the-lords-of-misrule-by-cj-stone-2/

Chapter from an unfinished book: The Lords of Misrule by CJ Stone

“First of all, the wilde heades of the parish flocking together, chuse them a graunde captaine of mischiefe, whom they innoble with the title of Lord of Misrule; and him they crowne with great solemnity, and adopt for their king.”

Philip Stubbes: Anatomie of Abuses (1583)

Chapter 1: Oh I Do Like To Be Beside The Seaside.

It all began, for me, in Margate, Kent, at an Anti-Nazi League demonstration called in opposition to a National Front march. My first protest.

Well actually it wasn’t my first protest at all. I’ve done a lot of protests in my time, like a lot of people my age. CND marches, anti-apartheid rallies, the Poll Tax protests, the Miner’s strike, a road protest or two. But all that was a long time ago. There comes a time when a veteran protester has to hang up his Doc Marten’s, slip on his slippers and settle down to the good life in front of the box. I mean, I’d done my noisy bit. CND may never have persuaded NATO to give up it’s Nuclear offensive capabilities, but the anti-apartheid movement had certainly played its part in the downfall of apartheid South Africa. I was one of the many millions of assorted political persuasions who regularly lent their feeble voices to the resounding chants of the eighties. “Maggie, Maggie, Maggie, out, out, out!” we would cry, emboldened by the presence of so many of our peers, enjoying the camaraderie, the closeness, the raucous, rebellious, carnival jollity of life on the march. London was all ours for a day. For a succession of days.

Anyone who wants to know what the atmosphere on a large march is like: imagine a crucial football match, the play offs for the second division, say. Now imagine your side is playing. Now imagine that your side has just scored the winning goal, in the last minute of the game. Imagine the roar that goes up, the roar of raw humanity. And then the march from the ground to the station where all the special trains are waiting. That’s it: the cat calls and chants, the blare of trumpets, the colourful costumes (your colours, your team), the feeling of belonging, of being part of something greater than yourself, all heading in the same direction, banners blazing, the feeling that you are all, young and old, black and white, Christan, Moslem or Jew, on the same side, the right side, the winning side. That’s the feeling.

I remember one march in the eighties, either CND or anti-apartheid, I can’t remember now. I was with a few friends. It was massive, maybe a half million people. My friends and I joined the march about half way along and marched for half an hour or more before going to the pub. We spent two hours in the pub, getting drunk, and then when we went out, the march was still passing by. That’s one huge football match.

“Maggie, Maggie, Maggie, out, out, out!” we sang as we joined the tail end.

I can’t remember any other slogans. The “Maggie!” chant did us for the lot. It served to rid the world of apartheid. “Maggie, Maggie, Maggie, out, out, out!” It was a barrier against the nuclear threat. “Maggie, Maggie, Maggie, out, out, out!” It kept the Miner’s in their bitter struggle for more than a year. “Maggie, out! Maggie, out!” Finally, and to everyone’s consternation, it served to oust the woman herself, when the Nation’s outrage over the Poll Tax took it’s toll on the unswerving woman’s popularity. Finally even the Tory party agreed with us. “Maggie, Maggie, Maggie, out, out, out!” they joined in, sneakily, behind her back, before politely telling her to her face that she would have to go. And then she was gone, in a welter of tears, in the back of a black limo, and it was over. Another good slogan lost.

Actually some friends and I revived it briefly later, during a road protest in our town. One of our company was on remand and was likely to be jailed, the first person to be caught breaking the notorious Criminal Justice Act. This was in 1994. His name was Iggy. So we marched to the courthouse through the streets of this medieval cathedral city, crying, “Iggy, Iggy, Iggy, out, out, out!” People were looking at us as if we were nuts. It was a slogan gone ironical, chanted entirely for our own amusement.

Yes, I’d done my bit. Maybe I’d not been at the forefront of CND, but I’d collected for the Miners on the streets of our town. I belonged to a club, with a spare back room, and we began to put on benefits for a number of causes. Our anti-apartheid money went directly to the ANC. We gave money to the Nicaraguan Solidarity Campaign, to the Miners, to the James Connolly Society (an IRA front, as we later found out). We had a “Russian Night” where we fed people Borsch and invited the Communist Party to attend. They were wonderful people: earnest, sincere, intense old men, with beards and waistcoats. We sang the Red Flag and the International, once, twice, a dozen times (such rousing songs) and put “Glasnost” and a hammer and sickle on our noticeboard outside.

Such was my total, absolute and unswerving commitment to the International Proletarian Struggle for World Revolution and the Dictatorship of the Proletariat (such ringing phrases demand capital letters), such was my undying commitment to the overthrow of capitalism, that I even vaguely (for about ten minutes) considered joining the Communist Party. The trouble was in deciding which Communist Party, exactly, I should join. There were about two dozen by this time, each one resolutely declaring itself to be the one, true and only vanguard party of the working class. There was the CPGB (Communist Party of Great Britain), the CPGB [M-L] (the Communist Party of Great Britain [Marxist-Leninist]) and the New Communist Party (this one distinguishing itself by being made up entirely of Old Communist supporters of the Soviet Union). Then there was the Morning Star group, which went on to form the CPB (Communist Party of Britain), the Democratic Left (the rump of the CPGB in the eighties), the CPGB (Provisional Central Committee), a tiny grouplet who jumped in and grabbed the CPGB name when they saw it hanging around without an owner, the RCPB (Revolutionary Communist Party of Britain) and the RCPB [M-L]) (Revolutionary Communist Party of Britain [Marxist-Leninist]). Finally there was the B&ICO (The Britain and Ireland Communist Organisation), which, having an unusual number of members of northern Irish background, used Stalin’s work as a basis for arguing the Two Nations Theory re. Ireland – i.e. north and south Ireland were two distinct nations and should stay that way. They also managed in a similar convoluted way to support Thatcher’s war with Argentina over the Falklands. No matter what the position, they would try and find a “Marxist” way of supporting it. If they weren’t actually conceived by some joker in MI5 then they ought to have been.

And this is not to speak of the numerous Trotskyite factions, the RCP, the SWP, the Militant Tendency (the Revolutionary Socialist League), the WRP, the IMG, the Sparticists etc. etc. etc.

So many to choose from. Like trying to pick out tins of soup in the Supermarket.

In the end I joined the Labour Party instead. Which would be a joke if I could think of a punchline.

Then what?

Then I continued the struggle. Firstly with the Poll Tax protests. Our little group marched to London by way of Rochester, following the line of the original peasant’s revolt. It took three days. We made it on to the front page of the Morning Star. We marched glumly through the empty Kent countryside till we came to a sleepy village, and then shouted and sloganed our way through that. It took a while to realise that, actually, the villages were empty too, this being commuter country. A few startled dogs were impressed, however. Maybe I even imagined myself to be Wat Tyler for a time (there’s a Tyler Hill nearby where we started our march), except that I didn’t really want to be executed. We made it to the main march in London, singing songs we’d made up along the way, then I did a quick shifty slip when I saw the police horses gathering and knew that there was riot on its way. Got the train home with two of my friends.

The Police horses are always brought out when they want to engineer a riot. The police are trained experts on crowd control. They’re also trained experts on how to get a crowd out of control if they want. Police horses work every time.

Then there was the Criminal Justice Act of 1994, which was aimed at suppressing the lifestyle choices of New Age Travellers, ravers, squatters and road-protesters. The march and rally against the Criminal Justice Bill (as it was) on May 1st 1994, was in the name of the Advance party. That was an auspicious day. Brilliantly sunny, we managed to gather maybe ten thousand people for a march from Hyde Park to Trafalgar Square, where, to the music of the Rinky Dink bicycle-powered, mobile sound system, we ekkied and drank and danced in the fountains for hours. Why aren’t all revolutions like this? And somewhere in everyone’s mind that day, an idea was formed.

Maybe they could be. Maybe the revolution is a party in the street.

But, as I say, all that was years ago. There’s something a little unseemly, perhaps, in the sight of a middle aged man with a beer-belly pretending he’s all at one with the revolutionary youth. There comes a time when dignity demands some patient reserve. We can’t all be fired-up with indignation at all the injustices of the world all the time. Or, if we are, there are other ways of going about curing them. Like becoming a bar-room philosopher, maybe. The revolution can wait till closing time.

Then something brought me back. Something was calling me.

It’s part of the dark charm of this vile, violent world we live in that so many of us can be so disengaged. We live, those of us in the West, in comfort and with the illusion of security. We hear stories of massacres, of torture, of great simmering hatred but that’s over there, in another country. Those are other human beings. What can any of us do? What’s the point of a march and rally through the streets of London over massacres in East Timor, or racial hatred and ethnic cleansing in the former Yugoslavia? What has that got to do with us?

And the problem is, of course, in trying to identify the culprits. Is it something abstract and obscure, like “human nature” or capitalism? Despite my years hanging round on the periphery of left politics, despite having chanted the stirring indignant poetry of the Communist Manifesto to everyone, and reading, and being entirely unable to absorb, about two thirds of the first volume of Capital, I still had no idea what capitalism actually was. It’s some sort of a system, isn’t it? Something to do with money? It makes some people very rich, and… er…. some other people poor. With that level of political analysis at my disposal, it’s a wonder I never stood for Parliament. Parliament is full of people with the same level of political sophistication as me.

Capitalism is an attitude of mind, a form of consciousness, a form of believing. Call it what you will. It has its institutions in the IMF and the WTO and the World Bank. Its army is NATO. Its cabinet is the G7 meeting of the seven most industrialised nations. It is a One World Government run by, and on behalf of the Party of the Ultra Rich. It meets in secret to discuss its plans. Its specific goal, its long term plan, is to own everything. To do this, it creates separation, it creates lack, it creates need, it creates desire. The need and the lack, the separation and the desire are all part of the same system. It recreates its processes in everyone, as a mindset, reinforced by fear, and it rewards people’s compliance by giving them money. Buying into the money system is buying into a process of abstract death. The power resides, not in people, not in living, breathing, walking, talking, laughing. crying beings of flesh and blood and bone, but in a number of abstract entities called corporations. The corporations are administered by living beings, who come and go, who live and die in the normal way, but the corporations go on forever. They are, to use a phrase I picked up from Noam Chomsky, “Immortal Corporate Persons”.

A chilling phrase. It reminds me of the Emperor in Rome, or the Pharaoh of Ancient Egypt: god-like beings with the power of life-and-death over the populace, institutions rather than individuals, passing on the rights of the institution from Father to Son, so remote, so abstracted from the normal thoughts and feelings of human beings that they don’t care if others live or die.

No subject in Egypt was allowed to look at the Pharaoh on pain of death. He was god, the personification of the natural order. His statues were immense.

It was the Pharaoh’s job, by ritual magic and by sacrifice, to ensure that the waters of the Nile rose every year to flood the plain, to make it rich with life-giving nutrients. And then one year the Nile didn’t flood. Instead it shrank. And again the next year. And again and again and again, over a succession of years, until all the stored grain was used up, and the population was desperate. And then they looked at the Pharaoh, and instead of this god-like being of impossible height and power, they saw a scrawny, wizened human being, painted like a whore, dolled-up like a statue.

Like citizens of ancient Rome or of Egypt, we are enthralled by the logic of their institutions. They make images of themselves, like gods. Coca Cola or McDonald’s or Nike. We believe them when they tell us that globalisation is inevitable, that poverty and want are inevitable, that the world-economic system is like a tide that cannot be reversed, that it is a force of Nature, not the work of men.

The Empire never ended, as Philip K. Dick used to say.

Isn’t it time that we looked at their faces?

Just another sunny day in this cheerfully run-down sea-side town. Bev and I (she’s training to be a Church of England Priest) go for a cup of tea on the balcony of an octagonal cafe on the promenade overlooking the beach. A cool breeze means we have to keep our coats on. There’s a few other protester types in and around the cafe. You can tell by their shaved heads and crombies, the ear-piercings, the air of knowing superiority: the Socialist Worker’s Party are in town. Still in the same costumes I remember from years back. A whole new generation, but they look exactly the same. Everything about them speaks their state of mind. The intensity of debate, huddled over a cup of tea, the mystical/elemental truths of Marxist Leninist theory dressed up as hard-nosed political realism: dreams of the barricades and armed insurrection between drags on a roll-up. What romantic young man, the fires of indignation still burning in his heart, hasn’t thought like this from time to time? Revolutionary fighters for justice, guerrilla theorists of the Class War, all of them, every one imagining that he might be Che Guevara one day. Che Guevara in a crombie and Doctor Marten boots. I like them. I’ve always liked them. I like the way they call each other comrade and even—for a while—believe it. Comrade is one of my favourite words.

But Margate is full of its own kind of garish frivolity, all the fruit machines in the amusement arcades on the front chiming out their jingles: all the light, the colour, the happy screams of kids on the switchback rides in Dreamland; people strolling arm in arm along the promenade engrossed in quiet conversation, or just taking in the sights. There’s a trendy vicar who keeps passing us, in mirror shades, making a show of his dog collar. And up ahead, the Anti-Nazi League banners are starting to gather, and, on the opposite side of the road, the Union Jacks and George Crosses of the National Front supporters. We spend some time on “our” side of the road, meaning, we’re with the Anti-Nazi League and the SWP, but, after a while I suggest we move over. I want to hear the conversations on the other side. We’ve got our stickers on. Mine says, Black and White Unite and Fight, while Bev’s says, Smash The National Front. So we take the stickers off, and then we’re just a middle-aged couple strolling across the road to get a hot-dog. I decide that my hot-dog will serve as a magical talisman of protection.

There’s a couple of brave young women on that side too, trying to hand out stickers, but no one wants them, and a gaggle of shaven heads in a shop doorway, looking serious but mean.

The differences between the shaved heads of the NF and the shaved heads of the SWP are subtle, but noticeable. It’s odd how they ape each other. The hair cut is the same, but there’s just a touch more detail in the accoutrements: an extra earring here or there, a badge or two. I’d say that the SWP are a little more stylish, but that’s probably my prejudice. I’m impressed for all that, at the enduring quality of the skinhead style, born on the football fields and council estates of England, when hippie was the fashionable norm, with its odd mix of rude-boy cool and Mod aggressiveness. Fighting clothes. And I’m pointing all this out to Bev as we move on up the line towards the centre of action.

I have to add, at this point, that the vast majority of working class people—for whom the skinhead style is merely a convenient haircut—are neither fascist not communist. Most of them couldn’t give a damn either way.

I wield my magic hot-dog to ward off the air of crackling violence. No one would dare come near me with this in my hand.

And then we’re standing there, watching and listening near a road barrier, and there’s three blokes looking at us through the corners of their eye. “Plain clothes policemen,” says Bev, and we move away again.

And now another observation. The National Front will be coming from the station ahead. They will pass down the road with Union Jacks on the right, and Anti-Nazi League banners on the left. Somehow we’ve all ended up in our proper places in this radical melodrama.

Back on the other side—the sunnier side, I feel—we’re approached by one of the organisers who wants us to sign a petition against Fascism. “Well all right,” I say, “I can’t argue with that. But I can’t see it making much difference. Who’s going to listen?” He invites me to an SWP branch meeting in the town. Someone from the local rag is interviewing an old Jewish man about the holocaust. He is very quiet and dignified as he speaks. Someone else sells me a copy of Searchlight, the radical anti-fascist magazine. All of this goes on for a very long time. The Anti-Nazi Rally started at one o’clock. The Fascists won’t be here till three.

Bev and I take another walk, to find a pub. All the pubs are shut.

Honestly, all this political activism can be very wearing at times.

In the end, though, the National Front turn up. We can hear them up by the station, chants and banners streaming in the wind, and the atmosphere begins to heat up. A woman comes up, whispering frantically. “Pass it on, we’re going to block the road, stop them getting through.”

“Where are they marching to, exactly?”

“To the clock tower.”

It’s about five hundred yards.

And now they’re moving in a tight-knit gaggle, police vans in front and behind, surrounded by riot police, with a Union Jack, a Welsh Dragon, and several George Crosses, singing Rule Britannia. There’s about a hundred and fifty of them. And, on the other side of the road, about a hundred and fifty of their supporters, and on our side about the same number of ANL, with, another hundred and fifty or so ranged across the road now, stopping the march moving forward.

Bev says, “they make me so angry.”

I say, “why? This is a National Front national rally, and they can only get a hundred and fifty to come. That’s pathetic.”

I’m fascinated. Fascinated in the way you can be fascinated by a peculiar disfigurement. Unpleasant, but you can’t take your eyes off it. They’re like an organism that’s risen out of the subliminal sea full of all the despicable deposits of human hate. They’re huddled together in this strange lump, all legs and arms and ears, like some many-headed, many legged, mutant being, heads severely shaved, with the ideologues (older men in smart suits with grey hair) under the banner in the front, and when they’re not singing Rule Britannia they’re shouting threats and abuse at the opposition. “Kill the reds, kill the reds, kill the fucking reds!”

They are hemmed in by riot police, shields and batons at the ready. The Nazis are trying to be chummy with the cops, calling them “officer” and the like, but the cops just look away. It wouldn’t do to be seen being friendly with any Nazis.

One young woman keeps leaping into the road, screaming “Nazi scum!” at them. The police keep shovelling her back. And then she’s pushing forward again into the road, leaning her trunk forward and dangling her arms: “Nazi scum! Nazi scum!”

“Go fuck yourself,” someone shouts back at her.

“Shut up, yer ugly,” she replies.

“Can you stay on the pavement please,” says the policeman.

“Oh, yes, sorry,” she says, politely, in the English manner, before leaning back into the road and starting again: “Nazi scum! Nazi scum!”

Bev and I are both Brummies, so we’re ashamed to learn that most of them are Brummies too. There’s a large George’s Cross at the back, with Birmingham City Skins scrawled across in black letters.

Someone else shouts, “go away, we don’t want you round here, this isn’t your town. Why don’t you go back to Birmingham?”

This woman has acne. One of the Nazis notices. “Er look, spots!” he says. Such is the nature of the political debate.

Someone else, a burly fellow with a square cut chin, like a 60’s comic Batman, is winding up one of the NF people by making a little waving motion with his hand and looking him in the eye. He’s saying, “come on then, if you think you’re so hard.” He is doing this repeatedly while his NF opposite number is getting in a frenzy. A policeman notices and tells him to pack it up. But there’s no law against looking at someone, and the little waving motion, low down, from his hip, is subtle but unmistakeable. “Come on, come on, I could take you out any time.”

Meanwhile it’s stalemate at the front. The police vans are inching forward, but making very little headway. A high ranking officer with a megaphone arrives and asks people to clear out of the way.

No one does.

Scuffles break out.

Riot police move forward, shields and batons raised.

Someone gets his shirt ripped.

The line gets broken but then reforms a few yards further down the road. And on and on like this. Every inch, every yard being fought for.

The three slogans are: “the National Front are a Nazi front, smash the National Front”, “Black and White unite and fight” – this one being singularly inappropriate, having nothing to do with Kosovar Albanians (but then, I don’t think any one could come up with a rhyme for Kosovar Albanians) – and the last one: “Police protect the Nazis,” said in a sort of nyer, nyer kids chant.

I tried, “Maggie, Maggie, Maggie, out, out, out,” but people were giving me funny looks.

And then the best line. Someone is standing on the pavement, looking at the sad spectacle of all these jobless Brummies, with their harder than hard stance, their childish aggression, like a confused fit of pique, having to stand so close to each other to gain a sense of identity, having very little else in their lives, and he says, “Hey look everybody” – pointing at them and laughing – “that’s the Master Race!” Everyone laughs with him.

Bev notices that one of the NF supporters on the other side has a kid on his shoulders. She’s being encouraged to scream hate abuse at the commies.

We’ve also both noticed that the police look exactly like the Roman battalions, and that they use the same tactical moves. The whole thing begins to take on a timeless air, as if this was a war being fought out in eternity. It’s even more appropriate, as this is Mars Gate, an old Roman port and garrison town.

The struggle goes on, inch by painful inch, down the parade of this out-of-season seaside town, until it gets to within about 20 yards of the clock tower, when the police decide that a tactical retreat is in order. A cheer goes up from the ANL front line. The NF never made it to their final destination. We’ve turned them back in their track. It is, at least, a symbolic victory.

Bev and I go for sausage and chips in a cafe. Then the pub across the road opens up, and we go for that pint I’ve been gagging for.

The pub is full of middle-aged leather boys, the Margate chapter of the Celtic Warriors, dressed in neat leathers, with their hair tied back in pony tails. One of them smokes a pipe. And it crosses my mind, for a second, that, had they been real Celtic Warriors, as opposed to a Motor Cycle Chapter merely bearing the name, it should have been them fighting the Roman Battalions.

Haven’t things changed?

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Quintessential Englishman: a review of Can’t Get You Out Of My Head by Adam Curtis

How Adam Curtis makes the world in his own image.

I’ve just watched the Adam Curtis documentary series Can’t Get You Out Of My Head on the BBC. Six episodes in all, it comes in at just under eight hours long. Curtis is a BBC documentary filmmaker with a very distinctive style. His films are first-person lectures on a variety of subjects, held together by a collage of archive film and music.

The combination of historic footage with an often-emotional soundtrack gives a dream-like quality to the narrative. You could say that he uses this technique in order to smuggle radical ideas into the viewers’ heads, but I suspect it’s the other way around. He uses radical film techniques in order to smuggle entirely conventional ideas into the viewers’ head, while feigning a radical agenda.

He certainly likes to talk in revolutionary terms. One of the films is called Shooting and Fucking are the Same Thing. The phrase comes from the Baader-Meinhof group when they were training with the Palestinians in the 1960s. The story goes that the Palestinians were offended at the sight of the German women sunbathing naked and asked them to put clothes on, to which Andreas Baader replied, “Sexual revolution and anti-imperialism go together. Fucking and shooting are the same thing.”

Fucking and shooting

The whole episode is lifted from a 2008 German drama film directed by Uli Edel, called The Baader Meinhof Complex. This is typical of Curtis’ method. He likes to reference obscure material without necessarily acknowledging where it comes from. This particular episode also highlights another of his approaches. While talking about revolutionary politics Curtis will often pick marginal figures, which he then holds up as examples of the failure of the left. The Red Army Faction is one example. Another is Michael X, who also appears in this film.

Michael X—proper name Michael de Freitas—was a racketeer and enforcer of the slum landlord Peter Rachman who operated out of Notting Hill in the 1950s. He became a revolutionary and an icon of the left in the 60s, before murdering one of his followers in Trinidad. He was hanged in 1975. Of course Michael X took his name from Malcolm X. The story was that when Malcolm came to Britain a desk clerk mistook the two for brothers as they were travelling together. That may or may not be true, but what’s obvious is that the adoption of the surname lent kudos to Michael’s revolutionary persona. Malcolm X was a powerful and charismatic figure with a genuine radical agenda. Michael X was a gangster, a violent extortionist and a murderer. You wonder why Curtis takes him as his focus.

Another example of this kind of substitution is his references to Greg Hill and Kerry Thornley, the creators of Discordianism. We’re treated to long passages about the origins of the pseudo-religion, about Operation Mindfuck and Kerry Thornley’s relationship with Lee Harvey Oswald, about Thornley’s descent into madness and paranoia and Greg Hill’s alcoholism. What we never hear mentioned is the name Robert Anton Wilson, arguably the man responsible for the popularization of Discordianism, through the Illuminatus! Trilogy, which he wrote with Robert Shea, and his Cosmic Trigger trilogy.

He’s mentioned in passing, but without naming him, as a Discordian working for Playboy magazine. That’s it. We are left with the impression of this weird historical and philosophical sideline, told as an adjunct of the story of our times, as if Wilson never existed and the inevitable end of the Discordian project is drunkenness and insanity. You could say that this is fair enough. Perhaps we already know who Wilson and Malcolm X are, so it’s pointless repeating these stories. Maybe it’s interesting to wander down these cul-de-sacs of history, like psycho-geographical explorers of the Western mind, but that’s not how Curtis presents them. Rather he suggests that these stories are essential to an understanding of where we are now.

As he says in his introduction: “We are living through strange days. Across Britain, Europe and America, societies have become split and polarised, not just in politics but across the whole culture. There is anger at the inequality and at the ever growing corruption and a wide spread distrust of the elites. But at the same time there is a paralysis, a sense that no one knows how to escape from this.”

The entire series is then presented as an explanation for how we got to this point. In pursuit of this we’re taken on a dizzying journey across the entire globe, from the UK to the United States, from Russia to China, from the post-war period to the present day. We hear the story of Jiang Qing, Madame Mao, and of her rise to power with the Gang of Four in China. It’s a fascinating story and worthy of our attention. If Curtis had given us the story in isolation, as an example of the vicissitudes of power, we would’ve thanked him. He loves using clips of her romantic operas, with stylized Red Guards in heavy makeup doing ballet moves with Kalashnikovs, but as an explanation for the world we live in now it’s remarkably off-beat. Madame Mao lost. Another faction took over in China, and they run the Chinese project now, whatever you might think of that. It’s a pointless excursion into the nether-regions of the world-soul which doesn’t really shed light on our current dilemma.

What’s notable as well is what he misses. There’s very little about Thatcherism or Reaganomics, the shift in wealth away from the population as a whole into the hands of the elites, the trickle-down theory and the financialization of the economy. Little about the control of the narrative by media companies in hock to the elites, little about the part the BBC, as the sponsor of this film, plays in it all. Adam Curtis is a creature of the Beeb. He obviously spends a lot of time in the archives, rooting round to find us his quirky treasures. But there’s a sort of faux radicalism about it, a showy emptiness, full of grand theorizing, without any real substance.

He loves the word “dark” as in “dark paranoia,” a word he repeats throughout the series. Another word he likes is “ghosts.” Were this delivered as a lecture, most of us would’ve walked out within the first hour. It’s a nonsensical argument displaying an essential nihilism. He has no explanation for why the world is as it is. He’s simply juxtaposing multiple storylines in a series of overlapping narratives that have no connection beyond the fact that Curtis has researched them.

Air

On the other hand, it is precisely the juxtaposition of images and sounds that keeps us watching. Every so often he’ll pause in his story and allow a moving image accompanied by a resonant soundtrack to occupy our attention. The result is often fascinating and strangely compelling, like looking in on someone’s unconscious processes.

One example, in the first program, after seeing an interview with Kerry Thornley, we’re led into an aerial sequence skimming over shimmering mudflats towards a shipwreck, accompanied by the Incredible String Band playing “Air.” The single word “England” comes up on the screen. This is followed by a shot of terraced streets leading to a waterfront where crowds are assembled, followed by scenes from a traditional English folk festival with a hobby horse, scenes of a listening station across a moorland landscape, then scenes of Africans in a concentration camp being numbered by British officers, which leads to Curtis talking about the collapse of the British Empire.

There may be some rational intention behind the juxtaposition of these images with this song, but it’s not clear what it is. The Incredible String Band are Scottish, not English, and the words, though beautiful, have nothing to do with what’s on screen. It’smore like a music video than a documentary and whatever its intention might be, the result is to create an impressionistic image of Englishness as something quirky, sinister and racist all at the same time.

Maybe that’s the purpose, in which case Curtis, as the quintessential Englishman, is as guilty as anyone else. It’s his plummy accent—sardonic, all-knowing, detached—that guides us through the multiple stories, linking them together. But he’s an unreliable narrator and often claims an insight that he doesn’t have. He’s constantly telling us what is going on inside other people’s heads, as if he can hear their thoughts.

An example: “In the 1950s, as the British Empire was falling apart, there was a growing sense that something was badly wrong under the surface.” But is that really the case? What is the “surface” under which he looks? Where does the “growing sense” take place? He’s referring to the mind, obviously. He’s claiming an omniscient view of the collective consciousness of the British people in this period, when he himself was still a child.

Where were you?

You can’t fault his taste in music. There were a number of times I was stopped short by a song, wondering what it was and wanting to hear it again, and there are some stunning sequences where a piece of music and a set of images gel into dream-like passages of lucid clarity, like being asleep and awake at the same time. It’s the end to which he puts this audio-visual feast that worries me.

As I said earlier, it’s nihilistic. He has nothing to offer. No solutions, no identifiable way out of the dilemma, no future, nothing to aim for: just this modern machine dystopia with its violence and corruption, its endless redistribution of wealth from the less well off to the obscenely wealthy.

It’s interesting that he starts and ends with a quote by David Graeber: “The ultimate hidden truth of the world is that it is something we make and could just as easily make differently.”

Graeber died last year, but his was one of the most insistent voices in support of Jeremy Corbyn. The BBC, meanwhile, did everything it could to undermine the leader of the opposition and to paint him as an anti-Semite. By doing so it managed to destroy the only plausible alternative to Adam Curtis’ nightmare vision: the prospect of a social democratic party in power in the UK, returning us to the values and priorities of the post-war era.

Originally appeared as No Escape From Discordianism here: https://www.splicetoday.com/politics-and-media/no-escape-from-discordianism

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No Escape From Discordianism

He has no explanation for why the world is as it is.

I’ve just watched the Adam Curtis documentary series Can’t Get You Out Of My Head on the BBC. Six episodes in all, it comes in at just under eight hours long. Curtis is a BBC documentary filmmaker with a very distinctive style. His films are first-person lectures on a variety of subjects, held together by a collage of archive film and music.

The combination of historic footage with an often-emotional soundtrack gives a dream-like quality to the narrative. You could say that he uses this technique in order to smuggle radical ideas into the viewers’ heads, but I suspect it’s the other way around. He uses radical film techniques in order to smuggle entirely conventional ideas into the viewers’ head, while feigning a radical agenda.

He certainly likes to talk in revolutionary terms. One of the films is called Shooting and Fucking are the Same Thing. The phrase comes from the Baader-Meinhof group when they were training with the Palestinians in the 1960s. The story goes that the Palestinians were offended at the sight of the German women sunbathing naked and asked them to put clothes on, to which Andreas Baader replied, “Sexual revolution and anti-imperialism go together. Fucking and shooting are the same thing.”

The whole episode is lifted from a 2008 German drama film directed by Uli Edel, called The Baader Meinhof Complex. This is typical of Curtis’ method. He likes to reference obscure material without necessarily acknowledging where it comes from. This particular episode also highlights another of his approaches. While talking about revolutionary politics Curtis will often pick marginal figures, which he then holds up as examples of the failure of the left. The Red Army Faction is one example. Another is Michael X, who also appears in this film.

Michael X—proper name Michael de Freitas—was a racketeer and enforcer of the slum landlord Peter Rachman who operated out of Notting Hill in the 1950s. He became a revolutionary and an icon of the left in the 60s, before murdering one of his followers in Trinidad. He was hanged in 1975. Of course Michael X took his name from Malcolm X. The story was that when Malcolm came to Britain a desk clerk mistook the two for brothers as they were travelling together. That may or may not be true, but what’s obvious is that the adoption of the surname lent kudos to Michael’s revolutionary persona. Malcolm X was a powerful and charismatic figure with a genuine radical agenda. Michael X was a gangster, a violent extortionist and a murderer. You wonder why Curtis takes him as his focus.

Read more here: https://www.splicetoday.com/politics-and-media/no-escape-from-discordianism

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Cosmic Right vs. Cosmic Left

Into the conspiracy underground.

“My personal feeling is that citizens of the democratic societies should undertake a course of intellectual self-defence to protect themselves from manipulation and control, and to lay the basis for more meaningful democracy.”

Noam Chomsky.

Conspiracies exist. For example, throughout most of the post-war era the CIA and the American government were actively involved in the drugs trade, aiding and facilitating drugs traffickers in the production, distribution and smuggling of illegal drugs throughout the world, as part of their war on Communism. This fact was first documented by Alfred McCoy in his groundbreaking book The Politics of Heroin in South East Asia, originally published in 1972, and attested to by numerous investigations ever since.

Likewise COINTELPRO activities from 1956 to 1971 saw the FBI involved in covert operations to disrupt and undermine American domestic political organisations, such as anti-war groups and civil rights organizations, using psychological warfare, forgery, fake reports, entrapment, harassment, false imprisonment, violence and (probably) assassination.

Most conspiracies get very little coverage in the mainstream media. Often, when a report does appear, the bulk of the news outlets will work together to attack the reporter rather than investigating the story, as happened to Gary Webb in the 1990s. For those of you who don’t know this story, check out the 2014 film Kill the Messenger, directed by Michael Cuesta.

Most of this was going on long before the Internet was established and it’s unlikely to have stopped since. The Internet itself has become the latest battleground in the ongoing disruption, distraction and disinformation that has overtaken our world, so it’s hardly surprising that there’s an explosion of online speculation about the nature and source of such activities.

Conspiracy theories exist because conspiracies exist. I never tire of saying that. In a world where the vast majority of the population is entirely excluded from the decision-making process, in which faceless corporations game us with glamour and false advertising, in which clandestine organizations manipulate our politics, where the uber-rich hide their profits in offshore bank accounts and pay less taxes than their cleaners, where war is profit, children starve and the rest of the planet’s inhabitants are considered of no value whatsoever, where else can we turn for an explanation?

Whether you think that Satan-worshipping pedophiles are behind it, giant lizards, or just the ruling class, most of us are wrapped up in our own conspiracy beliefs. The alternative—that the world is completely out of control, driverless, heading fast for a precipice of no one’s making—is almost too horrible to contemplate.

Read more here.

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