The philosophy of peaceful protest

I just wanted to post up a small discussion regarding protesting that has great relelvance right now in light of the #Occupy movements including the #OccupyLsx movement currently active in the UK.

Non-violent action by ordinary people is vital to the success of the movement for very simple reasons. There are still a great many people in the country who are not yet persuaded that the government is merely a proxy for corporate UK and are ensnared by the propaganda of corporations that pervade their TV screens and newspapers. Violence by protesters legitimizes violence by the state in the eyes of these as yet unconvinced observers, thus violence by the state is sure to follow and the cycle leads ultimately to the destruction of the movement. However, if the movement remains non-violent then violence by the state will be viewed unsympathetically by our fellow citizens, notwithstanding deceitful editing and misrepresentative reporting.

Strategies for addressing the media deficit of representation of ordinary people and NGOs will have to be a topic for discussion in another post.

Democracy Now!

Occupy Wall Street whilst the bankers are taking it all,

They're taking your job, my house and their cares are not even small,
Us peasants giving to the rich is their idea of reform,
They're Ivy Lee and have been taught this way since they were born,
What will it take for the elite to share power?,
When they already know that people are dying every hour,
To Occupy Wall Street seems all that we can do,
It will scare these crooks silly and they can't even sue,
Let the bankers feel the pain for their senseless ruthless gains,
Let's make this democracy now! and never the same pain again!

Message received?

Today I posted the following comment response to another commenter on The Guardian article "Occupy Wall Street: echoes of the past as protesters grasp the future" :

"@RjBig2000

no person can revoke these three basic rights, Life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness"


I like the general sentiment being employed in those romantically libertarian words but they fall well short of say socialism in terms providing a rights framework for achieving those things that the words long for, just like America falls abysmally short of the principles of the US constitution. This is a fact of life due to the power and corruption of wealth, which will always accumulate over time for ruthless enough individuals, groups and associations. The only thing that has ever worked for us peasants in the way of achieving even modest steps towards those ideals are social movements, workers unions and benevolent dictatorship. Democracy doesn't exist for us peasants. It never has. Liberal democracy as practiced by most Western nations is perfectly represented by the long time kids' favourite board game Monopoly. Money buys you friends in high places, politicians, political parties, political systems, governments, military juntas, brutal dictators, newspapers, television networks, Internet presence, prisons, schools, universities, entire education systems, police, armies and military hardware. It's all owned and controlled by an astonishingly small fraction of the global population. All the properties on the board were bought long before we were born, so we just get to pay rent in order to live on our own planet, and if you're not prepared to put up with that then they have everything they need to make sure the only place you are going is in the ground, and then your family gets the bill. And the US says that China is 'evil'?


Anarchism is the never ending fight against concentrations of power, which ultimately corrupt themselves, and in order not to be such a concentration of power anarchism essentially remains distributed, non-networked and leaderless, though we all happily jump on board and support movements for the benefit of the peasantry. Thus anarchism might best be understood as the state of mind one reaches having seen the king with no clothes, and that the game is and has always been rigged from top to bottom. Anarchism is not a club, an Internet site or a social movement. It is simply the recognition of the unspeakably bad state of affairs and the desire to bring about justice for the majority rather than the rich minority. Needless to say anarchism is deliberately misrepresented by the media, in fact in most cases it is just flat out lied about.


We need to wake up the anarchist that lies at the heart of every peasant by opening the curtains on the world around them. If we don't we are probably shafted properly, as a species I mean, and I mean it literally, mortally and urgently. Few people seem to grasp the enormity of what is coming in the wake of the failure to address the rapidly approaching man-made climate catastrophe and the also rapidly approaching energy crisis. Both will lead ultimately to global war (not to mention famine due to collapsed food infrastructure, disease, collapsed health care systems, genocides ad nauseum that will also result) and given that the nuclear power states' defense systems are largely automated (responsive to assumed attack) the chain reaction will resemble the dropping of a piece of cheese into a box full of loaded mousetraps. As we stand to day we are staring straight into the light of the oncoming train of extinction, and the boys in our engine room are still shovelling coal.


It saddens me that this message is not being received loud and clear by the peasantry, at least thus far, because they are our only hope."

Want to know why no bankers have been prosecuted?

The Guardian has put some rather interesting articles on its home page today highlighting the blatent and overwhelming corruption in our. 'David Cameron's £50,000 price tag finds 70 people willing to pay up' and 'City's influence over Conservatives laid bare by research into donations' are unusually revealing for the Guardian regarding our political process, such that I suspect that it is a 'shot across the bow' to the coalition. Why? I'm not sure right now, but it can't be anything to do with regulation given how bent all of the parties have been with regard to Rupert Murdoch's poisonous empire. So, we'll have to see what we can find out.