[Peace-discuss] "Where are the activists as austerity bites?" (from The Guardian, via UFPJ)

[Stuart Levy]

-------- Original Message --------
Subject: 	[ufpj-activist] Where are the activists as austerity bites?
Date: 	Fri, 5 Apr 2013 13:45:09 -0400
From: 	Global Network <globalnet at mindspring.com>
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  http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/apr/04/where-are-the-activists-austerity/print


  Where are the activists as austerity bites? They have been beaten back

*Protesters face violence, arrest and serious charges. Only the brave 
dare face this savage suppression*

*By *Laurie Penny

The Guardian (UK), Thursday 4 April 2013

First they came for the students. This week, 12 vanloads of police 
arrived at Sussex University, in collaboration with management, to evict 
students 
<http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/2013/apr/02/sussex-university-protestors-evicted-arrested> 
who had been occupying a room on campus for eight weeks. They had been 
taking a stand against privatisation of services at their university, 
creating a militant "pop-up union" and attracting support from all over 
the country: they had to be got rid of. Photographs from the day show 
police in antiseptic yellow uniforms swarming in as if to disinfect a 
wound in the body politic where the rage was bleeding through.

The suppression of student protest by the British state has been savage 
and efficient over the past three years. The students of Sussex were 
brave even to make the attempt. They knew all too well that they were 
risking arrest, serious criminal charges and physical violence from 
police and hired security, and that is what happened. It's what always 
happens when a government uses force to suppress radicalism.

Right now, as millions of people stare down the barrel of job losses, 
benefits sanctions, destitution and desperation and the rich are given 
tax cuts, I hear a lot of people asking why there isn't more resistance 
going on. Well, here's why. There was resistance, and it was brutally 
and systematically put down. The students, the street-organising 
anti-cuts campaigners, the Occupy movement. When people speak about the 
Occupy camps <http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/occupy-movement> and 
anti-austerity protests of 2010-12, it is with a tone of regret, as if 
somehow those grassroots movements just fizzled out because those 
involved didn't know what they were doing. On the contrary: they were 
cleared out, arrested and beaten back by police, just like the students 
at Sussex.

In Tory Britain, as the cuts kick in, even the most peaceful protests 
are put down as a warning to the rest of us. Last November, Bethan 
Tichborne, a 28-year-old teaching assistant, appeared at a public event 
in Oxfordshire and calmly told David Cameron that he had "blood on his 
hands". She was referring to the prime minister's decision to take away 
vital social support from people with disabilities, a policy that has 
already cost lives.

Tichborne was grabbed, tackled to the ground and restrained during her 
arrest, as Cameron continued to speak: "The police officers on top of me 
either couldn't or wouldn't hear me," she wrote on her blog. "I was 
crying and bleeding, I couldn't properly breathe.". Two weeks ago she 
was convicted 
<http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/mar/16/activist-shocked-conviction-cameron-protest> 
of causing "harassment, alarm and distress" and fined more than a 
month's wages. The message is clear: whether or not a protest is 
peaceful and legal is entirely up to the police and judiciary to decide, 
so if you want to play it safe, stay at home and sign a petition.

Last month, two of the students involved in the Parliament Square 
protests of December 2010, Alfie Meadows and Zak King 
<http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/2013/mar/08/student-tuition-fees-cleared-disorder>, 
were acquitted of violent disorder. This is a charge used almost 
exclusively against political protesters that carries a sentence of five 
years in prison. Meadows, King and their friends spent two years 
fighting to overturn the charges, prevented from speaking out by the 
courts process.

It seems a curious coincidence that the police singled out Meadows for 
scapegoating as a violent extremist, given that on the protest in 
question, as the police attacked students in Parliament Square, he 
received a blow to the head that required emergency brain surgery. He 
still has a hand-length scar across his skull. Even now, I am obliged to 
say that it's not been proved in court that Meadows' near-fatal brain 
bleed was caused by a police baton, because if I didn't I might get sued.

Sadly, many of the liberal-minded folk now wondering aloud where all the 
anger on the streets has gone were the same people who condemned the 
students and anti-cuts protesters for being just a bit too noisy, too 
rowdy, too "violent". As soon as the frustrated kids of Britain and 
their allies started smashing up bus stops and lighting bonfires outside 
Tory HQ, that was too much: throw the selfish brats in prison, teach 
them to mind their manners. First they came for the students. Now 
they've come for the rest of us, who will speak out?

Any government trying to push through austerity against the will of a 
large proportion of the population is going to have to rely on force to 
deal with dissent. That's exactly what this government, which had the 
support of just one in seven of the population even before it started 
tearing up the welfare state, has done. New movements to resist 
austerity must expect to meet the same wall of state violence as soon as 
they become effective, because that's how the Tories operate. It's how 
they've always operated. And shame on us, even in these cowardly times, 
if we don't support those with the courage to take a stand.

Global Network Against Weapons & Nuclear Power in Space
PO Box 652
Brunswick, ME 04011
(207) 443-9502
globalnet at mindspring.com <mailto:globalnet at mindspring.com>
www.space4peace.org <http://www.space4peace.org>
http://space4peace.blogspot.com/ (blog)

Thank God men cannot fly, and lay waste the sky as well as the earth.  
~Henry David Thoreau


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