Plus ca change….

(plus c’est la meme chose)

FOURTEEN. January 30th 2021

Like most normal people – if the concept of ’normal’ is even a thing these days – I was startled and left aghast by the events of January 6th, when Trump’s mob invaded the Washington ‘capitol’ and started messing with the fixtures and fittings, posing for selfies at other people’s desks and generally making a nuisance of themselves  whilst US legislators were about to confirm the results of the Presidential election . One hopes fervently that nothing like this is repeated.

In some ways, however, it perhaps  offered a bit of respite from the general experience of life recently, which I think for many of has begun to resemble a starkly un-amusing version of ‘Groundhog Day’. It’s not just that we have seemed to traipse endlessly around more or less the same circuit in relation to covid and all its disastrous manifestations;  but also that we have had to endure over and over again the same recycled bullshit about it from our alleged leaders;  the repeated failures of foresight, the serial incompetence, the shifty dissembling, and the irresponsible promising of something much better just around the corner have all become as familiar as they are depressing. In that context, it’s not,  of course, in any way cheering to note that a bunch of ignorant and bigoted morons have been encouraged and allowed by a variety of people in high authority to believe ridiculous lies and to attempt to force acceptance of those lies onto other people – indeed, to have those lies perhaps dictate the course of history –  but at least it sort of made a change. A few weeks on and it feels like we’re back to Groundhog Day. I’m pretty sure something else extraordinary will happen soon (vaccine wars?) and that when it does I’ll then be hoping things had stayed ‘normal’ (ha ha). Whoever said that one should be careful what one wishes for was wise, but still it’s hard at times not to wish simply for something different. 

Doing unexpected things, it seems to me, is a genuine talent – if one can call it that – of Trump and people like him. I don’t think that this is because he is actually imaginative or creative in any true sense of the word; it’s just that he is neither constrained nor inhibited from doing stuff which most other people would regard as idiotic, unconscionable, immoral, dangerous, insane, shameful or downright bad. This, in turn, is because he only has one belief – which is that he should be allowed to do whatever he feels like doing whenever he feels like it, and because his overriding characteristic is being nasty (his favourite word about his enemies, of course). The sooner people realise this and forget about any ideas that he has any sort of political agenda or philosophy, the better.

Anyway this capacity to do the unexpected has served him well, I think, like it serves most people of his ilk. The fact that he had again managed to take people by surprise in this way set me thinking. Of course many people predicted that he would do something outrageous before Biden’s inauguration, but just not this. Even though it was kind of the obvious thing for him to do, nobody really expected it (including, clearly, the Capitol guards), presumably at least partly because it was so outrageous. Getting some bombs dropped on Tehran might have been worse,  of course,  but it wouldn’t , somehow, have been so jaw-droppingly startling. What he achieved  on the 6th, alongside the lunatic Gulliiani, in whom it has become impossible to believe as a real person rather than a character in a Marvel comic, was more ‘special’ ; in the way that his mad ‘drive-around’ to visit his supporters outside hospital when he had covid (if indeed he did have covid) was ‘special’.

Trump is sometimes referred to as a great ‘disruptor’ of course, and his capacity to disrupt springs precisely from this readiness and tendency to do the unexpected. The events of the 6th set me off on a curious and indeed unexpected train of thought; not least because the core methodology of the activist organisation to which I belong is also disruption. We are committed to a pathway which proclaims that mass acts of civil disobedience are necessary in oder to disrupt ongoing business as usual, to wake people up to awful reality and to undermine a hopelessly corrupt and decadent system. At the time that I first heard about the hordes thronging into the capitol, it really didn’t occur to me that this event bore any relation to my sort of activism, but of course it does.

My attention was initially drawn to the potential for comparison when a colleague suggested to me that perhaps we might have something to learn from the mob. She meant, essentially, that the sense of entitlement they displayed, their quite flagrant disregard for protocols and the expectations of authorities, might be an example to follow. Maybe we might just as easily stroll into the Houses of Parliament (as opposed to annoyingly getting arrested for sitting in the road outside) if we only behaved as if we expected to be allowed to do so. I think there is some merit to this argument. The mass actions in which I’ve been involved which have been successful – in terms of achieving their tactical objective of, say, occupying a space for a period of time (and then perhaps creating a garden with a skate-park on a road bridge or mooring a boat or staging a rock concert at a major road junction) or blocking the entrances to a large institutional building – have mostly been characterised by a feeling of some surprise at how easy it was to do it, and how poorly organised, at least in the early stages, was the resistance of authorities. I’m now wondering if some of the actions which were less successful, apparently because they were thwarted by the authorities, lacked a certain and crucial boldness; so that we were too preoccupied with the response we might get and what ‘they’ were going to do (‘they’ being both the police / security and the public) and so lost connection with our own intention and purpose. In other words, we just weren’t confident enough.

I realise this may seem a bit abstract and doesn’t take into account the fact that security forces learn from experience (they are ready for you next time) and may even have ulterior motives for not trying too hard to stop you the first time or two, but nevertheless I think there may be something in this. Certainly I think that the single minded belief that you are going to do something, and that nothing is going to stop you, carries some weight. Trump’s own success in becoming and remaining President, unfortunately,  is evidence that the seemingly impossible is actually perfectly possible.

To be clear, my own organisation has no plans, so far as I know, to invade the Houses of Parliament. If we did, I certainly like to think that, once inside and with the free rein that Trumps’s mob had, we would manage something more creative  and aesthetically interesting than removing the  name plates from office doors and putting our feet up on the Speaker’s desk. This aspect of the mob’s behaviour was, I thought, very odd; notwithstanding the reports of guns and pipe-bombs and cable-tie handcuffs, there appeared to be no serious plan to do anything once inside other that lark about and show off on social media. We would at least have been ready to stage an intelligent ‘citizens’ assembly’ in the chamber and would have had some thoughtful spokespeople ready to talk to camera who weren’t wearing a bearskin and carrying a spear. We would also have had a plan for making sure that, if we did get in, it was quite difficult to get us out again. Why, having broken through doors and windows and made a lot of initial noise and fuss, did they all then consent to be quietly shepherded out again? There were no lock-on tubes, no elaborate infrastructure for the guards to dismantle. Nobody glued their hands to a statue. They didn’t even sit down! 

Crucially, I think, the mob presented no actual dilemma to the guards. As long as we assume that the guards didn’t actually want these thugs roaming around inside the capitol (which I realise is an assumption) then there were no difficult choices for them to make; it was simply a case of getting them out as soon as possible. For my organisation, presenting a dilemma  is at the heart of a successful piece of non-violent direct action. Whichever choice the authorities make – to resist / oppress / arrest you or to let you carry on – carries a cost in terms of resources, reputation  and public opinion,  If we get the nuances of this right (we don’t always) and do it  an elegant rather than an ugly fashion, then we win either way and the authorities lose either way.

Although I don’t think you can argue that the Trump mob are not activists (and I would prefer not to be in the same category but in this sense I think I am) I do think we can argue that they are not very thoughtful activists. Clearly they are not peaceful activists either and this may in fact be a factor which determines a lot. How you do something surely matters as much as what you do and why. When reflecting on the behaviour of the mob in Washington a few day afterwards, I recalled an apparently key moment on Whitehall over a year ago. We’d occupied the road for over 48 hours. We were far greater in number than the Trump gang were. We were tired, cold and wet and pissed-off from having loads of our property nicked by the guardians of the law, who were now keeping us 20 yards or so from the entrance to Downing St with a thin line of officers and some metal fences. A small number of people, newly arrived at the protest and evidently not very in tune with the non-violent culture, charged the fence and started to break through. Others watched, unsure whether to follow. It’s certain that had some more of us joined this effort we would quite easily have broken through. This initiative was countered by a similarly small number of people who called for calm and spoke passionately to the crowd about maintaining peacefulness. ‘Order’ was restored. We never got to Downing St.

I’ve sometimes wondered since, given the cynical behaviour of senior police officers and politicians afterwards in illegally misusing the Public Order Act and ludicrously trying to brand us as ‘terrorists’, whether it would after all have been better to break though the barricades. But I don’t think so. In fact a week or so before this event, on a ‘recce’ to the area, I had coincidentally watched a crowd of right-wing yobs violently challenging the police in Parliament Square. Some of them were literally throwing metal fences at the police. (None of them seemed to get arrested, by the way, nor branded as terrorists. Meantime hundreds of our activists are still being dragged through the courts for sitting in the road around that time). I think this matters. Any success we get will be coloured by the way we got it. Violence ‘works’ for sure, but it begets violence, of all sorts. If our message is love for nature and the planet, then we are just going to have to act with love and suffer the short-term consequences for long-term good.

This distinction about violence / peacefulness (and of course the other one about doing stuff which looks cool rather than stuff which makes you look like a moron) makes me feel better about sharing the category of ‘activist’ with these people. It also makes me less worried about the issue of disrupting democratic processes, something I have also done a bit of. I’ve been asking myself whether the rightness and foundation upon the truth of my cause makes it ok for me to do this whereas the obvious wrongness and ‘badness’ (and madness) of the MAGA mob makes it not alright for them to do it. I think I’m at peace with it. If ‘democracy’ says that the Emperor is wearing a cloak when he clearly isn’t than something is clearly wrong with democracy. More of that, perhaps, another time  

But whilst on the topic of possible similarities I must say it seems almost as absurd to call the Trump mob ’terrorists’ (or the thugs throwing metal fences at the police in Parliament square, come to that) as it does us. Mad, bad and dangerous they certainly are but ‘terrorists’, in the sense that the word was conceived and has almost always been used, they are not. Terrorists draw attention to their cause by putting bombs in unexpected places or sending poison through letterboxes; spreading terror. Trump’s mob tried to get their own way through direct action because the democratic process didn’t deliver for them. I guess we are doing the same. I can’t say I find the analogy particularly comfortable. but I think it’s reasonable.

One further way in which the event was  illuminating as well as horrifying was as a reminder that one should never doubt that a small group of determined people can change the world. This is a popular motto in our movement. Of course, its always spoken of as a positive thing, but this was a reminder that the change might just as easily be for evil as for good. It was a reminder that our side, too, has to be daring and ruthless, albeit guided by love and peacefulness, and that if we really want something we must, as Trump said, “fight like hell” for it.