TWENTY-TWO 3rd June 2025
A few months ago, while still on the way out of winter dreaminess and trying to find ways of coming to terms with the horrible reality which was dawning – which is ever-changing but pretty much all in the same direction – I enjoyed an afternoon at my local Everyman watching Timothée Calamet’s great performance as Bob Dylan in A Complete Unknown. There are a lot of contradictory things one could think and say about Dylan but I think it’s incontrovertible that he stood for congruence and defiance of conformity and I liked how that came across in the film. It set me wondering, given the impact made by Dylan and the social movements with which he was associated, how on earth, well over fifty years on, we have come to this. If I had an answer, it would be very long so I’ll leave it for now, but it also set me thinking about the pitfalls of idealism. (I don’t think Dylan was an idealist but he inspired plenty who were). I remembered a song by a guy called Little Stevie Forbert who was briefly touted as a ‘new Dylan’ around the time when the man himself was laid up after a bad motorcycle accident. The song goes like this:
You’ve traveled so far, the wind in your face
You think that you’ve found the one special place
Where all of your dreams will walk out in line
And follow the course you’ve made in your mind.
Well, it isn’t gonna be that way….
I think that’s pretty good, and the last line is a real kicker. However it is that we have come to this, it now seems pretty clear to me that the ideas that many of us entertained about how we were going to arrive at a new dawn through a process of mass peaceful civil disobedience were too optimistic. It would have been nice, and maybe if enough people had been ready to get off their arses, risk some discomfort and inconvenience and stand up (or sit down) to be counted, it could have happened; but it seems like we’re now beyond that possibility.
So in all the recent and current chaos and confusion and sense of profound disturbance, how does one decipher a way forward, a “direction home” as our Bob referred to? There might not be one, of course. It could be that we’re headed not ‘home’ at all, but just deeper and deeper into an abyss of brutality. It mostly seems that way. As we witness all around us the collapse of civility, the casual breaking of rules and protocols by the ‘leaders’, the ones who are most socially obliged by their position to uphold them, the apparent descent into something which looks and feels more and more savage, it remains tempting to conclude that the only hope of salvation is by following a manifestly opposite path – characterised by order, respect, peacefulness. That sort of positive vision is appealing and I find it engages my imagination even now just to think of it. It goes something like this: OK, there are many more of ‘us’ than there are of ‘them’, so we’ll all work together with kindness and humanity and we’ll make sacrifices and sit quietly in the road, peacefully and with love, and wait for justice. Well, as old Steve told us, it isn’t gonna be that way. We tried it and it didn’t work.
In chaotic times it can be difficult to discern any path forward, although it seems to be a human compulsion. Everyone looks to interpret or make meaning of what may just be simply crazy behaviour. We want to understand what just happened and to predict what’s going to happen. We try to distinguish between what is just “noise” and what is “signal”. I found myself thinking about that around about the same time as the Everyman excursion to see A Complete Unknown, when I spent an evening at a West Ham football match. I kind of knew to start with that it was a bad idea, inspired more by my personal history and an over-optimistic idealistic longing for something which was never likely to exist (“Forever Blowing Bubbles”) than by any realistic expectation of a satisfactory experience. In the event, the predictable debacle of watching a dismal defeat from a distant position in a vast new stadium, which will never be able to replicate the genuine sense of community that I used to experience, as a much younger person, in the old one, was made more dispiriting by having to endure a long trudge after the match as one of a huge crowd of spectators / consumers who were being marshalled slowly towards the tube station. It struck me how easily led we all were really, how the order and apparent safety of the dull procession rested entirely upon our willingness to go along with the commands of a few underpaid people in high-vis jackets.
You can make different things of that, of course, for good or bad. But anyway the impression of order and safety was suddenly altered when a scuffle broke out between two men a short distance away from me. Whatever they were arguing about was soon lost in a shocking display of escalating violence, with one of the protagonists clearly much stronger and/or much less inhibited by any social protocols or regard for others. His behaviour and his speech can only be described as beastly and his vicious attack must have left the other man badly hurt. Nobody (including me) did anything. We kept quiet and stayed safe. It was clear that the man who did the violence would not face any consequence.
Inevitably, once I’d started to get over the shock and the shame, and because of that compulsion to look for meaning, I thought about Trump and his mobs of lawless thugs and gangsters and his edicts and deportations and tariffs and Putin and his bombs and Netanyahu and his and the people in Gaza whom we are doing nothing to help and from whose plight we turn away our gaze. I thought about how violence works.
it appears to me that the direction of activist movements (if there really is any direction to be discovered within the current ever-changing-ness) is bound to be influenced by this realisation. Given that – through a combination of mass inertia and hoping for the best on the part of people who are worried about the state of things but apparently not worried enough to do anything about it themselves, plus a determined campaign to repress the right to protest on the part of the government – we have arrived at a place where peaceful resistance cannot work, it seems to me that something else is going to happen. The ‘signals’ (if they are not just ‘noise’) might be detected in things like the TESLA Takedown campaign – which, as well as allowing itself to overtly target and blame an individual (about time) has also spiralled sometimes into the destruction of property AND has worked. Nobody seems to have reported much yet on the activities of the Citizens Arrest Network but this campaign, too (while no violence nor threat of violence is involved) rests on the proposition that it’s effective and ok to expose the individuals who are making the climate crisis worse (by profiting personally as the head of a climate-wrecking company, for instance) and to deliberately make those people feel uncomfortable, The media has given some attention to the supposed demise or demoralisation of previously high-profile environmental activist groups, although the evident conclusion drawn, that people have somehow given up or just gone away, seems fanciful to me; my assumption is that determined people who are stopped from campaigning in one one way will campaign in another.
The organisations I’m connected with have been demoralised and disrupted enough by the turbulence of the past six moths or so to make it difficult for them to find a collective sense of direction. In trauma, purposeful action becomes more difficult. People get confused and dispirited and it’s hard for them to work together. But what I do notice is that people haven’t given up, which is heartening. We hear ‘noise’ and we are confused and conflicted by that, but inevitably we listen within the noise for ’signals” and I’m feeling like the signals point in a direction which is somewhat less peaceful and apparently ‘civilised’ than the direction being followed before. This could just be my feeling, and not shared by others, but currently I’m trusting my hunch because it’s evident that ‘playing nice’ against people and organisations who are unscrupulous, ruthless and reckless – and, importantly, who are backed up, protected and defended by politicians, law courts and most of the media, their abuses rationalised and their outrageously immoral behaviour normalised – is not going to cut it.
I think this issue was illuminated by the massive leap in popularity achieved by Mark Carney – in the past appearing as an ordinary and unexciting enough mainstream bureaucrat – when he evoked the image of a brawl on an ice-hockey pitch by saying, in response to Trump’s threats, that is was time to ‘throw the gloves down’. Suddenly everyone I know wanted to be a Canadian. It struck me that the surge in his appeal was because people know, intuitively, that this is the only proper response to a violent bully; and that the alternative sort of approach being modelled by the likes of Starmer and Mandelson, in which they suck up and appease in the hope of avoiding harm, is at best a delay of the inevitable and at worst a show of weakness which will be exploited mercilessly in due course.
I don’t yet see any Mark Carneys actually putting their heads above the parapet in the field of activism. That’s not surprising because nobody (except senior elected politicians, military officers and the heads of certain industries like oil, logging and mining) can openly propose the use of force – violent destruction of property and the ensuing harm to people – without facing legal consequences: but I assume that this is the inevitable direction of travel the clearer it becomes that the dream of successful mass peaceful civil disobedience is not going to be realised. Indeed it was probably ever thus. Whether we like to know it or not, a look at history shows us that explosions of rage and actual physical defiance have generally played at least some part in any successful opposition to ruthless authoritarian power.
An activist friend of mine once remarked to me that “sooner of later we’re going to have to fight them at the barricades”. Around about that time, as it happens, I was at a big disruptive protest event, lasting several days, on Whitehall in London. The police, who had managed the protest throughout in a confrontational way, had pushed the protest down the road away from the entrance to Downing Street and erected a barricade of metal fences. There was a point at which a group of protestors initiated a surge to forcibly break through the barricades. Along with a couple of others, I talked them down and we swung the large crowd behind a renewed resolve to remain peaceful. If we hadn’t acted then I’m pretty sure enough momentum would have built behind the small group of people ready to use force and that the barricades would have been breached. At that time I was completely convinced that I was doing the right thing. I’ve often wondered since about what might have happened had I acted differently.
A Reluctant Activist 