After a fine evening on Saturday diving in the Menai Straits in the dark where Becka and I got caught in the tidal current, surfaced, and all the Liverpool students diving club heard me clearly say: "It's alright, I know where we are," before I began to swim to the wrong bank, we returned to Liverpool and got up at six in the morning to go to the Stop the War demonstration.
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Just what exactly is going on now? Why has our government chosen this moment to declare a state of emergency? We've got the most unbelievable "anti-terrorism" bill rushing through parliament at short notice without a trace of dissent. It contains over a hundred clauses, ranging from imprisonment without charge, to the legitimization of surveillance upon everyone, to the criminalization of many forms of protest. Soon it will be illegal to tell people that toxic nuclear material is being handled upwind of their cities, let alone complain about it. The people they will be targeting are very small in number, they say. These people are so evil that their evilness would not be apparent to judge and jury, of course, and, instead of being detained indefinitely, subject to six month reviews, they could always choose to be deported to another country so that they can do their evil elsewhere. Would it were so that this option was available to murderers and bank robbers, people would say it was unjust. This is in fact how our ruling classes are going to repatriate dissidents from other countries who are living in London and embarrassing their non-democratic allies. So much for the West being a "beacon of democracy". All active elements of democracy are now being redefined as "terrorism". Fine language. The fact that this bill is even being considered shows that we have lost our own democracy in all but name. Perhaps in honour of this we should rename our country, "The Democratic Monarchy of Great Britain", because it goes well with what was once the official name of East Germany.
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Indeed. Meanwhile, there is this amazing war going on where peasant farmers are getting blown up by cluster bombs. Neither us, nor our directly elected representatives get a say in the matter. This is not government by informed consent. There is nothing but the projection of ignorance and fear here. It breaks your heart. We are told to fear "terrorists". We have been shown no evidence whatsoever that the WTC bombings have anything to do with the Afghan people who are being killed by our military machine that was funded by our taxes specifically for the defence of our own country, and we aren't going to be, because there isn't any. The American pilot training scheme and privatized airport security played a much greater part in the facilitation of that disaster than any child of Afghanistan. What they are doing is illegal, and they are changing the rules now so that to investigate and assert that our government is acting illegally, will be illegal. At least in the Soviet Union the people knew their government had no credit, and was in fact the people's enemy with its secret police and detention without trial, coupled with strict control of the media. They knew the facts. Here, we still habitually give them credit which they do not deserve. We keep hoping for the best. We keep our eyes wide to the possibility that they know what they are doing, even as they take chances with the death of millions by an avoidable famine, with nuclear war, with unstable regimes. We keep giving them the benefit of the doubt. All they need to do is to maintain is a certain level of secrecy and confusion, to sow doubts about the fact that what they are perpetrating are acts of unjustifiable violence. We, ourselves, are conditioned into believing that, somehow, it could turn out to be all for the best. Within that village idiot of a president, for whom the American people did not vote, we pray there is a wise man who can tame the dogs of war wrought by misery and blatant injustice across the world, a feat which no man of sense would dare to attempt. It's like watching a seriously drunk driver go into town. The best that could happen is he gets lucky. His fate and the fate of his victims have gone too far. If he runs over a woman in the street who happens to be in his way, you may hope that he finds it in his heart to call an ambulance in time, when in fact he is more likely to take the opportunity to get out and kick her head in so she can't take him to court. Luck is our only escape now.
The bus driver was playing dreadful music at the front and I listened to my little radio. There was no mention of the demo, which would have started by now, except in the London traffic reports of possible congestion along the route of the march. That's pretty damn minimal reporting.
The bus was then held up in one of those gridlock scenarios, parked across a junction with the lights cycling through red, green, amber over and over again till many of us just wanted to get off and walk the rest of the way. But the driver was uncooperative, and kept us in.
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Finally, we broke through onto the Hyde Park Road, where the police were actually doing something useful in facilitating the demonstration, instead of getting in the way. Becka's first move when we got off the bus was to get away from all the others, rather than wait for them. It would be too boring to stay, she said. As I had won an earlier argument and got her to leave behind the caving ladder and rope behind on the bus which she wanted to carry as part of her costume, it was my turn to do as she said.
Out in the middle of the park, among the milling crowds, we put on our yellow PVC caving oversuits and wore our dirty caving helmets with their carbide lights attached (but no carbide). Who's going to recognize a pair of cavers in Hyde Park, I thought. No one outside Yorkshire knows what they look like. But loads of people kept asking for our photo to show to their caving friends back home.
On the drive down, we had still been colouring in our placarded signs. The night before, on the drive back from the Menai, we'd rustled up one slogan to put on a sign: "Don't lead us back to the Dark Ages". I liked it because it was caving related, seeing as it contained the word "Dark". I tried several other attempts to labour the theme of caving into a slogan, but couldn't get anything to work. I came up with other things, though. A haiku: "Tony Blair, Doesn't care, About where, This is leading." Then there was a more wordy: "Democracy is government by informed consent, not ignorance and fear." At the very last minute I was still facing a blank white placard with Becka rejecting my, "Witness to the Death of Democracy", (instead favouring her "Cavers against cluster bombing", which she drew on the cardboardy backside of her placard). I finally struck on the snappy: "Our democracy is dying".
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It was important for us to have our own signs, because the placard manufacturing operation they call the Socialist Worker was, as usual, going to be in force. They make branded signs that all look the same with their big bold black slogan of the day, such as, "Not in my name", and hand them out to everybody like lollypops. I don't like it. In my opinion, it's better to carry no sign, than one which is the same as everybody else's. It doesn't make you look free-thinking. After reading the same phrase over and over again, passers-by aren't going to read any more because they won't be interested. It's counter-productive, and I really think that people ought to come up with something from their own heart, or pick a favourite quote, if they choose to hold words above their head. Of what we saw, Becka liked: "History repeats itself history repeats itself history repeats itself history repeats..."
Meanwhile, the caving oversuits were proving somewhat more successful than anticipated. Not only were people complementing us on our originality (what? like it took any effort?), but the TV crews started homing in to us for interviews. Uh-oh. We were going to be exposed as nincompoops.
The lady holding the big microphone said: "So, explain to me the meaning of this caving theme." The big TV camera lens pressed against my face like a gold-fish bowl. I empathised slightly with George Bush when he has to ad-lib about something without an autocue, and clearly doesn't know what he is talking about. The difference between us is that he has been given extensive training from experts over the years of being a politician and is still utterly useless, while I have only read ZNet and Schnews for the past year or so and have never been on camera or had to address a gathering of any size before in my life.
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I was astonished by my performance. Luckily, I don't think there'll come another chance for this to go to my head. My basic line was that the war in Afghanistan has been going on for the past 20 years. I can still remember the Russian invasion and Ronald Reagan's response. George Bush Snr was the vice president then, and many of the men in his cabinet during his presidential term of office are still influential in Bush Jnr's cabinet. The same men are waging war in Afghanistan as they have done in the past. Would they do any different? "Who do you think should govern Afghanistan now?" she asked me. It would be nice if the Afghan people had a chance to govern themselves for a change. Maybe you should be asking them about it instead of me? No doubt some US sympathetic regime will be imposed under the guise of the UN to pick up the pieces. No other type of government will be tolerated. The Taliban was tolerated for the time they were living up to US interests. Whatever happens, you will never see a government come into power there who pours scorn on US actions to date, which have been, as it were, catastrophic. What is required of them is humble gratitude.
The next TV crew side-stepped me and went straight for Becka because she's better looking. I asked one of the Liverpool people who had found us, not surprisingly, whether they'd like to go on TV instead of us. One of them, who had a poem he wanted to read out on TV, said yes. In that case, why not borrow one of our suits. He borrowed Becka's, as she was still rattled from her TV baptism.
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Unfortunately, the march began to gather and our branch funnelled between crash barriers and a row of police horses pooing on the ground. It was too crowded for TV interviews. Nevertheless, our friend satisfied himself by running around distributing copies of his poem to pedestrians and to the people handing out leaflets on the sidelines. The leafleting got quite dense at times and was almost as bad as at a trade show where you get the feeling you could make money selling it back to a paper recycling plant if you walked around for long enough.
The march went on and on for miles more than I expected, down loads of expensive streets. It was loud. If you weren't beside one of the numerous samba bands, you were in among a group chanting slogans like a congregation in answer to a bullhorn ("They say warfare," "We say welfare") or wedged directly in front of a jazz saxophone. The street traders had sold bunches of pea whistles to the crowd, and things got noisy. The police were small in number and pretty well behaved, facilitating an orderly expression of protest rather than impeding it. Not like how they behaved at the DSEi where there were far fewer protestors and they could afford to riot. I did hear from somebody that there was an "anti-capitalist" block at the tail end of the march that were getting the full treatment of harassment and containment. There must be an important police commander somewhere in the ranks who thinks that this is what must be done. He is allowed to run riot with his own section of the police force as long as he doesn't make too much of a scene. Without democratic accountability, such as an effective Police Complaints Authority, there is no way to stop him. This year's anti-terrorism bill permits the totally unaccountable MoD police to be employed to make up police numbers where there is a shortfall, so their behaviour will get worse because there is no reason for it to get better.
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Finally, we entered Trafalgar Square which was packed with people standing on different levels, surrounding the pools of water. I stood on a pillar and got a good view, and it looked like one of those civil rights scenes at the Washington Monument. That movement won its battle, by the way.
Becka was getting cold and asked to have her oversuit back. We sat on the road and spooned a few furtive mouthfuls of spinach curry to stave off our hunger pangs. It was the first day of Ramadan, so the Muslims were fasting until sundown at 4:20pm. We were supposed to meet our bus at Embankment at five.
We went down in the square to listen to the speeches. There was a good one by Paul Marsden, the previously undistinguished backbench MP who was one of a mere handful to have dissented against the government line and actually represent what is quite an important constituency at large in the country, motivated enough to demonstrate in large numbers. Of course, we expect him to be deselected by The Party before the next election because dissention in parliament cannot be tolerated. Heavens, they might actually faithfully represent the public interest, for a change. Instead, we have to live under this Singapore-style party machine charade which they pretend to us in some way approximates democracy, so if we don't happen to like the result, we should shut up, because otherwise we are just being anti-democratic, they say.
John Pilger made a short speech too, about what is going to happen next. It is no wild conspiracy theory either. Dick Cheney, the US vice president, has told us to prepare for a conflict that may last beyond our lifetime. Pilger thinks the administration will return to pick on the second most impoverished country in the world, Somalia, as Bush Snr did during his term of office, as a warm-up exercise prior to the final destruction of the nation of Iraq.
To destroy a nation requires massacre on a large scale. It is an art that has been practised over and over again with varying degrees of success, or lack thereof, throughout the world, by massive torture and genocide. The process has not been perfected in modern times. They'll keep trying it until they do. Eighty years of Soviet rule, including 30 years of Stalin, did not erase the constituent nations within the Soviet Union, though they tried. That must have been a blow to those who hoped it was possible. The US was founded on the back of the wholesale destruction of the native American tribes who lived on the land before. It's hard to muster that kind of violence these days, though, where they wielded guns against arrows, exterminated the bison, the food of the plains Indians, and the new world's susceptibility to the old world plagues of small pox and influenza had softened them up during the previous century (although AIDS is doing a sterling job in Africa today).
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No: Violence does not appear to achieve results. (Neither does the Death Penalty, for that matter, but that doesn't stop the politicians from trying.) The United States is the only nation in danger of losing its life today. But it will die by its own hand. Its government has institutionalized corruption to such a large extent with its campaign contributions and pork barrel bills that we no longer think of it as a disgrace. Their constitution has been violated at every level from the very process of presidential election and the bill of rights, down. As far as tax, welfare, law inforcement and the meaning of a national budget, they have just lost it. They keep throwing big money around at suits like a dot-com company, while much of their working class is under-educated and in poverty. At some stage it just won't work any longer. Something will have to give. When they start falling into that military hole where all of the taxes raised from the people are going towards fighting wars on the other side of the globe rather than into anything like welfare, maybe some of the bordering states will feel they could have a better life outside the Union. The Free State of New York would not send bombs to Asia, that's for sure. They might send gifts of charity and support, as small nations can do. Only large nations can afford to export large-scale violence. Maybe the world would be better without them.
Back to the reporting. There has been some arguing about the size of the crowd there. The BBC quoted 15,000 which is a serious underestimate and opens them up to the accusation of bias. The upper estimates are 100,000, but I don't know, having never seen a crowd that was properly counted against which to benchmark my visual observations. Some people have made parallels with the protests against the Vietnam War in the 1970s. Then, the word was "Communism", now it is "Terrorism". We know now that that war, even from the point of view of the president who started it, Lyndon Johnson, was absolutely unjustified. The records of his administration have been released. Three million killed and poisoned. A generation in America traumatised for nothing. This shit really happens. Last month, Bush Jnr. signed an order to ban the automatic publication of the records from Ronald Reagan's administration, which covered the time when this war in Afghanistan was begun and people like Osama bin Laden were first mobilized by the CIA.
We left the Square, making sure to stay close to someone from our bus with a mobile phone. This was lucky because the driver had parked up on Millbank instead of Embankment where he should have been. Liverpool arrival was at 11pm. And so, to bed.