R for Revolution

(photo from Cape Town Million Mask March – can’t find the photographer)

Amazed how off the ball the mainstream media was about the Million Mask March – I wasn’t in the loop (not a surprise, I’ve weaned myself off fast-news cycles and aren’t following as many Occupy/Anon feeds as I was a few years back), but started to see reports middle of last night, whereas here the BBC and others were essentially a news blackout. Maybe they were all at a Fireworks Party?

But I think like Occupy this is important, as is the sort-of Charity gagging law climb down – there’s a general feeling that many are extremely disaffected by modern politics, they see it as corrupt in the pockets of corporates and bankers, and unrepresentative of the people. Parliament is scared – not just of a V for Vendetta style uprising, but the fact that charities, single issue or lobbying organisations like 38 Degrees have much more membership than their paltry parties, are better organised and making real trouble for the MPs (oh bless). So they seek to gag them – amazingly for all their words of wanting more involvement or more democracy when it actually happens they try to stop it. I think this will backfire as an unholy coalition of diverse charities, political and lobbying orgs has already formed. There’s something in the air, and it’s not just the smell of gunpowder from all those bonfire parties. Be scared, be very scared indeed.

Funny I mentioned this to John and whether the Socialist Worker Party was there was mentioned…I LOL’d and said they are old politics, the far left don’t even have a clue how to use the new technology like these people do, or use memes to grab people’s attention in this increasingly social media world. Political symbolic acts, like the Turkey square protests, or Occupy, or Million Mask Marches are the next generation, the new way forward. No manifesto, no obvious leaders, no ‘what shall be done?’ because that really isn’t working, and those people end up power-broking to be kings, CEOs, happy-fed professional ‘activists’ or MPs (look at Galloway, Tatchell, Greer, Obama, Blair, Clegg…that list is endless…). Untrustworthy.

I’ve already said I think OccupyLSX failed to grow like the US as it was run by the same-old anarchist types, who knowledgable and talented, enforced their own old ideas of political involvement – by day 3 they had a ‘list of demands’. Too soon, not in the spirit of Occupy in the States, too easy to dismiss and put into a corner – the beauty of many of these movements is they don’t act like that. Like the people standing still in a square, it’s impossible to talk to a mass of people who stand up to be counted but won’t play their games.

Oh and while you’re cuddling up to the laptop to keep warm in winter, study this list of MPs who just voted to not support Labour’s motion to freeze energy bills. I bet THEY won’t be cold…