As I’ve said in comments on a few posts at other sites, the people who stage “protests” that block access to roads, railway stations, public buildings, and hospitals depend on the reactions of the people being mild, civilized, calm, and peaceful. But the more often these sorts of antics are performed, the thinner that veneer of civilization gets worn. At some point, and sooner than the organizers may realize, the veneer is gone and instead of peaceful commuters you’re disrupting, it’s a mob … and mobs don’t obey civilized rules like “thou shalt not kill”:
Those two were lucky that there was still some restraint being felt by the commuters. But it’s a clear warning sign that may not be attended to:
Extinction Rebellion, though it professes to be anti-Establishment, embodies the left-liberal values of the current Establishment hegemony.
That]s why rarely, if ever, will you hear anyone in government criticising Extinction Rebellion’s ideology, only its methods.
Then again, as one Conservative Brexiteer once told me, you can only fight a war on so many fronts. “Of course I know the whole climate change thing is bollocks,” he said – or words to that effect. “But I can only marshal my forces for one major battle at a time and that battle right now is Brexit.”
That’s how politicians have to think, it’s the nature of politics. Even the great Donald Trump has to play by these rules: look, for example, at how he has chickened out of having a red-team/blue-team scientific debate on global warming.
Happily, though, ordinary people are not constrained by such rules. There comes a point where they simply say to themselves:
“Sod this for a game of soldiers. I really don’t care whether what I’m about to do is wise or expedient or even legal, come to that. I’m just sick to the back teeth of what’s happening to my country. It’s wrong. It feels wrong. And if the system that is supposed to look after the interests of decent, law-abiding, productive citizens will no long protect the interests of decent, law-abiding, productive citizens then I guess I’ll have to take the law into my own hands.”
Which is exactly what happened at Canning Town Station in the East of London this week.
For months, on and off, Extinction Rebellion activists have been playing havoc with the lives of ordinary people who thought the law was supposed to protect them and their livelihoods from the kind of direct action that Extinction Rebellion and its apologists keep reassuring us is peaceful and in our best interests.
Grudging tolerance has gradually given way to a simmering sense of injustice: “How can it be”, ordinary folk have started to wonder, “that these privileged wanktards with their pointless degrees in Environmental Sciences and Advanced Poi are free to build pyramids at Oxford Circus and block Westminster Bridge when if I tried it I’d get myself chucked in jail?”
That simmering sense of injustice is now erupting into acts of rebellion — real rebellion, not Extinction Rebellion’s state-protected faux-rebellion — like the one in Canning Town Station.
Something very similar is happening with people’s feelings about Brexit: “How can it be right that we live in democracy which refuses to honour a popular vote? Surely honouring a popular vote is the most basic requirement. And if it doesn’t do that, then democracy has failed and we need to start looking at other ways of making our feelings known.”
