The government’s attempt to brand non-violent direct activists as “terrorists” has already backfired
~ Tabitha Troughton ~
This was the week when language in the UK temporarily gave up. At the bombing of Iran, the British people fell silent, or lapsed into incoherence, or sat in corners, clutching their heads. Trump and Netanyahu were classifiable, recognisable. But their own government’s behaviour—it was incomprehensible, indescribable. A word cloud of the British public’s mental state would have revealed, in flaming red letters: “Why?”
“War is peace. The attacker is the victim and non-violence is now terrorism” is no answer, but it’s the only one the public has been given. Gibberish is the inevitable result of attempts to justify a “defensive” attack by two nuclear armed states on a country which has no nuclear weapons, and was already negotiating. Blair took the long route to lie the country into an illegal war: his heirs are pressed for time, their bosses impatient, the propaganda correspondingly more bloodthirsty.
Into the baffled, horrified silence have whirled the screeching war trolls, on cue. “The enemy is within! Lock them up for life! Deport them! Kill them on sight”! The enemy being, in this case, for now, the non-violent direct action group Palestine Action, or anyone who expresses support for Palestine Action—while the US and its allies continue to ensure the need for its continued existence.
No-one believes that two peace activists spraying paint is “terrorism”, or that supporting them merits imprisonment, no matter which inanimate object they spray. Public nausea is not due to the government resorting to this nonsense—well, it would try, wouldn’t it—but due to the fact that people are expected to swallow it, just as they were told to swallow genocide or lose their jobs. “They’re traitors! They’re foreign agents! Iran’s a threat! Yes, it was Russia and China last week! Look over there – a non-violent terrorist”!
The squid ink of fantasy, lies, disinformation and confusion complements a reality where the government can no longer bear to speak about the genocide it continues, incredibly, to support. “We are all Palestine Action”, runs a current meme, which is something of an exaggeration. Kemi Badenoch and Nigel Farage are not Palestine Action, for example. But even they may, if there is another election, come to regret their gleeful support for Trump, whose initial bombing of Iran is already splitting the MAGA hierarchy, and further repulsing its voter base.
For the rest of us, the thought of the next election simply begs the question: are another four years of this tolerable? Is a day more of this tolerable? The answer—as emergency rallies break out nationwide, and London, like cities worldwide, continues to fill with vast, peaceful armies, and the Guardian’s letter page is taken over by politely furious correspondents expressing wholehearted support for Palestine Action—is clearly, “no”. It has never been tolerable. The system grinds barbarously and laboriously on, but its cogs are increasingly exposed; it falters: there are universal spanners in its works.
Image: Euan Sutherland
