Resistance is educating people about their options, about the consequences of their actions, about the truth of the havoc our luxury lifestyle plays out in the rest of the world, about the self-serving nature of politics and the realities of advertising.

Resistance is saying NO to disrespectful behaviour and the subjugation of ‘others’, petitioning against slavery in all its forms, striking over working conditions, marching for an end to the war, picketing arms manufacturers, boycotting unethical companies.

Resistance is standing together, using our voices and actions to let the money grubbers know that we can see what they’re doing and we don’t like it.

Resistance is pushing back, slowly but surely. Reapportioning ’power’ so we all have an equal share, so that we can decide if we need a 4×4, eyelash extensions, nuclear war, carbon capture technology, exams every year, a national deficit of billions. Resistance is readdressing equality for all and bringing our global system to the point where we finally realise that to harm our brothers and sisters is to harm oneself.

I’ve heard a few arguments for violent revolution (mostly the Socialist Worker’s Party pamphlet What Do We Mean by Revolution?, oh, and Marx) and they seem to boil down to this; impatience. Impatience with cloth-eared, unchanging, uncaring governments. Impatience with people who don’t understand or don’t want to listen. Impatience in getting a movement together, and learning to work together. Impatience with themselves and the subjugation they still must undergo until the system changes.

Violence speeds things up. After all, the ruling classes, the political oppressors, managerial subjugators can’t rule, oppress and subjugate when they’re burning in their beds. The sheep pen and muzzle the wolves; death, imprisonment, exile, toil, torture. There must be punishment. The oppressed must exhibit their new power by pushing the ex-leaders down in the mud with cries of ‘We can do it too!’ and ‘How do you like that?!’ A violent revolution negates any pretence that the oppressed believe in equal rights for all people. A violent revolution says ‘equal rights for our sort, for people we deem worthy’. A violent revolution encourages US versus THEM mentality. The oppressed become the oppressors.

What of those as-yet uneducated by the revolutionaries? As their system crumbles around them and the new leaders fumble with the country’s mechanics, jerking it along, will they understand the needs to be supportive or will they demand the despots return – those who enabled X-factor and cheap microwave ovens? How will they be dealt with? Since they don’t yet understand for themselves that we need to become self-sufficient and work our own land, what will the process of re-education be for them? Will they be forced to change their ways by the anarcho-hippys in power? Made to reduce fuel consumption and give up porn which subjugates and objectifies women? Without understanding of why these are necessary changes it will only appear as though extremists are out to steal their fun and make life difficult. A new resistance will be created; swooping power stations to turn the turbines back on, demonstrations with bouncing placards bearing bleached bottoms, cows being kept in secret for slaughter…The system, the idea that we deserve this lifestyle, is so well ingrained in people’s minds that they would feel oppressed, not freed, were they to be forcibly unshackled from it. And rightly so, for it would not have been their choice.

The nature of the system is such that revolution can only come about through resistance. Resistance is to exert an equal amount of force to the force upon you. There will, and is, fighting. Some of it violent. When people push at you, PUSH BACK, but aiming to overpower and thus deprive others totally of power, will breed resentment on their side. Whether politicians, police, post office workers or poi spinners, we all have equal power over ourselves and none over others. Resist arrest, but if you don’t fancy being beaten bloody by a cop, don’t fucking do it to them.

Resistance is a long and slow process, starting with one person making a decision, taking an action, encouraging others to consider their lives. A vegetable patch will not grow at the click of a finger. Most people don’t give up meat in a day. Dropping out of the system and working towards another takes time, but each person who commits themselves to it does so whole-heartedly and with full comprehension. They find a niche to fill; farmer, educator, builder, facilitator, and we each have a role to play.

We need to resist. We need to make these changes for ourselves, by ourselves, together. We need to show others that it can be done, ALL others. We need to work outside the laws and trust ourselves. We need to get in people’s faces with our actions. We need to keep this revolution going one garden, one house, one street, one village, one town, one city, one county, one country, one continent, one world at a time.

Everywhere we step, images and adverts and people and articles are out to make us feel guilty. Diet foods make us feel guilty for wanting a doughnut, charity muggers play on our emotions to benefit starving Africans, environmentalists tut at out wasting of resources, Facebook lets us know when we miss birthdays, the internet makes us feel bad for not knowing everything about everything, mobiles mean we have no excuse to be out of reach…and on, and on. I haven’t even mentioned the Church, for whom guilt is currency.

Guilt is an emotional human reaction based on the desire for everybody to feel love and be happy. It is easy to manipulate, and the media, charities, schools and other institutions all try. For most of us, this results in guilt-overload and massive inaction. A mere jaunt down the High Street, past Big Issue sellers, charity muggers, and adverts featuring perfect figures and fat-reduced food makes me want to hide under a rock with Bring It On and a spliff, closing my mind to all the cries of help I feel powerless to do anything about.

I want more guilt. More people need to feel more guilty about what they’re doing in order to become kinder, more generous, loving and thoughtful.

Thanks Aniela.

There is a huge difference between having guilt-inducing information and images thrust into ones mental space and having a personal reaction of guilt to an event. Constructive guilt is what bubbles inside you when you forget your brother’s birthday, run late to meet a friend, or your housemate’s hamster dies in you care. You recognise how you’ve created the situation, and you know you have to rectify it. Apologise, reimburse, whatever whoever you have affected wants from you (within reason, obviously.)

All those manifestations of guilt in the first paragraph are constructed guilt. An outside influence trying to make you feel guilty in order to further their own agenda; be it your boss who demands you check in with the office on weekends (you have the internet, after all) or a hundred photos of super-slim women holding 99 calorie snack bars (because doughnuts are sold by evil witches! so you’re bad if you have one. Yeah.).

Fuck that.

So much of what we feel guilty about has no relevance to us, and we’re not going to do anything about anyway. How much energy do we waste avoiding the eyes of charity workers in case they try to talk to us? Or worrying about whether we should change up our cars for a ‘greener’ model?

Guilt without action is wasted energy. Your choices are to either reject the guilt, or do something. Here we go.

Reject any guilt which feels like an obligation. Don’t listen to the SHOULD inside your head. Trust that you are a good person who doesn’t need outside influences to keep morally in line. You are capable of doing wildly loving, benevolent and generous actions without feeling shit about what you’re NOT doing first.

Take a look inside your head.

What do you feel guilty about right now?

Does this feeling come from outside influences? Is it a situation which you can improve, or rectify? Do you want to do what it would take to assuage the guilt?

If the word SHOULD appears in any of your answers, tell it to piss off and remember that you don’t need authority, or somebody else’s rules, to be a loving, caring, empathetic person. Without the draining energy of constructed guilt, it is possible, if not more likely, that you will do more – take more positive actions about a situation – than when you feel overwhelmed by everything you SHOULD care about.

Have faith in yourself; Go forth and love the world.

Throwaway Literature, for anybody who has read the About page began life as a lil ‘zine wherein I wrote & ranted about whatever occured to me. I believe the first issue asked the question ‘What Is Love?’ and sported a quote from Belle & Sebastian on the cover. The more recent issue, #5, covers the events of two summers ago, travails in Italy & Broadstairs, plus festival fun & frolics.

Two years later, & four months in the making, I have a slim volume for you to peruse. I write about Metamorphosis; the changes I went through while cocooned in a coach for twenty four hours, whether we should strive to change ourselves or not & there’s a neat little photo-collage of the changing nature of Barcelona’s much graffitted streets among other stories from my travels & tribulations.

It’s free to download here and will be appearing in print form sooner or later also. If you would like the print version pdf, just drop me a line & I’ll wizz it over to you. So that’s FREE to download here.

It would be wonderful to get some feedback from you guys about this, since I plan to be putting a new one out quarterly from now on.

Madrid was a bit of a strange one for me. These guys seriously love their ornamental cauliflowers, for a start, but also, it rained quite a lot & I could not gear myself up to do an awful lot. I went to the Retiro park a lot & the Reina Sofia art gallery, which I loved but didn’t take any photos of. It seems silly to me to take photos of art.

More, more, a few more over at Flickr.

Amelia

Hot damn, Paris is one of my favourite cities. The Eiffel Tower haunted me at every turn, I traipsed through cemetaries in the snow & blitzed past hollow-eyed skulls whilst discussing relationship dysfunction with one of my favourite peoples, we chilled out surrounded by aging, page-crinkled tomes, sipped café express in street-corner cafés & solved the world’s problems. I tried a hookah pipe & did not speak hardly enough French, lost my train ticket to Madrid & spent a night drinking on the steps of the Sacre-Coeur, took more photos of graffiti than people & went to the loo on a building site. I walked around Paris, linking the districts together, becoming lost & cold & wet & still marvelling at being in the deliciously French town. I ate a lot of bread.

More at my Flickr. Next week…Madrid.

Amelia

Few quick pictures of Paris where we blitzed through the catacombs, tramped through Pere Lachaise in the snow, hit up Hemingway’s old haunts and I got stuck. More on that story, later…

Amelia

Chaos is often used as a synonym for anarchy; which touchingly goes to show how much faith we have in our current world leaders. Anarchy, from the Greek, means ‘without ruler’ and the obvious result of a leaderless society would be crime, war, human rights violations and terrorism – a world apart from the one we inhabit today.

Everybody would be grasping after power and land, there would be no police to enforce the ‘correct’ way of living and nothing to stop people doing exactly as they wanted – and what everybody always wants is MORE with no thought to the cost of others, right?

To be without a ruler assumes that each and every person in the world has the right to govern their own life.

It follows, therefore, that if you believe that, then you believe that everybody ELSE has the right to govern their own life, and that you have no right to enforce a mode of living onto other people. This also means that nothing you do can impinge on anybody else’s choice of living. So if you want twelve-hundred Mercedes, they are going to be made by people who are happy and fulfilled in making Mercedes, for a price which accurately reflects the time and effort which has gone into making each car.

I have a lot (a LOT) to say on this subject, but for now let’s consider;

There is no need for anybody to have any power. Each and every person in the world has the right to govern their own life.

What do you think?

Amelia

Sunday morning I awoke and foraged for breakfast, discovering the most delicious vegan dark chocolate spread which tasted EXACTLY like the insides of pain au chocolat. I noshed on that and had some quite time reading my book before the morning over-view of Saturday’s events.

Aside from yet-more-talking, Marina was organising some direct action training that morning, so I decided to go out and get muddy down by the river. We did do radio training; learning to use radios during actions. It’s not just about turning on and having a listen, you know. We split into two teams and played Capture the Flag where each team has a flag (surprise) and the aim of the game is to, okay, there’s a clue in the name. We hid ours under a bridge, planning to use it as a bottleneck for the other team, a plan which was a little foiled when they approached from the other side of the river. Three of us, ‘White-Home’ stayed to protect the flag, and I was among the three who ventured towards the other camp, ‘White-Outreach’.

As we understood the rules at first, the opposing team could be tagged and would then be unable to move – a rule which worked in our favour when Martha (Red-Home) received a message calling for back-up while guarding my stationary self, so I was able to shout to Charlie for her to warn White-Home of their intentions. However, all three of us did end up stuck until Marina clarified that only the person holding the flag could be tagged. We wandered through their camp after that, Charlie eventually discovered the flag tucked into a tree stump and Elise from White-Home joining us. After some trial and error, another rule mix-up and me getting cracked in the head by somebody else’s, we formed a sort of relay group, throwing the flag as we were tagged. The rules were then clarified once again; when the flag carrier was tagged, the flag was to be returned to base.

Upon the return of the flag, Charlie and Maia decided it would be a good technique to switch-up with the boys, leaving Elise and I to watch one of the Red team rush with our white flag up to the Heart of Reeds – with Dan in swift pursuit! – but ultimately winning.

We had a debriefing session, then headed back to Pop-Up for lunch. (I may expand on the radio learnings in another post). More delicious food was on offer, this time potato soup and phat slices of crusty bread. Can I live at Climate Camp please? According to Alice though, sometimes the food can be dire.

I ended up at ‘Reception’ after lunch, in case of doorbell and new arrivals. Elise kept me company briefly and we discussed whether anything would be decided that afternoon as so much was going on aside from the meetings – quite a few people were out learning bushcraft in the afternoon or filming with Tom and his masks, and that morning most of the people who would have wanted to talk about direct action were out learning about doing it!

However, I feel that a lot did get covered in the end. Joining in the Outreach and Community group back in the meeting there were exciting actions on course to be implemented such as a South Coast Website, an environmental book group with talks and discussion, getting trained up to give talks and workshops at schools and community centres, creating press resource and teaching resource packs and running a blog to name, well, most of them.

We came together at the end to voice proposals, create working groups for particular actions and gauge consensus. Tom presented on the idea of Climate Carnival (!!) – a mass of masks, costumes and wheels tobe carted around the country on actions, providing an eye-catching creative space and generally being awesome. Very exciting. No specifics are in place yet, but there was a further meeting after I left. Direct Action put forward some targets and eventually created an ‘as and when’ working group for when people are involved in particular actions, the specifics of which need not be made public even within Climate Camp – although anyone can ask for the information.

To wind up the weekend there were some temperature checks on where people want to focus their energy, National or Regional and on having National or North + South or South Coast camp(s). I went for National and North/South (respectively), although since Kent is hugely under-represented despite having ‘hosted’ a Climate Camp at Kingsnorth I think I probably will try to focus my energies regionally and try to drum up some interest down around here.

And that was my weekend at Climate Camp South Coast Regional Gathering. Hopefully I’ll be getting involved with some community outreach tings and and and actually going out and doing actions instead of just sitting around being vegan and going on about that. Not that I’m going to stop going on about being vegan. But hey, you can be vegan AND rush power stations! So here’s to wanting something done and DOING IT YOURSELF instead of waiting for the government to step in and take over. COP15 proved pretty conclusively that they’re just going to fanny around waiting for somebody else to acquiesce to having less ‘power’ first, so fuck ‘em, don’t do what they tell you and DO IT FOR YOURSELF.

Amelia.

Climate Camp is

a fast growing grassroots movement of diverse people taking action of climate change

which began in August 2006 when 600 people gathered at Drax, a coal-fired power station in West Yorkshire for a ten day camp or learning and sustainable living, culminating in a day of mass action against the station. This is the first year that there have been regional gatherings and so last weekend, the 23rd and 24th of January, I popped down to Lewes, near Brighton, hoping to meet some like-minded people, learn things and get involved in doing something about this environmental mess we find ourselves in.

As well as being the first South Coast gathering, it was also my first involvement in anything Climate Camp-y, and so I headed down Lewes High Street towards Pop Up studios, housed in the old fire station, with some apprehension. As I rounded the corner of the studios a mock protest was being carried out, with people shouting as they were faux-arrested. I slid inside and arrived at the reception – a table on the stairs with a sign up sheet and a donation bucket. A couple of very amicable women met me and showed me where to dump my stuff and grab a bite to eat. Alone, I explored, discovering the balcony where I sat for a while and contemplated the view. A few others had popped out for to do the smoking, and I got chatting to them about the morning’s events (which I had missed due to extended circumstances leading to me arriving from East London, not Brighton).

Saturday morning had involved discussions of the positives and negatives of Climate Camp then coming up with different areas which needed attention. In the afternoon we went through these, splitting into six or seven groups to further discuss the aims and values, community, outreach, direct action and the national/regional/international links. Each facilitator came around the groups with their A3 piece of paper from the morning’s groups. And so! We discussed.

At anarchist meetings there is lots and lots of talking, and sometimes it does seem as if the talking will never end. Every point needs to be discussed, worked into a proposal and considered by whoever is present. This is one of the things which makes anarchy such a wonderful system (anti-system?) as only those who agree with an action need take it forward and everybody has their say, if they want it, with nobody able to grasp after or hog power, since if people don’t agree with your proposal, they simply won’t do it.

We spent most time talking about the Values of Climate Camp, deciding that anti-capitalism is pro-cooperative and then chatted for a while about whether a member of the BNP would be welcome, considering one of the values was ‘inclusive’. I think yes, so long as they were there for the reasons Climate Camp exists.
Outreach also yielded interesting ideas, a lot of which linked in with the later Community discussion. Suggestions made were mostly to do with raising awareness and educating people, getting more people involved with Climate Camp and other environmental actions, and, maybe most importantly, providing practical solutions to the issues we are educating people about. As a few pointed out, information about the environment can often be overwhelming and people are unaware about further action they can take other than turning taps off and recycling. More regional gatherings and community events were suggested, with a very exciting idea coming out of that…
I mostly listened during these discussions to gauge the kind of ideas being propagated and the enthusiasm of the participants. I did chime in on the BNP topic though, as how people treat and think about that party is a choice rant of mine.
At the same time as these discussions there was a seminar happening on the uses of social media, mostly twitter, for planning and during direction action, as well as awareness raising tools. There was an AWFUL LOT happening over the weekend, often at the same time, so people were frequently popping in and out of the discussions.

Dinner that evening was a delicious vegan squash and potato curry which was so good and very filling. All the food served at Climate Camp events is vegan, and I believe most of the attendees were vegetarian, although I didn’t go out of my way to discuss people’s eating habits (for once!).

That evening we watched a couple of films; Composting Capitalism and Dr Seuss’ The Lorax. Composting Capitalism was filmed in Copenhagen during COP15, and has an overview of the event, interviews with local people – including one of the founder’s of Cristiania – and sections from the People’s Forum. It is well worth and watch and can be found here on YouTube. The creator’s website is here.
I had never heard of The Lorax before. It’s a rhymed cartoon about capitalism and deforestation and such. Very sad! The lorax loses his habitat and all his friends when the Once-ler decides to use the Truffula trees to make thneeds and thus, destroys the local environment. It really made me need a thneed…

I headed out onto the balcony again to collect my thoughts and managed to get locked out! Upon re-entry, I sat with Alice and Elise who were discussing Alice’s squat (in the old museum of childhood in London!) and all the actions they’d been on and WWOOFing they’d done. Alice was delighted to learn that Elise and I were newer to Climate Camp than she, Elise having gone to a meeting for the first time the Tuesday previous and that weekend being my first contact. Apparently most people go to national camp or take part in an action. Alice went to the Blackheath camp in August as her first thing, then went down to VESTAS, before hitting up Trafalgar Square for Cop Out, Camp Out, after which she went to Copenhagen and then she slept for the best part of a month. After listening, agape, we went and got some popcorn, donned endangered-animal masks so Tom could film us dancing (I’m not entirely sure what he does with the footage, but I got to be a panda!), and chatted into the night. Tom’s masks are absolutely beautiful papier-mache creations which he makes to take on actions, all except the penguin which he claims somebody else made and is, actually, scary.

And that was Saturday! Tune in on Thursday for Sunday’s events.

Amelia