Bronze & Celluloid

A lot can happen in a week.

Black Lives Matter. The protests continue until real, actual change happens. So it should be. For a sense of scale - George Floyd was killed on 25th May, 20 days ago at time of writing.

For comparison, the Freedom Riders protest lasted for 7 months, between May and December of 1961, to protest the enforced segregation of public transport under Jim Crow laws. (If you don't know what that means - go take a read.) Pictured is what the white supremacists in Anniston AL did to the bus, for the apparent crime of deliberately not segregating passengers.

I don't know if anyone reading this blog is the kind of person that thinks the Civil Rights movement was in the wrong... but if you are, kindly, don't read my blog any more.

As mentioned. A lot can happen in a week.

An autonomous area of Capitol Hill in Seattle seems to be doing okay, despite Fox News (who haven't actually been there, according to those actually present) painting it as a remake of Red Dawn or Escape From New York. (Escape From Chaz sounds like a game that most people I know played in college.)

Protests are ongoing, continue to draw in large crowds, are usually pretty peaceful. Police in the US are starting to take out reprisals on people that have been marked as being at protests.

A bunch of media companies have decided that the racism inherent in their properties is, all of a sudden, not something they want people streaming, so it's been pulled down. This is apparently literally the fault of the protesters, depending on who you ask. As if five guys in bandannas walked into HBO's head office and refused to release the hostages until it was taken down.

And a statue of someone that most people had never heard of went for a swim in Bristol harbour.

There's him being pulled out by the lifeguards.

Let's be clear, here. There's been multiple petitions and attempts to get the statue removed by more legitimate and less upset-the-neighbours means. This was just the moment when people decided that the red tape wasn't necessary any more; that Edward Colston didn't deserve that statue any more, and that it was time to do something about it.

Edward Colston - a slave trader and merchant, a Tory MP, who lived in the late 17th and early 18th centuries, dying in 1721. He was heavily involved in the Royal Africa Company, who enslaved at least 84,000 human beings for profit, and shipped them across the ocean. Nearly 20,000 of them died en route, and would have been unceremoniously dumped overboard, potentially even into the harbour that his statue took a dip in.

Yes. That statue. See, it wasn't put up during his lifetime. Despite it allegedly being for his philanthropy and all the good work he apparently did - small change for a man made fat and wealthy from the blood of innocents - nobody really seemed to care enough about him to put up a statue until 1895. Long enough that he and everyone he knew was definitely dead and gone; long enough to paint a rosy picture of the man. That way, none of those nice Victorian folk would have to think too hard about a bunch of their wealth coming from selling human beings like beads and cloth.

The thing about a statue - the real thing about it, rather than a plaque, or an entry in a historical society or museum - is that it is meant to imply a certain amount of reverence, or respect. Certainly the Colston one was. This wasn't the shameful display of a man made rich off the literal backs of human beings. This was a man who was being displayed as a pride of the community, a charitable philanthropist whose former crimes are wiped away because a small percentage of his fortune was spent on local causes, for whatever reason. That's what the statue was for.

Talk about virtue signalling.

So when Boris Johnson says that taking down statues "lies about our history", you'll forgive me for maybe thinking that he is talking directly out of his arse. His statement - just like the statue itself - is just a cover-up. Just like all the shows currently being pulled from streaming services. Just a sleight of hand, a smokescreen.

See... this stuff that has been pulled - the old episode of Fawlty Towers with the racial slurs, the blackface episodes of various and sundry comedies (I use that term loosely in the case of Little Britain) - these things were racist when they came out. These things weren't cool when they came out. It can be said about Gone With The Wind that it was "of its time", and yeah it was, but people in the late 30s still knew what racism was, and still knew that when they were doing something racist, they were doing racist shit. And that doesn't excuse Little Britain. I mean come on.

(To cover the basics now. Yes, blackface is racist. No, "White Chicks" isn't just as bad, and even if it is, that's one movie in the face of thousands of examples of blackface being used to denigrate and disrespect people. Here's a video that will do a better job of explaining why than I can.)

These shows, these movies, knew what they were doing when they did it. They have remained in place and unchanged for decades. It is now, and only now, that their rights holders and distributors have made the decision to pull their availability on streaming services. Not because they have suddenly realised that they were in the wrong - not because they turned on the news and saw the protests and had a sudden change of heart - but because they're afraid of looking bad.

That isn't change. That's nervousness. That's squeamishness. That's hand-wringing, and it's the same hand-wringing that people do when they see the statue of a slave trader torn down. It's discomfort.

But it also means they don't have to have the actual conversation. They don't have to take a look at themselves, as corporate entities and as people, and address the real problem. And that's what's important, right? Anything to avoid having The Conversation.

This will probably prompt eye-rolling and dismissal, but whatever. The truth is the truth. Racism isn't just yelling slurs at people. It's deeper than that, it runs very deep indeed. It is systemic, and it has very real repercussions.

It's because the government, and the media that is supporting it, has described the Black Lives Matter protests as riots - and the reactionary far-right riots yesterday as protests.

So I will leave you with this picture from Reuters photographer Dylan Martinez, of a Black Lives Matter protester carrying one of the aforementioned far-right individuals away from a rather tense looking struggle.

Imagine that this mob of angry white men is stood there, in the street. They hate you. They despise you. They want to beat you, hurt you, maybe kill you. They think you are subhuman scum. They want you out of their country, despite the fact that you were almost certainly born here.

And then one of them goes down in the street scuffle, and is hurt.

So you carry him out of harm's way.

And you're still the bad guy.

Just... imagine that.

I'm not going to plug my Patreon right now. Instead I'm going to ask if you'd consider making a small donation to the UK BLM GoFundMe. It's a better cause than I am.

If you know what's at stake, stay strong. If you don't, do the reading and find out.

Justice for Breonna Taylor. Justice for Tony McDade. Black Lives Matter.

They've Got Skulls On Them

I am sure that all of us know at least one person that, observing the Black Lives Matter protests, expressed confusion. Not outright opposition, not mealy-mouthed "but think of the bricks", no; just confusion. There might, likewise, be confusion as to why people might be protesting against the actions of government - not just in the UK or the US, either.

Well. Let's take a look at a comedy sketch by Mitchell & Webb.

Though a lot of people I know won't have to click the play button. They'll just have to look at thumbnail and they will remember the entire thing.

I've probably used this before, but this is for a different purpose today.

Yesterday, 6th June, was the 76th anniversary of the D-Day landings. Now, we talk about that a lot, as part of our history. It's become emblematic, and we forget a lot of things surrounding it, bring in a lot of details that are only obvious in hindsight. Example: we weren't fighting the Nazis to put an end to the death camps. Sorry. We just weren't. The Soviets wouldn't come across Majdanek until a month and a half later, and when they told the rest of the Allies what they found, they were mostly ignored.

Nonetheless, World War 2 informed our media - and imagery used in our media - for generations. Not just the actual stylistic choices of the German army, the SS, etc, but also the propaganda used by all sides. It informed swathes of media as to what was menacing, what certain colours and fashions could imply.

This meant that every single person reading this was probably raised on a whole lot of media that broadcast to you who the bad guy was.

Like this.

I mean it's obvious, right? I know you know who these people are, you have outside context, but at the same time. Like. Homie on the far left is clearly the bad guy advisor, big shoots with the helmet is some kind of overboss, and despite the fact that she's wearing the same shade as everyone else, it's kind of heavily implied that bun-lass isn't on the same side as the dudes in identical total-concealment skull helmets.

They're called Stormtroopers.

And there's just one example. An obvious symbol of oppressive authority. There's no doubt who the good guys or the bad guys are in this.

Back in high school I thought I was oh so clever because I'd say stuff about the Empire having done nothing wrong. I cringe at that, now. Of course it's done shit wrong. It's an empire, and its enforcement and military is a totally unaccountable force of heavily armed faceless bastards named Stormtroopers. (I mean yes it is also run by an evil dark wizard but you know)

Here's the Peacekeepers from Hunger Games.

Right?

I know that the entire point in a movie, a comic book or a TV show is to have an immediate distinct visual that tells you something about who these individuals are. There has to be an element of telegraphing that happens. You can't just have the bad guys look like the good guys, or you won't be able to build a sense of distrust and fear between the faceless army and the handsome protagonists.

That's the mythology we are sold; the notion that we will always be able to see the bad guys coming - and that our friends will always agree who the bad guys are, because they are injurious to ALL of us, not just in an overarching "injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere" sense but in a "with my death ray I will end your world" sense.

That's the world that people have been raised in for three generations, the fictional shorthand of our modern mythology that repeats itself over and over - in science fiction, in fantasy, in the pale white milky world of the magical school which we won't discuss further.

So you're raised to believe that you will always know your enemy when you see them - and you are raised without being educated as to actions that our nations and our governments have undertaken in the past, which would show you that, sometimes, the bad guys can just take their hats off and pretend they weren't bad guys at all. Or they'll pick up a kiddy and pretend that they're doing the right thing.

Ooooh you bastard.

And then it turns out that your friend has identified a set of bad guys. That you were either unaware of or don't necessarily agree with, because they don't look like bad guys, and they've never been mean to you, so - surely...?

Because we have been told, for a long time, that the enemy will be signposted. That they will kick the puppy, they will show up to the tune of ominous music, they will be constantly threatening. Whereas, the law enforcement of the real world are clearly nice people, because yet more generations of media and society has told us so.

I myself have never experienced any harassment by law enforcement, and whenever I have had to deal with them, they have always been respectful and courteous. Aside from whenever I have passed through customs, wherein I have been treated like a criminal, probably because I have a beard and an Arabic surname, but I digress. I recognise that me being treated by that way is a privilege, and that me never having to fear a police officer actually harming me is likewise.

I have had the privilege of learning at a distance, rather than having to adapt to a situation I am forced to be in.

Which is why, I think, so many people balk at general anti-police sentiment. Because the police, to them, isn't some faceless oppressive force, it's that bloke that gave them a bottle of water that time they were drunk in Uni.

Which means they don't have a great way to square this in their head.

The Lincoln Memorial, earlier this week.

Admittedly I believe these folks are National Guard - I could be wrong. The fact is that a military force has been called in to manage what was a civil process, which began with a peaceful socially-distanced protest against a police murder, is not lost on me.

Sometimes your enemy will be an entire process. It won't be eight dudes wearing masks and toting guns - though sometimes it will be. Sometimes your enemy will be a system that allows those that are a part of it to kill and harm people with little threat of punishment or oversight, and the system already includes a swathe of people who are more than willing to do that to you. Sometimes because of the colour of your skin, your gender, your sexuality, your religion. Sometimes just because they're fucking mean.

A system with a large PR budget, centuries of racism to buoy public opinion on its side, and a large supply of tear gas and rubber bullets.

It doesn't look the way most people have been taught it will look - but it's the reality of the situation. It is what is happening, right now.

That's why it is important, at the bare minimum, to not look away. Even if you don't march, even if you don't help, even if you don't donate, even if you don't combat misinformation, even if you don't amplify voices or causes - the bare minimum you can do, is not look away.

Rather than ask you to look up my Patreon or similar I would ask my readers to consider donating to one of the orgs listed below. These are all provided by @malikthesudani on Twitter - it seems like a good list. If anyone you know wants to help, please, share this information. These are primarily US based but then that is where the people are being hit the hardest.

ActBlue (Community Bail Funds)

National Bail Fund Network

Black Visions Collective

Reclaim The Block

A further list of Mutual Aid Funds collected by @thegirlwithfood can be found here.

This Teen Vogue article is useful too.

I urge you to also do your own research. Don't just believe me. Do the research. Listen to people. Look up what happened to George Floyd, to Breonna Taylor. Remember them.

Don't look away.

Peace Is War

This is a CS gas grenade cannister.

2-chlorobenzalmalononitrile - also known as CS gas, a kind of tear gas - is utilised as a crowd control agent. It reacts very painfully with moisture on the body, most prominently the eyes, hence the name, tear gas. It also attacks the respiratory system, and can lead to burns on the skin if one is sweaty or sunburned.

It is an irritant.

It is marketed as non-lethal though this is disputed, given its actual function. Assuming a fully healthy human being that is under no duress and is in a well-ventilated space when they are hit with the stuff, sure, non-lethal. It doesn't often get used under those circumstances.

CS gas was developed in Porton Down research facility in Wiltshire.

Yes, Porton Down, wherein we have studied other chemical and biological weaponry in the past - such as sarin, anthrax, botulinum, so on. All the kind of stuff that is banned from use in warfare by the Geneva Convention.

Oh yes. Tear gas is banned by the Geneva Convention. You can't use it against the enemy in warfare. You can, however, use it on peaceful civilians.

You can use it on people who have gathered together to protest against a man's murder, and that is totally fine, and allowed. Nothing wrong with that whatsoever. And then, when the people you are using the tear gas on get upset, or annoyed, you get to claim they are the problem.

That way, you - the state - get to be right.

That's fantastic, because for as long as there has been a man in a house on a hill, there's been people that don't get to live on that hill, who have wanted to not drown every rainy season. The proverbial crowd with pitchforks. So it's important - if you are that man on that hill - to make sure that you can make people think that they might get what they want, if they never pick up the pitchforks.

You can't get what you want through violence, the apologists say. The state agrees, from behind several layers of accountability shifting, after its agents kill yet another black person, using the excuse of upholding the law.

A list of things that only came into existence after extensive physical protests:

- Some equal rights for non-cishet people, and by extension, Pride as a movement.
- Accessibility measures in the United States of America.
- Modern Germany, and the end of the Soviet Union.
- The United States of America.
- Modern France.
- Modern Algeria.
- The end of Apartheid.
- Worker's rights.

So don't tell the people in the cities of the United States that they have to do it peacefully. They tried it peacefully. They got murdered, and they got tear gassed. Don't quote Martin Luther King Jr - he mostly pledged peace, but stated sympathy for the rioters, and he, too, got murdered.

In the end you have to wonder if it wouldn't just be easier to stop killing minorities; perhaps not for a president who likes to parrot the words of segregationists, whose grandfather was in the Klan, but maybe for enough of the rest of America that a change can be made.

Justice for George Floyd.

I won't be asking you to hit my Patreon this week. Instead I would ask you to donate to the Minnesota Freedom Fund, to pay bail for protesters arrested in Minneapolis and beyond.

Thank you for your time.

Dark Mirrors On Shining Futures

Let's play word association.

What is the thing you think of first when you read the word, Luddite?

I would place a sum of money (not a large sum, I'm poor) on the fact that you would imagine a group of people scared of machines, scared of progress, scared of the future. Wanting things to be the way they always were before.

Certainly, in this day and age, that is the semantic connotation it holds.

Except, that isn't actually the true definition, which I will provide below.

Labourers whose livelihood revolved around manual work were right to be afraid of the machines that were being made in the early nineteenth century, if only because of the people who could afford the machines.

Automation was marketed to the worker as a way to make their job easier, a way to free up the hours of the day. It was then used by their employer as a way to cut costs, which did lead to reduced prices, but also to significantly increased profits. 

Could the workers of the period really trust that their employers, that the class of business owners that they had to work for, would have their best interests in mind? Keep in mind that, at this period of time, less than 5% of the population were even allowed to vote.

So when they saw the way the wind was blowing - when they saw that they, as a group, would start to lose their livelihood to the machines that could to the work of a dozen of them individually, and that the factory owners wouldn't hesitate to replace them - they took their tools to the machines, and beat shit out of them.

Which, when you think about it, is just the next step after a labour strike.

Is it a coincidence that, two hundred years later, our linguistic shift has made this movement - which was brutally suppressed by the government and factory owners alike - sound like weird technophobes? Cavemen scared of thunder?

(It bears mention, as an interesting aside, that Lord Byron was one of the most outspoken critics of the government's treatment of the Luddite movement. In a pleasing turn of events, his daughter became the world's first actual computer programmer - you would know her as Ada Lovelace. If you don't know her? Go fix that.)

So how is that particular situation related to our lives today?

Whenever a new technology comes about - whenever some interesting or inventive thing comes into the public eye - my immediate reaction ("Wow, that's kind of cool") is almost immediately undermined with a moment of critical thought, which is almost always followed by a measure of sadness and cynicism.

If Black Mirror - yes, the Charlie Brooker show - has taught us anything, it is that any new technical advance or life-enhancing gadget can be made menacing or detrimental with little effort.

Imagine how much simpler life could be if you could have, with a relatively painless implant, a universal ID system. Like, you just hold your hand over a thing, and your ID pops up. It can store your bank details, your driver's license, your passport, all those store cards you can't find any more, bus pass, the works. All in this one implant, that you can't lose. It's always on you.

I bet, halfway through that paragraph, you had immediately thought of several ways in which that could be used to undermine your civil liberties - and you can guarantee that is exactly what would happen. That we could be tracked, with relative ease. That companies would want us to BE tracked. That we'd be told that if we haven't done anything wrong we should have nothing to hide. So it goes.

The first person to come up with automated cashiers probably didn't immediately realise that they were paving the way for shops the world over to do away with a proportion of their staff and overwork the remainder - and probably not reduce their prices much.

This is the shit the Luddites took arms against. Literally.

Three facts that are connected:

• Jeff Bezos has a net worth of $165,000,000,000 - the approximate sum of the lifetime earnings of 137,500 US citizens, which is the population of Olathe, the fourth-largest city in Kansas.
• Amazon, his company, paid zero federal tax this year on their record profits in excess of $10,000,000,000. That is greater than the GDP of Haiti, and 48 other countries.
• When Amazon workers were given a pay rise, they had benefits taken away from them to cover the increased cost.

Got to be honest, I'd start smashing the machines as well.

If you'd care to share my blog with your friends, I'd appreciate that! If you'd like to thank me in a fiscal form for entertaining you a little bit, I do have a Patreon right here, but please - no pressure. Thank you for reading, and check my social media to the right to keep in touch.

Saturday Morning Villainry

If you were born when I was born, and watched as many cartoons as I did, then you are probably well acquainted with villainry of a specific sort.

Cast your eyes over this little bevvy of bastards (original artwork here: http://batkong40.deviantart.com/art/80-s-Animated-Villians-557990209 )

We all know who THESE folks are, surely.

The maniacal Megatron, leader of the Decepticons. Mumm-Ra the Ever Living, sworn enemy of the Thundercats. Skeletor, perpetual thorn in Eternia's side. Cobra Commander, GI Joe's constant nemesis. Shredder, leader of the Foot Clan, whom the Turtles battle at every turn.

All indisputable bad guys of the most epic quality. All, as Don John from Shakespeare's Much Ado About Nothing would put it, "Plain Dealing Villains". You know what they are about the moment you clap eyes on them.

They were so ridiculous, weren't they?

I mean as we all grow up and become adults we know that no villain looks like this. Nobody deliberately bedecks themselves with the trappings of mwahaha evil and does what these people do. I mean some of their truly most incredible plans include erecting a pyramid of blackness around the earth to block out the sun, unleashing a mostly uncontrollable iron titan to raze Eternia to the ground, and Megatron's biggest and weirdest plans are just erratic in the extreme. Hypnotising twenty-somethings in nightclubs for unknown reasons, convincing the world that the Autobots are evil by very dubious means (THIS ACTUALLY WORKED), and drilling to the core of the planet are all means by which the gladiator from Kaon thought he could secure victory.

They aren't the only crooks, obviously. I mean just name a cartoon. Captain Planet fought a whole host of bad guys who randomly polluted things as if that would benefit them in any way. I mean some of them weren't even making any money. They were just deliberately fucking up the rainforest for no apparent reason. Doc Terror and Hacker from Centurions were similar - they just acted douchey as if that would get them more likes on Instagram.

But then we all grew up. We started looking for nuanced antagonists. Sometimes, we found them. If we look at Alien we find a dual antagonist - the instinct-driven inhuman xenomorph, incapable of good or bad, simply doing that which it does, and the faceless corporation so determined to exploit aforementioned xenomorph that it is willing to give up the lives of its employees to secure the dangerous creature for profitable ends.

We started seeing bad guys in the regular world, with motives that were understandable that we could almost sympathise with (and in a few places, actually could sympathise with totally). We found Roy Batty and his quest for more life; we found the competing forces of nature and industry; we found antagonists of every stripe, some more like us than we liked, some more like those four-colour bad guys that we had grown up with. A whole spectrum of supervillains.

We start seeing them in real life, too. We see the faces of Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot, Ed Gein, Charles Manson. We realise that evil still lives, still exists in the world beyond the cartoons that we watched with our cereal on a Saturday morning. We realise that the antics of Megatron - a huge, mighty, despicable tyrant - are still more bearable and tolerable than those of, say, Luis Garavito. (If you don't know who he is - look him up - his nickname is La Bestia.)

...and then we have the current leaders of the United Kingdom and the United States.

Now every time I see the Cheeto holding up a piece of paper, another executive order, another bill, I get nervous. Because the first few made you think - well sure, it can't keep up this pace the entire time he's in power, can it? He can't keep signing these bills, which are clearly pretty shit for most of the population. Like every single thing this guy does seems to be something that Cobra Commander would do if he was in charge. Every single thing.

A selection of those bills that have been signed include trashing the Affordable Care Act (yes, he literally got rid of affordable healthcare, it means what it sounds like), promising to build the big fucking wall that won't stop drugs or people entering the US, making women's lives harder the entire world over, send federal authorities into every city that don't do what he says, fuck with the lives of immigrants from the Middle East (but not those countries he has business or military deals with), and force through pipelines that are mostly (if not universally) considered a bad idea.

Meanwhile, the Wicked Witch of Westminster is engaging in similar shennanigans, promising a trashing of trade deals and making vague threats of engineering better ones (usually with people like the Cheeto), cutting funds to objectively good things (The NHS and renewable energy), promising to spend billions on nuclear weapons that don't work, and indicating a willingness to deploy troops we can't afford to properly equip into countries we won't accept innocent refugees from.

...see, that's not evil like real world evil. That's not subtle. That's not the kind of thing a taut drama is written about, like Frost/Nixon or like the extra-judiciary murders conducted by Mossad in Munich.

This is Saturday Morning Evil.

How do we fight this? We aren't Optimus Prime, we aren't Lion-O or He-Man or G.I. Joe or the Turtles. If we show up and just kick people's asses, we are the ones who go to jail - or worse, get shouted down by well-meaning people on our side (just look at the response to the neo-Nazi chappy getting punched or how people felt about Shia LeBoeuf not turning the other cheek to another alt-right Nazi prick).

It's had to believe that people actually voted for this.

...well most people didn't, it does bear mention. Just less than 20% of the population of the United States voted for the Cheeto. Just over 17% of the population of the UK voted for the Tory party, who then changed out their leader for the Wicked Witch of Westminster without public consultation or similar.

I don't think that one in five counts as a mandate.

So what do we do about it? As Theoden says in The Two Towers: "What can men do against such reckless hate?"

...well I have to be honest, I am not strictly sure. But we have to make sure this shit doesn't happen again. I've often spoken out about resisting these bastards. Now it seems those words have come home to roost. Enough people have started to realise that this right-wing fuck-em-all approach is just going to get innocent people hurt and killed. If they haven't realised this, then they haven't been paying attention.

I've been experiencing fatigue in this department. There is only so often you can preach what you think is common sense, that you can tie the facts together to come up with a course of action or a method of resistance, and have little to show for it. Almost all the people who read my blog either agree with my particular line of thinking or just don't care very much - and I have no idea how to get my ideas TO the people that matter, TO the people who can be convinced by argument. Because I have faith that there are people that vote Tory, there are people that vote Republican, who are at their heart good people that are making a bad choice.

Everyone makes a bad decision, sometimes - none of us can look back at our lives and claim a golden streak - but some of those decisions only result in personal misery. Some of them compound with a great many other bad decisions.

And those decisions sometimes lead to these two cartoon villains being in charge of previously proud nations.

This sounds like a generalisation. It probably comes across as one. I know, love, value and respect people who don't vote like me, and don't think like me. We can still get on if we don't see eye to eye on this topic. And I don't think that everyone that wears a Labour badge is a saint, or that every Democrat is in it to help the world. It just so happens that the current antagonists of this season of Human Life are, well...jesus. They're like poster children for the worst of the worst.

But what can I do?

I can keep talking. I can keep up the facts and the thinking. Because giving up doesn't help anyone. And if there's any one thing that being ill for this long has taught me, it is that victory isn't always something that happens in a single action. Sometimes, victory takes weeks, months and years. Sometimes it isn't about knowing what to do in this moment...Sometimes it is about doing the right thing for as long as it takes, and staying standing until you can't - or until you win.

That's the lesson to take from Saturday morning. The fight always continues, but the good guys can't afford to give up. So they just don't. They fight, until the fight is over.

So let's do that.