Process
Status Items Output None Questions None Claims None Highlights Done See section below
Highlights
id800924749
What appears as an expression of “people power” to crowd members and supporters will be dismissed as shallow groupthink and thuggery by their enemies. To be a protester is to be smug and self-righteous, and uninterested in the serious business of political power.
id800925166
To the enemies of the crowd, every peaceful protest crowd is liable to become a violent mob, composed of naive rubes who don’t understand the issue at hand — particularly if the perennial folk devils of “outside agitators,” “a minority of extremists,” “anarchists,” “vandals,” “yobs,” or “criminals hell-bent on violence” infiltrate the crowd, “masquerading” as peaceful protesters and corrupting the guileless masses from within.
id800925646
It happens so often, and the charges are so frequently and transparently vexatious, that one can only assume such prosecutions are not a systemic failure by the police and Crown Prosecution Service but in fact a conscious tactic and a key part of the propaganda battle against protesters.
✏️ They will continuously beat protesters to near death, charge them with some crime or another, and that’s enough. The crime will inevitably be overturned, the protestors found not guilty, but the damage is done and the effect of protest=crime is established. 🔗 View Highlight
id800927637
the police will also use what Professor Paul Gilroy has called “the golden hour” after an outrage of their own making, the short window available to fix the narrative in aspic and in their favor — a moment when credulous journalists will happily print whatever allegations they are fed, thanks to an excess of trust and an absence of time and energy to corroborate the police line.
✏️ more propaganda techniques of controlling the narrative and taking advantage of people’s (and media’s) short attention span. 🔗 View Highlight
id800928586
Any debunking in the weeks, months, or years that follow the event inevitably reaches far fewer people, so this approach always constitutes a net gain for the state, reputationally speaking. Lie first, have the record corrected months later, and shrug, because the press has stopped paying attention and the public has forgotten.
id800928911
opinion-formers are almost always willing to concede, and perhaps even applaud, the “meaningful” political motivations that explain historic rioting. Those motives could include racism, poverty, or gender inequality, but the event has to have taken place at least a few decades ago: anything similar but recent is mindless thuggery, which must be condemned completely and immediately.
id800928941
In the past, goes the received wisdom, people protested against injustice with clear-eyed, righteous indignation; but not anymore. This time it’s different — this time it’s invalid, without context, without reason or morality