It was weird. Assange cleaved through the crowd surrounded by disciples – hundreds of them.Elsewhere small groups of zeitgeist adhrents addressed small gatherings of the initiates. the main crowd was kettled by St.Pauls. they chanted ‘Let us out’ but they were all happy clappy like they were bearing witness to something and wanted to suffer. It was comrades FUCKING WEIRD. Like the people had understood the forms of the ocupations but had no idea of content.Content didn’t matter.What was neededwas to be there. Assange left surrounded by praetorian guards – with him went the energy.he went into a newsagent. For hours afterwards adherents struggled to buy anything from the shop touched by his hand. It was fucking weird. There was repetitive chanting like a cathloic mass. Assange or another would say to the crowd ‘You must think for yourselves’ and the crowd would dirge back ‘we must think for ourselves’. V for vendetta masks, Anonymous, horizontal hand waving, cod phlosophy slogans like ‘we must evolve’….emphasis that none of this was ‘political’. Fuck me – where’s the rosicrucians phone number…i take back everything i said. There is nothing for our class here comrades – one of the most clueless inactions ever.
Meanwhile in Rome……
Ian Bone 
I didn’t bother going- I needed to spend a bit of sunshine time with the family.. But- part of me thinks it would be useful to get the agit-prop flowing at this kind of event. Or is it a lost cause?
Newcastle was a bit better than I expected. People stood about for a while; then we were addressed by the usual culprits, (plus a teenager who has recently had his face splashed all over Redwatch & who was shaking like a leaf but who still gave the best speech of the day). Then we discussed what to do next in small huddles because the bizzies were trying to earwig.
Some people decided to stay at the Monument and the rest went off to the banks. We blockaded the first one which shut immediately and occupied the second one, but not for long. I’m afraid that most of the anarchists then went off to occupy a pub, where the BBC were obligingly playing footage of the ‘Occupations’ in various countries.
Quote of the day was from one of the lads from Scotswood that we met on Jun30: “Call yourself an anarchist and you’re thinking of going rioting without a bottle of Brown Ale!”
That’s it. Still think it’s a load of diversionary, hand-woven organic-tofu, smock-wearing, middle-class masturbation…except in Rome 🙂
Me favourite…
Or maybe this one…
Here in Bristol we have 50-odd people ‘Occupying Bristol’.
Their chosen target is College Green, a public space – that you can ‘occupy’ anyway – outside Bristol City Council’s HQ.
What’s it all about? Assuming they get the numbers to affect anything, they’ll be able to stop a load of social workers and cycling-obsessed bureaucrats going about their business.
This is in a town that has the headquarters of LLoyds TSB, Hargreaves Lansdown and HBOS.
he he he am i the only person who read this as “why is everyone paying attention to him and not to me?”.
“I’ve done eton what’s he done”
Headed into Bristol and got to college green around 1pm. I reckon there were about 80-100 people when we got there and a couple of tents.
Was very quiet with a minimal police presence, probably 6 officers spread around the outskirts of the green.
Due to nowt happening and my lad saying he was hungry we left for a while, returning about 40mins later.
The crowd looked to have swelled slightly but this may be because people where now congregated around a speaker. Now this is the wierd thing – every sentence each speaker said was immeadiately ‘chanted’ back by several in the crowd. I’ve not experienced owt like it and it made me feel a bit uneasy. I hung around for another half-hour or so then decided that it really wasn’t for me so we left.
My lasting feeling is that it seemed very odd, although can’t put my finger on exactly why.
Good luck to em though.
Not heard it but interviews with participants can be heard here courtesy of From Bristol With Love.
Here’s that very man on Youtube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wJvrHzOYp7I
It starts about 2′ 21″ in. With a statement like: “The Zionists want a new world order” you’re right to be uneasy …
Cheers for that BB. However, he wasn’t one of the speakers I saw. I’m glad I left when I did if thats representative. How utterly bizarre!
3,000 in the City now- A certain Tim Matthews of OccupyLondon on RT News was saying ‘We need to create a viable space for people’, ‘we need more representation and a policy change’…eloquently underlining the press line that these movements don’t really know what they want and have unfocussed aims…No matter if they are a very general outcry against austerity (lead mainly by the middle classes who baulk at their now limited ability to speculate on property and take advantage of a cheap higher education that was designed to increase working class participation).
This is why they revel in the ‘We are the 99%’ slogan, when in reality it is the 70 or 80% divide that is closer to the truth, so they conveniently exclude themselves from a hierarchy of wealth with an over-simplification.
Apparently, a comrade tells me, the live stream on GlobalRevolution,tv, of the Black Bloc in Rome torching the Defence Ministry was widely criticised on the Twitter feed for showing ‘violence’- The feed was promptly stopped and changed…
In New York ‘activists’ were nicked for trying to close their accounts with Chase Manhatten…A faux-radical act that exposes just how impotent they are in the face of an epoch-changing crisis…
It’s not just Rome, there’s also Berlin, stroming the Bundestag and in Brussels, Dexia Bank looks as if it’s taken a bit of a battering (Graffiti: ‘I’m a bank, Burn Me’)…Now that’s what I call representing yourself.
Tim Matthews… wasn’t that another name the notorious Tim Hepple used? Not saying it’s the same bloke but maybe someone who knows what Hepple looks like can check.
Pic of Hepple/Matthews on Paul Stott’s blog- not the same bloke, just a common name…
Meanwhile over at pathetic middle class blogs like ‘Dangerous Minds’, all the little hipsters and trendies are joining in on a massive wankfest over Kanye West and other millionaire celebrities turning up at occupy wall street, Their revolution will only be televised if the celebs are big enough by all accounts.
…and we get Billy Bragg, the Minstrel recuperator of working class culture and resistance- The fucker must be worried about his negative equity and desparate to reclaim whatever credibility he has left after sucking Blair’s cock…
Billy Bragg – the Internationale and property speculation – shurely shome mishtake?
cheers for the props bristolblogger, the interview is with a different bloke tho, the ones we interviewed were the two gents sitting down with placards. I blame all those crazy punters who drink in a pub called The Bell myself….. :0) http://www.mixcloud.com/fbwl/from-occupy-bristol-with-love/
When I first heard of ‘Occupy the Stock Exchange’ for a very brief, possibly very delerious moment, I had this vision of the trading floor being occupied by us plebs on a Monday morning, the computer systems completely trashed and the traders weeping at the world they had lost… Let’s hold onto that vision for the not so distant future 🙂
Spoke to a mate of mine and he said the repeating is a Occupy Wallstreet thing. They are not aloud PAs or Megaphones so they repeat what a speaker says so everyone can hear. So it makes sense….over there.
But when its a group of 40 people who can and did use Megaphones do it, it just seems odd.
The black bloc in Rome cut through the masturbation – less charisma: more action. Much that I am critical of Chomsky – at times he can’t be distinguished from a John Pilger or Paul Foot, but he has insight over the limitations of these events which celebrate being slightly naughty. We all know that the city should burn, that Cameron should be forced out of Downing Street, that MPs should flee the Commons & fall into the Thames like Lemmings. Anarchy means the destruction of the US, UK, Sweden, China, India, Corporate structures, local power elites; it means the instigation of real democracy & the freeing of the 6 billion. It means that we shall no longer be robbed of our birthright as human beings.
Anarchy means the end of living like slaves, dependent on ‘masters’ to give us a job so we can survive.
Chomsky thrashes around like a moron when he condemns boycotting Israel. What a joke. I don’t listen to anything he says.
Some winners in all this are the computer and IT corporations. If political activity relies on network and telecomms equipment, that’s money in the bank for the carriers, computer and phone makers.
Meanwhile Obama has just sent in a team of interventionist military advisers to Uganda, aiming to work also in other countries in Africa, such as Congo – where a lot of the minerals necessary for phones come from. Maybe it’s to keep Chinese hands off the goodies, or extract rent from them. Pushing the Chinese away from the resources would be one way to keep them at bay as the US greatest creditor, but maybe it means proxy wars in Africa, more expenditure by western governments, faster hollowing out of western economies, more rebellion.
Have they really thought this through?
Sorry if it’s off topic a wee bit.
BTW, did it escape peoples attention that the blackberry network had trouble recently as they revamped their encrypted message service – the one used by rioters?
anywhere that assange is welcomed is a place i don’t want to go. thanks for the only reliable and sane report i have read so far about today’s antics.
Give em a chance eh ppl??
Yeah, some, if not all of us at LSX today though Assange’s spectacle presence was as wank as it sounded. Don’t tar everyone out on the streets – surely a good thing in itself – with the same celebrity-tainted brush…
Julian Assange is making an enormous mistake going round with a team of bodyguards. Not only does it make him look a total knob, it probably encourages, rather than dissuades feminists from shouting ‘rapist’ at him.
Given the damage the BNP did to their own reputation by ensuring Griffin has a goon squad with him everywhere he goes, Assange also shows a worrying lack of contemporary political knowledge.
Assange is the digital age Chavez, convinced of his progressiveness, yet drunk on immeasurable arrogance.
you could have said the same thing about OWS but see what that kicked off? Tbh most people there were fairly ordinary ( in a middle class studenty kind of way ) and not that culty, so while I don’t disagree with your criticism of the culty types, overall it is a good thing and people need to jump in one way or another .. almost all movements have started with fairly wierd people doing fairly weird stuff
“almost all movements have started with fairly wierd people doing fairly weird stuff“. I don’t think that’s true.
Two words .. Zombie Apocalypse!
I didn’t attend the event but I saw anarchist flags flying in the crowd in my travels through the internet yesterday. I expect there are adherents to all types of ideology amongst the occupiers but what we have to try to remember is, unless they are the BNP, EDL or Zeitgeist cult, to an extent, they, too, share a common goal with anarchists: The pursuit of freedom & an end to tyranny.
It’s not as if various scumbags and nutters haven’t ever raised anarchist flags or called themselves anarchists. I’ve met “anarchist” landlords and bosses. The best-known “anarchists” in Venezuela are part of the right-wing pro-oligarch anti-Chavez “opposition”. I think it’s long past time for revolutionary class-struggle anarchists to ditch the “anarchist” label, but …no point in getting hysterical 🙂
I popped along perhaps a bit later than the other posters to the Bristol demo. About maybe a hundred people, a hippy banging a drum and a small group of crusties drinking cider. All good fun.
What vaguely bothered me was the lack of any attempt to engage with the large numbers of passers-by who, even if they disapprove of alternative politics, crusties and bongos pretty much to a man, woman and dog on a string are pissed off with the billions of bank bailouts and billions of cuts.
Today there are more tents – maybe about twenty – and a wigwam and it all looks quite orderly. Maybe they’ll have more staying power than I thought.
There seems to be a lot of chiliasm/millenariansim going on with this. Will the new Baldwin appear before the multitudinous throng and lead the Wherethefuckrwe tribe up a molehill on the Planet Tharg.? There are a number of historical/hysterical precedents that spring to mind. Ooo! I,m coming over all limp…
Alec Baldwin? Stanley?
Just a quick question-what’s up with the “zeitgeist cult” thing? I saw the first two and semed to sy some interesting things. Especially about the banking industry. And a society without money-what’s wrong with that?
Zeitgeist has grown out of The ‘Venus Project’, whose guru thinks that humanity’s problems are merely a problem of design and technology- see for yourself….and enjoy!
http://www.thevenusproject.com/
(PS-If you want your own flying car or jetpack, put your name on the list now!)
“Zeitgeist has grown out of The ‘Venus Project’“.
Any connection with Transhumanism? The Transhumanists link to Nazis…
Hope this will do for starters;
http://thethirdestate.net/2010/03/zeitgeist-exposed/
and disturbingly, this for seconds (for fucks sake!)
http://pubsecrets.wordpress.com/2011/10/15/voices-of-the-occupy-movement-jews-get-out/
aaaaaaaaaaaarrrrrrrrrrrrrrggggggggggghhhhhhhhhhhh!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! What’s wrong with straight anarchy … establishing new structures that are controlled by & serving the 6 billion, the dismantling of power/oppressive structures & the freeing of all slaves. “Zionist” whilst labelling something that has become a cog of oppression is even more widely used as a racist slur. There are no ZOGs, only genocidal power structures.
Keith – please don’t take this as abusive, but just imagine that Zionist Jews had amassed the amount of control in the US that anti-ZOG leftists (let’s forget the Nazis) claim. Do you think the position would look necessarily and obviously (to you) extremely and totally different from how the position actually does appear today? In what way?
During the Gaza massacre, almost all US Congressmen, from both major parties, signed a motion saying Israel had the right to defend itself. Would they do something else if there really was a ZOG? Would Dennis Kucinich be ‘disappeared’ for being one of the 6 or so who didn’t sign?
Consider perhaps that Israeli company Magal does security at US nuclear installations both civil and military. If there really was a ZOG, would they wear Israeli military uniform and fly in on Israeli aircraft, or what?
http://working-class-self-organisation.blogspot.com/2011/10/rip-off-mask-of-government-spit-in-face.html?spref=fb
Ian,you might as well report about a bunch of fucking stamp collectors.
For me,worse than fucking nazis,at least you can see when they spot a seagull.
The most fucked up thing that ever happened to the struggle for a better future for the working class,was these parasites somehow attached themselves to our cause.
The more we disassociate ourselves from this collection of parasites,the better of we’ll be.
Tomorrows life managers,hiding behind a protest placard today.
I’ve sent a message to Occupy the London Stock Exchange’s Twitter account introducing myself as a disabled supporter who is currently unable to attend the occupation. In the message, I also requested a discussion upon the concept of Proudhon’s People’s Bank in one of the occupation’s democratic general assemblies be considered with a view to, subject to consensus, the inclusion of it in potential demands. Fingers crossed then. Surely we can’t give up the occupations yet??
they didnt even let Charlie Veitch speak and hes all peace peace spirituality zeitgeisty anarchism, so i cant imagine someone coming from an actual political anarchist position with ideas and stances on things will be welcome…not that i approve of prodhon in many ways at all prsonally
@Laurel I’m persistant and pesty. 🙂
Here is the manifesto/statement that I saw being discussed yesterday-
http://occupylsx.org/
Make sure you read the comments for da full flava of this charade…
As a friend said:-
“…they are so fucking fluffy it renders them piss weak and clueless…Ultimately, they’re too scared to face reality. Deny everything unpalatable, hold noone accountable for their actions, be nice and hope others comply.
Lambs to the slaughter, bless ’em. This London protest has become a PR exercise for the police amongst the young middle classes. And by all accounts, it’s going splendidly. That’s the future sorted then.”
Meanwhile in Hong Kong…
We are getting reports of massive anti-capitalist demo/occupations with our comrades battling the pigs at the main occupation site & setting up blockades elsewhere in the city. Trying to get more info/confirmation but y’all will appreciate it’s difficult. Hope they stay safe.
Fuck the fluffies!
all mass movements are there to be channeled, its winging if you think some other cult is doing a better job…
Loved the ACAB on the cop van- another nod to the 4 Skins. Punk has done more to spread the word of British working class resistance than anything else out of Britain- Class War was the only group to have any postive infulence abroad and we didn’t waste all our time waffling about the news in foriegn lands- like those arseholes who buy into the spectical.
‘But- part of me thinks it would be useful to get the agit-prop flowing at this kind of event’ It’s all over face book and the t-shirts in Camden Market. There like the painting on the caveman’s walls- and you can tell we live in a world of cynism and anger. That art is a reflection of real life- this public ‘art’ is a reflection of the spectical. It’s made my those who are all part of the problem.
As to what we’ve done- we haven’t grassed people to the Taliban or condemned the working class for eating fast food or even for wanting a gun.
That’s the difference between us and them.
Not exactly blowin in the wind
“Class War was the only group to have any postive infulence abroad“. But that influence wasn’t always of the kind that was wanted. In Norway I met people who were well into the image of the British group Class War (“we have found new homes for the rich”, etc.), but they wondered whether it was the British section of ‘International Socialism’. In Russia it was standard for youths I met who wanted to change the world for the better to be into both Pink Floyd and punk bands such as the Sex Pistols and the Cure.
It’s normal to be into Punk and Pink Floyd. Roger Waters is a great lyricist.
It wasn’t for Class War or British Punk to give people abroad lectures about their countries but to tell them about the struglle in our society and lives. We’re about giving control not about taking control.
I can’t stand the Cure- what people get out of them is their business, I just conclude their a wimp or a girl.