There is more to Natalie Jeremijenko than nifty protection gear for people on the wrong end of Dalek policing, but that’s what caught my eye here.

I like especially some of the “mediagenic” tactics, like putting big smiley faces on clothing on the spots most likely to be cudgelled by police batons.

I’m pretty indifferent towards the anti-globalisation movement, and the protest culture that has evolved around it, but generally in favour of people not getting gassed, beaten up, water-cannoned, shot in the face with rubber bullets or zapped in the guts with bursts of concentrated ultrasound for publicly expressing their opinions.

Everything Jeremijenko says about the need for a demilitarisation of protest is spot on. If protest is permitted to be peaceful, then protest culture will have the space and freedom to evolve away from its naive and inarticulate beginnings – it can be an incubutor for a more rigorously engaged politics. If protest culture is everywhere confronted by an armed and terrified state paramilitary force, then its political growth will be stunted and its worst elements will be radicalised. Maybe that’s the point?

This entry was posted on Sunday, October 31st, 2004 at 12:43 pm and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.