From: "K.M. Sutherland"
<[log in to unmask]>
Talking with the Polish translator of Eugenius Dycki's work at CCCP
I was
a bit dismayed to find out that the only televised access to world
affairs
for Polish people is through BBC 1. The national stations are
apparently
U.S. funded and blatantly pro-U.S. in all their reports. Still, this
extreme privation at least saved them from having to watch BBC 2's
Newsnight program yesterday, in which the smug-as-ever Jeremy
Paxman
fronted a "debate" preceded by a -completely misleading account-
of what
happened in London yesterday. For the benefit of listmembers who
weren't
there, I'll offer a brief description.
1. Newsnight focussed with the usual journalistic, casual humour on
protesters who had dressed up in carnival gear and who had
attached
themselves to a marginal or extremely focussed cause (The Cuban
five,
"cycle lanes" etc.). These protesters were THE TINY MINORITY of
the
10,000 or more who marched on Trafalgar Square. In fact they were
so few
and far between that I saw only a handful all day, on the whole route
from
Clerkenwell Green to Trafalgar. They make copy, of course. Their
pictures are pretty and make the protests look whimsical, or
oppositional
in a merely celebratory manner. On the cover of today's Daily Mail
and
Daily Telegraph (surprize surpize) there is a photo of a good looking
young woman with her face painted splashing about in the fountain
at
Trafalgar Square: I said to Andrea at the time how angry I was that
the
press would -inevitably- focus on her and her stupid friends, who
persisted in playing a ghetto blaster throughout all the speeches by
Politicans and representatives of a myriad political campaigns
(including
Dianne Abbott, Tony Benn, Jeremy Corbyn, the president of the
NUS, the
head of the Stop The War Colaition, the deputy president of the
National Fireworkers Union and representatives from Kurdish,
Colombian and
Palestinian resistance groups). These kids were just -messing
around-,
using the mass rally as an excuse to show off in public without
danger of
being pestered by the police (who seemed particularly interested in
what
the deputy secretary of the Fireworkers Union had to say about
wages for
public sector workers). The great majority, in fact almost ALL of the
protesters, didn't seem to think that May Day was about listening to
crap
dance music and taking ecstacy as a break from GCSE revision.
10,000
people marched to Trafalgar from Clerkenwell in a great column,
united in
a stream of Socialist Worker and Socilat Alliance banners, chanting
all
the way a great chorus of slogans against the Israeli occupation,
against
war in Iraq, against Bush and Blair, and against the National Front in
France and Le Pen personally. The physiognomy of this crowd was
completely various: there were old and young people, workers and
students,
black and white, party members and outraged citizens without any
party
affiliation. It was a coherent, organized, powerful march. The
speeches
in Trafalgar Square were addressed to this crowd. The kids in
carnival
suits had nothing to do with it, except insofar as they stopped
occasionally to listen and brightened up the atomosphere somewhat.
May Day was an INTERNATIONALIST, SOCIALIST mass protest
against U.S. and
British Imperialism. Every journalist saw this VERY CLEARLY.
BBC 2
disgraces itself with its trivialization of a very important and just
protest.
2. One of the Newsnight "debators", an arrogant and stupid
spokeman for
the IMF and anything that whiffs of structural adjustment anywhere
in the
world, kept repeating how "insignificant" it was that "7,000" people
had
turned up (not "marched in an organized column"). A defender of the
privileges attained by the ruling elite through their reliance on
engineered voter apathy would -of course- say this. The LEAST
apathetic
section of the national community is small enough to legitimate
general
apathy by comparative self-exposure. The fewer there are who
really care
about world poverty and corporate imperialism, the less -that very care
itself- is something we can take seriously. Apathy becomes by arranged
default the passive expression of -political sanity-. But what Newsnight
refused to say--what Jeremy Paxman could easily have said to this IMF
mouthpiece, had he been bothered--is that:
(a) This was a -working day-; the turnout was obviously going to be
limited.
(b) The reaction of working people on the route from Clerkenwell to
Trafalgar--including all types of workers, from construction labourers on
scaffolding in Holborn to office workers behind high glass windows--was
WITHOUT EXCEPTION, so far as I personally could see, a COMPLETELY POSITIVE
one. We saw gestures and cheers of solidarity from dozens of people on
their lunch breaks or taking a moment out of work to watch us go by. This
was a POPULAR SOCIALIST protest, not AT ALL a carnival of extremism and
anti-social mucking about. I suppose that for a defender of corporate
interests it would take 50% of the voting population to spill out in
united opposition, or whatever percentage of the not-totally-apathetic
voting population is necessary to win an election, before a protest would
become "significant".
I'm sick of the miserable capitulation of the BBC to the Labour Party's
corporate-driven agenda. A fair response would be -always to suspect a
cover-up unless you were there to see for yourself-.
Exactly the same thing happened with Bush's ascendancy to the
throne in
Washington--literally hundreds of thousands of protesters flooded
into the
city, outnumbering by far the odd crowds of fur-jacketed Republican
tourists from the outreaches of the rural Midwest, and of course the
U.S.
media stifled almost all the reports of this. Thank god (whomever)
that
our media hasn't yet fallen quite THAT low.
Yet.
K
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