Jamie says, activists need to own their bullshit:
There’s certainly a case that the sentences that he and others have got are on the harsh side. There have also been cases, as in the Fortnum occupation, where demonstrators were hauled up on highly dubious and somewhat draconian charges that were later dropped. But there’s an odd note of naivety in the discussion about these things, almost a kind of reverse Baader-Meinhof syndrome. The RAF believed that selective acts of terrorism would cause the state to drop its democratic façade and reveal the true violence of its nature. Certain protestors these days seem to believe that the state and associated power holders are bad people doing bad things, but also that unstructured and sometimes potentially dangerous acts of random activism will cause them to reveal their true cuddly nature. In this, there’s a strong air of acting up to get daddy’s attention and then being surprised when you don’t like the kind of attention daddy gives you.
Very much agree with this, though it still galls to see a hapless idiot like marbles having to go to prison for pulling a stupid prank, when fsckers like Murdoch pere and fils are largely left alone. More seriously, civil disobedience does not necessarily include having to accept the punishment the state decideds to hand out for your activism. Punishing Rosa Parks for sitting in the wrong in the bus was legal but wrong. Not that Marbles was a Rosa Parks.