According to some reports, upwards of 100,000 protesters are planning widespread disruption of next week’s G20 summit being held in London. Fears of violent clashes has forced Scotland Yard to cancel all police leave and London has been put on high alert.
The G20 is the largest gathering of world leaders in the UK for more than half a century and will cost British taxpayers more than £20 million to stage with much of the money being spent on an unprecedented security operation.
Anarchist Chris Knight, a 66-year-old professor known as “Mr. Mayhem” and leader of a group at the heart of the demonstrations is calling for guillotining bank executives and targeting London firms that fail to turn off their lights to commemorate “Earth Hour” with threats of break-ins and property damage.
Knight “strongly suggests bankers should stay away from the City next week. If you’re thinking of coming in, my advice is don’t. People are incandescent about your bonuses and the way you’ve destroyed their lives. We plan to lay siege to the financiers who have brought us into this recession and who continue to pursue policies that are destroying our planet”.
As for the police, “if they want violence, they’ll get it”, adds Knight, a former member of Labour’s extreme Left-wing Militant Tendency who now calls himself a revolutionary communist. “We intend to be peaceful but if they press their nuclear button, I’ll press mine. It’s called mutually assured destruction’. If Gordon Brown deploys his riot police, or sends in his agents provocateurs to start trouble as an excuse to attack us, all hell will break loose.”
Makes you wonder why the G20 leaders didn’t just have a videoconference.
Yep. And Kady’s going to be liveblogging! Yippee.
It can only get worse….I fear.
Nothing wrong with a little revolution every now again…
Mike
It’s a funny thing.
Whack-jobs like Chris Knight have always been around but an unexpected crisis could catapult them to the top in short order.
I understand he’s been suspended by the University of East London for his remarks.
“Makes you wonder why the G20 leaders didn’t just have a videoconference. ”
Hard to share three thousand dollar caviar over the phone.
This will be a skirmish, hardly revolution, which is right on schedule. Skirmish/agitation precedes rebellion, rebellion precedes revolution. It is going to be a hot summer. The luxury and comfort of sitting on a liberal fence wanes. The lesson to be learnt becomes clear: the only thing to be gained from sitting on the fence are splinters up one’s asshole.
Makes no difference to me one way or the other.
Wonder what Gil Scott-Heron would say…
he’s got a new album due this year so you can wait and see
as I put on your other blog today
“Power is not a means, it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship.”
George Orwell
“Capitalism is, after all, the way of life based on the principle that the most important activity is profit-making. That activity led the wealthy in the direction of continentalism. They lost nothing essential to the principle of their lives in losing their country. It is this very fact that has made capitalism the great solvent of all tradition in the modern era. When everything is made relative to profit-making, all traditions of virtue are dissolved, including that aspect of virtue known as love of country. This is why liberalism is the perfect ideology for capitalism. It demolishes those taboos that restrain expansion. Even the finest talk of internationalism opens markets for the powerful.”
George Grant (from “Lament for a Nation”, 1965)
When we do not regulate man or his passions, we are not acting in a fundamentally “conservative” manner.
The term “liberalism” is derived from the root word “Liberty” – and Liberty is the maximum amount of individual freedom that can be allowed under law.
Traditional conservatism seeks to LIMIT freedom to only those liberties that are customary and beneficial to social and cultural peace & order.
There aren’t many conservatives left out here anymore. Sir Francis and I continue to reside at our Chess Board in the park that sits in the middle of all this anarchy and heartbreak.
All we can do is ponder out next move and mutter “tsk-tsk.”