A decade of dissent: the violence of the system

In the latest part of my retrospective essay on ten years of The Acorn, which I edit, I look back on its content in 2019. The online document covering the entire decade can be found here.

A massive people’s uprising in France made the headlines in The Acorn throughout 2019.

We explained: “The Gilets Jaunes, or Yellow Vests, movement in France is the most important political phenomenon to emerge in Western Europe so far this century.

“It has smashed through the barriers of political stagnancy and sterility which so often disempower and stifle spontaneous expressions of popular discontent”.

I had been already covering the revolt on the Winter Oak site and elsewhere (such as the Morning Star, oddly enough!) at the end of 2018 – you can find a collection of various articles and translations here, if you’re interested.

A January 20 Acorn piece reported: “For the tenth weekend running, hundreds of thousands of people took to the streets all across France in the Gilets Jaunes or Yellow Vests revolt against neoliberal capitalism – and this in the face of unprecedented state violence and oppression.

“President Macron’s pathetic attempt to take back the initiative with his ‘Grand National Debate’ has been exposed as a sham, with his regional roadshows protected by armies of riot police – deployed to keep at bay the people he is supposed to be listening to!”

We commented that it had been interesting to see the system in panic mode in France, being forced to work through every step of the emergency disinformation procedures as the Gilets Jaunes revolt gathered more and more momentum.

“To start with, the Gilets Jaunes were just a passing nuisance. Then they were right-wing extremists, or left-wing extremists if the message was being aimed at a right-wing audience. After that, they were violent thugs and village idiots. Then it was all a flop and dying out. Then they were suddenly threatening armed revolution. They subsequently switched back to being fascists again…”

In short, the message to ordinary French people from “the well-groomed and arrogant” Parisian ruling class was “that they were nothing but uneducated riff-raff who deserved to be shot”.

And there was a very real physical side to this contempt. We revealed: “The first six months of the Gilets Jaunes uprising alone saw 2,448 protesters injured. Of these, 24 lost an eye and five had a hand blown off by police grenades”.

We were beginning to see more clearly the nasty entity behind the lies and the violence in France and elsewhere.

“Let’s be clear about this: the system exists. You can call it what you like – The Establishment, The Thing, The Matrix or the Industrial-Military-Prison-Propaganda-Complex – but it exists.

“It is the system that is always looking at new ways to monitor us, to control us, to infiltrate our lives, to direct our thoughts, to crush the tiniest possibilities of our freedom and resistance.

“It is also the system, of course, that insists that the system does not exist, that we should not confuse the many trees of its oppression and control with an overall wood that could be termed an entity.

“It says that anyone who talks of the system is a conspiracy theorist liable to start spouting all kinds of deranged, maybe anti-semitic, nonsense.

“The system says this because it knows full well that the rest of us – the powerless nobodies it so despises – will never be able to effectively challenge the system if we don’t even know that it exists”.

In another article, we said the scenario the system fears most is that people stop believing the myth that we live in democracies.

“Instead they see reality as it, as it has been for a long time: a criminal gang of professional liars, manipulators and thieves successfully holding millions of people in a state of thralldom, and being prepared to use unlimited violence to hold on to their power”.

Under the heading “Everybody expected the Neoliberal Inquisition” we looked at certain smears that were increasingly being used against dissidents.

We remarked: “Once accused of ‘anti-semitism’, the victim is faced with a dilemma similar to that of the famous ducking stool – if you drown you are not a witch and if you don’t then you are a witch and you have to be burned alive.

“If the person accused of anti-semitism admits guilt and apologises, not only will they not be left alone, but they will also have surrendered important political ground and will have set a precedent for the next absurd denunciation.

“If they deny having said anything wrong, this denial will be regarded as a further offence of perhaps even greater severity”.

Responding to a somewhat ridiculous French smear attack on anti-industrial thinking, we commented: “We are supposed to believe that it is industrial society which stands for life and health, thanks to the marvels of its pharmaceutical industry, and that it is its heartless opponents who threaten to bring death and misery to millions”.

We identified several pseudo-left gatekeepers of the system who “try to define the limits of our resistance, tell us all when we are going too far, whip us back into line when we begin to question the official narrative of infinite industrial growth, of humanitarian warfare and emancipatory technology”.

Not only did we report on the 2019 anti-WEF protests at Davos, where demonstrators had declared that “the infinite greed for profit and power that is seen at the Forum in Davos has no limits”, but we also later relayed the call-out for the January 2020 mobilisation.

The Acorn informed our readers about protests against the G7 in the Basque city of Biarritz, involving the Gilets Jaunes, about protests in Berlin against the European Police Congress and about a UK national day of action against Israeli-owned weapons manufacturer Elbit Systems.

We covered opposition to the mining industry in Brazil and the threat that “the bright blue seas of western Greece will be turned into oil fields” thanks to the government selling vast areas of sea and land for oil and gas drilling by companies like Energean, “with close ties to the Israeli government and Israeli corporations”.

Our bulletin also drew attention to an eye-opening account of life for workers in China: “Uprooted from the land, peasant-workers have to take jobs in the electronic, garment, construction, or service industries whose low wages force them to work punishing hours of overtime. They live in crowded dormitories, under CCTV surveillance and the constant threat of eviction if they protest”.

We described the threat of new industrial destruction in Mexico, with schemes including the Mayan Train, the “development” of the Tehuantepec Isthmus and massive commercial tree farms.

Resistance was expected. In a letter to their sisters across the world, Zapatista women declared: “We’re going to fight with all our strength and everything we’ve got against these mega-projects. If these lands are conquered, it will be upon the blood of Zapatista women”.

We further reported on grassroots resistance to the widespread destruction of trees in Indian megacities Mumbai, Bangalore and Delhi and the sale of forests for profit in Guatemala, using the fake-green Trojan Horse of so-called “Protected Areas”.

Trees were also threatened by a proposed dam in South Wales. Said campaigners: “It will devastate our beautiful woods and destroy ancient woodland”.

And the same was true of a project to build a theme park on the bonnie bonnie banks of Loch Lomond in Scotland. This would have been built on public land sold off to the developer.

Commented the Save Loch Lomond campaign: “This is about protecting our world-famous environment but it’s also about the fundamental question of who owns Scotland and who our beautiful country is for”.

In September 2024, by the way, the campaign finally saw off the dreadful proposals. Hurray!

We also explored why more than 110,000 trees had been chopped down in three years by councils across the UK.

We concluded that it was not a coincidence that cities like Newcastle, Edinburgh and Sheffield, where thousands of healthy trees had been massacred, were all 5G trial areas.

Campaigners were warning that it looked as if “millions of trees” faced being felled in the UK alone to ensure continuous signalling for self-driving buses, cars and trains and all the rest of the smart nightmare.

The Acorn covered resistance to the 5G roll-out in Australia and Switzerland and the UK – plus notably in France, where “guerrilla warfare” had begun against the system’s “smart” fascism.

And we called for a “final push against UK fracking” after a legal victory that led campaigner Joe Corre to tell the media: “I’m pretty confident we’re going to win this war, and we are not going to have fracking in this country”.

Our April bulletin saw the first appearance of our current masthead, declaring The Acorn to be an organic radical bulletin, following the launch of our sister organic radicals website.

We also featured the first in the series of organic radical profiles which continues to this day, showcasing Judi Bari.

That month also saw a break-through moment for us in terms of our relationship to the “climate” movement that was gathering a lot of media attention.

In January we had already been asking why “climate change” was taking up such a large part of the “environmental” movement’s attention, when there were so many real and obvious threats to nature to be addressed.

We mused: “Surely it couldn’t be because the climate change movement is being insidiously manipulated by elements of industrial capitalism itself?

“Could it really be the case that genuine environmental activists, arrested and locked up for their courageous actions, are being used as human cannon fodder for a global marketing campaign?”

In March we were on the same track and noted: “Disturbing evidence keeps emerging about the way the environmental movement, particularly the climate justice element, is being hijacked and manipulated by big business”.

By April 11 we had somehow relapsed into naivety and were generously giving “climate” movement Extinction Rebellion the benefit of the doubt and publicising its protests!

But 12 days later we published a special Acorn report about what we were now calling “Rebellion Extinction”.

This stated: “The integrity of XR as an organisation was dealt a fatal blow on Easter Monday, when its Twitter account started plugging links to a new website called XR Business, which had been announced in a letter to The Times“.

We took a look at various dodgy individuals who had signed the letter supporting XR, which included Paul Polman, the former head of Unilever who had just, as I now know, joined the board of trustees of the Rockefeller Foundation, part of the Rothschild empire.

By the end of the year we were writing about “Greta Thunberg: the billionaires’ favourite”.

The global figurehead for the climate movement had been credited by Time magazine with creating “a worldwide movement calling for urgent change”.

But the kind of change involved, we noted, had been indicated earlier that year when Thunberg was pictured, alongside Jane Goodall, in front of a sign promoting the “Fourth Industrial Revolution” so favoured by the Davos Gang.

[Audio version]