Uses of the Cathartic- An essay about civil disobedience and mass mobilisation

Mass mobilization is easy. It's the revolution that's hard.
(Sing this to the tune of the chorus of "Time Moves Slow" by BADBADNOTGOOD and Samuel T. Herring)

I have watched my inbox with a knot in my stomach this past week or so as the news rolled in about more than 500 people being arrested in London on Saturday August 9th as part of the "Lift the Ban" action that was organised by Defend Our Juries (aka, DoJ). DoJ organised hundreds of people into Parliament Square in front of the statues of Nelson Mandela and Mahatma Gandhi to hold up signs reading "I oppose genocide. I support Palestine Action". Activists were arrested not because they were themselves members of Palestine Action, but because they were publicly in support of Palestine Action's well...actions. On July 5, 2025, Palestine Action was proscribed as a terrorist organisation in the United Kingdom. This proscription was signed off on and endorsed by the current home secretary, Yvette Cooper. This makes both being a member of, or showing support for, Palestine Action a crime. The members of Palestine Action being arrested on terrorism charges are now known colloquially as the "Filton 24".

DoJ's Lift the Ban actions started taking place shortly after. They are aimed at getting the UK Home Office to delist the group from the Terrorism Act and release the Filton 24 from prison. So by holding up signs in support of the Palestine Action, they were engaging in civil disobedience by deliberately showing public support for terrorists. Despite these hundreds of arrests, to the extent of my knowledge, 10 people have been charged with "terrorism support". The Filton 24 meanwhile are rarely named in DoJ's public commentary.

DoJ has announced plans for another, bigger action this year on September 6th, with the aim of getting at least 1,000 people arrested in support of repealing the proscription of Palestine Action.

Having read through the action briefing that was sent out for next month, my earlier knot of nerves has now turned into a pit of dread.

I have no idea what is going on behind the scenes, but I think DoJ is publicly presenting a theory of social change where the way the world gets better is by "good people breaking bad laws" all by themselves. This is not a good theory of social change. It is especially concerning to me that they are planning an action which seems to not be focusing all that much on the Filton 24, and their experiences as political prisoners.

Further, DoJ has made clear that even prior to the start of these sign-holding actions, the Filton 24 were already in the process of challenging the proscription of the organisation, and they have a good chance of winning the challenge. So if the challenge is already underway, and has a good chance of succeeding, what is the purpose of getting as many people as possible arrested in support of them?

It is, I think, an effort to give frustrated people who are terrified and exhausted of the moral injury of watching a genocide unfold in real-time, something they can do with their justified moral outrage. It is a civil disobedience action aimed at providing catharsis, and not much else. We are all being made collectively less human for the violence we are forced to watch and powerless to end. How could you not need a pressure-release valve for that level of horror?

I agree that "good people break bad laws" is a rallying cry for a catharsis that feels urgent and important, but catharsis is not by itself a long-term strategy for structural social change. It burns hot and fizzles out fast. If the proscription is likely to be lifted, and was likely before the protests began, then people are being arrested for no reason other than the need to "do something". Surely we can come up with better, and more strategic reasons than this.

An anonymous UK activist has written a powerful essay about why we need to do more than just "something". They identify the practice of mass arrest as a protest tactic as a "Hallamist" practice, named after Roger Hallam, the founder of Extinction Rebellion who popularized arrest as a tactic of social change. The essay I linked to describes the tactic elegantly: "A group is formed, it has momentum and a simple plan - to get everybody arrested and then something good will happen". I find Hallamist protest strategy to be morally irresponsible and politically inefficacious.

We need to "do something" yes, but we need to do something in a way that can keep the energy going for the amount of time and effort it takes to make real change at political targets we can reasonably affect. Otherwise, we need to be having a conversation about political insurrection, not civil disobedience. We need to make it untenable for our governments to continue supplying aid and ideological support to Israel. We can't do that when our comrades are sitting in jail, or facing trial, for an outcome that was likely to happen in the first place.

Civil disobedience is a critical tool in our revolutionary toolkits. The fight for a more just world requires a PR campaign for progressive values, and civil disobedience has historically been a powerful way to do just that. However, I think the way DoJ is publicly planning and communicating about civil disobedience is a morally irresponsible and politically inefficacious way of engaging with that tactic. Civil disobedience has never achieved its aims on its own, not without a coordinated boots-on-the-ground poor and working class uprising to force the hands of politicians and the capitalist class. It's this coordinated, coalitional effort as part of a wider revolutionary struggle that DoJ is troublingly silent about.

My argument here is not that catharsis isn't important. My argument is that catharsis is a tool, just like anger, erotic desire, laughter, art, insurrection, journalism, and mutual aid. Wisdom is knowing which tool to use when, and how to use it well. I do not see this level of wisdom, at least not yet, in what DoJ is presenting publicly.

I do not condemn the moral intuitions of those who felt they could not sit idly by while their tax dollars are used to fund a genocidal regime. I do not condemn those who looked at their state-sanctioned options for protest in the UK and felt that writing a letter to their MP was not a strong enough objection to mass slaughter for the sake of land and natural resources while those same MPs vote to continue sending "aid" to Israel. When I see pictures of Palestinian children whose skeletons are visible through their bruised flesh, I feel that I am less of a person for every compromise and excuse I make to keep going about my day after that. To live under the fiction that what Israel is doing in the West Bank and Gaza is merely fighting terrorism, and what the UK is doing in proscribing Palestine Action is merely fighting domestic terrorism, is nothing less than maddening.

I have no easy or straightforward answers for how to find the most effective form of protest that ends a genocide quickly and permanently. I do not have the personal experience with Hallamist organisations that the anonymous activist who wrote that essay does. Heck, I’m not even a UK citizens. However, I have spent over a decade in labour and mutual aid organising in the United States, planning worker strikes, going door knocking to get people to join their union, and getting food and medical supplies to those who chose to make their activism more direct routes. I have participated in union organising at city, state, and national levels, and worked in coalitions and caucuses to push unions further to the left and resist institutional and state capture by moderates and liberals. Throughout all this, I have come to believe, and hope I can convince you too, that that we can learn from our collective histories of civil disobedience to build movements and action plans that can set us up for future success, and not just momentary catharsis when things feel hopeless.

What started out as a brief letter that I was going to fire off in an email has ballooned. I've written more than 11,000 words about this. The Hallamist Toddlers essay makes me a little worried that these critiques won't be taken seriously. I've lived in the UK for less time than Roger Hallam has been bouncing from organisation to organisation. I am sure that many of the organisers at DoJ have heard some of these critiques before. But I wouldn't be a leftist if I didn't think that we all owe each other a chance to do better.

I've decided to break up my ridiculous giant essay into smaller pieces in hopes of making it more digestible. I will present what I think are 4 lessons we can draw from the history of civil disobedience that call DoJ's Lift the Ban action plan into question. I plan to release these words in a series of 4 essays, one lesson per week, for the next four weeks. These are the four lessons from history that I want to highlight:

Lesson #1: Civil disobedience is a politics of spectacle and persuasion, and spectacles alone don't shift structures.

Lesson #2: Civil disobedience makes spectacles by deliberately making those who are suffering injustice, and those who come to the aid of those suffering, hypervisible to a mass public.

Lesson #3: Civil disobedience spreads the message about direct action efforts that need large numbers to work best, like major boycotts, support for prisoners, or fundraising campaigns.

Lesson #4: Civil disobedience requires a lot of message discipline. This risks silencing dissent and privileging the most "respectable" and "agreeable" people in an action. This risk never goes away, and requires constant vigilance to refute those kinds of respectability politics.

I relied heavily on the book Seeing Like an Activist: Civil Disobedience and the civil rights movement by Erin R. Pineda for these overall reflections. I highly recommend this book; it's very readable to a non-expert audience, and I learned a lot that I want to apply to my own activism down the line.

Each essay, I want to do three things:
(1) walk you through a brief and incomplete history of civil disobedience actions in the 20th century around the world,
(2) draw out some key lessons from those events, and then
(3) compare those lessons to the plans for DoJ's September 6th action, and suggest some changes to their strategy and messaging that are more in line with what we know to be effective civil disobedience strategy.

In the spirit of loving feminist critique, I plan to email these essays to Defend Our Juries as well, and invite them to respond publicly. There are no purely "good people" or "bad people". There are no morally pure political strategies, or spaces of straightforward innocence that we can all safely stand in. This is not a "call out" or a "cancelling". It's an attempt at serious public political discussion, using both the recent history of civil disobedience and what information DoJ has made available about their action plan.

The Palestinian people deserve to be sovereign not because they are morally innocent, but because their land was colonised and the only proper redress is decolonisation. Those of us outside of Palestine can leverage our collective power to change the tides and be part of a movement to end genocide and return Palestinian people to their land, free and sovereign. I don't fucking know how, but we've figured it out before, and we're going to do it again. The evidence of our future success is in how the sun now sets on the British Empire. But we cannot take the history of formal decolonisation, of which Palestine will, inshallah, one day be a part of, and ignore the evidence of the neocolonial regimes that arose in its wake, or the interconnectedness of British and Israeli colonial regimes. The path to the end of the genocide of Palestinians must, for those of us who survived because we were never in harm's way, be more strategic than simply trying to give as many non-Palestinian people as possible a way to have a moment of public moral catharsis.

If you make the decision to join the September "Lift the Ban" action, I hope these reflections give you pause, and also equips you with some tools other than "get arrested" for thinking about how to plan a civil disobedience action. I hope you take these reflections with you to planning meetings, and frame them however you need to so that people can take you seriously.

I believe that in the action plan for Lift the Ban, DoJ has organised a spectacle which doesn't pull at the heart strings of anyone except the protestors themselves. As someone who basically agrees that causing property damage and lost profits is not worthy of calling terrorism, and who has been following the writings of both the Filton 24 and DoJ closely, I think it is important to speak back to DoJ's plans and propose something better.

I believe there is time for DoJ to pivot their messaging and tactics, and plan a civil disobedience action that is morally responsible and politically efficacious. If that happens, I'd be proud to encourage any UK citizen I know to go show their support somehow. (Not me though, because I'm an immigrant to this country. We can't mess about with criminal charges like those of you with voting rights can, especially when it's potential terrorism charges we're talking about. But if this action goes forward in a thoughtful way, I'd love to sing its praises.)

Lesson #1: Civil disobedience is a politics of spectacle and persuasion

A Brief History of the Salt March and the Montgomery Bus Boycott

One of the things we can learn from civil disobedience history is that it is a politics of both spectacle and persuasion. The spectacle is whatever the activists are doing to bring attention to suffering in a hypervisible way. The persuasion is the narrative that surrounds what they're doing, and the way the press talks to the public and regular working peoples talk to one another. The most important part of these stories, is that neither of these instances of civil disobedience "worked" in the long term to bring about the change they aimed at. What they did instead was shift the public conversations around the injustice the public witnessed. Is getting a terrorism charge worth it to change public conversations several decades from now? I'm not so sure.

Gandhi and the Salt March

Take Gandhi's Salt March for example. It is not an accident that the past Lift the Ban actions have taken place near his statute at Parliament Square. They are deliberately invoking Gandhi's position in the public imagination as a model of civil disobedience. So let's look at that model more closely.

The 1930 Salt March took place from March 12-April 6, which saw Gandhi and 78 supporters from all over India march 387 kilometres, from the city of Ahmedabad to the village of Dandi. I learned a lot about it from Ramachandra Guha's door-stop of a definitive biography of the man. Guha noted that the decision to go from Ahmedabad (where Gandhi was living) to Dandi was because of the drama of the distance. There was a presumably abundant salt deposit in a much closer town, but he did not think it would attract spectators in quite the same way as a long march which gave the public time to see them:

There were inland salt deposits near the town of Badalpur. But these were just a few days walk from Ahmedabad, whereas Gandhi wanted this to be a long march, or pilgrimage perhaps, where his leisurely progress would enthuse people along the way and attract wider publicity too.

After mapping out the longer route, he wrote ahead to leaders in the stops along the route to bring crowds of people, including textile workers and "untouchables" to attend the nightly speeches he gave along the way. On the second evening of the march, the crowd that assembled to hear him speak was estimated to be upwards of 10,000 people. The crowd of the third evening was over 40,000. According to Guha, "All castes, creeds, religions and interests were merged into one irresistible wave of patriotism." By the time the marchers got to the last stop on the Salt March, the crowd who assembled to watch them was over 100,000 in a village that normally had a population of around 200.

The press was an important part of the Salt March as well, as not just onlookers but as participants in a sense. Guha writes:

A press car followed the marchers. The journalists were chastised by onlookers, who asked whether they were not ashamed of themselves when the sixty-one-year-old Gandhi and his colleagues were walking and thus making the ground sacred under their feet. The scribes were compelled to get out of their car and walk.

Gandhi's non-violence involved significant amounts of media attention, and he was consistent throughout his life in the conviction that letting the world hear from ordinary Indians was a core part of the strategy. All throughout the walk, Gandhi was writing articles for his publication Young Indian about the march, why they were doing it, and responding to critics. What made the Salt March a spectacle was not the 79 people walking, but the way they publicly discussed the injustice with the media, and made arguments that persuaded the ordinary poor and working peoples in India to join them in their own ways. The Salt March was a spectacle because of just how many people showed up to support the marchers, listened to what they had to say, and learned to circumvent the salt tax by refining their own using their available resources. Once the Salt March finished, Indians kept making salt on their own, having been taught by the efforts of the march how to do so. Eventually, millions of Indians were making their own salt in defiance of the salt tax. But even that spectacle wasn't enough to repeal the Salt Tax.

The Wikipedia page on the Salt March describes the aftermath better than I ever could: "Although over 60,000 Indians were jailed as a result of the Salt Satyagraha, the British did not make immediate major concessions." The salt tax wasn't even repealed until 1946, a full 16 years after the Salt March. Sure, the Salt March was important in that journey, but it is clear that it was not one of the direct causes of the repeal.

The civil disobedience of colonised peoples through Gandhi's Quit India movement helped break down support in the eyes of the UK electorate. It was part of a larger movement which helped move the attitudes of people in the UK enough that Celement Atlee was able to successfully run on a campaign promise to withdraw from India after WWII. But if that was the cultural and historical background, we still have to acknowledge that the decolonisation of British India was as much about the exhaustion of the resources to maintain the colony caused by World War II as it was a moral fatigure about colonailism.

Rosa Parks and the Montgomery Bus Boycott

Rosa Parks's civil disobedience, and the Montgomery Bus Boycott that her arrest launched relied on mass appeal to the public to work as well. I learned a lot from Cheryl Phibbs's book on the topic, The Montgomery Bus Boycott: A History and Reference Guide. Three quarters of all bus users in Montgomery, Alabama at the time were Black, which a large portion of those being Black women. Although all Black people were subject to the segregation laws, of course, the choice to centre Black women was due to both their combined economic power as users of the Montgomery bus services to commute to-and-from work, but also because of the social role that violence against "innocent" women played in the public consciousness.

Parks's decision to refuse to give up her seat was spontaneous on her part that day. However, at the time of her arrest, Rosa Parks worked as a secretary for the NAACP, and had already been an active racial justice organiser for over 2 decades. Her "spontaneous" decision happened while she was well aware of, and actively participating in, a coalition of multiple racial justice organisations. The Women's Political Council (WPC) and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) had run "test cases" of other with other Black women who were trained in disobedience methods to strategically refuse to give up their seats around the country. Racial justice organisers had been planning the Montgomery Bus Boycott for at least a year before Parks's arrest, as well as a court case to sue the state for racial discrimination. Parks was the perfect test case for the lawsuit, and the publicity of her arrest was used strategically to launch the boycott at the perfect moment.

Infamously, Parks was approached for the Montgomery lawsuit and to be one of the faces for the launch of the boycott, not just because of her decades of activist experience, but also in part because her light skin, her status as a married woman (and not a single black “wellfare queen”), her fashionable dress sense, and speech patterns as a relatively well-educated Black woman. All of this combined to make the police violence against her look particularly egregious.

The bus boycott meanwhile was so effective because poor and working class Black women domestic workers walked to work for a year, rather than ride the bus. Again, the plans for the bus boycott were in place before she was arrested- her arrest was a leveraged as a publicity stunt for a larger working class political action that was already in the works. The WPC and NAACP were waiting for an event that could launch the campaign, loudly, and with more organised support for both the organisations, and the people who would be walking to work instead of bussing.

Parks's arrest was the case that eventually led to the US Supreme Court ruling that would desegregate public services around the country, but it was made relevant to ordinary people through the images of the next year, when the boycott continued strong. The images of Black women in their work clothes walking in rain, heat, and all kinds of inclement weather were powerful because they showed a mass public that were more willing to sweat and get soaked to the bone than sit in segregated buses. These people walked to work, to school, to church, in all weather, every day for a year. That was the sustained spectacle, not just Parks's arrest.

The court case which Parks became the centre of won at the Supreme Court, yes. In Browder v Gayle the Supreme Court of the US ruled that Alabama's segregation laws were unconstitutional. But even that spectacle wasn't enough to prevent those same people from being assaulted by aggrieved white people once they started riding the bus again and re-segregate the United States through different means. Famously though, the white people in Alabama were fucking brutal and immediate in their racial backlash against Black bus riders. White men assembled street gangs to attack Black people when they got off the bus. They assembled to fire bullets into buses where Black people were sitting in formerly whites only seats. They followed Black bus riders home and threatened their families and shot into their houses. And now, all these decades later, many parts of the US are more racially segregated than they were before the Civil Rights Movement, not less.

Relevance to DoJ Action Plan

DoJ is clear that they've they understand the importance of spectacle, but I do not think they have designed an effective one. Gandhi didn't just walk to a river and hope to get arrested; his followers arrived to hear him speak in the 10s of thousands and they learned how to make salt in defiance of the British taxes. The arrest of Rosa Parks wasn't just an arrest of a woman sitting down; it sparked an entire city of Black people to engage in a year-long boycott which knocked out the biggest economic base of their local transport company. The cost of catharsis for the Lift the Ban protests is a proportionate loss of agency to control the narrative about terrorism and decolonisation of Palestine.

Here is how DoJ described the aims of Lift the Ban:

1 – Lift the Ban on Palestine Action. Stop persecuting those taking direct action to protect the Palestinian people from genocide.
2 – Name the Israeli assault on the Palestinian people as a genocide. Comply with the resulting legal obligations, including by ending all military trade and other military cooperation with Israel.

Let's also take a look at how the Action Plan describes civil disobedience. Notice the words that I put in bold here:

The action will follow the principles for traditional Defend Our Juries sign-holding actions, in which sitters sit at locations of symbolic significance, relevant to the message we are communicating, with nonviolent composure, until arrested or until it is clear the police have stopped arresting people.

The Action Plan also makes clear what a "non-violent posture" is on page 7:

• We are sitting down (only standing in exceptional circumstances)

• We have a gaze lowered in contemplation and resolve, not seeking contact with passers by or the police. Our words, or lack of, on the sign are what we are communicating. Let them speak for themselves.

• We do not give media interviews during the action as they disrupt the peaceful and impactful atmosphere we are creating

So, the goals of Lift the Ban are to get the UK government to remove Palestine Action from the list of terrorist organisations, and name what Israel is doing as a genocide. They way they will do this is by voicing public support of Palestine Action, and getting so many people arrested for doing so that prosecuting people under the law will become unfeasible, and the government will be forced to reconsider. The public will see scores of people getting arrested for a bad reason, and be outraged. Presumably then, the combination of unfeasibility of the law proscribing Palestine Action on moral and practical grounds, and general public outrage about the arrests, would prompt the government to recognize that the mass killing of Palestinians is a genocide.

This form of protest leaves little room for sympathetic onlookers to join the moral force of the public outrage they are aiming for. How can a sympathetic public get involved and voice their own outrage without themselves getting arrested? What does a sympathetic public do with their outrage? Write an ineffectual letter to their own MPs demanding the release of those prisoners too?

The lack of space for sympathisers to get involved, and absence of coordination with other organisations who are planning actions that could benefit from all the media attention is, in my view, a damning problem. The spectacle is supposed to be the arrest of hundreds of people that the general public would assume are doing something which should not be illegal. But this relies on a general public that already agrees with them. Does the general public, in fact, think that because the genocide in Palestine is unjustified, Palestine Action is therefore also justified in their direct action against the machinery of war? I think this is genuinely unclear. But suppose the general public is sympathetic to this framing? What then?

This tactic would therefore be relying on the unstated assumption that the Met Police will in fact be overwhelmed logistically by trying to arrest so many people at once. The police know that eyes are on them when they arrest protestors, and they are also putting up a public performance of their own. Protestors who get arrested willingly then can't do anything about this practically or ideologically to make this case to their audience. They've been instructed to not speak to the press or passersby, and the Action Plan says nothing about how their messages will be communicated to the public otherwise. I have had mates arrested by cops who ask them for their pronouns before doing a pat down, and made sure that trans women were patted down by cis women cops. The result is a protest that relies on police violence, and not the actions of the protestors, to up the ante of moral significant to the spectators. I think this is an unfortunate way to think about spectacle because it transfers the agency and narrative control of the action from the protestors to the police.

These mass arrest demonstrations which rely on police violence are also the perfect justification to give the Met Police a bigger budget to "handle" these protestors, and increase funding to "counter terrorism policing". What cop from outside London wouldn't accept overtime pay to travel into London on the days of the actions to join their colleagues in jackbooted thuggery? What law-and-order MP wouldn't want to be the one to run on a campaign of "we successfully stopped terrorists and their sympathizers and the activists walked right into our handcuffs"?

I actually think this is the most damning critique for DoJ and other Hallamist activists, but I understand why they do not find this convincing. So let me try a different argument.

A quiet sit-in with signs is only a spectacle because DoJ is relying on the image of the police arrests to be shocking to the general public. But regular arrests of protestors are not a spectacle or a shock. We expect the police to be traitors to social justice movements, and to just follow the orders of their superiors who represent the views of the state. Whenever I see police arresting someone, I feel indignant, but it is an ordinary part of my life. Everybody expects people in positions of power to be unmoved by moral sympathy for those below them. This protest is designed to make life difficult for the police, and give people who feel powerless to do something with their rage, but it doesn't target any of the institutions or practices that prop up support for Israel's genocide. Nobody sensible expects the police to treat anyone well who isn't a peer of the realm or a child predator in the royal family. There isn't anything here to get the public's heart strings plucked.

If DoJ leadership knows what the 500+ arrests are going to do to help the accused terrorists fight this legal designation, they haven't said. What is the causal connection between 500+ people getting arrested for holding up signs in support of Palestine Action and the bureaucratic process of de-listing of Palestine Action as a proscribed group? How was Yvette Cooper's work day impacted in any substantive way by the arrest of those protestors? What is the causal connection between the de-listing of Palestine Action as a proscribed group, and the naming of the Israeli assault on the Palestinian people as a genocide? Presumably, if they are successful, Palestine Action would no longer be a terrorist organisation. Is they were to continue doing direct action, "criminal property damage" doesn't then suddenly become legal just because the general public thinks its in support of a good cause. Would Palestine Action activists not simply be charged under regular serious property damage laws, rather than more severe terrorism charges? Is that better than the current status quo?

A Few Suggestions for DoJ

I think the lesson here from the long-term outcome of the March is that we should plan for civil disobedience campaigns to win PR battles over the moral attitudes of the general public that is then galvanized to think differently about the status quo. But the legal and political successes connected to civil disobedience campaigns require broad-based coalitions with other organisations working directly on those issues, which the civil disobedience brings attention to. Right now, the attention for Lift the Ban is on no one other than the protestors. Not even the Palestinians facing genocide, or the Filton 24.

There are several changes to the current Action Plan which would address the PR battle more effectively:
(1) reconsider what is "non-violent" about these protests beyond merely sitting quietly and looking down, and
(2) consider a form of non-violent action that involves members of the general public in a way that doesn't risk them getting arrested, and
(3) get media training for protestors who do risk arrest so that they can speak to the media thoughtfully about why they are doing this, and
(4) coordinate with existing anti-genocide and pro-Palestinian sovereignty organisation to bring attention to their work and action.

It would be just as much an act of civil disobedience to present speeches educating the public about the nature of terrorism laws in the UK, and how it silences genuine dissent.

It would be just as much an act of civil disobedience to put up a massive sheet of paper, and invite calligraphers to write down the names of every person killed by Israel.

It would be just as much an act of civil disobedience to gather people to read the names of each and every single person on a megaphone who has been murdered by Israel in a public vigil, and refuse to leave until the reading of names was complete.

It would be just as much an act of civil disobedience to gather to do a teach in that anyone could attend to learn about the history of genocide law, and civil disobedience itself.

It would be just as much an act of civil disobedience to organise ordinary working people in the UK to gather in informal town halls to discuss their frustrations with refusal of their government to stop supplying arms to Israel, and what diversity of methods they might use and organisations they might get involved with.

It would be just as much an act of civil disobedience to very loudly and publicly say the names of the Filton 24, and read prepared statements from them about how their proscription makes them political prisoners.

These examples are just that- examples, not suggestions.

The larger point is that the goals of Lift the Ban are seriously disconnected from both their actions and what we have seen work well historically with civil disobedience. It also does not acknowledge the limitations of civil disobedience for direct social change. I don't know what you want to make of all that, but I do know that it is a circuitous route to get from mass arrests for terrorism charges to "my government has stopped funding genocide".

The Hallamist Toddlers essay I linked to above says it beautifully, so I want to end this essay with their words:

"I would ignore them, but the truth is that their actions have ripples far beyond their members. Poor security culture leaves unlocked phones in the hands of the cops, increasing surveillance of the movements as a whole. Friends get dragged in, chewed up and spat out, and once again we find ourselves running emotional and logistical support, mopping up after an organisation that's more interested in the press than the people. The issues that long-standing groups have worked on get filtered through Hallamist messaging and actions because the media love images of middle-aged, middle-class white people getting carried away by cops more than they love the long, hard and often quite mundane struggle of mutual aid or community-building - or, indeed, the realities of front-line resistance."

Next week, I will be back with an essay about Lesson #2: Civil disobedience makes spectacles by deliberately making those who are suffering injustice, and those who come to the aid of those suffering, hypervisible to a mass public.

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