I have just discovered that Roger Hallam is no longer part of XR. He’s started a political party called beyond politics and they have recently thrown paint over the headquarters of Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth, Amnesty and Christian Aid. This is the message they left at those places:
In ordinary times we would not dream of throwing paint over your offices. But these are not ordinary times – these are the most extraordinary, fucked up times in the history of humanity. Governments are racing us towards extinction – into the indescribable suffering and death of billions of people as they take the world into 4°C of fatal heat – to make vast continents uninhabitable – to slaughter and starve the next generation. All for another few years of profits for the billionaire class.
In the face of this monstrosity, what have you done? Fuck all that’s meaningful. It is thirty years since we were told we will all die from climate chaos and you are deluded about how things change. Since the British parliament announced we are in a climate emergency last year, you have done fuck all. Since the Government decided this month it was adapting to the holocaust of a 4°C world you have done fuck all. Since we wrote to you last week demanding you bring down this genocidal government you have done fuck all.
We are here today to throw paint over your offices. Your horror at our actions reflects your self-importance, your self-obsession, your self-delusion.
We are the strangers at your gate – in the tradition of Jesus overturning the tables of the money men in the temple, in the tradition of beheading King Charles to create a republic of the people, in the tradition of the suffragettes smashing the windows of Oxford Street to get their rights, in the tradition of Martin Luther King’s letter from a Birmingham jail exposing the crass hypocrisy of the white moderate.
For decades you have preyed on the hope of both the young and old, conning them into giving their £3 a month so you can save the world for them. Conning them into thinking that emails, petitions and polite lobbying would do the job. While all the time you were just data mining, raising money for yourselves.
For decades you have used the fucked up language of the professional class. You have expressed “concern” for the slaughter of the innocent. You have expressed annoyance at “the lack of ambition” in stopping the death of nature. You hold up a plaster in response to the mass murder of our children.
For decades you systematically excluded working class voices with your emotional repression, your pretence of competence, your stupid language rules.
For decades you have smothered radicalness and truth telling. And now the time of reckoning is upon you.
Only a Greenpeace strategist has had the honesty to name what you are all up to – “managed defeat” as he told some of us. We will not accept “managed defeat” of everything we love. FUCK NO!
We have no words to describe our disgust. We have no words to describe our rage. We are all complicit but you have been in charge and you have utterly, utterly failed – we accuse you of appeasing radical evil.
Disband yourselves– or drive your organisations into a final battle with this genocidal regime. That means your executives going on hunger strike, your staff going to prison, your supporters blocking the roads.
The Revolution is on its way. Our sacred right and indispensable duty is to take down the government for its treasonous betrayal and replace it with citizens’ assemblies of ordinary people.
It’s time for you to step up or get out of the way.
Beyond Politics. July, 2020.