False Consciousness Begone!

China's anti-government protesters have hit on a genius way of winding up the government, though it has certain ethical drawbacks, as you'll see.

They're online, encouraging people to 'protest' by simply going for an aimless afternoon stroll at popular locations: shopping centres, campuses and so on. No placards, banners, slogans or marching, just an innocuous promenade.

So how do you spot the 'protesters' from the ordinary people doing their shopping or enjoying the breeze? You can't. So the Chinese police can either leave everyone alone and risk subversion spreading, or crack the heads of those they don't like the look of (this is what they decided on). Innocent people get a beating. Then they start to wonder how legitimate the state is, if it indiscriminately beats up ordinary people and subversion spreads anyway.

Genius: it's a hard lesson for the victims but it certainly punctures the belief that the state is essentially benign. In Marxist terms, their 'false consciousness' (traditionally applied to the belief that capitalism benefits the workers as well as the bourgeois) is stripped away.

Do the ends justify the means? In this case, perhaps. It's a clever idea in so many ways. The government loses whether it reacts or not. It's protest as non-protest. It's making my head hurt.

Look out for this one

If you get an e-mail like this, it's probably genuine.

Dear Western benefactor,
my name is Muammar Ghadaffi/Hosni Mubarak/the King of Bahrain and I am sitting on a major pile of bullion thanks to some wise investments in British defence exports, Swiss Banks and London property. I have now decided to have a short holiday in Europe/Saudi Arabia and would like to offer the opportunity to share in my good fortune. If you would like to look after my pension fund for a short period, send me your account details and may Allah (peace be upon him) bless you for your kindness. I will deposit several billions of my oil money in your account for safekeeping.

h/t Mark

Back to the books

In my absence, the flow of lovely books did not stop. Today's haul included Norman Cohn's The Pursuit of the Millennium: Revolutionary Millenarians and Mystical Anarchists of the Middle Ages, a classic detailing the period in which religion and politics were nigh on indistinguishable, and in which political radicalism and heresy often went together. Thanks to Norbert for the recommendation! I've also dived into European literature - which we, and certainly I, shamefully neglect. I've bought Cees Nooteboom's postmodern The Following Story and volume 1 of Peter Weiss's The Aesthetics of Resistance: a novel. One day, I promise myself, I'll be able to read it in the original. I can read French and with some effort, Welsh, but I'm continually ashamed of my limited abilities in languages.

What else? A collection of Margaret Atwood's essays called Curious Pursuits, and David Horspool's The English Rebel: One Thousand Years of Troublemaking from the Normans to the Nineties. It looks like a slightly more conservative companion to Vallance's A Radical History of Britain. I love this stuff because despite the many evils perpetrated by English and then British imperialism, the British are also recalcitrant bunch who don't want to be pushed around. You decapitated a king before the French and staged numerous other revolts from the Peasants to the Poll Tax. Revive that tradition!

I also received a replacement Danish Literature Tree and Renaissance Tree posters - very beautiful.