'Freeing the truth' – Extinction Rebellion activists on their week of action

From blockading printers to meditating outside Barclays, the climate crisis campaign has drawn a variety of participants

Extinction rebellion protesters blockade Newprinters publishing factory in Knowsley, Liverpool, last Friday. Photograph: Kenny Brown/Rex/Shutterstock

Mattha Busby

Mon 7 Sep 2020 

Thousands of Extinction Rebellion (XR) activists and supporters have been staging “die-ins”, preventing copies of newspapers from being distributed and meditating outside banks over the past week in a series of actions aimed at highlighting the worsening ecological crisis.

At printing plants in Merseyside and in Hertfordshire on Friday evening, many trucks carrying newspapers were unable to deliver to shops. The prime minister, Boris Johnson, accused XR of seeking to limit the public’s access to news amid suggestions that the environmental group could subsequently be treated like an organised crime group by the authorities.

Amanda, 23, a barista from Liverpool, was among those stopping newspapers owned by Rupert Murdoch from leaving Newsprinters’ Knowsley plant, and said she was motivated by frustration about how some of the media have reported on the environment.

“I’m increasingly realising some newspapers don’t report on the climate crisis accurately,” she said. “With some of the billionaire owners climate change sceptics, how can you expect what they write to really represent what is happening?”

For Amanda, who did not wish to give her surname, the action highlighted the importance of “freeing the truth” and showed how people can take direct action to significant effect.

“I joined XR about 18 months ago out of despair and helplessness in the face of the terrifying prospect of runaway climate change. I realised anything I was going to do in my personal life wasn’t going to cut it, the system is the greatest problem.”

Activist John Lynes from Extinction Rebellion at a protest in Parliament Square, London, on 1 September. Photograph: Tolga Akmen/AFP/Getty Images

Hundreds of XR supporters have been arrested over the last seven days – believed to be significantly fewer than in previous “rebellions” – the oldest of whom was 92-year-old retired engineer John Lynes, from Hastings.

“I don’t enjoy being a nuisance,” he said following his second arrest after protesting with XR and refusing to cooperate with the police on Parliament Square in London. “But we’ve tried everything else, there’s no sense of urgency; they’re talking about 2050, but by then it will be a bit late to do anything.”

He said it was crucial to keep pressure on the government ahead of the UN climate change conference next year, which the UK is chairing. “It’s my generation that has caused all this and we have a responsibility which I can’t duck,” Lynes said.

“The government response to climate heating is pathetic, that’s why we’re protesting. They’re doing so little and nothing in proportion to what’s needed.”

XR Youth activist Poppy Silk outside the office of her MP, Robert Courts, in Witney, Oxfordshire. Photograph: Guardian Community

In Cardiff, 19-year-old Poppy Silk and her XR Youth comrades have been protesting to urge MPs to support the passage of the climate and ecological emergency bill, introduced to parliament by the Green party MP Caroline Lucas on Wednesday to reflect the urgency of the escalating climate emergency.

If passed into law, it would help ensure the UK has a comprehensive strategy to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, amid frustration over inaction.

“We see how the government has dragged its feet and reacted slowly to the coronavirus pandemic, and it’s the same with the climate,” said Silk, who also protested outside her local MP’s office in Witney, Oxfordshire, this week.

“Neither of my MPs from home or where I study have backed the bill yet. Climate heating is the biggest threat to humanity and we need to act now. We’d far rather be having fun than putting our civil liberties at risk.”

An XR Buddhists demonstration outside a Barclays bank in central London last week. Photograph: Jeremy Peters

Back in London, Barclays bank – which lends money to fossil fuel companies – was the object of activists’ ire. Katja Behrendt, 35, a non-clinical NHS doctor, was part of an XR Buddhists demonstration outside one of its branches by Tottenham Court Road.

“Often we meditate as part of our protests,” she said. “It takes some getting used to but I’ve found these are the moments I feel really connected to my values.

“I find in activism sometimes it can be a bit ‘us and them’ and that people burn out so I was really happy to find other Buddhists interested within XR because it’s about how do we participate and protest and not further division.”

Chidi Oti-Obihara speaking at a protest in the City of London last week. Photograph: Guardian Community

However, Chidi Oti-Obihara, a former banker and 2017 Green party parliamentary candidate in East Ham, who protested outside Downing Street and in the City of London last week – making a speech calling for ecocide to be made a crime – said promises had been made by the government and others that were not being fulfilled.

“It’s incredibly important to keep the issue of climate change firmly on the agenda because so much has been done to deal with one emergency without contextualising it properly in terms of another emergency,” he said, contrasting the government’s dual responses to the pandemic and the climate emergency.

“The government has dropped everything, ignored due process and thrown everything at Covid-19 without considering the longer-term environmental impact of such bailouts.”

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/sep/07/freeing-the-truth-extinction-rebellion-activists-on-their-week-of-action

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French 'anti-maskers' most likely to be educated WHITE women in 50s, says study

Results show 94% of Covid sceptics would refuse vaccine and most describe themselves as free-thinkers

Kim Willsher in Paris

Mon 7 Sep 2020 

 

An anti-mask protest at the Place de la Nation in Paris where hundreds of demonstrators chanted ‘liberté, liberté’. Photograph: Kamil Zihnioglu/AP

French people who reject mask-wearing are more likely to be older, educated women who support the gilets jaunes (yellow vests) protest movement and the controversial virus specialist Didier Raoult, and would refuse to have a coronavirus vaccination if one were available, according to a new study.

They also describe themselves as free-thinkers who believe the government is meddling too much in their lives, have a distrust of public institutions and often support conspiracy theories, it found.

The French thinktank the Jean-Jaurès Foundation suggested “anti-maskers” were spread across the political spectrum, with the research results showing a slight tendency towards the right.

Antoine Bristielle, a social sciences professor who carried out the study, said he examined a number of Facebook anti-mask groups and that his findings were based on just over 1,000 responses to an online questionnaire.

The findings come after a demonstration in Paris by anti-maskers at the end of August at which hundreds of protesters chanted “liberté, liberté”. It is mandatory to wear a mask outside across the French capital.

Bristielle said four main objections to masks emerged from the respondents: that they are useless in preventing Covid-19 contamination; that they are dangerous because they cause breathing difficulties and are a “hive of bacteria”; that the epidemic is over or never existed and the governments have lied to the people; and that masks are being used to subjugate the people.

“While these four arguments methodically clash with the body of scientific facts,” the study says, “they nevertheless already say a great deal about the profile of the individuals who argue them: distrust of institutions, refusal of constraints, belief in conspiracy theories.”


Researchers found anti-maskers were likely to reject the political “elite” and traditional political parties and have more faith in the ordinary people to make decisions. In the first round of the 2017 presidential election, which resulted in a second round run-off between Emmanuel Macron and Marine Le Pen, a total of 40% of those who are against masks either abstained, spoiled their ballot paper or were not even on the electoral register. Of those anti-maskers who did vote, 20% voted for the hard-left candidate Jean-Luc Mélenchon and 27% for the far right’s Le Pen.

Above all, those who reject the enforced wearing of masks consider themselves free thinkers and 87% said society works better when people are responsible for their own lives, and 95% declared the government meddles too much in their daily existence.

Asked a series of questions about popular conspiracy theories, 90% of anti-maskers said the health ministry was in league with ”big pharma” to hide the poisonous effect of vaccines, 52% thought Princess Diana, who died in a car crash in Paris in 1997, had been assassinated, 56% signed up to the far-right conspiracy “replacement” theory and 57% believed there was a worldwide Zionist plot.

The study found 63% of those quizzed who were anti-mask were women, the average age was 50, and most had been in higher education. Only 2% had confidence in Emmanuel Macron and 3% in the prime minister, Jean Castex, and 94% said they would refuse to be vaccinated against the coronavirus. Most said they obtained their information from the internet and 51% said they trusted this information; 22% said they had taken part in gilets jaunes protests and 57% said they supported the movement.

Raoult, a controversial infectious diseases expert from Marseille, was well regarded by 87% of those asked who opposed masks, and almost all of them (98%) said patients infected with Covid-19 should be allowed to be treated with hydroxychloroquine as Raoult has suggested, despite claims the treatment could be dangerous

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/sep/07/french-anti-maskers-see-themselves-as-free-thinkers-study-shows

Beethoven was black': why the radical idea still has power today

An 1814 etching of Ludwig van Beethoven by Blasius Hoefel, after a drawing of Louis Letronne. Photograph: Imagno/Getty Images


He helped galvanise the US civil rights movement, and today sparks intense debate about cultural dominance and the musical canon. In his 250th anniversary year can we listen to Beethoven and what he represents with fresh ears?


Philip Clark
Mon 7 Sep 2020 11.47 BST

Exactly 80 years after Beethoven’s death, in 1907, the British composer Samuel Coleridge-Taylor began speculating that Beethoven was black. Colderidge-Taylor was mixed race – with a white English mother and a Sierra Leonean father - and said that he couldn’t help noticing remarkable likenesses between his own facial features and images of Beethoven’s. Having recently returned from the segregated US, Coleridge-Taylor projected his experiences there onto the German composer. “If the greatest of all musicians were alive today, he would find it impossible to obtain hotel accommodation in certain American cities.”

British composer Samuel Coleridge-Taylor (1875-1912). Photograph: Hulton Archive/Getty Images

His words would prove prophetic. During the 1960s, the mantra “Beethoven was black” became part of the struggle for civil rights. By then Coleridge-Taylor had been dead for 50 years and was all but forgotten, but as campaigner Stokely Carmichael raged against the deeply ingrained assumption that white European culture was inherently superior to black culture, the baton was passed. “Beethoven was as black as you and I,” he told a mainly black audience in Seattle, “but they don’t tell us that.” A few years earlier, Malcolm X had given voice to that same idea when he told an interviewer that Beethoven’s father had been “one of the blackamoors that hired themselves out in Europe as professional soldiers”.

“Beethoven was black” became a refrain chanted on a San Francisco soul music radio station and, in 1969, hit mass consciousness when Rolling Stone magazine ran a story headlined: “Beethoven was black and proud!” In 1988, two white students at Stanford University in California, following a heated discussion about music and race, defaced a poster of Beethoven, giving him crude stereotypical African American features, an act reported in the press as an act of racism.


Beethoven: where to start with his music
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Itchiness about Beethoven’s cultural dominance would continue to bring classical music out in occasional hives, and in 2007 Nadine Gordimer published a collection of short stories called Beethoven Was One-Sixteenth Black. But the issue of race laid largely dormant until this year – the 250th anniversary of his birth – when against the backdrop of Covid-19 becoming inextricably linked with the Black Lives Matter movement, echoes of Carmichael and X were voiced, coming from directions nobody expected.

William Gibbons, a musicologist at the College of Fine Arts in Forth Worth, Texas, had already put a bomb under classical music Twitter with a thread that began: “As 2019 winds down, here’s a short thread about one of my big resolutions for 2020: spending a full year avoiding Beethoven.” Then the pandemic struck and swept all the Beethoven celebrations aside anyway. With Europe heading towards lockdown, the composer Charlotte Seither, debating at the Beethoven-Haus in Bonn, caused a stir when she spoke of Beethoven fatigue and of his “toxic cult of genius” and “thinking in categories of dominance”. Andrea Moore – assistant professor of music at Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts – writing in the Chicago Tribune, called for a “year-long moratorium” on Beethoven performances. His music is ubiquitous, she reasoned – so how about using the “Beethoven-sized hole” left to commission new music, then return to the composer with fresh ears in 12 months’ time?
Malcolm X at a civil rights demonstration in 1963. Photograph: Bob Henriques/Time & Life Pictures/Getty Image


Moore’s proposal would end positively at least: we get Beethoven back, plus a stack of new compositions. But the truth is Beethoven is like Michael Rosen’s bear hunt – you can’t go over him, you can’t go under him, you have to go through him. Academics manufacturing a culture war, in which there can be no winners, is a very 21st-century way of dealing with a figure perceived as a problem: you turn him into a straw man and complain about being triggered. Carmichael and Malcolm X were far wiser. They didn’t advocate cancelling Beethoven, nor did they deal in easy gesture politics – the stakes were too high.

Was Beethoven black? The evidence is scant and inconclusive. The case rests on two possibilities: that Beethoven’s Flemish ancestors married Spanish “blackamoors” of African descent, or that Beethoven’s mother had an affair. But the truth Carmichael and Malcolm X sought was not scientific. “Beethoven was black” was a grand metaphor designed to unsettle and shake certainty.
Had Beethoven been black, would he have been classed as a canonical composer? And what about other black composers lost in history?

Metaphors ran right through black music. Edward Ellington and William Basie were ennobled to the status of a Duke and a Count, and the most intricate metaphor of all was spun by the Alabama-born bandleader Herman Blount who had begun to perform as Sun Ra. Blount – like Malcolm X, originally Malcolm Little – rejected his given surname as a “slave name”, and created an elaborate metaphorical backstory about Sun Ra, an alien from Saturn, who descended to Earth to preach peace and togetherness.

Corey Mwamba – musician, researcher and presenter of BBC Radio 3’s contemporary jazz programme Freeness – thinks that the metaphor has retained its potency. “The statement ‘Beethoven was black’ was a disruption of a very canonical way of thinking,” he tells me. “It makes us think again about a culture that gives his music so much visibility. Had Beethoven been black, would he have been classed as a canonical composer? And what about other black composers lost in history?”
 

Disappeared … the tragic composer Julius Eastman. Photograph: LCMF

Among many black composers whose work has disappeared from history, the story of Julius Eastman is perhaps most telling. As composer, singer and pianist Eastman was a vital part of the 1960s and 70s New York music scene, his open-form scores fusing the loops of minimalism with the grooves of popular music – a volatile synthesis that often detonated into free improvisation. Before his death on the streets and homeless in 1990, he loaded his pieces with deliberately provocative titles that pushed the spirit of “Beethoven was black” from slogan towards something that actually happened in sound.

In his recent book, A Hidden Landscape Once a Week, Mark Sinker reported his conversation with the photographer and writer, Val Wilmer, about when she interviewed Steve Reich, who had recently completed his landmark piece Drumming, based on drum patterns he heard in Ghana. Talking about an African American musician of mutual acquaintance, Reich said “he’s one of the only blacks you can talk to,” before adding “blacks are getting ridiculous in the States now”. Wilmer was shocked and enraged. “Wouldn’t you become politicised?” she concluded. The wider pressures on black composers in 1970s America can never be doubted.

“Radicals like James Baldwin and Angela Davis took time to think about what they were doing, then produced change,” Mwamba adds, “We actually need a deeper understanding of Beethoven, to understand why we love this music. It’s important we present this music from a position of love, rather than hierarchy or power, or as ‘something we’ve always done’.”

•The Aurora Orchestra perform Beethoven’s 7th symphony at the Proms on Radio 3 and BBC4 on 10 September alongside the world premiere of Richard Ayres’ No. 52 (Three pieces about Ludwig van Beethoven, dreaming, hearing loss, and saying goodbye)

 

Hong Kong shocked by violent police arrest of 12-year-old girl

Child’s mother says her daughter was buying art supplies when she was tackled and pinned to the ground by police

Helen Davidson

 @heldavidson

 

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Mon 7 Sep 2020 14.07 BSTFirst published on Mon 7 Sep 2020 05.36 BST

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 12-year-old girl one of hundreds arrested in huge Hong Kong protest – video report

Hong Kong police have been strongly criticised over the rough arrest of a 12-year-old girl whose family says was caught in a protest crowd while out buying art supplies.

Video widely shared across social media and in Hong Kong media showed the officers seeking to corral a group of people including the young girl, who ducked aside and tried to run away. An officer tackled her to the ground, while several others helped to pin her down.

The arrest came amid the largest street protest seen in Hong Kong since 1 July, the first full day under the national security laws imposed by Beijing on the city, outlawing acts of sedition, secession, foreign collusion and terrorism.

Almost 300 arrests as Hong Kong protesters oppose election delay

 

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The girl’s mother told Apple Daily she intended to sue and lodge a formal complaint. She said her daughter and her 20-year-old son – who were both fined under the city’s pandemic-related laws against gatherings – were out buying art supplies, and that the girl ran away because she was scared. Her daughter was bruised and scratched after the encounter.

Claudia Mo, a pro-democracy legislator, said the actions taken towards the girl “shows how unnecessarily jumpy [and] trigger-happy Hong Kong police have become”.

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 Hong Kong police violently arrest 12-year-old girl – video

In a statement a few hours after the incident, Hong Kong police confirmed the arrest of a 12-year-old girl, saying she had run “in a suspicious manner” and officers had used “minimum necessary force” to apprehend her.

“Police were concerned about youngsters participating in prohibited group gathering. Their presence at the chaotic protest scenes also endangers their own personal safety,” it said.

In a later statement police said: “Police attach great importance to integrity. If any person considers he or she is affected by police misconduct, he or she may lodge a complaint to the Complaints Against Police Office. It will be handled in a fair and impartial manner according to established procedures.”

On Sunday night, the Hong Kong government said people had ignored advice from police not to participate in unlawful assemblies, risking anti-pandemic efforts and potentially breaching the national security law. The government “strongly condemn[ed] these unlawful and selfish acts”.

“Police discharged their rightful duties today and took prompt and decisive actions to apprehend the offenders.”

The liaison office for the central government accused protesters of seeking to “reignite war”, and accused them of having “a cold-blooded disregard for the lives and health of the general public” in breaching gathering bans.

The spokesman said since the implementation of the law “Hong Kong society had undergone a positive change from chaos to governance”, and said there would be “zero tolerance” for any violations.

Almost 300 people were arrested on Sunday, the vast majority for unlawful assemblies. About 2,000 police officers were deployed early in the day, ahead of the protests which had been planned by a coalition of pro-democracy groups to mark the day that Hong Kong’s elections were supposed to be held.

Carrie Lam, Hong Kong’s chief executive, announced in July the elections would be postponed for one year because of the danger of Hong Kong’s most recent Covid-19 outbreak, but was accused of using the pandemic to silence opposition. Many protesters also called for the release of 12 people arrested by Chinese coastguards while attempting to flee by boat to Taiwan.

Separately, activist Tam Tak-chi was also arrested on Sunday, for “uttering seditious words”, Hong Kong police said.

The vice-president of radical democratic party People Power and a former radio host, Tam was arrested by the national security squad of the Hong Kong police force but was charged under the regular criminal ordinance, not the national security law.

Senior superintendent Li Kwai-wah said the squad was leading the investigation because of earlier suspicions that Tam had breached article 21 of the national security law, criminalising “incitement to secession”.

Tam’s words had “brought into hatred and contempt of the government and raised discontent and disaffection among Hong Kong people”, Li said.

At least 25 people have been arrested under the national security law so far, although just one has been charged.

The law has provided authorities with the means to widen the scope of their crackdown on dissent in Hong Kong, and has created a chilling effect across academia, media, and pro-democracy members of the public.

In the past month, newspaper offices have been raided, academics removed from their posts, and books regarded as be problematic removed from shelves or altered. Restaurants and shops have torn down “Lennon walls”, where people stuck up post-it notes with pro-democracy messages, and some politicians and activists have fled overseas.

The law’s articles are so broadly defined they have been found to potentially violate numerous international laws, UN groups said last week.

Media organisations have warned there is little clarity about whether standard acts of journalism – such as quoting someone advocating for independence – would put them in breach of the law, and some outlets have removed such content from online platforms. Visas for foreign journalists have also been delayed or outright denied.

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