Some more thoughts from SLH Dave (South Essex Radical Media) in the UK on dealing with the looming threat of vaccine passports. This was originally published on The Stirrer blog.
Preamble
During the latter part of the summer, some people could have been forgiven for thinking that we were going back to some version of ‘normality’ as things started to ease up and open up. Yet all the while, there’s been a shadow in the background in the form of the vaccine passport. A ‘passport’ that as I’ve previously written more times than I care to remember, can all too easily be repurposed into a form of digital identity – Dealing with the new (ab)normal – a situation report. A ‘passport’ that many are not yet sure how it will be implemented because the government keep moving the goalposts. While the government may be moving the goalposts and giving the appearance their approach is one of confusion, the direction of travel towards a severely restricted life for those who refuse to sign up for a vaccine passport is discernable for those who care to look. This is the trajectory I’ve suggested is likely to happen – Can the roll out of vaccine passports in the UK be halted?
The appearance of confusion and the constant shifting of the goalposts have their purposes. Firstly, they are a way of gauging public reaction to see if there’s going to be any serious pushback. If it looks as though there may be, all that happens is the way the narrative gets presented is changed to something more palatable while the core of what’s intended remains the same. Secondly, it’s part of the psyops that’s designed to wear us down to the point where the government hope that people will simply accept what’s going to be done to them in the vain hope that at some point, there will be a return to normality.
Another component of the psyops is laying a stark choice in front of people between getting vaccinated or having to endure more lockdowns. A ‘choice’ that’s ingenuous as those deemed vulnerable have already been double jabbed and the benefits of injecting pretty much the entire population with substances that are still in the trial phase are questionable to say the least.
Provocations…
There’s another element of the psyops which entails deliberately winding up the opponents of vaccinations/vaccine passports/the great reset, in a bid to get protests ending up as violent confrontations. The aim being to discredit the various currents of opposition to what’s being done to us. Sparking violence on protests is just one way of discrediting us – there are others, some of which are touched upon later on in this piece. Also, as with many other movements for change, aggressive tactics from the cops are a blatant form of intimidating people into not taking part in any future protests.
On September 3rd, there was a protest at a vaccination centre by the Science Museum in London. In a bid to stop people joining the protest, the cops blocked the exit from South Kensington station. This resulted in a crush at the top of the stairs with the potential for a backward surge down the stairs leading to a mass casualty event. The protestors at the top of the stairs literally had no option but to push their way through the police lines so that the crush behind them with its attendant risk could be eased. Needless to say that the protestors who did break through were then subjected to a pretty ruthless battering by the cops. You can see footage of what happened here. Lesson learnt – if you’re attending a protest, don’t use the nearest station to the assembly point, get off at the one before or go one stop extra, walk and always be vigilant as to what the cops are doing and how they’re deploying themselves.
Diversifying strategy and tactics
A point has been reached in this shitshow where we need to box clever and fight the battles to come on our terms, not those dictated by the authorities. What form of action you take depends on the overall aim.
Protests
If the aim is to get a large number of people from the diverse anti-great reset currents together in one place and at one time to connect with each other and boost morale, then the larger marches do have a place. Also, if there are enough people willing to hand out flyers, they are good for engaging with the communities they pass through. However, it has to be accepted that given how the media has been nobbled, there’s no point in expecting any coverage, let alone any reasonable, balanced reporting.
There are the smaller, more targeted marches – some held simply to make a point, others to attempt to shut places down. They do have a point but obviously, if the aim is to shut a place down, there’s a considerably elevated level of risk for the participants to consider.
I don’t like making criticisms in public, however, this has to be said…From my experience of the two marches I attended back in the summer, there were some pretty bloody alarming absences that, as the cops start to crack down, need addressing as a matter of urgency. They are effective stewarding / marshalling and should things go wrong, arrestee support and legal support. These two marches were quite relaxed affairs but even then, scanty and non existent stewarding led to them almost dissolving at some points along the route. Given the range of people involved in the various anti-great reset currents, it shouldn’t be that hard to find the expertise and experience needed to get these issues sorted if marches are going to continue to be a tactic.
As I’ve mentioned before, the Worldwide Freedom Rally in Trafalgar Square on Saturday July 24 was an utter shitshow with a range of egotistical speakers that can best be described as an act of self sabotage. Not wanting to be called a ‘conspiracy theorist’ but, it wouldn’t surprise me in the least if the rally was set up / manipulated as a black op to totally discredit the opposition to the new normal! I follow a fair number of UK based anti-great reset accounts on Twitter. In the days after Saturday 24 July, a decent sized majority of them felt that the rally was an utter disaster and would only serve to alienate people.
Winning hearts and minds, boycotts and sabotage
With the Policing, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill pretty much upon us, street protest of any kind will become riskier. Understandably, not everyone will be willing or able to accept that risk. As other movements for change have shown, there are many other tactics that can be deployed to get our message across and actively sabotage the implementation of vaccine passports and all of the shite that will follow on from that. From what I’ve seen so far, the various anti-great reset currents have grasped the importance of having a diversity of tactics, albeit there are lessons that still need to be learned.
Winning hearts and minds is something that has to be done at the local level in our communities and done in a way that is approachable. That means some very careful thought about the message to be conveyed is needed – telling the already vaccinated they’ve effectively signed their own death warrants isn’t exactly going to win hearts and minds! It’s got to be about sowing the seeds of doubt in peoples minds and pointing them in the direction of reliable sources of information. With some carefully thought out stickering and postering as well as face to face discussions, we intend to focus on what we can do at the local level and avoid the bigger set pieces and some of the dodgy elements latching onto them.
Then there’s the boycotts and sabotage. Plenty of people have said that they’ve no intention of going to a concert, sports event, restaurant or pub if they have to show a vaccine passport, paper or digital. That includes a fair few double jabbed people as well as the un-jabbed. That will be a lot of people engaging in the tactic of boycotting. Boycotts hit the bottom line. When this happens, it’s effectively sabotage. When the bottom line is getting hit, it may push some of the owners and managers to turn round to the government saying they are unwilling to carry on enforcing vaccine passports. That will more likely apply to the smaller chains and independents. The corporate giants who have bought into the narrative of the great reset will simply plough on regardless.
Boycotting, non-compliance and frustrating the implementation of vaccine passports is something a lot of people can and will be doing. While numbers on the streets can be ignored, the clobbering of the bottom line of compliant businesses cannot be dismissed. At the moment, its pretty much a risk free tactic. However, with the way things are going, it won’t come as a surprise that actively promoting boycotts as a tactic will end up being classed as ‘hate speech’ and dealt with accordingly.
Mutual aid and solidarity
What we seriously need to think about is how we support each other as our refusal to go along with vaccine passports increasingly shuts us out of supposedly mainstream society. For those who may have been to their last game of football or seen their last concert because they refuse to submit to using a vaccine passport that will eventually morph into a form of digital ID, it’s a case of offering solidarity and emotional support. However, given how strongly we feel about this and that for much of the last eighteen months, we’ve not engaged in many of these activities anyway, to be honest, these are easy sacrifices to make.
When it comes to being excluded from mainstream entertainment venues, I’m pretty sure that people will organise their own. Its human to want to socialise with others and to let off a bit of steam. There will be a return to raves in warehouses and fields. There will be underground gigs. There will be more house parties. Art could well hasten its escape from the sterility of the gallery and find its home on the walls. Watching your really local park side from the touchline may well turn out to be the perfect antidote to the hype of the Premier League. The human spirit will always find away to overcome the drive from those who presume to rule over us to regulate, monitor and control everything we do.
What is going to be a lot harder to deal with will be when the incremental creep of vaccine passports starts to reach the supermarkets and we find we can’t get the weekly shop. This is when shit gets real and will be the point where the authorities hope that many people will crack, get jabbed and sign up to the vaccine passport. As mentioned in previous pieces, the authorities will be taking an incremental approach to this in the hope that people won’t notice or that if they do, it’s too late to do anything about it. That gives us just about enough time to start sorting out things like the food banks we’ll need when we do eventually get shut out of the supermarkets. Hopefully, these will only have to be a temporary measure while we persuade the powers that be that denying us the right to buy food is NOT a good idea. Shit happens and desperate people will do desperate things – a few weeks of sustained looting and police / security forces unable to contain it may well persuade the authorities of the folly of forcing people to have a vaccine passport in order to buy food.
Growing and raising our own food has been mooted as a long term solution. Unless you are fortunate enough to own or have access to the land you would need to be self sufficient – collectively or individually – it will be nigh on impossible to be fully self sufficient. If you have access to a garden, with a fair bit of graft along with luck with the weather, it’s possible to achieve 2-3 months self sufficiency. If you can get access to an allotment, with some very careful and thorough planning, plus the attendant graft, you could get up to 4 months and possibly more self sufficiency. If you live in a flat, then the only option if you can’t get an allotment will be guerilla gardening – preferably collectively so there’s a crew of you to share the work and secure the plot you’re using. Having had some experience of growing some of our vegetable requirement, it has to be said that you are at the mercy of the weather and that no two years of doing this are the same. Essentially, growing your own has to be seen as a supplement to other ways of securing a decent supply of food as you get pushed further and further out to the margins of society.
I follow a range of anti-great reset accounts on Twitter across the political spectrum. A lot of them grasp the need for the kind of mutual aid and solidarity I’ve been discussing in this piece. However, there are a few rugged individualists out there who see this as the chance to relocate to somewhere remote, get their own personal stockade and live the survivalist dream. Having to be hyper-vigilant about raiders 24/7 isn’t a dream – it will be a nightmare! Putting it bluntly, solidarity and mutual aid will be the only way we get out of this situation. Essentially, were being forced into a situation where we pretty much have to build parallel / alternative social and economic structures in order to survive.
Conclusion
We are where we are. Shit is getting real. The coming months promise to be tumultuous and testing. Suffice to say, much of what I’ve spent the last year and a half predicting has come true or is well and truly in the pipeline – “Never let a crisis go to waste”. Conspiracy theorist? Not wanting to blow my own trumpet but I think ‘pretty accurate forecaster’ covers it better:)
Anyway, this is not the time to get bitter, there’s too much to do and too much at stake. My gut feeling is that we’re starting to win more people over or at the very least, prompt them to start asking some searching questions about what’s been done to us over the last eighteen months. The tide is slowly starting to turn. While there are some massive battles ahead and sacrifices to be made, we at least have a fighting chance.
The last year and a half has been a weird experience. In dealing with it and trying to analyse what’s being done to us, I’ll admit I’ve made some mistakes and errors of judgement. None of us are perfect. What’s important is learning from the mistakes that have been made and applying those lessons to the development of strategy and tactics going forwards. Hopefully, I can achieve this. Any way, it’s onwards and hopefully, upwards, as we enter the next phase of this shitshow…