Obligatory political-angst post
For any of you who have this fortnight’s copy of The List , there’s a fairly interesting artice by Mark Brown on page 10 about the attempt by the government and the media to trivialise this summer’s planned G8 summit protests in the minds of the rest of the country. Obviously, this being The List, the article isn’t available online, though I may type it in later once my upper-back stops complaining.
The gist of the article is that by repeatedly running pieces about the threat of violence at the protest, and referring to it as “an anarchist travelling circus” [q. Tony Blair], the media is allowing the general public to write off the protest as the work of some fringe nutjobs, and to comfortably ignore the whole thing.
The article sort of trails off towards the end, pointing the reader off to the G8 alternatives website rather than coming to any solid conclusions, but I still think that its original point is a good one. I’ve seen virtually nothing in the local or national media that suggests that the protest might go ahead peacefully, or goes into anything more than cursory detail about its aims. Ah well, I’ll be taking pictures at the event in July, so I guess we’ll see what happens then.
On a sort-of related note, Noam Chomsky’s lecture at Edinburgh University, The Fatal Triangle: The US, Israel & the Palestinians, is being webcast live on Tuesday 22nd March at 17.15. This is good news, since as far as I can tell, getting tickets to the actual event required that you were already very chummy with the event organisers.