Poison pens scribble about M1

May 30, 2001
Issue 

BY PETER ROBSON

NEWCASTLE — "M1 shares its name with a recent generation US Army tank, the M1 Abrams. It's ironic that today's crisis-addicts campaign against US imperialism — economic and cultural — when they enthusiastically take-up all the techno-macho jargon of gung-ho Americana."

This little gem is not a bit of poison pen work from the Daily Telegraph's Piers Akerman. It appears in the Newcastle University's student magazine, Opus, in the presidential report of Matt Thompson. Thompson is but one of those who, after M1, are crawling out of woodwork to defend capitalism and slander the new movement.

Thompson goes on to complain that "on the one hand, we've got corporate America pushing its culture on us and on the other, we've got radical America pushing its counter-culture on us. Make no mistake, America has a long and proud history of violent confrontation". Not like Australian history, I assume.

After comparing affinity groups to the cell structures of the IRA and ETA, Thompson goes on to deny the peaceful nature of the blockade of the Sydney stock exchange.

"If I stand outside your workplace with a throng of fellow-travellers and we all scrum together, refusing to allow you entry, is that peaceful? Peaceful, to me, is picketing, pamphleting and bannering. Physically blocking someone's legal right of passage is not peaceful".

Ignore the fact that much of the M1 protests was "picketing, pamphleting and bannering".

Ignore the fact that, as any worker can tell you, the aim of a picket is precisely to stop the movement of goods and labour in and out of a workplace.

Ignore the fact that it was special units of police that violently attempted to break up the blockades.

No, according to this student "leader", the act of a peaceful blockade is inherently violent.

What is Thompson's answer to the tactics of the "intellectually lazy neo-Marxists"? The use of "reason, logic, critical thinking and debate", of course.

If Thompson had bothered to come to M1 he would have seen plenty of critical thinking and debate occurring amongst the blockaders and onlookers, from the numerous speakers addressing the protest and the M1 "pamphleting and bannering".

Problem is, how much of this got aired on free-to-air television, on commercial radio or in the mainstream press?

Despite his claims to be "progressive", Thompson's attacks dovetail with those from right-wing columnists. The Newcastle Herald's Geoff Corbett also doubted the peacefulness of any form of blockading action, in his article "Rally the Resistance".

The act of linking arms across a doorway, to these self-styled authorities on freedom, is more violent than the grinding poverty that is afflicted upon the world by the operations of the global finance capital.

It is apparently more violent to restrict a shareholder's freedom to enter a building than to suck the resources from the majority of the world's poor into the pockets of a few rich individuals.

M1 has not only had its detractors, but also its defenders. Medicare campaigner Chris Osborne defended the blockade and declared it to be peaceful in a recent letter to the Newcastle Herald.

Even Rampaging Roy Slaven told a Newcastle University graduation ceremony that he "could sympathise with the zealots at protests like M1 and S11", whilst he championed the cause of public education for the graduates there.

Paul MacDonald, a communications student at the same university as el presidente Thompson, has produced a documentary which tells the real story about M1.

He interviews just some of the eighty activists that went to the Sydney M1 blockade from Newcastle — and finds people fully aware of the injustices of corporate globalisation and thoroughly determined to put an end to them.

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