Then & Now: A Letter to Occupy from David Osler
Ever asked your mum if she did anything more constructive in the Thatcher years than dressing up in ra-ra skirts and pixie boots and dancing to Duran Duran? It’s a reasonable bet that some people participating in Occupy London today [...]
The End is Nigh! Occupy!
“The End is Nigh!” Delightful words, written in bold on a sandwich board or screamed out on a street corner in the ecstasy of doom. But what does it mean? Sadly our own Christian enthusiastics are too busy dancing jigs, hoisting enormous [...]
Poppycock
Brainwashing, said the historian Christopher Hill, is something that happens to Other People. That’s the point, of course. You can’t see it if you’re in it. Hill was talking about the ideological victory of the Puritan work ethic: a [...]
Righteous Resistance
The bells, the bells, the bells which ruined my blessed sleep on the first Saturday of the occupation barely register anymore, having merged into the general background, but who ever imagined that all this Jesus-talk would become so normal? [...]
Pirates, St Pauls, and the Roots of Anti-Capitalist Protest
In May 1724, in a small bookshop just a stone’s throw from St Paul’s, Captain Charles Johnson’s A General History of the Robberies and Murders of the most notorious Pyrates went on sale, and became an instant hit. Though pirates’ bodies [...]
Past Tents: A Brief History of Protest Camping
The year 2011 has seen a blossoming of protest camping. First there was the tented city in Egypt’s Tahrir Square, then the Indignados in Spain, then the youth protests in Israel, then Occupy Wall Street in the USA. Now in as many as 950 towns [...]