by Vk

[edited a little]

Well sorry but i’d have a letter with a few angry things to say in reply to all this too but now i’m gonna be in Melb on Tuesday hopefully i can talk with people. But don’t expect me to be at the rally out front.

Firstly i do agree with some of the sentiment of the open letter. The last paragraph in particular. Arrestees should get in touch. There’s not many times when you’re faced with the full shit of the system when there will be so many people willing to support you. The most important thing in all this is that the arrestees get off. That is what the campaign should be aimed at. Even before i became particularly tied up in all of this i had serious concerns from the statements that have been released that this was the case.

What has really got me pissed about all this is the talk around whether people are running a political case or not. I will make certain decisions when i know more about my case and if anyone tells me i’m not being ‘political’ i will verbally rip their heads off. Additionally in the assumption that by only following what y’all have decided are people being ‘political’ it has pretty much shown that the agenda for this campaign is set.

I don’t blame people for that. The Solidarity Network got it’s shit together very quickly in a difficult situation. That was important. But unfortunately there seems now to be a fairly unchangeable vanguardist tendency that is getting some (fairly inconsequential) media and as a result media statements are being thrown out like they’re going out of fashion.

If people have decided that the political agenda of fighting further police repression is more important than the solidarity side then y’all should change name. I obviously agree fighting police repression is important but that isn’t the same as solidarity with the arrestees, especially if you’re forcing people to distance themselves because they aren’t taking on a particular version of being ‘political’. Again i know that people have done a lot of solid support stuff for arrestees, but unfortunately for many of us that has to be separate from the politics.

It’s very early for many of us - we’ve got months of this to go. And on that point it is shoddy to try to make people decide how they’re going to run their cases before we’ve even received a brief of evidence. Once that happens i will suppport all arrestees who choose to be as pragmatic as possible in getting off. And i will strongly defend that as a political choice with anyone who chooses to take it up with me.

This is where i’ll add that i’m not new to being arrested or having an early morning knock on the door from the cops. In a similar situation previously i took the lawyers advice over the solidarity campaign’s and i was bloody grateful for it. In our lives we constantly navigate a line between wanting to be outside the system and being forced back in. This is a really odd time to ask the arrestee’s to choose absolutely to not compromise ourselves. Please give me a recent example of a public political campaign getting someone (a protester especially) off.

And here’s my harshest point. Even if i could i would not be involved in the political campaign as it stands. The politics being articulated are shit. Civil liberties and right to protest. Who for? And why are we pleading that we are legitimate? Who wants that? I don’t want to be legitimate within this system. Why don’t you just get Thomas Kenneally to say that protest is the birthright of Australians as he did out the front of my previous court case. Too bad for all of us born outside Australia then.

This liberal democracy line is bullshit. There’s an opportunity here to run a campaign that doesn’t back down on the politics, but it seems like too many people are watering it down (or maybe they are just liberals at heart) just to get a media bite. I’d put more trust in a lawyer that takes on my case being helpful than i ever would in the media being useful to us.

Running a campaign with politics that aren’t watered down would mean it has to be separate from direct solidarity stuff with the arrestees but as i’ve already said that isn’t necessarily a problem as long as no-one tries to talk on behalf of us. It’s not like the current campaign is being run with a heap of input from the arrested. If it became possible arrestees could decide for themselves if they wanted to be involved in the political side of things without fearing that what’s at stake is losing the suppport of the solidarity network. But at the moment i’m not able to be involved, and i imagine many others don’t feel in the headspace to really take that on. Fuck martyrdom and fuck Che.