Philosophy student Alfie Meadow’s nearly died after being struck with a police baton during the 2010 anti-fees protest. Alfie has since been charged with violent disorder and faces a trial starting on Monday 26th March. If convicted he will go to prison.
This is a picture of Alfie after he perpetrated his violent disorder – well, after the surgery that saved his life, after he was so heinously and violently disorderly.
Perhaps my theory of a Very British Coup isn’t so ‘ironic’ after all? A government that didn’t win an election mounts an unprecedented economic attack on it’s own people while protecting the interests of a wealthy elite. The same government then uses the police to violently confront and suppress popular resistance and puts on trial the victims of police violence as the perpetrators of the violence that caused them life-threatening, traumatic injuries. Sounds positively Kafkaesque doesn’t it?
Well, Kafka was writing in response to Soviet style state totalitarianism but in the Anglo-American world today it is not the ‘reds under the beds’ that we need to be fearful off, it’s the ‘Freemarketeers in the woodpile’, who have used the Murdochized mass-media to successfully sell 1930′s style economic oppression and Victorian levels of obscene inequality to most of the population as if they were a self-evident good. It really does beggar belief.
Find out how you can support the campaign to Defend Alfie Meadows here: http://www.defendtherighttoprotest.org/justice-for-alfie-meadows/
petition signed. What a messed-up situation. I wish him success.
Thank you Steve. I’m touched by that. It surely is a mess. Poor little sod.