Fists raised in solidarity from Vancouver.

A delegation has arrived in Britain from Ivory Coast to protest about the forced child slave labourers used to grow cocoa for chocolate manufacturers, who claim to be unaware of the problem, despite the fact that this exploitation has existed for hundreds of years. Are the Africans 'violent anarchists' too, for resisting enslavement in the 21st Century?

So, your defacing of the statue of Winston Churchill was a strike against 'imperialism, capitalism, and other right wing values' was it. Aren't you the big man. Showing no respect to the very people who made it possible for you to have a right to protest are the actions of a pathetic individual.
I don't think it would have mattered whose statue you attacked, because to you it was just an opportunity to deface a symbol of the establishment. The fact, it was Churchill just showed exactly what kind of low, spineless, sad characters people like you really are.
30 days you should have got 30 years.

the problem with 'Defacing' the Churchill statue is that it offends and alienates guite a few people who actually agree with us. Now we all know that war is bad and can rarely be justifed. But a lot of people from this country went through things most of us cant even imagine in order to stop Hitler during WW2. My grandparents for one. They are both socialists and have been all there lives. They know the
Britsh Government aren't great but many vetrans see these staues as respect for what they did and for there fellow dead not just as symbols of British imperialism. Although your action can be seen as a symbolic act. It just won't be perceived as that by many people for whatever reason. I think this year's Mayday has shown that if you are non-violent, towards both people and peoperty then you gain the moral high ground and therefore more sympathy. Such as you wiping blood on the Policemans visor, I saw the photo in the paper and it didn't make the police look good. We have even got some sympathetic coverage in the mainstream press this year and in a few cases have come out looking much better than the police. Unlike last year.

In daubing Churchill's statue an attempt was made to debunk the Chuchill myth. Churchill enjoys an heroic status that his patchy career as a politician hardly merits. It was his blunders as Minister of War that sent thousands of allied troops to their deaths at Gallipoli. As Home Secretary he oversaw the massacre of the Sidney St "anarchists." He was a boorish drunk, an inverterate sexist and snob, a social reactionary and for all that, in his third reincarnation, a great war leader and orator. But then so was Stalin! Above someone suggested that the dauber should have got 30 years in jail for his lese-majeste. You might have thought he had pulled the statue down and smashed it to bits, as the velvet revolutionaries did with the icons of Bolshevism. Instead, Churchill got an affectionate make-over and was quickly restored to his ambiguous place in the pantheon of British Heroes. 30 days for the dauber was too much flak for an act that cut such little ice. Hysteria about "desecration" reveals that a dangerous puritanical fervour is running just beneath the surface in British public life. It feeds of secular myths - the Churchill-cult, the Thatcher-cult, the Diana-cult, now the Blair-cult. When such idiocies overwhelm reason and set the political agenda all our liberties are threatened and puffed-up Malvolios take centre stage.

I agree with what you have to say, but I think there's one major mistake in your approach. You wrote about the police behaviour as not what you expect from those whom you employ to keep you safe. I don't think that any police force can be seen as there to protect you. The police is a brutal form of class repression and works to maintain the status quo. The same goes for the state. Why put your faith in these forces as your protection from the hostile forces of the same system they represent? do away with states, with armies, with police, and you no longer need them. If the whole world is one country, there won't be any wars.

And I don't mean that I have any faith in the possibility of such a state of affairs coming to exist, but you should at least be aware that we don't live in an ok world with problems, we live IN a problem.

peace,

Jethro

Too many people with too much time on their hands....Britain is one of the least repressive regimes in the world. Anyone thinks otherwise is spoilt and has too much time on their hands.

If you can get to a copy of The Observer today (May 6) On the back page of the "Review" supplement there's a lovely colour photo of aforementioned bloodstained thug in a uniform. Oh, and I've got a job, cheers.

Just beacuse Britain is "one of the least repressive regimes in the world", it doesn't mean we should sit back and let all the crap that goes on in the world happen.

What good is having a "one of the least repressive regimes" when the planet is about to be choked by it's own pollution.

Hasta la victoria siempre! [until victory always]

The defacement of Churchill's statue was certainly an ambiguous act (as evidenced by the above discussion). However, this relatively small and inexpensive act of 'violence' which is not without its ideological justification (as well as the facts listed above, its interesting to note that many Bengalis blame Churchill for single handedly engineering the Bengal famine where hundreds of thousands of Indians died of starvation - but then ol' Winnie never was much of a one fr them Indians, he fought long and hard against independence and despised Gandhi, and anyway, he didn't win the war all by himself, as many seem to imply - loads and loads of ordinary soldiers and civilians played quite a large part, too), for me shrivelled in significance compared with the real blood of real people that was being splashed liberally around by the boys in blue. Both last year and this year the damage to property done by protesters was pretty insignificant, as was the 'clean-up' cost to taxpayers compared to the absurd sums spent on employing about thirty policemen to watch old ladys feeding pigeons in Trafalgar Square. In short, the right to protest far outweighs the damage done, in my opinion and i'll certainly be supporting the mayday actions next year. see ya there, jimbo. Ya Basta!

Don't picket - vandalize. Don't protest - deface. When ugliness, poor design & stupid waste are forced upon you, turn Luddite, throw your shoe in the works, retaliate. Smash the symbols of the Empire in the name of nothing but the heart's longing for grace.