Comment on Welcome to the Labour police state
FlyingCircus@lemmy.world 8 months agoTheir latest action was against the planes, but they have actually been extraordinarily successful at damaging the economic machine behind the genocide through targeted and sustained sabotage campaigns against Elbit Systems weapons manufacturer and their supporters, like Barclays Bank. They have already forced the closure of two weapons factories and forced Barclays to divest. It is most likely this sustained campaign that is the real reason for the terrorist designation, though the action at Brize Norton was probably the straw that broke the camel’s back.
It certainly made proscribing them an easy sell; you won’t find many people who think it’s unreasonable of the government to take a dim view of sabotage.
Hopefully it won’t distract too much from the bigger story of almost everyone apart from the government taking a dim view of genocide.
“Sabotage” they threw paint at fighter jets idiot
They weren’t fighter jets, they used crowbars as well, and even a tiny bit of paint in a jet engine can cause catastrophic damage at the sort of RPM and temperature they operate at.
Jet engines may react poorly with paint in the intakes. Those aircraft will need to be inspected and possibly repaired/maintained before they are allowed in the air again. That is sabotage.
100 years from now, who would possibly doubt that PAC are the heroes here and labor are the villains? Genociders are never on the right side of history. These people are heroes.
It’s not even really a Labour issue, support for Israel has been a long standing policy (partly because the UK was largely responsible for the creation of Israel back in the 1920s) and the motion to proscribe Palestine Action was broadly supported by every party. Regardless of the morality it was completely obvious and expected that breaking into a military base and damaging expensive aircraft was going to have consequences.
Doesn’t mean it’s not the morally right thing to do. Aircraft that are being used to bomb innocent civilians should be vandalized. Hell that’s the minimum. The morally right thing to do is to set them on fire. Legality and morality are only weakly correlated. Obviously the law says what the powerful want it to say, but that doesn’t mean it’s right or just. Setting fire to a UK plane that is being used to genocide people is no different than setting fire to an empty train in 1944 that’s about to be sent out on a run to gather up people to take them to a concentration camp. Sorry, but that’s just the simple truth of it. You can cite evil laws you want, but you might as well be citing the laws of Nazi Germany. Everything they did was legal as well.
Some things are just wrong. And enabling them is wrong. And we shouldn’t be afraid to say that. The people who vandalized those planes did nothing wrong. They’re victorious heroes. We should be memorializing them in song and story. The laws of evil men are not even worthy of consideration, beyond the practical choices of those choosing to engage in such acts of bravery and heroism.
Sabotaging the tools of genocide should be supported by everyone who isn’t a monster.
/ air tankers, unrelated to any genocide
Samskara@sh.itjust.works 8 months ago
Do you have some reading on this?
FlyingCircus@lemmy.world 8 months ago
I learned about this through an interview with a PA member on Rev Left Radio: …libsyn.com/palestine-action-direct-action-agains…
Saurok@lemmy.ml 8 months ago
www.thecanary.co/page/1/?s=Palestine+action
The Canary has covered a lot of their actions against Elbit and others. I’ve linked the search page above… They’ve honestly done so much stuff that this’ll probably be easier and you can just scroll through the articles.
Samskara@sh.itjust.works 8 months ago
Thank you. I see lots of vandalism, breaking and entering, blocking business entrances, and such. They are well organized and committed. They seem to have some success with that as in companies divesting or stopping to supply. Pretty impressive.
Going after the RAF for a tenuous connection to Israel was a bit too daring and turned out to be a mistake.
Saurok@lemmy.ml 8 months ago
Agreed. I think they probably could’ve kept at it for a while if they hadn’t fucked with the RAF, but it’s at least put a huge spotlight on them I guess. Hopefully, other Brits will take up the banner under different names/orgs.