Police kill protesters, hunt staff kill protesters, nuclear train drivers kill protesters. Governments kill protesters. Animal hauliers kill protesters, munitions carriers cut the legs off protesters. Whether these deaths and injuries are deliberate on the part of the perpetrator or accidental, those responsible for causing them are rarely fully held to account by investigating authorities or courts if the death or injury has been incurred during protest activity. Police lie and try to cover up deaths and injuries caused by themselves, investigators and courts are biased in the interests of governments, military, or establishment approved killers.
Protest can be a dangerous occupation. Don’t become a casualty and don’t put members of the public at risk when planning an action.
When we consider our own safety and security we are obliged to look at the safety and security the opposition has in place, and the tools that will be used against us. Governments have layers of defence, from propaganda tools to ensure only the determined find a way through their brainwashing practices, to laws which they write for themselves in order to arrest anybody anywhere, eavesdropping tools which spy on us to the tune of two million phone taps an hour and read our emails and text messages, to the military and police who can and do use lethal force to protect the criminal regimes clinging on to power.
Governments farm out much of their security work to the corporate sector profiteers through contracts, PFIs and ‘partnerships’. It’s worth noting that companies such as Serco and Lockheed Martin who receive billions of pounds of taxpayers money for manufacturing and administering our nuclear weapons of mass destruction are the very same companies who want to keep us under lock and key and to manufacture ID cards for all of us, keeping databases of information on every aspect of our lives. Big brother? No….much worse than that….and the tragedy here is that thousands of people who like to consider themselves decent types invest in these companies and keep them going.
Much of government’s efforts to intimidate potential resisters or neutralise any type of dissent is manifest in the thousands of news laws it passes, many of them supposedly aimed at ‘terrorists’, but in reality aimed at, and used against protesters. Many of these laws are slipped into being on the sly in the UK by means of Statutory Instruments…..which means they are add-ons to existing laws which become law without any scrutiny by parliament.
In the context of Direct Action, safety & security doesn’t just mean that you shouldn’t try abseiling into the path of a nuclear weapons transporter which is about to go by at 50mph. It means you have to be rigourously on your guard against the state and its many agents, be they sitting in front of a computer screen at GCHQ or Menwith Hill…..or sitting round a camp fire with you disguised as a protester.
For heaps of info, maps and pics of civilian and military sites which are involved in the business of spying on us all on a full time basis visit Alan Turnbull’s Secret Bases which joins the dots connecting the government, the military and private enterprise beautifully thus exposing the size and scale of what’s commonly known as the Military Industrial Complex.
