Occupy: The Othering

The déjà vu from the reaction of certain media to the Occupy series of protests has been utterly predictable. Anyone who was publicly active in the peace movement of the 1980s (I imagine much the same occured in the 1960s but I have no direct experience of that) will recognize the tawdry sensationalist fascination with demonstrators’ toilet habits, their appearance, their projected lack of cleanliness, the focus on supposed hypocrisy in their ranks because they haven’t eschewed every trapping of modern capitalism while existing in a major conurbation, the cries of “Get a job!” coupled with contradictory implications of lack of commitment to the cause.

So it’s no surprise to see my favorite organ of the yellow press, the Daily Mail, trumpeting a “gotcha!” about the Occupy London campaign that’s been gladly seized on by the usual suspects, complete with—you couldn’t make this up—thermal imaging camera “evidence”:

These are the damning images that prove the anti-capitalist protest that has closed St Paul’s Cathedral is all but deserted at night.

Footage from a thermal imaging camera taken late at night reveals just a fraction of the makeshift camp was occupied.

An independent thermal imaging company, commissioned by the Daily Mail, captured these pictures after similar footage from a police helicopter found only one in ten tents were occupied after dark.

Pah! The youth of today. The Daily Mail has long been the arbiter of what is acceptable behavior among social movements. Get off its lawn! Oh, wait:

Chilly: The images were taken at 11pm on Monday night, when most activists could be expected to have been curled up in their tents keeping warm

Yup. The Daily Mail expects everyone to be in their pajamas and tucked up in their sleeping bags by 11pm, even in the hubbub of a city center during a protest. It’s the British way.

Even the Mail can’t sustain this guff for long:

This image was taken at about 1am this morning, showing considerably more activity than when the thermal images were taken. The bright light is from the floodlit shops of Paternoster Square

... protesters sit chatting in the night air outside their tents at about 1am this morning

They should be asleep! Still, the Mail is all about balance, so we also get this:

One self-confessed part-time protester is Robin Smith, a 48-year-old former Conservative councillor for Wokingham Town Council.

He said: ‘There are lots of middle-class people turning up and helping but they have to go back home and some people come once and go away.

‘They’ve got jobs and a family to keep, so they’ve got to look after their kids or go to work. I go home every two or three nights to get cleaned up and then return to my tent.’

Balance, did I say? Yeah. Here it is—an absolutely hilarious cartoon, enlisting the Church of England with somewhat unsettling echoes of the Mail‘s Blackshirt-puffing past:

‘Go for it lads. Any poor soul out there must be absolutely frozen’


The Guardian goes one better and carries a firsthand report from the protest (my bold):

First, then, some myth-busting. I camped at the occupation last week. The idea that occupiers only use one in 10 tents is laughable. I couldn’t put an exact number on it, but I reckon that the nights I was down there, more than three quarters were full. The camp operates a sign in/sign out procedure to keep track of vacant tents. What’s more, I can’t find anyone who will independently confirm where this 90% figure came from. Cllr Richardson says it was determined by police thermal imaging. But a spokesman for the Corporation of London police said he couldn’t comment on operational procedure, and that the statistic hadn’t come from the police. In fact, the only person who has spoken about it is Cllr Richardson himself, who later told the Guardian he hadn’t heard it from official sources. The Daily Telegraph claimed their own thermal imagists had verified the rumour. Yet their video was not only shot at 12:30am (an hour before most occupiers tend to hit the sack): it also shows three separate protesters evaporating from sight when standing behind their tents – casting doubt on the accuracy of thermal imaging technology in the first place.

The article also—rightly—asks:

Does any of this even matter? Is this occupation against global financial injustice undermined if some of it is part-time? Does it maybe not even just strengthen the protesters’ cause, as it reminds us that these aren’t layabouts with nothing else to do; many are professionals with jobs to maintain, students with essays to write, or parents with children to care for. People who can’t be at the camp the whole time.

Does it matter? It obviously does to those desperately looking for straws to grasp to avoid having to address any of the serious issues involved, if they can just prise their fingers from their pearls for long enough.

This media strategy, of course, makes it easier for heavy-handed policing to be accepted by those unconvinced of or uncommitted to any cause. We’ll have to see how that works out. Hell, it’s not as if anybody remembers Kent State nowadays.

Posted by YAFB on 10/27/11 at 07:05 AM • Permalink

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