Thursday 23 November 2017

The First 8 Pages (As Text)


Each page takes about 2 minutes to read. So breaking these up, and taking turns at reading them, is a good way to start off an action that has a lot of new people in attendence.

Page 1:

Acknowledgement of Country: Can't Stand By would like to acknowledge that our network operates on the occupied land of the Aboriginal people. We pay our respects to elders both past and present and recognise that sovereignty was never ceded.

The Can't Stand By network exists to make the Australian government's regime of mandatory detention of refugees so economically, politically and socially expensive that they have no choice but to abandon this policy.

CSB is designed such that it will continue to operate until all offshore detention centres have been closed, the worst of the Australian onshore detention centres have been closed and there is a 30-day limit placed on detention in Australia with periodic judicial review of any detention after that. CSB will continue to apply pressure until these demands are not just an agreement but an operating reality.

There will be no extra time given even to politicians who say they are on our side. The government
has already had way too much time to do this of its own accord. As responsible adults, we now have
a moral duty to force an immediate end to this abuse. Once our demands have been met, the political pressure which holds the network together will no longer exist, and it will begin to dissolve
accordingly. However, if CSB did need to reactivate in response to a return to mandatory detention,
it is designed so that this could happen relatively quickly, even after a prolonged period of inactivity.

The following manual aims to give any member of the general public the necessary knowledge to effectively participate in the Can't Stand By network. CSB is intended to be an addition to, not a replacement for, any currently existing efforts to fight against mandatory detention in Australia.”

Page 2:
What CSB Does - Decentralised Networks

The CSB network is leaderless and completely decentralised. The most recognisable form of this type of organisational structure is in a “Mexican wave.” From an organisational perspective, a defining feature of a Mexican wave is that no individual person is in control of it. It is a genuinely mutual collective effort. Also, a person does not need to have any direct contact with the person or people who started a Mexican wave to participate. This decentralisation means that these waves can scale in size very quickly.
The CSB network shares three essential elements with a Mexican wave: 1. A simple, practical action that many people can easily replicate. 2. A rapidly transferable understanding of how this simple activity relates to the broader social forces. 3. A consistent rhythm which grants a significant number of previously unconnected people the ability to act in a coordinated manner.

As a participant in a Mexican wave, the broader social forces would include things like the entire crowd as an entity and the stadium which frames them. It is this context which gives significance to what would otherwise be the ordinary act of people using chairs. People stand up and sit down all the time, but it does not become significant until it is coordinated and framed correctly. The question for opponents of mandatory detention then becomes, what does the “stadium” look like for
us? What would it look like to “get out of our chairs”? And how can we use consistency or rhythm to facilitate decentralised coordination between large numbers of previously unconnected people?”

Page 3:

Civil Resistance

For CSB, “Getting out of our chairs” must be something which is capable of raising the cost of mandatory detention to such an extreme that the government is left with no choice but to immediately abandon it. It has been said that “Protest is when you say, “I object to this or that,” while resistance is when you do whatever it takes to make sure “this or that” can no longer happen. So for example, saying, “don't come through that door!” is a form of protest. On the other hand, putting your foot in the way of the door is resistance.

Can't Stand By is a non-violent resistance network, not a protest group. CSB is not aiming to convince the government or “speak truth to power”. It is known that the Australian media is so monopolised that one has to look towards third world dictatorships to find significantly worse examples of concentrated media ownership. The logic behind "speaking truth to power" assumes that “power” does not know what it is doing and this whole thing has been an unfortunate misunderstanding. But no one commits escalating covert human rights abuses for two decades by accident. The leadership of the Labor and Liberal parties know precisely what they are doing. To engage them in a serious debate about the legitimacy of mandatory detention would be an insult to all those who languish under its rule.

CSB is not trying to out-debate the government. We are working to out-organise them. Our goal is to use our numbers to make it physically impossible for any political party to continue mandatory detention. Like an ambulance with a siren that brings all traffic to a halt, or a fire alarm that triggers the evacuation of an entire building, the technique of civil resistance operates under the logic that there is an emergency situation so severe and urgent that business as usual needs to be suspended, in specific ways, until such a time that the emergency can be resolved.”

Page 4:

Crimes against humanity, like mandatory detention, are precisely the types of emergencies that warrant this kind of action. As serious as disrupting business as usual is, the issue of ending human rights abuse must be more important. Convenience and wealth can not be allowed to be more valuable than human dignity. Fortunately for opponents of mandatory detention, on a logistical level - on the level of who needs to stand where - mounting a campaign of civil resistance in Australia can be a simple and completely non-violent thing to do. In fact, it has been summarised in four basic words; Without Trucks, Australia Stops

These signs refer to the fact that an industry-wide strike of transportation workers would bring the entire country to a halt. Aside from the disruption that such industrial action would cause to the transportation industry itself, there is also the fact that almost every other industry depends on the transportation industry to function. If all the truck drivers went on strike tomorrow, Australia most certainly would stop. However, as true as it is to say “Without trucks, Australia stops,” it is also true to say that Australia stops, without the roads on which trucks depend. Without certain roads, there can be no trucks, and without trucks, there can be no economy.
The radical potential of this modified slogan is that while not everyone is a professional truck driver, almost everyone living in a big city lives within a short distance of an economically significant roadway. Any of these people could block these roads simply by walking over and standing on them. This simple act, carried out on a large enough scale, would in effect shut down the entire country. At the same time, it is important to stress how literally pedestrian and ordinary it is to close a road. The government will want to sensationalise it and make it seem aggressive and dangerous. But we should resist this framing. We must show that closing a road is NOT an extraordinary thing to do.

Page 5:

With decades of experience, many school crossings have demonstrated that two primary school children can be entrusted with the power of closing down a public road. Therefore, surely 30 grown adults should be able to manage to do a similar thing without needing police to hold their hands
while they do it.
The next way they will attempt to insight panic around CSB demonstrations will be over the topic of ambulances. However, no demonstration would ever block the path of an emergency vehicle. It may even be easier for ambulances to move around the halted traffic of a CSB action, rather than having to predict the path of moving vehicles with their potentially inattentive drivers. Added to which, the media panic is always selective.

The media never screams, "Won't somebody think of the ambulances!?", when traffic is gridlocked by a football grand final, lack of decent public transport or by the government shutting down an entire city to host a trade summit. If the government can close down a city for a human rights abuser like Vladamir Putin, then surely the people of Australia are more than justified in doing the same thing in defence of human rights.

Furthermore, CSB demonstrations have enough flexibility that they can dissolve at any point. If it ever became apparent that an action would pose a danger, then it can always be quickly dispersed. We refuse to let them scare us out of resisting. The practical issue of scaling up from mobilisations of 1 or 2 people to national demonstrations of tens of thousands will be addressed shortly. But for the moment, when we are searching for a way to “get out of our chairs” all that is needed is an understanding that ordinary people can easily bring the entire country to a halt simply by doing nothing more radical than standing in inconvenient locations together.


Page 6:

As peaceful as these actions are, we can see the kind of economic impact they might have by looking at examples where highways in Australia have been accidentally blocked. For example, on the 9th of March 2016, two highways were blocked in Sydney due to two separate traffic accidents. In the two hours it took the police to unblock the road, an estimated $16 million had been wiped from the Sydney economy. That equates to roughly $1 million for every seven and a half minutes.

What this means is that we do not have to hold the roads indefinitely. Instead, we can simply occupy them for short periods repeatedly. Rather than any one particular action being the decisive blow, the CSB network is instead designed to build up a cacophony of tiny pin prick disruptions that will eventually become unsustainable for the status quo.

The power of the strategy is that it makes a physical conflict between demonstrators and police completely unnecessary. Our aim is NOT to fight the cops. Our goal is to mobilise on such a scale that we can exhaust and overwhelm the police to such a degree that they become irrelevant as to whether or not the economy can continue to function. The day that the Australian government has to ask for its own roads back is the day that there will no longer be mandatory detention.

Heading - Material Impact

A mass campaign of non-violent economic disruption would raise three specific costs on the government.

ECONOMIC COST: The occupations are intended to operate like a citizens' initiated trade embargo. They will impede the functioning of the economy in general with the intent of costing it so much money that any government, no matter which party, will have a pressing economic incentive to end mandatory detention.

POLITICAL COST: The demonstrations will give an advantage to any political party that does not support mandatory detention by allowing it to promise voters an end to the costly
disruptions.

SOCIAL COST: The demonstrations will expose the reality that all governments are ultimately critically dependent on almost all their citizens voluntarily choosing to be compliant. Once ordinary
people have the political consciousness to recognise the industrial potential of their immediate surroundings, and the organisational capacity to act politically on this knowledge, the government is in a weaker position not just on this issue, but all issues.

Page 7:

The CSB network is a tool to allow opponents of mandatory detention to demonstrate and develop our organisational capacity. The government and the police (as an institution) will want to draw people's attention away from our organisational achievements by trying to pressure demonstrators into physical conflicts. We should be aware of this and resist being goaded into fighting on their terms. They would much prefer to have a physical fight, because even if they lose a physical fight, they can then use that loss to become even stronger on an institutional level. The fight the government does not want to lose is an organisational one, because this type of loss is much harder to spin in the media. An example of a government being unable to repackage a loss of this kind
occurred during the Abbot Liberal government's failed Operation Fortitude in 2015.

It boils down to the fact that it is entirely possible to have so many people on the streets that for the police to try to disperse the crowds would clearly work against the government's interests.
Heading - Operation Fortitude

Operation Fortitude was an incredibly dumb political stunt pulled by the Australian government. The plan was to have police officers patrolling the streets of Melbourne asking to see people's ID as though they were in Berlin in the 1930s. Obviously, this was not going to influence refugees. It was an effort in what is called “security theatre.” But the problem for the Abbott government was that people pushed back immediately and in a way the government could not contain. They had forgotten that since the advent of offshore processing, the Australian public has been physically cut off from the mandatory detention apparatus. They discounted the fact that geographic accessibility for the general public to the grounds of mandatory detention has not played out well for the government in the past.

Page 8:

In times when refugees were detained onshore, centres were often the target of sizable demonstrations held by the Australian people in solidarity with the refugees. In 2001, protesters even pulled and cut down fences, which contributed to the escape of up to 40 asylum seekers.

Offshore processing is advantageous for the government because even when there is a significant level of hostility towards mandatory detention, it can struggle to manifest because there is no obvious, physically accessible target against which to take action. The mistake of Operation Fortitude was to not only give the movement a tangible target, but a particularly vulnerable and obnoxious one at that. When the government announced their plan, demonstrators rallied almost immediately in the middle of a major intersection in down town Melbourne.

In the photos of the event, you can see that the police surrounding the demonstration are facing outwards to direct traffic. The demonstrators could not possibly have a permit. However, the police were still not trying to move them. They did not try to clear them because the government was afraid that if they pushed the protesters at this point, it would attract more attention from the public and the media.

Within 2 hours it had already gotten to the point that the police were overwhelmed, how much control might they have lost by the scheduled end of the operation in 2 days time? So the government instead called off the operation, despite the massive embarrassment this caused.

CSB aims to achieve a similar type of victory on a larger scale.

Friday 17 November 2017

Mistakes: An opinion about CSB

Mistakes: An Opinion About CSB (Draft)

#CantStandBy is an inherently D-I-Y project. That's kind of the point. It's ordinary people "having a crack at it". The #CantStandBy manual is not an infallible document. There are ways in which things did not go to plan in the early days.

For example, few people had anticipated how intense the highway occupations would be, or how total the media blackout around #CantStandBy would be.

Perhaps most disheartening, much larger groups (that actually had the numbers to be able to carry out the plan) did not seem at all moved by the demonstration of people self-organizing to shut down a highway in Coburg for 3 months in a row without injury or arrest. It was perhaps unfair to expect that they would be drawn to participate. At least until they had any reason to expect that it would grow dramatically.

Unfortunately, in early 2017 it CSB hadn't quite caught on in that way yet. By mid-2017, the political pressure which drew people to occupy the roads in the first place had begun to dissipate. Up until this point, except for a few months at the very beginning, the network had only known periods of growth. Around June 2017 things began to die off and energy seemed to drain from the network.

The possibility that this could be the end of #CantStandBy loomed.  Had it been a centralised organisation, it's difficult to imagine that it would have been able to sustain its activities so effectively for another six months with such a massive drop in energy input.

But decentralised groups are organisationally light - they can float for a while. Or at least #CantStandBy did. But until that next gust of political outrage pushed the network back into a significant outrage in Nov 2017, it was very hard to tell the difference between, gliding (at least somewhat) and falling.

However, the entire point of the network was that it was meant to be able to ebb and flow. People cannot resist at their fullest capacity indefinitely. The whole point of CSB was that participants were meant to be able to literally take 5 months off and come back into it still knowing how to participate.

During those coasting months when the network was recuperating, the regular community picket actions on the highways really helped keep the network alive. They were part of the thin threads of our sail that was just barely pushing the #CantStandBy boat forward.

But given that the network seems to have caught this new gust of political outrage and it looks as though it will be able to convert that into political demonstrations, this document seeks to address whatever potential shortcomings have been seen in the network so far. This will help people to make the most informed decision about what actions to participate in.


We will talk specifically about the nature of highway occupations (in a way that makes us sound like we're experts when we're just peopling having a crack at this).

We just hope to better prepare people for making decisions about whether to occupy roadways. So much more can be written on it and if you have any good resources tweet them to #CantStandBy. Also, there is already an excellent attempt cover some of the massive areas that the network manual missed - in the Black Cross Resilience zine Prepare and Repair. Which everyone should read. And then read again three months later at least. It really is quite good.

But with that said, here's the info we think you.

1. If you're blocking a road - don't think motorists are going to like what you're doing.

A problem with the network manual and a lot of the supporting media is that it does not accurately prepare people for the realities of highway occupations.

Part of the reason it is unable to do this is that it does not explore the fact that there is a fundamental difference in the nature of a demonstration that is organised towards disruption and a protest that is targeted towards outreach.

A protest that is designed towards outreach should take place in an area with a lot of foot traffic so that people can have conversations.

A protest that is designed towards disruption should take place at an economically significant location so that it is able to have the most impact.

At the moment, for the most part, people have just held whichever type of demonstration they have the numbers or prefer to hold on the highways.

This model has worked well. But it could potentially work even better if we were to appreciate the difference in these two types of actions and create spaces which are better able facilitate them both.

Out Reach:

Banner Drop Photos:

One thing we want to make clear is that we still want lots of small and solo "banner drop photos" taken on the 1st Saturday of each month at the #CantStandBy rallying points. This is absolutely vital to the network. So still go to the bus stop to take a photo. It's just now, you don't have to worry that it's not also disrupting the economy or reaching out to the general public as effectively as perhaps other tactics might. The banner drop photos aren't for disruption or outreach. They are to let other people in the network know that you're aware of the network and ready to go.

Campaign Stalls:

As with all CSB operations, the specifics of how these are carried out are up to the participants.

Hot Tip: Don't bother forcing a leaflet into the hands of every person who passes. Instead, make a large sign that is visible for 5-10 metres away that specifically indicates what is on the leaflet. This way it is far more likely that people who come up at take one actually want it. This works just as well as handing lots people leaflets they don't really want.

Disruptions:

Don't think motorists are going to like what you're doing. The methods suggested in the network manual to ease tension between motorists and demonstrators do not appear to have worked at any point. It seems almost no one is open to a discussion with a group of people who are blocking their car. Which is understandable. However, we don't need them to do be open to conversation. Instead, we need to keep them, and everyone else safe, while we take emergency action to end mandatory detention.

So the first step is to wear a hi-vis jacket. The second step is to bring ear protection. When highways get blocked they often erupt into a temporary storm of honking horns. If you have ear protection this will make your action much more enjoyable. If the ear protection is visible, it may also deter motorists from trying to engage in conversation.

By making this distinction, at the outreach actions, people can come anticipating an action that will be open, friendly and engaging. At the potentially disruptive actions, people can come prepared enough to be both safe and effective.

    We don't recommend blockading with less than 30 people.

    We don't recommend blockading with less than 10 people per lane.

The network manual says not to attempt an occupation of the roadway with less than 30 people. This is a good idea. Also, don't block the road with less than 10 people per lane. If you only have 30 people, we would strongly recommend only closing down a 2 lane road. This may mean occupying a different road than what is suggested in the network manual.

While it is possible and admirable to hold a blockade with fewer people - doing so can be an incredibly intense experience. Another drawback of occupying with fewer people is that it requires a much higher degree of trust and familiarity among the participants.

On the other hand, when a group of 100 people attempts to block a road it can often be much more simple. Demonstrators can basically cluster together and wander out on to the road when it is clear.

However, if you're doing this same thing with 30 people then the nature of the demonstration changes dramatically. Now, everyone has to be paying attention the whole time, and everyone has to work much harder to hold the road. This also doesn't leave many options for people to opt-out if something goes wrong during the action. Smaller actions also usually require some type of meeting to prepare participants and discuss what their roles during the action will be.

Neither approach is wrong, had there been no people brave enough to occupy the roads with fewer people, we would not know what was possible.

The strength of big occupations is that they are more accessible to the general public, and the strength of smaller occupations is that they require fewer people.

2. CentralStationActions

This is the purpose of the Central Station Actions:

Outreach:
Nov 25 (Last Saturday): An accessible place for people to meet.

Disruption:
Dec 2 (1st Saturday): An accessible network for people to act in.

The reason it is important to understand the difference between what these actions are trying to achieve is that different things make either type of action successful. A disruptive action is successful if a lot of people are annoyed afterward. For instance, if a lot of people (who didn't want to know about the action) are forced to become aware of it. Then that is a good disruptive action. This is specifically how Martin Luther King described his actions as working. On the other hand, if an outreach action establishes a good connection between an extra one or two demonstrators, then that is a fantastic outreach action.

So now we have 3 potential ways for people to engage with the network:

Physical outreach, disruption, and online promotions through Tuesday Tweet Storms.

3. It's possible to organise short unpermitted marches across bridges instead of occupations.

Another way to disrupt traffic is to march across a bridge. This may be easier to do, than holding still because if the traffic is moving slowly, it can keep people from getting out of their cars.

This can make the demonstration more manageable. At the same time, if it takes your group 15 minutes to walk across the bridge, it has a similar effect to if people stood still.

4. Use large objects for protection.


Wheelie bins, bikes, wheelbarrows, dumpsters, etc to provide a physical barrier between the demonstrators and the motorists.

Saturday 11 November 2017

#CantStandBy Library






  • #CantStandBy Non-violent Civil Resistance Network Manual

Dropbox Link: https://www.dropbox.com/s/321tpz8owga3z46/CantStandBy_A.pdf?dl=0
TinyUpload Link:  s000.tinyupload.com/?file_id=99761637619015260693

  • Related to CSB

George Orwell (Hopes Lies In The Proles):https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_V5vRBg6LTI



Simple Sabotage Field Manual:
https://www.cia.gov/news-information/featured-story-archive/2012-featured-story-archive/CleanedUOSSSimpleSabotage_sm.pdf

Boots Riley speaks at Marxism 2014:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nIAuC3d87Nk

Peter Camejo:

https://www.marxists.org/archive/camejo/1970/ultraleftismormassaction.htm
https://www.marxists.org/archive/camejo/1969/howtomakearevolution.htm

Jim Poe:
https://overland.org.au/2017/08/this-shit-is-not-normal/

Carlo Sands:
http://carlosands.blogspot.com.au/2017/11/lest-we-forget-when-working-people-had.html

Gaye Demanuele:
http://www.waca.net.au/refugee_rights_movement_for_or_with

Everyone Can Do Some Think:"Resources, provocations and practical things for action, ‘cos the world doesn’t just get better / stop getting worse on its own.

We embrace a diversity of abilities, tactics and approaches. We know everyone has a place in the struggle. We’re here to encourage people to realise their own power & support them to discover the ways they can best contribute."
https://everyonecandosomethink.wordpress.com/
Tom Clift:
http://junkee.com/manus-island-rally-images/133520

Behrouz Boochani exposed Australia's evil on Manus. The shame will outlive us all.
Richard Flanagan

https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2017/nov/24/the-shame-of-the-evil-being-done-on-manus-will-outlive-us-all?CMP=soc_567
  • Stuff about CSB specifically



Prepare & Repair : taking action & keeping safe at rallies, protests & direct actions
http://slackbastard.anarchobase.com/?p=40998

https://CantStandBy.blogspot.com.au



https://insurrectionnewsworldwide.com/…/the-refugee-rights…/
  • CSB videos


  1. Stronger Than Them
    https://vimeo.com/242178942

    A flier for the upcoming CantStandBy national day of action.
     
  2.  #CantStandBy: Ending Refugee Detention in Australia
    https://www.facebook.com/subMedia/videos/886941778106196/

    This is the video that started it all. It focuses mainly on explaining specifically how the network functions.

  3. #CantStandBy #CloseTheCamps
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Pjx3icC5r4
    More focused on the role of individuals in the network.
     
  4.  CSB: The First Five Months
    https://www.facebook.com/CantStandBy/videos/1892321387679483/
    This was the most organically popular, when it was released in large part, we think, because it was one of the first times the network had seen itself reflected back in some collective way.
  5. You Have To Stop Traffic https://vimeo.com/219955158
    This is just a good introduction to the concepts of civil disobedience. There is an article which goes into much greater detail about the relationship between CSB and the political strategy outlined by Martin Luther King in his letter from Birmingham jail.
    http://cantstandby.blogspot.com.au/…/political-arguments-fo…
  6. Can't Stand By - See you on the streets
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3j-sv38svA8

    This is a superbly filmed CSB promo video. If you have no ideas for what to do at a rallying point, this is a good type of action to try to copy. People don't have to hold the road unless you feel able to.
     
  7. #CantStandBy #Disrupt2017
    https://vimeo.com/242670823
    Instructional video for upcoming #CentralStationActions

    -------------------------------
    This is where the videos start to deviate from purely conveying the ideas in the #CantStandBy network manual and venture into political analysis. You do not have to agree with anything in these videos to participate in the network. CSB supporters are invited to make their own media in response. The popular stuff people will like. The unpopular stuff people will ignore. But it won't change the collective agreement spelled out in the network manual.

    The following videos help to explain was mass nonviolent civil resistance is our only hope – the Labor Party isn't coming to the rescue. They work best in this order.
    -----------------------------------

  8. Leaving The Past
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iVsp00dgvqY
  9. Better Call Get Up: Human Rights Criminals In Australia
    https://vimeo.com/221130672
  10. Capitalism, Whiteness and Refugeeshttps://vimeo.com/241454435

  11. Not technically a CSB video but amazing...
    https://www.facebook.com/akaWACA/videos/1481285791909188/

Saturday 20 May 2017

Political Arguments For Civil Resistance - Why "DuttonToTheHague" > "SackDutton"

Understanding why it is important to become involved a campaign of civil resistance depends on three points.

1) The Labor Party (and by extension the Australian Parliament) is not a viable avenue for ending the criminal bipartisan refugee detention regime.

2) People are entitled to change society without the approval of a majority of people when it means addressing an active humanitarian crisis.

3) Martin Luther King's, iconic model of civil disobedience and direct action, openly involved demonstrators intentionally acting as an annoying minority and not a pre-approved majority as is often mistakenly believed. The stated purpose of Kings demonstrators was to deliberately create tension so as to create a situation which the mainstream society found unbearable (not appealing).

This third point is important more for its implications rather than because we should feel any specific inclination to mimic King's campaign exactly. The reason it is important to address this issue is in order to challenge the false framing of his resistance that is used to shame modern activists into cooperation with the refugee detention regime.

The first two points are important because it is only once it is understood that there is no possibility for meaningful parliamentary reform that civil resistance becomes necessary. And it is only once it is understood that we are entitled to act without the approval of the majority of the population that civil resistance becomes a viable option. Finally, it is only once resistance is considered both necessary and viable, that specific answers as to how it might be carried out will become relevant for most people.

So instead of talking to people about the practical issues of how to resist, we have to start with the political arguments for why civil resistance is necessary in the first place.

1)

This starts by acknowledging that most political campaigns to end refugee detention are designed (in one way or another) to try to convince the bipartisan detention regime to change voluntarily through logical argument. But CSB does not think that this is possible because a fundamental assumption of these strategies is that the oppression of the refugees is the result of some type of misunderstanding. This in turn implies that the introduction of better information could be benificial as though if people or the government had a better understanding, then they would change the way they vote.

The problem with this strategy is the powerful (whether they be privileged social groups or politicians) do not often oppress people because they are confused, they do it because they materially benefit from the oppression (at least in the short term.) By “calling your local MP” (in whichever form) we are not telling them anything the criminal Labor and Liberal political dynasties do not already know. But politicians from both parties benefit enormously from people making these types of efforts to engage with them because it helps the them to maintain the illusion that there is some confusion around what is going on, and most importantly, it reinforces their role as the gatekeepers of any potential change in policy. The more invested social movements become in parliamentary political outcomes, the more powerful politicians are seen to be. The more powerful they appear, the more it feels like nothing could happen without their approval.

But this is a scam. Faith in political parties is not the solution. Having faith in the ALP was the origin of this problem. However, by putting the refugee rights movement in a situation, where it is so desperate for even a glimmer of hope, the Labor Party is able to present itself as a solution to the very problem it not only started, but which it also continues to have a very obvious and significant vested interest in maintaining.

For example, a rumour, which will often be spread around activist circles, is that someone has spoken to a “Labor party insider.” This insider will allude to a significant (but usually unnamed), section of the Labor party that secretly wants to agree with the social movement. Details on what this agreement actually consist of are usually kept vague. Just the very idea that politicians might secretly be listening to us is supposed to be enough for us to instantly see the importance in trying to help the Labor Party get elected yet again. After all, it is argued even though they can't help us right now, they will of course make good on this vague, unspoken, anonymous promise, that they have broken every single time they have ever had an opportunity to keep it. Obviously.

This rumour gets spread, no doubt in part because there actually are people inside the Labor Party who say this type of thing to people. But that doesn't mean we should accept this idea, or leave its implications unexamined. It is important to recognise that these rumours frame the bipartisan detention regime in a way which is hugely beneficial to the political parties and not at all historically accurate.

But the reason why these rumours persist, in spite of all the evidence against them, is that they dangle a very enticing metaphorical carrot in front of the social movement. This carrot is the idea that the Labor Party could solve their problem, almost instantly, if only they had the chance. Things will be different this time – they promise!

What is important about this, is that it moves the responsibility for the atrocities off of the Labor Party and onto ordinary people. The premise of the rumour is that the Labor Party desperately wants to be better, but it is voters who force them to be bad. This completely rewrites history.
In reality, it was the Labor Party who were the ones who sold the Australian people on the idea of mandatory detention in the first place. The Labor Party also helped sell the Australian people on the idea of offshore processing. At every opportunity that Labor has had to improve the situation of asylum seekers, they have instead made things much worse. To this day, Julia Gilard stands by the horrible atrocities she committed against refugees. While Kevin Rudd opportunistically lectures Liberal Party politicians for doing exactly the same types of things that he did when he was in power.

Unfortunately, because the suffering of the asylum seekers is so horrific there will always be a strong desire to believe any story which implies that the torture could be over soon, no matter how divorced from reality the claim may be.

Not only is the idea of immediate relief very appealing but it goes even beyond simple appeal. Given that most people have no viable conception of how to oppose a government policy, in any other form, except through some type of political campaigning, it isn't even really a genuine decision for most people to believe that the ALP is coming to the rescue, because without this premise they would have no political agency at all.

Therefore, it is very easy for Labor Party insiders to offer this type of self-serving conspiracy theory to social movements because they know that activists will help spread it around due to the fact that both groups benefit from the rumour. It gives the activists an opportunity to pretend like they might have some political relevance and it helps the Labor Party maintain some legitimacy as being socially progressive, despite advocating and orchestrating more than two decades of refugee kidnapping without apology, or a single fuck given.

The first step to discrediting parliamentary campaigning, as effective strategies for ending refugee detention, is to unquestionably establish, that mandatory detention and offshore processing are quite literally crimes against humanity. They have always been this way from their very inception. Which means it is likely many former prime ministers (from *both* major parties) are human rights criminals.

This may sound controversial, but the reality is that there is never a valid reason to detain people simply for being asylum seekers. That's why it had never been done before Labor proposed the idea in 1993. From the very moment the ALP suggested it, it was always explicitly intended to send a message. This message was to be sent by violently suppressing a civilian population from exercising their basic human rights. In this way, these policies have always been a form of racist political terrorism and a humanitarian crisis.

They are not simply bad or “extreme.” They are not a mistake. They are deliberate atrocities. The Labor and Liberal political dynasties have a massive shared interest in making sure that their abuse of refugees is never framed in terms of a “humanitarian crisis” or a “civil emergency.” These terms are too much of a threat because they attribute an appropriate amount of urgency to the situation. Which means that people too high up in the Australian political oligarchy could get into too much trouble if the detention regime was viewed through this framing. In the eyes of the regime and the general public, offshore processing and mandatory detention must always remain simply a “controversial policy” and not be allowed to become seen as a crime against humanity.

An example of the hesitancy to acknowledge the gravity of these crimes can be seen in the refugee rights movement, through the evolution of recent hashtags relating to the Immigration Minister Peter Dutton. The original demand put forward, which initially found widespread support was, “Dutton to the Hague.” But more recently, when the case for Peter Dutton to actually face human rights criminal prosecution was at its strongest, this powerful demand got downgraded, to the toothless slogan, “Sack Dutton.”

Perhaps more of the movement is more comfortable with Sack Dutton, because the slogan, 'Dutton to the Hague' raises some implications which are very uncomfortable for the progressive left. Specifically that there are many Labor politicians who should *also* be taken to the Hague. In fact, in many ways more or less the entire Australian political class should be on trial for these atrocities in a way no dissimilar from the process which took place after the end of Apartheid in South Africa.

Once it has been acknowledged that this is a 25 year bipartisan regime, being criminally supported by two powerful political dynasties, it becomes obvious why the only change that can come from within the system is to double down and escalate the crimes further.

The Australian government, has literally taken hostages, and more or less, been murdering them slowly, in order to send a political message. This means that they can't back out now, and say, ““oops,” my bad. I forgot you're not supposed to criminally violate people's human rights through institutionalised barbarism.” Once you start killing hostages you have gone well past the point of getting 'let off with a ticket' and the politicians know this as well as anyone. Neither party can afford to let the general public see the refugees as fully human.

For how much blood there is on everyone's hands in Canberra, they do not care if they have to sack a thousand Peter Dutton's. They would much rather do that then see a single Australian politician before the International Criminal Court. After all, this would set a very dangerous precedent for lots of the political class.

This is why both the Labor party, and the Liberal party, benefit from the slogan, Sack Dutton, because it plays perfectly into their good-cop, bad-cop routine. But 'Dutton to the Hague' is a problem because that could lead to Rudd To The Hague, and Howard To The Hague, and Gilard To The Hague and Abbot To The Hague. The lot of them are made uncomfortable by all this Hague talk.

On the other hand, SackDutton poses absolutely no threat because the Liberal Party's brand is built on accepting the blame for torturing the refugees. So if the Liberal Party has to dismiss an immigration minister for being too hard on refugees, this simply rallies their base and gives credence to the essential lie which maintains the detention regime. This lie is that the Liberals are so bad that Labor could be some sort of remedy. Once they have agreement on this obviously false premise, both political parties can continue to hustle the refugee rights movement indefinitely. SackDutton protects the bipartisan detention regime because it massively downplays the gravity and extent of the crimes that are being committed.

So the first political point that we need to establish is that mandatory detention and offshore processing are not just “bad policies.” Instead, they are an entrenched humanitarian crisis and a civil emergency, which both major parties are now materially and criminally invested in perpetuating.
Once this has been established, it dramatically undermines the idea that lobbying is going to have any effect because it is obvious that such powerful political dynasties would never voluntarily allow themselves to be held accountable for such far-reaching atrocities.

To further buttress this point, we can look at the example of the social movement against the invasion of Iraq in 2003. The important lesson about this Australian & international social movement was that it showed that simply having an overwhelming majority of people actively on the side of the movement was not enough to significantly influence either parties policies. Despite being the largest social movement in the history of the country, both major political parties basically ignored it. This is because championing the anti-war cause would mean challenging the existing order too fundamentally. This then raises the question how can ordinary people force the government to be accountable if not through awareness raising and electoral campaigning?

This is the question which Can't Stand By attempts to answer. But without first realising that awareness raising and electoral politics are dead ends, there is no reason to consider civil resistance in the first place. But before questions of how to resist are raised, it is often important to address some illusions about social change which are a hang over of the parliamentary politics model of social change.

2 & 3)

In particular, it is important to address the fact that even most people who realise that there has to be some sort of extra-parliamentary resistance to government policies, still often believe that this resistance, must conform to the rules of parliamentary politics. In particular they believe that all major decisions of the movement must be made with the support of the majority of the population.

But this is not at all historically true or politically defensible. Waiting for majority approval to address an atrocity is like ignoring someone having a heart attack in the middle of a town hall meeting because their name isn't on the speaking list. Some things are supposed to supersede polite formalities. Human rights atrocities are one of those things.

But the way that activists often justify arguing that we can not act without a majority is by falsely asserting that this is how leaders like Martin Luther King organised their campaigns of direct action and civil disobedience.

Society likes to pretend that Dr. King campaigned in a way which does not at all resemble his own clear accounts of his activities. Society likes to imagine a sanitised version that may as well be called Friendly Martin's White Approved Authentic Campaign of Civil Disobedience (TM). The idea that is pushed is that the demonstrators worked to abstractly convince a majority of the society to agree both with their political cause and their methods of resistance. Then after rational dialogue had led everyone to consensus, and a clear majority was neatly attained, demonstrators then peacefully marched on to the streets at which point (due to their superior numbers, and the logic of their argument) the government realised it had no choice but to change its position. This is the general formula which activists argue that King used to great success. But if you actually read Dr King's Letter from Birmingham Jail, the way he describes his campaigns differs significantly and fundamentally from this framing.

The first point of obvious contention is that in the letter from Birmingham Jail Dr. King said he had never participated in a campaign of direct action that was perceived as well timed by the broader society. Not once. Instead, rather than using a majority, his strategy was explicitly designed to be used by an otherwise powerless minority. Civil resistance is about recognising that there is an emergency taking place which over rides civilian normalcy.

Dr. King specifically describes the participants in his campaigns of nonviolent direct action, as being “gad flys.” Originally the term referred to a fly that bites livestock but it is also used metaphorically to describe a person who annoys or criticizes others in order to provoke them into action. King also specifically talks about his group deliberately creating and causing social tension. Not alleviating it. In fact, he talks about causing so much social tension that it becomes unbearable for the majority of people.

So in addition to discrediting parliamentary reformism, it is important to reclaim this stolen history and expose the fact that King's civil disobedience and direct action involved small minorities of disruptive people deliberately antagonising the majority of people. Once these points have been established, the types of questions can begin to be asked which Can't Stand By is attempting to help find answers for.


Letter From Birmingham Jail...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yHnKeajhoIw

https://vimeo.com/244574329

Monday 27 March 2017

CSB Netwok Manual (HTML/text version)

At the moment this is just the raw text from the #CantStandBy manual. None of the maps or graphs have been included. They will be added ASAP. They can currently be found in the PDF version of the manual. But we thought that an online text version might make it more accessible even with these limitations. We will try to improve it over time by reinserting the images and perhaps adding links to the chapters etc. In the meanwhile, enjoy!

End mandatory detention now!

#CantStandBy Non-violent Civil Resistance Network Manual

Friday 16 December 2016

Suggestions



So far the CSB network seems to be going well. It started off tiny and it has more than doubled in size in little more than a month. If we are able to maintain this rate of growth we will be an influential force in Australian politics less than 12 months. So while we might want the group to grow faster - we should also be careful to highlight that the network relies on consistency as much as it does passion. However, it is obvious that participation is still at a tiny fraction of what it needs to be. So what types of things could we do to help increase participation over the coming months?

Without really having any way to prove it, it could be argued that the 4 banner drop photos that were taken in November - were more crucial to mobilising people in December than the thousands of hits to various online articles/videos explaining how to participate in #CantStandBy. Showing is more important than telling.

Part of this has to do with the fact that articles/videos are aimed at the general public. As the network manual said a significant majority of the general public is not going to be interested in participating. We're looking to mobilise the most radical 0.1% of the population, so if a video is seen by 5000 people, (as a rough guide) that means that it has probably only reached about 5 people in your target audience (assuming all those hits were Australians). General outreach is still important as it is one of few ways to break out of just existing in little self-contained activist networks but it also has limitations.

It is possible that the 4 photos taken in November could have had a bigger impact because they concretely demonstrated to people who were already interested in taking action - what their participation could look like.

Some people may have seen the video of the man dancing by himself at the concert who eventually attracted a crowd of people to join him. He didn't do that by handing out manuals on how to dance. He also didn't walk up to people who weren't dancing and say "why aren't you dancing!?" Instead, he made what he was doing look accessible and fun.

Even though many participants were camera shy in Nov - the photos still showed real human beings in real locations carrying out the actions as they were intended to be. Then the next month twice as many people participated in twice as many locations.

Another reason why banner drop photos may have a bigger impact than online links to the manual is because, at this point, no one is looking for CSB banner drop photos unless they are already very sympathetic to the movement. People who are looking for banner drop photos are already looking for evidence to let them know its ok to take the to streets.

It may be easier to focus on these people in the initial stages rather than trying to get the entire general public to spontaneously rise up.

One potential limitation at the moment is that the only visible human components of the network have been the banner drop photos. While these might be one of our most effective forms of outreach, there could easily be other types of media that supporters could also create which could fill the gaps between the monthly demonstrations and allow people to see the other people who are participating in the network, making it more relatable.

People can:

* Upload photos of CSB posters or other materials which have been displayed in your local area. This can be a way to get content online which shows CSB activity. The more things that move #CantStandBy from being an idea to something that is being put into practice the better.

* Create "Why I support CSB" blogs, vlogs and interviews etc and upload them social media. If there's a part of the Network Manual you think that people need to be aware of you could create a video or article or graphic explaining why you think that this element is important. Don't worry if you have no credentials. People who support CSB don't care. The refugees don't care.

CSB reduced demonstrations down from having politicians speaking and mainstream media coverage to a single individual with a scrap of paper and hashtag written on it. Because of the politics behind the actions - they were still effective in inspiring others to participate. Following the same logic it also doesn't matter if you're just an ordinary person speaking into a webcam about #CantStandBy or writing articles or creating art. Others will still find your voice (and your example) inspiring in ways you might never predict.

* Extend banner drop photos to also include banner drop videos. There were reports that there were lots of cars honking in support of CSB demonstrators last month. It would be good to get some of that on film. Even doing quick little vox pops with people who volunteer at the demonstrations will help to raise the network's profile.

* Take photos of as many rallying points in your city as possible (even outside of a day of action). Use them to create media and upload it to social media. The more familiar people are with the locations - the more confident they will be to participate. This might also help to weed out any rallying points which are unviable - so that they can be avoided or replaced by new rallying points. If you wanted to you could combine some of this footage with a "Why I support CSB" blogs/vlog etc.

These are just some suggestions for anyone who is trying to get more people active in the network.

Monday 7 November 2016