Against Cameras on Demonstrations - Don't Trust Journalists

You only have to read the newspapers or watch the television news to realise what a stupid and nasty bunch of gits journalists, newsreaders, commentators, and their camera operators are.

They only tell us half the story; they repeat police reports, or press releases; they are lazy; they sensationalise; they lie; they pester people; they are smug and ugly.

The "News" is very important to our rulers, not because it provides information (it hardly ever provides useful or important information, and if something useful is reported it is usually well after the event) but because it keeps us distracted, fills our heads with crap, and over and over again sell lies to us. The "news" is not news, but propaganda. However, this propaganda is fairly subtle and complex, most journalists are so stupid they don't even know they are peddling it. There is not just one "line" but several competing ones. What this means is that we are encouraged to agree with an opinion (or line) within a set framework, we can choose to favour any variations on a left wing stance or a right wing stance, but we are not allowed to go beyond that.

For example, the right wing will say that striking workers should not have attacked the police, the left wing will say that the police provoked them or started it. No one will be saying that attacking the police in general is a positive thing. Again, we are constantly meant to think about the best ways to run the economy, we aren't meant to think that we would be better off without an economy.

In general, journalism is a job in which you have to start at the bottom and work your way up - if you can't stomach what journalism is about you'll jack it in or get the push long before you're working on The Guardian, or reading News At Ten. If you don't want to report the school fete in the local newspaper, or pester the families of murder victims for a few comments and tears to sell your newspaper and keep your wages coming in then your career won't go far. It's easier for journalists to write in cliches, they can't spend two weeks writing one article, and they've got to be punchy. The news is a soap opera - written to formula and full of lessons for us about things like law and order, the family, etc.

By the time a journalist has become established in our great democracies they are fully self-censoring propaganda machines, as reliable for the State and the bosses as officially controlled journalists in a totalitarian regime. But this doesn't mean we should feel sorry for the poor lobotomised dears, journalists are far more dangerous and powerful than the average police officer. Attacks and military offensives in places like Bosnia and Somalia are often effectively directed by media reporting. Here police attacks/clampdowns are prompted by journalists.

The sight of journalists in "war torn" or "famine" areas is particularly revolting. Their high wages and the expense of carting themselves and their equipment around is supposed to be justified by their "telling the world the truth" or "making a difference". Of course we aren't actually told the truth - i.e., the capitalism creates the economic rivalries that cause wars and that war is actually good for business, or that famines are caused by the world economic system. We are meant to feel helpless, and to believe that "human nature" is at the root of everything bad, not that the system itself is what creates inequality, war, starvation, powerlessness and misery for the masses and boundless wealth and power for the few.

There is a saying that the first casualty of war is truth, well the first casualty of the class war should be journalists.

Journalists today in fact fulfil a similar function for Authority as priests used to do in mediaeval Europe. Priests used to (and still do of course) go around dishing out lies, filling peoples heads with useless ideas and debates (i.e., make people more interested in religion and heaven and hell than real daily life), and spying on people. Journalists do the same job - peasants and proletarians used to have to be forced to go to church, now we happily pay for the privilege of letting the Journo-Priest into our living rooms at 6.00pm every evening. The next day we are meant to talk about what was on the news, not our real, miserable, powerless daily existence.

Don't trust journalists - their humanity has been squeezed out of them and their brains are on auto-pilot.

One of the first tasks of a revolution is to abolish the media.

In recent years there has been a proliferation of people on demonstrations who use cameras. Time was when you could tell who the journo scumbags or police spies were on a demo, these days you can't.

Part of the reason for using cameras is no doubt to record some of the events and people of the day for the posterity of the photo album. This may seem harmless enough but having a stash of photos of faces on demos lying around your house might not seem like such a good idea when the police come battering down your front door. You could argue that the likelihood of the cops raiding your house is slim. Also that surely address books are far more damaging. Yes, they probably are, but at least they serve some useful purpose to us (keeping in contact with other comrades), whereas photos don't, and, more importantly, photos on demos record all sorts of things and faces that we don't know about. I don't want my face to appear in someone's album of demo shots: what sensible or wild speculations could be made by the State by its appearance on that demo; with those people; at that point; and in this persons photo collection?? The State doesn't need any more information or evidence, of whatever they want to concoct, than they already have.

The other reason for using cameras on demos, the serious and worthy one, is that by filming everything that happens the cops can't get away with lying in court or beating people up for no good reason. It is true that evidence of this nature might benefit the odd victim of State justice however it could just as easily damn others. Not everyone on a demo, in a riot, or a similar action is going to be a passive law-abiding citizen willing to take a police kicking lying down. What if you get arrested, or lose your camera, and the cops get to see your snapshots?

Some journalist types (the ones who pretend to be on our side, as long as we are good democrats) deliberately film bust ups between proles and the State not only for the money they can make when they sell the shots, but also so that lawyers and Jo Public can see what really happened. Unfortunately, this means the State can also see it, and after such bust ups the police are bound to say to themselves that these journalists should hand over their film so that they can identify the trouble-makers. These well-meaning, career-minded journalists could get us into a lot of trouble. They are the sort of people who believe that if only the police and the State were subject to more public scrutiny and accountability then all cops would be nice and the State would be a genuinely lovely thing. What they forget is that the State and its cops exist to maintain the exploitation of the working class by the ruling class. The State and its hired thugs didn't arrive by accident, they're here for a specific purpose. If we don't realise who we are exploited by and why then we'll remain like stupid ants forever. These patronising journos and their ideological soulmates (eg. Tony Benn) just add to the general level of mystification and lack of class consciousness in our class. The road to hell is paved with Liberal idiots.

Another good reason you shouldn't take a camera on a demo is that one day journalists are going to be universally known for the anti-working class scum that they are, and when that day arrives their cameras, notepads and dictaphones are going to be shoved into the parts of their bodies where the sun doesn't shine. We don't want any innocent and naive proles to be at the wrong end of this unpleasantness.

If you have any demo photos at home, get rid of them. And don't bring your camera to any more demos.

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