I don't pay much attention to Roger Hallam or Extension Rebellion and don't really hold with their tactics, but....
Roger Hallam is My Facebook friend and former leader of Extinction Rebellion and is being held as a Political Prisoner in England....a great journalist (Chris Hedges) writes, “Roger is being held in Pentonville Prison in London, which was built in 1842 and is in disrepair.
He is charged with breaking bail conditions over an action that saw activists throw paint on the walls of the four major British political parties, as well as conspiracy to cause criminal damage.
A Green Party member leaked to the British police a recorded Zoom discussion Roger had with three other members of Burning Pink, an anti-political party organized to create citizen assemblies to replace ruling governing bodies, as they discussed upcoming actions.
The homes of the four activists on the Zoom meeting — along with Roger, they were Blyth Brentnall, Diana Warner, Ferhat Ulusu and Anglican priest Steven Nunn — were raided on Aug. 25. Their electronic devices were confiscated by police and they were arrested. Roger is housed in a dirty, vermin-infested cell and denied books and visitors.
A vegan, he is forced to live on a diet of cold cereal and bread. On many days there is no hot food served in the prison. Violent altercations within the prison are commonplace. The overcrowded cells often lack lighting and heat. He has no change of clothes and has been unable to wash the clothes he is wearing for weeks. He stuffs bedsheets and paper in the cracks of the door to block mice and cockroaches. The toilet in his cell has no seat, is covered in excrement and does not flush properly. He goes days without access to the outside. His reading glasses are broken.
He is waiting on a request for tape to fix them. The COVID-19 pandemic is in the prison. Two of the staff have died from the virus. Roger could be imprisoned in these conditions until February, if he is denied bail in a hearing scheduled for this week.
Roger's arrest came as Extinction Rebellion was planning a blockade of the printing presses of News Corps Printworks, which prints several major British newspapers, including The Times, Sun on Sunday, Sunday Times, The Daily Mail and The London Evening Standard.
The blockade took place on Sept. 4 to protest the failure of those news outlets to accurately report on the climate and ecological emergency. The blockade delayed distribution of the papers by several hours. "The days of standing up to tyranny have long faded," Roger writes from prison. "The life-and-death struggle against Hitler and fascism is consigned to the history books.
Today's liberal classes believe only in one thing: maintaining their privilege. Their one priority is power. The number one rule is: preserve our careers, our institutions at all cost.
The historical rule number one of fighting evil is the willingness to lose your career and to risk the closing down of your institution. The prospect of death and destruction is lost in a postmodernist haze.
Leadership has decayed into sitting behind a desk, following public relations protocols (otherwise known as lying). Leading from the front, the first to go to prison Martin Luther King-style died with the passing of the World War II generation."
"The game is up," Roger continued. "The old alliance with the liberal classes is dead. New forms of revolutionary initiative and leadership are rising up. Members of the new political party Burning Pink have thrown paint at the doors of the NGOs and political parties calling for open dialogue and public debate. The response, true to form, has been a lethal and deafening silence.
We are now in prison from where I write this article after a Green Party member recorded a Zoom call and passed it to the police. We have not been let out for exercise for the first five days. We have no kettle, no pillows, no visits. But we don't give a shit. We are doing something about Evil."
From Chris Hedges -
Two of the rebels I admire most, Julian Assange, the WikiLeaks publisher, and Roger Hallam, the co-founder of Extinction Rebellion, are in jail in Britain. That should not be surprising. You can measure the effectiveness of resistance by the fury of the response. Julian courageously exposed the lies, deceit, war crimes and corruption of the ruling imperial elites. Roger has helped organized the largest acts of mass civil disobedience in British history, shutting down parts of London for weeks, in a bid to wrest power from a ruling class that has done nothing, and will do nothing, to halt the climate emergency and our death march to mass extinction.
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