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nomic sanctions on food, medicine and other forms of humanitarian assistance. “Engagement is more likely to enable the political, economic and social openings that Cubans may desire, and to ease the hardships that Cubans face today.” Whichever group in Congress is consulted, from the vociferous Cuban American lobby in Florida to the claimed progressives in
the metropolitan centres, all agree with one objective, however achieved: regime change. The hemispheric gangster is simply biding its time. CT Dr. Binoy Kampmark was a Commonwealth Scholar at Selwyn College, Cambridge. He currently lectures at RMIT University. Email: bkampmark@gmail.com
Photo: Michael Swan / Flickr.com
Others include the truck blockade in Ottawa and its duplicates in Australia, New Zealand and the US, and the angry men outside the British parliament, waiting to pounce on passing politicians. By incoherent protest, I mean gatherings whose aims are simultaneously petty and grandiose. Their immediate objectives are small and often risible, attacking such minor inconveniences as face masks. The underlying aims are open-ended, massive and impossible to fulfil. Not just politically impossible, but mathematically impossible. Listening to these men (and most of them are men), it seems that every one of them wants to be king.
T ANGRY MEN? The Freedom Convoy protests that spread across Canada last month were directed at Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.
G eorge M onbiot
Rage rules in citizen protests u
W
hen a group in black fatigues called Alpha Men Assemble began practising paramilitary manoeuvres in a park in Staffordshire at the beginning of this year, it looked pretty threatening. These men, we were warned, were about to launch an insurrec-
tion against vaccines and in favour of “the sovereign citizen”. Since then, silence. It wouldn’t be surprising if the group had dispersed: a society of self-proclaimed alphas is bound to fall apart. This was just one example of the incoherent protests now sweeping rich, English-speaking nations.
he “sovereign citizen” theory is a powerful current running through these movements. Its adherents insist that they stand above the law. Some of them refuse to buy vehicle licences, or pay taxes or fines. They believe they are exempt from public health measures, such as lockdowns and vaccine passes. In other words, they arrogate to themselves sovereign powers that not even the monarch enjoys. They produce elaborate pseudo-legal documents to justify these claims. The “memorandum of understanding” published by two of the leading organisers of the Ottawa blockade, which makes impossible legal demands of the government, looks like a classic of the genre. It was supposedly signed by 320,000 people before the organisers withdrew it. What explains the appeal of this movement? Such claims of individual sovereignty arose in the 1970s ColdType | March 2022 | www.coldtype.net
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