On the wall of my office I have a photograph of my wife, Francesca, by the Trevi Fountain. In the bright Roman sunlight the waters of the fountain glitter and sparkle, and the white marble figures glow like the gods they represent. It’s a great photograph. It’s a great fountain.
To the eco-activists of Ultima Generazione (Last Generation), however, the Trevi Fountain is just another target. Accordingly, on Sunday, 21 May 2023, half a dozen of them vandalised the 300-year-old artwork by pouring diluted charcoal dust into the pristine water and turning it black. The banner they unfurled read: “Non Paghiamo il Fossile” (We Don’t Pay The Fossil), a reference to the Italian government’s subsidising of fossil fuel production. While the tourists who had gathered to view the fountain made known their disgust, Carabinieri dragged the bedraggled protesters from the Trevi and arrested them. Cleaning the Trevi will take weeks and cost tens of thousands of euros.
The Trevi is by no means the only artwork attacked on behalf of “The Planet”. Paintings by Leonardo da Vinci and Vincent van Gogh have also suffered from the attentions of eco-activists. Nor is their attention restricted to foreign masterpieces: Wellington drivers have been obstructed regularly by protesters demanding a fundamental policy-shift from road to rail, by gluing themselves to the carriageway.
The damage inflicted, the outrage provoked, the profound antagonism engendered by the actions of the protesters are generally agreed to be the point of the exercise. They are not in the least daunted by the obvious argument that their actions will likely do the planet’s cause much more harm than good.
Tired of these eco-warriors’ disruptive tactics, the British House of Commons recently passed legislation imposing harsh penalties on those inflicting damage and/or unwarranted inconvenience upon the persons and property of their fellow citizens. This April, Morgan Trowland, a New Zealand-born civil engineer now living in the UK, was sentenced to three years’ imprisonment for a protest action that shut down a busy London road last year.
Shocked by the severity of his punishment, Trowland’s comrades from the group “Just Stop Oil” condemned the British authorities for attempting to “intimidate” the protest movement. Demanding stronger state action against Climate Change, they argued, should not be treated as a serious crime.
Trowland’s sister, Holly, responding to her brother’s sentence from New Zealand, declared: “The argument is that it’s civil disruption. It works – history has shown that it works.”
Except, of course, history has shown no such thing.
The state tolerates political protest only so long as it causes minimal public inconvenience, harms no one, and is – as a consequence – almost entirely ineffectual. Protests that move beyond these parameters are a different matter altogether. Protests that disrupt public order, damage property and/or injure people are rightly perceived as direct challenges to state power that must be suppressed. Failure to shut down such protest activity not only incentivises its repetition, it also makes the state look weak. Since far too many economic and political interests require the services of a strong state, perceptions of weakness must be avoided at all costs.
Protests of the sort that polluted the Trevi fountain and hurled soup at van Gogh’s Sunflowers succeed only in hardening the resolve of the authorities. The counterfactual, where such behaviour prompts immediate state capitulation and the complete fulfilment of the protesters’ demands, is clearly nonsensical. Once the precedent was established, every cause in Christendom would seek to advance itself by adopting identical tactics. The situation would become intolerable, and since the existing state apparatus was clearly unequal to the task of preserving law and order, those with a strong interest in both would hasten to improvise a new one.
Looking back into our own history, there was tremendous optimism throughout the anti-Apartheid movement when protesters forced the cancellation of the Springboks vs Waikato game in Hamilton in July 1981. Surely, now, the movement’s leaders reasoned, Prime Minister Rob Muldoon will call off the rest of the Springbok Tour. But Muldoon would do no such thing. What had happened at Hamilton made the continuation of the tour imperative. Any other course of action would be construed as weakness. The prime minister made it clear to his police commissioner that the tour must proceed – whatever it takes.
In the weeks that followed, anti-tour protesters adopted tactics that anticipated a great many of the actions adopted by Extinction Rebellion, Just Stop Oil and Last Generation. Activists blockaded motorways, ran onto airport runways, blew up railway gantries and interrupted television transmissions. All to no avail. The tour by the South African Rugby team continued to its bitter conclusion. On the day of the final test match in Auckland, the protests degenerated into riots. Armed naval ratings from HMNZS Philomel waited in readiness to assist the civil power. The state could not be seen to lose – and it didn’t.
Much is made of the ‘right’ to protest. Certainly, in the minds of climate change activists, their disruptive/destructive behaviour is entirely justified by the sheer scale of the crisis into which the planet is said to have fallen. The inviolability of great works of art and the ability of citizens to move about freely – these are trifling considerations when compared to the climate horrors that await future generations.
Such uncompromising zealotry, however, is inimical to the modern state’s responsibility to keep the lights on, the trains running – and the population healthy. The organisers of the anti-vaccination mandates protest/occupation of parliament grounds in February-March 2022 may have been utterly sincere in their beliefs, but their protest was of a sort that no government, operating in the midst of a global pandemic, could tolerate. The only reason it lasted so long was because the New Zealand Police lacked the capacity to break-up the occupation quickly and effectively without resorting to deadly force. It took weeks for the police to assemble the minimum force required to regain control of the streets around the parliamentary complex and clear the grounds of the protesters’ encampment.
New Zealanders should be under no illusion that their state will have learned anything from the final brutal hours of the anti-mandates protest, other than the need for dedicated public order enforcement squads, state-of-the-art protective gear and as much non-lethal rioter-dispersal weaponry it can lay its hands on. Protest groups intending to move from the peaceful, well-organised and completely ineffectual demonstration towards more active disruption and civil disobedience should expect no mercy – for they will be shown none.
Historically, large assemblies of citizens were tolerated only if they came to the seats of power as petitioners and supplicants – and often not even then. We have a right to ‘lawful’ and ‘peaceable’ assembly – not to effective protest. The state cannot be bested by its citizens – not if it intends to remain unchanged and in control.
In an earlier incarnation, as a trade union organiser, I would tell workers contemplating strike action to bear in mind this single, bitter, but valuable, political truth. The capitalist state gives its citizens many customary and constitutional rights, but it only does so on one, very important, condition – that they never use them.