Johann Hari in
The Independent, doubtless inspired by Paul O'Grady's outburst last Friday, joins in the chorus of condemnation for the Con-Dem Coalition's cuts.
"There is a ripple of rage spreading across Britain. It is clearer every day that the people of this country have been colossally scammed. The bankers who crashed the economy are richer and fatter than ever, on our cash. The Prime Minister who promised us before the election “we’re not talking about swingeing cuts” just imposed the worst cuts since the 1920s, condemning another million people to the dole queue. Yet the rage is matched by a flailing sense of impotence. We are furious, but we feel there is nothing we can do. There’s a mood that we have been stitched up by forces more powerful and devious than us, and all we can do is sit back and be shafted."
I love it when she's angry.
Harri says it doesn't have to be this way!
Let's turn that ripple of rage into a tsunami of anger and fight back - and everyone can learn from The Gays.
"To understand how and why protest like this can work, you need some concrete and proven examples from the past. Let’s start with the most hopeless and wildly idealistic cause – and see how it won. The first ever attempt to hold a Gay Pride rally in Trafalgar Square was in 1965*. Two dozen people turned up – and they were mostly beaten by the police and arrested. Gay people were imprisoned for having sex, and even the most compassionate defense of gay people offered in public life was that they should be pitied for being mentally ill.
"Imagine if you had stood in Trafalgar Square that day and told those two dozen brave men and women: “Forty-five years from now, they will stop the traffic in Central London for a Gay Pride parade on this very spot, and it will be attended by hundreds of thousands of people. There will be married gay couples, and representatives of every political party, and openly gay soldiers and government ministers and huge numbers of straight supporters – and it will be the homophobes who are regarded as freaks.” It would have seemed like a preposterous statement of science fiction. But it happened. It happened in one lifetime. Why? Not because the people in power spontaneously realized that millennia of persecuting gay people had been wrong, but because determined ordinary citizens banded together and demanded justice.
"If that cause can be achieved, through persistent democratic pressure, anything can."
* Fagburn has no idea where Hari's got this date from. I've never heard of it before, and I've written far too many pieces on the history of Gay Pride in London.
What does he classify as an "attempt"? Two fellas holding hands?
Hari's grasp of gay history can be shaky, and picked freely from the internet - a web of deceit.
Surprisingly nobody has taken Hari up on writing
this bollocks in 2004.
"A San Francisco-based group called the Lavender Crescent Society sent five members to Iran in 1979 after the Islamic revolution there to spur an Iranian gay movement. They were taken straight from the airport to a remote spot and shot dead."
This is hilarious - You'd think if five American citizens were shot dead in Iran in 1979 it might have made the newspapers at the time - and five murdered gay activists would have merited a mention in the gay press at least, or made it into a single book of gay history.
Actually it's not surprising, he was writing about Iran and you can get away with saying anything bad you like about our Officially Declared Enemy number one.
Ho hum...
"Who would have thought, when we were tots in suburbia perving over stills of Andy Warhol films, that anyone could ever make being gay look like wearing Crimplene? Toksvig does – she's that deadly dull. On the other hand, thank goodness she is. Gayness is a wonderful thing, but of all the people the good Lord made gay, I thank Him for making Toksvig and Stephen Fry gay more than anybody else I can think of. IMAGINE IF THOSE TWO HAD GOT TOGETHER AND REPRODUCED! The smugness and self-obsession of any brats they banged out would surely send the I-Love-Me Meter into meltdown..."
Johann Hari in The Independent, doubtless inspired by Paul O'Grady's outburst last Friday, joins in the chorus of condemnation for the Con-Dem Coalition's cuts.
* Fagburn has no idea where Hari's got this date from. I've never heard of it before, and I've written far too many pieces on the history of Gay Pride in London.
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