How the 'Right to Protest' Became the State’s Most Effective Tool of Control

The genius of the state lies in letting you fight - just not for what matters

Photo by Markus Spiske on Unsplash

Western democracies pride themselves on being beacons of justice. It is all faux, of course. The rights of the people are never respected, even though they are written in law and the law says they are. They are simply tolerated and not encroached upon unless the government requires them to be. Keeping the masses happy by not encroaching on rights maintains the status quo and keeps the public content. Content people do not agitate, rebel, or look deeply into things. Ergo, keep the status quo, keep eyes off the corruption at the top: lobbyists, deals with favoured arms companies, Covid contracts to friends, etc.

It is only when the government wants something more from the public—usually more power or money—that they encroach upon their rights. It is a calculation they make: “Is it worth keeping the status quo, or can we push the people?”

So, they try us out.

In the UK, they left our elderly at the mercy of Covid by not allowing them to be treated in hospital. They even encouraged us to go out by using state funds to make eating out in restaurants 50% off. People died. No one rebelled.

The government told us that with 30% of British children living in poverty, the two-child benefit cap would not be removed because our nation could not afford the £2 billion cost, yet simultaneously promised at least £3 billion to Ukraine for as long as needed under their 100-year partnership declaration. The people did not hit the streets in protest.

The NHS was starved of funds, brought to its knees, contracted to private vultures, and ambulances privatised, going from arriving in a few minutes to 2 and a half days for one to show up. The British did not demand the government stop.

In all these scenarios, the human rights of everyone were rode roughshod over. But the government didn’t care, because the people didn’t use their protest rights to protest it. Just like the question of whether a tree falling unseen in a forest makes a sound, if a right is not demanded, did it ever exist at all?

The government thought it could get away with anything.

But then came the genocide in Gaza, and the people finally moved—not just in Britain, but all over the world. They finally decided to use their protest rights.

And the governments cracked down, hard.

Citizens of the ‘democratic’ Western world believed the crackdown on protest rights was an indication of their governments’ fear of mass rebellion in response to their complicity in the worst genocide any of us have ever personally witnessed. They are right.

But the genius of the state is that by encroaching on our protest rights and denying them in practice through state suppression, we are forced to defend those rights. This means that rather than our protests being about Palestine, we are instead fighting for the right to protest about Palestine. Our money, our time, and our energy go into this battle. In the meantime, Palestine gets lost in the ether.

This week alone, as a direct action protest group was proscribed as a terrorist organisation and GLAN lost its case to stop the government sending arms to Israel, the entire focus has been not on Palestine, but on legal proceedings challenging the government in its breaches of law, including the right to protest.

Whilst all attention was focused on this, the slaughter in Gaza continued in increasingly dystopian hell. The Israeli-American ‘Gaza Humanitarian Foundation’ (GHF)—which is meant to deliver food to Palestinians—has instead been rounding them up in cages and firing at them, whooping as they do so.

While all media attention was turned to our right to protest and court challenges to the government’s breaches of law, American contractors created an actual pen to collect starving Palestinians and shoot them for kicks as if it was the real life squid games.

Even Sky News couldn’t hide it. In their attempts to cover up for Israel as per usual, they came up with this fiendishly ridiculous headline: ‘Rise in Gaza deaths linked to Aid Distributions by Controverisal Group’ to basically say that the GHF are killing starving people en masse when they queue up to get food. Because they are depraved sickos who probably needed to fail an official psychopathy test to get the job.

And this is entirely by design. The government purposefully encroaches upon protest rights precisely to take attention away from the causes they protest.

And it is GENIUS in its evil.

The sophistication of modern Western democracies is in managing dissent without appearing overtly authoritarian. Through the mechanism of ‘protest rights’ they have the ability to redirect civic energy toward procedural battles rather than substantive change. This turns protest rights law into a tool for maintaining tight control over the population while appearing to respect democratic norms.

Not only that, by simultaneously appearing to respect democratic norms—by allowing an avenue to go to court to ‘fight’ for them—whilst systematically undermining them in practice through the glacial court bureaucracy that deliberately drags cases out for years, the government makes citizens complicit in their own disempowerment.

At the present time, this is because they are forced to redirect their energy into defending their right to protest for Palestine instead of protesting for Palestine. They become invested in ‘winning back’ rights that were supposedly guaranteed. However, by doing so they tacitly accept that the government has authority to grant or withhold these fundamental rights, which directly contradicts their own belief that such rights are inalienable. Permitted dissent is an oxymoron, yet they are fighting for permission.

By engaging in legal battles to defend the right to protest, they end up legitimising the system by working within it, rather than challenging the system itself.

If one thing the Gazan genocide has shown, its how absolutely and comprehensively we’ve been played by Western ‘democracy’.