Workers Solidarity Movement

In response to yesterday’s Irish News (Mon 20 May 2013) front page article, “Police to Occupy hundreds of vacant premises in Belfast during G8”, the Workers Solidarity Movement condemned security forces scaremongering in the media.

A spokesperson for the All-Ireland anarchist organisation said:

“These kind of absurd and over-the-top scare stories are aimed not so much at intimidating anarchists, but the concerned citizens, trade unionists and others wanting to show their opposition to the offensive waste of money on this pointless G8 charade.

Invoking the phantasm of invasions of ‘thousands of international protesters’ and bogeymen ‘anarchists bent on destruction’ is really aimed at creating a bogus climate of fear to try and intimidate ordinary members of the public out of exercising their legitimate right to demonstrate their objections to this reckless waste of resources. Resources that would be better spent on preventing cuts to services and attacks on the already penniless, like the Bedroom tax.

We find it a dereliction of civic duty and a shameful violation of journalistic ethics, that such crude propaganda from the security forces is printed more or less verbatim by journalists and newspapers, without any attempt to verify their veracity or solicit alternative views.

The real forces ‘bent on damage and destruction’ at this grotesque spectacle, will be the G8 representatives within their temporary battlements, planning the further ruination of peoples lives through ever more savage austerity, and the destruction of our environment through the unsustainable despoliation of the planet in the service of profit for the few”