Intimidation doesn't work if people refuse to be intimidated

On the genocidal British regime's proposed proscription of Palestine Action

Proscription is a tool of intimidation. It’s a blunt instrument, and it has one clear, fatal weakness: It only works if people are dutifully intimidated.

We’re all meant to say: ‘Oh, Yvette Cooper, she who barely cracked double figures in the leadership contest against Jeremy Corbyn, says we aren’t supposed to like Palestine Action, so I guess we all just have to tuck tail and accept genocide.’

That works when the target of proscription is marginal and widely reviled, as the initial targets of such repression invariably are. When genocidal ghoul Priti Patel proscribed the Islamic Resistance Movement Hamas, this worked because even the most committed Palestinian liberation campaigners in the country refused to endorse the group. They were a soft target. Demonised as the movement was even before proscription, most people did not have to change their behaviour. They would have recoiled from Hamas before the state directly ordered them to do so, and so Priti Patel’s order just required them to carry on doing something they’d already been doing voluntarily.

Now, however, her successor is trying to proscribe an anti-genocide direct action group whose supporters number in the millions. It is by no means an exaggeration to say that Palestine Action is significantly more popular than Cooper herself, who has all the popular legitimacy of foot fungus mixed with projectile dysentery and whose only redeeming feature is that she is not Keir Starmer.

Proscription of such a group will only work if those millions are so cowardly as to choose to be intimidated into silence. If Palestine Action’s supporters and sympathisers allow themselves to be silenced, then the British regime will hardly stop at Palestine Action. The PSC will surely be the next domino to follow. If, however, all of those who support Palestinian liberation remain steadfast and refuse to be intimidated, proscription will be a dead letter, a shameful monument to the fatal overreach of a regime that has definitively lost the run of itself.

For those who oppose the British-backed genocide in Palestine and the regime’s pivot towards fascism at home, there can only be one response to the proscription order:

LET THEM FUCKING TRY!

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