Thanks to the ludicrous yet frightening Living Safe Together booklet most of Australia knows about Karen, the women who became a ‘radical activist’ (whatever that is) by listening to ‘alternative music’ (whatever that is).

This booklet is designed to go to schools to help students and teachers understand the ‘dangers’ of ‘radicalisation’ (whatever that is) and dob in their friends and pupils. It is a reactionary’s wet dream, full of pompous platitudes and dangerous delusions, born of a world view that sees anyone who questions authority as the enemy. If you are not with us you are agin us. If you are not in ‘Team Australia’ you are a terrorist. This booklet is where Edmund Burke meets Tony Abbott, via the comics.

To be fair to the geniuses who developed this booklet, it was not just alternative music that led to Karen’s downfall. There was also student politics and ‘left-wing’activism (whatever that is). All of this led inevitably and inexorably to direct action environmentalism, where Karen lived in a forest camp, disrupting logging activities. She was arrested numerous times and ‘lost contact with her family and previous set of friends.’ In other words she believed and practised, like Martin Luther King and many many others, direct non-violent action, in her case to stop capital destroying the environment and with it the very system that produces the drive for profits destroying the world.

Karen eventually left the group, ‘disillusioned with in-group fighting’ and miracle of miracles became a moderate. She ‘took a paid job with a mainstream environmentalist organisation.’ Ah yes, the mainstream environmental movement that has not won many significant victories since about 1986, but which now has all these Green MPs implementing or just itching to implement austerity and piss farting around about climate change. Maybe the Greens could (they should in my view, bit won’t) mobilise that big section of society worried about the threat to the environment, worried about our rotten treatment of refugees, worried about growing poverty and inequality, to sit in in the streets of the major cities and close them down until a government of either conservative persuasion .

One underlying message of the booklet is pretty clear -play by the rules of the one percent. Reform the system, don’t challenge it. As the booklet says:

‘[Karen] also began to question the effectiveness of the protesting methods used by the group. It seemed they might make short-term gains but that there was no sustainable change unless it was translated into wider community support and government policies.’

This of course re-writes history. The suffragettes (whom the booklet incorrectly uses as a good example of nice peaceful reform) did not change the world by being polite. They conducted the sort of campaigns Karen did and were arrested and jailed for the political ‘crime’ of wanting women to have the vote. They won both because of their actions and because they built a mass militant movement. Like those in the Vietnam War who called for victory to the National Liberation front, their actions shifted the debate to the left and made their demands both accessible to and understood by the public. Indeed their militant wing would, in line with the ‘logic’of this this booklet, be an example of the ‘violent’ extremism the booklet rails against.

Except it isn’t violent, or extremist. The real extremists sit in Canberra and in the board rooms across the country. It is not Karen who invaded Iraq, or Afghanistan. It is not Karen who is bombing Syria. It is not Karen killing black men and women in custody. It is not Karen driving Aboriginal people off their land to open it up for big mining companies. It is not Karen killing women in relationships or doing little about it. It is not Karen increasing inequality and poverty in Australia. It is not Karen attacking Medicare. It is not Karen attacking penalty rates or wages. It is not Karen who is stopping equal love.  It is not Karen locking up and abusing thousands of innocent people on Manus Island and Nauru.

Karen’s conversion to the mainstream means she is no longer challenging the structures of power that are and impose this unjust society on us, a society of mass inequality, war, hunger, poverty and fast approaching environmental destruction.

As Howard Zinn so eloquently put it our problem is not civil disobedience; it is civil obedience.

There is another rotten message in the booklet too, namely that Muslims are a threat, captured by a similar message coming from the US. Muslim boys with clocks are dangerous. I will come back to this later.

Je suis Karen