[BretLudwig]

Humour as a Weapon

"I wouldnt normally run two pieces sent to me by Welf Herfurth in
quite such proximity. But this one by Andreas Faust, a Tasmanian writer
of the New Right, gave me a good laugh, and reminded me that political
activism is often most effective when it it most irreverent.
GW

This article has been researched and compiled for the purposes of
educating New Right and N-A activists in the use of humour as a political
weapon. There is a paranoid feeling amongst many on the New Right that the
mass media is our greatest enemy. Not so. This article looks at the ways in
which activists can use and manipulate the media, rather than the other way
around.

As an example: mention the 1932 opening of the Sydney Harbour Bridge to
any older Australian, and the first image that will spring to their mind
is a man on horseback, galloping forward to slash the ribbon with his
sword, before the €˜official representative could get to it. The
swordsman was a member of a political group called the New Guard. And
while this stunt was not especially humorous, it was certainly
eye-catching €“ it remains in the mass mind to this day. In that same
city in 2007, the crew of television show The Chaser made world headlines
when they infiltrated the APEC forum (one of them dressed as Osama bin
Laden), making a complete mockery of the forums expensive security
measures.

In general, the media doesnt give coverage to alternative politics (the
recent 9/11 Truth Forum in Sydney was completely ignored, even though one
of the speakers was a prominent Japanese MP). But €˜fringe views can
get past the editors if they are presented by means of some humorous prank
or stunt. Humour equals saleability...its as simple as that. People like
to laugh, and the editors know it. For the mass media, the dollar is the
bottom line...and the skilled prankster can actually make this work in his
or her favour. A prankster called Mark Pauline claimed that €œthe media
can never deny coverage to a good spectacle. No matter how ridiculous,
absurd, insane or illogical something is, if it achieves a certain
identity as a spectacle, the media has to deal with it.€� In other words,
instead of letting the mainstream media pigeonhole and stereotype them,
activists using humour and spectacle can turn this around and actually use
the media.

This was confirmed by a spokesman for the environmental group EarthFirst!:
€œThe media need stories €“ they want to run them, especially the
television media. What they dont want is some meeting or
run-of-the-mill visual situation theyve seen a million times before.
You give them something different and they actually get excited about
working on the story.€� Perhaps (shock horror!) it might even lead to
greater accuracy in their reporting.

Humour also wins favour with the common man in the street. Stridency and
self-righteousness turn people off €“ but humour can get them on side.
Its considered €˜cute, and could even help you attract the opposite
sex. As punk singer Jello Biafra said, €œhistorically the €˜Merry
Prankster has had a lot more to look forward to than the humourless
politico who sits around moaning about €˜the struggle.€� And
trickster characters have a rich history in mythology and literature.
Targets for political pranks are rife €“ for instance, the legions of
pseudo-left academics who condemn €˜privilege and praise
€˜globalism whilst making over $100,000 a year. The obnoxious
billboards of Benettons are just begging to be creatively altered, as are
posters for phoney humanitarians such as the rock group U2. I remember
seeing footage of U2 on the news a few years ago when they were touring
Australia. Bono, the singer, was here to lecture people about giving more
money to Africa. Then the cameras showed the band members leaving the
airport €“ in four separate limousines! One limo just wasnt enough.
For the cost of a stretch limo you could probably feed an African village
for twenty years. The band are currently engaged in trying to build a
skyscraper in Dublin €“ an act of cultural vandalism if there ever was
one.

U2 have already been the target of an amusing prank in the past. A band
called Negativeland put out a CD entitled €˜U2, with the name
prominently featured on the cover so people would think it was a U2 album.
When people took it home and put it on, they found it was a recording of
someone insulting and attacking U2! The bloated multi-millionaires failed
to see the funny side and (predictably) sued Negativeland.

A punk band called CRASS (posing as Creative Recording and Sound Services)
managed to get some tacky music (with subversive lyrics) inserted as a
flexidisc into a bestselling teenage bride magazine. CRASS also leaked a
faked conversation between Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan discussing
the possibilities of launching a nuclear war. The conversation was spliced
together from radio and TV statements, but was taken seriously by the media
and caused an uproar.

When the US Forestry Service (responsible for a lot of old growth logging)
put on a €˜Smokey the Bear birthday party for 300 children, an
EarthFirst! activist hired a Smokey the Bear costume and walked through
the crowd handing out anti-logging flyers. The kids were treated to the
bizarre spectacle of the rangers trying to arrest Smokey at his own
birthday! This made front page headlines the next day.

A media prankster called Joey Skaggs tricked a room full of journalists
and news readers (including some famous ones) into getting down on their
hands and knees and roaring like lions. He simply issued fake press
releases, pretending to be a trendy new therapist called €˜Baba Wa
Simba (the Lion King), and the journalists fell for it hook, line and
sinker. The journalists were induced to take part in €˜roaring
sessions, which many reported on positively afterwards. People can be
fooled into believing almost anything if its seen to emanate from some
€˜official quarter. There are no end to the ways in which consensus
reality can be manipulated.

Websites are also fair game. A musician from a band called Feederz once
set up a site parodying CNN. To add authenticity, when someone clicked on
the masthead they would be taken back to the real CNN site. As a result,
some of his fake stories actually found their way into mainstream papers.
It was seriously reported that Saddam Hussein was training suicide camels,
and that he had plans to blow up Pearl Harbour!

A group called the Yes Men set up a fake website for Dow Chemical. On the
anniversary of the Bhopal disaster (where thousands were killed by
chemical contamination in Bhopal, India) they were contacted by the BBC
(who thought they were genuine representatives of Dow), and proceeded to
give a statement saying that Dow claimed responsibility for the disaster
and were now going to do something about it. Because of this the real Dow
was embarrassed into cleaning up the mess.

A group called the Cacophony Society once held a fake welcoming party for
a new Starbucks, which seemed to praise Starbucks while actually
ridiculing everything they stood for. A member of the group spoke of the
successful nature of this strategy €œwhere you pretend to side with the
thing you really hate. It makes it hard for the subject of the protest to
get rid of you.€� Similarly, the aforementioned Yes Men have done
speaking tours claiming to represent the World Trade Organisation. Taking
WTO logic to its ultimate conclusion, they delivered lectures with
messages like €˜sweatshops are great. The same tactic could easily be
employed by nationalists or National-Anarchists. For instance, a
nationalist posing as a pro-multiculturalist could get invited onto a
public forum, and then give a speech saying that €œmulticulturalism is
great, because it causes social alienation and helps advance our ideal of
a rootless global population, more easily herded into line...€�

Obnoxious advertising billboards are excellent targets for humorous or
creative political statements. A group called the Billboard Liberation
Front, established in 1977, have published a handy guide for billboard
alteration. When doing a prank like this in an area with surveillance
cameras, it might be an idea for the prankster to wear some kind of
ridiculous disguise.

Pranks can also be played on establishment politicians. Once when Richard
Nixon was giving a speech from a stationary train, someone put on a
conductors cap and waved the train out of the station with Nixon still
in mid-speech. A Texas politician called Tim Moore highlighted the way in
which representatives often pass bills without even understanding the
content, by convincing his fellow pollies to pass a motion commending one
Albert de Salvo (actually the Boston Strangler).

Pranksters can even run for office. Local elections are easy to run in,
and candidates with a humorous platform often attract a protest vote from
those who are sick of the lies of the mainstream candidates. When Jello
Biafra ran for mayor of San Francisco, one of his policies required all
corporate businessmen to wear clown suits between the hours of nine and
five. He finished fourth out of ten candidates €“ quite a respectable
result.

The contemporary art world is also ripe for satire. Australia has a
well-known history of literary pranks, including the Ern Malley hoax,
where two writers created a fictitious modernist €˜poet to expose what
they saw (rightly or wrongly) as the shallow nature of literary modernism.
Another one was the Wanda Koolmatrie hoax, where a writer called Leon
Carmen posed as an aboriginal woman in order to get his book published,
thereby illustrating the biases inherent in the publishing industry.

In Austria, a group of artists who wanted to expose the pretensions of the
art world created a non-existent writer called Georg Paul Thomann, and it
actually worked. Newspaper articles were written about him because he was
perceived to be a €˜somebody...even though he was fictional and his
work was non-existent! This fake €˜artist was even chosen to represent
Austria at a world art fair.

An artist called Jeffrey Vallance couldnt get a major gallery to show
his work, so he bought a number of power point wall sockets from the
hardware shop, and covered them with his art. Then he went around the art
gallery in a tradesmans outfit and replaced all the wall sockets with
his own ones. Next he printed up programs, and invited his friends to view
his work on the art gallery wall sockets. He sent a program to the art
gallery itself €“ and they were so shocked they didnt do anything
about it. The employees hushed it up, in case they got in trouble! The
wall sockets werent removed, and it was only two years later that they
were finally painted over.

Schwaller de Lubicz defined magic as €œthe science of the right gesture,
the right word, at the right moment.€� That is what a successful prank is
€“ an act of magic. I hope this short article has provided suggestive
ideas for anti-global activists of all stripes, whether National-Anarchist
or otherwise.

Hail to the clowns."

Andreas Faust

http://majorityrights.com/index.php/...r_as_a_weapon/

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