🧑⚖️Integrity vs Expediency: The Climate Trial
As Martin Luther King said, moderates are our biggest obstacle to freedom. Here's how they enabled my prison sentence.
Note: This article was transcribed from a prison phoneline. You can listen to it here.
Yesterday, myself and four others were imprisoned for four to five years. The conservatives and the liberals have got it all sewn up. The narrative is set: for the conservatives, it's job well done. For the liberals, it's another chance to go through the motions of an "injustice trial". But this is not about five nice white middle-class people being banged up for "protest" on "the climate." It's about a few million not-so-nice white people deciding to have a few hundred million brown people die. Just for starters.
This is not about "climate change"; we agree with the judge on that. It is about murder. At scale. Forever. And that is a bad thing, a very bad thing, an evil thing. When the United Nations recently said we have two years to save the world, that they are not being "melodramatic," that economies will be "devastated," they mean it. Not in some distant future. In the next 10 to 20 years, that's what 1,000 public statements have said. It's what 10,000 peer-reviewed papers have said. It's coming. It is what it is. At some point, you'll be stepping over body parts on the way to work, going "well, you know."
What do you think David Attenborough means when he said "we face the end of civilization"? A picnic? What do you think 1 billion refugees at 2 degrees Celsius, 20 times the number at the end of World War II, looks like? Really?
Conservatives are the bad guys and liberals are the bad guys who pretend to be good guys, and the latter are the worse, which is why historically they are held in more contempt. They knew but they did nothing. As Martin Luther King said in a letter from a Birmingham jail, it's the moderates that repress, distract, sabotage the resistance to injustice. They are the main problem. Of course, the Carbon State and its functionaries are going to put people in prison for years if they come up with a resistance plan proportionate to the level of criminality we objectively face. If they are willing to have a few hundred million black people starve to death, then why be surprised that they pervert the course of justice?
This trial was not about "the right to protest." It is not about "a cause," "an issue." It's civil resistance against the biggest death project in human history, the greatest ever act of criminality. This trial was an experiment with the truth, as Gandhi called it. We were not trying to win, we were trying to tell the truth as if the truth was real, as if this slaughter, starvation, and rape is real. It was integrity, not expediency. So obviously, we spoke that truth. Obviously, we got interrupted. Obviously, we continue to speak even when the judges shouted at us to stop, had us dragged from the dock, banged up in jail. This is what evil looks like. It's what it does. And it's just the beginning.
Integrity at the present time is resistance, nothing more, nothing less. It's the opposite logic to expediency. Expediency is trying to have your cake and eat it. To maintain your privilege and status while appearing to do good. Expediency is to write an article about the trial but not glue your hands to your editor's desk. Expediency is to call for justice but not to challenge to judge because it will do in your career. Expediency is to lead a march but not have anyone sit down and be arrested. Expediency is doing everything that looks good but does no good. Expediency is betrayal. Betrayal of your family, your country, this world, but also of yourself—that temporary spark of consciousness in the void of eternity. Consciousness is truth, beauty, love. When you're on your deathbed, you will not be thinking about your career, the stuff you had; you'll be thinking about whether you became what you know yourself to be, a soul.
Integrity is a hard path. Your ego has to burn in a fire that destroys its desire to control. Integrity is humiliation, failure, being forgotten. As the greatest soul of the 20th century, Simone Weil, said: when you have an important decision to make, choose the most costly option. We might add, "in the 2020s," because if you don't, the cost will be far greater. In a week or two, all this trial business will be old news. All that will be left for us is the dual brutality of a British prison. Today I had boiled rice with fried rice. Yesterday, boiled rice with pasta. A few days ago, a note came through that cell door: two paragraphs, a guy down the row had killed himself. The new inmates bang on their iron doors all night, yelling, caged and enraged.
As this article wrote itself in my head, I cried. Not tears of self-pity, not of anger, but of determination. I know who I am. I know what I am doing, and that's why I'm Britain's most influential climate campaigner, as they like to call me. Take note: in the end times, integrity trumps expediency. I'm smiling. Are you?
We're appealing to the new Attorney General to stop this madness. Over 1000+ public figures, including singer Chris Martin (Coldplay), top human rights lawyer Sir Geoffrey Bindman KC and the UK's former chief scientist, Sir David King have signed an open letter against the insane sentencing.
Sign the Petition - after all, you can't lock up the truth. Then come to the demonstration to free truthtellers at 2-4pm on August 3rd in Parliament Square. A coalition of groups will be coming together for our freedom.
If you'd like to send me a message of support, you can email a note through to me in prison by sending it to rogerremanded@gmail.com
As always, you can sign up for nonviolent civil resistance with Just Stop Oil in the UK or via the A22 Network internationally.
