⌛Is There A Time Limit Or Not? A Letter To Celebrities
Nothing will change without you making ultimatums. Celebrities need to engage in civil disobedience to spark a revolution.
A lobster in a pot,
Dreaming a while
Under the summer moon
- Basho
Note: This article was transcribed from a prison phoneline. You can listen to the audio version here.
First things first, thank you so much for speaking outside the court last week and for publicising the appalling mockery of the trial. And thanks to all the others who have spoken up as well. But please remember, this situation is not about us, the #WholeTruthFive. The British legal system is institutionally unjust. Young people are kept on remand for two years or more, and many others have no voice in our brutal prison system.
I am writing this open letter to remind you, and those reading, that we are living through the most fucked up moment in human history. It is so easy for us all to follow the well-worn script: protesters fight for justice, get banged up, liberal notables come to the rescue, the fight continues, and then the good guys win. The anti-slavery campaigns, women's vote, trade union and civil rights, and all the rest of it—all good stuff. But to think that this is where we are at in 2024 is to be as willfully deluded as our friend Judge Hehir, for two reasons.
First, the situation is beyond massive; it's global and murderous. The injustice is incalculable: a third of Pakistan underwater, 50 degrees plus in India, millions of refugees streaming out of the Sahel and Central America. The obscenity of destroying our children's lives—it goes on and on and on.
Secondly, and most critically, there is a time limit, is there not? Or are we still pretending? We are on a cliff edge. This movement was founded shortly after the IPCC report in 2018, saying we have a decade left to half emissions. We will go over 2°C in the 2030s: one billion refugees. We have two years left (“to save the world”), according to the UN, as outlined a few weeks ago. I could give you another hundred data points: methane, glaciers, forest fires, ice, ozone, acidification. We are in a total fucking emergency. As the civil resistance movements have been pointing out since 2018, if this does not stop, our kids will starve. These islands will become uninhabitable. What was that about the AMOC collapse? Minus 10 to 30 degrees temperatures in UK winters—and then it goes on forever.
The last of our worries is getting banged up for a year or two. Please understand your responsibilities. Causes have demands; emergencies have ultimatums. Nothing will change without you making ultimatums. Clive [Lewis] needs to say to the Labour Party, "Cancel the Tory licences, or he will resign." Jenny [Jones] needs to glue herself to the House of Lords benches. Chris [Packham] needs to lead the marchers to sit down and keep doing it until he's put in prison. All of you need to engage in civil disobedience to force the national media to have a two-hour documentary on the starvation of our children.
I am tired of the lazy excuses on all of this. Look at XR, Insulate Britain, Just Stop Oil, and now this trial. There is no time for anything else. The liberal classes have to resist; otherwise, we will have fascism. In the 2030s, the next generation will go, "You did what? A march, a speech? A petition? What the fuck?"
But most of all, this is what I have to say: our civilization is built on the delusion of control, the utilitarian privilege of being able to ask, "Will it work?" You're not put in this world to stand by, to hedge, to prevaricate. We are put here to do the right thing in the face of evil. That is why we got dragged out of court for acting upon this truth. Now the baton is being passed to you. For the sake of the next 10,000 generations, don't drop it.
Thank you to everyone who joined our demonstration on Parliament Square to free imprisoned truthtellers. 60,000 have now signed a Petition to the new Attorney General to stop this madness. Please sign and share it.
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.
