Creative direct action ideas

[Moorlock]

Slobodan Milosevic found his control of Serbian government challenged by a group  of young, creative, theatrical protesters who go by the name Otpor. Take a look at their accomplishments  — they succeeded!

In Peru, The Civil Society Collective used street theater and provocative props in their protest against Fujimori's government. (And they won their battle, too).

http://www.nytimes.com/library/magazine/home/20001126mag-serbia.html
http://www.motherjones.com/news/feature/2000/09/otpor.html
http://archives.cnn.com/2000/WORLD/americas/11/19/fujimori.quit.02/index.html

Mug-shot images of President Alberto Fujimori and his disgraced spy chief stare from black trash bags piled up at anti-government demonstrations.

The bags — imprinted with pictures of a smiling Fujimori and a grim-faced Vladimiro Montesinos dressed in cartoon-like prison stripes — are fast becoming a collector's item. The images are framed in block letters, declaring: "Put the garbage in the garbage."

This is how some Peruvians are telling their authoritarian leader to go: by putting on daily street stunts in the plazas of a dozen Peruvian cities.

Another object of the street theater is the weekly ritual, now in its fourth month, of scrubbing red-and-white Peruvian flags in soapy washtubs outside the Government Palace in a symbolic cleansing of Peru's "dirty laundry."

Other performances include caged demonstrators wearing Fujimori and Montesinos masks at marches; wrapping the Government Palace gate with yellow construction site tape, embossed with the words "Danger! Mafia at work"; and women with spray cans squirting foam or red paint at riot police in a symbolic fumigation of the palace.

http://sniggle.net/peru.php

[Moorlock]

The Report from Iron Mountain was dreamed up by a pack of leftists during the Cold War as a satire of machiavellian governmental manipulation. It takes the form of a thinktank-analysis of the effect peace would have on the health of the state, and comes down firmly in favor of continual war as good for the country. The report simulated so accurately the voice of authority that anti-government militia types are fond of pointing to it  today as evidence of a government conspiracy.

http://web.archive.org/web/20040223173933/http://www.parascope.com/articles/1296/iron.htm
http://web.archive.org/web/20010406011637/http://www.williamcooper.com/nmmil.htm

[Moorlock]

A group of hawks calling themselves ProtestWarrior  took it on themselves to parody the simplistic slogans and reasoning of some of those who protested the overhyped sequel to Operation Desert Storm. They attended a peace rally, holding signs with slogans like "Saddam Only Kills His Own People — It's None of Our Business!"

http://web.archive.org/web/20060228210344/http://www.protestwarrior.com/

[Moorlock]

A (wisely) anonymous broadside advocates using simulated assassination  to accomplish all of the aims of political assassination without actually killing anyone.

This tactic was put into practice at least once — in May, 2004, spectators at the British House of Commons threw bags of purple-dyed flour at Prime Minister Tony Blair. "The attack would have been 'incredibly serious' if the dyed flour had been anthrax or ricin," reported the BBC.

http://web.archive.org/web/20010418132051/members.aye.net/~abrupt/house/simass.html
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/politics/3728617.stm#uhoh

[Moorlock]

Buffo reports: "In 1960 a series of demonstrations were held in Japan against the renewal of the Japanese-U.S. security treaty. President Eisenhower was to make a state visit to promote the pact. However, on the night of the 19th June, 300,000  Sohyo (trade union) members and 40,000 militants of the Zengakuren  converged on the Diet (parliament) building in a 'snake-dance.' Then they held a mass urination on the main steps of the building. The Japanese government was obliged to ask Eisenhower to cancel his visit."

And the Drudge Report brings us the news of a mass-mooning by a thousand protesters outside U.S. President George W. Bush's hotel room at Gothenburg, Sweeden.

The act of mass-mooning politicians goes back at least as far 1844 Tasmania, and may have been the origin of the term "Flash Mob"!

In 1967 a group of Chinese soldiers got in the habit of starting their mornings with a mass-mooning of Soviet troops across the border. Their Soviet comrades responded by holding up portraits of Chairman Mao when the mooning began!

And, of course, in protest publicity as in advertising, nudity sells. Protesting via disrobing is catching on from Nigeria to Antarctica.

http://web.archive.org/web/20010814093644/http://www.drudgereport.com/link7.htm
http://www.boingboing.net/2006/07/09/use_of_term_flash_mo.html
http://chiapas.indymedia.org/display.php3?article_id=303
http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2003/02/18/ED89714.DTL

[Moorlock]

Environmentally-minded pranksters in Kingston, Ontario — upset that the government was clearcutting old-growth forests in Temagami — decided that public opinion might be influenced if the trees were being cut down in town where the voters lived. So they created a phony memo from the Ontario Ministry of Natural Resources explaining that in order to avoid "an exorbitant municipal tax," the government would "capitalize on the current high market values of oak and maple lumber" by hacking down "5,000 trees in city parks and along city streets." Naturally, the long-overdue outrage was provoked.

Another way they have of harassing the natives up in The Maple Leaf State is to test military aircraft in low-altitude bombing runs on their land. Again, the Kingston pranksters bring it home, posting official notices alleging that the overflights and bombings will be happening where the white people live!

A similar prank from the Kingston crew was a notice calling for immediate military draft registration that was posted at a war-happy college campus back when the U.S. and its allies were fighting to keep Kuwait safe for monarchy. The Call to Register was designed to sober up some of the rambo-talking (but draft-eligible) men on campus.

http://sniggle.net/tem.php
http://sniggle.net/flyover.php
http://sniggle.net/draft.php

[Moorlock]

People opposed to the military draft by the United States government during the Vietnam War invented a form of protest they called the "comply-in." According to one activist, "The law... requires registrants to inform the draft boards within ten days of any change in address or status. This means changes in religion, mental attitude and everything else. We want everyone to take this law so seriously that they inform their board of every single change..."

[Moorlock]

Famous in U.S. revolutionary history is The Boston Tea Party  of 1773, in which an American rebel group calling themselves "The Sons of Liberty" dressed up in disguise/costume and dumped imported British tea into Boston harbor as a protest  against British control of the American economy. There's a first-hand report  of the party on-line:

http://www.historyplace.com/unitedstates/revolution/teaparty.htm

Another bit of colonial performance art worth mention was the elaborate funeral held commemorating the death of Freedom on 1 November 1765, when the British began enforcing the Stamp Act. Upon reaching the graveyard, Liberty was seen to suddenly resurrect, and the rest of the day was spent celebrating the miracle.

New Hampshire patriots (take a bow, y'all) pulled a similar stunt in 2006 — holding a solemn funeral for the U.S. Constitution.

Palestinians from Bilin also took inspiration from the Spirit of '76. They protested Israel's occupation with a number of creative strategies, including holding mock funerals for Justice, Fairness, Humanity, and Courtesy.

http://www.pbs.org/ktca/liberty/popup_teaparty.html
http://odur.let.rug.nl/~usa/E/teaparty/bostonxx.htm
http://www.newhampshireunderground.com/wiki/tiki-browse_gallery.php?galleryId=65
http://direland.typepad.com/direland/2005/07/the_palestinian.html

[Moorlock]

When California politicians rolled over to industry and refused to enact a consumer privacy law, privacy advocates proved their point by purchasing on-line the Social Security numbers of the members of the California Assembly's Banking Committee  and posting the first four digits from each number on-line  to demonstrate how easy it was.

http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2003/06/19/MN127207.DTL
http://web.archive.org/web/20040214155117/http://consumerwatchdog.org/corporate/pr/pr003416.php3

[Moorlock]

From the bureau of amateur chemical-warfare comes a report of a woman who responded to the mayor's call for a "zero-tolerance" drug policy for Elkhart, Indiana city employees by dropping off a tray of pot brownies at the Central Fire Station last Christmas.

[Moorlock]

Sven Woodside reminds us that "every joke is a tiny revolution" in his Master's Thesis of the same name which covers the role of humor in culture jamming, subvertising and billboard liberation.

Saint Mary's College of California even offers a class in Pranks: Culture jamming as social activism.

American labor activist Elizabeth Gurley Flynn made a fine case for sabotage  in the workplace as a tactic for organized or disorganized labor. "The strike is the open battle of the class struggle, sabotage is the guerrilla warfare..."

Other creative activists might get inspiration from Ozymandias' Sabotage Handbook or the Encyclopedia of Direct Action or The CIA Sabotage Manual.

The Surveillance Camera Players  have published a guide to the Guerilla Programming of Video Surveillance Equipment. "The basic concept of guerilla programming is simple: a group of individuals create a scenario and act it out using surveillance cameras as if they were their own, as if they were producing their own program, and as if the audience consisted of security personnel, police, school principals, residents of upper-class high security neighborhoods, and the producers and salespeople of the security systems themselves."

George Hayduke's classic manual of revenge, Getting Even: The Complete Book of Dirty Tricks, is now available free-of-charge on-line.

The U.S. government has done its own research into subversion of this kind, and has published its findings in such frightening tomes as Psychological Operations in Guerrilla Warfare.

This is matched by Carlos Marighella, a Brazilian revolutionary who created The Minimanual of the Urban Guerrilla.

Jihad Jerry says: "Pranks should never be thought of as menial, or light, or pejorative, even.... Because pranks are confrontational; pranks are creative; pranks are in that realm of transgressive art; a creative response to ludicrous situations that people find themselves in, in society, faced with illegitimate authority, illogical explanations, and mind-sets that are very, very unhealthy. A good prankster, basically through a creative act, breaks through all of that, and questions that and makes other people participate in that questioning."

The Yippies, American snigglers from the late 1960s and early 70s, were pioneers of modern guerilla theatre — and Abbie Hoffman's textbook of underground living and warfare, Steal This Book  is a classic textbook.

Prankster first class Joey Skaggs  was kind enough to include a manifesto  on his site: "[P]ranks camouflage the sting of deeper, more critical denotations, such as their direct challenge to all verbal and behavioral routines, and their undermining of the sovereign authority of words, language, visual images, and social conventions in general... Pranks are the deadly enemy of reality. And 'reality' — its description and limitation — has always been the supreme control trick used by a society to subdue the lust for freedom latent in its citizens."

Ben Shepard tackles the absurdist and paradoxical street theater that erupted during the reign of the U.S.A.'s George II at the beginning of this century. In his essay Absurd Responses vs. Earnest Politics: Global Justice vs. Anti-War Movements; Guerrilla Theater and Aesthetic Solutions, Shepard says "[t]he aim of an absurd response would be to create a brand of protest which merged the joyous ecstatic spirit of exhilarating entertainment with a political agenda aimed toward progressive political change. Within this festive revolutionary theater, progressive elements of political change would be linked with notions of social renewal. Moving spectators to join the fun, to become part of the concrete action of social change."

Links to these and more, at: http://sniggle.net/theory.php

[Moorlock]

Most cyberterrorist stories are ignorant scaremongering, but Jim Bell invented an interesting theoretical protocol by which a widely distributed group of people could conspire, more-or-less out in the open, to put out a contract on the life of the President of the United States or some other such figure, and get away with it.

Oh boy did They come down hard on him for that. Him and anyone else they could find. Maybe he's on to something?

http://web.archive.org/web/20000818021417/http://wired.com/news/print/0,1294,35620,00.html
http://www.politechbot.com/p-00387.html

[Moorlock]

The Los Angeles Cacophony Society infiltrated a G.I. Joe convention with a G.I. Joe War Atrocity Exhibit.

http://laughingsquid.com/los-angeles-cacophony-society-gi-joe-convention-prank/

[Moorlock]

 Counterfeiting, especially the emerging hobby of desktop counterfeiting, strikes right at the heart of Mammon, pissing on its ultimate sacrament.

"Counterfeiting was once the domain of skilled crooks who needed expensive engraving and printing equipment," writes desktop publisher Doug McClellan, "But as the prices of desktop-publishing systems have dropped, counterfeiting has gone mainstream. Personal computers with the graphics needed for counterfeiting are now available for a few hundred dollars.... [D]esktop counterfeiters are much harder to catch because the systems they use are ubiquitous and the number of forgeries they produce are typically small."

"Because U.S. currency is universally accepted and trusted," writes a representative of the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta, "it is widely counterfeited." U.S. Secret Service spokesman Carl Meyer acknowledges that the prestige of the greenback is only part of the problem: "U.S. currency is not only the most desirable currency in the world. It is also the most easily counterfeited."

"Intelligence analysts," according to a paper from the Henry L. Stimson Center, "traced much of the increase to a group of highly-skilled counterfeiters backed by Iran and Syria, who have produced as much as $1 billion in superb reproductions of the old U.S. $100 bill." (As a point of comparison, the U.S. Bureau of Engraving and Printing makes about $9 billion in bank notes each year).

An unknown nation (variously described as Middle-Eastern or as North Korea depending on whom the United States wants to bomb this week) is allegedly sponsoring the mass printing of what worried officials call the Superdollar.

An end-of-the-century raid in the Philippines found a counterfeiter with more than $50 billion in U.S. currency and treasury notes. Another source claims that in 1989 fully 82% of the U.S. hundred-dollar bills circulating in Europe were counterfeits.

Meanwhile, counterfeiters in Colombia are suspected of manufacturing more than a third of the counterfeit notes seized in the U.S. in 1999.

The Treasury Department is proud of the newly designed bills, with their Optically Variable Ink and other high-tech anti-counterfeiting elements, but even these new bills are being faked. (Back to the drawing board, and back to the drawing board again.) "Some have been deceptive enough to get by a clerk in a grocery or retail store," said Secret Service Special Agent Arnette Heinze, "but in virtually every case they've been detected at the bank or through the Federal Reserve system."

Alas, since most of the economic transactions in the world involve neither a bank nor the Federal Reserve system, the economy remains quite vulnerable to the counterfeiter's art.

A company called Envisions used the new counterfeit-resistant U.S. bills to advertise their color scanner. Their ad featured a scanned image of the microprinting on the new $100 bill: "No other scanner can scan a hundred bucks and capture the hidden detail as well as ours." Bowing to pressure from an alarmed U.S. Secret Service, Envisions stopped using the ad.

"In 1995," according to one report of testimony before the House Banking Committee, "only one-half percent of counterfeit money was produced electronically. So far in 1998, that has jumped to 43 percent..." Committee chairman Michael Castle put it this way: "The classic movie cliché of the ink-stained master engraver painstakingly touching up his counterfeit printing plates has now given way to amateurs, often suburban teen-aged computer hackers, or drug-dealing urban street gangs."

http://sniggle.net/counterfeit.php

[Moorlock]

When Canadian potheads learned that drug-sniffing dogs would be prowling about on Vancouver ferries, they took action. They created an alcohol solution of the essence of marijuana, and during events they called "spray days"  sprayed the solution all over the ferry boats to confuse the dogs.

In Elm Grove, Wisconsin, teenagers who felt unfairly targeted by cops on the prowl for underage drinkers set up a sting of their own. They had a party at which they gathered to drink root beer. When the cops came and raided the party, the teenagers sued — saying that the police had violated their rights when they stormed the property without either a warrant or reasonable suspicion that a crime was being committed. A federal judge agreed!

George Washington University students suspected that the police were monitoring their social networking websites to determine where and when their parties would be held, so that they could raid them on the pretext of enforcing laws against under-age drinking. They then announced a beer-"themed" party but were careful to have no actual alcohol on-site — "The look on the faces of the cops was priceless."

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/RTGAMArticleHTMLTemplate?tf=tgam/realtime/fullstory_print.html&cf=tgam/realtime/config-neutral&articleDate=20020808&slug=wpott808&date=20020808&archive=RTGAM&site=Front
http://www2.jsonline.com/news/wauk/nov01/hoax08110701a.asp
http://www.boingboing.net/2006/01/09/facebook_prank_on_po.html