Disguising, Mythologising & Protest

I was a little disconcerted on my first couple of visits to OccupyLSX by the number of people walking around with their faces entirely covered.  There is a healthy contingent of Anonymous UK occupiers who wear the iconic Guy Fawkes mask from the V for Vendetta film but they can all be seen unmasked at various times- how else are they supposed to have a drink and a smoke? There is also Anon, who is a mainstay of the camp, often greeting visitors in the Info tent. To my knowledge Anon’s face is always covered by his headscarf and his signature ski goggles.

I did, as most people do when they meet anyone, judge Anon by his appearance on first impression. I wondered why he dressed as he did. I have often in the past made similar judgements about Muslim women who fully cover their faces with the burqa or leave only their eyes showing with the niqab. I feel quite strongly that seeing another person’s eyes and face is quite fundamental to being able to relate to them and make a connection. Once I spoke to Anon, and heard him speak at meetings, it was clear that he was full of personality, ideas and sharp one-liners, and other considerations began to matter less.

The ubiquity of masks and disguises at Occupy protests worldwide has made me think about the wider importance of the mythical and the disguise in protest movements historically.  When we wear a disguise, even if it’s just make-up or some of the clothes we choose to wear, it’s usually both to hide or alter a part of our own identity as well as sending a message out to others. The same is probably true in the context of protest.

For example, at the Boston Tea Party in 1773 when a group of colonial Americans boarded a British ship in the middle of the night and threw tonnes of its valuable tea into the Boston Harbour in protest at a new tax imposed from London, these men dressed as Mohawk Native Americans. Their choice of dress has gone down in American History. The latest interpretations as to why they chose to dress this way are, on the one hand, to conceal their identities to guard them from the draconian punishments sure to be meted out on them were the British authorities to catch up with them.  And on the other hand, to send out a more symbolic message, namely, “we are American now,” like the American Indian (a bitter irony for the indigenous American community) and like Britain no longer.

There are a couple of fascinating tales of subversive disguise and mythmaking in the 19^th century.  In the late 1820s and early 1830s in southwest France, in the forest region near the Pyrenees, there was a bizarre confrontation brewing between the remote peasant villages of the forests and the modernising central authorities wanting to systematize what was to the locals, sacred land. Bands of local men, who became known as the Demoiselles, dressed up in full drag and formed into small guerrilla units attacking any forest rangers or royal authorities who encroached onto their land.  It is still something of a mystery as to why these men turned to transvestism in their hour of need but there are suggestions that the use of such disguise drew heavily on both folkloric traditions and the hedonistic celebrations of the carnival. Nevertheless, there’s no doubting that it emboldened them in their fight as they held off a much larger enemy for far longer than anyone expected.

A working class movement in Britain called the Luddites took a slightly different approach to the steady march of capitalism. A phenomenon of the towns and cities of a rapidly industrialising early 19^th century Britain Luddism, in simple terms, involved thousands of working men destroying and sabotaging the newly invented machines that were putting them out of a job. Much the same as the Demoiselle of the Arieges, the Luddites were left in fear for their way of life and they fought back in what we can see in hindsight were both losing battles.

Where the Luddites interest me is their name. Named after Ned Ludd, a man who may or may not have existed but was rumoured to have angrily destroyed a machine a generation earlier, the name took on a mythical significance. Ned Ludd became General Ludd or King Ludd, the personification of the cause, a heroic leader who was said to live in Sherwood Forest, that old stomping ground of another mythical talisman, Robin Hood. It’s like that famous line in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance: “When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.” Essentially it didn’t matter who Ned Ludd was or Robin Hood or William Wallace or even Jesus, it’s what and who they come to represent. At its height the Luddite Rebellion was engaging more of the British Army than the concurrent War with Napoleon in the Iberian Peninsula. But as dozens of the leaders were captured and either executed or sent to penal exile in Australia, the movement died out.

Enter the rural reprise of the movement and a new mythical embodiment of anti-capitalist rebellion.  As new threshing machines looked like spelling the end for many agricultural workers they took a leaf out of the Luddites’ book and began to destroy the new machinery. The Swing Riots of the 1830s, as the widespread agricultural uprising became known, was named after the invented figure of Captain Swing. Adopted as the figurehead of the rebellion, the impressively named Captain Swing’s signature appeared at the bottom of hundreds of letters and pamphlets through the South, East and South-East of England threatening that if they failed to stop the haemorrhaging of rural manual labour then Swing and his followers would continue to take matters into their own hands.

And this is where we can return to Anonymous because I see a striking resemblance between the way that anyone could sign the name Captain Swing and their message would take on the might of a wave. And now, anyone can post a comment or hack under the name of Anonymous, or set up a camp or Tweet under the name of Occupy, or on the flipside commit violence under the banner of Al Qaeda, Al Shabab, etc. What we’re talking about here are cells, loosely affiliated networks with no central command or control but thousands of low level interactions every hour of every day, online and in real life, linked only by a vague set of principles and techniques.  This is a paradigm the lumbering hierarchies of the last century struggle to keep pace with in the same way that the US army has struggled with guerrilla warfare (or “insurgencies”) ever since Vietnam.

For me, the masks of Anonymous say more about the culture that neoliberalism creates than they do about the people who wear them. The mask means more than just anonymity, it is strength in numbers. In one of their calling card phrases Anonymous say: “We are Anonymous, We are legion.” It answers a human need to sometimes be one of many, not just a ‘self.’ In anonymity, people can hope to escape the exhausting egoism of our age, the atomising force of late capitalism where the pressure is all on the self and particularly the self-image. Retreating into the crowd can feel like a relief.

But within the theme of disguise there also exists a paranoia and suspicion not just within the Occupy camps but within all direct action movements at the moment. I have been accused of being both undercover police and also an Evening Standard reporter! (I don’t know which is worse?) But this paranoia is hardly misplaced because we all know very well that they are out to get us, even in harmless environmentalist groups like the one PC Mark Kennedy disgustingly infiltrated. The establishment are usually guilty of the most deceitful disguise and right now they’re more rattled and paranoid than ever. For this Government, and the New Labour one before it, ‘protesters’ are an enemy but as the current system increasingly stumbles around like a dazed prizefighter ready to drop they are throwing punches more haphazardly than ever. How else can you explain the City of London Police listing Occupy London as a domestic terror threat on the same page as Al Qaeda and the FARC? Protesters are already an ‘other,’ painted as something to be disdained or mocked, but with a sick and paranoid establishment anyone with a different ideology now becomes a threat to be kettled, intimidated and beaten into submission. The malign intent of the elite and the police can no longer be disguised, because the swarm is too adaptable and the networks of information too fast that today’s activists and “networked individuals” are always one step ahead. We are not all Anonymous but We are Legion.

By Michael Richmond (@Sisyphusa)