the six people you'll meet at a pro-palestine [student] encampment
For Amu, who encourages me to write so much that I can’t bear not to.
THE FANATIC
it’s strange to call someone a fanatic in these circles - we are all, to some degree, fanatics. you must be in order to give up so much of your time to endeavours that are frequently fruitless. you must be so sure of yourself, so absolutely convinced that you are right when everyone else is wrong, that you are willing to sleep in a thin sleeping bag in a shoddy tent in sleet and snow and storms and go for days on end without showering. the confidence in your own moral superiority overpowers the odious funk steaming from your armpits and your crotch and your comrades and keeps you going even as your sinuses become clogged with the stench of the uncomfortably intimate but inevitable proximity.
the Fanatic, however, has no such confidence. you’ll speak to them, and they’ll spew words like solidarity and revolution and classism and it will be an overload; they will go ON and ON and ON. you’ll discuss the weather and somehow they’ll sneak these buzzwords in and you’ll become overwhelmed as they tell you about oppression and division and poverty and racism and homophobia and transphobia and xenophobia and colourism and misogyny and elitism and you’ll realise that ALL YOU WANTED TO TALK ABOUT WAS THE WEATHER. it’s tiring; you know these things, that’s why you’re here. why are you being lectured with buzzwords?
you’ll one day realise that the buzzwords are all the Fanatic has. there’s understanding there, of course, but when the Fanatic uses these words it is to mask their insecurity that their moral superiority is not so overpowering. they feel small and stupid, so they use the buzzwords that others have devised so they do not have to devise their own. they become empty in their overuse, and accusations of hatred that were once bone-shatteringly shocking are now tiresome and far too frequent to justify the generous employment of these buzzwords. nobody’s perfect, you’ll think, and many of these accusations come from a zealot who believes that less-than-perfection is synonymous with critical failure, who practices mental self-flagellation with all the enthusiasm of a devout catholic in pursuit of spiritual absolution. the Fanatic will make you feel like a right-wing cunt as you become tired of hearing these buzzwords, so much so that they become meaningless.
you’ll try to humour the Fanatic and dive into the world of -isms with them, until you realise that there is nothing beneath the surface, and the buzzwords are just buzzwords employed by someone who uses them to hide their own insecurity. they become a Fanatic to avoid confronting their own failures; they don’t have any answers any more than anyone else, but perhaps in the long twisty words that do admittedly roll off the tongue so nicely and sound so intellectual, they can find some first step to some solution. and then you’ll realise you haven’t showered in a while and that, to most people, you are the stinking buzzword fanatic.
THE RICH
the snake in the long grass is the Rich obscured by their moral superiority. you won’t notice it at first; you’ll think that the rich are the enemy and are the ones harassing you and leaving hate comments and reporting you to the police. but as time goes on, under the hustle and bustle of the camp, under the whispered late-night conversations of escalation and occupation, you’ll hear the slithering and hissing in the grass. someone will offhandedly hiss about their ski trip - another, their unimaginably gluttonous parental allowance. perhaps you’ll wonder how they manage to avoid developing the stink that follows the showerless and instead maintain a cloud of pungent perfume that announces their arrival well before you can spot them.
you’ll realise that they have the money and the time to maintain the veneer of polite civilisation that yourself and your comrades had supposedly abandoned weeks ago. they’ll slither up every day in clean clothes with a bright smile on their faces, and as you come to the sinking realisation that you are among the Rich you will feel your soul be filled with utter contempt and hatred. you’ll take the Fanatic with their empty words over the demonstrably false complaints of poverty that for some reason the Rich never fail to espouse any day. what do they know of hardship? of discomfort? of suffering?
you’ll realise, of course, that this camp is merely a little holiday away from a holiday for them. they’ll slither to a sunny spot and sit primly typing away at their theses and sipping their cappuccinos on the lawn with the same air as a beachgoer sipping a martini and flipping through vain and vapid vogueing magazines.
you’ll feel sick to your stomach as you see them slithering to the food tent to unhinge their jaws and devour the meals that those far less privileged than they ever will be have donated to you. you’ll think it’s wrong that they have still managed to maintain the servility of the local population and that they still leech off the labour of others in such a so-called liberated space. you thought this space was holy, away from the divisions of the university and the city and the world, but the presence of the Rich will reveal to you that the locals and the working people are still under the heel of their shiny far-too-expensive boot and that you have to break bread with people who simply expect this to be the correct order of the world. you will hate them, and you will hate yourself for allowing them to become your comrades unchallenged. their hissing and slithering becomes insufferable, and you will lie awake at night listening to the rattles of received pronunciation ring through the air and wonder how you managed to become so intertwined with this bed of snakes.
but when was the last time you had to work for survival? don’t you eat up all that irresistible food brought to camp? don’t you have an essay deadline coming up?
THE MODERATE
you’d love to believe that this person is merely a derivative of the Rich, but unfortunately the ills of moderation seem able to infect anyone, regardless of class. at first, it’s nice to have the voice of reason in every planning meeting - as they question every single action, your comrades’ inevitably annoyed defences help you understand why one would choose to undertake such risky maneuvers. but as you go on, partaking in and eventually planning risky maneuvers of your own, that same voice becomes a blockade to the strategic greatness you know you can achieve.
it’s frustrating - why should you have to convince every single person of every single action you want to take? shouldn’t it be obvious at this point - that action, regardless of risk, is what creates change? you thought people outgrew moderation, and yet here you are months later, trying to convince the same person to believe in the same basic organising principles that you thought everyone knew at this point. risk is part of the job, and pissing people off is how you get them to change their behaviour - if not their minds. the Moderate seems to think it works the other way around, though, and that if you’re nice enough, cooperative enough, polite enough, then the powers that be will have a change of heart so severe that they will empty their coffers of all that blood money and disavow all their polite, rich, and genocide-loving friends.
it must be nice to live in a world that works like that. a world where evil and willful blindness can be stamped out by a mere well-constructed argument and a few not-too-noisy demos. you’ll try hard not to scream and shout and stamp your feet, and you’ll realise why those defences from an age ago were so annoyed. your friends and comrades all agree that the Moderate is one of the worst people to deal with - they believe in the principles you believe in, but never seem to want to put them into practice themselves, or even anywhere near them. discussions with them are the black hole where action goes to die, your exciting proposals and endless justifications sucked into that gloomy pit with only smiling platitudes and fancy pastries in return.
you’ll begin to avoid them, cutting them out completely. you can’t have the same conversation over and over and over again - you have work to do. so you’ll ignore the Moderate, hoping that you see them less and less. you don’t pour energy into your defences any more - you simply smile and nod and go ahead as planned without them, hoping that your blatant condescension will wean them off their seemingly relentless desire to give input. soon, you’re in a world where risk is an everyday reality for everyone you know and you relish not having to justify anything to outside forces calling for patience, safety, and reason. you make plans. you execute them. you revel in the outcome. you repeat. it’s clean and simple and everything you think organising should be.
and then, of course, you’ll run into a stranger at a protest or get into a twitter argument or talk to your mum and you’ll re-realise that the principles that you allowed yourself to think were so universally believed are actually… not. how could you forget that? how could you forget that for most people in your little world, risk of this kind is not an everyday reality? people still think that voting is how change happens? perhaps it’s not just the Moderate you find yourself far removed from.
THE REVOLUTIONARY
this is one of the coolest people alive. they’ll tell you stories upon stories of their protests and arrests and occupations as you sit guarding over your sleeping camp in the dead of night. the Revolutionary is as angry and passionate as you are, but their self-assurance makes it all the more powerful. they’re calm, untethered from the world of work and degrees, instead attaching themselves to caring for every person around them. they are who you want to be when you grow up - you want to radiate cool collection like they do, you want to be as fearless as them, you want to see as much of the world as they have and do all the things they do.
and when you sit thinking about this you’ll realise that if there is real revolution, a real moment to seize power and control, then this should be the person in charge. someone who knows when to shut up and when to step forward. someone who cares for the big picture and the little details of our lives - a balancing act you’re not sure you’ll ever achieve. someone who has spent so much time helping others and trying to change the world but is still able to carve out a little corner of love and joy for themselves and for anyone they can find. the closest thing to a true Revolutionary you can find in your miserable imperial metropole.
you’ll try to ingratiate yourself in their life, as if some of their perpetual heroism will rub off on you. you’ll learn from them - with them - about how you might be able to follow in their footsteps. you’ll occupy buildings together or sit in long meetings together or sing and laugh together. you’ll listen to their protests that they’re a mess, just like you, and that they’re only trying their best, just like everyone else, but you won’t believe it. it seems superhuman at first, but as you see them in anger and frustration and depression you’ll realise that perhaps their protests have a grain of truth, and that they are just one person trying to take on so, so much. for some reason, that makes it all the more impressive - to know that this person feels your same depths of despair and insecurity and fear but keeps fighting on. keeps resisting. keeps bouncing back again and again and again. you can only hope that you’ll be that tough one day.
and eventually, months and years down the line, you’ll be telling a naive newcomer protest stories of your own, or you’ll bring them along to your meeting, or you’ll catch their eye at a demo - and you’ll see a very familiar feeling in their expression.
THE FREAK
you try not to judge people who turn up to camp. everyone is from different walks of life, from different backgrounds, with different ideologies - but you cannot for the life of you understand why the Freak is here. you know that they’re as morally motivated as everyone else, but why is this how they choose to express it? they have nothing to do with your sprawling university and your little studious bubble. you have to explain all the strange student slang that you hadn’t realised wasn’t so universal, you have to explain how each department works, you have to explain who the vice-chancellor is and who all their crabby footsoldiers are. they’ve never had to google how to use word’s bibliography function, they’ve never had to phone up student finance and beg them for information on missing payments, and they’ve never had to sit and stare at texts written by slaveowners and wife-beaters about man’s inherent freedom only to churn out essays for tutors who are unable to see the inherent hypocrisy in their perfect prose. it’s not their education and livelihood being used to fund a genocide and line the coffers of those who know that one man’s misery is another’s financial opportunity.
they’re nice and polite enough, sure - but every time they ask to borrow your card to use the toilet you are reminded of the harsh truth that, really, they have nothing to do with this specific cause. in the depths of your suspicion, in the part of your mind that you know is trained to operate with capitalist suspicion in the dark of the night, when you consider age-old stories of infiltration and deception, you cannot help but wonder about their motives. why would someone sleep in a tent and give up all illusions of privacy in the name of changing an institution that has no impact on them?
you know you’re being judgemental and a little bit evil about this. you know you’re giving in to the divisions between student and non-student that your university desperately wants to sow. you would never say anything about this, of course, out of fear of being labelled a classist cunt, but sometimes you meet your fellow gowned fellows’ eyes and know that they too wonder about what happens in that nebulous and alien mind.
time goes on and the Freak remains. students return to whence they came upon the closing of the term, but the Freak remains. students back down in fear of disciplinary action, but the Freak remains. students suddenly remember the importance of their education - the same one they have spent the summer disavowing as entangled in genocidal oppression - and abandon camp while the Freak remains. the Freak has nothing to gain and nothing to lose. the Freak is a single-minded, permanent, and consistent pain in the ass of those who wish for nothing more than quiet, neat, and respectable students to simply sit and type away on their laptops.
perhaps it doesn’t matter why they’re here - it doesn’t matter whether or not your university affects them (you later realise that it almost certainly does in some way). the Freak, unbound by the rules of education and discipline that are the embarrassing vestiges of false colonial meritocracy, mind undented by the hammering of so-called ‘hard work’ for the sake of some gilded scrap of paper, can upset these great and powerful institutions simply by existing where they have no presumed permission to be. they are your greatest ally and your greatest friend, there to remind you that the student life is one of privilege rather than constant hardship as you had allowed yourself to believe. the Freak is, perhaps, who we should all aspire to be, and your attempts to decode their seemingly aimless motivations are just produced by your secret shame that you cannot untether yourself from the world of study on which your self-esteem rests.
THE WORST FUCKING PERSON ALIVE
you never actually met this person. they never turned up to anything.