PsyOps in the Civic Centre Carpark

Leona Pippin reminded Norris of something on the day of the demo outside the Mosque. She stood on the back of a small flatbed truck that had been rigged up with a portable PA system to make a movable stage for speakers at the demo. She had a voice that was high pitched and clear. It carried and Norris could distinctly hear every word that she shouted into the microphone, but she was not shrill. She was fired up but she was not excited.

She just went on and on and on. She was unrelenting.

“The EDL are not welcome here. We are all assembled here because we don’t want the EDL in this borough. This is a multi-faith, multi-ethnic community. People of all religions and none live here and we all get on together. We don’t need the EDL coming here to start trouble. Go away EDL, go and crawl back into your holes. We are all united to oppose you and we are not going away until you have left the borough forever……”

At the beginning of the demo a large picket, two or three hundred plus, had formed up on the roadside directly opposite the mosque. That was where the lefties were, they were mainly, but not entirely, white. Across the road, outside the Mosque people were assembled who by their dress seemed to be mostly Muslims; they were mostly, but not exclusively South Asian men. It was difficult to quantify which group had the most facial hair, probably on balance, the Muslims.

Speeches were made by political activists and priests from the back of the flatbed, but it was all to the converted. The only persons in the immediate locality who might not fit into that category were the police who were corralling the demo and the pedestrians and motorists who passed it by with apparent indifference.

Then some how the word spread, “The EDL are here”, “There in the car park over there, outside the civic centre”.

The whole demo turned and began to move about an eighth of a mile to the left, focussing on a place where behind multiple lines of police who you just make out the tops of the head of about fifteen or twenty people, the EDL apparently.

Most of the demo moved across the car park and the flatbed truck went with them and Leona Pippin’s diatribe commenced. Only after she had kept going for about an hour did, Norris recall Hereward the Wake by Charles Kingsley. In this fictionalised account of early medieval English history, a climatic battle between Normans and Saxon rebels takes place in the Fens near Ely that involved the Normans' use of an early form of what the Americans in Vietnam were to call “Psyops”. They erected a wooden tower with a platform on top from which a witch, hired for the purpose, hurled curses at the Saxons. Perhaps this was as much to boost the morale of the Normans as to spook the Saxons, after all a marsh is not the best place for heavily armoured cavalry to operate.

Whatever the historical case had been, Leona Pippin was now carrying out a similar function relation to an early twenty-first century struggle against English neo-fascism. However in doing so Norris thought that she fell into a trap called: “My enemy’s enemy is my friend.” At times she was creating a verbal picture of the suburb that she was speaking in, (which was not the neighbouring suburb where she actually lived), as some sort of multi-cultural heaven, where all sorts and kinds of people united together against the common neo-fascist enemy.

Norris doubted if he needed this romanticised account of a suburban shithole to impel his political action. Norris knew that the road he picketed against racists was also the road where men outside the Mosque were rumoured to spit at passers by who they deemed to be gay: they were probably not big on Feminism either.

The situation like Norris himself was a mass of contradictions. He decided that he was a multi-layered onion within a multi layered onion which rotated in an unknowable universe.