Biting off more than you can chew...
Kim DuToit ran into a story about some
Greenpeace protesters who were surprised at the reaction they got.
bq. You have to have a heart of stone not to chortle when you read
this report:
Greenpeace had hoped to paralyse oil trading at the exchange in the City near Tower Bridge on the day that the Kyoto Protocol came into force. “The Kyoto Protocol has modest aims to improve the climate and we need huge aims,” a spokesman said.
Protesters conceded that mounting the operation after lunch may not have been the best plan. “The violence was instant,” Jon Beresford, 39, an electrical engineer from Nottingham, said.
“They grabbed us and started kicking and punching. Then when we were on the floor they tried to push huge filing cabinets on top of us to crush us.” When a trader left the building shortly before 2pm, using a security swipe card, a protester dropped some coins on the floor and, as he bent down to pick them up, put his boot in the door to keep it open.
Another item from the story -- this one really points out where Greenpeace is coming from:
“We bit off more than we could chew. They were just Cockney barrow boy spivs. Total thugs,” one protester said, rubbing his bruised skull. “I’ve never seen anyone less amenable to listening to our point of view.”
Emphasis mine -- they were not there to have a discussion, they were there to disrupt the traders and the traders did not like it. The traders were probably polite at first but when the Greenpeace people started in with the noisemakers, the traders decided to have an "action" of their own.
When I first moved to Seattle I was involved with Greenpeace for a few years -- quit after I saw them drifting further and further away from any semblance of science. Their co-founder -- Patrick Moore -- left the group for the same reason.
I wrote about him
here and
here.
Posted by DaveH at February 17, 2005 6:12 PM