So like everyone I thought that Just Stop Oil throwing the soup on the Van Gogh Sunflowers was a really bad idea, an insult to an important and beautiful piece of art, and the connection to the cause was confusing at best. But now I’m seeing people talking about JSO being funded by an oil heiress named Aileen Getty. The word psyop was flying around, something something false flag protest to make oil companies look better (??) so I had to get to the bottom of it. (I mean, I did a small amount of reading.)
If you google her name two results that explicitly mention her connection to JSO in the headline come up, Jerusalum Post and...Fox News. So of course I went with Jerusalum Post as the more credible option of the two. The article states that the rumour about the protest being fake somehow came from ‘a TikTok user by the name of Mars’, so that’s fun, and it explains who Aileen Getty is. She is indeed the heir to a vast oil fortune (Getty Oil, which no longer exists). JSO isn’t the only UK environmental movement she has put funds into. In fact it strikes me that you could spin this a different way, you could say that Aileen Getty perhaps feels that funding environmental groups is a way of undoing some of the damage her family had done to the planet. Like, I’m not saying that, I don’t know her, it’s just a way of telling things differently. It’s all in the way things are told.
You might say, well the group is very ineffective and the Van Gogh protest was such a bad idea and makes JSO look so bad that it has to be a psyop! I do not agree that it has to be, and will try and explain why. Basically these kinds of groups are set up to be leaderless, because they believe leadership creates positions that can be abused (true). There are founding members and funders etc, though if you asked a random person at a protest about funding and where it comes from they would probably say ‘I have no idea’ and ‘wait, what funding?’ and may not be able to name the founding members either. That’s because the core of these movements is the smaller groups, who come together regionally and nationally for actions and groups individually provide their own funding for, say, hall hire or flyer printing. (I assume the funding from people like Aileen Getty goes on national things like the network that keeps track of people who have been arrested, and makes sure they are supported.)
Within these leaderless groups, everyone is actively encouraged to plan and carry out their own actions, as long as they follow the group’s guidelines of what they support. (These tend to be extremely broad and open.) The thinking behind it is to empower individuals, and this is in a political climate where we’ve had the same party in power for 12 years and no individual seems to matter any more- I get why.
However if you’ve ever met A Person, you will know that empowering people to represent your group while basically doing whatever they want is likely to lead to a lot of really bad, misguided protest ideas. For example, I may or may not have been a moderator on a facebook group for the local chapter of [environmental movement] at around the time some guy put a protest banner on the cenotaph war memorial in London during the service on Rembrance Sunday. I can sort of figure out how he came up with this idea- we are in a very serious climate situation, and what is the most sacred thing to people that would therefore cause the most notice if I target it? A war memorial. He was also ex-army and it seemed from interviews that he felt drawn to do this for that reason, not that anyone on the right cared. The nationwide backlash was so severe that people were specifically searching up their nearest chapter of this group on facebook so they could send them long, abusive private messages, which I got to see because I was the moderator. It was clear that the general public thought his protest was awful and offensive, and I would guess that if this protestor had asked every activist in the country affiliated with this group if he should go ahead with his cenotaph protest, the answer would have been a resounding ‘no!’. But because of the ethos of this kind of group, he was tacitly encouraged to go ahead. He was not encouraged to think through the implications of a potentially controversial action on everyone else under the broader banner of this group.
With the Van Gogh thing I can kind of see how it happened as well. There had been criticism pre-pandemic of climate activism groups doing things like disrupting (electric) trains in poorer neighbourhoods of London. (Why? Same reasons as above, they didn’t think it through and there was no encouragement to run the action past any kind of vetting.) So recently environmental groups have been trying to focus more on where the power is: the financial sector of London etc. In this case I can imagine it was something similar: ‘who values fine art and valuable paintings? The rich!’ and no other thought was given. Of course Sunflowers is a much beloved, very beautiful painting and not at all the kind of painting only ultrawealthy art buyers would care about, so it was a very poor choice if that was the thinking. But I expect they went for it for the biggest emotional impact, and once again were not encouraged to think about the wider impact of their actions. Not only does everyone hate JSO even more now, people are making conspiratorial TikToks about it, the horror.
You might be wondering why on earth these groups don’t put more emphasis on thinking about the wider impact of their actions. The truth is, people hate basically every kind of civil disobedience. The amount of ridiculous things people will say about protestors who block a road is ridiculous. I remember during the BLM protests after Mike Brown was murdered, it didn’t matter how many times the protestors showed footage of them parting to let ambulances through, right wing pundits still insisted that by blocking the road they were stopping ambulances and literally killing people. I didn’t agree with the Insulate Britain protestors blocking the M25 (I felt the message was confused and it was making the public unmanagebly angry), but they were being blamed in the right wing press for literally killing a woman. She was very ill and on the way to hospital, but they were stopped by the protests and very sadly did not make it in time. But the Insulate Britain protestors were letting emergency vehicles through. The fact is, the woman was not in an ambulance, she was in her son’s car. Then you’d have to ask yourself, why wasn’t she in an ambulance? Well, because the NHS is so fucking underfunded and broken that ambulances may take far longer to arrive than is safe. People during the delay often drive the patient themselves instead in desperation to get to the hospital. So then that’s a whole other problem with this fucking country that we need to think about and solve, and the situation is now too complicated for a direct cause and affect. It could have been roadworks, an accident ahead, just traffic, that slowed the car down until it was too late. At any given time, any car on the road could be trying to get a desperately ill patient to hospital because the ambulance took too long. It’s too sad to contemplate.
Road blocking is one of the simplest types of civil disobedience, and can be for very short periods, but if you let yourself think ‘well what if?’ about any person in any car who now might be a bit latein a disasterous way, then you could literally make yourself a reason to not do anything to disrupt anything ever. Even the Jerusalem Post had a little snarky remark at the end of its article about how the JSO march would cause more CO2 to be emitted while people sat in traffic waiting for them to pass (even though turning off the engine while sitting still for long periods is becoming common driving knowledge at this point, but let’s not let that get in the way of a good snarky remark). It seems like the instinct to point out how stupid and counterproductive a protest is extends to even conventional types like marches, and I think some activists react to this by just supporting any kind of protest. I know people who would automatically stand behind the Van Gogh thing, not because they thought it was a good idea and they would have done it, but because they know from experience that people will find a reason to hate basically any kind of protest and will accuse you of ridiculously hyperbolic things while involved in one. I was once at an action when a friend who had been there several days was accosted by a member of the public. This woman really laid into her: didn’t she know that when a road was blocked by our group a couple of days ago, a little boy had died? And it was all her [my friend’s] fault? She had literally killed a child? It went on ages and when she left my friend broke down. It was fucking awful. (NB- even the right wing tabloids who love this kind of thing didn’t pick up any story about a little boy dying during these protests so I suspect it was completely made up.)
A lot of activists with this kind of group have gone with the idea that they will be hated whatever they do, so they shouldn’t overly consider what the public thinks. I do not share this view, and I long ago became disillusioned with the leaderless movement model, because if someone vaguely affiliated with a group you are also affiliated with does something shitty in the name of the group, no one wants to listen to how it wasn’t something you would have done or whatever- you basically did that thing too. And anyone with your group who speaks to the press or does anything unwise in public will be considered a spokesperson. The general public is not primed for the concept of leaderless movements. It’s like how anyone who performs anti-fascist actions can call themselves Antifa, but the right wing has imagined them into this super organised underground movement that is all connected. The alternative is to not affiliate yourself with any group at all, but that gives you vasltly less ability to join with others and organise, and joining with others is often why people get involved in activism in the first place. It’s tough and a bit of a mess honestly.
Tl;dr- the Van Gogh painting thing was probably just a bad idea someone had and I don’t know why people find this so baffling. People have bad ideas CONSTANTLY, especially about activism.
