Three cheers to the protester who showered the ECB’s Mario Draghi with glitter, the latest well-staged protest that taps into our appetite for iconoclasmThe face of protest is changing. In the years immediately after the 2008 financial crisis, mass rallies took over the streets of Athens and Madrid. Anger was aggressive. At some moments, it seemed societies might break down. But as that master of comedy Karl Marx pointed out, the philosopher Hegel missed a trick when he said history always repeats itself. Hegel forget to add, said Marx, that it tends to do so the first time as tragedy, the second as farce.There was a vivid farcical quality to Josephine Witt’s one-woman protest at the European Central Bank press conference this week. As the bank’s president, Mario Draghi, tried to speak about the endless process of nursing the EU economy and keeping Greece within it, she suddenly leapt on to his desk, showered him with gold glitter, and threw around flyers condemning the bank’s “undemocratic” policies. As the security men grabbed her she managed to show the cameras a T-shirt which had a slogan saying “End the ECB dick-tatorship”.A well-staged protest can similarly sell any politics you like, however crude Related: Protester disrupts European Central Bank press conference - as it happened Continue reading...
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