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Nonfiction: Youthful Anarchy
by Jim Feast
Richard Kempton, Provo: Amsterdam’s Anarchist Revolt (Autonomedia, 2007)
In Provo: Amsterdam’s Anarchist Revolt, Richard Kempton has laid open
one of the most intriguing and unthinkable passages in recent European
history.
Why unthinkable? Imagine this. In 1965, a group of disaffected Dutch
youth, fed up with their society’s englobed, smug dedication to
consumerism, began weekly performances around the base of an innocuous
statue of a child, which they periodically doused with gasoline and
wreathed in flames. Aside from a small coterie, nobody but the police
paid much attention.
Nonetheless, the Provos, as they were called, persisted, fa****oning a
philosophy and series of wacky proposals with the goal of forcing
Amsterdam to become a utopia. Their basic idea was: Since society was
stifling all forms of self-expression, “its members can only become
creative, individual people through anti-social conduct.”
Now here’s one surprise. The programs they began had the same whimsical,
fantastical qualities as their musings, but they came to a sudden,
charged life when the Provos quickly followed espousal with practice.
Their most famous proposal was contained in this:
"The asphalt terror of the motorized bourgeoisie has lasted long enough.
.. . . PROVO’s bicycle plan will liberate us from the car monster. PROVO
introduces the WHITE BICYCLE, a piece of public property. The white
bicycle is never locked. The white bicycle is the first free communal
trans****t . . . The white bicycle can be used by anyone who needs it and
then must be left for someone else. There will be more and more white
bicycles until everyone can use white trans****t and the car peril is
past."
They started distributing bikes in this way, and with great panache,
bringing a utopian idea--the elimination of cars through the
reinstitution of a gift economy--down to earth. (Personally, I was taken
by their unfulfilled proposal “to have plants growing in boxes on top of
automobiles and to have the automobiles drive on sunken roadways so that
pedestrians would only see a procession of greenery.” Last summer,
taxiing into Guangzhou with my wife, we found the tops of the concrete
side barriers planted with proliferating eglantine and other hanging
plants so that driving up a flower-bedecked entrance ramp we felt on a
path into a greenhouse not a super highway.)
Let’s get to the unthinkable part: the riot.
The Situationists, to which the Provos were often compared, were
infinitely more theoretically sophisticated and elegant, but no one ever
claimed they had anything to do with setting off Paris’s May ’68
explosion. The Provos, in contrast, a small, penniless and powerless
group of friends, dismissed by the press as pesky but irrelevant
hooligans, launched a massive social protest.
The cir***stance was the marriage of the Dutch crown princess to a
former Nazi. While the Provos planned to do what little they could to
disrupt the pre-ceremony procession, with smoke bombs and a
counter-parade, they hardly imagined a turnout in the thousands to back
them! “The wave of 5,000 young demonstrators astounded them and everyone
else. The Provos’ call had touched off a frenzy of anti-authoritarianism
directed against the Dutch bourgeoisie society.”
Kempton’s point is a good (and encouraging) one. The media and
authorities (including the Communist Party) had been as one in blocking
any discouraging words about the wedding. Many in the public were
outraged by the royal family’s alliance with this ex-Nazi and would join
with any group who would spearhead a resistance. A second invaluable
point to be garnered is that while the Provos’ outrageous techniques had
little effect when aimed, for example, at furthering protests against
the Vietnam war, they had great resonance when targeting a concocted
media event, suggesting that, when given half a chance, anarchists prove
much more adroit, quick-witted and amusing at opposing a spectacle than
the authorities are at staging it.
There’s more to the Provos’ meteoric rise and fall (and Kempton’s book)
that can be noted here, but overall it should be said the author has an
impressive ability to hint, even while scrupulously ****traying a
historical unfolding, at the under layers of significance. This--till
now--little-known story both shows the way a nearly unthinkable series
of events took place and throws in--in describing the Provos’ decrees
and stunts--many rib-tickling moments. Of how many historical accounts
can you say that?
--
Dan Clore
My collected fiction: _The Unspeakable and Others_
http://tinyurl.com/2gcoqt
Lord We˙rdgliffe & Necronomicon Page:
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News & Views for Anarchists & Activists:
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Skipper: Professor, will you tell these people who is
in charge on this island?
Professor: Why, no one.
Skipper: No one?
Thurston Howell III: No one? Good heavens, this is anarchy!
-- _Gilligan's Island_, episode #6, "President Gilligan"
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