“
Book of the day
Review
Beauty Is in the Street by Joachim C Häberlen review – Plastic People, pedal power and the strength of protest
An amiable history of countercultural agitators, from Amsterdam’s anti-car anarchists to Poland’s ‘revolution of dwarfs’, shows the myriad faces of postwar dissent
Stuart Jeffries
“Human sacrifices are made daily to this idol of the idiots: car power,” went the statement issued in 1965 by countercultural Dutch anarchists and performance artists calling themselves the Provotariat.
Long before Ulez, 15-minute cities and Just Stop Oil, the Provos (nothing, it hardly needs saying, to do with Irish republicanism) were trying to end what one of them called “the asphalt terror of the motorised masses”.
The Provos argued Amsterdam city centre should be closed to cars and an armada of bicycles all painted white should flood the city. The bikes would be unlocked to provide the “first free communal transport”.
“
posts
