that all sounds abit extreme……maybe your right though. a system is one hell of an investment.

ive heard of farmers defending their land with shotguns and ive heard of raves making a wall of people to protect a rig, never any violence from ravers tho,either OB coming in with batons or farmers shooting things.

over the years (since 1990/1991) there’s been a few bottles/cans thrown at cops and landowners, evicted buildings and farmers property set on fire as reprisals.

Just after the CJA was brought in in 1994, a crew person in London said to me “if the rig was confiscated, I am prepared to go to the area where we were grassed up and burgle houses and shops until we have gained enough cash to replace it!” The chap who said this to me was a media-savvy lad, who did so when I had a video camera and tape recorder in my hand. Although I didn’t record this statement (for everyones safety!) I could easily have done so and he knew that.

This was in the time when the Tories were last in power and were more harsh on confiscating rigs permanently (and cops would do snide shit like put screwdrivers through speakers, cut leads into sections etc) – the stakes were higher…

It did seem that the people who were involved with free parties back then also had far less qualms over funding their activities by other crimes (usually car theft and burglaries) – nowadays its only the odd chav who turns up in a stolen car and in many cases the peer pressure dissuades them from these activities rather than encourages it..

in France the cops became harsher on free parties as well, so the ravers responded – there was an incident last year where after a party was tear-gassed, they just stormed the nearest town/village and busted out every window!

it just proves the point – step up the conflict and both sides will fight their corner..

You may not know about this because things got a bit better from 1997-2001 – for whatever reason Blair’s government didn’t consider raves to be a priority problem; until the middle Englanders whinged via their MPs (look on hansard or theyworkforyou.com and you will see). but the “grudging acceptance” of raves obviously meant less confrontations….

But although British ravers are normally non-violent, the vandalism and trashing is inexcusable, it has got worse since 2000 and creates anger on the other side. It reallly is bad; and does affect the area (I saw a recent claim that one business abandoned a project to move into a building after it was raved – this is people’s jobs that are being lost here…)

However in the 1990s people used to at least try and find serviceable toilets (and not trash them) and/or bury their shit – and nor did they photograph the damage and shit and post the pictures in public places for all to see (why do ppl upload the trashing/crap photos to galleries? it makes it look like we condone these actions….)

We have already captured the territory; there is no need to destroy the infrastructure … and we can’t expect decent hard working people to clean up our human waste after us…