In Prague
Nick Holdstock
Around 600 protesters gathered in Prague on Saturday morning near the Old Town Square. 'No Corruption', the banners said: 'We are One'; 'Game Over. Insert CHANGE to Continue.' We marched first to the stock exchange, then on towards the Vltava River, surrounded all the way by police, who often stopped us for no obvious reason. At one of these halts a man in plain clothes took photographs, which caused some anger, but otherwise the mood was cheerful.
In front of a government building on the other side of the river people waved their keys in the air, an echo of one of the gestures made during the Velvet Revolution.
Halfway up the long, looping road to the Castle – no one was shouting slogans; it’s a stiff climb – the police stopped us again. A tourist bus disgorged its passengers. They were in their sixties and seventies, well-dressed, affluent-looking, unlikely, on the face of it, to be sympathetic to our calls for an end to global capitalism, inequality and the tyranny of the banks. They stared at us for a moment. Then they began to applaud. The crowd found its voice.
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