Impede the referendum and refuse to recognize the results once the SI vote wins. Though these strategies appear contradictory, [CIA Officer Michael] Steere claims that they must be implemented together precisely to encourage activities that aim toward impeding the referendum and at the same time prepare the conditions for a rejection of the results.
How is this to be done?
In the memo, the CIA proposes the following tactics and actions:
Take the streets and protest with violent, disruptive actions across the nation
Generate a climate of ungovernability
Provoke a general uprising in a substantial part of the population
Engage in a “plan to implode” the voting centers on election day by encouraging opposition voters to “VOTE and REMAIN” in their centers to agitate others
Start to release data during the early hours of the afternoon on Sunday that favor the NO vote (in clear violation of election regulations)
Coordinate these activities with Ravell & Globovision and international press agencies
Coordinate with ex-militar officers and coupsters Pena Esclusa and Guyon Cellis – this will be done by the Military Attache for Defense and Army at the US Embassy in Caracas, Office of Defense, Attack and Operations (DAO)
To encourage rejection of the results, the CIA proposes:
Creating an acceptance in the public opinion that the NO vote will win for sure
Using polling companies contracted by the CIA
Criticize and discredit the National Elections Council
Generate a sensation of fraud
Use a team of experts from the universities that will talk about how the data from the Electoral Registry has been manipulated and will build distrust in the voting system
The CIA memo also talks about:
Isolating Chavez in the international community
Trying to achieve unity amongst the opposition
Seek an aliance between those abstentionists and those who will vote “NO”
Sustain firmly the propaganda against Chavez
Execute military actions to support the opposition mobilizations and propagandistic occupations
Finalize the operative preparations on the US military bases in Curacao and Colombia to provide support to actions in Venezuela
Control a part of the country during the next 72-120 hours
Encourage a military rebellion inside the National Guard forces and other components
Recognising the situation for what it is – violent imperial interests attacking the leader for whom the Venezuelan people have repeatedly and overwhelmingly voted in free and fair elections (as Brazil’s centrist President, Luis Ignacio “Lula” Da Silva, concedes, “You can invent anything you want to criticise Chavez, but not for lack of democracy.” Chavez, in turn, allegedly once told Da Silva “The only problem with you, Lula, is that the Americans will never bother trying to kill you.”) – it is dazzlingly obvious where our loyalties should lie. As one of my favourite bloggers, The Heathlander, reminds us, Chavez remains immensely popular because of all he has done to help the poor and indigenous majorities of Venezuela.
However, it’s also worth pausing to note the “Bolivarian Revolution”’s contributions to the international sphere. I could talk about his attempts to mediate an end to the Colombian civil war – negotiations supported even by French hyperPresident Sarkozy – recently “dismissed” in a hissy fit by President Uribe, but a more central plank of Venezuelan foreign policy is the development of non-market trades – barters, usually – ensuring energy security to those whom the market routinely excludes. The proposed “Banco Del Sur” to rival the IMF/World Bank hegemony would also go a long way to a more stable and equitable world, and Venezuelan manoeuvres within OPEC are also worth watching. Analyst Alberto Cruz looks at the already highly significant effects of iniatives like these in Argentina, the Caribbean and elsewhere, and puts this in the context of recent developments:
There is no attack in Venezuela against capitalism as such, but there is an effort to build an alternative in the sense of creating a society in which the explicit aim is not the growth of capital or of the material means of production but rather the development of human capital. So long as the Bolivarian movement was not building that alternative there were no important desertions from its right wing. Now there are, because the class struggle is deepening and everyone takes their side.
That’s probably as good a concise summary of the current debate as you’re going to find. A more detailed analysis can be found in this International Socialism interview with Mike Gonzales; at the very least, we can observe that the proposed reforms (full text here) – and the accompanying project for a United Venezuelan Socialist Party (PSUV) – defy superficial summation. Many can be seen as a natural development in Venezuela’s slow revolution, innovations in participatory democracy that can help the country’s working class pass from merely voting to taking a more active and coordinated role in controlling their nation – a process that started with the Bolivarian missions and barrio cooperatives – while others actually roll back some of the freedoms gained with the 1999 constitution.
The reason for this ambivalence is the same as the reason why the more revolutionary reforms (now there’s an oxymoron that perhaps defines Venezuelan Socialism) are so necessary: all the goodwill in Chavez’s world won’t be sufficient to overcome the bureaucratic inertia of the state, or the influence of rightwing bandwagon-jumpers at high levels of government. There’s certainly still corruption incompetence and even malice within the Venezuelan state, and empowering action from below is the only real way to keep this influence at bay. It’s an ongoing conflict and a subtle one (Gonzales suggests, for example, that the PSUV began as an idea of the bureaucratic elite attempting to consolidate their own power, but which Chavez completely subverted by calling on all the workers to join it and influence it), but as the effects of global capitalism begin to literally tear the world apart it’s one whose ramifications extend way beyond Venezuela.
(John Howard’s pained expression: picture from Lenin’s Tomb)
After Aznar and Blair, another deputy sheriff has been kicked out of office, in this case by a landslide election. Perhaps they’ll be reunited one day in the Hague County Jail.
John Howard’s deputation in The War Against Terror was, as had been the case for his friends in Spain and England, an important ultimate cause of his out-chucking, but the proximate causes are somewhat different.
Opposition to the war was always even stronger in Spain than elsewhere in the Axis of the Willing, but Aznar really disgusted the Spanish voters by spinning lies about the Madrid bombings to make political capital out of tragedy.
Tony Blair earned the epithet of “Bliar” somewhat earlier, with his 2003 dodgy dossier, but a widespread mistrust of the rightly-hated Tory opposition still allowed him to scrape through the following election; he only announced his resignation in the wake of the major protests against his support, almost alone among world leaders, for Israel’s 2006 assault on Lebanon.
Howard is cut very much from the same cloth as these sadistic charlatans, and new PM Kevin Rudd’s pledge to bring Australian troops home from Iraq clearly helped him win. However, this was not a War vs Peace election; Rudd himself is a bit of a neocon (at least as far as Israel’s “right to self defence” is concerned), and two other issues also dominated.
Firstly, the environment: Australia is the first Western nation to really suffer from climate change, with a six year drought and consequent farmer suicide epidemic reminiscent of Southern India. It’s also one of only two large nations not to have ratified the Kyoto treaty, evidence of Howard’s denialist stance that drought-ridden Aussies simply couldn’t tolerate any longer. While he isn’t exactly an eco-warrior, Rudd promised to ratify the treaty more or less immediately, and when formulating economic policy or negotiating in Bali next month, he’ll be aware that he – perhaps more than any previous elected head of state – has a clear environmentalist mandate to fulfill.
However, if the big new issue of Australian politics is the environment, the thing that really settled the elections was a much older issue: workers’ rights and trade unions. Howard’s regressive WorkChoices programme was the one thing that the opposition has really, consistently opposed – indeed, Rudd came to lead the Labour Party on an anti-WorkChoices platform – and, where it wasn’t stooping to racist smears, the incumbent Liberal Party fought the election trying to terrify voters with the spectre of the unions.
(anti-government protests last year: picture from Tadamon)
The other election this week is for the Lebanese presidency, and it’s not going quite as smoothly. Lebanon’s is not an especially democratic system, due in part to its bizzare sectarian constitutional arrangements …
According to something called the “the national pact” – an unwritten agreement reached between all Lebanese confessional groups upon being granted independence from France at the close of World War II — the presidency is to go to a Maronite Christian, the prime ministership to a Sunni Muslim and the speaker of the house is to be a Shiite Muslim.
… which complicate things sufficiently for elections not to really happen, as such. Instead, the great and the good of the country come together to choose a consensus candidate that they can all put up with – the citizens are only consulted to ratify their selection, voting “yes” or “no”. So far, so nightmarish, but that list of great and good doesn’t stop at Lebanon’s borders. The influence of Syria is well known, but the big problem at the moment comes from the U.S. and Israel.
As George Galloway pointed out (back when he was still cool), we can see the lack of democracy in Lebanon by the fact that Hasran Nasrallah of Hizbullah is not president. After a heroic defense of Southern Lebanon against Israeli aggression, and a competent organisation of relief and reconstruction in the areas it controls, Hizbullah is extremely popular among Lebanese – in contrast to the ruling “March 14″ Coalition, against whose government over half the population protested in Hizbullah-led rallies last December.
Unfortunately, Hizbullah are a bit like Hamas; popular with the populations they are supposed to represent, but utterly abhorrent to the powerful interests which ultimately end up being represented. If Israel is willing to flatten half the country in an attempt to neutralise Hizbullah, if the U.S. is willing to build a Sunni extremist army in the North to counter (Shi’ite) Hizbullah in the South, then how could we expect any less than for them to interfere with the elections?
No wonder it’s hard to reach consensus, when the government’s foreign paymasters try to boycott the only really popular party. The election has already been postponed, while the old President’s mandate has already expired; Lebanon is currently without a president.
Lebanese-Australian blogger Ann of Reclaiming Space has just returned from a tour of Lebanon. She’s bemused by Robert Fisk’s visions of apocalypse in the country (no-one’s calling Lebanon a “hostile entity” yet; constitutional crisis is surely far preferable to the Gaza treatment), and instead recommends the following articles:
I hadn’t found the time to write up on this, but fortunately someone on the UMSU website has done it for me:
[Two weeks ago], a great victory was won at the University of Manchester Students’ Union. In attempt to hold to ransom the Palestinian University that we had twinned with, Al Najah in Nablus, the right in the Union put forward the Peace Through Education motion that sought to label Al Najah students as supporting terrorism. Students at Manchester, however, saw through the lies perpetrated by the supporters of Motion 1 and realised that this was a negative motion that sought to break our twinning, demonise Palestinians and to silence any criticism of Israeli atrocities on campus. Amid intimidation, racist abuse and childish insults, Palestinian activists put the case for their Amendment and for Palestine. In the best attended General Meeting since the 1990s, more than 1,100 students turned out to deliver a massive majority in favour of the amendment (634 for, 372 against, 13 abstentions) and subsequently in favour of the Amended Motion (531 for, 210 against, 17 abstentions).
What Wednesday proved was that support for our Twinning Agreement with Al Najah is overwhelming on campus. The campaign to defend it drew many other societies which at first glance would seem uninvolved. It politicised our campus and showed that the sometimes complex arguments about Palestine can become a mass campaign for justice and freedom.
The vote challenged the prevailing ideas in society at the moment, that Palestinians are suicide bombers, that people who resist imperialism and colonialism are terrorists and that the enemies of US and UK Imperialism and Israeli colonialism are inhuman religious fanatics. Instead, students at Manchester overwhelmingly backed the resistance in Palestine, it saw that the root of the problem was the colonial state of Israel and it recognised that under brutal occupation ordinary people can heroically resist.
Now, I’m starting to think that those “prevailing ideas in society” prevail only in the media. I was one of those campaigning for this vote, and was surprised at what a positive response I got from people. A lot of those who weren’t students or who were unable to make the meeting expressed sympathy with the Palestinian cause, and only a very few times did I have to explain the hypocrisy of equating Palestinians with terrorists, or put the violence of the oppressed in the context of, um, violent oppression.
One girl even marched up to me, with a leaflet in her hand supporting the Zionist motion, saying “this is all wrong!” and asking what she could do about it. More generally, while explaining the content of the motion, I rarely got to say the words “renounce terror” without provoking a tut or a rolling of the eyes. What really struck me at the meeting – aside from the necessary logistical nightmare that is democracy – was how on the defensive the Zionists were. “We’re not denying the Palestinians’ right to resist, but …”, “no-one wants to end the twinning, but…” – actually, I’ve spoken to these people in the past and they do deny the suffering of the Palestinians, they do oppose the twinning and have since its inception, but didn’t consider it politically viable to say so.
Of course, Manchester is one of the more politicised of universities, and has a large Muslim student body, so the rosy picture painted here may not apply to the whole country. It was also disappointing that, as a result of the aforementioned logistical nightmare, there was no time to debate any other motions; another seven had been scheduled, uncontroversial but still important. These mainly concerned student issues – some bread-and-butter, some political – but Motion 8 was to condemn a potential war with Iran.
However, this was a great day for solidarity; instead of “Why are we twinned with TERRORISTS?!“, the sad little vigil in the union entry now has a placard to the effect of “How dare they call us RACISTS?!“, and instead of sending an ultimatum and a racist slur, we’re receiving the gift of an olive tree. “It may a the symbol of peace“, many of us were nonetheless thinking, “but where can we put it in chilly Manchester where it won’t just die?“. But if we can defeat the Zionist lobby, I’m sure we can organise the erection of a little greenhouse or something.
This blog started in March 2006, as an excuse to play with web design and as a way of keeping the folks back home up to date with my adventures. When I moved from France to Surrey a year ago, these updates became the most depressing thing on the internet, and had to change in subject matter to avoid sinking into bathos. Reading and writing about politics, economics and history became the best way of passing the lonely Southern nights; through intense alienation, I found socialism.
Needless to say, things have changed a lot since then. I’ve been back home, more or less, doing something I more or less enjoy, since September. For the last two weeks, though, I’ve had 20 hours a week at the call centre (I’m only half-joking about hoping to unionise it after my probationary period is over in Spring) on top of my studies, and for about the same amount of time (it was Diwali, coinciding with one of periodic rethinks of my future career, and it seemed right to usher in all the changes) I’ve been a member of the SWP, which could predictably take up a lot of what time remains.
I thought I’d keep writing throughout this time, but it hasn’t happened. The time before my shift flies, after my shift I’m pretty knackered, and it’s getting hard to get anything done. So, it only seems fair to warn my loyal readers, I’ll be spending a lot less time on the blog for the foreseeable future. What posts I write will tend to be shorter, and more closely tied to my real life. I’ll try to compensate for these by reposting interesting things I find online (I am still finding time to read) either individually or in themed collections like the previous post, but essay-type posts chock-full of links are likely to become much fewer and further between.
Don’t go deleting me from your favourites, or anything, but, y’know, that’s the way it’s gonna be.
For similar reasons to the above, I’m struggling to keep up with watching enough interesting videos to keep Throw Away Your Telescreen going, and am unable to keep up the rate of one programme every two or three days. Anyone who wants to contribute to TAYTS will be more than welcome; just drop me a comment here.
* The song is All I Need, from Radiohead’s latest album, one of my favourite songs at the moment. It’s creepy, ominous and beautiful, so way open to some vaguely environmentalist youtube mashups. I like this one, a montage from the French film Microcosm.
And, in the background, the war grinds painfully on. Here are three articles, three new angles from which to view the catastrophe.
“Bloodbath” in Basra
There’s a filthy lie bouncing around the media lately, a tale of befuddled soldiers ducking and dodging the crossfire of an Iraqi civil war (and a filthy corollary, that without us there to police them, the Iraqis’ latent tribal instincts will have them at each others’ throats forever). Via Ten Percent, a recent quote from the British commander in Basra says otherwise:
ATTACKS have plunged by 90 per cent in southern Iraq since Britain withdrew its troops from the main city of Basra, their commander said yesterday.
Their presence in central Basra was the single largest trigger for violence, according to Major General Graham Binns. “We thought, ‘If 90 per cent of the violence is directed at us, what would happen if we stepped back?”‘ he said.
Collateral despair
I often cringe at a fixation with Coalition casualties, and the attendant trivialisation of the toll, many orders of magnitude higher, inflicted upon those who lived in the theatres of our wars. However, it seems that the casualty rate may be far higher than anyone realised, because the vast majority of dead soldiers are killed not by Iraqi bullets and IEDs, but by their own hand far from the battlefield. From Counterpunch, Mike Whitney reports on a survey by CBS news:
The Pentagon was covering up the real magnitude of the “suicide epidemic”. Following an exhaustive investigation of veterans’ suicide data collected from 45 states; CBS discovered that in 2005 alone “there were at least 6,256 among those who served in the armed forces. That’s 120 each and every week in just one year.”
That is not a typo. Active and retired military personnel, mostly young veterans between the ages of 20 to 24, are returning from combat and killing themselves in record numbers. We can assume that “multiple-tours of duty” in a war-zone have precipitated a mental health crisis of which the public is entirely unaware and which the Pentagon is in total denial.
If we add the 6,256 suicide victims from 2005 to the “official” 3,865 reported combat casualties; we get a sum of 10,121. Even a low-ball estimate of similar 2004 and 2006 suicide figures, would mean that the total number of US casualties from the Iraq war now exceed 15,000. That’s right; 15,000 dead US servicemen and women in a war that–as yet–has no legal or moral justification.
…
It’s not normal; it’s is a pandemic—an outbreak of despair which is the natural corollary of living in constant fear; of seeing one’s friends being dismembered by roadside bombs or children being blasted to bits at military checkpoints or finding battered bodies dumped on the side of a riverbed like a bag of garbage. The rash of suicides is the logical upshot of the U.S. war on Iraq. Returning soldiers are traumatized by their experience and now they are killing themselves in droves.
Meanwhile, via Fanonite, Chris Hedges writes in Common Dreams on the Washington power struggle that could determine whether the devastating PNAC crusade stops here or rolls on to Tehran. I’m not talking about risible popularity contest of the would-be presidential candidates, or the long-betrayed hope that the media would “learn” from the “failure” of their reporting on Iraq.
The last wall of defense that prevents the Bush administration from targeting Iran, an attack that could ignite a regional conflagration and usher in apocalyptic scenarios in the Middle East, runs through the offices of Secretary of Defense Robert Gates; Adm. William Fallon , the head of the Central Command (CENTCOM); and Gen. George Casey, the Army’s new chief of staff. These three figures in the defense establishment have told George W. Bush and the Congress how depleted the U.S. military has become, that it cannot manage another conflict, and that a war with Iran would make the war with Iraq look like an act of prudence and common sense.
…
The battle is between the Cheney camp, which would like to carry out strikes on Iran before Bush leaves office, and Gates and his senior generals. Cheney, who has always been able to push aside the feckless Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, is having a tougher time with the military. Fallon, for example, was successful in his attempt to block efforts by Cheney to move a third aircraft carrier into the Persian Gulf earlier this year and bluntly said that “there would be no war against Iran” as long as he was chief of CENTCOM.
…
The reliance on the military command, however, to be the voice of reason in the debate about a new war is not a healthy sign for our deteriorating democracy. Compliant generals can always be found to carry out the Dr. Strangelove designs of a mad White House. Those who resist implementing decisions can easily be removed. The protective cover provided by these figures in the defense establishment could vanish.
The recent Ibero-American summit in Santiago de Chile actually ended quite amicably, and all parties are keen to reassure that they’re still friends. But one thing about the summit caught the media’s attention, and one thing only.
King Juan Carlos of Spain told Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez to shut up.
In fact, the way the story has been played, it’s tempting to take the King’s side. Wasn’t Chavez just mouthing off, crying “fascist” like Rik from The Young Ones? Well, watch the clip (wonder why Chavez was dubbed into Australian), and you’ll see that the exchange between Chavez and current Spanish Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero was pretty civil, really. However, what you’ll have a harder time discovering is that Chavez was actually stating a fairly uncontroversial truth.
I don’t mean that he’s just like Blair, and Blair’s Britain is well on the road to fascism (although that is true, I’d probably have used the phrase “war criminal”). I mean he …
… is a former member of the Fascist Party.
… worked for an openly fascist dictatorship.
… opposed Spain’s transition from fascist dictatorship to liberal democracy.
… filled his cabinet with ex-fascists, holocaust deniers and Franco-worshippers.
… installed his friends as CEOs of newly-privatised corporations.
… admires men for their intelligence and women for their “willingness to be women”.
Chavez’s criticisms of Aznar were echoed by several other Latin American leaders, and whatever the politics behind them, they were, y’know, true.
The civil rights pressure group Liberty published a report this morning revealing that police powers to lock people up for a month without having to charge them already go well beyond those of comparable countries – including the U.S., and also including Turkey, a country that can much more legitimately complain of a terror problem but also with a well-deserved reputation for disrespect of human rights. The Home Secretary Jacqui Smith has previously complained that such a comparison would be so complicated as not to be worth bothering with – unsurprising, given her hope of getting the 28-day limit extended “before Christmas”.
A standard response to people worried about giving the police too much power is “if you’ve done nothing wrong, you’ve nothing to be worried about”. While it’s clearly absurd to suggest that the law is an infallible judge and enforcer of right and wrong, this happy absurdity belies an ugly truth. For now at least, if you’re “white” you have nothing to be worried about. While the limited use of terror laws to stifle free speech have, by now, been well publicised, they have mainly served to harrass Muslims.
The Kahar brothers, apparently threatened with summary execution in the incident described above, have been victims of another arbitrary police attack before, the infamous Forest Gate raid where one of them did take a bullet, but they are just the tip of the iceberg. I don’t need to document the uniformed Muslim-bashing that goes on under the guise of fighting terror, surely, it’s so uncontroversial it’s even come to the attention of a parliamentary Joint Committee, and yet rather than standing up for our Islamic friends and neighbours we’ve allowed the ‘Muslim community’ to be scapegoated, isolated and, justifiably on the defensive.
At a Stop The War teach-in last month, I attended a talk by a young Muslim lawyer (sorry dude, I forgot your name) who’s working to help people understand the terror legislation, the inherent contradictions and the ways of coping with them. For him, this fear of harrassment explained the under-representation of Muslims in activist circles. There are things I say on this blog, and in real life, that a Muslim simply could not get away with without being labelled a terror suspect, without facing a very real risk of prosecution and persecution. That’s to a large extent the reality, and to an even larger extent the perception. Small wonder, then, that often the only Muslims daring to speak out on anything are those who seek not to condemn, but to justify the excesses and complexes of the ruling class.
Of course, the last thing one can demand of the racist is consistency, and I don’t want to pander to ‘Clash of Civilisations’ lunacy by making this all about the Muslims. In truth, the identity of the feared and despised Other is as mutable as the alliances in Orwell’s 1984. We fear the Muslims now, and there’s a growing subsection of the media devoted to proving that we always did; take, for example, the disgusting new BBC series Clash of Worlds, rewriting British Imperial history – and even, shamelessly, the Naqba – in terms of a “collision” between the liberal Christian West and the fanatical hordes of Islam. The thinking man, meanwhile, is able to distinguish between different types of Muslim, and may reserve his inaccurate fear and loathing for the Wahhabi alone.
But once you start drawing up categories of people to fear and to loathe, it’s hard to stop. The Muslim makes for a particularly useful demonic other, and we shouldn’t pretend that The War Against Terror has been mere business as usual – it’s a definite escalation of racism, tied in with militarism in a way that no such complex has been for decades, and we should definitely all be thinking about the ‘F’-word about now – but we nor should we pretend he’s the only one.
For one thing, and it’s a theme I’ll be coming back to, the Islamophobia of the press and the intelligencia is often chillingly reminiscent of the anti-semitism of old. The Holocaust, it seems, was so shocking as to put us permanently on guard against the age-old European racism toward the Jew, but the mindsets that had incubated and legitimated Nazism had never gone away. All that fury that had once been directed at the Jews had to be turned at someone and, in an ironic alliance with a project that claims to represent the Jews, the settler state of Israel, that someone seems to be the Muslim Arab.
But I digress. The point is, racism and xenophobia never left us.
Though it’s pretty much taboo to say so openly, the thinly-coded equation between Black people and criminals is common currency in the mainstream. What I think was Tony Blair’s last speech as Prime Minister that didn’t concern the topic of Tony Blair as Prime Minister was one blaming Black on Black crime on Black gang culture. Don’t fail to notice the fact that he considers the negroes’ biggest problem to be the lack of strong father figures – the cult of patriarchal authority is what a certain type of White male is all about – but seriously, get a load of this:
We need to stop thinking of this as a society that has gone wrong – it has not – but of specific groups that for specific reasons have gone outside of the proper lines of respect and good conduct towards others and need by specific measures to be brought back into the fold.
Could these ’specific measures’ be anything like that which Martin Amis considers ‘the Muslim community will have to suffer until it gets its house in order’? We could go on and on (and, at some point, I probably will) about the paranoia with which any migrants are greeted, but let’s spare a thought too for the perenially-hated perenial migrants, the Gypsies.
Mr Fini said Gypsies considered “theft to be virtually legitimate and not immoral” and felt the same way about “not working because it has to be the women who do so, often by prostituting themselves”.
In an interview with the daily Corriere della Sera, he claimed Roma “had no scruples about kidnapping children or having children [of their own] for the purposes of begging”. Mr Fini, the leader of the ultra-conservative National Alliance and until last year his country’s deputy prime minister, added: “To talk of integration with people with a “culture” of that sort is pointless.”
Indeed. Fini’s lunacy passes for the norm in much of Eastern Europe, but he’s really not far off Michael Howard or the leader columns of the Sun either. In Britain too, Gypsy-bashing is if anything an even more legitimate form of racism than that directed at Muslims. Anyone seen the film Snatch, for example?
If the police are there to uphold the values (now there’s a word that should instantly put your guard up!) of society, then how can we expect them to be anything but racist? Even Ian Blair has complained, rightly, of institutional racism in the media, but he neglects to mention the similar problems within his own force. That falls to his sidekick, Cressida Dick, who admitted back in 2003:
I would say there is not an institution out there that could say, ‘We are not racist’. … It’s very difficult to imagine a situation where we will say we are no longer institutionally racist.
Later that year, that documentary vindicated Dick’s prevarication more than her half-hearted defence of the Met’s progress. Five officers resigned in the aftermath of The Secret Policeman, in which an undercover reporter showed vicious, prevelant racism among recruits in Greater Manchester and North Wales (one recruit, worryingly, said that Hitler had “the right ideas”). The then-Home Secretary David ‘machine-gun them all‘ Blunkett accused the Beeb of creating a story rather than revealing one, but a spokesman for the Black and Asian Police Association defended the documentary:
In a sense my members are relieved and grateful to the BBC because this has proved beyond doubt what we have been saying for a number of years. We need to sit round a table with the Police Federation, the Black Police Association and senior officers and discuss the revelations from a Manchester angle and what to do about it, but it’s not just a Manchester issue, such meetings should take place around the country.
So much has already been written on the subject of the unfortunate electrician. Much of it has focused on the incompetence that many would like to put down to the tense post-7/7 atmosphere, and it is that for incompetence that the Met were finally charged: not with murder, but with a breach of the 1974 Health and Safety at Work Act. As Steven Poole writes:
Certainly Menezes’s own health and safety were rather permanently compromised. But that was not exactly the point of the trial.
In fact, the burden of what the court found the police did wrong was to let Menezes get on a bus, and then a Tube train, in the first place, while the Keystone Cops were miscommunicating and urinating at inappropriate moments. Their letting a person suspected of involvement in terrorism run around on public transport is what was found to have endangered the public safety.
Quite so. If the police had been more efficient and shot de Menezes dead immediately he left his flat that morning, there would have been no grounds for censure at all.
There’s also the incompetence that led to shooting down the wrong man, which has, rightly, been the subject of a great deal more attention. It’s hard to get much consolation from the commentators on Have Your Say deploring the death of someone who “didn’t even look remotely Middle Eastern“, but we’re not all that guy, and either way the Met were afraid that heads might end up rolling for it. So they tried to soften the blow, sowing confusion around the events of that day, and engaging in a smear campaign (something with which the Kahar brothers, who aren’t paedophiles after all, can probably sympathise with) to try and make us glad Jean-Charles was gone. From The Nether-World:
The Met dishonestly manipulated a photo of Jean Charles de Menezes in an attempt to make him look more like Hussain Osman, one of the men who tried to bomb London’s transport network on July 21 2005.
The facts that Jean Charles de Menezes had apparently taken cocaine and had a fake stamp in his passport* was used as a smear to somehow justify the execution.
After the shooting, we were told that Jean Charles de Menezes was an illegal alien. He wasn’t
We were told that he was wearing bulky coat, refused to stop when challenged and then vaulted the ticket barriers. Not true
We were told that there was no CCTV footage at the Stockwell tube station. There was (at least in the ticket area, no footage was recorded on the train or on the platform as far as we know).
More disinformation is documented at Ten Percent, with Ian Blair personally accused of obstructing the IPCC’s investigations. Frolix, meanwhile, reveals the campaign of harrassment targeted at those who did challenge the official narrative and leak out bits of truth. I concur with his assessment that:
… it is the aftermath of this terrible event which gives us an insight into how the state functions, a story of an unaccountable, out of control police force which is not only getting away with murder but misleading the public then using its powers to arrest citizens who worked to expose it. While the fragmented aspects of this case are in the public domain, it is only when all the elements are drawn together that the true picture of the Met’s iniquity becomes clear.
Apologists for the police point to the tension and difficult circumstances of July 2005, but the fact is that there was nothing whatsoever about Mr Menezes which could give anyone reasonable grounds for concluding he was a danger to the public. The magnitude of recklessness here is staggering and those involved are indisputably a danger to the public themselves and unfit to be wielding firearms on the streets of London.
There is also the fact that somebody in the police force, somewhere in the chain leading from the shooter, through the officers directly involved in the operation, to the operational commanders and up to the Met leadership, fabricated a story which would have mitigated the police’s responsibility for the killing.
Just as worrying as the incident itself are the policies that led to it; when armed police consider that having one’s hands at one’s side is the stance of a suicide bomber, that headshots are the only way to be sure, tragedy seems inevitable. It’s what comes of getting training from Israel, of all places; perhaps the Met are starting to see a subset of the British public in the same way as the IDF see Palestinians. But if it’s hard to get a clear idea of what was really going over police radios on that day, what with the lies and all, allow me to put forward a hypothesis.
The police waited outside the house of a Muslim they had marked as a terrorissssuspect. One way or another, with the pissing and the tense atmosphere, they got him mixed up with his neighbour, and started following him around. They waited for him to get into the most spectacularly public place possible, and they chased him down and executed him. They pinned him down, and pumped him full of bullets. They did so believing him to be Hussain Osman, and knowing him to pose no immediate danger. They did it to prove a point.
The liberal press would have editorialised about how preferable this was to the risk of another attack, how deplorable it was that the Muslim Community’s inability to police itself made this kind of thing necessary, and slowly we’d sleepwalk into a place where it’s ok to shoot designated Muslims dead. It only failed because they got the wrong guy; if I’m right, Jean-Charles gave his life slowing the rise of fascism by a few crucial years. If I’m right, he’s an unwitting hero.
Is this far-fetched? As an officially sanctioned conspiracy it seems far-fetched, but as the actions of a few well-armed thugs, spooked by the events of the previous day, conditioned by one editorial too many about defiance and resolve in the face of the Islamist Other, trained by forces that safeguard an order worse than apartheid, it sounds mighty plausible. Whether it’s what actually happened or not is unfathomable, but we’ve created an atmosphere in which that kind of thing could so very easily happen.
This whole sordid tragedy has bought us time, but we’re not changing that environment. Unless we start doing something now, well, it’s only a matter of time before de Menezes’ name fades from the headlines, before another set of attacks or near misses, another set of speeches about clamping down on extremism and “Who do you think you are kidding Mr. Osama?” leader columns and then bam! here we are again.
In the short term, start dusting off any “Blair Must Go!” banners you may have accumulated after the flattening of Lebanon; I’m with the Tories, for once, he’s got to go. And in the long term? Challenge the logic by which any suspect is a terrorist, by which any brown person is a suspect. Start paying at least as much attention to the violence of the powerful as to the violence of the powerless. Reject racism, reject racist assumptions of security. Be on guard for establishment figures sneaking this in through the back door.
You may remember Adam Price MP from the recent documentary Ministry Of Truth; he’s the Plaid Cymru representative who agreed to sponsor the bill that would prohibit elected officials from lying (unbelievably, no such bill exists, and many leading politicians strongly oppose the principle of, um, being held to account).
In his blog yesterday, he addressed what we might call the English Question (h/t Charlie Marks):
Of the 23 bills announced in the Queen’s Speech yesterday 4 apply to England and Wales, 13 are UK-wide and six are England-only. So for a quarter of this session, Westminster will be an English Parliament to all intents and purposes – but for the presence of a phalanx of Celtic MPs.
The question is this:
Should we as Plaid MPs vote on these England-only bills?
Now, this is as good a time as any to introduce Plaid Cymru, arguably Britain’s only large leftwing party. Large, with a long term presence in Parliament (3 MPs at present) and umpteen in the European Parliament and Welsh Assembly, and left-wing in both policy and ideology. Of Plaid’s five stated aims, most are concerned with Welsh identity and self-determination, but the second is of particular interest:
To ensure economic prosperity, social justice and the health of the natural environment, based on decentralist socialism
Social justice? Socialism? These are concepts that have no place in contemporary mainstream politics; at least, not in Westminster. In fact, they are central to a lot of the debate in Holyrood and Cardiff. Even the Scottish National Party – heavily funded by big business and more rooted in liberalism than labourism – has made anti-imperialist (opposition to Trident renewal) and even anti-capitalist (opposition to PFI in the prison service and the NHS) policies a central plank in its campaign. It’s having a virtuous effect on the Welsh and Scottish branches of the Labour Party, too, as the only way they can stay afloat is by putting “clear red water” between themselves and the bought-out party leadership.
The result is a Wales and – especially – a Scotland that increasingly resemble the England many of us would like to see. Without the independence parties to rally around, the broad opposition of the English working class to New Labour’s neolib-neocon consensus has yet to coalesce into an effective political movement. As a result, of the few MPs who are actually likely to represent the interests of the working class, many have been elected from outside of England. Of course, as Adam points out, the obvious answer is “home rule all around”, but (apart from anything else) that’s not on the cards right now. So,
while we are waiting, should [Plaid] abstain on English legislation – or use our votes to defeat ideas like ‘foundation hospitals’ that we oppose? In a hung parliament this could become a crucial question.
I think this already merits serious thought.
Many people in England are watching the developments in Wales and Scotland with interest; I would even go so far as to say it’s central to political debate among my less political friends and acquaintances. Some, no doubt encouraged by the tone of debate on the English Question among the political class and their media, are resentful of the progress won, especially in Scotland, with what’s presumed to be “our” (English) taxes. Others watch with more admiration, but even then “it’s all very well for the Scots…”, people want to know when we can get some of that.
The English Question is not really amenable to a Scottish answer. Scots and Welsh national identity is in opposition to the monarchic British state – a perpetrator of immense imperialist violence that any right-thinking individual should abhor – but England, as the country which geographically, demographically and historically dominates the Union, risks identifying identifying istelf with the British state (indeed, most foreigners I have met routinely refer to the UK as ‘England’) and, indeed, in opposition to Scotland, Wales and Ireland.
British nationalism – identification with imperialism – is a disaster, a fertile breeding ground for fascism, and there is always the danger of English nationalism conflagrating itself with this monstrosity. A progessive English movement would have to align itself with Scottish and Welsh independence and against the British ruling class. Now I don’t think this is impossible – as Charlie pointed out when I brought this up in a comment in his blog, if anything there is more support for Scottish independence here than north of the border – but I do think it’s of the utmost importance in contemporary British politics.
In terms of a perversion of democracy, the English Question is a triviality next to various other anachronisms and contradictions of our Parliamentary regime. We’re so far, most of us, from having a say as to how our country is run, that the presence of a handful of MPs elected not by us (merely by people quite like us) is really neither here nor there. However, in terms of building a progressive popular movement to challenge the hegemony – in England, as it is in Wales – it is very important.
How should the three Plaid MPs vote on English-only legislation? I don’t claim to have the answer, but I think that exposing and exploiting this dilemma could do Plaid, and the SNP, and all of us a lot of good. It could cut through much of the parochial small-c-conservatism that monopolises debate on intra-UK nationalism, alleviate the sense of abandonment that brings the English working class to despair, and make the English Question so much more likely to be answered not with division, but with solidarity.
As part of Palestine Solidarity week, Manchester respiratory specialist Dr. Asad Khan just gave a talk about his recent tour of the West Bank. Infuriatingly true to form, I missed out on it (I just came online to check which building it was in and, lo, found it was on at 6pm, not 8pm why do I do this all the time goddammit that’s it I’m buying a diary…), but after a little sulk I’ve been reading his Palestine travelogue (starts here), presumably a poor substitute for the talk but it still paints a vivid – and shocking – picture of life under occupation. Highly recommended.
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