Mark Duggan Shooting

Moderators: Elvis, DrVolin, Jeff

Re: Mark Duggan Shooting

Postby norton ash » Wed Aug 17, 2011 12:02 pm

David Cameron:
We must fight back against attitudes that have brought parts of our society to this shocking state... Children without fathers. Schools without discipline. Reward without effort. Crime without punishment. Rights without responsibilities.


Gandhi:
The Roots of Violence: Wealth without work, pleasure without conscience, knowledge without character, commerce without morality, science without humanity, worship without sacrifice, politics without principles.


You're really asking for it with that piece of stolen rhetoric, Davey-boy. Better talk to your speechwriters.
Zen horse
User avatar
norton ash
 
Posts: 4067
Joined: Wed Nov 08, 2006 5:46 pm
Location: Canada
Blog: View Blog (0)

Re: Mark Duggan Shooting

Postby Stephen Morgan » Wed Aug 17, 2011 4:34 pm

Littlejohn thinks sentencing has been too lenient. Private Eye reveals that he, like Clegg and Cameron, was a riotous youth, when he was at his first newspaper.

Didn't Cameron once claim to be a fan of the band who did the song "I predict a riot"?

Looks like Sir Hugh Orde is to take over the Met. Fiddled his expenses when moving from the RUC, or whatever they're called these days. To the tune of many thousands of pounds. Not going to prison, though, being put in charge of the police.

The met have started Operation Tuleta, investigating computer hacking by the Murdoch empire, and the Mail have removed from their website all trace of one of the prime suspects, who was writing for them as recently as June.
Those who dream by night in the dusty recesses of their minds wake in the day to find that all was vanity; but the dreamers of the day are dangerous men, for they may act their dream with open eyes, and make it possible. -- Lawrence of Arabia
User avatar
Stephen Morgan
 
Posts: 3736
Joined: Thu Apr 19, 2007 6:37 am
Location: England
Blog: View Blog (9)

Re: Mark Duggan Shooting

Postby blanc » Thu Aug 18, 2011 3:47 am

The British justice system is supposed to be independent of political control. The pair of stolen shorts case demonstrates the lie.
blanc
 
Posts: 1946
Joined: Sun Feb 05, 2006 4:00 pm
Blog: View Blog (0)

Re: Mark Duggan Shooting

Postby semper occultus » Thu Aug 18, 2011 5:15 am

@S08
OK so Iwas waxing a bit apocalyptic - guess I'm still too pissed at seeing whole communities left twisting in the wind & totally undefended for 2-3 days but I'm talking trajectories here :
remember the fuel protests & the fragility & lack of resilience of the JIT society
& I'm not totally convinced that the weaponised clans of Mogadishu are that far removed from what could emerge in our metropolitan areas - I'm sure there are tranquil backwaters in Iraq & Afghanistan

not overly impressed with La Klein :
Locked away in a ballooning underclass with the few escape routes previously offered – a union job, a good affordable education – being rapidly sealed off.

whatever the cuts people still get free education up to 18 / A Level & free healthcare - what would that cost to buy off the shelf ?....that's still worth alot - we've still got massive frikken skill-shortages in this country & one of the rioters was an Oxford graduate wasn't he

this comment under the latest John Harris Grauniad article seems a brilliant expression of the exasperation that I see as a much truer represenation than Klein's nuanced sophistication of the motivation for some of those involved in what happened : highlighting the totally delusional & in my view utterly dangerous fallacies involved :

Well, I'm certainly not middle-class, and i'm all in favour of further riots - if that's what it takes to get this hideous system changed, then so be it. And yes, I don't personally care if the rioters burn down my house, as I don't own anything worth more than £50 anyway. Let them do their worst, i'll cheer them on quite happily. I'd rather die in a riot than live another year of corporate fascism.

If i was capable of making a bomb, i'd throw it at cameron without a qualm. He is responsible for the moral disintegration of society, and if I could take him down at the cost of my own life, I'll do so. Fuck him and his parasitic class,

If you had the chance to kill Hitler, would you take it? Yes, so would I.

I don't want to live in the society he is determined to shape. It makes me ashamed to be British.

Did you notice the police response to civil disorder? they were guarding Curries, and dixons, and Sainsburys, in preference to small businesses. don't think for one minute that the tories are on your side. They're not.


"if that's what it takes.."
in what possible way is this going to be what it "takes" to change anything in the direction the writer envisages ? Yeah lets crowd-source the solution to massively entrenched global socio-economic problems to these guys..
Image

I mean what could possibly go wrong ?

"Mr X ...Sauron is responsible for all evil in society & msut be smashed".....sorry there's a reason Lord of the Rings is shelved under fantasy...
User avatar
semper occultus
 
Posts: 2974
Joined: Wed Feb 08, 2006 2:01 pm
Location: London,England
Blog: View Blog (0)

Re: Mark Duggan Shooting

Postby semper occultus » Thu Aug 18, 2011 5:34 am

Stephen Morgan wrote:The met have started Operation Tuleta, investigating computer hacking by the Murdoch empire, and the Mail have removed from their website all trace of one of the prime suspects, who was writing for them as recently as June.


who was that ?
User avatar
semper occultus
 
Posts: 2974
Joined: Wed Feb 08, 2006 2:01 pm
Location: London,England
Blog: View Blog (0)

Re: Mark Duggan Shooting

Postby blanc » Thu Aug 18, 2011 8:00 am

I think the problem of what actually to do apart from riot to reverse the trend to corporate fascism has been exercising the minds of many who still think they have something to lose by chaos and bloodshed. Is there still a middle way?
blanc
 
Posts: 1946
Joined: Sun Feb 05, 2006 4:00 pm
Blog: View Blog (0)

Re: Mark Duggan Shooting

Postby Stephen Morgan » Thu Aug 18, 2011 8:53 am

semper occultus wrote:
Stephen Morgan wrote:The met have started Operation Tuleta, investigating computer hacking by the Murdoch empire, and the Mail have removed from their website all trace of one of the prime suspects, who was writing for them as recently as June.


who was that ?


Marunchak.
Those who dream by night in the dusty recesses of their minds wake in the day to find that all was vanity; but the dreamers of the day are dangerous men, for they may act their dream with open eyes, and make it possible. -- Lawrence of Arabia
User avatar
Stephen Morgan
 
Posts: 3736
Joined: Thu Apr 19, 2007 6:37 am
Location: England
Blog: View Blog (9)

Re: Mark Duggan Shooting

Postby Stephen Morgan » Thu Aug 18, 2011 8:59 am

semper occultus wrote:remember the fuel protests & the fragility & lack of resilience of the JIT society


The fuel protests were set up by the oil companies, I'm afraid.

not overly impressed with La Klein :
Locked away in a ballooning underclass with the few escape routes previously offered – a union job, a good affordable education – being rapidly sealed off.

whatever the cuts people still get free education up to 18 / A Level & free healthcare - what would that cost to buy off the shelf ?....that's still worth alot - we've still got massive frikken skill-shortages in this country & one of the rioters was an Oxford graduate wasn't he


Enforced activity during youth which results in a continued inability to read is not an education.
Those who dream by night in the dusty recesses of their minds wake in the day to find that all was vanity; but the dreamers of the day are dangerous men, for they may act their dream with open eyes, and make it possible. -- Lawrence of Arabia
User avatar
Stephen Morgan
 
Posts: 3736
Joined: Thu Apr 19, 2007 6:37 am
Location: England
Blog: View Blog (9)

Re: Mark Duggan Shooting

Postby Pele'sDaughter » Thu Aug 18, 2011 9:14 am

http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2011/au ... -messenger

Essex police charge man over water fight planned on BlackBerry Messenger

A 20-year-old is due in court after police discover alleged plans for a Colchester water fight circulating on BBM and Facebook

A man will appear before magistrates next month for allegedly trying to organise a mass water fight via his mobile phone.

The prime minister said last week that the government would investigate whether social networking platforms should be shut down if they helped to "plot" crime in the wake of the riots.

The 20-year-old from Colchester was arrested on Friday after Essex police discovered the alleged plans circulating on the BlackBerry Messenger service and Facebook.

The unnamed man has been charged with "encouraging or assisting in the commission of an offence" under the 2007 Serious Crime Act, police said.

He was arrested with another 20-year-old man the day the water fight was allegedly due to take place, and has been bailed to appear before Colchester magistrates on 1 September. The second man was released without charge.

The BlackBerry Messenger service, a closed communications network, was the social network of choice for organising many raids on shops and businesses during last week's riots in England.

A police spokesman declined to disclose whether Essex police had been monitoring the service since the riots. "Essex police use appropriate measures for whatever the crime and wherever our investigations lead us," he said.

Speaking during last Thursday's parliamentary debate on the riots, David Cameron said he would investigate whether social-networking sites should be shut down if they helped to "plot" crime. The prime minister said he would "look at whether it would be right to stop people communicating via these websites and services when we know they are plotting violence, disorder and criminality".

He has received support from some Tory backbenchers, including Louise Mensch, who likened such a ban to closing a stretch of rail network after an accident.

In 2008 there was a spate of mass water fights in British towns and cities that were organised through social networks. Most remained peaceful.This month a water fight attended by thousands of young Iranians attracted the attention of Tehran's morality police and led to a series of arrests.
Don't believe anything they say.
And at the same time,
Don't believe that they say anything without a reason.
---Immanuel Kant
User avatar
Pele'sDaughter
 
Posts: 1917
Joined: Thu Sep 13, 2007 11:45 am
Location: Texas
Blog: View Blog (0)

Re: Mark Duggan Shooting

Postby MacCruiskeen » Thu Aug 18, 2011 9:33 am

semper occultus wrote:
not overly impressed with La Klein


Well, I'm not the least bit impressed by your insinuation that Melanie Klein is some kind of mere diva or show-off.

semper occultus wrote:
Melanie Klein wrote:Locked away in a ballooning underclass with the few escape routes previously offered – a union job, a good affordable education – being rapidly sealed off.

whatever the cuts people still get free education up to 18 / A Level & free healthcare - what would that cost to buy off the shelf ?....that's still worth alot - we've still got massive frikken skill-shortages in this country & one of the rioters was an Oxford graduate wasn't he


1. You studiously ignore her point about the de-unionising of labour. Most jobs are a humiliation and worse than a waste of time, but a strong union can at least ensure that its members are not working [their lives away] for a pittance while subjected wholly to the whims of their users (aka 'employers').

2. "what would that cost to buy off the shelf ?" Yes, the ungrateful little beggars, eh? You've identified a market niche there, and it's crying out to be exploited. Let's make our children pay for school too. Their lifelong indebtedness can begin at the age of five rather than at the advanced age of 18. That'll learn 'em.

3. "one of the rioters was an Oxford graduate wasn't he." Have you never heard of youthful high jinks? In any case, even Oxford graduates can be unemployed or angry or both. (Not to mention greedy or opportunistic.) And I'd like to hear (from you, if possible) what proportion of those convicted were not Oxford graduates. Somewhere around 99.9%, I'd guess. Not that this has prevented people of a tabloid mentality from insisting that they're all nuffink but a bunch of spoiled, privileged brats.

People like me, we had it hard, y'know. Twenty-four of us in a plastic bag at the bottom of a septic pit.
"Ich kann gar nicht so viel fressen, wie ich kotzen möchte." - Max Liebermann,, Berlin, 1933

"Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts." - Richard Feynman, NYC, 1966

TESTDEMIC ➝ "CASE"DEMIC
User avatar
MacCruiskeen
 
Posts: 10558
Joined: Thu Nov 16, 2006 6:47 pm
Blog: View Blog (0)

Re: Mark Duggan Shooting

Postby Searcher08 » Thu Aug 18, 2011 11:27 am

blanc wrote:I think the problem of what actually to do apart from riot to reverse the trend to corporate fascism has been exercising the minds of many who still think they have something to lose by chaos and bloodshed. Is there still a middle way?


My impression from friends who are still in the strategy consulting world, is that twenty years ago, corporations that created things were still the key power. The people who worked in them were often fiercely loyal to them. The power basis seems to have changed dramatically these days, so that the financial sector dominates everything. Many famous companies are directly owned and managed by investment funds who are engaged in the 21st century equivalent of financial asset stripping. As an example Blackstone took over the UKs biggest care homes owner, sold all the properties made a massive gain then fucked off! The organisation was left in huge shit.

Big corporates used to be run by big ego people who wanted to make a pile of money for themselves, who wanted their corporation to outperform their rivals and who lived and breathed what their organisation actually DID (kind of the Apple / Steve Jobs model). I met and liked a lot of them. Some were like pirates, but they had passion.
Nowadays it's different.
Who the hell could get excited over working for an investment vehicle, like Carlyle or Blackstone? Where innovation is seen as a cost to be removed? That is as sane as saying "I weigh too much, so I are amputating my own limbs with a chainsaw". Many corporate cultures are becoming neo-feudal with Owners coming in , organising the Serfs to transfer all their wealth, then the Owners bugger off ensuring catastrophic financial famine. There is no interest in MAKING something
or being of SERVICE to others.

A friend who worked as a very senior public sector IT guy described - staff who had NO interest in what they were doing, only their own positional advancement. Like a game of The Apprentice with him seen as Alan Sugar. There was an attitude of 'tick-boxing' with no common sense. Huge IT projects were held up due to things like "redoing all Powerpoint presentations so that only Verdana font is used for the headings". Like closing a railway station until the rubbish bins were replaced with ones 1.5 inches taller to ensure standardisation

So there is a confluence of:

The only purpose of more and more systems is becoming a financial one

The extinction of the system seen as irrelevant after resource transfer

Resource extraction is done as an exercise in unsustainable one-off financial engineering, not as improving sustainable efficiency (vampirism not corporate fitness)

As this happens, the part of the system which looks outside and to the future and anticipates change, collapses completely - all this turns inwards into compliance enforcement.

For the system to still function during the looting, complexity must be reduced - this is achieved by removing innovation, looking internally only and unleashing an army of 'tick-boxers' who are utterly dissociated from their work, so normal goodwill based human-human social interaction is drastically curtailed


:lol2: :lol2: :lol2: Fekkin great, eh?
User avatar
Searcher08
 
Posts: 5887
Joined: Thu Dec 20, 2007 10:21 am
Blog: View Blog (0)

Re: Mark Duggan Shooting

Postby ilyinternet » Thu Aug 18, 2011 12:20 pm

blanc wrote:Is there still a middle way?

my 2p worth:

Peaceful demonstration? Iraq war protests. No.

Vote in new political party at the next general election that takes care of our interests and can't be bought off/lobbied? lol. No

Get everyone on near enough the same wavelength that a gradual slow change in consciousness/politics is inevitable? Nah. People are still divided.

These riots are a great example. My facebook account friends were split about 60/40 with the 60 being more or less sympathetic to the riots and the other 40 being daily mail. I'm a standard 'educated' middle class 26 year old and have friends on facebook from about 18-28 years old. If the educated yoof can't all get behind it or at least try to understand the reasons why it's taking place then perhaps we should worry. The benefit scrounger meme is particularly powerful. If only it could be flip-reversed to attack those at the opposite end of society.

Basically we need more welfare cuts, higher taxes, more poverty etc before a movement towards greater equality can take place. The msm/the majority won't acknowledge the state of the country until it directly affects them and by then it might be too late.
User avatar
ilyinternet
 
Posts: 55
Joined: Wed Nov 04, 2009 3:14 am
Location: Bristol, UK
Blog: View Blog (0)

Re: Mark Duggan Shooting

Postby AhabsOtherLeg » Thu Aug 18, 2011 1:41 pm

These not been posted yet?

David Starkey is becoming black:





Couple of different versions out there already, all pretty good.
"The universe is 40 billion light years across and every inch of it would kill you if you went there. That is the position of the universe with regard to human life."
User avatar
AhabsOtherLeg
 
Posts: 3285
Joined: Sun Dec 30, 2007 8:43 pm
Blog: View Blog (0)

Re: Mark Duggan Shooting

Postby AhabsOtherLeg » Thu Aug 18, 2011 5:42 pm

semper occultus wrote:I never figured you as an apostle of privatisation Ahab but the corollary of all this "bring-it-on"-ism & "what-do-you-expect"-ism & "its-like-the-bullingdon-club"-ism & the frigging Boston-tea-party is anyone with a grievance or illegal lifestyle choice is entitled to make up their own laws ( & yeah I know the US mortgage banks are busily doing it & look where that's getting us )...because if anything "they" do is fine for these bally-clad, brick-wielding shock-troops for a fairer society then everyone caught in the middle goes to hell in a hand cart....so what was it, only about 4 or 5 dead this time around but extrapolate forward & I don't see that leading anywhere good..anyone !?

in Croydon, that desolate inner-city hell-hole Croydon "its about showing the police we can do what we want..."...I've never lived in a lawless society & I have no wish to or come within 100 miles of it & projecting progressive fantasies onto those who do is fraught with the liklihood of terrible disappointment - by all means rebuild the social contract but calls for pretty radical change on both sides of the contract.

from a kid I have always & will always hate & fear violence - not always for the highest of motives, quite selfish & cowardly ones actually because absolutley no feat of imaginative gymnastics could ever put me anywhere else except in the shoes of those poor bastards cowering behind their front door in a flat over a kebab-shop whilst a crowd of wilding "gangstas" start torching the place or of some other poor bastard who god forbid tries to stop them & bacuase when advanced as a political solution the ultimate results are uterly uncontrollable & unpredictbale , except that once the state retreats then what takes its place is not likely to be desirable or preferable "chaos or fascism or warlordism" - looking over that precipice you can see the quickest way to Mogadishu, the skeletal structure is already in place : the organised crime gangs & street gangs basically taking over control of areas by outright violence & intimidation, those cuddly organisations that gang-rape your mother or sister if you don't join or otherwise knuckle-under, whatever anyone says their presence around the nasty core of these events is discernible at the very least - anyone thinking Theresa May is the last word in frikken oppression wait til people like that get the upper-hand - what are the RI community going to do to control them - go in waving a copy of the latest Slavoj Zizek at them ?


I don't know where you got the idea that I totally loved the riots and can't wait for more of them, Semper. That's not the case. I tried to make it clear, unnecessarily I would've hoped, that I think the five dead - six now, if the stabbing of the 14 year old in Enfield yesterday was directly related to the riots in some way - are a tragedy, a complete waste of life, and inexcusable. The 200 or more people made homeless and thrown into financial ruin - do you think I'm sitting here celebrating that as a victory for my non-existent revolution, which I've never called for? The most I've called for - and rest assured that nobody listens to me anyway - is a general strike, though I am of course aware that violence would inevitably come with that, mainly in the form of retaliation from the state if it went on long enough to have any effect or do any good.

I'm not looking at the guy in Birmingham who lost both his brothers in the same day and thinking, "heh, you aint seen nothing yet". FFS. But it could all have been a lot worse. It really could, and very nearly was.

The idea that I support some kind of British dekulakization, where small shopkeepers and furniture store owners are liquidated as a class by street gangs who constitute "socially friendly elements" to my hoped-for regime, and that I'll be out there waving them on with my copy of Slavoj Zizek as I encourage them to overthrow the Tories is pretty offensive. I would of course use Gramsci for that kind of thing.

What are you actually talking about anyway? I am not sitting here praying that the underclass will turn on and devour those only marginally better off than them (and in some cases even worse off than them) for the simple reason that I'd be one of the first to go. And no, I wouldn't be any happier if they'd torn up Knightsbridge or Kensington either, or Bearsden to bring it closer to home.

Whitehall, though, well... no, I suppose there are innocents there too. And if the rioters had headed down that way, all the people who wanted the army out on the streets would've gotten their wish pretty quick. I hear a battalion of the Irish Guards was put on standby for that eventuality.

So you won't hear much "bring-it-on" ism from me.

A bit of "what-do-you-expect" ism, though, yes, of course.

Everyone saw large scale civil unrest coming, years ago, not just the MOD. Seamus' thread showed that the police have been talking about a "Summer of Rage" since 2009 - when they actually released a statement saying they were "up for it". It's all been on the boil for ages. I've only ever said here that large scale violence was likely, if not inevitable, and that it would not be wholly unconnected to "the cuts", and the general attitude a Tory (or generally neoliberal) government displays and encourages among it's people. I never said I was looking forward to it or thought it would be brilliant.

London is not going to become Mogadishu just because Theresa May gets driven out of office, which I still hope to see. It might even improve a bit if she goes, and the rest of this government too. I expect it would, they're useless.

Here's the thing. Clegg and Cameron are pretty much calling for one-off extra-harsh sentences to be passed on mostly young and, let's say, disadvantaged vandals, looters, and arsonists. They both got let off easy in their own youth on the same kind of charges (repeatedly in Cameron's case, though I doubt that charges were ever brought in the first place).

Clegg's career could've been over at age sixteen if he was from a different background, the kind of background most of the looters come from. Pointing that out is not going to bring our civillization crashing down around us, or encourage more riots to occur, but the constant repetition of these vast, glaring, honking inequalities in the application of the law, pretty openly on class grounds, just might.
"The universe is 40 billion light years across and every inch of it would kill you if you went there. That is the position of the universe with regard to human life."
User avatar
AhabsOtherLeg
 
Posts: 3285
Joined: Sun Dec 30, 2007 8:43 pm
Blog: View Blog (0)

Re: Mark Duggan Shooting

Postby seemslikeadream » Thu Aug 18, 2011 5:59 pm

Caught Up in Nightmare: Killing Jack Rabbits
This post took shape in my mind over the last week, as I read and listened to further reaction to the riots in England. I didn't want to write what follows, and I thought about jettisoning this essay altogether more than once. The reason is very simple: the thesis I offer here, and the connections I will make, are profoundly disturbing. If we -- and by "we," I refer in this context to the West generally -- continue on our current path, our future will be increasingly bloody and murderous. But this shouldn't surprise us: the ruling class now visits on its domestic populations the same fate it has delivered for hundreds of years to those deeply unfortunate peoples who lived in targeted foreign countries. In their pursuit of power, wealth and dominion, the ruling class systematically brutalized, tortured, "relocated" and murdered those foreign peoples in vast numbers. (All this continues today, of course; see Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Somalia, Yemen, et al.) This is the program that the governments of the United States, England and other countries now bring home. I think it is of some value to look ahead to see what awaits us; among other things, you may take such precautions as are possible.

In my article last week, I mentioned the repeating pattern in the reaction of the ruling class and its defenders to popular uprisings. The current protests are condemned as "lawless" and "criminal," as representing the actions of what are almost certainly (in the ruling class's view) irredeemably "bad" elements of society. But the elites insist that some protests arise out of what the elites will kindly grant are "legitimate" grievances -- but all such valid protests are always those safely tucked away in the past. The elites neglect to mention that at the time those past protests occurred, the elites similarly condemned them as "lawless" and "criminal," as representing the actions of what were almost certainly (in the elite's view) irredeemably "bad" elements of society.

Ashley Dawson amplifies this theme:

The killing of [Mark] Duggan took place within the context of Operation Trident, a special arm of the MPS established in 1998 to investigate gun crime in London’s black communities. More recently, the MPS launched Operation Razorback in order to crack down on “troublemakers” planning to attend this year’s carnival in Notting Hill. As British activist Darcus Howe explained in a recent interview, these police operations come on top of a broader transformation in police-community relations facilitated by the war on terror that has allowed the police to engage in unimpeded stop, search, and arrest operations in Britain’s Black communities.

Despite the fact that most British police do not carry guns, being arrested in the UK is no joke. As Caroline Davies reported in an article earlier this year, 333 people have died in or following police custody in the UK over the last eleven years; not a single member of the police has been convicted for any of these deaths.

This pattern of police dragnets in Black communities has deep historical roots. As I discuss in my book Mongrel Nation, Black communities were targeted during the 1970s and 1980s by very similar special operations. In 1981, for example, Operation Swamp deployed huge numbers of police into the predominantly Black neighborhood of Brixton in South London. Margaret Thatcher’s conservative government oversaw the revival of Victorian “sus” laws that allowed police to detain anyone who they suspected might be either breaking or about to break the law. Not surprisingly, young Black men were disproportionately targeted, and a significant number of deaths in police custody ensued. In 1981, riots broke out in Brixton and quickly spread to Black, Asian, and white working class neighborhoods of cities such as Birmingham and Manchester.

Exactly the same pattern is repeating itself today. Given this fact, it’s worth remembering how these uprisings were framed at the time. The most trenchant account of urban unrest of the time, Policing the Crisis, suggested that urban “criminality” needed to be placed in the context of the organic crisis of the British state and society. For Stuart Hall and his fellow contributors, public fears about “mugging” (which anticipated and legitimated draconian tactics such as Operation Swamp that sparked the Brixton riots) were a moral panic that condensed much broader fears and redirected those fears onto the scapegoated figure of the “immigrant.” For the contributors to Policing the Crisis, that is, fears about crime helped authorities contain a much broader crisis in Britain.
...

In response to these interwoven economic and ideological crises, elites in Britain, the United States, and other developed countries gradually cobbled together the hegemonic project we now know as neo-liberalism. The lineaments of neo-liberalism of course included smashing institutions of working class power, shrinking and/or privatizing the redistributive arm of the state, and beefing up the state’s security apparatus. Hall and his colleagues called this approach popular authoritarianism.

A key element of popular authoritarianism, according to Policing the Crisis, was pinning the cause of the organic crisis on the figure of Black immigrant. Black communities had of course been hyper-exploited and, in tandem, economically marginalized for decades in Britain. Nevertheless, the underground economies that developed as a result were taken out of context and classified as criminal in a process that tended to pathologize entire communities and to treat criminality as a purely racial issue. Policing the Crisis elaborates a theory of Britain’s Black communities as part of an international surplus labor population whose outsider status allowed them to be demonized by British authorities in order to explain away their inability to establish a socially and economically just society. Both the Tories and the Labour Party cooperated in this scapegoating of Britain’s Black population, as a survey of the increasingly racialized elements of immigration legislation demonstrates.


The "broader crisis" of the 1980s to which Dawson refers has returned today with a vengeance. England and the United States are hollowed-out societies, with their former productive capacity vanishing at an ever-increasing rate. In close alliance with the State, the most powerful and wealthiest corporations continue to amass record profits, but only by siphoning up every last bit of wealth held by the numerically greatest, but otherwise weakest and most defenseless, part of the population. Every significant piece of legislation must be viewed in this context. This is true even of legislation which styles itself as concerning matters which would not appear to be directed to policing the "undesirable" elements of the population. Thus, Obama's heralded "health reform" bill, which I dubbed The Fuck You Act, has very little to do with providing health care, but everything to do with brutally controlling the weakest segments of society and extracting what little money they have left for the benefit of already vastly wealthy insurance companies and their constant partner, the State.

Although it is perilous to make such judgments as events continue to unfold, the evidence strongly compels the conclusion that we have entered the death spiral for the West's ruling class. The disfavored members of society have less and less economic resources of their own to be extracted, and fewer (and often non-existent) opportunities for improving them. Simultaneously (and inextricably connected to this point), the same disfavored members are increasingly unable to defend themselves in any area of their lives. The growing surveillance State watches over them day and night, privacy approaches the point of complete eradication, and the State continually adds to the weapons it uses to harass, intimidate, brutalize and imprison them. The State's methods of control are increasingly, brazenly explicit and crueler by the day.

As the society's resources continue to dwindle, the problem of the "surplus population" becomes more acute for the ruling class. The State now controls a population which is far larger than the ruling class finds useful for its purposes. What do States do in such situations? As much as we understandably resist stating the obvious conclusion, we would be well-advised to face it now: the State kills the especially disfavored parts of its population -- those who cannot work, those who are old and/or sick, those who produce nothing the ruling class finds of value.

If we broaden our perspective, and if we look beyond particular developments and attempt to grasp what is happening over a longer period of time, the nature of the horror that awaits us takes on a clearer shape: The West's ruling class is embarked on a program of killing and elimination. A general caution should be kept in mind. I'm not suggesting that this program is one that the ruling class has explicitly identified, even to itself, at least not necessarily. The ruling class is intent upon increasing its own power and wealth; in one sense, that is its only concern. I suppose, in some fantasy world, the ruling class would be content to enjoy its immense power and wealth while "ordinary" people pursue their own lives of contentment. This, of course, is the goal which the ruling class announces, and which it desperately tries to convince both itself and us is true.

But we don't live in that fantasy world. In this world -- and, I would argue, in any world where brute power is the final means of settling every dispute, especially when that power is consolidated in the State -- the ruling class seeks power and wealth by dominating and controlling the weaker segments of society. The ruling class may not set out to kill those people it finds unnecessary for its aims, but if the ruling class can maintain and increase its power and wealth only by eliminating them, it will eventually eliminate them. This is the logic of the ruling class's desires. It is certainly true that the ruling class could change much of this if it wished to: the productive capacity of both England and the United States could be reinvigorated, and much new wealth could be created and enjoyed by many more members of society. But the ruling class believes that would necessitate the diminishment of its power and wealth, so they will not consider the possibility seriously.

The ruling class dreamed a nightmare, and made it real. We are now caught up in it. For many of us -- certainly for me, and very possibly for you -- the end result is clear: the ruling class intends to kill us. Not today or tomorrow, the ruling class hasn't reached that point of desperation quite yet, but they'll kill us soon enough. We have no value to them; we're superfluous; we're not needed.

A killing by the State was the spark that ignited the London riots; many more killings by the State are where the ruling class's chosen reaction will inevitably lead it. We can note several signposts along the road through the nightmare. As I noted above, the State will exert increasingly brutal means of control and punishment:

Ministers and the security services are planning draconian powers to shut down or disrupt mobile phone messaging services and social networks in times of civil disorder.

...

Mr Cameron, promising yesterday to do "whatever it takes" to restore order, outlined a series of new security measures, which included:

* Consider further powers of curfew.

* Investigate using the Army to free up police for "frontline" duties.

* Give individual police officers the power to force people to remove scarves, hoods or masks covering their faces or be arrested.

* Extend "gang injunctions" banning teenagers as well as adults from associating with each other or visiting designated areas. The Government will also consult former New York Police commissioner Bill Bratton on further measures to tackle gang culture.

Mr Cameron confirmed that a parliamentary debate would be held on whether convicted looters should lose their benefits after more than 100,000 people had signed an e-petition calling for it. He also backed several local authorities – among them Nottingham, Salford, Greenwich and Westminster – who have said they will seek to evict social tenants who are convicted of being involved in rioting.


Before the ruling class finally eliminates the "undesirables," there is a necessary preceding step: the most disfavored, weakest elements of society must be demonized. I heard the following article first mentioned by Rush Limbaugh; it was quickly picked up by many conservative commentators (including self-identified "libertarians"). Limbaugh praised the article in glowing terms; he thought it identified the crucial issue in especially eloquent terms. For Limbaugh, the crucial issue was one made familiar in connection with history's bloodiest and most horrifying episodes of mass murder, although Limbaugh himself failed to note that fact. I'm sure it was merely an oversight. The crucial issue is, obviously, that the rioters are, as Limbaugh summarized it, "human only by virtue of their DNA." The rioters are not actually human at all; they are sub-human, animals deserving only to be put down.

From the article:

If you live a normal life of absolute futility, which we can assume most of this week’s rioters do, excitement of any kind is welcome. The people who wrecked swathes of property, burned vehicles and terrorised communities have no moral compass to make them susceptible to guilt or shame.

...

They are essentially wild beasts. I use that phrase advisedly, because it seems appropriate to young people bereft of the discipline that might make them employable; of the conscience that distinguishes between right and wrong.

They respond only to instinctive animal impulses — to eat and drink, have sex, seize or destroy the accessible property of others.

Their behaviour on the streets resembled that of the polar bear which attacked a Norwegian tourist camp last week. They were doing what came naturally and, unlike the bear, no one even shot them for it.

A former London police chief spoke a few years ago about the ‘feral children’ on his patch — another way of describing the same reality.

The article offers much, much more in the same vein if you have the stomach for it.

A day or two later, Limbaugh found another article that he deemed equally penetrating. This article speaks not only of London, but of "black mobs" intent on destroying America. This paragraph summarizes the perspective:

Let’s return to the question of why. Many have absolute confidence about what we are witnessing. They can surely imagine the whispers of Wormwood to a thousand Patients. Delighted that the Mob has bypassed the gradual path toward evil, they can imagine him basking in the heat of burning double deckers in Peckham. They know who delights in a father’s dream for his daughter destroyed. Others perhaps imagine Legion, who admits in the Gospel of Mark, “We are many,” before being cast into the maniacal herd of pigs by Christ. No longer simply pigs, the maniacal herd for our times now roams London and stalks families in Milwaukee and Akron.


This leads directly to an entry on the widely-read and influential Instapundit, which reads as follows in its entirety:

IN THE UK, a changed mood.

UPDATE: Reader Brent Salmons emails:

I just got back from a two year stint living in London, and I found that I generally agreed with Allister Heath’s editorials in the City Paper. But I’m conservative even by US standards, so all of my British friends thought that I was an extreme right-winger. Allister Heath is also pretty far to the right by British political standards and, as such, may be fooling himself.

That said, I just spoke with one of my friends in London (a Labour voter) and she said that the rioters should have been shot in the streets and then proceeded to complain about paying taxes to pay for those “do nothings”. So, perhaps Mr. Heath is correct after all.


We’ll see.


I assume I do not need to spell out why I find that "We'll see" far, far beyond abominable.

I began by observing that the West's ruling class has brought home to its domestic population -- systematically and with increasing brutality -- the barbaric, murderous behavior it has visited on much weaker, comparatively defenseless foreign peoples for centuries. You will find a discussion of that argument in, "Terrorist State, Abroad and At Home." (I emphatically note that the West's ruling class obviously has already brutalized and killed huge numbers of especially disfavored peoples at home as well, but I've focused on a separate element of the same lethal compound in this essay. For a discussion of America's treatment of Native Americans and Black Americans, see this article, particularly the second section entitled, "Torture and the American Project.")

To close this admittedly grim analysis -- but then, I did say we were discussing a living nightmare -- let us return to the viciously brutal war the United States waged in the Philippines over a hundred years ago. As I've periodically noted, the Philippines episode established the pattern the U.S. followed in countless subsequent foreign interventions. It is the identical pattern that the ruling class has begun to reenact in England and the United States (and in other Western countries as well, to be sure).

The following excerpt is from Paul A. Kramer's, The Blood of Government: Race, Empire, the United States, and the Philippines. You will find additional excerpts in, "The Mythology of the 'Good Guy' American."

Here is Kramer:

On the ground, racial terms like "gugu" and "nigger" both reflected and enabled a broadening of the enemy. In their letters and diaries, U.S. soldiers sometimes attached them to descriptions of combat status -- such as "nigger army" -- which, in effect, made them racialized terms for "insurgent." In some cases, they continued to distinguish combatants and non-combatants, referring to the latter as "natives" or "Filipinos." But in other cases, soldiers used both "gugu" and "nigger" to refer explicitly to noncombatants. "At meals [sic] times there are always a lot of little 'gugus' around, each with his tin can, begging scraps to eat," wrote Perry Thompson. Peter Lewis described how "the Niggers keep going to Church" on Easter. ...

Racial terms and exterminist sentiment were at the center of the most popular of the U.S. Army's marching songs, which marked the Filipino population as a whole as the enemy and made killing Filipinos the only means to their civilization....

...

One Nebraskan soldier boasted to his parents of his comrades' bold, aggressive fighting spirit, restrained only by officers' reticence. "If they would turn the boys loose," he wrote, "there wouldn't be a nigger left in Manila twelve hours later." ...

Racial exterminist impulses were also in evidence in U.S. soldiers' descriptions of violence against prisoners and civilians. The American torture of prisoners -- some fraction of which appeared in soldiers' letters, newspaper accounts, and court-martial proceedings -- was often, if not always, justified as a means of intelligence-gathering. The most notorious form of torture by the American side, if far from the only one, was the "water cure," in which a captured Filipino was interrogated while drowned with buckets of filthy water poured into his mouth. The scale of its practice and the frequency of death remain difficult if not impossible to establish.

...

Along with torturing them, U.S. soldiers also killed Filipino prisoners. Rumors of "no-prisoners" orders were common. Arthur C. Johnson of the Colorado Volunteers, for example, reported as early as February 1899 that Manila's prisons were already overflowing, and "the fiat is said to have gone forth that no more prisoners are to be taken"; he anticipated that "the Filipino death list promises to correspondingly increase." ...

The ultimate form of exterminist war was the killing of acknowledged noncombatants. As early as April 12, 1899, an entry in Chriss Bell's diary took derecognition to its furthest extension: Filipinos had already "caused so much trouble & murdered so many of our boys" that U.S. soldiers "recognize them no longer but shoot on sight all natives. Natives will not or cannot understand kind & civilized treatment. If you treat them as equals they will think you are afraid of them & murder you."

...

One of the most banal and brutal manifestations of racialization was U.S. soldiers' imagination of war as hunting. The Manila occupation and "friendly policy" had frustrated martial masculinity; the metaphor of the hunt made war, at last, into masculine self-fulfillment. All at once, a language of hunting bestialized Filipinos made sense of guerrilla war to American troops, and joined the latter in manly fraternity. "I don't know when the thing will let out," wrote Louis Hubbard one week into the war, "and don't care as we are having lots of excitement. It makes me think of killing jack rabbits."

...

The most notorious orders of indiscriminate killing were Gen. Jacob H. Smith's late October 1901 instructions to Marine Maj. Littleron W.T. Waller, following Filipino revolutionaries' successful surprise attack against U.S. soldiers at Balangiga on the island of Samar, to make reprisals against the entire population of the island. "I want no prisoners," he had directed. "I wish you to kill and burn." Smith ordered "all persons killed who are capable of bearing arms in actual hostilities against the United States." When Waller had asked the general for clarification, Smith stated that he considered any person over the age of ten "capable of bearing arms." The interior of Samar must be made "a howling wilderness!" The direct result of these instructions was systematic destruction and killing on a vast scale.


I had planned to offer a few final thoughts here. But I find I'm unable to write more on this subject right now.

These matters are too terrible, too profoundly horrifying.
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
Don’t forget that.
User avatar
seemslikeadream
 
Posts: 32090
Joined: Wed Apr 27, 2005 11:28 pm
Location: into the black
Blog: View Blog (83)

PreviousNext

Return to General Discussion

Who is online

Users browsing this forum: No registered users and 39 guests