liberalism

‘If You Tolerate This Then Your Children Will Be Next’

Activism, creative direct action, Culture, Democratic (in)action, liberalism, Life under Capitalism, Police Murder, Policing
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Today is the 40th anniversary of the National Guard’s shootings of student Vietnam War protestors at Kent State University in Ohio.

Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose – earlier today Martin posted about unwarranted police violence at a peaceable, permitted May Day protest in Rotterdamand this was his view on why the police attacked non-agressive, unarmed protesters:

I doubt that the police has explicitly gotten orders to crack down on political protests. If I had to guess I’d think that it’s a side effect to the Rotterdam police overreacting to what happened at the Hoek van Holland beach party of August last year — where inept policing and rioting football hooligans led to the police accidently shooting and killing an innocent man. Since then the Rotterdam police has become a lot harsher in dealing with potentially dangerous situations and since leftist demonstrations of this kind have always been seen as worrisome by them, it’s no surprise that this happened. Wrong, but not surprising.

I have to say, with all due respect, I disagree. Vehemently. State violence against dissenters is EU policy and therefore Dutch policy too.

The authorities’ violent response in Rotterdam, along with those at Kent State, Genoa, the G8 and G20 protests, Seattle, Minneapolis St. Paul, New York and countless other peaceful protests worldwide are part of an organised pattern of oppression and the silencing of popular opinion by supposedly democratic governments.Like I said back in 2007 when the Canadian police attacked a demo:

Protest isn’t all pink tutus, dogs on strings and rainbow flags: it can be fatal. Remember Carlo Giuliani, shot in the face, his head split like a melon by the wheel of a police landrover at Genoa? That’s what our democratic police are capable of when governments and elected representatives won’t listen and citizens feel forced to take to the streets to exercise their right to protest.

And the worst of it is, we’ve let them do it to us; rather than fight back, we’ve gone home scared, to watch ‘V For Vendetta’ on DVD and wish we could be braver human beings.

But it’s not very surprising is it, when just walking innocently through a demo on your way home from work can get you dead.

Oppressive violence against political dissenters is a feature of life under capitalism. After all, there’s money to be made from it:

Paramilitary political police on both sides of the Atlantic need only a discreet nod from the pols (and sometimes not even that) to go in joyfully and with boots, taser and fists. They love that sort of thing: that’s why they’re police. For every saintly murdered copper, devoted village bobby or innocuous deputy sheriff there are ten barely-controlled thugs with plenty of hate and plenty of gusto.

Every now and then they get let off the leash and someone notices. This time is was Salon. Then it all goes back to normal and soon these incidents just become part of the wallpaper of normal life, like warrantless wiretapping, torture, routine tasering or prison rape.

For anyone to expect that police on any continent will do anything but suppress any person or movement that might put their industry or jobs in jeopardy is very naive indeed.

I hate to keep quoting myself, but I don’t see the point of saying the same things year upon year in slightly different words. Police violence against dissenters is no occasional incident; to use that hackneyed phrase I’ve used so many times before, it isn’t a bug, it’s a feature.

Our leaders can waffle on about their commitment to liberty band fredom for all – and don’t they just, here’s Gordon Brown pontificating on the subject in April 2008:

Among the measures he announced were:

• New rights of protest. This will mean watering down laws – introduced just four years ago – that ban any unauthorised protest within one kilometre of the Palace of Westminster.

• New rights of access to public information by extending the Freedom of Information Act to companies carrying out public functions, such as private prisons.

• Entrenched freedoms of the press to carry out investigative journalism.

• A review of the rule that allows Cabinet papers to be seen automatically only after 30 years.

• New rights against invasion of property after it emerged there are 250 laws allowing state agents to enter a home.

• A debate about a British Bill of Rights and Duties and the possibility of a written constitution.

Have we seen any of these things? Have we hell. We know what politicians mean when they waffle on about freedom:

That’s what the ‘freedom’ in Bush & Blair’s constantly reiterated talking point means – the freedom for capital to be entirely free of restraints, legal, moral or physical. The ‘democracy’ part refers to the periodic tv ratings contests that we laughingly call elections – and any pretence to those being free and fair is long gone, in the UK as well as the US. It doesn’t matter who you vote for really.
Even if you do go through the motions of voting, the only real power your representatives have is the power to decide which lobbyist’s request they will accede to, and what the quid pro quo will be.

The real business of governing, ie how to manage the electorate’s money, is done by unelected trade representatives, at talks in luxury settings, protected against dissent by cordons sanitaires of barbed wire and armed troops, for the benefit of those whose generous capital donations keep those governments triumphant in the ratings wars and in power.

And until we all get a bit braver, and have the gumption to stand firm in the face of state violence and tyranny, to fight back even, there’ll be even more Kent States.

UPDATE:

This sort of gumption:

A group of around 20 school teachers forced their way into the television studios of Greece’s state broadcaster NET on Monday evening, to protest against the government’s austerity programme.

Reasoned argument considered harmful

liberalism, Media, US politics, Wingnuts
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John Emerson says:

People used to say that the media weren’t really right wing, but were just sucking up to Bush because they worship power and success. But if that were true, we should be seeing them sucking up to Obama and the Democrats now. They aren’t. Instead, what we’re seeing on TV these days is more of the same: President McCain, and President Boehner, and President Lindsey Graham, and President Snowe, and President Gingrich, and a couple of dozen other Republican Presidents. The slant has scarcely changed at all.

One of the reasons I gave up on America is the feebleness of the Democratic and liberal response to the increasingly conservative slant of the media. We’re long past the time when it made sense to be surprised by anything they do, and we should understand by now that they know what they’re doing and are going to keep on doing it. Squeals of rage about their egregious dishonesty, incompetence, and nastiness just make them laugh.

Coincidently, over at SEK’s place, Rich Puchalsky says something similar about engaging winguts:

What really tires me out about these posts is how strenuously you argue against whatever nonsense you’re writing about. Look, you say, I will painstakingly trace back through the process and show that it is constitutional at every stage! It’s like a rigorous, logical proof, following from simple first principles, that a shit-throwing monkey should not in fact throw shit at people.

John says liberals should stop being surprised at the media being rightwing, Rich says they should stop being surprised about lying wingnuts. Both have a point. The liberal blogosphere has long had a problem with realising that rightwing bias and wingnut lying are not abberations that can be corrected through reasoned debate, that they continue to occur because they’re profitable. Wingnut makes for good copy, while rightwing commentary is rewarded by advertisers where leftwing commentary is not. This is not a new development and those who object to Chomsky teaching them this, should take a look at A. J. Liebling, showing the same influences at work twenty years earlier. Hell, the same dynamics were already at work in the original yellow press.

Both socialists and anarchists have long known that you cannot ask for change, you need to force change on your opponents one way or another. Liberals, unlike rightwingers have failed to internalise this message because they’ve been in charge for so long and had had teh real left to fight their battles for them. Now that they find themselves cast out as well, it’s high time they learned it.

Tracking with closeups (2): Michael Moore

liberalism, Life under Capitalism, US politics
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Louis Proyect reviews Capitalism: a Love Story:

Despite its formulaic quality and despite some very dubious politics, I have no problem recommending Michael Moore’s “Capitalism: a Love Story”. Since there are so few movies (or television shows) that reveal the human side of the largest economic crisis since the 1930s, we must be grateful to Michael Moore for his steadfast dedication to the underdog. Except for Andrew and Leslie Cockburn’s American Casino, a documentary that covers pretty much the same terrain as Moore but without his impish humor, there’s nothing out of Hollywood that would give you the slightest inkling of the scale of human suffering.

Not quite a fullblooded recommendation, but note that it’s a critical review coming from the left of Moore, rather than the more usual puritian out of hand rejection of Moore and his movies by supposedly serious liberals. The Exile is on their case, as per usual.

Meanwhile some annoying rightwinger or other finds it interesting that Moore was financied with Goldman Sachs money in the kind of tedious gotcha aimed at any critic of capitalism. If you’re rich and succesful, you’re a hypocrite; if you’re not, you’re just jealous.

Much more examples of rightwing froth at Google’s blogsearch.

This is what I think Moore does best and seemed to have achieved again with Capitalism: a Love Story: breaking open the accepted limits of political debate. He shocks both liberals and rightwingers into defensiveness because he touches a nerve. He reminds both groups that the system they’ve both invested in is fatally flawed and has been for a long time, that there is a world outside the Beltway that can’t be captured in statistics and dry information.

Comment of The Day

Comment of the Day, liberalism, Life under Capitalism
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Hello again. Did I miss anything?

Anyway first day back online after a leisurely summer being poked prodded, dialysed and made hideously and explosively sick with antibiotics and weird blood chemistry and already I have my CoTD, on the death of Ted Kennedy. Exactamundo, WILFSSON:

WILFSSON

27 Aug 09, 2:12am (about 6 hours ago)

‘He became one of the great senators of our time’ says Obama and the Washington claque echoes him.

But, great as in comparison to who – or rather what?

Joe Biden? John Kerry? Jesse Helms? Hilary Clinton? John Edwards?

Considering a forty-year Senate career in which virtually every member has been a bought and paid for corporate hack, the question of greatness is surely rather moot.

He may have endorsed Obama, he may have helped the NI peace process but for all his eloquence on democracy and justice he would never have been in office had Kennedy senior not been a fascist, a bootlegger and an arms dealer Ambassador to Britain and Chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission who essentially bought his sons into office with both money and influence. “We’re going to sell Jack like soap flakes” he said. Ted Kennedy was a rich man from a rich family who expected to have political power.

So he lost two brothers to political assassination – “Hello. I’m Edwardus Kennedius Maximus, brother of a murdered politician, brother of another murdered politician” – but just because you’ve been bereaved it doesn’t make you any more moral. If that were the case humanity would’ve reached a much greater state of moral perfection by now.

He was untrustworthy in marital life and drove his first wife to drink with his many blatant affairs. He drank massively, which was a running joke in the media. Under the influence of drink and at a surprisingly late stage in his ‘distinguished’ life and career he played a very shady role in the commission and cover-up of a drunken rape by his nephew.

This is greatness?

There are those who will argue that tangled private life and personal peccadilloes like a few affairs and a constant smell of whisky have no bearing on the political greatness or otherwise of any given powerful man (because a woman would never recieve such generosity from the media, but that’s a whole other subject). It’s what He Does, not what he does that’s important – political achievements are somehow supposed to outweight complete arsery.

And he was an arse. What it always, always came back to for me with Kennedy is that the distinguished senator and sprig of American nobility left a girl to drown in a car wreck. He ran to save his own skin, and then he lied about it. He simply did not care whether she was alive or dead, provided he and his family not have any trouble. To me it said all that needed be said about his basic humanity, irrelevant of his politics.

Mind you I can’t let Kennedy politics go completely unremarked. They were of the white-bread, business as usual, carry on guys, let’s do a deal here school of politics, leavened with a hefty dose of guilt-fuelled ‘Hey, let’s be a little nicer to the servants, then we won’t have to deal with too much unpleasantness’ and a soupcon of “Oh yeah, lets give a concessions to the chicks, too while we’re at it. That’ll get me laid at least once.”.

Don’t get me started on the Kennedys and the Catholic church. I’ll be here all bloody day.

Eating ‘Umble Pie

Civil liberties, Crisis? What Crisis?, Gordon Brown, Internet, IT is not magic pixie dust, liberalism, Manufacturing consent, New Labour, Socialism, UK elections, UK politics
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uriahheep

Pity Labour’s decent left, poor loves; reduced as a result of Smeargate into trying to Uriah Heep themselves into another glorious 12 years of Labour rule. Frank Field MP:

Darkness at the Heart of the Labour Party

Harold Wilson asserted that the Labour party was a moral crusade or it was nothing. The McBride affair has left Labour members looking at nothing. That is the reality check that McBride has wrought on the party.Labour supporters are left bewildered and wondering what happened to the moral crusading side of our mission.

Poor old Labour party.

So very very ‘umble.

Nothing’s illustrated New Labour’s complete lack of clue about the wired world – and their own legislation – more than the way they still think they can hide things they’ve done online.

But Gordon Brown and his new media minister/guru Tom Watson are learning fast that things a politician or his aide might have done online (or ordered to have done), no matter how anonymous or pseudonymous it was at the time, can come back to bite said politician in the ass:

A bogus applicant using the name “Ollie Cromwell” paid £8.99 to set up The Red Rag as a campaign blog. The buyer had to provide only a name, address, telephone number and e-mail to create the site on November 4 last year. The address given was the House of Commons, The Times has been told. The site was registered for two years, ensuring that it would be in place throughout the general election campaign, which must be called by June next year.?

I’d laugh if it wasn’t so fucking tragic: a discredited PM and a corrupt cabinet are teetering on the edge of implosion, not because of one of the any number of other, more substantive offences they might’ve been convicted for, but for internet cluelessness.

Meanwhile the traditional political media are off with the fairies, self-obsessing (as is their wont) about the way Smeargate illustrates their own imminent demise -“Why wasn’t I in the loop? Why was I scooped by a blog? Oh shit, will I have a job tomorrow? I’d better get a blog…” – rather than using their leverage as the fourth estate to help oust a dangerously incompetent and deceitful government that those of all political persuasions loathe.

No help there then.

And public trust in government, the police and in civic life in general continues to erode almost to invisibility. The authorities are scared shitless of public anger.

Declaring a Civil Contingency event looms. But hey, that’s just civic society falling apart as a result of Chicago School economic policies, as filtered through Brownian endogenous bloody growth theory. Brutality’s a feature not a bug.

Pity the decent left. They’re in a terrible fix – wanting nothing more than to get rid of this shower of incompetents, not least for their own political ambition, but reluctant to let go of a jot or a tittle of power despite recognising their party’s government is a shambles. They surely must recognise that they’re first up against the wall when it all goes to shit. After all, they’re party members too, they enabled these people. But no, they still think they can recover a shred of credibility, hence the mass outbreak of humility this morning.

We see and hear a trio of Blairites making ‘I are serious elder statesman’ expressions at the media and condemning this dreadful, shocking behaviour in outraged and unimpeachably moral chapel elder tones. Frank Field’s spreading oleaginous humility – it’s the best butter- on his blog just to pound home the point that it wasn’t us, guv, it was those nasty Brownites, and Alex Hilton written a condemnation cum mea culpa for The Scotsman:

Politics is the means by which a country is run and good politics means a country is run well.

But politics is also the name of a silly game played by silly boys in the Westminster bubble.

It’s a fun game, I fully admit, and sometimes it just has to be played. But when playing a game is your ambition and your daily motivation, it’s time to grow up.

Mr McBride and Mr Draper suffered from being in the Westminster bubble where all they saw was the game; where a lie here or a smear there are just bishops and rooks on a chessboard.

Somehow they had lost sight of that other politics – that which is concerned only with delivering a secure, fulfilling and sustainable society for its citizens.

Pass me the sick bag, mother.

I know many Labour figures who shun these silly games. There are many more who, like me, enjoy playing a game from time to time but who don’t let it get in the way of more noble, long-term objectives. But this week, until this embarrassment dies down, every single one of us will look like a duplicitous, power-mad fool.

If Labour party members are still able to believe that despite everything they’ve done, every illegal war, every torture, every police murder, every fake enquiry, that Labour has any right or mandate to govern Britain, the ‘decent left’ are duplicitous power mad fools.

No matter how bloody ‘umble.