What does this tell us about the State?

The killing of Mark Duggan has been found legal. The anger around this case is legitimate as were the first sparks of protest and unrest in Tottenham (though what came later is another matter) in which locals mobilised around the police station. It is only middle-class white people who feel an instinctive sense of being on the side of the police. Ordinary people know what it is like to be stopped and searched by the police, especially if they're black or if they fit the profile of a 'terrorist'. It's not a testament to the character of individual officers - who may be awful or munificent - it's about the structural role of the police as a repressive institution with a dismal collective unconscious.

By the way I think the content of the ruling is not expressly problematic. What did we expect of the justice system? Even if the ruling had found that the killing was unlawful it would only serve to reaffirm the sovereignty of the state in its authoritative claims to legality and justice. For this reason I don't think there could by any just result as I question the authority of the state, and that is the fundamental question here. It's hypocritical to suggest that the jury finding the police killing illegal would serve anything other than reasserting the sovereignty. That may be understandable given the high emotions around the death of this man. But it is not the political issue at hand. Andrew Robinson produced an excellent couple of articles on Agamben's work on the area of exceptions in law:

“Homo” means human/man, and “sacer” has the double meaning of “sacred” and “taboo”. Homo sacer is defined as someone who can be killed, but not sacrificed. They can’t be sacrificed to the gods because they’re defined as outside the recognised terrain of valued life (there’s nothing left in them worth sacrificing; to sacrifice them would be sacrilege), but for the same reason, they can be killed with impunity.

I have deployed this concept before in the past with regard to the death of Osama bin Laden at the hands of the US army. On that occasion I was prompted to write by the incessant gurgling of Douglas Murray, who took the predictable position that it was fine for the US to violate Pakistan's sovereignty and commit an assassination. I think it can be said that Mark Duggan is a 'homo sacer' in that he is excluded from the sphere of rights and liberties (because he's a violent gangster, to quote the BBC) who can be legitimately killed by the police. Not even in controlled circumstances, not a public execution that has been legally ratified. Instead the killing is legalised by the very system which excluded Duggan in the first place. Thus, the departed was included insofar as he was excluded. It is in this process that the sovereignty claims its basic authority, the authority to make 'exceptions'.

Despair at American Injustice.

The Time for Rage.

As one of the people who lit candles for Troy Davis outside the US embassy on Thursday night, I feel obligated to write of the sheer obscenity of the case and others like it. Above us the Old Glory rippled in the wind as an armed guard was poised across from us, this is what marked the building apart from the others in Grosvenor Square. The statues of Dwight Eisenhower and Ronald Reagan stand at the opposite ends of the embassy, perhaps to signify the beginning and end of the Cold War. Of course, the statues were not there to celebrate the savagery of the Korean War and the depraved crimes in which the US government indulged throughout the 1980s. The Old Glory had not been raised up above the embassy to take pride in the bloodied foundations of the United States, where the remains of millions of Native Americans and Africans rest in unsettled and unmarked graves. The statues no doubt commemorate "truth, justice and the American way" not to mention America as the "Land of the Free" and "Home of the Brave".

How many Americans will think of Troy Davis when they next pledge allegiance? The details of the Troy Davis case are almost as hideous as Justice Scalia's scrotum. As The Guardian rightly notes: Out of the nine witnesses, seven have since recanted their testimony and some have cited police intimidation. One of the witnesses was illiterate and could not read the statement which they signed at a police station. No murder weapon was ever recovered. There was no DNA evidence at all and the case against Troy Davis was based on the testimony of witnesses. Out of the remaining two witnesses it is possible that one of them is Sylvester Coles, who has been implicated by nine people as a serious suspect in the murder. When he was drunk Coles confessed to a friend that he was the real killer. He has admitted that he owned the same model weapon as that was used to kill Mark MacPhail, supposedly Coles gave away the gun earlier on the day of the shooting. The only reaction of a real human being to all of this is despair.

Bare in mind Rick Perry has signed around 235 death warrants in the last 10 years and it was his predecessor George the Anointed who signed 152 in 4 years as Texan Governor. This is out of 475 executions since 1976 and 413 currently stew on death row in Huntsville. But let's not shirk from criticism of the Democrats and remember it was Bill Clinton who saw to it that Ricky Ray Rector was executed in 1992. Rector had survived shooting himself in the head after he had shot a police officer in the back. He was left "seriously mentally impaired", to say the least, on death row in an Arkansas prison cell for over 10 years. The court had rejected the claim of "grave mental impairment" and gave him the death penalty. Rather than pardon the man Clinton exploited the situation to wipe the press clean of the latest sex scandal - with Gennifer Flowers - to blight his precious campaign. On the night of his execution, Rector saved a slice of pecan pie for later, not understanding his death would come first. It took them 45 minutes to find a vein to shoot full of sodium thiopental and Clinton had dinner with Mary Steenburgen.

The 40th anniversary of the Attica Prison riot passed a week or so ago, it was September 9th 1971 when the hostage situation was crushed at the behest of Governor Nelson Rockefeller with the support of Richard Nixon. Over 2,200 prisoners seized control of the jail and held 39 guards hostage for four days in reaction to the death of activist George Jackson at the hands of prison guards in an escape attempt at San Quentin. The troopers were sent in to the jail and let loose over 2,000 rounds indiscriminately, killing 29 prisoners and 10 guards before going onto beat and torture even more prisoners. Cornel West has a word for the process whereby people become deferential subjects to the Establishment to the extent that they consent to domination and control. West calls this process "niggerization", not just of blacks but of whites as well, and he holds that Attica was a counter-move against this process. For the Establishment the riot had to be brought down in case it spread to other prisons, as was the case with riots which swept across America in the 60s.

In the 1940s there was an opening for black people to enter the workforce as labourers and escape a system of de facto slavery which continued after the American Civil War. The rise of radical sentiments and civil disobedience in the 60s made way for greater progress. But the opening was closed in the 1970s as the economy became finance-based and the role of African-Americans became increasingly superfluous once more. So the need for a huge system of incarceration emerged, which might explain why there are currently over 7 million Americans in some phase of the penal system. Of course, the root problem is the neoliberal model which appears to have finally collapsed into stagnancy. It is clear that the American political system has long been broken, with the opposition as rudderless as the powerful themselves. In the words of Thomas Jefferson "God forbid we should ever be 20 years without such a rebellion." For Jefferson rebellion is not a constant condition, though it does eternally return and the US is long overdue.

A Restless Summer.

Over the summer there seemed to be an endless flow of stories for the media to prepare narratives for and spoon-feed to us. This will come as a shock to those of you who have spent the summer in a masturbation furnace or perhaps on Mars. With everything from neo-fascist killing sprees and economic crisis to phone hacking and celebrity deaths, it was a damn good summer for news and certainly no silly season. Here are a few looks at major events in the summer, which you won't find in the mainstream media.

  
 THE GREEK MYTHS.

The debt crisis in Greece has rocked the Eurozone for months as it looked like German and French banks might be sunk the IMF and the EU moved in to force austerity measures in Greece to secure the interests of bankers in Western Europe. So Greece slashed €700 million more than the IMF and EU demanded of them, even as the country was saddled with yet more debt and the Europeans banks were handed €110 billion. The media so kind to inform us that the crisis was the result of "out-of-control" spending which we shouldn't pick up the bill for. The irony of all this is that the European country that has defaulted more than any other in the last century is Germany. Germany was excused from reparations to the countries that it had invaded, nor did the Germans have to pay back the loans that the Third Reich squeezed out of the countries it occupied in the war and especially not to the Greeks. Germany didn't even pay back the US for the loans that were used to pay the reparations levied on Germany after the First World War.

Even though from 2001 to 2007 the total spending of the EU was equal to 50.7% of GDP, out of the 27 member-states Greece was outspent by 13 states. Over the same time period public spending in Greece amounted to 44.6% of GDP. As the crisis hit Greece there was a jump in spending to 50.4% of GDP in 2009 and that is still the average expenditure in Europe. The relatively high level of public debt in Greece, before the crisis, goes back to the 1980s when the country was still recovering from the military junta. The weakness of the Greek government is in fiscal policy, though not spending but in tax-revenues that have collapsed as a result of anti-government sentiment exacerbated by an explosion of unemployment since the recession began. Sweden has the highest expenditure in Europe and yet there is no debt crisis, the reason being that the Swedish tax system is a lot better. The crisis in Greece was down to a flawed tax system and widespread anti-government sentiments which amounted to widespread tax avoidance and evasion.

Then there is the suspicious line that the Greeks are a "venal" and "lazy" people who have enjoyed a lavish state-expenditure at the expense of the rest of Europe. In actuality Greeks work around 2,120 hours a year compared with about 1,712 hours a year worked in Britain and 1,473 hours by Germans. Out of the OECD countries Koreans are the only people who work longer hours than the Greeks. You may have read of the "Greek Gravy Train", the tales of railway workers paid £60,000 a year and the way that professionals retire at 50 - though the average retirement is 62. There isn't much ink on paper about the huge numbers of Greeks who have received no pay in months and the ever-rising unemployment rate. Rationally, the Germans should bailout Greece in the way that the US bailed out Germany for free after it defaulted just after the Second World War. Instead the EU have been led by Germany into bailing out the banks at the expense of Greek democracy. The Greek people are now facing around 10 to 15 years of economic stagnation complete with a huge decline in the standard of living and in the end the country will still default anyway.

HACKED OFF!

The scandal at News International will probably be never fully said and done. It is much bigger than simply a scandal of hacking the phones of murdered children and soldiers killed in battle. We now know a lot more about the profoundly sordid relationship between the Murdoch media and the Establishment.  It has been common knowledge for a long time that the News International has a right-wing agenda. Out of the 247 editors who work for Rupert Murdoch not one came out in opposition to the Iraq war. The Murdoch media amounts to 40% of British media and has backed Margaret Thatcher, John Major, Tony Blair and David Cameron to electoral victory. We now know that soon after Cameron took office he first met with Rupert Murdoch before going on to meet with Rebekah Brooks when she edited The News of the World and then Dominic Mohan of The Sun for a "general discussion". Cameron attended the News International summer party where he gave an interview to James Harding of The Times and went onto give a speech at the CEO summit of that same newspaper.

Keep in mind that the Prime Minister also met with Paul Dacre, the editor of The Daily Mail, Lord Burns of Channel 4 and Deborah Turness of ITV News in the first month he was in office. Cameron later met with the editor of The Evening Standard for another "general discussion", the Prime Minister also attended the summer parties of The Financial Times and The Spectator. Unfortunately, the level of ingratiation that the political class has met with Murdoch does not end at a Christmas dinner with Rebekah Brooks and James Murdoch. We know that Tony Blair is the Godfather of Murdoch's daughter. We find that the Conservative Party and the police were entangled in the conspiracy ran out of a Murdoch red-top. No surprise here, it was the Thatcherites and the Met who colluded with Murdoch in 1986 to crush the print unions in Wapping. A favour for when The Sun led the media campaign against the Miners Strike of '84. Perhaps an extended favour for the campaign the Murdoch press led against Tony Benn - which went as far as actually fabricating psychiatric reports in order to question Benn's mental health - to prevent him from becoming leader of the Labour Party.


The problem with the dominant narrative in the mainstream media is that it assumes what went on at The News of the World was an aberration. As in All the President's Men we're told that the little guy can uncover a scandal which reaches the very top of power and then can bring down the President in the name of justice. So corruption can reach the very top but because of the democratic features of our society we can find it, root it out and restore greatness in our society. Once again it turns out we want the thing itself without the harsh element of it, just as so many of us want coffee without coffee (decaffeinated coffee), war without war (no casualties on our side) or even a revolution without revolution (no real change). In this case it is as if we want sleaze without sleaze, we need to get back to proper journalism which run without corruption and unscrupulous methods such as phone-hacking. It's the classic feel good story which is used to prevent a serious attempt to ask fundamental questions about the nature of the mass-media and the provision of news through corporate structures to the public.

NORWAY'S 9/11?

The massacre in Norway came out of nowhere seemingly, it took the pundits by surprise and prompted an embarrassing attempt to resurrect the "War on Terror" narrative. The Sun jumped on the opportunity to spin the headline 'Al-Qaeda Massacre: Norway's 9/11'. Clearly the Murdoch press were desperate to lead the public away from the stench of criminality around the papers and lead them by the nose against Muslims once again. It was almost as bad as when the American press looked up Edward Said for an "insight" into international terrorism in the wake of the Oklahoma City Bombing. Even though Said is a Christian, he is a Palestinian and therefore must be an expert on terrorism. After it turned out to be just another angry white man we could still read about the "failure" of multiculturalism that led to the attacks in The New York Times. We might choose to read in The Atlantic about how the massacre was a "mutation of jihad" whereby a white man goes ape as a Muslim fanatic would in order to prevent the coming "Islamization" of Europe. The leader of the English Defence League, a former BNP member, appeared on Newsnight to spin the same line.

In many instances the press came out no better than Robert Brasillach when he conjured up the notion of "reasonable anti-Semitism" during the Nazi occupation of France. Brasillach insisted he had no beef with Charlie Chaplin, Yehudi Menuhin and Marcel Proust, but the rest of Jewry could go hang as far as he was concerned. Similarly Breivik a distinguishes between "loyal" and "disloyal" Jews, who are a threat to the European civilisation, the state of Israel and global capitalism. For Breivik, Hitler was only wrong to exterminate the "loyal" Jews who deserved a homeland. In the same vein of thought we find Jack Straw who attacks Nick Griffin on Question Time as a Fascist before wheeling out Griffin's line that the Pakistani men see our women as "white meat". So there is a "reasonable racism" to be deployed for the protection of women against Pakistani rape gangs and to maintain "Britishness" with a ban on veils. There is nothing more suspect than the insistence that the actions of Anders Behring Breivik represent a current of working-class opinion in Europe which must be acknowledged in order to prevent such violent outbursts. 


In the manifesto Breivik churned out there are references and quotes to columnists Jeremy Clarkson and Melanie Phillips as well as Bernard Lewis, Bat Ye'or, Pamela Geller, Geert Wilders, Daniel Pipes, Ayaan Hirsi Ali and the Unabomber. The thought process behind the slaughter in Norway begins the mainstream right-wing discourse on Muslims and immigration in general, but then radiates outwards to the farthest reaches of jingo-lunacy. In one such instance Breivik used extracts of the Unabomber's manifesto and replaced words such as 'blacks' and 'leftists' with 'Muslims' and 'cultural Marxists'. You don't have to look too far to find hysterical noise in the gutter press about political correctness, multiculturalism, secularism, European integration and the "leftist" bias of the media. Interestingly Breivik didn't attack foreigners and turned his gun on his fellow Norwegians who were too tolerant towards the foreigners. As if the problem is not immigrants as such, but the political class that has been "corrupted" by the Left in a bid to subdue the unremitting greatness of the white man.
 

SHOPPING with VIOLENCE.

The riots seen in the UK seemingly came out of nowhere, inexplicable and indiscriminate violence tore through the capital before hurtling across the country. It was a peaceful protest in Tottenham over the death of Mark Duggan at the hands of police officers that descended into violence first. Then came a tidal wave of violence and looting that rushed through the streets of London, Birmingham, Manchester and a lot of other places. The commentariat was soon flailing wildly out of control for a useful narrative with Max Hastings wondering "How do you inculcate values in a child whose only role model is footballer Wayne Rooney - a man who is bereft of the most meagre human graces?" The Evening Standard pinned the blame on the GTA series whilst Melanie Phillips blamed the "liberal intelligentsia", oh and the rise of single-motherhood. As the Left called for a recognition of "legitimate grievances" the Right called for cuts to benefits and the repossession of property to punish the rioters. Then the decadent Starkey emerged to tell us all that it is down to the encroachment of "black culture" into a halcyon vanilla Britannia.

The conservatives were eager to shoot down any liberal nonsense about "legitimate grievances" and "social deprivation". At the same time the only permissible view was outright condemnation of the violence, which is a platitude to say the least as no one condones what happened. Even though the Right wanted to stress that these were the decisions undertaken by free individuals they could not bring itself to admit the exact nature of the riots. In the midst of the riots Kelvin MacKenzie was asked "Should we try to understand this?" and he responded "No, I don't think we should..." As if that wasn't bad enough then Michael Gove popped up to let us know that he's on "the side of order" and there are no excuses for violence. A strange position for Michael Gove to take given that he thinks the Iraq war is justified by the GDP of Iraq at the moment. Incidentally there are 5 million orphans in Iraq with over 1 million people dead as a direct consequence of war, with millions more displaced, deformed and dispossessed.

The violence of the student demonstrations came with a political message whereas the riots had no message at all. The rioters were not a revolutionary subject, in the Marxist sense, but more of a Hegelian 'rabble' who are outside of the organised social space and can only express their discontent through irrational outbursts - a 'lumpen-insurrection' of sorts. The rage and despair of the 'rabble' was expressed in the most impotent forms, the torching of random buildings and pointless thievery for example. Slavoj Žižek was right to call for a rejection of the demand to take a side, either that of a 'disenfranchised youth' or a 'small business owner'. In the riots we saw society attack society, a lot like watching a man slash away aimlessly at his own limbs, as Hunter S Thompson noted of much worse riots in the 60s "the American dream was clubbing itself to death". It was a conflict between people with a stake in community, who had managed to function within the system, and the people with no such stake and nothing to lose.

Zygmunt Bauman was correct to designate the riots as "defective and disqualified consumers" and it is easy to see the mass-looting as consumerism turned violent as it could not be realised in the proper way of shopping. Even the ignominious David Starkey acknowledged this point when he called the riots "shopping with violence". That was before he opted to wheel in the words of Enoch Powell to insulate the prevailing ideology from any damaging self-reflection. In the riots we find that at best "legitimate grievances" are secondary to impotent expression of anger, despair and envy. Ultimately the riots were a clear demonstration of the material force of ideology, it was the barbarous underbelly of consumerism rising to the surface and overflowing for all to see on Sky News. As for the people peddling vengeful answers to the riots, these are the same people who claimed there is no such thing as society. It was they who called for the "liberation" of the individual to pursue their own self-interest at the expense of others.

IRONY in TRIPOLI.

Then the Libyan Civil War resurfaced in the news as the rebels seized the capital to the surprise of Orientalist commentators everywhere, to whom the Arabs are still either incapable of winning a fight or are bloodthirsty animals. It looks as though this is the autumn of the Colonel, for Gaddafi soon disappeared. The great irony of the situation is that the Gaddafi regime was interventionist in foreign policy and had been for a very long time. The regime backed Idi Amin in Uganda, Slobodan Milošević in Serbia and Charles Taylor in Liberia as well as the IRA, the Sandinista movement and the ANC. Gaddafi sought to mediate disputes in African countries such as Mali, specifically between the government and rebels. He has even sent peace keeping missions to countries like Somalia. It has even been suggested that the Libyan government provided millions in investments to support governments in Liberia, Niger, Chad and the Central African Republic. Under Gaddafi the country had been led into armed conflict with Egypt and Chad on multiple occasions.

For years Muammar al-Gaddafi stood as the mirror-image of an American neoconservative as he saw a moral obligation to intervene where necessary on the side of the victim against the oppressors of the world. Of course, the side of the victim can be chosen selectively in accordance with the geopolitical value of fending off a particular oppressor. The same is true of the neoconservatives who wanted to fight the Communists in Afghanistan in the name of "freedom", but quietly supported Ceaușescu in Romania at the same time. We find similar contradictions in Libyan foreign policy, Colonel Gaddafi was on board for war crimes in Sierra Leone but backed the ANC at a time when Nelson Mandela was smeared as a "terrorist" in the US and Britain. The same reasoning was deployed to justify sending Libyan agents across into Egypt with the stated purpose of "subversion", even though Gaddafi was an admirer of General Nasser and wanted to emulate him as a "strong man".

Back in 1971 the CIA and MI6 put together a plot to bring down Gaddafi as part of an all-out-invasion of Libya, which would culminate in the release of political prisoners and the restoration of the monarchy. The plot fell apart as the CIA concluded that the Colonel sufficed as a bulwark to Communism in North Africa. The regime in Tripoli was opposed to Israel and Western imperialism, but  it was also opposed to the Soviet Union and Russian influence in the region. This was good enough for the time being. There has even been the suggestion (which has yet to be verified) that the coup which Gaddafi orchestrated in 1969 had been supported by the US. The regime modeled itself on the example set by Egypt, which had become a worrying example of independence by then. It is plausible that the coup was seen as a way to "buy-off" socialism and create a bulwark to the Soviet Union at the same time. So when tensions in the new regime led to a conspiracy to overthrow Gaddafi in 1975 the CIA immediately warned the Colonel who then steam-rolled over all internal opposition and continued to pursue an interventionist foreign policy.

As Gaddafi's regime became increasingly repressive and began to turn to the Soviet Union for greater support, so it was clear that Libya was going to become a "pariah state". Today commentators like to make reference to the way Gaddafi sponsored terrorism. When the US bombed Libya in 1986 the "reason" was that Gaddafi had sent arms and advisers to the Sandinista government of Nicaragua. Gaddafi mirrored the American support for the Contras, who were at the forefront of a terrorist campaign against the Sandinistas. The US continued to lean on Libya into the 1990s, this went as far as economic sanctions and backing an attempt to assassinate Gaddafi in 1996. A few years later the US made peace with Libya as Gaddafi made a bid to secure a comfortable place in a world that had changed greatly since the Berlin Wall fell. The support lent to Gaddafi was extreme, it went as far as selling him weapons which were later used against his own people. The British and the American governments even saw to it that the attempt to indict Gaddafi for his responsibility for the deaths of 1.2 million people in Sierra Leone.

A Lesson in Right-Wing Sociology.

For the press the riots of recent days were a spontaneous, random and unfathomably violent explosion with no connection to any substantial events or issues in British society. It is true that the mass-looting of shops is hardly a form of political activism. But the moral panic around the riots has the potential to drown out the social context in which these riots irrupted. The riot in Tottenham was connected to the death of Mark Duggan because it was a peaceful protest against what had happened that degenerated into violence. The shooting caused the Tottenham protests, which in turn led to the current situation as the protest descended violent. You're not going to convince me that if Mark Duggan were alive and there was no issue of police brutality historically there would still be looting going on. The commentariat are ignorant of the legitimate grievances behind the riots and refuse to even address them except to deride them as "excuses" for criminality. The urgency for change in our society is clear, we can't prevent future riots without addressing the issues which have festered for years.

On Newsnight Gavin Esler asked Kelvin MacKenzie "Should we try to understand this?" and the former editor of The Sun responded "No, I don't think we should..." That response is the example of everything wrong with the right-wing commentary on the riots. With that MacKenzie proceeded to call for shooting the rioters, at first he's less clear on that and then stresses "rubber bullets"; then he calls for legal punishments to make them "weep" because they won't "weep" at home or at school. It's clear that MacKenzie pins the blame on a lack of discipline at home and at school, no doubt beatings and canings are in order in those places. Of course the rioters should be arrested and prosecuted, but if we turned schools and homes into prisons for children would that prevent future riots? I think not. There are often references in the press to the "excuses" peddled by the Left in the form of sociological claptrap about 'social exclusion' and 'deprivation'. But the Right has it's sociology on this. In the case of Melanie Phillips it's the "chickens coming home to roost" for the liberal intelligenstia who have undermined British society in the last 30 years.

The line which Kelvin MacKenzie took falls back on assumptions which focus on the development of social problems, it's all about a serious lack of discipline in the home and in schools. So if daddy hadn't beaten the ever-living-shit out of Kelvin MacKenzie he would've been in on the mass-plot to raid JD Sports across the country with the help of a Volkswagen GTI no doubt. It is a severe lack of domestic violence and child abuse in schools which has led to thousands of people looting and attacking police. If only daddy had beaten them then they might have grown up to be a journalist who can write lies for Rupert Murdoch and smear the dead after outbursts of football violence, just like Kelvin MacKenzie. This line of thought is just as absurd as when Peter Hitchens claims that these are not 'riots' because riots have an origin in deprivation and then notes that the participants, who have been arrested, are "losers". Apparently the "criminal masterminds" of this spontaneous looting spree have all gotten away, so it only appears that the looters are from "pockets of deprivation". None of these gutless twerps can admit that if you are from a more stable and secure background then you are probably less likely to go around torching buildings.

 We've heard a lot of things said about the riots, e.g. that it is being perpetrated by "feral animals" who need to be put down and that the mob are just "mindless" thugs who should be shot. For Pat Condell the root cause is "stupidity" and a lack of "imagination", a "feral view of the world" which is a product of a rampant entitlement culture. So when you're 'pampered scum' by the state you just have to go out and raid JD Sports even though you can afford to shop at Ted Baker with those 'generous hand-outs' from the state. The rioters are drug-addled "vermin" running amok because the police don't have access to water cannons, rubber bullets and tear gas. Condell went on to call for the repeal of benefits for life to anyone who participated in the riots as well as the demolition of their homes. At the same time there is the claim that these people are "opportunists" with no excuses and have been in waiting for a moment to go out on a spree of looting. Oh and these people express the violent tendencies of the Left, especially groups like UK Uncut.

Note 'order' has to be maintained no matter what people are going through in society, the grievances will never be resolved and the poor should just put up with it so the facade of 'order' can carry on. Beneath the 'order' that the police are defending there is disorder on a huge scale and occasionally it ruptures the appearance of peace. The riots are subjective violence in the same sense that terrorism is subjective, just like terrorism it is the product of a history of imperialism and political stagnancy in the Middle East. That is not a justification for terrorism, it is an explanation which is better than the right-wing line that it is simply the result of a barbaric culture which needs to be dealt with. In reaction to the attacks on the Twin Towers the US invaded Afghanistan and Iraq which has exacerbated the threat of terrorism even more. The Coalition are about to slash public services to the bone and will no doubt increase the power of police, which will only lead to a situation where there is greater social deprivation and a higher chance of police violence to the urban poor.

The only excuse for violence to be found in the press is when it's police violence. If the cops shot a black man then there must be a good reason. It must've been self-defence, he shot at them and then they shot him - he got what was coming to him! There is always an excuse for these officers, even when the bullet fired at officers was found to be 'police issue' then Mark Duggan must've had the same ammunition as the police. When it turns out Mark Duggan never fired his gun then the line is he must've gone for his gun and they shot him. Thus, we should just unleash the water cannons, rubber bullets and even the military on the rioters. But then it gets uglier as the line turns to the ethnicity of the rioters. In the words of Nick Griffin "Feral black gangstas and Islamist fast-breeding sex pests are the problem." Why is it the people cleaning up after these people are all white? Consistently the Right are taking advantage of the riots to further pursue an agenda of social cleansing. The political class is flocking above to peddle easy answers which have failed and will continue to fail.

Where are the Police?

Would you agree with the following statement?

"That's crap, I don't buy that for a minute. Calling a riot an irrational expression of rage is such a cop-out, it's opportunism at it's worst, it's just a bunch of people grabbing any excuse they can find to go out and loot a store. Nothing more. The fact that these people ripped off the stores in their own communities, all that reflects is the degree to which these people have absolutely no respect for the law at all and certainly no concept of like community or civic responsibility."

I hope you don't agree with this line because it is never simply the case that a riot is just the decision of free individuals to go out on a rampage, there is always something bigger going on regardless of what the media will tell you. The quote is lifted from the film American History X and specifically the words of Derek Vinyard, played by Ed Norton, on the LA riots of 1992 which were sparked by the assault on Rodney King by police officers. I refer you to the good words of Bill Hicks on that particular affair. The reactionary birdsong around the riots we are witnessing are not so different from this line, though the racist element is subsumed beneath words such as "scum", "thug" and so on. The Right are going completely bat-shit over the riots, consistently arguing that the riots are completely unrelated to the death of Mark Duggan and simply we're witnessing the rational actions of free individuals. This has been pointed out about Twitter by Richard Seymour and the same is true all over the web. It is being fueled by mainstream rags of the Right.
 

I was in a recent argument on the Facebook group 'R.I.P. Mark Duggan' with a member of the EDL, who has since been banned for racist remarks, and another user who described his political views as "common sense". I initially got involved to shoot down the EDL mouthpiece who claimed that "No Muslim nation would tolerate this?" so I responded "No Muslim nation would tolerate this? I thought you want us to be different from Muslims??" At the same time, the proponent of "common sense" was arguing that the riots began because "an armed criminal called mr duggan did whether he fired his gun or didn't he still had it in him." He then exclaimed that the army should be sent in to "fuck up these idiots". When I gave these guys a prod about Mark Duggan and Charles de Menezes the immediate line was that both of them deserved to die because Duggan was an "armed criminal" and Menezes was an "illegal immigrant". Beware "common sense"!

Of course, when I pointed out the facts that Mark Duggan fired no shots at the officers and the gun he had on him was in his sock when he died the purveyor of "common sense" had another line to spew. The words he had were simple "He had a gun end of legitimate shoot", the logic was clear: a young black man was shot to death by cops, so it must be a good thing! We now know that the weapon Duggan was a replica that had been converted into a working gun, bare in mind that the bullet which was fired into a police radio turned out to be 'police issued'. I pointed out some of these facts in the argument and witnessed an interesting response "if he hadn't been carrying a gun he would be alive he made a choice." I even said I think Mark Duggan should've been arrested for possessing the weapon (though we now know it was hardly a weapon at all) but it was not enough and apparently I just had no problem with men carrying guns on the streets of London. The thought-process was clear "your an idiot if you carry a gun you are making a choice to live outside the law."

My response was "An idiot who thinks a man who has a gun in his shoe should be arrested and not shot repeatedly by officers who then try to make it look like self-defence... Interesting logic there again." Naturally this commonsensical fopdoodle continued to accuse me of condoning the possession of firearms. The Right has no room for the context of the situation that we're in today, for them it is simply a bunch of yobs going on a crime spree and the police or army need to restore order. These riots would have never have happened if Mark Duggan was not killed and there were serious efforts to resolve the grievances of the community. We'll no doubt see more riots before the decade is over. Finally I had him cornered "I don't think it's okay for people to carry guns, I'll repeat to you: Mark Duggan was carrying a gun and should've charged for doing so. What's so difficult to understand about my position? You think he should've been killed and, from what I gather, you'd like to see more people killed in this way." I'm still waiting for that response.

Angry White Men in Riotous Tottenham.

I Predict a Riot!

The riot in Tottenham has been all over the news since last night, though it initially had to compete with the recent polar bear attack in Norway especially at the Mail's website. Perhaps it is because the source of the rage was not adequately covered at all, the death of just another black man at in a city of over 7 million people was insignificant. Even though it was the police who fired four rounds into the mini-cab, the media seemed baffled at first. Of course, The Daily Mail has since jumped at the opportunity to go on about how Mark Duggan fired on a police officer and therefore forfeited his human rights. The killing of a white student by a bear in Scandinavia seemed to deserve a higher level of coverage than the death of a black father at the hands of police officers. Yet it should be noted that the death of a young black man only lit the match, Tottenham already has an unemployment rate of 8.8% and the community is being subjected to a series of huge cutbacks. Keep in mind a history of racism and police brutality that precedes the riot of 1985.

The exact details of the death of Mark Duggan are not clear, the police were from Operation Trident - the unit that deals with gun crime "in the black community" - who stopped the cab and shot him four times in the midst of an arrest. Incidentally, Operation Trident largely goes by the 'stop and search' approach when it comes to young black men and the point of the unit is to police the black community which requires "special policing" of course. The police have since let the media know that the shots were fired in self-defence because Duggan fired on them first. The police officer who was supposedly shot was in hospital over night and then the police claimed that the shot was absorbed by the officer's radio. An eyewitness claimed that the police had restrained Duggan on the ground when the shots were fired. It wouldn't be the first time the police have killed a man in this way, as we have seen with Charles de Menezes who was shot seven times in the head as he was restrained on the tube. Both men were excluded as targets which could be legitimately killed, by the police and chunks of the media.

Update: The bullet lodged in the police radio was a police issue bullet. So much for the claim that he was a 'stone-cold gangster' who shot at a couple of innocent 'bobbies' only to get what was coming to him. Apparently, the gun was still in his sock when he was killed and the weapon is only capable of firing blanks.

The protest outside the police station was a peaceful one at first. It turned violent after the police set upon a 16 year-old girl with batons. Apparently she had come towards the police lines yelling something about "justice", though the The Daily Mail is currently running with the line that she threw a rock at the coppers. Then there is the police claim that the violence started when the protesters began throwing missiles at police cars and vans, which some might say were 'bait' left there to provoke an attack as seen in the student protests. Of course, the Right are running with the line that the looting is not an expression of a 'legitimate grievance' and not only was it right that the police killed Mark Duggan but these people just wanted to go ape. The looting of shops and burning of houses is not an expression of anything, it is just the cheap opportunism of people who have no conception of community or civic duty. It's a line that has a lot in common with what Derek Vinyard said about the LA riots in American History X.

Karl Marx says "Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past." The Right will never understand this quote because they adhere to a conception of free-choice which eliminates all room for even the minimal level of context and determinants. For them these people simply chose to trash their own community, if Mark Duggan was still alive and there was no history of police brutality would this have happened? I think not. The legitimate grievances are socio-economic as well as racial and that is undeniable given the nature of events, unless you subscribe to 'free-choice' in which case it was just coincidental that the riot followed the death of Mark Duggan. This is bigger than Tottenham as poverty is not just ghettoised into a neat section of the City waiting to explode, which is the reason for fears that this could spread to other parts of London.

Don't Forget Brian Haw!

Brian Haw died in his sleep at the age of 62 after a struggle with cancer. In the last 10 years he has become a fixture of Parliament Square in a perpetual state of protest which defied the people responsible for the deaths of over 1 million Iraqis in war, who were eager to break him with the changes to law which David Blunkett likened to a "sledgehammer". Months ago Boris Johnson won a court order to evict Brian Haw, supposedly in preparation for the Royal Wedding, just as Boris had stamped out Democracy Village back in 2010. It was just when Haw was being treated for cancer in Germany that the Mayor, in collusion with David Cameron and Theresa May, decided to make his move and Haw immediately appealed the order in spite of his deteriorating condition. In fact, it was just as the Con-Dem Coalition came to power in May 2010 that Brian Haw was arrested for perhaps the last time at 8:30am.

Over the years there were consistent attempts by the Establishment to bring his 24 hour protest to a halt. He was repeatedly arrested and taken to court by the British government, which supposedly stands for enshrined notions of bourgeois freedom. Every time Haw won so much more cunning methods were used to force him out of Parliament Square. Protest outside Parliament, without permission, was banned in 2005 and only Brian Haw was exempt because his demonstration began years before the law was passed. Oh the absurd intricacies of legal wrangling! There were efforts to evict him by force and when that didn't work the government restricted the demonstration to 1 metre by 3 metres. The most recent efforts have limited the protest to the pavement and now it looks like the protest will be kicked off of the pavement and would no doubt disappear as a result.

It is important to remember that Haw began his protest outside of Parliament in 2001, first of all against the fresh round of sanctions imposed on Iraq by Western governments and then against the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Brian Haw was the son of one of the soldiers who liberated the concentration camp of Belsen. As an evangelical Christian he was deeply concerned with the suffering of oppressed peoples around the world, he had visited Northern Ireland during the Troubles and Cambodia's Killing Fields. Sadly, it would appear that Tony Blair has the last laugh in this instance and that might be a testament to the nonsense that is Karmic retribution. It is at least a testament to the moral fibre of how society that Tony Blair has gotten away with the outright war crime in which he indulged so enthusiastically. Over 1 million people have been slaughtered in Iraq, along with millions left deformed and dispossessed in the economic reforms imposed without the consent of the Iraqi people.

Iraq had been first subjected to sanctions by the United Nations soon after Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait in 1990 and the US struck back at the disobedient client state. In the 1990s the sanctions led to the deaths of over half a million children and possibly more people than the number of people who were killed in the atomic bombs dropped on Japan. Before the sanctions Iraq was a developed country, rich with oil and dependent on imported food. In 1996 the UN Security Council permitted Iraq to sell oil in order to secure food and other essentials for it's people. The control of the capital accumulated from the sale of Iraqi oil was under the Security Council, which was in turn dominated by the US. The special sanctions committee responsible for what is allowed to flow into Iraq in exchange for oil consistently opposed the rejuvenation of vital services such as power and water.

The country was permitted to restore it's oil industry as supplies of food and contracts for equipment were withheld in New York. The worth of the equipment exceeded $1.5 billion and included the equipment needed to diagnose and treat cancer, as well as X-Ray machines, the tools necessary to put out fires and even toilet soap. The stated purpose of these sanctions was to "pacify" Iraq by forcing it's government to stop building weapons of mass-destruction. In one instance, Britain blocked vaccines for yellow fever and diphtheria from being exported to Iraq on the grounds that the vaccines might be used in weapons of mass-destruction. The country was basically held to ransom, of which the Iraqi people suffered the real consequences and Saddam Hussein held onto power in the meantime. Though the Ba'ath regime was left crippled, it only clinged to power because of the impact of the sanctions on the Iraqi people and looks likely that Saddam would have been deposed in the Arab Spring.

Month X.

For the Love of Democracy.

After a month of protest by students across the nation the proposals were rammed through Parliament thanks to just over 20 MPs. None of whom are worth naming, as they will no doubt die having accomplished nothing in life, now it's left to the Lords. The 30,000 that came out to demonstrate across London on December 9th were irrelevant and had no role to play in the decision. As are the thousands who demonstrated in the weeks leading up to the vote, that began with over 50,000 on November 10th and peaked at 130,000 on November 24th. For that reason the decision was obscenely undemocratic. If the Orange Book Liberals cared about democracy they would immediately resign and end this coalition government. This is not the defeat of a grass-roots movement, as it was only passed by the skin of it's bollocks thanks to the spontaneity and ingenuity of the protesters. It is a sign that the movement must go further and a solid block of resistance is needed to undermine the cuts agenda.

The most vulgar elements of the media have latched onto the more chaotic scenes in Parliament Square to demonise the protesters and the student movement as a whole. The coverage focused on David Gilmour's lad swinging from a Union Jack on the Cenotaph and the non-event of the Royal Rolls getting a new paint-job. Even though 44 protesters were injured, compared with 12 police officers (one of which fell off of his horse), the right-wing media prefers to focus on the "crimes" of the rabble and the need for greater police powers. Never mind Alfie Meadows who needed emergency brain-surgery after being beaten with a baton. Never mind Jody McIntyre who was assaulted and thrown from his wheelchair, more than once, before being dragged to the pavement. Never mind young girls being beaten in the streets by officers of the law. We're the animals, we're the feral mob, because one of us urinated on Churchill's statue and swung from the Cenotaph.

After these demonstrations the notion that the police are just civil servants and are working to protect citizens has been decimated. In the mayhem in Parliament Square the police were not civil servants to the public but armed tools of the state. Though a cynic would say that we all knew what the police were before, the kettling and beating of teenagers only affirmed it. At a deeper level the state apparatus of liberal democracy can be seen to be breaking down. The Conservatives have no real democratic mandate to rule as a majority government, which is effectively is going on because of the support of the Liberal Democrats. The government needed the police to suppress the demonstrations, thus dragging disabled bloggers through the street and charging on students is necessary for the sake of "order". So the government can refuse to listen to our demands and write off all opposition as unrealistic, "There is no alternative" is the mantra as it was under Margaret Thatcher.

The Impossible?

Even though public spending on higher education is 0.7% of GDP and government debt is 70% of GDP. If you are in favour of deficit reduction putting the burden on students for the sake of cutting the deficit by 0.7% is hardly worth it. Especially when it has the potential to deter students from pursuing higher education and the fulfilling life that might be led as a result of it. Though if you consider that debt was 260% of GDP just after World War II you might start to question whether or not any of these cuts are necessary. It was austere policies based on liberal economic theories which led to and exacerbated the Crash of 1929, which in turn led to the Great Depression. The debt is not a crisis but a problem that can be dealt with over time by boosting economic growth which will increase tax-revenues. It is taxes that are the key to the current predicament, as public spending became unsustainable due to a collapse in tax-revenues during the recession.
 
Cutting public spending will only lead to a negative multiplier effect and pull the rug from under the feet of all reliant on the state - except the very rich who benefit from a slack tax-system. For every job lost in the public sector one could easily be lost in the private sector, as the two are interdependent and the economy has been mixed for decades. The impact of these cuts on our society could be dire in the long-term. For instance the systematic erosion of the welfare state will create a coercive welfare-to-work system dominated by private interests and a decrepit training scheme. At the same time the growth of the private sector is meagre and the Coalition needs a serious policy to create jobs. Instead of a serious policy the Con-Dems are cutting national insurance to reward businesses for hiring the unemployed, but these subsidised jobs will be at the minimum wage and will most likely drive down wages across the workforce.

Of course, most people who go to university will earn far more than the minimum wage which begs the question "Why should a postman pay for your university education?" Because a greater access to education is beneficial to society, greater access to education leads to greater freedom for all. The UK spends less than the US and Poland on higher education, Sweden spends 1.4% of it's GDP on higher education and has far better results than our system. Science and maths have been prioritised in this country because there is high demand, in finance, for workers skilled in those areas. This is part of the financialisation of the economy, which is currently being intensified. There are no signs are serious regulations and taxes being levied on the banking sector anytime soon. There is not going to be a serious crackdown on tax-evasion and avoidance, let alone white-collar crime. At the same time the abandonment of capital investment, e.g. building and modernising schools and hospitals, could result in greater job losses in construction.

Revolutionary.

It has been said that the resurgence of student radicalism has surpassed the militancy of 1968 when enormous student demonstrations rushed across the West. Although the student movement in this country has not come close to the French movement of '68, that almost toppled the government, in terms of spontaneity the movement is greater. It took over many years for serious opposition to Vietnam and de Gaulle to emerge. It is a misconception that today people are less radical and activism is less common than it was in the 1960s. The 2003 invasion of Iraq faced tremendous opposition even before it was launched, the millions of people who demonstrated against the war in London is a testament to the progress made since Vietnam. Today demonstrations often pre-empt the opposed policy, that is true in the case of the Iraq war as well as the cuts to education and raising of tuition fees.

Students can be seen as a barometer for the pressures and tensions building up in society. This is the reason that the 1960s student movement had such a massive impact in France and across the West. Though the cultural revolution of the 60s led to calls for sexual and gender liberation, a shift towards greater freedoms and rights, some of which has since been assimilated into the dominant ideology in the form of cheap hedonism. The radicalism which emerged against the Coalition has not instigated a cultural revolution, it could be a sign of things to come and a revolutionary shake up of the establishment is well overdue in this country. But it's difficult to say what the legacy of this movement will be. It is only in retrospect that we can look back at the 60s as the source of the individualistic tendencies that would be seized upon by the Thatcherites in the 1980s. So it is possible that we are entering a new phase in British politics.

The student movement is quite varied and somewhat schismatic, you can find yourself marching alongside communists and liberals, there is no one leader and no solid ideology. This is appropriate as the student body consists of all classes and is in a liminal state of transition. Thus, the body is fluid and has volatile potential. In another sense the students are mostly devoid of political baggage, though the conditions in society have disposed many of us to cynicism and pessimism. It is difficult to say what will come of this movement. But what we can learn from the 1960s is that student movements cannot win alone. France was brought to the brink of revolution in 1968 before the movement was defused and the government made massive concessions. Those concessions would not have been made if it weren't for the invaluable role the general strike played, as students do not have access to economic power. A movement to defend the welfare state is needed.