I was pleased to read that finally the UK government has shelved its plans for people to be able to be held without being charged, the so-called 'pre-charge detention' which seemed so much like 'protective custody' of the Nazi regime. Of course people can still be held for 28 days without being charged which seems wrong (as Monica Ali has noted, the next closest to us is Australia with only 12 days detention without charge), but at least we have not taken another step to indefinite imprisonment without charge. Neither fortunately have we simply returned to anything like the policy of internment used by British forces in Northern Ireland August 1971 - December 1975 under which 1,981 people, predominantly Catholic (only 107 Protestants were held and none before 1973) were detained without trial on suspicion of being associated with terrorists. Often the wrong person would be arrested; 104 were released immediately when they were found out not to be the suspects. All those interneed received harsh treatment such as beatings. The reaction in terms of strikes and protests by the Catholic population forced the abandonment. The British had a record of internment going back to The Boer War (1899-1902) during which they interned the families of Boer guerilla fighters in concentration camps to put pressure on them to end the war.
The UK has these examples from its own history of imprisonment without charge, even if it is not well known by many people especially outside Northern Ireland. It is one of those files of 'secret history'. Why did the government think that moving towards such a policy in the UK again would not radicalise Muslims and other people in the country in just the way they hoped to combat. The USA blunders on in its policies on terrorism but the British who have dealt with terrorist groups from Malaysia to India to Palestine to Kenya to Ireland over the past sixty years should be better equipped. Either the collective memory of the state suffers from Alzheimer's disease, or, I imagine, many in office like the power over the lives of individuals that such legislation gives them. It might be targeted at activists but it also cows the general population. The inheritors of the Blair legacy like a compliant, obsequious population and get irritated when we are insufficiently humble. Interestingly Home Secretary Jacqui Smith said that the 42 days would be introduced in future 'if needed'. Does that mean, when the British interrogators prove to be 3.5 times less effective than Australian ones rather than 2.3 times less effective as at present? More likely it means when the government wants to look tough and aggressive or prove it is a friend, to say, a President McCain led USA. It is interesting that since the credit crunch fear of terrorism on the part of the government seems to have evaporated on both sides of the Atlantic as the economic problems have provided a different way to show how robust the government is.
'The Guardian' yesterday carried an interview with Stella Rimington, Director General of MI5 (Britain's Security Service dealing with internal threats) 1991-6 and her comments have appeared across British newspapers. I was glad that she spoke out in the way she did, though, unsurprisingly she is still a supporter of the British Establishment and its confidentiality, she does have a somewhat liberal tone (going beyond the simple libertarianism found in some British Conservatives) which one can see as the basis of Dame Judi Dench's portrayal of the character of M, head of MI6 (the Secret Intelligence Service dealing with external threats), in the James Bond movies since 1995.
I can imagine many British people were glad when she said that the USA's response to the terrorist attacks of 11th September 2001 were a 'huge overreaction'. The USA behaved as if no-one had suffered terrorist attacks before or that somehow these ones were more evil than any other. As Rimington (1935-) noted she had been living in a country experiencing terrorist attacks for decades. You could argue that the British response in Northern Ireland, notably internment and shoot-to-kill policy of the British Army in 1982 bear similarities to what the USA is doing in Iraq. However, the British could or would not sustain an invasion of another country. The more I write this, the more I see in fact, there is less difference between the British policy in Northern Ireland and the post-2001 US policy in its 'war on terror'. I think it is basically that we see a difference because the British did not publicise it so widely nor adopt that moral tone which the Americans have forced not only on the people they are attacking but also on their allies and on neutral states. The UK is constantly being asked to prove that it is committed to the war on terror, for example, through adaptations to our passports and backing off when the USA detains British citizens at Guantanamo Bay.
You want to say to the USA 'get over it'. It is clear that the Bush administration was in fact waiting for an incident of the kind that happened on 11th September 2001 to introduce harsh legislation and larger funding for the security service. By adopting a very high moral tone it allowed the administration to excuse anything on that ground. This is why they keep re-emphasising the issue of the attacks even seven years later as that is what has allowed them to introduce torture as a method in the US legal system and to invade Iraq in order to secure its oil and keep it out of the hands of the Chinese. If 11th September events had not happened then the USA would have found something similar in order to give this legitimacy to their own actions, which even they knew were morally dubious so had to be trumped by something that they at least could suggest was some kind of ultimate evil.
Whilst the Bush administration used the 11th September attacks in this moral way, they have also commodified the attacks. This is partly as the viewing public of the World, especially the USA has no time to absorb complex messages and forgets them quickly. I always think it debases the deaths of the people in the Second World War to reduce it to 'WW2' and in the same way, if people really respected the victims, from many different nations who were killed on the 11th September 2001 they would not simply term it '9/11' which sounds like a lot number in a auction or simply an address in a building or just like the term '24/7'. It is a quick term which seems to be a key to unlock any form of policy behaviour however widespread and violating of civil liberties it is. Of course, the USA now as in previous decades sees itself as special as having the so-called 'manifest destiny'. I have mentioned the desire to exempt US soldiers from war crimes charges as if what they do will always be 'right'. This harks back to the medieval concept of 'holy' war (both from the Christian and Muslim perspectives) and that carrying it out in fact rather than leading to punishment in the afterlife as other violence would, improves what the warrior will receive when they arrive there. The US soldier who tortures, in George W. Bush's view of the World, as long as he does it to the 'bad' people, is to live forever in the glory of the 'Heaven' of a Conservative USA.
The use of the 11th September attacks to legitimate extreme policies, I feel, is Rimington's key concern. She believes it actually worsened the terrorist threat in the UK by alienating intelligent Muslim men from British society as we can see in the failed attacks on Glasgow airport carried out by doctors. I get angered by how the USA has behaved, its horribly self-righteous, patronising and myopic view (it paid no concern to what other people across the World have suffered, at times at the hands of the USA, just asked the Vietnamese) and how the UK has followed so closely in its footsteps to bring widespread suffering to so many more people. However, I am not a young man filled with anger at life anyway, and not believing in the afterlife I can only see the potential to suffer in detention by MI5. Others will have viewpoints which will give them the courage to discard those concerns for a chance to make their anger heard. If Rimington is not surprised that this is happening in the UK, why should the rest of us think it unusual that it is occurring, and not to see, like her, that the war on terror policy is worsening rather than improving things.
The other particularly UK issue that Rimington raises is the playground behaviour that the war on terror has brought to UK politics especially in parliament. Each party and many MPs try to outdo each other in how tough they are in responding to terrorism, pushing for harsher measures. Though Rimington does not develop this theme to the full, this kind of behaviour is very characteristic of what happened under the Nazi regime in Germany with different agencies in that regime seeking to outdo each other in how successful they were in killing Jews. This is apparent if you see reconstructions of the Wannsee Conference of 1942 where agency heads reported how many Jews they had eliminated (see 'Die Wansseekonferenz' (1984) a real time reconstruction, I saw the German version but it is also available in the UK under the title 'The Final Solution: The Wannsee Conference' and in the USA as 'Hitler's Final Solution: The Wannsee Conference'; see also 'Conspiracy' (2001) with British and American rather than German actors, I have not seen this one). This conference is what led to the extermination camps for not only Jews but also Roma, Poles and Russians.
I am not suggesting that the UK is leading to a policy of concentration camps, what I am warning, as Rimington has done, is that when politicians try to outbid each other in terms of showing how tough they are, especially when it comes to 'security' issues, it can lead to the most extreme policies and move a country down a path into areas of behaviour which up until then would have been seen as unacceptable. The 'norm' is shifted even faster by such outbidding, than even the initial extreme reactions would have done. This is because to say, 'I can go one better' tacitly accepts what has already established, without analysing it, and then says, 'well, this is not strong enough'. In fact, of course, the policy already in place may be too strong, but to say that gains no credit for the politican. Though the UK political system is a millions miles away from that of Nazi Germany, many of the same mechanics are in place in any political system whether it is democratic or not. The rhetoric of outbidding has not disappeared, but fortunately (!) the economic crisis has provided a new arena for it to be carried out, and one that impacts less on civil liberties.
Showing posts with label civil rights. Show all posts
Showing posts with label civil rights. Show all posts
Sunday, 19 October 2008
Monday, 13 October 2008
How Torture Became Culturally Acceptable in the UK
You may have heard about the recent advertisement that the BBC pulled after numerous complaints. In the UK you have to buy a TV licence every year, it costs £139 (€187; US$265). This money goes to fund the state-run television organisation the BBC (the British Broadcasting Corporation) which now has six television channels and about ten radio channels. The fine for not paying it is £1000 (€1260; US$1780) and if you do not pay that then you get sent to prison. The number of people being imprisoned (usually women are heavily over-represented for this crime) has been falling, in 1996 it was 157 people; in 2000, 20 people, though there were fines and community service orders instead. In 2001 almost 400,000 people were prosecuted for not paying their television licence, but I guess the bulk paid up because the previous year only 2,149 reached court. In the mid-1990s however, more women were imprisoned for not paying this licence than for theft, prostitution, fraud and forgery, attacking people physically, burglary and robbery or drunkenness, so it is a gender-specific crime. Men are more likely to continue defaulting on their payments but eight times less likely to be imprisoned than women. This may say something about how courts perceive the two sexes, and to some degree that in general women are less likely to commit any crime than men are. With various forms of watching television now available there is mass confusion: do a I need a licence if I watch on my computer or my mobile phone? The licence is a state fee so even if you do not watch the BBC channels you still have to pay.
Anyway, people are being fined and imprisoned for not paying their licences and the BBC is effective at catching them. However, this does not seem enough. They feel the need to terrify people into paying the fee and this is where the advertisements came from. They were introduced in April 2008 and faced immediate criticism. They have been likened to scenes from 'Nineteen Eighty-Four' saying that they know where you live, who you are, etc. This is a standard tactic of government departments in advertising, another regular example comes from the so-called Driver Vehicle Licensing Authority (DVLA).
The most alarming BBC advert featured the consequences of being imprisoned for not paying a TV licence, showing a man in prison and screams coming from a shower block with the tagline that detector vans can always find you watching an unlicenced television and implied that you could also be found in prison. The clear implication is that the prisoner is being raped in the shower block. The BBC admitted it had gone too far with this advertisement but felt that its softer approach in the past had not been successful. Prisons are violent, dangerous places the world over, people are raped in them, but it seems disgraceful that the threat of this should be used to get people to pay a £139 fee. Why does the BBC not cut out the middle man and simply have a van full of rapists which it drives round to the house of any defaulter and lets them in on the defaulter as a punishment rather than go through all the difficulty of sending them to court? Why is homosexual rape more tolerable for prime-time television than heterosexual rape or lesbian rape which is much more likely to be the case given the profile of those imprisoned for not paying?
The only real complaint about the campaign that attracted attention came from the very avuncular presenter Noel Edmonds who worked for the BBC for thirty years and now is on Channel 4. In September he said that he was going to stop paying his TV licence in protest at the heavy-handed approach that the BBC was adopting in its adverts. What is shocking is that there was not more widespread protest and from presenters with gravitas. Perhaps they are fearful of possible treatment from the BBC. How has it happened that the broadcasting corporation whose 'mission' (and it is on their website) is to 'Inform, Educate and Entertain', not to 'Terrify, Arrest and Punish'? I suppose this is part of the 'permissive atmosphere' that you find in authoritarian states. It does not need the dictator to say that various state bodies should act in a certain way, it just needs him to signal that he will do nothing to hinder them if they do. With the Blarite steps towards authoritarianism, this 'permissive atmosphere' has appeared and so state bodies now feel free to try to terrify people into compliance.
This incident got me thinking about how acceptable torture has now become in everyday culture. The BBC advert went out at prime-time which means that children, certainly teenagers would see it. How would you like to explain to a 13-year old or an 8-year old why that man is screaming? Yet, to the BBC supposedly a cornerstone of British culture, it is acceptable. This is because torture has become acceptable. People talk about how television and computer games have made violence commonplace, not something that I accept, but I do agree they can raise our tolerance for such things. The focus is always on the violence by the individual but in fact it works even more effectively for violence by the state. All of this stepped up in 2001 following the 11th September attacks in the USA. This was the excuse the US government had been waiting for and seemed to allow them to do anything now to counter their perceived enemies. It is ironic that in the 1970s the USA led the way in criticising the USSR for its human rights record and in the 1990s, China. Yet in the 2000s the USA has led the way in eroding human rights, snatching people from across the World to be tried under their jurisdiction (well in fact, that legal black hole which is Guantanamo Bay). We had not seen anything like this since the 1960s when Israeli snatch squads roamed the World seeking out former Nazis to abduct and take to Israel for trial. At least in the case of the Israelis generally they had loads of evidence against the people they took, the Americans do not even have this which is why so many of these prisoners have been held for so long and have to be tortured to get anything that will stand up in court.
The 'permissive atmosphere' was very apparent in the Iraq War of 2003 especially the Abu Gharib prison torture. It is clear that ordinary soldiers felt it was acceptable to torture prisoners. In common with torturers from the past notably Germans and paramilitary units of their allies, they were happy to be photographed carrying out these acts. No-one on the ground in Iraq questioned this behaviour; there were no moral questions about it despite the USA very loudly proclaiming itself a Christian country. The Iraqis (like the Vietnamese thirty years earlier) had been so de-humanised in the eyes of the average American, that treatment of them no longer fell within the bounds of what is acceptable for a human. These American soldiers no longer saw their prisoners as human beings, just objects to be abused. This happened in Vietnam too where the Vietnamese became 'Charlie' or 'VCs' not people. The atrocity of My Lai is well known (but too rarely mentioned these days) and it is becoming clear US soldiers in Vietnam were committing other atrocities, the activities of the so-called Tiger Force in the Vietnamese highlands in 1967 came to light in 2003. Quotes from former members of the unit were similar to these days: 'I knew it was wrong, but it was an acceptable practice.' and 'If they ran we shot them, and if they didn't run we shot them anyway.' This unit alone slaughtered hundreds of civilians and I am sure there are many others that will never be revealed. Knowing this is often the standard behaviour of their troops, in 2003 they sought exemption for all US troops from any war crimes charges, the only country in the World that would have been permitted this. Even though they did not get it, the arrogance of such a demand is alarming.
The USA may feel its troops have a right to commit war crimes and carry out torture if they choose, but the rest of the World generally seems to accept this. The focus in the UK seemed to skip past any concern about what was being done at Abu Gharib and instead focus on whether Lynndie England one of the soldiers photographed carrying out torture was a lesbian and so was asserting female control over men which she then sought to publicise across the internet as some sort of threat to male hegemony. How had the focus shifted from 'US troops carrying out torture' to 'lesbian challenging men through torture'? Given that she was pregnant by the time of her trial there might be questions about her sexuality. People seem happy to accept that torture was going on and somehow were more upset at frivolous explanations for the uses it was put to. This is as appalling as the 'causal nexus' explanation for the Holocaust carried out by the Germans in the Second World War, i.e. blaming Stalin's massacres for provoking Hitler's. Both were simply evil men who wanted to kill, there is no need to find a connection.
The reason why people could allow such attitudes without questioning the basic wrongness of torture I believe is because popular culture has shifted us this way. Torture features in serious, if popular television series. I am sure there are many I could mention but many I have not seen. I did watch 'La Femme Nikita' TV series (1996-2000) and in that torture was a weekly occurrence for a sinister US organisation. One week an agent happened to run into an old girlfriend while on a mission and so was routinely tortured by his own side to find out if he had given away anything. Psychological and physical torture were a weekly part of this series. Torture also appeared in another spy series 'Alias' (2002-06), though in less quantity. There was a sense that it gave these series 'edge'. The series 'Lost' (2004-10) also featured abductions, mental and physical torture. One of the lead characters is a former torturer from Iraq and the characters 'The Others' accept torture as a normal way to defend themselves, directed by their charismatic leader. They even blame the heroes of the series for 'making' them use torture. This has parallels with the USA's attitude especially to the Iraqi population, there are parallels to Vietnam too. I imagine these are deliberate on the part of the writers. A UK one is 'Spooks' supposedly an authentic series about the work of Britain's Security Service commonly known as MI5. It started in 2002 and has now run for seven series and does not look likely to come to an end, partly as the cast keeps on being renewed as individual characters are killed. This tries a very British approach on the counter-espionage/terrorist role and shows that even the UK's allies and leading people in the UK cannot be trusted. However, again torture both mental and physical is used. If this is going on in British prisons for real, then there are a lot of UK officials who should be hauled in front of war crimes tribunals too.
All of these series have had high viewing figures both in the USA and the UK and I imagine other parts of the World. They show torture as being something necessary and generally having to be used as a weapon in the war against even more evil people. I know moral ambivalence is 'sexy' these days and is probably an accurate reflection of where people stand, but it does push on the acceptance of such behaviour in real life, especially when in the context of 'them' and 'us' which our governments have been pushing hard right through the 2000s. It also encourages us to think the way that people did in Hitler's Germany and Stalin's USSR, not to be concerned if a neighbour or even a family member is arrested, clearly they are wrong and dangerous. Our popular culture is teaching us how to live in an authoritarian state without complaining; to accept that whatever is done however horrific because it is 'necessary' for our 'safety'. You need to remember that the organisation that ran the Terror of the French Revolution was the Committee of Public Safety.
So, I suppose we should not be surprised, if by now, after years of such popular and state propaganda, that the BBC feel it is alright to use such imagery and such threats to encourage people to pay a £139 fee. The question is, given how so few people raise any questions about such methods, how far do we go with the next step?
P.P. 18/11/2008: I had forgotten two more popular television programmes which contributed to the 'normalisation' of torture in the British media. The first was the inclusion of scenes from the Japanese television programme, 'Endurance' in which contestants were voluntarily tortured in a number of ways including sleep deprivation, prevention of urinating, bloating with food, deprivation of food, beating, exposure to creatures such as insects and reptiles often to the face (in actions reminiscent of scenes in 'Nineteen Eighty-Four') and so on. This was shown every week on 'Tarrant on TV' (began in 1992 and still running), certainly in the 1990s, I have not seen it for years. In some ways it was a racist feature inviting the audience to laugh at Japanese behaviour but also it made torture seem something comic rather than alarming. Many of the elements of 'Endurance' particularly exposure to creatures to the face and being forced to eat unpleasant things is a core element of 'I'm A Celebrity Get Me Out Of Here' which has been running each year since 2001 with this year's series being watched by nearly 9 million people. Possibly even worse than featuring torture in drama, having it in so-called 'reality' shows makes it seem very normal, and almost to be expected.
P.P. - 05/04/2009: It is interesting that this past week the House of Commons Foreign Affairs Select Committee, a permanent committee made up of MPs from all parties will begin examining the allegations that have come to light over the past two years about British involvement in torture, especially in connection with the war in Afghanistan and action by the Pakistani Internal Services Intelligence body ISI and the US Camp X-Ray at Guantanamo Bay to which prisoners from Afghanistan and Iraq have been flown and held without charge and tortured. In addition, there is the particular case of Binyam Mohamed and other British complicity in torture. Both MI5 (the UK's internal Security Service) and Greater Manchester police have admitted involvement in this torture already.
The fact that a civilian British police force has been involved is even more alarming. I know the Greater Manchester Constabulary have been dangerously odd since the days of Sir James Anderton (nicknamed 'God's cop' for his fundamentalist proclamations) as its Chief Constable (1976-91) and his outrageous statements about purging the city on a kind of religious basis that harks back to the witchfinders of the 17th century. The committee will also investigate the use of British Dependent Territory Diego Garcia for rendition (i.e. kidnap) flights to the USA, oversight of private security companies (i.e. mercenaries) employed by the Foreign and Commowealth Office and incredibly sexual abuse at the British embassy in Baghdad. It is apparent civil service standards deteriorated so far as to be like those of some third rate dictatorship not that of a supposedly leading democracy in the world.
In such a culture of self-righteousness of course torture will be seen as acceptable. I doubt the select committee, whose members are chosen by the prime minister of people previously involved with MI5 or MI6, will probe too deeply, at least some evidence of the shameful behaviour of British bodies is coming to light and makes ridiculous any attempt to portray the UK as a bastion of human rights. Rangzieb Ahmed arrived in the UK having been tortured by the ISI with three of his fingernails missing, so this torture that the UK is supporting is of the most medieval kind. It is sickening.
Anyway, people are being fined and imprisoned for not paying their licences and the BBC is effective at catching them. However, this does not seem enough. They feel the need to terrify people into paying the fee and this is where the advertisements came from. They were introduced in April 2008 and faced immediate criticism. They have been likened to scenes from 'Nineteen Eighty-Four' saying that they know where you live, who you are, etc. This is a standard tactic of government departments in advertising, another regular example comes from the so-called Driver Vehicle Licensing Authority (DVLA).
The most alarming BBC advert featured the consequences of being imprisoned for not paying a TV licence, showing a man in prison and screams coming from a shower block with the tagline that detector vans can always find you watching an unlicenced television and implied that you could also be found in prison. The clear implication is that the prisoner is being raped in the shower block. The BBC admitted it had gone too far with this advertisement but felt that its softer approach in the past had not been successful. Prisons are violent, dangerous places the world over, people are raped in them, but it seems disgraceful that the threat of this should be used to get people to pay a £139 fee. Why does the BBC not cut out the middle man and simply have a van full of rapists which it drives round to the house of any defaulter and lets them in on the defaulter as a punishment rather than go through all the difficulty of sending them to court? Why is homosexual rape more tolerable for prime-time television than heterosexual rape or lesbian rape which is much more likely to be the case given the profile of those imprisoned for not paying?
The only real complaint about the campaign that attracted attention came from the very avuncular presenter Noel Edmonds who worked for the BBC for thirty years and now is on Channel 4. In September he said that he was going to stop paying his TV licence in protest at the heavy-handed approach that the BBC was adopting in its adverts. What is shocking is that there was not more widespread protest and from presenters with gravitas. Perhaps they are fearful of possible treatment from the BBC. How has it happened that the broadcasting corporation whose 'mission' (and it is on their website) is to 'Inform, Educate and Entertain', not to 'Terrify, Arrest and Punish'? I suppose this is part of the 'permissive atmosphere' that you find in authoritarian states. It does not need the dictator to say that various state bodies should act in a certain way, it just needs him to signal that he will do nothing to hinder them if they do. With the Blarite steps towards authoritarianism, this 'permissive atmosphere' has appeared and so state bodies now feel free to try to terrify people into compliance.
This incident got me thinking about how acceptable torture has now become in everyday culture. The BBC advert went out at prime-time which means that children, certainly teenagers would see it. How would you like to explain to a 13-year old or an 8-year old why that man is screaming? Yet, to the BBC supposedly a cornerstone of British culture, it is acceptable. This is because torture has become acceptable. People talk about how television and computer games have made violence commonplace, not something that I accept, but I do agree they can raise our tolerance for such things. The focus is always on the violence by the individual but in fact it works even more effectively for violence by the state. All of this stepped up in 2001 following the 11th September attacks in the USA. This was the excuse the US government had been waiting for and seemed to allow them to do anything now to counter their perceived enemies. It is ironic that in the 1970s the USA led the way in criticising the USSR for its human rights record and in the 1990s, China. Yet in the 2000s the USA has led the way in eroding human rights, snatching people from across the World to be tried under their jurisdiction (well in fact, that legal black hole which is Guantanamo Bay). We had not seen anything like this since the 1960s when Israeli snatch squads roamed the World seeking out former Nazis to abduct and take to Israel for trial. At least in the case of the Israelis generally they had loads of evidence against the people they took, the Americans do not even have this which is why so many of these prisoners have been held for so long and have to be tortured to get anything that will stand up in court.
The 'permissive atmosphere' was very apparent in the Iraq War of 2003 especially the Abu Gharib prison torture. It is clear that ordinary soldiers felt it was acceptable to torture prisoners. In common with torturers from the past notably Germans and paramilitary units of their allies, they were happy to be photographed carrying out these acts. No-one on the ground in Iraq questioned this behaviour; there were no moral questions about it despite the USA very loudly proclaiming itself a Christian country. The Iraqis (like the Vietnamese thirty years earlier) had been so de-humanised in the eyes of the average American, that treatment of them no longer fell within the bounds of what is acceptable for a human. These American soldiers no longer saw their prisoners as human beings, just objects to be abused. This happened in Vietnam too where the Vietnamese became 'Charlie' or 'VCs' not people. The atrocity of My Lai is well known (but too rarely mentioned these days) and it is becoming clear US soldiers in Vietnam were committing other atrocities, the activities of the so-called Tiger Force in the Vietnamese highlands in 1967 came to light in 2003. Quotes from former members of the unit were similar to these days: 'I knew it was wrong, but it was an acceptable practice.' and 'If they ran we shot them, and if they didn't run we shot them anyway.' This unit alone slaughtered hundreds of civilians and I am sure there are many others that will never be revealed. Knowing this is often the standard behaviour of their troops, in 2003 they sought exemption for all US troops from any war crimes charges, the only country in the World that would have been permitted this. Even though they did not get it, the arrogance of such a demand is alarming.
The USA may feel its troops have a right to commit war crimes and carry out torture if they choose, but the rest of the World generally seems to accept this. The focus in the UK seemed to skip past any concern about what was being done at Abu Gharib and instead focus on whether Lynndie England one of the soldiers photographed carrying out torture was a lesbian and so was asserting female control over men which she then sought to publicise across the internet as some sort of threat to male hegemony. How had the focus shifted from 'US troops carrying out torture' to 'lesbian challenging men through torture'? Given that she was pregnant by the time of her trial there might be questions about her sexuality. People seem happy to accept that torture was going on and somehow were more upset at frivolous explanations for the uses it was put to. This is as appalling as the 'causal nexus' explanation for the Holocaust carried out by the Germans in the Second World War, i.e. blaming Stalin's massacres for provoking Hitler's. Both were simply evil men who wanted to kill, there is no need to find a connection.
The reason why people could allow such attitudes without questioning the basic wrongness of torture I believe is because popular culture has shifted us this way. Torture features in serious, if popular television series. I am sure there are many I could mention but many I have not seen. I did watch 'La Femme Nikita' TV series (1996-2000) and in that torture was a weekly occurrence for a sinister US organisation. One week an agent happened to run into an old girlfriend while on a mission and so was routinely tortured by his own side to find out if he had given away anything. Psychological and physical torture were a weekly part of this series. Torture also appeared in another spy series 'Alias' (2002-06), though in less quantity. There was a sense that it gave these series 'edge'. The series 'Lost' (2004-10) also featured abductions, mental and physical torture. One of the lead characters is a former torturer from Iraq and the characters 'The Others' accept torture as a normal way to defend themselves, directed by their charismatic leader. They even blame the heroes of the series for 'making' them use torture. This has parallels with the USA's attitude especially to the Iraqi population, there are parallels to Vietnam too. I imagine these are deliberate on the part of the writers. A UK one is 'Spooks' supposedly an authentic series about the work of Britain's Security Service commonly known as MI5. It started in 2002 and has now run for seven series and does not look likely to come to an end, partly as the cast keeps on being renewed as individual characters are killed. This tries a very British approach on the counter-espionage/terrorist role and shows that even the UK's allies and leading people in the UK cannot be trusted. However, again torture both mental and physical is used. If this is going on in British prisons for real, then there are a lot of UK officials who should be hauled in front of war crimes tribunals too.
All of these series have had high viewing figures both in the USA and the UK and I imagine other parts of the World. They show torture as being something necessary and generally having to be used as a weapon in the war against even more evil people. I know moral ambivalence is 'sexy' these days and is probably an accurate reflection of where people stand, but it does push on the acceptance of such behaviour in real life, especially when in the context of 'them' and 'us' which our governments have been pushing hard right through the 2000s. It also encourages us to think the way that people did in Hitler's Germany and Stalin's USSR, not to be concerned if a neighbour or even a family member is arrested, clearly they are wrong and dangerous. Our popular culture is teaching us how to live in an authoritarian state without complaining; to accept that whatever is done however horrific because it is 'necessary' for our 'safety'. You need to remember that the organisation that ran the Terror of the French Revolution was the Committee of Public Safety.
So, I suppose we should not be surprised, if by now, after years of such popular and state propaganda, that the BBC feel it is alright to use such imagery and such threats to encourage people to pay a £139 fee. The question is, given how so few people raise any questions about such methods, how far do we go with the next step?
P.P. 18/11/2008: I had forgotten two more popular television programmes which contributed to the 'normalisation' of torture in the British media. The first was the inclusion of scenes from the Japanese television programme, 'Endurance' in which contestants were voluntarily tortured in a number of ways including sleep deprivation, prevention of urinating, bloating with food, deprivation of food, beating, exposure to creatures such as insects and reptiles often to the face (in actions reminiscent of scenes in 'Nineteen Eighty-Four') and so on. This was shown every week on 'Tarrant on TV' (began in 1992 and still running), certainly in the 1990s, I have not seen it for years. In some ways it was a racist feature inviting the audience to laugh at Japanese behaviour but also it made torture seem something comic rather than alarming. Many of the elements of 'Endurance' particularly exposure to creatures to the face and being forced to eat unpleasant things is a core element of 'I'm A Celebrity Get Me Out Of Here' which has been running each year since 2001 with this year's series being watched by nearly 9 million people. Possibly even worse than featuring torture in drama, having it in so-called 'reality' shows makes it seem very normal, and almost to be expected.
P.P. - 05/04/2009: It is interesting that this past week the House of Commons Foreign Affairs Select Committee, a permanent committee made up of MPs from all parties will begin examining the allegations that have come to light over the past two years about British involvement in torture, especially in connection with the war in Afghanistan and action by the Pakistani Internal Services Intelligence body ISI and the US Camp X-Ray at Guantanamo Bay to which prisoners from Afghanistan and Iraq have been flown and held without charge and tortured. In addition, there is the particular case of Binyam Mohamed and other British complicity in torture. Both MI5 (the UK's internal Security Service) and Greater Manchester police have admitted involvement in this torture already.
The fact that a civilian British police force has been involved is even more alarming. I know the Greater Manchester Constabulary have been dangerously odd since the days of Sir James Anderton (nicknamed 'God's cop' for his fundamentalist proclamations) as its Chief Constable (1976-91) and his outrageous statements about purging the city on a kind of religious basis that harks back to the witchfinders of the 17th century. The committee will also investigate the use of British Dependent Territory Diego Garcia for rendition (i.e. kidnap) flights to the USA, oversight of private security companies (i.e. mercenaries) employed by the Foreign and Commowealth Office and incredibly sexual abuse at the British embassy in Baghdad. It is apparent civil service standards deteriorated so far as to be like those of some third rate dictatorship not that of a supposedly leading democracy in the world.
In such a culture of self-righteousness of course torture will be seen as acceptable. I doubt the select committee, whose members are chosen by the prime minister of people previously involved with MI5 or MI6, will probe too deeply, at least some evidence of the shameful behaviour of British bodies is coming to light and makes ridiculous any attempt to portray the UK as a bastion of human rights. Rangzieb Ahmed arrived in the UK having been tortured by the ISI with three of his fingernails missing, so this torture that the UK is supporting is of the most medieval kind. It is sickening.
Wednesday, 3 September 2008
Is the Enlightenment Over?
The Age of Enlightenment is seen as roughly the period from about 1688 to 1778/1789/1815 in which there was a shift away from superstition and belief in magic to a greater faith in rational thought and experimentation to determine how the world worked. Behind this were developments in philosophy with its emaphsis on 'reason' and also a move from seeing society as properly based on hierarchy. Out of this we get the first moves to democracy as we know it in the modern sense and also the sense of 'rights of man' (application to women took longer) and that everyone was equal under the law, no longer were nobles and monarch exempt. It did not achieve everything over night and things such as the French Revolution (1789) which began based on these precepts soon ran off the rails and turned to violence. The Enlightenment did begin to break down prejudices and in countries like Britain legal discrimination against Catholics and Jews began to be reduced and then abolished in the mid-19th century. However, as we know that did not stop religious intolerance and anti-Semitism persisting. The important thing about the Enlightenment was that it gave the intellectual basis (and in the case of France and the USA examples of constitutions and bills of rights) for a lot of the things that people aspired towards in a liberal demoncracy in the 20th century and so we saw things like votes for all people, civil rights for minorities, equality for women and welfare states. All of this took decades, but without the Age of Enlightenment we would be in an age in which we would think most things were controlled by magic and that it was right that nobles should pay no taxes and have the right of life and death over those lower down the hierarchy (the bulk of the population) who would be squeezed for taxes with no protection if they fell ill or lost their jobs.
My view is that the post-Enlightenment phase in which the ideas put forward slowly and painfully were put into reality, is coming to an end. Why do I think this? You might say that the mass wars of the 20th century, the Holocaust, racist killings, etc. showed that the Enlightenment was not well established. I agree that the Second World War was certainly the period when Enlightenment values were put on the line. In 1938 very few countries in the world had democracy. However, it was Britain, the USA, France that won the war and their values became dominant in large chunks of the world. Their ally was the USSR which of course had a Communist system which though rational (in contrast to the Nazis who had emphasised things like occultism) was totally opposed to the human rights aspects of the Enlightenment through purges and prison camps and with a very hierarchical system. Of course the societies of Britain, USA and France were not perfect, there was privilege, but generally people living in these countries and those that they influenced after 1945 had better conditions than at any previous time in history. We are never going to have Heaven on Earth, but there are degrees of quality of life and we should be able to get better ones than worse ones.
I believe, however, that sixty-three years after Enlightenment values won in about half the world they are being snuffed out and that when I die, it will be in a World that is far less liberal, equal and certainly less rational than the one I was born into forty years ago. On what basis do I make this judgement? Let us look at the broad facts. A quarter of the World's population lives in China a country without democracy, with a very hierarachical society in which free speech and free association (key tenets of the Enlightenment) are banned. The country has never really had democracy bar a few attempts in the 1910s almost a century ago. Torture and execution are common place. Around a third of all the executions in the World each year (about 900) are carried out in China and these are the ones we know about. Censorship is extensive and sophisticated. Despite greater internet access coming to almost every small village across China blocking of particular sites is handled very successfully as journalists covering the Olympics soon found out. In additional internet providers and browser companies seem quite happy to comply with China's steps to block access. A couple of decades agon China was seen pretty much as a backwater, but its vast economic growth cannot be ignored now and companies and countries are falling over themselves to collaborate with the Chinese dictatorship because it is so profitable. I have commented on how the US boycotted the 1980 Moscow Olympics but was happy to attend the 2008 Beijing Olympics even though China's behaviour is as bad probably worse than the USSR's was.
China has a relativist view of human rights. This argues that in certain societies 'rights' have a different meaning. In China they talk more about duty to the society as a whole. They argue that things like free expression and free association, freedom from torture, the freedom to have a fair trial, are not actually appropriate rights for their society. This is just utter rubbish. You cannot say that the people of China do not suffer pain and deprivation any differently to the people of the UK or USA. There are absolute freedoms which have been articulated by the West but in fact are about being a human and having nerve endings and a brain and having emotional connections to loved ones and wanting to be able to express ourselves. China's line, saying that somehow the Chinese are not engineered to want or have these things, is in fact an extreme form of racialism on the part of the Chinese government. Chinese people are no different to any other person on the planet in needing these things. Unfortunately rather than arguing that the UN Declaration of Human Rights has universal application to every single human, places like the USA are undermining this severely saying, that 'well, US citizens might have these rights but not people we have abducted and are currently torturing'. Rights do come with duties, but then again the US wants its troops exempt from war crimes indictments. If the most powerful democracy in the World is pandering this line, how can we not expect the world soon to be all adopting a relativist position on human rights, one that suits the powerful and not the ordinary people?
In 1986 the concept of state-backed terrorism was when US President Ronald Reagan sent aircraft to bomb targets in Libya. Similarly US President George W. Bush ordered the invasion of Iraq in 2003 because the country was supposedly harbouring Al-Qaeda operatives. China we know is going out of its way to support harsh regimes: Sudan where there has been attempts at genocide in Darfur, Zimbabwe - where Robert Mugabe has long ran a harsh dictatorship, Iran - a theocracy which the USA is concerned about in terms of its nuclear developments and threats to stability in the region. All of these things are ignored in the rush to capture more Chinese trade. The USA is another side to the problem. Since 1941 the USA portrayed itself as the leading defender of democracy and Enlightenment values, though this often led to it backing dictatorships particularly in Latin America, South-East Asia and the Middle East. However, it was a functioning democracy that seemed to allow opportunity for people and after the bitter battles, its apartheid-style laws were dismantled. Now internally and externally it seems to have a different position. I have noted before how President Bush has felt the ultra-wealthy to be his core constituency and John McCain who looks likely to be his successor is no different. His vice-president Sarah Palin loves shooting things and believes in creationism being taught in schools. Fundamentalism since he rose in the Iranian Revolution of 1979 has been feared, but of course it has been bubbling up in the Christian world as well as the Islamic. Since Ronald Reagan came to power you have seen the Christian fundamentalists get stronger and stronger. This leads to policies such as teaching creationism (which believes the World and its life were created in six days in 4004 BCE, so after the start of Ancient Egypt, let alone the dinosaurs) and abstinence in sex as a form of contraception in a country with record levels of teenage pregnancies. The US welfare provision that there was has been neglected and means 40 million Americans are likely to be turned away from a hospital if they turn up with an emergency case. The last couple of decades have seen the chance of advancing in US society if you come from an ordinary background decrease. The USA is no longer a land of opportunity except for the very rich.
Like China, the USA does not believe in the rehabilitative nature of imprisonment it believes in punishment. Though the US population is about a fifth of China's, a quarter of all the prisoners in the world are held in US prisons (about 1 in 100 Americans are in prison). The number of US executions has risen steadily since the 1980s. The USA quite happily uses torture now in its supposed war on terrorism, even torturing foreign citizens it has abducted. How is this any different from China? Oh, the main difference is that China tends not to abduct people and also tends to only torture its own population. So, with the two most powerful countries in the world having no interest in Enlightenment values where does that leave the rest of us? Well of course a lot of the world is under military dictatorship of one kind or another. These flicker in and out of life as in Pakistan at the moment, but even when democracy can take hold it is often far from a true democracy and still works on the basis of corruption and hierarchy power. Other strong states such as Russia, Iran, Saudi Arabia seem to have no interest in liberty and a willingness to use methods in terms of politics and legal processes which are abhorrent and originate from before the Enlightenment.
What about closer to home? Well the UK always follows US examples in preference to any other. We fly people to be tortured in US camps and seem to quite like the information the torture brings. Christian fundamentalism is catching on slower in the UK, primarily because the British loathe doing anything in a group bar for very short periods such as 90 minutes for a football match. About 4% of the UK population goes to church, we would rather queue up at a DIY store. In Britain we are Consumerist Fundamentalists and feel any constraint on our consumption as an assault on our 'religion'. However, faith schools are growing in number and the teaching of creationism is on the increase. Ironically the school at the end of my road teaches creationism but then gives dinosaur figurines to the boys as end-of-term gifts! Prejudice especially aimed at Poles is on the increase. We are set to have a government which like the American ones, is based on hierarchy and privilege. It is becoming almost impossible for ordinary people to afford to go to university and so many are being barred from getting what is now seen as the minimum for entering a decent job. If there was a referendum on these things we would have the death penalty, all police armed, use of torture for court cases, castration for sex offenders and repatriation of even third-generation immigrants immediately, the BNP which now has councillors in the Midlands, wants these things. It is only the politicians in Westminster brought up in the spirit of Enlightenment who are holding back this desire to return to the barbarity of the past. What happens when they retire and MPs who have only known the bigotry and violence of the 21st century come into office?
In my view we are seeing the end of the process which started with the Age of Enlightenment and are moving into a Dark Age. As in the early medieval period in Europe, we are going to see suffering, prejudice, persecution, violence, superstition, fear being the norms of our societies. No-one will have a 'right' to anything that they lack the power to snatch. We will be pushed around by the rich and the powerful in the way medieval peasants were. Life will be capricious and we will have nothing to defend us from it. We will all be potential victims of arbitrary law and terrifying punishment. All of these things are in place in China and are growing in Russia and the USA, that covers over 1.6 billon people, more than a quarter of the world. Many of the rest are not much better off. By 2038 it is quite likely that democracy and the rights that go with it will be as rare as they were in 1938.
My view is that the post-Enlightenment phase in which the ideas put forward slowly and painfully were put into reality, is coming to an end. Why do I think this? You might say that the mass wars of the 20th century, the Holocaust, racist killings, etc. showed that the Enlightenment was not well established. I agree that the Second World War was certainly the period when Enlightenment values were put on the line. In 1938 very few countries in the world had democracy. However, it was Britain, the USA, France that won the war and their values became dominant in large chunks of the world. Their ally was the USSR which of course had a Communist system which though rational (in contrast to the Nazis who had emphasised things like occultism) was totally opposed to the human rights aspects of the Enlightenment through purges and prison camps and with a very hierarchical system. Of course the societies of Britain, USA and France were not perfect, there was privilege, but generally people living in these countries and those that they influenced after 1945 had better conditions than at any previous time in history. We are never going to have Heaven on Earth, but there are degrees of quality of life and we should be able to get better ones than worse ones.
I believe, however, that sixty-three years after Enlightenment values won in about half the world they are being snuffed out and that when I die, it will be in a World that is far less liberal, equal and certainly less rational than the one I was born into forty years ago. On what basis do I make this judgement? Let us look at the broad facts. A quarter of the World's population lives in China a country without democracy, with a very hierarachical society in which free speech and free association (key tenets of the Enlightenment) are banned. The country has never really had democracy bar a few attempts in the 1910s almost a century ago. Torture and execution are common place. Around a third of all the executions in the World each year (about 900) are carried out in China and these are the ones we know about. Censorship is extensive and sophisticated. Despite greater internet access coming to almost every small village across China blocking of particular sites is handled very successfully as journalists covering the Olympics soon found out. In additional internet providers and browser companies seem quite happy to comply with China's steps to block access. A couple of decades agon China was seen pretty much as a backwater, but its vast economic growth cannot be ignored now and companies and countries are falling over themselves to collaborate with the Chinese dictatorship because it is so profitable. I have commented on how the US boycotted the 1980 Moscow Olympics but was happy to attend the 2008 Beijing Olympics even though China's behaviour is as bad probably worse than the USSR's was.
China has a relativist view of human rights. This argues that in certain societies 'rights' have a different meaning. In China they talk more about duty to the society as a whole. They argue that things like free expression and free association, freedom from torture, the freedom to have a fair trial, are not actually appropriate rights for their society. This is just utter rubbish. You cannot say that the people of China do not suffer pain and deprivation any differently to the people of the UK or USA. There are absolute freedoms which have been articulated by the West but in fact are about being a human and having nerve endings and a brain and having emotional connections to loved ones and wanting to be able to express ourselves. China's line, saying that somehow the Chinese are not engineered to want or have these things, is in fact an extreme form of racialism on the part of the Chinese government. Chinese people are no different to any other person on the planet in needing these things. Unfortunately rather than arguing that the UN Declaration of Human Rights has universal application to every single human, places like the USA are undermining this severely saying, that 'well, US citizens might have these rights but not people we have abducted and are currently torturing'. Rights do come with duties, but then again the US wants its troops exempt from war crimes indictments. If the most powerful democracy in the World is pandering this line, how can we not expect the world soon to be all adopting a relativist position on human rights, one that suits the powerful and not the ordinary people?
In 1986 the concept of state-backed terrorism was when US President Ronald Reagan sent aircraft to bomb targets in Libya. Similarly US President George W. Bush ordered the invasion of Iraq in 2003 because the country was supposedly harbouring Al-Qaeda operatives. China we know is going out of its way to support harsh regimes: Sudan where there has been attempts at genocide in Darfur, Zimbabwe - where Robert Mugabe has long ran a harsh dictatorship, Iran - a theocracy which the USA is concerned about in terms of its nuclear developments and threats to stability in the region. All of these things are ignored in the rush to capture more Chinese trade. The USA is another side to the problem. Since 1941 the USA portrayed itself as the leading defender of democracy and Enlightenment values, though this often led to it backing dictatorships particularly in Latin America, South-East Asia and the Middle East. However, it was a functioning democracy that seemed to allow opportunity for people and after the bitter battles, its apartheid-style laws were dismantled. Now internally and externally it seems to have a different position. I have noted before how President Bush has felt the ultra-wealthy to be his core constituency and John McCain who looks likely to be his successor is no different. His vice-president Sarah Palin loves shooting things and believes in creationism being taught in schools. Fundamentalism since he rose in the Iranian Revolution of 1979 has been feared, but of course it has been bubbling up in the Christian world as well as the Islamic. Since Ronald Reagan came to power you have seen the Christian fundamentalists get stronger and stronger. This leads to policies such as teaching creationism (which believes the World and its life were created in six days in 4004 BCE, so after the start of Ancient Egypt, let alone the dinosaurs) and abstinence in sex as a form of contraception in a country with record levels of teenage pregnancies. The US welfare provision that there was has been neglected and means 40 million Americans are likely to be turned away from a hospital if they turn up with an emergency case. The last couple of decades have seen the chance of advancing in US society if you come from an ordinary background decrease. The USA is no longer a land of opportunity except for the very rich.
Like China, the USA does not believe in the rehabilitative nature of imprisonment it believes in punishment. Though the US population is about a fifth of China's, a quarter of all the prisoners in the world are held in US prisons (about 1 in 100 Americans are in prison). The number of US executions has risen steadily since the 1980s. The USA quite happily uses torture now in its supposed war on terrorism, even torturing foreign citizens it has abducted. How is this any different from China? Oh, the main difference is that China tends not to abduct people and also tends to only torture its own population. So, with the two most powerful countries in the world having no interest in Enlightenment values where does that leave the rest of us? Well of course a lot of the world is under military dictatorship of one kind or another. These flicker in and out of life as in Pakistan at the moment, but even when democracy can take hold it is often far from a true democracy and still works on the basis of corruption and hierarchy power. Other strong states such as Russia, Iran, Saudi Arabia seem to have no interest in liberty and a willingness to use methods in terms of politics and legal processes which are abhorrent and originate from before the Enlightenment.
What about closer to home? Well the UK always follows US examples in preference to any other. We fly people to be tortured in US camps and seem to quite like the information the torture brings. Christian fundamentalism is catching on slower in the UK, primarily because the British loathe doing anything in a group bar for very short periods such as 90 minutes for a football match. About 4% of the UK population goes to church, we would rather queue up at a DIY store. In Britain we are Consumerist Fundamentalists and feel any constraint on our consumption as an assault on our 'religion'. However, faith schools are growing in number and the teaching of creationism is on the increase. Ironically the school at the end of my road teaches creationism but then gives dinosaur figurines to the boys as end-of-term gifts! Prejudice especially aimed at Poles is on the increase. We are set to have a government which like the American ones, is based on hierarchy and privilege. It is becoming almost impossible for ordinary people to afford to go to university and so many are being barred from getting what is now seen as the minimum for entering a decent job. If there was a referendum on these things we would have the death penalty, all police armed, use of torture for court cases, castration for sex offenders and repatriation of even third-generation immigrants immediately, the BNP which now has councillors in the Midlands, wants these things. It is only the politicians in Westminster brought up in the spirit of Enlightenment who are holding back this desire to return to the barbarity of the past. What happens when they retire and MPs who have only known the bigotry and violence of the 21st century come into office?
In my view we are seeing the end of the process which started with the Age of Enlightenment and are moving into a Dark Age. As in the early medieval period in Europe, we are going to see suffering, prejudice, persecution, violence, superstition, fear being the norms of our societies. No-one will have a 'right' to anything that they lack the power to snatch. We will be pushed around by the rich and the powerful in the way medieval peasants were. Life will be capricious and we will have nothing to defend us from it. We will all be potential victims of arbitrary law and terrifying punishment. All of these things are in place in China and are growing in Russia and the USA, that covers over 1.6 billon people, more than a quarter of the world. Many of the rest are not much better off. By 2038 it is quite likely that democracy and the rights that go with it will be as rare as they were in 1938.
Thursday, 12 June 2008
'Pre-Charge Detention': Wrapping Up the Destruction of Liberties in Weasly Words
Any hope I had for Gordon Brown, any belief that his imminent removal was being over-exaggerated and a hope he would continue has been eroded utterly by his pig-headed push to extend the period without charge from 28 days to 42 days. There is utterly no need for this measure. The USA has only 2 days (though prisoners taken to Guantanamo Bay are exempt) and even places like Turkey which hardly has a good human rights record only has 7½ days. Why does the UK have so much more and wanted it extended? I have no love for the Conservative Party, but am heartened by David Davis the Shadow Home Secretary resigning because he opposes this legislation. He is resigning his seat too and will campaign at the by-election as an independent on this issue. A Labour MP for Rotherham, Dennis McShane, was on television this lunchtime saying he could not believe that a Conservative (the party has a history of supporting strong law and order legisation) is opposed the 'necessary' stronger legislation (McShane listed the things he wants including identity cards for foreigners and more CCTV as well as this extended detention without charge), but he cannot see that this shows that the Labour Party is moving so far to the right-wing in its rush to abolish democracy in the UK that it is leaving the Conservatives behind.
The other thing that sickened me is how the BBC is now referring to detention without charge. It has gone from being called that, i.e. 'detention without charge' which it is, to now being termed 'pre-charge detention' to make it sound like some kind of preliminary process that will always lead to a charge. Of course this is not the case. If the police need 42 days to get the evidence to make a charge it suggests that the case is pretty weak anyway. In fact what the 42 days are about is less to do with gathering evidence and more about psychological pressure and presumably ultimately torture to get the suspect to confess. This kind of detention does not lead to charges as clearly was seen in the Hicham Yezza - Rizwaan Saber case last month. Rizwaan Saber who is studying a PhD at Nottingham University was arrested along with his academic supervisor Dr. Hicham Yezza who is of Algerian origins (he has lived in the UK since 1995 when he was aged 17). Saber's research meant he had to study terrorist literature. He had been accepted into the UK to study this area (which clearly is an important one which speaking Arabic he would be ideally equipped to focus on) and was using resources publicly available on US government websites. Both men were held 14th-20th May and were released without charge. So they were in 'pre-charge detention' for six days, but of course it was not 'pre-charge' because they were doing nothing wrong. The government is clearly embarrassed by the whole incident and are now trying to deport Yezza back to Algeria despite him living here for over a decade and working as an academic (who are usually exempt from immigration regulations to promote contact between universities and their staff across countries).
The Yezza-Saber case is alarming for two reasons. First it shows how even with the 28 days detention without charge it is being used improperly. Second it shows an aspect that I neglected to look at in my posting on the creation of the police state in the UK, that is the suppression of academic freedom to research what is seen as important. This is a form of censorship and seems to have slipped by without the bulk of the population being aware of it. Self-censorship seems to be increasing off the back of it with the BBC coming up with euphemisms and weasly words to conceal the actual severity and speed of the erosion of our civil liberties. Brown you have lost any support I had for you. You could have turned back the tide of Blair's authoritarianism, instead you have decided to extend and accelerate it. I hope that you will lose the vote on extending detention without charge and that it will bring down your government in the way that you have been warning Labour MPs that it will. You are not fit to hold office in a democracy, you need to go.
The other thing that sickened me is how the BBC is now referring to detention without charge. It has gone from being called that, i.e. 'detention without charge' which it is, to now being termed 'pre-charge detention' to make it sound like some kind of preliminary process that will always lead to a charge. Of course this is not the case. If the police need 42 days to get the evidence to make a charge it suggests that the case is pretty weak anyway. In fact what the 42 days are about is less to do with gathering evidence and more about psychological pressure and presumably ultimately torture to get the suspect to confess. This kind of detention does not lead to charges as clearly was seen in the Hicham Yezza - Rizwaan Saber case last month. Rizwaan Saber who is studying a PhD at Nottingham University was arrested along with his academic supervisor Dr. Hicham Yezza who is of Algerian origins (he has lived in the UK since 1995 when he was aged 17). Saber's research meant he had to study terrorist literature. He had been accepted into the UK to study this area (which clearly is an important one which speaking Arabic he would be ideally equipped to focus on) and was using resources publicly available on US government websites. Both men were held 14th-20th May and were released without charge. So they were in 'pre-charge detention' for six days, but of course it was not 'pre-charge' because they were doing nothing wrong. The government is clearly embarrassed by the whole incident and are now trying to deport Yezza back to Algeria despite him living here for over a decade and working as an academic (who are usually exempt from immigration regulations to promote contact between universities and their staff across countries).
The Yezza-Saber case is alarming for two reasons. First it shows how even with the 28 days detention without charge it is being used improperly. Second it shows an aspect that I neglected to look at in my posting on the creation of the police state in the UK, that is the suppression of academic freedom to research what is seen as important. This is a form of censorship and seems to have slipped by without the bulk of the population being aware of it. Self-censorship seems to be increasing off the back of it with the BBC coming up with euphemisms and weasly words to conceal the actual severity and speed of the erosion of our civil liberties. Brown you have lost any support I had for you. You could have turned back the tide of Blair's authoritarianism, instead you have decided to extend and accelerate it. I hope that you will lose the vote on extending detention without charge and that it will bring down your government in the way that you have been warning Labour MPs that it will. You are not fit to hold office in a democracy, you need to go.
Sunday, 4 May 2008
The Crooked Road to UK Dictatorship
As you will know if you read this blog with any regularity, my key fear for the UK at the moment is that it is steadily becoming an authoritarian state in which our civil liberties are stripped from us, supposedly in order to defeat terrorism. However, despite the claims many of the new powers the government and local authorities have are simply to keep the ordinary UK population in line. I was interested to read that next Tuesday (6th May 2008) there is a programme showing on BBC4 in their 'True Stories' series called 'True Stories: Taking Liberties' and it looks at the reduction of civil liberties in the UK during Tony Blair's premiership. It is presented by a man called Chris Atkins. It is always heartening to learn that your analysis of developments is shared by others and obviously I recommend you watch it if you can.
One thing that irritated me in the preview of the programme in 'The Guardian' was that they feel that Atkins 'overstates' his case when relating the developments in the UK to those that led to Nazi Germany. Now, this is always something that annoys me. For some reason people seem to think that the Nazi state appeared fully formed when Hitler came to power on 30th January 1933 with death camps, the Waffen SS, the fully system in place. Of course that is nonsense. It always takes time to develop a dictatorship. In fact democracy had ended in Germany in 1930 when President Hindenburg began ruling through presidential decree. Elections continued but they had little bearing on who became Chancellor of Germany and Hitler was effectively invited to become Chancellor. So, an authoritarian system had been three years in the making when the Nazis came to power.
The Nazis moved fast with legislation especially after the Reichstag Fire at the end of February 1933. However, it was not until 1935 that the Nuremburg Laws were introduced making Jews no longer Germans. It was not until 1936 that the German police force was centralised and rearmament began in full. It was not until 1942 that death camps for the industrial killing of Jews, Roma, Soviets, homosexuals, et al were established. This was nine years after Hitler had come to power. This is not to say the Nazi regime was not horrific, it is to say that even with its rush to carry out its terrible acts it took time. It is essential that we remember the ultimate activities of the Nazis, but often this leads people to overlook each step which took the country closer and closer to the Holocaust. In 1970 Karl A. Schleunes wrote 'The Twisted Road to Auschwitz' which explained how erratic the individual Nazi steps were, even if they did have an overall goal of reaching the most extreme.
Now, what it is vital to note for people living in a democracy is to be able to recognise those early steps that allowed the more extreme ones of the 1940s. We need to be able to tell when laws are being introduced like those of 1930-35. These laws in themselves were unacceptable though there severity is now overshadowed with what came later. I am glad to say that I do not anticipate the UK ever carrying out a genocide, but what may happen is that we end up with a form of state like Germany 1930-2 or even slightly later on. Thus, it is wrong to say that Atkins is misguided when talking about the crumbling of British civil liberties to refer to Germany in the 1930s. Germany was an industrialised state in western Europe which had a democratic system, so similar to the UK. Every element of the destruction of civil liberties in Germany after 1930 is to be abhorred just as every reduction in UK civil liberties now needs to be noted and opposed.
One thing that irritated me in the preview of the programme in 'The Guardian' was that they feel that Atkins 'overstates' his case when relating the developments in the UK to those that led to Nazi Germany. Now, this is always something that annoys me. For some reason people seem to think that the Nazi state appeared fully formed when Hitler came to power on 30th January 1933 with death camps, the Waffen SS, the fully system in place. Of course that is nonsense. It always takes time to develop a dictatorship. In fact democracy had ended in Germany in 1930 when President Hindenburg began ruling through presidential decree. Elections continued but they had little bearing on who became Chancellor of Germany and Hitler was effectively invited to become Chancellor. So, an authoritarian system had been three years in the making when the Nazis came to power.
The Nazis moved fast with legislation especially after the Reichstag Fire at the end of February 1933. However, it was not until 1935 that the Nuremburg Laws were introduced making Jews no longer Germans. It was not until 1936 that the German police force was centralised and rearmament began in full. It was not until 1942 that death camps for the industrial killing of Jews, Roma, Soviets, homosexuals, et al were established. This was nine years after Hitler had come to power. This is not to say the Nazi regime was not horrific, it is to say that even with its rush to carry out its terrible acts it took time. It is essential that we remember the ultimate activities of the Nazis, but often this leads people to overlook each step which took the country closer and closer to the Holocaust. In 1970 Karl A. Schleunes wrote 'The Twisted Road to Auschwitz' which explained how erratic the individual Nazi steps were, even if they did have an overall goal of reaching the most extreme.
Now, what it is vital to note for people living in a democracy is to be able to recognise those early steps that allowed the more extreme ones of the 1940s. We need to be able to tell when laws are being introduced like those of 1930-35. These laws in themselves were unacceptable though there severity is now overshadowed with what came later. I am glad to say that I do not anticipate the UK ever carrying out a genocide, but what may happen is that we end up with a form of state like Germany 1930-2 or even slightly later on. Thus, it is wrong to say that Atkins is misguided when talking about the crumbling of British civil liberties to refer to Germany in the 1930s. Germany was an industrialised state in western Europe which had a democratic system, so similar to the UK. Every element of the destruction of civil liberties in Germany after 1930 is to be abhorred just as every reduction in UK civil liberties now needs to be noted and opposed.
Saturday, 3 May 2008
Why they are Trying to Drive Brown Out
As readers of this blog will know, I am not a big fan of Gordon Brown, I think he is more honest and far less egotistical than Tony Blair was and whilst he still seems to be following New Labour's policy of moving to a semi-authoritarian state he is doing it with far less speed than his predecessor. However, it is clear that Brown is not acceptable to the super-rich and others in the so-called Establishment who actually run the UK. This seems to be the only reason for why there has been such massive fuss about the local elections. So, Labour lost seats and a handful of councils, but show me a mid-term party in government who does not. Local elections are never a good indication of national flows anyway, especially, as Thatcher demonstrated you can rule for years only attracting a minority of the general votes. Another issue is why replicate Labour on 26% and not Ken Livingstone on 47% which would mean a far closer election. The reason is, because those who want Brown removed are using any stick they can find to beat him with. 'The Guardian' is supposed to be a liberal paper which you would imagine would be sympathetic to the Brown government, but no it is talking about the 'dusk' of Labour on its front page even though the general election is not until 2010.
The super-rich could cope with Blair. For a start he did not head the Labour Party, he headed a personal party, which as I have noted before was tied to its head as tightly as the Peronists were to Peron and probably even more than the Gaullists were to De Gaulle. Blair could always control Blair by flattery. In addition, his desire to manipulate the media and to make the public feel somehow guilty when they disagreed with him, fitted with these influential people's desires. Blair would go to war when the USA commanded it and he totally toed the line over the threat of terrorism which is the first piece in threatening the populous to accept the authoritarian laws the super-rich seem so keen to have imposed in the UK.
It is clear that those with real influence dislike Brown because he is too cautious, too curious, too much his own man. They want the 90-day detention without charge in place, they want Brown involving himself in more wars they can profit from, they want him selling off Northern Rock cheap so they can buy it up, repossess houses and make more money. They do not want a prime minister who actually nationalises things and raises income tax even if it is on a sector of society they despise (loss of the 10p tax band upsets their servants, don't you know?). They tried it last year when they called Brown a coward for not having a general election and they are now going to hound him until he finally goes. The trouble for the UK is what is the alternative? The Conservatives should be snatching the initiative and drawing up vote winning policies. No, they are sitting back even smug than before. They have allowed a clown, Boris Johnson, a man who regularly parades how many people he has offended and how silly he is, to become London mayor. What are those coming to work on the 2012 London Olympics going to think of this buffoon. Even the Conservatives had better candidates than him. In fact I cannot believe he will even serve his full term of office, some major gaffe will force him to resign. Yet, the fact that he was the candidate indicates the contempt that the Conservatives have for the electorate.
The Conservative lead David Cameron is amenable, but like Johnson is another old boy from Eton, one of the public schools which admits such a small slice of British society. He is of a social category of the kind that we saw with Lord Douglas-Home and Sir Anthony Eden back in the 1950s and 1960s. His social class is so far removed from that of 93% of the UK population, but then again, he is like George Bush in the USA, the elite are their core constituency. I could even forgive Cameron all of that if he actually had some policies. Though I despise Thatcher you could never say she lacked a clear vision of what she wanted to do and the policies to achieve it. Cameron, in contrast, is content to assume that the premiership will be gifted to him in 2010 and he will just keep the country steady in order to benefit the wealthiest. He will adopt a reactive policy with the limited economic tools the Treasury seems willing to consider. What I envisage in the 2010s is very similar to the UK of the 1930s under the National Government, just encourage the public to keep their chin up while they are crushed beneath the pressure of the global economy. Unlike 1939 there will be no move in 2019 when China goes to war, because the uber-wealthy are more than happy to let the Chinese government to kill and torture millions of people if they choose, just so long as China keeps exporting the cheap goods and provides the cheap labour the wealthy like to use.
As happened in the 1980s when the media brought Thatcher in and kept her in despite the bulk of the population abhoring her and voting against her, Brown will be removed by the campaign against him which started in full force this week. He will probably be the last politician to be in charge of the UK. After him it will be figureheads of the rich just as Bush is in the USA, so Cameron will be here, a man without any political impact or any sense of direction beyond what his wealthy masters command. What we are seeing the dusk of is not so much Brown's premiership, but of the last dose of democracy the UK will have.
The super-rich could cope with Blair. For a start he did not head the Labour Party, he headed a personal party, which as I have noted before was tied to its head as tightly as the Peronists were to Peron and probably even more than the Gaullists were to De Gaulle. Blair could always control Blair by flattery. In addition, his desire to manipulate the media and to make the public feel somehow guilty when they disagreed with him, fitted with these influential people's desires. Blair would go to war when the USA commanded it and he totally toed the line over the threat of terrorism which is the first piece in threatening the populous to accept the authoritarian laws the super-rich seem so keen to have imposed in the UK.
It is clear that those with real influence dislike Brown because he is too cautious, too curious, too much his own man. They want the 90-day detention without charge in place, they want Brown involving himself in more wars they can profit from, they want him selling off Northern Rock cheap so they can buy it up, repossess houses and make more money. They do not want a prime minister who actually nationalises things and raises income tax even if it is on a sector of society they despise (loss of the 10p tax band upsets their servants, don't you know?). They tried it last year when they called Brown a coward for not having a general election and they are now going to hound him until he finally goes. The trouble for the UK is what is the alternative? The Conservatives should be snatching the initiative and drawing up vote winning policies. No, they are sitting back even smug than before. They have allowed a clown, Boris Johnson, a man who regularly parades how many people he has offended and how silly he is, to become London mayor. What are those coming to work on the 2012 London Olympics going to think of this buffoon. Even the Conservatives had better candidates than him. In fact I cannot believe he will even serve his full term of office, some major gaffe will force him to resign. Yet, the fact that he was the candidate indicates the contempt that the Conservatives have for the electorate.
The Conservative lead David Cameron is amenable, but like Johnson is another old boy from Eton, one of the public schools which admits such a small slice of British society. He is of a social category of the kind that we saw with Lord Douglas-Home and Sir Anthony Eden back in the 1950s and 1960s. His social class is so far removed from that of 93% of the UK population, but then again, he is like George Bush in the USA, the elite are their core constituency. I could even forgive Cameron all of that if he actually had some policies. Though I despise Thatcher you could never say she lacked a clear vision of what she wanted to do and the policies to achieve it. Cameron, in contrast, is content to assume that the premiership will be gifted to him in 2010 and he will just keep the country steady in order to benefit the wealthiest. He will adopt a reactive policy with the limited economic tools the Treasury seems willing to consider. What I envisage in the 2010s is very similar to the UK of the 1930s under the National Government, just encourage the public to keep their chin up while they are crushed beneath the pressure of the global economy. Unlike 1939 there will be no move in 2019 when China goes to war, because the uber-wealthy are more than happy to let the Chinese government to kill and torture millions of people if they choose, just so long as China keeps exporting the cheap goods and provides the cheap labour the wealthy like to use.
As happened in the 1980s when the media brought Thatcher in and kept her in despite the bulk of the population abhoring her and voting against her, Brown will be removed by the campaign against him which started in full force this week. He will probably be the last politician to be in charge of the UK. After him it will be figureheads of the rich just as Bush is in the USA, so Cameron will be here, a man without any political impact or any sense of direction beyond what his wealthy masters command. What we are seeing the dusk of is not so much Brown's premiership, but of the last dose of democracy the UK will have.
Friday, 15 February 2008
Britain as a 'Soft Touch' for Terrorism
I should keep a log of how many months pass between the UK newspapers being filled with stories about how the country is open house for terrorist activities and thus how we need to have longer terms of imprisonment without charge and we need to bar immigrants and we should all have identity cards. This one seems to be a reaction to thought of cutting back UK expenditure on jobs in intelligence bodies. At the end of the Cold War these bodies found themselves without much of a job so they first hitched themselves to the issue of organised crime and then since 11th September 2001 they have had an ever re-newing reason for the existence and for large expenditure on them. The last major terrorist incident in the UK was the 7th July 2005 bomb in London and the failed attempt to run a car into Glasgow airport on 30th June 2007.
US intelligence bodies invented al-Qaeda because funding in the USA has to be targeted at an organisation rather than individuals. There is nothing like al-Qaeda that is perceived by the bulk of the population, a multi-national terror corporation modelled on the lines of SPECTRE in the James Bond movies. Rather there are individual terrorist groups, usually very small, that sometimes co-operate but often work in contradictory directions. Some of the ones uncovered in the UK engaged in training which even British intelligence officials acknowledged would not benefit these terrorists at all. Many of young men who in the USA would be in the various militia and like running around pretending to be tough because they can achieve very little in their lives. The doctors behind the attack on Glasgow airport also suffered from similar inadequacies. Everyone loves being in a secret club and as happened with the left-wing terror groups of the 1970s such as the RAF in West Germany and the Red Brigades in Italy, it often becomes an end in itself though leading to terrible consequences.
To perceive a global conspiracy is as misplaced as racist warnings against the 'Yellow Peril' in the 19th century. At the same time as governments keep telling us to fear small terrorist cells they are quite happy to go along with the Chinese government which has millions of people under arrest and adds to that number on a weekly basis, supports dictatorships like that in Sudan and habitually uses torture in its system. Surely the world is at more risk for the 'respectable' Chinese government than it is from small groups of hotheads.
So if the UK is now a 'soft touch' for terrorism what was it in the past. In the 1970s-1990s the UK was plagued by bombings by Irish Republican bodies. Suspected Irish terrorists were barred from coming to mainland Britain, the SAS (Special Air Service) operated an assassination policy of these terrorists in Ireland and Gibraltar, there was internment of terrorist suspects often in inhumane conditions not that different from Station X at Guantanamo Bay, and even innocent people like the Guildford Four and Birmingham Six were locked up on flimsy evidence and kept in prison for years. There was censorship of political parties which would not deny terrorism. The British Army was based in large numbers in Northern Ireland, the Royal Ulster Constabulary drove around in armoured cars and were the only part of the British police force in which every officer was armed. Was this approach not tough enough? It certainly did not stop the bombings either in Britain or Northern Ireland. It was only when these things
The latest 'warning' from the Royal United Services Institute about the UK points to all the usual solutions: more money for the intelligence bodies, a strong Cabinet committee (often called a junta in other countries) of the military and political leaders to co-ordinate the reaction and more money to all the Armed Forces. Yet the most alarming element of this report is that supposedly Britain's multi-cultural approach makes Britain more vulnerable to attack. Well, that is fine then, lets move towards segregation, say along the lines adopted by South Africa in the apartheid era or the USA in the 1950s, because that policy did very well in having peace and reducing the number of deaths (this is a sarcastic statement). Britain is already suffering from insufficient multi-culturalism, look at areas where segregation has de facto happened, such as in the Bradford riots in July 2001.
The way to reduce terrorism is to make the people who live in a country feel they have something invested in it. If you exclude them further, then of course many will throw their lot in with those who are trying to make their view of society the dominant one. This is what happened in the 1970s in Italy and West Germany when people felt society and politics was all controlled by the rich and powerful and the only way to counter them was with violence. Of course the buzz of being a terrorist soon takes over, but that was what motivated these terrorists, and more importantly, the support system of hundreds more people that built up around the core of actual terrorists.
The other thing is powerlessness. As I have noted before, anger is really common in the UK because so many people of every kind of background feel that no-one will listen to them. Is it then suprising that some people take this anger further into violent attacks? Terrorism takes many forms and we see it with people attacking speed cameras. The government is reducing the voice that everyone has in the UK and so people are angry. If some sectors of society feels that are also facing prejudice and in particular access to opportunities, then their ears are going to be open to those who tell them there is another way and it can be won with violence.
The other point about these scares is they further erode the things we are actually trying to protect. If we move to a situation with censorship, restricted freedom of movement, segregation of different sectors of the population, detention without trial, detention camps, the use of evidence derived from torture, armed para-military bodies, a junta at the centre of government, then we might as well simply become China or North Korea or Saudi Arabia or Saddam Hussein's Iraq or Taliban Afghanistan because we will have turned our back on democracy and civil liberties and created just the kind of society actually many of the terrorists want. Our government is advancing the cause of the terrorists better than they are doing it themselves. Of course these lords and field marshals want such a structure so they can be in power, but for the rest of us we lose out far faster than even if terrorism becomes as frequent as it was in the early 1970s.
Britain is no more of a 'soft touch' for terrorists than it was in the 1970s. However, the rush to establish a segregated, authoritarian Britain which seems to be the mission of so many people in power at present, will exacerbate violence and terror of all kinds. A lack of multi-culturalism is to blame for many problems and its true achievement would actually lift a lot of the tensions that these commentators blame. Of course, they want the opposite, for us to be divided against our neighbours and fearful, because a divided and frightened society is much easier for them to control. Britain is a soft touch for would-be dictators.
US intelligence bodies invented al-Qaeda because funding in the USA has to be targeted at an organisation rather than individuals. There is nothing like al-Qaeda that is perceived by the bulk of the population, a multi-national terror corporation modelled on the lines of SPECTRE in the James Bond movies. Rather there are individual terrorist groups, usually very small, that sometimes co-operate but often work in contradictory directions. Some of the ones uncovered in the UK engaged in training which even British intelligence officials acknowledged would not benefit these terrorists at all. Many of young men who in the USA would be in the various militia and like running around pretending to be tough because they can achieve very little in their lives. The doctors behind the attack on Glasgow airport also suffered from similar inadequacies. Everyone loves being in a secret club and as happened with the left-wing terror groups of the 1970s such as the RAF in West Germany and the Red Brigades in Italy, it often becomes an end in itself though leading to terrible consequences.
To perceive a global conspiracy is as misplaced as racist warnings against the 'Yellow Peril' in the 19th century. At the same time as governments keep telling us to fear small terrorist cells they are quite happy to go along with the Chinese government which has millions of people under arrest and adds to that number on a weekly basis, supports dictatorships like that in Sudan and habitually uses torture in its system. Surely the world is at more risk for the 'respectable' Chinese government than it is from small groups of hotheads.
So if the UK is now a 'soft touch' for terrorism what was it in the past. In the 1970s-1990s the UK was plagued by bombings by Irish Republican bodies. Suspected Irish terrorists were barred from coming to mainland Britain, the SAS (Special Air Service) operated an assassination policy of these terrorists in Ireland and Gibraltar, there was internment of terrorist suspects often in inhumane conditions not that different from Station X at Guantanamo Bay, and even innocent people like the Guildford Four and Birmingham Six were locked up on flimsy evidence and kept in prison for years. There was censorship of political parties which would not deny terrorism. The British Army was based in large numbers in Northern Ireland, the Royal Ulster Constabulary drove around in armoured cars and were the only part of the British police force in which every officer was armed. Was this approach not tough enough? It certainly did not stop the bombings either in Britain or Northern Ireland. It was only when these things
The latest 'warning' from the Royal United Services Institute about the UK points to all the usual solutions: more money for the intelligence bodies, a strong Cabinet committee (often called a junta in other countries) of the military and political leaders to co-ordinate the reaction and more money to all the Armed Forces. Yet the most alarming element of this report is that supposedly Britain's multi-cultural approach makes Britain more vulnerable to attack. Well, that is fine then, lets move towards segregation, say along the lines adopted by South Africa in the apartheid era or the USA in the 1950s, because that policy did very well in having peace and reducing the number of deaths (this is a sarcastic statement). Britain is already suffering from insufficient multi-culturalism, look at areas where segregation has de facto happened, such as in the Bradford riots in July 2001.
The way to reduce terrorism is to make the people who live in a country feel they have something invested in it. If you exclude them further, then of course many will throw their lot in with those who are trying to make their view of society the dominant one. This is what happened in the 1970s in Italy and West Germany when people felt society and politics was all controlled by the rich and powerful and the only way to counter them was with violence. Of course the buzz of being a terrorist soon takes over, but that was what motivated these terrorists, and more importantly, the support system of hundreds more people that built up around the core of actual terrorists.
The other thing is powerlessness. As I have noted before, anger is really common in the UK because so many people of every kind of background feel that no-one will listen to them. Is it then suprising that some people take this anger further into violent attacks? Terrorism takes many forms and we see it with people attacking speed cameras. The government is reducing the voice that everyone has in the UK and so people are angry. If some sectors of society feels that are also facing prejudice and in particular access to opportunities, then their ears are going to be open to those who tell them there is another way and it can be won with violence.
The other point about these scares is they further erode the things we are actually trying to protect. If we move to a situation with censorship, restricted freedom of movement, segregation of different sectors of the population, detention without trial, detention camps, the use of evidence derived from torture, armed para-military bodies, a junta at the centre of government, then we might as well simply become China or North Korea or Saudi Arabia or Saddam Hussein's Iraq or Taliban Afghanistan because we will have turned our back on democracy and civil liberties and created just the kind of society actually many of the terrorists want. Our government is advancing the cause of the terrorists better than they are doing it themselves. Of course these lords and field marshals want such a structure so they can be in power, but for the rest of us we lose out far faster than even if terrorism becomes as frequent as it was in the early 1970s.
Britain is no more of a 'soft touch' for terrorists than it was in the 1970s. However, the rush to establish a segregated, authoritarian Britain which seems to be the mission of so many people in power at present, will exacerbate violence and terror of all kinds. A lack of multi-culturalism is to blame for many problems and its true achievement would actually lift a lot of the tensions that these commentators blame. Of course, they want the opposite, for us to be divided against our neighbours and fearful, because a divided and frightened society is much easier for them to control. Britain is a soft touch for would-be dictators.
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