None of this is original research, it is something which I read in 'The Guardian' newspaper, but seems to mesh with the developments I have been reading about from different sources ever since Tony Blair came to power in 1997 and particularly since 2001. As we all know, the terrorist attacks by Islamist extremists against the USA in September 2001, unlike previous such attacks, allowed the government of George W. Bush to adopt a policy they termed the 'War on Terror'. Elements of this included supposed justification for the invasion of Afghanistan and of Iraq by US-led alliances and the introduction of authoritarian domestic legislation in the USA and many of its allied states which have severely reduced the civil liberties of citizens of those countries as well as foreigners. Consequently in the 2000s we have seen a ramping up in the use of torture and detainment without charge or trial particularly by the USA and the UK, notably in collaboration with Pakistan. I have written before about how house arrest and 28 days' detention without charge, which in the past would have been totally unacceptable in the UK have become to be seen as the norm, and in fact, by some, as mild measures. Fortunately, the change in government in the USA and the work of the independent judiciary reviewing such steps in the UK has begun rolling back such policies, at least a little.
What is interesting is another element that has come to light in the UK about steps to target those people who are seen as being 'at risk' of becoming extremists, notably males with origins in South Asia. These are seen as the easy representation of Islamist terrorism and such attitudes have helped fuel racist groups and attitudes in the UK. Back in October 2006 and again in November 2008, university lecturers were encouraged to monitor Muslim students and report to the security services if they saw behaviour that was felt to indicate these students were becoming extremist: http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2006/oct/16/highereducation.topstories3 and
http://www.journal-online.co.uk/article/5087-lecturers-asked-to-spy-on-foreign-students-again Unsurprisingly, given that universities pride themselves on their autonomy and welcoming people from across the world, notably from countries where they face oppression, they were not happy to be told to adopt this spying role: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/education/7774949.stm
Parallel to these high profile developments in universities it seems less apparent has been the development of such monitoring at community level. The 'Prevent Violent Extremism' programme, termed 'Prevent' launched in 2006, has received £140 million (€152 million; US$228 million) has aimed at targeting these 'at risk' Muslims, and using language borrowed from the Communist Chinese dictatorship, 'deprogrammed'. As with the university lecturers, the government has set out to recruit community group leaders and workers to being their surveillance force. Those who have expressed a reluctance to do the government's spying have been terrified that they will lose their jobs or face threats from the police and security services themselves. It is becoming apparent that some college teachers are collaborating with the authorities in reporting 'suspects'. However, others are being pressured such as a mental health project in the Midlands and various youth projects across the country. The project is run by the Office for Security and Counter Terrorism and its head, Charles Farr and local leaders of the scheme, are former intelligence officers. The youngest suspect was aged 9 and he was sent for deprogramming.
'Deprogramming' is a term, which in English, is usually associated with helping people who have been rescued from cults to allow them to have a more normal perspective on society and people around them. It is a common way of translating what used to be termed 're-education' in China under Chairman Mao, punishing those, usually with imprisonment and hard labour, who were seen to hold views different from the state or came from a social class that was deemed to be a threat to the state. 'Re-education camps', which still exist in China, most of us would see as being identical to concentration camps (as opposed to extermination camps) of the Nazi German design. 'Deprogramming' is probably a correct term to use, but if this is being imposed on a 9-year old, one has to see it as being very severe. In the UK children do not even have criminal responsibility until the age of 10, one of the lowest ages in the world. So, can a 9-year old even be an 'extremist'? I was speaking to a 7-year old recently who was talking about chopping up girls and eating them, should he simply see a child psychologist or is he a genuine threat to the security of the country? If a child espouses fundamental Christian views and wants people struck down for stealing or coveting their neighbour's wife is he a potential terrorist? If he espouses the Five Pillars of Islam it seems he is much more likely to be seen as one.
Of course, a lot of this, trying to predict future crime, sounds very like something out of a science fiction novel or movie, in particular 'Nineteen Eighty-Four' (1948) in which dissidents are tortured and terrified into accepting without question, the totalitarian regime they are living under. The science fiction nature of this scary policy continues when you read quotations from Ed Husain, head of the Quilliam Foundation (which has received £700,000 from the Prevent fund), believes it is morally right to stop people committing terrorist offences before they occur. This is naturally the role of security services. However, there is a difference between stopping some conspirators who are sitting around assembling bomb making equipment and stopping someone, a child even, who perhaps might some many years into the future think about carrying out terrorist activity. No-one has used the term 'thought police' (from thinkpol in 'Nineteen Eight-Four') in the popular media for many years, but it is effectively what we are now moving towards. Other science fiction that we seem to be basing policing policies on includes 'Minority Report' (novel 1956; movie 2002) in which people with psychic powers are used by the police to predict crimes before they happen and in 'A Philosophical Investigation' (1992) by Philip Kerr in which scientists try to predict which men are going to commit violent crime by studying the lay out of their brains.
The key issue is that the principle of 'innocent until proven guilty' has gone. The principle of 'innocent until plans/commits a crime' has gone. In its place is 'innocent until someone believes that sometime in the future you may commit a crime'. There seems to be no monitoring of the quality of the assumptions about these 'potential' extremists, not even some pseudo-scientific explanation that people with a particular physiology or in specific circumstances are far more certain to commit a crime in the future. It is just a case of someone reporting someone else. As someone who has worked in different parts of the civil service, I know people are being reported on a daily basis. Every mail sack arriving at every job centre or tax office, every working day, has letters reporting people in it. The bulk of these are simply the disgruntled taking it out on the people they do not like the look of, or simply just a random person so they can make themselves appear more important.
Most of the public forgets that the authorities generally have a good idea on what people to target based on a mix of their own experience and own prejudices, generally they do not need help from the public. What involving the public is about, is developing an air of paranoia which helps foster compliance among them, so they do not complain when they have to undress, have their luggage opened in their absence or are searched repeatedly at an airport or when public transport is closed or the road blocks are put up. Paranoia in the UK tends to fade quicker than it does in the USA. I think because the British have faced far more real threats in their recent history than the Americans ever have. We have develop an awareness of genuine and falsified threat and have a natural scepticism which seems less common among Americans, but perhaps, more common among, say, the French, Germans, Spanish and Italians.
Simply thinking about a crime let alone having some vague resentment towards the government, should not be a crime, otherwise they will have to ban all crime novels and series and prevent anyone complaining about the service they receive from the government. Of course, that might be on the cards. What Prevent has helped do, is divide the very communities that policies following the Bradford and Oldham riots of 2001 were supposed to be assisting. It is pressurising more and more public servants in an insidious way to spy for the state.
The Prevent approach also blinkers people. The assumption that young Asian males from particular districts (Prevent currently only works with 82 councils; rising to 94 next year) are the only threat leads lots of 'blind spots' neglecting other threats and terrorism from different groups like the far right and Irish terror groups. That is if you believe, as the government seems to, that extremism leading to terrorism is so pervasive in our society. In the UK, partly due to public apathy, extremist views have never been popular. Even in states like Libya, Syria or Saudi Arabia, Islamist extremists are a small minority.
Of course, security services like to be well funded, so if to get more cash they have to adopt an approach of trying to be pre-emptive and in someone's view stop scores of young people coming terrorists, they are going to go with it, even if they have little faith in the approach. The UK government has got so wrapped up in the Bush myths that it cannot see straight. If terrorism is so widespread why did the UK never face a war over Ireland with the large Irish (869,000 of the UK population were born in Ireland; 6 million have Irish ancestry compared to 1.6 million Muslims) population here? Why was there not extreme left-wing terrorism in the UK in the 1970s when there was in Italy and West Germany? Why was there no neo-Nazi terrorism in the late 1970s? I suppose they would argue that somehow South Asian and/or Muslim young people have different 'mental wiring' to Irish or other white people, but that is not based on any scientific fact at all or the fact that many Muslim states, though facing incidents as the UK has faced, have also not had massive terrorist activity in the way the Prevent method envisages it coming.
I titled this section 'The Block Warden Arrives'. This refers to the role in Germany during the Nazi period (1933-45) though similar positions were used in the Portuguese Colonial War (1961-74) and in Argentina (1976-83). A block warden is a representative of the dominant party/state regime who in Germany oversaw around 40-60 houses and not only spreads propaganda in favour of the regime but monitors that his/her neighbours are complying with the regime's wishes, not simply passively but in an active way. Anyone, in the individual's judgement, who is not complying or without insufficient vigour or that the block warden simply dislikes, is arrested by the secret police and imprisoned/tortured/killed. The example from Argentina which brought the term 'the disappeared' to the world, is probably the model most likely to be adopted in the UK. Most simply people would disappear usually for long-term imprisonment or execution without their families ever knowing what happened to them.
What we are seeing in the UK at present with people reporting Asian neighbours plus the government trying to compel community workers to spy for them is a back door introduction of the block warden approach. Once in a while they may catch someone who is a real threat, but recent evidence shows that even the security services with their high tech equipment have arrested innocent people. Such powers are quickly abused especially by small-minded people who see their personal quirks as issues of national security, so people will be put under suspicion, not because they have any genuine terrorist sympathies but because some neighbour simply dislikes them or they parked in 'their' slot or their children were noisy or something. Such an approach actually wastes the time of the police and security services and creates so much 'traffic' of denunciation and counter-denunciation that it provides good cover for genuine criminals and even terrorists, though of course, their numbers are in fact tiny.
It is clear that more and more British people, often those very individuals who have been working hard to keep their communities in a fit state, are being compelled to work for what is increasingly a state machine aiming to police people's thinking. These people are often reluctant but history has always shown us there are always the 'little Hitlers' who relish such roles and you can imagine the bullyboys of the English Defence League queuing up to become these monitors in their neighbourhoods. I have noted before how local authorities have been abusing anti-terrorist laws to carry out their own agendas often in punishing people for violating (or for being suspected, however wrongly, of trying to violate) local regulations. The Prevent approach is simply giving them yet more abilities for them and even simple members of the public with which to beat the people they do not like in their neighbourhood.
Showing posts with label war on terror. Show all posts
Showing posts with label war on terror. Show all posts
Monday, 19 October 2009
Sunday, 19 October 2008
Dropping the 42 Days Detention Without Charge
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Saturday, 10 November 2007
Why 'The Siege' is Not a 'Daft Thriller'
I seem to be in a mood for writing about movies at the moment. Inspired by CP's comments on the 'what if?'s around Shakespeare I am currently working on a big posting about covers of lost books, so you will have to be patient for that, but in the meantime I will continue throwing out tablets of lead about movies. This one is a very much eye-to-blog one. Sometimes I ponder over an issue for weeks, sometimes they are even ideas I have had floating around for years, but in this case it was inspired by something I read just this morning in the UK newspaper, 'The Guardian'. I only get time to read one newspaper per week and the Saturday edition of this one is the one I choose. It has a strong section about entertainment media and though I now only watch 1-2 television programmes a week (a sharp contrast to just 3-4 years ago) I like to keep abreast of what is on, plus all the stuff about computer games and movies (which I generally rent on DVD, again in contrast to the early to mid-2000s when I went to the cinema 3-4 times per month). Makes me sound rather reclusive these days, but I suppose commuting 400 miles per week rather than the 50 miles per week I used to do has a large part in that.
Anyway, I generally agree with 'The Guardian' reviews of movies being shown on television. There is a little bit of schizophrenia obvious, because the person who writes the 'Film Choice' section for the television guide often disagrees with the person who writes the little reviews in the programme listings, it is clear their tastes are very different and I tend to agree more with the former than the latter. The listings reviewer, probably because of having less space, falls very much into pat assumptions, they are the kind of person that describes 'The Thirty-Nine Steps' as 'thriller from anti-Semitic author, John Buchan' a line that I have challenged in an earlier posting. Anyway today their comment on 'The Siege' (1999), which is showing in the coming week on British television as a 'daft thriller' is a terrible blunder. In this posting I will say why and if you have not seen it why you should watch it.
The film is about a terrorist attack in New York investigated by FBI officers Anthony Hubbard played by Denzel Washington and Frank Haddad played by Tony Shaloub, who importantly is an Arab-American. It soon becomes apparent that the attack has been caused by muslim militants who go on to threaten other attacks and the thriller element is how the FBI track down the terrorists. However, what gives the film more depth than the usual action thriller is what begins to happen in New York. Regulations become increasingly strict and Arab-Americans in the city are interned, including Haddad's son (this is reminiscent of the USA's interning of Japanese-Americans during the Second World War) and ultimately martial law is imposed on the city under the control of Major-General Devereaux played by Bruce Willis. Hubbard has to resolve the situation without descending into barbaric approaches to respond to barbarism, whereas Deveraux begins personally torturing suspects. In addition there is the interference of the CIA in the form of Elise Kraft played by Annette Bening and it becomes clear that the unit attacking New York was trained by the CIA and feeling betrayed has come to get some recompense for how they have been used.
I have probably given away too much of the plot, but I feel that is important in terms of discussing the film and why it is not 'daft'. The terrorist action does not approach the scale of the 11th September 2001 attacks on New York but in 1999 no-one who predicted such vast terrorist attacks would have been believed in the USA which at the time, despite the earlier bombing of the World Trade Centre in New York, still felt itself invulnerable to foreign terrorism (as opposed to domestic terrorism as in the Oklahoma bombing). The film was mainstream, I saw it in 1999 in Leicester Square, the premier location for cinemas in the UK. This partly stemmed from having four big names in the film. However, by being mainstream it was able to transmit and discuss important questions to the viewing public, especially in the USA, (and people who would not pay to see a Michael Moore movie or DVD) about compromising civil liberties when one is seeking to control terrorism and how the involvement of the military can easily escalate. If we look at the USA's approach to 'homeland security' and its use of torture at Abu Gharib prison in Iraq and at Guantanamo Bay, we can see that predictions in 'The Siege' were not out of step with what happened. In addition, an important element, is that the USA has to realise that for decades it has been arming and training people across the world to fight in its interest, and has often lied to them and actually exploited situations for its rather than their benefit and a time has come when it has to face up to such actions. The reason why the Mujahadeen was able to seize power in Afghanistan was because they had been trained and equipped by the USA. Insurgents in Iraq are often using weapons sold to Saddam Hussein's regime in the 1980s in order to fight Iran.
'The Siege' was not a box office success, probably because it challenged rather than comforted the US audience. If there had been a delay of 3 years in its production I doubt it would have ever been released. It was one of the most rented DVDs following the 11th September 2001 attacks and yet, again, I am sure that many renters were suprised that it did not echo the very simplistic, jingoistic attitudes coming out of the USA at the time. 'The Siege' is not a great movie, but it should not be simply written off as a 'daft thriller', it is entertaining, has genuine tension and more than that, more than the large bulk of contemporary movies, actually connects into current developments in the USA and the wider world in an accessible way.
Anyway, I generally agree with 'The Guardian' reviews of movies being shown on television. There is a little bit of schizophrenia obvious, because the person who writes the 'Film Choice' section for the television guide often disagrees with the person who writes the little reviews in the programme listings, it is clear their tastes are very different and I tend to agree more with the former than the latter. The listings reviewer, probably because of having less space, falls very much into pat assumptions, they are the kind of person that describes 'The Thirty-Nine Steps' as 'thriller from anti-Semitic author, John Buchan' a line that I have challenged in an earlier posting. Anyway today their comment on 'The Siege' (1999), which is showing in the coming week on British television as a 'daft thriller' is a terrible blunder. In this posting I will say why and if you have not seen it why you should watch it.
The film is about a terrorist attack in New York investigated by FBI officers Anthony Hubbard played by Denzel Washington and Frank Haddad played by Tony Shaloub, who importantly is an Arab-American. It soon becomes apparent that the attack has been caused by muslim militants who go on to threaten other attacks and the thriller element is how the FBI track down the terrorists. However, what gives the film more depth than the usual action thriller is what begins to happen in New York. Regulations become increasingly strict and Arab-Americans in the city are interned, including Haddad's son (this is reminiscent of the USA's interning of Japanese-Americans during the Second World War) and ultimately martial law is imposed on the city under the control of Major-General Devereaux played by Bruce Willis. Hubbard has to resolve the situation without descending into barbaric approaches to respond to barbarism, whereas Deveraux begins personally torturing suspects. In addition there is the interference of the CIA in the form of Elise Kraft played by Annette Bening and it becomes clear that the unit attacking New York was trained by the CIA and feeling betrayed has come to get some recompense for how they have been used.
I have probably given away too much of the plot, but I feel that is important in terms of discussing the film and why it is not 'daft'. The terrorist action does not approach the scale of the 11th September 2001 attacks on New York but in 1999 no-one who predicted such vast terrorist attacks would have been believed in the USA which at the time, despite the earlier bombing of the World Trade Centre in New York, still felt itself invulnerable to foreign terrorism (as opposed to domestic terrorism as in the Oklahoma bombing). The film was mainstream, I saw it in 1999 in Leicester Square, the premier location for cinemas in the UK. This partly stemmed from having four big names in the film. However, by being mainstream it was able to transmit and discuss important questions to the viewing public, especially in the USA, (and people who would not pay to see a Michael Moore movie or DVD) about compromising civil liberties when one is seeking to control terrorism and how the involvement of the military can easily escalate. If we look at the USA's approach to 'homeland security' and its use of torture at Abu Gharib prison in Iraq and at Guantanamo Bay, we can see that predictions in 'The Siege' were not out of step with what happened. In addition, an important element, is that the USA has to realise that for decades it has been arming and training people across the world to fight in its interest, and has often lied to them and actually exploited situations for its rather than their benefit and a time has come when it has to face up to such actions. The reason why the Mujahadeen was able to seize power in Afghanistan was because they had been trained and equipped by the USA. Insurgents in Iraq are often using weapons sold to Saddam Hussein's regime in the 1980s in order to fight Iran.
'The Siege' was not a box office success, probably because it challenged rather than comforted the US audience. If there had been a delay of 3 years in its production I doubt it would have ever been released. It was one of the most rented DVDs following the 11th September 2001 attacks and yet, again, I am sure that many renters were suprised that it did not echo the very simplistic, jingoistic attitudes coming out of the USA at the time. 'The Siege' is not a great movie, but it should not be simply written off as a 'daft thriller', it is entertaining, has genuine tension and more than that, more than the large bulk of contemporary movies, actually connects into current developments in the USA and the wider world in an accessible way.
Thursday, 10 May 2007
Combating Terrorism - Responding to whose Agenda?
In the 1970s-90s, West Germany and then reunified Germany suffered a series of terrorist attacks from a group calling itself the Rote Armee Fraktion (Red Army Fraction) a group set up in 1970 and commonly known as the Baader-Meinhof Gang after two of its founder members. The group received funds from the East German secret police, the Stasi, and in the early 1970s had training from the PLO (the Palestine Liberation Organisation). The group espoused radical left-wing policies though it can be argued that they were really simply spoilt rich people who got excitement from the bank robberies and assassinations, usually of businessmen, that they carried out. The group formally ended in 1998, partly as the world had moved on and they could no longer use the excuse of a need to promote a revolutionary and/or Communist society.
The Gang claimed that many of their actions in the 1970s were about challenging the authoritarian state that they saw West Germany to be. The result was that their actions actually pushed West Germany more towards authoritarianism: people with left-wing leanings, even if not supporters of the Gang, were removed from public sector positions such as the post office; the West German border police and police for the protection of the constitution (as these were federal as opposed to Land, i.e. regional, police forces) were strengthened and anti-terrorist units were created such as GSG9; the law was changed so that lawyers felt to be sympathetic to the gang could be excluded from any trials. When a number of the Gang were captured in 1977 three were murdered in prison and one severely injured. They had been sentenced to life imprisonment, West Germany not having the death penalty, but it was clear that the German state preferred to kill these convicts without any legal process, a so-called 'extra-judicial execution'. Thus, by the 1980s the Gang had effectively made West Germany more the kind of the regime it had argued it was from the start than if they had done nothing. All democratic states face the danger of losing what they seek to defend from terrorists.
One reason why there was bitterness in Europe over the American reaction to the September 11th attacks was that the Americans seemed to think that they were the only people who had ever suffered such things. Britain had been experiencing bombings throughout the 1960s-1980s and Northern Ireland after that too, killing and maiming numerous people. As a child in the 1970s I remember being separated from my mother so that she and I could both be searched, like all the other visitors, for weapons when we went to the Tower of London where there is still a plaque to mark where tourists had been killed by a bomb. I witnessed the Docklands bomb of 1996 from the window of my flat and I have known people caught up in the London bus bomb and Manchester bomb of the same year, this was all before anyone had even dreamed of the term 'al-Qaeda'. Countries like the UK, Germany, France, Italy, Spain have had such incidents repeatedly over the last few decades from various groups and yet we did not whine and expect the whole world to follow us in using the incidents to go off at a tangent and kill unrelated people. Given how the USA had behaved, particularly in carpet bombing Vietnamese people over so many years (and the mutations of Vietnamese children due to chemicals dropped by the American forces continues even now) it seemed very rich for them to then expect everyone to be so sympathetic to them about a single incident. Do not get me wrong, what happened was tragic, but that does not excuse the Bush regime's subsequent behaviour.
Adopting a sober reaction to terrorism is always hard for democracies. The UK fell into behaviour such as internment and the 'shoot-to-kill' policy of SAS (Special Air Service, the most famous UK special forces unit) against IRA (Irish Republican Army, since the late 1960s usually referring to the Provisional IRA or 'Provos' guerilla group as opposed to the broader organisation of the 1920s) suspects. However, what is apparent is under the cover of responding to terrorism, governments take the opportunity to extend their control over the population. As with the West German example at the start of this post, such a clampdown affects far more than any suspects. In the USA you had the introduction of the Department of Homeland Security, effective censorship of dissenting voices, the suspension of due process for suspects thrown without trial into the concentration camp at Gunatanamo Bay and so on. The UK has adopted similar policies allowing for longer detention without charge or trial, the greater monitoring of the population, the introduction of identity cards and so on.
You may argue that to defend democracy needs harsh measures. However, in turn you are doing more damage to democracy than the terrorists themselves. Even experts argue that things such as identity cards would not have stopped the 7th July bombers in London. Yet, the powers implemented to stop terrorism can easily be turned on others, for example, anyone protesting against the war in Iraq or even about a by-pass being built over a woodland. As has been proven in states like 1930s Germany, by the time people generally realise what freedoms they are losing they are in no position any longer to do anything about it. Defending democracy needs democracy to be strong, its institutions to stand for fairness and democracy, to unite, not divide a people.
So, we have the erosion of democracy in the name of defending it. No-one can deny that there is terrorist activity in the UK, but certainly not of the scale that we have been warned about repeatedly since 2001. A scared population is a compliant one and that is what governments like. To some degree most Britons have seen so much of terrorism in their lives that the 'warnings' just wash over them, in contrast, it seems to many Americans, who have experienced far fewer incidents of this kind. I do not believe al-Qaeda exists, certainly in the form it is portrayed with Osama bin Laden sitting like a villain from a James Bond movie hidded in an underground base, watching a map showing all his cells operating across the world. Al-Qaeda is like a brand that local terrorist groups can attach themselves to; it is a short hand for use by government and the media but one that fails to reflect the complexity and the diverse motivations of those who turn to terrorism. This is why, if we simply focus on rooting out al-Qaeda we will come nowhere near to ending Islamist-influenced terrorism. Watch 'The Power of Nightmares' series from the BBC, it is very good on these issues.
The current governments of the UK and USA, though, have not stopped at simply making their own countries more authoritarian, they have found an additional use for 'the war on terror' and that is, to advance economic and geo-political goals. Everyone knows that Saddam Hussain was no supporter of Islamist terrorism. He ran a secular state and was having to keep the different Muslim sects in his country in check. Support for that kind of terrorism was more likely to come from the British and American ally, Saudi Arabia. Saddam Hussain had been an ally of the West during the Cold War and after the Ayatollah's regime came to power in Iran in 1979, but by the 1990s his purpose was over. For the West he was becoming too nationalistic (this is the time when Western powers usually intervene, for example, with Nasser in Egypt in 1956) and of course, as I have discussed in the post 'Oil. What's it Good For? War!' the USA needed to secure a good source of oil for itself that the Chinese were not involved with yet. So, the war on terror was used as an excuse for a neo-colonial war to secure resources, so familiar in the 19th century, but seemingly less common now, or so we thought ...
Back to the UK perspective. I think Tony Blair, poor man, did genuinely believe that he was fighting a major threat in Iraq. He liked the fact that the terror 'threat' allowed him to be stricter in the UK, because, as I noted in '10 Years of the Blair Party', he has always had some authoritarian tendencies. However, he also allowed himself to be convinced, not by his own intelligence services, but by material from them distorted by political players, that Iraq was a threat. In addition, Saddam Hussain was a cruel dictator who needed to fall, but the West had already failed at that once in 1991 and while they actually removed the man this time, they unleashed all the forces that his strength had kept in check, all for the sake, not of countering terrorism because that has increased since the war, but for the oil reserves his regime sat on. In reviews of Blair's career today, Iraq overshadows everything else he did. This is fair, it was his greatest blunder, the blood of thousands of people is on his hands and it showed that despite his charisma and his belief that he controlled events, he was a weak leader, too easily influenced by one of the most brainless politicians a democracy has suffered. It showed, too, at the end of the day, he lacked the confidence in himself to divert Bush's plan. In 1950, Prime Minister Clement Attlee (unintentionally turning into a bit of a hero on these pages) flew to the USA and successfully persuaded President Truman not to drop atomic bombs on North Korea. Though this is an overlooked historical incident, it no doubt saved the fates of millions and a lot of the Korean peninsula is not a wasteland. Blair would have gone down in history if he could have acted as such a brake on Bush, but instead decided to not only roll over for his objectives but actively support such a foolish, and probably illegal, step.
The Gang claimed that many of their actions in the 1970s were about challenging the authoritarian state that they saw West Germany to be. The result was that their actions actually pushed West Germany more towards authoritarianism: people with left-wing leanings, even if not supporters of the Gang, were removed from public sector positions such as the post office; the West German border police and police for the protection of the constitution (as these were federal as opposed to Land, i.e. regional, police forces) were strengthened and anti-terrorist units were created such as GSG9; the law was changed so that lawyers felt to be sympathetic to the gang could be excluded from any trials. When a number of the Gang were captured in 1977 three were murdered in prison and one severely injured. They had been sentenced to life imprisonment, West Germany not having the death penalty, but it was clear that the German state preferred to kill these convicts without any legal process, a so-called 'extra-judicial execution'. Thus, by the 1980s the Gang had effectively made West Germany more the kind of the regime it had argued it was from the start than if they had done nothing. All democratic states face the danger of losing what they seek to defend from terrorists.
One reason why there was bitterness in Europe over the American reaction to the September 11th attacks was that the Americans seemed to think that they were the only people who had ever suffered such things. Britain had been experiencing bombings throughout the 1960s-1980s and Northern Ireland after that too, killing and maiming numerous people. As a child in the 1970s I remember being separated from my mother so that she and I could both be searched, like all the other visitors, for weapons when we went to the Tower of London where there is still a plaque to mark where tourists had been killed by a bomb. I witnessed the Docklands bomb of 1996 from the window of my flat and I have known people caught up in the London bus bomb and Manchester bomb of the same year, this was all before anyone had even dreamed of the term 'al-Qaeda'. Countries like the UK, Germany, France, Italy, Spain have had such incidents repeatedly over the last few decades from various groups and yet we did not whine and expect the whole world to follow us in using the incidents to go off at a tangent and kill unrelated people. Given how the USA had behaved, particularly in carpet bombing Vietnamese people over so many years (and the mutations of Vietnamese children due to chemicals dropped by the American forces continues even now) it seemed very rich for them to then expect everyone to be so sympathetic to them about a single incident. Do not get me wrong, what happened was tragic, but that does not excuse the Bush regime's subsequent behaviour.
Adopting a sober reaction to terrorism is always hard for democracies. The UK fell into behaviour such as internment and the 'shoot-to-kill' policy of SAS (Special Air Service, the most famous UK special forces unit) against IRA (Irish Republican Army, since the late 1960s usually referring to the Provisional IRA or 'Provos' guerilla group as opposed to the broader organisation of the 1920s) suspects. However, what is apparent is under the cover of responding to terrorism, governments take the opportunity to extend their control over the population. As with the West German example at the start of this post, such a clampdown affects far more than any suspects. In the USA you had the introduction of the Department of Homeland Security, effective censorship of dissenting voices, the suspension of due process for suspects thrown without trial into the concentration camp at Gunatanamo Bay and so on. The UK has adopted similar policies allowing for longer detention without charge or trial, the greater monitoring of the population, the introduction of identity cards and so on.
You may argue that to defend democracy needs harsh measures. However, in turn you are doing more damage to democracy than the terrorists themselves. Even experts argue that things such as identity cards would not have stopped the 7th July bombers in London. Yet, the powers implemented to stop terrorism can easily be turned on others, for example, anyone protesting against the war in Iraq or even about a by-pass being built over a woodland. As has been proven in states like 1930s Germany, by the time people generally realise what freedoms they are losing they are in no position any longer to do anything about it. Defending democracy needs democracy to be strong, its institutions to stand for fairness and democracy, to unite, not divide a people.
So, we have the erosion of democracy in the name of defending it. No-one can deny that there is terrorist activity in the UK, but certainly not of the scale that we have been warned about repeatedly since 2001. A scared population is a compliant one and that is what governments like. To some degree most Britons have seen so much of terrorism in their lives that the 'warnings' just wash over them, in contrast, it seems to many Americans, who have experienced far fewer incidents of this kind. I do not believe al-Qaeda exists, certainly in the form it is portrayed with Osama bin Laden sitting like a villain from a James Bond movie hidded in an underground base, watching a map showing all his cells operating across the world. Al-Qaeda is like a brand that local terrorist groups can attach themselves to; it is a short hand for use by government and the media but one that fails to reflect the complexity and the diverse motivations of those who turn to terrorism. This is why, if we simply focus on rooting out al-Qaeda we will come nowhere near to ending Islamist-influenced terrorism. Watch 'The Power of Nightmares' series from the BBC, it is very good on these issues.
The current governments of the UK and USA, though, have not stopped at simply making their own countries more authoritarian, they have found an additional use for 'the war on terror' and that is, to advance economic and geo-political goals. Everyone knows that Saddam Hussain was no supporter of Islamist terrorism. He ran a secular state and was having to keep the different Muslim sects in his country in check. Support for that kind of terrorism was more likely to come from the British and American ally, Saudi Arabia. Saddam Hussain had been an ally of the West during the Cold War and after the Ayatollah's regime came to power in Iran in 1979, but by the 1990s his purpose was over. For the West he was becoming too nationalistic (this is the time when Western powers usually intervene, for example, with Nasser in Egypt in 1956) and of course, as I have discussed in the post 'Oil. What's it Good For? War!' the USA needed to secure a good source of oil for itself that the Chinese were not involved with yet. So, the war on terror was used as an excuse for a neo-colonial war to secure resources, so familiar in the 19th century, but seemingly less common now, or so we thought ...
Back to the UK perspective. I think Tony Blair, poor man, did genuinely believe that he was fighting a major threat in Iraq. He liked the fact that the terror 'threat' allowed him to be stricter in the UK, because, as I noted in '10 Years of the Blair Party', he has always had some authoritarian tendencies. However, he also allowed himself to be convinced, not by his own intelligence services, but by material from them distorted by political players, that Iraq was a threat. In addition, Saddam Hussain was a cruel dictator who needed to fall, but the West had already failed at that once in 1991 and while they actually removed the man this time, they unleashed all the forces that his strength had kept in check, all for the sake, not of countering terrorism because that has increased since the war, but for the oil reserves his regime sat on. In reviews of Blair's career today, Iraq overshadows everything else he did. This is fair, it was his greatest blunder, the blood of thousands of people is on his hands and it showed that despite his charisma and his belief that he controlled events, he was a weak leader, too easily influenced by one of the most brainless politicians a democracy has suffered. It showed, too, at the end of the day, he lacked the confidence in himself to divert Bush's plan. In 1950, Prime Minister Clement Attlee (unintentionally turning into a bit of a hero on these pages) flew to the USA and successfully persuaded President Truman not to drop atomic bombs on North Korea. Though this is an overlooked historical incident, it no doubt saved the fates of millions and a lot of the Korean peninsula is not a wasteland. Blair would have gone down in history if he could have acted as such a brake on Bush, but instead decided to not only roll over for his objectives but actively support such a foolish, and probably illegal, step.
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