Sunday, July 31, 2005
Further to my last post, the Met really do seem to be going mad. Here are three examples. First, apparently the police officers who shot Jean-Charles Menezes ten days ago (five times in the head, remember) also held, of all people, the tube train driver at gunpoint. The overall behaviour of that particular group of police suggests to me that here we have a gang of armed lunatics on the loose. Which, given the existing threat from "Islamic" fascists, is all we need.
Second, while a friend of mine was a passenger in a taxi last week, it was stopped by police and he was searched, apparently merely because he is Asian. Finally, passing through Paddington station a couple of days ago I saw a woman dressed as a Cornish pasty to advertise a cafe being stopped and questioned by more police.
I wonder what sort of mentality would make police officers shoot someone of whom they had no reasonable suspicion. It emerged today that according to their "Operation Kratos" guidelines, armed police don't even have to identify themselves as police officers or shout "stop" before shooting a suspected suicide bomber. Unless the police had seen the explosives or knew who their target was and what he planned, this would preclude reasonable suspicion altogether. Quite apart from being inhumane, it increases the risk of more innocent people being killed by the police.
Many of the bystanders at the Stockwell shooting said they saw "an Arab" being pursued by police, despite the fact that Jean-Charles Menezes is not, and looks nothing like, an Arab. I don't think those people are racists who think anyone being chased by the police must be an Arab. Simply, in a stressful situation, saturated with media and government publicity about political-Islamist terrorism, they made quick assumptions which, in the cold light of day, would seem to them stupid.
Police officers are no less prone to make such assumptions than anyone else. Indeed, they are more prone. They are trained to believe that they have special "powers" in order to protect society; that they are almost a caste apart from society, at least partially alienated from it. The more intelligent TV police dramas and noir crime novels often make this one of their themes, and police officers themselves have commented on it. It is a short step from believing such an absurd proposition to believing Jean-Charles Menezes was a suicide bomber, or at least to believing one is entitled to make a snap judgement as to this based on no evidence at all, except the most circumstantial. And such assumptions, made by police officers with guns in their hands, are often fatal - as Harry Stanley's family, Jean-Charles Menezes' family, and many others know all too well.
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Second, while a friend of mine was a passenger in a taxi last week, it was stopped by police and he was searched, apparently merely because he is Asian. Finally, passing through Paddington station a couple of days ago I saw a woman dressed as a Cornish pasty to advertise a cafe being stopped and questioned by more police.
I wonder what sort of mentality would make police officers shoot someone of whom they had no reasonable suspicion. It emerged today that according to their "Operation Kratos" guidelines, armed police don't even have to identify themselves as police officers or shout "stop" before shooting a suspected suicide bomber. Unless the police had seen the explosives or knew who their target was and what he planned, this would preclude reasonable suspicion altogether. Quite apart from being inhumane, it increases the risk of more innocent people being killed by the police.
Many of the bystanders at the Stockwell shooting said they saw "an Arab" being pursued by police, despite the fact that Jean-Charles Menezes is not, and looks nothing like, an Arab. I don't think those people are racists who think anyone being chased by the police must be an Arab. Simply, in a stressful situation, saturated with media and government publicity about political-Islamist terrorism, they made quick assumptions which, in the cold light of day, would seem to them stupid.
Police officers are no less prone to make such assumptions than anyone else. Indeed, they are more prone. They are trained to believe that they have special "powers" in order to protect society; that they are almost a caste apart from society, at least partially alienated from it. The more intelligent TV police dramas and noir crime novels often make this one of their themes, and police officers themselves have commented on it. It is a short step from believing such an absurd proposition to believing Jean-Charles Menezes was a suicide bomber, or at least to believing one is entitled to make a snap judgement as to this based on no evidence at all, except the most circumstantial. And such assumptions, made by police officers with guns in their hands, are often fatal - as Harry Stanley's family, Jean-Charles Menezes' family, and many others know all too well.
Thursday, July 28, 2005
Good news - for once - from Northern Ireland today. The IRA, taking advantage no doubt of the fact that terrorism is in the public mind at the moment, has announced a definitive renunciation of violence.
Of course, this has happened before, but not since the 60s - and the Provos are really a different organisation to the IRA that "dumped arms" back then. They do reserve the right to defend Nationalist communities, but this is only sensible in an unilateral renunciation of violence. The only thing is, I do suspect that unfortunately this means the IRA will continue to act as vigilantes in Nationalist areas. They haven't actually disbanded, after all.
Ian Paisley hotfooted it to the TV cameras, of course (well, waddled in a hunched Addams Family sort of way) and his response was sadly predictable. To paraphrase: "I don't believe it! I can't believe it! If there were no IRA I'd have no reason to exist, so I'll just talk about Sinn Fein being murderers. Please God, do something! Whore of Babylon...No, No, NO..."
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Of course, this has happened before, but not since the 60s - and the Provos are really a different organisation to the IRA that "dumped arms" back then. They do reserve the right to defend Nationalist communities, but this is only sensible in an unilateral renunciation of violence. The only thing is, I do suspect that unfortunately this means the IRA will continue to act as vigilantes in Nationalist areas. They haven't actually disbanded, after all.
Ian Paisley hotfooted it to the TV cameras, of course (well, waddled in a hunched Addams Family sort of way) and his response was sadly predictable. To paraphrase: "I don't believe it! I can't believe it! If there were no IRA I'd have no reason to exist, so I'll just talk about Sinn Fein being murderers. Please God, do something! Whore of Babylon...No, No, NO..."
Wednesday, July 27, 2005
Fighting fire with fire
Today it's the Metropolitan Police who've got me worried, with more facts coming out about the fatal shooting at Stockwell Tube station. Now, I've no principled objection to the police shooting to kill suicide bombers. But Jean Charles Menezes wasn't a suicide bomber - and the police had no legitimate reason to think he was. Let's look at the facts.
The police found the address of a block of flats at the scene of one of the bomb attempts last Thursday. It seems two of the people involved in that attempt lived there, so the police kept a watch on the block. Jean Charles Menezes also lived there, in a different flat. When he left home three armed plain-clothes police officers from "SO19" (the Met's firearms unit) followed him (didn't they leave anyone to watch the flats? Why did they assume he was a terrorist?)
Arriving at Stockwell tube, the police produced guns and started to chase Menezes. They were wearing no uniform or identification as police officers, so naturally he ran away in the most likely direction - onto a Tube train, where they shot him dead, following new guidelines instructing them to shoot suspected suicide bombers in the head.
A single shot to the head from one of SO19's pistols (the same ones the SAS use) would kill anyone. But the police shot Jean Charles Menezes five times. It doesn't sound as if they acted as professionally as their boss, Ian Blair, claims. Combined, these circumstances make what happened look less like a legitimate, though flawed, police operation and more like murder through incompetence and abuse of power.
The Met are calling the "shoot to kill" orders "Operation Kratos". Kratos is a Greek word meaning strength or, by extension, power and rule. It's usually used in combination with other Greek political words: e.g. "democracy", rule by the people. The Met, however, have left out the demos bit and concentrated solely on kratos. I'm sure I can't be the only one who finds the whole thing a bit worrying.
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The police found the address of a block of flats at the scene of one of the bomb attempts last Thursday. It seems two of the people involved in that attempt lived there, so the police kept a watch on the block. Jean Charles Menezes also lived there, in a different flat. When he left home three armed plain-clothes police officers from "SO19" (the Met's firearms unit) followed him (didn't they leave anyone to watch the flats? Why did they assume he was a terrorist?)
Arriving at Stockwell tube, the police produced guns and started to chase Menezes. They were wearing no uniform or identification as police officers, so naturally he ran away in the most likely direction - onto a Tube train, where they shot him dead, following new guidelines instructing them to shoot suspected suicide bombers in the head.
A single shot to the head from one of SO19's pistols (the same ones the SAS use) would kill anyone. But the police shot Jean Charles Menezes five times. It doesn't sound as if they acted as professionally as their boss, Ian Blair, claims. Combined, these circumstances make what happened look less like a legitimate, though flawed, police operation and more like murder through incompetence and abuse of power.
The Met are calling the "shoot to kill" orders "Operation Kratos". Kratos is a Greek word meaning strength or, by extension, power and rule. It's usually used in combination with other Greek political words: e.g. "democracy", rule by the people. The Met, however, have left out the demos bit and concentrated solely on kratos. I'm sure I can't be the only one who finds the whole thing a bit worrying.
Tuesday, July 26, 2005
Working class?!
I'm posting rather a lot about the Oxford branch of the Independent Working Class Association at the moment, but they seem to want to force themselves on the public's attention. Their latest smart idea is to sue Labour Councillor Bill Baker for defamation for suggesting they are associated with extremists.
To represent them in this matter they have hired the London defamation law firm Carter Ruck, better known (and rightly ridiculed by Private Eye) as Carter Fuck. CR are notorious for helping the rich, famous and corrupt to suppress criticism of themselves, but less well known for their rigorous legal ethics.
As for the substance of the case, here are the facts. The IWCA nationally was set up in 1997 by a group called Red Action, which still dominates the IWCA: they refer to it as their "IWCA initiative". Most of the IWCA's leading figures are also members of Red Action (the affiliations of the Oxford IWCA councillors I know only from hearsay, so I won't comment).
RA was a faction expelled from the Socialist Workers' Party in 1982 for "voluntarism", in this case concentrating on beating up fascists, or those they suspected to be fascists, at the expense (as the SWP saw it) of actual politics. Indeed, RA declares that "militant anti-fascism in its purest form...is physical violence". Accordingly, RA helped set up and still actively participates in Anti-Fascist Action, condemned by the Newham Monitoring Project for its "intensely paranoid, almost paramilitary tactics".
It is often the case that groups like RA, who set out to fight fascism putting physical confrontation first and politics second - rather than confronting the fascists politically above all, and on the streets when necessary - themselves become rather like their enemy. Indeed, I have heard AFA members expressing the sentiment that they have more in common with, and more respect for, "the fash" than for their "so-called allies" in the anti-fascist movement. Certainly RA treat other anti-fascists with nothing but contempt. Since they often mention James Connolly it is odd that they don't remember his condemnation of "A physical force party - that is, a party united on no one point except..." resolving political problems by physical force.
More seriously, RA has always proudly and uncritically supported Irish Republican terrorist groups. They refer to the INLA/IRSP as "a fraternal organisation" and declare themselves "inspired" by it, and during the Troubles they organised "delegations" to Northern Ireland to meet terrorists as well as working-class activists in the Republican community.
As RA's own potted history of their group notes, "Another eminently practical benefit in accepting the use [of] and need for armed struggle meant that any ethical reservations about our own use of violence for political ends, i.e. militant anti-fascism, was automatically legitimised." In the early 1990s two RA members were jailed for their part in an IRA bomb plot, something of which RA remains very proud (it used to feature on the front page of the group's website) although they insist they had no knowledge of those members' terrorist activities.
And there we have it. Not very socialist, but then RA and the IWCA both declare that "socialism is dead". All of this information is derived from reliable sources, most of it from RA's and the IWCA's own publications. If Cllrs. Craft, Cole and Kent and almost-Cllr. Saunders dispute any of it, or somehow maintain that it doesn't justify Cllr. Baker's comments, I invite them to go ahead and sue me too!
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To represent them in this matter they have hired the London defamation law firm Carter Ruck, better known (and rightly ridiculed by Private Eye) as Carter Fuck. CR are notorious for helping the rich, famous and corrupt to suppress criticism of themselves, but less well known for their rigorous legal ethics.
As for the substance of the case, here are the facts. The IWCA nationally was set up in 1997 by a group called Red Action, which still dominates the IWCA: they refer to it as their "IWCA initiative". Most of the IWCA's leading figures are also members of Red Action (the affiliations of the Oxford IWCA councillors I know only from hearsay, so I won't comment).
RA was a faction expelled from the Socialist Workers' Party in 1982 for "voluntarism", in this case concentrating on beating up fascists, or those they suspected to be fascists, at the expense (as the SWP saw it) of actual politics. Indeed, RA declares that "militant anti-fascism in its purest form...is physical violence". Accordingly, RA helped set up and still actively participates in Anti-Fascist Action, condemned by the Newham Monitoring Project for its "intensely paranoid, almost paramilitary tactics".
It is often the case that groups like RA, who set out to fight fascism putting physical confrontation first and politics second - rather than confronting the fascists politically above all, and on the streets when necessary - themselves become rather like their enemy. Indeed, I have heard AFA members expressing the sentiment that they have more in common with, and more respect for, "the fash" than for their "so-called allies" in the anti-fascist movement. Certainly RA treat other anti-fascists with nothing but contempt. Since they often mention James Connolly it is odd that they don't remember his condemnation of "A physical force party - that is, a party united on no one point except..." resolving political problems by physical force.
More seriously, RA has always proudly and uncritically supported Irish Republican terrorist groups. They refer to the INLA/IRSP as "a fraternal organisation" and declare themselves "inspired" by it, and during the Troubles they organised "delegations" to Northern Ireland to meet terrorists as well as working-class activists in the Republican community.
As RA's own potted history of their group notes, "Another eminently practical benefit in accepting the use [of] and need for armed struggle meant that any ethical reservations about our own use of violence for political ends, i.e. militant anti-fascism, was automatically legitimised." In the early 1990s two RA members were jailed for their part in an IRA bomb plot, something of which RA remains very proud (it used to feature on the front page of the group's website) although they insist they had no knowledge of those members' terrorist activities.
And there we have it. Not very socialist, but then RA and the IWCA both declare that "socialism is dead". All of this information is derived from reliable sources, most of it from RA's and the IWCA's own publications. If Cllrs. Craft, Cole and Kent and almost-Cllr. Saunders dispute any of it, or somehow maintain that it doesn't justify Cllr. Baker's comments, I invite them to go ahead and sue me too!
Monday, July 25, 2005
Update
Predictably, the Lib Dems came a pretty miserable third in Northfield Brook! What did surprise me was that Carole Roberts, the excellent Labour candidate, not only won, but got 54% of the vote, with the IWCA second on 28%. A bit of a come-down for them, in the first seat they won back in 2002.
The IWCA are an odd phenomenon. I'm told their organisation in North London is good and constructive, but it seems to have no relationship with their Oxford people. Here they are simply opportunist, going for the knee-jerk anti-drugs vote and attending few council meetings - instead they spend their time attacking "multiculturalism", by which they mean any spending on specifically minority projects.
The IWCA seem to think there are no inequalities in society other than class inequality. I agree that class oppression is fundamental, but you can't hope to represent the working class unless you see and struggle against what divides it, and understand the reasons why some working-class people are more oppressed than others.
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The IWCA are an odd phenomenon. I'm told their organisation in North London is good and constructive, but it seems to have no relationship with their Oxford people. Here they are simply opportunist, going for the knee-jerk anti-drugs vote and attending few council meetings - instead they spend their time attacking "multiculturalism", by which they mean any spending on specifically minority projects.
The IWCA seem to think there are no inequalities in society other than class inequality. I agree that class oppression is fundamental, but you can't hope to represent the working class unless you see and struggle against what divides it, and understand the reasons why some working-class people are more oppressed than others.
Wednesday, July 20, 2005
Lib Dem Watch
The Liberal Democrats, the party you join if you don't have any politics, are up to their usual tricks here in Oxford. Their leaflet for the by-election in Northfield Brook ward on Thursday declares that only they can beat Labour. Given that they got less than ninety votes there in May, this seems a bit silly. But the Lib Dems have a bar chart to back up their claim - showing the result for the whole of Oxford East!
Meanwhile, and more seriously, Evan Harris, Lib Dem MP for Oxford West, spent yesterday trying to get a debate in Parliament on restricting abortion rights, in alliance with anti-abortion campaigners and the homophobic "Christian Institute". Yes, in case you were wondering, that is the same Evan Harris who promotes himself as "patron" of the Oxford Gay Pride Festival. What an accomplished hypocrite.
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Meanwhile, and more seriously, Evan Harris, Lib Dem MP for Oxford West, spent yesterday trying to get a debate in Parliament on restricting abortion rights, in alliance with anti-abortion campaigners and the homophobic "Christian Institute". Yes, in case you were wondering, that is the same Evan Harris who promotes himself as "patron" of the Oxford Gay Pride Festival. What an accomplished hypocrite.
Monday, July 18, 2005
Hello again!
OK, back to the blogosphere after more than a year of silence. To be honest, I forgot I had a blog!
I obviously can't post without mentioning what's in everyone's mind at the moment - the horrible atrocity in London on the 7th. My heart goes out to all those who have suffered, in those bombings and in all like events, of which there are depressingly many. But the proximity of it - the fact I have friends who use those tube lines regularly - gives a mercifully rare immediacy to the concept of mass murder.
If there is one thing everyone can do in response to this, it's to offer solidarity in word and deed to their local Asian community. Asian people are already suffering from opportunist attacks by fascists, and as my friend Dave Renton points out, it's not just Muslims who are being attacked: the Sikh gurdwara at Gravesend was attacked by a mob of fascists.
These attacks clearly have nothing to do with "revenge" for the London bombings, just as the London bombings themselves have nothing to do with "revenge" for Iraq and Afghanistan. Rather, both proceed from the viciouly reactionary politics of the perpetrators. Fascists want a vicious racially "pure" dictatorship, Al-Qaeda supporters want a nightmarish fundamentalist "Caliphate".
Al-Qaeda and similar groups don't even particularly hate Western people, for all their talk of a rigid distinction between "Dar al-Islam" and "Dar al-Harb". After all, they kill far more people in Iraq than in the West. Their terrorism has a concrete political object. In pursuit of this object, their "trainers" convince mainly vulnerable young people, like the two men recruited at the youth sports centre in Leeds, that if they murder people by blowing themselves up they will go straight to Heaven. The only appropriate word for such an ideological leadership is evil.
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I obviously can't post without mentioning what's in everyone's mind at the moment - the horrible atrocity in London on the 7th. My heart goes out to all those who have suffered, in those bombings and in all like events, of which there are depressingly many. But the proximity of it - the fact I have friends who use those tube lines regularly - gives a mercifully rare immediacy to the concept of mass murder.
If there is one thing everyone can do in response to this, it's to offer solidarity in word and deed to their local Asian community. Asian people are already suffering from opportunist attacks by fascists, and as my friend Dave Renton points out, it's not just Muslims who are being attacked: the Sikh gurdwara at Gravesend was attacked by a mob of fascists.
These attacks clearly have nothing to do with "revenge" for the London bombings, just as the London bombings themselves have nothing to do with "revenge" for Iraq and Afghanistan. Rather, both proceed from the viciouly reactionary politics of the perpetrators. Fascists want a vicious racially "pure" dictatorship, Al-Qaeda supporters want a nightmarish fundamentalist "Caliphate".
Al-Qaeda and similar groups don't even particularly hate Western people, for all their talk of a rigid distinction between "Dar al-Islam" and "Dar al-Harb". After all, they kill far more people in Iraq than in the West. Their terrorism has a concrete political object. In pursuit of this object, their "trainers" convince mainly vulnerable young people, like the two men recruited at the youth sports centre in Leeds, that if they murder people by blowing themselves up they will go straight to Heaven. The only appropriate word for such an ideological leadership is evil.
