A timely article from John Pilger starts with the routine violence of the Police against another stop and search victim. Finding nothing, having assaulted him already, they promise they’ll find something ‘next time’. Of course this isn’t violent for the forces of law and order.
Likewise killing people abroad in the name of ‘freedom’ to exploit isn’t violent nor is the theft of the welfare state from people violence. Violence is when the Police get a taste of their own medicine and when property is under threat from Burke’s ‘swinish multitude.’
And the cold-blooded murder of Mark Duggan that sparked off the riots in Tottenham. The BBC Reporter wanted Pilger to await the Police Inquiry. Strange you don’t need an inquiry to know there were riots!!
Tony Greenstein
Damn It Or Fear It, The Forbidden Truth Is An Insurrection in Britain
By John Pilger
August 19, 2011 "Information Clearing House" --- On a warm spring day, strolling in south London, I heard demanding voices behind me. A police van disgorged a posse of six or more, who waved me aside. They surrounded a young black man who, like me, was ambling along. They appropriated him; they rifled his pockets, looked in his shoes, inspected his teeth. Their thuggery affirmed, they let him go with the barked warning there would be a next time.
For the young at the bottom of the pyramid of wealth and patronage and poverty that is modern Britain, mostly the black, the marginalised and resentful, the envious and hopeless, there is never surprise. Their relationship with authority is integral to their obsolescence as young adults. Half of all black British youth between the ages of 18 and 24 are unemployed, the result of deliberate policies since Margaret Thatcher oversaw the greatest transfer of wealth from the bottom to the top in British history. Forget plasma TVs, this was panoramic looting.
Such is the truth of David Cameron's "sick society", notably its sickest, most criminal, most feral "pocket": the square mile of the City of London where, with political approval, the banks and super-rich have trashed the British economy and the lives of millions. This is fast becoming unmentionable as we succumb to propaganda once described by the American black leader Malcolm X thus: "If you're not careful the newspapers will have you hating the oppressed and loving the people doing the oppressing."
As they lined up to bay their class bigotry and hypocrisy in parliament, barely a handful of MPs spoke this truth. Heirs to Edmund Burke's 18th century rants against the "mob rule" of a "swinish multitude", not one referred to previous rebellions in Brixton, Tottenham and Liverpool in the 1980s when Lord Scarman reported that "complex political, social and economic factors" had caused a "disposition towards violent protest" and recommended urgent remedial action. Instead, Labour and Liberal bravehearts called for water cannon and everything draconian: among them the Labour MP Hazel Blears. Remember her notorious expenses? None made the obvious connection between the greatest inequality since records were kept, a police force that routinely abuses a section of the population and kills with impunity and a permanent state of colonial warfare with an arms trade to match: the apogee of violence.
It hardly seemed coincidental that on the day before Cameron raged against "phony human rights", NATO aircraft - which include British bombers sent by him - killed a reported 85 civilians in a peaceful Libyan town. These were people in their homes, children in their schools. Watch the BBC's man on the spot trying his best to dispute the evidence of his eyes, just as the political and media class sought to discredit the evidence of a civilian bloodbath in Iraq as epic as the Rwanda genocide. Who are the criminals?
This is not in any way to excuse the violence of the rioters, many of whom were opportunistic, mean, cruel, nihilistic and often vicious in their glee: an authentic reflection of a system of greed and self-interest to which scores of parasitic money-movers, "entrepreneurs", Murdochites, corrupt MPs and bent coppers have devoted themselves.
On 4 August, the BBC's Fiona Armstrong - aka Lady MacGregor of MacGregor - interviewed the writer Darcus Howe, who dared use the forbidden word, "insurrection".
Armstrong: "Mr. Howe, you say you are not shocked [by the riots]? Does this mean you condone what happened?"
Howe: "Of course not ... what I am concerned about is a young man Mark Duggan ... the police blew his head off."
Armstrong: "Mr. Howe, we have to wait for the official enquiry to say things like that. We don't know what happened to Mr. Duggan. We have to wait for the police report."
On 8 August, the Independent Police Complaints Commission acknowledged there was "no evidence" that Duggan had fired a shot at police. Duggan was shot in the face on 4 August by a police officer with a Heckler and Koch MP5 sub-machine gun - the same weapon supplied by Britain to dictatorships that use them against their own people. I saw the result in East Timor where Indonesian troops also blew the heads off people with these state-of-the-art weapons supplied by both Tory and Labour governments.
An eyewitness to Duggan's killing told the Evening Standard, "About three or four police officers had [him] pinned on the ground at gunpoint. They were really big guns and then I heard four loud shots. The police shot him on the floor."
This is how the Metropolitan Police shot dead Jean Charles de Menezes on the floor of a London Underground train. And there was Robert Stanley and Ian Tomlinson, and many more. The police lied about Duggan's killing as they have lied about the others. Since 1998, more than 330 people have died in police custody and not one officer has been convicted. Where is the political and media outrage about this "culture of fear"?
"Funny, too," noted the journalist Melanie MacFadyean, "that the police did nothing while some serious looting went on - surely not because they wanted everyone to see that cutting the police force meant more crime?"
Still, the brooms have arrived. In an age of public relations as news, the clean-up campaign, however well-meant by many people, can also serve the government's and media goal of sweeping inequality and hopelessness under gentrified carpets, with cheery volunteers armed with their brand new brooms and pointedly described as "Londoners" as if the rest are aliens. The otherwise a
bsent Boris Johnson waved his new broom. Another Etonian, the former PR man to an asset stripper and current prime minister up to his neck in Hackgate, would surely approve.
And there was Robert Stanley and Ian Tomlinson,
ReplyDeleteI think that should be Harry Stanley, murdered by police for the crime of carrying a chair leg in Hackney. It isn't hard to see that Robert Stanley is a chain of opticians.
Pilger is a brilliant writer, and that's a great Malcolm X quote, but I can't help feeling he's not so sharp when he says:
many of whom were opportunistic, mean, cruel, nihilistic and often vicious in their glee
As someone who once suffered 30 attempted muggings in the course of eighteen months in one of the major riot areas, I had much less fear of violence from groups of kids during the time they were rioting than during normal times.
The British Establishment having the luxury in the past of externalizing the violence within self, as a result and loss of being connected to self, in the past this negativity channeled to a large extent exported overseas, in particular to regions that culture being dissimilar to British, as say being black skinned useful for identity as targets for hostilities of British vindictive and institutionalized hate, as the World contracted proportionably as compared to the past, now at the cross roads within and without, with dismay seeing working class miners beaten up by police, and working class citizens, [if they can find work}, now objectified as thugs or rioters or whatever, certainly not as civilized as Cameron whom being so gentrified, is to step up violence as with the use of water cannons and rubber bullets, it is of great misfortune our politicians, police, the media, all subject to cowardice. in as having to serve mammon, or for those that do not understand, the Banking and the Financial Elite, it is a paradox the Elite are incapable of understanding the links that interconnect reality, this problem resolved by the application of force as in the Police Force and the outcome being violence, it is not for me to say this is a primeval solution and the outcome will eventually create a costly and unmanageably situation, it would appear this society is incapable and crippled as to have lost its way and now lacks grace, and harmony. This loss of vision is now locked into a fate that excludes any possibility other than its own destruction.
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