States only fear the streets

The ongoing, and highly encouraging, revolutions in Tunisia and Egypt, illustrate one simple, fundamental fact: the only thing that makes States fear for their existence is people on the streets. External threats, even when existential, just bolster the State and allow it to strengthen its internal grip along the lines of “if you’re not with us, you’re against us”. An external threat, real or imagined, is a handy pretext to suppress or marginalise internal dissent, as was so amply illustrated in the Cold War. Even if hot war breaks out, the State is in its element – as Randolph Bourne so famously said, “War is the health of the State”.

Amateur terrorism (to distinguish it from the professional, industrial terrorism practiced by States) is an irrelevance to the State, a pinprick at best. All of the efforts of Irish Republican guerrilla organisations failed to make more than a dent in the British State. They succeeded in bumping off a few of the ruling class (though a hell of a lot of the working class – thanks a feckin’ bundle, guys) and causing physical damage, but even if they’d managed to whack the full Cabinet in the Brighton bomb another would have emerged rapidly and the State would have been emboldened into declaring a state of emergency. As for destroying buildings, this was just accidental Keynesianism, a boost to the construction industry and urban regeneration. The jihadists are bungling amateurs in comparison and present no threat at all to the State.

Even when seriously dangerous urban guerrilla groups have been ‘effective’, in the sense of killing cops and members of the ruling class (the Red Brigade in Italy and Red Army Fraction in Germany come immediately to mind), they themselves haven’t threatened the State’s existence. In the case of Italy, of which I know a fair bit of recent history and speak the language, the Left urban guerrillas were more than matched by neo-fascist paramilitaries, shadowy groups in the State itself (Gladio, P2), and external forces (CIA). In terms of bombings, shootings and killings, the Brigate Rosse and other Left guerrillas were the most ‘successful’ such groups in Europe in the 70s and early 80s, but they still strengthened the State and provoked it (though this is a bit chicken and egg) into covert terrorism (the ‘strategy of tension‘). What did scare the living daylights out of the Italian State during the anni di piombo wasn’t the piombo but the workers, as Italy was experiencing very sharp class struggle in the 70s and early 80s, in the form of strikes and factory occupations, and revolution seemed imminent. The urban terrorists were an extreme outcome of class warfare but were really just a side-effect. It was revolting workers that put the shits up the ruling classes, not a few extremists with bombs. As anarchists often say: you can’t blow up a social relation.

Only when people get on the street en masse and get involved in direct action does the State really get scared, and a smart ‘modern’ State does its best to prevent this happening in the first place. The strategies – bread and circuses, divide and rule, distraction, external threats – are millennia-old, and change only in form over the ages. All of these are evident today in the actions of the UK State, distraction in particular. Many of the chatterati sing the praises of the Internet as a vehicle for ‘democratic change’, and listening to them you’d think that you could make a revolution by forming a Facebook group, writing blog posts and Twittering. That the Internet has added new dimensions to, and opportunities for, organisation is undoubted – it’s been an important organisational method in Tunisia and Egypt – but without action, literally, on the ground, a plethora of blogs and Twitter feeds and Facebook groups is not just an irrelevance to the State, it’s a positive aid. It gives the impression of pluralism and democracy in action, but a ‘blogsphere’ fragmented into hundreds of thousands of personal ranting boards actually aids power by diffusing any opposition into egocentric masturbation (this blog included!). The Internet fragments opposition, not coalesces it. Even if the ‘blogsphere’ were to speak with one voice, the State wouldn’t give a monkey’s. It might tweak and tack a bit, and one faction might gain ascendancy over another, but the status quo would be under no threat at all.

And States encourage this fragmentation. The UK State has, over the last two decades, gradually removed the space for public flesh-and-blood protest, offering ‘virtual’ online protest as a weak substitute. Once, you could, and people often did, just march off down the street to demonstrate, as I remember happening a few times in my youth. It’s a natural human tendency – you want to protest about something, you go ahead and do it. Now, you have to notify the cops weeks in advance, let them determine your route, have hundreds of stewards to keep protesters under order, be surveilled six ways from Sunday by CCTV and forward intelligence teams (FIT) [1], and make sure no-one says anything nasty that could be classed as ‘incitement’. Even then you end up being interned – sorry, ‘kettled’. Once, trades unions would hold mass meetings to make decisions. Now, all decisions have to be taken by secret postal ballot.

The aim of the State is: isolate, fragment, render irrelevant. The more people work in concert, and discuss and debate and argue face-to-face, and experience real direct action, the more their consciousness changes and the greater the threat they pose to our rulers. The more they’re isolated and individualised and gulled into passivity, the more they’re prone to fear, self-centredness, and acceptance of dominant realities as manufactured by the media. Action radicalises, inaction paralyses [2]. This has been known to rulers and ruled throughout history, and rulers have done their damnedest to keep people from acting together, either bluntly through repression and fear, or more subtly through distraction.

Once feet hit the street, and workers come out on strike, the State shits itself. Because when it comes down to it, there are a lot more of us plebs than there are rulers, and a lot more people than there are cops and soldiers.

One other thing that’s encouraging about the ongoing revolutions, and which befuddles the Western media and ruling classes: the revolutions have no leaders. They’ve been triumphs of spontaneity and self-organisation. What the Western media call “vigilantes” in Egypt are what would have been known as street councils in earlier revolutions (or even – gasp! – soviets). People acting together generate their own order. This has been a feature of pretty much all successful revolutions. What has also, sadly, been a regular feature has been the hijacking of revolutions by opportunists and chancers seeking power, and it’s my fervent hope that this doesn’t happen in Tunisia and Egypt. Perhaps this is where the Internet might be useful, in exposing such chancers and the lies that they use to gain power. Had such a worldwide instant web of knowledge and communication existed in 1917, there’s no way that the Bolsheviks would have got away with the absolute whopping and lethal lies that they told to cling on to power. The Internet can have its uses, but it can only ever be an aid to, not a cause of, revolutionary change.

[1] See also the excellent FIT Watch blog, exposing the Orwellian behaviour of FITs.

[2] This is the essence of the seemingly abstruse and niche, but highly influential, Situationist theory of the ‘Society of the Spectacle‘.

Megrahi release: a lot of sound and fury…

…signifying nothing but another Spectacle designed to distract attention from the real issue of the Lockerbie bombing, namely the realpolitik behind the stitch-up of Megrahi as a convenient patsy. Whenever you hear loud howls of outrage from politicians ‘across the political spectrum’ (which in UK terms is centre-right to far right) you can be sure that the louder the howls and more fervent the outrage, the more important the issue(s) attention is being diverted from. In the case of the “Lockerbie bomber”, released from jail on compassionate grounds on account of him being due to croak any day now, the howls have become louder and more fervent with every passing hour, with even the Yanks joining in, the Director of the US political police – sorry, ‘FBI’ – declaring that the decision “gave comfort to terrorists” [1] and St Obama saying the decision to release was “a mistake”.

It was quite handy that Gheddafi gave Megrahi a “hero’s welcome” as that gave the various rent-a-rants (sorry, ‘commentators’) and MPs an excellent focus for their outrage. So convenient, indeed, that the mischievously minded might wonder if Gheddafi hadn’t been tipped the unofficial wink to play up the reception for public consumption both in Libya and over here, despite the official line that Brown had written to him asking for a quiet homecoming. The “triumphalism” of the reception gave the rent-a-rants an easy target to rage against safe in the knowledge that whatever they said would have zero practical effect on the fait accompli and so there’d be no comeback [2], which allowed them to puff, preen and posture as they wanted. NuLabor hacks North of the Border also used the release as a convenient stick to beat the Scotnats with, safe in the knowledge that the stick couldn’t be turned against them. A win-win for the ranters and gobshites that represent the “consensus” of the UK, and particularly the English, political class – the Megrahi release was the equivalent of a free ball in snooker, an opportunity which costs nothing and can gain much.

What all the bluster and thunder conveniently distracts attention from is that the conviction of Megrahi was, even if you’re charitable and naive and gullible, pretty damned iffy. All the initial leads pointed towards a Syrian-backed group as the perps in revenge for the downing of an Iranian civilian airliner by the US warship Vincennes (an event that’s been successfully airbrushed out of public history), but with the US turning against their former puppet Saddam Hussein Syria suddenly became a valuable ‘regional ally’ so there was a sharp switch in the investigation’s focus to another ‘state sponsor of terrorism’, Libya. Suddenly a dodgy witness is found in Malta, who after being wined and dined and treated to goodies by investigators, and after being shown photos of Megrahi, identified him many years after the ‘fact’ [3]. As Private Eye, for all its faults one of the few remaining bastions of investigative reporting in the UK, and which has doggedly pursued the “travesty” of Megrahi’s conviction since 2001, wrote in an article in the recent edition:

Megrahi’s trial was a travesty. There were the testimonies of two witnesses who were paid huge sums by the CIA – one a notorious liar and paid informer, Abdul Giaka, who first put Megrahi in the frame; the other the Maltese shopkeeper who identified him as the man who bought clothes said to have been packed round the bomb. He had been shown photographs of Megrahi. [4]

The only material evidence linking Megrahi and Libya to the bombing was a tiny bit of circuit board ‘re-found’ amongst the crash debris some years later. All in all a pretty thin case, and there were strong grounds for believing that Megrahi’s appeal against the conviction would have not only discredited this evidence but would have also brought the realpolitik of US and UK governments into the frame and opened a can of worms which both States were keen to see remain closed and buried. The Eye again:

News last week that Megrahi was to be returned on ‘compassionate grounds’, because he was dying of cancer, briefly raised hopes that his appeal could continue in his absence. But that was never going to be allowed to happen, and Megrahi, who had always said he would never return to Libya until his name was cleared, duly dropped his appeal.

That the appeal won’t go ahead has dismayed many UK relatives of victims of the atrocity, including the courageous and redoubtable Jim Swires, but has undoubtedly led to huge sighs of relief being breathed in the corridors of Whitehall and Westminster. With Megrahi dead and the appeal buried, the chances are that the truth of the bombing, who carried it out and, more importantly, why and on whose orders, will never come out in our lifetimes, unless investigative journalists keep digging (oh for a Seymour Hearsh over here). Which will happily suit the gobshites and rent-a-rants who can continue to foam at the mouth in parliaments and newspapers, and more importantly the senior figures in the UK and US States who know the truth.

Whenever you see the English political class united in ‘outrage’ at something or other, you can lay good odds that there’s something needing covering up. Instead, as the Eye puts it, the “outrage would be better focused on the governments and justice systems that have ensured we have all been denied the full truth about Lockerbie.”

As a ‘side-dish’ to this story, it was interesting to compare and contrast the public view North and South of the Border. I was up in the Highlands on holiday these last two weeks, and in the week running up to the release the Herald, and BBC Radio Scotland (I didn’t watch any TV – hey, I was on holiday!), continuously ran stories on the impending release. The Herald carried many letters on the issue, and it was interesting to see from them, and from the radio reports, that the prevailing public opinion was that a) the conviction was dodgy and should be examined, and b) the guy should be released to spend his last days at home even if he was guilty, with politicial commentators declaring that showing mercy was a “strength” of which Scotland should be proud, and which reflected well on the nation. I don’t know what the reactionary English press wrote during this time, but it was clear from the newsstand headlines on the release that compassion was not top of the agenda. Another illustration, to my mind, of the increasingly civilised discourse and culture in Scotland, compared to the reactionary, and often neo-fascist, barbarism to the South. The contrast between civilisation and barbarism becomes, it seems, starker and more glaring each time I venture North. With luck one time I’ll stay up there and not return…

Postscript

A good letter on this topic appeared in the Herald last Saturday which is worth quoting in full in case the link ‘goes off’:

Hypocritical for Americans to voice anger

The USS Vincennes shot down an Iranian Airbus on July 3, 1988, killing 290 innocent civilians. When the Vincennes returned to its home port of San Diego, it was given a hero’s welcome. The crew members of the Vincennes were awarded combat action ribbons.

Commander Scott Lustig won the Commendation medal for “heroic achievement” for the ability to “maintain his poise and confidence under fire” that allowed him to “quickly and concisely complete the firing procedure”. To top it all, the citizens of Indiana raised money not for the dead Iranians but to the very ship that destroyed their lives.

Now, as Megrahi is allowed to go home to die in Libya, most Americans as well as our Foreign Secretary David Miliband, express disgust at the scenes of flag-waving. Mr Miliband said: “Obviously the sight of a mass murderer getting a hero’s welcome in Tripoli is deeply upsetting, deeply distressing.” I wonder how the Iranians felt when they heard of the Vincennes arrival back in San Diego.

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It is not often we have the opportunity to be proud to be Scottish but I, for one, am deeply relieved that our small nation stood up to the political heavyweights who tried to interfere with the Scottish legal system which chose to show that, even after a heinous crimes had been perpetrated, we are capable of granting a dying man compassion.

Even if Megrahi did commit the terrible act of bombing Pan Am 103, who ordered it? Colonel Gaddafi? The very same Gaddafi who is now treated to private audiences with our own leaders?

Martin Walsh, Paisley.

Another article worth reading is The Framing of Al-Megrahi by the respected human rights lawyer Gareth Peirce which looks at Megrahi’s fit-up in forensic detail, and reveals some quite disturbing facts about US and UK geopolitical and secret service interventions in the case, right from the night of the crash when unidentified US spooks were trawling the crash site.

[1] Megrahi release ‘right decision’. BBC News online, 23/8/09

[2] Unlike, say, the liberal warmonger Aaronovitch whose fervent support for the Iraq war helped shore up support for the war of plunder and thus indirectly made him complicit in the immense death and destruction caused by it, a complicity for which he could, though sadly likely won’t, be held personally accountable

[3] Megrahi: a ‘convenient scapegoat’? BBC News online, 20/8/09

[4] Private Eye, No. 1243, p28. See also the Private Eye website where you can buy copies of the late and much-missed Paul Foot’s investigations into the Megrahi fit-up.

[5] The Herald, Letters page 22/8/09, also on the newspaper website.

Israel: the Millwall of the Middle East

I’m sure that billions of words worldwide have been written on the latest invasion of the by the Israeli military of the Gaza Strip where 1.4m people live in just 139 sqm [1] (~10,000 people/sqm, not much less than London’s 12,000 people/sqm [2]), and although the actions of this rogue state infuriate and deeply sadden me, there’s no point adding yet more moral obloquy and outrage to what’s already out there, produced by folk who write far better than myself. Only the most die-hard fans of Israel can unequivocally defend the latest massacres – despite the Israeli embargo on journalists entering the Strip, plenty enough photos and footage of dead children are coming out of the place to fuel righteous outrage worldwide. Dead children hit a hardwired spot in the vast majority of human beings that no amount of rationalisation can overrule – military and political ‘rationality’ will never trump killed children, which is as it should be, as any society that puts military logic above human life is well on the way to being inhuman. So it’s hardly surprising that the vast majority of comment is, to put it mildly, critical of Israel’s actions.

One thing, though, is very clear indeed. The Israeli State doesn’t give a shit what the world thinks, and in the Middle East can do what it wants to who it wants when it wants, with complete impunity. Israel is the Millwall FC of the Middle East: “no-one likes us, and we don’t care”. With one very important exception: the USA. The only reason Israel can do what it does is that it has the unconditional support, nay encouragement, of the USA, which provides it with $2.4 billion in military aid every year[3], and owns half of its foreign debt [4].

The reason for US support is simple: Israel is its client, albeit an occasionally truculent one, in the most important oil-producing region in the world. Israel serves to extend US geopolitical hegemony to the Middle East, and by being smack in the middle of the region perfectly divides the region into ineffective dysfunctional States. To use a Chess analogy, Israel is a queen placed on the enemy back ranks, capable of causing absolute havoc and attacking any and all enemy pieces. Worse, the opposition’s queen was captured decades ago, after the destruction of Abdul Nasser’s Egypt and the death of pan-Arabism, and the other pieces are forever getting in each other’s way and lack any movement.

As with all analogies, of course, this one breaks down, as Israel needs constant funding and support from the US to survive, without which the queen would be demoted to a minor piece and would very rapidly have to come to terms with the ‘enemy’. US support has been constant and unwavering since 1948, and it’s arguably stronger now than ever – there’s no question that the Israeli regime ran the Gaza invasion plans past the outgoing Bush regime before acting, as not only would Israel have never dared to act so massively without at least tacit (and likely, behind closed doors, explicit) US permission [5], but the US would have made some protest, however equivocal, against the invasion given the worldwide condemnation of it.

So the question is: will the US continue to give unconditional political, military and economic backing to its client State? On the face of it, the simple answer to that question is ‘yes’, at least in the short to medium term – the US president-in-waiting Obama has already declared his strong support for Israel [6], and the US imperial adventure in Iraq shows no sign of immediate failure. In the longer term, though, two things are clear:

1. The US will fade seriously as an imperial power as its economy collapses. It’s already retreating from much of the world under competition from the EU and China, and even in its “own backyard”, South America, Left-wing governments have emerged and are giving Uncle Sam the finger, a situation inconceivable during the Cold War. US economic decline means that it’s having to pick and choose its imperial adventures, going for those that seem to deliver the most buck for bang, hence the war of plunder in Iraq which has nevertheless turned out to be rather less profitable than anticipated. This economic decline will accelerate markedly when, not if, the dollar loses its status as a reserve currency and the US trade deficit comes home to roost

2. Oil will run out. The (in)famous Peak Oil [7] is forecast variously to occur within one or more decades, with many arguing that the peak oil point has already been passed, and economically-extractable oil will surely be extremely scarce by the middle of the 21st Century. Maintaining imperial hegemony in the Middle East is very costly for the US, but up to now has been worth it because the returns outweigh outlay: put simply, imperialism in the Middle East generates a healthy profit. As oil becomes scarcer that profit margin will shrink, and must perforce reach a point where its not worth the imperial candle, particularly as the empire itself is shrinking rapidly (see 1). When that happens, Israel will cease to be a prized US asset in an oil-rich region, and will instead become an increasing liability in the desert.

It’s plain, then, that in the long term Israel will be abandoned by its sponsor and godfather, and will have to start getting on with its regional neighbours and making new friends in the world. The trouble is, memories are long and blood grievances can span generations, and there’s no question that Israel is seriously pissing off just about everybody these days. It pisses on its neighbours, it ignores the EU, and gives the finger to the UN. Now that apartheid South Africa is dead and buried, Israel has no friends in the world other than the US and its 51st State, the UK. I hope, for the sake of those living in Israel, Jew and Arab alike, that far-sighted thinkers in Israel realise this and are making plans for a kinder, gentler Israel that will be able to make friends, and not blood enemies as it’s done up to now, because come the fall of the US empire Israel will otherwise find itself hated, alone and vulnerable, and an awful revenge may be wrongfully wreaked on its citizens by those with vendetta in their hearts.

For its own sake, and the sake of its citizens, the rogue State needs to quit being a psychopathic terrorist and become a constructive social entity, and needs to do this soon. There was a time when Israel was admired by many on the Left for its kibbutzim, socialism and progressiveness, and it’s not impossible for it to return to that state.

[1] Wikipedia entry on the Gaza Strip, Demographics section.

[2] Wikipedia entry on London, Demography section.

[3] Bush pledges to increase US funding to Israel, ynetnews.com, 20/6/07

[4] CIA World Factbook: Israel, Economy section.

[5] “US tacitly backs Israeli offensive”, BBC News online, 29/12/08

[6] “Obama pledges support for Israel”, BBC News online, 4/6/08

[7] There’s a very detailed analysis of the Peak Oil issue in “Peak Oil Overview” on The Oil Drum, a website devoted to energy issues. Written in June 2008, the analysis doesn’t come up with a date for ‘peak oil’, which is a slippery concept depending on many factors, including price, affordability, extraction technologies, reserve estimates, environmental impact, and more, but does show that liquid oil production in the major oil-producing nations has already peaked.