Missiles on the Blocks
- May 2nd, 2012
- Posted in Analysis . Protest . Random
- By danielrenwick
- Write comment
This week we’ve heard that not only have the Olympics disrupted our transport system more than snow blizzards on top of autumn leaves, but that they also meant that our city is to be militarised, quite literally, out of the money this whole country, not just London, pays in tax. The Royal Navy have deployed their largest assault vessel, HMS Ocean, in Greenwich, Marines encircle our coast, in the city centre itself there will be 12,500 “Olympic Police, 13,500 armed services (2,000 of which fully armed), 5,000 specialist police, 1,000 in logistical support, not to mention the 7,500 private security forces roaming the street. A combined force of 23,700 security forces will restrict liberty for the “safety” of us all. Security on such a vast scale will be overseen by that beacon of democracy G4S, the private security company that has recently made inroads into schools, prisons and roads– big societing it up.
As if that wasn’t enough, Typhoon fighter jets and military helicopters will be in our skies, just to deter those terrorists that have no aerial power in their own countries, but of course have full capabilities to breach British aerospace. Add the cherry on top of the cake is of course the surface to air missiles that will be placed on top of residential blocks. While this may make that xenophobic, patriotic, Falkland war loving Brit feel safer at night, those with a little more sense and self-consciousness will move beyond inherited jingoism to feelings of caution, worry and dismay at the need to deploy such capacities for destruction to fight an enemy that at his worst operates using over the counter chemicals cooked in basements with crude equipment. The notion that such enemies can be fought with full military might is not only erroneous, as the Afghani resistance proves daily, it also evokes the great satire of Team America, Trey Parker and Matt Stones scathing critique of over-militarised responses to terrorist threats.
The film starts with the destruction of Paris by American forces seeking to neutralise a jihadi with a suitcase. In response, missiles are fired and destruction is wrecked at comically disturbing levels. When I hear of the measures taken to keep London safe, all I can think of is that opening scene. Imagine a terrorist does make it through the net of GCHQ, Mi6, Mi5, Special Branch and the SO15’s intelligence. Does the aforementioned security infrastructure fortify London even slightly? I fail to see how. If I work on mainstream perceptions of this world, there’s some math that just doesn’t work.
Since 9/11, attacks upon Western power have come in numerous forms, but mainly suicide bombings. With the exception of car bombs, the only difference I can think of is the gunmen in Mumbai. Now, tell me how the jihadi at the gates can be taken out with a missile? I don’t think he can and I do not believe the measures of security that we will be subject to have been conceived with the quintessential “Islamist extremist” in mind. While some on the right will engage in fantasy and provide a long-list of conjecture over potential security threats that warrant such disturbing force, I think we must consider these measures as a message more than a response to need.
What we are witnessing is the normalisation of militarisation of our cities. We accept the surveillance infrastructure to keep us safe, we accept our actions being logged, so why not accept armaments on top of buildings? It’s not too far of a jump and has hardly been met with critical commentary. When such actions were taken in China, it was used as a stick to beat the central committee who were going mad with paranoia and continuing to “abuse human rights”. But instead of seeing this through the prism of state repression, we are made to feel that “our boys” provide us with comfort, their presence on our streets in the thousands embraced. And that’s the most troubling part – as we’ve seen countless times across this world, military deployments come quickly and are dismantled slowly. Imagine London is attacked – imagine the attackers breached security in a way that is sensationalised, imagine that the enemy at the gates was said to be upon us and knows more about the inner workings of our system than we thought. Imagine a world of suspicion. Imagine that as well as having your movements logged and your texts and emails read – you are also in the crosshairs of weaponry countless times a day. It is not the world we are living in, but it could be round the corner.
I do not believe this is the final stage in the building of the dystopia – it is merely a lunge towards it. The greatest threat London faces is embarrassment. With movement restricted around this city, an increased cost of living and a depletion of resources, the disenfranchised youth who were so combustible last summer will have powder kegs beneath them. The Olympics have long been a tool of dispossession and neo-liberalism and London’s 2012 is no exception. Public money has been pilfered into private hands and for generations the urban poor will be paying for their own displacement. Military deployments are about scaring the radical elements to make the elites feel safe. The Olympics is accelerating the processes by which London becomes a sanitised investors paradise, civil disruption would hurt the magnetising effect the Olympics would have on business with the Big Smoke. With the coalition’s austerity measures failing, they are reliant upon a lucrative Olympics to pull in the private businesses that their economic plan hinges upon. With recession being the consequence of their foray so far, there is very little room for complacency. London 2012 must generate money.
So, like the abusive father inviting friends over for dinner, certain punitive measures are put in place to ensure that once guests are in the house, everyone will act civilised – or will have hell to pay. That’s the message I take from the militarisation of my city – and like the petulant kid grown use to abuse from power – my response is this: go fuck yourselves.
A couple of things….
First up, austerity measures? Austerity certainly doesn’t apply in the case of the Olympics, for which the rapidly spiraling costs are headed towards a total spend of £24,000,000,000. I could have written £24 billion, but it looks more like the figure that it is with a string of 9 zeroes attached. Add that to the ~1,000,000,000,000 (£1 trillion) gifted to bust banks and it seems like a drop in the (drought-fuelled) ocean.
Luckily for the Olympics, money is created out of thin air so there’s plenty of cash for transitory spectacles that uproot locals and remove public spaces like Hackney Marshes, only to replace them with shopping centres and car parks and standing arsenals of weaponry and security personnel that are unlikely to just disappear when the three-week spectacle is over. Hospitals, schools, kids who want meals and essential public services can go whistle in the austerity wind, while the State bails out bust banks and channels billions of hastily invented quantitively eased and squeezed fictional money in the direction of various vested private security interests.
I appreciate the way in which you challenge the ‘narrative’ of the Olympics, but am not so impressed by your falling back on the so called ‘Jihadi with a suitcase’ threat as the de facto standard terror threat that everyone apparently faces. But I can see how that might happen given that the Olympics has carried that threat-baggage since the announcement of the Olympic bid winners on 6th July 2005, along with the the euphoria that followed for a few short hours before, allegedly, four jihadis with suitcases (actually, rucksacks) vaporised themselves on three trains and a bus, managing to leave behind not a trace of themselves or the never-before-seen explosives that they are alleged to have used. “But there’s CCTV!” everyone cries. There isn’t.
Looking back over the last 7 years from 2012, it’s easy to see how those who swallowed the unsubstantiated and unproven 7/7 narrative and the travesty of justice that was the inquest process, along with all the mostly fictional terror, largely intelligence fabricated transatlantic ‘jihadi’ plots built on footage of Muslims rolling around with sticks and being summoned to Special Branch and intelligence set-up storage facilities to look incredulously at fertilizer, are wont to think that missiles in everyone’s lofts, just in case, is a good idea.
Why challenge everything but the jihadi with a suitcase narrative? Especially when the reality is, as various UK examples and Anders Behring Breivik example show, that the far greater threat emanates, as ever, from the far-right that always manages to slip under the radar while everyone is probing every beard, burka and brown-skin in sight.
@Antagonist: A thought provoking and respectful response, thank you. While I think your arguments don’t actually hit me – they are important points to make. A couple of things in response.
a) You, in fact, recognise the austerity measures in your response to me. Your challenge of my language use is that I don’t make reference to collosal government spending, going in to private hands. But, quite contrare, I do – but do not specify amounts of areas of spending other than the Olympics, see the penultimate paragraph, where I state: “Public money has been pilfered into private hands and for generations the urban poor will be paying for their own displacement.” Let’s not knitpick though.
b) I am not “falling back” on the narrative of the jihadi with a backpack – the jihadi is the archetypal terrorist in modern discourse. My argument is about showing that the governments measures do not address or tackle threats from such “terrorists” and are in fact geared towards something else, which I then speculate about. The reason I do this is that in our collective imagination, the threat to Britain comes from Islamism and jihadis – it is them we fortify ourselves against, and my argument seeks to challenge that imagination.
c) Do I not challenge the jihadi with a suitcase narrative? I make it pretty clear that the government measures are not addressed at tackling the threat posed by jihadis. I do not challenge the 7/7 narrative and the terror threats for more reasons than I care to list on a public forum. If you wish to discuss this further, please email me danielrenwick@gmail.com
d) Finally, I did write an article that argued that European supremacism (white supremacy, racism…) was the fundamental threat to the world, written the day after the Breivik massacre. I did not publish it in the end, but I do agree with you on your point. Where you are misguided, however, is that far-right nationalists will saboutage or attack their own olympics. They will to busy wrapping themselves in the Butcher’s Apron and burning their throats singing in nationalistic fervour to even think of terrorism against Britain.
But, in answer to the general question you pose, i.e. why not tackle the jihadi narrative? Well, it’s a political choice and boils down to expediency. I could write critical prose that challenge all mainstream narratives, exposing almost everything that is held sacred in the collective consciousness of the white world and undermine it. However, I do not want my political discouse to be confined to the conspiratorial blogosphere. I have full respect for those who make that choice, but I make mine for reasons that I want to have people’s ears. I do not want them to pre-judge me on the basis that I do not accept their holy cow. Consider me as a trojan horse and my arguments more as provocation to dig into the rabbit holes – that’s what I want them to be. I do genuinely appreciate comments such as yours and would encourage you to respond publically if you want to, there’s plenty I am happy to discuss – but on the issue of whether 7/7 was an act of British intelligence services or not – is not the realms I wish to delve into as a writer or as a thinker – the rabbit hole is deeper than that. The reason for this is simple, I genuinely believe that if tomorrow, if were revealed that the US had a hand in 9/11 – there would be no great revolution, there would be no fundamental change, instead there would be obfusication and acceptance…just with Britain and the Walsall Anarchists: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walsall_Anarchists
Thanks for the considered reply. First up, in the interests of full disclosure, prior to commenting on your article, I had not encountered your writing or speaking works. I have since listened to a talk that I believe you gave on the subject of anti-imperialism and by which I was generally quite impressed. If that talk was anything to go by, I suspect we have far more in common than divides us.
My original comment was hastily written and more of a vaguely related diatribe aimed at throwing a few more considerations into the mix than it was a direct critique of the bulk of your original article. The austerity numbers were merely to highlight and provide context for the magnitude of the financial crimes committed by the ruling class against the working class. It’s nothing new, but the numbers are far greater than at any point in history and, consequently, the burden to be borne by the working class is far greater than it ever was, to be endured, as is stands, indefinitely should we not become sufficiently organised en masse to oppose such endless servitude in service of fictional finance capital.
Lenin flagged Imperialism as the highest stage of Capitalism. I’d go one further and state that false-flag terrorism (along with one or two other things, cultural imperialism for example) is one of the most subtle and nuanced tools in the Imperialist arsenal.
We only have to look not terribly far away to the six counties for a vast body of evidence that supports this contention. Similar, well documented examples exist across Europe (and indeed the world) in the form of ‘terrorist’ attacks that are now recognised incontestably to be the work of a combination of States, state agents in the form of individuals and factions within government, police and security apparatuses, groupings of ex-State/military agents and plausibly deniable State, military and corporate actors, in conjunction with the odd easily-duped patsy here and there. When I refer to States, state agents and operatives, this does not automatically imply or suggest actors from the States within which such attacks have occurred, although conversely this does not automatically deny these possibilities; essentially the dialectic in action and applied in the researching and evaluation of such events. In the case of the six counties, we know that British state agents were actively involved in the commissioning, preparation and execution (in all meanings of the word) of terrorist atrocities. The range of crimes committed by these groupings range from simple collusion and complicity in the covering-up of links, connections and truths, right through to the design, direction and implementation of the attacks themselves.
All that said, I have no idea which individuals, grouposcules or factions were responsible for 7/7, nor would I like to speculate without some tangible evidence on which to base that speculation. We do know however that things in the particular case of 7/7 have been covered-up, fabricated and otherwise deliberately crafted to mislead. If the official narrative is so clear-cut, why should any of these things occur? And would it be right for those on the left to ignore the fact that we know the official narrative of 7/7 is demonstrably untrue? We would do well to remember that the burden of proof for judicial cases is not one which is to be met by those who are aware the narrative is a nonsense but rather, as with any criminal prosecution, the burden of proof lies with the accusers to provide compelling evidence that proves beyond reasonable doubt the crimes of the accused that they wish to prosecute. Again the six counties provides us with a long list of crimes for which the State has what, when applied to a working class criminal, might be referred to as ‘previous’.
To postulate that false-flag terrorism is one of the most nuanced tools of Imperialism is not to implicate any particular group or individual in the events of 7/7, but merely to acknowledge the lessons of history with regard to the covert activities of States, alphabet and alphanumeric agencies, corporate interests and factions comprised of representatives from all of these camps, operating in common cause. In short, conspiring; conspiring against the general public in support of ruling class agendas in actual conspiracies that are in no way theoretical after they have occurred.
The starting point for 7/7 is that crimes were committed, suspects charged, tried and found guilty, posthumously, without any sort of trial, jury or judicial scrutiny and without the burden of criminal proof required for any sort of just successful prosecution being met. That should be of concern to anyone with an interest in challenging the authority and legitimacy of State apparatuses, in addition to the wealth of more overt crimes of state and corporate structures that are the familiar fodder for those on the left.
Of additional concern should be a number of other, loosely related, prosecutions of ‘terrorists’ who have committed no actual crime, who have neither the wit, intelligence, nor means to commit an actual crime of the proportions of which they stand accused, but who have been portrayed by the various underhand and duplicitous means that are the core business of the State, police and intelligence services, to be the greatest threat to ‘our way of life’. Many of those that have fallen foul of these prosecutions have received extended and indeterminate sentences, as well as life sentences of 40+ years for having committed no actual crime. And, if no actual crime has been committed, and it is clear that the means and methods to commit such crimes are merely contrived fabrications, then we are left with cells full of lifer ‘terrorists’, predominantly Muslim, who have committed no actual crimes. This is an inversion of any just notions of what anything that resembles justice might be. It is worth remembering that Draconian laws passed on the pretext of tackling the alleged threat of ‘Islamist extremism’ apply to all of the monarch’s subjects, not just the Muslim ones and this is something likely to become more apparent in the forseeable future when it is used, as it already has been, to suppress genuine and legitimate political dissent.
With regard to archetypes, I’m not particularly interested in what the ruling class dictate to be what you refer to as “the archetypal terrorist in modern discourse” or those that reside merely in the “collective imagination”. I’m interested in the material “collective reality” and what the true nature of an actual archetypal terrorist has consistently been throughout the ages. As we well know, “the archetypal terrorist in modern discourse” so pervasive in the “collective imagination” is nothing more than the discourse of the ruling class and their “collective imagination”. The ruling ideologies are, historically at least, the ideologies of the collective imaginings of the ruling class, propagated into the wider “collective imagination” and consciousness by the ruling class propaganda machines, whether these be State Broadcasting Corporations (which, as we know are only evil if they are the State Broadcasting Corporations of China, Iran, or the People’s Democratic Republic of North Korea) or their corporate alternatives.
“The archetypal terrorist in modern discourse” is not what the ruling class dictate it to be, but rather the actuality such as it exists in the form of bodies of armed men operated by and operating in the service of the ruling class. They don’t unleash their terror through hair dye, rucksacks and return train tickets d satellite systems. To be duped into believing that an archetypal terrorist, irrespective of whether the discourse is ‘modern’ or otherwise, is a suicidal Muslim is one of the greatest deceptions for which the liberal left has consistently fallen in recent years.
On that level, you are absolutely falling back on the jihadi with a backpack narrative, missing entirely the large elephants that are always in the same room. This is further compounded by the statement, “whether 7/7 was an act of British intelligence services”, as if the only possible alternative to the 7/7 ‘narrative’ of amateur, suicidal, Islamofascist Muslims with no agenda other than suicide and a few casualties, much less any tangible political agenda, is that British intelligence operatives were responsible. The reality of the situation is that there are an almost infinite number of combinations of the agencies and individuals listed above that potentially had a hidden hand in the orchestration and implementation of 7/7, but the continued wilful and repeated denial of such possibilities by the left is perhaps one of the most regressive approaches to the modern geopolitical paradigm in which we find ourselves.
Your position on 9/11 is similar to that of Noam Chomsky, who famously said about the suggestion of U.S. involvement in 9/11, “Who cares?” A distinctly odd pronouncement about an event of such magnitude, and one from which the consequences are, irrespective of your position on the details of how it came to be, still being felt by countless thousands who had nothing to do with the act’s commission.
Meanwhile, those on the left with more progressive approaches, rather than dismiss and ignore the possibility that everything might not quite be as we are told by the ruling class, are providing historical context and precedents for such terror spectacles and reiterating the importance of what Marxist academic Professor David Macgregor describes as a response to instances of “Machiavellian State terror”, namely: “oppositional theorizing: questioning government and looking for connections between events”; activities which MacGregor suggests “are critical features of what it means to be vitally active in the political universe”.
I realise that to begin to question and challenge the ruling class narratives of events such as 7/7 has the potential to open a world populated by conspiratologists, alien abductees, fascists, Neo-Liberals, Neo-Conservatives and a whole range of other undesirables, but they too, like the State, must be challenged, exposed and overcome.
Thanks for the considered reply. First up, in the interests of full disclosure, prior to commenting on your article, I had not encountered your writing or speaking works. I have since listened to a talk that I believe you gave on the subject of anti-imperialism and by which I was generally quite impressed. If that talk was anything to go by, I suspect we have far more in common than divides us.
My original comment was hastily written and more of a vaguely related diatribe aimed at throwing a few more considerations into the mix than it was a direct critique of the bulk of your original article. The austerity numbers were merely to highlight and provide context for the magnitude of the financial crimes committed by the ruling class against the working class. It’s nothing new, but the numbers are far greater than at any point in history and, consequently, the burden to be borne by the working class is far greater than it ever was, to be endured, as is stands, indefinitely should we not become sufficiently organised en masse to oppose such endless servitude in service of fictional finance capital.
Lenin flagged Imperialism as the highest stage of Capitalism. I’d go one further and state that false-flag terrorism (along with one or two other things, cultural imperialism for example) is one of the most subtle and nuanced tools in the Imperialist arsenal.
We only have to look not terribly far away to the six counties for a vast body of evidence that supports this contention. Similar, well documented examples exist across Europe (and indeed the world) in the form of ‘terrorist’ attacks that are now recognised incontestably to be the work of a combination of States, state agents in the form of individuals and factions within government, police and security apparatuses, groupings of ex-State/military agents and plausibly deniable State, military and corporate actors, in conjunction with the odd easily-duped patsy here and there. When I refer to States, state agents and operatives, this does not automatically imply or suggest actors from the States within which such attacks have occurred, although conversely this does not automatically deny these possibilities; essentially the dialectic in action and applied in the researching and evaluation of such events. In the case of the six counties, we know that British state agents were actively involved in the commissioning, preparation and execution (in all meanings of the word) of terrorist atrocities. The range of crimes committed by these groupings range from simple collusion and complicity in the covering-up of links, connections and truths, right through to the design, direction and implementation of the attacks themselves.
All that said, I have no idea which individuals, grouposcules or factions were responsible for 7/7, nor would I like to speculate without some tangible evidence on which to base that speculation. We do know however that things in the particular case of 7/7 have been covered-up, fabricated and otherwise deliberately crafted to mislead. If the official narrative is so clear-cut, why should any of these things occur? And would it be right for those on the left to ignore the fact that we know the official narrative of 7/7 is demonstrably untrue? We would do well to remember that the burden of proof for judicial cases is not one which is to be met by those who are aware the narrative is a nonsense but rather, as with any criminal prosecution, the burden of proof lies with the accusers to provide compelling evidence that proves beyond reasonable doubt the crimes of the accused that they wish to prosecute. Again the six counties provides us with a long list of crimes for which the State has what, when applied to a working class criminal, might be referred to as ‘previous’.
To postulate that false-flag terrorism is one of the most nuanced tools of Imperialism is not to implicate any particular group or individual in the events of 7/7, but merely to acknowledge the lessons of history with regard to the covert activities of States, alphabet and alphanumeric agencies, corporate interests and factions comprised of representatives from all of these camps, operating in common cause. In short, conspiring; conspiring against the general public in support of ruling class agendas in actual conspiracies that are in no way theoretical after they have occurred.
The starting point for 7/7 is that crimes were committed, suspects charged, tried and found guilty, posthumously, without any sort of trial, jury or judicial scrutiny and without the burden of criminal proof required for any sort of just successful prosecution being met. That should be of concern to anyone with an interest in challenging the authority and legitimacy of State apparatuses, in addition to the wealth of more overt crimes of state and corporate structures that are the familiar fodder for those on the left.
Of additional concern should be a number of other, loosely related, prosecutions of ‘terrorists’ who have committed no actual crime, who have neither the wit, intelligence, nor means to commit an actual crime of the proportions of which they stand accused, but who have been portrayed by the various underhand and duplicitous means that are the core business of the State, police and intelligence services, to be the greatest threat to ‘our way of life’. Many of those that have fallen foul of these prosecutions have received extended and indeterminate sentences, as well as life sentences of 40+ years for having committed no actual crime. And, if no actual crime has been committed, and it is clear that the means and methods to commit such crimes are merely contrived fabrications, then we are left with cells full of lifer ‘terrorists’, predominantly Muslim, who have committed no actual crimes. This is an inversion of any just notions of what anything that resembles justice might be. It is worth remembering that Draconian laws passed on the pretext of tackling the alleged threat of ‘Islamist extremism’ apply to all of the monarch’s subjects, not just the Muslim ones and this is something likely to become more apparent in the forseeable future when it is used, as it already has been, to suppress genuine and legitimate political dissent.
With regard to archetypes, I’m not particularly interested in what the ruling class dictate to be what you refer to as “the archetypal terrorist in modern discourse” or those that reside merely in the “collective imagination”. I’m interested in the material “collective reality” and what the true nature of an actual archetypal terrorist has consistently been throughout the ages. As we well know, “the archetypal terrorist in modern discourse” so pervasive in the “collective imagination” is nothing more than the discourse of the ruling class and their “collective imagination”. The ruling ideologies are, historically at least, the ideologies of the collective imaginings of the ruling class, propagated into the wider “collective imagination” and consciousness by the ruling class propaganda machines, whether these be State Broadcasting Corporations (which, as we know are only evil if they are the State Broadcasting Corporations of China, Iran, or the People’s Democratic Republic of North Korea) or their corporate alternatives.
“The archetypal terrorist in modern discourse” is not what the ruling class dictate it to be, but rather the actuality such as it exists in the form of bodies of armed men operated by and operating in the service of the ruling class. They don’t unleash their terror through hair dye, rucksacks and return train tickets, they do it through standing armies, navies, air forces, warships, submarines, sub-machine guns, nuclear weaponry, a planet full of military bases and off-world satellite systems. To be duped into believing that an archetypal terrorist, irrespective of whether the discourse is ‘modern’ or otherwise, is a suicidal Muslim is one of the greatest deceptions for which the liberal left has consistently fallen in recent years.
On that level, you are absolutely falling back on the jihadi with a backpack narrative, missing entirely the large elephants that are always in the same room. This is further compounded by the statement, “whether 7/7 was an act of British intelligence services”, as if the only possible alternative to the 7/7 ‘narrative’ of amateur, suicidal, Islamofascist Muslims with no agenda other than suicide and a few casualties, much less any tangible political agenda, is that British intelligence operatives were responsible. The reality of the situation is that there are an almost infinite number of combinations of the agencies and individuals listed above that potentially had a hidden hand in the orchestration and implementation of 7/7, but the continued wilful and repeated denial of such possibilities by the left is perhaps one of the most regressive approaches to the modern geopolitical paradigm in which we find ourselves.
Your position on 9/11 is similar to that of Noam Chomsky, who famously said about the suggestion of U.S. involvement in 9/11, “Who cares?” A distinctly odd pronouncement about an event of such magnitude, and one from which the consequences are, irrespective of your position on the details of how it came to be, still being felt by countless thousands who had nothing to do with the act’s commission.
Meanwhile, those on the left with more progressive approaches, rather than dismiss and ignore the possibility that everything might not quite be as we are told by the ruling class, are providing historical context and precedents for such terror spectacles and reiterating the importance of what Marxist academic Professor David Macgregor describes as a response to instances of “Machiavellian State terror”, namely: “oppositional theorizing: questioning government and looking for connections between events”; activities which MacGregor suggests “are critical features of what it means to be vitally active in the political universe”.
I realise that to begin to question and challenge the ruling class narratives of events such as 7/7 has the potential to open a world populated by conspiratologists, alien abductees, fascists, Neo-Liberals, Neo-Conservatives and a whole range of other undesirables, but they too, like the State, must be challenged, exposed and overcome.