22/07/2005
Raising the bar
Sirens continue to wail, and helicopters burr overhead.
But now that the police have shot a suspect five or six times to make sure he was dead, it is hitting home how much things are never going to return to what they were.
New York, yes. Moscow, yes. Violence by the state is part of the fabric of these cities, their police are well documented for repaying force with force. But London? Not until now.
Before all this started the police in London had a reputation for being polite, and freshfaced. OK, so they’ve sometimes been overkeen to stop and search non-whites, and racism has been exposed as an issue which attention.
These people are clearly not pussycats, but shooting a man dead on the tube in front of the public? This is no mere chase - no attempted stop and search. Was the man a muslim? What was under his unseasonally warm padded jacket? We don’t know.
When we read the reasons that some of the bombers gave to friends and family explaining their actions, violence and hate against muslims, wherever in the world, is pretty much #1. Guantanamo Bay. Iraq. London.
If this man was indeed muslim, innocent or not, it will feed the fire, which increases the feeling that it is never going to stop. This first police killing appears to be a sign of things to come.
If that doesn’t scare you, it is quite likely that nothing will.
Yours etc.,
Spinoff.
14:25 Posted in Blog | Permalink | Comments (9) | Email this
Comments
Not sure I entirely agree. London police have killed a bunch of people before, and not just as a result of beatings in custody. The one that immediately springs to mind is the poor bastard who took out a cigarette lighter in the shape of a gun in Brixton only to be summarily executed before he could light his fag. That was in front of the public too.
Culturally they may be less trigger-happy than the NYPD or their Moscow counterparts (given that they were only allowed to carry guns relatively recently), but to suggest that they have shied away from repaying force with force in the past is fallacious. Footage of the miners' strikes, the May Day protests, the poll tax riots, just to pick a few examples, I think, bears this out...
Posted by: Basayev | 22/07/2005
They shot him five times not because they were panicking, but because they were using low velocity rounds - ironically, in order to minimise the threat to other people.
And whilst it is worrying, it's no more worrying that getting blown up on the way to work.
Posted by: VI Ulyanov | 24/07/2005
It may not be more worrying to you, but if you were Asian (and I'm assuming you're not) it might be a hell of a lot more worrying... a combination of profiling plus a shoot first policy puts dark skinned folk generally at something of a disadvantage...
Posted by: disagree | 24/07/2005
I don't imagine anyone feels anything other than appalled at the shooting of this Brazilian gentleman. But the immediate media/civil liberties frenzy - 2 weeks after the slaughter of nearly 60 people on public transport - seems to me a little misplaced. I suggest that it would help to put oneself in the place of the policemen who do these jobs. Comment is cheap, but actually doing the job is something else.
Orwell may or may not have said "We sleep safely in our beds because rough men stand ready in the night to visit violence on those who would do us harm", but the sentiment is the right one.
And, on the general question of Islamist terrorism, consider the British spokesmen for that faith who nearly always nuance their ritual denunciations, along the lines of "Yes, it's terrible, but if only Britain/the West would pull out of Iraq/Afghanistan and force the Israelis to come to terms with Hamas, oh and by the way, please don't criticise us or we will complain of Islamophobia..." Also, that particularly sinister variant: "The Koran forbids the taking of innocent life". This begs the question of who has defined innocence since the slaughter of an entire Jewish tribe in Medina in the early 7th century though to 9/11 and the London bombings?
Posted by: Patrick Heren | 26/07/2005
Al-Qaeda is yet another manifestation of the 'closed' society that reached its apotheosis in 20th Century totalitarianism: the individual will be governed from above by a leadership it cannot remove and with which it cannot disagree; the slightest dissent is punishable by death; there is a hyper-agressive foreign policy aimed at subjugating countries and bringing them into the fold; foreigners are regarded as degenerate; the individual serves the state, as opposed to vice-versa.
Stalinism, Nazism and now Al Qaeda. The names change, the aims do not.
Which is why it remains vitally important that this most recent spate of bomb atacks do not tempt us into compromising our human rights or civil liberties, fistly because the very thing that marks us out as a decent humanistic society is that we can permit such considerations such as 'civil liberties' without their being viewed as a threat to the stability of the state, and secondly because if we do let slip our dedication to maintaining human rights and civil liberties then our ethical agenda will start being directed by the men with bombs. This simply cannot be allowed to happen.
Concerns about civil liberties are therefore not misplaced as, at root, it is these things that are under attack from the tube killers. Liberty would have no place in the proto-fascistic theocratic society that they are trying to bring about.
Posted by: postman | 28/07/2005
Christ. Patrick Heren, quite aside from adding a fictitious Orwell quote (rough men standing ready, eh?) to your confabulations, I think you're full of it.
'But the immediate media/civil liberties frenzy - 2 weeks after the slaughter of nearly 60 people on public transport - seems to me a little misplaced.'
Are you working for the home office? If the amount of coverage awarded to the innocent man who got shot had been equal to the amount of coverage given to the 60 innocent people who died then maybe you might have a point. But clearly it wasn't.
Granted the police do a difficult job, and are under a lot of pressure at the moment. But they fucked up. And an innocent man died. I think that deserves some reflection on the nature of our response to the terrorist threat at the very least.
Your Islamaphobic take on history does you no favours either. The Jewish tribe in question, I believe, sold Mohammed out to the Meccans. Not so innocent then.
And postman, are you muddling Al Qaeda with Westminster?
Posted by: surrounded by fools | 16/08/2005
I am not muddling Al Qaeda with Westminster. Your implication that there is a moral valency between the two is itself the act of a fool.
Posted by: postman | 17/08/2005
Is an implication an act? And what's 'moral valency'? If you mean moral equivalence, then no, of course I'm not implying that there's moral equivalence between Al Qaeda and Westminster. That would be ridiculous.
But I think your comparison between Al Qaeda, a stateless horizontal structure composed of linked networks with overlapping aims, and a totalitarian regime, a vertical structure with the state at its head and a singularity of purpose, is just wrong.
Obviously my comparison between your definition of Al Qaeda and the way that Westminster operates was exaggerated for comic effect. But 'the individual will be governed from above by a leadership it cannot remove and with which it cannot disagree' made me think of Blair's government, 'hyper-agressive foreign policy aimed at subjugating countries and bringing them into the fold' of Iraq, and 'foreigners are regarded as degenerate' of the Daily Mail.
But I agree with you when you say: 'Concerns about civil liberties are therefore not misplaced as, at root, it is these things that are under attack from the tube killers.' Word up.
Posted by: surrounded by fools | 17/08/2005
An implication is an act. An act must be spoken, written or somehow constructed in physical form in order for others to perceive it. Furthermore, an implication is itself the direct product of thought processes - the cortical and chemical movements that generate thought processes are themselves actions, and are also therefore, acts, albeit unconscious ones. Implications therefore qualify as 'acts' on several different plains.
Al Qa'aeda and totalitarian states share philosophical bases which can be distilled down to a simple common start point - a belief that the cause is absolutely right, and - and this is the most critical point of all - that the body that retains power, is not open to suggested change, or removal by popular demand. The structural differences between states and clandestine operations such as this are many; the nature of absolutism however, does not change and is common to both.
To compare the UK, the Labour Party, and by implication the US to absolutist, totalitarian states is facile in the extreme. Totalitarianism is Hitler's death camps, Stalin's disappeared, Mao's purges, Kim Il Sung's man made famines, Saddam's use of chemical bombs on his own people, draining of the marshes and political murders. These are regimes marked out by the slaughter of millions, complete media censorship and the utter subjugation of human rights to the interests of the state. To call Blair totalitarian is shrill, leftist nonsense, and robs the word "totalitarian" of its particular and horrific meaning.
Posted by: postman | 18/08/2005
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