Just another mindless, fucking Nazi in his CCTV Panopticon

Recently I have been focusing on the British Secret State and its attendant Police State as well as the manner in which the Blair/Brown junta is busily denying Brits their right to enjoy European civil rights protection.

The sad truth is that none of this could have happened without the silent consent of the British people. And in that sense the old adage, "People get the governments they deserve," remains very true. There is a strong authoritarian streak amongst those who rule Britain. This has existed for centuries. Some say it was imposed on Anglo-Saxon culture by the caste-ridden Normans who conquered Britain almost a thousand years ago.

That same authoritarian racism must, inevitably, have been stamped indelibly on the British psyche and lies there smoldering, flaring up as arrogance, xenophobia, racism and a general resentment of all things foreign. Of course, their rulers know and share these sentiments and put them to good use in order to exercise even greater control over the masses.

I came across an example of it today.

Firenzo is an East European gipsy immigrant who, most days, can be seen outside the local supermarket selling copies of The Big Issue, a magazine published especially for the homeless to sell and to make a little money from. He doesn't sell many but still he stands there in his padded jacket, braving the bleak winter winds, a smile on his face, shivering.

He's a long way away from his beloved homeland, an economic migrant trying to eke a living in this hostile society in order that he can send a little of his earnings back to the family he left behind. Homeless, he lives illegally in a derelict building, hoping the Police don't know or are turning a blind eye.

He's a friendly guy and always says hello.

"Ça va bien, mon ami?" he says in French, which he speaks more of than English.

"Ah, le temps, il fait si froid. Il est chié!" I reply in a bad temper.

"Oh, ce n'est pas trop mauvais," he replies cheerfully.

People like Firenzo. They stop and chat with him before going into the supermarket. He's become part of the local scene. Even the Municipal Council is including him in their latest tourist brochure.

Walking towards the supermarket today, I saw him at his usual post outside the entrance chatting with someone. All of a sudden a man with an English accent shouts at him.

"People like you should be digging trenches, doing hard labour twenty-four-seven, that's what you should be doing!" he screams, his face distorted with hate.

Firenzo looked on in astonishment taking the brunt of this attack quite calmly but with an expression of incredulity.

I stepped in, pointing at his assailant and shouting back, "It's fucking Nazis like you that're turning this country into a fascist state!"

"Who me?" he replied, wide-eyed with disbelief that suddenly it was he who was under attack.

"Yes you, you fucking Nazi!" I replied, and to underline the point shouted in German, "Scheisskoepf!" at a rapidly receding figure who, seeking refuge in his car, drove off still screaming abuse at us. Returning the compliment, I gave him the finger.

Poor Firenzo shook my hand and thanked me. I bought a copy of his magazine, commiserated with him and went in to do my shopping. When I came out he was gone, probably afraid that the incident would attract the attention of the Police who would then move him on. His intuition was correct. Five minutes later a Police van drove past slowly.

A few minutes later I saw him walk past waving. I returned the wave with a clenched fist sign of solidarity. For I too have known what it is to be homeless and on the street. But much worse, like Firenzo I too have experienced the brunt of mindless prejudice and racism from cowards no different to that hate-filled man.

So sad, when I think about it, that narrow-minded bigots such as he, choosing scapegoats and racial stereotypes against which to spill all his pent-up anger and resentment, through such misdirected rage only play into the waiting hands of cynical and opportunist politicians who calculatedly play the race card and flirt with the prejudices of the gutter for their own personal gain. Something which in Britain both Nu Labour and Tory are doing alike with no heed of the consequences.

It is on those politicians our bigot should be offloading his toxic waste, not on ordinary, fellow humans. But of course, he can't because they're well out of his range, well-protected in their bubble of unreality, protected from the hoi-polloi by body-guards, who drive around in armour-plated cars.

Britain's chickenhawk dictators, leaders of a new managerial aristocracy who live in gated, secure communities, separated from an increasingly impoverished underclass by both invisible economic walls as well as CCTV cameras.

This bigot will continue voting for the chickenhawk dictators who kill millions of innocents in his name. Not that he cares a damn. To him they're just "Dirty Arab Terrorists." He will continue to blame all his troubles on the closest available victim. He will whinge and complain and do nothing to challenge the real cause of his unhappiness, the Police State around him. And in his narrow-minded, nasty little way he will, as he always has, keep helping to build that open prison.

He's just a mindless, fucking Nazi who's turned this country into a CCTV Panopticon.

Secret State-terrorism Rules, OK?

The recent attack by the fascist, Scottish Judge, Lord (Colin Sutherland) Carloway (picture above), on the lawyer, Aamer Anwar, was not only an expression, on the former's part, of a redcoat arrogance but must be seen as a calculated attack on the Scottish judiciary itself.

The entire Thought Crime Trial against the Scots-born Mohammed Siddique smacks, from beginning to end, of having been instigated by the secret services under the cover of the State. The message is clearly meant to terrorise the British Muslim community into fear and subservience. It is a notable fact that whereas Muslims of colour are being punished thus, whites convicted of similar offences are being treated leniently.

British law, on either side of the border, remains institutionally racist and apparently above any criticism. For if it is the Law then it goes to say, does it not, that the manner in which it is practised must be, without question, right and proper?

Well, certainly in the pompous minds of those such as the stern-faced Colin Sutherland who would have Scotland remain under the iron heel of the terrorism of its ruling elite, his very name evoking the infamous Duke of Sutherland of the Highland Clearances.

Very relevant to the encroaching police state in Britain are a collection of essays, Writing by Candlelight, by the late radical historian, Edward Thompson. Published nearly thirty years ago, Thompson describes how the current police state developed over successive Labour and Tory governments. And significantly how a police state can only grow through the previous existence of a secret state (a state within a state answerable to no one but itself).


Edward Thompson

After all these years and having purchased another copy of Thompson's essays for just one penny from Amazon (40-odd copies left) I am re-reading them with care in order to comment in the hope that readers not familiar with Thompson may see for themselves how Britain's very own brand of fascism has been so long in the making.

Of course, it can be taken much, much further back, at least into Victorian times. The British ruling classes have always possessed a ruthlessness, particularly against its subject races, of the type that later became associated with Hitler. But in the real world it is more likely that Hitler copied the cruelty of British imperialists!

Thus Thompson:

we are now approaching a point of crisis [1980] in which not fascism but a peculiarly British form of authoritarianism, working behind the back of of the democratic process, is now bringing national life within its general closure ... Britain, as we enter the 1980s, has the most reactionary government in Western Europe, which is simultaneously attacking the livelihood and democratic rights of its own people, and accepting, with bellicose subservience, a client role for the state as a station of NATO. In compensation for the abject collapse of traditional British influence and power, Mrs Thatcher is repeating history as a farce, and attempting to mimic (before bored auditoriums) Churchill's post-war role as the leading ideologist of Cold War in the Western world.

Writing by Candlelight, Introduction, p. ix

Now, anyone who has a memory of the old British colonies will know exactly what Thompson means by "a peculiarly British form of authoritarianism" because that's how they were ruled until bankruptcy required them all to be ditched. But authoritarianism didn't just disappear. It returned home to roost in what's now left of the dysfunctional, motley entity still jokingly referred-to as the United Kingdom. The empty ideology of Empire was replaced by an equally fake Cold War propaganda and that, in turn, by the nonsense of the 'War on Terror', a straight import with the former from Washington, DC.

Faced with suddenly having to replace a brainwashing of plebs with Hollywood lies about a Red Menace &c, the British secret state, along with its US counterpart, had to find a replacement to justify its ongoing imperialist ravaging of the Planet. Enter the 'War on Terror' which it promoted simultaneously in both the UK and the US as well as the other Anglo-Saxon countries. Such a promotion simply side-stepped parliaments and was taken-up by a few political figure-heads, such as Bush, Blair, Aznar and Howard, who were fed in turn by their secret services.

About which Thompson observed:

The inter-operation of and exchange of information, intercepts, etc., between British and US security services (CIA, NSA, etc.) is total: ... 'anything and everything would be possible if it was considered necessary to protect the Anglo-American joint Intelligence arrangement.'

ibid, p. 118

And not only did the spooks, in their incestuous, pan-Atlantic relationship, cooperate totally with each other, they both fed and controlled politicians through constant threats of blackmail and political destabilisation. Thompson mentions Harold Wilson's sudden decision to step-down from the premiership as an example of this, quoting Chapman Pincher, "that Sir Harold Wilson said, last year, that MI5 'plotted against him, tried to secure his downfall'," (ibid, p. 121)

Arguing the desperate need for a parliamentary inquiry into the danger coming from MI5 and MI6, Thompson goes on to say, "But the unpleasant truth is that this inquiry cannot and will not be made." (ibid, p. 120)

It is becoming evident that the reason why the Prime Minister, the Government, the Parliamentary Labour Party, and the House of Commons, will do nothing whatsoever about the situation is that they lie under a state of blackmail to the security services.

I know of no historical precedent for this ...

ibid, p. 121

Now, think about this: a rumour has long been circulating that Tony Blair's unquestioning support for George Bush's illegal attack and occupation of Iraq came as a direct result of pressure put on him by the secret services. Pressure of blackmail that would have destroyed his political career.

We already have it from ex-spook, David Shayler, that he was assured by one of his MI5 colleagues they had a dossier on Blair (and many others no doubt, including Brown). So, knowing that the CIA and its British counterparts work so closely together, nothing could have been easier for Bush's rogue cabal to have ensured that he, Blair, stayed in line. And this despite all the more recent talk of Bush not having pressured Blair to support his murderous war.

The conclusion is clear: Britain, from what Thompson warned us of thirty years ago, is run by a secret-state that manipulates elected politicians like rag-dolls. And it is that secret-state that pressured the rag-dolls to legislate away all our hard-won freedoms to replace them with the police state which has come to be.

Meantime, the secret services in Britain continue their totalitarian agenda without any question or challenge from the Mother of Parliaments itself.

In a very real sense, the symbol of the state in the form of the Parliament, has not only lost all legitimacy, sitting in splendid isolation in its Victorian Gothic pile, which just like the government, masquerades as something it’s not, it has also relinquished whatever power it had over the functioning of the state to Blair’s vampires who are in reality ‘asset-stripping’ public resources under the guise of ‘efficiency’ and ‘reorganisation’.

Sooner or later people are going to wise up to what ‘Blatcherism’ has done, the question is, will we have a voice and the means to turn the tide?

William Bowles, Democracy Inaction

How the Mighty have Fallen!

Yet Blair's coup against British parliamentary democracy did not arise from thin air. It followed similar coups by Thatcher and, before that, through concerted attacks against democracy by the secret state and its services in MI5 which, no doubt, were following directives given the CIA by Washington, DC. That must never be forgotten and it's why books like Thompson's must be read and re-read.

For without the Secret State, neither Blair nor his successor Brown, or the Redcoat Judge, Carloway, could get away with the terrorist crimes they continue to perpetrate against the people of Britain.

__________

Addendum: And by a remarkable coincidence this article is published on the very day that the BBC News 24 programme gave MI5 and MI6 a free recruitment ad in its 9AM News. I forgot to mention, of course, that the BBC plays a significant role in Britain's secret state.

WE WILL NOT BE SILENCED!

Now go here to WeWillNotBeSilenced.Com and be inspired!

This is what the Internet is for!

A Bad Day for Bennelong's Baboon-Lookalike

The champagne corks will be popping in Kangaroo Valley in London tonight. And it's a good day for the rest of us as well because, finally, the Ozzies got to kick out the baboon-like fascist thug, John Howard, described by OpEd as "Bush's rectal appendage" in a humiliating electoral defeat.

Howard always reminded me of one of those classical, idiot Ozzie archetypes straight out of the Edna Everage Show. The kind that any Ozzie would squirm with embarrassment over. And it was this utter shitbag, to continue in the antipodean vernacular, who was responsible for the killings of thousands of innocent Iraqis and who shoved Australia up a place in Bush where the Sun don't shine.

He also turned Australia into a police state as have his partners-in-crime, Tony Blair and Gordon 'The Toad' Brown, Britain. The arrogant Toad knows his come-uppance is still delayable.

But for how much longer?

In the classic manner of all robber barons, Brown has so overstretched the capabilities of the British military that it is no longer viable as a fighting-machine. While social spending has been severely cut back, military expenditure spirals. Imperialist, warmongering Britain comes only second to the USA in military expenditure and leaves the rest of Europe behind.

What a sad epitaph for Britain's End-of-the-Empire-Show!

The baboon Howard even lost his own parliamentary seat, keeping him out of the Australian parliament altogether. Let's hope The Toad is given the same treatment in Britain's next elections. For the only place he belongs is behind bars along with serial-killer, Blair.

A Rebellion has now Arisen Over the Land

It is by no accident that I have invoked the Mother-of-all-Jihads against the would-be dictator Brown and his ruling junta of ministers. There is a rebellion that is burning over the land. A rebellion fed by an anger that has been building over the last six years since that other traitor and war-criminal, Tony Blair, dragged a reluctant people into the killing-fields of Afghanistan and Iraq.

This revolt is now so widespread that it can no longer be dismissed or ignored by either the British state or its servile mainstream media (MSM). And it is coming from every sector of British society, from both its establishment and from the streets and market-places. On the one hand, we see it emanate from hoary old Peers in the House of Lords complaining of the shameless irresponsibility of a Premier who sends ill-equipped soldiers to fight and die in Washington's imperialist wars. And on the other we see it in the total disaffection of Joe Public with the two-party dictatorship and oppressive State apparat that rules over him.

The rebellion that burns today will, I forecast, sooner or later turn into some sort of popular velvet revolution. I can predict that with certainty because, as with all revolutions, it is the growing dissatisfaction and unrest provoked by the oppressive and disastrous follies of the State itself that is bringing this about.

When the Berlin Wall finally fell in late 1989 I was in Lübeck, Germany, visiting an old relative. I remember telling him then that once the old regimes of Eastern Europe fell that, sooner or later, their demise would be reflected in a similar collapse of their mirror-images in the West. For despite all the empty talk about 'democracy', blah, blah, western governments are themselves carefully-contrived dictatorships of one sort or another. There is no true freedom of expression. Dare to express your political views too loudly and you're guaranteed to get a visit from the Men-in-Black. Or worse, especially if you're a brown-skinned Muslim in Britain's racist, police state.

It happened to me in Edinburgh ten years ago just before the first elections to the Scottish Parliament. At the time people were being actively encouraged to take a real political interest and to put themselves forward as candidates for the new Parliament. Having played a very active role, to say the least, in Highland politics in the 'nineties I decided to have a go. Being an anarchist by nature, I formed my own political party calling it Rainbow Alliance Alba (or RAA). The idea of RAA was to form a rainbow alliance of people of all political hues in order to create a true, peoples' party.

Having entered RAA onto the electoral list, I printed out some leaflets and distributed them around Edinburgh and Glasgow. From the RAA leaflet it was clear that my sentiments were unashamedly anti-capitalist and against its wage slavery.

Two weeks later I received a knock on the door and two plain-clothes cops from ostensibly the CID (Special Branch more likely) insisted on entering my home and questioning me about RAA. Very polite they were but still extremely curious about my reasons for standing for the Scottish Parliament. In the event, I assured them it had all come to nothing and that RAA had died a quiet death in the backstreets of Portobello. They went away.

So much for free-speech in Britain.

In the real world, Britain is a parliamentary dictatorship where each citizen is heavily but discreetly surveilled and where no one is very far from the midnight knock on the door. Not even the slightest attempt at political dissent goes unnoticed or is not investigated by an inquisitive State. If you are an Asian, a person of colour, or God forbid, a Muslim, then you're really asking for trouble. So the rule is just keep your mouth shut, don't attract attention to yourself and go quietly about your daily business.

No one seriously believes all that nonsense about democracy anymore. A cynical public is only too aware that that was all ideological crap that was forced down our throats, along with Thatcher's notorious reds-under-the-bed, to keep us standing to attention and in line during the days of the West's Cold War against China and the Soviet Union. Since then not only have all ideas of democracy been ditched but so have any remaining thoughts of individual freedom. The State rules over all.

And that brings me back to the present rebellion and the coming Revolution. Because this will not be led by a Marxist-Trotskyist elite or British Left that is no more capable of organising a revolution than a common piss-up in a brewery. Nor will it be led by some precious liberal-minded pseuds or a foppish and mercenary literati from the intellectual salons of the Internet, although no doubt they will all attach themselves like limpets to anything that might get going.

It will be fuelled, if anything, by a libertarian Right who, in their eyes, see that an Englishman's home is no longer his castle and that a 'Marxist State' (sic) has now encroached upon all that is sacred to the British way of life. And joining them will be the surly middle-classes who see their pensions being eroded and their privileges being taken away. To these can be added the raggle-taggle Left as well as the economically and socially marginalized sectors of the population, all threatened by the encroaching dictatorship of the Brown junta and its farcical ID cards.

Sadly, the Muslim population of Britain --the real canary-in-the-cage when it comes to Britain's encroaching police state-- will, with a few notable exceptions, continue to play the role of a passive victim no different to that of a Pakistani or Bangladeshi waiter abused and attacked by a bunch of racist thugs on a late-night binge. The British State's highly-politicized, racist judiciary will continue to hand out impossibly harsh sentences to brown-skinned 'terrorists' in a manner which would have put their Victorian counterparts to shame. And in Scotland, Lord Carloway and Butcher Cumberland's Red-coats still rule, OK?

The rebellion and the slow revolution-in-the-making will come from precisely the same place where Eastern European uprisings originated. It will have nothing to do with ideological dogmas or Marxist dialectics. It will arise from a common disaffection that people all around the Planet harbour against the encroaching oppression of the State in people's private affairs. Something that already unites conservative and right-wing libertarians with liberal-minded democrats, Christian evangelists, anarchists, armchair Lefties and yer average bloke dahn-the-marketplace.

It will be from that unlikely and unexpected quarter that our dictators will find themselves hauled away by the tumbrils whence, indeed, heads shall roll. For Both Brown and Bush are really now in the very same place that the failing Romanian tyrant, Ceausescu, once found himself.

Up against the Wall.

Britain's Ceausescu
An Open Call for the Mother-of-all-Jihads Upon this Evil Government!

The openly racist oppression of Muslims by the State and its politicised judiciary in Britain goes on. The latest case is that of the 25-year-old Pakistan-born Abdul Rahman who has been convicted for having a letter encouraging a call-to-arms in Afghanistan!

Not in Britain but in Afghanistan!

According to the BBC, "Rahman admitted having the letter with a view to circulating it to encourage others to join the jihad." And when Police raided Rahman's house in Manchester,

they found computer disks of speeches given to crowds in Pakistan claiming, "Allah is calling for jihad."

Although the BBC avoids telling us exactly what it further observes that,

Rahman was also accused [but not convicted] of assisting another person to commit or prepare a terrorist act, which carries a possible life sentence.

What utter drivel! What does the BBC take us for if it expects us to believe this latest vomiting state terrorism nicely timed, as always, to knock the public back into shape just as Gordon 'The Toad' Brown's Nu Labour fascists are reeling from one scandal to another?

Since the sacking of Greg Dyke who dared to challenge the warmonger Blair the BBC has become a shamelessly servile tool and conduit for state propaganda favouring whichever of the two parties presently holding power in Britain's police state, parliamentary dictatorship.

This last show trial was covered by BBC News 24 last night after a lengthy coverage of sports news (bread and circuses to keep the proles distracted) in which Rahman was alleged to be running "military training schools" in northern England. To emphasise the point, the BBC showed us a brief clip of what appeared to be two men dressed in anoraks sliding down a hill in the snow!

Britain's show trials against Muslims are becoming increasingly farcical: first Mohammed Siddique in Scotland's first thought-crime trial and conviction followed by the persecution of Siddique's lawyer by the tyrannical Lord Carloway; then the conviction of the so-called Lyrical Terrorist for having written her thoughts on the back of a bus-ticket; and now Rahman for his support of Afghan freedom fighters who are bravely standing up to the imperialist USUK occupiers in occupied Afghanistan.

And by saying that last do I also become guilty of promoting a so-called jihad?

Sobeit.

Let me make it very clear to The Toad and his closet-fascist government: if that is what you, in your abject ignorance, call 'jihad' then yes, I (a non-Muslim) do indeed call on all that is Holy to bring down on your miserable heads the Mother-of-all-Jihads in order that this vile government and the system it seeks to perpetuate is forever consigned into the sewers of history!

Mr Gordon, The Lying Toad, Brown, Britain's latter-day Ceausescu, are you listening to the anger that is spreading across the land?

Ari Fleischer’s Freedom’s Watch Involved In ‘Marketing Sessions’ To ‘Sell’ Iran War

In September, the New York Times reported that the White House front group Freedom’s Watch, led by former White House Press Secretary Ari Fleischer, was considering a “national advertising campaign” to make the case for war with Iran, claiming that “Iran poses a direct threat” to U.S. security. Previously, Freedom’s Watch doled out $15 million to flack for the Iraq escalation.

While 63 percent of Americans oppose to military action in Iran, Freedom’s Watch apparently believes it can coax the public into another war. Laura Rozen reports that Freedom’s Watch is involved in test-marketing “language” to sell war with Iran. Laura Sonnemark, an attendee of the sessions, describes her experience:

After joining a half dozen other women in a conference room, she found, to her surprise, that she had been called in to help some of the country’s most prominent hawks test-market language that could be used to sell a war against Iran to the American public. […]

“He was asking questions about [Iranian president Mahmoud] Ahmadinejad going to speak at Columbia University, how terrible it was that he was able to go to Columbia and was invited,” Sonnemark says. “And he used lots of catch phrases, like ‘victory’ and ‘failure is not an option.’” […]

“After two hours, [the leader] asked three final questions,” Sonnemark recalls: “How would you feel if Hillary [Clinton] bombed Iran? How would you feel if George Bush bombed Iran? And how would you feel if Israel bombed Iran?”

While the focus group was commissioned by another organization, Freedom’s Watch reportedly “shared information” produced by the session.

In the next step of their PR campaign, the Freedom’s Watch announced a redesigned website yesterday, complete with a new blog, “guest posts by prominent conservative figures,” and ways for visitors to be “heard directly by their members of Congress.” In an e-mail blast to supporters today, President Bradley Blakeman states, “our efforts have just begun.”

These attempts to sell war with Iran smack of the White House’s efforts to sell the Iraq war. In August 2002, Karl Rove chaired the White House Iraq Group, whose mission was to “develop a strategy for publicizing the White House’s assertion that Saddam Hussein posed a threat to the United States.” At the same time, Fleischer was propagating these false assertions to the public.

As a founding member of Freedom’s Watch, it is no surprise Fleischer is importing his White House propaganda tactics for war with Iran.

http://thinkprogress.org/2007/11/20/freedomswatch-iran-sell/

Yasmin Alibhai-Brown: Where's the outcry about our police state?
Dogs have better safeguards than the nameless suspects being hauled into custody
THE INDEPENDENT, 10 October 2005

"Woolgathering" is a brilliant new word I have just learnt. It describes the state of being heedless, thoughtless, neglectful, distracted. It is also apt to describe a new national affliction. While we are woolgathering, twittering and tittering about Beckham's fortunes, the catwalks, Jude Law's love life, the dating games of blind sex-pot ministers, the Brown/Blair power struggle and the Tory leadership contest, the country is being redesigned, reconfigured, dominated, fouled and corrupted by a hubristic government which feels entitled to rule over us forever and in whichever way it chooses.

We need to wake up and put away the languorous good living supplements and whatever novel is causing a buzz in clever circles. None of it matters. British culture, art, politics, society, the media, the justice system, are being forced to submit to the will of New Labour under Tony Blair who wants to compel us to become subject to his will rather than free citizens of a free nation. L'Etat c'est moi, he now appears to believe. Absolutely.

No other British leader in modern times has gone this far. Internment, arbitrary and punitive deportation, barbaric laws, shoot-to-kill policies have now established themselves on this soil. Yet the majority of Britons do not demur or baulk. Through default they consent. Some energy has, admittedly, gone into protests over planned identity cards and the law against religious incitement. But the even more serious raids on liberal democracy don't generate too much concern.

President Blair wants a wifey media, a tame judiciary, obliging lawyers, public adoration, a poodle parliament, power which answers to nobody but George Bush. On the international stage, he issues commands and threats, seeks acclaim and deference. Last week he ordered Iran to lay off Iraq, to stop sending arms to insurgents who have the temerity to attack our soldiers in their tanks. Meanwhile we claim legitimacy, the right to blast the shit out of Iraqis, good and bad.

Yesterday, three alarmed jurors spoke up to protest against the re-arrest and planned expulsion of four Algerian men accused of making ricin to use in terrorist attacks. One man, Kamel Bourgass, who also killed a policeman, was found guilty of this plot. No evidence was found to implicate any of the others charged. They were acquitted by a jury.

For days I have been fretting about the arrests of these legally freed Algerians. It's what Presidents Milton Obote and Idi Amin used to do in Uganda, to bang up people who had been duly freed by the courts. Now, finally, the jury members have come out. 'Before the trial," said one, " I had a lot of faith in the authorities to be making the right decisions on my behalf ... Whereas having been through this trial, I am very sceptical now as to the real reasons why this new legislation has been pushed through".

I completely accept that intelligence has to be gathered and it will be essential to get sharper, smarter policing and spying which may well require exceptional temporary powers granted by an independent judge. At times I even find myself applauding when some fanatic Muslim preacher is put away without due process, a burst of populism which is unbecoming and immoral. But I do not wish to live in a police state which uses democracy as a clever disguise to encroach on our liberties.

Every day men and women in this country are being hauled into custody as nameless suspects. They may or may not be guilty. It doesn't really matter any more. They are Muslims. Dogs have better safeguards than these presumed terrorists. The rules of the game have changed, Blair tells us. But, as the newly retired, immensely wise judge Lord Steyn says in an interview in this newspaper today: "This is not a game, this is a deathly serious and earnest matter".

Blair and his gang, imbued with granite Christian certainties, claim our acquiescence to keep us safe, they say, in a dangerous world. Are we really living in more perilous times than during the two World Wars or the Cold War when weapons of mass destruction were in the hands of war-makers on both sides?

Charles Clarke, the Home Secretary, has capitulated on the pernicious proposed legislation which would have outlawed the "glorification" of terrorism, whatever that meant or was meant to mean. But he still wants the right to hold for 90 days people who have not been explicitly charged and to pack them off to their old countries so they don't bother us. It is a double whammy. If you are marked out as a "terrorist" you can be incarcerated and deported, all in the silence imposed by the new anti-terrorism measures.

All too soon, this cowboy justice begins to apply to others. Internment, exiling human beings, curtailing freedom of expression, have become responses to a range of difficult problems. The duffing up of the Labour Conference heckler Walter Wolfgang illustrated the point perfectly. (I do wonder though whether there would have been such a fuss around the country if the victim had not been an elderly refugee who fled Nazism, but, say, a young Asian or Afro-Caribbean man?)

Countless more people, including children seeking asylum are being cruelly deported. Every day campaigners get e-mails about these wretched people, the latest I have had is from Jessica Levy, a desperate English woman whose husband Hossain is being sent back to Iran where torture is a gadget liberally used by the state to inflict docility and compliance. Even Middle Englanders in some places are rising in protest when they witness obvious miscarriages of natural justice in such cases.

Blair has, in effect, torn up the Geneva convention on refugees, and disdains the substance and spirit of the European Convention on Human Rights.

You would have thought waves of resistance would rise to stop these outrages. But no. The Tories are too enamoured of authoritarianism themselves. Lib Dems play polite and earnest and are no match for the indomitable ruling clique. Peers and MPs - with some brave exceptions - have retreated from principled opposition since the London bombs. Ken Livingstone is in the pocket. Journalists "friendly" to the Blairite project, of whom there are too many, follow the leader like needy cult members. Blair is their visionary Maharishi and as mesmerising and untrustworthy as the original. The rest of us try without making any impact.

New Labour, it seems, will not be stopped and searched as it vandalises precious principles and thuggishly knocks out checks and balances. Cherie Blair warned in August: "It is all too easy for us to respond to such terror in a way which undermines commitment to our most deeply held values and convictions and which cheapens our right to call ourselves a civilised nation". I wonder if we have this right any more, Cherie, or if it is too late already.

__________

Rory's Comments: An article dated 2005, it's true but nevertheless so relevant two years on. How long is it before the Great British Public is going to do something about the Nu Labour fascist bully-boys?

Dr Israel Shahak: The Weight of Three Thousand Years

In a recent column in the INDEPENDENT, Yasmin Alibhai-Brown, recalls a memory of her friend, Hugh Blaschko, a Berlin Jew who escaped Nazi Germany for England.

"He escaped to Britain in the late 1930s to become a world-class scientist. Israel would bring out the worst in his people, he always said, and I argued with him. Survivors of the Holocaust, I believed, were on the side of the angels. "No, my dear," he would respond, "the Jewish state will make us nationalists, and will one day make us racialists." I am glad he is not alive to see his prophetic words turned flesh," Yasmin concludes.

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article14024.htm

Who else but racists would treat any other human the way the Israelis treat Palestinians, Lebanese and other non-Jews? Since the creation of the state of Israel all we have seen is the nationalist chauvinism and racism of which Blaschko warned. Thousands of innocents, predominantly Palestinians, have died and continue to die while slowly the outside world begins to wake up and ask, do Israelis consider Arab lives to be inferior to theirs?

In his book, The Weight of 3000 Years, Professor Israel Shahak, himself a holocaust survivor and unremitting critic of Judaism, explains the origins of this terrible truth. Yes, according to the Talmudic law that Orthodox Jews practise the life of a Gentile (non-Jew) is as of nothing compared to that of a Jew. And this hoary old teaching remains a fundamental cornerstone of Judaism, right up to the present day, even though it sometimes comes into conflict with Israeli secular law. It is written into the military manuals used to train Israeli soldiers and preached by rabbis to their communities. There is one law for Jews and another for Gentiles.

In her article, Yasmin Alibhai-Brown refers to Rabbi Goldberg who writes in his book, The Divided Self, "since 1967, [Israel] has been a Herrenvolk democracy, a term used to describe South Africa under apartheid, in which one group of subjects, the Israeli citizens, enjoys full rights while a disenfranchised group, the Palestinians, enjoys none of any significance."

She goes onto use the word apartheid to describe Israel's arrogant behaviour. But according to Professor Shahak, she is wrong: Jewish chauvinism is worse than apartheid because, in the territorial sense of the word, Jewish separatism makes no allowance for the Gentile in its midst. There are just Jews, the chosen children of God and there's the rest of us beast-like heathens. Every day, an Orthodox Jew begins his prayers by thanking God for not having been born a Gentile.

This black-and-white ideology has, to date, been little understood by non-Jews, particularly of the Liberal kind who unthinkingly assume that Israelis think no different to other races where the respect for the sanctity of life is taken for granted as a given norm. That has proven, at best, to be wishful thinking. Singularly lacking the universalism of other religions such as Christianity, Islam and Buddhism, Judaism is a religion and culture that thrives on exclusivism, separatism and intolerance. For centuries, the darker side of Judaism lay well-hidden, protected by its teachers whose first purpose was to defend Judaism from the persecution of others. It could be argued that it is this self-interest that led to the layers of deceit and concealment found in the laws of the Talmud, that it was necessary to hide the true meanings from the hostility of Gentiles. But on closer examination it becomes difficult to see where self-interest takes over from ideological exclusivism.

To use a modern-day analogy, it could be argued that contemporary Israelis feel surrounded by hostile people and cultures very different to their own and it is this fear that has made them into such an aggressive, warlike culture; that the new chauvinism for Eretz Israel (the land of Israel) grew out of this fear born out of the desperate vulnerability of the holocaust victims: never again!

Well yes, take several thousand Europeans and plant them on someone else's land in the Middle East and you've got an instant recipe for trouble. A sense of vulnerability is the least of your concerns when you come into direct physical collision with an indigenous (Palestinian) population wondering what the hell all these Europeans are after, invading their homes and treating them with such inhuman abuse. Is it that difficult to see where hospitality ended to be replaced with a burning hate?

The story of the enforced colonization of Palestine by European aliens is only part of the story. A significant part but by no means the whole story. And, at a time well past the eleventh hour, when the Middle East's tinder-box fires begin to rage again and the world lurches towards another great conflagration, it behooves us all to spend some time to find out how in heaven's name a "chosen people" could have collectively become a spectre of the Apocalypse.

Professor Shahak's book provides vital reading-material for anyone, Jew and non-Jew alike, who wishes to understand how the sins of the fathers (and mothers) keep visiting themselves on the children.

THE WEIGHT OF 3000 YEARS, Download PDF here

Chávez and Ahmadineyad agree that the dollar empire is collapsing

TEHRAN, November 19.— Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez stated today in Teheran that “the dollar empire is collapsing,” according to ANSA.

“Soon we won’t be talking about dollars anymore because the value of the dollar is in free fall and the dollar empire is collapsing,” Chávez said to a group of journalists.

The Bolivarian leader visited Tehran, coming from Riyadh where he had attended a meeting of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) where Venezuelan and Iranian leaders proposed “de-dollarizing” crude oil operations.

In this capital city, Iranian President Mahmud Ahmadineyad and his Venezuelan counterpart confirmed that two their countries "will be together to the end,” EFE reports.

"Fortunately, we are witnessing the fall of a system of arrogance (the United States) and continuing victories of the people,” Ahmadineyad said during a joint press conference in which Chávez also reiterated his support of the Iranian nuclear program directed towards peaceful ends.

At the same time, Chávez pointed out that the cooperative relations between the two countries are of special importance to Caracas from a moral, political, economic and social point of view, and cited the $4.6 billion in joint investments. Chávez later traveled to Paris where he was received Monday night.

IRAN CUTS LINKS TO DOLLAR

From London, Reuters reports that Iran has effectively cut all ties with the dollar when it comes to oil revenues, according to Iranian authorities.

"This is an economic decision and we've been proven right. Over time the dollar has got weaker and weaker," Hojjatollah Ghanimifard, international affairs director of the state-owned National Iranian Oil Company (NIOC), informed Reuters."

Translated by Granma International

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Why Britain is being turned into an Internal Prison and an External Fortress

Fifteen years ago, driving to catch the ferry from Scotland to Ulster, I was stopped by a policeman and asked the question, "Where are you coming from and where are you going?" It's a question that was repeated many more times at police and military check-points throughout Ulster to end only when crossing into Eire which felt to be a haven of tranquillity after occupied Ulster.

Finally, on return to Britain via the ferry from Cork another police-check was made of my car. I assured the cop that I wasn't carrying any 'Dublin Rock' (dynamite) and he laughed. Fifteen years on, if I dared to say that, I'd likely be arrested, my car impounded and its upholstery ripped apart. I could expect to be interrogated for hours on end, strip-searched, DNA-tested and my details fed into the police national database.

Britain has become both an internal prison and a fortress from outside.

Hence, some further observations to make after the publishing on this blog of a series of several articles about the encroaching police state in Britain, a series which has received well over 1600 hits on this blog in the last three days or so:

In the Guardian article below, Anas Altakriti asks why it is that, despite all the draconian security measures implemented by Blair and Brown in the past few years, Britain is now more susceptible to terrorism than ever before.

Part of the answer must be that a lot of what has been labelled 'terrorism' by Washington's quislings in London was part of a fabricated, thus quite artificial, contrivance by secret service spooks in the classical manner they are known for throughout the annals of British imperial rule both abroad, in Ireland and now in mainland Britain. It was precisely the kind of thing that the radical historian, the late Edward Thompson, warned about in his book, Writing by Candlelight.

Add to that we must bear in mind that NATO has a history of using secret operations meant to deliberately cause 'terrorist' incidents within NATO countries in order to frighten and more easily control populations as well as to scapegoat target groups and organizations. Operation Gladio was a NATO-run operation in the 'fifties which was employed to do just that.

The infamous Bologna bombings of the 'seventies was a Gladio operation which was then conveniently blamed on the Red Brigade. There is nothing to show that this kind of operation is still not used by NATO and its associates in the western secret services, including the Israeli Mossad.

In fact, it [Operation Gladio] wasn’t even an American idea – it was very much ours. The strategy of tension began on the order of British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, who in July 1940 called for the establishment of a secret army to “set Europe ablaze by assisting resistance movements and carrying out subversive operations in enemy held territory.”

The Strategy of Tension, N.M. Ahmed, The Cutting Edge

In his excellent article, Nafeez Mossadeq Ahmed goes on to observe that,

The existence of this secret operation exploded into public controversy when in August 1990 upon the admissions in parliament by Italian Prime Minister Giulio Andreotti, the existence of ‘Gladio’ was exposed as a secret sub-section of Italian military-intelligence services, responsible for domestic bombings blamed on Italian Communists. Ganser documents in intricate detail how a subversive network created by elements of western intelligence services – particularly that of the US and UK - orchestrated devastating waves of terrorist attacks blamed on the Soviet Union, not only in Italy, but also in Spain, Germany, France, Turkey, Greece, i.e. throughout western Europe. Despite a number of European parliamentary inquiries; an European Union resolution on the Gladio phenomenon; NATO’s close-doors admissions to European ambassadors; confirmations of the international operation from senior CIA officials; and other damning documentary evidence; NATO, the CIA and MI6 have together consistently declined to release their secret files on the matter.

The Strategy of Tension simply isn’t part of our historical consciousness. Very few historians of the Cold War are fully conversant with it, let alone academics working in international relations and political science. This is despite the fact that it played an instrumental role in physically constructing a threat, projected into the USSR, which did not ultimately exist. Ipso facto, the Strategy of Tension belongs to the waste-bin of history.

But not quite because, at least since the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, it was revived by the CIA and its British and Israeli friends in the form of the infamous 'Al Qaeda' ("the Database") where it can be proven that Al Qaeda was a creation for which the CIA itself was responsible. So everytime you hear mention of "Al Qaeda" (or, more appropriately, Al-CIA-duh) be sure you can smell a rat.

The Bush cabal and their minions in London would rather we didn't know that. Strange, was it not that Britain's ex-Foreign Secretary, Robin Cook, who resigned that post when Blair dragged Britain into the bloodbath of Iraq, met a sudden death whilst hill-walking on Ministry of Defence land in the Scottish Highlands? Was Cook's death the result of something rash he said in the House of Commons when he identified Al Qaeda as The Database and because he just knew too much about why Blair insisted, as even he admits, that British soldiers should go into the killing fields?

Whether Tony Blair was in any way personally involved with the circumstances around the death of Robin Cook as well as those surrounding the "suicide" of whistle-blower, Dr David Kelly must yet remain a mystery. What is extremely clear is that he is a war criminal who still walks free. His time must come. He has a huge deficit to pay not only on his house mortgage but in terms of the millions of human deaths for which he is directly responsible.


The Coven Dines

Blair will, doubtless, know something about the principle of karma. Although it's rather late in the day now he would do well to ponder on karma as well as to recall the Christian version seeing as he claims to be a religious person: "As you sow so shall you reap." But when he talks about religion it's more likely that, as we have seen in practice, his is of a more diabolic nature! Anyway, his appointment with the rest of Eternity is of his making and not of our concern.

But the police-state this arch-traitor and his minion, Gordon 'The Toad' Brown, have created are most certainly another matter. For by adopting a copy-cat foreign policy with that of the imperialist Neocons, who twice stole the White House from the people of the USA, he has used Bush's fake 'War on Terror' to create a replica police-state in Britain along the lines of those which have been created in the other English-speaking countries, the USA, Canada and Australia.

As Anas Altakriti says, on his several journeys all over the world nowhere does he encounter so much police surveillance as he does whenever he returns to Britain. Six years ago at Reading Station, on returning from south Asia, I had occasion to leave my suitcase unattended for a moment. Literally minutes later, on my return, I found a policeman rifling through its contents, just in case there was a bomb inside. This was weeks after 911. I wasn't arrested. Today I might have been tasered.

And it is a sobering thought that while Britain has become so oppressive the chances are that a walk through Moscow Central Station would encounter less suspicion from the men in black.

And that brings me to the second point why Britain has been turned into a police-state: it is because the British government --no matter who might be running it-- is now solidly welded to an aggressive US foreign policy. A policy based on decades of permanent war to rob Oil, Gas and other material resources needed to perpetuate the American-led capitalist economies. These wars being presently --and which in future will be-- fought all over the Planet are bound to attract resistance and retaliation from their victims. Hence the plans for blast-proof public buildings, extra surveillance, border controls etc.

It is reminiscent of the barbed-wire and CCTV cameras that encircled public buildings during the 'nineties in northern Ireland. Nothing has changed just magnified and where surveillance is now far more sophisticated and extensive.

"Where are you coming from and where are you going?"

As my foreign readers will see, Britain has been a tightly-controlled police-state for much longer than most others and always because of its imperialist interventions abroad. 911 provided the psychological gateway for this present blitzkrieg on our freedoms. Blair knew that when he made his notorious, sleight-of-hand speech saying that "the kaleidoscope had been shaken" and when the pieces settled there would be "a new world." A rather bad attempt at verbal mesmerism, I thought at the time. But, for at least a while it served to trick the masses into a kind of hypnosis.

Just as Ulster was then reduced to a country in permanent siege, as Edward Thompson predicted would happen it is now the turn of mainland Britain. Whether the 'terrorists' are 'from the IRA' or 'from Al Qaeda' is, ultimately, of little relevance. Both are a deceit. Instead, what should concern us, are the reasons why succeeding British governments invite such retaliation through their constant and unwanted interference in the affairs of other peoples and their countries.

It is not only Blair who has his karma to face. It is our rulers who while so afraid of their world-in-collapse resurrected a Frankenstein of their own making, the very thing they lied to us about while deceitfully claiming to 'protect' our freedoms.

For it is they who are the terrorists we were warned to expect.

Losing the fight

Anas Altikriti

November 16, 2007

THE GUARDIAN

The prime minister's statement [last] Wednesday that terrorists could strike anywhere, at any time, hardly provides any useful information, let alone induces confidence in the government or security agencies actually knowing what threat they claim to be facing or capable of successfully overcoming.

It was similar to the recent MI5 report which left one wondering what was expected of ordinary citizens if not to go into a state of frenzy, panic, fear and suspicion.

More than six years after the declaration of the revamped and replenished "war on terror", this leads us to a very important question: has the world become any safer or more secure over those years? And if not, why not?

To put this in basic terms, the balance sheet does not look good. Actually, it looks extremely bad on all fronts. Even "our way of life" which was Tony Blair's favourite chorus line, seems to have changed for ever. Reports that intensive security measures at UK airports are to be stepped up will bring a sense of dread to millions of people travelling into and out of the UK every year. Anyone travelling out of Heathrow over the past 16 months would have realised that "our way of life" has changed, and quite profoundly at that, whether we like it or not and as a direct result of our reaction to alleged terror threats, rather than to the attacks themselves.

Travelling across more than four continents in the past three months, I couldn't help but wonder why it was that Sydney, Cape Town, Vienna and Amman airport security staff don't feel the need to impose similar draconian and often un-dignifying security searches upon their travellers. Don't terrorists know the way to Australia? Don't they think that striking in South Africa is of any particular use? Or do they approve of the "way of life" that Austrians lead?

Yet travel is merely one strand of life, and while frequent flyers like myself may feel the brunt more than most, one can argue that it isn't the most important or pressing issue within this whole argument. What is important, however, is the issue of human rights.

It is a terrible travesty of a nation that has come so far in winning the right for people to express themselves, to have an opinion, to choose their governors and hold them accountable, to worship, to move freely and to enjoy their basic freedoms without any threat of those being violated under any circumstance, that we have long been defeated by the absurd argument that it is all right to violate the rights of a few in order to preserve the rights of the many.

As the MI5 report along with the prime minister's statement on terrorism both nicely coincide with the re-opening of the debate on extending detention periods for terror suspects well beyond 28 days, one would expect an open, transparent and clear debate on whether the line we are pursuing, as a point of principle, is actually working or not. However, the problem is that it has become beyond contempt to even suggest that upping security, in the way that we have in recent years, may be leading to increased insecurity.

Security of a nation is only achieved when all parties, particularly its citizens, work together for that ultimate aim and objective. It is when a culture of driving safely becomes the norm that we prevent or lower the fatalities on our roads. It is through the embedded culture of keeping one's street and city tidy that we successfully overcome littering and it is by the unshakeable mentality of respecting other people's property and sanctities that we manage to fight theft and robbery. We can employ as many police as we think necessary, but if that embedded culture or mentality is lacking, individuals will break the law on the given fact that there simply isn't someone watching everywhere all the time.

In recent years, anti-terror legislation, coupled with a multi-fold increase in stop-and-search rates, hundreds of false raids and detentions, control orders that are based on flimsy evidence and inconsistent judicial sentences have created a sense of suspicion, fear, intimidation, distrust and possibly even hatred throughout society. And not only within the Muslim community for whom these measures seem to have been designed, but throughout society as a whole.

Imagine how a businessman or someone going on holiday would feel if they were made to go through such intrusive measures when travelling out of or into the UK, only then to hear that there are possibly 2,000 youngsters groomed to blow themselves up throughout the country over the next 10 years or so. How would a person feel if they saw their street cordoned off at dawn by the anti-terror squad who then move to blast into their neighbour's house and drag one or two people out handcuffed and blindfolded? Would it even matter if that person was released after 28 days or more, with no explanation as to what happened or why.

How should we view Atif Siddique, charged with possessing material (downloadable from the internet) being handed an eight-year prison sentence when Robert Cottage, formerly of the BNP and found with what was described as the largest haul of chemical explosives, a rocket launcher and a nuclear biological suit, was jailed for quarter of that term?

What of Samina Malik, or the "lyrical terrorist" who wrote silly and childish poems glorifying terrorism on the back of WH Smith receipts and who now expects to be handed a prison sentence following a media frenzy, and is seen and described in the same light as the DVLA bomber, Miles Cooper?

The UK already has the longest pre-charge detention period in the western world and, by all accounts, it doesn't seem to be working. What is required is a new and creative line of thinking as to what mistakes have been committed and how new approaches can be adopted so that the fight for our collective security, safety and prosperity, can become a common ambition of everyone who lives in this country. That would be a way of life worth fighting for.

1984 is Now!

Despite the smug-faced comments of wannabe MP, Mr Dale, he of the Tory, Zionist Right, it is daily becoming clear that a backlash is now growing throughout every quarter of the British mainstream media to the police-state legislation announced by Britain's Stalinist Premier-by-Diktat, Gordon 'The Toad' Brown.

'The Toad' because, when flustered as he so often is, he does that funny thing with his jaw as if he were swallowing a fly. And now it looks like The Toad is going to find himself in a constant state of fluster as his public support drops to 30% (like Bush) and he faces a likely rebellion by Labour MPs against his attempt to increase police detention time to 56 days from 28 days, already the longest pre-charge detention time anywhere in the western hemisphere.

The Observer article by Henry Porter simply adds a further dimension to my own, A New Dark Age is Upon Us, which 'Apoplectic from Tunbridge Wells' attempted to dismiss. Ironically, his attempts to fob it off brought 1500 hits to this blog, suggesting that even if the comfortably privileged of the Home Counties might not have much truck with a Scots Eurosocialist they were certainly interested to read what he had to say.

And so they would for despite all the calculated fear-mongering that has been going on in this country ever since the 911 and 77 false flags, and despite their tendency to whinge and moan about things and to look for scape-goats to blame it all on, deep down the Brit remains a sensible type who is not easily taken in by the kind of hysteria that characterizes the average dumb Joe from Stateside.

Things, as Henry Porter rightly says, have deteriorated in Britain where the fear-factor plays just as much a part as it does in the rest of the English-speaking world where the Bush cabal's invented 'War on Terror' has been cynically used as a weapon to bludgeon us all into a planetary Gulag.


US Internment Camp

It is no accident that Britain, which became Washington's vassal-state nearly seventy years ago when Churchill went cap-in-hand to Roosevelt for more money to fight the war, has now the most draconian police-state of all the English-speaking countries. For not only have Washington's London quislings obeyed the Bush cabal's orders in full but it has always been a natural tendency of the British ruling classes who, whilst pretending to be awfully nice chaps, rule over their peasantry with an iron heel.

And every time we hear one of our traitors vow allegiance to their Massah in the White House we are sure to hear the same servile commitment to a "special relationship" which we are now assured is something that nobody else, least of all America, pays any attention to. What the British quislings mean is, of course, coded language for, "Help preserve our capitalist interests so that we can continue to exploit the World while you, America, acts as our Bully on the Block." And so incestuous is the Anglo-American relationship between $ and £ that it's impossible to tell them apart. So dependent is one upon the other that the two countries, along with their Anglo-Saxon relatives in Canada and Australia are now in a Goetterdaemmerung-like nuclear death pact which is already limbering-up in preparation to fight the Sino-Soviet Alliance by taking out its chief ally in Westasia, Iran.

The comparison with Orwell's 1984 is so apposite right down to the contrived terrorist incidents meant to persuade the proles of the threat from Eastasia. And however uncomfortable it may make us all feel so are the comparisons between the Anglo-Saxon police states and Nazi Germany. The style is, of course, different. Howevermuch Bush, Blair and Brown would yearn to strut and pose as Hitler did in the Nuremburg rallies they've never approached the mad, hypnotic power of that Austrian drug-addict who once woke up screaming, foaming at the mouth, claiming that he had seen the Uebermensch (Superman) and was mortally afraid.

What was Hitler's drug-induced Superman but a vision of a future where the horrors of a technologized war would create a hell-on-Earth over vast swathes of land? As they have done with our robotized armies in the Middle East and elsewhere? Perhaps the horror he saw then was no more than the nightmare which we are now collectively living through? Something which as in Nazi Germany has been carefully kept hidden from the people by a controlled, embedded Media?


The new RAF Uebermensch

And now the nightmare comes back where the Holocaust shall not only be in ever greater numbers among the innocent and helpless in the targeted countries but among all those who dare to dissent at the great crime against humanity that is being carried out by evil men in suits and ties who smile as they kill millions only to deny the slightest responsibility for having done so. Untried war criminals.



All things must finally return to their origins.

The open prisons that are now being created by those same suited, smiling men are only at the other end of the horror they inflict daily on their battlefields which lie mostly hidden from the eyes of the news cameras. News is tightly managed before it is regurgitated to the proles. Public opinion is similarly kept on a leash by governments which are in constant fear of the truth being told. The fear-mongering which is used to control the masses is simultaneously felt by their rulers who are also ruled by a fear that the entire lying facade which they are employed to keep up is about to collapse around them.

Dominated by this fear they scheme endlessly to find ways of ever more controlling their populations in order that when the collapse finally comes everyone and everything can be kept tightly-corralled like demonstrators in an anti-war rally.

The Toad currently hiding in 10 Downing Street is the very epitome of this fear. That is why as each day goes by his style of government gets more and more to resemble an hysterical Ceausescu who knows his number's almost up, that people are not going to keep taking his Stalinist dictatorship much longer.

It is time for the people to start mobilising into a broad front against Britain's tin-pot dictators. Of essence such a mobilisation should be one taking-in all shades of opinion in a popular campaign to save and reinstitute the liberties which these common traitors have sought to take away from us. Henry Porter rightly quotes Winston Churchill. What faces us now is in many ways far more insidious than the first Battle of Britain. For today we face an enemy from within: a cabal of traitors. An enemy which should be fought just as determinedly as before for to lose now will mean the end of Britain's story.

We must not tolerate this putsch against our freedoms
A few journalists and MPs are prepared to fight the government's sinister anti-libertarianism. More people should join them

Henry Porter,
The Observer, Sunday November 18, 2007

Welcome to Fortress Britain, a fortress that will keep people in as well as out. Welcome to a state that requires you to answer 53 questions before you're allowed to take a day trip to Calais. Welcome to a country where you will be stopped, scanned and searched at any of 250 railways stations, filmed at every turn, barked at by a police force whose behaviour has given rise to a doubling in complaints concerning abuse and assaults.

Three years ago, this would have seemed hysterical and Home Office ministers would have been writing letters of complaint. But it is a measure of how fast and how far things have gone that it does nothing more than describe the facts as announced last week.

We now accept with apparent equanimity that the state has the right to demand to know, among other things, how your ticket has been paid for, the billing address of any card used, your travel itinerary and route, your email address, details of whether your travel arrangements are flexible, the history of changes to your travel plans plus any biographical information the state deems to be of interest or anything the ticket agent considers to be of interest.

There is no end to Whitehall's information binge. The krill of personal data is being scooped up in ever-increasing quantities by a state that harbours a truly bewildering fear of the free, private and self-determined individual, who may want to take himself off to Paris without someone at home knowing his movements or his credit card number.

Combined with the ID card information, which comes on stream in a few years' time, the new travel data means there will be very little the state won't be able to find out about you. The information will be sifted for patterns of travel and expenditure. Conclusions will be drawn from missed planes, visits extended, illness and all the accidents of life, and because this is a government database, there will be huge numbers of mistakes that will lead to suspicion and action being taken against innocent people.

Those failing to provide satisfactory answers will not be allowed to travel and then it will come to us with a leaden regret that we have in practice entered the era of the exit visa, a time when we must ask permission from a security bureaucrat who insists on further and better particulars in the biographical section of the form. Ten, 15 or more years on, we will be resigned to the idea that the state decides whether we travel or not.

Who pays for the £1.2bn cost over the next decade? You will, with additional charges made by your travel agent and in a new travel tax designed to recoup the cost of the data collection. But much of the money will go to Raytheon Systems, the US company that developed the cruise missile and which, no coincidence, has embedded itself in Labour's information project by supporting security research at the party's favourite think-tank, the Institute for Public Policy Research.

The odour that arises from the Home Office contract with Raytheon is as nothing compared to that created last week when the Home Secretary and Prime Minister used the announcement of the 'E-borders' scheme as well as increased security at shopping centres, airports and railway stations to create an atmosphere that would push MPs to double the time a terrorist suspect can be held without trial. It also helped to divert attention from the mess in another Home Office database concerning upwards of 10,000 security guards who may be illegal immigrants.

On detention without trial, no new arguments have been produced by Gordon Brown. He won't say how many days he wants and he won't answer David Davis, the shadow Home Secretary, who points out that all the necessary powers to keep people in jail after a large-scale attack are provided in the Civil Contingencies Act 2004.

To this, Brown replies that declaring a state of emergency would give terrorists 'the oxygen of publicity'. How does he square this absurd statement with the high alert being sounded by police, politicians and spies over the past two weeks, which has given the greatest possible publicity to the power of the Muslim extremists to change our lives?

The truth is that while his government limps, heaves and splutters with an incompetence only matched by its unearthly sense of entitlement, the Prime Minister has become fixated with this issue as though it were a virility test. So his chief Security Minister, Lord West of Spithead, who had voiced his doubts about raising detention without trial on Radio 4, was hauled into Number 10 to have his thoughts rearranged. Less than an hour later, he appeared like an off-duty ballroom dancing champion and adjusted his conviction as though it was no more than a troublesome knot in his very plump, very yellow silk tie. He will not resign of course. What is a mere principle placed against his recent elevation to the Lords and the thrilling proximity to power?

How have we allowed this rolling putsch against our freedom? Where are the principled voices from left and right, the outrage of playwrights and novelists, the sit-ins, the marches, the swelling public anger? We have become a nation that tolerates a diabetic patient collapsed in a coma being tasered by police, the jailing of a silly young woman for writing her jihadist fantasies in verse and an illegal killing by police that was prosecuted under health and safety laws.

Is it simply that the fear of terrorism has stunned us? The threat is genuine and the government is right to step up some security measures, but let us put it into perspective by reminding ourselves that in the period since 7/7, about 6,000 people have been killed on our roads. And let's not forget the bombings, assassinations, sieges, machine-gunning of restaurants and slaughter that occurred on mainland Britain during the IRA campaign. We survived these without giving up our freedoms .

Or is there some greater as yet undefined malaise that allows a sinister American corporation to infiltrate the fabric of government and supply a system that will monitor everyone going abroad? I cannot say, but I do know that an awful lot depends on the 40 or so Labour MPs needed to defeat Brown's proposals on pre-trial detention. They should be given every encouragement to defy the whips on the vote, which is expected within the next fortnight

It is important that the press has moved to the side of liberty. The Daily Mail, which I wrongly excluded from the roll of honour last week, attacked Jacqui Smith for 'her utter contempt for privacy' and warned against the travel delays and inevitable failure of another expensive government database. And Timothy Garton Ash, who has so far stayed above the fray, wrote in the Guardian last week that 'we have probably diminished our own security by overreacting, alienating some who might not otherwise have been alienated'. Labour MPs should listen to these voices.

The Prime Minister is fond of quoting Churchill, so I will again: 'If you will not fight for the right when you can easily win without bloodshed, if you will not fight when your victory will be sure and not costly, you may come to the moment when you will have to fight with all the odds against you and only precarious chance for survival.'

henry.porter@observer.co.uk

When Reality comes Crashing through the Door

Mohandas K. Gandhi, the leader of India's huge Satyagraha Movement was once asked by the BBC what he thought of western civilization. He paused for a moment to ponder the question and then replied saying, "I think that it would be a very good idea!"

It is a sad truth that in many areas of human rights not only has western 'civilization' not progressed since Gandhi's days but it has actually retrogressed. The ongoing war crime against Iraq is a perfect microcosm of the way that the western world has descended into a new, technological barbarism.

And yet there are those who, ensconced in the distracting comforts of a capitalist Rome that is already burning around them, choose blindly and arrogantly to ignore the reality when it stares them in the face.

One such is blogger Iain Dale, a self-proclaimed right-of-centre (sic) Thatcherite, wannabe Tory MP, "radio pundit" (that'll be Radio 4 of course), Zionist, Daily Telegraph writer, Jack Russell owner and resident of the leafy, upper middle-class avenues of the very Tory 'Royal' Tunbridge Wells, Kent (got the picture?)

In that sickenly smug manner only privileged English overlords have (despite his Scots name) this apologist for the British secret state ridicules my recent piece, A New Dark Age is Upon Us, by not only describing me as an idiot but by belittling the excellent Muslim Public Affairs Committee UK website for having kindly published same on its front-page.



Self-satisfied establishment-hack, Dale (see picture above), goes on to say, "we shouldn't underestimate how widely held these fantasist views are," acknowledging that the public's awareness of the British police state is now beginning to snowball as inevitably it was bound to.

Yes, Mr Dale. You cannot simply hijack a country in the way that several successive governments --and in particular the Brown/Blair regime-- have without people noticing, however hard you try to hide it.

It is no accident I am sure that the British establishment, as Dale has, is now waking up to this reality. Some months ago that serial liar and war criminal, Tony Blair, angrily denied on TV that Britain was turning into a police state. Well, let me underscore the obvious: when a scum-bag like that is provoked into denial you can be sure that the opposite of what is said is true!

Of course, Blair is in a class of his own when it comes to a murderous nastiness that has led to his earning a pariah status amongst even his own people. Whereas the ever-unpopular Gordon 'The Toad' Brown is simply despised as a piece of detritus left behind by the Blair dictatorship. A highly toxic piece of detritus nevertheless as witness the latest draconian legislation invented by his 'Security' Minister, the gormless ex-Admiral West (below), who sees Britain to be at war with unseen forces conveniently labelled Al Qaeda (and we all know who's behind 'the Database', don't we?)



Dale is probably a genial sort who has, on the whole, only the best intentions at heart (especially for himself) while he drives about in his Audi world of self-gratification, privilege and comfort, well insulated from the miseries of life daily experienced by the marginalized, the economically underprivileged and those under daily persecution, mostly Muslims, people of colour and poor whites who due to a lack of education and a resulting illiteracy are treated contemptuously and cruelly by the socially and materially privileged from which his ilk springs.

Dale accuses me of being a fantasist when it is he who has much more in common with a Marie Antoinette who, when advised that the French peasantry was dying of starvation, is popularly thought to have suggested, "Let them eat cake!"

Indeed, Mr Dale. I suggest you review your article in a year or two and then see how far down the totalitarian road this two-party dictatorship of chickenhawks has gone. But, living in the divided and gated world that is modern Britain it is doubtful even then you will be able to see beyond the rose-tinted bubble of unreality you so obviously live in.



So, see you in your nightmares, Iain, where the likes of this author and the millions he represents will haunt you as an unwanted spectral visitation from that world out there you'd rather pretend (Cuchachoo, Mrs Robinson) didn't exist or you wish would just go away as you open another bottle of expensive Montrachet.

Dwell upon that thought, Mr Dale, one of these fine days that reality's gonna come crashing through your door!