Showing posts with label neo-liberalism. Show all posts
Showing posts with label neo-liberalism. Show all posts

Monday, July 07, 2008

On the Dangers of Riding Two Horses at Once

As some try to give new life to the rumour that French President Nicolas Sarkozy is an agent for Mossad, something far more interesting attracts my attention. Sarko just doesn't like that arch-Machiavellian and schemer, New Labour's plant at the European Commission, Peter Mandelson, who it is widely known puts the interests of the World Trade Organisation before the EU or its people.

I have consistently argued here that the main players responsible for directing the EU away from its traditional social-democratic policies and pushing it into the anarchic world of 'neo-liberalism' (Thatcherism in another guise) have been Tony Blair, New Labour and their man in Brussels, Peter Mandelson. They have, of course, obtained sterling support from extreme right-wingers in eastern Europe like President Vaclav Klaus of the Czech Republic and the rogue Kacinsky in Poland. Both are great supporters of the so-called free-market policies of 'neo-liberalism' because it is precisely countries like Poland and the Czech Republic which would be the first to benefit from west European businesses shutting down in, say Clermont-Ferrand or the north of England, and relocating in the East where wages would be considerably lower and unions practically non-existent.

And it was the stark policies of 'neo-liberalism', the job losses and consequent insecurity they entail, the tearing-apart of basic utilities like electricity, water and public transport and their sale to private companies at knock-down prices that made the public of France, Holland and Eire say NO in their respective referendums for first the EU Constitution and then the Lisbon Treaty. In France and Eire, neither the public or the farmers wanted an end to the Common Agricultural Policy which, whatever one might think of it, stabilises and guarantees prices to European farmers. Sarko, being first and foremost a French politician, is now beginning to take heed of the political unpopularity of the very 'neo-liberal' policies to which he first gave lip service.


Sarkozy waxwork in Madame Tussauds, Berlin

So it is hardly surprising that France comes into a head-on collision with the 'Anglo-Saxon Economics' of 'neo-liberalism' and its primary mover and shaker in Brussels, Peter Mandelson. Here we can see a fundamental collision of interests between what are essentially the traditional interests of the Anglo-American financial fraternities and their Continental counterparts, the latter now manifest as the Franco-German economic and military alliance, the basic motor behind the creation of what is now the EU.

Britain continues to be viewed with suspicion by that alliance and its supporters as the trojan horse within the EU representing the essential military-economic interests of the Anglo-American partnership and its fraternities. The same partnership which for well over a century has been behind the machinations, maneuverings and conspiracies leading to two world wars against their German competitor and the ultimate global hegemony of the Anglo-American partnership and its modern-day imperialism.

"To annihilate the German threat, the British ruling elites had gambled for high stakes; for over 30 years (1914-45) they had woven a web of financial machinations, international complicities, intelligence conspiracies, diplomatic devilry, military savvy, and inhuman mendacity, and they finally succeeded. This game for Anglo-American supremacy came at the cost of approximately 70 million lives (two world wars): a holocaust whose nature is beyond words. Both conflicts were willed and set off by Britain ... So the West has to think again --to think, in fact, that there is something far worse than Nazism, and that is the hubris of the Anglo-American fraternities, whose routine is to incite indigenous monsters to war, and steer the pandemonium to further their imperial aims."

Preface, p. XIX, 'Conjuring Hitler' by Guido Giacomo Preparata, Pluto Press, 2005.

Despite the inevitable demise of the British Empire and its being subsumed by its heir, the US Empire, the interests of every British government, irrespective of its political colour, is to carry-out the requirements of the Anglo-American fraternities and to serve its military-economic interests. The Anglo-American fraternities are joined at the hip and this is the truth behind the phrase that British politicians sometimes use when they defend the 'special relationship' and the prime-minister-in-waiting, David Cameron, points to by saying that this relationship is in the DNA structure of the Tory Party!

Whoever replaces Mandelson at the Commission when his term is finally over we can be sure that the 'Anglo-Saxon Economics' of Anglo-American 'neo-liberalism' will continue to be served enthusiastically by a new British government. The Franco-German alliance knows this and will tailor the future of the EU appropriately with a likelihood of Euro-sceptic countries like Britain and Eire on an outside second tier and the core countries committed to closer unification such as the Franco-German alliance on the inside.

For too long it has been the purpose of Britain and its Anglo-American fraternities to utterly destroy Germany and to control continental Europe. It was relatively free in the days of the Empire to do practically whatever it liked. As for example when the Bank of England could force the Indian Government to sell it its gold and silver at knock-down prices, destroying Indian agriculture, finally leading to the great Punjab Famine in the 'forties when over 4 Million died and the British Raj didn't bat an eyelid. Naturally, British students of modern European history are not reminded about these things.

Instead they are groomed to perpetuate the monstrous lie of a German responsibility for two world wars. A monstrous lie which is now being finally exposed by writers like G.G. Preparata, confirming what many of us have always suspected: that behind the lies and hypocrisy of Britain's rulers lies the stench of a decayed and unburied corpse.

"The sheer amount of lies perpetrated by the Anglo-American establishment against its public in order to preserve the myth that WWII was a 'good' war, won for a just cause, is incalculable ... In sum the Allied elites have told a story. The story that the Germans have always been disturbers of the peace; they disturbed it once and were punished for it, although a little too harshly. Out of such blundering castigation, an evil force materialized out of nowhere --a force whose evil greatly exceeded the petty severity of the Allies that caused such evil to emerge despite themselves. And, the story goes, the evil of this force grew to be such that a violent global conflict became necessary to uproot it."

"More than a cock-and-bull story, this is an insult. And what is worse, every day more and more people, for the sake of psychological tranquility, choose to believe it. Because individuals, as the loathsome Machiavelli put it in his 'classic' vademecum for subhuman conduct, are 'simple' and willing to trust the word of the constituted authorities. Constituted authorities, which we think embody our will, when in truth they are nothing but high battlements hiding oligarchy and lies, both of which must come to an end."

P. 268, 'Conjuring Hitler' by Guido Giacomo Preparata, Pluto Press, 2005.

Those who adhere to both sides of the argument, both pro- and anti-EU, would do well to study a book like Conjuring Hitler in order to better understand just how it is we find ourselves in the post-911 world today. A world where Britain, though now organically part of a developing European Union, will not give up its military-economic allegiance to the USA, finding itself evermore uncomfortably betwixt and between two power blocs.

Sarkozy may be short on history but his cunning nature has already reminded him that, unlike Britain, he cannot ride two horses at once.

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Monday, January 21, 2008


Edward Thompson and the Growth of Britain's Police State

Dipping into the late Edward Thompson's Writing by Candlelight it begins to become clear how Britain has become an embryonic police state without any serious opposition by the libertarian/left. It also becomes clear that the destruction of freedoms has come not from either that section of the population or from Marxist subversives but from the authoritarian tendencies of the British establishment itself.

Thompson wrote of this trend to the police state during the latter years of Labour's Callaghan premiership. Things were still building-up to Thatcher's final showdown with the British labour movement, peaking in the Miners' Strike of 1984 and their subsequent defeat at the hands of a highly politicized and violent police force. And his warnings came nearly a quarter-century before the quisling Blair who, under orders from Washington DC, implemented 'Anti-Terror' laws which not only scapegoated Muslims but prepared the way for the consolidation of a cosmetically disguised form of totalitarian de facto dictatorship.

Thus in 1979 Thompson was warning us that

the undermining of democracy is certainly going on, and at an inflationary rate. And it is becoming clear from which quarter the wind is blowing. It is blowing from the quarters of ACPO (The Association of Chief Police Officers) and from the barracks of the law-and-order brigade ... not the law-and-order brigade but the defenders of civil liberties are attempting to uphold the constitution and the rule of law.

Writing by Candlelight, p 210

At the time of writing, Thompson wrote of the death whilst in police custody of the protester, Blair Peach. In this context he searches for earlier historical precedents where members of the police force had been found guilty of wilful murder by a coroner's tribunal (see ibid, p. 194). One wonders what Thompson would have had to say about the blatantly wilful murder and subsequent cover-up of the killing of Jean-Charles de Menezes by the notoriously corrupt Metropolitan Police?

Thompson was probably Britain's last radical historian, born in a time when decency and social compassion were still important as political values. It was his generation who fought Hitler and then helped to create the Welfare State, only to see it destroyed forty years later by a peculiarly British form of fascism espoused as 'the free market' by the authoritarian Thatcher and later copied and re-labeled as 'the Third Way' by her New Labour admirer, Tony Blair.

Were it not for Thatcher's victory against the labour movement, 'free market' monetarism and its successor, Blair/Brown's 'neo-liberalism' could never have gained a political foothold, let alone flourished. And it was for precisely that reason the forces of British capitalism had to take on the labour movement and to destroy it. The growing police authoritarianism, endorsed and promoted by the BBC and mainstream media, that Thompson describes in the 'seventies was simply the public face of the eventual coup d'etat against civil liberties that Britain's establishment was preparing its public for.

Thompson emphasises the point by quoting James Anderton, then the chief constable of Manchester, who on a TV programme was asked what was the greatest threat to law and order.

He reassured us that, looking forward 'from a police point of view' to his next ten or fifteen years in the service, he sees no difficulty in dealing with crime, however serious: 'basic crime, as such, theft, burglary, even violent crime, will not be the predominant police feature'. The threat to 'law and order' today comes from 'seditionists', 'political factions whose designed end is to overthrow democracy as we know it' -- persons at work 'in the field of public order', in industrial relations and politics, whose aim is to 'subvert the authority of the state and ... involve themselves in acts of sedition.' That is where he intends, as commander of an 'immense force', to pack his punch.

Writing by Candlelight, pp 209-210

And pack their punch they certainly did under Thatcher's instructions in their brutal despatch of the miners in 1984. The coup d'etat was over, the British police state was born. And under Thatcherism's successor, Tony Blair, it was consolidated and given undreamt-of powers through the pretence of 'Anti-Terror' laws imported into Britain under the behest of the criminal Bush regime. And, resulting from the experiences Britain's rulers had gained in Ireland, ACPO in 1977

decreed that there should be 'a new Public Order Act giving the police power to control marches and demonstrations, similar to police powers in Ulster.'

Writing by Candlelight, p 205

Those powers were readily given it in the Public Order acts of 1986 and 1994 where even the right to remain silent was to be taken as an inference of guilt.

The police in Britain had successfully promoted itself through the constant lobbying of weak politicians into becoming a vastly influential power within the nation.

"As one Chief Inspector has said," writes Thompson, "ACPO "is the one authoritative body the government will go to seek views". (State Research, October 1979).

Today's generation sees the police as an authoritarian force with which it is better not to become involved. Even the colour of its blue uniforms seems to have taken on a darker hue and its peaked caps look more akin to the Gestapo. Not only the younger generation but older ones have, through the experiences of the last three or four decades, come to this conclusion. Gone are the days of the friendly Bobby who would tell you the time or guide old ladies across busy roads. And, if you are a Muslim or a person of colour, you really had better watch your step. The police are likely to be corrupt, dangerous and are certainly not to be trusted.

And yet Thompson reminds us of a time when in Britain it was the police which had to watch its step and not upset the public overmuch.

The angry crowd, in the eighteenth or nineteenth century, could commit depradations -- untiling houses, burning down corn-mills and conventicles, carrying-off waggon-loads of grain, letting off mill-dams, unhorsing police and military -- which makes today's rare affrays look petty.

Writing by Candlelight, p 205

Compare the above to the few peaceful demonstrations that take place in Britain today! The only thing resembling Thompson's descriptions took place in the 1990 Poll Tax Riots or the occasional mid-summer riot. In the Nineteenth Century the British establishment lived in fear of revolution and both the police and the government were obliged to tread carefully. Out of this was born the myth that the Englishman's home was "his castle."

Authoritarian policing was associated with the Prussians or Czarist Russia. In Britain the police were considered to be public servants.

There was a consensus that the British people put a value on freedom and democracy so high that, at the cost of a little inefficiency and certain difficulties in government, the police and army must be kept in their place.

Writing by Candlelight, p 209


There was, as Thompson writes, "a dialectic between notions of law which make up the 'institutions' or traditions [of the individual's freedoms] of this country." Authority, however contemptuous of the angry crowds, was on the defensive as were its police.

By the 1970's all this had changed.

What has been peculiar to Britain, until lately, has not been the fact that we have police but the place into which the police have been put. That is, the police ... have been firmly held in a position subordinate to the elected civil power and have been subjected to certain expectations and rules; and this has been done both by constitutional safeguards and by a continuous running argument turning on precedents and cases, inquests and judgements, in which the public has been one party to the debate.

Writing by Candlelight, p 204

Out of this grew Britain's reputation for being a free country.

For what was remarked upon by foreign observers (including those from Prussia, Russia, and Chicago) over some three hundred years was the peculiar jealousy of the British people towards the central powers of the state, their abhorrence of military intervention in civil affairs, their dislike of state espionage and of any form of heavy policing, their indiscipline and their sensitivity as to the citizen's rights of privacy.
Writing by Candlelight, p 204

Now, it may well be argued that these freedoms were mainly enjoyed by the genteel and not by the ragged poor who might well be transported to penal colonies for attempting to stave off starvation by thieving a loaf of bread or some potatoes. But the point is that those were the values from which were born the myth of the 'freeborn Englishman' who knew how to teach Johnny-foreigner a thing or two. Values which when combined with the Kiplingesque nonsense of "the White Man's Burden" provided Britain its rationale for the colonizing of 'less civilised' races. Hence, Westminster was to be seen as "the Mother of Parliaments", the model for democracy.

Ironic then that it was the Mother of Parliaments which finally caved into the incessant pressures of the law-and-order lobby and allowed the police to gain the pinnacles of authority it enjoys today. Ironic but not surprising if one remembers that, whatever the views of the people might be, the job of Parliament is to carry out the diktats of a capitalism which has travelled a very long road since Victorian reformism to the amoral anarchy of the New World Order's 'neo-liberal' de facto imperialism. The very New World Order that the likes of Anderton foresaw as the goal to be achieved once the 'seditionists' had been finally put down.

In this new order, the police have sought to become not only a national institution but a moral authority. As Thompson warned,

What is alarming today is that the police are attaining to a position in which they can actually manufacture what is offered as 'public opinion', and are offering their occupational needs as a supreme priority beneatch which, not they, but the British public must be put in place ... That is what is new ... What is new is the very powerful public relations operation which disseminates these notions as an authorized, consensual view -- an operation carried on out of our own taxes; which presses its spokesmen forward on every occasion upon the media; which lobbies inquiries and Royal Commissions, constantly pressing for larger powers; which bullies weak Home Secretaries (and boos them when they cross their wishes); which reproves magistrates for lenient sentencing; which announces unashamedly that the police are in the regular practice of breaking judges' rules when interrogating suspects; which slanders unnamed lawyers and lampoons libertarian organizations; which tells judges how they are to interpret the law; and which justifies the invasion of the citizen's privacy and the accumulation of prejudicial and inaccurate records ... This is new. This is formidable.
Writing by Candlelight, pp 200-201

Thompson goes on to observe that as a historian he knew of no other time when the police had had "such a loud and didactic public presence," offering themselves as a distinct interest, even a prime national institution and when politicians and newspaper editors "have submitted so abjectly or ardently to their persuasions." Whilst in power, Thatcher set in motion swingeing cuts in schools, social services, libraries, universities, research, nursery schools, law centres ... everything except police pay and military spending. "She entered our money in a public subscription in support of the priorities of the police."

Thatcher's model for Britain was not just authoritarian, it was of a police state where the police would, in effect, replace the power of the Church to become the new moral authority,

that we should be instructed as to what value we are to put on freedom and democracy, and be instructed by the police. And that the police are to be seen as, somehow, for themselves, rather than as servants to us, so that we are to be instructed by the police as to what is to be our place.
Writing by Candlelight, p 201

When we hear the smug lies emanating from our senior police officers today, of the ongoing 'need for vigilance against terrorists', blah, blah, we can see how the police have 'tuned the pulpits' and replaced the age-old sermons with new sermons of fear. Together with the politicians, their purpose, like religion, of control remains unchanged. And as in the Dark Ages, the screws of their new Inquisition grow tighter.

Certainly 911 and 77 provided the architects of Britain's police state the events to justify the bringing-about of this new Dark Age. Events which look increasingly likely to have been deliberately staged by Britain's secret services in collusion with others in order to bully the public into submission. If two words characterise the method used by the senior politicians, the secret services and the police in order to have brought about this new totalitarianism they are bullying and terrorism. No longer afraid of the public, of the danger of revolution hence the need for reform, our rulers see us as no more than sheep to be controlled and herded around. In the last few years, it is the Muslims that have been used as the scapegoat for the implementation of this new totalitarianism.

But the real enemy, as it has always been, is you, me and democracy.

(To be Continued)

__________

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Sunday, May 20, 2007


Blair's Kaleidoscope Dystopia

Significantly, one of the last things that Tony Blair does before finally quitting (don't believe it until it happens) is to go off to greet the British military occupation on a rah-rah tour in Iraq. A mortar attack was made on the British Embassy but unfortunately missed hitting Blair who went on to give a heart-rending speech on what a great job 'Our Boys' were doing defending good ol' Freedom 'n' Democracy and making the Matrix World a safer place to live in, blah, blah, blah.

Meantime, ex-Prez Jimmy Carter is reported by the BBC to opine on Blair in tones which if not quite Red Pill are still an embarrassing pink.

Criticising Blair for his "blind" support of the war in Iraq Carter said the UK's "almost undeviating" support for "the ill-advised policies of President Bush in Iraq had been a major tragedy for the world."

"... I think the combination of Bush and Blair giving their support to this tragedy in Iraq has strengthened the effort and has made the opposition less effective and prolonged the war and increased the tragedy that has resulted."

The Iraq invasion had "caused deep schisms on a global basis", said Carter, and he hoped Mr Blair's successor, Gordon Brown, would be less enthusiastic in his support for it.

Jimmy Carter's outspoken condemnation of Blair followed a similar interview he gave to BBC Newsnight last year when he expressed his disappointment at the "apparently" subservient attitude of the British government towards the White House. Carter went on to observe how enthusiastically Blair had helped to influence Bush's war-mongering by adding "a very strong voice from London in the shaping of a common policy."

"I have been really disappointed in the apparent subservience of the British government's policies related to many of the serious mistakes that have been originated in Washington," he added.

"No matter what kind of radical or ill-advised policy was proposed from the White House, it seems to me that almost automatically the government of Great Britain would adopt the same policy without exerting its influence."

Well, this is about as candid as any establishment political figure is going to get. Apart, that is, from the priceless comment by Sir Rodric Braithwaite (UK ambassador to Moscow 1988-92, then foreign policy adviser to John Major and chairman of the Joint Intelligence Committee) who described the miserable Blair as "a frayed and waxy zombie straight from Madame Tussaud’s."

"This one," Sir Rodric continued, "seems to live and breathe. Perhaps it comes from the Central Intelligence Agency’s box of technical tricks, programmed to spout the language of the White House in an artificial English accent."

"Perhaps," of course, is a deliberate understatement by an ex-intelligence boss who knows full well Blair's long history as an informant and quisling whose CIA-directed mission was to finally destroy the reformist tendencies of the British Labour Party as well as his country's freedoms.

When the establishment begins to talk in those terms you can be sure that political affairs have not just deteriorated, they have taken on the proportions of a Titanic listing badly before being sucked down into an unforgiving abyss.

The list of Blair's crimes are endless: in his youth an MI5 informant, a war criminal who not only lied to his parliament and people about non-existent WMD's but who actively used his intelligence services to fabricate lies in order to feed them to their CIA counterparts and a compliant media. Leo Strauss, the architect of the 'noble lie', kiss-my-ass philosophy of the neocons would have been delighted in how deftly his acolyte, the Bliar, was able to put the science of spin, distortion and invention into service. So would Goebbels, he of the Big Lie.

Not only was the Iraq invasion justified by a stream of well-orchestrated lies where Bush and Blair were fed just the kind of 'intelligence' they instructed their spooks to feed them it was, by an incredible sleight-of-hand, made to seem like a necessary act in an equally fake 'war on terror' where Saddam Hussein and the nebulous Al-Qaeda were held responsible for 911.

Though taken in by the Al-CIA-duh link to 911 story few in Europe bought the contorted logic linking both to Saddam Hussein. But it didn't matter a damn because the target audience to persuade was not in Europe but with the folks down home in Amerikkay. And they bought it hook, line and sinker, thanks to the force-feeding techniques used by the Bushblair duo and their media sycophants on both sides of the Atlantic.

Just hours after 911, Noam Chomsky, in an interview on a then relatively free BBC World Service, warned the world that the real impact of 911 would follow in a world of rapidly-deteriorating civil liberties. He was exactly right and an inexorable onslaught on civil liberties followed where the diabolic duo used their fabricated 'war on terror' and the excuse of 'security' to overturn the basic tenets, such as Magna Carta and Habeas Corpus, upon which Anglo-Saxon law was founded eight hundred years ago.

The havoc wreaked upon our freedoms by these satanic minions is much greater than anything their erstwhile counterpart, Adolf Hitler, was able to bring about in a war-torn world. And yet it follows on nicely in a descending curve of civilised values which Hitler and Mussolini would have been delighted to see their political descendants bring about in a world betrayed by smooth-talking gangsters.

The 'war on terror' was never what it was purported to be. More correctly it was a war of terror in which the ultimate goal is to dismantle the old, so-called 'politics of consensus' of the post WWII period, where social spending was considered an important aspect of developing capitalism, and to replace it with something far more brutal disguised by the economic description of 'liberalization' and 'globalization.'

A fake 911, the 'war on terror', homeland security, the invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan, the neocon Blueprint for a New American Century, a racist scapegoating and terrorizing of Muslim communities, all these are but the various building-blocks by which a New World Order is being created. The same new world order that Blair predicted would follow in a speech given not long after 911 in which he claimed that "the Kaleidoscope" had been shaken and when the pieces fell back into place the fractal reality of a new world order would have come about.

How many professional 'commentators' would have rashly said what they knew to be the truth: that 911 was a carefully-orchestrated event deliberately brought about to give the likes of Bush and Blair a Pearl Harbour event to justify their war-mongering in the name of Big Oil and the betrayal of their people's freedoms? How many editors would have dared to risk their careers by publishing anything but the official spin on 911 or the warnings of Chomsky that 911 would presage a new dark age of totalitarianism?

It was left to the politically marginalised sectors of a prison planet to get the truth out by any means they could find, predominantly the internet. For nearly six years now, this writer has played his part in that small band. And we shall continue until such time as the likes of Bush and Blair are successful in finally being able to control the internet and turn us into 'non-persons', beings who simply do not exist in the fractal-reality of the dystopia they intended when they shook the kaleidoscope so violently on 11 September 2001.