The logic of the Democratic Police State posted by bat020

posted by bat020

Good piece by John Pilger in today's New Statesman on what he calls the rise of the "democratic police state" (available online at UK Watch).

It covers ground that should be familar to Tomb readers, including Thomas Friedman's chillingly McCarthyite call for an official blacklist of those "just one notch less despicable than the terrorists" - he means those who believe US government actions are the root cause of terrorism.

Pilger also picks up on last month's police raid on a community bookshop in Leeds, where they confiscated anti-war material claiming it would "work people up". He notes how fear of terrorism is being used to justify a repressive police presence in Muslim areas:

Muslim people all over Britain report the presence of police "video vans" cruising their streets, filming everyone. "We have become like ghettoes under siege," said one man too frightened to be named. "Do they know what this is doing to our young people?"

He ends with a quote from Tony Blair from his press conference on 26 July:

We are not having any of this nonsense about [the bombings having anything] to do with what the British are doing in Iraq or Afghanistan, or support for Israel, or support for America, or any of the rest of it. It is nonsense and we have to confront it as that.

... which is itself interesting, because in his press conference on 5 August, Tony Blair was asked "You have said repeatedly that you don't think there's any link between Britain's involvement in the Iraq war and what happened in London", to which he replied:

Well let me first of all correct, I keep being asked this and I keep correcting it but it doesn't seem to make any difference but there it is. I mean I've never said that those people who are engaged in extremism won't use Iraq as a way to recruit or motivate people as they do Afghanistan, as they do the issue of Palestine, as they do, as the video made clear yesterday, what they call the presence of western countries in Islamic countries.

All this underlines that those who deny that imperialism is the root cause of terrorism are logically forced into a racist position, namely that Muslims are the root cause of terrorism. Police repression, ranging from a massive increase in harassment of young Asians all the way to the wanton slaying innocent commuters, all follows from this.

Of course this racism is disavowed - the ideological formula is "There are Good Muslims and there are Bad Muslims, except that there are no Good Muslims." And the fact that even the most timid and respectable Muslim organisations are now targets of the liberal bombers simply confirms this grim logic... which can only be halted if we Stop the War.