There is no "moderate" centre ground when it comes to fascism

It's extremely concerning how the political right (and an alarming number of self-declared "centrists") have taken to using "antifa" as an insult, as if being opposed to fascism is some kind of moral degeneracy.

When it comes to extreme ideologies like fascism (street thuggery, dictatorship, genocide, white supremacy, violent oppression, eugenics, anti-Semitism ...) you're either opposed to it, or you support it.

There is no moderate centre ground when it comes to fascism. No matter how much you might wish for it, there simply isn't a convenient fence for right-on handwringers to sit on.

When it comes to fascism the only sensible position for anyone other than fascists is on the anti-fascist side. This is because if the fascists gain power they'll eliminate all opposition starting with the leftists and the anarchists before they move on to eliminating the democratic socialists, liberals and traditional conservatives. 

If you have any political opinions other than fascism (or pig-headed apathy about all political issues and a willingness to adopt total subservience to your political leaders in order to save your own skin if fascists ever come to power) then you have a responsibility to be antifa.

Inaction when it comes to fascism is clearly implicit support for fascism, but promoting the ridiculous, but increasingly popular false equivalence that those who oppose fascism are "just as bad" as the fascists themselves is even worse. It's worse because it implies that to oppose fascism is morally repugnant, when in reality smug indifference to fascism is the real moral degeneracy that people should be worrying about.

Even if the number of people alive who still remember the horrors of the Second World War have dwindled, we still have countless recorded testimonies that the brutality of Hitler's Nazi regime was enabled by the indifference of millions of ordinary people.

It was the self-serving indifference of the people who just quietly got on with their lives as their neighbours and work colleagues were dragged off by the fascists who allowed the political purges and then the Holocaust to happen.

Britain has a long tradition of resisting fascism (the battle of Cable Street, WWII, opposition to the National Front in the '70s and '80s, ridicule of the BNP & EDL ...) but nowadays many of the descendants of those who made incredible sacrifices to beat fascism during the Second World War are actually more likely to share content from extreme-right hate groups like Britain First on Facebook and whine piteously about how nasty the Antifa leftists are, than they are to do like their grandparents did and actively resist the horrors of fascism.

In fact we've no excuse at all for inaction, or for mindlessly spewing the ridiculously dangerous trope that to oppose fascism is as bad as fascism itself.

Back in the 1930s nobody knew the appalling scale of the horrors that fascism would inflict on Europe but the British working classes came together in solidarity to beat Oswald Mosley's fascist blackshirts into submission. Nowadays we've got access to an enormous mass of information about the horrors that are possible when desperate people succumb to the lure of fascism, so we've no excuse at all for not being anti-fascists.

So next time you hear anyone smugly condemning those who stand up against fascism as being "just as bad", remember that they're condemning all anti-fascists, including previous generations of your family who made such sacrifices in the fight against fascism on the continent. 

They're essentially saying that your grandparents/great-grandparents were just as bad as the concentration camp guards in Nazi Germany because they actively, and in many cases violently, resisted fascism.

By making this ridiculous argument they're placing themselves on a mythical centre-ground where inaction and pseudo-liberal handwinging in the face of violent swastika waving white supremacists intent on dictatorship and genocide is morally superior to active resistance and condemnation!

It's long been said that "all that is necessary for the triumph of evil is for good people to do nothing". And it should be obvious that all that is necessary for the triumph of fascism is for right-wingers and sickeningly smug so-called "centrists" to go around spreading the incredibly dangerous notion that to actively oppose fascism is as bad as fascism itself.

 Another Angry Voice  is a "Pay As You Feel" website. You can have access to all of my work for free, or you can choose to make a small donation to help me keep writing. The choice is entirely yours.

OR

The lamentable decline in the standard of public debate

For all of its faults during the time of empire, the United Kingdom used to be a thriving hotbed of intellectualism. Not only was the United Kingdom the driver of the industrial revolution, it was also a land of rapid intellectual, scientific and political development. 

These days, as the standard of public debate continues sinking to every more dispiriting lows, I think it's worth looking back and considering how the hell have things gone so wrong.

Background

Its obviously an over-simplification to start at any arbitrary point, but we must start somewhere, so the rise of liberalism in the 17th Century seems as good a point as any. It was from this period onward that the persecution of non-conformism declined dramatically.

In the 17th Century the philosophers Thomas Hobbes and John Locke established the concepts of the social contract and natural rights that gradually eroded the tyranny of the monarcy-state-church nexus.

The English Civil War resulted in the fall of the monarchy, but the powerful political elites who took the place of the monarchy imprisoned and marginalised radicals like John Lilburne ("Freeborn John") and the Levellers to prevent an egalitarian reformation of British society. Despite these efforts by the powerful elites to stamp out political and religious radicalism by persecuting non-conformists like the Levellers, Seekers, Quakers and the Diggers, the unstoppable trend towards liberalism and tolerance of of religious non-conformism had been set in motion.

It was never the case that persecution of non-conformity was eliminated entirely, but from the late 17th Century onwards the people of Great Britain found ever more freedom to express non-conformist political views, and to practice whichever religion they liked, or none at all for that matter. 

Another visionary liberal philosopher to spring up in 17th Century Britain was to inspire the independence revolution in the United States. Thomas Paine's revolutionary essays inspired the movement that excised the monarchy-state-church nexus from vast territories of North America.

The vestiges of the tyrannical monarchy-state-church nexus persist in Britain to this day. The UK state is an anachronism with its monarch serving as joint head of state and head of the established church, its antiquated and unrepresentative electoral system and its unelected religious clerics in its bloated and entirely unelected House of Lords. However the power of the state to silence, imprison and execute critics of the establishment order has been gradually eroded, such that we can publish our republican sentiments, our anti-establishment political views and our non-conformist theological thoughts with little fear of being economically sanctioned, imprisoned or garotted by the monarchy-state-church nexus for airing such views.

The 19th Century heyday

The 19th Century wasn't just the heyday of the industrial revolution, it was an age of rapid public enlightenment and social progress: Libraries, educational institutions and museums sprang up all over the nation; education and basic literacy gradually became the norm rather than the privileges of the wealthy; and barbaric practices like slavery and child labour were abolished.

Against this backdrop of rising standards in literacy and freedom from oppression, Britain played host to an extraordinary array of political movements. Liberals, anarchists, religious non-conformists, Owenites, socialists, communists, libertarians, laissez-faire capitalists, free-thinkers, mutualists and syndicalists all competed for attention from an increasingly literate population.

Non-conformists and hetorodox political thinkers had a much more difficult time on the continent. A look at the lives of many of the most interesting European political thinkers of the age (Proudhon, Bakunin, Michel, Galleani, Malatesta, Blanqui ...) reveal lives interrupted by prolonged periods of imprisonment and exile. Britain was not free of political persecution by any stretch of the imagination, however the more liberal environment meant that London became a safe haven for all kinds of heterodox political thinkers including Marx, Engels, Herzen, Mazzini, Kossuth and Kropotkin.

In response to a furious letter from the Spanish embassy decrying Britain for harbouring political exiles in 1871 the British government declared that "all foreigners have an absolute right to enter the country and remain", and that they have the same right as British citizens to be "punished only for offences against the law".

Public intellectuals

The growing tolerance of unorthodox political and religious thought in the United Kingdom led to the rise of countless public intellectuals, many of whom worked to educate the public through the publication of essays and literature and were deeply involved in the political affairs of their age.

It's impossible to provide a definitive list of 19th Century public intellectuals, however naming just a few high profile individuals from the period goes to show how intellectuals were held in high public regard: John Stuart Mill, William Morris, George Holyoake, Alfred Russel Wallace, Charles Darwin, Thomas Henry Huxley, Francis Galton, Herbert Spencer, Alfred Marshall, Alexander Graham Bell.

The high public profile accorded to intellectuals continued well into the 20th Century. It's unlikely that anyone but the most determined early-mid 20th Century dullard would have managed to remain completely unaware of the writing and political views of the likes of H.G. Wells, Bertrand Russell, George Bernard Shaw, C.S. Lewis, John Maynard Keynes, George Orwell, Aldous Huxley...

The late 20th Century onwards

Who are the great British public intellectuals, philosophers and political theorists of the 21st Century?

There are obviously a great deal of very intelligent people in Britain, who could rightly be considered public intellectuals, however, it seems to me that very few of them have a large enough public profile that they would be recognisable to the majority of people.

Tim Berners-Lee deserves enormous credit for inventing the World Wide Web, but how many people could tell you what he was famous for just from hearing his name or seeing his photograph? The same goes for a number of other modern day intellectuals. What percentage of the general public could even identify the likes of Robert Skidelsky, Ian McEwan, Martin Amis, Tariq Ali, Susie Orbach, AC Grayling, Andrew Motion, Alan Bennett, Mary Beard or Roger Penrose?

The only high profile public intellectual I'm completely confident that the majority of British people could identify is Stephen Hawking.

When it comes to politics the situation is utterly embarrassing. When a revisionist halfwit like Michael Gove is considered to be one of the great intellectuals of the Tory party, and a the likes of Tristram Hunt and Gordon Brown are lauded as the great intellectuals of the Labour Party we know that we're in trouble. 

Anti-intellectualism and stupification

The United Kingdom has turned from a country that celebrated intellectualism to one that treats it with suspicion and contempt, especially if intellectuals (these days so often prefaced with "so-called" by the tabloid press) dare to voice a political opinion that goes against the established orthodoxy. When people speak out against the right-wing economic orthodoxy that has dominated UK politics for almost four decades, they are hounded by the tabloid press. In my view an awful lot of public intellectuals are afraid to speak out against the right-wing economic orthodoxy for fear of the abuse they'll suffer from the right-wing press. 

The hounding of public figures who speak out against the orthodoxy is not the only way in which the tabloid press helps to control public debate. Newspapers like The Sun and The Daily Mail are deliberately written in the vocabulary of children in order to make their glib right-wing political tropes accessible to even the least intelligent adults. It's not just conjecture that the tabloid newspapers have contributed to the stupification of the British public either. Research has shown that reading a tabloid newspaper is worse for your vocabulary than not reading a newspaper at all, and that "the presence of tabloid newspapers in the home during childhood has been linked to poor cognitive attainment at age 16".

It's not just the tabloids that are to blame. Generations of politicians have turned the UK education system into an absolute shambles, where children who attend state schools are denied the absolute basics in critical thinking, philosophy and economics and taught that correct answers are handed down to them by authority to be uncritically rote learned and regurgitated upon demand in order to obtain rewards in the form of grades. It obviously makes no sense for the establishment to teach future generations critical thinking skills and basic macroeconomics, otherwise they'd grow up to ask questions and find out that their own rational self-interest is not best served through continued support for an out-of-touch establishment minority that is clearly intent on hoarding political power for their own class and enacting ideologically driven economic policies that enrich the already rich at the expense of everyone else.

The declining standard of political debate 

The standard of political debate in the UK continues suffering a steep decline. People seem to no longer even understand the meanings of fundamental political words and phrases. Terms like "communism", "anarchism", "liberalism" and "socialism" have been weaponised, so that simply calling somebody a "communist" is somehow considered sufficient to discredit their entire position, without any obligation for the term communist to even be understood, let alone it be demonstrated that the accused actually subscribes to any of the numerous communist ideologies.

We live in a world where hurling words like "communist" around as if they're crude insults rather than political words with specific meanings or publishing pictures of the opposition leader looking odd while he eats a bacon sandwich are considered dynamite by the political right. Meanwhile many on the left seem to think that simply calling David Cameron a "pigfucker" (instead of criticising any of the countless socially and economically destructive policies Cameron's government have inflicted on the UK) is a debate winning tactic, rather than the kind of crude unsubstantiated assertion that makes the left look like a bunch of ranting extremists.

The rise of someone like David Cameron was pretty much inevitable given the stupification of the electorate. Cameron has proven himself an egregious liar, an abuser of the English language, a snide and manipulative person who refuses to answer direct questions or act in good faith and a coward who is terrified of having to think on his feet (hence his refusals to participate in unscripted public debates). However, despite all of this evidence that David Cameron is a fundamentally dishonest charlatan and clearly the least intellectually capable Prime Minister in living memory, somehow over 11 million people saw fit to actually vote in favour of keeping him in power!

It doesn't matter whether you agreed with the likes of Benjamin Disreali, John Stuart Mill, Winston Churchill, William Beveridge or Clement Attlee, it's pretty much impossible to argue that they were stupid people who just read out a load of scripted nonsense and ran away from any form of actual debate. These were intelligent men of principle who knew what they were talking about and were unafraid of open honest debate.

I'm not Tory but I'm pretty damned sure that the likes of Disreali and Churchill would be utterly appalled that the Conservative party is now being led by such an intellectually stunted, snide and downright dishonest chancer like David Cameron.

What can be done?

It seems that little can actually be done as long as the parliamentary authorities allow David Cameron to continue repeatedly evading questions and blatantly lying to parliament, and as long as the mainstream media refuse to hold David Cameron and the Tories to account for their litany of lies and broken promises to the public.

David Cameron can sign a "contract with the electorate" then simply have every trace of it deleted from the Tory website when it became clear that they'd broken nearly every pledge it contained; he can lie to parliament that the UK has been "bankrupted"; he can lie to the public that the Tories are reducing the national debt (when they've actually created more new debt since 2010 than every Labour government in history combined); he can use all kinds of Orwellian language to claim that black is white and white is black; and he can lie over and over and over again about the leader of the opposition. He can do all of this and get away with it because virtually nobody holds him to account for it.

Even if David Cameron is removed from power, if the means to lie, distort, adopt bad faith positions and spout logical fallacies remains so desperately unchallenged, his successors would be fools to limit themselves to honest, good faith debate.

The poet WH Auden once wrote that "Whatever the field under discussion, those who engage in debate must not only believe in each other's good faith, but also in their capacity to arrive at the truth". Surely nobody believes that it's possible to engage in this kind of honest debate with the likes of David Cameron? Surely nobody believes that David Cameron would voluntarily stick to the truth, argue in good faith or answer direct questions (rather than repeatedly evade them with a load of heavily scripted and largely inaccurate tabloid style rhetoric and snide political point scoring).

Unfortunately, until the public begin to demand a higher level of public debate from their politicians, any politician who does try to adopt the traditional British form of debate (by limiting themselves to avoiding lies and smears, arguing in good faith and actually answering the questions they're asked) would be voluntarily tying their hands behind their back while allowing other less scrupulous politicians to repeatedly punch them below the belt to cheers of delight from the tabloid-minded masses.

 Another Angry Voice  is a "Pay As You Feel" website. You can have access to all of my work for free, or you can choose to make a small donation to help me keep writing. The choice is entirely yours.

MORE ARTICLES FROM
 ANOTHER ANGRY VOICE 
         
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David Cameron's Orwellian word games
                     
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What value can be found in religious contemplation?

I find a lot of theological writing to be tortured, laborious, inaccessible and uninspiring, a real chore to wade through and a thoroughly unrewarding investment of my time. Other examples I find lucid, powerful and thought provoking. In this article I'm going to consider what value can be found in religious contemplation.

Avoiding absolutism

I'm of the opinion that much of value can be taken from things that have stemmed from religion and religious contemplation. I don't necessarily have to agree with something for me to see some inherent value in it, or for it to have at least impacted and informed my worldview.

To give a rather crude example of how good can be found in religion, many years ago I did repair work on a number of Church of England churches. I've never been Church of England and I have deep reservations about the entanglement between the CofE and the UK political system. As a child I attended a number of state funded Church of England schools and grew to deeply resent the religious indoctrination I was subjected to from a very young age. The idea of an official state religion with special privileges in the political establishment and in society at large concerns me deeply, especially as I have studied the terrible persecutions of heterodox religious groups and individual thinkers enforced by the Church of England-UK state nexus in the past.

However my deep revulsion at this anachronistic Church of England status as an Official State Religion with special social and political privileges could never be enough to destroy the beauty and wonder of repairing an ancient building in the English summer, the tranquility of the Churchyard, the wind in the yew trees, the centuries of dedicated craftsmanship invested in the building and the profound sense of shared community history.

For all of the bad that has been perpetrated by man against man in the name of religion, good has sprung of it too. Beautiful religious architecture is one example and thought-provoking religious philosophy is another.

To deny that there is that of both good and bad in vast entire aspect of human endeavour is to take a militant absolutist stance.

Swami Vivekananda

"Each soul is potentially divine. The goal is to manifest this Divinity within by controlling nature, external and internal. Do this either by work, or worship, or mental discipline, or philosophy - by one, or more, or all of these - and be free.  

This is the whole of religion. Doctrines, or dogmas, or rituals, or books, or temples, or forms, are but secondary details."

In my view this Swami Vivekananda quote contains great truths born of religious contemplation.

I sincerely believe that you don't have to be of a religious persuasion to see the truth in what Swami Vivekananda was saying, although I can understand how stuff like the concept of "divinity" could be offputting to those of irreligious sentiments. However I don't consider the replacement of the overtly religious concept of  "divinity" with the philosophical concept of "transcendence" or the more psychological concept of "self-fulfilment" to be unacceptable debasements the essential meaning of the first paragraph.

Transcendence

"Any person can achieve transcendence. The goal is to achieve self-fulfilment through self-discipline and active engagement with the world. Freedom can be found through constructive activity, contemplation or both."

To rephrase and slightly simplify the first paragraph in this manner does not eradicate the essential meaning, but it frees it from the kind of overtly religious undertones that many find offputting. Could anyone now disagree with this statement?

Dogma

The second paragraph is particularly close to my own beliefs about the fundamental distinction between spirituality and dogma.

It is possible to believe in God(s) without believing in organised religious dogma, just as it is possible to for people to devote their lives to practicing organised religious dogma without ever really contemplating the existence and nature of the God(s) that their religious order is actually dedicated to. The two things are separate, but linked by centuries of association.

A declaration of the primacy of individual enlightenment over religious dogma resonates strongly with my libertarian and anarchist sympathies. Of course we should be free to develop our own personal worldviews, whether we believe in God(s) or not. Thus if religion is to exist then it should exist to encourage and support people in their own self-enlightenment, not to enforce an ideological orthodoxy through indoctrination and the punishment of transgressions.

Conclusion

Of course people are still free to contest that nothing good has ever stemmed from religion and sneer at the use of words like "divinity" if they want to see the world like that. However such a stance betrays naive absolutist thinking. To witness attempts to occupy some kind of intellectual high ground by decrying anything that has ever stemmed from religion is to witness a bold scrabble towards an imaginary plateau of rational enlightenment, the like of which will forever remain unobtainable to those who close their perceptions through simplistic absolute judgements about incredibly complex issues.

However you define your goal in life (enlightenment, transcendence, self-fulfilment, divinity ...) there are many paths to achieve it, however one of the most impassable obstacles on any path is closed-mindedness.

Like I said in the intro, I find an awful lot of theological writing to be turgid, unrewarding and often deeply hypocritical or contradictory stuff, but amongst all the dross there are still many gems to be found. Concepts that are concisely expressed and thought provoking to those with the openness of mind to contemplate the meaning of things without necessarily accepting them at face value.

To conclude I'll leave you with another Swami Vivekananda quote:

"To believe blindly is to degenerate the human soul. Be an atheist if you want, but do not believe in anything unquestioningly."

 Another Angry Voice  is a "Pay As You Feel" website. You can have access to all of my work for free, or you can choose to make a small donation to help me keep writing. The choice is entirely yours.

MORE ARTICLES FROM
 ANOTHER ANGRY VOICE 
         
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The incompatibility of Christian ethics and modern Conservatism
                     
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About that "banned" Church of England advert
                             
Richard Dawkins and the far-right extremists
                
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The Tory ideological mission

  

No anarchy in the UK, police advise people to grass up anarchists

The Westminster Counter Terrorism Police advise you
to inform on your friends and neighbours if you suspect
that they are guilty of having dissident political thoughts.

On 29 July 2011the City of Westminster Counter Terror Focus Desk released a newsletter which contained the statement:

"Anarchism is a political philosophy which considers the state undesirable, unnecessary, and harmful, and instead promotes a stateless society, or anarchy. Any information relating to anarchists should be reported to your local police." (source)

This police call for people to grass up anarchists comes in the wake of a bizarre right-wing social networking campaign to downplay the atrocities committed by the far right terrorist Anders Breivik in Norway with misleading and unsourced statistics which claimed that anarchist/leftist terrorists have been responsible for more deaths atrocities than Islamic fundamentalists, separatist nationalists and far right organisations combined.

The first part of the police statement is ostensibly correct, however it is clear that whoever wrote it just stole their definition of anarchism from the first line of the Wikipedia article on the subject (without complying with Wikipedia's terms of use policy, which specify that to reuse Wikipedia content you must provide credit to the authors). Had the Westminster anti-terrorist police read further than the first sentence of the Wikipedia article they would have found that by the fourth sentence the Wikipedia article stated that "there is no single defining position that all anarchists hold, and those considered anarchists at best share a certain family resemblance" and that the remainder of the article offers detailed descriptions of the vast diversity of different anarchist philosophies.

For the police to lump all anarchists together as a threat to society is a classic use of gross over-simplification, over-generalisation and stereotyping. It is as stupid as seeing all Muslims as terrorists or all Irish as IRA plotters and it doesn't say much for the competence of anti-terror police, that they see fit to publish such simplistic and uninformed views.

The police have been trained to fear anarchism because its inherent anti-state philosophy conflicts with the principle duties of modern day police forces; to defend the interests of the establishment and to protect the private property of the wealthy. The fact that the policeman that wrote this "advice" had to look anarchism up on Wikipedia to find his definition and then just plagiarised the opening sentence without apparently bothering to read any further is illustrative of the police mentality that there is no need to fully understand dissident political thought, simply a necessity to prevent it.

On the same page of the Westminster counter terrorism leaflet there is a picture of a flag with some Arabic text and a similar request for the public to grass up Islamist terrorists with the statement "[This flag is] often seen used by al-Qaida in Iraq. Any sightings of these images should be reported to your local police." The fact that the second warning contains similar advice and features below the anarchist warning shows that in the minds of Westminster counter terrorist police, gathering intelligence on domestic anarchist groups is considered as a higher or at best an equivalent in priority to combating UK based al-Qaida terrorists.

It is easy to understand police fear of anarchist tactics like black bloc,
however their decision to lump them together with other anarchist philosophies
such as anarcho-syndicalists and existential anarchists highlights their ignorance.

It is easy to understand the reasons that the police fear anarchism, the anarchists they most often encounter in the line of duty are people like direct activists, squatters and protesters using the black bloc strategy. It is pretty clear that most coppers don't really have any real understanding of the philosophical term "anarchist" and just use it as a kind of pejorative to describe people that wont accept the status quo, similar to "troublemaker" or "radical". However it is difficult to imagine what benefit the police would get from informants passing on their knowledge of anarchist philosophies such as existentialist anarchism, participatory politics or somatherapy.

Anarchism and the study of anarchist philosophy is not illegal and human rights legislation disallows discrimination against people because of their political beliefs. The very idea of the police instructing people to report individuals who hold or study dissident philosophical ideas is frighteningly close to George Orwell's concept of thoughtcrime and brings to mind the fact that in the early days of the Nazi Germany dissident political thinkers such as anarchists, socialists and communists were rounded up and imprisoned in the Dachau concentration camp.

In the late 19th Century William Melville of Scotland Yard
was the first of many police officers to use
underhand tactics to frame dissident political groups.

It is clear that the British establishment have feared anarchist philosophy for over a century. The Home Office and Metropolitan police spent 80 years hiding the fact that a police agent provocateur called Auguste Coulon working for MI5 founder William Melville planted bomb making materials in order to secure the conviction of a small group of anarchists in Walsall in 1891. The Anarchist newspaper "Commonweal" reported that "Inspector Melville the premier liar of Scotland Yard has been boasting openly that he has succeeded even beyond his hopes in splitting up the Anarchists into factions and has set them fighting each other instead of carrying on their work".

The British police have continued with the use of agent provocateurs to infiltrate anti-establishment groups in order to secure the imprisonment of their members. The most recent example being the case of undercover police officer Mark Kennedy who was found guilty of unlawfully spying on an environmental group and playing a key role in the plan to break into the Ratcliffe on Soare power station in 2009 for which 20 people were found guilty. When it emerged that Kennedy had been a police informer and that the Crown Prosecution Service had deliberately withheld vital evidence from the defence, the convictions were overturned by three senior judges who stated that Kennedy had played a "significant role in assisting, advising and supporting ... the very activity for which the appellants were prosecuted".

Not only have the British police authorities tried to bring down anarchist and other non-conformist political movements through the use of agent provocateurs, they have also benefited from reams of anti-dissent legislation designed to combat political protest. The Police have been allowed to brutalise people that choose to express their right to peaceful political protest with impunity for decades, from the murder of Blair Peach in 1979, through the brutal oppression of the miner's strike to the modern day kettling and baton charges familiar to virtually anyone who has attended an anti-establishment protest in recent years.

The Mark Kennedy case is another example
of how UK police use underhand and illegal tactics
to frame anti-establishment political groups.

The police tactic of kettling is one of the clearest examples of how the police view non-conformism as latent criminality. The tactic of mass detention is a clear partisan strategy to inflict discomfort and suffering on people that choose to protest against the actions of the establishment in order to dissuade them from ever doing it again. As part of the establishment machine the press will almost certainly concentrate on the actions of a tiny violent minority who are while the detention and intimidation of the peaceful majority is almost universally ignored.

Returning to the Westminster document and their broad definition of anarchism, (Anarchism is a political philosophy which considers the state undesirable, unnecessary, and harmful), several commentators have pointed out that David Cameron's so-called "big society" seems to fit this description of anarchism. Since the election in 2010 the Tories have set about vigorously destroying the welfare state, selling off state infrastructure and sacking tens of thousands of government employees, making claims that the shortfalls in state provision should be made up by individuals and small community groups as part of the nebulous "big society" initiative.

Most anarchists would be appalled to see such ruthless ideologically driven destruction described as "anarchism", however the Tory slash and burn neo-conservative policies are more consistent with the over-simplistic definition of anarchism favoured by the police (reckless and wanton ideologically driven destruction) than the activities of most of Britain's disparate anarchist groups. Even though the Tory party look set to reduce the police force by 34,000 and have set about attacking police pay and pensions, the subservient police mentality prevents them from recognising that the real destructive force that should be countered is the neo-conservative ideology of the establishment, rather than the radical ideas of a few disparate and largely powerless anarchist groups.

The police mentality towards philosophical anarchists and anti-establishment groups brings to mind Pastor Martin Niemöller's famous statement about the inactivity of German intellectuals following the Nazi rise to power and the purging of their chosen targets, group after group.

First they came for the communists,
and I didn't speak out because I wasn't a communist.
Then they came for the trade unionists,
and I didn't speak out because I wasn't a trade unionist.
Then they came for the Jews,
and I didn't speak out because I wasn't a Jew.
Then they came for me
and there was no one left to speak out for me.

If you know anything about anarchism (or are capable of looking up some anarchist philosophy on Wikipedia) I recommend that you comply with police instructions and ensure that any information relating to anarchists is reported the local police. You should email as much anarchist literature as you can to  projectgriffin@met.pnn.police.uk or post it to Belgravia Police Station, 202-206 Buckingham Palace Road, London, SW1W 9SX.

If they are inundated with emails and letters explaining the basic fundamentals of the many diverse anarchist philosophies, perhaps they will think more carefully about publishing inflammatory material that attempts to build prejudice against and criminalise political thought by equating it with terrorism.

 If you enjoyed this post, maybe you could buy me a beer? £1 would get me a can of cheap lager whilst £3 would get me a lovely pint of real ale.