Inner Quests

http://news.antiwar.com/2011/08/29/cables-reveal-2006-summary-execution-of-civilian-family-in-iraq/

 

At what point do we in the West, particularly we citizens of the US and the UK, recognise that we are in a position of complicity with murder comparable to that of German citizens during the Holocaust? The MSM emphasises the badness of the Taliban, Saddam and Gaddafi regimes as rationales for invasion/intervention, but if a measure of badness is the death and misery created it is at least arguable that the interventions result in more badness; if badness is measured by motivation then it is at least arguable that greed rather than any noble motive is behind the interventions; if brutality is the measure of badness then atrocities such as these again demonstrate the immoral nature of the interventions. The question is what do we do about it. It is one thing to highlight this on sites like antiwar.com, information is valuable, but what do we do with the information? Where is the coordinated effort to establish a wider dialogue, links between groups working for peace and justice etc.?

 

 

 

What happened in London was tragic but it didn’t come out of nowhere; a culture of violence, and disrespect has been building for a long time. We’ve seen the stabbings, the shootings and the general lack of respect that some people (it’s not just young people) have for others. Now it’s exploded. Thousands of people were involved in looting. For some it was an expression of frustration, for others an expression of their criminality and violence, for many it was simply an opportunity to ‘fill their boots’. Whatever the motivation they felt little affiliation for society.

 

 

The one thing that youth centres and youth services give disaffected young people is some link to the wider society. A space where they can let off steam and make connections with adults on a more equal level than is possible with teachers, parents, police or employers. It’s not really equal because the youth workers have responsibilities and resources that the young people don’t; but if the youth workers are doing their job well then there is an understanding that these responsibilities and resources are held for they young people. To cut youth services is to cut an important link between young people and society.

 

If you are middle class or waged you see some of the effects of cuts in public services and rises in the costs of living, but we are not generally aware of how hard this hits people at the bottom of the social ladder. The apparatus of the state, banks, corporations and police treat the poor with disrespect. The incident that sparked the riots was the killing of a black man by the police in what some regard as judicial murder similar to the killing of Jean Charles De Menezes.

 

 

The media ignores this and focussed on the lawlessness of the rioters. Darcus Howe was interviewed very soon after the riots made the connection but the BBC interviewer made it clear that she did now want to hear about this.

 

 

That the media should take such a prosecutorial tone suggests that it is interested not in getting at the truth but in pushing a particular perspective.

John Pilger writes of the interview with Darcus Howe:

On 4 August, the BBC’s Fiona Armstrong – aka Lady MacGregor of MacGregor – interviewed the writer Darcus Howe, who dared use the forbidden word, “insurrection”.

Armstrong: “Mr. Howe, you say you are not shocked [by the riots]? Does this mean you condone what happened?”

Howe: “Of course not … what I am concerned about is a young man Mark Duggan … the police blew his head off.”

Armstrong: “Mr. Howe, we have to wait for the official enquiry to say things like that. We don’t know what happened to Mr. Duggan. We have to wait for the police report.”

On 8 August, the Independent Police Complaints Commission acknowledged there was “no evidence” that Duggan had fired a shot at police. Duggan was shot in the face on 4 August by a police officer with a Heckler and Koch MP5 sub-machine gun – the same weapon supplied by Britain to dictatorships that use them against their own people. I saw the result in East Timor where Indonesian troops also blew the heads off people with these state-of-the-art weapons supplied by both Tory and Labour governments.

An eyewitness to Duggan’s killing told the Evening Standard, “About three or four police officers had [him] pinned on the ground at gunpoint. They were really big guns and then I heard four loud shots. The police shot him on the floor.”

This is how the Metropolitan Police shot dead Jean Charles de Menezes on the floor of a London Underground train. And there was Robert Stanley and Ian Tomlinson, and many more. The police lied about Duggan’s killing as they have lied about the others. Since 1998, more than 330 people have died in police custody and not one officer has been convicted. Where is the political and media outrage about this “culture of fear”?

www.johnpilger.com

The lawlessness of the police in the way they treat the underclass, the lawlessness of the government in their prosecution of illegal wars, the cheating of MPs over expenses, the social irresponsibility of bankers are connected to the lawlessness on the streets. It is easy to condemn the kids on the street and it’s right that acts of violence, vandalism, terror and cruelty should be condemned. But it’s important to understand deeply and poetically the connections.

 

 

“There is a transnational ruling class, a “Superclass”, that agrees on establishing a world government. The middle class is targeted for elimination, because most of the world has no middle class, and to fully integrate and internationalize a middle class, would require industrialization and development in Africa, and certain places in Asia and Latin America. The goal of the Superclass is not to lose their wealth and power to a transnational middle class, but rather to extinguish the notion of a middle class, and transnationalize a lower, uneducated, labor oriented class, through which they will secure ultimate wealth and power.

The global economic crisis serves these ends, as whatever remaining wealth the middle class holds is in the process of being eliminated, and as the crisis progresses, the middle classes of the world will suffer, while a great percentage of lower classes of the world, poverty-stricken even prior to the crisis, will suffer the greatest, most probably leading to a massive reduction in population levels, particularly in the “underdeveloped” or “Third World” states.”

Andrew Gavin Marshall, ‘The Global Economic Crisis: The Great Depression of the XXI Century’

I found this quote on Third World Traveler. It looks like a website that everyone should be looking at.

These two videos are a good introduction to understanding the financial crisis and how it affects institutions and nations but only an introduction there is a lot that I don’t understand. If Greece owes money to the banks and can’t pay then the banks have a problem but since our pension funds are invested in the banks as well as investments from countries like China which have a surplus then we have a problem if the banks collapse. But why should we give money to Greece to pay back the debt to the banks or to pay the interest on the debt. We have to borrow money from the banks to pay off the debts of Greece but we are never going to get the money back from Greece so we’re borrowing to lend money we can never get back. If the banks are in trouble and we have to stop them going under why not lend them the money so that they owe us? My brain hurts.