Thus ends Wittgenstein’s Tractatus and this, it seems, is how our government has now come to define people’s right to protest.

In the space of a few weeks we witnessed the scandalous and shameful show of police brutality during the G20 protests, the arrests of 114 activists in Nottingham, allegedly in a ‘pre-emptive’ (that word again) attempt to prevent some undefined catastrophe, as well as the revelations that the police have been spending thousands of pounds of taxpayers’ money (or ‘UK Plc’ as one officer charmingly put it) on recruiting informants within the protest movement and disrupting perfectly peaceful and open activist networks.

For anyone paying attention, these practices are nothing new. Yet many in the mass media did their best to feign shock and dismay at the revelations. Predictably, these abuses have now been quickly reframed as shocking aberrations within an otherwise perfectly adequate law enforcement system. Indeed, the G20 protests have already seen two or three individual officers offered as designated villains (á la Abu Ghraib). Meanwhile, the toothless inquiries that have now been launched within and beyond the IPCC have already shown they had missed crucial point: that officers who broke the rules did so because of the way they had been trained, not in spite of it.

Indeed, reading the media coverage one is struck by the depressing uniformity of the punditocracy whose party line seems to be: “The police do a hard job well, but mistakes occur and that should be fixed.” In other words, it is taken as a truism that the police’s duty to protect the ‘public’ did not in fact extend to the vast majority of those actually present on the day: the protestors. In a surreal inversion of meanings worthy of Orwellian status, “the public” had to be protected from … the public.

As Musab Younis’s piece on this website showcases, it took a great show of discipline by the media to ignore this basic truth. Everyone ‘knew’, it was reasoned, that the only right the protestors were allowed to claim was the right not to be beaten up too badly. By the same token, the right to be kept safe while exercising a basic democratic prerogative was something protestors had somehow automatically foregone through their impudent act of lèse-majesté towards the powers that be.

These are powerful reminders of the monumental challenges lying ahead for the protest/peace movement but also, more encouragingly, a sign that attention is being paid.

Indeed, the extend of the state’s efforts to curb our civil liberties and stifle our right to protest is the very indication of the necessity and relevance of our peace movement and also, ultimately, of its inevitable success …

Vive la revolucion!

Peace etc.,
Hich

HMP Canterbury (July 2009)

This magazine is many things. It is an invitation, a call-to-arms and a cri-de-cœur. But above all it is a labour of love and we want you to share with us the utter joy and pride we feel in bringing it out to the world, time after time, edition after edition, against all odds.

In this issue, we have an unprecedented range of interviews: with Noam Chomsky, unarguably “the greatest intellectual alive”; Michael Albert, the founding father (or uncle) of Participatory Economics and Znet; Norman Finkelstein, the US firebrand academic and bestselling author of Beyond Chutzpah, and Gavin Hayes, General Secretary of the influential pressure group Compass.

We have news and comment, a number of feature articles tackling grand political themes, as well as pieces on books and music. We believe our world needs everyone of us to be aware, informed, atuned and we believe the contents of this magazine will set you thinking about possibilities, hopes and challenges.

For anyone who wants to understand the world, to find out what the issues of our time are and how we can best address them, this magazine is not a bad place to start. Please join us, read the magazine, visit our website, subscribe if you can and tell all your friends, they’ll thank you for it.

Welcome aboard and enjoy!

Peace, etc.
Hicham

Hicham Yezza

In “Karma Police” their zany ode to the disenfranchised, Thom Yorke sings: ‘I’ve given it all I can/ But we’re still on the payroll.’

Without wanting to indulge in a fanciful over-arching reading, this is quite a brilliant encapsulation of what the band’s primary theme, its force motrice, has been since its inception: that of the inexorable human condition of being part of a society that refuses to acknowledge your individuality yet doesn’t offer you a way out. A prisoner’s dilemma for our emotionally bankrupt age.

It is debatable how much of Radiohead’s rise to global stardom in the mid-90s owed to the transfer of loyalty that ensued from the disappearance from the other great band with a claim to the alienation niche, Nirvana. It is certainly the case that Radiohead’s initial efforts were heavily embued with the Seattle-sound of Generation X angst. But their own brand of beneath-the-skin empathy is unmistakably theirs and always will be.

The most surprising thing to have happened to Radiohead is that they are now a byword for brave musical experimentation. It could have all gone so very wrong – yet it didn’t. They patently hold most of what passes in the music industry for common wisdom in utter disdain. When “Creep” their mega hit of 1992 launched them as a mainstream success, everyone expected them to do the wise thing: More of the same, please!

Instead, they released “The Bends”, a sinewy collection of solid, noisy, relentless sketches to the dismayed admiration of critics and fans alike. Indeed, the whimsical bathetic wailings of “Amnesiac”, their fifth album (2001), would’ve been considered commercially suicidal by almost any other band in the world but they seemed to relish a taste for perpetual wrong footing of their audiences.

The nearest cultural outfit one can think of to their brand of re-invention-lite is not another band but actually a different sort of artist altogether: Mr Ricky Gervais of ‘The Office’ and ‘Extras’ fame. If you think this is a laboured analogy, bear with me: Gervais’ sure-footed evolution from masterful cringe-merchant to the uber spokesman for good-hearted cynicism seems with hindsight like an obvious strategic repositioning but it was a gigantic risk at the time and had, at its heart, a careful sense that artistic stagantation. Even at the very top is the kiss of death for any artist worth their salt. Likewise, Radiohead have simply refused to play the game they were so comfortably winning. A very commendable position – and one that has, fortunately for them and for us, paid off handsomely in the shape of sustained commercial and critical stature.

At a recent gig in Manchester in June, there was a moment when “Karma Police” was reaching its apotheosis and the crowd, lathered in quasi-religious togetherness, heaved side to side to the lyrics. For a minute now, I lost myself, I lost myself. After twenty years on the road (and the couch?), the point was still the same: losing yourself maybe the best thing that can happen to you. Radiohead keep striving to lose “Radiohead” only to come up for air, zelig like, transformed into something stranger, hazier and as hard to corner as ever. We protest of course, but we do so with a beaming smile.

Do you believe in free speech? Do you believe in open debate? Do you believe in in-depth analysis and no-nonsense opinions? If your answer to all these questions is to the affirmative then Ceasefire Magazine needs you.

This is our fifth year and we believe the need for a radical forum of opinions and ideas is more acute and more pressing than ever. The fourth estate has always maintained an uneasy relationship with the powers of the day, but it’s virtually impossible to be a truly independent journal these days when faced with the daunting pressures that afflict the press as a matter of course: financial strains, institutional pressures, censorship (including self-censorship) – all the way to the most overt kind of bullying. But publish we must. “Speak truth to power” we shall. We believe in the power of ideas and we would like you, dear readers, to join us in our quest for a more sustainable, better-run world. Idealism is dismissed as an irrelevant luxury in a world dominated by cynicism and realpolitik. Well idealism might be redundant, but idealists certainly not. From Martin Luther King to Mandela, it’s the very people who think the unthinkable that make the impossible … possible.

So join our team: write, design, report, and create for us. Subscribe to our magazine and help us make it a powerful beacon of free thought. Do it all, and do it now.
We’ll be waiting.
Peace, etc.

Hicham Yezza

Hich Yezza

February 2006

It has now been five years since the drum roll for the invasion/occupation of Iraq started, and how little change do five years bring! The same coarsening of the rhetoric, the same invocation of imminent threats to the very stability of the space-time continuum that we had heard in reference to Iraq are now being hastily reheated around Iran. Of course, certain things have changed. Bush & Co. have all but squandered the moral capital they had garnered post-911, which has meant the docile domestic consensus is now replaced by increasingly vocal opposition by the democrats as well as the wider anti-war movement. Militarily, the possibility of a full-scale US invasion is almost non-existent after the debacle in Iraq. No doubt, however, some form of military aggression is being considered (and planned, according to some analysts). Not only is this against international law (anyone remembers this?) but it would almost certainly result in the current Middle-Eastern chaos multiplying a thousand-fold. Iran has made its intentions very clear about retaliating if attacked and most military experts agree that it has the means to deliver on its word. The major issue, of course, when it comes to nuclear disarmament is the fact that the international treaties, signed with great fanfare since the seventies have little or no meaning to anyone but the very weak. The top nuclear nations have made a mockery of their commitment to engage in a worldwide effort to rid the planet of these catastrophes-in-waiting. For those nations queuing up to join the Nuclear VIP club, there is no better incentive to hurry in their efforts than to see the respect and regard accorded to those who have gone down that path: India, Pakistan, Israel are virtually immune to any form of military pressure and they know it. Even the tiny North Korea openly taunts Bush and his impotence to do anything remotely belligerent against the third member of the infamous “axis”. Indeed, at the time when Iraq was pleading with the world that they had no WMDs, North Korean officials were virtually screaming from the rooftops to anyone who’d listen that not only they possessed the fabled Nukes but were not afraid to use them. The US reaction to those two very different messages (Attacking the first, and pleading with China to reason with the second) has been a very eloquent lesson to all those third world nations worried about being bullied by the world’s sole super power. Nuclear disarmament might not be the cause of the moment, but it will not go away and though it’s not too late to do something about it, time is running out, fast.

Visit www.cnduk.org for more information.