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“He should have a Nobel prize,” says the first person I speak to.

The immense Logan Hall at Bloomsbury Square is completely full and we are sitting, along with hundreds of others, in an adjoining room served by a live video link. It is the School of Oriental and African Studies’ largest ever lecture crowd and there is an air of anticipation. Noam Chomsky – linguist, philosopher, critic, polymath – is about to appear on stage. At almost 81, this is likely to be his last visit to London.

I am speaking to members of the audience at random, asking them why they have come to the lecture. The first person I have picked turns out to be a noted professor of philosophy. Has he been aware of Chomsky for a long time?

“Everyone in the world’s been aware of Chomsky for a long time,” he says, laughing, “unless they’re not literate.”

The audience is one of the most diverse I’ve ever seen. A couple of rows in front of the professor sit students Michael, Andrew and Marika, all in their twenties. “My housemate told me about this lecture,” says Michael. “I’ve only ever seen him on YouTube.”

In a three-day visit to London, entirely unadvertised except for small notices on LSE and SOAS websites, each of Chomsky’s three public talks is surrounded by huge crowds of people without tickets, desperate to get in.

Chomsky’s genius is undisputed (even by his enemies) and his astounding productivity over half a century is the stuff of legend, though often bemoaned as providing an impossible standard for others to meet: his first book, Syntactic Structures, was published a full fifty-two years ago, in 1957 – it is still in print – while his latest book, Hopes and Prospects, is scheduled for publication in 2010.

But you could still be forgiven, at first, for wondering what all the fuss is about: he speaks in a low tone, at times barely audible, with no appeal to rhetoric.

It is the substance that everyone has come for, though, and there is plenty of it. His lectures are extraordinarily wide-ranging: the Congo, Cuba, Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Latin America, Britain, Iraq, the US and China are all given detailed analyses; over two hours are devoted to the Middle East. Topics range from hard-headed geopolitical analysis to a discursion into Cartesian philosophy.

In an era where politicians and the media commonly decry the “apathy” of the public, the thousands who came to listen to Chomsky demonstrated that there remains a ravenous appetite for serious political analysis. And the huge success of a lecture tour by an icon of libertarian socialism is even more impressive at a time when Britain is said to be swinging inexorably to the right,.

The main thrust of Chomsky’s message was that our current economic and political model has led us to the point where the very survival of our species is far from certain. The threefold threats of climate change, nuclear destruction and mass poverty and starvation are the results, Chomsky believes, of a worldwide politico-economic system which has privileged the wealth and power of a tiny minority above the survival of all.

To make matters worse, Obama has shown no sign of substantial change: his campaign was funded mainly by the very same large corporate institutions which are to blame for our current predicament. The US president has also escalated the ongoing onslaught along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border, still intends to control Middle Eastern resources, continues the ‘extraordinary rendition’ policy of worldwide CIA kidnap, and has taken no action to stop illegal Israeli settlement-building in the West Bank.

Chomsky is so unassuming that only occasionally are you reminded of his stature. One of those moments was at his LSE lecture, when he mentioned as an aside how he had been at the LSE a full forty years ago, in 1969, delivering a lecture at the invitation of philosophical giant Karl Popper.

Another was during a small reception held after a lecture at SOAS two days earlier, when he quietly explained to a Lithuanian student the detailed history of anti-Semitism in her country which predated, contrary to her assumptions, the Nazi invasion. She looked shocked. “I bet they didn’t teach you that in school,” he said wryly.

“He is the great moral judge of this age,” says the professor in the SOAS lecture, as a hush descends in anticipation of Chomsky’s emergence, “outstanding above all others.” The thousands who gave him a standing ovation in London last month – some of them arriving six hours early to queue for front row seats – seem to agree.

For a wide selection of Chomsky’s latest articles, visit www.chomsky.info

VICE Magazine interviewed Noam Chomsky during this lecture series. The interviewer was Kate Albright-Hanna, who was Director of Video for New Media on the Obama campaign in 2008.

http://www.vbs.tv/watch/vbs-meets/vbs-meets-noam-chomsky

US military intervention in Africa, writes Adam Elliott-Cooper, is premised on a Western understanding of a global racial hierarchy in which Africans are at the bottom.

Racism has been endemic in Western foreign policy for centuries. When the Spanish arrived in what they called the ‘West Indies’ in 1540, they saw the indigenous people as vermin – no life was worth sparing. A critic of Spanish colonialism in the ‘New World’, Bartolomé de las Casas (1484-1566), described the actions of the settlers: “All those captured – pregnant women, mothers of newborn babies, children and old men – were thrown into the pits and impaled alive”.

The relevance of race and racism has not been prominent in the study of international relations, despite glaring differences in economic and military power between the predominantly white ‘North’ and the overwhelmingly black ‘South’. Colonial legacies, which have left destruction and suffering in their wake, have been exacerbated by economic policies unimaginable in Europe or the USA.

The inhuman treatment of non-Europeans, the global majority, simply because they stand in the way of economic resources or military gains, has been standard practice for the makers of Western foreign policy. Hundreds of years after de las Casas wrote of the horrors of colonialism, those of European descent continued to enslave, plunder and exterminate indigenous peoples around the globe. As Kipling described it, this was their burden: “Send forth the best ye breed/ Go bind your sons to exile/ To serve your captives’ need”.

European racism was of course resisted, and its criticism was published in western literature as soon as non-Europeans gained access to the Western media. The most notable exposition of the effects of racism on the psyche of both colonisers and colonised is found in the works of Frantz Fanon (1925-1961) and Edward Said (1935-2003). These fathers of postcolonial studies developed a crucial framework for the understanding of Western intervention in Africa. Fanon highlights the contradictions of colonialism as follows: “Black Africa is looked on as a region that is inert, brutal, uncivilised” even though “[d]eportations, massacres, forced labour and slavery have been the main methods used by [western] capitalism to increase its wealth . . . and establish its power [in Africa]”. Even today, Europe and the USA profit greatly from goods that are sourced under slave-like conditions (such as sweatshops) – yet they rarely question their own morality in intervening in conflicts in which they have often helped to start or exacerbate.

The Somalia case

In 1992, Somalia was dubbed a ‘failed state’ by Western academics, citing the breakdown of Western-style political institutions and infrastructure. This judgement led the US-led UN task force to claim that they could restore law and order (helpfully ignoring the fact that Said Barre, the ruthless dictator spreading violence and suffering across Somalia, had been backed, funded and militarised by the US ever since he had come to power.)

Somalia was the first external military intervention in Africa since the end of the Cold War. The country had been fought over by the US and USSR a number of times via proxy wars in the postwar period, and the US saw the 1992 intervention as a chance to assert dominance as the global superpower in a unipolar word. Noam Chomsky dubbed it “a PR operation for the Pentagon”. Such a PR operation could only be conceived in a framework of US superiority: Africans were perceived as different to people of European descent – the ‘other’.

The ‘good intentions’ of the US mission in Somalia are usually stressed. The US mission statement was described by Chester Crocker, former Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs, as a “sweepingly ambitious new ‘nation-building’ resolution”. But what made the US think they had the power to enter a country to stop a civil war and end a famine? More importantly, what made the US think they had a moral superiority over the Somali people that qualified them to determine the way in which their state was run? The US government dictated to the Somali people (and to the rest of the world) who they would install as the new leader of their country. Edward Said sums up this mentality as “the universal discourse of modern Europe and the US” who “assume the silence, willing or otherwise, of the non-European world”. Such sentiments are reflected in mainstream Western media: the Wall Street Journal despairingly states that “modern day colonialism may be the only policy that can prevent more tragedies in Somalia, and perhaps elsewhere in Africa”. This paternalistic attitude towards Africans is a further indication of the racism that has been burned into the minds of the American mainstream.

A further US attack on Somalia killed four people and wounded 20 in early 2008. The Pentagon claimed they were targeting a known al-Qaeda terrorist inside Somalia – yet despite the attack constituting a clear breach of international law, the US was not subject to any investigation. In fact according to the BBC, the US Defense Department spokesman Bryan Whitman “refused to give the identity of the target, whether the strike had achieved its goal or how the strike had been carried out”.

Such arrogance and contempt for international human rights serves as an expression of the racial superiority that international actors of European descent feel they have over Africans. Such apologias for neo-colonialism – including bombing raids in the name of national security – are entrenched in western media.

9/11 and Sudan

It is often stated that national security concerns justify pre-emptive action as part of the so-called ‘war on terror’.

In 1998 the US bombed and destroyed a pharmaceutical factory in Sudan called al-Shifa, which was the main source of anti-malarial and veterinary medicines in the region, and essential for a predominantly agricultural country with many health problems (due, in part, to the ongoing conflict).

The US government insisted that the attack, dubbed ‘Operation Infinite Reach’ was a response to attacks on US embassies in Tanzania and Kenya a few days earlier. They also claimed that the factory was producing a VX nerve agent (classified as a WMD by the Chemical Weapons Convention) and that the owners of the medicine factory had ties with al-Qaeda.

The allegations of VX nerve agent production came from a CIA operation that found EMPTA (a compound used in VX) in a single soil sample taken from outside the factory. However, as EMPTA is also used in the production of industrial products such as plastic, it is therefore not banned under the Chemical Weapons Convention. As the New York Times notes: “Officials later said that there was no proof that the plant had been manufacturing or storing nerve gas, as initially suspected by the Americans, or had been linked to Osama bin Laden … no apology has been made and no restitution offered.”

It is impossible to say how many Africans died as a result of the ensuing shortages of human and veterinary medicine (the few serious estimates put the number at many thousands). But this is obviously beside the point. As Noam Chomsky points out, the ruling political elite in America uses such military forays to enable it to ignore popular calls for reforms such as for a state-based universal health service, improved schools or job creation.

Yet such diversion would not be possible if there did not already exist an underlying assumption of US moral and intellectual superiority in a global racial hierarchy. The implementation of foreign policy, from ‘humanitarian’ military intervention to the ‘war on terror’, can be – and is being – used as an effective tool in diverting the attention of western populations away from the problems in their own countries.

The destroyed lives of Africans are, at the most, little more than a slightly unpleasant afterthought.

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)

Hicham Yezza

Sixty books, hundreds of academic papers, thousands of lectures, interviews and talks over five continents and five decades: at 80, Noam Chomsky is an intellectual, cultural and personal phenomenon. Yet the more interesting thing about the man is probably the fact that he seems completely unfazed, when not downright irritated, at his status as the “Elvis of Academia” (as U2’s Bono calls him).

Thousands of pages have already been written about the man’s personal and intellectual journey from teenage prodigy to acclaimed scholar and the world’s foremost public intellectual. However, September 2008 is a good month to be taking a look at the man’s achievements and positions on the economy. As far back as the late 1960s, Chomsky mounted a robust attack on the economic tenets of unregulated market capitalism. In particular, he denounced the corporate habit of whining about too much government control when the economic going is good only to protest at the need for the government to “intervene” to assist (i.e. bail out) those same corporate interests when the going isn’t so good.

Those who have been observing at close range the unfolding economic disaster on Wall Street and beyond this past year have noted the powerful parallels between the Chomskyan critique of corporate greed and the predictable cries for help emanating from Lehman Brothers, Merrill Lynch and other stalwarts of Market Capitalism.

When Lehman Brothers filed for bankruptcy in Mid-September, straight-faced analysts and business leaders expressed shock at how the company was “allowed to fail” by the federal authorities. A peculiar formulation that you are unlikely to see used when talking about blue-collar workers “allowed” to be made redundant. The incredible assumption of course, was that the tax payer was supposedly a stakeholder (as management-speak has it) in a corporation’s survival when is in trouble but should be a mere bystander when multi-billion dollar profits are being raked in.

Chomsky’s “academic” work is now seminal and whether you agree with its tenets or not, it is undeniable that he has reshaped (indeed, fundamentally altered) the face of linguistics and cognitive theory. There is a common tendency to dismiss his non-linguistics forays into nedia criticism, political theory and foreign affairs as naïve, simple-minded and extremist. But it is precisely those efforts that have highlighted his continued relevance as a master expositor, analyst and educator. It is easy to underestimate the impact of his demystifying, no-nonsense approach as a writer and speaker on generations of activists, intellectuals and readers. But his attack on the academic disease of fetishising “language as obfuscation” has been very effective in exposing the growing tendency of academic circles to establish intellectual niches seemingly inaccessible to the layman/woman (and, as Chomsky has shown repeatedly, often deliberately so) by creating unsurmountable barriers of entry to those members of the public without the necessary qualifications or bona fides: obscure jargon, layers of intellectual meta-structures to mask simple (rather than simplistic) truisms and a taste for the convoluted and the oblique (notably his attack on certain exponents of postmodernism and literary theory).

Whether he is seen as a prophet or a charlatan, Chomsky certainly leaves very few indifferent. And it is this ability to bring out the mind of his listener out of its atrophied comfort that continues to excite and stimulate. In his interview with Ceasefire – the first of two parts – you can see the trademark rigour, intellectual honesty and genuine humility that have characterized his life and his work. His profile as the “world’s greatest intellectual” (a formulation he has incidentally denounced as meaningless) certainly shows no signs of diminishing. Whenever a major crisis erupts (9/11, The Iraq War, The Georgian War), or a major event takes place, Chomsky’s opinion on the matter is always quickly solicited (and dissected) by disciples and foes alike. This is as good a definition of “being relevant” as you’re likely to find.

Ultimately, whether as oracle or as nemesis, Chomsky’s relevance is set to continue for many decades to come. As far as we’re concerned: Amen to that!

The interview

August 18, 2008

Is a two-state solution to the Middle-East conflict still possible? Edward Said ended up supporting a binational-state position.

A two-state settlement in accord with the very broad and longstanding international consensus remains possible. An agreement along those lines was almost reached at Taba Egypt in January 2001, the one significant departure of the US and Israel from the rejectionist stand that has been primarily responsible for undermining this outcome. And though there have been changes for the worse since, they are not irreversible.

My own view, since I reached political consciousness in the 1940s, is that a binational state would be the most reasonable solution for all concerned. From 1967 to the mid-1970s, steps could have been taken towards federalism and in the longer term binationalism. I wrote and spoke about the matter quite extensively at the time. By the mid-1970s, that opportunity was lost, and the only way to approach federalism and closer integration is in stages, the first stage being a two-state settlement. It is intriguing that when the proposal was feasible, it elicited utter outrage, but now that it is not feasible (except as a late stage in a long-term project), it is welcomed within the mainstream (New York Times, New York Review, etc.). The reason, I suspect, is that the proposal is basically a gift to hard-line rejectionists, who can claim that “they want to destroy us” so we had better take all we can.

We should attend carefully to the crucial distinction between proposal and advocacy. We can propose that everyone should live in peace and harmony. It rises to the level of advocacy when we sketch a feasible path from here to there. The only advocacy of a binational state that I know of is the one I described: in stages, beginning with a two-state settlement.

Supporters of a one-state settlement often argue that if Israel takes over all of Palestine, it will face an internal struggle for civil rights resembling the anti-apartheid movement. That is an illusion, however. Israel and the US can simply persist in their current programs of incorporating whatever is of value to them within Israel, while taking no responsibility for Palestinians in the scattered fragments that remain, and leaving them to rot and turn on each other, as is happening in Gaza.

Do you think there is a real chance that anarcho-syndicalism will ever be implemented on a large scale?

Prediction in human affairs is a very uncertain enterprise. Too much depends on will and choice.

There is also little point in speculation. Those who regard these ideals as worth pursuing should do what they can to lay the basis for implementing them, whatever their (necessarily uninformed) guesses as to the likelihood of success.

Do you agree that the 21st century will be dominated by the rise of China and India? If so, would this be a positive or negative development?

Looking over a long historical stretch, China and India are now beginning to recover their leading role in the global economy up to the 18th century, before they were crushed by Western (later also Japanese) imperialism. It is highly questionable, I believe, whether they can return to anything like the status they once had. Both countries face enormous internal problems, social and environmental. As one illustration, in the latest Human Development Index China ranks 81st and India 128th (about where it was when the neoliberal reforms were initiated 15 years ago). That is only one indication of very severe problems, which it will not be easy to overcome. Any progress they make should be, on balance, a positive development, though the world is too complex for any simple judgment.

Do you think the global anti-war movement has failed to achieve a critical mass of support over the past five years?

The notion “critical mass” is not well enough defined to respond. It has registered achievements as well as failures. Take Iraq. It has failed to bring the war to an end, but it has succeeded in preventing US escalation to anything remotely like the level of Vietnam. The “why” question would require a lengthy disquisition, not a brief response.

Does the term “public intellectual” still carry any meaningful weight in the 21st century? do they have a role to play?

As much as ever.

Hicham Yezza

On 8th April 2009, 12 students (of whom 11 were Pakistani nationals) were arrested with great fanfare in the Greater Manchester area. A “big plot” had been foiled, announced Gordon Brown gravely on the very first day, presumably in case people were intending to wait for such insignificant trivia as ‘facts’ and ‘evidence’ before passing judgement.

Unsurprisingly, all were released within thirteen days, without charge and without any apologies or, indeed any signs of humility from those in charge of the operation.

Instead, to the injury of having their lives ruined and their reputations damaged beyond repair was added the insult of being unceremoniously dumped, head first, onto the deportation convoy.

How the ‘evidence’ against the men was insufficient to charge them with as much as an ASBO but enough to declare them to be serious threats to our ‘national security’ was an absurdity too obvious for many media outlets to notice. Instead, we saw a hurried re-heating of the ‘you can’t be too safe’ litanies. Once again, the commentaries’ reaction was predictably monochrome: it was widely accepted that arresting those innocent men on the flimsiest of evidence was a win-win situation for all concerned.

Equally obvious was the fact that the students themselves, their families and their communities were excluded from the particular calculus, for one obvious reason: they did not matter.

A typical example could be found in an analytical piece in The Guardian on April 23 by Sandra Laville instructively titled ‘Police weigh red faces against atrocity’, the concluding sentence of which reads: “It is the police’s job to take decisions based on assessing risks. And more than any other agency they are likely to press for quick action in the knowledge that a few red faces are worth it if a bigger crime is averted”. It gets worse – in a piece addressing the issue of the ‘cost’ of wrongful arrests, there is zero mention of the cataclysmic impact on those arrested and their families. The writer had, in other words ‘correctly’ understood the inherent assumptions and the readers, as always, were expected to follow suit.

Of course, anyone serious enough about discussing the consequences of such police incompetence could easily point out the extreme damage it causes to the communities they affect, often exacerbating the very dangers allegedly been combated.

But again, this is too obvious a point for serious commentators to linger on. Unfortunately, until the politicised nature of anti-terror policing is expunged, innocent victims will continue to be arrested and immigration rules will continue to be used to clean up the resulting mess and, yes, to protect a few red faces.

For more information on the ‘Justice for the North West 10′ campaign, click here.

Murray Goulden

Away from the gaze of mainstream media and politics, there is a vibrant, growing subculture which holds both institutions responsible for the most heinous acts of brutality and deceit. It is political movement that, in size, dwarfs anything that might traditionally be labelled ‘radical’. The numbers in its ranks are impossible to know, but the youtube videos through which it channels its messages receive hits in the millions, as do the multitude of websites around which it is organised. The level of popular acceptance of some of its key tenets are known however, and they are striking. An Ohio University poll in 2006 found that a third of American’s believed the events of 9/11 were in some way abetted by the federal government, about the same percentage of American’s that voted Bush in for his second term two years earlier. Amongst young adults polled, those believing the official account of what happened on 11th September 2001 were actually in the minority. The ‘Truther’ movement, as they call themselves, is an elephant in the halls of power; a mainstream radical movement.

For those who are used to occupying the fringes of political thought, these are astonishing figures. Truther’s do not limit themselves solely to the events of one day in September either; under the New World Order (NWO) mantle they have assembled a dense scaffold of conspiracies encompassing all the major events of modern history, the current economic troubles included. The mainstream media’s unwillingness to report this phenomenon is perhaps understandable. Their discomfort in dealing with Truther groups should be no surprise, for Truthers hold dear assumptions that deny the media establishment its legitimacy. The reliance of the media on ‘official’ sources of information – politicians; security services; lobbyists; PR spokespersons – all are, by definition, rendered suspect by conspiracists. The media organisations themselves are too a part of this self-serving elite whose interest is not in justice or truth, but merely the promotion of the status quo.

In this, the Truther movement has much in common with other radical political movements, yet the radical should be careful of celebrating the success of it. Whenever one stops to consider the apparently concrete walls between the concepts by which we order society, one quickly finds the immutable to be nothing more solid than sand. Such is the case when separating the different systems thorough which we create, and act upon, knowledge. A religious church can quickly become a political movement; a political idea rapidly transformed into a scientific fact. Watching celebrity atheist Richard Dawkins, haranguing a Christian with fevered conviction as only a man witness to the One Truth can, one quickly beings to question who amongst the participants is the man of reason, and who the religious fanatic.

The appearance of the Truther cause as a political movement is similarly fluid. At the heart of all Truther accounts is, it seems, an overarching, invisible, omnipotent elite, engineering building collapses as easily as they engineer global economic collapse (of which they are also accused). These superhuman individuals appear to be gods in all but name. Truther’s readily engage in scientific analyses of the events of 9/11, yet such is the power and reach of the controlling elites, that any evidence contradictory to the Truther can be dismissed as lies, its proponents mere pawns of the powerful. In light of these characteristics, the Truther movements appears more as a secular, scientific religion.

We live in a time when mainstream political ideology encompasses nothing more inspirational than ‘triangulation’ and the race for the middle ground. Radical politics, meanwhile, is hamstrung by the complexities demanded by the numerous challenges it finds itself in opposition against. The difficulty of extracting a coherent message from the many actors which made up the recent G20 protests attests to this. The Truther movement is different however. The young, angry and inquisitive are easily drawn to revolutionary political movements, but here there is no abstract, nebulous ’system’ tackle; no ghost to try and hurl one’s self against. Here, the bad guys are easily identifiable, for the secrecy in which they operate is paradoxically no barrier to their unmasking, whether it be the Bilderberg Group, Illuminati, Elders of Zion, or any of the other shadowy actors leading the march of the NWO. For such individuals, the Truther movement offers the authority of science and the certainty of religion to create a compelling ideology, and so its success in drawing activists away from more traditional radical movements is unsurprising. It has no need for the difficult questions of what should come instead of the status quo, for it only exists in opposition to what is. To offer answers to such questions would seem impossible, for the political and economic landscape which the traditional radical seeks to challenge is here rendered nothing more than a puppet show, a shadow on the cave wall. The true power is unseen. Furthermore, and of particular worry to the radical, in its invocation of adversaries of supernatural ability, it serves only to entrench the established order. How does an individual even begin to challenge a group capable of orchestrating what these elites are accused of, a group which exists outside the reality of mainstream culture, and so beyond its reach?

Truther accounts of 9/11 feed on any perceived coincidence, mistake or unknown. Why was the US airforce running war games on the day of the attacks which confused efforts to respond to the hijacks? Why did the towers fall as they did, and when no skyscrapers have previously collapsed due to fire? Why was so little debris visible at the Pentagon crash site? The key assumption underpinning these questions, as one might expect from a religious account, is that complete knowledge of an event is possible, and that everything happens for a reason. There is little sign here of postmodernism; of Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle, or of Chaos Theory’s irreducible complexity. Instead we have only the ordered execution of labyrinthine plans. That many Truther explanations are in themselves more incredible than any official version seems to go unremarked. Is an account in which the towers were secretly wired with explosives really more plausible than the version which holds the impact of jumbo jets laden with fuel responsible for the collapses?

The actual specifics of Truther claims of 9/11 are so detailed, and various, that it is impossible to consider them in detail here. It is perhaps though worth acknowledging that, in the author’s own view, it is not impossible that elements of the US security services had foreknowledge of the attacks, and chose to let them happen to further their ideologies. This is, however, a world away from the idea of a fully orchestrated ‘inside job’, and the superhuman elite required to achieve such a feat. Regardless, I am more of the opinion stated by Chomsky: that in a sense it doesn’t really matter if 9/11 was an inside job. The conspiracy claims will never be satisfactorily answered, and merely distract from what we do know, which is that the Neo-Conservatives exploited the attacks to pursue their policies with lethal conviction for seven disastrous years, whilst a supine media did little more than flag-wave from the sidelines. Besides, as Richard Curtis’ Power of Nightmares shows so well, ultimately there is little more to separate Neo-Con statesman from Al-Qaeda operative than conventions of dress, and more comfortable living arrangements.

There is, however, one particular element of the 9/11 attacks that does stand out from all the smoke and debris of that day. Eight years after the attacks, we still await the release, by the US government, of footage showing the plane hitting the Pentagon. The decision to show the comically ambiguous two frames of footage from a nearby garage forecourt security camera, which may or may not show the nose of Flight 77, only adds to the confusion. It may be that this is evidence, as Truther’s state, that it was in fact a missile, not a plane, that struck the Pentagon. More likely, the US security establishment is unsold on the idea of showing the world its most potent symbol being struck a fearsome blow by a group of Muslim fanatics armed with Stanley Knives.

There is a third explanation for the non-appearance of these tapes, which brings us conveniently full circle. That some clear sighted individuals in the halls of power recognise that the Truther movement is a dead end, a useful sideshow with which to distract those most sure to be its critics. Truther’s are of course no homogeneous entity – there is no single Truther account, and there is no archetypical adherent. The Ohio University poll found though that “Members of racial and ethnic minorities, people with only a high school education and Democrats were especially likely to suspect federal involvement in 9/11.” One more easily associates these groups with radical than Republican politics, so why not allow the disaffected to disenfranchise themselves? Hand them the means to convince themselves of the unerring control with which you orchestrate events, whilst you in truth ham-fistedly bumble from one crisis to the next.

We have then a conspiracy conspiracy, designed to rob the radical left of foot soldiers by creating doubt and suspicion where there need be none.

Hey, its more plausible than the missile theory.

Further Reading:
www.911truth.org
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_World_Order_(conspiracy_theory)
http://www.infowars.com/
The Obama Deception: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eAaQNACwaLw
Loose Change: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7E3oIbO0AWE

Proportional representation, like freedom of speech, is a chum of demagogic racism. The BNP have aimed their sights at this alien electoral system in the June EU Parliament elections and for good reason: just 9% of the vote in the North West would give them a realistic chance of winning their first ever Parliamentary seat (they polled 6.4% last time).

The BNP have been making ground in local elections, now with 56 councillors on principle local authorities. In most by-elections they have contested this year, they have significantly increased their vote share. In an deadening victory in the formerly safe Labour ward of Swanley St. Mary’s in Sevenoaks, Kent, they increased their vote share by 41.8%. It is not uncommon to see the BNP come second or third in local elections. By combining their core vote and the raspberry (or ‘Fuck You’) vote, they have been taking a similar electoral role to the Liberal Democrats. This new popularity, combined with an electoral system that rewards minority parties, lubricates their chances of gaining MEPs in June. This matters because the more power they get, the less taboo they are. This nation of quiet racists will feel less shame at the ballot box.

There are broad similarities between local and European elections in the way they are contested and the way people vote. Traditionally, the turnout is low and the anti-government vote high. Minority parties flood pliable areas with resources, to maximise their chances of getting somebody elected. This is what the BNP are doing in the North West and West Midlands. On top of an intense, repetitive canvassing and fund raising campaign, their advertising has been audacious. This includes use of mobile adverts demanding British jobs for British workers, known as ‘Truth Trucks’, and promotional stalls in every town centre in Cumbria and the Black Country. Their Fuhrer, Nick Griffin, tops their list of candidates in the North West region and their Deputy Fuhrer, Simon Darby, tops the list in the West Midlands. Though EU enlargement means less seats to go around, they still have a healthy chance; in the former region they missed a seat in the 2004 elections by 1.5% of the vote share, in the latter their shortfall was 1.7%. Mr. Griffin has stepped down from his usual duties to concentrate solely on the European elections. This has primarily involved fund raising road shows, giving speeches comparing the BNP’s electoral campaign to the 1940 Battle of Britain. He also just released a video of himself at the Whitehall Cenotaph, conflating donation to the BNP’s campaign fund with honourable sacrifice in a World War. This hallucinatory rhetoric will resonate with some.

To conclude, all it will take for the BNP to win seats at the European Parliament is for them to mobilise (already happening) and for UKIP to do less well (likely). In a sense, the d’Hondt voting system is too democratic. By compromising with minority parties, it gives the oxygen of publicity to fascists.

“Anti-capitalist protesters embarked upon a wrecking spree within a City branch of the Royal Bank of Scotland today,” shrieked The Times on April 1, “and engaged in running battles with police as G20 demonstrations turned violent. Police were forced to use dogs, horses and truncheons to control a crowd of up to 5,000 people who marched on the Bank of England, in Threadneedle Street, on the eve of the London summit.”

This narrative of events is entirely typical. Under the headline “Police clash with G20 protestors”, the BBC reported that “protesters stormed a London office of the Royal Bank of Scotland”, adding: “officers later used ‘containment’ then ‘controlled dispersal’” (BBC, April 1). The Guardian reported: “The G20 protests in central London turned violent today ahead of tomorrow’s summit, with a band of demonstrators close to the Bank of England storming a Royal Bank of Scotland branch … [S]ome bloody skirmishes broke out as police tried to keep thousands of people in containment pens” (The Guardian, April 1).

What is interesting about this narrative is that it precisely reverses the events of the day.

Eyewitness accounts of the day agree that the police began the now-infamous tactic of ‘kettling’ protestors – refusing to allow anyone in or out of a confined space held by police lines – as soon as the four marches had converged on the Bank of England, at around midday. An article in The Times a day earlier by a former Assistant Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, Andy Hayman, suggested that the police had planned to use this tactic well in advance: “Tactics to herd the crowd into a pen, known as ‘the kettle’, have been criticised heavily before, yet the police will not want groups splintering away from the main crowd. This would stretch their resources” (The Times, March 31).

Note that the “violent outburst” (Telegraph) of window-breaking took place hours after the police had decided to “herd the crowd” of at least 5,000 people “into a pen” without access to food, water or toilet facilities – and without allowing them to leave.

The press was surely aware of this. The Guardian’s live blog from the day noted at 11.57 a.m. that “the barriers designed to fence in the protesters are not big enough”, an hour later it confirms that there is “a ‘kettle’ at the Bank of England”: half an hour later they report “clashes” and finally, at 1.30 p.m., “a window has been smashed.” An objective observer of the sequence of events here might ask whether the police ‘kettle’ had in fact been responsible for the “clashes”, “violence” and smashed window.

But this idea – that the kettle might have provoked the “clashes”, and that the police might therefore be responsible for the “violence” – is remarkably absent from virtually all of the reams of press coverage of the protests. We do, of course, have a spectrum of opinion: whereas the right-wing Daily Mail sees the protestors as “a fearsome group of thugs”, a “bizarre group of misfits” fuelled by “Dutch courage” and a “willingness to use violence” (April 1), for the left-wing Guardian only “a minority of demonstrators seemed determined to cause damage” whilst “much of the protesting” was “peaceful” (April 1).

Again, the notion that there was not a “violent” core of demonstrators at all, but that people were provoked into “clashes” with the police due to police tactics, is absent. Even the article which is by far most critical of the police actions – a piece by Duncan Campbell in The Guardian titled ‘Did police containment cause more trouble than it prevented?’ – only goes as far as to say: “As for the violent clashes that led to cracked heads and limbs, how much was inevitable and how much avoidable?”

Campbell concedes that “some demonstrators were bent on aggro” but adds: “so were some of the officers.” He also criticises the conditions inside the kettle and suggests that it will make people think twice before embarking on a demonstration in future. Thus Campbell suggests the “clashes” were avoidable, but does not indicate that the kettles actually led to the “clashes” – though, to give credit where it is due, his is the only piece in the press which dares to suggest that the police were themselves violent.

“The challenge of policing”

Well before the protests, the press had been reporting with glee the “violence” predicted as “London went into lockdown” and “protestors issued a call to arms” with “police fears” of protestors “intent on violence” (The London Paper, 31 March).

The BBC posted a sympathetic article titled ‘The challenge of policing the G20′ (30 March) which pointed out that: “police officers spend their professional lives trying to play down the public order implications of demonstrations – it’s in their interests to keep things calm.”

“The security strategy of the day,” they reported breathlessly, “resembles a three-dimensional ever-changing puzzle” where “the unknowable factor is the demonstrator bent on violence”. The article ended with a quote from Commander O’Brien: “If anyone wants to come to London to engage in crime or disorder, they will be met with a swift and efficient policing response.”

This flurry of media coverage predicting “violence” from “anarchists” was clearly initiated by the police, who released a barrage of press statements before the protests which served to pre-emptively quell criticism of their actions on the day – actions which had, of course, been planned well in advance. The G20 policing was to be “one of the largest, one of the most challenging, and one of the most complicated operations” ever “delivered” by the Metropolitan Police, according to Commander Simon O’Brien, who hit the press circuit with gusto in the days preceding the G20 (CNN, March 27).

The press obediently played their part by reporting police “fears” word for word, with complete sympathy, and with no question of asking those who planned to protest whether they thought the police reaction might be overly violent. After all, “the police have had to prepare for every possibility” on April 1, noted the Times: “from terrorism to riots” (The Times, March 31).

With ample opportunity to question an unusually talkative police force, barely a single sentence in the press asked whether the police preparation for the protests might be heavy-handed or that a violent reaction by the police to the protests might lead to serious injury or death. The protestors, of course, were to be “violent” “mobs” (based on police “intelligence” gleaned from “social networking sites”), but the police were to be calm, measured and undertake only necessary measures.

The effect of this press coverage was to justify in advance all police actions whilst de-legitimising any actions by protestors. Endless predictions of “violent protestors” meant that all the day’s “clashes” were sure to be blamed on the “minority” of those “intent on violence” – even if evidence suggested that “clashes” were actually instigated by police, and that violence was in the main inflicted by the police on protestors. Within the press narrative, the police are merely reactive; forced to respond to a “violent” situation and “keep things calm”; the notion that they could have actively encouraged and provoked “clashes” seems patently absurd.

So what’s missing?

There are a number of important questions which simply didn’t appear in the press.

a) Did the police intend to ‘kettle’ demonstrators in a confined space regardless of whether there was any violence or not?

All the evidence, including past cases of the police using this tactic, suggests this was the case. (At the Climate Camp protest at Bishopsgate on the same day, the police beat protestors back into a kettle despite them holding up their hands and chanting ‘this is not a riot’, as can clearly be seen on the Indymedia video ‘Riot police attack peaceful protestors at G20 climate camp’).
Is there a possibility that the police were not in fact “forced to use dogs, hoses and truncheons” due to “violent” protestors, but that they inflicted violence on peaceful protestors?

b) Was there really “violence” from the protestors?

The Metropolitan Police state that “small groups of protestors intent on violence, mixed with the crowds of lawful demonstrators” (Met Police, 2 April) and The Guardian quotes Commander Simon O’Brien as claiming there were “small pockets of criminals” within the crowd who attended a memorial for Ian Tomlinson on April 2. Again, eyewitness accounts of both days state that virtually all of the violence came from police. Despite hours of kettling and media reports of “missiles” being thrown at police (translation: plastic bottles), the only tangible evidence of protestor violence at either of the two main protest sites seems to have been some smashed windows, which of course is damage to property and not “violence”.

The Guardian reports that a small group of demonstrators were “seeking confrontation as they surged towards police lines.” Of course you’re expected to sit quietly when you are being held against your will behind police lines and periodically beaten with batons. But is it conceivable that those who “charged” police lines simply wanted to leave? And why is it confrontational to “charge police lines” without using any weapons, but not confrontational to hold thousands of people in an area, keeping them there with kicks and batons? That the protestors could have actually showed remarkable restraint when being provoked in an unbearable situation is laughable according to all the press. Yet this is what eyewitness accounts point to.

Only the Letters page in the Guardian gives any credence to this: one person writes that “the few scuffles we did witness were caused precisely at the frustration of people not being allowed to come and go as they pleased”; another states that: “an ugly mood developed after those who had come to exercise their democratic right to protest were detained against their will” (Guardian, April 3).

c) Were the police tactics responsible for the “violence” of the day?

Because the press has been admirably obedient in reversing the course of events, this is an impossible question – according to the media first there was “violence” from “anarchist” protestors, then the kettle began. Yet once we establish a more accurate chronology, and take into account police prior planning, it seems that it had always been intended to shut thousands of people into an enclosed space without being able to leave.

d) Was the ‘kettling’ tactic intended to make people think twice about demonstrating in future?

The most critical piece in the press, by Duncan Campbell in the Guardian, states that those “people thinking about embarking on demonstrations in the future may have to decide whether they want to be effectively locked up for eight hours without food or water and, when leaving, to be photographed and identified.”

Yet it does not suggest that this may have been the initial intention of the police in adopting this tactic, even though it is absurd to suggest the police might have planned to use this tactic without imagining it would lead to anger and frustration on the part of those trapped in the kettle. In conjunction with the extensive restrictions to freedom of protest under the New Labour government, amply documented elsewhere, it might be reasonable to suggest that the police tactics were in part, at least, designed to deter protestors.

e) Were the police violent and should any officers face charges?

Remarkably, this question is absent from virtually all the press coverage – despite hundreds of injuries to protestors, the death of someone apparently trapped in a kettle, and video footage showing baton charges directed towards crowds of people with their hands in the air, the use of riot shields as an offensive weapon, and the beating with batons of protestors sat on the ground (see, for example, ‘Riot police attack peaceful protestors at G20 climate camp’ on Indymedia). The ample groundwork laid by the police suggesting there would be protestors “intent on violence” happily accounts for all the violence of the day and makes easy to ignore eyewitness accounts that state that peaceful protestors were being kettled, charged, beaten and provoked by the police.

To take just one of countless eyewitness accounts, see for example a typical report that “a girl … who was on the front line of the cordon, was suddenly shoved up against a wall and kicked repeatedly by a policeman. He left her as she stayed cowering … The general atmosphere was fear at who the police would pick on next.” (Indymedia, April 6).

Given the number of witnesses and video evidence, it has taken remarkable obedience by the press to refuse to ask this question – and for a media so obsessed with violence, it seems strange that the overwhelming violence of the day – that inflicted by the police on protestors – barely merits a mention.

Dear friends,

Thanks to everyone for the considerable and unstinting support they have given to the Free Hich campaign from the start. It is only due to the help and support of thousands of people that Hicham has been able to fight for justice for so long.

As many of you may know, Hich lost his case against the Home Office at Northampton Crown Court on Thursday 12th February. The charge is “securing avoidance of immigration control using deception” and comes under the Immigration Act. The sentencing will take place on March 6th. The charge carries a maximum sentence of 2 years in jail.

We are obviously saddened and disappointed at the outcome, especially considering how hard Hich and the campaign have fought for him to have his day in court. Despite this setback, Hicham’s spirits remain high. His legal team is now considering the various options on offer and we will therefore be releasing a full statement in the coming few days.

Peter Tatchell, one of the UK’s most prominent civil liberties commentators has written a piece about Hicham’s persecution in today’s Guardian. Please read it and add your comments.

Last week, the Guardian published a piece by Hicham on the subject of the student occupation movement.

In the meantime, your continued support is crucial to ensure Hicham is treated fairly and any attempts to deport him are resisted. Please continue to visit the website for updates and invite your friends to join this Facebook group. Ways to help Hich can be found on the website under “How to Help”. http://freehicham.co.uk/what-can-we-do/