Peaceful Violence

Why do the Police always seem to end up attacking or otherwise crushing peaceful protests. Isn’t their job to arrest criminals? Peaceful protestors.

Of course there may have been people within this example who were breaking the law but the amount of violence that police officers inflict on peaceful protestors is completely off the scale. I used to think it was only American police who routinely over-reacted.

So then why is it that this innapropriate level of force is permitted? Why don’t we see coppers in court, in jail, dishonorably discharged from service. And then the use of anti-terror laws against protestors. The whole thing stinks. It smells like either coppers or government don’t want us to hear the protestors. It’s like they want to kill the most fundamental part of our democracy. What next?

Tipping Point

Maybe, just maybe, the revolution against the establishment is about to accelerate, to make a strong surge. When enough people become radicalised from the bottom up change will happen. Marx said this but even conservatives accept it, in their case through fear.

Change, upheaval, but always across the political spectrum an attempt to throw out the bath water and keep the historical baby of Ascendant Man. It could be around the corner, it probably is just around the corner. Obama’s approach of grass-roots activism and the first major implementation of mass peer-to-peer communication in political activism is now a proven alternative to millennia of top-down centralised hierarchical political culture.

This is new, this is different. This is change, if we let it, will it, and hope for it:

“Come senators, congressmen, please heed the call. Don’t stand in the doorway, don’t block up the hall,”

“Come mothers and fathers throughout the land, and don’t criticise what you can’t understand. Your sons and your daughters are beyond your command. Your old road is rapidly agin’. (Bob Dylan, 1964)

I was born in ‘64 when this revolution was in its infancy too. I have waited with a yearning for this kind of change. With global problems ahead of us that have no answer in terms of the thinking that caused them there is now a real imperative to find a different way. Perhaps Obama will help us make the break away from the diseased past and turn this world into a heaven. Oh, let us pray for it. And I ain’t even an American.

Hypocrisy in the UK

When the Police become immune from prosecution because ‘it will not be in the public interest to prosecute a chief inspector for theft’, this looks like we really are stepping over the line into a Police State – the job of the Police is without qualification to uphold the law. The public interest is served by prosecuting and sacking any Police Officer who dares to break the law – coppers must always set an example and never be covered by excuses. When coppers are seen to get away with it the state starts to look pretty much corrupt:

Sharongate: a scandal that exposes the truth

IT REALLY is a case of ‘one law for them and another for us’ in police state Britain. That’s the only conclusion it’s possible to draw from the scandalous decision not to prosecute Worthing’s top police officer Sharon Rowe over allegations she stole wine from M&S. Even the Worthing Herald, hardly a regular critic of the establishment, called for the Sharongate decision to be ‘challenged and reversed’ pointing out sagely (Nov 27): "If Chief Insp Rowe is innocent, then surely it would be in everyone’s interest to shout it from the rooftops… If the evidence is tested and she’s guilty it’s equally important that justice should be seen to be done." And it wasn’t that there was no case to answer. As the Herald’s website reported: "Crown solicitors have admitted they had enough evidence".

Sussex Police itself admitted that Rowe was let off the hook simply because the Crown Prosecution Service decided "it will not be in the public interest to prosecute a chief inspector for theft" (Worthing Herald, Nov 27). For public interest read state interest. You can bet your life they’d consider it in the ‘public’ interest to prosecute a single mum with hungry kids for shoplifting a tin of beans, or a pensioner without enough cash to pay the heating bills, or one of the increasing numbers of unemployed – or any of the rest of us for that matter! But a chief inspector is different, apparently, because she is one of them and to admit that police can be criminals would undermine the big lie of moral superiority that we have to be forced to swallow so we put up with this stinking, corrupt, power-mad state of theirs without ever daring to raise a voice in protest. But now the truth is out there.