The Fanonite

Tony Benn’s principled support for David Davis’s reelection. (thanks Tom)

Libertarians from the Left and Right sometimes meet in the middle against an authoritarian state. In 1961, having served for 10 years as an MP for Bristol South East, I was declared disqualified because my father had been a peer and he had died. It was argued that I had inherited his peerage.

A by-election was called, and, despite my disqualification, I decided to contest it to argue a point of principle. Winston Churchill, the former Conservative Prime Minister, sent me a letter of support for which I am, to this day, most grateful.

I must be the only Labour candidate who has ever circulated 30,000 copies of a letter from a Tory leader to my constituents. The law that prevented me sitting in the Commons was later changed as a result of that by-election.

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By Muhammad Idrees Ahmad, Variant, Issue 32, Summer 2008; Spinwatch, June 23, 2008; Scoop (New Zealand), June 25, 2008; UK Watch, June 25, 2008; Media Monitors Network, June 25, 2008; Dissident Voice, June 27, 2008

“The public has to be more alert”, warned one “international terrorism expert” in the Daily Mail late last year, because Scotland “is set to become another Israel within five years”. “[A]nti-terror measures will soon become a common feature of life”, he assured the audience, and called for “routine arming of police officers” and increasing children’s “awareness of the dangers of terrorism” and for them to be “encouraged” to report anything “out of the ordinary”.

The oracle of doom was one Amnon Maor, identified as the head instructor of counter-terrorism for the IDF and Israeli border police.[1] Maor is working with security firm 360 Defence, based near Glasgow, which is “training Scottish police, military and civilians in security techniques”. This wouldn’t be the first time the British police benefits form Israeli anti-terror expertise. The police squad that carried out the extrajudicial execution of the young Brazilian electrician Jean-Charles de Menezes in the London underground had received similar training.

In the post-September 11 world, Naomi Klein writes, Israel has pitched its “uprooting, occupation and containment of the Palestinian people as a half-century head start in the ‘global war on terror’”. Britain has since been furnished with its own unpopular occupation of Arab land – and the lessons from Israel are not lost on its architects. In disaster lies opportunity – and the only thing more useful than a thing to fear is fear itself. The give away line in Maor’s prescription above is his offer to increase children’s awareness of the dangers of terrorism – absent the real thing, fear should suffice. The Prime Minister may not have many achievements to his name, but he can claim patents to ‘Fortress Britain’, whose battlements sit on a foundation of fear.
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Kucinich tries to impeach Bush on the 9th, the Supreme Court voted to restores the rule of law to Guantánamo on the 12th and today Shadow home secretary David Davis has resigned as an MP as a stand against the government’s “assaults” on civil liberties.  Newton states that for every action there’s an equal and opposite reaction: are we starting to see a swing back for civil liberties?  I bloody hope so.  Nice to see Bush, Blair and their cabal getting a little scare.

Truthdig: As I listened to Rep. Kucinich invoke the great engine of impeachment—he listed some 35 crimes by these two faithless officials—we heard, like great bells tolling, the voice of the Constitution itself speak out ringingly against those who had tried to destroy it.

ACLU: NEW YORK - In a stunning blow to the Bush administration’s failed national security policies, the Supreme Court ruled today 5-4 that the U.S. Constitution applies to the government’s detention policies at Guantánamo. The Court concluded that detainees held at Guantánamo have a right to challenge their detention through habeas corpus.

BBC Online: Shadow home secretary David Davis has resigned as an MP. He is to force a by-election in his Haltemprice and Howden constituency which he will fight on the issue of the new 42-day terror detention limit. Mr Davis, 59, told reporters outside the House of Commons he believed his move was a “noble endeavour” to stop the erosion of British civil liberties.

Lo and behold! Gordon Brown, the man who has been forlornly playing the pipe still wet with Tony Blair’s spit, has failed to lure many vermin with his call for for more draconian legislation. So when finally a rat does come out, it bears a Muslim name. According to the Daily Telegraph, Brown’s call for 42-day detention — a political move according to Jacqui Smith to present the Tories as soft on terrorism — has received the endorsement of one Khurshid Ahmed, Chairman of something called the ‘British Muslim Forum’. ( It is worth reading the current article in conjunction with this article by Gareth Peirce; it provides necessary context about the draconian “anti-terror” legislation in Britain). My friend Paul de Rooij comments:

The British government is seeking to pass a law allowing 42-day-detention without trial for “terror suspects”. Note, that Britain already has draconian “anti-terror” legislation in place from the days it fought Irish nationalists. All the recent measures added to this legislation are specifically targeting Muslim “terror suspects”, and thus it is truly bizarre to find a Muslim organization favoring the government’s proposed measures. It is a bit like an organization of turkeys popping up stating that they are in favor of Thanksgiving.

The history of terrorist arrests in the UK is appalling. Many wrongful convictions, brutality in prison and under questioning, horrendous conditions in jail causing prisoners to lose their minds… and the cases that led to many arrests and were trumpeted in the media resulted afterwards in the release of suspects without charges and without any apology. And there are other frivolous cases: imprisoning a woman who wrote a poem lauding the resistance fighters in Iraq and Afghanistan…

‘The arrest of a Nottingham University student for downloading an al-Qaida manual is an outrage and undermines the university’s academic integrity,’ writes Ayesha Christie.

On May 14, Rizwaan Sabir, a student of politics and Hicham Yezza, a former student currently employed at the University of Nottingham, were arrested under the Terrorism Act. Their crime? Sabir, a graduate research student, who is writing his MA dissertation on Islamist extremism and international terrorist networks, had downloaded an edited version of the al-Qaida training manual from a publicly accessible US government website. He had sent it to Yezza to print, and the material was noticed by staff who passed it on to university authorities. The university reported it to the police, and the two men were arrested. Kept in detention for six days, they were released without charge on May 20.

The university has argued that it was well within its grounds to contact the police. After all, what was Yezza, employed in a non-academic role, doing printing a terrorist manual? Arguably, the university was only acting in the interests of the safety of its students and staff. In the current climate of fear and surveillance constructed by the government and much of the media, we are all encouraged to be on “terror alert”.

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David Mamet, the writer behind Wag the Dog, is the latest to join the ranks of Arthur Koestler to Kinglsey Amis to Christopher Hitchens: people who have moved to the right and attacked former allies. Playwright David Edgar challenges the new generation of deserters (thanks Paulo).

One striking aspect of the 1968 and post-1968 generation has been overlooked in the current nostalgia fest. Despite Robert Frost’s stern warning against the dangers of youthful idealism (”I never dared to be radical when young, for fear it would make me conservative when old”), remarkably few of those formed by 1968 and its aftermath have moved to the right in middle age. That is, until now.In the same way that a surprising number of Thatcher and Reagan’s key thinkers were former communists, the ideological campaign for the war on terror abroad and against multiculturalism at home has been dominated by people who were formed by the student revolt, feminism and anti-racist movement of the 1970s. As with the political defectors of the past, their critique of the left is validated by personal experience. Just as past generations sought to reposition the fault-lines of 20th-century politics (notably, by bracketing communism with fascism as totalitarianism), so, now, influential writers seek to redraw the political map of our own time. And, intentionally or not, they are undermining the historic bond between progressive liberalism and the poor.

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So much concern has been shown in the West in recent years for the plight of women in the Muslim world that feminists have actively supported aggressive wars against sovereign countries. Presumably they want to bring the same rights to the Afghan, Iraqi or Somali woman enjoyed by an American or a Brit. Just yesterday the main story on MSN Video was the chain of American restaurants where people have their Sushi off naked women. Very dignified, since the woman was actually referred to as a ‘model’. Now we see yet another right enjoyed by American women. For some reason I am not very sure if these rights should be introduced in the Muslims world. But maybe I’m just an unreconstructed misogynist from a premodern patriarchal culture.

You most probably didn’t hear about this, but imagine the headlines had the same thing happened in a Muslim country? Where are those Colonial Feminists?

A lecture by the founder of the Pirate Party, their policies are not only about piracy, privacy and the internet they are also important in challenging patents that prevent 3rd world countries such as in Africa legally producing the medicine they require to control Aids and other diseases. 

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1984? No — 2008. Welcome to the British dystopia!

“Hi-tech ’satellite’ tagging planned in order to create more space in jails“, the Independent reports. “Civil rights groups and probation officers furious at ‘degrading’ scheme”.

Ministers are planning to implant “machine-readable” microchips under the skin of thousands of offenders as part of an expansion of the electronic tagging scheme that would create more space in British jails.

Amid concerns about the security of existing tagging systems and prison overcrowding, the Ministry of Justice is investigating the use of satellite and radio-wave technology to monitor criminals.But, instead of being contained in bracelets worn around the ankle, the tiny chips would be surgically inserted under the skin of offenders in the community, to help enforce home curfews. The radio frequency identification (RFID) tags, as long as two grains of rice, are able to carry scanable personal information about individuals, including their identities, address and offending record. Read the rest of this entry »

The threat of fascism was hinted to by Norman Mailer before his death. More recently he has been echoed by Gore Vidal, Paul Craig Roberts, Naomi Wolf and Ron Paul among others. Here Ray McGovern brings to bear some ‘Lessons From the Past‘.

“There are few things as odd as the calm, superior indifference with which I and those like me watched the beginnings of the Nazi revolution in Germany, as if from a box at the theater…Perhaps the only comparably odd thing is the way that now, years later….”

These are the words of Sebastian Haffner (pen name for Raimund Pretzel), who as a young lawyer in Berlin during the 1930s experienced the Nazi takeover and wrote a first-hand account. His children found the manuscript when he died in 1999 and published it the following year as “Geschichte eines Deutschen” (The Story of a German). The book became an immediate bestseller and has been translated into 20 languages-in English as “Defying Hitler.”

I recently learned from his daughter Sarah, an artist in Berlin, that today is the 100th anniversary of Haffner’s birth. She had seen an earlier article in which I quoted her father and emailed to ask me to “write some more about the book and the comparison to Bush’s America…this is almost unbelievable.”

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