-Caveat Lector-
From
http://www.guardian.co.uk/Archive/Article/0,4273,4321856,00.html
> There are, of course, profound differences between the US and Britain.
> The US sees itself as a wounded nation; many of its people feel
> desperately vulnerable and insecure. But while our cowardly MPs seek
> only to dissociate themselves from the victims being persecuted by
> Torquemada Blair's inquisitors, the lord chancellor's medieval
> department is preparing to dispense with most jury trials, which are
> arguably now the foremost institutional restraint on the excesses of
> government.
}}}>Begin
Comment
The Taliban of the west
This war is threatening the very freedoms it claims to be defending
George Monbiot
Guardian
Tuesday December 18, 2001
The pre-Enlightenment has just been beaten by the post-
Enlightenment. As the last fundamentalist fighters are hunted through
the mountains of eastern Afghanistan, the world's most comprehensive
attempt to defy modernity has been atomised. But this is not, as
almost everyone claims, a triumph for civilisation; for the Taliban
has been destroyed by a regime which is turning its back on the
values it claims to defend.
In West Virginia, a 15-year-old girl is fighting the state's supreme court. Six weeks
ago, Katie Sierra was suspended from Sissonville high school in Charleston. She had
committed two horrible crimes. The first was to app
ly to found an anarchy club, the second was to come to classes in a T-shirt on which
she had written "Against Bush, Against Bin Laden" and "When I saw the dead and dying
Afghani children on TV, I felt a newly recovered se
nse of national security. God bless America." The headmaster claimed that Katie's
actions were disrupting other pupils' education. "To my students," he explained, "the
concept of anarchy is something that is evil and bad.
" The county court upheld her suspension, and at the end of November the state's
supreme court refused to hear the case she had lodged in defence of free speech.
Katie is just one of many young dissenters fighting for the most basic political
freedoms. A few days before Katie was suspended, AJ Brown, a 19-year-old woman
studying at Durham Tech, North Carolina, answered the door to
three security agents. They had been informed, they told her, that she was in
possession of "anti- American material". Someone had seen a poster on her wall,
campaigning against George Bush's use of the death penalty. Th
ey asked her whether she also possessed pro-Taliban propaganda.
On October 10, 22-year-old Neil Godfrey was banned from boarding a plane travelling
from Philadelphia to Phoenix because he was carrying a novel by the anarchist writer
Edward Abbey. At the beginning of November, Nancy Od
en, an anti-war activist on her way to a conference, was surrounded at Bangor airport
in Maine by soldiers with automatic weapons and forbidden to fly on the grounds that
she was a "security risk". These incidents and oth
ers like them become significant in the light of two distinct developments.
The first is the formal suspension of certain civil liberties by governments backing
the war in Afghanistan. The new anti-terror acts approved in Britain and the US have,
like the reinstatement of the CIA's licence to kil
l, been widely reported. The measures introduced by some other allied governments are
less well known. In the Czech Republic, for example, a new law permits the prosecution
of people expressing sympathy for the attacks on
New York, or even of those sympathising with the sympathisers. Already one Czech
journalist, Tomas Pecina, a reporter for the Prague- based investigative journal
Britske Listy, has been arrested and charged for criticisi
ng the use of the law, on the grounds that this makes him, too, a supporter of
terrorism.
The second is the remarkably rapid development of surveillance technology, of the kind
which has been deployed to such devastating effect in Afghanistan. Unmanned spy planes
which could follow the Taliban's cars and detec
t the presence of humans behind 100 feet of rock are both awesome and terrifying.
Technologies like this, combined with CCTV, face-recognition software, email and phone
surveillance, microbugs, forensic science, the monit
oring of financial transactions and the pooling of government databases, ensure that
governments now have the means, if they choose to deploy them, of following almost
every move we make, every word we utter.
I made this point to a Labour MP a couple of days ago. He explained that it was "just
ridiculous" to suggest that better technologies could lead to mass surveillance in
Britain. Our defence against abuses by government wa
s guaranteed not only by parliament, but also by the entire social framework in which
it operated. Civil society would ensure there was no danger of these technologies
falling into the "wrong hands".
But what we are witnessing in the US is a rapid reversal of the civic response which
might once have defended the rights and liberties of its citizens. Katie Sierra's
suspension was proposed by her school and upheld by th
e courts. The agents preventing activists from boarding planes were assisted by the
airlines. The student accused of poster crime may well have been shopped by one of her
neighbours. The state is scorching the constitutio
n, and much of civil society is reaching for the bellows.
This, I fear, may be just the beginning. The new surveillance
technology deployed in Afghanistan is merely one component of the US
doctrine of "full-spectrum dominance". The term covered, at first,
only military matters: the armed forces sought to achieve complete
mastery of land, sea, air, airwaves and space. But perhaps because
this has been achieved too easily, the words have already begun to be
used more widely, as commercial, fiscal and monetary policy, the
composition of foreign governments and the activities of dissidents
are redefined as matters of security. Another term for "full-spectrum
dominance" is absolute power.
There are, of course, profound differences between the US and
Britain. The US sees itself as a wounded nation; many of its people
feel desperately vulnerable and insecure. But while our cowardly MPs
seek only to dissociate themselves from the victims being persecuted
by Torquemada Blair's inquisitors, the lord chancellor's medieval
department is preparing to dispense with most jury trials, which are
arguably now the foremost institutional restraint on the excesses of
government.
The paradox of the Enlightenment is that the universalist project is
brokered by individualism. The universality of human rights, in other
words, can be defended only by the diversity of opinion. Most of the
liberties which permit us to demand the equitable treatment of the
human community - privacy, the freedom of speech, belief and movement
- imply a dissociation from coherent community.
While those who seek to deny our liberties claim to defend
individualism, in truth they gently engineer a conformity of belief
and action, which is drifting towards a new fundamentalism. This is
an inevitable product of the fusion of state and corporate power.
Capital, as Adam Smith shows us, strives towards monopoly. The states
which defend it permit the planning laws, tax breaks, externalisation
and blanket advertising which ensure that most of us shop in the same
shops, eat in the same restaurants, wear the same clothes. The World
Trade Organisation, World Bank and IMF apply the same economic and
commercial prescription worldwide, enabling the biggest corporations
to trade under the same conditions everywhere.
Some of those who, in defiance of this dispensation, write their own
logos on their T-shirts are now being persecuted by the state. The
pettiness of its attentions, combined with its ability to scrutinise
every detail of our lives, suggest that we could be about to
encounter a new form of political control, swollen with success,
unchecked by dissent. Nothing has threatened the survival of "western
values" as much as the triumph of the west.
www.monbiot.com
Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2001
End<{{{
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