Sides? (was Re: the terrorist bombings in London

[Sean Mannion]

>One night the main news story shows violent protests against the G-8 summit 
>in Edinburgh, with masked hooligans attacking police and breaking shop 
>windows; the next night you've got the terrorist attacks in London, another 
>manifestation of violent opposition to the G-8 summit, with the police and 
>emergency services swinging into action to aid the innocent civilian 
>victims of the attacks. The juxtapositions are there, unfortunate or 
>accidental though they might be; the politicians don't even need to make 
>the link explicit.

I don't know, maybe the police verdict of a 'violent minority' as the cause 
of disruption in Edinburgh city centre might serve to distinguish between 
the thousands of non-violent campaigners and the small faction of violent 
(mostly anti-capitalist) protesters responsible. In the same way, perhaps, 
that news footage may lend itself to allow the critical mind to 
differentiate between 'violent opposition' that mainfests itself in 
confrontation with police and vandalism of private property, and 'violent 
opposition' that manifests itself in handhand explosives. Perhaps, because I 
don't think there is a suitable juxtaposition that leads to an analogy 
between terrorists and anti-capitalists in the public mind, I don't see this 
as being as 'disturbing' as you have. I'd like to attribute most of the 
population of this country with an intelligence critical enough to see the 
vast distinction between a disperate and arbitrary grouping of individuals 
whose protests attract certain violent sectors, and a disperate grouping of 
individuals whose protests, ex hypothesi, are violent in the extreme.

>in the popular imagination, it is an "awfully easy leap from G8 protestors 
>(in their hundred thousands) to those violent brick throwers (measured in 
>hundreds)", as Mike points out in his most recent post, just as it is 
>between the terrorist extremists and Muslims in general. Same principles 
>apply in both cases: weed out the violent brick throwers; weed out the 
>terrorists.

I don't buy your analogy, and I don't think most will either; whereas G8 
protestors and 'violent brick throwers' are necessarily linked by an 
involvement in what each would term 'necessary political protest' 
(regardless of degree), muslims and terrorist extremists don't share this 
kind of commonality at all - shown in the fact there is no consensus among 
muslims that there should be an islamic state or, indeed, a political Islam 
at all.

Furthermore, when we consider the fact that the UK has suffered far more - 
and for longer - at the hands of terrorist units more familiar and closer to 
home than Islamic extremists; coupled with the reminder that the most 
shockingly brutal, and sustained protests of the last thirty years came in 
the form of the Miner's Strike, and not in either the protests of the last 
week or those of May-Day 2000 in London, I think it a serious misjudgment of 
the 'popular imagination' to assume that those kind of connections hold.


>The great hypocrisy of the "Anti-Capitalist" lobby -- anarchists, 
>socialists, what have you -- is that on the one hand they decry the evils 
>of US or UN intervention against corrupt despots and regimes wherein 
>injustice is rife, minorities are oppressed and genocides are wrought 
>("non-aggressor nations" is the euphemism of choice), and yet their whole 
>raison d'etre is built around the violent overthrow of a cultural system 
>(capitalism) and governments which have a democratic mandate.

I'm not an anti-capitalist in the strictest sense, and recognise most 
socialist theorists and politicians (that I heard) as advocating a socialist 
mode of governance through several series of economic and political reforms, 
and not "the violent overthrow of a cultural system (capitalism) and 
governments which have a democratic mandates". This leads me to think that 
subtlety between communism and socialism has been lost here, as with alot of 
others besides; the term 'Anti-Capitalism' is just as misleading a generic 
tag for an entire movement as the slogan 'Make Poverty History' (which 
should be just re-classified as 'Make Certan Kinds of Extreme Poverty 
History') is for the aims of popular campaign - Paul Kingsnorth's 'One No 
Many Yesses' is a good study in exactly how diverse the'anti-G8' are.

But if you want to talk about rife injustice, oppressed minorities, and 
genocides (in that order), then lets look at Blair's decimation of Britian's 
Welfare State, what passes for such in the USA, unequal access to education 
in both, the fact that the in the '80's/'90's the USA had more black men in 
correctional facilties than South Africa at the height of apartheid whilst 
UK's police force has been repeated accussed of structuralized racism after 
the farce of the Stephen Lawrence enquiry; and if genocide is the third 
course of the meal, i'm thinking i'll have the Churchill/Turkish Genocide 
combo, or the Bush/Clinton Iraq sanction platter.

>And the terrible irony of the current debate is that, to all intents and 
>purposes, while the G-8 nations are working to ease poverty and oppression 
>in Africa, this "Anti-Capitalist" lobby, by their opposition to the 
>process, appears to be dedicating itself to prolonging African hardship and 
>misery. It still remains to be seen whether or not this is in fact the 
>case.

It's actually not my argument that the G8 aren't working to it - it's that, 
in light of the facts stated earlier, they just aren't doing enough - at 
least, certainly not all they could find themselves doing, and the only way 
you could understand protest against the G8 as seeming to dedicate 'itself 
to prolonging African hardship and misery' would be if you took the G8 to be 
providing the last word in emanicipation and relief for African states. 
Given the interventionist track record elsewhere, I can't subscribe to the 
opinion that what the G8 are doing is good enough.