Classifying Violence

There have been a string of stories about violence in the recent mainstream news coverage that betray a rather crude system of bias and classification. Of course, you can identify such a system of ideas underpinning almost all news coverage of everything, but the coverage of violence is particularly important. Nothing motivates people quite as well as violence, or at least the threat of it. This isn't about pain, as plenty of people willingly undergo pain for a perceived greater benefit whether it be in a gym or brothel dungeon or elsewhere. Though Fight Club might contend that it is the condition of humans in the late capitalist culture to seek their own self-destruction, this isn't actually happening; the world is not full of underground boxing rings run by anarchists. Well, not yet.

One man died during the demonstrations in London yesterday which demanded action from the G20 meeting. Mentioned in almost every single news story on the subject was that bottles were thrown at police as they tended to the man, who collapsed and was later pronounced dead at a nearby hospital. In particular The Times headlined his aspect to the story, alongside their 'G20 WAG slideshow'. I'm not defending the people who threw the bottles, just noting how the coverage of what happened is entirely in keeping with the police strategy of the day - aimed at demonising protestors and portraying them as unruly, irrational thugs. So, a little context is needed.

Firstly, the police had adopted their usual policy of canceling all leave and flooding the streets with as many officers as they could muster, seeking to pen in and contain the protests. Their mentality was clear - suspect everyone.

Jeannie Mackie, a barrister who had attended the climate camp as an observer, was penned in for two hours after police cordoned off both ends of Bishopsgate.

"I thought it was completely unnecessary," she said.

"I was kept for two hours. Lines of police lined up with their batons and they were completely pumped up and looking to have a go. My feeling was everyone in there was peaceful but they wanted to clear them out." Responding to the police use of the kettling technique she said that although the courts had ruled that it was legal, there had to be a good reason. "I asked one officer could I go and he said no – I might to and cause trouble. I giggled and said that wasn't very likely and he said, 'you can never tell with these people'." - Guardian

This is a common theme to smaller protests, particularly in the UK. However, during the large scale, nationwide protests against the invasion of Iraq in February 2003, this wasn't an option because they simply don't have the numbers to 'kettle' that many people. Despite the vast numbers involved all over the country (I was in London but major protests were held elsewhere too), it was one of the most peaceful demonstrations of resistance imaginable. Ultimately, it failed miserably because the decision to go into Iraq had been made months if not years beforehand.

However, the point remains that when the police adopt this strategy at smaller protests it leads to violence by demonstrators. The deployment of police was clearly aimed at protecting the establishment which has, either deliberately or due to utter stupidity, led us into a financial collapse and recession. The Bank of England, and a branch of the effectively bankrupt Royal Bank of Scotland (currently insured by the taxpayer against losses for over £300 billion) were the principle targets, and for good reason. The police effectively made themselves targets by so obviously allying themselves with the very people who've caused the resentment, and by adopting draconian containment strategies.

However, for all their suspicion and attempts to restrict the movements of the demonstrators, the police failed to stop a small band of renegades with scarves obscuring their faces, who broke a window at the RBS branch where they proceeded to wreck the place in pretty amateurish fashion - lighting a small fire and throwing a chair through a window. As Sky News reported:

Riot police had to be sent in after activists broke into a branch of the Royal Bank of Scotland. - SkyNews

It's relatively certain that had riot police not been sent in these reckless but ultimately quite tame people would not have brought about the collapse of civilisation as we know it, but the aim here is to blame the violence entirely on the protestors and show the police response, of violence, as inevitable and imperative. I spoke to a friend who saw the incident at the RBS branch and she told me it was 'one of the most orchestrated things she'd ever seen', in that the police surrounded a small group separately from the main block of protestors, probably anarchists of some stripe, giving them the choice of either fighting through the police line or breaking through the window. Needless to say, this detail has escaped all mainstream coverage. This manner of reporting completely exonerates the police who sought to protect the institutions of capital, even describing their baton charging assault of largely peaceful protestors as "driving demonstrators away from the Threadneedle Street branch [of RBS]." The depiction of events would become more aggressive.

Outside the Bank of England, an effigy of a banker hung from the traffic lights was set on fire, releasing fumes of pungent black smoke. - SkyNews

Curious that Sky, part of Rupert Murdoch's empire, would be so concerned about the burning of one effigy of a banker yet consistently fails to report on large-scale pollution. Still, anything that makes it look like the heathen demonstrators were out of control and needed to be taught a lesson by the noble riot police. To go along with Sky's rather Hollywood portrayal of events the phrase 'G20 in lockdown' is now being widely used.

Largely overlooked, or at least downplayed, was the arrogance of city workers waving £10 notes out of the window at demonstrators, to which many responded with a chant of 'jump, jump'. 'Make love, not leverage' was another moment of amusement. The significance of the city workers behaving in this way is that it is a form of incitement, yet there's absolutely no possibility of criminal charges as not even the media have recognise the significance. This isn't the haves smugly flaunting their wealth at the have-nots, but those who belong to and are responsible for an economic-financial system that has led us down this ugly road flaunting the sheer absence of accountability for their actions to those who are demanding it. It's a pure 'fuck you'.

Just as Brown's plan to indebt the country out of a recession (a warped Keynesian philosophy) will only make control by banksters further entrenched, and thus this kind of manufactured crisis more likely, the footsoldiers in the City of London not only escape punishment, they are encouraged to act with impunity. In the other camp, there were at least 87 demonstrators arrested (only 4 charged so far), essentially for petty violence and disorder in which the police and those working in the targeted institutions were complicit.

Perhaps more worrying is the outcome of this meeting of Bilderberg agents that they call G20. Obama and Brown (both Bilderberg attendees prior to being elected) led to way to the all-new and improved $1.1 trillion dollar plan to fight the economic 'crisis'. $750 billion of this is in the form of additional loans and reserves for the IMF, which will presumably 'help' the poorest countries of the world by further indebting them to people who've proven untrustworthy and irresponsible for centuries. Still, Ban Ki-Moon was impressed.

So, aside from Brown and Obama, who else was at the G20 meeting? Among others attendees included Angela Merkel, the German Chancellor, Robert Zoellick, the President of the World Bank, Dominique Strauss-Kahn, Managing Director of the IMF and Tommaso Padoa-Schioppa, chair of the International Monetary and Financial Committee (a position he took over from Brown in 2007), which sets the political agenda of the IMF. Along with Brown and Obama, they are all Bilderberg members and, critically, all attended prior to ascending to their current positions of power. Just to rub it in, when Gordon Brown announced the new plan he said:

"I think a new world order is emerging with the foundation of a new progressive era of international co-operation." - Telegraph

It's evidently a phrase the Bilderbergers are trying to make fashionable, it was only in January that Henry Kissinger was talking of the global economic 'crisis' as an opportunity to create a new world order. In his speech in Berlin in July 2008, Obama stopped just short of using the very same phrase. Rather than the $1.1 trillion dollars, it is the Financial Stability Board that I suggest will be the most prominent and significant policy to come out of this G20 meeting and therefore best embodies the plans of the New World Order. While its role will ostensibly be to prevent future such crises, that's a joke given that such crises are manufactured by the very same people now pushing their agents down this path. However, in describing it as an 'early warning mechanism' Brown gave us a hint that economic crisis will join the ranks of terrorist attacks and climate change as being a threat that is rarely manifested but constantly referred to by analysts and journalists. So, the recession may well end next year but I predict that the threat of financial collapse and recession will increase, at least in terms of popular mainstream coverage. So, the new powers granted the Bank of England to secretly takeover failing banks may just be another step in a long story of consolidation and centralisation of the economic and financial systems.

Regarding the terrorist threat, a story earning minor coverage yesterday was that a 19 year old man has been arrested in connection with the shooting of two British soldiers in Northern Ireland. Throughout the coverage of the fatal shootings, in which four others were seriously injured, the language used has almost never referred to the politically motivated shooting of six people, including two civilians, as a terrorist attack. If you do a google search for the story there are only a handful of articles even using the word 'terrorism'. Those that do talk of the fear of a return to the terrorism of the past, as though two people weren't already lying dead from just such an attack. The implication seems to be that if you're a Muslim and you happen to have a CD in a box in your attic that happens to have an Al Qaeda document downloaded from the US Justice Department recorded on it, then you're a terrorist. However, if you're Irish and white and hang around outside an army base and willfully shoot four soldiers and two innocent pizza delivery guys you're just a 'dissident'.

There is indeed a difference between people fighting against the military occupation of their land (which is how many Irish see the presence of British soldiers) and people seeking to morally cleanse the world through indiscriminate slaughter. But the end result is the same, and it is meant to be the media's job to report on things earnestly and critically, not peddle corporate and state propaganda. Much of the press, particularly the intellectually self-absorbed liberal left, love to take on the pretence of doing their jobs properly. After all, they're smarter than the Venezuelan beauty queen who recently described a visit to Guantanamo Bay as 'a lot of fun'. However, these are the same journalists who for weeks have been reporting on the minute details of the tedious death of one Jade Goody, a woman who was nothing more than an ignorant, talentless racist.

It is a 'Mean Girls' philosophy, of picking on anyone who makes a mistake in order to make oneself look superior. Fine if you're a stuck-up 15 year old who'll no doubt get their comeuppance but not if you're the national and international press. They might get a sense of bourgeois pride from pointing out how dumb Miss Venezuela is but no one expects a beauty queen to have anything constructive or significant to say about Guantanamo Bay. The BBC article states:

President Barack Obama has ordered the closure of the camp, which now holds around 240 inmates, by early next year. - BBC

This is technically true, Obama did sign an executive order saying the prison must be closed down within a year. However, people will still be held without trial, or even charges being laid.

Sec. 3. Closure of Detention Facilities at Guantánamo. The detention facilities at Guantánamo for individuals covered by this order shall be closed as soon as practicable, and no later than 1 year from the date of this order. If any individuals covered by this order remain in detention at Guantánamo at the time of closure of those detention facilities, they shall be returned to their home country, released, transferred to a third country, or transferred to another United States detention facility in a manner consistent with law and the national security and foreign policy interests of the United States. - Executive Order, Whitehouse.gov

While the Guardian would herald the decision as doing away with "the most potent symbol of excess in George Bush's 'war on terror'" they and others completely overlooked the fact that the war on terror was not just a Bush policy, that being locked up indefinitely is still being locked up indefinitely regardless of whether you're in Guantanamo Bay or somewhere else. Of course, the Guardian is almost entirely read by students and the formerly socialist middle class, groups in which it simply isn't acceptable to criticise Obama. Just as Irish terrorism isn't called terrorism, Obama's indefinite detention without trial isn't called what it is. Also worth noting is that there's been yet another drone missile strike in Pakistan in the last 24 hours, and given the renewed focus on Afghanistan it's increasingly likely Obama will seek to expand 'George Bush's' war on terror into Pakistan in the coming months and years.

This humourless bitchy, self-glorifying attitude is also evident in the reporting of neo-fascist mafia frontman and prankster Silvio Berlusconi. Now, Berlusconi is as corrupt as they come, and barely deserves basic human sympathy but at least the man's got a sense of humour, which is more than we can say for the BBC. A series of mocking articles detail some rather boisterous behaviour (he is Italian for heaven's sake) on the part of the freemason premier including apparently causing offence to the Queen by shouting, playing hide and seek with Angela Merkel and holding up the NATO summit by being on the phone. Frequently referred to in these articles is an incident from November last year when Berlusconi spoke of president-elect Obama as 'young, handsome and tanned', which given the uniform coverage of the 'first black president' is hardly a taboo comment. The BBC reported:

Opposition politicians in Italy said Mr Berlusconi's remarks about the US president-elect were at worst, racist and at best, undiplomatic.

Mr Berlusconi shrugged off the criticism, saying those who disagreed with him were humourless "imbeciles". - BBC

Berlusconi was not insulting people who merely disagreed with him, but those who sought to make what was indisputably a joke into a racial slur. In order to not look racist, the BBC automatically sides with the critics and ignores the problems with their criticism. I'm not defending Berlusconi, though I think it is quite a funny joke. But if the media wants to be taken more seriously than beauty queens then it needs to not buy into symbolic but meaningless gestures like the closure of Guantanamo Bay (if indeed it actually happens), report on violence in a consistent and principled way and abandon the double standards that makes their discussion of Obama's race acceptable but turns the odd joke into a racist slur. They'd also do well to not devote quite so much time and effort to world leaders talking about the threat from Al Qaeda, as Obama did yet again just yesterday. There's only so many times the same speech is effective.