First they came for the Communists, but I was not a Communist so I did not speak out.
Then they came for the Socialists and the Trade Unionists, but I was neither, so I did not speak out.
Then they came for the Jews, but I was not a Jew so I did not speak out.
And when they came for me, there was no one left to speak out for me. – Pastor Martin Niemoller
I first used this statement in an essay here back in 2003 and it was
and is, entirely predictable that the hysteria surrounding 'extremist,
fanatical Muslims’ that Blair’s Britain has created would finally
result in the murder of an innocent man at the hands of Blair’s
security state.
That
the man the police shot in cold blood was a Brazilian, only reinforces
the essentially racist nature of a system that needs a scapegoat that
is in reality, based not on religion but on 'race’, in order to justify
its 'war on terror’. A system that has over the past four years
consistently pumped out the same message – albeit in a thinly disguised
'code’ – it’s okay to make war on dark-skinned people. Sooner or later,
the war would come home, it was as predictable as night following day.
Hence the phrase used with such monotonous regularity by the state,
'not if but when’ was a self-fulfilling prophecy, hard-wired if you
like, into the system. A 'rolling Reichstag fire’.
So
when people talk of the 'blowback’ caused by the occupation of Iraq, I
have in mind something quite different. Yet again, I find myself
pointing out to the 'liberal, left’, that the 'international terror
network’ is capitalism’s Frankenstein monster let loose on the world, a
monster created long before the invasion and occupation of Iraq. A
monster that lies hidden under the veneer of 'democracy’, waiting only
for the 'right’ conditions before being unleashed by the capitalist
state.
 The
Palestinians are the pikeys of the Middle East. If they must have a
homeland, give them part of Saudi Arabia, because the Egyptians, the
Syrians, the Jordanians and the Lebanese don’t want them either …. No
more hand-wringing. It’s time for neck-wringing ….
The
other good news is that yesterday’s terrorists didn’t have 72 virgins
on their dance card. They chucked their backpacks and legged it. So
maybe there aren’t as many recruits willing to End It for Allah as we
have been led to believe ….
We
are currently being treated to the thoroughly demeaning spectacle of a
British minister swanning around the Middle East trying to elicit
assurances from sovereign governments that in the unlikely event of our
actually agreeing to their requests for the extradition of wanted
terrorists, currently living in London council accommodation, they
won’t be subject to the death penalty or electrodes on their goolies.
Frankly, who gives a damn?
Put these lunatics on the night boat to Cairo and let the Egyptians, Syrians or whoever do what the hell they like with them. – Richard Littlejohn, the Sun, July 22, 2005*
We
have but a brief window of opportunity to oppose and defeat Blair’s
'ordinary fascism’ before it engulfs us all and I must say that in all
honesty I am not optimistic given the history of this country.
I
had started to write the essay reproduced below before the events of
Friday, 22 July overtook us but realised that it was entirely apposite
to what’s happening right now but with a few amendments to the original
text.
Yesterday,
the 23rd of July I actually made it to the venerable age of sixty and
ironically, the only advantage accruing being a 'Freedom Pass’ to
travel London’s public transport system for nothing (those bits of it
that are still operating under the creeping lockdown as the security
services shoot their way across London).
I
was born in London and have spent my entire life living in big cities,
London, New York and Johannesburg. I’m a genuine city boy and feel
quite at home in them, or at least I did. I’ve always regarded cities
as harbingers of what it feels like to be a global citizen, so whether
in New York or Jozi, it was my city. I’ve never felt any real
affinity to the idea of national 'identity’, perhaps because of my
background, so if anybody asks me where I come from, I invariably
answer, London. This was the place that shaped me, where I cut my
teeth, political and otherwise.
My
folks’ network of friends and comrades came from all over, Africa,
Asia, the Caribbean, so I suppose I was raised to think of myself as
part of a global 'family’ from the getgo. This might well have a lot to
do with why I’ve travelled so much in my life but also it’s the source
of my insatiable curiosity about the world and its peoples’.
Everywhere
I’ve ever lived, I’ve always 'dropped’ right in and never felt out of
place or unwelcome. But paradoxically, growing up in a Leftie family,
also puts you on the 'outside’; it makes you different, a paradox that
also contributed to my affinity to all those who are, for whatever
reason, considered different and on the 'outside’ (thanks to Patricia
for this insight).
On
Friday night I went out to a club in north London to listen to music
I’ve never really liked, punk (it ain’t syncopated, that’s why) but
couldn’t get away from the incongruous thought of everyone in the place
listening to this frenetic, 200bpm+ from another age almost, whilst
outside, in the big city, the security forces are hunting down the
'enemy within’ with a licence to kill on sight. Shoot now and don’t
bother to ask questions later. God knows what it feels like to be an
Asian in Britain today, especially a young Asian man (and as I point
out above, anybody with a dark complexion who runs from white people
with guns and has their i-pod wires showing).
Somewhere
I read that there are something like 200 million people 'on the move’,
mostly unofficially, in our allegedly global village. The reality is of
a vast army of unofficial, cheap labour unlike any in history, not even
the mass migrations of the 19th century (that was confined to
Europeans) can compare to the ravages of the poor countries of the
world caused by the economic policies of the Western economies.
Policies that have torn apart countries and destroyed whatever fragile
gains they made following the liberation struggles of the 40s, 50s and
60s.
I’m
old enough to remember quite well the first wave of Caribbean cheap
labour drafted into this country in the 1950s to work on the buses and
trains and in our hospitals. Brits didn’t mind them doing all the shit
jobs they didn’t want to do but otherwise vilified and shunned them,
the pathetic remnants of our colonial past, the so-called Commonwealth,
that was anything but common or wealthy.
Many
found 'bedsits’ in Balham where I grew up and I can remember walking
past the Jehovah’s Witness chapel, a corrugated iron roofed building
next to a stable on Boundaries Road on a Sunday morning and hearing the
gospel music that always grabbed me, rocking out of the place (the door
was always left open so one could look in and straight up the aisle and
see the preacher doing his thing). The congregation was actually quite
mixed, that is, an incongruous mix of West Indians in baggy 'zoot
suits’ and middle-aged, working class English ladies dressed in their
'Sunday best’ of flowery print dresses and elaborate hats, an image
that sums up the contradictions of those times.
London
was in those days (the 1950s), a grim, grey and dismal place of
bombsites and rationing, and far from being the glorious victors of
WWII, we were in fact, a bankrupt nation totally in hock to US capital
(a relationship that has come to haunt us to this day).
The
'war on terror’ is part and parcel of the reality of the deliberate
impoverishment of millions of people through the actions of the World
Bank and the IMF and its hired guns, the armies and security services
of the US/UK/Israel, the real and awful 'Axis of Terror’. For not only
have these Western institutions caused these mass migrations of people
in search of a decent living, they have led directly to what the
Western media describe as 'failed states’ that has in turn, created a
vast army of displaced people, who have been denied the right to a life
in the country of their birth and so have turned to what they thought
of as the 'bastions of democracy’ for safety, only to be shunned,
vilified, demonised, incarcerated and eventually ejected back out into
a cold, hard world.
This
is the reality of 'blowback’, a world where sheer desperation has led
to rise of the terrorist, for failing a genuine movement of liberation
and revolution that can offer a real alternative to the awful world of
capitalist exploitation, there are those, thankfully a tiny minority,
who fall prey not only to the nihilists but inevitably to the security
forces of the West who employ them.
For
surely, nothing illustrates the need for a genuine alternative to the
world created by the West than the events that threaten now to
overwhelm and ultimately engulf us all. Without seeing the events in
Iraq and elsewhere as part of a larger process, we are doomed to fall
prey to the oldest con in the book, the scapegoat upon whom we can heap
all our frustrations and fears, fed by a media that pushes all the
'right’ buttons right on cue, led by its partner-in-crime, the
capitalist state.
And,
as more information becomes available about the events of the past two
weeks, if past experience is anything to go by, it’s more than likely
that the British security services have had a sinister hand in setting
up the horrors visited on the people of London over the past two weeks.
And
to those who cry conspiracy, look no further than the role of the
British security agencies in Northern Ireland, specifically the Force
Research Unit (FRU), a unit that was still in operation until at least
1997,
…an
undercover security operation financed and run by the British state in
Northern Ireland for more than two decades …. involving up to 100
soldiers and double agents— [that] organised a series of covert
intelligence and military operations and authorised their agents to
carry out numerous illegal activities including bomb making, murder,
and the shooting of Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC) officers.
…
[The FRU’s] chain of command reaches up to the highest echelons of the
British state within the armed forces and intelligence gathering bodies.
(For more on this see 'Fresh revelations on secret British terror organisation in Northern Ireland’, By Robert Stevens, 15 May 2001)
*
The quotes above are but a small snippet of the inflammatory and racist
garbage of this man Richard Littlejohn. Objections should be sent to:
letters@the-sun.co.uk or richard.littlejohn@the-sun.co.uk
And I am sure the Press Complaints Commission would like to hear from you as well. http://www.pcc.org.uk/complaint/how_complaint.htm.
See the Arab Media Watch where I got these quotes from.
Langston Hughes by Winold Reiss
And,
as I have taken the phrase "darker than blue" from Langston Hughes
(1902-1967), it’s only right and proper that you check out one of the
giants of the 'Harlem Renaissance’ at Langston Hughes. Curtis Mayfield made it popular in one of his songs 'We people who are darker than blue’. I’ve tried to find the original attribution but so far, no luck, but I’m sure a reader will direct me to the source.
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