http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/mar/28/free-protest-clegg-oh-dear?
A commentator indicated that what's good for the goose should be good for the gander. I quoted him and added my own comment:
TheGreatRonRafferty
28 March 2011 9:05PM
On the BBC earlier tonight - the announcement that hooligans wearing face coverings would be banned from demonstrations. On screen at exactly the same time - a line of police officers ....... with face coverings.
You couldn't make this stuff up!
Well, anything and everything they do to protect their economic, social and state interests is fine, even if they have to set aside constitutional rights and freedoms in the process. We've seen this in the emergency dictatorial regimes used to protect a bourgeois capitalist state in Italy (Mussolini), Germany (Hitler), Spain (Franco), Chile (Pinochet), etc, etc (just riffle through the diplomatic history of the US, Britain and France for a more complete list. If the threat from the working class and its mass of poor allies isn't quite as immediate, but still acute, you get permanent regimes of emergency mostly military goons (as in North Africa, the Middle East, Central Asia etc) protecting the capitalist system. A bit less acute and a bit more constrained by the deadlock between the classes underlying classical bourgeois democracy and you get what we see in eg the US Britain and France. Sometimes desperate concessions (as in the postwar Welfare States and their equivalents) and sometimes (when the bourgeoisie feels it's got us on the ground) a good kicking and a lot of harrassment (the Thatcher/Reagan/neo-lib-con era).
If we did the same to them, their choir of media angels would stop singing hosanna in the highest and start belting out a doom-laden dies irae. We'd hear no end of the evil being done to Freedom, Democracy, Justice, National Glory, the Economy, and Joe down the Pub.
If we managed to exorcise capitalist economic insanity and set up a workers state or two, they would protect their interests (ill-gotten gains) by all measures necessary, in the name of National Glory, the Economy and Joe down the Pub, and in flagrant disregard of Freedom, Democracy and Justice. (Using Joe down the Pub to do their dirty work, of course.)
In all these instances they are evidently operating a dictatorship in the interests of the bourgeois class, all the while screaming that a corresponding dictatorship in the interests of the working class is totally indefensible, has no right to exist and must be exterminated.
Over the past couple of decades it has become obvious that Classes are still with us, and that they are still engaged in Class War. Obvious but unacknowledged, and unmentionable in respectable public discourse (eg the Beeb and the Guardian). George M and others describe the symptoms, but refuse to diagnose the cause, even less the cure. But until the cause is diagnosed and publicly acknowledged, and until there is a massive public debate on the best cure, then the symptoms will just get worse and worse.
The New Deal and the Welfare State were just desperate palliative measures (morphine to keep a dying system from feeling the agony). As soon as the worst fever abated, the mercy measures were withdrawn, and the system was back on the street as its old rapacious self, hungrier and more ruthless than ever.
And if anyone can imagine a new dispensation of Welfare State palliatives being prescribed today, in the first place they're out of their minds, and in the second place, if the inconceivable should happen, it would all be rolled back again in a few decades, for ever and ever.
So, would you rather be a naive non-combatant torn limb from limb by Freedom and Democracy Peace-Builders, or would you prefer to bite the bullet and defend yourself and yours and your own interests - the interests that are shared by everyone in the world except the rich and powerful few and their mercenary thugs and parasites?
No comments:
Post a Comment