The British media elite shit a brick when anti-war protestors in Moscow were arrested for holding up blank signs.
Now the British state is doing the same thing they're all suddenly silent or actively supporting it.
:ukkk: The last week really has reignited my hatred for this country like an enormous bottle of paraffin on a previously just glowing barbecue.
No society can function without hypocrisy, no really, you have to lie to people to keep the state moving. Do you honestly think a president or prime minister could just say the truth about everything? “As president I promise that I’ll only assassinate maybe a dozen people, I’ll only kill 50,000 in a war, and Ill defraud the retirement accounts of only the bottom 3% of the country” people would riot.
Quite obviously I do not. I'm not sure what this comment is getting at.
society can function
keep the state moving
:bruh: you're on a far-left forum. It's pretty much all communists and anarchists here.
Communists believe in a state, and I stand by what I said, lying to the people is necessary for a well oiled social machine to function, if lying is the carrot then the stick is truth. If there’s gonna be a treat shortage you sometimes need to lie to stop a treats riot. If greed is good then lying is holy. :Elim-Garak:
you don't have to lie if you're doing good things
well once you've killed the capitalists anyway
Typical reactionary pattern. When the bad people do something, it's bad. When the good people do something, it's good. The action doesn't matter, reassessing who is good or bad based on what they're doing is a waste of time, the only thing that matters is rooting for your team.
This is a decent roundup but it misses a key sinister element. This is a try out for all public order policing and protest going forward. These spectacularly illegal-otherwise arrests are made possible by the draconian new policing bill that was passed earlier this year. A law that means if the police just feel like something you're doing may cause distress or offence to a hypothetical person then you've committed a crime. There doesn't even have to be a complaint.
The Act gives the Home Secretary powers to make regulations without reference to Parliament and to decide on the type of protest deemed acceptable or unacceptable by the state. "The Act implements a recommendation by the Law Commission to introduce a statutory offence of public nuisance and abolish the existing common law offence. This will provide clarity to the police and potential offenders, giving clear notice of what conduct is forbidden. The maximum penalty for this offence is reduced from an unlimited term to 10-years imprisonment." The new law also allows senior police officers to give directions and impose conditions, including beginning and end times of protests, on those organising or taking part in either a procession or assembly that the police decide are necessary to prevent disorder, damage, disruption, noise impact or intimidation.
Holy WHAT, you can get a 10 year sentence because some random asshole cop actually pulled the "oi mate, you got a loicense for that speech?"
Yep, or even just the go-to tactic of cops here for the last 20 years. Kettle a protest and then tell them to disperse, arresting anyone who follows the order.
I've also heard of UK police kettling people for like 9 hours and then arresting people for public indecency when they had to take a piss, sounds like parody but that's Britain for you.
I've been in kettles where they've done that, several where they give a dispersal order and then nick you for trying to leave, ones after football matches where they've kettled fans for hours in the heat and then nicked people for public drinking because they only thing they had on hand was a can of lager, even charged kettled people with horses and then charged people with public endangerment for spooking the horses. Literally you name it, they do it.
And all of that is just in my adult lifetime, never mind other members of my family who lived through the miner's strikes of the 50s-80s or friends who grew up in Northern Ireland.
Yeah, pigs here love towing the line between unprompted ultra-violence and then being sticklers for red tape. Guess that's just at the heart of the British establishment lmao.
I was actually quite surprised watching footage of the George Floyd uprisings in 2020 how much less American cops kettle, although I guess the trade off is they seem to use rubber bullets and the like way, way more.
Yeah, the kettle was basically the secret weapon of the so called 'policing by consent' philosophy that's supposed to be the guiding philosophy of Britain's modern police forces.
It's technically non-violent (although the view from inside the kettle as horses and riot police tighten it on a bridge where there's no more room looks very different) but forces a situation where protestors are forced to react either to get out or just survive inside the kettle, giving the cops an excuse to drop the act. It's called a kettle because it's designed to boil over.
Now obviously I don't believe that 'policing by consent' is a real principle, because as soon as it doesn't work the state reverts to overt violence as I've seen firsthand myself. And things like the kettle are designed as a technical dodge for that idea entirely.
But as far as I know America has never even given lip service to such philosophies. The question is which is worse; having no pretence of a social contract in policing or using policing by consent as a smokescreen and propaganda tool to disguise the oppressive violence of the state?
It’s technically non-violent
Well except for the Hillsborough massacre by police kettling people so they were crushed to death
This is the propaganda potential of the kettle, when it becomes intolerable or life threatening any action to escape it becomes the thing the police blame for injury and loss of life. Hillsborough was an early example of that, but the repetition of the tactic hasn't always gone unnoticed.
and of course any police line will be credulously and cynically repeated by the media because the media is owned by men who hate the working classes on a fundamental level and would crack the world if they thought a penny might fall out
Good post, and yeah, in a lot of ways America's complete lack of lip service at least lays things out the way they actually are. I think because of supposed 'policing by consent' and the fact that UK cops don't routinely carry guns a lot of people assume that they're actually comparatively wholesome and non-violent (doesn't help that a lot of British media tries to enforce this image - every time I see a post on one of the major UK subreddits about how whacky and approachable cops are I want to scream) but those people have probably never seen British cops like the Territorial Support Group in action.
Exactly, the irony is that despite the fact the US police is supposedly far more 'militarised' it acts more like a vigilante militia. Whereas in the UK they operate with more of a military/intelligence hierarchy.
Units like the TSG and armed response operate are far less visible as specialised units that are targeted through the use of online monitoring, Forward Intelligence Teams, and possibly the most extensive undercover infiltration and surveillance program ever ran. As a result police violence happens more often on raids or behind closed doors in custody, away from phone cameras and prying eyes.
There is of course the usual racist thuggery and things like gun and drug running ops amongst rank and file too (one 20+ year op only came to light after the racist murder of another cop somewhere I used to live) but the deliberate police and state violence is better organised and concealed.
To some degree this has always been true given the closeness between the police, Met, and MI5, but it's also because many of the tactics and organisation used during the occupation of Northern Ireland during the troubles was then directly applied to policing at home.
Imperialism abroad etc etc.
Yeah, 100% agreed. There are very sinister connections between UK police, the private sector (a lot of the new police tactical teams that sprung up over the last decade or so are trained by private military contractors) and intelligence services (both military and GCHQ) that goes way beyond even your average :frothingfash: cop - not to downplay how harmful even 'average' chud cops can be, of course.
It's one of the many reasons I'm almost dreading Keir Starmer getting in more than the current Tory shitshow, a lot of New Labour types are very 'law and order' focused and are all about this sort of shit - I remember reading about the Blair government wanting to use military intelligence tactics and algorithms to try and identify and contain neighbourhoods they thought would be likely to have high rates of crime or political/religious extremism - Can't help but feel those sorts of tactics were perfected in N Ireland.
Absolutely. Starmer himself is unashamedly a wholecloth tool of the intelligence state and people forget the degree to which Blair cabinets were filled with actual fascists when it came to things like law and order and immigration.
US police is supposedly far more ‘militarised’
I always found this funny. The Military, even at it's worst, is so much more orderly, professional, and capable than the cops that the comparison is ridiculous. Most police officers barely know how their guns work and shoot much worse than civilian enthusiasts. They don't know the law, they don't know or care what their procedures are, and their whole attitude is basically "There will never be any consequences for me so I'll just do whatever I want and let the courts sort it out later".
They haven't become more militarized. They've become better armed and much, much more independent of any civilian control, operating more like warlords and bandits than military personnel.
as far as I know America has never even given lip service to such philosophies.
Yeah American cops have always ruled through violence and violence alone. the rest of society manufactures legitimacy for them, but they don't give a shit about legitimacy. They've got guns.
American cops do kettle quite a bit, but it mostly only works on libs who don't know better these days. Mostly the cops are happy torturing people with pepperballs, chemical weapons, flash bang grenades, and various other toys. I imagine to some extent they'd rather just torture everyone than actually process them for arrest.
10-years imprisonment.
for context, that's twice as much as i got for a GBH charge lmao
A law that means if the police just feel like something you’re doing may cause distress or offence to a hypothetical person then you’ve committed a crime. There doesn’t even have to be a complaint.
yeah this is literal police state shit. it is completely ignoring even the flimsiest pretense of rule of law, delegating the power to infringe one of the most basic civil rights to the truncheon-wielding legbreaker pigdogs of capital. now don't get me wrong, i don't believe in all of that liberal hogwash anyway, but it used to be that western states at least tried to keep up a facade of being "the free world." These were ofc purely bourgeois freedoms that were only upheld as long as you didn't threaten the societal distribution of wealth and the dictatorship of capital. But even that is too much of a hassle for the ruling class now. one guy holding up a sign or yelling slogans doesn't threaten anything. it is fucking nothing. the royals do not have to give a flying fuck about one rando in a crowd of tens of thousands of avid cowtowing monarchoids, but no. not the tiniest bit of dissent is tolerated. questioning the west's genocidal imperialism was never something the ruling class was happy about, but it is being turned more and more into a completely taboo subject. If things go on like this, literal holocaust denial will soon be more acceptable than mentioning the crimes the british crown committed in Africa.
Couldn't agree with this more.
The oppression and lack of bourgeois freedoms that targeted minorities and actual threats to the establishment already felt is getting rolled out wholesale. And the comfortable middle class whites are still treating each example of it happening to someone like them at a Royal event or a climate demo as an isolated incident of overreach because they're too comfortable to notice that their relationship with the state is changing.
Britain has never been the liberal, diverse opinionated, marketplace of ideas that it has pretended to be. But in the last 20 years or so we've gone from protest and non-state sanctioned opinion being tolerated but ridiculed, to actively suppressed and punished, and now the establishment treats anything less than fawning praise and respect as a criminal and traitorous act.
Let us all remember our hero in these trying times
:dennis:
Let his wisdom grant us strength and conviction
Infinite hatred for England, infinite hatred for the US
One of the most fucked nations in europe, and that's really saying something
hm, almost like that wave of anti-protest laws in the last couple years was a sign of things to come. i just wonder how far they'll take it before they abandon the pretense of caring about democracy.
this wave of repression carried out by the regime during its transfer of power, indicates a desire on behalf of the backward country's leadership to project strength---however analysts of the small island nation believe such undemocratic actions may cause backlash and lead to further chaos in the region
My favourite part about this was the turd burgler cuck brained loser beta shitbags on r/unitedkingdom immediately went into police apologist mode with excuses like "the police were just protecting her from danger you see" "it was a breach of the peace it's reeaassonaaabllee"
I hate them all. I want to shit and vomit into their morning cereal every day until they beg for mercy
Wonder if those users in that sub will be happy when their cost of living going to shoot up this winter, and going to get beat by the cop when they try to protest that
They wont protest anything I can guarantee they're all a bunch of pearl clutching overpaid PMC twats who were born for the sole purposes of being intensely insufferable.
/r/PoliceUK, which has actual verified police officers, has an active presence in that and other UK subs. Anything even mildly critical of the police and you’ll see a downvote brigade or the same posters running interference.
