25 July 2005.
The nature of all the “we” talk in the last two weeks of British political rhetoric and all of Tony Blair’s moralising about “evil in our midst” was illuminated in eight bullets from a semiautomatic pistol Thursday 22 July. London police shot down 27-year old Brazilian electrician Jean Charles de Menezes in the Stockwell tube station on his way to work for not having met their standards of whiteness and for wearing a jacket. The “we and them” in the real world turned out to be “we” the British authorities and ruling class, and “them” the common people.
Police say they were watching a flat and followed him when he left for work that morning. Several plainclothes cops went after Menezes after he leapt over a ticket turnstile. They chased him down to the platform and onto a train. “They pushed him onto the floor and unloaded five bullets into him. He looked like a cornered fox. He looked petrified,” a witness said.
Lying followed the killing. Immediately afterward, the police said he was “an intimate accomplice of the cell” that committed the explosions in the tube the day before, and that officers had warned him to stop. The first claim was publicly exposed as a falsehood. So was the second when bystanders reported that the cops said nothing when they were chasing him – they just shot him eight times, seven in the back of the head.
This is a concentration of how the British authorities treat minority and working class youth in general and what they are capable of doing on a mass scale. South Asians, Middle Easterners and other foreigners in the UK who report that they fear for their lives can’t be said to be suffering from delusions. The cops were members of an elite firearms unit, not some panicky rookies. London police chief Sir Ian Blair announced that he “deeply regretted” the error, but insisted that it was “very possible” his police would gun down more people in the near future. London should just get used to it, he said.
The highest authorities called it a “tragedy”, as if it has been an accident and not murder. London’s Mayor Ken Livingstone, who had previously issued a statement linking the earlier tube bombings to the UK’s participation in the war in Iraq, defended the police. They only did “what they believed necessary to protect the lives of the public,” he said, as though Menezes was not a member of the public entitled to live.
The reality of the US-UK “war on terror” has exploded onto the streets of London as horror has piled upon horror in the last two weeks. On 17 July, five days after the London bombings that killed at least 56 people and seriously injured several dozen more, the Metropolitan police identified four British men, aged 19 to 30, as Islamic fundamentalist suicide bombers who had detonated bombs on a bus and three tube trains. On 20 July, two weeks later, four more young men attempted to explode bombs, again on a bus and three tube trains, but this time only the detonators ignited, and there were no serious casualties.
Blair and his ministers are continuing to insist vehemently that talk that the London bombings bear any relation to the war in Iraq and Afghanistan “only gives support to the terrorists”, as Blair argued, and virtually amounts to “treason”. As the Sunday Times thundered, it gives “the terrorists an excuse on which to hang their atrocities”. Prior to the Iraq war, Blair went to great lengths to legitimise the war under international law and justified it on the grounds that he was protecting the British people from imminent danger from the Saddam regime’s weapons of mass destruction, which he claimed could hit Britain in 45 minutes. This proved to be an utter lie.
Now blood was being shed on the streets of England, but not by Saddam’s henchmen nor Al-Qaeda agents from Saudi Arabia or Morocco, as reportedly in the Madrid bombings, not, in short, by anyone whom Blair had warned against, but instead by young men born and raised in the streets of England itself, or as one commentator put it, “young men who loved cricket and worked at the local chippy”.
What had gone wrong? Ministers scrambled to distance themselves from any responsibility for the bloodshed in London and tried to channel the wave of anger and revulsion that swept the streets into targeting what Blair called “the evil ideology” and “barbaric ideas” of “Islamic extremism”. While paying lip service to Britain’s “multicultural” society, the government and media strong-armed Muslim leaders before the TV cameras to offer excuses for Islam, to pledge to work with the police and to “root out the evil in their midst”. Headlines screamed, “SAS tracking Muslim suspects”. (The SAS are military commandos infamous for, among other murders, the gunning down of three unarmed Irish Republicans in Gibraltar). BBC brought in pro-Western Islamic experts to ferret out texts in the Koran that might justify “violence”, in an undisguised effort to show that there is something about the Islamic religion that is peculiarly violence-prone.
But most people understand that there were much more complex causes behind the attacks. Islam has been around a long time, but not suicide bombers. And there is a widespread feeling that Tony Blair and his ministers are lying once again when they try to disconnect the Iraq war from the bombings. In any case, they have no lessons to give anyone about “terrorism” and “evil ideology”. On 19 July, even as Blair and his ministers tried to bludgeon into being a media consensus to not mention the war, a prominent human rights organisation released a report that 25,000 Iraqi civilians had been killed in the two years following the conclusion of the war in Iraq. The US/UK-led coalition forces inflicted the largest portion of the casualties. On that same day, an opinion survey by the Guardian newspaper revealed that, despite the government and media campaign to convince them otherwise, over two-thirds of those polled believed that there was a “direct connection” between the bombings and the war in Iraq. More than a third said Blair bore “a lot” of responsibility” for the tube bombing and 31 percent said some, while only 28 percent bought the official argument.
The government and media targeting of the “evil ideology” in the midst of the Muslim community provides yet another outrageous example of the lying hypocrisy of imperialism. The militaries of the predominantly Christian countries of Britain and the US have committed horrors in Afghanistan and Iraq that, fortunately, the people of London can barely imagine. Yet were the Pope, the Anglican Archibishop and other top Christian leaders dragged before the cameras to defend Christianity and the Bible?! Does anyone seriously doubt that the Bible, with its talk of “an eye for an eye” and other hymns to bloodthirsty revenge, offers any less justification for reactionary violence than the Koran? When former heavyweight boxing champion Muhammed Ali visited the World Trade Center in the wake of September 11th, reporters asked him how it felt to share a faith with the bombers. Ali responded pleasantly, “How do you feel about Hitler sharing yours?” Singling out Islam today while excusing Christianity after three years of the atrocities inflicted by “Christian nations” like Britain and America in Iraq and Afghanistan – not to speak of centuries of support for the genocide of the Native Americans, the enslavement of millions of Africans, and countless other horrors – reflects and reinforces underlying assumptions of British cultural and national supremacy and plays into the hands of reactionary efforts to divide people on racial, cultural and national lines. It is no wonder that the anti-Muslim bigotry dominating the country’s airwaves has fuelled the firebombings of mosques and attacks on Muslims, with one Muslim man beaten to death in Nottingham.
When Blair insists today once again in the face of majority sentiment that the bombings have nothing to do with Iraq, he is letting the people of Britain know that he has no intention of “doing a Spain” and withdrawing from the Middle East. The Blair regime has hitched the destiny of British imperialism to the Bush regime’s unprecedented grab for global empire. For all its talk about how no amount of outrages committed by the government could excuse the bombings because “we are a democracy”, “we have ways to express dissent”, the government’s decision to follow Bush to war in the face of massive opposition here and abroad went a long way to exposing that the masses have no real power in the oldest democracy in the West. This lesson was written in blood in the police murder of Jean Charles de Menezes.
A number of memorial meetings were held around the capital to commemorate the dead and wounded after the 12 July bombings. Survivors of the attacks spoke, evoking feelings of shared pain and fears. The government has tried to seize on this mood of unity and turn it to its own ends, labelling anyone who dared cast blame on the government as “divisive”. Shadow Home Secretary David Davis urged, “We mustn’t allow the terrorists to drive a wedge between us – we have to stay united as a country.” The truth is that Britain has never been a united country; there was no national unity around going to war and there’s none now on pursuing it. Over 1,000 people gathered on 16 July to remember the dead and link the London bombings with the demand for the government to get out of Iraq. Peter Brierley from Leeds, whose son Sean was killed while in the British army in Iraq, told the crowd that he had originally supported the war, but had come to the conclusion that it was based on lies. “We have got to stop lying, we have got to start telling the truth”, he urged.
The British imperialists have already shown in Iraq that they are willing to see countless deaths of Iraqi civilians in their effort to stabilise that country as part of their drive to restructure the Middle East under the rule of their American senior partners and set up an unprecedented global empire. Now that this effort has fuelled bloody reprisals at home, far from hesitating in their imperial quest, Blair and his henchmen are calling for the British people to forget that this is a bloody war for empire and instead get behind it. They are coldly using the slaughter of innocents in their own streets to try to reverse the verdict in the minds of millions that the occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan is unjust, as is the war on terror as a whole, and instead portray this as a defensive war to defend British lives and civilisation. What they are revealing instead is that Blair is one of the heads of an imperialist system, a system rooted in the division of society in classes that will never cease waging unjust imperialist wars and that will try to use every major event in society to justify these wars, until the imperialists and their system are swept off the stage of history.
There are great challenges facing those who want to put an end to the horrors created by this system – the actions of the London bombers play into the hands of the government in crucial ways. Yet this is not one-sided: Blair is lying once again in a brazen act of self-justification, and many know that he has just been waiting his chance to implement the draconian measures now being fast-tracked through Parliament. Only a couple of months ago, on the first day of the British election campaign, he baldly declared that he was going to “put Iraq behind us” and only talk about his own electoral agenda. Instead the issue of Iraq dogged him at every step of the campaign, like some recurring nightmare, and he was returned to Downing Street with the votes of barely 20% of the British people. Throughout the country now talk of the reasons behind the bombings springs up in an instant, in almost any context, at a bus-stop or tube station, in a shopping queue. What is needed now is for those who burn with anger at the crimes being committed by this system to lift their sights and cast away illusions that change will come from above, from pressuring Parliament or voting for better politicians, and instead rouse the masses of people to force Britain out of this unjust war and to fight the system behind it.
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