Kettling: mass arrest for collective punishment

Mass arrest is now regularly used in Britain to punish political dissent.

Traditionally, when police faced large congregations of people whose actions they wished to impede, they resorted to the selective arrest of a minority and the dispersal of the majority. However, particularly since the G20 demonstrations in April 2009, police have changed tactics and sought the mass arrest of demonstrators in an action known as kettling.

Kettling is a euphemism for the indiscriminate detention of large numbers of people in temporally-created street holding pens. Those rounded up include, of course, the demonstrators, but also journalists and unlucky bystanders who happen to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. All these unfortunate souls are detained for several hours in these street enclosures without medical facilities, food, water or access to toilets, while denied any form of meaningful contact with those who are detaining them. The boundaries of the kettle are controlled by baton-wielding police, aided on occasion by dogs, horses and temporarily erected steel fences. Demonstrators facing the police lines, often suffer kicks and punches, supplemented by blows from police batons and riot shields.

The student demonstrations in the final months of 2010 saw the development of so-called “hyper-kettling,” a further torment inflicted on the incarcerated. The amount of space available to people inside the kettle is progressively constricted until the detained are packed in like sardines in a can. In one case, demonstrators were compressed on Westminster bridge with police lines sealing both bridgeheads.

Kettling was first used in Britain in 1999 to detain anti-WTO demonstrators in London. Initially justified as an extreme measure to deal with extreme situations, the technique has now become standard police practice, particularly in London. In one notorious case on 24 November 2010, teenage children demonstrating in London were kettled. The kettle was only opened after midnight, leaving many teenagers stranded in London on a freezing night.

As a means of causing pain and discomfort to those engaged in political protest, kettling is highly effective. Those beaten at the edge of the kettle, particularly when the incarceration area is being constricted, come off worst, as one journalist covering the student demonstration on 9 December 2010 points out:

“The police started to push back then they started using their batons on protesters. I was caught then and pushed up towards the front. I ducked, my glasses were knocked off my face so I was trying to hold them. Then, basically, a baton strike came to the side of my face and then onto the top of my head. Directly onto the crown of my head. I felt a big whacking thud and I heard it reverberating inside my head….blood was streaming down the back of my head and back of my neck and matting my hair.”

Yet even for those not injured by the police, the effects of street arrest can be severe. Physically, many will suffer from exposure, dehydration and inability to use toilets, leading to people needing to defecate and urinate in their clothes. Psychological suffering centres on the inability of the incarcerated to know when they will be freed; and hence the pitiful chants of “Let Us Out.” The anxiety may be practical, for instance not being able to make an appointment to pick up a child, or it may stem from the claustrophobia of being crushed in a crowd.

Kettling is also used as a propaganda tool.Television pictures show lines of police confronting a mass of demonstrators. The impression is invariably given that it is the police who are defending a line against aggressive street protesters, when the reality is that the demonstrators are being pushed into an ever decreasing amount of space.

The police and conservative authoritarians excuse kettling by arguing that among the demonstrators there are hooligans, who cause damage; therefore the police are justified in kettling hundreds of innocent people in extremely unpleasant conditions for hours as a means of dealing of dealing with the problem. Yet In confronting other crimes the police do not have recourse to mass arrest of the innocent for their own convenience. Additionally, the practical benefits of kettling are short-lived. Some demonstrators may fear to protest in the future, but others, angered by the experience of kettling, will abandon the traditional protest march in favour of more disruptive forms of protest, which do not lend themselves to kettling.

Under closer examination, therefore, ketttling can be seen as the collective punishment of political protest and is clearly intended as a deterrent against those thinking of exercising their democratic right to demonstrate. Its use does nothing to help public policing in the long run and explodes the myth that British police are operating merely to uphold the law rather than to deter and punish political protest.

Such mass and indiscriminate arrest simultaneously violates the civil right to demonstrate and the personal right against arbitrary arrest.

Kettling and police violence against demonstrators has now become common currency; and that which is a regular, normal and an every-day occurrence ceases to be newsworthy. Yet sometimes it is precisely that which is normal which requires moral and political focus. Why can police beat demonstrators, journalists and by-standers, at least without causing serious injury, with impunity? Why can these same people be detained in kettles for hours without redress?

How long will it be before police are explaining away stampedes in a kettle in which people die and are seriously injured? How long will it be before the kettle of today becomes the concentration camp of tomorrow?

Note

In January 2012, the Court of Appeal overturned an earlier surprise decision of the High Court, which had held police action during the April 2009 G20 demonstrations to be excessive and unlawful. The Appeal Court judges in overturning the ruling exonerated the police and endorsed the violent police kettling operations deployed during the largely peaceful demonstrations.

The effect of the Appeal Court decision was to legitimise the forcible detention in street holding pens of thousands of legal non-violent protesters simply because senior police officers "honestly" believed that a “breach of the peace” by some of the demonstrators was possible. Flowing from this judgement is the precedent that any protest consisting of more than a handful of people can be lawfully kettled as a means of dealing with a possible future breach of the peace by a few demonstrators.

The decision leaves the right to demonstrate unmolested in tatters, handing the police the virtually unlimited power to incarcerate and punish demonstrators. In practice, this power will be used with discrimination: not so often that it become blatant that there is no right to protest in Britain, but sufficiently often to deter political protest on the streets.

Of course, the ruling can be challenged in the Supreme Court and in the European Court of Human Rights, but in the meantime the ruling stands.

Danish Cartoons: No to religious censorship

Multiculturalism has confused the left on matters of censorship

In 2006 the New Labour government in London promoted a bill in Parliament to outlaw the publication of material that religious people might find offensive. The main backers of the bill were fundamentalist Muslims.

Some on the "left" felt that this bill would play a positive role in reducing anti-Muslim feeling in Britain and help integrate society. I did not agree; hence the letter below.

6 February 2006

Hi Ian,

I never thought, when we left university in 1983, that twenty-six years later we would be debating the possibility of fining and even jailing people who mocked religion, nor putting the Enlightenment on par with Islam. Times change.

Islam, like all religion which purports to command behaviour beyond that of the individual choice, makes a totalitarian claim on society. Liberalism, by contrast, aims to maximise the individual’s freedom of action, consistent with everybody else having the same freedom. The trade-off between the two is not one of reconciling two positions which are different but of the same kind (e.g. should the outside of the building be painted yellow or green), but of compromising one position which purports to give maximum choice to all with another that seeks to impose a ‘patterned’ life on everybody.

Let me take three consequences of attempting to appease fundamentalist Islam, which has become so enraged in Britain and elsewhere this week as a consequence of cartoons published in a Danish newspaper. (It is perhaps worth pointing out that no Muslim in Britain need see these pictures, and whatever is decided in Britain is hardly likely to cause Denmark to rescind its long tradition of freedom of speech).

First, if Islam were to be protected against ridicule, then of course other religions would enjoy the same protection. ‘The Life of Brian’ and anything like it would be seen no more in the New Britain.

Second, if a cartoon published in a newspaper causes outrage, then so much greater is the outrage, for example, of women walking uncovered through Muslim areas. Once you have abandoned the individual rights as a basis of law making, where does one stop in ensuring social peace through appeasement?

Third, most people who want to attack Islam (as opposed to Muslims) are from the Muslim community itself. The veil of censorship would fall on the likes of Salmon Rushdie, and we would have the absurd position of the British State attempting to stop the secularisation of Islamic communities, and prosecuting dissidents within its ranks.

The whole debate in Britain is absurd. Last week we had the Blair government seeking to impose censorship on publications which ‘insulted’ Islam (and for form’s sake other religions too). What effrontery from these New Labour scumbags! What kind of insult is a cartoon compared with the massacre of hundreds of thousands in Iraq? Why does the government concern itself with insults against Muslims caused by scribblers, but see none in 90-day detentions without charge? The truth is that the Blair government seeks censorship for the same reason that seeks 90-day detentions and war – it wishes to expand power of the state.

I know you decided in the end to oppose the Religious Hatred Bill, so what I’m trying to do is to pull you back even more firmly into a defence of liberal positions, positions which form the bedrock, in my view, of any worthwhile socialism.


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Imagined Communities by Benedict Anderson

Nationalism conceived as an imagined community continues to be a driving force in the world today.

Imagined Communities, first published in 1983, prompted a series of investigations into nationalism that embraced several other writers such as Eric Hobsbawm and Ernest Gellner. Of the book itself, there is much discussion on the net, so here I only want to add a few points which were of particular interest to me.

Nation as an imagined community is a gripping idea. The members of these communities (British, Swiss, Indonesian, etc) imagine themselves as part of a family or Gemeinschaft even though it is impossible for them to know one another. The book is an attempt to account for that conception in the modern world.

Anderson traces the first steps towards the development of the nation in Europe. The Middle Ages were nation-free. Allegiance was to king, church and lord and neither language unity (except for the Latin of the elite) nor clearly defined geographical boundaries existed.

Printing changed everything. After the market had been exhausted for Latin texts, publishers sought to exploit the vernacular and in so doing put in train the process of turning some local dialects into literary languages. In parallel, the development of the absolutist state expanded the state bureaucracies, whose officials used the vernacular language which was unified, consolidated and disseminated in printed form across territories.

Anderson comments on the seeming oddity of nationalism taking off first in the New World before exploding in Europe in the French Revolution. In discussing this, the book draws not just on North but in strong measure on South America. The argument is that the colonial officials of these states resented the growing centralised power of their European masters, so the middle rank state bureaucrats in league with commerical interests in the colonies rebelled. Rebellion had nothing to do with either ethnicity or language.

In Europe by the late Nineteenth Century the key promoters of nationalism were the school teacher, civil servant and journalist. Nation increasingly became anchored in an ethnic conception of language. Royalty and aristocracy engineered a new basis for their position: their representation of nation-ness as opposed to loyalty to them through God and tradition.

By the end of the nineteenth century most of Africa and Asia were colonies of European powers. As the state apparatus and commercial organisation expanded the number of administrators grew. European colonialists had their superior position preserved through growing levels of racism. The racist aspect of nationalism expanded.

In ruling their colonies, the imperial powers also imported their own nationalisms, which became templates for the oppressed people of those lands to copy. For instance, the story of the French revolution taught in colonial schools became a ready tool for those fighting for national Independence in Indo-China. Independence movements consolidated the existence of nation states across the globe, however ethnically heterogeneous those states were.

Nationalism did not die with advent of communist regimes after 1917. Revolutionaries consolidated their power within existing state apparatuses. Indeed, Anderson begins his book by focusing on the conflict which broke out in 1979 between two communist “nation” states, Vietnam and Cambodia.

Anderson highlights two features of nationalism which traditionally are overlooked: the map and the museum. Every nation state carves out is territory on the earth and so makes a shape of itself. In fact that shape comes to represent the nation as a shape without marking for rivers, mountains, towns, etc. The museum collects together the images and artefact's of the nation.

Several other features of the book are worthy of comment.

First, Anderson’s argument is distinctive, not just in his characterisation of nationalism and his argument that it is not something which is historically finished, but in the fact that the bulk of his examples are taken not from Europe and North America, but from Latin American and Asia. While this is fully justified given the argument, some of the material calls on historical knowledge which might challenge the “educated amateur.”

The book avoids jargon, though it does overflow with metaphorical language, but it is less flowery than the writing style of his brother Perry. The text is nonetheless easy and enjoyable to read.

Finally, the book ends with a chapter on its own history and an account of its publication and translation around the globe. Against the charge of arrogance, one could certainly excuse Anderson given the influence that his book has had. And strangely, the chapter is interesting to read in its own right.

ANDERSON, Benedict,Imagined Communities, Verso: 1983, 2006.

Britain is no longer a free society

By the end of 2007 there was a growing realisation that civil liberties in Britain were draining away. (Written December 2007)

Britain is now a society, which has departed from any normal understanding of civil liberties and personal freedom. People can be held by police for a month (and soon longer it would seem) without being subject to any charge. They may also be sent to prison and suffer other deprivations of liberty for what amounts to ‘thought crimes.’

Last month, for instance, a twenty-three year old woman, Samina Malik, received a nine month suspended prison sentence plus a community service order for writing jihad poetry on a cash till receipt and for having visited jihad websites. This was even though the jury found no intention on her part to aid or commit terrorist offences.

The current acceleration in authoritarianism consists of three interrelated process. First is the ever growing surveillance society with the ubiquitous CCTV cameras - soon to be augmented by electronic identity cards – which increase the power of the state vis-à-vis its citizenry. Second is the widening raft of illiberal legislation ranging from the banning of demonstrations outside parliament to the criminalisation of free speech and free browsing on the internet. Third is the increasing resort to prison and control orders. Britain has become the most watched state in Europe and has the highest proportion of its population in jail.

All of this has happened, of course, against a background of a genuine terrorist threat, but one that has been exaggerated and abused by government. Yet we live in an age of political passivity, sustained by a slow but real increase in the living standards of so-called "Middle England" and for many better-off workers too. Thus suverying the situation from a position of relative comfort, Mr and Mrs average are so used to believing that they live in a mostly free and tolerant society – and that any restrictions are reasonable and serve the general good – that they are not noticing that the structures that sustain that freedom, gained over centuries of struggle, have now cracked and are coming apart.

Income Inequality in Britain

Income inequality in Britain is growing even bigger.

A recent OECD report has provided some figures for income inequality in Britain. It is worth noting some of these.

In 1985 the income ratio between the top and bottom deciles of the population was 1:8. By 2008 that figure had grown to 1:12. In comparison, the ratio in other northern European countries (e.g. Germany, Netherlands) had deteriorated from 1:5 to 1:6 over the same time period.

Even that masks the growth of income of the very rich: i.e. the top one percent of the population. In 1970 they took home 7.1 percent of national income; by 2005 the figure stood at 14.3, with the top 0.1 percent alone taking around 5 percent of pre-tax income.

In the 1970s and 1980s taxation and benefits were able to re-distribute around half of the increases in income going to the richest. By the 2000s that figure fell to 20 percent.

Opinion polls in Britain show that around two-thirds of people believe that income inequality is too big.

Finally, it should be noted that the OECD report is based on official documentation. In reality, the rich receive more than is ever officially attributed to them through a variety of legal and illegal means.

Ĉu Ĝi Estas Nur Fabelo? (Is it only a fable?) by Jan Wolski

This book published in 1935 weaves a fantasy of inter-war Polish children building cooperatives and planning for better future.

This is a strange fairytale – a mixture of pure fantasy and political parable. The story is set in an impoverished village in interwar Poland. The children engage in various forms of naughty behaviour which parental disapproval – shown physically and morally – fails to rectify. The local teacher (La Senjoro Instrusito) believes that the root of all naughtiness is an attempt by children to emulate adult behaviour. The cure is to set up a youth cooperative in the village in which the children can produce things for themselves – products ranging from schoolbooks to the skating shoes. The children are enthusiastic and set about the work and so become model child citizens.

The bulk of the book consists of an imaginary state of affairs in which all aspects of building a network of cooperatives, first across Poland and then across the world, are considered. The boundless optimism of the young people for the project is unreal, but somehow makes the book interesting. You know that everything will turn out well.

In the final chapter we have moved on ten years and the teacher has retired. He is invited to visit a cooperative colony in the mountains where by chance all his old pupils (now trained as doctors, cooperative administrators, etc) now live. We glance into this regimented but idyllic community of cooperative, polite and enthusiastic young people. Visitors from cooperatives Denmark, Italy and even Algeria are there. In this later edition of the book, it is emphasised that Esperanto is spoken for international communication. The last pages of this book, published just four years before Poland’s conflagration in the Second World War, express the forlorn hope that such a generation of young people will go on to build a world based on peace and cooperation.

This book is no Comintern tract. It is distinctly Polish with endless soft nationalistic references to Polishness and indirect praise for the Polish dictator Josef Pilsudski. The book espouses moral virtue, cooperation, collectivism and self-help. It is a wonderful portrait of the hopes of a forgotten age.

I picked up this book in the Esperanto bookshop in Budapest for some fifty eurocents. Its pages are yellow with age; and one thought – perhaps more interesting than the contents of the book itself – is the where the book has been, and the history it has seen, since its publication in Warsaw in 1935.

WOLSKI, Jan. Ĉu Ĝi Estas Nur Fabelo? Esperanta Eldono-Kooperativo en Varsovio 1935

The book was written in Esperanto. (La libro estas verkita esperantlingve.)


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Ethnic Cleansing at Dale Farm

The liquidation of the Dale Farm gypsy settlement is a case of localised ethnic cleansing camouflaged with the language of protecting the Green Belt.

On Wednesday 19 October 2011 after several appeals and much dithering in the courts – in which Britain’s judges prioritised planning law over human rights – the forceful eviction of gypsies from the Dale Farm settlement began.

On the first day, the settlement, weakly defended by residents and non-violent direct action activists, was attacked at day break by columns of riot police. Electric stun guns (tasers) were offensively deployed on two occasions. Once the residents and their supporters had been subdued, the bailiffs moved in to do their dirty work of demolishing homes.

The gypsies were evicted from their ten-year-old settlement, consisting of land which the settlers either owned or had been leased to them. There were no issues of trespass.

The gypsies themselves were dispersed and driven from the municipality of Basildon. Their pain is every bit as strong as that of people ethnically cleansed in Palestine or elsewhere. Eighty-six families and around one hundred children were rendered destitute, left to inhabit car parks and road lay-bys.

To carry out this piece of micro-ethnic cleansing, Basildon’s Conservative-led council and the Home office spent around twenty million pounds to make hundreds of people homeless. That amounts to some 230 000 pounds per gypsy family. Obviously Cameron and the Basildon Council leader, Tony Ball, think this is money well spent to pander to racist sentiment in Britain.

Those who say this is merely about upholding the laws of urban planning are either using this pretext to cover their racism or to absolve their consciousnesses. There is simply no meaningful parallel in preventing a property developer building for profit or a homeowner building an extension with the bulldozing of a decade old settlement. Why should planning law trump all other considerations? When the London orbital M25 motorway was built thousands of square kilometres of Green Belt land were concreted. Of course, a derogation for the M25 motorway was permitted because the road was deemed important. But why was there no derogation for the largest gypsy settlement in England?

The Dale Farm settlement is to be bulldozed in an attempt to create the pretence that it never existed.

Zamenhof: the forgotten philosopher

Ludvik Zamenhof's humanism led to a rejection of nationalism.

Ludvik Zamenhof tends to be known, if at all, as the creator of Esperanto. As an ethical and social philosopher, his humanism is little studied outside the Esperanto community. Zamenhof’s thought had biblical origins. He was influenced by the prophet Hillel the Elder, whose Golden Rule, what is hateful to you, do not do to your fellow, was developed by Zamenhof into a rejection of nationalism and religious intolerance. In their place Zamenhof promoted cosmopolitanism and universal human values. Below I provide a translation of a single passage of Zamenhof’s writing.

“I am totally convinced that every nationalism presents only the greatest unhappiness for humanity, and that the aim of every people should be the creation of a harmonious humanity. It’s true that the nationalism of oppressed people – a natural reaction of self defence – is more excusable than the nationalism of oppressors; but, if the nationalism of the strong is ignoble, the nationalism of the weak is imprudent; yet each reinforces the other and presents a vicious circle of unhappiness from which humanity can never escape unless all of us give up our self-love of the group and try instead to establish ourselves on a wholly neutral basis.”

The original Esperanto was:

“Mi estas profunde konvinkita, ke ĉiu nacionalismo prezentas por la homaro nur plej grandan malfeliĉon, kaj ke la celado de ĉiuj homoj devus esti: krei harmonian homaron. Estas vero, ke la nacionalismo de gentoj premataj — kiel natura sindefenda reago — estas multe pli pardoninda, ol la nacionalismo de gentoj premantaj; sed, se la nacionalismo de fortuloj estas nenobla, la nacionalismo de malfortuloj estas neprudenta; ambaŭ naskas kaj subtenas unu la alian, kaj prezentas eraran rondon de malfeliĉoj, el kiuj la homaro neniam eliros, se ĉiu el ni ne oferos sian grupan memamon kaj ne penos stariĝi sur grundo tute neŭtrala.”

Functionalism

Functionalism is a sociological theory which suffers from deficiencies and can provide an underpinning for conservative world views.

Functionalism (and its resultant method of research, which leads to the comparison of institutions in different societies) is far from useless. Postulating that in order to exist an institution has to do X, Y and Z and then asking how it does it raises key questions for investigation and analysis.

The problems lie in what is NOT asked in the functionalist paradigm.

History: in Society A a function is fulfilled by activity P. In Society B the same function is fulfilled by activity Q. But why the difference? It has to be explained by the different histories of societies A and B, and not by the comparison between them.

The functionalist paradigm also ignores what political actors themselves think they are doing.


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How Rulers Rule: Three Types of Regime

Political regimes keep themselves in power by one of three methods: repression, wining the propaganda war against their opponents or by having no serious opponents.

States have repressive and ideological mechanisms at their disposal, all of which serve to put the brakes on radical social change. Indeed, given the massive discrepancies of income, wealth, status and power within all societies - and assuming people not to be inherently masochistic - one can assume radical distributional change would occur, if it were not for these mechanism of control that hold back both revolution and radical reform. In the last hundred years or so, the main threat to the ruling elites in capitalist countries was the demand for some form of socialist society, and indeed socialist writers used up an enormous amount of ink attempting to fathom out how socialism could come about. While socialism was by far the most powerful challenge both politically and ideologically to capitalist rule, opposition has also come from various forms of fascism and, more recently, from fundamentalist Islam.

In the developed world only two types of regime have existed until now: one is the capitalist system, often but not always, operating in a democratic or semi-democratic polity. The other was the rule of communist parties in Europe, Asia and a few other outposts; historical communism constituted a significant global force during what Eric Hobsbawm called the short century 1917-89. Under both capitalism and state socialism, however, there has always been a strata or class of people who possessed disproportionate wealth and power, though inequality was greatest in capitalist countries, most of which most of the time were, ironically, democracies.

Much traditional Marxist writing has sought to identify and clarify the capitalist state per se. While such an approach is not incorrect, I think it fails to capture what can be seen as three specific forms of elite rule and state formation over the last century or so.

The first is repressive rule through the authoritarian state. The elites maintain their rule by using the military and police to restrict civic rights (freedom of speech, assembly, etc) and these regimes either have no elections or else corrupt the electoral process. We can assume that the majority of the people, if they had the choice, would vote the existing political elite out of office and vote in politicians who would attempt to bring about fundamental regime change. Regimes of this kind have been present in Europe: fascist Germany and Italy until the end of the end of the Second World War, or Spain, Portugal and Greece until the 1970s are examples. All the former communist countries had political regimes of this type.

The second is ideological rule, which historically has only occurred in capitalist countries. All of these regimes have had a large measure of civil liberty and competitive elections, though of course behind the state there is still a repressive arm. The ruling elites maintain their privileges in several ways. First, they are able to convince the majority of people that they are better rulers than the leaders of left wing parties, a goal which is achieved though their dominance in the media and often by means of approving concessions, such as social welfare. Second, the leaders of left-wing parties are co-opted into the political elite and/or end up compromising their social democratic goals to acquire or keep office. Third, the power of capital as a ‘pressure group’ is so huge it can usually force left-wing governments to compromise. In Western Europe until recently this has been the pattern of politics: political elites seeing off, co-opting or compromising moderate social democracy. In every case the majority of people have been convinced not to back parties seriously contemplating radical social change.

The third is post-ideological rule. In western Europe the long-term trend in the first three-quarters of the twentieth century was for the left to grow in strength and for ideological rule to replace repressive rule. However since the 1980s, and after 1989 in particular, the left – social democratic, communist, or liberal – has collapsed as a political force. The reasons for this are several, but the result is to create a society where capitalist power, and the groups which benefit from it, face no serious organised challenge at all. Working people shun politics altogether. Everyone who suffers economically individualises his or her pain; they filter their alienation through music, drugs and on-line virtual contacts. Community and shared meaning evaporate and are replaced with cults, mysticism or sheer isolation. Logic, argument and intellectual debate disappear in favour of the soundbite or the fatuous. Political competition in democracies comes more and more to focus on spin and trivia (e.g. bald leaders are never elected, etc) as the fundamental assumption of the system are increasingly unquestioned.

Of course this trichotomy is only a rough and ready one. Particular states at particular times are likely to combine elements from all three ideal types. The model is problematic in dealing with situations where ‘ideological rule’ is maintained by and within one ethnic group while another faces a repressive rule; e.g. Palestinians in Israel, or indeed the social underclass in the US or Britain today. Nonetheless I believe the trichotomy is very clear in describing the overall political model in Western Europe as regards the movement from ‘repressive’ to ‘ideological’ and then to ‘post-ideological’ rule.

The trichotomy can be clarified by mean of a joke. The devil is showing a newcomer around Hell. In the first room there are a group of people sitting in a barrel of shit. The man asks, ‘Why don’t they get out?’ ‘Ah,’ says the devil, ‘they can’t because there is a soldier there with a gun waiting to shoot anyone who tries.’ They go into the second room where there are another group sitting in a barrel of shit. The man notices, though, that the soldier is asleep, so he asks ‘why don’t they get out?’ ‘Well,’ says the devil, ‘look, there’s a TV screen telling them how nice and warm it is in barrel compared with outside.’ They go into a third room and the man again sees a group of people sitting in a barrel of shit, once again the soldier is asleep, but this time the TV is just showing pop videos. ‘So why don’t they get out?’ asks the man. ‘Well,’ says the devil, ‘they’re busy watching the videos and they don’t know that there’s life outside the barrel.’

Post-ideological rule came into full bloom in the mid 2000s both in Europe and North America. It was reinforced by the myth of eternal economic growth financed on credit; a boom in which all but the poorest would find fulfilment in ever-expanding private consumption. Yet, the economic base of that society shattered in the financial crisis which exploded in the autumn of 2008, leading to soaring unemployment, bankruptcy and economic despair. One feels writing today (July 2009) that the car has gone over the cliff, but not yet hit the rocks. We are seeing the end of a political era without being able to find the birth of a new one. The whole society remains limp in inactive anticipation. Politically not much has happened, even if fascist parties have won some electoral backing across Europe. We are in phoney war where the post-ideological model, in it present form at any rate, has come to an end but failed to disappear.


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