FREEDOM=LESS STATE POWER, MORE PEOPLE POWER

   The police masks become evermore grotesque; replicas of Darth Vader with stuffed chests and clots covering breast and hips. There they stand in the streets of Paris, revolutionary Paris, or in the streets of old French villages, ready to crush all opposers of "democracy". These are the saviours of freedom of expression, we are told; and if they don't strike us that way at first sight it might be because there is a second-sense about so-called democracies who need such postively desperate levels of security. These are the noble forces who choke a man to death whose crime is selling a cigarette on the streets of New York City. How did democracy and free-expression wind-up needing such droves of goons to protect them, when for ages, even through some very dangerous times, like those my own father lived through, these required nothing more than a modium of credit with the governed? If you are one of those people ignored by your government you already know the answer. For you, as in many nations around the globe, from Ireland to Greece, there is no representative government, merely the bankers or the plutocrats who support them. So while I disappove of terrorists, I am not assured by States who go berserk at the site of a balacava or a raised fist or a cigarette for sale. Where, we may ask, is the people's stake in today's 'democracies'? If you ask that question you will hear a great silence on Wall Street and in Washington, a thunderous silence in the halls of government.  It just so happens, apparently, that although the security police now regularly harrasss the poor in the United States and across Europe and Russia and in China as well---we are told by our government that we actually need more of them and more military equipment on our streets to guard our suddenly disappearing freedoms! But why is freedom ebbing? What has a minority of men in business and in goverment done against their own populations to lessen the people's freedom? Why has our freedom, as our government frequently tells us, come under threat? 

John Kerry, the Secetary of State, brought out his best French yesterday to issue a romantic eighteenth-century salute to France, but that France is no more. What stands in its place is a vaguely scleroic, highly nervous population tettering on the edge of racial politics if not outright facism. How could this happen in one of the most tolerant and liberal places on earth? Kerry talked about the great tradition of freedom without mentioning how the blood of the French Revolution unsettled both Europe and America, and still unsettles it. And of course he did not dare to mention that the unbridled domination of private Finance and Corporate power under the guise of "globalism" poses any threat whatsoever to freedom, none at all! This is what is called the liberalism of our day. It is the ugly mask of a failed generation. 

Kerry's romantizied France is no more, instead contemporary France is reverting to yet another history-less place where people imagine that they are required to defend freedoms they have failed to notice that they no longer possess, such as freedom from spying, from intrusive police, or, the right to have an income or a job. (And don't declare that right out of the question too quickly, since it is being seriously considered in Switzerland and elsewhere. (And the Swiss, we may note, are not famous for their generosity) Which France was Kerry addressing? The embittered acidic France of the slain cartoonists? I doubt it. That France, in which I participated when I lived there---is so far to the left that  they have no seat at the table and are considered cultural rather than political. (Tell that to the families and friends of the slain journalists and see what they reply!) These men were political, and they meant it. They would want to be remembered by political action, not love-ins!

 While the debate rages about protecting freedom no one mentions imperialist France, that country which claimed Syria as one of the spoils of the First World War. This fact receives no mention as a cause of anything at all. When the West steals it is legal, but if the East dares to assert itself, it is ignored, mocked, or explodes in to factions which don't fit into a State system at all--- and shouldn't ever have been forced into one. Nor do they mention the economic or political incentive lying behind the so called "War on Terror". The United States budget for "counter-terroism" is now in the billions of dollars. Moreover, precisely what is germaine to the freedom of Egypt, or of Syria, or of Libya, or that of Palestine or Iran, by declaring to the world that: We Are All Charlie? What can that sporific phrase mean to them? Nothing. A vaguely cultural sensibility is no answer to the people of the Middle East who have now bled for years for freedom, and still do not have the freedoms for which they have fought. No answer at all. Do we consider all of them, much as we take any oppostion to Israel, to be stamped with the mark of Cain?  And until we have answered them, as we still have not, how can we mend our own societies from runaway financiers and obbessive militarists, those who foist more security upon us to solve the despair created by the lack of democracy? Down this road Facism looms, a liberal facism perhaps, at least at first, organized by Finance and purchased by Corporations, yet nonetheless a facism expressly fashioned to restain all those who work with their mind or hand, as did the satirists at Charlie Hebdo.

     We don't only need protection from terrorists, we need protection from those who are using terrorism to corral, control and surveil us; and it is growing clearer all the time than the second threat is far more acute than the first.

Will Morgan

January 9, 2015