Skip to content or view mobile version

Home | Mobile | Editorial | Mission | Privacy | About | Contact | Help | Security | Support

A network of individuals, independent and alternative media activists and organisations, offering grassroots, non-corporate, non-commercial coverage of important social and political issues.

Execution of "Occupy Democracy" and the Banality of Evil

Black Robin | 29.10.2014 13:05 | Occupy Everywhere | Analysis | Policing | Repression | London

The sense of duty trumped ethics in the state repression at Parliament Square

Heritage Wardens enforce a ban on music
Heritage Wardens enforce a ban on music


"Most of the time I deal with customer service," said the man in a Salvation Army uniform as he commanded a battalion of policemen to violently haul peaceful Occupy Democracy protesters off their illicit tarpaulin "structures".

Meet Parliament Square's chief heritage warden, Mr S. His full name is not important. He wears his uniform, I wear mine. He is a decent chap on a personal level, even a principled one. A former sapper in the Royal Engineers, he helped build roads and schools in Iraq and Afghanistan. He is now the future of policing in the threadbare patch of grass situated opposite what is laughingly referred to as democracy.

Mr S loves service, loves uniform, loves his country and loves order. Many would regard him as a heroic figure, standing against the hoards of imaginary enemies, both domestic and foreign, which are crucial to the government's legitimacy.

Mr S faced unwarranted abuse in the line of duty as Heritage Warden. His lip was cut when someone hit him in the face, although it turned out that this was an accident. Someone had uploaded his photo to Twitter calling him a child molester and others have engaged in bullying about his weight. But most ignored him.

He works for AOS, a private security firm contracted by the Greater London Authority (GLA) to enforce the most draconian policing the motherfucker of democracies has ever witnessed. When a bye-law was infringed, Mr S would warn the offender. If the offence continued, the police would step in to put enforce Mr S's words, occasionally with a well-aimed fist.

Incidents included a man playing an acoustic guitar and singing a song about trees. Mr S delivered the warning and on being ignored by the guitarist as he finished his song, the warden went into conference with the police to discuss which legislation could be applied to criminalise music. Did the bye-laws or the Police Reform and Social Responsibility Act (PRSA) apply to the guitar, the woman accompanying him with a melodica (unauthorised amplified sound) or the general melodic feeling imparted to the audience of half a dozen?

Mr S was not without sympathy for the cause. He felt very moved by some protesters, particularly one woman who was dragged by police across Parliament Square while sobbing. "I admire her for the strength of her opinions," said Mr S. "But the law is the law." He had ordered the police to pounce on the woman.

Justifying his role, Mr S insisted he is a family man with a mortgage to pay and that he is "only obeying orders". On this basis, he justifies the enforcement of the most obscenely petty rules governing Parliament Square.

It was not just Mr S who was doing his duty. When asked whether the bored looking policemen guarding fences would like to be somewhere else, a light-hearted police liaison officer chirped: "This is the job they have been given by the chain of command." All individuality and moral conscience has been extinguished in the service to the state machinery. It doesn't matter that human rights were being trampled into the grass and mud or that the rules were blatantly absurd, all that matters is duty. As members of this expedient law enforcement mechanism, they no longer matter as individuals. And if one removed himself, another would fill his place.

Hannah Arendt dubbed this the "banality of evil" following her interviews with Adolf Eichmann in an attempt to understand the motivations of Nazi war criminals. By calling a crime against humanity "banal", she was pointing to the way in which the crime had become accepted, routinised, and implemented without moral revulsion, political indignation or resistance.

The failure to think is genocidal. The failure to take accountability for our actions, even within a hierarchy such as the police or a privately contracted police operation, is tyrannical. Eichmann himself claimed that while implementing the Final Solution, he was merely acting on duty and twisted his reasoning and Kant's categorical imperative to justify it as a moral act.

Arendt's indictment of Eichmann was an indictment of society in general, where oppression is acceptable, a noxious set of laws is obeyed and enforced and all that matters is obedience with no critical distance from authority.

That's not to say Parliament Square's heritage wardens are ideological Nazis that would send Jews to the gas chambers, nor that the ridiculous bye-laws are equivalent of the Nuremberg Laws. But the line of thinking is the same. Ethics and reasoning are no longer relevant. All that matters is duty. As a result, within the manicured and exclusive grounds of Parliament Square we have fertile soil for tyranny.

Mr S and his colleagues are not the sole problem. The problem exists in the institution that the Occupy Democracy campaign was attempting to lobby, an institution that - like the police - was established to protect the ruling class against the interests of the masses. On the other side of the road, the sentiment was largely in favour of harder policing.

In a debate on the Occupy protest, that august feudal institution renowned for brazen corruption, the House of Lords, ignored the appeals for greater parliamentary accountability and focused on policing. Home Office Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State Lord Bates voiced horror at the potential for a protest to "get out of hand" and pose a "risk to the public" when it "begins at 50, grows to 100, and then grows overnight to 150."

"Proportionate policing" required one cop for up to two protesters, "just in case" - of what? There was less violence and civil unrest at the Occupy protest than there is on a Wednesday night in a Surrey market town. Is national security so delicate that the order of things could be destroyed by cutting a piece of string (criminal damage) or giving someone refreshments (obstruction of police)?Donnachadh McCarthy, the former Deputy Chair of the Liberal Democrats and columnist for The Independent, who was campaigning for better police pay and pensions. Not exactly an anarchist.




One wonders what the honourable Lord Bates thinks should be the proportionate response to a demonstration on a scale of the Hong Kong protests - probably less "light touch" than the Chinese Communist regime.

But apart from the Green Party's Baroness Jones, who was smacked in the face by the hand of firm government for having the audacity to attempt to give a protester a bottle of water, the Lords were unanimous in their desire to close down any protest the government could not limit, control and shut down - no matter how peaceful. (Readers will be glad to know that, as a member of this privileged feudal club, Jones was released without charge - others were thrown in a cell at Charing Cross Police Station)

After congratulating the police, Tebbit said: "The easiest way to reduce the manpower required be for these objectionable people to cease their objectionable claim to occupy part of what is public land." (Public land that is now under the purview of glorified bouncers)

The debate concluded with Labour's Lord West of Spithead indicating that running over the demonstrators with a car could be a reasonable response: "when I was being driven past in my car in my full uniform, they came and stood in front of the car and I managed to stop an incident because my Royal Marine driver said, “Shall I re-educate them, sir?” and I said, “Not today”."

The sentiment in the House of Lords is that repression is the best treatment the unarmed, peaceful Occupy protesters could get and that it would be better they were removed by force. Parliament has declared war on peaceful protest.

If we are not at the point of having a police state, then we will very soon be there. We can see it building: the rising xenophobia and intolerance, the misery of austerity and the public acceptance of intrusive repressive measures based on the insidious notion of "war on terror". These are dangerous times.

How do we defeat this monster?

Black Robin
- Homepage: http://blackrobinanarchy.blogspot.nl/

Upcoming Coverage
View and post events
Upcoming Events UK
24th October, London: 2015 London Anarchist Bookfair
2nd - 8th November: Wrexham, Wales, UK & Everywhere: Week of Action Against the North Wales Prison & the Prison Industrial Complex. Cymraeg: Wythnos o Weithredu yn Erbyn Carchar Gogledd Cymru

Ongoing UK
Every Tuesday 6pm-8pm, Yorkshire: Demo/vigil at NSA/NRO Menwith Hill US Spy Base More info: CAAB.

Every Tuesday, UK & worldwide: Counter Terror Tuesdays. Call the US Embassy nearest to you to protest Obama's Terror Tuesdays. More info here

Every day, London: Vigil for Julian Assange outside Ecuadorian Embassy

Parliament Sq Protest: see topic page
Ongoing Global
Rossport, Ireland: see topic page
Israel-Palestine: Israel Indymedia | Palestine Indymedia
Oaxaca: Chiapas Indymedia
Regions
All Regions
Birmingham
Cambridge
Liverpool
London
Oxford
Sheffield
South Coast
Wales
World
Other Local IMCs
Bristol/South West
Nottingham
Scotland
Social Media
You can follow @ukindymedia on indy.im and Twitter. We are working on a Twitter policy. We do not use Facebook, and advise you not to either.
Support Us
We need help paying the bills for hosting this site, please consider supporting us financially.
Other Media Projects
Schnews
Dissident Island Radio
Corporate Watch
Media Lens
VisionOnTV
Earth First! Action Update
Earth First! Action Reports
Topics
All Topics
Afghanistan
Analysis
Animal Liberation
Anti-Nuclear
Anti-militarism
Anti-racism
Bio-technology
Climate Chaos
Culture
Ecology
Education
Energy Crisis
Fracking
Free Spaces
Gender
Globalisation
Health
History
Indymedia
Iraq
Migration
Ocean Defence
Other Press
Palestine
Policing
Public sector cuts
Repression
Social Struggles
Technology
Terror War
Workers' Movements
Zapatista
Major Reports
NATO 2014
G8 2013
Workfare
2011 Census Resistance
Occupy Everywhere
August Riots
Dale Farm
J30 Strike
Flotilla to Gaza
Mayday 2010
Tar Sands
G20 London Summit
University Occupations for Gaza
Guantanamo
Indymedia Server Seizure
COP15 Climate Summit 2009
Carmel Agrexco
G8 Japan 2008
SHAC
Stop Sequani
Stop RWB
Climate Camp 2008
Oaxaca Uprising
Rossport Solidarity
Smash EDO
SOCPA
Past Major Reports
Encrypted Page
You are viewing this page using an encrypted connection. If you bookmark this page or send its address in an email you might want to use the un-encrypted address of this page.
If you recieved a warning about an untrusted root certificate please install the CAcert root certificate, for more information see the security page.

Global IMC Network


www.indymedia.org

Projects
print
radio
satellite tv
video

Africa

Europe
antwerpen
armenia
athens
austria
barcelona
belarus
belgium
belgrade
brussels
bulgaria
calabria
croatia
cyprus
emilia-romagna
estrecho / madiaq
galiza
germany
grenoble
hungary
ireland
istanbul
italy
la plana
liege
liguria
lille
linksunten
lombardia
madrid
malta
marseille
nantes
napoli
netherlands
northern england
nottingham imc
paris/île-de-france
patras
piemonte
poland
portugal
roma
romania
russia
sardegna
scotland
sverige
switzerland
torun
toscana
ukraine
united kingdom
valencia

Latin America
argentina
bolivia
chiapas
chile
chile sur
cmi brasil
cmi sucre
colombia
ecuador
mexico
peru
puerto rico
qollasuyu
rosario
santiago
tijuana
uruguay
valparaiso
venezuela

Oceania
aotearoa
brisbane
burma
darwin
jakarta
manila
melbourne
perth
qc
sydney

South Asia
india


United States
arizona
arkansas
asheville
atlanta
Austin
binghamton
boston
buffalo
chicago
cleveland
colorado
columbus
dc
hawaii
houston
hudson mohawk
kansas city
la
madison
maine
miami
michigan
milwaukee
minneapolis/st. paul
new hampshire
new jersey
new mexico
new orleans
north carolina
north texas
nyc
oklahoma
philadelphia
pittsburgh
portland
richmond
rochester
rogue valley
saint louis
san diego
san francisco
san francisco bay area
santa barbara
santa cruz, ca
sarasota
seattle
tampa bay
united states
urbana-champaign
vermont
western mass
worcester

West Asia
Armenia
Beirut
Israel
Palestine

Topics
biotech

Process
fbi/legal updates
mailing lists
process & imc docs
tech