The Function of Police in Modern Society: Peace or Control?

A good read on creation of modern police force. Before the creation of police forces, & their resultant brutality, societies used to take care of miscreants in their midst through a mix of force & rehabilitation. Then came the modern police force, which was created by elites to control the poor masses of the society. I will extend it even further & say that then those elites started to control the government to control the masses, too, & hence, laws are made & enforced in today's society, all over the world, to effectively control the poor public.

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BL-Hn_XjlS0

JAISAL NOOR, TRNN PRODUCER: The ongoing debate and protest around police brutality and how best to hold law enforcement accountable generally have one underlying assumption: the police’s role is to serve and protect the population. Police reform advocates are demanding reviewing police practices and increasing accountability through body cameras or civilian review boards with teeth.

A lot of people have told us in Baltimore and around the country that they need police, because the same people that are being affected by police brutality also live in high-crime areas, where policies have created a cycle of violence and the war on drugs is raging, there’s mass incarceration. And these areas are dangerous. People are driven to violence and desperation. And they need police to protect themselves. How do you respond to those arguments? And why do you think it’s important to bring up the history of police when having these discussions today?

SAMUEL MITRANI, ASSOC. PROF. HISTORY, COLLEGE OF DUPAGE: Well, I don’t think that people are wrong to say that we need police. We live in a very violent society with a lot of poverty, with increasing inequality, and all the problems that the society creates lead to more and more violence, the people who are ground up by the system. So I can totally understand people’s desire to be protected from those problems.

But I think the problem is the way that the police system that exists in this country was created isn’t actually to solve those problems. And I think the reason people say they need police is because that’s the only thing we can conceive of, it’s the only answer we’re given to the problems of crime, of violence, and really, I think, ultimately of poverty. But I don’t think the police are a very good solution to those problems. I think we really need to think about other kinds of systems. And I don’t think you could have a society like ours that grinds up so many people and that doesn’t defend itself with something like the police. But I think we need to understand where they come from.

NOOR: And so talk about where they come from, because I think a lot of people will be surprised to learn that the modern police force is only about 150 years old. There was no police force as we know it until the middle of the 19th century. Talk about where they came from and why they were instituted. And also I think people will be interested to know what form of police and law enforcement existed before the modern police force.

MITRANI: Well, I think there’s two different systems, if you’re talking about the United States, that existed in the 19th century. One was a system in the South which was really designed to control slaves, and it came out of slave patrols. In the North, in cities, you got police as a wage labor economy developed.

So I actually want to start by talking about the system that existed before, which is more or less a system of elected officials responsible for enforcing order. But they didn’t have a lot of separation from the population. So you’d have a constable elected in a small town, but that person would make their living by having their own farm. And they’d be called on when necessary. They could raise a posse. But the whole tradition of having a posse was a tradition of having the population itself be organized to deal with a specific, immediate problem–there’s a murderer loose, you know who did it, you have to catch the person.

That’s very, very different from the system we have now, with a military force of people whose professional training makes them separated from the population. They wear uniforms. They are full-time police officers. That’s something which really emerged as you got huge numbers of people in big cities, like New York, Philadelphia, Chicago, Boston, starting in the 1820s, ’30s, ’40s, ’50s, who we re no longer linked to the elite.

At an earlier time in the cities, you’d have a whole idea that people could move up. You started off as an apprentice. You could become an artisan. There was a much smaller group of people who were totally separated from that path and the people who were separated from that path, but there was some idea of controlling, didn’t live that far from other people, who were much more embedded in the society. But by the 1850s especially, you got more and more people who really had very little chance of moving up, who were going to be workers their whole lives. And this is especially true of immigrants coming from Ireland, coming from Germany, coming from other parts of Europe at that time in the northern cities.

And so people who were business people, wealthy people, were really scared–oh, man, in this city, there’s a whole huge number of people over there. We don’t know what they’re doing. They’re totally out of our control. They don’t necessarily like what’s going on, because they’re paying them extremely low wages. Many of them are forced into prostitution. So in that situation, elites develop the idea of a police force to put some control on those people.
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Definitely true. And also there’s plenty of racism against free people of color in the North during this time period, who had a better situation than slaves, but it’s not like they were treated equally to the white population, or even to the immigrants at that time. But in the cities like Chicago, their numbers are very small at the time period I’m talking about.

NOOR: And so talk about what was happening. Talk about the social turmoil, especially in the later half of the 19th century, in big cities like Chicago. And even in Baltimore, we had huge strikes here as well, and in New York, of course. So talk about what the turmoil revolved around and why the elites felt so threatened during this time period.

MITRANI: Well, there’s a basic truth, which is nobody really likes having a job. I mean, basically, having a job kind of sucks if what you’re going to do all day every day is go to work for somebody who pays you just enough to survive. You have no chance of owning your own business, which increasingly became true at all these cities–in Baltimore, for sure.

So people resented that, and they organized. And they had a preconceived idea that they were citizens of this republic, especially the white people who had been raised this idea, and they had the idea that they had the right to some better situation.

So coming out of the Civil War you had big organizing campaigns, big strikes, big conflicts over this new wage labor economy. In 1867 in Chicago there’s a general straight strike for the eight-hour day. Then, in 1877, there was a huge strike, which started on the railroads, and it reached big proportions in a bunch of cities across the country.

Actually, Baltimore is one of the cities where it get the most violent. And Baltimore at that time basically didn’t really have a modern police force. And so the strikers were put down with the National Guard. The National Guard came into Baltimore, shot down quite a few people ... . Chicago already had a police force that had been created in the few decades before, with a lot of violence put down those strikes. And after that, the business people who had been suffering from the strikes, who’d been struck, they raised from their own pockets enormous sums of money. In Chicago they bought the police Gatling guns, they bought them artillery pieces, they bought them muskets in order to make sure the population could be kept under control, because they were really scared.
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Now, what’s interesting is, ... , because as this wage labor economy was developing, that was also the time when you had a big increase in crime and you had a big increase in the numbers of people who were more or less pushed out of the system, who had no easy place, no easy way to make a living. So you had more petty crime, you had more prostitution, you had more street crime of all kinds in the late 19th century then you had in the first half of the 19th century in all these big urban cities. And so people also felt the need for some protection from this kind of disorder at that moment.

So, in Chicago, at least in the 1880s, some liberal politicians made an attempt to make the police more serve the population a little bit, reestablish some legitimacy. They did this by providing some services, like taking people to the hospital. They really publicized the things they did that were needed. And they especially developed this new ideology of order, which said what everybody says today: we need the police. They’re the thin blue line protecting civilization from anarchy. And we can’t possibly live without them; otherwise, things will go out of control. And this is something that got reinforced, especially after this Haymarket bombing in 1886, when there was another huge strike wave across the country and in Chicago. There was a bomb that went off that killed seven police officers. The aftermath of that: this idea of the police as the defenders of order and civilization against these crazy anarchists who are class conscious became implanted in a lot of the population’s mind. But there were still lots of people who resisted that, who organized in unions, who organized to resist police brutality (they didn’t use the term then, but that’s what they were resisting), and these people pushed the police back time and again.
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I think it’s a deep problem that there’s no easy solution to. We have a society that rests on violence in 100 different ways, starting with the military overseas with all the people in prisons. And how to keep this huge, violent system in place? Well, you have thousands and thousands of men with guns who are armed and trained to do so. But you also have to make them legitimate.

NOOR: And so, tying this back to today, there’s a lot of well-intentioned, serious activists around this country that want to live in a more peaceful society, and they want police to be held accountable. What lessons of the past do they need to understand to move the conversation forward? ‘Cause right now we’re stuck in a system where people are trying to, some would argue, put Band-Aids over a gaping hole that is the issues we have with law enforcement today, the killing of unarmed black men around this country and the numerous cases of brutality that are ongoing.

MITRANI: ... I think the problem is we live in this kind of society.

I think really that the needs of working-class people and of poor people need to be put first. This country has plenty of money that people shouldn’t be pushed on the streets, which need to have afterschool programs and very fully funded public schools all over the country that can get kids off the streets and give them a decent job. I think it, actually, everybody in the country should have the right to a job that provides enough money that you can live a decent life. This country is perfectly rich enough to have that.

That’s not on the table right now, unfortunately, but if you really want to talk about solving the problem of crime, you’ve got to address the problems that create crime. And I don’t think that the police do that. The police are a system that has violence to deal with the immediate problem created by a criminal right now in front of you.

So what I would say for activists is to push for all these issues and see how they’re related. I think that the more that the needs of working-class people, the needs of ordinary people can be pushed and put first, the more that we can demand the things that we actually need and not accept that the needs of business people and of bankers should come first, the more we have a chance of dealing with the problems in front of us. But that’s not so easy to do.

NOOR: ... I wanted to end with bringing up two points. One is the racial, the historical racial animosity law enforcement has to people of color, especially African-American people. And there were moments where police acted in solidarity with striking workers and the working class, and those police officers were either fired or removed from the police force in other ways. Can you briefly touch upon both those points?

MITRANI: Those are two very big points. The first point, I think, is central to the problem today. I think we had a situation where the police that I first started talking about, that developed in the 19th century, really developed in reaction to the development of a wage-labor economy with immigrant workers. But in the 20th century in the North–in the South the story is somewhat different–really the key story is a great migration of black people into the northern cities to form a key section of the American working class, and then to be the people who are the last hired, the first fired, who face all the problems created by the society first of all. And so the police have been used to keep that population in line, really since the 20 century. And you’ve seen this time and again with the rights in Chicago in 1919 through the ’50s, through the era of the black movement in the ’60s and ’70s, when in Chicago–I’m sure people know about the police murder of Fred Hampton, led by the state’s attorney, to really try to put a lid on that movement. I think the current system of mass incarceration is in part a reaction to that movement and an attempt to get young black people, especially young black men, off the streets. So I think that’s absolutely central to any discussion of this.
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And on the one hand, police are workers. They’re hired to do a job. And that creates all kinds of problems for the police themselves, the same kinds of problems that other workers can face. They can face very difficult working conditions, etc. But the nature of their job kind counterposes them to the population every single day. And I think many police officers start a few people through a very negative, almost cynical lens. I don’t think most police officers don the uniform thinking, what I’m going to go do is brutalize people. No. But what you’re forced to do every day kind of counterposes you to the population. And I think in that context it’s too much to expect very many police officers to side with the population. It would take a real act of bravery for a police officer to do so, and they would face some real repercussions, although it’s happened before. The Afro-American Patrolmen’s League in Chicago is an example of that, when you had a big mass movement and the man named Renault Robinson challenged a lot of what was going on with police brutality in Chicago. I know this story in Baltimore less. But it’s possible. But I don’t think we can ... expect it to be the rule.

Israel, World Capital of Homeland Security Industries - Shir Hever on RAI

Some great insights into how Israeli defence industry are flourishing by exporting high-tech military equipment to developing countries. Israeli economy is becoming increasingly dependent on its defence industry. Since, defence industry is so important for Israeli economy, the elusive peace process between Israel & Palestine will always remain elusive. As Shir Hever says in the end that why would you want peace in the Middle East, when the occupation & war is bringing in cold, hard cash in the country.

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M0dyHMVMh0s

PAUL JAY, SENIOR EDITOR, TRNN: ... a lot of your work has been about the Israeli security state. I guess one of the things that doesn't get talked about enough ... is how much money gets made out of the security needs of Israel or the perceived security needs of Israel. Talk about how important all that is to the Israeli economy, particularly the Israeli elite.

SHIR HEVER, ECONOMIST, ALTERNATIVE INFORMATION CENTER: There was a sort of wave shape in the amount of dependency of Israel on the security economy and the military economy. During the Cold War years, especially in the '80s, there was a peak in massive investment in security and exports, and the Israeli industrial force was over 20% working for the military industry one way or another. Then that collapsed, especially during the '90s. There's a big shift to different sectors. Many of these big companies underwent a very severe crisis.

JAY: Why?

HEVER: Because the end of the Cold War meant lower demands. There was no investment in high-tech industry. There was also a deep social change in Israel with immigrants coming from the former Soviet Union which started to integrate into different sectors of the Israeli economy, mainly the high-tech sector, which was growing very fast. And so that meant that Israel was demilitarizing in many ways. And there was also this kind of hope that because of the Oslo negotiations there would be an end of the occupation. So international corporations started to invest in the Israeli economy in the belief or in the hope that it will become less militarized and the consumer economy would flourish.

All that was actually proven to be false, and starting from the year 2000, with the Second Intifada of Palestinians against the Israeli occupation, and even more after September 11, 2001, in the United States, there was a surge of the Israeli military industry again. And it's not the majority of the Israeli economy. It's not the biggest sector in Israel. But, nevertheless, there is no country in the world in which security plays such an important role as it is in Israel.

JAY: Now, before we get into the domestic situation, let's talk about how important security is as an Israeli export, and also the politics, 'cause it's interesting who they export to.

HEVER: Yeah, this is something that--Israel always played a very interesting role in the global arms trade, because there were some attempts by the Israeli military companies to compete with the U.S. military companies, which were crushed in the bud very quickly. And that shows exactly the moment in which U.S. support for Israel stops. Whenever an Israeli military company tries to sell something to China which has some U.S. technology in it or tries to compete with a U.S. company over producing a fighter plane, for example, that's the end of U.S.-Israeli alliance right there.

So Israeli companies evolved into targeting themselves as a sort of complementary to the U.S. military industry. The U.S. is the biggest arms exporter in the world by far, but Israel is the highest per capita arms exporter in the world. And while the U.S. specializes in big combat platforms (fighter planes, bombers, warships, helicopters, and so on, tanks), Israel is selling a lot of components that go with these platforms. So if you already got the F-16 from the U.S., you can buy special missiles, navigation systems, communications systems from Israeli companies that go with your F-16.

JAY: And if you go back historically, sometimes Israel would sell and could sell things to regimes even the Americans couldn't openly sell arms to.

HEVER: Yeah. And whenever you make a sort of comparison of which are the biggest arms exporter in the world, Israel is not very high--well, it's high compared to its size, but it's never in the top five. But when you ask which countries are selling to developing economies or to those tertiary markets, then Israel is quite high on the list.

JAY: And it included the South African apartheid regime, Columbia, Honduras, and it goes on and on.

HEVER: Yeah. So if we're talking about the '60s, '70s, '80s, Israel sold weapons to Rhodesia, which also had an apartheid regime; to South Africa, breaking the embargo very blatantly; to Guatemala during the civil wars; to Chile under Pinochet. Those countries which found it very difficult to convince the more mainstream weapon companies to sell them arms could always go to Israel.

JAY: And why--I mean, Israel's always trying to present itself as a democratic country. They're very interested in making sure that American--American Jews, particularly--support, send money to Israel. They never seem concerned. I mean, most American Jews are left-of-center, progressive in one way or the other, some of which except when it comes to Israel, but certainly when it came to South Africa and Chile and things like that. But they never seem to care about that, the Israeli governments.

HEVER: Well, sometimes it's because they do that in coordination with the U.S. government. Like, for example, in the Iran-Iraq War, where there was weapons being sold to both sides of the same time, then Israel was selling to Iran and the U.S. selling to Iraq, and it was coordinated. So in that case they're working with the U.S.

But also there was a sort of debate within Israel about how the arms industry is a strategic asset and who should they export to. And the question is: can the Israeli military grow stronger by this revenue that comes from exporting those kind of systems that are being developed for the Israeli army? Maybe those systems that are becoming a bit obsolete and outdated, we can sell them, use the money to develop something new.

And there was a worry in Israel after the occupation of 1967, because France, which was the biggest supplier of arms to Israel at the time, said they're going to embargo weapons sales to Israel unless Israel withdraws from the occupied territory.

JAY: What year was that?

HEVER: 1967. And the Israeli government was worried there's going to be an embargo. And at that point they said, we have to develop everything ourselves; we have to have a very strong military industry so that we can make our own tanks, our own cannons, and so on. They didn't know that they were actually going to be rewarded for the occupation and that France, which sold some weapons to Israel, is going to be replaced by a much bigger supplier in 1973, six years after the occupation, the United States. So they already made that strategic decision: they're going to reach out to new markets to try to sell Israeli weapon technology wherever they can.

But I think what we see in the last decade or so, especially after September 11, is that Israel has kind of shifted their target audience. It's not that they're looking for those countries that are under embargo to sell them the Israeli submachine guns. The famous submachine gun the uzi is no longer produced in Israel, actually. It's now made in China. But actually they were going to sell to those areas in which there is extreme inequality, extreme social resentment, to the governments, in order to repress that kind of uprising.

So, actually, Israel is now the world capital of homeland security industries. They're selling security cameras, surveillance equipments, drones, riot gear. That is the sort of technology that governments need in order to control their citizens. And it comes not just with the actual technology; it comes also with an ideology. It comes with the ideology that, look what Israel is doing, how Israel is controlling Palestinians and every aspect of their lives, and decides who can pass and who gets a permit and so on, and uses this technology to leave Palestinians no option to resist, and why don't we sell that to other governments around the world. For example, Brazil bought a lot of that technology in order to repress the favelas in preparation for the World Cup. We see that in India, not just in the area of Kashmir, but mainly there along the border with Pakistan, and in East Europe. And we also see that with extreme-right governments, like Berlusconi in Italy that was worried about asylum-seekers coming from Africa, and using Israeli drones and Israeli technology to try to block that, but also not just buying the technology, but also buying the legitimacy, saying Israel is a wonderful country. Berlusconi was a big pro-Israeli spokesman. And if Israel is allowed to do it, we can do it too.

JAY: And part of what the Israeli model for their sales, I guess, says to these regimes is you don't have to be worried about an uprising someday; you can repress people for decades and decades. Just look at us.

HEVER: Yeah. It's a very cynical worldview. It brings to mind 1984, that you can just use brute force to repress resistance.

I think there is a limit to how much it can work. And there's also a limit to understanding of how you can use it and where. Now that we're watching what's happening in the Ukraine, it brings to mind what happened in Georgia in 2008, in which a failed Israeli general, Gal Hirsch, who actually did terribly in the war against Lebanon of 2006, formed his own security company, went to Georgia, and talked to the government about selling them Israeli equipment. And the Georgian government believed, because of this prestige of the Israeli army, their equipment would be able to stop the Russian army. Now, we know what happened in the end in 2008. They were immediately defeated. So it actually goes to show that the Israeli army has completely lost its preparation and its technologies that were designed to fight other armies. The Israeli army hasn't engaged in a conventional war for 40 years. They're now completely concentrated on fighting civilians and repressing them.

JAY: And at the cutting edge. You mentioned drones and surveillance equipment. I saw ... Netanyahu was in California and made a deal with Jerry Brown to make deals with Silicon Valley, and cyber security is one of the things they want to work on. There's a lot of integration or interpenetration between American capital and American security, intelligence, and Silicon Valley with Israel's intellectual capacity, money, and security industry. And they have their political representatives, too.

HEVER: Yeah. But I think it's falling apart, because the Israeli high-tech industry has grown, like I said, in the '90s very rapidly. But it grew where many of these companies, their dream was to be bought by a U.S. company and then they can leave. A lot of the very talented Israeli high-tech entrepreneurs found themselves very happily moving to other countries. And then, between 2000 and 2008, there were eight years--so, after the crash of the NASDAQ of 2000 and until 2008, the next economic crisis, the average increase in value of Israeli high-tech companies was zero percent over eight years. During that time--that's because a lot of those companies collapsed and lost everything. And those who survived were mainly tied to the security apparatus, and their biggest customer is the Israeli army.
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JAY: ...if this is an increasingly big sector of the Israeli economy, ... the interests of this sector certainly are not to have a peace agreement. How much does that influence politics?

HEVER: Well, it's not easy to show how that influences directly. You don't really see how that lobby works. But you can see that Israel's former prime minister and former minister of defense, Ehud Barak, he has done many political mistakes in the last couple of years, and it seemed that he is not going to be able to get into the government again. So he said, I'm now going to do what I actually like to do best: I am going to the private sector. And then it becomes apparent that he has many friends who own these security companies, and he can open doors for them, and he can get a lot of money from them. So, obviously, these security companies' business model is built on the occupation. These are companies that their motto when they go to arms trade shows and show their equipment, they say, this has already been tested by the Israeli army on actual people. You can only have that because of the occupation. So every new weapon is first sold to the Israeli army, shot at Palestinians. Then you can sell it.

JAY: Yeah, and they probably have nice little sales videos showing how this all works.

HEVER: Of course. Yeah. After this invasion of Gaza that we were talking about, there was a trade show that the Israeli army did where they showed how each and every of these new inventions were used in the attack on Gaza, completely shamelessly.

JAY: So the attacks become demos.

HEVER: The attacks become demos, and these companies make a profit out of it, and then these companies are hiring senior Israeli officials. I don't think that means that they want to end the peace process or sabotage the peace process; it means they want to continue it forever, because as long as it continues, they can continue these periodic attacks and they can continue the occupation.

JAY: Yeah, 'cause the peace process is a process of never come to an agreement about peace.

Chris Hedges Interviews Noam Chomsky (Part 1 of 3)

A great interview by Chris Hedges of Noam Chomsky. Nothing much to comment for me on this, except to reiterate that North American & European people think that they are living in a democratic & free society where you are free to speak & think as you wish. But it is what instilled in them through their education system.

Public Relations (PR) system works so well that it subtly sends the message to the public that you are expected to follow the authority, regardless of how wrong that authority is. A large section of the public believes whatever spews out of the governments' mouths. Another section of the public, even if it doesn't believe governments' lies, still follow what the government tells them to do because they are trained to think that that's how the system works.

How can there be any so-called "democracy" in a country when its public is considered as "bewildered herd" & "ignorant & meddlesome outsiders," & are treated as "spectators" instead of active participants in making the internal policies of the country?

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bwRf5HHm2Mo

CHRIS HEDGES, INVESTIGATIVE JOURNALIST: Let's begin with a classic paradigm which is throughout the Industrial Revolution, which has been cited by theorists from Marx to Kropotkin to Proudhon and to yourself, that you build a consciousness among workers within the manufacturing class, and eventually you lead to a kind of autonomous position where workers can control their own production.

We now live in a system, a globalized system, where most of the working class in industrial countries like the United States are service workers. We have reverted to a Dickensian system where those who actually produced live in conditions that begin to replicate almost slave labor--and, I think, as you have written, in places like southern China in fact are slave [labor]. What's the new paradigm for resistance? How do we learn from the old and confront the new?

NOAM CHOMSKY, LINGUIST AND POLITICAL COMMENTATOR: Well, I think we can draw many very good lessons from the early period of the Industrial Revolution. It was, of course, earlier in England, but let's take here in the United States. The Industrial Revolution took off right around here, eastern Massachusetts, mid 19th century. This was a period when independent farmers were being driven into the industrial system--men and women, incidentally, women from the farms, so-called factory girls--and they bitterly resented it. It was a period of a very free press, the most in the history of the country. There was a wide variety of journals, ethnic, labor, or others. And when you read them, they're pretty fascinating.

The people driven into the industrial system regarded it as an attack on their personal dignity, on their rights as human beings. They were free human beings who were being forced into what they called wage slavery, which they regarded as not very different from chattel slavery. In fact, this was such a popular view that it was actually a slogan of the Republican Party, that the only difference between working for a wage and being a slave is that working for a wage is supposedly temporary--pretty soon you'll be free. Other than that, they're not different.

And they bitterly resented the fact that the industrial system was even taking away their rich cultural life. And the cultural life was rich. You know, there are by now studies of the British working class and the American working class, and they were part of high culture of the day. Actually, I remembered this as late as the 1930s with my own family, sort of unemployed working-class, and they said, this is being taken away from us, we're being forced to be something like slaves. They argued that if you're, say, a journeyman, a craftsman, and you sell your product, you're selling what you produced. If you're a wage earner, you're selling yourself, which is deeply offensive. They condemned what they called the new spirit of the age: gain wealth, forgetting all but self. Sounds familiar.

And it was extremely radical. It was combined with the most radical democratic movement in American history, the early populist movement--radical farmers. It began in Texas, spread into the Midwest--enormous movement of farmers who wanted to free themselves from the domination by the Northeastern bankers and capitalists, guys that ran the markets, you know, sort of forced them to sell what they produced on credit and squeeze them with credit and so on. They went on to develop their own banks, their own cooperatives. They started to link up with the Knights of Labor--major labor movement which held that, as they put it, those who work in the mills ought to own them, that it should be a free, democratic society.

These were very powerful movements. By the 1890s, workers were taking over towns and running them in Western Pennsylvania. Homestead was a famous case. Well, they were crushed by force. It took some time. Sort of the final blow was Woodrow Wilson's red scare right after the First World War, which virtually crushed the labor movement.

At the same time, in the early 19th century, the business world recognized, both in England and the United States, that sufficient freedom had been won so that they could no longer control people just by violence. They had to turn to new means of control. The obvious ones were control of opinions and attitudes. That's the origins of the massive public relations industry, which is explicitly dedicated to controlling minds and attitudes.

The first--it partly was government. The first government commission was the British Ministry of Information. This is long before Orwell--he didn't have to invent it. So the Ministry of Information had as its goal to control the minds of the people of the world, but particularly the minds of American intellectuals, for a very good reason: they knew that if they can delude American intellectuals into supporting British policy, they could be very effective in imposing that on the population of the United States. The British, of course, were desperate to get the Americans into the war with a pacifist population. Woodrow Wilson won the 1916 election with the slogan "Peace without Victory". And they had to drive a pacifist population into a population that bitterly hated all things German, wanted to tear the Germans apart. The Boston Symphony Orchestra couldn't play Beethoven. And they succeeded.

Wilson set up a counterpart to the Ministry of Information called the Committee on Public Information. Again, you can guess what it was. And they've at least felt, probably correctly, that they had succeeded in carrying out this massive change of opinion on the part of the population and driving the pacifist population into warmongering fanatics.

And the people on the commission learned a lesson. One of them was Edward Bernays, who went on to found--the main guru of the public relations industry. Another one was Walter Lippman, who was the leading progressive intellectual of the 20th century. And they both drew the same lessons, and said so.

The lessons were that we have what Lippmann called a "new art" in democracy, "manufacturing consent". That's where Ed Herman and I took the phrase from. For Bernays it was "engineering of consent". The conception was that the intelligent minority, who of course is us, have to make sure that we can run the affairs of public affairs, affairs of state, the economy, and so on. We're the only ones capable of doing it, of course. And we have to be--I'm quoting--"free of the trampling and the roar of the bewildered herd", the "ignorant and meddlesome outsiders"--the general public. They have a role. Their role is to be "spectators", not participants. And every couple of years they're permitted to choose among one of the "responsible men", us.

And the John Dewey circle took the same view. Dewey changed his mind a couple of years later, to his credit, but at that time, Dewey and his circle were writing that--speaking of the First World War, that this was the first war in history that was not organized and manipulated by the military and the political figures and so on, but rather it was carefully planned by rational calculation of "the intelligent men of the community", namely us, and we thought it through carefully and decided that this is the reasonable thing to do, for all kind of benevolent reasons.

And they were very proud of themselves.

There were people who disagreed. Like, Randolph Bourne disagreed. He was kicked out. He couldn't write in the Deweyite journals. He wasn't killed but he was just excluded.

And if you take a look around the world, it was pretty much the same. The intellectuals on all sides were passionately dedicated to the national cause--all sides, Germans, British, everywhere.

There were a few, a fringe of dissenters, like Bertrand Russell, who was in jail; Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg, in jail; Randolph Bourne, marginalized; Eugene Debs, in jail for daring to question the magnificence of the war. In fact, Wilson hated him with such passion that when he finally declared an amnesty, Debs was left out & had to wait for Warren Harding to release him. And he was the leading labor figure in the country. He was a candidate for president, Socialist Party, and so on.

But the lesson that came out is we believe you can and of course ought to control the public, and if we can't do it by force, we'll do it by manufacturing consent, by engineering of consent. Out of that comes the huge public relations industry, massive industry dedicated to this.

Incidentally, it's also dedicated to undermining markets, a fact that's rarely noticed but is quite obvious. Business hates markets. ... Markets, if you take an economics course, are based on rational, informed consumers making rational choices. Turn on the television set and look at the first ad you see. It's trying to create uninformed consumers making irrational choices. That's the whole point of the huge advertising industry. But also to try to control and manipulate thought. And it takes various forms in different institutions. The media do it one way, the academic institutions do it another way, and the educational system is a crucial part of it.

This is not a new observation. There's actually an interesting essay by--Orwell's, which is not very well known because it wasn't published. It's the introduction to Animal Farm. In the introduction, he addresses himself to the people of England and he says, you shouldn't feel too self-righteous reading this satire of the totalitarian enemy, because in free England, ideas can be suppressed without the use of force. And he doesn't say much about it. He actually has two sentences. He says one reason is the press "is owned by wealthy men" who have every reason not to want certain ideas to be expressed.

But the second reason, and the more important one in my view, is a good education, so that if you've gone to all the good schools, Oxford, Cambridge, and so on, you have instilled into you the understanding that there are certain things it wouldn't do to say--and I don't think he went far enough: wouldn't do to think. And that's very broad among the educated classes. That's why overwhelmingly they tend to support state power and state violence, and maybe with some qualifications, like, say, Obama is regarded as a critic of the invasion of Iraq. Why? Because he thought it was a strategic blunder. That puts him on the same moral level as some Nazi general who thought that the second front was a strategic blunder--you should knock off England first. That's called criticism.

And sometimes it's kind of outlandish. For example, there was just a review in The New York Times Book Review of Glenn Greenwald's new book by Michael Kinsley, and which bitterly condemned him as--mostly character assassination. Didn't say anything substantive. But Kinsley did say that it's ridiculous to think that there's any repression in the media in the United States, 'cause we can write quite clearly and criticize anything. And he can, but then you have to look at what he says, and it's quite interesting.

In the 1980s, when the major local news story was the massive U.S. atrocities in Central America--they were horrendous; I mean, it wasn't presented that way, but that's what was happening--Kinsley was the voice of the left on television. And there were interesting incidents. At one point, the U.S. Southern Command, which ... gave instructions to the terrorist force that they were running in Nicaragua, called the Contras--and they were a terrorist force--they gave them orders to--they said "not to (...) duke it out with the Sandinistas", meaning avoid the Nicaraguan army, and attack undefended targets like agricultural cooperatives and health clinics and so on. And they could do it, because they were the first guerrillas in history to have high-level communications equipment, computers and so on. The U.S., the CIA, just controlled the air totally, so they could send instructions to the terrorist forces telling them how to avoid the Nicaraguan army detachments and attack undefended civilian targets.

Well, ... it wasn't publicized, but it was mentioned. And Americas Watch, which later became part of Human Rights Watch, made some protests. And Michael Kinsley responded. He condemned Americas Watch for their emotionalism. He said, we have to recognize that we have to accept a pragmatic criterion. We have to ask--something like this--he said, we have to compare the amount of blood and misery poured in with the success of the outcome in producing democracy--what we'll call democracy. And if it meets the pragmatic criterion, then terrorist attacks against civilian targets are perfectly legitimate--which is not a surprising view in his case. He's the editor of The New Republic. The New Republic, supposedly a liberal journal, was arguing that we should support Latin American fascists because there are more important things than human rights in El Salvador, where they were murdering tens of thousands of people.

That's the liberals. And, yeah, they can get in the media no problem. And they're praised for it, regarded with praise. All of this is part of the massive system of--you know, it's not that anybody sits at the top and plans at all; it's just exactly as Orwell said: it's instilled into you. It's part of a deep indoctrination system which leads to a certain way of looking at the world and looking at authority, which says, yes, we have to be subordinate to authority, we have to believe we're very independent and free and proud of it. As long as we keep within the limits, we are. Try to go beyond those limits, you're out.

"Cold War Mentality" by Loujie

 
"Cold War Mentality" - Loujie, China Daily, China

Margaret Atwood on Free Will, Safety & Modern Romance

I liked this Chatelaine interview with Margaret Atwood, Canada's most celebrated author & novelist, because of a few comments she says about prison-industrial complex, political infatuation with terrorism when more people die of cancers & car accidents in the West, & modern-day change in people's behaviours towards family & work commitments. I, however, am more interested in the first 2 points than the third.

1. As she says about prison-industrial complex that "now that we have for-profit prisons, they have to be kept supplied. It’s actually an incentive to create more criminals." As I've blogged earlier that we can clearly see in US prisons that are being transferred from government care to private companies' care, who do everything in their power to lower their costs & increase their profit margins. This is also shown in the Netflix's series, "Orange is the new black," where female prisoners in Litchfield minimum security woman prison are being fed unhealthy slop, experienced full-time correctional officers are being replaced by inexperienced part-time guards, & prisoner rehabilitation is not even a word in new company's operation manual.

On top of that, the justice system is being skewed towards lowering the bar for crimes to the point where more criminals are somehow actually good for the society. Since when creating more criminals & destroying the lives of people, instead of trying to "address the underlying issues that drove them to commit crimes" is the new norm?

2. Some 3,000 people died on 9/11 some 16 years ago, & it become a rallying cry for American politicians, & every other politician around the world, to "fight terrorism". Majority of the public also blindly supports whatever the politicians come out chanting for the day. Although, that incident & several terrorist attacks after that one, around the world, are reprehensible, one has to wonder why the public & government don't try to tackle vehicle accidents, gun deaths, & numerous other fatal diseases with as much intensity & commitment as much as they do with "terrorism". Terrorism has never killed so many people as much as thousands upon thousands die every year, unlike a terrorist attack, due to non-terrorism causes.

Main reason is that in the guise of terrorism, military funding can be increased, & the government can easily put in place strict draconian controlling measures for the public. As we all know (or should know) that fear is the best way to control the public. All other non-terrorism activities don't help in increasing military funding, & hence, no new "toys" for the army to play with & the government can't control its public since it can't generate that life-ending fear with the promise of that miraculous cancer cure.

3. For the 3rd point, I am not going to blog too much but I really liked what she said about the sad state of modern human's isolation; "the ultimate vision of our desire & increasing ability to control everything in our lives is that there are no other people in our lives. People do what they do — & some of it is really bizarre, & always has been." Isn't this what "YOLO" is all about that hence I am only going to live once, why should I listen to someone else & instead follow my own head & heart. Well, we can very well see where that is leading us?

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http://www.macleans.ca/culture/books/qa-margaret-atwood-on-free-will-safety-and-modern-romance/

"The Heart Goes Last", Margaret Atwood’s latest book & her first stand-alone novel since 2000’s Booker Prize–winning "The Blind Assassin", follows suit. Set in an only slightly alternative contemporary America, it tells the story of Stan & Charmaine, a married couple left homeless after an economic collapse. Enticed by the offer of good jobs & a nice home, they sign up to participate in the Positron Project in a corporate-run town called Consilience. The catch? Residents spend every other month in their civilian Pleasantville paradise, & the rest of their time as inmates in a massive & mysterious work prison.

As she did with "The Handmaid’s Tale" & the "MaddAddam Trilogy", Atwood pushes current, real-life dilemmas to their logical & darkest conclusions. In the case of "The Heart Goes Last", she takes on income inequality, the privatization of the justice system & government surveillance. As Atwood explains, “No one is ever really writing about the future, because we can’t know the future. My speculative fiction is a commentary on the past and the present.” Here, she reflects on free will, feeling safe & super-realistic sex dolls.

...
Chatelaine: Let’s get to your writing & "The Heart Goes Last". It takes place in the fallout of an economic recession much like the one that began in late 2007, which was around the time you were writing "Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth". Has the issue of economic collapse been long on your mind?

Margaret Atwood [MA]: Actually, when I was writing Payback, the economic collapse hadn’t happened yet, but the book came out in 2008, just as we were really feeling its effects, so everyone thought I had a crystal ball — which I kind of did. I had been looking at ads on the subway, as is my habit, for all those credit relief & payday loan companies, & I could see something was happening.

But for "The Heart Goes Last", I had been thinking more about prisons, in part because of protests over the shutting down of prison farms. [In 2009, the Conservative government announced it would be closing its operating farms at six prisons across Canada. The program was one of the country’s most successful prisoner rehabilitation projects.] We haven’t really decided what prisons are for. Are they to punish people, to rehabilitate them, to give them a fresh start? Are they to protect the public? In some cases, the answer to the last question is yes — you don’t want Hannibal Lecter running around eating people. But in many cases, there is a knee-jerk reaction to imprison people, without looking at other options to address the underlying issues that drove them to commit crimes.

One of my models was Australia’s history as a penal colony. With only men at first, it was quite unruly, so the idea was to settle men down by sending them women. But there simply weren’t enough women in prison to meet the demand, so they lowered the bar, criminalized more behaviours & sentenced women more harshly to supply the demand. Today, now that we have for-profit prisons, they have to be kept supplied. It’s actually an incentive to create more criminals.

Chatelaine: The shadow that hangs over the book is the choice between freedom & security. Stan & Charmaine have been in terrible circumstances, pursued by gangs of rapists & murderers. They opt to give up their freedom to have some sense of safety & stability. Consilience would have an appeal.

MA: The good side for Stan & Charmaine is they’ve finally got a nice house.

Chatelaine: And the bad side is that they spend half their lives in prison. That’s the compromise.

MA: It’s a serious compromise & one that’s so old in how it’s played out over time. It’s one of the most primal questions: “What do I have to do to keep my family safe?” If we didn’t have those feelings, the human race wouldn’t be here. But the real question should be: “What is safety?”

Chatelaine: Because those fears tend to get exploited?

MA: Yes. Way more people are going to die from car accidents than terrorist attacks [but we’re more afraid of terrorism]. If you really don’t want people to die, reduce the speed limit or install blood-alcohol monitors that would prevent drunk people from driving.
...

Chatelaine: In the novel, Stan & Charmaine also grapple with commitment & freedom in the context of their marriage.

MA: It’s not just a political question. It’s a fundamental question for all of us — how much free will we actually have & how much we actually want. The answers are going to be individual. Some people don’t want that much choice. They want other people to make choices for them. Other people want infinite choice.

Chatelaine: Speaking of infinite choice & intimacy, I want to ask you about sex in the book. Without revealing too much, there is a subplot involving the manufacturing of elaborately realistic sex dolls, which people have designed to look like anyone or anything they desire —

MA: Which are in process right now. In Japan, they’re making them so realistic that they have goosebumps on their skin & human body temperature!

Chatelaine: What’s the appeal?

MA: I think that people are afraid of rejection. But I read an article about people who buy these expensive sex dolls, & they say that they like them because there’s no hassle. No one’s bothering them, no one’s nudging them, no one’s laughing at them or asking them to take out the garbage.

Chatelaine: That seems like a sad statement about modern romance.

MA: It’s a sad statement about human isolation. The ultimate vision of our desire & increasing ability to control everything in our lives is that there are no other people in our lives. People do what they do — & some of it is really bizarre, & always has been.

I love the quote that I put at the beginning of the book from the journalist Adam Frucci. He wrote a story for the website Gizmodo in 2009 called “I Had Sex with Furniture,” about all about these weird new sex toys that are being developed. And he says in the story, “I did the deed with an inanimate object so you don’t have to.” In a consumer society, where it all comes down to whether or not you can pay for something, it all becomes acceptable. So the question is: How do you measure normal?

The Quantum Mechanics of Israeli Totalitarianism

A great opinion piece, detailing how Israel controls Palestinians.

With that much control, even little kids & teens start to rebel against their own parents, who love them dearly. Israel, after all, is an occupying force, occupying illegally (per several UN resolutions) & would love to even control how much air Palestinians breath (it already controls their water).

It's funny how the Western, developed world still think that Israel is a democratic country, surrounded by authoritarian regimes. As the opinion piece points out very nicely that "the unending occupation, the sheer chutzpah with which the Israeli government continues to expand its presence in the West Bank while sieging Gaza, the escalating protests by minorities inside the country's 1967 borders, & the composition of the new government, all put the lie to such claims today," that it's a democratic country.

What was astonishing for me in reading this commentary was the intro to few processes & procedures Israel has put in place to control the Palestinians. And, these procedures are put in such a way, that an untrained eye would not be able to see the oppression & control Israel exerts on Palestinians.

Then the developed world complains a few rockets were fired in Israeli territory by Palestinians. The developed world should ask the question to themselves, before blaming & complaining about Palestinians, is what would you do if someone (your boss, your parents, your spouse, your neighbour etc.) watches & control your every move? Would you feel relaxed in that environment or would you violently lash back, keeping in mind that moving out of that job / family / relationship / neighbourhood is not an option?
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http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2015/05/quantum-mechanics-israeli-totalitarianism-150507072609153.html

With the coalition government formed by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu easily the most ultranationalist & conservative government in Israel's history, even the most cockeyed optimist would shrink from imagining that Oslo can still be revived, if only the right treatment were concocted.

The problem today is not that anyone but the most self-interested Israeli, Palestinian or US officials still pretends that the peace process is functioning. Rather, it's that hardly anyone in a position of power can explain precisely when, how & especially why it died. To do so requires moving far more deeply into the dynamics of the endlessly troubled peace process than most policy-makers or commentators are willing to delve, into what I term the "quantum mechanics" underlying Oslo's fatally flawed structures.

Israel has long claimed uniquely democratic credentials in a region besot with authoritarian regimes.
The unending occupation, the sheer chutzpah with which the Israeli government continues to expand its presence in the West Bank while sieging Gaza, the escalating protests by minorities inside the country's 1967 borders, & the composition of the new government, all put the lie to such claims today.

Matrix of control

What's still poorly understood by most non-Palestinians is just how deep the level of control has long been. Even if you've spent decades travelling through the West Bank & Gaza, the intensity of that control remains hard to grasp.

As I walked through the Jordan Valley last month near the front-line village of Fasayel, I began to understand how one reason why it's been so difficult to explain the intensity & all-encompassing scope of Israel's "matrix of control" over the Occupied Territories is that even its critics don't use strong enough language to describe it.

Israel is not just an "occupier" or a "coloniser". However democratic it may (or may not) be inside its 1967 borders, in the Occupied Territories Israel's rule is nothing short of totalitarian.

In calling Israeli rule totalitarian, I am not arguing that the government mimics the worst policies of thought control & ideological purism practised by the 20th century's Fascist & Communist states such as Nazi Germany, Stalinist Russia or Maoist China (although Israel's constant harassment & imprisonment of Palestinian activists does reflect a desire to control how Palestinians think and act, at least publicly).

Rather, I'm talking about a much deeper level of control, at what can only be described as the quantum level of Palestinian daily life.

To understand how it feels to live as a Palestinian today you need to think like a particle physicist, not a social scientist. Moving through the space of Israel/Palestine involves negotiating a host of forces that the average Palestinian has about as much control over as the average electron or proton does of the nuclear & quantum forces determining its path. And it's through this near total control of the space that Israel is able, in George Orwell's description of totalitarianism, to "control the past as well as the future".

Israeli geographer Jeff Halper, founder of the Israeli Committee Against Home Demolitions (ICAHD) coined the "matrix of control" to describe these forces. The name evokes numerous overlapping layers of control, including the physical infrastructure of settlements & their security corridors & zones, bypass roads, closed military areas & even "nature reserves". The matrix also includes the bureaucratic & legal/planning levels, & the use of large-scale violence & imprisonment to control people's behaviour & movement.

With its matrix of control, Israel has achieved an unparalleled & uniquely successful synergy of "bio" & "necro"-politics, controlling life & death at most every scale of Palestinian existence. The matrix is continuously adjusted with as much care as Israel has adjusted the caloric intake of Gazans during its periodic intensifications of the Gazan siege.

Three, four & five dimensions

A look at the group of detailed maps created by ICAHD reveals upwards of two dozen parameters of control that can intersect at any given coordinate on the map. But the map is only a two dimensional representation of a multidimensional & multi-levelled reality. It's not just various forces meeting on the ground. When you're walking through the 97% of the West Bank that is in Areas B or C & thus under Israel security control, you realise that the matrix extends both under the ground you're walking on & above your head.

Below ground, Israel controls all the water resources in the West Bank, &d for 50 years has systematically taken most every possible well, stream, aquifer or other water source from Palestinians (in direct violation of international law, it must be remembered).

It also controls the airspace above Palestinians' heads, as the constant buzz of Israeli fighter jets training overhead in the Jordan Valley, & the ubiquitous presence of drones & helicopters almost everywhere at any time, & the prohibitions on building new floors on existing structures makes clear.
In whatever direction Palestinians look or want to step or reach - left or right, forwards or backwards, above or below them - the land, air & water surrounding them is largely outside their permanent control.

Blink of an eye

But it is not just that most of their territory is out of Palestinian hands. The quantum physics of Israel's matrix of control also has its own Heisenberg, or uncertainty principle.

In quantum mechanics this principle asserts that it is impossible to know with precision the exact state of a particle because the very act of observing it changes its state. In the same way, merely by changing their location Palestinians change the state of territory upon which they are moving.

On the one hand, despite the rockiness of the landscape, the geography of the West Bank can be among the most liquid on earth. It changes as one moves through it, depending on who you are - Jew or Palestinian, settler or refusnik, soldier or international. Spaces that seems open & free can suddenly be surrounded by military forces & closed off, declared off limits for any length of time for a variety of reasons merely because Palestinians moved into & through it or used it for grazing, water, or other normal activities.

Moreover, their very movement through the geography can change it not just for a moment, but permanently. At the same time, the uncertainty principle can also operate with a time lag. If Palestinians decide to walk through a Jordan Valley village, for example, or to plant trees on their land in the hills around Hebron or Jenin, it's not at all uncommon for the Israeli military to issue demolition or confiscation orders a few days later.

In particular, the movement of Jews has an even more profound effect than Palestinians especially when establishing an outpost or settlement. Once land is claimed even on the flimsiest of pretexts the military usually moves in & declares a still larger area a security zone, making it impossible for Palestinians to access the land for months, years or even decades.

And so, it seems that land in Palestine can change states from liquid to solid almost instantly, freezing in place whatever Israel decides it wants frozen, from people to legal categories. The quantum physics of Palestinian geography can thus produce permanent changes not just in the three normal dimensions of space, but in the conflict's "fourth dimension" as well, namely time.

But however many dimensions one considers, the goal remains the same: to achieve, in the words of the Palestinian-Israeli hip-hop group DAM, "Maximum Jews on maximum land; minimum Arabs on minimum land."

Neoliberal policies

There is even a fifth, economic dimension in which the physics of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict operates. The neoliberal policies imposed on the Occupied Territories under Oslo have ensured that when Palestinians aren't being displaced by Israeli settlers or bombs, they are fixed in place as objects of development, whose economic life is confined to small spaces that remain largely under Israeli control. The possibility of their becoming subjects able to shape their own destinies is, it seems, outside the laws of physics operating in the Holy Land.

It is the changing nature of the political, physical & economic geographies of the Israeli-controlled Occupied Territories that has made it so difficult for Palestinians & their supporters internationally (including in Israel) to develop effective strategies of resistance, never mind transcending the occupation.

With Oslo's final demise, Palestinians don't just need new strategies for resisting an occupation without end; what's needed is an entirely new physics as well.

Indeed, it has long been argued that Palestinians are still waiting for their Ghandi. It might well turn out that to overcome decades of totalitarian Israeli rule, a long-dead peace process, & ineptitude, corruption & authoritarianism internally, Einstein would be a far more useful figure.


Mark LeVine is a professor of Middle Eastern History at University of California, Irvine, and a Distinguished Visiting Professor at Lund University.