Who benefits?
Viewing events on Saturday, and listening to the Metropolitan Police’s Commander Bob Broadhurst on Radio 4 this morning, one is reminded of how gentle and civilised the police in Britain generally are, both to peaceful demonstrators (as this account shows) and to non-peaceful. Never mind Libya or Syria, if anarchists tried to pull such stunts even in France they’d be dealt with ferociously.
The irony is that here are self-proclaimed “anarchists” protesting against a reduction in the size of the state. Aren’t anarchists supposed to be in favour of smashing it?
Well, to an extent. According to the Whitechapel Anarchist Group, the most prominent of the various organisations: “Anarchy is a highly organised form of society that is clearly the only morally sensible way to run the world where everybody is the master of their own destiny.”
“The Anarchist solution… would be a society where there is no State, all wealth is owned in common by the people, relationships are non-exploitative, work is shared and decisions made in the knowledge of all.”
Or in other words, they wish to create all the conditions for Communism, while hoping that a Communist dictatorship won’t emerge, despite overwhelming evidence that it would.
I’m not taking anything away from the hundreds of thousands of demonstrators who acted completely lawfully – they have the right to do so, even if I personally believe there is no alternative to cuts – but violence does seem to follow Left-wing protests around, especially whenever students are involved. When was the last time Right-wingers in Britain caused such violence? If the entirely working-class English Defence League can manage a large protest in Luton without violence, why can’t middle-class lefties?
The Left’s domination of European political violence is a result of its moral righteousness. Earlier this month protesters compared themselves to Libya and Egypt’s revolutionaries, thus sowing the idea that the authorities were not in fact the accountable employees of a state run by democratically-elected politicians, but storm-troopers of the Man. Even this was nothing like as absurd as student leader Adam Ramsay’s reference to the “anger of a doomed youth”. Bless. (I hate to spoil the party, but had Wilfred Owen only been facing the prospect of an overdraft to pay for his media studies course, rather than German machine guns, I’m not sure his poetry would have been quite so moving.)
Then there was Ed Miliband’s absurd speech on Saturday, in which he said: “We come in the traditions that have marched in peaceful but powerful protest for justice, fairness and political change… The suffragettes who fought for votes for women and won… The civil rights movement in America that fought against racism and won… The anti-apartheid movement that fought the horror of that system and won.”
We’ve already had Polly Toynbee comparing cuts to the Final Solution, Laurie Penny calling cuts “a stab in the back” and Karen Buck saying the Tories are trying to drive Muslims out of London (without so much as a telling off). If senior opponents of spending reductions are so willing to dehumanise opponents, make inappropriate historical comparisons and use the race card, is it any wonder that in a sea of righteous anger violence ensues? Source Here