The Judge RANTS!
Date: 29/04/11
And Still It All Goes On...
I had originally intended to go out today for one of my six-mile walks, but the weather seemed too unsettled and too dull for the occasion (if you are going to spend three to four hours trekking around and through a forest, it helps if the sun is shining). So, I turned over in bed and went back to sleep.
I have to say that I'm pretty proud of my neighbourhood; I haven't seen a single square centimetre of bunting of any description anywhere; no sign of the street parties which the corporate media assured us would be clogging up every thoroughfare and cul-de-sac the length of the Realm. The only place I have seen such clutter was - shamefully for them - around a children's day nursery near where I work. It seems some people still want to propagandise the tinies to know their place in the constitutional (dis)order in the same way that they wish to bamboozle them with visions of heavens and nightmares of fiery hells.
As someone who remembers the fête de merde which marked the marriage of William Saxe Coburg Gotha von Battenburg's parents thirty years ago this coming July, I find some cause to be heartened. I remember going out on a similar hike on that occasion, but far more flags were put out, far more bunting was bunted then than one has been able to find.
This didn't stop the embedded media trying to put the best possible construction on it by careful use of numbers. "Thousands of people" (*), the BBC breathlessly assured us, were taking part in "more than 5000" street parties. Now, if we assume that this figure is in any way accurate in the first place, and if we also assume that these grovel-fests were taking place both in urban residential areas and in small country villages (as well as all points inbetween), then we can also make an assumption of an average attendance of, say, one hundred people per party across the board.
Five thousand times one hundred equals half a million people. Sounds impressive, doesn't it? Until you consider that the population of the Yuck-Eh? is above sixty million; that means that only about one person in a hundred and twenty could be arsed to attend one of these street parties. It's even less impressive when you consider that - such is the generally mercenary mentality of our world today - an awful lot of people will do anything for a freebie; and that a lot of those present will have been children - in whom the 'something for nothing' culture has always been deeply embedded (and why not?) - who also might have been dragged along by their parents anyway.
Either way, it's not exactly a ringing endorsement of public support for PR-puffed late-model feudalism, is it? Perhaps the scales have fallen from more eyes than those in whose interests the present system operates would care to admit even to themselves.
The obsession of the media in covering the publicly-funded wedding of two otherwise quite unremarkable people has, of course, enabled those in power to utilise the occasion to try to bury bad news while most people are looking the other way; or to continue the policies of both contemporaneous and pre-emptive stifling and intimidation of dissent against the power structure.
In the former category, look at some of the stories which have been conveniently buried in the miasma of monarchist crud which has been pumped into the eyeballs of the 'ordinary, decent, hard-working, law-abiding, cliché-loving' public:
In the second category - and far more sinister - are actions by those in power against any form of legitimate protest against them:
Which follows this revealing quote from a Commander of the Metropolitan Police a couple of days or so ago:
"This is a day of celebration, joy and pageantry for Great Britain. Any criminals attempting to disrupt it - be that in the guise of protest or otherwise - will be met by a robust, decisive, flexible and proportionate policing response."
(bold type is mine).
And just to show that it isn't just the State itself which is capable of undermining our fundamental right to dissent:
Add to all this the decision by the UK authorities to charge Alfie Meadows, a protestor at last December's protest in London who was hit so hard by a police baton that he had to have life-saving brain surgery, with 'violent disorder', which carries a maximum penalty of five years in prison (it's the same rap that Edward Woollard took).
Taken all in all, we can see a pattern emerging here; that attempts at protest against the régime's destructive policies, no matter how peaceful or nuanced, will be met with threats, intimidation and - if deemed necessary - a disproportionately violent response. Someone really ought to remind those in power at the moment that those who make peaceful change impossible effectively render violent change inevitable, because people will come to realise that if they are going to be pre-emptively arrested, held on dubious pretexts, railroaded through a policing and judicial system which is shot through with a bias against dissent and subjected to draconian penalties, then they might as well be hanged for a sheep as for a lamb. And that, of course, will be taken as the green light for even more repressive methods to be deployed, and the masses will be kept 'on message' by portraying all dissenters as 'violent anarchists' or 'middle-class entitlement-junkies'.
We could be in for a long, hot summer, and who knows how many people whose only 'crime' (or 'pre-crime') is a dissenting view from that of the powerful in our land will have had their lives disrupted by wrongful arrest or prosecution, ruined by disproportionate punishment or even ended by unaccountable police thuggery by the time the grey fogs of autumn call again.
(*) Update: By the time I'd posted this page, the Bullingdon Broadcasting Corporation had amended this to "millions of people". Perhaps they'd got the Metropolitan Police in to do the counting for them (see point 3 here).
