What does one call a state partially ruled by a club for police chiefs and ‘law enforcement’ bureaucrats who do not wish to obey the law?
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What to call it?August 8th, 2009 |
 34 comments to What to call it? |
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to keep DNA profiles of the innocent for six to 12 years, depending on the seriousness of the offence.
When did innocence become an offence?
Erm, I suggest we call it Britain. Welcome home, chap!
Oligarchy? Plutocracy? Blighty?
And it is the EU law. So much irony there, I wouldn’t know where to begin.
The innocent are only presumed to be such until proven guilty – hence the need to keep their records. Simple, really.
… well I’ve been referring to it as ‘Police State Britain’ for some years – nascent until recently, although I’d say it actually came into being earlier this year when certain key legislation came into force.
No doubt many see people who think as I do are ‘swivel-eyed loons’. Fair enough, I can live with that, but I think in years to come more will realise its truth if we do not act in time to halt and hopefully reverse this trend.
‘Give me the man and I will find the crime’
Alisa,
And it is the EU law.
No it isn’t, it is UK law, which now incorporates the European Convention on Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms. The Convention, to which the UK has been a party since 1950, though it was only received as domestic law in 1998, is not an EU law, is not administered by the EU and pre-dates the EU. (However the Convention has also been separately received into EU law, in theory.)
On the question of ‘proven guilty’ it should be of interest to note that ACPO and the Home Office separately insist that a suspect’s DNA record should be kept, even if it is determined that the there was no crime for him to be suspected of.
There is now in Britain a category of suspected persons, into which anyone may fall, and whose lives are lived under a disability thereafter: “one teacher was denied a job because a neighbour called the police after seeing him naked in his own house.” This is not just a question of the authorities targeting those who they wish to persecute with catch-all laws (though that would be bad enough). It is a culture of endemic suspicion and arbitrary denunciation.
“Just when I think things can not possibly get any worse – they suddenly do”.
“They” keep implying that DNA evidence is infallible, when I’m pretty sure it isn’t.
Also couldn’t it be relatively easy to fit someone up with it?
Say I nicked a glass with your DNA on it from you without you noticing, and knowing that your DNA was on the database, then left it at the scene of a crime. You may be in a bit of bother if you havent got a water tight alibi, may you not?
@RAB my immediate reaction to your hypothetical spot of bother is that a water tight alibi might not make any difference given the amount of hype around DNA, though I’m not experienced with how such things are presented and used in court so couldn’t possibly comment. Anyone?
Thanks for the elucidation, Guy – not that it makes the system look any saner.
If a court tried to convict you on DNA evidence that was being held illegally could your lawyer get you off on that technicality? Of course after the first time it happened the government would probably change the law to make the illegally held evidence admissable.
We don’t seem to have an adequate vocabulary to describe our state. Or State. Most of the “ocracies” and “archies” tend to describe a distinct government of some kind; that is the governance is focussed in one place, or one class, which rules. The current situation of diffuse governance doesn’t seem to have a good descriptive term unique to itself, which it deserves.
This is an interesting situation: a European court has ruled that the British DNA database is illegal, and British law enforcement officials are ignoring that ruling. Now, it seems to me that most frequenters of this blog are ardent opponents of British membership in the EU and the attendant ceding of power to the unelected “eurocrats” in Brussels. So shouldn’t your government’s growing a spine and sticking a figurative finger in the eurocrats’ collective eye be a cause for celebration?
Obviously it’s not, but only because the reason British law enforcement officials have finally drawn a line in the sand is to protect the unspeakably vile DBA database. So perhaps this is an opportunity for a change in tactics. Seize this event as demonstrating that the UK needn’t, and shouldn’t, quietly acquiesce to mandates from Brussels, and that it should retake its sovereignty in this and other matters. Simultaneously work to eliminate the database, of course, but that’s entirely separate from the matter of withdrawing from the EU (or at least minimizing British subservience to it). The enemy has handed you a tool; grab it and use it.
And while that’s going on, perhaps the nice folks who brought down Twitter et al the other day could be persuaded to take a crack at the DNA database . . . ? Just a thought.
Oh, and as to the original question, my suggestion is “assholeocracy”.
Totalitarianism is a reasonable fit, at first sight. However the description from wikipedia, which seems reasonable, indicates problems with this word-
Totalitarian regimes or movements maintain themselves in political power by means of an official all-embracing ideology and propaganda disseminated through the state-controlled mass media, a single party that controls the state, personality cults, control over the economy, regulation and restriction of free discussion and criticism, the use of mass surveillance, and widespread use of state terrorism.
The progressive state doesn’t have the distinct concentration of power in a recognisable party that traditional totalitarian states are distinguished by. Rather, advancement in the system (or persecution by it) are based upon the individual’s adherence (or refusal to adhere to) to the state (hegemonic) belief system. As such it has elements of theocracy, but this is inadequate as the belief system is not a religion per se. Power is not concentrated in a single glorious leader, but diffusely distributed among belief groups. For instance the ACPO is not an arm of the government as such. It created itself, and simply assumed power on its own initiative, and was then recognised by other power groups. Power thus is concentrated by a mutual recognition system. Groups outside this power structure (e.g. anti-temperance groups) are simply ignored by it.
The belief system is now threaded through all of the society’s power and control structures, and is effectively impossible to remove without their destruction.
Having just been browsing through Gibbon again, I’m reminded of the imposition of Christianity on the Roman Empire. The Theodosian Code prohibited the practise of paganism, but not the profession of it. Pagans were still free to declare their opposition to christianity but, barred from office by not being in the new christian “in crowd”, their voices were simply ignored. Meanwhile the mass of the people, who were barred from any pagan practise, simply forgot it. When all the population are only allowed to live in one particular way, the intellectual support for alternatives just dwindles and dies.
The timescale can be very rapid. A Roman born in the first decade of the fourth century, as a pagan, in a universally pagan state, in which Christians were a minority, would have seen toleration of Christianity enacted in his twenties, the last pagan emperor die in 360, to be immediately followed by one who instituted the death penalty for pagan ritual. By the time our Roman is elderly, he is living in an entirely christianised society.
We are now at about the stage where it is impossible to live as anything other than a progressive, even if you privately disagree and profess that disagreement. We fall over ourselves to demonstrate that we are not one of the long list of ists or phobes which are heretical.
So I would say that we are a theocratic tyranny, with the obvious qualification that the religion has no specific god or gods (though my guess is that as it deepens, there will be increasing encouragement for the lower citizenry to declare some “faith” or other- it does not matter which, so long as it is an approved “faith” which is subordinate to the progressivist belief system- that is “nice” christianity, “nice” islam, etc etc).
Laird,
No. Because you are operating on the same false premise that Alisa was. This is not an EU court. The EU does not, yet, have any jurisdiction in this particular matter.
The Strasbourg court is the final arbiter of the application of the European Convention on Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms, which is now incorporated directly into English, Scots and Northern Irish law. (Scots law happens to be different for the moment, on this subject.) It just happens to be abroad, and to have no powers of enforcement. (The situation is similar to the role of the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council as the final court of appeal for many former British colonies.)
However the Home Office and the police are quite happy to ignore the native British courts when it suits them too:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/8178341.stm
And of course that was true in all the cases prior to 2001, when retention of DNA of the innocent, illegal under the old law, was retrospectively legalised. The new limits for retaining it, which are subject to consultation (another word for delay, since the Home Office will anyway do what it first thought of), are of the same order as the time taken to take a case all the way through the English Courts and to Strasbourg, so giving itself another 8 years in which no significant changes will be made, before the possibilty arises that it has to reformulate its position.
Ian, all that is needed is some abstraction. For example, ‘religion’ is a special case of ‘ideology’. Then, look at that wiki definition. Look at the term ‘party’. There it is used as an official and well-defined organization, but in reality it is just a special case: parties don’t need to be official and well-defined. Now, think about ‘tyranny’: it can be imposed by an individual, a strictly defined group of individuals, or a loosely defined collection of groups that have some common goal – all special cases. So what you get in the end is ideological tyranny.
Laird, did you miss my comment and Guy’s reply, or is it me that is missing something?
Oops, I see Guy is addressing this yet again.
Guy (and Alisa), I didn’t miss your post; it’s just that I think it’s a distinction without a (practical) difference*, at least to most people. A European court (OK, Strasbourg, not Brussels; my bad) is presuming to dictate human rights policy to England. The fact that its authority arises from a Human Rights treaty rather than the EU charter (or whatever its organizing document is called these days) is probably irrelevant to most people. Are you really above a little sleight of hand on what is merely a technical difference, if it advances your position? Your enemies certainly aren’t!
Carpe diem! (Or perhaps carpe eventus might be more accurate.)
* I know there’s a nice old latin legal phrase for that but I can’t recall it.
IanB, how about “burearchy,” government by (and for the sake of) bureaucracy.
To me that doesn’t quite cover it., because “bureau-” implies traditional images of governance by government, that is a centralised state. The governance in this form of tyranny is not focussed in the state or its bureaucracy. Governance is everywhere.
Likewise Alisa’s ideological tyranny is a good term (better than mine) but it isn’t really specifically descriptive enough; it could apply to anything from e.g. islamic theocracy to soviet communism to puritan New England.
Diddling around the web, I chanced upon Althusser’s first essay identifying his useful term the Ideological State Apparatus; that is the network of institutions distinct from the “Repressive State Apparatus” (police, courts, army) which are not directly part of the state but which are the means by which the ruling class reproduce their ideology- church, schools, academia, the family, the media etc. You could add in NGOs, charities, etc. It seems to me that there is some validity to the idea that the ISA is dominant in our “progressive” tyranny; that the tail is wagging the dog. Rather than a powerful central government using the ISA to promote its ideology (e.g. Stalinist indoctrination via soviet schools) it’s more like the ISA doing the controlling.
Dunno. I’m flailing around a bit here.
I have to remind people of the concept of soft fascism. A key characteristic of fascism is that it is corporatist rather than wholly party centred. The best known fascist regimes (and particularly the Nazi one) promulgated a legend of central control and management, but there were tangles of competing fiefdoms and self-aggrandizing authorities. The form is also discernible in the sub-fascist ‘national security states’ of the Latin American juntas and family dictatorships, and in the ‘big man’ polities of Africa.
There is a particularly strong resemblance with the South American pattern – not just the obsession with national identity and threats to security, but the way the state machine becomes a means of redistribution from the poor and the independent rich to an army of privileged state and party hangers-on – among whom the police and quangocrats are prominent. You can see the era of New Labour in particular as the Brazilianization of the British state.
Sure, that’s a feature, not a bug. You go from the most general to classify more specifically. First you classify according to the kinds of ideology and according to the means of enforcement, and then you can go and pigeonhole these two categories further. I am sure that the possibilities are as endless as the ideas in the heads of the power-hungry. So now you need to define the current ideology, and the means by which it is being enforced. Again, top to bottom, from the general to the specific. I think I might begin by saying that the underlying ideology has been, for a very long time, one of control for the sake of control, with only the pretexts changing (God, Volk, Proletariat, Gaia, etc). I think that what we may be witnessing is a process in which they are running out of pretexts (although they are still milking the ‘Gaia’ one for all they can, and there are always occasional Threats, aka Security), and so are headed towards a mindset where they won’t even bother with pretexts at all. One could always hope.
What’s wrong with kakistocracy?
Speaking of EU law, this will come as no surprise to anyone here.
I always thought that the top cops who started ACPO had a bit of a tin ear. If I were setting up a secretive, unaccountable quasi-national police force, I would avoid acronyms which are quite so reminiscent of Gestapo, Sipo and the rest, Or maybe it just gives them a bit of a cheap thrill. Who knows?
IanB, I take your point. I’m not sure if what you’re describing is really very different from classical oligarchy, though. Oligarchs didn’t always hold official positions, either.
Still, if you want a word, how about ‘cliquetocracy’ or ‘cliquetarchy’, defined as ‘distributed governance by self-appointed elites’?
Ian B.
Of course what A. was really doing was not descibing the situation in a “capitalist” society.
In reality the various different groups and organizations he mentioned were not really spending their time “reproducing capitalist ideology” to the next gernation, the people in them had all sorts of DIFFERENT opinions (and did not see spreading them as a primary role anyway).
What Marxists do when they talk about institutions spreading an ideology is not describing reality as it was – they are describing is WHAT THEY THEMSELVES ARE TRYING TO CREATE.
Gramsci was the most open about this – the Long March through the institutions.
Take control of the schools, the youth groups, the proffessional associations, and (yes) the churches – and use them to spread a socialist view of the world (capture the minds of the people – make it impossible to see the world in nonpolitical terms).
This turns classical Marxist theory on its head – as it is about using the “ideolgocial superstructure” to control teh “economic base” but it was Marxists do in practice (and they are very good at it).
Ayn Rand is often accused of being an “over the top” writer (which, as she was a Romantic, I do not think she would have been insulted to be so called) however her describtion of how leftists operate to take control of things (especially the describition of how the various groups of leftists operate in “The Fountainhead”) is rather like a fly-on-the-wall documentary.
Everthing from the legal and medical profession to the arts – there are groups of leftists working together to take them over and spread a leftist message.
And it is done with intent – not by accident.
As W.H. Hutt said of the (nonMarxist – at least too Dobbs and Straffa found a way of combining it with Marxism) leftism of the Keynesians.
Hutt was asked how the Keynesians had “won the debate” in economics departments – and he gave the following reply:
“There was no debate, they were not interested in debate – they simply took control of the key committees in charge of appointing new staff and in charge of setting examinations for students, and that was that”.
It was much the same in the American publishing industry – virutally every house fell to a sustained and deliberate effort at entryism and control.
Which is why, in the United States, explicitly anti leftist publishing houses had to be founded (I know it would have been better to have nonpolitized publishing – but the left had made that impossible by taking control of all the once nonpoliitcal publishing houses).
A moments thought should tell someone this is why such things as state education are so dangerious.
If the left take over a private school this is sad – but one can go off and found another school.
But if the left take over a system which is financed by vast sums of taxpayers money…….
And they have – both in the United States and in Britain and other nations.
Police.
The police are no different from other insitutitons – they are vulnerable to manipulation and this is what is happening.
The training collages, and promotion (especially to the senior ranks).
Try being an old fashioned apolitical thief taking – and see how far you get.
The police are being New Labourized.
If the military are as well (in Britain and the United States) then things will get very bad indeed.
Paul, I agree and disagree with you. And my reference to Althusser was not support the marxist conclusions, but the marxist analysis of how ideologies flourish or fail is valid. Their appreciation of it is why they have won and we have utterly lost. They recognised a need for the Long March Through The Institutions because of work like Gramsci and Althusser which identified how society works, giving them the tools to take control of it. You cannot win unless you understand what you have to do.
I think you’re wrong here. While these various institutions prior to the marxist takeover may not have been overtly conscious of their role in maintaining cultural hegemony, they certainly functioned that way. The church, schools etc cannot be morally or culturally neutral. When they are all promoting a particular ideology (e.g. patriotism) they are an “ideological state apparatus” as Althusser identifies. It was the recognition of that that allowed the post-marxists the insight that they needed to subvert these institutions, which is what they did (though a more thorough analysis reveals that some of the institutions were already “subverted” before Gramsci, since the educational elite for instance were already believers in statisms of various kinds. The universities were not captured by progressives/marxists, they were an initial nest of them which spread out to conquer the rest of the ideological apparat).
One of the fundamental errors in the marxist analysis is the beleif that there is false consciousness and true consciousness, and the belief therefrom that marxism is the true consciousness, and that the job of marxism is to remove the false (capitalist/individualist etc) consciousness. But there are only different consciousnesses. It is impossible for a person to grow up without adopting some ideological framework, and none is more “true” than any other, they are simply different. A person may grow up as a marxist, or a conservative, or a libertarian, or a christian, muslim or atheist. The institutions intentionally implant those consciousnesses. If marxists run the schools, they implant a marxist consciousness. If christians do, they implant a christian consciousness. Muslims do so via madrassas. And so on.
We may argue (I would argue anyway) that libertarianism is the most “neutral” consciousness, since it makes the least demands for fealty to an ideology; but our claim that property rights exist or the person has absolute rights over themself are axiomatic assumptions that cannot be objectively proven by any known philosophical argument. I wish they could be. But in the end they are just things that we believe, and are thus a consciousness.
Anyway, I think it’s fundamentally naive to believe that prior to the modern left, the ideogical state apparatus (church, schools, families, media, workplace etc) were all pulling in different directions in a glorious free marketplace of ideas. In the 19th century we see a very, very powerful imposed consciousness which we might colloquially call Victorian Values- patriotism, work ethic, sexual prudery, know your place in the class system, christianity and so on. A person who admires the C19 is of course at liberty to argue that those were noble values to hold; but it is simply wrong to pretend that they did not constitute an ideological hegemony sustained by Althusser’s “ideological state apparatus”. They quite clearly were (and are- many of those values are still promoted by the ISA).
Every child is taught a value system. It is impossible to raise a child without doing so. When that value system is largely universalised (as most are- that is “the values of our society”) then we must recognise the structures which do so. In Althusser-marxist language, they are the ideological state apparatus.
Ian, the only way the Long March Through The Institutions can work (and has been working) is when the Institutions in question are at least partially controlled by the state. Whether such situation is a priory or not, with the Marcher having to make it so, is irrelevant to the fact that such a March is entirely consistent with a collectivist world view. So yes, it could prove a winning strategy for “us” as well, but it would result in a case of a successful surgery ending with a dead patient.
OK, I admit that my first thought was to answer, “the United States”. It has something to do with the collapse of the rule of law, the creation of an illegal nationwide “Pavel Trofimovich Morozov” memorial informer program, and the White House ordering union thugs to attack citizens exercising their First Amendment rights.
I yield precedence to the United Kingdom for the moment, but we may pass you in the next week or so.
Subotai Bahadur
Ian it is not “how society works” in any universal sense.
Only a few decades ago none of the institutions you mention was involved in “reproducing an ideology” or anything like that.
What the Marxists did was not describe reality (that is nonsense), but rather to descrive the reality they were trying to create – whilst PRETENDING that they were simply trying to replace one ideology with another (although they never use the word “ideology” to refer to their own ideas).
I sware to you that even in teh 19th century teachers in both state and private schools (and minister of religion and …..) had all sorts of different opinions – and to talk of such things as schools, churches, voluntary groups (or whatever) “reproducing an ideolgy” because this is the way all societies work, is false.
Not only did people have wildly different views (and still work together) but NOT EVERYTHING IS POLITICAL – the primary work of (for example) a church is not about spreading an ideology (left, right, or centre).
The personal (and the social) is often NOT political.
Alisa – sadly Marxists (and other forms of leftist) can take over organizations that have nothing to do with the state (and they often have done).
A classic example is how various forms of leftist had taken over almost every publishing house in the United States by the 1940’s – that was the reason that pro freedom had to go out and found new publishing houses.
This is the point – if leftists take over a private organization that is sad, but one can walk away (although in the case of a chariable trust there is also a loss of resources to the left).
If they take over a government funded one – then they have control over all that money.
Every year one is forced to hand over money to them – which they use for their fell purposes.
That is what is wrong.
S.B. – agreed.
I simply think you’re wrong Paul. The reason you can’t recognise that the “old” ideology was an ideology is that you agree with it. Everybody thinks that their own ideology (conservatism, liberalism, progressivism, communism, religiosity, atheism, etc) is the neutral position. There is no neutral position, as I said, because any transmission of a value set- which the various institutions naturally do- is inherently not neutral. That isn’t necessarily wrong, but it is not the same as neutrality.
There are certainly times when the ideological hegemony is stronger and more coherent, and others when it is weaker and more diverse (for example, the C19’s ideological hegemony was the former whereas the somewhat more liberal C18 was the latter) but there always is one.
It does not disprove this to point out ideological diversity. The elites often fall into disagreement about detail, until a new unified ideology emerges. We can see this recently in the 1960s/70s, when parts of the ideological elite were very sexually liberal, and others (e.g. the feminists) very conservative. But this battle is eventually won by one side or the other, and then unity returns.
The ideological apparatus is real. It is an utter myth that the marxist-progressives invented something new. They simply turned what was already there in a new direction. And if we go back to, say, the previous Big Change which spawned Victorian Values, we see the same process- for instance by the non-conformist churches who went out and “community organised” and took ideological control of huge swathes of Britain with a combination of charity and coercion from the bully pulpit.
In fact, we can find the same process in the christianisation of Rome; to quote the last pagan emperor Julian The Apostate-
Saul Alinsky’s method. In the fourth century.
Yes, one can call it ‘ideology’, or one can call it ‘prevailing values’ – there will always be values that are prevailing at any particular point in time. It’s like market monopolies: a totally free market does not exclude the possibility of monopolies coming into existence, what it does instead is ensure that once the majority of consumers are no longer happy with the existing monopoly, they are free to create/patronize an alternative. Per Paul’s example, if the public is not happy with the majority of the publishing houses being leftist, they are free to create/support new, non-leftist publishing houses. The same with education: the only reason Western education systems are almost entirely leftist is that they are either partially or wholly owned by their respective governments. This ownership is not always what made these institutions leftist in the first place, and even if it did, this is irrelevant. What is relevant is that this ownership prevents the creation of viable non-leftist alternatives.