Wednesday 25 July 2012

Farcical Olympic Games: Culmination of Long-Running British Security Obsession

When I arrived home from the ancient City of Stirling this evening, I started a bath running and switched the television on. It defaulted to one of the BBC's eight new channels dedicated to the London Olympic Games (in contrast, the BBC provides only 25 minutes of Scottish programming on BBC One Scotland, 20 minutes of Scottish programming on BBC Two Scotland, and a scant six hours of BBC Alba. The BBC provides only two radio stations in Scotland), on which a football match between America and France was being played in front of an almost entirely empty and eerily silent National Stadium in Glasgow. 


It is the latest sign that the people of Scotland have utterly rejected the London Olympic Games in their millions. It's not surprising: the organisers of the London Olympic Games have "reallocated" millions of pounds of National Lottery funding from Scottish communities to millionaire athletes and security agencies. 


The build-up to the Games has been farcical in the extreme. The imposition of segregated road lanes for such contributors to world peace and prosperity as Chang Un of the DPRK and Prince Nawaf of Saudi Arabia, and for thieves and spivs like Switzerland's J Sepp Blatter (sadly, Brazil's Dr Joao Havelange has now resigned to avoid expulsion and prison and will not be picking pockets throughout London), has made it abundantly clear to the people of this country that these games are not for us - they are for the enjoyment of the oligarchs. 


A major financial backer of the Games is Union Carbide, which perpetrated the world's worst-ever industrial disaster, slaughtering through its criminal negligence more than 3.700  of India's poorest people, and injuring over half a million more. "So maye much be spyed also, by the company and pastyme that a body vseth. For a man is for the moost parte condicioned euen lyke vnto them that he kepeth company wythe all", as Bullinger so correctly noted


The British regime hired G4S, the security company which killed refugee Jimmy Mubenga four months earlier, to provide security for the Games. I need not go into any great detail about the utter failure of this company to secure the event adequately. 


The failure of G4S to fulfil its contract, however, led to an unexpected boon for the British regime. 


18,000 British soldiers - if the BBC report this week is accurate, 2.500 of whom can be expected to commit acts of violent thuggery over and above their systematic rape and destruction of much of the Middle East  - have now been set upon the streets of London. 


This is more than the armies of Costa Rica, Mauritius, Monaco, Iceland, Haiti, Vanuatu, Palestine, Panama, St Kitts and Nevis, Antigua and Barbuda, Seychelles, Barbados, Gambia, Bahamas, Luxembourg, Belize, Guyana, Cape Verde, Equitorial Guinea, East Timor, Suriname, Malta, Lesotho, Central Africa, Liberia, Kosovo and Jamaica combined. 


It is worrying that visitors to the United Kingdom, should they make it through the hours of queues at "UK Border Force" control points, will see a country totally swamped with soldiers armed to the teeth, in scenes reminiscent of some class of Third World banana republic.


This has been a long-term policy of successive British regimes, however - to increase as much as possible the militarisation of the country. 


First, by attempting to normalise the military - having them wandering down the streets dressed in their uniforms, having them delivering the FA of England Cup to be presented to whichever racist scumbag wins it in a particular year (congratulations, John Terry), or having them sit like startled chickens on the corners of flags at Six Nations matches. 


Secondly, by changing the image of the military from the (generally accurate) perception of a gang of neds with two O-Levels between them who come back from a couple of months shooting "ragheads" to bottle people in bars and knock the bird around a bit, to the new "Wur Heeeeeeroz" shtick, eagerly lapped up by The Sun and other outlets for the hard of thinking. This has even penetrated to television stations which now apparently host some sort of Military "Oscars". 


God, you can just imagine it, can't you? "And the award for 'Best Cold-Blooded Murder of An 18-Year-Old-Kid Who You Shot In The Back' goes to............Mark Wright and James Fisher!".


Thirdly, if you cannot get the military into the country quickly enough, just turn the country into the military. Ten years ago, the vast majority of us had never seen an armed policeman in our life. Maybe if one happened across a hostage situation, or perhaps the odd one at an airport. Now, though, the police force has been transformed into a paramilitary force, armed to the teeth, and which is visibly armed and patrolling almost all public spaces with machine guns. 


Since 1990, 1.433 people have been killed by the police in England and Wales (roughly eight times more than have been killed by "terrorists"). In that time, not a single police officer has been convicted of manslaughter.


The regime has been cunning, and they have done it well, but Friday represents the apogee of their militarisation of Britain: the moment where finally, they have managed to have patrolling the streets of the United Kingdom an armed militia, ready and willing to protect the regime from the people. 


If Russia is "Upper Volta with missiles", then Britain is North Korea with a friendly face. 

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