Are you a “pre-terrorist”?
Thursday, January 29th, 2009Has your government secretly classed you as a “pre-terrorist” on account of your political actions or beliefs? Alberto Toscano has written a disturbing article on the Liberty Central website that highlights the stakes involved with the development of the “new authoritarianism” that is infecting so many of Europe’s political leaders.
It’s not only political dissenters who are in the sights of those who prefer to focus on “ruling” rather than “serving”. Whatever you may think of football and the fans who follow it, you should be aware of current police treatment of football supporters, if only because what is happening to football fans today will no doubt be happening to runway protesters (and their ilk) tomorrow. [UPDATE: it's happened: Campaigners monitored by civil servants]
And while on the subject of the police acting in an illegal overbearing manner, let’s not forget that many police officers are due to be equipped with Tasers this year. These are devices the ostensible purpose of which is to reduce the need to use firearms against citizens, but which, as the American police have repeatedly demonstrated, often end up being used to simply compel unruly, noisy or merely irritating citizens to obey the wielding officers’ commands. (EDIT: never mind the US police, you don’t have to go that far to find officers gratuitously electrocuting citizens)
Just checking for pre-terrorists.
*Image from Mike Langridge’s flickr collection. Mike has kindly made this picture available for public use using the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic licence.