Who Is The Enemy?

There was once a group I was peripherally involved with trying to sell arms to the Argentinians prior to the Falklands Debacle.  I was an enemy of the State – though the Argentinian one as the arms were dud, the scam being to remove some of their ability to buy good ones. There is more to say on this, but not for now.

How do we know who the enemy is?  I discovered after the farce above that it could never have been the families I played canasta with in Argentina and Brazil, and it never seems to be ordinary people anywhere I travel or get home to – though at home I am always more aware of an ‘evil poor’ roosting round the corner or across the tracks.  At home, when I see a cop clubbing some poor guy with a few drinks in him at the G20, I know that cop and his ilk is the enemy, until he inevitable cover-up comes along and I start to worry about a more malign influence than a few bullies in uniform (which most cops ain’t).  Dirty Harry would have blown Harwood away before the blow was struck, whipping his club away and sticking it where the sub don’t shine.  None of our cops thought to help or arrest, making themselves an enemy of sorts.  Some of them imagine Harwood is Dirty Harry – they can’t see the integrity issue at the heart of the films.  The use of force has to be against the punk, crook or cop.  And, of course, they hide behind the very bureaucracy and cover-up that is the enemy to Harry.

I turned my attention long ago to wondering how our States get any allegiance from us and a wide range of observations on what an enemy was.  They rarely seem to be the people killed by people like the man I used to be, or my younger replacements now.  In the Falklands Farce the ‘enemy’ killed were at least in uniform and male,even if many were young, conscript boys.  Documents leaked today show this is not true in Afghanistan and that we are fighting a very dirty way there.  The leak is said to be a threat to national security, when the opposite is true.

I’m going to cut a long story short here.  I have a living to make.  Enemies, if we look at how they are created in many different ways, are used to control our lives.  We need deep scrutiny of this to get an understanding of the extent to which we are being controlled by enemies.  We are in Afghanistan and killed untold numbers of Iraqis over many years for ‘reasons’ by no means clear to me, supposedly to keep terrorism away.  Most of the dead enemies will be women, children, old people and other non-combatants; people I would have been very happy to break bread with.  Given the opportunity, I have found little difference between enemy soldiers and my own and there is no real difference between the literature produced about us all, except the Russian stuff is funnier and more sophisticated, even in its knob-gags.

The idea I’d like to throw out, is that even the evil poor might be a creation of an enemy we don’t recognise.  It’s easy enough to recognise the idea, say, that ‘terrorism’ is just another Jabberwock – some mythical figure that will somehow go away if you give up your virgin daughters to it –  (we give up, mostly, our young men to Afghanistan for what?) – but the difficult question is what is maintained because the enemy has to to fought or preparations made and maintained to fight?  Who is being controlled by this really?  Who is really gaining?  There is no draft – whose ‘daughters’ are being given up?

We generally recognise that maintaining large armies is not good for the social economy as little profit is returned from any rape, pillage and plunder they get up to.  But what sort of ‘army’ is being kept in place ‘dealing’ with the evil poor?  We should be directing our attention to just how many of our enemies are ‘Jabberwocks’.  That is, only ‘real’ in the sense that they take away our quality of life to pay a far more substantial and real enemy we don’t spot.

I’m feeling more and more sure that the evil poor are far too much trouble to deal with than their ‘talents’ indicate they should be, and that we need to look to a network to understand who we should be fighting.  I think, more and more, the answers lie at home and in who is taking the money.  I would intend none of this to get in the way of our cops and other agencies getting in amongst criminal underclass types and getting them out of our lives;but I do think what has been going on has been a maintenance action, almost ‘designed’ to keep the problem there almost in the manner a protection racket works.

What is not happening is any kind of secular, democratic development of freedom being both creative in individuals in society and structured as freedom from crime, exploitation and crass aspects of tradition and religion.  In short we don;t know what tolerance is and are confusing it with being so laid back we fall off our chairs under the boots of whatever diversity fascism is in fashion.  We need to free up our thinking.  Even at basic levels, we struggle to listen to anything that is going to lead to change.  ‘PC Copperfield’ is now serving in Canada.  The short article in the Telegraph link below is revealing.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/law-and-order/7908488/Free-the-police-and-save-billions.html

One needs to read beyond the obvious claim we can slash police budgets and get much better policing, though I’m sure this is true to some extent.  I’m afraid we have to get round to working out we are now in the remedial class when it comes to using technology and avoiding gross bureaucracy when we design systems.  We complain about our work-shy evil poor, but can’t see we are all at it in wanting bloated salaries for sitting in offices and, in fact, are training our people to want this through endless classrooms, playing with paper.  If Copperfield is right, GMP employs around a third too many people, still doing a substantially worse job than the Canadians.  We often found the same in manufacturing restructuring 30 years ago, and lots of productivity comparisons suggest this kind of disparity.

We make mountains out of molehills, but worse are capable of defending these in public, wasting money and making everyone feel let down.  Quite decent people concerned with civil liberties become the enemies of cops because they point to obvious indecent behaviour by the likes of  Harwood.  This is pathetic, childish behaviour.  One look at PMQT should be enough to tell us we have this as a disease.  The enemy is at home, in our inability to free ourselves from Jabberwock superstitions.  There are some pitfalls in international comparison, but the biggest is ignoring them altogether, a very British disease.

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New Methods To Promote Social Justice

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/crime/6678045/Paedophiles-continued-as-social-workers-because-of-watchdog-failings.html

The above is a link to the CHRE (council for health regulatory excellence – or somesuch appalling quangoese).  I’ve read the full report and can confirm the Telegraph writer gets the gist.  It’s worth a look if you missed it.  Fundamentally, it’s an enquiry into the IPCC equivalent for social workers and showed this organisation was a complete mess and covering up major incompetence and scandal.  This is a widely held view on the IPCC itself, but their CEO and Chair are in active denial and are using silly IPSOS Mori polling of society in general to hide their failings.  The CHRE is a dismal GUANGO (no typo, it sounds more like guano), but the report shows what can be done with a little straightforward enquiry.  They actually asked people involved for their views and looked at some of the horror cases that emerged without the kind of hostile prejudice cops show when confronted by old ladies they have let down.

We could revise the methods used by using new technology and get good work done across the public sector.  The basic idea is simple – ask the right people and protect whistle-blowers.  New technology would allow us to talk directly to complainants (say Google Talk) and get surveys done very cheaply using ‘spankout a survey’ technology (more than this, we can follow up to find out what respondents really meant).  The results could easily be available for genuine public criticism on a website.

I’m only talking in outline here, but the great advantages involve cutting costs and cutting out the expert bias of guns hired by authorities interested only in protecting their own interests.  I could set up a working model very cheaply.  Universities are already doing work like this.

There are issues about protecting anonymity on all sides, but these can be handled.  Such a system immediately confronts managerial and political interests and this is probably the only reason it’s not in widespread use.  There’s a business opportunity here too, though this runs up against existing interests too.

My guess is it would take about five to ten pages to detail how to go about it all.  In principle, we could change the way we go about public sector decision making, and the legal and political systems too.  The move is towards a real open society and, of course, confronts the enemies of such.

The Telegraph report shows what can be found out and established, though we could go much further.

The key issues for me concern public choice theory – roughly a means to bring the ‘private’ interests of decision-makers into line with public interests.  There is no need, in the first place to get very technical.