The London Metropolitan Police is
encouraging businesses and the general public to immediately report
anyone who holds anti-government political beliefs to the authorities
as terrorists, calling on people to become volunteer informants as
the state prepares for widespread social unrest.
“This was the surprising injunction
from the Metropolitan Police issued to businesses and members of the
public in Westminster last week,” reports the London Guardian.
“There was no warning about other political groups, but next to an
image of the anarchist emblem, the City of Westminster police’s
“counter terrorist focus desk” called for anti-anarchist
whistleblowers stating: “Anarchism is a political philosophy which
considers the state undesirable, unnecessary, and harmful, and
instead promotes a stateless society, or anarchy. Any information
relating to anarchists should be reported to your local police.”
In also calling on people to report Al-Qaeda paraphernalia to
police, the briefing conflates “anarchists” with terrorists.
“It unfairly implies that anyone involved in anarchism should be
known to the police and is involved in an dangerous activity,” said
Jason Sands, an anarchist from South London. “There is nothing
inherently criminal about political philosophy whatever it is. The
police work under the convention on human rights which disallows
discrimination against people because of their political beliefs and
even the request for information would seem to be in breach of that.”
Of course, the “anarchist” label could apply to a whole range
of political beliefs, but the fact that the state is now openly
criminalizing anti-government sentiment and encouraging people to
report on their neighbors for expressing dissent or displaying any
sign of their political philosophy is a clear indication of how
paranoid the British government has become of its own citizens.
As anarchist Sean Smith told the Guardian, “It’s pretty
absurd, but not surprising, when the state seeks to criminalise ideas
it deems to be dangerous to its own survival.”
Indeed, if you want an insight into where the British government
thinks this is all heading, look no further than a 2007 Ministry of Defence report which foresaw “the middle classes becoming
revolutionary” and “taking on the role of Marx’s proletariat”
within three decades.
“The world’s middle classes might unite, using access to
knowledge, resources and skills to shape transnational processes in
their own class interest,” warns the report, predicting mass unrest
and social dislocation.
This is why the authorities are already putting the squeeze on any
kind of political beliefs that could be construed as anti-government.
They are aware of the fact that the increasingly dangerous, unjust
and economically deprived post-industrial revolution now being used
to eviscerate the middle class in the west will provoke a hostile and
radical reaction.
Encouraging people to report on each other for political beliefs
deemed undesirable by the state is precisely what happened in Soviet
Russia and Nazi Germany.
One common misconception about Nazi Germany was that the police
state was solely a creation of the authorities and that the citizens
were merely victims. On the contrary, Gestapo files show that 80% of
all Gestapo investigations were started in response to information
provided by denunciations by “ordinary” Germans.
“There were relatively few secret police, and most were just
processing the information coming in. I had found a shocking fact. It
wasn’t the secret police who were doing this wide-scale
surveillance and hiding on every street corner. It was the ordinary
German people who were informing on their neighbors,” wrote Robert Gellately of Florida State University.
Gellately discovered that the people who informed on their
neighbors were motivated primarily by banal factors – “greed,
jealousy, and petty differences,” and not by a genuine concern
about crime or insecurity.
(Source) See also the Daily Mail article on the subject.
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