So, the Shri Lankan government says that footage is fake, while a panel of experts have no declared it to be real.  Simply, is it that surprising that a bunch of men, dressed in uniforms may murder people who were only a month before considered to be enemies of the state?

Yes, the LTTE may have done bad things over their history, but weren’t we also taught in school two wrongs do not make a right?  Oh, that’s right, we were also taught that the victors write history because in the mainstream might, undoubtedly, makes right.

Either way, I’m doing my part to help these videos go viral.  No one should end their days stripped naked, blindfolded and shot in the back by a man with boots and a Kalashnikov.

Every now and then you do something, experience something or meet someone who reminds you what you stand for.  This happened too me recently when I met a African-Swedish man who told me his story while rolling a cigarette.

As it turns out, this man (who I shall call ‘Dave’) had come over from Sweden with a friend, intending to buy a bus to live in, while travelling up and down the East Coast.  As we’re talking, Dave tells me that he’d recently been busted in a nightclub with drugs that amounted to two bottles of acid, some mescaline and a bag of weed.  The police had confiscated Dave’s passport, and he was waiting to sit trial in about Mid-January.

Normally, most would hear these details, tune out and say, ‘well he deserved whatever he gets…’  But let us delve a little deeper.

The police, bless their souls, are apparently doing their best to charge him with every offence possible.  This includes both Trafficking and possession.  As it turns out, Dave had already done one month in prison — most people, if they haven’t written him off already, will have now done so.

Dave goes on to tell me, sincerely, how much he doesn’t want to go back to prison.  He explains that during his month-long stay, he was placed in a cell with a man who had killed two people.  A murderer.

Then, to make matters worse, lawyers and police have been trying to tell him that he is an addict.  He then points out an irony — there is more heroin and meth available on the inside than there was ever available to anyone on the outside.  In Dave’s own words, ‘if you weren’t an addict going in, there’s a good chance you’ll be an addict coming out.’

Dave tells me that if this had happened in Europe, he’d probably just have been fined.  But we in Australia seem to be a little more vindictive than our Old World counterparts.

The police require Dave to stay at a fixed location.  He cannot live on the bus that he had paid a lot of money for.  Instead he has to stay at a hostel.  Additionally, Dave told me that he’s had to pay up to $10,000 in lawyers fees, and his parents have had to fly out from Sweden in order to sit at his trial.

I ask you, where is the real crime?  For what purpose have we gone ruined Dave’s live?  For wanting to alter his consciousness with chemical substances.  The horror!

So let’s take a step back and assess the situation.  You have a man, a foreigner, arrested and charged with possession and trafficking offences (where, depending on the amount you’re caught with, it is automatically assumed you were trying to sell them to people, even if you weren’t).  If convicted, he is a criminal.  An evil person on par with murderers and rapists.  He will be put in prison and forced to associate with hardened criminals.

In essence, parliament has made a law forbidding a thing which has no, real, inherent criminality attached to it — people have been trying to alter their consciousness for centuries.  Big whoop.  Instead, for reasons such as ’safeguarding the morals of the community’, ‘keeping our kids safe and free from drugs’, oh, and my personal favourite, ‘protecting the individual from themselves’, the Australian legal system looks set to lock Dave up, expose him to elements of criminality that Dave had no previous association with, as well as the hardest drugs in great quantities, for a long period of time.  And people ask why so many convicted criminals ‘re-offend’.

Ask yourself, for a moment, is this just?  Are you really happy with a person’s life being destroyed over something so criminal?

But then, ‘It is the law.  He should have known and has to face the consequences.  That’ll teach him.’

Police brutality during the marches to comemmorate the first anniversary of Alexandros Grigoropoulos murder surpassed any limit today, in a coordinated operation of barbarity and crude violence against protesters across greece. Under socialist orders police violence has left dozens of people wounded.

In Athens the protest march called at 13:00 in Propylea was attacked by riot police forces before even starting. Protesters fought back erecting flaming barricades and forcing the police to retreat with use of rocks. Protesters also occupied the rectorial headquarters of the University of Athens in Propylea, lowering the greek flag and flying a black flag in its place. The march continued to Omonoia square where more clashes took place and several shops were destroyed -one consumed in flames. At Syntagma square motorised police forces (Delta team) charged the march from Ermou street. After the charge the Delta-team thugs dismounted and threw rocks at the protesters. As a cause of the police orgy in violence, an elderly member of the Worker’s Revolutionary Party-Trotskyist (EEK) has been reported to be in serious condition due to head injuries: Ms Koutsoumbou, a veteran prisoner of the anti-dictatorship struggle, was hit by a Delta force motorbike during the mounted charge on the crowd. According to Savas Michail, leading member of EEK and major radical philosopher, Ms Koutsoumbou is in intensive care having received far worse hits than during her tortures by the colonels’ junta. One more man has been hospitalised with serious injuries. At the time 60 people are reported detained.

In Salonica the 3,000 strong protest march turned violent when riot police attacked it without any provocation with tear gas and blast grenades. Clashes ensued along the main avenue of the city. The police surrounded some 200 protesters outside the Ministry of Macedonia and Thrace, but were liberated by the rest of the march. The previous night the police broke the university asylum in the Salonica Polytechnic arresting 8 people who the authorities claim had attacked the International Expo with molotov cocktails. The march in Salonica has not been concluded at the time of writing and the situation is particularly tense as the protesters are returning to the main avenue to protest against police brutality.

In Larissa the protest march proceeded through the main streets of the city smashing CCTV cameras, coming under attack by riot police forces. The protesters errected barricades and engaged the cops with stones and other projectiles.

There is little information about the course of the marches in other greek cities.

At the same time, the 21 people arrested in the anarchist social centre Resalto last night have been charged under the notorious anti-terrorist law for construction and distribution of explosives (beer bottles and two bottles of heating oil).

The protest marches for the 1st anniversary of Alexandros Grigoropoulos murder by cops will continue on Monday, while at 21:00 on Sunday there will be a memorial demo at the spot of his shooting in Exarcheia.

Originally posted here.

I just wanted to share with you the following, taken from a Legal, Jurisprudence Textbook. It has to be one of the most objective overviews of Anarchism I’ve seen around, which is surprising considering the extract was contained in a textbook intended for potentially hostile audiences — law schools.

The Limits of Law: Anarchist Objections to Law and State

Laws, decrees, edicts, ordinances, resolutions, will fall like hail upon the unfortunate people.

Third philosophical thesis: We are not cabbages

All of which is to say that, beyond being boring, jurisprudence is about the ways that all sorts of laws which define our society, our political agendas, our sexuality, our visions of reality and our day-to-day struggles intersect.  Is law, then, simply a repressive agent from which we need to be freed in order to recover, or discover, our true selves? As I noted, one of the interesting things about Foucault’s Chinese encyclopaedia is that it demonstrates to us the limitations of our own thought processes. Is law only a distortion or reduction of what could otherwise be? Does it suppress our individuality and freedom?  DH Lawrence thought so. In his Study of Thomas Hardy, he wrote that under the influence of too many laws people are like “the regulation cabbage” — going rotten at the centre instead of blooming.

DH Lawrence

Study of Thomas Hardy

[Making laws] is like protecting the well-being of a cabbage in the cabbage patch, while the cabbage is rotting at the heart for lack of power to run out into blossom.  Could you make any law in any land, empowering the poppy to flower? You might make a law refusing it liberty to bloom. But that is another thing. COuld any law put into being something which did not before exist? It could not. Law can only modify the conditions for better or worse, of that which already exists.

But law is very, very clumsy and mechanical instrument, and we people are very, very delicate and subtle beings.  Therefore I only ask that the law shall leave me alone as much as possible. I insist that no law shall have immediate power over me, either for my good or for my ill.  And I would wish that many laws be unmade, and no more laws made.  Let there be a parliament of men and women for the careful and gradual unmaking of laws.

… we are like the hide-bound cabbage going rotten at the heart. And for the same reason that, instead of producing our flower, instead of continuing our activity, satisfying our true desire, climbing and clambering till, like the poppy, we lean on the sill of all the unknown, and run our flag out there in the colour and shine of being, having surpassed that which has been before, we hang back, we dare not even peep forth, but, safely shut up in bud, safely and darkly and snugly enclosed, like the regulation cabbage, we remain secure till our hearts go rotten, saying all the while how safe we are.

There may be much value in what Lawrence says. Insofar as laws (of society, thought, the legal system) provide us with a way of existing without giving too much thought to what comes next, and without having to make difficult decisions or reflect upon the assumptions we are making, they can be a deadening influence which both capitalise on our desire for safe answers and encourage complacency.  But, as we have seen, law is also arguable the basic condition of meaning: law defines, categorises and sets conditions for communication.

Lawrence’s sentiments raise the question of whether law is necessary to human society at all, and — supposing that it is necessary — what form it should take. These are the questions which have not traditionally been central to legal theory, so persuaded are we that law is a necessary and (probably) a positive element of social existence.  However, political philosophers and, in particular, anarchists, have challenged the traditional acceptance by Western cultures of the state and its associated concept of law imposed by a sovereign.  Although anarchist thought has never been regarded as “belonging” to legal philosophy, it does in my view offer some interesting contributions to an understanidng of law.

This neglect of anarchist thought is hardly suprising: law is typically regarded by legal theorists as imposing order on a society, while anarchism is frequently associated with chaos and disorder.  However, while the “anarchist” label is sometimes adopted by people wishing to reject order altogether, that is not the primary use of the term is political philosophy.  Anarchist theory does not reject order as such, but it does reject order imposed on a society by a centralised hierarchical authority such as a state.  The political motivations behind this rejection vary considerably between anarchists: broadly speaking, some are libertarians or anarcho-capitalists who see the state as an obstacle to radical individualism or a completely free market; others hold communitarian ideals, and regard the state as a violent institution which creates inequalities between people (through institutions such as private property), which prevents people from taking responsibility for ordering their own communities, which obstructs human potential and mutual co-operation, and which perpetrates more violence and war than it prevents.

Early anarchists tended to identify the concept of law with state-based authority, meaning that their rejection of the state also entailed a rejection of law.  For instance, Peter Kropotkin observed that law is seen to be remedy for all evils: “Instead of themselves altering what is bad, people begin by demanding a law to alter it. — A law about fashions, a law about mad dogs, a law about virtue, a law to put a stop to all the vices and all the evils which result from human indolence and cowards.”  In placing our reliance on laws given to us by the state, according to Kropotkin, we fail to exercise our own judgement and initiative in ordering our existences, and become subservient to both the law and the state.  Reliance on the state prevents us placing reliance on ourselves and from forming co-operative relationships with others.  Similarly, Leo Tolstoy, a Christian anarchist, defined laws as “rules, made by people who govern by means of organised violence for non-compliance”.  Rather than representing the will of the majority, for Tolstoy, law represents the subjective wishes if a few privileged people, who create laws which server their own interests and protect their private property.  Tolstoy argued that the violence of law cannot be justified: if people are irrational and need violence to exist, then everybody must have the right ot use violence, not just the few who have power; if, on the other hand, people were (as he thought) rational, “then their relations should be based on reason, and not on the violence of those who happen to have seized power”.

Any anarchist rejection of law is, however, tied to its rejection of the state.  Anarchism does not entail a rejection of law as such, as long as it is possible to disengage the concept of law from the presence of a state.  In other words, law may be acceptable, necessary, and even positive for anarchists, as long as it is not arbitrarily imposed by a superior and oppressive institution such as the state.  Such a non-state law may be difficult for modern Western lawyers to envisage: after all, our very concept of law tends to assume the existence of state coercion.  But anarchists have argued that we do not need to think of laws as a hierarchical institution which forces its subjects into compliance.  Nor should law necessarily be regarded merely as a set of rules or static limits.  Rather, it might be “a design, an experiment, and a learning process”.  More practically, it could be created and enforced by consensus and with the co-operation of all members of a society.  Such a law may seem idealistic, impracticable, even impossible. (Though when we think that something is impossible it is important first to remember Foucault’s Chinese encyclopaedia.  Is the object impossible, or are we simply limited in our imagination?)  Clearly, a greater awareness of the law of non-Western and indigenous cultures has led in recent years to some acceptance of broader concepts of law, which are not based upon the presence of centralised state authority…

All citations have been left out — it took me long enough to re-type the whole passage. (my apologies for any errors)  Extract taken from Margaret Davies, “Asking the Law Question” (3rd ed, 2008).  It should also be noted that the opening quote is taken from PJ Proudhon’s General Idea of Revolution in the Nineteenth Century, page 132.