Impunity 1959


After such an extended break from blogging, you will be deeply disappointed that I restart with something as mundane and trivial as Jeremy Clarkson. I have defended the man in the past, because I much enjoy Top Gear and consider that much of what he has been criticised for in the past had been an amusing winding-up of the po-faced of the kind I employ myself. But nasty, indeed vicious bullying of a subordinate should always be a sacking offence.

That did not ought to be the question, though. He hit someone and they had to go to hospital. Where are the police? They are incredibly fond of sweeping up scores of teenagers for thought crime, but here we have an actual violent assault that spills blood, and it seems completely out of the question the perpetrator is brought to account. Why is that? I had a personal experience a couple of years ago when I was very mildly hurt – less than young Oisin – in an assault, and the police insisted on arresting the perpetrator despite my repeated requests to them not to do so. They told me rather firmly that the idea that it is the victim who has a say in pressing charges, is a myth. Why was Clarkson not arrested?

I cannot in my mind dissociate this from the non-arrest of Jimmy Savile for his crimes, despite their being well-known and reported at the time. That seems to link in to the wider paedophilia scandal, and the question of why no action was taken even in the most blatant of cases when there was compelling evidence, such as that of the extremely nasty Greville Janner MP.

But then I think still more widely as to why, for example, Jack Straw has not been charged with the crime of misfeasance in public office after boasting of using his position to obtain “under the radar” changes in regulations to benefit commercial clients, in exchange for cash. I wonder why a large number of people did not go to jail for the HSBC tax avoidance schemes or the LIBOR rigging scandal, which involved long term dishonest manipulation by hundreds of very highly paid bankers.

At the top of the tree is of course the question of why Blair has not been charged for the crime of waging illegal war. The Chilcot Inquiry heard evidence that every single one of the FCO’s elite team of Legal Advisers believed that the invasion of Iraq was an illegal war of aggression. Yet now the media disparage as nutters those who say Blair should be charged.

Then I think of all the poor and desperate people who get jailed for stealing comparatively miniscule amounts in benefit fraud, or the boy who was jailed for stealing a bottle of water in the London riots.

The conclusion is that we do not have a system of justice in this country at all. We have a system where the wealthy and governing classes and those associated with them enjoy almost absolute impunity, broken in only the rarest of cases. At the same time those at the bottom of the pile are kicked hard to keep them there. There is no more chance of justice against those in power in the UK than there is of the killers of Nemtsov being brought to book in Russia.

But what has really scared me is this thought. This situation has been like this my entire life: and I have reached the age of 56 before I realised it. A very great many people have still not realised it at all.

What does not scare me is this. I realise that if the system of justice is completely corrupted, then there is no obligation on me to follow the laws of the state. In fact it would be wrong of me to do so. I must seek my ethical compass elsewhere than in the corrupt power structure which weighs so hard upon the people.


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1,959 thoughts on “Impunity

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  • John Goss

    Mary @ 9:51

    You’ve really lifted my day. I am so depressed with world affairs but when I read your comment about seeing the skylark it elevated me to new heights. We do not have skylarks round here. At least I have never seen one, but it took me back to my childhood, playing near and even in the neglected bomb-shelters. In the field in which they were located half underground not far from Bawtry airport, there were many skylarks, with their original songs soaring in the sky. It was of course more rural and there were other birds we do not, or very rarely see round here, like fieldfares and lapwings, linnets and whitethroats.

    You’ve made my day. I won’t let anybody spoil it for a while. I’m off to walk the dogs. Thank you. Hope you have a lovely day.

  • Habbabkuk (La vita e' bella)

    Anon

    Many congratulations on your splendid several posts yesterday; you really handed it out to that sad old obsessive Mary (she of the great solicitude for all children except those abused by grooming gangs in the UK) and you really stirred up that nest of anti-Jew vipers which still infests this blog.

    Very good to see you back and keep up the good work. I too am envisaging a visit to Israel and shall not fail to follow your splendid example and report back objectively on this blog.

    In the meantime, I shall continue not to boycott Israeli products products produced outside the Occupied Territories or Israeli cultural events.

    Shalom!

    @@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@

    Buy dollars, pounds, euros and shekels, dump rubles, reals, rupees and renminbis forthwith.

  • Bottomline

    Hi Mary, thank you for your eye-opening posts. I dare say some of you detractors would be very comfortable on the sofas overlooking Gaza when butcher bibi was about his business.

  • Mary

    Anon’s Hasbara/CAMERA garbage was consigned to the bin. As water off a duck’s back.

  • Bottomline

    @ Mary – So was Revelations 2:9 actually referring to the cinema of satan then?

  • Habbabkuk (La vita e' bella)

    Mary

    Mentioning something once hardly counts as an obsession unless of course you’ve lost it completely. Have you?

    Which currency is used in Gaza and the West Bank? (genuine question).

  • Habbabkuk (La vita e' bella)

    “Anon’s Hasbara/CAMERA garbage was consigned to the bin. As water off a duck’s back.”
    _____________________

    Ducks have many excellent qualities – and they are of course rather tasty as well – but they hardly set the standard as far as intelligence is concerned, do they.

    So I’d suggest you avoid comparing yourself with a duck if you want people to take you seriously, Mary.

  • Mark Golding

    Why would Ukrainian Jew Congressman Engel sponsor a bill to supply US lethal weapons to Ukraine and request a strategy to threaten and smoke out President Putin?

    https://www.congress.gov/114/bills/hres162/BILLS-114hres162eh.pdf

    Obviously it is the close relationship he has with the former governor of Dnepropetrovsk, Igor Kolomoisky, Ukraine’s richest oligarth whose private army was behind the nasty sniper attacks in Kiev contracted to discredit the former government of Ukraine. It was Kolomoisky’s dirty green-backs that financed the coup.

    Within the Jewish community, Dnepropetrovsk natives like to refer to their home as the “Rebbe’s City,” a nod to the many years Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson lived there and the special affinity that he showed to the city of his youth. In the current turmoil, Kolomoisky saw a special significance in this appellation, saying Dnepropetrovsk has become a poster child for harmony among citizens of Ukraine, he said, “The ‘Rebbe’s City’ has become a symbol of the unity of Ukraine.”

    http://ukrainia.com.au/category/ukraine/

    SHAME on YOU Congressman Engel!

  • nevermind

    I’s suggest you avoid comparing yourself to some Holy mystic who might have never existed if you want people (you know, new posters you like to denigrate like a schoolmaster) to take you seriously, habbakuk.

    What a beautiful morning, time for some gardening.
    @ Clark, good to hear you got rid of the pain, but, get that dental appointment, pills only work until you run out.

  • Trowbridge H. Ford

    Must say that I still think that the germanwings crash was an act of sabotage, quite reminiscent of the sabotaging of the Sukhoi 100 a few years back, especially because of the memory card of its FDR being missing or destroyed, the co-pilot allegedly putting the plane in a steep descent within nine seconds of the captain leaving the cockpit, his being so slow in overriding the cabin’s lockup, no attempt to explain why the co-pilot was motionless during the deadly descent, why there was such a rush to judgment by the French prosecutor Brice Robin, etc.

    Will only explain further if the posters show some interest in the likelihood of its just being another plot.

  • John Goss

    Macky at 10.59 am. Yes I saw it. Looks OK. I haven’t signed up to it yet and may not do because I have an information pile-up at the moment. It is good to read your comments and those of other informed people like Mark Golding. Keep them coming. But enjoy this weather. 🙂 Everybody.

  • Johnstone

    Trowbridge H. Ford

    Can we believe the cry wolf this time? Not sure! It would be good to be able to believe unquestionably what the media and authorities tell us wouldn’t it? ..so tell us more

  • Anon

    Thanks for that, Habbabkuk.

    In the spirit of the boycott and with Mary in mind, I filled my bags to bursting with the finest Israeli produce from the kibbutz – dates, olive oil, wines, spices and souvenirs. It really is incredible what they are managing to produce out of the desert over there. Sadly over the border there is nothing but minefields and al-Qaeda. The Israeli soldiers even lob some of their food over the fence for the poor Egyptian troops who are half starved.

  • Macky

    @RobG, you are in good company re the insanity of MAD;

    “Stupidity comes in many forms. I’d like to say a few words on one particular form that I think may be the most troubling of all. We might call it ‘institutional stupidity’. It’s a kind of stupidity that’s entirely rational within the framework within which it operates: but the framework itself ranges from grotesque to virtual insanity.

    Instead of trying to explain it, it may be more helpful to mention a couple of examples to illustrate what I mean. Thirty years ago, in the early eighties – the early Reagan years – I wrote an article called ‘The Rationality of Collective Suicide’. It was concerned with nuclear strategy, and was about how perfectly intelligent people were designing a course of collective suicide in ways that were reasonable within their framework of geostrategic analysis.

    I did not know at the time quite how bad the situation was. We have learnt a lot since. For instance, a recent issue of The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists presents a study of false alarms from the automatic detection systems the US and others use to detect incoming missile attacks and other threats that could be perceived as nuclear attack. The study ran from 1977 to 1983, and it estimates that during this period there were a minimum of about 50 such false alarms, and a maximum of about 255. These were alarms aborted by human intervention, preventing disaster by a matter of a few minutes.

    It’s plausible to assume that nothing substantial has changed since then. But it actually gets much worse – which I also did not understand at the time of writing the book.

    In 1983, at about the time I was writing it, there was a major war scare. This was in part due to what George Kennan, the eminent diplomat, at the time called “the unfailing characteristics of the march towards war – that, and nothing else.” It was initiated by programs the Reagan administration undertook as soon as Reagan came into office. They were interested in probing Russian defences, so they simulated air and naval attacks on Russia.

    This was a time of great tension. US Pershing missiles had been installed in Western Europe, with a flight time of about five to ten minutes to Moscow. Reagan also announced his ‘Star Wars’ program, understood by strategists on both sides to be a first strike weapon. In 1983, Operation Able Archer included a practice that “took Nato forces through a full-scale simulated release of nuclear weapons.” The KGB, we have learnt from recent archival material, concluded that armed American forces had been placed on alert, and might even have begun the countdown to war.

    The world has not quite reached the edge of the nuclear abyss; but during 1983, it had, without realizing it, come frighteningly close – certainly closer than at any time since the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962. The Russian leadership believed that the US was preparing a first strike, and might well have launched a preemptive strike. I am actually quoting from a recent US high-level intelligence analysis, which concludes that the war scare was for real. The analysis points out that in the background was the Russians’ enduring memory of Operation Barbarossa, the German code-name for Hitler’s 1941 attack on the Soviet Union, which was the worst military disaster in Russian history, and came very close to destroying the country. The US analysis says that was exactly what the Russians were comparing the situation to.

    That’s bad enough, but it gets still worse. About a year ago we learned that right in the midst of these world-threatening developments, Russia’s early-warning system – similar to the West’s, but much more inefficient – detected an incoming missile strike from the US and sent off the highest-level alert. The protocol for the Soviet military was to retaliate with a nuclear strike. But the order has to pass through a human being. The duty officer, a man named Stanislav Petrov, decided to disobey orders and not to report the warning to his superiors. He received an official reprimand. But thanks to his dereliction of duty, we’re now alive to talk about it.

    We know of a huge number of false alarms on the US side. The Soviet systems were far worse. Now nuclear systems are being modernised.

    The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists have a famous Doomsday Clock, and they recently advanced it two minutes. They explain that the clock “ticks now at three minutes to midnight because international leaders are failing to perform their most important duty, ensuring and preserving the health and vitality of human civilisation.”

    Individually, these international leaders are certainly not stupid. However, in their institutional capacity their stupidity is lethal in its implications. Looking over the record since the first – and so far only – atomic attack, it’s a miracle that we’ve escaped.

    Nuclear destruction is one of the two major threats to survival, and a very real one. The second, of course, is environmental catastrophe.”

    More here;

    https://philosophynow.org/issues/107/Noam_Chomsky_on_Institutional_Stupidity

  • Anon

    Here’s a good one. The Israelis recently tried to reintroduce the extinct Ostrich into the wild. Unfortunately some of these poor creatures strayed across the border into Egypt where they were promptly machine-gunned to death by Egyptian soldiers. They thought they were spying devices. The Israeli project had to be abandoned.

    That’s what you’re dealing with.

  • Petra

    THF: Interesting pointers being made to the location of the LHC loop wrt the crash site.

  • Winkletoe

    I’d looked in vain for skylarks, then, oddly enough, after seeing & hearing one in flight-song above the summit of a hill near Plymouth four summers ago, I suddenly started seeing them locally (sth Cambs.). Perhaps it’s a matter of being attuned.

    To the present: huge numbers of fieldfares and redwings coming through. Songthrush right on front doorstep. Yaffles. Hares very active.

  • Macky

    For those who still believe that AI is beyond being used for dirty politics; in the very week before Palestine joins the ICC, with immediate plans to file a complaint against Israel for war crimes, AI has just conveniently released a report that has accused armed Palestinian groups of War Crimes, namely for showing “a flagrant disregard for the lives of civilians” by the firing of indiscriminate rockets into Israel, and for firing & storing rockets in or near civilian buildings in Gaza ; two points, 1) AI were denied access to Gaza by Israel, so how could it verify all its accusations ? 2) Once Palestine is a member of the ICC, it can itself be investigated for war crimes, so impeccable timing, in line with standard Israeli tactic to mirror project crimes and then claim some sort of negation by false equivalence;

    http://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/26/world/middleeast/amnesty-international-sees-evidence-of-palestinian-war-crimes-in-14-gaza-conflict.html?_r=0

  • Mary

    Getting sillier and sillier now.

    The commenter @ https://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2015/03/impunity/comment-page-8/#comment-516297

    cannot or will not acknowledge that the produce grown on stolen or occupied land is often mislabelled as ‘Produce of Israel’, a lie and probably an offence under the Trades Description Act to boot.

    Check The Label – Boycott Israeli Produce
    CAMPAIGNS / Posted by Friends of Al-Aqsa / Monday, 05th January, 2015
    Boycott Israel

    An effective strategy to end occupation

    FOA advocates the boycott of Israel at multiple levels, in order to pressure Israel into ending its illegal and immoral occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip. Boycott is a means for ordinary people who are angered by Israel’s attacks on civilians to give voice to their anger through positive action.

    This boycott campaign is both economic and cultural and will continue until Israel lifts the siege on Gaza, ends its occupation of Palestinian lands, removes settlers from the West Bank and answers charges of War Crimes.

    Palestinians have called for action and boycott is our strongest tool.

    Boycott is a tool of protest, and we are all protestors in the face of Israeli war crimes and oppression.

    Our boycott call has been heeded by individuals, businesses, councils and trade unions. We will not stop until Israel stops its inhumane treatment of the Palestinians.

    Boycott hurts Israel in a number of ways –

    1. It reduces their income as companies stop trading with Israel.

    2. It isolates Israel by rejecting it from the rest of the democratic world by exposing it as a false democracy, wherein there is only freedom for one people and oppression for another.

    3. It pressurises Israel to change its inhumane policies in Gaza and release it strangle hold in the West Bank.

    4. As world governments clamour to support Israel and its ‘right to defend itself’ while ignoring the relentless Israeli aggression and wanton violence against Palestinians, ordinary people like us can make a huge difference. Through boycott, we isolate Israel and send a clear message that the global grassroots communities will not stand by and do nothing while Israel murders innocent Palestinian women and children.

    /..
    http://www.foa.org.uk/campaigns/boycott-israeli-produce

    http://www.foa.org.uk/uploads/wall-carrot-design-A3-Poster-2_web.jpg

  • Republicofscotland

    It was most enjoyable watching David Cameron squirm under questioning from Paxman.

    The wooden PM, stuttered and looked uncomfortable,when Paxman asked,why foodbanks had risen from 66 to over 400 since he came to power,in 2010.

    Paxman a self confessed Tory,twisted the knife when he said, to the incompetent PM,”You claimed you were going to fix broken Britain.”

    Paxman sensing blood,in the water,virtually chided the inept UK PM,over VAT rises that Cameron promised wouldn’t happen,after he came to power,in 2010.

    It’s no wonder the bungling,cack-handed PM,was running scared of debating.

  • Republicofscotland

    As for Ed Miliband,taking questions from the public,which moved on to the subject of his,equally egotistical brother David, Ed’s sombre waffle about,how the rift had never healed,with David,over the fight for party leadership,it would’ve brought tears to a glass eye.

    Miliband may have suckered a few,emotionally unstable folk,into believing that he actually gives a damn,others will no be fooled so easily.

  • Republicofscotland

    The London wolf,who disguises himself as a buffoon,in order to seem more approachable,Boris

  • Republicofscotland

    Re my last comment

    Johnson, Johnson has come out swinging at Mad Jim Murphy, Murphy’s crime,intimating that monies in the form of tax from bankers bonuses,should be spread across the UK.

    Johnson a Bullingdon spoilt brat criticised Murphy, adding that Hong Kong,Singapore and Dubai were the UK’s rivals and not London.

    Of course in reality London is a black hole sucking up cash and talent relentlessly from these isles,and unless something is done about it,the wealth division between north and south,will continue to grow.

  • Republicofscotland

    Over and over again we hear from anti-independence campaigers (especially failed former Chancellor Alastair Darling) that an independent Scotland could not have afforded to bail out the Scottish banks. After all, Alastair knows best! He was in charge when they collapsed!

    His argument relies on the assertion that banks are bailed out by the taxpayers of the country in which the institution is headquartered. This simply isn’t true.
    Number 1 Churchill Place, Canary Wharf, London, is the global headquarters of Barclays Bank PLC. If you accept there is such a thing as a Scottish bank then Barclays is clearly an English bank.

    At the time of the crash, the media constantly told us that Barclays didn’t need a taxpayer bail out at all. But in fact, Barclays Bank – yes, that English based bank – received the single biggest bail out package of any UK bank. It was just that most of it didn’t come from the UK taxpayer.

    Instead, Barclays was bailed out to the tune of £552.32bn (at backdated exchange rates) by the US Federal Reserve and £6bn by the Qatari Government. In other words, foreign governments bailed out Barclays with more than twelve times the money the UK Government gave as capital support for RBS (£45bn).

    Next time you hear someone say an independent Scotland could not have afforded the banking bail out, remember how the US Federal Reserve bailed out Barclays to the tune of £552.32bn.

    Ask them if they think Scotland would have made the same bank regulation mistakes as the city of London led Westminster government? It is a fact that the contribution of an independent Scotland’s taxpayers to any bank bail-out that may or may not have been required in an independent Scotland would have been the same as it has been with Scotland part of the UK.

    http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/gordon-macintyrekemp/scottish-independence-bank-bailout_b_4895234.html

    Don’t believe the Westminster hype,Scotland,can and will go it alone.

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