"You have to treat the public as potential terrorists - not as citizens", says Jeff Halper, describing the logic of the endgame of global capitalism, which he describes in his book as a "Global War Against The People". Pointing to its huge security-industrial-intelligence complex, he looks at Israel as a leader in this new economy. By exploiting the Palestinians as a resource, its research into methods of controlling a subject population has assisted in the development of weapons technologies such as drones and nanobots. In our second hour, we read a paper which looks at social structures and linguistic frames which are being rolled out to support hegemony worldwide by deliberately blurring the distinctions between violent terrorism and non-violent dissent.
Thanks to Michael Gilligan for making and supplying the audio.
Neither of this episode's contributor has featured on the show before, and they detail contrasting angles of a useful new lens through which to view the increasingly Draconian measures being taken worldwide in the name of "security". The first speaker, Jeff Halper, is a retired Anthropologist and head of The Israeli Coalition Against House Demolitions (ICAHD). His on the ground research in Palestine alongside the Snowden/Wikileaks revelations prompted him to write the book. He also draws on Pacification Theory by Mark Neocleous.
We hear an impromptu recording made at SOAS in London on 8 October 2015, to launch his new book the "Global War Against The People". This focuses on the special role of Israel in the endgame of global capitalism, as a leader in the business of "security". He suggests that Israel can be seen as a microcosm of the capitalist global system, in which a tiny elite are busy developing ever more complex technology to try to keep control of an ever more exploited and impoverished underclass. I have slightly cleaned up his talk, which runs to just less than 1 hour, followed by questions which we hear in the second hour. Our second contributor is Ben Harbisher, a lecturer at an English University. I found his paper, Unthinking extremism - Radicalising narratives that legitimize surveillance while researching for the Wikispooks article on extremism. Written for an academic audience in the journal Surveillance & Society, this is a demanding but detailed look at what Harbisher refers to as the "Fusion Intelligence Complex". Although usually set up with money from central government, he explains that "Fusion Centers" are comprised of both public and private local "stakeholders" and are relatively autonomous. As Harbisher demonstrates, they have a clear conflict of interest and he presents a number of examples when economic interests have usurped legal mandates, and these groups have been used for political and/or economic gain to stifle democratic dissent. His focus is on the UK, where, for example, the Occupy London encampment in front of St. Paul's cathedral was deemed a great threat to British society. The paper examines observes a quite deliberate blurring of the lines between terrorism and dissent which was formerly acknowledged as legitimate by the introduction of a new set of frames such as those referred to by Jeff Halper in the first hour.
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