We're all going to the dogs

Meanwhile, back in England, international terrorists were queuing up at the Excel exhibition centre in the London docklands to order equiment at the Defense Systems and Equipment international arms fair.

This heartwarming item of wall art can be found on Brick Lane.

Of course, the media don't take this view and are happy to follow the government line that, sure, Indonesia should be allowed to buy as many fighter jets and bombs as they can get credit for, as long as they promise only to use them for proper war (presumably against Russia), and not against civilians. Which is exactly what they did as soon as they got them. But this didn't matter. The actual unwritten contract said that they could buy tanks, machine guns, bombs and so forth as long as they didn't use them against Western civilians. That's not allowed. That would be an act of terrorism. Anything done to other nations, howsoever random and without warning, as a bomb dropped on a city from 30,000 feet through clouds at night, is called fighting terrorism. Pretty soon bombs will be flying everywhere back and forth as everyone is fighting terrorism against everyone else.

But this same media still parrots the lie that America a leading light in the democratic world because it holds "free" and "fair" elections, which cost half a billion dollars for each candidates in pay-back money, so aren't free, which deleted many legitimate voters from the polling lists in the state of Florida, so aren't fair, and which turned out not to be elections at all since it was finally demonstrated for real that the supreme court is actually the body which appoints the president, and not electorate at all.

I've never gone to a political demonstration in Britain before, but in a one party state you don't get the feeling that voting is having much effect. You'd think that possibly there are other channels for democratic effect. For example, you could join the Labour party and hope that voting within it you could affect policy. However, they are busily destroying their systems of internal democracy year by year to make sure that even that won't work.

Who's responsible for this waste of space?

So I found myself heading down on foot to the train station in Cambridge to catch the train to London. I felt kind of crazy to be doing this. All I had as a contact was a website by the Campaign Against the Arms Trade, and it said to meet for a Fiesta for Life Against Death on this day at this place. I tried to get a couple friends to go with me, one of whom holds political views on this subject, but was too chicken after he read the section warning you about police tactics, and the other who is married to someone who works in the arms manufacturing business and is not entirely impressed by his collusion.

I enjoyed the trip down because I learnt a lot about myself. In my head I had thoughts going around and around about what I was doing, what would happen if I got arrested and beaten up. Should I have left my wallet and camera at home so they wouldn't get stolen or broken? Was I being too paranoid about the police? Why did I feel, deep within me, that I was doing something wrong? I felt that I was a criminal off to do a job in another town. I'd get away with it as long as no one was looking and no one suspected. I took a circuitous route to the meeting point, the last two miles on foot even though there were train stations near to where I wanted to go. What was getting into me? As I grew up I have been told on the news over and over again how privileged I was to have been born into a "free" country. I could not work out where these feelings were coming from. Fortunately I had arranged to meet an old friend who works in London for a drink in the evening, so to me that was my legitimate excuse. All I was doing was travelling down a few hours early to see if this advertised spectacle was really going to happen. That was all. Maybe I was coming down to buy something in a specialist London shop. I was not, repeat, not, just down here looking for trouble.

The police hold up the critical mass group at the exit of a roundabot in order to ensure maximum traffic disruption.

A helicopter buzzed overhead continuously, showing that there was something going on. As I reached the roundabout one kilometre away from the meeting point, the Critical Mass group which had started at 10am at Waterloo Bridge arrived and swung round the roundabout in front of me and collided with police. There weren't many there, but they caught people's bikes and turned them back and put their vans in the way. Pretty soon there was a big traffic jam as more and more bikes piled in behind. The police started directing traffic around the immobile crowd as best they could when they could have more easily blocked the road a little further away from the junction to give them room. It was unclear what they were holding people up for because there was already a group of marchers further up the road behind them.

This is about the point where I joined in with the crowd. The police eventually let it go forward (almost having to order us to move) and we took over the road. The pedal powered scrap-heap and sound system on wheels, rinky-dink, was there. I had first seen it in Bonn a month ago, playing bits of music. In fact there were several bicycles with trailers full of loud sound systems rolling about.

The road rose onto a bridge flyover and the police suddenly became more numerous with their vans and motorcycles weaving in and out of the crowd. Many people chained their bikes to the railing to pick up later because they were becoming a nuisance in this pedestrianized situation.

Another view of the "kettle" strategy. Note, the rest of the bridge is empty. What is their problem?

Suddenly, like in a game of Go, the police formed a rectangular box around a large section of people and banners. Those on the outside were free to move around and walk past it taking photos, wondering what on earth was going on. There were some scuffles around the perimeter of this box because any time someone tried to leave, the police would shove them back. Obviously you couldn't shove back against the police in return because that was trouble. They were organized. When they pushed someone, it was okay. If you pushed a policeman, that was wrong and somehow technically against the "rules". All they had to do was ensure that you had no alternative but to push into them and they had an excuse to do what they wanted. It reminded me of the time I had been accosted by a bully and was put into a situation where anything I could say was going to be taken as an insult. Any which way you lose. Aside from the fact that many bullies grow up to be policemen, what were they trying to achieve? A bully is looking for an excuse to fight. But surely if the police are trying to get you to do something, you have to be free to do it. Simply surrounding a crowd and standing there for over an hour making sure everyone gets pissed off misses the point. Unless that is the point.

The arms dealer effigy begins to look worried.

I and many of the stragglers on the outside of the "kettle" (as this police strategy is called) wandered ahead to the other end of the bridge, down the sliproad which approached the Excel Centre and onto a patch of waste ground where the march was supposed to end up. You could tell this was the place because there was a soundstage, speakers and a coffee stall. Between this area and the approach to the Excel centre there were loads of police. They had linked together crotch to arse in a long line across the road with their big black gloves ready to punch you. Behind them were more police, then millions of vans. If you walked out to the side somewhat and squinted you could see behind all that a row of horses in riot gear. Behind them the Excel Centre full of its light armaments and riot control equipment for hire-purchase. You could bet that the delegates over lunch must have been joking to their clients how, if things got exciting, they would get a chance to see their products in action. Maybe fire a few rounds of plastic coated metal bullets into the crowd while no one was looking. Like at the Iranian embassy, many of these guys would be on diplomatic passports, so could get away with shooting a few people dead from the rooftops if they felt like it.

The area was disappointingly empty. A couple of speeches were made on the platform and I was wondering what was happening to the rest of the people. I wandered back up the sliproad onto the bridge and saw the police still "containing" the demonstration for no conceivable reason. One of the banners was painted with the police checkerboard motif and read: "Police against the arms trade", which I thought was quite clever since all you could see from ground level were police below all the banners. The samba band started up in the middle and kept people's spirits up during this long wait.

Eventually there was movement. A couple of arrests happened on the junction of the slip road. You could tell they were happening because of the blitz of cameras pointing, flashing, snapping and capturing the event. When the police arrest someone they don't actually give them a chance to go peacefully. That is not an option. They have to grab them from both sides, twist their arms so they are doubled over and start stumbling about. Not surprisingly this tends not to be in the right direction, which gives the excuse to drag them nice and violently behind their lines or into a police van, probably on the additional charge of "resisting arrest". I was wondering how on earth it was possible not to "resist" arrest given that sort of treatment. We're talking about the resistance of inertia and gravity and the fact that elbows don't bend backwards.

The police make a bodge-up the process of moving people where they want to go.

The police carried on. With about 50 metres between where people were and where they were meant to get to, they made it impossible to proceed in an orderly fashion. All it would have taken is for them to stand back, and let people go where they obviously belonged without putting any metal barriers in the way. For a few seconds I was on the wrong side of these barriers with a wall of police behind me, people being thrown back and forth over it, and I just froze. Then asked permission to climb the fence from the policeman beside me to get away. During this time some bright spark had put some music on the sound system turned up real loud. It was the song which goes: I GET KNOCKED DOWN/ BUT I GET UP AGAIN/ NOTHING CAN KEEP ME DOWN/ I GET KNOCKED DOWN/ BUT I GET UP AGAIN/ NOTHING CAN KEEP ME DOWN. For a few seconds there I felt it, I felt a tremor of revolution.

In fact, for all their technologies of crowd control, the truncheons, the electric cattle prods, the riot shields in the back of their vans, and so on, the one most effective device was startlingly absent: A nice loud tannoy and someone to speak sensible instructions into it. They could then tell people what to do, and those who didn't want trouble would do it. "Go directly into the controlled area and don't approach the line of policemen." We'd have all done that. But that's not how they did it. They neither sought nor demanded order.

What a sexy set of black gloves and black suits you're all wearing. I expected them to start dancing and snaking around the park when the music started.

After this excitement, the next person on the platform announced that two planes had crashed into the World Trade Centres in New York but he hoped not too many people had been hurt. Most of us thought: Stupid joke. Get on with the rest of the speeches. We want to hear about the MoD bringing in child prostitutes to service the needs of the seedy arms dealers in the evenings. We want to hear about war machines, the rocket launchers fired into remote villages in the dead of night, children picking up time delayed mines in the shape of toy animals and bringing them home to their family. The fuel-air bombs which suck up oxygen for an entire square mile and kill all animals, napalm, cluster bombs, incendiary devices. Rational people actually sit down and design these fucking things. How the cost of one fighter jet can provide clean water for a million people for life, but is instead is piloted by some moron who flies low and cuts the cables of a ski lift. A submarine which cost half a billion dollars in a world of need, defends us against no known enemy, but can surface into a sight-seeing boat and sink it. It's all so utterly crap. And there's a president obsessed with a missile defence program more costly than sending a man to Neptune, which wouldn't work, and even if it did it wouldn't defend against the real disaster (not hypothetical) that just happened today.

Some milling around happened.

They have to realize that when they fight against the rest of the world, they are fighting against people, not machines. While Americans are not willing to take their bombers closer than five miles vertically of their target site for fear of risking their lives, even though this means they will miss and many others will die. While they prefer to send cruise missiles thousands of miles to blow up things, whatever the cost, their obsession with machinery is so much at the heart of their war policy and consequently their defence policy that it is wholly unable to cope with suicide missions. The only way to "defend" against suicide missions is to cease actively making large populations suicidal and vengeful. This would require the application of justice and the renunciation of economic and military violence, not retribution which only causes more vengeance.

In Japan after the American government dropped nuclear weapons on two cities, predominantly full of civilians, the Japanese people decided that this fate was so horrible they were not going to have anything to do with the deployment of nuclear weapons, ever, because they knew what it was like. Is it too much to hope for America to come to the same conclusion: that the bombing of cities is so horrible that it should not be conducted by anyone for any reason whatsoever?

I can see an international treaty lining up swiftly banning the bombing of cities. I can see G W Bush actually dithering as to whether he should sign it.

Canary Wharf at night. Big banks booming.

The speeches finished. People and police milled around. I sat down and read a book. There was a sudden incident where they swarmed in and snatched someone, but it was too fast to see, like a magic trick. Later, someone hooked up a radio to a sound system and we heard the real news from the BBC. That's it, time to go, I thought, and headed off.

I was meeting my friend over in Canary Wharf where he has worked in a bank since getting his Maths PhD from Bristol in the same year as I did. Whereas I program for machine tools, he works out the high finance strategy and had been watching stock markets collapse all afternoon. The economy is destroyed. All those people who were told to save for their pensions by making contracts with private firms which depended on the stock market, can forget about eating in their old age. Back in the old days we made a simple contract with our government to pay our pensions out of taxes which did not depend on anything as ill-conceived as the stock market "economy", but unfortunately didn't require so many bankers, which is why they are against such simple and elegant solutions.

Canary Wharf is in many ways the twin of the World Trade Centre; the banks that occupy floors on one cluster of buildings, occupy the other, so the event was close to home. We went to his flat, drank beer and watched some TV. Our Prime Minister, Tony Blair, decided to declare that a terrorist attack on America was an attack on Britain and that we should be considered an equal target. Any action that the American government chose to make in "retaliation", we would back, no matter how insane or counter-productive. Thanks a lot, mate. You are a great help. You could almost sense that he was almost disappointed that it hadn't happen here so he could be the centre of attention (in which case the American government would certainly not have felt any need to do anything about it, and maybe even continued to tolerate NORAID. Those were the days). In any case, he responded by stepping up more airport security in Britain, banning flights over London for the foreseeable future, and set the financial district on red alert the next day.

In an almost sarcastic move, a thousand more police were deployed on the streets of London to "reassure the public".

After a slightly pissed train journey and walk across Cambridge, I got home and watched the TV news till the early hours of the morning as more pictures came through. I watched the buildings collapse like pile drivers with people clinging to the outside, and it was so horrible I had to switch off. Meanwhile, American fundamentalist "Christians" were barking on the radio about how we have to kill all fundamentalist "Islamics", in direct violation of the "First Commandment". Where do these people come from? It's the dark ages all over again.