Morale and Morale-busting

I suppose we’d always find something topical in these extracts from Ian McLaine, Ministry of Morale: Home Front Morale and the Ministry of Information in World War II (George Allen and Unwin, London, 1979). But the recently published claim that that the current government had a policy of promoting immigration expressly as a means of transforming the ethnic and cultural make-up of the country gives this post added interest.

Looking back we find that many of the persuasion strategies used in the era of mass immigration were given their first run out during the Second World War to manage the reaction to US soldiers’ presence in WWII. As part of this ‘gigantic social experiment’ we see many of the practices that are now familiar being used for perhaps the first time, at least on so large a scale: such practices as historically constructed apologias for Black behaviour; intervention in schools to control politically sensitive language; the police being instructed to discourage ‘discrimination’; the large scale funding and social deployment as government proxies of voluntary organisations known to be committed to race-liberalism; acculturation to social problems imposed by government diktat leading to a growing acceptance that the artificial situation is ‘normal’; propaganda publications specially designed for both host and incomer to smooth both groups' rough edges and facilitate mixing; the government sponsoring of ‘spontaneous’ goodwill and hospitality as model for private emulation; these and more are here.

We can also imagine that this social experiment had interest for integrationists in America. Eisenhower’s agreement not to segregate White and Black troops stationed in Britain, and the Americans’ exposure to British puzzlement and anger at negative attitudes to Blacks born of long experience can only have aided the integrationist cause.

These extracts are also interesting for the light they throw on the growth of government involvement in the minutiae of everyday life and the inexorable growth of rules and regulations; WWII ushered in the nanny state, then as now war was used as pretext for social control.

***

One of the primary tasks of the Ministry of Information was to compile a weekly report for government on the state of public opinion and on the results of various surveys into lifestyle and consumption habits, the Wartime Social Surveys:

[all emphases in bold are mine]

Not only were the reports comprehensive and detailed, delving into many apparently trivial aspects of wartime life, they were - which was more important - unbiased and accurate when tested against the quantitative findings of the British Institute of Public Opinion and the Wartime Social Survey. Their uniqueness lay in the fact that for the first time a government had at its disposal a reliable machine for testing public responses to administrative and policy decisions

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… and for gauging the needs of the people. […]

The cynically-minded observer might be disposed to comment that it took a total war for the British governing classes to show real and practical concern for the condition of the people. But while it may be true to say that the main thrust of Home Intelligence’s work was directed towards ameliorating wartime discomforts and grievances in order to buttress support for the government, it is also true that the staff of the Ministry came to regard their labours as socially useful, war or no war. […]

Once it had settled down, the Wartime Social Survey became an extremely useful adjunct to government. In June 1941 Louis Moss, late of the BBC Listener Research unit and the British Institute of Public Opinion, was appointed as Superintendent and together with Stephen Taylor he readied the Survey for the great demands that were to be made upon it by governments. At the end of the following month all but two of the existing staff resigned when the Ministry refused to approach the National Institute of Economic and Social Research again, the Institute having earlier withdrawn its support because it objected to the Survey’s study of morale as well as of public opinion. However, new staff were immediately engaged and put to work.

[p.260]

Although the major concern was with the immediate physical and psychological well-being of the populace in time of war, the nature and breadth of the Survey’s work had obvious implications for peacetime. Never before had government involved itself so intimately with the minutiae of British, largely working-class, life. Appalled at the prospect of the loss of such a unique organisation, Taylor from as early as September 1942 urged the retention of the Survey after victory in the form of a National Institute of Opinion Studies. He correctly anticipated that after the war economic and social restrictions would continue in being for some time, necessitating appropriate social research so that the government of the day might reach sound and just decisions. […] Taylor was supported by the Ministry. The unit survived and is today a valuable part of the Office of Population Censuses and Surveys.

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For our purposes it is important to note that, as with the reports of Home Intelligence, the Wartime Social Survey was more than an expedient tool for the maintenance of morale. It represented a considerable widening of the ambit of government concern for the condition of the people and may be considered part of the wartime acceleration towards social reform.

The presence in Britain after January 1942 of American troops, several million of whom had passed through the country by D-Day, threw on the Ministry of Information yet another responsibility that of smoothing and enhancing relations between this most numerous body of foreign soldiers and their civilian hosts.

Certain worrying questions presented themselves. How would the populace respond to the presence of soldiers whose country of origin was by no means popular in Britain? A country, moreover, which was inevitably to become the senior partner in the alliance. If resentment arose, would it affect the nature and quality of the British war effort? What of the large numbers - amounting to tens of thousands - of black American troops? The potential for friction between a strained, tired population and the well-paid, ebullient young Americans, freed of the many restraints governing their behaviour at home, was considerable.

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Upon the arrival of US servicemen, the Ministry of Information set up an American Forces Liaison Division which was made responsible for co-ordinating what was essentially a locally based programme of smoothing relations between the public and the American forces. Only at the level of town and village could the Ministry, through the agency of RIOs, (Regional Information Officers) recruit the co-operation of numerous bodies and authorities. Local improvisation rather than central direction was necessary if success was to be achieved. Employing much the same tactics as were applied to stealing the thunder from the left, the Ministry remained in the background, ‘fomenting spontaneous hospitality’* and encouraging manifestations of good will. […]

* Southern Region Report, INF 1/327B

There were two initial difficulties. The Americans came ‘self-sufficing, fully equipped, and prepared to regard Britain in much the same light as they regarded North Africa, namely, as the base from which they happened to be fighting at the moment’; and it was only through the efforts of General Eisenhower and the creation of a top-level British-American Liaison Board, on which the Ministry was represented, that this variant of isolationism was broken down. A number of publications prepared for distribution to American troops undoubtedly helped. […]

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The second difficulty had to do with money. The Ministry’s programme languished for want of it. When the government was persuaded to allocate finance for disbursement by the department, the hospitable impulses of the areas in which US soldiers were stationed or spent their leave were given tangible form.

What was done once money became available? The Local Information Committees, which had been a cause of distress to the Ministry in the past now came into their own, for on them were represented the many interests whose co-operation was required. Hospitality Committees were set up. These comprised local authorities, the Regional Commissioner, voluntary societies and the churches, their ‘ideal being to allow no American to go home again without having at least been under one British roof and made one British friend’. The American Red Cross, which lodged and fed troops on leave in facilities provided by the British, was assisted by a total of 40,000 women volunteers who helped organise Red Cross Clubs. Two hundred and fifty social clubs were established by voluntary agencies such as the YMCA, Rotary, the Salvation Army and the Jewish Hospitality Committee, while the WVS ran some 200 Welcome Clubs where British civilians were able to meet American servicemen ‘away from the atmosphere of the street or the pub’. The Ministry encouraged and supported the British Council and the English Speaking Union in sending speakers to American establishments and aided the American Red Cross in forming clubs for the purpose of instructing some of the 60,000 ‘G.I. brides’ about American life and customs.

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Care must he exercised lest the impression is given that most Americans took their ease in church halls and Rotary clubs: it is more likely that the majority preferred the atmosphere of the pub and the company of ‘loose women’ to the amenities so earnestly and anonymously fostered by the Ministry of Information. But insofar as the Ministry facilitated it, the contact of hundreds of thousands of young Americans with the kindness and warmth of ordinary Britons undoubtedly helped to ease much confusion and loneliness. We are, however, principally concerned with the impact of the U.S. troops on their hosts. It did not have the consequences which might have been anticipated from a reading of the intelligence reports prior to Pearl Harbour or from the fears which motivated the Ministry’s campaign to popularise the United States.

The complaints and accusations levelled at the American troops were many. They were said to drink too heavily, to be boastful and contemptuous of the British armed forces (‘the Dunkirk Harriers’), to be too highly paid, to corrupt young women, and to practise discrimination against their black comrades.

[p.267]

By December 1942 such reports had considerably declined in number and in 1943 they had all but disappeared. This, together with the constant remark that the Americans were ‘settling down well’, may be taken as an indication of the way in which they came to be regarded as part of wartime life, albeit an exotic part. The RIO for the Southern Region described the American ‘occupation’ as a gigantic social experiment and asked whether it had succeeded:

... in spite of fairly frequent incidents ... annoyance and criticism lost significance as time went on. It was smothered by a growing appreciation of the Americans as a whole. Irritating and disquieting incidents continued, but there Was less and less inclination to draw general and damning deductions from them. People began to realise ... that the Americans really belong to a different nation, with different standards, customs, manners of approach’.

If after actual contact the British revised their earlier notion of the Americans as close relations, how did they respond to the black American troops in their midst? Great concern was expressed in the War Cabinet. It was feared in a generally undefined way that the presence of black US soldiers would have untoward consequences for the morale of both civilians and servicemen and for Anglo-American relations. The Ministry of Information did not entertain such fears and adopted a cautious and sensible approach to this contentious matter.

In August 1942 Anthony Eden referred the War Cabinet to ‘the various difficulties’ likely to be encountered, including the health of coloured troops during the English winter, should the United

[p.268]

States continue to send the existing proportion of black troops to Britain. Cabinet agreed with the Foreign Secretary’s proposal to press the Americans for a reduction in the number being sent over. A month later Sir James Grigg, Secretary of State for War, submitted a memorandum in which he argued that the failure of British civilians to sympathise with the distinction drawn by white against black troops would lead to friction between white Americans and the host populace. The morale of British troops overseas would also be adversely affected should there ‘be any unnecessary association between American coloured troops and British women’. He therefore recommended that the lead of the US authorities should be followed and, as an example of the policy he had in mind, he appended to the memorandum a note written by the Major-General in charge of Administration, Southern Command, for the guidance of British servicemen.

Following a potted history of slavery and of the reasons for the segregation practised in the southern American states, the note spoke of the ‘bond of mutual esteem’ between the races and the white Southerner’s sense of moral duty to the negro ‘as it were to a child’. Of ‘a simple mental outlook’ and lacking ‘the white man’s ability to think and act to a plan’, the negro is nevertheless capable of engaging in civil strife if allowed too much freedom and too close an association with white people. With these facts in mind, British serving men and women were advised to be sympathetic to coloured men but to avoid making intimate friends with them, women being adjured never to ‘walk out, dance or drink’ with coloured soldiers. As a general rule, it was thought best in such matters to emulate the behaviour of white American troops.

Grigg’s recommendations were too much for Lord Cranborne who, as Secretary of State for the Colonies, was aware of the effect the adoption of such a policy might have on black colonials serving with the British forces. He protested that ‘it is going too far to attempt to ask the British Army or the ATS to adopt the attitude of the American Army towards American coloured people’. The Lord Chancellor, Lord Simon, warmly supported Cranborne. Although he stated that the coloured man was entitled to equal treatment only ‘if he behaves himself’, Simon insisted upon the maintenance of equality in service and in civilian life. Herbert Morrison, despite concern for the consequences of the fascination of coloured men for some British women, also came down against Grigg’s proposals: the police had already been instructed not to practise discrimination and to discourage it among others; advice to soldiers on the lines suggested

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would certainly become known to the general public; and in any case assurances had been received from General Eisenhower that the US Army would not segregate coloured from white troops in the United Kingdom.

Bracken’s contribution to the debate was confined to the circulation of a letter he had written to Grigg on 16 September. Though it was desirable, the Minister of Information maintained, to avoid offending white American soldiers, it would be unwise to try to lead the British people to adopt the American social attitude to the negro:

I do not think that the mass of the civilian population ought to be approached with any propaganda on the subject. A wrong step would be disastrous, and there is not sufficient prospect of any real success, however wise one’s attitude. Incidentally, the essential agents of national hospitality are the Voluntary Societies, with whom we are working very closely. Their fundamental principles are involved in the doctrine of no racial discrimination.

The Ministry’s general philosophy on propaganda apart, Bracken could hardly have advised otherwise since on 20 September 1942 the Sunday Express had carried an article under his name, ‘The Colour Bar Must Go’, which, while referring to coloured British subjects, was unlikely to be divorced from the American issue in the minds of most readers.

In the light of reports reaching the Ministry of Information, Bracken’s caution was well advised. The probability of antagonising the public by ‘education’ along the lines suggested by Sir James Grigg was high. Of all factors contributing to tension between the civil population and the Americans by far the most important was the discrimination publicly exercised by white against black, the initial puzzlement leading eventually to ‘strong feeling’ and ‘considerable indignation’. British soldiers shared the civilians’ feelings: one incident said to be typical was that in which a number of soldiers, upbraided by Americans for ‘fraternising with negroes’, commented that as both black and white troops had come 3,000 miles to help win the war they saw no reason to distinguish between one American and another. Civilians took increasingly to interfering verbally and physically in disputes between black troops and white officers and military police, the GOC Southern Command reporting a number of such incidents to Sir James Grigg who in turn anxiously informed the Prime Minister.

Faced with a cascade of memoranda on the subject, the War

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Cabinet was thrown into a lengthy discussion on 13 October 1942. While it was thought that the British people ‘should avoid becoming too friendly with coloured American troops’, it was also agreed that Grigg’s suggestions ‘went too far’ and that no modification be made in respect of free access by coloured persons to canteens, pubs, cinemas and the like. The Lord Privy Seal, Sir Stafford Cripps, was asked to consult with the Home Secretary and the Secretary of State for War and to produce a revised set of instructions for the Army and an article for the Army Bureau of Current Affairs.

For the man who had been chosen earlier in the year to go to India in order to conduct extremely delicate negotiations with Congress and who might therefore have been expected to possess an understanding of racial problems and communal sensitivities, Cripps made surprisingly few alterations to the instructions appended to Grigg’s paper of 3 October. The offensive analysis of the negro character and the recommendation that the British should emulate the white American attitude were omitted, but there remained references to black slaves as having taken ‘root and multiplied’, to the capacity of their descendants for inspiring ‘affection and admiration’ like children, and to semi-tropical labour being more fitted to the coloured man. British servicemen and women were to be told to adopt an objective attitude in any discussions they might have with white Americans on the colour question, but the advice remained much the same as before. Just what effect the issuing of these instructions had on ‘other ranks’ it is difficult to say, but it is doubtful whether on a matter so closely involving deeply personal beliefs and attitudes much influence was exerted. Bracken successfully vetoed the distribution of similar advice to the general public. He also expressed opposition to ‘written documents’ and ‘the didactic approach’ being inflicted on the Army, but could not prevent the scheme going ahead.
Some publicity did, in fact, escape from the Ministry of Information. But it was on a small scale, aimed at specific groups in the community and exhibited rather more discretion than was shown in the final product of the War Cabinet’s deliberations. Louis MacNeice, the poet, was commissioned by the Ministry on behalf of the Board of Education to write a booklet, Meet the U.S. Army, for the guidance of school teachers. In it he touched on the colour problem:

The American Negroes require a special comment. There are many Negro soldiers in this country, and those Britons who have met them have been very favourably impressed by their pleasant manners and their readiness to please. These Negro troops are not,

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on principle, separately brigaded, the U.S, War Department having rightly declined to differentiate them from other American citizens. It must be remembered, however, that ... they are in the unique position of being descended from slaves; this memory of slavery, being still fresh, retains a psychological hold both on the Negroes themselves and on many of the white fellow-citizens ... from this they will only gradually break free. Any American Negro who comes to Britain must be treated by us on a basis of absolute equality. And remember never to call a Negro a ‘nigger’.

The Ministry steered very cautiously between the shoals of indignant British opinion and the ingrained attitudes of many white American soldiers. The Regions were advised to seek the guidance of the commanding officer of the local American unit before encouraging hospitality for black troops and to obviate ‘embarrassment’ by never inviting ‘negro troops to a dance at which white American troops and English girls’ were present. RIOs were also asked to point out to Americans that the British people, having no colour problem of their own, could afford to take ‘a more detached and seemingly more humanitarian attitude to negroes’: hence their impatience at evidence of discrimination. One Regional officer found this policy irksome. When asked by the American Southern Base Commander whether anything could be done to moderate the public’s ‘effusiveness’ towards black soldiers, he replied unofficially that departmental instructions prevented him from taking such action in much the same way as US Army policy prevented ‘what most American Officers would have liked to do, namely, to exclude Negro troops from this country’.

A year after the thorough Cabinet discussion Sir James Grigg was still pressing for a change of ‘attitude on the colour question’. Failing to analyse the circumstances and the possibility of discriminatory behaviour on the part of the US military police, he cited the crime statistics relating to black troops. These showed that the incidence of sex offences was twice as heavy and of violent crimes five times as heavy as among white American soldiers; and as black troops were less inclined towards drunkenness, Grigg concluded that ‘in both these classes of crime the trouble is due to the natural propensities of the coloured man’. The Duke of Marlborough, who as a lieutenant-colonel was liaising between the American and British forces, also felt constrained to warn Churchill:

There is, I know, a feeling throughout parts of the country in which these negro troops are quartered that it is unwise and

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dangerous to go out into the roads and country lanes after dark and ‘there is growing resentment that these conditions should be allowed to exist. I know the difficulties of the situation as they confront you and the American authorities, I do not wish to make a mountain out of a molehill but I do visualize that during the coming winter when the hours of darkness grow longer that the number of these crimes will become greater and also the possibility of their being undetected will also be facilitated.

The Prime Minister considered the situation ‘serious’. But the Ministry of Information, in possession of no evidence to substantiate the Duke’s forebodings, continued to counsel prudence, Both in the policy towards black troops and in the tactic of quietly encouraging the basically friendly and hospitable promptings of the public towards the American visitors, the department acted in accordance with the stance evolved in 1941. In these, as in other matters of morale and public opinion, the British people were trusted to behave sensibly and in a manner consistent with the nation’s best interests.

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Keith Laidler: Ensuring Acquiescence

From Keith Laidler, Surveillance Unlimited (Icon Books Ltd, 2008) pp.171-194

Chapter 11
Ensuring Acquiescence: The Carrot and The Stick

The Carrot

We hear much about the ‘Orwellian’ dynamic in our society, but in truth the changes we are witnessing owe more to Huxley’s Brave New World than anything found in Nineteen Eighty-four. Instead of repressive tyrants and omnipresent intrusive technology we are in the midst of a process of mass pacification. Computers and technology have been designed to be user-friendly - all the hard-to-understand jargon, all the sharp edges have been smoothed away. Technology is our friend, non-judgmental and ever-present and eventually ... invisible. The danger of a ubiquitous technological environment was seen as long ago as 1991, when Mark Weiser, chief technologist of the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC), pointed out that ‘the most profound technologies are those that disappear. They weave themselves into the fabric of everyday life until they are indistinguishable from it.’

This ubiquitous computing (or ubicomp), known in Europe as ambient intelligence (AmI), is already well advanced, with plans for ultra-convenient RFID personal biometric monitors woven into clothing to act as a cue for lighting and heating within the home, altering our personal environment continuously and without our conscious awareness. Refrigerators that monitor (via RFID again) our food stocks and automatically order replacements from the supermarket when we run low form another frequently mentioned example of the ubicomp environment.

We are developing a childlike dependence on technology: it informs us, entertains us, cooks our food, even gives us directions when driving. Our mobile phones keep us connected to friends and family, credit cards transfer funds for goods and services in a fraction of a second. We know our laptop like an intimate friend, one to whom we are happy to confide our hidden interests and passions. But beyond the slick technology is a darker reality. Our computer is less a friend than a gossip, its console less a TV screen than a one-way mirror. We see only the reflections of our own commands appearing on the screen - we do not observe the myriad individuals and organisations who are collecting our every keystroke and using it to record, analyse and sell on to others everything we buy, our sexual preferences, what our political affiliations are, and a host of other private transactions.

Intimacy and ‘bonding’ with the machine lowers our resistance, salves our suspicion and lulls us into a sense of false security. Each day we unwittingly divulge more and more about ourselves to our electronic friend, forgetting that we are no longer playing with individual gadgets - we are dealing with an overarching technological umbrella, and the complex mass of information we allow to be placed under this umbrella ‘will be passed on endlessly, to be configured and reconfigured, sold, resold, and redirected in a thousand ingenious ways.’

But note: there is no coercion here. We are all so cosy with technology that, with no thought, we routinely hand over enormous amounts of personal info, or subscribe to a road toll system that may cut a minute or two off our daily travel time, but will at the same time ensure that, 24/7 and year-round, no confidential data we possess, no journey we make, will escape technology’s all-seeing eye. If we choose to accept the benefits of these technologies without considering their attendant risks, then we are assuming that the possibility of creeping government repression - leading ultimately to the establishment of a controlled society - is non-existent. This flies in the face of all historical precedent; given human nature and the desire of individuals and groups for dominance, such an assumption is a reckless betrayal of all our society’s freedoms. And for what? More convenient shopping and a shorter delay at the toll booth?

On the rare occasions that mass protest does erupt, the wise government espouses compromise, making minor changes, or even ostentatiously shelving a large part of the programme (intending to introduce it in stages, by stealth, later). This normally has the effect of neutralising opposition. In a liberal democracy people feel uncomfortable holding ‘extreme’ views, even on such topics as basic freedoms, and if the other side offers ‘concessions,’ they feel duty-bound to reciprocate. A sham compromise effectively disarms resistance and allows repressive legislation to creep, stage by stage, over our liberties.

The stick

When cosmetic changes and compromise are insufficient, the authorities promote a climate of fear and loathing; ID cards have been in turn a cure for benefit scroungers, illegal immigrants, and terrorists. This latter grouping has been the most useful as, although we may loathe benefit scroungers, we actively fear terrorists, a shadowy grouping who have the power to take away our health and life without warning. The fight against this nemesis has been given an elevated status: the ‘war on terror.’ Today the term is a little out of fashion, and while President George W. Bush still mentions the WoT, Prime Minister Gordon Brown has apparently forbidden the phrase. But then again, it has served its purpose.

If we step back and view the broad canvas of events over the past decade, it is obvious that 11 September 2001 was the tipping point for all matters of a surveillance nature. There had, of course, been surveillance before this date: CCTV had been in operation for some 25 years, and wire-tapping and mail intercepts were not unknown. But post-9/11 it is obvious that an absolute deluge of legislation and surveillance has been unleashed on the nations of Western Europe and the United States. An editorial in Surveillance & Society succinctly describes events:

Suddenly, during 2001, the steady increase in surveillance received a boost from a world event. September 11 prompted widespread international concern for security in the face of global terrorism ... Already existing surveillance was reinforced at crucial points, with the promise of more to come. Many countries rapidly passed laws permitting unprecedented levels of policing and intelligence surveillance, which in turn draws upon other sources such as consumer records.

The attack on the Twin Towers of the World Trade Centre is the causa causans, the fount and origin of the term ‘war on terror,’ and the fundamental justification for those who claim we face so grave a situation that we must be prepared to give up many of our basic freedoms in order to live in reasonable security. It behoves us, therefore, to look very closely at the events of 9/11 and to decide if we really are in such great danger as some would have us believe, or if the threat has been exaggerated in order to serve another agenda.

In chapter 5 we looked at the idea of defining the ‘topography of the argument’ so as to steal a march on rival arguments: progressive teaching, wind farms and the like. Now we have the ‘war on terror.’ It is instructive to ask whether the draconian measures implemented since 9/11 would have received such an easy passage had the president announced a ‘campaign against terror,’ or an ‘anti-terror initiative.’ The word ‘war’ successfully defines the topography of the argument in favour of the hawks and those advocating extreme measures, because a war demands extreme measures.

The immediate parallels with the threat of Islamic extremism, at least for the United Kingdom, must lie with the IRA action of the last half of the 20th century. Note that this conflict was never graced with the title ‘war’; on the contrary, because successive UK governments did not wish to emphasise the level and consequences of sectarian dissension in the province, the conflict was ‘the Troubles’ - a phrase that, even now, serves to defuse the impact of the murders, bombings and religious violence that Northern Ireland suffered for more than 25 years.

IRA activity led to innumerable deaths and mutilations. According to the book Lost Lives, up to 2004 the IRA were responsible for 1,781 deaths, while around 20,000 were injured (6,000 of them British Army, UDR or RUC personnel and up to 14,000 civilians). The paramilitaries killed Lord Mountbatten, a cousin of the Queen, the Conservative MP Airey Neave, and they attempted to kill the then prime minister Margaret Thatcher and most of her Cabinet in the Brighton bombing of 12 October 1984. Against this, in the UK the jihadists have managed the 7/7 tube and bus bombing with a death toll of 52, and a failed bombing fourteen days later. And yet the IRA attacks were ‘Troubles’ which did not even lead to the introduction of additional passport restrictions on citizens of the Irish Republic, and whose impact on the freedoms of the British people (internment in Northern Ireland excepted) was minimal. In contrast, a single successful bombing has led to Britain acting as a willing ally to the ‘war on terror’s’ main protagonist, the USA. What lies behind this perceptual dichotomy that we are invited - or rather, instructed - to accept?

It is not that the threat of Islamic extremism is non-existent; it is the disproportionate response, the asymmetrical manner in which we are asked to perceive the threat, and the blatant overreaction in terms of legislation and deployment of surveillance technology, that gives cause for concern. In terms of actual damage and deaths, the jihadists have not demonstrated one hundredth of the destructive potential of the IRA. Why, then, should a terrorist threat of low intensity result in an exponential rise in draconian legislation and intrusive surveillance powers? Is this merely a political panic attack, or are we looking at an orchestrated dismantling of our freedoms?

The politicians, of course, insist it is neither of these alternatives. The justification lies not in terrorist activity seen to date in the UK, but in the catastrophic fact of the attack on the World Trade Centre. If the jihadists are able and willing to mount attacks on this scale, resulting in the collapse of enormous structures with huge loss of life, then - so the argument goes - we are dealing with a threat level well outside of that posed by the IRA, UDA, ETA, or any of the many extremist groups that currently populate our planet. And in the face of such a challenge, all the many recent restrictions and intrusions on our freedom are, they argue, necessary for our own good.

Time and again, then, we come back to 9/11 as the pivotal moment, the raison d’être, for the exponential growth in the most repressive aspects of the surveillance society. ID cards, centralised data bases, RFID tagging, electronic surveillance and the rest, all are presently necessary to protect us against the jihadists, and the reason the jihadists are to be feared is 9/11. If this is so, we should certainly look very closely at the circumstances of this iconic attack on Western civilisation.

World Trade Centre 7 and the ‘prophetic’ BBC

There are already a huge number of books, articles and TV programmes concerning the attack on the Twin Towers, and it is not the purpose of this work to enumerate a minute-by-minute account of the disaster. Nor to apportion blame. Indeed, looking too closely at the minutiae of such events is sometimes counter-productive; we have had, for example, numerous ‘human interest’ TV programmes on 9/11, the plight of individuals, the dangers facing fire crews etc, but too few on the accusations and counter-accusations that have made the attack so problematical. There is, however, one part of 9/11 that must give any thinking person pause: not the destruction of the twin towers (World Trade Centre 1 and 2), but the little-reported collapse of World Trade Centre 7, more than seven hours after the first of the Twin Towers came down. And the BBC’s ability to cover its destruction 26 minutes before it actually occurred.

A new Pearl Harbor?

For more than 50 years controversy has raged around the Japanese attack on the US naval base of Pearl Harbor in 1941 - was it, as Franklin D. Roosevelt said, a ‘day of infamy’ when Japanese planes appeared out of a clear blue sky and brought death and destruction to an unsuspecting American Pacific Fleet? Or did the American government have advance warning of the planned attack, and choose to allow an outrage to occur in order to awaken an isolationist American public to the dangers of fascist Germany and a Japan with grandiose imperial pretensions?

In Infamy: Pearl Harbor and its Aftermath, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist John Toland revealed compelling evidence that President Roosevelt had foreknowledge of the event, yet chose to do nothing. Robert Stinnett, in his book Day Of Deceit, presents massive evidence that Roosevelt intended to goad the Japanese into an overt attack. Indeed, in the Vacant Seas order, Roosevelt had cleared both civilian and naval shipping away from the Japanese fleet’s attack route, in order to aid the enemy’s undetected approach to within striking distance of Pearl Harbor. The release of former secret files from the US Navy has shown that the US had broken the Japanese Navy’s codes and knew exactly where and when the attack would take place. The more valuable US ships such as aircraft carriers were ordered out of Pearl to other locations. Tellingly, 69 of the 74 Navy intelligence summaries delivered to President Roosevelt in the two weeks prior to the attack have been ‘lost.’

In sum, the Pearl Harbor ‘let it happen’ scenario is at least plausible, and given the undoubted isolationist feeling among the US public, a good argument can be made that it was, despite the underhand way in which it was carried out, absolutely essential to the final victory over fascism.

The parallels between the situation facing President Roosevelt in 1940 and that confronting the Bush administration at the beginning of the 21st century are compelling. The Taliban and their terrorist training camps had been identified as a clear threat to United States interests, just as Nazi Germany and an imperially-minded Japan had been over 50 years earlier. And despite what was seen, by the respective US administrations at least, as a pressing need to destroy their enemy before they gained in strength, in both cases the American public were steadfastly against foreign military adventures. Roosevelt’s answer, as we know from recently declassified correspondence, was to provoke Japan into making the first overt act of aggression, so justifying a military response and letting the president off the hook of his electoral promise not to send American boys to fight abroad unless the US were attacked. The breaking of the Japanese codes, the failure to warn Pearl Harbor, the movement of strategically important vessels, the Vacant Seas policy, all make it highly likely that the president of the United States took the decision to sacrifice the men and women at Pearl Harbor in order to prevent an even greater catastrophic loss of life and geopolitical influence in the future. Captain Joseph J. Rochefort was head of the Navy’s Mid-Pacific Radio Intelligence Network before and during the Pearl Harbor attack. In his oral history for the US Naval Institute, he put the case for allowing the attack to go ahead with characteristic succinctness: ‘It was’ he said, ‘a pretty cheap price to pay for unifying the country.’

And by a strange coincidence, exactly twelve months before the 9/11 attacks a major American ‘neo-con’ think tank cited ‘another Pearl Harbor’ as the quickest means of bringing about the transformation of American military and geopolitical strength. The Project for a New American Century (PNAC) was founded in 1996 to promote an agenda for strengthening America’s position and influence in the world. In September 2000 it published Rebuilding America’s Defenses: Strategy, Forces and Resources for a New Century, in which it claimed that ‘ ... the process of transformation [in American strategy and forces], even if it brings revolutionary change, is likely to be a long one, absent some catastrophic and catalyzing event - like a new Pearl Harbor.’

This comment does not, as some have insisted, reveal a plot to launch 9/11. But it does show that the value of a ‘new Pearl Harbor’ in bringing about transformational change was acknowledged by PNAC. Of interest, too, is the fact that a significant number of PNAC’s founders and signers are working for, or have worked for, the Bush administration, including Dick Cheney, Richard Armitage, Paul Wolfowitz and Donald Rumsfeld.

This is far from proving that the Bush administration instigated a ‘new Pearl Harbor’ in order to allow major changes in US foreign and domestic policy. And yet the idea is not perhaps as incredible as it might at first appear - the US government has certainly considered similar ideas at least once before. A fifteen-page US government Top Secret document dated 13 March 1962 and entitled Chairman, Joint Chiefs of Staff, Justification for US Military Intervention in Cuba detailed, among other deceptions, a number of ways that attacks on American soil by US operatives could be used to stir up national indignation and act as a pretext for the invasion of communist Cuba. Among the suggestions in what has become known as Operation Northwoods was using drone planes to simulate an attack on an American passenger aeroplane. Below are two extracts from this document:

It is possible to create an incident which will demonstrate convincingly that a Cuban aircraft has attacked and shot down a chartered civil airliner en route from the United States ...

We could develop a Communist Cuba terror campaign in the Miami area, in other Florida cities and even in Washington ... We could sink a boatload of Cubans en route to Florida (real or simulated). We could foster attempts on lives of Cuban refugees in the United States even to the extent of wounding in instances to be widely publicized. Exploding a few plastic bombs in carefully chosen spots, the arrest of Cuban agents and the release of prepared documents substantiating Cuban involvement also would be helpful in projecting the idea of an irresponsible [Cuban] government.

To sum up, it seems likely that:

1) Pearl Harbor was a ‘managed event’ used as a means of uniting the nation in an acceptance that American foreign policy should change.
2) Not only had similar plans been considered in 1962 (despite the risk of loss of life to American citizens in ‘Homeland America’), but that
3) the value of such a ‘new Pearl Harbor’ to rapidly ‘transforming’ American geopolitical perceptions had been explicitly acknowledged as late as September 2000 by a group (PNAC) which would contribute major players to the Bush administration.

This is emphatically NOT a smoking gun. But it does bring a note of caution to the proceedings; we should take nothing for granted, and should look at the events surrounding the attack on the World Trade Centre with unbiased eyes, refusing to pass over or omit awkward facts.

A possible scenario would see the US intelligence services aware of the impending jihadist attack, allowing it to go ahead and, knowing the targets involved well ahead of the event, using this lead time to enhance the destructiveness of the attack, making it a visual spectacle that would burn itself into the nation’s psyche and conjure up an unstoppable demand for retribution. And indeed, there are many anomalies in the World Trade Centre/Pentagon attacks, deeply unsettling questions that remain unanswered while the mass media continue to uncritically regurgitate the official version.

Of all the many anomalies, none is so strange and compelling as the collapse of 7 World Trade Centre. Rather than get bogged down in a detailed overview of the attacks on the Twin Towers and the Pentagon, this discussion will concentrate solely on 7 WTC. There are many advantages to this, not least of which is the bewildering complexity of the full story. By focussing on 7 WTC, we can look at a manageable event and come to some valid conclusions that should be applicable to the attack as a whole. 7 WTC is interesting for two main facts which no one disputes:

1) 7 WTC collapsed without any active terrorist involvement, six hours after the main attack on 1 and 2 WTC (the Twin Towers).
2) The BBC announced the collapse of this building 26 minutes before it fell.

The official version of 7 WTC’s destruction is that debris from the fall of 1 and 2 WTC weakened the building, and ignited fires which led to its eventual collapse. The map [below] shows the relative positions of the seven separate World Trade Centre buildings that were dispersed across World Trade Centre Plaza. As is obvious, of all the buildings, 7 WTC lies furthest from the Twin Towers (1 and 2 WTC) whose eventual downfall generated so much controversy. It might therefore reasonably be expected to receive far less damage than those buildings closer to the collapse. And while this protection-by-distance might well be mitigated by the fact that 7 WTC is the tallest of the remaining buildings, and therefore perhaps more vulnerable in its higher storeys to damage from the destruction of 1 and 2 WTC, the nature of the collapse (for all practical purposes, the Twin Towers fell within their own footprint) would mean that the majority of any debris ejected would originate from the base of the collapsed buildings. If this is so, then, looking at the map below, it is obvious that 6 and 5 WTC would act as shields for 7 WTC. And in fact 5 and 6 WTC did suffer extensive damage, but did not collapse. By contrast, 7 WTC sustained far less damage, implying that the ‘shield effect’ hypothesis is substantially correct. And yet it, alone of all the other WTC buildings, did collapse.

It is valid to ask why this particular building went down, and there are no easy answers. This conflicts with an eyewitness interview conducted by Jason Bermas with Barry Jennings, the deputy director of the Emergency Services Department of the New York City Housing Authority. According to Jennings, not long after 1 WTC had been hit by an aircraft, but before the attack on 2 WTC, he escorted Mr Hess, one of Mayor Rudy Giuliani’s highest-ranking appointed officials, to the Office of Emergency Management (OEM) on 7 WTC’s 23rd floor. This office was the command bunker where any emergency in the WTC area was to be handled, and was staffed by US security personnel. What he found astounded him: the entire emergency headquarters had been abandoned. This is his story:

Upon arriving into the OEM EOC we noticed that everybody had gone. I saw coffee that was on the desk, still - smoke was still coming off the coffee, I saw - I saw uh, half eaten sandwiches. And I called several individuals, one individual told me that, that um, ‘to leave, and leave right away’ ... We subsequently went to the stairwell and we were going down the stairs. When we reached the 8th uh, the 6th floor, the landing that we were standing on gave way. There was an explosion and the landing gave way. And I was left there hanging. I had to walk back up to the 8th floor. After getting to the 8th floor everything was dark.

I’m just confused about one thing, and one thing only. Why WTC 7 went down in the first place? I’m very confused about that. I know what I heard. I heard explosions. The explanation I got was that it was the fuel oil tank. I’m an old boiler guy. If it was a fuel oil tank it would have been one side of the building. When I got to that lobby, the lobby was totally destroyed. It looked like King Kong had came through it and stepped on it. And I - it was so destroyed I didn’t know where I was. It was so destroyed they had to take me out through a hole in the wall, a makeshift hole that I believe the fire depot made to get me out.

Let us be clear about this. A well-respected, credible witness is stating that he was in the 7 WTC building and that there was a devastating explosion before the second of the Twin Towers was even hit by an aircraft, and long before either 1 or 2 WTC came down (this latter event being the supposed cause of the fires and damage that made 7 WTC fall). Just as worryingly, the explosion seems to have been planned, as all the OEM staff had vacated the building and Mr Jennings was told by an unnamed source to flee WTC, ‘to leave, and leave right away.’ And this was no small explosion: it wiped out the entire lobby and (contrary to official claims) caused many deaths too. Equally concerning, if this event was planned - and taking Barry Jennings’ testimony at face value it is very difficult to see how it was not - it could not have been put into effect in the few minutes that had elapsed since the first aeroplane struck the first tower. Such a plan called for prior knowledge of the attack hours, even days, before the event.

The BBC announcement - clairvoyance, chance or something else?

From the time of the first attack on 11 September, the BBC newsreaders, like most of the world’s media, had been providing a constant stream of updates on the unprecedented situation in New York.

At 21.54 London time on 11 September 2001, a BBC newsreader made the sombre announcement that the Salomon Brothers building (another name for 7 WTC) had collapsed:

Now more on the latest building collapse in New York. You might have heard a few moments ago we were talking about the Salomon Brothers building collapsing, and indeed it has. Apparently that was only a few hundred yards away from where the World Trade Centre towers were. And it seems this was not the result of a new attack, it was because the building has been weakened during this morning’s attack.

There was just one problem with this news: it was wrong. Or rather, it was a little ahead of time. 7 WTC was still standing when the broadcast was made - it did not collapse until 26 minutes later, at 22.20 London time.

As if to compound the error, the London anchorman then handed over to his New York colleague Jane Standley, who carried on the report of the collapse apparently unaware that the 7 WTC building could still be seen on the right of the screen, behind her left shoulder. This point needs to be emphasised: the visual evidence here is absolutely irrefutable. As the BBC reporter confirms the destruction of 7 WTC it stands as large as life on the screen behind her. And, enhancing the Alice in Wonderland nature of the report, as Ms Standley continues to comment on this new ‘collapse.’ a strap line appears across the lower half of the screen confirming the news: ‘The 47-storey Salomon Brothers building close to the World Trade Centre has also collapsed.’

But there is more. At around 22.15, as Jane Standley continues to hold forth on the non-existent collapse (with 7 WTC still standing proudly behind her), a very strange thing happens. Had this broadcast conversation continued for a further five minutes (and there was no sign of it winding down), we would have been treated to the spectacle of 7 WTC collapsing for real, on air, behind Ms Standley. But, mirabile dictu, at this crucial moment, just five minutes before the actual collapse, the image of Jane Standley begins to break up and the BBC loses the feed and the picture from New York.

BBC News 24 also broadcast the news that 7 WTC had collapsed, with a corroborative time stamp on their broadcast to confirm, without fear of contradiction, that the BBC was somehow aware of the destruction of 7 WTC around half an hour before it went down.

Richard Porter, the head of news at BBC World, offered this explanation for these astonishing events:

1) We’re not part of a conspiracy. Nobody told us what to say or do on September 11th. We didn’t get told in advance that buildings were going to fall down. We didn’t receive press releases or scripts in advance of events happening.

2) In the chaos and confusion of the day, I’m quite sure we said things which turned out to be untrue or inaccurate - but at the time were based on the best information we had. We did what we always did - sourced our reports, used qualifying words like ‘apparently’ or ‘it’s reported’ or ‘we’re hearing’ and constantly tried to check and double check the information we were receiving.

3) Our reporter Jane Standley was in New York on the day of the attacks, and like everyone who was there, has the events seared on her mind. I’ve spoken to her today and unsurprisingly, she doesn’t remember minute-by-minute what she said or did - like everybody else that day she was trying to make sense of what she was seeing; what she was being told; and what was being told to her by colleagues in London who were monitoring feeds and wire services.

4) We no longer have the original tapes of our 9/11 coverage (for reasons of cock-up, not conspiracy). So if someone has got a recording of our output, I’d love to get hold of it. We do have the tapes for our sister channel News 24, but they don’t help clear up the issue one way or another.

5) If we reported the building had collapsed before it had done so, it would have been an error - no more than that.

This is, with the greatest respect, simply not good enough. Much of Mr Porter’s carefully worded comments contradict one another; others are plainly untrue:

1) We didn't get told in advance that buildings were going to fall down. No one is accusing the BBC of this. But it is obvious that the BBC was told in advance that a building had fallen down. This is a crucial point. Someone told the BBC that 7 WTC had collapsed. Who had foreknowledge of this event? The BBC doesn’t say.

2) Elsewhere in the statement Mr Porter admits that their news output (in line with other news services) was based on incoming information from a variety of sources. He states that BBC colleagues in London were monitoring feeds and wires services and that we did what we always did - sourced our reports and constantly tried to check and double check the information we were receiving. If that is the case, then why did they not pick up on the fact that the story was blatantly untrue? More importantly, there should be a record at the BBC of the source of the ‘7 WTC collapse’ story. Who made this claim? Which agency fed this information through to BBC News - was it Reuters? Voice of America? Associated Press? Knowing the source of the information would allow us to move one step back along the chain of responsibility, and perhaps come to a clearer judgement on the motivation behind the story.

3) [We] used qualifying words like ‘apparently’ or ‘it’s reported’ or ‘we’re hearing.’ This is simply not true. As one commentator noted:

In the most important final 7 minutes and 15 seconds of the said segment the words ‘apparently,’ ‘it’s reported’ or ‘we’re hearing’ are not used in the context of building 7, viz.: ‘Now more on the latest building collapse in New York ... the Salomon Brothers Building collapse ... and indeed it has.’ ‘What can you tell us about the Salomon Building and its collapse?’ ‘When it collapsed.’ [Ticker] - ‘The 47-storey Salomon Brothers building close to the World Trade Centre has also collapsed.’

This same commentator also asks: ‘Who is responsible for the newsroom in-desk and floor prompters being used by the news presenter? Who is responsible for the news report on the bottom screen news ticker? Who is responsible as the newsroom floor source for giving these people information? What is the complete list of editors and journalists responsible for this program on said day?’ None of this information has been vouchsafed by the BBC.

4) We no longer have the original tapes of our 9/11 coverage. This statement beggars belief, and brings to mind other convenient document misplacements, like the Belgrano incident’s missing submarine logs. Such a loss appears even less likely in the face of BBC policy which states:

[Ref No. Policy Area/Policy Statement 01 Components to be Retained 01-01] : The following components to be retained: Two broadcast standard copies of all transmitted/ published TV, radio and BBCi output - one to be stored on a separate site as a master; One browse-quality version for research purposes, to protect the broadcast material.

5) In the chaos and confusion of the day, I’m quite sure we said things which turned out to be untrue or inaccurate - but at the time were based on the best information we had. This is exactly the point: in the chaos and confusion the BBC omits all qualifiers such as ‘apparently’ or ‘we’ve unconfirmed reports that ...’ and gives the correct name of the building, the precise number of floors in that building (47), the explanation of the collapse (that 7 WTC was weakened by damage from the collapse of 1 and 2 WTC), and the Corporation even knows that the building was apparently empty. This is no throwaway remark or rumour that somehow took on the robe of truth; this is detailed, accurate data. Where did this information originate? It is all very unsettling. As one commentator notes, this is ‘some pretty precise reporting for a day of chaos when everyone was “trying to make sense of what they were seeing ...” ’

6) If we reported the building had collapsed before it had done so, it would have been an error - no more than that. But it is much more than that - it was an error that turned out to be true. It was prescient. The likelihood that the BBC, or anyone else, would suddenly decide, de novo, that another building would collapse - no, more, that it had collapsed - when the only buildings that had fallen so far were those struck by large passenger jets, has to be vanishingly small. And yet someone does make up this incredible tale, the BBC reports it as fact, and 26 minutes later, the incredible occurs. To call it an ‘error’ does not even come close. We need to know the originator of this story, the man or woman who can foretell the future with such impressive accuracy. The BBC must have the name of this person or organisation - the Corporation has a moral obligation to bring this information into the public domain.

The BBC’s disingenuous approach to what must be regarded as a highly suspicious series of events has satisfied no one. A posting on the net encapsulates the feelings of anger and frustration felt by many:

You lose footage of one of the most important days in modern history … (Good job! That way no one can ‘prove’ anything that day …) Out of all the surrounding buildings that suffered massive damage - WTC 3, 4, 5, 6 - and assorted others that suffered minor damage (among them, WTC 7 - Salomon Brothers Building), the BBC - by merely a mistake and in confusion - picked exactly the right one that was going to fall - (Good job!) Hey, the BBC is incompetent - they lose tapes AND they claim buildings fall that haven’t - but what LUCK! They hit the lottery! What a ‘lucky guess,’ huh? BBC should go to Vegas, with those odds - you’d be rich. BBC is not part of the conspiracy - but you are just a bunch of pathetic dupes. You capture the biggest smoking gun in history ... and your response is ... to call yourselves incompetent and go play ‘blind/deaf/dumb monkey’ on your public. Good job, Guys!!

Despite the obvious parallels between Pearl Harbor and 9/11, one huge disparity remains. While Pearl Harbor resulted in military action abroad, very little change occurred within mainland America itself. With the exception of the arguably unconstitutional internment of US citizens of Japanese origin, the freedoms and rights of the American people were left largely unscathed by World War II. Nor were the rights of other nations materially affected by the Japanese aggression against the United States. Not so with the ‘war on terror’ which, we have been told with breathtaking arrogance, ‘is different from any other war in history.’ The attack on the World Trade Centre which precipitated the ‘war on terror’ has led not only to the invasion of two sovereign states, Afghanistan and Iraq, but to a raft of controlling and repressive legislation (most of it issued in the form of secondary legislation) in both the USA and the United Kingdom, and latterly in many of the EU nations as well, and to intrusive and unnecessary surveillance on an unprecedented scale.

Inevitable war

There is an added danger. While the idea of ‘pre-emptive strike’ is derided as cowardly and base when it is delivered by the Japanese on America, the Bush administration (and its UK ally New Labour) appear to have embraced the concept with both hands - if America and friends are doing the striking. Iraq is the example par excellence of this, with ‘coalition troops’ deployed pre-emptively to prevent the development or use of ‘weapons of mass destruction’ and to sever links between Al Qaeda and Iraq - both of which motives turned out to be illusory.

But this disastrous symbol of American neo-con philosophy has done nothing to dampen that country’s enthusiasm for firststrike action. Iraq is simply the most prominent example of a worrying malaise that is creeping by stealth into the Western democracies - pre-emptive politics and theories of inevitability. Several academics have pointed out that recent statements by politicians have continually stressed the inevitability of disaster; we are told on a regular basis that terrorist attacks are not merely possible, but unstoppable. In May 2002, FBI Director Robert Mueller announced that more suicide bombings in the USA were ‘inevitable ... We will not be able to stop it. It’s something we all live with.’ Vice President Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld both repeatedly used the phrase ‘Not a question of if, but when’ during several television interviews, as did Tom Ridge, the first Homeland Security Director. Note that very little detail is given, even such obvious parameters as the timescale of these inevitable happenings. Few would argue that a terrorist attack will probably occur sometime in the next ten years, but the rhetorical nature of the repeated emphasis on ‘inevitable attack,’ especially when screened repeatedly via non-critical media, gives the population an impression of predetermined, imminent, repeated attacks about which ‘something must be done.’ Moreover, much of the evidence upon which these sloganeering statements are made is veiled beneath classified documents that are, by definition, completely unavailable to public scrutiny.
What remains is a faith-based form of politics in which a political elite claims to be in possession of facts denied the ordinary citizen, who must accept whatever pre-emptive action that elite deems necessary, purely on the basis of trust. What is worrying, as academics Greg Elmer and Andy Opel have pointed out, is that although rarely-read government policy documents offer less strident analyses of these events, ‘public statements by a host of public officials, broadcast repeatedly as sound bites, describe a stark, inevitable future of unending terror threats. The contradictions between the written documents and the public statements suggest a wilful attempt to harness the immediacy (and uniformity) of ... news outlets to distribute and maintain an atmosphere of fear and emotion.’ And, it might be added, to encourage acquiescence to both foreign pre-emptive strikes and national legislation further restricting personal freedoms.

Given these developments, historical precedent, and the unanswered questions surrounding the World Trade Centre attack the event which introduced and ostensibly legitimised these unwelcome extensions of state power - we have excellent grounds for suspecting that events may well be being manipulated by groups intent on securing an even firmer grip on power and influence. What laws remain to protect our freedoms, and what can we do to resist further encroachment?

Plato on Democracy’s Transition to Tyranny

Perfectly describing our age?:

Come then, tell me, dear friend, how tyranny arises. That it is an outgrowth of
democracy is fairly plain.

Yes, plain.

Is it, then, in a sense, in the same way in which democracy arises out of oligarchy that tyranny arises from democracy?

How is that?

The good that they proposed to themselves and that was the cause of the establishment of oligarchy--it was wealth, was it not?

Yes.

Well, then, the insatiate lust for wealth and the neglect of everything else for the sake of money-making were the cause of its undoing.

True, he said.

And is not the avidity of democracy for that which is its definition and criterion of good the thing which dissolves it too?

What do you say its criterion to be?

Liberty, I replied, for you may hear it said that this is best managed in a democratic city, and for this reason that is the only city in which a man of free spirit will care to live.

Why, yes, he replied, you hear that saying everywhere.

Then, as I was about to observe, is it not the excess and greed of this and the neglect of all other things that revolutionizes this constitution too and prepares the way for the necessity of a dictatorship?

How? he said.

Why, when a democratic city athirst for liberty gets bad cupbearers for its leaders and is intoxicated by drinking too deep of that unmixed wine, and then, if its so-called governors are not extremely mild and gentle with it and do not dispense the liberty unstintedly, it chastises them and accuses them of being accursed oligarchs.

Yes, that is what they do, he replied.

But those who obey the rulers, I said, it reviles as willing slaves and men of nought, but it commends and honors in public and private rulers who resemble subjects and subjects who are like rulers. Is it not inevitable that in such a state the spirit of liberty should go to all lengths?

Of course.

And this anarchic temper, said I, my friend, must penetrate into private homes and finally enter into the very animals.

Just what do we mean by that? he said.

Why, I said, the father habitually tries to resemble the child and is afraid of his sons, and the son likens himself to the father and feels no awe or fear of his parents, so that he may be forsooth a free man. And the resident alien feels himself equal to the citizen and the citizen to him, and the foreigner likewise.

Yes, these things do happen, he said.

They do, said I, and such other trifles as these. The teacher in such case fears and fawns upon the pupils, and the pupils pay no heed to the teacher or to their overseers either. And in general the young ape their elders and vie with them in speech and action, while the old, accommodating themselves to the young, are full of pleasantry and graciousness, imitating the young for fear they may be thought disagreeable and authoritative.

By all means, he said.

And the climax of popular liberty, my friend, I said, is attained in such a city when the purchased slaves, male and female, are no less free than the owners who paid for them. And I almost forgot to mention the spirit of freedom and equal rights in the relation of men to women and women to men.

Shall we not, then, said he, in Aeschylean phrase, say 'whatever rises to our lips'?

[...]

And do you note that the sum total of all these items when footed up is that they render the souls of the citizens so sensitive that they chafe at the slightest suggestion of servitude and will not endure it? For you are aware that they finally pay no heed even to the laws written or unwritten, so that forsooth they may have no master anywhere over them.

I know it very well, said he.

This, then, my friend, said I, is the fine and vigorous root from which tyranny grows, in my opinion.

Vigorous indeed, he said, but what next?

The same malady, I said, that, arising in oligarchy, destroyed it, this more widely diffused and more violent as a result of this license, enslaves democracy. And in truth, any excess is wont to bring about a corresponding reaction to the opposite in the seasons, in plants, in animal bodies, and most especially in political societies.

Probably, he said.

And so the probable outcome of too much freedom is only too much slavery in the individual and the state.

Yes, that is probable.

Probably, then, tyranny develops out of no other constitution than democracy--from the height of liberty, I take it, the fiercest extreme of servitude.

That is reasonable, he said.

Keith Laidler: ‘A Day in the Life of a Database Citizen’

From Laidler, Surveillance Unlimited:

Thursday

10.40 AM:
John Brown is returning by plane from a business trip to Germany. He booked at the last minute with a colleague, but the pair asked not to sit together, as they both prefer window seats.

This seemingly innocent request flags them up on Project Semaphore, part of the UK government's e-borders programme which screens and records everyone entering and leaving the United Kingdom. It will soon include all 40,000,000 domestic plane and ferry journeys, providing a comprehensive passenger movement audit trail that can be checked against other databases.

11.10 AM:
On landing, John heads for passport control, passing Mobile Forward Looking Infra Red (FLIR) cameras whose job is to remotely search beneath passenger clothing for hidden weapons or drugs.

The queues remind him of the doubts he's been entertaining about a planned family holiday to Florida's Disneyland. Since 9/11 and the 'war on terror', visiting the States requires a lot more than a simple passport. Under the US-VISIT programme, launched in 2004, every visitor must be fingerprinted by a US Customs and Border protection officer, who also takes a digital photograph of the traveller's face. John doesn't like the idea of a foreign country in possession of his family's biometric data, and wonders if they wouldn't have just as much fun at Disneyland Paris. Unfortunately, EU regulations will soon demand identical biometrics on passports and ID cards.

John is right to be concerned. According to a recent compre­hensive report, US authorities use biometric identifiers to confirm the identity of passengers so that their details can be checked against over a dozen mega-databases including those of the FBI and Interpol. What he does not realise is that his own trip to Germany has already been logged in various European data bases, including the giant Schengen Information System (SIS).

12.00 NOON:
As he leaves the airport, John hardly notices the numerous CCTV cameras that record every aspect of his passage through the building; indeed, some cameras are so carefully blended with the airport decor that they are impossible to make out. A number of these machines use automatic face recognition to check for identity on passport and driving licence photo data­bases. Once the Identity Card scheme goes 'live', such intrusive surveillance will be rolled out countrywide, and all public anonymity will vanish. Even citizens who eschew all domestic and international travel will be instantly identifiable to the gaze of the CCTV operator.

12.11 PM:
On the way to his car, John phones his wife Irene to say he arrived OK, and mentions jokingly that 'there was no Al Qaeda attack on our plane'. This conversation is immediately picked up by an Echelon satellite through the keywords 'AI Qaeda' and 'attack'. All telecommunications traffic in Europe and the rest of the world - phone, mobile, fax and email - is listened in to by the Echelon system, which is run by the US National Security Agency. Three major optical networks, each carrying 100,000 calls, have been routed by BT into the US base at Menwith Hill near Harrogate. John's conversation is recorded and transcribed for analysis by human operatives. As a pre­caution, a trace is put on his mobile.

12.21 PM:
After speaking with his wife, John leaves his phone switched on, which enables the watchers to triangulate his position from nearby mobile phone masts as he drives into his central London office. But even with the phone off, the mobile can be remotely activated to send in its position-data every five minutes or so. Every mobile, on or off, can be made to function as a tracking device.

12.45 PM:
London confuses John and he resorts to satellite navigation, or 'sat nav', to find the best route to the office, not knowing that the GPS system, which is run and owned by the American mili­tary, can use the equipment to track his movements. Sometimes John parks his car outside central London and uses his Oyster card to travel in on the tube. Each time he does this, his every move is watched by Transport for London's extensive CCTV system, and his Oyster card automatically logs his identity and movements, giving the authorities a detailed travel trail over several weeks, should this prove necessary.

2.15 PM:
John was needed at the office only for an hour or so, and is soon back in the car heading for home. The petrol gauge is showing empty, so he pulls into a service station where a fore­court camera, linked to the police-operated ANPR (Automatic Number Plate Recognition) system, reads his number plate and compares it to a database of 'targeted' number plates of vehi­cles wanted in connection with criminal or terrorist activity. John's office also lies within the Congestion Charging Zone and, despite the charge being levied only between 7.00 am and 6.00 pm, his car registration plate, like that of every other car entering the zone, is logged day and night by another ANPR camera. The cameras used are similar to those that are sited every 400 yards on all major motorways in the UK, all reporting directly to a police command centre.

3.15 PM:
During their earlier phone conversation, John's wife had asked if he would pick up their sixteen-year-old son Mark from school. As he gets into the car, Mark tells his father he's just been finger­printed 'to speed up the lunch queue', so joining at least 1 million children in the UK who have now had this biometric taken, often without parental consent.

John is annoyed that no opportunity was given to opt out of the scheme; a biometric cannot be changed, and if a hacker breaks the school computer Mark's ability to obtain a driving licence, credit facilities or a passport will be compromised for life. He's also worried about the possibility of 'planted' finger­prints leading to wrongful arrest. Just six months earlier, John himself had come face to face with the injustice of the UK's new biometric regulations - he was wrongly identified by CCTV footage as a shoplifter and had both his fingerprints and DNA sampled. Despite proving his innocence, neither biometric has been removed from the police database, and both will remain there even after he is dead.

4.00 PM:
On the way home John and Mark decide to stop off at a shop­ping mall to buy some wine and soft drinks to celebrate John's return. The car is tagged by CCTV as it enters the car park, and the registration number read and logged. Other cameras watch his movements throughout the city centre; citizens in London can have their image captured 300 times in a single day. John's gait and movements around the city centre are auto­matically analysed for 'suspicious behaviour' by algorithms in the CCTV software.

4.15 PM:
John uses a credit card, automatically establishing a further link in the transaction trail that records his every purchase, date and location in real time throughout the year. And he also uses a reward card, whose purchasing details are sold to marketing companies. John has been buying Anusol for haemorrhoids, and the reward card information is used to put him on a haemorrhoids database (they do exist, along with others for equally embarrassing ailments such as incontinence and erectile dysfunction!). Very soon now, John will be receiving unsolicited promotional brochures through the post detailing a revolutionary new piles treatment he might wish to buy. Every economically active individual in the UK appears on around 700 databases.

5.00 PM:
Back in the car, and Mark is already texting friends on his new mobile phone. John bought the device on the understanding that they would also use it to employ a company specialising in tracking mobile phones. With this service, he'll always know where Mark is. Thanks to the alert that his 'AI Qaeda' message initiated, all phones linked with John have been included in the watch on him, so Mark's texts are also being subjected to detailed scrutiny.

7.15 PM:
After dinner, safe in the comfort of his own home, John spends the evening surfing the internet, where numerous 'cookies' inform the search engine of every website he has visited, how many pages were read and for how long. The information generated will be sold to marketing companies and, combined with his store and credit card purchase details, means that John's doormat will soon be covered with an even bigger pile of unwanted junk mail. Outside the house, drone mini-helicopters with CCTV watch from above, while infra-red enabled cameras turn the dark night into day. As John and his family sleeps, newly deployed Visibuilding technology will soon allow police to scan through the walls of his home, and those of all his neighbours, to locate each person in any room of the house, and observe their most intimate behaviour.

Review: Keith Laidler, ‘Surveillance State’

A person cognisant of the problem of the emerging British surveillance state and looking for a decent overview of the issue in book form could not do much better than pick up a copy of Keith Laidler’s Surveillance Unlimited (Icon Books: 2008). Dr. Laidler is an anthropologist by training and also an acclaimed wildlife filmmaker, he has written articles for the Guardian and Independent newspapers and New Scientist magazine.

Surveillance Unlimited is a big-picture analysis of the situation in Britain including comparisons with the totalitarian states of the last century; Bentham’s Panopticon, Huxley’s Brave New World, and Orwell’s 1984; ID cards; RFID; CCTV; the phasing out of the cash economy; email, phone, PC and banking security; the Echelon system; the trend toward supra-national and private control of these systems; 911, the ‘War on Terror’ and psychological warfare; the inadequacy of human rights and other legal protections; and options and opportunities for resistance. It is written in accessible and smooth prose and at 264 pages is a fairly quick read, taking me about three hours.

In the chapter on 911 the focus is on the BBC’s remarkable foreknowledge of the collapse of World Trade Center 7. I think it’s quite brave of Dr Laidler to write so extensively on this issue as so many people (have been trained to) automatically write off critics of the official story of 911 as kooks. My view is that to be aware of such glaring problems with the orthodox version and yet remain silent and uninterested is the true kookery. The final chapter, ‘What we can do to resist,’ is also brave, endorsing direct action and sabotage should democratic action fail to reverse course. He is surely right to say, though, that despite the fact that

[i]ndividuals and pressure groups can help cut holes in the surveillance web, [...] until public opinion sets its weight behind such lone voices, it will be difficult indeed to stem the tide.

The key problem - the deliberately incrementalist advance of the police-state - is described in an introductory chapter:

Place a frog in a saucepan of very hot water and its survival instincts are activated immediately: the back legs unflex explosively and throw the amphibian clear of danger.

Place that same frog in a second saucepan of lukewarm water. Safe in its chosen element, and comforted by the pleasant warmth of the surrounding medium, the amphibian will choose to remain where it is. Now gradually increase the temperature, degree by slow degree, and a strange thing happens. The frog gradually habituates to the increas­ing heat until it will happily tolerate the temperature which made it leap from the first saucepan.

Stranger still, the amphibian will choose to remain in the steadily heating liquid - provided the temperature is raised slowly enough - until, one by one, its vital func­tions begin to fail. Eventually, it is boiled alive: overcome by the stealthy approach of danger.

Politicians in Western societies have taken this lesson of incremental advance towards a chosen goal to their hearts. Denied the simplicities of rule by diktat, they have applied it to the human population under their charge in a bewil­dering variety of fields; from taxes and creeping privatisa­tion, through education, to increasing EU federalism and foreign invasions. Nowhere has this stealthy approach to increasing state control been more successful than in surveil­lance and the destruction of our liberties and privacy.

There are signs, though, that more and more of us are becoming aware of the problem -- including the fact that my library copy of this book has been issued frequently over the last year. Arguably, too, concern is strongest and most vocal amongst the young.

News-Propaganda

A lot of MSM ‘news,’ I’m convinced, is not about reporting events which recently and spontaneously happened but about preparing us for that which tptb plan to bring about somewhere down the line.


When Martin Narey the Barnado’s chief proposes that children of ‘bad parents’ be taken into care immediately they are born and Middle England’s most popular and influential newspaper promptly assembles a case to persuade us of his wisdom - complete with flattering biography and one-sided speculations about the children this practice ‘could have helped’ - I worry we are being propagandised.


Melanie Phillips’s child-theft cheerleading in the same rag even hints at what I think is going on. Phillips writes of ‘the motor behind this catastrophe: the prevailing attitudes of a ruling elite which, pretending to be non-judgmental about family background, has actually smashed the traditional family to smithereens.’ Note the ‘pretending’ that I emphasised. I have no doubt this is a true assessment. But what is the implication of that? Either our political leaders these last few decades have felt themselves compelled by higher powers to lie to us about vital social questions, or they themselves consider society to be a mere laboratory for their experiments and see us as lab rats. Or, perhaps, a bit of both.


Is it inconceivable, then, that breakdown in social structures, from the family level up to the national, could be the planned effect of various establishment programs? And that state-managed replacements for traditional and organic social structures, under cover of the state being the only agency capable of correcting problems of such an awesome scale, is the goal?


In Melanie Phillips’s books there are numerous passages like the one that follows - although this is from Mary Whitehouse’s autobiography ‘A Most Dangerous Woman’ - demonstrating that the population was being prepared for and pressured into social change desired by the state, its corporate partners, and the professor priesthood. If the media, schools, and NGO’s were propagandising in previous decades for liberal causes that common sense wisdom feared would cause exactly the problems we now face, might they also now be propagandising for illiberal causes as the solution? The old familiar problem>reaction>solution strategy?


From ‘A Most Dangerous Woman’:

But things had been happening in Britain ever since the war which had been destroying our moral and intellectual defences. Various so-called ‘progressive’ educational philosophies were gradually taking hold, and although A. S. Neill’s Summerhill School was virtually a one-off case, its influence was pernicious in the extreme. James Dobson, the American psychologist, had this to say about the Summerhill philosophy

Please note how many of the following elements of the new morality can be traced to the permissive viewpoint represented by Neill: God is dead; immorality is wonderful; nudity is noble; irresponsibility is groovy; disrespect and irreverence are fashionable; unpopular laws are to be disobeyed; violence is an acceptable vehicle for bringing changes; authority is evil; everyone over thirty is stupid; pleasure is paramount; diligence is distasteful.


And, of course, it was a very small step indeed from Summerhill to ‘children’s rights’. The Children’s Angry Brigade Communique No. 1 warned its readers that ‘education can damage your mind’. It went on: ‘We are tired of being a repressed generation. Our generation is repressed by censorship laws, age regulations, school, and sadly our own parents. No longer shall we accept this repression. We are angry ... We shall not limit ourselves to non-violent acts if the school situation persists ... All sabotage is effective in hierarchical systems like schools - smash tannoys/PA systems, paint blackboards red, grind the chalk to dust.’

Barking up the same tree, but more elegantly, were the BBC and ITV schools broadcasts of the autumn of 1970, with their prevailing mood of doubt, confusion and depression. ‘Moral principles should be decided by me’ was what the children were encouraged to believe. ‘The morality of work is the morality of slaves’ they were told, while family life was invariably shown as unpleasant, mothers as selfish and incapable, the home as a place of strife and boredom, Christianity as a mixture of boring symbolism and difficult theological ideas, and Jesus Christ as a humanist.


Then throughout the 70s there was the manipulation of the family planning propaganda, which tried to persuade one and all that teenage pre-marital sex was inevitable and that the only answer was easy access to contraceptives - a hugely lucrative business. There were publications like Make it Happy which explicitly described for its teenage readers a whole range of perverted abnormal sexual practices (group sex, communal masturbation, oral and anal intercourse, etc.). There has also been the irresponsible and distorting effect of so many of the teenage magazines.


So how could ‘chastity’ and ‘fidelity’ possibly survive, even as words, in this maelstrom of atheist humanist claptrap? Especially as so many church leaders, politicians and media people lacked the courage to expose the irrationality of its so-called logic and the dangers to mind, body and spirit this posed, particularly to the vulnerable young.

It is to this class of people, the state and its experts - that destroyed a functioning society with this madness - that Martin Narey and Melanie Phillips says parents should be forced to hand over their newborns: to themselves in effect. How convenient -- and how terrifying.

Taylor and the Little Picture

In an otherwise strong review of Christopher Caldwell’s Reflections on the Revolution in Europe: Immigration, Islam, and the West, Jared Taylor makes a common error of specialists. Because his professional focus is entirely on the symptoms of mass non-White immigration into the West Taylor rationalises that Europe’s political leaders are reluctantly compelled by the principle of non-discrimination to impose their solution for immigrant related problems on all communities:

By contrast, Europeans act on principle. When the French decided they couldn’t have Arab girls wearing veils to school, they felt compelled to ban yarmulkes and ‘large crucifixes’ as well. Italians and Germans couldn’t ban veils without taking down classroom crucifixes that may have been up for centuries.

Europeans therefore cannot bring themselves to combat alien practices head-on. When the Danes got sick of Muslims fetching brides from the old country, they had to ban young spouses rather than illiterate Third Worlders. By forbidding the import of marriage partners under the age of 24, the Danes mostly stopped the practice, but they had to pretend they had an underage-spouse problem rather than an immigration problem.

Measures like this bother people who shouldn’t be bothered. If the authorities step up surveillance on fire-breathing imams, they think they have to keep tabs on other people, too. If they cut back on welfare because of immigrant chiselers, they have to change the rules for everyone. Although it came to nothing, one Swedish bureaucrat, shocked to discover female genital mutilation was going on in her country, argued for mandatory checkups for every Swedish girl.

If Taylor did not choose to limit his study to the effect and ignore the cause he might have concluded that Europe’s rulers find ‘managing diversity’ a useful excuse for imposing the policies they prefer but that would otherwise have little justification.

The ‘Latinoization’ of Miami

Here’s an eye-opening history of the ‘Latinoization’ of Miami. It’s disturbing enough in what it says, calling attention to the way ‘Miami’s old-line, non-Hispanic white political and business elite’ subsidised its own dispossession assisted by the CIA pursuing its imperial goals, but I suspect the deeper truth is even worse: that the ‘Cold War’ was largely a phoney war whose primary purpose was domestic social control and Military Industrial profit; and that the ‘American’ state considered the presence of Cubans in Miami beneficial not only for their anti-Communist views but because they contributed to ‘diversity,’ i.e., social division, so adding to pressure that America’s racial and cultural identity be redefined. But like I say, if the truth is only as bad as presented here, that’s quite bad enough.


Latinos: Remaking America, Eds. Marcelo M. Suárez-Orozco and Mariela M. Páez (David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies, Harvard University and University of California Press, 2002) pp. 75-81

Chapter 3: Power and Identity: Miami Cubans

by Alex Stepick and Carol Dutton Stepick

The Building of Cuban Miami

We Cubans made Miami. Before us, Miami was nothing but a decaying winter vacation spot and swamp. Now, it’s the capital of Latin America. And, we Cubans did it!

-- A Miami Cuban businessman

Indeed, Cubans do deserve much of the credit for shifting Miami’s economic focus from northern tourists to international southern trade. But their stories of self-congratulation usually fail to acknowledge the critical political context that encouraged them—even permitted their success.


Cubans fleeing Castro’s Cuba began arriving in significant numbers in the 1960s, following the failure of the Bay of Pigs invasion. Their arrival reflected both the failure of a U.S.-backed military invasion of Cuba and the failure of a socialist revolution to retain those who had the most skills and resources for reconstructing Cuba. The Cubans’ arrival also coincided with the construction of Great Society programs that provided extensive benefits to minority populations and that were quickly expanded to include Cuban refugees. The U.S. government created the Cuban Refugee Program, which spent nearly $1 billion between 1965 and 1976. Through this program, the federal government paid transportation costs from Cuba and offered financial assistance to needy refugees and to state and local public agencies that provided refugee services. Even in programs not especially designed for them, Cubans seemed to benefit. From 1968 to 1980, Latinos (almost all Cubans) received 46.9 percent of all Small Business Administration loans in Dade County.


Even more important was indirect assistance. Through the 1960s, the private University of Miami had the largest Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) station in the world, outside of the organization’s headquarters in Virginia. With perhaps as many as twelve thousand Cubans in Miami on its payroll at one point in the early 1960s, the CIA was one of the largest employers in the state of Florida. It supported what was described as the third largest navy in the world and over fifty front businesses: CIA boat shops, gun shops, travel agencies, detective agencies, and real estate agencies. Ultimately, this investment did much more to boost Cubans in Miami economically than it did to destabilize the Castro regime.


The state of Florida also passed laws that made it easier for Cuban professionals to recertify themselves to practice in the United States. At the county level, in the late 1970s and early 1980s, 53 percent of minority contracts for Dade County’s rapid transit system went to Latino-owned firms. Dade County Schools led the nation in introducing bilingual education for the first wave of Cuban refugees in 1960. The Dade County Commission also designated the county officially bilingual in the mid-1970s. With about 75 percent of Cuban arrivals before 1974 directly taking advantage of some kind of state-provided benefits, and with virtually everyone profiting from indirect aid, the total benefits available to the Cuban community appear to surpass those available to any other U.S. minority group.


The first wave of Cubans has been labeled the “Golden Exiles,” the top of Cuban society who were most immediately threatened by a socialist revolution. These new arrivals were different from other minorities in the United States. They were not only white but also predominantly middle or upper class. The presence of entrepreneurs and professionals in the Cuban refugee flow provided a trained and experienced core who knew how to access and use the extraordinary benefits provided by the U.S. government. Some had already established a footing in the United States and, when the revolution came, abandoned one of their residences for another across the straits of Florida. A Cuban shoe manufacturer, for example, produced footwear for a major U.S. retail chain before the Cuban revolution. He obtained his working capital from New York financial houses. After the revolution, the only change was that the manufacturing was done in Miami rather than Havana. He even was able to keep some of the same employees.


The earlier-arriving, higher-status refugees created the first enterprises in what came to be known as the Cuban enclave and allowed Miami to be the only U.S. city where Latino immigrants created a successful and self-sustained ethnic enclave economy. Miami has proportionally the largest concentration of Latino businesses (over fifty-five thousand) and of large Latino enterprises in the country. Although Miami-Dade County has only 5 percent of the total U.S. Latino population, thirty-one of the top one hundred Latino businesses in the United States are located there. U.S. Cubans’ rate of business ownership is more than three times that of Mexicans and nearly six times that of Puerto Ricans.


The Cuban enclave benefits not only Cuban business owners but also the broader Miami Cuban community. Most later-arriving Cuban immigrants from more modest origins than the Golden Exiles are employed by Cuban Miami enclave firms in various entry-level positions, which may offer low wages but can often be apprenticeships rather than dead-end jobs. Miami Cuban employers frequently provide training to their Miami Cuban workers and may even help them establish their own independent businesses. Miami Cuban garment workers become subcontractors, establishing informal workshops in their homes. Miami Cuban construction workers become contractors or subcontractors, also working out of their homes. For financing, workers who have turned entrepreneurs can go to banks (sometimes owned by Miami Cubans and certainly staffed by Miami Cubans) where they are likely to find sympathetic loan officers. For markets, they rely on the Miami Cuban community’s loyalty and preference for buying from “their own.”


The result has been a most economically successful immigrant community. A comparison of Cubans and Mexicans who came to the United States in the mid-1970s, for example, revealed that the Cubans not only had higher wages than the Mexicans, even Cubans with the same educational level as Mexicans received higher wages.


Miami Cubans also transformed Miami by attracting investment and migration from the rest of Latin America and the Caribbean, turning Miami into a diverse, dynamic Latino economic center of the Americas. Only New York has more foreign-owned banks than Miami. Nearly 50 percent of U.S. exports to the Caribbean and Central America and over 30 percent of U.S. exports to South America pass through Miami. Miami’s Free Trade Zone is the first and largest privately owned trade zone in the world. With more non-stop cargo flights to Latin America and the Caribbean than Orlando, Houston, New Orleans, Atlanta, Tampa, and New York’s Kennedy combined, Miami’s airport is the top U.S. airport for international freight. The airport has more airlines than any other in the Western hemisphere; it is frequently easier to get from one Latin American country to another by going through Miami than by going directly. Miami also has the largest cruise port in the world, ironically transporting primarily U.S. passengers on vacations throughout the Caribbean and Latin America while many of the citizens of those countries are immigrating to Miami. Miami may not be a global city equal to New York or London, but it is assuredly the economic capital of Latin America, and its Cuban immigrants made it so.


The economic transformation has also altered much of Miami’s culture. For example, at a 1998 event held by the University of Miami and the state of Florida to discuss plans for educating a “multilingual workforce for the 21st Century,” the university’s newly installed dean of education, an import from a university up north, spoke of language diversity as a problem that people where he came from would soon be encountering. The faculty member who was moderating the conference gently reminded the dean that in Florida multilingualism is viewed as an asset and promised to continue to educate him.


Antibilingual-education measures such as those that passed in the late 1990s in California no longer have a chance in Miami. It is easier to find a job, to shop, and just to get things done if one knows Spanish. It is also much easier to advance economically if one knows English. Miami is truly bilingual and multicultural. Miami Dade Community College has more foreign students, mostly Latino, than any other college or university in the nation. One of the three Spanish-language local television newscasts has more viewers than any of the local English-language television stations. The main Spanish-language daily, El Nuevo Herald, reprints articles from eleven Latin American newspapers. The 1990 census showed that Spanish had replaced English in Miami-Dade as the language most often spoken at home. Even at work, the language most frequently spoken by Latinos in South Florida is Spanish (42.2 percent).


It is not just the number of Latinos and the pervasive use of Spanish that makes Miami the de facto capital of Latin America. Latinos are also the demographic majority in some Texas cities, such as Laredo, El Paso, and San Antonio, and in other border areas such as California’s Imperial Valley, but there they lack the political and economic clout exercised by Miami Cubans.


Miami Cubans translated the favorable reception by the U.S. government and the millions of dollars of resettlement assistance not only into a self-sufficient economic enclave and thriving international economic city but also into a “direct line” to the centers of political power in Washington. Despite considerable political diversity among Miami Cubans in the early 1960s, by the 1970s politics and profits had become fused. Anti-Castro, anticommunist Miami Cubans invested locally and also enforced political consensus by harassing, boycotting, and even terrorizing their more liberal political and economic compatriots, a process referred to as enforceable solidarity.


The outcome was a profound economic and political solidarity. From the 1960s on, most Miami Cubans, despite their diverse class origins and social views, patronized other Miami Cuban-owned businesses and preferred conationals as business associates at the same time that they shared a coherent anti-Castro, anticommunist ideology. Expelled and despised by the government of their country, abandoned at the Bay of Pigs by a supposedly friendly host government, bartered away during the 1962 Cuban missile crisis, and ridiculed by Latin American intellectuals, the exiles had few to trust but each other. As illustrated in a full-page advertisement in the Miami Herald that was paid for by the most powerful Miami Cuban organization, the Cuban American National Foundation, resentment and a sense of persecution had evolved:

All our achievements have been accomplished with a national press coverage that has often portrayed us as extremists. This has been the most unfair and prejudiced perception we have experienced in America. . . . The Miami Herald is aggressive in its ignorance of our people. It refuses to understand that Cuban Americans see the struggle between totalitarianism and democracy as a personal, ever-present struggle. We live the struggle daily because our friends and families enslaved in communist Cuba live it daily. (Cuban American National Foundation 1987)

Unlike other minorities, which usually adopt antiestablishment, progressive positions, Miami Cubans have been militant conservatives on foreign policy, specifically on anticommunism issues. As a result, anticommunist policy positions and anticommunist rhetoric are de rigueur for local political candidates. For example, in the mid-1980s the City Commission passed a resolution barring any expenditure of “funds of the City of Miami . . . where representatives of Communist-Marxist countries have either been scheduled to participate or invited to attend.” Subsequently, Miami-Dade County passed a similar resolution. In an effort to win Miami Cuban readership, the Miami Herald created an entirely new Spanish-language edition run almost exclusively by Cuban exiles who seldom have a favorable word for the Castro government.


The Miami Cubans’ solidarity has produced tangible political results. Miami’s city and county mayors are foreign-born Cuban immigrants, as are the superintendent of the public schools (the fourth largest district in the nation), the president of the community college (the largest in the nation), and the president of the local state university (one of the country’s most rapidly growing). In the wake of the Elián crisis, the Miami Cuban mayor fired the Anglo police chief and the Anglo city manager. They were replaced by Miami Cubans. Also Cuban-born are the Miami-Dade County police chief, the state prosecutor for Miami-Dade County, two congressional representatives, and the majority of the Miami-Dade County state legislative contingent. Nationally, the two Miami Cubans in the U.S. House of Representatives, along with the Cuban American National Foundation, successfully promoted Radio and T.V. Martí, which broadcasts to Cuba, as well as the Cuban Democracy Act, which tightened U.S. economic sanctions against Cuba. More generally, Miami Cubans have emerged as a group whose support is actively courted by a growing number of officeholders from outside the state—from presidential candidates to members of Congress seeking campaign contributions.


These victories have not been without costs to the image of Miami Cubans and the well-being of the overall community. In response to an intolerance concerning political opinions about Cuba, the Inter-American Press Association and the human rights group Americas Watch in 1992 condemned the Miami exile community for violations of civil liberties. There have been many other lost opportunities. The most recent examples: An international music market conference that focused on the Americas had met in Miami Beach for several years, but in 1998 the county blocked the conference because Cuban musicians were scheduled to attend. Also in 1998, the Miami Light Project, a leading local arts group, had to forgo presenting a Cuban musical group in order not to lose $60,000 in county funding. The July 1999 Junior Pan American Games track and field meet was moved to Tampa after Miami-Dade refused to support it because Cuba would be represented in the games. The Latin Grammys scheduled for September 2000 pulled out of Miami. For similar reasons, a local group bidding to hold the 2007 Pan Am Games in Miami-Dade pulled out after realizing that the county would not support the games because Cuban athletes would participate.


Achieving both economic and political success as a Miami Cuban did not necessarily shield individuals from prejudice and discrimination. Certainly during the early stages of Cuban settlement in the 1960s, Cubans confronted significant prejudice when apartment owners, for example, posted signs declaiming, “No Pets, No Kids, No Cubans.” Moreover, in an effort to prevent the political empowerment of Cubans, local Anglo politicians in the 1960s and 1970s successfully urged federal officials to relocate new Cuban refugees outside of Dade County. Public resentment against Cuban Americans mounted, especially in the wake of the 1980 Mariel boatlift when the Miami Herald editorialized repeatedly against Cubans and when national polls listed Cubans as the least desirable immigrants. This was largely a reaction to Castro’s propaganda about those leaving Cuba in the boatlift. As late as 1993, a USA Today/CNN/Gallup poll found that only 19 percent of the respondents believed that immigration from Cuba has benefited the United States. Dade County was also the birthplace of the English-only movement in the United States during the 1980s.


By the late 1980s, after the election of a Cuban-born mayor, a majority on the city council, numerous state representatives, and a congressional representative, and recognizing the business elite’s inability to advance their agenda without the support of the Cuban business community, Miami’s old-line, non-Hispanic white political and business elite switched to a policy of incorporation. In the meantime, the Cuban enclave had been forging itself into the staging ground for a profound Latinoization of Miami.