Thursday 12 June 2008

You maniacs! Damn you! Damn you all to hell!

SPOILER WARNING - in the unlikely event that you haven't seen the film of Planet of the Apes (the 1968 original, not Tim Burton's pointless 2001 remake) and don't want to be warned of the plot twist at the end, don't read on. Otherwise, scroll down...
















The Government's latest parliamentary victory in pushing through 42 days detention without trial was depressing on many levels. It kept Gordon Brown afloat to fight another day, but remained a reminder of how weak he is and how strong the policy-lite ex-PR weasel David Cameron is - I wouldn't want Gordon to win this one on a matter of principle, but I'm not crazy about a Cameron government coming a step further, either - at best, I think he'll maintain something like the status quo, at worst he'll be New Labour without even the obligatory Labour nods towards social justice (for those of you wondering what any of this has got to do with Planet of the Apes, patience - we'll get there eventually).

As if that's not depressing enough, it shows how wedded Gordon Brown is to authoritarian clunking-fist solutions to problems. The UK authorities can already detain suspects without trial for longer than the authorities in any other country we would regard as remotely democratic or respectful of the rule of law. Even without the extension to 42 days, just look at where we stand. In Canada they can hold somebody for a day before charge or release. In in Russia it's five days, six in France, a week in Ireland, seven and a half days in Turkey.

If the Canadians (who would be indistinguishable to most jihadi nutcases from Americans and whose armed forces are actively involved in fighting the Taliban in Afghanistan) only need a day, why do we have four weeks, holding out for six? Russia - a sort of democracy, but a bit on the authoritarian side, rarely held out as a model of civil liberties and the rule of law - still has to charge suspects after less than a week, or let them go, yet in freedom-loving Britain four weeks is still not long enough for us to hold people without trial "just in case". Turkey; again, it's a democracy, but not exactly a paragon, yet our suspects could be languishing in jail without the authorities having to give any reason for more than 20 days longer than Turkish law permits and we want to add another two weeks, just to be on the safe side. The figures, by the way, come from a Liberty report here.

I've deliberately excluded the USA, where you need to be charged after only two days, because they've got this whole Guantanamo Bay thing happening and are exceptional in using the legal category of "unlawful combatant" to exclude certain classes of prisoner from the legal protections given to criminal suspects or prisoners of war (especially when it comes to detention without trial). But even in the USA this legal jiggery-pokery has been challenged in the Supreme Court. I believe that the range of prisoners who aren't covered by the Geneva Convention has been narrowed down - Al Qaeda suspects are still in legal no-man's land, for example, but Taliban captives are subject to the Geneva Convention, so presumably have the same rights as any other POW.

Perhaps this is just the inevitable result of government action needed to prevent another 9/11. Well, the September 11th attacks were off the scale in terms of deaths in one incident, but:

a) even including 9/11, the chances of dying in a terrorist incident are modest to say the least - read and digest these figures (I can't vouch for the absolute accuracy, but the orders of magnitude are about right). One terrorist death is too many, but they're just not killing that many people, compared with other preventable causes of death.

b) the September 11th plotters were ruthless and effective. But most of the recent crop have been incompetent fantasists. Just look at some of the more recent plots - for example the probably unworkable attempt to bring down airliners with liquid explosives disguised as soft drinks. Official over-reaction has lead to a windfall for soft drink sales at airport shops and shedloads of inconvenience for air passengers, but all in the name of protecting us from a plot too cumbersome to work. Or how about these idiots trying to bring terror to London's West End and Glasgow Airport. Not forgetting Richard Reid, the useless shoe bomber. Maybe we're running out of competent terrorists.

c) as far as I can understand their motives, what terrorists want is to cause as much disruption and terror as possible - which is exactly what governments hyping up the threat level are doing. The also would like to provoke a backlash - for example, I understand that the purpose of most attacks by Islamist radicals in Egypt was to provoke an already authoritarian and oppressive government into becoming even more oppressive, in order to stir up opposition. Well thought out police and anti-terrorism operations and good intelligence work might help a state to deal with terrorism, but sliding into over-reaction and curtailing the civil liberties of the majority is just doing the terrorists' work for them.

The latest attempts to curtail our liberties were what made me think of the final scene of Planet of the Apes. The astronaut, played by Charlton Heston, is exploring the strange planet he's been stranded on, an earth-like world where apes are the dominant species who regard the native humans as animals and treat them as such. At the very end of the film, he comes across the remains of the Statue of Liberty, looming out of the wilderness and finally realises that he's not arrived on some distant planet, but on his own world in the distant future when humans have destroyed their own civilization and the apes have inherited the Earth. His final words are a curse on the stupidity of the human race:

You maniacs! You blew it up! Damn you! Damn you all to hell!

Planet of the Apes is more fantasy than hard Sci-Fi, but that's one hell of a final scene. It's not remotely plausible - even as a child I didn't find it credible that a relatively flimsy copper-sheathed statue hadn't corroded and eroded away centuries ago, over a period when entire cities had apparently crumbled without a trace. But it's such a powerful symbol that most people willingly suspend their disbelief. The image has a monumental, mythic quality, like Shelly's Ozymandias:

I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert . . . Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed:
And on the pedestal these words appear:
"My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!"
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away.


There's a striking similarity between the two visions of the wrecks of lost civilizations, but there's an important difference, as well. Ozymandias records the wreck of vanity, pomp, vainglory and power. The remains of Lady Liberty are in a way far sadder, for she is a symbol not of long lost crushing autocratic rule, but of hope and freedom. On the pedestal of Ozymandias' statue is carved a vain boast. Compare and contrast with these words from the Statue of Liberty's bronze plaque:

"Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!" cries she
With silent lips. "Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!"


Her decay represents the death of Lincoln's resolve that that "government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth."

As our elected politicians casually chip away, bit by bit, at the liberties which are among the proudest achievements of our democratic, liberal civilization, I'm haunted by the spectre of the ruined Statue of Liberty. Maybe one day a traveller in our antique land will marvel at the ruined traces of the liberties we once enjoyed and damn us all to hell for the self-destructive maniacs we were.

So even though he's spent most of his life being a Tory, I'll be raising a glass to David Davis tonight. Here's to you, Sir, for making a stand, and here's to Lady Liberty - long may she stand.

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