#cressida dick
Some absolutely repulsive apologia for a brutal agent of state repression and terror from The New Yorker. Dick is a victim of no one, least of all her own officers. Nobody outside the political and media cliques that hold a monopoly over public thought, and the middle class from which they are drawn, ever saw her as anything other than another in a long line of police tyrants. Ordinary Londoners have never seen the “symbolism” of a gay woman; they’ve seen the reality of racist, misogynist, anti-worker policing that murders their neighbours with impunity, ruins the lives of their loved ones, and makes them far less safe than they would otherwise have been.
The British establishment is currently attempting to salvage some of the rapidly collapsing public image of a vital repressive state apparatus; this kind of rhetoric is not possible in Britain right now, and is pushed to the side in favour of an “acceptance” that Dick had to go and that the Met is fundamentally corrupt. Dick is openly associated with the appalling nature of the Met precisely in order to facilitate a new image when the next commissioner comes in; the sins of the police are being deliberately associated with her in the hope that they might be thought to disappear when she does, away to a chokingly rich early retirement. But this kind of disgusting bullshit, published in an American magazine but by a London-based writer, shows what the commentariat really thinks. They don’t care about the people who are hurt; they view them with contempt. Menenzes means nothing to them. They want more state repression, not less; even under Corbyn the Labour party was trying to outflank the Tories to the right by calling for an expanded and better funded police force.
Media should serve the people, not dismiss and oppress them. Once, liberal journalists understood this, and some of their names have gone down in history as martyrs, Marat being an early high water mark. But that history is a long, long way gone. Knight cannot even bring himself to describe the unprovoked, broad daylight murder of an innocent man by security services in any more stringent or powerful words than as an “error”. Why should workers value freedom of the press when this kind of insulting nausea is what that freedom brings them? When the workers take control of the productive capacity of society—when they take direct control over the presses, and the server banks, and the offices—they will demand and produce a higher standard of media. This kind of sickening article is a sign of a dying society that has run its course and is begging to be put out of its misery, and saved from its crisis of the mind.
