Aftermath, page 9
I have been in the worst of places. Devoid of windows, though not devoid of care. To call it a complex is a metaphor. To call it a disgrace implicates us all in shame. I have faced this in the worst of ways – that the monsters that do the worst we can point to are the manifestations of our monstrous narratives, made from the city as we have constructed it. The lawmakers and ministers will redact their involvement, hide what they knew, accept no responsibility they will never see prison; the rules we live by keep them safe. They police us, and fail us and still we trust them, as if we can abdicate for ourselves, and then hold them to account
Citizenship and Politics: A Postcolonial Glossary
Citizens of the world (see: Citizens of nowhere / Commonwealth citizens) – The government of the atro-city has returned you to dust, now your names will be lost. You lived in the atro-city as
Funny tinge – As in, it is not just about being black or a funny tinge… you know, different… B, err, from the BME community – left-wing politician Angela Smith used the words ‘funny tinge’ to describe British Asian (Bengali) journalist Ash Sarkar, the only person of colour on a live TV panel. Finally, you can stop calling yourself ‘brown’.108 You live in the aftermath of the
War on terror – Whose defining category is ‘Muslim’ whatever and however: in this context, the definition purposely seems to have no nuance and that is its great strength for the definer, not the defined it is primarily for you that
The Hostile Environment – Comes into existence: a web of legislation that turns us all into police, making it impossible for people of minority origin to feel free, in fact designed to make certain groups feel so unwelcome that they choose to exclude themselves. Everyday people check your right to study, right to rent, right to walk into a shop or airport or train station or through a university lodge with a backpack on. The aim is to create, here in Britain, a really hostile environment for illegal immigrants. And others So Theresa May, then Home Secretary, later Prime Minister, said and did. In ideal terms for the fascist state, she wanted us to choose to go home – to permanently leave the UK, or choose not to try to come at all. There are deportation flights; and families being ripped apart. If people do live and stay, they are ferociously policed in the name of keeping the public safe by those who point away from themselves – there the drug dealer, there stop and search, there bad faith, there, there all of it shades of darkness, punishable with cultural silencing, a certain social narrative, police brutality and eventually prison and whatever they do inside. While outside the gates is a pernicious
Austerity – The end of shared social space: the defunding and closure of our libraries, our social centres, our play spaces, our community sports, an arid landscape in which the chance to create is hard won, made harder for
Citizens of nowhere / Commonwealth citizens – My grandmother’s life forfeit in Partition, my mother in her womb. I know the state works to undermine communities’ trust in each other and lead us in circles, to a condition of permanent fear and harm and from there to
Radicalisation – There are many theories about what radicalises a mind – the word itself is malleable, the word is a curve as horizon and used within poetry, theory, resistance, ideology as violence, for emancipation for causing terror (see also terrorist) after 9/11 while the new state seeks only to
Prevent – As if there is no cure for the natural tendency towards violent annihilation, they want you to fear, you now have a statutory duty to report the Muslim man next to you and report on children, report on neighbours, the hospital, the school, the university, the HR department must report on anyone Muslim, anyone who is pro-Palestine, who makes you uncomfortable (with apologies for the text as violence) Prevent makes civil society into border police; all of us are meant to police in case of something.
There is much to understand about the danger / safety binary, the wide definitions of radicalisation and the climate of fear created and worked on within Prevent. The argument is that it turns young people from terrorism before they become radicalised. But it has proved damaging, sowing distrust, disillusionment and a dangerous isolation and affecting the opposite of what it says it wants to achieve. It has been discredited as Islamophobic, it has set up covert surveillance on young Muslims through youth radio projects, through art, through other social networks. A British Muslim child, four years old, talking about the wildly popular computer game Fortnite has been referred. Another four-year-old says cucumber: nursery staff hear cooker bomb, and begin the process of referral. The Home Office says it has kept the public safe, but cases have been missed despite that; we have seen now that people can play the system to mask radicalisation while planning attacks.
In 2020, William Shawcross, a former director of a neoconservative think tank and of the UK’s Charity Commission, was appointed by the government to lead the strategy. The papers write him so: under his tenure [the Charity Commission] was accused of institutional bias against Muslims, while Muslim groups highlighted comments he made in his book Justice and the Enemy, which appear to support the use of torture and the detention camp at Guantánamo Bay.
They quote him: Europe and Islam is one of the greatest, most terrifying problems of our future. I think all European countries have vastly, very quickly growing Islamic populations.
The climate of fear is in no way about to break. Its storm is let loose in the atro-city in the online words of powerful men the viral load will take care of itself as after the event the government applied the same flawed reasoning about how to identify a would-be terrorist to a terrorist at risk of recidivism, as if their scant knowledge would prevent a bona fide109
Terrorist / terrorism – I know this word as certain men. I know this word is just a word. It has been understood by conservatives also as non-state political violence perpetrated naturally by people of colour on the left it has been reserved for Nelson Mandela and South Africa’s ANC. For Palestinian resistance to Israeli occupation, the Irish right to self-determination; Black liberation movements, animal rights movements the word is wide, it will swallow Black Lives Matter protestors, diaspora Sikhs standing in solidarity with farmers in Punjab against the fascist Indian state; climate change activists; and what should we call men who commit violence from a place of ideology? – *right-wing fanatics, insurgents, extremists?
Lone wolves – See above*
Counterterrorism – Will use the tools of surveillance, interrogation, incarceration, based on the underlying assumptions of what a terrorist looks like, in short they use their definition of the problem try to fix the problem making fear a ley line, making trust a power game, so easy to play double-blind, hard to believe in
Desist and disengagement – Experience shows that many of those who are wedded to a political cause may never become totally disengaged but may still make the decision to desist,110 they say, calling on
Culpability / credibility – The event happens. It is reported. It now has to become possible:
1. That trained criminologists and policing authorities can believe that a terrorist with a complex prison history and a firm grip on his narrative arc has the inner strength even to desist forget disengage from the persuasion of violence when he says and shows what they hear and see regardless of that history, the lure of the Caliphate
2. While authorities and senior editors at The New York Times will broadcast the voice and story of a Canadian man who says he was a terrorist; says he fought with ISIS in Syria, says he committed brutal violence and is now reformed and able to live a normal life among citizens in a flat above a shop. It is possible that those same experienced journalists and counterterrorism experts will win awards for their podcast Caliphate, for their reportage. It is a fact that in December 2020, the paper will admit that this terrorist made his whole story up and was believed: the myth he made up was his own radicalisation
3. That when you find a book on countering radicalisation through partnerships between London Muslim communities and the London Metropolitan Police by a man called Robert Lambert, published in 2011, you might find it useful. His authorial style is canonical. He writes about the draconian, top-down policies of the state which ignore and worsen grassroots realities. He writes against hate preacher Anjem Choudhary, who, by then, has already converted the terrorist of this piece. He talks about anger, faith and political violence on Britain’s Islamophobic streets. Research makes you go further, and you find that for years he was a member of the Special Demonstration Squad, set up by police to gather undercover information on left-wing British protest groups. Stop the Vietnam war. Pro-Palestinian organisations. Anti-apartheid activists, the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND), Labour MPs. Which used the names and identities of 80 dead children as aliases for their operatives. Which for years operated covert surveillance on the family of Black teenager Stephen Lawrence, murdered in a racist attack in London in 1993, in an attempt to smear their campaign for justice and police accountability. Professor of Terrorism Studies, Robert Lambert, MBE (University of St Andrews) was once undercover, to infiltrate an Animal Rights protest group. He had several relationships – one with a woman activist, and together they had a son. Then Lambert, or whatever name he went by, disappeared. Neither his partner nor son knew for decades that his identity was assumed, and he went free, which raises the question of111
Punishment – When should punishment begin? How intricate should it be? How far should it go before you cross your own border, into the self you don’t know yet you are?112 How young does that journey start, and when do you realise that you are locked within the
Prison industrial complex – We cannot address the myriad, interlocking injustices of a racist prison industrial complex without going to the roots of violence, which start with what we learn. By the start of the Fishmongers’ Hall
Inquest – In which no one can say how it all went wrong, Witness A, MI5 will remain anonymous. The Home Secretary writes in support. Seeking to justify redactions of other documents on the grounds of public safety, human rights.113 The undercover police want to remain anonymous for fear of terror reprisals. The press want the court to deny anonymity; to name (and shame) the former wife of the terrorist, though she hasn’t seen her ex for years – they argue this is in the public interest – and that her fear of being doorstepped or attacked or her property graffitied never happens except in fiction as if this case was not more real than that seeking of
Equality – The desire to remain safe I mean in the dignity of a human life
In litany. In lament – As a question that even in the face of traumatic violence and our grief when the linear text cannot but must always represent continuity can we imagine a different world with the language we have? I am sinking in
Water, as pani, as pain – I am meant to shape something out of tears. I cannot find a mould for them. All I have is
Language and trust – The beautiful, hopeful possibilities of those where they meet a hybrid form. Hope to spend time with. The text is the carrier that is all this is for
Dignity – None of us will survive this. Our only chance is to dismantle it. I want this as I want to love. Do not reconstruct it, do not reassemble it. Our only chance is to end it: I am talking about harm, the state’s harm, the harm that punishes us before we are born: for the idea of us, our races and religions, for our class and genders, for our audacity in breathing hope as children. I am talking about the dignity of a life, of every life. I am talking about affinity as
Fiction as imagination – After backstory and event there is a curve to consider. To be imagined is a kind of violence without the memory of true condition of fiction as radical action. Which is not fiction, it is hope
Abolition
If we do not seek to hold all lives, to look, as Rich writes, steadily at the thing itself, we cannot mourn how they came to be, nor can we curtail the horror they will inflict. We begin to believe that we cannot change the world that makes people violent, that makes them kill: it will kill us.
This is a lament for all lives lost in a shameful system organised to harm, and in which a void is filled by violent ideology some choose to see through to death. This murderous system: that steals speech and legislates against positive action, meets terror as a solution, the only reliable continuity as narrative journey in a broken life fragmenting us from each other, and from hope.
Hope, which is a discipline, as Mariame Kaba reminds us.114 To think about a world in which others will never make those same final choices makes me catch my breath
They say that abolition is a horizon, not an event. I see it behind me and in front as a curve
Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Angela Y. Davis, the abolitionist thinkers show us that though we struggle to imagine a world without prisons in all forms, we must try. In England, a terrorist’s fatal actions make that revolution to hope so much harder for many. Real prison, real horror is the only solution, and the only place in our imaginations: a terrorist should be on indeterminate sentence, even before they can do actual harm.115 Yes, it is fair, they say for the sake of public safety. I am ashamed to say that fairness is the balance of the sentence here. This is not a question of language but of life.
Let’s consider instead the case of young Harry Vaughan, teenaged, not a terrorist but qualified as neo-Nazi terrorist, far-right terrorist as if the terrorist is not normally those things. And if splitting the argument over qualifying language seems unjustified here, let splitting be the active sensation – where justification is the concern – in a country where the fastest-growing terrorist threat is from the far right,116 young Harry, with straight As in his final school exams, with fourteen terror charges, and two extra for possessing indecent images of children, had 4,200 images and 302 files in his devices, including an extreme right-wing terrorist book, bomb-making manuals, and a guide to killing people. He had documents about Satanism, Neo-Nazism and had downloaded and watched two child abuse videos, classified Category A – as prison: the most serious type. He lived at home with his parents, his father a clerk in the House of Lords. He was ‘focused and able’ so the judge said, and awarded him a two-year suspended sentence – taking into account his diagnoses as on the autistic spectrum. His parents committed to helping him change for the better.117
This is not a call to expand the terminology of the war on terror in the name of anti-racism or a call for more, or longer, or more vicious incarceration. It is not a call to feed the prison’s cells. Kundnani writes:
One key lesson to emerge from abolitionist organising is to be wary of ‘reforms’ that promise safety but actually add power and reach to law enforcement… To see the injustices in ‘counterterrorism’ law enforcement is to see how racialized fear works to validate amplified policing and incarceration more broadly…
People are right to point out that there is a disparity in how white and Muslim perpetrators of mass violence are labelled. The way forward, though, is not to broaden the use of the term ‘terrorism’ – and the assumptions and government practices that go with it – but to reassess the ways the country currently polices terrorism and probe more deeply into the social and political roots of ideological and racial violence.118
Atiya Husain agrees, saying that terrorist is not an inadvertently racist label that can be peeled off brown men and stuck onto white men. Rather, the racial history and significance of the concept is constitutive of terrorism. The terrorist is a racial, epistemic, ideological and material other.119
Would a different label have kept anyone alive? I think of Jack. And of Saskia, who I never got the chance to know. The violence perpetrated is narrativised almost as an inevitability, which makes it an easy thing to think about more punishment as the only recourse to justice we can imagine.
I am not making an argument for the release of extreme and high-risk violent criminals in this moment now. I know danger is still present in prison and anywhere else. It is a reactive state. But in We Do This ’Til We Free Us, Kaba writes that questions like What about the really dangerous people? are not questions a prison abolitionist must answer in order to insist the prison-industrial complex be undone.
The issue of danger, and of harm, and of the depravity and indignity of prison now, the neglect, the denial of need; the fact they are places of suffering, violence, and death; they hurt and they injure and they destroy lives120 and their place in the atro-city are what we must face while we work for better at root. What can be changed now to build a more just world for many?
If the events of Fishmongers’ Hall leave me any way out of loss, it is a recognition that the institutions of the atro-city, from which such violent harms arise, are homegrown, are no place of greater safety. We need new ways of holding ourselves as a society now, real transformations at the point of basic class, racial and gender justice. Restorative justice as a social transformation to heal community divisions caused by scarcities of so many kinds. Until perhaps forms of prison encoded in the curation of society and prison itself are no longer considered a predicate for our ‘civilisation’ to continue.
The irony of calling here on Neil Basu, Britain’s most senior counterterrorism police officer, is not lost on me, as in an interview he said:
Policies that go towards more social inclusion, more social mobility and more education are much more likely to drive down violence … than all the policing and state security apparatus put together. It is much more likely to have a positive effect on society [… ] The prescription for me is around social inclusion – it’s social mobility, it’s education, it’s opportunity.121
Now, in the aftermath, the UK government announces and passes the new Counterterrorism and Sentencing Act, which will introduce mandatory minimum sentences of fourteen years for the crime, as well as increasing powers of police and surveillance, broadening the definition of terror – as
