Bartlett's Bizarre Bazaar

When an organisation with deadly powers has been caught lying, time after time after time, is it wrong to suggest that people ought to withdraw their co-operation? Or does it seem far more unreasonable to suggest that we ought to give that organisation our full support? Well, as The Man said, 101% support, which is 9% less than most people with a liberal attitude towards numbers, and 1% more than ought be possible. So again, The Man manages the frankly astounding feat of finding a ‘Third Way’ that is utterly objectionable and numb-headed.

Jean Charles de Menezes was not a suicide bomber. He was not challenged outside Stockwell tube station. He did not vault the ticket barrier. He was not chased onto the tube train. He was not wearing a bulky jacket. He was not wearing bomb belt with protruding wires. He did not act erratically as a result of cocaine in his system. He was not a rapist. These were lies.

These lies and smears and no-one is to be prosecuted? No-one is to be sacked?

Mohammed Abdul Kohar and Abul Koyair did not have a chemical weapon. Abul Koyair did not shoot his brother. These were lies.

So after the ‘benefit’ of having seen the lie ‘Jean Charles de Menezes was a rapist’ planted in the press as a post-hoc justification for his murder after the exposure of the other police lies, what credibility can be given to ‘shot Forest Gate man is a computer paedophile’? None. Absolutely none.

Some suggest that post-modernists have destroyed the idea of truth. Perhaps Truth, but not truth. To do that it seems that you need a state empowered by the voluntary adoption of a state of war. The production of truth is necessarily a social process, that is all ‘post-modernists’ argue, though it should be noted that it seems most people who declare their opposition to ‘post-modernism’ appear to be basing this stance on a consideration of the front covers of books that they have not read. The adage that runs that the first casualty of war is truth does not simply mean that in war, people lie, but that in a state of war the normative structures of the social institutions that produce truth are eroded, leaving the production of anything accepted as truth impossible.

Given the role that sections of the Met Police have had in destroying truth, and even if these people cannot be prosecuted for the lies surrounding the shooting of de Menezes and the shooting of Kohar, then what ought to happen is that the new Kohar case should be declared void, a mistrial if it comes to that, and the members of the Met Police ought to face trial for obstructing justice. Thanks to their hard work to destroying the social institutions that produce truth, they are guilty of this regardless of whatever is the Truth of the Kohar case.