Category Archives: Chris McMichael

Mahala: Armoured Cities

Leave a reply

http://www.mahala.co.za/culture/armoured-cities/

Armoured Cities

by Chris McMichael

The last few weeks have shown how quickly a global police state can be mobilized when people stop listening to rulers and attempt to reclaim public space. Hundreds of protesters In Tahir Square demanding an end to the military generals’ highjacking of the Egyptian revolution were shot dead with US-manufactured weapons and dosed with chemical agents. Meanwhile, in a clampdown co-ordinated through the Department of Homeland Security, police departments in 18 US cities attempted to shut down the Occupations with pepper spray and sonic weapons. In the UK, the government announced a blanket ban on protests during the Olympics next year and have proposed a massive increase in their power of ‘pre-emptive arrest’; an attempt to institute legal clampdowns on dissent under the guise of securing the sporting spectacle.

State violence is becoming harder to keep under wraps. Images online of predominately young people being beaten and attacked stand as a disturbing herald of future events. State security apparatuses, built up throughout the world in the name of fighting crime and terrorism, are revealing their real function: the enforcement of an unjust social order.

The Olympics are apparently to be “secured” by military missile systems pointed at civilian spaces. As geographer Stephen Graham has argued, such global spectacles serve as platforms for state experiments in new military urbanism. Throughout both the global North and South, social war is becoming one of the key organising principles of city life. SWAT style, zero-tolerance policing blurs the line between law enforcement and combat. Widespread surveillance systems monitor the public. Technology developed in war zones is being deployed in everyday life. The sonic weapons recently used by the police to attack the Occupy Movement in the US were first tested in Occupied Palestine.

Graham argues that “polarising worlds” (elites and everyone else) within cities themselves are a product of neoliberalism which has rewarded a narrow band of the wealthy at the expense of the majority. The city is all about separating and securing space and privileges. Ensuring the smooth wired mobility of solvent ‘risk free’ individuals and groups while containing ‘risky’ surrounding populations. The goal is ‘world class cities’ with sanitised urban space available for unhindered accumulation and consumption.

Theorists have connected the “pacification of urban space” to ongoing foreign conflicts. While the war on terror has involved military actions against Al-Qaeda, for the most part it is used by governments around the world to crush dissent and justify militarism in everyday life. Even the controversial Protection Of Information Bill uses counter-terrorism rhetoric, the line of defending South Africa from ‘unnamed enemies’, to justify implementation in the name of ‘national security’. The real enemy may well be a populace stirring from uncritical slumber.

Security and arms industries keep posting record profits despite the economic downturn. As military budgets in the first world face cost-cutting austerity measures, arms and security industries have turned to developing countries like South Africa to sell expensive ‘homeland security’ packages. During the 2010 World Cup, the South African Police Services went on an unprecedented spending spree, buying a futuristic array of mobile command centres, new body armour straight out of the next Batman movie and helicopters with heat sensors apparently as “effective in tracking a suspect as 25 police officers on the ground”. An SAPS plan to buy unmanned drones, regularly killing civilians in Pakistan, and very popular with the US Occupying Forces, for vaguely defined surveillance purposes, was abandoned only when the SA Civil Aviation Authority insisted on keeping them out of civilian airspace.

Almost all of the SAPS spending spree had one key purpose: crowd control. Crowds characterize the ongoing rebellion of the poor throughout the country, of course, the endemic community protests and blockades that are very much a feature of post-apartheid South Africa. As Don Delillo once put it, ‘the future belongs to crowds’. Urban planners and security consultants envision dystopian near future scenarios of environmental and economic collapse, mass migrations due to global warming and conflict over scare resources.

The irony is that these security establishments protect and serve the same geo-political system leading to their nightmare scenarios.

Underpinning the military policing of the city is the elite’s fear of revolt, dangerous ‘populism’ (a euphemism for direct democracy) and insurgent populations. The uprising of the poor. It has driven the pre-emptive criminalisation of anticipated future dissent. Elites rightly fear the fragility of the global system and the consequences of deepening inequality.

Again the upcoming Olympics provide a glimpse into the paranoid ruling mindset today. The organisers of the 2012 event recently chose The Clash’s “London Calling” in an ad campaign. The song is a snarling, rousing vision of social breakdown and dismay. Hardly the stuff of Olympic dreams.

A wonderful example of the real spilling into the spectacle of mega-events. These events already blur the boundaries between theatre and security. Mass displays of police and military reiterate State power as much as they’re about public safety. We are meant to look on and remember who is in charge. We are meant to remain onlookers rather than agents ourselves. We are not supposed to participate. Or storm the pitch.

Which is precisely what’s been happening this year. Wall Street. Tahir square. Both the form and indignation of protests have surprised state security. For now. In the case of Egypt, repression has backfired. A liberal call for elections has escalated into radical demands after the military crackdown. Protesters describe the army as a cancer to be removed. In the US, imagery of unarmed people attacked by riot police has meant massive coverage for the Occupations.

What is potentially revolutionary is the multiplication of transnational links, through the internet and smart phones, allowing vivid connections between different national struggles across the world. People are putting their situations together and seeing common denominators of oppression. Once those insights spread, genuine change is possible. State repression is ever more deadly. The ferocity unleashed across the world, in Greece, in American cities, in Hangberg, in Egypt, is what happens when rulers and their allies are challenged.

Mercury: Querying the benefits of ‘corporate theme parks’ to locals

Leave a reply

http://www.themercury.co.za/index.php?fArticleId=4004309

Querying the benefits of ‘corporate theme parks’ to locals
Will the legacy of the 2010 World Cup make South Africa a safer place once the tourists and the cameras have gone, asks Christopher McMichael?

June 10, 2010 Edition 1

Christopher McMichael

SOUTH Africa is using the safety and security preparations for the World Cup to attempt a massive rebranding of the country.

The four weeks of football, fun and heavy drinking will be augmented by the largest mobilisation in the history of South African policing.

The re-militarised police force aims to ensure an incident-free event while still maintaining the event’s carnival atmosphere.

To show its commitment the government has invested over R1 billion in preparing against all exigencies. This has included a drive to increase police numbers and the purchase of exotic crowd control and surveillance equipment.

As with all other aspects of World Cup spending (R40bn and counting) this has been justified in terms of the legacy it will leave: in this case the SAPF’s beefed-up ability to fight crime. But, as with other aspects of World Cup spending, the value of this legacy is a matter of perspective – and the dominant perspective seems to be that of Fifa and its multinational backers like Coca-Cola and adidas.

They will broker no infringement on their marketing rights, a fact which is evidenced by the backlog of cases against local businesses which have tried to add some World Cup magic to their own modest advertising initiatives.

If we look at the legislation around the event, a legal framework that is necessitated by Fifa, the structure of benefit becomes clear.

As a host country, South Africa has granted legal indemnity to the organisation for any potential lawsuits against it. This is backed up by the promise of policing to prevent against any infringement on Fifa’s brand rights.

In its concrete form this has seen the creation of special SAPF units which will patrol and punish any infringement.

The SAPF instructions which aim to inform people living and working around stadiums of the restrictions around the World Cup, such as traffic regulations, emphasise that their co-operation is central to the safety and security procedures. Although these perimeters are physically controlled by the SAPF, their authority in doing this is implicitly shown to come from Fifa by way of the local organising committee.

Rather than being mobilised around national patriotism, the power from which compliance is legitimated is private capital.

The state seems to stand in as the local subsidiary of a more powerful international conglomerate. This is also an implicit idea within aspects of the security plans which may not at first seem to deal directly with ambush marketing. For example, while host cities will be protected airspaces during the events, and will be patrolled by the air force, this has as much to do with preventing against unofficial advertising through skywriting and blimps as it does with preventing suicide attacks being launched by air.

World Cup security is, at its heart, aimed at protecting the advertising interests of transnational capital: within this dynamic the SAPF has in effect been partly privatised.

But here lies a contradiction: it is the South Africa government, not to mention public spending, which has footed the bill for the world class stadiums, new airports and expanded police presence. Without the state, Fifa would have no event to monopolise.

In its purest form, Fifa is a parasitic body, which extracts huge revenues from the efforts of host countries while leaving them with the bill.

Without the support of a national state, Fifa’s power is essentially symbolic. What perhaps accounts for this is an ideological framework which views the private sector as somehow having society’s best interests at heart – investment will lead to social development and so on.

A corollary of this is that the state is seen as bureaucratic and inefficient, such as in its perceived inability to protect against crime during the World Cup, while the corporate world is seen as streamlined and efficient.

This obscures the reality of massive state intervention in favour of transnational capital. As can be seen in the case of the World Cup, the state steps in to privatise the profits and, by extension, socialise the risks.

However, this is not just a case of the crude marxist formulary of the state serving as the political wing of capital. As can be seen in the South African case, the government has stepped in to protect the interests of some of the most powerful conglomerations in the world against local enterprises which have quite rationally tried to get a few slivers out of 2010.

This cynical manoeuvring has, in many cases, been aided by the boosterism of the media that has tended to focus on the minutiae of government preparation while ignoring the critical question of who benefits.

Much verbiage has been expended on the government’s alleged inability to protect against the threats supposedly issued by al-Qaeda and car hijacking syndicates.

This ignores the crucial question: will turning our cities into heavily patrolled corporate theme parks make life safer and more secure for ordinary South Africans after the tourists and cameras have gone home?