http://repwblic.informe.com/viewtopic.php?p=1496#1496 -
a bit of scribbling about this BBC series, but I haven't heard the lot :
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b01l7pv1
- Capital Justice
I only just caught an episode of this series this morning which was dealing
with the fact that whilst the protesters in the Occupy movements are faced with
a whole series of laws to arrest and control them the bankers that they are
protesting against are more or less operating beyond legal control : the
contributors to Capital Justice do not mention it indeed they are obviously
unaware of it but they are debating issues at the heart of republicanism - this
being the UK they are utterly ignorant of the fact that all of these things
that they are ignorantly debating are the essence of republicanism which has a
huge body of literature debating the politics of law and order.
These were essentially the issues at the heart of the American and especially
the French revolutions : this is more or less the reason that so much propaganda has been made in the UK against Republicanism for the past 200+
years - that the British Empire was built upon the criminality of international
corporations such as the East India Company which was the source of the UK's
wealth and republicans opposed this and made common cause across the empire
with all of the subject peoples. However having successfully dismantled the European empires politically republicanism's remaining problem is that the
condition of so many countries' independence was that the corporations retained
the property that they had seized when they invaded and occupied those
countries - and the UK protected its source of wealth by imposing the English
Legal System on them which was indeed mostly created by and for the interests
of the imperial corporations from the sixteenth century on wards.
At the heart of the British Empire was a single key institution created in the
seventeenth century - the Bank of England which raised the money to fund the
military part of the project and upon which the mercantile bankers that funded
the enterprise of exploiting the conquered territories and the peoples enslaved
by military conquest became dependent. Whilst the UK's military occupation of
these conquered territories has ended the governments created by ' independence ' have all too often merely been acting as proxies on behalf of the old European empires, oppressing their own compatriots and taking a share in the
imperial corporations' loot and continuing to practice the criminality that the
original ' cosmopolitan ' republicans opposed. Why has Cosmopolitanism ceased
to be a popular politics in Europe ? Because our societies benefit from the
present situation just as our ancestors benefited from slavery which provided
an increased material standard of living at the expense of the poverty, misery
and deaths of people unseen and unheard of.
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2 Aug
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