West Is Losing Its Moral Standing

POLICE in riot gear drag protesters up a city street, and make multiple arrests. People demonstrating in opposition to the present government and its policies find themselves treated like terrorists or criminals, rounded up and charged with plotting violence; and most of the mainstream media – and majority public opinion – go along with the official view that protesters are suspicious types, whose freedom matters much less than the nation’s “security”. For a few brief hours on Wednesday, in other words, it was difficult to tell – from a quick glance at the news – whether the city on our screen, with its ranks of riot police confronting protesters, was London or Istanbul. There is no comparison of scale, of course, between Wednesday’s police raid on a squat in Soho occupied by anti-capitalist groups hoping to protest against this month’s G8 summit in Northern Ireland, and the huge popular demonstrations in Istanbul, triggered by the threatened redevelopment of a local park.