Arbitrary Detention and Magna Carta

The Premier, Wherever.

Sir,

Perhaps some rear-view vision may help you when considering the laws now being proposed regarding arbitrary detention. It is somewhat gratifying that international treaties are belatedly being cited as reasons to oppose this slide into dictatorship, but it is odd that no-one seems to remember what underpins our personal freedom here and the whole of our legal system.

In 1225 in England, the royal seal was affixed to what is generally seen as the definitive version of Magna Carta by the clerks of King John, a somewhat controversial monarch, as is his namesake, our current de facto one.

Chapter 39 is now regarded as perhaps the main clause of that document. It states that "no freeman can be arrested, imprisoned, deprived of his property, outlawed, exiled or "in any way destroyed" except by "legal judgment of his peers or by the law of the land." It forgot to mention the ladies. It is clear that the law of the land was not meant to be amendable so as to negate the intent of that chapter.

You are in the process of assenting to laws that will negate the intent of that clause, arguably the most important in the legal system that is ancestral to our own. What do you think you are doing?

If you assent, you will be seen by history as the exact opposite of the men who opposed arbitrary power at Runnymede, and posterity will not think much of you. Many of us in Australia have lately come to expect the worst from that weird campsite behind Lake George. The worry in this matter is the apparent consent of you lot, the state premiers and territory chief ministers.

Magna Carta in its final draft came just under 160 years after the Norman invasion of England, to a country plagued perhaps since the withdrawal of the Roman legions, by strife, invasion and civil unrest. Through the turmoil of several civil wars and much unrest since, it has never been revoked, though it has often been neglected for a time.

Mr Blair, who apparently believes he derives his authority from an authoritarian antique sky god, rather than from the customs of his country, is the latest challenger. I suggest, on historic and statistical grounds, that he is unlikely to find long-term favour with either his appointed boss or the future citizenry of Britain. For the present population of Britain, Magna Carta is apparently too far back, the nightly TV dosage of "Plod is my Shepherd" having reset people's brains towards a craving for authoritarianism.

The revocation of Magna Carta's core provision is now being proposed in Australia, a bit over 200 years after the invasion of Australia by the British, to a country that seems remakably peaceful once you turn off the TV and the radio.

As we are all (detained refugees and other state serfs excluded), now free men and woman in Australia, why are you now proposing to add a new category of citizen, the disappeared, to our ranks?

At the time of Magna Carta, as a trivial aside, by family legend my lot were on the side of the dictatorship, seizing other folks' property for the king. We are not proud of it. We did a bit better under South Africa's apartheid and opposed that, though ineffectually. In the end, though, 20 million people there said enough. So the laws you are now apparently about to assent to here are unthinkable in South Africa at present.

So here we go again. The language and provisions and likely outcomes of this new anti-terrorist bill are all very familiar, from apartheid days in South Africa. There, arbitrary detention was used as a cover to murder many folk.

I knew some of the people who were found guilty. They did not seem remarkably different from their counterparts in the overt and covert police here. They were dedicated people, doing what they felt was right for their community.

A few were even likeable. But hundreds were still tortured and murdered under cover of that arbitrary detention. We already have arbitrary detention, in our refugee camps, here and on once pacific and hospitable islands and it has been disastrous in its implementation. Also, in the self-interest stakes, Australia is on the nose internationally because of it. Why do you suppose this will be any different?

The reason for the present wave of fear re terrorism is, as everyone with two neurons to rub together knows, the invasion of Iraq, almost certainly illegal in international law and hence also (curiously), illegal in Australian law. As a people we seem hell-bent on what is now legally serial murder. New Zealand is not threatened by Islamic terrorists; their last problem was with the French. Can we as a community still not see the connection?

If you wish to protect the people of your state from indiscriminate terrorism, several things have to be done.

First, the Prime Minister has to be stripped of his power to send Australians to war without community assent. Then Australia might be on it's way to becoming a genuine democracy. At present it is, I suggest, best described as a brown-bag party dictatorship, badly out of control.

Australia's remarkable historic belligerence probably harks back to the wish for preferment and wealth through foreign campaigns, of the naval and military officers stationed here in the early days of British settlement. This was a dead-end posting, so all foreign campaigns were welcomed by the establishment, military and civil. That set the pattern and we have hence missed very few opportunities to attack faraway folk, since the Maori wars.

This must stop, if not for reasons of common decency, then because attacked faraway folk and their militant supporters, aka what the bunyip from behind Lake George defines as terrorists, are getting slightly disgruntled. There is nothing wrong with that definition except that it excludes our own government-sponsored killers.

Wars should not be launched without the consent of the people in a referendum. Without that, this will never be a real democracy and in the end our colonisation of this continent will probably fail in consequence. We will eventually be overrun by an enemy we need never have made, while being abandoned by our hoped-for bully-boy protector for its own domestic reasons. We are inevitably a third-rate power, apparently in the incurable habit of attacking other third-rate, second-rate and occasionally even first-rate ones. This seems to be a sort of national death-wish.

We should switch to building a genuine defence force [ or a Humanitarian Aid Group that can also Defend the Nation,] that would make Australia unassailable. We should not be a spare attack-puppy for whoever is the current international rotweiler, such as we are now.

Then we should be scrupulously neutral. Our armed forces should become in their offshore capacity, wholly and solely international disaster-relief forces. We could lead the world in that.

Our recent effort as a nation in helping after the big tsunami, was a far better way to go in winning friends and long-term security, than our recent attacks on the people of the Middle East, or our habit of forever celebrating our past killing of Turkish people in their homeland.

That way, the ordinary people of the world might eventually come to like and appreciate us rather than our wallets. As we are going now, proposing for instance to train very unpopular government forces in the southern Philippines, we will merely make ever more enemies, all with long memories.

I have met farmers in the backveld in South Africa who are still very bitter about Australia helping the British with its war, concentration camps for women and farm-burning there, in 1899-1902. Those are the ones who don't play cricket. Live by the sword ...?

You will not bring this country security by throwing away the core provision of Magna Carta.

You will though, if you can persuade it to stop attacking faraway folk and blowing their kids arms off with airforce bombs and assault rifles. Our heroic government pilots and SAS soldiers in the Middle East, of whose exploits we curiously hear so little, are other people's deeply-hated terrorists.

We are waging an illegal war on people who have never troubled us and we then pretend to be surprised that they retaliate by killing our citizens and other ordinary folk in nightclubs and the like.

[However, the Indonesia Bali bombings were actually assisted by the CIA who were fear-mongering an Australian 'call to arms' to bolster support for the Coalition of the Killing's illegal and degrading resource wars in the Middle East.

The occupation and genocide of the Iraqi and Afghanistani people was moved along and assisted by marching in puppet government's to control the masses.]

I suggest that your personal duty re this terrorism legislation is very clear. Shirk it, and history almost certainly will regard you and you fellow premiers and chief ministers as either spineless or very poorly informed. I hope this letter will help remove the second excuse. It is an open document and copies have gone to all the other premiers and chief ministers.

I have the honour to be, Sir,

In no way yours, or your admirer regarding you conduct on this matter to date.

Peter Ravenscroft.

By Peter Ravenscroft posted 4 November 05

Bush, God and Transnationals

The tragedy (for the entire world) is not that Bush is delusional, mentally unstable and intellectually challenged - that is well known. Rather, it is that he remains as commander in chief of the USA - placed in that position by commercial and other financial interests.

Related:

Australia's 'Anti-Terrorism' Bill: the framework for a police state Over the past month, Prime Minister John Howard and the six Australian state premiers and two territory chief ministers have joined hands to draft draconian new laws that will erect the juridical scaffolding for a police-state. The Anti-Terrorism Bill 2005 is unprecedented in both its content and in the conspiratorial methods that have been employed to push it through the state and federal parliaments.

ASIO settle wrongful detention case out of court
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Open Letter to Australian Senate
Every West Australian needs to take note of the proposed terror legislation that will be debated in the Senate next Tuesday. Our own Premier has sold us out, and the time has come for some serious and organised protest in WA to protect our democracy and civil liberties. Write to the Senate, to the papers, and to every political party. This is a fundamental issue that affects the future of our society.

$145,000 for false arrest in NSW
The lawyer - who has represented almost all Sydney's high-profile accused [alleged] terrorists, [scapegoats for the Coalition of the Killing's resource wars in the Middle East] including Mamdouh Habib - who was kidnapped and tortured and who successfully sued the state for wrongful arrest, malicious prosecution and false imprisonment.

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Sydney Morning Herald Poll flawed
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New anti-terror laws and the Muslim community
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Shoot-to-kill bluff
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Sedition Laws Target Peaceful Civil Disobedience
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Stanhope flags doubts on 'hasty' terrorism bill
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Despoja: Stanhope hero of the hour
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Stanhope stands his ground
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Anti-terrorism laws inquiry 'too short'
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Australia: Rattling the cage
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Anti-terrorism laws put rights at risk: Fraser
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Stop the war on civil liberties!
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Spots and Stripes
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They know where you live
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No! Your Rights Australia
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800 people deemed a potential security risk?
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Democrat Will Oppose Anti-Terrorism Laws
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Collection of Terrorists Meet to Take Away Our Rights
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Peace Activist Agrees to be removed but challenges security review
ATTENTION: CHIEFS OF STAFF - IMMIGRATION REPORTERS - LEGAL REPORTERS

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Anti-War Extremists Loyal to Scott
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Terrorgraph not quiet on 'Aussie militant' probe
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Phillip Duddock's 'accent' heard in militant broadcast
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Lawyer dismisses ASIO fishing raids as PR stunt
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Is this our most dangerous Newspaper?
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HOSTAGES OF THE WAR ON TERROR
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Chomsky signs on for justice
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If he'd been given his passport he'd be a free man
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Trial by unrelated video clips
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Noble Cause Torture?
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New account adds weight to interrogation claims
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Australian senate accused govt of war crimes
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Fascist Australian Govt torture exposed
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Lawyer blames police for Habib break-in
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No reason for Habib to sell story: Beazley?
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Aust Community criticises Govt for 'crimes'!
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Australian Govt Guilty of Crimes: Community
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What they did to Habib
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Innocent witch verballed by federal fascists!
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Innocent Victorian man held in custody for Xmas?!
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Innocent Melbourne man makes second bail bid
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Community seeks more power to interrogate ASIO suspects
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Greens warn of 'politicised' terror trials
AUSTRALIA/CUBA?: The Australian Greens say they are concerned that new anti-terrorism laws being debated in the Senate allow for the "political black-banning" of defence lawyers at terrorism trials.

Melbourne man charged over ASIO links
ASIO a know Australian terrorist organization is verballing the community again...about allegations that a man, while living overseas, received funds from Al Qaeda and had close association with the members of the terrorist group.

DING DONG! THE WITCH IS DEAD
A court has been told Joseph Thomas is a sleeper? ZZZ! Melbourne Australia: A court has been told that Osama bin Laden asked a Melbourne man to become a "sleeper" in Australia before undertaking activities for the Al Qaeda network? Munchkins: "Ding Dong! The Witch is dead. Which old Witch? The Wicked Witch! Ding Dong! The Wicked Witch is dead."

AFP: The unlikely CRIMINAL
It was born of a bombing and it made its name after a far more devastating act of terrorism. But for most of the 25 years in between, little was known about the Australian Federal Police force or the work it did.

Australian Federal Government complicity in war crimes
Complaint to Australian law officers about Australian Federal Government complicity in war crimes.

There is no justification for torture
In the weeks since the abuses at Abu Ghraib prison were revealed, evidence continues to seep out of similar mistreatment of prisoners in other US military detention centers in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Guantanamo Bay.

Howard rejects spy agency overhaul
Prime Minister John Howard has played down the need for a major overhaul of Australia's spy agencies as a result of an inquiry by former intelligence officer Phillip Flood.

Mamdouh Habib: Taunted and Tortured!
Four Corners [Walls]: Terrorist - or Taunted by the Australian Defence Force who sacked him as a cleaning contractor? Who is Mamdouh Habib? And why was he harassed by the Australian Federal Police? Then tagged and labelled as a spy? Why was he vilified by the community? When he fled to Pakistan how did he end up being tortured in Egypt? And how did he end up at Guantanamo prison camp reserved for the men America calls "the worst of the worst.

He was an undercover agent for the blues
He was my journalist, he was working undercover. The fellow knew all of the moves.... He really had me romping, bare footing stomping. He just kept igniting my fuse....

Up there Khasali: Innocent man new bail laws
The New South Wales Supreme Court has asked innocent man Bilal Khazal to increase to amount of surety offered, before the bail is formally continued.

HEY! BIG BROTHER? LET INNOCENT PEOPLE GO!
Young men terrorised, tortured, and threatened with charges for no crime by Australia mate the lucky country. Lucky if you're not used for Howard's FEDERAL ELECTION and George Dubya's WAR ON LIBERTY! Who shot liberty? IGNORANCE!

Ul-Haque 'the man who wants to become a doctor'
The taskforce is investigating French man Willie Brigitte, who was tipped back home for a visa breach. Allegedly the Un-Australian Newspaper claimed he also attended training camps before his six-month stay in Sydney. Police have not alleged Mr Ul-Haque knew Brigitte. The Un-Australian just mentioned it because they are 'you guessed it' up John Howard's butt and they like the USA want 'you guessed it' our Federal Government. Well Yankee go home!

Brain injury for suspicion 'inhumane'
Faheem Khalid Lodhi refused bail by a Sydney court and remanded until June in hell at the (HARM-U) High Risk Management Unit at Goulburn. While he is in there he will receive a brain injury and is likely to self-harm due to the gross violation of living standards.

Keelty foresees more terrorism
Australian Federal Police (AFP) Commissioner Mick Keelty says terrorist groups will continue to find new ways to threaten countries.

Daily Terror rolled-over for Howard's war games
The DAILY TERROR is suspected of being the source of the news this morning that Willie Brigitte is a terrorist and that Sydney faces a bomb attack.

Lawyer claims Al Qaeda suspect's evidence tainted!
Before returning to Australia last year, Thomas was arrested and held in custody for five months by Pakistani authorities before being released without charge.

Man terrorised by ASIO remanded in 'AA' isolation!
A Victorian man has been remanded in custody after being charged with terrorism offences, including having links to Al Qaeda?

Ruddock foreshadows new terrorism laws
The new laws will allow police to access emails and mobile phone SMS messages, enable wider use of surveillance devices, and protect sensitive national security information during terrorism trials.

Islamic movement denies links to Al Qaeda
The Islamic Youth Movement has denied having any links to Al Qaeda and says it is considering legal action against the Four Corners program. In a statement released early this morning, the group rejects allegations it is helping coordinate any kind of terrorist network inside Australia and says it is being unfairly targeted.

2nd Renaissance -10 The War on Witches [150]
In 1484, Pope Innocent VIII issued a Papal Bull that became the rationale for establishing the Inquisition in Germany. The following excerpt from the Bull sets out the official view of the danger of witches to the community. The Bull and this this passage provided the sole excuse for the torture and cruel executions that were, ultimately, to be the fate of up to fifty percent of the population of some villages.

South African leaders continue public stoush

South African President Thabo Mbeki and the Nobel peace prize winner Archbishop Desmond Tutu have strongly criticised each other in a worsening public debate.

It has become a bitter contest between two of South Africa's most senior public figures.

Archbishop Tutu says President Mbeki has labelled him a liar and a charlatan.

In a written statement, Archbishop Tutu said he would pray for the African National Congress (ANC) Government, just has he did for the apartheid Government.

The dispute began a week ago when Archbishop Tutu gave a speech and criticised the ANC's black empowerment programs, which he said benefited a small recycled elite.

President Mbeki retaliated with a strongly worded response in a weekly newsletter.

He urged Archbishop Tutu to show respect for the truth.

By Just Us 30 November 04

Remembering the Common Hood Soweto and Runnymede

The Soweto uprising began with school children going on strike against the government order that the language of instruction become Afrikaans.

I flew from Detroit, with one stop, to the University of Witwatersrand in Johannesburg to participate in an international conference, The Promise of Freedom and its Practice: Global Perspectives on South Africa's Decade of Democracy.

I arrived on the heels of students protesting the cut in university 'bursaries' forcing many to terminate their studies, especially the poorer students. When the university responded by calling in armed police, helicopters, and 'bouncers' from neighborhood gangs, some faculty remonstrated, "this seems very much like Bantu education in a different guise," they wrote the Vice Chancellor, alluding to the apartheid system of education that prevailed during the third quarter of the 20th century.

The difference now is that the IMF-imposed cutbacks, unlike apartheid, are truly pan-African, whose effect is the destruction of the independent university in the mother continent as a whole.

(The Committee for Academic Freedom in Africa has been ringing this alarm for years.) During a break in the conference I strolled down the hill from Wits (as they call the university), across Mandela Bridge, over the railway tracks (O so many!) and mini-bus yards, down the African street with its hawkers, colors, and fragrances, in order to meet the comrades of the Anti-Privatization Forum, the Landless People's Movement, Jubilee South Africa, and the Indymedia Center who were gathering at the Worker's Library in an anti-war coalition. They were to be evicted at the end of the month from that venue by the Johannesburg city council.

Molefi of the Education Rights Project explained that the anniversary of the Soweto student uprising on 16 June 1976 had ceased to be a day of resistance, and, under the new dispensation, had become a day of reconciliation named National Youth Day. Meanwhile, the bursaries are revoked, and the financial squeeze is even tighter in secondary and primary schools. The door to education is closing for the poor, despite the fact that the Freedom Charter, or Kliptown Charter of 1955, declared. The Doors of Learning and Culture Shall Be Opened!

The verb tense (found in the Bill of Rights or the Decalogue) we can call the noble intentional future rather than the mechanical temporal future, though there are powerful forces that would put the promise of free, equal, universal education into the past tense. "All the cultural treasures of mankind shall be open to all by free exchange of books, ideas and contact with other lands."

"Look," I said to Molefi, "Magna Carta was sealed on about the same day of the month as the Soweto uprising began, 15 June 1215." "But what have they to do with each other?" What, indeed! In my case they were two stops on a journey. They share something else--a notion of the commons.

The 16 June 1976 uprising began in Soweto, "the mother city of black urban South Africa," in Mandela's words. Phil Bonner and Lauren Segal of Wits History Workshop show how Hector Peterson was shot dead that day, with many hundred of others. "Don't Start the Revolution without Us" said a placard in another city. "The blood of the martyrs water the tree of the revolution," said the militants.

The Soweto uprising began with school children going on strike against the government order that the language of instruction become Afrikaans. One thing led to another, and by a mighty heave of the planet, by a combination of cultural politics and people's war, the children invented toyi-toyi, and Mandela was released from prison, apartheid came crashing down.

In fact it is the source of a vigorous debate, of memories and counter-memories.

As a leader of the African National Congress, and its armed organization, Umkhonto we Sizwe, Nelson Mandela was sentenced to life imprisonment at the Rivonia trial of 1964. The trial helped to destroy the power of the internal resistance to apartheid and the years of exile began. He spoke for four hours from the dock, saying in part, "The Magna Carta, the Petition of Rights, and the Bill of Rights, are documents which are held in veneration by democrats throughout the world."

Mandela was attracted "by the idea of a classless society, an attraction which springs in part from Marxist reading and, in part, from my admiration of the structure and organization of early African societies in this country. The land, then the main means of production, belonged to the tribe. There were no rich or poor and there was no exploitation." Earlier in 1964 he said that "in such a society are contained the seeds of revolutionary democracy in which none will be held in slavery or servitude, and in which poverty, want, and insecurityshall be no more.

It is the inspiration which, even today, inspires me and my colleagues in our political struggle." Thus he acknowledges the groundation of the African commons. Sifiso Mxolisi Ndlovu was a Form Two student at Phefeni Junior Secondary School (PJSS) in 1976.

He remembers that they had been on a go-slow from March; they heaped the Afrikaans text-books in front of the principal's door.

They boycotted classes, and sent emissaries to other schools, including the more celebrated Morris Isaacson High School whose student leaders were affliliated with various liberation organizations, including Black Consciousness. But in its origins the younger students at Phefeni were the vanguard.

They imagined something easy-going "whereby female students will wear our trousers or their fathers' trousers and we will wear our sisters' dresses--it would be like a Guy Fawkes thing" It was an English idiom of treason and carnival combined. The placards of the 16 June in front of ten thousand students said simply "O Hell with Afrikaans." Steve Biko explained that hell was part of European theology not African.

"In putting forward my counter-memories as a 14-year-old Form Two student at PJSS in Soweto I argue that it is these students themselves who were the actual champions of their own struggles, and very young students indeed." Commemoration is a contested activity in the creation of the social imagination. This practice involves a process of self-criticism and a renewal of identity. Therefore possibilities are opened for change in the basic terms of reference ." Yes, I think that he is right and we must do the same with Magna Carta.

Steven Biko was the guiding figure in the Black Consciousness Movement which arose after the banning of the black political parties in 1964. Biko's greatest essay was "Black Consciousness and the Quest for a True Humanity." "Black consciousness would be irrelevant in a colourless and non-exploitative egalitarian society." Even the liberals "see blacks as additional levers to some complicated industrial machines.

This is white man's integration--an integration based on exploitative values in which the poor will grow poorer and the rich richer in a country where the poor have always been black." "The most potent weapon in the hands of the oppressor is the mind of the oppressed." "As people existing in a continuous struggle for truth, we have to examine and question old concepts, values and systems."

"All people shall have equal right to use their own languages, and to develop their own folk culture and customs," said the Kliptown Charter. Ngugi wa Thiong'o wrote an essay Moving the Center: The Struggle for Cultural Freedoms "this literature was celebrating the right to name the world." The center was moving from Europe. " The history of struggle is maintained by the people's songs, poems, stories, anecdotes, remembrances, he wrote.

Bantu education said history began with the white invasion of 1652. The imperialists propagated the 'return to the bush' concept, where 'bush' equaled savagery. "A people without a positive history is like a vehicle without an engine." "Thus a lot of attention has to be paid to our history if we as blacks want to aid each other in our coming into consciousness."

Biko praises the culture of workers and peasants. The love of communication and the widespread intimacy of social relations arose at first from the village and then from the township. African songs are group songs. In the village community "there was no such thing as individual land ownership.

The land belonged to the people. Farming was based on joint efforts and shared labor; exchange was based on reciprocity and mutualism. A culture of defiance, self-assertion, and group pride and solidarity grew. "We believe that in the long run the special contribution to the world by Africa will be in this field of human relationship." That contribution has its dependence on the African commons, a material substratum.

Biko looked positively upon the Kliptown Charter, or the People's Charter of 1955. In 1955 a congress of the people met at Kliptown, "a multiracial village on a scrap of veld a few miles southwest of Johannesburg." The Charter was read aloud in English, Sesotho, and Xhosa. The people have been robbed of their birthright to land, liberty, and peace. "The People Shall Govern!" it exclaims. The national wealth shall be restored to the people. The land shall be redivided amongst those who work it. I emphasize the notion of reparations that are entailed in the charter, expressed here once again in the tense of grammatical nobility.

Steven Biko was imprisoned incommunicado. He was kept naked and manacled. What became clear in the Truth and Reconciliation Commission is that his torturers had received a signal from their superiors. Biko was killed in September 1977 during interrogation.

In 1996 Captain Jeffrey Benzien demonstrated to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission how to use the wet bag as a suffocating hood to torture prisoners. For the first time white South Africans witnessed on their TVs the routine torture of prisoners.

There is a dim memory that habeas corpus, the rule of law, the prohibition of torture, and trial by jury have found their origin in chapter 39 of the 63 chapters of the 'Great Charter.' Until 1215 innocence or guilt was determined by trial by fire and water; afterwards trial by jury--"lawful judgment of his peers"--replaced the tortures as a means of discovery of truth. This is part of the significance of chapters 39 and 40. 39. No free man shall be taken or imprisoned or disseised or outlawed or exiled or in any way ruined, nor will we go or send against him, except by the lawful judgment of his peers or by the law of the land. 40. To no one will we sell, to no one will we deny or delay right or justice.

Aelred Stubbs was banned from South Africa the year his friend, Steve Biko, was killed. Hewas Biko's posthumous editor. An Anglican vicar with the Anglo-Saxon first name of Aelred, named after a Cistercian monk who died about fifty years prior to Magna Carta, and whose last name of Stubbs is no less venerable it having been also the name of the Victorian constitutional historian who summed up Magna Carta in words unknown to Bush, "the King is, and shall be, below the law," and mistaken by the American Bar Association as I found out when I went to Runnymede, which I had done a couple days earlier.

My flight to Johannesburg had a twelve-hour lay-over at Heathrow airport, time enough for me to do some preliminary reconnaissance at Runnymede. Amid the tangle of companies, stations, stops, slipways that is the result of privatization of ground transport at Heathrow airport I eventually found the local bus I was looking for. I purchased a return ticket for £3.90 and caught the number 50 B bus at platform 5.

It was an utterly beautiful May morning when I discharged myself across from the royal castle at Windsor, shop awnings were just opening up, morning shadows were deep under the Jubilee arch at the train station, &c. I couldn't get a boat so early in the morning to take me down the Thames to Runnymede but Ali from Rawalpindi whose uncle lives in Detroit working at the GM plant in Hamtramck taxied me there.

Birdsong was loud and ringing across the meadows, a tweeter against the woofer of the roaring Boeings taking off from Heathrow. The chestnuts were blooming, and the hawthorne as well, lending the scene a shining light of loveliness. Such was the magic of the day thatit summoned up in me from the days of yore both nightmares of ruling class terror and dreams of bountiful, peaceful equality.

I lay me down in a fair field full of folk and dreamed dreamed, with the medieval Piers Ploughman, dreamed with the Christian in The Pilgrim's Progress, and dreamed with William Morris from the News from Nowhere.

The feudal critique begins with a dream by the side of a stream of the ruling class men in silk gowns swaying from side to side and making speeches, or Lady Fee married at the Castle of Strife and Senseless Chattering.

Piers the ploughman is devout: "For human intelligence is like water, air, and fire--it cannot be bought or sold. These four things the Father of Heaven made to be shared on earth in common."

Piers Ploughman was written in 1370. Three centuries later in 1670 John Bunyan wrote Pilgrim's Progress while in prison where he also made shoelaces for prisoners at the borders of Islam. Vanity Fair ruled over by Sir Having Greedy and Lord Carnal Delight who destroyed that commons of water, air, fire, and mind, submitting everything to the capitalist program of getting and enclosing. All religion he said was to visit the fatherless and widows in their affliction. He wrote of "an inheritance, incorruptible, undefiled, and that fadeth not away."

Advancing two hundred years to the William Morris dream of 1890, we have his anti-industrial dream, News from Nowhere. Having quarreled in their discussion about the Morrow of the Revolution the anarchist stormed out and sighed on the banks of the Thames, "if I could but see it! If I could but see it!" before falling asleep to dream the revolutionary green utopia.

I was pleasantly roused from these reveries, half expecting to see Rat at any moment carrying the bottles under his arms and Mole bringing the basket for a picnic on the commons. Instead, a young man working for the National Trust pulled up in a Land Rover, and identified himself as "a commoner," advising me to stay on this, the west side of the river if I intended to walk back to Windsor, as the other side was all private land. Could Toad of Toad Hall be far? Across the meadow I spied at the foot of Cooper Hill slope where the land meets the river meads, what I was looking for, namely, the American Bar Association's shrine to Magna Carta. "Could I walk across the field?"

He looked at my footwear, and pointed me instead to a narrow way. This landscape was dense with ruling class magic, and a few hours tramping about it, notebook in hand, was not going to discover but the most obvious of the secrets in this semiotic density.

It is a highly wrought landscape--an English utopia of Whig origins made awkward by nervous American memorializations, and weird exchanges of dirt.

The Queen of England gave an acre or so of sloping land here to the USA, and a JFK memorial put on it. There are fifty steps for the fifty states of the USA each one different to approach the JFK memorial designed by Sir Geoffry A. Jellico, CBE. A sign includes this bit, "the craftsmen were unable to comprehend this need for individuality, and could only complete their task when the steps were likened to the uneven appearance of a crowd at a football match." Welcome to England, the land of class snobbery!

The American Bar Association's shrine has lots of stars; stars on the ceiling, stars on the floor, and a star over the plinth in its middle. Cosmic, heavenly, I guess is the suggestion, or perhaps that inheritance, incorruptible, undefiled, and that fadeth not away. The words on the plinth surrounded by stars in this temple on the buttercup field used to epitomize Magna Carta are "symbol of liberty under law" which is not at all what Magna Carta does say.

Just the opposite (remember Stubbs): it is the King under law. The ABA has got the whole thing wrong, understandable for the Cold War in 1957 when they built it.

The thing is centered in an enclosure which includes an oak tree planted by the Duke of Gloucester, another by the Prime Minister of India in 1994. In the same year Her Royal Highness, Queen Elizabeth II, planted an oak, and they all seem to be flourishing after ten years.

In our age of the reclamation of the commons, the fetishism of the earth as private property, or indeed as anything else, is becoming increasingly ridiculous. The fetishism is at the base of patriotic fever.

This became clear to me as I read the sign at the foot of another young oakling. John O. Marsh, Jr., Secretary of the Army of the United States of America, in 1987 had planted it with soil that had been brought from Jamestown, Virginia, "the first permanent settlement in the new world." English settlement, they meant. Welcome to a bit of the USA, the land of genocide!
The American Bar Association misapprehends the significance of Magna Carta. This is not to imply that British monuments nearby are invariably more faithful to their subjects. At the fiftieth anniversary of Queen Victoria's coronation a railway bridge was constructed in Windsor called the Jubilee Arch, though it has utterly nothing to do with jubilee as reclamation of land, manumission of slaves, cancellation of debts, or reparations for wrongs done. The effrontery of imperialism is to monumentalize the people's struggles and invert their meanings.

In 1929 the Runnymede meadows were given to the National Trust by the widow, Lady Fairhaven. Two granite structures on either side of the road signified something big ahead. On one of these structures carved in four-inch capital letters are the words, illegible if you are driving, but impressive on foot,

IN THESE MEADS OF THE 15 JUNE 1215 KING JOHN AT THE INSTANCE OF DEPUTIES FROM THE WHOLE COMMUNITY OF THE REALM, GRANTED THE GREAT CHARTER, THE EARLIEST OF CONSTITUTIONAL DOCUMENTS WHEREUNDER ANCIENT AND CHERISHED CUSTOMS WERE CONFIRMED, ABUSES REDRESSED, THE ADMINISTRATION OF JUSTICE FACILITATED, NEW PROVISIONS FORMULATED FOR THE PRESERVATION OF PEACE AND EVERY INDIVIDUAL PERPETUALLY SECURED IN THE FREE ENJOYMENT OF HIS LIFE AND LIBERTY.

Customs? Ancient customs, OK. But cherished customs? What do they have in mind? I have argued that the Americans did not understand Magna Carta, or rather, that if anyone followed its spirit, it was W.E.B. DuBois rather than Eleanor Roosevelt because DuBois put the emphasis on the 750 million colonial peoples whose lands were robbed of them leaving them in poverty whereas the UN Declaration of Rights which Eleanor Roosevelt hoped would join Magna Carta in worldwide esteem tended to slight the material issues of equality, those cherished customs.

The argument depends on a little knowledge of medieval history, and it does not at all depend on a coincidence in the date of 9/11. The text provided by the National Trust makes some of the argument.

John merely saw the document as a means of buying time and by mid- July 1215 he had asked the Pope to annul the document. Driven to revenge by autumn of the same year the Barons had offered the throne to Louis, the son of the King of France, and a bitter civil war ensued. However, the Magna Carta was not dead. Upon John's death in 1216, his 9 year-old son succeeded to the throne, as Henry III, and his minority council, appointed to govern in his infancy, resurrected the Charter. Henry's strength grew after victories over Louis and his supporters at Lincoln and Dover.. Support for Louis dwindled and in September 1217 [William Blackstone gives its date as September eleventh] he signed a peace treaty and withdrew to France. The defeat of Louis was used as an opportunity to re-issue the Magna Carta with modifications including a supplementary charter dealing with forest laws.

In 1297 the Magna Carta entered the statute book becoming the first constitutional in the world. One modification referred to widows: "she shall have meanwhile her reasonable estover of common." What did this mean? 'Estover' is Latin. The 17th century English jurist, Edward Coke, author of the Petition of Right, translated, "it signifieth housebote, hedgebote, and ploughbote." The Anglo-Saxon may seem equally obscure, until we say that these botes were quotas for fuel, fencing, and building. Technically, then, estovers referred to maintenance of production and preservation of subsistence.

The rest of the argument concerns direct appropriation. Chris Fisher, J.M. Neeson, E.P. Thompson comprise the interpretation of customary forest law formed by 'the Warwick School.' What we learn from their studies, respectively, of the Forest of Dean, Windsor Forest, and the forests of Nottinghamshire is that while feudalism had come to an end by two hundred years ago, the poor people who were necessarily the losers in the advent of capitalism retained with a firm grip their customary hold on various forms of timber and other usufructs of the forest. The miners of the Forest of Dean had the foresight in 1610 to write down their laws and customs "time out of mind".

When their customs were enclosed, the Book of Dennis was their constitutional writ, for when they were challenged in 1831 the Deputy Surveyor to the Chief Commissioner of Woods referred to "that little book which they consider their Magna Carta."

Written statute law had to come to terms with common custom, and it did so with the locution "from time immemorial" or from "the time when the memory of man runneth not." The customary uses are named; the names are unfamiliar to us privatized souls, the names may be subject to a variety of condescension--historical materialist, Monty Pyhtonist, sociological, or farcical, and good fun it is too.

Yet they spelled health care, shelter, even social security, and a comely table spread. Some might see them religiously as Bunyan did, relief for the fatherless and widows of affliction.

Pannage, chiminage, and agistments were protected in the supplementary forest charter. Pannage is to put the pigs in the forest in the autumn to feed on the nuts and mast. Agistment permits livestock some regulated forest pasture. Chiminage is use of forest paths without having to pay toll. Professor Isabel Hofmeyr of the University of Witswatersrand concludes her brilliant study of the African Pilgrim's Progress by asking us to remove the tollgates that separate the national and the international. She thus asks for a literary world with chiminage, and of course you immediately wonder, why stop there?

Karl Marx concluded Das Capital's magnificent chapter ten on the working day, "In place of the pompous catalogue of the 'inalienable rights of man' comes the modest Magna Carta of a legally limited working-day." One tradition is local, particular, antiquarian, modest; the other is universal, general, modern, and pompous.

The Kliptown Charter (1955) contains similarly modest provisions, such as, "there shall be a forty-hour working week, a national minimum wage, paid annual leave, and sick leave for all workers, and maternity leave on full pay for all working mothers."

It also abolished slavery, or unpaid labor, "child labour, compound labour, the tot system and contract labour shall be abolished." In the vine-growing agricultural districts of South Africa it had long been the form of exploitation to pay workers in "tots," or mugs, of wine rather than cash.

A modest, unpretentious memorial can be found at Runnymede with apparently nothing to do with Magna Carta. Two oral historians produced a book on sale at the Magna Carta tea-room of "the life stories of twenty-two ordinary people of Runnymede." It provides a microscopic view into the 20th century British working-class. So many of the lives born before or during World War I, so many suffered from childhood diseases, some were orphaned, other parents fostered children.

Ernie Holland had a 'bad war.' After it he could not stop shaking and weeping for decades.. Rose Vincent said, "Life seemed one long catastrophe." Many had the chiminage of war or empire, experiences in Burma, North Africa, Spain, Australia, New Zealand, Ireland, Naples, Poland, Canada. Many worked at Vickers, building Spitfires, Wellingtons, other weapons of war, the post-war engineering. Although there is one reference to a communal water well, the commoning experienced by this testimony was either of an emergency kind--survival during the Battle of Britain, in which the self-activity of ordinary people discovered sharing--or it was indirect and a result of the post-war welfare state.

Time after time the happiest moment, the "luckiest," was the acquisition of a council flat, housing, like news from nowhere. Of the twenty-two lives, fourteen are widows and they have their estovers by which I simply mean fuel, shelter, and nurturance are not wanting.

I hitched from Runnymede with Julian and his dog Max back to Windsor where traffic was completely blocked by the police as an anti-terrorist precaution while the guard was changed at the imposing and impregnable Victoria Barracks. Thus he had the leisure to point out to me a) the Royal flower gardens which were opened only two days a year and this was one of them, and b) the relatively large fields belonging to the Castle and which were planted with all sorts of organic and non-genetically modified plants. Having left the shade of the Runnymedge commons, in a twinkling I was to hear about the South African commons.

My visit to the Apartheid Museum on Gold Reef Road in southwest Johannesburg was on a warm winter afternoon. Welkom, my taxi driver, was born in Zimbabwe and returns when he can (or must) to visit his grandmother's village. He speaks eight African languages, in addition to English.

He explained that he learned them as a school-boy from the other kids in school. From him I first heard the clicking of Xhosa talk, which danced in my ear like the grace notes of a Chopin waltz. He discharged me to the sounds of the muezzin's call to the faithful to afternoon prayer sung out from a minaret near the museum.

My colleagues at Witswatersrand were so right--two hours was not nearly enough time to take in the powerful explanations of racial degradation (the photos, texts, videos) or absorb the impact of the engines of human exploitation (nooses, Casspirs, "hippos," and prison- cells) there on display.

The UN Conference against Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia and Related Intolerance met in Durban, South Africa, in the late summer of 2001. The UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Mary Robinson of Ireland, joined President Thabo Mbeki, the host of the Conference, and the delegates from Bulgaria and Thailand, in comparing the final declaration of the conference to the twenty-first century "Magna Carta."

Magna Carta does not contain clauses about schooling, education, books, language, or culture: certainly, it cannot compare to the specific grievance of the imposition of an oppressor's language upon popular instruction such as the decree from the Department of Bantu Education. Resistance to Afrikaans escalated bringing with it a train of others grievances from the apartheid system as a whole.

Although Magna Carta was written in Latin, it was read aloud in the churches in French and English translation. As we compare the Soweto uprising of 16 June 1976 with the Magna Carta of 15 June 1215 it becomes clear that while languages (Latin, Afrikaans, English, Zulu) need to be learned, language itself is not the subject which will help us compare them. What has been lost in each is the vernacular discourse of the commons.

Of course the Structural Adjustment Programs of the World Bank and the IMF destroy the actual commons of intelligence, water, air and fire. The destruction of the discourse of the commons, on the other hand, is left to Lord Turn About and his sychophants, Mr Two Tongue and Mr Any Thing.

That English has been the language for the consolidation of the neo-liberal global order is known. That counter-discourses of insurgent knowledge can be nevertheless formulated in English is also known.

What Alamin Mazrui has pointed out is that this can occur only in conditions of collective struggle and mass movement. The World Bank has provided figures indicating that the majority of students in African universities have been drawn from the ranks of the peasantry, the working class and petty traders. But the families of many of these students do not have the means to bear the rising cost of university education imposed by IMF's so-called cost-sharing formula.

Many of the poor have chosen to impoverish themselves even further by selling part of their subsistence plots or livestock, for example--than see their children locked out of the Academy.

A traditional commons of the sort that inspired Biko and Mandela and to which Welkom, the cabbie, returns, has been exchanged by these families for the university and its promise of "the cultural treasures of mankind."

The OED gives us examples of the use of the word "bursaries" from Canada, a 1907 English statute, and from 18th century Scottish practices all denoting free education, providing semantic agreement with Piers the Ploughman's notion that human intelligence cannot be bought and sold but must be shared on earth in common.

As for the 'promise of freedom and its practice,' the title of the conference in Wits, I'd conclude that before getting a new 21st century Magna Carta we should get the old one back, now with chiminage, widow's estovers, rule of law, jury, no torture, habeas corpus, the whole hog.

By PETER LINEBAUGH posted 17 June o4

Peter Linebaugh teaches history at the University of Toledo. He is the author of two of CounterPunch's favorite books, The London Hanged and (with Marcus Rediker) The Many-Headed Hydra: the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic. He can be reached at: plineba@yahoo.com

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