For those who say well they were sex offenders, first think of all those falsely accused and dealt with in the section which follows and then reflect on these words:

First they came for the Socialists, and I did not speak out - Because I was not a Socialist.
Then they came for the Trade Unionists, and I did not speak out -Because I was not a Trade Unionist.
Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out - Because I was not a Jew.
Then they came for me -and there was no one left to speak for me.

Attributed to pastor Martin Niemoller (1892-1984) about the cowardice of German intellectuals following the Nazis' rise to power and the subsequent purging of their chosen targets, group after group.

Cruel and unusual punishment is forbidden under articles of the UN human rights and other conventions.

Parents

Ironically both ordinary parents as well as sex offenders who have served their sentences are suffering cruel and unusual punishment. The parents can experience 'punishment without crime', harassment from social workers to the point where they are driven to mental breakdown or flight and the cruel punishment of the seizure and forcible adoption of their children.

Sex offenders One of the most frightening new UK developments is the increase in powers being given to police men and women to grill sex offenders who have served their sentences. The techniques are so harsh as to amount to degrading and inhuman treatment and it is not uncommon to hear about uneducated police grilling individuals of high intellectual ability. This is very similar to what was experienced in Nazi Germany and in the former USSR. As with parents under threat the mantra used is 'child protection'.

Discussion related to cruel and unusual punishment

The background to the following fascinating exchange is that Tom O'Carroll, infamous for his views on adult attraction to minors, and also imprisoned for them, had just described his first home visit by two police officers acting under a new device, chillingly named ARMS (Active Risk Management System). Interested readers can see his account of his ordeal at https://tomocarroll.wordpress.com, a blog that surely helps maintain police interest in him.

Our editor responded to him, acknowledging the contribution his ordeal had made to the creation of 'Rallying point'.

This was his reply:

Rallying point - a point or principle on which scattered or opposing groups can come together.

Love the teddy bear picture, and the idea of rallying on a principle.

Have to say, though, that I am uneasy over a single principle if that principle is anti-statism. There is much injustice, for sure, and unjust outcomes should be fought. But children are murdered at the rate of around one every 10 days in the UK at the hands of their parents, sometimes following unspeakable neglect and cruelty. The state cannot and should not ignore that.

Tom

(Tom may not be aware that his figure for a child killed every 10 days by a parent includes those killed by foster parents - that is, while in the care of the state.)

Editor

This was little short of astonishing. Probably the most publicly reviled published writer in the West, with the recklessness, or courage, to write about ideas that invite both public hatred and official revenge (and by the way held in high regard by a few scholars), formerly imprisoned for his thoughts and actions, is here supporting the State in their rights over parents. Comments anyone?

The editor decided to turn to another brilliant thinker for a reply.

This is Ben Capel replying to Tom.

It's evident that Tom's humanity and compassion simply won't permit him to blind and deafen himself to the agony of severely mistreated children. But I would question whether his faith that the State can be trusted to protect them is as sound as his empathy and kindness, neither of which is in question.

I don't want to sound patronising; I deeply admire this man and I'm inspired by his unwavering courage and humour in the midst of murderous popular hatred and malignant official fear-mongering. I don't have a scrap of his bravery, but when I read him he makes me feel braver, more able to articulate my dissent. That's quite an accolade - I read a lot, but very few writers have a similar effect on me.

I am instinctively anti-State; I consider the State a barely tolerable evil. But I know I have some explaining to do. So here goes.

The social democratic error was to take the State at face value: 'it' was simply an instrument to be used for good or for ill. But the State was never as straightforward as that. As the great libertarian historian, E.P. Thompson, frequently noted, we have a State-within-the State, a Secret State, a Deep State or Security State, that is accountable to absolutely no democratic control. Now run by unelected senior civil servants (as it always was) and private security contractors (which is relatively recent, historically), it is the veiled power which ensures that, whichever way you vote, the Government always gets in.

The State is neither rational nor accountable, nor is it transparent. It represents what the great French radical Jacques Ranciere has described as 'the police order': it endeavours to regulate and police what may be perceived, what must never be perceived (by the lower orders, at least), what you can say and what you can't. And it's aided and abetted by what another great French intellectual, Louis Althusser, would immediately recognise as an Ideological State Apparatus: our so-called 'free press', whose function has become that of reiterating ideologically dominant narratives and ignoring or caricaturing dissent.

I know this is becoming a theme tune of mine, but I need to return to it here: the role and power of what Jacques Lacan called 'the University Discourse'. This superficially appears to be concerned with the generation and dissemination of discovery, of knowledge. But appearances are never the whole story: what the University Discourse conceals (just think of all those statisticians and forensic psychologists who contribute to the National Offender Management Service) is the Master who is calling the shots (and financing the 'research' projects).

Unlike Foucault's discourse theory, Lacan's much more radical discourse theory takes account of the unconscious: those forensic psychologists and statisticians are responding to requests put to them by the police and the criminal justice system. In other words, they are technicians, utterly complicit with the dominant ideology they serve. The true intellectual, on the other hand, refuses to accept the definitions of problems posed and formulated by our unelected Masters (ACPO members, security officials, and, increasingly unelected NGOs), reserving the right to formulate their own sense of what is problematical. The Master functions as the technicians' unconscious determinant: "I'm only furthering knowledge" should include the unconscious (or at least veiled) determinant 'at the behest of ACPO/NOMS, etc').

Tom falls firmly into the category of radical intellectual. He is no technician, no sock-puppet of the University Discourse. Nevertheless, the State he places so much faith in is deeply irrational, frighteningly over-powerful and incorrigibly subject to mission creep: create a new state agency (think of MAPPA) and its primary purpose immediately becomes not only to go on surviving, but to keep on growing, appropriating more powers to itself as it does so and fomenting more public fears to justify its expansion. This is an evil monstrosity, not enlightened progressiveness.

The existing State, I would argue, does exactly what thinkers such as Slavoj Zizek and Alain Badiou have argued: it subdues, obfuscates and buries the truth in the name of political expediency and 'what works' (in the service of the dominant ideological order, of course. It cultivates the fiction that parental and child interests are antagonistic or opposed, whereas for the vast majority of people they coincide, and it creates biopolitical monsters (paedos, terrorists) to justify the diversion of public monies into useless (and thoroughly reactionary) white elephants like MAPPA.

An anti-Statist rallying point has never been more needed. Sorry Tom; I love you but I disagree with you on this. And your benevolence toward those intimidating police bullies who invade your privacy every three months utterly astounds me.

Tom O'Carroll responds

I agree with every word of Ben's anti-statist analysis; but it doesn't answer the point I raised. How would Ben address real child abuse in the absence of state intervention? It's not that I have great faith in the state; it's just that I am struggling to see a viable alternative.

Tom

More from Ben Capel

Tom asks an exceptionally important question; I don't dispute that. It's just that I believe that the State's army of petty officials masquerading as 'child safeguarding experts' isn't fit for purpose.

Take the eager adoption of 'emotional abuse' by social workers recently; it enables them to interpret just about anything a parent does or doesn't do as abusive, expanding the State's punitive, family-destroying practises ever further. This latest initiative was driven not by rational debate but by aggressive lobbying from vested interests in the burgeoning child protection industry. That and, of course, the propensity of weak, unpopular politicians to jump on any passing moral bandwagon in desperate attempts to look good to an alienated and pissed-off electorate.

We should remember that the Nazis' dreaded SS were called the Schutzstaffel, the Protection Squad. The SS were protecting Hitler of course, but official State protectors are protecting the people from one another, despite the fact that they never asked for such protection. The ideology of official protection is and always has been pernicious, because it sets up obstacles to the spontaneous cultivation of informal networks of trust and solidarity between people, upon which true child welfare depends, and replaces them with mutual suspicion and fear, which is catastrophic for good child rearing (and for children: people of my generation had the precious freedom to roam far and wide when we were children; it brought us into contact with risk and danger, for sure, which we learnt to manage or avoid, but it also brought us into contact with excitement and adventure, which helped us grow).

Official safeguarding has never been a response to popular demand or spontaneous public sentiment; it's always been imposed from above by those who see themselves as our 'authorities'. I'd have less objection to the frighteningly high level of coercive and destructive power invested in social workers and cops - petty officials - if their education and training weren't so appallingly insufficient for the work they undertake on behalf of the State (as I'm sure Tom would agree, the State is not identical with the people, nor is it their servant, as mendacious official ideology implies).

Social workers and cops have power without ability; unlike psychoanalysts, who don't have the power to destroy families and incarcerate people, they require no exploration and testing of their own psychopathology to emerge as 'qualified professionals'. Self-idealising fictions will do (I want to help people).

The reason why psychoanalysts must undergo a lengthy personal analysis is precisely to protect their patients - the public - from their own idiosyncratic psychopathology; if I am driven to annihilate 'sex offenders', the chances are that I am either repressing sexual feelings which are considered publicly offensive or that I am 'getting off', obscenely and deviously, on giving vent to limitless reserves of sadistic enjoyment thanks to a socially sanctioned scapegoat.

These tendencies would debar candidates from practise as a psychoanalyst. They appear to be compulsory for social workers and cops.

Until the State is brought under far more rigorous democratic accountability, until cops and social workers are required to have deep and enduring insight into their own irrational drives and sadistic tendencies (which most people have), until secret tribunals which pre-judge citizens (e.g., secretly arranged pre-conference meetings of assorted professionals to share their views/prejudices/speculations/innuendo with one another ahead of child protection conferences involving accused parents, or MAPPA meetings which exclude those who they are judging and destroying) are abolished, until defenceless citizens are accorded full legal representation against the might of the State in all of its proceedings and 'meetings' (including those appallingly sexually abusive meetings Tom describes in his article on ARMS), the State should withdraw and leave its citizens unmolested.

We need a movement to regain the ground taken from us by the State - the ground of the informal, the spontaneous, the private and the 'unauthorised'. The Rallying Point could become the seed of that movement.

Tom O'Caroll responds

"Until the State is brought under far more rigorous democratic accountability [etc. etc.], the State should withdraw and leave its citizens unmolested."

But would they be happily 'unmolested'? Or would life be nasty, brutish and short? The Hobbesian nightmare of anarchy was no mere imagining, but strongly grounded in man's truly savage history.

The challenge now is to keep the baby (the rule of law as opposed to the bloody law of the jungle) while ameliorating the worst excesses of democratic states that are usually crass and clumsy rather than malevolent.

Human rights law, a recent development, is a beginning.

As for the ignorance of police, social workers, etc., it is easy to reject the state that employs them. But then what? Ben talks about the 'spontaneous cultivation of informal networks of trust and solidarity between people'.

Sure. Like a modern love relationship, say, which is a spontaneous coming together of two people who love each other and set up house together. But what happens if they fall out? Who gets the kids? What if one partner is murderously jealous after a betrayal? In the absence of law, it's every man (and woman and child) for themselves and devil take the weakest.

In the hippy seventies there were some wonderful spontaneous communes. There was also the Manson family and the Jonestown massacre. Admittedly, there was also Waco a little later (overwheening state again); but Waco had been no utopia either.

Our best hope, I suggest, is to build on what we had got, not hope to start from Year Zero. The answer to ignorant cops and social workers is to press for a universal philosophical education prior to vocational training for any career.

The elite have long understood the value of 'a liberal education'. It's not an impossible push to make such education more liberal (encouraging independent thought) and more universal. Ben and I, and many readers here, I'm sure, are already beneficiaries. It can go further.

Ben, you mention 'democratic accountability'. Such accountability is critically dependent on education, which the state itself has gradually got better at delivering in recent centuries. Presumably you would not want all the schools and universities to survive only by courtesy of sponsorship from McDonalds and the like?

Ben Capel resonds

I hope Tom will agree with me that there's a difference between human rights law and human rights ideology. Laws made in the image of the latter are probably not worth having - it was the West's conception of human rights that authorised its savage military destruction of entire states in recent years. Just think of Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, Congo, Mali, Sudan, the Central African Republic, Libya, Iraq - the list goes on, all of them justified under the banner of 'humanitarian intervention to prevent human rights abuses'. These blood-soaked adventures have made the world a vastly more dangerous and violent place, allowing death-worshipping, enraged religious gangsters to fill the resulting political vacuum.

My point about the insufficiency of the training of over-powerful State petty officials was not so much to do with education, although their relatively low level of attainment says rather a lot about their intellectual preparedness for the roles they will adopt upon 'qualification'. I fully agree with Tom that learning the arts of critical thinking is absolutely vital, a minimum-necessary precondition for all vocational training. But does this come from schoolmasters?

My working class grandparents, uncles and aunts would probably disagree: they didn't get secondary - or higher-level education, because it was totally unaffordable for them, apart from a fortunate few who won scholarships. Critical thinking comes from the struggle against injustice and inequality, from an intelligent solidarity of the oppressed and excluded - the kind of solidarity the Rallying Point initiative is attempting to encourage.

I'm far more concerned with the fact that these petty officials, who can send people to prison and dismember their families, are not required in any shape or form to examine their own irrationalities, by which I mean the pathological sources of their passions and sadistic hatreds. The latter can easily be obfuscated as 'professional safeguarding' under a politically-orchestrated 'common sense', but this totally obscures the material, political conditions under which some 'professional safeguarding' preoccupations are favoured, while others are ignored.

It seems to me that revolutionary change in the structure and undertakings of the State is required, not piecemeal reform, which will always result in the corruption and domestication of anything too threatening to the oligarchies who rule us under parliamentary democracy (just read the late Ralph Miliband's brilliant book, The State in Capitalist Society - I doubt if either of his sons are capable of mounting a similarly powerful argument).

The Hobbesian ideology, brilliant though it was for its time, suits the purposes of our misanthropic, mistrustful political elite perfectly. It's no longer a thesis for enlightened reform; aren't the people who dispose of the festering contents of our filthy bins, who damage their bones by operating pneumatic drills, who swiftly clean opulent hotel rooms for a clientele they will remain invisible to and unthanked for, who wash the windows of the plundering and psychopathic major banks before daybreak every day, worthy of some credit for their lived, intelligent opposition (or indifference) to the dominant, State-regulated parliamentary ideology? An ideology, of course, that condemns them to a life of thankless drudgery, poverty and toil.

One's position in the social edifice, I'm arguing, which includes the position of those who are excluded from any meaningful and dignified place in the existing State-regulated edifice, is vastly more important in fostering critical thinking than learning about Rousseau or Voltaire, Stuart Mills or Marx. Those who choose to endorse the existing State-regulated social order by becoming cops, social workers and probation officers, not infrequently at odds with the values and ethics of their proletarian origins, are worthy of contempt, or at least exceptionally robust scepticism, not sympathy and veneration for the 'difficult jobs' they do.

Enlightened political action, at least as defined by the State and its 'free' media marionettes, consists in helping the police root out a handful of child abusers, paedos, suspected terrorists. It amounts to a kind of universalised grassing to the authorities about anyone assumed or suspected to be 'dodgy', according to the ideological suppositions of the dominant social order. It's ugly, paranoid and nasty.

But this is a pale shadow of true emancipatory political action and true public freedom, which is centrally concerned with acting in common with the excluded, the speciously demonised and the irrationally punished.

This calls not for a continuation of what we have, but for a new form of political action, one that is not based on the viciously divisive politics of identity (Muslim/Christian, Hetero/Homo, Black/White, Female/Male, and so on). The new politics we humane libertarians are charged with helping to reinvent, in keeping with a centuries-long tradition of dissent and emancipatory action (so it doesn't have to come from some fictitious Utopian nowhere of Ground Zero), is not based on particular 'identities', which will always divide and sow resentful paranoia, but on what Alain Badiou has called an 'egalitarian future where humanity finally takes charge of its own destiny'.

Tom and I, I believe, are brothers in solidarity when it comes to the aims and goals of a good society; he has more trust in the State than I have, but perhaps we might find some common ground if we agreed that that State would have to undergo a radical, democratic reform to become genuinely protective of seriously endangered children, as opposed to the massive job-preserving market for happily ignorant petty officials it currently is.

The latter, I fear, are primarily motivated in their 'risk assessments' to preserve their own hides from media criticism. Zero risk spells tyranny. When it comes child safeguarding, which over the last few decades has become the cornerstone of Western law, the State is not fit for purpose, at least as far as the powerless, voiceless and excluded are concerned.

Come to the Rallying Point, Tom; our differences are trivial in comparison to the gigantic errors and dogma-driven priorities of what the anthropologist Roger Lancaster rightly calls 'the Punitive State'.

This brilliant debate closes on a conciliatory note

I agree absolutely, Ben, although I would protest it's not that I trust the state too much - I don't trust the state at all - but that we should not get too carried away with idealised alternatives either.

As a rallying point between us, I think we can agree that the untrustworthy state can and should be challenged in the all-too-many cases where its impact is clearly oppressive and unjust. Your work and Brian's, via Inquisition 21, makes a great contribution to this task. The point I raised is a reasonable one for academic debate, I think, but I have no wish to be divisive.

Editor. Perhaps readers could give an opinion on both the above and if they believe that the ideas of Noam Chomsky support the anti-statist view.

You might also like to read Rhinakerous and Hippocriticus

The American gulag is here.

Return to index.