{"id":400006,"date":"2025-09-05T12:50:10","date_gmt":"2025-09-05T12:50:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/400006\/"},"modified":"2025-09-05T12:50:10","modified_gmt":"2025-09-05T12:50:10","slug":"in-britain-criminalizing-dissent-is-an-imperial-strategy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/400006\/","title":{"rendered":"In Britain, Criminalizing Dissent Is an Imperial Strategy"},"content":{"rendered":"

In August, over five hundred people were arrested at demonstrations opposing the British government\u2019s recent decision to list direct-action group Palestine Action as a \u201cterrorist organization.\u201d Peaceful protesters mostly aged in their sixties and seventies<\/a> were dragged away from the square in front of the Houses of Parliament for the alleged crime of holding placards expressing support for the organization, which was banned even despite its nonviolent tactics.<\/p>\n

These unprecedented arrests have been called a \u201cgross abuse<\/a> of state power,\u201d as participants highlight the overreach through which counterterrorism laws purportedly intended to protect British citizens are instead used to intimidate and jail them. But the arrests are just how imperialist state power is supposed to operate. \u201cPeople are shocked [by the arrests], but it\u2019s exactly how the law is meant to be used,\u201d a spokesperson for campaign group Defend Our Juries (DOJ), which organized the protests, told Jacobin.<\/p>\n

The Palestine Action arrests are just part of a broader strategy. Political diaspora communities and left-wing political movements in the UK face criminalization under what Amnesty International has called one of the world\u2019s toughest<\/a> anti-terrorism regimes, often due to influence by authoritarian foreign powers. For example, the UK\u2019s highly criminalized Kurdish community experiences repeated detention<\/a> and interrogation without the right to silence, terror sentences<\/a> for holding Kurdish flags, and a recent raid<\/a> on the London Kurdish Community Centre that culminated in the arrest of six community organizers on similarly trumped-up terrorism charges.<\/p>\n

Draconian measures deployed against organizations and movements that have never posed a threat to UK citizens are a feature, not a bug, of the British government\u2019s neo-imperialist strategy.<\/p>\n

Israel and Turkey have long been the UK and United States\u2019 key intelligence and security partners in the Middle East, a role they exploit to safeguard their respective occupations of Palestine and Kurdistan. To understand how these geostrategic relationships relate to domestic repression in the UK, counterterrorism must be seen as an extension of earlier colonial approaches, feeding into Cold War strategies directed against communist and Third World movements. Drawing on racist notions of a civilizational threat to the West, imperial states have entrenched Western power through military intervention and intensive intelligence operations.<\/p>\n

Throughout the Cold War, Israel worked hard to represent \u201cterrorism\u201d as irrational and illegitimate \u2014 a projectspearheaded by Benjamin Netanyahu<\/a> himself at the Jonathan Institute, which he founded, naming it after his brother who died during a raid to recover hostages from a hijacking by Palestinian insurgents. The Jonathan Institute held two major conferences on the topic of \u201cinternational terrorism\u201d in Jerusalem and Washington in the 1970s and \u201980s. Israeli politicians, military analysts, and academics represented the Palestinian liberation struggle as uniquely violent and dangerous, erasing the political reasoning behind armed struggle to demonize Palestinian political actors as inherently barbaric.<\/p>\n

As Lisa Stampnitzky writes in Disciplining Terror, terrorism was no longer spoken about as criminality but rather as total irrationality. In an increasingly paranoid security landscape, political violence by anti-colonial nonstate actors came to be seen as an existential threat. By the end of the Cold War, these narratives had been fully embraced by US neoconservatives \u2014 and would reach their full power following the 9\/11 attacks and the United States\u2019 unilateral declaration of a global \u201cwar on terror.\u201d Endlessly regurgitated by the ever-growing field of \u201csecurity experts,\u201d many of whom are employed by arms companies, the war on terror rhetoric also fueled enormous and lucrative growth in military and surveillance technologies.<\/p>\n

Israel has benefited from this reconceptualization of \u201cterror\u201d to quell global opposition to its genocide. \u201cThat \u2018t\u2019 word is scary. People think of the 7\/7 [2005] London bombings or 9\/11. But that\u2019s not what Palestine Action ever was,\u201d the DOJ spokesperson says.<\/p>\n

Turkey has also played a crucial role in this process. Notably Ankara has worked hard to expand the war on terror beyond an Islamist threat, positioning regional liberation movements as globally significant \u201cterrorist\u201d actors. Turkey joined NATO in 1952 and has played a linchpin role in entrenching US power across the region ever since, acting initially as a counterweight to Soviet power and subsequently as an enforcer of US interests.<\/p>\n

Throughout the Cold War, the United States invested heavily in developing a secretive CIA-led counterinsurgency project in Turkey, specifically targeting left-wing and Kurdish movements. US military support for Turkey has grown year over year since the 1960s. To this day, Turkey commands the second-largest armed forces in NATO and hosts crucial US nuclear assets. Still, the relationship between Turkey and the United States involves more friction than Israeli-US collaboration, and Turkish politicians have spent several decades lobbying for international recognition of Kurdish insurgency as a global terrorist threat. This rhetoric also intensified<\/a> following 9\/11, with Turkish politicians castigating Western powers for not taking Kurdish \u201cterrorism\u201d seriously enough and arguing that the war on terror can only succeed if it combats political violence everywhere \u2014 not just that which poses a direct threat to the US.<\/p>\n

The result is a political stalemate. The United States, UK, and other Western governments frequently treat support for Palestinian or Kurdish liberation as illegitimate violence outside acceptable political norms, thus shutting down channels for peaceful, political, and nonviolent opposition. Both Turkey and Israel have used the counterterrorism infrastructure of the post-9\/11 era to entrench their own positions as part of this supposed \u201cWest\u201d threatened by \u201cterrorist\u201d violence. Further, they have strengthened their material relationships with Western allies, deepening intelligence collaboration and receiving increasing military aid from the US while condemning whole populations to permanent criminalization and occupation.<\/p>\n

The UK\u2019s Terrorism Act was passed in 2000 \u2014 already suggesting this power cannot be viewed as a knee-jerk response to post-9\/11 counterterror hysteria. \u201cThe Terrorism Act is not fit for purpose,\u201d the DOJ spokesperson says. \u201cIt\u2019s meant to protect the public from acts of terrorism, but now it\u2019s protecting corporate and foreign state interests.\u201d<\/p>\n

While the original act primarily proscribed Islamist groups, it also included the Kurdistan Workers\u2019 Party (PKK), alongside other secular and leftist groups engaged in regional and national liberation struggles, largely based on reasoning derived from secret intelligence. From the outset, laws marketed to the UK public as guaranteeing its \u201csafety\u201d against terrorist attacks have been used to target other secular, national-liberation struggles \u2014 rather as the Palestine Action listing was parceled up with the listing of a neo-Nazi fringe organization called \u201cManiacs Murder Cult\u201d to help push the decision through Parliament.<\/p>\n

This has sometimes left the Kurdish movement in a farcical position. For one, the UK admits it does not consider the PKK a threat to British national security. \u201cUK security data shows that even PKK sympathizers in the UK have not engaged in violence there, yet political interests override legal realities,\u201d says Seyid Pirsus of the UK Kurdish Assembly\u2019s Diplomacy Committee. More than that, the PKK itself partnered with the United States to rescue the Yezidi religious minority from genocide at the hands of ISIS, while the PKK\u2019s Syrian affiliates remain allied with the US and UK as part of their ongoing campaign against the Islamic State. UK prosecutors have repeatedly attempted to bring cases against UK nationals joining the fight against ISIS. A judge overseeing one such case<\/a> stated he was \u201cuneasy\u201d over the prosecution of so-called \u201cacts of terrorism . . . carried out with the support of the RAF [Royal Air Force].\u201d In this case, the Terrorism Act was seemingly used directly against UK security interests.<\/p>\n

\u201cOn the morning of the raid, myself and another one of the now defendants had been invited to meet the minister for the Middle East at the Foreign Office for a commemoration of Yezidi women murdered by ISIS,\u201d one defendant in the ongoing terror case against Kurdish community organizers in London tells Jacobin:<\/p>\n

\n

Instead, that same morning, I was in solitary confinement, being called a \u2018terrorist\u2019 by a group of police interrogators. [Kurds] are allies when we enhance their image of defending human rights and \u2018terrorists\u2019 when [the UK\u2019s] security partnership with Turkey is becoming more lucrative.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

These apparent contradictions make sense once the act is understood not as a neutral piece of legislation open to potential abuse but rather as a sledgehammer in the UK\u2019s neo-imperialist toolkit. It furnishes the UK with a uniquely wide-ranging set of powers used not only to fragment domestic opposition and international solidarity but also to strengthen relationships with its authoritarian partners in the Middle East, while also gathering intelligence on their behalf.<\/p>\n

Even as the courts fill up, UK police tactics long deployed against the Kurdish community are used to further repression and surveillance without even needing to proffer a justification for arrest. This includes the \u201cSchedule 7<\/a>\u201d prerogative, which grants police and border officers the power to interrogate individuals without the right to silence and force access to their phones on pain of a jail sentence. This can be coupled with other<\/a> repressive measures including stripping individuals of their bank accounts or the imposition of European travel bans on UK nationals to create a broader climate of suppression and surveillance.<\/p>\n

\u201cDemanding Kurdish linguistic and cultural rights is met with state violence, both in Turkey and in the UK,\u201d the Kurdish defendant says. \u201cGrowing up in London, I saw my community being consistently targeted with raids, arrests, and surveillance, echoing the ways in which the Turkish state has criminalized Kurds for over a century.\u201d<\/p>\n

In the immediate future, these trends look set to continue. Even as the UK doubles down on its support for Israel, Tel Aviv has threatened to withdraw<\/a> its intelligence cooperation with the UK over the possibility of British recognition for the Palestinian state. It\u2019s a further reminder of how the West\u2019s authoritarian regional partners advance their own agendas under cover of the UK\u2019s neo-imperialist interests.<\/p>\n

The current Turkish government has publicly trumpeted its opposition to Israel\u2019s genocide in Gaza but is thus also seeking ways to reassert its indispensability to Western interests. In particular, like Tel Aviv, Ankara presents itself as a key Western partner against Iran. A general reduction<\/a> in the United States\u2019 boots-on-the-ground presence in the Middle East will mean increased reliance on Turkey and Israel to further the West\u2019s agenda, in turn enabling both states to demand further concessions from the UK and the US.<\/p>\n

Arms companies can profit at both ends of this relationship, perpetuating the Middle East\u2019s forever wars to sell more weapons, while pushing for repression of the protests that have been particularly effective in targeting the military-industrial complex\u2019s UK assets. The Palestine Action proscription came after protesters successfully targeted RAF planes with graffiti. The grubby revelation<\/a> that a British Army chief successfully lobbied for the group to be proscribed on behalf of his new employers in the US defense industry should come as no surprise.<\/p>\n

Similarly, UK Kurdish activists believe their detention and repression often track to freshly inked arms deals between Westminster and Ankara. \u201cWhenever the UK has expectations from Turkey, pressure on the Kurdish diaspora tends to increase, in a pattern repeated over forty years,\u201d Pirsus says, pointing to a meeting between UK foreign secretary David Lammy and his Turkish counterpart in the run-up to the UK Kurdish Community Centre raid. The two NATO partners have just signed a fresh, multibillion-pound fighter plane deal<\/a>, suggesting more repression lies ahead.<\/p>\n

These complex, converging agendas mean well-intentioned moral appeals over the apparent abuse of the UK\u2019s counterterror laws are unlikely to stem the tide. Certainly the Palestine Action proscription and broader anti-genocide movement has catalyzed important coordination between religious, trade union, and other political movements, but this coordination will itself inspire further-reaching repression. \u201cIt\u2019s not going to end with Palestine Action,\u201d the DOJ spokesperson suggests. \u201cIf [far-right UK political party] Reform comes into power, we will see Greenpeace proscribed [and] trade unions proscribed.\u201d<\/p>\n

The Parliament Square protesters were dragged away under the gaze of a statue of Nelson Mandela, who was slandered as a terrorist by a series of British governments before he was elevated to his latter-day status as a human rights icon. The sculpture offers a physical reminder that the \u201cterror\u201d label is never really about protecting the British public \u2014 but always deployed to reinforce the continued imperialist commitments of UK foreign policy.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"In August, over five hundred people were arrested at demonstrations opposing the British government\u2019s recent decision to list…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":400007,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5018,3,4],"tags":[748,393,4884,1144,712,16,15,1764],"class_list":{"0":"post-400006","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-britain","8":"category-uk","9":"category-united-kingdom","10":"tag-britain","11":"tag-england","12":"tag-great-britain","13":"tag-northern-ireland","14":"tag-scotland","15":"tag-uk","16":"tag-united-kingdom","17":"tag-wales"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/115151780237364702","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/400006","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=400006"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/400006\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/400007"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=400006"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=400006"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=400006"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}