The recent kind offer from those charmers at the English Defence League to help the British Police crack students’ skulls/kettle pensioners/create more activists will probably be turned down. The Police have a monopoly on the use of “legitimate” (sic) force, and want to keep it.
What a sad spectacle the EDL make of themselves by even dreaming that they will get the approval they so obviously crave from the Big Father Figure. In Hegel’s dialectic of the master and slave, this is what the master has that the slave craves – the ability to recognise. Without that, the slave perceives themselves as nothing…. (Kojeve)
It reminds me of something Hunter S. Thompson wrote in his book about the Hell’s Angels
The Angels, like all other motorcycle outlaws, are rigidly anti-Communist. Their political views are limited to the same kind of retrograde patriotism that motivates the John Birch Society, the Ku Klux Klan and the American Nazi Party. They are blind to the irony of their role… knight errants of a faith from which they have already been excommunicated. The Angels will be among the first to be locked up or croaked if the politicians they think they agree with ever come to power.
And
The highlight of the Press conference was the reading, by Barger, of a telegram he had already sent to His Excellency, the President of the United States:
PRESIDENT LYNDON B. JOHNSON
1600 Penn Ave.
Washington D.C.Dear Mr President:
On behalf of myself and my associates I volunteer a group of loyal americans for behind the lines duty in Viet Nam. We feel that a crack group of trained gorillas [sic] would demoralize the Viet Cong and advance the cause of freedom. We are available for training and duty immediately.Sincerely
RALPH BARGER JR
Oakland, California
President of Hell’s Angels.
Thompson drily continues “For reasons never divulged, Mr Johnson was slow to capitalize on Barger’s offer, and the Angels never went to Vietnam.” (page 265)
Kudos to the late Allen Ginsberg for the brilliant and perceptive speech (15 November 1965)
(thanks to George for the loan of a copy of t’book).
