The permanent state of emergency
Is the subject of this Law and Disorder post:
This is important. Whilst the systematic exclusion of certain persons from the legal system is never something to be taken widely, an increase in its scope is of course worrying. It represents the increasingly overt politicisation of the law, and a continued disintegration of the legal form.
Of course, when one rationally examines the situation there really is no state of emergency to speak of. One wonders just how much threat there truly is from terrorism. Even those ‘big’ attacks that do succeed in reality kill very few people. If one was to judge states of emergencies from deaths surely the most pressing state of emergency is caused by the impersonal violence of global capitalism, which kills untold numbers of people every day.
But if we have reached an ’emergency’, the one wonders when it will ever end. If this is an emergency, then for the foreseeable future we will surely be living through an emergency.