TO ADD to the drama surrounding the visit of the Pope – who set the scene with his, and his associates’ attacks on aggressive secularists and atheists who have apparently overrun the UK – it was the ‘old enemy’, since the time of the crusades at least, fellow believers, Muslim street cleaners, who took the strain and were picked up by armed police, accused of a terrorist plot, and imprisoned for 48 hours without charge, without even a shred of evidence against them, except for allegedly overheard remarks in a workers’ canteen.
This was obviously the best that could be done under the circumstances, since the arrest of a group of ‘aggressive British atheists’ for plotting to assassinate the Pope would have had too much of a Monty Python touch about it.
Nevertheless, there are plenty of Loyalists about who make all kinds of remarks about what should be done to Popes, and yet they were not interfered with in any way, out of political consideration for the situation in the north of Ireland, no doubt.
It fell to Muslim street cleaners to be the fall guy for the British capitalist state’s dramatics.
So, it was on the basis of an overheard fraction of a remark, or remarks, or joke, that armed police were dispatched to the Westminster City Council canteen to arrest and drag off five cleaners to Paddington Green police station for interrogation by the anti-terror squad.
That this was a matter that should and could have been cleared up in ten minutes is obvious, it was however dragged out for days, with anti-Muslim feeling being built up all the time, and London Muslims beginning to feel that they were being made scapegoats.
The whole drama proves that any ordinary person can be deprived of his liberty on the basis of overheard opinions or even jokes that the state does not find to its liking.
It also suggests that such an event can be dragged out over days when it suits the authorities to wrack up tensions, to suggest that the Pope could be in danger, when the reality is that it is the British people and its liberties that are in danger from the Pope, as his speech at the Westminster Hall made clear.
He said of Thomas Moore that ‘he followed his conscience, even at the cost of displeasing the sovereign whose “good servant” he was, because he chose to serve God first.’
Here the ‘Holy Father’ confuses ‘god’ with the Roman Catholic Church, meaning that he who does not put the Roman Church ‘first’, including the supporters of Henry VIII cannot be serving ‘god’.
Likewise, the Holy Father considers that Catholics owe their allegiance to Rome and not to the British parliament when he opposes Catholics having to obey Equality Laws, which he plainly sees are the work of the devil.
Even in the 21st century, the Catholic Church cannot get rid of the smoke of the ‘Holy Inquisition’.
There are some who say that they are mystified why the bourgeois media are hysterically seeking to whip up support for the medievalism of the Roman Catholic Church and the papacy.
The reason is obvious. Immediately ahead in Britain is a historic struggle to decide which class is going to pay for the capitalist crisis, the decrepit, bankrupt and historically outmoded capitalist class or the working class.
The historic weakness of the British ruling class, demands reinforcement by Catholic absolutism. This is why they are making such a fuss over its counter-revolutionary leader.
However, the Pope cannot save British capitalism or capitalism anywhere, since the whole historic process is preparing the working class to thrust it into the dustbin of history with all of its supporters.
