Gangsters' hold on Sydney is safe

Following the recent riots along Sydney's beaches, Ms Miranda Devine says that the Gangsters' hold on Sydney is safe. She writes that:

FORGET Clover Moore as the Grinch of Sydney's Christmas. The "Lions of Lebanon" with their Glock pistols and Molotov cocktails have put her to shame this holy season. While the NSW police lock down entire beachfront suburbs, instruct stores to stop selling baseball bats, and apply the full force of the law to pasty-faced nerds with a taste for Nazi literature, they continue to cower from the real hardmen, the Lebanese-Australian criminal gangs of Sydney's south-west who have ruled the roost in this city for at least a decade and now number in their thousands.

And she concludes that:

That Iemma's electorate is at war with former premier Bob Carr's former electorate of Maroubra is a handy synchronicity. It highlights the ALP's long-term culpability in creating the monster that is plaguing the city, its history of ethnic branch-stacking and "whatever it takes" tactics to shore up support in the heartland electorates of the south-west, its policy of spin and cover-up which is at last coming undone.

As one passenger last week told taxi driver Adrian Neylan, who has chronicled the violence on his weblog, "the gangs have won".

Indeed they have, but the recent display of official cowardice in the face of the criminal gangs of Sydney's south-west is just a taste of the way Sydney has been run for a decade.

Emphasis Mine

O how the past is quickly forgotten:

• The Vietnamese crime gangs of Cabramatta who were the problem in the 1980's.
• The Bikies since the 1960's
• The Mafia from around Griffith during the 1970's
• The Irish gangs since 1788
• The Chinese Triads since the 1850's
• And there are probably some that I have overlooked

One thing you can say about crime is that it is multicultural. At the same time, it is a recurring theme throughout Capitalist and other societies.

What intrigued me about Ms Devine's comments were the similarity to the idea put forward in Washington Post columnist Anne Applebaum's study of the use of the criminals to maintain power:

Nevertheless, it was relatively rare for the thieves to aim their 'justice' at those running the camps. By and large they were, if not exactly loyal Soviet citizens, then at least happy to co-operate in the one task that Soviet authorities set for them: they were perfectly happy, that is, to lord it over the politicals - that group to quote [Evgeniya] Ginzburg again, 'even more despised and outcast than themselves'.

Applebaum, Anne (2004), Gulag: A History of the Soviet Camps, Penguin Books:Australia, pp.270.

This was to last until about 1947, when the wave of arrests after the end of the Second World War sent more political prisoners into the Gulag. Now the power relationship changed:

Almost as soon as they started appearing in the camps towards the end of the war, this new sort of prisoner began creating trouble for the authorities. By 1947, the professional crimminals no longer found it so easy to dominate them. Among the various national and criminal tribes who dominated camp life, a new clan appeared: the krasnye shapochki or 'red hats'. These were usually ex-soldiers or ex-partisans who had banded together to fight against the dominance of the thieves - and, by extension, against the administration that tolerated them. Such groups operated well into the next decade, despite efforts to break them apart. In the winter of 1954-5, Viktor Bulgakov, then a prisoner in Inta, a far northern mining camp in the Vorkuta region, witnessed an administrative attempt to 'break' a group of politicals by importing a contigent of sixty thieves into their camp. The thieves armed themselves, and prepared to start attacking the politicals:

They suddenly got hold of 'cold weapons' [knives], just as one would expect in that sort of situation...we learned that they had stolen the money and possessions of older man. We asked them to give the things back, but they weren't accustomed to giving things back. So at about two o'clock in the morning, just as it was turning light, we surrounded the barracks from all sides, and began attacking it. We started to beat them, and we beat them until they couldn't get up. One jumped through the window...ran to the vakhta, and collapsed on the threshold. But by the time the guards arrived, no one was there...They took the thieves out of the zone.

...

But the authorities took note. If political prisoners could band together to fight thieves, they could also band together to fight the camp administration. ....

pp. 418-9 ibid

Emphasis Mine

In Marxist theory, these criminal elements are part of the lumpenproletariat.

Roughly translated as slum workers or the mob, this term identifies the class of outcast, degenerated and submerged elements that make up a section of the population of industrial centers. It includes beggars, prostitutes, gangsters, racketeers, swindlers, petty criminals, tramps, chronic unemployed or unemployables, persons who have been cast out by industry, and all sorts of declassed, degraded or degenerated elements. In times of prolonged crisis (depression), innumerable young people also, who cannot find an opportunity to enter into the social organism as producers, are pushed into this limbo of the outcast. Here demagogues and fascists of various stripes find some area of the mass base in time of struggle and social breakdown, when the ranks of the Lumpenproletariat are enormously swelled by ruined and declassed elements from all layers of a society in decay.

Emphasis Mine

In any oppressive regime, the criminal elements are used to keep the majority of people down through fear. Witness the hysteria over crime figures. Even though we are told that the rates of crimes are decreasing, we are conditioned to become more fearful of crime.

The reason is that any oppressive system needs to keep people frightened (either of it or of external enemies). And when we are frightened, we are conditioned to run to the nanny state for safety and comfort.

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