As a social phenomenon, gangsterism is not confined merely to the lower rungs of modern society. Indeed, it occupies much of the ‘high moral ground’ and has political dimensions that reach well beyond the local neighbourhood. This article aims to examine some aspects of the causes and creation of gangsterism as well as some of the responses of communities and governments to it.

Gangs have existed since earliest times in one form or another. We usually associate negative connotations with the word ‘gang’ and tend to think of troublesome and difficult young men as their members. Yet not all gangs are bad. Gangs of workers are used to construct railway lines and the ‘Guardian Angels’ gang in New York functions to help reduce crime on the Big Apple’s subways. Let’s try to make a distinction between gangs and gangsterism. Gangs are not necessarily bad but gangsterism invariably is. Depending on your politics or which newspapers you read, Robin Hood and his merry men were either gangsters or do-gooders stealing from the rich to give to the poor. We need to move beyond such simple concepts of gangs but before doing that we must examine their basic characteristics.

Sociologists portray modern gangs as the outcome of certain social circumstances such as unemployment, poverty and lack of self-esteem. They operate as mini-communities with their own hierarchies and create a sense of belonging amongst youth in particular. To solve the problem of gangs, they say, you must find solutions to the socio-economic problems of our society. If people have jobs they will not steal and they will not sell drugs. However, this argument does not explain why youth from middle and upper-class homes join gangs and commit crime. It does not explain the esteem and status given to gangs by young people who are materially well-off.

One reason given to explain this is the influence of popular ‘heroes’ within our entertainment industries. The mass media have their own values and not only reinforce accepted forms of culture but also generate sub-cultures and corresponding behaviours and attitudes. Bollywood tends to create the former and Hollywood seems to favour the latter. Western ‘heroes’ are more likely to be anti-heroes, using gratuitous violence to enforce their own versions of ‘justice’ and ‘law’ and reinforcing rampant individualism as an acceptable mode of behaviour. The debate rages about the extent of violence in the media and the relationship between it and the unhealthy behaviour of young children.

The media play a complex and ambivalent role in the characterisation and propagation of gangs. Violence sells, as the media moguls are well aware, not just in film but also increasingly in computer games. There may be no proven, identifiable causal link between violence in the media and real acts of carnage perpetrated by disaffected youth, but many people believe that there is. We witness gruesome reports of (mostly American) teenagers killing their peers - and even pre-adolescent murderers - with frightening regularity. Each time it occurs, parents, the community and the law enforcers collectively ask, "Why has this happened?" There is talk of ‘copy-cat’ killings and the twisted desire for recognition and ‘fifteen minutes of fame’. There are calls for tougher action on crime and drugs. There are demands for the return of the death penalty. There are some communities, fed up with what they see as the lack of effective action by the authorities, that take things into their own hands. An extreme form is PAGAD - South Africa’s "People Against Gangsterism and Drugs" - which is incensed and motivated not only by the inability and apparent powerlessness of the law, but also by blatant corruption found within the rank and file of the lawkeepers themselves.

The usual response of the editors of the grosser tabloids and well-permed hosts of superficial current affairs shows is to blame easily identifiable ‘ethnic gangs’. In Australia, this has taken the form of blaming Asian and Lebanese gangs. Indeed, even the former Federal Police Commissioner, Mick Palmer, has been accused of generating suspicion and stereotypes with his comments that these groups are behind Australia’s increasing crime rates. While there can be no doubt that members of such groups are heavily involved in drugs and crime, it is also obviously true that the media portrayal of such groups and gangs is often biased and unbalanced. Representations seen in the news reports are frequently a far cry from reality. We are all aware how prone the media are in manufacturing ‘news’ when it suits them. Frenzied sensationalism and oversimplification of events, aided by an increasing flurry of rapidly selected visual and sound bytes, render reportage at times almost meaningless. Fear and prejudice are thereby made substitutes for fact and information. The media have this sort of thing down to a fine art.

Specific themes and techniques are employed to create and reinforce negative images: the use of statistics to distort facts and create a sense of fear and criminality ("the figures speak for themselves", or sometimes they say what we want them to say); text carefully chosen to reflect a negative image of a particular community or group ("Lebanese" equals "Muslim"); using visual cues and symbols to play on community concerns ("a picture is worth a thousand words", especially if you can’t find anything good to say); justification of the use of racist attitudes in reportage ("our values" versus their behaviour); sensationalism and voyeurism ("It’s shocking, but let’s take another look"- or two or three).

The games played by the media are bad enough, but those played by certain governments and world powers are potentially more sinister by comparison. The "Gang of Four" ruled China with an iron communist fist, but that was acceptable, because we didn’t expect anything good from those dictators anyway, did we? But what about that gang of henchmen hanging around with that arch-villain, Saddam Hussain? We couldn’t just let him/them massacre ethnic Kurds and those Shia marsh-dwellers, let alone invade neighbouring lands that serve our collective interests by selling us their finite resources. We must not forget to plaster Bad Boy Osama Bin Laden’s photograph beside every article on terrorism, even if the photo is already ten years old because that’s the only one we have! All forms of international terrorism must be stopped at any cost, even if we have to bankroll friendly dictators and murderous regimes with illegal arms or drug smuggling! This is how we make our ‘New World Order’: with hypocrisy, lies, disinformation, betrayal and abusing ‘the Law’.

The United Nations superceded the League of Nations because it was a more effective means of allowing the richer, Western nations to dominate the rest of the world. Whatever good political motives there were seem to have taken a back seat to hegemony and cultural and economic exploitation. Along the way, institutions such as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund have been co-opted to serve the interests of the Western powers. This is not a global conspiracy theory, it is a global conspiracy pact, with parts played - or not played - by various members of the International Gang as and when required. UN peacekeepers and monitors have been strategically placed in various trouble spots to enact an agenda that appears to counter logic. Bosnians were prevented from defending themselves or procuring arms while radical Serbs were slaughtering them. Single members of the Security Council - like the tail that wags the dog - use their veto powers to prevent action and response when the world cries out for justice. Specific resolutions may be moved and adopted, but never implemented.

While some governments, such as those in Northern Ireland and Britain, target organised, paramilitiary activity as a response to what they regard as gangsterism, others are in fact the gangsters themselves. We need not look very far to compile a list of such countries from within parts of the Balkans, Central Africa, Central America, South East Asia, and so on. Yet the overt operations of the former group are often more sinister than the amateurish reactions of the latter. The UK government is currently seeking to introduce a "Terrorism Bill" into permanent legislation, the provisions of which have been attacked by groups like Amnesty International who claim that such provisions may result in gross human rights violations. In particular, AI is concerned about the following: the definition of "terrorism" and its emphasis on "serious violence against any person or property" for the purpose of advancing a "political, religious or ideological cause"; wide-ranging powers of arrest; denial of a detainee’s access to a lawyer upon arrest; denial of the right to have a lawyer present during interrogation; the maximum period of detention without charge being seven days, with an extension of up to five days being granted by a judicial authority after the initial 48 hours; the shifting of the burden of proof from the prosecution to the defence in various provisions.

Most of the organisations identified by the proposed Bill are Irish, but the UK Home Secretary, Jack Straw, wants to add another list of 21 organisations, 16 of which target Muslims, with Palestine, Kashmir and Algeria receiving particular attention. It comes as no surprise that there is no reference to right-wing Zionist or Hindu organisations, Mossad or the South Lebanese Army (SLA). These groups have been acting with impunity for many years because they serve the interests of the status quo.

Edward Said, a well-known Palestinian-born academic who has lived most of his life in the USA, is an outspoken critic of the Israeli government’s treatment of Palestinians. Last year he visited Lebanon to give two public lectures and also made a ten minute stop at its southern "security zone" recently evacuated by the Israelis after 22 years of illegal occupation. He pitched a tiny pebble into the deserted area, like others were doing in some symbolic ritual of bidding good riddance to the former occupation force. His photograph immediately appeared in Israeli and Western newspapers where he was described as a rock-throwing terrorist. As a result of this, his invitation to deliver the annual lecture (to be entitled "Freud and the Non-European") at the Freud Institute and Museum in Vienna in May 2001 was cancelled, in the words of the Institute’s chairman, because of "the political situation in the Middle East and the consequences of it." Said later read in a New York Times interview with the chairman that the reason was the photograph and that it "might offend Viennese Jewish sensitivities in the context of .....the history of Austrian anti-Semitism." Said now claims the real reason was that Zionists in both Israel and the US offered to pay for an exhibition on behalf of the Institute in Israel if his lecture tour was cancelled. The irony of all this is that Freud himself was hounded out of Vienna by the Nazis.

Meanwhile, Israel - with the full support of the US - continues to besiege and kill Palestinians mercilessly on a daily basis. In the past six weeks over 200 Palestinians have been killed and over 6,000 wounded - nearly all of them unarmed civilians. The Australian government too has come under fire for brokering a deal with the Israeli foreign ministry for SLA members and their families who fled to Israel following the Jewish state’s unilateral withdrawal from Lebanon last May. Chief amongst many abuses and atrocities committed by members of the Israeli-backed and trained SLA was the running of the notorious Khiam prison, built by the Israelis in 1987, in which 8,000 people were tortured and detained in nightmarish, bestial conditions.

The questions we need to ask ourselves are these: Who are the real gangsters in today’s world - the "terrorists" or the "peace-makers"? Is not a government that supports gross human rights violations - be it Israel with its SLA henchmen or Australia with its offer to accept them - also guilty of gangsterism? Where do we stand in all this, as people dedicated to the concept of peace with justice?