Until the world crumbles, Myanmar!

Military juntas - god love 'em. They're a bit out of fashion nowadays, but you still see them around - a bit like moustaches.

Probably one of the more retro outfits is the military collective that has been "running" Burma (they call it Myanmar) since they took over in a coup in '62. Actually, there's been more coups since, there was one in '88 as well, in response to a crisis brought upon by pro-democracy demonstrations. They tend to get by through a mixture of drug money (opium), forced labour and the odd massacre.

Probably The Best Democracy Activist in the World (she won the Nobel Peace Prize in '91), Aung San Suu Kyi has been under house arrest in Burma since 2003, and the rulers have just decided, in their infinite wisdom, to keep her there for the foreseeable future.

They also face a variety of rebel forces seeking national self-determination for the various ethnic groups in Burma, most notably the Kayin (or Karen) on the border with Thailand. The junta tends to send the thugs to murder, rape and capture slaves, now and again. The Karen have organised themselves a 6,000 strong national liberation army (the KNLA) to defend themselves from such assaults and fight for a separate state.

The current leader is a rather short, pug nosed General called Than Shwe. He rarely leaves the country, probably fearing that he'll be overthrown by one of the other nutcases in the Junta. These people, the only people they hate and distrust more than the people they oppress is each other.

The "Right To Exist".

Counterpunch has a great knack for publishing articles at the precise moment the discourse requires them. This one, on the question of Israel's sacred "right to exist", is no different. Given the election of Ehud Olmert, a man quite possibly more reactionary and racist than the Fat Butcher himself, there is a dire need for a bit of realism in the debate. The author, Virginia Tilley, says exactly what needs to be said:

It is entirely legitimate for Hamas to require firm confirmation of Israel's borders before recognizing it. It should also be incumbent on the international community to confirm where those borders will be before insisting that Hamas recognize Israel's "right" to them. Otherwise, recognizing Israel's "right to exist" could be construed to mean that Israel has a "right to exist" within whatever borders it chooses in coming years.

It's bizarre. Israel has a "right to exist", but the Palestinian nation either does not exist or doesn't have a right to exist depending on what particular Zionist one is speaking with. How is this? Furthermore, what about the right of Palestinian children to exist - rather than be murdered or starved to death. What about the right of the Palestinians to collectively decide who their representatives will be? What about the rights of Palestinians who were forced off their land by the militias to return to their homes? What about the right of the Palestinian people to resist occupation?

You see, this is the problem. You can't deny other people their rights for 5 decades and then complain when they fail to respect yours. Either everyone has the rights that Israel has (the right to land-grab, expand, kill people with impunity) or no one has them. If Israel has them alone, then they are not "rights", they are privileges. They are privileges that have been accorded to Israel simply because of its importance to the system of Imperialism.

Hamas shouldn't declare that Israel has a right to exist for two reasons:

1) To do so would be a betrayal of the platform on which they were elected in a democratic election

2) The Israeli state exists on the precondition that others nations - principally, the Palestinian nation - don't have the right to self-determination. Therefore, to recognise to Israel's right to exist, the Palestinians would be recognising their own right not to do so.

Their "rights" would remain the same as they are today: the right to be humiliated and debased, the right to be poor, the right to be oppressed and occupied, and the right to be killed.

Is Fucking Great #1

David Cronenberg is fucking great.

Lying Liar

Famous Islamophobe and everyone's favourite Somali reactionary, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, has quit as a Dutch MP.

She was forced to resign because it was revealed that she had lied on her asylum application when entering Holland. She said she had come straight from Somalia, when in fact she hadn't - she had been in 3 other countries before her entry into Holland. Her Dutch citizenship is being revoked as a result. She also lied about her age and her name.

For obvious reasons, Miss Ali is a darling of the racist right and the pro-war Left. Her story was that she fled an arranged marriage and the rampant "persecution of women" in Islamic societies, and had now become a devout (angry at god) atheist and "critic" of Islam. She worked with useless, dead filmmaker, Theo Van Gogh, on his 2004 film 'Submission', which highlighted the plight of "abused women".

In fact, a recent Dutch documentary claimed, Hirsi Ali's marriage was quite consensual and it also revealed other interesting facts about her past, like the fact that she fled Somalia before the civil war, not as a result of it, like she has claimed.

In good news, she's getting a cushy new job at the American Enterprise Institute, a 'think tank' (frankly, I doubt there's much thinking going on there at all) which states that its goal is to:

"Defend the principles and improve the institutions of American freedom and democratic capitalism--limited government, private enterprise, individual liberty and responsibility, vigilant and effective defense and foreign policies, political accountability, and open debate."

Well, I think I speak for most reasonable people when I say that the AEI and Saint Ayaan deserve each other.

The Class

At the risk of turning my blog into 'A General Theory of Rubbish: Part 2', I'd like to take a moment for a bit of pointless nostalgia.

I was browsing the site of the National Union of Miners, and they have a rather spiffing selection of old NUM banners. Quite enjoyable, actually.

Example:























Look at them, they're all excellent.

I do remember seeing an NUM banner with Lenin and Keir Hardie on it that also had the face of Ramsay MacDonald - sadly for Ramsay, his image had been defaced in response to his betrayal of the first Labour government.

I can't find it though.

If anyone knows, gimme a shout.

Really Fake

LucasFilm, under pressure from fanboys everywhere, recently announced that it would release the original theatrical cuts of the Star Wars trilogy on DVD later this year.

Star Wars fanboys are interesting in that most of them ceased to be "boys" about twenty years ago and "fan" doesn't really cut it either. Most of them are probably borderline autistic.

I like the fact, however, that "fan pressure" has paid off. Let's be clear: Lucas is basically a total hack. Irvine Kershner, not 'The Beard', directed the best Star Wars Film, 'The Empire Strikes Back'. Whereas Lucas was responsible things like the frankly rubbish 'Ewoks'(the only creature that could make you root for the Empire), not to mention the roundly pitiful, cynical exercise which has been the prequel trilogy (the third one wasn't bad, but it wasn't good either). But, despite that, the original trilogy has remained an absolutely gold-plated piece of pop culture, probably the most important cultural artefact of the 20th century.

So, when it came to the DVD release of the original trilogy last year, most people hoped that they would get what they wanted: the original trilogy on DVD. Instead, Lucas thought that he might "tinker" with it a little. He felt the original movies were "missing something", they were "incomplete". What did they need then? You guessed it! Lots more CGI.

Lucas is like a kid with a new toy: fidgety, he needs to "show everyone" what he can do with it. He can't help it. Aploplectic with excitement, he heads back to the original unblemished films and begins to prod and poke. Every little dodgy effect, every sense that the original trilogy represented something "real" is removed and replaced with a collection of pixels. The films are not improved in any real sense, they just look "modern" and "up to date". Which means they look fake.

The world in which the original movies took place was, of course, "fake", it was "fiction". But it was a particular type of fiction, a fiction you could believe existed somewhere. The Mos Eisley Cantina was a place with History. A clapped out joint where blood had been spilled and scores had been settled.

The Millennium Falcon looked like a piece of shit, because it was a piece of shit. It looked like it had fallen apart and been put back together again. It looked broken and used and abused. It looked worn, like it had seen too many decrepit space ports and took on too many quicker, newer Imperial vessels. Like an old racehorse, out for one last moment of glory before it was put out to grass, and a well-earned rest. It was corroded.

An image made on a computer can "look corroded", it can have all the proper shading, texture and "signs" of corrosion, but it can't, by definition, be corroded. The effects in the original movie were made possible principally by modelling. The moviemakers made lscale replicas that they would then manoeuvre on wires, using the trickery of cameras and, yes, a little computer work to add "authenticity". And that's important. We used computers to make us believe that this model was an "actual" spaceship, traversing a galaxy that exists, or existed, "far, far away".

That is not what CGI does. As the science fiction author China Mieville has noted, the purpose of CGI is not to deceive, to make you believe that what you're seeing is real. No, no, no. The purpose of CGI is to make things look less real, less authentic. An indication of this fact is the way in which the use of CGI is advertised. Filmmakers want to let you know that they've used CGI, they're proud of the fact. In fact, CGI isn't useful unless the viewer knows that they're watching CGI. The Matrix Reloaded and the Star Wars prequels are probably the prime examples of this phenomenon.

If you think about it, it's a bit odd. It's like the Magic Circle issuing a press release in which they reveal that there isn't really such a thing as magic; instead, they're just a bunch of devious cranks out to make people believe that the impossible is possible using cheap gimmicks and a bit of showmanship. Well, yes! They are out to do that. And sawing a woman in half isn't going to impress anybody if you say beforehand, "well, actually, this is all a load of nonsense, it's just a trick of mirrors, she'll be fine, we've done this loads of time". The point, in movies as in magic, is to maintain the illusion, not to reveal it.

Back to Lucas. After "going over" the originals with his new brush, he wanted to "show" everyone where he had made improvements. He wanted people to "see the difference". Why? He wasn't adding anything to the story. Star Wars wasn't made any more interesting or exciting by the addition of CGI. If anything, as I'm sure most fans noted, it made the films considerably worse. The scenes at Mos Eisley or the Cloud City weren't improved by the inclusion of some rather bogus looking computer generated imagery. It just looked silly. Before, here you were in Mos Eisley: a really crappy spaceport in the middle of some god forsaken Solar system out in the middle of nowhere, with Alec Guinness and Luke Skywalker and the two gay robots. What does this scene need? Ah, yes, of course. A 10-second master shot of the speeder entering Mos Eisley port, in which the characters look absolutely fake, the city looks like something from a (bad) computer game and the sound bears no resemblance to the images on screen. (This was actually one of the inclusions in the "Special Edition" version of the trilogy, which I have on video). Way to go, George!

Why this then? For one, CGI is expensive and time consuming. If a film has a lot of CGI in it, then it must be important. What other reason could there be? Using models and makeup and camera trickery would be much less expensive and less time consuming. The Wachowskis wanted everyone to know that the Matrix sequels had more and better CGI than the original movie - it's a sign of success. But how was their famed effect from the first movie, Bullet Time, created? With the aid of computers? Sure, computers were involved in the creative process. But at the centre of the creation was the genius idea of John Gaeta of placing hundreds of cameras in a circle around a scene, which were timed to go off at ever so slightly different times, one after the other (watch 'The Matrix Revisited' DVD for a much better explanation of this technique). In other words, human ingenuity and cameras, machines that catch moments of "The Real", were responsible for probably the most exhilarating moment in Science fiction movies since the Imperial vessel lurched onto the screen in the opening shot of 'A New Hope' in 1977.

Now, I'm not, I promise you, some kind of primitivist technophobe. Computer technology has contributed to great moments in Cinema - when it's done right, with care and taste. The Battle of Pelennor Fields in the Return of The King astonished me, as I'm sure it did most people who saw it on the big screen.

However, the obsession with CGI in Hollywood (actually, there has been a bit of backlash against it recently) is indicative of a lazy commercialism, not a thriving creative impulse. If large amounts of crap, vulgar CGI can add $10 million to an opening weekend, then in it goes, regardless of the artistic merit of the addition. Executives figure that most people who go to the movies, certainly movies like 'The Matrix' and Star Wars, are young boys. And what do young boys do a lot of? No, not that, the other thing. Yes, they play computer games! Make going to the movies more like sitting in front of your PlayStation, that'll be a crowd pleaser. Forget narrative coherence, characterisation or witty dialogue, they're so passe and dull. Emotional integrity? Fuck that! Look at that big explosion.

But while you may look, you'll soon realise something. It's not an explosion. It's not real fire engulfing a real building. It's not stunt men, or cameras on the end of cranes that have made this image possible. It's some bleary eyed geek, hunched over his keyboard, spilling Diet Coke on the mouse mat.

This is the future.

Scotland win something

The Scottish national football team has won the Kirin Cup. I hadn't heard of it either, but it sounds good.

All the more impressively, we didn't even have our best players with us. Three Celtic players - Shaun Maloney, Stephen McManus and David Marshall - were withdrawn from the squad so that they could play for Celtic in both Roy Keane and Alan Shearer's testimonials. A strange decision really.

Anyway, it's the cup finals today.

I'll be supporting Gretna in the Scottish Cup Final (obviously) and Liverpool (most Celtic fans have a soft spot).

The Facts

I don't think anyone, even HP writers, has debased the English language with regards to fascism and anti-Semitism as much as Dear Melanie.

Basically, the anti-Semites are: 90% of people who read, work or report at the Guardian, the Indy and the BBC; most Arabs; most lefties; most academics and all Palestinians.

Fascists are: everyone who disagreed with the war on Iraq; anyone who recognises any virtue in the Palestinian cause whatsoever and most Muslims.

Everyone who disagrees with the above assessment is probably both.

An elaboration:


Anti-Semites are everywhere. The fact that people deny this either proves them to be anti-Semites, or ignorant saps, probably both.

The Jews are under threat of genocide in Israel. Israel is a legitimate state, which is populated by people who survived the Holocaust. Anyone who compares contemporary Israel policy to any other brutal historical epoch is trivializing the Holocaust and thus is both a fascist and an anti-Semite. The Palestinians are the same as the Nazis.

Anti-Semitism is increasing inexorably. It is flamed not by Israel's imperialism, but by media reports and left anti-Semitism. Israel has a right to defend its borders, the savages do not. The savages have forfeited this right by dint of their savagery. Islam is brutal. Tomahawk missiles are not.

The fascists we should be concerned about are not the BNP or David Duke, but the latent fascists who populate our universities, think tanks and media outlets.

Any Jew who denies the facts is a self-hater and a fascist.

I've shown myself to be anti-Semitic by writing this. By denying that I'm anti-Semitic, I thus prove that I am. By denying that denying I'm anti-Semitic proves I'm anti-Semitic, I'm proving myself to be a fascist.

Any questions?

Nick Cohen dies of Syphillis!

I wish.

Physical confrontation of the class enemy

"The fascists build by organizing soft support around a hard-core following. Direct, physical confrontation can break them by driving a wedge between the people who may agree with some of their ideas–like the idea that immigrants will take away jobs–and the murderous thugs who form the hard core of their organization."

Anti-fascist praxis on a German train.