Par En Bas

Foreign Hoardes Threaten Native Species

2008-07-29T06:22:00.001-07:00

I'm sure this article about the "invasion" of Scottish waters by a seaweed usually found in the Pacific Ocean was not written by racists, but isn't it funny how easily the language of nationalism and immigration can migrate to the field of marine biology?

What do immigrants and Japanese seaweed have in common? They both out breed us:

"Conservationists believe the seaweed's rapid growth could potentially threaten other native species."

The danger of this dangerously fertile and adaptible foreign seaweed is that it will damage and eventually replace the much less fertile, more fragile (pampered, you might say) native species. Conservationists are disgusted at the thought. We need to protect our own because, well, you know:

"At the moment we don't know what impact it will have on marine wildlife, although it is likely it will reduce the diversity of our native seaweeds by outgrowing them, as it has in other parts of Europe," she said."

A dire warning indeed. Clearly our European brothers and sisters have already come under the iron grip of this invading watery menace. It's tentacles have now reached our shores and we must act.

Here's some advice:

...it is important boat users and others take care not to spread it further."

You get that, then? Don't let the foreigners get into or onto your boat or you'll spread them all over the place.

I'm absolutely petrified. I mean, I'm not seaweedist or anything but surely it's only right and proper that we look after our own? What's wrong with that? We can't be expected to provide a home for every species of seaweed that happens to weedle its way into our delicate eco-system, can we? To be honest, I think the people over at Scottish Seaweed First! have it right.

You've been warned Scotland. Now, arise and expell the foreign hoardes! (Unless they make a tasty soup, in which case, some of them can stay).

The Apotheosis of New Labourism

2008-07-21T04:46:00.001-07:00

The government's latest 'welfare reform' is horrible on an almost mundane level - mundane in the sense that, like most, I wasn't really that surprised by the extent of its abuses of the welfare principle.

The character who does interest me, however, is the man responsible for this policy roll-out, James Purnell.

Purnell is New Labour incarnate. A public schoolboy and Oxford graduate with an emanantly punchable face. He served his time under Blair and now he's ready for the big push. Isn't it interesting how the plans are being rolled out while Brown is taking his "Fuck Me, He's Useless" Roadshow to the Middle East? Seems to me like Purnell is making a little move on Flash Gordon. And what better way to do that than having a go at the poor and disabled? There's always a few votes in that, you know.

As someone who's spent his life in Glasgow, I know a little about Incapacity Benefit (IB). Most people who are on it are quite ill. Some people who are on it are not that ill, but have medical problems. But that's not really the issue is it? The reason these people don't have jobs is that the industries that employed their fathers have gone, replaced by work in fast-food restaurants and call centres.

The government isn't interested in getting these people "back to work" - the cost of re-training all these people would be astronomical. It's interested in the apperance that it's being "tough" on the disabled and the poor. Going by the comments over at the BBC's "Have Your Say" shout-a-thon, it's popular with the people who read the BBC News website, and why shouldn't it be?

Remember, there's always votes in blaming the poor - it's an Iron Law.

The U.S Oil Industry? Nationalize it!

2008-06-16T07:54:00.000-07:00

Very interesting poll here, showing that "only" 47% of Americans oppose the nationalization of the oil industry. The remainder is made up of about thirty percent in favour of nationalization and the rest "unsure". A plurality of Democratic voters favour nationalization and about two thirds of Republicans oppose it.

It's all moot, obviously, but it's a interesting sign, if anyone doubted it, of the leftward swing in American society over the course of the last few years. In the home of neoliberalism, the blowback seems to be gaining pace.

Callinicos on Obama/Empire

2008-06-12T06:37:00.000-07:00

There is much to agree with in Alex Callinicos' article on Obama in Socialist Worker this week. He rightly lambasts Obama for his pathetic speech to AIPAC and his weasel words about "the military option" and the Iranian nuclear issue. He correctly claims, following Schlesinger, that the U.S President, for a variety of reasons, wields most of their power in the foreign policy arena. He suggests that Obama may, once President, "water down" his opposition to the Iraq War - so important to his victory over Clinton in the primaries.

However, I must admit that parts of the article left me completely baffled.

First of all, in a strangely weird vein he claims that part of Obama's success is that he offers the U.S ruling class a "better face" for their exploits across the world. Now, I don't know if there capitalists who support Obama because he'll make imperialism more palatable - perhaps there are. But this doesn't explain his popularity or his defeat of Clinton in the primary process. There are not many members of the U.S ruling class voting in the Democratic primary in Wyoming, I'd guess.

Secondly, most of the more venal members of the foreign policy intelligentsia are not rushing to support Obama. Men like Bill Kristol, the egregious Charles Krauthammer and the late Christopher Hitchens have not been desperate to jump aboard. True, there are some members of the liberal foreign policy establishment (Samantha Power, Brzezinski) who have hitched their wagon on to Obama, but this has more to do with his opposition to the war than anything else.

Alex then says Obama's victory was "clinched" by superior fundraising and that this shows how he will be "dominated" by money, just like all the other candidates. It's true that Obama did raise more money than Clinton, although as I said in a previous post, none of it was from so-called "federal lobbyists" and lots of it was from ordinary people making small donations. He powered his campaign by a mixture of donations from "traditional" Democratic sources (liberal sections of the capitalist class, unions) and a healthy stream of small donors, contributing ten or twenty dollars a time.

The question also must be asked: if the idea of a black man as President (or a "black Emperor", as Alex puts it) is so appealing to the U.S ruling class, why is Obama the first? I mean, if having black men running the show is so appealing, why all this resistance to it? Why all the support for McSame? Why all the "questions" about his past? Why is the current President, an appalling Imperialist war criminal positively aching to see America's dominion spread far and wide, so supportive of McCain - a man with whom he shares a volatile past as well as party allegiance?

Lenin On Clinton/Obama

2008-06-08T10:10:00.000-07:00

It's becoming clearer and clearer that, bar a complete diasaster, Barack Obama will become the next POTUS. Rasmussen's daily Presidential tracking poll has him up 8 against McCain. This increase in his support since last week (when they were tied) is a result of increased support for Obama amongst Democrats. The end of Clinton's campaign is helping Democratic party identifiers to coalesce around the presumptive nominee of the party. Given the current ratio of Democrats to Republicans, Obama only needs to mobilize the Democratic base to a sufficient degree and he wins.

But Lenin is not enthusiastic about the prospect. He says that Hillary would be a bad choice for VP, which I agree with. He then says that Hillary "commanded" the white working class vote. He lists some of the "overwhelmingly white" states she won - West Virginia, Kansas, Ohio, Pennsylvania. He claims this can't be explained purely by racism (a point I'll come back to) and instead it can be explained by Clinton's "populist" economic rhetoric as opposed to Obama's "neoliberalism".

Obama won numerous poor and very white states - Alaska, Montana, Wyoming, Kansas, Montana, Oregon. Most of the states Lenin listed are a part of the "Appalachian" midwest, and populated with the "tough" descendants of Scots-Irish immigrants. They are states with a history of racial tension, arising either from the trauma of desegregation (like West Virginia) or from acrimonious economic competition in the 70's (like Ohio). These racial tensions have been exarcebated by the process of deindustrialization that took place in these states under Reagan and Clinton. This clearly hurt Obama badly in these states. In West Virginia, 19% of white voters said they voted against Obama "partly because of his race". In Kentucky, this numer was 17%. These are the people, in other words, who openly admitted to pollsters that they were racist. The number of racist votes is likely to be higher still. It would be a good guess to say that up to a third of Clinton votes in these states were explicitly racist - i.e against Obama because he's black - in nature. Clinton did not have play upon fear of the black peril - these people fear the black peril constantly, instinctially - it's what consumed their parents' lives and it's what consumes their own lives.

In a state like Montana, which has an African-American population of 0.5%, situated a way up in the north, the ripples from civil rights and deindustrialization never really made an impact. Obama won this state, filled with its non-latte drinking, quite poor white folks, by sixteen percentage points. Therefore, it was not the "whiteness" or the "working class" nature of states that made them favour of Clinton, it was a combination of poverty and decline and a history of racial tension and racism.

Lenin also claims that Obama is a "neoliberal" candidate. I'm not entirely sure what this means with Lenin. In a discussion in his comments board some time ago, he claimed that the SNP government in Scotland that has recently scrapped fees, reintroduced grants, ended PFI, opposed Trident, restarted social housing projects and and made moves to fund local government through an income-based tax was also "neo-liberal". His proof? They've cut corporation tax. One wonders what usefulness this term has when it covers everyone from Alex Salmond of Nicholas Sarkozy. But, let's take Lenin at his word. Is this true about Obama?

Well, as I said in my post a few weeks back, Obama is not a radical. He supports more tax on those earning more than $100,000 a year (this would be called "Old Labourism" here), a hike on the capital gains tax (which is not popular), he supports "taking back the department of labor for labor", raising the minimum wage, "renegotiating" NAFTA, more pay for teachers and, of course, he's ended the practice of the Democratic Party being funded by Federal Lobbyists. Lenin pointed out that Clinton supported the (John McCain) policy of freezing the federal gas tax for the summer. Obama does not and for good reason - it was and is a pointless gimmick. It would save your average American 30 cence a day. While the price of oil rockets up, any savings would likely be completely neutralized. It's a crap idea.

Lenin is right that this policy and others helped to create an "impression" that Clinton was to the left of Obama on the economy - but she wasn't. The most genuinely progressive Democratic candidate, outside of Kucinich, John Edwards endorsed Obama for a reason. The "rustbelt" trade unions like the United Mine Workers and the United Steelworkers endorsed Obama for a reason. These people couldn't afford another Clinton presidency.

Lenin says that he thinks Obama will be just as bad as Clinton (Bill) when gets into the White House. Of course, this is pure speculation. What I will say is that Obama, presuming he's elected, will almost certainly be working with a Senate and House packed with Democrats. He will be elected to euphoria around the country and a genuine feeling of popular power - even revolt. These forces will be hard to contain.

Anti-Semitic Treaty?

2008-05-28T16:44:00.001-07:00

Hasn't it occured to anyone else how Anti-Semitic the ban on cluster bombs is? I mean, it's obvious the anti-Israel extremists are trying to take away Israel's right to deploy weapons which are, and I quote, "highly useful on the battlefield".

That's why they were used to extensively during Israel's war with Lebanon (or "Hezbollah" if you bend that way) in 2006, one presumes. In total, the Israelis dropped around 4 million "bomblets", up to a million of which may not have exploded. These unexploded bomblets are responsible for the death and disfiguration of up to 200 Lebanese since the end of the war. Children are more likely to be the victims of this since the round "bomblets" can be confused for toys.

Luckily Israel, along with other brave nations such as the U.S, India, China, Russia and Pakistan, is not a signatory to this outrageous treaty and so will continue to deploy this "highly useful battlefield device" whenever the terrorists threaten our way of life.

Well, thank god for that!

"Elitism", Class and American Politics

2008-05-16T09:15:00.000-07:00

An interesting article in the Worker this week outlining the impact of class on American political discourse focussed on the recent attack against Obama that he is an "elitist". The fake furore erupted months ago when Obama was recorded saying that people in rural American towns had grown "bitter" and become "attached to guns and religion" because of the failure of the American political system to deliver meanginful improvements in their lives.

Now, apart from being demonstrably true, this quote and the way the media reported it indicated some quite interesting aspects of the "American Ideology". Zizek said in the 'Sublime Object' that ideology - attempts to explain and interpret the world by way of a single operation (Marxism, Capitalism, Ecology) - always leaves behind a "real, hard kernel" that cannot be incorporated. This "constitutive lack" is the fragment of the real world that not only cannot be incorporated ("quilted") but is also, in a sense, crucial to the formation of the ideology in the first instance.

To give an example: capitalist ideology would say that we are "free" under capitalism - free speech, free labour, freedom of religion, association etc, etc. And whilst this is true (let's imagine that these freedoms are not being eroded every day) the "freedom" we enjoy under capitalism exists simultaneousy, and indeed is derived from, a very real unfreedom - that is, the fact that every worker under capitalism is forced to sell their labour power to capitalists.

In America, this works in quite a specific way. American society is built on the prospect (illusion) of social mobility for those at the bottom - the American dream (so-called because, as George Carlin says, you need to be asleep to believe in it). This has helped to create the illusion, and concomitant political discourse, of "classlessness".

But what is the reality? The reality is that not only is American one of the most unequal, class divided societies in the world but that it is increasingly so. The bottom 80 percent of Americans owned only 15 percent of all wealth in 2001, a three percentage point decrease since the 1980's (we should all know how and why this came about). In the industrialized world, only in Switzerland does the inequality instrinsic to capitalism appear as stark as it does in America.

The point being that when Obama mentions class, however obliquely, it arouses displeasure precisely because "class" is this "real, hard kernel" which cannot be incorporated. Class is the trauma, the original moment of crisis that warped the social space for the "classless" society. So the media elites and the politicians flap around for a insult (elitism! that'll do), a way of burying the trauma again, so that polite discourse can carry on. Talking about class to an American politician/journalist would be, for them, like trying to hold a discussion with someone who had a great gaping, weeping sore on their forehead - uncomfortable, all averted eyes and sneaked glances.

The only way it can possibly be dealt with is by finding a useful proxy - this is where "elitism" becomes useful. According to this metric, Barack Obama is part of the elite, but Hillary Clinton and John McCain aren't. The fact that Clinton and McCain are both from hugely powerful and wealthy political families and Obama is not isn't important. "Elitism" here refers to a demeanour, a certain "folkish" quality that can be conferred on politicians who hold your "values".

George Bush, that down-home ordinary Texan who chews tobacco, hunts and loves God is not part of the Elite. Obama, the snobbish, effete liberal who Hates America and is probably a sleeper agent for Al-Qaeda, is part of the Elite.

So, how do the American elites deal with "class"? That's it, by not dealing with it.

To be fair, this is how I routinely deal with my problems.

Socialists for Obama?

2008-05-04T11:23:00.001-07:00

My interest in the campaign of Barack Obama to become President America has had a long gestation. It began a little less than a year ago when I heard the excellent journalist Gary Younge give a talk on the topic of African-Americans and their struggles at Marxism 2007. Whilst admitting that an Obama victory would be primarily of symbolic importance, Younge argued, persuasively I thought, that symbols matter. The "symbol" of a mixed-race man raised in, by all accounts, humble conditions by a single mother becoming President on a platform emphasizing his "premature" opposition to the War in Iraq would be a powerful one. Amongst his other foreign policy promises is to meet "without prior conditions" the leaders of America's enemies.

His domestic policy program is a fairly standard reproduction of the traditional Democratic Party formula: steps towards universal health care, soft-Keynesian economics, taxes on "profiteering" Oil companies, vague opposition to trade deals, environmental concerns, support for choice etc. It contains all the same compromises and deficiencies one would expect. His assurances that he would be willing to "bomb Pakistan" if it looked likely to become a safe haven for Al-Qaeda members fleeing the meltdown in Afghanistan was an attempt at "toughness" that now seems entirely incongruent. His earlier "sympathy" with the Palestinians has been replaced with AIPAC adoration and the routine about the special relationship with the Israeli ethnocracy.

His opponent in the race is Hillary Clinton, who supported the War and whose foreign policy includes a commitment to "obliterating Iran" if it attacks Israel. This assurance, whilst totally in line with her strict neocon foreign policy (she was, apparently, instrumental in her husband's decision to bomb Serbia in the 1990's) is completely silly and would constitute a violation of the constitution of the United States, in which only Congress can give authorization to declare war. Hillary's main claim on the trail has been that she's "experienced", although, as most observers have pointed out, this "experience" includes things like the entirely failed attempt to introduce Universal health care during the first Clinton's administration.

On the question of finance, Obama has raised more money than any other Presidential campaign in History at this stage, and has done so mainly on the back of a million or so small donors. He has refused to accept money from Federal PAC's (Political Action Committees), claiming correctly that you can't be the voice for working people in Washington if you accept money from groups designed to silence that voice.

More recently, the media campaign has centred on a particularly ugly attack on Obama's former pastor, Jeremiah Wright, whose remarks about American foreign policy and its malcontents scandalized an American public who assumed America had been handing out free candy in the Middle East for the past 15 years. This has led to a "problem" for Obama, particularly amongst older "white working class" (yes, this term has been imported from America!) voters. Obama also got himself into some bother when he said that white working class people in rural towns in the Midwest had become "bitter" and attached themselves to "guns and religion". First of all, if you consider that in a state like Ohio 1 in 10 people are now on food stamps, it's small wonder Americans are "bitter". Second of all, the policy of the Republicans (to support the redistribution of guns and god but not food or wealth) seems to add some weight to Obama's comments.

The Republican candidate is a mentally ill 71-year old named John McCain of noble (inbred) extraction who played his part in the killing of men, women and children in Vietnam, was captured by the Viet minh and tortured, an unfortunate episode that apparently led to him revealing secrets in return for his own safety. He is running on a platform of a hundred year occupation of Iraq, a retrenchment of Bush's tax cuts for the rich and a health care policy I doubt even he understands. He also, in uncommonly comical mood for a man known for his violent temper, called for the U.S to "bomb bomb bomb, bomb bomb Iran" to the tune of a well-known Beach Boys track. I can't think of what the world would look like with this crazed neo con as Emperor - well, actually, probably about the same as it does now.

I mention all this because I'm a little bit perplexed about the attitude of the British left to all this. I can remember having discussions with people at the time of the 2005 election about the realities involved in calling for a "defeat for Blair". I pointed out that if Blair was defeated this would almost certainly mean, in reality, a conservative government led by, god almighty, Michael Howard. However, leftists seem to be less willing to express support for defeating McCain at all costs. Why?

Well, first of all, there is the purely reflexive response ("they're all the same"). When one points out that they're not (McCain's Thousand Year Reich vs. Obama's opposition to the War) the differences are then declared inconsequential.

Off the top of my head, I can think of one group to whom these differences have consequence - the people of Iraq! Don't we think that we should try and support politicians who claim to oppose the war and occupation of Iraq (and Obama's claim is more convincing than most), as well as continue to build the anti-war movement? Don't left-wing anti-war Americans have the right and the duty to Iraqis to try and elect Obama as opposed to John McSame, if that is the choice presented?

Secondly, they posit the zero sum game ("We need to build the anti-war movement, never mind elect anti-war Presidents"). If this is true, why did we bother calling for a vote against Blair? If we're being consistent, we would have hope to see ALL the warmongers defeated, not just the British variety.

Thirdly, we can't support Obama because he's a Democrat ("Vote Ralph Nader"). This is perhaps the most attractive alternative to Obama and the Democrats. Nader is, after all, an appealing reformist politician who has gained some good support in the past. Does that mean we should support him every time he decides to run no matter what the other factors to be considered? I don't think so. If the choice between Obama and McCain is this stark, I think we can safely call for a vote for the Democrat. The principle reason why Nader did so well in 2000 is that there was simply no substantive difference in the campaigns of Gore and Bush. Nader's campaign helped to bring Gore to the Left a bit, and his eventual vote was an impressive one. He ran in 2004, when the choice again seemed stark to most Americans, and he didn't do nearly as well. He won't do well in 2008 either, I don't think.

It's always hard to support politicians as a socialist. We're naturally inclined to be suspicious of people in suits and ties. Obama is a not a radical. He's not committed to Soviet power and the outlawing of wage slavery, that's clear.

But on the most important issue in the world right now (the growing humanitarian and political disaster in Iraq) he stands - tentatively, insecurely but clearly - on the opposite side to his opponent.

People should think about this on those terms and realise that there's only one conclusion.

Iraq is the New Vietnam, argues Bush

2007-08-23T06:01:00.000-07:00

In a rare moment of clarity and insight, President Bush compared the ongoing war and occupation of Iraq with the fateful American intervention in Vietnam.

Of course, he's not the first person to make such a comparison, although his conclusions regarding American policy in Iraq are something of a novelty.

Apparently, according to the President, the mistake the Americans made in Iraq was that they left too early, a decision which cost millions of lives. If the Americans had stayed rather than prematurely withdrawing (you'll find these debates are filled with sexual metaphors) then millions of Vietnamese people who died would not have. The implications for this regarding Iraq are clear to George - we need to stay in Iraq until the job is done.

Now, before I say anything about the insanity that is the occupation of Iraq, let's address Bush's "Short History of the American-Vietnamese War" - a narrative worthy of the IHR school of "history".

The Vietnam War, as popularly understood, refers to the process, not the event, of American intervening of behalf of Vietnamese "anti-communists", mainly based in the South, against the left-wing, nationalist rebels based in the North. This process of intervention involved large-scale bombing of civilians in the North (and neighbouring countries), political assassinations, election rigging, torture and rape. Millions of Vietnamese people were killed. Chemical and biological warfare played a full and complete part in the American campaign. In the end, as a result of a massive anti-war movement at home and abroad, and the gradual disintegration of the American army, the Americans were forced to pull out of Vietnam in 1975. The nationalist rebels quickly established dominion over the whole of the country.

This new republic, whilst avowedly "socialist", remained staunchly Stalinist. It was, and is, repressive and undemocratic, but it's not genocidal. Victory over the Americans and the Southern stooges represented progress for the Vietnamese people and prevented millions of more deaths in Vietnam. This new government was also responsible for overthrowing the genocidal Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, doubtless saving millions more lives. Still, the new republic had to deal with the legacy of the War, including the effects of the chemical weapons used by the Americans during the war on future generations. Since the end of the Cold War, it has evolved, predictably enough, along the Chinese path - splicing market liberalization with "communist" political structures. It is, for bourgeois economists, something of a success story.

The Vietnamese people were saved by the Vietcong from American butchery. Their struggle, against all the odds, was as heroic as it was costly.

Iraq is not the new Vietnam. The Iraqis lack the united Political and military focus of the Vietnamese liberation movements, the NLF. The Americans were disadvantaged in Vietnam by the jungle surroundings. The Iraqi resistance lacks the co-ordinated backing afforded to the Vietcong by the Soviet Union and China.

But there are similarities. Both involved America arrogantly and violently trying to subvert the right of a people to determine for themselves their own future. Both were wars that could not be won - for every guerrilla they kill, two will appear in their place. Both are incredibly unpopular at home and abroad and both have left American imperialism wounded.

All we can hope for now is an end to the conflict in Iraq that mirrors the one in Vietnam.

Resurrection

2007-08-23T05:49:00.000-07:00

I've decided, for a number of unimportant reasons, to try and keep up the blog again. I realised that I was missing the opportunities that blogging affords people like myself i.e the marginalized, the oppressed, the habitually lazy. That is, the opportunity to vent my spleen, uncensored and free from the constraints of respectable bourgeois discourse. It also affords me the opportunity to wind up a variety of people whom I dislike, as well as venerate those that I like.

A Convergence

2006-07-12T15:27:00.000-07:00

A decade after the Pentagon declared a zero-tolerance policy for racist hate groups, recruiting shortfalls caused by the war in Iraq have allowed "large numbers of neo-Nazis and skinhead extremists" to infiltrate the military, according to a watchdog organization.

Who said that modern politics was riddled with unbridgeable chasms (no one, I realise)? Isn't it great to see those two most, ummm, "ideologically disciplined" social forces, the American Army and the Neo-Nazi movement, put aside their fued in favour of the common good? Now our Aryan brothers will have a hand in freeing the Arab people of Iraq and safeguarding the Israeli state - warms the cockles of even the most cynical heart, I'm sure.

Onward Christian Soldiers!

Haha

2006-07-01T15:37:00.000-07:00

A Flag Of Racial Pride?

2006-06-17T07:27:00.000-07:00

The Grauniad has a comment piece today, written by those most rare of creatures, a female, black England fan. Her experiences are, well, not too surprising:

"Born and brought up here, I've always considered myself black British, while remaining proud of my Jamaican heritage. But I found myself having to justify my right to be among the fans who flocked to an outdoor screening of England's opening World Cup match.
Joining the throng at Canary Wharf in London's Docklands, I was greeted by a group of young, white males in England shirts, draped in Saint George's flags, their faces painted red and white. "What are you doing here?" one of them demanded. Thrown, I replied: "I'm here to watch the football. What are you doing here?" "I've got a right to be here. I'm English," he said. "You're not."

Read the rest

Hate To Say I Told You So

2006-06-11T10:18:00.000-07:00

My World Cup post has obviously caused a lot of upset. I've been called a "racist", a "sweaty sock" and a "plastic paddie".

I called the English fans racist and chauvinistic. This was wrong, it seems. It looks like a percentage of them are in fact fully blown Fascists:

Two England supporters have been arrested for having their bodies painted with Nazi insignia at the side's opening World Cup game.

Ah well, who knew?

The Beginning Of The End: Again

2006-06-08T07:34:00.000-07:00

So a rather insignificant man, who's "influence" was largely a product of the fervent imagination of the Western MediaGovernment, is, we hear, dead.

Yes, all round bogey-man and bearded genius, Abu Musab Al-Zarqawi, has been killed in a heroic American bombing operation. The brave freedom-lovers dropped a 500 pound bomb on a house near Baghdad, and then dropped another one just to make sure no one made it out alive. Amongst those not to survive were a child and a women who were living in the house alongside the evil-doers. But, then again, who really cares? The Brown Eyed Devil is dead, and now, asks the BBC hopefully, will this mean an end to the insurgency?

Um, no. For a couple of reasons:

1) The Iraqi resistance largely disliked Zarqawi and his small band. The resistance is 95% Iraqi, and this Jordanian upstart was something of a nuisance, not a "Leader".

2) The resistance arises from the Occupation, not the "Jihadist" ideology of Al-Qaeda. Only an end to the Occupation can bring an end to the resistance, and only the resistance can bring an end to the Occupation. The resistance is self-contained. If it fulfils its purpose, it will disappear. If the Americans and their stooges continue to massacre, rape and pillage their way around Iraq, the Iraqis will continue to struggle against it.

Indeed, a more realistic outcome of this death is that the resistance becomes more united and national. He was largely a divisive figure, so this may bring the Shia and Sunni groups resisting the occupation closer together. That would be an irony indeed, and the best answer to the crowing of the belligerati and supine Media.

Victory To The Iraqi Resistance!

The World Cup

2006-06-03T04:14:00.000-07:00

Further to this, I want to add my own two cents on the World Cup. It's pretty simple - here it is:

I want England to get beat. I want them to be humiliated. I want them to be embarrassed and disgraced. I want everyone who's flying the St. George's Cross to be bitterly dissapointed. I want the little kids with the flag painted on their face to be distraught and cry so that the paint runs down their little cheeks. I want it to be as painful and excruciating as possible. I want to see Beckham crying. I want to Rooney get injured really, really badly. I want to see them torn to shreds. I want to see their chauvinistic, fat, ugly, racist support, each and every one of them, deflated and looking as pathetic as possible.

And then I want to see Brazil or Germany win.

That's all I want.

Until the world crumbles, Myanmar!

2006-05-27T00:32:00.000-07:00

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".

2006-05-25T13:28:00.000-07:00

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

2006-05-19T08:26:00.000-07:00

David Cronenberg is fucking great.

Lying Liar

2006-05-16T08:07:00.000-07:00

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

2006-05-15T09:38:00.000-07:00

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

2006-05-13T16:46:00.000-07:00

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

2006-05-13T05:59:00.000-07:00

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

2006-05-09T18:41:00.000-07:00

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!

2006-05-07T11:17:00.001-07:00

I wish.

Physical confrontation of the class enemy

2006-05-03T15:25:00.000-07:00

"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.

When the cat's away...

2006-04-30T05:07:00.000-07:00

The Mice will play

It seems that three Latin American leaders have gone and signed a treaty without giving Washington prior notice and veto power. How rude! Don't they remember the rules? Christ, if this was the 80's...

Thankfully, it's not. Yanqui imperialism has got its "lidless eye, wreathed in flame" on other parts of the world right now. 72 Poor American Souls have been killed in resistance operations this month in Iraq, the highest total in 5 months. The media corps' hope for an "end to the insurgency" appears, of course, to be unlikely to materialise. The number of dead American soldiers - we "do" body counts for them - now stands at 2400. Just think about that number for a moment.

In the context of modern warfare, it's quite amazing: the disparity in weaponry between the Iraqi resistance and the U.S Army, the extraordinary levels which the Americans have gone to keep the numbers down, the endless, belligerent psy-ops, black ops, botched ops.

And still they can't keep the natives under control.

It must really, really piss them off.

V for...Oh, I can't be bothered.

2006-04-25T04:42:00.000-07:00

A man whom I read, though sometimes don't understand because I don't have a doctorate in Philosophy, K-Punk, has joined the circus on V for Vendetta. He's criticizing, and he's not the first, the "watered down" content of the film.

The filmmakers, it's true, seem to have favoured a kind of catch-all liberalism instead of the comic's, presumably more "controversial", militant Anarchism.

The main criticism being that it's rather unclear what the terrorist known as 'V' is actually fighting for. We know he's fighting against the fascist regime, but what he's looking to replace it with is never discussed in the movie.

The Anarchists are, as usual, up in arms, decrying the Hollywood machine for corrupting the purity of Moore's original piece.

For what it's worth, I enjoyed the movie as a piece of entertainment. It didn't contain any especially radical or novel political content in my estimation - nothing you haven't seen in endless 'dystopian future' movies. Except, of course, for that ending - which is just about the most radical thing you're likely to see in a Hollywood movie.

Mark also elaborates on other things he's written, particularly on the difference between us rather docile British students and our raucous cousins in France.

And on the political possibilities of a radical nihilism.

Oh, and he fucking hates the Artic Monkeys - which can only be a good thing.

Thou Shall Obey

2006-04-13T06:04:00.000-07:00

An RAF doctor who refused to serve in Iraq has been sentenced to eight months in jail and dismissed from the service.

This is a chap called Malcolm Kendall-Smith, who's a flight lieutenant in the Air Force. During his trial, he aroused the anger of lots of people by comparing the U.S invasion of Iraq with the actions of Nazi Germany. In fact, he actually used the words "moral equivalent".

He pointed out that Nazis were tried for complicity in "wars of agression" at the Nuremberg trials and that the invasion of Iraq also qualified as such - therefore any orders associated with such a venture would be de facto illegal, and he would be required not to follow them.

Sadly for him, the notion of the "law" is unimportant when compared to the needs of the army. We can't allow bad precedents. So tonight, Doctor Kendall-Smith will be languishing in a military jail.

May I suggest he watches this.

Prodi Rubbish

2006-04-12T07:17:00.000-07:00

For once, the recent lack of posts is not down to my fecklessness. This time, the useless wankers at NTL are to blame because they gave me a broken modem, meaning I was sans broadband for a full fortnight!

Those were lonely nights, I can tell you.

Anyway, since everything is right with the world again, I thought I'd give a word on the recent elections in Italy.

The results are in and Prodi, it appears, has won by 0.1 of a percent. Considering his opponent is a crypto-fascist ex-cruise singer who's led Italy kicking and screaming into the debacle in Iraq and has overseen the worst economy in Western Europe in the last 4 years, it's hardly a resounding endorsement for L'Union, Prodi's "center-left" coalition.

It's understandable, Prodi is a figure with his own history of corruption. He's also a rather dour economics professor. And he's admitted that he's keen to push through the kind of "reforms" that've just died in France.

On the other hand, the main far left party, Rifondazione Communista (the Party of Communist Refoundation), achieved very respectable results. They got 5.8% in the lower house of the Italian parliament and 7.4% in the Senate - about 4.7 million votes in total. Coupled with 2 percent for the Official Communists, it was a decent showing, and proves the success that can be had by standing on a anti-neo-liberal, anti-war platform.

Still, there will be problems for Rifon. As part of the center-left coalition led by Prodi, they will be held partly responsible for the policies of that government. And if the policies of Prodi include, as they probably will do, neo-liberal reforms, the question will be put: are you with or against neo-liberalism?

The main reason for joining the coalition that Rifon gave was that Berlusconi was so great a threat that they had to do everything possible to ensure his defeat. They also hope, as many have before them, to have some kind of "civilizing" role on the Prodi regime.

We'll see. In fact, it's not even clear that Prodi will take over. The marginal nature of the victory has given dear Silvio scope to "challenge" the result, and a recount may even be required.

A Problem?

2006-03-18T01:03:00.000-08:00

On their page about the pensions crisis, the BBC highlighted this comment sent in by a reader - presumably because they think it's a nugget of truth:

Part of the problem is that there is an expectation by many people in the UK that the state will never let them go hungry or without a home

Sandy Mann, London, UK.

Yeah, what are we like, eh?

All those unreasonable expectations like "food" and "shelter". Don't we realize the Chinese are prepared to east just a bowl of rice a day, and the Indians love to live in huge slums!

And here we are, demanding things like "decent housing" and "a living pension" from the hard-up employers.

The state should exist only to keep us in line (the police), and keep other people in line (the army).

Islam and the Englightenment

2006-03-13T17:14:00.000-08:00

A really excellent article in the Review this month, written by Neil Davidson - author of the also excellent book 'Discovering the Scottish Revolution'.

A timely piece (which I imagine is why they published it!), given the recent hysteria over the racist cartoons.

All interesting, but there's a particuarly useful debunking, or at least a critique, of the notion that Christianity was 'open' to the rationality and scienctific progress promised by the enlightenment. Islam is usually counterposed here, as an example of an 'inflexible' or, worse, 'intolerant' religion - unwilling to change or adapt its tenets to new realities.

- The 'rational' inquisition

Similarly, many important Enlightenment thinkers, most famously Voltaire, absolutely despised religion and Christianity. So it's a bit unfair for that religion to take the credit for his ideas! Who would want to anyway? Voltaire was a strident anti-democrat, who favoured an enlightened despotism which would circumvent the stupidity of the masses. But, anyway.

Read Neil's article, it's a belter.

Jimmy Johnstone (30th September 1944 - 13th March 2006)

2006-03-13T16:52:00.000-08:00

Just a little word on the death of this man.

Celtic fans, more than any other fans I think, tend to be in love with the history of their club. I'm no different.

So even though I never seen him play in the flesh, I felt like I had witnessed every single Jimmy Johnstone game. From clips and anecdotes, you can tell he was a special player - and a special man.

He died yesterday, after fighting a long battle with motor neurone disease.

Jimmy played in the days before footballers became mercenaries, moving from club to club in search of money and fame. Jimmy was a 'Celtic man', in the best sense of that phrase. Committed, on and off the park, he exemplified everything that is great about Glasgow Celtic as a Scottish cultural institution.

And he was a hell of a winger.

Cheers Jinky!

Subcomandante Marcos says: "Par En Bas"

2006-03-10T09:05:00.000-08:00

In a brilliant new interview in radical American newsletter, Counterpunch, 'leader' (although I'm sure he doesn't like the term) of the EZLN, Subcomandante Marcos, has laid out his ideas about the future of the Latin America:

"We think, fundamentally, that the future story of Latin America, not only of Mexico but for all of Latin America, will be constructed from the bottom--that the rest of what's happening, in any case, are steps. Maybe false steps, maybe firm ones, that's yet to be seen. But fundamentally, it will be the people from the bottom that will be able to take charge of it, organizing themselves in another way. The old recipes or the old parameters should serve as a reference, yes, of what was done, but not as something that should be re-adopted to do something new."

Quite apart from being a clear espousal the of the Marxist concept of self-emancipation, it should also serve as a lesson to those on the left for whom the swing to the left in Latin America begins and ends with Chavez, Morales etc.

The fact is, if it wasn't for the popular movement which backs him, Hugo Chavez would probably either be dead or sitting in some dungeon right now, while a fascist general lords it over Venezuela. Similarly, Morales came to power as the personification of a massive workers' and indigenous movement in Bolivia. If these people, like Lula in Brazil, decide for any reason to abandon these movements, then they will be sitting ducks.

More from the Man in the Mask:

"What we're going to do is shake this country up from below, pick it up and turn it on its head".

New Look

2006-03-09T17:42:00.000-08:00

I've decided to go for a little change of look.

I fancy this as a bit more elegant.

Do you think he'll get his job back?

2006-03-09T17:11:00.000-08:00

I always knew teachers were fucking nuts

Jokes aside, it's interesting that he wanted to "talk to the media" about his inability to find work after he had been fired by the school.

I mean, how deep is the malaise in French society that respectable middle class types feel their only option is to take hostages?

N.B. Are teachers still considered as middle class anymore?

I had often thought...

2006-03-08T10:20:00.000-08:00

Venerable Marxist-turned-Neo-Con (how cliche) Norman Geras has highlighted a contribution by one of the signatories to the 'Unite Against Terror' statement. For anyone not aware, UAT is the lovechild of Harry's Place and something called OpenDemocracy.

Its founding statement, issued in response to the July 7th bombings, basically asserts that the bombings were not motivated by any anger towards US/UK foreign policy, but by a radical, indeed 'fascistic', hatred of 'democracy'. You get the picture. Basically, anyone who reads Cohen or Aaronovitch or any of the Pro-War blogs could have knocked it out in ten minutes. So, platitudes abound!

"We believe that democracy and human rights are worth defending with all our strength. The human values of respect and tolerance and dignity are not 'western' but universal."

Great, who doesn't? The important question is not whether respect and "tolerance" are values worth upholding, it's whom we get to do the upholding. For many of the people who've signed, Cohen, Hitchens etc, the U.S. Marine Corps is up to the job.

The problem there is that the U.S. Army, and the U.S. State, has a long, proud, staunch and continuing opposition to democracy and human rights.

Anyway, UAT is a fairly insignificant organisation, restricted to the insular, if slightly creepy, world of Neo-Con Left. The reason I mentioned them, as I intimated, is because 'Norm' chose to highlight one contribution - presumably because he thinks it 'resonates'. It's written by a man called Evan Matthew Daniel - who tells us he was in 'Manhattan on September 11'. Here's the rump of Mr. Daniel's contribution. It's interesting, I think you'll agree.

"I had long thought that countries like the United States and Britain - liberal democracies - were imperialist powers responsible for most of the world's ills and that wide-spread poverty and economic desperation in the Muslim world drove some Muslims to commit desperate acts, like blowing themselves up in pizza parlors in Tel Aviv, slamming planes into buildings in New York City or terrorizing commuters on the subways of London and Madrid. As I learned more about the perpetrators of these acts of violence it became clear that they were not members of some lumpenproletarian under-class. These were educated middle-class men following an ideology that stands against everything liberals are supposed to defend: open societies, equality for the sexes, political pluralism, free expression, the list goes on and on. It's high time that those of us who consider ourselves progressives and liberals stood up against what is the greatest global threat to freedom and democracy in the world today, the threat of Islamist totalitarianism."

This raises a number of interesting points.

Daniel correctly identifies that Imperialism is responsible for most of the world's ills. Although he may have meant it to, nothing he says after this contradicts or diminishes this point. The hijackers were middle class, so the US and UK aren't imperialist? Eh? How does that work then?

Firstly, there's arisen in much of the West's mainsteam political and intellectual discourse a kind of 'before and after' version of history. Some would like us to believe that the whole pantheon of human history (or, certainly post-war history) can be divided into pre and post 9/11.

This is an neat rhetorical device. It makes it seem that the 9/11 attacks were the 'first act', and that every action thereafter is a response. It encourages us to dismiss as 'unimportant' the preceding 50 years of theft, corruption, murder and dictatorship supported and perpetrated by the West in the Middle East. Followers of the Israel/Palestine conflict will recognize this trick, particularly in the media coverage. Israel is always 'responding' to some Palestinian transgression. You're not meant to ask, sorry, WHAT THE FUCK ARE THEY DOING THERE IN THE FIRST PLACE?. It helps them create a debate in which the only reasonable question is, 'how violent should our retaliation be?'

Now, as to the class of the hijackers. It's hardly a great historical revelation that resistance to imperialism is led by the urbane middle classes. Gandhi went to UCL - does that mean Indian anti-imperialism was somehow unconnected to the Indian masses? No, of course not. The leaders of the Chinese and Cuban revolutions were also bourgeois figures. Also, to be somewhat tactless here, it's obvious that if the hijackers have to engage in activities like going to flight school in America, they need to be of a certain intellectual 'quality'. But, that's irrelevant.

The ideology of Islamism and 'Western Values'? Sure, I'll take Daniel's word for it that "we" stand for some of those things and some Islamists don't. So what? Listen, let's get this straight.

The idea that Fundamentalist Islam poses any kind of serious threat to Western Capitalism is, quite simply, absurd. They may be capable of various hits now and again that damage our pride, make us scared etc, but the notion that the West is in serious danger of being enslaved under Sharia Law is stupid.

Osama Bin Laden is a Arab nationalist with particularly strong religious beliefs. He believes in self-determination in the Arabian peninsula, ending American involvement and 'Islamic states.' So have lots of people before him. He just happens to think the way to bring this about is to provoke a War with the West by engaging in 'terrorist' activity.

And another thing, this stuff about an 'alliance of liberals and socialists'. Fuck off! Liberalism and socialism are diametrically opposed. Classical liberalism is infused with disgusting class prejudice, casual racism of the worst sort and unthinking Imperialist hubris. Liberals intend to support and stengthten class society, whereas socialist seek to abolish it - where's the common ground? Let the liberals oppose it in their own way, and we'll do it in our way.

And don't give me this nonsense about 'defending the Enlightenment'. Only out of touch Marxian academics like Professor Geras could think that the major point of conflict in the modern age is between the proponents and detractors of the Enlightenment. I think we can safely assume that there are more important divisions in the world than whether one should defend Voltaire.

Still, at the end of the day, the real divisions in the world, that is, class divisions, will always rise to the surface - despite the best efforts of obscurantists like Bush, Blair and Bin Laden.

Labour Fiends of Iraq

2006-03-07T09:26:00.000-08:00

The masses will doubtless be stirred by
this rousing call to action by the *snigger* Labour FRIENDS of Iraq.

The LFOI, for those of you still blissfully unaware, are a group of MP's and Labour party activists committed to the invasion and occupation of Iraq. You know the type, the kind of people who see a 'straight line' between the International Brigades and the U.S. Army on the outskirts of Fallujah. The kind of people who think Blair is a latter-day Sartre - which would make Bush our General de Gaulle?

Who knows what goes through their minds, apart from very little.

Thankfully, however, despite their quite incongruent vanity, these people remain a small force on the Left.

White Phosphorus, Fallujah and Jesus Christ

2006-03-03T17:15:00.000-08:00

So, the Dear Leader has finally admitted, to Michael Parkinson of all people, what many of us had already suspected. The Christian Deity spearheaded the liberation of Iraq! His wrath brought down the Savage Leader, and now the Kingdom of God will be extended to the land where the Arabs live.

The Thinker-President is, as we know, only too keen, mainly for electoral reasons but also because he's a total cretin, to proclaim his righteousness at every turn. God guides him, God protects him from evil-doers, he converses with the Almighty, etc, etc. Crucially, Bush is associated with a certain strand of Christianity - namely, hard-right born-again Evangelical Christianity. Some on the far left in America, groups like the Maoist RCP, even claim he is a 'Christian Fascist'. I'm not sure about this. Certainly there are fascistic elements to the Bush doctrine (Imperial expansion, the merging of the State and the corporations), but above all, Fascism relies an autonomous mass base. Say what you like about Billy Graham, but he's hardly likely to lead a paramilitary organization in terrorizing the American working class.

Blair has been, up to know, more reticent about proclaiming his Godliness. Alistair Campbell, in folklore at least, summed it up by saying 'we don't "do" God'.

Christian Socialism did, of course, play a large part in the development of the British Labour Party. One of Keir Hardie's big problems with Marx was his perceived hostility towards religion. Hardie himself was quite a religious man. Tony Benn is also famed for his passionate Christian beliefs, as well as his staunch democratic socialism. Even the Dear Leader has called himself a 'Christian Socialist'. Now, I don't really want to get into the whole 'religion and Marxism' debate. Simply to point out that just because religion doesn't get as big an airing in British politics, it's always there, underneath the surface.

Until, it seems, now. Let's get to the crux of the matter. Here's the Dear Leader on the American offensive against Fallujah in 2004:

"They (the insurgents) are fighting democracy, they are fighting to stop democratic elections supervised by the U.N. and due to take place in January,"

And here's a photo, posted without comment, of the effects of that assault.

Here's a photo of another person killed in that particular War Crime.

Now, I'm not a Theologian. I don't wish to ruminate on the implications of killing babies and melting the skin of innocents in the interests of Greed and Power. Presumably Bush and Blair know the Gospels, and there must be some quote in there which justifies such actions. And if, when the Dear Leader transcends his mortal shell, God does indeed pardon him, we, as the inheritors of the Earth, will merely have to repeat Bakunin's old saying:

"If God did Exist, it would be necessary to Abolish him."

A revolutionary career

2006-03-01T07:06:00.000-08:00

A revolutionary career does not lead to banquets and honorary titles, interesting research and professorial wages. It leads to misery, disgrace, ingratitude, prison and a voyage into the unknown, illuminated by only an almost superhuman belief.

- Max Horkheimer

Whenever I'm discussing the world with friends/peers, a few arguments always pop up. Firstly, they'll generally accept my complaints about the world. War, poverty and racism etc are bad things, we can all agree.

Then, in most cases, they agree that we have to do 'something' about it. Their proposals usually range from boycotts to 'voting Labour out'.

However, my protestations about the intrinsic revolutionary power of the working class never go down well, for a couple of reasons:

1) What do you mean by the working class? Most people are 'middle class', aren't they? You're only working class if you do 'manual labour' etc.

2) The working class, insofar as it exists, is, in the West at least, 'bought off'. People are too busy living their happy lives to worry about radical change.

To the first point, Harman's excellent article from a years ago in the ISJ, called 'The Workers of the World', destroys the popular sociological notion of a disappearing 'working class'. Readers interested should seek it, it's available on the web.

As to the second point - it's an oldie but not a goldie. As far back as the 50's and Crossland's 'The Future of Socialism', people on the left even have argued that capitalism is now stable, it's future was secure. The only thing socialists could do now was fight 'culture wars', and wage Gramscian struggles to change the terms of popular discourse.

In May 1968, the theories of a 'bought off' working class were exceedingly popular in academia. Then, something happened. Motivated by a radicalized student base, the French proletariat awoke, bringing down the nationalist leader De Gaulle in a massive general strike, and almost overturning the French state. The movement, through a complicated process of betrayal and conciliation, was eventually defeated and French capital, once again, managed to stabilize itself.

This movement was part of a massive worldwide strike against capital and oppression. The Prague Spring, the civil rights movement and the anti-Vietnam war movement were a part of this internationalist struggle. Whole sections of society across the world were radicalized. Intellectual ferment brought forth a 'New Left' committed to opposing both Stalinist tyranny and the degradations of the American empire. Figures like Tariq Ali, Christopher Hitchens, Perry Anderson all coalesced around this broad approach.

As the decades proceeded, and the Fire Last Time became an even hazier memory, some people lurched back into the shadows of cynicism. Whole sections renounced their previous radicalism, and were welcomed back into the fold by the Guards of Capital. Some, such as David Horowitz and the editor of the risible 'Black Book Of Communism' , Stephane Courtois, became 'outspoken critics' of the Left. Others, like Tariq Ali, remain an inspirational example of the courage and revolutionary spirit which exemplified the days of '68 - from the Veitcong in the trenches, to the Czechs resisting Stalinist oppression.

The politics of '68 were certainly not perfect, which is reflected in some of their numbers later apostasy. They did valorize Chairman Mao to an unhealthy extent, which led many of them to take the weird position that though the Soviet Union was bad, Enver Hoxha's Albania was the workers' paradise. Trotsky was certainly a revered figure for many of them. However, it was not the Trotksy of the Bolshevik revolution, it was the Trotsky of Duetscher. Trotsky as glorious failure, idealist, the 'unreasonable' opposition to the inevitability of Stalin.

They could, as much as they tried, never make a total break with the Soviet Union. Seduced by the rhetoric and the red flags, it was always maintained that, however distasteful, the Soviet Union must be, kind of, better than Western Capitalism.

And then comes '91 - and tears rain down their blushing cheeks.

Anyway, hopefully you'll forgive my discursiveness.

The point is that I am a proletarian revolutionist!

I was motivated to say that because of comments on unnamed websites. You know the type, 'you'll grow out of it'.

Maybe one day I will, but I take immense heart from the people I know and the people I've read about who haven't. Those who refused to succumb to the overbearing hopelessness of the world.

I leave you with a quote from the old man:

Life is not an easy matter... You cannot live through it without falling into frustration and cynicism unless you have before you a great idea which raises you above personal misery, above weakness, above all kinds of perfidy and baseness.

- Leon Trotsky

Lenin next to the Red Flag

The Most Dangerous Organisation in Britain?

2006-02-22T15:55:00.000-08:00

Forget the BNP, the sub-human fossils at UKIP or the Unreconstructed Stalinists at New Labour, surely the "campaign group" 'Middle England in Revolt' represents the most frightening, if slightly hilarious, force on the poilticial landscape.

In the interests of fairness, I'll let them put their cause to the readers:

"Cottenham is where Middle England has drawn a line in the sand - and we are inviting other communities to join us in a mass revolt against the blind, deaf and dumb bureaucracy of the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister. We had a rude awakening back in February 2003 when more than 800 wealthy and aggressive travellers rode into town, set up a massive camp on Smithy Fen on the edge of the village and usurped Human Rights legislation to claim their right to stay.After a year battling with local and national bureaucracy, we took the law into our own hands and withheld our Council Tax in support of our Human Rights. "

"Wealthy" AND "agressive", eh? Imagine that. Is that to say they wouldn't have been bothered by this most discourteous of "invasions" if the invaders were poor and docile?

It's always funny to see the middle class get into a lather about "property rights" and "the rule of law". It seems to me that they remain the last people to take the system at its word. The ruling class, for the most part, know it's all a scam. The working class definetly know it's a scam - the problem is they don't know who's scamming them, or what to do about it. But the middle class are permanently angered because, well, they actually believe the hype.

On a more serious note, historians amongst you will recognise the spectre of an embittered, radicalised petty bourgeoisie dismayed by an overly bureaucratic government and dangerous "wealthy" minorities.

Anyone for a reconstitution of the Reich in Cheltenham?

Nazi in Jail

2006-02-20T10:11:00.000-08:00

So, British "historian" and all round not-nice guy David Irving is in jail.

The detestable, pug faced wretch has been put in the slammer in Austria, for a speech he made "denying the Holocaust" (a criminal offence in Austria) in 1988.

Iriving now says he think the Holocaust did happen, and that statements he made denying it back then were wrong.

Still, Nazis in Jail - is that ever wrong?

Maybe, maybe not.

Commas and the Labour Party

2006-02-17T08:11:00.000-08:00

Because I have nothing better to do, I was looking at the website of the Scottish Labour Party today. In the "About Us" section of their site, they set out the following:

"As a democratic, socialist party we welcome people to join the party from all walks of life, have their say and influence policy."

Notice, if you will, the comma here between socialist and democratic. What this suggests is that the SLP is both democratic and socialist.

Now, look at the same section at the UK Labour Party's website:

"The Labour Party is a democratic socialist party."

Where's the comma gone? The SLP is explicitly socialist, whereas 'London' Labour is democratic socialist. Interesting, don't you think?

By the way, in formal terms, the word "democratic" is redundant if it appears before socialist or socialism. Socialism is, by definition, the most democratic way of organizing human social life.

When groups put "democratic" before socialist, they're sending a signal to the people to whom real socialism would be dangerous i.e. you can trust us, we're not going to threaten your power, privilege etc.

That is, "democratic" socialist means capitalist socialist, or "status quo" socialist (not the band, though that would be interesting). Of course, the New Labour project is based on openly announcing this fact, whereas the "old" Labour Party would pretend (to itself as well as the class) to be a "real" socialist party, but was always ready to prop up the stinking system if they were required.

Private Luis A. Moreno

2006-02-15T07:25:00.002-08:00

I don't know how many people are aware of this site. It's called the 'Iraqi Coalition Casualty Count', and, well, it does exactly what it says on the homepage. It gives detailed analysis of the numbers of "Allied" soldiers killed and wounded in Iraq.

It's a useful tool for those trying to gain an insight into the ups and down of the resistance's activities.

As it stands, there have been 2269 American soldiers killed (a further 16653 have been wounded) and 101 British soldiers. The site, amongst other things, gives details of where in America the Dead Soldiers came from. Unsurprisingly, California has seen the heaviest losses, with some 236 Californians being killed.

Looking at the long list of names, I began to wonder.

Private 1st Class Luis A. Moreno, aged 19, hailing from the Bronx, NY, died on 24th January 2004. I wondered why he signed up. How many Iraqis had he killed. But most importantly, I wondered what he had to gain from the expansion of Empire. What had the people of the Bronx, many of them poor or unemployed, to gain from an increase in the profits of Halliburton?

What did Private Moreno mean to the people who sent him there? A young latino from the Bronx? Expendable.

He died "defending" a gas station in Bagdhad, a cruel irony.

Private Moreno was a victim of Forces he didn't understand. His body, his whole being, had been merely a vessel for powerul interests.

As he lay there, dying of his injuries in a British hospital , I wonder what thoughts and images passed through his mind. Regret? Probably. Pain? Yes. Fear? Definetly. The best moments and happiest moments of his 19 yeard old life? Hopefully.

He died for blood soaked bastards for whom his death, and thousands of others, was merely a means to their ends.

Motivation

2005-08-02T06:25:00.000-07:00

It's strange how you can find yourself motivated to do something almost without noticing.

I'm going to try, once again, to keep the blog up.

Not because I think I have anything particuarly illuminating to say (shit, look at Oliver Kamm, he gets away with it) but because it makes me feel better.

That's the emancipatory thing about this medium. Whereas otherwise I might have unexpressed thoughts, I can now blather all day long to the world. Or to the few people who read this blog.

Onwards!

Sharon and Hamas Unite Against Islamo-Fascism!

2005-07-11T13:06:00.000-07:00

...in other news, Earth was invaded by an extra terrestrial force earlier today. The marauding aliens entered our atmosphere at 9 Am GMT.

Seriously, Hamas have condemned the attacks, saying "targeting civilians while they are working and travelling is denounced." Surely this represents the first time the Israeli state have been on the same page with Hamas. You could see it as an encouraging sign that humility is breaking out in the "Israel-Palestine" conflict (which is a "conflict" in the same way the Nazi invasion and occupation of the Sudetenland was), or you could see it as a sign of just how meaningless the "outrage" of world leaders is.

Harry's Place have posted a useful poll of British opinion after the bombings. It shows that 60 percent of Britons are "not satisfied" with Balir and 72 percent agree with Galloway that our role in the mass slaughter in Iraq fuelled the attack.

Of course, HP has a diffirent spin on it. They see it as proof that the British people are uniting with New Labour, the Neo-Cons and the decent left in their crusade against Islamo-Fascists - which, if you're unsure, means anyone with a beard who doesn't like McDonalds and bikinis...and Israel.

Interesting news

2005-07-10T11:21:00.000-07:00

The BBC is reporting that the governemnt is drawing up some plans for a withdrawl from Iraq. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/4668661.stm

Could this be the start of the the retreat, tails planted firmly between legs? Let's hope so.

The Predictable becomes the actual...

2005-07-08T03:40:00.000-07:00

This could obviously be said of the terrorist attacks themselves but it seems like the media and establishment parties also had "properly prepared" for an event like this. Blair's response has been typically worthless and hypocritcal, as has that of the other G8 leaders - apparently Bush opposes the death of civilians, surely a great comfort to the grieving Iraqi widow/mother. It always amuses me at times like this just how much emphasis the media places on the hackneyed "outrage" of the ruling classes. Did anyone really expect Jacques Chirac to say, "at last zee roast beef got taken down, how you say, a peg or twoo"? If you took the BBC's coverage seriously, the fact that the G8 leaders opposed Al Qaeda would be agreat revelation. No, the "condemnations" and indeed the sympathy with the victims should be seen for what it is, a charade. Blair and Bush mourn when it is politically expedient to do so. The deaths of un-people in Fallujah has, as Chomsky mught put it, no status with our rulers.

As a socialist and a humanitarian, I mourn the loss of all innocent life - trite I know, but nevertheless true. However, unlike the complicit media and the mendacious elites, civilians deaths are not on a graded scale of grief-value. The Iraqi child starved by sanctions; the New York firemen; the Afghani farmer, the Iraqi girl in Bagdhad; the the Palestinian grandmother assassinated by the IDF, they all have status.

The question should not be who cares most about the dead, who is more outraged than whom, the question should be, who consistently opposes "mass murder"? Is it Blair? No. Is it Bush? No. Is it Hitchens, Aaronovitch and the morons over at Harry's Place? No. Is it, god forbid, Rupert Murdoch and the Sun? I think not.

Roosting

2005-07-07T14:06:00.000-07:00

37 are dead and some 700 are injured. The UK has, almost inevitably, experienced "blowback" from our latest imperial adventures. The terrorist attacks are not an attack on our "values", nor are they some apolitical acts of random violence. For the perpetrators, and for us, they have meaning and if we wish to stop further atrocities we need to decipher those meanings and address them. Now, of course, the objective of the politicians and the media will be to disguise the real motivations behind these attacks. We will hear endless accounts of the terrorists hatred of our "way of life" and "values". In this narrative, an attack on London would be just as likely as an attack on Paris or Berlin. In this narrative, the fact that the 3 major post 9/11 attacks have been on Australia (most victims in Bali were Australian) Spain and Britain - 3 of the main backers of the mass slaughter in Iraq - is just a "coincedince", or is merely aimed at "dividing" the "west". Already, we have had heard endless platitudes about Londoners "standing together", which is merely disguised nationalism masquerading as solidarity. You'll hear this, "whatever their diffirences, Londoners will not be cowed by terrorism". It's "us" against the terrorists. Forget our own government's crimes against the population of Iraq and elsewhere, that's not important. Oh, and by the way, who could possibly now be against ID cards?

If we really do want to stop terrorism, "resolve" and bombing people will not suffice. Unconditional support for Israel cannot continue; we must remove our hated presence in the Middle east in its entirety; we must stop promoting dictatorship and poverty in all parts of the world. Or, if we wish, we can continue with the disastorous "war on terror" and live to count the bodies and speak the worthless "sorrow" another day.

The choice is ours, the victims of war and terror, they, with their armour plated cars and police escorts, are not fit to take up the challenge.

Yes, yes it was horrible.

2005-07-03T12:05:00.000-07:00

OK, it was all horrible - horribly predictable and predictably horrible, horrible. I am, of course, speaking of Live 8. There were many lowlights but I'll just highlight a few.

First, Bono, Bono, Bono. Now, against my better instincts, U2 are a band I don't mind, they can quite competently write a little jangly stadium rock song - fine. But, Bono, if there is a more self-serving, sanctimonious and wearisome rock tsar (sic) than him out there, I'd like to meet him, and beat them to a bloody pulp. He "did this face" when on stage with the dilapidated McCartney that made me want to chew my own arm off. Bono and McCartney, where was their "moral outrage" at the onset of the mass slaughter in Iraq? Perhaps they misplaced it while dragging their guilt ridden behinds around assorted African villages, "entertaining" the bemused, but grateful, village folk. Or it may still be lodged somewhere in the orifice of Bush, who, were are told by the man with the sun glasses, has "done" more for Africa than any other Yanqui master. This may well be true, Bush may have "done" more - but more what? More pillaging? More structural re-adjustment? More arms sales to crackpot dictators?

So, Bono comes on and sings a few crowd pleasers, repeats a few platitudes about "making history" and then pisses off. McCartney looks weary - a burnt out old hippy who, although once a member of a fine rock band, is now as relevant as telegrams.

The crowd look slightly bemused during the whole affair. They listen to a few pop stars play their music, interlaced with teeth-grinding "pleas" to the G8 leaders, and all the while they are told to remember what they are "here for". You see, that's that the problem with the whole MPH, Live 8 "thing". It's a completely manufactured movement. Full of manufactured celebs and their manufactured guilt, cow-towing with manufactured politicians. Of course there is genuine "sentiment" out there in the country but so what? There bloody should be! We (or our governments) are the cause of that continent's misery.

Coldplay are like U2 and Martin is like Bono - though not nearly as annoying. At least Martin came out against the War (although this was just an exercise in pointing out the bloody obvious.)

My next lowlight was Geldof and a little Ethiopian girl he saved. Saint Bob, dressed all in white, like a Thatcherite charity mongering angel, explains that this little girl "wouldn't be here today without Live Aid [him]". The little girl looks up at Bob gratefully, her eyes bright and thankful. He looks at her and thinks "this is what it was all for", his heart swells, the audience applauds. An absolutely stomach churning disgrace but a nice little microcosm of the whole day. Her, the helpless African; him, the philanthropic Westerner; us, the passive observers; THEM, the saviours in waiting.

It all ends with a rousing version of Hey Jude - all in unison one last time to make poverty history. Bill Gates was there as well you know - though sadly no attempts were made at irony. Geldof called it a "great day". The audience left, their "consciousness raised", their minds at ease that Saint Bob and the leaders will make it all go away. The BBC packed away their belongings, there was "no violence" in Edinburgh, thankfully. Brown and Blair loved it, 20 died in a suicide bombing in Iraq. Elton John spent 20 grand on flowers - 30,000 children died in Africa, poor souls.

Good News!

2005-07-01T09:55:00.000-07:00

The local council and the pigs had been desperate to stop us going anywhere near Gleneagles Hotel while our dear leaders were carving up the planet, but finally they have relented http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/scotland/4639643.stm

SSP MSP Frances Curran called it "a famous victory for democracy", and while I wouldn't go that far, it does indeed show that you have to fight for thr right!

See you there (I'll be the handsome boy looking distinctly apathetic!)

Adventures in "Emo"

2005-06-25T10:53:00.000-07:00

Last night, courtesy of some free tickets from my uncle, I seen a band called Funeral for a Friend play in Glasgow. I had seen this band support Boy Sets Fire while they were on the way up. Now they are selling out venues across the country, on the back of the release of their second album 'Hours'. F4AF play what you might call post-hardcore, or "emo".

Emo, short for "emotional hardcore" is the latest big trend in alternative music. It has supplanted the angsty downtuned riffs of nu-metal with an even more introspective mood. Teenage boys everywhere have taken to silent rumination on the plentiful woes of their existence. Anger is replaced by regret and aggression is replaced by self-pity. Whereas Metallica or Pantera fans like to get drunk, headbang for a couple of hours and then have a nice riot, "emo-kids" are straight edge (they don't drink or do drugs, or, unbelievably, have promiscuous sex) and remain rather passive. Long, unkempt greasy hair, ripped t-shirts and denims has been replaced by pristine swept fringes, clothes that are fashionably small and an almost anorexic thinness. To be sure, this crowd was out in force in Glasgow last night.

The music itself is patchy - like any genre, it has his good bands and it has its absolutely hateful ones. The good bands display a kind of endearing emotional sensitivity and musical artfulness, the bad ones (and they are in good supply) sound like malcontent rich kids with too much time on their hands.

Politically, there is also diversity. There are many post-hardcore bands which have refined and improved the "anti-establishment" attitude of punk. Bands like BoySetsFire and Rise Against have taken Emo and blended it with the ferocity of hardcore and rhetoric of Rage Against the Machine. The others - the majority in emo - are more interested in the foibles of repeated heartbreak, emotional redemption, suicide and increasingly in something they called "sexual politics". I don't really understand what "they" mean by this yet but presumably it goes something like "boy meets girl", "girl plays hard to get", "boy gets upset", "boy buys a guitar" etc etc. Life is reduced to a series of interpersonal disputes between the self-loathing and the self-obsessed.

Anyway, FF4F were absolute bollocks. The singer is from Wales and yet he speaks like Axl Rose - "how you doin' Glassgou?" Fuckin' idiot. Me and my fellow stroppy companions left two songs before the end.

And no, I wasn't thinking about this shit during the gig. I was concentrating on other, far more interesting subjects.

Cal.

Entry into the Blogosphere

2005-06-22T11:46:00.000-07:00

I realise creating a blog is tremendously cliche but I couldn't help myself. If anyone is wondering, 'Par en bas' is French and it means 'from below' or more accurately, 'from the below'.
I am a student and I'm a raving leftie so if you're offended by that sort of thing I advise you never to return to this page.

Over the coming decades, I hope to both bear witness to the socialist revolution and be a part of it. If on my death bed I can say I have done both these things then I will be a happy man. If I haven't, but I've won an Oscar and own a house in Beverly Hills then I have a talent which has not yet revealed itself to me.

Enough mutterings. I hope to both bring your attention to things other people have said or written and offer my own two cents on anything I find disturbing/enlightening.

In comradeship,

Callum.