Tsunami notes. posted by lenin

While people across the world charitably empty their pockets to contribute in some small way to ameliorating the horrendous situation facing survivors of the tsunami, the Indonesian army has resumed its war on Acehnese rebels. Bear in mind that:

The Indonesian death toll from the tsunami is nearly 80,000 people, with most of the fatalities in Aceh, and the government expects the figure to head towards 100,000 as rescue workers reach remote towns and villages.

Perhaps the Indonesian army thinks, with the Reverend Fred Phelps , that there is a message from God in all this, and are acting accordingly. Or perhaps they don't much care, just like every major Christian fundamentalist outfit in the United States .

Meanwhile, what of the 'global aid' situation? According to The Guardian, the best the whole world has managed - including governments and private donations - is £259m. When hurricanes hit the southeastern United States earlier this year, President Bush managed to find $13.6 billion without having to be cajoled, as the US appears to have been this time. Even the UK's comparatively generous donation (£50m from the government) was prompted by a massive flow of money from the British public - £32m, which rather made the government's initial pledge of £15m look mean. (Incidentally, the excellent Media Citizen calculates that the $35m pledge from the US government so fwould cover about 3.5 hours of their occupation of Iraq; although now that this pledge has mysteriously been increased ten-fold , it actually accounts for approximately a day and a half of occupation).

This isn't surprising. The response to the flooding in Mozambique in early 2000 was similarly pitiful , as was the mean-spirited, tetchy response to appeals for aid when the Montserat volcano erupted. Cynically, one might allow that this would all be fair enough if only the US and Britain did not seek so assiduously the mantle of the humanitarian. But, after all, the major economic powers all cost the developing world a fortune in 'debt repayments' each year, a situation which they have deliberately engineered . Indeed, the devastating imperialist subventions of the West rank right up there with tsunamis, earthquakes, volcanoes and floods as the greatest disasters to be visited on humankind. So, while it might be a miserable hope, it is not an unreasonable demand to expect our leaders to live up to their self-revering phrases just once.

For those who need information or would like to help with the tsunami, I can recommend no better source than the The South-East Asia Earthquake and Tsunami blog . Check out those sitemeter numbers, by the way - without any apparent mainstream media referrals, the traffic is enormous.

Missive. posted by lenin

Dear Reader,

The earthquake, the tsunamis, the dead. 60,000 of them at the latest count, ranging from Thailand to Somalia - and barely a word said about it that does not damn the dead with boredom, repetition and bad faith. What? You dare to doubt me? Have a random look at some of the punditry and leader columns on this issue if you can do so without vomiting. I'll come to some of that in a minute.

What is the solution? Well, call me a cynic if you like, but I prefer to have someone to blame. Thousands dead? Seen it before, and records are made to be broken - without someone to blame and with few avenues for making a difference (yes, donate your post-Christmas change by all means), there is little left to do but pontificate over the fucking obvious. So, an acquaintance of mine - who is not unfamiliar with seismology - helped me out by putting it all in perspective: "Oh yeah, see, but this is the hand of God. Those people, they're not going down to Thailand to see the beaches, they're going for dirty things with children which enraged God." Well, I answered through a mucus-soaked hanky (minor 'flu attack), He certainly put a stop to that, didn't He? And aside from taking His time, He seems to have taken a few thousand who didn't meddle with children. "How do you know?" Came the hopeless reply. I subsided into my chair and blew long and hard into my fetid rag.

Which is as good a metaphor as any for what columnists and pundits have been up to over the last couple of days. Take David Aaronovitch , for instance. Well, somebody has to. For a punctilious lack of wit (he prefers sarcasm) and a simultaneous devotion to moralism (as opposed to morality), few can match him. And by imputing a 'lack of wit', I mean to invoke Martin Amis' beautifully put footnote from his memoir, Experience:

"And by calling him humorless I mean to impugn his seriousness, categorically: such a man must rig up his probity ex nihilo."

Today's sermon from Aaronovitch sums up a few of the pertinent facts, airily dismisses what 'some people say' (we are never allowed to know who) and then proceeds to conjure up the apocalypse:

Dennis Smith used the occasion of the Indian Ocean disaster to argue that now was the time to reduce the La Palma mountain in size, "to lessen the impact should it ever slide into Atlantic." "But, who," Smith asked, "will pay for such a huge reduction of a landmass?" Hmm. What country is New York in?

Similarly one day we will be hit by a gigantic asteroid if we don't work out a way of intercepting them in space. Not soon, maybe (or maybe very soon), but it's going to happen. But when Dubya confided his pre-election desire to restart the US space programme, he was widely laughed at.

Mountains falling into oceans, gigantic asteroids, Dubya being laughed at? Never heard that before. The La Palma problem is a genuine one, although I leave it to scientists to judge whether chopping a volcano in half is not fraught with danger. The space programme has always been a matter of geopolitics. The original moon landing race was a bipolar affair, with America and Russia urgently scrabbling to make space a 'sphere of influence'. One could, and should, read the current babble about conquering Mars as an extention of the PNAC desire to take advantage of the 'window of opportunity' afforded by the absence of a serious superpower rival and entrench the US' dominion. It is well enough reported that the civilian and military space programmes are converging, and some of those reports suggest that it would cost up to $1 trillion. True enough, with that money, no region need do without warning systems, (or AIDS drugs, or adequate nutriments come to that). But with an enemy like a "gigantic asteroid", are you prepared to take that risk?

Aaronovitch proceeds with a few swipes against those alleged to be retreating into 'parochialism' and an 'idealised village life' because they don't believe what them there doctors and science folks tell 'em, then returns to his usual form:

This coming year, Gordon Brown told us this week, is "make or break" for development in poorer countries. The chancellor is calling on G8 countries to match Britain's commitment to reach the long-touted, never-achieved target of 0.7% of national income going on aid. He is also taking the initiative on debt reduction.

If past reactions are anything to go by we will react to the government's emphasis on world interdependence in one of two ways. We will either complain that what it is doing is not enough - and then do nothing ourselves. Or we will suggest that there are bigger and more immediate priorities here at home that preclude "gallivanting" around the globe.

There seems to be no way of condemning the government fairly. If we say Brown's actions are a drop in the ocean ranged against a mega-tsunami of debt which Western governments and banks are largely responsible for, then we are hypocrites for not doing enough ourselves. I don't personally own a bank, nor work for the government. One does attempt to make the government actually represent us by demonstrating and the like, but Aaronovitch seems to get piqued when people do that. This is, after all, a democracy and not a mobocracy. Still, it is an impressive journey - from the dead in Thailand to faith in our government via collapsing mountains and gigantic asteroids. The end was never in doubt, but the journey was spectacular.

There's more, but let's leave the journos to one side. Hilary Benn, the International Development Secretary who has the looks, but not the charm, of Lembit Opik, has been doing the rounds over this. He insists that the government is doing a great deal, thanks, and would appreciate it if citizens devoted themselves to helping 'close the gap' between the rich and the poor in the world economy. This is like Osama bin Laden calling on Muslims to reduce the level of non-state violence in the world. The United States, on the other hand, merely wishes the world to know that it is "not stingy" after it was criticised by the UN for proffering a measly $15m in aid. They added another $20m, making it $35 million - which is about a third of Bush's advertising budget during the 2004 election. Britain, by the way, has given $29m or £15m, approximately 1% of what the Millenium Dome eventually cost. Disasters, social and natural, tend to reveal where real priorities lie. Well, consider:

The UN claims that the cost of the rescue operations alone will run into billions . Billions. And some would rather we spent it all on occupying Mars.

Democracy in action. posted by lenin

I leave off the blogging for a couple of days, and the world becomes even more stupid. First of all, I note that the Tories have pledged to cut the number of MPs in Westminster by one fifth. Well, they've made a good start on their own over the last two elections.

Iraq has no such piffling concerns. With one party pulling out of the anxiously awaited elections, and Iraq's "Foreign Minister" announcing that these may have to be delayed in some areas after all, it seems unlikely that it will win anything better than a coalition of puppets, pinnochios and pushovers: Allawi, Chalabi and Sistani. Fallujah, of course, is in such a pitiful state that there can be no chance of its remaining live residents being able to recover the bricks in their houses never mind attend a polling booth. So far from the olive branch, they will be left with nothing but the gun and the same can be said for Mosul and many other areas.

And in Palestine, the first local elections for some years in the occupied West Bank have produced some bad news for Israel :

Hamas declared itself a significant political force after West Bank local election results were announced yesterday. It was the first time the Islamic movement, branded a terrorist organisation by Britain and other Western governments, had contested any local or national election.

Both Hamas and the late Yasser Arafat's Fatah party claimed victory. Hanan Yousef, a West Bank Hamas leader, said: "This election has proved that we have a strong presence here. This means the Hamas programme of resistance has many supporters."

The 'Hamas programme of resistance' amounts to precisely this: resisting. That's all they do that is different from Fatah. There is no social programme to speak of, and Hamas do not even have the 'virtue' of being able to impose religious strictures on the every day life of Palestine. Reactionary Islamism has never had a great deal of support in the occupied territories, contrary to what is sometimes reported. All Hamas have is the fact that they are not prepared to capitulate entirely to Israel; and this suggests that Marwan Barghouti would have fared well in the Presidential elections (which Hamas have boycotted). True, he's banged up in Israel right now, but so are approximately 8,000 Palestinian political leaders.

Finally, a belated link to a fine article about the emergence of a "Republican proletariat" in America. The US working class, it seems, have to swing right before anyone will acknowledge that they exist. In this, a lesson that the social-democratic centre-left will not - because they cannot - learn: the votes of the poor, the exploited and the oppressed are not to be taken for granted. It isn't the case that there is 'nowhere else for them to go'.

AIDS Action Cosies Up to Bush; British State Involved in Terrorism. posted by lenin

Yes, I know I said I would shut up, but this is unbelievable. Once again, Doug Ireland has the scoop :

It's mind-boggling: Marsha Martin, the executive director of AIDS Action--the AIDS community's largest, most visible, and wealthiest Washington lobby, with a multi-million dollar budget--has jumped into bed with the Bush-Rove Republicans with both feet. In a perfectly scandalous act of betrayal of the AIDS community, Martin is one of a small committee sponsoring a pricey celebration of Bush's November victory, and that of the Republicans in Congress. And guess who gets the money from this orgy of felicitations to the GOP? A front group for Big Pharma that crusades against giving cheap, generic AIDS-fighting meds to the world's poorest victims of the AIDS pandemic.

Mind-boggling? They may as well have proffered their buttocks to the Republicans with a slab of butter melting in the crevice.

While I'm here, let me just choke on my bacon sarnie over this :

Special Branch link to Omagh atrocity

...

The six year long investigation into the Omagh bombing - the worst single atrocity of the Troubles - took an extraordinary turn yesterday when it was revealed that a Special Branch officer is to be questioned for allegedly telephoning through an anonymous warning.
The officer, who has not been identified, is now the chief suspect for making the call received by detectives in the County Tyrone town 11 days before the outrage.

...

The Guardian has been told the anonymous call, made at 10am on August 4 to a CID officer in Omagh, contained detailed information, including the names of five republican suspects. The information was never passed on to police on the ground.

The fact that the call was made has been known for some time but the source of the call has never been traced. The Special Branch officer is to be asked if he made the call, and if so, why.

We know, of course, that the British state has had a long history of involvement with terrorism (more below), particularly in association with the UDA. But that was Loyalist terrorism, aimed at prominent enemies of the British state (which is not to say that civilians were not frequent and intentional targets). This suggests that the British state was involved in a Republican terrorist campaign, which killed only civilians. Much worse, they knew 11 days before the attack occurred that it would happen, who would do it and how. And they knew because one of their own Special Branch operatives was able to tell them.

Special Branch's response to this info from one of their own was to say that there was nothing in it, while the police "ignored warnings, failed to act on crucial intelligence or question key suspects" and evidence was covered up. Now, the cover-up job wasn't particularly sophisticated. The information sheet on which the details of the call were recorded was simply never accounted for in the RUC investigation after the bombing - instead, some genius scribbled across it: "NOTHING TO DO WITH OMAGH".

Fantastic. For what its worth, my guess is that they allowed the attack to happen precisely because the effect was to finally break the back of militant Republicanism. The atrocious nature of the attack, the fact that it killed 29 civilians (even though there were warnings, the police didn't act on them), that put an end to any remote sympathy among Catholics with the insurgency strategy.

Note, by the way, that one man was put away for involvement in this attack, despite the fact that the police had inserted false notes into an interview given by the suspect, Colm Murphy. Why was he imprisoned? What level was his involvement? He allegedly lent two mobile phones to the guys who were going to carry out the attack. The prosecution acknowledged that their case rested on confessions allegedly beaten out of made by Mr Murphy, which he claimed were bogus.

A few quick notes on state terror, then...

The use of death squads is unsual in stable democracies, but two countervailing examples are those of Spain and Britain. In Spain, the GAL carried out terrorist attacks, killing 27 people between 1983 qand 1987. It was later discovered that the GAL was a combination of police officers and mercenaries, organised and funded by government ministers and leading Socialist Party politicians. The British state's involvement with the Ulster Defense Association, or UDA (which also operated as the Ulster Freedom Fighters, UFF) grew out of a tradition of loyalist paramilitarism. In particular, it drew on the legacy of the "B-Specials", a part-time police reserve notorious for its brutality and anti-Catholic bigotry. Membership of the Ulster Defense Regiment, a 'legitimate' army, overlapped significantly with the UDA. Many of the soldiers in the UDR moonlighted in the UDA; the UDR actually allowed dual membership, presumably because the activities of the loyalist group dove-tailed with the security goals of the state. In fact, the UDR was quite a remarkable institution - it was perhaps the only state institution in United Kingdom territory that had a recorded crime rate that was double that of the population as a whole.

The main axis of interaction between the British state and the UDA, however, was in the relationship between the Force Research Unit (FRU), and the Shankill Road based 'C' Company of the UDA (Johnny 'Mad Dog' Adair's stomping ground). The FRU was a special body of British military intelligence, which recruited members of the UDA - notably Brian Nelson - and drip-fed information on people they wanted targetted. Pat Finucane, the civil rights lawyer, was their most prominent hit. The man who pleaded guilty to killing Finucane was Ken Barrett an intelligence agent. As investigations revealed , this was not an accidental alliance, but a systematic process of collusion that lasted for decades. One small irony of history is that the RUC is credited with having expended a great deal of effort in covering up these crimes, while its members were often themselves targets of the UDA. And that's just the information the government will allow us to have, since ten pages of the report have been blanked out. The collusion did not end, either, when the UDA was finally made illegal in 1992. Some writers like to claim that the loyalist spate of extreme violence in the early nineties was due to Special Branch being unable to direct their charges any more, but the Cory report noted that there was substantial evidence of collusion in the car-bomb murder of Rosemary Nelson in October 1997, but this time it was believed to have been carried out by a minute ultra-fanatic schism known as the Red Hand Defenders. This group, 20 members strong, has issued warnings against Catholic postal workers and staff working in Catholic schools. It has claimed responsibility for a number of attacks which were later discovered to be the actions of the UDA, and it is believed that the RHD is used as a cover name by elements within the UDA and the Loyalist Volunteer Force (LVF).

All of which indicates that the British state has been prepared to work through any old bload-soaked hand in Ulster, planning, inciting and colluding in the killing of civilians. And some people claim to just know that the British government would never kill civilians to meet its own political objectives.

Solstice Greetings. posted by lenin

Okay, lenin has his fricking Santa hat on, and all you kids are invited onto his lap. Jingle my balls while you're there, and whisper any gift requests into my ear without slipping the tongue in.


Head gear.

As a non-theist, I don't give much of a flying buggery fuck whether this festival of religion and commerce is called the Christmas, Xmas, the Holiday Season, Hannukah, post-Eid festivities (is Eid over yet?) or whatever you like. It's just another Winter Tale if you ask me. But, as the merrily atheist Doug Ireland points out for me, Christopher Hitchens has belched out a hearty Bah, Humbug on the matter while debating a religious fundie on Pat Buchanan's television show, and for the first time in ages I agree with him. Do check the link, if only to see Pat Buchanan get smacked around like a rogue elf who's just broken all the toys.

Doug Ireland, for his part, deserves a couple of Ho's for this and this . A third to Dead Men Left for consistently amusing, insightful bloggery over the year.

Charlotte Street has an excellent post on 'anti-Americanism', so drop down his chimney for some mince pies and milk. Marc Mulholland is back in Northern Ireland for the holidays. He doesn't, unfortunately, report on the sign that appears at Belfast City Airport: "WELCOME TO NORTHERN IRELAND. And by the way, you're fuckin' welcome to it." (What? You dare to suggest I would make this up?) But kindly go and warm his chestnuts, and remind him that civilisation does exist beyond the sticks.


Christmas morning: another unwanted hat.

Jews Sans Frontieres is simply one of the best blogs around, and is certainly the best anti-Zionist blog on the net. I strongly urge you to fill his stocking.

Finally, before I run out of seasonal puns, the jolly Anglo-German blogger Oliver Kampf tells me he will be writing yet another self-effacing, witty and incisive missive, this time on the matter of King Herod's often misunderstood policies designed to tackle the proliferation of under-twos. Go over and give the old bird a good stuffing. Turkey won't taste so good anywhere else.

Okay, that's me for now. I may post a little pic of myself yodelling into the toilet bowl on Christmas morning, but otherwise I'm shutting up about it for a couple of days. Ho ho ho.

Gary Webb, RIP. posted by lenin

The death of reporter Gary Webb is, aside from being another episode for conspiracy theorists to mull over, a tragedy for serious news reporting. Webb published a famously devastating series of articles on the connections between the CIA and cocaine trafficking . Further, as Doug Ireland reports:

A huge amount of what Webb wrote was later confirmed in a CIA Inspector General's report , and in the findings of investigators for the Senate committee that investigated the CIA-drug links (as the top investigator for the Senate Select Subcommittee on Terrorism, Narcotics, and International Operations, the admirable Jack Blum, testified in 1996).

Doug also notes that the LA Times, the most egregious of the many newspapers that took to viciously slandering Webb as he dropped his bombshells, has decided to issue a disgusting obituary on Webb. One thing I would dissent on is the idea that, as Doug quotes Marc Cooper saying, this is a case of "a major newspaper dropping the ball journalistically, and then extracting relentless revenge on an out-of-town reporter who embarrassed it". My guess is that the LA Times did not merely 'drop the ball' on this story; they, and the rest of the news industry, were simply uninterested in publishing the story. MediaLens offer an interesting account in this regard:

Gary Webb is a typical example of the kind of journalist who dismisses Media Lens-style analyses as so much extreme conspiracy theorising. Webb was an investigative reporter for nineteen years, focusing on government and private sector corruption, winning more than thirty awards for his journalism. He was one of six reporters at the San Jose Mercury News to win a 1990 Pulitzer Prize for a series of stories on California's 1989 earthquake. In 1994, he was awarded the H.L. Mencken Award by the Free Press Association, and in 1997 he received a Media Hero's Award. Webb describes his experience of mainstream journalism:

"In seventeen years of doing this, nothing bad had happened to me. I was never fired or threatened with dismissal if I kept looking under rocks. I didn't get any death threats that worried me. I was winning awards, getting raises, lecturing college classes, appearing on TV shows, and judging journalism contests. So how could I possibly agree with people like Noam Chomsky and Ben Bagdikian, who were claiming the system didn't work, that it was steered by powerful special interests and corporations, and existed to protect the power elite? Hell, the system worked just fine, as I could tell. It +encouraged+ enterprise. It +rewarded+ muckracking."

Alas, then, as Joseph Heller wrote, "Something Happened":

"And then I wrote some stories that made me realise how sadly misplaced my bliss had been. The reason I'd enjoyed such smooth sailing for so long hadn't been, as I'd assumed, because I was careful and diligent and good at my job. It turned out to have nothing to do with it. The truth was that, in all those years, I hadn't written anything important enough to suppress." (Webb, 'The Mighty Wurlitzer Plays On', in Kristina Borjesson, ed., Into The Buzzsaw - Leading Journalists Expose the Myth of a Free Press, Prometheus, 2002, pp.296-7)

In 1996, Webb wrote a series of stories entitled Dark Alliances. The series reported how a US-backed terrorist army, the Nicaraguan Contras, had financed their activities by selling crack cocaine in the ghettos of Los Angeles to the city's biggest crack dealer. The series documented direct contact between drug traffickers bringing drugs into Los Angeles and two Nicaraguan CIA agents who were administering the Contras in Central America. Moreover, it revealed how elements of the US government knew about this drug ring's activities at the time and did little, if anything, to stop it. The evidence included sworn testimony from one of the drug traffickers - a government informant - that a CIA agent specifically instructed them to raise money for the Contras in California.

The response to the first instalment of Dark Alliance was interesting - silence; the rest of the media did not respond. Normally this would have been the end of the story, but Mercury News had placed the report on its website, which was deluged with internet visitors from around the world - 1.3 million hits on one day alone. This attention generated massive public interest "despite a virtual news blackout from the major media", Webb writes. Protests were held outside the Los Angeles Times building by media watchdogs and citizens groups, who questioned how the Times could ignore a story of such obvious importance to the city's black neighbourhoods. In Washington, black media outlets attacked the Washington Post's silence on the story. It was at about this time, Webb writes, that "my reporting and I became the focus of scrutiny". (p.305)

The country's three biggest newspapers - The Washington Post, the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times - focusing on Webb rather than on his story, all declared the story "flawed", empty, and not worth pursuing. Webb comments:

"Never before had the three biggest papers devoted such energy to kicking the hell out of a story by another newspaper." (p.306)

Webb's editors began to get nervous, 5,000 reprints of the series were burned, disclaimers were added to follow-up stories making it clear that the paper was not accusing the CIA of direct knowledge of what was going on, "even though the facts strongly suggested CIA complicity", Webb notes. Despite a lack of evidence or arguments, the story was quickly labelled "irresponsible" by the media. Ultimately, Mercury News backed away from the material, apologising for "shortcomings" in a story that had been "oversimplified" and contained "egregious errors". Webb quit Mercury News soon thereafter.

As additional information subsequently came to light, Webb recognised that he had indeed been in error:

"The CIA's knowledge and involvement had been far greater than I'd ever imagined. The drug ring was even bigger than I had portrayed. The involvement between the CIA agents running the Contras and drug traffickers was closer than I had written." (p.307)

Despite the press condemnation, Webb writes, the facts became more damning, not less - but they were never seriously explored. Instead the story was permanently tarred as "discredited".

So why did the press turn on the story and on Webb himself?

"Primarily because the series presented dangerous ideas. It suggested that crimes of state had been committed. If the story was true, it meant the federal government bore some responsibility, however indirect, for the flood of crack that coursed through black neighbourhoods in the 1980s... The scary thing about this collusion between the press and the powerful is that it works so well. In this case, the government's denials and promises to pursue the truth didn't work. The public didn't accept them, for obvious reasons, and the clamour for an independent investigation continued to grow. But after the government's supposed watchdogs weighed in, public opinion became divided and confused, the movement to force congressional hearings lost steam...". (p.309)

There is a very concise and accurate summary of Webb's career at Wikipedia . Wikipedia goes to great lengths to get its articles as accurate and 'neutral' as possible, so it is instructive to note that they credit Webb with having been proven right in most essentials by the findings of the CIA Inspector, Senator John Kerry (who?), the Justice Department, and by a letter published by Representative Maxine Waters. Not only was he proven right, moreover - without his reports, it is unlikely that these investigations would have been carried out.

How many journalists can claim as much?

Update: Just noticed this excellent article by Yoshie Furashi at Critical Montages . The quality and consistency of Yoshie's output has landed her a couple of articles in Counterpunch and Dissident Voices.

A few links. posted by lenin

After insulting Ed 'the head' Staines in my comments box, the least I can do is repay his impatience with a plug for his excellent (if overwritten) essay on the historian G R Elton . He is a welcome addition to my blogroll, although one hopes he doesn't soil it too much.

With a fresh new cognomen , the author of Dead Men Left is back and swiping with both fists, and directs my attention to this excellent article by Apostate Windbag, whose tag-line alone deserves a Pulitzer.

Finally, Dorothy Parker is online . I particularly like to re-read this :

Résumé
Razors pain you;
Rivers are damp;
Acids stain you;
And drugs cause cramp.
Guns aren't lawful;
Nooses give;
Gas smells awful;
You might as well live.

Christmas cheer.

Oh, and a couple of Googlies. I have noticed over the past three days some odd hits coming to my sitemeter. First, I have been discovered by a reader looking to find evidence that Lenin's father was a Muslim . Even better, another browser believes that Lenin would have supported Bush . Is it possible that either of those statements could be true, let alone both at the same time? Another one! This time, some pervy readers would like to see pictures of Khmer Fucking . Tsch. Hobbies, eh?

Killer Idea for Christmas Money. posted by lenin

KILLER IDEA

Here's the deal.

We do a series of movies that spoof the new 'spoof' niche that has opened up in Hollywood. Here's a few title ideas:

"NOT ANOTHER TEEN SPOOF!"

"SPOOFMEMBER"

"THE SPOOF WHO SHAGGED ME"

"SPOOFY MOVIE"

"SPOOFY MOVIE TWO"

"HOT SPOOFS: NUMERO DEUX"

"SPOOF HARD"

"THE NAKED SPOOF: THE FINAL MONEYSPINNER"

"SPOOFBALLS"

etc etc.

You see, certain movie niches after a time become regarded as tired and cliched among more educated and urbane segments of
the audience. These are typically the best part of our audience, the ABC1 group. The spoof market has typically worked by
usurping the incredulity at those well-hoed niches and making fun of them. Cynical generation-Xers react well to films which appear to validate their disgust at the apparent phoniness of some of Hollywood's more repetitive and banal output.

I feel that this audience may well be growing tired and weary of the old "spoof" format. As recent shocking statistics indicate, even VHS sales of these movies are falling drastically low. Should we therefore give up trying to make cheap money by reselling already well-established formats by apparently subverting their content?

Hell no.

What we should do is reach out to those who are now totally turned off by spoof films and offer some biting criticism of the
spoof genre. In that way, we can multiple our returns on ...

So, what do you all think?

KILLER IDEA, THE SEQUEL/SPOOF/BBC REPEAT

I omitted to mention the great soundtrack albums we could have for all of these films. There are literally millions of cheap - I mean to say, tragically under-rated - songs out there, which we could buy the rights to and sell in a double-CD album.

Maybe some chart-bottoming nu-metal or Yank punk.

Reply to Taxloss on Multiculturalism. posted by lenin

The blogger taxloss has proffered some thoughtful comments on my post about multiculturalism below .

Before I get to the meat of his argument, there is one point I want to make. Taxloss comments that I 'weaken' my point by 'straying into different territory' at the end of my post. Possibly, by talking about two different issues in the same discussion, I run the risk of diluting the impact of one of them. But I think the two were united by the theme of how to fight the far right, so it was a justified risk in my assessment. I'll take the risk of extemporising on some confluent themes in this response too.

So, to the argument. Taxloss says that I miss two key words in my exposition of multiculturalist logic: 'integration' and 'inclusion'. He is right. I didn't mention these points at all, and it never occurred to me. Segregation (which is recommended by the BNP), taxloss says, was never discussed as part of the multiculturalist argument - which is also true, although I didn't say that it was. Integration, he adds, was not designed to preserve or fetishise difference, but rather to demonstrate sameness. Oh, quite! Underneath it all, aren't we the same? Isn't 'race' and so on skin-deep, and aren't we really all pursuing our own version of the same human story? Set aside my sarcasm, which I will explain later, and allow me to say that I agree with taxloss here - to some extent.

The trouble comes when my interlocuter suggests that this is the authentic, positive multiculturalism that we should heroically defend. Of course, I am for including Muslims, but isn't the language of 'integration' nowadays precisely the form that 'respectable racism' takes? When David Blunkett avers that Asians don't speak English enough, and should speak it even in their own homes, don't we hear the authentic voice of authoritarianism and British nationalism? How far a step is it to say that Asians or Muslims don't integrate because they won't or can't, because their culture is incompatible with ours? Wasn't this precisely the appeal of Pim Fortuyn? These Muslims will not integrate into Dutch liberal society, accept my homosexuality and so on... In short, isn't 'integration' now the language of exclusion?

And again, when I protest against the fetishisation of difference, it isn't because I wish to see difference obliterated. To that extent, I am not that bothered about whether people choose to 'integrate'. I simply find it irrelevant from a political point of view whether one prefers the pie 'n' mash shop or the curry house. In fact, the only point at which such a thing would become relevant would be if the universal rights that we all are entitled to as basic, fundamental trumps over-riding anything else, were infringed on for a particular group - say, if curry houses were firebombed by racists.

This is what I mean when I say that culturalism must be displaced by universalism. This isn't about us having different cultures and you respecting my culture and me respecting yours, it is about social justice, about rights that we are all entitled to. The universalist (socialist) attitude to the oppression of gays or Muslims is to say that these are common strategies of exclusion and marginalisation which say something more fundamental about the society as a whole. We all want good housing, decent jobs, safety from bullying and so on, and being an anti-racist is a logical corollary of that.

As soon as you accept culture as the horizon of political discourse, the focus is shifted onto the terrain of whether this or that culture can co-exist, adapt to one another's existence etc. This precisely allows racists to say that "we aren't racists, we just think that different cultures can co-exist peacefully". Further, "integration? I'm quite sound with my white English culture, thank you very much. I don't feel any overwhelming need to 'integrate' with Asians." Oh, better yet, "inclusion? Exclusion! Attempting to include people of different cultures not only dilutes my culture, which I wish to defend, it is also unsustainable, dangerous, will lead to rivers of blood etc".

To which you will raise the perfectly solid and decent response: "but that is nonsense, these cultural differences are irrelevant, and what you really want to do is create an artificially homogenous state ruled by fascists. The real issue is that everyone should be free to live and work unmolested. The arguments of 'racial difference' are so much superstitious hocus-pocus, and the arguments about 'cultural difference' are a sublimated version of the same."

And you will be right, even though your response is precisely not that of a multiculturalist but a universalist.

There are a couple of other things I didn't mention, which taxloss doesn't pick me up on. I did not mention the word 'tolerance'. It is a commonplace of multiculturalist discourse that we ought to be tolerant toward the Other. John Gray, in his The Two Faces of Liberalism ( reviewed here ) approvingly cites Voltaire's comment: "What is tolerance? It is the appurtenance of humanity. We are full of weakness and errors; let us mutually pardon each other for our follies."

As a stipulation about human interaction, I happen to think this is invaluable advice and beautifully put. As a guide to race relations, it sucks. Zizek is better:

Liberal "tolerance" condones the folklorist Other deprived of its substance (like the multitude of "ethnic cuisines" in a contemporary megalopolis) - any "real" Other is instantly denounced for its "fundamentalism", since the kernel of Otherness resides in the regulation of its jouissance, i.e. the "real Other" is by definition "patriarchal", "violent", never the Other of ethereal wisdom and charming customs.

Tolerance, per se, is not a virtue. It just means putting up with something. To promote it as a virtue suggests that somehow other people are a burden - Jamaicans, Asians (both Muslim and non-Muslim), gays etc. are to be 'tolerated'. This is as misanthropic a notion as I have ever heard. And then there is the matter of what we shall tolerate (here I explain my earlier impertinence). Difference, of course, is what is to be 'tolerated', but the story of multiculturalism glides gently over whether such differences are horizontal or vertical. Aren't we deep down all the same? Big people, small people, black, white, Jew, Gentile, capitalist, worker, victim, torturer... The reason why this series would never be pursued to its conclusion is because at a certain point, it becomes clear (once again) that what is relevant is oppression. Sometimes, the answer to Rodney King's question "Why can't we all just get along?" is that there are some people we shouldn't get along with. DW Griffiths' film 'Tolerance' was precisely an attempt to justify the racism of his film 'Birth of a Nation' on grounds of the specific experience of the Southern whites, while the anti-racists were seen as intolerant, elitist etc.

In short, I mean to say as clearly as I can that every conceptual operation by which multiculturalism establishes its anti-racism can be appropriated with frightening ease by the far right. As a discourse, its focus is wrong, its arguments are flawed, and its value in combatting racism is dubious.

"I'd kill them all ... They don't know what democracy is." posted by lenin

It's hard to list all the things that are wrong with and stupid about this :

AMERICAN marines and military intelligence analysts are studying the tactics of insurgents in Iraq — staging mock hostage takings, roadside bombings and suicide missions, as well as studying the Koran, praying to Allah and learning to think like jihadists.

...

For a touch of realism, newcomers are supplied with traditional Arab garments and ordered to take off their shoes indoors. “You need to think of yourselves as mujaheddin, holy warriors,” the group is told, “and you aspire to be a shahid, a martyr killed in battle.”

In Ali G accents, the trainees learn to call out Allahu Akbar (God is most great) and Alhamdu Lillah (praise be to God). They are given a Penguin Classics translation of the Koran and an Islamic prayer mat and are shown how to pray.

“One reason you are strong is that the infidels go to church only on Sunday, but you kneel and reflect your submission to God five times a day,” Purdy told them in character.

“We don’t have nuclear weapons, but we have you and you are more powerful than the weapons of the Jewish dogs and infidel crusaders.”

But what is of some more importance is what sort of lessons the troops are drawing from this adventure:

One marine had returned only six weeks ago from a seven-month posting in Iraq. He will be going back soon. “It’s what I do,” he said. Had the course taught him anything he had not learnt in the field? “It’s helped me to know how the enemy thinks and appreciate how sophisticated they are.”

If he were in charge, how would he deal with the Iraqis? “I’d kill them all,” he replied. “They don’t know what democracy is.”

I seem to recall a certain well-known former leftie slavering enthusiastically that the troops were learning "fantastic lessons" that would enable them to roll into Syria and Iran, the glories of 'liberation' in tow. How right he was.

Fallujah at the Movies. posted by lenin

The number one International story in The Guardian today is the stunning news that a film is to be made about Fallujah :

Universal Pictures announced yesterday that it is to make The Battle for Falluja. To prove it is serious, it has enlisted Indiana Jones himself, actor Harrison Ford, to help defeat the insurgency.
The film - Hollywood's first foray into the second Iraq conflict - is due to go into production next year and will be based on a yet-to-be-finished book, No True Glory: The Battle for Falluja by Bing West, a former marine, politician and now war correspondent.

...

Writing last week for the online journal Slate.com, West said: "If America needs a hard job done, the marines will do it, and they won't lose their humanity in the process or any sleep over pulling the trigger. Yes, they are 'the world's most lethal killing machine.' That's what America needs in battle."

So, this will be the third atrocity visited on Fallujah, then.

Globalisation and the State. posted by lenin

‘The rise of the modern state over the past four centuries has been halted. In the twenty-first century we will witness only its decline.’ Discuss. There are notes attached below, but no bibliography. I can answer questions about that in the comments boxes if anyone has any.

Escaping the state?
The modern state is alleged to be experiencing a terminal crisis about which it can do little or nothing. Theorists of ‘globalisation’(1) (Harris, 1995; 2002), ‘postmodernity’ and ‘Empire’ (Hardt & Negri, 2000) argue that the nation-state is being outrun by changes in the world economy, which include: the drastic expansion in world trade since 1970; the increasing ability of capital to move operations off-shore; the freer movement of labour due to cheap air travel - in short, mobility. Capital, as Marx predicted(2) , has battered down all walls, Chinese walls included. According to Nigel Harris:

“Global integration is making the movement of commodities, of finance and of workers, greater and greater … movement increases faster than output. The world economy, it seems, has by now passed the point of no return, and we are set upon the road to a single integrated global economy, regardless of the wishes of governments and citizens. Indeed, any efforts to reverse the process, spell catastrophe.”(3)

Against this, I intend to argue that the changes in the world economy have been misunderstood; the capacity of capital for increased mobility has been over-stated; and the state’s relationship to capitalism has been misconstrued. I will also challenge the categories which I think have facilitated these errors. The modern state is not leaving us - it is merely changing its mode of operation.

What is the Modern State?
Discussion of this question has been defined by two poles of opinion: those who take a broadly Weberian view of the state, and those more inclined to a Marxian view. Max Weber defined the modern state in the following famous words:

“[A] state is a human community that (successfully) claims the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force within a given territory.”(4)

He adds that the state also needs legitimacy, which can take three basic forms: traditional, charismatic and legal, the latter reflecting the more rationalised form of rule typical in modern states. This definition reflects Weber’s commitment to methodological individualism. He specifically opposes it to functionalist(5) explanations in the following words:

“Sociologically, the state cannot be defined in terms of its ends … Ultimately, one can define the modern state sociologically only in terms of the specific means peculiar to it.”(6)

Marx & Engels, by contrast, defined the state in terms of both its means and its ends. They took an ‘instrumentalist’(7) view of the state in which the “executive of the state is but a committee for managing the common affairs of the bourgeoisie”(8) , and a

“…public power which no longer directly coincides with the population organising itself as an armed force. This special public power is necessary because a self-acting armed organisation of the population has become impossible since the split into classes ... This public power exists in every state; it consists not merely of armed men, but also of material adjuncts prisons, and institutions of coercion of all kinds….”(9)

In the former explanation, the state is a semi-autonomous body claiming authority over a specific territory; in the latter, it is a ‘public power’ that emerges as a result of class division. Both of these explanations have been refined and drawn out by adherents of the respective theories. The Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci, for instance, argues that the state is not merely a separate public power operating on behalf of the bourgeoisie, but rather is governed at any one time by a ‘power bloc’ whose objective is to win ‘civil hegemony’ to legitimise their rule. (Gamble, Marsh & Kent, 1999). These power blocs allied fractions of different classes together, (a classic example of this would be the Glorious Revolution of 1688 which welded what Perry Anderson called “a supine bourgeoisie”(10) with the feudal aristocracy).(11) The Weberian literature on the state has been varied, but certain themes remain intact, especially the emphasis on politico-military power, which is seen as autonomous rather than an adjunct of class rule.(12)

If the modern territorial state is conceived of as a contingent answer to the needs of an emergent capitalist economy which requires rationalisation and the standardisation of weights, measures, currency and language, then it may well become irrelevant if the capitalist economy becomes so transformed as to require new structures.(13) If, on the other hand, the state is seen as the outcome of class division, it follows that the state will be relevant in some form as long as class divisions remain. In particular, if the modern state is conceived of as a capitalist state, it is unlikely to be superseded as long as the capitalist mode of production remains intact. In what follows, I will try to assess the claims for globalisation in light of this discussion.

The Claims for Globalisation
Before going any further, I want to outline some of the key processes which theorists of globalisation suggest are undermining the modern state, for good or ill. As I suggested before, they rotate around the notion of mobility. But not merely of labour, capital and goods – also of values, culture, gustatory choices, religion and sumptuary proclivities (albeit that these could be seen as a certain type of good). The increasing availability of cheap air transport, for instance, makes it easier for people to move across the planet and seek work opportunities. The management of this process is one which nation-states are finding increasingly difficult and politically contentious. The production and distribution of illicit drugs is so vast that national and even international police institutions have found it impossible to prevent.(14) Simultaneously, technological developments – especially the internet – have caused a ‘globalization’ of culture, in which a Baghdad blogger may communicate his thoughts with a Texan rancher.

There has been a dramatic increase in the level of global trade since the collapse of the Bretton Woods system in the early 1970s, growing by an annual rate of 6% in the 1990s.(15) Between 1970 and 1997, world trade increased sevenfold to account for $400 billion. From 1973 to 1998, the daily turnover in foreign exchange markets rose from $15 billion to $1.5 trillion.(16) The collapse of the ‘tiger economies’ in South East Asia during the last quarter of 1997 is often cited as an example of what can happen with such vast and (it is argued) uncontrollable flows of financial capital, but Brenner (2002) points out that the same processes were at work in America during the same period.(17) Cross-border mergers and acquisitions increased from 42% of Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) in 1992 to 59% in 1997.(18) This increasing global integration of capital has been seen by some as representing a fundamental break in capitalism, in which “both ‘industry’ and ‘finance’ have been internationalized but with separate and uncoordinated circuits. This has then massively weakened the individual nation-state” leaving it “unable to regulate or orchestrate its national currency”.(19)

With these underlying processes have come decisions by states to cede control over certain aspects of national economies. India reduced its tariffs from 82% in 1990 to 30% in 1997, while Brazil cut 25% to 12% in the same period.(20) The decision by Chancellor Gordon Brown to make the Bank of England independent was a precondition for joining the European single currency, while those that have already joined have been obliged to accept strict stipulations about public spending and stability in line with prescriptions associated with neoliberal economics.(21) There has been a tendency to reduce the state’s involvement in the economy through the privatisation of national industries.(22) Similarly, states have delegated power upwards to economic institutions like the World Trade Organisation, the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank.(23) The UN is a global political body in which nation-states formally cede control of many issues which infringe on national sovereignty to its agencies.

From all of this, the argument appears to suggest itself: capital, finance, labour, culture and politics are increasingly global, to the extent that the nation-state can no longer properly contain them. Its territorial control is threatened by what Hardt and Negri call the “deterritorializing apparatus” of capital, and “information networks” which “release production from territorial constraints insofar as they tend to put the producer in direct contact with the consumer regardless of the distance between them”. Production is said to be increasingly decentralised and dispersed across the globe.(24) These processes, over the long term, are eroding the nation-state and will, at the very least, halt its long ascendancy.

Multinational capital and the nation state
In the lexicon of postmodernity(25), the term ‘decentred’ figures prominently. Not only the subject, but now also capital, is decentred. The global integration of capital and its increasing mobility means that a transnational like Nike may outsource production of its trainers to Vietnam and sell them across the world at inflated prices. At the same time, information networks(26), just-on-time delivery systems and low-cost transport allow for greater fluidity of capital and goods. The increasing mobility of capital and finance is a fact of life. But the internationalisation of capital is not a new process – it has been a feature of capitalism since its early mercantile phase (Braudel, 1981). It was particularly pronounced in the period before 1914. As sociologist Michael Mann points out:

“Domestic saving and investment still correlate about 75 percent among OECD countries, indicating that foreign capital is not all that internationally mobile... And the differences in real interest rates between countries are about the same as they were a century ago. Indeed, it is doubtful whether, in many respects, capital is more transnational than it was before 1914, except in the special case of the European Union.”(27)

Figures in Hirst & Thompson (1996) show that direct investment in the period 1992-3 specifically privileged ‘home’ nations.(28) And although it is true that between 1970 and 1997, the level of world trade rose to $400 billion, it is also true that 60% of this went to OECD states.(29) Hirst & Thompson (1999) similarly point out that profits to multinational companies (MNCs) are based largely in the ‘home’ regions, while sales and assets are overwhelmingly based in home countries.(30) Flows of FDI to developing countries are highly concentrated, as well, with the bulk of it going to the NICs in Asia and Latin America, while Eastern Europe, the Middle East and Africa are largely excluded. Gill (2003) notes that the US, EU and Japan each have 12% or less of their GDP composed of exports.(31) This surely suggests that a) globalisation is neither as truly global, nor as ‘decentred’ as some suggest and b) capital is not as mobile as is often suggested either.

There are reasons for this. Research by Ruigrok & Tulder shows that of the Fortune 100 top companies, at least twenty would not exist had it not been for their being saved by their respective ‘home’ states, while many had benefited enormously from “preferential defence contracts” and so on.(32) Further, as Wood (2003) points out, citing the research of Alan Rutger, “Scrutiny of corporate operations is likely to reveal that ‘multinational enterprises are not particularly good at managing their international operations’, and that profits tend to be lower, while costs are higher, than in domestic operations”. Similarly, it is true that states are submitting themselves to the growing authority of supraterritorial institutions like the WTO, but the state “still provides the indispensable conditions of accumulation for global capital”. One “can imagine capital continuing its daily operations if the WTO were destroyed” but “it is inconceivable that those operations would long survive the destruction of the local state”.(33) Examples are not hard to come by: Nike could not continue to profit from cheap labour operations in Vietnam were it not for the government proactively creating the conditions in which capital can thrive. Castells is right to suggest that states themselves “created the foundations for globalization”.(34)

But if capital has not been as omnicompetent and mobile as globalisation theorists sometimes maintain, neither has the state entirely lost its control over the movement of labour. Nigel Harris (2002) reports that the US and the EU in particular have moved to severely increase the costs and decrease the rewards of migration outside of legally managed channels – with some (often tragic) success. Cultural transmission is much easier now than ever before, but this does not necessarily lend itself to an undoing of the nation-state. As Gill (2003) points out, the fear of cultural homogeneity can prompt attachment to the nation-state or to a local culture.(35) Nation-states have ceded political as well as economic authority to supranational institutions, true, but all of these were founded at the behest of nation-states and are maintained by them. (In a touching irony, the United Nations was founded in San Francisco, its formation principally driven by the US).(36) NGOs have some clout but, as David Chandler points out, they have increasingly relied on states for funding and co-operation.(37)

Conclusion
I think it is useful to dispense with the term ‘globalization’. Given what has been said, it can be seen as an obfuscatory device with little real referent.(38) ‘Globalization’ is used to refer to different, incommensurable processes which run parallel to one another, but not strictly as part of the same movement. For instance, there is no obvious correlation between the freer movement of capital and that of labour. At the same time, it is often alleged that the state is finding its powers encroached on: but while many relinquish certain social welfare functions, most are accruing to themselves greater authority of governance over non-economic life, a process with only tenuous connections to the internationalisation of capital. ‘Globalization’, in falsely bundling together these different processes, is a fiction, an ideological construct. What Milanovic is complaining about is an economic orthodoxy, generally known as neoliberalism. If he said that globalization was making the poor worse off, while someone else said that it enabled one to communicate with many people of different faiths and backgrounds, they would not be disagreeing because they are speaking of different things.

The processes which are said to be undermining the nation-state have been exaggerated and misconstrued. And where there are tendencies which could potentially undermine the authority of the nation-state, demanding a more local or global polity, there are simultaneous processes which are reinforcing its hold from within and without. The relationship between state and capital, it seems to me, conforms more fully to the Marxist understanding of the state than the Weberian one. In that understanding, the modern state is a capitalist state which, given present indications, is likely to persist as the axis of political and economic activity for some time.

Notes.
1. In fact, Harris prepared this thesis while still a revolutionary Marxist and long before such theories were in vogue. See Nigel Harris, The End of the Third World: Newly Industrialising Countries and the Decline of an Ideology, Penguin, 1986.
2. See the famous passage from The Communist Manifesto:
“The need for a constantly expanding market chases the bourgeoisie over the whole surface of the globe. It must nestle everywhere, settle everywhere, establish connections everywhere.
“The bourgeoisie has through its exploitation of the world market given a cosmopolitan character to production and consumption in every country. All old established national industries have been destroyed or daily are being destroyed. They are dislodged by new industries...that no longer work up indigenous raw materials, but raw materials drawn from the remotest zones, industries whose products are consumed not at home, but in every quarter in the globe... In place of the old local and national seclusion we have intercourse in every direction, universal interdependence of nations.”
3. Nigel Harris, The New Untouchables, 1995, (p 226).
4. Weber, Essays in Sociology, H H Gerth & C Wright Mills ed., (p 78).
5. For a functionalist explanation of the modern state, see Ellen Meiksins Wood’s account in Empire of Capital, London, 2003: “Capitalism is, by nature, an anarchic system, in which the laws of the market constantly threaten to disrupt the social order. Yet probably more than any other social form, capitalism needs stability and predictability in its social arrangements. The nation state has provided that stability and predictability by supplying an elaborate legal and institutional framework, backed up by coercive force, to sustain the property relations of capitalism, its complex contractual apparatus and its intricate financial transactions”. (pp16-7). And elsewhere: “On the one hand, the state must help to keep alive a propertyless population which has no other means of survival when work is unavailable, maintaining a ‘reserve army’ of workers through the inevitable cyclical declines in the demand for labour. On the other hand, the state must ensure that escape routes are closed and that means for survival other than wage labour for capital are not so readily available as to liberate the propertyless from the compulsion to sell their labour power when they are needed by capital.” (p. 18).
6. Ibid, pp 77-8.
7. Ralph Miliband’s The State in Capitalist Society (1969) is an account of the state which is faithful to this model; the personnel occupying administrative positions are considered to be drawn from, or the servants of, the capitalist class. The capitalist class does not itself govern, Miliband approvingly quotes Karl Kautsky as saying, “it contents itself with ruling the government” (p. 51).
8. Karl Marx & Friederich Engels, The Communist Manifesto, (p 82).
9. Friedrich Engels, The Origins of the Family, Private Property & The State, 1884, quoted in Colin Barker, ‘The State as Capital’, International Socialism 2:1, Summer 1978.
10. Perry Anderson, The Origins of the Present Crisis, 1965
11. Bertell Ollman tacitly acknowledges these refinements in summarising Marx’s position thus:
“In capitalism, the state is an instrument in the hands of the capitalists that is used to repress dangerous dissent and to help expand surplus value … Marx also views the state as a set of political structures interlocked with the economic structures of capitalism whose requirements … it must satisfy, if the whole system is not to go into a tailspin. And, finally, the state is an arena for class struggle where class and class contend for political advantage in an unfair fight that finds the capitalists holding all the most powerful weapons.” (Bertell Ollman, Theses on the Capitalist State, http://www.nyu.edu/projects/ollman/docs/theses.php).
From being an ‘instrument in the hands of the capitalists’, the state moves to being ‘an arena for class struggle’ where class and class contend for hegemony, albeit in an unfair right.
12. For a Marxist discussion of this debate, see Alex Callinicos, Theories and Narratives: Reflections on the Philosophy of History, Cambridge, 1995, (pp 110-28). It should be noted that while their respective positions were often subsumed into a theoretical Cold War, the Marx-Weber debate involved a great deal of cross-fertilisation. The political scientist Christopher Brooke describes Perry Anderson’s Lineages of the Absolutist State, accurately I think, as “an exercise in Weberian comparative macrosociology”, albeit one that is carefully integrated into a Marxist heuristic (http://voiceoftheturtle.org/show_article.php?aid=131).
13. If we agree with Spruyt that *********FILL IN*********
14. According to the United Nations Drug Control Programme, “More than 300 tonnes of heroin are thought to have been produced annually in the 1990s, mostly for export”, while “In recent years, illicit drug consumption has increased throughout the world. Various indicators -emergency room visits, substance abuse related mortality cases, arrests of drug abusers, number of countries reporting rising consumption levels -make clear that consumption has become a truly global phenomenon.” They attribute this to the increase in global trade. "Despite the positive implications which the increase in world trade has for prosperity and efficiency, sustained growth in international trade can complicate efforts to control the illicit drug problem." See United Nations, World Drug Report, 1997, pages 17, 18 & 29. (http://www.un.org/ga/20special/wdr/wdr.htm).
15. Wayne Ellwood, The No Nonsense Guide to Globalization, London, 2001, (p. 16).
16. Fred Halliday, The World at 2000, New York, 2001, (p. 61).
17. Private purchases of US assets increased from $375.5 billion in 1996 to $669.15 billion in 2000. By the first half of 2000, gross US assets held by the rest of the world reached $6.7 trillion or 78% of US GDP. Robert Brenner, The Boom and the Bubble: The US in the World Economy, New York, 2002, (pp 208-9).
18. Ellwood, op cit, (p.58).
19. Scott Lash & John Urry, The End of Organised Capitalism, Cambridge, 1987, cited in Alex Callinicos, Against Postmodernism: A Marxist Critique, 1989, (p. 136).
20. Ibid, (p. 33).
21. The fact that many European states have not themselves adhered to these restrictions is suggestive, but David Held avers in respect of the EU that “sovereignty is … clearly divided: any conception of sovereignty which assumes that it is an indivisible, illimitable, exclusive and perpetual form of public power – embodied within an individual state – is defunct”. Held, Democracy and the Global Order: From the Modern State to Cosmopolitan Governance, 1995, (p. 112).
22. The economist Edward Luttwak explains that each privatisation of an industry in one national economy pressure other state to follow suit, “forcing the pace of decontrol” internationally. Luttwak, Turbo Capitalism: Winners and Losers in the Global Economy, Orion Business Books, London, 1998.
23. David Held notes that accepting the intervention of the IMF may not represent an immediate threat to sovereignty, but it “is often the result of recognition that there is minimal scope for independent national economic policies”, while conditions attached to assistance from the World Bank “have been insisted upon by the ‘dominant coalition’ of advanced industrial countries which effectively control World Bank policy”. Held, 1995, op cit., (pp. 110-1).
24. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire, Harvard, 2000, (p xii, pp. 296-7).
25. This is another category that needs challenging, although I have not the space to do it here. See, in particular, Callinicos, 1989, op cit. and also Perry Anderson, The Origins of Postmodernity, London, 1998. Callinicos accurately traces the overlapping economic, philosophical and political tropes which have been associated with postmodernism, debunking what he calls ‘the myths of postindustrialism’, critically engaging poststructuralism, and noting that those literary and artistic devices often associated with postmodernity are in fact distinctly modern. Anderson traces the genesis of the concept to a ‘conservative reflux’ within literature which met the challenge of modernism’s powerful lyricism with its own perfectionism of detail and the use of irony. Its development into a theory of epochal change is also noted for its inconsistency and inadequacy. My suggestion is that the notion of postmodernity is of little use in assessing the prospects for the modern state.
26. On this, see Manuel Castells, The Rise of the Network Society: The Information Age, Volume I, Oxford, 2000. In particular, his analysis of ‘informational capitalism’ in which multinational corporations are increasingly decentralised into ‘interlocking networks’, in which power is exercised ‘randomly’ rather than dominatively in hierarchical structures. (pp. 208, 210).
27. Michael Mann, ‘As the twentieth century ages’, New Left Review 214, 1995
28. The following table, constructed from those figures, appears in Chris Harman, ‘Globalisation: A Critique of the New Orthodoxy’, International Socialism, 2:73:

PERCENTAGE OF BUSINESS FOR MULTINATIONALS IN HOME COUNTRY

manf'g service manf'g service
sales sales assets assets
US 64 75 70 74
Japan 75 77 97 92
Germany 48 65 n/a n/a
France 45 69 55 50
UK 36 61 39 61

29. Fred Halliday, op cit, (p. 66).
30. Paul Hirst & Grahame Thompson, Globalisation in Question, 2nd Edition, Cambridge, 1999, (pp. 82-3).
31. Graeme Gill, The Nature and Development of the Modern State, London, 2003 (p. 241).
32. Cited in Chris Harman, ‘Analysing Imperialism’, International Socialism, 2:99, Summer 2003 (p. 43).
33. Wood, op cit, (pp. 139-40). Gill also remarks that “The forces of globalization themselves rely directly upon the state for their ability to function. Markets, NGOs, media companies and all the other institutions that propel globalization need to have some guarantees that they will not be subject to criminal or terrorist attack”. (p. 248).
34. Castells, op cit, (p.147).
35. Gill, op cit, (pp. 239, 246). Slavoj Zizek deserves mention in connection with this, for suggesting that the preservation and encouragement of discrete local cultural nuances is always-already inscribed into the internationalisation of capital, not merely as a means of creating new market niches, but also of reducing difference to harmless cultural twists which can easily be absorbed by multinational capital. (One thinks of the HSBC campaigns in which it advertises itself as ‘the local bank’ because of its understanding of local cultural nuances etc).
36. Peter Gowan, ‘US:UN’, New Left Review 24, Second Series, November/December 2003. The recent war on Iraq certainly demonstrated that nation-states could, as always, simply ignore the UN, which is even weaker than the League of Nations (that at least had its own army). But this is because the UN is composed of nation states of varying strengths, in which none can match the power of the US. The UN should be understood as a means by which states regulate their dealings with other states; international law is a process and not a monument.
37. David Chandler, From Kosovo to Kabul: Human Rights and International Intervention, London, 2002.
38. Gill suggests that “globalization is dialectical, not unilinear, promoting opposing tendencies: integration and fragmentation, universalism and particularism, homogenisation and differentiation”. Gill, op cit, (p. 246). My assessment above is a malign twist on this.

Seumus Milne on secularism and the left. posted by lenin

A very sharp piece by Seumus Milne in The Guardian today. I don't know that I accept the argument for an Incitement to Religious Hatred law. I would want to be very careful to ensure that religious leaders and even religions themselves could be criticised, even in intemperate irrational tones. In fact, if Milne is right, I would suggest that existing laws on Incitement to Racial Hatred should merely to be refined or extended cover Islamophobia. Here are a few extracts:

At its most rational, opposition to protection for Muslims and other religious groups is based on the argument that whereas race is about biology, religion is a set of ideas which can be adopted or discarded at will. But in reality, just as ethnicity isn't mainly an issue of genetics, religion isn't only a question of beliefs: both are also about culture and identity. In Britain, religion has increasingly become a proxy for race. It hasn't escaped the attention of racists that many people in Britain who a generation ago would have regarded themselves as Pakistani or Bangladeshi now see themselves primarily as Muslims - nor that targeting Muslims is a way round existing race hate legislation, as well as drawing on the most poisonous prejudices and conflict of our era.

Precisely, and very aptly put. The issue about Islamophobia is that being a Muslim is just as much a part of one's identity as being a Jew. (Interesting that some 'free speech' advocates have defended Nick Griffin's right to describe Islam as 'evil'; how would they react to such a description of Judaism?)

By the same token, for the secular left - which is about social justice and solidarity if it is about anything - not to have stood with British Muslims over Islamophobia or the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq would have been the real betrayal. It is not, and has not been, in any way necessary to compromise with social conservatism over women's or gay rights, say, to have such an engagement; on the contrary, dialogue can change both sides in positive ways. But it is a chronic flaw of liberalism to fail to recognise power inequalities in social relations - and the attitude of some liberals to contemporary Islam reflects that blindness in spades.

Again, an excellent point put succinctly. A formal neutrality toward every specific religion, in which each is as bad as any other, misses the way in which certain religious groups may be targeted specifically and hatefully by racists (who then go on to add that any defense of Muslims/Jews/Buddhists etc. amounts to special privileges etc).

Outright opposition to religion was important in its time. But to fetishise traditional secularism in our time is to fail to understand its changing social meaning. Like nationalism, religion can face either way, playing a progressive or reactionary role. The crucial struggle is now within religion rather than against it.

That offers one hostage to fortune too many. True, the axis of struggle has been displaced to some extent, and it doesn't make any sense to expend the bulk of one's energies in Britain against the CoE, for instance. On the other hand, Iranian reformers and leftists might have a word or two to say about why opposition to religion can still be important. (Albeit that resistance against that regime can take a left-Islamist form). But Milne's last two sentences are precisely right. Islamism should properly be understood as a kind of nationalism, an 'imagined community' of believers, which may face left or right. Those brought up with a religious background will often radicalise first within their religion before they dispense with it. The crucial battles today are against racism, imperialism & capitalism. Religion only becomes an important enemy when it is contiguous with oppression.

Multiculturalism, free speech and the far right. posted by lenin

Now that David Blunkett has been brought low by the tag team of his former lover and that unctuous berk, Stephen Pollard, it's time to pause and reflect. Nick Griffin, psy-clops leader of the BNP, called David Blunkett, "a fascist monster" yesterday. I like my ironies to be a little more ironic than that, but it is instructive to see what this gesture entails. Griffin told The Guardian some years back that the government's policy and rhetoric toward asylum seekers (then guided by Blunkett's hidden hand) was legitimising what the BNP were doing. What can Blunkett have done to lose such a noble heart and mind?

Politically correct racism

Axiomatically, those who attack multiculturalism and free speech can be placed somewhere on the political Right, inevitably the far right. Yet, these two - dare I say it? - canards are becoming precisely useful fodder for the far right. Griffin notoriously appeared at the election count in Oldham wearing tape over his mouth and a t-shirt that read 'Gagged for telling the truth'. His new party slogan is "Freedom, Security, Identity, Democracy". Those last two signifiers could have come right out of a 1980s 'multiculturalism' seminar. The new party magazine, replacing John Tyndall's proscribed Spearhead magazine, is called Identity. Griffin once explained his liking for curries, which was not merely a gustatory triviality. He notoriously took Paxman apart on a Newsnight interview a couple of years back, using the same 'multiculturalist' logic that Paxman did ("yes, we all have our different cultures, and that's why there must be a wall in Oldham - so the Muslims can have their culture, we can have ours and, oh look, here's a Hindu who supports me").

Griffin is very good at playing this game, which suggests he understands something about ideological hegemony. For example, on the new party slogan, he explained to a meeting of the Ku Klux Klan that it was a carefully crafted new strategy. Speak in code, allude to what cannot be said openly. Define your agenda in terms of freedom, security, identity and democracy - "and no one can touch you for it". He is not the only contemporary leader of the far right to understand that political concepts are not fixed, but floating signifiers. They are fought over and 'captured'. Hence, Pim Fortuyn's complaint that the Muslims were 'intolerant' of his homosexuality. Fortuyn wasn't the classic right-wing populist: not satisfied with being gay, he was also a sociologist, and proclaimed loudly that some of his best lovers were immigrants. Politically correct racism, then.

Multiculturalism is not merely inadequate, it is positively beneficial to the far right. The strategy of the far right in Europe for some time has largely been to win electoral respectability, attain office and prove to the ruling class their ability to efficiently run and maintain a modern state. If they can present their racism in the lingua franca of the dominant discourse of the age, then they are half-way to winning seats. By positing the existence of a series of discrete, autonomous cultures, the discourse of multiculturalism allows Nick Griffin to say, as he did at his court hearing for incitement to racial hatred some six years ago - "I am a white separatist, not a white supremacist". (He received a 9-month sentence which was suspended for two years, on account of his publication of a racist magazine called The Rune which not-too-subtly looked forward to the hanging of black men and also described how Jews controlled the media).

What must displace multiculturalism is universalism; that is, we must replace a discourse which fetishises difference with one that prioritises the rights which we all have.

Freedom to say it...

I have never much cared for the Voltairean dictum on free speech. For one thing, I would never die for a fascist's right to say whatever dippy little thing entered his head. For another, the favour would certainly never be returned.

Stanley Fish tells us that there's no such thing as free speech, "and its a good thing too". I don't like him, but he has a point. All freedoms are, of course, in some sense relative. We relish our autonomy, but only insofar as this respects the autonomy of others. We leftists want the worker to be free from exploitation, which is obviously incommensurable with the capitalist freedom to exploit. We want women to be free to walk the streets at night which, even more obviously, is incompatible with the freedom to rape, rob or murder. And so it is, perhaps, that we have reached the stage where incitement to racial hatred is regarded as a crime under bourgeois law. The freedom of black people to live their lives without being harrassed and abused and their right to be free from fear and intimidation is of course impossible to square with the right of racists and fascists to bully and intimidate them.

So, freedoms are relative, and therefore determinate. At some point, we prioritise the rights of one group over another. The right to live is more important than the right to murder - so much so that killing is the single most prevalent taboo in all human societies. Circumfluent issues such as abortion and the right to die obviously constitute some pretty horrendous grey areas, particularly for those who are obsessed with "the beginning of life and the very end of life" as the fictitious child of Sidney Poitier in Six Degrees of Seperation has it. (He continues: "What about the eighty years we have to live between those two inexorable bookends?") Nevertheless, a sense of which freedoms to prioritise is easily intuited by most, presumably based on an understanding of our nature as aliens on this planet, the only creatures on it who are not only interactive, but also interdependent, not only changed by the world, but enforcing change on it.

The consequences of such reasoning are as follows: 1) Freedom of speech is relative, not an absolute, 2) When two freedoms appear to conflict, it is not always possible to reconcile them. 3) The standard prescriptions from postmodern liberals on freedom of speech are therefore inadequate for the purpose of making the necessary distinction to prioritise one freedom over another.

If it is obvious enough that some freedoms of speech could in principle be suspended for the sake of another's well-being, it isn't quite so clear where to draw the aclinic line. One might agree with the ACLU that it is permissible for someone to write revisionist accounts of the Nazi holocaust, but disagree with their defense of far right marches through black or Jewish areas. And this, perhaps, indicates some of the difficulty. Political speech is by its very nature conative. It is a call to action, or it is nothing. It says something about the world, and either calls for its defense or its overthrow, or its fundamental reform. To write a revisionist account of the Nazi holocaust might seem harmless enough, if disreputable and revolting. But I claim there is a limit to this logic. Would we, for instance, think it permissible for a television show to be openly racist in this day and age? We have not come so very far from the Seventies, where comedies depicted white people reacting with fear and loathing to the presence of a black person. The black and white minstrel show isn't so far back in our history. And Jim Davidson still gets stand-up jobs for the BBC even though he isn't really funny and can't do most of his obscene racist material because it would put the BBC in breach of the law. So, the question is by no means an academic one. Could we countenance an openly racist television show? Most of us find it contemptible enough that Hollywood produces torrents of subtly poisoned garbage for us to digest. Should the BBC transmit live broadcasts from Abu Hamza to counter-balance Songs on Sunday?

As I have noted before, those who rally to the defense of free speech for the likes of Griffin and, more commonly, Kilroy, are notably silent when any of the real PC cliches are challenged and confronted (cf Jenny Tonge's comments on becoming a suicice bomber). Freedom of speech is surely a precious thing, provided you use it to bolster any sad old prejudice about foreigners, gippos, pikeys and beggars.

Anticapitalist rhetoric

Why is it that Le Pen felt the need to embrace an Algerian on a live platform in 1998, and tell the crowd that "he is no less French than I am", while berating "unpatriotic" multinationals who sell out French workers? Why is it that the BNP claim to be "the only non-Marxist socialist party" in the North, urging people to join the Amicus union, berating the government for selling out manufacturing workers? Why did they run on a platform of alleged anticapitalism, opposition to the World Bank and IMF, opposition to the Iraq War, environmentalism and so on? Isn't it obvious that by discarding the notion of systemic opposition, the Left allowed itself to become merely a reactive force, saying to governments "you mustn't do that!" while rallying only to stop the latest radical right excess? In this way, the far right has been able to take such swift advantage of the degeneration and racialisation of politics.

Fortunately recent trends, represented by the antiwar movement and the European Social Forum, suggest a renaissance of radical dissent. This is what is needed. One thing that is certainly not needed is for the left, whether radical or merely anti-fascist, to place itself at the disposal of the Labour Party as Searchlight insists we must . No anti-fascist activist will have any credibility if they appear to be simultaneously the puppets of a party which supplies much of the electoral base for the far right through its betrayals. The strategy of accomodation, and being intimidated by the liberal citation of the far right menace, is over. Real political intervention has begun.

A few links. posted by lenin

Socialist Worker has a brief and excellent article on the growing movement for reform in, well, Saudi Arabia. Since SW's relaunch with the snazzy new Euro-left design (it's modelled on Liberacione), it has had much more unique and interesting material. The polemicising has been properly relegated to the back pages, while the news stories have become more incisive. Mike Rosen also has a nice review of new film starring Al Pacino as The Merchant of Venice, particularly useful after Jonathan Freedland's philistine denunciation of the play this week as 'anti-Semitic'.

The latest import into Iraqi politics from Latin America are Colombian military & police . The last one was the death-squad-sponsor John Negroponte. Now, they have gone a step further and acquired the services of the auxiliaries of death squads. Of course, there are tonnes of mercenaries operating in Iraq (or 'foreign fighters' as they are sometimes known).

And while I'm at it, the hat trick - Pinochet arrested; Griffin nicked; and now this . Can't be bad now, can it?

Evolutionism: a philosophical dialogue. posted by lenin

“Modernity can and will no longer borrow the criteria by which it takes its orientation from the models supplied by another epoch: it has to create its own normativity out of itself”. Jurgan Habermas.

So, I was having a chat with Napoleon the other night, and he says to me, he says:

Napoleon - So, lenin, my legacy is a blinding success compared to yours. Where did it all go wrong?

lenin - Ah, Nappy, I think it was the social anthropologists that did me in.

Napoleon - I don't follow.

lenin - I shall explain.

Napoleon - Pray do so.

lenin - I shall. You see, from the fall of Aristotle, many false Gods and even phonier magi emerged to fill the void. They recovered ancient texts, searched for clues, worked wonders with nature and sought the secrets of the universe. The ruling class in certain places - the princes of Italy, chiefly - was of such a mind as to give these guys sponsorship provided they could create pretty little objects which the Prince would keep, conserve and display to those who doubted his divine authority. They created academies (the Accadamei dei Linceii etc), worked on their spells, consulted the texts retrieved by the humanists, and carried out what would come to be known as experiments. Galileo, then Bacon, divined that truth was to be found in the Book of Nature rather than the Book of God (which came from second-hand sources of dubious repute). Men emerged in the school of natural philosophy who began to call themselves scientists. They determined that all things were matter and motion, configured in various ways. This goodly frame, the earth, was such a configuration, authored by God, and with wondrous messages for those who cared to examine the text.

The geocentric, geostatic cosmos of Aristotle having been quite exploded, all that remained was an infinite and intricate concatenation of causes and effects. Hence, Locke's "law of unintended consequences". Ferguson could write that history was "the result of human action, but not the execution of any human design". Smith, of course, made his unfortunate remark about the 'hidden hand', which I have always taken to be a cryptic reference to some indignity he suffered at the hands of his childhood captors.

The Enlightenment, then. Its geographical axis was Western Europe, particularly France and Scotland, although its intellectual horizons were framed by the Americas and the colonies from whence would emerge sugar, tea, silk and other commodities of empire. The Scottish philosophes had their highland clansmen to Lord it over from their comfort zones in the industrializing cities (Smith had a chair in Glasgow University, surrounded by a thriving industrial belt), while all were aware of the uncivilized brutes that seemed to be dropping like flies over the pond (the Scottish Enlightenment supported the repression of rebellious Highland clans in 1715 and 1745, who resembled the Native American “savages” somewhat). Smith wrote in his Theory of Moral Sentiments of the compelling differences in custom between the "civilised nations" on the one hand, and the "savages and barbarians" on the other. He took issue with Rousseau getting all moist about the natives (the Caribs of Venezuela), presenting only "the indolent side" of savage life to make it seem "the happiest of any". He had his own little theories about that, and they usually broke down into four stages.

"There are four distinct stages which mankind pass through," he said, as if satirising Marx in advance of his coming, "first, the age of the hunters; secondly, the age of the shepherds; thirdly, the age of agriculture; and fourthly, the age of commerce". Four stages. D'you suppose Marx threw in the Asiatic Mode of Production just to maintain the symmetry? (Yes, yes - Smith's model of 'four stages' is largely to do with technological development, while Marx is concerned with the 'mode of production'). At any rate, the idea of history as progress was born. And not merely among the Scots. The French philosophes were adamant that knowledge was not merely increasing, but would do so infinitely (Fontenelle). Turgot believed that not only knowledge moved progressively forward, so did human history. A patriot of the Second International before his time.

Anyway, the Enlightenment model of rationality was centred, as I say, on principles believed to be derived from the 17th Century foundation of modern physics. As these methods had yielded such splendid results from nature, they must have something to say about human societies. Voltaire attempted to import into France the new science and philosophy of Newton and Locke, while Hume subtitled his Treatise of Human Nature (1739-40) “An Attempt to introduce the Experimental Method into Moral Subjects”.

Herein, the birth of social theory. This developed Montesquieu and “The Spirit of Laws”, in some ways continuing the classical concern with political institutions – republican, monarchic and despotic, although Montesquieu also took an interest in the weather. Yes, you see, Asia’s torrid climate naturalises despot, whereas the colder climate of the north prefers republican and monarchical governance. The cold also repels invaders, which is why you couldn't take Russia, Nappy dear.

Nappy - You didn't hold it for long either, fuckface.

lenin - But of course Montesquieu is reflecting his own concerns in his lurid portraits of 'Oriental despots', the latter standing as an oblique criticism of Bourbon absolutism. Comte, by contrast, was more positive than HIV (I do like these modern hip hop expressions). His 'positivist' theory of knowledge was also an attempt to apply scientific methods to as wide a variety of social phenomena as possible. The Comtist law of three stages (what is it about laws and stages) ran thus: 1) Theological, 2) Metaphysical, 3) Positivist, or scientific. Turgot had anticipated this new evolutionism: “All ages are linked by causes and effects which bind the present situation of the world to all those which have preceded”. Stages, of course, had been economic categories for the Scottish thinkers; for the French, they were intellectual categories.

And it was the Scots who sounded the first note of social evolutionism as a theory of history. “It is in their [the Indians’] present condition that we are to behold, as in a mirror, the features of our own progenitors”, Ferguson averred. This was the central precept of the 'comparative method', which held that by studying 'backward' societies overseas, we might understand the genesis of our own civilization. Hence MacLennan: “[T]he preface to general history may be compiled from the materials of barbarism”. Unto which it is only fair to say that we are fairly well stocked with the materials of barbarism ourselves.

Similarly, Tylor assured us that ‘backward’ elements within a society may speak of its past, just as ‘backward’ societies may speak of the past of civilisation. Lewis Henry Morgan wrote of the Iroquois and had a great deal of fun with three stages (savagery, barbarism, and civilization).

Marx read Morgan's Ancient Society, which had been published in 1877, between December 1880 and March 1881, taking at least ninety-eight pages of handwritten notes. Engels cited him approvingly in The Origins of the Family, Private Property & The State, and even subtitled his book In Light of the Researches of Lewis H. Morgan. To Engels, Morgan's description of the Iroquois was important because "it gives us the opportunity of studying the organization of a society which, as yet, knows no state."

The 'four stages' of the history of class society - ancient; asiatic; feudal; capitalist - are partially elucidated by Engels in Socialism: Scientific and Utopian. The 'asiatic' business, with its Orientalist accretions, has been a boil on the Marxist backside ever since. Marx announces in his preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy that "No social order ever disappears before all the productive forces for which there is room in it have been developed". I'd like to say I proved him wrong...

No, Engels wasn't stupid about this; he was subtle, dialectical even, if you must. He and Marx both understood that history was both kind and unkind, that it had its stops, starts, and occassional reverses.

But all of this lent itself to the animating illusion that to be in the present was to be at some considerable advantage to the past: we are either closer to the fulfilment of history or already there. There are two ways to equate social progress and evolution: 1) Take an ethical attitude to evolutionary process for its contribution, 2) Take an ethical attitude to process in itself. I myself have been accused of determinism, and positivism (despite launching a spectular and bloody attack on some of its open devotees in 1908). But it was the dregs of Lamarckism, positivism, Spencer, Tylor, four stage this, three stage that, and the rest up to and including the renegade Kautsky; they were the iron balls attached to the feet of the revolution. They persuaded socialists that the new order would build itself, or through the actions of parliamentarians, while they slept. Progress was inevitable, the new society had merely to be midwived into existence by the loving care of reformists. Even the Great War was not enough to disabuse them of his appalling historical fallacy.

Napoleon - We'll be back after the break with news and sport.

"Hi, my name's lenin, and I'm a cynic." posted by lenin

You are a Cynic.
Cynicism was originally the philosophy of a group
of ancient Greeks called the Cynics (main
article), founded by Antisthenes.

Nowadays the word generally describes, somewhat
pejoratively, the opinions of those inclined to
disbelieve in human sincerity, in virtue, or in
altruism: individuals who maintain that only
self-interest motivates human behavior. A
modern cynic typically has a highly
contemptuous attitude towards social norms,
especially those which serve more of a
ritualistic purpose than a practical one, and
will tend to dismiss a substantial proportion
of popular beliefs, conventional morality and
accepted wisdom as "bullshit".

In informal use, derived from the meanings
described hereabove, cynicism may refer to
heartless calculating behavior or thinking.
Someone who has no faith in the goodness of
other human beings may have less restraints to
behave in a calculating way without compassion
but this doesn't have to be the case.

Despite the negative portrayal of cynics, some
would argue that such people simply
"refuse to look through rosy-tinted
spectacles" and do not fear to demolish
popular beliefs no matter how sacred society
considers such alleged misconceptions. Cynics
themselves tend to take this view, regarding
themselves as enlightened free thinkers, and
their critics as deluded social pretenders who
"bury their heads in the sand".
However, an excess of cynicism in an individual
can cause social or psychological difficulties
when cynics see themselves as depersonalised
and self-serving inhabitants of a meaningless,
fictitious, and shallow world.

One behavioural indicator of profound cynicism is
an absence of participation in defence of
principles. The cynic may look as though they
are timidly adopting a policy of "Don't
get involved, it only brings you trouble,"
but their inactivity flows from a deeper belief
that nothing can be changed anyway: "Don't
get involved, you won't make any difference
anyway. Why waste effort on a futile
cause?"

Critics of cynics often regard cynicism as a form
of nihilism and as damaging to the function of
life. They may often describe a cynic as
"a grumpy old bugger".


Which Hellenistic School of Philosophy Would You Belong To?
brought to you by Quizilla

I resisted that meme for a while, but Chris Brooke seemed to imply that I was a dog when I explained my results to him, so I've decided to come out in the open and admit my affliction.

Cool Britannia. posted by lenin

Official! We now have the coolest teenagers in Europe . According to a story being rehashed on BBC Breakfast this morning, British teenagers admit to taking more drugs, drinking more booze and smoking more fags than any generation of youngsters outside of Hollywood:

Cannabis was the drug of choice, rather than tobacco, for 15-year-old boys. Smoking cigarettes was still more popular among girls, of whom 24% admitted smoking.

The study found that 46% of girls and 40% of boys admitted drinking alcohol in the week before they were quizzed by researchers.

According to the professional pillock they had on as a guest this morning to decry these figures, they are higher than for anywhere else in Europe. "We are part of a dubious elite", he intoned gravely. Well, fuck him. It's like the chicken pox - good to get it out of the way.

One caveat, however. Kids, there isn't enough crack-smoking going on in those figures. I mean, couldn't you even lie to sound cool? When I was a kid, I would have confessed to having done skag if it would make me look hard and edgy. Nevertheless, I salute your hedonism, although I wouldn't want your bodies at forty. (And before anyone makes any lewd remarks, I don't want them now either).

Philosophy and war. posted by lenin

From Wilfrid Owen's A Terre (Being the philosophy of many Soldiers):

Dead men may envy living mites in cheese,
Or good germs even. Microbes have their joys,
And subdivide, and never come to death,
Certainly flowers have the easiest time on earth.
"I shall be one with nature, herb, and stone."
Shelley would tell me. Shelley would be stunned;
The dullest Tommy hugs that fancy now.
"Pushing up daisies," is their creed, you know.

Berlusconi. posted by lenin

Says here in The Guardian that a film is to be made about Berlusconi:

Silvio Berlusconi, Italy's controversial prime minister, may be the subject of a new film.
The La Stampa newspaper reported at the weekend that a written account of Mr Berlusconi's life, An Italian Story, was being considered as the basis of a feature film - with the prime minister's backing.

The book was a charming official hagiography which explained, among other things, where young Silvio got his "sense of duty, love of hard work, and capacity for self-sacrifice".

Never mind the faintly fascist language there (they should have finished the series: duty, hard work, self-sacrafice, honour, blood, soil...). Berlusconi has a 'capacity for self-sacrafice'? Heh! Let's see him put that little idea into practice.

Camus on Sisyphus posted by lenin

Like Said and Derrida, Camus emerged from the periphery of a rapacious empire as a subversive, and critical intellectual (although not, in the end, too critical - rejecting Stalinism for pacifism, he could not wholeheartedly support the Algerian revolt or the demand for independence). Like both, he criticised Marxism, (although not on account of its Eurocentrism, Orientalism or phallogocentrism). Unlike either, Camus could avoid repetitiveness and opaqueness (respectively). Here is on The Myth of Sisyphus:

The gods had condemned Sisyphus to ceaselessly rolling a rock to the top of a mountain, whence the stone would fall back of its own weight. They had thought with some reason that there is no more dreadful punishment than futile and hopeless labor.

...

It is said that Sisyphus, being near to death, rashly wanted to test his wife's love. He ordered her to cast his unburied body into the middle of the public square. Sisyphus woke up in the underworld. And there, annoyed by an obedience so contrary to human love, he obtained from Pluto permission to return to earth in order to chastise his wife. But when he had seen again the face of this world, enjoyed water and sun, warm stones and the sea, he no longer wanted to go back to the infernal darkness. Recalls, signs of anger, warnings were of no avail. Many years more he lived facing the curve of the gulf, the sparkling sea, and the smiles of earth. A decree of the gods w as necessary. Mercury came and seized the impudent man by the collar and, snatching him from his joys, lead him forcibly back to the underworld, where his rock was ready for him.

...

As for this myth, one sees merely the whole effort of a body straining to raise the huge stone, to roll it, and push it up a slope a hundred times over; one sees the face screw ed up, the cheek tight against the stone, the shoulder bracing the clay-covered mass, the foot wedging it, the fresh start with arms outstretched, the wholly human security of two earth-clotted hands. At the very end of his long effort measured by skyless space and time without depth, the purpose is achieved. Then Sisyphus watches the stone rush down in a few moments toward that lower world whence he will have to push it up again toward the summit. He goes back down to the plain.

Camus speaks of Sisyphus as "the absurd hero", whose happiness is to be found in the meaninglessness of his existence, in his own negation, in his subjection to symbolic repetition which the big Other (Mercury) has imposed on him. It is the price of his passions, and his love of life. Through it, however, he finds his enjoyment of life.

Well, that's just a tad too masochistic for me. I prefer to think of Sisyphus as the trapped office pen-pusher, or call centre worker, or car factory labourer. Each new project, each new research job or sales drive, each new batch of cars becomes an enormous rock to be pushed up the hill. Thus completed, a new contract is procured and the stone trundles back to the bottom again. It is the curse of alienated labour in which one's own desire is always being deferred or pursued on the side, while one is submitted to the circuit of capital. It is what happens when you're busy making other plans.

Contra Camus, I think Prometheus will in the end be a happier human type than Sisyphus.

John Rentoul denies reality. posted by lenin

So, how many did 'we' really kill? That is the homework set for Independent readers by ultra-Blairite columnist John Rentoul today. He sets some helpful correctives against the obscene bias displayed by the authors of the Lancet report, which would be even more helpful if Rentoul had the faintest idea what he is talking about. Fernando Pessoa wrote in his 'Factless Autobiography' that "to read is to dream, guided by another's hand". A little imagination should tell you whose hand guided Rentoul's idle dreams as he whispered through the pages of the Lancet report. I'll take his claims one by one.

First, Rentoul establishes the importance of the question. "Whether 194,000 have died as a result of the invasion, or 8,000, is terribly important. ... For most people ... it must be suspected that where the real figure is within that range would make quite a difference to their view of the morality of invading Iraq." So, any attempt to minimise the numbers could reasonably be construed as a simultaneous attempt to justify the war on Iraq.

Let the minimising begin:

[The 100,000 figure] is only the central point of a range that extends from 8,000 to 194,000. This huge disparity was mocked ignorantly by one American commentator as "not an estimate, it's a dartboard". It was also defended, equally ignorantly, by the editor of The Lancet, who said: "It's highly probable the figure is 98,000. Anything more or less is much less probable." Both wrong. What the figures say is that there is a 95 per cent chance that the true figure lies between 8,000 and 194,000. There is a 5 per cent chance that it is even lower or even higher. And the probability that any number is right gets lower the further away from 98,000 it is, up or down, but even so the spread of possibilities is unusually wide.

I leave to your consideration whether the editor of the Lancet, the report's authors, and those who conducted the extensive peer reviews are really more ignorant than John Rentoul, who is not a scientist to my knowledge. Oh, but he is a journalist, and he is supposed to check his claims. The defense proffered by the authors, which Rentoul might have examined, was supplied to the Tomb in response to Fred Kaplan's 'ignorant' criticism:

On page five of the report. second to last paragraph, the authors do
give us
a margin of sampling error. They have not found a hard-and-fast 98,000
additional deaths, but a range from 8,000 to 194,000.


That is correct. Research is more than summarizing data, it is also
interpretation. If we had just visited the 32 neighborhoods without
Falluja and did not look at the data or think about them, we would have
reported 98,000 deaths, and said the measure was so imprecise that there
was a 2.5% chance that there had been less than 8,000 deaths, a 10%
chance that there had been less than about 45,000 deaths,....all of
those assumptions that go with normal distributions. But we had two
other pieces of information. First, violence accounted for only 2% of
deaths before the war and was the main cause of death after the
invasion. That is
something new, consistent with the dramatic rise in mortality and
reduces the likelihood that
the true number was at the lower end of the confidence range. Secondly,
there is the Falluja
data, which imply that there are pockets of Anbar, or other communities
like Falluja, experiencing intense conflict, that have far more deaths
than the rest of the country. We set that aside these data in
statistical analysis because the result in this cluster was such an
outlier, but it tells us that the true death toll is
far more likely to be on the high-side of our point estimate than on the
low side.

"That is," Crooked Timber comments "the sample contains important information which is not summarised in the confidence interval, but which tells you that the central estimate is not likely to be a massive overestimate." If Rentoul for some reason refuses to inspect the Tomb, so much the worse for him. Ignorance is no excuse. The inference, of course, is that Rentoul, besides having failed to check his claims, hasn't understood confidence intervals (as indeed I didn't either until given a brisk education on the topic).

Moving on:

And there are good reasons for thinking that the true figure is towards the lower end of The Lancet's range. The 98,000 figure is extrapolated from an excess of 44 deaths reported since the invasion. Of these, most - 23 - were not caused by violence. They were attributed to heart attacks, strokes, accidents, "neonatal and unexplained infant deaths", and infectious diseases. This is curious, considering the poor state of Iraqi health services before the invasion.

The figure of 44 excess deaths is only reached by excluding Fallujah, making the assumptions of the report highly conservative . Of these, 18 were attributed to heart attack and stroke, and 11 were attributed to chronic illnesses; deaths resulting from violence accounted for 73, or 44 if you exclude the 52 which are recorded in Fallujah, which the authors did. Further, and this is a curious point of ommission, Rentoul does not mention that while deaths resulting from heart attacks, strokes and chronic illnesses increased after the invasion, those resulting from violence increased much more dramatically - from accounting for 2% to accounting for 51% (or 37% if Fallujah is ommited). As the report notes, the "Violence-specific mortality rate went up 58-fold".

Rentoul's next attempt is to suggest that the authors have constructed the figures with a bias toward a low 'baseline' in Iraq:

More plausible, I would have thought, is that The Lancet study suffers from recall bias, a well-known phenomenon in such surveys where interviewees find it harder to remember accurately events that took place long ago. This would reduce the estimated pre-war death rate, and make it seem that there were more "excess" deaths after the invasion.

The study was conducted both before and after the invasion, but the recall period is set at 2-7 years, so recall bias is something to be accounted for. Here is what the report says:

[M]ost of the increase in infant mortality is plausibly linked to the conflict, although we acknowledge the potential for recall bias to create an apparent increase in infant mortality.

We believe it unlikely that recall bias existed in the reporting of non-infant deaths, because of the certainty and precision with which these deaths were reported, and the importance of burial ceremonies in the Iraqi culture. The under-reporting of adult deaths recently or since the invasion to hide combatant deaths would lead us to underestimate the death toll associated with the invasion and occupation of Iraq.

The bulk of the deaths reported are among adults and not children.

Next:

However, sticking for the moment with the 44 "excess" deaths reported in The Lancet study, just under half - 21 - were caused by violence. But most of these were not attributed to coalition forces. Seven were criminal, two were anti-coalition fighters, two were unknown and one was caused by Saddam's forces in the early days of the war. Which leaves the nine for which US, British or other allied forces were blamed.

This both misconstrues the data and misses the point. Here is the passage in the report Rentoul is referring to:

Table 2 includes 12 violent deaths not attributed to coalition forces, including 11 men and one woman. Of these, two were attributed to anti-coalition forces, two were of unknown origin, seven were criminal murders, and one was from the previous regime during the invasion.

Note that the authors refer to Table 2, not to the figure excluding Fallujah. Making adjustments for Fallujah (removing, as with the total figures, 49.92% of those deaths), we are left with 6 of 21 deaths not attributable to coalition sources. Hence the claim that the bulk of violent deaths visited on civilians were attributable to coalition actions.

It is as well, while we are at it to note what the report says on violent deaths:

The main causes of death reported for the 14·6 months before the invasion were myocardial infarction, cerebrovascular accidents, and consequences of other chronic disorders, accounting for 22 (48%) reported deaths (table 2). After the war began, violence was the most commonly reported cause of death, either including (73/142 [51%]) or excluding (21/89 [24%]) the Falluja data, followed by myocardial infarction and cerebrovascular accidents (n=18) and accidents (n=13; table 2). [Emphasis added]

What follows from Rentoul's nit-picking? All of his criticisms were accounted for in the report, at least those that have been properly conceived. (He also goes to the usual length of mentioning the Iraq Body Count figure which, as its authors note, is likely specifically to be an understimate, and which the report notes has "low sensitivity" as most "passive surveillance studies" do). We are still left with a likely 100,000 excess deaths since the estimate has discounted for those factors Rentoul rakes up, of which the most common type is violent. And we are still left with the coalition forces being responsible for most of those deaths. A further point could be made that, if there has been a general increase in deaths due to diseases, heart attacks and other medical conditions, this could be in part due to the serious and shocking decline in the state of the country's infrastructure, specifically the medical infrastructure. However you construe (or misconstrue) the data, we are still left with a shocking rise in the level of mortality, and this is directly attributable to the decision to invade.

Since Rentoul sets out his stall at the start of the article by suggesting that the lower the likely figure, the less insupportable the war will be, this can be recorded as yet another failed attempt to cover for those who waged it.

Third Avenue. posted by lenin

I've been busily composing an essay on Globalisation and the Modern State for my course (which, it goes without, saying, I'll post a version of here shortly - with added jokes and so on). But I's like to say hello and thank you to Third Avenue for these kind words .

A Brit in New York, the Third Avenue is not quite a Third Way. In fact, (s)he offers a series of concise and polished thoughts on politics that reflects a commitment to some kind of left. Bloggers who write as if they do so with conviction and are critically receptive to others are rare, so Third Way is a welcome addition to the blogosphere and my blog-roll. Plus (s)he has inadvertently given me an idea for a new strapline.

The Picture of John Gray. posted by lenin

Will Self, fresh from renovating Oscar Wilde's classic, stripped and examined John Gray for an interview published in the Independent (actually, this interview is two years old - still Self's shit is so good it never goes stale):

Gray is very good at his destruct jobs. Here he is on Post-Modernism: 'Just the latest fad in anthropocentrism.'; on atheism: 'Secularism is like chastity, a condition defined by what it denies.'; on environmentalism: 'A high-tech Green utopia, in which a few humans live happily in balance with the rest of life, is scientifically feasible, but it is humanly unimaginable.'; on Buddhism 'This is only another doctrine of salvation, subtler than that of the Christians, but no different from Christianity in its goal of leaving our animal inheritance behind.' As you can see, this is not some work of middle brow, Alain de Bottonesque consolation, philosophy viewed as an antiseptic sticking plaster for the fevered mind...

Even better, and at the behest of Dead Men Left , I thought I'd direct your attention to this classic encounter between Self and Littlejohn:

CAMPBELL: Neither did I get a chance to read yours Richard but that's not to say that I won't. But what do you make of what David Aaronovitch has said? It is front page in the Independent. He says Richard Littlejohn's novel is a 400-page recruiting pamphlet for the BNP.

LITTLEJOHN: What else do you expect from an overgrown student union leader who used to be a member of the Communist Party? I think it is a badge of honour to be attacked by people like David Aaronovitch to be perfectly honest. I might put it on the cover.

SELF: Well he is right.

LITTLEJOHN: Is he?

SELF: It is a 400 page... I've read 200 pages of it and that is a 200 page recruiting leaflet for the BNP.

LITTLEJOHN: Well, you can't comment until you have read the other 200.

SELF: Why? Does it suddenly turn into Tolstoy?

LITTLEJOHN: You'll have to read it and find out, won't you.

SELF: Well it won't take me long.

LITTLEJOHN: This is typical of the self-regarding, self-appointed metropolitan elite. If you don't agree with them they don't engage you in argument, they throw slogans at you. If you disagree with them on immigration or asylum, you are a Nazi. If you disagree with them on Europe, you are a racist or a xenophobe or a little Englander. That is all they have got - they have only got slogans - they haven't got arguments.

SELF: I don't have slogans, I have reasoned opinions and I am sitting no more than 2ft 6ins away from you, Richard.

LITTLEJOHN: Well give me a reasoned opinion then. Tell me why it is a recruiting thing for the BNP?

SELF: Because it is the kind of book... I don't actually think it is a very important or serious book and I don't think you really inflame the issue very much and I am grateful for that. I don't think it has got a lot of reach. It is actually a fairly light romp, funnily enough, for a book that is based on really a procession of stereotypes of situations - exaggerations and stereotypes cobbled together into a totally implausible and bizarre kind of moral fable or anti-moral fable. So I am not too worried about your book Richard but I do think that it represents a kind of gross distortion of reality. In a sense, I suppose if you could say it is just a light comic novel then it is allowed to be a gross distortion of reality. It is like a kind of Tom Sharpe for the far right really. Is that fair?

...

CAMPBELL:Well that is the kind of Aaronovitch/Self criticism of what you have done in your book - that all the villains seems to be swarthy, Kosovan asylum seekers.

LITTLEJOHN: Not true at all.

CAMPBELL:With a next-door family of Somalians -

LITTLEJOHN: - that is wrong - if you have 110,000 words, you can pick what you like. That is rather what I expected and what I hoped the Guardian and Independent would do.

CAMPBELL: You are rather pleased about it?

LITTLEJOHN: I am absolutely delighted. The main villains of the piece actually are two white middle-class lawyers and policemen.

SELF: Wait a minute, the solicitor is dubbed as being part of an entry-ist plan by left-wing Islingtonians who kind of submerge themselves - one of them becomes a policeman who incidentally is graphically depicted masturbating with a truncheon - and the other one is a gay lawyer who runs a left-wing - a kind of firm that actually is vaguely impossible - that operates out of the Gray's Inn Road. I have read your book Richard, I do wish you would stop saying that I haven't. I have read 200 pages, I read them quite closely.

LITTLEJOHN: But you haven't read the book in its totality and you have to read the book in its totality.

SELF: Why?

LITTLEJOHN: In order to understand it.

SELF: Does it turn into Tolstoy at page 205?

LITTLEJOHN: No it doesn't turn into Tolstoy. I don't set out to be Tolstoy. It is a much more complex book than that.

SELF:Than Tolstoy?

...

CAMPBELL: Is what you wrote about the man who called Two Jags, that's a name you coined: "He's a chimp, a pustulating boil of resentment and class hatred, a chippy, thin-skinned puffed up laughing stock, an ocean-going tub of lard, groaning with arrogance, ego, hypocrisy, and inferiority, he's an inadequate, inarticulate embarrassment, a disgrace to Britain at home and abroad." ...Do you sometimes think that this is a human being you're talking about?

LITTLEJOHN: Nah.

[laughter]

SELF: Well he doesn't say he's a human being, does he? He uses the classic form of demonisation which is to say he's a chimp, in other words he's bestial. So he's actually dehumanised the subject of his abuse before he even moves on to piling on the pejoratives, and I think that's very psychologically interesting, of course we're all familiar with the kind of people who demonise other human beings by turning them into bestiary...we all know who does that.

[long pause]

LITTLEJOHN: In the Psychiatrist's Chair with Nicky Campbell

CAMPBELL: Caroline Feraday has the travel.

The Fallujah Archipelago. posted by lenin

One way to tackle the jaw-dropping levels of unemployment in Iraq is to have forced labour organised by the US military . Yes, but before they get that far, returning refugees will have to suspend the search through the rubble where their homes once stood and submit to a procedure of prodding and branding:

Under the plans, troops would funnel Fallujans to so-called citizen processing centers on the outskirts of the city to compile a database of their identities through DNA testing and retina scans. Residents would receive badges displaying their home addresses that they must wear at all times.

There is, however, a commendable commitment to public transport:

Buses would ferry them into the city, where cars, the deadliest tool of suicide bombers, would be banned.

So this is what it takes to get American troops enforcing the Kyoto protocols. Now, as you all know, this operation was conducted to allow the weary citizens of Fallujah access to a voting station come January. What? You dare to doubt the Bush administration's commitment to democracy? This is a government, I remind you, that stood in two elections to win one - I call that commitment.

But anyway, the trouble is, as they 'funnel' the residents back into the city, they have to watch for insurgents:

One idea that has stirred debate among Marine officers would require all men to work, for pay, in military-style battalions. Depending on their skills, they would be assigned jobs in construction, waterworks, or rubble-clearing platoons.

"You have to say, 'Here are the rules,' and you are firm and fair. That radiates stability," said Lieutenant Colonel Dave Bellon, intelligence officer for the First Regimental Combat Team, the Marine regiment that took the western half of Fallujah during the US assault and expects to be based downtown for some time.

I like 'radiation' metaphor.

Meanwhile, on the hearts and minds front, the resistance are learning a few tricks themselves according to Patrick Cockburn :

To avoid alienating locals, especially Christians who are numerous in Mosul, resistance leaders have not forced alcohol shops to close. In Fallujah, CD, musical-instrument shops, hair-dressers and coffee shops had all been forced to close.

See, that was a bad move. Everyone knows that hairdressers and coffee-shops are packed with people who know how to run the country. Why deplete your potential resources? Still, those who in the UK are currently calling for the right to kill burglars will be happy to know that Iraqi insurgents are one step ahead of them:

The resistance has also reportedly launched a campaign against criminals, releasing a video showing the beheading of three men who had kidnapped a Christian shopkeeper. A ransom was repaid.

This reminds me of how the IRA would mete out justice in working-class Catholic areas of Northern Ireland when the locals didn't trust the cops (oh, they trust them now, uh huh, everything's fabulous now). It was never pretty, and I'd have a tough job trying to count how many knee-caps were turned into spongy messes either with the use of drills or bullets. Much as this was resented (and I certainly know it was tolerated through gritted teeth), the thought of an occupying army with its own torture centres, its own record in terror, and its use of paramilitary murder squads, can't have been far away.

Work beckons.

Harry's Blunt Hatchet. posted by lenin

I linked to Bat's article on Galloway's libel victory yesterday, and I note that Harry's Place have posted a very feeble article insinuating that Bat is a fantasist, must be making it all up, couldn't have written for the Telegraph. Even the increasingly pitiful Oliver Kamm showed up to dispense an inept insult.

I won't waste time making fun of the author's sorry attempts at adumbrating SWP thought on the relationship between class and ideology, but I will point out two things:

1) The Bat did work for the Telegraph.

2) HP Sauce raises a furry eyebrow at the claim that Telegraph journos were angry about the war and also in agitating against the management:

"But Torygraph hacks nodding their heads sympathetically to a junior Trot's take on world politics? Hmmm."

Well, look. The struggle for union recognition alluded to by Bat is a simple matter of record. Rising militancy among the journalists there has been extensively reported It is also a matter of record that they won recognition and have been a pain in the managerial arse ever since.

How do those brave liberal warriors for truth, justice and the American way miss out on such widely reported facts? You know the answer to that.

Johann Hari Denies Reality. posted by lenin

Ironically, in a post about George Galloway being caught out in a lie, Johann Hari sinks to a bit of fibbing himself. I am quite surprised, in fact, since he knows full well that he has not merely made false accusations against Galloway, but repeated them once they were pointed out. I even reminded him recently.

He now says that my debunking of his article was 'unsuccessful' despite him never having confronted the charges. Bad move. Very bad move.

Here is a concise list of the most obvious fabrications and distortions:

1) Hari claims Galloway defended Hussein's right to invade Kuwait. He did not. He specifically rejected it. Hari's claim was made with the use of a carefully edited (blatantly distorted) quote.

2) Hari claimed Galloway was rendering a moral equivalence between Saddam's regime and Western liberal democracies. Galloway was not. Again, Hari makes his claim with the use of a carefully edited quote.

3) Hari claims that Galloway, in comparing Hussein to Stalin, is not wielding a criticism. Passages contiguous to those cited by Hari show that he was.

4) Hari claims that Galloway fails to mention the ideal of two-states, but he does.

5) Hari claims that Galloway 'evades' the reasons for Israel's creation: he does not.

6) Hari claims that 800,000 Jews were 'ethnically cleansed' from Arab countries after 1948. They were not.

Those are padded out with a farrago of insinuation and unfounded claims that he can produce no evidence for. Now, is it lying when one mangles quotes to produce meanings other than their original intention? Is it libel when one does so to impute sinister motives to their author? Should Galloway sue? I think we should be told.

Muck of ages. posted by lenin

I'd like to remind you all that reading is an active process. You interpret these symbols, construct your own meanings from them, situate them in your own context. The point is, if for some reason this blog fails to ignite your chest hair and inflame your genitals, it's all your fault.

That's just as a way of introducing you to this indescribably boring and inapt article from the Economist. Never mind the mindless slavering over the immigrant-baiter Sarkozy, just pay attention to the following:

In this post-ideological age, Mr Sarkozy—like Tony Blair or Bill Clinton, both of whom he admires—prefers inventive, tailor-made solutions over lofty visions.

Blair shies away from "lofty visions"? "Post-ideological age"? You're about five years out of date, darlings! The 'post-ideological age' reached its terminus in Seattle, and Blair started his grandiose fabulating in Chicago after the Balkans war.

Anyway, as I said at the start, you people need to start putting more effort in. Go read the article and make up your own sarcy put downs. The best one to be entered in the comments box wins a free Donnie Darko soundtrack album (don't ask me why, I just happen to have two).

Kilroy. posted by lenin

It just never stops being funny.



I always said he had a lovely smile.

Bat on Galloway. posted by lenin

No, that isn't a literal depiction of some sordid reality. Galloway has had a few bloodsuckers on his back, but the Bat isn't one of them. Here's an excellent insider article on Galloway and his fight against the Telegraph:

I've been following the George Galloway libel story with a personal as well as a political interest – I was working for the Telegraph at the time of the smear – so I was doubly satisfied to see my former senior management come a cropper in the High Court last week.

The atmosphere in the Telegraph office back in April last year was bitter, but subdued. Most journalists, in my section at least, were openly anti-war, and many had been on the huge Stop the War Coalition demo on 15 February 2003. We were also in the midst of a protracted battle for union recognition, which we won a few months later.

Given this backdrop, us hacks instantly clocked this story for what it was: a politically motivated attack aimed at discrediting an anti-war movement that had unleashed rebellious sentiment across the country, even stoking discontent among the paper's own staff.

Go read. And put comments in his box, you silent, whimpering wretches.

Iraq. posted by lenin

An interview with Patrick Cockburn :

THERE SHOULD be no mystery about the nature of the resistance in Iraq. The situation is very simple, as it would be in most countries of the world--when you have an occupation by a foreign power, you have resistance. And that's exactly what's happened in Iraq.

It's absurd to think that there are tiny groups either of foreign fighters or remnants of the former regime who are holding the rest of the population to ransom.

You can see this in Falluja, in Mosul. You could see this from the very beginning--from the summer of 2003. Whenever I went to a place where there had been an attack on an American patrol, and U.S. soldiers had been killed, always, the local kids were jumping up and down for joy. This was always an unpopular occupation with most of the population, and that majority has gone up.

An article on Fallujah from the Christian Science Monitor:

US forces sweep through one neighborhood after another, only to find insurgents popping up in "cleared" areas.

The battle Monday killed one marine and wounded three others - a high cost against three insurgents, who had moved into a house 50 feet across the street from a newly established marine position at a Fallujah fire station. That house and several others nearby had been cleared just two days earlier.

"Fallujah," you say, "but that's all over isn't it?" Yeah, sure. Of course it is. Go back to bed.

An article on napalm :

The United States is using napalm in Falluja. So far, the military has denied the allegations, but the proof is mounting. On Nov. 28 The Daily Mirror’s political editor, Paul Gilfeather filed a report stating: “US troops are secretly using outlawed napalm gas to wipe out remaining insurgents in and around Fallujah. News that President George W. Bush has sanctioned the use of napalm, a deadly cocktail of polystyrene and jet fuel banned by the United Nations in 1980, will stun governments around the world.”

...

The US has already admitted that it used napalm during the siege of Baghdad. The truth was reluctantly confirmed by the Pentagon after news reports corroborated the evidence. The military has tried to conceal the truth by saying that there is a distinction between its new weapon and “traditional napalm”. The “improved” product carries the Pentagon moniker “Mark 77 firebombs” and uses jet fuel to “decrease environmental damage”. The fact that military planner’s even considered “environmental damage” while developing the tools for incinerating human beings, gives us some insight into the deep vein of cynicism that permeates their ranks.

An article on Abu Ghraib :

BRITISH officials in Iraq warned the Foreign Office and American authorities of serious concerns about the treatment of prisoners six months before the torture and sexual abuse at Abu Ghraib was revealed.

Several civil servants seconded to reconstruction jobs in Iraq have described in interviews how they witnessed ill-qualified American guards ignoring basic human rights as they turned Abu Ghraib into a military interrogation facility — rather than the civilian installation they wanted.

Gareth Davies, governor of Pentonville prison in London, discovered in December 2003 that Americans were using leg irons and belly chains to hold prisoners — a violation not only of new Iraqi laws adopted by coalition forces but also, he believed, of international conventions and of Britain’s 1833 Abolition of Slavery Act.

And radical Christian cleric Jerry Falwell says: The war "goes pretty well if you watch it on FOX".

Prayer. posted by lenin

From Albino Neutrino :

Hello, god.

Boy, are you fantastic.

Listen, could you give us some food? I know, I know, I nicked Zebedee's favorite chicken last week. I did do that, yeah.

But, honestly, if Zebedee had nicked one of my chickens, I would have probably just shrugged it off, you know.

Not buried him in a pit, like I did that time he called me a muppet.

Anyway, look after yourself.

And don't forget the food.

As if there weren't enough chicken-thiefs in the world already.

Kosovo. posted by lenin

Imperialism and human rights don't really mix, unless the latter is reduced to a cynosure of military liberalism. This is obviously what happened during the 1990s, and so much worse for much of the Left that it allowed itself to be fooled ("well, they say it's for human rights, that must be good"). Kosovo was the high watermark of this, the Nato intervention representing the moment at which what you might call a humanitarian 'suspension of the law' changed the very coordinates of the international legal structure. Before the war took place, all were agreed that it was a violation of the UN Charter - but something had to be done, regardless. The ethical , it was said, over-rode the political. After the war, international legal scholars either hailed a sea change in the law or retroactively legitimised the intervention in various ways.*

There is no need to expend a great deal of energy pointing out the various ways in which this ideological mirage can be seen through. We know, because figures in the know have told us:

Mr Bush showed a misunderstanding of a major strategic achievement of the Clinton administration ... In particular [he] missed the intrinsic connections between enlargement and the conflict in the Balkans ... NATO enlargement advanced US interetsts in dealing with one of the country's foremost strategic challenges: coping with a post-communist Russia whose trajectory remains in question. (David Benjamin, member of the US National Security Council under Clinton, quoted in Vassilis K. Fouskas, Zones of Conflict: US Foreign Policy in the Balkans and the Greater Middle East, Pluto Press, 2003, p 49).

Even if the motives of the bombers had been entirely benign, there were well known alternatives at the time. Since that intervention which predictably resulted in catastrophe, the major threat to peace in the region has been the rise of Albanian nationalist extremism in Kosovo. This led to scenes last year which were described by one UNMIK official as "Kristallnacht" . Well, no, I don't like the use of that term either, but there was a serious risk of ethnic warfare. What is more, according to Dutch military analysts at The Clingendael Institute, the US has been stirring the pot by supporting the NLA and its attacks on Macedonian forces. The UN has done its best to make Serbs resentful, while alienating the 'liberated' Kosovo Albanians so much that they now demand that this "colonial" body evacuate themselves immediately. And, it goes without saying, the Serbian government have been stirring things up in an effort to maintain some grip on the region. All of this has been occluded somewhat by the hopelessly triumphant coverage of the Milosevic trial.

Now, via Histologion , we learn that Kosovo has as its elected leader a war criminal and possible mafioso . The 'elected leader' is, of course, not a wholly meaningful position in a region run by Bernard Kouchner on behalf of the UN, but it does mean something for the future of Kosovo that it is riddled with extreme nationalist groups attacking Serbs and Macedonian troops, and its political elite are seperatist, bigoted, war criminals. The least one can say is that this sordid story doesn't redound to the credit of the liberal imperialists.


*(See, for instance, See, for instance, Press Communique 99/32 and 99/23, International Court of Justice, 2nd June 1999; “Legal Standards and the Kosovo Conflict”, Appendix B, “Yugoslav Forces Guilty of War Crimes in Racak, Kosovo”, Human Rights Watch 29th January, New York; Louis Henken, “Kosovo and the Law of Humanitarian Intervention”, American Journal of International Law, v. 93, no. 4, October 1999)

Excellent. posted by lenin

From the BBC :

Euro MP Robert Kilroy-Silk has had a bucket of farm slurry thrown over him by a protester in Manchester.
The UK Independence Party member was arriving for a BBC radio show when the attacker emerged from behind a bush.

Fellow guest Ruth Kelly MP was also hit by the slurry. Mr Kilroy-Silk said the man, who later disappeared, claimed he was "doing it in the name of Islam".

Bucket of shit for a bucket of shit. Fantastic.

HP Sauce. posted by lenin

From Charlotte Street :

Curiously, I once considered adding to my notes on rhetoric the entry “Always Psychologise!: If your opponent criticises you more than once, he is evidently obsessed/ fixated by you, you are being stalked by him etc, his objections are to be reread as ‘symptoms’ of his disorder etc…”.

Purely by coincidence, this was in a post about Norman Geras accusing the Street of being fixated with him.

Now, in another astounding coincidence, I discover that Harry's Place has accused Dead Men Left of being fixated with it. Definitely an anal fixation this time, then.

By the way, please do consult the HP link. In it, you will find many comments from sub-literate pro-war amoebas who take the time and trouble to study and analyse us far left bloggers with the curiosity of anthropologist (but none of the rigour). There is also a link to a rather silly blogger who I was once over-generous about, and who now demands that I include him in my half-mocking 'Enemies List', and who in the linked post expends impressive fury and venom explaining his hatred for the SWP, Respect and all things Galloway. He cunningly undermines these three menacing entities with the use of an uncomprehending article in that notorious bastion of integrity and honesty, the Weekly Worker. I even attract yet another prat-fall of an insult from some people calling themselves SIAW. I don't know why they don't like me. And then there's Harry who once reacted to a little teasing by announcing that: "You in particular can shove your fist right up your filthy arse!" I can, but how does Harry know this? Has he been watching me in the wee small hours? Is he stalking me? Could it be some wierd and fetishistic fixation he has with me? Police? Hello...?

The Informer posted by lenin

Review of John Perkins, Confessions of an Economic Hit Man, San Francisco, 2004.

“Economic hit men are highly paid professionals who cheat countries around the globe out of trillions of dollars. Their tools include fraudulent financial reports, rigged elections, payoffs, extortion, sex and murder.”

1.
Susan George constructed the Lugano Report as a satire on the priorities of capitalism and the brutality of the political right. Purportedly a report by top academics, economists and experts on preserving capitalism against new threats in the 21st Century, George’s narrative has recommendations such as population reduction through disease and war offered seriously to the government commissioning the report. This book, which is not satire but testimony, doesn’t quite go that far. Still, the story it tells is damning and compelling. Before we get to that, however, there is one small matter to clear up. Spies. Spies are sexually charismatic, unusually intelligent and sadistic, as we all know. They charm their way into the lives and beds of enemies, before wasting them with a one-liner as dry as a shaken Martini. Decisive, effectual, calculating and ultimately superior in every way to the anonymous henchmen they send to their graves every day, they are the modern equivalent of those awesome and thrilling heroes, the aristocrats of early modern Europe. From Percy Blakeney to James Bond, the fixtures of clandestine political subversion have been the same. To my knowledge, only a few works of fiction have undermined this alluring mirage: one is Harlot’s Ghost by Norman Mailer; another is the quasi-fictional Confessions of a Dangerous Mind by Chuck Barris; others might include the occasional anti-heroes in the works of Graham Greene and John Le Carre.

In John Perkins Confessions of an Economic Hit Man we have the first factual account of the spy as social misfit and malcontent. Perkins was recruited to the US National Security Agency by a man known as ‘Uncle Frank’ to become an Economic Hit Man (EHM) because, he believes, they liked his profile: he had experienced a stressful upbringing in a poor household with puritanical and manipulative parents, was frustrated with life and the absence of sex, money and opportunities. They did not dwell on his degree from the Boston University College of Business Administration. Another thing they were unconcerned about was that, as a patriotic American, he opposed the Vietnam War. This was in 1967 so one must assume that such a stance was still controversial. Indeed, part of his reason for wishing to be recruited by the NSA was that positions with it exempted one from the draft. One other option was a position with the Peace Corps, where one might be sent to such places as the Amazon rain forests in order to help the indigenous peoples. Being of Abnaki background himself, Perkins wanted to immerse himself in the forest lore. Seeking direction, he called his Uncle Frank.

Uncle Frank amazed him by suggesting that he should definitely take the Peace Corps position because, after the fall of Hanoi, the Amazon was going to become a vital region. “Loaded with oil,” he explained, “we’ll need good agents there – people who understand the natives”. He added with a chuckle that Perkins may well end up working for “a private company, instead of the government”. Though he didn’t know it yet, Perkins was being promoted from a spy to an EHM. His notice of acceptance arrived in the mail, along with the same for his wife Ann, and they were sent to Ecuador following training at Peace Corps camps in South California, in September 1968. At first it was a blast, working with descendants of the Incas in hunting-farming subsistence villages. Perkins sympathised with them in a way he never had with the townsfolk where he grew up. Then, with dreary punctuality, a man named Einar Greve, Vice-President of Chas T. Main (consulting firm to the World Bank), descended on the airstrip. He was there to assess whether Ecuador should receive loans of billions of dollars in order to build hydro-electric dams. Felicitously, he was also a colonel in the US Army reserve.

Greve wanted to recruit Perkins for Chas T. Main. Yes, he told Perkins, he too had ‘liaised’ with the NSA, (wink and nod). The pair chatted, agreed to communicate by mail, and Perkins thenceforth used a small, portable typewriter to compose reports assessing Ecuador’s economic prospects, political changes and the growing frustration of the indigenous people as they found themselves confronting oil companies and international development agencies. The Peace Corps tour ended, and Perkins was invited to a job interview at MAIN headquarters in Boston. MAIN dealt mainly with engineering prospects, but the World Bank was beginning to insist that they retain qualified economists on their staff to assess the feasibility of projects. “The letters you sent me,” Greve told him, “indicate that you don’t mind sticking your neck out, even when hard data isn’t available”. So, in January 1971, Perkins was offered a position as an economist with MAIN at 26 years old. Fully aware that these circumstances had probably been engineered by Uncle Frank, Perkins’ ego nevertheless tumesced as he considered the possibilities of sipping Martinis in plush hotels, surrounded by bikini-clad nymphs as he nurtured a loaded firearm inside his jacket.

His first role was to travel to Java and assess the prospects for engineering projects there – with the firm suggestion in his ear that he produce a glowing report if he wanted advancement. Java was, Greve assured him, an “economy that will soar like a bird”. He produced econometric models for predicting growth in Kuwait, Indonesia and anywhere that prospects for huge construction works emerged, submerged himself in a welter of statistics and charts from the IMF and other sources, laboured intensively in the library – until he was approached by an attractive brunette named Claudine Martin. Martin, a Special Consultant to Chas T. Main, Inc., had been asked to help in Perkins’ training.

She explained that his position was an unusual one, and that he would keep it confidential. He was to be moulded into an EHM, (a term selected, apparently, because no one would take it seriously). “No one can know about your involvement – not even your wife.” She would teach him what she could over a series of weeks, then he would have to choose, finally, whether he was in or out. Seduced, he was very much in. Martin had used the NSA profile on him to present a calculated front of physical allure and verbal manipulation. His role, he was told, would be to use his understanding of economics to “justify huge international loans” that would send billions of dollars sluicing back to companies like MAIN, but also Bechtel, Halliburton, Stone & Webster, and Brown & Root. His other role would be to ensure that these economies were bankrupted after receiving these loans so that they would “be forever beholden to their creditors, and so they would present easy targets when we needed favours, including military bases, UN votes, or access to oil and other natural resources”.

Perkins would assess prospects just as before, but now “The unspoken aspect of every one of these projects was that they were intended to create large profits for the contractors … while assuring the long-term financial dependence and therefore the political loyalty of governments around the world. The larger the loan, the better.” Claudine explained to Perkins that “We’re paid – well paid – to cheat countries around the globe out of billions of dollars. A large part of your job is to encourage world leaders to become part of a vast network that promotes US commercial interests.” Kermit Roosevelt was the first EHM, Martin told him, and had been an important accomplice in the coup against Mossadegh of Iran. This was the proud tradition he was to inherit.

2.
This is how Perkins got in. What follows in the book is an imbrication of history (about the CIA-MI6 coup in Iran, the Monroe Doctrine and so forth), memoir, and starkly rendered details of how he helped construct this vast network of debt and fealty. The story is told very much with Perkins’ present judgement weighing on it. He is self-mocking, ironic, astounded at his own naiveté. He looks back on his youth and his early manhood with tenderness and condescension, drawing his story out of the characters he has dealt with, and contextualises each operation in the geopolitics of the US at the time. The reader is not allowed to be in the dark as to why Indonesia became so important, for instance. Perkins own motivations, including his ‘relationship’ with Claudine and the breakdown of his marriage (he viewed his bond with Ann as the result of one of his boyish capitulations to parental whim), are explained deftly but are not allowed to overwhelm the political narrative.

Take Indonesia, for instance. We are taken there on the back of Perkins’ romantic visions of Balinese dancers, Bugi pirates, Komodo dragons and sarongs. Then, the mirage dissipates and we are confronted with a Jakarta of young prostitutes offering themselves for a few coins, lepers with bloody stumps instead of limbs, canals built by the Dutch colonists turned to cess-pools, sewers lying open, families crammed into hovels made from cardboard. “I had seen poverty before … but nothing to prepare me for Jakarta.” Happily, Perkins and his team are based in the Hotel InterContinental Indonesia which caters to the “whims of wealthy foreigners, especially oil executives and their families”. There he meets their project manager, Charlie Illingworth, an armchair warrior who specialised in historical accounts of great military battles. Illingworth lights a cigar, sighs and drinks to a good life. Everyone joins the toast.

Their mission was officially to electrify Java. Unofficially, they were there to “accomplish nothing short of saving this country from the clutches of communism” and “make sure Indonesia doesn’t follow in the footsteps of its northern neighbours, Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos.” Indonesia was also oil-rich, which would make it a “powerful ally” to the oil-dependent United States, Illingworth observed. Perkins’ job was to develop a master plan to get the oil industry, ports, pipelines and construction companies electrified. He should “err on the high side” in his estimates, otherwise Indonesia might “live under the hammer and sickle or the Red Flag of China!” Perkins can deceive himself, for a while, by pretending that what is at issue is idealism, and helping Indonesia lever itself out of a medieval economy. Until he looks out of the window of his hotel room, “across the opulence of the hotel’s gardens and swimming pools, and see the hovels that fanned out for miles beyond. I would know that babies were dying out there for lack of food and potable water, and that infants and adults alike were suffering from horrible diseases and living in terrible conditions.” He knows full well that Illingworth and the rest are there for self-interest, and to serve the interests of US foreign and commercial policy, which prompts the following epiphany:

“I also realised that my college professors had not understood the true nature of macroeconomics: that in many cases helping and economy grow only makes those few who sit at the top of the pyramid even richer, while it does nothing for those at the bottom except to push them even lower. Indeed, promoting capitalism often results in a system that resembles medieval feudal societies. If any of my professors knew this, they had not admitted it – probably because big corporations, and the men who run them, fund colleges. Exposing the truth would undoubtedly cost those professors their jobs – just as such revelations would cost me mine.”

Perkins’ position therefore relied on self-deception. He rationalised his choices: he had worked hard for this; was only doing what he had been trained for; was in agreement with the best minds in the world on the matter; maybe all that stuff about the economy’s likely exponential growth was true. His estimates might have been exuberant, but… Howard Parker, formerly of the New England Electric System, was assigned to help design the electrification project. Fresh out of retirement, he was an embittered (but astute) old man who knew precisely what was going on. “They’ll try to convince you that this economy is going to skyrocket,” he told Perkins, “Charlie’s ruthless. Don’t let him get to you.” Perkins, however, had already bought the entire line. This project would see Indonesia’s economy flourish, he said. “I’ve seen what can happen when oil is discovered. Things change fast.” Parker wasn’t having any of that. “I’ve forecasted electric loads all my life … And I can say for sure that no electric load ever grew by more than 7 to 9 per cent a year for any sustainable period. And that’s in the best of times. Six per cent is more reasonable.”

Perkins was recalcitrant, even as Parker accused him of “being in it for the money” and selling his soul to the devil. Yes, it troubled him, sent him on a long walk while he battled with his doubts. But a soothing thought returned him briefly to equanimity: Howard Parker had said that he would do what he considered right, regardless of Perkins’ conclusions. Travelling across Indonesia and interrogating local officials in major population centres for data, he was shocked to find that ordinary Indonesians saw the World Bank’s involvement in the country as part of Nixon’s foreign policy, not only across Indochina, but also the Middle East. US policy was not merely greedy, rapacious, but also anti-Islamic (This was just before the high watermark of political Islam). The Soviets, some students told him, would not last, but the next civilisational strife would be between Islam and Christianity – just read Arnold Toynbee’s Civilisation on Trial, and The World and the West. It’s all there. And they warned:

“You must open your hearts to the poor and downtrodden, instead of driving them further into poverty and servitude. There’s not much time left. If you don’t change, you’re doomed.”

Doubts aside (and Perkins really does lay on the self-flagellation rather thick), the econometric report he produced pointed to exactly the enormous spike in growth that was expected of him. Howard Parker was fired because he had “lost touch with reality”. Perkins was promoted, because he estimated ‘load growth’ of between 17 and 20 per cent. He was given the title of Chief Economist and a raise: “It did cheer me up a bit.” He adopted the bravado of Robert MacNamara, president of the World Bank and adjuvant to US goals in preventing any UN intervention on the Indonesian slaughter of East Timor. Despite what he considered his limited expertise, Perkins found his reports being approved, stamped and put to use. He was the Chief Economist now, and he began to see himself as “a Merlin who could wave his wand over a country, causing it to suddenly light up, industries sprouting like flowers”.

3.
Having successfully indebted Indonesia, propped up a pro-US dictator and sent a sluice of money funnelling back to American corporations, Perkins moved on – to Panama. And here, the story darkens. The history of US involvement in Panama is skilfully adumbrated, before we arrive at the coup which places Omar Torrijos in power. Torrijos, unlike many Latin American dictators, wished to steer Panama in an independent direction. The country’s ruling families had done splendidly out of being the chief supplicants of US power in the country, but Torrijos advocated certain limited social reforms for the poor, and objected to the School of the Americas which was located in the Canal Zone.

Opposition to US foreign policy and Nixon was all over Panama. The poor were becoming radicalised. Perkins was there on a hit job, but his stay took him through the shanty towns as well as the banks of privileged middle class houses and clubs. His government guide, Fidel, was able to point him to crowds of recent immigrants from surrounding countries with fascist dictatorships supported by America, to prostitutes offering themselves for a few US dollars. He meets Omar Torrijos, who lectures his ear off about US imperialism in Iran. The Shah he is not altogether fond of, but he thinks he can learn a few things about how to modernise an economy from him. He knows, however, that he will not survive should the US decide to get rid of him: “We have the Canal. That’s a lot bigger than Arbenz and United Fruit.” Torrijos expresses admiration for Arbenz and his programme, adding that “They couldn’t afford to let [him] give the rest of us ideas.”

Torrijos lets Perkins in on a secret. The Panamanian government has Bechtel pissing on its leg because they plan to build a new canal at sea level, which they intend to allow the Japanese to finance and build. This will leave Bechtel out in the cold, and when the president of Bechtel is George Schultz, formerly Nixon’s secretary of the treasury, you don’t want to leave them out of anything. Hence: “Panama needs your help. I need your help.” Perkins is bewildered. Torrijos says that he needs to show that he can look after the poor without being the servant of Russia or China. He wants to be a model for other poor countries seeking independence and well-being. He knows full well that Perkins and his company obtain contracts and money by vastly inflating the size of projects, but in this instance he needs to build up electricity, transport and communications and to do it he needs money: World Bank money.

Perkins, amazed and thrilled at Torrijos’ offer, nevertheless wonders what he’s been smoking. Torrijos must be aware that the international aid game is a sham, designed to make him rich and keep his country poor. It was assumed that all men in power were corruptible. If he did not use it for his own personal benefit, as Suharto and others did, this would be seen as a threat – especially if he sought independent development. Despite his forebodings about it, Perkins agrees to the proposals and the money pours in. Now, all seems to go well. Perkins gets on with his life, travels to Saudi Arabia and launders some money there, then gets the Kingdom hooked on a vast amount of debt, which betroths the Saudis to investments in US companies and compels them to maintain oil prices at a reasonable level. He pimps a woman for someone he calls ‘Prince W.’ He meets Graham Greene in a trip back to Panama, and shares some of his stories with him. He nets Colombia into huge loans, again by massively inflating the estimates. And then, Jaime Roldos is assassinated.

4.
Roldos, the President of Ecuador from 1979 until his death in May 1981, had been a staunch opponent of big oil, and had a particularly rocky relationship with Texaco. His ‘Hydrocarbon Policy’, upon which he was elected, stipulated that as Ecuador’s oil supplies were potentially its most important asset, it should seek to develop and exploit such resources only in ways that benefited the majority of the population. He wanted to use this policy to deliver social reform, although he was also aware that he needed to carry many influential families with him.

In November 1980, Ronald Reagan was elected President of the United States - the Panama Canal Treaty negotiated with Torrijos, and the Iranian hostage crisis were major factors in that election. Early in 1981, Roldos presented his new hydrocarbon policy to the Ecuadoran parliament. In the US, the PR men set to work portraying him as another Castro, a dictator effacing democracy and the Ecuadoran constitution. A strange evangelical outfit known as the Summer Institute of Linguistics (SIL), which colluded with the oil companies in persuading locals to move out of their homes when some drilling needed doing, began to hysterically attack Roldos. He in turn accused them of colluding with the oil companies and ordered them out of the country. He also told the oil companies that their plans would not be approved unless they benefited the majority of the country. On May 24th, 1981, he died in a fiery helicopter crash.

Torrijos wept for and eulogised after Roldos, and he too expelled the SIL. Two months later, On July 31st 1981, he himself died in a plane crash. According to Perkins, these were classic CIA assassinations – further, he is fairly certain he knows the reasons for the interventions. The EHMs had not succeeded in their work, and so ‘the jackals’ were brought in to take care of the situation.

5.
Perkins, in the meantime, had quit his job at MAIN and set up his own company called Independent Power Systems, whose goal was to provide environmentally sound ways of generating electricity. Having connived in ripping countries off for billions to enrich US corporations, assisting pro-US dictators & servicing targets with sexual favours, he'd finally had enough. He was out as far as he was concerned, but – as he had been warned – one is never really ‘out’. He was rewarded surreptitiously for his services and, when it emerged that he was working on a book called Conscience of an Economic Hit Man, was offered a bribe – which he took. Coded threats and bribes emerged each time he considered spilling the beans, and each time he acquiesced. It was not until 9/11 and after that he decided the book must come out. Conspiracy theories abounded, he says, and still do because much of the truth is unknown. But the truth, although often concealed, is not a conspiracy. It is a story of Empire that is as old as Rome and as new as capitalism. In fact, one of the things that Perkins does an excellent job of showing is the connection between economic imperatives and foreign policy. This does often lead him to reductive analysis, but at least he tries – he is not merely satisfied with giving you his scoop, he wants the reader to understand the nature of the beast and to find ways of putting it down.

The arc of Perkins narrative is one of naivete, corruption, sin and redemption. Having started with a description of an ugly town called Shell, scraped out of the Ecuadoran Amazon jungle to serve the oil company it is named after, a stark military zone as well as a workplace for thousands of indigenous labourers, he ends his book with a call to Jefferson and Paine. From ‘corporatocracy’ – his phrase – to authentic revolutionary democracy, in fact. And it may well be that this hit man’s latest kill has taken out the pristine platitudes with which Empire legitimises itself, an appropriately iconoclastic accomplishment from the son of Calvinists.

Humanitarian intervention. posted by lenin

The Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation (Whisc, or, Whinsec) is a made-over version of the School of the Americas, which has been training Latin American military and police recruits in the techniques of putsch and modern dictatorship since 1946. If you want details see here .

What is of some interest now is the emerging pattern in 'student' intake for the regime. The bulk of students have always been military, and they have always come from countries in Central and Southern America where trouble is either brewing, or under way, or being repressed under some well-trimmed iron heel. Here is a pair of tables showing which countries have supplied students to the SOA & Whisc since 1996. Note Colombia and Bolivia; the former, a corrupt puppet democracy using far right paramilitaries in a war against peasants and trade unionists, the latter a puppet democracy which was unable to impose a deeply unfair water privatisation scheme on its people because of popular revolt. The messenger pigeons are screeching 'coup'.

Hitchens at West Point. posted by lenin

From the New York Post :

BILIOUS Brit writer Christopher Hitchens has been asked to lecture U.S. military officers-in-training at West Point. The Vanity Fair columnist, a reformed leftist who backed George Bush's re-election and who now supports the war on terror, will be speaking at the famed military academy on the subject of "Iraq, Afghanistan and democracy in both places," he tells PAGE SIX. Hitchens, who attacks the likes of Bill Clinton, Martha Stewart, Michael Moore, Mel Gibson and Mayor Bloomberg in his new book, "Love, Poverty and War," says he was very surprised by the invitation. "I thought, 'Surely the U.S. military can't be in that much trouble,'" he quips. "Is it a great country, or what? Actually, I think it's an honor, especially now. This is the next generation of American officers." Hitchens says the academy offered him a "nominal" fee for the lecture, which he has asked to be donated to a fund for soldiers' widows and orphans.

Hack. Love that "quip", by the way. Suddenly PJ O'Rourke seems funny.

Johann Hari attacked. posted by lenin

Some disgraceful prankster has launched an immature attack on the estimable Johann Hari's website.

I can't understand why anyone would do this. It's silly, it's childish and doesn't deserve to raise the slightest chuckle, no matter how funny it is. I myself will entertain not a single belly-laugh. I hope you all can maintain a dignified and vaguely sorrowful look on your face until this mess is cleared up.

Masses Against the Taxes. posted by lenin

Charles Kennedy’s sweater-wearing egg-heads and ‘beautiful soul’ liberals must yearn for the days when “mass liberalism” was not a figment of the imagination, something devoutly to be wished but always deferred to that future parliamentary majority. But I’ve been trying, of late, to understand the hegemony of Liberalism in 19th Century Britain, and the absence of a Marxist party until the early 20th Century. I’d put the problem roughly as follows: the Liberal party was the party of the industrial middle class, dominated by aristocratic Whigs and espousing the ideals of the bourgeoisie (Free Trade, laissez-faire economics, antipathy to aggressive imperialism* etc), so how did it obtain the support of the overwhelming bulk of the working class?

There are a number of ways that historians have attempted to explain this. Three views which usually emerge from social historians and Marxists are:

1) Working class liberalism was a result of the defeat of Chartism, which led to the politics of accommodation, compromise and so on. This is a model which accepts that 1848 was the high watermark of British radicalism, and what ensued was a downhill struggle.
2) There was a labour aristocracy, a layer of skilled artisans who were better rewarded for their work and could be bought off by the liberal elite, and this enabled them to sink their roots into working class communities. This is Hobsbawm’s thesis.
3) Liberalism can be seen as a conjugation of different single issue campaigns and pressure groups, rather than as a party programme.

In the latter view, Gladstonian liberalism is seen as deriving its support from an inchoate mass of different groups, often with incompatible goals. Indeed, pressure groups based on Nonconformism were a bed-rock of liberal support in this era. Gladstone, in this model, would be the galvanising force that managed to weld a liberal majority through his charismatic political interventions. Consider, however, some of the pressure groups which built up liberal support: the United Kingdom Alliance (a temperance movement), the Liberation Society (for disestablishment of the Church of England), the National Education League (for secular education outside of the Anglican establishment), the National Liberal Federation (an embryonic political party led by Joseph Chamberlain). The last two were Joseph Chamberlain’s political bases for opposing and seeking to depose Gladstone from the left. The liberal policies which Chamberlain proposed were of the kind that appealed to working class radicals (state intervention in the economy rather than laissez-faire), while Gladstone preferred the more staid, non-interventionist policies of classical Liberalism.

I mean to say, Liberalism’s support did rest on some unlikely coalitions, but not as a result of myopic single-issue campaigns. There was a split in liberalism between the gentrified Whiggery of the Westminister leadership and the radicalism of the working class, and the story of how this was overcome is not just one of indirection and moral fervour.

Which is not to say that moral issues did not have their place. Gladstone was notorious for his moral campaigns. According to David Vincent, this was likely to be because Gladstone could not promise anything material to the working class, being committed to laissez-faire economics. He had to work with moral symbolism, hence the attempt to capitalise on the series of atrocities carried out by the Ottomans against Bulgarians. Many include his commitment to Home Rule among these, but that particular policy demands explanation more than it explains. Firstly because the policy was not a popular one, and it split the party in two. Second, because Gladstone’s handling of Ireland involved the most authoritarian extremities where he thought it was appropriate, including the suspension of habeas corpus, arbitrary detentions etc. The most likely explanation of this policy is that Chamberlain was against Home Rule, would never swallow it, and therefore Gladstone would be rid of a powerful rival in the caustic former mayor of Birmingham (who had founded the first local ward cells as a means of mobilising the masses, and therefore had a strong base). Indeed, Chamberlain did beat a hasty exit, and two years later became a Tory, foisting his protectionist and interventionist ideas on the future party of ‘small government’.

Eugenio F. Biagini argues (in Liberty, Retrenchment, and Reform: Popular Liberalism in the Age of Gladstone, 1860-1880, 1993) Liberal hegemony is not, in fact, something that requires special explanation, but is a natural result of the historically radical ideas contained in liberalism. Wheras other historians saw 1848 as the decisive break in radical history, Biagini avers that what is striking is the continuity – by 1880, for instance, most of the Chartists’ demands had become the law of the land, because mainstream liberalism had adopted and nurtured the causes of the radicals. Liberalism, far from being an incoherent mess of conflicting claims, was a cohesive ideology which answered many working class needs. Further, Biagini believes it is mistaken to associate liberal ideals with the middle class – many of those policies which seem most conservative are in fact historically radical working class ideas.

The most obvious continuity is in the reform programme. The extension of the franchise was continuous with the Chartist demand for universal suffrage; anti-corruption legislation enacted by Gladstone’s government answered a demand to end corruption; anti-statism, which is seen as a conservative idea, was one of the key ideas of working class radicals. The state had been seen as a coercive and potentially dangerous institutions. Tax was seen as an evil to be avoid because, in those pre-welfare times, taxes tended to come down heaviest on the working class. Free Trade was also a means of ensuring small government, as it meant there was less need for regulation and taxes on consumption. From this followed anti-imperialism, or retrenchment, in which belligerent foreign policy was seen as wasteful and likely to lead to larger government. Indeed, the 1906 Liberal landslide owed itself to a Free Trade programme and lower taxes on food. Anti-clericalism was a radical idea, as the working class resented paying tithes and taxes to sustain the Church of England, while temperance had been propounded by William Lovett.

In Biagini’s view, there was no Marxist party in 19th Century Britain because liberalism could itself answer many of the demands of the working class; in that view, Labour replaced the liberals not because of a natural working class interest, but because the liberals alienated many of their supporters by neglecting and suppressing unions. The Liberals, says Biagini, were the natural party of the workers in the 19th Century.

Well, so much for this. The continuities which Biagini emphasises are not illusory, but neither do they simply quash the discontinuities. Home Rule was not a natural demand of the working class, and Biagini exaggerates the anti-statism of the working class, as there was broad support for intervention and regulation of the economy. As Michael Mann wrote in 1997:

“States were … expected to do much more for citizens: to provide infrastructures integrating their territories, to engage in mass mobilization warfare, and to organize more social welfare. As Perez-Diaz (1993) notes, the state became "the bearer of a moral project". The notion surged on the far right, in the form of proto-fascism (Sternhell, 1994). It also surged amid centre-leftists like the German "Socialists of the Chair", British "New Liberals", French Republican Radicals, Russian liberal zemstvo intelligentsia. Leftists and Marxists lagged until after World War I and the Bolshevik Revolution.”

The Liberal foreign policy was not as anti-imperialist in practise as its ideology stipulated, to riot in understatement. The answer has in part to be because the Liberal Party was an amorphous party, a ‘broad church’ as the Nonconformists liked to say. Chamberlain exemplified the party’s left-wing, attracting and mobilising the radical grassroots, while the Whigs worked away at reassuring and defending the industrial middle class. In that view, then, although Chamberlain was a threat to Gladstone, he was of enormous use to the Liberal Party as a whole. Liberalism was able to cross classes in much the same way that the US Democrats have been able to up until now, by hegemonising the left vote with radical words and serving capital in deeds.

*Not that Victorian liberalism lived up to these claims. One of Gladstone’s many torments in office was the Liberal foreign policy record, which included the 1882 invasion of Egypt.

Galloway wins; Hari huffs. posted by lenin

George Galloway has won his libel case against the Telegraph. I am told that, aside from condemning the Telegraph, the judge also described the story as an attack on the antiwar movement - which is exactly what it was.

Johann Hari, however, is upset . Peeved, you might say. Astonishingly, he takes the opportunity to reprint falsehoods - which he knows are false, because he has read my lengthy rebuttal .

For instance, he reproduces the following:

How about the passage where Galloway defends Saddam's claim to Kuwait, describing the province as "clearly a part of the greater Iraqi whole stolen from the motherland by perfidious Albion"? What about the fact that Galloway repeatedly refers to Saddam's statements and actions as coming from "the Iraqis", as if Saddam was their legitimate representative rather than their oppressor? For example, he says that in the First Gulf War, "I made my stand with Iraq." No you didn't, George. You stood with Saddam; conscript Iraqis - most in their teens - were being sent to be slaughtered in the name of an invasion they did not support.

Unto which:

This is a blatant - and I must conclude intentional - misrepresentation. Here is Galloway's actual quote:


"For Iraqis of all political persuasions, Kuwait had been stolen from the motherland by perfidious Albion - Great Britain, the former colonial power." (Page 42).


He does not describe "the province" thus - he describes Iraqis as having that perception. Galloway could be wrong in this assessment, but that is immaterial since he did not say what Hari says he did. In fact, Hari seems to be the one in doubt of Kuwait's legitimacy as a nation, since he is the one who describes it as a "province". (Province: "A territory governed as an administrative or political unit of a country or empire." ) What can Johann mean?

Follow the links for more. Galloway 1 - Pro-war Left 0.

US Marine: They told me it was a war for oil. posted by lenin

The Guardian prints the comments of a Marine who has started actively campaigning against the war and occupation. I spotted this on the internet a while ago and have been desperately hunting for it since. Here you go:

I know the commitment it takes to serve your country, but I also know this war has nothing to do with protecting my country. My sergeant put it best a week before we left for the Middle East: "Don't think you're going to be heroes. You're not going for weapons of mass destruction. You're not going to get rid of Saddam, or to make Iraq safe for democracy. You're going for one reason, and that's oil."

War for oil. Excellent. As some perspicacious critic once remarked in a wholly different context: "Strange humanism. Strange human rights."

Barghouti's Run. posted by lenin

Via Jews Sans Frontieres , Marwan Barghouti is back in the running for the Palestinian presidency. This can only be good news. Fatah has long since ceased to be capable of running a serious campaign to defend Palestinian rights, and Barghouti's promise to "achieve peace on the basis of justice, freedom, the return of Palestinian refugees, and freedom for our prisoners" is a welcome break from the sad, slumbering quiescence of the Palestinian leadership in recent years. One hopes Barghouti has some sense that the Palestinians cannot win this fight alone, and that the strategy of suicide bombings is an absolute failure. Clearly, the latter is not emerging from nowhere, and it isn't an argument that Barghouti can win overnight and without some loss of credibility.

To quote from Jacqueline Rose's recent superb article on the topic:

According to Eyad El-Sarraj, the founder and director of the Gaza Community Mental Health Programme, today's suicide attackers are, for the most part, children of the first intifada. Studies show that during the first uprising, 55 per cent of children saw their fathers being humiliated or beaten by Israeli soldiers. Martyrdom - sacrificing oneself for God - increases its appeal when the image of the earthly father bites the dust. 'It's despair,' El-Sarraj states baldly, 'a despair where living becomes no different from dying.' When life is constant degradation, death is the only source of pride. 'In 1996, practically all of us were against the martyr operations,' Kamal Aqeel, the acting mayor of Khan Yunis in Gaza, explains. 'Not any longer . . . We all feel that we can no longer bear the situation as it is; we feel that we'd simply explode under all this pressure of humiliation.'

Only by overcoming the sense of isolation which Palestinians feel, by committing to an international campaign of solidarity, will it be possible to stop young Palestinians wasting themselves and attacking targets which bear no immediate relationship to their oppression. Many attempts were made by sympathisers with the Palestinian cause to persuade Arafat to pursue an internationalist campaign, but he preferred to consolidate a fiefdom under Israeli tutelage. Barghouti's base is different, and one hopes he can articulate a different kind of politics.

The Next Revolution Will Read Trotsky. posted by lenin

Via Bat , an unexpectedly strong article on Deutcher and Trotsky by Neal Ascherson . I didn't know any of the background of Ascherson's politics that Bat brings up, but I do remember reading in a collection of essays his observation that the Russian Revolution would be repeated at some point in the future because it was too good an idea not to be. To discover that he's a Liberal Democrat with a history of right-wing Labourism is a surprise to say the least.

Still, here's some highlights:

Again, interpretations of 1917 and its aftermath have changed almost out of recognition. Most contemporary readers of history probably agree that the ‘real’ revolution was that of February 1917, and that the October power seizure by the Bolsheviks was little more than an opportunistic coup d’état. History has also taken an increasingly nasty view of Lenin. For so many decades, oppositional Communists and post-Stalinist leaders of the Soviet Union would condemn abuses of power by describing them as ‘departures from Leninist norms’. Now, however, the fashion is to dismiss this approach as intellectual comfort-fodder. Lenin, it’s said, in no way offered an alternative to Stalinism. In fact, it was Lenin who created the machinery of inhuman oppression which Stalin merely continued – admittedly, on a vaster scale – to operate in the way that it was designed to operate. It was Lenin who established the Bolshevik monopoly of political power, who set the precedent for denouncing all critics of that monopoly as ‘counter-revolutionaries’, who locked the Bolsheviks into the fatal claim of ‘substituting’ for a working class which by 1921 had almost ceased to exist. It was Lenin during the Civil War who licensed the Red Terror – executions, family hostage-taking – against the class enemy.

My own feeling is that this approach is too crude to last. The Bolshevik Revolution was more ‘authentic’ and popular than we currently admit; to see Soviet history merely as inherited homicide is an excuse for not thinking about it. But while these versions last, their sting affects Trotsky too. And there’s worse: the suggestion that Trotsky has become irrelevant. If Lenin had set up a political tradition which could only achieve its ends by force, would it have made any significant difference whether Trotsky or Stalin succeeded him? Given Trotsky’s impetuous nature and his practice of Red Terror during the Civil War, might he not have been even more ruthless? In terms of public attention, Trotsky’s stock has fallen even faster than Lenin’s. After all, if the three giants of the Revolution were, in the current view, ‘as bad as each other’, why should Trotsky – the one who never held the leadership – be of special interest?

‘As bad as each other’. The real abyss separating Deutscher from modern historiography is a moral one. An average British history graduate today will have been taught to evaluate revolutions on a simple humanitarian scale. Did they kill a lot of people? Then they were bad. Showing that some of those killed were even more bloodthirsty than their killers is no extenuation. Neither is the plea that violence and privation, the sacrifice of the present, may be the price of breaking through to a better future. George Kline dismissed this in The Trotsky Reappraisal (1992) as ‘the fallacy of historically deferred value . . . a moral monstrosity’. Monstrous or not, it’s a bargain with the future which, as anyone over 60 will remember, Europeans of all political outlooks were once accustomed to strike. But today ‘presentism’ rules, and the young read the ‘short 20th century’ as the final demonstration that evil means are never justified by high ends.

Isaac Deutscher saw history differently. His standards are not those of Amnesty International. Instead, he measures everything against the cause of the Revolution. The Trotsky trilogy has a spinal column of moral argument running through it which can be reduced to this question: did this or that course or idea help to fulfil the Revolution, or divert it from its true purpose? In the value of that ultimate purpose, Deutscher has solid faith. Trotsky expressed it on many occasions. In Siberian exile at the age of 22, he wrote: ‘As long as I breathe, I shall fight for the future, that radiant future in which man, strong and beautiful, will become master of the drifting stream of his history and will direct it towards the boundless horizon of beauty, joy and happiness!’

...

As well as sharing Trotsky’s loathing for Stalin and his minions, Deutscher broadly shared his analysis of what the Soviet Union became in the 1930s. Trotsky continued to regard it as a ‘deformed workers’ state’. In other words, the basic achievement of the Revolution – the abolition of the power of capital and the ending of private ownership of the means of production – remained intact under the superstructure of bureaucratic dictatorship, state terrorism and censorship. Two things followed from that premise. First, the USSR was still reclaimable for the Revolution, though it would probably take a second revolution to achieve it. Second, the duty of all true socialists to defend the Soviet Union – even Stalin’s Soviet Union – against attack by a capitalist power remained absolute and unqualified.

...

If Lenin, hard and unbreakable, was the axle of the Revolution, Trotsky was the roaring wheel. In this heroic period, he revealed a kit of talents which few humans have possessed. He was a whirlwind organiser who could bring any chaos to order, a terrific orator who could swell the hearts of thousands, a literary intellectual whose writings on culture, history, political philosophy and military tactics are still fresh and brilliant, a rare military commander who combined mastery of mobile warfare with a charisma which roused exhausted soldiers to die for him. In almost any other country, a man with such talents and such victories would have dreamed of ‘mounting the white horse’ – of taking supreme power – and it would have been hard to stop him.

But Trotsky was different. It was not just that he regarded men on white horses as a vulgar joke. He seems never to have thought of politics in terms of personal power and he was incredulous and then merciless in his contempt when he found that some of his colleagues did so. At one level, this proved his revolutionary integrity and democratic commitment. But it also revealed his weakness. Trotsky had all the gifts except political instinct. It was not just that he disdained intrigue. He was genuinely baffled by it. All his imaginative powers seemed to switch off when party colleagues pulled at his sleeve and begged him to join this or that faction in the struggle to succeed Lenin.

...

Deutscher’s ‘victory in defeat’ summary to his trilogy rests, in the end, on the hope that Soviet Communism is reformable, and on simple awe. ‘It cannot be, it would be contrary to all historical sense, that so high an intellectual energy, so prodigious an activity, and so noble a martyrdom should not have their full impact eventually.’ No? All that can be said is that when the unimaginable climate of revolution returns, as in some shape it will, young men and women will read and understand Trotsky and Deutscher as we no longer can.

Do go and read Bat's account for the commentary, which teases out the nuances of Ascherson's piece better than I can over my morning coffee.

China. posted by lenin

Via Blood and Treasure , here is some graphic illustration of the Chinese dictatorship's approach to law n order. Oh, what, you need a warning? Yes, it's graphic. They kill someone, you twit.

I'd like to thank that lady who lectured me on he 'gains made by the Chinese proletariat and the petit-bourgeois Western intellectuals [students'] who would take it from them'. She, and her copy of the Morning Star, will live forever in my dreams.

Ukraine. posted by lenin

It's been hard to know what to say about Ukraine. Yes, on the one hand, 'both sides of the divide' (to use a vile, unctuous phrase) are supported by either Russia or America. Great power politics has its sway here. But, as Dead Men Left recently argued, this should not prevent us from supporting the movement for democracy.

According to Shuggy , some on the pro-war Left have detected an eery 'silence' on this issue among the anti-war Left. Shuggy thinks it is revenge for all the jibes about the warniks silence over Fallujah - except of course that the supporters of war bear some responsibility for what happens in Fallujah, whereas the antiwar Left can't quite be held responsible for the shady election dealings in Ukraine.

At any rate, they have obviously not seen this or this .

Culp and Culpability. posted by lenin

There has been a lot of discussion about how much of the present disaster in Iraq the US can be held responsible for. Norman Geras argues that even if the consequences were likely to be disastrous, this should in no way affect the decision as to whether it was just to wage war. He also argues that “The US and its allies are not responsible for this second war [the resistance] - unless you simply assume its legitimacy in advance as a just struggle against foreign invaders.” That indeed may be precisely what is at issue, but others have argued – successfully I think – against Norm’s strictures. Even if the US is not responsible for the ‘second war’ – which is really a continuation of the first, and therefore a continuation of the war which Geras believes the ‘coalition’ is responsible for – it is not obliged to fight it, and it is by no means obliged to fight it in the way that it does. There was always the option of an expeditious withdrawal, allowing a caretaker Iraqi government to organise elections etc. This was the early promise of Jay Garner, but it was swiftly done away with because it would have meant that the US would not have been able to implement its programmes for Iraq’s economy. I might also take issue with how Norm characterise – or caricatures – the resistance as it developed in its infancy. (Its all “Ba’athist remnants” and “foreign fighters”, which therefore means that it cannot have been a legitimate resistance…) Further, as Robin Green points out, if those who initiated the aggression cannot be held responsible for its predictable consequences, how do the pro-war left manage to hold the antiwar movement responsible for being ‘objectively pro-Saddam’? How many times did we hear, “Oh yes, you mean well, but the consequence of what you’re saying is…” At any rate, even if you don’t hold the US responsible for the quite predictable resistance to the occupation, it is responsible for its own actions.

For instance, if the US bombs Fallujah, while anything up to 150,000 residents are trapped inside (and by US admissions, only a few thousand of these were actually resistance fighters), that’s one thing. You can try to put it down to ‘terrorists’ if you like, but I submit that any defense in court that begins “Well, he started it…” isn’t going to get you anywhere. If the government appointed by the US and presumably acting on its instructions moves to prevent doctors treating the wounded , on the other hand…

”The ministry of health instructed us not to provide aid for Fallujans,” says Dr. Aisha Mohammed from Baghdad. ”But then they have not done anything to help them during the siege, and very little at the refugee camps in Baghdad.”

…and also neglects those whom it presumably accepts a responsibility to treat, then the culpability is dripping from ‘coalition’ fingers. And if Fallujah is left “a horror” after the attack, which was justified in part as an attempt to “liberate” the city and its people, then I begin to have questions about someone who tries to exculpate the perpetrators from responsibility.

Apoplexy of Enlightenment. posted by lenin

This excellent piece by the Adornian on Enlightenment fetishism couldn't fail to remind me of the uncomprehending attacks on Derrida when he hit the earth (See here and here for a couple of decent burials). In particular, Adornian reports:

I have been forced back into the blogsphere by my irritation, firstly at getting round to reading Francis Wheen's "How Mumbo-Jumbo Conquered the World" and a recent post on Harry's Place which displays a similar crude Enlightenment fetishism.

Wheen's book is often on target - taking apart the culture of new age mysticism, pseudo Buddhism and generally quackiness. Actually, as an aside, I find Zizek funnier and more astute on these matters - particularly his suggestion that, were Max Weber alive today, he would be writing "Western Buddhism and the Spirit of Late Capitalism" instead of "The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism".

Anyway - it was only really two pages of Wheen's book that really caught my attention - where he suggests that Adorno blames the Enlightenment for all modern ills and fails to recognise that it is really only through the Enlightenment that modern ideas of rights, justice etc. came about. Moreover, he berates the idea of their being a connection between Enlightenment thinking and the Holocaust. Wheen follows in the tradition of those whom have obviously failed to get through the preface to the Dialectic of Enlightenment, where Adorno and Horkheimer say the following.

"We are wholly convinced...that social freedom is inseparable from enlightened thought. Nevertheless...we have just as clearly recognised that the notion of this very way of thinking, no less than the actual historic forms - the social institutions - with which it is interwoven, already contains the seed of the reversal universally apparent today."

Indeed, the sputtering refusal of Enlightened intellectuals to read the text is becoming acute where before it was merely chronic. The reactions to Caroline Merchant's feminist-environmentalist critique of Francis Bacon yielded similarly block-headed views in which much of what Bacon wrote has to be ignored and the critique is misconstrued. ("Oh yes, Bacon may have used the odd colourful turn of phrase to convey what his new empirical methods, but...").

Now that imperialist apologetics takes precisely the form of defense of rationality, science etc., it is becoming more obvious what is valuable in the poststructuralist critique of these notions; indeed why the Marxist attempt to revolutionise (not reject) modernity and its totalising apparatus of reason is so necessary.