The ghost of elections past... posted by lenin

ITEM 1:

"U.S. encouraged by Vietnam Vote. Officials City 83%
Turnout Despite Vietcong Terror," NEW YORK TIMES, Sept. 4, 1967, p. 2.

Direland has more on this article:

United States officials were surprised and heartened today at the size of turnout in South Vietnam's presidential election despite a Vietcong terrorist campaign to disrupt the voting.
According to reports from Saigon, 83 per cent of the 5.85 million registered voters cast their ballots yesterday. Many of them risked reprisals threatened by the Vietcong.

"The size of the popular vote and the inability of the Vietcong to destroy the election machinery were the two salient facts in a preliminary assessment of the nation election based on the incomplete returns reaching here....
"A successful election has long been seen as the keystone in President Johnson's policy of encouraging the growth of constitutional processes in South Vietnam...
"The fact that the backing of the electorate has gone to the generals who have been ruling South Vietnam for the last two years does not, in the Administration's view, diminish the significance of the constitutional step that has been taken.

ITEM 2:

Ronald Reagan statement on the election of Jose Napoleon Duarte as President of El Salvador

May 18, 1984
On Wednesday, May 16, the Central Elections Commission of El Salvador certified Jose Napoleon Duarte as the winner of the May 6 Presidential election in that country. By this act, the people of El Salvador have made clear their choice of Mr. Duarte as the first popularly elected President of that country in recent history.

The voters have chosen as President a man who had dedicated his life to achieving democracy and reform for his homeland. We congratulate President-elect Duarte on his victory and pledge that we will do all in our power to strengthen the ties of freedom and democracy that unite us.

Mr. Duarte carried with him a clear mandate from the people of El Salvador, over 80 percent of whom voted on May 6, that democracy and the vote should determine their future. The United States bipartisan observer delegation noted that, ``This election was fair and honest, and . . . provided a clear and undeniable mandate to whichever candidate is elected.'' Election observers from other countries echoed a similar conclusion.

In protecting both rounds of the recent elections, the Salvadoran Armed Forces took more than 80 casualties, demonstrating once again their determination to defend freedom. They acted professionally and apolitically and are showing us now that they will respect the popular electoral will. In contrast, the guerrillas refused to participate in the election and intensified the combat before, during, and after the voting.

As El Salvador's voters had to brave the intimidation of the guerrillas, their newly elected President will have to face the challenges of creating a peaceful and secure framework for social and humanitarian reform, economic development, and further democratic advance.

The people of El Salvador have spoken. We, along with other nations committed to a democratic form of government, must heed their courageous action. We will support their newly elected government in the pursuit of and the opportunity for a better life.

I look forward to meeting with El Salvador's new President-elect on Monday, May 21, during his visit to Washington. In addition, I have asked Secretary of State George Shultz to head our delegation to the President-elect's inauguration on June 1 in San Salvador.

Tenner to anyone who can tell me how many corpses followed each of these 'elections'?

More election euphoria. posted by lenin

The Iraqi blogger Raed is unhappy about the elections. He points out that:

1) "The fake government in Iraq announced that 72% of Iraqis voted today. Later they announced that 8 million Iraqis voted, which means that around 56% voted because the number of Eligible voters inside Iraq is more than 14.27 million."

2) "There is NO WAY that the primitive weak Iraqi government could know how many people went to vote today this fast, and these numbers are mere exaggerated guesses.

Yet, they are stupid enough to miscalculate numbers.

The number of Iraqis outside is more than 4,000,000. 56% of Iraqis are older than 18 years, which means that around 2.5 million Iraqis are Eligible voters outside Iraq. Less than 250,000 of them voted.

The surprise is that by a simple calculation, the total number of Iraqi Eligible voters inside and outside the country is more than 16.75 millions, and the number of people that actually voted is less than 8.25 million."

Less than 50% of all eligible voters actually voted. Success, success!! Keep repeating.

Another thing that bears mentioning is that the low turnout is blamed on 'insurgent violence'. Well, that has to be part of it, but how to explain the low ex-pat turnout, where there was considerably less danger?



Oddly, an organisation calling itself the International Organization of Migration claims that 94% of ex-pats voted , which would be pretty bloody difficult since only 25% of them registered.

Rumours were apparently percolating among Iraqis that if they didn't vote, they would have their food rations cut off. Or so report Raed and Baghdad Burning . Dahr Jamail reports:

Many Iraqis said Monday that their names were marked on a list provided by the government agency that provides monthly food rations before they were allowed to vote.

”I went to the voting centre and gave my name and district where I lived to a man,” said Wassif Hamsa, a 32-year-old journalist who lives in the predominantly Shia area Janila in Baghdad. ”This man then sent me to the person who distributed my monthly food ration.”

Mohammed Ra'ad, an engineering student who lives in the Baya'a district of the capital city reported a similar experience.

Ra'ad, 23, said he saw the man who distributed monthly food rations in his district at his polling station. ”The food dealer, who I know personally of course, took my name and those of my family who were voting,” he said. ”Only then did I get my ballot and was allowed to vote.”

”Two of the food dealers I know told me personally that our food rations would be withheld if we did not vote,” said Saeed Jodhet, a 21-year-old engineering student who voted in the Hay al-Jihad district of Baghdad.

Meanwhile, Salim Lone - former advisor to Sergio Vieira de Mello - argues that "the election fell so completely short of accepted electoral standards that had it been held in, say, Zimbabwe or Syria, Britain and America would have been the first to denounce it." Success! Glory to the civilising mission.

Election "irregularities" are already emerging.

But wait: "I can see the markets rising like a beautiful bird!"

Finally, Fisherblog reproduces the view of the Federation of Workers Councils and Unions in Iraq, urging workers not to participate in the elections. It is interesting for the reasons they give. I reiterate my own view that the decision to participate is a judgement call for Iraqis, to do with their own assessment of risks and potential benefits, but this is still an interesting take - not least because some accuse the antiwar Left of being uninterested in the views of Iraqi socialists.

Iraq election news... posted by lenin

Some interesting articles and links on the situation in Iraq today. The Iraqi blogger Shlonkom Bakazay derides the "draconian elections" and remarks that there are only five television cameras allowed to film what is happening at 6,000 polling booths. He also reveals that the Beeb is using Allawi's supplied translators who feed false translations of what an interviewee has just said.

Polling stations at a number of towns in Iraq were still not open five hours after voting was due to begin, according to the country's Electoral Commission, while the polls are set to close an hour early .

Predictably, the turnout among Sunnis is negligible, yet I am hearing whispers of a turnout of 72% nationally, which would be comfortably high. The source of the claims? Tex at Antiwar.blog has the answer: a single Iraqi election official. That official change his position after question, (click on the "72%" link above). Other estimates are more modest, positing a turnout of 50% or more , another report suggesting merely that it could "reach or exceed 50%" . That would hardly be miraculous, but certainly a stronger turnout than I would credit for such a transparently fraudulent, anarchic, unfair process.

I don't need to enlighten you about the spate of suicide bombings and rocket attacks that have marked this election. 44 have been killed. Despite the fixing, the injustice, the exclusion of so many voters and the death, the occupiers have hailed it as a "success" . Frankly, if two Iraqis had made it there to vote only to perish in a mortar attack on the way out, they would still find a way to call it a success.

And Juan Cole has some excellent analysis :

1) "[T]his process is not a model for anything, and would not willingly be imitated by anyone else in the region. The 1997 elections in Iran were much more democratic, as were the 2002 elections in Bahrain and Pakistan."

2) "[T]he Bush administration opposed one-person, one-vote elections of this sort. First they were going to turn Iraq over to Chalabi within six months. Then Bremer was going to be MacArthur in Baghdad for years. Then on November 15, 2003, Bremer announced a plan to have council-based elections in May of 2004. The US and the UK had somehow massaged into being provincial and municipal governing councils, the members of which were pro-American. Bremer was going to restrict the electorate to this small, elite group.

Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani immediately gave a fatwa denouncing this plan and demanding free elections mandated by a UN Security Council resolution. Bush was reportedly "extremely offended" at these two demands and opposed Sistani. Bremer got his appointed Interim Governing Council to go along in fighting Sistani. Sistani then brought thousands of protesters into the streets in January of 2004, demanding free elections. Soon thereafter, Bush caved and gave the ayatollah everything he demanded. Except that he was apparently afraid that open, non-manipulated elections in Iraq might become a factor in the US presidential campaign, so he got the elections postponed to January 2005."

Exactly right, in two shots. The elections were extremely flawed, but even insofar as they do reflect what Iraqis want, that is a victory of Iraqis themselves against the coalition.

Incidentally, there are some right-wing US commentators who are rather unhappy that votes are being counted at all:

CARLSON: Listen, we can't leave We can't stay. It's a terrible situation to be in, and we're going to end up -- listen, in secret meetings at the White House, they're no longer talking about democracy flowering in the Middle East and a bastion for others to follow, they're saying, How are we going to get out of this with honor?

...

You know if our post-war policy had been a little better, Iraqis wouldn't have to be quite so brave to vote and we may end up supporting with our own soldiers a theocracy or a semi- theocracy that the Reagan-Bush people armed Saddam Hussein to prevent. That's the irony of all of this.

The Other Occupation. posted by lenin

If Iraq is an example of a failed occupation, Israel is perhaps the most successful and enduring occupation in history. So successful in legitimising itself, in fact, that the only problem it now has is with how much of the land it has claimed it may keep. I've written about it before, but Israel's double-bind in the Occupied Territories is germane to something I discovered today thanks to a friendly e-mail spectre.

"The Demographic Problem"
In a nutshell, the problem is as put by Yitzhak Rabin to his own party back in 1976:

The majority of the people living in a Jewish State must be Jewish. We must prevent a situation of an insufficient Jewish majority and we dare not have a Jewish minority.... The minority is entitled to equal rights as individuals with respect to their distinct religion and culture, but not more than that.

Religious and cultural rights, but not political rights. Binyamin Netanyahu got himself into trouble for saying this a couple of years ago:

Netanyahu's speech, his first diplomatic address since becoming finance minister, attacked Deputy Prime Minister Ehud Olmert's call for a withdrawal from most of the territories due to the concern that Israel could not remain a Jewish democratic state if it didn't ensure a 80% Jewish majority.

...

"We do have a demographic problem but it is with the Arab Israelis, not the Palestinians," Netanyahu said. "The declaration of independence depicts Israel as both Jewish and democratic. To stop democracy from wiping out the Jewish nature of the country we must insure the Jewish majority. Incorporating the Arab Israelis fully into Israeli society should be done hand in hand with protecting the Jewish nature of that society," he said.

The left-wing Israeli historian Baruch Kimmerling notes that this is precisely one of the considerations underlying present Israeli policy toward the Occupied Territories, since the Palestinian population is set to rise exponentially. Annexing the Occupied Territories right now would immediately lead to a binational state:

[T]he territory between the Mediterranean and the Jordan river contains 5 million Jews (and non-Arabs) and 4.5 million Palestinians (citizens and non-citizens).

Current demographic projections indicate that future population figures will favour the Palestinians and further imperil the slender Jewish demographic majority. Arnon Sofer, a geographer from Haifa University, calculates that by the year 2020, a total of 15.1 million persons will live on the land of historic Palestine with Jews being a minority of 6.5 million. (Kimmerling, Politicide: Ariel Sharon's War Against the Palestinians, Verso 2003, p 17).

"Greater Israel"
This represents a serious challenge to the very idea of a Jewish State. The other side of the bind is the historic commitment of Zionist leaders, both right and left, to the notion of a Greater Israel. In Ben Gurion's words:

Just as I do not see the proposed Jewish state as a final solution to the problems of the Jewish people, so I do now see partition as the final solution of the Palestine question. Those who reject partition are right in their claim that this country cannot be partitioned because it constitute one unit, not only from a historical point of view but also from that of nature and economy ... after the formation of a large army in the wake of the establishment of the [Jewish] state, we shall abolish partition and expand to the whole of the Palestine.

Avi Shlaim in The Iron Wall: Israel and the Arab World (2000) describes how the doctrine of 'the Iron Wall', (Ze'ev Jabotinsky's argument that overwhelming military force would be needed before the Arabs would even consider sharing land which they, rightly, considered theirs) has not merely been the informing policy of both Labour and Likud governments, but is also being distorted and amplified into an even more vicious doctrine by the Israeli right today. Netanyahu argues that there can be no peace with Arab states, and that the Iron Wall posture must remain in place to ward off Arab hostility. He ardently espouses the dream of an undivided Land of Israel, in the tradition of the revisionist right, which bases its claim on ancient biblical maps. (John Rose expertly demolishes the nonsense around this in The Myths of Zionism (2004)).

Since Israeli governments of both left and right have in practise pursued a Greater Israel, it would make sense for them to find a way to resolve the demographic problem without exciting international attention. Yes, I am being deliberately sarcastic with those euphemisms.

The Solution.
The problem is therefore as follows: how to hold on to effective control of the Occupied Territories, annexing much of the land without absorbing too many Palestinians. Hence, the offer of bantustans at Camp David in 2000 - thin strips of land punctuated by settlements. Hence, the continuation of settlement-building in the West Bank, which Israel will not be withdrawing from, during the Oslo years (and especially under the odious racist, Ehud Barak).

But what about the withdrawal from the Gaza Strip, where the settlements are to be dismantled? True, there are only 17 settlements in Gaza compared to 118 in the West Bank, but still - a concession to realism, perhaps? A miserly, pitiful gesture toward the possible construction of a sovereign Palestinian state, if nothing else to soften its international image and give Bush something to talk about? A recognition of the demographic problem for the Jewish State?

So I had thought. It transpires that Israel will remain an occupying power under law in Gaza. According to the UN Special Rapporteur:

It plans to retain ultimate control over Gaza by controlling its borders, territorial sea and airspace. Consequently, it will in law remain an Occupying Power still subject to obligations under the Fourth Geneva Convention.

There you are, then. There is to be no relinquishing of the grip on Gaza, just a mild loosening. The West Bank will, in all likelihood, continue to sprout settlements like a teenager pustulating. And the Palestinians who live in these areas? The IDF has been doing its best to ensure that as few as possible can stand to remain, not merely by bulldozing homes, shooting civilians, blasting neighbourhoods, torturing prisoners and so on. They have also struck at one of the few remaining means of Palestinian subsistence, by destroying 4,000,000 square metres of cultivated land including olive groves . They have bulldozed homes in Gaza to create a 'buffer zone' on the border with Egypt, and Human Rights Watch report that in 2004 alone the IDF made 16,000 people homeless - whether they were suspected of insurrection or not. They are planning now to destroy 3,000 homes in the Gaza Strip under a spurious pretext .

One would be forgiven for thinking that the Israeli government was sending a strong hint to the Palestinians to leave.

Restoration farce? posted by lenin

According to Iraqi Democrats Against the Occupation , a leaked document written by General Al-Hamadani ("overall coordinator for security matters" for Iyad Allawi) recommends a full restoration of the Baath party. They have a scanned copy of the document here . IDAO comments:

While advocating caution to stem "international opposition" to such move, General Al-Hamadani nevertheless supports the return of leading Baathist to government and cites measures to ensure that "those belonging to other parties are excluded from military and security institutions", in effect advocating a dictatorship in Iraq.

They go on to add that with the threat of civil war after the demonstration election tomorrow, there is a need for those Iraqis interested both in democracy and an end to the occupation to unite around a common programme and prevent any attempt at a return to dictatorship.

Elsewhere , they provide an assessment of the elections from the left-wing Baghdad newspaper Al-Ghad:

[A]fter the destruction of Falluja, and before it Najaf and other Iraqi towns, it is now clear that the promised 'elections' in Iraq became a cover for the execution of a military plan aimed at consolidating the occupation and diverting world public opinion from the destruction and shedding of innocent blood. At the same time, preparations for an international conference in Egypt are under way, to legitimise the end results wanted by Washington's with its current massacres, and for deciding the destiny of Iraq in the absence of the legitimate representatives of the Iraqi people.

They then go on to outline procedures for genuinely free and democratic elections:

First- Announce a timetable for ending the occupation and withdrawal of foreign troops completely from all areas of Iraq, with support of the Security Council.

Second- Conduct the elections under international supervision decided by the UN with personalities well known for its credibility and respect by the world peoples.

Third- Agree, as much as possible, on a fair system for proportional representation for all sectors of Iraqi society.

Fourth- Representatives of the main sectors of Iraqi society to announce its rejection of the campaigns of destruction and killing of Iraqi towns conducted by US forces, and also condemn the terrible crimes and mutilations perpetrated by suspect cliques that damage the reputation of the Iraqi people and the legitimate patriotic resistance and provide great services for the occupiers, helping them in justifying the occupation.

Now, if a small group of left-wingers in Baghdad can make the disctinction between the genuine resistance and the barbaric lunatics who make such gruesome theatre for Western audiences, how come so few Western liberals can manage that?

Iraqi elections. posted by lenin

We accept that if Iraqis are entitled to hope for anything, it is for some good to come of this occupation. Elections, at least, that aren't compulsory and don't involve a single candidate accruing 100% of the votes on pain of torture and death. Hence, "50 to 60 percent of Iraqis are "very likely" or "intend" to vote in most areas" according to recent US surveys (no longer the 80% claimed at the end of last year). After suffering murder (even in the absurdly low official figures, it is acknowledged that most civilians were killed by the coalition and not insurgents), instability , 70% unemployment and torture at the hands of US troops , UK troops (in the linked story, a soldier explains that he took pictures of the torture to show to his mother - aawwwe), and Iraqi police , the least Iraqis could ask for is some small reward for their patience and forbearance.

Sadly, though rather predictably, these elections are farcical without being funny and tragic without being dignified. It is impossible, with the best of wills to conduct free and fair elections under occupation with a war of attrition taking place between rebels and occupiers. The best of wills is exactly what is missing here, of course, but I'll come to that later. Already we know that approximately 3 million Iraqis will be unable to participate. As MediaLens points out, neither will the 100,000 killed by the occupiers, the hundreds of thousands of refugees from Fallujah and those languishing in US-run jails. There are, of course, those who will be unwilling to vote in an election which, as Jonathan Steele points out, has no defining issues of difference:

In fact the differences between the various lists and candidates' programmes is minimal.

The key issue of how long the occupation should continue has not been debated. This leaves the many Iraqis who want to see an early end to it in a dilemma. A contested election is undoubtedly seen by many Iraqis as a historic step forward. On the down side, the vote gives legitimacy to the occupation, especially when there is no party on the ballot which is campaigning unambiguously for the troops' departure.

Very few Iraqis talk of the invasion as a liberation these days. The vast majority call it an occupation, yet they see no party or candidate articulating that viewpoint. So the sense of powerlessness and disenfranchisement persists.

At the moment, less than a quarter of Iraqi ex-pats - who are probably in a better position to vote than those who remain pats - have registered to vote. Juan Cole reports on a Zogby poll that says only 56% of Kurds say they are likely to or definitely will vote. (In the case of Kurds, there is expected to be an overwhelming majority for the > "unity alliance" involving the two main Kurdish parties, the communists and a small Islamist party). Further, only 9% of Sunnis will vote. Interestingly, the poll also reports that both Sunnis and Shias - whose voting intentions are obviously very different - want the occupiers out very soon (82% Sunnis, 69% Shias). Many Shi'ites are preparing to shun the elections, precisely because they are not seen as legitimate. It had been hoped that Sadr, whose standing remains high, would bid his supporters to vote. Silence from the bearded chubster so far.

There is also the small question of what is being voted for; once again, it is a 'transitional' government rather than an actual one. We've heard this one before. The 'transitional' government will not exactly govern, any more than the interim government presently 'authorises' US strikes on Fallujah or Mosul. Its role will be to decide on a constitution for Iraq (doubtless with the assistance of that enormous US embassy currently under the management of John Negroponte). That may be ratified, and if it has, Iraqis might get elections for a proper government in December - after the rules of the game have been decided by the US, naturally.

Many think that elections will be the first stage in getting the occupiers out. Since no parties contesting the elections are actually calling for this, it is hard to see how this is the case. But The Guardian reports that:

[A]n independent research group, GlobalSecurity.org, which tracks Pentagon contracts and military movements, claims there are about 12 of the bases under construction. "They are suggestive that the American presence is going to dominate for years not months," said John Pike, the head of the organisation. He added that the bases were not the only evidence that US troops planned a long stay.

"How many fighter jets does the new Iraqi army have? None. How many tanks? None. What do you call a country with no jets and no fighter planes? It's called a protectorate.

"They're so far away from giving Iraq a normal military you don't even have industry seminars salivating over the prospect of selling them stuff."

Since the US is committed to staying, and the elections are not to be allowed to alter this, the occupiers are taking no chances. The US taxpayer has been tapped for $80 million (on top of everything else) to pay for the National Democratic Institute for International Affairs (NDI) and the International Republican Institute (IRI) to use in manipulating the Iraqi elections. From MediaLens again:

Professor William I. Robinson of the Global and International Studies Programme at the University of California calls NDI and IRI "extensions" of the US State Department:

"I suspect that [NDI and IRI] are trying to select individual leaders and organisations that are going to be very amenable to the US transnational project for Iraq."

USAID has allocated $30 million to a CIA front organisation, the National Endowment for Democracy (which was involved in assisting putschists in Venezuela), to allocate to parties regarded as 'moderate'. Ex-patriot parties have already developed a monumental material advantage by working with the occupiers, from whom they received $100 million before the invasions. Dahr Jamail reports that Iyad Allawi has so much cash, he is practically giving it away - to journalists. The money is in dollars. He also happens to be the only candidate who appears regularly on television, while what the Boston Globe calls "underfunded parties" struggle to be heard. As the Centre for Defense Alternatives points out, even the massive insecurity in Iraq benefits Allawi and the established powers since those with government positions have access to security to facilitate campaigning, while the rest who are thus impeded have little access to media.

Meanwhile, there are hundreds of candidates who are standing without being able to campaign, reveal their names or even reveal their faces when they turn up to vote. As many as fifty out of 111 parties standing have dropped out, either out of opposition to the elections as presently constructed or for fear of assassination - yet their names remain on the ballots.

So what are we left with? An election in which many cannot vote, many will not, and many will have no idea who they're voting for. No one will be able to vote to end the occupation, stop the US-imposed privatisation programmes which are destroying Iraq's economy, or put an end to the torture of prisoners which is now being practised by the same police force which is going to run Iraq's law enforcement even after the departure of troops. The result can hardly even be representative given the exclusion of so many, the bribing of journalists and the intervention of American dollars. Foreign observers will not be able to monitor the process, which at least leaves fewer people to bribe.

Iraqis deserve much, much better than this rigged, anarchic and unfair substitute for democracy.

Update on suicide bombings. posted by lenin

There was, as you can see below, a flood of commentary on yesterday's article on suicide bombing. There are a few points I want to make, but first of all it should be of some interest to reconsider those sentences cited by Linda Grant in her communication with Norm:

Some research has been done on the motives of suicide bombers, by
interviewing those who failed to pull it off. Amazingly, they reported that they did it because it was cool. Now in prison, their principal request is for hair gel. I kid you not.

This was bewildering at first, and communication with Linda didn't make it less so. She is, for a start, extremely polite and helpful. She also appears to be sympathetic to the Palestinians. I won't quote directly, since I do not have permission to do so, but I will say that Linda was not able to provide a reference to the cited research. It was apparently in Haaretz, about a year ago, but their archive isn't free. Googling has yielded nothing, and the supplementary information that was provided didn't seem to contribute to Linda's case.

For instance, this shows that one Palestinian group is busily persuading young Palestinians that there is glory in suicide bombing, but it doesn't mention hair gel or image consciousness. This suggests that those who typically carry out suicide bombings have been witness to Israeli brutality, but it doesn't say anything about hair gel or image consciousness. And this suggests that general despair at the situation of Palestinians imposed by Israel is not a sufficient cause of suicide bombings, but it doesn't mention...

In fact, some actual research that I was able to dig up points to two key factors in the phenomenon of suicide bombers in Palestine. One is individual level economic and social factors; the other is organizational strategy. Neither is sufficient alone, but both are necessary components.

The blogger, Lawrence of Cyberia , reports:

Shin Bet interviews intensively every intercepted suicide bomber to find out their motives, and reports that the single most common motivator is having a relative or close friend killed by Israeli occupation forces.

On the role of women suicide bombers, Israeli sources attribute a mixture of motives: nationalist, religious, personal, socio-economic... But no hair gel, and no concern for one's image. Indeed, one theme that seems to persist is that one has either witnessed Israeli brutality directly or experienced it in the family. This fits in with the argument cited from Jacqueline Rose's piece yesterday, specifically that "today's suicide attackers are, for the most part, children of the first intifada".

As several interlocutors pointed out, ideology must have a substantial weight in the decision to detonate oneself in a crowded area. I also mentioned individual psychological conditions, as there often appear to be mental health issues involved (wasn't it Frantz Fanon who first established a connection between colonial war and mental disease?). All of which leads me to insist on my main conclusion, which should be so obvious that it ought not bear repeating: No occupation, no suicide bombers.

Whatever other factors you insist upon, no matter how wrong (strategically and morally) you reckon suicide bombing to be, and no matter how much we emphasise the fate of victims, the above aphorism is untouchable and unexceptionable. The political conclusions are obvious.

Update: Linda Grant, although she is on to what I am up to on my blog, took the trouble to e-mail me the article she was alluding to. When someone posted this article on the MediaLens message board and suggested that it was the one Linda was alluding to, I wasn't so sure. The reason is because I can't see any justification for the sentence alluded to above in the article cited. It is an interesting article, but I don't think it says that hair gel is the number one request among failed suicide bombers, and I don't think it quite qualifies as research. Nor does it appear to say that suicide bombers do it because it is cool. You tell me.

Auschwitz. posted by lenin

On suicide bombing. posted by lenin

Terry Eagleton's article on the topic in The Guardian yesterday wasn't his best, but it was provocative enough to get this , from Norm, this from Chris Young and this from Chris Brooke (cited in order of sympathy with the points made).

I don't think there is a great mystery about why Palestinians engage in suicide bombings against Israel. For instance, Jacqueline Rose says this:

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.'

During the period when Palestine and Israel were supposed to be making pretty noises at one another, reaching agreements for a possible future agreement for a possible future Palestinian state, what was Israel doing? Building more settlements (with those charming 'Jewish Only' roads attached), while siezing water-supplies. While settlers floated on deep blue swimming pools, Palestinians just down the hill carried their water home in jerry cans. Violence against Palestinians continued at a low level, especially in state institutions where torture was and is widely practised. In short, the occupation did not end because of negotiations, it intensified. And under Barak, there was an intensification of violence against Palestinians. In July 2000, the fruit of Oslo was finally unveiled at Camp David: the Palestinians were to be granted a few strips of land interpolated by armed Israeli settlements. The best the Palestinians could achieve, after years of negotiation, was a deal that perpetuated "the subjugation of the Palestinians" (according to then special adviser to the Foreign Office, David Clark ). Meanwhile, "Already in summer 2000, the authoritative Jane's Information Group reported that Israel had completed planning for a massive and bloody invasion of the Occupied Territories." ( Norman Finkelstein , more here .). It is clear now, as if it wasn't clear at the time, that Israel never had any intention of taking Palestine's "peace offensive" as anything other than a threat. The rest is fairly well-known history.

The Palestinians do not have hawk air-jets or tanks or helicopters. They don't even have a very well-equipped army. They have a subterranean movement which includes both religious and secular groups. In direct combat with the IDF, they don't stand a chance. Hence, suicide bombings.

You don't have to infer from what I have said that I consider suicide bombings a just tactic (certainly not those directed at civilians) or a wise tactic. But there is no mystery. Palestinians mount suicide attacks because they are desperate, and because they have little else, because negotiations have delivered nothing, and because it affords them an extended reach that their cache of toy weapons do not. There are also issues of mental health when considering the individual suicide bomber, since many are said to suffer from psychological distortions, lack of social affect and so on. Ideology has its weight, of course, although it is wrong to reduce this to religious fervour. However, the main cause of suicide bombings in Israel is what Israel has been doing to the Palestinians.

If you prefer to avoid such crushing realities, take refuge with Linda Grant, who writes to Norm that:

Some research has been done on the motives of suicide bombers, by interviewing those who failed to pull it off. Amazingly, they reported that they did it because it was cool. Now in prison, their principal request is for hair gel. I kid you not.

Apparently, then, it's all about living fast and dying young...

They know not with what forces they be meddlin'... posted by lenin

Did you know that there is a small cult, or nomenklatura, a cabal, a caste of people who raise themselves above the masses and commune with abstract forces?

They encrypt their writings in strange heiroglyphs and obsolete language. They hate and fear the people, yet are never satisfied with the government. They specialise in predictions based on their carefully constructed codes, and often claim omniscience about the likely future state of the world.

Their outlandish claims are often slaughtered by reality, and they are left looking rather foolish. Rather than change the paradigm, they blame reality, or the government or the stupid masses. So pitifully indoctrinated are they that they continue to produce predictions and, like the broken clock that gets it right twice a day, go cuckoo when they finally hit the right hour.

As Rolf Harris once said, "can you tell what it is yet?"

Iraqi Police Torturing Iraqis. posted by lenin

The good old days are here again - no longer need Iraqis be tortured by American or British troops. Now, courtesy of the coalition, we have a national, nay patriotic, police force dishing out the rough stuff. According to Human Rights Watch :

[U]nlawful arrest, long-term incommunicado detention, torture and other ill-treatment of detainees (including children) by Iraqi authorities have become routine and commonplace. Human Rights Watch conducted interviews in Iraq with 90 detainees, 72 of whom alleged having been tortured or ill-treated, particularly under interrogation.

...

Methods of torture cited by detainees include routine beatings to the body using cables, hosepipes and other implements. Detainees report kicking, slapping and punching; prolonged suspension from the wrists with the hands tied behind the back; electric shocks to sensitive parts of the body, including the earlobes and genitals; and being kept blindfolded and/or handcuffed continuously for several days. In several cases, the detainees suffered what may be permanent physical disability.

Detainees also reported being deprived by Iraqi security forces of food and water, and being crammed into small cells with standing room only. Numerous detainees described how Iraqi police sought bribes in return for release, access to family members or food and water.

Electro-shock therapy! Starvation! Beatings that leave one disabled! You don't suppose, do you, that while they have Saddam in custody they might be probing him for clues about how to control these people?

John Negroponte: "Come on, you old bastard, you murdered and tortured these fuckers for years, you've gotta have some idea how we can do it!"

Saddam: "Well, this is why I made sure to get the electricity running again properly last time."

Negroponte: "We're listening..."

Is there anything more that they can add to make it just how obvious and hollow the lie about 'humanitarian intervention' is? The answer is yes, because records were made to be broken. Bear in mind that the Iraqi police force that now operate are being trained by the American forces to wield the monopoly of violence when the troops finally withdraw. Coalition-imposed Iraqi democracy is looking more and more like Axl Rose's planned album, Chinese Democracy: It's taking ages, looks like its going to be shit anyway, and no one's buying it.

Report from Hari v Mieville debate. posted by lenin

Gossip, innuendo, triumphalism...

It is wrong, hideously wrong, to abbreviate the debate in the way suggested in the title. Nevertheless, that was where the action was at as far as I was concerned. To set the background, a debate about Who Do We Vote For Now? was held at the ICA for pissed-off lefties. It was hosted by John Harris, who did his best under the circumstances, and made a few decent points himself into the bargain. Speaking for Labour were Neal Lawson and Johann Hari; for Respect, China Mieville (he would have been joined by Salma Yaqoob, who was sick - but would have been the only woman speaker of the night); for the Liberal Democrats, the truly awful Ben Ramm, editor of The Liberal; for for the Greens, someone whose face looked lovely and lived in but whose bloody name I forget; for Plaid Cymru, a very witty and charming guy whose name I forget (and who couldn't really account for his presence at such a meeting in London anyway); for not voting, Brendan O'Neill, former RCP groupie, now suited libertarian of Sp!ked Online.

I arrived in the crowded bar area (where the debate was held), slightly early. I met Johann as he came in ("ooh, er, now I know you don't I...? Ooh, yes, it's Lenin!"), and also a friend of his who was very nice about my haranguing of Hari. Johann mistook me for a Scottish person, explained that he had reheated a kebab recently and was laying out intestinal pie with odious frequency. He would buy me a drink afterward as previously promised on his website, (he didn't, although I have to be fair to him and say that he never had the chance). I sat down with the proprietor of Dead Men Left who was looking rather dapper. The dry humour was more or less as you find it on his blog. Guy Taylor, of Globalise Resistance, was there, as was John Rees of the Stop the War Coalition .

There were probably a few people there whose names I don't know but are equally deserving of mention as the motley crew discussed above, but this is where I was situated.

The debate began with Neal Lawson indicting new Labour, hoping to reclaim old Labour (though not too old), and saying that he wouldn't advise anyone on who to vote for, that was a judgement call and so on. He was loyal to a set of values, not to a tribe or a party. ("What?" We tittered. "A prominent member of Labour can't even recommend his own party?" He later threw caution to the wind, frustrated by the trajectory of debate, and said that - in fact - Labour was the best, the only way to achieve real change in Britain).

Johann Hari spoke, told the funny story about the kebab again (I think he really meant it), passionately denounced Blair's stand on asylum seekers, on civil rights, on drugs, on free markets and so forth. He was eloquent on some of it, stumbled on a few points, but was generally wittier and more impressive in person than in writing. He explained, for instance, that "the only line The Independent ever censored of mine was a suggestion that 'Tony Blair has done everything for the gay rights movement except take one up the arse himself'". That's not true, but it's funny. He did not talk about Iraq, at first, preferring to be drawn in the course of debate. He smoked and drank copiously, a youthful Christopher Hitchens. I waited for a mention of Galloway. Go on, Johann. Repeat your slanders. I have a mental folder the size of Ceredigion. Unfortunately, he constrained himself to some general points on why we should vote for whoever our hearts desired in safe Labour seats, but stick with Blair in the marginals. The reasons were, in a way, quite solid. Howard was a bastard; the Tories would be even harder on asylum seekers than new Labour, and had a policy of turning away genuine applicants; they would cut benefits like the Working Families Tax Credit. These things made a difference; they couldn't be dismissed, because thousands of lives and livelihoods hung in the balance. Many questions were asked from the floor (Hari was the star of the night in at least that respect), most of them dissenting. Hari apostrophised, polarised, ostracised...

The Plaid Cymru guy spoke. Loveable, affable, as witty and charming as any politician has a right to be. He poured scorn on new Labour, denounced sectarianism on the Left, dissed the Tories and bigged up the Greens and Respect. I couldn't have liked him more. But I still can't remember his name or work out what the fuck he was doing there.

China Mieville is a stange sort of speaker. He looks like he could knock you out, but his voice is full of youthful enthusiasm. Let's not forget, first of all, that it is one thing for a politician to lie; it is quite another to lie at the expense of tens of thousands of lives. That's a big thing. Blair lied; thousands died. And we still have some people hinting that they may yet vote Labour, that all governments are terrible, the Tories would be worse. China talked about Iraq and Palestine, but also about privatisation, selection in schools (which is also known as 'rejection' for most kids), tuition fees, increasing inequality, the statistical tricks used to suppress waiting list numbers and unemployment figures etc. All of which was a way of getting round to the fact that we desperately need a new kind of politics, one that reflects the needs of ordinary people, that won't scapegoat asylum seekers or play populist games on crime, that will call for the troops to come home. China also laid into the 'pointing and whispering campaign' about Respect, referred to the recent resolutions overwhelmingly passed in support of gay rights and abortion rights.

An interesting debate began at this point. On the question of withdrawing the troops, someone suggested that it would simply be a bloodbath if they were withdrawn. How could one justify this. I wish someone had said that there was already a bloodbath. What China did say was that a) we've heard that argument before (take your pick), b) withdrawing troops doesn't mean withdrawing support - we owe Iraqis, big time, and that includes money, reconstruction and anything else that doesn't involve murder and torture. On Respect, someone asked Johann if he might come out and express his criticisms so that there could be a debate. Very well. Johann cited two comments, one by Yvonne Ridley, the other by George Galloway. Ridley's comment was about the Taliban, and was construed as supporting them; Galloway's comment was the one made in the Mail on Sunday about the dictatorship in Pakistan (I've never been able to read this, as it is unavailable online). John Rees countered that he disagreed with Yvonne Ridley's comment, but believed it was less an expression of faith in theocracy than an expression of relief that she had been released unharmed; he suggested that Galloway's comment was made in the context of not wishing to see Pakistan broken up, which was being suggested at the time - but again, he emphasised that he disagreed. China also suggested that Ridley's point was being taken out of context.

At which time, Johann Hari leaned forward into the mic and sputtered that China was an apologist for an apologist for the Taliban. This wasn't his finest moment of the evening. For one thing, even if you put the worst possible construction on Ridley and Galloway's comments, you are still left with ad hominem abuse and not political analysis. The Labour Party has a preacher for its leader and one of its senior ministers is associated with a far right Catholic sect, but that isn't a particularly good reason not to vote for it. Etc.

Brendan O'Neill was alarmingly poor, and his speech was riddled with inconsistency. He insisted at one point that he would not vote at the next election (almost everyone attacked this point), and would urge everyone else to avoid doing so as well; he later comically claimed that he would never urge anyone else not to vote. He insisted that all political parties, even the smaller ones, were obsessed with things like anti-smoking, fatty foods and what-not - yet he was the only one to discuss such things the whole night. He said he wanted a "total war of ideas", yet later insisted that certain things were outside of politics (fuel consumption, fox-hunting etc). When challenged on his anti-voting fatwa, he became hopelessly incoherent, saying that there are other ways of conducting political struggle - which is true. But it only takes five minutes and a pencil stroke to go and vote. And why not do so, just with tactics in mind? If nothing else, to send a message to the political elite whom O'Neill and his internet comrades so rightly despise? Er, well, there are better ways of conveying your disgust and, er... Yeah yeah. Move one. Next speaker.

The Green was sweet, had many interesting things to say. Unfortunately, I was onto my third pint by then and his anti-charismatic performance caused me to fall into temporary day-dreams. What would happen if I became President, I began to idly wonder? Suffice to say, I had nothing against the Green, and he would probably survive my inauguration.

Yet more controversy. Challenged about the Iraq war, John Rees had said that the antiwar Left was not against intervention. We would have favoured building solidarity with Iraqis, along precisely the lines that the South African resistance built ties - through unions, political organisations etc. The same way, in fact, we organise around Palestine. The Iraqis, with international working class support, could topple the dictatorship themselves - and gain a great deal more than the few crumbs of colonial freedom that the Americans would proffer amid the carnage. Johann Hari countered that there had been an uprising in 1991, and Saddam had been able to crush that, slaughtering about 100,000 people into the bargain.

The mic was handed out. I rose, and waved my hand. "Johann," I announced with a bit of smugness, "you are far too modest. What you ought to say is that the Iraqis were crushed by Saddam with our help. The rebels were blocked by the Americans at the height of their uprising, when they had successfully taken much of the country. The reason, we now know, was because if Saddam was to be ousted it should be by the military as far as those who waged the first Gulf War were concerned. Now, on the point about Family Tax Credit, you say the Tories will cut it: don't worry, Johann, Labour will get round to it." How I tittered. Polite laughter in reply. "And on asylum seekers, you mention that Michael Howard will turn back legitimate asylum seekers, but Blair's government already does that. When we were allegedly bombing Serbia to save the Kosovans, we were also turning them back at the British embassy and obliging them to remain in a country that was being bombed. Blair has said that if migrants can't support themselves, they will be removed. If they can't support themselves, they are in most need of help! New Labour is not a force for liberation or poverty relief, it is a force that needs to be defeated."

At least, I thought that's what I had said. What I seem to have said is "Errh, fnuccking, Johann, bloody Blair and schtuff..." I also seem to have said it at about 300 decibels, thus almost rendering the mic inoperative. Three pints, that's all it takes with me. Remember that, potential seducers! Polite applause.

The editor of The Liberal, Ben Ramm, was the most unbearable speaker of the whole night. Snide, cocky and actually insistent on a return to Free Trade - Victorian England style! Why he was invited, I shall never know. He was uncompromisingly for the Liberal Democrats, of course, and was heckled by those who are familiar with the Liberal record in Sheffield, Liverpool and elsewhere. I tuned out.

Other people spoke, but I can't be bothered recounting what they said. A vote was taken on who people would vote for - which Respect won overwhelmingly. The MC, John Harris, didn't bother to acknowledge this fact. I hung around and shook Johann's hand, insulted the guys who were selling The Liberal (update: it turns out I was actually insulting Ben Ramm who now hides behind a bushy little beard to conceal the fact that he's only twenty-two), accosted China and offered my expert advice on what he should have said to this and this. Meaders was silently seething that he hadn't got to speak, as he had been eager to demonstrate that not everyone standing near the bar was pissed and stentorian. I was broke, and had to get home. Other stuff happened of course, but you don't want to hear about that. Oh you do? Well, Johann Hari returned from the toilet and joined China in trashing the place while screaming "FUCK THE BOURGEOIS STATE!!" What? You dare to doubt me?

A pint of McEwan's... posted by lenin

I am not, I should stress, a regular reader of Ian McEwan's writing. The emotional tenderness doesn't particularly appeal to me, being the tough and youthful thug that I am. At the same time, the didacticism - which is the only way that McEwan knows how to write about politics - is usually ill-conceived. The Child in Time, widely regarded as McEwan's best, captures both of these aspects of his style. The heroes of McEwan's books are usually liberals fraught with ambiguity, which one imagines is supposed to be the same thing as intellectual suppleness. Didactic ambiguity, then, is McEwan's currency.

All of which is a way of introducing a topic visited and revisited on a couple of fine literary blogs I frequent. McEwan has undertaken a political novel of sorts, a story which unfolds over the 24 hours of Saturday, 15th February 2003. It is ambitiously titled Saturday. From the enticing nibbles that have been released to the Guardian, I gather that the novel is framed around the massive Stop the War demonstration that preceded the war. It has a nice chap, a liberal character named Harry Perowne, who knows another nice guy, a liberal Iraqi who tells him "yes yes, the Americans are perhaps coming for bad reasons, but we'll be rid of Saddam, and when he is gone I will buy you a meal" (that's a paraphrase). I knew a couple of Iraqis who had similar sentiments myself, but they didn't offer me any prandial delights. Perowne is a surgeon who has treated an Iraqi with wounds from torture, obviously meted out by Saddam's mukhabarat. He thinks the Stoppers are animated by self-defence (don't start another bloody war, it'll get us all killed!), yet insist on a monopoly of morality and righteousness.

There's much more, but this is the kind of thing that McEwan has been asked about, and has talked at length about, in interviews. Now, the two bloggers I mentioned.

First of all, This Space has written several dissenting posts . He makes some perceptive points. The novel, says This Space, is unconscious of its own narrative limits (why does the good doctor not treat a Colombian torture victim, or an Acehnese torture victim?):

There is no involvement but a supercilious schematic based on a very limited perspective that is also unaware of its limits. However, this is the understanding of what fiction is if one reads reviews in newspapers like The Guardian. Here we have a narrative of complete control where the only doubt is the contemptible liberal umming-and-arring of a character designed to justify the inexcusable open-mindedness to Blair's criminal war by writers like Ian McEwan and other journalists.

He also mentions the author's own moral commitments:

The author of Saturday talks about how, in 2001, he was planning a comic novel about a tabloid journalist. Then 9/11 occurred and he lost interest. He lost interest in the novel and novel writing itself for six or so months. Clearly the deaths of 100,000+ Iraqis didn't have the same impact.

The second blogger is the novelist Ellis Sharp, who has also been anticipating McEwan's latest with a sense of dread . He imagines he'll find Christopher Hitchens between the sheets, which I admit is an alarming prospect (although it has a strange allure for a fantastic pervert like me). Ellis discusses McEwan's political naivete:

Looking ahead to the war and its aftermath, McEwan wrote that he hoped that “the regime, like all dictatorships, rootless in the affections of its people, will crumble like a rotten tooth” – which indeed it did. But he also hoped that a “federal, democratic Iraq that the INC committed itself to at its conference can be helped into existence by the UN”. McEwan had a touchingly naïve faith in the Iraqi National Congress as the voice of the Iraqi people. But of course the United Nations declined to involve itself with either the war or its bloody, chaotic aftermath. His belief that this war had anything at all to do with bringing democracy to the oppressed people of Iraq provides just one more dismal example of the endless naivety of those liberal intellectuals who shut their eyes to the massively documented history of American “interventions” around the world.

Leave aside the political failure, for a second: think of the literary failure. Here is an author in full command of the English language; invective is not beyond him; he ranges across the full diapason of human passion. Yet, he has - from all indications - nothing to say about the deformed crooks, the spies, the former Baathists, the opportunists and the realpolitikers who were instrumental in making the case for this war (I refer to the INC). How about a word or two on the kinds of human beings who populate the Whitehouse or conspire by the Hudson River? Or the smooth persuaders who disseminate whispers, talk to the press, organise this or that speaker for this or that meeting?

By way of contrast, I can't imagine Philip Roth - for all his self-declared cynicism and detachment from the causes of his youth - missing this point. The strength of David Hare's recent work has been his ability to include the voices of his political opponents, and include them eloquently, at their best and most persuasive, without mockery - yet there is no umming or aaaahing. There is no conflict between rigorous self-questioning and absolute ideological commitment. In fact, the two are contiguous.

What appears to be missing is authorial sympathy, for which is substituted ambiguity, liberal bed-wetting, chin-stroking etc.

Of course, I don't suppose I'll bother to buy the book now. I'm prejudiced against it and, like I say, the author has never been in my top ten list. But you might. Let me know if its any good.

Hari, Cohen & Aaronovitch. posted by lenin

The troika is beseiged; a split is in the offing.

Johann Hari has said goodbye to his illusions, while Nick Cohen and David Aaronovitch embrace theirs. Let's take a couple of representative passages. First Aaronovitch on Bush's nutty inaugural speech:

What Bush actually said was this: we went to sleep after the death of communism and forgot about freedom and all that kind of thing. Then came 11 September and we realised that it mattered. The 'deepest source' of America's vulnerability was the fact that 'whole regions of the world simmer in resentment and tyranny'. And the only force that could deal with these phenomena was 'human freedom'. Then came this, essentially a restatement of what JFK said more than 40 years ago. 'The survival of liberty in our land increasingly depends on the success of liberty in other lands. The best hope for peace in our world is the expansion of freedom in all the world.'

Not everyone was petrified by the Bush vision. Jim Steinberg, deputy national security adviser under Clinton, complained to the New York Times that it was 'quite remarkable that one of the notions that's been so resisted by Republicans is the idea of a deep interdependence in the world, and now (Bush has) essentially adopted the notion that tyranny anywhere threatens freedom anywhere.'

Pick your jaw up, please. Now Cohen on the case of Hani Youssef, an Egyptian lawyer emigre set to be returned forcefully to his homeland even though he faces the threat of torture:

In the long-run the only solution is for the global move towards democracy to get moving again. In these strange times, the only person who believes that this is possible or desirable is George W Bush. In his inauguration address last week he announced that the 'survival of liberty in our land increasingly depends on the success of liberty in other lands. The best hope for peace in our world is the expansion of freedom in all the world.' And was feared and hated by right-thinking people the world over for saying so.

Now, two passages from Johann Hari. The first, in debate with the editors of MediaLens back in November 2003:

I refer you to George Bush, who said apologised yesterday for "decades of failed US policy in the Middle East… we should not tolerate oppression for the sake of stability." Nor, he implied, should they fund and arm it. Yes, it will take time to turn around all US policy: we can discuss (and must campaign about) the horrors of Uzbekistan and the House of Saud. But I believe it is beginning.

And from this week's article on the Bush inauguration, linked at the top:

After 11 September, some of the political thinkers I most respect started unexpectedly reading from this script about US foreign policy. Christopher Hitchens is a good example. For decades, he had exposed the monstrous anti-democratic policies of the US, from the Nixon-Kissinger years to Reagan's dirty wars in South America. But after the attacks on the Twin Towers, Hitchens argued that the vicious American foreign policy he opposed had died with Bin Laden's victims.

...

the rhetoric is flatly contradicted by US action on the ground, and we simply have to be honest about it. If Bush was serious about "exporting democracy and freedom", the best place to start would be with the authoritarian regimes he currently funds, supports and deals weaponry to. Egypt - which receives a $2bn handout from the US Treasury every year - has been under 'Emergency Rule' for 25 years now. Political dissidents are routinely tortured. Pro-democracy activists are jailed. The current President, Hosni Mubarak, expects his son to succeed him as head of state. A US president committed to spreading democracy and freedom would withhold the vast sums he sprays on this authoritarian state until there is an Egyptian perestroika.

Does Bush condemn the Saud Crime Family who oversee public beheadings and commit "widespread torture with complete impunity", according to Amnesty? Not exactly...

Hari then proceeds to add layer upon layer of reasons why the US' present foreign policy comportment is not that of a liberator, and concludes:

Nothing would make me happier than if the most powerful state in the world was committed to spreading democracy and toppling vicious governments. It is not; in many places, it is doing precisely the opposite. As George Bush begins his second term with another false cry, it is time to wake up.

Hari even goes so far, in replying to some questions in the comments box, as to apologise for having taken the US government seriously at its word - which redounds to his immense credit. Can you imagine any of the other zealots of the 'democratic revolution' recanting - after Abu Ghraib and the 'bread basket', Guantanamo, Fallujah, after 100,000 dead (and surely rising)? It is one thing to maintain that it was necessary to support the Iraq war simply because Iraqis would stand a chance of gaining from it (as Hari still does). To continue to argue, as if one didn't know better, that there is such a thing as "the global move towards democracy" in the face of compelling evidence to the contrary is a signal either of bad faith or of wilful dogmatism and self-delusion. The contrast is both depressing and encouraging.

On resistance. posted by lenin

I have a few interesting texts and articles about the resistance in Iraq that I want to distill in a future post. But, hungover and exhausted, I merely wish to offer a few links. First of all, the insurgency is growing , and not because of something Allah's many representatives on earth have had to say:

"The insurgency will grow larger," said Ghazi Bada al Faisal, an employee of the Iraqi Ministry of Industry and a Fallujah resident. "The child whose brother and father were killed in the fighting will now seek revenge."

"Revenge". At least he understands who started this shit.

An excellent new article in the International Socialism journal (unavailable online) describes the trajectory of the resistance and its roots in pre-war political developments. It cheerfully destroys many of the canards of those who support the occupation on the grounds that the resistance is inspired by dreams of a Pax Talibana or a return to Baathism, while also pointing out some of the ways in which the supposedly fatal Sunni-Shi'ite divisions in Iraq have been surmounted by the resistance. However, what I want to draw attention to is a passage that explains a recent characteristic of the resistance. The article above draws attention to the increasing sophistication of the fighters, which blogger and journalist Robert Lindsay discusses here and here . (They can take out Bradley tanks these days, which - apparently - takes some doing). But in the ISJ article, I encountered this:

In November a fighter from Mosul outlined the impact the assault [on Fallujah] had on resistance strategy: 'If Mosul becomes like Fallujah, and all the people start fighting, the Americans will call in the air force and destroy the city. Many of us feel that guerilla attacks are better than a city-wide insurrection.'

The US could indeed go around destroying city after city. The political consequences of bombing Fallujah have been shockingly slight, albeit this could in part be explained by the sanitary news reports we received on the assault. The pictorial representation of cruelty being meted out by American and now British troops has had much more impact. (By the by, and for those with nothing better to do, I have a little puzzle: Can you describe in ten words or less the priorities of a normally vocal centre-left website that was suddenly struck with aphasia around the time of the Fallujah assault, and yet again finds itself desperately seeking diversion now that the British army - the 'armed wing of Amnesty International' according to Nick Cohen - stands accused of involvement in the torture of Iraqi prisoners, apparently with instructions from on high? Like tourettes victims, they compulsively bark out the same epithets: "Galloway! Stoppers! Scabs! 'Resistance'! Fuckers! Bastards! Arf, arf, arf!! Galloway! Lindsey German!! Bastards! Stalinislamofascistrots!! A-whooo-ooo-oo!!").

Yet, even on its own terms, the strategy of obliteration has been disastrous for the occupation. Fencing off towns with barbed wire, destroying entire cities, mass imprisonment, torture and even the threat of death squads has as to date increased the number and strengthened the resolve of the resistance. So, the strategy now appears to be to accept a possibly pro-Iranian government with a strongly Shi'ite leadership (unthinkable some months back, and actually dismissed as an acceptable outcome by US government figures immediately after the invasion). This, it is assumed, will undermine the nationalist/patriotic appeal of the resistance and transform it into an ethnic civil war. Why else insist on elections for a cardboard assembly (it will have no governing powers) when approximately 3 million Iraqis - in largely Sunni areas - will be unable to vote? By winning over al-Sistani and pacifying al-Sadr, they have demobilised the Shia component of the resistance; by waging all out war in the vast Sunni north, they have intensified the Sunni component.

Still, the right to resist a murderous and morally debased occupation remains not only a moral imperative but also a legitimate right recognised by the United Nations General Assembly , which:

Affirms once again its recognition of the legitimacy of the struggle of the peoples under colonial and alien domination to exercise their right to self-determination and independence by all the necessary means at their disposal. [Emphasis added].

That sounds strangely familiar.

Update - Scott Ritter, card-carrying Republican and former UN weapons inspector, has this to say:

History will eventually depict as legitimate the efforts of the Iraqi resistance to destabilise and defeat the American occupation forces and their imposed Iraqi collaborationist government.

And history will condemn the immorality of the American occupation, which has debased the values and ideals of the American people by legitimising torture, rape and murder as a means of furthering an illegal war of aggression.

The Nation puts gays in a skirt. posted by lenin

You know the refrain. If a male issues slightly effeminate signals, he must be, well ... one of those. God love him, he probably likes to try on make-up and prance around in dresses. I'm awful sorry to hear about your boy being queer, Ethel. We could have a couple of studs over at the farm break him in. Etcetera.

Well, it turns out Abraham Lincoln was gay . How does one deal with such a revelation?

If you work for The Nation, you whack a pair of breasts on him, give him panties, a bottom shaped like a luscious peach, and a pair of lustrous black heels. Hence, Babe Lincoln . Because, as you and I know, a homosexual is an invert, a poor sod who hasn't quite grasped his/her gender role. Some wires got crossed, an X chromosome dropped a leg, the maintenance guy couldn't turn up to fix it, and so what should have been a woman emerged with a cock. The cock, as any fule know, is the man's prize for being a man, and it seems unfair that a woman may purloin it before even having the courtesy to be born.

Enough delusional nonsense. The notion that homosexuals are simply 'inverts' who have been issued with the wrong genitalia and hormone balance has long been disproven. Consider: in 1948, when men where men and gals were in the kitchen, 37% of the men privately interviewed in a study by Alfred C Kinsey admitted to having fooled around with other men. That's right, they fucked, sucked and licked all manner of things from the old rubbery doughnut to the seed-sac, swinging like a hairy pork medallion. I am fairly certain that there was cuddling, caressing and tender kissing involved as well. This, bear in mind, was a rigorous scientific study and has been amply confirmed over the years. Men who fought wars and wrestled with grizzlies also displayed erotic and romantic affection for other men. Incidentally, it also happens to be the case that most men who like to dress in women's clothes and put on make-up prefer women. (I bet it makes a wank more interesting).

The sterile categories of heterosexual and homosexual are pukeworthy in their innocence, and endearing in their idiocy. That dichotomy is a sort of sexual Cold War in which all the various centrifugal and centripetal forces are subsumed into two great camps, the gay and the straight: Frottage? That's fine, if a little eccentric. Bum-sex with a woman? Well... can't approve of that, but it isn't gay. Nail varnish and lipstick? For a man? Get thee to a nunnery! Let him paint an inch thick, and send him to buggery! Goats? Well, male or female...? Do you intend to procreate, or will the green hills be speckled with waste prophylactics and the spent juices of hedonistic indulgence?

To side-step the obvious for a second, I want to remark on The Nation's response to the protest about their stupid cartoon. Doug Ireland , a long-time gay radical who has written for The Nation, fired off some admirably vitriolic notes to its editor and staff, while a flurry of e-mails and missives from the readers led to a heated debate in the offices of this highly regarded progressive magazine. Some wanted to acknowledge the mistake and get on with the good work that The Nation has been doing for some decades. Instead, what happened was that they introduced a series of readers letters and invited the cartoonist to respond. Originally, the editors introduced the response as follows:

We received many letters from readers offended by Robert Grossman's "Babe Lincoln" (Jan. 24). His cartoon was intended as a comment on the controversy stirred by C.A. Tripp's new book, The Intimate World of Abraham Lincoln, in which Tripp argues that Lincoln was homosexual. We leave historians to debate Tripp's thesis, as we leave readers and Grossman to discuss the cartoon's significance below. We regret it if the cartoon demeaned homosexuals, transgender people or even Log Cabin Republicans. --The Editors

That last sentence in particular registers a serious demoralisation and also political degeneration. This is an era in America in which gays are told by Democrats that they are asking for too much, too soon (there is a timetable for human rights?), while they are assured by Republicans that they do not fit into the Christian run of things unless they happen to have the monumental advantage of being Dick Cheney's daughter. The lachrymose Clinton apparently [ie, according to Kerry sources] told John Kerry to attack gay marriages and run a homophobic campaign. You would think The Nation would understand the purchase of this and not play silly buggers. The final sentence does appear to have changed so that it reads:

We regret if the cartoon unintentionally offended anyone.

Hardly better from a moral standpoint, but proof at least that the protests had wiped the condescending smirk from their faces. Yet, it remains totally unsatisfactory. It began, if you ask me, with the political compromise over Kerry. The Nation begged Nader not to run, would have donated several body parts if he would only withdraw and fall behind Deputy Dawg. So terrified were they by Bush and his various dogs that they would get behind anything that didn't reek of the pachyderm. So, they acquiesced in the game of the Democratic Leadership Council, surrendered their political nous and sold their souls to arbiters of 'mainstream' liberalism. Now, having surrendered electorally on the key social and economic issues, they appear to be casual with even those minimal issues that liberals continued to associate themselves with in the 1990s - gay rights, racial equality and women's liberation.

Most gay people in the US don't quite resemble anyone in Will & Grace, the 'edgy' sitcom of liberal Middle America. They are not chiselled, well-toned and well-heeled. They are not upper-class yuppies who find life-choices sooooo difficult. They are probably mastering that lathe next to you, or driving the school bus (heaven forfend!). They could well be selling sweeties or hotdogs, or allowing the pet dog to casually shit on your lawn. There are no giveaway breasts or panties, no flip airs and graces, no heels or pert bums. If the most respected liberal magazine in America hasn't figured that out, or has forgotten it, there is ample cause for a boycott.

Update: Read the lapidary Gore Vidal here and more from the laconic Doug Ireland here .

Iraq elections. posted by lenin

Several Iraqi exiles have written to The Guardian to prick the self-comforting illusions of Western liberators: Iraq's elections are neither free nor fair . They also go on to suggest how Iraqis may be allowed to govern themselves. Indeed, this is just perfect common sense. If the Soviet Union had organised 'elections' while it occupied Afghanistan, few would have credited the results, especially if it was heavily funding its own placemen, had already destroyed much of the country and prevented millions from voting, and was in the process of fighting a live civil war with the inhabitants of that unhappy country. We would conclude, with hardly a hesitant thought, that this was a 'demonstration election' designed to confer legitimacy on an occupying power that had no right to be there.

As an excellent MediaLens alert says:

Tony Blair's last ditch deception on Iraq involves claiming that, no matter what side people had been on before the war, there is "only one side to be on in what is clearly a battle between democracy and terror". ('Blair praises Iraqi election bravery in flying visit,' Sarah Left and agencies, The Guardian, December 21, 2004)

However, the American writer Edward Herman, co-author with Frank Brodhead of the classic work, Demonstration Elections (South End Press, 1984), points out that when an occupying power sponsors an election "it is not free and democratic because it was imposed by an external force and did not come from demands from within". (Email to David Edwards, January 15, 2005) Moreover, because the election is externally imposed, participation can be interpreted as an implicit approval of the occupation, a corrupting factor in the vote.

And of course the 100,000 Iraqis killed under the occupation will not be voting; nor will the unknown thousands languishing without charge in US-run jails. The ongoing conflict will prevent many more from participating - the several hundred thousand refugees from Fallujah, for example, who are currently busy trying to survive. Nor will international observers be able to monitor the election inside the country.

On December 15, the New York Times reported that on a list of 228 candidates submitted by a major Shiite-led political alliance to Iraq's electoral commission, Abdul Aziz al-Hakim's name was entered as No.1. The Times reported that Hakim has close ties to Iran's ruling ayatollahs:

"For the United States, and for Jordan and Saudi Arabia, which have Sunni Muslim majorities, the prospect of Mr. Hakim and his associates coming to power raises in stark form the brooding issue of Iran's future influence in Iraq." (John F. Burns and Robert F. Worth, 'Iraqi Campaign Raises Question Of Iran's Sway,' The New York Times, December 15, 2004)

New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman warned ominously: "Iran [is] actively using its influence and money to push its candidates." (Friedman, 'Neocons need Iraqi neo-Baath,' The Times Union, December 19, 2004)

Unreported by the mainstream US and UK press, another foreign power is also using its influence to push its candidates.

Washington-funded organisations with long records of manipulating foreign democracies in favour of US interests are deeply involved in the election. The National Democratic Institute for International Affairs (NDI) and the International Republican Institute (IRI) are part of a consortium to which the US government has provided over $80 million for political and electoral activities in Iraq. NDI is headed by former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, while IRI is chaired by Republican Senator John McCain.

Professor William I. Robinson of the Global and International Studies Programme at the University of California calls NDI and IRI "extensions" of the US State Department:

"I suspect that [NDI and IRI] are trying to select individual leaders and organisations that are going to be very amenable to the US transnational project for Iraq." (Robinson, quoted, Lisa Ashkenaz Croke and Brian Dominick, 'Controversial U.S. Groups Operate Behind Scenes on Iraq Vote,' www.newstandardnews.net, December 13, 2004)

Robinson adds that these leaders must be willing to engage in "pacifying the country militarily and legitimating the occupation and the formal electoral system". The goal being to guarantee that Iraq is controlled by "economic, political and civic groups that are going to be favourable to Iraq's integration into the global capitalist economy".

In a search using the LexisNexis media database, we found that no British newspaper has mentioned these NDI and IRI activities at any time over the last twelve months.

The interim government has forced the independent al-Jazeera TV station and critical newspapers to shut down. Former US proconsul Paul Bremer banned all reporting on the rebirth of the Baath Party and all protests calling for an end to the occupation. Baghdad-based journalist Borzou Daragahi reports that Iraqi reporters are under threat from US troops, Iraqi police and insurgents: "We're unable to get access to anybody," one journalist told him. "We're frightened." (Daragahi, Arab Reform Bulletin Vol. 2, December 11, 2004)

The same is true of electoral candidates who are unable to canvas voters and even reveal their names. Voters, therefore, are not in a position to make any kind of informed choice.

While US-subsidised media broadcast freely, officials working for interim prime minister and former CIA asset, Ayad Allawi, have been handing journalists envelopes stuffed with $100 notes for simply turning up to press conferences. The money, of course, is American.

And, as the estimable Juan Cole points out, they aren't even being asked to vote for a government or a president. They are voting for a constitutional assembly which will not govern, merely draft a possible constitution which may or may not be ratified. As he also notes elsewhere, Allawi's "pockets" of Iraq that may not be able to vote probably contain 3 million persons .

This is no case against elections; it is a case for genuine self-determination with real elections for a real government with US troops making a hasty exit.

Short letter to the President. posted by lenin

What follows will be cheap and nasty, like sex with a Northern runaway.

Dear Bush,

Congratulations on winning this time around. Congratulations, too, on fooling the press into thinking your subsequent inauguration was a 'news' item, when everyone knew it was going to happen. Shutting down everything in a ten-block radius and spending $40 million must have contributed to the mystique (what did you initially pledge for the tsunami victims? No come on, dollars not pesos...).

However since I have your ear, (and what a divinely shaped Protestant ear it is), I'd liked to ask you if you really meant this:

All who live in tyranny and hopelessness can know: the United States will not ignore your oppression or excuse your oppressors. When you stand for liberty, we will stand with you.

Because that is precisely the sort of thing drivel-merchants like Christopher Hitchens and Dennis Miller like to believe, and I can't believe that you are as idiotic as they strive to be. One awaits with sweet dread what kind of 'contrarian', anathematizing blimpism the Late Hitchens will generate next. Lean closer, please. You can wipe the phlegm off the lobe later. True, you aren't exactly ignoring the oppression of the Acehnese, but I would think that by trying to reinstate relations with the torturing, murdering, raping TNI was some kind of comfort to the oppressors. And when you assist the Colombian far right in its noble quest to wipe out peasants and trade unionists, I can't help but think you are again on the side of the - whatchamacallem? - evildoers. And when you prolong and amplify a long-standing US foreign policy tradition of unconditional support for Israel, it seems to me that you could be accused of standing with the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians and everything that has been entailed by that. There also appears to have been a minor putsch attempt in Venezuela which your comrades in the National Endowment for Democracy appear to have been involved in. You appear to enjoy more than convivial relations with the Saudi royal family, King Abdullah of Jordan, 'President for Life' Hosni Mubarak of Egypt and that gentleman with the mysterious name in Pakistan. Now, the unhappy workers of Pakistan are in open rebellion against their government, and have no apparent affiliation with the Islamists which populate your dreamscape. When will Bradley tanks rumble through Islamabad? I ask merely for information, and wouldn't dream of mocking someone with your obvious polemical talent ("er, er, its evil and bad and, er, er, God wants America to stand for freedom").

It's not that I think you're talking shit. It's just that you appear to be - well look, I don't want to be sesquipedalean, prolix or pleonastic - dissembling, issuing porcine whoopsies, dropping flam, bam and flim-flam, paltering, misciting, indulging in a petit-bourgeois deviation, coughing up testes, dissimulating, romanticising, mythologising and covinising.

I think we both understand one another.

Kilroy 'resigns'. posted by lenin

As if ...

The union between UKIP and Robert Kilroy-Silk was a tawdry, opportunistic affair. When it became clear that their reactionary little ship was not capacious enough for his ego, the leadership squeezed him out. The two whores, thus entangled in the same bed, fucked and fatally infected one another. Consider them finished.

Thomas Frank on Democrats. posted by lenin

I enjoyed Frank's What's the Matter With America? (as it was called on UK publication), but one thing that consisently struck me was that, Frank's critique of present Demo-goguery notwithstanding, he retained a rather bleary-eyed view of liberalism past (which once, apparently, stood for "equality and economic security").

Without this mythologising, the book would have to have been called Why Aren't You Voting Nader?. In his latest interview for In These Times magazine, he takes this one step further, to the point of utter logical confusion. For instance, here is he in the Democrats:

I think the values of the left still have power. But something has become apparent to me since I moved to Washington, D.C. [from Chicago]. There is this aversion, bordering on hatred, for the left, especially among Democrats. People who dominate discussions in Democratic circles despise the left, and there is no way in hell they are going to embrace the values of the left. You can try to explain to them how they need to do it for strategic purposes or in order to win elections, [but] it doesn’t matter. The Democratic centrists got their way [in the 2004 presidential election], they got their candidate, they got their way on everything, and they still lost. And who gets the blame? It’s going to be the left.

This is virtually unexceptionable and, one would think, instructive. Yet:

So how do Democrats make the argument?

They just have to bite the bullet and try it. We’ve got to do something new. But they’re not going to do anything unless they’re pushed, unless there are forces on the ground making them do something. And it’s our job to stir up those forces.

...

What’s your next project?

I think I’m going to write about what the Democrats have to do. Don’t you think that’s the thing?

The Democrats will never do whatever it is that Frank thinks they ought to do, because they have utter contempt for the left, yet 'the thing' is to write about what Democrats ought to do? This is where an analysis of the Democratic Party would have been invaluable. It is conceivable that the Democratic Party, pressured from without, will be coaxed into altering its rhetoric, offering a few useful reforms, defending those it has itself initiated etc. It is inconceivable that it will become the kind of organisation, the kind of tool, that can deliver a socially just settlement or put an end to imperial misadventure.

How many times does it need demonstrating? At the zenith of liberal reforms, the New Deal delivered some benefits and union protection, but failed to stop mass unemployment. Roosevelt, the most liberal of Democrat presidents, nevertheless contrived to provoke a conflagration with the Japanese and thus inaugurated the global - as opposed to merely regional - American empire: hence the imperial acronym, FDR. From that point, it is all entirely downhill. In the postwar era, Democrat presidencies have been among the most reactionary and imperialist, and the end of it all was the oleaginous Bill Clinton surreptitiously attacking gays, playing with subliminal racism over Ricky Ray Rector, slashing welfare, bombing the Balkans and the Middle East, allowing his economic policy to be dictated by Wall Street and sacraficing American labour on the altar of free trade.

The 'thing', surely, is to think about what the Left must do, how it must use its resources and continuing strengths in this period. The significance of Frank's book is, among other things, the way in which it maps the struggle for ideological hegemony. The Left defangs itself in that struggle by attaching its hopes to the coterie of charlatans and morally bankrupt, rich blueboys that lead the Democratic Party. With Bush's eyes fixed somewhere above and beyond the firmament, there is every opportunity to belt him severely in the fundament.

Tony & June... posted by lenin

The Prime Minister has an ill-deserved reputation for running away from the tough audiences. However:

Prime Minister Tony Blair is to appear in a fly-on-the-wall documentary for Channel 4's youth strand T4.

In the programme, Tony and June, he spends 24 hours with presenter June Sarpong.

The pair share a cup of tea at his Sedgefield home, have a pint in his local pub and attend one of David Blunkett's last press launches as Home Secretary in Sheffield.

The behind-the-scenes footage was shot shortly before Christmas.

Sarpong, who previously dated high-flying Labour MP David Lammy, will also interview Mr Blair in the studio.

And an audience of young people from across the UK will have the chance to question the Prime Minister on issues affecting them.

They will debate the war in Iraq, teenage sex and pregnancy, education and drugs.

It can't be an accident that the name of this documentary is startlingly close to that of a flimsy and humourless 1970s sitcom.

Faith Schools. posted by lenin

A few thoughts prompted by the intervention of Osama Saeed in this morning's Guardian (which I cannot link to at the moment as The Guardian's server appears to be down). Saeed has consistently argued for separate 'faith schools' for young Muslims growing up in Britain, and the arguments supplied today are a good summary of the standard: faith schools produce higher average test results; other faiths are allowed state-funded schools; it will help support Muslim identity where the present integrationist approach dilutes it.

Well, I hate to be platitudinous, but the very idea of a 'faith school' is a contradiction in terms, and obviously so for anyone who thinks about it. Education is, or should be, about how to think as much as what to think. It is about cultivating a critical, questioning attitude, which will help people understand rather than merely adapt to the world in which they live. I am not arguing for a second that the present secular state school system does that (or indeed that it is entirely secular). But the answer to the present imperfections is in part to abolish faith schools in their entirety and expunge religion from schools, except as a topic of study. I am not here reinforcing some naive Enlightenment dogma about the inevitable conflict between science and religion - there is not such thing. But faith is about acceptance, an acceptance that goes beyond the evidence of our senses and the grasp of reason. One believes precisely because one cannot rationally grasp or prove. It wouldn't be faith otherwise.

To depart from the obvious for a second, I should point out that it is true that faith schools generally provide better results. They are, in fact, over-subscribed as schools. Doubtless, some will aver that this is because the Founding Father is watching, and approves. However, the National Secular Society points out that while 20% of state school children take free school meals, only 12.2% of CofE school children do. Similarly, the number of kids with special needs in CofE schools is lower than the national average. (For the bewildered, I should point out that the number of kids taking free school meals is an index of poverty in the school. Children from poor backgrounds tend to have more emotional problems, fewer advantages in education, more turbulent family backgrounds and so on). The other thing to point out is that because faith schools are over-subscribed, the schools are allowed a de facto selection process, wherein they can cream off the brightest students (or at least those who do well at tests, which isn't quite the same thing).

The other argument provided by Saeed is that Muslim identity is being diluted in state 'secular' schools. At home, the children are invited to believe there is only one God, while at school they are swishing around in nativity plays pretending to be Magi. I don't find that particularly compelling. For one thing, the topic of that dreary little play (ickle baby Jesus) is the most quoted prophet in the Quran. For another, if that is a problem, the answer is to allow Muslim children to absent themselves from such activities - if they wish.

As a socialist, I don't find it sufficient that we atheists ('Christians in drag' Nietzche calls us) share a land-mass with Muslims. Our children should grow up together, play together and learn together. Then it will be harder for white non-Muslims to grow up and believe in the justice of bombing Muslims. It hardly needs pointing out that the reverse applies. Separating Muslim children from other children is not the answer to the problems (of discrimination, of poor performance, and lack of opportunity) that they have. No state funding for state schools of whatever religion. Parenthetically, I would add that this isn't an expression of that formal neutrality to religion that often ends up specifically targeting Muslims. Socialists ought to be sensitive to the crying need to improve the situation for non-white children growing up in this country - but that is a universalist demand, not a particularist one, and the answer is to provide a system that adequately serves us all.

Mike Jackson: British imperialism from Derry to Iraq. posted by lenin

General Sir Michael Jackson, if similes are worth anything, is like a shark. Think of the carnivorous teeth jutting from his mouth, the angular face, the black eyes swimming in a red sea. The civilised upper class comportment is precisely the manner he will assume when he bites your leg off. Melodrama or comedy? We'll get to that.

As photographs emerged of British soldiers torturing Iraqi prisoners - not our dear British boys! - at a detention camp near Basra, the good General was the image of cold fury and reserved disgust. He told the media that, though he could not comment on an ongoing trial, the army condemned "utterly all acts of abuse". It's an old story.

In Derry, on January 30th 1972, the Parachute regiment shot dead 13 civilians during a civil rights protest. The man in charge of the operations that day was a sprightly young captain of the 1st Battalion named Michael Jackson (he was 31 at the time). As the paras leapt into action, Jackson could be seen yelling "Go, Paras, go!!". In order to justify the shootings, Jackson kept a 'shot list' , describing those shot as "nail-bombers", "pistol-firers" and so on. None of the thirteen civilians shot were firing pistols or lobbing nail-bombs or carrying rifles. They were fleeing.

Notoriously, in a meeting held involving then Prime Minister Edward Heath, Lord Hailsham explained that there was a law that allowed the British Army to shoot enemies of the crown. Much more than that, the British government was obliged to take action. One British para has told the Bloody Sunday inquiry that there was no shot or threat from the crowd or alleged snipers:

"The only threat was a large assembly of people and we were all experienced soldiers who had been through riot situations before."

He added:

"We were all in high spirits and when our lieutenant said, 'Let us teach these buggers a lesson - we want some kills tomorrow,' to the mentality of the blokes to whom he was speaking, that was tantamount to an order."

Never mind. Thirteen murders was a step up in Michael Jackson's career. From that point on, his feet have barely touched the ground. He was later given the command of the 1st Battalion which had carried out the atrocities in Derry, as this very polite BBC profile explains (doesn't mention Bloody Sunday). He then worked for the MoD for some time before being knighted.

The next time we hear of him, he is leading the British side of military operations in Serbia, as part of the Nato chain of command. You can see a charming photograph of the general with Wesley Clark and Croatian ethnic cleanser Agim Ceku, who had been placed in command of the KLA during the US war on the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. He has since been promoted to Chief of the General Staff (2003) and his knighthood was promoted to Knight of the Grand Cross (New Year) for his leadership during the war crimes in Iraq.

Jackson has come a long way since his youthful ineptitudes in Derry. There is unlikely to be a 'shot list' today. It will suffice to say that anyone killed by British troops is a suicide-bomber, rifle-bearer, pistol-firer or some such thing. Torture, not unknown in Northern Ireland in the particularly brutal period following Bloody Sunday, will be the act of a few rotten apples, bad people who bring the army into disrepute. But Mike Jackson knows better. As a former para, he will know that British troops are trained for brutality, not humanitarianism.

Still, if you don't like all that, you can read a very polite interview with the General on Breakfast with Frost here .

A few notes and update on the last post. posted by lenin

Alphonse is splendid. From thoughts on Islamophobia & Edward Said to Goethe's theory of colour, Alphonse ranges over contemporary debates with a fine combination of literary flair and theoretical competence. Don't let the mandarin tone and content put you off, it is a generous read. (Alphonse has responded with a becoming blush and a beautiful speech that occurs in Tony Kushner's wonderful plays Angels in America and Slavs!).

US journalist Tim Shorrock has an excellent post on the Bush administration's attempts to restore full military ties with the Indonesian government. He has finally, it seems, sorted out his blog format, and everything looks fabulously neat and tidy. Please pay a visit to the man.

Doug Ireland has a cautionary post for naive leftists who might be taken in by the fraud, charlatan and anti-Semite, David Icke. It seems that the lizard-gazer had taken a liking to one of Doug's posts and assumed he agreed with the politics of the mammalist far right. I have always hated the unctuous, preening Icke, and am happy to see him get the kicking he is due.

Chris Brooke has a very nice little ditty for everyone to sing along to, while Marc Mulholland is back in the motherfucking house .

Responding to the last post, Norman Geras dissented from my presentation of his views on the war:

Come on, Vlad, you're not playing straight here. You're strongly implying that the post of mine which you link to says there can only have been one reasonable view about the war. But it doesn't say that. Brad DeLong already tried to pin that one on me, and I answered him here .

Re-read the post of mine that you link to; read my reply to Brad DeLong. No, you don't agree with my positions. But don't suggest I deny the possibility of legitimate disagreements on the left about the war.

To which I responded that my implication was no more than what was implied in the original post from Normblog that I linked to, which was that Norm believed there was only one morally reputable view on the war, (approvingly citing a suggestion from Kamm to that effect). Norm responded that his point had still not been met, and that he hadn't actually said that. So, here I am.

To be fair to Norm, what he actually says is this:

There was no persuasive moral case against the Iraq war. There were creditable moral reasons for entertaining doubts about it.

Which then becomes this (inter a great deal of alia):

There was no moral case against the Iraq war, though there were creditable moral reasons for having doubts about the moral case for it.

He does not specifically say that there is no morally reputable case against the war; he does say that one can have morally creditable doubts about it (which is not the same thing as there being a morally creditable antiwar position). It is not Norm's position that one cannot be opposed to the war in morally creditable ways, but it is his position that such opposition cannot be persuasive.

Nevertheless. Geras, I feel, has not articulated the argument properly. Of course there was a morally persuasive case against the United States waging war on Iraq. It was that the Iraqis would pay a terrible and unnecessary human cost in the process of the war and would have little at the end of it to repay their patience. But what is at issue is not, if you ask me, morality. It is politics. The antiwar Left, if I may ventriloquise for it, simply does not accept that the US - with a record abroad that is worse than Saddam's domestic record - is to be entrusted with the fate of oppressed people. We do not accuse the pro-war Left (at least not all of it) of being morally deficient. It is their political analysis we question. One other remark I'd like to make is that Norm complains about the clamorous certainty of the antiwar movement, its unwillingness to concede a good case to 'the other side'. If 'the other side' is the US army, all I can say is that there are good reasons for this cynicism.

Stalinism. posted by lenin

George Galloway is a Fidelista, and is damned. Arthur Scargill keeps the faith with the ex-USSR and is rebuked. Eric Hobsbawm is both 'an apologist for Stalinism' and 'not a Stalinist' according to Johann Hari.

Now, Alex Callinicos has his knuckles rapped for describing Nick Cohen as an 'ex-Leftist':

Why is Nick Cohen an ex-leftist? Did he make a statement recently that I missed? I'd be surprised to hear it. Pending some fresh information, I assume that Alex Callinicos so characterizes Nick Cohen because he (Nick Cohen) supported the war to get rid of Saddam Hussein. All those years of criticizing Stalinism and Stalinists, and this is what has become of socialist democracy for one of the SWP's leading thinkers: only one possible viewpoint on the war. [Emphasis added]

Imagine there being only one possible viewpoint on the war. Actually, don't vex your imagination. Oliver Kamm has already concluded the matter for us:

"The supporters of war have a monopoly of morality on the subject. There is no reputable anti-war position."

This outlandish claim was cited by Normblog recently. Approvingly, the context would suggest, since the author of that blog admits that the thought had given him some trouble but no longer did. Then there is the constant refrain about the "pseudo-Left" who opposed the war on Iraq and who even, the dirty bastards, went so far as to support the right of Iraqis to resist the subsequent occupation.

I am less interested in Callinicos' barb at Cohen than the uses of the term 'Stalinism'. The ex-Stalinist Harry Saunders likes to throw around the charge of Stalinism from time to time, particularly at those who support anti-imperialist movements. (I don't want to take up space here, but I've posted a few retorts to Harry's muddled piece here ). Johann Hari encourages his readers to believe that because Respect houses George Galloway and a few former affiliates of the Muslim Association of Britain, it comprises "totalitarians in an unconvincing leftwing costume". Christopher Hitchens was convinced before the war that the antiwar movement was populated by "pseudo-Marxists who, deep in their hearts, have a nostalgia for the days of the one-party State and who secretly regard Saddam as an anti-imperialist".

Given that practically all of these people insist that we must, without criticism, support the Iraqi Communist Party and the Iraqi Federation of Trade Unions, which is dominated by the former, I somehow doubt that they have a principled opposition to Stalinists as such. The ICP may once have apologised for Saddam's brutality, (that cost them), but in the current lexicon of Cohen, Hari and others, they are nothing less than 'socialists', 'democrats' and so on. The PUK, beloved of Hitchens, Cohen and the other gruesome array of pro-war apologists cited above, have a record of collaboration with Saddam, as well as with Iran and Syria (Islamist and Baathist tyrannies, respectively). Dr Barham Salih, whose words are so often adduced to shame the antiwar Left ("complete moral failure" etc) likes to cozy up to the Iranian regime - indeed, he owes a lot to them. Iran helped the PUK in its civil war with the KDP, and was rewarded with carte blanche to murder Iranian Kurds hiding out in the north of Iraq.

If you really want to find Stalinists, Baathists and theocrats, they are easy enough to spot. Just have a look at the Interim Iraqi Government. If you want to know who their allies are, they are generally to be found writing lazy, bellicose missives in the liberal press. Stalinism as an ideology (not a state formation) has a complex history. Its devotees have been courageous, and they have also been treacherous. Suffice to say, I don't think it takes much courage to support the world's largest imperialist power as it destroys Iraq.

Pentagon: Let's make our enemies gay... posted by lenin

It transpires that the Pentagon developed plans for an "aphrodisiac" chemical weapon that would provoke "widespread homosexual behaviour among troops would cause a 'distasteful but completely non-lethal' blow to morale".

Homosexual behaviour is 'distasteful', then, a 'blow to the morale'. Something tells me that these gentlemen have never served in the military.

The Mayor Responds on al-Qaradawi. posted by lenin

A friendly ghost e-mailed me last night with the PDF file of the mayor's response to his critics on the al-Qaradawi visit. The mayor had, he rightly told me, comprehensively destroyed the arguments proffered by Peter Tatchell and some others, revealing many of them to be based on pure prejudice, and others on misinformation. Many of those who criticised the mayor's approach on this and contributed to a dossier against the al-Qaradawi visit are desperate Islamophobes who believe that Islam can only be reactionary, that there can be no progressive voice within Islam. I have the whole thing saved here for your comfort and convenience, since PDF files can be mucky.

The mayor's dossier establishes a number of things: 1) Yusuf al-Qaradawi is regarded by both Muslim and non-Muslim scholars as a progressive and tolerant voice within Islam; 2) Al-Qaradawi does not support wife-beating as his accusers say, he openly condemns it, while advocating the equality of the sexes; 3) He has condemned terrorist atrocities from 9/11 to Bali; 4) He has spoken against anti-Semitism and is not himself an anti-Semite as his accusers suggest. Indeed, he has insisted on the equality of Christians, Muslims and Jews, earning him the ire of extremist groups like al-Muhajiroun; 5) He favours democracy and political pluralism; 6) He favours Muslim countries developing friendly relations with the US (notwithstanding his criticisms of US policy), and has shared a platform with Bill Clinton and Richard Holbrooke to argue that point; 7) He condemns the kidnappings and the targetting of citizens in Iraq and elsewhere.

The dossier also establishes that the critics of al-Qaradawi's visit fundamentally misrepresent the evidence and cite imbalanced sources (in particular, some of their information comes from a group calling itself the Middle East Media Research Institute - MEMRI - which is run by an Israeli colonel and which specialises in producing anti-Arab, anti-Muslim propaganda. Read more here and here .)

A number of things are ceded by the dossier. First of all, it is clear that al-Qaradawi, opposes homosexuality as a "perversion". So do leaders of the Christian and Jewish faiths. In fact, this is the stance of Dr Jonathan Sacks, who supports clause 28, and who is often revered as a voice of compassion and moderation. This doesn't protect the leaders of any religious faith from criticism, but why single one out? In particular, why does Outrage claim that al-Qaradawi supports the "killing" of lesbians and gays, when the only source they cite (a rather rancorous page from IslamOnline which I won't link to for obvious reasons) cites a Saudi scholar citing such a recommendation from the Quran, while al-Qaradawi says nothing to this effect at all? (From the dossier, al-Qaradawi is cited as saying: "It is sufficient for a Muslim to object to it verbally or at least within his conscience. We are not required by our faith to declare a war against homosexuality and homosexuals.") Why does Peter Tatchell regard him, then, as more dangerous and more extreme than the BNP, who really would like to kill all lesbians and gays? Are, perhaps, brown homophobes worse than white ones? A letter signed by, among others, the Lesbian and Gay Coalition Against Racism, also notes this alarming aspect of Outrage's campaigns.

The dossier also concedes that al-Qaradawi supports the right of Palestinians to carry out suicide bombings as an exceptional and desperate case. His own explanation is cited: "If the Palestinians had weapons similar to those of the Israelis – tanks, F16 helicopters, they would not have resorted to turning themselves into human bombs. This has been turned into a no-option situation – they had to do this because they have no other means of resisting their enemy and liberating their land." I don't particularly care to pander to the left-liberal moralists on this question. The statement above is virtually unexceptionable, and while I personally don't believe the strategy of suicide bombing is correct, there is no doubt that its persistence is a direct result of the despair created by the Israeli occupation (as well as, to some extent, the weakness and corruption of the Fatah leadership).

At any rate, once the hysterical concatenation of phoney charges, hypocrisy and concocted outrage is dispensed with, the case against al-Qaradawi's visit is reduced to one that might be supplied by the Israeli embassy. The charges are, like Astroglide, messy but not sticky.

Gordon Brown: The British Empire Strikes Back. posted by lenin

In the Daily Mail today:

Britain must stop apologising for its colonial past and recognise that it has produced some of the greatest ideas in history, Gordon Brown has declared.
The Chancellor called for the "great British values" - freedom, tolerance, civic duty - to be admired as some of our most successful exports.

He used a visit to one of Britain's former East African colonies and one of the strongholds of the campaign against 'white imperialism' to make an unabashed pitch for a return to patriotism.

...

"We should celebrate much of our past rather than apologise for it.

"And we should talk, and rightly so, about British values that are enduring, because they stand for some of the greatest ideas in history: tolerance, liberty, civic duty, that grew in Britain and influenced the rest of the world.

"Our strong traditions of fair play, of openness, of internationalism, these are great British values."

The revival of the language of imperialism continues apace...

'Martial Law' in Aceh, and tsunami notes. posted by lenin

December 25th, 2004, the Indonesian military cheerfully announced to the world's press that it had killed eighteen guerillas in Aceh, a province on the north-west tip of the Indonesian island of Sumatra. I don't think this made British television news. It would have spoiled the Queen's Speech (for those who missed that particular barnstormer, Her Majesty defied convention, calling for tolerance and pleasantness).

At any rate, 18 corpses was quite an inauspicious achievement by the standards of the Indonesian military (TNI). Previously, General Sutarto had told the Jakarta Post that since martial law was imposed in May 2003, TNI had successfully killed 3,216 Acehnese rebels. Amnesty International, for their part, reported that TNI had engaged in torture and extra-judicial killings as well as "rape and other forms of sexual violence" . (I don't know about you, but I can't imagine and don't care to imagine what those "other forms of sexual violence" might be.) The report also mentions the destruction of homes and property, the expulsion of residents, the conscription of children and adult civilians into military operations.

'Martial law' (in reality a military occupation) was imposed in the first place as the necessary prelude to a ferocious assault on the GAM, who control large swathes of Aceh. The GAM had gained in strength during the brutal Suharto years, and in 1998 - when the dictatorship was overthrown by an uprising of students and the poor - evidence emerged of 'rape centres' and torture used by TNI. (This was familiar from East Timor - Jose Ramos Horta smuggled out photos of Indonesian troops hanging prisoners by chains, shoving steel poles down their throats, forcing them to eat dirt, applying electric shocks to their genitalia, and burying bodies in unmarked graves at night.) While a limited 'peace process' had been attempted by the former president Abdurrahman Wahid in 2000, the military had moved to sabotage any rapprochement, in particular by arresting five GAM negotiators. Wahid's successor was his vice-president Megawati Sukarnoputri, whose priority was the preservation of the Unitary Republic of Indonesia - a popular stance among the country's political and military elite after the loss of East Timor. Megawati began to severely curtail press freedom , explaining that:

We, the government, feel very grateful and respectful of press freedom. But now it is the obligation of the press to maintain and guard this freedom.…[T]he responsibility of the national press lies in its professionalism to protect and promote national unity.

There followed not merely legal restrictions, but also physical attacks on journalists . The military, of course, took a keen interest in ensuring that all news was published "in the spirit of nationalism" .

As 'martial law' began, Indonesian hawk fighter jets (guess where they bought those from?) were pounding GAM bases . About 40,000 troops and police, backed by aircraft, warships, armour and artillery were deployed, according to Agence France Press . Eye-witness reports on life under the military speak of beatings meted out to farmers suspected of giving food to rebels. Others would just "disappear" . The Indonesian military, it was said, found it difficult to tell the difference between civilians and rebels - so they murdered both.

In May 2004, 'martial law' was transformed into a 'civil emergency', in which the region was nominally put back under the control of a civilian administration. This was largely a cosmetic change. Troops remained. Neither the checkpoints, nor the house searches ceased. For that matter, torture, rape and murder (there's a triptych to decorate TNI headquarters) didn't absent themselves either.

Since the tsunami struck, there has been some detail emerging about TNI control hampering the delivery of aid , while refugees from Aceh report that Indonesian troops have executed several tsunami victims . And now the Indonesian government has announced that it would like all foreign military troops assisting aid to withdraw by the end of march - to be replaced by three more battalions of Indonesian soldiers and one battalion of "mobile brigade" police, which the New York Times reports is "generally the force most feared by civilians in Aceh. The brigades are regularly described by civilians as being the most brutal of the array of forces here."

After the tsunami, the stormtroopers. The GAM has offered another ceasefire , but it is being ignored. Part of the reason for this escalation is that the military occupation has not achieved its end - quite the reverse. A perceptive article in Dissident Voice reports that while only a few hundred GAM activists had been operative in Aceh before 'martial law', "Gen. Sutarto stated that GAM had 10,000 guerrillas by May 2003":

Human rights activist Muhammad Isa noted last year that “when Aceh was declared a military operations zone, there were only a few hundred GAM insurgents in Pidie, North Aceh and East Aceh. Now, there are a lot more throughout Aceh.” Indonesia specialist Edward Aspinall wrote: “Many journalists and others who interviewed new GAM recruits in rural Aceh in 1999 noted that many of them were motivated by a desire to exact revenge for family members who had been killed, tortured or sexually abused by security forces earlier in the decade.”

The first lesson of war: the more one murders and maims, the more one is obliged to murder and maim. This is a war that cannot be won by the Indonesian military without butchering thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of Acehnese. Once again, we know who these purveyors of perverse violence can rely on for support .

(Acknowledgements: The above is a very rough first draft of an article that may see the light of day. Since I won't be able to later, I'd like now to take the time to acknowledge the assistance of Tim Shorrock who has his own excellent blog and has written a great deal about Aceh. Bat also provided several useful links.)

Tsunami notes...

It would be remiss not to remember the plight of the oppressed Christians in America at this tragic time. A missionary group based in Virginia has kidnapped about 300 Muslim kids from Aceh and taken them to Jakarta. Describing them as 'orphans', they hope to raise them in a Christian children's home in the Indonesian capital. According to the website of the group, WorldHelp :

"These children are homeless, destitute, traumatized, orphaned, with nowhere to go, nowhere to sleep and nothing to eat. If we can place them in a Christian children's home, their faith in Christ could become the foothold to reach the Aceh people."

It is worth pointing out that the page on which these words appeared has been removed , but luckily Google has it cached .

And some good news! Natural disasters often destroy productive capacity and send share prices skittling downwards, but the Asian stock market has been largely unaffected by the tsunami.

In Defense of the Stop the War Coalition. posted by lenin

The recent spate of attacks by Johann Hari*, Nick Cohen and Labour Friends of Iraq on the Stop the War Coalition is interesting for a number of reasons. They share the following characteristics:

1) Proximity in time (choreography).

2) Repetition of false claims (reading from a script).

3) Hysterical tone (histrionics).

Those three ingredients make for a cheap music hall production of The Crucible. Almost all of the false claims are authored by those who supported the war in the first place, although the following claim from Peter Tatchell appears on the LFoI 'open letter':

Right now, the STWC supports "the resistance" in Iraq by any means necessary – a tacit endorsement of the suicide bombing, hostage-taking and execution of innocent civilians, including brave, selfless aid workers, election supervisors and ordinary Iraqis on their way to school and work. The STWC justifies this carnage in the name of "national liberation".

The fact that none of this is true doesn't detain a respected political campaigner, reputed for his honesty. I have already dealt with the charge about the statement on the IFTU here . To quickly summarise, despite as yet unsubstantiated rumours that such a statement ("by whatever means they deem necessary") was present in an October 8th e-mail sent to members of the steering committee, it was not present in any statement issued by the StWC. It is not the policy of the StWC to support, even tacitly, the murder of civilians. The StWC has already made clear its opposition to such murders here . It and groups associated with it, went to great lengths to try to stop the murder of Ken Bigley and called for his release.

The LFoI 'letter' repeats the charge above, and adds:

Here is what Andrew Murray, the StWC Chair wrote on Independent journalist Johann Hari’s own website, hidden away in a ‘comments’ section. This is the only comment from StWC leaders on the murders - one line, in one post, on one blog, while writing about another topic - ‘We condemn this killing and its perpetrators, whoever they are.’ That’s it.

In fact, Andrew wrote a letter to the Independent condemning the attacks which the editors chose not to publish. It is available on the Stop the War Coalition website .

The 'open letter' also conflates the actions of a few lunatics on the fringe of the resistance with the resistance tout court, and attempts to imply guilt by association with a flimsily constructed syllogism: You support the right to resist the occupation; some of those alleged to be part of the resistance carry out acts of extreme brutality; you must therefore support these acts. You would think that any fool would notice that the conclusion does not follow from the premises, but not these fools.

The bulk of the LFoI's "open letter" is therefore based on nonsense and spin. The fact that it has been sent to local StWC groups supports the claim that this is part of an attempt to split the coalition before the elections. LFoI enjoys rather convivial relations with some senior Labour ministers, including the surrealist Ann Clwyd MP who is a leading member. Its sole political accomplishment to date has been to contribute to achieving union backing for the Blairite stance on the occupation of Iraq at the last Labour conference. It, of course, supports continuing the occupation and does not support the right of Iraqis to resist that occupation.

You can excoriate them at: info@labourfriendsofiraq.org.uk

* Johann Hari gave a false rendering of the ESF meeting at which a member of the IFTU spoke in his Independent article, discussed below. For the record, I include the TUC's version of events here .

Letter from Alex Callinicos to Gilbert Achcar... posted by lenin

LETTER TO GILBERT ACHCAR

12 January 2005
Dear Gilbert,

You know how much I respect your judgement – both about revolutionary politics in general and more particularly about the Middle East. Your writings over the past few years have been enormously important as a source of orientation through the tortuous twists and turns of imperialist strategy. Your ‘Letter to a Slightly Depressed Anti-War Activist’ has become a classic. But precisely for these reasons I read your piece ‘On the Forthcoming Election in Iraq’ (published at:
http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=15&ItemID=6948 ) with a growing sense of dismay.

It’s been clear for some months that the Iraqi resistance, in the broad sense of the range of forces opposed to the occupation, was split on the question of whether or not to participate in the elections: the radical Shi’ite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr’s vacillations on the issue are a symptom of this since he is something of a weather vane. (It is interesting that the Association of Muslim Scholars, which has links with the insurgents in the so-called Sunni Triangle, has just said that it will call off its boycott of the elections in exchange for the US setting a date for its withdrawal.) I agree with you that whether or not to take part in elections under foreign occupation or colonial rule is a tactical question, not one of principle. But precisely for that reason, I’m very unhappy about the kind of absolutist tone of your discussion, which doesn’t really capture the dynamic of the situation. (1)

Continue reading...

Note: I've created a page for longer posts. This is to avoid pushing interesting stuff down the page and out of sight. It also means that you get to see that fabulous photo of me more often. Use it for target practise.

HP Sauce. posted by lenin

Is the bottle half-empty or half-full? Well, today's incisive post from Marcus at Harry's Place suggests that we'll be hammering out the last residue from the bottom soon.

Marcus has been lurking about the Tomb, malingering around Dead Men Left and generally sniffing around for truffles to munch on. He investigates the comments boxes. He smells the blood of a Trotskyist. He hunts. And he comes up with this:

What is worth highlighting [from a post at Dead Men Left] though is this passage about a 'slander' on the STWC:

Following the murder of Hadi Salih, international officer of the Iraqi Federation of Trade Unions (IFTU), Nick Cohen and Johann Hari (aided and abetted by their blogging sidekicks) penned disgraceful attacks on the Coalition for the national press. Both were based on the lie - the absolute, flat-out lie - that the Coalition supports civilian deaths and urges the resistance on by "any means necessary". I dealt with the slander here; Lenin adds more to the story here and here.

The Coalition doesn't support civilian deaths. No one ever mentioned the words "by any means neccessary". It's a slander. Got that ? Good.

Nothing eludes gumboots Marcus. He continues:

[Dead Men Left appears] in someone else's comments box [mine] making things a little less clear about what those in the STWC actually think about acceptable tactics:

It's been said before, but I don't think there's anything wrong with the "by any means necessary" formulation: "necessary means" clearly does not include the murder of trade unionists; this will do nothing to liberate Iraq.

I say that as one member of the Stop the War Coalition. Clearly, others in the Coalition will disagree with that, for all sorts of reasons. That's fine by me. For the Coalition to work at all, as Robin says, all kinds of compromises have to be made.

I misunderstood Marcus' point for a moment. I thought he meant to imply that the author of Dead Men Left was quietly conceding that such a statement had appeared and was defending its use on those grounds. I grumbled. He replied:

'Lenin', haven't you missed the most important point made by 'Meaders' in your comments box ?

Is it "fine by you" that some in the STWC apparantly think the systematic targeting of Trades Unionists for murder is an acceptable tactic ? Is that fact an acceptable "compromise" to put up with in order to make the STWC "work"?

The willingness to locate the most sinister possible meaning in Meaders' statement is characteristic of the hysteria and hyperbole that runs through the pro-war left's campaign against the StWC. Point of logic:

Dear me. He says that some in the coalition "may disagree with that". With what? Well, what he has just said in the previous paragraph, which is:

"It's been said before, but I don't think there's anything wrong with the "by any means necessary" formulation: "necessary means" clearly does not include the murder of trade unionists; this will do nothing to liberate Iraq."

That is to say, *some* may disagree with Meaders on how those words could be interpreted, hence the need - if they ever existed - to edit them out before release.

I know, I know. Inter-blogging rivalry sucks big fat fucking melons. Its boring your pants off (yeah, that's why my hit counter goes up every time I have a feud with some dyspeptic sociopath on the pro-war left).

However, this has some importance. It is my view that there is an effort underway to split the StWC before the elections, and that this is led by elements within the Labour Party. It isn't even a big secret. The early-day motion tabled by Harry Barnes MP and supported by pro-war backbenchers calumniated the StWC with precisely the false charges issued by Hari, Cohen and their friends at Harry's Place. In fact, HP Sauce even ran a campaign to get Labour MPs to back the motion. Meanwhile, Labour Friends of Iraq runs petty, stupid and spiteful stories making wild claims against the StWC which mimic and even go further than the falsehoods propagated by the HP club.

Just bear that in mind next time you read of some terrible thing the antiwar Left are up to now...

Bloggery in the work place... posted by lenin

It can get you fired apparently. Of course, if you consult the blog in question, you will see that its author was dismissed for maintaining a blog on his own personal time at his own expense and for the sake of entertaining and enlightening a devoted audience he had built up over the years. In it, he allegedly made comments that brought Waterstones, the company he worked for, into disrepute. On which note, I would like to point out that Waterstones is a filthy residue clinging to the epicentre of Satan's anal circle. Can't fire me.

But it seems, from what I have read, that what in fact happened was that a new manager started work at the Edinburgh branch at which the author worked and preached sci-fi. The new boss didn't like the look of him, decided he was the wrong face, shifted the Sci-Fi section to some reclusive section of the store and sent his employee packing to the outer regions of the cleaning room. Eventually, on some spurious pretext, he was fired. Encouragingly, there are tonnes of comments from present and former employees of Waterstones on his blog, offering solidarity and so on. No one has told them, apparently, that 'the class war is over'.

Via Ken McLeod and Charlie .

Ann Clwyd & More on Aceh... posted by lenin

The Vicar of Cynon Valley...

The United Kingdom's "Human Rights envoy" to Iraq has a peculiar conception of human rights. Her latest correspondence is on her concerns about the humanitarian situation in Fallujah. This time she is conversing with Raoul , a colleague at my other, occasional blog Media Lies produces a stupefying series of comedic non-sequiturs and obedient euphemisms. Take the following:

Essential services were disrupted during the course of military action. However, Iraqi and multi-national forces supplied Fallujah's civilian population with water supplies as they moved into the city.

Well, they're dead, the city's destroyed, but at least we brought them water... Note also the evacuation of the necessary verb from the first sentence. No one did anything to the essential services, they just happened to be 'disrupted' (by the weather no doubt). One supposes that the bombing of one hospital and the hi-jacking of another had something to do with this?

Similarly, she goes on to add:

The Iraqi Government and the Multi-National Force had also stockpiled essential supplies in the city before operations began to provide for the immediate needs of Fallujah's civilians.

What civilians, Ann dear? Didn't the marine corps tell you? There were no civilians in Fallujah, which is why the US refused to allow aid in during the main phase of the assault. At least if there were, they would have been shot dead as one AP photographer witnessed:

"I decided to swim ... but I changed my mind after seeing U.S. helicopters firing on and killing people who tried to cross the river.''

He watched horrified as a family of five was shot dead as they tried to cross. Then, he "helped bury a man by the river bank, with my own hands."

Further, the same witness reports:

"Destruction was everywhere. I saw people lying dead in the streets, wounded were bleeding and there was no one to come and help them. Even the civilians who stayed in Fallujah were too afraid to go out," he said.

"There was no medicine, water, no electricity nor food for days."

...

"U.S. soldiers began to open fire on the houses, so I decided that it was very dangerous to stay in my house," he said.

Those 'supplies' can get exhausted after a while, I suppose. Then again, a few cans of Spam can come to seem quite meaningless when your house is being shot at and your neighbours are being buried on the banks of the Euphrates.

Clwyd goes on to talk about the reconstruction projects that are planned, claims that Fallujah's residents and leaders were aching for an assault to happen ( they weren't ) and generally produces more sick humour in one letter than Sam Kinison managed in a whole career (although Kinison, to his credit, never claimed to be a great humanitarian).

Aceh...

You may be encouraged to hear that at least some British media attention is now being given to the behaviour of Indonesia in Aceh (though none to the British role in that, obviously). BBC and Channel Four have both run news items on it and the tone was not quite as equivocal and pandering as it has been. They have taken their time, but we shouldn't be cynical.

At least now we know that it takes a tsunami spreading from central Africa to the southern tip of Thailand to get British television to talk about the repression of the Acehnese. What will it take to get them to talk about the fact that Britain supplies the weapons and even the money to buy those weapons? You'd think they were frightened of offending someone...

There's also a very brief article in Socialist Worker about it. Unfortunately, it seems to have been written by a smug bastard who thinks he knows it all. Aside from that, this week's SW is a good read.

Dear Johann... posted by lenin

E-mail to Johann Hari...

Dear Johann,

You say in your article "A leading Iraqi trade unionist has been murdered. Where is the left?" that:

"The Stop the War Coalition passed a resolution recently saying the resistance should use 'any means necessary' - which prompted Mick Rix, a decent trade unionist, to resign from the STWC on the grounds that this clearly constituted support for the murder of civilians."

Three points: 1) This was not a 'resolution' but a public statement endorsed by Andrew Murray and Lindsey German, 2) The statement that was 'passed' by the meeting on Tuesday 19th October (and reported in the WRP paper News Line that same day) did not contain the phrase you cite, not even when it originally appeared on the website on October 11th and was published in the Morning Star, and 3) Mick Rix has not, in any statement I can find, or any statement you adduce, resigned because of such a phrase - albeit it is claimed (I assume correctly) that it was included in an initial e-mail on October 8th to supporters of the StWC. Rix's objections, from what I can gather, were to the criticisms of the IFTU. (If it matters, I think the bulk of them were merited). Incidentally, you note in your response to some interlocutors that the alleged words were removed from the statement after a resignation, a great deal of fuss and an Independent report. In fact, the fuss emerged after the Morning Star article. Harry Barnes MP submitted his Early Day Motion on October 14th. The Independent article appeared on October 20th. Mick Rix e-mailed his resignation on October 19th at 9.16 am.

You must be aware of the significance of these distortions - which I do not say are intentional. To suggest that this phrase was included in a 'resolution' that was 'passed' by the StWC suggests that such a view is representative of the bulk of the StWC activists. It suggests that it is, currently, the public position of the StWC. It suggests, as you surely intended if you believed what you were writing was true, that such a view entails support for the murder of Hadi Salih. I don't need to explain the significance of claiming the StWC only changed this in response to resignations and press criticism, but simply reiterate that it is not true.

On the ESF meeting at which the IFTU representative spoke, you write:

"But he was an Iraqi who didn't restrict his comments to the need for occupation troops to leave once a democratic election has been held. He also insisted on talking about the nature of the Sunni "resistance" - one of the most reactionary political forces anywhere on earth, consisting of homicidal misogynists, homophobes and supporters of Sharia law. The audience at the Social Forum booed and hissed him so loudly that he had to leave the stage."

I don't know who the 'three people' are that you have spoken to about this [mentioned elsewhere], but al-Mashadani did not make any such comments. He didn't get the chance to. The booing and hissing was orchestrated by a group called Iraq Occupation Focus, who objected to al-Mashadani's presence there. They began their protest as soon as the meeting was opened by the chair. From what I can gather, approximately 100 out of a crowd of 2000 joined that protest. Then, as soon as al-Mashadani rose to speak, an attempt was made by a small group to storm the stage. Al-Mashadani was bundled off by his minders and the meeting cancelled. The objection to al-Mashadani's presence at a meeting against the occupation was perhaps understandable since an IFTU representative named Abdullah Muhsin had advised Labour conference delegates to support the continuation of the occupation - which he later, comically, denied. But people I know who were at the meeting agree that the tactics of the protest were childish and basically ruined what could have been an interesting meeting. You may be interested to know that Lindsey German of the Stop the War Coalition had to make her speech over the heads of the protesters, whom she ridiculed.

In short, you are wrong to suppose that 'the audience' in toto booed and hissed; that the protest was related to al-Mashadani's surmisal of the Sunni resistance; that he made such comments at the ESF conference as you impute to him.

Again, the significance of these distortions is obvious enough. If you were right in what you said, there would have been a majority of delegates who objected to hearing al-Mashadani's views on the Sunni resistance (and therefore, implicitly, were uncritically supportive of it - and perhaps would therefore be supportive of Hadi Salih being murdered...).

[I drew much of my account of the meeting from my old mucker Meaders at Dead Men Left .]

Johann, that ends my challenge to your piece, but I'll add a few comments of my own. I personally agree that it is the legitimate right of Iraqis to resist the occupation by any means necessary. I don't mean that torturing and killing trade unionists is a legitimate part of that. And I have also said previously that groups like Tawhid wal-Jihad are not a legitimate part of the resistance (they are a tiny fragment responsible for a tiny proportion of attacks, and their attacks are typically not directed at the occupiers but at civilians). But attacking the means of repression (army, police etc) by which the occupation sustains itself is legitimate. Indeed, I fail to see how it could be otherwise.

Consider: this occupation has brought with it 100,000 deaths on a conservative estimate; it has brought torture; it has doubled child malnutrition in Iraq; it has involved the deliberate murder of civilians; the destruction of an entire city on a spurious pretext which was later disavowed (Zarqawi); napalm has been used on populated areas. Leaving aside the past heap of misery for which the occupiers can be found guilty, this record alone is an affront to the humanitarian discourse by which the occupying governments have sought to sustain their legitimacy. When Saddam did this sort of thing, no one was in any doubt about what to think of resistance.

'Lies and the Left'... posted by lenin

Excellent post from Dead Men Left casually taking apart the falsehoods perpetuated by both Johann Hari and Nick Cohen in recent articles.

They have accused the Stop the War Coalition of supporting the murder of civilians in Iraq. The condemned the murder of Hadi Salih. Yet both authors have accused the StWC of encouraging 'the kidnappers/Baathists/Islamofascists/whomever' to resist 'by any means necessary'. This is false. Here is the relevant passage from a statement on the IFTU which they believe they are citing:

The StWC reaffirms its call for an end to the occupation, the return of all British troops in Iraq to this country and recognises once more the legitimacy of the struggle of the Iraqi people to secure such ends.

Resisting the coalition is "legitimate". Killing civilians is not. Hari is recycling a fabrication which was put about some of the sectarian papers and repeated on Harry's Place. Doubtless Cohen is too, since he draws much of his material from the Alliance for Workers Liberty and Harry's Place.

Indeed, as Andrew Murray of the StWC wrote to the Independent after Hari's attack, "we condemn all civilian deaths in Iraq, including those tens of thousands which are the responsibility of the occupying forces [Hari] supports." (Emphasis added).

Imagine someone who directly advocated the war accusing the antiwar movement of being complicit in murder. Imagine citing falsehood to do it. If you can imagine that, you've got yourself a column in the liberal press.

Fallujah... posted by lenin

Fallujah, like your worst date, has been fucked and forgotten. There is no need to be comprehensive in our review of the facts, and there is certainly no sensible dispute about them.

When the war was initially declared 'nearly over', Fallujah was an island of tranquility amid the desert storm. Looting and resistance activity were scarce, and the town took control of its affairs quite rapidly. The first mayor, chosen by residents, was Taha Bidaywi - a staunchly pro-US figure. However, the occupiers' incompetence and brutality swiftly alienated local residents - first, they set themselves up in former Ba'ath headquarters, which annoyed a few. Then, when a relatively small demonstration gathered outside the building where US soldiers were stationed to demand their exit, troops fired on the crowd and killed 15 civilians. Patrols and frequent raids on houses agitated and alienated residents even further. Resistance cells began to develop and, to mangle a media cliche, the "cycle of violence" escalated. Following a particularly bloody attack on four American mercenaries, the occupiers prepared and carried out a horrendous assault on Fallujah, bombing civilian areas, sniping at the unarmed and filling ambulances with bullet-holes. Outraged, thousands of Iraqis from across the country - Sunni and Shi'ite - gathered on Fallujah with medical aid and assistance for their stricken countrymen. Bush, a uniter and not a divider, had practically the whole country against him. Control was finally handed over to Major General Muhammad Latif and a brigade including many of those who had resisted US troops. That was not a situation that was destined to last.

A propaganda line was prepared, while Fallujah was peppered with repeated bombardment. Foreign fighters had taken Fallujah, we were told. Zarqawi was in Fallujah. The greatest evil since Fu Manchu was weaving webs of destruction from a hidey-hole in a Sunni city. Fallujah was bombed, and stormed by troops who were prepared to fire on anything that moved. One hospital was bombed and another was siezed - in order, it was said, to prevent doctors from issuing negative propaganda about civilian casualties. There were no civilians in Fallujah, US military officials averred, even though they had forced all males of fighting age to remain in the city. Of course, Zarqawi was not found there, and the BBC reported in the 'preparatory' bombing phase that there was no reliable evidence of 'foreign fighters' in Fallujah . Zarqawi, like those elusive weapons of mass whatever, had sneaked across the desert and deposited himself behind a sand dune. It later transpired that the resistance leaders were local, not foreign . Via Remain Calm , I learn that Zarqawi was never expected to be there , according to Major General Richard Natonski, who ran the operation:

"We never expected them to be there. We're not after Zarqawi. We're after insurgents in general," Natonski said.

800 civilians were believed to have been killed.

Once the assault was over, residents were told that they may eventually be allowed to come back and live - but they would have to wear ID badges with their name and address clearly displayed and work in militarised labour camps . Meanwhile, the UN issued warnings about the state of refugees, who would take months and not merely days to return - they were subsisting without much food or water, and would have no electricity in their homes and hospitals when they returned.

So, how is Fallujah coming along? Try this : "completely devastated", "I don't see a single building that is functioning", "rotting bodies"... Fallujah is a "city of ghosts" where dogs feed on the decomposing corpses. This is what emerges in a documentary film to be shown on Channel Four news tonight. News reports illustrate some of the destruction :

Few houses escaped damage from the intense American air raids late last year and the insurgent bombings and shootings that followed. Work teams have cleared rubble from the streets, but it is still tangled with downed power lines. Craters cut off access to side streets, and some buildings have walls or ceilings missing if they weren't simply destroyed.

Unremarkably, the US has gained little from the attack except to spread the insurgeny and generate fury among Fallujans. Naturally, their troops continue to shoot up vehicles at checkpoints , torture and murder innocent people , and bomb houses containing civilians . On every index, the occupation of Iraq is a moral and political disaster. And Fallujah is the sign and symbol of that disaster.

Still, instead of thinking about that and the approximately 100,000 dead (before the attack on Fallujah), or the desperate plans to introduce 'death squads', or even the fact that child malnutrition is double what it was before the war, you could always have a read of the US government's assessment of the progress achieved in The New Iraq. What, I wonder, would they consider a failure?

Profile of The Curmudgeonly. posted by lenin

Philip Challinor tells the future , and its horrid. His blog, The Curmudgeonly, is a hilarious series of 'news reports' from the year 2020 - but like most fiction set in the future, it is really about the present. And the best the old curmudgeon (he's only 35) can say about the present is that it isn't as bad as what he just thought up.

Take the following, a satire on the Jerry Springer Opera controversy:

The BBC is set to broadcast the musical Disgusted, Tunbridge Wells despite one of the largest levels of public complaint in the corporation's history.

The stage version of the musical has been running in London's West End for nearly two years, and has been an extremely popular, if controversial hit, consistently outselling even Cameron Windcheater's Carry On Falluja.

The BBC's announcement six months ago that it would be broadcasting the musical prompted an immediate reaction from the tabloids. The Sun objected to the "obscene implications" of the song and dance routine Hey Mr Bluenose, in which most of the adjectives and half of the nouns are replaced by "censorship" bleeps.

"These bleeps carry clear implications that the song contains evil obscenities. We would not want to hear the obscenities, so why must we hear the vile verses which contain them?" wrote Sun editor Michael Portillo in a "The Sun Says Special" column last autumn.

Meanwhile the Daily Maul objected to the song Decent People Shouldn't Have to See This on the grounds that "the lyrics implied that there was something wrong with being a decent person" - an impression that could well cause irreparable moral damage to any children who might be watching the broadcast, the paper said.

Cameron Windcheater. There is a healthy and hilarious drizzle of these Brass Eye-style character names in each report - later on, the Maul's editor is called Gaynor Speedhump. If you're not tittering, you're not paying attention.

The Curmudgeonly doesn't content itself with casually pissing on the inflamed and incensed, however. He likes to give the Prime Minister a gentlemanly kicking whenever the mood takes him:

New measures could soon be put in place to combat the growing "culture of blame" in Britain, the Prime Minister announced today.

"The culture of blame which pertains in this country today is an unhealthy and debilitating trend," the Prime Minister said. "A democratic government cannot allow itself to be swayed merely by the opinions of the public, unless those opinions convey a duly positive and constructive attitude."

The Government is known to be concerned about the resignation of former Minister of Freedom, David Blunted, because of blame attached to him. It is feared that, if nothing is done, blame might also be attached to other ministers, thus limiting their freedom of action.

The 'culture of blame' is one of the most mind-numbing bromides to emerge in political culture for some decades. In some ways, it fits perfectly into New Labour's political language in which verbs are largely subtracted. (No one does anything, things just happen; we can't alter our conditions, just adapt to them; your company didn't sack 200 people, the conditions of the knowledge economy just restructured the market).

Aside from regular updates from the future, the curmudgeon began his blogging career with a series of planetary profiles packed with references that are both esoteric and Aesopian. He is also given to prolific literary reviewing a perusal of which reveals a penchant for the fantastic and, obviously, the satiric.

Finally, Mr Challinor enjoys a touch of post-prandial criticism , particularly if it enables him to detonate a few sarcastic, sinistral lexical explosives under the nose of The Guardian's pusillanimous editor.

Witty and opprobrious, The Curmudgeonly awaits the serenading of some media outlet - so that he can chuck it right back in their fucking face. As a political writer, he is hilarious; as a comedian, he is deadpan. Like the best satirists, he is funny because he is serious. Most importantly, the curmudgeon is never sanguine - in fact, he rather makes the BBC 2's 'Grumpy Old Men' look like a bunch of whining middle-class former coke addicts by comparison.

Aceh Blackout Update... posted by lenin

Congratulations are due to The Guardian for finally covering the repression in Aceh - in a piece entitled Attacks by Indonesian rebels put aid workers on alert . Think about what is implied by the opening paragraphs:

The global effort to bring relief to countries devastated by the tsunami is under threat from the re-emergence of insurgencies in both Indonesia and Sri Lanka.
Indonesia's army stepped up security yesterday in Aceh following gunfire at the weekend in the provincial capital Banda Aceh, close to the UN's main compound. Nobody was hurt. Police blamed separatist rebels of Gam, or the Free Aceh Movement, which has been fighting for independence from Jakarta for 25 years.

The article's authors do not even cover their shame with a fig-leaf ('conflict' threatens aid is the usual line), instead repeating what the Indonesian military has claimed. Unmentioned is the fact that Indonesian human rights activists consider the presence and performance of the Indonesian military the main block to aid. They call on the government to suspend the status of 'civil emergency' and report that aid is being controlled by the military, who have rejected help with the distribution of food and medical supplies. The same is maintained by Human Rights Watch , who urge that aid distribution should be taken out of the hands of the military and put in the disposal of appropriate governmental and non-governmental bodies.

The Guardian article gives the impression that the Indonesian use of force ("stepped up security...") was reactive and not a continuation of their repression in the region. In fact, the GAM had proffered a unilateral ceasefire after the calamity that struck Aceh. But Indonesian military chiefs insisted that offensive operations would continue :

"Our security operations continue, the only difference is that it may be less in scale and intensity," Lieutenant-Colonel Nachrowi, of the military headquarters' general information department, said on Friday.

"The principle is that all our forces in Aceh are basically continuing their duty under the security operation. But they also have to accord a large portion of their time for the humanitarian relief efforts.

"We continue to launch raids into suspected GAM (Free Aceh Movement) areas and our vigilance remains high."

Of course, there may be some cause for confusion when, just days later, the Commander of Indonesian Armed Forces insists that they are not conducting operations against the GAM. (Indeed, to hear him tell it, the rebels are kidnapping aid workers and stealing food like there's no tomorrow. There is no proof of his claims on the former, and the latter would involve the GAM wresting food supplies from the Indonesian military).

But there has been shooting, and a UN observer who witnessed the event says it was an Indonesian military officer and not GAM rebels behind the trigger.

Naturally, The Guardian makes no mention of this or the fact that behind Indonesia's repression is the vigorous support and munificence of the United Kingdom (we will even give Indonesia the money to buy our weapons). The figure of the 'compassionate' liberal journalist (shirt-sleeves rolled up, a soft croak in the voice, a glint of moisture in the eye, and a fixed, determined expression), is belied by the simple refusal to report the facts. Here is a situation where Britain can easily help curtail a humanitarian crisis - by ceasing to contribute to it.

Googled. posted by lenin

Sunday nights. They're always a bit boring aren't they? Hence, "Googled".

First of all, I have received a hit from someone seeking to pair Durkheim and Tsunami . What could possibly be the fucking connection? Answers on a comments entry please.

Someone else was seeking the origin of the phrase "charm offensive" . Look, diligent researcher, I haven't a clue. Someone was looking for another oxymoron, like 'military intelligence' or 'fair and balanced' is my surmise. Here's a 'phrase dictionary' definition for you.

Now, just fuck off will you?

Update: Also had a sinister guest looking for contemporary torture techniques , and another who is as convinced as I am that England Rugby are Shit .

"The Salvador Option" posted by lenin

According to Newsweek, the Bush administration has a new plan for Iraq. And it is known as the 'Salvador Option' :

The Pentagon is intensively debating an option that dates back to a still-secret strategy in the Reagan administration’s battle against the leftist guerrilla insurgency in El Salvador in the early 1980s. Then, faced with a losing war against Salvadoran rebels, the U.S. government funded or supported "nationalist" forces that allegedly included so-called death squads directed to hunt down and kill rebel leaders and sympathizers. Eventually the insurgency was quelled, and many U.S. conservatives consider the policy to have been a success—despite the deaths of innocent civilians and the subsequent Iran-Contra arms-for-hostages scandal. (Among the current administration officials who dealt with Central America back then is John Negroponte, who is today the U.S. ambassador to Iraq. Under Reagan, he was ambassador to Honduras.)

Pause for a second. There is no "allegedly" or "so-called" about the death squads that operated in El Salvador from 1979 to 1992. The UN-sponsored Truth Commission investigating the matter put it as simply as this:

The reformist coup by young military officers in 1979 ushered in a new period of intense violence. Various circles in the armed forces and the private sector vied for control of the repressive apparatus. Hundreds and even thousands of people perceived as supporters or active members of a growing guerrilla movement...were murdered. Members of the army, the Treasury Police, the National Guard, and the National Police formed "squads" to do away with enemies. Private and semi-official groups also set up their own squads or linked up with existing structures within the armed forces. …

It should be said that, while it is possible to differentiate the armed forces death squads from the civilian death squads, the borderline between the two was often blurred. For instance, even the quads that were not organized as part of any State structure were often supported or tolerated by State institutions. Frequently, death squads operated in coordination with the armed forces and acted as a support structure for their activities. The clandestine nature of these activities made it possible to conceal the State's responsibility for them and created an atmosphere of complete impunity for the murderers who worked in the squads. …

These death squads were partially home-grown, developing out of a long-standing collusion between landowners, businessmen and the military elite. But crucial too was the activity of the United States government, specifically through the CIA. Testimony from Salvadoran army officials reveals that the CIA involved them in regular briefings, trained them in torture methods, provided a monthly budget and even funded little expenses like having black window panes installed on vans so that executions and the like could be carried out in secret. One former officer named Richard Castro described how, after training with the US, he had been told by his fellow officers of two towns that had been captured, each with a population of roughly three hundred. He was told that its inhabitants would be tortured for information, then executed. He later discovered that all six hundred had been killed. According to Rene Hurtado, who worked as an intelligence agent for the Treasury Police (one of three Salvadoran paramilitary forces) before fleeing to Minnesota, the US had taught interesting torture techniques to his colleagues at Army Staff headquarters. In particular favour among torture methods were electric shock, suffocation, mutilation, the tearing of skin from the body and sticking needles into the flesh. He also describes the use of US-manufactured torture equipment, including something that looked like a radio "with General Electric written on it". Witnesses describe how Colonel Nicolas Carranza, who took to death squad activity with unusual facility and enthusiasm, was funded by the CIA to the tune of $90,000 a year. The Atlacatl Battalion, created under US pressure, was responsible for some of the worst atrocities, including the murder of Jesuit priests and the El Mozote massacre .

The activities of US-Salvadoran paramilitaries did not end there, however. In the US, Frank Varelli worked for the FBI tracking the activities of domestic opponents of Reagan's policies in Central America, focusing in particular on Salvadoran immigrants facing deportation - he would match his lists with 'death lists' supplied by the Salvadoran junta.

In all, the repression in El Salvador took 75,000 lives. Duarte's regime, funded to the tune of $6 billion by the US, became one of the most notorious and bloody governments in the region. In 1992, a peace agreement was reached, and since then the FMLN has dominated in elections, despite thinly-veiled threats from Arena (the party of the old junta) that votes for the FMLN would lead to reprisals from Washington.

That conveys some of what, apparently, awaits Iraq. Indeed, Dick Cheney telegraphed this during his pre-election debate with John Edwards:

Twenty years ago we had a similar situation in El Salvador. We had -- guerrilla insurgency controlled roughly a third of the country, 75,000 people dead, and we held free elections. I was there as an observer on behalf of the Congress.

...

And today El Salvador is a whale of a lot better because we held free elections. The power of that concept is enormous. And it will apply in Afghanistan, and it will apply as well in Iraq.

I'll leave to your imagination what grotesque creatures lurk in Cheney's belfry. Returning to the Newsweek story, we learn exactly why the 'Salvadoran Option' is being considered:

Prime Minister Ayad Allawi is said to be among the most forthright proponents of the Salvador option. Maj. Gen.Muhammad Abdallah al-Shahwani, director of Iraq’s National Intelligence Service, may have been laying the groundwork for the idea with a series of interviews during the past ten days. Shahwani told the London-based Arabic daily Al-Sharq al-Awsat that the insurgent leadership—he named three former senior figures in the Saddam regime, including Saddam Hussein’s half-brother—were essentially safe across the border in a Syrian sanctuary. "We are certain that they are in Syria and move easily between Syrian and Iraqi territories," he said, adding that efforts to extradite them "have not borne fruit so far."

Shahwani also said that the U.S. occupation has failed to crack the problem of broad support for the insurgency. The insurgents, he said, "are mostly in the Sunni areas where the population there, almost 200,000, is sympathetic to them." He said most Iraqi people do not actively support the insurgents or provide them with material or logistical help, but at the same time they won’t turn them in. One military source involved in the Pentagon debate agrees that this is the crux of the problem, and he suggests that new offensive operations are needed that would create a fear of aiding the insurgency. "The Sunni population is paying no price for the support it is giving to the terrorists," he said. "From their point of view, it is cost-free. We have to change that equation."

So, they're going to make it cost the Sunnis something, and - presumably - the same goes for anyone else who doesn't line up behind the 'coalition' and its ruling junta.

Media blackout on Aceh. posted by lenin

Bewilderment. You haven't the slightest clue what I'm talking about. "Media blackout on Aceh?", you say. "There's been little but Aceh on the news for over a week!"

True, but there's been little talk of Aceh - you know, this Aceh . In fact, one of the few references to it in the British media that I have seen is in this splendid Pilger article in the New Statesman. There have been repeated attacks by the Indonesian military, ignoring a unilateral ceasefire offered by Acehnese rebels:

"Our security operations continue, the only difference is that it may be less in scale and intensity," Lieutenant-Colonel Nachrowi, of the military headquarters' general information department, said on Friday.

"The principle is that all our forces in Aceh are basically continuing their duty under the security operation. But they also have to accord a large portion of their time for the humanitarian relief efforts.

"We continue to launch raids into suspected GAM (Free Aceh Movement) areas and our vigilance remains high."

One possible reason that these attacks have not been covered is that journalists witnessing fighting have been cleared out by the Indonesian military and told to keep quiet . Indeed, the continued restrictions on media and human rights organisations have prompted a polite missive from Human Rights Watch to President Yudhoyono. But the BBC and ITV, for instance, have reported extensively from Aceh, and only one report has so far been produced on the atrocities by the BBC - which describes merely how "Tensions Flare in Quake Countries" . The same goes for the American media. So why has there been so little discussion of this repression being carried out during the worst humanitarian crisis for the region since the slaughter in East Timor?

Perhaps it is because, as the New York Times put it , "Aceh, an overwhelmingly Muslim province with rich oil and gas reserves, is far more important to Indonesia's future and that of Southeast Asia than East Timor ever was". It is also very important to ExxonMobil, which has been sued by the International Labour Rights Fund on behalf of Aceh residents who claim they have been subject to murder, torture and attacks by Indonesian military units guarding ExxonMobil's gas fields. It could also have something to do with BP's extensive involvement in the region. But then, as even the sub-literate - and usually the sub-literate - are aware, news corporations owe no fealty to private companies operating in other spheres. For shame! Those who evinced such courage over the lies about Iraq are not about to be cowed by pressure from industry, even if it was forthcoming.

Perhaps, then, it is because the United Kingdom is arming the Indonesian government to the teeth . It could also be because the Bush administration has been manouevring to get military aid restored to Indonesia, and has recently been trying to restore military training programmes to the junta (which is only partially less a junta for having an elected body manage its PR). But the British media that allowed itself to be judged by the state (and moreover accepted its verdict), is too vigilant to have government ministers, spinners and hacks tell them what is news.

Yet, the puzzle remains.

Even a cursory investigation into what the Indonesian military has been up to in Aceh of late puts the BBC's pusillanimous headline to shame. Torture, now a global commodity, is ubiquitous in Aceh. As indeed, are arbitrary arrests, extra-judicial killings, summary killings . An ITN viewer would have no idea that there was any tragedy in Aceh than the one created by the weather. A BBC viewer would know of 'skirmishes', 'unconfirmed reports' and 'back and forth accusations' - she would know nothing of the silent deaths taking place under martial law.

Like our sainted Prime Minister, I do not believe the British public suffer from 'compassion fatigue'. It is simply difficult to know what to do with compassion when information is so curiously scarce.

Brown's "Marshall Plan" posted by lenin

Lord, but The Guardian loves Gordon Brown . So much so, in fact, that they will even repeat old news stories on his behalf and plaster them on the front page with a large, adoring photograph. In particular:

Gordon Brown launched Britain's campaign for a Marshall plan for Africa yesterday when he called on the international community to harness the "passion of compassion" generated by the Asian tsunami disaster to make 2005 a breakthrough year for the world's poorest continent.
Unveiling the government's three-pronged plan for greater debt relief, more generous aid and better trade access, the chancellor said the global response to the tsunami disaster was an expression of the public's demand for action to tackle poverty.

What is this three pronged plan? Why, just this:

· Debts owed by the world's poorest countries, including Sri Lanka, to institutions such as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund should be written off

· A doubling of aid to $100bn (£55bn) a year

· Better trade terms to help poor countries to build up their export capacity while rich countries dismantle their protectionist barriers.

The first is an old policy , and its extension from Britain to the IMF and the World Bank would hardly be a result of Gordon Brown's Olympian efforts, while the second is two years old and not a specifically British policy. The third platform is again a policy aimed at other countries rather than Britain, and is almost three years old . In fact, all of these policies represent aspirations for what other countries and international agencies might do, with varying degrees of plausibility and laudibility. They don't even have the virtue of recycling old money as the Chancellor is wont to do, because he isn't proposing any specific funding from Britain. And, however you judge these policies, they are all rehashed from some years ago.

There is practically no news content in The Guardian's story whatsoever. All that is new is that Gordon Brown and the Prime Minister are taking advantage of the tsunami to make a great fuss about an old policy on aid which is both flawed (because of trade conditions attached to it) and unlikely to succeed even on its own terms (because it will rely on raising the money from financial markets. Unsurprisingly, the Chancellor and Prime Minister's remarks on the subject are quoted at great length and without the slightest criticism.

You may as well be aware that post-World War II Marshall Plan aid amounted to a total of $100 billion in today's money. None of it was ever intended to be paid back.

Dr Death. posted by lenin

Only Ken Dodd has sent more old ladies to sleep than Dr Harold Shipman, and he didn't even do it on purpose. The medical doctor is a repository of such trust, such reverence indeed, that it is hard to credit stories like this . Doctors and psychiatrists participated in the torture of Iraqi prisoners, it seems, both by divulging medical records and by collaborating with interrogators.

It shouldn't be a surprise. As Martin Amis points out in Yellow Dog, doctors are not to be trusted. Maps are the ultimate form of power-knowledge, and imagine what someone with a map of your body or brain could do. If you can't be bothered to imagine, let me tell you. They can inject poisons into a woman's cervix, experiment with new forms of castration, cut you and inject sulfanilamide into the wound, chop off breasts, prepare cyanide salts to kill you, vivisect you, chop up your liver, split open your skull while you are conscious and experiment on your brain, inject tropical diseases into your bloodstream, bleed you to death, have you shot, beaten, shrink your head...


The shrunken head of a prisoner discovered at Buchenwald.

All in the name of research . Of course, some of what I described above was perfectly common in 19th Century America. Much of modern gynaecology developed from experiments on Irish women and slaves.

I'm not saying you should start fearing your family doctor but, you know, think about what they can do if they want to. Harold Shipman had acquired the cognomen "Dr Death" for years before the alarm bells rang. If my Dr had a nick-name like that, I'd have asked some fucking questions.

Rushdie on liberal collapse. posted by lenin

From The Guardian :

How disappointing it is to read that Ian Jack (Beyond belief, Saturday Review, January 1) was happy to see the freedom of speech of Murdoch employees (including himself) defended by the massed ranks of the Metropolitan police "and their horses" at Wapping in 1986 and 1987, but, in the face of protests by a few religious thugs, is a lot less certain - "would that have been wise?" - about the wisdom of defending the rights of the playwright Gurpreet Kaur Bhatti and the menaced theatre where her play Behzti was staged.
Mr Jack comes perilously close to the currently fashionable Blairite politics of religious appeasement at all costs. He goes on: "The state has no law forbidding a pictorial representation of the Prophet ... but I never expect to see such a picture. On the one hand, there is the individual's right to exhibit or publish one; on the other hand, the immeasurable insult and damage to life and property that the exercise of such a right would cause. In this case, we understand that the price is too high." What condescending nonsense - and it's ignorant, too. I have before me many examples of the long Islamic tradition of pictorial representations of the Prophet - from Timurid Herat, for example, and from Iran. Should we now censor ourselves because the current potentates of the Islamic faith are more repressive than their predecessors? Do we have no principles of our own?

The continuing collapse of liberal, democratic, secular and humanist principles in the face of the increasingly strident demands of organised religions is perhaps the most worrying aspect of life in contemporary Britain. That even Mr Jack's principles are wobbling is a sign of how serious the problem is.
Salman Rushdie
London

It was astonishing how many 'left' authors, journalists and celebrities were prepared to believe and argue that Rushdie invited his fatwa on himself, and he is perfectly placed to see how such allegedly 'tolerant' gestures often conceal racist contempt. ("Is it wise to be stirring these people up?") There is, however, one blind-spot in Rushdie's argument. True, he picks up on Blairite 'religious appeasement', but it should be pointed out that the latter is contiguous with increased state repression of Muslims. The 'incitement to religious hatred' law is an example of how New Labour would rather defend the right of Muslims not to hear unpleasant things about the Prophet than defend their right not to be locked up without trial, or held in island prisons where torture and beatings are said to be widespread. They appeal to Muslims in the most reactionary, inept and condescending ways (think of the 'faith schools' debacle, Oona King sending 'Eid Mubarak' cards out to any constituent with an Asian-sounding name...), rather than on universalising principles of human rights and social justice. An 'incitement to religious hatred' law is easier for them than ceasing arms sales to Israel, withdrawing from Iraq, demanding the end of Guantanamo-style prisons etc.

That touches on another point. Rushdie fingers 'strident' religious outfits for forcing the collapse of 'liberal, democratic, secular and humanist' ideals. No. These ideals are being gutted from within. There is growing evidence that the Abu Ghraib torture rituals were known of and approved from above . The plans for permanent Guantanamo-style prisons are an extension of this logic, in which the Geneva conventions are seen as "quaint" by US officials, and the term 'human rights' is reduced to a cynosure of imperialist discourse. The Patriot Act, the Prevention of Terrorism Act and countless copies across the world formalise the growing authoritarianism of Western liberal democracies, and the increasing impatience of ruling elites with the very formulae by which they once legitimised their rule against communist insurgency - human rights, freedom of speech and organisation, right to trial by one's peers etc etc.

The liberal collapse should be seen as a symptom of the termites within rather than a reaction to the exigencies of some religio-cultural dispute.

The Sosophists posted by lenin

From MSNBC :

A study by researchers at the University of Toronto suggests the language used in the popular television show both reflected and influenced speaking trends.

In the report “So Cool; So Weird; So Innovative”, to be presented this weekend at the American Dialect Society’s annual meeting in Boston, linguistics professor Sali Tagliamonte and co-author Chris Roberts focused on intensifiers -- words used to emphasize a point -- and found that the language used by the TV characters not only mirrored what goes on in the real world, but actually pushes it forward.

“’So’ is the new favorite -- at least among mainstream culture,” Tagliamonte told Reuters on Thursday, adding that no study has been done on why the word is so popular.

So what? So so.

Philip Roth, Period. posted by lenin

From The Dying Animal:

"You violated the law of aesthetic distance. You sentimentalized the aesthetic experience with this girl--you personalized it, you sentimentalized it, and you lost the sense of separation essential to your enjoyment. Do you know when that happened? The night she took the tampon out. The necessary aesthetic separation collapsed not while you watched her bleeding--that was all right, that was fine--but when you couldn't restrain yourself and went down on your knees. And what the hell compelled you? . . . Drinking her blood . . . constituted the abandonment of an independent critical position. . . . Worship me, she says, worship the mystery of the bleeding goddess, and you do it. You stop at nothing. You lick it. You consume it. You digest it. She penetrates you. What next . . . ? A glass of her urine? How long before you would have begged her for feces? I'm not against it because it's unhygienic. I'm not against it because it's disgusting. I'm against it because it's falling in love. The only obsession everyone wants: 'love.' People think that falling in love they make themselves whole? The Platonic union of souls? I think otherwise. I think you're whole before you begin. And the love fractures you. You're whole, and then you're cracked open"

Googled. posted by lenin

Proper blogging resumes later (probably this afternoon).

For the moment, I despair. You worry me, readers. Particularly, the Australian reader who made his way here by typing the following words into Google:

Really young girls being fucked the first time .

If you return to the Tomb, my antipodean friend, let me give you a hint: it doesn't pay to be that specific when you're trying to dig up porn on the internet. You have to leave out all but the most essential words. So I'm told.

Update: Milder one this time. Someone locates me with the words traditional masks from the Gorane tribe . Unfortunately, my interest in Sudan doesn't stretch that far.

Hearts and minds. posted by lenin

According to The Times, Iraqi resistance fighters now outnumber occupation troops with approximately 200,000 active insurgents. Note that this is the assessment of "Iraqi intelligence" which is directed by the CIA . It is hard to believe that such an assessment would have been issued without the latter's approval. The assaults on Najaf, Fallujah and Mosul were supposed to put down the resistance, just as the appearance of Ahmed Chalabi among a patsy Shi'ite coalition was supposed to signal the acquiescence of the Iraqi Shia to indefinite occupation.

Some will rush to describe this as an outburst of vengeful Sunni aggression designed to curtail a potentially crippling electoral process. No:

General Shahwani said that there were at least 40,000 hardcore fighters attacking US and Iraqi troops, with the bulk made up of part-time guerrillas and volunteers providing logistical support, information, shelter and money.

“People are fed up after two years without improvement,” he said. “People are fed up with no security, no electricity, people feel they have to do something. The army (dissolved by the American occupation authority) was hundreds of thousands. You’d expect some veterans would join with their relatives, each one has sons and brothers.”

Despair at the occupation and the disasters it has entailed drives this resistance, more or less as common sense would dictate.

But since I mention the elections, the article mentions that they may well have to be delayed - citing the views of the Iraqi defense minister, who I previously reported as saying that only in certain Sunni areas would they be delayed. In Ramadi and Fallujah, where a large, but under-reported demonstration demanded the immediate withdrawal of coalition forces at the weekend, there are neither registered voters nor voter registration stations, according to Knight Ridder .

Finally, don't take a gubernatorial position in Baghdad - two months after the deputy governor was shot dead in his car, the same fate has met the governor of that city.

Permanent state of emergency. posted by lenin

Concept:

A notable precursor in this field of para-legal 'biopolitics', in which administrative measures are gradually replacing the rule of law, was Alfredo Stroessner's regime in Paraguay in the 1960s and 1970s, which took the logic of the state of exception to an absurd, still unsurpassed extreme. Under Stroessner, Paraguay was - with regard to its Constitutional order - a 'normal' parliamentary democracy with all freedoms guaranteed; however, since, as Stroessner claimed, we were all living in a state of emergency because of the worldwide struggle between freedom and Communism, the full implementation of the Constitution was forever postponed and a permanent state of emergency obtained. This state of emergency was suspended every four years for one day only, election day, to legitimise the rule of Stroessner's Colorado Party with a 90 per cent majority worthy of his Communist opponents. The paradox is that the state of emergency was the normal state, while 'normal' democratic freedom was the briefly enacted exception. This weird regime anticipated some clearly perceptible trends in our liberal-democratic societies in the aftermath of 11 September. Is today's rhetoric not that of a global emergency in the fight against terrorism, legitimising more and more suspensions of legal and other rights? The ominous aspect of John Ashcroft's recent claim that 'terrorists use America's freedom as a weapon against us' carries the obvious implication that we should limit our freedom in order to defend ourselves. Such statements from top American officials, especially Rumsfeld and Ashcroft, together with the explosive display of 'American patriotism' after 11 September, create the climate for what amounts to a state of emergency, with the occasion it supplies for a potential suspension of rule of law, and the state's assertion of its sovereignty without 'excessive' legal constraints. America is, after all, as President Bush said immediately after 11 September, in a state of war. The problem is that America is, precisely, not in a state of war, at least not in the conventional sense of the term (for the large majority, daily life goes on, and war remains the exclusive business of state agencies). With the distinction between a state of war and a state of peace thus effectively blurred, we are entering a time in which a state of peace can at the same time be a state of emergency. (Slavoj Zizek, London Review of Books , 23 May 2002)

Example:

The United States is preparing to hold terrorism suspects indefinitely without trial, replacing the Guantanamo Bay prison camp with permanent prisons in the Cuban enclave and elsewhere, it was reported yesterday.
The new prisons are intended for captives the Pentagon and the CIA suspect of terrorist links but do not wish to set free or put on trial for lack of hard evidence.

The plans have emerged at a time when the US is under increasing scrutiny for the interrogation methods used on the roughly 550 "enemy combatants" at the Guantanamo Bay base, who do not have the same rights as traditional prisoners of war.

A leaked Red Cross report described the techniques used as "tantamount to torture". (Julian Borger, The Guardian , 5th January 2005)

The liberal-democratic 'state of emergency' probably has many precedents, but one that stands out in particular: Israel in the occupied territories. According to UN investigators , Israel's military policy of defining 16 and 17 year olds as adults contravenes Israeli law, as does its treatment of those it targets and detains. Redefining childhood under a military order enables Israeli troops to target and kill children (200 since the beginning of the last intifada) without sanction. Children as young as 12 may be detained for a maximum of six months if they throw stones at Israeli soldiers, while 14 year olds can get as much as 12 months inside. Further, there is ample evidence of Palestinian children being subject to torture under Israel's criminal justice system:

Israel is proud of its judicial system and administration of justice. As a nation, Israel is committed to the rule of law and to due process of law in criminal proceedings. There are, however, serious doubts as to whether this commitment extends to the Palestinian Territory, and particularly to the treatment of Palestinian children in the justice system. Consultations with the principal Palestinian, Israeli and international non-governmental organizations working in this field, the study of their carefully prepared reports, backed in some instances by affidavits from their victims, and interviews with several children who were detained, interrogated and imprisoned, reveals an alarming pattern of inhuman treatment of children under the military justice system in the Palestinian Territory. The Special Rapporteur would have preferred to discuss this matter with the Israeli authorities before reporting on it. Unfortunately, the Government of Israel has elected not to cooperate with the Special Rapporteur. In these circumstances, the Special Rapporteur has no alternative but to raise the issue as a prima facie case of inhuman treatment to which the Government of Israel should respond.

Torture methods include sleep deprivation, shaking, threats, heads being shoved down toilets which are repeatedly flushed, blindfolding and beating. Children are usually detained for months before even being tried and are often fined large sums of money (US$250).

Israel, of course, has its own 'Guantanamo' known as Facility 1391 . It has trained assassination squads for America in Iraq. Israel pioneered the United States' current method of sealing off towns and cities with barbed wire in an occupied country.

Behold: The pupil teaches the master.

The Protestant Ethic. posted by lenin

I've always been interested in Weber's assertion of a causal connection between the rise of puritan values and the rise of capitalism. In many ways, I had thought that the relationship was rather the opposite that he had stipulated: that the new middle class, the burghers and tradesmen who were already forming a capitalist society simply happened to be drawn toward a certain kind of Protestantism. On the other hand, was it not the aristocratic class which had enabled capitalism through its enclosures of the land, forcing peasants out into the towns where they would both form the labour market and a market for consumption? Things become even more tricky when you look at how Weber draws out the connections he claims exist. He seems, at times, to proffer a stronger thesis (that capitalism could only have come into existence with the unique X-factor of puritanism) than is justified by the evidence he cites; at others, he seems merely to say that the two are connected. For a theorist so profound and exact in the development of his concepts, this is extraordinary. What follows is a rough sketch of Weber's thesis, drawing on the original text and a few cricitical or corroboratory works by other authors. Now, you and I both know there's nothing good on telly, so go ahead and give it a once-over.

"Elective affinity"

Weber’s thesis, in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (TPESC), is approximately thus: The rise of capitalism in the West is part of its uniqueness, the unique result of an “elective affinity” between the needs of capitalist production and the discipline of the Lutheran ‘calling’. (Weber, TPESC, chapter 3, 1930). There are two contradictory motives involved in capitalist production: 1) Amass wealth beyond personal need, and 2) Avoid the use of wealth to satisfy personal desire. These motives cohabit well with the demands of Protestantism that the believer devote herself to a life of good works, and the Puritan devotion to asceticism. (Ken Morrison, Marx, Durkheim, Weber: Formations of Modern Social Thought, 1995).

Weber’s approach to capitalism is significant for this thesis in a number of ways. First of all, he believed that capitalism was contrary to human nature, a freak occurrence that arose from the conjugation of a number of historical events and epochs, starting with the Greco-Roman city-states. This reflected a commitment to methodological individualism, his opposition to Marxist models which saw history as an ordered procession of stages (modes of production) which were universal. According to Weber, there is no order in history and its stages are unique rather than universal. Weber is interested in locating the general tendencies in history, but he is also alert to the importance of local variations and differences. He seeks to avoid a “one-sided materialistic” view of history, and therefore attempts to conjoin analysis of the material with the spiritual – that is, between patterns of belief and systems of social action. (Bryan S. Turner, Max Weber: From History to Modernity, 1992; Morrison, 1995). Weber contrasts Western capitalism to ‘Oriental’ civilisation in which, he argues, similar economic factors persisted to those which preceded the development of modern capitalism in European countries and yet did not result in countries like India or China developing modern capitalism. (Weber, Introduction to TPESC, 1930).

In his discussion, Weber details a number of connections between the persistence of Protestant values and the development of modern capitalism. Many centres of commercial activity – France, Germany, England, Scotland and Switzerland - evinced intense economic development, just as Protestantism was taking hold of Western Europe. (Morrison, 1995). In modern Europe (Weber wrote TPESC between 1902 and 1903), there was a correlation between religious affiliation and social stratification. Business leaders, owners of capital and highly skilled labourers were overwhelmingly Protestant. The relative dearth of Catholics involved in economic activity in Germany, for example, bucked the usual trend in which minorities are compelled by simple virtue of their marginalisation and oppression, to seek recognition in key industries and to excel even where they can receive no recognition from the State. (Weber, TPESC, chapter 1, 1930). Hence, the ensuing discussion.

The "spirit of capitalism"

The “spirit of capitalism” embodies three demands: 1) devotion to amassing wealth beyond personal needs, 2) commitment to unrelieved toil coupled with self-denial and 3) avoidance of use of wealth for personal enjoyment. (Morrison, 1995). Now, as Weber makes clear, this set of attitudes does not actually persist in modern capitalism. (Weber, TPESC, chapter 1, 1930). It is nevertheless the set of attitudes which eventuated in the development of modern capitalism. Weber adumbrates this “spirit” first by referring to the writings of Benjamin Franklin, a millionaire and self-help guru, specifically to a set of maxims to be found in his Necessary Hints to Those That Would Be Rich. Those hints include: 1) Time is money, 2) Credit is money, 3) Money is of the prolific, generating nature, 4) The good paymaster is the Lord of another man’s purse and 5) Evince a hard-working nature and it will boost one’s stand with creditors. “Truly,” says Weber, “what is preached here is not merely a means of making one’s way in the world, but a particular ethic.” It has “the character of an ethically-coloured maxim for life”. (Weber, TPESC, chapter 2, 1930). In fact, Weber goes on to describe Franklin’s recommendations as “moral attitudes” which are merely “coloured with utilitarianism”. Weber thinks he is justified in making these allusions because Franklin’s own life story speaks of his Calvinistic upbringing, and when Franklin is asked why should “money be made out of men”, he replies with a bible quote: “Seest thou a man diligent in his business? He shall stand before kings.” Franklin, however, had repudiated his Calvinist past when he wrote his manual so it is not clear whether he is entitled to his conclusions in this respect. (Elton, 1963).

Another way in which Weber illustrates the “spirit of capitalism” is by making a distinction between what he calls traditional capitalism and modern capitalism. Traditional capitalism endured until the 19th Century, and was episodic, adventurist, speculative etc. It included war, trade, piracy, even tax-bargaining with a feudal king. Modern capitalism involved the rationalisation of the labour process, the reinvestment of profit, and sustained and regular enterprise. The key difference he points to for his argument, however, is the attitude to work and consumption. Paying workers a higher piece rate in traditional capitalism had the effect of reducing the amount of work done, since they could obtain the same amount of money for less work. In modern capitalism, it would increase production since workers could get more money by working faster. This, he says, is because man does not wish to earn more and more money “by nature”, preferring his accustomed lifestyle. Capitalism has to overcome some stubborn resistance to get people to think and behave as consumers. (Weber, TPESC, chapter 2, 1930).

The "Protestant ethic"

This is where asceticism or the “Protestant ethic” comes in. The first part of the ethic discussed by Weber is the Lutheran notion of the “calling”, in which worldly avocations were considered God created and therefore “fulfillable in a spirit of worship”. This notion was known to medieval writers, but according to Weber it allowed Protestants to see in their daily life a devotion to God’s work. (Elton, 1963). The effect of the Reformation, Weber claimed, was that “the moral emphasis on, and the religious sanction of, organised worldly labour in a calling was mightily increased”. (Weber, TPESC, chapter 3, 1930). This was not enough in itself, however. The second aspect of this asceticism, therefore, is what Weber calls “worldly asceticism” which he attached especially to Calvinism. Calvin had rebuked the Catholic Church for its tolerance of worldly pleasures and its permissive doctrine toward salvation (in which “good works” would be considered a sufficient condition to erase sin and allow admittance to heaven). He proposed the doctrine of predestination in which: 1) God divides humanity into the ‘saved’ and the ‘damned’, 2) no believer can know his fate until it is revealed to her on death, 3) nothing can be done to relieve, or forgive, or reverse the decree, 4) God has abandoned all but the elect – Christ died only for them. To contain the resulting anxiety, Calvin placed two obligations on believers, the first being that they had an absolute duty to assume they were among the elect, the second being that they had to stave off doubt since this would be seen as a loss of faith. (Morrison, 1995; Weber, TPESC, chapter 4, 1930). As brotherly love could not be in the service of the flesh, it had to be expressed by work, in the service of God. This worldly grace served to allay the religious distress created by not knowing whether one was saved or damned. Unlike Catholic asceticism, there was no tendency to retreat from the world – this was asceticism in the world. (Weber, TPESC, chapter 4, 1930).

But it is through the work of Richard Baxter that Weber locates the link between the Puritan asceticism and the ‘spirit of capitalism’. A Presbyterian, he was inclined to religious moderation and dismayed by the more extreme doctrines of the fanatics. His book, the Christian Directory, was a compendium of Puritan ethics. Wealth, according to Baxter, is a moral danger – it invites idleness, relaxation, the temptations of the flesh. (Cock an eyebrow if you must, but some people still take this shit seriously.) A man should, to be certain of his state of grace, “do the works of him who has sent him, as long as it is yet day”. (Weber, TPESC, chapter 5, 1930). Labour was seen as a means both of fulfilling God’s will, and avoiding sin. Work had always been an approved ascetic device, but it was also now a condition of saving grace. There was also a tendency to regard the division of labour as providential, and also necessary to prevent idleness. And since God had his hand in all walks of life, if an opportunity for profit was placed before the Puritan, he was obliged to pursue it with a purpose. “To wish to be poor was, it was often argued, the same as wishing to be unhealthy … [asceticism] has the highest ethical appreciation of the sober, middle-class, self-made man.” Puritans also emphasised the virtues of formal law, insisting that Mosaic law retained its relevancy provided those trappings only relevant to Judaism were shorn - an important contribution to the development of capitalism. (Ibid).

There was a sense, however, in which the Puritan ethic was bound to disintegrate under the weight of its own creation. Weber cites John Wesley: “[R]eligion must necessarily produce both industry and frugality, and these cannot but produce riches. But as riches increase, so will pride, anger, and love of the world in all its branches … we must exhort all Christians to gain all they can, and save all they can; that is, in effect, to grow rich.” Or, as Weber notes, “the full economic effect of those great religious movements … generally came only after the peak of the purely religious enthusiasm was past.” (Weber, TPESC, chapter 5, 1930).

How accurate?

This is the trajectory of the “elective affinity” which was finally to result in the rise of modern capitalism. How accurate is this picture? Weber himself insisted that he was not arguing that capitalism “could only have arisen as the result of certain effects of the Reformation … On the contrary, we only wish to ascertain whether and to what extent religious forces have taken part in the qualitative formation and the quantitative expansion of this spirit in the world.” (Ibid). Indeed, Weber was positing his thesis of a “spirit of capitalism” as an “ideal-type”. Ideal-types, in the Weberian lexicon, are “logically and formally precise statements of possible relationships” which can then be tested for coherence and empirical validity. Weber’s argument was that within the setting of Western Europe in that historical epoch, and only within that setting, “the contribution of the Protestant ethic was indispensable to the rise of capitalism … In that sense only can the Protestant ethic be regarded as the cause of the rise of capitalism.” (Philip Abrams, Historical Sociology). Is even this, relatively weak, thesis compatible with the facts? There are some reasons to doubt this. For one thing, capitalism was well-developed in the south of Italy and Germany before Luther’s emergence as a reformer. And it subsequently developed without impediment in Catholic France, until the Thirty Years War. Anglican Britain and Catholic Belgium industrialised before more notable Protestant countries. (GR Elton, The Reformation, 1963). Moreover, as Maxime Rodinson has argued, it is possible to interpret the absence of capitalism in “Oriental” countries in a different and perhaps more pertinent light. After all, it wasn’t merely the Orient which failed to develop, it was also the rest of Asia and Africa – and this stagnation was confluent with the colonial expansion of Europe. It could be argued that the uniqueness of the West essentially comes down to its getting there first, and being able to subjugate the Rest, politically and economically. (Nazih Ayubi, Political Islam: Religion and Politics in the Arab World). And it was not really the petit-bourgeoisie and self-made men who were the agents of capitalism, as Weber supposes. A critical condition for the expansion of markets was the “enclosures” of land, in which peasants were thrown off the land so that it could be converted to pasture so as to sell sheep-wool. Many of those thrown off the land were forced to get jobs and accept wages in money, which made mass production sensible. In other words, the noble landlords and magnates, whose values were decidedly not those of Puritan asceticism, were in the vanguard of capitalism. (Sami Zubaida). What remains, perhaps, is that there is some connection between the rise of capitalism and the Reformation. It is not clear that it is a causal relationship and, if it is, in which direction the causality flows.

One more thing. Weber witnessed a confluence between hard work and Protestant values. He wasn't around to see the current President of the United States scamper about his ranch with his recently deceased mutt looking for doodle-bugs.

On the exploitation of suffering. posted by lenin

Some commentators (Matt Drudge, Norman Geras and others) took exception to the way in which a leftist commentator linked the disaster emanating from the Indian Ocean to the catastrophic imperialist intervention in Iraq and the occupation of Palestine. This article in particular was criticised for allegedly exploiting a natural disaster for political ends.

I don't need to tell you how to think about such judgements or about the thoughts which prompted them, but I will place a generous portion of my earnings on the idea that few of those scandalised by the piece linked to above will be as indignant about this or this . The first, a spurious attempt by Michael Howard MP to argue the merits of the free market on the basis of its alleged ameliorative effects on those suffering its most obviously baleful effects, at least attempts to elevate itself above party advocacy (although not very far). The second, a straightforward government press release which Hilary Benn MP may or may not have written, passes itself off as a column. It is nothing of the kind. Beyond the pedantries and pieties so typical of this government's way of selling itself to the British public, it contains nothing but white noise. It is simply a standard affirmation that the government is in touch with "the British public" and that the golden gloriole which had been scuffled and knocked askance during the Iraq misadventure is firmly back in position atop the Prime Minister's ample skull.

Forgive me for straying into the obvious, but it is in the nature of such things that media outlets and political leaders will seek to capitalise on them, and some may even see aspects in these events which appear to support their perspective on the world. Jo Moore wasn't merely taking the piss when she suggested that 9/11 was a good day to bury bad news (although her subsequent 'apology' obviously was a piss-take).

Still, one hopes that even a 'New Labour' spin-doctor would lack the chutzpah to exploit the Nazi holocaust . When Norman Finkelstein first accused the World Jewish Congress, among others, of exploiting the expropriation of the Jews by the Nazis for its own political and financial gain, he was howled down by its executive director Elan Steinberg as a phoney whose views were "warped". On a Channel 4 documentary, The Battle for the Holocaust, Steinberg asserted that Finkelstein's claim that the World Jewish Congress had amassed $7bn for its coffers was false. Further, Steinberg had been so outraged that he phoned the author and demand to know the source for his claim. (The source, of course, was footnoted on page 108 of the book, so the effort was unnecessary). "And he told me," Steinberg recounts, his voice dripping with contempt, "that the source for his claim was a German newspaper that said that. And this man thinks he is a scholar?"

True enough, the source was a report on the Stockholm Holocaust Conference in 2000 in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, of which I cite the relevant passage:

On Tuesday, the executive committee of the WJC met in Stockholm to discuss the disposition of the accumulated funds for persecuted or murdered Jews. In recent years, the WJC has primarily confronted Swiss banks with claims on relevant accounts that had long been dormant. Part of the deposits also consisted of fortunes resulting from gold looted by the Nazis from occupied territories and Jews, and which had been used for payments abroad, again primarily in Switzerland. The president of the WJC, Bronfman, said that the sum of the funds to repay and compensate survivors and dependents so far amounted to about $7 billion. A large part was supposed to go to living survivors or their heirs, and the rest for educational purposes.

The FAZ could be lying, and - being a German newspaper - could have sinister ulterior motives for doing so. On the other hand, Steinberg offered no good reason for assuming the story to be false, and did not rebut Bronfman's alleged claim with hard evidence although he had the opportunity to do so. Still, at least we know from the Independent's report that:

The World Jewish Congress, which has wrung billions of dollars in Holocaust restitution from European governments and companies, is being investigated by the authorities in New York following a series of unusual money transfers of hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Allegedly, Rabbi Israel Singer - who is president of the WJC - has been ordering unusual payments to a numbered bank account in Geneva. His long-time colleague and chief patron of the WJC, Edgar Bronfman, has ordered an internal enquiry. There is still a threat from Elliot Spitzer, the New York attorney-general, that the organisation could come under a full-scale formal enquiry if the sums don't add up.

It is pretty rank that any group might extract financial gain from the expropriation and extermination of 6 million Jews. Surely it is odious enough, already, the obscene amounts of money that lawyers and political associates negotiating and pressing these claims have made. And just as insulting, too, must be the ceaseless invocation of the Nazi holocaust to justify the construction and conduct of Israel, "the only democracy in the Middle East".

New Years Resolution. posted by lenin

Oscar Fingal O'Flahertie Wills Wilde was, as his very name suggests, not one for self-indulgent asceticism. As generous in nature as his enemies were mean, he never denied himself anything except a few years on the end of his life. An upper class socialist, a gay family man, a blasphemous aesthete for whom religion held some strange allure, an invert who became a convert - never has a human being so thoroughly had his cake, eaten it, then had a few more. He was a master of volupté, as volumous as he was voluble. Even in his disgrace, he managed to emerge from prison in the sensuous garb of humility: refashioned for the intended readers of De Profundis as Jesus Christ. Hence George Bernard Shaw's caustic remark that Oscar had come out of prison quite unaltered. All of which is a way of introducing you to the following bon mots from Wilde:

"There is a fatality about all good resolutions. They are invariably made too soon."

"Good resolutions are useless attempts to interfere with scientific laws. Their origin is pure vanity. Their result is absolutely nil. They give us, now and then, some of those luxurious sterile emotions that have a certain charm for the weak."

That should put a stop to all of that frenzied moral revival you're beating into yourself today.

Hurricane Katrina dossier posted by lenin

This is a post collecting all material from Lenin's Tomb on Hurricane Katrina, its foreground and aftermath. It is list chronologically, in descending order.

The Politics of the Weather
On the privatisation of the emergency management services to IEM (for a cool $500,000) and the failure of mayor Ray Nagin to make adequate preparations for poor residents of New Orleans.

Spot the Difference
On the racist coverage of the 'looting'.

The Politics of Weather Redux
Follow-up on the catastrophic neglect of New Orleans' residents.

The Politics of Weather 3: the shyness of experts
IEM attempts to cover up its role in the failure of hurricane preparations, and is exposed with the help of some screen grabs.

Natural disasters and free market fundamentalism
More on IEM's past and present failures, as well as a brief on James Lee Witt Associates - a partner in the IEM grab of emergency management.

God punches America for Gaza's Sake
Zionist nutter says God is punishing America for the Gaza withdrawal.

Letter from Louisiana
An on the ground report from Marxist literary theorist Carl Friedman.

Katrina, Katif and Katyusha: are they by any chance related?
Mainstream Zionist rag blames America once again.

With this much blood in the water, what else would you expect to start circling?
Mercenaries are sent into New Orleans, while Corporate America takes care of its own.

Pride Restored
IEM decides to restore its pride and admit its involvement in the hurricane emergency planning.

'The Only Reason They Haven't Looted Wal Mart is Because That is Where the Police Sleep
The US government is more interested in protecting property than in protecting lives.

Everything has gone according to plan
Against the lionisation of Mayor Ray Nagin: an examination of his history and his role in this disaster lays a substantial finger of blame on him.

Recipe for Lawlessness, Cajun-style
On the racist reporting of crime in New Orleans after the cataclysm.

American Splendor
US neoconservative fantasises about post-apocalyptic revenge on the lefties, peaceniks and traitors.

Duck & Cover, The National Guard is in the House
More on the mercenaries currently on the loose in New Orleans.

Reality Invades US Newsrooms
Perfumed, lacquered news anchors are mugged by the reality of the horror in New Orleans.

Floating Corpses 'Least of Public Health Worries'
US government's ill-informed health concerns for New Orleans.

It's all in the delivery
The medium becomes the message: the US media reaction to New Orleans starts to become the story itself, to the considerable expense of the facts on the ground.

Praise the Lord; Pass the Ammo
Guns and tear gas are in demand as New Orleans residents are viciously slandered as murderers, rapists etc.

Who did police shoot dead in New Orleans?
Some reports say they shot only the bad guys who were trying to kill army contractors. Others say they shot the contractors.

These authorities always have their guns at the ready and they look like they're enjoying intimidating people.
It's all sticks and no carrot in New Orleans, as martial law and curfews are accompanied by roadblocks and the city is turned into a "little Somalia".

New Orleans: built on exploitation, destroyed by policy
Some useful links on the ongoing catastrophe.

Why was New Orleans turned into a war zone?
On martial law in New Orleans and an admission from General Blum.

New Orleans to be rebuilt without underclass.
The 'power elite' in New Orleans doesn't want the poor back in the city.

Myths of Civilisational Collapse.
The myths that helped cover up US government crime.

You don't risk what you can't afford to lose.
The government worked hard to protect... commodities.

God cleaned up public housing.
So says a Congressman from Baton Rouge.

All the world is a market.
Bush's allies are quick to sieze on the reconstruction cash for New Orleans.

More aid withheld by US government.
San Antonia reporter Carlos Guerra finds that the US government has been blocking aid.

Israeli Ex-Chief Rabbi: God punishes blacks.
For having no God.

Abolishing the poor.
How poverty is ethnicised so that "welfarised blacks" may be scapegoated.

Fema director 'resigns'.
Fall guy quits to take the heat off his paymasters.

The punchline.
DVDs produced by the New Orleans government to explain to the poor that they would receive no help in the event of a hurricane... weren't delivered.

They should dangle in their own noose.
Nursing home owners arrest for criminal negligence by criminally negligent government.

Prez Promises Rez.
Bush sends in entreprenoooers to 'rebuild' New Orleans.

New Orleans: nothing to see here.
Confirmation that the media claims of mass rape and murder in New Orleans were lies to distract from the massive government crime.

No shit.
LA Times speculates that racism may have been "a factor" in the misreporting. D'you think?

New Orleans police brutality.
Post-Katrina, the old racist state violence continues.

Zizek on Katrina.
The Slovene psychoanalyst in one of his better pieces about racism and state violence in New Orleans.

Katrina: the crime that keeps paying off.
State cancels property rights (for the poor); terrifying testimonies from survivors about racism and brutality from police: "we were stopped by police, made to get out and told, ‘Lie down on the ground, you black monkey bitch.’"

How lies justified murder.
Police lies about a fatal shooting incident that was used to justify the blocking of aid to New Orleans unravel.

How shall the masters of the universe deal with us?
With the confidence of a master race, the US government cancels the rights of poor people to their own property.

A full and independent inquiry.
US government promises a full and independent inquiry. Dog bites man.

Katrina: Harsh self-criticism.
The government 'admits' to some mishaps.

Katrina Whitewash: a shameful cover-up.
Official report on Katrina omits, distorts and covers vulnerable ass.

Martial law, forced labour and some other niceties of American life.
The post-Katrina political set-up is laid out bare.

On the anniversary of Katrina: why Hezbollah does what Bush wouldn't.
Hezbollah can rebuild Lebanon after Israeli attack, but Bush still hasn't rebuilt New Orleans. Guess why?

Christopher Hitchens dossier. posted by lenin

The following links record various hefty kicks into the decaying, bloated cadaver of the Late Christopher Hitchens - in no particular order, but just for reference and for any stalkers out there (public service is its own reward):

Principle
Hitchens' attack on Respect: "it is very badly written, it says nothing new and what was worth repeating is obliterated by what was never worth saying in the first place".

The Strenuous Credulousness of the Capital
In which Hitchens' "contrarianism" is cunningly exposed as the deepest conformity.

Tariq Ali versus Christopher Hitchens
The pre-Popinjay Hitchens is casually slapped about by his old comrade.

Chomsky, Monbiot & Hitchens on the Hippocratic Oath
One or two secret little treasures from Hitchens' past.

Christopher Hitchens' Existential Despair
Trouble in Iraq has Hitchens reaching for casuistry - obviously, it would have happened anyway.

Hitchens at West Point
The 'Dude', as some rather dull people insist on calling him, is called to service by the US Army.

Hitchens on Zarqawi
Any jaw-dropping sequence of inventions, half-truths and slanders will suffice to justify the war as it plumbs new depths of barbarity.

Hitchens is in the house: count the forks and spoons
Noam Chomsky used to overcome apologists for US policy by studying the documentary record: a trick Hitchens might want to learn next time he cites some Act or other.

Tour London with Christopher Hitchens, David Horowitz and Paul Johnson
This could be spectacular. For instance, Hitchens could greet Johnson and seriously ask "Have you stopped beating your wife yet?"

Pugilist v Popinjay: conflagration down town New York
Hungry Hitchens in a grudge wrestling match with Gorgeous George.

Judging a Book by its Covers
"For some odd reason, which he has yet to satisfactorily explain, Christopher Hitchens does not read my online writings or consult me before unleashing another torrent of drivel on the world". Quick review of 'Regime Change' or 'The Long Short War'.