Where are we now? posted by lenin

You could class this among the posts I've written about the relationship between state and capital. (By the way, Galloway is kicking some puce arse on Question Time as a write, so it is as well to note it now before someone asks him about the Schiavo thing - at which point I'm going to turn the telly off).

The Left has always had a fairly simple way of gauging its prospects - beyond psephological concerns, they inquire as to the health of the labour movement. If the prognosis is good, prospects for success are good. If the labour movement is weak, anaemic, perhaps crippled, then failure is too close for comfort.

From the late 1960s to the mid-1980s, the state was engaged in a war of attrition against organised labour on behalf of capital. This began with Barbara Castle's 'In Place of Strife' act, which was aborted almost on conception due to the hard resistance of the trade unions, in particular those who had previously been weak - bin workers, Leeds textile workers, the Ford women and others. The act proposed a cooling-off period before strikes could take place. Workers who ignored the cooling-off period and stayed out on strike were liable to prosecution, fines and imprisonment. The problem was that the first cracks in the comfortable post-war consensus were beginning to appear. Profitability showed its first weaknesses as the long post-war boom was coming to an end, and the system's ability to absorbe workers demands was narrowing. Hence, a Labour government was trying to impose laws that would seriously restrict the right to withdraw labour power, and thereby (they hoped) reduce the combativity of the labour movement.

When Labour lost the 1970 election to the eunuch Heath, the new Tory government tried to impose the Industrial Relations Act - if anything, more extreme than anything Thatcher managed. But the labour movement was particularly combative at this time, and as the government rode harder, became increasingly assertive in its demands. In particular, two massive NUM strikes in 1972 and 1974, with massive solidarity and flying pickets, broke the back of both that law and that despicable government (not only despicable, you understand, for putting Ricky Tomlinson in jail). Heath called an election, asking the nation - who runs the country: the government or the miners? They got their answer alright. Labour won two elections in 1974, the second time emerging with enough of a majority to govern properly. Among those opposed to Heath's election gambit was Margaret Thatcher, who believed that if only the miners were defeated, she would be leader of the Conservative Party shortly and therefore the Prime Minister.

Labour tried a different tack. As unemployment was rising higher, the OPEC crisis made its effects felt, and profits sank, employers lobbied the government to restore profitability to British industry. This they sought to do through the 'social contract' , which would restrict workers' wage rises to no more than 5% each year, in a time when inflation was on average about 20% a year. Effectively, wages were to be cut to make capitalism work. This was enacted through the connivance of left-wing trade union leaders. Because of this, the grass-roots resistance was often quite fractured and weak. However, the system did not last for long and, however weakened the unions were as their struggle entered a downturn, they still retained enormous purchase. In 1981, when Scargill won the presidency of the NUM, the young government of Margaret Thatcher was obliged to retreat on one of its offensives in the face of massive industrial pressure.

Yet, the Tories had a plan. The ruling class has its folk memories too, and, as one labour correspondent noted during the miners strike, "miners emerging from the bowels of the earth to demand their rights touch a raw nerve". The miner was a 'black avenging ghost' (as Zola put it) for the Tories, who had been twice humiliated by this cruel shade. Nicholas Ridley therefore proposed a plan in 1978 that would put an end to the NUM, which had been the cutting edge of working class militancy since the late sixties. They could, he said, defeat the miners if they started by establishing a trend. A series of heavy defeats inflicted on smaller unions would set the scene splendidly. Next, they needed to build up coal stocks and imports, encourage non-union road hauliers to transport the substance, develop dual coal-firing stations at plants, encourage other unions in the mineworks and develop a mobile police force capable of reacting to outbreaks of struggle where they occurred. This they did, and several northern cities were transformed into police occupations during the 1984-85 strike, as a Tory government deliberately set about destroying mines that were profitable and operative. Just as they had allowed unemployment to soar in earlier years in order to eviscerate the manufacturing unions, now they crippled huge sectors of the economy to pursue their class revenge against the miners. Scargill was prescient: this was an attempt to destroy the mining industry. The miners struck and were greeted with enormous solidarity. Even Sun printworkers struck in support of the miners in 1984.

While the miners were portrayed as an undemocratic entryist attempt on British democracy, the Tories delinquently ransacked British jobs - and, I might add, set the most extreme forces within MI5 to work targetting Scargill and his union, infiltrating it and fixing him up - a process which led to a series of bogus 'revelations' in 1990. Scargill's deputy at the time, Roger Windsor, now appears to have been an MI5 agent, as was the previous 'moderate' union leader, Mr Joe Gormley .

The defeat of that strike was far from inevitable, but it was decisive. After that, other unions were attacked and briskly defeated - including the printworkers. That trend was not so much bucked as rudely interrupted by the massive campaigns against the Poll Tax. It was not the first time the Tories were on the defensive but, again, it was decisive. Riots on Trafalgar Square finished Thatcher, and would have finished the Tories had it not been for the epic incompetence of Neil Kinnock and his last-minute PR election-grabber. The launch of anti-Poll Tax campaigns, and the later struggles against the Criminal Justice Bill, the environmental protests and Reclaim the Streets demos all captured something of a new radical spirit, and all would coalesce into the anticapitalist movement that erupted in the City of London in June 1999. Similarly, the Major government's attempts to undo the mining industry for good met stiff and bitter resistance as well as public defiance. While the media line on the 1984-5 strike had been that democracy was threatened by Marxist insurrectionists, even the Daily Mail found time to discover the 'honour' of the miners in 1992.

The victories of the signal-workers and airline workers during the 1990s represented a substantial recovery after the horrifying defeats of the 1980s. They in no way entered the scales in the same way that the defeats had, but they showed that capital would no longer have an easy ride, and the government would no longer be able to pursue its agenda with such roughshod force. While Thatcher had systematically and repeatedly tried to take out all the major unions, breaking the back of one after another, no government would risk this after the poll tax riots. The defeats continued, of course. The betrayal of the Liverpool Dockers is one of the most shameful episodes in British labour history.

Yet, however flawed, New Labour's trade union legislation and minimum wage laws gave new confidence to many workers. Not only have there been new unionisation drives (poorly exploited by the big unions), but there has also been a massive shift to the left within the unions, whose members are becoming more combative. RMT members in particular, however vilified, have won massively as a result of this strategy.

The firefighters struggles - thus far to no avail - and the postal workers more successful strikes have shifted the coordinates again. Even journos are getting in on the act, and the recent successful struggles by Telegraph journalists is testament to this. The most recent success - not yet an outright victory - has been the government climbdown on pensions for public sector workers. They were terrified, and so they should have been, of a massive spate of industrial action sweeping the country in the middle of a general election. When in 2001 the postal workers went on an unofficial walk-out during a general election campaign, they won more than they had even asked for, just as their later wild-cat strikes won solidly, hands down. The BA workers also demonstrated extraordinary militancy in the Summer of 2003, and made substantial gains with the threat of strike action in 2004.

I shouldn't downplay the significance of the defeat of the firefighters. Had the firefighters strike continued, and been fought successfully, the government would not have been able to go to war on Iraq. The army would have been too busy scabbing to go blow Iraqis' heads off. The defeat owes a great deal to the Labour loyalties of the leader, Andy Gilchrist. Inclined to be serenaded by ministers as he was, he called off crucial strike days just as the government was really feeling the heat. You know they were feeling the heat because Prescott felt the need to channel Thatcher and darkly intimate that we wouldn't go back to those days. When John Prescott is sent out to issue an intemperate, incomprehensible rant, you know the cabinet is falling apart at the seams. The fact that there was enough grass roots confidence to go for the strike is as significance as the fact that there wasn't enough confidence to defy the leadership.

A process of political re-alignment is taking place in the trade unions, of which the shift of support to Respect in some quarters is just an example. Clearly, continually being hooked to a devoid, neutered, parasitic organism like the Labour Party isn't a solution that offers any lasting appeal.

Where are we now, then? I would phrase it roughly as follows: The labour movement has recuperated somewhat from the locust years of the 1980s. But recovery is never an even process. Ideologically, the Left is enjoying a considerable resurgence. This has not yet filtered through into ubiquitous class struggle or unalloyed victories. While there is a clear anti-Blair mood in the country, and while most people want trade unions to be stronger, there desperately needs to be a new political direction for the labour movement, and the unprecedented scale of the antiwar campaigns offer the best chance of that. Respect seeks to support striking workers, oppose imperialism, defend civil liberties and oppose racism against Muslims and others. In this way, the unprecendented ideological upsurge is to be married to the as yet building potential of the new left in the trade unions.

That's why you should try to return a Respect MP at the next election. It will break through the dull triopoly of the main three parties, pressing a serious grass roots movement into halls of government. While a Liberal Democrat MP will vote to curb the right to strike (cf the resolutions passed at the recent conference), and while Blair will continue to grind every principled bone in the Labour party to dust (we needn't even speak of the Tories), Respect stands unwaveringly for repealing all anti-union laws, renationalising the railways, ending the disgraceful PFI projects, withdrawing troops from Iraq and opposing further warmongering. While other parties may play dangerous games with asylum seekers and gypsies, Respect won't stigmatise the most oppressed in our society.

One last thing. Vote Respect if you can. I don't care if you have some grudge you're nurturing against George Galloway. Get over it. If you can't vote Respect in your area, I leave it to your conscience. Vote Green, vote for an antiwar Labour MP, even vote Liberal or abstain... whatever you think will best help the radical Left where you are.

Fascism and third ways. posted by lenin

Chris Brooke has an excellent series of posts on the relationship, however you construe it, between the discursive practises of New Labour and those of the far right. Naturally, a great deal of inaccurate ultra-left shit has come my way about this topic (you know, the BNP are harmless compared to Blair's imperialist zeal, Hitler was no worse than Churchill etc).

I've nothing to add about the topic except that I think the only thing Blair and the far right have in common is that they will use the same pool of hot-button topics to buttress their unpopular ideological dispositions. And they both have need of the vagueness of such formulations as duty, hard work, patriotism, family etc. for the same reason.

Links. posted by lenin

Dead Men Left has a couple of blinding posts. First, a nice dissection of Johann Hari's idiotic recycling of anti-Respect nonsense here . Second, an interesting article on the recent poverty statistics from the Department of Work & Pensions here .

News for Respect supporters. The East region FBU has stumped up a grand for the election campaign:

FBU regional official Adrian Clarke said “We invited Respect to our meeting before Christmas and following that we had a request for a donation. That has now been voted through.

"Several of us are already members of Respect, but what has made this kind of formal link possible is the decision by the FBU conference last year to disaffiliate from the Labour Party.

“Delegates to the conference were very clear that we do not want to retreat into apolitical trade unionism. The wider political issue is that a great many people have taken a long, hard look at the Labour government and have concluded that we have to build a new left in this country.

“While many people are talking about it, Respect is getting on and doing it. It has come in for criticism from Labour politicians. They fear that they are going to be confronted by a credible, left wing alternative. The continued attack by New Labour on the issue of pensions is being felt across the whole of the working classes but it is being pursued with extreme vigour particularly against public service workers including firefighters and control staff.

According to the Independent , several Labour MPs are going to defy Blair and stand on an antiwar and anti-occupation platform. A very clear consensus has formed around punishing Blair at this election. Take Dan Plesch's recent article as a case in point. Or former Foreign Office advisor David Clark in The Guardian , in which Blair is convincingly portrayed as "a weak man who bends to power" (and therefore, if the Left flexes its muscles...). Even Mark Seddon , the wet fish of the Labour Left, raises the spirit to call for a reduced Labour majority, as "it may be the last chance to save the Labour party for social democracy and from remorseless internal collapse". Then there is the existence of sites like Backing Blair , So Now Who Do We Vote For? , Strategic Voter and so on. The fact that the Tories are looking so miserable, so very very weak, helps enormously. We can have the confidence to assail that phalanx of arse-lickers and nose-tanners on the Labour back-benches, especially those who backed the murderous war on Iraq, without risking a Tory victory.

Finally, Tariq Ramadan has an excellent article in today's Guardian, calling for a liberal interpretation of Islam.

Middle East: Bush Out. posted by lenin

According to Adam Shatz in the Los Angeles Times , Bush's embrace can prove deadly for dissidents in Arab countries - driving the poor and oppressed into the arms of Hezbollah against the US which, having invaded Iraq and given carte blanche support to Israel, gets no props in the Middle East. Gary Younge makes a similar point in the South African Mail & Guardian.

Fortunately, the real resistance in the Middle East is taking off regardless. This report from this year's Cairo Conference sums up the mood:

The gathering mood for change meant there was a fascinating mixture of Islamic, nationalist, socialist, peasant and trade union activists from across Egypt. On the first evening over 1,000 people crammed into the opening rally, which was followed by three days of discussion.

The dominant theme of the conference was the urgent need to oppose the occupation of Iraq and how real reform could be achieved in Egypt.

The democracy hailed by George Bush and the Washington neo-cons is not the democracy people in the Arab world are fighting for. In Egypt a new campaign called Kifaya — “Enough” in Arabic — has been launched, calling for real democracy.

The campaign is demanding the end of Hosni Mubarak’s reign as president and opposes plans to nominate his son as the next president.

Yes, yes, I know that dirty ' I ' word was slipped into that report. Well, They can sometimes have as much interest in overthrowing dictatorship as anyone else. The report continues:

Dina is a member of the anti-globalisation movement in Egypt. “There is rising struggle in Egypt,” she says.

“The vast majority of Egyptians want an end to corruption that allows billions of dollars to be salted away by officials and their hangers on. We want an end to the emergency laws that have been used to keep people down. We want an end to laws that outlaw independent political organisations and trade unions, and ban public gatherings. In the last 24 years over 20,000 people have been killed by the state.

“Every day in Cairo the police sweep through the underground Metro or stop minibuses heading to the slums that ring Egypt’s capital. They seize young men on the pretext that they are cracking down on Islamic militants, or looking for drugs. They seize you if they find a piece of hashish on you, or if you have forgotten your ID papers.

“Every night they pack off hundreds of young men to police stations and state security centres. If you are lucky they might hold you for a couple of hours, or a couple of days. If your luck is rotten they will beat you, or torture you with electric shocks—a facility available in all of Egypt’s police stations.

“The police have to fill a daily quota of arrests, so they seize people at random. Torture under Mubarak’s regime is routine.”

The most severe repression under the present regime is often meted out to those who dare to oppose the government’s links with the US and Israel.

There are also interviews with two attendees of the Cairo conference, one a delegate supporter of Moqtada al-Sadr in Iraq, the other a Sunni intellectual.

Meanwhile, a memo shows that the US commander in Iraq, Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, authorised the use of torture . No wonder, then, that Sadr's follower calls for million strong anti-US demo .

Finally, why is the government blocking investigations into the murder of Iain Hook, a UNRWA official, by Israeli forces?

Repression in the new Iraq. posted by lenin

From Socialist Worker :

Iraq’s interior minister has told Iraqis not to demonstrate against the regime. Falah al-Naqib told journalists on Monday that protests were among “attempts to destabilise the situation” in Iraq.

Naqib’s comments came after government bodyguards opened fire on an unarmed and peaceful demonstration of workers, killing at least one.

The workers, employed by Iraq’s technology ministry, gathered last Sunday in Baghdad to demand higher wages. Naqib defended the bodyguards who shot at them, saying they were just doing their job.

The minister’s comments came a few days after a leading Shia cleric in Iraq called for a “million strong demonstration to demand a timetable for the end of the occupation”.

Sheik Nasser al-Saedi, a follower of radical Shia leader Moqtada al-Sadr, called on “all political forces to take part in this demonstration” during his sermon last Friday at the Grand Mosque in Kufa.

More here , and here .

'Moonbat Central'. posted by lenin

The salubrious Mr Kampf has found a new venue. Joining the host of bloggers at the conspiracy site, Discover the Network, he now writes for the gloriously named 'Moonbat Central' (http://www.discoverthenetwork.org/moonbatcentral/2005/03/chomsky-in-edinburgh.html).

If I were to use the methods Kamm does in the above article, I might note the following lunatic tics: standard citation of Cold War polemic against Noam Chomsky, in this case a letter by the grotesque Samuel Huntington* (although what is untypical is that Chomsky's rebuttal immediately follows, and casually annihilates Huntington's case); the habitual invocation of scholarly standards that, to date, have eluded Kamm; the usual uncharitable reading of every possible fact or circumstance surrounding the material he is discussing (The Gifford Lectures are intended to “contribute to the advancement of theological and philosophical thought”, but Chomsky is instead using the occasion to advance his political opinions...); the casual misreading of the text (Chomsky, Zelig-like, is said to select targets according to audience, which could be true, although the example Kamm offers doesn't offer much to support the claim, particularly once you've read the article he is parsing); the slovenly reference to a "historical record" which his opponent has failed to excavate, but over which he exerts excruciating mastery.

Etc. Much more interesting, though, is the fact that this 'Militant Liberal', this strenuous capitaliser of the abstract, this tabloid journalist, in attaching himself to the orbit of the Moonbats, has acquired a fan club - one neo-Nazi, it seems. (See link). Naturally, I'm shocked, outraged, dazed, bewildered etc. Whatever my reaction is, it certainly doesn't involve me pissing myself with laughter at the gauche ineptitude of an amateur bibliophile and polemicist so desperate for venues to pursue his Chomsky-stalking that he will even involve himself with nutter conspiracy theorists and discarded Cold War witchfinders.

One last thing. A suggestion for Mark Kaplan's "Notes on Rhetoric" :

Historical Record. Your opponent is invariably unfamiliar with it, while you master it with matchless facility. Allude to it wherever possible, encourage your opponent to acquaint himself with it. So much the better if you have a cache of slightly obscure references that you can dispense, especially if these bear only tangential relationship to what you are discussing. In particular, when called upon to explain the relevance of the reference, explain that you are not about to spoon-feed your opponent and advise him to get off his flaccid fundament and do some independent reading. It will, you can assure him, be its own reward.

*Aside from his part in the imperial subventions in Vietnam, Huntington's political sympathies are peculiar. Apartheid South Africa, for Huntington, was a "satisfied society", in which "the people for some reason are not protesting".

Dead Babies. posted by lenin

Nicholas Kristoff recently wrote for the New York Times:

Here's a wrenching fact: If the U.S. had an infant mortality rate as good as Cuba's, we would save an additional 2,212 American babies a year.

Yes, Cuba's. Babies are less likely to survive in America, with a health care system that we think is the best in the world, than in impoverished and autocratic Cuba. According to the latest C.I.A. World Factbook, Cuba is one of 41 countries that have better infant mortality rates than the U.S.

Even more troubling, the rate in the U.S. has worsened recently.

In every year since 1958, America's infant mortality rate improved, or at least held steady. But in 2002, it got worse: 7 babies died for each thousand live births, while that rate was 6.8 deaths the year before.

This is why it is so important to spend legislative time and money trying to sustain a human vegetable in life.

A new 'Coalition of the Willing'? posted by lenin

Via HP Sauce . The Telegraph has produced an unusually stupid leader on Iraq and 'international law':

The truth is that the war was probably not legal under international law. Those who believe that is a fact of cardinal moral importance have not yet had the courage to admit the inevitable conclusion of their position. It is that there now needs to be a "coalition of the willing" to restore the legal government of Saddam Hussein to its rightful position as the sovereign authority in Iraq. Tony Blair must be arrested and tried by the ICC, and Saddam should be the primary witness against him. That is the inescapable logic of the champions of international law. It should make every-one realise how unreal is the world in which they live.

I don't want to keep beating the same drum all the time, but general ignorance of the case obliges me to have another bash. Law is a process, not simply a set of rules, or a structure. It is a negotiation process replete with loopholes and torsions. There are usually two or more sets of interpretations which are not reconciled. The spurious determinacy that is imposed on law at the level of the nation-state (by the judge, backed by the legitimate monopoly of violence) is absent in international law. Therefore, as Marx once had it, "between equal rights, force decides". International law is the precise form that modern imperialism takes, and the huge expenditure of time and energy making the legal case for imperial subventions demonstrates that this is the case. Need anyone remind themselves of the grotesque crimes perpetrated under the rubric of international law, with the backing of the UN? Or of the fact that the UN has now, ex post facto, legitimised the war on Iraq?

That said, there is no reason for anyone who maintains that the war was illegal to accept the Telegraph's stupid attempt at a reductio ad absurdum. Never mind the fact that the Telegraph is only taking one crime into account when one would prefer to reverse decades of criminal intervention in Iraq if that were possible. If it is true that the war on Iraq was illegal, there need be no coalition of the willing to restore Hussein to power. His sovereignty is not what has been violated. It is Iraq's sovereignty that has been violated, and there is a "coalition of the willing" currently acting to evict the occupiers. It is known as the Iraqi resistance. They are legally guaranteed as well, because the UN :

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 is, if the Telegraph now accepts that the invasion of Iraq was illegal, the legitimacy of the resistance follows.

CIA: US is a "declining power". posted by lenin

While not quite as bleak for the US as the Wallerstein thesis , the CIA's prognosis is remarkable in that it abets warnings issued by neoconservatives , who argued since the early 1990s that other potential superpowers had been silently germinating behind the iron curtain, particularly the Chinese , and that America had better sieze the 'window of opportunity' afforded by the end of the Cold War to frustrate any such challenge.

The CIA concludes:

The likely emergence of China and India ... as new major global players—similar to the advent of a united Germany in the 19th century and a powerful United States in the early 20th century—will transform the geopolitical landscape with impacts potentially as dramatic as those in the previous two centuries.

I say this conclusion corroborates neoconservative thinking, but they are no Cassandras. Robert Kagan of the Project for the New American Century argues that US legitimacy is diminishing with friends and "like-minded" peoples as a result of US unipolarity. Europe prefers the “constraining egalitarian quality of international law” while enjoying the security provided by the “behemoth with a conscience”. America, contrary to common wisdom, can “go it alone”, and does so. (Robert Kagan, “Paradise and Power: America and Europe in the New World Order”, London, 2003; also, Robert Kagan, “Looking for Legitimacy in all the Wrong Places”, Foreign Policy, July/August 2003). According to Professor of International Law Michael Glennon the UN's “irrelevance” is actually a product of US "unipolarity" in a post-Cold War world. France, Russia, Germany and China also believe the world is becoming "unipolar". France's former foreign minister Hubert Vedrine believes "a politically unipolar world" is unacceptable, and therefore France is "fighting for a multipolar world". Russia and China formalised an agreement in July 2001 affirming their commitment to a multipolar constellation of global powers. (Michael J. Glennon, “Why the Security Council Failed”, Foreign Affairs, May/June 2003).

This is an argument accepted by much of the Left. Peter Gowan, in "The Global Gamble", outlines what the book's subtitle calls America's "Faustian bid for global dominance". America, according to Gowan, is the last remaining empire, a "Hegemon" dominating economically through the Dollar-Wall Street Regime, and politically through military incursions into the former Yugoslavia. ( In this, he represents a strand of thinking relatively popular on the left. Gregory Elliot suggests that Hubert Vedrine's term "hyperpower" most closely encapsulates the United States' "awesome dominion". (Peter Gowan, “The Global Gamble: America’s Faustian Bid for Global Dominance”, London, 1999; Gregory Elliot and John Rees, “The Balance of Global Forces”, Institute of Education, July 2001).

Underpinning these arguments is some conception of what the "bipolar world" represented, and how the collapse of one of those poles has affected the world. Most of those cited above would assent to the suggestion that the USSR was some form of post-capitalist state, that it was an ideological, as well as military and economic, competitor with the United States. During the Cold War, local powers were almost inevitably sucked up into the rubric of one of the two main competing powers. The over-arching framework of bipolarity seemed to render other struggles and rivalries nothing more than local manifestations of the Cold War. When the Russian Empire collapsed not only Stalinism, but also most forces and discourses of resistance appeared to collapse. The various communist parties in Europe disbanded, disintegrated or dissembled. The social-democratic left, far from benefiting from this state of affairs, was dragged into the void with their embarrassing militant cousins. There remained only one serious narrative for the future - the free market capitalist one whose vanguard was a victorious US.

This is an optical illusion. Instead of treating the USSR as a leader of the global revolution, we should treat it as any other polity. Instead of US unipolarity, we have multipolarity. The fall of the Russian Empire has rendered existing tensions, such as those between the US and the EU, more visible. Trade disputes have been supplemented by geopolitical disputes, as several European countries refused to support the occupation of Iraq, denying the US a vital source of legitimacy. Additionally, nuclear states have proliferated. Local conflicts between India and Pakistan, and between North and South Korea, resonate well beyond their own borders. China, too, is a rapidly growing power which, according to the American international relations analyst John Mearsheimer, could "be much wealthier than its Asian rivals", its huge population base enabling it to "build a far more powerful army than either Russia or Japan could". China "has the potential to be considerably more powerful than even the United States." (JJ Mearsheimer, “The Tragedy of Great Power Politics”, New York, 2001).

Another view is that the US has "crash landed". For Gore Vidal, America resembles nothing so much as "Rome before the fall", while for E.M. Wood present US strategy is “ultimately self-defeating”. (Gore Vidal, “United States: Collected Essays, 1952-92”, New York, 1992; Ellen Meiksins Wood, “Empire of Capital”, London, 2003). This thesis is most eloquently espoused by Immanuel Wallerstein, who asserts that American behaviour, far from providing surety of future strength, is indicative of present weakness. The US has not won a serious victory since losing Vietnam. Having abandoned interventions in Lebanon and Somalia, the US has only been able to defeat minor powers and even those victories are not as complete as they appear. The first Gulf War, for instance, resulted in the status quo being restored, with Hussein smashing the Shi'ites and Kurds, and the Kuwaiti monarch returned to his throne. (Immanuel Wallerstein, “The Eagle Has Crash Landed”, Foreign Policy, July/August 2002). Another apparent victory, this time in the Balkans, does not bear close scrutiny either. The war ended with a deal, negotiated by Ahtisaari and Chirnomyrdin, which was much closer to Milosevic's proposed terms as the war began than to Nato’s terms at Rambouillet. (See Noam Chomsky, “Nato and the New Military Humanism: Lessons from the bombing of Yugoslavia”, London, 1999; Wallerstein, op cit, argues that US bombing did little to alter the course of Balkans history, while Kagan, in “Paradise and Power…” op cit, suggests that the war was primarily fought to preserve the unity of the transatlantic alliance, although Americans had “compelling moral reasons” to be involved – as, no doubt, did Turkey). With barely a tank dented, Milosevic gained a “defeat” more flattering than he had any right to expect. Not US military power, but Serbian people power, put Milosevic in the dock. American power is therefore on the wane, and its present conduct may serve to hasten that decline rather than prolong its longevity.

That's putting the case too strongly if you ask me. It is true that the US is losing much of its purchase on Latin America, South East Asia and the Middle East - its traditional zones of dominance. But the fact that the world is already a multipolar one does not mean that the US cannot frustrate its rivals, as it is presently attempting to do - supporting dictators here, quietly coopting branded revolutions there, launching imperialist missions elsewhere.

But. Iraq has been a huge miscalculation for the present administration, and this was reflected in the distinct back-pedalling of many hawks several months back. However much momentum the neoconservatives get out of the discontent in Lebanon, however much they succeed in splitting off the majority Shias from the Sunnis in Iraq and shutting down the military resistance, the fact is that Iraq is now a major millstone round their necks. The elections in Iraq represent the success of Shi'ite resistance rather than the culmination of US strategy, while the acceptance that Iraq is to be run by anti-American, pro-Iranian and pro-Syrian parties represents the biggest failure of all. It is unlikely that Bremer's diktats on the economy will survive for very long if the Shi'ite groups get their way - even though they do not in fact govern at the moment, they represent a material power which America's best torture centres and tanks cannot quite break. And the big oil companies have already won a battle with neoconservative ideologues to keep Iraq's oil nationalised. The naked corruption of the process of reconstruction is making it unlikely that American taxpayers will be willing to subsidise future wars. Meanwhile, they are losing politically on the domestic front - the success of anti-recruitment campaigns makes it difficult for the US to sustain another intervention without drafting.

The "Iraq syndrome" will weigh down on future generations of policy-makers. The emergence of a superpower rival may be just the thing to help shake it off.

Ralph Nader on Terri Schiavo. posted by lenin

Via Direland . Ralph Nader has decided to jump aboard the nutty pro-life bandwagon over the feeding and watering of Terri Schiavo. Doctors have confirmed that Terri is not capable of thinking or feeling, as her cerebral cortex has liquefied. So, Ralph Nader, once a fervent pugilist on behalf of the progressive Left, has teamed up with a rightwing 'bioethicist' to denounce decisions by several courts, backed up by ample medical expertise, to remove Terri's tube. According to her husband she had asked that in the event of her being reduced to such a state, she should not be forced to stay alive. Accordingly, he has been attempting to legally fulfil her wishes for some eight years. Before he did that, he had attempted every available form of therapy - to no avail.

Direland cites :

"When doctors determined that Terri had entered a persistent vegetative state, Michael flew Terri to California for experimental surgical treatments, sleeping on a cot in her hospital room.

"Even after doctors in California determined surgery would do nothing to help Terri, Michael continued to seek help. He admitted Terri to a Florida brain-injury center and hired an aide to take her out to parks and museums, in the hope it might stimulate her reawakening. It didn't."

When American lefties used Nader's alliance with a rather nutty group called the New Alliance Party as an excuse to vote for the repellent John Kerry, I thought they were missing the point (which was that such silliness was far less ominous than Kerry's support for mass murder in Iraq). I don't resile from that position. But with this idiotic intervention, Nader has eschewed fundamental left-wing principles - namely, the maximum freedom of the invididual that is commensurable with the freedoms of others. His joint statement displays remarkable ignorance of the case, and therefore illustrates a knee-jerk sympathy for 'pro-life' causes.

This is all the more bewildering in light of the fact that, on questions of abortion about which Nader was particularly vilified, he clearly stated that:

I don’t think government has the proper role in forcing a woman to have a child or forcing a woman not to have a child. And we’ve seen that around the world. This is something that should be privately decided with the family, woman, all the other private factors of it, but we should work toward preventing the necessity of abortion.

If the government has no business telling a woman what she must do with the child that is gestating inside her, it surely has no business intervening in a case against all available medical wisdom and against Terri's stated wish.

The radical Left will need better representation than Ralph Nader at the next election. And it won't emerge from within the Democratic Party.

Slavoj Zizek: Enjoy! posted by lenin

Via Dead Men Left , I see Tim has a delicious scoop - namely some piccies of Slavoj Zizek's wedding. I can't be the only one to think that Zizek looks decidedly mobbish in his apparel and general demeanour.

A couple of other links while I'm at it. DML picks up a link to a new site called Islamophobia Watch . It certainly appears to be picking on all the right people, and has wound up some wierdo pro-war site run by obsessive-compulsive 'Stopper'-haters.

I received a note in my inbox telling me that protests were planned for the mass murderer Narendra Modi's visit to the UK this Saturday. The fear of that has caused Modi to call off his visit . Recently, Modi was unable to make a visit to the US after protests led to his visa being revoked . He was to visit America on the invitation of the Asian American Hotel Owners Association, where he was to be "honoured".

Modi had connived in and encouraged a state-wide pogrom against Muslims in Gujarat, leaving about 2000 dead and 200,000 without homes. Sexual violence against its victims was also encouraged, and Modi along with his right-wing allies in the BJP and VHP have systematically blocked every effort to prosecute those responsible or investigate what happened.

A good article here discusses the prospects for the Latin American New Left in light of the 'revolution' in Venezuela.

Antiwar.blog knew it yesterday, and today the Washington Post reports on it. That story about 'Iraqi security forces' killing 84 insurgents was bullshit.

The hallowed reputation of UN peacekeepers is now in tatters after it emerges that they have been raping and molesting in Bosnia, Kosovo, the DRC - humanitarian intervention just ain't what it used to be.

And finally, a good analysis of the amazing uprising in Kyrgyzstan here . How long before the State Department says "we did it" and brands it the "Ash Revolution" or some stupid bloody thing?

The incommensurability of Norms posted by lenin

Norm on protesting about fox-hunting fox-hunting :

There are so many types of suffering and injustice in the world that any single person can only be active in protesting about and opposing a fraction of them. Given this, it can nearly always be said that you shouldn't be wasting time on this when what really matters is that. But everything that matters really matters. The fact that some things matter less is only an argument for ignoring them if you think that everybody should be constantly mobilizing over what matters most. Thus: unless you're protesting and active over (just for example) Darfur, you're not entitled to speak out about anything.

Norm on protesting against the occupation of Iraq :

Yes, they could be demonstrating for the people of Zimbabwe. They could be demonstrating for the people of Darfur. They could be demonstrating for those Iraqis struggling for democracy in their country and against a murderous 'insurgency'. But they prefer to keep the war going over the war they could not stop.

What silliness on his part.

Neoliberalism in Europe. posted by lenin

The Bolkestein directive, or the 'Services Directive' as it is otherwise known, is not likely to feature in the Sun's compendium of loony Euro measures. This is for the perfectly excellent reason that it was a measure designed to subvert the interests of workers and consumers.

Named after Frits Bolkestein, the former EU internal market commissioner who introduced the idea in January 2004, the law enables the company you work for to transfer its headquarters to a country in which legal protection for workers is particularly weak, and you would suddenly find that you no longer have the benefit of protections won by decades of trade union and social struggle in your own country. The right to strike, pay negotiations, pensions - forget all that. Bolkestein has suggested that the law is about harmonising rules in the EU. Effectively what it does is level down, so that the lowest common denominator in terms of regulation prevails. Unsurprisingly, our oleaginous Prime Minister, after striving to weaken protection for British workers on his last Euro-adventure, is in the vanguard of this movement. Peter Mandelson, that paragon of self-effacing asceticism, has accused opponents of the directing of wanting to lead "a cosy life" .

George Monbiot summarises :

Companies, it says, “are subject only to the national provisions of their Member State of origin.”(2) Roughly translated, this means that a company based in one European country but working in another is bound only by the rules of the country in which it is based. If a construction firm whose offices are in Lithuania, for example, has a contract in the United Kingdom, it need abide only by Lithuanian law while working over here. The obvious result is that every enterprising corporation in Europe will relocate its headquarters to the place in which the laws are weakest.

And then it gets really weird. The state responsible for enforcing the rules – health and safety laws for example – will be the one in which the company is based, not the one in which it is working.(3) If, for example, a Lithuanian construction company is forcing workers in the UK to use dodgy scaffolding, our own Health and Safety Executive won’t be able to do a damn thing about it. Instead, the Lithuanian equivalent must send its inspectors over here, and, without local knowledge, hampered by any number of translation problems, seek to defend the lives of British workers.

Given the way such markets work, the company they are monitoring will, more likely than not, be a British one flying a Lithuanian flag of convenience. But if that company is threatening your safety on a building site in Brixton, you will be able to seek protection only by protesting to the authorities in Vilnius.

Speak good Lithuanian, do you? Fancy an easyJet flight every time something goes wrong? It would certainly add new meaning to the term "flying picket". There has not been a move this contemptuous of public opinion since the highly secretive and abortive Multilateral Agreement on Investment which, among other things, sought to allow companies to sue governments who impose regulations which are deemed to have restricted its ability to make profit under the new regulations.

For now, lucky you, the move has failed. The French have scuppered it, much to the dismay of other governments in the Union.

Why did it fail? Certainly not because of the feeble protests of the European Trade Union Confederation (ETUC). More likely, it is because Chirac as having a hard enough time at home, what with strikes and protests erupting on an almost weekly basis against his plans to scrap the 35 hour week . The Bolkestein directive, while barely known about or discussed in Britain, has been met with a gale of protest in Europe.

Naturally, the European leaders anxious to impose this law have not given up. Hence, "'Bolkestein directive' to stay, but will be watered down" . Bolkestein, for his part, isn't satisfied . For him, it's just another form of racism .

Tour London With... posted by lenin

... Christopher Hitchens, David Horowitz and Paul Johnson!



Oh, joy! Perusing my copy of Hitchens' For the Sake of Argument, I find the following report from a dinner party for neocons:

Marty (Hot Lips) Peretz tried a flailing attack on the 'loathsome' foreigner Hitchens. (Peretz is one of those tiresome, unctuous types who thinks he's a wit and is half-right.) At next days' session, Horowitz took up this cry and made it more extreme. It was obviously emotionally important for him not to be outdone by anybody.

They will have much to talk about, I hope.

And on Johnson, so much better:

Long before he made his much-advertised stagger from left to right, Johnson had come to display all the lineaments of the snob, the racist and the bigot. 'The Portuguese are just wogs,' he yelled at me during a discussion of the Salazar dictatorship. Feeling himself slighted at the seating arrangements for a dinner one evening, he marched towards the door, thumping his walking stick and shouting, 'I won't have it. I'm going to my club!' His customary difficulty in fighting his way across a room was compounded on this occasion by his wife, who intervened to persuade him to stay and pointed out sweetly, 'Paul, dear, you don't belong to a club'. 'Fear of hellfire', he told me, kept him in the Roman Catholic Church. He added that all the same, he often broke the Church's commandments. I already knew that, or thought I did until he added wolfishly: 'You see, I quite often pray for people to die.' He has terrible trouble spelling and must carry a dictionary. I remember when he was caught out plagiarising a misquotation of Herbert Marcuse from Encounter - a sort of triple-crown howler. His knees, already weak, turn to a jelly of deference whenever a title or a country house is mentioned. Once at a cricket match he took out his displeasure at the arrangements on the family dog, Parker.
I really could go on (as he knows).

Hitchens also mentions that "On a famous occasion in a Greek restaurant in Charlotte Street in 1973, he struck [his wife] across the face for disagreeing with him in public and, when rebuked for this by a colleague of mine, threatened to put him through a plate glass window."

This could be spectacular. For instance, Hitchens could greet Johnson and seriously ask "Have you stopped beating your wife yet?" Naturally, and very sadly, we won't hear any of that kind of gossip again. Hitchens' remit is drily summed up as follows:

Christopher Hitchens will give lectures drawing on his expansive knowledge of Britain and America, talk about the two cultures, their world roles etc. and generally illuminate the relationship between these two nations and peoples.

Oh, what are our "world roles", Christopher? Do tell.

Another High School shooting? posted by lenin

I'm afraid so :

A high school student went on a shooting rampage on an Indian reservation, killing his grandparents at their home and then seven people at his school, grinning and waving as he fired, authorities and witnesses said. The suspect apparently killed himself after exchanging gunfire with police.

And check the resonance of this sentence:

It was the nation's worst school shooting since two students at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado, killed 12 students and a teacher in 1999.

How many school shootings has America experienced? The number seems to be well above average, and it is particularly worrying when you have a sufficient database of recent examples to start ranking them.

The suspect is said to have admired Hitler and posted messages on a neo-Nazi website, a fragment of information which, if true, is congruent with the story of those who carried out the Columbine massacre, who also admired Hitler. In Gus Van Sant's film Elephant, in which two alienated high school students decide to arrange a brutal cull of their classmates and teachers before offing themselves. One of their obsessions, it transpires, is watching footage about fascism and Hitler.

If I were to guess - and, okay I will - I would say that Hitler, fascism and the Nazi holocaust represent precisely the negative mirror to America's liberal, tolerant self-image. In a Channel Four documentary, The Battle for the Holocaust, several historians suggest that the memory of the Nazi judeocide has been appropriated as an ideological opposite to capitalism and liberal democracy, especially after the collapse of the Cold War. For those styling themselves as outcasts, or even the 'Angel of Death' as this particular suspect did, the Nazi contempt for humanity and its death-dealing, sadistic violence is an obvious pole of attraction.

Yet, the Moore thesis - that imperialist violence abroad, fear-mongering and alienation at home, and easy access to guns - create the conditions for such atrocities seems as powerful as ever. The background of mass murder in Iraq, the legitimisation of torture and rape (see in particular the reaction of right-wing shock-jocks to Abu Ghraib), and the disgusting intellectual apologetics for imperialism, does not seem to discourage the notion that callous murder is at some level a normal occurence, especially when married to fictitious zeal for justice. During the bombardment of Serbia, which is when the Columbine shooting occurred, Thomas Friedman wrote for the New York Times:

"Like it or not, we are at war with the Serbian nation (they certainly think so), and the stakes have to be very clear: Every week you ravage Kosovo is another decade we will set your country back by pulverizing you. You want 1950? We can do 1950. You want 1389? We can do 1389 too."

Perform a quick mental experiment - replace the word 'Serbian' with 'American' and 'Kosovo' with 'Palestine' or, perhaps, 'Iraq'. Who would you think was talking?

The oldest hatred. posted by lenin

Oh, joy of joys! I now have nutters visiting me from the Jewish Tribal Review, an anti-Semitic website created by fundamentalist Christians and 'revisionists'. I won't link to it, but the reason for the link is that the blogger Robert Lindsay has written a post complaining about anti-Semitic comments of his being deleted from the Tomb. The JTR, which Lindsay links to (see under The Jewish Question), has republished his post on their site, although they may well have done this without his permission.

If any of their visitors take to depositing anti-Semitic filth in the comments boxes, they will be deleted and banned. Yeah, see, its because I'm part of the evil Zionist conspiracy that controls the world and... woo ha ha ha ha ha. Etc. The Tomb is commodious enough to handle most kind of kooks, but not these fucking fruitbats.

Terri Schiavo and the American Cult of Death. posted by lenin

Life's parentheses are the poles of attraction for the zealous defenders of life in the United States and, increasingly, in Britain. The right to life, and the confluent refusal of a right to die, the theme is the same from the foetus and the infirm - no man has a right to take life. It is without the province of human beings, firmly in His tough-loving hands. So it is with the fate of Terri Schiavo, a brain-damaged Florida woman who has until recently been sustained in life by receiving food through a tube.

Her husband, Michael, having attempted every possible avenue of experimental therapy since 1990, when doctors handed down their diagnosis, believes the tube should remain disconnected. Terri's family, by contrast, are fighting for her to be kept alive. She, for her part, has expressed a wish not to be sustained on artificial life support. Naturally, I shall have little to say about this case except to note that it is obviously better matter for Republican politicians to be talking about than Social Security or "state-sponsored murder"* in Iraq. Fortunately, polls show that most Americans disapprove of Congressional and Senate intervention into this matter. The state may not impose a torturous life in a barely functioning body on any human being. In Direland's pithy formulation: "Every person his own Kevorkian" .

(*Placard seen at pro-life demonstration: "Save Terri From State-Sponsored Murder").

What is much more interesting is that, in between the bookends of life, all kinds of murder and mayhem will be mandated by God. In fact, isn't the irony of this that the cult of life is elevating its gloriole in a society whose cultural output makes a fetish of death? From Bonnie & Clyde to Natural Born Killers, the open secret of American (and by extension, global) fantasy life is that death is a beautiful and erotic thing. Teen horror flicks pitch an extreme negative fascination with the body and its inners with a sensuous devotion to its sensory surfaces - or to put it more bluntly, sex and violence.

Curtis White makes an apt point in his hilarious book about The Middle Mind, regarding the Spielberg schlock Saving Private Ryan. Spielberg's "conscience" movies are always suffused with platitudinous drivel, purporting to be idealism, or compassion or some other appropriately undemanding reaction to the world's evils. This one in particular makes use of the flag, which flaps majestically at the beginning and end of the film, wrapping its contours in a comforting Stars n Stripes diaper. One knows that it is not going to offend 'patriotic' sensibilities, just as the use of softie Tom Hanks to play the heroic Captain Miller deflects embarrassing memories of tough guy John Wayne posturing a la The Green Berets. Yet what is the central "lesson" of the movie? As White has it, it is to be found in the connected scenes in which the intellectual multi-lingual Upham persuades Captain Miller to issue a command not to kill a German prisoner. The German is pathetically attempting to recite the Star Spangled Banner. Here is a human life, a PoW with rights under international law. One does not simply kill one's prisoners, unless already among the savage, and that is downright unAmerican. What does the German do? He comes back, guns blazing, and takes out Captain Miller with obvious satisfaction. Upham learns his lesson and does what we all know he should have done in the first place: pops a bullet in the evil Kraut's head. The lesson, therefore, is:

[A]lways choose death, for if you do not, death will come anyway, later, multiplied.

These intellectuals with their Hamlet-like procrastination, their sensitivity and cowardice, will get us all killed. Back in the present day, the old soldier named Ryan weeps over Miller's grave and wonders once again if he has led a good life. The flag returns, translucent, radiant. But a resonance of death this time, the flag bears a slight similarity to the eery deathliness of Warhol's 'Diamond Dust Shoes' .

Of course, there are all sorts of cheap shit movies that do a lesser courtesy to the same job. I was watching Commando with Arnold Schwarzenegger in it last night, for instance. (Plot: murderous ex-dictator of anonymous Latin American country, recently deposed by Arnie, wants him to assassinate the new 'nice guy' President the Americans have assisted to power. Stop laughing. To this end, they kidnap Arnie's sweet, doe-eyed little daughter in her dungarees and pink sweater, and threaten to kill her if he doesn't do what they say. Naturally, being evil, they're going to kill her anyway, hur hur hur. Arnie busts the fuck out of there, kidnaps, shoots, beats and conflagrates his way to that tropical nation, because "awl that mattas to me now is my dawta". But why fabulate? The videos taken by soldiers in Iraq of dead Ay-rab bodies, their hilarious titles ("Ramadi madness", "sneaky little bastards", "Another Day, Another Scumbag"), the slick professionalism and the overlaying of aggressive heavy metal music, easily match Tawhid wal-Jihad's sicker productions for morbidity and cruel fascination with humiliated flesh. The 'rape footage' from Guantanamo, if it is ever released, will doubtless provide similarly revolting scenes implicating the viewer in sadistic pleasure at the torture and humiliation of others. It isn't even necessary to go abroad for one's kicks, however. America is a violent society, more so than most other advanced capitalist states. The combustible fusion of imperialism abroad, fear-mongering at home, and ready access to firearms has ensured this.

From life's terminus, we have regressed to its middle, and now must proceed to the very beginning of life. I came out of my mother's tummy, but how no one will say. Apparently some bee stung a bird and she dropped an egg which was later transported by a stork to the hospital. And then... well, I didn't ask too many questions, so we shall avoid that particular excursus.

The main point I wish to make about the beginning of life is that it does not occur at some stage in the gestatory period, or in the moment of conception, however immaculate. Sperms and eggs live and die. They are living organisms with their own cycles. Why, sperm are so friendly, I've shaken hands with several billions of them. If you don't like that, consider this: they are all potential human beings and the murder of any of them deprives the world of a woulda coulda shoulda been human. This is true: everytime one of you two-egg carrying beings out there menstruates, you've just knocked off two. Typically, men are the biggest murderers, carelessly spilling entire galaxies into their P.E. socks each morning.

Oh sure, those things are still ours, merely excreted bodily substances. Sure. And what about the pregnant lady? Is she not the host to a particularly voracious and uncomfortable parasite? Does she not have an alien outgrowth filling out her womb, radically exteriorising her most secret cave? If not, then the fucking thing is part of her body, hence still hers. The state has no mandate over her particulars, even one that might one day become a dribbling, giggling, weeping, pissing Boletus like Governor Bush.

Homes, land & homeland. posted by lenin

Conal Urquart, a Guardian journalist much-derided at Jews Sans Frontieres , reported precisely one week ago that Israel was planning to demolish 25% of its settlements in the West Bank.

Today, Ha'aretz reports that:

Israel plans to build 3,500 new homes in the West Bank to cement its hold on Jerusalem, government sources said on Monday, drawing a Palestinian warning that peace efforts were at risk.

Having set about destroying homes in Gaze under spurious pretexts, Israel now reaffirms its strategy of loosening its grip here, tightening it there, in line with its demographic concerns and its expansionist dynamic. See here for more.

One thing I would remark upon, just by the by, is that 3,500 'homes' built on illegally occupied territory to buttress already existing settlements do themselves constitute settlements. This terminological inexactitude is unlikely to be accidental on the part of Ha'aretz. Or perhaps it results from linguistic constipation, an extreme retentive disorder that will simply not allow some of the roughage of discourse pass. You can take that metaphor as far as you like.

Why, why PFI? posted by lenin

According to the BBC , these Private Finance Initiatve schemes are terribly good for business:

A Treasury budget report shows that the first £14bn of PFI deals signed will give the private sector a guaranteed £96bn return over 26 years but industry denies it is profiteering.

Business has tended to justify this in terms of the huge risks it is taking in embarking on such projects. This is creamier bullshit than the usual variety. Look at the number of crisis-ridden PFI projects, and see how many of the companies involved have been brought to heel: Pathway, the disastrous £800m project to automate post offices and provide a swipe-card system to pay welfare benefits; Nirs2 the national insurance system; the Child Support Agency IT contract with EDS; and the Passport Agency IT upgrade. Research by Standard & Poors, a credit ratings company, shows that PFI projects are usually low-risk for the companies concerned, while other research shows that returns are unusually high.

When companies like Jarvis do mess it up (their share value collapsed largely due to their involvement in the Potters Bar crash), they are bailed out by the banks. In fact, had the banks not thrown Jarvis a lifeline, the whole PFI system would have collapsed ignominiously, for Jarvis owns about 10% of the total value of PFI debt that the government has raised. The financial backers of the projects - like, for example, Abbey National - simply take their share of the cash and withdraw if something goes wrong. This is what happened to the Tower Hamlets' schools PFI project: the building firm involved, Ballast Plc, went under and so Abbey withdrew its backing for the project, and children are left with half-built schools. There is no law that compels companies involved to provide continuity of service, while the government backs a compensation scheme for profit loss in the event that the public sector cannot keep up its end. Further, the only inquiry into shareholder profits resulting from the scheme show that they have been 61% higher than those agreed in the PFI contract.

If the project goes well, then a local council can expect to be saddled with inflated debts for years to come. This is what happened with Coventry's two hospitals, the Walsgrave and Coventry and Warwick. Where there once was two hospitals, one on the outskirts and one in the centre, both have been demolished and now there is now one, rebuilt, on the outskirts - at an initial cost of £174 million. Where an initial refurbishment project would have cost approximately £30 million, it ended up costing £36 million per year over thirty years: that's over £900 million. This is perfectly typical - Allyson Pollock has shown that as soon as a private finance scheme is proposed, the price of hospital regeneration rises by an average of 72%, and from there the costs continue to soar. The only way to meet these costs is to cut provision - that is, to cut the number of beds and staff. This has also been replicated across the country.

Allyson Pollock et al have pointed out in the British Medical Journal that:

Cash can only be released by cutting services or by moving services to sectors where partial funding and user charges are practicable, or by redefining public services as private goods. Preventive, rehabilitation, mental health, disability, and long term care services continue to be withdrawn from the range of services available within the NHS, as does routine elective care.

David Taylor MP excoriated the government, noting that it did not raise any new money as the government claimed:

"Every penny raised for PFI schools, hospitals and prisons ... is paid for by the public purse, plus interest, plus profits."

Incidentally, once the hospital has been paid for by the public sector, the private consortium that built it will get to own it.

So, the question in the title is more than justified. This is a scheme that is neither cost-effective, nor does it reduce long-term borrowing requirements, nor does it produce reliable results. It also has the disadvantage of adding extraordinary costs and risks to any refurbishment or rebuilding programme that a local council might undertake. It reduces both the quantity and quality of the service provided. For a government that prides itself on pragmatism and prudence, this is a policy that astonishes in its fecklessness and recklessness.

The answer isn't easy to locate. The policy was designed by David Willetts MP, a very right-wing Conservative and head of policy coordination under Michael Howard. When Kenneth Clarke, then Tory Chancellor, first introduced the programme in 1993, he was assailed by Labour critics. Right up until 1996, the policy was savaged by frontbench and backbench Labour MPs as an unworkable sham. One of the reasons that so few PFI projects were issued by the Major government was precisely the opposition that it might provoke. Private sector firms were worried as well, since they would have to work with local councils which were increasingly falling into Labour hands. There were legal worries, too (don't worry, Labour sorted those out in its first year). Had Labour insisted on maintaining its opposition, the policy was dead in the water.

I would once have put it down to this government's extreme ideological disposition towards the private sector, but it appears that something more mundane was behind Labour's change of heart: Andersen Consulting. Paul Foot reported :

Andersen Consulting offered its services free to the Labour Party's Commission on Social Justice, set up by the Labour leader John Smith. The Commission was chaired by Sir Gordon Borrie, former Director General of Fair Trading, and a director of Mirror Group Newspapers, whose anti-trade union regime under David Montgomery was ushered in with the blessing of the Mirror's new accountants, Arthur Andersen.

...

On 12 May 1994, the day John Smith died, Andersen Consulting announced that its new director of research was to be Patricia Hewitt, Neil Kinnock's former press officer and deputy chair of the Party's Social Justice Commission.

...

In the summer of 1996, Andersen Consulting organised its biggest effort for the Labour Party. The entire team of prospective Labour ministers - about a hundred MPs - were ferried to Templeton College in Oxford, where they were treated to extended seminars by Andersen executives. The theme of the seminars was 'how to be an efficient minister'. No reference was made to efficient accountancy, nor did anyone explain why a group of unelected consultants whose partners had been banned from Government work by the Tory Administration were thought to be the best people to lecture Labour MPs on their responsibilities as elected ministers. Andersen Consulting have always insisted that these seminars were 'commercial': that is, that they were paid for - but no one has ever disclosed who paid, or how much.

Andersen went on to participate in and advise on those bountiful PFI projects, even after its Enron shenanigans were exposed.

No, it isn't strictly true that the entire Labour inner circle committed to PFI simply on account of its connections with Andersen Consulting, but it presumably didn't hurt either. Much more important was the background of importing SDP-style policies (along with a raft of former SDP stalwarts like Roger Liddle) and imposing them on the Parliamentary Labour Party, as well as on the country as a whole.

Party political broadcast: a Respect MP would strenuously oppose these stupid PFI schemes, argue for renationalising hospitals and schools concerned, as well as the imposition of a windfall tax on those companies who have profited from this crazy scheme. The money would be put into public services. Never mind the Tories - if you want to slash bureacracy and get value for money, vote Respect.

Iraq's "culture and tradition": the occupation according to the BBC. posted by lenin

From the BBC:

Looking cowed and frightened, a young man, identified by his full name and sitting directly in front of the camera, is being bullied and browbeaten by an interrogator who remains out of the picture.
"By what authority did you do these things?"

"Sir, they led us astray with their fatwas and offering us money."

"Do you realise that everything you did is perfidy?"

"Yes, sir."

"This Mullah Mahdi who gave you fatwas is a dog. He is scum. I'll get him within 72 hours and put him on TV, God willing."

"God willing, sir."

Ibrahim confesses to involvement in a series of attacks, and abducting and killing Iraqi policemen, national guards and others.

He says he was paid $100 (£52) per operation by his commander, or emir, who, he says, is homosexual.

I have no idea why the dude's sexuality would be relevant, but note that the television station on which these staged confessions are taking place is al-Iraqiya, a part of the Iraq Media Network (IMN) which is not merely "government-run" as the BBC reports, but was founded, and is funded, by the United States. The Beeb goes on:

The televised confessions, on a programme called "Terror in the Hands of Justice", are shown at prime time every night, and are clearly aimed at shocking the Iraqi public.

They portray the insurgents as bloodthirsty, venal, morally deviant, and religiously bankrupt.

A naked psyops campaign, then, aimed at undermining support - passive or active - for the resistance. The Beeb goes on:

Human rights advocates may not be happy about it. But such practices are deeply rooted in Iraqi culture and tradition - and a very effective propaganda tool for the authorities in their battle with the insurgents. [Emphasis added]

In the sense that such practices did persist under Saddam Hussein, the BBC is right. But a lot of other practices are "deeply rooted in Iraqi culture and tradition" in that sense: torture , mass murder , gassing , rape and much more besides. How many more Iraqi 'traditions' will the occupiers be upholding? Ethnic cleansing , perhaps? Or maybe the assassination of one's political opponents ? Hey, human rights groups might not like it, but this is part of their fucking culture, alright?

Protest report. posted by lenin

Dead Men Left is a fucking genius:

Predictions
Very high turnout. Around 100-200,000, giving a police estimate of 20-50,000.

Derisory media coverage.

Here is the BBC :

Police say about 45,000 people joined a demonstration in London, while organisers put the figure at 100,000.

I have no idea how to count these things, although I will say that I nipped into Pizza Hut at Picadilly for some lunch and watched the demo go by. I was there for a full hour and the chain of people didn't stop until I was outside belching in the fresh London air. Westminster City Council had vans, rubbish collectors and street cleaners hovering behind the tail end of the demo.

What can I say? It looked enormous, and even if you accept the police figure for some obscure reason, 45,000 is hardly an insignificant number. I remember the days when I would have licked that many bumholes just to get half the number out on a demo. Aye lad, you don't you know you're born. I have also camcordered the event and the footage is notable for a number of things. First of all, my hands can't hold shit steady. The picture shakes like a Parkinson's victim. Second, it was young, mixed and vibrant. There were young Muslim girls wearing the hijab - those oppressed, submissive souls - jumping around, laughing and yelling "Fuck Bush". They even got a chant going on precisely that theme. Third, there were a large number of Respect placards in the crowd, with Leon Kuhn's excellent art-work on them.

Started off in Hyde Park, with a temperature in the early 20s celsius, bright sun and a mild breeze. It was already extremely noisy when I arrived, and the cops were standing about with that "Overtime, overtime" expression on their faces. Always nice to have their sympathy. Ranks of vans were situated about the place, especially up near the Marble Arch. The march stretched back to some distant end of Hyde Park that I didn't care to amble down to. The drummers were there - ba-dah dah dah dah dah, ba-dah dah dah dah dah etc - as were an inordinate number of whistleblowers. The wrong kind of whistleblowers.

Eventually, the police let us bugger off on our way and the march proceeded down to Park Lane before taking a detour up some bloody road that I had never been down before. Turned out we were going to hi-jack the American embassy and issue demands: "We want some helicopters and pizza, you capitalista fucks!" That didn't work out, the embasssy being surrounded by metal fences and policemen, but there was apparently some ceremony with a coffin and a letter. All I saw was a horde of co-demonstrators charging and dancing around the perimeter of Berkeley Square, where once a nightingale sang [correction: it's Grosvenor Square. Bollocks.]. A vast bronze eagle graced the top of the embassy, and a lonely American flag flapped gently in the breeze. My camcorder zoomed in for dramatic effect. Back out to Park Lane (it was actually an hour-long circuit through Mayfair, so I'm editing), and onto Picadilly. Picadilly ascends in front of you in a great hump, so the vast sprawl of protesters makes for dramatic pictures - not on my mobile phone, however, which is a myopic little bastard and can only clearly discern details from five yards away. The Royal Academy of Arts was advertising a Matisse exhibition, which at least sorts tomorrow out.

Like I say, I detoured into Pizza Hut, knackered and starving, and was apostrophised by an Italian family who didn't like the pizzas we have here. I don't blame them. Fed and watered, I scurried off to Trafalgar Square to hear Lindsey German's voice cutting the air like a sledgehammer hitting concrete. It's very distinctive. She's lovely in person, but her speeches are a bit boring if you ask me. Some geezer who sounded Carribean to me made a terrific speech about US imperialism in Venezuela. "The US are intervening in Venezuela because they say they want a democratic leader. Hugo Chavez has been elected nine times in six years! What more do they want?" Well, my guess is they want him to die in a plane crash, but we'll come back to that. I loitered, filmed some people while muttering "I'm a police spy and I'm gonna get you loony lefty bastards". No one stirred.

This demo showed two things in my view: first, the momentum has not dissipated; second, it just isn't enough. Brian MacWilliams, head of the ILWU, was able to address the anti-capitalist rally in Seattle in 1999 and say "There will be no business as usual today". Well, there was business as usual today. The antiwar movement has been far too staid and conservative, partly because the main bodies in it need to maintain a broad coalition, which means being inoffensive to mainstream opinion. The enterprising vigour of the anticapitalist movement would be a welcome addition to the antiwar movement here. I'm not talking about trashing McDonalds windows (and surreptitiously stealing the McMuffins), but a bit of ingenuity and militancy would not go amiss.

Anyway, I have some pictures which I'd like to post, but Bloggerbot is fucking me up right now.

Polls/fake news/march. posted by lenin

Interesting poll results on some websites recently. John Harris runs a website named after his book So Now Who Do We Vote For? for dismayed Labour voters. It includes an excellent breakdown of local Labour constituencies, results from the last election, a very brief synopsis and a recommendation for tactical left-of-Labour voters. In its poll of visitors asking who they intend to vote for, Respect leads by a substantial margin, with the Greens in second place, Lib Dems third and Labour fourth. They also link to a fine new website called Make My Vote Count . The Muslim Public Affairs Committee asks visitors to choose a party for the next election which, again, Respect leads by a substantial margin. The Black Information Link has a poll asking whether visitors prefer Galloway or Oona King for Bow and Bethnal Green constituency. Galloway takes it with 94% of the vote.

The Bush administration has been in some trouble for manufacturing fake news broadcasts that glorify government policy, with the use of PR firms. Local news outlets have been broadcasting these as if they were real news. According to David Miller of Spinwatch , the BBC has fallen for the same old trick :

Spinwatch investigation has revealed that journalists working for the Services Sound and Vision Corporation (SSVC) have been commissioned to provide news reports to the BBC. The BBC has been using these reports as if they were genuine news. In fact, the SSVC is entirely funded by the Ministry of Defence as a propaganda operation, which according to its own website makes a 'considerable contribution' to the 'morale' of the armed forces.

...

Spinwatch can reveal that we have our very own fake journalists operating in the UK. The government pays for their wages and they provide news as if they were normal journalists rather than paid propagandists. Normally they work in a little known outfit with the acronym BFBS, which stands for British Forces Broadcasting Service. BFBS exists to 'entertain and inform' British armed forces around the world and is entirely funded by the British Ministry of Defence. BFBS is run by the SSVC. But on this occasion no mention of Ministry of defence funding was made. She was introduced simply as a reporter 'from the British Forces Broadcasting Service' who 'has been embedded with the Scots Guards'. As one wag inside the BBC puts it, this suggests a process of 'double embedding', first working for the MoD and second embedding with a regiment. The report began:

'Route 6 is the main road North out of Basra. It runs through the badlands of Iraq's marsh Arabs They make a living from crime - carjackings, smuggling and murder are common place. It's also the scene of an age old feud between two warring tribes.' (Good Morning Scotland, BBC Radio Scotland, 25 November 2004 - see below for link to full transcript)

Naturally enough, we are told that the regiment in which the reporter is 'embedded' has resolved these tribal problems by negotiating 'a ceasefire' following which 'the two tribes had had their first nights sleep in several months'.

Finally, you'll want to congregate at the north end of Hyde Park for the demo today. It starts in about two hours time, although you will usually wait a while before the damn thing gets moving. If you want to save your feet, I recommend you prop yourself up by a tree with a copy of Socialist Worker while you wait. I'll be filming it and taking pictures on my mobile. If I can find a way to get the footage on the web, I shall do so. See you there.

Troops out. posted by lenin

Be there.

Humanitarian intervention. posted by lenin

Here is a list:

1) Colombia .

2) Iraq . More .

3) Afghanistan . More .

4) Kosovo .

5) Venezuela . More .

6) Lebanon/Syria .

7) And finally, "Struggle moves from Iraq to World Bank" .

Trager-comedy. posted by lenin

In the Coen Brothers' rendition of The Ladykillers, it transpires that the lady is not for turning. The lady in this case being the black widow, Marva Munson, who lives alone and rents a room to some crooks who plan to rip off some money from a riverboat casino office. The criminals are led by a slick Professor G H Dorr (Tom Hanks), a pompous classicist who nevertheless has immense reserves of charm and civility to draw upon as the situation dictates. He succeeds in wetting a few drawers around the town with his citation of Edgar Allan Poe, and has almost every angle of his caper covered - except that contingency, or what appears at first sight to be contingency, makes a fool of him.

Part of what makes this film funny is just how predictable it is. The cues come along right on time, and one knows to expect that one member of the crew after another, having plotted to murder Ms Munson, will end up meeting an undignified death. The film could proceed just as well with another bunch of 'characters', since what matters is the role they perform in the unfolding sequence rather than their petty idiosyncrasies. In fact, fate seems to be sealed by the morphing portrait of Ms Munson's late husband; it is he who sternly directs his wife from beyond the grave, altering the expression on his portrait with a deftness lost to modern art. It is he who smiles cruelly as one crook after the next meets his punishment. Of course, the late Mr Munson is a stand-in for the authors of the script, they who really do pull the strings.

The function-of-a-Trager in their script is to be filled by whatever caricature they have recently been nurturing in their estimable comic minds. Tom Hanks' character, for instance, is a re-working of George Clooney's 'Everett' in O Brother, Where Art Thou? Marlon Wayans, meanwhile, is on typical - nay, stereotypical - form as he cusses, lusts after this women, identifies that women with his mama, and generally resembles something from Good Times ("dy-no-mite"). The caricatures fulfil their roles in the usual way, and the end of it all is that the confluence of circumstances allows Ms Munson to invest millions of stolen dollars on Bob Jones University, a bible-bashing outfit she is particularly keen on.

There is no cosmic scriptwriter, but there are scripts which we are locked into. Eric Berne, the founder of an odd cult called 'transactional analysis', noted in The Games People Play (1964) how much of one's life is scripted, not by a self-conscious author but by the model of elders and events, dear boy, events. One learns certain routines and models for dealing with problems as a youngster, and they become, or form part of, the script for adult life. In a less individualistic analytical model, one would note how scripted day to day life is. Take Alphonse's neighbour , for instance:

I have this insane neighbor. He gets up at 7 o'clock every single morning, Monday to Friday, like a machine. He showers, shaves, and - every day now, you understand - puts on a suit. Out the door he comes carrying the same breifcase. Then he takes the metro - same line, every day - and gets off at the same stop, goes up to the same building, to the same floor, sits at the same desk, and stares at a computer for hours.

What could possibly motivate him to perform this compulsive ritual, daily?

Alphonse is right. It's all scripted, darling. Someone has to do it, so why not you? (Leave aside that, for Althusser, ideology is what prepares you for the role). Basically, one takes the role because it rewards well enough.

Did the US use weapons of mass destruction in Fallujah? posted by lenin

According to Dr Khalid ash Shaykhli , an Iraqi health ministry official assigned to head a medical team investigating the situation in Fallujah, the US used mustard gas, nerve agents and other burning substances in its assault on that city, all banned by international convention. On top of that Guiliana Sgrena , the journalist shot by US troops, has already produced photographic evidence of the use of cluster bombs.

The use of cluster bombs in civilian areas is illegal , according to the UK government . The point about cluster bombs is that they disperse about 670 bomblets about the size of tennis balls, themselves dispersing into about 200,000 sharp needles which can enter the body and move inside organs for days, causing immense pain, if the victim does not die.

Fallujah has largely been forgotten by the Western media, despite the fact that the offensive continues. No wonder that, according to Dahr Jamail , "Fallujah has come to symbolise Iraq under occupation". (See Tariq Ali's interview with Socialist Worker as well).

19.3

Value and valuation. posted by lenin

A Jane Austen-style title for a response to the impeccably classical Paul Craddick, who has raised a question about the Marxian version of the labour theory of value:

I'd be interested to know how anyone who still credits Marxian value, at least as a heuristic (or, better, as an apprehension of something basic and undeniable about economy and production), answers the basic "Austrian" contention:

"... a suit is not eight times as valuable as a hat because it requires eight times as much labor as a hat to produce. It is because a finished suit will be eight times as valuable [Ed. sc., desired-demanded] as a finished hat that society is willing to employ eight times as much labor for the suit as for the hat."
(Roepke, paraphrasing Wicksteed, in Economics of the Free Society, p. 20, n. 2)

Someone in the comments box adds that "the fatal flaw in Marxist economics is the inability to identify an autonomous realm of supply and demand -- the market, in other words -- which gets wholly subsumed to production."

Inasmuch as the circuit of market transactions are where value is seen to be realised, there is an element of truth in this. Value, for marxists, derives from production or, more specifically, from labour. But the answer to the commenter, which partially deals with Paul's point as well, is to be found in Marx's brief pamphlet, Value, Price and Profit, chapter I, part IV . Taking issue with a by now famous Citizen Weston over the determinants of wages Marx says:

You would be altogether mistaken in fancying that the value of labour or any other commodity whatever is ultimately fixed by supply and demand. Supply and demand regulate nothing but the temporary fluctuations of market prices. They will explain to you why the market price of a commodity rises above or sinks below its value, but they can never account for the value itself. Suppose supply and demand to equilibrate, or, as the economists call it, to cover each other. Why, the very moment these opposite forces become equal they paralyze each other, and cease to work in the one or other direction. At the moment when supply and demand equilibrate each other, and therefore cease to act, the market price of a commodity coincides with its real value, with the standard price round which its market prices oscillate. In inquiring into the nature of that VALUE, we have therefore nothing at all to do with the temporary effects on market prices of supply and demand. The same holds true of wages and of the prices of all other commodities.

As I say, this partly answers Paul Craddick's query. If marginal utility can be seen as a factor regulating demand, then it becomes a factor in the fluctuation of prices around the natural value of a commodity. The example provided by the 'Austrian' merely compounds this: if the coat requires eight times as much labour to make, that itself is significant. At the moment, it doesn't require any work at all to acquire air, although this could by no means be said to be a substance lacking in utility for most people. Yet, it costs nothing, and will cost nothing until our skies become so polluted that air worth breathing requires labour.

There endeth the lesson. Naturally, I will be relying on the trained Marxian economist who hosts Dead Men Left to shore up my case with genuine expertise.

Bush crowns Wolfowitz: the iron fist becomes the hidden hand. posted by lenin

As Wolfowitz is made President of the World Bank by President Bush, Tim Shorrock has the goods on Wolfowitz's sordid past . He cites Associated Press :

Administration supporters of Wolfowitz said Wednesday he is suited for the World Bank post and pointed to his management experiences at the Pentagon and his diplomatic experience at the State Department. He had served as assistant secretary of State for east Asia during the Philippinetransition to democracy. He also serves as U.S. ambassador to Indonesia.

Well, guess what his diplomacy in Indonesia amounted to? Read on...

This is not new. Robert McNamara was President of the World Bank from 1968 to 1981. In order to get that job, he quit his old one as US Secretary for Defense, a post he had held under both Kennedy and Johnson from 1961 to 1968, supervising the destruction of Vietnam. It is widely reputed that McNamara has somehow resiled from his actions, but all he has done to date is indicate that he felt the war could not succeed, was misguided even though it was conducted according to "the principles and traditions of this nation". He had personally ordered the massive escalation of bombing of defenseless civilians in South Vietnam 1965, not to mention the more widely discussed escalation against the North.

Denis Healey reports a revealing meeting with McNamara:

We used to have breakfast together in Brussels before every meeting of NATO defence ministers. I once asked him how things were going in Vietnam. "Just fine," he replied. "Next month we'll be dropping twice the tonnage of bombs we are dropping this month."

Anyway, we at least have to thank President Bush for choosing his main neoconservative sidekick for the role, since it illustrates at a stroke the connection between neoliberal economic policy and neoconservative foreign policy. And, as some wiseacres have pointed out, at least it removes him from the Department of Defense.

Breakfast bites. posted by lenin

Here's a few nuggets:

1) Berlusconi to withdraw troops from Iraq . Facing huge public pressure, one of the most arrogant of Europe's leaders is fixing to capitulate. Why? Because he knows that his war has handed a huge election gift to the Left. Italy is not alone . Dissent is also rumbling in the belly of the beast.

2) Mark Seddon wants to see Labour's majority reduced. Can anyone help him out with that?

3) Dead Men Left reports on a massive public sector strike due over pensions next week .

4) The Bush administration continues to produce bogus news stories for local news programmes which puff up government policy .

5) Following Chavez's recent public conversion to socialism, Critical Montages brings news of a Washington policy to contain Chavez . Chavez distinguishes his socialism from Stalinism, saying: “We must reclaim socialism... but a new type of socialism, a humanist one, which puts humans and not machines or the state ahead of everything."

Defining F & T. posted by lenin

The word "fascism" is over-used, and with it the word "totalitarianism". In the former case, it was used in ridiculously broad terms by ultra-leftists from the 1920s until the 1980s. These days, it is used by some pro-war leftists and conservatives to describe a wide variety of movements without much discrimination. The silly blogger Tim Worstall calls Naomi Klein a fascist on grounds that ought to invite a chuckle or two. Similarly, Paul Berman described Che Guevara as a "totalitarian". In the latter, I think it is over-used by definition since it has little to recommend it as a concept. The liberal columnist Nick Cohen referred to the Muslim Council of Britain's lobbying for an 'incitement to religious hatred' law as "religious totalitarianism".

T.
I'll come over all English, then, and have my T first. A while ago, I described 'totalitarianism' as a shifting, polysemous notion . Naturally, I did so to sound cool (and it worked), but the point stands. The term originated as an anti-fascist concept in May 1923, but was shortly thereafter appropriated by Benito Mussolini himself, who spoke of the "fierce totalitarian will" of his Fasci di Combattimento, while Ernst Junger spoke of "total war" and "total mobilisation". The reputed historian of fascism Ian Kershaw notes that, although totalitarianism has evolved into a comparative method, a means of associating and discerning similarities in different kinds of dictatorship (principally, fascist and communist), its accounts have typically been more satisfactory in dealing with fascism than with Stalinism (he singles out Arendt for this critique). So, while Carl Friedrich adumbrates a six-point theory of totalitarianism (among which are the shared characteristics of a one-party state, monopoly over the media, state control of the economy etc), Kershaw points out that the concept can "only speak in a generalised and limited fashion about similarities of systems, which on closer inspection are so differently structured that comparisons are forced to remain highly superficial". For instance, the 'state control of the economy' model is highly misleading when applied to fascism for reasons I will come to later. He cites Hans Mommsen: "The totalitarianism theory is a myth which stands in the way of any real social historical explanation [of Nazism]". One of the main disadvantages of the theory is that it begins with a regime, takes it as a fait accompli, and works backward, accepting the regime as a teleologically necessary result of the movement that produced it. Another more serious one is that with its focus on the techniques and forms of rule, it has nothing to say about social or economic conditions, the functions of the regime, or its goals. (See Ian Kershaw, The Nazi Dictatorship: Problems and Perspectives of Interpretation, 2000; also Ian Kershaw and Moshe Lewin (eds), Stalinism and Nazism: Dictatorships in Comparison, 1997). Robert Paxton adds similar objections - for example, while Hitler came to power with the assistance of "traditional elites", Stalin did not. Therefore, Stalin did not have to deal with concentrated centres of socio-economic power that Hitler did, since these had been removed by the Russian Revolution. Whatever the similarities in the techniques of power, there were significant differences between the two regimes. He adds further that if 'totalitarian' theory typically bundles Nazism and Stalinism together, the exclusion of Italian Fascism is mysterious, since it achieved a 'totalitarian' control over its own citizens every bit as repressive as Nazism.

Even, however, if you were to place the most generous construction on the term, and hold it as a concept with limited use in identifying movements and regimes which claim a total mandate over the behaviour of a people, it couldn't conceivably be applied to the Muslim Council of Britain's misguided call for a law against 'religious hatred' or incitement to it. And in any serious analysis of different movements and regimes, it is close to useless.

F.
This brings us neatly to fascism. However you begin, this is a difficult phenomenon to define. Is it, strictly speaking, an ideology? What regimes count as fascist? The term is known to originate from the Italian word fascio (a bundle or sheath), although it was also related to the word fasces, a Latin term for the axe encased in a bundle of rods used in Roman public processions to signify the unity and authority of the state. Mussolini launched the world's first fascist movement on May 23 1919 in Milan to "declare war against socialism ... because it has opposed nationalism". Although it united syndicalists and war veterans, proposed all kinds of radical measures (women's sufferage, huge tax levies on the wealthy, workers' say in control of production), it implemented none of these in power. In fact, Robert O. Paxton, a liberal historian of fascism, writes that whenever "fascists acquired power, they did nothing to carry out these anticapitalist threats", although "they enforced with the utmost violence and thoroughness their threats against socialism".

This experience led some socialists to conclude that fascism was merely the instrument of the bourgeoisie for crushing the workers. Such was the view of Gramsci in his early years, who described it as the "white guard of capitalism". The German Communist Party (KPD) reached a similar conclusion, deciding that fascism had already arrived in Germany courtesy of General Seeckt's crushing of the Left in Berlin. The fact that this was ordered by the Social Democrat Frederich Ebert led some of them to conclude that fascism was a means of control which capitalists could use even through the social-democratic left, so that the problem was "social fascism" as much as it was real fascism. This was officially the position of the Comintern after 1924, which described it as the "open terroristic dictatorship of the most reactionary, most chauvanist and most imperialist elements of finance capital". As Dave Renton points out in a useful but flawed summation of the arguments from a Marxist viewpoint, this didn't make a lot of sense. First, it ignored the role of the masses in fascism's rise to power, and second it ignored the primacy of the petit bourgeoisie in the movement. How could it have a mass appeal if it was merely the expression of one section of a tiny capitalist class? (Fascism: Theory and Practise, 1999)

He advances the analysis of Trotsky, Silone, Thalheimer, and the later Gramsci, and so will I shortly. Let's get back to the question of fascism as an ideology. Roger Eatwell, Stanley Payne and Roger Griffin all argue for an understanding of fascism as an ideology of a peculiar kind. Griffin calls it "a revolutionary form of nationalism", while Payne defines fascism as a series of ideas containing negations, goals and a particular style. Tellingly, in describing fascism in this way, Payne will not allow that Nazism was a movement of the same genus as Italian fascism, but rather it was a "non-communist National Socialist equivalent to Stalinist Russia". Eatwell, in defining it as an ideology, mildly proffers the following qualification: "There is a sense in which fascist movements and regimes departed significantly from the ideological roots". (Fascism: A History, 2003). He says further "it did not necessarily lead to brutal dictatorship and genocidal practise" in the same way that Marxist ideology did not necessarily... I think this is a shockingly misplaced thought. Primo Levi put it best when he said (in an interview featured at the end of If This is a Man/The Truce) that one could imagine socialism without concentration camps, but this could not be said of fascism. Socialism had gone wrong, fascism had gone right - all too right. Eatwell here performs a move similar to many liberal interpreters of fascism in that he gives too much credence to what fascists claim for themselves. True, genocide was not a necessary corrolary of fascism (even if it was a very likely one), but brutal dictatorship? Similarly, when Sternhell describes fascism as "socialism without the proletariat", an anti-liberal, anti-rationalist synthesis of nationalism and socialism, he gives too much weight to some of the intellectual roots of fascism and to what fascists had to say of themselves.

Ian Kershaw proposes a different way of looking at the question, in which the actions of the fascists are at least as important in defining what the phenomenon is as the ideology, however constructed. Characteristics which Italian Fascism and Nazism had in common include: "extreme chauvanistic nationalism ...; an anti-socialist, anti-marxist thrust aimed at the destruction of working class organisations...; the basis in a mass party drawing from all sectors of society, though with pronounced support from the middle class and proving attractive to the peasantry and to various uprooted or highly unstable sectors of the population; fixation on a charismatic, plebiscitically legitimised leader; extreme intolerance toward all oppositional or presumed opposition groups, expressed through vicious terror, open violence, and ruthless repression; glorification of militarism and war...; dependence upon an 'alliance' with existing elites...; and at least an initial function ... in the stabilisation or restoration of social order and capitalist structures". These are, as Kershaw points out, much more significant overlaps than those traced between Stalinist Russia and the Nazi regime, and therefore the category of fascism is far more helpful in understanding Nazism than that of totalitarianism.

Robert O. Paxton, in his account, offers a more general objection to defining fascism as an ideology:

The classical "isms" rested upon coherent philosophical systems laid out in the works of systematic thinkers. It seems only natural to explain them by examining their programs and the philosophy that underpinned them.

Fascism, by contrast, was a new invention created afresh for the era of mass politics. It sought to appeal mainly to the emotions by the use of ritual, carefully stage-managed ceremonies, and intensely charged rhetoric. The role programs and doctrine play in it is, on closer inspection, fundamentally unlike the role they play in conservatism, liberalism and socialism. Fascism does not rest explicitly upon an elaborated philosophical system...

Interestingly, Paxton goes on to describe fascism's reliance on romanticist ideas of national historic flowering, the historic destiny of a people and its mystical union with the leader. He refers to "Fascism's deliberate replacement of reasoned debate with the immediate sensual experience ... And the ultimate fascist aesthetic experience, Benjamin warned in 1936, was war". (Paxton, The Anatomy of Fascism, 2004).

Fascism seems to be principally a movement, sustained by mythologies, emerging from the social distress of the petit bourgeoisie yet appealing to segments of all classes. Now, while Paxton certainly rejects the case I am about to make, his book provides much of the empirical support for it. Indeed, while he briskly rejects the crude ultra-leftist notion of fascism as simply the tool of big business, he does acknowledge the ease with which the two worked together once they had made their Faustian pact. Fascism does not emerge from within the ruling class, but they do accomodate themselves to one another.

One Marxist definition which does seem to be of some use, therefore, is one that conjoins the Bonapartist model and the Gramscian hegemony model. The Bonapartist model derives from Marx's discussion of Louis Bonparte's coup, following a failed working class uprising. It was as if, Marx said, the bourgeoisie realised that in order to retain its social system, it had to give up political control. Given an equilibrium between the working class and the bourgeoisie, Bonaparte, representing only a narrow section of society (the petit-bourgeoisie and the lumpenproletariat) was able to assume power and achieve some independence. But in doing so, he preserved the material power of the bourgeoisie, thus regenerating their political power. The homology was picked up by Klara Zetkin and, later, Trotsky. It is also given a favourable hearing in Ian Kershaw's non-marxist approach. The other element, Gramsci's hegemony theory, is roughly as follows. No regime can rule by force alone - they usually rule by consent, whether tacit or explicit. The fascist regime in Italy enjoyed much public support as a result of easy victories over foreign enemies (the last of which was Ethiopia in 1936). There was so little active dissent in Nazi Germany that the Gestapo required only one officer for every ten to fifteen thousand citizens (the GDR, for instance, required many more Stasi officers). For a regime to consolidate this consent, it must achieve ideological hegemony. When hegemony breaks down, as it did for liberal democracy in late Weimar, there will be a recourse to extreme measures to preserve the status quo. Gramsci understood the state as a hegemonic bloc, welding segments of different classes together (a case in point would be Anderson's "supine bourgeoisie" in alliance with the old feudal elite after the Glorious Revolution).

In this vein, Ian Kershaw outlines four blocs of power in the Nazi regime, drawing on the analysis of Franz Neumann and Peter Huttenberger: the Nazi political elite; 'big business' (including large landowners); the army; and later the SS-police-SD complex. There was some tension within this bloc - their interests overlapped, but were not identical, and power shifted gradually away from business and the army to the Nazis and the new SS-police-SD complex. The early power of the conservative business establishment could be seen through both the crushing of 'subversive' elements in the SA in 1934, and in the waning power of Hjalmar Schacht, since his position as President of the Reichsbank inclined him to expand international trade, while more powerful sectors of business (especially the electro-chemicals giant IG Farben) pressed for more autarkic policies aimed at protecting crucial raw materials for rearmament. Indeed, for Kershaw, it was rearmament that provided the crucial catalyst for the fusion of interests between the Nazi elite, the army and large capital. It has often been argued (for instance by Tim Mason) that the initiation of the Four Year Plan in 1936 signalled the final "primacy of the political", in which the Nazis acquired considerable independence from the business elite. In fact, IG Farben had scripted the technical details for the plan, and it was itself part of a long fusion between elements of business, the military and the political elite. Both Hitler and Mussolini were inclined to see the economy as subordinate to the nation, but they could not and did not seriously depart from the interests of big capital right until the last few years of the war. The formation of the state-owned steel company, Reichswerke-Hermann-Goring, was opposed by Germany's steel barons, but the state's involvement kept steel prices high, and it coincided with a major "re-privatisation" wave, which also returned the mammoth United Steelworks to private hands.

Doubtless, the balance of power within this 'power cartel' tipped slowly toward the Nazis and the SS-police-SD complex. However, even with the increasing radicalisation of the regime, there was no shortage of opportunity for business to profit, including the exploitation of labour in conquered territories and the construction of deportation and gassing facilities as the Nazi holocaust began. They also benefited to a large extent from the 'Aryanisation' of Jewish capital, and were instrumental in bringing about the expansive wars of conquest that made the Final Solution possible. While certain groups within the army and the old aristocratic elite eventually resisted Hitler, industrial leaders did not join them. Kershaw writes:

Until the last stages of war, the benefits of the Third Reich to all those sections of industry and finance connected with armaments production were colossal. Undistributed profits of limited liability companies were four times higher in 1939 than they had been in 1928 ... The mammoth profits of major concerns was no incidental by-product of Nazism, whose philosophy was closely tied in with provision of a free hand for private industry and the eulogization of the entrepreneurial spirit.

Again and again, Hitler's ideological obsessions overlaid domestic or foreign policy decisions, but these nevertheless redounded to the considerable advantage of business. The decision to launch Operation Barbarossa, for instance, was certainly animated in part by Hitler's hostility to "Jewish Bolshevism". But it also had the aim of deterring a Russian attack on Rumanian oil fields, which gave the Axis half of its supplies. As long as the Soviet Union was undefeated and expanding in East and South East Europe, it could be a threat.

This is to understand the hegemonic bloc comprising Nazi rule as one in which business joined as a last resort, given the impotence of liberal parliamentarians and old-fashioned conservatives. Terrified by the threat of revolution, desperate for industry to be made profitable again, they had been nevertheless wary of the horny-handed rabble-rousers of the far right. Once the pact was made, however, it held fast and, with the vicious suppression of labour, the destruction of trade unions and leftist organisations, and the repeal of many gains made during Weimar, business was bountiful.

What distinguishes fascism from other forms of authoritarian rightist rule is its roots in mass politics. It is a distinct and unique danger which, regardless of populist rhetoric and promises to the poor, forms a deadly pact with the state and business elites; and it is this pact which makes its lunatic racist visions possible. It is not a coherent ideology, or even one that tries to be. It is a movement emerging from the social distress of the petit-bourgeoisie and the very poor during a crisis of capitalism, and a liberal-democratic crisis of hegemony; but it is one which fuses with other class interests. It is buttressed by myths, sutured by nationalism and racism. It is a proxy movement which turns the revolutionary discontent of the lower middle classes and poor against them, and which seeks to obliterate the Left and its allies.

To put it as simply as possible, fascism is not a simple conjunction of nationalism and socialism, some synthesis of left and right. It is a movement that in each and every case, in every empirically validated way possible, has treated the Left as a mortal foe, destroying it before all else. The socialists filled the concentration camps before anyone else did. Those who casually toss about the phrase 'totalitarianism' or knowingly tap their nose and hint that some lefty rhetoric overlaps with the far right merely evince their own paucity of analysis and political imagination.

Land of Gory. posted by lenin

Never mind "the fascist aesthetic" (in retrospect, it would have been better to approach that one through the prism of the Barthesian notion of 'mythologies'). Check this out:

When Pfc. Chase McCollough went home on leave in November, he brought a movie made by fellow soldiers in Iraq. On his first night back at his parents' house in Texas, he showed the video to his fiancee, family and friends.

This is what they saw: a handful of American soldiers filmed through the green haze of night-vision goggles. Radio communication between two soldiers crackles in the background before it's drowned out by a heavy-metal soundtrack.

"Don't need your forgiveness," the song by the band Dope begins as images unfurl: armed soldiers posing in front of Bradley fighting vehicles, two women covered in black abayas walking along a dusty road, a blue-domed mosque, a poster of radical cleric Muqtada Sadr. Then, to the fast, hard beat of the music — "Die, don't need your resistance. Die, don't need your prayers" — charred, decapitated and bloody corpses fill the screen.

"It's like a trophy, something to keep," McCullough, 20, said back at his cramped living quarters at Camp Warhorse near Baqubah. "I was there. I did this."

...

Troops often carry personal cameras and video equipment in battle. On occasion, official military camera crews, known as "Combat Camera" units, follow the troops on raids and patrol. Although the military uses that footage for training and public affairs, it also finds its way to personal computers and commercial websites.

The result: an abundance of photographs and video footage depicting mutilation, death and destruction that soldiers collect and trade like baseball cards.

"I have a lot of pictures of dead Iraqis — everybody does," said Spc. Jack Benson, 22, also stationed near Baqubah. He has collected five videos by other soldiers and is working on his own.

By adding music, soldiers create their own cinema verite of the conflict. Although many are humorous or patriotic, others are gory, like McCollough's favorite.

"It gets the point across," he said. "This isn't some jolly freakin' peacekeeping mission."

...

"You find out just how weird it is when you take it home," said McCullough, whose screensaver is far more benign, showing him on his wedding day.

Brandi McCullough, then his fiancee and now his wife, said she had walked in as he was showing the videos to friends who were "whooping and hollering."

The 18-year-old was shocked by images of "body parts missing, bombs going off and people getting shot."

"They're terrifying," she said by phone from Texas. "Chase never talked about anything over there, and I watch the news, but not all the time. I didn't realize there was that much" violence.

She also wondered why anyone would record it.

"I thought it was odd — a home video," she said. "People getting shot and someone sitting there with a camera."

...

Another specialist, who wouldn't give his name, said the bloody videos disgusted him.

"I wouldn't watch them, and the people I work with wouldn't watch them," said the specialist, stationed at a base near Mosul in northern Iraq. "I don't think it's proper."

He compared the violent videos to those made by insurgents showing beheadings.

What. The. Fuck?

Link and addendum. posted by lenin

Direland has the story:

THE FORGOTTEN CHILDREN OF ABU GHRAIB: Children were held at the Abu Ghraib torture prison, where some of them were abused--both physically and sexually--according to government documents and testimony obtained by the ACLU under the Freedom of Information Act and released on Thursday. Brigadier General Janis Karpinsky, the prison's former commander, was among those who testified to investigators that children were held, including one who was only eight years old. The Associated Press reported the story, but the TV news channels were too busy discussing how Michael Jackson showed up at his trial in pajamas to mention it. If child abuse is committed in the name of national security, I suppose it just isn't all that newsworthy. The Washington Post did run a Friday story about the documents' revelations of a list of over 100 "ghost prisoners" hidden without any official record at the torture prison by the CIA with the connivance of military intelligence. Of course, in the very first 'graph of that story, signed by Josh White, the paper cited "documents obtained by The Washington Post," giving the impression that the paper had an exclusive and had actually done some digging; but the ACLU -- which had really obtained the incendiary documents and released them to the entire press corps -- wasn't mentioned until the last paragraph. Honorable journalism, that. And the abused children jailed at Abu Ghraib weren't mentioned by the Post story at all...

Linking to my last post, Jodi Dean at I Cite rightly notes that "the way that rationalism was brought into the service of the local in eugenics and medicalized racism" complicates the picture of fascism as purely irrationalist. I merely lift my reply from her comments box:

[A] crucial distinction needs to be made between different levels of rationality, one which I ought to have made in the post.

Adorno and Horkheimer's immanent critique of Enlightenment bears some relevance here. The objectification and instrumentalisation of nature has proved to be deadly in some hands. And goals that derive from irrationalist impulses can be implemented in rational ways. The internal picture of the Nazis was one of being compelled to wipe out a threat and of having to find the most unsentimental means of doing so. Similarly, during Reichskristallnacht, although people were encouraged to smash up Jewish shops and attack their homes, there were penalties for anyone who was perceived to have done so for selfish (pathological) reasons.

Conversely, and picking a more or less random example, the Azandes as studied by Evans-Pritchard engaged in practises which would be deemed scientifically unsound, irrational etc, yet it would be perfectly rational for an individual growing up in such a society to internalise these as norms, simply for the sake of survival.

So it makes sense to deconstruct the perceived divide between rationality and ideology (Blair's Third Way, "doing what works" etc), which is itself pure ideology. Like Lenin, we should ask "cui bono"? For whom are you rational, to what end, and in what circumstances?

Pity I failed to mention Zizek on political jouissance yesterday - for fascists, the Other 'steals' enjoyment in the nation-state and its mythos, while the fascist regime says "You May!" - you may oppress, vilify, rob, abuse etc. In this way, the supporters of fascism are libidinally bound to its order. Nah, needs more thinking about. I'll come back to you on that.

Finally, two calamities struck yesterday. Gary Kasparov retired from the chess game, and Dave Allen retired from life. Allen was a socialist by conviction and funny by virtue of his seriousness. Curiously, but commendably, although he packed his shows with anti-religious humour (he loved that Pope hat), he always ended with the phrase "may your God go with you".

The fascist aesthetic. posted by lenin

Terry Eagleton begins his book The Ideology of the Aesthetic (1990) by reminding the reader that:

Aesthetics is born as a discourse of the body. In its original formulation by the German philosopher Alexander Baumgarten, the term refers not in the first place to art, but, as the Greek aisthesis would suggest, to the whole region of human perception and sensation, in contrast to the more rarefied domain of conceptual thought. ... It is as though philosophy suddenly wakes up to the fact that there is a dense, swarming territory beyond its own mental enclave which threatens to fall utterly outside its sway. The territory is nothing less than the whole of our sensate life together - the business of affections and aversions, of how the world strikes the body on its sensory surfaces, of that which takes root in the gaze and the guts and all that arises from our most banal, biological insertion into the world.

It is "the body's long inarticulate rebellion against the tyranny of the theoretical".

Unsurprisingly, perhaps, some of Mussolini's earliest allies were futurist artists and intellectuals, men attracted to speed and violence. They were supporters of the war, and despised the socialists for selling out the nation. Marinetti, a close associate of Mussolini's, wrote:

For twenty-seven years we Futurists have rebelled against the branding of war as antiaesthetic ... War is beautiful because it establishes man's dominion over the subjugated machinery by means of gas masks, terrifying megaphones, flame throwers and small tanks. War is beautiful because it initiates the dreamed of metallization of the human body. War is beautiful because it enriches a flowering meadow with the fiery orchids of machine guns.

It goes on, but you get the gist.

But the aesthetics of war is accompanied by the aestheticisation of politics - or, as Walter Benjamin had it:

Mankind, which in Homer's time was an object of contemplation for the Olympian gods, now is one for itself. Its self-alienation has reached such a degree that it can experience its own destruction as an aesthetic pleasure of the first order. This is the situation of politics which Fascism is rendering aesthetic. Communism responds by politicising art.

In the movie Max, a fictional Hitler befriends a Jewish art dealer called Max Rothman. Hitler's inadequacy and resentment of the decadent, cosmopolitan, upper bourgeois Rothman is obvious from the beginning. He hates modernism, and the film gives the clear impression that he resents it at least in part because he doesn't get it. For him, art must represent universal truths, while for Max this is an age in which such truths are in flux, expanding and contracting, shattering from time to time. Rothman encourages Hitler for, although his art betrays little in the way of talent, "there's definitely something twitching behind your curtain". Well, that something proved to be Hitler's oratory. Awful, posturing, vulgar, raging, and yet utterly compelling, Hitler discovers that he can compel a beer hall. He packs his speeches with vile anti-Semitism, the most odious filth from the right-wing gutter press where Hitler got much of his information from. He rants and fabulates, packs his discourse with irrationalist fantasies and libidinal intensites. His speech works by homonomy and synonomy rather than logic.


Walter Benjamin

The revolt of the pathological (in the Kantian sense) against universalising rationality partly underlies the appeal of fascism.

These themes unify the various material promises. For the petit-bourgeoisie, caught between this Scylla and that Charybdis, fascism promises capitalism without capitalism. That is, hierarchy and profit without instability and profiteering. Small, patriotic capital against greedy workers and usurious multi-national finance capital. For the conservative bourgeoisie, fascism is a useful ally against the left. For some workers and lumpenproletariat, it is a revolt against greedy capitalists.

There is a fascist idea of the body, the healthy organic unit. Some mistakenly think it is to be found in the film Fight Club, in which flabby, miserable workers turn their lethargic bodies into carved wood. But the aesthetic of Fight Club is nihilist, rather than fascist. There is no organicism, or fetishisation of hierarchy, only destruction, only levelling. Shiva, rather than Brahma, is the animus behind Fight Club. The marches of healthy fascist soldiers through towns, the myths of fit young men siezing trains and roads, 'liberating' towns and cities, muscles that snap, long elegant bones, 'pure' blood - this is the body politic, the anatomy, of fascism. The political body, for fascists, is prone to the odd 'virus'...

Fascists prioritise the local over the universal, preferring the warmth of the biological and the illumined poetics of the senses to chill rationalism and abstract ethics. Any successful universalism will answer the demands of the senses, without succumbing to their narcissism. That is why fascists aestheticize politics, while socialists politicise art.

Melanie Phillips on Lebanon. posted by lenin

Melanie Phillips , Britain's foremost crackpot of the Right, is taking what she calls the "msm" to task for not highlighting the possibility that the massive pro-Syrian demonstration organised by Hezbollah was not quite as it appeared. The msm is right-wing shorthand for "mainstream media", which is the right's version of "corporate media" - the standard right-wing "anti-elitism" objects to the liberal cultural elite rather than the capitalist economic elite.

The source of Mad Mel's dissension is an article which appeared in World Net Daily, claiming that most of the demonstrators weren't Syrian at all. She cites former Lebanese Prime Minister Michel Aoun:

"This was not a Lebanese showing, and many of those who actually were Lebanese were not there because they support Syria. We know that at least three Palestinian camps were present. And there are 700,000 Syrian workers inside Lebanon, many of whom are not even supposed to be there. They were urged by Syria to attend so it looks like many Lebanese are protesting. Plus Syria bused in their own citizens from Syria through the border into Lebanon to join the rally."

Further:

"Yesterday was not a spontaneous outpouring; it was planned and orchestrated," he said. "You see in the opposition rallies that they happen every day. People are going because they they want to, and they are going regularly."

It isn't a particular surprise that Aoun is making these claims. He had been appointed Prime Minister when he was known as General Aoun, was armed by Saddam Hussein, and led Christian Maronite forces against the Muslim fighters. Aside from trying to evict Syria, his main enemies were the Druze and Muslim forces. He is considered a war criminal, and is not associated with the bulk of the Lebanese opposition.

However, is he nevertheless right? The last claim must be right: demonstrations are planned and orchestrated, that's how they work. How did the demonstrations against Syria's occupation begin, and where did all those flags come from? Someone must be organising something. But what about the attendees. First of all, let's get the numbers right.

According to USA Today , at least 500,000 turned out for the demonstration, dwarfing previous anti-Syrian demos. According to Brian Whitaker in The Guardian , "Trying to estimate the number was futile, but half a million would be plausible and a million not unbelievable".

As to the character of the demonstration, Whitaker observes that:

The anti-Syrian protesters who have attracted worldwide attention are mostly Christians, plus Sunni Muslims and Druze, and they are generally from the better-off sections of Lebanese society. Yesterday's masses were overwhelmingly the poorer -- and historically downtrodden -- Shia, who form 40% of the population.

Hezbollah supporters in Lebanon are not small in number, then. Shi'ites in Iraq have, in Zogby polls , reported deep worry about the international pressure being placed on Syria:

Almost 60% of Shi'a, on the other hand, now worry that in the wake of this assassination measures will be taken that will result in a deterioration of the Lebanese security situation, an attitude shared by only about 15% of Maronites and Druze.

Further:

How best now to proceed with securing Lebanon? Only Maronites see a Syrian withdrawal as key with one-half agreeing with this as the solution. About one-third of Shia and Sunnis and less than one-fourth of Orthodox agree. Many Lebanese, in particular Orthodox, Sunni, and Shia, see the solution to Lebanon's security in "reinforcement and deployment of the Lebanese army and security forces all over Lebanon." And while 60% of Druze see the disarming of Lebanon's militias as necessary for the country's future, only about one in seven Maronites, Orthodox, and Sunni agree. Not surprisingly, only 5% of Shia agree, since the "disarming" provision of UNSC 1559 specifically has Hizbollah in mind.

As Critical Montages notes, if the estimates are right, about 13 to 26% of the total population of Lebanon arrived at the demonstration in support of Syria. This is massive, but it would not be a surprise given the reported views of many Lebanese people. There isn't a clear consensus in support of removing the Syrian regime (although I am personally not in doubt that it should be evicted). Part of the reason for this has to do with Israel, which was in occupation of Lebanon for some 20 years, and wishes to destroy Hezbollah, the primary force responsible for evicting IDF forces. There is presumably a worry that Israel will reinvade.

So, yes, the demonstrations probably are representative of much Lebanese opinion, and no there is no evidence of them being simply bussed in from other countries etc. Nor is there evidence of the coercion that Aoun speaks of, and no one will provide it because this is the sort of thing one floats to plant seeds of doubt - it is not the kind of thing one expects to be called on. If anything, what we have seen has been a popular expression of hostility to US interventionism. And that, dears, the "msm" will never touch. Damn the lot of them.

Shoah, Naqba and ethnic cleansing. posted by lenin

It is enough that Europe's Jews were almost completely exterminated by the Nazis, (at least 60% of those in gas chambers using carbon monoxide or Zyklon-B). Enough, that is, to say that the memory of it shouldn't be abused or insulted by those who ought to bloody well know better. It is also enough that 750,000 Palestinians were ethnically cleansed, driven from their homeland by fanatical conquerors who believed that the answer to anti-Semitism was to build a Jewish State on what was alleged to be Biblical Israel, the land of Solomon and David. That too should not be abused.

So when fatuous idiots write letters like this:

The most dramatic incidence of ethnic cleansing in modern times has been the systematic ethnic cleansing of Jews from Arab lands. It is a pity the mayor appears either to be in ignorance of this or to be indifferent to it.
Prof Geoffrey Alderman
London

A response of some kind is merited. It is a complete fiction that there has been systematic ethnic cleansing of Jews from Arab lands, and the worst thing about Alderman's missive is that it seems to be answering Ken Livingstone's criticism of Israeli ethnic cleansing against the Palestinians - which was systematic, and planned, as revealed in Plan Dalet documents discussed by Israeli 'new historians'. To falsely accuse nations, let alone a whole region, of ethnic cleansing is a vulgar slander, and it also has the unfortunate side effect of trivialising quite real oppression of Jews in some Arab countries. Thankfully, Jews Sans Frontieres has been on the case.

Here he deals with Egypt , and here Morroco . There is also a very strong article by an Iraqi Jew named Naeim Giladi who writes that:

Jews from Islamic lands did not emigrate willingly to Israel; that, to force them to leave, Jews killed Jews; and that, to buy time to confiscate ever more Arab lands, Jews on numerous occasions rejected genuine peace initiatives from their Arab neighbors. I write about what the first prime minister of Israel called "cruel Zionism." I write about it because I was part of it.

Another good article about the same is stored here . A nice article exposing the myth of "systematic ethnic cleansing of Jews from Arab lands" is to be found in Ha'aretz .

Unsurprisingly, Professor Alderman's letter drew this tart reply from a "trailing spouse" .

Dining with the enemy. posted by lenin

The Pentagon has released an Iraq Culture Smart Card to help soldiers meet and eat with Iraqi families. Replete with lists of dos and don'ts, diagrams outlining social structure, tribal allegiance and so on, it is an invaluable cultural map for enterprising soldiers who want to get on with the locals. Unfortunately, it misses out a few. Allow me to inform the troops before one of the poor bastards gets shot.

DO: Get the fuck out of the country right now.

DON'T: Torture anyone. It's a war crime and you could end up on America's Whackiest Torture Videos. Then you'd look pretty stupid.

DO: What are you still doing there?

DON'T: Shoot up houses, cars or ambulances.

DO: Return those idiotic medals that some of you have been given for your services to imperialism. Just chuck it back in their face, and tell 'em to fuck off.

DON'T: Bomb cities and shoot at anything that tries to escape. Remember the advice of the Good Soldier Svejk: "Don't shoot! There are people on the other side!"

DO: Form alliances with other pissed off Vets and their relatives demanding an end to the occupation.

DON'T: Play that stupid fucking 'nu metal' crap. You're just making things worse for yourselves. Let me put it this way: if I had to listen to that horseshit, I'd be strapped into a car-bomb, flying right into your base yelling "ALLLLAAAAAAAHU AKHBAAAARRRR!!"

DO: Frag, shoot at commanding officers, set fire to effigies of Bush, piss on the flag, go AWOL.

DON'T: Let Oliver Stone make a movie about your life. You will rue the fucking day.

There's more, but I think we both understand each other.

Conspiracy theory redux. posted by lenin

Last year I speculated that Nick Brown had been bagging votes for Blair when he pretended for a while to be a "rebel". Nick Brown, I thought, the blandest Blairite in the whole cabinet - a rebel? So, imagination suddenly aflame, I wrote:

Imagine Tony Blair spies disaster in the offing with both Labour MPs and opposition parties capable of uniting to wreck his latest Flagship Policy, and invites a respected but dismally boring MP into his office for a chat. They talk about how much this bill is going to hurt the government, whether it succeeds or fails. The MP is loyal, and amiable, and what is more he is highly regarded by liberals who might otherwise be moderately suspicious of the government. Tony talks him round the issues, what is at stake for the government, how it could only be avoided by a resounding success for the bill. And suddenly, as if he'd thought of the idea himself, our loyal MP says:

"Well, what if you let me join the rebels? Let me pretend to be their most dedicated and principled spokesman, the one who won't buckle no matter what concessions the Chancellor delivers from his sack. Being a former cabinet member, with no major tarnishes to speak of, they would be hard pressed to turn away from me. Now, then, say I suddenly 'return to the fold' as it were, at the last second, citing aforementioned concessions and my enduring concern for the wellbeing of the Party. That would be certain to send a great shattering crack through any coalition of dissent."

And Blair says:

"Well, there was no need to be fucking wordy about it, Nick, but I take your point."

And over a glass or two of Kristal, they proceed to call in their political advisers, pore over the details and evolve a strategy...

Anyway, I reckon John Denham has been fulfilling more or less the same role in relation to this latest anti-terror law . The more important question is what the implications of this law are. Among those are the obliteration of rights won by revolting barons in the form of the Magna Carta.

When Winston Churchill was an apologist for Fascism. posted by lenin

Old news, occasioned by the growing veneration of Churchill by American neoconservatives, and also by the recent opening of a museum dedicated to Churchill's life, or rather to eulogising about one of the great bastards in British history.

Richard Burton was banned from the BBC in 1974 for writing, in an article about his experience of starring in a biopic about Churchill, in which he said he virulently hated Churchill and all his kind. He said:

“In the course of preparing myself… I realized afresh that I hate Churchill and all of his kind. I hate them virulently. They have stalked down the corridors of endless power all through history…. What man of sanity would say on hearing of the atrocities committed by the Japanese against British and Anzac prisoners of war, ‘We shall wipe them out, everyone of them, men, women, and children. There shall not be a Japanese left on the face of the earth’? Such simple-minded cravings for revenge leave me with a horrified but reluctant awe for such single-minded and merciless ferocity.”

Burton was onto something, while the BBC merely robbed themselves of a star for Hi-de-hi. Churchill, commenting on the British suppression of Iraqis fighting for independence from the empire, said:

“I am strongly in favour of using poisoned gas against uncivilized tribes. The moral effect should be good… and it would spread a lively terror…”

And Elliot Abrams was onto something when he compared Ariel Sharon to Churchill, for when Churchill was Colonial Secretary, he authorised the bloody suppression of Palestinians fighting the Mandate. He was also a supporter of eugenics:

"The unnatural and increasingly rapid growth of the feeble-minded and insane classes, coupled as it is with a steady restriction among the thrifty, energetic and superior stocks, constitutes a national and race danger which it is impossible to exaggerate ... I feel that the source from which the stream of madness is fed should be cut off and sealed up before another year has passed."

And, addressing himself to the Palestine Royal Commission in 1937, said:

"I do not admit... that a great wrong has been done to the Red Indians of America, or the black people of Australia... by the fact that a stronger race, a higher grade race... has come in and taken its place."

Writing of Bolshevism and Zionism, (guess which he preferred), he referred to "the schemes of the International Jews", "this sinister confederacy" and said "this world-wide conspiracy for the overthrow of civilisation and for the reconstitution of society on the basis of arrested development, of envious malevolence, and impossible equality, has been steadily growing."

What more could you add to that list? A poisonous racist, a supporter of eugenics, a proponent of mass murder, a vile imperialist and ... an apologist for Fascism? Oh yes. Benito Mussolini had "rendered a service to the whole world", showing "a way to combat subversive forces". Even Hitler received some Churchillian approbation: "One may dislike Hitler's system and yet admire his patriotic achievement. If our country were defeated, I hope we should find a champion as admirable to restore our courage and lead us back to our place among the nations."

In fact, it was Churchill who authorised over 200 Nazi troops to join British forces in suppressing the partisans who had liberated much of Greece from Fascist rule, fighting on the side of the reactionary Colonel Grivas.

But surely, you say, Churchill won the war and therefore...? No, Churchill made pretty speeches (among which was one he made to parliament in 1940 describing Mussolini as a "a very great man") and diverted the troops to imperialist subventions in Africa and the Middle East (Persia). Churchill was an obese ruling class pillock, a bilious racist, an imperialist and an apologist for Fascism. One yearns for the day when we will all do to the memory of Churchill what Byron proposed passers-by to upon encountering the grave of Castlereagh:

Posterity will ne'er survey
a Nobler grave than this:
Here lie the bones of Castlereagh:
Stop, traveller, and piss!

You too can be saved!! posted by lenin

A meme bouncing around the philosophically inclined part of the blogosphere is the triad of Althusser's notion of 'interpellation', or how the subject is convoked by ideology into filling the blank space of a superstructural function; Badiou's Truth-Event, in which the subject is convoked by a miraculous event; and Heidegger's 'Call of Conscience', which issues from within me, yet is somehow beyond me. It's a dirty job, and someone has to do it - but who? Ideology designates the subject, interpellating him, transforming a "Mr Anderson" into "Neo". Ideology, like Morphius, makes a mysterious, urgent call, the one Mr Anderson knows he has been waiting for.

Althusser has it in his Three Notes on the Theory of Discourse:

Ideology interpellates individuals by constituting them as subjects (ideological subjects, and therefore subjects of its discourse) and providing them with reasons-of-a-subject (interpellated as a subject) for assuming the functions defined by the structure as functions-of-a-Trager [support].

Trager is an intimidating word, but it comes from Marx in Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy. The Trager is the executor of the structural process, the necessary support. For instance, in commodity-exchange, the individual appears as a conscious representative of the exchange process inasmuch as she is a commodity owner. Who will fulfill the roles opened up by imperialism but he who has been interpellated by the call of 'God, Country and College Money', or the opposing call of 'Allah, national independence and jobs'?

In what circumstances, then, is one likely to be interpellated, to receive the call "Hey, you!"? Precisely, the Truth-Event, the Second Coming, the revolutionary irruption that puts the brakes on history's locomotive. (I'm thinking of that sweet anecdote from Benjamin's Theses on the Philosophy of History in which the revolutionaries smash all the clocks in the town as a literal expression of the Event's arrival, in which Time is rudely interrupted by Eternity). Badiou's paradigm is the Christ-event, the resurrection that suspends the Law (you know, natural Law, like how if you die you stay dead), as advertised by St Paul. The illegality of Christ's return produces a multiplicity in excess of itself, one that allows the overcoming of finitude. The Law (you die, you don't come back) is a cipher of finitude (biological limitation), and the Event reproves the Law, showing that infinity is possible.

So, there you are. Being a Christian, you're saved, you now know that bodies come back from the dead. The Law needn't be all that is. You become a proselytiser, a titanic shit-stirrer, informing all and sundry that Caesar is a nobody, a nothing, you could take him easy if he didn't have all those guards. You are an insurgent, a revolutionary, a proletarian, a class warrior. Just as St Paul obliterated the difference between Greek and Jew, so you insist that there is no war but the class war, and no race but the human race. This homology is viewed askance by liberal leftists and Tory sceptics like Bertrand Russel and John Gray. It is obscene, dangerous, a threat to the modus vivendi, upsetting the coordinates by which both hope to achieve their political goals. More ominously, they fear that in such an Event, it is they who would be cruciform.

That's enough for now. I got nothing to say about Heidegger. Don't like him, don't understand him, don't even give a fuck. Sorry. Here's some links for you: Charlotte Street , I Cite , CPRobes and Alphonse .

Topos posted by lenin

Discover the Network ! I directed you all to this site some while ago, particularly to the diagrams replete with moving branches, little dollar signs and boxes naming institutions and magazines and each juncture.

After reading this glowing review of the centre-left Dissent magazine at David Horowitz's Front Page magazine, I've got a better idea. There should be a website devoted to unearthing the structural affinities between Cold War liberalism and neoconservatism. Lots of little diagrams showing how the memes and rhetorical tics flow back and forth; maps showing overlapping discursive fields; scattergraphs depicting correlations and so on. As a topographical exercise it would be both useful and a precious wind-up for the likes of Horowitz and HP Sauce.

When Jack Straw was a Saddam apologist. posted by lenin

If you were an Iraqi Kurd who had been tortured by Saddam's regime and was seeking refuge in Britain in 2001, you might have received a letter from the Home Office indicating that the Home Secretary:

is aware that Iraq, and in particular the Iraqi security forces, would only convict and sentence a person in the courts with the provision of proper jurisdiction ... you could expect to receive a fair trial under an independent and properly constituted judiciary.

This was what was told to an Iraqi Kurd who refused an order to shut off power to Kurdish parts of Iraq. He was suspended, electrocuted and beaten. The letter, passed on to the Refugee Council, went on to say in the protocol of such refusal letters:

"The secretary of state considers your claim to be an example of prosecution not persecution."

This was part of an unannounced decision by the Home Office to dramatically increase deportations of Iraqi Kurds living in Britain, and in that year refusal rates for Iraqi applicants stood at 78%.
Imagine if some leftist had made the claim that "Iraq, and in particular the Iraqi security forces, would only convict and sentence a person in the courts with the provision of proper jurisdiction". They would be pilloried and vilified in every organ, and The Sun would surely denounce such a person as a traitor. The British government does not give a diseased testicle about the plight of ordinary Iraqis, as is illustrated daily by the impunity of those carrying out and ordering disgusting abuse of Iraqi civilians and prisoners and by the ritual contempt with which asylum seeker are treated.

Checkpoint Killings. posted by lenin

Well, I suggested the other day that checkpoint killings were quite ordinary events in Iraq these days, and examples of this can still be found on the Iraq Body Count website. However, a huge number of these don't become bodies thanks to the hospitals. See this , for instance.

Meanwhile, an AP report tells how:

Yarmouk Hospital - just one of several large medical facilities in Baghdad - receives several casualties a day from friendly fire shootings.

On Saturday, for example, US soldiers opened fire on a civilian vehicle in Baghdad, injuring a man and killing his wife.

But all glory be to the land of impunity, where a President may order epic crimes against other countries for no cost at all, yet has to face impeachment if he receives cock-sucking from anyone but his wife. (I imagine dear old Barbara Bush was much put upon.) For:

[S]ome shootings - involving trigger-happy foreign security contractors - will never be investigated. Late last month, in Baghdad, unidentified foreigners in a convoy of three white four-wheel-drive vehicles opened fire on a small car that had come too close.

The woman driver was killed, her body left slumped in the front seat, splattered with blood and shards of glass. A male pedestrian was hit in the spine and paralysed. Those responsible are unlikely ever to be brought to book.

Still, no one can beat the Whitehouse spokesman for spewing intestinal pie through a sanctimoniously pursed mouth, especially when it comes to suggestions that our boys, our boys, target civilians:

The White House rejected Ms Sgrena's claims. "I think it's absurd to make any such suggestion that our men and women in uniform deliberately targeted innocent civilians. "That's just absurd," said spokesman Scott McClellan.

However the Third Infantry Division, whose troops include those that fired on the Italians' car last Friday, came under investigation in April last year for opening fire on carloads of Iraqi women and children at checkpoints, according to US army documents obtained by the Guardian.

"The order was given to shoot anything that moves, but it wasn't meant to be taken literally," one soldier told the US army investigator.

Well, what dumbass gave out an order that wasn't meant to be taken literally? Don't they know that irony is not a strong point among Americans, particularly those who join the army because they think it will put them through college?

Insult to injury. posted by lenin

Those troops in Iraq having a blast. They're making DVDs of themselves playing with Iraqi corpses and kicking mortally wounded prisoners in the face. Video footage obtained by the ACLU shows:

a bound and wounded prisoner sprawled on the ground, [showing] his bullet entry and exit wounds. At one point, a U.S. soldier kicked the prisoner in the face.

Army documents quoted a soldier at the scene as saying he "thought the dude eventually died. We weren't in any hurry to call the medics."

...

In another part of the video, a soldier grabbed the arm of a truck driver who had just be shot dead and [made] the corpse wave to the camera.

Well, according to the Pentagon:

"It didn't rise to the level of criminal abuse"

The Army considered it "inappropriate" rather than abusive. That "inappropriate" word is a favourite of school-teachers and social workers. It's what they use to describe behaviour that is slightly embarrassing or stupid. The Palm Beach Post, which put some sections of the video on its website, omitted the audio because of "profane language". So, they calculate that the surprising spectacle of soldiers in war cursing would be more shocking to its readers than the sight of their brave boys booting a man who has bullet wounds, is lying on the floor, and is about to die. Having to hear the word 'fuck' is less endurable for sensitive readers than having to see a dead Iraqi wave at them. I'd say that's revealing.

Googlebomb: Sean Hannity is a lying idiot. posted by lenin

UK readers will understand that Sean Hannity is some kind of idiot. We do get books by Al Franken and documentaries like Outfoxed. Well, it's time the whole world knew that Hannity was a liar and a dickhead of throbbing proportions.

Sean Hannity

Sean Hannity

Sean Hannity

Sean Hannity

Sean Hannity

Sean Hannity

Sean Hannity

Sean Hannity

Sean Hannity

Sean Hannity

Sean Hannity

Sean Hannity

Sean Hannity

Sean Hannity


All of the above realise that Hannity needs his testicles removing with hot tongs. If you're a blogger, go see the original Googlebomber at A la Gauche to join in.

The 'new economy'. posted by lenin

Critical Montages has an excellent post on the myth that lack of skills is at the root of low pay for the average worker during and after the 'new economic paradigm' which was allegedly discovered at some point in the 1990s.

There are a number of things that need to be said about this notion, and I intend to post more about this in the future. The first thing to note is that the 'new economy' was largely an ideological construct deployed in advance of there being any real evidence of increased productivity and the like. Indeed, it was really standing on its head a certain kind of language that was used during the 1980s and early 1990s. Economists as diverse as William Lazonick and Robert Reich were certain, in the 1980s, that a new economic paradigm was called for, and Japan had mastered it. They drew on some truths, but romanticised the reality of Japanese capitalism. In particular, they claimed that the Japanese tendency to look for long-term profit shares rather than short-term profit rates, the intervention of MITI, the existence of 'company unions' and the tendency to keep skills on the shop floor and emphasise training created stability and 'vertical solidarity'. Reich, who went on to become Labour Secretary under Clinton, before leaving in some dissatisfaction, made some stinging criticisms of the Reagan administration in this vein, noting that public spending (in education, health, street-lights and so on) was an investment in the economy.

Well, in the 1990s, the Clinton team utilised some of this rhetoric on being elected, while the real discursive cross-over came when a) the Japanese economy went belly-up and b) the US economy discovered it could have reasonable growth rates without high inflation (ie, without rising wage costs). The 'goldilocks economy' (not too hot, not too cold) conjugated with a great deal of technophilic nonsense about how the web would create millions of rich people. The sort of huckstering, PT Barnum-style case for capitalism that had prevailed in 1920s pamphlets became common ideology, so that Newsweek was moved to published an article entitled "The whine of '99: Everyone's getting rich but me!"

At any rate, David Coates' excellent book, Models of Capitalism, expertly demolishes the nonsense about the impact of skills on wage growth, and also - valuably - on the alleged levelling capacities of education, one of New Labour's favourite shibboleths. I am readying a longer and more boring post on this, but I'll give fair warning.

Update on last post. posted by lenin

It isn't really an update on the actual material covered in the last post, which was a rather vicious but nonetheless jocular dig at some of Johann Hari's polemical tactics. I made clear then, and want to doubly emphasize now, that I do not regard Hari or any of his liberal colleagues in the media, as left-wing equivalents to the fraudster known as David Irving. It is an update on one of the reactions.

The reason I come back to this is that I advertised my post at MediaLens , which is an excellent site for media analysis and criticism from a Chomskyist point of view. The editors are very tolerant about my attention-seeking, so whenever I think I've produced something half-decent I seek an audience there. Most of the people who post there are intelligent and thoughtful left-wingers, many of them unusually perceptive. Unfortunately, I seem to have elicited a bout of Holocaust denial from one of the regular contributors there. He proceeds in the usual fashion, claiming that there is some chain of equivalents that links liberal supporters of imperialism to Nazi apologists like David Irving: in particular, the myopic liberal David Aaronovitch was compared with Irving. I explained that I was joking, and also that such comparisons if offered seriously in print would lose a libel suit any day of the week. What then followed was a bundle of falsehoods and bizarre inversions of reality, perhaps retailed in good faith (and so much the worse if they were). These often coincided with the kinds of claims made by the idiotic Irving himself.

I have no truck with idiots who claim that the Left is drifting toward anti-Semitism in its criticism of Israel, or toward Fascism in its refusal to back imperialist wars which are justified as humanitarian ventures. But there is a real problem if people like this believe what they do, and still place themselves on the left. They are either deeply confused, or deliberately dissembling. At any rate, to allow their version of events to float in the blogosphere, untouched and unanswered is to normalise it, make it an acceptable and normal kind of argument. It should be exposed for what it is, which is dangerous delusion at best.

Fascism has not gone away, in case anyone has been living under a rock. It is a crime in progress in many parts of the world. There is a serious danger that, given a sufficient concatenation of crises, a full-scale revival of Fascism could be convoked. The myths which will help midwive its rebirth have to be challenged.

Johann Hari: "the David Irving of the Left"? posted by lenin

I've tried being nice. I've gone to the extremes of the encomiastic, larding Johann with compliments like a simpering groupie. And where is the love? Where is the honey-honey, cheep-cheep, sugar-sugar, baby-love? Why do you build me up, buttercup, only to let me down? Etc. Well, I've had enough. Like a rejected rabbit-boiler, I am now on a mission of revenge. The preceding is a way of indicating in advance that you are in no way supposed to take the following entirely seriously, or at least that I intend to backtrack considerably at the end.

Johann Hari once stupidly referred to Eric Hobsbawm as "the David Irvine [sic] of the Left" . Now, reading his material, one gets a sense that he is at least familiar with David Irving's methods, because he - well - he uses some of them. Hey, if he can dish it out, he can take it.

Here's a few examples, then to the meat of the matter.

Reviewing George Galloway's slender polemic, I'm Not The Only One, Johann Hari issued several falsehoods , which he then repeated when Galloway won his court case. Here is a typical example, where Hari states:

How about the passage where Galloway defends Saddam's claim to Kuwait, describing the province as "clearly a part of the greater Iraqi whole stolen from the motherland by perfidious Albion"?

What Galloway actually said was:

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

By removing the first six words, and replacing the words 'Kuwait had been stolen from' with 'clearly a part of the iraqi whole', Johann made it seem as if Galloway had indeed defended Saddam's claim to Kuwait. In David Irving's trial, it emerged that he had falsified evidence relating to Himmler's phone log on December 1st, 1941, to make it seem as if Hitler was doing his best to prevent his subordinates from enacting the Final Solution, reading the words "Verwaltungsfuher der SS haben zu bleiben" as "Juden zu bleiben". What had actually read "administrative leaders of the SS to stay" was interpreted as "Jews have to stay where they are".

Another example. Johann, in an interview with Antonio Negri, appears to have lifted samples of another writer's work and imported directly into his own without bothering to credit the original , a technique known as plagiarism.
David Irving, in his biography of Goebbels, drew on the work of the Nazi apologist Ingrid Weckert without bothering to credit her when he wanted to slip a statistic or two past the inattentive reader, (this was in order to minimise the violence against Jews on Reichkristallnacht).

The most obvious example of where Hari apes these methods is in his attack on Hobsbawm itself, whom he describes as "an unapologetic defender of Stalinism" (elsewhere stating that "Hobsbawm is not a Stalinist" ). On what basis does he make this charge? Thus:

He would gladly have spied for Stalin, he explained recently and without regret, if only he had been asked. In his autobiography, he explains that he "treats the memory and tradition of the USSR with an indulgence and tenderness". In his 600-page account of a lifetime of supporting the Soviet Union, there are three regrets or caveats I could count. The last is typical. He notes briefly: "I am prepared to concede, with regret, that Lenin's Comintern was not such a good idea." That will be a comfort to the tens of millions Lenin and his acolytes slaughtered.

Even the material Hari cites leaves it very questionable whether Hobsbawm is actually an "unapologetic defender" of Stalinism. Indeed, in the book, Hobsbawm is constantly explaining, if not explaining away his former support for the regime. Hari ignores counter-factual evidence from the same autobiography, in which Hobsbawm denounces Stalinism, or indeed in Hobsbawm's much lauded history of the 'short twentieth century', Age of Extremes, (from the latter, see the chapter on 'Real Socialism'). It is one of Irving's hallmarks to adduce implausible evidence to support this or that thesis and ignore more solid evidence that belies it. Where he cannot do this, he explains the countervailing evidence away with a few glib gestures, or misrepresents it.

Etc. I could do this all day.

Of course, Johann Hari is not the David Irving of the Left. Neither is Eric Hobsbawm. While Irving attempted to silence free speech by serving a writ with the aim of having a book by Deborah Lipstadt pulped, was shown up in court as precisely the falsifying, Holocaust-denying, far right sympathising creep that he claimed he wasn't, Hobsbawm is a reputed historian with a series of magisterial histories behind him. Irving systematically lied in the service of Fascism, while Hobsbawm fought fascism.

But Johann Hari is a polemicist, and sometimes a terrific vulgariser. This is bad news when you're paid to do it by a national newspaper. Usually, however, the worst of Hari emerges when he is writing for a website - either his own or, formerly, Harry's Place. Item: in the second installment of Hari's scintillating Pilger Watch series, Hari performs a classic bit of cut n paste logic. He says:

In his latest New Statesman piece – which, in a move onto bold new territory for the Pilge, is an attack on the liberal media – rants about “a certain PC-ism, such as the sound and fury over dropping the gay age of consent, adds to the illusion of a Labour government that, had it not fallen in with the awful Bush, would be celebrated as "progressive".”

Note the choice of language. “Political correctness” is a term used by conservatives to attack the left’s Gramscian attempts to change the terms of political discourse to steer it away from racism, sexism and homophobia. It is a phrase whose use has extremely reactionary connotations, as Pilger must know.

As he is more interested in what Pilger's words connote than what they denote, let's just remind ourselves of who was complaing about multiculturalism not so long ago. Sure, one can disapprove of multiculturalism as a discourse without necessarily being a reactionary. I do myself. But Hari "must know" that doing so can have "extremely reactionary connotations".

Anyway, let's just get Pilger's statement out of the way:

A certain PC-ism, such as the sound and fury over dropping the gay age of consent, adds to the illusion of a Labour government that, had it not fallen in with the awful Bush, would be celebrated as "progressive". Tell that to the people of a faraway country, more than half of whom are children, whose lives have been devastated by the fanatical Blair and his court of apologists. Read the robotic Hoon's statement on the use of cluster bombs - how Iraqi mothers would one day be "grateful" for the use of weapons that killed their children - and Ministry of Defence letters to the public that lie about depleted uranium and its Hiroshima effect.

Hari says, more in anger than sorrow:

Pilger often denigrates the fruits of progressive struggles on issues like gay rights. He mocks them as either irrelevant or, worse, baubles hanging on an imperialist tank ... Pilger acts as though by celebrating the heroic fight for an equal age of consent, gay people are legitimising arms sales to tyrannies.

Why is this? Why does Pilger sneer so about the achievements of gay rights struggles?

Oh, darling, give it a fucking rest! If it isn't obvious to you, come sit on my knee and I'll explain it: Pilger does not 'sneer' at the achievements of gay rights struggles. He sneers at those who use New Labour's concessions to those struggles a poor fig leaf to cover for what is essentially a reactionary government. He sneers at those who imagine that, say, the repeal of Clause 28 - necessary and right though that was - outweighs the deaths of 100,000 people, government-sponsored mass murder, social injustice, growing inequality, the privatisation of essential services, cuts in benefits for those who need them, the slanders against asylum seekers and the sucking up to the rich. He sneers at the Tonier Than Thou bunch, who can always find 'progressive' reasons to defend this weak and nasty government. He sneers, in short, at dudes like you.

Disclaimer: I am not responsible for what morons may say about this post.

Pentagon lied about hostage shooting; Whitehouse don't get the resistance. posted by lenin

Well, the European news agencies have been reporting this for some time now, and it has appeared in the Australian media, yet ABC just 19 minutes ago could only say "Story of Italian Hostage's Release Unclear" . The BBC, which at least covers it, can only bring itself to say that "details remain unclear" .

She was released by Iraqi insurgents holding her captive after negotiations carried out by Italian intelligence. The story relayed by the Pentagon was that the car had been speeding toward a check-point and the boys had just been a little bit over-zealous with their index fingers.

Not so, according to Guiliani Sgrena, the released hostage. It wasn't a check-point, and they weren't speeding. Doug Ireland has the goods:

"Our car was rolling along at normal speed, so it was impossible for there to have been a misunderstanding," Scregna told the Italian magistrates who've been charged with investigating the murderous incident, according to the Italian wire service Ansa-- which also says her account has been confirmed by one of the Italian secret service agents in the car with her, who was likewise wounded. These two testimonies from the victims of the shooting completely contradict the Pentagon's account that Sgrena was in a speeding car that was heading straight for a checkpoint and was shot at to stop it. In fact, says Scregna, there was no checkpoint--"just a patrol that started shooting at us as soon as they bracketed their headlights on us." In the same dispatches, Sgrena's boyfriend, Pier Scolari, says Washington wanted to eliminate her because Scregna--who'd reported extensively on the abuses at Abu Ghraib--had "important new information, and the U.S. forces didn't want her to get out of Iraq alive," according to the Nouvel Obs. Scolari went so far as to speak of an "ambush."

Well, smack my arse and call me a tart, I am not one bit surprised. Iraq Body Count, for anyone who has time and energy to hoke through the database, carries veried reports of many car shootings in which innocent drivers and their kids copped it near a security check-point.

Meanwhile, an interesting look at the resistance in Iraq at the Beeb. There's some of it I would take issue with - you know, those moments where you realise they're talking out of their Alistair Campbells - but it's still worth a look. Examples of Campbells? They claim, as do many news outlets drawing their information from quasi-official sources, that the bulk of the resistance attacks are carried out by "networks loyal to the former Ba'athist regime", although they attribute most suicide bombings to non-Iraqi militants like Zarqawi. Doug Ireland carries a link to an article by Michael Schwartz in Tom Dispatch, which:

goes a long way to demolishing the current White House/Pentagon claim that the Iraqi insurgency has a centralized command and control structure constructed by an alliance between Ba'athist and Saddamist recalcitrants and the administration's current hobgoblin, the odious Abu Massab al Zarqawi (a claim that our easily manipulated mass media have largely transmitted uncritically.)

Schwartz suggests why "the foundation upon which these descriptions are built -- that these forces now dominate the resistance, supply its leadership, or provide the bulk of its resources -- is likely to prove profoundly inaccurate. This is most easily seen by consulting -- of all sources -- the CIA, which issued a contrary report about the time the Newsweek article appeared.

"According to the CIA, the Zarqawi faction and his Saddamist allies were 'lesser elements' in the resistance, which was increasingly dominated by 'newly radicalized Sunni Iraqis, nationalists offended by the occupying force, and others disenchanted by the economic turmoil and destruction caused by the fighting.' There is, in fact, a vast body of publicly available evidence in support of the CIA's perspective, including, for example, most first-hand accounts of the resistance in Falluja and other cities in the Sunni triangle.

"In the short, dreary history of America's Iraq war, our leaders have repeatedly acted on gross misconceptions about whom they were fighting -- sometimes based on faulty intelligence, but sometimes in the face of perfectly accurate intelligence. This is, in all likelihood, another instance where they believe their own distortions, and it is worthwhile attempting to understand the underlying pattern that produces this almost predictable error.

"One way to characterize this propensity to mis-analyze the resistance is to see that all the portraits thus far generated of the Iraqi resistance have been based on the assumption that it is organized into a familiar hierarchical form in which the leadership exercises strategic and day-to-day control over a pyramid shaped organization. Such a structure is described by both military strategists and organizational sociologists as a 'Command and Control' structure.... No one exercises such control over the forces that fought against the Americans in Falluja or Sadr City and those that are currently fighting a guerrilla war in Ramadi and other Sunni cities that boycotted the recent elections.

"Guerrilla wars violate the command-and-control portrait in two important ways: local units must, by and large, supply themselves (since an occupation army would be likely to interdict any regular shipments of supplies); and they are likely to have substantial autonomy (since hit-and-melt tactics do not lend themselves well to central decision making)... [Guerrillas] are less vulnerable to attacks on supply lines and to the targeting of commanding officers -- two key strategies of conventional warfare.

"The resistance in Iraq reflects this dialectic of guerrilla war. The mujaheddin in Falluja, for example, seem to have been notoriously decentralized; even local clerical leadership reportedly achieved only a tenuous discipline over the troops. This same lack of discipline, however, made it impossible for the U.S. to identify and eliminate key leaders. During the second battle for the city in November, their hit-and-run tactics allowed them to hold out for over a month against a force with overwhelming technological and numerical superiority. The command and control portrait is not a useful tool when it comes to analyzing a large component of the Iraqi resistance, and it is of little use if it is applied to the movement as a whole..."

Schwartz article here .

Branding the revolution. posted by lenin

A while ago, I posted on the involvement of PR companies in the Iraqi elections . Introducing this week's surrealist human rights report from the State Department, Paula Dobriansky remarked :

"As the president noted in Bratislava just last week, there was a rose revolution in Georgia, an orange revolution in Ukraine, and most recently, a purple revolution in Iraq. In Lebanon, we see growing momentum for a 'cedar revolution' that is unifying the citizens of that nation to the cause of true democracy and freedom from foreign influence."

This was the first time the phrase 'cedar revolution' had been heard in relation to Lebanon. Timothy Garton Ash puts it mildly:

Spot the odd one out. "Purple revolution" in Iraq? Purple, as in the colour of blood? There's a vital difference between a democratic revolution which is peaceful, authentic and generated by people inside a country and one that is imposed, or kick-started, by a military invasion and occupation. To be sure, the former can and should be encouraged from outside.

...

But there's a problem if the brand name for Lebanese people power - cedar revolution - seems to come from a senior American official, who in the next breath talks about "freedom from foreign influence".

Branding.

When a spontaneous uprising is successfully overlaid with the branding given it by a foreign power, the narrative quickly follows, one that can be guided to a 'natural' ending by the script-writers. Bush shaking his finger in the air, demanding Syria's troops and intelligence forces leave Lebanon. US officials calmly hinting that Syria is on its last warning. Blair saying the regime has only one chance remaining. Assad saying he'll remove 'some' troops. The other side, about which we hear so little, has only one symbol: Flags held aloft by crowds in the square, the mythical centre of people's power, the scene of liberal democratic awakening which Europe and America can only gaze on with longing, given the corruption and hollowness of their own democracies.

The point, then, is to decouple them - America does not have ownership of this revolt, and any particular direction the struggle might take does not invite America to undertake corrective editing.

"Mayor in new Race Row" posted by lenin

That is what the Evening Standard sandwich boards say on Oxford Street. Because mayor Ken Livingstone has a) called Ariel Sharon a war criminal and b) claimed that Israel and its supporters are inflating claims of anti-Semitism in order to cow critics of Israeli policy. See the article for yourself. The Jerusalem Post seems more upset that Livingstone described Sharon as a 'war criminal' than anything else. We needn't detain ourselves - Sharon is an epic murderer, a toxic racist, and a jaw-dropping hypocrite. This is unfortunately a common human type.

However, because of point b), Jason Pearlman of the Board of Deputies has issued a statement:

"He seems to be claiming anti-Semitism doesn't matter," a spokesman said. "Once again the Mayor has shown an inability to understand and show consideration for the Jewish community."

Is Livingstone claiming that anti-Semitism doesn't matter? Let's parse the article:

Today the Israeli government is helping to promote a wholly distorted picture of racism and religious discrimination in Europe, implying that the most serious upsurge of hatred and discrimination is against Jews.

All racist and anti-semitic attacks must be stamped out. However, the reality is that the great bulk of racist attacks in Europe today are on black people, Asians and Muslims - and they are the primary targets of the extreme right. For 20 years Israeli governments have attempted to portray anyone who forcefully criticises the policies of Israel as anti-semitic. The truth is the opposite: the same universal human values that recognise the Holocaust as the greatest racist crime of the 20th century require condemnation of the policies of successive Israeli governments - not on the absurd grounds that they are Nazi or equivalent to the Holocaust, but because ethnic cleansing, discrimination and terror are immoral.

He plainly isn't saying that anti-Semitism doesn't matter, otherwise why must it be "stamped out"? But is he right that the main targets of racists in Europe today are Muslims and black people? Duh. Is his point in anyway invalidated by the figures indicating a rise in anti-Semitism? No.

Well, then. Actually, it seems more likely that the Board of Deputies are pissed off by Ken's criticism of their support for Israeli murder. He says:

Throughout the 1970s, I worked happily with the Board of Deputies in campaigns against the National Front. Problems began when, as leader of the Greater London Council, I rejected the board's request that I should fund only Jewish organisations that it approved of. The Board of Deputies was unhappy that I funded Jewish organisations campaigning for gay rights and others that disagreed with policies of the Israeli governmen.

Relations with the board took a dramatic turn for the worse when I opposed Israel's illegal invasion of Lebanon, culminating in the massacres at the Palestinian camps of Sabra and Shatila. The board also opposed my involvement in the successful campaign in 1982 to convince the Labour party to recognise the PLO as the legitimate voice of the Palestinian people.

The fundamental issue on which we differ, as Henry Grunwald knows, is not anti-semitism - which my administration has fought tooth and nail - but the policies of successive Israeli governments.

That, in a nut-shell, is the "new race row".

Islam, humiliation and recognition. posted by lenin

Interesting discussion over at Dead Men Left about the victory of a Muslim schoolgirl who wanted the right to wear full Islamic dress in school, even though it contravened the school's own uniform policy (which allowed the hijab, but not the jilbaba).

The author, known as Meaders to enemies and acquaintances, is right to laud this decision, but I think he puts slightly the wrong spin on it, and I also think I guess the reason for this. He sees it as a "Woman's Rights" issue, and my guess that this is in part a reaction to a certain kind of liberal Islamophobia which can only see the hijab or, say, the burqa, as an obliteration of personal identity etc., and therefore can only see Islam as repressive of women. The reason I don't think it is about women's rights is that, although it involved a woman in this case, the case resonates far beyond its own borders - it involves a universal claim about what kind of rights a person is allowed to claim against those aggregated to a community or institution. I won't hassle Meaders any further on this, since he has been sand-bagged by another two of my favourite bloggers, Kate and Shuggy .

I want to have a look at this case in the context of a few authors who have been interested in this kind of topic. Avishai Margalit has, in The Decent Society, been interested in interpreting questions of identity and oppression through what he claims is a universal feature of humiliation. Among examples he provides of this are the degradation of Jews in concentration camps, second-class citizenship for blacks, the banning of headscarves in a French school (the book was written some years before the new legislation), the degradations of homelessness and extreme poverty, and the treatment of hired Arab workers by Israeli kibbutzniks. Specifically, Margalit is not talking of the kind of humiliation tha might result from a random insult, but of "the humiliation of encompassing groups by the institutions of society". It is a macro-ethical, rather than a micro-ethical concept.

The kind of humiliation that would seem relevant here is humiliation as loss of control, "the symbolic element which expresses a victim's subordination". Religious symbols in particular have the power to define who is and who is not a member of this or that community, and since they are subject to contesting interpretations there is a question of how to decide which is the sound interpretation and how therefore to act on it. (Is the burqa an oppressive garb or an expression of an identity that one feels to the bone? Etc). The question then is how a non-humiliating society treat these 'encompassing groups', and Margalit's solution is cultural tolerance with a presumption in favour of the interpretation given by vulnerable minorities.

Steven Lukes, in Liberals and Cannibals, takes issue with this for a number of reasons which I think are compelling. First, the heterogeneity of the list of examples of humiliation that Margalit provides suggests that there isn't a real unifying principle involved. And I agree with Lukes: the concept of 'humiliation' is so elastic in Margalit's hands as to be practically meaningless. In the old days, Marxists dealt in such concepts as oppression, exploitation and so on, which I consider to be more useful in characterising these matters, because it is part of a universalising and not a particularising apparatus. And, most importantly, these concepts involve a materialist and not a subjectivist universalism.

Another problem is that there are certain 'encompassing groups' which may not merit toleration at all. Margalit offers examples of this - Nazis, the criminal underworld - but no principle or method for designating such groups. Lukes counters this by offering the concept of ascriptive humiliation, that is "mistreating people by means of ascription, in the classical sociological sense of the term: that is, by reference to statuses that are assigned to individuals, identifying what individuals are, not what they do". The two forms of this are discrimination, which can be both intentional and structural, and cultural imperialism or hegemony, which consists of the universalisation of a dominant group's or nation's experience and culture, and its establishment as the norm, "rendering invisible the perspective of the oppressed while simultaneously stereotyping them as 'other'". "Ther culturally dominated are thus paradoxically both marked out by stereotypes and rendered invisible".

On the basis of these conceptual provisions, Lukes tries to answer his own question - on what basis may we deem a particular group's cultural claims illegitimate? There are two ways to identify such groups. First, if they themselves are official constructs and "ascriptively humiliate". Secondly, if they act unjustly, by restricting the civil and political liberties of their own members or of others. Some groups need to be restrained from enforcing restrictions on their own members. Another consideration is that, some groups will apply for special protection on the basis of being targeted, and we need a means of deciding which claims are legitimate. For instance, some groups may claim offense at a cultural product or a politician's remark. What if they are vulnerable to offense because of their own dogmatic beliefs or because such moments of offense offer an opportunity for mobilisation? Hence, respectively, some Sikh leaders reaction to a play and some Jewish leaders reactions to a comment made by Ken Livingstone to a journalist. A good deal of culture is given to offending, and satire can hardly avoid it. So, shall we dispense with Philip Roth, Woody Allen and Lenny Bruce because some Jewish people found them offensive?

I think this provides a good way of thinking about the 'incitement to religious hatred law', which could potentially protect homophobic clergy or imams from criticism. Similarly, it clarifies the hijab issue and a few others besides. Identitarian politics are clearly inadequate in such cases, merely empowering the self-pitying rhetoric of some groups - including, by the way, the far right. It is not an accident that the name of the BNP's in-house magazine is Identity. Their new way of articulating their racist ideology is to complain about alleged injuries done to white people and their culture by the presence of other groups whose values are incommensurable with theirs. What matters is not 'recognition' by the 'Family of Man' as Margalit has it; it is social justice.

Some people are under the curious misapprehension that the claims made by Muslims for the right to wear the hijab are precisely of a kind that would be deemed illegitimate by Lukes. I had an e-mail correspondent who was persuaded of exactly that: namely, the hijab was a kind of infringement on personal liberty enforced by patriarchical Muslim families, and therefore any attempt by the state to curb this oppressive practise was progressive and secular. In this case, there is a confusion between a micro-ethical problem and a macro-ethical one. That some families may impose the hijab on an unwilling daughter is one thing, and it may result from some attitudes widespread in a social group (namely, working class immigrant communities living in French banlieus). But it isn't true to say that this is something inherent in the 'encompassed group', particularly since the hijab is optional and not mandatory in Islam. It is a matter of one's identity, and there need be no coercion involved in the decision to wear it. Few could miss the absurdity of the state deciding to intervene and restrict the right to wear a hijab for all Muslim girls on the pretext that some families may be forcing the child to wear it. (This, indeed, was one of the factors involved in the recommendation made to the French government to ban it).

I might add that the fact that this occurred in a society in which Islamophobic behaviour on the part of the state is widespread compounds and accentuates the injustice. For instance, in October, two fashion shows featuring the hijab were banned by the mayor of a Paris suburb. At the end of 2003, the French bank Societe Generale refused admittance to a Muslim woman on the grounds that she wouldn't remove her hijab. No law against wearing it there, but the security guards chucked her out. Some French doctors now say they will not treat veiled women, and another Parisian mayor has insisted that if a Muslim woman wants to be married, she has to remove her hijab and only then will she be allowed to wed at the local city hall. There is no objection to the bridal veil of Christian tradition. These are some egregious examples of what I suggest is structural discrimination, and the hijab ban is a reflection of this.

Britain, too, marginalises and oppresses Muslims in a variety of ways - usually by denying them employment opportunities, housing them inadequately, subjecting them to the rough end of the state's monopoly on violence. There is here a legitimate claim by British Muslims in response to this, which is that those who want to are entitled to reinforce their identity as Muslims. Since they are subject to 'ascriptive humiliation', targeted for who they are not what they do, they have a right to demand the fullest cultural expression that is commensurable with the human rights of others and those within their 'encompassed group'. It is on these and like grounds that I maintain the right to wear the hijab or jilbab is a matter of universal human rights.

Anyway, I fucking hate school uniforms.

Oh, do shut up, Charles! posted by lenin

Prince Charles is touring Australia and, just so you know, he has been inspecting the locals' diets. He began his visit by claiming that the British public had "tortured" him over his relationship with Camilla Parker Bowles:

"I thought the British people were supposed to be compassionate," Charles said, according to the excerpt printed in The Mail on Sunday newspaper.

"I don't see much of it."

Well, we haven't buggered him on video, electrocuted him, beaten him with poles or given him the strappado - but that can be remedied. However, if we do this, it will be because a) he is a Royal and b) he talks bollocks.

For instance, Prince Charles complained some time ago about the possibiliy of GM technology leading to a potential "genetic disaster" - which makes it all the more strange that he wants to marry one. At any rate, anyone from a heriditary monarchy moaning about genetic calamity is asking for it. I've seen pictures of the Royals together and they only have three faces between them; one of those belongs to the corgi.

His ramblings about the environment have been widely mocked, although his spokespeople insist he has many Green advisers. That would be more impressive if they didn't live in window-boxes.

I do think it sad, though, that the number of Britons who want to see Charles become King has dropped to 31% . I mean, after all, we had a King Charles before...

War criminals in Afghanistan. posted by lenin

General Abdul Rashid Dostum, it is fair to say, is not someone you want to meddle with. As chief of Jubash-e-Milli Islami Afghanistan, Dostum was responsible for atrocities that would mantle the cheeks of the Bush administration with a blush of shame, if they were still capable of shame. Approximately 50,000 people lost their lives to the maniacs that would later be called 'the Northern Alliance'. Naturally, when the 'liberation' of Afghanistan was over, Paul Wolfowitz had to go meet this guy, and give him a cuddle.


Dostum.

Dostum has been allied, in his time, with Russian imperialism, and the Islamist forces of Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, the notorious Afghan war criminal. The United Nations is investigating Dostum, a key ally of the US during its invasion, for crimes of torture and intimidation against witnesses to a war crimes inquiry.

There was a well-known massacre at Mazar-i-Sharif , committed by the US. A prison with approximately 500 men in it was bombed on the pretext that the prisoners were rioting. Dostum was the commander of Northern Alliance forces in that area, and an adjuvant to that particular American atrocity. He has also been useful in procuring trade with neighbouring countries.


Dostum and Karzai compare nose-pickings.

On the other hand, he remains quick to temper. The Telegraph columnist and reputed Pakistani journalist Ahmed Rashid desribed an interview with him:

Rashid tells the story of going to interview General Dostum in his Qalai Janghi fortress just north of the Uzbek stronghold of Mazar-i-Sharif. Rashid noticed smears of blood and flesh in one corner of the courtyard and wondered to the guards if a goat had recently been slaughtered. Guards informed him that an hour earlier Dostum had ordered a soldier accused of stealing to be tied to the tracks of a tank that then drove around until he was reduced to mincemeat.

Well, that'll be a lesson to him.

Anyway, you'll be pleased to know that General Dostum has now been made chief-of-staff to the commander in chief (that's President Karzai - they even insist on the American appellations). A man who thinks an appropriate punishment for theft is to be strapped to tank tracks and mashed to mince-meat is leading the charge for democracy in Afghanistan. I'm certainly glad they're bringing some women into the government with that in mind. I'd hate to think it was just psyhopathic male war criminals.

Diversity/Difference. posted by lenin

Diversity is not, in itself, a virtue. It is to be lauded wherever it is presumably because of secondary benefits it brings, or because of the harmful effects of homogeneity. A couple of tediously obvious examples:

1) If black people are under-represented on campus or in the employment figures, that could be evidence of an underlying social injustice.

2) If your country has never had a gay President, that could be to do with public and establishment prejudice.

If, in the same country, black people have been slaves and homosexuality has been illegal, I'd say there's a strong likelihood of statements one and two being right.

On the other hand, when David Horowitz's neoconservative Front Page magazine reproduces an article from the American Enterprise Institute complaining of 'employment discrimination against Republicans and Christian conservatives', at least one eyebrow is sent aloft:

"Imagine opening your newspaper one morning and reading a Supreme Court opinion that puts a startling new twist on an old civil rights tactic. The Court declares that some prominent university has violated equal opportunity laws by "engaging in a pattern of employment discrimination...against Republicans and Christian conservatives. Of the university's 1,828 professors, there are only eight Republicans and five Christian conservatives. Such statistical evidence of gross political and ideological imbalance has been taken as a telltale sign of purposeful discrimination in many previous civil rights cases. In this case as well it provides prima facie evidence that individual rights are being systematically violated on arbitrary grounds. Justice demands compensatory action to protect the rights of these groups. Is this a right-wing pipe dream? It may not be as far-fetched as you think."

The gay-bashing Republican senator Rick Santorum was similarly concerned, and made serious moves, to amend Title IX of the Higher Education Act so that it would enshrine "ideological diversity" alongside "sexual equality" and so on. The idea behind it was allegedly to combat "rising incidents of anti-Semitism and an increasingly anti-Israel agenda among college professors". That's an ugly little conjugation, so let's decouple the two. If there's a need to combat anti-Semitism, then that is a move aimed against diversity - and quite right too. If the aim is to obliterate anti-Israeli viewpoints, then what we are talking about is authoritarianism, not diversity. On the other hand, if we are insisting on having a few anti-Semites, a few other kinds of racist, a few liberals, a Trotskyist or two etc., then why not extend the logic even further?

Majikthise today brings distressing news of a report that, once again, Republicans are under-represented among the academia. She quotes Aaron Swartz :

Scary as this is, my preliminary research has discovered some even more shocking facts. I have found that only 1% of Stanford professors believe in telepathy (defined as "communication between minds without using the traditional five senses"), compared with 36% of the general population. And less than half a percent believe "people on this earth are sometimes possessed by the devil", compared with 49% of those outside the ivory tower. And while 25% of Americans believe in astrology ("the position of the stars and planets can affect people's lives"), I could only find one Stanford professor who would agree.

There aren't enough idiots in the academia, then! It would be an interesting social experiment to calibrate both the academic and student intake on campuses according to the latest poll results and census surveys. For instance, given the number of court cases that have ended in large settlements for aggrieved porkies, there has to be a large number of people in America who always thought McDonalds' was healthy food. We have to get those fuckers into the universities.

Musical interlude. posted by lenin

Crooked Timber has an attempted rap version of Locke written by a 'leading British political philosopher'. I've contributed the following in the style of Immortal Technique:

You betta watch what tha fuck flies outa ya mouth
Or Ima burn your house down with ya tied to ya couch
Cos reward and punishment’s the only rational way
To make a fuckin man do whatever the fuck I say
I gotta viewa human nature that’s tabula rasa
Cos you don’t know shit til I make you my masta

Separation a powers, got my checks and balances
And the Glorious Revolution got me in the palaces
And you mystical muthafuckas just look like some phalluses
Locke down and cold, murdering all yo fallacies.

Empirical truth, mutha, don’t ever try to diss me
Cos I got rhymes that’s colder than Walt Disney
My lyrics are like syphallus but harder to catch
An if you don’t obey my law, then you gettin yo ass capped
You gettin locked in the pen fo ten to fifty
Monopoly a violence boy, cos you lookin shifty

You Hobbesian people swallow like Bambi Woods
And you’d never live a day in the projects or the hoods
Cos you ignorant about what keeps men from they selfish ways
Private property, boy, helps the people get paid.

Etc etc etc.

Today's challenge from Lenin's Tomb: summarize the views of your favourite philosopher in a rhyme. And I don't want to hear any shit about "I'm yo Master Signifier muthfucka". I've already though about that, and am composing it as I speak.

On a more serious note, a nice addition to the Ron Aronson article cited the other day is an interview with the man conducted by Danny Postel on the Camus-Sartre controversy.

US human rights hypocrisy. posted by lenin

One thing some news outlets were swift to pick up on when the State Department issued its annual human rights report was that Saudi Arabia had been criticised for the first time, and the Iraqi Interim government even copped it - but no mention of Abu Ghraib, Bagram or Guantanamo, or of the fact that the Iraqi police and security forces now torturing prisoners have themselves been trained by the CIA.

Before I get to the serious stuff, here's a couple of hearty one-liners. On Israel and the Occupied Territories , the report states:

"There were no reports of politically motivated killings by the Government or its agents during the year."

Of course there weren't.

Now, on Saudi Arabia, the report rightly notes the following:

[A]uthorities reportedly at times abused detainees, both citizens and foreigners. Ministry of Interior officials were responsible for most incidents of abuse of prisoners, including beatings, whippings, and sleep deprivation. In addition, there were allegations of beatings with sticks and suspension from bars by handcuffs. There were allegations that these practices were used to force confessions from prisoners.

Canadian and British prisoners released in 2003 reported that they had been tortured during their detention; however, the Government denied these claims.

Maintaining its reservation to Article 20 of the Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment, the Government does not recognize the jurisdiction of the Committee Against Torture to investigate allegations of systematic torture.

The US can say this because it is a signatory to the Convention Against Torture, which was ratified by US Congress in 1994. However, at the moment the Convention has no teeth, and there were attempts to give it some by passing a protocol at the UN which supported inspections. The US would not back this, according to the Telegraph , because:

[S]enior figures in the Bush administration - most notably in the Pentagon - have argued that the protocol could lead to intrusive inspections of the American detention camp at Guantanamo Bay.

The extent of torture at Guantanamo , Bagram and elsewhere has been hinted at and, sometimes, documented . One of the techniques described above ("suspension from bars by handcuffs"), known as the Strappado, has been seen in Guantanamo.

Further, the US itself seems to be the provider of some of the torture equipment that the Saudi regime uses, not to mention weapons . As an Amnesty International spokesperson pointed out :

"Although torture is endemic in Saudi Arabia, Smith & Wesson had no qualms about exporting approximately 10,000 leg-irons to Riyadh, and, apparently sharing this lack of concern, the Bush administration approved the sale ..."

"For decades, human-rights groups and the U.S. State Department have documented Saudi Arabia's cruel use of leg-irons and shackles to inflict torture and force confessions. With this shameful shipment, we can expect the torture of religious minorities and peaceful protestors to continue for years to come."

In Egypt , too, the report mentions widespread torture, but doesn't mention that Egypt is America's second greatest ally in the Middle East receiving the largest portion of US military aid next to Israel. And once again, guess who the supplier is?

This morning, The Guardian has run a lengthy interview with the Prime Minister in which he "hails" a "ripple of change" in the Middle East. They also run a column by Jonathan Freedland claiming that the war on Iraq had a 'silver lining' in that it had initiated wave of change in the Middle East - Bush's "democratic revolution". (Typically, there is a reference to Arafat's death "unblocking movement" on the Palestinian side of the Israeli occupation, as if the problem was not the intransigence of the occupiers themselves). Well, evil actions can generate positive results, and it certainly is true that the bombing of Iraq excited some upheaval - but this is mainly concentrated in two regimes supported by the US, and began as a movement against the war. Hence, the Cairo declaration . The continuing tumult, ironically, may have more to do with the war's failure, both militarily and morally, than anything else.

Any fool who runs around claiming that the war is a success and democracy is spreading across the Middle East as a result is a pure sap, or worse.

A note on Belle de Jour. posted by lenin

Look, before we go any further, Belle de Jour is not a fucking call girl. A call girl takes a man's manky cock in her mouth while resisting the urge to throw up on his balls. This helps pay the bills, even if it carries the risk of rape and syphallus. She doesn't go home and write perfumed, tart little missives with occasional literary reference and jokes about the punters. She doesn't have her posting dates in French in a dilute gesture of sophistication. She doesn't stack up Buñuel DVDs in her sitting room. She doesn't wax ironic about her middle class background and her middle-brow literary proclivities, or exude faint lefty doxa. Belle de Jour is a man peddling male fantasies for guilty liberals - the moral masochists who like to be told what bad boys and girls they are for having politically incorrect indulgences.

Second, Belle de Jour is not even very interesting. It is dilute tittilation for the prurient sophisticate, the urbane masturbator who likes to wind up a satisfactory wank with a crepe and copy of McEwan's latest. It is not merely shit, but infrequently updated, reminding one of the joke from Annie Hall, about two old women eating in a restaurant: "What terrible food they have here!" "Yes, and such small portions!"

Thirdly, this colossal anus, this epic non-entity, this vapid Middle Mind with a gap in his being that would amply accomodate the tackle of a blue whale, has a book out. I just saw it in the bargain bookshop today, where I occasionally malinger in the hope of finding something cheap and tatty - I found it alright. Blogs shouldn't become books, because books cost money and if you're that interested you can always go to the internet cafe and scan the archive for fifteen minutes, which is about as much time as it would take. Still, at least by taking money for this drivel Belle de Jour has finally proved to be some kind of whore.

A ruse and a hoax, that terminal blog has to be the most hateful practical joke ever played on the gullibility and narcissism of bloggery, particularly the gossipy Guardian-scanning section of it. No, I'm perfectly well, why do you ask?

Capturing the Friedmans: Review. posted by lenin

This is a film designed to frustrate the comfort of an opinion. Your guess is constantly confounded. Arnold Friedman, the father in the unhappy family of the title, who lived a wealthy suburban life on Long Island, was without doubt a paedophile, a man who was sexually attracted to children - as young, perhaps, as four years old. Everything else, however, is in doubt, up for grabs, and terrifyingly so. If the police were right, Arnold Friedman and his son Jesse abused children in a computer class held at the Friedman home for four years. The charges included 'sodomy of the mouth and anus' as one contributor puts it. If not, then Arnold and Jesse both went to jail for crimes they did not commit. If not, then Arnold was beaten, pissed on and threatened with death for something he didn't do. The process of arrest, charges, trial and conviction are all recorded on Friedman family cameras. It was (I think I'm right in using the past tense) a technophilic family, delighting in filming, recording, and using computers. So an abundance of circumstantial and emotional evidence, the kind that doesn't get into court hearings, is available for the documentary. There's a lot more besides.

It shouldn't be that difficult. Arnold pled guilty on all counts, and his son pled guilty with an excuse. Jesse was given the maximum sentence, of which he served 13 years. Arnold, sentenced to ten to thirty years, died in prison. Several of the children present testified to some of the horrible things that were allegedly done to them. Arnold admitted in correspondence with a journalist to not only being a paedophile, but of having had sexual contact with two boys (unconnected to the charges), 'short of sodomy'. He had been caught with paedophilic material (magazines in those pre-internet days). Jesse told the court that he himself had been abused by his father, and that this had blurred his view of right and wrong.

Still, there's something not quite right about this picture. I watched the film, initially persuaded at some level that the charges were accurate. However, when the film-maker interviews some of those involved in the case, nothing adds up. One man, interviewed with his face in the dark, describes how he was raped by Arnold and Jesse years earlier, and that this was one of a number of rapes that took place in front of the other children, who themselves were sodomised. There was even a 'game', apparently, called 'leap-frogging', in which the boys allegedly pointed their backsides in the air, and Jesse and Arnold 'leapt' from one to the other, inserting their penises. Another man, also in the same computer class, is interviewed in clear day. He says nothing happened, and it was fabricated. He says there were 'leap-frogging' games, but these were the kind generally played by kids with their clothes on. Back to the man whose face is occluded by dark. The director and narrator, Andrew Jarecki, tells him what the other witnesss aid. Yes, well, the actual sodomy took place in the bathroom, away from the rest of the kids...

It later emerges that the man with his face occluded 'recovered' these memories when he was subjected to hypnosis. He had gone into the hypnosis unaware that the abuse had happened, and he had come out with a clear memory in his mind of these disgusting acts. Repressed memory is mostly nonsense: when people are abused, they typically have more trouble with forgetting the events than with remembering. In separate footage of interview with this man, whose testimony led to 35 charges of sodomy, he gives a definite impression of fabulating.

Similarly, one of the detectives involved in capturing the Friedmans gives a clear sense of the difficulty, the painstaking care involved in even making such an accusation. She informs the camera that they had first acted on a list of names held by Arnold (perhaps of kids in his computer class) after searching his house for child pornography. She says they went to the houses, explained to the parents what they were doing, and interviewed the children. This apparently then yielded a surfeit of testimony of the abuse alluded to above. However, one tape survives of such an interview taking place, and it was taken by the mother. The mother recorded the child adamantly repeating that no such abuse had taken place. One officer kept repeating "you had better remember, because if you don't you will grow up to be gay". It was implied that he could become an abuser himself. The detective interviewed on camera also suggested that Arnold had "stacks and stacks" of pornographic material all over the house, surrounding the piano at which he often played and so on. Photographs taken when the search occurred show nothing like this.

Several of those who said they were abused at the time now deny it, and some of them are either on camera or recorded on audio tape saying that nothing took place. One of them explains over the phone that she had been bullied by the police into providing answers that she wasn't ready to give. One of the key witnesses in the film, a District Attorney involved in the case, explained that there was a dearth of physical evidence of such abuse (bruising, bleeding etc). Other parents whose children attended the class said that they went to pick up their children from the computer class, often stopping in early, and never found a thing going on. All of those children who alleged abuse said that they had been filmed, and that pornographic pictures had been made of their experiences. No photographs or video-tapes were ever found. One of the search photographs taken by the police showed pornographic pictures and cameras arranged together in Jesse's room, but the montage was allegedly created by the police themselves, who took the pictures from his Playboy magazines. Detective Galasso tells the camera that they did not ask the children leading questions, and goes on to give an example of a non-leading question: "What about Johnny? He was there, did you see anything happen to him?" Several witnesses who were interviewed themselves say the questions were even more probing than that.

Still, it becomes hard to believe, at times, in the innocence of the pair. Elaine Friedman, the mother, clearly believes that Arnold is guilty, and is hurt and angry that her children expect her to support him. She knows that he has admitted to some sexual contact with two boys. An understandable reaction to that might be to seek divorce, but she stays with him - even when the threatening telephone calls start to come in ("gonna kill your son ... creep Jew cocksuckers ... gonna cut off his balls ..." etc). She also complains on camera that he had never sexually satisfied her, and it is not hard to guess what she thought might be the reason for that. Under terrible emotional stress, and not entirely a stable quantity at the best of times, she cracks quickest and loudest among all the family members. She shrieks at her sons, who berate her for not supporting the father, she weeps bitterly, tries to calm them. They, meanwhile, are furious with her betrayal, as they see it.

It is Elaine who receives advice from the lawyer, indicating that Jesse needs to unhitch himself from his father. If he is standing next to his father in court, he will be chained to stacks of pornographic magazines and an admitted history of paedophilia. If he stands alone, he stands as a young man with no such baggage. Arnold has to plea guilty to save his son. Well, she urges Arnold to plead guilty. There's a furious row, screaming, Arnold - ordinarily, apparently, a very quiet, nebulous and self-effacing person - launches a chair across the room and furiously screeches that he is not guilty and will not plead guilty. He asks his son Jesse what he ought to do, and Jesse tells him to decide. Arnold pleas guilty. As his brother Howard says, if you didn't do it, why plead guilty? It's the most heinous crime imaginable, why accept responsibility for it? Similarly, why did Arnold go for a 'close-out'? A close-out involves admitting to a host of crimes that you have also done which will then by discounted for, so that you cannot be re-arrested. Arnold therefore admitted to having sexually abused practically everyone in his class. Why admit to something like that, if it is untrue? And why does Jesse go on to try and plea-bargain, now that his father is in jail?

Well, to answer the second question first, it seems that the close-out confession - which was supposed to be a confidential document - was taken to a number of the parents of witnesses who were going testify on Jesse's behalf. They were told, 'your son is going to testify that he was not abused, but we have a statement from Arnold Friedman which says he did it'. By the time Jesse came to plea-bargain, the jury already knew his father had confessed to it and he had no supporting witnesses. Another reason Jesse chose to plea-bargain was that he was told if he plead guilty, he would face a relatively small number of charges. If he didn't, they would lay a few thousand on him, and he would never come out of jail. Even his mother Elaine began to tell him he should plead guilty at that point just to reduce his sentence. Well, like I say, he got the maximum possible sentence. Perhaps Arnold plead guilty to save his son, or because he had done something, or because he knew what he was, or because his wife pressured him into doing so. The latter is the charge made by the son, David Friedman. However, it isn't a new phenomenon. Recently, the men convicted of brutally attacking the Central Park Jogger in 1989 were freed when the actual attacker, Matias Reyes, admitted to the crime and DNA evidence implicated him. Several of the innocent men had pleaded guilty to the crime, the longest serving about ten years. Arnold also claimed in a letter to a journalist covering the case that he had engaged in sexual activity with his brother, Howard, when he was thirteen and Howard was eight. Howard, on camera, denies that this ever happened.

Whatever you think about this case, a number of things do come through the bewildering array of contradictory evidence. The original investigation was largely fictitious: it did not occur. There was a concerted attempt by detectives to get answers that would lead inexorably to their prefered conclusion. This was in the height of the 'satanic ritual abuse' and 'sex circles' hysteria, and a number of high profile cases from that era subsequently turned out to be based on bogus or mocked-up evidence. The trials did not occur, as deliberate and enormous pressure was placed on both suspects to cop a plea-bargain, which both did. Many careers were made on the basis of that case, and a great deal appeared to hang on it for those detectives involved. Andrew Jarecki, the film's director, told Charlie Rose in an interview that he encountered enormous obstruction and obfuscation from the police and from lawyers involved in the case. The media, too, had an interest in portraying this story in a salacious and cold-hearted manner (watch for one of the newscasters raising his eyebrows at the word 'sodomy' when he relates the case).

Another thing that is clear is that Arnold Friedman was a guilty man, even if he didn't the crimes of which was convicted. He was guilty of posessing child pornography, and admitted to having had sexual relations with two boys. His son Jesse may be guilty of the charges against him, but given the present state of evidence it is doubtful he would go to jail if the trial were conducted today. Arnold is dead, Jesse lives and is pressing for his convictions to be overturned . David Friedman, who was to be featured in the original documentary about New York clowns that led to this one, remains a professional clown.