Israeli death squads in Gaza posted by lenin

IDF soldiers in disguise:

The four men in traditional Arab garb didn't attract the attention of Ahmed Khalil, 27, when he drew near his farm not far from the town of Beit Hanun in northern Gaza. They looked like the vegetable merchants who usually come to buy produce in the early hours of the day. But as soon as they approached, two of them fired at his head with pistols equipped with silencers. He died immediately.

The four men, disguised as Palestinians, were members of the most recent death squad formed by the Israeli government in Gaza to eliminate Palestinian fighters. The four thought that Khalil was a member of the resistance movement on his way to carry out an operation against an Israeli target, Israeli military sources later said. The Southern Zone Command of the Israeli army said that the death squad was formed on instructions of the Israeli mini-cabinet, which urged the army chiefs of staff to take more aggressive action against the resistance in Gaza, so as to end the firing of local-made rockets at Israeli settlements.

The new death squad is code-named Samson. It is a new edition of the Arabists, or units made up of men in Arab garb with orders to attack resistance men deep inside Palestinian territories. On the outskirts of Gaza, members of such squads often abduct farmers and hand them over to Israel's internal intelligence service, Shabak, for interrogation. There, the men are routinely coerced to supply information about the resistance. Yediot Aharonot recently admitted that Palestinians were being blackmailed by the Shabak into working as informers.

Such units have been operating for a long time in the West Bank. They are called Duvdevan (Hebrew for cherry) and are responsible for most of the target killings of leaders of the Palestinian resistance. Israeli television has just aired a documentary on the training of such units. Experts in makeup, language training and undercover operations help train Duvdevan members. The latter are often disguised as vegetable merchants and told to drive around in Mercedes pickups, the same type of vehicle favoured by Palestinian merchants. The occupation army now has the Arabists as well as the Samson units working undercover in Palestinian territories.

Labels: gaza, idf, Israel, palestine

Iraqis letting the occupiers down again. posted by lenin

What other country could so torture another country, so devastate it, so thoroughly plunder and destroy it for over a decade, and yet have thousands of people still saying "well, hell, maybe they'll do a better job with Darfur"? Take a look at this. I think there might have been a short time, maybe for the first twelve months of the occupation, where Bush's supporters would still have ironised about how happy-go-lucky life was under Saddam, but we should have heard the last of that. The statistics in the Oxfam-NIIC report describe a cruel and callous asset-stripping operation. We knew about the refugees, the attacks on women, the SPC death squads, the torture chambers (that, remember, were actually worse after Abu Ghraib), the abritrary imprisonment of tens of thousands, the shooting up at checkpoints, the bombing of housing estates, the deliberate destruction of water and power facilities, the attacks on hospitals, the black and decker punishment, the dawn raids, the sport killing and raping, the proliferation of mass graves, the slave labour, the curfews, the biometric lockdown, the subjection of Iraqi cities to blitzkrieg then military fascism. One could have guessed that people were also starving to death, and dying from preventable disease, and suffering from mental trauma. But here are the statistics: 43% of Iraqis are in absolute poverty; 28% of Iraqi children are malnourished; 32% of internally displaced persons who need food rations can't get them; 70% of Iraqis don't have adequate water supplies; 80% don't have effective sanitation; 4 million Iraqis are in dire need of humanitarian assistance (no, not that kind, get the damned finger off the trigger); and 11% of new born babies are underweight.

The causes of this are fairly straightforward: a violent occupation has driven out about forty percent of professional Iraqis, destroyed much of the infrastructure in which they were able to work, frustrated transport of people and goods, terrorised communities and disrupted the provision of basic services like schooling; the country has been privatised and purchased, with the effect of massively increasing unemployment since about half of the Iraqi labour force had been employed in the state sector prior to the occupation; the billions of US tax dollars that were supposed to be for 'humanitarian assistance' have been handed over to political clients, mercenaries and rent-seekers (Ahmed Chalabi is predictably one of the big levers used in this, having been placed in charge of the Supreme Contracts Committee in 2005); the cut tarrifs and flat taxes have reduced state income even more than it might have been; the main institutions of the state welfare structure were attacked and squeezed to near genocidal effect under sanctions, hollowed out by 'de-Baathification', and then transferred to patrimonial control; such state-run organisations as are functioning are often leased out or contracted under memoranda of understanding, thus further transferring potentially huge amounts of Iraqi government resources to private entities; everything that is built and rebuilt (after a good bombing campaign, usually) is run within the public-private hybrid that characterises the state-capitalist extortion of Iraq, so that all the profits accrue to Halliburton, all the liabilities accrue to the puppet regime, and all the costs are borne by the public. Were it not for the presence of several thousands of NGO organisations in Iraq, the situation would be a great deal worse than it is.

There might, who knows, be another epidemiological survey of Iraq released next year. If the above statistics are correct, a third of the population of Iraq is at risk of dying from starvation, never mind the much more frequent causes of death such as gunfire and aerial bombardment. One estimate that models the Lancet's statistics on IBC trends suggests that close to a million are probably dead already, in addition to the death rates that one would have expected under Saddam and sanctions. Yet, the death rate had a doubling time of one year in the Lancet study. That is, if it was 3.2 per thousand on year, it was 6.6 per thousand the next, and 12 per thousand the following year. If organised violence has slowed down over the last year, then it is possible that slightly less than a million have died as a result of the occupation to date. If the rate of increase stayed the same, then there were 24 deaths per thousand this year, which would add roughly 650,000 to the total, meaning an excess death rate of 1.2m. I don't know how much the rate of violence can potentially increase, but if the same trend held until 2010, then the death rate would be approximately 10 million.

Still, the teleprompter continues to give both Democratic and Republican candidates the following line in some variation: "can't win em all, better luck next time, Iraqis let us down".

Labels: iraq, occupation

"The Nazi Conscience" posted by lenin

If you're wandering through the bookshops in a daze, collecting more words to clutter up your untidy life with, you might want to grab a copy of Claudia Koonz's The Nazi Conscience. I haven't time for a full review here, but it is one of the most systematic efforts I have read to encompass the specific set of moral claims that facilitated Nazi atrocities, and to detail how these were produced and became hegemonic. What is most impressive about it is how it describes both continuity and discontinuity - that is, it is as attentive to the ways in which the Nazis drew upon norms that were then ubiquitous as it is to the singular range and intensity of the Nazi indoctrination programme. It also, whether the author intended this or not, deals a sharp blow to the Goldhagen thesis that Germans were collectively guilty for the Nazi holocaust, that it was something embedded in their specific cultural arrangements. Koonz shows that by contrast, Germany was among the least antisemitic countries in Europe until the late 1930s. The Nazis, in courting mainstream opinion, suppressed some of their vicious hatred of the Jews - Streicher was good for the activists, but they recognised that they would have to lay the basis for widespread acceptance of racial 'science' through more moderate sounding, 'impartial' bodies and journals. Even Hitler's 1939 speech, which contains what we now rightly see as a threat to commit genocide against the Jews, spent only a few minutes of a lengthy speech on the topic. Victims of the Nazis, like Klemperer, described - even in their most despairing moments - forms of solidarity and aid, even as a terrifying consensus was being constructed against the Jews. That consensus licensed a two-front war: a global war on those blamed for retarding German expansion, and a domestic war on Germany's putative existential enemies.

The construction of that consensus couldn't rely on repression alone, since recent evidence suggests that the Gestapo were frequently ineffective and that Germans could selectively circumvent rules they did not approve of (provided they weren't Marxists or Jews). Nor could it rely on the blaring, vulgar output of rags like the Sturmer. And nor were the conditions of the battlefield a sufficient cause of the atrocities of the frontline. Rather, Koonz urges readers to see Nazi soldiers as being something apart from conventional troops - they were treated and indoctrinated as race warriors, selected for acceptance of the core elements of Nazi ideology (respect for the Fuhrer, devotion to the 'Volk', belief in the justice of conquest, and a belief in the existence of a Jewish threat). For Koonz, there are four basic intellectual and moral assumptions of Nazism. The first is that the life of a Volk is like that of an organism with "stages of birth, growth, expansion, decline and death", a motif drawn straight from the evolutionary sociology of people like Herbert Spencer and from quite widespread rightist doctrine. For example, the response to class struggle was frequently to appeal to workers to sacrifice themselves (their class interests) for the greater good, for the survival of the national organism. The second assumption, also widespread, was that values were specific, appropriate to the nature of the ethnic group and their environment. This appeal to particularism, supremacism in other words, was expressed in the high camp of love for one's ethnic comrade (Volksgenosse) and, of course, for Germany above all else (this, for Goebbels, was "the first commandment of every National Socialist", as he explained it in "The Little ABC's of National Socialism"). The third was the acceptance and promotion of outright aggression against "undesirable" peoples, something also drawn directly from the colonial experience, and the nation-building one. Take L Frank Baum - he of The Wizard of Oz - who wrote that "The whites, by law of conquest, by justice of civilisation, are masters of the American continent and the best safety of the frontier settlements will be secured by the total annihilation of the few remaining Indians ... better that they should die than live like the miserable wretches that they are." And of course the final assumption was the right of governments to annul the legal protections of assimilated citizens on the basis of what the government defined as their ethnicity. The Nazis appealed particularly to analogies with American policy in justification, hoping that their racial codes would one day be as widely accepted as US immigration quotas, antimiscegenation laws, involuntary sterilization programs in twenty-eight states, and segregation in the Jim Crow south. What was unique in Nazi persecution was that although their propaganda frequently bestialised Jews and black people and gypsies and so on, they considered their enemy invisible: they didn't oppress on the basis of a visible or cultural marker of difference. Their racialism was hopelessly inconsistent and befuddled, as all quackery is, based on certain arbitrary considerations of lineage: but it was also based on what was considered by US-European ruling class and rightist circles to be the best biological (genetic) knowledge.

The continuities are not only in the elements of the 'Nazi conscience', but especially in the conception of global war as a 'race war'. Gerald Horne's recent book 'Race War: White Supremacy and the Japanese Attack on the British Empire' investigates some unexplored dimensions of the Pacific War, specifically the way in which both the Japanese and the Allies understood that war as in part a 'race war', in which the Japanese empire sought to subvert (or more correctly, reverse) the colonial racial hierarchy, and very conscientiously utilised the sense of outrage and hostility that populations in South East Asia felt toward centuries of white supremacy. This was manifest in the notorious atrocities carried out in the camps. They encouraged non-Japanese guards of the internment camps to see Europeans as they had always seen others - as inferior, subjugated people. The records show that London and Washington were deeply alarmed about this, and particularly worried about the potentially powerful propaganda appeal. After all, the main allies were all engaged in state-sanctioned supremacist policies, either through colonies (US, Britain, France) or domestic annihilation and domination (US, Australia, Canada). It became a crucial element of Allied propaganda to avoid any public statement that hinted at white supremacy, even while a 'race war' was pursued domestically - and it seems British officials bear partial responsibility for America's internment policy during World War II, advising their US counterparts of the 'lessons' of the attacks on Hong Kong and Pearl Harbour, which essentially involved the claim that America had been lax in allowing an Asian-American hybrid community to develop. Of course, America's own escape from some form of fascist rule was in some ways quite narrow: it is reasonably well known that business leaders in the US plotted a coup against Roosevelt, but there was also a mass, nativist, authoritarian racist movement that was flourishing in the States long before the Nazis were more than a cuckoo clan in Germany. Although they were not the centre of KKK obsessions, Jews were being lynched, or hounded out of institutions, or attacked in the United States, long before that horror began in Germany. The scale of their violent operations, the extent of collusion in the political elite, their ability to penetrate local office, and the unity they achieved between the upper class and 'white collar' workers, points to something that could have been American Fascism - had it not been for multiracial working class combat and resistance against the Klan in the urban centres.

Years of anti-racist struggle, the decolonisation movement, anti-imperialist solidarity campaigns, victories by the oppressed, and so on, have so radically altered official political culture that a world-view which was once only marginally challenged in Europe and America by socialists contesting the capitalist system (and not by all of them either) is now only marginally accepted by cranks. African-Americans destroyed southern apartheid, South Africans destroyed white supremacy, and while the dregs of antisemitism are reconstituted and re-valourised as the official ideology of Israel, it doesn't have much going for it beyond the Levant. So, we're safe, right? Not a chance. After all, imperialism hasn't gone away. European and North American states are still racial hierarchies, with increasingly aggressive anti-immigrant campaigns. The global class hierarchy is still intersected by a racial one. Far right parties have been making electoral gains across Europe, all galvanising antagonism to migrants and especially to Muslims (who are blamed in noxious literature for drugs, rape - of white women and children, of course - for sexual deviancy, crime, and terrorism), all preying on the sense of betrayal and breakdown that comes with the neoliberal assault on society. America still treats black life as cheap, regards young black men as prison material, applies a racist death penalty, and still indulges the occasional spot of ethnic cleansing, as in New Orleans. And, of course, no ruling class is going to hesitate to cancel bourgeois democracy, even as they now don't hesitate to curtail it in the name of a 'war on terror' (revoking the rights of subjects on grounds of suspect loyalty, spying on domestic dissenters, interning and torturing citizens etc). If fascism returns, it may not require the specific apparatus of 'race science': it will surely feed on the darkest excrement in the 'zeitgeist'. The existential threat is now, after all, an immaterial force, something called values, the binds populations and states, guides global agents, turns babies into suicide bombers and statesmen into freedom fighters. The revanchist racism of the Bell Curve may only be a fringe partner of a coalition that could involve minutemen, Christian fundamentalists, deranged 'secularists', militarists etc. The toxic elements are present, and could easily be convoked in a graver crisis than we are presently experiencing.

Labels: 'totalitarianism', capitalism, nazism

Iraqis celebrate victory posted by lenin

Well, they've won, and the Iraqis round here are going seriously festive. They've taken over Edgware Road, on and off, flags all over the place - not only Iraqi ones either - people throwing sweets out to the crowd, kids charging about like crazy, grandmothers watching from the pavements, young guys and gals turning the Iraqi ensign into a fashion item. The area around here is one immensely noisy gridlock at the moment. Car horns, clapping, dancing, foghorns, chanting, drums - quite a few English people taking part too. Here's some footage and pics:













This started two hours ago and it hasn't abated yet.

Labels: iraq

Disastertainment: the sequel. posted by lenin

As if to take the piss completely, this piece of shit slithers down the sewer (you can watch the trailer here). A big storm comes down the North Sea, and - to apocalyptic chorals ripped off from Orff - brings a vengeful mob of truculent waves down the Thames, tearing the barrier to shreds and causing alarm in Whitehall. Landmarks are drenched. Desperate phone calls are made ("get out of London, now!"). The deputy prime minister peers over his glasses while his COBRA team flounder, and ask stupid questions like "are you saying the worst is yet to come?" They evacuate the city, but all too late. Martial law is the settled way to accomplish this, of course. The hero, in a way, is a whacky scientician who has some crazy theories that turn out to be correct. This is a common theme in 'environmental' disaster movies: not that a scientific consensus with overwhelming evidence is conscientiously obscured, rebuffed and ignored. Not that there are any 'interests' involved in destroying the planet (yeah right, what are you, a conspiracy nut?). But that one salutary genius with oddball problems of his own and estranged relations has the answer, and a bungling political leadership refuses to act until it's too late due to some obscure complacency. Still, it's as well they don't act too soon, otherwise we wouldn't get to see all that cool water submerge the houses and landmarks, and cause big fuckin a-splosions everywhere. This film is rated 12 (some partial nudity, mild swearwords and nasal drug abuse), and will be appearing in cinemas across Gloucestershire this August.

Labels: disaster politics, environment, hollywood

Latest Iraqi resistance stats posted by lenin

The trends continue to be supported by the coalition's data. The rate of attacks is at an all time high, weapons cache finds are at an all time high, attacks are still directed overwhelmingly at occupying forces, but as the Iraqi police and army are trained and put into combat situations, they are taking a bigger brunt of the violence. The attacks on civilians remains the smallest wedge of all attacks. Resistance attacks are still concentrated in four provinces where the occupiers are most active, of course, and least present where the occupiers have given authority to regional parties. Once again, the areas under almost complete insurgent control are the areas most likely to have working electricity, which is telling. Support for a divided Iraq remains extremely low, predictably highest among the Kurds. One welcome new trend is a dramatic decrease in sectarian incidents reported. Sadly it continues to be the case that those attacks on civilians, whether sectarian or insurgent in nature, are those with the highest death yield, and civilians continue to bear the brunt of attacks. The report attributes the high profile attacks (suicide attacks and car bombings) that take large civilian casualties to "AQI", but this fits too easily into the occupation narrative: the truth is that there are a number of groups - still a minority of resistance fighters - who are using these tactics. Here are some charts:







One surprising claim is that huge areas of Iraq are either completely or partially read for transfer: that is, areas under complete or partial insurgent control are being designated as fit for a withdrawal of US troops. Diyala, Salah ud-Din, Baghdad, and Ninewah are all considered on the road to transfer. I doubt that this amounts to an admission that control has already effectively been handed over to the resistance in many cases, but clearly there is a rollback of operations being prepared, sure to be seen (correctly) as an ignominious defeat, even if the occupiers only withdraw as far as the Green Zone - which is itself under increasingly effective attack (and guess who the American government blames for that).

Incidentally, Channel Four news tonight reported from Afghanistan on the rolling wave of occupation massacres there: the scale of these, their ruthless brutality, their increasing frequency, is driving a growing rebellion against the occupiers. Local rulers are increasingly under obligation to criticise and attack the occupying forces and even the most pro-western elements in the elite are feeling under pressure to criticise their masters Nick Paton-Walsh summarised the situation by saying that the situation was gradually evolving from an insurgency into a revolt. So that's two failing occupations, two revolts - one full-blown, one germinal - and a caucus of North American and European governments under the threat of being ousted by outraged electorates.

Labels: iraq, iraqi resistance, occupation

2,4,6,8, ignorant liberal knownothingism is really great! posted by lenin

This is really depressing. The Nation was never a radical magazine (I still remember its creepy lack of gumption over the Kosovo war), but Katha Pollitt is a fucking journalist. To write a polemical article about the Iraqi resistance, not only without attempting to find anything out about it, but while mashing together elements that plainly don't belong in the category, is exactly the kind of lazy, pompous, moralising that plays into the hands of the war's apologists. For Pollit, the resistance can be adequately characterised as "theocrats, ethnic nationalists, die-hard Baathists, jihadis, kidnappers, beheaders and thugs", and can thus be contrasted with the Sandinistas who "stood for health care, education, land distribution, modernization--not burning down liquor stores and music shops, beating up unveiled women, suicide-bombing ordinary civilians, bringing back sharia law."

I wish that the Iraqi resistance was a socialist one, but it ought to be a principle of socialists and liberals that people have a right to defend themselves against a violent occupation regardless of whether their politics are congruent with ours. It is not, of course, true that the resistance can be characterised in the fashion Katha Pollitt describes, and this happens to be relatively easy to find out. Each batch of statistics that emerges from think-tanks, the Department of Defense and the Multi-National Forces confirms that the military insurgency is overwhelmingly a guerilla war against the occupiers, targeting troops, and not civilians. Every sophisticated study describes a decentralised, acephalous, local resistance movement based on nationalism and Islam, animated by an experience of occupation brutality. There are restorationists, and there is a slender takfiri wing, but the bulk of the resistance is - curiously enough - not captured by the impressions conveyed in mainstream media reports. (Scour the dossier). Further, Pollitt doesn't seem to realise that resistance is a political term: as such it embraces precisely the trade unionists and secular feminists who are opposing the occupation, and whom Pollitt is outraged on behalf of, and it excludes those who are undermining the resistance by trying to turn it into a sectarian civil war.

Actually, Pollitt's position is a little worse than this. A little humility would compel her to recognise that the Iraqi resistance is doing far more to frustrate American imperialism than then American left is. The resistance is supporting us. It is their courageous insistence on combatting an enemy with immense death-dealing power, confronting them in the streets despite years of savage murder, despite the prospect of incineration and shredding, that is causing Bush's unpopularity. This is what caused the House to pass a bill opposing permanent bases in Iraq. It is this which is causing the Pentagon to draw up contingency plans for withdrawal. It wouldn't matter what position American liberals took if the resistance could do it alone, but the antiwar movement is - no matter what the President says - the decider. The articulate antiwar liberals in the media have a unique responsibility to combat racist myths and Pentagon propaganda, not collude in it. Instead of energetically accomodating itself to the beheaders, kidnappers, torturers and murderers in the Democratic Party, the antiwar movement must maintain its political independence. It should stolidly insist that the resistance is largely a necessary response to occupation and not some inexplicable excrescence. Then it will not be caught in the trap of calling for an unprincipled withdrawal which will empower people whom they concede are nothing else but psychopaths, tyrants, theocrats and beheaders. It isn't even necessary for the Nation liberals to ra-ra the resistance: they simply have to stop colluding in lies, recognising old-fashioned colonial mystique for what it is, and let people draw their own conclusions.

Labels: iraqi resistance, liberals, socialists

Brown: the Amis Papers. posted by lenin

Martin Amis is writing up his verdict on the new Prime Minister for The Observer, and I have been forwarded a sneak preview:

Honeymoon horrorism
A cosmic irony, the First Chancellor mused, that a predecessor whose mountainous reputation for vanity begat endless and opprobrious satire, should have left the body-length bedroom mirror behind. He stared, brownly, saturninely, into its reflective sheen. He had an expansive - even magisterial - front, but was it the front of Jove? It was a moment of insurmountable, excruciating misery when he realised that his hunched, resentful, guilty posture screamed 'usurper'. Each hooded, quasi-Oriental oculus bore the stamp of an apparatchik-led coup. He scowled, sending an orgiastic ripple from chin to shining chin. The Rubinesque body whose swimming convexities had moments ago been irrigated with molten jets of moisture, probed with lascivious amber bars, and pummelled with fluffed cotton towels, was now a seething patchwork of sunburnt red and blanched white. He stuffed every global inch of it into a handsewn two-piece suit whose tough fabric threatened to scorch his inner thighs with each stride. He breakfasted with the trusted team of glad-handers on yoghurt and fruit salad. Despite the suspicion he invariably gives that his adipose layers have been constructed with the mulch of kebab meat and pints of Spitfire, Gordon has the appetite, agility and acumen of a rabbit. Ed Balls shot him a suspicious glance as he lapped the surplus peach melba from the carton lid, but the Prime Minister winked reassuringly. The fat of the land was safe under his watch, his smirk seemed to say.

Such is the day, I surmise, that my new Prime Minister has been through when I meet him in the back of his charcoal limousine. Like Tony, he is an early riser (not career-wise, I realise with a moment of voltaic mirth that threatens to overthrow a strict poker face regime). He is also a considerate host, inviting me to brunch on a Murray's mint while his advisers gurgle with helpful phrases. "Labour's coming home!" Balls ululates. "Things can only get better," another chips in. Nice try, I think. Cool Brittania had existed for a leadership prodigiously more chilled out than this one. I inquire as to whether the fight against Islam will proceed with the same vigour under the new administration, and a frigid silence descends on the back seats. "I think," Gordon trembles, "that we have to be careful not to fight religious fanaticism with political fanaticism." I sense treachery. "Well then," I steam, "with what else should fanaticism be fought? A sense of benign resignation? Wistful moderation? A mournful sigh, followed by the complete transfer of the realm to the Islamic Emirate of Ali Baba?" The frigid silence mutates into a winter of discontent, until Sinister Balls interrupts my interrogation. "Now hang on a minute, Mart," he says, contracting my name in a dismal attempt at familiarity. "No," I tell him, "fuck off, Balls. I'm serious. Take that complacent civil service comportment and the suicidal love-embrace with the Mohammedan half-brothers, and fuck off."

We eyeball, Balls and I, for several minutes before Gordon, to whom I am increasingly partial, chuckles ruefully: "It's easy for you to say that, Martin. I've been wanting to say that for years, but I have to live with him! Anyway, we're cracking down harder - we won't be as madly insensitive about it as the last lot were. Tony and his gang, you know, they rushed out policies on the spot. I'll give it time to ferment in the opinion columns with the odd leak here and there." The levity has prepared the ground for some gratuitous flirtation. I tell Gordon that the world has grossly underestimated him. He touches my hair and kindly remarks that this was a problem I had never had to contend with. [In retrospect, I wonder how kind the remark in fact was. Consider deleting?] "What's it like," I ask him, "being the topic of discussion by media mooncalves?" He confides that the world of politics can almost be as savage as that of publishing, and slips in a remark about the scars on his back. Copycat, perhaps, but I'm starting to like the sound of his purr. And in strictest confidence, he reveals that the Alistair Campbell diaries were in fact ghost-written by a neice with learning difficulties, as were his columns for Mature Arseholes. The whole opus magnum horribilis, it seems, is a nepotistic palimpsest. "Am I," Gordon coyly inquires, "talking too fast for you?"

I return, exhausted, to my West London pad and give the Hitch a call. He is exuberant, or drunk, or both: his vowels are a touch more elaborate and enduring than usual. "One point upon which I trusted Blair less than his successor is the former's simpering religiosity. I think it accounts for the supererogatory restraint of his in the war on fascism." "And Brown?" I wonder. "Oh God, Mart, he's the face of boring theocratic tyranny. Honestly, try lighting a fag next to him and his lips become tighter than a duck's arse." "His wife's quite sensual, though," I say, feeling strangely protective of my Prime Minister. "I wouldn't fuck her with your dick," he blisters, "and I don't think he would either." Hitch gives offense, but only in a good cause. Somehow - this always happens nowadays - the conversation bounds suddenly from theocracy to sexual propinquities to eighteenth century revolutionaries, and back again. I suspect that he may be losing the distinction between irony and non-sequitur. I remind him that in older days, he would deduce from his descent down a Hebraic chute that Israel should be wiped off the map, from his sexual liberationism that abortion should be aborted, and from his revolutionary socialism that communism should be overthrown. "Don't. Be. Silly." He says, and rings off.

Gordon has been on the task for only a brief while, but his stature is assured. His pachydermic confidence has stampeded the Tories into retreat - which can only be good for as long as a scandalous number of them are lurching back to the old hobby of appeasement. One of them, spotting me lounging about in the Commons tea room, approached me with an outstretched hand and malevolent eyes. "I am a big fan," he said. Excuse me, I thought, while I evacuate my bowels. "I always remember," he continued, "your review of Hannibal. Very funny. Especially when you said that Thomas Harris had 'gone gay' for his creation. Some people called that homophobic, but I think it was inspired. Isn't it always sad, though, when a talented author goes gooey over a psychopathic serial killer?" He was casually fucked off by Balls, who had come with Kit Kats and Espresso. The Brown regime radiates homeliness and protection. It is not the nanny state, it is the Daddy State, and this patriarch shows no sign of relenting in the necessary war on the burglars. Yet, as besotted as I am with New New Labour - a superfluity of novelty, an excess of change, a surfeit of modernity - Tony will never be completely parted with. I think about him with the blood. Last night I masturbated, electrically, in his memory. Hair stood aloft on every surface of my body, and I spasmed rhythmically. It might, to any observer, have resembled a scene from An American Werewolf in London. I directed shapeshifting visions of him in a prefrontal movie, a semi-pornographic romance (for some reason, I protected his modesty even in my fantasies). To a miraculous, wrist-cranking crescendo, I imagined him floating through the open sash window and winking at me from three feet above. "Mmmm," I gristled as his ghost hovered over me, "Mr Blair".

Labels: gordon brown, islam, martin amis, new labour

Afghanistan: poppy in one ear, cock in the other. posted by lenin

Perhaps the coalition currently ruling Afghanistan militarily is getting fed up with American annihilism. Conn Hallinan of Foreign Policy in Focus has an interesting article up at Counterpunch, describing a bit of grumbling among America's allies. Too many bodies piling up, looks bad on television. The SPD have most to worry about, of course, because it is outflanked to the left by the Left Party, and there is a vote coming up on extending Germany's role in the mission. Suddenly their shower of uncharismatic largely right-wing leaders are vocalising complaints about the occupation. The UK Defense Secretary is apparently trying to pin the blame for the failure of the occupation on the United Nations.

Also interesting is the discussion of widespread opposition to Washington's eradicationist policy toward opium growth, which makes up about a third of total income in Afghanistan. It's treated as if it's an accident that in Colombia, where Dyncorps has practised this policy before, coca acreage is at exactly the level it was when the crop spraying began in 2001. It's as if the destruction of peasant communities, the ruining of food crops, the poisoning of a fragile and threatened ecosphere, was all an incidental byproduct of an exuberantly idealistic war on narcotics. On the other hand, if the whole thing was a counterinsurgency effort, all of these effects would be predictable. If there was no serious effort to disrupt the biggest coca barons and their right-wing paramilitaries, and if the main aim was to attack the sources of support for FARC among poor peasant communities, then none of it would be a surprise. The reason is that, as the United Nations Drug Control Programme acknowledges, there is no evidence that FARC are themselves involved in any trafficking: they have even participated in programmes to replace the crop with other sustainable commodities. On the other hand, what FARC do endanger are American interests in Colombia: as Under-Secretary Marc Grossman explained, FARC

"represent a danger to the $4.3 billion in direct U.S. investment in Colombia. They regularly attack U.S. interests, including the railway used by the Drummond Coal Mining facility and Occidental Petroleum's stake in the Cano Limon oil pipeline. Terrorist attacks on the Cano Limon pipeline also pose a threat to U.S. energy security. Colombia supplied three per cent of U.S. oil imports in 2001, and possesses substantial potential oil and natural gas reserves."

In the past, the US has abandoned the mass poisoning policy in the face of opposition from Karzai and its client regime. And it may be that they will abandon it again if it threatens to fracture the military alliance. However, consider its utility: the best thing from the point of view of the American government about using Dyncorps is that, as civilians, they are exempt from the usual scrutiny, even though they were routinely engaged in combat with Colombian rebels, and were caught transporting heroin. They may engage in a range of actions well beyond stated US goals, and the administration need never have to answer for it. William Wood, the current US ambassador to Afghanistan, used to oversee Dyncorp's campaign in Colombia. He'll know what the score is.

Labels: afghanistan, occupation, opium

Disastertainment posted by lenin

It could happen. The trouble is that if the Thames did flood, we would be the last to be prepared because media groups like Associated Newspapers have spent so much time commodifying the disastrous aspects of human experience that we simply become inured to it. We do face a range of risks as a species, but the information we get about these is filtered through entertainment and media industries that are frequently contributing to the problem, and who, moreover, make their living from aestheticising disaster. They are incapable of doing otherwise. The daily block headlines and striking images of flood water deliberately mimic those in the Hollywood parent productions. If it can't be commodified (or if it may be politically inconvenient) it doesn't get a look in, as per the destruction at the Japanese nuclear facility after last week's earthquake, which disappeared from the news very quickly.



Catastrophe is only saleable inasmuch as it is an aesthetic object in itself. This is most obvious in docu-dramas, television emergency simulation spectaculars, and in movies, like The Day After Tomorrow, in which the most striking thing is precisely how gorgeous and alluring disaster and its means of destruction happen to be. For example, it may one day be the case that an earthquake in the ocean basin will produce a series of twenty- to forty-foot waves speeding toward the American mainland. Who is to say the first thing you think of wouldn't be that fucking stupid film? Twentieth Century Fox had already succeeded in preemptively capitalising the spectacle of pillars of wind and walls of water devastating American cities long before Katrina made landfall. This is why historical and present context, and sustained attention, is always missing. Few of the news reports about Katrina, for example, really spent much time discussing even what preparations Ray Nagin or the various private enterprises contracted had made, never mind why the aid was being blocked and why the Department of Defense called the city's desperate population an insurgency. They haven't returned to spend much time examining why the victims haven't had their houses rebuilt or their insurance paid out, and why the ethnic cleansing hasn't been reversed. There has been the very occasional nod to the possibility that carbonising the atmosphere could have contributed to causing the disaster, but on the whole it remains a freak accident. There is presumably an effort in some bureacracies to 'learn the lessons', but then there always is. Whatever the lessons are, we won't get to hear much of them: it will be new footage, new angles, shocking photographs, and then the weather.

Meanwhile certain looming threats tend to slip out of sight once the novelty goes out of them. Mike Davis has been warning about the risks from avian flu for a few years now, but it is only transiently placed in the headlines. The H5N1 virus is in fact spreading, and among the infected there is a 60% death rate. There are things that can be done, such as stock up on Tamiflu and similar antiviral drugs, although there are now resistant strains developing. Essentially, a massive international effort is required, and what is being offered is an uneven set of local initiatives based on early warnings systems. We might soon see a repeat of the 'Spanish Famine' (it wasn't particularly Spanish, but Spain reported its incidence more accurately than other countries) which, beginning in September 1918, killed about 20 to 40 million people worldwide and infected about a quarter of the US population. And then the employers will be yapping their heads off because of the high absence rate. But again, we will have been sacrificed in large numbers because we had no input into the response.



We are given no information, or such information as we are permitted to have is either false or extremely vague. Take terror, the most overrated threat to the human species since it was widely believed that masturbation would lead to blindness. America has colour-coded terror alerts, and since 2006, MI5 has operated a similar system based on the words 'Critical', 'Severe', 'Substantial', and so on. Tells us nothing, but it sounds cool. It's an ideal media management tool, a labour-saving device that purports to boil down complex realities (and/or fictions) to a single phrase or colour. We are thus encouraged to adjust our sense of how much we need the state in its punitive and coercive capacity to expand its operations, (even as its meliorative and public service functions are gradually disengaged), on the basis of little actual information. We are not encouraged to do anything, except be more suspicious of the neighbours.

A ubiquitous public understanding of risks and how to handle them is fatal to power, because the sources of these risks are quite commonly embedded in our social structure. In the United States, for example, an exercise called Dark Winter was run in June 2001 by the John Hopkins Centre for Civilian Biodefense. It involved several senior national politicians and former security and intelligence directors. Its findings were perfectly predictable: one was that the political leadership was fairly clueless about how to handle such things as bioattacks; another was that America's healthcare system didn't have the capacity to deal with such eventualities; another was that the response of ordinary people would be key. The latter is very often the case: the response of passengers on United Airlines Flight 93 was in some ways a model in disaster-prevention - they stopped the attackers from finding a much better target than a field in Pennsylvania by collectively discussing the situation and then acting decisively. But the broader point is that to understand the risks we live with is not merely to have a handle on the failings of a particular administration. It is to strip away the mostly unnecessary secrecy of official deliberations and planning. This would render us both more effective at dealing with problems and less susceptible to scaremongering. It is also to understand properly the nature of the social world that we are reproducing (and may choose to stop reproducing at some point).

Labels: disaster politics, spectacle

In which I become a diverting anecdote. posted by lenin

As you can see, I come not to praise Johann Hari but to demonise him. A few people have drawn my attention to this weird segment in Hari's latest for Dissent:

One of the most popular left-wing blogs in Britain, Lenin's Tomb, goes further, viciously scorning Muslims who fight back against Islamic fundamentalism. Even though it is written by an atheist writer who enjoys alcohol, female company and free speech, it has ridiculed Muslim women who attend freedom of speech rallies as "Uncle Toms", and condemned Muslims who have "comfortable upper-middle class" lives because they aren't "interested in subjecting [themselves] to the ascetic demands of religion." Cohen's thesis applies with laser-accuracy to these parts of the left, and it is here that his critique is most powerful: they have indeed become reflexive defenders of the far right. Against this, Cohen quotes the Iranian author Azar Nafisi: "I very much resent it when people - maybe with good intentions or from a progressive point of view - keep telling me, 'It's their culture'... It's like saying the culture of Massachucets is burning witches." Again, he exaggerates the extent to which these thoughts are part of the mainstream left. But this error is as nothing to the pro-war left's final and most disastrous reading of all.

The last time I was referenced in a mainstream US magazine, it was obliquely in Ian Parker's exceptional eulogy to Christopher Hitchens for The New Yorker. And the last time I was so misconstrued was when the unhinged son of the Hoares decided to paint me as a supporter of Slobodan Milosevic. It isn't all that worrying that I didn't say the things that Johann Hari thinks I said. Who doesn't sometimes get that treatment? Practically everyone else who is referenced in the article is dealt with in a similarly unfair fashion (and more generally, I can count Negri, Derrida and Hobsbawm among my companions). And it isn't as if that is the part of his article that I disagree with most. However, bloggery is narcissism or it is nothing, so I will take the trouble to direct readers of that infidel magazine to the small matters of fact in this small case.

I don't viciously scorn Muslims who fight back against "Islamic fundamentalism", because that can be a very good thing to do. I do viciously scorn all those who misrepresent and vilify Islam in the service of imperialism, because that is a bad and wicked thing to do. I don't condemn Muslims who live comfortable upper middle class lives and aren't interested in the ascetic demands of religion. I mentioned in this post about the neocon American Islamic Congress that one member of it was probably of that ilk, but I did not and do not think that being in that position merits special criticism. What I did think at the time, and what I still think now, is that "being determines consciousness", and that one's class perspective is likely to regulate one's political purview. I don't describe women who attend freedom of speech rallies as "Uncle Toms". This was probably passed on to Hari by his friend, 'Dave', who sometimes comments here. In the comments to the post about that so-called 'March for Free Expression', I was asked to comment about a speaker named 'Ali', who is in fact a man (the gender fabrication is symptomatic). He was well received because the rally was designed to appease racism. I retorted: "it's always good to have an Uncle Tom present, so I don't doubt he got good cheers". The worst thing about that sentence was the offense against the English language. The BNP Nazis and right-wing libertarians in the crowd would certainly have appreciated 'One Of Them' coming out and abetting the charge that Muslims are the principal threat to liberty and free speech. Such was the theme of the march, and such were its politics. At any rate, 'Dave' took this to mean that I consider all Muslims who demand free speech "Uncle Toms" (hence the pluralisation). Hari is quoting 'Dave' and not me. On such insignificant fluff was a paragraph of piffle built: the inference that I think 'It's their culture' is clearly nonsense. That essentialising, culturalist gesture is more likely to be found among Hari's friends on the 'pro-war left' than it is on this blog. Hari could do himself a favour and read what one of his favourite authors, Sam Harris, has to say on the topic. Or indeed, he could inspect Hitchens' latest.

Anyway, to be sullied in a magazine that has migrated from Cold War liberalism to Hot War liberalism is no particular dishonour. But you might ask, and you would justified in asking, as the Black Eyed Peas once did so gracefully, where is the love?

Labels: bomber 'left', johann hari

Annihilism: preparing for the worst. posted by lenin

Naturally, the floods are forcing us to think about climate change. Obviously. Sure. Even as we exchange ribbons of viral hypertext, I can see the government preparing to dump the oil companies and airlines and motorway construction outfits and petrol retailers and car firms and steel giants and supply industries and gas suppliers and so on, all to protect a the rurban hybrids in Gloucestershire from drowning in muddy water pestilence. This post isn't actually about 'climate change' (or impending doom, as it ought to be known, without a trace of sarcasm). There's nothing to write about: the scientific consensus is rock solid. Everyone who is empowered to act immediately knows what it will take, and not one of them has any intention of doing what it will take: this separation between conception and action gives rise to alienated language, in which our existence is threatened not by our own actions, but by impersonal forces, rather like those that supposedly operate under the canopy of 'globalisation'. We need to make a 90% reduction in our carbon emmissions merely to prevent ecospheric destruction from sliding beyond our capacity to remedy it. That requires a massive global programme of public works, of house construction and reconstruction, of renewables, of extensive public transport, and an elaborate system of rationing. It requires such a radical transformation, and such a tremendous mobilisation of public activity to accomplish it, that no really existing capitalism could cope for half a minute with the impact. Similarly, any solution that did emerge from the current ruling elites, supposing such was available, would concentrate massive power in their hands rather than, as is surely indicated, radically democratising it. But for now, we are stuck in our death pact, and the only controversy is over how many eco-contrarians' heads would be required to fill the hole in the ozone layer.

No, this isn't about 'climate change'. It is about another kind of annihilism (which term may, and should, be contrasted with 'Islamic nihilism' whenever that preposterous phrase is issued). It is about threats that will not be 'taken off the table'. It is a truism of American political discourse that no option - not even the nuclear one - can be taken off the table with respect to Iran. From Rudi Giuliani to Hillary Clinton (across that vast ideological spectrum), the prospect of Iranians getting their Hiroshima and Nagasaki is officially not 'off the table'. Gordon Brown earlier today refused to take the military option "off the table" with regard to Iran, but he hasn't as yet raised the prospect of turning Tehran and its citizens into a boiling twelve mile high column of white hot dust and smoke capped by future fall-out. Rest assured, he will get round to it. What does it mean not to take an option "off the table"? Firstly, it is to put an option "on the table" that wasn't there before. Obviously in the case of Iran, it is also a calculated insult: you may not strive to possess weapons even at the level of our imaginations; however, we will not only possess them, but we will proliferate them, and threaten you with them, and few will notice the absurdity. It is nuclear terrorism with added irony.

Additionally, this 'table' is more tilted than usual, since no one else has any 'option' but to comply or be punished. Imagine Chavez saying that he wouldn't remove 'the option' of eating Bush's liver with fava beans and a fine chianti from 'the table'. That would be certainly be a much less wicked transaction than atomic megadeath, and no innocent people need die from it, even if that mobile facsimile of shit they call the Vice President would be tragically still alive. Somehow, though, I expect this sound, forward-looking policy for 21st Century socialism would receive a great deal more flak from the Washington press pack ('pack' as in 'running dogs'). Well, that is to be expected. What is more insidious is the language, redolent of good husbandry, and sound strategic calculation. Never say never, don't burn your bridges, keep your options open etc etc. How very coy, and sly, and grotesque, to raise the prospect of barbecuing countless human beings as a matter of sane planning, and sensible tomorrows. And since they haven't got a whisp of an argument that could persuade us to keep paying for these weapons of mass destruction, it has to be insinuated both that they would never be used, and that they may well have to be used one day. The American, and by extension British, administration is devoted to a policy of breaking down the strict barrier between conventional obliteration and the nuclear fashioned kind. With mini-nukes, and radioactive weapons and nuclear-tipped warheads and so on, that process is already well underway. Plainly, they need to break the taboo on the use of anything both military and nuclear, and so the rhetorical escalation may well be capped by a nuclear-tipped strike on Iran's enrichment facilities and revolutionary guards depots, sure to be followed by 'we-got-away-with-it' victory celebrations.

Alarmist, you say? Possibly, but the alarm bell hasn't stopped ringing for over fifty years, and it is occasionally worth paying attention to the background noise. Furthermore, we are beseeched daily to remember what act of cartographical discourtesy Iran supposedly threatened Israel with. We are invited by America's demure and restrained political class to consider charges of genocide against that country, apparently to be accomplished through the discharge of fissile material. And you will remember that this particular bunch, far from being alarmist, worked assiduously to tell the truth about Iraq's threat to the United States. You do remember that, don't you? If you don't remember that, remember this: several high-profile American politicians have threatened Iran with nuclear strikes, while one senior British politician threatened Iraq with nuclear attacks. Neither country, quite obviously, threatened us or anyone else with the same. I merely raise the possibility that what is happening here is old-fashioned imperial transference: the murderous plots of states are almost always matched and preceded by even worse plots on the other side. If American politicians are on the one hand charging Iran with intent to destroy, and on the other hand threatening them with nuclear weapons, it is surely not a bad guess that Iran - for its revolutionary resistance to colonialism, not for its bazaari class and its religious repression and its neoliberalism - will be made an example of.

Labels: annihilism, disaster politics, eco-death, nuclear megadeath

Watch Galloway posted by lenin

If you aren't watching it, go ahead and view his speech here. The speaker is attempting to shut Galloway up, while the Tory who made the complaint in the first place has crept up on the bench behind Galloway to heckle more loudly.

Update: you can watch the whole thing here, thanks to Spidered News and the Couchtripper.

Labels: george galloway

Britain's faked map during Iran 'hostage' crisis. posted by lenin

A parliamentary report into the 'hostage' crisis some months back has conceded Craig Murray's point that the maritime map published by the Ministry of Defence was actually confected from thin air - that between the ears of defence ministers. The report says that the map could be regarded as "deliberately misleading", that there is no certainty in the coordinates given by the British government, and that the government was lucky that Iran didn't contest it. There hasn't been much time, given the very rapid lurches by the Brown government, to reflect on the extraordinary mendacity of the regime we've recently ousted. The Blair era might well have been known for nothing much more exciting than sell-outs and sleaze had it not been clear early on that the priggish lawyer in charge was also a fervent imperialist. From the first bombing of Baghdad in 1998, the usual spate of very British lies and hypocrisy were augmented by a blood-curdling moralism drawn directly from Cold War B-Movies. And as the policies became more outrageous, the deceptions became more egregious, never reaching such a ridiculous height as during the summer of death in Lebanon. And so, by the time the troops were siezed in the Gulf, hardly anyone could believe a word the government said. And they still didn't get it: they confidently expected that if they pressed the old buttons, brought out the flags and the imperial bunting, and issued resolute messages via The Sun and the usual scum press, they would galvanise a mass of support against the Mad Mullahs. It must have been a shock to discover that people were more willing to believe the Iranian government than the British one. From start to finish, the farrago showed what a dwindled figure the former Prime Minister cut, what a petty crook he had become in the eyes of most. Most Americans would be happy to see Cheney impeached, and quite a few would like to see the same happen to Bush. I believe that most Britons would probably be content to see Blair hanged. Either by the Mahdi army, or on the end of stockings with an orange in his mouth after a failed erotic asphyxia transaction, it makes no difference.

Now they're talking about a Brown bounce as if it has anything to do with anything he's doing. On the contrary: it is because Cameron only looked good next to the last bunch of belligerent fanatics. The Tories' 'radical' plans for expanding privatisation in the NHS and Cameron's mealy-mouthed phrases about the environment simply aren't enough to cut it on their own. Brown is ahead in the polls now, but the recent two bye-election victories actually marked sizeable swings away from Labour, 11% in Sedgefield and 5% in Ealing Southall, as compared with the record lows of the 2005 election. And that serves as a salutary warning to the hardline Atlanticist who is presently threatening single mothers and the unemployed with cuts and workfare. Labour's core vote doesn't have to return to the fold simply because the mad bastard with the humourless grin has been kicked out. They probably won't unless there's something in it for them.

Labels: 'hostage' crisis, iran, lies, ministry of defence

The curious case of the controversial cartoons that didn’t count posted by ejh

"Is there any point to which you would wish to draw my attention?"
"To the curious incident of the dog in the night-time."
"The dog did nothing in the night-time."
"That was the curious incident," remarked Sherlock Holmes.

Some short time ago, some of you may recall, there was something of a controversy involving the publication of controversial cartoons in Denmark linking, shall we say, the Prophet Mohammed with terrorism. These cartoons caused a certain reaction, as they were intended to do. During the ensuing controversy, many people thought it best to express solidarity with the provocateurs, by reprinting the cartoons, by expressing sympathy with them, by marching in their support and by publishing a great number of articles and internet comments condemning people who had threatened the publishers - or even disagreed that they had a right to publish these cartoons.

It was a freedom-of-speech issue. There were no complexities here, no questions of provocation or offence and anybody who observed that it wasn’t necessarily so simple could be expected to be abused as an apologist for terrorism, a relativist and what you will. (It was, however, quite in order to abuse the cartoons’ Muslim opponents for thinking there was only one side to the question, a paradox I seem to remember noticing in a letter I wrote at the time to Private Eye.)

Anyway, that was then and this, apparently, is now. Yesterday, in the Western liberal democracy where I live, a High Court judge ordered a cartoon banned and all copies of the magazine that published it seized. Police were sent to raid newsagents and the editors of the magazine were ordered to reveal the name of the artist who produced the cartoon, so that proceedings could be considered against them, proceedings which could lead to a two-year prison sentence for all involved.

These cartoons did not seek to inflame ethnic tensions, nor did they imperil national security (assuming a cartoon could do so). Their offence was simply to lampoon the Royal Family, in a manner which was certainly rude but not destructive. Giles Tremlett reports in the Guardian:

The cartoon on the front cover of El Jueves (“Thursday” – ejh)….showed Crown Prince Felipe and his wife Letizia in the midst of an ardent session of love-making.

A speech bubble issuing from the prince's mouth makes a joke about the amount of work done by the royal family and a government decision to give families €2,500 (£1,680) for each new child.

"Do you realise what it will mean if you get pregnant?" the prince asks. "This is going to be the closest thing to work that I've ever done."

Not all that ardent, really, if you look, but leaving that aside, this is the sort of social commentary which surely falls a long way within the bounds of legitimate free speech - if free speech is to mean anything. Is Prince Felipe depicted as a terrorist? He is not. He is depicted having sex with his wife. We know they do this, because they had their second child just a few weeks ago.

I bother with the detail and the circumstances, by the way, because it is possible that this controversy has passed you by. This is because for some reason this case has not brought on the worldwide outcry occasioned by the other matter to which I alluded earlier.

Which is a strange thing. The case, one would have thought, is no less strong, in fact it is a rather less complicated matter. It is surely an outrage in a Western democracy that newsagents should be raided, magazines seized, editors required to reveal names of contributors, people threatened with prison, all for no more pressing reason than there appears to have been an offence to the dignity of a member of the Royal Family (if, indeed, he was actually offended). It is the sort of thing that might have appeared in a cartoon and been prosecuted in 1820s Britain, where Crown Princes - and indeed, Kings - were frequently the butt of cartoonists' abuse. When people talk about modernity and the need to defend it, you would think this would be exactly the sort of thing they mean. You’d think this would be a cause célèbre.

Yet curiously, it is not. I am unable to detect a worldwide controversy about the police raids. Or even a small one. It has of course made some small impact in Spain, where some newspaper editors and journalists still remember what it is like to face bans and the threat of imprisonment. (For this reasons, the general level of political and cultural debate seems to me to be rather higher, more serious-minded, than back in the UK.) El Mundo, for instance, reprinted the cartoon in an act of solidarity.

But where, elsewhere, are the concerned and the outraged? Where, in the UK, are the bloggers? Where are the newspaper columnists and editors? Where are the politicians? Where are the editorials, the statements, the demonstrations? Where are those who stood up for freedom in Denmark now that it is menaced in Madrid? Where are those who believe that freedom, if it means anything, means telling people what they do not want to hear?

Well, fair enough. If individuals don’t want to comment on this or that controversy, if it doesn’t particularly interest them, if they have better things to do if they just don’t feel like it then that’s OK. I mean it. One can condemn people for what they say, but one should not condemn for what they have not said – there are far too many websites that cater for the opposite persuasion. Besides, it’s not as if the internet is full of commentary on the subject from people who don't think you have to invade countries and bomb their civilians before you can be accepted as a friend of civilisation.

So it’s not that any individual person or party or paper or website isn’t saying anything. That’s not what bothers me. It’s the difference between the two situations that bothers me. Remember, when it came to Denmark, this was a Matter Of Principle. It was nothing to do with Islam, or provocation, or anything: it was to do with freedom of speech. That particular freedom had to be defended and everybody needed to say so. There were no complications. You couldn’t pick and choose. That was Relativism and that was what led to the trouble in the first place.

Well, what’s the difference? Where’s the storm of protest this time? Is freedom really not to be protected abroad as readily as it would be at home? Isn’t the real difference that those who were threatening freedom of speech in the Denmark case were a small minority of Muslims, whereas now it is the police and the courts, the apparatus of the law?

Isn’t this actually a matter not of principle so much as narrative? Isn’t that narrative one that says that the apparatus of law is what we in the West should fight for, because it is what protects our liberties - whereas the Muslims threaten our liberties so they are who we are supposed to fight? Isn't it only a matter of principle when it's a chance to Get The Muslims?

For what it’s worth, my underinformed opinion is that nobody will go to jail. Although Prince Felipe may be a chinless wonder, his father is certainly not and it would be unwise of him to have people thrown in clink merely for making ribald commentary about his family. But still, there will presumably be fines levied and precedents set.

So perhaps this is a ‘sleeper’ and there will be a torrent of complaint tomorrow or next week. Concern will be expressed by politicians, outrage in newspapers, apoplexy in the blogosphere. But if there is not, then a principle will have been created, indeed may already have been created. It is all right for cartoons to risk provoking hatred against Muslims but it is not all right for cartoons to risk provoking laughter against princes.

But we knew that already, did we not?

Labels: 'free speech'

A 'surge' of their own posted by lenin

The monthly figures for June showed the highest daily number of attacks on US troops for four years, confirming an upward trend that has been happening for the last four years. The figures also confirm an encouraging downward trend in attacks on civilians which, at any rate, still constitute a minority of such attacks: roughly 70% of attacks are directed at coalition forces, 16% at the Iraqi security forces, and 14% on civilians. As Marc Lynch explains [audio file], this, combined with the revelations of a united resistance political front on Thursday, reflects a sense of growing confidence that the occupiers may be pushed out of Iraq. It also expresses a desire by the nationalist mainstream of the resistance to push the takfiri elements to the margins, since they now believe that they can articulate their interests in a post-occupation Iraq.

Despite some efforts to spin it in a contrary fashion, this pretty well ruins the narrative that the Americans are trying to push, that they are winning Iraqi insurgents to their side against 'Al Qaeda'. Incidentally, there is an interesting psyop going on right now with this 'revelation' that Omar al-Baghdadi, supposedly the leader of the 'Islamic State of Iraq' was a fictitious character (even though it has been claimed that he was captured). This emerged in US interrogation of a captured 'Al Qaeda leader', which means it was probably tortured out of him. Whether the information is true or not, the backstory being provided by the military is certainl false. They claim that this character was invented to give the impression that the 'Islamic State of Iraq' was not a front group for 'Al Qaeda in Iraq', and that it is a national movement and not a foreign one. This is designed to be confusing, but it is reasonably well known that a) the ISI is a composite of different groups, and b) most of the membership of 'Al Qaeda in Iraq' is actually Iraqi, and not foreign (although most of the suicide attacks are alleged to be carried out by the tiny input of 'foreign fighters'). If I didn't know better (and I don't), I would guess that the US military is right now busily trying to win a domestic propaganda battle in order to legitimise a long-term occupation. The Iraqis, they say, are coming to realise that we are their allies, and that 'Al Qaeda' are their real enemies, and so we must stay and protect them alongside our former enemies. It's something to do with leveraging xenophobia.

Labels: iraq, iraqi resistance, occupation, US imperialism

New United Iraqi Resistance Front posted by lenin

This story is accompanied by a lengthy interview with three resistance leaders hiding out in Damascus. The scoop is that seven Iraqi resistance outfits, including the Army of Islam (whom the occupiers have claimed are working for them), the Iraqi nationalist 1920 Revolution Brigades, Hamas Iraq and a faction of Ansar al-Sunna, are forming a united front called the Political Office for the Iraqi Resistance, in preparation for a US withdrawal of troops. It is to articulate a shared political programme, "including a commitment to free Iraq from foreign troops, rejection of cooperation with parties involved in political institutions set up under the occupation and a declaration that decisions and agreements made by the US occupation and Iraqi government are null and void ... The programme envisages a temporary technocratic government to run the country during a transition period until free elections can be held." The opposition to working with groups currently involved in political institutions means there will not be an arrangement with the Mahdi Army, especially since it now looks as if Sadr's movement may be going back into the government.

Abu Aardvark points out that Hamas Iraq results from a split with the 1920 Revolution Brigades, but that it hasn't been seen much since. It is apparently close to the ideology of the Muslim Brotherhood, and it opposes the sectarian drift of some organisations. The faction of Ansar al-Sunna that is participating (the Legitimate Committee of Ansar al-Sunna) is reported by the Guardian to have broken with the main group over sectarianism and the strategy of suicide attacks:

"We wanted to unite with other resistance forces, but the other group is moving closer to al-Qaida and refused. Al-Qaida has brought benefits and problems," Zubeidy says. "They attack the US occupiers. But every day the problems they bring become greater than the benefits.

"Resistance isn't just about killing Americans without any aims or goals," he continues. "Our people have come to hate al-Qaida, which gives the impression to the outside world that the resistance in Iraq are terrorists. Suicide bombing is not the best way to fight because it kills innocent civilians. We are against indiscriminate killing - fighting should be concentrated only on the enemy. They [al-Qaida] believe that all Shia are kuffar [unbelievers] - and most of the Sunnis as well."

Well, there had been attempts before, in 2004, to form a united, non-sectarian political platform for the resistance, but it seemed to hit the skids very quickly. A number of these organisations include both Shi'ites and Sunnis, and operate in the south as well as the north, but that is not sufficient to make them the broad Iraqi political front that is clearly indicated. Most Iraqis support resistance attacks and oppose the occupation, and a Maliki-led government is unlikely to last long if the troops are chased out. But the main anti-occupation force among Shi'ites appears to have been excluded because it decided to participate in the elected bodies under the occupation. And given that one strategy the occupiers are considering is partitioning Iraq into three, a political front that doesn't command cross-sectarian support might well play into America's hands.

Labels: iraq, iraqi resistance, occupation, US imperialism

Independent news. posted by lenin

This is a good idea.

Labels: media, news

Mass Graves posted by lenin

Beseiged Iraqi city overflowing with bodies.

Labels: iraq, iraqi resistance, US imperialism

Planetary Oblivion: or, how I learned to stop worrying and love capitalism. posted by lenin

I am told that David Aaronovitch is planning a book entitled 'Voodoo Histories' which is (oh, bless), a book about 'conspiracy theories'. Presumably in an inspired moment, he thought that title up all by himself, (although why should it be that the terms for mystical nonsense so frequently refer to beliefs attributed to colonised Others - Wheen's 'Mumbo-Jumbo' is such an example?). This flood of tributes to various kinds of supposedly irrational belief (religion, pomo, New Age, etc) is itself the latest outbreak of obscurantist drivel, a fetish, a symptom of the utter lack of intellectual and moral responsibility among the literati. Having been accessory to something approaching genocide its awful criminality, these guys - the contemporary equivalents of Julius Streicher - want to say something about irrational beliefs and their pernicious effects on politics. A moment's reflection would surely compel the conclusion that the main types of irrational belief formation that threaten humankind are those that enable colossal damage to be done to us and our life-support systems. I mean to say that those incorrect beliefs that are encouraged by corporate-funded propaganda are covering for the worst, ongoing threat to human life that we have ever faced, bar nuclear war.

Suppose the oil corporations were correct in one single respect - that the predictions so far made by all the prestigious scientific bodies and global panels such as the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change are all wrong to date. Suppose, however, that instead of being dire pessimists, these bodies have been outrageously happy-go-lucky in their assessments, and that things are much worse than we have so far understood. As George Monbiot points out, this is what is entailed by a recent NASA-led study:

The IPCC predicts that sea levels could rise by as much as 59cm this century(2). Hansen’s paper argues that the slow melting of ice sheets the panel expects doesn’t fit the data. The geological record suggests that ice at the poles does not melt in a gradual and linear fashion, but flips suddenly from one state to another. When temperatures increased to 2-3 degrees above today’s level 3.5 million years ago, sea levels rose not by 59 centimetres but by 25 metres. The ice responded immediately to changes in temperature(3).

The effects?:

As well as drowning most of the world’s centres of population, a sudden disintegration could lead to much higher rises in global temperature, because less ice means less heat reflected back into space. The new paper suggests that the temperature could therefore be twice as sensitive to rising greenhouse gases than the IPCC assumes. “Civilization developed,” Hansen writes, “during a period of unusual climate stability, the Holocene, now almost 12,000 years in duration. That period is about to end.”

And what's stopping the government from doing something about it? Why is the Stern Report so pathetic in its recommendations? Why does it so irrationally propose to solve a problem with means that its authors explain will not solve the problem? Oh, business as usual. The CBI - the ruling class in congress - might withdraw its support. The newspapers aren't exactly communicating much of this urgent reality or the political consequences, because fossil fuels is good advertising revenue. In fact, the state of scientific knowledge seems to make as little impress on this situation as the putative good intentions of the very powerful. Perhaps some sectors of the ruling class are unwilling to see the environment in which their system operates disintegrate, which is going to take place without urgent action in the next couple of generations. Yet they balk at the costs of the necessary measures, perhaps correctly assessing that they could trigger a social revolution (I mean it). Perhaps BP really does mean Beyond Petroleum. Perhaps Shell really is turning green in the face. Yet, for some mysterious reason (something to do with capital accumulation or, to be even more technical, profit), they continue to mine the ancient remains of carbon-based life-forms, sending tremendous pulses of carbon dioxide into an ecosphere that is not equipped to handle it, thus effecting massive chain-reactions that will eventually obliterate the basis on which much of the ruling class subsists. (It might also do something rather nasty to you and I, but we don't really count except as labour power.) And the core industries continue to insist that all is rosy. If it isn't rosy, it's murky - very complex, unclear, mixed signals etc. Aside from the 1.2 million road deaths each year, which we are not supposed to notice, the implanting of oil use into the - you might say - genetic make-up of advanced capitalist economies is driving a global series of oil wars. Oil is not the only cause of conflict in Nigeria, Angola, Colombia, Russia, Aceh and so on, but it is a commodity unlike any other, and ensuring its profitable distribution and transportation is a very important goal for the world's ruling elites. In the same way, coltan wasn't the only cause of conflict in the Congo, it simply happened to cohere and augment every other cause of the conflict. Sadly, if someone wanted to write a Black Book of Capitalism, those particular instances would be far down the list of depravity. Capitalism is organised crime, but these are among the lesser busts that could be made.

Of course, as Monbiot also points out, by a colossal and ugly historical irony, the regions most responsible for what we tweely refer to as 'climate change' are those that would be struck last, and struck least. Those that will drown to death or have to flee with clutched belongings to overcrowded and shrinking land masses will not be the wealthy. Those who will starve to death because of the ruination of fertile soil, lack of water and reduced crop yields will not be Bill Gates and Warren Buffet. As New Orleans showed, the increasing frequency and intensity of tropical storms will not be borne by the rich, who will have guards perched beside housebound turrets with automatic weapons aimed, in case anyone comes a-begging. And if they can batten themselves down in gated fortress communities, the ruling classes would sooner ride out the deluge than part with a solitary iota of their power and wealth to alter the course of this calamity. This is the same class of people who are callous enough to poison us on a regular basis: who still try to sell children tobacco as a lifestyle choice (and not as it might more properly be understood, as a style of death); who vend unhealthy slop and call it diet food; who give us carcinogens in our food and atmosphere; who pump fumes into our environment that give us bronchitis and asthma; who allow shit to go into our burgers with letting on; who allow toxic chemicals into our food; who give us BSE (and then try and blackmail us into Buying British); who give us radiation poisoning and asbestos sickness; who give us unsafe environments to work in; etc etc etc. These are not our allies in the struggle against planetary oblivion.

The most menacing and dogmatic voices of unreason are therefore: the mad extremists who insist on continuing in our present state of affairs; the utopian idealists who think that it can bring us a poverty-free, well-fed, sustainable planet; the evildoers who profit from it; the cool psychopaths who try to charm us into believing that all will be well; the cruel men of violence who will go to all lengths to conserve and defend the system. Root out the evil ideology within, I say. We have been indoctrinated for too long by this slavish cult of capitalism, and I say we have endured enough together.

Labels: environment, famine, planetary destruction, war

The American Ruling Class posted by lenin

Labels: america, capitalism, kappa kappa gamma, ruling class

Oily cretins (latest attack on Galloway) posted by lenin

You remember, I think, some years ago there was a libellous story in the Telegraph. The newspaper, still then under the control of the now convicted felon Conrad Black, ran a story about documents purporting to show that George Galloway was in the pay of Saddam Hussein. Galloway was awarded £150,000 in compensation for the defamatory claims, and also full legal costs, amounting to over £1.5m. Justice Eady defined the claims in the newspaper's coverage as containing four basic claims that any ordinary reader would take away:

a) Mr Galloway had been in the pay of Saddam Hussein, secretly receiving sums of the order of £375,000 a year;

b) He diverted monies from the oil-for-food programme, thus depriving Iraqi people, whose interest he had claimed to represent, of food and medicines;

c) He probably used the Mariam Appeal as a front for personal enrichment;

d) What he had done was tantamount to treason.

This was libellous, and these remain defamatory claims to make. However. Immediately upon hearing of the allegations, a pro-war hard-right Tory MP named Andrew Robathan wrote to the Committee on Standards and Privileges to demand that an inquiry be made into them, reminding them as he did that he had fought in the Gulf War. Subsequently a prolonged inquiry was held into this matter, and the Committee has now concluded that George Galloway will be suspended for 18 days from the House of Commons for "damaging the reputation of the House".

This may seem curious. After all, the Commissioners accept Eady's definition of the libellous claims, and the Commissioner for Parliamentary Standards either acknowledges that George Galloway did not personally benefit from "moneys derived from the former Iraqi regime", or accepts that George Galloway did make many declarations of interest over Iraq, eleven times. Further, he finds no instance in which monies from the appeal were improperly spent. There is no suggestion that George Galloway attempted to deceive anyone about his involvement in the Appeal or his interest in the matter. The Commissioner does not believe that George Galloway's views or advocacy were a result of receiving money from Saddam Hussein, because he doesn't accept that George Galloway's views changed or that he received money from Saddam Hussein. The complaint made by Andrew Robathan is clearly unsubstantiated: this should have concluded the matter. So, what gives?

Well, here's a clue: the majority of the Committee voted for the war on Iraq. Two of its members are former chairs of the Labour Friends of Israel. One of them, Kevin Barron MP, played a pivotal role in the witch-hunt of miners’ leader Arthur Scargill in 1990. Seasoned red-baiters and warmongers, then, and they had to find him responsible for something. Here is the basis of the suspension: he called into question the motives of the inquiry and therefore brought the House of Commons into disrepute. That is to say, because he dared to suggest that a committee of ten members of parliament might have a political motive, he is suspended. This is pathetic.

Now, the committee did make other complaints, which Galloway disputes, but they say these would have resulted merely in a request for an apology. Namely, they say, George Galloway: didn't use his parliamentary resources in a "reasonable" fashion by using them to help the Appeal (this is stretching the definition of what is "reasonable", but those are the breaks with a bunch of pro-sanctions, pro-war MPs); didn't cooperate with the inquiry and tried to conceal "the true source of Iraqi funding" from them (in fact, the claim that Galloway didn't cooperate is belied by the record of transactions which is available on the website of the committee, in which the Commissioner notes as late as November 2006 that he was very content with Galloway's cooperation); wasn't quite forthcoming enough about declaring his interests (despite the fact that he did discuss it in the House of Commons numerous times, widely advertised the appeal, held meetings in the house, and consequently was satirically known as 'the MP for Baghdad Central'); did not register the Appeal in the Miscellaneous Category (although as they concede, he was not directed to do so when he consulted the previous Commissioner in 1999). This ragbag of petty complaints is the sum of a great effort made over several years to try and impugn the reputation of an antiwar MP.

Added to it are several bizarre implications, which occur throughout the deliberations, but not in the recommendations. At one point, the Commissioner raised a 'suggestion' that had been made to him that Elaine Galloway, George Galloway's former spouse, received £13,000 in payments from the appeal. The Commissioner then claimed to have 'forgotten' who 'suggested' this to him. This allegation of criminal behaviour rests on the person of Ms E Laing, who received payments from the appeal: the implication was that Ms E Laing could be made to look like 'Elaine'. But, as the Commissioner acknowledges, George Galloway tracked down Ms E Laing and passed on the details to him, and so there is no mystery about who Ms E Laing is and what the sum was paid for (secretarial work), and who paid it (Stuart Halford, since she has his personal assistant). So, this smear was introduced into the proceedings and instead of being removed or clarified, was deemed 'peripheral'. Additionally, a photocopy of a purported "minute" of a meeting between Galloway and Hussein in 2002 was introduced at the last minute, having landed on the commissioner's desk some hours before a meeting with Galloway. It was without any explanation as to its specific provenance or how it remained secret until then. It purports to show Galloway suggesting that some of his work on behalf of the Mariam Appeal might be financed by "an oil-related mechanism". The only possible explanation as to its provenance, provided by Ms Alda Barry, was stricken from the record. She explained that it would have been a tape recording. However, since Galloway supplied the Commissioner with the evidence that there had not and could not have been such a tape recording, a letter of apology was sent by the Commissioner on 17th April 2007 to George Galloway, in which he apologised for having tried to prove that such a tape existed. His report nevertheless left open the 'possibility' of such a tape. We are told that it comes from 'intelligence' and that the commissioners "take the view that the alleged record of the meeting between Mr Galloway and Saddam Hussein in August 2002 is authentic", even though they acknowledge that it has not been "substantiated". Similarly, the Committee members decide, citing only one of the experts who looked at the Telegraph's documents (while ignoring the existence of other forged documents), that on balance they think they're probably not forgeries: whether they are forgeries or not, the information contained in them is certainly untrue, as the Commissioner also concedes. They breach their own standards, too, by insisting on including claims made by utterly discredited witnesses, including one "Tony" Zureikat, whose evidence supposedly supports the claims in the 'minute', but who manages to get the time of the meeting wrong by at least six months (he is vague: it happened in Christimas time or New Year, according to him).

Given that the nature of the evidence they adduce is so flimsy, and so disreputable, the Committee's decisions are naturally sparse. You might have thought that a Committee that was confident in its various assumptions would be a bit more harsh than asking for an apology for not having registered the appeal in Miscellaneous and so on. You might have thought that the basis of a suspension from the House of Commons for bringing it into disrepute would be somewhat stronger than that George Galloway said mean things about the committee's motives. Instead, they have produced a great many conclusions, which proceed from ommissions and distortions, and as such the best that they could do with it was trump up some sort of headline-grabbing charge. How pathetic, and how risible. If the Commissioners don't realise that they have brought themselves into disrepute with this disingenuous charade, this can only further confirm the impermeability of the Westminster village to the real world.

Labels: anti-war, george galloway, mariam appeal, new labour

Orange Order march in Basra posted by lenin

I was pointed by an e-mail correspondent to an interesting post at Slugger O'Toole, about an Orange Order march staged in Basra by some of the troops. I've nicked some of the pictures below (more at O'Toole's place, obviously), but an interesting bit of information cropped up in the comments section, where someone pointed out that the photographer could be identified as Private Dane Mackenzie, because the photographs were posted at his Bebo account. And there, he reveals some interesting predilections there. Oh, you know, the usual - he's prayd to be a Prawd, he's got oltra-foscist palatics, he laiks loyalist rayits (know whaddamean, laik?), and he wants to kill all the taigs. No surrandahr!





What fun. Where is an Iraqi insurgent when you need him? Where's three or four suicide bombers? I don't mean to glorify terrorism, I simply think the Iraqis should kill these pricks.

Labels: iraq, northern ireland, orange order, our brave boys

Another one bites the dust posted by lenin

Foreign fighters, eh? Can't live with 'em, can't get 'em to fuck off. But this is about those other fighters, the massive penetration of 'Al Qaeda' and Iran that supposedly has taken place. Here's the figures that matter: 0.7% of the Iraqi resistance is foreign, and none of them are Iranian. Did you read that correctly? Of the foreign fighters, 45% are Saudi (America's best fwend supplies lots of suicide attackers), 15% Syrian, and ... whoops, no Iranians. Ironically, part of the ramping up of anti-Iran propaganda can be pinned on what Seymour Hersh called "The Redirection", in which the US is attempting to break the emergence of what it calls 'The Shi'ite Crescent'. How does it do so? By funding several Sunni jihadist outfits - oh, and guess who we're told they've got links to. Still, no need to ponder these matters for too long when there is bombing to be done, and bowels to evacuate (which adds resonance to the phrase "let's bomb the shit out of them"), and the Amreekan ruling class is baying for war on Iran. How ill named the 'war on terror' is for all that.

Labels: iran, iraq, iraqi resistance, occupation, US imperialism

Defiantly striding toward rapture. posted by lenin

Soon, readers, apocalyptic metaphors will be as cliched in relation to Iraq as they were in Vietnam. This may not be immediately obvious since, although close to a million have already died, there is growing befuddlement over exactly what the White 'supremacy' House plans for the human race. The least one could say is that we are getting mixed signals. One minute we are told not to worry, that behind the scenes Bush and his confederates are secretly planning a withdrawal (to be completed, with satisfaction, by an incoming Democrat-led executive). The next we are told that not only will the President-unelect veto the latest vote by the House of Congress to withdraw most forces from Iraq by April 2008, but that he won't even listen to Republican proposals to perhaps one day, maybe by the end of the year, develop some plan to in the future withdraw from Iraq. Meanwhile, it is reported today that they won't stop at the borders of Iraq. They want to do something about that pincer they've got Iran in.

Well, then, if we stop paying attention to leaks and rhetorical-strategic manipulation, what is definitely ascertainable? Iraq is being bombed at five times the rate it was last year. The number of troops in Iraq is at a record level, as is the number of private mercenaries. The Bush administration has repeatedly lengthened the troops' tours of duty. They claim each massacre as a 'success', and - despite Maliki's recent embarrassing remarks - expect that the comprador elite will require American military assistance for some time. Even though rival sections of the American ruling class advertise antiwar positions (even the New York Times has bitten that bullet), their recommendations are not to withdraw from Iraq, but to scale down the war and remain in Iraq with fewer troops concentrated in bases, as an essential lever over the Iraqi government. There is no reason to believe that the troops are on their way out unless they are simply hammered. Only if and when the Green Zone falls to insurgents will that happen.

Meanwhile, the cassus belli against Iran has been assiduously constructed, with almost daily briefings about Iranian support for and arming of insurgent groups (usually via Hezbollah) in both Iraq and Afghanistan, and the 'illegal entry' of Iranians into Iraq. There are the claims about nuclear weapons in development, and the economic boycott already applied as a result. And there is growing coverage of a crackdown in Iran on various groups (Israel is again trying to bribe Iran's Jews to flee en masse to its own tender care, but no can do). That completes the ardent imperialists' tryptich: Terrorism, Weapons of Mass Destruction, and Human Rights Abuses. Any truth to America's charges against Iran is, of course, entirely coincidental. For example, we don't have any evidence that Iran is supporting insurgents anywhere (and this would be counterintuitive since the insurgents are opposed to Iranian influence in both Afghanistan and Iraq), or that it is constructing nuclear weapons: but then that is the reason why the claims have to be repeated in the same fashion so that people get a picture of consistency and recall the axiom that there is no smoke without fire (and no smokescreen either).

On the matter of conflagrations and the ensuing issue of smoggy pestilence, we need only recall the belliful of lies recited by credulous and agitated commentators before the current calamity befell Iraq. Much has been made of the PIPA poll that showed CNN viewers and print media consumers were less likely to hold delusions about what was happening in Iraq than Fox News, and indeed this does tell us something about the power of the media to generate irrationality. However, the scapegoating of Fox lets other news organisations off the hook rather too easily. 47% of those who relied on print media still had one of three basic misperceptions about Iraq (either that WMD had been found, or that Saddam had been connected to Al Qaeda, or that the world supported America's war). 55% of CNN viewers did, 61% of ABC viewers did, and 71% of CBS viewers did. 41% of Americans still believe that Saddam Hussein was "directly involved in planning, financing, or carrying out the terrorist attacks of September 11th, 2001", and most people can't identify the geographical origin of the hijackers. This illustrates a few things, then. The first is that public irrationality is deliberately maintained and cultivated by the state and the capitalist media. The second is that part of the way in which this is done is to encourage passivity and disengagement from politics. Think about it this way: Americans supposedly care more than any other group on the planet about the crime scene in New York and Washington. It is the source of endless moralising in the media and among politicians. It supposedly animates Americans to heights of fierce and bold outrage. Yet not only are most people poorly informed about the basics, but a substantial portion still believes a line that they are probably unaware originates from Dick Cheney and has been completely discredited: there is more evidence of American complicity in 9/11 than there is evidence of Saddam Hussein's involvement in it (and that is to say that I don't think there is much evidence of American government complicity). Talk about 'conspiracy nuts' or 'conspiraloons' is therefore an excellent way to displace blame for what is in fact officially manufactured irrationality onto small groups of internet-based activists. And of course the more obscure the topic, the more likely people are to know little and believe outright falsehoods. On nuclear weapons, a 2005 Pew Research poll found that more Americans (55%) believe that Iran already has them than are aware that Britain has them (52%). Most Americans drastically underestimate the scale of the nuclear arsenal possessed by their state. More than half think the US has 200 warheads or less, while it in fact has 6000 with 2000 on high alert. High alert means that they are primed and ready to be fired within minutes. Polls also report that most Americans think the Bush administration supports Kyoto.

It may seem like I'm picking on Americans here, and I am: you guys should read Lenin's Tomb more. But the broader point is that we misunderestimate them (the ruling classes) at our peril. The clearly discernible programme, beyond the befuddling array of mixed signals, is to continue aggressively pursuing the current wave of expansionism, and to continue to threaten the world's population centres with violence and possibly - if the rewards are sufficient - thermonuclear extinction. Iran is already under attack by a Washington-backed gangsterish Wahabbi outfit, and I bet that hardly anyone outside Iran, American or otherwise, is aware of this. Any more, that is, than people are aware that close to a million have died as a result of the occupation of Iraq: a million more than would have died from the already murderous sanctions regime. Any more than people are aware of millions approaching starvation in Afghanistan, and the rolling wave of Nato massacres there. Any more than they are aware that Haitians have been put through a nightmare and would like to see their elected President returned. The current wave of mass sanity about Iraq and Afghanistan is extremely threatening to this programme, which is why there is such a strenuous effort underway to persuade people that the war may be nearly over anyway or that we can't leave quite yet because of some moral imperative (in the same way, they try and persuade us that we're all Green now, or are moving in that direction, and that all will be well). Bar outright repression, they've got to absorbe, redirect and misdirect popular anger, contain it, frustrate it, disorient it, demoralise it, bemuse it with inanity, defuse it with triviality, and divert it into dead ends like the Democratic Party (the US far right calls them 'Dhimmicrats', ho ho ho). I swear that we will enter Armageddon with people still wondering why the Democratic Party won't do something about it, while others beg Ralph Nader not to do anything about it. Meanwhile, in Britain, the liberals will still be clucking about whether Islam can be properly integrated, and whether we should really apologise for our Western Way of Life, and why should we allow the burqa when it's clearly a symbol of oppression, and isn't that Galloway a terrible man, so on. Oh, there will be some demented whispering when it's finally time for the lights to go out.

Labels: afghanistan, iran, iraq, US imperialism

1958 posted by lenin

Britain's Iraqi puppet regime was overthrown 49 years ago today. Background here.

Labels: britain, hashemite, imperialism, iraq, monarchy

Who are the insurgents in Afghanistan? posted by lenin

The one-word answer supplied in most news reports to this question is, of course, "Taliban". It would be astonishing if this was all there was to it, so occasionally we get the admission that it includes other elements. For example, a UNAMA spokesperson says:

"The Taliban are not the only component of Afghanistan's insurgency. There is factional fighting in parts of the country, insecurity caused by drug traffickers and those fighting because they have been intimidated or paid to do so ... They all form important elements of this insurgency.

There is, of course, a way to put this that saves the basic underlying claim that anyone resisting the occupiers, in military or other ways, must have obscure and disreputable motives. The occupiers are innocent, everyone else is guilty until proven innocent. USA Today put it thus last year: "The insurgency is a loose alliance of Taliban guerrillas, followers of former prime minister and fundamentalist warlord Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, al-Qaeda terrorists recruited from across the Islamic world, opium traffickers and local fighters whose murky motives are rooted in tribal politics." Pro-occupation think-tanks like the Senlis Council and the International Crisis Group advise the occupiers to meet the grievances of the local population, who can thus be won away from supporting the insurgency. The Senlis Council's report, focusing on Helmand, Kandahar and Nangarhar, describes a number of reasons why local populations are increasingly turning toward support for the insurgency, and thus putting local politicians under pressure to support it as well, and the main one is Dyncorp's destruction of the opium farms of the poor (those belonging to the wealthy warlords are left well alone). Senlis has advocated legalising opium production for medicinal purposes There is a misperception that opium production is especially controlled by the Taliban. It is true that the biggest increase in product lately has been in Helmand - taking it to almost 70,000 hectares. But across the country, according to the UNODC, total production last year was 165,000 hectares. In those areas controlled by US-allied warlords, and for Afghanistan's wealthy landlords more generally, opium production is a vital component of their continued control. Various commentators have suggested legalising opium production rather than destroying livelihoods, but this sort of misses the point: keeping it illegal makes it an excellent source of funds for covert action, and right now it is providing America's allies in Afghanistan with enormous leverage over the country. In other words, the current war to secure a successful client regime relies on extirpating production that could generate revenue for the opposition, while leaving the resources of the ruling elite well alone. Indeed, billions of US dollars have been ploughed through the channels of a patrimonial state into the hands of the pro-American rentier elite. The "war on drugs" is what it has always been: a free-form, wide-ranging counterinsurgency campaign; meanwhile, the insurgency has, as a result of this, an element of class warfare, since what is now fuelling it, in part, is the misery of poor farmers being deprived of their means of livelihood, with massive starvation and misery, while the rich prosper.

So, then, perhaps we should also ask a question about who exactly the Taliban are. For, although we assume we know, Najib Manalai, an Afghan government adviser, insists that the Taliban are a very different kind of movement today:

the Taliban are no longer a single group, one single entity. The Taliban, at first, were students -- Afghan students who traditionally wanted to study theology. In the beginning, they were a group of Afghans who had very good intentions after five years of anarchy in Afghanistan -- they just wanted to bring peace to Afghanistan. They were very popular. Then this movement was somehow hijacked by Pakistani intelligence services and by international terrorist groups. Now when we talk about the Taliban, we are talking about a kind of amalgam of different forces, such as people who are unhappy about government forces because they can't find their place in the present confederation of Afghan policies; people who are committed to other interests -- foreign interests, mainly from the Pakistani circle; and there are people with the fundamentalist ideology of the international Islamic movements. "The Taliban" is a composite of these components.

There is a great deal of euphemism in that. Afghanistan's current polity is a sectarian one, which largely excludes Pashtuns (Karzai is in this respect a useful token). Recall that the initial success against the Taliban involved the ethnic cleansing of some 50,000 Pashtuns. But this sectarian dynamic is in part a result of the failure of the US to win Pashtun allies prior to the war beginning. They had tried with Abdul Haq, the anti-Taliban 'moderate' who had broken with Gulbuddin Hekmatyar's Hizb e-Islami before fighting the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan under the CIA-funded Yunus Khalis. But he wouldn't follow orders and publicly criticised the bombing of the country. It was his aim to mobilise a domestic insurgency independently of the CIA and the ISI. One or the other of these two agencies leaked his plans to the Taliban during the bombing and ensured his death. At any rate, the US was only interested in pro-American Pashtun leaders, and could find precious few. As such they had to rely on the Northern Alliance with whom they started making a secret alliance in 1999. So, those who "can't find their place in the present confederation of Afghan policies" are those who are being specifically excluded. The predominantly Pashtun Taliban regime was in fact more representative of the different ethnic groups than the current one. Aside from the various groups in the south, there is a growing insurgency in the north-west of the country, due to conflict with the warlords in government such as Ismail Khan, and the ridiculously brutal spate of Nato bombardment (apparently these recent massacres are the result of a deliberate policy shift).

Aside from the growing armed insurgency, there is of course an unarmed political opposition developing. The Taliban era was a desperate one, but this regime is hardly more progressive. Aside from the fairly serious matter of occupying troops rampaging through cities, airplanes lobbing bombs at villages, secret prisons, torture cells, kidnappings and so on, there is the small problem that the state built and the groups empowered by the occupiers are client despots. They murder and torture their enemies with impunity, and their police chiefs rape and extort. They steal taxes, bulldoze houses, steal land. Northern Alliance rulers kidnap people and ransom them back to their families with the pretense that they were Taliban arrestees. There is nothing the attorney general likes more than to lock up media workers who displease him. Critics like Malalai Joya are unwelcome (she has recently been suspended for the remainder of her term). The Department for the Promotion of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice continues to operate. Reports last year that it would 'return' after a resolution passed by Karzai's cabinet last year were misleading: the department, although now synonymous with Taliban terror, had actually originated under the US-recognised Rabbani regime, and continued under Karzai's regime in various forms. The Vice and Virtue squads continued to operate in Kabul, warlords like Ismail Khan imposed the old regime, and Karzai's 'Accountability Department' took over many of the roles of the department. In this respect, it is worth noting that, as NGO workers Chris Johnson & Jolyon Leslie point out in their widely praised Afghanistan: The Mirage of Peace, that the Taliban have been demonised out of all proportion. This isn't simply an artefact of war propaganda, but in part a result of NGO misconceptions. Their repression, as brutal as it was, should not have been understood as simply an emanation of their own peculiar, reactionary ideology. It was rooted in the common social practises of the most conservative elements of society in Afghanistan, which fused with the conditions of war, and then civil war, to produce a militant war on 'sin' and 'vice' (with well-known, and savage punishments such as stonings and amputations). If you go back and have a look at the scholarly studies of Afghanistan during the rule of the Taliban, this is a frequent theme raised by the regime in justification for some of its worst policies (excluding girls from education for example). Nasreen Ghufran noted in Asian Survey in May 2001 that the regime's claim was that it needed time to develop the correct environment for girls and women to be educated and work: it saw its model, ironically, as the Islamic Republic of Iran. Nevertheless, women's struggles were able to exert some effects. As Jeanette O'Malley wrote in 2000: "In early June, supreme leader Mullah Omar issued an edict allowing for the expansion of mosque schools for young boys and girls. The mosque schools are apparently little more than a substitute acceptable to clerics and hard-line officials for state-run schools, as they offer the same curriculum." NGO groups who worked in Afghanistan were able to set up schooling for girls by simply telling local Taliban officials that it was a mosque. The point is that the assumption that hardline religious and social conservatism was something that could be pinned exclusively on the Taliban has been at best a misguided one. Today, of course, the imposition of the burqa is still enforced even if not by edict. Women must now struggle against empowered warlords, who are given to raping women (and children) they like the look of. A recent study found that most women in Afghanistan suffer mental and physical abuse. So-called 'honour killings' continue, as do slavery and stonings.

Now, whatever the prevailing barbarism in Afghanistan, the insurgency doesn't command significant support anywhere beyond the southern provinces at the moment. If the only dynamic involved here were the insurgency, which is widely understood as a Taliban affair and whose tactics are becoming increasingly brutal, then this state of affairs would remain permanent. However, it is not. The attempt by the United States to impose and maintain a pro-US regime is developing several oppositional currents. Its barbaric air campaign is galvanising communities of resistance in surprising places, while also driving people into the arms of the Talibs and their allies. This is why British military leaders are worried that they may lose Afghanistan. They couldn't possibly lose militarily to a rag-tag collection of militants: it is the political nature of the war they are fighting, the fact that is for US domination, that is producing this resistance, and that will ensure - if we don't force our governments to end the occupation - that a prolonged and vicious war is afoot. This may also take the form of a civil war at some point. Unfortunately, the resources for a left or even secular nationalist movement in Afghanistan are extremely limited. Military resistance to the this brutal occupation is obviously legitimate, and no occupation force has a right to complain if it is tormented by its enemies ("awe, shucks, the insurgents are holding up all our good work"). However, if there is hope for Afghanistan it lies in a broader, more grassroots and less fissiparous movement than the austere and brutal Talibs or Hekmatyarists could ever deliver. How much chance is there of that happening? After almost thirty years of devastating war in which the most reactionary elements have been promoted and defended by imperial interlopers, in which rival imperial powers have tortured the people of Afghanistan for decades, it is easy to be pessimistic. After all, neither the CIA or the ISI will ever leave Afghanistan alone, and even if they did it would be a long struggle to unite a sufficient coalition of women and the poor to displace the conservative elites. A great deal depends on external factors such as what happens to the US in Iraq, whether we can force our states to withdraw their troops, whether Musharraf survives in Pakistan and who replaces him, etc. But, the more the insurgency becomes an armed movement of the poor, the more political independence they will have to develop, and the greater chance they will have to confront the landlord class. And groups like RAWA and fiercely independent figures like Malalai Joya are still fighting.

Labels: afghanistan, occupation, resistance, taliban, US imperialism

Soliloquy posted by lenin

Some Hamlet for you:

Labels: Hamlet, Shakespeare

And another massacre in Afghanistan... posted by lenin

27 civilians killed this time. Nato 'couldn't confirm' the deaths...

Labels: 'war on terror', afghanistan, occupation, US imperialism

Iraq veterans: "...the entire war is an atrocity". posted by lenin

In a very wide-ranging and in-depth piece of reporting, Chris Hedges & Laila Al-Arian of The Nation have interviewed fifty combat veterans of the Iraq war. The results are devastating. These are, as the writers point out, on the record, named eyewitnesses. They are people who could testify in court, in other words. Many of these guys have come back from the war, shocked at the disparity between the savage perversity they were part of, and what is reported in a politically timid media. A lot of them describe a sickening resentment of Iraqis, which the authors relate to a report from the Pentagon some time ago, showing that less than half of soldiers and slightly less than two fifths of marines thought that Iraqi civilians should be treated with dignity and respect. They'll be a civic bunch when they return home.

It is not merely that there is depraved acting out of murderous fantasies under conditions of a frustrating war. It is that they rarely encountered Iraqis, contrary to the notion conveyed in those wierd 'encounters' that are filmed by embedded camera crews, in which marine commanders go out and meet 'haji' for the day. When they did go out of their compounds, the report says: "Some shot holes into cans of gasoline being sold along the roadside and then tossed grenades into the pools of gas to set them ablaze. Others opened fire on children. These shootings often enraged Iraqi witnesses." It goes on:

We heard a few reports, in one case corroborated by photo­graphs, that some soldiers had so lost their moral compass that they'd mocked or desecrated Iraqi corpses. One photo, among dozens turned over to The Nation during the investigation, shows an American soldier acting as if he is about to eat the spilled brains of a dead Iraqi man with his brown plastic Army-issue spoon.

"Take a picture of me and this motherfucker," a soldier who had been in Sergeant Mejía's squad said as he put his arm around the corpse. Sergeant Mejía recalls that the shroud covering the body fell away, revealing that the young man was wearing only his pants. There was a bullet hole in his chest.

"Damn, they really fucked you up, didn't they?" the soldier laughed.

The scene, Sergeant Mejía said, was witnessed by the dead man's brothers and cousins.

The daily sweeps and raids tend to include incidents of attacks on civilians, rarely yielding weapons caches or anything of the kind, but often ending in the destruction of homes, terrorised Iraqis, and a family having to try and find relatives who have been towed away to be 'fucked' in one of the American military's interrogation camps. This is how the typical raid goes:

"You run in. And if there's lights, you turn them on--if the lights are working. If not, you've got flashlights.... You leave one rifle team outside while one rifle team goes inside. Each rifle team leader has a headset on with an earpiece and a microphone where he can communicate with the other rifle team leader that's outside.

"You go up the stairs. You grab the man of the house. You rip him out of bed in front of his wife. You put him up against the wall. You have junior-level troops, PFCs [privates first class], specialists will run into the other rooms and grab the family, and you'll group them all together. Then you go into a room and you tear the room to shreds and you make sure there's no weapons or anything that they can use to attack us.

"You get the interpreter and you get the man of the home, and you have him at gunpoint, and you'll ask the interpreter to ask him: 'Do you have any weapons? Do you have any anti-US propaganda, anything at all--anything--anything in here that would lead us to believe that you are somehow involved in insurgent activity or anti-coalition forces activity?'

"Normally they'll say no, because that's normally the truth," Sergeant Bruhns said. "So what you'll do is you'll take his sofa cushions and you'll dump them. If he has a couch, you'll turn the couch upside down. You'll go into the fridge, if he has a fridge, and you'll throw everything on the floor, and you'll take his drawers and you'll dump them.... You'll open up his closet and you'll throw all the clothes on the floor and basically leave his house looking like a hurricane just hit it.

"And if you find something, then you'll detain him. If not, you'll say, 'Sorry to disturb you. Have a nice evening.' So you've just humiliated this man in front of his entire family and terrorized his entire family and you've destroyed his home. And then you go right next door and you do the same thing in a hundred homes."

As you would expect, practises allegedly outlawed since Abu Ghraib continue, including the hooding. The arrests are usually abitrary, or based on bullshit evidence or rumour or worse. Most of those who ended up at harsh camps like Abu Ghraib were there for petty crimes like theft, but were treated like animals anyway. (When there was a riot against conditions in the prison, the soldiers shot it up, killing nine people, and one of them posed next to the cracked skull of one corpse, pretending to eat the brains again). The racist language that goes with these practises are as you would expect: "haji", "camel jockeys or Jihad Johnny or, you know, sand nigger." Naturally, the second there's trouble, they open fire on every "haji" in sight:

"One example I can give you, you know, we'd be cruising down the road in a convoy and all of the sudden, an IED blows up," said Spc. Ben Schrader, 27, of Grand Junction, Colorado. He served in Baquba with the 263rd Armor Battalion, First Infantry Division, from February 2004 to February 2005. "And, you know, you've got these scared kids on these guns, and they just start opening fire. And there could be innocent people everywhere. And I've seen this, I mean, on numerous occasions where innocent people died because we're cruising down and a bomb goes off."

And, of course, since they don't stop for any purpose, they regularly speed into Iraqi civilians with impunity - not only the army, but the private contractors as well. And if they feel like shooting up a bunch of civilians - well, we heard before how they manage that, and it's confirmed here:

Several interviewees said that, on occasion, these killings were justified by framing innocents as terrorists, typically following incidents when American troops fired on crowds of unarmed Iraqis. The troops would detain those who survived, accusing them of being insurgents, and plant AK-47s next to the bodies of those they had killed to make it seem as if the civilian dead were combatants. "It would always be an AK because they have so many of these weapons lying around," said Specialist Aoun. Cavalry scout Joe Hatcher, 26, of San Diego, said 9-millimeter handguns and even shovels--to make it look like the noncombatant was digging a hole to plant an IED--were used as well.

"Every good cop carries a throwaway," said Hatcher, who served with the Fourth Cavalry Regiment, First Squadron, in Ad Dawar, halfway between Tikrit and Samarra, from February 2004 to March 2005. "If you kill someone and they're unarmed, you just drop one on 'em." Those who survived such shootings then found themselves imprisoned as accused insurgents.

A lot of the killings at the temporary checkpoints happen in the dark. "Baghdad is not well lit ... There's not street lights everywhere. You can't really tell what's going on." Yeah, well, there's this electricity problem... Not that there is much risk of getting into trouble for shooting up a family at a checkpoint. As one colonel said when briefed on the killing of a family of four by an 18 year old equipped with deadly technology: "If these fucking hajis learned to drive, this shit wouldn't happen." Further: "several troops said the rules of engagement were fluid and designed to insure their safety above all else. Some said they were simply told they were authorized to shoot if they felt threatened, and what constituted a risk to their safety was open to wide interpretation."

The Google ad next to the story says: 'Support Our Troops: Silicone Wrist Bands, Patches, Custom Dog Tags, Hats and more'.


Incidentally, I have been trying to avoid the frenzy about Alistair Campbell and his diaries, but this BBC interview is worth quoting:

ANDREW MARR: Did you have doubts?

ALASTAIR CAMPBELL: No, I'll tell you, look I thought it was the right thing. I thought it was the right thing.

ANDREW MARR: But do you think that now?

ALASTAIR CAMPBELL: And I do think that now.

ANDREW MARR: Despite all 600,000 people dead?

ALASTAIR CAMPBELL: Well, you know, there are cameras there now Andrew, there weren't cameras there when there were a lot of people dying before.

Aside from Marr's laudable acknowledgment of the facts about this, Campbell's response has to be the most miserable, risible excuse he could have thought of. These deaths, of course, have by and large not been caught on camera. They have been registered by an epidemiological survey team, which was there before, and which found that 655,000 more people died than would have died under the continued reign of Saddam and sanctions combined.

Labels: iraq, iraqi resistance, occupation, US imperialism, us troops

'Al Qaeda': they get around. posted by lenin

They're like Shaolin shadow-boxers, ninjas, the Wu-Tang Clan, and they aint' nuttin ta fuck wit. They can slip into any situation unnoticed and fuck you up, Jack. There's 'Al Qaeda' in Iraq, there's 'Al Qaeda' in Somalia, there's 'Al Qaeda' in Afghanistan, there's 'Al Qaeda' in Europe, there's 'Al Qaeda' in London, there's 'Al Qaeda' in Indonesia, there's 'Al Qaeda' in China, there's 'Al Qaeda' in Palestine... Perhaps we have underestimated these guys. I was under the impression that 'Al Qaeda' referred to a group of combatants around bin Laden and Zawahiri that has been substantially diminished, its core leadership probably hiding out in Waziristan or somewhere. Apparently, however, they have some extremely cool technology: they use sonic departiculifiers, teleporters, and transporter beams supplied by the Enterprise, to project themselves across hugely disparate political matrices, uploading their virtual selves into the bodies of local militants like Agent Smith, insinuating themselves effortlessly into the most complex conflicts. Why stop at Palestine? Surely it must be obvious that they are responsible for every other planetary problem as well - or have they gotten to you too? 'Al Qaeda' it was who invaded Iraq, overthrew Allende, occupied the Philippines, rigged the 2000 elections, created the Contras, and fought on both sides of the Opium Wars. In addition, while we're at it, they invented AIDS, killed Diana, created the Illuminati as a front organisation (you never know how deep the shell-game goes), caused the tsunami, created Alanis Morrisette and are even now deflating my tyres. They could in the room with you as you read this. Don't look over your shoulder, and don't show fear. It makes them crazy.

Labels: 'al qaeda', c-word

On tightening belts posted by lenin

Soon, American taxpayers will be reminded that they can't afford a national healthcare service...

Labels: health care, iraq, sicko

Innocence is suspect. posted by lenin

I've been thinking about these images and also about Blair's racist commentary on 'black crime' before his departure. Recall, Blair said about a wave of knife and gun crimes that people had to drop their "political correctness" and recognise that the violence would not be stopped "by pretending it is not young black kids doing it". He went on to blame "gang culture", and said that "We need to stop thinking of this as a society that has gone wrong - it has not - but of specific groups that for specific reasons have gone outside of the proper lines of respect and good conduct towards others and need by specific measures to be brought back into the fold." The procedure is clear: first, he pretends he is breaking a taboo, by re-affirming a long-held prejudice about 'black crime' (if the fact that they are black is irrelevant to the crime, why mention it?) - as if he wasn't aware of specific police programmes, widely publicised, designed to crack down on "black on black crime"; second, he pathologises crime as belonging to a "gang culture" specific to the group that he has identified as having "gone outside of the proper lines of respect and good conduct" (ie, black children); third, he insists upon the basic innocence of the society as a whole. Violent crime is, in the former Prime Minister's imagination, something that belongs to 'blackness'. Clearly, the reason why nominally anti-racist liberal media pundits didn't raise a fuss about this, and still basically worship him, is because they agree with his views.

The flipside of this is rarely thought of at any great length, but it is so pervasive in the culture that it ought to be recognised: why is 'whiteness' never marked in this way? That is to say, what accounts for its basic invisibility, and the refusal in mainstream ideologies to adhere it to certain forms of criminality that are specific if not unique to small minorities of white people who have done a little bit more than go outside the proper lines of respect and good conduct? Or why, more generally, do we not hear such phrases as "white on white crime"? Or even "white crime"? Why is it that in general someone will only feel obliged to point out the skin tone of a man who has committed a crime if he is in fact non-white? Clearly, the answer is that 'whiteness', like 'blackness', is a metaphor, and that its origins are in the normalising strategies of power. Obviously, no one is actually 'white', but the power of the metaphor is that it is clean, smell-free, disembodied, an empty space, necessarily invisible. It is innocent. As usual with 'racial' metaphors, there is also a great deal of sexual repression, the attempt to expunge and transfer every last trace of eroticism. So it is also innocent in the childlike, presexual sense too. The fascist male is imagined through the tropes of classicism, stripped of sexuality precisely in order that he may comport himself adequately as a harmonious and cultivated Grecian. By contrast, in fascist racial mythography, black people are seen as voluptuously, dangerously, demonically eroticised: they are reduced to bestiary. Having coded those bodies in that way (as 'racial'), the fascist gesture is to naturalise the body as an authentic, pre-social site of truth. By different degrees, this holds for racial mythography more widely, and one need only think of the classic productions of Hollywood capital in which black people are imagined as uncontrollable rapists, unable - through lack of civilisation - to canalise their base animal lusts into the proper reproductive channels.

Well, here, the innocence of 'whiteness' that results from the 'racial' categories thus erected, is something that the former Prime Minister himself benefited from immensely. The failure of dirt to adhere to 'whiteness' is what permitted the figure of Teflon Tony to thrive in the spectacle, at least until 2003. Blair's untouchability was itself a metaphor for the system's own spectacular pristineness: as he himself recently insisted, one can't fight the 'war on terror' without insisting on the fundamental innocence and goodness of Western states. No one is oppressing you, the white man insists, your ideas are absurd. The upshot of this claim is not only that the hundred lashes for anyone suspected of spreading sedition is fair and reasonable, but that the conduct attributed to 'blackness' is something external to the system, a psychopathology, a cultural text that emanates from some essential lack or deviance ("deadbeat dads" was the thesis at the time, as I recall).

And 'whiteness' is not merely normalised, it is centralised, in the precise measure that it marginalises the non-white: so that although it appears to be a marker of physical difference, and although it is grafted onto the body, it actually signifies a space of power, and points to specific historical regimes and phrase regimens, to shifting relations of domination. Its deployment, even indirectly or by ommission, is never merely descriptive: it is a strategic exertion of power. Blair appealed in his discourse on crime to exactly the same system of 'racial' metaphors that he has appealed to in the 'war on terror', but he has not - and would not have - referred to something like "the Aryan race". That is, he didn't appeal to biological or 'scientific' notions of 'race'. He may or may not believe in such notions, but that is not the reason for his coyness: the most important factor is that it simply wouldn't sit well for a contemporary centre-right politician to rely on explicitly fascistic language. The reason I raise this is because some people have a terrifically hard time understanding what it means to refer to anti-Islam racism, because they're hung up on cliches. They will remind us that Islam is not a 'race', for example, which implies that there is or can be a coherent biological entity that would conform to 'race', which Islam simply doesn't coincide with. This isn't the case, and the point here isn't simply that 'race science' has typically been non-science - in the case of phrenology, it was an emission of 18th Century romanticism deriving from the Physiognomica of Aristotle (again with the classicist motif). The points is that 'race' was initially, before it became a narrative of polygenic human societies with more or less direct linkages back to distinct originary communities with clear physical and mental distinctions, a system of domination. To put it another way, before anthropologists, missionaries and others could gather the source material for their bestial metaphors and 'Great Chain of Being' tropes, European states had to invade, colonise and enslave the populations that were then to be studied and thus categorised.

There is nothing essential about the biological claims made for 'race', which are themselves ridiculously incoherent. Racism is not directed at 'races', since 'races' don't exist. Racist language works through metonymy, through chains of association and substitution. 'Race' is a construction which organises the perception of differences (and suppresses other perceptions of the same), functioning as a pseudo-explanation for social phenomena, and providing a mandate for the exertion of power. (Hence, in Blair's analysis, black kids are uniquely responsible for violent crime due to something specific in their culture, and therefore we need to send more police with more powers into their neighbourhoods to intimidate and regulate them). Inasmuch as Islam is construed as responsible for what it cannot logically be responsible for; inasmuch as it is made to bear the full guilt for activities resulting from a dense mesh of geopolitical exploits; inasmuch as it is used to organise perceptions of difference; inasmuch as it carries the freight of less acceptable language (like 'Paki'); inasmuch as it is inflected with 'blackness'; inasmuch as one can essentialise about it (in the form of a 'Muslim Mind' or some similar chimera); inasmuch as that knowledge derives from the direct exertion of power; inasmuch as the utilisation of that knowledge is a strategic operation of power; inasmuch as Islam is depicted as a coherent organising principle for everyone who bears that identity; inasmuch as Islam is used as the basis of ascriptive humiliation; inasmuch as it is used formally or informally to organise state repression; inasmuch as demeaning or insulting depictions of Islam are coordinated with the political victimisation of Muslims; inasmuch as one being a Muslim would encourage people to think you ought to have to wear special identification; inasmuch as it would discourage people from employing you and otherwise deprive one of the normal range of possibilities; inasmuch as its invocation inhibits or reverses ordinary human empathy - well, precisely to that extent it is possible to speak of anti-Muslim racism, or 'Islamophobia' in the shorthand.

The 'war on terror' has engaged all of the above functions of Islamophobia in various ways, and the former Prime Minister is more than culpable in word and deed of anti-Muslim racism, as well as more traditional forms of racism. New Labour has been extremely conservative and traditionalist in its race relations, despite the patina of multiculturalist mauve. In its treatment of asylum seekers, it gleefully partook of the racist media frenzies, imputing criminal intent, fraudulence and corruption to them. They were assailed as beggars and as people who defecated in shop doorways. Following rioting in Bradford, which reflected a multitude of social problems and rising racism (usually described euphemistically as 'racial tensions'), the government's hard man Home Secretary took the view that Asians - that was then the preferred nomenclature - had to learn to speak English in their homes, and integrate. The language of 'flooding' - that is, an invasion, an overrunning - in reference to nonwhite migration, whether legal or otherwise, is a favourite with the reactionary tabloids, but it was also referenced by New Labour ministers. The Blair administration planned to divert all of the interlopers into 'accomodation centres' - camps dotted about the country, separated from the mainstream community and from one another. Already, the refugees pent up in sadistic 'detention centres' run by private security companies have been driven to riot and suicide, but continue to be detained en masse, having committed no crime other than being unable to prove 'whiteness'.

Some silly-billies will inevitably demand to know why I hate white people so much. Yet it should be obvious that there is a problem here. We have had one of the most reactionary governments for years which has, in various ways, pimped the policies and attitudes of the fascists. It has embarked on an extraordinarily energetic wave of international violence alongside a domestic crackdown on civil liberties, both of which predated 2001. It has fanatically, and sometimes with deranged satisfaction, threatened other societies with extreme violence - such as when Geoff Hoon promised Iraq that Britain would not hold back from using nuclear weapons against it in 2003. So, why doesn't it stick in the spectacle? Why is it that liberal commentators will still try and persuade you that Blair meant well enough, and that New Labour is a bunch of forward-thinking pragmatists? There are, of course, multiple reasons. But the alibi provided by the productive metaphors of 'race' and the presumptive innocence of 'whiteness' should not be overlooked, particularly when the government's prevailing ideology and that of the ex-Prime Minister is so heavily racialised.

Labels: 'race', blair, crime, gender, racism

America's Iraqi regime in crisis: a bloody 'withdrawal' posted by lenin

While there is much talk about whether the Bush administration is moving toward 'withdrawal' from Iraq, not much space is being given to the crisis engulfing Maliki, who might be about to fall. Sadr is said to be sponsoring a 'no confidence' motion in the government, which would be supported by the Vice President. A united opposition, backed by the oil workers, is being developed over the neocolonial oil laws. The Green Zone is under attack, and Maliki's alibis are swearing to Voice of America that it would be a disaster if he fell, while his Foreign Minister is pleading with the Americans not to leave for fear that the increasingly isolated government should collapse.

If there is a 'withdrawal', it will be to the bases, and it will almost certainly be accompanied by an escalation in the barely reported air war. If you follow Global Security's military news section, they provide a daily collection of military press releases and publications, all of which detail large numbers of air operations every day. Now, of course, we don't get to hear much about the effects of this campaign, because the only people who are allowed anywhere near the frontline are credulous embedded reporters like the former Green Beret, Michael Yon. However, as Tom Engelhardt documents, and as the Lancet studies have shown, the unreported air war is responsible for huge numbers of civilian casualties in Iraq. 13% of all violent deaths in Iraq in the period covered by the second Lancet survey were put down to air strikes, which amounted to 78,000 deaths. But the troops are getting tired, their periods of service are running out, there are probably as many private mercenaries there now as there can be, the escalation is proving politically costly for the GOP, and a sizeable part of the US ruling elite, expressed through their tribune the New York Times, wants to wind down the direct involvement of the US military without ceding political control. Well, what other way to do it than pound the cities from 20,000 feet above as they usually do when they don't want feet on the ground?

Labels: iraq, occupation, US imperialism

The hype dies. posted by lenin

So, the meagre, little white hopes about New Labour's newest labours are dead already. You remember how it was: the uber-Atlanticist Gordon Brown included one or two people who were critical of the war on Iraq to his cabinet, and even allowed some people to say mean things about the Blair period. Everything would surely change. Well, I doubt many people really bought it, but we may as well update the story. Brown brought Digby fucking Jones into the government to be a trade minister. That's right, the union-bashing, war-supporting, pensions-busting, right-wing former tub-thumping tub of lard for the CBI. He isn't a member of the Labour Party, doesn't support it, and has often led the charge against it from the right.

Today, David Miliband - who, though he voted for the war on Iraq, supposedly held very private worries about the whole idea - told the press that he would not take the option of a military attack on Iran 'off the table', implying that Iran was developing nuclear weapons and that was destabilising its neighbours. Of course, these claims were delivered with a singular lack of conviction, because the purpose of this isn't to persuade but to wear down your resistance to these manifest lies, to dull your outrage on hearing this nonsense, so that eventually stop fighting it.

Now, take Kim Howells, the ridiculous Foreign Minister, and former chair of Labour Friends of Israel. This is the exchange between Claire Short and Howells over the current crisis in Palestine. Short's intervention is admirable, draws attention to the depraved activities of the IDF that she witnessed, outlines the conditions of the Palestinians, and explains who the putschists were in Gaza. Howells gives a classic piece of Foreign Office obfuscation - thanking this or that state leader, issuing glittering generalities about progress, making greasy insinuations, diverting the discussion down his memory lanes, and refusing point blank to consider any of the punitive actions against Israel that have been applied to its victims.

So, welcome to your new New Labour government. Same bullshit, same flies, same smell.

Red October posted by lenin

Revolutionary socialist hip hop..., via 3arabawy.

Labels: hip hop, red october

Trousers posted by lenin

Incidentally, I should mention that Ellis Sharp kindly presented me with a pair of trousers yesterday. They hug the waist gently and drape elegantly over my fat limbs. They also have many surprising items in the pockets and secreted in the lining. Why not get yourself a pair?

Labels: lenin's trousers

One's divine incipience posted by lenin

Aside from augmenting narcissistic personality disorders, bloggery is a collosal globalisation of the ego. Alongside the great hope of the internet can be placed the bloggified reduction of discourse to a tussling amorphous mass of mewling 'voices'. So many bloggers - where they are not giving free reign to personal obsessions, paranoid delusions of persecution, teenage bullying, hokey mysticism, fantasies of omnipotent power and despotism, and languorous self-adoration - are merely engaged in petty entrepreneurial exercises, combining lurid self-display with outrageous self-promotion. I only now proceed to blow my own horn with that proviso: my talk at Marxism yesterday, entitled 'What's Wrong With Conspiracy Theories?' went rather well, or so I imagine. An audio version of it will be online at some point, and those attending can order any talks on CD (three quid a piece) if they missed anything, but I'll outline (a brushed up version of) some of what I said.

First of all, what is a conspiracy theory? I don't think we have a working definition that we would be satisfied to use consistently. It is at best a short-hand for poorly supported theories based on speculative leaps and suffused with paranoia. Obviously, the term is used to refer to quite ordinary facts of politics (that state leaders might wage war for reasons other than advertised, or that corporations might not have the well-being of humanity at heart), while it is not used to refer to quite extraordinary conspiracies (to commit genocide, ethnic cleansing and so on). The fact that the term connotes more than it denotes inclines some pursuing the investigation of what might be called a conspiracy to prefer the language of criminology - see, for example, Hitchens' book on Kissinger. I tried, then, to see if historical examples could illuminate the matter: for instance, the iconoclasm during the Dutch Revolt being put down to a tiny conspiracy; the French Revolution being described by Burke and others as a conspiracy of Freemasons and secret revolutionary organisations; anti-Jesuit myths in 19th Century France. In fact, early-modern Europe contains dozens of such examples, and usually they are a form of elite thought when faced with revolt: in other words, there can be nothing fundamentally wrong with the system, so a small group of conspirators must be behind it.

The twentieth century has plenty of similar examples, usually involving theories of groups conspiring to subvert the nation: Hitler and Stalin were the world-champions of this kind of paranoia, but consider Truman’s claim during the Korean War that "the communists in the Kremlin are engaged in a monstrous conspiracy to stamp out freedom all over the world". By the same logic, he was engaged in a conspiracy to promote capitalism. At the same time, the Supreme Court was busily beefing up the ‘clear and present danger rule’ because of the activities of socialist educators who held informal meetings to discuss politics and strategy – the court said that it didn’t matter that they weren’t actually planning a communist takeover: "It is the existence of the conspiracy which creates the danger". Similarly, Hoover’s account in The Masters of Deceit, accused communists of "trying to influence and control your thoughts": this from the head of a politically repressive FBI that would engage in assassinations, political repression, spying etc precisely in order to influence and control American thoughts. Ruling class conspiracism often involves a serious amount of transference. We have our contemporary examples of anti-Islam conspiracism, one egregious example of which is the claim that the Muslim Brothers plot to take over Europe, and then the whole world - in other words, while Western armies invade and take over mainly Muslim countries, it is seriously entertained in various ways that 'they' seek to invade and conquer 'us'.

The interesting thing about this is that this kind of conspiracism is not recognised in the classic liberal-conservative account of Richard Hofstadter, 'The Paranoid Style of American Politics'. Instead, he sees it as largely a temporary phenomenon associated with the far right, whose moral claims are incompatible with the bargaining and give-and-take style of American politics. Political fear is thus reduced to a 'style', a cultural pathology. Cory Robin's excellent 2004 book 'Fear: the history of a political idea' takes issue with this. He points out that fear had a very real basis in the structure of American society, particularly at a time when between one and two of every five American workers was subject to some kind of political investigation or loyalty oath. The trouble with the standard conception of political fear is that it is seen as emanating from a despotic political leadership crushing civil society – whereas McCarthyism operated precisely through those civil society organisations. Widespread political inhibitions and real persecution can thus operate very effectively in a liberal polity.

Arguably, conspiracism - which I would describe as the attempt to comprehend, or map social structure by collapsing it into conspiracy, has deep roots in American culture in general, and liberal political theory in particular. The belief in conspiracies and the existence of actual plots was important in the fighting during the American Revolution, and the ongoing worries about alien influence, agents, subversive forces etc manifested themselves in different ways: as David Brion Davis points out in his collection of "images of un-American subversion", there was the anti-Masonism of the 1820s and 1830s; in the 1840s, there was anti-Mormonism; William Wu points out that much of the literature on the Chinese in the 19th Century was suffused with paranoia about the ‘yellow peril’. Counter-subversive movements were thus a way to restore collective, national self-confidence: either on racial grounds - paranoia about Indian cannibals, the KKK as a racial ‘counter-conspiracy’; on sexual grounds – McCarthyites saw forms of sexual ‘deviance’ as ‘un-American’; or on class grounds – communist plots, left-wing sympathies etc. Since then we have had conspiracist engagements with the problems of globalisation – Pat Buchanan’s thesis that the Bilderbergers, the UN and Manhattan money interests were all in on it together. This is classic John Birch Society stuff.

Ralph Waldo Emerson warned that "society everywhere is in conspiracy against the manhood of every one of its members". It is the individual that is assailed by the conspiracy, and the political polyvalence of conspiracism is thus a result of the fact that it less the result of a clear political analysis than a defence and hubristic munification of the individual against the manipulations of the state/elite. Thus in rightist variants, (patriotic militias, Klan, minutemen, Birch Society etc), the ‘counterconspiracy’ often takes the form of what Richard Slotkin called "regeneration through violence", a masculinist assertion of rugged individualism and self-reliance against social communication and interdependence which is seen as feminising. Yet, there were also leftist accounts that – while not exactly conspiracy theories – stressed the crushing of the individual. Culturally in Heller’s Catch-22, Kesey’s One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest, and politically in Vance Packard’s ‘The Persuaders’, the large-scale efforts to channel our unthinking habits by advertisers, social engineers etc. The fear was of a mass-produced individual.

However, liberal theory makes itself felt in other ways too, especially in the facile opposition between conspiracy and cock-up. For a start, the idea that, as Rummy put it, stuff happens, is a classic dogma of free market thought: life is simply a lottery. The Smithian ‘invisible hand’ may be no more sophisticated than the ‘hidden hand’ of conspiracism. On the other hand, conspiracy theories rely on a liberal individualist account of agency – tightly knit cabals of interlocking vested interests acting independently of structure. Or, which is actually a little more vulgar, social structure collapses into these networks of conspiracy.

Of course, some of these fears are based on a very accurate appreciation of reality. It has been pointed out that the growing profile of conspiracism emerges in the background of precisely the roll-back of the New Deal since the 1970s and a sense of betrayal and disillusionment that resulted. Further, some of the current wave of conspiracism that really took off in the 1990s can be seen as a ‘blowback’, resulting from the revelations about COINTELPRO, and Watergate, and later Iran-Contra. One of the most disturbing obsessions of the 1990s was with what the New York Times called "black paranoia". Black Americans have been more willing to charge the state openly with crimes than some other social groups, largely because they have been the victims of them. WEB Dubois and Paul Robeson’s "We Charge Genocide" petition to the UN, about the reign of terror in the south is one example. Carmichael and Hamilton, of the Black Panthers, famously wrote that the system was such that, though its effects weren’t the result of a conspiracy, they may as well have been because the effects were still the same. The willingness of black Americans to believe that the Oj trial was inflected with deep racism, and that the state was involved with crack in the ghetto, and that – as both Bill Cosby and Spike Lee believed – AIDS was someone’s attempt to wipe out undesired social groups, was interpreted as paranoia. Often this was discussed in a patronising way that suggested that while there were legitimate historical reasons for suspicion – not least slavery, Tuskegee, the anti-black component of COINTELPRO, the ‘social hygiene’ programmes – it was no longer rational to hold that the society was fundamentally racist. Dinesh D’Souza maintained that black Americans were "pathological" in their predilection for "racial paranoia". It is all too easy to see this as a form of transference – for it was the white bourgeoisie that was to a large extent fearful of black people, especially in light of the riots after the Rodney King verdict. And if – as was maintained – black people had no legitimate grievance and were deluded about their condition, then their reaction had to be a manifestation of paranoid excess, and thus they could blow again. In fact, there is a very real basis for many of these beliefs – in respect of the crack in the ghetto theme, Gary Webb’s reportage later revealed that funding for the Contras had partially been raised by selling crack in African American districts. And as Cockburn & St Clair wrote in their account, the rhetoric about 'black paranoia' ignored the "long history of the racist application of US drug laws".

We also have to register the fundamental difference between ‘supernatural’ theories and parapolitical ones – although the two shade into one another at a certain point: Robin Ramsay wonders in his book about conspiracies why an interest in conspiracies is often accompanied by an interest in the supernatural, and part of the reason would seem to be in the conception of power as importantly being wielded by small groups of elite individuals manipulating large numbers of other people at great remove – this permits the possibility of magical channels allowing the manipulation of events and people by people operating in an occult fashion. Part of its roots may also be in the great historical roots of conspiracism: the Satanic conspiracy.

We would not be willing to easily dismiss certain forms of parapolitical theories. Conspiracies of such a category arguably include: 1) Operation Gladio; 2) Operation Northwoods: "We could develop a Communist Cuban terror campaign in the Miami area, in other Florida cities and even in Washington. The terror campaign could be pointed at Cuban refugees seeking haven in the United States. We could sink a boatload of Cubans en route to Florida (real or simulated). We could foster attempts on lives of Cuban refugees in the United States even to the extent of wounding in instances to be widely publicized"; 3) Various alleged plots against Harold Wilson, (Operation Clockwork Orange; attempted coup); 4) allegations of FSB involvement in the blowing up of Moscow apartments; 5) Hitchens’ allegations about 1968 election plot; 6) Foot’s investigation into Pan Am Flight 103; 7) the Gulf of Tonkin Incident. One could add that a state which sort of loses trillions of dollars in its myriad covert operations across the planet does plenty to invite suspicion onto itself.

Yet, for all of the above, there is a growing willingness to believe certain poorly supported, speculative and improbable theories, in large part because of the breakdown in authority of political elites and knowledge-producing institutions. For example, I was recently asked to 'prove' that an organisation named 'Al Qaeda' existed. Well, who could 'prove' that except by going through the books - by Lawrence Wright, Jason Burke, the media reports on PBS and CNN, and so on? (By the same token, of course, one can only 'disprove' it with these same sources, and if you think you could write a book indicating that there was US government hand in 9/11 without citing that repertoire of material, including the 9/11 Commission Report, I recommend you get some of the recent books attempting to do so, and check their annotations). Some commentators talk about an epistemological crisis which is somehow a facet of postmodernity. I think this mistakes the map for the territory: postmodernism, if it has any meaning, is an attempt to account for the breakdown in confidence in the forms of knowledge associated with modernity, whose calamities – genocide, colonialism, racism, enslavement programmes, eugenics, gender repression – clearly called them into question. Still it is true, as Jodi Dean points out, that it isn’t only alien abductees who are suspicious about news items or other forms of information: to some extent, we are all afflicted with that, (especially when faced with war coverage). And we can only overcome it by producing our own forms of knowledge, as a class, through self-confident institutions working in the labour movement. However, it isn’t only a lack of trust in political elites: historically, conspiracism has been attached to a breakdown of trust in others, which is less healthy. This is evident in a lot of the cultural manifestations of conspiracism in which the world is seen as a bleak, dog-eat-dog, place in which at most, there can be small, fraught bonds between familiars. Of course, this is frequently Hollywood capital's version of conspiracism, but not always: a tour of the websites devoted to the topic of 9/11, for example, would yield, amid some resourceful and interesting sites (but ones I still disagree with), a wide array of serious paranoids (like Michael Ruppert), some of them antisemitic (like Eric Hufschmid), some of them merely stuck on the obsessions of the Buchananite old right (like Alex Jones), and some of them off-the-wall (like Rick Siegel and his nuclear strike theory).

So what about 9/11 theories? Are there any good ones, aside from the 'official conspiracy theory' - which, after all, is embodied in a report that was directed by a political appointee and which deliberately suppressed certain conclusions (such as the idea that US Middle East policy was co-responsible for the attacks; and that NORAD and the Pentagon had supplied false or misleading information)? You will not be astonished to hear that I conclude there aren't any - and that there can't be. I went through a small sample of the dozens of examples of arguments made by people like Michael Ruppert, David Ray Griffin, Nafeez Mossadeq Ahmed, and others, which are actually refuted by looking at the source evidence they themselves supply. I'll reproduce these in the comments boxes if someone asks. However my point is not that this is adequate in itself to prove that the Bush administration had no hand in 9/11. You could never prove such a thing, and what would be the point in trying to do so? After all, you can't possibly know - you don't get speak to the insiders, you don't have access to anything that might be written down on paper marked 'Cosmic: Eyes Only', if indeed anything of that kind would be written down on paper, and what's more, the only way to get that close would be to become an insider. You can only go on what you think the balance of probabilities is. No, my points about this handling of evidence would be as follows: 1) whatever problems we have with understanding properly what happened on 9/11, they are made worse by these authors and these websites because of the profusion of misleading claims, hyperbole and sometimes sheer unalloyed fantasy; 2) there must be a reason for plainly unsupported claims being offered with appended sources that actually contest the claims being made - I don't believe this is because all of these writers are hoaxsters and moneyspinners and seeking to bask in unearned limelight. I think that's probably true of some of them, but I don't think that, for example, Nafeez Mossadeq Ahmed is deliberately trying to mislead anyone. The answer must be that the evidence is to some extent irrelevant, or at least subordinate to the suspicion. Why else should it be, for instance, that you can read on Cooperative Research about Bin Laden and the CIA training the KLA together, only to check the reference and find that it says nothing like this? It's only a click away, so why would it be offered as support? It's a little harder to check references listed in the back of a book, but not that much. So, again, there must either be an expectation by some hucksters that their references won't be checked by gullible readers, or there must be a sense that even if the source doesn't say what you claim it does, the audience is willing to deduce that meaning from it.

I concluded, nicking points made by contributors from the audience, that if there are really grounds for thinking that the Bush administration had a hand in the attacks on September 11th, then the demands for an independent inquiry are a pointless distraction. There will never be such a thing. If this really happened, and they really helped kill thousands of people in Washington and New York, and they managed to keep the secret restricted to a small core of state personnel, then they will kill you before they let you get that close, precisely as they are now killing reporters in Iraq and Afghanistan. There is only one way to find out if the attacks on the World Trade Centre were really in whole or in part orchestrated, directed, funded, guided or even simply permitted intentionally by the US government, and that is to overthrow it. If you are not prepared to countenance doing that and encouraging others to do so, then your theory or suspicion leads you simply to disabling horror and fear at what the state can do. If you are prepared for that, you have to be prepared to end the system that perpetuates these structures of extremely concentrated, secretive power. If you want to do that, then you have to organise against the system and its defenders without moralism, without losing sight of the goal, and attack it at its weakest points. At the moment, their weakest points are not the cities they may or may not have helped defile in the United States, but the cities they are definitely, deliberately, openly defiling in Iraq. The activism around the highly speculative hypotheses about what happened on 9/11, with its clutter of exaggerations and falsehoods and half-truths, is thus a massive displacement activity. The main focus of the left in my view should be first and foremost on what the US state and its principle constitutency - the American capitalist class - is definitely, obviously doing to the people on this planet and has been doing for more than a century now.

Labels: 9/11, conspiracy theories, parapolitics, truth

The rolling wave of massacres continues... posted by lenin

35 slaughtered in one provinced, 108 in another, 25 killed here - they got sick of attacking weddings and have now turned to attacking funeral processions. Last week they wiped out forty-five people. Oh and, on a related note, 10,000 a month massacred in Iraq.

Well, that was the news, now it's time for a forecast. Red mist over parts of Baghdad this morning, clearing to reveal cloudless skies which should be visible from the ground floors of recently decapitated buildings. There will be angry gusts of blustery wind emanating from London, and a smattering of liberal hypocrisy over Palestine. The threat of nuclear-tipped warheads looms over Iran, while a cold front of racial apartheid sweeps through Australia. A touch of white plague will settle on poorer parts. The murder in the Democratic Republic of Congo will resume. The gulf stream will change course, which should lead to a touch of frost in the UK. Forest clearing and soil degradation will spread deserts across much of the global south. The sea will shortly rise to enclose thousands of square miles of land, and will only subside when every last sea creature has been netted, filleted, gently chewed, and sealed in Marks and Spencer packaging as party snacks. The planetary slum system is working its way, gently at first but with growing force and rapidity, across parts of Brazil, Nigeria and India, and then everywhere else as well. Eventually, someone will suggest overthrowing the system of capital accumulation on the grounds of its connections with weapons of mass destruction, terror, and human rights abuses. It will be added that we don't want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud.

Labels: afghanistan, occupation, US imperialism

Speaking of hygeine... posted by lenin

It ought to be recalled that the development of products in the US in particular - both in terms of design and marketing - was deeply penetrated by the pseudoscience of eugenics that was prevalent before the second world war. The art historian Christina Cogdell describes how the doctrine of 'streamlining' itself was borrowed from the ideal-type depictions of what a typical American guy and gal would look like once racial degeneration had been expunged. The development of commodities and utilities was depicted and understood as a natural correlate to the evolution of human beings toward a utopian type.

Eugenics and its modern inheritors (as Edwin Black points out, the same pseudoscience has been regenerated and repackaged as a branch of genetics), drawing upon the authority of science, are in this respect deeply ideological movements, in which human beings are held to be simply unfit in their present state for whatever utopia is worth striving for. The economic crisis of the 1930s les to two significant pressures: one, the socialist and progressive tendency, to transform American society; another, the reactionary quasi-fascistic one (also indulged by some socialists at the time), to transform the American 'type'. And of course, the development of 'racial' types was yielded in exactly the same way as the development of the ideal human type, which happened to be the exclusive property of the 'white race': with averages derived and significant divergences from those averages pathologised or medicalised. Thus began the sterilisation programmes. But in the field of popular science and design, the same pseudoscience was used to elaborate a whole new field of aesthetics. One of the earliest efforts to get to grips with the average American were the aggregate measurements were taken of army recruits in World War I. A sculptor working with those average dimensions produced a less than admirable portrait of the average American male - slouching, too much of a pot belly, not quite tall enough - and much hysteria followed about degeneration and how it might be averted. So, in fact, new 'average' types were designed for both sexes, and competitions were held to see who could best match them - it was rather difficult and even the best prizewinners didn't match the proportions very closely.



Still, the profusion of cultural and media enthusiasms for this doctrine were reflected in 'science' items promising that 'Some Day We Will All Be Like This' (longer legs, thinner skull, shorter fingers, super-intelligence); and also in a supplement to the first ever Superman comic, in which it was explained that on the basis of evolutionary trends, it was not at all improbable that one day mankind may soon have Superman's extraordinary abilities. Fascism for children. General Motors staged an exhibit at the 1939 New York World’s Fair, orchestrated by Norman Bel Geddes’ and called 'Futurama'. Corporate leaders were, on the whole, rather impressed by this vision, and corporate marketing departments absorbed the doctrine of a streamlined future: homes, household appliances, cars, telephones, highways, cities - and of course, streamlined people, reduced to an accessory to the design model. Well, now, this is the quintessential ideology of advertising: human beings are embellishments to the perfect design of the product. In themselves imperfect, incomplete and needful, they are uplifted and made whole by their integration into the universe of commodities. You cannot dislodge yourself from it, because then you'd simply be cold and wet and naked, a shivering, bare-forked creature reduced to serfdom or something worse.

Labels: advertising, capitalism, eugenics, racism, social hygeine

Ethnic Cleansing posted by lenin

L'Oreal tried to prevent non-white women from being recruited to advertise its soap products...





Pictures via Chabert.

Labels: colonialism, ethnic cleansing, racism

Terrorist attack foiled. posted by lenin

Updates about the Hitler-worshipping fanatics who tried to cause a 'race war'...

Labels: bnp scum, fascism, terrorism

Queimada posted by lenin

Marlon Brando flashes his rather sexy blue eyes at some ex-Portuguese colonists and persuades them to side with the British Empire, which is on the side of civilisation and progress. Would you feel the movie was ruined for you if I added that it is an analogy of the Vietnam War, and that the British end up being even more brutal than the Portuguese? Tough.

Labels: anti-imperialism, capitalism, colonialism, empire, queimada

Reason in revolt: two books on enlightenment. posted by lenin

Little God, Big Hitchens
I can get two reviews in here for the price of one. I'll start with Hitchens' latest, 'God Is Not Great'. Some people, in the wake of an atrocity by religious fanatics that has already been matched several times over in this young century, have taken to taking up atheism as if it were a militant creed. The range of people willing to reduce most of the world's problems to religion include the admirable Richard Dawkins, and the despicable Sam Harris. Hitchens, who has at different times been both admirable and despicable, is not saying much that he hasn't said before. If you look at his writings in the 1980s, he was often explaining the futility of belief, stressing its role as a false comfort for the poor and a source of morality for power. He contemptuously dismissed 'Liberation Theology' as a pathetic oxymoron, reminded readers of what Freud had to say in The Future of an Illusion (that religions are a form of wish-fulfillment), refers to "the mystical element in modern tyranny", specifically Stalinism and Nazism, insists that it is impossible for the religious and irreligious to be at peace, and - in his writings on El Salvador and Nicaragua, generally finds religion either to be a poor ally of socialism or its devout enemy. His latest therefore summarises the arguments of a lifetime, or the life that he has had since he was nine years old and decided firmly that God did not exist, a fact he is given to bragging about. But then, as someone remarked to me, perhaps this only means he still thinks like a nine year old.

God Is Not Great is sometimes witty, or at least half-witty, which is better than average. And it displays some of the author's ostentatiously wide learning with some of the old lapidary skill. It repeats many of his catechisms of old, the Freudian reference, the one-liners and the blunt insistence that not only can there be no peace between the religious and the atheist, but such peace would be undesirable. It is also superficial, error-strewn, and riddled with inconsistency and disavowal. On the error front, one could mention that Victor Serge didn't in fact invent the term 'totalitarianism' (it was Giovanni Amendola, a parliamentary opponent of fascism, who invented the phrase 'totalitaria', and Mussolini who took it up proudly, boasting of his 'totalitarianismo'). Or, his claim that Islam is in need of a Reformation, which suggests that his reading didn't take him as far as the revivalist movements of the 19th Century and that he doesn't recognise the self-evident analogue between salafism and Lutheranism. Equally, it may be that he doesn't really understand what the Reformation in its various manifestations was really about. On inconsistency, one marvels about his references to the Parties of God destroying Iraq without really dallying on the fact that the biggest Parties of God and the most aggressive ones are actually allies of the occupation. He doesn't seem to have noticed, either, that God's soldiers were fighting alongside him in Bosnia. On disavowal, the whole work can be seen as a careful expiation of the sins of imperialism and indeed of capitalism. Religion is blamed not only for the bad deeds of the religious, but also for modern 'totalitarianism', the threat of nuclear war, conflict in Palestine, gender repression (somehow the idea of Hitchens as a feminist doesn't really convince), the destruction of Iraq, the Lebanese civil war and so on. He states, falsely, that Iran is about the bring the world closer to the brink of nuclear war because it is acquiring nuclear weapons - this is the sort of assertion that is made without evidence, so perhaps we should follow Hitchens' motto and dismiss it without evidence. He finds that it is the religious fanatics on 'both sides' of the Israel-Palestine divide that have frustrated the attempts to reach a two-state settlement, an obvious falsehood about which it is safe to say he knows better.

The least useful thing that could be said about the book is that it is not constructive: it is not supposed to be constructive. It has some interesting, if rather old, things to say about different religions (oh, the common patriarchal norms, the sexual repression, the insistence that - as he puts it - "the birth canal is a one-way street", the textual bases for genocide and sectarianism and so on), garnished with the mantra: "religion poisons everything". It brags, repeatedly, that the attitude of non-believers like him is not one of faith, not dogmatic, but relies on free discussion and evidence. For a man who spent a great deal of February and March 2003 explaining that Wolfowitz would definitely bring peace and prosperity to Iraq, that the weapons of mass destruction would definitely be found, that evidence of Saddam's connections to the global jihad would be located, this doesn't sit well. Alright, perhaps it was unreasonable of him to make a claim to 'Twenty-Twenty Foresight' as he put it, but the fact that he persists in believing these things in hindsight despite the abundance of evidence to the contrary doesn't leave one with the impression that he is an avatar of Enlightenment. You can still find him on the Charlie Rose show repeating the gags about Saddam's alleged connections to the Abu Sayyaf movement and the 'hospitality' given Abdul Rahman Yasin, one of the alleged WTC bombers in 1993 - and thus, hint hint, the Baathist regime might have been behind it. The former is without substantial evidence (despite allegations rehashed in the neocon Weekly Standard in 2006), and the latter is a discredited thesis advanced by Laurie Mylroie who, before changing her - well, I won't say mind, but before changing her opinion on Saddam, was arguing for a deepening of the relationship between the Reagan regime and the Baath one. In fact, Yasin was an Iraqi who was released by the US government to return to his country of birth. When he arrived in Iraq, he was allegedly imprisoned and the Iraqi government repeatedly offered to hand him over in exchange for sanctions relief. But the US authorities that permitted his release were evidently not interested in prosecuting him - an interesting story in itself.

There are other reasons for doubting that Hitchens has overcome faith. To insist on the superiority of the scientific method against, say, 'intelligent design' is in principle a sensible step, but to serve it up with a blustering scientific realism and a curious combination of sociobiology and genetic reductionism arguably blunts the force of the argument. Similarly, it is one thing to assert religion's role in many of the worst forms of human behaviour, but it is another to reduce religion to that. Here he gets himself into an appropriate muddle: Dietrich Bonhoeffer's resistance to the Nazis is explained away as a victory for humanism, not religion. Okay, but then this - and countless other examples could be adduced - is a tacit acknowledgment that at least religion can coexist with humanism, rationalism, and so on, which mocks his own claim that there can be no peace between religion and atheism. The history of the development of science by the religious doesn't permit any facile opposition between the two (Copernicus, Kepler, Bacon, Boyle, Newton etc). Nor is there even a complete opposition available between science and the Counter Reformation, in which the Church sought both to crush its enemies and restore its earthly power precisely by learning and spreading the new methods being developed. All of this has become so obvious that it is common wisdom among philosophers of science that its relationship to religion has often been productive, and that the instances of repression (of Galileo, for instance) are the exception rather than the rule.

It is simple enough to cite statements in the holy texts, but he is every bit as literalist as the fundamentalists and salafists. Such a gesture is completely incompatible with Hitchens' noisily avowed materialism, as well. If one only thinks of the millenia during which religions were developed and elaborated and argued over and censored and repressed and rearticulated, it is clear that a religion is not, or is not only, the content of its texts. It is a work of labour, a performance by people working in different contexts, deriving meanings that are apt for their circumstances. How else could there be such disagreement among people of the same faith about when and whom it is permissible to kill, or love, or rule? It may be an alibi of repression, but it is also an alibi of revolt (which raises the earlier prospect, that Hitchens doesn't understand the Reformation, or that part of it that was manifested in 1525). Although Hitchens claims to operate on the basis of Marx's critique of religion, he neglects to note that Marx was also a critic of the critique of religion: that he insisted that social change would come first and then people would abandon their "religious narrowness". He fundamentally misrepresents Marx, therefore, to make a case more befitting Bruno Bauer.

[Update: it has been drawn to my attention that I forgot to mention that - from a contrarian of Hitchens' stature - the title 'God is Not Great' is embarrassingly obvious. As in - "God is Great: Not!"]

God Is Not Great is principally a polemic about current affairs. Secularism and democratic republicanism are metaphors for American imperialism. In his hands they are alibis for repression and not, as one might have hoped, for revolt. Hitchens' long-standing anti-theism has become a means by which he commutes his remaining liberal commitments into support for aggressive American expansionism, nationalism, and accomodation to the claims of Zionism. If it wasn't for this, the book would probably not have been written, for there is not much in the book that was worth saying that hasn't already been said better, without the howlers, the arrogance and the insistence on using provisional scientific research as brickbats.

Defending Reason From Its Defenders
Dan Hind's new book, The Threat To Reason, is a very different kind of book. It too sees reason and Enlightenment values as being under threat, but the author doesn't accept that the main threat comes from New Agers and the religious. The Enlightenment is conscripted for various projects - not only American warfare, but also the corporate assault on environmentalism (or the attempt to coopt it), the capitalist attempt to curb labour protections, and the effort to override consumer and worker concerns about genetically modified foods. Bush cites Locke, The Economist cites Adam Smith, agribusiness cites progress against the forces of unreason, Blair contrasts globalising optimism with parochial pessimism and despair, and so on. A "bowdlerised and historically disembodied Enlightenment" is being used as a form of blackmail: if you are against us, you are with the forces of unreason. It has become a source of immense self-confidence for political and capitalist elites and the American empire, who all claim to be safeguarding that heritage. What Hind refers to as 'Folk Enlightenment' - because we all know the tune, even if the lyrics change sometimes - is reflected in the facility with which neoliberals appropriated the Scottish Enlightenment for their global crusade, matched by the neoconservative affirmation of the need for 'Enlightened' administration of Third World countries. Its use in this fashion has also helped people who described themselves as being on the Left, reconcile themselves to the invasion and occupation of Iraq. The current clash-of-civilisations theme of imperialist apologetics often casts America's contemporary Islamist opponents as pre-Enlightenment and mythological (in contrast to America's self-image as confident and progressive). Similarly, the defense of capitalist enterprise against "eco-fundamentalists" who tend to be depicted as preferring to subsist in mud-huts on diets of greens and grains, is a familiar one.

Partially, the roots of this appropriation of the Enlightenment are located in anticommunism, in which a number of thinkers saw the tradition of 18th Century liberalism as the only viable alternative to - well, you probably could have guessed it - serfdom. (For in this outlook, the only alternative to liberal capitalism is something essentially premodern). Hind is very adept at drawing out the ways in which this has been perpetuated institutionally (he is a Lobster contributor after all), and in which it became the handmaiden of tyranny as well as exploitation. There are also some excellent put-downs - of Hitchens, and Wheen and that whole school of unthought. The unaccountability - ethically and otherwise - of corporations, and their private efforts to use Enlightenment methods to bolster their own power is described in some detail, as is that of the state: this, Hind calls 'Occult Enlightenment'. Additionally, the recklessness, moral irresponsibility and irrationality of the 'war on terror' is outlined brilliantly. There is a good discussion of the Enlightenment and various interpretations of it, and Hind also takes on some of the myths about the postmodernist assault on enlightened thought: pomo is thus summarised as not so much a coherent body of thought but as in many respects "a response to the accumulated disasters of Western modernity from the nineteenth century through to the 1960s: imperialism, world war and genocide". I don't think it could be put better than that. It concludes with a way out of the current binds, a gesture toward a truly Enlightened method. For one thing, we need to recognise the state-corporate nexus as the essential source of contemporary irrationalism. The vague, ahistorical histories in which people's ideas are given enormous social weight need to be eschewed in favour of an understanding of the institutional forms that produce knowledge. Hind reminds the indefatigable contrarians and defenders of reason that, far from being fearless conveyors of unblemished truths, they are themselves employees for information industries, some of them private and some of them state-owned. The forms of knowledge that they produce are conditioned by these institutions, and they delude themselves when they imagine otherwise. We need to abandon the illusions of 'disinterested' inquiry and try to overcome the property forms that currently repress common creativity and thought.

A few quibbles. I don't quite understand how Theodor Adorno is cast as a 'postmodernist', much less how Adorno and Horkheimer become the central examples of postmodern thought. Adorno's immanent critique of the Enlightenment doesn't entail a radical scepticism about the possibility of knowledge, and he was nothing if not a rationalist. Derrida and Foucault would surely have been better examples, especially since they are the most hated 'postmodernists', the clercs whose trahison has been most heinous for people like Wheen and Hari. Take, for example, Francis Wheen's How Mumbo-Jumbo Conquered the World, which characterises Derrida's philosophy in the words of Barbara Ehrenreich, as maintaining that the "world is just a socially constructed ‘text’ about which you can say just about anything". Similarly, take Hari's claim that the bad man wants to attack reason and language. Now, neither of these claims is true. Derrida was astonished to hear that his critique of logocentrism had been misinterpreted in this fashion: "I never cease to be surprised by critics who see my work as a declaration that there is nothing beyond language, that we are imprisoned in language; it is, in fact, saying the exact opposite. The critique of logocentrism is above all else the search for the 'other' and the 'other of language...'". So far from abandoning truth, Derrida insists: "the value of truth (and all those values associated with it) is never contested or destroyed in my writing, but only reinscribed in more powerful, larger, more stratified contexts". He was not, as so often depicted, a textualist: "not that I consider laws, constitutions, the declaration of the rights of man, grammar, or the penal code to be the same as novels. I only want to recall that they are not ‘natural realities’, and that they depend on the same structural power that allows novelesque fictions or mendacious inventions and the like to take place. I have never ‘put such concepts as truth, reference, and the stability of interpretive context radically into question’ if ‘putting radically into question’ means contesting that there are and that there should be truth, reference, and stable contexts of interpretation". It is, in other words, the kind of reasoned and responsible critique of existing forms of institutionalised power/knowledge that is the most characteristic of the radical Enlightenment. Nor is the hatred for Derrida accidental. His Of Grammatology is explicit in connecting the deconstruction of Western philosophy to anti-imperialism. He explained: "the science of writing – grammatology – shows signs of liberation all over the world". By attacking the tropes through which white, European supremacy has been propagated, he has undermined the self-confidence of would-be imperialist intellectuals. Similarly, Hind could have been a bit more unkind to Peter Gay, who is actually partially responsible for the simplistic dichotomy between religious thought and Enlightened thought. Although Gay acknowledges the religious commitments of some of the chief Enlightenment thinkers (Locke, Rousseau, Newton, Ferney), his attempt to recreate the "mind of the Enlightenment" as a pagan throwback, a sort of Francocentric sensuous humanism, reinforces that binary. Similarly, in handling the resonance of the experience of French philosophes for contemporary usurpers, it would have been worth commenting on the inegalitarianism of its leading lights. While, for example, the later utilitarians like John Stuart Mill have sometimes been rightly criticised for their support for colonialism (the view that Bentham himself supported the British colonies has been undermined by Jennifer Pitts' recent work), a lot more could be said about the contempt of people like Montesquieu, Voltaire, Diderot and others for the multitude, whom they energetically sought to distance themselves from. While hostile to certain forms of religious superstition, they articulated a fanatical resentment of 'le peuple' as mindless and malleable, that is surely analogous to the current warnings against 'populism'. The discussion of the 'Occult Enlightenment' might have been enriched by a discussion of its relationship to Renaissance and early-modern magical practise, since magical forms of thinking persist in elite doctrines. Those are merely quibbles, however. The author has done something that Dawkins et al have not done, which is to take both the Enlightenment and religion seriously, and to locate the social forces responsible for squandering and diverting its immense resources. He also handles wit, sarcasm and scepticism better than the current militant anti-theists do. And be prepared for the unexpected, too, because he isn't as content with the obvious as the God-botherer-botherers are.

Labels: atheism, enlightenment, hitchens, imperialism, islam, religion

The Battle of Algiers posted by lenin

Check out that Ennio Morricone score.

Labels: battle of algiers

Brown Fudge posted by lenin

The scary ones are right. Gordon Brown is proving much more savvy, and a lot less fanatical than Blair. It was one thing to bring a few people into the cabinet who condemned the war, and sack Lord Goldsmith. It was one thing not to respond to the latest attempted attacks without a great deal of fuss about new laws and the rules of the game being changed. Now to introduce proposed legislation, ceding a few more powers to parliament, and let Straw go out and diss Blair's record on live television, and noisily refuse to engage in the Islam-baiting that Blair and his acolytes did - well, that suggests a very clever and adaptible political strategy. None of the fundamentals have changed, and nor would one expect them to. Brown supported the war on Iraq and bankrolled it, and still does. He is expected to go ahead with extending the length of time that terror suspects can be detained without charge. He is going to continue with his neoliberal policies and privatisation. But he is reaching out to those who were pissed off by the illiberalism, crackdowns on civil liberties and parliamentary powers that he himself was party to.

By the way, did any of you notice that apart from introducing de facto pay cuts before ceding control of the Treasury to New Labourite Alistair Darling, he actually sneaked through some huge public spending cuts? Sneaky fucker.

Labels: gordon brown, new labour

Their partners in crime. posted by lenin

It is known to most pundits, but perhaps not so to the general public, that America's SIIC allies in Iraq are among the worst sectarians, killers and torturers in the country. Their Badr Corps has, aside from fighting alongside US troops in various operations, been an active death squad, terrorising Sunni communities, kidnapping, torturing, leaving drilled bodies in the streets and so on. Some people might even know that the CIA trained the Badr and various Kurdish militias to carry out "abductions, assassinations and other kinds of intimidation". Even less well understood than this, however, is the repressiveness of the Kurdish statelet in northern Iraq. There has been some very limited coverage of ethnic cleansing against Assyrians and Turkomen. There were headlines when a man who had criticised the KDP leader Massoud Barzani in a newspaper was kidnapped by Parastin, tortured until he signed a confession of 'defamation' and imprisoned for thirty years, although I don't know if anyone other than Amnesty picked up on the PUK's men firing on peaceful demonstrators. Now, a new report describes widespread torture carried out by the Kurdish security forces - oh, electrocution, beating with metal rods and cables, the usual. Well, why not? They learned it from the best and are, after all, partners to a much larger crime.

Labels: iraq, kurdish leadership, torture

Insurrectionary devices posted by lenin

Pointing out the absurdity of reducing resistance movements in Iraq to Al Qaeda, I listed some of the known movements operating in Iraq a while ago. Abu Aardvark links to a new report on the media statements of Sunni insurgents in Iraq. Below is a chart comparing statements made by different groups with claims of responsibility for various attacks and their targets, for the month of March this year:



It isn't supposed to be comprehensive, but it does indicate the relative capacity, aggressiveness and tendencies of different groups. As one would anticipate, the Islamic State in Iraq, which is generally referred to as 'Al Qaeda' (although in fact only one group within this collection claims to be connected to 'Al Qaeda', and there isn't much evidence of any material links to Zawahiri and bin Laden), claims responsibility for a minority of attacks. It is among those Islamist groups that targets Shi'ites (under the rubric of attacking their militias), but the preponderance of its attacks were directed against the US military and its Iraqi auxiliaries in that month. And, at any rate, on its own account it did a great deal more talking than fighting. Far more significant Sunni forces are groups like the Mujahidin Army, which claimed 132 anti-US attacks that month, and 4 on their Iraq compadres. And the sectarian salafist group, Ansar al Sunna, is more significant still - but it doesn't have the brand recognition. The mystery about the 1920 Revolution Brigades, an Iraqi nationalist guerilla movement, is that they are known to be highly active, yet rarely issue statements or claim credit for attacks. The only statement they issued recently was to deny claims made in the Washington Post that they were working for the United States military.

It goes without saying that the stenographers of power, especially the embedded reporters and the big wire services, accept the language of the occupiers and thus end up producing utterly incoherent reports. Take this, for example. In it we are treated to the phrase "anti-Iraqi forces", and the assertion that these are 'al Qaeda', and that they are trying to gain control of Anbar. It's one of a wave of similar stories indicating a 'turn' on the part of Sunni Iraqis, who have had enough the tactics of that organisation and are thus turning toward the US:

Anbar was once the heart of the Sunni Arab insurgency and the most dangerous region for American soldiers in Iraq.

But local Sunni Arab tribes began to turn against Sunni Islamist al Qaeda last year, angered by the militant group's indiscriminate killing of civilians and harsh interpretation of Islam in the areas it held sway.

Many al Qaeda militants have since been driven out of Anbar and into provinces north of Baghdad.

A reporter would have to forget, or set aside, everything he or she knew about this situation in order to produce a report like that. Not only is it reasonably well known that the 'tribal strategy' of the US is collapsing around its ears, but only in the masturbatory fantasies of General David Petraeus could it be entertained that Anbar is no longer the heart of the Sunni insurgency, and no longer a dangerous place for American soldiers to be. And aside from the above illustration, there is the small matter of the main Sunni bloc that decided to participate in the government withdrawing, with one politician pledging to become part of the resistance. In other words, while support for the resistance among Sunnis remains solid in every poll, and while the US hasn't even taken most of Baghdad yet, or Baqubah, much less the whole of Anbar or Diyala, the political establishment is fracturing. The Sadrists have withdrawn participation from the parliament, taking six ministers from the cabinet and at least 29 representatives from the Council of Representatives. They, alongside the Iraqi Accord Front, reduce the number of representatives in the institution from 275 to 190. The SIIC, Dawa and their Kurdish allies are thus trying to form a new pro-US government without these groups. The fabric of the occupation regime is gradually coming to pieces, and its opponents include much bigger fish than the risible 'Islamic State of Iraq'.

Labels: iraq, iraqi resistance, US imperialism

Marxism 2007 posted by lenin

It starts this Thursday, and all the stars are coming: Tony Benn, Mark Thomas, Craig Murray, Gary Younge, Paul Gilroy, Moazzam Begg, Giuliana Sgrena and Yvonne Ridley (on the reporting of the Iraq war), Michael Albert, Billy Bragg (who will be grilled on his Progressive Patriotism), Susan George (on the neocons), Mike Rosen (who will be plugging Lenin's Tomb for the most part, but may have a word or two to say about children's literature), China Mieville (who will be talking about rubbish), Victoria Brittain, Rose Gentle, Nick Broomfield (with his new documentary), Zizek on liberalism etc. And... what's this? Tom Stoppard? Surely a mistake? Apparently not - he and David Edgar and Michael Billington will talk about theatre in revolt. There is a good sprinkling of trade unionists such as Mark Serwotka and Geoff Martin. The excellent David Harvey will be there to talk about neoliberalism. There are some great speakers from the Middle East, including Lebanese socialist Bassem Chit, Egyptian socialist Kamal Khalil, Hassan Jumaa of the Iraqi oil workers union, Palestinian activist Ghada Karmi and independent Egyptian MP Hamdeen Sabahi. Playwright Alistair Beaton is doing a show, demanding to know what's so funny about politics. Ian Birchall will talk about how the Russian Revolution was lost. Oh, and there's me. I'm speaking on 'What's Wrong With Conspiracy Theories?' - oh, don't even ask, I'm not giving anything away. But if you want to come see me squeak and cough and sweat and curse under my breath, you can come find me at 3.45pm on Saturday afternoon. If you want to come and heckle, please bring a container for your vital organs. You can purchase a ticket for either the weekend or the full week, and prices vary depending on whether you're employed or a student. The timetable is here, and the booking form is here.

Labels: anti-capitalism, anti-imperialism, marxism, socialism

The transubstantiation of the Enlightenment posted by lenin

Dan Hind's new book is out, and I will have a review for you shortly. In the meantime, he has an article about the conscription of the Enlightenment on behalf of expansionist imperialism:

[A]t the level of perception management, the Enlightenment served exactly the same purpose as the religion that is supposed to be its mortal, defining enemy. "Believe what you like, only do not resist", was the watchword of the White House and of Downing Street. You could take your pick from crusades, democratisation or weapons of mass destruction. If you liked your drama really straightforward, you could even believe it was all about a son's righteous thirst for vengeance. Would-be enlightened intellectuals might want to look more closely at an institutional system that was able to use the Enlightenment itself as just one more theme in its campaign to sell an illegal war. It is the virtuosity of the people who brought us the invasion of Iraq, not the vaudevillian villainy of the evangelical right, surely, that should engross the attention of our paladins for truth and justice.

Faith, it is said, is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things unseen. Can the enlightened advocates of war in Iraq now deny that they were lost in the fervour of their hopes, that they were deluded as to the nature and purposes of earthly power? This need not lead us to despair of enlightenment, to imagine, as some do, that the hope of material improvement must always decay into murderous utopianism. That is a cheap kind of worldliness, the philosophical equivalent of Damien Hirst's cows in formaldehyde; at once luminously transgressive and entirely safe.

Labels: enlightenment, imperialism, religion

Terrorist attack: 100 dead. posted by lenin

They didn't simply bomb once. They did it for three hours. It wasn't one building or four, but a whole village. They succeeded in killing one hundred civilians, and didn't even have the courtesy to exterminate themselves in the process. Meanwhile, the ongoing terrorist assault on Baquba has reportedly killed 350 people, and a homicide attack on Sadr City (at last, a use for that ridiculous phrase!), has killed 26 people.

In other news, Blair's message to Muslims: "No one's oppressing you."

Labels: 'war on terror', afghanistan, terrorism, US imperialism