Marxism 2008 posted by lenin

Come along to Marxism, why not? It's starting this Thursday and spreads out lavishly over the weekend like a louche Waugh-esque bohemian. I will be speaking on 'Liberal Imperialism: from the Boers to Basra' which, as you might expect, covers some of the material in my fabulous upcoming book. As the book takes a strongly historical approach to the topic, I will be adding much more commentary on recent topics such as Darfur etc, updating the material on Iraq, and explaining why Christopher Hitchens drinks enough alcohol to strip the paint off the White House on a daily basis. I also intend to leave out the best stuff from the book, so you still have to buy it. Blogging comrade Hossam el-Hamalawy will also be speaking, both on the opening platform and on the strike wave in Egypt. Tariq Ali, Nick Davies, Gary Younge, Paul Gilroy, Moazzam Begg, John Bellamy Foster, Tony Benn, Steve Bell, Larry Elliott of the Guardian, David Hilliard of the Black Panthers, and others will also be there. If you want to get hardcore argument on the recession, the environment, Labour, the trade unions, racism and the 'war on terror', Marxism is the place to be. And don't give me that "I'm doing other stuff/I'm in hospital/I'm in another country" bollocks. Be there, or I shall have to use the rubber truncheon.

Labels: 'war on terror', environment, marxism 2008, new labour, socialism, trade unions

Brown and the unions posted by lenin

Labels: gordon brown, new labour, privatisation, public sector pay, trade unions

Fascism, workers and the 'national community'. posted by lenin

Tim Mason has described how the Hitler regime, even once it had physically liquidated its trade unionist and socialist opponents during the first half of 1933, was not capable of simply overriding the interests of the working class. It had instruments of terror, such as the politically committed 'soldiers' of the SA, who would happily apprise intransigent workers of the new spirit of national community if they failed to accept wage cuts and degraded working conditions. And it could rely on the existence of a vast reserve army of labour created by the depression to coerce workers into accepting a more subordinate status. Yet the Nazi regime had to engage the working class and try to s[t]imulate their support. The working class was sufficiently important to the Nazi self-image and propaganda that the Nazi Party's records tended to overstate the extent of working class membership drastically, sometimes doubling the real levels. In truth, at least according to Richard Evans, workers were often those quickest to leave the Nazi Party having joined it, and the real means by which the Nazis expanded beyond their traditional lower middle class backbone was by integrating segments of the upper middle and ruling classes.

The spectre of the working class constantly hovered over the Nazi regime. This is hardly because workers were serenely insusceptible to Nazi ideology. Many workers bought Goebbels' propaganda wholesale, and were quite convinced by the idea of restoring the colonial programme in order to overcome the depression. Those who had not been immersed in traditions of socialist activity were the most vulnerable. Even in conservative Bavaria, however, where repression and depression atomised and disoriented the working class most thoroughly, the evidence suggests that workers were severely hostile to the new regime. When the Nazis created the 'Council of Trust' to consolidate its rule in the factories, early elections showed large numbers of workers, sometimes as many as three-fifths, rejecting the Nazi candidate. Such hostility was felt and expressed most vociferously as wage cuts, longer working hours, and terrible shortages compounded the unpopularity of the regime between 1933 and 1936, with oppositional groups gaining ground in the factories. If the working class no longer expressed its demands in explicit slogans or in the language of Marxism (quite apart from Nazi repression, the disarray of German Marxists in the face of the Nazis' rise to power had pretty well discredited them and angered their supporters), they explicitly expressed a class antagonism which could become the basis for a powerful movement against a highly fractious state. Throughout the Reich, working class self-organisation and collective action was increasingly in evidence in the later 1930s. Though it was rarely understood as directly political resistance to the Nazi state, the regime had to take it seriously and find ways to counteract it.

While the social Darwinist doctrines which the Nazi leadership embraced strongly militated against welfarism, minimum wages or other such anti-competitive practises, the Nazis were nominally a 'workers' party', and had spent a great deal of the pre-1933 era wooing the socialist working class. They were committed to the creation of a 'national community', and such - it was imagined - would eventually be generated through war, in the mythical spirit of 1914. But in the meantime something had to be done about the workers besides the wave of repression and surveillance that was immediately introduced. The Labour Front, though it was a coercive organisation which posed no threat to the German capitalist class (which duly joined the organisation) was one attempt to produce such a feeling of community, and various legal forms were introduced to permit workers to petition their bosses or seek the intervention of the Trustee of Labour, who was to enforce codes of industrial chivalry, in which the role of the employer was now that of a carer as well as a leader. The Nazis had abolished genuine democratic restrictions on employers as well as every gain made since the fall of Bismarck. But the Labour Front, despite the formal restrictions on its scope of operation, eventually became a means by which employers - usually smaller employers - could be disciplined into accepting some concession or other.

It is important to be clear about one thing: to the extent that Nazi institutions pressured employers to assimilate to the imaginary new social order this did not, ever, mean that the Nazis were siding with the workers in a class dispute. One result of Nazi terror was that real wages sank even below the miserable levels that had persisted under Hindenburg and von Papen for the first few years of Nazi rule, (the recovery in later years was a side-effect of the armaments boom). The overwhelming impact of Nazi rule was to disarm the working class, demolish its political parties, drive down its wages, and place a repressive police state at the service of the employers. The conservative-romantic propaganda about a national community that the business class had been disseminating throughout the 1920s became part of the official ideology of a state with an unprecedented grip on the production of ideas. In the long-term, the decimation of working class self-organisation with the resulting retreat to the private sphere and the individualisation of economic struggle arguably laid the ground for a much less politicised working class and a much more stable capitalism in the postwar era. Yet, while that was an admirable record from the point of view of employers, the Nazi Party didn't intend to be simply an anti-communist dictatorship. It intended to turn ordinary Germans into racial warriors.

It was a crucial goal of the Nazis to convert workers to the 'national socialist' doctrine, since these workers would be the footsoldiers of a total war - to colonise Eastern Europe and enslave Russia, having helped conquer Spain and invaded Belgium and France. They had, somehow, to produce a social concert without fundamentally transforming relations of production. (Despite all the talk of a 'planned economy', the Nazi regime didn't in fact obtain real state control of the economy until mid-way through the war, instead tending to rely on close alliances with major corporations such as IG Farben.) The Nazis therefore tended to settle on aesthetic solutions, emphasising the Beauty of Work, the inherent value of artisanal labour, the necessity for 'happiness' to pervade the working environment. This was met with sullen forms of resistance, including defacement of redecorated work premisses and 'anti-social' behaviour.

When it finally came to total war, however, it was necessary to do something very different. Only a politically committed minority could experience a war to the finish between Nazi Germany and its geopolitical rivals as a great adventure and a noble exertion of a restless race. 'Strength Through Joy' was a slogan even less persuasive in the battlefield than in the workplace. So, it was necessary to redistribute wealth in a new way. Götz Aly has shown (in his recent book, Hitler's Beneficiaries) that the Nazis, so far from relying on Germans of any class paying for the war, actively sought to transfer most of the economic burden of the war from German taxpayers to the citizens of conquerered territory. The reason for this was that, the so-called 'Augusterlebnis', the conservative fantasy of Spirit of 1914, could not be duplicated in September 1939. On the contrary, it was obvious that years of Nazi indoctrination, relentless propaganda, repression, the destruction of political opponents, the cranking up of antisemitism, had not created the indicated 'national community'. It is true that this was in part because Hitler had been driven by a national economic crisis to launch his war of expansion far more quickly than he had intended, and thus hadn't adequately prepared the ground for war fever. But Hitler was supposedly an adored national leader. Yet, while Churchill could expect British workers to pay for a war with severely restricted consumption and the purchase of war bonds, Hitler was unable to expect the same of German workers. Instead, the regime bolstered welfare provisions with state subsidies to welfare provisions rising from 640.4 million Reichsmarks in 1938 to 1,119.2 million Reichsmarks in 1943. Meanwhile, invading Nazi soldiers brandished Reich Credit Bank certificates with exchange values set at such levels that they could buy local produce very cheaply. Such measures were paid for with plunder and extortion, in which the Nazis imposed enormous levies for the 'services' supplied by occupying troops and received payment in labour, resources and in several cases, goldbricks.

Aly is far too committed to the implausible idea that the Nazis practised a kind of racially exclusive egalitarianism ("Nazi socialism", as he calls it). In showing how much the Nazi state came to rely on the proceeds of brutal extraction and slave labour to sustain popular acquiescence, he by no means demonstrates that German workers actually benefited from Hitler's war as his title implies. Rather, welfare programmes ameliorated a situation of severe hardship created by war. Similarly, while (according to Aly) most of the increase in taxation within Germany was paid by those with the means - the capitalist class - the overwhelming bulk of profits from the war also went to this class. War was a highly profitable investment on their part, as it often is for businesses, for whom warfare is one of the few activities that will induce them to part with a chunk of their profits. The main force of Aly's argument, however, is that German workers were not 'willing executioners' but largely bought off by a regime anxious to forestall resistance. That of course demands a further interrogation as to the state of a people so available for purchase in this way. And there is no doubt that most ordinary Germans acquiesced in the war, while millions either had knowledge of or complicity in its most barbaric expressions, from slave labour to genocide. But then it is no part of this argument that the German working class remained in a state of pristine opposition to Nazism, splendidly unaffected by its barbaric cadences, secretly in a state of permanent opposition. Rather, it is just that structurally the working class proved impossible to integrate into the Nazi dream of a racial-national community of solidarity - far more so than middle class sectionalism, for example - precisely because of the elitism that characterised Nazi ideology and practise.

Labels: capitalism, fascism, hitler, nazism, working class

Various Artists III posted by lenin

Another Friday night gig at the Tomb. Here's the irrepressibly stylish David McAlmont singing 'Yes':



David McAlmont can be found singing old jazzy love songs these days, and very nice it is too.

And this is, my friends, is filthy and gorgeous:



This one is liable to give you a dirty mind:



The last one is only available to listen to here. But it's well worth it.

Labels: various artists

"Is the White Upper Class Turning Fascist?" posted by lenin

Illuminating debate here.

Labels: elections, fascism, white upper class

The flight of the cassowary. posted by lenin

Pigs are winging through the atmosphere as I write. The Tories are not only back from the dead, not only headed to Downing Street, not only in the lead, but absolutely annihilating the once deadly New Labour electoral machine. For its part, New Labour is heading for a life-threatening crash in the ballots come the next general election. 20% behind in the latest polls and in fifth place in the Henley bye-election, Labour not only failed to keep its deposit last night, but was beaten by the Greens and the fascist BNP. Coming after a national meltdown and a humiliating loss in the heartland seat of Crewe and Nantwich, which miserably nasty campaign saw Labour swing to the right of the Tories, this result on a reasonably high turnout cannot be seen as anything but a sign of voters' determination to hammer Labour. The government is idiotically pretending otherwise, but the raucous laughter in Millbank is audible from where I am sitting.

A lot of the blame for this is being laid on Gordon Brown's beefy shoulders, and as Roobin pointed out, polling for Unison suggests that about half of voters are less likely to vote Labour because of the performance since Brown took over. There is no question that Brown has seemed to flummox at every opportunity, from the 'early election' saga to the Northern Rock fiasco. He has talked tough on the ten pence tax rate only to retreat somewhat under pressure, but even the retreat was inadequate and left people dissatisfied. He backed down rather swiftly under pressure from truckers over fuel prices, but has produced nothing to anyone's general satisfaction. They tried to talk about class in Crewe and Nantwich, but it was in the context of a risibly racist and authoritarian campaign, and it looked hypocritical coming from a party that has constantly assured us that the 'old divisions' are gone. There appears to be no sense of timing either: they have been consistently too late to recognise public outrage, too quick to dismiss opposition, hesitant and reluctant in their concessions. Brown's administration, since October last year, has seemed increasingly distant from the real world. But even when the 'Brown bounce' (RIP) was with us, the discordant notes were already sounding, as when the sepulchral successor promised 'British jobs for British workers' in front of an audience of determinedly chipper conference-goers, who cheered. And Brown's adoption of neoconservative shibboleths was one of his more bizarre introductions to the electorate. By and large, such ideas are extremely unpopular, even among a good chunk of Tories. And even the neocons in the Conservative Party aren't being lippy about it - the big theme on the Tory website today, just above the celebration of the Henley result, is not patriotism, or war, or asylum seekers, or Muslims, or even clubbing the unions. It is celebrating the 60th birthday of the NHS.

The reasoning guiding Brown's series of misfires, however, is impeccably New Labour (except for the 'early election' business, which was classical Brownite procrastination). The government has always been at pains to seem tough, but it has always been as weak as it is nasty. For example, taking a million pounds from Bernie Ecclestone then giving it back and still letting him have the policy he wanted is precisely the sort of thing that was allowed to slide in the early Blair years because voters still expected some decent policies. It would be death to Brown today. Blair did much to court the right, successfully, in his early years. His meeting with Thatcher might have even seemed bold to them, a big two fingers to trade unionists and lefties. Brown's meeting with Thatcher and his referencing of Gertrude Himmelfarb would have done little to woo a right that is convinced he is a taxaholic, red-tape wielding, red-flag hugging bureaucrat with secret socialist leanings, and it certainly came at a time when Labour voters were no longer biting their tongues and hoping for the worst to pass. The first years of Blairism were characterised by real-terms public spending cuts and 'restraint' in excess of what even the Tories would have opted for, but people forgave it because it was expected that compensatory policies of enhanced trade union rights, a minimum wage, slightly more local democracy and a big boost in public spending later on would make up for it. Today's restraint targets the poorest just when they are suffering most, just when Labour appears to have no further palliation up its sleeves, and just when the erosion of the electoral base that began under Blair has come to seem career-threatening to Labour MPs. The abolition of the ten pence tax rate comes just as child poverty is rising again, pensioner poverty is rising, inequality soars to record levels, and the cost of core goods is soaring. That was not really new: Brown had previously abolished the winter fuel allowance, which hits harder when fuel costs so much more than it did when the allowance was introduced. And the strategy of cutting taxes for those slightly better off and raising them for the poor, in the hope that the former would reward the party with votes and the latter find nowhere else to go, was straight out of the school of 'triangulation' that the government has been practising since well before it was elected. It just happened to coincide with all the accumulated ills of previous years bearing fruit. What the Lebanon crisis was to Blair, the ten pence tax rate is to Brown (albeit Brown is not likely to be forced to resign just yet).

There is of course the matter of Brown being knifed repeatedly by the ultra-Blairites who have not lost their killer instinct, (while Brown never really had one). But then, that was happening when Brown was in Number 11, and if he suffers a Caesarian death it will be because he had neither the ability nor the nous to change course. Tied to the political and fiscal strategies that he has embraced for more than a decade, he is also part of a party machine that is more or less impervious to the 'grassroots'. Just because New Labour's electoral coalition is finished doesn't mean Brown or anyone around him knows how to build an alternative coalition. Instead, heading to the polls in horrible financial state and with nothing but bad news for the electorate, they're going to spend their time trying to square that old circle of flattering businessmen and keeping the unions on board, just at the point when this seems a more distant goal than ever. New Labour is not dead, but everything that touches it is. No radical idea or movement in its orbit will survive the coming massacre. The lessons is, if you're on the Left and you want to weather this storm, stay the hell away from the Labour Party.

Labels: david cameron, gordon brown, neoliberalism, new labour, tories

lolpig posted by lenin

With apologies to lolpigs:

Labels: agent provocateur

Cost of living (up again) posted by lenin

I don't know what your weekly food bill is, but it's gone up quite dramatically over the last year:

A basic basket of a dozen essential items has soared by an average of 23 percent in the past year. For example, 12 eggs, which cost £2 last May, are now £2.92 – a 46 percent leap. The price of a bag of rice has increased by 93 percent.

A chicken costs £1.50 more than 12 months ago and bread is up 28 percent, butter 30 percent and milk 17 percent.

Food prices across the board have risen by 6.6 percent in the last year, with the cost of staple foods soaring even faster.

A typical family’s annual shopping bill has gone up by about £1,000 in the past year – that’s an extra £2.70 every day.

A thousand pounds per year is approximately £20 extra per week. For most people, myself included, that is a lot of money in a weekly budget. At the same time, the government's drive to push down workers' wages is not restricted to the public sector. What they always say is that wages drive up inflation, and so they are calling for 'restraint', the burden of which overwhelmingly falls on workers especially low paid workers. This is one reason why it is so essential that public sector workers not only strike, but strike to win. Dave Prentiss is saying the right things, but it's going to come down to the initiative of trade unionists as to whether decisive action is taken, or whether it is confined to symbolic action with the goal of slightly improving bargaining power with the government.

Labels: economy, food prices, inflation

Morbid Symptoms posted by Roobin

“The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.”

A quote from Antonio Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks: he applied it to Italy in the 1930s. I think it sheds some light on our situation today.

“Ideology” is a dirty word in mainstream politics. Loosely defined it is a collection of ideas. More precisely it is a particular point of view. Our society is dominated by class; it is a large determining factor in ideology. That’s not the beginning, middle and end, of course. There are a number of ways people are defined, by race, gender, sexuality… and so on. The point is these are the building blocs of ideology.

Ideology became dirtied for one half of mainstream politics between 1983 and 1992. A progressive series of defeats for the left and the unions in Britain were compounded by illusions in Actually Existing Socialism in the east. The collection of ideas around the Labour Party were seen to have failed. Senior Labour members took this lesson on board and adjusted. What mattered from now on was not “ideology” but “best practice”… what “works”.

What happened was the Labour Party could no longer build the alliance it thought it needed for its project, based around elections and the British state. It went off to build a wider coalition to the right of its considered natural constituency. Based on the theory of triangulation, its leaders considered traditional supporters would have nowhere else to go and so follow them. As far as they wouldn’t follow the party to the right, the leaders came up with some interesting (and deeply ideological) justifications for what they were doing. All sorts of things became “socialist”, from PFI to the Iraq war to (in one case) copyright law etc, etc...

But, after having proven themselves capable of running a neo-liberal government the Labour Party has found itself in a quandary. Neo-liberalism is a busted flush as far as the public goes. This is the case right across the world. Politicians have to build movements of consent for their policies. But, with the public so opposed to public policy this is a bit difficult. Wherever you look, in the eyes of politicians, the people have become an obstacle to get over, be it their organised refusal to work or their organised refusal to vote for certain treaties, or just their unwillingness to dignify the whole process with their vote, they keep throwing a spanner in the works.

The government is in a difficult position, so is the opposition. The Tory party’s natural ground is on the right. It pioneered neo-liberalism in Britain, and to some extent the world. It cannot build an alliance on an open neo-liberal platform. It has to head left. The Tories paint themselves green, they defend tax breaks for the poor, talk up ‘civil liberties’, they make eyes at the co-operative movement (such as it is), and so on.

Collections of ideas, points of view, have become muddled or abandoned altogether. In this situation politics becomes unstable. It is difficult for Labour to hold a hard right agenda and vice versa for the Tories. It's difficult to orient yourself when left-Labour MPs vote for internment while hard-right Tories make it a resignation matter.

Take one example, a recent poll commissioned by Unison, a union whose leadership has invested a great deal in supporting the Labour Party. It finds, due to the current government’s performance, a small majority of traditional Labour supporters are less likely to vote Labour at the next election.

On the breakdown of issues, generally speaking things are as they tend to be; with the exception of education, where the Tories fare slightly better (Note the baseline here: between 18-24% of people cannot say which party has the best policy on any issue). The Tories do well on civil liberties issues, indicating Labour is generally seen as authoritarian, enough that the Tories own authoritarian tendencies get overlooked.

With the Labour supporters considering switching at the next election the Tories figures improve sharply. They beat the Labour Party on everything except housing. They even tie on public sector pay, such has been the effect of the government’s pay deals.

Perhaps this means a shift to the right, but scroll down further. There is rising support for the proposition that public need should come before private profit.

“In principle, public services should be run by government or local authorities, rather than by private companies”: in 2000, 27% strongly agree, 2001 45% strongly agree and 2008 50% strongly agree. Taken with the people ‘tending’ to agree (29%) that makes just shy of 4/5ths of the population agreeing with the notion. Pretty much the same percentage agrees people providing public services should be employed by government or local authorities.

Add to that a near majority (49%) who regard health, welfare and education as the most important issues and there you have it, Labour supporters breaking with Labour regarding naturally left-wing issues as important and so giving their support to a right-wing party. Take that on board with all the relevant discussions about the neo-liberalism, the new imperialism and so on, you have a recipe for unstable politics. Neither the Labour Party nor the Tories will build long-term coalitions, at least not based on this snapshot. Neo-liberalism has no popular basis anymore but no large-scale, organised alternative has arisen. Without tectonic change we will have stalemate.

Gramsci's morbid symptoms rear up as populist movements (say, the movement against NHS cuts), breakaway or rebel parties such as UKIP or Respect (RIP). Be it new left or new right, they are only partial solutions to the crisis, defensive reactions rather than positive movements. The symptoms generally manifest themselves as disengagement from mainstream politics, cynicism, the rise of technocracy and corruption.

If we have trouble orienting ourselves then we need to keep open the debate about the times we are living through, where our society is headed. Considering the gap between needs and means, the solution to the crisis and the means we have at our disposal at this moment, a re-examination of the united front might be of order (I am aware this is an openended proposition).

This decade has been called an age of mass movements. Although revolutionaries have a different perspective (self-activity is liberating, movements of people are infectious and cause generalisation) the basic pact of the movement was to try to shift public opinion from underneath power, deny it democratic legitimacy and thus undermine ruling class movements (such as the drive to war in Iraq). The effect of 30 years of neo-liberalism/neo-conservatism has been to hollow out democracy. It is a deadletter, an appendix to the modern ruling class.

So future movements of people will have to have much more direct, painful economic effect. Who wouldn't agree with that, especially when there's a potentially devastating economic crisis that could mean fight or die for millions across the world? The fight against the pay freeze means a lot to trade unionists, especially in the public sector. How can we make it meaningful for the other 3/4 of the workforce not in unions?

Labels: gramsci, Politics, united front, war of position

The ladder of fundamentalism posted by lenin

I have often puzzled over the chain of connections that leads liberal Islamophobes to treat the hijab/niqab/burqa/'veil' as the first step in a sequence of associations whose culmination is terrorism. Whether it is an Observer scribe making, shall we say, inferential leaps concerning the relationship between such a garment and suicide attacks, or an open reactionary who supposes that the Human Rights Act is the first step toward Islamic law, there appears to be a set of unstated assumptions that urgently need to be explained. I have finally, I believe, hit on the answer. First of all, observe this educational slide show. The narration is supplied by Richard Burton, but as it is a silent presentation, you will just have to use your imagination.







Oh, I readily admit that I may not here have mastered the political morphology involved, but we can at least discern the missing contours of what until now has been an casually enthymematic body of, er, 'thought'. It seems that the 'veil' (in truth any garment that can be identified as specifically Muslim) contains a diabolical magic that converts nice liberal Western women into furiously repressed, militantly submissive maniacs. However, I thought a more general overview of the connections tacitly posited may be useful, so I threw this piece of shit together:



This is a road map to hell. Whichever route you take, you find yourself on the side of evil. This is, I might add, a pared down version of chart. I have excluded the route to Jimmy Saville's house, for instance. But you get the picture: arrows, squiggly lines, text boxes, and a big feckin circle, all add up to anti-Western naughtiness. Study it, learn it, and for heavens' sake stay resolute.

Labels: 'islamofascism', 'veil', islam, islamophobia, the liberal defense of murder

Pay strikes posted by lenin

Council workers have voted by a substantial majority for pay strikes this summer, following up from successful strike action by teachers and civil servants in April. 800,000 workers will be on strike, but there's no word yet as to what kind of action is going to be proposed by the national executive. I hope it's dawning on them that one day actions aren't enough - but Prentis et al are Labour men as far as I know, and are likely to face serious pressure from the government to scale it back a bit. Chancellor Alistair Darling is worried at any rate. He is quoted by the Telegraph as saying: "I certainly hope there won't be a series of strikes. Strikes very rarely achieve their goals". As if his concern here was that the unions might not succeed against his government. And the Tories are calling for an "extremely tough" stance, reinforcing the suspicion that once in office they are going to go after the big unions in a major way.

Labels: new labour, pay cuts, strike, tories, trade unions

Agent Provocateur posted by bat020

"This chap wasn't really the sort you'd expect to see shouting abuse at police officers at an anti-war demo. He was, after all, a policeman himself."

Labels: george w bush, police, protest, stop the war

George Carlin, RIP posted by lenin

George Carlin has died of heart failure.

Labels: george carlin

Beat Primer posted by Roobin

Shortly before midnight on September 4th 1957 Jack Kerouac and his partner Joyce Johnson were waiting on a street corner for delivery of the following day’s New York Times. In it was a review of Jack’s second published book On The Road, which hailed its publication as “an historic occasion”.

Kerouac’s life was changed forever by the review. He’d go to sleep that night and wake up famous. Yet, as Johnson noted in her autobiography Minor Characters, “he couldn’t figure out why he wasn’t happier than he was”.

Part of the reason was the six-year gap between the novel’s genesis and its eventual publication, during which it was edited down from its original 120-foot long manuscript. He came to regret compromising his vision for publication.

But Kerouac and the Beats have touched virtually all modern culture. Seriously. Some immediate examples:

Pop music: prime Bob Dylan, stream of consciousness lyrics with long breath lines or David Bowie’s persistent sci-fi fascination and adoption of Beat language (listen to Ziggy Stardust... and think Beat Generation). Literature: JG Ballard, William Gibson, The Liverpool Poets, Irvine Walsh, Charles Bukowski, Douglas Coupland, Hunter S Thompson to name but a few.

Method: cut and paste, recontextualising old material, dead phrases, to create something new. Add nihilism and/or anarchism a la Burroughs, what do you get? Punk. The terms “rap” and “riff”, central to popular culture today, were crucially developed by the Beats. Before the Beat Generation the riff was the obligatory part of a song. After the Beats it meant to improvise and generally build on a foundation. The Beats would meet and “rap” long, improvised, semi-poetic monologues. A fine, recorded example is Jack Kerouac’s narration to the film Pull My Daisy or Lenny Bruce’s stand up (virtually all stand up comedy comes from Bruce).

Random names and references: The Soft Machine, Steely Dan, The Subterraneans, Interzone, The Subliminal Kid, Exterminator (XTRMNTR), Howl of the Unappreciated by Lisa Simpson (the line "I saw the best minds of my generation..." has been recycled so many times), The Dharma Bums, Pretty Girls Make Graves, and, never forget, The BEATles.

I could go on.



Of the principle Beat writers Kerouac had the longest pedigree, claiming to have written his first novel aged eleven. There is still a large portion of unpublished writing from his early days. However, Kerouac didn’t make his breakthrough until he abandoned proper fiction for “spontaneous prose”. He was an excellent typist and would write continuously, sometimes for days on end, allowing his thoughts to flow directly onto the page.

Kerouac would justify this approach in mystical terms. Born into a Catholic family and spent many years exploring the grey-area between Christianity and Buddhism. He saw a link between the beatific (hence “beat”) vision and the Buddhist concept of revelation, or satori. To him writing was holy.

Mysticism was the root of Jack’s later conservatism. He saw self-emancipation as an inner journey (perhaps also a habit borne from living under the military/industrial project). When later generations took up the Beat credo of free expression, giving it a political twist, he reacted and headed rightward.

But was it that the kids were picking up on? Why did J Edgar Hoover, head of the FBI, list the three main threats to the American way of life as “communists, eggheads and beatniks”? It was what Kerouac wrote about.

On The Road is about a studious young man called Sal Paradise and his adventures in America’s underground, a self-sustaining network of junkies and jazz fanatics, homosexuals and career criminals… people pushed to the margins.



The hero of the novel is Dean Moriarty, a bisexual car thief. Like many an angelheaded hipster he’s not exactly reliable, but he’s full of life, a zest he transmits to everyone around him. Moriarty was based on Neal Cassady, an icon of two generations of counterculture, who drove Ken Kesey’s Merry Pranksters in bus around America, handing out free LSD and performing “acid tests”. Cassady was also the inspiration behind One Flew Over The Cuckoos Nest hero McMurphy.

Before On The Road polite America only heard about this world through pulp fiction and films like Reefer Madness (Burroughs’ first book, Junky, was first sold as a pulp novel, called “Confessions of an Unredeemed Junkie”). Not only were these people not deluded or depraved, to Kerouac they were modern-day saints. For a country still to go through the shock therapy of the sixties, when McCarthyism was a fresh memory, this was strong stuff.

It’s worth dwelling on McCarthyism and the Cold War in general. There is a wonderful, short passage about an encounter between Sal’s “battered boat” and a military parade headed through Washington DC. “There were B-29s, PT boats, artillery, all kinds of war material that looked murderous in the snowy grass…” The contrast is almost comic. The powerful, sleek hardware of death parading past a tiny group of raggedy, sarcastic youngsters. We see the inhuman, invulnerable machine up against fragile humanity. Luckily, humanity wins out. Last in line of the parade is a pitiful little boat. That must be Harry (Truman’s) boat, says Dean.

The end of World War Two saw the rise of two military superpowers. Despite the hope of 1945, civil society had lapsed under the military/industrial complex. As Jack and his friends were whizzing around America in cars a dying George Orwell was writing 1984, where repressive power was so overwhelming it bent truth to its will (2+2=5). Liberals (in the broadest sense) feared secrecy and repression. But, with repression for some, there was repressive tolerance for others.

The post war boom meant stabilisation, a decline in the bloody purges of the CPSU as well as the paramilitary class war in America. Social movements were quelled. The triumphant momentum of 1945 subsided. There was no longer an urgent need to exile or murder rebels. They could be picked off. Individuals who refused or were unable to find a place within the system, accept the prevailing ideology, could be safely pushed to the margins (with a degree of psychologising and pathologising). In the case of Russia, dissidents were often sectioned as insane.



In America the common caricature of the Beat was the Beatnik (a portmanteau of Beat and Sputnik). The Beatnik was a workshy coward, unfit for the factory, office or army. Nothing could have been more opposed to the average Beat. For example, the three main Beats: both Ginsberg and Kerouac served in numerous manual jobs (Kerouac once listed them in the intro to the Lonesome Traveller collection, he also served in the Merchant Navy during WW2). Although Burroughs had a trust fund he was also, at one point, a farmer.

That’s all good, but why care about On The Road, Kerouac and the Beats today? Although secrecy and surveillance dog our society we also face a contradictory but connected problem. Orwell thought we’d be suppressed by a distortion of truth and lack of information. In his Brave New World, Aldous Huxley thought we’d be swamped with information, desensitised and unable to sort trivia from significance. Revolutions in culture, technology and communication have greatly accelerated our society, bringing Huxley’s vision partway to life. One place where these two ideas meet is in political management, in spin (“it’s a good day to bury bad news”).

Society has never been more ‘democratic’ or ‘meritocratic’. We have never had greater access to information, government or power. However, the connection between people and their rulers is more carefully controlled than ever before.



We read On The Road with a different eye and ear to Kerouac’s contemporaries. On The Road is a defining moment in the birth of modern youth culture, as well as the end of literary culture. We read it for great historical flavour, as part of why we are who we are.

Labels: Beat Generation, Jack Kerouac, Literature, Pop Culture

Some more terrorism you didn't hear too much about. posted by lenin

I think we can take it that this chap was serious:

When police raided his flat they found a terrifying arsenal of weapons, including four nail bombs hidden under his bed, bullets and an assortment of bladed weapons including swords, knives and a machete, Leeds Crown Court heard. They also discovered DIY bomb manuals, a guide to how to make your own sub-machine gun and internet instructions on "how to assassinate people and get away with it by using poison".

Strange to relate, however, we have not been treated to Batman and Robin style alarms from the Home Secretary and his protégé over the urgent threat to British lives. No rolling coverage from the Beeb, no queues of 'expert' witnesses apprising viewers of what they already know, not even much attention. Yet, such plots are, unlike the imaginary ricin plot, or the filthy plan to raze the Manchester United football stadium, quite serious, and ominous. I suspect that as the far right gain respectability in the polls, their would-be paramilitary brethren will take heart and try to stimulate 'race war' with calculated atrocities that will surely outdo anything David Copeland accomplished. Cottage and his confederate had, if I remember, the largest cache of weaponisable chemicals ever hauled in the UK. We will be hearing from fascism soon enough.

Labels: bnp scum, fascism, love music hate racism, nazi, unite against fascism

McEwan's Bitter posted by lenin

Is it possible to survey Britain's most celebrated littérateurs and not find them repulsive? Take Ian McEwan, for example. Today, he is standing up for his friend Martin Amis. By his lights, Amis is maligned because of his opinions about something called 'Islamism'. "It should be possible," McEwan avouches, "to say, 'I find some ideas in Islam questionable' without being called a racist." But say so and "immediately someone on the left leaps to his feet and claims that because the majority of Muslims are dark-skinned, he who criticises it is racist." Whatever else McEwan can be accused of, he can be acquitted of any precision in his thought, right away. 'Islamism', Islam, medieval this, intolerance that, and so on and on - McEwan accessing a chain of associations in such a way as to make it obvious that he hasn't a clue what each term actually refers to. We can also dismiss any charge that he has an active imagination (as opposed to an active fantasy life), since he didn't actually think any of this up for himself - every trope was contrived for him by imperial ideologists, beginning at least 200 years ago with the emergence of doctrines of Aryanism.

But McEwan is certainly devious, or at least disingenuous. As I recall it, what Amis said was: "There’s a definite urge - don’t you have it? - to say… the Muslim community will have to suffer until it gets its house in order. What sort of suffering? Not let them travel. Deportation - further down the road. Curtailing of freedoms. Strip-searching people who look like they’re from the Middle East or from Pakistan … Discriminatory stuff, until it hurts the whole community and they start getting tough with their children." He also added a good many ruminations about the "rank and file Muslim male" (lacking intellectual curiosity), the different strands of Islam (Shi'ism romantic and dreamy, Sunnism orthodox and strict), the Muslim population (they're rutting incessantly and gaining on us), and a great deal else besides. "We are hearing from Islam", he averred. This is only a critique of 'Islamism' if, as I suspect is the case, both Amis and McEwan think 'Islamism' is nothing other than the political mode of an Islam that is univocally reactionary, intolerant, medieval...

Fittingly, McEwan also waxes sentimental about "Englishness" - as in, "this is the country of Shakespeare, of Milton, Newton, Darwin...". Don't you hear the echoes of John Major and Andrew Rosindell MP? Romantic nationalism of this variety never alights on other treasures of the past. This is also the country of Clive, and Wellington, and Castlereagh. It is the country of lithium-popping colonists in fancy dress, butchering 'coolies' and kicking their servants and wives to death. It is the country whose ruling class almost unanimously adored Hitler until he trod on their toes. It is the country of serfdom and Enclosure Acts, of state terror and slavery, the country whose noble inventions include the concentration camp and the machine gun. It is the country with more experience than any other in dehumanising the "dark-skinned", the better to brutally slaughter them. But that is the trouble. You can't descend into a senescent fantasy about "Englishness" for long before some lefty "leaps to his feet" and declares it a senescent fantasy. And if these censorious politically correct thugs succeed in their intellectual terrorism? Why then, no one will ever be able to say "this is the country of Amis, of McEwan...".

Update: McEwan's silence.

Labels: 'islamism', ian mcewan, islamophobia, pro-war 'left'

Anti-BNP Protest posted by lenin

Thousands already present at the anti-BNP protest due to kick-off soon. However, the police have been quite aggressive. A number of individuals spotted at the Bush protest have been arrested. More to come later.

Update: It has turned into a really lively event with thousands thronging the streets. The police are taking pictures of the protesters but the DJ simply advised the crowd to "stick your middle figure up to that camera right there".
Pictures and video footage will come soon.

Well, that was better than I thought it would be. Initially the turnout didn't look great, but it seems to have picked up once we got started. Lots of trade union banners, gay pride people, Muslims, a very mixed crowd and precisely the kind of microcosm of London that one would have hoped for. Whatever pressure was coming from the police at the start seems to have died down as it got underway, unless I missed something. I had to leave before the speeches and performances at the end, so anyone who stayed on can fill me in. Anyway, here's your first batch of pics. The protest started at Tooley Street near the GLA building and marched to Trafalgar Square, with music, speeches and performances going on throughout.







And here's some of the performers who played on the floats:





Here's more of the protest as it proceeded:







And it arrives in Trafalgar Square:

Labels: anti-fascism, bnp scum, love music hate racism, racism, unite against fascism

How to run a counterinsurgency posted by lenin

US military guide, from Wikileaks:

The manual directly advocates training paramilitaries, pervasive surveillance, censorship, press control and restrictions on labor unions & political parties. It directly advocates warrantless searches, detainment without charge and (under varying circumstances) the suspension of habeas corpus. It directly advocates employing terrorists or prosecuting individuals for terrorism who are not terrorists, running false flag operations and concealing human rights abuses from journalists. And it repeatedly advocates the use of subterfuge and "psychological operations" (propaganda) to make these and other "population & resource control" measures more palatable.

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

Hey, hey! posted by lenin

I've noticed that in my long periods of absence during exams, the number of visitors to the site declined quite dramatically, and it's really about time we put this in order. So...

Labels: bloggery

Public Service Announcement posted by lenin

Labels: bnp scum, far right, fascism, racism

Idiocies of the New Labour Left. posted by lenin

I found this Michael Meacher article on MediaLens, and it reminded me why I've never really trusted Meacher's 'return' to radical politics after his time in government and support for the invasion of Iraq (subsequently recanted). Entitled 'Britain's new class structure', his argument regurgitates a slightly nuanced variant of New Labour's 20-60-20 analysis of society, with an underclass comprising 20% of the population, a middle class constituting the majority of 60%, and a privileged minority of 20%. All Meacher does is fragment the upper layers, so that "Britain now has five distinct classes." Five classes in all? Do tell:

The poor, conventionally defined as those with less than 60% of median earnings, have to get by on less than £217 a week. But included with them should be the 1.5m people whose household incomes are no more than £10 above that, and constantly afflicted by insecurity.

Next come the largest class, those around the median income in Britain today of £23,600 (or £454 a week).

Ah, let me stop you right there, Michael: you're talking bollocks. Of 30.27m taxpayers in the UK, 18.5m (56%) earn below £20,000 a year (pre-tax). There are 6m taxpayers (18.2%) living on between £20-30,000 a year. So, this idea that there is a vast middling group living on 'around' £23,000 a year is flatly false. (Data usefully summarised at wiki).

Meacher doesn't do himself any favours either by focussing on currents of income rather than wealth, the kind which is highly heritable and brings income currents with it. As I've pointed out elsewhere, the bottom 50% of the population owns less than 6% of the wealth, and the bottom 75% of the population owns just over a quarter of the wealth. In other words, there is a clear majority who have precious little in terms of real property, a large minority who have enough property and privilege to be counted 'middle class', and the top 10% who own most of the wealth.

Perhaps this is too harsh. Meacher is certainly right about the extreme concentrations of wealth taking place at the very top, and I take his point to be that the government could credibly restore some of its standing by simply curtailing a few of the privileges of the uber-rich (such as tax holidays for non-doms), and that is fine as far as it goes. He is right that the majority of the population would clearly support such a policy, and even a few Tories might go along with it. It just isn't all that convincing an analysis from someone who is trying to position himself as a potential left-wing challenger to Brown, that's all.

Labels: incomes distribution, inequality, socialism, working class

Good hair day posted by lenin

Islamophobia Watch draws attention to the victory of Bushra Noah in her discrimination case. The young woman was turned down for a job at hair salon because she wears a headscarf. Now, this is a boost for workers everywhere, particularly female workers who are often the target of sexist dress code policies that insist they wear a skirt and so forth. Previous challenges to such policies have been difficult to sustain, but this lays down a precedent. So, not just a victory against blatant employer Islamophobia, but also something that working people will find useful if they want to challenge their employers on discriminatory dress codes. However, the radical firebrands at HP Sauce have been moved to eructate as follows:

Why should a hairdressing salon carry even the risk of losing business because an irrational third party who as decided that showing hair is sinful and thus must be covered up at all times wants to work in the trade?

Surely the the person making bizarre lifestyle choices based on their irrational fears and superstitions should carry the consequent risks and inconveniences - and and not expect someone else to?

This is posed as a "moral question", no less. The tradition that this argument draws on is that embodied in the legal defense of segregation. Why should businesses have to run the risk of losing business by being forced to employ blacks? Why should they have to even allow them in the store if it'll drive away good white customers? Why can't they bar customers at their own discretion? The citation of the holy profit, of the inviolable rights of property owners, is precisely in that usage. (It is, of course, still the case that those who want to preserve the legacy of segregation in the labour market argue against affirmative action and similar legislation as a form of 'reverse discrimination' - thus implying that the prevailing inequality is meritocratic). The interesting thing about this is that such arguments were answered by civil rights legislators, who accepted the narrow terms of the discussion. They pointed out that public accomodations, shops and so forth, were not merely private property but of such a kind that they both were and had to be open to the public. This property is inserted into market relations, which is a sphere of social life that ought not to be restricted on the basis of race or any other irrelevant factor. The tormented souls at HP Sauce are appealing to a conception of property rights that has historically been tailored for the defense of white supremacy, and which would sit as comfortably in the literature of the BNP today.

Labels: hp scum, islamophobia, muslims, property rights, working class

Liberal imperialists: send Blackwater into Darfur! posted by lenin

According to the Financial Times:

Mia Farrow, the actress and activist, has asked Blackwater, the US private security company active in Iraq, for help in Darfur after becoming frustrated by the stalled deployment of a United Nations peacekeeping force.

Ms Farrow said she had approached Erik Prince, founder and owner of Blackwater, to discuss whether a military role was either feasible or desirable.

Labels: darfur, humanitarian intervention, sudan, the liberal defense of murder

Curious analogy posted by lenin

Munira Mirza of the Sp!ked/RCP crowd, and co-author of the phoney Islam-bashing Policy Exchange report last year, defends Boris Johnson's decision to remove the anti-racist component of London's annual 'Rise' festival in the following terms: "We don't have anti-racist fireworks on New Year's Eve and we don't need to organise an anti-paedophile concert to prove our moral credentials on the issue." Let me get this straight. Over 5% of London voters selected a far right racist candidate for mayor. The BNP has councillors across the country, and has received well over 100,000 votes in local elections. In some areas it has received stupendous majorities. And it's not just the BNP. The National Front, more explicitly Nazi than the BNP, made five digit votes in London. This is all in the context of a rising arc of racist violence in the UK. If militant paedophiles had garnered this level of support in the context of a surge of child-molestation, would there be carnivals in the park with a subtle, non-too-explicit message against raping children? Dare I say there might have been even more than that?

Labels: bnp scum, boris johnson, london, racism

The double squeeze posted by lenin

When the economy tanks, prices are supposed to go down as demand slumps. The trouble is that prices are soaring, particularly in the commodities that people most need. I expect many people will, like me, have noticed the weekly food bill going up. Food prices have apparently risen 20%. Alongside food prices, the latest news is that energy prices are set to go up by 40% this winter. This compounds already existing rises in fuel prices, and it also comes at a time when New Labour has scrapped the winter fuel allowances for pensioners. At the same time, the Bank of England is determined the keep interest rates high and even considered raising them this month. The tight credit market drives up the real cost of borrowing as it is. One effect is to drive would-be home buyers off the market and force them to seek rented accomodation. That's driving up rent already, with an overall rise of 6% (a figure that conceals even sharper rises in particular locations). The Bank of England raises interest rates to curb inflation, but the theory is that such inflation results in normal circumstances from an overheating economy or 'excessive' wage demands. This inflation, however, is the result of speculators moving from riskier margins to blue chip stocks, as the subprime collapse undermines the allure of high-risk, high-profit investments. So, what the Bank is actually doing is knowingly restricting consumption when times are already tough. The signs are that they will drive interest rates up further. So, we're being hammered from every direction.

The only hope is the kind of collective resistance that will be displayed in the public sector pay strikes this summer. Note that the Shell fuel tanker workers won a 14% pay increase as a result of their strike, causing the CBI to worry that there will be a summer of discontent. In the last year alone, strikes in the public sector have risen by 25%. That's a trend that is likely to continue, although those calling for tougher militancy will face the argument from New Labour supporting union leaders that they have to scale back the action in order to do least harm to the government given the prospects of a Tory victory in 2010. The unions have got precious little from the government for previous acquiescence, and the Brown administration has moved far enough to the right to given an opening to its Left for David Davis of all people - he, who would restore the death penalty and isn't too hot on gay rights. What is more, when people feel helpless and desperate they can very easily swing further to the right - inaction on the part of organised labour may actually help hand the Tories a victory. Nonetheless, the argument will be made and heard, and the contest will then be between loyalty to Labour - eroding rapidly, but still quite strong among some - and the desperate need to pay the bills.

Labels: economy, energy, interest rates, prices, profits, strikes

What they have done to Somalia. posted by lenin

Compared to 4 million Iraqi refugees, only a tiny minority of which are actually taken care of by the countries chiefly responsible for their predicament, over 700,000 refugees from Somalia may seem relatively small. But this is the figure for Mogadishu alone, and the US-UK war on Somalia, waged through the Ethiopian client-state has been escalating, such that the UN has been compelled to declare the crisis there "worse than Darfur". There are some 2.6m Somalis on the brink of starvation and a further million is expected to be added to that figure by the end of the year. The Independent has found deep complicity between the UK government and war crimes in Somalia. For example, British aid to Ethiopia has doubled since 2005, presumably to held it cope with the burden of de facto occupation. And this Channel 4 documentary shows British support for many of those suspected of the worst crimes in the country. Aside from the spate of attacks on civilians, and the routine US air strikes (against 'Al Qaeda', don't you know), there is the usual run of looting from aid agencies and attacks on the deliverers of such aid. But the operations of AFRICOM, probably the main vector of US involvement in this combat, merely updates a more direct exertion by CENTCOM over fifteen years ago.

In the early 1990s, Somalia was a test-bed for 'humanitarian intervention'. This intervention did not involve overthrowing a dictatorship or stopping a genocide in motion. The early remit of Operation Restore Hope was, putatively, to overcome a famine which was attributed to political anarchy and state failure. The intervention notoriously ended in massive bloodshed, with US troops responsible for grave offenses against the citizens they were purportedly defending. In some popular accounts, (this is a representative sample), the reason for this is that the mission was turned over to the UN in 1993 and was broadened into a 'nation-building' exercise, which meant taking on General Aideed and other hostile forces in military combat. In another account, by Walter Clarke and Jeffrey Herbst (the former was Deputy Chief of Mission at the US Embassy in Somalia during Operation Restore Hope) told Foreign Affairs readers that in fact the nation-building component was implicit from the beginning, and that it was forced on the UN as fait accompli by the United States government rather than forced on US troops by the idealistic UN (and at any rate, US troops were not under UN authority). Clarke and Herbst have it that the mission still "saved thousands of lives", regardless of the evident calamity of its later stages, and maintain that the real problem was the 'schizophrenia' of both Bush and Clinton administrations, who committed themselves to a humanitarian discourse without properly appraising the corollaries of such an enterprise. If this were the range of relevant debate - which seems to break down into the familiar dichotomy of 'realists' vs 'idealists' - we could just end the discussion here. But let's just look at what in fact transpired.

The political background is the breakdown of the Siad Barre regime which, though it had built up great popular momentum in anti-famine campaigns through the 1970s, had become straightforwardly a corrupt and authoritarian one by the time it lost the war against Ethiopia in 1978. Having previously aligned to the USSR, it sought the tutelage of the US, abandoned any nominal commitment to socialism and national unity, relied on clan affiliation as the base of its support, and was utterly ruthless in decimating the opposition. Given the divide-and-rule tactics of the Barre administration, the insurgency that developed was also organised along clan lines. International humanitarian aid sharpened the conflict, as the government was able to distribute it selectively to its allies in the combat. By 1991, Barre was overthrown, but several dynamics had already been set in motion by the war. For example, the agriculturally rich riverine areas, inhabited by historically oppressed and poorly armed minorities, had attracted warring parties who could sustain themselves by looting. So, there was a war economy in place. Those who overthrew Barre maintained equivalent power relations, so there were grounds for continuing war. And the minority clans were last to receive official aid. As those from 'ruling' clans such as the Darod fled in anticipation of reprisals and purges, the refugee population soared and villages found themselves inundated by populations they could not support. So, there were food shortages, and already a great deal of resentment and distrust of international aid agencies. And some social layers came to rely on the plunder that had developed in the war, so banditry became a prominent form of subsistence. Former government forces continued to counter the new ruling forces, divided between General Aideed and 'Interim President' Ali Mahdi Mohamed, and sometimes unleashed vicious 'vengeance' against 'disloyal' areas, which included campaigns of rape and murder. It is a cliche, but a roughly accurate one in this case, to say that no side in the war was virtuous. In fact, the depredations of 'both sides' contributed to the famine that struck for 18 months during 1991 and 1992.

Somalis did not wait passively for American or UN forces to arrive. They responded to the overthrow of Barre by setting up independent organisations to express their interests and manage relief. One such was the Somali Red Crescent Society which, together with the Red Cross, engaged in a massive aid effort. That aid was delivered to approximately 2 million people at the height of the effort. A huge portion of the aid was of course looted, and those delivering it were at risk of being attacked by armed forces. Aside from looting, rent extraction was rife as hauliers and others involved in the delivery process extracted high prices for their services. Notably, during the worst period of the famine, the UN declined to invest much aid in the country, and generally remained aloof from political efforts to negotiate a united government of some variety. When it did deliver aid, it tended to cut out or ignore Somali staff. As Alex de Waal points out in Famine Crimes, this tendency to simply overlook Somalis in operations supposedly designed to help them carried over from the food distribution efforts to the military occupation of the country by the US, who never expected General Aideed's war against the US to get the level of support that it did.

By December 1992, the UN had estimated half a million deaths from famine in Somalia, with 4.5 million people in desperate need. This state of affairs provided the backdrop for an experimental post-Cold War intervention by the first Bush administration, and it was in the last month of 1992 that the first of 25,000 US troops began to arrive. Among Americans, it was initially a popular intervention by an increasingly unpopular presidency, since it seen as a simple relief effort.
In truth, as Alex de Waal has written, the operation was launched as the famine was concluding. The main cause of death was increasingly disease, particularly malaria, but the occupiers turned up without any anti-malaria programme. The UN Special Envoy, Mohamed Sahnoun, wrote that the actual aid programme that the UN disbursed was so limited and delayed that it actually became counterproductive. The intervention had far more to do with testing out the emerging doctrine of 'humanitarian intervention' than relieving needful Somalis. This should be understood in the context of the US managing 'transitional' societies in the former USSR and of course its attempt to reshape the former Yugoslavia, which was taking place at the same time.

In a way, the aid operation - supposedly the purpose of the US dropping in - swiftly became auxiliary to the military one, in which rebels were attacked and Somalis disarmed by US forces on the streets. Similarly, the UN began in early 1992 to try and negotiate a political settlement, which resulted in a plan for a Transitional National Council (TNC) on 27 March 1993 - although if Clarke's testimony is accurate, this was all driven by Washington. The previous day, the US had pushed through UN Security Council Resolution 814, which gave the new UN authority extraordinarily wide-ranging powers and remit, without actually saddling the occupying forces with the status of occupation armies (which would burden them with the legal responsibilities of occupation, including building infrastructure and protecting civilians). The United Task Force (UNITAF), effectively a US occupation force with tiny contingents from supporting countries, ran the operation from December 1992 until May 1993, when authority was handed over to the UN mission, UNOSOM. When UNOSOM took control, all US forces aside from the logistical ones, were independent of the UN's command structure.

The US authorities had spent the first few months of their involvement siding with General Aideed, and even attacked his rivals on several occasions. They did allow General Morgan, a rival of Aideed, to attack and occupy the port city of Kismayo, which in fact led many to conclude that the US was supporting Morgan. When Somalis protested against the UN, by contrast, they were shot at and several killed. However, the US had changed tack by May, deciding to marginalise Aideed rather than rely on him as an ally, he was quickly the leading figure in an anti-occupation insurgency. As the UNOSOM mission came into increasing combat with Aideed and the Sudanese National Army that he represented, Aideed used Radio Mogadishu to broadcast against the UN. In June 1993, the UN raided the station, claiming that the place was a weapons depository, which resulted in 17 Pakistani soldiers being ambushed and killed. The response was a search-and-destroy operation by the United States, beginning in August with the arrival of Delta Force and Army Rangers. There followed three months of intense urban warfare by no means characterised by a humanitarian impulse. This culminated in a notorious battle near the Olympic Hotel in October 1993, in which the US lost severely - the topic of 'Black Hawk Down'. What is not usually discussed in the films and hit books is the fact that the occupation armies had been treating the civilian population with contempt. African Rights published reports of Belgian troops murdering and torturing civilians, which allegations were dismissed until soldiers started to issue blunt confessions. In fact almost every component of the patchwork UNOSOM force was implicated in such crimes. These were different in character from the war crimes of the US, however: the former were not planned or part of a military strategy, while the latter were. Among them were a US-led mission to attack a hospital where it was supposed General Aideed might be, which resulted in patients being slaughtered as helicopter missiles rained down. Another was an attack on a civilian meeting of Aideed's political movement, which resulted in 54 deaths. In fact, US helicopters regularly opened fire on crowds, not as a result of the intrinsic evil of the pilots or even their superiors, but as a necessary dynamic of a war in which the US found itself increasingly opposed to the majority of the Somali population. As de Waal writes:

One thing that the us and un never appreciated was that, as they escalated the level of murder and mayhem, they increased the determination of Somalis to resist and fight back. By the time of the 3 October battle, literally every inhabitant of large areas of Mogadishu considered the un and us as enemies, and were ready to take up arms against them. People who ten months before had welcomed the us Marines with open arms were now ready to risk death to drive them out.

Since it is always raised, it is worth addressing the argument that, at any rate, UNITAF was of some help in opening up supply lines and distributing food. Already, this is problematic because of the way aid interacted with the war dynamic, but even so the expectation created by the US at the time was that 2 million lives would be saved. In fact, the estimate of the US Refugee Council is that 25,000 lives at most were saved by the variety of food and medical aid that was actually delivered. A non-militarised aid operation working alongside, rather than against Somalis, drawing on their knowledge and relying on their leadership, would have achieved similar results - perhaps better results, and without the need for mass murder. It is certainly true that delivering food aid in a timely fashion and on the basis of local knowledge would reduce food prices and thus alleviate some of the problems contributing to the war. But any relief operation was always subordinate to ulterior concerns and ultimately thwarted by the chaos and brutality inflicted by the US on the country. The reason why Somalia is officially considered a failure is because the US did not succeed in creating a client-regime that would cheerfully implement IMF dispensations. The response to the emergence of the Islamic Courts Union, the first stable and relatively popular government Somalia had experienced in some time, has been to revive that attempt but this time without American troops in the line of fire, and with a narrative of civilizational contest rather than 'humanitarian intervention'. Instead of Belgian, Italian, Pakistani and Moroccan troops torturing and murdering and raping civilians under a US-led mandate, the Ethiopian Army has been charged with this vital task. Thousands have died already, and what was an improving situation has become a catastrophic one. That is what can be done to Somalia in relative invisibility, and in the high-octane racist climate of the 'war on terror'.

Labels: 'war on terror', africom, mogadishu, somalia, US imperialism

Fallujah's legacy posted by lenin

The media chorus is unmistakeable, and obscene. Iraq now looks more hopeful than ever, they crow. Iraq is back on its feet, and terrorists are finally being driven to the margins. One could go on at nauseating length. The vilest extreme of this tendency is the extollment of Fallujah as the supreme example of such victory: once crawling with evildoers, this new haven of civility and neighbourly conduct shows what can be accomplished with gravel in the guts. In fact, this sort of depraved propaganda began in 2006, at the height of the US-incited sectarian warfare in Iraq, when American military officials began to laud Fallujah as a safe haven for the embattled Sunni population (on whom the Badr Organisation had just been sicced).

Let me just recount the salient details of what was done to Fallujah. Prior to April 2004, there had been a growing military conflict between Fallujans and the occupation forces, particularly after a massacre of peaceful demonstrators outside occupation headquarters. That conflict culminated in the capture and public defilement of four mercenaries, all of whom were carrying out the functions of the army in a privatised form. These modern day imperial adventurers were rapidly defined as innocent civilians, when in fact they were defending US trucks and outposts. Mercenary operators are not well-behaved mothers' boys when they're in Iraq: we've seen enough footage of them to know that, and infer a great deal more. It is a telling sign of how hated the mercenaries are that a recent malarial infection that spread throughout Fallujah was named 'Blackwater' by residents. At any rate, the US subsequently planned a siege of the city, but - despite killing hundreds in a few days and committing serious war crimes, including the bombing of a hospital - they were unable to keep control, and eventually had to cut an ad hoc withdrawal deal, leaving effective authority in the hands of local notables. (We now know for that Bush and his cabinet were fully planning a complete blitz in April 2004. Bush's pep talk to his cabinet on 6 April is reported by Lt Gen Ricardo Sanchez: "Kill them! Be confident! Prevail! We are going to wipe them out! We are not blinking!'") They continued to carry out raids and bomb attacks, but it wasn't until after the November 2004 election victory that their blitzkrieg resumed. They decided to order out the civilian population and relentlessly bombed the city in order to 'encourage' the evacuation. They shut off the water and electricity and started to pound the place, with weapons including white phosphorus, until thousands were dead. With over 150,000 refugees living in tents outside the city, US troops overran the territory and shot at anything that moved. They considered any boy older than ten to be a potential insurgent. They destroyed half of the homes, at least.

Having blasted, fried or shredded thousands to death and thousands more to injury, having destroyed tends of thousands of homes and mosques and schools, they put the city under a strict curfew, with a biometric lockdown and forced labour. They set up Camp Mercury on the outskirts of the city and used it as a base for torturing prisoners - which procedure the Marines referred to as 'fucking' them. There is more to say on this, but for the moment, let's consider the strategy employed here. I summarised the findings of one extensive report on America's urban warfare strategy in Iraq here. To condense, the strategy appears to involve seven key points: encircle and close off the city; forcefully evacuate those who remain; cut off food, water and electricity; confine reporters and block media coverage; massive bombardment; conduct an urban assault, using sniper fire, and put survivors through violent searches; attack hospitals, ambulances and other medical facilities.

This kind of intense urban warfare was planned and meditated on for years in advance. In a piece for the journal Environment and Planning in November 2005, the geographer Stephen Graham recounts a glitzy event he was asked to attend in Haifa in 2001. It turned out to be stuffed full of IDF and Marine Corps figures, senior US military planners, RAND corporation clerks and such. He recalls:

We were sickened by the euphemistic and obfuscatory language where every discursive trick was employed not to call a killing `a killing'. We were amazed to discover that US, Israeli, and British `experts' in this emerging field of urban warfare were such close friends that they seemed to constitute a transnational social body, orchestrating the intense exchange of technology, experience, training, and experience between the three nations. We were nauseated at the bellicose technophiliac masculinities, where systematic repression and state killing were portrayed in glossy PowerPoint slides with a palpable sense of fascination, even excitement.

He goes on:

Strikingly, the tricks of the trade of such warfare have, since 2001, quickly morphed to once again become central platforms of state geopolitical power. Fueled by a paranoid sense that global urbanisation is somehow working to undermine the technoscientific, disciplinary, and killing abilities of imperial nation-states, military urban specialists, such as those who attended the Haifa event, are helping to rethink radically how the United States, the other Western powers, and Israel wage war. The symptoms and results of such a transformation are now all too clear. In fact, they are difficult to escape. There are the demonisation and the calls to annihilate cities that symbolise resistance to colonial power; the masking of atrocities through an all-encompassing `terrorist' discourse; and the Orientalist `Othering' of Arab urban places and their inhabitants. Then there are the assaults on dense cities with helicopter gunships, cluster bombs, and artillery; the `psychological operations' that involve the bombing and targeting of journalists who have the temerity to show the resulting carnage on the ground; and the voyeuristic consumption of city-killing for pleasure and entertainment in news, films, novels, and video games (some produced by the militaries themselves). Finally, there are the political calls to destroy, `cleanse', or `pacify' aberrant, dehumanised `terrorist nest' cities, the inhabitants of which, it is endlessly implied, might easily project unimaginable terror onto Western cities if not annihilated.

These combined techniques of repression and representation were unmistakeably deployed in Fallujah (as Graham goes on to show in his article), so what the media pundits are in fact celebrating is a masterpiece of grand urban terror and repression, the pre-meditated destruction of a city in which up to 100,000 civilians were still living.

The results of the attack are still emerging, incidentally. One side-effect has been a surge in birth deformities, probably resulting from the chemical weapons, including depleted uranium and white phosphorus, used by the US in the area. But the main effect of the seige was the intended one: the complete subordination of Fallujah's population to martial law. What is currently lauded as 'stability' is in fact a harsh despotism run by former Republican Guards who round up suspects arbitrarily, then beat and torture them. It is a city riddled with blast walls and checkpoints, and any imam who preaches against the occupation is ordered to shut down. It is a place where the mere suspicion of insurgency can result in your fingernails being pulled out as you are beaten up. A city in tatters, a "big jail" still under biometric lockdown, still without regular electricity or clean water (which one reason is why malaria is spreading). And you can do all this to a city and call it progress because of the success of the preparatory propaganda. Not only was the whole terrain suffused with evil (a 'terrorist nest'), but it was home to the supreme evil-doer himself, 'Satan', according to Colonel Gareth Brandl. It is telling that in the WaPo piece linked above, US military propaganda, which held that the city was under the control of 'Al Qaeda', is recited by the Awakening Council cretin in charge of the place. He knows perfectly well that it's nonsense, but also knows that American newspapers will believe anything unless its officially denied. Because that is what it takes for what is sure to be recorded as one of the crimes of the century, giving expression to a brutal doctrine of urban warfare, to become a success story.

Labels: fallujah, iraq, iraqi resistance, war crimes

My house, Our home. posted by lenin

Guest post by Dave S.

On the one hand, there are just too many houses. We've had to put up with a booming decade of TV egging us on to buy and to let and to become rich beyond belief, but big capital has gone one further than that distant acquaintance of a distant acquaintance who packed in his job to do up old flats. They've been on a building spree, throwing themselves into mill conversions and futuristic towers that have all come onto the market at the same time. And so, flooding the market after a decade of pushing up prices, they can't sell them. In Manchester and Birmingham it's the same story, one of those crises of over-production that make capitalism so absurd. Now, says the editor of Building magazine, "what they tend to do is to get to a stage and make the buildings watertight so they don't deteriorate" and cut their losses there.

One the other hand, there are just not enough houses. George Monbiot reckons we need another three million, based on research from Shelter and from testimony like this:

Wendy Castle moved into her flat in the Trellick Tower in west London when her eldest child was a baby. He?s now 16, and she has three others between 13 and 2. But her flat has only two bedrooms. She sleeps in one of them with her two youngest children. The room is completely filled by beds. On one side they are jammed against the window, which no longer shuts properly. On the other they are pressed against the heater, which can?t be used because of the fire risk. Her two oldest boys share an even smaller room.

The lack of "affordable" housing was one of the main issues in the London mayoral election, and it's also one of New Labour's principle motives for immigrant-bashing. Margaret Hodge MP earned the censure of even the Tory press last year for asserting "the legitimate sense of entitlement felt by the indigenous family" over the needs of spongeing immigrants. This, in the heartland of "no Dogs, no Blacks, no Irish", in a target constituency of the BNP neo-Nazis, who are surprising no-one by doing quite well out of the housing crisis despite hating council homes and their tenants.

Behind the familiar tidal-wave-of-immigrants scapegoat lurks a familiar enough culprit for the dilapidation of council housing. Just as private companies are being more and more closely "involved" with health and education, so too are large scale stock transfers moving social housing into the private sector. The associations taking over our council houses - such as New Charter where I grew up, and Eastlands where I'm living now - tend to be ostensibly not-for-profit, at least for now, but this changes nothing when they operate in a market driven by profitability. They still have to give a return on investments - a profit for the banks - and accordingly run their homes just like a private landlord: lowering standards, increasing rents, evicting undesirables.

However, this goes beyond the standard neoliberal pillaging of the public sector. Shelter identifies the right-to-buy as a major driver of the housing crisis, and for all that they've been out of the news since the 1980s we should definitely take these small scale stock transfers as seriously as the large, for their political ramifications go way beyond. People remember Margaret Thatcher's annihilation of the unions as a political force - and are right to be encouraged by recent signs of a recovery from this attack - but just as important in her arsenal against a working class politic was the right to buy.

We are mostly right to deride the word "aspirational" as media code for "middle class", but this misses a crucial nuance. To be an aspirational voter is to be an individualist, a lonely robot, a Willie or Linda Loman mortgaging themselves out to better build up their own little place in the world, and reshaping the working class (well, a section thereof) into this image was an important part of Thatcher's mission. The formulation that "any man who, beyond the age of 26, finds himself on a bus can count himself as a failure" didn't just serve as an excuse to sell off public transport, it served to stigmatize the use of collective facilities and gear up our aspiration towards a private mode of transport. Likewise, when each put in charge of our own little corner, we are much less inclined towards collective struggle.

That being determines consciousness is a cliché of the far left, but the Thatcherite right understood it at least as well as we did, and were better equipped to act upon it, changing our economic situation to undermine our politics. The home-owning consciousness starts with a reluctance to strike lest we endanger our mortgage payments, and ends with the dismissal of our collective interests, with the feeling that "we are all middle class now". We were not, of course, suddenly middle class - most of us still had a relationship with the means of production far less ambiguous than this implies, and a lower income too - but a significant minority of us were nonetheless being taught by our mortgages how to aspire. And it was this, as much as the destruction of the NUM, that set back the workers' movement for a generation.

This whole process, however, depends on the market as a reliable manager of housing. Which, as is surely being proved beyond all doubt by current events, it is not. The current economic crisis was not caused by the housing markets, but it has manifested itself here more than anywhere else. Waves of credit-fuelled speculation push the price up so that no-one can afford to buy a house, and then the bubble bursts so that no-one can afford to sell a house. And so do we enter the phase of creative destruction, in which capitalism crushes the very aspirations that its political representatives had put so much effort into cultivating.

Where once they were ushered into the housing market with welcoming arms and "generous" subsidies, people are now being chased out by mortgage foreclosures. The alarming increase in home reposessions is far from the whole story.; the trade fairs and seminars that promoted getting rich quick out of buying to let have now switched their focus towards the sell-and-rent-back market. Hark! Ye property investors, desperate mortgage-holders will sell their homes to you at a massive discount to avoid the repo men, and then pay you rent for the privelege of staying there (and don't worry, you can always evict them after a year if someone else seems more profitable). Others still are going for IVAs and the like, which can sometimes help but which also add another layor of creditors seeking a profit at the debtors' expense.

Mightn't these homeowners prefer to be bailed out by an accountable, public body that would put tenants before profits? Mightn't the construction companies struggling to sell their accumulated inventories have difficulty arguing against a massive compulsory purchase order from the government, on behalf of those eternally waiting for a council house? Mightn't we question too the second and third homes of those in the "plutonomy sector"? Mightn't there be a case, in short, for nationalising a huge swathe of the nation's housing stock? There's certainly an environmental case - the market is never going to meet even the government's tame targets for sustainable homes, let alone deliver the kind of efficiency drive that peak oil and climate change demand - but I think that the political case might strike a chord at the moment too.

The campaign to defend council housing is a very good start, but this might be the time to get us through the housing crisis and to reunite ourselves against the divisions that Thatcher and her successors have sown among us; the time, in other words, to demand council housing.

Labels: defend council housing, homelessness, housing, mortgages, rent

Bush Protest posted by lenin

Since I expect that the news isn't going to mention today's protest, I thought I'd post some pics and footage for you. I must admit, I was too tired to climb up on the railings and get a good panorama, so you'll have to check out the other sites. A few thousand turned up, not bad for a Sunday evening, but not enough to break through the police lines and get into Downing Street - although there was a brief attempt by some of the naughtier elements, culminating in the heinous theft of a steel barrier. Here's some pictures to begin with:






More later.

Labels: george w bush, london, protest, US imperialism

Defending asylum seekers posted by lenin

This marvellous piece explores the resistance to the government's asylum policies by ordinary people on estates across Britain.

Labels: asylum seekers, immigration, solidarity, working class

Caption Competition posted by lenin

Labels: angela merkel, caption competition, george w bush

Israeli settlers beat up Palestinian woman posted by lenin

Watch this. One cannot help being reminded of the Klan here. As far as the colonists are concerned, this Palestinian woman overstepped the line merely by herding her sheep too near to their 'settlement' - thus refusing to accept that her land should be illegally annexed. And so they sent out a punishment squad, in masks, with sticks, and they beat her and her husband and her nephew.

Labels: colonialism, Israel, palestine, settlers, west bank, zionism

42 Days Later posted by lenin

42 days. But only 37 rebels. And nine crucial votes from the hard right DUP. Without the support of Peter Robinson and his dour, petit-bourgeois party of Orange ascendancy, the government could not have won this vote today. They say the DUP has been bought - no doubt, but how much would you have to give these fuming reactionaries to get them to back extended internment? And though the government won the vote, I have not yet detected a coherent argument for a 42 day detention limit. Bear in mind the obvious harms that result from detention without trial already. One example emerged very recently when Rizwan Sabir and Hicham Yezza were arrested under the Terrorism Act 2000. Sabir spent six awful days in custody over a piddling issue that ought to have been resolved without any police involvement. With the promulgation of spying on campuses and in workplaces, it is almost certain to be the case that innocent people are banged up. And incidentally, even those who aren't innocent don't need to be detained without trial. The main argument of New Labour has been that this is what the police want. In truth, not not all senior police officers agree with the policy. And at any rate, it is not unknown for the police to want to expand their powers: it doesn't necessarily follow that they should get what they want. One argument, offered by an RUSI commentator, goes roughly like this: the police need 42 days to build a case, otherwise they will have to bring it to prosecution before all the facts are assembled, and then a guilty person may walk free. This is frankly insulting to one's intelligence. The police should already have substantial evidence before they arrest someone, and it isn't good enough to say 'we couldn't let them continue with their plans and place people at risk'. If there are known plans, the police and intelligence services can clearly act on it when the threat becomes obvious. There is also a subsidiary argument, presented as the main one, which is that the current arrangements are a shambles because they lack accountability - quite, but that doesn't make the argument for lengthening the duration of detention without trial.

We, of course, are at a decided disadvantage. We are not privy to the minute details of policing, or counter-terrorism operations. Consequently, we are encouraged to take the police's word for it on such matters, and this is why New Labour is insistent on citing police opinion. Nonetheless, we have ample evidence to go on. Internment is not only harmful to those it targets - it doesn't work. The vast majority of those arrested are never tried for anything, and most of those who do face trial are brought to court for non-terrorist offenses. This was the case when it was used against the IRA in the 1970s, and it is the case today. When internment was introduced in Northern Ireland, it was actually against the advice of Whitehall advisers and the head of the army in the occupied territory - not because they had moral qualms, they just knew it wouldn't work. The government pressed ahead, regardless, and produced what is now widely regarded as one of the worst policies of the - oh god save us all - 'Troubles' (like, kneecappings and bombings just left us all a bit troubled by the experience).

And let us not forget the global 'security' matrix into which this policy slots. The government has co-operated with torture flights, and has permitted extradition even where it is known that someone might end up in Guantanamo or some other hellhole. I read recently that the US was using a system of floating prisons, so that they can 'fuck' the prisoners - ie torture them - without anyone being around to hear the screams. The Tory opposition, of course, rests on an appeal to nationalism and on English traditions of liberty, a rhetorical tic that goes back to the 'Glorious Revolution'. And they are entirely opportunistic in their position, having spent years backing the government's worst measures. This is, however, a much deeper problem. The 'war on terror' has been resisted and opposed, sometimes quite effectively, but its assumptions are regnant in the political class, and it is as part of opposition to that war that we ought to defend civil liberties. The opposition parties say they expect the House of Lords to send the law back, but parliament will force it through. The only possible basis for beating this organisationally is within the milieu of the antiwar movement, not in any of the houses of parliament.

Labels: 'war on terror', civil liberties, islamophobia, torture

Herrenvolk culture posted by lenin

This is just a quick montage made up of pictures I gleaned from various books. First the imperial sales pitch:






Now, the pomp and majesty of the democratic-minded imperialists:



Now for humanitarian imperialism:



And who is fit for self-government?:



Clearly not the untermenschen:

Labels: british empire, imperial ideology, racism, US imperialism, white supremacy

65 hour working week posted by lenin

I've just been told by a friend in Europe that the EU's employment ministers have forced through a 65 hour working week:

Following 3 years of tough negotiations, the Employment Ministers of EU member states have reached an agreement to allow for a work week of up to 65 hours or more. After long talks and with France and Italy changing their stance under Sarkozy and Berlusconi, a political agreement was reached on a 13-hour working day. On-call time is divided into active non active, with only the latter being remunerated.

Employers will be able to opt-out from the 48-hour working week, allowing for the working time to be extended based on an individual agreement with employees.

The law states that employees can 'choose' to work up to 65 hours a week, which in practise means that they will face the choice between doing so and not having employment.. This has been reported in the British press as "EU sets max work week at 48 hours, Britain keeps opt-out". Actually, British workers wouldn't experience much change because the New Labour government has always insisted on the Tory opt out clause. And you do have to sign the opt out agreement if you want to work for many big businesses, or even a temp agency. Many already work longer than 13 hours a day, including NHS workers, and Britain has long been the most overworked country in Europe. Nonetheless, the EU has set to level up, rather than levelling down, as the New Labour catechism has it. And this is a big set back for workers across Europe, especially for those in the labour movement who thought that the EU represented some kind of progress for workers. This offers Sarkozy a chance, for example, to further 'reform' the 35 hour week. He tried to slip out a suggestion that the 35 hour week would be abolished at the beginning of the year, but the uproar from unions forced him to back down. What Sarkozy has been unable to do by law, the employers will presumably try to do piecemeal.

Labels: 65 hour week, europe, working class

How do you become "Britain's top Muslim"? posted by lenin

Apparently it is possible to become "Britain's top Muslim". I would like to know how this can happen, and will therefore be awarding special Tomb brownie points to whoever can tell me in no more than 2 million words what the procedure is. Bear in mind that wit and insight does count at the Tomb - it just doesn't count for much.

Labels: islamophobia, muslims, the sun

Pretzel-eating invasion monkey to visit London posted by lenin

Don't forget the Bush visit, folks. As those of you who get the Stop the War Coalition's newsletters know, the march planned against Bush's visit has been banned. Now, what is it about the Stop the War Coalition that makes them want to keep trying to ban our marches like this? Why do they have to keep testing us? Do they just want to see if we really mean it this time, or if we're just taking the piss? Less crudely put, that could actually be the answer: they really want to see if they can break us, if we really are in decline as the newspapers say. I don't see this tactic working, of course: they'd have to nick Tony Benn, Steve Bell, Jeremy Corbyn MP, probably a few other MPs and trade union leaders; and they're probably going to find a sizeable turnout for a Sunday evening. I suggest you get down there - this Sunday, 5pm, Parliament Square. If any of you doesn't show up, you better either be dead or in another country. Or both.

Labels: george w bush, london, protest, stop the war coalition

Filmkritik posted by lenin

"The second wave of American films about the war came in the early 1980s. Most notably First Blood (1982) Uncommon Valor (1983) and Missing in Action (1984) looked and sounded completely different from the films of the first wave. In terms of content, these new treatments, focusing entirely upon the plight of American veterans in the United States and those supposedly still being held by Hanoi, were unapologetic in their revisionism. For one thing, they took the POW/MIA myth as fact, with American viewers even returning to Southeast Aasia to rescue POWs in the case of Uncommon Valor and Missing in Action (each spawning sequels). By such means, America learned that its Vietnam veterans not only hated the evil Asians who were still holding their buddies hostage, but abhorred their own government, which continued to deny - and even cover up - the very fact that those buddies were prisoner.

"One irony of the principle POW films is that they made a part of the argument that I am making: specifically, that the war with Vietnam was still going on ... after 1975, through the 1980s, and well into the 1990s at least. Unfortunately they, along with the entire POW/MIA industry, inverted the roles of victim and aggressor, choosing to represent Americans as being held hostage by the Vietnamese, never mind acknowledging the ongoing war against Vietnam. Meanwhile, release of the films coincided with several paramilitary operations in Southeast Asia undertaken by the Reagan administration. Segments of Hollywood joined the cause. As Bruce Franklin revealed in Mythmaking in America, in a strange alliance Colonel James 'Bo' Gritz (an Army Special Forces veteran and a firm believer in the POW cause), William Shatner, and Clint Eastwood put together a 1982 cover rescue mission into Laos - with the full knowledge of the president, who reportedly told Eastwood that, if the team found on POW, he would "start World War Three" to get the rest out.

"The mission, as well as other efforts supposedly directed by Gritz, turned up no evidence of surviving American POWs. The task of suggesting that there was such evidence was left to, and picked up by, Hollywood. In Uncommon Valor (1983) and Missing in Action (1984), teams led by Gene Hackman and Chuck Norris, respectively, turn up dozens of POWs still being held in Southeast Asia. Although Uncommon Valor was more commercially successful, Missing in Action was more influential in the genre, helping to pave the way for its own sequels and other related films. Central to the plot of Missing in Action and the films that would follow it was the complete inversion of victimization. American war crimes are unmentioned or exonerated while the Vietnamese are depicted as barbarous criminals. Franklin sums up the strategy of historical inversion in M.I.A: 'Just as the POW issue was consciously created in 1969 amid shocking revelations about US conduct ... Missing in Action uses the POW issue to indoctrinate the audiences of the 1980s with the notion that Americans were not the victimisers but the victims. Those who have forgotten, or are too young to remember, learn that all accusations of US war crimes are merely insidious Asian Communist propaganda designed to hide the crimes the Vietnamese are still perpetrating against innocent Americans.' ...

"None of these earlier films, though, had anything like the impact of 1985's Rambo: First Blood Part II.

"Timed to coincide with the ten-year anniversary of the end of the war, the pre-release press kit for the film contained a video treating the POW/MIA issue and hyping Rambo's connection to the myth of surviving prisoners being held by Hanoi. A sequel to 1982's First Blood, a surprising box office success, Rambo revolves around the character of John Rambo, a misunderstood and tortured American veteran of the war in Vietnam. The script for First Blood had circulated for years in Hollywood, undergoing numerous plot changes and tentative casting. In the body of rising superstar Sylvester Stallone, however, the character became a veritable superhero in the 1980s, a cultural phenomenon that would reshape the ways in which Americans ld and discussed stories about the war in Vietnam.

"The opening shot of Rambo reveals the prison labour camp in which Rambo (Stallone) has spent the last several years since single-handedl destroying the town of Hope, Oregon, in First Blood. Rambo's former commander, Colonel Trautman, arrives at the prison, requesting that Rambo accompany him on a new mission: 'Recon for POWs in 'Nam.' After hearing the details of the mission and agreeing to join Trautman, Rambo asks the question for which the film became infamous. 'Sir, do we get to win this time?' 'This time it's up to you', Trautman replies. Unfortunately for Rambo, Trautman is not in charge of this mission. Marshall Murdoch, a Washington bureaucrat working for a congressional committee, is leading the team, along with a group of mercenaries. The committee, Murdoch explains to Rambo, is simply attempting to find evidence that will disprove any beliefs that POWs are still being held by the Vietnamese. Rambo is only supposed to take photographs of the empty camp, the very one in which he was held during the war. 'Under no circumstances,' he is informed by Murdoch, 'are you to engage the enemy.'

"After being dropped in Vietnam from the base in Thailand, Rambo meets up with Co Bao (played by the Hawaiian actress Julia Nickson), his Vietnamese guide, who speaks in short, choppy English. As they move down the river toward the camp, escorted by pirates, Rambo tells Bao his story - how, when he returned from Vietnam, he found another war going in the United States, a 'quiet war' against the veterans. Bao relates that she is working against her own government because her father, an 'intelligence officer', had been killed. When the mission is over, she tells Rambo, she would very much like to go to America. When they arrive at the camp, Rambo defies his orders and, with Bao's help, infiltrates the camp, which is of course populated with a dozen American POWs. He easily kills and outmaneuvers several Vietnamese guards, all of whom appear even less Vietnamese than Bao. Rambo rescues one POW and brings him along to the extraction point where he is to be picked up by Murdoch's men. Along the way, as they elude the inept Vietnamese soldiers, the POW tells Rambo how timely his rescue was: 'They move us around a lot - to harvest crops'. Thus the film's first explanation for why the Vietnamese would still be holding American soldiers: during a devastating famine and with an ongoing war with Cambodia, the Vietnamese need some help with their agricultural production ...

"Rambo, however, is much less concerned with the Vietnamese, or even the Soviets, as an enemy than it is with the United States government. Rambo's mission was never intended to prove the existence of POWs. The government, which the film ultimately shows to be more evil and corrupt than either the Russians or the Vietnamese, had no intention of rescuing any POWs found by Rambo. This is consistent with both the tone and content of the POW/MIA myth, whose adherents strongly believed in a government-led cover-up of evidence confirming the existence of remaining POWs. It is also consistent with domestic Reaganism in general, which blamed government for the troubles of the country. Trautman, angry at Murdoch for abandoning his man, tells him that he knows what the cover-up is reall about: 'Money. In '72, we were supposed to pay the Cong four and a half billion dollars in war reparations. We reneged. They kept the POWs.' Murdoch doesn't dispute this story; he in fact admits that the POWs are being held as ransom. But the alternatives to a cover-up are either 'paying blackmail money' that would end up 'financing the war against our [Cambodian] allies,' or, worse, 'starting the war up all over again' to save 'a few forgotten ghosts'.

"Back at the POW camp, Rambo escapes with the help of Co Bao, who returns disguised as a prositute servicing the Vietnamese guards. After their escape, Bao and Rambo share a romantic encounter, during which he agress to take her with him back to the United States. After the kiss, however, Bao is gunned down by a Vietnamese soldier, which sets off Rambo on a killing rampage, leading him back to the camp to rescue the remaining POWs rather than escape alone. During this sequence, Rambo becomes a one-man death squad, destroying helicopters and entire villages, and sending all the Vietnamese into a frenzied panic and, eventually, to their deaths. After a final face-off with the Russians, Rambo takes a helicopter and returns to the base in Thailand, ready to confront his betrayers. Removing the large mounted gun from the helicopter, Rambo completely destroys the huge supercomputers lauded by Murdoch at the beginning of the film. He then goes after Murdoch, stabbing his knife into a desk right next to Murdoch's head, but allowing him to live. 'You know there's more men out there,' he tells Murdoch. 'Find them. Or I'll find you.' As Rambo is one his way out of the camp, Trautman implores him to stay rather than wandering off. 'The war, everything that happened here, may be wrong. But, dammit, don't hate your country for it,' he tells him. 'Hate?' Rambo responds. 'I'd die for it.' Rambo also goes on to offer a final statement on behalf of his men. 'I want what they want, what every guy who came over here and spilled his guyts and gave everything they had wants: for our country to love us as much as we love it.'"

Edwin A Martini, Invisible Enemies: The American War on Vietnam 1975-2000, University of Massacheusetts Press, 2007

Labels: hollywood, imperial ideology, rambo, vietnam

The failure of 'Iraqification' and the colonial temptation. posted by lenin

I think it obvious that the US government would much rather have successfully imposed a client regime on Iraq than have to deal with a long-term military commitment to Iraq. As Immanuel Wallerstein has pointed out, 3 trillion dollars may not be a lot of money to George W Bush, but it is seriously draining on a national economy - even where, as has been the case, a great deal of that money funnels back into select US corporations. So, the strategy to date has been one of 'Iraqification': train up sufficient Iraqi security forces allied to the regime, itself a sort of klepto-bureaucratic elite uniting sectarians of all sects in a pact of national self-destruction. Into those security forces were elevated a combination of ex-Baathists, Badr Organisation militia members, and the most sinister criminal elements, all of whom were ready for a nationwide blitz of torture and executions. Various components of these security forces have been used in tandem with US troops to engage in 'pacification' operations, with the long-term goal of preparing them to control the country. The fallback position was that the US would maintain permanent bases in the territory, but somewhat more in the fashion of America's 'lily-pad' strategy than of straightforward colonisation I think. Nonetheless, we now know that the US plans not 14, but over 50 permanent military bases in Iraq. [Note: the SW article points out that documents leaked to Al Hayat suggest that the total number of bases planned is 400 - that's larger than the current total of 251. If the Al Hayat report is accurate, then the US plans not only a permanent occupation, but an expanded one.] That would be an unprecedented commitment, and no one could believe that it didn't amount to the complete, enduring occupation of Iraq. What else could you call it? It's a colonial commitment, quite different from the way the US has tried to exert power arguably since WWI and certainly since WWII.

A bit of background. Neil Smith's excellent work on Isaiah Bowman, "Roosevelt's geographer" as he was known, demonstrates some of the geo-economic intelligence that went into determining America's global posture in the era of WWII and after. Bowman had been involved in the imperial strategies of successive administration since Woodrow Wilson's, and under Roosevelt he helped devise the response to Hitler. One of his responsibilities after Kristallnacht was to find a way to deal with the huge refugee flow from Nazi Germany. America was reluctant to accept them, and Bowman's proposition was that America 'acquire' Angola from the Portuguese - whether in the way that Louisiana was acquired, or in the fashion that Cuba was, I can't say - and use it as the basis for a Jewish Homeland. This is not as bizarre as it may sound. The early Zionists had considered Uganda as a possible 'homeland', which underlines the colonial nature of the project. In part, Bowman's stance may have been guided by his scepticism about the idea of colonising Palestine - especially if it included what was then known as Transjordan, since this would result in a Jewish minority in perpetual conflict with an Arab majority.

Bowman was aware by 1942 that the Nazi regime was engaged in genocide, and the public outcry prompted Roosevelt to accept an immensely important project by Bowman, similar to his Inquiry during and after WWI, which had been intended to devise a settlement suitable for America's purposes. This undertaking was known as the 'M Project' and it sought to find a solution to the organisation of Europe and its populations. It has to be stated candidly that Bowman was not a humanitarian. He was a eugenicist and a racist (against Jews as well as others), and believed that certain populations would have to be separated from others to prevent these centrifugal forces from tearing Europe apart again. He certainly didn't think America should relax its immigration standards, or allow an even bigger surplus of labour to develop at a time when 12 million were unemployed. This was part of the intellectual basis, if I may speak loosely, for his proposals. His survey produced hundreds of documents, reports, memoranda, translated materials and so on, and he fed Roosevelt with ongoing advice. On Palestine, he initially advised him to make no promises beyond consultion with both sides after the war. He was concerned both about the prospects for conflict in Palestine if the US backed the Zionist takeover, and also about the idea that European states would see the US as interfering in its affairs and thus take the opportunity to disregard the Monroe Doctrine. But above all, Bowman believed that there had to be conditions for accumulation - land, labour and capital - for any territorial enterprise to work. And it was his focus on the economic dimension of the spatial order that was decisive in his plans for a post-war American hegemony. To the Nazi claim of "Lebensraum for one" he proposed "Lebensraum for all" - this was not because he didn't believe in empire, but because he knew that control of productive resources was far more central to a nation's global power than direct territorial control. America could exercise its dominance primarily through market relations: a new world order, in which the New World ruled by the profit margin. This did not mean no use of military power. On the contrary, America should be able to "police the world": "If we are expect to build a vast Navy and operate merchant ships on an unheard-of scale, we are not going to toss those things away at the end of the war on any theory of peace. We are going to keep them and make them work in the interests of the way that we set up". Further, "In the economic field we shall want to be in on everything the world around." Military action would conserve a global order shaped in America's interests - and as we have seen, that can involve a quite unprecedented frequency and intensity of global violence.

In his work for Roosevelt's territorial committee, he directed the committee members to frame all territorial settlements in terms of the economic and political objectives of the United States. One of the main issues that he had to deal with was the situation of Germany - some in the State Department believed that partition was the answer to the problem, while Bowman envisioned an expansive Germany surviving after the war, with generous eastern territories under an overall Allied military control, the better to act as a bulwark against the USSR. He had misgivings about the possibility of a resurgent German economic power competing successfully with the US, but still took the view that the USSR was a far bigger threat than Germany. He did not in the end win that fight with the administration - Cordell Hull, Anthony Eden and Vyacheslav Molotov all agreed that Germany would have to be partitioned. But where he was successful was in pushing for a programme of American expansion. Whereas the British were used to having material interests "everywhere", America had been "tentative, timid, doubtful" and would now have to "make a sudden shift into the new world order". But rather than rest on its colonial laurels (America's colonial possessions were comparatively meagre), the US should engage in a determined effort to shook loose the colonies and open them up to American capital. Bowman was no believer in independence, and held that colonial extraction from colonised territories was simply wise use, since the natives would have no use for the products thus extracted. Trusteeship was the alternative to direct colonial rule for those areas not annexed by the European powers, not independence. For example, not only Japan, but also Korea and Indochina, would become the subjects of trusteeship. (In fact, Roosevelt offered Indochina to Chiang Kai-shek at the Cairo summit in 1943, but the Chinese ruler was not interested). Resource-rich states should be exploited through the market rather than military occupation. If the British imperialists saw this as an attack on the Empire in the name of American economic expansionism, they were right. Bowman admired the British Empire and was fond of Churchill's racist shop-talk on the colonies, but he was as determined as his political masters to make America a truly global power. Bowman was also central to devising plans for a post-war international organisation that would replace the League of Nations, just as US planners were conceiving a 'Grand Area' in which the US would exert its hegemony - this would include the Western hemisphere, the Atlantic and Pacific economies, China, Japan and south-east Asia. Bowman fancied that the UN Charter should be modelled on the US constitution, and asserted that such an organisation should embrace a number of universal "self-evident" truths, including his own nationalist and racist assumptions about population control and immigration. And when, at the United Nations Conference on International Organisation in San Francisco in 1945, the USSR and China argued that any trusteeship should include independence as its eventual goal, Bowman foresaw an "inevitable struggle" with the Russians, whom he saw as trying to expand into the ex-colonies and muscle in on what he regarded as American turf. It was Bowman's lasting lament that the UN could not and did not become a global management system for the United States, because the national issue would not go away. The UN was gradually populated by recently liberated states who spoke the language of Third Worldism or socialism or national independence, and thus became the object of disapprobation and chastisement for American conservatives, from Goldwater to Perle.

Nonetheless, the world order conceived by Bowman and his confederates was roughly realised. America did have long-term military commitments, but this was usually in the way of creating client regimes. It has not been a formal colonial power since it gave up direct rule over the Philippines - you could argue about Hawaii and Puerto Rico, but these are annexed territories rather than colonies. So today, the United States ruling class appears to be divided between those who want to resuscitate 19th Century liberal imperialism, with extended periods of formal occupation, and those who want to stick with the Brzezinski 'realist' camp, managing a global system of vassals through bribery, cajolement, 'lily pads', economic blockade, and brief, effective demonstrations of violence. A number of things would make them more wary than they already are of anything that looked like a formal colonial posture. The first, of course, is that they have the best army in the world and yet can't beat the opposition in either Iraq or Afghanistan: these are unemployed workers, farmers and students in the main, not professional soldiers, and yet they have proven that the US cannot rule their respective countries. The second is that despite the temporary reprieve for the occupiers in Iraq, and the complicity of sectarian elites in the process of breaking the country up and subduing it in a long-term relationship of dominance, even sycophantic pro-US clerics are warning of a much wider uprising should the current plans proceed. Even participants in the puppet government are unhappy about what is proposed. Presumably, the US is not confident that without the presence of troops the advantageous oil contracts it has secured will be honoured - perhaps they envision the overthrow of the Maliki government if troops are even substantially reduced. Yet, what is proposed is such a sweeping and enduring state of occupation and - as a corollary - war against the Iraqi population that it is hard to see this as anything but a temptation to undertake 21st Century colonialism.

Labels: cold war, colonialism, fdr, imperial ideology, isaiah bowman, the geography of capitalism, US imperialism

"This is what a union is, fellas." posted by lenin

Labels: american working class, matewan

The American Working Class posted by lenin

Michael Yates:

We don’t have time today to discuss all the various control tactics used by employers: the herding of workers into factories, the detailed division of labor, mechanization, Taylorism, personnel management, lean production—all of which deny workers their humanity, their capacity to conceptualize and carry out their plans, to actually “own” what they make. However, let us look at a sampling of jobs in modern America:

Auto workers: There are about 1.1 million auto workers. Not only are they facing rapidly rising insecurity, they are also confronted every day with a work regimen so Taylorized that they must work fifty-seven of every sixty seconds. What must this be like? What does it do to mind and body? In this connection, it is instructive to read Ben Hamper’s Rivethead (1992), a startling account of working in auto plants. Hamper worked in an old plant, where the norm was about forty-five seconds of work each minute. He eventually got a job in a new, “lean production” facility. He called it a “gulag.” In her book, On the Line at Subaru-Isuzu (1995), sociologist Laurie Graham tells us about her work routine in one of these gulags. Below, I have skipped a lot of the steps, because I just want to give readers a sense of the work. Remember as you read it that the line is relentlessly moving while she is working:

1. Go to the car and take the token card off a wire on the front of the car.
2. Pick up the 2 VIN (vehicle identification number) plates from the embosser and check the plates to see that they have the same number.
3. Insert the token card into the token card reader.
4. While waiting for the computer output, break down the key kit for the car by pulling the 3 lock cylinders and the lock code from the bag.
5. Copy the vehicle control number and color number onto the appearance check sheet....
8. Lift the hood and put the hood jig in place so it will hold the hood open while installing the hood stay....
22. Rivet the large VIN plate to the left-hand center pillar.
23. Begin with step one on the next car.

This work is so intense that it is not possible to steal a break much less learn your workmate’s job so that you can double-up, then rest while she does both jobs. Within six months of the plant’s start-up, a majority of the workers had to wear wrist splints for incipient carpal tunnel. Necks and backs ache from bodies being twisted into unnatural positions for eight hours a day. Supervisors recommend exercises and suggest that workers who cannot deal with the pain are sissies.

What is true for auto workers is true for all who do this type of labor—whether it be in beef processing plants or on chicken disassembly lines where workers labor with slippery blood and gore on the floor and on their bodies. And where cuts lead to infections and disease.

Clerks: There are about 15 million clerks in the United States. Many years ago I was on a television show with former secretary of labor Robert Reich. In response to my claim that a lot of the jobs being created were not all that desirable, he said that there were a lot of good jobs available, ones in which workers had a real say about their jobs (no doubt referring to the “quality circles” so popular then). One such job was that of “clerk.” I blurted out in a loud and incredulous voice, CLERKS! I suggested that perhaps Mr. Reich had never noticed the splints on the wrists of many clerks, signs of epidemic carpal tunnel syndrome. Since that time, I have actually worked as a clerk, at the Lake Hotel in Yellowstone National Park. I describe the experience and what I learned in my book Cheap Motels and Hot Plate: An Economist’s Travelogue. Clerks work long hours; they are on their feet all day; they take regular abuse from customers; they are exposed in full view of supervisors with no place to hide; they are accorded no respect (think about customers on cell phones in grocery lines); their pay is low; their benefits negligible. After a hard day at the front desk, I only wanted a few drinks and a warm bed. The stress level was extraordinary.

Restaurant Workers: There are 11 million of these, growing in number every year. Next to personal care and service workers, those who prepare and serve our food are most likely to experience a “major depressive episode.” Restaurant workers in Manhattan’s Chinatown log as many as one hundred hours a week, for less than minimum wage. The pace of the work, the pressure of it are unbelievable. Check out the arms and legs of a kitchen worker. They are full of cuts and burns. Substance abuse is widespread.

Secretaries, Administrative Assistants, and Office Support: These workers are 23 million strong. They are poorly paid, many in sick buildings, stuck in badly designed chairs, staring at computer screens for hours, taking orders all day long (usually women from men), and often heavily Taylorized. These workers, whose working conditions are satirized so skillfully on the television series The Office, have to contend with daily degradations, including all too prevalent sexual harassment. Here is what my sister said about her work:

I, too, share some of your fears and anxieties. As one of the administrative assistants you talk about, I can relate to the long days of sitting at the typewriter (in years past) and now at the computer. I am sure that is the cause of my neck and shoulder pain and the many headaches from which I suffer. Although I basically like my job and the people with whom I work, after thirty years I am anxious to move on to something else. I look forward to retirement in about three to four years, moving to the city, maybe working part-time, and finding meaningful things in which to participate.

Security workers: Three million men and women watch over others in prisons, malls, gated communities, in occupied Iraq, and on our city streets. This is a type of work guaranteed to be stressful and to generate not only an extremely jaundiced and pejorative view of the rest of society but also an extreme, macho personality, prone to violence.

Custodial workers: There are 4 million building and grounds workers, many of them immigrants, keeping our buildings clean and the grounds swept and manicured. Often they are hired by contractors who are themselves employed by the buildings’ owners. It has taken monumental efforts by the SEIU to organize some of these exploited workers, who must often labor in close proximity to dangerous cleaning fluids, solvents, and chemical fertilizers.

Medical workers: There are more than 13 million people laboring in our hospitals, surgicare centers, and nursing homes, as well as in individual residences. With the exception of those at the top, including health care administrators and most of the physicians, health care is a minefield of poor working conditions. Even nursing has been degraded and deskilled so much that the nursing shortage could be nearly filled simply by the return of disaffected nurses to their profession. At the request of the California Nurses Association, I spoke this summer to nurses in four Texas cities. I heard many tales of woe: sixteen hour days, two weeks straight of twelve-hour days, insane patient loads, constant cost-cutting that damages patient health, demeaning treatment by administrators, etc. Conditions only worsen as one goes down the health care occupation ladder.

Labels: american working class, dead labour, work

Waiting in the Food Line posted by lenin

Labels: america, american working class, economy, poverty, recession

A Comedy of Murders posted by lenin

"Von Clausewitz said that war is the logical extension of diplomacy; Monsieur Verdoux feels that murder is the logical extension of business." - Charles Chaplin

Labels: capitalism, chaplin, monsieur verdoux

What's the matter with West Virginia? posted by lenin

Clinton is now down and out, and if Barack Obama has any sense he will not consider her for the VP. This isn't because she's vicious and ruthless and would probably undermine him in office - actually I would quite enjoy that. It isn't because of her race-baiting either - Obama doesn't really mind all that, and can adapt. It is because she will probably cost more votes than she will draw. However, one of the claims she successfully established for herself was that she had a critical appeal among white working class voters and Hispanics. I do not mean to say that this claim is accurate, but many commentators believe it. In fact, there is some limited truth to the claim. For although Obama did make some surprising breakthroughs in white working class areas, it was Hillary who commanded this vote in the main. Look at some of the states where Hillary won: Indiana, an overwhelmingly white, manufacturing state; West Virginia, an overwhelmingly white, manufacturing state; Ohio, overwhelmingly white with - like London - a poor urban core and a rich right-wing belt around it; Kentucky, a southern/mid-west state, overwhelmingly white, with a strong history of car manufacturing; Pennsylvania, an industrial heartland, overwhelmingly white. You may wonder what Hillary had to offer those people apart from fear of the 'black peril'.

It's very simple, and it doesn't take long to explain. Barack Obama is a neoliberal candidate who has hitched his wagon completely to Wall Street. He can provide a faintly progressive veneer to the accumulation practises of the uber-rich. Clinton, while I don't for a second she would have proved more progressive in office, placed herself to the left of Obama on the economy. She knew something quite important, and that is that Bush had won these areas strongly in 2004 after years of Democratic hegemony by posing as an economic nationalist and a defender of jobs. West Virginia, for example, used to be a hardcore Democratic state. Yet it went Republic big time in 2004. This is what Mike Davis had to say at the time:

A bastion of the powerful steel and mine workers' unions, West Virginia was famously loyal to the national Democrats in such dismal elections as 1956, 1968 and 1988. Yet last week Kerry lost West Virginia by a shockingly large margin (13 percent) ... The great achievement of the Clinton era was to realign the Democrats as the party of 'new economy', of the bicoastal knowledge industries and high-tech exporters. Instead of an economic rescue package for the heartland as demanded by the industrial unions, Clinton rammed through the job-exporting North American Free Trade Agreement (Nafta).

Kerry campaigned on that legacy. Like Gore, he was heavily funded by the entertainment, software and venture capital industries. And, also like Gore, he campaigned without a compelling economic message or serious proposals to stem further loss of industrial jobs. At the most, he promised modest tax breaks for corporations that kept jobs at home. Bush, on the other hand, had imposed temporary tariffs on imported steel in 2001. The tariff was undoubtedly a cynical Rove-inspired tactic to capture blue collar Democrats, but it worked. From a West Virginia standpoint, the Texas cowboy had the guts to stand up to European competitors, while Kerry offered little more than aspirin for terminal cancer. Bush was perceived (however incorrectly) as an economic nationalist while Kerry was tarred as an untrustworthy Europhile.

So, this is what Hillary Clinton did: she talked up 'bread and butter' issues; attacked Obama on NAFTA; pledged to cut taxes on exorbitantly high 'gas' prices; proposed tax cuts for 'middle class' (working class) Americans and tax rises for the rich; and stressed the importance of defending manufacturing jobs. It doesn't do to puff Hillary as the Bull Moose reformer, even if she looks like a testosterone-fuelled white supremacist at times. And Obama did make some similar pledges on tax and the minimum wage. In fact, Obama got into trouble for raising the issue of class at one point - but it was in such a fashion that he was accused of "elitism". And it is worth remembering that Clinton is to the right of Obama on the single biggest economic issue facing America, the trillion-dollar 'war on terror'. Nonetheless, Clinton was relentless on the 'bread and butter' issues, the manufacturing job issues, and particularly pushed a version of the economic nationalism that Bush did: 'get tough with China, bring jobs back home', was one of her themes. She also attacked 'corporate America' for union-busting, and was far more successful in getting union money than Obama, who was more successful with Wall Street. Clinton was explicitly appealling to the constituency that would once have been called 'Reagan Democrats' - those who are right-wing on social issues, but tended to vote Democrat for the sake of their material well-being. To repeat a theme of Chomsky's, asking whether Clinton's proposals amount to anything is like asking whether the promises in a Colgate commercial amount to anything. Of course they don't. But she successfully segmented and targeted an audience that is furious over the Bush economy and in all probability developing a long-term allergy to the Republicans.

In truth, what's the matter with West Virginia is what's the matter with the rest of America. The Democrats ditched the New Deal about thirty years ago, and now the only apparent repository of statist Keynesianism is the GOP, which is mainly in the business of defending business. And there isn't a serious organised alternative. Davis is right: the Frank thesis, that poverty-stricken 'red state' voters are voting against their economic interest, contains an unstated and insupportable premiss, which is that people have a real chance to express their economic interests at elections. They do not. They have something equivalent to a market research survey: what policy flavour do you prefer, on a scale of 1 to 5...?

Labels: america, barack obama, democratic party, george w bush, hillary clinton, john kerry

Israel Threatens Iran, and Oil Prices Skyrocket posted by Yoshie

We have to come up with a way of making clear to the US power elite: no, we can't afford Israel any more. Otherwise, we'll all go bankrupt. Look:

• "Oil prices had their biggest gains ever on Friday, jumping nearly $11 to a new record above $138 a barrel, after a senior Israeli politician raised the specter of an attack on Iran and the dollar fell sharply against the euro" (Jad Mouawad, "Oil Prices Skyrocket, Taking Biggest Jump Ever," New York Times, 7 June 2008).


• "Oil prices surged almost 8 percent, to $138.54 a barrel after a senior Israeli politician raised the specter of an attack on Iran and the dollar fell against the euro. 'As soon as that news hit the tape, oil spiked about $6,' said David Kovacs, an investment strategist at Turner Investment Partners" (Abha Bhattarai, "Dow Slides Nearly 400 Points; Oil Surges," New York Times, 7 June 2008).

Since the decades of neoliberal capitalism have led to public and private underinvestment in key industries and infrastructure, including oil, the margin of error is narrow, and we can't let the power elite of Israel make any stupid move.

If the Americans were smarter, they would be demanding that, instead of backing Israel no matter what, the USG withdraw troops from Iraq and Afghanistan (which the Iranians, the Syrians, the Turks, the Pakistanis, the Indians, the Russians, and other interested parties in the region can collaboratively manage on behalf of the world) and invest the money saved ($165 billion from now through June 2009) into oil field development to cover the estimated investment shortfall ($95 billion, according to Platts). Technology to raise oil production exists -- what's lacking is the political will to transfer it, as well as money, into the right hands (i.e., the hands of those who own most existing and potential oil reserves, the national oil companies of the global South).

Meanwhile, "the unemployment rate [in the United States] in May had its highest monthly increase in 22 years" (Bhattarai, 7 June 2008). Will the Fed stick to its promise not to cut rates again any time soon and to defend the dollar? Cut the rates to revive economy,¹ and the Fed will stoke inflation and risk imperiling the dollar's status as the world's reserve currency² (of which US Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson recently had to reassure the Gulf Arab ruling class³); raise the rates to attack inflation and restore confidence in the dollar, and the Fed will risk plunging economy into a depression.

1 More fundamentally, cutting the rates, i.e., treating the credit crisis as if it were a crisis of liquidity, doesn't touch the heart of the financial darkness: banks' inability to trust each other (cf. Joseph Halevi, "Los bancos centrales ya no tienen margen de maniobra. . . ," Sin Permiso, 30 December 2007). Hence the crisis continues: "Banking Group Won't Change Way Libor Measure Is Set" (Bloomberg News, 30 May 2008); Michael Mackenzie and Gillian Tett, "Libor Remarks Fail to Put Unease to Rest" (Financial Times, 2 June 2008); Tony Jackson, "Lack of Trust Lurks at the Heart of Banking Trouble" (Financial Times, 2 June 2008); Sean Farrell, "The Next Banking Crisis?" (Independent, 3 June 2008); "Why Interest Rates Are Higher than You Think" (Money Week, 5 June 2006).

2 The European Central Bank has been more hawkish on inflation than the Federal Reserve. There is no coherent international policy on inflation and economic growth, even among the power elites of the US-led multinational empire, which makes it difficult for the Fed to perform its balancing act.

Moreover, a great part of the recent oil price rises has been due to the dollar's weakness. Those oil producers, like the Gulf states, whose currencies are pegged to the dollar (but most of whose imports come from Europe), are thus forced to adopt a pro-cyclical policy against their interests. Bretton Woods II has ceased to make sense even on capitalist terms (to say nothing of the social costs to the South of accumulating dollar reserves and financing the US economy at the expense of domestic investment).

3 See how crucial petrodollar recycling has become to plug the US current account deficit:

As a result of the recent rise in oil prices, oil exporters have become important counterparts to the United States in the ownership of foreign savings. Their current account surplus represented in 2005 some 40 percent of the U.S. current account deficit, nearly doubling in one year (Chart 2).

Chart 2
Current Account Positions
(in billions of US$)

¹Ratio of current account of oil exporters to current account of the United States (in percent, right axis).

Oil exporters are close to becoming more important than Asia in the holding of net savings outside the United States (Chart 3). While Asia's current account surplus is projected to have risen to US$341 billion in 2005 (equivalent to 47 percent of the United States' current account deficit), that of oil exporters is projected to have reached US$296 billion (equivalent to 41 percent of the United States' current account deficit). Relative positions are expected to reverse in 2006. According to IMF projections, oil exporters' current account surplus would amount to 46 percent of the U.S. deficit in 2006, while the figure for Asia would drop to 41 percent.

Chart 3
Foreign Savings
(Current account surplus, US$ billion)

(Saleh M. Nsouli, Director, Offices in Europe, International Monetary Fund, "Petrodollar Recycling and Global Imbalances," Presentation at the CESifo's International Spring Conference, Berlin, 23-24 March 2006)

Labels: empire, iran, Israel, oil, ruling class, stop the war

"National Socialists for Israel" posted by lenin

According to Ha'aretz:

Nazis against anti-Semitism? As bizarre as that sounds, a group of Germans which calls itself "National Socialists For Israel" launched its Web site in support of Israel.

"Stop the hatred of the Jewish people," the Web site reads. "The Jews are a healthy, strong nation."

The organization - whose members have yet to reveal themselves to the public - claims that Israel's right to exist is anchored in the principles of social Darwinism, the same principles which the Nazis adopted prior to the Second World War.

Labels: far right, Israel, nazi scum, zionism

Conservatism and hegemony posted by lenin

Great article by Corey Robin on the history and strategy of American conservatism.

Labels: alexander hamilton, barry goldwater, conservatism, edmund burke, hegemony, joseph de maistre, neoconservatism, segregation

A Sentimental Education posted by lenin

Coming soon to a classroom near you:

A proposed new history GCSE syllabus could force students to accept the government’s point of view on contentious issues such as terrorism and the Middle East conflict.

OCR, one of the leading examination boards in Britain, has published a draft version of the history GCSE syllabus that is due to be taught in schools next year.

The course brands the Palestinian Liberation Organisation (PLO) and Irish Republican Army (IRA) as “terrorist groups” of a similar nature to Al Qaida.

One history teacher, who wished to remain anonymous, spoke to Socialist Worker about his concerns with OCR’s new history course.

“The specified content of the course rules out any critical approach to the questions,” he said.

“If teachers or students decided that the IRA and the PLO were not ‘terrorist groups’, then they would be in danger of failing the course.”

This reminds me of an episode in 2005, when the UMP government of France introduced a law insisting that schools should teach the "positive" aspects of the French colonial empire as part of the syllabus. It is also a great deal like HR 3077 which was unanimously passed by Congress in October 2003, which insisted that colleges could lose state funding if they were found to be insufficiently favourable to US policy in the Middle East. The purpose is essentially the same - it has nothing to do with academic standards, and everything to do with inculcating the kinds of sentiments that will prepare young people to accept imperial commitments. The first two efforts were defeated, incidentally, and so must this one be. Even if you disagree with the analysis as to the purpose of such language, that is evidence in itself that there is a debate about these questions that cannot and should not be foreclosed. It is outrageous that a student studying the Middle East would be obliged to start from the principle that the PLO is a "terrorist" group, especially when the term is so obtuse and value-laden.

Labels: education, imperial ideology, schools

Also appearing... posted by lenin

An article of mine will be appearing in Christopher Hitchens and His Critics, published by New York University Press. If you absolutely can't wait, you can read the original at MRZine.

Labels: christopher hitchens, the complete and utter works of richard seymour, the liberal defense of murder

The Making of a 'White Working Class' posted by lenin

It is far from obvious why class should be colour-coded. We can see how 'race' has been contiguous with strata within classes, so that the lowest wages and the least skilled occupations are dispensed to non-white members of the working class. We can also see how class is often construed as a kind of ethnicity, and how ethnic designations often overlap with economic positions. But the question of why there should ever be an identity such as a 'white working class' is clearly a social psychological one. One way of looking at this is to identify an extreme example to look for salient traits, and I think I have such in the 1922 Rand Rising. The Rand, or Witwatersrand, is of course the core of the gold and mineral mining industry of South Africa, and has been since the late nineteenth century. As such, it was the centre of capital accumulation at the time of the Rising, with the overwhelming (distorting) emphasis on mining capital.

Historically, the modern doctrine of ‘race’ emerged in two ways. The first was in the course of military confrontation, as in the combat between European farmers and American Indians. Originally considered the colour of the ‘juyce of Mulberries’ or ‘Olive coloured of a sad French green’, they were understood as having been ‘naturally white’, but darkened by the climate. Only when relations between them and Europeans were characterized increasingly by military combat were the racial codes introduced. Similarly, the battles of white Afrikan frontiersmen with 'natives' co-produce a colonial-racial ideology, which would be referenced during the 1922 rising. The second way in which 'race' emerged was precisely in the global ordering of the labour-system, and the replacement of white indentured labour with African slaves. Race had always ordered the colonial labour system in South Africa, whether when Africans worked as slaves until 1834, or during the period of 'colour bar' legislation in the Cape and elsewhere. The "colour bar" that emerged after the Mineral Revolution turned what had been a stratification according to skill into a stratification by race. But what was the cause of such policies. According to one well-known aqccount (HJ & RE Simons, Class and Colour in SA, 1850-1950), "White Labourism" was a "primary cause of policies that incite racial hostility", which implies that the political ideology of white workers intruded into the running of the labour system, redistributing the structure of wages and privileges to the benefit of the 'white working class'. It is certainly true, as I mentioned in a previous post, that white workers (mainly British workers trained in the Cornish mines, as part of what Jonathan Hyslop calls an 'imperial working class') pressed for the imposition of forms of colour bar legislation some time before employers were ubiquitously in favour of such means. However, as I also said, the demand became effective when employers and state administrators decided to back it. There is a rationale for this. As Harold Wolpe points out ('The White Working Class', Economy and Society, 1976), the particular demand for a skilled, supervisorial bloc of labour directing unskilled labour, resulted from the particular conditions of early mining capitalism, where the risks were high and the scope of the labour force too large for an individual capitalist manager-owner to handle (nowadays, of course, we have byzantine bureaucracies known as 'human resources' and 'personnel', as well as an apparatus of junior managers, to deal with this). British immigrant workers may have accepted colonial ideology. Used to being at or near the bottom of a vertiginous class pyramid in Britain, they were now part of a 'master race'. And arguably they had a shared grounding in the imperial experience that was quite different from their metropolitan cohorts. However, the drive for a colour bar was still at the stage of the 1890s an expression of an interested defined more by status and the desire to preserve it than anything else. Keeping the main labour competition out of skilled occupations preserved a skill monopoly. Further, just as a refinement to the point, the 'white working class' was not yet defined by whiteness - it didn't include, for example, proletarianised Afrikaners, who only became a majority of miners in the Rand by 1918, after a period of the state promoting Afrikaner employment in the mines. And 'white labour' had no serious political platform then of the kind that would gradually acquire and which was expressed in a way in the Labour-Nationalist Pact administration of 1924. (David Yudelman, in The Emergence of Modern South Africa convincingly disputes the idea that the Pact was a genuine political victory for white workers, but that is not quite my point: the point is that they were recognised as a special and particular constituency by that time). So, had employers not turned to segregationist measures in the mid-1890s, and had state personnel under the British not encouraged this in various ways, it is difficult to imagine a 'white working class' identity of the coherence that was later displayed emerging.

Afrikaners had to compete with African labour for access to employment during the early 1900s for a number of reasons. The social historian Timothy Keegan describes (in Konczacki et al, Studies in the Economic History of South Africa, Volume II) how an older Boer way of life had been squeezed by British capitalist penetration and land speculation. Previously they might have relied upon only guns and ammo for hunting, and wagons and oxen for travel and trade. But by the end of the Anglo-Boer War, they were political and militarily defeated, as well as economically transformed. The diminishing scope of 'free land' produced class stratification within the community, with some becoming reasonably profitable landowners and others becoming 'bywoners' (tenant farmers). They were, however, unable to compete with experienced African sharecroppers, whose advantages included their emphasis on communal life which helped them weather the vicissitudes of crop cycles. Keegan rather unflatteringly describes it in these words: "Mostly, they ended up in the industrial centres as unskilled proletariat, where the white supremacist state was eventually to save them from the consequences of their economic ineffectuality". This is not quite right. As Charles van Onselen shows (in Studies in the Social and Economic History of the Witwatersrand: Volume II, 1982), the initial tendency - quite successful for a while - was to join the local petit-bourgeoisie, involving themselves in two key economic areas: cab driving, and brick-making. Oh, laugh if you want: white bigots in the cabbie or brickie industry? I never in all my days! But of course the mining industry demanded a proper national transport system, which Kruger duly provided toward the end of the 1890s, just as the rinderpest was destroying the cattle that would pull the cabs, and the artisanal brick-makers lost out to mass production with Victorian technology. So, yes, Afrikaners were eventually forced into proletarianisation en masse. And, as more of them fled into the urban centres, dislocated by war and disease, they became more and more of a political problem.

It is sometimes claimed that Afrikaners remained unemployed through choice, by their refusal to accept conditions and jobs that their lack of 'economic effectuality' would have assigned them to - the jobs being done by the 'Kaffir', the 'native', African labour. Were they already so suicidally 'white' that they would rather starve than lower themselves to the status of the African working class? Robert Davies (in 'Mining Capital, The State and Unskilled White Workers in South Africa, 1901-1913', Journal of Southern African Studies, 1976) suggests otherwise. The truth is that it simply cost more to hire Afrikaner labour because it cost more to support the reproduction of their labour. As they were not subject to the migrant labour system and the various system of colour bars, they were not housed in vast cheap compounds, and fed with bulk bought meat. Their families, moreover, were not supported outside the capitalist sphere of production. Petit-bourgeois Afrikaner nationalist and labour politicians were sure that white workers would make up for it by superior productivity, unable to see a social logic to what they took to be a perversion of the capitalist class. And it is by the mid-1900s that you start to hear for the first time calls for a 'White Labour' policy. Previously, Afrikaner social struggles and complaints had been met with indifference, repression and occasional palliatives. By 1906, however, there was a recession in the Rand economy and huge numbers of displaced, unemployed Afrikaners - with not a few trained soldiers among them, who had recently come close to defeating the mighty British Empire. The protest had to be met in some way, particularly as it was noticed that British mine-workers during their 1907 strike against productivity speed-ups had gained the solidarity of Afrikaner labourers, whom they addressed as "fellow South Africans".

David Roediger points out that the 'labour republicanism' of American workers in the 19th Century involved its adherents measuring their status both against the dream of an egalitarian republic of small producers and the nightmare of chattel slavery. (David Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness, Verso, 2007) Similarly, white workers in early twentieth century South Africa could compare their lot with that of the indentured migrant 'Kaffir'. From 1910 onward, the mining industry was suffering a crisis of profitability which it sought to recover by boosting productivity, and increasing the number of machines that technicians supervised. The number of white employees per 1,000 tons hoisted declined continually between 1911 and 1915. Besides which, the employers were accelerating the fragmentation of skilled jobs into semi-skilled jobs that black workers could hold (still subordinate, of course). This was among the issues that drove the 1913 strike on the Rand which resulted in a humiliating defeat for the Smuts government. Lionel Phillips, the mine industrialist and Unionist politician concluded that it was nonetheless better to back down on this occasion than risk a general strike which might stimulate a revolt among the far larger mass of African labour. The state and mining capital adopted two strategies to meet the problem. The first was to devise a military strategy to defeat the strikers next time (and it seems there may have been deliberate efforts to provoke the next strike that took place in January 1914, and which was defeated by the recently constituted Union Defense Force). The second was to co-opt labour - but this meant white labour. For example, when African workers held a strike shortly after the white workers strike in 1913, they were simply brutally crushed - and don't appear to have gained any solidarity from white workers. There was no sense of accomodating their demands. So, among other measures, the government opened daily lines of communication with trade unions (which, I should point out, were segregated and had been since they were formed against stiff resistance from employers), and moved to impose state regulation on the industry. White labour, previously making demands from without the state, were now seen as fit subjects for incorporation into it - not, of course, as co-equals with capital or any such thing, but certainly as superior to their African co-workers.

Trade union leaders were given to expressing their demands in terms of preserving the 'colour bar' and holding back the 'black peril' - often as a disingenuous means of galvanising wider support for mundane economic strikes, but in fact the colour bar issue did come up repeatedly. In the post-WWI period, there was actually a steady erosion of the colour bar, because employers figured it would be cheaper just to alleviate the restrictions. The Low Grade Mines Commission went so far at one point as to recommend the legal abolition of segregation. A 1920 strike by African workers had - though it was pummelled relentlessly - scared the hell out of the employers, and even forced a few concessions out of them. And at the same time, the co-optation of white workers was having less and less success, and employers were anxious amid plummeting gold prices to reduce workers' wages. So, it was that the stage was set for the 1922 Rising on the Rand. Jeremy Krikler points out in White Rising (Manchester University Press, 2005) that at the time of the strike there were 200,000 workers in the Rand mines, but approximately only 10% were white workers. Yet, and this is the crucial thing, they made no appeal for solidarity from African workers. Not only that, but when African workers crossed the picket line, they were not considered scabs in the way that white workers were. The slogan of the strike was, infamously, 'Workers of the World Unite for a White South Africa'. It is worth pointing out that this didn't have the effect of galvanising mass cross-class support from white communities, as was presumably intended. So, what was going on?

Let's review: by 1922, Afrikaaners had fully entered the labour force in the mines, so the sector protected by colour bar legislation and custom was fully, inclusively 'white'; the fate of 'white labour' had become an explicit concern of the political class; the insitutions of segregated labour had been thoroughly entrenched, and the 1913 Native Land Act allotted three quarters of the land to white people or corporations, with rules restricting the sale of land to Africans; and neither the 1913 nor 1920 African miners strikes had resulted in much solidarity from white workers. So, I think that by this point it is safe to say that a 'white working class' identity had developed with some coherence. It competed with communist identities, of course, particularly after the electrifying revolution in Russia, which had also stimulated a wave of African revolt in the cities and would later infuse the countryside rebellion by the ICU (as in "I See You"). But my argument here is that to the extent that it is possible to conceive of a coherent 'white working class' identity, here it was. Now look at the sequel.

As the strike wore on, and it became clear that the Smuts government was intransigent (Smuts was viciously hostile to labour all his political life), the strike was developing into an open, armed insurrection. The Smuts government was plotting the most vicious military force, including aerial bombardment, against the strikers. As this ominous prospect unfolded, a staggering series of racial massacres occurred, comparable with similar riots and pogroms in America and Russia in the same era. I noted that African miners were not considered 'scabs' and they weren't. They were rarely attacked, and unions insisted that they be kept out of the fight, which was between themselves and management. And when the massacres did start, it was not of African mine workers, or even of labourers as such. It was random killing of civilians - there are eyewitness reports of women and children fleeing squads of armed white workers, and being shot down in cold blood. 150 were wounded, and 44 killed, by one estimate. Jeremy Krikler (in 'The Inner Mechanics of a South African Racial Massacre', The Historical Journal, 1999) supplies the background. In the weeks prior to the massacres, an hysteria had built up in white communities about the 'black peril'. A palpable terror of an uprising took hold: 'the Kaffir will kill us all'. This fear had apparently been stimulated by one relatively isolated confrontation between African and white labourers at the New Primrose Mine, but the preparatory conditions were: a) the strikers knew that a terrible intensification of the class struggle was coming; and b) they had justified their strike by appealling to race pride, and race privilege, to keeping the African down, and perhaps their own guilt would have led them to expect an African uprising. But Krikler suggests another aspect of this: they took their appeal to be part of the white community seriously, and in their murders dramatised their desire to be in solidarity with the institutions of white supremacy that were about to massacre them: it was as if to re-direct the fire onto the 'real' menace, as opposed to the respectable white workers who only wanted their fair share.

The consequence was that they were cruelly defeated. They didn't take the insurrectionary class logic of their fight as seriously as they took the racial element. One consequence was that they lost approximately 17.7% of their wages - which, as Yudelman points out, was not really recovered by the Pact administration, whose policies of segregation, wage controls and state regulation were closer to the opposition than most like to admit. The workers were unable to see beyond a sectional interest because they racialised it. They were in part defeated by their commitment to the idea of a 'white working class', which in turn was produced in the furnace of colonialism, and the prevailing global system of white supremacy.

Labels: apartheid, racism, segregation, south africa, white working class

Genocide-friendly media posted by lenin

Via JSF, Ha'aretz has been caught carrying adverts from an organisation named 'Samson Blinded' that favours the physical destruction of the Palestinians. Next stop for these guys, the New York Times, next to Thomas Friedman's column.

Labels: genocide, inevitable accusations of antisemitism, Israel, palestine