If people hate you, and you train and arm them, you are training and arming your enemies, the better to kill you – as we see. But none of the three front benches has the small courage to admit that the war was a mistake. When it was popular, they were happy to share in its popularity.

There is a laboratory where these Tory policies are being played out now. It is called London. Boris Johnson said he was a "progressive conservative" who would "help the poor" and "green the city". One of his first acts in power was to lay off half the people in London government working on lowering the city's carbon emissions, and to kick plans to limit pollution levels into the long grass.



One year in, it is clear he has delivered handsomely – for the rich. He has given them a de facto tax cut by abolishing the extension of the congestion zone to well-heeled west London, and by abandoning the £25-a-day charge for SUV drivers. He has paid for it by pushing up costs for the poorest people in London, ramming up bus fares by 20 per cent. He has opposed all new regulation on the City of London, and still praises sub-prime mortgages – the cause of the Great Crash of 2008.



Under the Conservative council of Hammersmith and Fulham – named by Cameron as a model for how he will rule – things have gone further. It has paid for tax cuts by shutting down 12 homeless hostels, increasing the cost of meals on wheels for poor pensioners by 60 percent, and suddenly charging disabled people who need home help £12.40 an hour.

In September, director Roman Polanski was arrested in Switzerland for leaving the U.S. in 1978 before being sentenced to prison for raping a 13-year-old girl at Jack Nicholson’s house in Hollywood. During the time of the original incident, you were working in the industry, and you and Polanski had a common friend in theater critic and producer Kenneth Tynan. So what’s your take on Polanski, this many years later?

Vidal: I really don’t give a fuck. Look, am I going to sit and weep every time a young hooker feels as though she’s been taken advantage of?

First, I was in the middle of all that. Back then, we all were. Everybody knew everybody else. There was a totally different story at the time that doesn’t resemble anything that we’re now being told.

The media can’t get anything straight. Plus, there’s usually an anti-Semitic and anti-fag thing going on with the press – lots of crazy things. The idea that this girl was in her communion dress, a little angel all in white, being raped by this awful Jew, Polacko – that’s what people were calling him – well, the story is totally different now from what it was then.

You think anti-Semitism is motivating the prosecution of Polanski?

Anti-Semitism got poor Polanski. He was also a foreigner. He did not subscribe to American values in the least. To [his persecutors], that seemed vicious and unnatural.

What are “American values”?

Lying and cheating. There’s nothing better


You first started traveling to California in the 1950s; then you moved here. What’s the most dramatic change you’ve seen in this state since those days?

More foreigners. But that’s a very healthy change. At one time, California was the most parochial place on earth. It was kind of gooney. In a sense, Hitler put the United States on the map by murdering as many Jews as he could get his hands on and driving the others away. They came here, to America, and many to California. My first years here, right after I got out of the Army, Aldous Huxley, Christopher Isherwood, and Thomas Mann dominated this town. We didn’t even have to develop people as good as this! We inherited
them.

‘Talk about Europe and they call you extreme. Talk about tax and they call you greedy. Talk about crime and they call you reactionary. Talk about asylum and they call you racist. Talk about your nation and they call you Little Englanders.

But we trust the people. They are not bigoted or ungenerous. They understand that Britain has responsibilities to those who have been displaced by war or persecution. But they can also read maps. And they can tell that something is going badly wrong when tens of thousands of people are crossing the entire length of the European Continent, travelling through safe countries en route, before suddenly lodging an asylum claim in Britain.’

William Hague speech 2001. Tumbleweeds and the BNP now occupy the ground of abandoned convservatives.

What an absolute red herring this entire week has been, and how convenient for self-righteous bien-pensant liberal elitists to wag their fingers at a thoroughly (and disproportionately) discredited small party, as if this magically waves away the utter mess they've created in this country, and how discredited they themselves are amomgst the public at large.

If anyone on that panel decided to go home thinking they've gained some points for courage for kicking someone while he's not only down but vehemently pinned to the ground by a baying mob, they're more deluded than anyone thought.

The circus preamble around the event only gave Nick Griffin a rock-star aura until the actual show where if anything, being jeered and derided, he ridiculously came to resemble some kind of persecuted Messiah. Vilification ill-befits any serious person, interested in serious issues and discussing them reasonably. All the mud-slinging went beyond its affect and turned the show into a joke. A delicious irony was the way Chris Huhne talked about defending minorities and then proceeded to delight in the format of the show, which pitted one person (and the small constituency he represents) against 4 pannelists, a hostile audience and the entire mainstream press.

Most people who vote BNP, and this wasn't touched on enough, do it stick two fingers up at the political class. This is what the press would be addressing if they weren't inextricably part of the problem. This isn't about Nick Griffin or his party, there is still a major problem about how we as society deal with minority views which don't fit an ever-smaller spectrum of acceptable opinion.

He says today:

Beyoncé belief
Reader Nick Paterson-Morgan drew my attention to the following announcement in The Times:



My first reaction was that this must be a wind-up, probably placed for a bet by someone at the swine flu hotline with nothing better to do. We rang The Times advertising department and they assured us it was genuine.

There’s no mention of a Mr Pong, or any father’s name for that matter. If true, which I still doubt, somewhere out there in Shropshire is a single mother called Kate Pong with quins, variously named after an American pop singer, a model and the U.S. President.

You couldn’t make it up.

Actually you could make it up. MacGuffin at TabloidWatch points out that Littlejohn’s team, typically, didn’t bother checking their facts properly. Kate Pong is a labrador.

He says ‘we’ rang the Times, which suggests he couldn’t even do that himself either. And notice how he even includes a snide remark about single mothers. In a story about a dog.

It is surely a positive that Britain finally has a world champion with an appreciation of the good things in life (Jenson Button) as opposed to a monosyllabic, monkish automaton in a helmet. It also shows what a Japanese lingerie model can do for your lap-times.

But once the partying is over, someone should invite Button to spend 30 seconds on a set of asymmetric bars. By the time they have scraped him off the crash mat and called an ambulance, Tweddle will have gained the limitless respect she deserves.

What makes the new 'Modern' Conservative party modern? There are still more Etonians than women and Ethnic minorities combined.

There is obviously a huge risk in sending an extra 40,000 machine-gun wielding troops into a country they don't understand to "clear" huge areas of insurgent fighters who look exactly like the civilian population, and establish "control" of places that have never been controlled by a central government at any point in their history.

US aerial attacks on the Afghan-Pakistan border have killed 14 al-Qa'ida leaders, at the expense of more than 700 civilian lives. He says: "That's a hit rate of 2 per cent on 98 per cent collateral. It's not moral." It explains the apparent paradox that broke the US in Vietnam: the more "bad guys" you kill, the more you have to kill.

It has been 20 minutes since I’ve read [Jan Moir's] now-notorious column, and I’m still struggling to absorb the sheer scope of its hateful idiocy. It’s like gazing through a horrid little window into an awesome universe of pure blockheaded spite. Spiralling galaxies of ignorance roll majestically against a backdrop of what looks like dark prejudice, dotted hither and thither with winking stars of snide innuendo.

The Iraqi puppet government has requested that Syria turn in Iraqi Ba`thist leaders who are stationed in Damascus. A Syrian official gave a rather (unusually) good response: he said that if Syria were to turn in Iraqi dissidents, Nuri Al-Maliki would have been turned in to Saddam Husayn. Nuri Al-Maliki responded thus: whatttt????

This doesn't surprise me in the least. I can't remember the last time the Nobel peace prize wasn't handed to a rapacious mass murderer. (Before you mention Al Gore he was pretty enthusiastic about destroying Yugoslavia before he started jetting around the world telling us not to use aeroplanes.)

The purge crushed Most's belief in gradual reform. He became convinced the system could only be changed by blowing it up – and suddenly realised that explosives were now lying all over Europe and the US, in sheds controlled by ordinary workers. Dynamite needed no expertise to operate; it could be carried in your pocket; and it could kill. He announced: "It is within the power of dynamite to destroy the capitalist regime just as it had been within the power of gunpowder and the rifle to wipe feudalism from the face of the earth. A girdle of dynamite encircles the world!"

Most travelled from country to country, urging workers to pick up their dynamite and use it against the bosses who forced them to work 12-hour days, seven days a week, for starvation wages. He became the model for Ossipon, the refugee-anarchist Ossipon in Joseph Conrad's novel The Secret Agent, who walks the street with a bomb forever strapped to him, ready to blow himself up the moment the police swoop. In anticipation of Islamism, Ossipon brags that his enemies "depend on life ... whereas I depend on death, which knows no restraint and cannot be attacked. My superiority is evident."

There is however a need to explain why things like this make the headlines without fail every single time. Who gives a shit? I would love to commission a poll to see how many in the Asian community give a shit. He insulted someone, he probably didn't mean to, he said sorry. A man in his 70s said it wouldn't have been a big deal in his day. What an earth shattering event. This is just an excuse for the chronically PC to rattle their tired old sabre and pseuds to justify writing about a boring, worthless reality TV show they'd otherwise be ashamed to admit they watch.

The Nobel peace committee should retire, and turn over its huge funds to some international peace organization which is not awed by stardom and rhetoric, and which has some understanding of history.

The judge [at his trial] quite liked him, and he was intrigued by the fact that this rather talkative kid who wrote tons of pieces for the press had not defended himself. So he said - Mr McVeigh, could we hear more from you? [McVeigh] said, 'Well, your honour, I will base my case on Justice Brandeis, one of our most brilliant jurists, in his opinion in Olmstead. There, he writes that when government ceases to lead by example and actually provides a bad example, anything can happen. Government is the last teacher. Everything I did, I learned from my government."

Since when, with debt levels lower than almost all other wealthy nations, and lower than almost all of modern British history, is it suddenly "a disaster" which requires savage cuts.

"From 1750 to 1870, Britain won wars, assembled an astonishing navy, built an empire and launched the Industrial Revolution to become the envy of Europe, yet the national debt was consistently above 80 per cent of GDP. Nobody cared. High national debt was a precondition for winning two world wars in the 20th century. Periods when the over-riding preoccupation has been lowering the national debt have coincided with industrial, economic and strategic decline. So it will again."

Just before Vidal arrived, the poverty-wreathed Guatemalan people had elected a left-wing president called Jacobo Árbenz Guzmán. They wanted him to introduce a minimum wage and start taxing the US mega-corporation, the United Fruit Company, that dominated the country's only industry, banana-growing. The outraged United Fruit Company acted to preserve its profits – by getting Washington to topple Árbenz and install a dictator. The phrase "banana republic" entered the language. (Bananistan for a central Asian variation.)

"I was astonished," Vidal says. "I had known vaguely about our numerous past interventions in Central America. But that was the past." He discovered that Senator Henry Cabot Lodge was leading the charge, and "I didn't believe it. Lodge was a family friend; as a boy I had discussed poetry with him". He says he realised then he had been fighting "for an Empire, not a republic". His grandfather, he resolved, had been right all along: wars only serve elites.

He rapidly became the leading left-wing critic of American foreign policy. He warned against every war from Vietnam to Iraq, often with extraordinary prescience. At the height of George W Bush's post-9/11 popularity, he said: "Mark my words – he will leave office the most unpopular President in history."

In the meantime, we should take the only lawful action that is open to us.
At the coming Election, refuse to vote for any of them, and do so in such numbers that they can no longer claim they have any mandate to rule, so that their zombie parties collapse in a heap of dust and worms, and we can start again.

But do not imagine that this is some sort of Labour crisis, which will be solved by a smiling team of Old Etonians floating along our troubled streets.
The evil that drove Fiona Pilkington to her horrible death was released by Labour and Tory governments alike, by the liberal elite in general, during half a century of misguided stupidity

The same techniques, it was hoped, would ensure that the "intelligent minorities" would rule, undisturbed by "the trampling and the roar of a bewildered herd," the general public (the Sun readers), "ignorant and meddlesome outsiders" whose "function" is to be "spectators," not "participants."

Similarly, the problem is not that writers sell-out, but that, as Noam Chomsky told the BBC’s Andrew Marr, “if you believed something different you wouldn't be sitting where you're sitting". (The Big Idea, BBC2, February 14, 1996) Chomsky once related a story he had heard from a civil rights activist at Harvard Law School:

“He once gave a talk and said that kids were coming in to Harvard Law School with long hair and backpacks and social ideals and they were all going to go into public service, law and change the world. That's the first year. He said around April the recruiters come for the summer jobs, the Wall Street firms. Get a cushy summer job and make a ton of money.

“So the students figure, What the heck? I can put on a tie and jacket and shave for one day, because I need that money and why shouldn't I have it? So they put on a tie and a jacket for that one day and they get the job for the summer. Then they go off for the summer and when they come back in the fall, it's ties and jackets and obedience and a shift of ideology.”

In 2007, the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission referred Megrahi’s case for appeal. “The commission is of the view,” said its chairman, Dr Graham Forbes, “that based upon our lengthy investigations, the new evidence we have found and other evidence which was not before the trial court, that the applicant may have suffered a miscarriage of justice.”

The words “miscarriage of justice” are missing entirely from the current furore, with Kenny MacAskill reassuring the baying mob that the scapegoat will soon face justice from that “higher power”. What a disgrace.

One of the functions of a capitalist state is to defend capitalism from itself, to defend capitalism from the capitalists. It was Marx—dare we mention him? I hear he’s coming back in style. It was Marx who said one capitalist will kill many other capitalists, that the system begins to consume itself. We see that with Bernard Madoff and the like.

My reading of 1945 tells me that we ended up making a shameful deal with Stalin, under pressure from Roosevelt to do so, giving the Soviet tyrant the very 'free hand' in central Europe that we had impotently sought to deny Hitler. The difference was that by then we had sacrificed huge numbers of lives, all our wealth and our Empire. For what? If we had stayed out of power struggles in which we had no power, there'd have been no need to make a deal with Hitler, or Stalin either.

Joyce - the first senior Government figure to resign over the war - said: "We need to make it clear our commitment in Afghanistan is high but time limited. For many, Britain fights, Germany pays, France calculates, Italy avoids.

Conventional wisdom about the distant or quite recent past was seldom conventional wisdom at the time. The perceptive commentators (Trotsky and Churchill on Hitler, for instance, not to mention those who opposed the Iraq war before it began, those who initially said that British exams were being devalued, those who warned against university expansion, those who refused to accept that Gordon Brown was a competent Chancellor, I could go on) were in small minorities when it mattered, and only became recognised as wise when it was far too late. Mr O'Brien must have heard the story of the Emperor's New Clothes. Most people who hear this story think they would have realised the little boy was right. Experience tells me that most of them would have sided with the crowd, and believed the fake tailors. The curse of Cassandra was to be always right, and never believed.

Legal and judicial reform is one barometer of social change, but so is popular culture and Bryant must have been extremely sensitive to it. A quick scan through 1970s popular culture reveals how its ideas about sexuality, gender, and relationships were a radical break from the past.

IF anyone thinks that someone is obliged to produce scientific proof of God's existence for him or anyone else, he overestimates human capacities. No-one has ever suggested that such proof was available, and I don't know why anyone would look for such a thing in such a place. All the arguments about the existence or non-existence of God are very old, and none of them has ever persuaded anyone who didn't want to be convinced in the first place. What I'm interested in is the motives people have for belief - and unbelief.

Anyone violating the sanctity of the Holy month of Ramadan will be arrested under the Jordanian Penal Code number 16, article 247 from 1960, the police department in Ramallah said Wednesday.

"The only man convicted in the 1988 bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 arrived in Libya today after he was released by the Scottish government -- drawing ire from heartbroken family members of the 270 victims who felt they had to relive the searing pain of loss all over again." Drawing ire? The families (through their association) sold their loved ones for cash payments from Qadhdhafi. (To be fair: there were families who were opposed to the deal, but the majority prevailed).

NATO should be more involved in protecting its members' energy resources, the alliance's top diplomat said Thursday amid concerns that fuel supplies face threats ranging from terrorism to supply cuts by disgruntled exporters.

NATO has a "role to play in this field," Secretary General Jaap de Hoop Scheffer told a gathering of ministers and senior diplomats from almost 50 allied and partner nations.

Some NATO allies want it to consider a military role in protecting pipelines, oil platforms and sea routes bringing oil and gas to Europe and North America. Poland, which is heavily dependent on Russian oil and gas imports, has suggested a pact to support allies whose supplies are
threatened.

If you’re a deskbound general continually demanding more men, more weapons and more money to subdue Afghanistan, you get endless air time, a peerage and a gold-plated pension.

If you’re a humble squaddie with service in theatre, whose doubts about the war are so serious you go Awol for two years, you face disgrace, a court martial and possibly jail.

Lance Corporal Joe Glenton, 27, of the Royal Logistic Corps, has been charged with desertion for refusing to return to Afghanistan, and faces extra charges for speaking out about a war he (and plenty of his mates) say is unwinnable.

When MoD top brass say the same thing it makes headlines, not a charge sheet.

Rarely has the class distinction between officers and men been so clearly defined.

Nobody - but nobody not the Queen, not the so-called captains of industry, not the bosses of the BBC or any other public body, not the brain free footballers of the Premier League, not the so-called celebrities on our TV screens and most emphatically not the pigswill brigade who run the privatised utilities, deserves more than the Prime Minister's salary of £195,000 a year.

If you can't live on that - and millions of people have to get by on much less than a 10th of that - then quite frankly you deserve to die.

When on his recent visit to Turkey President Obama called for Turkish entry into the European Union, he put his finger on a strategic and cultural sore spot. The French president, Nicolas Sarkozy, speaking for the majority position in Europe, was quick to respond: Turkey may one day enjoy a privileged relationship with the EU, but full membership is out of the question. Turkey is not European – geographically or culturally.

Interpretations of the US stance are numerous and contradictory, but they highlight deep tensions within Europe on the issue. Some believe the US is concerned primarily with securing access to the energy reserves of the Caspian basin; others suspect Washington of using Turkish alignment with American policy (by way of Nato) to exert pressure on its European allies; still others see an attempt to weaken Europe by placing a Turkish economic, demographic and cultural millstone around its neck.

Considering events inside Iran from June 12 on, it seems highly likely that many of Iran's more affluent, urban-activist and technologically savvy youth had concluded that they could achieve their political objectives best, not at the ballot box in June 2009, and not by arguing their case before the rigid bodies of Iran's executive branch, but by tailoring their messages of dissent to foreign audiences, taking to the streets to provoke repressive responses by state authorities, with every action of the state serving to delegitimize it in the eyes of the West's metropolitan centers, whose recognition and validation the protestors have sought above all.


Indeed, the West is where we find the real streets the demonstrators want to control. Not "from Engelob Square to Azadi Square," as Robert Fisk reported it, but how Engelob Square and Azadi Square, Evin Prison and the Basij militia, play in the United States and other Western powers, where 98% of the "internationalists" wouldn't blog, "tweet," text-message, or take to their own streets to stop a single NATO missile from striking a wedding or funeral party in Afghanistan, however much they cheer Iran's dissidents.

This is that these people are not, as idiotically claimed by much of the media, a 'right-wing' revolution against a 'left-wing' old-style Labour. They are practical men and women of the New Left, uninterested in nationalising the railways, gripped by sexual, social and cultural revolution and hostile to national sovereignty. They grasp that their revolutionary objectives can after all be achieved by Parliamentary means, not least because most in the media are either sympathetic to them, or so dim and uninstructed in the ways of Marxism that they cannot see what is going on in front of their noses.

But it’s generally the others who go. That’s why the stupid war goes on unquestioned, and why politicians, never in our history so ignorant of war, have allowed the debate about whether we should be there at all (we shouldn’t) to dribble away into an argument about helicopters.
Next time, they should lay the coffins on the despatch box in the Commons, right in the faces of the Cabinet and the Shadow Cabinet, and make all the MPs look at what they have done, while they debate their stupid war.

AMY GOODMAN: That was President Obama in Cairo in his heralded address to the Muslim world. John Pilger, he says the continued expansion of settlements has to stop, your response? And an overall to his entire address?

JOHN PILGER: He says the continuing response, but what about all the settlements, the so-called settlements, colonies, that have so honeycombed the Occupied Territories over almost two decades? I thought the most significant aspect of that statement was he referred to the continuing settlements, leave the ones that have already been built. Let’s stop building them now. Of course, the Israelis, ever resourceful in this area, got around this very quickly. by issuing building licenses to those settlements that were about to be built and hadn’t been built as if they had been built so they would not fall into President Obama’s category.

The crime always is independence. Iran is an independent state and has almost miraculously maintained itself in forms that we might not approve of, certainly, but it has maintained itself as an independent, major state in the Middle East. That is absolutely intolerable to the U.S. State.

And Obama has not shifted from that at all. He has made a number of patronizing appeals to the Iranians, but now, as he is in effect saying, the protesters should be allowed to control the streets of Tehran. Turn that around. What if it was suggested that protesters should be allowed to control the streets of Washington? But that of course is another side of double standards. I don’t believe anything has changed. If it is going to change in the Middle East as in other parts of the world, there has to be greater pressure.

No mention is made of the enormous American army of mercenaries who are in all those theaters of war, and Special Forces. No mention is made of the special forces operation inside Iraq come inside—I beg your pardon, inside Iran. $400 million was allotted to that particular secret war by Bush, in one of his signing decrees, which money has gone to both the Kurdish and Baluchi separatist movements. The whole region is being crafted, if you like, for a very, very long American colonial presence. Eventually, it will not need a standing army there. That is the future in that part of the world, as I say, unless people become aware of that and start to bang on the doors of government, of Congress, and of power in this country to expose it.

His reaction hasn’t been perfect: unlike France and Spain, he hasn’t withdrawn the US Ambassador yet. He supports the International Monetary Fund and World Bank, which are vast brakes on Latin American democracy, and he bad-mouths Chavez while arming the genuinely abusive Colombian government. But it is a vast improvement on Bush and McCain, who would have been mistily chorusing “We are all Honduran Generals now”.

I still think it highly instructive that we challenge the wisdom of this war on the basis of casualties that we have endured, and never the countless civilian casualties that we are responsible for as a result of our actions.

We will now see a debate, covered uncritically in the media on the war in Afghanistan which is centred on its cost to us. A free press would surely be lambasting the political class for this outrage. Much like the commentariat here, the debate in Russia during the invasion of Afghanistan was invariably about the cost to the aggressor. The US/UK was calling for the withdrawal of Russia regardless of the security situation in the country.

I know how unpopular a view this is in Britain but the invasion of Afghanistan is just a war crime and we have no right to be there. The sooner we bring our 18 and 19 year olds from the front line of this phony war the better.

It’s based on my reading of what I believe is happening in Iran. This, in my judgment, is a post-ideological generation. My generation was divided into third world socialists, anti-colonial nationalists and militant Islamists. These are the three dominant ideologies with which we grew up. But if you look at the composition of Iranian society today, 70 percent of it is under the age of thirty—namely, born after the Islamic Revolution. They no longer are divided along those ideological lines.


And if you read their newspapers, if you watch their movies, if you listen to the lyrics of their underground music, to their contemporary arts, etc., which we have been doing over the past thirty years, this, to me, is a civil rights movement. They are operating within the Constitution of the Islamic Republic. They don’t want to topple the regime. If you look—come outside, from the right of the right, in the US Senate to the left, is waiting for yet another revolution to happen. I don’t think this is another revolution. This is a civil rights movement. They’re demanding their civil rights that are being denied, even within the Constitution of the Islamic Republic. From their chants that they are doing in the streets to their newspapers, to their magazines, to their websites, to their Facebook, to their Twitters, everywhere that you look, this is a demand for civil liberties and not—


There are, of course, underlying economic factors, statistically. The unemployment in the age cohort of fifteen to twenty-nine is 70 percent. So this is not a class warfare. In other words, people that we see in the streets, 70 percent of them, that a majority of them are young—70 percent of them do not even have a job. They can’t even rent a room, let alone marry, let alone have a family. So the assumption that this is a upper-middle-class or middle-class, bourgeois, Gucci revolutionaries on the side of Mousavi and poor on the side of Ahmadinejad is completely false.

The only demographic groups in which our survey found Mousavi leading or competitive with Ahmadinejad were university students and graduates, and the highest-income Iranians. When our poll was taken, almost a third of Iranians were also still undecided. Yet the baseline distributions we found then mirror the results reported by the Iranian authorities, indicating the possibility that the vote is not the product of widespread fraud.

It is bad enough that the ghastly Blair creature might rise from the political tomb, hands clasped in pious prayer, upper lip trembling with fake emotion, pockets crammed with money from the lecture circuit, drivel streaming from his mouth. That would perhaps be the only thing that might make the nation warm to Gordon Brown again.

Gaza's forced separation from Palestine, and its miserable condition, have been almost entirely consigned to oblivion, an atrocity to which we should not contribute by tacit consent. Israeli journalist Amira Hass, one of the leading specialists on Gaza writes that "The restrictions on Palestinian movement that Israel introduced in January 1991 reversed a process that had been initiated in June 1967. Back then, and for the first time since 1948, a large portion of the Palestinian people again lived in the open territory of a single country--to be sure, one that was occupied, but was nevertheless whole... The total separation of the Gaza Strip from the West Bank is one of the greatest achievements of Israeli politics, whose overarching objective is to prevent a solution based on international decisions and understandings and instead dictate an arrangement based on Israel's military superiority... Since January 1991, Israel has bureaucratically and logistically merely perfected the split and the separation: not only between Palestinians in the occupied territories and their brothers in Israel, but also between the Palestinian residents of Jerusalem and those in the rest of the territories and between Gazans and West Bankers/Jerusalemites. Jews live in this same piece of land within a superior and separate system of privileges, laws, services, physical infrastructure and freedom of movement" (April 24, BitterLemons.org).

There is much debate about whether torture has been effective in eliciting information -- the assumption being, apparently, that if it is effective then it may be justified. By the same argument, when Nicaragua captured US pilot Eugene Hasenfuss in 1986 after shooting down his plane delivering aid to Reagan's contra forces, they should not have tried him, found him guilty, and then sent him back to the US, as they did. Rather, they should have applied the CIA torture paradigm to try to extract information about other terrorist atrocities being planned and implemented in Washington, no small matter for a tiny and poor country under terrorist attack by the global superpower. And Nicaragua should certainly have done the same if they had been able to capture the chief terrorism coordinator, John Negroponte, then Ambassador in Honduras, later appointed counterterrorism Czar, without eliciting a murmur. Cuba should have done the same if they had been able to lay hands on the Kennedy brothers. There is no need to bring up what victims should have done to Kissinger, Reagan, and other leading terrorist commanders, whose exploits leave al-Qaeda far in the distance, and who doubtless had ample information that could have prevented further "ticking bombs."

Occasionally the conflict between "what we stand for" and "what we do" has been forthrightly addressed. One distinguished scholar who undertook the task is Hans Morgenthau, a founder of realist international relations theory. In a classic study written in the glow of Camelot, Morgenthau developed the standard view that the US has a "transcendent purpose": establishing peace and freedom at home and indeed everywhere, since "the arena within which the United States must defend and promote its purpose has become world-wide." But as a scrupulous scholar, he recognized that the historical record is radically inconsistent with the "transcendent purpose" of America.

We should not, however, be misled by that discrepancy, Morgenthau advises: in his words, we should not "confound the abuse of reality with reality itself." Reality is the unachieved "national purpose" revealed by "the evidence of history as our minds reflect it." What actually happened is merely the "abuse of reality." To confound abuse of reality with reality is akin to "the error of atheism, which denies the validity of religion on similar grounds." An apt comparison.

Mr Brown has the bad luck to look like his party and like his government, ie not very nice. But he is no worse than Anthony Blair, who was voted for and tolerated by many of the people who are now so enraged about Gordon Brown. There is no significant difference, apart from public relations skill and the physical features of the Prime Minister, between a government led by Gordon Brown, Anthony Blair and David Cameron. Labour's poll ratings and popularity collapsed not when it changed its policies (for it never did) but when it swapped a Prime Minister who could smile but not read, for one who could read but not smile.

We are still governed by an unaccountable establishment. But nowadays it is made up of Eurocrats and human rights judges, BBC executives and quango heads.

Ban did condemn "the excessive use of force" by the Israelis in its massive assault on Gaza. As Abu Nimah noted, presumably the UN Secretary-General "found Israel's attack on Gaza perfectly acceptable, but he disagreed only with the tonnage of high explosives that should be dropped by Israeli planes." While correctly condemning Hamas rocket attacks on Israel as "violations of basic humanitarian law", Ban neglected to say the same of Israel's ongoing massive violations.

So you've seen television ads. Suppose there's a television ad for a drug, or a car, or something. In a market society, what you would have is a description of the properties of the commodity because then you get what are called Ôinformed consumers making rational choices.' But that's not what you get. What you get is forms of delusion because the business wants to create uninformed consumers, who make irrational choices. That is, they want to undermine markets. Which is very much like the political system. You want an electorate, which is uninformed and makes irrational choices under modern democracy, so the whole kind of ideology is so remote from reality that it's almost impossible to discuss.

Yohji Yamamoto, Spring 2009
Sure, the creative loafer has the cash, but he's not about to pay someone else to pick up his milk and morning paper. After all, the vocation may be artistic, but the values (and, in this case, the clothes) are blue-collar.

Exchange with Mark Urban

Mark- I find your blog very thorough and engaging. I don't however seem to see much distinction between our military institution and our political system which couldn't be further apart at this moment in time. As an anti-war Brit I don't think the confidence and effectiveness of our armed forces is to be taken lightly, afterall they are probably the reason I am freely able to conduct this e-mail to you right now.

Surely though you can separate criticism for our political elite from demeaning the role of our armed forces. If you agreed with the war then its not an issue, but for those who feel tagging along with the worlds only superpower in plundering vulnerable third world countries is not a good policy- shouldn't be required to bite their tongue in a time of war.

This has nothing to do with the general principle that a strong national defence is of utmost importance. Do you have an opinion on our political leaders, most with no military background, making decisions to send our troops to war on ever-changing pretexts? Moreover ill-equipped in many cases- If so what is the required mode of protest?


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------


NOT FOR POSTING ON MEDIALENS
Salim,
I am replying to some of the recent traffic caused by my Iraq blog but would ask you to respect that this is a personal response to your interesting mail, rather than an attempt to re-start the debate in the forum of Medialens.
Yes, I accept there is a difference between criticising the political elite and the armed forces. Nothing in my blog or the subsequent traffic precluded: opposing the war; criticising political leaders for getting us into it; and trying to ensure that such a thing never happens again. The primary lesson that I drew was in fact that prime ministers are unwise to take a divided nation into such a campaign. But once we were in, a moral responsibility to the Iraqis and need to support the armed forces justified support for British operations there.
As for political leaders with no military responsibility sending troops into battle, it can be problematic. I have heard differing views from generals on this topic. But while most would, I think, prefer to be led by people who understand ugly realities of battle, they accept that this is a rarity in modern society.
all the best
Mark



From: S Izza [mailto:s.izza@mail.com]
Sent: 24 April 2009 17:22
To: Mark Urban
Cc: editor@medialens.org
Subject: war and peace

While welfare fraud is committed on a mass scale from the Banks to the front benches, the tax-man is still much more concerned with the some coucil estate dweller claiming benefits while working at Iceland.

Vote none of the above please.

I think that one of the sort of untold and unheard story of Pakistan’s entire existence in the United States media was the lawyers’ movement that peacefully, I might add, and in large terms secularly, drove out of power a entrenched military dictator, both out of military power, but also out of civilian power.


And I think that that really speaks towards two inherent presences in Pakistani society. One is they have a robust, critical media that is not multi-—sort of multi-voiced. There’s Urdu presses, Urdu newspaper channels, English newspaper channels and other regional channels and newspapers, so very, very diverse media that has had a critical engagement with the state on many different levels. And secondly, the need of Pakistani people, in general, to—you know, as in any other citizenry of the world, to ask for security, to ask for safety, to ask for engagement with their government.

And I think that the rise of this sort of civil movement, the lawyers’ movement and its sort of student wing, really speaks to the articulation by the Pakistani people that they want to operate within a democratic framework and not within a sort of a military dictatorship that they had been under for the past ten years.

David Cameron asks us to treat the June 4 elections as a referendum on the Brown government. Well, if you like. But you might also treat them as a referendum on the feeblest, most gutless, most ineffectual, most sleazy and complacent Opposition in British history, an Opposition that deserves to be sacked and replaced.

One former Labour minister said: "I object to your decision not to reimburse me for the costs of purchasing a baby's cot for use in my London home... perhaps you might write to me explaining where my son should sleep next time he visits me in London?"

Don't mind paying taxes so that male MPs can order nappies and tampons even though they live alone, its pointless wars, trident& IDcards that the Telegraph fails to grasp the public outrage over.

While you are entitled to your own opinions, you are not entitled to your own facts. To claim Thatcher boosted aspiration is false – unless you mean merely the aspiration of the rich to become super-rich.

IF there is anything more indicative of the inherent bias in our mainstream media which is miles apart from the people it pretends to inform and represent, its the reaction to the top rate tax increase.

Despite the fact that 68%, a large majority of the population are in favour of increasing the rate, the media have focussed on the political nature of the move in a collective effort to undermine it and present it as some kind of spiteful throwback to old labour.

Interesting angle to take given the mainstream press are comprised largely of 150k plus earners from public schools.

Joanna Lumley seems to have taken to the Ghurkha's in classic orientalist fashion. In fact the entire media has exoticised and romanticised the Ghurka's as this mysterious fighting force from the bygone days of Empire.

Very patronising and self-regarding of a Joanna to appoint herself the articulated consciousness of the Ghurka's plight. I see no similar campaign for our own soldiers who are underpaid, underequipped and sent to wars on ever-changing pretexts.

The government lost on such an issue of principle but the same people couldn't bring themselves to protect their own citizens and indeed constituents from summary arrest and detention without trial for more 500 hours, dismantling ancient liberties. The principle should be the following, in our current condition: people willing to lay down their lives for this country, should have their heads thoroughly examined.

Now we have an ID card scheme which promises to be voluntary but will inevitably be compulsory. Obviously the rally cry is if you have nothing to hide you have nothing to worry about, but its precisely because I have nothing to hide that I'm deeply worried. Why should a citizen in a free society have to prove their innocence at every corner as if the country is on the brink of voilent revolution.

After Ian Tomlinson's tragic death, I hope foreign offices around Europe and even Africa are warning their citizens not to participate in political rallies when visiting the UK. Protests are being increasingly seen as inherently subversive and a threat to the state, whereas just about every worthwhile achievement has come about through political activism. WE haven't reached an end point, withering away the means to protest only provides fertile ground for the more extremist groups which explains the growth and relative popularity of groups like the BNP and hizb u tahrir.

Let's just hope ID cards are scrapped and these authoritarian measures are reveresed

If a writer has any guts he should write all the time, and the lousier the world the harder a writer should work. For if he can do nothing positive, to make the world more liveable or less cruel or stupid, he can at least record truly, and that is something no one else will do, and it a job that must be done. It is the only revenge that all the bastardized people will ever get: that somebody writes down clearly what happened to them." - Martha Gellhorn, 1941

هذه تقرير يتحدث عن الوظع الاقتصادي في الشرق الأوسط و البلدان الخليجية. يقيم التقرير على مقالة في الجريدة "Gulf News" و مقالة في "القدس العربي". يبحث في المقالات السعار النفط و ركودا الاقتصادي في المنطقة بسبب الازمة المالية العالمية.

يتوقع رئيس صندوق النقد الدولى مسود احمد انخفاض في النمو الاقتصادي بين البلدان في الشرق الاوسط و في الخليج من 2% في المائة في العام 2009.

وذكر التقرير الصندوق النقد الدولى ان معظم البلدان في العالم العربي سوف تستخدم ثروتة نفط لكي استثمر في الخدمات العامة و تجنب التراجع المالي.

المملكة العربية السعودية، التي عند الاقتصاد الاكبر في العالم العربي، سوف ملك عجز الذي يبلغ عن 1.7 بليون الدولار الأميركي.

يتوقع احمد ان سينزل الصادرات النفط الى النصف، و ستعاني الدول الخليج من تراجع في ثروتة نفط بنسبة 50%.

يقول الصندوق النقد الدولى البلدان التي تصدّر النفط هي الجزائر، والبحرين، وايران، العراق، الكويت، لليبية، عمان، قطر، المملكة العربية السعودية، السودان، واليمن.

حسب صندوق النقد الدولي يحدث الإنخفاض في اسعار النفط المؤسسات المالية المختلفة في المنطقة الخليج و العربية، ويشكل مشكلات طاويلً فيها.

يحدث الازمة المالية العالمية على قطاع الخاص و قطاع العام في منطقة الخليخ و العربية مثل سياحة و الصادرات.

اخيرا في الوضع الاقتصادي الصعب هل يمكن رؤساء العالم مثل الرئيس باراك اوباما يساعد في تعافي الازمة الاقتصادية العلمية؟

هذه تقرير يتحدث عن الوظع الاقتصادي في الشرق الأوسط و البلدان الخليجية. يقيم التقرير على مقالة في الجريدة "Gulf News" و مقالة في "القدس العربي". يبحث في المقالات السعار النفط و ركودا الاقتصادي في المنطقة بسبب الازمة المالية العالمية.

عند للنساء في الغرب بعض الحريات التي ليست موجودة في بعض البلدان العربي والاسلامي.

"Restoring religious faith to its rightful place as a guide to our world and its future is of the essence." Or this: "In surrendering to God we become instruments of his love". He told the story of his "first spiritual awakening" aged 10 when his teacher knelt and prayed with him when his father had a stroke. He warned the teacher that his father was a committed atheist who didn't believe in God, only to be told "God believes in him". And he's had fun at the expense of the civil servants and Alastair Campbell who told him "we don't do God" by finishing with the hope that in acting, politicians will "follow God's will - and by the way God bless you all".

No doubt Mr Blair's religious outpourings will generate a spot of reaction from those who might find it a bit rich to be lectured in religious and moral terms by the man who led us into Iraq and oversaw the culture of casual mendacity that marked New Labour. But for those of us who toil along the Burma Road, watching Mr Blair put on a trademark display of self-deprecation and lip-quivvering guffery was a moment for nostalgia. Say what you like, this guy is good.

Erich Fromm, 54 years ago, concluded: "Man [sic] today is confronted with the most fundamental choice; not that between Capitalism or Communism, but that between robotism (of both the capitalist and the communist variety), or Humanistic Communitarian Socialism. Most facts seem to indicate that he is choosing robotism and that means, in the long run, insanity and destruction. But all these facts are not strong enough to destroy faith in man's reason, good will, and sanity. As long as we can think of other alternatives, we are not lost."

Dear Mr Izza

Thank you for your e-mail regarding 'BBC News' on 3 January. Please
accept our apologies for the delay in replying. We know our
correspondents appreciate a quick response and are sorry you've had
to wait on this occasion.

I understand you felt Peter Sisson's did a poor job of presenting the
item on the Gaza protests in London. I also note that you felt the
item was biased in favour of an Israeli point of view.

The range of tastes and opinions held by our audience is so diverse
that it's inevitable some viewers will dislike or disapprove of the
performance of certain presenters. It's a very rare TV personality
who meets with everyone's approval, and it's clear that opinions on
them can vary considerably.

Our programme contributors are appointed on the basis of their
experience and talent, but judgements are often subjective and we
would never expect everyone to agree with every choice we make.
However, we don't engage any presenter or reporter unless we believe
they're competent and can meet the specific demands required of them.

All BBC journalists and newsreaders are well aware of our commitment
to impartial reporting. They seek only to provide the information
which will enable viewers and listeners to make up their own minds;
to show the political reality and provide the forum for debate where
there is full opportunity for all viewpoints to be heard.

In dealing with any controversial matter the BBC is required to give
a fair and balanced report. However, balance cannot simply be judged
on the basis of the time allocated to the representatives of either
side of an argument. One spokesperson may make his or her points
concisely while another needs rather longer to explain a point of
view. Account also needs to be taken of the way a subject is covered
over a period of time; perfect balance is difficult to achieve on
every single occasion while overall it is a more achievable goal.

Please be assured that senior editorial staff, the Executive
Committee, and the BBC Trust keep a close watch on programmes to
ensure that standards of impartiality are maintained.

I would also like to assure you that we've registered your comments
on our audience log. This is the internal report of audience feedback
we compile daily for all programme makers, news teams, and senior
management within the BBC. The audience logs are important documents
that can help shape decisions about future programming and content
and ensure that your points, and all other comments we receive, are
circulated and considered across the BBC.

Thanks again for contacting us.

Regards

Stuart Webb
BBC Complaints
__________________________________________
www.bbc.co.uk/complaints



-----Original Message-----



Why am I paying a liscence fee to listen to supercilious wankers like Peter
Sissons treat with contempt a popular gathering against an international c
rime (assault on gaza), endorse police brutality and apologise for Israeli
crimes by accentuating Hamas and equating protestors with Hamas sympathiser
s! Please address this, the BBC is worse than Sky news on this issue, its p
athetic and cringeworthy at times. Is Peter Sissons the self-appointed pros
cribor of 'evil terrorist' organisations because I certainly didn't get the
impression he was mediating and sourcing information like an actual report
er, as opposed to a sycophantic apologist for state crimes and those of the
ir allies.

Actually, it is still not too late to bring back the Hereditary Peers, decent incorruptible old coves who have Britain in their bones and blood. Why do we believe that ‘democracy’ is the answer to everything when it so frequently elevates idiots and crooks to power?

"Impartiality is a nice cop-out. How can we be impartial when people are suffering and dying? It's a luxury we can't afford," she said.


Broadcasters do not have to be absolutely neutral on every
controversial issue. And while broadcasters should deal even-handedly with
opposing points of view in the arena of democratic debate, it does not mean that
'balance' is required in any simple mathematical sense or that equal time must be
given to each opposing point of view”.

Tzipi Livni says in 2009 that the assault was necessary, that it is going according to design, that there is no humanitarian crisis, and that the invasion will be good for the Palestinians. Yet Ehud Barak in 1999, in answer to a question from the reporter Gideon Levy about what he would have done if he had been born Palestinian, replied without pause: "Joined a fighting organization." Ehud Olmert says in a daring interview in his penultimate season in office that there will have to be a two-state solution and that Israel will have to give up a large part of the settlements it now holds. Yet Olmert devotes his final weeks in power to the merciless waging of this war, and refuses to convene his cabinet to take up the encouragement of a cease-fire...From the imposition of state terror in one generation spring the soldiers of guerrilla terror in the next generation. Those to whom evil is done, do evil in return.

One family buried a slain son over his grandfather. Another bundled up the tiny bodies of three young cousins and lowered them into the grave of a long-dead aunt. A man was laid to rest with his brother.

"Gaza is all a graveyard," gravedigger Salman Omar said Tuesday as he shoveled earth in Gaza City's crammed Sheik Radwan cemetery, a cigarette dangling from his lips.

The New York Times attempts to show itself to be self-critical in its reporting of the current aggression on Gaza, unsurprisingly the article descends into a slimy self-regarding exculpation of all inaccuracies and alleged biases. By showing e-mails from opposing sides of the argument it points to the likelihood that they're doing something right, then it reports,

"But in the case of the complex, intractable struggle between Israel and the Palestinians, even the best, most evenhanded reporting will not satisfy those passionately on one side or the other."

Why is it such a mystical struggle? The solution has been on the table for over 30 years, and is agreed upon by virtually the entire security council bar the US and Israel. Its instructive the only people who wish to mystify the conflict are precisely the ones who oppose a peaceful settlement on the basis of the overwhelming international consensus. For this reason there can't be a liberal utopian compromise between the two sides, the colonialist never concedes something for nothing, whatever is achieved through political or armed struggle is only a result of the colonialists realisation that the concession is in its own interest to make.

Fisk writes that the Israelis claim they are fighting in Gaza for us, for our Western ideals, for our security, for our safety, by our standards. He laments this but the Israeli's are absolutely correct, in fact by our Western standards they are being quite proportionate. Did we even have a pretext rooted in any conception of reality for going into Iraq or Afghanistan? There is good reason why the former colonial powers of Europe are refraining from being seriously critical of Israel's atrocities, one is we have been committing them for centuries and continue to do so now. There has been scarcely a year in the last few centuries when European colonisers and their hired soldiers haven't been plundering some distant land and oppressing its natives.

Satre captures the colonial dilemma

You said they understand nothing but voilence? Of course; first, the only voilence is the settler's; but soon they will make it their own; that is to say, the same voilence is thrown back upon us as when our reflection comes forward to meet us when we go towards a mirror.

If one was to step back from the present conflict and look at the issues dispassionately the main question which arises is the nature of the attack, whether Israel is acting defensively or offensively is important because it delineates the distinction between aggression and lawful retaliation. Its difficult for any objective observer, who happens to know five minutes of the history of the region, to see Israel as anything other than an aggressor. In which case the aggressor has no rights (under international law) and must pull back immediately. The calls for a ceasefire are futile but correct. Attacks by non-state actors or quasi-administrations are either isolated terrorist attacks, (much less severe breach than aggression) or belligerant reprisals. If the Israeli actions are seen as defensive then it must be tacitly admitted that Israel is not just defending its citizens but an occupation which is itself is necessarily offensive. The Western governments cannot condemn Israel however because it would smack of unimaginable hypocracy, not least, the western media narrative is rather more simplistic, the guys with suits are the goodies, the one's who can barely afford them are the badies

The story of the 2009 war on piracy was best summarised by another pirate, who lived and died in the fourth century BC. He was captured and brought to Alexander the Great, who demanded to know "what he meant by keeping possession of the sea." The pirate smiled, and responded: "What you mean by seizing the whole earth; but because I do it with a petty ship, I am called a robber, while you, who do it with a great fleet, are called emperor." Once again, our great imperial fleets sail – but who is the robber?

liberte

For his 29th birthday he threw a $600,000 party in New York at which guests included Donald Trump, Kevin Costner, Muhammad Ali and the Duchess of York. Combs is a "maven", a consummate social connector, before whom all barriers of race and class dissolve.

Until he changed his name recently to P.Diddy, Combs performed under the title of Puff Daddy. But he has also tried out other sobriquet ranging from the opportunistic ("the black Sinatra") to the overweening ("the world's greatest entertainer"). In private though, he imagines himself heir to another self-made American also known to throw a good party, Jay Gatsby. ("Have I read The Great Gatsby? I am the Great Gatsby!") It doesn't seem to bother Combs that Gatsby's life ended in shattered dreams, his well-heeled friends exposed as fickle and insincere. But then, while Gatsby found it ultimately impossible to escape his humble origins, Combs has no such concerns. Far from hiding his roots he does the opposite , insisting upon, and even exaggerating, his connection to the streets of New York in order to offer himself as a brand name for black urban culture. Fitzgerald, the laureate of the jazz age, would have found it difficult to countenance that blackness could be a social asset. But this is the hip hop age. And Sean Combs' millions are based on the enormous influence that black culture now wields across America and the rest of the world.

Taking a shoe for the Great Leader
I suppose not everyone appreciates having their country plundered and its resources sold off to the highest bidder

Sock and Awe

After the recent attacks, the elite feel "there is no safe haven. There is no place to run and hide," said Uday Shankar, chief executive of Star India, which runs a string of entertainment and news television channels. "They cannot go behind the Taj hotel's double doors and feel shielded from the chaos and insecurity outside. That shield has been shattered. The terrorists struck South Mumbai, the most desirable address in India."

Across the city, wealthy youths paraded with "Enough Is Enough" banners. Hundreds of middle- and upper-class residents of the ritzy Colaba neighborhood gathered outside the terrorist-hit Chabad House, a Jewish center, to perform yogic sun salutations and deep-breathing techniques.

"There was no such protest or activities for us. Now everyone is feeling vulnerable, not just us, the common people," said Madhuri Jayprakash Sawant, 49, whose 29-year-old son is in a coma from brain damage suffered in the 2006 train attacks. "The first-class people are the ones now running the national outrage. But the common man is usually the one who suffers, alone."

Islamo-Fashionistas

The iconic black and white keffiyeh, or Arab headdress, famously donned by late Palestinian president Yasser Arafat has hit the streets of Beirut in a rainbow of colours -- much to the chagrin of older Palestinians.

Stylish youngsters, both men and women, can be seen in the city's chic cafes and restaurants sporting red, blue, pink, brown and purple versions of the keffiyeh.

Western and Arab tourists are also snapping up the hip item.

The trend, however, is seen by many here as an insult to a symbol traditionally linked to the Palestinian cause.

"These colours aren't for us... it's nonsense, it's a fashion show," said Salim Ali Kayd, 74, who has been a Palestinian refugee in Lebanon since 1948, when Israel was created.

House Un-American Activities Committee

Amidst the threat of atomic death from on high, the western world was embroiled in the Cold War. Although both the American and Soviet governments were painting a horrendous picture of a possible hot war, the so-called Cold War was, for all intents and purposes, a political fabrication. In fact, mutual threats and brinkmanship supported a relatively stable international system, symbolized by the 1963 installation of the telephone "hot line" linking the White House to the Kremlin.

Much like the mass hysteria that has spread over the United States since the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, many McCarthy-era government officials were calling for and enacting extreme measures to combat a perceived threat. And the real question at the time—as it is for the present—was whether people would retain their basic freedoms and avoid the dredge of conformity that threatens our very humanity.

Ideological State Apparatuses

But it is by an apprenticeship in a variety of know-how wrapped up in the massive inculcation of the ideology of the ruling class that the relations of production in a capitalist social formation, i.e. the relations of exploited to exploiters and exploiters to exploited, are largely reproduced. The mechanisms which produce this vital result for the capitalist regime are naturally covered up and concealed by a universally reigning ideology of the School, universally reigning because it is one of the essential forms of the ruling bourgeois ideology: an ideology which represents the School as a neutral environment purged of ideology (because it is ...lay), where teachers respectful of the ‘conscience’ and ‘freedom’ of the children who are entrusted to them (in complete confidence) by their ‘parents’ (who are free, too, i.e. the owners of their children) open up for them the path to the freedom, morality and responsibility of adults by their own example, by knowledge, literature and their ‘liberating’ virtues

I ask the pardon of those teachers who, in dreadful conditions, attempt to turn the few weapons they can find in the history and learning they ‘teach’ against the ideology, the system and the practices in which they are trapped. They are a kind of hero. But they are rare and how many (the majority) do not even begin to suspect the ‘work’ the system (which is bigger than they are and crushes them) forces them to do, or worse, put all their heart and ingenuity into performing it with the most advanced awareness (the famous new methods!).

Mumbai Attacks
Yet again this week we see the recurring narrative amongst head-of-states eager to express there outrage at having not monopolised all forms of violence, espousing the rallying cry for the western nations and there allies that this is "an attack on us all". But what does Miliband mean for example, when he says "us all"? Why wasn't the invasion of Iraq or Lebanon in 2006 an attack on us all. Is a shoot-out in a hotel really more morally reprehensible than a half-tonne bomb dropped on a hotel in Baghdad, or a wedding in Afghanistan. It was also described (presumably equally important) as an attack on "modernity", of course what we do is bomb backward countries in the name of "modernity" which is perfectly acceptable in Miliband's "21st Century international affairs".

An audience member on Question Time asked without irony, are we losing the "war on terror?". The presumptions are all distorted. Who are these self-appointed crusaders assigned to eradicate the scourge of 'terror', the same people who have presided over more civilian deaths in third world countries (where people apparently don't matter, unless they're non-Muslim and reside in "Jewish centres") since the war on terror was declared. Wanton killing of civilians is terrorism, not a war on terrorism, its a shame people are so deeply indoctrinated to see the radically obvious.

Zurabishvili, like other opposition leaders, emphasized that she's pro-Western and doesn't support Russia, which seized two Georgian rebel enclaves and marched its forces within 25 miles of Tbilisi during the invasion.

"I think the big confusion in the American policy . . . is to confuse support for a country and its democracy with the support for a small group of people," Zurabishvili said of Saakashvili, a U.S.-educated lawyer, and his
allies.

"Partly, I'm angry that there is so little anger around me at what is being done to our society, supposedly in order to protect it," said the 76-year-old in an interview in Waterstone's magazine.

"We have been taken to war under false pretences, and stripped of our civil rights in an atmosphere of panic. Our lawyers don't take to the streets as they have done in Pakistan.

"Our MPs allow themselves to be deluded by their own spin doctors, and end up believing their own propaganda."

He added: "We haul our Foreign Secretary back from a mission to the Middle East so he can vote for 42 days' detention.

George Bush, Condoleezza Rica and other dignitaries solemnly invoked the sanctity of the United Nations, warning that Russia could be excluded from international institutions “by taking actions in Georgia that are inconsistent with” their principles. The sovereignty and territorial integrity of all nations must be rigorously honored, they intoned – “all nations,” that is, apart from those that the US chooses to attack: Iraq, Serbia, perhaps Iran, and a list of others too long and familiar to mention.

The junior partner joined in as well. British foreign secretary David Miliband accused Russia of engaging in “19th century forms of diplomacy” by invading a sovereign state, something Britain would never contemplate today. That “is simply not the way that international relations can be run in the 21st century,” he added, echoing the decider-in-chief, who said that invasion of “a sovereign neighboring state…is unacceptable in the 21st century.” Mexico and Canada therefore need not fear further invasions and annexation of much of their territory, because the US now only invades states that are not on its borders, though no such constraint holds for its clients, as Lebanon learned once again in 2006.

Brown Reborn


The critics remain sceptical about the "quiet man" turning up the volume routine but Brown has a much wider base to convince

The year 2003 saw the unfolding of two counterinsurgencies. One was in Iraq, and it grew out of foreign invasion. The other was in Darfur, and it grew as a response to an internal insurgency. The former involved a liberation war against a foreign occupation; the latter, a civil war in an independent state. True, if you were an Iraqi or a Darfuri, there was little difference between the brutality of the violence unleashed in either instance. Yet much energy has been invested in how to define the brutality in each instance: whether as counterinsurgency or as genocide. We have the astonishing spectacle of the state that has perpetrated the violence in Iraq, the United States, branding an adversary state, Sudan, the one that has perpetrated genocidal violence in Darfur. Even more astonishing, we had a citizens' movement in America calling for a humanitarian intervention in Darfur while keeping mum about the violence in Iraq.

On Hearts and Minds
it seems US strategy to gain "hearts and minds" is to invade the heart to occupy the mind.

Are authors like Richard Dawkins and your brother Christopher succeeding in rendering God irrelevant to the 21st century? And why do you think faith is essential to British society?

Peter: These authors have discovered that there is a deep anti-Christian feeling among the victims of post-1960s secular university education. But they may be dismayed if they succeed in destroying Christianity, only to have it replaced by Islam. No society or culture can exist for long without faith. Liberal reformers always fall foul of the law of Unintended Consequences, because they don't understand institutions or traditions.

Propaganda is so engrained in national news media that reporting on Wars have been reduced to something resembling a sports column on the national football team.

Hitler on Propaganda:
What, for example, would we say about a poster that was supposed to advertise a new soap and that described other soaps as 'good'?

We would only shake our heads.

Exactly the same applies to political advertising.

The function of propaganda is, for example, not to weigh and ponder the rights of different people, but exclusively to emphasize the one right which it has set out to argue for. Its task is not to make an objective study of the truth, in so far as it favors the enemy, and then set it before the masses with academic fairness; its task is to serve our own right, always and unflinchingly

Danish Cartoons

Some background, the intriguing question is why this provocation took place and who benefited from it. Was the reason as straightforward as the cultural editor of the paper claimed? That is, as a step to preserve or enhance the democratic right of “freedom of the press” and “liberty of expression,” which the Jyllands-Posten claimed were endangered by the media’s self-censorship toward Islam. The alleged motivation for publishing the cartoons might have been credible had the paper been a traditional bastion of democracy. But the group behind the paper has a dubious ideological and political history. Their editorial line was pro-Nazi during the Second World War and militantly antisocialist and anticommunist, as well as vehemently pro-American, during the Cold War. The Jyllands-Posten remains an ardent supporter of Israel’s policies in Palestine, a warm partisan of Danish military participation in the wars in Muslim countries, and hostile to third world immigrants. The appalling irony is that it is this organ of the press that donned the mantle of champion of “freedom of expression” and implicitly contributed to setting the infamous thesis of “clash of civilizations” on the ideological and socio-political agenda.

Saif al-Islam Gaddafi, Libyan leader Moammar Gaddafi's influential son, echoed the delight expressed in much of the Arab news media. "What happened in Georgia is a good sign, one that means America is no longer the sole world power setting the rules of the game," the younger Gaddafi was quoted as telling the Russian daily Kommersant. "There is a balance in the world now. Russia is resurging, which is good for us, for the entire Middle East."

Amongst all the left-wing hysteria over Obama its hard not to lose sight of his actual policies. After all Obama's position on the war in Iraq is that it was "inconceived", and that its not working, there's no principled opposition there, anyone could say that. Its what German chiefs of staff were saying after Stalingrad and Barborossa

McCain doesn't know Shi'ite

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jNsr2aF1XM0&NR=1

"Czechoslovakia broke up a long time ago, this is kind of like referring to Jenifer Lopez and Ben Affleck as 'Bennifer'.. today, you just can't do that, 'cause they split up."

I love the way it had to be broken down into a fine paste for americans who can't understand or refer to anything serious without a trivial analogy to make sense of it. Although it is important to treat all serious matters with a sincere and studied triviality.

The recent case of Nicky Reilly was the major tabloid topic this week. The surreality of the Conradian aspect to the episode seemed lost on most commentary. When life imitates art the whole line between reality and fiction becomes blurred. Very few facts have been released about the exact motives and affiliations of the 'bomber' from Plymouth, who seemed to be attempting to blow up an obscure restaurant in Exeter. Nonetheless the fear factor is accelerated and the episode fits neatly into that precise narrative, namely we need to be on guard against this Islamico-Anarchist threat and the "indoctrination" by "radicals" of innocent youth.

The MI5 predictably claimed to have known of Nicky Reilly - a Muslim convert - and that he crossed their "radar", but I have a suspicion that MI5 have absolutely know idea how to handle this threat. Its nothing like the IRA, and the only vague historical parrallel can be found in the dark urban setting of Conrad's The Secret Agent, in 19th Century London, where anarchists attempt the most absurd and audacious atrocities, while lamenting the artificial and corrupt institutions that surround them. With the vast underworld, secret meetings in coffee shops (in this case a chip shop), and bombs carried on 40 minute bus journies some of the detailed conguity with the novel is uncanny.

Backing the Bishop

What the opponants of reasoned and proportionate attention and discussion of issues relating the Islam and the modern world all have in common is an oppressive commitment to political correctness. Thousands of e-mails of complaint to the Sun and the BBC by people who I strongly presume have barely listened the Archbishops actual comments in either his Radio 4 interview or his address previously, don't serve as a barometer of public opinion, and therefore shouldn't be used as justification for journalistic hysteria. Why does a tepid and reasonable discussion about religion and civil law evoke outcry in our mainstream 24hour media!