Wednesday, December 31, 2003

Johann Hari's Fan Club. posted by Richard Seymour

You would expect the title of this post to be intended sardonically, but oddly it isn't. Hari genuinely has a minute cult following on the net, almost as big as mine. I've debated some of them here , so if you want to be dazzled by their astounding grasp of logic, rhetoric and reality, click on the link and hold your breath!!

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The Guardian and Blair's New Year Message. posted by Richard Seymour

The Guardian is an odd institution. You like to think it deals with issues in a serious manner, then suddenly something happens and it goes all gorblimey. The Princess Di issue sent it over the top, advancing further than even the beacons of reaction dared to. The main thing that happens, however, is that it just runs out of steam and lapses into newspaper cliche mode. Today, the Guardian is actually reporting as news that revellers were set to welcome the new year in!
Damn their pasty-white butts, I would never have imagined in a hundred years that all those people who miraculously appear on the streets EVERY SINGLE YEAR at EXACTLY THE SAME DATE had anything to do with NEW YEAR CELEBRATIONS!!

But the best news today is Blair's speech . Blair´s message for 2004 is as follows, and pay close attention because it´s a cracker:

'I will not falter'

Ho ho ho!! Well, how long did it take him to think of that one? He must have been in the Cabinet Office with all his bumlicking colleagues, discussing the pros and cons:

"Well, quite frankly, I was thinking of having a major fuck-up this year. What do you all think?"

"Focus group evidence shows people don´t like fuck ups unless it saves them tax money, Tony."

"Hmmm. Okay, what if I say 'I won´t fuck up'."

"No, no, Prime Minister, that sounds too much like 'I won´t shut the fuck up'. People won´t like that at all. Polling data from the Yougov website shows..."

"Alright, alright! How about 'I WILL NOT FALTER'?"

"Magnificent, Prime Minister!"

"He's a genius!"


You will have gathered, I'm sure, that what Tony Blair means is not exactly what is directly implied by his headlines. When he says, "I will not falter", he seems to mean, "I'm going to do whatever the bloody hell I like, and noone can stop me. Exterminate! Exterminate!"

He evokes, as he always does, the "difficult choices" which he has to make. We are supposed to simper and go "aaawe, bless". But he promises to do exactly what he has always done and disregard everyone else. He will go ahead with tuition fees which are - get this - "free at the point of study, fair at the point of repayment"! He will continue the occupation of Iraq, regardless of how unloved it is. He will continue to privatise whatever he can get his grasping little hands on.

In other words, Blair's New Year Message is "Fuck You All!"

Happy New Year.

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Sunday, December 28, 2003

The Darkness Must Die!! posted by Richard Seymour

Another Reason Why a Neutron Bomb Could Be Fun!


They didn't get to Christmas number one with their lacklustre retro horseshit, well boo-fucking-hoo. All those people who went out and bought the CD because it was sooooo fucking hilarious and camp should be ripping out their teeth in shame. Gary Jules' beautiful rendition of "Mad World" was clearly the better single even if it wasn't very "Christmassy" as the Darkness lead whined on a BBC interview.

I've been into most kinds of music, and I mean that term rather loosely. In my youth, I danced like a melon to Betty Boo and Sister Sledge. I grovelled at the altar of the tasteless, hoovering up every nugget of vomitous drivel they chucked my way. And yet I have never seen anything so dire, so tuneless, so absolutely inexplicable in its appeal as The Darkness.

Tell me, anyone who's ever liked any kind of rock, what is it about them? I used to listen to glam-rock, and Seventies music. If you read this message and think "lenin doesn't like Seventies glam", YOU'LL BE WRONG. But I usually insist that it has some tune, and that the main performer isn't some overgrown choirboy with a twatty face covered in craters.

Yes, yes, yes. It's soooo ironic and cheeky. And you lap it up like the sour tarts that you are.

Fuck off and die, you miserable, mediocre geeks.

Happy Xmas.

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Saturday, December 27, 2003

Saddam Could "Embarrass" the West... posted by Richard Seymour

How the BBC Covered Up US Complicity With Saddam.


I dimly recall Medialens discussing an ITN mention of the potential "embarrassment" that Saddam could cause the West if he were to discuss his dealings in open court.

Now, the BBC has added its voice to that regimented choir, allowing Paul Reynolds to rehearse a disgusting littly hymn about how Jesus Rumsfeld was once tempted by Satan.

Take this, for instance:

"The trial might turn into more than an account of genocide, invasion, murder and massacre, dominant though that would be.

It could become a political event tinged with some embarrassment for countries and individuals who were once close to him.

Saddam Hussein's egocentric sense of history, largely centred around a vision of himself leading the Arab world as Saladin led it against the Crusaders, would surely tempt him to play to the gallery of Arab opinion..."



Two things. If it is truly a matter of mere "embarrassment", we are on a disastrous moral level, which reminds us of David Aaronovitch comparing the British empire to an "embarrassing Aunt" who farts. Secondly, if this has anything to do with Saddam Hussein pretending to be a Saladin, leading Arabs against the crusaders, one would expect him to play down his dealings with the West.

But the main part of the article, although presumably supposed to be the space for media dissent, bolsters pro-Western assumptions about Hussein and his relations with the United States and the United Kingdom. The hymn begins promisingly enough:

"[I]t is important to remember that Saddam Hussein's main supplier was the Soviet Union. He was sent its best equipment - Mig 29s, T 72 tanks, artillery, gunboats and Scud missiles."

This is true, although we'd expect therefore to be granted something in the way of context - "supplier" is different from "supporter", and something ought to be said about the reasons why the USSR would support Saddam, all the better to criticise their actions.

Under the heading "US diplomacy", the Beeb offers an interesting lead in:

"The role played by the United States turned out to be important diplomatically. And this is where Mr Rumsfeld came in."

Sorry? This is where the story starts? Are we absolutely sure. Oh well, let's see where it goes:

"In the early 1980s, the bogeyman for the Americans was Ayatollah Khomeini. He had come to power in Iran during the 1979 Islamic revolution."

The first propaganda line: The devil made them do it. Except, of course, that US support for Saddam and his Ba'ath party stretches back to 1963 if I'm not mistaken - and, oh, don't bother looking that up, cos I'm not mistaken. 'Kay?

The next verse:

"With Iran seen as the danger, Washington turned to Iraq as the bulwark.

Iraq had invaded Iran in 1980 but the Iranians had held the advance and were striking back with human wave attacks. Iraq was known, by 1983, to have used chemical weapons to stop these.

A US State Department memorandum in 1983 stated: "We have recently received additional information confirming Iraqi use of chemical weapons." "


All very well, loves, but this isn't the starting point for US support for Hussein, nor is it the reason. And you know it. Or perhaps not, because the next headline is:

"Iran the motive"

No, no, no! How many times do I have to tell you idiots? Here, let me help you. According to Said Aburish, (A Brutal Friendship, 1997), the CIA closely controlled the planning stages but also played a central role in the subsequent purge of suspected leftists after the coup. 5,000 were killed, including many doctors, lawyers, teachers and professors who formed Iraq's educated elite. The massacre was carried out on the basis of death lists provided by the CIA. The lists were compiled in CIA stations throughout the Middle East with the assistance of Iraqi exiles like Saddam, who was based in Egypt. An Egyptian intelligence officer, who obtained a good deal of his information from Saddam, helped the Cairo CIA station draw up its list. According to Aburish, however, the American agent who produced the longest list was William McHale, who operated under the cover of a news correspondent for the Beirut bureau of Time magazine.

MOTIVE NOT IRAN! Okay? Can I make it any clearer? Need I underline it any further?

But the BBC continues:

"Mr Rumsfeld had been defence secretary under President Ford and was then head of a private pharmaceutical company.

Minutes of their meeting in December 1983 were taken by an American diplomat and later released in edited form under the Freedom of Information Act. They were published by the National Security Archive, a private research group.

It is clear from the account that Mr Rumsfeld was concerned about Iran and that this was the motive for the American approach.

The minutes state: "Rumsfeld told Saddam that the US and Iraq shared interests in preventing Iranian and Syrian expansion."

There is a lot of talk about stopping Iranian oil exports.

The report also sums up Saddam Hussein's reaction: "Saddam Hussein showed obvious pleasure with the President's letter and Rumsfeld's visit."

There is no mention of Mr Rumsfeld having raised the issue of chemical weapons with Saddam Hussein, though he said he did in an interview with CNN in 2002."



The BBC finishes its coverage of US-Iraqi relations with the following literary flourish:

"A report on another meeting, recorded that he did raise it with the Iraqi Foreign Minister Tariq Aziz, saying that "our efforts to assist were inhibited by certain things that make it difficult for us, citing the use of chemical weapons". Diplomatic relations between the US and Iraq were restored in 1984. Past alliances often embarrass governments."

The nice Mr Rumsfeld DID raise the use of chemical weapons, after all? This is reassuring, although one wonders in what context. It wasn't, possibly, the Iraqis saying "look, if you want us to kill people properly, you've got to give us the means" and Rummy saying "You've got it!"?

The fact that the result of that meeting was a restoration of diplomatic relations between the two countries might offer some clue, but thankfully, we know the following -

On March 23, 1984, Iran accused Iraq of poisoning 600 of its soldiers with mustard gas and Tabun nerve gas. Donald Rumsfeld returned to Baghdad on March 24, 1984. On that same day, the UPI wire service reported that a team of UN experts had concluded that:

"Mustard gas laced with a nerve agent has been used on Iranian soldiers. Meanwhile, Donald Rumsfeld held talks with foreign minister Tariq Aziz."

Probably the most critical piece of information is that according to Washington Post journalist Bob Woodward, in a December 15, 1986 article , the CIA began to secretly supply Iraq with intelligence in 1984 that was used to "calibrate" mustard gas attacks on Iranian troops.

The US subsequently provided computer equipment to help with munitions development, financial assistance, diplomatic support, intelligence and chemical weapons .

After the US Senate unanimously supported the "Prevention of Genocide Act of 1988", the Reagan administration mounted a campaign against the act, which would have prevented any further equipment going to a dictator believed to have GASSED HIS OWN PEOPLE, YES, GASSED HIS OWN PEOPLE, and successfully turned it back. (Jentleson, Bruce W.
1994. With Friends Like These: Reagan, Bush, and Saddam, 1982-1990. New York: W.W. Norton. 1994
.)

In December 1998, "Dow Chemical sold $1.5 million of pesticides to Iraq, despite U.S. government concerns that they could be used as chemical warfare agents," reported The Washington Post , adding that an "Export-Import Bank official reported in a memorandum that he could find 'no reason' to stop the sale, despite evidence that the pesticides were 'highly toxic' to humans and would cause death 'from asphyxiation'."

Evidently, IRAN WAS NOT THE MOTIVE. According to a document published by the U.S. Department of Commerce, titled "Approved Licenses to Iraq, 1985-1990", "Reagan administration records show that between September and December 1988, 65 licenses were granted for dual-use technology exports. This averages out as an annual rate of 260 licenses, more than double the rate for January through August 1988."

And even when the American government knew the Iran war was over, and publicly admitted Saddam's use of chemical and biological weapons, Secretary of State James Baker received a memo from the State Department informing him that Iraq was aggressively developing chemical and biological weapons, as well as new missiles. In spite of this disturbing intelligence, the memo also instructed Baker to express the administration's "interest in broadening U.S.-Iraqi ties" to Iraqi Under-Secretary Hamdoon. (State Department memorandum, "Meeting with Iraqi Under Secretary Hamdoon," 24 March 1989).


Well, what's the point? What is the fucking point in going through all of this well-known record when we all know the BBC isn't going to change it's tune, and some chicken-necked ballbag licker from Republicans Abroad probably thinks the BBC already far too subversive, and we all know the whole point of the BBC is to spout propaganda horseshit?

This is the point: they get away with it too easy. I say we write these fuckers and let them know. Paul Reynolds, the banausic, irrelevant author of the piece, doesn't offer his e-mail address for the perfectly understandable reason that he cannot defend his idiotic little article. So, go to the top: richard.sambrook@bbc.co.uk

I'm not calling for childish abuse, now. We'll keep that for later. Just write him and point out just how truly awful the BBC's allegedly reputable coverage of the facts surrounding US support for Iraq has been. If anything else, it would be good to wipe the smug grin off his face as he realises his e-mail box is crammed with irritating complaints once again. Good, clean fun.

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Tuesday, December 16, 2003

Lies and Cambodia, Part II posted by Richard Seymour

Blogger Beezlebozo attempts a defense of his
lies over Cambodia
. I don't suppose those of you who read Bozo's response to my little jibe will have missed that a) he failed to respond to the bulk of the arguments b) he distorts what arguments he does choose to deal with, and c) he falls back on the standard line of trying to reassure other readers that I am not only intellectually backward but also morally repugnant. I must be, of course.

Anyway, let's deal with the easiest ones first:

Bozo Idiocy Number One -

"Lenin has also repeatedly relied on the claims of serial fabricator John Pilger for his information about putative US support for the Khmer Rouge. For those not aware, Pilger, claimed in one of his documentary" [sic] films (Cambodia: The Betrayal, 1990) that British special forces who were training the anti-communist resistance to the continuing Vietnamese occupation of their country were in fact training the Khmer Rouge. When two SAS officers sued both him and the station that aired the film for libel, Pilger was forced to pay substantial damages in an out of court settlement, and to publish this humiliating statement in the UK press:

"The defendants now accept that neither plaintiff has ever trained Khmer Rouge or any other guerrillas and particularly not in mine-laying or any other military techniques which would be directed against civilians. Neither plaintiff would ever contemplate any such thing and would refuse to do it if ordered." (See http://www.stuff.themutual.net/cambo.htm)."


You will have noticed that Beezlebozo cannot have read my post or followed this particular case with any prolonged interest. Pilger and his colleague did not make claims of that particular kind against those two specific SAS men. That was neither stated nor implied in the original documentary. The trial collapsed on the defense side due to the British government blocking documentary evidence now available to the public including a signed affidavit stating that British soldiers had indeed trained the Khmer Rouge.

Bozo Idiocy Number Two -

"For example, he claims a contemporary CIA demographic analysis "put[s] the figure" for US bombing deaths in Cambodia "unofficially at 600,000 to 700,000." I have a suspicion- call it a hunch- that lenin has never even read the report, but rather is simply uncritically reciting what he's read in other agitprop sources like those of Michael Vickery."

Interestingly, Bozo fails to address himself to several seperate reports which I cited:

"In fact, the Finnish Inquiry Commission estimated that 600,000 people had died as a result of the bombing. Father Ponchaud put the figure at 800,000, although Chomsky and Herman pointed out that there was reason to believe Ponchaud may have exaggerated that toll, while the CIA's demographic study (cited above)tells us that "US government sources put the figure unofficially at 600,000 to 700,000".

Michael Vickery, using CIA estimates to arrive at a lower figure, suggests it might be closer to 500,000. (Michael Vickery, "Cambodia 1975-1982", 1984).

In addition to this, 2 million refugees were created (according to the Finnish Inquiry Commission)..."


The point of this argument, as he knows perfectly well, is to refute his stupid and ignorant claim that "[t]he commonly quoted 500,000+ figures for the war had actually been released by Pol Pot himself, and are without any validity."

They are not "released by Pol Pot himself". Bozo's claim is a straightforward falsification.

Second, Bozo plays an interesting sleight of hand in referring to "war-related deaths" as being caused by all sides of the civil war, and not just as a result of the US bombing. Had the US not backed Lon Nol's vicious regime, and accompanied it with a heavy sprinkling of bombing, there would not have been half the fighting that ensued. The Khmer Rouge, a previously marginal political force, would not have witnessed the remarkable acceleration in its membership growth rates that it did. Regardless, his claim that any figures above the ones he cites are the product of Pol Pot's imagination is refuted.


Bozo Idiocy Number Three - Lenin's "ignorant praise for [Hildebrand and Porter's "well-sourced, well-documented arguments" reveals that when it comes to Cambodia, lenin simply *does* *not* *know* *what* *he's* *talking* *about*."

I note that Bozo doesn't bother to include the relevant quote. I cite them as an "apparently" well-documented source. I cite them for one figure, that 100,000 people died from starvation per year during the final years of the war in Cambodia. It is a credible figure - US AID reported in the final year of the war that famine was afoot with 75% of the country's draft animals destroyed, (largely by the US bombing). This would result in "slave labour" and "rationing". Sources close to the US predicted a million deaths from starvation as the war was ending, while Dr Penelope Key lamented that the next generation of children would be afflicted by "malnutrition". Inasmuch as the Hildebrand and Porter book is considered well-sourced, that is perhaps because it cites (among its apologetics for the Khmer Rouge) numerous reports from various sources, charities, international organisations, etc. Those sources are credible. But I don't much mind if the figure is dispensed with for the sake of this argument. It will still not erase the fact that the figures for the numbers of deaths caused by the US bombing are not the product of Pol Pot.


Bozo Idiocy Number Four -

"At a similar moral level is another of lenin's favorite sources, Michael Vickery, whose book Cambodia 1975-1982 claims the Khmer Rouge "did not foresee, let alone plan," the genocide they inflicted; they were merely "petty bourgeois radicals overcome by peasantist romanticism" (p287). Even though the reputable academic sources estimate that the toll of the Khmer Rouge genocide *begins* at 1.5 million, Vickery's book gives the ludicrous figure 740,000 deaths under the Khmer Rouge. As with Starvation and Revolution, this speaks for itself."

Vickery says that the Khmer Rouge did not plan the genocide they inflicted. Well, duh! Stalin did not "plan" to kill millions, any more than Mao Tse Tung did. These deaths were the result of state-ideological structures of decision-making. In the case of the Khmer Rouge, it was also because they were absolute lunatics. But I daresay they did not have a document planning this exercise in advance.

His description of the Khmer Rouge as petit-bourgeois intellecutals hardly sounds like an apologetic to me. And Bozo provides no evidence to refute his claim or those of the other scholars whom I cite.


"There are many more examples of mangled history, false assertions, and outright misrepresentation exhibited in lenin's screed, but these should suffice to demonstrate the only point I wished to make: lenin simply *does* *not* *know* *what* *he's* *talking* *about*."

Let's see. Beezlebozo has falsely claimed that any figures for the deaths incurred as a result of the US bombing of Cambodia above 500,000 is a propaganda line only ever originating from the Khmer Rouge. He has falsely claimed that the US did not assist the Khmer Rouge, and that all help they did give was aimed at the "non-communist forces", (the Sihanoukists), when in fact they directly aimed assistance at Pol Pot's men, supplied them with material, diplomatic and financial support, covered up for them ideologically, and openly liaised with the Khmer Rouge's most disgustingly apologetic cretin, Prince Sihanouk. He has claimed that Pilger's court case somehow refutes the content of his documentary for ITV, without displaying any awareness that the context of the case (namely, the British government's intervention in what was at any rate a fraudulent trial) would in fact tend to show that the government did indeed have something to hide. He has claimed that in helping the Khmer Rouge and its allies, the US was merely observing "the principle of non-intervention", ensuring that Vietnam did not "swallow" Cambodia. Anyone remotely familiar with elementary reality would have to collapse in hysterics at the idea that the US ever observed "the principle of non-intervention" in relation to Indochina. But additionally, anyone familiar with the background would know that Vietnam had no intention of "swallowing" Cambodia, and had made two consecutive peace offers accepting the return of the Khmer Rouge without Pol Pot and Ieng Sary.

In other words, displaying ignorance, a willingness to distort and fabricate, and a crushing lack of irony, Bozo's last paragraph invites ridicule. I suggest you mail it to: spammert81@yahoo.com

Be prepared for the most amusing volleys of abuse you've ever encountered if he bothers to reply.

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Kidult Politics and the American Right. posted by Richard Seymour

A loving smack on the bum for the Bush team.


Some childish abuse.
Let’s face it, they’re all winners. They struggle against great personal disadvantage, a heritage of bad genes, lousy luck and sub-standard copulation. Imagine managing in the face of such odds. The undeveloped intellects, the twisted, cruelly distorted bodies. The inane gurning and dribbling. And the childish fantasies, earnestly expressed. If they weren’t also complete and utter shits, I might feel enormous sympathy for the Republican Party.
Over the years, they have done their best to absorb the brightest minds in America, using their enormous financial leverage to pay for party apparatchiks, marketing men, intelligentsia, pollsters, think tanks etc. The net result is that they still control one half of American power. On the other hand, their President and CEO is George W. Bush, a man who will get past the first sentence in good time so don’t mock.
It is a capacious institution, embracing East Coast liberal conservatives, small-town farmers, Christian fundamentalists, gun enthusiasts, libertarians, far right fanatics and isolationists. It is also home to the neoconservative, a modestly variegated species, having its origins in two distinct generations: respectively, Trotskyists turned to Cold War liberalism; and most recently the followers of Leo Strauss. The latter are often hardcore Zionists and Likudniks, which may for the first time make the Republican Party more pro-Israel than the Democrats.
In that spectrum of opinion, George W. Bush seemed initially to tend toward a paleoconservative isolationism, but subsequently surrounded himself with hard right neoconservatives and only a couple of ‘doves’. While his father abstemiously restrained the Republican programme to a modest Eisenhowerianism, Bush junior has taken the USS Enterprise to new zones, pursuing the more extreme edges of Reaganite outer space. Now, clearly, there is no connection between this political alignment and George W’s putative idiocy. No. One need only be a hypocrite, a liar or an extremist zealot to wholeheartedly swallow the Bush programme. One may be all of these things and also be an urbane intellectual shrouded in darkness and glowers (as opposed to Bush jnr’s idiotically sunny smiles). But one does have to be very stupid indeed to accept both the rhetoric and substance of the present administration without any sense of the incongruence of the two. It is therefore no coincidence that both Reagan and Bush affected a sweet, warm-hearted but tough, folksy demeanour, doing only the hard talking while allowing others to do the hard thinking.


The cunning of unreason.
We generally think it’s a hopeful sign for us if our enemies are abnormally stupid, but Bush’s stupidity is depressingly normal. Nor is it the case that a lack of intelligence is cosubstantial with a lack of guile. One of the most alarming things about kidult politics as practised by this administration – and expertly by Bush in particular – is its sophistication, its ability to press all the right emotive buttons. I recall a pro-Republican acquaintance boasting to me that Bush had “all Clinton’s moves”, and it was a perceptive remark: Clinton did not begin the trend of speaking to voters “like Little Orphan Annie”, as Gore Vidal once put it, but he was an expert at it. He could emote better than Bush, but he wasn’t as good at the tough guy act. And while he clearly had more right to common folk pretensions than the upper class white-bread Bush, he often sounded like a dreadful yuppie and was not averse to evincing a subtle good-old-boy racism. Both Bush and Clinton can do a convincing line in self-mockery and irony, while being able to shrug off criticism with a knowing smirk. Both can lie fantastically well, and these aren’t just the ideological lies that usually sustain a Presidency. But this matchless capacity for purposeless lies has proven a drain on the charm resources of both. As a friend once remarked to me, Clinton would have been even more popular in the polls if he had said:
“Mah fellow Americans. Not only did I fuck that woman, but I also made her come. Top that, Ken Starr!”
But that would break the rules of kidult politics – a world in which noone ever has illicit sex, takes corrupt funds, scapegoats the poor or uses the nearest available country as a convenient glop mop to erase the evidence of one’s latest misdeed. In fact, kidulthood’s apparent innocence is entirely sustained by a deep core of cynicism. One cannot stop the lies, so why not believe them?
The Simpsons gives this logic its most advanced articulation. It portrays a corrupt America, full of police brutality, homelessness, bribe-taking politicians, a media more interested in lewd perversion than the news, public education falling apart at the seams, and a class of scavenging capitalists cutting corners while treating workers as over-priced commodities. Yet, it stops short of drawing the logical conclusion that the whole society must begin from scratch – this is FOX, after all – and instead allows an eery innocence to have the last say. Witness Lisa Simpson, the eight-year old prodigy who knows about the police acting as vanguards of corporate America, but still rallies round the flag when called to do so. One knows that everything is awful, but this is AMERICA after all. The ironic in this form is wilful innocence, just as the innocent sentimentality of the confessionary talk show is brute, cynical narcissism.


Innocence and cynicism – seperated at birth?
The American Right is a past master at trading on the collusion between innocence and corruption in this way. Iran-Contra was revealing for, among other things, the tenacity with which a hard core of the American public insisted on believing in the protestations of innocence from Oliver North and his accomplices. I posit that those people, or the bulk of them, were fully aware that the Reagan administration was a corrupt clique in league with mercenaries, but were able to subsume any sense of repellence in the notion that these men were essentially innocent. This or that disgusting act was necessary in the fight against evil and so was, in a more fundamental way, good. The stars and stripes is for this reason the complete Republican emblem, the gestalt image portraying both the face of modern freedom and that of corrupt tyranny. It is no coincidence that the party of Law and Order, in whichever country, is also the party of police brutality and extra-legal force as the inherent transgression needed to sustain the Law. The resort to war, too, may in fact violate the very ethical or legal exhortations which the warriors say they are out to defend. This dialectic is carefully defended by Robert Kagan in Paradise and Power, a more than usually eloquent neoconservative tract on the necessary reliance of the Kantian paradise of modern Europe on the Hobbesian power politics of modern America. If anything, it is America which has been enjoying the Kantian transcendental paradise, while Europe has suffered the irruptions of real political violence in the form of the IRA bombers in London and the GIA bombers in Paris. But it is an ideological necessity for rightwingers that they are the tough bastards living in the real world, weathering the storms of geopolitics so as to protect – who else? – the innocent.


The Matrix vs “the Desert of the Real”.
It is easy to be innocent, of course, if such innocence entails preserving one’s privileges in the world without suffering any discomfort about it. Indeed, how else does Agent Smith tempt his informant if not by contrasting the nightmare world of the real with the mouth-watering fiction of the Matrix? September 11th, far from militating against such these traditional ideological coordinates, has only compounded them and given them reason. One can even pretend to have abandoned innocence while diving beneath Blanket Security. If anyone hoped that the experience of a successful attack on America would arouse an awareness of the suffering of the rest of the world, they might have looked more closely at the reaction to the trial run in 1993. Al Qaeda made an abortive airplane crash into the WTC, (abortive in the sense of failing to generate the mass hysteria that 9/11 provoked), and there followed seven years of American growth, anti-terrorist rhetoric, a few demonstrative assaults on foreign lands and at least the façade of self-assurance. But not, even in the initial shock, a sense of global hostility to American hegemony, or an awareness that these kinds of atrocities were daily inflicted on the rest of the world, often as a result of American actions.
Kidult politics is about contrived lack of awareness, (a barely conscious contrivance on the part of the ignoramuses to be sure), and the ideological appeal of naïveté, sutured by cynicism. It is the American Right’s triumphant reprisal of postmodernism. For that reason, it is our global enemy.

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Wednesday, December 10, 2003

Guess How Much I Care About Rugby? posted by Richard Seymour

For a spectacle involving a bunch of deformed grunts fighting for possession of a ball, Rugby's been getting a massive press windfall since "our team" (England) beat "their team" (Australia). Growing up in Northern Ireland, I learned that it didn't quite do to support such an inadequate collection of flabby turds as our own team. We supported England, whatever the sport was - even if it was something disturbingly genteel like cricket. And so, if England brought home a trophy after years of miserable failure, I would have been the first one prancing around like a little fairy in my England flag.

Well, not any more, you limey fucks! Yeah, I'm talking to you.

See, I couldn't help but notice a few things about this sudden enthusiasm for rugby that Englanders are evincing:

a) It's all made up. Noone gives the slightest cock about rugby, not even the players' mums.

b) It was the one excuse for a national day off work that wouldn't result in the threat of sack and lots of little schoolkids being molested by the old bill (pace, antiwar demos).

c) England sucks. I don't mean at sporting endeavours, I mean in every walk of life. This country is cold, wet, the pubs shut too early, the laws are oppressively outmoded, the newspapers are cack, and we can't choose between post-colonial internationalism or just old fashioned nationalism, so we get the worst of both worlds.

d) Other stuff happened.

No, really! I swear to fuck, (or, more properly, to Marilyn Manson the God of Fuck), other shit went down while all you goofballs were busy swearing allegiance to some gloriously illiterate, twatty, overgrown schoolboys crammed into ill-fitting suits. I know you're probably thinking I'm taking the piss out of you, but lenin would never presume to satirise a group so profoundly intelligent as rugby fans (neophytic or otherwise). Seriously, stuff happened. Like:

America killed some more people in Afghanistan . Wasn't that last year? Yeah, well, they said it would all be fine by now but times makes fools of us all, and now the warlords control the country, the Taliban are making a comeback and no elections in sight for those lucky bastards in Kabul or elsewhere who could even contemplate taking part in an election.

The Iraqi Resistance took a few more American soldiers . But the Iraqis love us! Turns out maybe not - they really weren't playing hard to get when they said "aaaagh, you killed my wife, die in hell you American-Zionist pigs! Allahu Akhbar!"

The Pentagon was caught lying its ass off about what happened in Samarra - still, fifty-four "terrorists" killed, eight civilians killed... it's easy to get the two mixed up.

Israelis and Palestinians gathered together for a demonstration against the ongoing Israeli occupation. True, the Israelis probably just attended because they figured wherever there were lots of Palestinians there wouldn't be a suicide bombing, but fuck it, it's a start.

A new left alternative to new Labour began the process of starting on the road of possibly beginning moves toward a germinal radical coalition to fight elections. It's got George Galloway in it. Yes, that man with the moustache who said Bush and Blair were "wolves". Easy, son, easy! He didn't mean it. Every time he speaks, he retracts his "insult to the noble wolf".

So, there you go. There's just a few of the things that happened while you were away. Yeah, you bet I give a shit about the rugby and all its sudden converts who should be punished by being forced to watch the bastarding horseshit for a year. No offence. I care a lot.

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Thursday, November 27, 2003

There Should be More Presidents Like Kennedy: Dead. posted by Richard Seymour

Kennedy was a piece of shit, and anything you say about the man that doesn't partially reflect this central truth is likely to be a lie. The legacy of the Kennedy administration is one of the most astonishing cover-ups in history, much more disturbing than the circumstances surrounding the man's death...

Let's take a cursory look at the record:

Some of Kennedy's best fucks were doves
American power, Cold War counterinsurgency and CIA assassinations are the hallmarks of that corrupt and reactionary administration. It was Kennedy who, when not extemporising with some glamorous literary and artistic friends - nay, admirers - escalated attempts at restoring the old pro-US dictatorship in Cuba with the Bay of Pigs fiasco, and Operation Mongoose. Overthrowing Castro was "the top priority of the United States Government, all else is secondary, no time, money, effort or manpower is to be spared". ( Evan Thomas, Robert Kennedy, His Life (Simon & Schuster, 2000) p. 149). Operation Mongoose involved several attacks on the Cuban land mass, spending hundreds of millions of dollars on top flight equipment, weaponry etc., all because Castro nationalised some American interests and gave the impression that he didn't take orders well. At the same time, there were several bizarre attempts on Castro's life - in a particularly Wile E. Coyote moment, they tried to smuggle in some cigars that would cause Castro's beard to fall off. It was the Kennedy administration which began the tradition of imposing economic sanctions on Cuba, encouraging its hemispheric allies to blockade Cuba.

The Cuban missile crisis was largely the manufacture of the Kennedy administration. The USSR had 20 ICBMs versus "180 American ICBMs, 12 Polaris submarines (each carrying 12 nuclear missiles) and 630 strategic bombers stationed in the US, Europe and Asia. Kennedy had announced that the US would, by 1964, triple its ICBMs" . The Kennedy administration deliberately escalated the growing confrontation over the division of Berlin, knowing the horrendous consequences: "We have the prospect, if the Soviet Union, as a reprisal, should grab Berlin in the morning, which they could do within a couple of hours. Our war plan at that point has been to fire our nuclear weapons at them. But these are all the matters which we have to think about." As Kennedy also acknowledged: "The object is not to stop offensive weapons, because the offensive weapons are already there, as much as it is to have a showdown with the Russians of one kind or another."


Kennedy started the bloodiest, most contemptible war America has ever engaged in. No, it wasn't just Nixon and that lousy Southern Democrat LBJ. The administration was elected with an enormous mess brewing for the US in Indochina. In Laos, Vietnam, Thailand and elsewhere, the popular opposition to US client dictatorships was becoming overwhelming. Kennedy chose to accept a settlement with Laos (temporarily), but escalated in Vietnam 'where he ordered the deployment of Air Force and Helicopter Units, along with napalm, defoliation, and crop destruction. US military personnel were sharply increased and deployed at battalion level, where they were "beginning to participate more directly in advising Vietnamese unit commanders in the planning and execution of military operations plans"' . The mission looked so successful initially that they thought they might be able to pull out having secured full victory in no time at all. The Joint Chiefs of Staff all concurred: the VC should be "eliminated as a significant force" about a year after the Vietnamese forces then being trained and equipped "became fully operational."

He's a good man, he don't mean no harm...
I know, I know. Kennedy was a dove who was going to pull all those boys out of Vietnam, just to save America from its homocidal and suicidally dangerous course. The plans for withdrawal were his way of avoiding what was going to be a devastating cataclysm of bloodshed across the whole of Indochina. Yes, even though he insisted that Diem get the boys together and focus on winning this thing, even though he authorised a drastic escalation of the war on the recommendations of Robert MacNamara, even though he specifically regarded the lack of public enthusiasm for the war as a problem. He was a good guy, trying to work things out, and he got shot for the privilege.

True, he bugged his own Oval Office, had Mafia connections, stole the election and pissed on black voters while later trying to claim credit for the Civil Rights marches which were a response to his inaction - what can one say? "Bad man, good president." Despite all of these known and contemptible crimes, "Kennedy called us to something larger than ourselves", apparently because he was good looking and said things like "ask not what your country can do for you" which was such a contrast to the fusty politico-speak of Fifties politicians. Oh, and also because he risked nuclear war: "From the failure of the Bay of Pigs came the triumph of the Cuban missile crisis. There was a cyclical pattern to such things. He kept getting better. And so did we, because of what he showed us about ourselves." Thanks to JFK, 'we' were able to smack the world around more effectively, because he "called us to something larger in ourselves". "Kennedy’s truest legacy" was to have given America a "period of peace" , regardless of whether he was planning to take American troops out of the war that he'd started.


How well do Democrats fuck ass? Ask the American Left!
Let's take an exercise in advanced pattern recognition. Four slimy, corrupt, reactionary Presidents with a record of military aggression overseas, criminal neglect of the poor at home, extensive use of the most oppressive state powers, and crimes of the sort that would land any other American in jail. Two of them are Republicans, and two Democrats - (Nixon & Bush jnr, and Kennedy & Clinton respectively). Which two do your average American radical leftists still insist on harbouring some affection for, despite knowing the shit they pulled? Clue - it's not Nixon and Bush. Yes, yes, yes. Bill Clinton is "Bubba", and if Al Gore had been allowed that election victory, things would be sooooo different. JFK gave us a "period of peace", was just about to pull out of Vietnam, and was murdered because he wasn't anti-Cuban enough. Well, it's the abused wife scenario again - "he's a good man, you just don't know him like I do! I can change him!"
Of course you can. All you need is to change yourself enough, and he'll love you. Right, beeyatch?

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Monday, November 24, 2003

England: a National Disgrace. posted by Richard Seymour

A dissection of David Aaronovitch's England.

Here's the title:

English actually

It's about time that we stopped being afraid of celebrating our nationality. After all, we can be quite nice

David Aaronovitch
Sunday November 23, 2003
The Observer


Of course "we" can, David. You were just being "nice" when you slandered the left by association with anti-semitism , accused them of being liars and ... oh, what was it? Apologists for genocide? Something like that.

Aaronovitch's little dream sequence is apparently prompted by the victory over Australia in the rugby. Two points - a, noone watches Rugby and b, "we" couldn't possible have lost.

Mark this :


"The occasional great win becomes England even more than always losing - it's winning all the time that is alien to us. The period of Empire, when we - together with fellow Britons - ruled arrogantly over millions of foreigners in faraway lands, sometimes seems like a departure from national character, an unpleasant aberration - a bit like a staid aunt getting drunk and making fart jokes on New Year's Eve."

No, dear, taking a vast chunk of the planet by force and subjecting them to extreme oppression and slavery is not "like a staid aunt getting drunk and making fart jokes on New Year's Eve". And several hundred years is a very lengthy aberration indeed. Funny how it took a series of Marxist and nationalist rebellions to shake the drunk old slag to her senses, no?

"We will now see a resurgence of discussion about Englishness."

How good of you to make the first contribution, David, but do you think you could keep it in perspective a bit? "The coincidence of the World Cup victory with two new movies that are centred in notions of England and its history" may well form the occasion for a lengthy mastubatory fit of nationalism on your part, but I wonder how many of the 58 million residents of England are now hastily jotting down notes from Simon Schama, Roy Foster and Norman Davies, ready for the next pub discussion about "Englishness"?

"We have always known what Irishness is, of course".

Of course "we" have, David! The fact that "we" were in their country for a few hundred years might be considered a good reason to be thoroughly well acquainted with "what Irishness is". But I wonder if perhaps "our" understanding of "Irishness" isn't perhaps a kind of Orientalism - you know what I mean, the Irish are childish, suspicious, given to fantasy, good liars, lazy, untrustworthy, full of native good humour, illogical etc etc. Irishness, perhaps, is not much more than Oirishness in this context.

"But Englishness has had nothing to push against. It sometimes becomes easier to know what it isn't."

Yes? Go on...

"In August, on the hottest day of a hot summer, walking down the high street through a sea of heat, I did not feel as though I was in England. Somehow the sun had changed everything, in much the way that darkness or disaster do. London had become somewhere else."

Ah, so it's the weather that makes me peepers go squinty! Too roight, Meeery Popins. Nowt but a loada bleedin owld rain!

"Vomiting on the pavement is to England what circumcision is to many African tribes - a painful and messy rite of passage."

Well, dear, not everyone gets to read one of your articles, but I daresay there is something decidedly "English" about that yank of the guts as you realise you're consuming undiluted drivel.

"Our ambivalence about victory and defeat, our desire to see ourselves as part of the small battalions (even our pageantry has a Ruritanian quality, maintained in the face of modernity), are what gives World War II its particular value for us."

Not the defeat of Fascism, then? No, the English troops were charging into occupied France thinking "Ooh, does my battalion look big in this?"

"Despite the best attempt of our hooligans to prove him wrong, England remains as Orwell described it - characterised by a complacent gentleness in which fascists do not get elected to very much, and where populists are treated with suspicion."

Orwell's description of 'old maids biking to Holy Communion through the mists of the autumn morning'
might inspire a little scepticism in most, but as far as Aaronovitch is concerned, the Sixties never happened - and, God willing, they never will.

"We are fonder of under - rather than overstatement."

But not overly strong on our sense of irony, if the rhetorical bombast of this article is anything to go by.


"But the overwhelming characteristic of the English is the way in which tradition and modernity operate in a constant dialectic."

Now, now. We're entering dangerously New Labour territory here ... traditional values in a modern setting, hmmm?

"Take the rural idyll. Every few months an otherwise rational English writer or journalist announces that he or she has sold up and moved the family to some place that has two names, rather than just one."

Is this irony intentional, or unintentional? How far can David go before the editor realises he's taking the piss?

"There can be no other country where a complete genre of aspirational programmes consists of people getting out of cities and moving to the country (sometimes any country will do)."

I doubt if David watches a lot of Icelandic television, or even scans the German channels for the late night porn. But this, I suspect, is a delivery of instinct. England is SUCH a rural country, so it must be true. It's self-evident, is it not?

"Richard Curtis works both sides of this line. City singletons live interesting lives in semi-communes, before finding happiness in a castle. The pull of the country house is always there, but he acknowledges the vigour of the city. In this hugely urbanised country he is right to do so."

And this, my fellow outpatients, is where we're finally let in on the joke. Curtis obviously gave Aaronovitch a quick phone call and said "look, is it possible you could concoct some ridiculously bloated, pompous load of old cobblers for the Observer and make it an ad for my film? It's just that some people are having a go at me for not representing England realistically. It's almost as if they think I'm painting a caricature of Merrie Little Englande just to sell my movie to naive Americans."

Don't believe me? Read on!

"It struck me, after Love Actually, that one of the most distressingly authentic moments of Englishness was when a critic expressed the wish that the 10-year-old character's precocity be rewarded with 'a clip round the ear'. We are still a nation that likes to beat its kids."

That's appalling in any country, let alone a nearby one. But I wonder if David missed the even more startling and brutal reality that we like to bomb kids with some regularity too?


"I hope that Master and Commander will supersede Braveheart, Rob Roy and all those other movies where the English are seen as effete sadists who cannot pleasure their spouses. It contains a more essential truth about the English than do those travesties."

Quite. Showing the English engaging in a bit of derring-doo bravery is "essential truth" while showing them as colonial occupiers and sadistic is a travesty. Flawless logic. I'll let the next bit speak for itself:

"We can be a bloody good lot, and - just for today, accusations of smugness notwithstanding - we are going to make sure that everyone knows it."

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Monday, November 17, 2003

Their Anti-Racism and Ours posted by Richard Seymour

David Aaronovitch smears the Left by association with "anti-semitism". Tony Blair and his liberal supporters worry about our "anti-Americanism". Mark Strauss writes a devastatingly stupid article for Foreign Policy laying blame on "anti-globalisation" protesters for the surge in anti-semitic attacks - adding the outrageous charge that some protesters at Porto Allegre brandished the Swastika. (Notice that he considers the following anti-semitic: "Nazis, Yankees, and Jews: No More Chosen Peoples!" So, if we want to avoid anti-semitism, we really ought to be endorsing the idea of Jews as Chosen Peoples. If we object to the idea of a two-state solution, we may be providing a "snapshot of an unfolding phenomenon known as 'the new anti-Semitism'." Neat.)


It's not hard in all of this to see why we have become wary of this language. But we leftists should actually be a lot more aggressive on this - we are the ones who fight racism of all kinds, anti-semitism included. Was it the White Army or the Red Army who engaged in anti-semitic pogroms? Was it the left or the right in pre-war Germany which propagated a vicious climate of anti-semitic hatred? Was it the left or right in France which recently took to the streets in protest against the massive vote for Le Pen? Was it the left or right in Britain which led the Cable Street protests, blocking a Fascist march?

This is our terrain. We are the anti-racists, not those hypocritical masters of pomp, churning out sorry drivel for the mainstream press.

And we should know our terrain, and tread very carefully on it. Saying Israel is an apartheid state is not anti-semitic. On the other hand, if you find the Jews responsible for everything from the Russian Revolution to 9/11 and the Gulf War, you might be said to have a small fixation with Jews. The Medialens website was unfairly attacked by David Aaronovitch last year because a handful of posters on its message board had reduced the place to a loony bin of "Jewish plots" and all sorts. He rendered his message to "the Left", as if squadrons of young radicals were signing themselves up to conspiracy chic with a touch of anti-semitism thrown in. Well, that is inaccurate. But it is also true that some people who are by no means anti-semitic and who do consider themselves on the Left have defended the perpetuators of such conspiratorial gibberish. They have done so out of resentment at the denkverbotten that has surrounded discussion of Israel in Britain and America. They do not agree with such views, or at least would substantially modify them, but they agree with the right to express them. I myself do not agree that anyone has the inherent "right" to express racist or anti-semitic views - rights are not absolute, especially when one person's rights are incommensurable with another's. Moreover, we surrender a lot of valuable ground when we allow ourselves to defend the indefensible.

We cannot allow the neoconservative right or liberal Zionists a single straw to clutch at if they attempt to slander anti-Zionists as "Anti-semitic in their effect if not their intent". Or much, much worse, as we have come to expect. So, let's drop this stupid free-speech stipulation that prevents us from terminating the abuses of racists, and let's remember what our history and struggle has been. It is, and has always been, a fight against oppression and injustice everywhere - we were on the side of Jews in Europe just as much as we are on the side of Arabs in Palestine. It is a history far more distinguished and honourable than that of the right, who now have the cheek to appropriate our language and use it in the service of oppression.

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Friday, November 14, 2003

The Bush Doctrine: "God Made Us Do It" posted by Richard Seymour

I'm sure I can't have been the only one to notice both the ITV and Channel Four news describing the latest Bush dyslexities as a "charm offensive". Let me parse a phrase or two for you:

"I'm so glad to be going to a country where people are free to express what's on their mind... freedom is a beautiful thing."

"Freedom is not America's gift to the world; freedom is God's gift to humanity."

(Add the cheap smirk for yourself.)

Well, Bush certainly isn't too subtle in playing that old routine about "if you lived in Iraq, you wouldn't be free to say what you're saying", although he does express it in an ironic way as if to disarm critics. Actually, you will notice that when people say that, what they want you to do is pretend that you DO live in Iraq. The only thing worthy of attention in this statement is Bush crooning "freedom is a beautiful thing" as if he were some clapped out soul singer speaking as part of a UN delegation to South Africa.

The second statement is a Bush classic, an old favourite of his . I want you to consider the complexity of that statement. Go back up and read it again. "Freedom is not America's gift to the world". Of course it isn't, dumbass! Do you think we imagine you fought all the anti-colonial wars, every democratic revolution and every protest movement? I suppose you thought we'd forgotten all about fifty years of US support for scummy little dictatorships, fostering an atmosphere of authoritarianism, barbarity and extreme corruption just because it created a favourable investment climate?

But at least that first part of the statement looks like humility. It looks like the American president saying "We don't really think we're the best thing since Toussaint L'ouverture". But mark the punchline: "Freedom is God's gift to humanity"!

Well, he took his fucking time getting round to that! I suppose God was just biding his time, waiting for us to get the massacring and torturing out of our systems before handing us our freedom. But of course, Bush didn't mean that God literally gives us our freedom - he meant that America does so on God's behalf. So, he makes a typical piece of Pax Americana arrogance sound like humility and self-deprecation. Cicero was very good at this. American letters to the Guardian are so hilariously eloquent on this point that they bear repeating:

"So this is how you Brits treat the president of the United States? The president of the nation that sent millions of its young men to defend the people of England during world war two? Now it would seem our president is not worthy of an official visit. This is treatment one would expect from the French..." Thomas Farnkoff Portland, Maine, USA

You can hear that obnoxious, abrasive voice now: 'America saved Europe in World War Two, held back Communism, and gave democracy to Germany and Japan. And you guys are just jealous cos we're rich and free and you're not.' If any of the many Americans living in London fancy debating me on this point, you'll see me prowling around in my black winter coat with the "Stop Bush" badge ineptly clasped onto the breast. Come and tell me all about the "Freedom fries" and those "Dixie Sluts" (or "Blixie Chicks" as Al Franken ineptly called them in one of his corporate gigs for Clear Channel). Tell me all about the bad Germans and the bad French. Tell me about freedom and democracy and how you just don't get why people hate America so much. Tell me about your Constitution and the flag and how your government is itching to "liberate" people from obscure countries whose names you can't easily pronounce. Let me hear you now,

#"freedom is a beautiful thaaaang, freedom is a beautiful thaaaang..."#

I won't mock a position for being "childish" - that put-down is a staple of conservatism, and, as Francis Bacon had it "antiquity was the youth of the world", and it gave us democracy. But the patent idiocy of the discourse is compounded by a very adult sophistication about how to work with unconscious phantasy life, press emotive buttons and hinder dissent. Part of the strategy involves getting us to waste our time on pointless inanities, but it also involves creating a climate of intimidation for arguments that do not resonate with the Flag-Freedom-God fantasy. Bush isn't just a childish dolt. He's also a big, pompous buffoon who has the cleverness to know good PR advice when Karl Rove gives it to him. Rove obviously thought it would be a neat idea to have Bush "drivin down the Mall with the Briddish queen". Time to make that fucker rue the day!

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Tuesday, November 04, 2003

How the Far Left Got It’s Groove Back: posted by Richard Seymour

Lessons for the British Left.


1

Capitalism is a house of whores and pimps, and it’s never been cooler to say so. Only fifteen years ago, we’d have been obliged to meet the response that ‘really existing socialism’ was a house of torturers and trained assassins – which is true, so long as we reverse the meaning of that phrase, ‘really existing socialism’. Still, we are just escaping the crushing weight of Stalinism and at more or less the right moment – the anticapitalist purview is becoming a popular outlook across Europe, is sweeping governments in and out of power in Latin America, and is supplying the Palestinians with a hotbed of political support across the world. It arrived just as Indonesian workers and students had liberated themselves from Suharto (led by some unorthodox Marxists and trade unionists). It impacted upon the windows and shop-fronts of the City of London, that island of feudal capitalism on the banks of poverty-stricken East London, just a few months after NATO had liberated the Kosovans from their houses.
The accumulated energy of the anticapitalist movement seemed to break on the rock of 9/11, but that was as temporary as President Bush’s newfound leadership qualities. Gales of protest buffeted the US Enterprise as it interfered with the ancient civilisation of Babylon, assisted by the loyal Klingons in Downing Street. Trade union militancy has revived across the world, with the exception of the United States where the Bush administration took the opportunity afforded by 9/11 to smack the Longshoremen around. Elections in Germany, France, Brazil, Argentina, Bolivia, South Korea and even Britain in some measure have registered the dual tendency toward radicalisation and disengagement from parliamentary democracy – not as mutually supportive as they may seem.

In short, we’re back, and we’ve got a brand new bag.

2

I have to risk a Michael Winner impersonation at this point and say “Calm down, dears!” All of the above may be accurate, yet we still face some profound strategic conundrums and some almighty roadblocks. The crucial problems facing the Left in Britain are:
1. The absence of a national, mass political force to the left of Labour.
2. The absence of principled dissent within Labour.
3. The success of the far right in pockets of Britain reflecting an increase in racism generally.
4. The continued financial attachment of trade unions to Labour.
5. The increasing cost of beer.

Opinion polls reveal with terrible consistency a hardening antipathy toward asylum seekers and immigrants. This is compounded by a more direct and obvious racism toward Asian residents of the industrial North and Islamophobia, which is not entirely restricted to the right. This is the one issue on which the far right have been able to win an audience. Everything else they say which catches any resonance is drawn directly from the far left. The BNP have virtually zero support for their programmatic racism and antisemitism, and have consequently been forced to abandon the hardcore Holocaust revisionism and ‘fists and boots’ white nationalism of the early nineties and favour a more media friendly, politically correct racism. Their magazine is called ‘Identity’, which might have been the name of a postmodern publication in the Eighties. Nick Griffin’s justification for racial cleansing is that distinct cultures cannot co-exist, which is an extreme variant of multicultural discourse. But this has afforded them a space for growth. Their members are so depressingly thick that they have managed to lose many of their seats because of violence, while the remainder have been unable to fulfill their duties as councillors. But there are enough depressingly thick voters out there who will still support anything wrapped in a Union Jack.
Insofar as the far right feed off racism, we must double our energies against it. Insofar as they articulate a bastardised anticapitalist dynamic, we should articulate the real Armani.
The latter presents us with the remaining dillemas to which I now turn.


3

A lion walks into a bar in Islington, calmly perches himself on a stool and asks the barman in a low growl for “a pint of Best Bitter, please”. The barman, determined not to be thrown, puts on his professional smile and pours the pint. “Two pound eighty”, he says. The lion grumbles a bit, fumbles around in his fur, then finally paws over some change. After the lion has downed a few gulps, the barman can’t contain his curiosity any more. “Errr, it’s funny, you know, ‘cos … well, we don’t get too many lions in here.”
“I’m not fucking surprised at two pound eighty!” The lion snaps.
This must be how local Labour activists feel when they arrive at their annual Party Condescension to be sneered at, prodded and studied with anthropological curiosity by a leadership whom they nevertheless adore. Would that they had the courage to ‘Rise like lions’ as Shelley urged, but they’re too busy consuming some of Tony’s Best Bitter. If Tony was a lion-tamer, he’d be thinking “oh, where’s the fucking challenge in this? All I have to do is emote and they start weeping like incontinent bumholes”.
Given that Labour has neither the desire nor the ability to attract the kind fof young Lions capable of making their circus that bit more appealing, we shall have to look elsewhere. There is an enormous space on the Left, not presently occupied. Liberal opportunists occassionally usurp it for short term political gain, but they have also done their absolute best to make sure noone in the Tory seats think they’re left-wing. Why should this be? We have built a great movement, whose social weight resonates well beyond the borders of the Left. We have led in strikes and disputes, we have seen our preferred candidates win in union elections, we have given New Labour more than one bloody nose. And for all this, we have emerged without the ability to challenge new Labour electorally. We have little sustained presence in the mainstream media, and no money.

The answer must be to occupy that empty space on the electoral terrain, while not vacating the space for activism, which sustains us in between each electoral date. We need a new coalition of the left to fight Blair in those elections, and the proposals by George Monbiot and Salma Yaqoob are a great step in that direction. Those sniffing sectarians who think that it ain't good enough if it ain't Marxist need to extricate themselves now. Weekly Worker and Worker's Liberty have both, to their infinite shame, reacted strongly against these proposals for left unity. They insist on 'class politics not electoralism'. As if opposition to war wasn't the most profound kind of class politics. As if elections were nothing, and class politics not somehow reflected in them. As if we were somehow ditching the notions of class, and the classical conception of socialism, by participating in elections. Didn't Lenin once lead the Bolsheviks into participation in elections to the Duma, or did I dream that?

The Greens, on the other hand, are shitting themselves. They had assumed they would take the antiwar vote with their winning combination of blandness and sanctimony. They have said immediately that they want nothing to do with such an alliance, because most of its policies would be like Green policies anyway. Well! Good reason for you to be involved, he? Treble your membership overnight! But they were not as central to the antiwar movement as they could have been, and their television representative, Dr Caroline Lucas, was about as convincing as the Liberal Democrats in her arguments against the war. Therefore, let them huddle in their glass houses and throw stones.

4

Finally, if anyone doubts that a strong performance of the Left in elections terrifies the ruling elite, take a cop of this from the Independent:

"France faces a year of turbulent and possibly explosive politics after a tactical alliance was formed at the weekend between two parties of a resurgent far left ... In an opinion poll published yesterday, after two leading Trotskyist parties agreed to fight regional and European elections together next spring, 31 per cent of French people said that they would "consider" voting for the far left.

One of the parties, the Ligue Communiste Revolutionnaire (LCR), has doubled its membership in the past 18 months, as young French people, seduced by the anti-globalisation movement and cynical about conventional politics, flocked to the extremes.

So many new members have joined that the LCR has had to publish an A to Z of revolution, explaining, among other things, who Leon Trotsky was ...

The resurgence of the far left threatens to put the French political clock back to the 1950s and 1960s, when the strength of the Communist Party and other smaller left-wing formations prevented the emergence of a powerful movement of the centre-left. François Mitterrand, the former president, changed that by building the Parti Socialiste and persuading the Communists into a series ofalliances which ultimately withered their support among blue-collar workers...

Despite their success, the two principal Trotskyist parties do not even believe in democratic politics. They insist that change can only come through revolution.

Lutte Ouvrière is a secretive, sect-like organisation which appeals largely to disaffected blue-collar workers and revolutionary ideologues ..."


Like I told you, terrified!

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Wednesday, October 29, 2003

Report from the spark that started the fire... posted by Richard Seymour

If you were present to see the spark that started the Great Fire of London and lived through it, you would consider yourself lucky. Tonight's meeting in central London, called "The Future of Politics" hasn't yet set the world alight. But from atomic ruptures come nuclear explosions, and this had to be compound molecular at least.

Salma Yaqoob opened, because she's the sort of person who isn't well known but should be. After a good deal of spiel about Galloway being kicked out of the Labour Party for representing Labour values and 'welcoming' George W. Bush to London , (20th November, don't forget), she outlined how, as she sees it, politicians of all parties increasingly toe the line of a tiny, unpopular minority - no, not the Tories (and for anyone who's just reading this tonight and doesn't know yet, Duncan Smith has lost his job). They represent the will of big business, multinationals and the rich. They take us back to Victorian-style capitalism (a sado-masochistic ass-fucking) and tell us it's in the name of modernisation. Therefore, since the mainstream electoral choice before us is "Bombs n Big Business New Labour", "Bombs n Big Business Tory" and "Reluctant Bombs and Wish We Were Big Business Liberal Democrat", we ought to be thinking about creating a new alternative.

The mainstream parties rely on our passivity, on the idea that we will forget, or that we will be compelled to vote for one of the main three out of "lesser-evilism" which is almost inevitably described as "realism". We are reinforced in our passivity and lack of confidence by the same story, retold in countless different and familiar ways, that There Is No Alternative. We now need to see ourselves as the agents of change. We really are "the other superpower".

There must therefore be a representation of that at elections, in the media, in the unions. We must build a new, electoral bloc, coalescing the parties and individuals of the left; a coalition that will combine grassroots activism with electoral strategy. Elections, it is true, are usually a short game - and we're playing a long game, because the fight against war and capitalism doesn't disappear the second you put your cross on a bit of paper. But even acknowledging the limites of elections, we must see the opportunities involved in making an impact in this way.

If the tiny, schismatic far right can set off a change in the political climate by taking a handful of council seats, we can certainly do much better. We must agree to work together on the issues that unite us, and not fight one another on the issues that divide us. Therefore, Salma Yaqoob says, I have distributed a document called "Principles and Unity" which talks about some of the ways in which the left can start a dialogue and overcome the divisions of the past. It isn't intended to be the end of the discussion, but the beginning of one. We should be able to build a broad movement which is not the product of a single party, or its plaything.

Different groups do have a different perspective, of course, and we don't wish to abolish those, but we must have an agreement for action. This will require open-mindedness and audacity.

Ken Loach was the next speaker, and after a couple of jokes that went down well, he repeated much of what Salma Yaqoob had just said. Then he talked about the idea of "reclaiming the Labour Party". The Labour party had always had a contradiction at its heart, he said, in that the only way it could deliver reforms in favour of working people was when employers could make big enough profits. The employers register their demands, what they require in order to be profitable, and those demands are now more extreme than ever - keep the anti-union laws, make them tougher, end welfarism, privatise what's public. Blairism is the extreme end of the cold logic of Labourism.

Reclaim the party? WHICH party? The Callaghan and Healey government, enthralled to the IMF and spending cuts, sending in the army to break up the firefighters' strike? The party of Kinnock, with its lethal bureacratic choking of what radicalism lay within the Labour Party? The party of Harold Wilson and attacks on "politically motivated" striking seamen? We see the agony of the Labour left in all this - they campaign with you to say no to war, no to privatisation, no to tuition fees, no to the neoliberal agenda. And then they say 'but you have to vote for all of that'. And where once the disenfranchised Left huddled around the warm flanks of the Labour Party, (Bennism), today's anticapitalist and antiwar movements aren't interested in Labour.

Therefore, if we fail to represent ourselves electorally, we just hand over voters to the hypocrites of the Liberal Democrat party. We must take seriously the costs and consequences involved, form a professional outfit, and "That's a real challenge for the Left".

George Monbiot offered consolations to the deposed Tory leader - IDS, RIP! Or words to that effect. IDS reminded him of the red squirrel, who until recently occupied an ecological niche in Britain, in the suburbs and countrysides. There were plenty of nuts for him to associate himself with. But the red squirrel's territory was slowly taken over and colonised by the grey squirrel, "a large, aggressive rodent with bright eyes and a bushy tail". And the red squirrel receded into the margins until there was nowhere left for him to survive but in certain decaying institutions.

Now, the Left needs to open its eyes wide to the massive ecological niche opening up for it. There is a huge space to the Left, which noone is filling. The reason we have not filled it so far is because the Blairite transformation of Labour came so quickly and hit so hard that it left some totally confused. This confusion can be registered that STILL, after everything that has been done to the, the main unions continue to contribute their funds to the Labour Party.

Many are cynical about democracy - they say it's a scam, and that the real decisions aren't taken in democratic institutions. That's true. It IS a scam, as presently constituted. The main parties conspire in making one another seem more interesting than they really are, and the net result is "the neutron bomb effect" - the structures of democracy remain intact, but the democratic life inside has died. We therefore need both an electoral and an extra-parliamentary party. Remember when New Labour were elected, they were so terrified of the Tories and their friends in the media that they rigidly stuck to the most pedantic Tory measures. WE have to make them that terrified. We therefore propose a coalition.

Yes, we have disagreements. And the 'splittism' of the Left is partially a result of the fact that we really do believe in what we say. But if we are to succeed, we must unite. And if a coalition isn't the answer, what is? Rousseau once said that the people of England think they are free, but they are not. They are free once every five years when they vote - thereupon slavery falls upon them. And looking at how they use that freedom when it falls upon the, he said, the slavery is well deserved. Our task is to prove Rousseau wrong.

A crowd of CWU reps were introduced and got an enormous, hammering, standing ovation. Tony Blair would kill to get an ovation like that - actually, if I recall right, he DID kill to get an ovation like that. Mark Dolan of the CWU told us that 30,000 postal workers across the length and breadth of Britain were out on unofficial action. That included most sorting offices and most branches. The rest were walking out as he spoke. This is a battle, he said, for the survival of the union. The management has reneged even on what limited promises and agreements it made already. It has attacked the union, targetted union officials for punishment. In Southall, some workers were asked to volunteer for some duties which they didn't normally do. When they said 'no', the manager suspended them.

We spent tonnes of money campaigning against the Tories and their privatisation agenda. Now we're paying for the Labour to do it instead!! Why do we keep giving money to people who shit on us? (He didn't mean it THAT way people! Get serious!)

He said that as far as he was concerned, the CWU should back Galloway wherever he stood, and appealed for everyone to support them, and got another standing ovation.

Linda Smith of the FBU related a few stories from the firefighters' strike, informed us that the disputes were not over and that Phase II of the 'pay deal' was likely to be voted down tomorrow, so expect more on that. John Rees, for the Socialist Alliance, read an article from the Sunday Telegraph indicating that plans for Bush and the Queen to have a triumphant procession along the Mall had to be abandoned because of the fear of antiwar demos. Other proposed events, such as a Bush address to parliament, were cancelled because of the fear of boycotts.

"And they say we didn't build a great movement? All we did was release on bloody press statement and suddenly a 'state visit' becomes 'bloke comes round for tea'!"

The next opportunity to punish New Labour will be at Bush's visit, but then we must build from there. Millions of working people are responding to decades long hurt inflicted by the neoliberal machine. You cannot do that to people and not expect a reaction. Inevitably, they will seek an alternative. Now, we have been given a window of opportunity that will last for months at best. If we don't start now, we won't start at all. Then we will be left with a liberal revival, or worse, a fascist revival. We cannot abandon activists we work with today, to the hands of the Liberal Democrats tomorrow.

Bob Crowe was most interesting in that you got to see why trade unionists actually voted for the man. He's a warm, witty man with real passion. This is obscured in the media news by a few illiterate sound-bites justifying the latest strike, featuring Bob with a minging scowl on his face. At this meeting, he was all bon homie and Labour history. He talked of how it was his union which had been crucial to the formation of the Labour Party 107 years ago. Tommy Steele of the National Union of Railwaymen argued at a meeting, (which Bob has the minutes of), all those years ago, for the formation of a Labour Representation Committee to address the fact that the working class were not being represented politically. Many backed him, but his opponents insisted that the only way to progress was to stick with the Liberals, that the working people of England would never break from the Liberal Party. They called Steele and his allies "splitters". Those discussions mirrored the discussions of today.

He pledged support for George Galloway in the elections, was scathing about New Labour, and said his union would stand shoulder to shoulder with anyone who would support them, including those Labour MPs who continue to fight for socialism and renationalisation of the railways, but the big picture was that he was going to support the SSP north of the border, his union would be giving the funds to them, and the hint was that if we built such an alternative across England and Wales...

Finally, Galloway rose to speak, like a lion in need of a good roar. He retailed a joke he has often told about the late Willie Gallacher, a Clydeside MP and Communist, but I won't tell you what it is in case you go to one of his meetings. He urged the left to build a "popular unity coalition" to oppose Bush, Blair and globalisation. We are in derelection of duty if we fail to take to the electoral battlefield against those who have hi-jacked Labour. The Prime Minister, he said, have committed "a crime, an appalling blunder" and it should be his political death. "He's on the ropes, we can knock him out, so let the bell ring!"

He announced that he would stand on a unity list of candidates across the country for the European election wherever it was thought that his candidature would be helpful. He repeated the theme of unity, and end to the squabbles of the past and roared "The People, United, Will Never be Defeated!" Following which he laid into Blunkett for his shameful response to the police racism captured on camera by the BBC. He laid into Jack Straw for sacking the British ambassador to Uzbekistan, who did the world a sterling service by standing in the main square in the capital and denouncing that dictatorship. He told the world that the ruler of Uzbekistan had thousands of people locked away, many were being tortured, and some had even been boiled to death. This was the ethical foreign policy.

Nature, he said, abhors a vacuum. (Look, I've studied science and it fucking doesn't, okay? So stop saying that everyone. It's an old Aristotelian hand down, so shut it.) He said, nature must abhor a political vacuum most of all - all sorts of nasty forces can creep in - be they fascist thugs, or liberal hypocrites.

"But I must tell you, the slogan of 'reclaim the Labour Party' does not look promising." He told of how he knew he was finished when three senior Labour Party members, (Tony Benn, Michael Foot and Tony Woodley), appealed on his behalf - and the lady at the centre of the committee of three sat mentally knitting. Who saw, he wondered, the tear-stained people cheering on the warmonger Blair for seven minutes? 'Reclaim the party' did not look promising. He had only 9 months, of course, to prepare for the elections. "But great things can happen in nine months!" We need a rebirth of the Left.

Galloway rounded up his usual oratory tour de force with a quote that I seem to have heard somewhere before - "The great only look great because we are on our knees". Yes, I remember that phrase. Paul Foot once quoted it in a meeting some years ago. His version bears repeating:

"The great only look great because we are on our knees. Let us rise!"

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Monday, October 27, 2003

Killing Eye-rackians is FUN!! posted by Richard Seymour

If you kill forty people while fighting for the 'coalition', it's unfortunate. If you do it while fighting against a foreign occupation, it "shows the depth of depravity to which [you will] stoop" (Jack Straw). Today, as Iraqis mourn yet more dead kin, they will have also to stomach the astounding, sickening hypocrisy of those who wasted more living bodies during the war and subsequent occupation than the Iraqi resistance can even dream of. It's reassuring to hear from George Bush that he is now "even more determined to work with the Iraqi people", because I was starting to think the Iraqis might not care for his company.

Meanwhile, theories abound about precisely what shadowy organisation was behind this attack. Al Qaeda, of course, come to mind, and it was one of the first questions the Channel Four news asked this lunchtime of Lindsey Hilsum as she reported from the scene. According to Iraq's deputy interior minister, "Some countries, unfortunately, are trying to send people to conduct attacks". Or, if you don't like that, "Defense officials said they believe loyalists of fallen Iraqi President Saddam Hussein were responsible for the wave of bombings." The President has an even better theory, according to New York Newsday: "President Bush said progress in Iraq is making insurgents more 'desperate' and fueling attacks."

Well, George, I'm not sure exactly who are the 'desperate' ones here, but I'm convinced your right. The only reason people could possibly object to the US occupation of Iraq is because of all that progress you're making. Give 'em freedom and look what happens - they bomb you! New Labour knows the feeling. They do everything they can to help the sponging, inflexible forces of conservatism out of their hidebound public service ethic, and people are so pleased that they won't even bother to go vote for them!

It is perfectly obvious, if only anyone will bother to think through the stunning lies and smokescreens, that the escalation of violence in Iraq is a direct consequence of the occupation of Iraq. The Red Cross and other aid agencies are targetted so that they will leave and create an enormously difficult situation for the Americans who will generate massive resentment through their 'shoot first, ask questions later' security policies. Other countries are already wary of offering troop commitments to help the occupation. Does that need any further explanation? Could it be any simpler? The Iraqi resistance will inevitably include a cross-section of people, groups and interests. Inevitably, it will include some Ba'athists. Inevitably, it will include some fundamentalists. Perhaps it may even include some foreign activists. But I don't suppose it's so over the top to imagine that ordinary Iraqis may be involved in some of this. And I'll even go you one further - I think it's just possible, I'm not saying its certain, just possible, that the Iraqi people really don't appreciate the US presence in their country. To clarify, let me update you on the latest Iraqi opinion polls...

Not so very long ago, the warniks were assuring us that Iraqi public opinion was, and always had been, sovereign in the decision to invade Iraq and the decision to say there. Would the antiwar crowd now admit, they wondered, that the Iraqi people had fully endorsed the US efforts to oust Saddam, and only the international gang of leftist misanthropes had ever opposed it? Surely, they reasoned, it was a mark of the left's fundamental self-righteously errant ways that they found themselves opposing the popular Iraqi will while pretending to defend the Iraqi people?

I said before that I didn't believe this argument held much water. I still don't. If Iraqi public opinion had come out 99% in support of the war, I would consider it a disappointment and a major blow, but not a refutation of the case against US imperialism. Even oppressed people can be wrong sometimes, and surely that is a truth so obvious it ought not need stating.

Still, I suppose the warmongers will change their tune now, by the same logic that they expected the antiwar movement to crawl to the victors because of some opinion polling data. The latest poll from Iraq "released this week showed that 67 per cent of Iraqis view the American-led coalition as 'occupying powers', more than 20 per cent higher than a survey conducted shortly after the fall of the former regime. According to the poll, conducted by Iraq's Centre for Research and Strategic Studies, the number of Iraqis who view the coalition as a 'liberating' force has dropped from 43 to 15 per cent, and very few feel safe in the presence of the police or foreign armies controlling the country." ( The Observer , Sunday 26th October 2003).

Another source of triumphal back-slapping and self-congratulation among the warmongers has been their 'discovery' that most Iraqis wanted a US-style government. Well, that evidence was misrepresented to begin with (it just happened that the largest minority of the tiny fractions of a highly split vote on which country Iraqi politics should be modelled on was the US), but the news is: "In a second blow to US and British hopes for a Western-modelled democracy in Iraq, the poll also revealed that the vast majority of Iraqis preferred an Islamist government - 33 per cent supporting a theocracy and 23 per cent an Islamic democracy such as that in Iran."

So! Now that the Iraqi people have had enough of US imperialism, presumably so will the coterie of journos who were so seduced by it this Spring? I await with trembling fingers Nick Cohen's simpering apologia as he realises that it was he all along who was betraying the Iraqi people. Christopher Hitchens will presumably return to his platitudinous line that a "principled policy cannot be judged by the number of people who endorse it".

At any rate, if we don't hear from the warniks, we'll assume they admit defeat. It is at least satisfying for us to note that as pollsters ask their questions and probe the Iraqi psyche, they are obliged to withhold information about which country they are operating from: "Respondents were told the poll was being done for media both in Iraq and outside their country, but no mention was made that the American polling firm was running it." (Associated Press, October 13th, 2003).

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Wednesday, October 22, 2003

Dude, Where's My Sanity? ... Michael Moore and his critics. posted by Richard Seymour

Michael Moore is a liar. It's been proven. Every film, book or article he has produced has involved some kind of deception designed to amplify his case or make a case where none existed at all. So we are told by the rightwing US media, and now by Spinsanity.org .

The apparently rigorous fact-checking has produced a website and many, many articles and television slots for critics of Moore's work.

Spinsanity begins with a resume of the stock accusations deployed against Moore. "Moore repeated a well-debunked myth about supposed US aid to the Taliban, falsely portrayed a scene in a Michigan bank to make it appear as though one could open an account and walk out with a gun, and altered a Bush-Quayle '88 campaign ad, among numerous other distortions."

So, I suppose it would be as well to start there. The US aid to the Taliban is reported in Michael Moore's film as reported by the State Department . The critics assert that the money was handled by the UN and NGOs. Interesting logic since these same critics usually have no problem in asserting that the oil-for-food 'aid' which was given to Iraq was spent by Saddam Hussein on his palaces (so John Sweeney told me). But this aid was given in the context of US support for the Taliban (at a time when, as Moore points out, other impoverished nations with larger populations were not flattered with the same attention). This was also in the context of Taliban visits to the US to discuss an oil pipeline , an idea now being discussed by Kirzai with Pakistan and Turkmenistan The usual argument from critics is to say that this was 'food aid', an act of generosity by a benign United States. There are good reasons for thinking this is cobblers, as Moore suggests , but at that point we're entering the realm of speculation. Moore is making a case based on a quite common interpretation of the facts - Spinsanity and others counterpose it with their own interpretation which is hardly more plausible and probably a good deal less given what we know about US generosity .

The scene from the bank "falsely portrayed" is in fact an accurate portrayal of real events. The original advertisement was real, the bank offer was real, the bank really did supply him with that gun. Critics complain that Moore couldn't have got that gun from that bank, because those guns (Weatherby Mark V Magnum rifle) are only available "in a vault four hours away". Additionally, the guns you see behind Jacobson as she watches Moore fill in his forms are "models".

In fact, the whole thing was staged: 'His immediately walking out of the bank with a long-gun was allowed because "this whole thing was set up two months prior to the filming of the movie" when he had already complied with all the rules, including a background check.'

Aside from the fact that Moore was making a movie (duh!) and therefore had to take a little time over it (even fly-on-the-wall documentaries have scenes shot and re-shot), the Chicago Sun Times tells us: "Put as little as $ 869 in a 20-year certificate of deposit, and the Traverse City-based bank will hand over a Weatherby Inc. Mark V Synthetic rifle that lists for $ 779. Deposit more, and you have a choice of six Weatherby shotguns or a limited-edition rifle."

In other words, what you saw Moore do is what any customer could do on an average day, given the funds. Moore claims that his background check was completed in ten minutes, and he walked out of the place five minutes later. Perhaps that IS because he had arranged everything and made sure the movie would run smoothly - but if so, here's the question: YEAH, AND, SO, WHAT? A bank will give you a gun for a CD, and they'll give you the gun right away if they can. That's a fact, and a worrisome one.

The Willie Horton ad. The ad shown for a brief fraction of the movie, Bowling for Columbine, is a reference to smears on Michael Dukakis by Republican strategists in 1988. In Moore's movie, it features a subtitle reading: "Willie Horton Released. Then Kills Again."

Spinsanity say that "Moore has recently acknowledged some of his errors", and has "admitted" that he made a correction to the original subtitle. Moore "admitted" a "typo", noting that of course Willie Horton hadn't killed again, he had only raped someone. So that's okay. He also notes that Lee Atwater apologised on his deathbed for orchestrating the smear campaign against Dukakis. The sort of soft-headed literalism that insists upon Horton being a rapist, not a murderer may be called for, but it doesn't undermine the essence of the point. They also point out that the subtitle was not present in the original campaign ad. The association, however, (between Dukakis' "lax" prison policies and the release of a murderer who then rapes), was in the original campaign ad, but you wouldn't have known it from Moore's film if the subtitle hadn't been added. Does Moore substantially alter the facts, or is he merely employing artistic license? Even admitting the whole force of the critics' point, does it in any way attenuate the actuality of the smear?

Lockheed Martin's sattelites: Lockheed Martin apparently never made "nuclear weapons" when the Columbine Massacre took place. Therefore, Michael Moore must be lying when he suggests that it did to the Lockheed Martin spokesman: "So you don't think our kids say to themselves, well gee, dad goes off to the factory every day and, you know, he built missiles. These were weapons of mass destruction. What's the difference between that mass destruction and the mass destruction over at Columbine High School?"

Naturally, you will have noticed that nowhere does Michael Moore suggest that the plant made 'nuclear weapons' or even necessarily any kind of weapons at the time of the shooting. He does suggest that such weapons were made at certain times, and the spokesman responds by acknowledging that such weapons were made but by suggesting that these were defensive.

Nevertheless, according to Spinsanity, Moore's new book 'sets the record straight, writing that "Lockheed Martin, the biggest arms maker in the world, built rockets that carried into space the special new satellites that guided the missiles fired into Baghdad" during the recent war in Iraq. (page 74)' Oh, I do beg your pardon, but that does indeed set the record straight. Lockheed Martin did indeed once make missiles. They now make sattelites to guide those missiles. Obviously there's no connection between the two.

Spinsanity complains about the following: "Clark has said that he received phone calls on Sept. 11 and in the weeks after from people at 'think tanks' and from people within the White House telling him to use his position as a pundit for CNN to 'connect' Sept. 11 to Saddam Hussein." (From "Dude, Where's My Country?") Apparently, Wesley Clark has since set the record straight and said it was a think-tank, not the Whitehouse who contacted him on 9/11. Well, that's a reliable statement since noone could think that Clark would be pressured by the Whitehouse and others into changing his story a little. But even if it is true it doesn't change the literal veracity of Michael Moore's statement in the book, something you would expect the dogmatic literalists of Spinsanity to understand.

Spinsanity has more gripes: "There were claims that the French were only opposing war to get economic benefits out of Saddam Hussein's Iraq. In fact, it was the Americans who were making a killing. In 2001, the U.S. was Iraq's leading trading partner, consuming more than 40 percent of Iraq's oil exports. That's $6 billion in trade with the Iraqi dictator." (page 69) Thus Moore's book. Spinsanity rages that "that "trade" was done under the auspices of the United Nations oil-for-food program, which allowed Iraq to sell a limited amount of oil to purchase humanitarian supplies ... One can only imagine what Moore would have said if the U.S. refused to purchase Iraqi oil and allowed its citizens to starve".

Well, presumably America was doing it for humanitarian reasons. I have no reason to believe that the US acts for any other motive than humanitarian ones, and I certainly don't believe they imposed sanctions which were considered murderous by the DIA before their implementation and which have since proven so, with any harm in mind. Obviously, that 'trade' wasn't really 'trade' because it was allowed under UN "auspicies". Or, perhaps it really IS trade when one country purchases something from another country. What do readers think?

The allegations against Moore proceed from untrue, to vague, to tedious to bizarre. In an Extra the Spinsanity editors detail numerous 'errors' in Moore's book: "Moore offers the suggestion that the Saudi government was behind the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks ... there this no evidence that the Saudi government or Saudi officials helped plan the September 11 attacks".

Again: "Moore claims that the U.S. "oversaw the assassination of [Congo leader Patrice] Lumumba" in 1961. However, according to a July, 2000 US News & World Report article, Lumumba was actually killed by Belgian operatives (though, as that article makes clear, the CIA apparently did have its own plot to assassinate him)." Anyone who knows about the assassination of Patrice Lumumba and the murky details surrounding it also know that there is ample evidence from numerous investigations of US involvement, and Ludo DeWitte's book on this matter makes this clear. One review of the book summarises thus:

"[T]he government released archive material related to the Kennedy assassination that included an interview with the White House minute-taker under the Eisenhower administration, Robert Johnson.

In a meeting held with security advisers in August 1960, two months after Congo achieved its formal independence from Belgium, Eisenhower ordered the CIA to "eliminate" Lumumba, according to Johnson's account.

There was a stunned silence for about 15 seconds and the meeting continued, Johnson recalled.

The CIA's director, Allen Dulles, referred to the Congolese leader as a "mad dog."

Among the American agents on the ground in the Congo was a young CIA man working under diplomatic cover, Frank Carlucci, who tried to work his way into Lumumba's confidence in the months before the murder. Carlucci went on to become national security advisor and defense secretary in the Reagan administration and is today the chairman of the Carlyle Group, the influential merchant bank that includes George Bush Sr. among its directors.

According to Larry Devlin, then the CIA station chief in Leopoldville (Kinshasa), the agency's chief technical officer arrived in the African nation shortly after the elimination order from Eisenhower. With him he brought a tube of poisoned toothpaste that was to be placed in the Congolese leader's bathroom. The improbable plot was dropped, however, in favor of a more direct method. Lumumba was delivered into the hands of his bitterest political enemy, Moises Tshombe, the secessionist leader of Katanga."

Yet another: "Moore uses fake quotes as chapter headings, implying that Bush (or administration officials) said things they never said. The most problematic is '#3 Whopper with Bacon: 'Iraq has ties to Osama Bin Laden and al Qaeda!'' (page 53) He quotes Bush repeatedly stating that 'We know [Saddam] has ties to Al Qaeda' - but provides no source suggesting the administration tied Saddam to Bin Laden personally." So, supposing that Moore was only speaking of Bush and his staff (not the media, the 'experts', the pundits, the neocon intellectuals etc.) what is the material difference if Saddam was falsely said to have ties to Al Qaeda or if he was falsely said to have ties to Al Qaeda and its leader?

The list of bogus charges and surrealisms goes on and on. Sometimes, there are charges which merit further investigation. But the bulk of them are so idiotic, so literal-minded, so surreal that they would barely merit mention if they were not part of a concerted attempt to smear Moore. It would certainly be inappropriate to see Moore as a Chomskyian critic with all the academic rigor that pertains thereto. Moore has research teams ensuring that nothing he writes can land him in court, but that doesn't protect him from errors. The fact that he is a satirist affords him some freedom to exaggerate, smooth over rough edges with some glib humour and simplify rather complex arguments. It entitles him to offer the humorous proposition that Saudi Arabia knocked down the World Trade Centre in a fit of pique, without having the witless drones behind far too many internet sites pointing out the patently fucking obvious. One is only surprised that they didn't mention that Moore had urged Oprah Winfrey to run for President and point out "there is no evidence that Oprah Winfrey has expressed any desire to run for President or that she would represent Moore's twisted views if she did".

There are, of course, perfectly good reasons to criticise Moore. Some have been put off by his claim that Gen Wesley Clarkson is "antiwar" and would therefore make a good Democrat candidate for President. Others don't like him saying that Mumia Abu Jamal "probably killed that guy". These are differences of judgment as much as they are of fact, and those who criticise Moore on these grounds are being a lot more honest about their implicit ideological assumptions than the 'neutral' partisans of Spinsanity and the infantile nutball who runs "Bowling for Truth". There are many on Moore's side who would like him to be more careful, if only to protect himself from the inevitable rightwing attacks. But lenin finds the whole argument tedious. The meticulous and bloody-minded poster-boys for rationality at Spinsanity must, of course, sustain their equidistant poise between Michael Moore and Anne Coulter - which is a way of reinforcing ideological assumptions as much as it is an attempt to hide them behind apparent neutrality. Spinsanity's prose has roughly the dryness, texture and quality of a stale cow-pat, and if Moore had composed a book of outright lies called "The Complete and Utter Truth" I would still rather read that than swallow any more schoolboy 'gotchas' from his opponents.

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