Tag Archives: United States

On the smudging of the political spectrum

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One of the interesting things I’ve noticed when reading opinions from normal American voters (not bloggers – I mean people on forums, Yahoo! Answers and the like) is how confused many of them are when it comes to understanding the political ideas espoused by many of the candidates in the race to become president. For example, the view is often expressed that Hillary Clinton ought not be president because she is a ‘socialist’. Other Democratic candidates are equally dismissed as representing the ‘far-left’ or espousing ‘socialist healthcare’. Several times, I’ve been called a ‘Leninist’, ‘Communist’ or ‘Stalinist’ after questioning the official version of events from Downing Street or the White House. The New York Times, The Guardian and MSNBC News are all regularly referred to as being ‘of the left’, ‘far-left’, ‘socialist’ and even ‘communist’, despite the fact that they are broadly establishment-friendly liberal media outlets. In Spain, Aznar and the FAES-Libertad Digital-El Mundo alliance have regularly referred to the PSOE as ‘the socialists, communists and anarchists’ – language borrowed almost word for word from Franco’s fascist dictatorship.

This phenomenon casts light on two particular points worth looking at. Firstly, that the propaganda of the cold war era still courses through many people’s veins. People still fear socialism in a more primal way than they fear even Islamism or other far-right ideologies. The United States is not at risk of getting a socialist president any time soon, so why is this irrational fear perpetuated? The reason is that the USA represents a spectacularly unequal capitalist society and has all the accompanying problems that might be expected. Rather than noting that socialism might offer a solution to some of these problems (as it clearly does), people are instead encouraged to have a Red Dawn* style view of socialism. The true ‘threat’ of socialism is, of course, an empowered and united labour force.

The second point is that it has become standard practice to label any political opponent who is even slightly to the left of yourself as ‘socialist’ or ‘communist’. Hillary Clinton, on any normal political spectrum, would be regarded as having a centre-right political ideology. But it is not uncommon to hear commentators and citizens alike using the term ‘socialist’ to describe her point of view. And I’m not just talking about Mark Levin or equally perverse ‘shock-jocks’ and fetishists. Mainstream media outlets like Fox News Channel (a channel which, incidentally, spends a lot of time criticising the ‘mainstream media’!) have regularly used terms like ‘socialist healthcare’, ‘socialised education’ and so on as a scare tactic. Actually, public health and education, free at the point of use, are generally accepted now as being good for society, good for business, good for the country. It’s the word ‘social’ which seems to scare people so much. all the while, the right is referred to as merely ‘conservative’.

Spain has had a left of centre government in power for the last four years and despite the PP-FAES-Libertad Digital-El Mundo alliance’s shrill warnings about ‘the end of Spain’, dark terrorist conspiracies and economic collapse, Spain seems to be doing OK. This is the reason why the PP rarely challenges the PSOE on any policy issue except when it touches on concepts of ‘national unity’ and alleged threats to tradition. Rather, they spend their time posturing and holding press conferences, much as they did when they were in power. Despite being from the ‘far left’, the country is doing fine. But I know that this is a story which won’t be told in the United States, where fear of a single word still dominates political discourse.

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*Red Dawn – if you haven’t seen this film, try to download it or something. It’s a fiercely jingoistic anti-Soviet propaganda movie from about 1984 starring Patrick Swayze and Charlie Sheen, and it recounts the events following a Soviet-Cuban invasion of the United States. I imagine it gave a lot of impressionable teenagers nightmares and a firm hatred of socialism, which was exactly its intention. It’s a pretty terrible film but also quite amusing in parts.

Senior US officials implicated in nuclear black market

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An interesting post at Lenin’s Tomb asks why more isn’t being made of Sibel Edmonds’s claims about corruption in the US government.

State Secrets laws don’t permit her to talk to a judge about it, much less a television reporter, and much of the media has avoided looking too intensely at the matter. Apparently, she knows that several high-placed American officials put US nuclear materials on the black market, some of which were going to Pakistani secret police individuals with connections to ‘Al Qaeda’.

By the way, lots of work on at the moment… I’m still working on a few longer posts though.

Nazi Pop Twins documentary

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Prussian Blue - the Nazi Pop TwinsYesterday, after watching Pirates of the Caribbean 3 (0/1) and Turistas (1/1) we flicked over to More 4 to watch a documentary which was first broadcast in July this year. It concerned Lamb and Lynx Gaede, the teenaged twins who comprise Prussian Blue, a Nazi pop band. I’d heard of Prussian Blue before, probably through the Popbitch message-board, but had never really given them much thought. The documentary offered some insight into these Nazi pop twins and the way they were manipulated and pushed around by their scary mother, April. The twins, aged around 14 or 15 in the film, were clearly? trying to distance themselves somewhat from the White Pride / National Vanguard movements.

The film was naturally full of unpleasant views , mostly espoused by the awful April and her equally unpleasant father. At onepoint, during a small argument about signing CDs for members of the White Pride movement, April could be heard saying to one of her daughters that she should help out for a bit and that “Then you can be as much of a cunt as you like for the rest of the evening”. I hope that Lynx and Lamb find the strength to make the break with the atrocious philosophy forced on them by their mother. She’s one of those annoying people, incidentally, who doesn’t understand language or logic: the thought that she could define racism and that what she promoted wasn’t racism because she didn’t call it that. Sorry, it doesn’t work that way.

Anyway, the documentary is well worth watching. It should be noted that such families are extremely rare in the USA… failure to remember this would be thoroughly anti-American.The reason they don’t make many documentaries about all the other, normal families is that they probably wouldn’t be as interesting as a film about some Nazi Pop Twins.

YouTube: racism and homophobia are OK

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I mentioned in a post some time ago that I was disappointed that a video with a bit of swearing in (Nick’s epic bowling movie, for example) could be banned from YouTube.com whereas videos from the BNP which solicited almost explicitly racist comments are left untouched. This situation is symptomatic of a problem with the far-right in online communities: they’re far better organised than the left wing are. So, for example, a video during which a Socialist party member reads from a selection of BNP literature and describes them as racist is met with responses like ” Can you explain the non-stop HATE I see every day in the eyes of black men…?”.

Later, the comments devolve into opposing sides referring to eachother as “Moron” and later, “C*nt”. Intriguingly, this last word is banned from videos on YouTube but not from the comments people leave. Check out the abuse this user gets on his profile page. Interestingly, I only stumbled upon that user’s profile because he, in turn, had been sending me offensive and threatening messages because he thought I’d posted a video spoofing homophobic reggae ‘star’, Buju Banton. In turn, a video of fellow reggae performer Shabba Ranks saying the bible supports Buju’s positon features the comment “Heah i aint famous so f*ck it, all queers should be shot dead it aint right and should be dealt with by aggression and plenty of it cut there cocks off if they cant use it properly f*ckin sick bastards.. [sic]”.

I recognise that in the US, where YouTube is registered, there exists a stronger belief in freedom of expression, whatever offence is caused. And yet, YouTube’s Community Guidelines state “We encourage free speech and defend everyone’s right to express unpopular points of view. But we don’t permit hate speech which contains slurs or the malicious use of stereotypes intended to attack or demean a particular gender, sexual orientation, race, religion, or nationality”. The advice given by YouTube is that if you’re not happy with something, you should flag it as inappropriate and it will be dealt with. I know, however, that this is just not applied to offensive comments.

So what should be done? Some people will say that frankly, freedom of speech should be upheld above all other rights. I disagree when it comes to hate speech as categorised in YouTube’s own rules. YouTube really needs to make more of an effort to moderate debate on its pages. There’s no stopping stupid thugs making unpleasant videos like this but YouTube should be checking the content that gets uploaded to its site.

Well *I* liked it

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I’ve got to admit that the best film I saw this year was the new Bond film, Casino Royale. I’m not saying that it was the best executed, acted, written or produced… probably it wasn’t. But it was by far the most enjoyable and quite frankly, I’ve kind of given up on watching films which are supposed to trigger some sort of emotional or intellectual response.

This process began with Donnie Darko, a movie which was made for people like me (drop-out, pot-smoking philosophy students who listen to independent record labels). Anyway, lots of people I knew loved it and eagerly recommended it to me so I watched it and thought it was completely abysmal. It just seemed so pointless that I didn’t care enough to ‘unravel’ the ‘secrets’ of the film. Ooh the old lady and the tunnels and the rabbit… it’s all so cryptic and yet full of imagery!

I felt sorry for George Clooney when the press started going on about Syriana and saying it was an indictment of US petro-policy and so on. Well, I didn’t exactly feel sorry for him: he’s an incredibly wealthy movie star who can do whatever he likes. But I did think ‘Oh no, poor old George is going to have a lot to live up to after all this attention’. And I was right: Syriana, whatever it was intended to do or say, did and said nothing to me. It was a jumbled, waffly, trite, emotive work in mental masturbation. It said “See, we’ve made the world shit” in the way that only a $50 million movie can.

I’m afraid that I was also singularly underwhelmed by this year’s smash hit, Pan’s Labyrinth (El Labarinto del Fauno). This film was made half to appeal to me and half to appeal to mental people like Gemma’s cousin in C.R. who believe in pixies and fairies (which they insist on spelling ‘faeries’) and other such nonsense. The half that was supposed to appeal to me was the fact that it was set in post Civil War Spain and there were nasty Franquistas running about everywhere.

The thing is: this is one of the least talked about periods of recent history here. After the Civil War which you can argue about for decades and never agree, Franco formed a dictatorship and set about rebuilding a heavily traumatised Spain in his own image. I’ve never seen a film which dealt with this subject matter and was interested to see Pan’s Labyrinth and how it treated this delicate, fascinating subject matter. Thing is, the film is set then but doesn’t really say anything about it. The setting is pretty much irrelevant to the plot – and as such doesn’t interfere with the delicate, magical story surrounding the little girl who’s the main character. The problem is that I can’t abide mythical beasts or any of that stuff and so even though I got what was going on, I couldn’t stand it.

Bond, on the other hand, was great. Simple, manly action; beautiful, exotic women in low-cut dresses; a dab of betrayal and lost love. It’s not a film which will change the world but by heck, it was thrilling and that’s what it set out to be.

I used to love the more avant-garde, emotional, witty and moving films made by directors like Godard. Actually, I still do… thing is that no one’s making films like that these days and the closest alternative is the pseudo-art-movie. I’d rather eat fresh bangers and home made mash than a pre-cooked fancy ready-meal from Sainsbury.

Melanie Phillips is a terrorist

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One of the current stars of the right-wing (or rather, neo-con) blog circuit is the English columnist and author, Melanie Phillips. Her vociferous hatred of Islam, her certainty that, left to the pansy-liberals, Britain is doomed to become a caliphate (her book’s called Londonistan) and her… vociferous hatred of the left have all earned her a certain cachet among the broadly American neo-conservatives whose praise she courts. Personally, I think they like her even more because she’s English and serious-looking: far easier to like than the dangerously blonde and completely mad scourge of common sense, Ann Coulter. Oh, and because she’s very good at telling certain people that their ill-fouded beliefs about Britain are correct.

Well I guess that’s enough praise for Melanie. The reason I’m writing is to have a look at some of her writing. Specifically, her recent article ‘Suicide Of The West‘ in the National Review Online.

The main gist of this article is that the British ‘establishment and chattering classes’ are making a huge mistake in their understanding of Islamist terrorism when they consider that it might be influenced by foreign policy. She states that this attitude ignores the fact that this terrorism has a religious aspect and that,

There was an al Qaeda plot in Birmingham to blow up Britain back in 2000 — before 9/11, let alone the war in Iraq. Similarly, jihadi attacks on the U.S. began 22 years before 9/11 with the Iran embassy hostage crisis in 1979, followed by two decades of further attacks.

It is undeniably true that Islamist terrorists existed before 2001 (they would have had to form their cells long before then in order to carry out their earlier attacks on the WTC, the east-African embassies etc etc). What she omits to mention is that US/UK foreign policy also existed prior to 2001. For example, the ‘war in Iraq’ didn’t begin in 2003. It could reasonably be stated that the war began as early as 1990 when Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait. Our military took up positions in Saudi Arabia (at the behest of the regime there) and continued assaults on Iraq throughout most of the subsequent thirteen years.

Prior to the Iraq war, the United States supported Iraq in its war against Iran, supported jihadis in Afghanistan against the Soviets, supported the Shah in Iran (this was before it was all about ‘freedom and democracy’) – all policies which had their as their base a fairly sound (if unpleasant) strategic intention but which undoubtedly fomented anger and hatred against the west long before 2000. When remembered, these facts make it clear that while it’s perfectly obvious that al Qaeda started before 2000, so did the foreign policies which allegedly enraged them. I’ll go further and say that Melanie Phillips knew all of this perfectly well but chose to ignore historical fact in order to pursue her central theme: that we are facing a religious war rather than the hangover from decades of meddling, bombing and assassinating.

Why does Phillips think that she can get away with this? She is a journalist of many years’ experience with an excellent academic reputation. It’s puzzling that she can be rigorous while constructing arguments based utter mendacity. Well, it’s not really. Her rhetoric has been carefully honed to fit its intended audience: the American right-wing. Who else would believe the myth of the religious war when no war has ever really been about religion?

Phillips goes on to say that the radicalisation of British Muslims is the fault of (wait for it…) the BBC. By bombarding the British people with anti-USA, anti-Israel propaganda, the BBC is ‘culpable’ for al Qaeda terrorist attacks.

[The BBC] powerfully incites hatred by persistently misrepresenting Israel’s self-defence as unwarranted aggression, and giving air-time to an endless procession of Islamic jihadists, propagandists, anti-Western activists and bigots with rarely even a hint of a challenge.

While I am unable to review every minute of the BBC’s news coverage over the last ten years, I can remember plenty of interviews and airtime given to Israeli officials, US Army generals and modern neo-conservatives which I have seen with my own eyes. If you watched the BBC at the time of the invasion of Iraq, you too will remember the ghoulish blood lust that seems to overtake every news outlet at times of war. The Guardian had rather too many graphics of how laser-glide bombs work for my liking. My point is that it’s unreasonable to accuse the BBC of prejudice unless you’re willing to accept that ‘when it counts’, the BBC always backs up ‘our boys’.

Add to that the campaign led by the BBC against the Taliban regime in Kabul (extensive reporting of human rights abuses, the destruction of the Bamiyan Buddhas, a Despatches documentary about the religious/moral police force), joyous reports of democratic elections in Afghanistan and Iraq… I’ve looked hard for this alleged bias in the BBC but I’ve never found it.

For Israel’s fight is the world’s fight. Lose Israel, and the world is lost
…

…yes, that’s true. But how do we best secure the safe future of Israel? By deciding that we’re locked in some sort of esoteric ‘religious war’? Melanie Phillips is committed to selling the concept of a clash of cultures, a war of ideals. This war exists but it’s not between Christians and Muslims. The war of ideas in the west is between truth and lies, between power and democracy, between terror and debate, between reason and hate. Those of us dedicated to truth, democracy, debate and reason – from accross the political spectrum – need to stand up soon to prevent these people from controlling the dialogue.

‘Islamism’ in Swansea University

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The Guardian reports today that many universities across the UK house extremist and Islamist groups which ‘pose a threat to national security’. Swansea University is listed as one of the institutions where Islamist groups have been found to operate by professor Anthony Glees, head of Brunel University’s centre for intelligence and security studies.

While I haven’t been a student at Swansea for some time now, it’s true that there was a fair degree of student activism on campus. I took part in campaigns for the abolishment of university tuition fees, to prevent the closure of university departments and on behalf of the Socialist Workers’ Party against the war in Afghanistan.

At around the same time, a motion was put before the student union council to boycott Israeli academics and institutions because of acts being committed by the Israeli state against Palestinians. These were the days of Ramallah and Jenin where crimes against humanity were carried out by the Israeli army.

The main critics of the motion to boycott Israeli academics and institutions were American and Jewish students, understandably fearful that the left wing of the student body were turning to an anti-Semitic position. A synagogue was damaged in an attack in 2002 – and though it was never proven that this was connected with Muslim or socialist students – the suggestion was that the socialists had helped to create a culture of hatred in the town.

Naturally, I think that this was the wrong conclusion. At a time when the BNP were trying to claw their way into local politics, race riots were taking place in Bradford and Leeds, the US had started its racist war against Muslims in Asia, there were a lot of violent and malicious incidents occurring. I believe that the intellectual boycott brought about by the student union was one of the best considered political acts I have witnessed. It was absolutely not anti-Semitic, and I find it personally insulting that whenever there is any discussion of the wrongs that have been committed on either side of the Palestinian conflict, accusations to that effect will be made.

The reason I have brought this up is that I have a sneaking suspicion that Swansea’s ‘extremism’ and ‘Islamic’ will be found to be intrinsically linked with the boycott of Israeli academics and institutions – which just isn’t the truth. As ought to be expected in the climate of fear that the British government is doing its best to create, any free thinking or direct action is automatically challenged as a threat to security.

Anyone familiar with Swansea university, Swansea City Council and the Swansea Police’s attitude towards leftist student activism will already be aware of the attempts made to silence lecturers, terrorise students and prevent demonstrations. It seems that the next attempt might be to refer to Muslim student activists as ‘terrorists’. This is exactly the sort of thing warned about before, throughout and after my brief time in Swansea.

The defamation of any politicised student or worker body has reached such a degree of acceptance in the UK that we may well have gone beyond the point of no return. It’s imperative that anyone who can, speaks out against this attitude.

The legality of the war never mattered.

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Recent leaks and admissions over exactly what Lord Goldsmith, the Attorney General said in his two bits of advice to the PM about war in Iraq has been generated by the Labour party to cloud our memories of why it is we opposed the war.

Legality was never the factor that bothered us. It was the only argument that could have been used to physically prevent our troops going into battle; but the argument against the war was always a moral one. And we were right. Today, Iraq still barely has a government, is under foreign occupation and suffers continual attacks from foreign insurgents. It seems trite to mention all this again, but there were no terrorists in Iraq until the US and the UK let them in. 21,000 civilians have died because of our greed. Half a million children died because of the hopelessly corrupt and inept UN Oil-for-Food programme and the allied air-strikes which went on for 10 years.

So now, Tony Blair says that he is happy to fight the election on trust, but at the same time, he makes the insupportable claim that if 10% of Labour voters stay at home, the Tories will get in “by the back door”.

We can trust Blair on some points: he’s committed to curtailing human rights in the UK; he’s willing to support the phoney wars started by the US; he will intentionally mislead the government and the electorate to pursue policies he believes are right; he cannot be trusted.

Of course, Michael Howard is no better.

So it makes sense to vote for smaller parties. England would benefit from an increase in the number of parties asking for support in the election. The Lib Dems might well still be interested in introducing proportional representation as a replacement for our current system.

Give Labour a bloody nose, but don’t let the Tories back in! Is what I think.