war within a breath

Threatening Iran

08.29.07 - 09:50am

It strikes me that something missing from the debate over Iran is any consciousness of the fact that the Iranian state and people may feel that they are the ones being threatened.

Yesterday, George Bush “ramped up the war of words between the US and Iran” accusing Tehran of “threatening to place the Middle East under the shadow of a nuclear holocaust” and saying that he had authorised US military commanders in Iraq to “confront Tehran’s murderous activities”. Every time an American politician discusses the Middle East they talk of the threat from Iran. Yet in the same breath they invariably make actual threats against that nation.

In actual fact, while refusing to roll over, as Britain invariably does, Iran has publicly been remarkably conciliatory towards the US. At one point it even voluntarily suspended its legal uranium enrichment as part of a deal with the EU, a deal which subsequently fell apart because the EU could not deliver on its promise to extract a commitment from America not to attack, a sequence of events which has subsequently mysteriously disappeared from history.

Iran has not attacked anyone in the last 250 years. It has been attacked: by Iraq under the then US-backed Saddam Hussein. During that conflict, according to the Washington Post, the CIA gave Iraq intelligence that Iraq used to “calibrate” its mustard gas attacks on Iranian troops.

The fact that the coalition invasion of its immediate neighbour, and a gigantic naval presence in the area, may now give Iran grounds for feeling threatened, does not figure much in mainstream debate on the “war of words” between US and Iran. In fact the war of words itself seems to be rather one sided, with the fighting talk emanating mainly from one party.

I do not know whether Iran is developing nuclear weapons but I do have the rather quaint, old-fashioned notion that such an accusation might require some evidence and that you need a damn good reason before you start threatening another country with attack.

Yesterday’s events actually bear the hallmarks of being a staged propaganda exercise aimed squarely at US public opinion. Bush lambasts Iran; hours later American troops arrest seven Iranians in Baghdad and drag them out of their hotel cuffed and blindfolded in front of television cameras.

By the time it was revealed that the men were part of a delegation from the Iranian energy ministry, in Baghdad at the invitation of the Iraqi government for contract talks, the pictures had been flashed across every television channel in the US and Europe. All the men were later released without charge.

It could all be a coincidence, but then I am not sure the Sheraton Hotel is a likely hotbed of Iranian terrorism.

Furthermore, one might feel there is more justification for Iranian people to be in Iraq than occupying soldiers from the superpower half way across the world.

For reference purposes, here is an interesting fact sheet on the US-Iran issue.

Category: Iran | Tags: | 2 Comments »

Immigrants Will Eat Your Baby, Mail Reveals

08.25.07 - 01:38pm

Normally I would not sully my online journal with the ravings of the Daily Mail. Actually, I don’t even look at it in the newsagent but I recently discovered the site Mail Watch and was particularly struck by this front page.

As one commentator at Mail Watch put it: “they may as well just write ‘vote for the BNP this October or else’”.

I am sure I do not have to point out the numerous despicable tactics the Mail employs here. Sullen dark people, standing around avoiding honest work on the left, the happy, smiling, gloriously white, Middle England nuclear family on the right preparing to jump on the next plane to Australia.

White British people going overseas are “ex-pats” looking for a better life, while dark people coming here are obviously “immigrants”, with all the nasty connotations the word has on Daily Mail Island. The idea that people coming to live here may be responsible people with aspirations and families of their own is beyond the Mail.

The basic vile racism which motivates the front page also leads the Mail to play fast and loose with the more complex reality of the story. The 574,000 figure cited by the Mail includes 91,000 Britons moving back to the UK after working abroad. It also includes the numerous Americans, Irish, Australians, Kiwis and others who come here every year to live and work. However, they obviously cannot be “immigrants” because they’re white and speak English and don’t fit the Mail’s “rivers of blood” narrative.

If there is one thing that might be capable of making me want to leave this nation it is the hate so clearly epitomised by the Daily Mail and its ilk.

Category: media | Tags: | 4 Comments »

Stupid, Dishonest or Just Gullible?

08.24.07 - 10:32am

There is a strange article today on the Guardian website in which Angie Bray, the Tory leader on the London Assembly uses a visit by Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez last year to launch an attack on the Mayor, Ken Livingstone.

Much of it is just the usual insincere and rather petty knockabout of British politics but part of the article makes a number of serious claims regarding Chavez and the political situation in Venezuela, by which Bray intends to damn Ken by association.

Comment is comment but it reflects badly on the Guardian that the organisation should allow its own site to be used to peddle a series of easily exposed falsehoods.

Bray begins:

“On the day last year when City Hall was overtaken by mysterious men in dark glasses heralding the arrival of Venezuela’s president, Hugo Chávez, the Conservative group invited along one of the many dissident groups in the country whose members have had to flee abroad since he took office. Of course, Ken banned them from the building.”

Well this talk of men in dark glasses, with its menacing overtones, is pretty feeble. As we can be quite sure that Angie does not talk in such breathless terms about the bodyguards of any other world leaders, many of whom also wear dark glasses, I can only assume she is simply being intellectually dishonest.

The person that Angie Bray met, interestingly unmentioned by name in the article, was Aleksander Boyd, editor of the website Vcrisis. Mr Boyd was banned from entering the GLA offices because he was judged a possible threat to public safety, given that he openly advocates the violent overthrow of Venezuela’s democratically elected government. Here is a little example of Mr Boyd’s writing:

“I wish I was Genghis Khan, I wish I had eaten my half-brother… Therefore the scum of this earth a.k.a. Hugo Chavez and followers would not be willing to piss me off. Ergo they would be extremely careful of not treading on my rights. Attempts to conquer commanded by me would encounter nothing less than total submission owing to the sheer fear that my presence would cause.”

And another:

“Yesterday I had a conversation with someone about Venezuela and its problems. Given the peculiar characteristics of our crisis, my interlocutor asked “what’s the solution then?” And I replied “when elected politicians treat one as an animal, how on earth can be expected that one behaves as a gentleman? The solution in my view is clear and simple: violence.”

I would be interested to hear Angie Bray’s views on someone who was speaking in such terms about overthrowing the British government.

Anyway, considering the nature of the people Angie Bray is consorting with it is hardly surprising she has some very strange views about Chavez and Venezuela. She continues:

“Have you ever seen the Venezuelan electoral register? It looks innocent enough at first, with columns for your name, address and polling number. But then it suddenly turns slightly menacing: a long line of columns records every ballot you have ever cast. One of the fundamental tenets of democracy, which guarantees freedom from persecution, is the secret ballot. Yet this is unheard of in Chávez’s Venezuela.”

Now this really rang alarm bells. Being openly socialist, and on occasions something of a comical figure, Chavez is routinely portrayed in an overwhelmingly negative light by the British and American media. However, this was the first time I had heard anyone question the secrecy of the ballot. And my scepticism was warranted. Either Angie Bray simply invented this nonsense herself or, more likely, Boyd and his group fed it to her. There is simply no truth in it at all.

The European Union Election Observation Mission, in its December 2006 report on the Venezuelan election, concluded: “The electoral process complied in general with international standards and with national legislation as regards the management of the electoral administration and the electronic voting system.” Specifically on the secrecy of the ballot, the report said: “The electronic voting system established in Venezuela is efficient, secure, and auditable, and the competence of its technical experts is consistent with its advanced technological level. The use of fingerprint readers neither violates the secrecy of the vote, nor is a source of fraud.”

Back to Angie again:

I could use this article to recount the many other abuses of democracy and freedom committed by the Chávez regime, but instead I want to focus on the hypocrisy of Ken Livingstone: cheeky chappy Ken, man of the people, defender of the poor, staunch ally of a tyrant.

Note that while Bush has an administration and Brown has a government, Chavez apparently leads a “regime”. As for the Venezuelan president’s democratic credentials and his being a “tyrant”, well it becomes tiresome to repeat over and over and over again in the face of such smears that Chavez won the presidential election in 1998 with 56% of the vote, a 2000 election with 60% of the vote, was returned to power in a spontaneous popular uprising after a coup against his democratic government in 2002, defeated a recall attempt with 59% of the vote in 2004 and was reelected yet again in 2006 with 63% of the vote.

Leaders such as Brown, Bush, Nicolas Sarkozy and Angela Merkel can only dream of such support. Let’s not forget that Labour achieved a mighty 35.3% of the vote in 2005 while Bush was awarded the US presidency in 2000 despite actually losing the popular vote to Al Gore, even putting aside the controversy in Florida.

Opponents of Chavez continue to toss such falsehoods around, I suspect banking on the fact that if you repeat an accusation often enough people will start to believe it and those actually committed to the facts will use up energy correcting them. On two occasions the BBC has altered stories on its website after I challenged the organisation over false claims about Hugo Chavez but such claims continue to resurface.

The Guardian grandly titles its editorial blog section “Comment is Free”. I suggest the editor consider whether part of its remit is to propagate outright and easily refuted fabrications.

As for Angie Bray, the only question which remains is whether she is stupid, dishonest or simply unduly gullible. A discomfiting thought considering the position of responsibility she unfortunately occupies.

Thanks to Calvin Tucker, whose research I used in the preparation of this article.

Category: Venezuela, media | Tags: | 5 Comments »

Iraq and Vietnam

08.23.07 - 08:53am

For a man who has spent his entire presidency asserting that black is white and up is down while everything around him turns to disaster, no misrepresentation or twisting of the facts is a fabrication too far.

And yesterday, George W Bush finally went for broke. After spending years denying, avoiding and scoffing at any comparison between Iraq and Vietnam, he stood up in front of American war veterans, with that smirk on his face, and fully embraced it.

It is just that his comparison was not between the Iraq conflict and the oft-lamented “quagmire” of Vietnam, the comparison made by so many war critics (erroneously in my view, for several reasons) but between the fairy tale Iraq in which America is battling international terrorism and the fantasy Vietnam conflict in which America failed millions of innocents by losing its resolve in the face of international communism.

According to Bush: “The price of America’s withdrawal [from Vietnam] was paid by millions of innocent citizens.”

That he can stand up in front of an educated audience before the world’s media and make such a statement without everyone falling around laughing is a testament to the power of the enduring falsehoods surrounding America’s “involvement” in Indochina.

This narrative is illustrated here in the BBC’s summary of the Vietnam conflict. According to the BBC, the salient points are that North Vietnam defeated the US-backed South Vietnam, an estimated four million Vietnamese civilians died in the conflict, up to 250,000 South Vietnamese troops were killed and America lost roughly 58,000 soldiers.

In the real world the facts are that rather than being a war between North and South, the Vietnam War was, overwhelmingly, an attack on the rural population of South Vietnam by the United States and the government it was supporting, in order to suppress an internal rebellion vast numbers of that population were willingly supporting. The estimated four million Vietnamese civilians died, to a significant degree, by United States firepower. The US military was bombing gigantic swathes of rural South Vietnam before a single North Vietnamese soldier was even seen south of the border.

All of this information is readily available, much of it does feature in mainstream coverage, certainly on this side of the Atlantic. Yet it must be hidden from view when the “Commander-in-chief” stands up to yet again mangle the historical record for political expediency.

The BBC reports:

“Many argued that if we pulled out, there would be no consequences for the Vietnamese people,” Mr Bush said. “The world would learn just how costly these misimpressions would be.

“Three decades later, there is a legitimate debate about how we got into the Vietnam War and how we left.

“Whatever your position in that debate, one unmistakable legacy of Vietnam is that the price of America’s withdrawal was paid by millions of innocent citizens,” Mr Bush said, mentioning reprisals against US allies in Vietnam, the displacement of Vietnamese refugees and the massacres in Cambodia under Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge.

The obvious fact that much of the region was left in a state of utter devastation by the US assault does not seem to be of any relevance to Bush. Nor is the fact that America proceeded to isolate Vietnam internationally following the end of the war, exacerbating the social and economic problems caused by the destruction of its national infrastructure and the devastation of its agricultural lands. Nor the fact that America moved to surreptitiously support the Khmer Rouge because they were aligned against Vietnam.

Milan Kundera once said: “The struggle of people against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.” Nowhere is this more applicable than in trying to understand the devastation of Indochina.

However, there certainly are valid comparisons between Iraq and Vietnam.

In both of these conflicts, aggression was justified by lies and in both, the United States (with Britain slavishly following in Iraq) unleashed unpredictable forces it was to discover even a military superpower could hardly contain.

Category: Bush, Vietnam, Iraq | Tags: | 3 Comments »

“Norman Tebbit in clown’s uniform”

08.21.07 - 07:10pm

While I would usually have little time for a pressure group which campaigned to put Gordon Brown in office I cannot ignore Compass’ report on the world according to Boris Johnson.

I fully acknowledge that when considering the pronouncements over time of any individual, public figure or otherwise, caution is warranted. All of us say things we regret or come to realise are incorrect and later retract or repudiate.

Much of what the report details is relatively trivial or simply for comedy effect. Nevertheless, some of his opinions and indeed activities, summarised here, go beyond the knockabout of what passes for normal politics in this democracy-deficient nation and into the realm of the unconscionable.

Among the more sordid episodes in the report is his agreeing to supply friend and convicted fraudster Darius Guppy with a journalist’s address, knowing that Guppy was planning to have the journalist beaten up, with “a couple of black eyes and a… cracked rib”.

He also has a nice line in pub level racism, referring to black people as “picaninnies” and talking of ignorant Africans as breaking out into “watermelon smiles” at the arrival of the great white leader Tony Blair. Way to turn out the black vote there, Boris.

But the most revolting is his claim that the problem with Britain’s former colonies is “not that we were once in charge, but that we are not in charge any more”. I am unfortunately forced to acknowledge that this garbage, playing down as it does the basic immorality and pervasive brutality of our colonial past, does have some appeal to the Daily Mail-reading set.

Even so, this little dossier, which characterises Johnson as “Norman Tebbit in clown’s uniform”, may yet give the Tories pause for thought when it comes to deciding their candidate for London Mayor.

Category: general politics | Tags: | 1 Comment »

Demonising Demonstrators

08.21.07 - 09:23am

The media breathlessly parroted the police line that the camp had been “infiltrated by troublemakers”, only it was all nonsense

The mainstream media owes the Heathrow climate camp protesters an apology.

For weeks now, reaching a crescendo during the eight or nine days of the actual camp, these peaceful, democratic and obviously well-informed protesters have been subjected to a sustained series of fabrications and exaggerations.

“Hoax bombs to cause alerts. Assaults on airport fence … Protest leaders calling themselves ‘The Elders’ advised ‘clashes with police will happen’,” shrilled the Evening Standard.

“A hard core of anarchist demonstrators are drawing up plans to bring Heathrow to a standstill using an array of tactics including disguising themselves as ordinary holidaymakers to cause havoc in the airport terminals,” screeched the Daily Telegraph.

Newspaper reports, and to a lesser extent the television news, breathlessly parroted the police line that the camp had been “infiltrated by troublemakers” and was being taken over by monstrous “anarchists”, who cared little for the stated cause but were simply out for a fight with the police.

All of it was nonsense, as pointed out by a bemused George Monbiot in a column written from within the climate camp itself.

The issue I am concerned with here is not the cause itself, although the scientific consensus on climate change is overwhelming, but rather with how protest, direct action and in fact any active concern over public policy which does not go through the soporific “normal channels” is treated by politicians and journalists.

Events such as the climate camp are actually very instructive for any honest media observer. At the first sign of “direct action” the media rallies around the establishment and peddles any number of fabrications with little regard for the facts. Those with power have some redress when they are attacked by the media. But activists and grass-roots protesters have little influence and are thus fair game for reporting filled with the most egregious falsehoods.

When they were not peddling alarmist nonsense, bemused media commentators were questioning whether such protests were worthwhile. Why didn’t the climate change protesters just go through the normal “democratic” channels? Why didn’t they cut their hair and get jobs?

But social and political progress is not simply handed down from above by the wise men of the political establishment. Often, governments and politicians have to be dragged kicking and screaming to implement changes which are later viewed as obviously right and proper, whether it be the end of slavery, votes for women, black civil rights in the US or any number of other causes.

These movements start with the activities of a relatively small number of committed people, people who are often alternately snarled at and lampooned by conservative forces.

Yes, the mainstream media owes the climate camp protesters an apology, although I fear hell may freeze over before they get it.

And for pure entertainment, here is some footage of the climate camp protesters escorting police off the campsite. I happily acknowledge that the police were more restrained than might have been expected but their leading officer’s “report” of events to his superior is priceless.

Category: protest, media | Tags: | 2 Comments »

Fair Deals and Market Forces

08.19.07 - 01:02pm

Our economic system routinely rewards those who contribute relatively little to the public good while those who do exactly that are expected to make do with a pittance and a warm glow

Nurses in England will decide by the middle of September whether to take industrial action over the government’s final below inflation pay offer, according to reports in the media today, in a case which provides an instructive insight into the fundamental flaws in the functioning of our economy and our society.

The government is offering a staged pay increase amounting to 1.9% for the year. Roughly 95% of England’s nurses had already voted to go ahead with industrial action prior to this slightly improved offer from the Department of Health.

While nurses traditionally receive justifiably sympathetic coverage from the mainstream media, that media will not address the fundamental underlying issues which this case momentarily brings to light.

The first is the simple fact that nurses, and other public sector workers, are being used as a tool by this (supposedly) Labour government in order to keep a lid on the monster which haunts the dreams of the money men, inflation. Salary increases at the top end, and in various parts of the private sector, plus tax evading non-domiciles and others are causing inflationary pressures in the economy. And to try to offset this it is the poorer yet essential public sector workers who pay the price.

Nurses are expected to take a pay cut (in real terms) in order for the government to keep control of inflation, while lawyers, city traders and others can continue to pocket pay rises greater than most people’s annual salaries.

The current starting salary for a newly-qualified nurse is £20,026. Many lower-paid nursing staff earn between £14,453 and £19,730. In a shocking example of how workers of such true value to society are viewed by the government, these low paid workers are being offered a £38 one-off payment as part of the new package.

A £38 one-off payment.

Less than the price of a bottle of the Champagne which no doubt adorn the tables of our government ministers as they meet their big business chums to decide what’s best for “the economy”.

The second point is that our economic structures routinely reward those who contribute relatively little to society and the public good while those who do exactly that are expected to make do with a pittance and a warm glow. Rewards gravitate towards those who contribute not to society but a lot in services to capitalism and the wealthy elites who coordinate it.

The case of the nurses and public sector workers is of particular interest. For those who prattle about the free market seem blind to the fact that this case is the exact opposite of the functioning of a free market. Nurses’ pay awards are being actively suppressed by state interference because the government cynically yet openly proclaims inflation as a greater priority than fair pay for vital public servants.

This internal incoherence aside, abandoning such workers to the buffeting of the “free market” would change little. As George Carlin puts it: “The game is rigged.” Private vices, public benefits might be a tenet of free market capitalism but rampant inequality, reaching such levels that it has even broken into the mainstream press, plus the slow erosion of the social gains made after World War II tell a different story.

I am not proposing solutions. There are some others, such as Michael Albert, who are. I am saying that we as a society must face the fact that while the difficulties we are confronted with can be alleviated by tinkering at the edges, they will never be resolved until we tackle the deep flaws in the system itself.

There is no reason to believe this is the end of history, that the state capitalist model is the best of all possible worlds. We need to break free from the phony free market religion which continually preaches that it is.

Category: capitalism | Tags: | 2 Comments »