Apostate Windbag

More Enlightenmentmonging from Romana’s hubby

2007-08-17T04:08:00.000+02:00

An analogy [one you’ll probably not find on this year’s SATs]:

The Enlightenment is to Richard Dawkins and his transatlantic conceited coterie of atheo-fundamentalist cocks [I do mean that in the sense of ‘being proud as a’ and not in the sense of ‘as rigid as a’ – although now that I think about it, that could just about work too], Hitchens, Harris, Amis and McEwan, as a plunger handle is to a racist frat-boy marine at Abu Ghraib: used the wrong way round and up the bums of Muslims. In other words, for a purpose entirely in opposition to that for which it was originally intended.

[Furthering the phallic allusion here for just one tendentious and possibly thoroughly supererogatory second longer – It is remarkable is it not, that once upon a time, middle-aged left-wing men with diminishing little-general capacities just bought lavishly redundantly fast Italian roadsters and a mistress younger than their daughter, but these days, it’s always the luckless Enlightenment that seems to get the blood coursing through the old soixant-huitard schlong. I say, a shot of that Robespierre must work monstrously better than those diamond-shaped blue pills.]

In the unwitting or witting service of imperialism and Islamophobia normally is the ill-fitting purpose for which he and others wield the Enlightenment. But he’s at it again, and this time that smug, expensively coiffed salt-and-pepper bouffant of an evolutionary biologist is using his Manichean ill-read caricature of the Enlightenment and reason for more – oh and I do hate this word, but there’s nothing else for it – classist motivations.

In his new two-part series, Enemies of Reason, in perhaps what is a correction to an oversight from his last series, The Root of All Evil, he is attacking new-age flim-flammery, not merely established religion. He aims to show how silly, silly, silly people are who believe in dowsing, alternative medicine, spiritualism, mediums, crystal balls, tarot cards, astrology and the rest of the panorama of such ‘free-thinking’ applesauce.

I say correction, as his last series had only aimed at converting everyone to atheism, while it is, sadly, more than entirely plausible, if irrational, to be both an atheist, or, more precisely, someone who puts down ‘secular’ or ‘no religion’ on census forms, and simultaneously believe that the planet Mercury has some passing influence on whether you’ll finally get that promotion to second-assistant fartcatcher to your department’s under-manager of company stationary monitoring, or that an ascending Venus means that you and everyone else born in the same month as you will find true, ineffably soul-nourishing love before week’s end. There is not a small number of people who don’t go to church these days, but an unhappily large percentage of them still believe in palm reading, Echinacea and homeopathy, hang tacky first-nations dreamcatchers off their porches, and would rather step out into a street full of traffic than walk under a ladder that mid-pavement was leant against a building. One might here repetitively reflect that it is not, as G.K. Chesterton apparently never did say, that when people leave the church they will believe in nothing, it is that they will believe in anything.

I have little quarrel with Dawkins’ understandable impatience with people’s belief in this bricolage of infantillist nonsense per se. I have no time for any of this bullshit myself when I encounter it amongst people I know. On Free Tibet marches I used to attend years ago, whatever the injustice of the Maoist occupation, I always cringed when the crowd launched into chants of ‘Long live the Dalai Lama’. Rather, the concern I have is the class frame that this inheritor of the Earldom of Lincoln uses to scaffold his prosecution.

It is quite striking how the accent of almost every single one of the objects of his scorn in the documentary, including even the rather bumbling astrologer for the Observer (I know! It passed me by too. I’d never even noticed that the Observer had an astrology column. That and the constipated Nick Cohen! That’s it, I’m switching to, er, wait, the Indy has one too, I’ll bet, doesn’t it?), are so very far from Dawkie’s studiously deathless yet chipmunkish RP. From the scouse aura-photographer and the pink-cardiganed psychic energy tutor to poor swishy Simon the mancunian tarot hustler who, to be honest, got rather rumbled by Dick, to Craig the spiritualist minister, to Ken the dousing Cornishman who refuses to admit his dousing skill doesn’t work when it’s disproven before his eyes. Isn’t he simple? Poor, deluded, unsophisticated Ken.

Yet the sceptic magician, Derren Brown, who, like Houdini once did, debunks spiritualists and is on Dawkins’ side, has only the lightest hint of regulation-meeja-personality Estuary, and only by his forward-mouthed U’s can you tell that Dawkins' other fellow rationalist in the film, the psychologist dousing-demystifier, Chris French, must have spent some time oop north before university. It’s been a long time since one could definitively tell a person’s class from her accent, but yet, there’s something there. Dawkins is schoolmaster, not academic here.

Dawkins, far from even having any empathy for these people, holds them in the utmost dersision. Worse still, he offers no explanation for this latter-day growth in superstition and belief in the supernatural. It simply is. ‘Reason has a battle on its hands.’ ‘Science is under attack.’ ‘[There is] an epidemic of irrational superstitious thinking.’

Rather than recognising the foolishness of their thinking but understanding and explaining where it might have come from, he all but calls them fools to their faces with his own sneering, taunting visage.

The closest he comes to a reason for this contagion of the cockamamie is his unsupported assertion that there is ‘a prejudice against science in schools’ and that university science departments are closing around the country. He also gives ‘postmodern relativism’ a bit of a short and ungratifying poking. However lamentable the state of science education may be, and however much postmodernism in its sundry flavours deserves a good, sharp wedgie, I’d like to offer a more quotidian explanation.

Karl Marx, perhaps the most noted of all noted atheists, gave a generation of American anti-communists a gift with which to beat domestic left-wingers – with his epigram describing ‘religion [a]s the opiate of the masses’. Throughout the cold war, this, from his Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, was considered the most arrogant of phrases and perhaps more of a reason to condemn socialism than any conclusions or prescriptions in the rest of his egalitarian philosophy. The emphasis was always on the ‘godless’ part of the ‘godless commie bastard’ felicitation. But in fact, the rarely printed complete quotation, far from arrogant, is full of empathy and at the same time offers a clear, obvious explanation as to why people believe in religion, or in this case, new-age mumbo-jumbo:

Religious distress is at the same time the expression of real distress and the protest against real distress. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, just as it is the spirit of a spiritless situation. It is the opium of the people. The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is required for their real happiness. The demand to give up the illusion about its condition is the demand to give up a condition which needs illusions.

It is the wretched condition of the world that gives rise to these uninflatable spiritual life-preservers that people cling to.

People have believed and continue to believe in superstition, whether of the established religious or new-age category not simply as Dawkins imagines because it offers an (incorrect) explanation of where the universe comes from and gives hope that we live on after we die, but also because life as a peasant, or industrial worker in earlier times, and in latter days a shelf-stacker at Wal-Mart or an at-any-moment-outsourced call-centre worker, is so fraught with hardness, with precarity, with loss, unfairness and poverty, that religion offers a meaning, a structure, a reassurance that things will be better after we die, that no matter what, someone loves me. However lonely I may be, there’s always somebody on my side. That if I believe hard enough, and pray enough, maybe I will get that job promotion. The false hope that comes from today’s Mystic Megs is no different.

I don’t know if anyone’s done any studies of this sort of thing, but it would be interesting to find out how many prayers or questions of tarot readers, ask not about healing or romance, but about personal economic matters – jobs, bills, credit cards, debt, mortgage payments, car loans, will there be enough money to pay for the kids’ Christmas presents? When despairing people go to these charlatans, it is more in search for hope in a world that offers none than anything.

Richard Dawkins’ father was a colonial officer in Malawi, at the time Nyasaland. The family is listed in Burke’s Landed Gentry as the ‘Dawkins of Over Norton’. He is married to the Honourable Sarah Ward, daughter of the Seventh Viscount Bangor, George Plantagenet, descendant of the 1st Duke of Clarence, brother of King Edward IV [and, yes, spods, also the second Romana on Doctor Who]. How very clever he was to have been born into and married into such families who could deliver the likes of him unto Oxford, and not some undereducated line of Cornish tin miners.

I should say here that it is not I who is saying that superstition is the province of the working classes, and atheism the realm of the well-off and educated, but Dawkins himself.

In 2002, Dawkins gave a talk, ‘An Atheist’s Call to Arms’ at the TED (Technology, Entertainment, Design) conference, which describes itself onanistically as ‘an invitation-only event where the world's leading thinkers and doers gather to find inspiration’. Another World Economic Forum-style circle jerk, in non-PR-speak, in other words. Some of the sort of people who attend TED may well be galacticos of the academy (who won’t be so poorly compensated in any case), but for the most part they are the unforgivably rich.

The talk was much of the usual, unobjectionable bigging up of atheism Dawkins is good at, although unknowingly, his shirt collar was caught underneath his blazer lapel the whole time. Oh the shame of such a boner in such august company. At one point, he asked:

Is there any correlation positive or negative between intelligence and tendency to be religious? … A recent article by Paul G. Bell in the Mensa magazine…[shows that from] 43 studies carried out since 1927 on the relationship between religious belief and one’s intelligence or educational level, all but four found an inverse connection. That is, the higher one’s intelligence or educational level, the less one is likely to be religious…There are people in this audience easily capable of financing a massive research survey to settle the question.

A couple of times he hinted to his bloatedly moneyed audience that the battle against religion would be financially costly, and then he came out and just said it. He begged for money from them:

This is an elite audience…I suspect a fair number of [you] despise religion as much as I do… And if you’re one of them, I’m asking you to stop being polite and come out and say so. And if you happen to be rich, give some thought about ways in which you might make a difference. The religious lobby in this country is massively financed by foundations such as the Templeton Foundation and the Discovery Institute. We need an anti-Templeton.

In a world in which there was less imperialism, less poverty, less competition, more social solidarity – in a more just world – there would be less need for religious fundamentalism and new age mumbo-jumbo.

Yet ironically, it is these captains of industry to whom Dawkins attends, fellates, cap in hand, begging them to fund his ‘militant atheism’ movement, the very commanding heights whose capitalist methods are responsible for the poverty, social dislocation, and imperial drive for war that incubate the despair that produces the wounds to which religion and new-age obscurantism are salve and balm.

In a further irony, as literary critic Terry Eagleton noted in the London Review of Books, that when Dawkins in his writing is not thoroughly ignorant of moderate theologians who see no conflict between faith and reason, is so baffled by them that he simply dismisses them, unable to fathom what he could utter to gainsay a word of their perspectives. For Dawkins, there is only athieism on the one hand and theism that is by definition fundamentalism on the other. There is no middle ground.

Yet it is these very non-fundamentalist religionists, those liberation theologians, liberal Anglicans, Catholic Workers, the architects of Jubilee 2000, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Mahatma Gandhi, Tariq Ramadan, the Unitarians, the Quakers, the United Church of Canada, the Jesuit Sandinista ministers who chose the revolution over the church whose faith inspires or inspired them to fight poverty, oppression, war and colonialism, whose work actually helps build the world without injustice, without despair that builds the hope in the hearts of men and women that actually diminishes the need for superstition.

Indeed, if we follow this logic, then the Sermon on the Mount, of all things, or rather an adherence to its prescriptions of solidarity, is more likely to deliver the rationalist culture that Dawkins hopes for than a legion of Dawkinses.

Dawkins’ explanation for superstition is all opiate of the masses and no heart in a heartless world.

The exploding package of EU Postal Privatisation

2007-02-27T21:27:00.000+01:00

Article I did on spec for a publication. They didn't want it in the end, but here you go (I warn you - it's a little dull).

When I was a little boy, every month I would go to the local Canada Post office and get a special envelope with the new commemorative stamps that had recently been issued. My grandparents in England too would send me British commemorative stamps at Christmas, sometimes at other times, falsely saluting Alexander Graham Bell as the inventor of the telephone or raising the ire of the anti-secularists for printing lickable, perforated squares of snowmen instead of magi or mangers.

As I grew older, philately diminished considerably in my estimation. However, when I was in Madrid recently, I wandered down an alley just off the Plaza Mayor, where there is a minor gaggle of stamp shops. I wandered past and saw in a couple of windows not a few stamps and brittle old envelopes with stamps from the era of the Spanish Republic. Though 2006 is the 70^th anniversary of the start of the Spanish Civil War, this was one of the only remembrances I could find in the city of the period. Stamp-collecting has more or less gone the way of the dodo (the extinction of which was, I should note, had been commemorated on one of the stamps I had had as a child) in this age of Playstations and Nickelodeon, and I thought what a shame it was. The socialist thirty-one-year old I am momentarily was a stamp-fanatic eleven-year-old and thought what beautiful little bits of history are held within and taught by these funny sticky squares.

Technology and the proposed new EU postal services directive will soon put paid to stamps and stamp-collecting entirely. The EU FAQ on the directive on the Commission website mentions that after full liberalization it is unlikely that new service providers will retain the anachronism that is the stamp. One can’t mourn the passing of out-dated technologies, I suppose. But the directive will kill off more than the soppy philatelic memories of this nostalgic author. The full privatization of post across Europe will produce services that are deeply uneven and unequal. It will produce a grossly unfair two-tiered postal system, with one set of quality services for the large corporations and urban middle class, and another set of poorly provisioned services for rural areas, the urban poor, small businesses and the outermost territories of member states – if they even have access to such services at all. Though the Commission portrays postal privatization as one more aspect of the grand drive to bring Europeans together, it will in fact diminish the economic, social and territorial cohesion of the Union. The death of public postal services after more than three hundred years of their existence is indeed something to mourn. Or rather, as Wobbly Joe Hill reminded his fellow trade unionists as he was dying: not to mourn, but to organize – against.

The EU internal market Commissioner, Irishman Charlie McGreevy, recently confirmed that all European postal services are to be opened to competition by 2009, in keeping with the last postal directive of 2002. Full, or near-full marketisation of post has already occurred in Germany, Finland, the Netherlands, Sweden and the UK. With the new directive, the commissioner wants to fast-track liberalization in the remaining 22 member states.

Postal services in the Union are covered by a 1997 directive that opened up the sector to competition for mail weighing more than 350 grams – essentially large packages – easily the most profitable sector of the postal market. Items under 350 grams were designated ‘reserved areas’. In 2002, the reserved area was amended down to 100 grams, and as of January, 2006, no mail delivery of items over 50 grams could be monopolized by a national provider. The Commission has this month confirmed that by no later than 2009 are all member states to eliminate this last reserved area.

McGreevy is quick to counter opponents of the measure by saying that we are not to worry, universal service provision – comprising the ‘affordable’ provision of at least one delivery and collection five days a week to all citizens - is ‘copper-fastened’ into the directive.

In fact, upon the briefest of investigations, one finds that universal service provision is not so much ‘copper-fastened’ into the directive as it is lathered in soap and butter ready to slip through its hands and bounce right out the door into a jungle of free-market rapaciousness.

The language used by the commissioner gives the game away immediately. On the liberalizing side, actions ‘should’ and ‘must’ happen. Member states are ‘required’ to take them. But on the consumer side, language ‘provides for the retention of uniform tariffs’ (i.e., the same price for a similar item, regardless of address); it ‘allow[s] a flexible choice of means to finance universal service provision or the possibility to share out the universal service obligation between operators.

But we need not look to the weasel legal language of the directive to see what will happen. We can see the effects of postal privatization in those member states where liberalization has already been completely or nearly completely realized. Closure of rural post offices, mass lay-offs and a flexibilisation of the workforce is the norm in every jurisdiction.

In January this year, Austria’s conservative coalition government agreed to sell of 49 per cent of its shares in Österreichische Post, but the process of privatization has been underway for about a decade. In 1996, the state-owned Austrian Postal Authorities (Österreichische Post- und Telegraphenverwaltung) was refigured as Post und Telekom Austria AGan enterprise based on private company law. It sold off its telecoms and post bus transport services, while simultaneously acquiring a majority stake in Feibra AG, a private distributor of adverts, and has expanded into Slovenia and Slovakia. Over this ten-year pre-privatisation period, thousands of workers have been laid off. Between 2001 and 2005, the workforce was cut by 22 per cent, or 6600 employees. The share of part-time hires has doubled and the number of workers coming from temp agencies has skyrocketed. Whereas previously, the company used temp agency workers only at peak times such as Christmas, such practices have been institutionalized. Finally, more than 1000 local post offices (out of a total of 2300) have been closed across Austria.

In Ireland, An Post sold off its SDS Courier service – its most profitable department – as part of a government-directed opening of the market favouring the big courier services such as DHL and Federal Express. The management is softening up the workforce for privatization by withholding pay-rises and understaffing sorting offices. An Post workers feel that this is part of a strategy of weakening employee morale so that there is less internal resistance to the inevitable full privatization.

In the UK, where postal privatization is quite advanced, there has been thousands of post office closures, almost entirely in rural areas. Only some 1,500 of 8000 rural post offices are profitable, but the principle behind postal services in the UK for some 350 years has been that the profitable regions subsidise outlying and naturally unprofitable areas, ensuring equal access to services across the country. With the liberalization of the Post Office’s most profitable division, is it any wonder that rural post offices are scheduled for market demolition? As of 1999, the UK had some 18000 post offices. It now has 14000, and this week is set to announce an expected further 2500-3000.

In Sweden the postal workforce declined by ten per cent over the period 1995 to 1999 – from 46,000 to 42,000. In Germany, it dropped a whopping 37 per cent – from 380,000 to 240,000 – over the period 1990 to 1999.

The privateers argue that technological change is behind most of this, and this is at least partially true. Some 80 per cent of mail worldwide is now sent via computer. In the UK that figure is 90 per cent. However, at the same time, parcel post has grown by leaps and bounds. Federal Express is the second largest airline in the world, if measured by size of the fleet. The closure of thousands of rural post offices across the Union is a political decision. A neo-liberal fundamentalist decision. It is not driven by technological change.

In the Commission’s own FAQ on what will happen after full liberalization, it states that ‘as a matter of principle, competition creates jobs’. This is true only in a perverse way. In the wake of telecoms liberalization – which is the model to which postal privatization is regularly compared - cost savings to consumers was achieved on the backs of mass lay-offs and outsourcing to temp agencies and developing world call centres. Jobs were created, but poorly paid, ununionised, temporary and part-time ones. Similarly, the private telcos are incredibly reluctant to introduce new technologies to rural and poor areas where they feel the cost of an upgrade of the lines is not worth the revenues they expect from such regions. The cost of a line rental may have dropped across the board, but broadband remains beyond the reach of many in rural areas. Even in urban areas, some telcos have been taken to court for refusing to upgrade lines in apartment complexes that mostly house the elderly or poor, for the same reason. With public service provision, the cost is spread across all regions and levels of income.

The Commission believes that liberalization will result in cost-savings for the consumer. However, the area where money is to be made is in the high-population-density areas where post can be moved in bulk easily. Further, again, in the Commission’s own FAQ, it states that while it is likely that more postal operators will offer services in an open postal market, ‘most operators will be found in the area of business originated mail, which represents close to 90 per cent of total mail volumes. Private consumers are less likely to be able to choose between different postal operators, at least in the short to medium term.’ Elsewhere, in the same document, it states that while the universal service obligation guarantees the affordability of postal services (so it’s gonna be about the same price, but don’t expect any reductions, honey). At the same time, huzzah, ‘prices for business mail are likely to fall very soon after market opening, as most postal companies will focus on this area to begin with.’ Here, they are all but admitting that consumers will not benefit from postal privatization. If postal companies are making their money from business mail, what incentive is there for private service providers to subsidise consumer mail? Any cost-savings they find they will pass on to their most valued customers, not some grandmother in a village in Lapland.

Indeed, the most likely scenario is that private providers will focus on the business and urban mail sectors and leave the rest to the rump incumbent providers.

So if the directive supposedly guarantees universal service provision, how exactly will the market provide?

The answer is it won’t, as, again, the Commission admits. In order to ensure universal service provision member states ‘may choose’ from a range of different options: state aid (subsidizing private businesses), public procurement, compensation funds or cost-sharing. In other words, recognizing that private providers will be extremely reluctant to provide loss-making services, the Commission has concluded that to continue to ensure universal service provision, governments will still have to pay for it.

Essentially, we are selling the goose that lays the golden egg. While still having to fund universal provision of service, governments will no longer have the subsidy for this service that business-originated and parcel post previously provided.

One might as well ask why move forward with privatization at all, if it is not just a big gift to business, wrapped up in string…

…but of course without stamps, and don’t even try to send it from your village post office.

'Murder on an unimaginable scale'

2006-08-10T17:07:00.000+02:00

'The deputy commissioner at Scotland Yard, Paul Stephenson, went even further, saying that the plans amounted to "mass murder on an unimaginable scale."'

Murder on an unimaginable scale? Let's assume for a moment that there was in fact a dastardly terror plot here (I know, I know - that's Tooth Fairy, Father Christmas talk) and not another grand production from Number 10's Acme Distract-O-Matic , is the number of deaths really so unimaginable?

The average number of passengers on an aircraft leaving Stansted is 124; the average number of passengers on an aircraft leaving Gatwick is 129; the average number of passengers on an aircraft leaving Heathrow is around 150. The average of these three averages is 134 (.333333333...., etc., but there's no such thing as a third of a person - other than under rubble in Qana - ha! Ba-dum-cha!). 134 x 9 - the number of planes supposed to be explodeded - and we get 1206 (please excuse the ropey math here, but you get the point) .

As of an hour ago, the body count in (the) Lebanon was 1002. Okay, so it's a smidge under 1206, but it's still on a perfectly imaginable scale. In fact it's so imaginable it's actually real. Really real live dead people! Can you imagine that?!

You know, I imagine we'll get to a number pretty close to 1206 in a day or three, and I imagine it'll probably go above that too.

What an imagination I have.

Amsterdam

2006-02-12T18:18:00.000+01:00

Am in the middle of moving to Amsterdam for a new job that for once is actually interesting and pay a salary that is above the minimum wage. Will be sans internet for about a month while I look for an apartment, so still nothing to report, really, other than more apologies for my continued radio silence.

But just quickly and retroactively:

a) Yah boo sucks to the Tories for winning the Canadian election, but remember, kids, the left also advanced, despite Layton’s pathetic rightward frolics (strategically stupid as well – retreat back to the Anglophone left’s traditional anti-Quebec chauvinism and you wreck any chances of advancing in that province, which must be engaged if one is to ever win a federal election. Doug has more along these lines.);

b) Obviously I’m not in favour of burning down Danish embassies over some ropily executed cartoon blasphemy (although burning down American embassies over their various imperial exertions is an entirely different kettle of fisken, and, heck, while we’re at it, Haitians: fill your boots ransacking the local Canadian chancellery), but has any one actually had a look at these drawings? Whatever we may say about freedom of speech and blasphemy, the cartoons are manifestly racist, with caricatures of Muslims not radically distinct from the doodles of buck-toothed, thick-specs-wearing Japs or hook-nosed Shylocks of yore (Lenny, as always, has been note-perfect on this one);

c) My friend Justin of Different Day has decided to have a go at this whole podcasting lark, with ‘The Thousand Beer Show – Pop, politics and pintage’, (so titled for the renowned abundance of the substance in Belgium) and your correspondent was the first invited guest. You can have a listen to my wretched, stumbling pretensions at rock knowledge and an atrociously over-simplified account of the recent Canadian general election here;

and

d) Husky Rescue, Two Gallants [which I saw opening for the Decemberists long before the NME got their inky little paws on the duo], and The Kooks.

Ten items or less

2006-01-24T18:57:00.000+01:00

Sorry for the writer's block, comrades. Will be back in form soonish, hopefully. In the meantime, here's something I did today instead of doing other things I should have been doing. (Click on image for larger version)

Visit here for info on the NUJ's Low Pay Campaign.

White Stripes plot with Coca-Cola execs to murder Colombian trade unionists

2005-12-09T16:44:00.000+01:00

(Well, apart from the libellous hyperbole, that post-heading's essentially true)

Now, it may be nigh on a decade since I held Oasis in any esteem whatever, but I'm afraid I have to tip my hat to Noel this week, who in an interview in the latest NME has quite aptly described Jack White, of the well-overrated White Stripes, as looking 'like Zorro on doughnuts' and criticised him for writing a song for a Coca-Cola commercial:

'He's supposed to be the poster boy for the alternative way of thinking. Coca-Cola man, fucking hell! And all right, you wanna spread your message of peace and love, but do us all a favour. I'm not having that, that's wrong. Particularly Coca-Cola, it's like doing a gig for McDonalds.'

Zorro on doughnuts

According the (very smelly*) NME, Jack White did it for luuurve:

'White Stripes singer Jack White has finally confirmed he's done a coke ad - and said he's done it to get a message of love out to the world…"I've been offered the opportunity to write a song in a way which interests me as a songwriter. I certainly wouldn't want a song that I'd already written to be used on a commercial. That seems strange. But to be asked to write something particular along one theme of love in a worldwide form that I'm not really used to appealed to me. I've written a song and I wrote it really quickly and it's an interesting commercial that's been made. I was inspired by the commercial."'

Yes, that's right. Coca-cola, always teaching the world to sing, in per-fect har-mon-ieeee (The updated 'Teach the world to sing' ad for Coca-Cola Zero now includes a 'rap' bit and Hootie-and-the-Blowfish-style non-threateningly dressed minorities who look like they go to a good university). What a promoter of peace and love. And isn't what the world needs now, love, sweet love? What a paragon of compassionate capitalism. A very model of corporate responsibility. Except in Colombia, where union leaders and organisers are regularly assassinated at Coke bottling plants while the anti-union parent company turns a blind eye to collusion between paramilitaries and the plant managers. But still, you know, apart from that, they're a regular bunch of hippie peace-freaks, Coke.

In fact, Colombia happens to be the most dangerous country in the world to be a trade unionist. In the last ten years, 1,535 trade unionists have been murdered for their activities - more than the rest of the world combined. For more info on Coke's crimes in Colombia and how you can kick Coke off your campus (if you're a student, natch), visit the homepage of the Campaign to Boycott Killer Coke, or the Colombia Action Network. The latter link also has a broad range of information on Colombia, as do the UK-based Colombia Solidarity Campaign and War on Want.

So stop drinking that Coke. Tastes like gouch sweat anyway. And White Stripes fans - get your ever-lovin' motor-city asses in gear and contact Zorro, c/o manager Ian Montone, at 323 308 1818, and tell him How Wrong He Is.

* Has anyone else noticed this, how much the NME smells? I'm serious here - maybe it's just the batch that gets sent to the Brussels Waterstone's - but the NME just reeks. I mean literally pongy, I'm not just talking about the uncritical UK-scene boosterism, shit writing and sticking Gwen Stefani on the cover.

PS. Apparently Blur are heading back to the studio this month to record a new album sans the sexiest man alive, Graham Coxon. I guess this means his sacking is permanent. This is a crime almost on the level of writing songs for Coke commercials.

The blanching panic of the eunuch poltroons in the Democratic Party, and other bagatelles

2005-12-06T17:00:00.000+01:00

Right. Am out of bed and have drained throat of a lemon-curd-jar's worth of phlegm. Enough with the chicken soup and dubbed-into-French re-runs of Beverly Hills 90210: There are hypocrisies of social democrats and liberals to expose! Still have a bit of a sticky cough, mind, but think that's more to do with half-choking on a be-pestoed tortellini (tortellino?) last night than any remnants of bird flu or tuberculosis. (Lower lip protruberating, head cocked, sympathetic brows a-tilt, The Reader says 'Awww. Didums.')

Quick tour of the interweb before I stick the knife into the SPD once more:

First off, if you haven’t read it yet: Sy Hersh's latest New Yorker piece, on where the war is headed next: 'Up In The Air' (republished here at Truthout). Absolutely vital.

The veteran New Yorker journo predicts that under ever-increasing domestic pressure over the war (not least coming from within a Republican party on course to be decimated in next year's congressional elections), but unable to end it without embolding his enemies, Bush will deliver a sizeable and genuine return of troops some time next year while the war continues by other, more destructive means. The on-the-ground troops will be replaced with a massively expanded bombing campaign, such as has not been seen since Vietnam.

Bush is to have his cake and eat it too. As the US public is unable to stomach many more deaths of their doughty, skookum tumtum boys and girls (although as ever remain fairly sanguine about a limitless number of Iraqi deaths), Junior will mount another 'Mission Accomplished' style pronouncement, declaring that the war is over (chintzy, garlanded ceremonies have already been scripted of the lowering of Old Glory and the raising of the Iraqi standard over military bases [Whatever did happen to that variation on the Israeli flag some clever State Department graphic design intern dreamt up as a new Iraqi drapeau last year, by the way?]), aiming to bequiet the more squishy sympathisers of the anti-war movement and the fretters in his own party, all the while in fact escalating the war by using almost exclusively air power to crush the resistance.

The generals, however, are worried this might just make things worse, given that even the most crackerjack sagacious of smart bombs tend to kill many more civilians than trigger-happy, raised-on-X-Box-and-Eminem 17-year-old ground troops, and, like the worm that turned into three worms when you cut it up with your plastic-but-sharp Lion-O Thundercat sword as a cruel pre-pubescent, for every dead civilian at least three new insurgents seem to be created. (Did you catch the subtle 'my-1980's-adolescent-pop-cultural-experience-was-superior-to-your-
-overly-kinetic-1990's-version' disdain embedded there within the commentary? Sigh. What happy days they were when Lego came in six colours and Transformers came in metal.)

Nota bene: Bush's 'Victory Through Air Power' plans look an awful lot like the humble 'we-can't-just-cut-and-run-so-let's-turn-it-over-to-the-bombardiers' suggestion of the otherwise very good Juan Cole, doesn't it? (The good professor responds that he 'argued that the US should only make this airstrike capability available for defensive operations.' Okay, but isn't the point of the disingenuous 'Pottery Barn' position that the States can't pull out its forces lest civil war break out? How does one defensively prevent civil war? It seems a pretty offensive, or at least pro-active process. Sy's got you here, Cole-y. [The other point that Cole misses, as he idealises the Afghan campaign's air power strategy he recommends returning to, is that the decisive stratagem in that theatre there was not the air power support of local forces, but the winning over of warlords and sections of the Taliban with wadges of cash. There's nobody on the ground to bribe in Mesopotamia. Oh, and dude, what's with the forgetting about, like, the minimum 3,000 - 4,000 civilian deaths from aerial bombardment in Afghanistan anyway?])

***

A good bookend piece to Hersh's feature is Alexander Cockburn's 'Revolt of the Generals', over at Counterpunch, which details the rapidly declining fortunes of Bush and the Republicans ('One has to go back to the early 1970's when a scandal-stained Nixon was on the verge of resignation, to find numbers lower than Bush's,' says he), but also the blanching panic of those eunuch poltroons in the Democratic Party (including that skinny, empty-vessel darling of the 'Democratic wing of the Democratic Party', Barak Obama, and even the anti-war-esque former boy-mayor of Cleveland, Dennis Kucinich) in the wake of John Murtha's call for immediate withdrawal from Iraq. However grim the Republicans' fortunes, the jellyfish Dems are entirely incapable of capitalising on the situation.

***

Hitchens fans, and God knows I'm one, ha ha, will adore my internautical comrade Lenin's superb exegesis of the 'genocidal imagination' of dear Chris H. over at MRZine, writing under his slightly more pedestrian real name.

***

I emerged from my sweaty bed the other day to discover to my surprise that my native land (that would be Canada, comrades, despite the regularity with which I am partially mistakenly categorised as a Britischer in various nationally dichotomised blogrolls) is having another election. I was so off the ball that I missed the entire first week's campaign. See, this is what happens when the Globe and Mail starts charging for content. De toute façon, it seems the pro-war, pro-imperialism-lite Michael 'I-say-"we"-when-I-talk-about-Americans-but-am-actually-Canadian' Ignatieff has been parachuted into a Toronto riding (trans: 'constituency') with the aim of stirring up such a wave of Trudeaumaniacal sentimentalist desire for an intellectual leader of the Liberal Party that he will be able to surf straight into the PMO. Unluckily for him, the sizeable local Ukrainian community is a little humpty about the riding association's semi-non-democratic shenanigans that produced the candidacy of the former Harvard academic and (continuing) apologist for war crimes, somewhat diminishing his prime ministerial and possibly even MP prospects. Rick Salutin has a piquant little biography of the man at Rabble.ca. Michael Neumann's 2003 piece on Iggy in Counterpunch is also worth a butcher's.

***

For my Canadian readers, let me just mention briefly for the record that I never did like Buzz Hargrove.

***

Meanwhile, my pathetically perpetually approval-seeking homeland is also very excited that Jon Stewart mentioned the country briefly on the Daily Show.

I am occasionally homesick, but not at times like this.

***

Oh, and Backword Dave has Doctor Who filming by his house. Dude. How awesome is that?!

Extenuation

2005-11-22T11:30:00.000+01:00

Am feeling as rough as an old badger, hence little in the way of posting. Do not expect any for a couple of days.

A young badger. Couldn't find a picture of an old one.

Peretz a 'Breakthrough' for the Israeli left?

2005-11-18T21:40:00.000+01:00

In the struggle for justice for Palestine, the left outside Israel so rarely pays attention to economic or political dynamics within Israel proper, outside of how such things might affect the occupied territories. Why concern oneself, too many ask, with the internal processes of the occupier-oppressor when helicopter gunships set elementary schools ablaze and extra-judicial targeted assassinations slaughter bystanders, while the settlements continue to expand on the West Bank and the serpentine Separation Wall meanders through Palestinian land, carving out yet more acreage for Eretz Israel?

But this is a wilfully purblind ignorance, and a perspective as absurd as suggesting that because there is little difference between Democrats and Republicans, there is nothing of interest to the global left in American electoral contests. It is not enough to simply say that there is no genuine electoral left in the United States and dismissively leave it at that. One must ask why this is so. Equally, it is not enough to ask 'What has the Israeli left ever done for the Palestinians?' One must ask why they have done nothing.

In the last week, there has been a political earthquake within the ranks of the Israeli Labor Party: A giant has been felled. How this development may or may not affect the occupation is reason enough to pay attention to internal Israeli phenomena.

New Israeli Labor Party leader Tom Selleck.

Whenever one visits an Israeli newspaper website such as Ha'aretz, one is struck by the number of ads for anti-poverty charities. This is no mere shilling for money for the settlements - or at least some of it isn't. While the world's attention has been rightly focussed on the war crimes committed in the occupied territories, Benjamin Netanyahu as Prime Minister initiated a programme of structural adjustment within Israel every bit as vicious as those of his models, Thatcher and Reagan in the UK and US. The economic liberalisation, steady reduction in social service provision and diminishment of trade union rights continued under Barak and has rapidly expanded under Sharon, whose finance minister is, of course, Netanyahu. The cutbacks to social services have all gone to the country's massive defence budget and funding the settlements. This liberalisation has not gone without consequence. The number of poor families in the country increased by 20.3 per cent in 2004 alone, with one in three Israeli children now living in poverty. Poverty has flourished to such an extent that the gap between rich and poor in Israel is now actually greater than in any other developed country - hence all the charity ads.

The occupation is not merely ruinous to Palestinians; It is also literally consuming Israeli society itself.

[By the way, I don't think visiting a website counts as breaking the boycott - surely one has to be informed in order to offer solidarity to the Palestinians. That said, this whole boycott business is a bit of a fuzzy thing at the edges. Live herbs and helva have been pretty easy for me to avoid (In any case, I manage to kill basil plants with the ease and impunity that the IDF kills eleven-year-olds, so it's all probably for the best), but when I was in Amsterdam last weekend, I accidentally bought a falafel that turned out to be dripping with Palestinian blood. Scarfing down the yummy thing, my German friend, Jens, and my Palestinian friend, Osama, both said more or less at the same time, 'You realise that's an Israeli falafel?', and I responded, 'Mmo, muh-uh. Ifs noff. Ifs mutch.' To which Jens rebutted, 'No, Maoz Falafel's definitely not Dutch, it's Israeli.' To which I rejoindered, 'Oo fwure? Hmm. Oh weh, ifs wery masty.' The next day I looked Maoz up on the old interweb and it turns out it is a Dutch company, just owned by expat Israelis. So ner, thought I. That doesn't count. But then I read that the actual falafel it uses, on the other hand, is not terribly Netherlandish. It's a complicated business, as I said. It reminds me of my days as a teenage vegetarian, when I was morally torn upon finding out that most beer was filtered using edible gelatines, which is made from animal bones, or isinglass, which is made from fish bladders. I gave up vegetarianism some time shortly thereafter. I was not a terribly good vegetarian anyway, what with the regular 'bacon breaks' I allowed myself from time to time. (NB., vegan readers: Most bottled bitters and lagers are O.K., but Guinness? Not vegan!)]

All this has only exacerbated the plight of Mizrahi, or 'Eastern' Jews (immigrants from other Middle Eastern and north African countries), who since their first arrival in the 1950's have been viewed in much the same way within Israel by the Ashkenazi (those from Europe and their descendents) elite as Muslim immigrants from the Middle East and north Africa are in Europe. Most Easterners are trapped on the lower rungs of the socio-economic ladder and many live below the poverty line. According to veteran Israeli peace activist Uri Avnery, the Eastern Jews are overrepresented in Israeli prisons. Of course one shouldn't take the analogy too far, and the poverty that exists in the Mizrahi neighbourhoods doesn't compare to that of the occupied territories and, one hardly need add, there are no helicopter gunships, but Israel has its own Jewish banlieues, if you will.

On the Gush Shalom site this week, Avnery tells of the sort of welcome that greeted the Mizrahi immigrants in the 1950s:

'From generation to generation, a (true) story was passed on about the Moroccan immigrants who were driven to a place in the middle of the desert and told to build a new town for themselves. When they refused to get out of the truck, its tipping mechanism was activated and they were literally "poured" out, as if they were a load of sand.

This racism that divides Israel in two has only intensified since then:

'[T]he Ashkenazi ruling class openly despises the Arab manners, diction and music that the Eastern immigrants brought with them. This overtly racist attitude towards the Arabs became a covert racist attitude towards the Eastern Jews. These reacted defensively by adopting an extreme anti-Arab attitude.'

Labor (and its forerunner, Mapai) dominated Israeli politics from long before the founding of the state of Israel until the 1970s. To this day, while Likud governs, Labor is seen as the party of the establishment. Likud exploited this sense of alienation felt by non-Ashkenazi Israelis to break the lock Labor had in power, by reaching out to the Mizrahim in the late seventies and eighties.

In a pattern we see everywhere else - from the poor American south to those unemployed whites living two doors down from a mosque in a French or German suburb, where those just one step above the lowest of the low often support not the left, but the hard right - Eastern Jews do not vote Labor; they vote Likud. They do not support the peace camp. They do not go to peace rallies. Few of them attended the 200,000 strong rally in Tel Aviv on Saturday in commemoration of assassinated Labor Prime Minister Yitshak Rabin. To the Eastern Israelis, the peace camp is the preserve of the wealthy, Ashkenazi Tel Aviv elite. Why does Labor care so much about the Arabs, they demand, and not the poorest of Israelis?

As Sharon's aide-de-camp, Shimon Peres has not only backed unilateral disengagement, the rapid expansion of the settlements on the West Bank and the Separation Wall's annexation of still more Palestinian land, he has also fully backed Likud's structural adjustment. You couldn't fit a Kleenex between the economic policies of Peres and the right of the Labor Party and Sharon and Netanyahu. So when we ask why there is not much of an Israeli left - or at least one that has done anything for the Palestinians, we must understand that the foundation of any left anywhere - the working class - in Israel for the most part is tied at the hip to Likud.

Which is why the toppling of Peres as leader of the Labor Party by Amir Peretz this week is so profound.

Peretz, which, as Avnery has pointed out, means 'breakthrough' in Hebrew, is a Mizrahi Jew from Morroco and also the head of the Histradrut, the Israeli trade union. Domestically described in similar terms to UK trade unionism's 'Awkward Squad', Peretz's leadership of the union has orchestrated regular general strikes, holding the union's own against Netanyahu both as PM and as finance minister. The first Mizrahi Israeli to head the Labor Party, Peretz won above all because he opposes neo-liberalism in Israel. He wants to push Labor back to the left economically and promises to raise the minimum wage, end the cutbacks, increase spending on social spending and focus on the plight of the huge numbers of Israelis who are living in poverty.

Mizrahi Israelis voted en masse for Peretz in the party's leadership primaries, while Perez won the backing of the wealthier, largely Ashkenazi Labor elite. As a Mizrahi himself, a left-wing trade unionist campaigning on a traditional social democratic platform, he has the potential to knock the Mizrahi pillars of support out from underneath Likud.

Peretz also calls for an end to the occupation and Sharon's unilateralism. He wants to return to negotiations and a final settlement with the Palestinians. Indeed, he has called for a Palestinian state for twenty years - since long before such a call was politically acceptable in Israel. And most importantly, he makes the connection between the occupation and poverty in Israel. If there weren't settlements, if there weren't an occupation, Israel's poor would not be so. The money for the settlements should instead to go to social programmes and poverty reduction, he says.

Opposed to Labor's support for Likud, he is to pull his party out of the coalition government, forcing new elections early next year. Were Labor to win that election, he would be the first non-Ashkenazi Prime Minister of Israel.

Naturally, Israel's bosses have reacted in horror to Peretz's unexpected victory. On the weekend, the Manufacturers Association of Israel and the Federation of Israeli Chambers of Commerce attacked Peretz's economic proposals, in particular his call for a raise in the minimum wage.

Voters, however are much more receptive to his ideas. According to a Ha'aretz poll, if Knesset elections were held today, the Labor Party headed by Peretz would have increase its power significantly, winning 28 mandates - up from its current 21 - to Likud's 39. Also, a majority of the Israeli public believes Peretz's victory in the Labor primaries increased the party's chances to regain power, and for the first time in a long time, 82 per cent of traditional Labor voters say they will consider voting for their party again. Nonetheless, as interesting as this for all represents in terms of movement within the Israeli polity, we must analyse this event realistically, and not with through the rose-coloured gas mask goggles the Zionist left is.

Although the party's chances will only increase from the predicted 28 now that he has won the Labor leadership, 28 is still quite far from being able to form government. Sharon, having been able to associate the country's economic reforms more with his finance minister, and remaining enormously popular for disengagement, would still win, whether as head of Likud or heading up his own party he would almost certainly form if Netanyahu manages to successfully challenge him for the leadership. This party is all but certain to win, and, having lost the next election, Peretz will be disposed of just as quickly as its last leader, Amram Mitzna, who upon his election was also hailed as the peace candidate.

Secondly, the rest of the Labor establishment remain in power and are working to undermine their new leader. All the Labor Party government ministers and most of the party's MKs did not vote for Peretz. They have described his victory as 'traumatic', as shocking as losing to Netanyahu in 1996, that he has stolen 'their' party from them in a hostile takeover, and some people somewhere have already begun to whisper about problems with Peretz's voter registration.

If Sharon leaves Likud to form his own party, Peres will almost certainly join him there, splitting the Labor party. (Ha'aretz jokes, what then would Peretz's rump Labor party be called? 'New Labor'?)

Furthermore, for all the noise about Peretz's commitment to social democracy, his candidacy was a well-oiled machine, co-ordinated by industrialist Benny Gaon, high-tech millionaire Ofer Kornfeld and Guy Spiegelman, another high-tech businessman and the head of the Labor Party academic forum. Futhermore, while described as a firebrand union leader, in recent years he has moderated his stance, presumably with his parliamentary career in mind.

In 1999, he resigned from the Labor Party to form his own party, Am Ehad ('One Nation'). Though he was as much of a social democrat then as he is now, the party won just two mandates in the Knesset that year and three in 2003, and ultimately merged back with Labor last year (ironically following a courtship by Peres, who thought Peretz would protect him against Barak). However popular he is with the Israeli working class, in the two parliamentary tests of this popularity so far, he has been unable to translate it into power.

But, above all, it was not Likud that initiated the occupation, but Labor.

The occupation is Labor's occupation.

In 1974, Labour established the first settlement in the West Bank.

Peres and assassinated soi-disant peacenik Yitzhak Rabin supported Menachim Begin and Sharon's 1982 invasion of Lebanon.

Rabin and Peres never established the safe passages between the West Bank and Gaza promised as part of Oslo, and continued the settlement programme.

Contrary to popular myth, at Camp David, it was not Arafat who walked away from Barak's 'generous' offer of a Palestinian Bantustan, but Barak who walked away from the idea of honourable negotiations that would give Arafat something he could take back to his people.

Even those to further left equivocate: the Meretz Party (now Yachad), the democratic socialists to the left of both Labor and Am Ehad, who hold six seats in the Knesset and are supposedly the party of a just peace with the Palestinians, participated in the 92-96 Rabin (Peres) and later Barak coalition governments - all the while settlements were expanding. Meretz itself is split over the Separation Wall, with half the party approving of its unilateral annexation of Palestinian land. The party is also split over the IDF's actions in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, with the so-called 'Securitist Zionist' faction regarding them as legitimate counter-terror operations, while the radicals in the party oppose the actions as 'illegal and immoral. The party also officially denounces the Refuseniks' refusal to serve in the Israeli military (although, to be fair - the party really is divided over this. While it denounces refusal to serve, the party's US affiliate website links to Courage to Refuse ['Ometz Lesarev'], the Refusenik organisation, and the radicals organise support for them and a number of Refuseniks are active at a number of levels in Meretz).

Only the far left, anti-Zionist Hadash party, which currently has three seats in the Knesset, is consistent in its support for Palestinian rights.

But ultimately, the Palestinians do not need to wait for the Israeli left to join their struggle, any more than South Africa's blacks had to wait for the Afrikaaner working class to join theirs. However much it can't hurt to have an Israeli left on side, the Palestinians will struggle on and one day win, with or without one.

Sarko steals Le Pen's thunder - to some extent

2005-11-16T20:49:00.000+01:00

Great news! The Front National rally the other night was shit!

According to the BBC, 'only a few hundred die-hard supporters braved the cold to wave their flags and listen as [Jean-Marie Le Pen] blamed "mad and criminal" mass immigration for the unrest.'

Sadly, at the same time, his popularity has jumped by five per cent, according to a poll for Paris Match.

Things fall apart.

2005-11-14T17:00:00.000+01:00

It really is Bizarro World. John Simpson has written another very astute analysis.

Writing on how the curfews have only created the illusion of containing the violence, with in any case the unrest continuing beyond the capital city, Simpson notes that the very measures being used to contain the violence is itself exacerbating the situation and creating yet more reasons for the young people to fight:

'A woman of 24, heavily pregnant, came to the courtroom to find journalists who would be interested in watching a video she had made of the police coming to her flat to arrest her husband.
'In fact he had been on night-shift, and not out in the streets at all - but the video showed how aggressive the police were, and there are dozens of accounts going the rounds of the police shouting at the demonstrators that they are "sales arabes", dirty Arabs.

'The mother of one prisoner told me that the policeman who arrested her son had shouted that the boy ought to be sent home. "What home does he have but France?" she asked, tearfully.'

I quit my tech news job last month to go freelance. In order to help make the transition, I've been teaching English at a local community college for students learning to be fine-dining waiters and waitresses. They are all immigrants ranging in age from 19 to mid-forties from north and west Africa, apart from one pupil from Ecuador and another who is a rather louche middle-aged Cuban defector. Today, I used a simplified news report about the riots from the BBC World Service's Learning English site to spark off some conversation practice. Without offering up my own opinion, they all suddenly came alive, attentive as I've never seen them before - especially the younger ones - responding that the French youths 'ont raison' - they are right. The anti-immigrant racism, the police harassment, the unemployment - it's not much better here, they said. One older man from Morocco said that if he were younger and living in France, he too would be rioting.

Separately, I also teach advanced English to a pair of white, middle-aged businesswomen - one a Fleming, the other a Walloon. I somehow think they would respond differently to the exercise.

Indeed, according to Le Journal du Dimanche, sadly, some 53 per cent of the French people support the actions of Nicolas Sarkozy, the interior minister. Here in Belgium, the far-right Vlaams Belang (formerly the Vlaams Blok) has managed to climb to the top of the electoral heap in Flanders in particular by exploiting similar fears over immigrants.

Most of my friends here in Belgium are actually from France. The other night I asked my friends Camille and Nico (who in some respects actually resembles the French interior minister, and so is regularly taunted as 'Nicolas Sarkozy' by his media-sponge of an eight-year-old little sister), both of whom are quite exemplary of the anti-neo-liberal mood of much of young France, what they thought of the émeutes. Both of them were quite clear that Sarkozy is a pompier pyromane, a 'pyromaniac fireman': he knew exactly what he was saying and what would happen when he described the rioting youth as 'racailles', and promising to 'karcherise' the suburbs. This is all part of his grand strategy for the 2007 Presidential Election, say my friends, making a play both for working class whites with a soft sort of racism and who are most concerned about 'l'insecurité', and in particular that fifth of the population that votes for the Front National. Nico believes that because Sarkozy is so admired by the far right for his zero-tolerance approach to crime and immigrants, that there need not be any far right participation in the upcoming presidential elections. If Sarkozy is the right's candidate, you already have your fascist to vote for, says he.

I think he exaggerates somewhat. Sarkozy is no fascist; he just is being very savvy about courting the far right vote. As Doug Ireland has written, for Sarkozy to apply the term Karcherise 'to young human beings and proffer it as a strategy is a verbally fascist insult and, as a policy proposed by an Interior Minister, is about as close as one can get to hollering "ethnic cleansing" without actually saying so.' Nonetheless, his popularity will be read by other right-wing pols throughout Europe and further afield as a practicable strategy for electoral success.

Furthermore, Le Pen knows Sarkozy is off poaching FN supporters, and isn't about to let all the political dividends from the riots accrue solely to the UMP's right wing. The old fascist has organised a rally against immigration and the riots this evening.

The LCR held a march two nights ago in Paris between Saint-Michel and Saint-Germain-des-Près. The group called the some 1,000 to 1,500 who demonstrated against the declaration of the state of emergency, 'a success for a rally called at such short notice'.

Sadly, Le Pen's rally tonight will likely be much larger, though it too has been called at short notice.

The centre cannot hold, etc., etc.

***

V. good interview with Daniel Cohn-Bendit, the Franco-German 'indésirable' soixante-huitard street-fighter turned Green MEP in Der Spiegel. He may have been in favour of the European Constitution, but he hits all the right notes when it comes to the French riots.

Covering riots, Economist magazine reporter somehow accidentally transported to Bizarro World, not France

2005-11-13T18:58:00.000+01:00

Sensibly deciding to steer clear of the maniacal Islamofascism-obsessive explanation for the French riots of Steyn, Pipes and Hitchens, the Economist nevertheless once more hasn't missed an opportunity to argue for greater labour market deregulation and attack the free and democratic association of workers, otherwise known as trade unions. For the libertarian pointy-heads at the magazine, the rebellion is obviously the natural result of France's thirty-five hour working week, job protection laws, high minimum wage and bolshy unions.

Er...Whatchutalkinboutwillis?

Arnold finds the Economist's reasoning somewhat specious.

I swear, if the Economist did an investigation into why my roommate always leaves a consumated roll of toilet paper in the toilet without changing it, they would conclude that it all boils down to the continued existence of a public monopoly on meat inspection in Wales. Got athlete's foot from the gym changing room? Its due to over-regulation of the Danish toy industry. Egg with no yolk? Well, if Catalonia didn't subsidise access to museums for students and seniors… An asteroid headed for Earth to destroy life as we know it? Plainly it's the fault of Corsican pay-roll taxes. Invasion of lizard-men from one of Saturn's moons? Public funding of New Zealand's national opera company. The Rapture and the subsequent thousand-year reign of Satan? Swiss air traffic control unions.

The magazine - sorry - 'newspaper' - does recognise that in the suburbs there is a 'toxic mix of poor housing, bad schools, inadequate transport, social exclusion, [and] disaffection among Muslims who are discriminated against,' and the main problem is, 'above all, mass unemployment'. And this is indeed absolutely correct - the country's official youth unemployment rate is 23 per cent and in the suburbs climbs to 40 per cent, and 70 per cent of all new contracts are only temporary, according to Prime Minister de Villepin himself, with 80 per cent of new contracts for young people being temporary.

However, for the Economist's journalists, this mass un- and underemployment is not a product of economic sabotage on the part of very profitable French capital, which is, like its German cousin, attempting to discipline both government and electorate into a still-further deregulated business environment. No, for them, the problem is that 'the French labour market is throttled by restrictions such as the 35-hour week, a high minimum wage, and tough hiring and firing rules,' or, 'what economists call an "insider-outsider" labour market: full-time permanent jobs are so protected by law that employers try not to create many, preferring instead temporary workers or interns whom they can shed more easily when times get tough.'

'This suits the insiders,' continues the article, ' particularly those on sheltered public-sector contracts. But this leaves a whole swathe of youngsters with the very sensation of insecurity that the social system is designed to prevent.'

Thus in the Economist's Bizarro World (the upside-down backwards world from the pages of Superman where everything is the opposite of what it is on Earth, where up is down, ugliness is beautiful and alarm clocks dictate when to go to sleep), it's not the beatific corporations' fault for preferring short-term, part-time, ill-paying contracts and interns, but the avaricious full-time permanent employees and powerful unions, selfishly fearful that they too will be thrown on the scrap heap, who are to blame.

There has been much vilification of the country's 35-hour-working-week law, when in fact, between 1995 and 2003, France actually increased its work hours, if only marginally, according to the OECD, despite the existence of the law. Furthermore, French workers are some of the most productive in the world, ahead of Britain, Germany, the United States and Japan, according to the European statistics agency, Eurostat.

The danger here in all this is that the Economist's conclusion will also be that of France and, more broadly, of the European Union, when it comes to any post-riot consensus. Already, prior to the riots, the UK Presidency of the Union was pushing the Anglo-Saxon model hard, given its 'record levels of employment'. In the wake of the violence, such a model will look even more attractive.

However, the low unemployment rates in the UK and US have not resulted in riotless Shangri-Las of social peace. They are the product of an explosion in McJobs, well exposed by American journalist Barbara Ehrenreich in her bestseller, Nickle and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America, and exactly the sort of short-term, low-pay, part-time positions the Economist pretends to be so concerned about in France. America's middle class is fast disappearing as the McJob dynamic colonises even traditional middle-class white collar jobs, a phenomenon that Ehrenreich has also now written about, in her latest book, Bait and Switch: The (Futile) Pursuit of the American Dream. Precarity is the order of the day even for well-educated citizens. It is this very deregulation which causes the creation of McJobs, as it has been in France. Other countries are as much of a tinderbox as France is.

The republic needs more job protection, not less.

***

Oh, and one quick note on the riots that seems to have been underreported: The rioting has involved poor whites as well, though admittedly not in the same numbers as those from north or west Africa.

Hitchens' Kurdish Jeep Revisionism

2005-11-12T14:55:00.000+01:00

Correction: In the last piece, I mentioned that everyone, both critics and admirers of Hitchens, have accepted at face value Christopher's Kurdish Jeep Revisionism. This is not completely true, as Dennis Perrin, a friend of Hitch's and author of American Fan, has written in to say. Dennis has written about the mythical Jeep episode a number of times. From his blog, Red State Son:

'He may have been in a Kurdish jeep, but the [story about his conversion therein] is a complete lie, and Hitchens knows this. I spent time with him in the period he mentions, and he never stopped criticizing Bush's "mad contest" with Saddam, much less opined that "co-existence" with Saddam was "no longer possible." I have a tape of him debating Ken Adelman on C-SPAN in 1993 where he's still critical of the Gulf War, and again no mention of wanting to overthrow Saddam. As late as 2002, when I asked him directly if he did indeed favor a US invasion, he waffled and said that W. would have to convince him on "about a zillion fronts" before he could sign on.

'But that wouldn't make for good drama, nor would it bolster his public image as Stout Warrior. So he tells the above tale, and does so without shame. When I first heard him do this on Don Imus's radio show (Hitchens is no racist but he has no problem using one for exposure), I emailed him and reminded him of his history. He didn't deny it, said that perhaps his memory wasn't as sharp as he would like, but in the end it didn't matter. Who cares what he said in 1993 or 2002 -- this is what he's saying now and if I didn't like it, tough.'

Also worth reading, if you haven't yet, Dennis' 2003 obituary for Hitchens, which appeared in the Minneapolis/St. Paul City Pages, which is far better than Alexander Cockburns' sometimes-bordering-on-homophobic attacks on Hitchens, and expresses very well the disappointment rather than the anger many of us feel who once were fans of Hitchens . As another of Hitchens' former friends and Buffy the Vampire Slayer analyst, Roz Kaveney, puts it,

'There is that exchange in Buffy 6.6 where Dawn says "This is going to be one of those things where you are not angry, just very disappointed" and Giles says "Yes, except for the not being angry part."

I was never a Buffy fan, but that about sums up my feelings towards the once great writer.

Oh, and do go have a read of Roz's captivating remembrance of her days with Hitch at Oxford. He may these days prefer the company of those campaigning against the militant homosexualist agenda, but as a young buck he had a rather different prediliction.

***

Update: It seems it's just a right-old salmagundi of hypocrisy and double-standards for Hitchens these days, le pauvre.

Jonathan at A Tiny Revolution apparently did a comedy double-take when watching that somewhat oldish Hitch documentary of his book, The Trial of Henry Kissenger, saying, 'Hold on a sec, lemme just rewind that bit...That's not...why, why, yes it is the International Action Center Christopher is chatting quite, quite friendlily with at an anti-Kissinger protest. But, but I thought he didn't like them very much...'

Hitchens: Reactionary, sine macula

2005-11-11T18:18:00.000+01:00

One supposes that if Hitch was willing to prostitute himself to wealthy hard-right Republican anglophile weirdoes for a tour of London along with fellow-former-leftist-turned-right-wing-wackjob David Horowitz (in which guests would have accompanied Hitch & Horowitz around the Houses of Parliament, the Tower of London [to see the bleeding crown jewels!] and other Olde Englande landmarks, had the event not been mysteriously cancelled), and is now regularly writing for Bill Kristol's neo-con and Christian right publication, the Weekly Standard, it really shouldn't surprise anyone that if anything remains of his leftist conscience, it certainly isn't needled by an appearance on conservative cougar Laura Ingraham's radio programme.

Laura Ingraham

However, for all his confidence in the anti-fascist, liberatory power of white phosphorus, cluster bombs, torture and anal rape with toilet plungers, one assumes that as a confirmed soixante-huitard, he could never descend so far as turning his back on anti-racism.

Such an assumption would be wrong. While even Marc Cooper and David Aaronovitch (and also, actually, an oddly remarkably lucid John Simpson) are quite clear about the racial and economic 'root causes' of the French émeutes des banlieues, Hitch remains more akin to the Mark Steyn/Daniel Pipes 'this is what you get if you let the darkies in' perspective: Via Lenny and Sonic at Hitch Watch, we find that Johnny Walker Black Label's best customer told Harpee Ingraham two days ago, 'If you think that the Intifada in France is about housing, go and try covering the story wearing a yarmulke.'

Although, frankly, it's not entirely dissimilar to what he said about the Bush administration's response to Hurricane Katrina having had nothing to do with race during the 'Grapple in the Big Apple' with Galloway in NY, to the shocked gasps of even those audience members who'd turned out to support him.

But wait - hold on to your fork, there's more. Sonic is also reporting that ultra-secularist Hitchens gave the Witherspoon Lecture this month at the Christian fundamentalist, pro-theocracy Family Research Council.

Here is a piccy of him looking beardy and surrounded by virgins:

And here is the image used to link to the Family Research Council's current campaign, which appears on the same page as Hitch's snapshot with the happy-clappy interns:

I wonder if his rider for the gig was the same case of scotch and 200-pack of Rothmans he gets at Hay-on-Wye?

And it doesn't stop there. I recently came across what's actually a fairly oldish article by Tawfiq Chawbourne, who managed to snag a quick and dirty thirty-second interview with the great man on the way out of some London to-do with Francis 'Marx would have approved of the invasion of Iraq' Wheen moderating and Ian McEwan in the audience.

Hitch actually offers Tawfiq an endorsement of the Bush policy on Venezuela, which regular readers will remember as having been a policy that encourages rightist coups. Chris then seems to even go so far as to approve of a Bay of Pigs redux. Says Christopher, 'Chavez is a thug. He’ll be gone within two years, as will the Iranian regime. And Bush will be landing in Havana within two years. Then the last two uniformed leaders [in the Americas] will be gone.'

However over-represented they are in the press, however few of them there may be, and however incoherent their arguments, pro-war leftists do in fact exist, but Hitchens is not one of them. An anti-Chavez, pro-invasion-of-Cuba, softly-racist, Sarkozy-sympathising, Weekly-Standard-publishing, Family-Research-Council-Witherspoon-lecture-giving, Laura-Ingraham-show-appearing individual cannot with any gleaning of truth left to the statement be called a leftist, regardless of his position on the war.

Nonetheless, I am at a loss as to an explanation how all this developed. Shock at 9/11 and any subsequent support for the war does not necessitate indifference to New Orleans or Clichy-sous-Bois suffering.

Lenny of the Tomb reckons 'the trauma of losing a good friend of his on 9/11…catalysed a turn to the right that he had been slowly making for years.' However, I'm not entirely convinced by the Paul Berman thesis that the 'muscular liberal' philosophy of Hitchens and other pro-war progressives, had been in gestation since the Balkan Wars or even as far back as the Rushdie-Le Carré brou-ha-ha. Although I was opposed to 1999's Nato bombing of Yugoslavia, I'll readily admit that the Balkan Wars were not easily ideologically navigable, and a good many who have been opposed to the war since the bombing of Afghanistan - such as the late Susan Sontag - were with Hitchens on the question of intervention in Bosnia and later Kosovo. Furthermore, while almost the entirety of the soft left in the US turned away while Clinton introduced his welfare reforms, expanded the death penalty, diminished health care funding (and in so doing restricted abortion access), enforced developing world structural adjustment and constructed the WTO, Hitchens pulled no punches. He was relentless in his assaults on Clintonian triangulation. If Hitchens' current positions are indeed part of a general trend dating back fifteen years, then there is a rather long, eight-year stretch of recalcitrant progressivism that is unaccounted for in the model.

I'd also not heard that Hitch had lost anyone, and am of the opinion that if he had, as he is more than shameless enough to exploit the person's memory, he would have mentioned it repeatedly. So I dragged out my copy of Love, Poverty & War from underneath the kitchen table's uneven leg, and re-read what Hitch had written immediately after 11 September.

Hitch's very first piece after 9/11, 'We're Still Standing', for the Evening Standard on 12 September, begins with, 'Well, I won't see Barbara Olson again.'

However, one doesn't get a sense from the article that she was his friend, merely that he knew her. Furthermore, in the days immediately after the towers fell, there was much talk of Olson's last minutes, as she had used her phone to alert her husband, the solicitor-general, of the hijacking. It may be more that Hitch was just mentioning that he happened to know a personnage that was in the headlines.

In any case, both this piece, and his second, on 13 September, for the Guardian, 'The Morning After', are actually of a radically different political perspective to everything he has written since, beginning with the now well-known 'Against Rationalisation,' on 20 September, for the Nation, where he would begin to stake out his liberal hawk position. Indeed, in the Guardian piece, Hitchens is quite critical of Bush, writing:

'The United States as a country has no fixed position on Islamic fundamentalism. It has used it as an ally, as well as discovered it as an enemy. It could not bomb Saudi Arabia or the United Arab Emirates, even if it found conclusive proof that the hijackers and assassins had actually trained there. So what does the president mean when he says so portentously that "we shall make no distinction between the terrorists and those who harbour them"? It looks like a distinction without a difference, and gives a momentary impression of being decisive, while actually only confusing the issue.'

And what is the issue of which he writes? Interestingly, it's the history of America's foreign policy:

'On the campus where I am writing this, there are a few students and professors willing to venture points about United States foreign policy. But they do so very guardedly, and it would sound like profane apologetics if transmitted live. So the analytical moment, if there is to be one, has been indefinitely postponed.' [Italics added]

Seven days later, he must have decided that the analytical moment was to be permanently postponed, and made a 180 degree turn away from this initial perspective with 'Against Rationalisation', and its follow-up, 'Of Sin, the Left, and Islamic Fascism', in which he attacked the left for saying essentially the same things he had said in his first two post-9/11 articles.

So, even if he had been close friends with Olson - which isn't clear in any case - he was still willing to 'rationalise' (his word) the attacks for at least another two articles after she had died. Thus the mystery is what made him change his mind within this seven-day period. If the shift had coincided with the attacks, his analysis would be fairly explicable, i.e., he was so shocked by the attacks that he reconsidered his perspective, etc., etc. - the similar arguments we heard from a number of liberal hawks - but it didn't.

The only point I've heard that attempts to explain this seven-day turnaround was that a close friend of his tore into him about the 'The Morning After' piece in the Guardian for much the same reason that he has since torn into Chomsky. However, I've only ever read this hypothesis once, and I can't remember where I read it or who this critic-friend was.

What I find curious is that none of his opponents has mentioned this. He's regularly asked by interviewers sympathetic and hostile why and when did he change his opinions, and he always responds that he didn't change, the Left did, and then produces this quaint story about being in a jeep during the first Gulf War with some Kurds who had a photo of George Bush Sr. attached to the vehicle which made him re-think his opinions, but this is an ex post facto reorganisation of his political trajectory accepted both by admirers and critics. The truth is that he changed quite abruptly some time between the 13th and 20th of September, 2001.

In the end, however, whatever it was that shifted him on the question of 11 September - as well as the battles this shift engendered between him and the left - have so comprehensively transformed his ideas that he is now, from belligerent, triple-chinned tip to lewdly blotto stern, not merely or even a liberal hawk, but a reactionary, sine macula.