Au revoir, mes enfants, au revoir

Right, dear readers, it's time for me to shut down the computer and toddle off to That London to play my small part in the Olympics. If you meet a fat man dressed as a plum and being sarcastic, give the password (Plashing Vole) and you'll receive some exclusive Live Blogging.

I'll probably post something most days (Vole's Olympic Diary?) but opportunities will be limited. I'll miss you all terribly, of course.

As a parting gift, some musical treats from my vaults. We'll kick off with the 1983 classic 'If I Were Sebastian Coe' by Shay Healy.



As I'll be dependent on London Transport for the next few days, Flanders and Swann's 'A Transport of Delight' seems entirely appropriate. GNAC wrote one called 'Uncomfortable Modes of Transport' but it's instrumental and too relaxed for the subject. I'd also really like to post The Last Poets' 'Sport', but it's not online! Astonishing. Puts the Olympics into perspective.



Can't talk about winning and losing without Pavement's 'Winner of the':



Early 1980s Tom Paxton has something to say about the Olympics: 'Be A Sport, Afghanistan':



As do Orange Juice: 'Moscow Olympics':



More tenuously: Hole's 'Olympia' (named after the American town, not the Games):



I would have posted Monograph's 'Gallant Losers' for the GB fencing team but that's not on the internet either. Have Th' Faith Healers' 'My Loser' Instead:



Bye all!

Heirs to Orwell

This is lovely. Obama and Co. are wandering round the world proclaiming that they're leaving Afghanistan just in time for the next Presidential elections. 

Hillary Clinton, the US secretary of state, recently said Washington did not want any "permanent" bases in Afghanistan

but

her phrasing allows a variety of possible arrangements

and 

"There are US troops in various countries for some considerable lengths of time which are not there permanently," a US official told the Guardian.

and

British troops, Nato officials say, will also remain in Afghanistan long past the end of 2014, largely in training or mentoring roles.

which means that

Although they will not be "combat troops" that does not mean they will not take part in combat.

And in the end, 'no permanent troops' comes down to:

American and Afghan officials are locked in increasingly acrimonious secret talks about a long-term security agreement which is likely to see US troops, spies and air power based in the troubled country for decades.

Though not publicised, negotiations have been under way for more than a month to secure a strategic partnership agreement which would include an American presence beyond the end of 2014

And so we reach this stage in the imperialist project. Just as the Americans and British are STILL occupying Germany (they actively helped Nazis back into power, because their prime interests was intimidating the Russians), the Afghans are going to become unwilling hosts of forces engaged in a much wider struggle - against China, Iran, India and Pakistan.  There are about 192 countries in the world: 135 of them have a US military base (according to the US military): so let's not pretend that our countries aren't puppets led by Quisling governments. 


Meanwhile, let's remind ourselves of what Orwell (who was a sneaky nark himself) had to say about politics and language, in Politics and the English Language (1946). It works for Cameron and Miliband too:

In the case of a word like democracy, not only is there no agreed definition, but the attempt to make one is resisted from all sides. It is almost universally felt that when we call a country democratic we are praising it: consequently the defenders of every kind of regime claim that it is a democracy, and fear that they might have to stop using that word if it were tied down to any one meaning. Words of this kind are often used in a consciously dishonest way. That is, the person who uses them has his own private definition, but allows his hearer to think he means something quite different. Statements like Marshal Pétain was a true patriot, The Soviet press is the freest in the world, The Catholic Church is opposed to persecution, are almost always made with intent to deceive. Other words used in variable meanings, in most cases more or less dishonestly, are: class, totalitarian, science, progressive, reactionary, bourgeois, equality.

The political dialects to be found in pamphlets, leading articles, manifestoes, White papers and the speeches of undersecretaries do, of course, vary from party to party, but they are all alike in that one almost never finds in them a fresh, vivid, homemade turn of speech. When one watches some tired hack on the platform mechanically repeating the familiar phrases -- bestial atrocities, iron heel, bloodstained tyranny, free peoples of the world, stand shoulder to shoulder -- one often has a curious feeling that one is not watching a live human being but some kind of dummy: a feeling which suddenly becomes stronger at moments when the light catches the speaker's spectacles and turns them into blank discs which seem to have no eyes behind them. And this is not altogether fanciful. A speaker who uses that kind of phraseology has gone some distance toward turning himself into a machine. The appropriate noises are coming out of his larynx, but his brain is not involved as it would be if he were choosing his words for himself. If the speech he is making is one that he is accustomed to make over and over again, he may be almost unconscious of what he is saying, as one is when one utters the responses in church. And this reduced state of consciousness, if not indispensable, is at any rate favorable to political conformity.

In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible. Things like the continuance of British rule in India, the Russian purges and deportations, the dropping of the atom bombs on Japan, can indeed be defended, but only by arguments which are too brutal for most people to face, and which do not square with the professed aims of the political parties. Thus political language has to consist largely of euphemism., question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness. Defenseless villages are bombarded from the air, the inhabitants driven out into the countryside, the cattle machine-gunned, the huts set on fire with incendiary bullets: this is called pacification. Millions of peasants are robbed of their farms and sent trudging along the roads with no more than they can carry: this is called transfer of population or rectification of frontiers. People are imprisoned for years without trial, or shot in the back of the neck or sent to die of scurvy in Arctic lumber camps: this is called elimination of unreliable elements. Such phraseology is needed if one wants to name things without calling up mental pictures of them.

When there is a gap between one's real and one's declared aims, one turns as it were instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish spurting out ink. In our age there is no such thing as "keeping out of politics." All issues are political issues, and politics itself is a mass of lies, evasions, folly, hatred, and schizophrenia.  

Political language -- and with variations this is true of all political parties, from Conservatives to Anarchists -- is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind. One cannot change this all in a moment, but one can at least change one's own habits, and from time to time one can even, if one jeers loudly enough, send some worn-out and useless phrase -- some jackboot, Achilles' heel, hotbed, melting pot, acid test, veritable inferno, or other lump of verbal refuse -- into the dustbin, where it belongs. 

How to deal with al-Qaeda

Here's what the British tried in the early 20th century:

 in the 1920s on Afghanistan’s Northwest Frontier, the British planted loudspeakers in planes warning tribal peoples that God was angry with them for breaking the peace with India

It didn't work, of course - and the British can't stay away from Afghanistan. I wonder if this is where bin Laden got the idea of using planes to express god's wrath?

I have a children's book from the 1920s called Behind the Mountains by Wray Hunt (author of Boy Of The Indian Frontier and Satan's Daughter, aka Angus Joseph). It's a boys' adventure story set in Afghanistan. The two plucky young British boys crash in Afghanistan because the nice-but-stupid Hindu servants haven't put enough petrol in their tank. So they have to make their way back to India (then - Pakistan now), fighting off hordes of the 'hook-nosed savage' Muslims. It's a classic bit of imperialist racism (the illustrations are utterly racist, and the mystical Indian symbol we now know as the swastika is stamped on the spine, as many India-related books were), and fascinating in the way it racialises the Afghan Muslims in a different way to the Hindus, who are treated as wayward children or pets. I might bring it on one day and quote from it: there's nothing on the web.

Interestingly, the title comes from Robert Burns writing about Scotland - and there's plenty of British imperialist literature referring to the Celtic nations as children or savages to be tamed before they can contribute to the business of Empire-building. The Scots were known as Irish or Wild Irish into the 18th -century, for instance. The lesson is: the English used the same discourses or frameworks wherever they went. Given that Hunt's real name was Angus, it's likely he was Scottish and knew his Burns.

Handing over the baton?

Today's one of those occasions on which the new media/old media divide is up for examination. I'm watching BBC News 24, which is leading on two stories which originated on the web, one of them weeks ago. The first is the Wikileaks release of 90,000 US military documents relating to the war in Afghanistan; the other is a story about a bear which got trapped in a car.

The Wikileaks story has been floating around for a long time. It's the kind of event an anonymous, locationless organisation can do: the BBC or another established, regulated media organisation would have avoided the legal ramifications, would have spent too long considering the national or security implications, and would probably have been penetrated by the security services in any case (there's a long history of news media aiding the secret services).

On the other hand, it's interesting that Julian Assange is now giving a press conference for the offline media, and three chosen newspapers have been given full and early access to the material- clearly the 'old' sources are still important, for informing the wider public, and because they have greater journalistic resources when it comes to investigating stories. Strikingly, however, Assange's conference displays his awareness of the limitations and responsibilities of classic journalism: research, fact-checking, skepticism. He's also engaged in some weeding of material which would, he says, cost lives or damage security, which is a major assumption of authority. His nomadic, independent approach gives him the freedom to subvert the cultural and legal boundaries which hamper established media, but it makes him immune to the checks and balances too (though Fox News behaves in exactly the same way, as its disgusting behaviour over the Shirley Sherrod story shows (rightwing blogger edits a black Department of Agriculture official's speech to make her look racist - she gets the sack by a cowardly employer but is reinstated when the true story emerges, Fox refuses to apologise or alter its position - as does the blogger: original, unqualified and uncorrected story here).

 Either way, we're into a new era when the power of major news organisations fail to uncover major scoops - they're sclerotic, timid and too dependent on their relationships with authority.

The bear-trapped-in-a-car story is the other side of the new/old media coin. Ten years ago, it's the kind of thing which would take up page 3 of a local newspaper. Now it's a light-hearted bit of fluff which fits in with 90% of what's on the internet. What's shameful is that it's now a story for the global news media: rolling news has very obviously led to dumbing down, simply to fill space. IT'S NOT NEWS, PEOPLE!

What's still unclear is the implication for Wikileaks and similar sites. No doubt the security services are chasing it through legal and illegal means - cyberwar resources will engage in DOS attacks and more, but it'll be like nailing down a jelly. I'm hugely positive about this. Wikileaks claim they're politically neutral, but a commitment to the free exchange of information is clearly a libertarian/anarchist position which will hopefully challenge authorities which act with impunity by keeping us in the dark.

Cameron's big plan

It all became clear this morning, as I lay in bed listening to Radio 4.

David Cameron had two things to say:

1. We should all 'revere' the military.
2. Soldiers in Afghanistan are to get an extra £30 per day, up from a £15 daily bonus.

Cameron paraphrased the poet Charles M Province, saying: "I want you to think of that great quotation that it's not the politician that brings the right to vote, it is the soldier, it is not the poet that brings free speech, it is the soldier, it is not the journalist that brings free expression, it is the soldier. So I want you to help me create a new atmosphere in our country, an atmosphere where we back and revere and support our military."

Province is a deeply dubious American militarist. The poem Cameron distorts also contains these lines:

It is the Soldier, not the campus organizer

Who has given us freedom to protest.

It is the Soldier, not the politician

Who has given us the right to vote.

It is the Soldier who salutes the flag,

Who serves beneath the flag,

And whose coffin is draped by the flag,

Who allows the protester to burn the flag

Obviously, this is the most total of bollocks. A second's thought about campus protest brings to mind the Kent State Massacre, in which US soldiers shot dead several students, or the Iranian Basiji attacks on students recently. The reference to flag-burning locates the poem in the Vietnam war - flag desecration was a hot topic on the pro-war side, though the Supreme Court has consistently ruled that it's a constitutionally-protected method of free expression.

It's obvious. He's planning a military coup. This stuff about 'revering' the military is little short of sinister. It precludes any critique of military behaviour - despite the UK military being involved in torture (Baha Mousa, for one), repression and assassination (Northern Ireland), and all sorts of disgraceful activity of the sort I discussed in relation to the British Empire a day or so ago. There's got to be more thought, more nuance. If this is the level of Cameron's intellect, I'm very worried.

I'm sure that some soldiers are perfectly respectable, and I feel sorry for those forced into the armed services as the only way out of poverty or difficult circumstances, but I really don't think we should 'revere' those who simply want to kill people. Additionally, there isn't a military regime in the world that promotes freedom of speech, the right to vote or free expression. Cameron's a sinister liar or delusional if he believes this rubbish.

We need a military, but the idea that we should worship them is politically and socially dangerous. They become a breed apart, not reflecting our social makeup. They get away with events like My Lai, Bomber Command killing tens of thousands of civilians in Dresden alone, or the murder of hundreds of fleeing conscripts after Kuwait on the Highway of Death.

This extra money is a shocker as well. The government's spent their whole time telling us that we're all going to suffer badly through massive budget cuts, yet the nuclear weapons budget is untouched and soldiers are going to be paid a lot extra.

There are 10,000 soldiers in Afghanistan. The extra £15 per week works out at £1, 050, 000 per week, or £54,600,000 per year. This is a shocking amount of money in the midst of what they're telling us is the worst financial depression in decades.

Unless you see it as a wise investment in muscle ready for the civil unrest which will follow the welfare, school, health and public service cuts. Then it's always useful to have some happy, violent lads on hand (as demonstrated by the police during the Miners' Strike).

PS. If you're depressed by the Tories' attack on education, get a load of this moron - and the Tory minister who struggles to contain his grin.

From art to the streets!

Gloriously, as we left the Kapoor exhibition, the Troops Out of Afghanistan demonstration was passing - probably 5,000-10,000. I felt a wave of nostalgia, having whistled and chanted with the best of them in my time. I love the slogans, the odd posters, the witty banners and even the myriad of splinter groups selling poorly-written posters explaining why their groupuscule is the true inheritor of the legacy of Marx/Lenin/Trotsky/Mao/add your own guru here - despite my utter despair that the left can't get together to actually do anything significant. Instead, we'd all rather pretend to be revolutionaries and attack any other sect rather than the actual enemy. Demonstrations like this are particularly useless: nobody's listening, no minds will be changed, but the marchers feel better about themselves.

The MLKP (Marxist-Leninist Communist Party) are banned as terrorists in Turkey - which doesn't bother me. The fact that they are ardent supporters of Enver Hoxha's evil, paranoid brand of communism really does. Don't confuse them with the CPGB-ML, the British sect which considers the CPGB and the CPB to be not nearly Stalinist enough…

The demo was a classic - despite it being about Afghanistan, every other cause was represented. Every Communist Party and Trotskyist group (none of which would ever dream of holding a free debate or standing for election) was there (hell, every member was there), except for the ones no doubt boycotting it for doctrinal reasons. Photos are here, but I'll put my favourites up.

Nuanced. Sophisticated.

That'll show 'em. Isn't condemnation a little… oppressive?

Well if King's Lynn and satellite villages oppose the war, then it'll have to stop!

War, on drugs

Paul Flynn castigates the idiocy of the Afghan policy - the result of eight years of war is that 95% of heroin in Britain comes from a country flooded with Western troops, the same proportion as when the Taliban ran the country. The only difference is that heroin is now massively cheaper than it was then. A victory for capitalism, at least.