Author: Mick Hartley

All the US blogs are discussing the Democratic Presidential nominees. Quite right, of course, but I can’t help thinking, can someone just wake me up when it’s all over and tell me who’s got the nomination. That way I don’t have to learn about all these people and their policies and histories and campaign details….Dean, Clark, Gephardt, whoever…..because none of them are particularly interesting and I’m only going to have to forget all but one of them anyway.

o add). What is it about alternative comedians that’s so depressing? “Have I Got News For You” used to feature various examples of the type: one I remember in particular some time around the start of the Iraq war expressed with heavy irony the opinion, when the subject was WMDs, that oh yes, the US would be sure to find them, no doubt about that – the implication being of course that they’d plant them. For this lot the world’s just one big conspiracy run by US Business. Pictures of massacres in Bosnia are just a ruse by the power elite to keep the public’s mind off the oppression at home (cue wild applause); it’s only because the passengers in the 9/11 planes were such white middle-class wusses that the hijacks succeeded (more wild applause). It’s just so narcissistic, apart from the fact – problematic, you’d have thought, for comedians – that it’s not funny. Davis blames Chomsky. As he says of Hicks:

Having ploughed his way through the writings of the arch-radical Noam Chomsky, he arrives at an impossibly crude, conspiracy-theory view of American society in which every important decision is taken by a secretive corporate elite bent on preserving its own power. He talks about “totalitarian mind-control government” with a straight face. This sort of up-market left-wing fantasy — Nostradamus for the latte-drinking classes — has become a commonplace in the post-Hicks comedy era.

It’s all done with the straight-faced conviction that they’re being incredibly courageous to speak out like this. Lenny Bruce wouldn’t have been amused.

The Talking Heads, Blondie, Richard Hell and The Voidoids. And having name-checked Richard Hell, it would be impossible for me to finish without mentioning my nomination for the greatest song title ever…..”Love Comes in Spurts”.

nage” is new to me. It certainly has a bit of class. With “signs” you’re just referring to a collection of individual objects, but “signage” seems to link them together somehow, as separate manifestations (a manifestationage?….no, maybe not) of some deeper totality. Or maybe it’s something that just happens, without any human agency: signage appears, like foliage, and using the term reflects a general feeling that we’re no longer in control, that there are hidden forces at work doing things like, um, putting up signs.

She certainly had a way with words, didn’t she, Reem al-Rayashee? – the late Reem al-Rayashee.

In a videotape explaining her actions, the bomber was seen seated between two Hamas flags, clutching an assault rifle. “It was always my wish to turn my body into deadly shrapnel against the Zionists and knock on the doors of Heaven with the skulls of Zionists,” she said. “I always wanted to be the first (Hamas) woman to carry out a martyrdom operation where parts of my body can fly all over.”

Is that what she told her careers master at school? “I want to be the first woman to carry out a martyrdom operation where parts of my body can fly all over.” I’m just curious as to why she had two babies if that was always her ambition, but it’s probably best not to think too much about it.

Update: against my own advice I have thought about it. She’s the perfect Hamas woman, really, isn’t she? Kills Zionists, and herself, but only after she’s done her breeding.

Norman Geras over at normblog has some interesting things to say about the Benny Morris interview in Haaretz. Concerning the crimes which were committed in the founding of the state of Israel, which Morris so scrupulously records:

If, as Morris argues, such crimes were, and had to be, a part of the foundation of the state of Israel – if Israel’s very foundation, in other words, could not have happened without crimes of this kind – then the conclusion would have to be drawn that the foundation of the state was not justifiable at the time and so should not have happened.

All I would say, and this is not so much of an argument against what Norm is saying as just a comment on it, is that my feeling from the Morris interview is that he’s looking at the whole thing in the broadest possible terms: where, when it comes down to it, could you find a country who’s history isn’t soaked in blood? For centuries, millennia, people have been colonising other people, invading their neighbours, killing each other. This doesn’t justify it, but that’s the way it’s been. In historical terms, Israel’s crimes are insignificant: if you want a modern comparison, then China’s colonisation of Xinjiang, which I posted about earlier, is far far worse. No, it doesn’t justify it, the point Norm raises still stands. But at what point do we go back and say, OK, from now on everything has to be justifiable, but before that, hey, that’s alright, that’s history, no point in crying over spilt milk. And why should whatever Israel has done come after that point? Israel has defeated enemies who attacked it in at least three wars; it’s surrounded by states that actively seek its destruction. Isn’t there some point at which you say, well, it’s there, that’s where those people live, it’s their home. Why should Israel alone be subject to a set of international laws which frankly few other countries could comply with if you go back far enough.

Norm distinguishes between a state’s right to exist, and the question of whether its foundation is justified. I suppose what I’m trying to say is, in those terms, can any state really claim that its foundation was justified? All of America would be ruled out. Africa as well, I would think, in that African nations were to a large extent creations of the colonial powers. Even Europe: practically every country has its disaffected minorities, and whole populations have over the course of history been shuffled between one nation and another as the balance of power shifted. So why should Israel be singled out?

Via Arts & Letters Daily, a good article on WMDs…..and there’s not too many of those around. I was particularly interested in the theory that Saddam had effectively given up on his WMD program but refused to admit this, even to the extent of drawing on himself the wrath of the US and its allies…..well, even to the extent, as it turned out, of losing everything. This fits in with what I was thinking back in April when good old Baghdad Bob was a regular feature on our screens. Remember Baghdad Bob? Yes he was very funny in a way, but it was more than that; there was something almost incantatory about his pronouncements. It was as though, if you say something forcefully enough, it’ll come true. You could argue, I suppose, that the wretched man had no choice; that if he’d told the truth, said that US forces were advancing irrevocably into Baghdad, then if things had changed and Saddam had come out on top, next thing he knew he’d be watching his daughter being raped and tortured. But I have to say that watching the man pronounce with total conviction that the US forces were being annihilated, I got a distinct whiff of a completely different and (yes, I’m coming over all Kilroy-Silk) primitive culture, where all that really matters is the presentation, and truth doesn’t have the same meaning as it does for us in the West. The Word, whether written in the Koran, or pronounced by Imams or those in power, is all important, and the idea of a reality that can be tested independently is just, well, not there. Which is why I can believe that for Saddam the idea of himself as defying the West – the new Saladin – and continuing to pursue his dream of WMDs, was more important than the reality. And why the image of Saddam being dragged from his spider hole and being humiliated by the medical examination was such an effective and essential part of the US strategy in Iraq.

she was that fateful evening at Kensington Palace when she encountered Diana escorting one of her “men friends” from the premises. The doughty elderly lady stated her opinions forcefully, at which Diana gave voice to some…..well to some things, some things perhaps best left unsaid, cruel hurtful horrible things, about dear Georgie, and about Eddie as well…..horrible horrible unforgiveable things. Well, it was short work to do what had to be done, for the sake of the family, and the future of the Windsors. A couple of gin and tonics and a phone call later, and it was all decided: the wheels had been set in motion which would lead inexorably to that fatal encounter in the tunnel beneath the Seine.

A convincing scenario, certainly, but it has to be said that many now believe that this is in fact a story put about by Prince Charles, to cover his own guilt, and in the belief that what with the old dear dead it was hardly going to matter to her if she was fingered in this way.

But we have moved on since then. Now, those like myself who have made a deep study of this whole sordid business have come to the inescapable conclusion that it was in fact the French who were responsible. You’re not really surprised, are you? The reasons for this are too complex, and frankly too explosive, to divulge here, but I am prepared, for a small consideration – no, make that a large consideration – to provide details on an individual basis to those with sufficient interest, and sufficient funds.

Prince Charles had become aware of this development, and was the driving force behind the setting up of this latest enquiry, in the hope that his name would at last be cleared. He may also have felt that for a moment, when it was seriously being considered that he might have personally authorised and planned Diana’s death, people might come to sort of respect him in a vague sort of way as not such a useless prat after all, but someone with, you know, a bit of fire-in-the-belly type of thingy.

Alas the Queen got to hear of this. (How? She’s the Queen, she hears everything, God bless ‘er.) And she decided that this was a good opportunity to make sure that the useless great pillock along with that ghastly Camilla would never, ever, be King and Queen. She determined that the enquiry would damn Charles; that his goose would be well and truly cooked.

The government, however, are very unlikely to allow this to happen. Relations with France are critical, and Blair has spent considerable time cosying up to Charles and is certainly not about to see all that work go up in smoke.

So, expect a whitewash.

rsued by cat. Scene two, ten seconds later, cat dashes across the lawn from right to left pursued by squirrel. To judge from the increase in the number of squirrels in our area recently, I imagine that the word went out on the squirrel street after that: “hey, those big animals with the long tails that we’re all so scared of? Well, they’re pussycats.”]

Are we going to see foxes ambling around Oxford Street soon, mingling with the shoppers? It wouldn’t take long for foxes to descend in the esteem of us city-dwellers to the level of large rats – a process the squirrels are already undergoing. Which suggests that what the hunting crowd should be doing is releasing loads of foxes into cities in the dead of night. The anti-hunting brigade would soon see their support plummet.

no qualm, no hesitation, no flicker of doubt within the Party about the wisdom of its own policy, which amounts to this: punish the Uighurs for the slightest sign of dissent, and when they protest, punish them harder. There is nothing to show that the Party can see what is obvious to anyone who visits Xinjiang: that the Uighurs have been reduced to second-class members of the ‘great Chinese family’. Absent, too, is any recognition of the anger caused by Han Chinese immigration, a wholesale transfer of population from the east which began as exile and which now flourishes on the foundations of China’s desert gulag.

China, we’re lead to believe, is the sleeping giant, the next superpower, now in the process of making a smooth transition to a capitalist economy. Can we really believe that in the light of what we know about what actually goes on there? This is a society where everything flows from the top down. What the Communist leadership seems to have learnt from the West is not an increased respect for human rights but an increased determination to make sure no one hears about their human rights abuses. Russia is often compared unfavourably with China in terms of managing the transition form communism, but Russia actually ditched their party rulers; China is still ruled by theirs, a rule without any legitimacy whatsoever. So will the Chinese empire implode like the Soviet empire did? Who knows? – we’re in uncharted territory here. But you have to suspect that the 21st century is going to be a great deal more interesting for the Chinese than they might wish.