Blood and Sand

I watched two people die tonight on film.
One was an Iraqi baby, one of twins, in a hospital where there wasn't even an oxygen mask or a proper incubator for a prematurely born baby. Because the Coalition of the Willing had been all too willing to steal Iraqi wealth, to put priority to projects to exhange dinars with Saddam's face on for post-invasion currency, and to fatten up US contractors at the expense of children sick and starving from dysentery and malnourishment. That's not an easy thing for a father to see.
The other one to die was an American soldier, the sole survivor of a shot down Black Hawk helicopter. One of his comrades was burnt and charred in a horrific pose. He explained in his MidWest drawl that something was broken - I wasn't sure what, because he was made to walk anyway - before he was suddenly gunned down. When the first bullet hit, he seemed as surprised as I was.
Then a Microsoft window popped up, to ask me if I wanted to upgrade my Media player.
Video has an unreality, but it's important to remember that even if the news is shot like Made-For-TV movies these days (and in the case of the Jihadist films, like bad MTV music videos), the people in these films are real.
The worst experience I had with this was editing the results of a Shell-instigated massacre in the Niger-delta region of Nigeria. Some thugs from a neighbouring town had been hired - probably with local police - to attack an Ogoni village. Hundreds at least died. Usually by machete. MOSOP - the local liberation movement - had smuggled footage of the atroicty out, at great risk. As usual, the mainstream media ignored it (the same happened with the PKK footage of the Saddam gas-attack on the Kurdish town of Halabja. I remember seeing that footage whilst its authenticity was being strenously contested, because Saddam was the West's guy).
I got drunk editing that footage from Nigeria. It was the only immediate way of dealing with it, in the traditional English manner. That and crying, of course.
I've finally managed to get hold of some resistance footage from Iraq. Most of its rubbish unfortunately. I mean that from a technical point of view. Some of it's quite well done though. I saw a statement from a resistance group that was in English - eloquent, reasonable and in many ways appealing. But three times in the film (which was 15 minutes long), there were mentions of 'foreign policy controlled from Tel Aviv', and a couple of other mad anti-Semitic allusions.
A shame. But one thing that really should be learnt by now, is to listen to these small voices of madness. My enemy's enemy is by no means my de facto friend. Usually these are the hints that tell us the insanity event horizon was a few miles back and receding. Just look at the footage of Dubya and his pet sheep book on 9/11 if you have any doubts.
Because I would like to think there was a resistance group out there I could identify with. I guess that's true of alot of Western lefties. Whilst I don't believe the media portrayal of the resistance (or, as it's called for some reason the "insurgence") as little Syrian-sponsored Ayatollahs, nor do I have a lot of time for the Jihadist point of view.
This week, Bush told the Americans that they would be in Iraq until at least 2008. By then, it seems more and more likely, there will be an assault on Iran, regardless of popular support. Bush claimed this week that no leader wanted war. Absolute shite, of course. I saw a bit where today where Peter Jay (I think) asked Jim Callaghan - then the previous Prime Minsiter - how he thought the Falklands War was going, under then Prime Minister Thatcher. 'I wish I'd had a war' he responded. If not for that war, the Thatcherist, Monetarist project in Britain - and perhaps most of Europe - would have died a death in 1983. If not for the Iraq War, then even the fraud of 2004 would not have been feasible for the Neo-Con crew in the US. And leaving aside the question of who was responsible for 9/11, it's likely at least that a good Iran event will help the Republican re-election in 2008, as an honourable Afghanistan flag-waver might help Gordon Brown soon too.
The link needs to be made between the resistance in Iraq and the liberation movements in the West. That means we lefties need to be backing non-religious resistance groups in Iraq. There must be some, as Islam was not exactly strong under the Baathist state - in fact the anti-religion position of communism was official policy until relatively recently, and certainly the new wave of fundamentalism made less headway in Iraq than in nearly any other Middle East state.
It looks at the moment though like an openly non-religious resistance group would find itself trapped between a rock and a hard place, (like the anarchists in the Spanish Civil War, to give a favoured analogy). So if one group does come out, it's important that we get behind them as noisily and aggresiviely as possible.
Assuming, of course, that there's no mad anti-Semtitic, kill-the-queers, lock-up-the-women, religious bollocks to go with it :-)
Oh, this then...
Have you ever walked the lonesome hills
And heard the curlews cry
Or seen the raven black as night
Upon a windswept sky
To walk the purple heather
And hear the westwind cry
To know that's where the rapparee must die
Since cromwell pushed us westward
To live our lowly lives
There's some of us have deemed to fight
From tipperary mountains high
Noble men with wills of iron
Who are not afraid to die
Who'll fight with gaelic honour held on high
A curse upon you oliver cromwell
You who raped our motherland
I hope you're rotting down in hell
For the horrors that you sent
To our misfortunate forefathers
Whom you robbed of their birthright
"to hell or connaught" may you burn in hell tonight
Of one such man i'd like to speak
A rapparee by name and deed
His family dispossessed and slaughtered
They put a price upon his head
His name is known in song and story
His deeds are legends still
And murdered for blood money
Was young ned of the hill
A curse upon you oliver cromwell
You who raped our motherland
I hope you're rotting down in hell
For the horrors that you sent
To our misfortunate forefathers
Whom you robbed of their birthright
"to hell or connaught" may you burn in hell tonight
You have robbed our homes and fortunes
Even drove us from our land
You tried to break our spirit
But you'll never understand
The love of dear old ireland
That will forge an iron will
As long as there are gallant men
Like young ned of the hill

Who me?

Damn, these days I'm a respectable hard-working yuppie with a family to take care of.
You can hardly remember the real me.
But there's still some mates out there who remember. The guys who know me from living hard and hard-up, who are the best mates I've ever had. (They know who they are, so no names here!) I still owe them a shitload of money, by the way - which I still intend to pay back with style when I can!
I've been lucky in my life, to have made some very special friends. Some of them, I still see now and then to this day. Some, will be friends whenever I meet them - be that 20 years in the future, it'll be the same as yesterday.
I miss being able to go out for a beer with them - especially tonight, on a Friday night. But, of course, my life had changed long before I moved out here: it's a question of being the father with children. And being the hard-working-don'tbe-too-hungover-the-next-day yuppie fucker that I am.
All I can say to my friends who know me then and now is - whether you like it or not - deep down, I'm *still* the real me! And basically, they can all kiss my unshowered ass before I really believe a fucking word of their yuppie bollocks.
cheers

Lazy bastard

OK. I was going to paste a couple of paragraphs from an email, so here they are:

We don't have time for fundamentalists of any kind, whether god-botherers, party-ideologists or Newtonian-Cartesian-obsessives.
We can't afford to leave the devastation of the planet's climate to single-issue-environmentalists.
We can't afford to leave the corporate rape of the human population to union activists and human rights' fighters.
We can't say 'Stop the War' and ignore the famine and disease.
We can't fight for freedom and ignore overpopulation.

And every political ideology is based on a paradigm that came into being with the first phase of the industrial revolution (be that beginning in the 1770's in England, 1787 in France, or 1865 in the USA).
If Douglas Adams was still alive, I'd suggest we invent quantum politics. Where you can't tell what the spin on a certain issue is until there's an observer to intervene in the process.

In the absence, my plan for a revolution is as follows:
"Overthrow all capitalist/hierarchical structures"
"And what are you going to put in their place?"
"Dunno, but IMHO destroying the entire planet and having millions dying daily of starvation and easily treatable diseases is just about as crap as it gets, so I'm pretty confident we can work something out between us."

The basics behind this is being annoyed at the state of science in a society that is driven by science, and in a world where science tells us we're fucking our entire ecosystem. Also, how this relates to our spiritual understanding of religion, the meaning of life, and all that other shit.

OK, I'm a bit spoilt in this, because I understand the meaning of life (which is not such a big deal, so let's ignore that for now); but it's a bit difficult to get used to the fact that most people are as ignorant of the science surrounding their lives - the technology that supplies their electricity, delivers gas to their cars, connects their computers to this website - as if they were early-settlers believing in some mad-shepherd's monotheistic ravings.
People in the West accept this stuff without having the slightest fucking clue what makes it happen - which is why we have such a hard time making them understand why the planet is being fucked up. Most people have essentially no better theoretical understanding of why the light works in their room, or the TV gets Fox, than some dude in Bhutan who never had a history in this shit till 5 years back.
In Bhutan, I can understand this ignorance, because it'sa new concept, and folks are playing catch up.
But in countries like England or the States or Netherlands - well, simply put, there is no fucking excuse. It actually makes me angry. So I would see it like this:
"Sorry, we're cutting off your gas. You can't use it anymore".
"No, I need that, I can't live without it"
"Oh, you can't live without it. Do you know where it comes from?"
"No."
"Do you know what damage it does when we use it?"
"No."
"Do you know how much we have left?"
"No."
"Then shut the fuck up and piss off."

If it's so fucking important to you now, at least take enough of an interest to find out a bit about it.
Of course, when you see what people ingest, sometimes despite their better knowledge, well, no surprise that they don't give a shit. WHo, with even the slightest education, would eat a McDonalds' burger?

So, I don't agree that the fight to change - or rather, save - the World is just a question of winning the argument. That would be easy.
What we need to do is restore sanity to a good part of the wrold's population. And that's a bit more difficult...

I heard a thing a few years back, and I heard it on the radio, so I don't have alink to hand, that two thirds of the world' population are clinically speaking "Mentally ill". And in Western countries, this number approaches 90%.
I don't have a link for this report, but I do remember that it was issued by the UN/WHO. Most people, of course, have ignored it.
As a thought though, can you think of one leader of a major military power in the last 25 years who was vaguely sane?

One more today

One more for today, here's an article from the Palm Beach Post, called 'Nature Can Still Win'.
There's things to come this year...

Brassneck

Like it?

I was watching a news item on the BBC about yet more starvation in Zimbabwe. It's being at least a little reported now, which is more than can be said of the massacres in the same area - Matabeleland - twenty years ago. But, to be honest, much of Africa seems to be trying to live up to the 'basket case' rep it had a few years back. One of the great hopes, Uganda, is looking distinctly worrying with Museveni's cadre becoming unpleasantly dictatorial after all this time. In Kenya, the cops smashed up a newspaper office for daring to report that the government might be holding talks with the opposition: it was more a statement of intent than a targeted action. Zambia is also barring opposition parties, and the usual circuits of poverty, corruption, bigotry, sexism and homophobia are doing their rounds.
Then there's Zimbabwe, which is rapidly turning into the Albania of Africa, with its very own basket case at the helm. The biggest disgrace here is that Mbeki and the other so-called leaders are such chickenshits that they don't dare to go against any grain, and call a spade a spade. Mugabe is a nasty fuck, and if protecting him is what the OAU amounts to these days, then it's not the Pan-Africanism that Lumumba and Nkrumah and Garvey were fighting for.
And with all these nasty shits, I can't help feeling that in alot of the cases there's some fucking white multinational shits pulling the strings. If the population of Congo or Nigeria ever found out just how much their "leaders" were black puppets being pulled by white men, I daresay there'd be blood in the streets real quick.
And where is a Lumumba or a Nkrumah now that we really need one? Museveni and Rawlings been either a big diasppointment, or predictably dwarf-sized when measured to their predecessors. Other than them, the situation in the last twenty years, when Africa has being getting more brutally and repetetively raped than at any time since Imperialism was thrown off, and probably since long before that, has been a situation of appalling turf wars, internecine hatred, petty gangsterism and appalling genocide.
The West doesn't give a fuck - all the Live 8 platitudes and weasel-words to the contrary. The West is the rapist. Asking for some tidbits from the West's table is the same as asking for mercy from your rapist, your captor, your massa.
It's simply a continuation of slavery by other means. Berlin 1870 all over again - it's the Race for Africa. The West can look charitably pious cheaply with one face whilst gangbanging Africa for its resources and people and pray to their blue-eyed God with the other face.
The one figure in Africa that could really lay claim to be the heir of Lumumba and Nkrumah is Mandela. He's even from their generation.
And to be fair to him, he does make some radical statements, even if he's a bit keen to be seen with Bono or the Spice Girls or whathaveyou. (And, to be honest, I do sometimes have a bit of trouble understanding what the fuck he is actually saying!) But he's been safely put in a box of "Saint Nelson" now, and nobody actually listens to him anymore. He'd have to start another armed revolt to be heard, and even I wouldn't expect that of the guy.
Mandela though, is the only one around who could resist the works of the multinationals in Africa, but I don't hear diddly squit from him on that. Be clear though, it is the work of the multinational corporations, with turnovers bigger than the GDPs of the countries they dominate, who are running the show down in Africa.
The reassuring thought is that the same was - and is - true of South and Central America. And that horrific oppression through the 80's and into the 90's has produced Chavez and Morales and Marcos and Lula. Not, of course, that I would expect any of them to transform society as such - that's for people to do themselves, not rely on leaders to do it for them - but they are perhaps a symptom of some independence and a determination to fight for themselves.
A couple of times, people have talked of the winds of change in Africa. Once was Macmillan, and there was a change as the imperial powers - at least in token - relinquished their powers. The second time was in '89, '90, when the uprisings across Africa seemed to offer a new prospect, but instead only brought Charles Taylor and the Interahamwe.

There's no easy answers here. What I do know, is that as nice as it was, the expressions of concern shown last summer by the people who were listening to the Live 8 messsage, who wanted African debt cancelled, who want nice things for Africans, those concerns are irrelevant.

We in the West - our wealth and our lifestyles are based upon exploitation of people in Africa and Asia, and upon a ravaging of the environment. I can't put it any plainer.
If we want to end poverty, starvation, genocide-by-default in Africa, then we have to put a stop to our lifestyle of insane decadence.
We have to stop being slavemasters.
If we want to deal with the consequences of Climate Change, we have to stop raping our environment - which means we have to stop using energy, foodstuffs, minerals on a scale way beyond any possible need.
We have to stop being rapists.

Until the people living in the countries of the West are going to come out onto the streets and demand that their governments and their employers give them *less* luxury and *less* material possessions, then the world is gonna continue going to hell in a handbasket.
Unless the Africans and the Asians are going to teach us middle class Westerners after all...

naming

The world record holder for the junior 5km skating is a Norwegian guy called Harvard Blokko.
Now who thought that was a good name for a kid? Did they have hopes of starting their own comedy stage act?