I lost patience with Boris Johnson a very long time ago. As one of the columnists in the I wrote a week or so ago, Johnson’s a politician, not anyone’s gaffe-prone friend. Quite. He’s a ruthless politician, and his image as some kind of lovable oaf, or so he imagines himself, is a weapon he wields in order to gain a popular following. He’s a very nasty, ruthless intriguer, as shown by the way he started out supporting ‘Remain’, and then jumped ship and stabbed David Cameron in the back. He would undoubtedly argue that he did so because he was persuaded by the ‘Leave’ campaigners arguments. To me it just seems to me that he changed his views quite cynically because he though that the Leavers offered him a better chance of getting the top job.
As for the gaffes, there’s nothing cute or amusing about them. If they only embarrassed Johnson, it would be a different matter. But they embarrass the country, make international tensions worse, and have seen years added to an innocent woman’s jail term by a tyrannical regime, in the case of the British Iranian woman, Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe, accused of spying by the Iranians. She wasn’t. She was visiting her Iranian family for the New Year. But that didn’t bother Boris and his mate, Michael Gove, who immediately shot their mouths off and gave the Mullahs more ammunition with which to persecute this poor woman. There is nothing remotely cute or funny about the incident, which on its own clearly shows Johnson’s complete lack of competence to serve as Foreign Secretary.
Now BoJo has opened his mouth once again, to claim that Brexit won’t lead to the return of a hard border between Ulster and the Republic. Why? Because there’s a border between Camden and another part of London, which millions of people pass through every day, and they are not stopped or inconvenienced by a hard border with checkpoints. The government just takes the money from the costs of their transport.
Johnson’s remark has been widely ridiculed for the obvious reason: the border between Camden and the rest of London is absolutely not like the border between Northern Ireland and Eire. Camden and London are both in Britain, unless Johnson has plans otherwise. It is not an international border, while the border between Ulster and Eire is.
And the danger with Brexit is that if there isn’t a very carefully negotiated open border between the two parts of the Emerald Isle, the Good Friday Agreement will collapse, and we will once again be mired in the bloody conflict of the Troubles, which took so many lives and maimed and ruined so many others. I was at school during it, and can remember the IRA’s bombing campaign over here. The last thing I want is a return to the murder and killing.
And I’m heartily sick of Johnson’s lies and the sheer rubbish he spouts. He lied repeatedly about Britain’s contribution to the EU, claiming that after Brexit it would go to the NHS. It didn’t, and Johnson was there spinning madly, trying to get out of the fact that this lie was spread across the sides of buses across the country. Then a month or so ago, he revived the lie again. And again.
I don’t know if he honestly believes this latest piece of rubbish, or if it’s a very cynical piece of rhetoric intended to win people over to his side. Because Boris is media celeb, who’s been on Have I Got News For You, and so it must be true. In some ways, it doesn’t matter, because if Johnson does get his way with a hard Brexit, we will see a hard border in Northern Ireland, and that will lead to increased conflict between Nationalists and Loyalists. If it doesn’t automatically lead to outright violence.
Once again Boris has opened his mouth, and the consequences of what he plans are horrific. He’s incompetent, a liar, and a ruthless self-publicist. And others are paying dearly for his so-called ‘gaffes’. And I’ve had my fill of him. Get him out of government now, before his stupidity leads us back to the horrors of sectarian violence. His stupidity has already got one innocent woman spending more years in jail. If he’s in charge of Brexit, it could end with nothing less than mass murder and assassination.
The very anti-racist, anti-Fascist Jewish critic of Israel, Tony Greenstein, put up a piece on his blog on Sunday about his interview on RT’s ‘Sputnik’ programme with George Galloway and his cohost, Gayatri. Greenstein is another, who has been expelled from the Labour party and smeared as an anti-Semite, because he has dared to step out of line and criticise Israel for its maltreatment of the Palestinians.
In the interview, Galloway asks how it is that Greenstein, who is not only Jewish, but the son of a rabbi, could ever be accused of anti-Semitism. Greenstein replies by telling him how he first became aware of the Palestinians’ conditions, and that they, not the Israelis, were right. It was while he was at school in Liverpool. He went to the King David Jewish school, and one day the school decided it was going to stage a debate on the issue of Israel and the Palestinians. No-one else wanted to argue the Palestinians’ case, so Greenstein decided to do it to play devil’s advocate. It was while he was researching it that he came to conclude that the Palestinians were entirely justified in their cause.
As for being smeared as an anti-Semite, Greenstein makes the point that those making these smears – the CAA and the Jewish Labour Movement – aren’t interested in genuine anti-Semitism. They are people completely without any morals, cynically using the accusation to silence decent people and their criticism of Israeli racism and apartheid. This is the only way they can defend Israel, as the facts themselves demonstrate how the Palestinians are oppressed and being ethnically cleansed from the ancestral lands.
This piece also demonstrates why I’m very happy to get much of my news from YouTube. Mike posted up a piece last week asking his readers if they were happy getting their news from YouTube instead of the mainstream broadcasters, because of the issue of bias on the latter. I do watch the mainstream news, but I prefer to get my information from the various alternative news networks on YouTube and the Net, because I heartily dislike the pro-Tory bias of the Beeb and the rest of the mainstream media. And also because the programmes on these alternative channels, like RT, have more interesting things to say than the mainstream. They have a different, deeper analysis into free market capitalism as the cause of poverty, criticise the imperialism which is now being disguised as humanitarianism in the ‘War on Terror’. And in the case of Greenstein, actually allow somebody onto TV to refute the smears against him by Ian McNicol’s corrupt apparatchiks and the Israel lobby.
Somehow I doubt Mike or anyone else libelled as an anti-Semite is going to enjoy the same courtesy from Andrew Marr, just as they will very definitely not be invited to appear in the pages of the Sunday Times, Torygraph, Heil or Scum to argue their cases.
I realise that Galloway is not everyone’s favourite politico, but his interview with Greenstein shows very clearly why we need alternative media sources like RT, while the mainstream media do nothing but pump out right-wing lies and smears.
Mike has posted a number of pieces on his blog commenting on the right-wing bias displayed by Andrew Marr on his Sunday morning show. One recent example of this was his comment to a Tory guest, who came on immediately after he had given a hard interview to someone from the Labour Party. His interview of the Tory was softer, and at the end of it he leaned over to tell her that she had done ‘very well’. Or something like it.
I’m not surprised by this bias. Marr is a fan of the free market, the sacred ideology at the heart of Thatcherism, against which no-one is allowed to blaspheme or question. He was in the I newspaper a few weeks ago praising Steven Pinker’s new book, which argues that the world has got immensely better due to science, reason and markets. Pinker’s a neuroscientist and atheist polemicist. The book’s a successor to his previous work, The Better Angels of Our Nature. This was written to refute the claim that the 20th century was the bloodiest period in human history. This argument has been made in defence of religion, as much atheist polemic is based on the violence and bloodshed that has been generated by religion. But the 20th century is a problem, as the massacres and genocides there took place within an increasingly secular world, and in the case of the horrors committed by Communist regimes, were perpetrated by aggressively atheist regimes. And in the case of the Fascist regimes, it’s questionable how religious they were. General Franco in Spain believed that he was defending Christianity from secularism and materialism when he launched his attack on the Republican government, and horrifically many Christians did support the Fascist regimes against the supposed threats of Communism and Socialism. I’m well aware that Hitler claimed that he was doing ‘the Lord’s work’ in persecuting the Jews in Mein Kampf, but in his Table Talk he has nothing but contempt for Christianity, and wants astronomical observatories set up near schools as part of a scientific campaign against the religion. Hitler’s own religious beliefs seem to have been a kind of monistic pantheism, possibly not that far removed from those of the Monist League, who also sported the swastika as their symbol. As for Mussolini, the Italian dictated signed the Lateran Accords with the papacy, in which the Pope finally recognised Italy’s existence as a state in return for Roman Catholic religious education in schools. But il Duce had started out as a radical socialist, and many members of the Fascist party still were vehemently atheist. Much depended on the religious opinions of the local Fascist ras whether Roman Catholic religious education was taught in the schools in his area. I don’t wish to go into this argument now, whether these regimes were really atheist or not, or if the 20th century really was the bloodiest period in human history. I just wish to make the point that this was the issue at the heart of Pinker’s previous book.
Pinker’s new book apparently tells us that everything’s getting better, including the environment, and Pinker marshals an impressive arrays of facts. But all this said to me was that people and governments have become more ecologically conscious. It does not mean that we aren’t facing the devastating loss of an extraordinary number of this planet’s animal and plant species, or that we face catastrophic global warming which may make the Middle East uninhabitable.
But even more questionable is Pinker’s and Marr’s assertion that modern, post-Enlightenment society has been immensely improved thanks to the science, reason and markets. In the case of science and reason, at one level the statement is obviously true. Human life has benefited immensely from scientific advance, particularly in medicine. But the view that science and reason didn’t exist before then is one that many Medieval scholars would strenuously reject. In contrast to the stereotypes, the Middle Ages actually wasn’t anti-science. There are poems from the 12th-13th centuries celebrating it, and the new knowledge that was flooding into Europe from the Islamic world. The 15th century English poem, The Court of Sapience, lists the various branches of knowledge known to the medieval world, and celebrates them as the area of ‘Dame Sapience’, an idealised personification of wisdom. As for superstition and the occult, historians have also pointed out that the Middle Ages were also an age of scepticism as well as faith. Medieval theologians wrote texts arguing that visions of demons were more likely caused by a full stomach interfering with the correct functioning of the nerves, and so causing bad dreams. Others doubted whether the seers, who claimed to be able to identify thieves through peering in bowls of water or other reflecting surfaces, had any such powers, and were simply using common knowledge to put the blame on notorious thieves. And in contrast to what Marr apparently thinks, free market capitalism did not suddenly emerge in the 18th century with the French Physiocrats and then Adam Smith. In fact, some Christian theologians were arguing for free trade as far back as the thirteenth century.
As for free market capitalism benefiting humanity, the evidence today is that it really doesn’t. The neoliberalism ushered in by Thatcher and Reagan has done nothing but make the lives of the poor much poorer across the world, and in so doing has increased international tension and political violence. The Korean economist, Ha-Joon Chang in his book 23 Things They Don’t Tell You About Capitalism, shows how the strong economies of the world’s developed nations were all created, not by free trade, but by protectionism.
This is very clearly not something any true-blue Thatcherite wants to hear. But it also shows the strange, cult-like nature of the ideology of free trade capitalism. A number of writers have pointed out the apparently illogical, absolute belief its supporters have, even when they are shown the plentiful evidence to the contrary. They still go on believing and demanding free market solutions, even when it is abundantly clear to everyone else that not only do they not work, they are even causing immense harm. And Marr is clearly one of these true believers. He also seems to have uncritically accepted the view that science, reason and free market capitalism were all products of the Enlightenment, when academic historians have been pushing the origins of science and capitalism further back to the Middle Ages, and demonstrated that the Age of Faith was also one of Reason, however irrational it now seems to us.
Marr’s praise of the book and its promotion of the free market also gives more than an indication of his own political beliefs, and why he is much less sympathetic to left-wing guests on his show than those from the right. He’s another member of the cult of neoliberal market capitalism, and this has to be protected at all costs from unbelievers. Even when he and the Beeb swear impartiality.
This Saturday, 3rd March 2018, Radio 4 are broadcasting a programme on Douglas Adams and his ideas for the Hitch-Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, based on papers at Cambridge University. The programme’s part of their Archive Hour series, at 8.00 O’clock in the evening. The blurb for it on page 119 of the Radio Times reads
John Lloyd explores a collection of Douglas Adams’ private papers written as the latter’s ideas for The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy took shape.
There’s a bit more about the programme on the previous page, 118, which runs
Don’t Panic! It’s the Douglas Adams Papers
As part of the commemoration of the 40th anniversary of the first broadcast on Radio 4 of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy a new series begins on Radio 4 on Thursday. It includes unused material held at Cambridge University by author Douglas Adams, and Adams’ papers are the basis of his friend and collaborator John Lloyd’s tribute this evening. The tribute inevitably hinges on Adams’ famous inability to write. He “got stuck”. But the results of his anguish impressed such fans as Richard Dawkins and Stephen Hawking, both of whom appear. A priceless homage to a comedy genius.
And there’s a two-page feature on him on pages 114 & 115.
The new series of the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy is on Radio 4 at 6.30, on Thursday 8th March. The new series’ entitled The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy: Hexagonal Phase, and the listing for it in the Radio Times runs
Simon Jones returns as Arthur Dent in a new sci-fi comedy tale based on Dirk Maggs’ novel And Another Thing, with additional material by creator Douglas Adams. It sees Arthur and the rest in an adventure involving Viking Gods and Irish confidence tricksters-not to mention the first glimpse of the Eccentrica Gallumbits.
I don’t think I’ll be listening to it, as I went off Hitchhiker and Adams way back in the 1990s. I loved the first two books, but their quality steadily went down, and I’ve had no desire to read the Dirk Gently stories or anything else Adams’ wrote. And I also wasn’t impressed by the way Adams got very sniffy in an interview on the radio with Paxman, when Paxo told him he wrote science fiction, ‘but it was good’, and Adams denied that he did. Hitchhiker clearly is SF, but it seems Adams either didn’t respect the genre due to literary snobbishness, or simply didn’t want to be pigeonholed as an SF writer. I can also remember him on another radio programme back in the 1990s telling an audience of schoolchildren that he was a ‘wordsmith’. I’m sure that’s true, in the sense that Adams was genuinely concerned with making sure his work was exactly right, but it still sounds more than a little pretentious and conceited when the uses the term to describe himself.
Here’s another great piece from Chunky Mark the Artist Taxi Driver, which he posted yesterday. He comments on the remarks in the Torygraph from the former head of MI6, Richard Dearlove. Dearlove was speaking about Jeremy Corbyn’s meeting with a Czech spy, and declared that the Labour leader ‘has questions to answer’. This is part of the continuing attempt to create a ‘Red Scare’ about the Labour party and its leader, comparable to the ‘Zinoviev Letter’ that lost Labour an election in the 1920. The Zinoviev letter was an MI5 forgery, and this is a complete non-story and Tory libel.
Mike’s pointed out that the spy in question was a diplomat. Corbyn met him, just as he met other diplomats and no secrets were passed on. The Czechs, and the academic in charge of their Secret Services library has said they have categorically no evidence that Corbyn ever worked for them, or passed on any secrets at all. And in the week Andrew Neill, who is the former editor of the Sunday Times and the Economist, told his viewers precisely what a load of rubbish it this story is on the Daily Politics.
Corbyn is threatening to sue for libel. Gavin Williamson, the Tory apparatchik who repeated in a Tweet, is trying to backtrack without giving Corbyn the apology or money to charity that he demanded.
But the bug-eyed slander-merchants of the Torygraph are still carrying on with it.
Chunky Mark makes the point that Dearlove himself is hardly reliable, because he was involved in the concoction of the ‘Dodgy Dossier’ that served to bring us into Blair’s illegal and murderous war in Iraq. And he’s repeating the libel that Corbyn handed secrets over to a Commie spy, simply because he hates and fears him.
He also comments on the resignation of Ian McNicol, the Labour Party chief, who presided over the massively unjust suspension and expulsion of tens of thousands of Labour members, because they had the audacity to vote for Corbyn rather than endorse the preferred Blairite Thatcherite entryists. Chunky Mark says that we shouldn’t celebrate his departure, because this is a man who poured his life and blood into the Labour party. Before going on to say precisely why we should. One of those he expelled was a trade unionist. She committed the terrible offence of saying that she ‘f***ing loved Dave Grohl’ in a post she put up about the Foo Fighters. This apparently brought her union and the Labour party into disrespect. Actually, considering the fruity language on the internet, I’m surprised anyone even noticed, let along took offence.
So McNicol’s walked, and hopefully we’ll get a better, fairer person in to do his job. Hopefully.
The redoubtable Tony Greenstein, anti-racist, anti-Fascist and very definitely not an anti-Semite, put up a post yesterday commenting on McNicol’s departure, with the restrained title ‘Rejoice – The Witch is Dead – Crooked McNicol Rides No More’. He gives further information on McNicol’s resignation. Apparently he was given his marching orders on Tuesday. Greenstein also points out that this is just the beginning of making the Labour party’s bureaucracy more just.
But this does give up to everyone libelled, smeared and unfairly expelled, simply for their opposition to the Blairites and their wretched neoliberalism.
The BBC Radio 4 series, British Socialism: The Grand Tour, continues on its usual timeslot of 1.40 pm on weekdays next week, beginning with a programme on Sidney and Beatrice Webb. Here’s the programmes due to be transmitted, with the brief descriptions of them from the Radio Times.
Monday Sidney and Beatrice Webb and the Fabian Society
Michael Ward, Dianne Hayter and Steven Fielding join Anne McElvoy to explain how Beatrice and Sidney Webb contributed to the development of the modern welfare state.
Tuesday Ernest Bevin vs. Stafford Cripps
McElvoy traces the battle between rival traditions of British socialism amid the crises of the 1930s.
Wednesday 1945
Anne McElvoy examines how Ellen Wilkinson went from the Communist Party to the Jarrow March, and to a seat in the Cabinet as Secretary of State for Education.
Thursday Socialist Feminism and 1968
Anne McElvoy explores how the women’s liberation movement and the politics of 1968 changed the language of socialism in Britain. With contributions from Sally Alexander of Goldsmiths, University of London; Barbara Taylor of Queen Mary, University of London; and Jon Lawrence of the University of Exeter.
Friday Tony Benn
Amid the crises of 1970s, competing strands of British socialism struggled for dominance. There were the statist technocrats, who looked back to Labour’s 1945 victory and the building of the Welfare State; the post-1968 generation who had revived the tradition of a socialism focused more on radical self-realization. Meanwhile, the shop stewards forged a new approach to trade unionism. So when Tony Benn moved from a mild, modernising emphasis on the possibilities of technology, and started marching alongside workers who had occupied their factories, it was a significant turn. Present by Anne McElvoy.
And there’s an omnibus edition of that week’s programmes on the same channel at 9.00 pm in the evening that same day.
As readers of this blog will have gathered, I’ve an interest in robots and robots as musicians. Compressorhead are an all-robot band from Germany, who play Hard Rock and Heavy Metal music. They started as purely musicians without a singer, but have at last built one. He’s called ‘Mega-Wattson’. The robot rolls around on caterpillar tracks, has a structure where a human’s eyes would be that resembles sunglasses, and, as a singer, has a massive mouth full of teeth. Oh yes, and he has a Mohican that raises and goes down in emphasis to what he’s singing. The band also sports a new guitarist and backing vocalist, ‘Hellga Tarr’. Her name seems to me to be a pun on ‘Hell Guitar’. She is very definitely female, as they’ve given her a waist and plastic boobs.
The song’s Motorhead’s ‘Ace of Spades’, and it’s dedicated to Lemmy!
Here’s the clip from YouTube:
This does, however, remind me of piece from the 2000 AD strip, ‘ABC Warriors’, in which the ‘Meknificent Seven’ of robot warriors for truth and justice discuss their favourite bands. It ends with Hammerstein saying that everything was rubbish after Led Zeppelin.
It’s from A.B.C. Warriors: The Volgan War – Volume 3, by Pat Mills and Clint Langley. I don’t agree that everything after Led Zeppelin was rubbish. And this is pure rock and roll. Rock on!
And one of the comments is also funny. One of them suggested that after this, there’ll be Cyborgs banging around down in the mosh pit.
More good news for fans of mature SF. The bad news is that the new set of programmes, which continue from last year, is on Channel 4 at 10 O’clock in the evening, bang opposite the X-Files, which is on channel at the same time. Grrr! Better set your videos, peeps.
The new set of programmes begins with ‘The Father Thing’. The blurb for this on page 67 of the Radio Times runs
The sci-fi anthology series inspired by Philip K. Dick’s short stories returns. In this episode, the world is under attack as aliens quietly invade people’s homes young hero Charlie must make difficult decisions to protect his mother on the human race.
Another small article about it on page 65 states
The sci-fi anthology returns with a version of Philip K. Dick’s The Father Thing. That was published in 1954, the same year as the serialisation of the novel that inspired the movie version of Invasion of the Body Snatchers-and it you’ve seen that, or just know the premise of it, you can skip this.
Jack Gore and Greg Kinnear are both excellent as ayoung boy and his dad, shadowed by the threat of marital strife until the kid starts to have more serious concerns.
A possible theme about children fearing the loss of a divorcing parent never coalesces. Instead, as the boy’s mates get involved, we veer into a half-cocked Stranger Things homage. A well-performed, nicle shot dud.
I’ve noticed that one of the perennial themes in Dick’s work is that the hero is always in a rocky marriage, and the wife, or one of the female characters, is always bitch queen from hell, to use the words of Arnie Rimmer. Dick’s was married several times, but he comes across as something of a misgynist.
Despite the Radio Time’s critic’s sniffs, The Father Thing is one of the pieces that’s been republished recently, and I look forward to seeing it. But we’ll decide whether it’s a dud or not, thank you.
Trump is apparently serious about arming teachers to protect them from another school shooting. The best solution obviously would be to restrict firearm ownership, so that people couldn’t get their mitts on powerful submachine guns, especially not criminals and murderous nutters. As for teachers with guns, I’m reminded of the Boomtown Rats old hit, ‘Tell Me Why I Don’t Like Mondays’. It was based on a real incident, where a teacher came in and shot down her class. When she was asked by the police why she did it, she simply replied ‘I don’t like Mondays’.
In fact, Douglas Adams was making jokes about arming teachers with guns as long ago as the 1980s, in the third book of his Hitch-Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy series. I’m afraid it’s so long ago since I read it, that I can’t remember what it was called. But I do remember it involved Ford and Arthur going off to investigate the re-emergence of a savagely xenophobic and militaristic race, the Armourfiends of somewhere-or-other – I’ve forgotten the rest of their name. These people are so mad keen on war and weaponry, that certain professions are armed because of their work. This includes teachers.
What started as a joke by Adams’ is now being promoted as serious government policy by Trump. Somewhere up there, Adams must be having a very dry, ironic laugh. Always supposing that heaven exists, and the Good Lord will let militant atheists in.
The Vehmgerichthofe were secret courts in medieval Germany, whose task was try and execute traitors. They’re supposed to have been revived in Nazi Germany, though I haven’t seen them mentioned in the orthodox works of scholarship on Nazi Germany.
But the Campaign Against Anti-Semitism, and the kangaroo courts established by the Labour Party to try those smeared and libelled as anti-Semitic because they criticised Israel certainly resemble these mythical Nazi courts. The identity of the Campaign Against Anti-Semitism’s management board is kept secret, no doubt to protect them from being sued by their victims. And the identities of those making the complaints and accusations are similarly given pseudonyms.
As for Labour’s own kangaroo courts, Mike’s experience was that it is all held in secret, you are not told what the evidence against you is nor the identity of your accuser, and there are no concrete charges. This is in violation of the principles of British justice, which states that the accused is innocent until found guilty, they must know the identity of their accusers and the evidence against, and not only must justice be done, it must be seen to be done, so that the courts are open to the public. Well, these were the principles of British justice, until Tony Blair and then Cameron and Clegg and now Tweezer started setting up secret courts to try those people in cases, where the disclosure of evidence and the identity of their accuser, would threaten national security.
In fact, these go further than the Nazi Volksgerichthofe (Peoples’ Courts), set up to try cases of high treason. The jury was composed of members of the Nazi party and president over by Roland Freisler. But despite the secrecy of the proceedings, everyone knew Freisler’s identity. And the rigged jury in these courts certainly resembles the very rigged courts in the Labour Party to settle allegations of anti-Semitism, which had obviously already decided that Mike was guilty, despite his strong refutation of the accusation.
The Campaign Against Anti-Semitism and the Jewish Labour Movement are Fascist organisations. Get them out of mainstream politics, and back in the gutter with their friends in the Islamophobic far right.
Beastrabban\'s Weblog 