Here’s another video from YouTube comics creators and YouTubers, Jim Rugg and Ed Piskor, in which the two discuss one of ‘Spain’ Rodriguez’s best-known and most notorious characters, Trashman. Rodriguez was one of the major talents in ’60s underground comics. The two state he was first published by Evo and the East Village Other, and was part of a group of underground comix artists and creators called the Berkeley Tribe. Spain was fully part of the ’60s counterculture and Trashman was an explicit expression of that decade’s political radicalism and youth revolt. The Kayfabers remark that stylistically Spain appears influenced by mainstream comic artists, like the legendary Jack Kirby and John Romita at Marvel, he’s far removed from them in politics and content. Because Trashman was an agent of the ‘6th International’, gunning down the enemies of the people. The comic, The Collected Trashman, has the date ‘1969’ on it, but this doesn’t mean it was actually published them. Even so, it deals with the decade’s topics of distrust of the government, Vietnam, drugs, free love and hippies. There’s a lot of sex in it, so be careful about watching it at work. The two also compare Trashman to later heroes like Mad Max and Judge Dredd. Trashman careers about an urban environment in a souped-up car, to which armour and a set of tank tracks have been added, rather like one of the bizarre, demented vehicles in Mad Max: Fury Road. It might also be because of the mixture of automotive mayhem, extreme violence and urban dystopia that’s behind the Kayfaber’s comparison to Judge Dredd.
Rather more problematic to contemporary readers is Spain’s highly sexualised view of women. A number of underground comix creators were accused of sexism and misogyny, such as Robert Crumb, and I think Rodriguez may have been another one. But the Kayfabers argue that Rodriguez was doing it when feminism was emerging, and so was probably trying to get more publicity through notoriety.
It’s an interesting look at one of the best-known and remembered of the decade’s underground heroes. I don’t know if such a comic would be possible now. Certainly the decades of terrorism that followed the 60s from groups like the Baader-Meinhof Gang in Germany, the various radical terrorist groups running amok in Italy, and the IRA and the loyalist paramilitaries in Northern Ireland would probably make such a character deeply unappealing to large sections of the public, quite apart from the Fall of Communism. Trashman was going to be controversial even in the 1960s, with the rise of terrorist groups like the Weathermen and the violence at the Democratic National Convention. There’s even a story in the comic in which Trashman shoots that up.
Nevertheless, there are still students sticking posters of Che Guevara on their walls and the rise of Black Lives Matter and strong initial support for former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn in Britain and Bernie Sanders in the US shows that a sizable section of the British and American electorate want far more radical change than the right-wing cliques that have seized control of the Labour party in Britain and Democrats in the US are prepared to give them. Not that either Corbyn or Sanders ever remotely endorsed terrorism and violence, despite the vilification of the former by the British political and media establishment.
One of the complaints among some comics creators and fans is that Marvel and DC, the two main comics companies in the US, have moved too far leftward. Instead of producing good, enjoyable stories with strong plots and characters, the two are instead concentrating on explicit statements about social issues and promoting characters based solely on their gender, race or sexuality. This is putting readers off, and as a result American comics are in decline as people turn instead to Japanese manga, which eschews these issues. This is the view of Ethan van Sciver and the Comicsgaters. I can see their point of view, although the Guardian pointed out in an article a few years ago that comics have always dealt with political and social issues. That’s quite true. One episode of the Superman radio series in the 1940s was applauded by NAACP and the Anti-Defamation League as the Man of Steel had gone after the Klan. In the 1970s both Marvel and DC dealt with racism and the collapse of American self-esteem following Watergate. There were several issues of Captain America in which the Captain forswore his patriotic identity to call himself ‘Nomad’ following his own, brief loss of faith in his country. There were also a number of Hulk stories which showed a very strong critical attitude to the military, doubtless influenced by the unpopularity of the Vietnam War. However, Stan Lee, the man responsible with artists like Kirby and Ditko, for so many of Marvel’s most iconic heroes, also said in an interview that he was careful not to let the political content alienate those readers who didn’t agree with it.
The Kayfaber’s state that Trashman is a product of its times, though it can also be seen as a period piece set in that decade because of its timeless quality. Back in the 1990s the Heil went berserk at a similar radical, underground comic on sale in the shops. This was an anarchist version of Tintin, in which the boy detective was shown joining the struggle against the cops and the state. Of course, the book had absolutely no connection to anything Herge actually wrote or did. However, the rise of the internet has provided would-be comics creators with an opportunity for launching their own comics without the hindrance of the mainstream comics publishing industry. It’s therefore possible that as Thatcherite neoliberalism continues to collapse and show itself corrupt and bankrupt, underground comix heroes like Trashman may rise to stick it to oppressive capitalist authority once again. And especially if less radical ways of changing the system or expressing dissatisfaction are suppressed by Blairites and Thatcherite Labour leaders like Keir Starmer.
Okay, I admit it: I’ve put up any number of posts about mad right-wing internet radio host, Alex Belfield. So many, in fact, that one of the great commenters here described him as ‘my favourite right-winger’. Well, something like that. Belfield is interesting in that he says openly what the Tories think in private but deny in public. He’d like the NHS privatised, because somehow handing it over to private healthcare companies will reverse the lethal chaos and deprivation that four decades of Thatcherite privatisation and three decades of Tory cuts have done. Much of his views are bog-standard Daily Mail bigotry. He rants about the Channel Migrants – ‘the dinghy divers’ – as he calls them – landing here and being put in 5 star hotels. But I’m pretty sure the migrants and asylum seekers aren’t getting five star service. They’re there because there seems to be nowhere else to house them. And while I’ve no doubt some of them are economic migrants, others are equally doubtless genuine asylum-seekers fleeting some horrific regimes. He also hates British benefit recipients. There was a story in the mainstream news a few months ago that there were a couple of million jobs going unfilled. So Belfield put up a video about that, demanding all benefits be stopped so that people should be forced to apply for them. Never mind the fact that a large proportion of the benefits being claimed are by people in work, who can’t support themselves on the paltry wages the Tories and British capitalism have decided are enough to keep them alive.
He also hates the BBC, left-wing media and students and universities. He has a feud going with the Beeb. He claims he was forced out of a career in local radio because of jealousy from the other broadcasters. He, a working class lad from a pit village, who had never gone to uni, had more viewers than they, who were ‘Guardian-reading, middle-class, champagne-sipping, oyster-eating Naga Manchushy – for some reason he has an especial hatred of Naga Manchetty – twirlies. He’s been the subject of a series of raids and prosecutions, including a court action involving Jeremy Vine. He’s appealed and received donations from his viewers to help him fight these cases, all the while protesting his innocence and claiming that the courts have found him innocent, at least in the specific cases he’s put up videos about. However, the truth seems to be rather different and somewhat murkier. Jim Round, one of the great commenters on this blog, has pointed out that Belfield has not disclosed what he’s done with the money. Which contrasts very strongly with his loud denunciation of the BBC for allegedly spending half of the donations to Children In Need on the charity’s directors and staff and refusing to reveal what it has done with the donated money. Last Friday Jim made this comment about Belfield’s court cases.
‘As pointed out previously, Belfield is the defendant in all of the cases, the main one now a six week jury trial at crown court next July, something he fails to mention to is supporters. The other is the now public Jeremy Vine defamation case. A video he posted shows Belfield waving only the letterhead of an FOI request (again, freely available) to his followers (who uncannily like Farage followers, never research anything he tells them) There is a lot more to it if you are prepared to waste an hour of your life searching Twitter. He has now deleted the above video, something he does regularly if his followers pass negative comments or he gets a bit to close to the line. On a side note, the Liverpool taxi driver has been quoted as saying that the bomber asked specifically for the hospital, and the mosque story seems to come from a Daily Mail “source” make of that what you will.’
And today Jim posted this comment and link to a Twitter post about the Belfield vs. Vine case.
If you follow the link, you get to a Tweet from ‘Outing the Snallygasters’, who says of the Vine case:
‘FACT CHECK: 5th Oct’21 the High Court defamation case, brought against Alex Belfield @celebrityradio, commenced. His defence was poor & the Judge made him pay the claimants costs (£25k). He posted a number of deflection tweets/video. Here’s the truth
The email address is that of the official court records. The Tweet’s also worth looking at for the three pictures of the thumbnails from Belfield’s videos with ‘False’ stamped across them.
The statement that the judge ordered Belfield to pay Vine’s costs appears to contradict Belfield’s own statements that he’s a pure as the driven snow and the court hasn’t been able to find anything against him.
Belfield is doing well at the moment. He says he has over 300,000 supporters, which is quite possible. It’s a respectable number, but I get the impression that it’s dwarfed by the really popular YouTube creators, like Zoella and the beauty vloggers.
But apart from his appalling right-wing views, there are serious questions to be asked about his own conduct and what he has done with the money given to him through the kindness of his own supporters.
One of Bristol’s most important industries is aviation and space research. The city has a proud heritage of designing and manufacturing aircraft and space satellites. One of the greatest of these planes was the Anglo-French Concorde, partly built in Bristol at Filton. Rolls-Royce is one of the companies involved, which is why I was particularly interested in this little video from them. posted on their channel on YouTube. It’s a short film about their new plane, ‘Spirit of Innovation’. It’s a small, single person propeller plane, but differs from other, similar aircraft in that the engine’s electric rather than oil-driven. In the video, the pilot and various officials and technicians describe working on the aircraft, how it involved engineers from all over England and the huge advance in research into electric aviation the plane represents. It was designed to beat the speed record and has done so by a large margin. The team believe that the third age of aviation – electric planes – are here and will make a strong contribution to carbon-neutral travel.
It’s a fascinating plane and obviously a great achievement, but I wonder how much of a contribution such planes will make to making international travel greener. I think to have any significant impact on the production of greenhouse gases by aircraft, it will have to be installed on the large passenger aircraft. And while I have seen other videos about electric airplanes, I can’t recall seeing anything about replacing jet propulsion with electric propeller engines. One possible replacement for fossil fuel jets may be engines using liquid oxygen and hydrogen, like the large space rockets. If this was done, the result would be water and steam rather than anything harmful to the environment. I first read about the idea of planes using Lox and liquid hydrogen way back in the Usborne Book of the Future when I was 12. There has been the odd murmur about the idea since then, but I really haven’t heard anything about any research on it for a long time so I do wonder if that idea is dead.
In the meantime, I salute the Rolls-Royce engineers latest achievement, and hope it does help create the greener future our planet and society so desperately needs.
*****
I’ve also written the following books, which are available from Lulu.
Mad Tory internet radio host Alex Belfield is a staunch opponent of the NHS. He’s been posting a number of videos about its failing and pushing the line that the NHS should be privatised, as that will somehow magically improve service. Today he put up a video about the number of elderly patients, who have been failed by the NHS. The title of this wretch video is ‘Tues 23rd Nov NEWS 🗞 HOPELESS 🇬🇧 130,000 OAPs Conveniently ‘Gone’ & 100,000 Kids In Care’. I’m not going to post it up here, because I draw the line at posting anti-NHS propaganda. The video’s gathered a large number of comments, mostly supportive, from people who have lost loved one to what looks like incompetence and malpractice. Several of the commenters also express their hatred of socialism and the expectation that somehow the NHS would be better it wasn’t socialist and ‘colonised by the far left’. I kid you not. Here’s a couple of comments.
SteveB said: ‘The NHS needs to be completely reformed. It’s is a Left-Wing, socialist toilet, utterly unfit for purpose, and a money sink that generates very little return. My elderly neighbour was killed by NHS indifference and incompetence.’
Another individual, ‘Chamberpot’, replied: ‘Agree completely: it’s a sacred cow and it’s been colonised by the hard left and we have no choice if we don’t like it. The worst thing is that we know from looking at places like Denmark that government provided health care doesn’t have to be a socialist sink and we can remember that the NHS wasn’t like this.’
While I have every sympathy for the people, who have lost relatives and friends thanks to failures in NHS care, much of this is due to the reverse – Tory policies and specifically privatisation. So I left this reply to the comment:
‘No, the reason why it’s in such a state is due to privatisation and the Tories. It was set up in 1948 by the Attlee Labour government following the recommendation of the Beveridge report. The Socialist Medical Society had been campaigning for a socialised healthcare system since the 1930s. The Tories have been starving it of cash, while the outsourcing of services to private healthcare companies have increased costs. These have gone from five per cent when it was fully nationalised to around American levels of 20 per cent. The private hospitals Bozo is so keen to give contracts to are smaller and, in my experience, actually offer a poorer service than the NHS. I’m sorry for your neighbour, but the solution isn’t privatisation. It’s more nationalisation.’
I wonder if I’ll get a reply to my reply, or even if it’ll stay up. I’ve posted responses to some of the daft, pernicious nonsense the Lotuseaters have said in their videos before now, and my comment has mysteriously disappeared.
What is clear from these comments is how ignorant people are about the NHS and its history, and also how they’re easily misled by Belfield’s rants about the far left. Some of Belfield’s videos attacking the NHS are about recent affirmative action policies, like the demands that a certain number of staff must be BAME as well as gay. He’s put up videos attacking the introduction of administrative posts for such diversity, whose occupants are on tens of thousands of pounds. He sees it as a waste of money. For him, this is a ‘far left’ policy, but the fact is that his rhetoric about identity politics deliberately obscures the destruction of the NHS by Tory and Blairite privatisation.
A number of the great commenters to this blog have raised the issue about what Belfield has done with all the donations he’s been given by his supporters. Supposedly this has been to help him fight malicious prosecutions brought by envious rivals at the Beeb and the local rozzers. But it’s a good question, as Belfield himself is very keen on demanding to know where the donations to charities like Children in Need go. Despite his claims to be a mere working class lad from a pit village made good, Belfield is clearly wealthy. Not many people can afford to have a baby grand in their front room. I don’t begrudge him his money – I wish more people had the opportunity to do well. But I despise the way he uses it to advocate policies aimed at making the very poorest even poorer. And if he’s banging on about privatising the NHS, you can bet he’s got private health insurance, which I’m sure many of his supporters won’t be able to afford. And it wouldn’t surprise me if he’s also got connections to the private healthcare companies.
Belfield is pushing anti-NHS propaganda. and if he gets his way, people will be paying for substandardtreatment by private companies after it’s gone. Just as Bojob wants.
Here’s a turn-up for the books – mad right-wing internet radio Alex Belfield has posted this video taking Jeremy Corbyn’s side against the Tory councillor who libelled him. The Tory had posted a meme showing Corbyn about to lay a wreath on the burning car left by the vile suicide bomber when he tried to blow himself up outside Liverpool Women’s Hospital. It was a truly despicable act, although the Syrian immigrant who did so had planned on detonating it in Liverpool Cathedral during the Remembrance Day Service. He had gained the trust of the local Anglican clergy and community through feigning conversion to Christianity, but had been noticed attending mosque during Ramadan. And he had clearly not been short of cash, as he was somehow able to rent a second house which he used as his wretched bomb factory. Fortunately, this vile scumbag succeeded in only destroying himself. The detonator exploded, but not main explosives, and the taxi driver was able to escape with only a burst eardrum.
Despite the vile smears of the media, Corbyn has never, ever been a supporter of terrorism. Far from it. He stood for the British government talking to the Republicans in Northern Ireland, but was also respected by the Loyalists for his even-handedness. And at the same Thatcher and the Tories were loudly denouncing the Labour party for advocating talks with Sinn Fein, she herself was doing exactly the same. But quietly, of course, in case it might damage her image as the patriotic Iron Lady refusing to surrender to the IRA.
But such lies and fake history don’t mean anything to the right-wing establishment, and so this Tory councillor published his libellous meme. Corbyn consulted m’learned friends, and the councillor has now settled out of court. Oh dear. How sad. Never mind, as Sergeant Major Windsor Davies used to say. What is astonishing is that someone as right-wing as Belfield has taken the side of the man demonised by the right as a communist, anti-Semite and supporter of terrorism.
It’s because Belfield himself feels, or alleges, that he’s also been libelled. He has claimed that he is the victim of false accusations, vexatious prosecutions and malicious investigations by his former colleagues at the Beeb and Nottinghamshire police, and has fought to defend himself in the courts. Hence he states in the video that he still stands up for free speech, but you still have to be careful what you say. Just because he’s standing talking doesn’t mean that things aren’t happening on his behalf. He clearly draws a comparison between his own treatment and that of the former Labour leader. And that’s what’s behind his surprising show of support for Corbyn.
This is quite amusing, as it’s caused the heads of some of his supporters to explode. The comments section for that video are full of people moaning about how Corbyn is still evil, not a true man of the people and so on, and that the meme was still true. Or couldn’t be libellous, because it was a meme. Which shows the mentality of some of his supporters. And some of the great commenters on this site have suggested that Belfield himself has a few questions to answer, like what, pray, has he done with all the donations people have sent him? Belfield has been able to fight his court cases through appealing to his viewers for donations. However, it’s unclear what he’s done with them. It’s quite an issue, as Belfield has also loudly denounced the Beeb and other charities for squandering their donors’ money on high salaries for their directors and staff, particularly in the case of Children in Need.
But in the meantime, I’m just enjoying the spectacle of a right-wing Tory like Belfield taking the side of Jeremy Corbyn.
I got this email from the anti-privatisation group We Own It. It’s a petition to the House of Lords requesting them to continue the opposition against the government’s Health and Social Care bill, which further privatises the NHS. I’ve signed it, and I am posting it here so that others can sign it if they wish.
“Dear David,
We’re disgusted but not surprised.
293 Conservative MPs voted late last night to pass the Health and Care Bill and open our NHS in England further to private companies.
That is a massive betrayal of our country and of our NHS.
But if they thought that this would be the end of our fight to save the NHS from them, they are badly mistaken.
As the bill now goes to the House of Lords, we must ramp up and ask peers to protect our NHS.
Given the government’s track record on the NHS, it wasn’t too surprising that Conservative MPs voted to pave the way for American style healthcare.
But you’ve already achieved quite a lot in this fight:
We worked with the Daily Mirror to expose the Conservative MPs who have financial interests in private healthcare.
50,000 emails were sent to MPs, forcing the government to offer a concession on private companies on NHS boards.
We spread the word about this government’s attempts to destroy the NHS in 30 local press outlets.
We’ve built a movement along with Keep Our NHS Public, Just Treatment, 999 Call For the NHS, and Your NHS Needs You. This will help us have more impact going forward.
3 Conservative MPs voted against the bill because of your arguments. It’s not much, but it shows we can flip them.
You helped do all this and you should be very proud of what we’ve achieved.
And we can keep pushing for more wins as the bill goes to the House of Lords.
Please join our call to all peers to stand up for our NHS.
Despite the result, giving up just isn’t an option.
As an American doctor working in our NHS recently said:
Will this Bill help you see your GP sooner? NO
Will it improve your health in any meaningful way? NO
Will it reduce the time you have to wait in A&E? NO
Will it fix the broken social care system? NO
Will it hire and train doctors and nurses to address the staffing crisis? NO
This bill only affects the NHS in England, but whether you live in England, Wales, Scotland or Northern Ireland you can be part of the fight against it.
Lives depend on us fighting this bill. The survival of our NHS for future generations depends on it.
We will fight it in parliament, but even more importantly, we will fight it in our communities.
Now that the Bill is going to the House of Lords, we have a real opportunity to get wins.
Add your voice to our demand that the House of Lords back our NHS now.
To build back towards the NHS we need, we must make the NHS the default provider of services. We must make sure private companies don’t make decisions about our care.
Now let’s show the Lords that we mean it when we say PROTECT OUR NHS!
Thank you for every action you take to stand up for our health service.
Cat, Johnbosco, Zana, Alice and Matthew – the We Own It team”
In this video, Simon Webb of History Debunked critiques another Black history book promoting racial propaganda and fake history. The book’s Black History Matters, published by Franklin. The book follows Martin Bernal’s Black Athena, published in the 1980s, in viewing ancient Egypt as not only a Black civilisation, but the ultimate source of western civilisation as its cultural achievements were taken over by the ancient Greeks and Romans. Webb states he read the book in the 1980s, and while it was interestingly written he thought it was a load of rubbish. Since its publication there has been further research into the ethnic origins of the ancient Egyptians, including DNA analysis. This has found that the ancient Egyptians didn’t descend from Black Africans, but were genetically related to the people’s of the ancient Near East, such as Mesopotamia. The Black component of the modern Egyptian genome was introduced later during the Arab occupation. The book has pages on ancient Egypt,, and at one point declares one of the manuscripts recovered to be a ground-breaking medical compendium. Well, sort of, but not really. It’s a collection of spells for use against various diseases. This was pretty much the standard practice in the ancient Near East at the time. Similar spells against disease are known from Babylon and the Hittite Empire. But it ain’t medicine as it’s now understood, Jim.
The book goes on to discuss Ethiopia, but neglects to mention that this was an Arab colony, as shown by the Semitic nature of its languages, Amharic and Tigrinya. These are descended from various South Arabian languages, like Sabaic, the language of the ancient kingdom of Sheba, now Marib, in Yemen. The book also discusses the Swahili civilisation without acknowledging that it, too, was the result of Arab colonisation. The Swahili culture was founded by Arabs from the Sultanate of Oman, who were also responsible for setting up a slave trade in east Africa. However, while there is plenty of material in the book on the transatlantic slave trade, there is absolutely nothing whatsoever on the Arab slave trade. This is despite the fact that the Arab slave trade captured and transported the same number of slaves as White Europeans.
The belief that the ancient Egyptians were Black and were the ultimate source for western culture is widespread in the Black community and passionately held. Much of it comes from the Senegalese Afrocentrist scholar, Cheikh Anta Diop in the 1960s, and Webb has also made a video debunking this fake history. It goes back further back, however, to Black American travellers to Egypt in the 19th century. It’s understandably based on a simple syllogism: Africa is the home continent of the Black race. Egypt is in Africa, therefore the ancient Egyptians were Black. There’s also a psychological need behind the identification of the ancient Egyptians as Black: much western scholarship before the rise of the modern Black power movements scorned African culture as worthless, and Blacks themselves as racially and intellectually inferior. This has created a need amongst Black activists to demonstrate their cultural and intellectual equality, if not superiority to Whites. And as the best known, and most magnificent ancient African civilisation, ancient Egypt fits this requirement. There also seems to be a conspiracy grown up about the Black identity of the ancient Egyptians as well. I remember being told by a Black American exchange student at College that the reason so many statues from Egypt missed their noses and lips was because they had been hacked off by those evil imperialist Victorians determined to hide their true race. As noses and lips are some of the features most likely to be chipped off over time, regardless of the race of the statue, I don’t believe that at all. But it shows the paranoia and racial suspicion among some Afrocentrists.
There have been a number of attempts outside of Afrocentric history to find an African component in ancient Egyptian civilisation. A few years ago archaeologists examining a number of mummies found that the features of their occupants were more characteristically African than the portraits on the cases. This fuelled speculation that, due to first the Greek and then the Roman domination of Egypt, indigenous Egyptians were deliberately having themselves painted to appear more European. If this was the case, it would come from the oppressive system of apartheid the Romans operated which reduced indigenous Egyptians to second class citizens. A head of Queen Tiyi, which has rather African features, was also adduced as proof that the ancient Egyptians were Black, or had some Black ancestry.
In the 1990s New Scientist also published a piece speculating about a prehistoric sub-Saharan contribution to ancient Egypt. An ancient stone circle had been found further south, and the central stone seemed to be roughly carved to resemble a cow. The archaeologists behind the discovery speculated that the circle dated from the time when the Sahara was still green and had been made by a Black, pastoralist people. As these people’s livelihood and culture was based on their cattle, they naturally worshipped a cow goddess. As they climate changed and the region became a desert, the herders moved north to join the White ancestors of the Egyptians, and the cow goddess became the ancient Egyptian goddess Hathor.
There were also programmes by the Beeb at the same time that claimed that the Egyptians were Black until the race became lighter following the Arab conquest. On the other side, I don’t recall any of the Roman or Greek authors, like Herodotus, who visited ancient Egypt, describing its people as Black.
To be fair, not every Black intellectual believes this. Caryl Phillips wrote a book, Afrocentrism, debunking it way back in the ’90s/ early 2000s, which was reviewed in the Financial Times. I’ve seen the Egyptians as a race somewhere between White and Black. They certainly portrayed themselves as darker than Europeans. Ancient Egyptian art stereotypically shows men as reddish-brown in colour, and women as yellow. European cultures, like the Minoans, painted themselves as pink. The Egyptians also, however, painted the Black cultures further to the south as Black. However, it makes more sense to see ancient Egypt as part of the ancient Near East because it was part of that geopolitical and cultural area. Basil Davidson, a White Afrocentrist, defended his view that the ancient Egyptians were ultimately the source of Greek and Roman culture and science by stating that it was what the Romans themselves said. Perhaps, but the majority of the foreign contribution to Greek science actually comes from the Middle East, such as Babylonia and Phrygia, rather than Egypt.
Davidson also wrote an interesting history of the Swahili culture, which I found in Bristol’s Central Library years ago. This was written as a kind of ‘bottom-up’ history. Instead of viewing it as an Arab culture that had been imposed on Black Africans, he saw it as Black Africans accepting Arab culture. However, he did not deny or omit the Arab contribution, as this book appears to do.
The book’s title clearly shows that it’s been rushed out to cash in on the Black Lives Matter movement. Unfortunately, instead of being proper history it’s just pushing racial, if not racist, propaganda. I’d argue that any attempt to argue that Black Africans are the unacknowledged source of White culture and dwelling on the transatlantic slave trade while saying nothing about the Arab is racist against Whites.
African culture and history is genuinely fascinating without its reduction to myths and racial propaganda, and there are a number of excellent books about it. Unfortunately it looks like they’re going to be ignored in favour of extremely flawed and biased treatments like this.
I’ve already posted up one video from mad right-wing radio host Alex Belfield showing Boris Johnson making a fool of himself in a speech to the CBI. Instead of giving his speech as planned, Johnson went on about Peppa Pig while riffling through his notes. A similar video from the Scum apparently had the obnoxious clown making car noises as well. Well, he used to be a motoring journalist. I was once told by friends of mine in Bridgwater that there was a poor chap down there, who was convinced he was a car. This poor, deluded soul apparently used to pull up all by himself, sans motor vehicle, as a car at petrol stations. Perhaps the pressure has got to Johnson, and we can similarly expect him to go on his merry way making ‘brm brim’ noises while handling an imaginary steering wheel.
There was speculation that Johnson had only pretended to lose his place and his sanity as a diversion from his wretched Health and Social Care bill, which is the next step in the privatisation of the NHS. If that’s the case, then it really hasn’t gone as planned. Yes, the media weren’t talking about how the NHS is to be broken up into 42 different organisations, with the heads of private healthcare firms sitting on the boards. But it did generate much speculation about the state of Johnson’s health and his competence to run the country. Now, according to Mike today, a number of Tory MPs have sent in letters stating that they have no confidence in the buffoon. Mike states that it only needs 15 per cent of Tory MPs to make similar complaints, and the issue has to go before parliament. Bozo could be on his way out.
Unfortunately this won’t mean the end of vile Tory rule, as his replacement will almost certainly be another ghastly neoliberal determined to destroy the NHS and welfare state, and reduce working Brits even further into poverty while muttering mantras about how great Brexit is. But in the meantime we can enjoy the spectacle of a really flailing, desperate Bozo.
Belfield is as Tory as Johnson, but as an opponent of the lockdown bitterly hates Johnson for imposing it. Which is actually just about the only good thing his government has done, and even that was too late. Never mind – it’s great watching the hate Belfield has him. The video’s titled ‘No, I’ll Never Forgive You Boris 🤬 Script Fail Or Schtick? Are You OK Prime Minister?’ No, I don’t intend to forgive him either, nor any of the other Tories. To quote Torquemada, the grandmaster of Termight from 2000 AD’s ‘Nemesis the Warlock’ strip, ‘Never forgive, never forget, never for fun’. Yeah, I realise that the slogan’s also a satire on the National Front, who fully deserve it and worse. But it should also apply to the Tories for their tyrannous misrule.
Here’s a bit of fun for a Tuesday morning. I found this short video on the Gerry Anderson channel in YouTube, in which the hosts talk about the times the show used toys while filming the various cult series Anderson created. Sometimes it was simply a case where a commercial toy was cannibalised for its parts, which were then used in the creation of one of the shows’ models. This happened to a model tank, which was taken apart and its pieces used for a number of models, including the armoured vehicle hunting down the aliens that made it down to Earth in UFO. At other times commercial toys of the spaceships and other vehicles seen in the show were used while filming, including one of the spacecraft from Terrahawks.
I was interesting in this, because I had a Super Eight cine camera when I was lad, and like many others me and a few friends went and made our of SF films with it using action men and spaceships made from plastic model kits. These were hung from strings across a painted space background and flown about by hand. We really enjoyed making them, but I always felt a bit frustrated as I would have loved to have been able to make something of more professional quality. Of course, this was far beyond my boyhood capabilities. I knew that the SF films used matte work and TV series like Dr. Who and Blake’s 7 used Colour Separation Overlay, or Chromakey, to superimpose their spaceships on a space background without strings, and wished I could do the same. You were supposed to be able to do something like it with Super Eight by exposing a section of film twice to produce ghosts etc. Or so I was assured by the manuals. In fact you couldn’t with Super Eight, as one you reached the end of the cassette holding the film, that was it. It was all over and locked. I think you could do it with Standard Eight, however.
Since then I’ve found out that many of my favourite SF shows hadn’t used such sophisticated optical techniques, but instead had models dangling from wires. If I’d known about this at the time, and particularly about the use of commercial toys as props, I would have felt better about my own efforts.
Making these short films – Super Eight lasts only 3 minutes 20 seconds – were immense fun, and like a number of other children I dreamt of being a film director like George Lucas or Spielberg. Well, that hasn’t happened. But I do think Super Eight filming did encourage creativity among the children and young adults who used it. If you can remember that far back, Screen Test with Michael Rod also used to run an annual competition for the best Super Eight film created by the show’s young viewers. Some of these were very good, others not so impressive. I think several of them were about a future in which everything was done on computer. Obviously, it was very far-fetched!
Super Eight was rapidly made obsolete by videotape and the new video cameras, which have also been superseded by DVD, Blue Ray and digital media. Editing software is available for computers so that people in their homes, using footage from their phones or digital cameras, can produce their own films for YouTube and other social media platforms of extremely high quality, far above what could be done with ordinary amateur cine film. And it’s great that the technology has moved on, so that more people are able to do this and share their creations with a wider public than just themselves, their family and friends in the privacy of their own homes.
The hosts here also talk about how they threw their model Gerry Anderson spaceships into the ground, or pulled them along in the hope that it would look like the special effects sequences on screen. Its says much about Anderson’s series that they’re still so fondly remembered after decades. They’ve even revived Thunderbirds, though it’s now computer generated rather than puppets. Which, I have to say, is a bit disappointing for fans of practical effects, but you can’t have everything. I hope Anderson will continue to inspire new generations of young SF film-makers for some time to come.
The conspiracy/parapolitics online magazine, Lobster, has published a review of a new book on the smear campaign against Chris Williamson, Labour, the anti-semitism crisis & the destroying of an MP, by Lee Garratt, Thinkwell Books (thinkwellbooks.org), 2021, £10.00, by John Booth. Booth states that he knows Williamson personally, having sought to work as a volunteer activist in a Tory marginal. He was sent instead to work with members of his local constituency party, who were campaigning in Joan Ryan’s constituency of Enfield North. This was because, he found out later, that Ryan’s supporters put a higher priority on making sure the chair of Labour Friends of Israel retained her seat than the party actually winning an election. Which just confirms what we knew already about the Blairites and the Israel lobby: they don’t mind destroying the party, so long as they retain their grip on it. But Booth decided instead to go to Derby North to help campaign for Williamson.
The book briefly describes Williamson’s career and the attacks on him as part of the manufactured anti-Semitism crisis, the party’s inability to fight back and the process by which unsubstantiated allegations were uncritically accepted by the party as ‘patterns of behaviour’ that required condemnation and punishment. The book also includes Williamson’s correspondence with the party about these smears and attacks. It notes that Williamson had two allies in the shape of Fabian Hamilton, the Jewish MP for Leeds North East, and Laura Smith, who was at the time MP for Nantwich. It also discusses Williamson’s critics, including Ruth Smeeth, Margaret Hodge and Luciana Berger, who actually stood as a Lib Dem candidate in the north London constituency in which Booth had hope to campaign for Labour. Booth is extremely impressed by a passage in Garratt’s book which makes it clear how absolutely vacuous all this screaming about anti-Semitism is. For all that the Blairites, Tories and Board of Deputies screamed that the party was a hotbed of Jew-hatred, hardly anyone has actually been arrested and charged by the rozzers despite the fact that it is a crime in this country. The passage runs
‘It should be acknowledged that, in modern Britain, anti-semitism is a criminal offence. One can, and should, report it to the police. Consequently, one would expect that any “anti-semitic crisis” in the Labour Party – at the level and over the timescale that has been alleged – would have resulted in a significant number of criminal convictions. At this point in time then, one may ask, how many Labour MPs have been found guilty of committing an anti-semitic crime? The answer is zero. For those frothing at the mouth regarding Ken Livingstone, Chris Williamson or Jeremy Corbyn, this must come as a surprise. What about at the CLP [Constituency Labour Party] level? Surely constituencies such as Berger’s Liverpool Wavertree, seen by The Guardian and Berger as festering hotbeds of “anger, denial and prejudice”, would have harboured CLP individuals ripe for committing such crimes? The answer is, up to this point, not one Labour constituency member has been found guilty of committing an antisemitic crime. Indeed, to find evidence of any anti-semitic acts that have resulted in police action, anywhere in the country amongst Labour’s half a million members, is difficult. There seems to have been only a handful of members scattered around who have faced criminal charges. And to my knowledge, at this moment in time, not one of them has been found guilty. This surely is an improbable state of affairs, particularly for an issue that can easily be dealt with in court. Moreover, for such a “crisis” to lack any evidence in relation to its existence, is quite an embarrassment. One looks in vain for the simple acknowledgement of this reality in either party or the media.’
Garratt goes on to describe the anti-Semitism smear campaign as a manufactured witch-hunt comparable to that of Senator McCarthy. Booth concludes his review
There is a wider and deeper context to this “non-story” which I and 2 others, as well as targeted Jewish members of the Labour party, have tried to describe. But by narrowing the focus upon the abusive treatment of Chris Williamson and by adhering to standards higher than those of his dishonest opponents and their mainstream media allies, Garratt has performed a very valuable democratic service. Are there many people left in the Labour party to act on his warning?
I honestly don’t know, as Starmer is continuing his campaign of throwing members out on the flimsiest of excuses. That’s when he can be bothered to find one. With the Blairites and Israel lobby working hard to make sure that people only see their propaganda, I felt it important to put this review up as a reply to it. Especially to book’s like Dave Rich’s, which was part of the anti-Semitism smear campaign against Labour and promoted the lies that Corby and the party were anti-Semitic. As Rich is either head, or something big in the Zionist Federation, this is what you’d expect unfortunately.
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