Here’s another video that has zilch to do with politics. Apparently, the computer giant Apple has, or is launching, their own TV channel. And one of the shows they’ve made for it is an adaptation of Isaac Asimov’s epic Foundation series of books. This is one of the works for which Asimov is best remembered, along with his Robot books – I, Robot, The Caves of Steel and others. I, Robot was filmed a few years ago with Will Smith playing a human detective investigating the suicide of a robotics scientist. Together with the chief suspect, a unique robot with free will and a mind of its own, Smith uncovers a conspiracy to take over the city with a new generation of robots. I haven’t read the books, so I don’t know how faithful the movie was to them. Something tells me that they took a few liberties, but I don’t know.
I haven’t read Foundation either, but I gather it’s an epic about an academic, Hari Seldon, who invents the science of psychohistory. Using its techniques, he predicts that the vast galactic empire that is so ancient, no-one actually knows where Earth is anymore, is about to fall into a new Dark Age. He prepares for this by setting up the eponymous Foundation on a barren planet with the intention of collecting all human knowledge in preparation for the restoration of civilization. It’s one of the major influences behind both Frank Herbert’s Dune and George Lucas’ Star Wars. The heart of the galactic empire is Trantor, a world that has become one vast, planet-wide city. This is the model for Coruscant, the city planet which is the capital of the Republic and then the Empire in Star Wars.
The video shows scenes from the new series along with clips of others as they were being shot. There’s also a comment from the director or one of the producers, who says that Asimov was keenly interested in technology, and so would have approved of Apple making the series. There have been attempts to adapt Foundation before, apparently, but they’ve all failed due to the complexity and immense time span covered by the books. I do remember way back in the ’70s there was an LP version, where it was read by William Shatner. Less reverently, back in the ’90s one of the Oxbridge theatre groups decided to stage a play which combined it and Dr. Strangelove, titled Fundament! This ended with a Nazi scientist shouting, ‘Mein Fuhrer, I can walk!’, just like the end of Kubrick’s movie.
Take a look at the trailer. It looks awesome, though unfortunately there have been movies where all the best bits were in the trailer, and the film itself actually dull. I hope this isn’t the case here. My problem with it at the moment is that it’s going to be on another streaming channel, which will mean having to subscribe to that, rather than getting it with a satellite/cable TV package.
Major Grin is a YouTuber, who posts videos about Star Trek, many of which mock the show, pointing out some of its flaws and inconsistencies. The video below is just a collection of scenes from Star Trek: The Next Generation in which Data, the android crew member, visits prisoners in the Enterprise’s brig. What may make it particularly interesting for fans of the series are the scenes from the story ‘The Most Toys’ where he visits the villain, Kivas Fajo.
Fajo was a galactic billionaire collector of strange and rare objects. In ‘The Most Toys’, he takes Data captive and tries to add him to his collection. Data resists, and is helped to escape by one of Fajo’s employees. Fajo intercepts them, however, shooting her with his disruptor, and threatens to kill another one of this servants unless Data obey him. Data raises his phaser to kill Fajo, but is then rescued as both he and Fajo are transported back to the Enterprise.
The role of Fajo was to be played by the British actor David Rappoport. Rappoport played the leader of the dwarfs in the 1980s Terry Gilliam fantasy film, Time Bandits and one of the O Men in one of the Beeb’s ’80s children’s programmes. He was also friends with the people, who ran the Old Profanity showboat down on Bristol’s docks. Despite his lack of height, Rappoport was a performer with real charisma. He had attitude, style and swagger, as shown by his performance in Time Bandits. He appeared in a number of movies and TV series, but managed to break out from just playing SF/ Fantasy roles. Shortly before his death, he starred in a Channel 4 show about an uptight British businessman, complete with bowler hat and pinstripe suit, who becomes more relaxed and laid back when he visits America and experiences proper pop music. Sadly, he died during the making of ‘The Most Toys’ and was replaced by an actor of normal height.
It’s interesting comparing the performances of Rappoport and his replacement. While the other actor’s performance is light, almost comic, Rappoport’s is all snarling aggression, spitting hate at Data from behind the cell’s forcefield.
I don’t want to take anything away from Warwick Davis’ achievement in making the same transition from SF, Fantasy and Horror to mainstream television – he’s now the host of the British game show Tenable – but I do wonder how much of his success he owes to David Rappoport having done it just before him.
David Rappoport – one of the great figures of British fantasy cinema. RIP big fellow.
George Bernard Shaw, The Intelligent Woman’s Guide to Socialism, Capitalism, Sovietism and Fascism, foreword by Polly Toynbee (London: Alma Classics 2012).
Introduction
This is a great book. It’s the kind of book on socialism I was very much looking for in the 1980s when the papers were all praising Margaret Thatcher and alleged superiority of capitalism to the heavens. What I wanted then was a classic defence of socialism, which clearly showed the destructive nature and defects of capitalism, and how these would be removed for the better under a proper socialist government with a clear idea of what needed to be done and how it could be achieved.
This is a rather long review, so I’ve split up into four parts.
The book was written between 1924 and 1928, when it was first published. George Bernard Shaw is one of the great figures in British socialism. An Irishman, he was one of the founders of the Fabian Society along with Sidney and Beatrice Webb, and editor of its anthology of socialist writings, Fabian Essays. He’s best known for his play Pygamalion, about a linguist, Henry Higgins, who takes Eliza, a rough working class girl, and tries to mould her so she can pass as a lady of the genteel classes. It was filmed as the musical My Fair Lady, starring Rex Harrison.
Shaw wrote it between 1924 and 1928, when it was published, at the request of his sister-in-law, Lady Cholmondley. She had asked him to write a letter explaining socialism for women. Shaw looked into it, and discovered that amongst the masses of literature about socialism, there weren’t any books that realised that there were such creatures. And, he adds in his ‘Instead of a Bibliography’, very few that recognised the existence of men either. The book’s addressed to a female audience. The reader is a ‘she’ and the examples given are taken from women’s lives, jobs and experience. Shaw recognises that most women are occupied as wives and mothers, or shop girls and workers in the great weaving mills, the common female roles at the time. But he also recognises and fully supports the fact that more professions were being opened up to women in science, law, medicine and so on. If done badly, this approach by a male writer can seem patronising, but Shaw, as a great writer, manages to avoid it. And even though it’s aimed at women, I greatly enjoyed it, and would recommend it to other blokes.
Capital, Equality of Incomes and Imperialism
Shaw tries to present complex ideas about capitalism by simplifying them down to the level of ordinary people’s housekeeping or domestic economy. He defines capital as left over money. It’s the money you have left after spending your income on rent, food and so on. This is the money that the idle rich, the landlords, invest in industry. And money’s only real value is for the food and clothing that it will purchase. You cannot eat money, and the food it will buy must be eaten or else it will be spoilt. Which means that money must be invested and used, rather than stored up.
At the heart of Shaw’s view of socialism is the equalization of incomes. He believed that everyone should earn exactly the same amount. Capitalism had created vast inequalities of wealth. On the one hand there was a small minority of the idle rich, who had to invent pastimes and diversions in order to use up their wealth. On the other was the vast mass of the poor, living at or near starvation level. He begins by asking the reader how they would divide up the nation’s wealth, challenging the reader to think for herself rather than let him do her thinking for her. He then proceeds to argue that it is impossible to decide that one person should be paid more or less than another because of their personal morality or ability. He sharply criticises the quasi-feudal economy of his day, when 90 per cent of the country worked to support the gentry, who only comprised ten per cent of the country’s population. They do nothing for it, don’t benefit from it, as they can’t personally eat or drink more than anyone else. And instead of investing it, they simply take it out of the country to invest it or spend it abroad. He also attacks British imperialism for this same thing. It hasn’t benefited the peoples we have conquered nor British tradespeople, businessmen and workers. It has led to the exploitation of Blacks abroad, who can paid far less than their British counterparts. Thus Britain is flooded with cheap imports, and British companies are going bust and their workers laid off.
The Progress of Capitalism and Decline of the Businessman Owner
Shaw then describes how the middle class have their origins as the younger sons of the aristocracy, with a few acute remarks on the absurd gradations of class which meant that a wholesaler was socially superior to a retailer. His father was a businessman, who had been a member of the gentry. As such he looked down on the elite Dublin shopkeepers, even though they were richer and entertained the local Irish aristocracy, which he very definitely couldn’t. But business was changing. The age of the small businessman in personal possession of his business, was giving way to joint-stock companies owned by their shareholders and managed by professional, salaried staff. Under pressure from the unions, they were combining to form monopolistic trusts. This made them ready for nationalisation.
Nationalisation and the Coal Industry
He presents the coal industry as particularly needing nationalisation. At the time he wrote, there were a number of different mining companies. Some worked poor mines and were close to bankruptcy, others very rich. However, miners wages were set at the level the poor mines could afford, which was near starvation. Coal prices were set for the rich mines, and so prices were high. The miners were thus being starved and the consumer overcharged. The mines should thus be nationalised so that the workers were paid a fair wage, and the consumer a fair price. Shaw advocated nationalisation so that costs and prices could be brought down and goods sold at cost price.
Banks and the Stock Market
He also discusses and explains finance capitalism, stocks and shares, debentures, futures and the stock market. He warns the reader against get-rich-quick scams, like the bucket shops which will charge his prices for very risky shares. If people want to invest, they should do so with the government or municipality. Their shares won’t provide a great yield, but they will be safe. He recommends that banks should be nationalised because of the problems the small businessman had acquiring capital. The big businesses rely on financiers, who certainly won’t lend the small businessman wanting a modest loan anything. Neither will the banks. He pointed to Birmingham as an example for the future, as it had established a municipal bank to serve the customers the big banks wouldn’t.
More anti-Semitism smearing and scumbaggery from Rachel Riley, Tracey Ann Oberman and Frances Barber. The internet commenter ‘Rachael Swindon’, or @rachael_swindon, her Twitter monicker, is Rachael Cousins, a firm supporter of Jeremy Corbyn. Her internet handle comes from the fact that she’s from the railway town in Wiltshire. According to a Buzzfeed article last year by disgraced FT hack Mark di Stefano, she and her husband are both currently unable to work due to their disabilities. Her husband has fibromyalgia, the same debilitating disease that afflicts Mrs Mike, and which can cause severe pain and fatigue. Swindon herself suffers from osteoarthritis in her legs. As well as supporting Corbyn, she also shares the former Labour leader’s support for the Palestinians. However, this does not mean that she is anti-Semite. She isn’t. It’s perfectly possible to support the country’s indigenous people – the Arabs – without hating Jews. Indeed, the pro-Palestinian organisation to which Tony Greenstein, a self-respecting secular Jew belongs, won’t accept real anti-Semites.
Unfortunately, this fact isn’t reported by the lamestream media, and for fanatical the fanatical supporters of Israel, any sympathy for the Palestinians means that someone must be a vicious anti-Semite. This even extends to left-wing Zionists. When a group of liberal Israelis said the Jewish prayer for the dead, the Kaddish, over dying civilians shot by the IDF last year after they broke out from Gaza, they were subjected to a hail of abuse from the ultra-Zionist right. And yesterday, Rachael Swindon was subjected to the same smearing for her support for the Palestinians by Riley, Oberman and Barber.
This was sparked off by a Tweet she’d put up about another 100 year old man, who like Captain Tom Moore, was also doing laps of his garden for charity. Unlike Captain Moore, he wasn’t White, and wasn’t getting the same amount of attention. Gary Lineker noticed this and retweeted it. And Riley’s mates, Barber and Oberman erupted into frothing ire. They called her Rachel Swindler, claimed that she led a Corbynite troll army to post anti-Semitic hate and abuse against Oberman, and compared her to David Icke.
Zelo Street in his article about this sordid piece of smearing and abuse states that it’s another example of the rich trying to silence the poor. He concludes
‘Rachael Cousins is political, opinionated, insistent, and yes, persistent. But she is not a “swindler”, she doesn’t have a “troll army”, she’s not racist, and not a hate merchant. Yet there are the well off, trying to have her erased from Twitter conversations.
She knew that when she gave BuzzFeed that interview. “I am a woman who has got a voice … They are trying to take that away from me”. Free speech is for everyone, whether you agree with their politics or not. Maybe Ms Cousins’ detractors should remember that.’
One of the ways Rachel Riley tries to silence her critics is by suing them for libel. At the moment she is pursuing Mike and two other people through the courts after they blogged and criticised her for the abuse she has poured on her critics, including calling them anti-Semites simply because they supported Jeremy Corbyn.
This nasty bit of jealousy and smearing by Riley’s friends coincidentally occurred at the same time I was reading Bernard Shaw’s The Intelligent Woman’s Guide to Socialism, Capitalism, Sovietism and Fascism. First published in 1928, this the great Fabian playwright’s savage indictment of capitalism. It was written at the request of his sister-in-law, and obviously aimed at a female audience. It is directly addressed at the reader – he constantly refers to her using the second person, and the examples used to illustrate his argument are, as far as possible, female. I found it in one of the second hand book companies’ catalogues, and ordered it. Although it was written nearly a century ago – he first began it in 1924 – his arguments still have bite. And one of the many all-too relevant points he makes is how the rich use the law to their advantage against the poor simply because their wealth allows them to engage expensive lawyers that are well beyond the ability of the poor to afford. Shaw writes
The civil law by which contracts are enforced, and redress given for slanders and injuries that are not dealt with by the police, requires so much legal knowledge and artistic eloquence to set it in motion that an ordinary woman with no legal knowledge or eloquence can get the benefit of it only by employing lawyers whom she has to pay very highly, which means, of course, that the rich woman can afford to go to law and the poor woman cannot. The rich woman can terrorize the poor woman by threatening to go to law with her if her demands are not complied with. She can disregard the poor woman’s rights, and tell her that if she is satisfied she can take her complaint into court, knowing very well that her victim’s poverty and ignorance will prevent her from obtaining proper legal advice and protection. (p. 61).
This, in my opinion, exactly describes the behaviour of Riley and her besties Oberman and Barber. She has, however, got a surprise with Mike, as he has been able to crowdfund a defence against her suing him for libel. Mike had simply described how she had abused a sixteen year old school girl with anxiety as an anti-Semite, who then suffered a torrent of similar bullying from her followers and supporters. Riley doesn’t dispute the facts of this case, but nevertheless has accused Mike of libel. It’s important that Mike, and the others defending themselves against her, win in order to stop her abusing the law to silence reasonable criticism of her shabby, unreasonable behaviour.
If you are therefore willing and can afford it, you may wish therefore to make a donation to Mike’s crowdfunding campaign. Details are over at this website.
There was praise and celebrations across the country and, indeed, some others, yesterday at the news that Captain Tom Moore had succeeded in raising £15 million for the NHS by doing laps around his garden, all at the grand old age of 99. It’s an inspiring feat, for which Captain Moore rightly deserves the all the praise he received. The army also did their bit by providing him with a guard of honour as he did his laps.
But Mike also put up a provocative piece yesterday, which while also celebrating Captain Moore, also pointedly argues that his fundraising feat is also an indictment and distraction. It’s an indictment of the way the Tories have kept the NHS underfunded. And it’s also a distraction from the Tories catastrophic mishandling of this crisis. It keeps attention away from crucial issues, such as:
The Tories were told to buy equipment, including for ventilators and PPE, after the Health Service’s preparedness for a pandemic was tested in 2016. They didn’t.
We need mass testing to combat the epidemic, but the Tories have so far only managed 35,000 a day, and that’s reluctantly.
The disease chiefly affects those at the bottom of society, which is why ethnic minorities are disproportionately likely to suffer from it.
Mike asks why no-one in the mainstream media is asking why the Tories aren’t funding the NHS properly. And he concludes that as poor people are more likely to die than the very rich, the Tories will keep on distracting us until they decide that enough of us have died.
The fact that no one is asking why the NHS is so underfunded is a terrifying demonstration of the way 40 years of Thatcherism has normalised charity work standing in for state provision. Thatcher wanted to dismantle the welfare state completely, including privatising the NHS. She was only prevented by doing so by a massive cabinet revolt, but since then the Tories and Blue Labour – the Blairites – have been privatising the NHS by stealth. One of the reasons Thatcher wanted to abolish the welfare state, apart from the fact that she saw it as supporting idlers – a view which she also shared with the Nazis, who called such people ‘asocial’ – was because she thought it discouraged traditional charity. If the welfare state was dismantled, the poor would not suffer, or at least, the deserving poor wouldn’t, because human generosity lead people to give more to charity. Over the other side of the Pond, former Democratic president Bill Clinton expressed this in a speech in which he said there couldn’t be a government programme for every issue, and so turned instead to private charity. And where Clinton led, Blair followed, trying to transform the Labour party into a slightly more liberal version of the Tories in the same way that Clinton had taken over much of the free market, anti-welfare ideology of the Republicans in the US. He was also profoundly influenced by Thatcher, who reciprocated, calling him her greatest achievement.
Later on, however, it appears that Thatcher realised her views about private charity were wrong. It doesn’t work like that, and is no substitute for state provision. People have not become more generous. In America, it must be recognised that religious Conservatives are, on average, more generous donors to charity than secular liberals. But charity simply isn’t able to alleviate poverty and deal with issues such as lack of proper healthcare, homelessness and so on as state action in the economy and proper welfare provision. But governments have carried on as though it was.
Thus we have continued fundraising drives for hospitals and other parts of the health service. Schools are also expected to raise part of their budgets through private fundraising by teachers and parents. And a 99 year old man has had to raise money that the government should have provided anyway as a matter of course. To which you can add that now millions of people are being kept from starvation by private charity – food banks – instead of getting the money they need to live, eat, heat their homes and clothe themselves and their families from the welfare state.
A similar point was made a few years ago by one of the American left-wing news sites on YouTube. This was after it was reported that some American teachers were too poor to run cars, but were nevertheless still determined to do their best for their pupils. The media was praising their heartwarming dedication, just as the media yesterday praised Captain Moore’s heartwarming good deed. But the news site argued that such poverty wasn’t heartwarming. Quite the opposite. Dedicated teachers deserved to be paid properly, so that they could afford possessions like cars that everyone else takes for granted.
As for distracting us from the way the government’s repeated failures is killing us, Mike has got a point. During a period of revolutionary ferment, I can’t remember whether it was the 18th or the 19th century, Austria’s chief of police or minister in charge of security was asked if he didn’t think the theatres should be closed. He replied that he wanted them kept open to divert the people away from revolution. And so we have the unedifying spectacle of the press and media encouraging us to praise the great heroes of the medical, care and other workers, who are doing their level best to combat this disease. And all the while the same newspapers have vilified the NHS, junior doctors and other medical staff for resisting Tory NHS reforms and demanding higher pay. It’s particularly disgusting that so many of those, who have lost their lives are members of ethnic minorities that the Tories have done everything they can to smear and deport. One of them came back yesterday with a poem, ‘Will You Still Clap me?’, which pointedly asked whether Brits would still continue to appreciate the contribution BAME people give our society after the crisis is over. It’s clearly struck a nerve, as the head of UKIP denounced it, as has right-wing internet personality Sargon of Gasbag, I mean Akkad.
Mike and Zelo Street have written excellent pieces attacking such hypcrisy, which can be seen at:
I am not decrying for a single moment Captain Moore’s splendid fundraising effort. He deserves all the praise he gets. But the NHS also deserves to be properly funded, its workers to be properly equipped and paid, and the British people to have a proper welfare state that gives people the right money they needed to support themselves. And they absolutely deserve a far, far better media than the one we now have, which refuses to raise these issues.
As for the Tories, all they deserve is our utter, unreserved contempt.
Wednesday’s edition of the I also carried the news that the various organs of the Jewish establishment, which took it upon themselves to smear Jeremy Corbyn and his supporters as anti-Semites, issued a joint statement celebrating their meeting with the new leader of the Labour Party, Keir Starmer. They were Marie van der Zyl of the Board of Deputies, Jonathan Goldstein of the Jewish Leadership Council, Gerald Ronson, the chairman of the Community Security Trust, and Mike Katz, the head of the Jewish Labour Movement, formerly Paole Zion. They declared that Starmer had done more to tackle anti-Semitism in Labour that Corbyn did in four years of leadership.
This is a flat-out lie. Corbyn and his supporters were never anti-Semitic. Quite the opposite. Corbyn did much for the Jewish community, as various other Jewish groups recognised. Real anti-Semitism was at the lowest it had been for years during his leadership. But he was a critic of Israel, and so the official Jews declared that he had to be an anti-Semite. It’s the only way they can defend Israel against criticism of its indefensible ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians.
Starmer’s meeting with these knaves and clowns was a capitulation. He, along with the rest of the leadership hopefuls, had signed up to the Board’s 10 pledges for dealing with anti-Semitism. These can be summarised as the immediately expulsion without defence of anyone they decide is an anti-Semite. And that definition is very elastic, and applies only to pro-Palestinian activists, critics of Israel, and those, who try to defend them. The Board of Deputies, Jewish Leadership Council, Community Security Trust and the Jewish Labour Movement are all Zionist organisations, though you may be accused of anti-Semitism for pointing this out. Fact means nothing to these scoundrels. They are also Conservative to the core, which is why they also had a very party political motive for wanting Corbyn removed. It was very noticeable that Starmer’s meeting with them didn’t include left-wing Jewish groups, like Jewish Voice for Labour and the Jewish Socialist Group. Because they were the wrong kind of Jews.
And this contemptible lack of interest in defending the Jewish community as a whole, and in particular left-wing Jews, was shown very clearly in the Jewish establishment’s culpable silence on Tuesday over the publication of a cartoon in the London Evening Standard. Drawn by their cartoonist, Christian Adams, this portrayed Keir Starmer welcoming Ed Miliband back into the party. It was supposed to be a comment on Starmer’s own leadership that he was welcoming a former leader, who had been a failure. But it was a comment on George Osborne’s editorship of the Standard, that Adams showed Miliband with a hooked nose, buck teeth and clutching a bacon sandwich. Dripping a reddish substance. Miliband is Jewish, and the attacks on him when he was Labour leader definitely had an anti-Semitic tinge. Miliband’s father was the Marxist intellectual, Ralph Miliband. Miliband pere was a refugee from Belgium. He was a fierce critic of this country’s class system and the public schools that maintain it. But there is no question of his loyalty. He fought bravely for Britain in World War II to overthrow Nazism. But the Heil decided to run a feature calling him ‘The Man Who Hated Britain’ as an attack on his son. Yes, we’re back to the British establishment’s fears and vilification of Jewish intellectual, ‘rootless cosmopolitans’ and the idea that Jews have no loyalty to the country in which they reside.
But Miliband’s true patriotism and bravery during the War contrasts strongly with the Mail’s. This was the newspaper that hailed Oswald Mosley’s vile BUF with the headline ‘Hurrah for the Blackshirts!’. Even when it dropped him, it still carried on supporting Hitler and publishing anti-Semitic headlines about Jewish refugees and so on. And the father of former editor, Paul Dacre, rather than serving in the army to defend our great nation, was instead far behind the lines covering the glamorous world of showbiz and celebrities.
As for the physical depiction of Miliband, who doesn’t have a hooked nose or buck teeth, they’re common to the racist depiction of a number of different ethnicities. But that does include the Jews. As does the bacon sandwich. The right-wing press ridiculed Miliband for eating a bacon sandwich ‘weirdly’. But many on the left also saw there another anti-Semitic trope. It was too similar to the medieval forms of ritual humiliation, in which Jews were forced to eat pork. As for the red substance, that was probably tomato sauce. But it also looked a bit like blood, which brings back the blood libel – that Jews ritually murder Christians in order to use their blood to make the matzo bread eaten at Passover. This vile smear has been at the centre of horrific pogroms and massacres down the centuries.
I realise these are just tropes, but that is how the official Jews of the Israel lobby judge whether something is anti-Semitic. It is, if it can be shown to conform to a literary trope or historical parallel. Even if what is being reported, such as the Israeli massacre of Palestinian civilians, is true.
By their own standards, Adams’ cartoon is anti-Semitic.
But the London Evening Standard is edited by former Tory chancellor George Osborne. and as the Jewish establishment is Tory to a core, Miliband is ‘the wrong kind of Jew’. The Board and the rest of them were culpably silent.
Both Mike and Zelo Street put up articles attacking the cartoon, the Standard and the hypocrisy of the Jewish establishment. As did Martin Odoni, another Jewish victim of the anti-Semitism witch hunt in the Labour Party. Martin commented
“Come on, BoD, come on, David Collier, come on, Jonathan Hoffman, and all you other self-righteous Zionist squealers cheaply using Jewish identity as a cover story for Israeli political gain. We know that the Evening Standard is a Tory newspaper, and therefore an ally of yours. But if you ever want to retain the slightest remnant of credibility, you need to protest this more loudly than any deed by anyone you have attacked in the Labour Party over the last five years.
“Because unlike almost all of the deeds you have attacked, this is absolutely explicit. It is an outrageous racial caricature, by the very standards you have insisted on imposing. You cannot apply them selectively.”
And both Mike and Zelo Street show Tweets from a variety of people showing that Martin’s definitely not alone. The silence of the Board and its fellows has been noted by very many people, who are disgusted.
Mike concludes his article with the comment
‘We’ll be waiting a long time for the Bod, JLC, JLM, CST and all the named champions of the fight against (Labour)(alleged) anti-Semitism to say anything, I reckon!
But what do you think?’
Well, it’s Friday as I write this, and all those august bodies have said not a dicky-bird.
Which shows you they aren’t interested in tackling real anti-Semitism, but only criticism of Israel and the socialist left.
And now for another of my cartoons, in which I try to express my outrage, anger and disgust at the Conservative party and their murderous, destructive policies. This one takes the form yet again of a CD cover or promotional poster for the totally imaginary band, the Dead Thatchers. I was inspired to invent them by the American punk band, the Dead Kennedys. Their angry songs bitterly attacked the economic and social conditions of Reagan’s America. One of their songs, which I’ve based this cartoon on, was ‘Kill the Poor’.
As you can see, the cartoon shows a firing squad shooting dead a representative selection of poor folks, that the Tories despise and have been killing for years, while all the while claiming to help them. Looking on are David Cameron, Theresa May and Boris Johnson, their eyes blood red. The people shot represent the disabled, the unemployed, single mothers, low paid workers and asylum seekers.
And as left-wing bloggers and activists like Mike, Another Angry Voice, Zelo Street, The Poor Side of Life, Diary of a Food Bank Helper and so many, many others have shown for the past decade and more, Tory and Thatcherite policies are killing the poor. The harsh regime of fitness to work tests and benefit sanctions imposed by the DWP, as well as cuts in the amount paid and a waiting time of five weeks from making the claim to first payment for Universal Credit, have resulted in an estimated 120,000 people dying from austerity. Over a quarter of a million people a few years ago were forced to use food banks to keep body and soul together. Millions of children and adults were living in poverty. And thanks to Boris’ incompetent, bungled and penny-pinching handling of the Coronavirus crisis, that’s all got worse. Much worse. Firms have sacked their workers, rather than apply for the government help to pay 80 per cent of their wages. The government has promised to pay 80 per cent of the earnings of the self-employed and small businesses, but this is calculated on whether they pay business rates. Not all businesses do. Some, which share a building, leave it to their landlord. Those firms won’t get anything. And the small businessmen who will qualify won’t get it until June. For many of them, this will be too late.
And don’t be misled. The Tories do hate the poor. They despise and revile anyone on benefits as a scrounger. They see them as biologically inferior, people who should ideally be discouraged from claiming benefits or even allowed to die, rather than become a burden to the rich. Boris Johnson, Dominic Cummings and their brief hireling, Andrew Sabisky, all have this eugenicist view. As does the wretched, loathsome Toby Young, who attended a eugenics conference alongside real anti-Semites, racists and Nazis. And then there are all the Tory and other right-wing hacks, like Brendan O’Neil of Spiked, Trevor Kavanagh of the Scum and others, who complain bitterly about the lockdown, because, like BoJob and Cummings, they believe old people, the disabled and the weak should be left to die rather than the economy be damaged. Thanks to this attitude and the decades-long campaign of vilification in the press, the British public thinks that 27 per cent of all benefit claims are fraudulent, whereas the true figure is something like 0.2 per cent. This hatred also extends to single mothers, of course. Tory minister Peter Lilley had them on his little list of people he despised, who he sang about as a pranced about the stage in a parody of the song from Gilbert and Sullivan’s The Mikado at a Tory party conference back in the ’90s. And nearly two decades before then, in the mid-70s, Thatcher’s mentor Sir Keith Joseph declared they were a threat to our stock, provoking mass outrage at such a Nazi comment.
And of course the victims include asylum seekers because of the very long tradition of Tory racism, a racism that has led to their brutalisation by profiteering and incompetent government outsourcing companies like Serco in the detention centres. Not that the racism is just confined to asylum centres. A large section of the Tories is deeply racist, and particularly towards Muslims. They are also far more genuinely anti-Semitic than Labour. A few days ago David Rosenberg of the Jewish Socialist Group put up a piece detailing some instances of their anti-Semitism. This included an incident remembered by the former speaker of the House of Commons, John Bercow. He was told by an unnamed Tory MP that if he had his way, ‘people like you’ would not be allowed in the chamber. Bercow asked him what he meant – lower class people, or Jews. The man replied ‘Both’. But never mind, Chief Rabbi Ephraim Mirvis heartily loves the Tories and warmly welcomed Tweezer entry to 10 Downing Street. Mirvis seems to consider anti-Semitism as synonymous with anti-Zionism or hostility to Israel, so he and the rest of the Jewish establishment have precious little interest in combating real anti-Semitism when it comes from genuine Nazis or the right. Comfy little Tory supporters, they’re only interested in manufacturing spurious claims and smears against the left.
As for the low paid, they hate them because not only do they claim benefits, but, like the unemployed, the believe it’s their fault they’re poor. In their idea of capitalism, a version that has never existed apart from their imaginations, the free market rewards merit. If a worker is low-paid, then it’s their fault. They should either work harder, or actively find a better paid job. Even if, thanks to the low-wage policies they’ve imposed since Thatcher, there are none about. In that case, it’s just tough. The free market is somehow sacrosanct and inviolable.
Here’s the cartoon. I hope you like it, and, as always, please don’t have nightmares.
Radio 3’s The Essay next week is doing a series of programmes on Paul Robeson. The show’s called ‘The Essay: Paul Robeson in Five Songs’, and is on from Monday to Friday at 10.45 pm. The short description of the series by David McGillivray on page 122 of the Radio Times runs
The turbulent life of Paul Robeson, the American performer whose career was shamefully curtailed by racism and anti-Communist hysteria, is reflected in five of his songs in a series of essays through the week. His was one of the most magnificent bass baritone voices of the 20th century, and the story behind his biggest hit, Ol’ Man River, is told by his granddaughter tomorrow [Tuesday]. Robeson’s most sustained success in films was in the UK but mostly the roles offered him were demeaning and he turned to political activism. The trade union ballad, Joe Hill (Friday) provides a melancholic epitaph.
Here are the blurbs for the individual episodes by day.
Monday.
No More Auction Block
The life and struggles of New Jersey-born bass-baritone singer, actor and civil rights activist Paul Robeson (1898-1976) are explored through five of his songs. Robeson’s signature performances include Show Boat and Othello, but spirituals defined his early career, and in 1925, Robeson and his accompanist Lawrence Brown turned them into “art music”. In this first installment, scholar and professor of black music Shana Redmond explores the ways in which Robeson’s performances of No More Auction Block map his own struggles.
Tuesday
Ol’ Man River
Susan Robeson explores the personal and political aspects of the song that is forever identified with her grandfather – Ol’ Man River, written by Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein expressly for Robeson for their groundbreaking 1927 musical Show Boat. But the singer would not wrap his unique voice around it until the following year in the London production. He would have a lasting and complex relationship with the song, especially as a black superstar performing for white audiences. “My grandfather transformed Ol’ Man River from a song of submission and despair into a song of resistance.”
Wednesday
The Canoe Song
Paul Robeson and film should have been a perfect fit. The 20th Century’s first black superstar had presence, voice and fierce intelligence that projected from the screen. British audiences adored him, but for Robeson cinema was a constant betrayal of his political idealism. Matthew Sweet considers the confusing threads that make up Zoltan Korda’s 1935 Empire flag-waver Sanders of the River, which still hummed to the astonishing power of Robeson’s voice in the Canoe Song, prompting British audiences to declare him as “our Paul”.
Thursday
Zog Nit Keynmol
When Paul Robeson stood before a Moscow audience on the evening of 14th June 1949 in the Tchaikowski Hall, few expected to hear him perform the Yiddish Partisan song Zog Nit Keynmol (Never Say). His rendition of this fierce anthem of defiance, composed in the middle of Nazi slaughter, was thick with emotion, and at the end the crowd either fiercely applauded or booed. Robeson had sung for those he knew were already murdered, imprisoned or facing death as a new wave of Stalinist repression against Soviet Jews was underway. Nigerian-born actor and singer Tayo Aluko explores Robeson’s torment and contradictory emotions that make this performance so dramatic.
Friday
Joe Hill
London-based cultural historian Marybeth Hamilton summons up the ghosts of both Earl Robinson’s 1936 song Joe Hill – about the Swedish-American labour activist – and Paul Robeson as she explores the ways Robeson was so completely erased from culture and memory for many Americans. “If any one song in Robeson’s repertoire sums up those histories of denial silencing it is Joe Hill.“
Paul Robeson – one of the left-wing giants of the 20th century. I had a very left-wing aunt, who was a massive fan of Robeson. She would have loved this. I also wondered if all the Israel-critical Jews smeared and vilified by the Israel lobby shouldn’t sing Zog Nit Keynmol. From what I gather from reading David Rosenberg’s and Tony Greenbstein’s blog’s, the greatest resistance against the Nazis, including the Warsaw ghetto, came from the anti-Zionist Bund. The Zionists all too often made deals with the Nazis, as when the Zionist newspaper, the Judischer Rundschau, praised the Nazi Nuremberg Laws and urged its readers to ‘wear your yellow stars with pride.” Or when Rudolf Kasztner, the head of the Zionists in occupied Hungary, cut a deal with the Nazis whereby tens of thousands were deported to Auschwitz in return for a few being allowed to emigrate to Israel.
According to next week’s Radio Times, Radio 4 next Saturday, 28th March 2020, is broadcasting an adaptation of Jules Verne’s ‘The Mysterious Island’ at 3.00 pm. The blurb for it runs
‘Drama: To the Ends of the Earth: the Mysterious Island
Three very different people escape the American Civil War by stealing a balloon – which crashes near a deserted island. But perhaps it is not quite as deserted as they think. Gregory Evan’s dramatisation of Jules Verne’s sequel to 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea.’
What struck me about this is that Captain Nemo is played by an Asian actor, Sagar Arya. There’s a bitter controversy at the moment over ‘forced diversity’, the term used for writers, directors and producers altering the gender and race of established characters in order to make traditional, or long-established stories, plays, films or TV series more multicultural, feminist or otherwise inclusive. It might be thought that this is another example, but it would be wrong.
In an interview with Alan Moore I found on YouTube a few months ago, the comics legend behind Watchmen, V for Vendetta and a series of other strips and graphic novels, explained why he made Nemo an Indian prince in The League of Extraordinary Gentleman. The comic, which was made into a film a little while ago starring Sean Connery, imagines a kind of late 19th – early 20th century superhero group formed by Alan Quartermain, the Invisible Man, Dorian Grey, Dr. Jekyll and his alter ego, Mr Hyde, and Captain Nemo. The group travels on their adventures in Nemo’s ship, the Nautilus. The strip was drawn by 2000 AD art robot, Kevin O’Neill, whose art back in the 1980s for an edition of the Green Lantern Corps was judged too horrific for children by the late, unlamented Comics Code. So far, however, I have heard of no-one being left psychologically scarred by his art on The League. Moore stated that he made Nemo Indian, with O’Neill’s art consequently showing the Nautilus’ interior decorated with Indian art and architectural motifs, because that is exactly how Verne described him in The Mysterious Island. He wasn’t at all like James Mason in the Disney movie.
Now I dare say that the Beeb may very well have chosen to adapt The Mysterious Island for radio in order to give this favourite Science Fiction character a new, multicultural twist. But it is faithful to Verne’s original conception of the character. It’ll be interesting to hear what it’s like.
Here’s the video from the AlanMooreVids channel on YouTube, in which Moore talks about the strip. It’s a segment from the BBC 4 series on comics, Comics Britannia. The video shows O’Neill’s art, and the artist himself working. Moore praises his collaborator on the strip, saying that he take the most disturbing of his ideas and make them two or three times more upsetting. But he admires his skill for the grotesque, which in Moore’s view places him up there with the caricaturists Gilray and Hogarth. It’s high praise, but I think Moore’s actually right. If O’Neill had become a caricaturist instead of a comics artist, I think he would be admired as the equal of such greats as Gerald Scarfe and Ralph Steadman.
Next Saturday, 14th March 2020, Radio 4’s Archive on 4 is on the British servicemen who were used as subjects during tests of the atom bomb. The blurb for the programme, After the Fall Out, in next week’s Radio Times, runs
Some 22,000 servicemen were present at nuclear tests between 1952 and 1990. Most had no choice in the matter – or even understood why they were there. Playwright Gordon Murray has been interviewing some the Christmas Island soldiers and their children to discover the fall-out from the fall-out.
From what I remember, the squaddies, who took part in these tests, were simply transported to the test zone and then told to stay there. They were given minimal, if any, protective clothing. Many have suffered from terrible ill-health, and I remember that a few years ago the victims of these tests were suing the army, MOD or government, or perhaps all three. I don’t believe they were successful. It will therefore be interesting to hear what this programme has to say about this iniquitous page of recent British history.
