Here’s a bit more information that might explain what’s going on at the Wellcome Collection. Webb on his offending video put up a link to the Wikipedia page about Grace Ndiritu – not Enduritu, as I spelled her name – which states that she is indeed an artist and shaman, whose worked with a number of important museums.
‘Grace Ndiritu (born June, 1982) is a British-Kenyan visual artist. In 2009, her art was on display at the Metropolitan Museum of Art collection in New York. This gained her a place in Phaidon’s The 21st Century Art Book published in 2014 and Time magazine in 2020. She is a member of BAFTA and also the winner of The Jarman Film Award 2022 in association with Film London.’
‘In 2012, Ndiritu began creating a new body of works under the title Healing The Museum. It came out of a need to re-introduce non-rational methodologies such as shamanism to re-activate the “sacredness” of art spaces. Ndiritu believes that most modern art institutions are out of sync with their audiences’ everyday experiences and the widespread socio-economical and political changes that have taken place globally in the recent decades, have further eroded the relationship between museums and their audiences and she believes museums are dying. Ndiritu sees shamanism as a way to re-activate the dying art space as a space for sharing, participation and ethics. From prehistoric to modern times the shaman was not only the group healer and facilitator of peace but also the creative; the artist.
In 2019 Ndiritu led a group of museum directors, academics, activists and artists, in a reading group with meditation at the controversial AfricaMuseum in Tervuren, Belgium, as part of conference Everything Passes Except the Past organized by Goethe Institut, on the restitution of objects and human remains from Europe back to Congo.
Ndiritu declared that 2020 was The Year of Black Healing. In honor of this, she led a year long programme of exhibitions, performances and talks in collaboration with institutions across the world, which was featured on The Sunday Times radio show with Mariella Frostrup and Elephant magazine.]‘
‘Since 2013 Ndiritu has been doing shamanic performances as part of her visual art practice, as a result of her training in esoteric studies such as shamanism, which she began over 16 years ago. In 2017 she was invited to give a talk on her work at Fondation Ricard in Paris, alongside other renown speakers such as Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev – director of Documenta 13 art exhibition and Fabrice Hergott – director of Musée d’Art Moderne de la ville de Paris.
She has also written essays about museums and exhibition making Healing The Museum (2016), Ways of Seeing: A New Museum Story for Planet Earth (2017) and Institutional Racism & Spiritual Practice in the art world (2019). Her most ambitious shamanic performance to date A Meal For My Ancestors: Healing The Museum, included staff members of the U.N., NATO and EU parliament, activists, and refugees at Thalielab, Brussels (2018).A briefing paper on climate change and refugees directly inspired by the performance, written by one of the participants, has now been published by the EU Parliament Research Services (May 2018).To date Ndiritu’s performances have taken place at Fundacion Tapies, Barcelona (2017),Laboratoires d’Aubervilliers, Paris (2016), Glasgow School of Art (2015), Galveston Artist Residency Garden, Texas (2015), Museum of Modern Art, Warsaw (2014), Musee Chasse & Nature, Paris (2013), Centre Pompidou, Paris (2013).’
Going through a stack of old copies of the small press UFO magazine, Magonia, yesterday evening I came across a couple of articles, which mentioned the bizarre attitudes of two right-wing Tory MPs. One of these was a humorous piece about the Eurosceptic politico Teddy Taylor, who was beating his drum against the EU because they wanted to set up a commission to study UFOs. The article was in Magonia 48 for January 1994, titled ‘Watch the skies – and your wallets’ and ran
According to newspaper reports, Eurosceptic Tory MP Teddy Taylor has been looking into a potentially profitable new gravy-train for clued-up ufologists. In a Parliamentary question to Trade and Industry Secretary Michael Heseltine about “unidentified flying objects and aliens in the asteroid belt”, and their “implications for public policy” he has been trying to shake loose information on a ‘fact-finding tour’ (i.e. publically funded bunfight) about UFOs by Euro MPs. Taylor fumes: “These MEPs have been swanning around Europe asking people if they’ve seen one. They’ve come to the staggering conclusion that aliens might exist, but that you can’t be certain.” Amazingly, it appears the European parliament is considering setting up a Euro UFO Observation Centre as an official European Institution. “This may sound fun, but it makes me angry. My constituents have lost jobs because of the EC’s incompetence and nuttery.”
It makes us angry too – if the EC (sorry, EU) is throwing money at UFOs, why is none of it coming our way? We are investigating. You have not heard the last of this. Brussels, be warned!
The second is more serious, and comes from a review of Nick Redfern’s On the Trail of the Saucer Spies: UFOs and Government Surveillance (Anomalist Books 2006) In Magonia 92, June 2006, p. 18. Redfern’s book also claims that various extreme right-wing groups have tried to infiltrate Ufology. This comes from an anonymous individual, who claims that he was a member of Special Branch tasked with combating such infiltration. This is highly debatable, as the extreme right-wing group involved was APEN, which was a hoax perpetrated by a student at Cambridge University. The supposed whistleblower also doesn’t mention real instances of right-wing infiltration, like a conference on conspiracies set up in the 1990s that gave a platform to anti-Semites and Nazis like Eustace Mullins, or how some of them also joined the ‘Witness Support Group’. This was supposed to be a group to support people, who had witnessed UFOs or been abducted by aliens. Its newsletter, Rapport, contained some extremely nasty anti-immigrant ravings by a member of the BNP, who put all his hate into sub-Kiplingesque poetry. The group ended in tragedy when one its members committed suicide after some moron told them they were under CIA surveillance.
But the Magonians also pointed out in the review that one of the leaders of the big British UFO organisation, BUFORA, Patrick Wall, also had very extreme right-wing views and deeply unsavoury connections.
And if we are going on about the far right connections of ufology, then what about BUFORA’s one time President Patrick Wall, often regarded as the most racist and reactionary of all post-War Tory MPs. Wall was associated with a shadowy ‘anti-communist’ movement, the World Anti-Communist League, said to be financed by Saudi Arabia and Taiwan (then under the dictatorship of Chiang Kai Shek), and involved in channelling funds to all sorts of extreme right organisations, and used to channel money for the CIA to help set up the Provisional IRA.
With friends like that, who needs to do any infiltrating?
Actually, if Teddy Taylor was worried about politicians with weird views about UFOs wasting public money, he needn’t have gone as far as the EU. One was much closer to home in the shape of the Earl of Clancarty, otherwise known as Brinsley Le Poer Trench. Trench was a market gardener, who inherited a place in the House of Lords as he was a cousin of an Anglo-Irish lord. He was very racist, anti-immigrant, and a supporter of Ian Smith’s Whites-only government in Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe. He also believed in UFOs, ancient astronauts and that the Earth was hollow and inhabited by subterranean civilisations. In 1979 he organised a debate in the House on UFOs, in which he also asked questions about what the government knew about alien bases in the asteroid belt. Uncovered Editions published the documents from the debate as a book in the 1990s. Trench’s debate was notorious at the time, and one of the countercultural presses published a piece about it, calling it ‘a most visionary and loony debate’.
Finally, why the EU was certainly flawed, membership in it is far preferable to the chaos and economic destruction that’s going to hit this country if the Eurosceptics like Taylor get their way. MEPs spending public money to ask people if they’ve seen alien spacecraft is a small price to pay for jobs, proper funding for industry, access to the single market and working migrants and students bringing their skills and hard work to this country.
Despite the horrific views and antics of UKIP and its leading activists Carl ‘Rape Tweet’ Benjamin, aka Sargon of Akkad, Mark ‘Nazi Pug’ Meechan, alias Count Dankula and Paul Joseph Watson of Infowars, the real Fascist threat comes from the Fuhrage and his wretched Brexit party. That’s the view of Kevin Logan and his guests Mike Stuchbery and The Cognitive Society, as they argued on the latest edition of Logan’s Let Them Eat Kek anti-Fascist Youtube broadcast. And it’s hard to argue against them. UKIP’s vote has collapsed. In recent polls, they score 0.O%. The Brexit party, on the other hand, is scoring somewhere like 30%. It’s set to be the winner of the Euro elections in Britain. In some areas, according to some polls, it’s taken over from the Tories. But its success is based on deception and an increasing appeal to militant, intolerant nationalism.
Some of that success is based on the idea that getting the Brexit candidates into the EU parliament will somehow achieve a no-deal Brexit. Which is a lie. The Brexit deal has to be made by the British parliament and the EU. It can’t and won’t be done by a tiny minority in Brussels, as Mike points out in his blog.
But Farage and his dodgy crew also owe their popularity through presenting Brexit as the cure for all the ills of British society, while offering little in the way of concrete suggestions or proposals. The Brexit party has issued no manifesto, and Farage apparently got very stroppy on Andrew Marr’s show when Marr dared to ask him what his policies were. Farage also positions himself as somehow a man of the people, despite the fact that he is the most fake, most inauthentic politico of the lot.
Mike in his article about him today has a meme from The Left Bible pointing out that in reality, the Fuhrage couldn’t give a crap about the working class. He has abstained on voting for help for small farmers, abstained on voting for help for minimum wage workers, abstained on voting for help for workers on Zero hours contracts, and turned down EU funding for food banks.
At the same time, he and his wretched party are trying to get the voting public to forget that Farage is a millionaire venture capitalist, that he’s a pal of the rich and greedy, and his schemes would set our fair nation to be asset-stripped by his fellow disaster capitalists. They are also trying to get the British people to ignore how authoritarian the party is, and its sheer racism. Logan, Stuchbery and Cog also discussed in their video how appeals for ‘Brexit’ have been interpreted as more than simply a call to leave the EU, but a justification for racism and the deportation of immigrants.
A few days ago Zelo Street put up a piece in the style of 1984, which points out exactly how Orwellian Farage and his crew are. They are like the Party in 1984, deliberately deceiving the public, in Zelo Street’s parody personified by Winston Brit, whom they exploit and oppress while telling them that everything will be great after Brexit. The article ends
So Winston Brit voted for Big Brother Farage. He belonged. He mattered. But one day, when he sat there in his modest little home, with no work and no income, and reached out to The Party, there was no-one there. Only then did he realise that Brexit had not made things Better for him, that Farage had indeed been taking the money and giving nothing back, that The Party was a vehicle for unprincipled freeloaders, and he’d been had.
Sadly, by then it was too late. Winston Brit had lost his job, his democratic rights, his hard-won protections against exploitation, his clean water, his good air quality, and food standards. His country had been sold out by those disaster capitalists he thought did not exist. Brexit meant his country was now owned by another, much larger, country.
The Party sought power entirely for its own sake. Welcome to Farage’s 1984.
A friend of mine works in one of the deprived areas of Gloucester. This is an area of acute poverty, afflicted by crime and drug addiction. Many of the people she sees, who have absolutely nothing, are determined to vote for Farage. Because somehow he’s one of them. He’s a man of the people. She asked me if people really were voting for him, because every time he appears he’s got a pint in his hand.
But that’s it, or part of it. He drinks, he smokes, traditional pleasures that are now being discouraged. He has an easy speaking manner with him, appears confident when he appears on shows like Marr’s, and is constantly presenting himself as somehow being the ordinary man against the Establishment. Despite the fact that he very definitely not an ordinary man, and very much part of the Establishment. And his supporters, and those of UKIP, get very angry whenever anyone points out that these two parties are not on the side of ordinary working people. Anyone who says they are is immediately denounced as spreading Establishment propaganda.
In many ways the type of people Farage is appealing to are the same type of people Johnny Speight based the monstrous, racist Alf Garnet on. Speight was a left-winger, and based on the character on working class Conservatives. People for whom the Tories had done nothing, and who lived in poor homes with smashed windows. Extreme patriots with a hatred of coloured immigrants and gays.
American Conservatives often quote a line from Republican president Gerald Ford, the man who was so thick, he couldn’t walk and chew gum at the same time. Ford said that ‘a state can give you everything you want, can take from you everything you have.’ But it my experience, that’s also done by unfettered capitalism and free market private industry. The private industry that Ford, and Farage, stand for. As Logan, Cog and Stuchbery have pointed out, the concept of Brexit Farage is promoting is so nebulous, that it leaves its supporters able to project their own hopes on to it, no matter how these may conflict with those of others.
But it’s an illusion. A no-deal Brexit won’t benefit Britain. Brexit won’t benefit Britain, and it won’t be a blow against the Establishment. It’ll be a blow for the super-rich establishment, including Farage, and they will use it to take from us everything we have and cherish, from our civil liberties, to whatever remains of the welfare state and NHS. A vote for Farage is a vote for autocracy and exploitation.
Corbyn’s finally tabled a motion of ‘No Confidence’ in Tweezer after her refusal to allow a meaningful vote on the pathetic deal she’s made with Brussels. So I though I’d put up this video from Andrewscottuk’s channel on YouTube of a classic Spitting Image sketch about Thatcher. It’s a spoof on the ‘No Confidence’ vote the Tories held about Thatcher, which resulted in her resignation, and shows parliament singing ‘Go Now’ to her.
Enjoy!
And I hope the same thing happens to Tweezer, and she gets the message: Go. Now!
Here’s another story from the I, simply reporting a piece that was in another newspaper. Yesterday, the I was repeating a piece from the Sunday Times that David Miliband might come back to England to lead the new ‘centrist’ Blairite party that’s been debated for months now. Today, 13th November 2018, the I ran a piece about an article in the Scum, in which the Spice Girls called upon the people of Britain to support Tweezer in her Brexit negotiations with Brussels.
The article on page 7 of newspaper ran
The Spice Girls have called on Britons to back up Theresa May in her Brexit negotiations.
The band were known for their girl power message during the 1990s, but Emma Bunton, aka Baby Spice, told The Sun of a change in message more than 20 years on. She said, “It’s people power. We’re about equality and bringing everyone together.”
Bandmate Geri Horner also backed Mrs May, saying the Prime Minister did not have an “easy position”.
She said: “We don’t have to agree on politics, it’s bigger than that. You can just support a woman doing the best she can and that’s it.”
Er, no, you don’t have to support May. She might be doing the best she can, but she’s the head of a party that has single-handedly done its absolute and level best to reduce ordinary working people, the sick, the disabled and the unemployed to grinding poverty. While at the same time depriving them of employment rights, privatizing the health service and stripping back the welfare state to make benefits as difficult and as humiliating to obtain as possible. As a result, something like 14 million are in poverty, a quarter of a million at least are using food banks, and homelessness has shot up. And there is an ongoing genocide of the disabled which is largely ignored by the mass media. Her predecessor, David Cameron, by calling the referendum did more to split the UK than Sinn Fein and the Scots Nats, because everyone in Northern Ireland and Scotland wishes to remain in Europe. It’s only we English, who swallowed the xenophobic rubbish and outright lies of the Leave campaign.
And whatever Tweezer says, any deal she makes will not benefit the vast majority of this country’s people. Despite her party’s rhetoric, there have no interest in doing anything to improve conditions for the rest of us. Quite the opposite. The Tory party is the party of the rich and affluent, the aristocracy and the business classes. Thanks to austerity, their wealth has massively increased while Britain’s working people have become much poorer. Any deal May will want to make with Brussels will be intended to benefit them, not us.
The best thing in the circumstances will be for Tweezer’s negotiations to fail, an election called and the Tories kicked out and replaced with a proper, Labour government that can actually do the job of rebuilding our economy, welfare state, NHS and relationship with Europe.
As for the Spice Girls themselves, I don’t hate them, but I was never a fan. They always struck me as Conservatives, and a number of my friends didn’t think much of them, regarding them as a manufactured band. As for their slogan ‘Girl Power’, the Science Fiction, Fantasy and Horror film website, Moria, in its review of their film, Spice World, said it was meaningless. It was a kind of ‘post-feminist feminism’, and so was essentially as meaningless and empty as their music. The video for ‘Spice Up Your Life’, in which the girls fly through a dark, twilight city of towering skyscrapers, drenched in rain and given occasional illumination by a distant searchlight on high-tech surf boards seems so much based on Los Angeles of the SF film Blade Runner that I’m surprised Ridley Scott didn’t sue them for copyright. Blade Runner is one of the great classics of SF cinema, not least for its striking cityscape and Vangelis’ synthesizer score. It’s a downbeat, depressing movie, in sharp contrast to ‘Spice Up Your Life’, which is just a piece of inconsequential fun. But the movie had something deep to say about humanity and our assumptions of moral superiority over the biological machines we may create to serve us. Plus the fact that it had that awesome speech by Rutger Hauer as the Replicant leader, Roy Batty, to Harrison Ford’s Rik Deckard at the end: ‘Now you know what it’s like to be a slave. To live in fear. I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe, seen ships on fire off the shores of Orion…’ etc. Seeing the Spice Girls’ video of ‘Spice Up Your Life’ the other day on YouTube reminded of just how great a piece of cinematic art Blade Runner was.
As for ‘people power’ and the rhetoric about equality and bringing everyone together, that’s very rich coming from the Scum. The Scum’s the mouthpiece of the Tory party, which has done everything it can since it was founded by Murdoch to divide Britain, not least through its strident, persistent racism. It’s thanks to the Tory party and their imitators, New Labour, that there is now a yawning chasm between rich and poor, while the Tories have exacerbated and created further racial divisions by whipping up hatred and fear against immigrants and asylum seekers. Quite apart from the general hatred and fear the Tory press incites against the unemployed and disabled, whom they despise and denigrate as ‘scroungers’.
The Spice Girls are planning a comeback, and if people like their music, that’s fine. They gave people a lot of pleasure back in the 1990s. But this time, their message in the Scum is definitely best ignored.
Last week the editor of the Groaniad, Kath Viner, spiked a cartoon by the paper’s Steve Bell for supposed anti-Semitism. The cartoon commented on the complete indifference to the murder of 21 year old Palestinian medic, Razan al-Najjar by the IDF shown by Netanyahu and Tweezer. Bell depicted the two having a cosy chat by the fire, in which al-Najjar was burning. This was too much for Viner, who immediately did what the Israel lobby always does whenever the country is criticised for its brutal treatment of the Palestinians: she immediately accused the critic of anti-Semitism. The cartoon was anti-Semitic, apparently, because al-Najjar’s place in the fire was supposedly a reference to the Holocaust and the murder of the Jews in the Nazi gas ovens. Despite the fact that Bell denied that there was any such intention in his work, or indeed, any overt references to the Holocaust at all.
Bell was naturally outraged, and issued a strong denial. I’ve blogged about this issue, as has Mike, and Bell’s denial was also covered by that notorious pro-Putin propaganda channel, RT. And an Israel-based journalist, Jonathan Cook, has also come down solidly on Bell’s side and against censorship.
Mike posted a piece reporting and commenting on Mr Cook’s view and analysis of the case on Saturday. Cook is a former Guardian journalist, who now lives in Nazareth, the capital of Israel’s Palestinian minority. Cook praised Bell’s cartoon because of the way it held power to account, and indicted the powerful and their calculations at the expense of the powerless. He stated
In other words, it represents all that is best about political cartoons, or what might be termed graphic journalism. It holds power – and us – to account.
He then went on to describe how, by siding with Israel over the cartoon, the Guardian was siding with the powerful against the powerless; with a nuclear-armed state against its stateless minority. He then goes on to make the point that when criticism of Israel is silenced, the country benefits from a kind of reverse anti-Semitism, or philo-Semitism, which turns Israel into a special case. He writes
When a standard caricature of Netanyahu – far less crude than the caricatures of British and American leaders like Blair and Trump – is denounced as anti-Semitic, we are likely to infer that Israeli leaders expect and receive preferential treatment. When showing Netanyahu steeped in blood – as so many other world leaders have been – is savaged as a blood libel, we are likely to conclude that Israeli war crimes are uniquely sanctioned. When Netanyahu cannot be shown holding a missile, we may assume that Israel has dispensation to bombard Gaza, whatever the toll on civilians.
And when we see the furore created over a cartoon like Bell’s, we can only surmise that other, less established cartoonists will draw the appropriate conclusion: keep away from criticising Israel because it will harm your personal and professional reputation.
He then makes the point that doing so plays into the hands of real anti-Semites, and generates more:
When we fail to hold Israel to account; when we concede to Israel, a nuclear-armed garrison state, the sensitivities of a Holocaust victim; when we so mistake moral priorities that we elevate the rights of a state over the rights of the Palestinians it victimises, we not only fuel the prejudices of the anti-Semite but we make his arguments appealing to others. We do not help to stamp out anti-Semitism, we encourage it to spread. That is why Viner and the Guardian have transgressed not just against Bell, and against the art of political cartoons, and against justice for the Palestinians, but also against Jews and their long-term safety.
Mike goes on to make the point that we need to be more critical about the raving paranoiacs, who see anti-Semitism in Steve Bell’s cartoon, and also in Gerald Scarfe’s depiction of Netanyahu building his anti-Palestinian wall using the blood and bodies of the Palestinians themselves. This was attacked by Mark Regev, the Israeli ambassador, as ‘anti-Semitic’, who claimed that it was a reference to the Blood Libel. It wasn’t, but the I apologised anyway. Mike goes on to say that there is no such thing as an unintentional anti-Semite, but authorial intentions are routinely ignored in these cases.
He then goes to state very clearly that as the authorial intentions of these cartoons weren’t anti-Semitic, Viner was wrong about Bell’s cartoon. Just as the Sunset Times, as Private Eye dubbed the rag, was wrong about Scarfe and Mike himself, as was the Campaign Against Anti-Semitism. And so are the people, who’ve accused Ken Livingstone, Jackie Walker, Tony Greenstein and so many others of anti-Semitism. And in the meantime, Netanyahu gets away with mass murder.
Mike concludes
But Mr Cook is right – these attitudes only fuel real anti-Semitism among those who draw the only logical conclusion about what’s going on in the media, which is that the Establishment is protecting the Israeli government against censure for its crimes.
It suggests to me that all those involved in this charade have been creating problems that will come back to harm all of us in the future.
Now part of the problem here could be certain developments in anti-racism and postmodernist literary theory. For example, some anti-racist activists have argued that there is such a thing as unconscious racism, and have used it to accuse people and material they have seen as spreading or legitimising racism, but without any conscious intent to do so.
In postmodernist literary theory, the author’s intent is irrelevant. In the words of one French postmodernist literary theorist, ‘all that exists is the text’. And one person’s interpretation of the text is as good as another’s.
Hence, those arguing that the above cartoons are anti-Semitic, could do so citing these ideas above.
Now there clearly is something to unconscious racism. If you look back at some of the discussions and depictions of racial issues in 1970s popular culture, they are often horrendously racist by today’s standards. But they weren’t seen as such then, and I dare say many of those responsible for some of them genuinely didn’t believe they were being racist, nor intended to do so. And unconscious racism is irrelevant in this case too. The accusers have not argued that these cartoons are unconsciously racist. They’ve simply declared that they are, without any kind of qualification. Which implies that their authors must be deliberately anti-Semitic, which is a gross slur.
As for postmodernist literary theory, the accusers haven’t cited that either. And if they did, it could also easily be turned against them. If there are no privileged readings of a particular text, then the view of someone, who thought Bell’s cartoon was anti-Semitic, is no more valid than the person, who didn’t. Which cuts the ground out from such accusations. That argument doesn’t stand up either, though here again, the people making the accusations of anti-Semitism haven’t used it.
Nevertheless, their arguments about the anti-Semitic content of these cartoons and the strained parallels they find with the Holocaust, or anti-Semitic conspiracy theories, are very reminiscent of the postmodernist texts the American mathematician Sokal, and the Belgian philosopher Bricmont, used to demolish the intellectual pretensions of postmodernism in their 1990s book, Intellectual Impostures. One of the texts they cited was by a French feminist arguing that women were being prevented from taking up careers in science. It’s a fair point, albeit still controversial amongst some people on the right. However, part of her evidence for this didn’t come from studies showing that girls start off with a strong interest in science like boys, only to have it crushed out of them later in their schooling. No! This strange individual based part of her argument on the medieval coat of arms for Brussels, which shows frogs in a marsh. Which somehow represents the feminine. Or at least, it did to her. For most of us, the depiction of frogs in a marsh in the coat of arms for Brussels is a depiction of precisely that: frogs in a marsh. Because, I have no doubt, the land Brussels was founded on was marshy.
But Cook and Mike are right about these accusations, and the favouritism shown to Israel, playing into the hands of anti-Semites.
The storm troopers of the right are very fond of a quote from Voltaire: ‘If you want to know who rules over you, ask who it is you can’t criticise’. Or words to that effect. Depending on whether the person using the quote is an anti-Semite or an Islamophobe, the answer they’ll give will be ‘the Jews’ or ‘the Muslims’.
Of course, their choice of the French Enlightenment philosopher is more than somewhat hypocritical. Voltaire hated intolerance, and in the early stages before it became aggressively anti-religious, the French Revolution stood for religious toleration. A set of playing cards made to celebrate it showed on one card the Bible with the Talmud, the Jewish holy book containing extra-Biblical lore and guidance, and the Qu’ran.
But by ruling that criticism of Israel is anti-Semitic, the Israel lobby very much appears to show – entirely falsely – that the anti-Semites are right, and that the Jews really are in control of the rest of us. It gives an utterly false, specious confirmation of the very conspiracy theories they claim to have found in the works of the people they denounce. The same conspiracy theories they claim to oppose, and which have been responsible for the horrific suffering of millions of innocent Jews.
It’s high time this was stopped, and accusations of anti-Semitism treated with the same impartial judgement as other claims of bias or racism. And false accusations should be firmly rejected as a slur, and apologies and restitution demanded from the libellers.
Yesterday, Mike put up several articles reporting and commenting on the antics of Chris Heaton-Harris, a Tory whip, who took it upon himself to write to university lecturers teaching international relations, asking for their names and details of their courses. He was specifically concerned about what they were teaching about Brexit.
This rightly aroused very strong fears about the government trying to interfere in academic freedom. One university vice-chancellor, Dr. David Green, told Heaton-Harris that he could have the information he wanted, if he stumped up the £9,000 to study the course that all the other students have to pay. He was also quoted on RT as making the point that this was the beginning of the road to Orwell’s thought police and political censorship.
Exactly the same point was made by Dr. Marina Prentoulis, a lecturer in media and international politics at the University of East Anglia. Dr. Prentoulis also pointed out that it shows how weak the Tory position on Brexit is, if they have to go around trying to intimidate university lecturers. She also explained that she felt that, whatever her own views about Brexit were, and she said that she had campaigned against it, she trusted her students to make up their own minds.
Absolutely. University and should be an environment where young people are encouraged to be open-minded, to look at and evaluate for themselves the arguments and evidence pro et contra different views. And this, I would argue, is exactly what Heaton-Harris fears. He’s not upset at students being indoctrinated. In fact, he’s pantingly all for it. It’s just that he wants it done by right-wing Tory lecturers, who share BoJo’s attitude about ‘pinko’ papers being full of depressing predictions about how it will fail. Or Michael Gove, and his bug-eyed rant a few years ago about schoolchildren being taught the Blackadder view about the First World War in history.
As I said in my previous post about this, all totalitarian societies, including Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia, persecute and carefully control education because of the threat it poses to their attempts to indoctrinate the young people of their states. It includes the control of school and university curricula, the expulsion of dissident lecturers, including Jews in Nazi Germany, their imprisonment and murder. Both Hitler and Stalin butchered tens, if not hundreds of thousands of teachers and university lecturers when they invaded Poland, in order to deprive its people of their intellectual freedom and independence.
All over the country lecturers and professors have been massively unimpressed. Afshin Rattansi in his interview with Prentoulis said that he understood that most of Heaton-Harris’ letters were thrown in the bin.
Others fought back by sending Heaton-Harris their satirical reply. Yesterday, Mike published a piece about how Peter Coles, an astrophysicist at Cardiff Uni, had responded to Heaton-Harris’ missive with a letter detailing how his course on cosmology and the Early Universe, (EU), also included Brexit, culminating in the line “Unanswered Questions: Limitations of the Standard Model and why the fuck are we doing Brexit?” </em
The Daily Heil has taken up Heaton-Harris’ cause, and asked students to send in their stories about anti-Brexit propaganda being taught by university lecturers. And so other academics and members of the general public have also joined in, and today Mike has put up a selection from them.
These have included Steve Peers, professor of law at the University of Essex, whose letter begins ‘Dear Witchfinder General’.
‘Aaron’ sent a message beginning
“I attend updog university, and we are being taught anti Brexit propaganda by our left wing professors. We are now made to gather in the study hall once a week and salute an EU flag whilst the professor slowly eats a croissant.”
Will Davies said that his lecturer in Communism and Masculinities stated he believes in free speech, but only if its in a language other than English.
Tom Goodwin sent an email about how outrageous it was that his lecturers could not give him a straight answer about Brussels and curved bananas, and how infuriating it was that they should fill his head with true facts.
And Tim Brudenell sent in a piece about how he was just saluting the National Anthem, when his history lecturer broke in and forced him to eat a copy of Karl Marx’s Das Kapital.
It isn’t just the Heil that is publishing demonstrably fake, sensational news. It’s also the Torygraph, which is just as frantically Eurosceptic and hysterical about the Labour party and Jeremy Corbyn. Yesterday the weirdo Barclay brothers’ esteemed organ and the Heil ran the story that Lola Olufemi, Cambridge University’s Student Union’s women’s officer, had written a letter demanding that the university replace White authors with Black and Ethnic Minority writers to ‘decolonise’ the curriculum.
This was another bogus story. Olufemi had made no such demand. Yes, she wanted the curriculum ‘decolonised’, but certainly did not say that she wanted White authors replaced. It’s probably no coincidence that both papers have published piece after endless piece protesting against non-White immigration and the growth of communities of ‘unassimilable’ immigrants.
Mike’s article makes the wider point that these newspaper are effectively shooting down the mainstream press’ claim to be trustworthy and reliable, as opposed to all the fake news coming out of the alternative media outlets, like the Internet. He states that their reputation is now in such a sorry state, that people are starting to lampoon them, and includes a piece satirising the Daily Mail, which claims that Jeremy Corbyn met Lee Harvey Oswald prior to the assassination of JFK. Which he didn’t, being only 14 at the time.
One of the funny spoof replies sent to the Mail I’ve seen is by Kevin Logan, a male feminist on YouTube, who posted this reply. Logan’s a male feminist and supporter of transgender rights, as well as being very anti-racist. His channel consists of a number of videos, such as his series ‘The Descent of the Manosphere’, in which he tackles the outrageous far-right, and the very genuine misogyny, homophobia and racism by members of the Alt-Right and their fellow travellers on YouTube. He’s very highly educated, but is quite a sweary bloke, so be warned: the video below contains ‘colourful metaphors’, as Spock describes foul language in Star Trek 4: The Voyage Home. (Gratuitous reference for Trekkers).
His spoof letter to the Heil reads
Hello there fellow patriots at the Daily Mail.
I am writing to you concerning the troublingly pro-cheese eating surrender monkey turn of events in the Gimpology Department of Wankchester University, where I am currently reading stuff and that.
I was in my compulsory ‘Communism and Being Gay Studies’ lecture on Thursday of last week and was astonished at the behaviour of my lecturer, professor Karl Stalin Trotsky-Marx, Ph.D.
Upon my raising concerns about his reMOANer sympathies, he made me stand at the front of the class and masturbate furiously while singing ‘les Marseillaise’, which is normally only something we are forced to do during our compulsory ‘White Genocide 101’ classes. Can you please send help, as I am afraid my support of Brexit may end up with me getting bummed by a German called Helmut.
Yours spiffingly, Herbert P. Wiff-Waff.
Yes, I realise swearing ain’t big or clever. But it is the reply the Heil deserves. Just as it deserves all the others.
As for Mr. Heaton-Harris, he claimed that he was writing the letters not to intimidate, but because he was writing a book on the issue. This just makes it worse, as it means that he was using his position in government for his own pecuniary gain. Which is fraud.
Now it seems that the Honourable Gentleman, and I use the words loosely, has mysteriously disappeared, just as he should and his wretched government should have done long ago. All correspondence addressed to him on this issue is now going to Tory Central Office.
And I hope it won’t be too long before these closet totalitarians follow him into obscurity.
Yesterday Counterpunch published a powerful piece by Robert Fisk, ‘Who Could Ever Feel Pride in the Balfour Declaration?’ attacking Theresa May’s plans to celebrate the centenary of the British Prime Minister’s declaration during the First World War to support the establishment of a Jewish homeland in Palestine. Fisk is a journalist with the Independent, where the piece was originally published, and a veteran critic of Israel and its ethnic cleansing of the country’s indigenous, Arab population. He begins the article
Theresa May told us that Britain will celebrate the centenary of the Balfour Declaration this summer with “pride”. This was predictable. A British prime minister who would fawn to the head-chopping Arab autocrats of the Gulf in the hope of selling them more missiles – and then hold the hand of the insane new anti-Muslim president of the United States – was bound, I suppose, to feel “pride” in the most mendacious, deceitful and hypocritical document in modern British history.
As a woman who has set her heart against immigrants, it was also inevitable that May would display her most venal characteristics to foreigners – to wealthy Arab potentates, and to an American president whose momentary love of Britain might produce a life-saving post-Brexit trade agreement. It was to an audience of British lobbyists for Israel a couple of months ago that she expressed her “pride” in a century-old declaration which created millions of refugees. But to burnish the 1917 document which promised Britain’s support for a Jewish homeland in Palestine but which would ultimately create that very refugee population – refugees being the target of her own anti-immigration policies – is little short of iniquitous.
The Balfour Declaration’s intrinsic lie – that while Britain supported a Jewish homeland, nothing would be done “which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine” – is matched today by the equally dishonest response of Balfour’s lamentable successor at the Foreign Office. Boris Johnson wrote quite accurately two years ago that the Balfour Declaration was “bizarre”, a “tragicomically incoherent” document, “an exquisite piece of Foreign Office fudgerama”. But in a subsequent visit to Israel, the profit-hunting Mayor of London suddenly discovered that the Balfour Declaration was “a great thing” that “reflected a great tide of history”. No doubt we shall hear more of this same nonsense from Boris Johnson later this year.
He states that Balfour issued the Declaration in order to convince American and Russian Jews to continue to press for continuing the war against Germany, after Russia was forced to sue for peace the same year in 1917. He points out that Britain should, by rights, apologise to the millions of Arab refugees created by the Declaration, as Britain has done for the Slave Trade and the Irish Potato Famine. But he predicts that Britain won’t, because Theresa May needs Israel far more than she needs the support of the Arabs. Much of the article is really a discussion of David Cronin’s book Balfour’s Shadow: A Century of British Support for Zionism and Israel. Cronin’s an Irish journalist living Brussels, who very definitely despises anti-Semitism and Holocaust-deniers, and who faces up to the issue of the support of Mufti of Jerusalem for the Nazis and the Holocaust. The book details the British use of violence and repression against the Arabs, including the use of ‘extra-judicial execution’. Fisk also shows in his article how British prime ministers since Balfour, of both the Left and Right, have supported Israel at the expense of its Arab population. PMs who have supported Israel and its ethnic cleansing include Clement Atlee, Harold Wilson, Margaret Thatcher and, of course, Tony Blair. Fisk also details British complicity in supplying arms to the Israelis and that they gave no protection to Arab civilians when they were being massacred, such as at Haifa. Fisk states
Cronin’s investigation of Colonial Office files show that the British military lied about the “cleansing” of Haifa, offering no protection to the Arabs, a policy largely followed across Palestine save for the courage of Major Derek Cooper and his soldiers, whose defence of Arab civilians in Jaffa won him the Military Cross (although David Cronin does not mention this). Cooper, whom I got to know when he was caring for wounded Palestinians in Beirut in 1982, never forgave his own government for its dishonesty at the end of the Palestine Mandate.
But Britain’s support for Israel hasn’t always been reciprocated. When the PLO opposed the Falkland’s War, they were told very clearly by the British ambassador that it was no concern of theirs. At the same time the Israelis were selling Skyhawk jets to the Argentinians to shoot down our flyboys.
Fisk concludes the article
From the day that Herbert Samuel, deputy leader of the Liberal Party and former (Jewish) High Commissioner for Palestine, said in the House of Commons in 1930 that Arabs “do migrate easily”, it seems that Britain has faithfully followed Balfour’s policies. More than 750,000 Palestinians were uprooted in their catastrophe, Cronin writes. Generations of dispossessed would grow up in the camps. Today, there are around five million registered Palestinian refugees. Britain was the midwife of that expulsion.
And this summer, we shall again be exhorted by Theresa May to remember the Balfour Declaration with “pride”.
The debate over Brexit and how it should be implicated continues to divide politicians over this side of the Pond, particularly in the Conservative party where Boris Johnson seems determined to contradict everything said by the rest of his party. Nigel Farage, UKIP and the Leave campaign notoriously claimed that once we left the EU, the money we’d sent off to Brussels would be used instead to fund the NHS. This promise has been proved to have been blatantly false, and the money supposedly saved – or will be saved, when we eventually leave the EU – will most definitely not be spent on the NHS.
This isn’t a new issue. It was extensively covered at the time, complete with Boris and Farage appearing on various news programmes denying that they’d ever made such promises. Even when shown footage of the promise prominently displayed on the sides of buses. I found this piece short video from Sam Seder’s Majority Report. It was originally posted back in the summer, but the issue remains acutely relevant. In it, Seder shows Farage desperately trying to slither out of his promise to fund the NHS from Britain’s EU contributions. And he makes the point that Farage has broken his promise. This shows how news of Farage’s and the ‘Leave’ campaign’s duplicity crossed the Atlantic.
This still remains relevant to British politics, as the Conservatives are still making all kinds of claims about how Brexit will be implemented and how they will secure a good deal for Britain. But they’ve broken so many of their promises, even without the blatant mendacity of the Leave campaign, that they simply can’t be trusted.
And Farage’s duplicity also affects American politics and their relationship with us. He has, after all, appeared on the hustings with Trump, and the orange Nazi wanted him to be appointed our ambassador to the US. Fortunately, this was very definitely rejected by the Tories. Farage and Trump are both extreme right-wingers, who have shown that they really can’t be trusted to honour their election promises. It’s good that Farage hasn’t been made our man in Washington, but he still remains a very dangerous political presence.
Okay, I’ve already blogged about one Counterpunch article today, by Garikai Chengu tracing the history of British imperial domination in Iraq. This is another article from the same magazine that needs to be read. It’s about the NATO conference yesterday and today, and the continuing build up of NATO forces along the borders with Russia. NATO troops, including British squaddies, are being sent to reinforce Poland, Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia, against possible Russian aggression.
The 1980s Cold War
This was on the BBC news yesterday, which reported that there were fears about a possible Russian threat following Russian attempts to fly military aircraft over Estonian airspace. This is all extremely frightening, as it is all too much like the Cold War those of us, who are now middle aged, grew up under in the 1980s. It was a time when Thatcher and Reagan were ranting about the Soviet Union being ‘the evil empire’, and the world really was on the edge of nuclear war. It dam’ well nearly broke out too, on at least three occasions. On one of these, it was only through the very clear thinking of a Russian officer, who insisted on visual confirmation of a nuclear attack after the Soviet defence computers malfunctioned and signalled a false alarm, that we’re all here, alive today.
Reagan himself nearly started another nuclear showdown with a stupid joke. He opened a Republican rally with the quip that ‘Congress has passed legislation against the Soviet Union. Bombing begins in ten minutes’. While the Republican faithful cheered wildly, a Soviet nuclear missile base in Siberia went on red alert for half an hour. Some people should really know when to keep their gobs shut. And another nuclear incident was started by a technician dropping his spanner down a missile silo. And there no doubt have been others, too many others.
The children of my generation were left traumatised with the threat that any second we could be vaporised and our planet reduced to dead, smouldering ash, just as our parents’ had been during the Cuban missile crisis. We hoped, prayed and rejoiced that everything might be different when Communism fell. The Soviet Empire dissolved, nations threw off the yoke of tyranny, and people from the east and west could finally meet and mix, to work and set up businesses in each others’ countries. The Iron Curtain Churchill described was gone. And the spectre of nuclear holocaust was lifted from that part of the Eurasian landmass.
Now it all looks like it’s all coming back.
Cloughley on the Failure of the Campaigns in Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya
Brian Cloughley, the author of the Counterpunch piece, is a former NATO soldier, whose duties included serving with an NATO atomic missile regiment. He discusses the irony of Poland hosting the NATO conference just when the Chilcot report had condemned Tony Blair for his lies and crimes in the Iraq invasion. The article describes the failures of the NATO invasions and actions in Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya, all of which are now in a worse state than before. And despite the overwhelming numerical and technological superiority of NATO forces in Afghanistan, we still have not subdued the Taliban, who are little more than a bunch of tribesmen with only the most basic equipment. As well as increased instability and conflict in all of these conflicts, and the growth of Islamism and massive human rights abuses, the attack on Libya has also worsened the migrant crisis, as hundreds of thousands from elsewhere in Africa flood into the country, seeking a better life across the Med in Europe.
Russia No Threat
Cloughley also talks about the bloated financial nature of NATO, as it consumes a large part of its member countries’ taxes in expenditure on American arms and support that they can often ill afford. Its lavish expenditure can be seen in the fact that it has just opened a new palace in Brussels, the cost of which has escalated to $2 billion. And now NATO is strengthening its forces on its eastern borders against a supposed Russian threat, using terms like ‘forward presence’, which, despite official denials, suggest that they are preparing for a war. However, General Petr Pavel, Chairman of NATO’s military committee, has stated that Russian “aggression is not on the agenda and no intelligence assessment suggests such a thing.”
The German Foreign Minister, Frank-Walter Steinmeier has also warned against exacerbating the situation with further military posturing. He has said “What we should not do now is inflame the situation with saber-rattling and warmongering. Whoever believes that a symbolic tank parade on the alliance’s eastern border will bring security is mistaken. We are well-advised not to create pretexts to renew an old confrontation.” This comes from someone, whose country for over four decades was on the very front line of any possible war between NATO and the Warsaw pact.
Putin himself has told his diplomatic corps that this is all about western aggression, about NATO trying to justify itself. He said “NATO seems to be making a show of its anti-Russian stance. NATO not only seeks to find in Russia’s actions pretexts to affirm its own legitimacy and the need for its existence, but is also taking genuinely confrontational steps.”
Cloughley is convinced that there is no military threat from Russia, and this is really just the West and NATO preparing for yet another unprovoked war, selling it to its peoples on the lies that intelligence really has shown the Russians are building up their forces to invade.
This is terrifying, and, frankly, a damning indictment of the Continent’s leaders. It looked for a few decades that the spectre of nuclear war between Russia and the West had gone forever. Now it’s come back. I really am not sure how much of a military threat Russia is. The Beeb reports mention overflights of Estonia by Russian planes. But they attempt to do that to Britain, and have done since the 1980s and possibly long before. What usually happens is that we send up a few RAF planes just as they’re approaching Scotland, at which point they scarper back to Russia. It’s been going on for decades. My guess is that the Russians are trying something similar in Estonia. It is a deliberate attempt to intimidate, to prod us, but nothing out of the ordinary.
Russian spends vast amounts on its arms, but even then, it’s much less than American military expenditure. And Lobster has published more than one article taking apart the lies my generation were told about the military threat from the Warsaw Pact in the ’70s and ’80s. We were told that the Soviet forces were massive, their troops eager and well-trained, and well equipped. They were poised to invade Europe at any moment. They weren’t. Their military equipment, including tanks, were inferior to the West. And more importantly, by the 1970s, the USSR simply wasn’t interested. Rather than dedicated Cold Warriors bent on exported Communism, the Nomenklatura – Communist party functionaries and officials – at home were to busy enjoying their own privileges, and trying to get abroad to buy good quality western goods they could sell on the black market back home.
Ukrainian Government and Nazis; Persecution of Russians and Democrats
As for the Russian threat to the Ukraine, from what I’ve seen and reblogged here, everything suggests that rather than being the aggressors, the Russian minority is the victims. They are being persecuted, subject to nationalist violence, and prevented by physical force from exercising their right to vote. Rather than being genuine democrats, the Ukrainian government looks like your bog-standard set of post-Soviet oligarchs, and corporate stooges, comparable to their counterparts in Britain and the US. The government also contains genuine, unreconstructed Nazis from the ‘pravy sektor’ – the Right Sector. These are groups which wear the insignia and uniforms of the auxiliary SS units which collaborated with the Nazis in their invasion of the US, and truly horrific pogroms against Soviet Jews. They are ultra-violent thugs, who have carried out horrific attacks on genuine Ukrainian democrats and trade unionists. In the demonstrations that overthrew the pro-Soviet government a few years ago, they shot at and attacked the peaceful demonstrators on their own side, while trying to make it look like it came from the Russians.
I’ve also seen footage on YouTube in which Russian soldiers capture a masked soldier, who then announces that he’s an America. I don’t know whether this is propaganda, or footage of a genuine event. Either is possible. But I certainly don’t discount the possibility that some of the supposedly Ukrainian troops include American special ops forces.
Europe Pushed to Brink of War for Corporate Profit
Putin is a thug. His assassination of his political opponents in Russia and beating and intimidation of journos, who refused to follow his line, is ample proof of that. But I don’t believe he is planning to invade Poland or the Baltic States. I am most dreadfully afraid that this time, Europe is being pushed into war with Russia on false pretexts, for the corporate profit of international capital. And it will be us proles, from America, England, France, Germany, and right across Europe into Poland, Ukraine, the Baltic and Russia, who will pay the bloody price.
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