Clive James on Nixon’s Interview with Henry Kissinger

One of the books I was reading in hospital was Clive James’ The Crystal Bucket (London: Picador 1981). As I said in a previous blog post, James was the TV critic for the Observer. He started out on the radical left, and ended up a Conservative, writing for the Torygraph. During the 1980s and 1990s, he had his own show, first on Channel 4 with Sunday Night Clive, and then on the Beeb with Monday night. In these, he zoomed up and down the information superhighway to bring you satirical comment on the news and interview stars like Peter Cook, William Shatner, and Sylvester Stallone’s weird and highly embarrassing, at least for him, mother.

James could be witty and intelligent, and in The Crystal Bucket he reviewed some of the programmes then being shown on the serious issue of the time. Like old Nazis and Fascists like Albert Speer and Oswald Mosley talking about Nazi Germany or their career as Fascists, without once admitting that they were genuinely persecutory anti-Semites, responsible or in Mosley’s case, criminally supporting a regime that murdered people in their millions for no other crime than their ethnicity or political orientation.

James also reviewed David Frost’s interview with Richard Nixon, in which America’s most notorious president until Trump tried to sound repentant for the horrors of his foreign policy, while actually not denying or repudiating them at all. This was the interview that was recently filmed as Frost/Nixon.

Frost also interviewed the man responsible for Nixon’s genocidal foreign policy, Henry Kissinger. Kissinger brought chaos, torture and death across the globe from the overthrow of Allende in Chile to the support of another Fascist thug in Pakistan. Of whom Nixon himself said that this thug was ‘a son of a bitch, but he’s our son of a bitch’. Kissinger’s massive bombing campaign was responsible for the rise in power of the Khmer Rouge, who became the leading opposition group against the Americans. And after they seized power came the genocides and massacres of Pol Pot’s Year Zero, in which 1-2 millions died.

The review’s particularly interesting for this passage. James was not a total opponent of the Vietnam War, and seems to have believe that the Americans were right to fight against the Viet Cong because of the horrors they would inflict on the rest of the country when they gained power. He criticised Frost, because he thought Frost had bought the whole anti-Vietnam War argument, and states that the Americans were justified in bombing North Vietnamese bases in Cambodia. They were just too brutal, as was Kissinger’s foreign policy generally, and his overthrow of the democratically elected president of Chile, Salvador Allende, was criminal.

James wrote

Indeed Frost’s questioning, though admirably implacable, was often wide of the mark. Frost had obviously bought the entire ant-war package on Cambodia, up to and including the idea that the North Vietnamese had scarcely even been present within its borders. They were there all right. There was considerable military justification for US intervention in Cambodia, as even some of the most severe critics of Nixon and Kissinger are prepared to admit. ‘Now jusd a minude,’ fumed Kissinger, ‘with all due respecd, I think your whole line of quesdioning is maging a moggery of whad wend on in Indo-China. ‘

Well, not quite. Nixon and Kissinger might have had short-term military reasons for their policy in Cambodia, but the ruinous long-term consequences were easily predictable. Nor, despite Kissinger’s plausible appeal to international law, was there anything legal about the way he and his President tried to keep the bombing secret. In fact, they conspired to undermine the United States Constitution. Kissinger’s personal tragedy is that his undoubted hatred of totalitarianism leads him to behave as if democracy is not strong enough to oppose it.

Unfortunately his personal tragedy, when he was in power, transformed itself into the tragedy of whole countries. The most revealing part of the interview was not about South East Asia, but about Chile. It transpires that a 36 per cent share of the popular vote was not enough to satisfy Kissinger that Allende had been democratically elected. Doubtless remembering Hitler, who had got in on a comparable share of the total vote, Kissinger blandly ascribed Allende’s electoral victory to a ‘peculiaridy of the consdidution’. But Margaret Thatcher is Prime Minister of Great Britain by the same kind of peculiarity, and presumably Kissinger, if he were still ruling the roost, would have no plans to topple her. By what right did he topple Allende?

Kissinger couldn’t even conceive of this as a question, ‘Manipulading the domesdig affairs of another goundry’, he explained, ‘is always gombligaded.’It is not just complicated, it is often criminal. The Nixon-Kissinger policy in Chile was an unalloyed disaster, which delivered the population of that country into the hands of torturers and gave Kissingers’ totalitarian enemy their biggest propaganda boost of recent times. You didn’t have to be Jane Fonda to hate the foreign policy of Nixon and Kissinger. all you had to be was afraid of Communism.
(‘Maging a Moggery’, pp.226-228, 4th November 1979).

This shows up two things. Firstly, the sheer murderousness behind Hillary Clinton. Posing as the ‘woman’s candidate’ in the Democratic presidential election contest, and then again in the elections proper against Trump, she showed none of the deep feminine, and feminist concerns for peace and humanity, which have seen women across the world lead marches and protests groups against war and Fascism. Like the women in Chile who formed a group campaigning for the release of information on the victims of Pinochet’s coup who ‘disappeared’. I remember Sinead O’Connor singing ‘Nothing Compares 2 U’ back in the 1990s as part of a programme celebrating them and protesters like them. Hillary, instead, has shown herself every bit as much a military hawk and anti-democrat as the generals she surrounded herself with. I’ve no doubt that if she had won the election, we would now be at war with China and Russia. She’s also the woman, who glowingly boasted how she went on holiday with Kissinger, something that did not impress Bernie Sanders in the presidential debates.

It also shows up the Times. A few weeks ago, I posted up a bit I found in a book on the right-wing bias of the British media. This was an extract from the Times, in which one of their lead writers declared that Pinochet’s coup was entirely justified, because Allende only had 36 per cent of the vote and he couldn’t control the country.

Well, Thatcher had the same proportion of the vote, and there was widespread, determined opposition to her in the form of strikes and riots. But instead, rather than calling for her overthrow, the Times celebrated her election victory as a return to proper order, economic orthodoxy and the rest of the right-wing claptrap.

It shows just how thuggish and hypocritical Murdoch’s Times is, and just how much Hillary certainly didn’t deserve the support of America and its women. She’s been whining about how she’s been the victim of left-wing ‘misogyny’ ever since. But if you want to see what she really represents, think of Nixon, Chile’s disappeared, it’s campaigning women and Sinead O’Connor’s performance. O’Connor herself, in my opinion, is no saint. But she’s the better women than Hillary.

Sam Seder on Disney’s Animatronic Donald Trump

Well, as Freddie Mercury once sang in Queen’s epic track, ‘Machines’, ‘The machines take over’, and this time there really ‘ain’t no rock ‘n’ roll’. Or as the blurb for this video puts it instead, the Trump animatronic is so horrifying it’ll haunt your dreams.

Disney have created a robot version of America’s most unpopular fascistic president for their Hall of Presidents. The Trumpdroid stands in front of the other animatronic US presidents, and recites a speech, with appropriate gestures and body movements, about his august predecessors were responsible for crafting the American constitution and political structure, and so creating the freedom that Americans enjoy today.

And Seder and his co-hosts are right: it is very creepy. The robotics technology used to animate the machine is really impressive, but it does bear out the observation of one Japanese robotics scientist. I forgotten the fellow’s name, unfortunately, but he shrewdly observed that people are uncomfortable with things that resemble them closely, but are still very different. Hence the human discomfort with robots when they become a little too accurate. Something similar was also said by Red Dwarf’s Kryten way back in the 1990s. Lister, or one of the other members of the ship’s highly dysfunctional crew, ask him why his manufacturers have made him look very much less than a perfect replica of a human. He replies by stating that it’s because this would make people feel uncomfortable around him, for exactly the same reasons the Japanese scientist suggested. And way back in the mid-1970s, an irrational fear of robots – ‘robophobia’, or ‘Grimwade’s Syndrome’, was one of the plot elements in the Tom Baker Dr. Who serial ‘The Robots of Death’. This particular serial was set on a sandminer, a vast mining vehicle, operated by a small human crew under which was a much larger labour force of robots. And the robots start shaking off their servitude. It’s explained in the show that some people have an irrational fear of robots, because although they look like humans, they don’t employ any body language. And so to them they appear as ‘the walking dead’.

Rather more humorously, Seder and his friends joke that the other mechanical presidents are looking at the Trumpdroid wondering how on Earth it got there. And that the President Lincoln android is just about to tell the rest of them that there’s no choice for it now: they have to put the pistols to their heads and blow their little robot brains out. They also joke that it’s rather like the bit on the SF series Westworld, when the robots look down at themselves and finally realise what they are.

Rather more seriously, the clip begins with a discussion between Seder and a caller about the GOP’s tax bill, and why people join the Republican party. He states some join, because they hate the Environmental Protection Agency, and what to use highly toxic pesticides on their land, like Tom Delaye. Others really hate trade unions, and what to destroy them to keep ordinary people poor. But the majority do it to enrich themselves through corporate sponsorship. Such is the state of American politics. And the same comments also apply to the corporate Dems of Hillary Clinton, and to the Conservatives and Blairite Labour over this side of the Pond.

If these characters remain in power, perhaps the world would be much better if the machines really took over. Or the Xenomorphs from the Alien franchise. After all, as Ripley says in the 2nd film, Aliens, when she discovers the way she and the space marines have been betrayed by the Corporation, the aliens ‘don’t f**k each other over for a percentage’.

Telesur English on the Chaos Caused by the Death of Gaddafy

This is another very short video from the South American broadcaster, Telesur English, about the destruction wreaked on Africa by the murder of Colonel Gaddafy. The video states that under the dictator, the country had free education and healthcare. It was also a racially tolerant society, and Gaddafy did much to help the other countries on the continent. The NATO bombings that assisted the rebels have destroyed much of the country, including the free education and healthcare. Islamist rebels have taken over large regions, and the country is in turmoil. The racial tolerance is gone, and weapons from Libya have travelled south, to be used by Islamist rebels making life miserable in other African nations.

This is all absolutely true, and I’ve said much of it before. But it’s interesting to see it repeated by Telesur. Gaddafy wasn’t perfect. He was a thug and a dictator. He also used Islamist terrorists to kill his political rivals elsewhere in Africa and the Middle East. But he gave his country prosperity after decades of bloody Italian colonial rule, secular government, albeit one that mixed Arab socialism with Islam and stability. And there is now a massive racist backlash against the Black Africans, who came to the country seeking a better life, or passage to Europe.

But he defied America and big oil, and so he was on the neocons list of countries to be invaded and leaders to be ousted. His country has been destroyed, Africa as a whole impoverished. And Hillary Clinton, now promoting herself as the great feminist heroine, had a jolly good giggle about his death.

Hillary Clinton, Laura Kuenssberg and ‘Mobying’

Laura Kuenssberg and Trollface: Have her supporters been posting misogynist remarks as her opponents, in order to get them silenced?

Yesterday, Mike over at Vox Political reported that the internet petition to get the BBC to sack their political editor, Laura Kuenssberg, for her egregious Conservative bias, had been taken down. It was removed by the man, who had put it up, who did so out of his strong distaste for misogynist comments put their by trolls. The former politics editor at the Independent also mentioned the sexist comments put up on the petition in an interview published in the Guardian. The comments were supposed to have been put up there by supporters of Jeremy Corbyn. Mike was sceptical about this, pointing out that it’s very easy for opponents of the petition to post disgusting comments on it, and then complain to the internet hosts or the petition organisers about its content.

Democratic presidential hopeful, Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, D-NY, waves to supporters after speaking at a campaign stop in McAllen, Texas, Wednesday, Feb. 13, 2008. (AP Photo/Eric Gay)

I share Mike’s scepticism, as this seems to be exactly what Hillary Clinton did in her campaign against her rival for the Democratic nomination, Bernie Saunders. First of all she accused Sanders’ supporters of sexism, because some of them threw money at her in protest of her taking funds from Wall Street. And then about 12 or 25 pro-Bernie Sanders newsgroups and forums were removed from the web in a single evening by the net hosts, because of complaints about disgusting misogynist comments on them. To some, like Kyle Kulinski on Secular Talk, it looked very much like Shrillary and her supporters had been engaging in cyber-sabotage, as the sheer numbers of the groups taken down in such a short space of time makes it highly unlikely that it was an accident.

And Shrillary does have previous in this. She was caught hiring an internet firm, Correct the Record, to go on-line and argue with Sanders’ supporters. Correct the Record is a purely commercial firm, and this was a straightforward business transaction. They were paid to argue with Sanders’ supporters under the guise of Shrillary supporters, despite the fact that they were nothing of the sort, just a company of internet mercenaries carrying out a contract.

According to a website that Is Best Not Mentioned, the tactic of going onto someone else’s political site and posting unpleasant and inflammatory material there in the guise of being that site’s supporters, is known as ‘mobying’. It’s a term from the Conservative part of the Net, used on sites like Little Green Footballs, Red State and Free Republic. The terms supposed to come from the following Moby quote about wrecking George Bush’s chances with his supporters.

No one’s talking about how to keep the other side home on Election Day. It’s a lot easier than you think and it doesn’t cost that much. This election can be won by 200,000 votes. You target (Bush’s) natural constituencies. For example, you can go on all the pro-life chat rooms and say you’re an outraged right-wing voter and that you know that George Bush drove an ex-girlfriend to an abortion clinic and paid for her to get an abortion.

The site Best Not Mentioned seems to believe that it’s a purely Right-wing phenomenon used by various Conservative groups against each other in the Republican party’s own internal feuds. But looking at the highly suspicious behaviour of Shrillary’s paid trolls on the Net, it looks like it could be used by professed American liberals, and Kuenssberg’s defenders over on this side of the Pond too.