Nigeria in Moves to Develop Its Own Helicopter

Here’s an interesting little snippet of news from the Inter Vlog channel on YouTube. It seems that Nigeria’s National Agency for Science and Engineering Infrastructure, NASENI, in conjunction with the country’s aviation authority, is currently in moves to produce a made-in-Nigeria helicopter. The aim is to purchase a Belgian Dynali helicopter and back-engineer it, using Nigerian engineers trained at the Dynali works in Belgium. However, they are seeking to licence the helicopter, so it won’t quite be an illegal Third World knock-off. The Dynali helicopter was chosen because it’s easy to back-engineer, and the projected, Nigerian machine will be a sports helicopter.

This is interesting as Africa is possibly the last place anyone would think of for technological innovation and development. I was taught at school that the continent, and indeed the rest of the Developing World, was prevented from industrialising through the trade treaties set up during decolonisation. Britain and the rest of the developed world wished to protect their manufacturing industries while having access to the raw materials of Africa and the rest of the Third World. They therefore set up tariff barriers against manufactured goods from these countries while establishing treaties that kept Africa and other countries primarily as exporters of agricultural goods and raw materials, like copper. This system, dubbed neocolonialism by the Norwegian economist Gunnar Myrdal, has kept Africa and the rest of the Third World poor. This seems to be changing. Looking through YouTube for this, I found another video on the development of a bus by Uganda and another video showing off the planes, helicopters and drones individual Nigerians had built. There clearly is a lot of intellectual potential in Africa waiting to be tapped. I also heard at school that Nigeria, with its vast oil reserves, could be the world’s wealthiest country if it weren’t for the massive corruption. This also makes me wonder if Nigeria is now where India was a few decades ago in its industrialisation, and, also like India, will be a rising economic force in a few decades time. If that happens, then it could have a devastating effect on a number of economies around the world as they are undercut by cheaper, African-made goods.

I’ve a particular interest in this as Bristol and the south-west were a centre of the British helicopter industry with Westland Helicopters. They fell into financial trouble in the 1980s, and Maggie sold them off to the Americans because of pressure from the American government.

Thus she destroyed another part of our manufacturing and technological sector all to keep in with Reagan.

History Debunked on the Genocidal Brutality of the Hero of ‘Hotel Rwanda’

Simon Webb, the main man of the History Debunked channel on YouTube, has today put up a very revealing video exposing the horrific reality behind the hero of the 1990s film, Hotel Rwanda. Set during the Rwandan genocide, the film told the story of how its hero, Paul Rusavajena, a Hutu, saved the lived of a thousand Tutsis by providing them sanctuary in the hotel he managed. He claimed he did this on his own, but the fact is that the hotel was occupied by UN peacekeeping forces, who were the real protectors of the Tutsis. Survivors have alleged that instead Rusavajeni extorted money from them and gave room numbers to Hutu murder gangs. Despite this a film was made of the events with Rusavajena’s collaboration, which made him into a hero. And he did very well from the film. It was very popular with what Webb describes as White liberals. Rusavajeni became rich and bought two houses, one in Texas and the other in Belgium. However, after the war in Rwanda ended, Rusavajeni was actively involved in the terrorist group, the Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Rwanda, which particularly targets women and children in its attacks, and founded his own terrorist group, the FLM. He has been exposed however and arrested. Last week he was tried for his crimes and sentenced to 25 years imprisonment.

Webb tells this unedifying story in order to attack the double standards he believes White liberals have towards Blacks. If a White man commits and assault, he is punished with the full force of the law. If a Black man commits a similar offence during a robbery he is committing, White liberals will attempt to excuse him by saying that he was desperate because he was unable to get a job through racism. And while Webb claims that he believes that all peoples and politicians, whether White, Black or Asian, can be just as greedy, brutal, prejudiced and xenophobic, White liberals believe non-Whites to be somehow far nobler. Thus, if a famine occurs in Africa, Webb wonders whether it is due to the local leader stealing aid money and spending it on guns or hiding it in a Swiss bank account. White liberals, however, will blame it on the international banking system and colonialism. And if Black Africans turn on each other and fight terrible genocidal wars, like Europeans did in World War II and the Holocaust, this should be offset by finding a Black hero, who shows the essential nobility of his people by standing against it. This all shows the low standards White middle class liberals apply to Blacks, and consequently their low and patronising view of them.

Much of the poverty in Africa and elsewhere in the Developing World is due to the West in one way or another. It has been hampered by crippling debts with international banks with resulted in the nations of the Third World making huge interest payments which were far larger than the initial sums borrowed. Africa and other nations like it are kept poor through the neo-colonial agreements made with their former imperial masters during decolonisation. These agreements forced the newly independent nations to concentrate on producing raw materials, such as agricultural products and minerals and prevented them from industrialising. There are a large number of such nations producing the same goods and because competition is great, prices can be kept low. The strictures against industrialisation prevents them from developing industries producing finished products, such as, say, cars, for which they could charge more and diversify their economies.

However, much of the poverty in the Developing World really is through the corruption and brutality of the region’s rulers. Way back in the 1990s the Financial Times stated that the corruption in many African nations was so great that they were kleptocracies, who were only called states by the grace of their western partners. Just how nasty this corruption is was described by a visitor our local church hosted last year from Africa. This gentleman had had a very hard childhood, and was several times at death’s door from starvation. His family had had some property to support themselves at one point, but this was stolen from them. As for xenophobia and racism, many African countries were created by amalgamating territory from different tribes, many of which were historical enemies. Nigel Barley in his book, The Innocent Anthropologist, describes how some Cameroonians would angrily denounce western racism, while sneering and reviling their own country’s Dowayo people whom Barley was researching. They did not, however, regard this as racism. And famine and the looting of western aid money have been used as an instrument of genocide by the continent’s dictators.

Some of you will remember Band Aid, the charity record produced by various western pop stars, and the Live Aid global concert in 1985, organised by Bob Geldof to raise money to help the victims of a terrible famine in Ethiopia. But it’s been revealed since then that precious little money or food actually reached the victims. It was stolen by the Communist military dictatorship to prevent it reaching the victims of the famine, who were part of a tribal rebellion.

As for middle class White liberals viewing Blacks and other non-Whites as somehow nobler, I’m afraid there’s something to this too. This ultimately comes from the myth of the Noble Savage which emerged in the 17th century. This viewed the First Nations of America as somehow more noble than Europeans as they were uncorrupted by civilisation. Diderot and the philosophes of the French Enlightenment produced a similar myth of the people of Tahiti when they were encountered by western explorers in the 18th century. To European intellectuals like Diderot, the people of Tahiti lived a freer, more natural life untouched by the artificiality of European culture. In the 1960s and ’70s one of the currents among western left-wing intellectuals was Third Worldism. Impressed by the experiments in socialism by some Third World governments and the apparent lack of materialism amongst their traditional societies, these intellectuals similarly believed that these peoples were somehow more nobler than those of the west. They looked to them to start the socialist transformation they hoped would soon spread throughout the world

As for the left excusing Black criminality and violence through appeals to poverty and deprivation due to racism, that has also occurred. One of the right-wing YouTube channels last week posted a video showing how the supposedly left-wing American media had provided such excuses when covering the case of a Black man responsible for a racial assault.

Against this is the far more obvious obvious, and far better known negative view of Blacks and other non-Whites, which has resulted in their abuse and exploitation and which still supports continuing discrimination against them in the west. One result of this is that not only may Blacks and some other ethnic groups have a higher unemployment rate and experience greater poverty than Whites, but they may also receive tougher sentences for crimes they have committed.

Rusavajeni isn’t the only supposed hero who has been exposed as a much darker figure than portrayed in film. Oscar Schindler, whose rescue of his Jewish employees from the horrors of the Third Reich was depicted in the 90’s film, Schindler’s List, has similarly been alleged to have been an extremely exploitative employer. And it’s fair to say that many of the great heroes of history are far darker and more morally ambivalent, especially when viewed by modern standards.

Blacks and other ethnic groups aren’t any more or less virtuous than Whites, and should deserve the same treatment. Just as they shouldn’t be demonised, monsters like Rusavajeni shouldn’t be idealised either because of the colour of their skin.

Pat Mills and Anti-Racism and Anti-Nazism in British and American Comics

This week I’ve put up a number of articles about a couple of interviews I’ve found on YouTube with the long-time British comics creator, Pat Mills. Mills was one of the recidivist offenders, who revitalized a moribund British comics industry in the 1970s with a succession of groundbreaking new magazines the war comic, Battle, Action, and, of course, the mighty 2000AD. Mills is of Irish heritage and distinctly left-wing, so that his sympathies are always with the poor and the persecuted against the establishment, and there was more than a little element of subversion in his strips. Judge Dredd from the first was meant to be a symbol of the Fascistic elements in modern American policing, and J.D. is as much villain as he is hero. The mutant heroes of the Strontium Dog strip are second-class citizens in a future Britain which barely tolerates them. They can only live in ghettoes, and the only work they can do by law is bounty hunting. It’s an explicit comment on racism and anti-Semitism. Nemesis the Warlock was a similar attack on religious bigotry, set as it was in a devastated Earth of the far future, ruled by Tomas de Torquemada and his terminators. They were a military order of warriors, who had whipped up fear and hatred of intelligent aliens and embarked on a series of holy wars to exterminate them across the Galaxy. This was partly based on the medieval inquisition in Roman Catholic Europe, with elements of modern Fascism. For example, the robes adopted by the Terminators recalled Ku Klux Klan costumes.

Comics at the time were increasingly focused on the issue of racism and persecution, particularly in the case of Marvel Comic’s X-Men. The mutants in this strip, like those of Johnny Alpha’s nuclear-scarred Britain, were also persecuted. One of the recurring villains in the strip were the Sentinels, a race of giant robots created to hunt down and kill robots by the stock mad scientist in the belief that this would preserve humanity from the threat to their survival the super-powered mutants – Homo Superior – represented. Another of Mighty Marvel’s villains was the Hate Monger, dedicated to whipping up bigotry and strife. This character also wore a costume based on the Klan, and was revealed as Hitler, or a clone of him.

The American comics industry was founded by German Jews, who brought with them their former homeland’s tradition of telling a story through a series of pictures derived from Wilhelm Busch. I think many of them had also seen combat fighting against Nazism in the army during the War. It’s therefore not hard to see in strips such as the X-Men a metaphorical treatment of the persecution of the Jewish people, as well as other outsider groups. As well as being a metaphor for racism, the X-Men also had an large following of gay young people, possibly because the social hostility shown in the strips towards its mutant heroes mirrored their own experiences as marginalized outsiders.

And concerns over the threat of Fascism were also seen in other British comics. The British version of the Captain Britain strip, written by Dave Thorpe and then Alan Moore, was set in an alternative Britain in which a deranged, mutant aristocrat, Mad Jim Jaspers, had created a biomechanical creature to hunt down and exterminate all mutants. At the same time, he had encouraged a Fascist dictatorship to seize power, which then began the process of persecuting and exterminating mutants.

This was succeeded by Moore’s V for Vendetta in the adult comic, Warrior, which featured an anonymous guerilla, V, fighting a personal war against the Fascist authorities of a near-future Britain. It was filmed with Hugo Weaving as ‘V’, Natalie Portman as his companion, Evie, with Stephen Fry as a gay TV host and John Hurt as the dictator. Moore himself dislikes the movie, partly because the contract he signed with the studio meant that the character is now their property. But it is a powerful film, which accurately shows certain aspects of Nazism, such as the use of concentration camp inmates for medical experimentation.

Pat Mills also says in the interviews I posted about earlier this week that the strip Charley’s War was subversive in that it was anti-war strip in a war comic. Mills is disappointed by the way the strip wasn’t included in an exhibition on comics and subversion, and notes that in this, the centenary years of the First World War, there seems to be a deliberate policy amongst the British broadcasters of not showing anything with an anti-war content, such as Blackadder Goes Forth. Radio 4 have made shows about the great stage play and film, Oh, What a Lovely War!, but it wasn’t that long ago that Michael Gove, the Tory minister for education, opened his mouth to say that children were getting an entirely wrong view of the War based on Blackadder. Mike naturally wrote a very sharp reply to that piece of nonsense.

But there were other strips in Battle, which also rose out of the mass of the usual gung-ho stories of courageous British squaddies winning against brutal and stupid Germans, and which did shock with their realism. Darkie’s Mob, which was about a mysterious commander, who takes over a failing British unit trapped behind Japanese lines in Burma was one of these. Another I remember which particularly shocked me was a short piece in Battle, in which British soldiers are fighting their way through Germany. I think it was a stand-alone strip, rather than part of a continuing storyline. The story ended when the squaddies reach a group of emaciated figures standing behind barbed wire, the inmates of one of the death camps. This was clearly about the Holocaust, and what it was really like, rather than the usual glamorous war stories, and I remember being shocked by the starved bodies of the inmates. As I doubtless was supposed to.

Battle, Action, 2000AD and Warrior were part of a trend that had emerged in American comics in the late 1960s, when they turned from simple escapism to dealing with real issues – such as racism and feminism. British comics up to the launch of Battle and Action had tended to avoid explicit politics, and in some cases had actually been very racist. And this tradition of commenting and attacking racism and bigotry continues in American comics today, and in 2000AD, now sadly nearly all that’s remaining of the British comics industry.

These are the type of strips, which Mike and I grew up reading, along with so many others of our age group. And they reflected the very real anxieties of the time. Left-wingers were worried about the rise of Maggie Thatcher, her links to the hard right and the violence and political threat posed by the BNP/NF. In the original comic strip version of V for Vendetta, the Fascists seize power in Britain after devastating nuclear war between America and the Soviet Union over the crisis in Poland. To many of us, the threat of nuclear annihilation in Maggie’s and Reagan’s New Cold War was only too real.

In his talk to the Socialist Workers’ Party, Mills reads out a letter he received from the CEO of a school, a former punk, who states that everything he learned about Fascism, he got from Judge Dredd; everything about racism, from Strontium Dog, and everything about feminism from Halo Jones. And he now considered it the most subversive thing he could do was to help produce open-minded, critical young people. And it isn’t just racism. When Thatcher tried to criminalise positive teaching of homosexuality in school – that it is perfectly natural – the British comics industry responded with the anti-homophobia anthology AWRGH!, whose initials stood for Artists and Writers Against Rampant Government Homophobia. Comics in the 1980s and ’90s sold much more than they do now, and so they made a very large number of young people aware and alert to these issues. It partly explains why British society has broadly become more tolerant, despite continuing bigotry in some areas. Like the right-wing of the Tories and UKIP.

This is also why I found Mills’ story of how the Board of Deputies of British Jews complained about a story in Crisis utterly amazing. Crisis was another adult comic, which dealt explicitly with contemporary issues of western imperialism, the power of the multinationals and the exploitation of the Developing World. The comic had featured a story about the beating of a Palestinian protester in Gaza, based on a real event told to Mills by a Palestinian. The Board complained because the lad’s broken body, left lying in the road, looked to them a bit like a swastika. As Mills himself said, it wasn’t there because comics creators aren’t that clever. But I was left amazed at the thought that anybody could accuse anyone in mainstream British comics at the time of racism or anti-Semitism, given how radical and anti-racist so many of them were.

It’s also why the accusation by the Campaign Against Anti-Semitism earlier this year against Mike is so outrageous. I’ve blogged before in Mike’s defence pointing out that he very definitely is not racist and not anti-Semitic, having both Black and Jewish friends and participating at College in a performance commemorating the victims of the Shoah. Mike read these comics, with the anti-racist and anti-bigotry message which they strove to impart to their readers. I realize that no doubt there were many people who read them, without really taking the anti-racist, anti-bigotry subtext onboard, but even so many people in the comics milieu were and are liberal in their attitudes towards tolerance of minority and marginalized groups.

But the Campaign Against Anti-Semitism and the rest of the Zionist lobby have no qualms about smearing genuine anti-racists, and people who have written about and denounced anti-Semitism and other forms of racism and persecution, like Jackie Walker, Ken Livingstone and Tony Greenstein. And there is the real danger that by doing so, not only will they libel and smear decent people, but trivialize real anti-Semitism in doing so.

I’ve blogged earlier this evening about the fine job Richard Coughlan did in producing his videos debunking Holocaust denial. But British and American comics and their creators, like Pat Mills, Alan Moore and Stan Lee and Jack Kirby, the creators of the X-Men, and that strip’s writers and artists since, have also contributed greatly to attacking racism and bigotry in the strips they produced.

Republicans Try to Block RT from Being Shown in US

The Republicans are up to their tricks again, trying to stop American audiences from taking their news from alternative sources and so getting a clearer, different picture from that the corporate media wishes to impose. In this report by Samira Khan from RTUK, Republican Senator John McCaine and one of his colleagues are trying to pass a bill, which would allow American network providers to avoid having to carry RT – Russia Today – in the US. The ostensible reason is that Russia is using the broadcaster, which is owned by the Russian state, to influence American politics. There’s a clip in the programme of various Republicans in Congress debating and complaining that too many Americans are getting their views from RT.

The programme notes that there are three other state-owned foreign broadcasters in the US. These are France 24, Al-Jazeera, which is owned by Qatar, and, of course, the Beeb. None of these will be subject to the McCaine’s and Graham’s bill.

I’m very much aware that RT is owned by Russia, which since the Second World War has been America’s ideological and geopolitical opponent. And, despite the Fall of Communism and the introduction of capitalism, Russia still is in geopolitical opposition to America. But the claims that Russia is interfering in US politics is pure rubbish.

This twaddle ultimately comes from Hillary Clinton and her attempts to blame everyone else for her failure and corruption at the elections. She claimed that the leaked emails from the Democratic National Convention, which showed how corrupt she was in her dealings with corporate backers, and how she and Debbie Wasserman Schultz unfairly manipulated the internal electoral process within the party to stop Bernie Sanders coming to power, came from the Russians. They weren’t. They came from disgruntled members of her own party.

As for the accusation that Russia was influencing US politics, there’s no evidence that they were doing so unduly, or at least, no more than they had been. And as William S. Blum has pointed out on his Anti-Empire Report, that’s a lot less than America has interfered in other countries. He has a whole list of the countries, in which America has interfered in their politics and elections, not counting those, which the US has actively invaded or organized or backed coups to overthrow liberal and left-wing, but not necessarily Marxist or even Socialist governments. And there are pages and pages on this in Blum’s book.

This is just another attempt by the political establishment to try and shut down alternative media, and stop the American people from finding out what their country is really doing. Not just around the world, but also to them. Thanks to both the establishment Democrats and the Republicans’ promotion of corporate interests, as Pat Mills observed in one of his talks on politics and comics, there are pockets of America which are like the Third World. And this is White America, never mind Blacks, who still remain much poorer.

The corporate establishment is panicking, both in America and over here in Blighty, because people are no longer buying the right-wing propaganda churned out by Fox News and MSNBC, or by a supine BBC over here, which has turned its news into a kind of British TASS for Conservatives. (TASS was the Soviet state news agency before the collapse of Communism). They’re taking their news from alternative sources, like the Real News Network, RT, Democracy Now!, The Young Turks, Secular Talk, the David Pakman Show, Sam Seder’s Majority Report in the US, RTUK over here, media commentators like Chunky Mark the Artist Taxi Driver, and a whole plethora of bloggers and vloggers. And they’re getting worried.

It’s why establishment journos in the press and on the Beeb are whining about how the decline of their sector of news gathering and publication means that there will no longer be a consensus view that broadly unites people of all shades of political opinion. What this actually translates into is a panic that they won’t be able to shape public opinion like they could. They argue this means that opinions are becoming increasingly polarized and oppositional. It also means that they’re afraid that they can’t shape public opinion for the benefit of their corporate proprietors like they used to, and without influence and declining sales they could see all that lucrative advertising money that keeps so many of them going, drying up.

And the giants of the internet are also panicking. It’s why Google is so keen to demonetize ‘controversial’ material on YouTube. The excuse is that they’re doing so to stop racist, Alt Right, Nazi and Islamist propaganda appearing on the platform. But as so much of what is demonetized extends to left-wing news outlets, like David Pakman, Sam Seder and Democracy Now!, this excuse is very spurious and flimsy indeed. Google has said it wants to prioritise corporate content. It’s therefore just another big corporation trying to silence the critics of the corporate capitalism that’s destroying the planet and impoverishing everyone in the world except the super-rich 1 per cent.

It’s also why Facebook has also changed its policy, so that bloggers like Mike over at Vox Political also find it hard to reach their audience.

People the world over aren’t buying the corporate, establishment propaganda. They are turning to alternative media, which includes Russia Today, to find out about what’s really going on. And the corporate media is terrified. Hence this wretched bill. And I’ve no doubt that if this gets through Congress, the Tories will try something similar over here. After all, RT is also over here, as is the Iranian state broadcaster, PressTV, and they also tell the British public facts and information that they really don’t want people to see. Like George Galloway talking about the oppression of the Palestinians in Israel, and western militarism and imperialism in eastern Europe and the Middle East.

Lobster on Politically-Motivated False Accusations of Anti-Semitism

I found this very interesting and pertinent quote from Uri Avnery’s paper, ‘Manufacturing Anti-Semites’ in Tom Easton’s article, ‘Terrorism, Anti-Semitism and Dissent’, in Lobster 47, Summer 2004: 3-8. The article’s an analysis of the role of the Neo-Cons in Britain and America, and the Israel lobby, in the invasion of Iraq and the new imperialism in the Middle East. The article’s based on four books, Covert Action: The Roots of Terrorism, ed. Ellen Ray and William H. Schaap, The Politics of Anti-Semitism, ed. Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St Clair, The Betrayal of Dissent: Beyond Orwell, Hitchens and the New American Century by Scott Lucas, and George Galloway’s I’m Not The Only One. He writes

Uri Avnery’s ‘Manufacturing Anti-Semites’ is a very powerful attack on the present government of Israel by one of its own citizens.

‘The Sharon government is a giant laboratory for growing the Anti-Semitism virus. It exports it to the whole world. Sharon’s propaganda agents are pouring oil on the flames. Accusing all critics of his policy of being anti-Semites, they brand large communities with this mark. Many good people, who feel no hatred at all towards the Jews but who detest the persecution of the Palestinians, are now called anti-Semites. thus the sting is taken out of this word, giving it something approaching respectability.’

In America, he says, ‘the Jewish establishment is practically straining to prove that it controls the country’. Avnery describes how in 2002 a young black congresswoman, Cynthia McKinney, ‘dared to criticise the Sharon government, support Palestinians and (worst of all) Israeli and Jewish peace groups. The Jewish establishment found a counter-candidate, practically unknown black woman, injected huge sums into the campaign and defeated Cynthia. All this happened in the open, with fanfares, to make a public example – so that every senator and congressperson would know that criticising Sharon is tantamount to political suicide.’

Easton in his paragraph quotes the absolute dominance of the Israel lobby over congress, and the disastrous effect this has had on relations between America and the rest of the world.

This theme is taken up by George Sutherland, the pen name of a ‘senior congressional staffer’, in describing what he calls ‘Our Vichy Congress’. He writes: ‘For expressions of sheer grovelling subservience to a foreign power, the pronouncements of Laval and Petain pale in comparison with the rhetorical devotion with which certain congressmen have bathed the Israel of Ariel Sharon.

After detailing several examples of the way the Israeli lobby operates, including preventing an investigation of the Israeli ‘arts students’ saga, he concludes:

‘Israel’s strategy of using its influence on the American political system to turn the US national security apparatus into its own personal attack dog – or Golem – has alienated the United States from much of the Third World, has worsened US ties to Europe among rancorous insinuations of anti-Semitism, and makes the United States a hated bully.’

Sutherland quotes the words of EU commissioner Chris Patten in The Washington Post: ‘A senior Democratic senator told a visiting European the other day: “All of us here are members of Likud now.”(p.5).

Avnery, and Israeli critics of their country’s foreign policy and maltreatment of the Palestinians, are, not surprisingly, subject to intense hostility in their homeland. In one poll, a majority of Israelis declared that those of their countrymen who defended the Palestinians should be stripped of their citizenship. Avnery also has a point about the way the cavalier use of accusations of anti-Semitism have cause the word to lose much of its sting. The Cynthia McKinney affair was reported and remarked on in the Libertarian blog, Vox Day, which is highly critical of Israel and does have a very pronounced tone of anti-Semitism.

The accusations directed at Naz Shah, Ken Livingstone and now Jeremy Corbyn are in line Sharon’s strategy of trying to silence his critics with the same accusation. And the more it’s used, the more likely it will have the opposite effect.