Abby Martin on the Jimmy Dore Show Talks about US Crimes of Empire: Part 3

This is the third part and final part of my article on the interview with Abby Martin on the Jimmy Dore Show. She’s a tireless critic of American imperialism, and the presenter of the Empire Files on TeleSur English, and before that, on RT.

Dore and Martin discuss how the Empire and the Deep State loathes Trump because he ain’t good for the Empire’s image. After Bush had nearly pushed Americans towards revolution, Obama managed to placate people, and win them back to the Empire. But Trump is worse for the Empire because he’s such an a**hole and psychopath. There are people, who are just as psychotic. Paul Ryan, another Republican, hates the poor. But Trump is ramping up the Empire to colossal levels. There are now troop surges in Afghanistan, and the formation of Africom to deal with Somalia. Everybody’s heard of a horrific massacre committed by one of the warlords, and blamed on al-Shabaab. But what you aren’t being told is that week before his village was subject to a bombing raid which killed a load of kids. Martin talks about Trump’s hypocrisy and cynicism. He attacked Killary for the way she sold arms to the Saudis, but has been more than willing to sell them arms himself so they can kill civilians in Yemen. Under Trump, there has been a 400 per cent increase in drone strikes, and a 75 per cent increase in civilian deaths. Under Bush and Obama, the US military just killed every military-age male in a given locality. Now they’re carpet-bombing whole villages. Just like the Israelis kill Palestinians. Well, Trump said he would kill not only the terrorists, but also their families, in direct violation of the Geneva Convention. Unfortunately, he has not honoured the promises Martin hoped he would, like normalising relations with Russia.

And then they get on to MOAB – the Mother Of All Bombs. This ‘mini-nuke’ – actually a conventional bomb that approached some of the destructive power of a nuclear device – was dropped on a cave system in Afghanistan. They said it only killed terrorists, but there were people in that area, and we won’t know if it only killed terrorists, because nobody’s allowed in there. Martin describes ISIS as a barbaric death cult – which is true – but states that this doesn’t give us the right to kill the people, who live in these countries. She makes the point that the applause which greeted the MOAB attack was a dehumanisation of the Afghan people and the victims of this weapon.

They then discuss whether some of the people on the Right, who supported Trump, may now be disillusioned with the orange buffoon. Many people probably voted for him because they thought he was anti-interventionist. But he hasn’t been. This might be because the military-industrial complex and the warfare state are beyond his control. Martin hoped that this part of the Republican based would speak out, but she was disappointed. The base is just interested in having a more efficient War On Terror. They aren’t speaking out about Venezuela, nor about the push for war with North Korea, they just don’t want us to fund al-Qaeda. As for Trump himself, he was never anti-interventionist. He just appeared so as it was a useful stance against Killary. He doesn’t have to surround himself with generals, who just want war because with every new invasion they launch, they get another star on their jacket. They two then discuss how nobody knows why America was in Niger.

I realise that this is an American programme, discussing American issues. But it also directly and acutely affects us. A number of our politicos have attended Republican conventions, and one of Trump’s British buddies was Nigel Farage. The Tories have been copying and utilising Republican policies since Maggie Thatcher took over as premier in the 1970s. And New Labour did the same with the Clintonite wing of the Democrats, adopting their stance against the welfare state, and introducing neoliberalism, deregulation and privatisation, including the privatisation of the NHS, into the Labour Party.

The situation is rather different over here in Blighty, as we are now lucky enough to have a real Socialist as leader in the shape of Jeremy Corbyn. But New Labour is desperately trying to hang on in the shape of Progress, Labour Friends of Israel and the Jewish Labour Movement. And they have been using the smearing of decent anti-racists, the majority of whom are Jewish, as anti-Semites and their expulsion from the party as a weapon to purge their left-wing opponents.

As for imperialism, we are still riding on the back of America’s coat-tails, trying to be a world power by exploiting the ‘Special Relationship’. And so we support their wars in the Middle East, and the looting of these countries’ state industries and the brutalisation and impoverishment of their peoples.

Our media isn’t quite as bad as the Americans’ just yet. The news over here does accept that climate change is real at least, and there are still news reports about the poverty caused by austerity and Tory cuts to the welfare state and health service.

But it is heavily biased towards the Tories. The Beeb is full of public school, very middle class White guys, and its news and editorial staff have contained a number of high profile Tories, several of whom have left their posts to work for the party under Cameron and May. ‘Goebbels’ Robinson and ‘Arnalda Mussolini’ Kuenssberg are members of the Tory party. Robinson led a whole series of Tory groups, while Kuenssberg spoke at a fringe meeting in the Tory party this year.

The Kushners noted in their book, Who Needs the Cuts, that the Beeb does not allow anyone to question austerity, and it is just assumed, entirely falsely, as true and necessary by the rest of the media. And academics from Cardiff, Edinburgh and Glasgow Universities have noted that the Beeb is far more likely to talk to Tory politicians and managing directors about the economy, than Labour politicos and trade unionists.

And the war on alternative media is happening in this country as well. The Tories would love to close down RT. We’ve already seen them join in the baying mob accusing it of being Putin’s propaganda arm interfering with British democracy over here. All the while being very silent about how the Israelis were caught trying to get the people they don’t like removed from May’s cabinet. We’ve seen them criticise Labour MPs for appearing on the network, while ignoring their own people, who also have. And May got on her high horse to write a letter to Alex Salmond telling him not to take up a job as presenter with the Network.

And the bots and algorithms cooked up by Google and Facebook to protect us all from ‘fake news’ are having an effect on ‘controversial’ read: left-wing bloggers and vloggers. They direct potential readers away from the sites the corporations have decided are a threat to democracy. Mike’s suffered an inexplicable fall in the readership of some of his articles, and some of his posts have had to be reposted after mysteriously vanishing from Facebook. Even before then, there was an attempt to censor Tom Pride over at Pride’s Purge by claiming that his site was unsuitable for children. The pretext for that was some of the coarse humour he employs in his satire. This is nothing compared to some of the language you will hear on YouTube. It looked very much like his real crime was sending up Dave Cameron and the other walking obscenities taking up space on the Tory benches.

What Abby Martin says about the media and the crimes of Empire describe the situation in America. But it also describes what the neoliberal elites are doing over here.

We have to stop this. We have to take back parliament, and end the warmongering. Now.

Radio 4 Programme Next Week Asking ‘Where Are All the Working Class Writers?’

Next Thursday, 23rd November 2017, at 11.30 in the morning, Radio 4 are broadcasting a programme, Where Are All the Working-Class Writers? by the writer Kit de Waal. The blurb for the programme on page 137 of the Radio Times runs

Birmingham-raised writer Kit de Waal published her first novel in 2016, aged 55. She used part of the advance to set up a scholarship in an attempt to improve working-class representation in the arts. She talks to writers, agents and publishers about barriers for writers from working-class backgrounds.

More information about her and the programme is in another piece on the opposite page, 135. This states

“I never expected to be a writer,” says Kit de Waal in this thoughtful exploration of class and writing. “I was working class, I was the daughter of immigrants. People like me weren’t even expected to go to university. ” De Waal did go to university, but at 51; she’d left school at 16. She knows that her background and – and how it influences the stories she tellls – makers her an oddity in literary circles. As she speaks to writers, agents and publishers to find out why this is, it becomes clear that class is an intrinsic part of the under-representation question, overlapping with race and gender. She gleans erudite contributions – take Tim Lott’s description of working-class writing as “the literary equivalent of soul music”, as he asks, “who’s making the soul music?’ Who’s making the rock ‘n’ roll?’

This is an issues that the great British comics writer, Pat Mills, raised in some of the interviews I posted up on here. Mills, who created the classic anti-war strip, Charley’s War, and wrote and created many of the classic characters in the SF comic, 2000 AD, has said that he felt angry that there were no working class characters in comics and very few in mainstream literature. Worse, there was an attitude amongst the media that was determined to exclude them. He has described how he was working on a story for Dr. Who in the 1980s, which was to have a working-class spaceship captain. This was rejected by the script editor, who really didn’t like the idea.

As for popular music, I was told by a friend of mine a little while ago that this was another traditional working class area that was being taken over by the middle classes. Most of the stars now in the charts, or at least at the time, were graduates of university courses in music or the performing arts. The pub rock scene, which emerged in the ’70s and which the launched the careers of many of the great working class bands of the ’70s and ’80s is now very much disappearing.

Once upon a time, back in the 1980s and 1990s, Private Eye’s literary column took a somewhat similar view of the contemporary literary scene. The reviewer back then was acutely critical of the snobbishness and cliquishness of literature and the publishing industry. The Eye believed and very strongly argued that British literature was dominated by a small clique of writers, who were largely vastly overhyped, to the exclusion of better writers and aspiring authors, who were rejected out of hand. They gave as an example of this a conversation they’d heard about with one of the editors of Granta. When the editor was asked about a piece submitted by one aspiring author, they responded by asking what colour the enveloped it was send in was. This, the Eye’s reviewer went on, showed precisely what the attitude towards outside submissions at the magazine was. It was geared entirely towards people within the literary clique. Those outside were automatically rejected, manuscript unread.

The Eye wasn’t particularly interested in the class aspects of this question. Which isn’t surprising, as Richard Ingrams, the former editor pointed out during a talk one year at the Cheltenham Literary Festival that the magazine’s founders – himself, Willie Rushton, Peter Cook and so on, were all middle-class and privately educated. The Eye’s reviewer said several times that there was no reason why working class writers should be particularly promoted over others. They also made the occasional sneering comments directed at left-wing authors stressing their very working class roots that they were ‘prolier than thou’. I think they may even have made a comment about ‘Prole-lit’ for a type of very stereotypical ‘working class’ literature.

But they also attacked authors, who seemed to be published solely on snob value, because they were members of the aristocracy or the upper-middle classes, rather than because their writing had any intrinsic merit. Regarding one such author, the Eye’s reviewer said that any miner, who ever picked up a pen to write a sonnet, was of far more interest and value than them. They also savaged authors from the upper classes, who struck them as having a particularly patronising attitude to the lower orders, who read her books. There’s one review, which takes Jilly Cooper to task for this, whether the reviewer writing as her, sends her up by describing her readers as ‘pawps’ as an example of the class snobbishness in her novels. I’ve never read Cooper, so can’t really say whether this attitude is entirely fair or not, or, if it is, whether Cooper is any worse than many other authors.

I think that in more recent years the Eye’s literary column lost a little of that fierce opposition to the cliquishness of the literary scene, and particularly the London literary milieu. It still attacks and parodies overhyped, bad writing, but this seems part of a simple attack on overrated, mediocre literature. This now includes the works of the stars of reality TV shows and vapid, but inexplicably popular, bloggers and vloggers on the Net. But working class representation in writing, and other areas of the arts is a genuine part of the wider issues of access and exclusivity. Whether the Net will have an impact here, in popularising the work of working class writers, who would otherwise remain unpublished if left to the world of traditional literary agents and publishers, remains to be seen.

Vox Political’s List of his ‘Inflammatory Rubbish’ Articles Documenting Tory Attacks on the Sick and Disabled

This is the amended version of an article I posted earlier, when I had yet to hear from Mike himself about what happened. This was because his blog was extremely difficult to log onto late last night, so I feared Mike had been personally libelled by Stevens – he hadn’t – and that the internet was censoring his replies. It probably wasn’t either, but it has in the past.

Yesterday, Chris Stevens, the Tory councillor for Horley in Surrey, went off on a rant denouncing the articles journos like Aditya Chakrabortty and bloggers, vloggers and disability activists like Mike had put up describing how Tory welfare policies are killing the sick and disabled as ‘inflammatory rubbish’.

So Mike yesterday put up a list of some of his own ‘inflammatory rubbish’ articles to prove exactly that that is precisely what they are not. He states in his brief introduction to the list that it isn’t exhaustive, but it makes his point.

It may not be exhaustive, but it is a long, long list. And as you can expect from Mike, the articles come from reputable sources.

I’ve had repeated difficulty getting on to the article, although that’s been easier than the article before it, where he denounced and refutes Stevens’ rant. This looks to me very, very much like net censorship.

Here’s the link to Mike’s list of articles about the Tories’ chequebook euthanasia of poor and disabled.

http://voxpoliticalonline.com/2017/11/11/inflammatory-rubbish-heres-a-list-of-this-sites-articles-on-tory-brutality-to-the-sick-and-disabled/

As for Stevens, I put up an article last night attacking him for his vilification of journos and bloggers like Mike, comparing him to Chris Davies, the MP for Mike’s part of Wales, who libelled him as an anti-Semite. These were based on the gross smears made by the Campaign Against Anti-Semitism, whose name is a deliberate misnomer. They are in reality an Israel lobby group, who were founded to manipulate public opinion after they found out that severely normal Brits despised the Israeli blockade of Gaza and the murder of Palestinian civilians. Very many of the people they have libelled as anti-Semites, perhaps even the majority, are Jews – secular, Liberal, Torah-observant or ultra-Orthodox. It doesn’t matter. One word out of place, and decent people are presented as something monstrous, close to Nazis. Even when Jewish critics of Israel have themselves been victims of anti-Semitic abuse and violence, as some of those who supported Mike in his struggle against this libel have been.

‘Michelle’, one of the many great commenters on this blog, told me that on Question Time Stevens was so upset that he shouted at Chakrabortty. This uncomfortable reality was too much for the delicate soul to bear. It’s all very reminiscent of the old joke about the incompetent vicar, whose curate one Sunday finds in the vicar’s written for his sermon ‘Point weak here – so shout’.

I’m sick and tired of Tory shouting and vilification. I’m sick of it from Stevens, sick of it from Davies, sick of it from IDS, Damian Green and the other murderous apparatchiks in the DWP, and heartily sick of it from Theresa ‘Goody-Two Shoes’ May.

They should all do the decent thing and resign. Immediately.

Get these b***ards out before they kill again.

Have the Internet Giants Censored Mike due to Tory Lies Spouted by Chris Stevens

I’m amending this piece, as I wrote it in haste late last night because I couldn’t get on Mike’s site to read his article responding to Chris Stevens’ denouncement of the journalists showing how the Tories are murdering benefits claimants as ‘inflammatory rubbish’. I’ve talked to Mike since then, and he’s managed to correct me on a few points.

Mike put his article up, which can be found at http://voxpoliticalonline.com/2017/11/11/tory-tv-plant-peddles-ugly-lie-to-hide-the-uglier-truth-about-dwp-deaths/ after last Thursday’s edition of Question Time, in which Chris Stevens, a Tory councillor from Horley in Surrey, was planted in the audience as an ‘ordinary man’. Picked out by the man Private Eye describes as ‘Dimblebore’, Stevens responded to Aditya Chakrabortty’s remarks on the deaths caused by the Tories’ policies to the disabled and long term sick as ‘inflammatory rubbish’. Chakrobortty is a Guardian columnist. Real journalists, as opposed to the hacks writing for the Scum, the Heil and the Torygraph, have to check their facts.

I thought that this was a personal attack on Mike, as I couldn’t get through to Mike’s blog. It seemed that the internet providers had taken Mike off the air. I got on to his website and read the long, long list of articles he put up refuting Stevens’ bilge about his documentation of the Tory crimes against the disabled being ‘inflammatory nonsense’.

Then I tried to get through to the previous article, describing Stevens’ smears against the many journalists and disability rights activists documenting this issue.

I failed to get through to it. And despite repeated attempts I couldn’t get through to his later post or his website. This was with Internet Explorer. I tried with Google, and had no more success with that. I was told that my computer was configured correctly, but the website could not be found.

So it appeared that Mike’s been censored.

Talking to Mike today, it appears that he probably wasn’t. He said that afterwards he had been inundated by people asking for his response to the show. Hence the long list of articles he put up, which, by no means exhaustive, extensively documents just how this government and its predecessor are killing the disabled.

All to give the rich 25 per cent a whopping tax break. And create a cowed workforce, which will accept any starvation wages.

It reminded me very much of how Mike was smeared by another Tory, Chris Davies, the Tory MP in Mike’s part of the principality. He smeared Mike as an anti-Semite based on the entirely false accusations and sheer lies of the Campaign Against Anti-Semitism, a pro-Israel lobby group that was founded in 2014 when the Zionist lobby got worried that severely normal Brits, Jews, Gentiles, whatever, were turning away from supporting Israel due to the Israeli state’s bombardment of Gaza. They have been responsible for smearing anyone, who raises difficult questions about the Zionists long and bloody history of ethnic cleansing against the Palestinians, and their willingness, over and over again, to make deals with real anti-Semites and outright Nazis, ending in the persecution of diaspora Jews, in order to provide more prospective colonists for Israel. Very many of the people smeared by the CAA are Jews, ranging from secular liberals, to the Torah-observant and devoutly ultra-orthodox. So many, in fact, that Alexei Sayle, himself the son of Jewish communists, observed that it was strange that the majority of those smeared were Jews.

Mike was smeared because he dared to speak up for those smeared as anti-Semites. People like Ken Livingstone, who was notorious for his opposition to racism, whether against the Irish, Blacks or anti-Semitism. And Jackie Walker, a Jewish woman of colour, who aroused their ire because she criticised their attempts to conflate anti-Semitism with opposition to Israel, or at least its policy of apartheid and ethnic cleansing.

The press took up the story about the smears against Mike, and asked Stevens what he thought of it. So, showing his utter ignorance, Davies opened his mouth and declared Mike to be a disgusting anti-Semite with no place in politics. Stevens knew nothing of the background to the story. He had not asked Mike for his views, or whether the accusations were genuine.

He didn’t even have the decency to ask the people Mike was at College with, who asked him to perform in a theatrical work they staged to commemorate those murdered by the Nazis in the Shoah.

And he didn’t ask Mike, or other members of his family, like myself, about our uncle Bill. Uncle Bill’s surname was Hyman. It used to be Goldberg-Hyman, which is, you reverse the order, an almost stereotypical Ashkenazi surname. But we and Mike just called him ‘Uncle Bill’. As you do.

And now we have another bilious ignoramus, who appeared on TV to claim that articles attacking the government’s merciless persecution of the disabled are ‘inflammatory rubbish’.

They are not. They are sourced, reasoned descriptions of an objective truth, which Mike himself has sought to publicise over and over again.

And Mike speaks from personal experience. He cares for Mrs. Mike, who has fibromyalgia, which has left her in terrible pain. Our uncle, Bill, suffered from Parkinson’s Disease, a terrible, paralysing illness that struck down Michael J. Fox, the star of movies such as TeenWolf and The Frighteners, and the TV series Spin City. Our grandmother was also severely disabled with Alzheimers in the last few years of her life, when our mother gave up her career as a teacher to look after her.

But Mike has suffered from censorship in the past. He has reblogged several of his articles, after he found that they had mysteriously disappeared from Facebook.

Just like the other left-wing bloggers and vloggers, who are finding their sites demonetised or flagged down as ‘controversial’.

This is how the Tories handle criticism, as does that section of the Zionist establishment that is totally behind the massacre, brutalisation and ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians, and the contemptible vilification of decent, genuinely liberal anti-racist women and men. Simply because they include Israeli racism amongst the other forms, including anti-Semitism, that they have fought and, in very many case, of which they have been a victim.

I have nothing, absolutely nothing, but contempt for this censorship.

As for Chris Stevens, he has shown himself to be totally unfit to stand as an MP. In a party now notorious for its utter mendacity, he has shown himself one of the most mendacious.

He has to go.
Like his fellow Tory Chris Davies.

By siding with the CAA, Davies has shown how willing he is to adopt the postures of real racists, whose own language against Jewish critics of Zionism recalls some of the worst tropes of anti-Semitic rhetoric.

And Stevens has shown himself completely at ease with the Tories’ murderous policies towards the disabled, which have seen hundreds of thousands, if not millions thrown off the benefits that support them, and which has led to the deaths of 700 plus people.

If they has any decency, they should recant and resign. As indeed, should his entire vile government.