Let’s all live in one big happy barracks

Posted on January 27, 2012 by Matt

There’s a good piece by Mark Levine on the Al Jazeera website about Barack Obama’s glorification of the U.S military in his State of the Union address, which  began with the fatuous and utterly delusional observation ‘ We gather tonight knowing that this generation of heroes has made the United States safer and more respected around the world’.

The president who came to office largely as a result of his perceived opposition to the Iraq war went on to cite a list of the military’s achievements over the last decade:

For the first time in nine years, there are no Americans fighting in Iraq. For the first time in two decades, Osama bin Laden is not a threat to this country.  Most of al Qaeda’s top lieutenants have been defeated. The Taliban’s momentum has been broken, and some troops in Afghanistan have begun to come home.

All of which, according to Obama, constitutes

 a testament to the courage, selflessness and teamwork of America’s Armed Forces. At a time when too many of our institutions have let us down, they exceed all expectations. They’re not consumed with personal ambition. They don’t obsess over their differences. They focus on the mission at hand. They work together.   Imagine what we could accomplish if we followed their example.

Yes, that’s right.  Just follow the examples of Iraq and Afghanistan and reach for the stars,  you patriotic Americans.   Levine rightly takes Obama to task for this drivel, asking

Does the President really believe that the United States is more respected around the world because of its military activities? Did no one point out to him that the morning of his speech, the marine sergeant who led the 2005 assault on Haditha that killed 24 Iraqi civilians received no jail time for his action, same as the seven other American soldiers who were part of the raid?

Levine calls for America to be transformed into a ‘post-military society’ and compares  the U.S military-industrial complex with the domination of Egypt by the Egyptian armed forces, pointing out that

in both countries the military – or rather the conglomeration of forces tying the military to leading economic actors with whom they disproportionately control their country’s political and economic life – is perhaps the single most important factor responsible for the lack of democratic accountability or sustainable and broadly distributed economic growth.

Fair point.  On one level Obama’s love letter to the military is an example of the kind of inane  populism to which US presidents are normally prone on such occasions.  With an election campaign coming up and new wars looming, it isn’t surprising that  the Peace Laureate should want to sing the praises of America’s ‘heroes’ as loudly as possible and seek to bathe in their reflected glory.

But running through his  speech is the assumption that the military itself is a moral paradigm for American society.   As Obama reminds Congress:

Those of us who’ve been sent here to serve can learn a thing or two from the service of our troops. When you put on that uniform, it doesn’t matter if you’re black or white; Asian, Latino, Native American; conservative, liberal; rich, poor; gay, straight. When you’re marching into battle, you look out for the person next to you, or the mission fails. When you’re in the thick of the fight, you rise or fall as one unit, serving one nation, leaving no one behind.

Obama then describes his own experience of being ‘in the thick of the fight’ during last year’s Bin Laden hit.   You might not think that sitting in the situation room watching a Navy Seals team shoot an unarmed man in his pyjamas who they could just as easily have arrested, is the most inspirational model.  But Obama thinks otherwise:

One of the young men involved in the raid later told me that he didn’t deserve credit for the mission. It only succeeded, he said, because every single member of that unit did their job — the pilot who landed the helicopter that spun out of control; the translator who kept others from entering the compound; the troops who separated the women and children from the fight; the SEALs who charged up the stairs. More than that, the mission only succeeded because every member of that unit trusted each other — because you can’t charge up those stairs, into darkness and danger, unless you know that there’s somebody behind you, watching your back.

Therefore, ladies and gentlemen:

So it is with America. Each time I look at that flag, I’m reminded that our destiny is stitched together like those 50 stars and those 13 stripes.  No one built this country on their own. This nation is great because we built it together. This nation is great because we worked as a team. This nation is great because we get each other’s backs.

Please pass the sickbag.   No wait, I think I’m over it.   So now you know the solution to all America’s problems folks.   Abandon your  greed, your irresponsibility and your selfish egoism and behave like a hit squad team and go into that ‘darkness and danger’ together, knowing that someone else has got your back.

Obama’s suggestion that the military is some kind of inherently admirable and superior institution isn’t uniquely American of course.  In Britain Michael Gove’s plan to put ‘soldiers into classrooms’ and introduce compulsory cadet forces into comprehensive schools is based on similar assumptions.

This isn’t to say that there aren’t military values that are worthy of admiration, depending on the circumstances, such as self-sacrifice and self-discipline,  teamwork and cooperation.  But there are other institutions where these values are also essential.   In Accident & Emergency wards, the ambulance service, or the operating theatre.  In the collegiate relationships in the staffroom that are essential to any good school.   In the fire brigade.  In NGOs engaged in famine relief.

Such institutions rarely – if ever – receive the kind of eulogies that politicians like to lavish on the armed forces.   There are also military values that are somewhat less worthy of admiration,  such as the willingness to follow orders blindly regardless of whether they have any moral or legal basis and  go into other countries to kill people you do not know and who have never attacked you just because a politician told you to.

Discipline, aggression, self-sacrifice and the ability to follow orders and behave as members of a team might seem like virtues on the Normandy beaches, but they can look very different  when soldiers are sent to fight neo-colonial wars and military occupations.   In the same week that Obama sang the military’s praises, research commissioned by the U.S Army found that American troops in Afghanistan routinely displayed ‘extreme arrogance, bullying and “crude behaviour”‘, and that this was one of the reasons why Afghan soldiers keep shooting at their NATO allies.

Similar behaviour was noted in Iraq, and was a key trigger of the insurgency in cities like Falluja.   So the military cannot and should not be considered some kind of moral exemplar for the rest of us to model ourselves upon, even if those who send soldiers out to kill and die like to think so.

The exaltation of the military was once an essential characteristic of fascism.  Today, in our new era of permanent crisis, with its protests, rebellions, riots and the constant possibility of ‘civil unrest’, it isn’t surprising that our political elites would also like to imagine society as a  barracks and parade ground,  with all its members unquestioningly obeying the orders of their superiors and behaving as disciplined components  of the national ‘team’.

So atten-shun you slackers.  Put your hand on your heart and salute the flag, and quick march.  Left, right, left, right, and let’s all make our country great again.

 

 

 

 

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Skulls, Bones and Human rights

Posted on January 26, 2012 by Matt

I’m a big fan of the Israeli architect and writer Eyal Weizman.  His book Hollow Land: Israel’s Architecture of Occupation (Verso 2007) is a brilliant and revelatory account of the different ways in which Israel has used topography and physical space to  dominate and undermine the Palestinians and enhance its control of the Occupied Territories.

So I was naturally drawn to an essay that Weizman co-authored with Thomas Keenan in the latest issue of Cabinet, the New York-based art and culture magazine,  devoted to the subject of forensics.    It doesn’t disappoint.   Entitled ‘Mengele’s Skull’ Keenan and Weizman’s essay traces the relationship between forensic anthropology and human rights, with an account of the 1985 exhumation of Joseph Mengele as its starting point.

The authors see the exhumation and the subsequent confirmation of Mengele’s identity as the beginning of a new era in which war-crimes investigations were increasingly based on ‘things’ and the forensic remains of victims rather than the testimonies of living survivors, as was the case during the 1961 Eichmann trial in Jerusalem.   In their view

If the trial of Eichmann indeed marks the beginning of the era of the witness, we would suggest that the exhumation of a body thought to be that of Mengele in June 1985 signals the inauguration of an era of forensics in human rights and international criminal justice.

The authors go on to argue that:

If things have begun to speak in the context of war-crimes investigation and human rights, it is not simply that we have acquired better listening skills, or that the forums of discussion have been liberally enlarged. The very entry of bones and other things into these forums has changed the meanings and the practices of discussion themselves. In fact, the entry of non-humans into the field of human rights has transformed it.

This case is made through a step-by-step analysis of the techniques used to confirm the identify of the skull of the ‘Angel of Death’ in Sao Paolo.    These included forensic anthropology (the study of human remains, skull shape and size, bone structure, dentistry etc), handwriting analysis and an innovative  video-imaging process known as ‘face-skull superimposition’ in which photographs of Mengele were superimposed over the skull to establish that it ‘fitted’.    

Until I read this essay I wasn’t aware of the American forensic anthropologist Clyde Snow, who was one of the members of the team that examined Mengele’s skull.

 

At the time Snow had just begun training the Equipo Argentino de Antropología Forense (Argentine Forensic Anthropology Team) in the exhumations of the ‘disappeared’ during the military junta’s ‘dirty war’.  These investigations helped prosecutors convict  a number of the military officers who ordered these killings, and the Argentine  Forensics team has since gone to carry out similar investigations in many different countries, including East Timor, El Salvador and Bosnia.

As I wrote the other week, it was this team that exhumed the victims of the 1981 El Mozote massacre as part of the UN investigating team that went to El Salvador in 1993.

On the strength of this essay, I was keen to find out more about Snow, and I’ve just finished Witnesses from the Grave: the Stories Bones Tell (Little & Brown 1991) a fascinating and compelling  account of his life and work by Christopher Joyce and Eric Stover.   Born in 1928, Snow has spent much of his professional life examining the concealed remains of men, women and children who died violently and often atrociously, and helping bring their killers to justice.

Before becoming involved in human rights investigations, he played a key role in a number of high-profile criminal cases in the United States, including the trial of the serial killer John Wayne Gacy.   For me the most powerful and moving section of the book concerns his work in Argentina,  where he transformed a group of raw and inexperienced students into tenacious investigators into one of the worst episodes of state terrorism in their country’s history.

The whisky-drinking, poetry-loving Snow comes over as a likeable and admirable character, whose essential ethos was summed up in a 1985 speech that he gave to the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) the role of forensic anthropologists in human rights investigations.  Snow  is a big fan of Federico Garcia Lorca, and in his speech he cites Lorca’s 1936 killing by Francoists as an example of ‘state murder’, in words that are worth repeating:

Of all the forms of murder, none is more monstrous than that committed by a state against his own citizens.   And of all murder victims, those of the state are the most helpless and vulnerable since the very entity to which they have entrusted their lives and safety becomes their killer.   When the state murders, the crime is planned by powerful men.   They use the same cold rationality and administrative efficiency that they might bring to the decision to wage a campaign to eradicate a particularly obnoxious agricultural pest.

That is indeed, how it is.   And as Snow points out, ‘the homicidal state’ often behaves in ways that are not that different from ‘the solitary killer’, except,  as he points out

The great mass murders of our time have accounted for no more than a few hundred victims.  In contrast, states that have chosen to murder their own citizens can usually count their victims by the carload lot.   As for motive, the state has no peers, for it will kill its victim for a careless word, a fleeting thought, or even a poem.

Snow made that speech just before going to Argentina to begin the work that would help shatter the culture of impunity that the military Junta believed would protect them forever.  In doing so he and his young team rendered a huge service, not just to Argentine society, but to humanity.  Because even the most viciously predatory states  like to conceal the evidence of their crimes in an attempt to hide them not just from the scrutiny of the present – but also from the future.

There was a time when this could be done in the belief that nature would take its course and reduce their victims to anonymous heaps of bones, so that even if they were discovered they would have no names or identities.   Today that is no longer possible.  As Joyce and Silver point out, thanks to forensic anthropology the bones of their victims have become witnesses, and the work of Snow and his team have made it that much more difficult for their killers to get away with it.

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All they are saying is give war a chance

Posted on January 24, 2012 by Matt

Yesterday’s decision by EU foreign ministers to impose an embargo  on Iranian oil has brought the world one step closer to the war that Israel and elements within the US political establishment have long sought.   If Iran carries out its threat to close the Strait of Hormuz, then it will initiate a potentially catastrophic confrontation,  not only in the numbers of lives that may be lost (most of which will not be ours of course), but it terms of its ability to generate massive political and economic chaos in the Middle East and also impact on the crumbling economies in the West.

It is a measure of the  stupidity, subservience and sheer incompetence of the EU leaders that they have taken a reckless decision which runs entirely contrary to Europe’s own economic interests.   Greece, Italy and Spain all import large quantities of Iranian oil and are all likely to pay a heavy price at a time when their economies are already going under.

The EU’s aggressive brinkmanship has been given the usual diplomatic facade, with a joint statement from Cameron, Merkel and Sarkozy calling on Iran to suspend its nuclear activities and insisting that ‘We have no quarrel with the Iranian people. But the Iranian leadership has failed to restore international confidence in the exclusively peaceful nature of its nuclear programme.’

Similar statements were made when sanctions were introduced against Iraq that led to an estimated half a million deaths during the 1990s.   They were also made by Western leaders before the bombs fell on Serbia, Iraq and Afghanistan,  and no doubt the Iranian population will feel similarly moved by their concern.   Because, after all,  as Foreign Secretary William Hague insists:

‘It is absolutely right to do this when Iran is continuing to breach UN resolutions and refusing to come to meaningful negotiations on its nuclear programme. These are peaceful and legitimate measures, they are not about conflict.’

And then there is the truly ridiculous non-entity ‘Baroness’ Cathy Ashton, the EU’s foreign policy chief, parachuted into her job by the Labour Party for reasons that were unclear to anyone, now solemnly warning that

‘Iran has the opportunity to come forward not just to talk, but to have some concrete issues to talk about. It is very important that it is not just about words. A meeting is not an excuse, a meeting is an opportunity and I hope that they will seize it.’

And last but by no means least there is Ivo Daalder, the US ambassador to NATO, also inviting the Iranians to ‘ resolve this issue with negotiations.’   And if they won’t, well you know

‘These situations, the choices are very, very difficult. I have not looked at the exact military contingency plannings that there are … But of this I am certain: the international waterways that go through the strait of Hormuz are to be sailed by international navies including ours, the British and the French and any other navy that needs to go through the Gulf; and second, we will make sure that that happens under every circumstance.’

Translated into less diplomatic language,  the Iranians are indeed being given a choice: capitulate completely to the demands of the ‘international community’; dismantle their nuclear program and submit to an inspections regime of the type that was imposed on Iraq; allow inspectors to come into their country and grant them unlimited access to all of their nuclear and many of their military installations.

No state in its right mind would agree to this, especially after what happened in Iraq,  and the West knows this perfectly well.  But the pressure being applied to Iran has very little to do with nuclear proliferation.  Everyone knows that even if Iran had a nuclear bomb and used it for whatever reason – an assumption that is entirely based on the belief that Iran is some kind of mad state intent on collective suicide – then it would be annihilated within minutes.  Everyone knows that Israel has some two hundred odd nuclear warheads, even if no European or American politician ever talks about them.

If nuclear proliferation were really the issue then the states that are now applying sanctions could seek to resolve the Iranian nuclear programme within a broader international framework that might include for example, Israel’s nuclear ‘deterrent’ – to say nothing of their own.   Nor is  just a question of the Israeli tail wagging the US – and indirectly – the European dog.

Ever since the end of the Cold War, American military policy has been predicated on the premise that no state should be able to challenge US dominance in any part of the world.   This was one of the reasons for its obsession with Iraq.  As a result of  the strategic blunder of the 2003 invasion,  Iran has been empowered and must be taken down.

Nuclear proliferation is therefore the diplomatic battering ram, through which the US has sought to mobilise international support behind this objective.   But in the end we are not talking about world peace here.    Iran is being targeted for reasons that are entirely to with geopolitical strategy, access to energy supplies in the Caspian and the Gulf, oil pipelines and the continued attempt to dominate a region that the West still thinks it owns.

And as for the European Union, its role in this episode has been truly shameful and pathetic.  There was a time, when some europhiles speculated that the EU might be able to forge a new relationship with the Middle East, and that it might even act as an honest broker in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.   That never happened.   Despite the initially tepid response of France and Germany to the Iraq war, the EU has fallen entirely in line with the US-Israeli agenda in the region.

From its participation in the pointless ‘Quartet’ that has achieved almost nothing except to act as a networking and money-making forum for Tony Blair.  Now the EU  is doing everything that Israel wants and everything that the United States wants.  In doing so it has brought the world one step closer to yet another war – even as its leaders continue to talk of peace.

 

 

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Obama: president of the United States of Israel

Posted on January 23, 2012 by Matt

Somewhat bizarrely there are still those who argue that Barack Obama is not just the lesser of two evils, but some kind of brave, progressive politician genuinely trying to do the right thing in a difficult political climate.   Anyone who believes this should check out the following video produced by the White House entitled Israel & the US: An Unshakeable Bond, which has just been released as part of Obama’s pre-election campaign.

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This seven minute and fifteen second love letter to Israel manages to be simultaneously abject, cynical and dishonest and leaves hardly a single Zionist cliché untouched.   Against a horribly mawkish soundtrack of swirling strings Obama can be seen delivering a speech to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) in which he declares his ‘unshakeable’ commitment to Israeli ‘security’.

Various Israeli officials including Shimon Peres, Ehud Barak,  and a former head of Mossad praise his administration’s  commitment to this noble cause, as Obama lists some of the examples of his support for Israel that include missile defence systems, unprecedented cooperation between the US and Israeli military, the sharing of advanced military technologies,  US opposition to the Goldstone report on human rights violations carried out during Israel’s 2009 assault on Gaza (characterised by Obama as ‘we stood up strongly for Israel’s right to defend itself’), and the US vetoing of the Palestinian bid for statehood in the UN.

Iran  looms large in Obama’s list of achievements.   He tells AIPAC  how he visited the Vad Yashem Holocaust museum and the town of Sderot and ‘saw the struggle to survive of an 8-year-old boy who lost his leg to Hamas rocket.’  Had he travelled less than a mile further south, Obama might have discovered Palestinian children in the Gaza Strip engaged in a similar struggle for survival –  and he might also have spoken to the parents of some of the 352 children killed during Operation Cast Lead.

But to the Peace Laureate there are only victims on one side and there is only little Israel, a fragile oasis of democracy and western ‘values’ surrounded by an Arab sea of hate.   And so he tells his audience ‘I was reminded of the existential fear of Israelis when a modern dictator seeks nuclear weapons and threatens to wipe Israel off the face of the earth.’

Let’s be clear about this: this ‘threat’ is a lie and a president who repeats it as  a potential casus belli is a liar, a coward and a warmonger.   Obama is so determined to please his audience that he insists that ’no options are off the table’ against Iran.   The famous photograph of White House officials watching the killing of Osama bin Laden alternate with soundbites from Ehud Barak, the  counterterrorist warrior, who praises Obama’s commitment in the ‘struggle against terror’.

Barak tells his interviewer to ‘go and ask Osama bin Laden and go ask the Haqqanis,  go ask half a dozen pretentious terror leaders who you cannot contact anymore because of the readiness of this administration to take action.‘

It really is something to witness Obama the Peace Laureate and former Chicago community organizer receiving an accolade for his killing prowess from a hard, devious bastard like Barak who has always excelled in such activities himself – and also to see the degree to which Obama is prepared to bask in such praise.   But it is also  par for the course.

Four years ago one of the components of Obama’s ‘hope’ message was the belief by some of his supporters that he would stand up to Israel and pursue a less one-sided approach to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict than his predecessors.

This disgraceful video is one more explanation why that did not happen and why justice for the Palestinians remains as remote and elusive as ever.   So low is Obama prepared to sink in his desire to outflank the Republicans and please the Israel lobby that Unbreakable Bond even includes praise from Netanyahu.   Never mind the fact that Obama was only recently overheard apparently endorsing Nicolas Sarkozy’s depiction of the Israeli Prime Minister as a liar.

It is a dismal reflection of the extent to which Israel now dominates US domestic politics that the president of the world’s only superpower feels the need to gain Netanyahu’s approval in order to be re-elected.  But such support has now become so ingrained in the US political class that both parties routinely attempt to outdo each other in paying homage to an alliance that is often contrary to America’s own national interests.

According to a recent report by Mark Perry in Foreign Policy magazine Mossad agents during the Bush administration posed as CIA agents to recruit members of the Iranian Jundallah organization to kill Iranian officials and civilians.  One official quoted in the  article argued that these activities risked prompting retaliatory attacks against Americans, and told Perry ‘It’s amazing what the Israelis thought they could get away with…Their recruitment activities were nearly in the open. They apparently didn’t give a damn what we thought.’

This isn’t the first time that Israel has pursued its own interests at the expense of its ally and benefactor, secure in the knowledge that no matter how badly it behaves it will always be forgiven.    American support not only overlooks such behaviour – it also encourages Israeli  arrogance and lawless violence toward the Palestinians and towards its neighbours.

Because in the end there is no reason why Israel should ever make any political concessions or do anything to moderate its behaviour as long as the US political establishment continues to provide it with money and weapons, and as long as American leaders are prepared to make grovelling and shameful videos like Unbreakable Bond .

And a politician who is prepared to sanction such material is not a man to inspire ‘hope’,  but a coward and a cynic who deserves no more respect from ‘progressives’ than the man who held the job before him.

 

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Torylandia: every deficit has a silver lining

Posted on January 22, 2012 by Matt

In these tough times the nation faces difficult choices, as the government never ceases to remind us – always with the same tone of regret, as if to say what else can we do?  But with every week that passes it is becoming glaringly apparent that the government knows exactly what it wants to do,  and that behind the endless hypocritical flannel about the big society and responsible capitalism, it has a single overriding objective: to take advantage of the current crisis and transform the corporate penetration of the UK’s public services into an irreversible process.

This objective is evident in virtually every field.  It might be the Coalition’s Work Programme, which is being administered by our old friends Serco and G4S, among others – moonlighting from running immigrant detention centres and prisons  in order to provide work training to unemployed youth.  These companies can expect to make between £4,000 to £13,700  for every individual they find work for.

Nice work for them.  But now the National Council for Voluntary Organisations (NCVO) has accused these companies of ‘ cherry-picking’ people most likely to gain employment and leaving the least employable to the voluntary sector, thereby starving charities of funds.

Then there are schools.   There are now 1529 academies in the UK, compared with 203 under Labour.   There is also Gove of Gove Hall’s flagship free school programme, which is being driven forward with similarly breathless and unseemly haste.   Last week Barclays Bank announced that it would provide ‘expertise and support’ to schools across England.

Naturally such support will be focussed on academies, free schools,  to which Barclays will be providing £1.25 million to help get off the ground.   As the government helpfully points out these schools ‘ are free from local authority control, making external expertise in finance and HR invaluable’.   What does Barclays hope to gain from this relationship?   Well, it will be offering ‘structured work experience opportunities at Barclays branches and offices to pupils from academies and Free Schools’ .   In doing so,  according to Barclays chief executive Antony Jenkins:

By providing financial awareness training and valuable work experience we can help young people to contribute to and share in future prosperity.  We can also make a positive impact to these schools by encouraging our employees to serve as governors, and by lending our banking expertise to school boards.

Not too much talk of a rounded education in there, though such schools will no doubt be useful in churning out the next generation of Barclays employees.   There are also the government’s proposals to privatise the probation service.  Already the government has obliged the probation service to bid for offenders’ unpaid work (community service) against three private companies,  Mitie, Sodhexo and…quelle surprise, it’s Serco again.

Last but not least there is the NHS.   The government is now attempting to pass its health and social care bill, which among other things proposes to allow NHS hospitals to use half their bed, appointments and car park spaces for private patients.  This bill is currently trying to negotiate its way through some pretty rough seas, with one of the government’s own advisers warning that opposition from within the NHS might become an ‘NHS version of the Arab spring.’

Well bring it on.   Because nearly four years after a crisis that was caused in large part  by the private sector with the assistance of an incompetent and complicit political class,  it is nothing short of astounding that this government made in hell is still getting away with the ruthless asset-stripping of the public sector – all in the name of efficiency and making savings.

This corporate Klondike is nothing to do with the national good.  It is a massive con-trick that is being perpetrated on the public in an attempt to convince people that wholesale privatisation is unavoidable and inevitable.   But one of the reasons for the Coalition’s frantic haste is its anxiety that it may only be a matter of time before the population wakes from its torpor, and resistance and opposition begin to reach a critical mass and block or slow down the whole ‘reform’ process.

Until then, it is clearly determined to channel as much lucre into the corporate coffers as it can get away with.  Which is why we need to be equally determined to close that  window of opportunity sooner rather than later – because Torylandia may be a good place for companies, corporations, lobbyists and consultants.  But for many of us it is a dismal place and promises to get a hell of a lot worse.

 

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Etta James RIP

Posted on January 21, 2012 by Matt

In terms of its ability to stir the emotions, there is nothing like the singing voice, and  that power has never been dependent on technical proficiency.  There are a lot of singers with great voices who fail to evoke or generate any emotion at all.   Like Alexandra Burke singing Leonard Cohen’s Hallelujah.  Or Leona Lewis’ atrocious version of Hurt, the Nine Inch Nails song that Johnny Cash so powerfully and triumphantly transformed into the anthem of his twilight years.

Cash took a song about pain and heroin addiction and transformed it into a sombre existential credo, drawing on an inner torment and darkness that cannot be reproduced on the X Factor or Britain’s Got Talent – and which would almost certainly be considered intrusive, alien and just too real if anyone tried.

It is almost impossible to watch Cash singing ‘ Everyone I know, goes away in the end’ in his aged, quavering voice on that last great video,  against a crescendo of piano  and acoustic guitars, without feeling touched in places that Simon Cowell – thankfully – can never reach.

Lewis’ bland and ridiculous version, on the other hand, has all the emotional depth and dramatic power that one might expect from Basil Brush reading Auden’s Funeral Blues.  But this stunningly inappropriate choice of cover maybe reflects a certain zeitgeist.   As capitalism stagnates and crumbles, as one country after another goes down the austerity plughole and the future often seems to turn grimmer by the day, pop culture continues to provide an inane backdrop our lives.

Today it is impossible to turn on the radio or go into a shopping centre without hearing some manufactured singer with a perfect voice emanating fake and pre-packaged emotion in soaring Whitney Houston or Mariah Carey-esque cadences.  Many of these songs are  accompanied by the usual videos of pretty airbrushed singers straining to make even their most banal pronouncements seem soulful and heartfelt, eyes closed and faces transfixed by a passion and emotion that that is often conspicously absent from their Cowellised bleatings.

The themes of most of these songs are pretty much the same as always: how I found you, how I need you, how I lost you, how I want you back again.  But with a few exceptions both the songs and the singers sound – and often look – like clones who have come fresh off a studio production line, and their frantic emoting often sounds hollow and emotionally numb.

But maybe that’s how we like it.  Maybe fake music is the most appropriate soundtrack for an era in which so much has been revealed to be fake.  Because these are sad and painful times for many people and as TS Elliot once pithily observed, humankind cannot bear very much reality.

One  singer who was not fake was Etta James, who died yesterday at the age of 73. When Etta sang, she really meant it.   Her voice was an amazing instrument.  She could be soulful, bluesy, gutsy, sexy and tender and she was able to transmit a level of raw emotion that is conspicuously absent from so many of today’s clones.

My all-time favourite James song is I’d Rather Go Blind, which she recorded in 1968.   Co-written by a friend of hers Ellington Jordan, who first sang it to her when she visited him in jail, it is just one of the most poignant and beautiful love songs ever recorded.

Many people have covered this song, including Rachel Crow – on the first US season of the X-Factor, no less.  Beyoncé did a creditable version for the film Cadillac Records, in which she put in a fine performance as James herself.  But nothing I have ever heard beats the original.  Even after listening to it countless times, I still feel that tingle in the spine when that shimmering opening guitar riff comes in and James sings out

Something told me it was over/When I saw you and her talkin’/Something deep down in my soul said, ‘Cry, girl’/When I saw you and that girl walkin’ around

Many people have felt these sentiments and many singers sung about them, but few singers have ever conveyed  sadness, longing and regret so powerfully as James did in that song.  Like Billie Holiday, she really meant it, and when she sang the blues she sang them from experience.  Abandoned by her father as a child, she was brought up by various carers because her mother was never at home, one of whom used to beat her in order to make her sing for his friends.  Even after signing for Chess Records and becoming famous, she had longterm problems with heroin addiction and a succession of bad relationships.

No one would wish such experiences on anyone, and they can’t be considered some kind of precondition for great art.  But in James’ case, they forged a singer with real heart and soul, whose emotions were genuinely felt rather than simulated for the benefit of the cameras or a place in the X Factor final.

In her later years she suffered from dementia and the leukemia that eventually killed her.   But I will always remember the proud, sad and beautiful woman who poured so much of her life into two minutes and thirty seconds of pure unadulterated emotion, which you can find right here:

YouTube Preview Image

 

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Foreign scroungers take our benefits

Posted on January 20, 2012 by Matt

It doesn’t stop, and in those dank and rancid corners of the national press that are forever England, it never will.   Today the rightwing broadsheets and tabloids are venting on full spleen, spraying indignant flecks of bile at a report from the Department of Work and Pensions (DWP) which claims that 370,000 foreign-born residents in the UK are claiming state benefits.

The news has generated the kind of nuanced and thoughtful headlines we have come to  expect:

370,000 migrants on the dole – The Daily Telegraph

More than £2 BILLION in benefits are paid out to foreigners each year – The Daily Mail

Foreigners get £2.1 billion in benefits every year – The Daily Express

Foreign legions on dole – The Daily Star

Coming just two days after UK unemployment jumped to 2.69 million for the first time since the Major years, these are headlines to warm a coalition government’s heart, and are clearly part of an orchestrated attempt to distract attention from the UK’s failing economy and focus attention on the familiar image of  ’foreigners’ as parasitical intruders.

Thus we find an article in the Telegraph co-authored by employment minister Chris Grayling and the minister for immigration Damian Green  entitled Labour didn’t care who landed in Britain, which explains how the government initiated the DWP  research  project which aimed  ’ to match information about people’s nationality when they entered the country with the list of people now on benefits’.

Why would the government want to do this?   According to Grayling/Green, it’s because ‘ we have to have a system that is fair and transparent, and which stops people receiving money that they should not be entitled to.’   

An admirable aspiration no doubt.  Except that the government’s concern with the numbers of ‘immigrants’ and ‘foreigners’ who might not be entitled to state benefits has nothing to  do with fairness or transparency.  It is a cynical gambit intended to score points over Labour and fuel ‘anger at the huge burden of benefit tourism’ as the Daily Express puts it – regardless of the evidence.

Grayling and Green themselves point out that most of the claims in the government’s findings are not illegitimate and they are not even made by ‘foreigners’:

We’ve tracked down three quarters of them, and most have a right to what they are receiving. They are people who have settled here, either by becoming British nationals or being given indefinite leave to remain. Those people who are now British nationals are fully entitled to means-tested benefits. Those who come here for a limited period cannot claim benefits. But if we allow them to stay, the current rules say they can access our welfare state.

Yes, ‘our’ welfare state that the government is so fond of.   No wonder the Daily Mail – that well-known supporter of the welfare system –  quotes Grayling promising that the government ‘will root out those claimants who cannot prove their immigration status and in turn they will be stripped of their benefits.’

The report behind today’s newsplash is based on  a random survey by the DWP of 9,000  claimants ‘ who at the time they registered for a NINo (National Insurance Number) were non-UK nationals’.   The 370,000 figure is an estimate based on these preliminary findings.

Contrary to the way it has been represented in the press, this figure does not refer to non-UK nationals on  ’the dole’, but foreign-born claimants accessing a variety of different state benefits that include disability allowance and widow’s benefit, out of an overall national total of just over five and a half million claimants.

Of these 1, 438,000 are on jobseekers allowance, of whom 121,000 claimants were listed as non-UK nationals at the time they first made their claims –  8.5 percent of the national total.   The DWP’s figures also note that that 98 percent of all claimants in the survey have subsequently been found to have ‘ an immigration status consistent with a claim for DWP working age benefits’, that includes British citizenship (54 percent of the total), indefinite leave to remain (29 percent) and refugee status (10 percent).

These conclusions do not exactly amount to a national emergency.   Nor do they  bear out the thesis of a massive abuse of the system by illegitimate foreigners.  Of the DWP’s 9,000 samples, 1,316 ‘could not be be matched to the computer information database’ and their immigration status could not be established, while 68 claimants ‘had no lawful immigration status‘ and another 57 were ‘subject to immigration enforcement action’.

So that’s it folks.   Out of 9,000 ‘foreigners’ claiming state benefits in February 2011,  125 might have been claiming benefits that they were not entitled to.  Really makes you want to throw up your hands in horror, doesn’t it?

In some quarters it really does.  So the Express tells us that foreigners are ‘pocketing £2.1 billion a year in welfare benefits.’   And the Mail accompanies an article on today’s report by recycling a story that was widely covered in the tabloids  last August, about a Somali family who were rehoused in an £8,000 house in West Hampsteads.

The relevance of this story to today’s headlines, from the Mail‘s point of view, is that Saeed Khaliif, the family’s father,  ‘has up to eight children and lives on benefits. He has not worked since arriving here three years ago.

The Mail does not say why Mr Khaliif has not worked.  But it does not need to.  A photograph of his wife smiling in the doorway holding a mobile phone will tell the story to its readers; that the Khalifahs are Third World migrants who breed too much and that they belong to the ‘The foreigners being paid £2billion in benefits a year including 371,000 on the dole (and 5,000 claiming £42m in illegal handouts).’

Hatred is duly served and the useful distinctions between them and us are maintained and reinforced.   Just get rid of the immigrants and everything will be alright again.   So all in all a good day’s work for the government.   And ministers can go to bed tonight with a cup of hot cocoa and congratulate themselves on a job well done.

 

 

 

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Remembering El Mozote

Posted on January 19, 2012 by Matt

Just over thirty years ago, in a three day period from December 10 to 13 1981, a unit of the US-trained elite Atlacatl Battalion massacred more than 1,000 men, women and children in the course of an anti-terrorist limpieza (cleanup) operation in and around the rural  hamlet of El Mozote, in El Salvador’s Morazan province.

The massacre was a deliberate act of state terrorism that was intended to ‘drain the sea’ in an area was believed to be sympathetic to leftwing guerrillas of the Farabundi Marti Liberation Front (FMLN).    It was also the single worst atrocity in a 12-year civil war in which some 75,000 people were killed.   At the time the provisional Salvadoran government under José Napoleón Duarte denied any responsibility and blamed the massacre on the guerrillas themselves.

These claims were  supported by the Reagan administration, which carried out its own misinformation campaign and dismissed photographs and media reports of the massacre as propaganda.  It was not until 1993 that  the legendary Argentine Forensics team exhumed dozens of skulls and human remains, including children at El Mozote, as part of the UN truth commission investigations that paved the way for an end to the civil war.

Even then the troglodyte Salvadoran right denied that  the military was responsible and insisted that the children had been shot by the FMLN or were in fact armed guerrillas themselves.   In 1994 I visited El Mozote myself, in the company of Father Rogelio Ponseele, a Belgian priest who had spent the entire civil war with the guerrillas of the Revolutionary Army of the Poor (ERP).

At the time the hamlet was a spooky and mostly deserted collection of huts, and the only monument to the savage events that had taken place there more than a decade before consisted of four stark silhouettes of a man and a woman holding the hands of a boy and girl.  Today the monument includes the names of all those who died there, but no one has ever been prosecuted for the killings.

It was not until this Monday,  that El Salvador’s leftist president Mauricio Funes made the first public apology for the massacre during a commemoration of the 20th anniversary of the peace accords which bought the civil war to an end.  At the site of the massacre, according to Associated Press, Funes told a gathering of peasants and farmers:

‘I ask forgiveness of the mothers, fathers, sons, daughters, brothers and sisters of those who still today do not know the whereabouts of their loved ones. I ask forgiveness from the people of El Salvador, who suffered an atrocious and unacceptable violence.’

On one level the fact that such an apology on one level is an indication of how much  El Salvador has changed politically since the 1980s.    To see what kind of place it was, it’s worth reading Mark Danner’s brilliant 1993 account of the massacre in the New Yorker The Truth About El Mozote.

But the coming of democracy has not brought peace to El Salvador.  Two decades after the end of the civil war, it remains one of the most violent places on earth.  According to a report published last year by the Geneva Declaration on Armed Violence and Development, El Salvador had the highest murder rate in the world between 2004-09, with 65 homicides per 100,00 inhabitants, followed by Iraq and Jamaica.

Every year hundreds of Salvadorans are shot and stabbed to death.  But today it is no longer the death squads and the state organs of repression that are doing most of the killing, but tattooed nihilistic gangs fighting over territory in or a share of the US drugs market in a country where the average income is $7200.

Meanwhile, as the North American Congress on Latin America points out, military influence in El Salvador and across Central America is increasing as a result of the ‘war on drugs’ and its concomitant violence and insecurity.

From the US there has been no apology for El Mozote or for the support that it gave to the Salvadoran military and police who were responsible for 95 percent of all human rights abuses during the war.   At the time massacres and atrocities were considered a necessary price to prevent ‘another Nicaragua’ or the implantation of ‘totalitarianism’  in Central America – and Ronald Reagan’s coterie of Cold War zealots only paid attention to them in order to neutralise criticism inside the United States and ensure the continual flow of funding from Congress.

Today  the violence and cruelty that was part of the West’s ‘victory’ in the Cold War has been has been conveniently forgotten – or else it was never considered important enough to remember in the first place.   Meanwhile those who took part in that policy have died or continued in the same trajectory.  Ronald Reagan, the murderous cowboy-clown with the folksy grin has a statue erected in his honour in London.   Other former Reagan officials went on to join the Bush administration’s ‘war on terror.’

One of them was Elliot Abrams, his sinister Assistant Secretary of State for Human Rights and Humanitarian Affairs – rarely has a job title been so far removed from the quality of the man who filled it.    A self-proclaimed ‘gladiator’ in the Reagan administration’s Central America policy, Abrams played a key role in attempting to cover up human rights abuses in El Salvador, and once dismissed reports of the El Mozote massacre in the Washington Post and the New York Times as ‘nothing more than communist propaganda’.

He  subsequently insisted that ‘The Administration’s record on El Salvador is one of fabulous achievement’.    In 2001 Abrams became a national security advisor to the Bush administration on, with responsibility for the Near East and North Africa.   Abrams was one of a series of old Central America hands who oversaw the Iraq war and insurgency, and were closely associated with the policy known as the ‘Salvador option’ – in which Shi’a death squads directed from the Iraqi Ministry of the Interior were unleashed against Iraqi insurgents and civilians during the so-called ‘surge’.

Today this ruthless Israel-firster, former Contragate crook and apologist for atrocity is a fellow of the Council on Foreign Relations and an unrelenting advocate of American and Israeli violence across the Middle East and beyond.

And this is the point.   For what took place at El Mozote was not an insane outbreak of irrational violence, but a method and a technique that has been used by states in many different conflicts.   National security managers like Abrams know this perfectly well, but they tend not to spell it out too overtly to an American public that still believes in America’s essentially benign purpose in the world.

Today America and its allies routinely decry regimes that ‘kill their own people’ as a justification for aggressive wars and ‘regime change’.   El Mozote reminds us of a time when the US supported one of the most barbarous and ruthless regimes of the late twentieth century – regardless of the fact its armed forces also ‘killed their own people.’

So let us remember the victims of El Mozote, but let us not forget the people who killed them and those who tried to cover up their acts.   Because there is really no reason why they should be forgiven.   And some of them are still with us, and like Macbeth, they have been wading in other people’s blood for so long that they simply can’t kick the habit.

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Death on the Greek borders

Posted on January 18, 2012 by Matt

International attention is once again focussed on Greece as EU and IMF officials gather in Athens to work out a deal to prevent a potential debt default and a Greek exit from the eurozone, and protesters once again take to the streets.   EU/IMF ‘reforms’ have already had a disastrous impact on large swathes of the Greek population,  but the brutal unravelling of Greek society is unlikely to feature very highly in the calculations of politicians and economists.

One group of people will not receive any attention at all: namely the hundreds of thousands of undocumented migrants and refugees who are stranded in a state of permanent illegality in Greece – a country that doesn’t want them but does not allow them to go to other European countries as a result of its role in the EU’s system of migratory controls.

In 2010 I made two visits to Greece to carry out research for my book on borders and migration.   At that time Greece was the main route for undocumented migrants trying to get into Europe and many of them were trapped in an unbelievably difficult situation.  Thousands were living in Athens, without work or legal status, where they faced increasing violence from neo-Nazi vigilantes and repression from the police.

Hundreds were camped out in the hills near the port of Igoumenitsa, trying to get to Italy.   Others were shunted back and forth between some of the worst detention centres in Europe.   Every day more migrants were crossing the Greek-Turkish border and some were dying in the attempt.

Repression and exclusion hasn’t been the only response of Greek society to the country’s undocumented migrants.  A number of organizations and individuals have acted in solidarity with Greece’s migrants in various ways.   They include Welcome To Europe (W2eu), an NGO which campaigns on behalf of migrants and refugees in Greece and describes itself as ‘ a grassroots movement that embraces migration and wants to create a Europe of hospitality’.

For the last two years two of W2eu’s members, Salinia Stroux and Regina Mantanika, have been driving back and forth across Greece in a van they call the ‘infomobile’, collecting information about undocumented migrants and refugees, and helping trace relatives who have drowned or disappeared trying to cross the country’s borders.

In August 2010 the infomobile discovered a mass grave near the village of Sidero at  the Greek-Turkish border along the Evros river, where some 200 migrants who had died trying to cross the frontier were buried in an ‘Illegal Migrants Cemetery’ whose only monument was a bullet-ridden sign.

 

At first the Greek government denied the cemetery’s existence, but they were eventually obliged to acknowledge it.  Since then the cemetery has got larger, as more migrants have drowned.   Some of these deaths are named in a powerful and often unbearably moving report published by Infomobile Greece, entitled Lostatborder: A journey to the lost and the dead of the Greek borders,  which is now available in English translation.

The underlying philosophy behind this chronicle is summed by the authors’ account of a memorial gathering on 30 August at the town of Provatonas , near the border to commemorate some of the migrants who died at the Evros river:

‘We want to give back a piece of dignity, to those whose lives disappeared – right here – into the senselessness of the European borders. We gathered for giving back a piece of dignity also to those who survived. A piece of dignity that was lost on the way to Europe, like the passports or the photographs showing the faces of the beloved ones that are carried away by the water. We want to give back a piece of dignity to all of us, who feel ashamed in the moment of these deaths because we failed in our attempt to stop this murderous regime and to create a welcoming Europe.’

The attendees at Provatonas also included relatives of some of those who had died, such as Tahera, an Afghan refugee in Hamburg, whose husband Bashir drowned in the Evros, and who before learning the details of his death had written to him:

My dear Bashir,
The world without you is no world, it’s a world without
colours. Life has become very hard. I beg god, if you are
alive, please may He make you come back to me and to
our children very soon. And if really happened what I
am not able to find words for, that you will never come
back, I ask god for you to find a better place in paradise.
There is not a day or night passing when the children
don’t wake up or fall asleep thinking about you. They
miss their father very much and talk about you all the
time. My dear Bashir, please, I would like be close to
you.
Tahera

And John, from Kenya, whose wife Jane drowned in the Evros and was subsequently identified through DNA testing after being dug up from the Sidero cemetery.   In his statement at the memorial John paid tribute to his dead wife and told the gathering:

My love for you is beyond measure and you will keep being between us forever. We will keep the flame by. We know your values and we will carry on the spirit. Will our lord help us to stand firm as a family. Our dear parents, brothers and sisters, our loving children, will always remember you. Relatives and friends will always remember and respect you. The papas of the fountain here Jane, in the same respect, have included you as a member for the Evros victims, but not as a last respect: May God bless your soul in a kind of peace.  Amen. My appeal here, today, Ladies and Gentlemen is that just as we joined hands looking for Jane, we join hands making it possible to take Jane back home in Kenya to be buried in respect and dignity.

Lostatborder is another form of commemoration,  a tragic but essential tribute to those who have died at another of Europe’s ‘murderous borders’, and a firsthand account of an ongoing humanitarian disaster which neither Greece nor the EU are keen to acknowledge.

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Say goodbye to Luke and Dan

Posted on January 17, 2012 by Matt

If ever I forget why New Labour was such a hollow and amoral rightwing project, there is always someone out there to remind me.   It might be the Great Man himself, still effortlessly serving God and Mammon and raking in the millions while bringing  peace to the Middle East.   Or his equally grasping wife,   currently involved in a £65 million project to open a chain of private health clinics in UK supermarkets, which according to the Follow Health blog ‘is taking advantage of the coalition Government’s plans to open up the health market to private competition.’

You have to admire the chutzpah, even if you can’t exactly imagine Nye Bevan giving her a high five.   Then there is Alastair Campbell the Moralist, pontificating on the decline of journalistic standards and the absence of compassion in the tabloid press to the Leveson Inquiry.    And apart from such luminaries, there the lesser moths who once hovered in the Blairite flame, some of whom have taken advantage of the Miliband Sucks bandwagon to raise New Labour’s tattered flag or leave the party altogether.

One of them is Luke Bozier,  political consultant, entrepreneur and former e-Campaigns Manager for the Labour Party, who has just announced his decision to join the Conservatives.  In  a blog post Bozier explains that he joined the Labour Party five years ago because he was attracted by Blair’s ‘pro-business attitude and a commitment to reforming our creaking public services‘.

Now unfortunately, Blair’s successors have turned their backs on this noble vision, and Bozier can no longer remain amongst them:

I despair, because I love this country and I care deeply about making public services better. About dismantling the traps in our bloated welfare system. About projecting confidence on the world stage. About the deficit and debt. I no longer wish to be associated with Labour’s ludicrous attitudes to education reform or its dire mismanagement of the economy.

Luckily our patriot has found a government that loves his country  as much as he does:

It’s Cameron’s Conservatives who are being fiscally responsible, doing the hard work needed to put the economy back on track. His party is taking the steps needed to improve our schools, our welfare system and to invest in new infrastructure like HS2. His party is instituting the regulatory reforms so desperately needed to allow private enterprise, the engine of the recovery, to flourish.  Those reforms are social justice. And social justice is why I entered politics.

I don’t know much about Luke Bozier, but somehow I doubt that someone who joined Labour after the Iraq war and who equates Cameronism with ‘social justice’ really cared too much about it himself.  In fact virtually every word of this cri de coeur rings hollow, from its outrage at the UK’s  ’bloated’ public services or that priceless goal of ‘projecting confidence on the world stage’- an objective which to both Blair and Cameron usually means waging war somewhere.

Bozier’s volte face appears to be relatively recent, unless he was already contemplating it last November when he co-authored a piece for Labour List to launch the Labour’s Business website, whose aim is to place ‘enterprise at the heart of Labour politics in the 21st century’ .   Flushed with can-do spirit, Bozier and his fellow-author argued that ‘we don’t believe that the Tories are the natural party of enterprise & business; in fact, it’s in Labour’s interest – and it should be at the heart of Labour values in this century – to promote and support self-employment and entrepreneurship.’

The post went on to argue that:

Our century puts the “means of production” in the hands of individuals – what could be more progressive, more empowering, more Labour than the opportunity to take control of one’s own economic future.

So the ‘means of production’ are to be placed in the ‘hands of individuals’ and that’s ‘progressive’?   Well bless my soul, what unadulterated vacuous drivel.   Unfortunately there were – and are – many Luke Boziers in the Labour Party and the Conservatives, who have transformed words like ‘progressive’, ‘empowering’ or ‘reform’ into empty catchphrases and cool brand names to promote a political agenda that is essentially neoliberal, pro-City, pro-privatisation and pro-war.

Such men – and women – are so similar to each other that they are easily able to jump ship and reinvent themselves with a minimum of discomfort.  Take Dan Hodges, another exiled disciple from the temple of Blair, who has made a seamless journey from the New Statesman to the Daily Telegraph, where he can now be found writing blogs with titles like ‘everyone’s laughing at the left‘ and ‘Iran: Why we need a Start the War coalition’.

You’re not going to find too many Telegraph readers who are going to disagree with such sentiments.    But what the hell was someone with views like this doing in the Labour Party in the first place?    It isn’t surprising that Hodges and Bozier were friends, and now Hodges has defended his mate in the Telegraph on the grounds that:

Those who criticise leaders or policies or political positions that are clearly leading their party to ruin aren’t traitors. I actually think they are the real heroes. Turning against the tribe takes greater courage than marching silently alongside it. What Luke did was wrong. But it certainly wasn’t cowardly.

Hodges clearly would like his readers to admire such bravery as much as he does himself, but I really can’t join in the admiration.  And I can’t help thinking that it doesn’t take much courage to turn against a party that you regarded as  a political hotel or a career move.

Such men might be opportunists, but that doesn’t make them traitors either.  For the fact that they believe that Gordon Brown represented ‘the left’ or that Ed Miliband’s tepidly left-of-centre agenda is ‘leading their party to ruin’  merely demonstrates to me that are Thatcherites in social-democratic drag who have returned to their natural home.

So let’s give two cheers for Lucky Luke and Dissident Dan, hollow heroes in a party they helped to hollow out,  cardboard iconoclasts who stood out against the unquestioning tribe, and then hope that the Labour Party can one day attract people who really are worthy of respect.

 

 

 

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