9/11 - Never Giving Up on Humanity

Twelve years ago today, the world witnessed the appalling and devastating attacks on the Twin Towers in New York, as well as on the Pentagon and the would be fourth attack on possibly the Whitehouse or Congress which was seemingly stymied by the bravery of passengers on board the doomed flight. Since the thousands of deaths on that dreadful day, hundreds of thousands more have died or been injured or displaced in the terrible wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and scores of other places.

With the War on Terror fought out on battlefields across the world, some of them in the ether of the internet, the polarisation between the west and particularly the Middle East, between Christian and Muslim, has been assumed to be total. Just as Islam divides the world between a Dar-al Islam (the House of Islam) and a Dar-al Harb (the House of War) so the narrative has been that we are all now in two, mutually hostile camps with little in common and even less hope of any reconciliation.

And yet, as with so much in the modern, dumbed-down reporting that passes for journalism and news today, all is not as it seems. Throughout the world, people of all faiths and none continue to do what they have always done - live together, work together, even pray together. Whether the Egyptian Christians who formed a protective cordon round Muslims at prayer during the anti-Mubarak protests, or the Muslims who similarly formed a protective cordon round Christian churches to defend them against assaults by Islamist extremists; or the many other examples of interfaith dialogue and support, ordinary people, believers and non-believers, continue to believe in each other.

Here are some videos on this Day of Commemoration which give hope for a better, safer and peaceful future. A future where the message of love that is at the heart of all faiths and in the hearts of all people is able to be heard and lived out in full.

Watch and have faith in us. All of us.

In America:

In Egypt:

They are saying: "We are the Egyptians, Muslims and Christians all together. Oh Egypt, our mother, here's your people, gathering all together for you, Lord is greater, Christians and Muslims we say, long live Egypt. Long live Egypt."

And "In the name of Jesus and Muhammed, we unify our ranks,"

Whilst, still in Egypt, people are brought together by traditions older than both faiths:

And in Kenya:

Last but far from least, Syrian Muslims join Syrian Christians to worship in their Church together. (commentary in Arabic only)

Skynet is Coming - A Warning from History

Today In History -10 February 1868, Florida

Republican conservatives draft new constitution which concentrates
political power in the hands of the governor and limits the impact        

of the Black vote.  This is made possible by Conservatives, aided by military forces, who seize the convention hall and establish

control over the reconstruction process in Florida.

This violent act to restrict the rights of minority citizens and suspend the operation of normal democracy is by no means an isolated incident in the history of rightwing politics in the USA or elsewhere. Conservatives eschew the ability of the State to do very much at all - whether economics, education, welfare or whatever, private enterprise is favoured. Its definition of democracy is all too often a deeply qualified one and all about defending the elite's privileges in the face of what is termed fanaticism on the part of the democratic majority - that is, anything that in any way challenges the power and wealth of the richest.

The military however is another matter - neoliberals accord military and policing as the key responsibilities of the State, although even there the private profit motive is introduced wherever possible. Whole wars have been found to support the corporate business agenda - Iraq being a major recent case, with Libya following on.

Not all conservatives are blind to the dangers or as unprincipled as the neoliberal wing which dominates the Republicans in the USA and other conservative parties around the world in pursuing ever more vicious and unyielding ideologically-driven policies. It was one of their own, a former military commander, President/General Dwight Eisernhower who, in his farewell address of  January 1961, warned of the growing danger of the then emerging military-industrial complex. Driven by its need for conflict to feed its business needs, he voiced his concerns about the armaments industry taking on a life of its own in needlessly and endlessly fostering conflict and war. In this, it would seek ever more influence over politics and threaten democracy, liberty and freedom.

Eisenhower also warned against the rise of a scientific elite, linked to the military, being allowed to drive public policy in a range of fields, not least the military. In this, the ceaseless development of ever more powerful, devastating and even sinister weaponry has proven him right: from "tactical" nuclear weapons and the neutron bombs of the 1980s to the drones of today and, being developed now, the DNA-seeking, 100% computerised, non-human operated drones of tomorrow. Terminator seems just a few steps away.

Yet his words went unheeded by both Democrats and Republicans, so that now the USA spends nearly as much on weaponry as the rest of the world put together. This in a society where thousands die each year from malnutrition, where tens of millions even now have little effective healthcare and where life expectancy is lower than in many so-called Third World countries. This too in a country where the Patriot Act has done away with many legal safeguards and where progressive political and environmental protesters are officially ranked alongside jihadists as potential terrorists, especially where their views bring them into conflict with the arms industry or the military.

But the neolibs don't care - and in the 145 years since the coup d'etat in Florida, possibly the only thing that has changed is that they would not need to physically seize the convention: they would already have the whole process stitched up and probably outsourced. War, rumours of war and threats are what keep the military-industrial complex going - peace is anathema to it. And so the President's words ring prophetically true, but go unheeded.

Here is Eisenhower's full farewell address to the nation 17 January 1961:

We Love Big Brother

"They can't get inside you," she had said. But they could get inside you. "What happens to you here is forever," O'Brien had said. That was a true word. There were things, your own acts, from which you could never recover. Something was killed in your breast: burnt out, cauterized out.

But it was all right, everything was all right, the struggle was finished. He had won the victory over himself. He loved Big Brother.

(Orwell, "1984")

When fiction becomes fact.

All of Us

Today, 5^th November, is Bonfire Night in Britain. This is our form of what, in many countries, is a fire festival – like Norwuz, the pre-Islamic new year festival marked in Iran by a remarkably similar combination of bonfires and fireworks. But in Britain, as we burn the “Guy”, whilst most know that the man it symbolises, Guido Fawkes, attempted to blow up both the King and Parliament in 1605, less is known about the circumstances that led him to do this – and some of the similarities to today.

Britain did not exist at the time, although by the Union ofthe Crowns of 1603, England and Scotland shared a monarch. James Stewart, the sixth of Scotland and first of England, had travelled to London from Edinburgh after inheriting the English throne from Elizabeth Tudor – his second cousin and the executioner of his mother, the Catholic Mary Stewart, Queen of Scots. James shared with Elizabeth a deep distrust of Catholicism, viewed as a threat to the sovereignty of both their kingdoms as it was the faith professed by their major Continental enemies - the Hapsburg Empire (Austria, Spain and the Spanish Netherlands) and France.

Consequently, Catholics in Elizabethan and early Stewart England had a far from happy time – Elizabeth's father Henry VIII had seized Catholic assets and declared himself the head of the established church, a position held to this day by the monarch. Opposition to the Anglican Church therefore was soon viewed on a par with opposition to the King and, as such, treason. Catholicism was outlawed; the Catholic church’s assets were seized and disbursed between the King and his followers; and priests were hunted down and killed. Their followers, real and simply suspected (or even maliciously accused) were subject to detention, torture, trial and execution.

It was against this background that Guido Fawkes and a number of co-conspirators vainly plotted to place barrels of gunpowder under the Houses of Parliament and explode it with the King and his Parliamentarians during the State Opening of 1605. Unfortunately for them, they were discovered, seized, tortured and executed - not, as one might assume, by burning, but by the equally grotesque spectacle of being hanged, drawn and quartered.

Fawkes can therefore be viewed as either a terrorist or a freedom fighter depending on your point of view. Given that he and his fellow Catholics could be seized and executed by the State purely for holding their beliefs, the logic that says people can fight against tyranny - whether in the Arab Spring or the Warsaw Uprising or on the beaches of Normandy - would seem to apply to the conspirators as they dragged their barrels of powder into Westminster's cellars.

Certainly, in the last few years, the caricature of Fawkes has assumed symbolism as the "face" of opposition to the new tyranny that has swept so many western countries in recent years. Never as free or democratic as we have liked to claim, Britain and the USA in particular have introduced sweeping new laws following the 9/11 atrocities, supposedly to protect freedom, but in truth placing it increasingly at risk. Centuries of legal norms, such as habeas corpus and the right to trial by jury, have been removed or jeopardised as never before - with electronic surveillance massively increasing the power of the authorities to track and trace their opponents.

Of course, Bush and Blair, the main authors of these new measures, claimed that they were necessary to counter the grossly exaggerated claims of international terror networks supposedly threatening our way of life  apparently more seriously than the Nazis or the Soviet Union ever did. And so we have the twisted irony of having our freedoms removed supposedly to protect them!

Consider just a handful of the disgraceful actions that the new laws have allowed so far:

- the imprisonment, without trial, for years of hundreds of men, including several children like Mohammed al Gorani, in Guantanamo bay, many seized on the basis of allegations from extremely dubious single sources.

- the detention without trial of a number of people in Britain who were never allowed to know what they were even suspected of let alone see the evidence against them: none have been brought to trial and several are being held/restricted at the request of semi-dictatorial Arab regimes such as Algeria.

- the use of evidence obtained under torture: the USA especially, including under Obama, has "outsourced" torture to allied regimes, including Assad's Syria and Gaddafi's Libya so that they can claim not to carry it out themselves - this more than anything else has been the main factor behind the wave of anti-US protests across the Arab world.

- domestically, in the UK, supposedly anti-terror laws have been in the main used to detain environmentalist activists and prevent them from taking part in demonstrations. The same laws led to the prosecution of a peace campaigner, Maya Evans, for reading out aloud the names of British servicemen and women killed in Afghanistan and Iraq in front of the national cenotaph in Whitehall, while in an earlier case a Labour Party member - a survivor of a Nazi concentration camp - was arrested and held for several hours for booing the then Home Secretary.

- in both the USA and UK, and recently in Greece, anti-government protests have been faced with increasingly brutal responses: from the kettling of a heavily pregnant woman in freezing weather in a London disability protest, to the pepper spraying of an elderly woman by US police or the use of a chained young woman as a human shield by Athenian riot cops, the level of violence deployed by the state against its opponents in supposedly free societies is growing and growing fast.

- the bizarre detention of the Green Party Presidential and Vice-Presidential candidates, Jill Stein and Cheri Honkala, by the police during the second Obama/Romney debate, when they were taken to a large facility, strapped to chairs and held incommunicado for eight hours.

"Dangerous" 84 year old woman protestor sprayed by US police.

More routine law was used last week to prosecute successfully a Glasgow man who shouted "no public spending cuts" at poor sensitive Prime Minister David Cameron. Meanwhile, the supposed civil rights champion, Liberal leader Nick Clegg, is pushing ahead with plans to create an electronic database that will store the records of every phone call, text message, email and internet visit by every citizen of the UK. Both the potential and likely actual abuse are massive - quite aside from the risk of hacking of such a goldmine of personal information by third parties.

Nothing puts our rights at risk more than our surrendering them to an ever more powerful state. From Magna Carta onwards, we have fought for our rights and freedoms: millions sacrificed their lives the struggles for them over centuries. To quietly acquiesce to the corrupt, overweening would-be tyrants of the modern governments that claim to foster and defend democracy by destroying it would be a betrayal of them and of ourselves. It recalls the cynical words of Lenin - that "Liberty is precious; so precious that it must be rationed." As soon as any Government is permitted to use even a smidgen of such logic, then the very nostrums that supposedly set us apart from the dictators, tyrants and ideologues who would oppress us are shredded and gone. 

And so, Guido Fawkes, by some accounts the last man to enter Parliament with honest intentions, symbolises now the face of resistance to oppression and tyranny of the state over individual belief. His mask has been adopted by many in last year's Occupy movements around the world, as well as by the Anonymous  meme inspired by the movie V for Vendetta, which took the trends of post-9/11 to their possible conclusion of a deeply oppressive police state. Like the oppression of Bush, Blair and their successors (Obama has prosecuted more whistle-blowers than Bush), the state in V for Vendetta justifies its restrictive policies in the name of defending the safety of the people. And yet, as with post-9/11, where the awful deaths of 4,000 have led to wars that have killed over 2,500,000 more, any real ongoing threat is small set against the disproportionate reaction. And bad people with bad intent use the moment to assume ever greater power to force through their real agendas - against environmentalists, liberals and socialists, ultimately in the name of the Big Money corporates who reap so much from perpetual war.

No one can stop them, apart from us. However difficult it may seem, how overweening their authority - no Government, no system has any more power then we let it have over us, than we surrender to it. From Prague's Wenceslas Square in 1989, to Tahrir Square last year, or Times Square last week, ordinary people can make the difference - but only by acting together.

And so, as the fires burn tonight and rockets soar into the sky, the finale of V for Vendetta comes so appropriately to mind, and the words of Natalie Portman's character, Evey, when she is asked who V was: 

"He was my father and my mother, my brother and my friend. He was you, and me....He was all of us."

Attack of the Drones

The last thing you will ever see ...

Under President Obama, the USA has massively increased its use of killer drones - unmanned, remotely piloted aircraft that seek out and destroy targets with aptly named Hellfire missiles at no risk at all to their operatives. The USAF is now training more drone pilots than "real" pilots, taking its warfare in countries like Yemen, Pakistan and Afghanistan to a new level. And France, UK and USA waged a massive drone war in Libya, taking out an entire regime without a single loss of a pilot - but with many casualties and massive damage left across the fields and deserts of Cyrenaica. Indeed, so complete was the destruction of key Libyan infrastructure, that one NATO commander complained that "It's getting more difficult to find stuff to blow up."

Historically, war has been limited to some degree by the fact that all combatant sides face the risk of casualties. This is what has led, ultimately, to humans seeking to avoid war - but with that element at least superficially removed, what constraint remains, what limits will not be broken?

America has now killed hundreds, possibly thousands, of women and children in supposedly focussed drone assaults to take out supposed (and sometimes real) terrorist targets, killing on an indiscriminately wide scale that in any other context would be decried by the USA itself as an act of terror, a war crime. Their actions are indeed illegal under international law, but the US abrogates itself of signing up to international law, just as it demands everyone else should observe it. The consequences are to turn both it and its British and other allies into pariahs, creating tens of millions of enemies among the vulnerable and poor by depending on brute force to ensure their continued supremacy, until the day comes, of course, when that will no longer be enough. The unending War on Terror is indeed a war of terror, and its unlimited span a self-fulfilling prophecy, a recipe for endless conflict. One of the types of drones is called the Reaper - and indeed, Obama and Cameron and co may want to reflect on the old saying that you shall reap as you sow...

And this is just the beginning. Many nations are now developing robot armies that, in ten or twenty years time will make drones look like stone age weapons - and the bad news for Obama is that, having set this precedent, it won't just be America and its satellites that will have these armaments. As we stand on the threshold of planetary destruction, we are letting our leaders sleepwalk us into armed oblivion. The Age of the Terminator beckons.

So what are we fighting for again?

"Our country can no longer speak with moral authority" 

                                                  - President Jimmy Carter on President Obama's "kill list"

Fighting for western values in the never-ending War against Terror. Bush and Blair used this line over and over; and so too have their successors, David Cameron in the UK and perhaps even more so "Democrat" President Obama.

In the name of this struggle, constitutional freedoms have been set aside, the centuries old principle of habeas corpus has been ripped up, a surveillance society has emerged across the planet, interventionist wars in Iraq, Libya and now Syria have encouraged intolerant strains of Islamism (paradoxically in the defence of supposedly democratic and increasingly aggressive Israel), and a host of new laws have criminalised previously legitimate acts of protest. The British Government is now proposing to hold some trials in secret, without juries, and the Americans are hinting at an attempt to extradite Julian Assange on a capital charge of treason should he ever leave the Ecuador embassy in London.

Meanwhile in South America, in one week two democratically elected leftwing Presidents have been deposed by judicial coups backed by the USA and its corporate masters. And now we also know that, as more American pilots are now being trained to fly remote-controlled drones from the comfort and safety of offices in the heart of the USA, hundreds and even thousands of civilians have already been killed in their strikes, and President Obama is operating a kill list. With this, he is  permitting Americans to assassinate people around the world in an orgy of international criminality which if, say, the Chinese were doing would probably by now have invited threats of nuclear assault from the White House. Often drones are used to undertake dreadfully (and deliberately) misnamed surgical strikes which slaughter dozens and scores of innocent bystanders - such as a recent mission which involved bombing a public funeral.

It makes you wonder, what is it exactly we are fighting for? What are these so-called western values which apparently set us so apart from the rest of humanity? And if they are so precious, why have they been so readily set aside?

"Oh, I got a live one here!" 

Taking A Bullet for Dave - The Armchair Arrogance of Corporal Cameron

At least Adolf Hitler had some combat experience, even being decorated on the recommendation of his Jewish Company Kommandant.

As he presides over the "war-in-Libya" but not "war-with-Libya", British Premier Dave Cameron, a man who has never served in a war but happily makes one, yesterday gave vent to his frustration with military commanders who have expressed concern that British forces are overstreteched between their commitments in Afghanistan, Germany and now Libya.

"You do the fighting and I'll do the talking", he admonished them bravely via the living hell of a Downing Street press conference. His ire came as it was revealed that the Libyan adventure - very much his initiative back in February when he rushed round Europe lobbying for a euphemistically titled "no-fly-zone" - has. so far, cost over quarter of a billion pounds of UK taxpayers' money. Each £800,000 Tomahawk missile fired by UK forces at Gaddafi's forces on behalf of the shadowy rebel alliance is the equivalent of a full-equipped NHS hospital ward being lobbed into downtown Tripoli.

Not a sum to be sniffed at, and our Dave has the guts to make clear that this must be seen through to the end. He's ready to have Our Boys get on with the shooting and killing (and being killed) around the globe if needs be. While he will chip in with his gaseous utterings to anyone unfortunate enough to have to listen.

It is fortunate to be alive in Britain now: for 60 years we have been spared a major war. Unlike previous generations, slaughtered in the trenches or mowed down on the beaches of Normandy, relatively few of us have tasted real combat. And even fewer among our political class, most of whom have not even changed a light bulb let alone a bayonet during their graceful ascent from public school via Oxbridge to the Boardroom and Cabinet Office.

It is a well-observed nostrum that in the annals of peacemaking many of the most fervent advocates of peace are former soldiers. Few who have been in a war will willingly entertain another one for any but the most necessary reasons. Notably, in the conflicts in the Gulf in 1991 and 2003, it was politicians rather than military who were the strongest advocates of war - "Stormin" Norman Schwarzkopf, the US commander in Desert Storm, argued that the military could and should wait for up to two years for UN sanctions to force Saddam out of Kuwait. But President Bush Snr wanted his glory, as did Junior a decade later, in spite of his own draft-dodging past. And let's not even think about Blair, who wouldn't know one end of a gun from another, but seemingly just loves the smell of gunpowder in the morning.

Yet aren't they so tough, these proud men? Like the later Roman Empire in its sharpest decline, where the bureaucracy and senatorial class adopted military uniforms but simultaneously banned themselves from army service, our politicians are full of other men and women's bravery, ready to take the toughest of decisions from the safety of their offices, the bloody consequences of their actions far out of sight and out of their timid minds.

They are of course put in power and sustained by a massive military-industrial complex, as brilliantly covered by Simon Jenkins in a recent Guardian article here. This shows how, in spite of the removal of the Soviet Bloc and the comparatively fewer threats to national security in recent years, the West continues to spend more and more on weapons and, having acquired them, can't quite fight the urge to find somewhere, even anywhere, to use them. And with the rise of automatic weaponry like drone planes, the ease with which these can be deployed is increasing exponentially.

Dwight Eisenhower

We were warned, sixty years ago. By a politician, yes, but one with spades of military combat experience in the Second World War. President Dwight Eisenhower spoke darkly of the rise of a military machine that, in time, would consume both the industrial and political classes, suborning them to the objective of war.

Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.  This world in arms is not spending money alone.  It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children.  This is not a way of life at all in any true sense.  Under the clouds of war, it is humanity hanging on a cross of iron.  

 ~Dwight D. Eisenhower, speech, American Society of Newspaper Editors, 16 April 1953

As Dave Cameron contemplates his next brave speech, ducking the slings and arrows of verbiage hurled by his suited and sitted opponents across the floor of the Commons, he might do well to reflect, when he does the talking, on just how empty his own words really are.

GAS! Gas! Quick, boys!-- An ecstasy of fumbling,
Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time. (W. Owen)