tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-51909941776324207202024-03-20T01:14:15.221-07:00Viridis LumenA radical, ecosocialist take on the climate change crisis and the challenges confronting humanity in the face of global warming, resource depletion, religious intolerance, media manipulation and social injustice.Viridis Lumenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08097453038753328641noreply@blogger.comBlogger532125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5190994177632420720.post-83515285712212066692023-10-24T15:33:00.016-07:002023-10-24T22:16:40.341-07:00The Putin Paradox<p> </p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg_uG_tq4rc_EYfpg6PEq-wdzzvSY4krG6L_pYj6mk_smQDQ1ntYkvHD1RchUClb592PjhzI5LakO9m9M3ATh-RFJs0IbaolQWZk4D3icg3-wpfcol7QeZ4wj3N0Ell9YKw25WNnBqM24fbmRHgkwJoDYLhSKyoVyRgCNI8whZOHy0z-H_5fxqrDr2VU88y/s690/putin.jpeg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="460" data-original-width="690" height="213" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg_uG_tq4rc_EYfpg6PEq-wdzzvSY4krG6L_pYj6mk_smQDQ1ntYkvHD1RchUClb592PjhzI5LakO9m9M3ATh-RFJs0IbaolQWZk4D3icg3-wpfcol7QeZ4wj3N0Ell9YKw25WNnBqM24fbmRHgkwJoDYLhSKyoVyRgCNI8whZOHy0z-H_5fxqrDr2VU88y/s320/putin.jpeg" width="320" /></a></div><p></p><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"></td></tr></tbody></table><br />1948 marked the Nakba, the expulsion of 700,000 Palestinians from their homes by the new Israeli state, driving them into the small wedge of land that is Gaza, where the population is now 2,200,000 - half of them children. It has been under blockade for 20 years and now there are fears that the Netanyahu government's objective is to expel the Palestinians completely.<p></p><p>Last week, Russian President Vladimir Putin waded into the appalling carnage visited by the IDF on Gaza, the West Bank and south Lebanon, supposedly promoting peace. His hypocrisy however sadly matches Biden's and Netanyahu's. </p><p>Putin of course is currently waging his own bloody war, including bombing Ukrainian hospitals, partly over the Crimean peninsula. He has put about a myth that this historically is a Russian land. But it is not. <br /></p><p>Just four years before the Palestinian Nakba, Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin ordered the Sürgünlik - the deportation of the entire population of the Crimean Tatars. This was a Muslim community that had lived on the peninsula for several centuries before the Russian Empire conquered it in 1773, annexing it a decade later. Stalin falsely claimed that the entire population were Nazis (sound familiar?), but in truth this was one of several forced mass deportations to make way for the Russification of the Soviet Republics. </p><p>As well as the Tatars, around 40,000 Estonians, the vast majority of them women and children, were moved to Siberia in 1941 and 1949, with other big forced transfers of Latvians, Lithuanians, Turkomens, ethnic Germans and Armenians around the same time. In all cases, large numbers of Russian settlers replaced the deportees.<br /></p><p>And so, pictured above, in May 1944 up to 423,000 Tatar people - literally the entire population - were deported from their historical homeland of Crimea and sent to Central Asia and Siberia. Uzbekistan was the main destination.</p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjmjTV9WhRUFK31OsBPbpVcXqs3zz5U4aLpNkCDkrQYbDH8JXMWwog8ZaNmoqRznBzMppA8KUH1Wx7pR2jnZlDVDYfefABiN0MflpGvmHzEt8L5kjzYeW9gM-3IE3PutiFMI2_98cmKGrh9svYgPDV16Yj5IeIl-F4RhFRhVdjB-4PSM53cup50EqKsayaj/s1357/Deportation_of_the_Crimean_Tatars_uk.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1357" data-original-width="1280" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjmjTV9WhRUFK31OsBPbpVcXqs3zz5U4aLpNkCDkrQYbDH8JXMWwog8ZaNmoqRznBzMppA8KUH1Wx7pR2jnZlDVDYfefABiN0MflpGvmHzEt8L5kjzYeW9gM-3IE3PutiFMI2_98cmKGrh9svYgPDV16Yj5IeIl-F4RhFRhVdjB-4PSM53cup50EqKsayaj/s320/Deportation_of_the_Crimean_Tatars_uk.png" width="302" /></a></div><br />According to the files of the NKVD, the predecessor to the KGB, around 10% of the deportees died in transit or in forced labour camps over the next five years. Meanwhile, as the Tatars were removed, in 1944 alone, 51,000 Russians moved into collective farms vacated by deportees. More than a quarter of a million acres of land was forcibly transferred.<p></p><p>This was how Russian settlers achieved an overall majority in the population of the peninsula. </p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhiIPOOcqgWwLgJRZyzUZINc1-b6gVXVHGXHBWOJNig09FaVMq2i1lxKLvU6VTHzgeXhz_qkKl1OgZbTNpWrKvzXZRed-4aOYP5uSswPalbdwI71eS2ehcC0d9BYftGNfrtxTxapIU4YbKmtjJmq273g2YP_xLEvNGvgtRk_uf-382VIAFe2kyzH9j31IcQ/s550/FB_IMG_1698184456985.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="451" data-original-width="550" height="262" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhiIPOOcqgWwLgJRZyzUZINc1-b6gVXVHGXHBWOJNig09FaVMq2i1lxKLvU6VTHzgeXhz_qkKl1OgZbTNpWrKvzXZRed-4aOYP5uSswPalbdwI71eS2ehcC0d9BYftGNfrtxTxapIU4YbKmtjJmq273g2YP_xLEvNGvgtRk_uf-382VIAFe2kyzH9j31IcQ/s320/FB_IMG_1698184456985.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><br />Yet while Stalin's successors condemned the policy, they did not allow the Muslim Tatar deportees to return home and those who tried were quickly removed again. <p>It wasn't until 1989 that the ban was lifted by Mikhail Gorbachev, the Russo-Ukrainian who was the final leader of the Soviet Union. The Supreme Soviet declared the deportations illegal. Initially a small number of Tatars finally made the journey back to the Crimea but faced violent riots against their return by Russian nationalists, particularly in Yalta where the Soviet army had to intervene to stop escalation. <br /></p><p>In 1954, the peninsula had been brought under the Ukrainian Republic within the Soviet Union. Although on a low turnout, in spite of the Russian majority, 54% of Crimean voters backed Ukrainian independence in the 1991 referendum. </p><p>In 1999, the small Tatar population was accorded a level of self-governing status via the Mejlis, an elected council, by the independent Ukrainian constitution, which also granted automatic Ukrainian citizenship to around 150,000 exiled Tatars across the former USSR. Over 100,000 gradually returned to the Crimea - not without some bureaucratic opposition from Ukrainian officials - and by 2004, they had regrown to around an eighth of the population of the peninsula.</p><p>However, the Mejlis was turned into an appointed body by pro-Russian President of the Ukraine Viktor Yanukovitch in 2010 and following the Russian occupation of the Crimea in 2014, many Tatars complained about renewed persecution. According to the UN Human Rights agency they have often faced harassment and disproportionate levels of arrest. Most of the 10,000 people who left the Crimea in the subsequent year after the Russian occupation were Tatars. </p><p>Putin's slaughter of some 8,000 Muslim civilians in Grozny at the turn of the millennium and his fostering of Russian Christian nationalism doubtless did little to reassure them. Similarly, the approving description of him as "the key to white survival" by former KKK leader David Duke and other supportive white supremacists inside and outside Russia may not have helped.<br /></p><p>The Russian authorities banned the Mejlis in 2016, declaring it an extremist organisation. </p><p>One of the Tatars elected leaders, Rustem Umierov, is now Ukrainian Minister of Defence, organising resistance to the imperialist Islamophobe Putin, a man who should be in the dock in the Hague. </p><p>He should of course be there alongside, among others, fellow pseudo-Middle East "peace envoy" Tony Blair and his criminal confederate George Bush. As the old anarchist saying goes - neither Washington nor Moscow.</p><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg_Mc6TwteY4-NGi-6n0qD4hsECW_cVyut4eyHDBsqpPLoNRO5VUcRssmVQsELWiIIPS8ZhlzuiZnQI9-qXzNuM1t-ysBC8RIqfm4otgCuPIY_lKlHnq2dUGdmy6u4n6JOE4hAO2VPxQt8QQjZOm7aBLDQkZ4B6TThQVSycQXdJA8uuQBAxZcJhzZS0BFW6/s682/EYS-_RXWAAMMPAK.jpg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="350" data-original-width="682" height="164" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg_Mc6TwteY4-NGi-6n0qD4hsECW_cVyut4eyHDBsqpPLoNRO5VUcRssmVQsELWiIIPS8ZhlzuiZnQI9-qXzNuM1t-ysBC8RIqfm4otgCuPIY_lKlHnq2dUGdmy6u4n6JOE4hAO2VPxQt8QQjZOm7aBLDQkZ4B6TThQVSycQXdJA8uuQBAxZcJhzZS0BFW6/s320/EYS-_RXWAAMMPAK.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">The Sürgünlik,1944</td></tr></tbody></table><br /><p></p>Viridis Lumenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08097453038753328641noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5190994177632420720.post-73186762694028088582021-03-17T12:37:00.008-07:002021-03-18T00:45:14.645-07:00Statues and Statutes<p> </p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhGmY7ekWMkyemvCBDc6nTK8YvbinPkMmzyoTRN5fv7YdBrBcfkD7oCDJWXUXMl3uwH2FX6Rz4jKbTwxwTpS6HxtDLJgJMWZAIjjmkwRf99-WM76k-rfqwuC37F7ijBatOez5RGHE6-CgoY/s650/2.58591589.jpg.gallery.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="433" data-original-width="650" height="426" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhGmY7ekWMkyemvCBDc6nTK8YvbinPkMmzyoTRN5fv7YdBrBcfkD7oCDJWXUXMl3uwH2FX6Rz4jKbTwxwTpS6HxtDLJgJMWZAIjjmkwRf99-WM76k-rfqwuC37F7ijBatOez5RGHE6-CgoY/w640-h426/2.58591589.jpg.gallery.jpg" width="640" /></a></div><br /><p></p><p>If we needed any more proof of the Government's inherent illiberalism, and the range of prejudice and bigotry that accompanies it, the last week has surely provided a surfeit. The awful murder of Sarah Everard was a shocking example of how, allegedly, the mere impression of acting on state authority can be misused to appalling ends. </p><p>Yet the response of Boris Johnson and Home Secretary Priti Patel has been to seize the moment to propagandise and push through even stronger laws to control and squash the citizenry - literally hours after the terrifying image of a 5foot2 woman thrown to the ground and cuffed face down by police as they <a href="https://www.thenational.scot/news/19159200.outrage-police-break-clapham-common-vigil-sarah-everard/" target="_blank"><b>broke up the vigil for Sarah on Clapham Common</b></a>, one of the last places she passed through alive. The apparent circumstances of her murder prompted women and men to come to remember her and to "reclaim the night", just as women did decades ago when Peter Sutcliffe's killings in Yorkshire led to the authorities telling women not to go out alone, a suggestion echoed in the wake of this latest murder. The same authorities had the option of allowing an organised, socially distanced gathering, but chose instead to deploy public health rules to forcibly break up the spontaneous one that took place anyway.<br /></p><p>In as tone deaf an example of misogyny as you could get, the Government's proposed initiative to protect women now is to deploy large numbers of undercover police to trawl post-lockdown pubs and clubs to identify and supposedly detain potential rapists and murderers. With the endorsement of Opposition Leader Keir Starmer, the alleged misdeeds of one police officer will apparently be solved by having more police officers mixing secretly with the public.</p><p>Except we know how that has gone in the past. Police spies infiltrated a wide range of peaceful groups, particularly in the environmental movement but also trade unions, race justice groups and others pursuing perfectly legal aims. </p><p>Supposedly to remain undercover, some of them <a href="https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/undercover-police-inquiry-officers-relationships-activists-wives-mark-kennedy-b1594367.html" target="_blank"><b>developed relationships with women activists, living with them and even fathering children before disappearing</b></a>. Some acted as <i>agents provocateurs</i>, initiating others to commit often trivial offences but offences nevertheless that got them criminal records and were used by the state to tighten legislation against its opponents. <b><a href="https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-18423441" target="_blank">One case, highlighted repeatedly by Green Party MP Caroline Lucas using parliamentary privilege, allegedly involved a police officer setting off a bomb outside a department store in order to frame an animal rights activ</a>ist. </b><b> </b></p><p>In this new paradigm, how far will undercover duties involve officers mingling in night clubs acting "in role"? What potential is there for abuse of position and power to do quite the opposite to protection? Rather than acting to counter the cultural objectification of women, it seems more a very conscious misrepresentation of a terrible event to enable an ever-creeping interference in normal social life and activities.<b><br /></b></p><p>Yet <b><a href="https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2021/mar/16/bill-that-curtails-ability-to-protest-in-uk-passes-its-second-reading" target="_blank">this same week's Policing bill uses precisely the zeitgeist of peaceful activism as a national secruity threat to enact the most draconian legislation in our history</a></b> - now past its second reading in the Commons, the new laws as they stand will make it illegal to protest too loudly, or to "<i>cause annoyance</i>" to even one person. If you commit such an appalling excess, you can face ten years in jail.</p><p>The legislation is clearly pitched at environmental protests such as Extinction Rebellion - demonised by a <a href="https://policyexchange.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2019/07/Extremism-Rebellion.pdf" target="_blank"><b>former police officer's report for the rightwing Policy Exchange </b></a>thinktank in 2019 and<a href="https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2020/jan/10/xr-extinction-rebellion-listed-extremist-ideology-police-prevent-scheme-guidance" target="_blank"><b> listed as an extremist ideology</b></a> by Counter-Terrorist police a few months later. Also in sight are initiatives like the Black Lives Matter protests last summer and many of the anti-fracking protests that spiked the attempts to destroy swathes of the English countryside in the entirely unnecessary search for shale gas. While most fracking is now cancelled or on indefinite hold, the Tories' funders have long and unforgiving memories and a long backstory has been created all the way back to David Cameron's Coalition era pledge to<a href="https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2015/jul/20/the-four-pillars-of-david-camerons-counter-extremism-strategy" target="_blank"><b> crackdown on "<i>non-violent extremism</i>"</b></a>. </p><p>Be too different (travelling communities will now be required to have special identity cards), or too radical and it doesn't matter how pacific or law abiding you are, you are still an annoyance - a decade in the clink beckons. <br /></p><p>Attack a woman, of course, is a different matter. Almost simultaneously to passing the policing legislation, the Government turned down a range of proposals to make it easier to protect women facing domestic violence and to turn misogyny into a hate crime, although a very recent concession will involve recording gender and sex-based crimes where these are judged to be factors. In a blatant lie, the ill-titled Safeguarding Minister appeared on TV to claim that hate legislation is "<i>mainly for minority groups</i>" and as women are the majority, it couldn't apply to them.</p><p>Never in the field of British politics have so many been misled so much by the guardians of the few. To paraphrase that Tory icon, Winston Churchill.</p><p>Unlike women, though, this much "white"-washed character, with his very mixed legacy of wartime leadership, anti-Indian racism and sexist jibes about women's faces, is carefully protected: deface Churchill's statue, or those of any of </p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhhS3W0e82ZJZ_GMPambWqwPPlAEDmhiOZMuBrJuYh1fwldHNxrizjdFu8HjNWc4hR93Ln_r_OGqR9mjCQdHB5-1I2bH2K6UJKzsTmXfC3gRD27ENuIqLXStnsgUHQj1Oa-c38aLdDOII-d/s810/1_churchillpic.jpg" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="539" data-original-width="810" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhhS3W0e82ZJZ_GMPambWqwPPlAEDmhiOZMuBrJuYh1fwldHNxrizjdFu8HjNWc4hR93Ln_r_OGqR9mjCQdHB5-1I2bH2K6UJKzsTmXfC3gRD27ENuIqLXStnsgUHQj1Oa-c38aLdDOII-d/s320/1_churchillpic.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>the slave traders and mercantilist thieves that grace our cities, and a special place awaits you in Patel Hell. For, it seems, these lumps of Victorian marble that stare down silently on largely disinterested people, who barely give them a passing glance, are integral parts of our national culture. And the snowflake fascists can't bear the idea of anyone disrespecting them by doing something like drawing attention to the historical facts of their icons' lives and deeds - leading to <b><a href="https://www.mylondon.news/news/zone-1-news/metropolitan-police-under-fire-protecting-20154598" target="_blank">a police guard </a></b>being set around Churchill's image near Scotland Yard this week, just in case. <p></p><p>It seems that when the Left disagree vocally with something, such as Rees Mogg speaking at a university or an <a href="https://www.thelondoneconomic.com/politics/rape-threat-mep-candidate-carl-benjamin-and-his-ukip-tour-bus-pelted-with-milkshake-three-times-132518/" target="_blank"><b>AltRight candidate speculating about raping a Labour MP</b></a>, this is "<i>political correctness gone mad</i>" and "<i>cancel culture</i>" - even although the perpetrators are pretty free to carry on sounding off as much as they like: witness the oaf Piers Morgan's tantrum when he was criticised by a weather presenter over his highly personalised attack on Meghan Markle last week. <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZsenBOe_AQg" target="_blank"><b>He chose to walk, but no one made him. </b></a>No one actually shut him up - someone simply disagreed with his pompous bombast.<br /></p><p>But now, block a road with a demonstration, shout too loudly or spoil someone's enjoyment of their day by warning about climate catastrophe, or campaigning about racism - or remembering a murdered woman... and the freedom-loving Tories will lock you up for the next decade. The same people who wax lyrical, tearfully even, about the Magna Carta and mythical English rights to avoid wearing face masks during a deadly pandemic will incarcerate those who offend or annoy them. Cancel culture deluxe.<br /></p><p>So we face what so many of us have long feared and warned about - <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/conservative-mps-speak-about-the-ukip-entryists-taking-over-their-party-2018-9?r=US&IR=T" target="_blank"><b>post-purple wave</b></a>, the Conservatives are no longer small state advocates, but rather Big Statists. Not the sort who want to use the state to better lives, or at least not the lives of all. Instead, they are seizing and deploying state power to embed themselves and their friends and funders into the ownership of the nation. </p><p>The market system, bad though it was, is decaying, replaced not with the common good, but instead with the rise of the nobility of <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_jW0xUmUaUc" target="_blank"><b>Varoufakis' "techno-feudalism"</b></a>. This is now a place where an Etonian chumocracy acquires the state and its authority to preserve and extend their writ indefinitely, and where the last serious socialist challenge to its ascendancy is demonised into a hate-filled totem of fear and loathing; Jeremy Corbyn channelled as the Emmanuel Goldstein of the 21st century.</p><p>A place where the future is a boot - a copper's boot - stamping on the face of change, the face of hope. Forever.</p><p>And yet, thousands commemorated Sarah Everard around the country; thousands turned up outside Parliament to oppose the new legislation. And hundreds of thousands joined the BLM protests and XR actions. You can kill the canary if you like, but the fires are still burning - our species and our planet are at severe risk; people still demand justice - for racial minorities, for the female majority and for all society. No politician can legislate these truths away. </p><p>And we won't let them.</p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg1x6jwaCZJekeZspUZyP3hLepDIQx3JU5lV68YJkQrArFM4Fd2LlmuS8xx5m3BIIgkUsmSb-UM2nF_pyLR7bqgsSsGWh-71oYLMvyrQ4Vt9FbS9uT0zDfGB6vLyu0iZbFcPL37wnZsgg-W/s696/police-bill-protests-1-696x442.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="442" data-original-width="696" height="406" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg1x6jwaCZJekeZspUZyP3hLepDIQx3JU5lV68YJkQrArFM4Fd2LlmuS8xx5m3BIIgkUsmSb-UM2nF_pyLR7bqgsSsGWh-71oYLMvyrQ4Vt9FbS9uT0zDfGB6vLyu0iZbFcPL37wnZsgg-W/w640-h406/police-bill-protests-1-696x442.jpg" width="640" /></a></div><br /> <p style="text-align: center;"><br /></p>Viridis Lumenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08097453038753328641noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5190994177632420720.post-67603979597232904782021-02-02T14:57:00.008-08:002021-02-03T01:08:49.523-08:00Suits You, Sir Keir!<p><span style="font-size: medium;"></span></p><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEghy24KvrB38KYTacvYMG_wNhgewyIDqHJBsbUY6UIfoJdUQ9exajjwB-VcJ2jdQEuuq-9NpP2a5rtFeXbJob48v3_1DYhu-qwkP1aoccuhzot0RvFwRy2BHTAEX3KtK3oiw_T8XKIor1Qx/s630/starmbyn.jpeg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="420" data-original-width="630" height="426" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEghy24KvrB38KYTacvYMG_wNhgewyIDqHJBsbUY6UIfoJdUQ9exajjwB-VcJ2jdQEuuq-9NpP2a5rtFeXbJob48v3_1DYhu-qwkP1aoccuhzot0RvFwRy2BHTAEX3KtK3oiw_T8XKIor1Qx/w640-h426/starmbyn.jpeg" width="640" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><b>Behind You! </b>- <i>The allegedly scruffy Jeremy Corbyn followed by Man in an Empty Suit</i><br /></td></tr></tbody></table><span style="font-size: medium;"><br />Reeling from a 7% swing to the Tories in the latest opinion poll, haemorrhaging members and money and struggling to be heard even in the silence of the depleted Covid Commons, Labour's leader Sir Keir Starmer has taken a leaf not so much from the Biden as the Trump Playbook to try to revive his flagging fortunes.</span><p></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">In the true spirit of neoliberalism and new Nu-Labour,<a href="https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2021/feb/02/labour-urged-to-focus-on-flag-and-patriotism-to-win-voters-trust-leak-reveals" target="_blank"><b> a leaked report recommends the party needs to "make use of the (union) flag, veterans and dress smartly". </b></a></span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">In an unsurprising triumph of form over content, the report from the party's Research team has found that after nearly a year of the startled Starmer regime, the vast majority of voters have no idea what the party is about or what it stands for. Possibly seeking to consolidate this vacuum, the proposal seems that the party should become even more indistinguishable from the Conservative Government, to whom Sir Keir has repeatedly leant his support or, failing that, his abstention on issue after issue through their dreadful mishandling of the coronavirus pandemic. </span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">Supposedly intending to hold Boris Johnson to account via his lawyerly "<i>forensic questioning</i>", he has rarely landed so much as a light smack on the fingers to the Old Etonian prefect as now over 106,000 citizens have died. The supposedly lame Ed Miliband has been the only Labour frontbencher to come anywhere near embarrassing this laziest of Prime Ministers during these historic days, only to have to hand back in time for Starmer to try to outdo the Tories in demanding schools stay open in the face of union fears - until of course he heard Johnson was going to close them and so rushed out a closure demand just ahead of the PM's announcement.<br /></span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">Similarly, he has singularly failed to challenge the appalling nepotism and pork-barrel politics of this most corrupt of government and he has backslid on a raft of legislation. The latter has included notably supporting the Brexit Deal in spite of doggedly insisting on opposing the almost identical Theresa May deal two years ago and later dragging his party to supporting a second referendum - this latter step was a fatal move that drove millions of Labour voters over to the Tories and Brexit Party, shearing the party of dozens of seats. More recently and even more shockingly Starmer failed to oppose new powers granted to the espionage services including the right to torture and kill, in spite of his past fairly good record as a challenger for human rights in the courts. </span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">His time as Director of Public Prosecutions though perhaps pressaged his true or maybe changed self. Quite aside from the failure to prosecute Jimmy Saville (not his direct decision, but on his watch), his tightening of the criteria for viable prosecutions for sexual assault led to a marked and immediate decline in rape prosecutions which remains the case today, a decade later.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">But of course, the one thing that does seem to set the wooden knight aflame is attacking the Labour Left and in particular Jeremy Corbyn, now expelled from the Parliamentary Party (though readmitted to wider party membership by the National Executive Committee). In spite of campaigning for the leadership election on a promise of keeping the socialist, transformational policies of the Corbyn era, he and his Shadow Cabinet have now backed away from tax reform, from ending student fees and have even signalled a move away from the radical Green New Deal. Once the pandemic crisis is over, it seems only a matter of time before his Shadow Chancellor Annaliese Dodds will be out-austeritying the Tories on balancing the budget after the months of furloughing employees (a policy adopted by Sunak and Johnson after their one and only meeting with Jeremy Corbyn and John McDonnell in the early stages of the crisis).</span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">So as he waves his flag and patronises veterans in his best pinstripe, Starmer seems unlikely to see the truths staring him in his seemongly ever-startled face: that when Labour previously embraced this Tory-lite strategy under Tony Blair, it was in the backwash of the collapse of the USSR and the "<i>end of history</i>", where voters were however uncertainly willing to accept neoliberalism and the benign guidance of the liberal "Political Class" in return for some meagre share of the Dream. </span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">But we are twenty years on now and <i>Cool Britannia</i> is buried under thick icy sheets of personal debt, broken promises and shattered lives. The Tories have successfully played the new landscape by setting neighbours against neighbours and sharpening conflict everywhere. Even their ludicrous, vicious predatory purchase at above-the-odds prices of over seven times the quantity of covid vaccines needed to innoculate all of the UK has been driven by an attempt to stymmie other countries' efforts to vaccinate and save the lives of their citizens. </span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">Yet from Starmer, there is nothing. Some level of complaint that some things haven't been done well enough, or soon enough; or a bizarre notion that he can bring down Boris by pointing out some time or other that the PM muddled his figures - when anyone knows he can't even count his children properly but his voters don't care.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">Just as Biden needs Bernie Sanders, AOC and others in the USA to drive him hard if the grievances that Trump leeched off are ever to be resolved, so here we need more than a Man in a Suit - especially this particular man (after all, e<a href="<iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/bi2_2ogPMvo" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen></iframe>" target="_blank"><i><b>ven Corbyn managed to wear a suit with "for the many, not the few" pinstripes during the last General Election</b></i></a>). Voters will not be won back by some well-scrubbed liberal with excess hair gel oozing his support for the incumbent. Rather, they want the transformational politics skewered in December 2019 by the vitriol of the billionaire press, the bias of the BBC and the rampage against their own party by the Labour Right - quietly among them, perhaps, Starmer himself with the more than obviously suicidal strategy of his insistence on Corbyn backing a second Brexit referendum.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">Like the rest of the world, we are at a historic crossroads. The death and devastation of the pandemic demand something better than the "<i>business-as-yesterday</i>" Blairite revanchists. We do well to remember that the last time Labour lauded veterans in this way, it ended with scores of sons and daughters of some of the poorest communities in the UK lying dead or maimed in Iraqi deserts or on Afghan hills. True love of country, or of community, involves challenging its wrongs and making it into something better. It isn't about the flim-flam of waving flags and putting on a tie. <br /></span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">Above all, it isn't about being another Tory Party. We've already got one. And that's already more than enough.</span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><iframe allowfullscreen="" class="BLOG_video_class" height="343" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/bi2_2ogPMvo" width="560" youtube-src-id="bi2_2ogPMvo"></iframe></div><p><br /></p>Viridis Lumenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08097453038753328641noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5190994177632420720.post-56555712442763501332021-01-20T15:36:00.005-08:002021-01-21T04:26:58.559-08:00Intermezzo Americana?<p><span style="font-family: georgia;"><span style="font-size: medium;">Maybe some of us, many even, will sleep a little better tonight. Just that tad more restfully. It's been a good day. Some big symbolic changes.</span></span></p><div dir="auto"><div class="ecm0bbzt hv4rvrfc ihqw7lf3 dati1w0a" data-ad-comet-preview="message" data-ad-preview="message" id="jsc_c_o"><div class="j83agx80 cbu4d94t ew0dbk1b irj2b8pg"><div class="qzhwtbm6 knvmm38d"><span style="font-family: georgia;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><span class="d2edcug0 hpfvmrgz qv66sw1b c1et5uql rrkovp55 a8c37x1j keod5gw0 nxhoafnm aigsh9s9 d3f4x2em fe6kdd0r mau55g9w c8b282yb iv3no6db jq4qci2q a3bd9o3v knj5qynh oo9gr5id hzawbc8m" dir="auto"><div class="kvgmc6g5 cxmmr5t8 oygrvhab hcukyx3x c1et5uql ii04i59q"><div dir="auto" style="text-align: start;">But what we mustn't do is think we can turn off the alarm clock. Nor turn it back. Because we've had our wake up call and now, somewhat unusually, our world has a second chance, of sorts.</div><div dir="auto" style="text-align: start;"> </div><div dir="auto" style="text-align: start;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhZDwz_H3aBN5qcoUjAtSjdwpNxyDUdDA8m0QXuatkWGUN4xOpRvqQR8XK9ehZYfVB9uPVQXGRL4O5k0J0VBX6VveyLg3Jg7irnjTU6_0InMUbo6c0opf2XqKAeikV3g7TiYaIyHf2qtCf_/s553/kennedy+rev.jpg" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="320" data-original-width="553" height="231" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhZDwz_H3aBN5qcoUjAtSjdwpNxyDUdDA8m0QXuatkWGUN4xOpRvqQR8XK9ehZYfVB9uPVQXGRL4O5k0J0VBX6VveyLg3Jg7irnjTU6_0InMUbo6c0opf2XqKAeikV3g7TiYaIyHf2qtCf_/w400-h231/kennedy+rev.jpg" width="400" /></a></div>But for others, the same desperate fears and frustrations that led to their giving all their hopes and trust to a snarling sociopath grip their hearts and minds tonight as they have for years, decades, whole lives. We may condemn them for their bad choice, laugh and sneer at their credulity, denounce their apparent bigotry. </div><div dir="auto" style="text-align: start;"> </div><div dir="auto" style="text-align: start;">Except, one in five of them would have voted for Bernie if the Democrats had run him, and many more were originally part of the New Deal Coalition targeted by Reagan and dismissed as deplorables by both Clintons. Many were Latin Americans. And many more than last time were black.</div></div><div class="o9v6fnle cxmmr5t8 oygrvhab hcukyx3x c1et5uql ii04i59q"><div dir="auto" style="text-align: start;"> </div></div><div class="o9v6fnle cxmmr5t8 oygrvhab hcukyx3x c1et5uql ii04i59q"><div dir="auto" style="text-align: start;">They will still be there in four years. Will they still be angry, still afraid? Still as many?</div><div dir="auto" style="text-align: start;"> </div></div><div class="o9v6fnle cxmmr5t8 oygrvhab hcukyx3x c1et5uql ii04i59q"><div dir="auto" style="text-align: start;">The people who destroyed their worlds, closed their factories, poisoned their water, sent their kids to desert wars and shut down their futures - they are as much in the Oval Office tonight as they were four years and forty years ago. They promise to listen more, to heal better and certainly progressive voices are louder than before. </div><div dir="auto" style="text-align: start;"> </div></div><div class="o9v6fnle cxmmr5t8 oygrvhab hcukyx3x c1et5uql ii04i59q"><div dir="auto" style="text-align: start;">Yet they have always promised so, and power is seductive and elites so terribly good at absorbing real challenges. It's not conspiracies or cults; it's just what happens when authority is based on rank and hierarchy, greased of course by filthy lucre. It has been so ever since we were persuaded to give our grain to the priests to store in the temples. And then the priests gave the grain to soldiers and made themselves into kings and emperors and built palaces and capitols. <i>Primus inter pares</i>. </div><div dir="auto" style="text-align: start;"> </div></div><div class="o9v6fnle cxmmr5t8 oygrvhab hcukyx3x c1et5uql ii04i59q"><div dir="auto" style="text-align: start;">But senators need tribunes to call time on their deeds. Symbols need to be more than themselves. You don't "<i>speak truth to power</i>". You tear it down and share it out. Otherwise, nothing ultimately changes until the all that is left to make it happen is the whim of the mob and the rumble of the tumbril. Biden quoted Kennedy today but not to the extent of repeating his not particularly radical but still prescient predecessor's warning that <span class="ILfuVd"><span class="hgKElc">"<i>Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable</i>."</span></span></div><div dir="auto" style="text-align: start;"> </div></div><div class="o9v6fnle cxmmr5t8 oygrvhab hcukyx3x c1et5uql ii04i59q"><div dir="auto" style="text-align: start;">So the monster is gone. And perhaps we can sleep. But not too deeply or too long. </div><div dir="auto" style="text-align: start;"> </div></div><div class="o9v6fnle cxmmr5t8 oygrvhab hcukyx3x c1et5uql ii04i59q"><div dir="auto" style="text-align: start;">The world may have a second chance, but it only gets one wake up call.</div><div dir="auto" style="text-align: start;"> </div></div><div class="o9v6fnle cxmmr5t8 oygrvhab hcukyx3x c1et5uql ii04i59q"><div dir="auto" style="text-align: start;">And we've just had it.</div><div dir="auto" style="text-align: start;"> </div><div dir="auto" style="text-align: start;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjX5ZAsqE_m0H0lw4y253InF4Z29Vc24as_ttK1RnicE2MOhJMUv0nVzbLbCcVZjSS51XVuLxTrYsjhlFq7oAUzi_n8B_YfNjTy_AXM67Cg0188WSExFqKJgNZ0ARy4hYPYZyjwkCddDcch/s1280/trump+monster.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="640" data-original-width="1280" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjX5ZAsqE_m0H0lw4y253InF4Z29Vc24as_ttK1RnicE2MOhJMUv0nVzbLbCcVZjSS51XVuLxTrYsjhlFq7oAUzi_n8B_YfNjTy_AXM67Cg0188WSExFqKJgNZ0ARy4hYPYZyjwkCddDcch/w640-h320/trump+monster.jpg" width="640" /></a></div><br /> </div></div></span></span></span></div></div></div></div>Viridis Lumenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08097453038753328641noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5190994177632420720.post-68665573295631654022020-12-28T03:34:00.018-08:002020-12-29T04:55:14.709-08:00Pandemic: A Century of Capitalism and Complacency<p> </p><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjZ6c0_9yD81W8_H-AaZtPuflYio1VdxFTcIgGmfwGKs64ytwHXPsLc5ewxFkPvfLKspsNn5LNyQButDs7V8Zf3f8o7Kl-hJ1sjC0jgg5ZxEmI76Z56Ji9m3Q0KbRyTgz8Ddj9ZpZlS2baF/s500/spanish-flu-masks.jpg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="329" data-original-width="500" height="264" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjZ6c0_9yD81W8_H-AaZtPuflYio1VdxFTcIgGmfwGKs64ytwHXPsLc5ewxFkPvfLKspsNn5LNyQButDs7V8Zf3f8o7Kl-hJ1sjC0jgg5ZxEmI76Z56Ji9m3Q0KbRyTgz8Ddj9ZpZlS2baF/w400-h264/spanish-flu-masks.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i>Women wearing face masks against the 1918 flu pandemic</i><br /></td></tr></tbody></table><!--[if gte mso 9]><xml>
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<p></p><p class="MsoNormal">It is a well-hackneyed, over-used nostrum that those who do
not learn from history are bound to relive it; yet it is as relevant as ever in
2020 as the world reels from the impact of the first truly global pandemic
since the 1918 to 1919 H1N1 “<i>Spanish influenza</i>”.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Covid-19 and H1N1 are both viruses that likely have their
origin in poor animal husbandry, and both posed strikingly similar challenges
to governments. The rapid onset of a new disease combined with gross economic
inequality, ever faster modes of mass transit and increasingly diverse sources
of information are also notably similar. </p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Influenza is a long-recognised disease recorded as far back
as Hippocrates and Livy in classical times, but its pathology remained a
mystery. By 1500 its range of symptoms, normally involving increased body
temperature, sweats and nausea, were attributed by Italian doctors to the
influence or “<i>influenza</i>” of either the cold or the stars. From the
Enlightenment onwards, mass outbreaks were studied more scientifically and
after the 1891 Russian flu epidemic doctors had formed the view that it was
caused by a germ - anything from bad water to smog was seen as a potential
breeding ground for what one medical professor referred to as “<i>very clever
little beasts</i>”.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Influenza isn’t a germ, but rather a <i>virus </i>– Latin
for <i>poison</i> – a tiny, non-cellular agent that is not alive but replicates
inside the living cells of a host organism. They are sub-microscopic – 100,000
would just cover a fingernail. In 1918, before the invention of electron
microscopes, this meant scientists were finding germ cultures that caused
secondary infections rather than the primary viral source. Consequently,
although some of the precautionary measures that were implemented were effective
for both types of threat, there was a significant lack of understanding about
how flu was transmitted.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">The pandemic originated in the mid-West of the USA where in
January, an unusually aggressive strain of flu emerged among livestock farmers
in rural Haskell County in Kansas. The outbreak disappeared after 7 weeks, but one
local farmer, Albert Gitchel, was shortly after drafted into the army ahead of
deployment to the Great War front in Europe. He worked at Fort Riley as a cook
before falling ill on 11 March. By the end of the month, 1126 of his comrades
had joined him and 46 had died.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">The disease was far more virulent than previous influenzas –
tingling fingers led rapidly to high temperatures and severe vomiting. While
many recovered quickly, the symptoms were more persistent in others and after 5
or 6 days developed into fatal respiratory infections. Although some medical
scientists and doctors like William Welch urged quarantine measures, the US Army continued deploying infected
regiments across the Atlantic Ocean on cramped troop ships where the virus
spread exponentially.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">In this way, the flu reached Europe. Army bases such as the
British at Etaples became centres of infection as men moved to and from the
cramped conditions of the trenches to equally packed barracks before embarking
on crowded trains and ships back to England for leave. By July, Manchester
recorded its first cases, while the German army delayed its final major
offensive as the virus decimated its’ ranks. </p>
<p class="MsoNormal">The virus reached neutral Madrid and the King of Spain succumbed.
Ironically, his death and the uncensored debate about it in the Spanish press
led to the unwarranted moniker of the “Spanish flu” (resulting in hostility to
Hispanic people back in the USA where the “<i>Spanish Lady</i>”, a skeleton in
a black flamenco dress, became an icon of both the disease and naked racism).</p>
<p class="MsoNormal"></p><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh_bkuaT1YMkDoqYQu6a-XIGEYyUmymtwH2Al7qIur_P0WI8BOvlPuf6aAsEq03ioC8NLHJwpcUojni8cw92QhUYuaT7Rhkz2Ji-LUqP8v5H8KnsY8RCR3cD09xbHia5pAWLr-8x5fEDZGc/s274/warnng+poster.jpg" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="274" data-original-width="226" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh_bkuaT1YMkDoqYQu6a-XIGEYyUmymtwH2Al7qIur_P0WI8BOvlPuf6aAsEq03ioC8NLHJwpcUojni8cw92QhUYuaT7Rhkz2Ji-LUqP8v5H8KnsY8RCR3cD09xbHia5pAWLr-8x5fEDZGc/w330-h400/warnng+poster.jpg" width="330" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i>Dr James Niven took the initiative in Manchester</i><br /></td></tr></tbody></table>The British Government censored anything they felt might
damage wartime morale –<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Arthur Newsome,
the closest equivalent to a Chief Medical Officer, decreed it important to “<i>keep
calm and carry on</i>.” Concerned to maintain munitions production, the
government took few steps to counter the disease, even when Prime Minister
Lloyd George nearly died from it – he was secretly treated in Manchester City Hall
for several weeks after attending a crowded war bond rally.<p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Yet it was a Scots-born Manchester doctor, James Niven, who from the
outset identified that this flu was far more aggressive and needed a proactive
response. He lobbied to close schools, distributed at his own expense over half
a million posters urging personal protective measures and presented the first
public health films with a character called Dr Wise advising on social
distancing and masks. The city’s death rate was possibly as low as one eighth
of the norm, though it didn’t spare Niven from eventual suicide.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">After a summer lull, an even more virulent strain emerged in
September. Victims were much more prone to fatal secondary infections, many
dying with a characteristic deep blue skin tone resulting from pus-filled lungs
starving the body of oxygen.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Cities like Sheffield and mining communities across
Yorkshire were particularly badly affected owing to the close working and badly
ventilated conditions in heavy industry and mines, as well as often cramped
housing. The illness led some to desperation – Joseph Meek, a Normanton miner,
in a curious harbinger of 2020, drank carbolic disinfectant not to cure but to
kill himself, while some parents facing their own deaths killed their children
for fear of no one being left to care for them.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Yet the government continued with its complacency, advising
treatments such as rest – impossible for people scraping by in a time with no
sick pay – consuming Bovril and opium, or even inhaling potash. Trains and
trams ran unaffected and shops, pubs and theatres stayed open. Where local
authorities did take measures, these were half-hearted – in York, for example,
American soldiers were banned from cinemas, but locals were free to attend. </p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Other countries similarly had at best disparate and
inconsistent responses: in the USA, municipalities often took responsibility
for public health and were often at odds with the preferences of state
governors. While some areas had draconian rules on, for example, mask wearing,
others were much more lax and in several cities demonstrations were held to
complain about measures viewed as affronts to American individualism. All the
same, the Federal government passed the Defense of the Realm Act to censor any
stories in the press that it deemed could spread “fear or dismay” – a bizarre line of reasoning not unknown
to the President of the USA in 2020’s pandemic.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Nevertheless, the USA reeled from the disease. Cities became
ghost towns as it spread and mass graves became commonplace. In all some
550,000 US citizens were to die of the flu – 40% of all the US military casualties in
the Great War succumbed to it rather than German guns. And the end of the conflict brought little
lasting relief - armistice celebrations in November led to a further round of
infections, unwittingly causing many more deaths around the world.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">By the turn of the year however, the virus had largely run
its course in Europe and North America. A final wave in Spring 1919 was much
milder as the virus had by then infected most of those it could – cleverly, they
know not to completely destroy their hosts, although in June one of its final
victims was Yorkshireman Mark Sykes, of Levantine Sykes-Picaud infamy. (He was
dug up in 2008 to recover viral remains to help treat the Swine flu outbreak, a
variant of H1N1.)</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Of course, alongside France and the USA, Britain was an
imperial power and trade and military activities carried it round the planet to
their colonies. India, where British military railways injected the virus
across the sub-continent, was to endure over 17 million casualties, while one
in fifty Africans – one in ten in Tanzania – perished. China and Russia were
also badly affected, though civil wars in both countries meant only estimates
are possible.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Notably, Australia quarantined itself, banning all entrants –
like its New Zealand neighbour now, it consequently avoided the devastation
wreaked elsewhere. At home, working class civilians and troops were by far the
worst affected. Over 30,000 British troops had succumbed, while in the UK
itself around 200,000 people died, with many others facing long-term problems.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">In all one in three of the global population was infected
and between 2.5% and 10% of those died – btween 100 million and as many as 200 million people,
depending on the estimate. The normal flu death rate was about 0.1% by comparison.<br /></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"></p><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiG-Bi_cevOpcXr_X7jo0ZC3zzds6CIytPy-E1jF7f6DheNcNLr_CJOYA2O87is_CqvRf1JEmu0eqLBqC5OQ8aIOOjzpQLf5CwTsq_TqeEXUh48qf8gHSTK6lAzznfT39NKbKFgIPbiNRdq/s259/angela.jpg" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="259" data-original-width="194" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiG-Bi_cevOpcXr_X7jo0ZC3zzds6CIytPy-E1jF7f6DheNcNLr_CJOYA2O87is_CqvRf1JEmu0eqLBqC5OQ8aIOOjzpQLf5CwTsq_TqeEXUh48qf8gHSTK6lAzznfT39NKbKFgIPbiNRdq/w300-h400/angela.jpg" width="300" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i><a href="https://edition.cnn.com/2020/04/28/us/woman-101-beat-coronavirus-trnd/index.html"><b>Angela Friedman</b></a> survived both pandemics</i>. </td><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"> </td><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"> <br /></td><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><br /></td></tr></tbody></table>Today, there are parallels with 1918 but differences too.
Covid emerged suddenly. The UK Government was more focussed an international
crisis than on public health and social media has spawned a range of debate
from the highly intellectual to the dangerously ill-informed. <p></p><p class="MsoNormal">However, viruses
are much better understood and treated infintely more effectively by modern medicine, leading to a significantly lower death rate. Parallel to this, the
implementation of social distancing, protective face masks, and proper quarantines - rather
than the confused, partial ones in the UK - clearly make a significant difference. </p><p class="MsoNormal">This is borne out in many places, but perhaps most poignantly by Sweden's ultimately awful death totals following its decision to avoid large-scale lockdowns. Per capita, with 36 covid deaths per million, Sweden stands between the UK (35 deaths pm) and USA (43 deaths pm) in having a high level of deaths - in contrast, its more precautionary neighbours in Norway (6 deaths pm) and Denmark 10 deaths pm) have very substantially lower mortality rates. (Source - <a href="https://www.statista.com/statistics/1104709/coronavirus-deaths-worldwide-per-million-inhabitants/" target="_blank"><b>Statista)</b></a><br /></p><p class="MsoNormal">One heartening personal story of how things have changed is that of Angela Friedman, who was born on a migrant ship from Italy to New York during the 1918 pandemic. Aged 101, she survived contracting covid-19 earlier this year - in spite of previously suffering cancer, sepsis, internal beleeding and several miscarriages. Angela may have superhuman genes, as her daughter proudly declared, but even with these her chances of survival were doubtlessly much better this year than when she was born.<br /></p><p class="MsoNormal">While the current pandemic is dreadful, having taken over a million lives and blighted millions more, and has been badly managed by many governments, the death rate is much lower than 1918-1919: a year which now stands as a striking example of what happens when almost nothing is done at all. It is a lesson right-wing politicians in the UK, USA, Brazil and India would have done well to have learned rather than indulging conspiracy theories about Big Pharma or secret Chinese biological warfare - both with striking antecedants in 1918 when either <a href="https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/the-flu-pandemic-of-1918-and-early-conspiracy-theories#The-controversy-around-aspirin" target="_blank"><b>asprin manufacturers or the Kaiser were blamed for the flu.</b></a></p><p class="MsoNormal">Fortunately, most countries have taken a more collective and interventionist approach to the current public health emergency, otherwise there is no doubt the death toll would be much, much higher. Strong public health systems have proven their efficacy: such as the one in <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/jun/07/cuba-coronavirus-success-contact-tracing-isolation"><b>socalist Cuba</b></a>, the South Korean track and trace process and the remarkable achievements of <a href="https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/with-few-resources-senegal-emerges-as-a-leader-in-the-fight-against-covid-19?utm_campaign=NewsHour&utm_content=1608382018&utm_medium=pbsofficial&utm_source=facebook&fbclid=IwAR2l3aoLBxOmL3a5BqjREnLixRggo_G9rd-Nrgee4NUtwEhvCnoZEGFV5PU"><b>the west African country Senegal</b></a> which, with few medical resources, has achieved the second lowest death rate on the planet by drawing on its long experience of fighting infectious diseases such as ebola and dengue fever. <br /></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Yet so too remain the true causes of our maladies – the
exploitation of our environment and animals; the inequality of our health,
housing and welfare systems; and politicians who advocate for profit over
people and planet. We live in a world where, in the middle of this pandemic, <a href="https://www.ohchr.org/EN/NewsEvents/Pages/DisplayNews.aspx?NewsID=26595&LangID=E" target="_blank"><b>water, that most natural and life-essential substance, has become a tradable commodity on the Futures market</b></a> - this means people are now speculating on its availability to profit from its anticipated (and from investors' perspective, its preferred) scarcity. </p><p class="MsoNormal">This is the same world where an invisible dot with some nasty prongs has almost brought our system to its knees in a matter of weeks, so you might be forgiven for hoping we would have learned to treat our habitat with greater respect and vow to pursue new ways of living in harmony with each other and our environment. Yet so far, such a change is, to put it mildly, elusive. </p><p class="MsoNormal">Covid is not so much an existential biological threat to our species as a piercing wake up call we ignore perhaps literally at our peril. The next pandemic may well be much worse, and much sooner than we imagine, as we continue to degrade our world and tangle and tear and transform the very threads of existence. All for cash. <br /></p><p class="MsoNormal">Capitalism remains the true virus - and socialism the only effective
vaccine.</p><p class="MsoNormal"> </p><p class="MsoNormal"></p><p class="MsoNormal"><i><b>Below:</b> from the British Film Institute; a colourised version of the 1918 public health film Dr Wise</i> <br /></p><p>
</p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p><iframe allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/hn1OvVwtC24" width="560"></iframe></p>Viridis Lumenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08097453038753328641noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5190994177632420720.post-80705000410275746312020-10-27T12:24:00.011-07:002020-10-29T12:51:27.427-07:00Biden and Business As Usual - Liberal Delusion Number 119<p class="MsoNormal"> <a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhLiK6LHuT_ID0SeXckhtEoreXDdDWZ_sl55vkPHx8uzXYZ5PYBeBUUySxgi7VColIQ0_LEV6jnnuTFhuxZG9Eaji0iZSBWySdGlbLDkCC-4-jglWWqovh0mR9ZGnTtEaYaUgjL5tqVA9Hh/s1400/Biden1.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1400" data-original-width="1400" height="229" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhLiK6LHuT_ID0SeXckhtEoreXDdDWZ_sl55vkPHx8uzXYZ5PYBeBUUySxgi7VColIQ0_LEV6jnnuTFhuxZG9Eaji0iZSBWySdGlbLDkCC-4-jglWWqovh0mR9ZGnTtEaYaUgjL5tqVA9Hh/w229-h229/Biden1.jpg" width="229" /></a><span style="font-family: georgia;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="line-height: 107%;">One week out
from the US Presidential election and, not entirely unlike last time, the
so-called progressive wing of the Establishment, the liberals and social
democrats, their sponsors and media mates, have perhaps a little more cautiously than last time more or less
called it for Joe Biden. Trump is toast, disintegrating faster than bone spurs
in an X-ray machine.</span></span></span></p><p></p><span style="font-family: georgia;"><span style="font-size: medium;">
</span></span><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: georgia;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="line-height: 107%;">Yet, while <a href="https://www.rasmussenreports.com/public_content/politics/elections/election_2020/white_house_watch_oct27" target="_blank"><b>yesterday's Rasmussen national poll giving the incumbent Trump a 1% lead is still
something of an outlier,</b></a> most other polls, while giving Biden a lead of around
7% on average all show things tightening. With the impact of the efforts by
Republican governors to effectively disenfranchise poor and black voters over
the last two years, a tack seen on balance as favouring Trump, and the robust
efforts to impair voting by mail in this virus-ridden poll, the result may yet
be much, much closer than the broad left, and some traditional conservatives,
might like to wish. </span></span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: georgia;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="line-height: 107%;">Certainly, it is far too soon to call the result – especially
once you factor in the massive pile up of Democrat votes in relatively few big
states set against the need to balance that with wins in smaller states to tilt
the winner-takes-all maths of the Electoral College (the body that actually
elects the President). As we know from 2016, the President does not need a majority of votes cast to carry the college. He just needs to come close and come ahead in the right places.<br /></span></span></span></p><span style="font-family: georgia;"><span style="font-size: medium;">
</span></span><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: georgia;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="line-height: 107%;">Taking a
hunch, Biden on balance may probably win; and yet his victory will be a truly
hollow one; less the routing of far right, neofascism and rather more the
temporary stopgap Hindenburg provided against Hitler’s Nazis in their 1932
contest. That even now the outcome is actually still in question with Trump
averaging the support of around 9 in 20 voters demonstrates that this vote
will not conclude anything in spite of all the pious hopes of liberals for the
USA to return to being “<i>a normal country</i>” and of their counterparts everywhere
for “<i>politics as usual</i>”, a resumption of the comfortable spin of two sides of
the same capitalist coin taking buggins turn at squandering people’s hopes and
dreams and our planet’s resources and biosphere alike.</span></span></span></p><span style="font-family: georgia;"><span style="font-size: medium;">
</span></span><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: georgia;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="line-height: 107%;">Biden’s
legacy is toxic – from his active<span>
</span>backing of crime legislation that has incarcerated almost 3 million
predominantly black people to work for free on behalf of the military and big
corporations in a form of modern slavery under Bill Clinton to fostering the
continent-wide fracking rolled out under Obama. Like many liberals his stance
is that of a chameleon, from cold blue to hot red and back again depending on
circumstances. And, in Biden’s case, it seems to also be who he listened to last - Bernie or Barack, Kamala or Hillary.</span></span></span></p><span style="font-family: georgia;"><span style="font-size: medium;">
</span></span><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: georgia;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="line-height: 107%;">Trump has
made much play of Biden’s memory issues. Some have seen this as a 74 year old
man trying to disingenuously portray a 78 year od man as “past it”. But in
truth Joe’s memory lapses extend far back in time to much younger days: this is
a man who in his first run for President, way back in 1988, <a href="https://youtu.be/mCJMF7mflGE" target="_blank"><u><b>forgot to credit
Bobby Kennedy when he used his words to invoke patriotism, forgot to mention he
was quoting UK Labour leader Neil Kinnock when he asked why his wife was the
first in her family to go to college and who somehow forgot that rather than
topping his law class, came 74<sup>th</sup> out of 86 and, in a strikingly Trumpian outburst, told a questioner he almost certainly had the higher IQ.</b></u></a><br /></span></span></span></p><span style="font-family: georgia;"><span style="font-size: medium;">
</span></span><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: georgia;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="line-height: 107%;">Biden’s 1988
primary candidacy collapsed with his hubris and lies, but this year it seems the
Democratic National Committee was so fearful of a truly transformational
candidacy in the shape of Bernie Sanders that they set aside everything. From Joe’s
economy with actualite through his son’s unquestionably dodgy dealings in
Ukraine to the outstanding, un-investigated claim of sexual assault by him on a
young female intern working in his office in the 1990s, it doesn't matter - all that does is that he isn't Trump.<br /></span></span></span></p><span style="font-family: georgia;"><span style="font-size: medium;">
</span></span><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: georgia;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="line-height: 107%;">And it
shows.</span></span></span></p><span style="font-family: georgia;"><span style="font-size: medium;">
</span></span><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: georgia;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="line-height: 107%;">Biden was
credited as the winner of the final debate last week: most polls found him to
have stood up to Trump, though relatively few were enthused by him. The debate
was seen as treading water and unlikely to shift more than a handful of voters.
And yet a throw away comment by Biden in the closing moments may yet prove to
be disastrous.</span></span></span></p><span style="font-family: georgia;"><span style="font-size: medium;">
</span></span><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: georgia;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="line-height: 107%;">Asked about
climate change, Biden seemingly boldly announced he would close down the oil industry. Unsurprisingly,
Trump suggested this was the big news of the night, leaving Biden stumbling to
correct himself that this would be done “over time.” </span></span></span></p><span style="font-family: georgia;"><span style="font-size: medium;">
</span></span><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: georgia;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="line-height: 107%;">It is true
we need to shut down oil, but the fact is Joe Biden has no particular interest
in doing so. Nor does he have much understanding of what might replace it.
Where Bernie Sanders (or the Green Party Presidential candidate Howie Hawkins)
might have talked about transitioning jobs in oil into renewables, Biden
betrayed his lack of knowledge and even belief in the need to change by having little to nothing to say. It was after all, under the Obama-Biden Administration that the plug was effectively pulled on the previously burgeoning US renewables industry in favour of opening up the country to fracking - so much so that his now running mate, <b><a href="One week out from the US Presidential election and, not entirely unlike last time, the so-called progressive wing of the Establishment, the liberals and social democrats, their sponsors and media mates, have perhaps cautiously more or less called it for Joe Biden. Trump is toast, disintegrating faster than bone spurs in an X-ray machine. Yet, while today’s Rasmussen national poll giving the incumbent a 1% lead is still something of an outlier, most other polls, while giving Biden a lead of around 7% on average all show things tightening. With the impact of the efforts by Republican governors to effectively disenfranchise poor and black voters over the last two years, a tack seen on balance as favouring Trump, and the robust efforts to impair voting by mail in this virus-ridden poll, the result may yet be much, much closer than the broad left, and some traditional conservatives, might like to wish. Certainly, it is far too soon to call the result – especially once you factor in the massive pile up of Democrat votes in relatively few big states set against the need to balance that with wins in smaller states to tilt the winner-takes-all maths of the Electoral College (the body that actually elects the President). Taking a hunch, Biden on balance may probably win; and yet his victory will be a truly hollow one; less the routing of far right, neofascism and rather more the temporary stopgap Hindenburg provided against Hitler’s Nazis in their 1932 contest. That even now the outcome is actually still in question with Trump averaging the support of around 9 in 20 voters is proof enough that this vote will not conclude anything in spite of all the pious hopes of liberals for the USA to return to being “a normal country” and of their counterparts everywhere for “politics as usual”, a resumption of the comfortable spin of two sides of the same capitalist coin taking buggins turn at squandering people’s hopes and dreams and our planet’s resources and biosphere alike. Biden’s legacy is toxic – from his active backing of crime legislation that has incarcerated almost 3 million predominantly black people to work for free on behalf of the military and big corporations in a form of modern slavery under Bill Clinton to fostering the continent-wide fracking rolled out under Obama, like many liberals his stance is that of a chameleon, from cold blue to hot red and back again depending on circumstances. And, in Biden’s case, who he listened to last. Trump has made much play of Biden’s memory issues. Some have seen this as a 74 year old man trying to disingenuously portray a 78 year od man as “past it”. But in truth Joe’s memory lapses extend far back in time to much younger days: this is a man who in his first run for President, way back in 1988, forgot to credit Bobby Kennedy when he used his words to invoke patriotism, forgot to mention he was quoting UK Labour leader Neil Kinnock when he asked why his wife was the first in her family to go to college and who somehow forgot that rather than topping his law class, came 74th out 0f 86. Biden’s 1988 primary candidacy collapsed with his lies, but this year it seems the Democratic National Committee was so fearful of a truly transformational candidacy in the shape of Bernie Sanders that they aside everything from Joe’s economy with actualite through his son’s unquestionably dodgy dealings in Ukraine to the outstanding, un-investigated claim of sexual assault by him on a young female intern working in his office in the 1990s. And it shows. Biden was credited as the winner of the final debate last week: most polls found him to have stood up to Trump, though relatively few were enthused by him. The debate was seen as treading water and unlikely to shift more than a handful of voters. And yet a throw away comment by Biden in the closing moments may yet prove to be disastrous. Asked about climate change, Biden announced he would close down the oil industry (this, bear in mind, from the VP in the administration that opened up thousands of fracking well-heads across the USA, fostering all the poisoned wells and flaming kitchen taps featured in scores of Youtube videos). Unsurprisingly, Trump suggested this was the big news of the night, leaving Biden stumbling to correct himself that this would be done “over time.” It is true we need to shut down oil, but the fact is Joe Biden has no particular interest in doing so. Nor does he have much understanding of what might replace it. Where Bernie Sanders (or the Green Party Presidential candidate Howie Hawkins) might have talked about transitioning jobs in oil into renewables, Biden betrayed his lack of knowledge and even belief in the need to change. In the crucial swing state of Pennsylvania, once a Democratic bastion but in many counties now with a registered Republican majority, Biden’s confusion and slipperiness may be his undoing. For this is where liberal managerialism comes unstuck – it was precisely its detached elitism, foisting fracking on poor communities which, eventually, have gained some modest economic gain from it in spite of their environmental catastrophes, that turned voters away from the likes of Hillary Clinton to Donald J Trump. While polls in the state given Biden a narrow lead, most were taken before the debate and on the ground Trump’s campaign by all accounts is reaping a swift dividend from Sleepy Joe’s apparent wish to now shut down the very industry he and Barak Obama imposed on them. Trump is an appalling, nasty, greedy, sociopathic narcissist. It is truly difficult to find any redeeming features in the man at all. Yet like Hitler, he has fed on genuine grievance and directed it to his advantage. Unlike Hitler, he has no ideology and is not as well organised, but that is not to say that, once he is gone, someone more coherent won’t emerge at the head of his huge base vote and the armed militias he has told to “stand by”. That the Democrats have singularly failed to destroy him and his creed is proof enough that they have yet again failed to even begin to understand the forces that created him in the first place – because they and the corrupt elitism they represent and buttress are perhaps the primary force. The force that saw so many working class Democrats as having nowhere else to go and so eminently betrayable to the corporate interests that have bought the Dems lock, stock and barrel – so much so that a movement like Sanders’ was seen as a threat rather than the once-in-a-generation opportunity that it was. And if in the end Joe Biden just squeaks in, with a half-baked programme and a promise simply to not-be-Trump and a Supreme Court soaked in Tea Party bigotry, the next four years are already lost and the next forty seriously at threat." target="_blank">Kamala Harris, sued them unsuccessfully in her capacity as Attorney-General of California to stop them drilling off the seismically sensitive Pacific coast.</a></b><br /></span></span></span></p><span style="font-family: georgia;"><span style="font-size: medium;">
</span></span><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: georgia;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="line-height: 107%;">In the
crucial swing state of Pennsylvania, <a href="https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/where-trumps-2020-coalition-must-come-from-in-pennsylvania" target="_blank"><b>once a Democratic bastion but in many
counties now with a registered Republican majority</b></a>, Biden’s confusion and
slipperiness may be his undoing. For this is where liberal managerialism comes
unstuck – it was precisely its detached elitism, foisting fracking on poor
communities and now after they have made some modest economic gain from it in
spite of their environmental catastrophes deciding to shut it down, that turned voters away from the
likes of Hillary Clinton to Donald Trump. </span></span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: georgia;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="line-height: 107%;">Biden had established a narrow lead with the prospect of winning the state's vital Electoral College votes back, but on the ground Trump’s campaign by all accounts is reaping
a swift dividend from Sleepy Joe’s apparent wish to now shut down the very
industry he and Barak Obama imposed on the state. <a href="https://overland.amgreatness.com/app/uploads/2020/10/PA-POll-Oct-25th-.pdf" target="_blank"><u><b>The very latest Pennsylvania statewide poll, out tonight, gives a 2% advantage to the President.</b></u></a><br /></span></span></span></p><span style="font-family: georgia;"><span style="font-size: medium;">
</span></span><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: georgia;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="line-height: 107%;">Donald Trump is an
appalling, nasty, greedy, sociopathic narcissist. It is truly difficult to find
any redeeming features in the man at all. Yet like Hitler, he has fed on
genuine grievance and directed it to his advantage, however dissembling and disingenuously. Unlike Hitler, he has no
ideology and is not as well organised, but that is not to say that, once he is
gone, someone more coherent won’t emerge at the head of his huge and still very much intact base vote and
the armed militias he has told to “stand by”. </span></span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: georgia;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="line-height: 107%;">That the Democrats have
singularly failed to destroy him and his creed is proof enough that they have
yet again failed to even begin to understand the forces that created him in the
first place – because they and the corrupt elitism they represent and buttress
are perhaps the primary force. They, like New Labour under Blair in the UK, saw so many working class
Democrats as having nowhere else to go and so eminently betrayable to the corporate
interests that have bought the Dems lock, stock and barrel – so much so that a
movement like Sanders’ socialist one was seen as a threat rather than the
once-in-a-generation transformational opportunity that it was.</span></span></span></p><span style="font-family: georgia;"><span style="font-size: medium;">
</span></span><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: georgia;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="line-height: 107%;">And if in
the end Joe Biden just squeaks in, with a half-baked programme, a promise
simply to not-be-Trump and a Supreme Court soaked in Tea Party bigotry, the
next four years are already lost and the next forty seriously at risk.</span></span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: georgia;"><span style="font-size: medium;"></span></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: georgia;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEimAEQWnWUooTlxBKwDEfH9jQAVraLuWU1ufZnyx1WCJdCTOAeugamiDftwlfSxO0lJpPDOcPCusXnaULLPiBUFpW4yt93nTIgeqDN1AhdvMngcIF6OtTa86VVqiN0MRjSCik7UAkV0W1Zx/s976/_115039792_biden_trump_6_index.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="651" data-original-width="976" height="426" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEimAEQWnWUooTlxBKwDEfH9jQAVraLuWU1ufZnyx1WCJdCTOAeugamiDftwlfSxO0lJpPDOcPCusXnaULLPiBUFpW4yt93nTIgeqDN1AhdvMngcIF6OtTa86VVqiN0MRjSCik7UAkV0W1Zx/w640-h426/_115039792_biden_trump_6_index.jpg" width="640" /></a></span></span></div><span style="font-family: georgia;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /><span style="line-height: 107%;"><br /></span></span></span><p></p>
Viridis Lumenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08097453038753328641noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5190994177632420720.post-88094458190112851762020-09-16T00:42:00.002-07:002020-09-16T00:56:25.698-07:00Lest We Forget - No, poppies aren't banned<p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgMcLA73L_eQbtgtrsvHnE7U2djXmoryuJmAFiDih0w6zXLL1NFeFx2lj5YM7f2O_jlX-QcEWpTezjdf_cHN8Z8-8ZaqxQ44nqktRJkcV2wX3HM84yZAy_u1YZnwFVtrDHEN__DA0ZP4LDM/s1280/Veterans-3-1280x965.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="965" data-original-width="1280" height="301" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgMcLA73L_eQbtgtrsvHnE7U2djXmoryuJmAFiDih0w6zXLL1NFeFx2lj5YM7f2O_jlX-QcEWpTezjdf_cHN8Z8-8ZaqxQ44nqktRJkcV2wX3HM84yZAy_u1YZnwFVtrDHEN__DA0ZP4LDM/w400-h301/Veterans-3-1280x965.jpg" width="400" /></a></div><br />Every year, it seems to come a bit earlier as the nights start to draw in, the birds head south and we scour the forest floors for firewood...<br /><br />Yes, you know what I mean. The invidious social media posts telling us the British Legion aren't selling poppies in "certain areas" (never your own of course, somewhere else) because they are "offensive to some minorities" (unstated which, but Muslims and non-white people are clearly in with a shout). British people (as long as they're white) need to "stand up and take back" our (Belgian) poppies.<br /><br />And yet again the British Legion will explain this is not true. As it has had to do since at least 2016 if not earlier.<p></p><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjZPFoFFphyphenhyphenqJ9kheUNqALUSM4GIA-r78DX6LXc-fU9-ck0rRi4yqH6Fy16YL8aUDq4bX6SUSITL33vVZVZtORd7qQ4ZUZy8WPx5GEQeEOmFTNqscTWec_YyAXbdpDpdJSSX7trmrAPg2t_/s590/Royal-british-legion-poppy-hijab-Muslim-618403.jpg" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><img border="0" data-original-height="350" data-original-width="590" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjZPFoFFphyphenhyphenqJ9kheUNqALUSM4GIA-r78DX6LXc-fU9-ck0rRi4yqH6Fy16YL8aUDq4bX6SUSITL33vVZVZtORd7qQ4ZUZy8WPx5GEQeEOmFTNqscTWec_YyAXbdpDpdJSSX7trmrAPg2t_/s320/Royal-british-legion-poppy-hijab-Muslim-618403.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i>Remembrance hijab</i><br /></td></tr></tbody></table><p>Remembrance Day and poppies commemorate all the fallen. Contrary to the "Britain stood alone" (apart from a posh white Canadian and a jokey, similarly pale Aussie) narrative of the movies and the media, in fact the British were never alone. <br /><br />Indians, Pakistanis, Bangladeshis, Arabs, Africans, Chinese and Afro-Carribean people fought alongside white British soldiers in huge numbers and were frequently decisive in turning defeat into victory. <br /><br />The British Indian Army (recruited from what is now India, Pakistan and Bangladesh) contributed 2,500,000 soldiers to the British wartime army, about a quarter of the total - twice the numbers from Australia, Canada and New Zealand combined - and the largest volunteer force in history. Half a million of them followed the Islamic faith.<br /><br />As well as being a decisive factor in the war against Japan, Indian and Pakistani troops fought in nearly ever major engagement elsewhere, including El Alamein and critically at Monte Cassino, as well as D-Day and the Battle of the Bulge. Meantime, nearly 6,000 African-Carribean volunteers (including many women) served in the RAF and hundreds of thousands of troops from Kenya, Tanzania, Nigeria, Burma, Malaysia, and a range of other non-white states came forward to serve as allies. Tens of thousands of Muslims, Hindus, Sikhs, Buddhists and others died fighting fascism, even as the British government diverted food from imperial colonies, contibuting heavily to several million deaths from famine in Bengal in 1943.<br /><br />The people who routinely plaster this annual lie on social media betray not only their racism, but their ignorance of history and lack of awareness of who is remembered each year. You can always find some hate speaker saying anything you like, but "some minorities" have never demanded that poppies be banned. Indeed, had it not been for the service of men and women from "some minorities", Britain would almost certainly have lost the war against the Nazis in 1941, just as the Wermacht was pouring into the Soviet Union and before the US entry to the war. <br /><br />But, of course, in spite of their faux claims of patriotism, the fact is that at least some of these fake poppy ban posters might perhaps have been happier if the war against fascism had produced a very different outcome. Rather than the strain of two minutes silence, they might have preferred instead to join in some throaty, full-throttle "<i>sieg heils</i>" and then listen enraptured to the click, click, clickety-click of jackboots on the Mall.<br /><br />Lest we forget.</p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhFw_I3_cAJaKjsLjUtYaD5Z3Gsvj8NGTsMUQjTLnF8uh8qz23Q84uYt0IjrtlmF84T7mrVeLG1x94-QvaWSxx6qo3Uo4lecVVy8yR-0fOeOAll-CKGMgXoU3D-koaCQLCT4NL8Ks31S_oK/s448/MKAUK_Poppy_Appeal-61.jpg.gallery.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="299" data-original-width="448" height="268" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhFw_I3_cAJaKjsLjUtYaD5Z3Gsvj8NGTsMUQjTLnF8uh8qz23Q84uYt0IjrtlmF84T7mrVeLG1x94-QvaWSxx6qo3Uo4lecVVy8yR-0fOeOAll-CKGMgXoU3D-koaCQLCT4NL8Ks31S_oK/w400-h268/MKAUK_Poppy_Appeal-61.jpg.gallery.jpg" width="400" /></a><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg6SWsI02BMMBku5aWU_DzdAmlAuijtjK12up715gXOXFgKyvjb_8b6uDk7ZtD5T83XQ6VrWCIgxvGLp1onLU0VzvLtL4n5NpbsPcRGTSl5GVqGGac4DnIW_951woa06_sPpfP-9xo49ipX/s1024/photo_editor_ds_1600242657946.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="793" data-original-width="1024" height="248" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg6SWsI02BMMBku5aWU_DzdAmlAuijtjK12up715gXOXFgKyvjb_8b6uDk7ZtD5T83XQ6VrWCIgxvGLp1onLU0VzvLtL4n5NpbsPcRGTSl5GVqGGac4DnIW_951woa06_sPpfP-9xo49ipX/w320-h248/photo_editor_ds_1600242657946.jpg" title="Big fat fascist lie" width="320" /></a></div><br /></div><br /><p></p>Viridis Lumenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08097453038753328641noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5190994177632420720.post-73657562828535671442020-08-21T12:48:00.028-07:002020-08-24T16:11:17.779-07:00The Love of Leon Trotsky<p><span style="font-family: verdana;"> </span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiIBP54NTcN-O-LdOobqVKlOegNRigaYHqHb1hvyL1UsYfGegrA8a6rLU1LGQ0evYq-Rpic2539p2NewDAXmi2yrsh_T7h21He__AlQ5WcZUT6WLEO5OcnkR6hovDZ0Rbd5YTuClHBnYvEl/s1200/p03npr6g.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="675" data-original-width="1200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiIBP54NTcN-O-LdOobqVKlOegNRigaYHqHb1hvyL1UsYfGegrA8a6rLU1LGQ0evYq-Rpic2539p2NewDAXmi2yrsh_T7h21He__AlQ5WcZUT6WLEO5OcnkR6hovDZ0Rbd5YTuClHBnYvEl/s640/p03npr6g.jpg" width="640" /></a></div><p></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">Eighty years ago today, Lev Davidovitch Bronstein, better known as the Communist revolutionary leader <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leon_Trotsky#Final_months"><b>Leon Trotsky</b></a>, died in a hospital in Mexico City from fatal head wounds sustained the day before when a Stalinist agent, Ramon Mercader, attacked him in his study with an ice pick. Trotsky's guards had almost beaten his assailant to death, but while still conscious, he ordered them to stop and after a spell in jail Mercader was to end up spending many years in idle retirement in Cuba at the expense of the USSR.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">It was the end of an eventful life. Born to relatively affluent farming parents in the southern Ukrainian Jewish community, Trotsky grew up observing the gross inequalities and violence of Imperial Russia. He became interested in the radical socialist ideas sweeping Russia at the time at university and quickly got into trouble with the Czarist authorities. He was jailed and exiled twice to Siberia, escaping both times and adopting the name of one of his jailers firstly to aid his flight and later to be his revolutionary codename (just as Vladimir Ulyanov became Lenin).</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">In 1901, anticipating the century ahead from his readings of Marx and Engels, he foresaw better times and devoted himself to struggle for them:</span></p><p><i>As long as I breathe I hope. As long as I breathe I shall fight for the
future, that radiant future, in which man, strong and beautiful, will
become master of the drifting stream of his history and will direct it
towards the boundless horizons of beauty, joy and happiness!
</i></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">Trotsky's odyssey took him from the Russian forests to Germany, Switzerland, Britain, Belgium, France, and the USA in pre-revolutionary exile. He first returned to Russia in 1905 where at the age of just 26 he latterly headed the first St Petersburg Soviet (revolutionary council) during the revolutionary insurrections that nearly toppled the Czar that year. Previously a member of the <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lctklKLx8yI"><b>Russian Social Democrats, a Marxist party, he had stepped back following the split in 1903 between the Bolsheviks under Lenin</b></a>, who pushed for a highly centralised party to prepare to act as a revolutionary vanguard, and the Menshevik wing headed by Martov, which argued for a more decentralised organisational structure and a more gradualist approach to change. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">For all that Trotsky was committed to socialist revolution, he was at least initially one of the more pragmatic members of the movement, working to reconcile the two wings and maintaining a degree of independence almost right up to the Communist October revolution. He joined the Bolsheviks in spring 1917 when the Russian Empire had collapsed and the liberal regime that had replaced it was veering between repression and chaos. With a reactionary coup narrowly defeated by armed workers, Trotsky headed the Military Revolutionary Committee that co-ordinated the seizure of the Winter Palace and dissolution of the Provisional Government of Kerensky (a bombastic character, much misrepresented in the West in subsequent decades as some tragic democrat as opposed to a would-be Bonapartist dictator-in-waiting).</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">In the subsequent Russian Civil War, when a range of foreign powers and domestic opponents sought to overthrow the Soviet government, Trotsky was instrumental in creating the Red Army and as Commissar for War directing much of its ultimately successful strategy, fighting a four-front struggle. Traversing Russia in an armed train numerous times, unlike most other leaders on all sides he frequently risked his personal safety to direct and encourage the frontline troops. </span></p><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgZbamFEEeH5KV7omQyhXg0a0ospp1URwIrLxaeMXZB9tO16kIil4TJcOGxiXqVmPdrb84qX8soUaTaEW_P-JTEJc8L7HabJ8Z8bP3ATjt4YsGFV2Ep1mEUpS3_prEN0mOHN5dUKk5gy8Hs/s1254/800px-Leon_Trotsky_Armored_Train_1920.jpg" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1254" data-original-width="800" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgZbamFEEeH5KV7omQyhXg0a0ospp1URwIrLxaeMXZB9tO16kIil4TJcOGxiXqVmPdrb84qX8soUaTaEW_P-JTEJc8L7HabJ8Z8bP3ATjt4YsGFV2Ep1mEUpS3_prEN0mOHN5dUKk5gy8Hs/s640/800px-Leon_Trotsky_Armored_Train_1920.jpg" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i>Trotsky speaks on top of his armed train</i><br /></td></tr></tbody></table><p></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">Once it was over, he initially sought to return to his first love - writing on political theory and practice and history, including producing a four volume history of the revolution - but was persuaded to stay on in government by Lenin. With the country in ruins, Trotsky maintained a militarised approach to reconstruction and while the new socialist regime struggled for some time, his hard tactics began to work and industrial production began to rise again. He worked with Lenin to both nationalise and revitalise the economy, including backing the controversial New Economic Policy which briefly reintroduced small scale market economics while not veering from the aims of a socialised society.<br /></span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">Perhaps though one of the biggest tragedies of both the Revolution and in some ways the whole 20th century was that, following an attempted assassination attempt in 1919, Lenin became chronically and progressively ill, dying in 1924 - possibly <i>hurried along</i> during a visit from Stalin, his ultimate successor and an avowed opponent of Trotsky. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">Stalin had started out as a sort of Bolshevik enforcer - he organised gangs of agitators and fundraised for the Party by carrying out bank robberies (NB - this was one of the few criminal activities Lenin sanctioned). He had always been in the background, almost invisibly so during the revolutions of 1917 but by 1923 had risen to be General Secretary of the Communist Party, a key role overseeing how it ran. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">In the ensuing <a href="https://www.nationalww2museum.org/war/articles/trotskys-struggle-against-stalin"><b>struggle for power within the party, Trotsky was repeatedly outmanoevred by the rising Georgian sociopath</b></a>, first being expelled from the Communist Party along with several prominent supporters, then sent on internal exile to Central Asia and finally deported with his wife Natalia Sedova to Turkey in 1929.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">In his final, prolonged exile, Trotsky first set up in Prinkipio, an island in the Sea of Marmora just off Istanbul, before subsequently having to move on to France, Norway and then to Mexico as government after government either objected to or feared his activities in the ferment that was 1930s Europe. He worked with relatively small groups of international revolutionaries to develop a counterforce within communism to the increasingly totalitarian Stalinist regime in the Soviet Union. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">This he devastatingly critiqued in his work <i>Revolution Betrayed</i>, a searing indictment of the bureaucratization of the country, which he had repeatedly warned about in the earliest days of the revolution. A new class had arisen - one of administrators and managers, serving themselves rather than the People, and accountable only to itself. The democratic promise of the early Soviet days had all but evaporated and while he conceded that there were material gains for many ordinary people, these were both impeded and stolen by the new Masters.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">Trotsky initially sought to avoid any split in the Communist movement. His stated aim was to restore workers' democracy rather than divide the party, but after Stalin ordered the German Communists to decline any Popular Front with the Social Democrats against the rise of the Nazis, in 1933 he agreed to create a new socialist movement, the Fourth International. This sought to promote a different path to a genuinely communist state, one where power was more firmly in the hands of the masses - though Trotsky's approach remained decidedly centralised, a conundrum in his thinking he never resolved. In any case, the Soviet system as it had evolved to be was to be dismantled and forged again. </span></p><p>I<span style="font-family: verdana;">n addition, while Stalin had reconciled with capitalist states, Trotsky argued that Communists should forever press for global revolution - given the state of the world, full revolution in one country was not possible; however challenging, permanent revolution had to be the objective of all communists until world revolution was achieved.<br /></span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">Brooking no opposition, Stalin consolidated his position as supreme authority within the Party and state in the early to mid-thirties before unleashing his Great Terror against his remaining opponents, real and imagined, in the purges of 1937. By the end of the year, virtually all the original revolutionary leaders had been eliminated within the USSR and, condemned <i>in absentia</i>, Trotsky was to be no exception. Spending his final days in a well-fortified house, Avenida Viena on the outskirts of the Mexican capital, he seems to have sensed his coming end, either from high blood pressure or at the hands of an assassin and while he resisted Mercader, in his reported final words, he seems to have been unsurprised by his pending demise at the behest of his one-time rival.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">Volumes have been filled about Trotsky, a good number of them eloquently and passionately by the man himself - Trotsky's writings are rarely not an enthusiastically good read. Yet in spite of this, in many ways he remains one of the most enigmatic characters in revolutionay history. Loved and loathed by socialists of different hues, a genius to some while demonised, literally, by others, his stamp on one of the seminal events of modern history is unquestionable. While communists will argue that historical forces brought about the 1917 revolutions, as Trotsky himself wrote, while such forces are supra-personal, they nevertheless operate through people. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;"></span></p><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi7ZVrVe466nyE66oKZ0ftjIsPRAqqe_NPoLLx96yehzcedH85S4-5Z83jS5RVNzrWrzMDVqkwA7iyIN7tZImriAMRhJ67EUykYtaHNyyr7kcgnoqbtj2E8UCF5LqlPetFsizx-EbyDf94E/s668/52fcddce047b083425409628c111fcd4_w700_h500.jpg" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="500" data-original-width="668" height="306" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi7ZVrVe466nyE66oKZ0ftjIsPRAqqe_NPoLLx96yehzcedH85S4-5Z83jS5RVNzrWrzMDVqkwA7iyIN7tZImriAMRhJ67EUykYtaHNyyr7kcgnoqbtj2E8UCF5LqlPetFsizx-EbyDf94E/w410-h306/52fcddce047b083425409628c111fcd4_w700_h500.jpg" width="410" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i>Trotsky, Lenin and Kamenev in 1918</i><br /></td></tr></tbody></table><span style="font-family: verdana;">Without Trostky, Lenin would not have carried the Politburo in favour of the October revolution. Without Trotsky, the Red Army would potentially not have even been created let alone have won the civil war. Without Trotsky, the Soviet Union would have died in its cradle.</span><p></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">Here of course is where everything else moves to the what ifs of alternate history. What if Lenin had lived? What if Trotsky's struggle against Stalin had had a different outcome? What if the Soviet Union had developed along the more proletarian, democratic path he advocated? After the years of War Communism and central direction, how different from the totalitarian Stalinist state or the later Brezhnevite bureaucracy might the Soviet Union have ended up being, or not? <br /></span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">Trotsky, like any human, was of course full of contradictions. He fulminated against Stalin's banning of his Left Opposition faction within the party, but had previously supported Lenin in banning the Workers' Opposition and other factions opposing their strand of thinking. He denounced Stalinist totalitarianism, but had successfully opposed Lenin, a relatively unusual stance, in banning independent trade unions, arguing that such things were no longer necessary in a workers' state.<br /></span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">His own opponents often claim he butchered thousands of people in the civil war, in putting down the Kronstadt rebellion and in suppressing opposition parties in the early 1920s. Yet all this needs some context.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">The civil war was a bloody affair. That is the nature of civil wars. All norms of behaviour are destroyed. Distrust rules and outcomes are rarely gentle. The Russian civil war began when Social Revolutionaries, Kadets and other so-called liberal parties decamped from Moscow and Petrograd to Samara in central Russia and set up the Komuch, a rival government, in June 1918. Co-operating with hardline White Russian Czarist generals and soldiers, as well as the Czech Legion, they launched a violent attack on the Soviets, with the avowed aim of liquidating the Bolsheviks who were then ruling in coalition with a faction of Left Social Revolutionaries. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">Over the following three years, the Komuch largely ate itself - the rival liberal and socialist parties turned violently on each other and then, sponsored by the British Empire, the White "People's Army" turned on them and installed Admiral Kolchak as effective dictator. To portray their bloodthirsty campaigns and pogroms, armed and aided by a range of foreign states including the UK, France, the USA and Japan, as some sort of crusade for democracy and freedom is at best misplaced.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">It is true that in reaction to the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Committee_of_Members_of_the_Constituent_Assembly"><b>Komuch</b></a>, the Bolsheviks suppressed, though did not initially ban, the remnants of these parties in their areas and after the Left SRs attempted to assassinate Lenin and carry out a coup d'etat in late 1918, the Soviet Government ruthlessly carried out a wave of often extra-judicial arrests, torture and executions. Even so, this should still be viewed as a response to the nature of the threat they faced, as was the continuation of oppression in the immediate period after the civil war ended. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">Russia was grossly under-developed compared to most of the rest of Europe - it was the last place that Marxists had anticipated a socialist revolution. Initially favourable developments elsewhere in Europe, with Germany in revolution in late 1918 and early 1919, Hungary briefly declared a Soviet Republic, Italy going through a range of Red Uprisings and Leftist movements growing in France and Britain, gave hope for international revolution to follow the Soviet example. However, one by one these were suppressed and snuffed out, often with great violence, but the ruling class's hostility towards the New Union of Soviet Socialist Republics was undiminished. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">With virtually the entire world ranged against the nascent workers' state and more than willing to use everything from economic embargoes to military intervention to overthrow it, the conditions sadly did not lend themselves to generosity towards rivals with murderous intent. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">And yet, in the USSR, women gained marital equality and the right to divorce; it became the first country in the world to legalise homosexuality; the land was collectivised and the economy was taken into state hands. Ultimately, albeit not entirely by the means Trotsky himself advocated, in less than a generation and in spite of the worst war in history and the appalling carnage of the Stalin regime, the Soviets achieved free education for all, built houses for tens of millions, provided free healthcare and were the first country into outer space. Under communism, a peasant state had become a superpower in barely three decades.<br /></span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">Trotsky devoted his life to change: that he miscalculated on occasions, sometimes on a grand scale, does not diminish either his effort or achivements. He was flawed - even allies like Max Eastman, an American supporter, reported that while he observed every protocol of politeness and seemed to have little vanity, his global view of everything made him a detached, in some ways cold character often quite incapable of the diplomacy and sociability required of a successful politician. Typical of his bearing is the story that when Stalin attempted to make a joke to him about a relationship <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexandra_Kollontai" target="_blank"><b>Alexandra Kollontai, a prominent female Bolshevik</b></a>, was rumoured to be having, Trotsky angrily rebuked him and never spoke to him again in any personal way.<br /></span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;"></span></p><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhL0zeiZrL5pdY1nj5roJN2yB99co5NBXxS04DMk_KGL5p62ANv60bEY6bbK2tnCjEK1AH4fr8kgyCFS3iZLH-gnPssebtxRKwv9lu3vpi24UaUWPbJa2xtmQevViGXhHxHgFo3cjigYI8y/s360/unnamed.png" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="317" data-original-width="360" height="254" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhL0zeiZrL5pdY1nj5roJN2yB99co5NBXxS04DMk_KGL5p62ANv60bEY6bbK2tnCjEK1AH4fr8kgyCFS3iZLH-gnPssebtxRKwv9lu3vpi24UaUWPbJa2xtmQevViGXhHxHgFo3cjigYI8y/w288-h254/unnamed.png" width="288" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i>Lenin with Stalin</i><br /></td></tr></tbody></table><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">Yet with his sociopathic charm and crude bonhomie, Stalin was able to build coalitions that literally overwhelmed Trotsky and his earnest comrades in the Left Opposition. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">And while his earlier exiles in Czarist Russia had been times of rising intrigue, his final exile in the 1930s was marked by years of impotent frustration, ranting to his small coterie of followers and staff. While damning Stalin for the rise of Hitler and his unwillingness to compromise with the German SPD, Trotsky was equally to be found blocking and condemning any co-operation between his own Fourth Internationalists and groups like the Spanish POUM, a temporarily highly successful anarcho-syndicalist force in the Spanish civil war. A reading of his deteriorating and increasingly irate correspondance with his fellow exile, the writer Victor Serge, is a striking example of how banishment did nothing to soften Trotsky and how his intransigence frequently isolated those who, somehow, continued to respect him from afar.</span></p><p></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">Trostky's son, Lev Sedov, commented that "<i>I think that all Dad's deficiencies have not diminished as he has grown older, but under the influence of his isolation, very difficult, unprecedentedly difficult, got worse. His lack of tolerance, hot temper, inconsistency, even rudeness, his desire to humiliate, offend and even destroy have increased. It is not personal, it is a method and hardly good in organisation of work</i>." </span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">It is something much ruminated on - the revolutionary who loves The People, but not people. To Eastman, Trotsky saw the masses but not the personal; all was great forces in action with little regard for individuals who were the parts that made up the sum. And so he was allegedly capable of summarily ordering a roomful of revolutionary officers to be taken outside and shot in the belief that they had failed to carry out their tasks well enough, while at the same time issuing proclamations urging revolutionary soldiers to show mercy to any White combatants who surrendered so that they could be won over to the cause.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;">Yet while some revolutionaries like Gramsci wondered if having never experienced personal love diminished their capacity as a revolutionary, Trotsky was certainly capable of personal love. Contrary to <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2009/oct/31/trotsky-stalin-service-patenaude"><b>appalling biographies that try to portray him as an unfeeling psychopath</b></a>, he cared deeply for his children and risked his life to protect his grandson during one attempted assassination. His brief but passionate <a href="https://www.artsy.net/article/artsy-editorial-frida-kahlos-love-affair-communist-revolutionary-impacted-art" target="_blank"><b>love affair with Frieda Kahlo </b></a>aside, he was devoted to his wife Natalia (whom he also referred to as Natasha) for decades and one of his last pieces of writing offer up a moving tribute to her and what she meant to him, as well as his hopes for a future he by then knew he would not see. It is as beautiful a paean to a revolutionary life as could be penned and in itself is perhaps the best testament to the contradiction of love and zeal, of pragmatism and ideology that was Leon Trotsky:</span></p><p><i>I thank warmly the friends who remained loyal to me through the most
difficult hours of my life. I do not name anyone in particular because I
cannot name them all. However, I consider myself justified in making an exception in the case of my companion, Natalia Ivanovna Sedova. </i></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;"><i>In addition to the happiness of being a fighter for the cause of
socialism, fate gave me the happiness of being her husband. During the
almost forty years of our life together she remained an inexhaustible
source of love, magnanimity, and tenderness. She underwent great
sufferings, especially in the last period of our lives. But I find some
comfort in the fact that she also knew days of happiness. </i></span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;"><i>For forty-three years of my conscious life I have remained a
revolutionist; for forty-two of them I have fought under the banner of
Marxism. If I had to begin all over again I would of course try to avoid
this or that mistake, but the main course of my life would remain
unchanged. I shall die a proletarian revolutionist, a Marxist, a <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dialectical_materialism" title="Dialectical materialism">dialectical materialist</a>, and, consequently, an irreconcilable atheist.
My faith in the communist future of mankind is not less ardent, indeed
it is firmer today, than it was in the days of my youth.<br /></i></span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;"><i>Natasha has
just come up to the window from the courtyard and opened it wider so
that the air may enter more freely into my room. I can see the bright
green strip of grass beneath the wall, and the clear blue sky above the
wall, and sunlight everywhere. </i></span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;"><i>Life is beautiful. Let the future
generations cleanse it of all evil, oppression and violence, and enjoy
it to the full.</i></span></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;"><i></i></span></p><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi96D4sZjKPIIiYn16AqDFFhiLRrHrfi1dJFLhuiNCdo_Gd61nbILqOIzfkvkqKVQzQ8NVv8QConMfZsgUxmGgVVwg1kL8SDFxNdVxft4ilxU4rqJjzAzLsv2x4x6a0_0JVsOhJbkKAJFNw/s460/Trotsky-with-his-wife-Nat-001.webp" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="276" data-original-width="460" height="345" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi96D4sZjKPIIiYn16AqDFFhiLRrHrfi1dJFLhuiNCdo_Gd61nbILqOIzfkvkqKVQzQ8NVv8QConMfZsgUxmGgVVwg1kL8SDFxNdVxft4ilxU4rqJjzAzLsv2x4x6a0_0JVsOhJbkKAJFNw/w575-h345/Trotsky-with-his-wife-Nat-001.webp" width="575" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i>Mexican exile: Natalia Sedova and Lev Davidovitch</i><br /></td></tr></tbody></table><span style="font-family: verdana;"><i> </i></span><p></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;"><br /></span></p>Viridis Lumenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08097453038753328641noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5190994177632420720.post-57248082127588149142020-08-17T13:38:00.022-07:002020-08-19T05:16:29.532-07:00Dear Other White People<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: verdana;"></span></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><iframe allowfullscreen="" class="BLOG_video_class" height="266" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/seGGYyhA9n4" width="320" youtube-src-id="seGGYyhA9n4"></iframe></span></div><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="line-height: 107%;"><br /></span></span><p></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: verdana;"><span style="line-height: 107%;">Dear
Other White People</span></span></span></p><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: verdana;">
</span></span><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: verdana;"><span style="line-height: 107%;">If
the covid crisis is unprecedented, the last few weeks has seen Britain reach even
deeper depths of the surreal as again and again race issues we liked to imagine
existed only in the USA come more and more frequently to the fore here too.
Whether it is someone abusing people from black or other minority ethnic
background on a train or bus, or police stopping a car with black occupants (one of
whom turned out in a recent incident not to be a burglar but a Member of Parliament), or <a href="https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/far-right-black-lives-matter-protests-racism-patriotic-alternative-hope-not-hate-a9672401.html?fbclid=IwAR1UEcaYBPsaKPQLaFLKb26XGYFvCI1kHAks2WzENP_5Ud0B5w2Jum9yUtM"><b>the rise of
openly racist groups like the Patriotic Alternative</b></a> (even the BNP at least pretended not to be racist),
our society stands as exposed as any other as saturated in bigotry and
prejudice. As much as anywhere else, our society can hear the rants and witness the acts committed against those whose skin colour or clothes or other characteristics
suggest they are not directly descended from the white Caucasians our history
traditionally claims “native” British people are descended from.</span></span></span></p><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: verdana;">
</span></span><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: verdana;"><span style="line-height: 107%;">Following
<a href="https://youtu.be/hPKd0aTwfrI"><b>the casting of the statue of 18<sup>th</sup> century slaveowner Edward Colston
into the waters off Bristol harbour</b></a>, at the entrance to the ocean over which he
transported 100,000 black Africans to work as slaves in the British colonies, a
wide range of white voices, sadly including even the new Labour Party leader, condemned
the act by a crowd of people of different races. They had marched through the
streets of a city whose wealth is founded on the slave trade, all united in
proclaiming that Black Lives Matter particularly in the wake of the appalling
murder in the USA of a black man George Floyd by a white policeman, who slowly
strangled him in public over nine long, agonising minutes. A couple of weeks
ago, extraordinarily, <a href="https://youtu.be/ci9tKCwogkU" target="_blank"><b>video footage showed a British cop trying the exact same
thing on a black suspect.</b></a></span></span></span></p><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: verdana;">
</span></span><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: verdana;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhwFAQukwoL6syIS1pdY4h4TGuEWjCr6M0hu6ycL2ct4yDRgALpbhSKZTd14jzeZmUdh-PU4ucW_GMXfhF-NKur-oMKR3heft3Csb4ayUCMGQRH9SK14coNJixvIjy63pLilbZgfbRME4_e/s640/london-police-arrest-man-suspected-of-urinating-on-officers-memorial.jpg" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="384" data-original-width="640" height="192" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhwFAQukwoL6syIS1pdY4h4TGuEWjCr6M0hu6ycL2ct4yDRgALpbhSKZTd14jzeZmUdh-PU4ucW_GMXfhF-NKur-oMKR3heft3Csb4ayUCMGQRH9SK14coNJixvIjy63pLilbZgfbRME4_e/w320-h192/london-police-arrest-man-suspected-of-urinating-on-officers-memorial.jpg" width="320" /></a></span></span></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: verdana;"><i>Fascist taking the piss on a police memorial</i><br /></span></span></td></tr></tbody></table><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: verdana;"><span style="line-height: 107%;">In
June and July, tens of thousands of all race backgrounds took part in BLM
demonstrations in hundreds of cities and towns around the UK, but the wave of
protest was largely negated. The mass media pondered on the possibility of a
surge in covid (which never happened) as a result of the protests, in spite of
them being generally well-arranged and socially distanced. Where there were
crowds, they were far more often the rightwing Football Boys or remnants of the
EDL or Britain First who trooped out in varying but smaller numbers tanked up
with bile </span><span style="line-height: 107%;"></span><span style="line-height: 107%;">and beer to shout abuse at the BLM marchers in between literally pissing on the
streets of London on behalf of the pot-bellied Master Race.</span></span></span></p><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: verdana;">
</span></span><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: verdana;"><span style="line-height: 107%;">Yet
somehow the narrative shifted. Spray paint on Churchill’s statue in London one
weekend led to the monument being boarded up the following weekend and in a
well-tried rightwing tactic several tabloids associated a call by a small
anarchist group to remove it because of his well-known racist views (<i>he was
particularly hostile towards Indians and as well as denigrating their vital contribution to the war, <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/mar/29/winston-churchill-policies-contributed-to-1943-bengal-famine-study"><b>stood by disinterestedly as three million Bengalis died of famine in 1943 as food was diverted to feed the British army</b></a></i>) as being a demand of the wider BLM
movement. Faux horror and shock erupted over an almost entirely false story and
before long PM Boris Johnson first obliquely encouraged had right violence
supposedly in defence of the statues and then proclaimed that he would not
“take the knee”, the symbolic act of BLM. </span></span></span></p><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: verdana;">
</span></span><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: verdana;"><span style="line-height: 107%;">So
now the prevailing argument runs that we need to concentrate on the Now; the
statues are either irrelevant or, apparently, key symbols of our history and to
remove them would pose a great threat to our identity as Britons – presumably
white ones. And as for now, well, we need to focus on stopping an "invasion" of would-be migrants, many fleeing wars started by or supplied by the UK, from crossing the Channel. The <a href="https://morningstaronline.co.uk/article/b/far-right-mob-britain-first-launch-migrant-patrol-ship-off-dover"><b>far right Britain First group is lauded by the gutter press for launching a patrol boat to deter the desparate people making dangerous attempts to enter a country</b></a> where they perhaps mistakenly believe they will find safety. As the Home Secretary bravely talks about deploying the armed services against these wretched refugees, many families with small children, we seem to go into some sort of xenophobic fit. <br /></span></span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: verdana;"><span style="line-height: 107%;">But of course, it's not to do with race. It's just about protecting ourselves... After all, with four Asian or Black Ministers sitting at
the Cabinet table in major offices of state, how could Britain be anything but
a multicultural paradise, blind to prejudice? </span><span style="line-height: 107%;"><span style="line-height: 107%;">With a few black and brown faces on TV and even in parliament, we may argue
Britain has changed. </span></span></span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: verdana;"><span style="line-height: 107%;"><span style="line-height: 107%;">Except it hasn’t.</span>
We still live in a racist state. <br />
We sing Rule Britannia on live TV at the <i>BBC Proms</i> each year and create the mythical narrative of our
ancestors bravely shouldering "<i>the white man’s burden</i>" of civilising
the savages.<br />
<br />
Yet we were, and we are, the savages.<br />
<br />
For as we sing "<i>Britons never, never shall be slaves</i>", we
conveniently forget - we were slavers. Our Empire, its wealth and the legacy we still
benefit from, were in truth the black peoples’ burden as, along with Spanish,
Portuguese, French, Dutch and Danish slavers, Britain ripped nearly 13 million
black people from their homelands, communities and families and transported 10 million to
the Americas (3 million people - dead, dying or insubordinate - were put overboard en route and lie at the bottom of the Atlantic) to labour in a range of plantations, whipped, raped, abused and
worked to their deaths. And back in Africa, <a href="https://viridislumen.blogspot.com/2016/11/the-eternal-dark-heart-of-empire.html"><b>our great heroes like Stanley
machine-gunned thousands of Congolese and torched hundreds of villages in
search of the saintly Dr Livingstone as he acquired swathes of Africa for the
Empire.</b></a><br />
<br />
Black African or Caribbean people are 4% of our population, but 40% of those in
poverty. People of South Asian origin are castigated as terrorists or grooming
gang members, while people who look like they may have antecedents in China </span></span></span><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: verdana;"><span style="line-height: 107%;"></span></span></span><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: verdana;"><span style="line-height: 107%;">are
accused of causing covid sickness. All are more likely to be unemployed,
unwell, physically attacked - or worse.</span></span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: verdana;"><span style="line-height: 107%;"></span></span></span><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: verdana;"><span style="line-height: 107%;">Just this last week, <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_of_Stephen_Lawrence"><b>the Metropolitan Police closed the case of Steph</b></a></span></span></span><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: verdana;"><span style="line-height: 107%;"></span></span></span><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: verdana;"><span style="line-height: 107%;"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_of_Stephen_Lawrence"><b>en </b></a></span></span></span><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: verdana;"><span style="line-height: 107%;"></span></span></span><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: verdana;"><span style="line-height: 107%;"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_of_Stephen_Lawrence"><b>Lawrence,</b></a> the young black man murdered by passing white racists while h</span></span></span><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: verdana;"><span style="line-height: 107%;"></span></span></span><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: verdana;"><span style="line-height: 107%;"></span></span></span><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: verdana;"></span></span><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: verdana;"><span style="line-height: 107%;">e </span></span></span><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: verdana;"><span style="line-height: 107%;"></span></span></span><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: verdana;"><span style="line-height: 107%;">waited for a bus back in 1993, on the grounds that they do not believe th</span></span></span><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: verdana;"><span style="line-height: 107%;"></span></span></span><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: verdana;"><span style="line-height: 107%;"></span></span></span><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: verdana;"><span style="line-height: 107%;">ey will ever prosecute all those involved in his death - only two members of a much larger gang who stabbed him to death have been jailed and even that took 18 years to achieve. While the appalling handling of his case eventually led to a finding of the Met being institutionally racist a</span></span></span><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: verdana;"><span style="line-height: 107%;"></span></span></span><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: verdana;"><span style="line-height: 107%;">nd so</span></span></span><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: verdana;"><span style="line-height: 107%;">me attempts at reform being carried out, for Stephen and his family, justice remains as elusive as ever.</span></span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: verdana;"><span style="line-height: 107%;"></span></span></span></p><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhFe-f5SxViip19mcnc4WxucwQ8aFtcGd22I4xk3Za8valNNrT-pO7vrRMpd5LnrAddbLj3ZCw-_YimUuIm8NdRI3-kIvO_L-n3Rr14irtx1fEl2brIPW_W6a-KYMPB1pglVhyphenhyphenHTcgPwQyb/s1200/39eef95d-b212-4ccf-a9ad-282c2c0ba2cb-7964707a.jpg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="630" data-original-width="1200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhFe-f5SxViip19mcnc4WxucwQ8aFtcGd22I4xk3Za8valNNrT-pO7vrRMpd5LnrAddbLj3ZCw-_YimUuIm8NdRI3-kIvO_L-n3Rr14irtx1fEl2brIPW_W6a-KYMPB1pglVhyphenhyphenHTcgPwQyb/s640/39eef95d-b212-4ccf-a9ad-282c2c0ba2cb-7964707a.jpg" width="640" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i>Stephen Lawrence - murdered by racists in 1993</i><br /></td></tr></tbody></table><p></p><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: verdana;"><span style="line-height: 107%;"><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; height: 5px; width: 1px;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEghgLMh0_V-BlwHicaH5kK6L_2sE5EjrSSxVbVehjtvW9L71U2R-f27nIQnVOPZenKkcLs4CSVTyeJBKQuzTTD8y9V1b3Jm39qKQZ7CWFkl3UysKDHsExo9teIJbDYfRFBZTJzsYR1gSvS_/s364/Stephen_Lawrence.jpg" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"></td><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><br /></td><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"></td><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><br /></td></tr></tbody></table></span></span></span><p></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: verdana;"><span style="line-height: 107%;">And this is where we have to look at ourselves if we are white. We may consider
ourselves to not be racist. We may have black or Asian friends, maybe we’ve
been to a Hindu temple or Muslim mosque or a Sikh wedding, enjoyed a culture
night here and there. Like a good curry...<br />
<br />
In truth we seem to be actually quite an insecure lot. Perhaps our assumption
of superiority, whether manifesting as smug benevolence or hostile aggression,
stems from knowing our greatness exploded from the barrels of guns and that our
Empire was no different to any other. Brutal, exploitative and racist.<br />
<br />
And like anyone raised in an environment where brutality towards others is seen
as a norm, we need to spend some time in questioning our own assumptions,
beliefs, feelings. We may not think we are like our great-grandparents, but
their blood courses in our veins and their ideas endure in our heads and
outlooks, just as their loot lies deep in the founds of our country. <br />
<br />
And we need to ask ourselves, who are we really?</span></span></span></p><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: verdana;">
</span></span><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: verdana;"><span style="line-height: 107%;">Reams
have been written about the ongoing racism that leaves black and Asian people
in the UK facing discrimination, harassment, intimidation and even physical
violence – deaths are mercifully fewer than in the USA, but that is probably
more on account of our lacking a full-on “gun culture” than any greater racial
harmony - and firearms deployed by the police feature often enough in the
deaths of black people identified as potential or actual menaces purely because
of their skin and the stereotypes around these of “<i>looking suspicious</i>”.</span></span></span></p><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: verdana;">
</span></span><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: verdana;"><span style="line-height: 107%;">And
this is far from confined to neofascists on the far right, like the rotund
characters “defending” Churchill’s statue in London with alleged Nazi-style salutes
and bottles chucked at police horses while chanting “We are racists and we like
it.” Nor is it just the constable in Cambridge whose video from 2015 shot to
viral infamy as he explained to a motorist that he was indeed stopping him
because, “<i>no offence mate, but you’re black</i>.”</span></span></span></p><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: verdana;">
</span></span><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: verdana;"><span style="line-height: 107%;">This
prejudice soaks our culture – from a presenter on Sky News asking a black
colleague why she stays in Britain (her home country) when she has so many
criticisms to make of its racism to the every day assumptions that ultimately leave
people of colour substantially more likely to be sick and dead from covid than
their white counterparts. </span></span></span></p><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: verdana;">
</span></span><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: verdana;"><span style="line-height: 107%;">Many
years ago, Mohammed Ali memorably asked <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zVuoK9Uj1dk"><b>“<i>Why is everything white</i>?” in an
amusing but telling interview on the BBC Parkinson show.</b></a> Nearly half a century
on, there seems to have been little progress or, if there was, it has now been substantially
reversed by several decades of a political culture that has used “immigrants”
and “refugees” (spit the words out!) as scapegoats for the much harsher,
individualistic country we have become. </span></span></span></p><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: verdana;">
</span></span><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: verdana;"><span style="line-height: 107%;">And
for these words, read “black people” – for as the Brexit debate crystallised
(but did not originate) the hate, the xenophobia that has become ever more blatantly
evident has not primarily been concerned about incomers as a whole nearly as
much as it has played to deeper white prejudice against black people, whether
migrants or British born. “<i>Go home to Africa!</i>”, accompanied by puerile
monkey-noises, has been an oft-heard taunt of the counter-demonstrators at more
than one Black Lives Matter event in recent weeks. </span></span></span></p><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: verdana;">
</span></span><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: verdana;"><span style="line-height: 107%;">Yet
while many, even the majority, of white British people will insist they are not
racist and may ourselves find the poisonous outpourings of Britain First and
the Football Lads Alliance (never mind our Prime Minister’s encouragement of
them) deeply offensive, there is another side to prejudice against black people
we all too often shy away from; and that is white privilege.</span></span></span></p><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: verdana;">
</span></span><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: verdana;"><span style="line-height: 107%;">The
mere mention of White Privilege of course often meets with howls of protest
from white people. Where is the privilege of a white homeless man compared to
the wealth of someone like Chancellor Rishi Sunak? What about a single parent
Mum on a predominantly white council estate rubbing by on social security
compared to Priti Patel or Kwasi Karteng, both senior government ministers or a
slew of prominent black people on the media, in sport or business? How can there
possibly be such a thing as white privilege?</span></span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: verdana;"><span style="line-height: 107%;"><br />
Well, let’s look at what White Privilege is and what it is not.</span></span></span></p><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: verdana;">
</span></span><p><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: verdana;">I recall just
once, a single time ever, being treated in what could be viewed as a racist way
when another white man attributed to me "<i>Scottish narrow-mindedness</i>"
because I disagreed with him on something at work. Taken aback, I remember
asking him what he meant and it became obvious this was his long held view not
just of me, but of all Scottish people, whoever we were. In effect, he was
shutting down my voice not because of anything I had done or could do – but
because of where I was born, who he perceived me to be.<br /></span></span>
<span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: verdana;"><br />
One, single time. It had no particular consequences for me. My other colleagues
didn’t share his prejudice nor his view on the matter in hand and I suffered no
detriment other than brief frustration at not being listened to. <br /></span></span>
<span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: verdana;"><br />
But I have often wondered since - what if that happened to me every day,
several times? What if it had been going on since I was born? What if it was
accompanied by insults and anger even from random strangers? What if it was
accompanied by threats and actual violence? What if people stared at me
suspiciously on trains or equated me to an animal or a pet "<i>as a joke</i>"?<br /></span></span>
<span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: verdana;"><br />
What if they sprayed that I wasn’t welcome on the door of my home? Or shoved shit
or poured petrol through the letterbox? What if my achievements were either
denigrated as having to be down to cheating or special treatment or even
bizarrely praised as exceptional for "<i>someone like you</i>"? <br /></span></span>
<span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: verdana;"><br />
And what if people who shared my nationality were many times more likely to be
out of work or low paid or in substandard housing or sick or killed, maybe
because everyone else thought like my former colleague that there was something
inherent in us that meant we didn’t even deserve to be heard? And what if I
complained or even just politely asked for better, I was asked who I thought I
was or why was I "<i>playing the race card</i>"? How would I feel,
day in, day out?<br /></span></span>
<span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: verdana;"><br />
Yet that is precisely how it is for black and Asian people in the UK. Even
those who may enjoy other types of privilege as males or being from a wealthy
background. Still they have and continue to face denigration of one sort of
another not because of what they think, say or do, but simply because of the
colour of their skin, or their faith or accent.</span></span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: verdana;">A black woman posted a video on Facebook today of a white man screaming abuse at her and other black people on the London Underground simply for being black. The sheer hatred exuding from the man towards people he had never met before is terrifying, but perhaps the saddest part of all was in the words she posted on the video: "<a href="https://www.facebook.com/hayley.bradford.378/videos/2828380980730556/" target="_blank"><b>Being black in the UK is tiring</b></a>." <br /></span></span></p><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: verdana;">
</span></span><p><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: verdana;">So my white
privilege is that I don’t face these things, at least not for being white. It <i>is</i>
the advantage of not being treated with derision or suspicion, of not having to
do something twice to prove you're not cheating, or not having negative assumptions
laid upon and hostile treatment visited on you - simply because of your race or
the colour of your skin.</span></span></p><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: verdana;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhj2oFZ-36j3lZQlN2sAkGb0EI_csQkgiPYUyK4rVp03BvbtuMKaFB2OFqqLs-NL9yyNmfkHXynkrYQjHGgMwScJFoYAO81yMgCc6Q4yMA4DVV6YZcx-h4AAIF20OlBst8avvZZfHyzcGYq/s246/117605302_10157232143401338_1762479787838947826_n.jpg" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img alt="Here comes the Master Race!" border="0" data-original-height="205" data-original-width="246" height="256" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhj2oFZ-36j3lZQlN2sAkGb0EI_csQkgiPYUyK4rVp03BvbtuMKaFB2OFqqLs-NL9yyNmfkHXynkrYQjHGgMwScJFoYAO81yMgCc6Q4yMA4DVV6YZcx-h4AAIF20OlBst8avvZZfHyzcGYq/w308-h256/117605302_10157232143401338_1762479787838947826_n.jpg" title="Here comes the Master Race!" width="308" /></a></span></span></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: verdana;"></span></span></td></tr></tbody></table><p><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: verdana;"> Yes, we can all
have tough times. And no one is saying all white people have it easy - in our
world, relatively few people do. There is much that needs to change for all of
us, which is why I am a socialist. </span></span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: verdana;">But if you are white, then yes we have the
privilege in our racist society, with its "<i>hostile environment</i>"
and a government - elected by us - headed up by a man whose lazy, drooling lips
ooze racial insults and calls his Orcs onto the streets to spit their venom and
piss their prejudice over the pavements of our capital city.<br /></span></span></p><p>
<span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: verdana;">
If we are white, we have the privilege of being born into, growing up and living in a country
founded on the spoils of Empire, the loot from scores of other countries around
the world and the impressed labour of countless millions of black, Asian,
Chinese and other peoples. Yet even last month at the height of the BLM
demonstrations, an opinion poll showed that the overwhelming majority of white
British people are actively “proud” of our Imperial past and suddenly keen to
preserve the statues of slavers and colonialists they hitherto probably barely
even noticed as they passed by. Removing these things would allegedly “erase
our history” even although oddly enough I have no recollection of learning
history by looking at statues usually randomly erected to praise the wealth of
dead men.</span></span></p><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: verdana;">
</span></span><p><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: verdana;">We are of
course far from alone in not confronting our past. Few nations ever do - so
perhaps we could lead the world for once in acknowledging the tragedies of our
history. </span></span></p><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: verdana;">
</span></span><p><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: verdana;">Acknowledging
our white privilege <i>is not</i> about blaming ourselves for the deeds of our
ancestors, but it <i>is</i> about acknowledging, understanding and making some
sort of reparation for the impact of the past on today. Just as no family
exists independently of its preceding generations, nor does any nation. <a href="https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/taxpayers-still-paying-british-slave-12019829"><i><b>You may
not realise it but if you were a UK taxpayer, then as late as 2015 you were still
paying for the huge compensation payments made to slave owners by the British
government when slavery was finally ended in the 1830s.</b></i></a> But for white Britons, at
the same time as paying the taxes, we gained all the benefits of the wealth of
Empire and the economic advantages founded on that and which continue through
to today either via the legacy of past Dominion or by the economic imperialism
of today. </span></span></p><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: verdana;">
</span></span><p><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: verdana;">And if you
want to truly know our white history, and your own, it is worth reflecting that
if you know of a black person who shares your surname, you almost certainly do so
because at some time some of your ancestors owned their ancestors – slave
owners were not just a rich elite: a bit like property timeshares today, tens
of thousands of ordinary British people “invested” in slaves they never met or
saw, but whose labour or rental paid dividends to them. You can track back at the <a href="https://www.ucl.ac.uk/lbs/project/details/"><b>National Archives online</b></a>. More than any statue of
a slaver, a black person with your surname is a living testimony to our true
history of violence, murder, indenture and rape.</span></span></p><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: verdana;">
</span></span><p><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: verdana;">In contrast,
the "freed" black slaves received not a penny in compensation and
indeed initially remained in a similar legal condition as "apprenticed
freemen". Even when this was done away with, overwhelmingly they remained
mired in poverty and scrapping by on the subsistence wages paid by their former
owners – and those who later came here on the <i>Windrush</i> and subsequently,
who worked in the jobs white people wouldn’t do and who have played a huge part
in keeping the NHS going, they have also paid via their taxes towards the debts
on the slave-owners’ compensation. <b>In effect even in the 21<sup>st</sup>
century black Britons have been having to buy their own freedom. </b></span></span></p><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: verdana;">
</span></span><p><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: verdana;">And just as
our white advantages have endured, so have so many of black people’s disadvantages.
That is how capitalism functions - generation by generation generally it locks
in the benefits and barriers, and all the more so if accompanied by racism and
violence. </span></span></p><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: verdana;">
</span></span><p><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: verdana;">So only by
understanding our history and economic system better do we make any sense of
today and of ourselves and our attitudes. We cannot on the one hand want to
commemorate the myths of our allegedly glorious past while denying the impact
of the horrific things done by our ancestors. And while we urgently need to tackle our
institutions and social norms, we also have to check ourselves – no amount of
race awareness training, positive action programmes or diversity monitoring
will make an ace of a difference if we don’t look at how we ourselves behave,
consciously and unconsciously too. How colour blind are we truly? And indeed,
should we be, for by setting race aside, are we truly seeking equality or is it
as much a means of denying the reality for BAME people of the prejudices past
and present in limiting life chances and even in some cases life itself?</span></span></p><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: verdana;">
</span></span><p><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: verdana;">Psychology
shows that humans are a social creature. We thrive on one another and our
inherent nature is compassionate and co-operative, not the competitive,
conflict-driven creature we are repeatedly told we are. Yet just as we are at
core collegiate, the inevitable limits of the number of people we can
personally know and the division of our world into nations, races and classes –
all, ultimately at some level fictions we choose to believe in – we can too
easily be drawn into a sense of Us, our community, our family, our friends, and
the Other: those who do not look like Us, who maybe wear different clothes,
have different accents, traditions, skin tone. And if we don’t like anything,
it seems uncertainty and the unknown hold much fear for many humans.</span></span></p><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: verdana;">
</span></span><p><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: verdana;">So here, too
often, some sow the seeds of division, turning the joy of difference into a
threat: a demand for equality somehow a call for domination. Nearly always it
is driven by ignorance rather than hostility, but the one can easily morph into
the other and it is certainly experienced by its victims as hostile. Racism has
been fostered by decades of rumours and lies spread by small groups of
organised xenophobes and fascists, egged on at a supposedly respectable
distance by the mass media and many mainstream politicians. So in the 70s we
saw Thatcher steal the National Front’s clothes to crack down on immigration,
in the 2000s Gordon Brown sought to tackle the rise of the BNP by wittering
about British jobs for British workers and of course the allegedly liberal
Cameron fostered the <i>hostile environment</i> to ape UKIP as it grew at his
party’s expense.</span></span></p><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: verdana;">
</span></span><p><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: verdana;">Ignorance
will never be defeated by softly legitimising it with a dob of “<i>reasonable
racism</i>”. It can only be tackled by calling it out when you see it. Silence
doesn’t just mean consent – it positively manufactures it. It creates cultures
where many who are profoundly uncomfortable with what is going on around them
will nevertheless comply because the silence of others makes them feel they are
alone and resistance is futile. Watch the closing scene of “<i>Butterfly’s
Tongue</i>”, a film about the relationship between a little Spanish boy and his
elderly schoolteacher during the civil war, and you will see how easily it
happens.</span></span></p><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: verdana;">
</span></span><p><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: verdana;">Yet the
striking thing when you do challenge racism is not how entrenched it is, but
how paper-thin much of the anger can be. Ignorance stems often from its own pot
of despair, fed and fuelled by genuine grievances but with a misplaced target.
One of the most striking moments for me when I was canvassing and encountered three people sitting on a garden wall who said they were voting
for the hard right BNP. I have known some on the Left whose response would be to angrily
denounce them as racists and even refuse to speak with them – yet that would do
nothing. Calling out racism isn’t necessarily about shouting at it.</span></span></p><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: verdana;">
</span></span><p><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: verdana;">Instead, talk
with them. If they utter racial slurs or threats, ask them why they have chosen
to do or say what they do. Ask them to think how they would feel if someone did
that to their mother or father. If they think white Britain has supposedly “<i>superior
values</i>”, ask them where bigotry sits among them, and why. Above all, listen
– as I did with my three whose main concerns were about the local GP surgery
and buses to town. They had been told both were much better in Asian areas,
which some in the local media had made out were subsidised because Asian people lived there.
In truth, most of the local Asian and white areas were mired in much the same poverty
and poor services, something they seemed to take on board during our discussion
– by the end of which they at least promised to vote differently. It is from finding common issues - not difficult in our grossly unequal society - that bridges can be built and barriers broken down, and the very real problems faced by people of all races can begin to be genuinely tackled.<br /></span></span></p><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: verdana;">
</span></span><p><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: verdana;">Listening
though is not agreeing. It is about understanding in order to effect change:
never become complicit. Challenge prejudiced decisions at work or in the community. Speak out when someone makes a racist statement with the implication that, as another white person, you must feel the same way. Don’t go along with a bigoted joke – though rather than
denouncing the teller, ask them why it is funny, ask them why they thought you
would find it amusing and how they would feel about a joke like that told about
them. Most people are good-natured enough that if you peel back the edifice of
division created by all manner of extrinsic factors, they do not see the Other,
but rather recognise another human being. (<i>Alongside this though, we might exclude the fascist leaders and organisers - some will not be won over, and it is important to recognise this too and never, ever compromise with their vile ideologies.</i>)<br /></span></span></p><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: verdana;">
</span></span><p><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: verdana;">All lives
matter, yes, but it’s black lives that are being taken. Understand that the
call for equality is just that, nothing more – though be prepared for those who will see it
as a threat to their status and authority even. </span></span></p><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: verdana;">
</span></span><p><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: verdana;">If you are a
white person, like me, we can help make a difference even by just making clear
to other white people that we don’t share their views, and that their
assumption we do is offensive to us. If they play the old card that the problem
isn’t with black or brown skinned people but that they want that nonsense they
call integration rather than multiculturalism, ask them what they mean – every single
one of us is different. I may share the same skin tone as you, but our tastes, our
likes and dislikes, the things that make us who we are could be wildly
different, while if they bothered to talk to someone from a different ethnic
background, they could be very surprised at how much they have in common. There are many injustices and wrongs in this world - why add to them by being racist? Or by accepting racism as somehow being inevitable?<br /></span></span></p><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: verdana;">
</span></span><p><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: verdana;">Listen to black
and other ethnic minority friends, colleagues, neighbours and others, but equally don’t
assume that they will want to tell you <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/ng-interactive/2020/jul/29/young-british-black-voices-behind-uk-anti-racism-protests-george-floyd?utm_source=pocket-newtab-global-en-GB" target="_blank"><b>their personal experiences</b></a>. You don’t
need to have a child abuse survivor recount their abuse to know it is wrong and
act against it. Similarly with racism. If someone feels able and wishes to tell
you their story, fine, be honoured that they wish to share it with you, but
don’t expect it or require it. Just be an ally - be a comrade. </span></span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: verdana;">And as one black American writer has pleaded, as black people are often raised with the mantra that they need to be twice as good (as white people) to fit into society, if it is going to be like that, please <a href="https://time.com/5871387/white-people-must-be-twice-as-kind/" target="_blank"><b>can white people be twice as kind</b></a> - twice as thoughtful about what our neighbours of colour may be going through encountering things we simply don't. Our white ancestors created this awful problem - but we can sort it, or begin to, not by beating ourselves up about the past (though equally not blindly celebrating it either), but by embracing our neighbours with different skin tones and cultures, by learning about them and looking for the things that bind us together.</span></span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: verdana;">Racism
damages lives, destroys them even, cuts them short – and it is the accumulation
of the often small acts in themselves that build up to legitimise the harm.
Hitler’s concentration camps did not just spring into their awful existence overnight
– years of gradually insulting and slowly dehumanising Romanies, Jews and
others normalised the hatred, so much so that many camp guards actually
believed they were committing an act of good when they forced victims into gas
chambers. And so it goes that every act of hatred, or ignorance, no matter how
small, needs to be challenged.</span></span></p><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: verdana;">
</span></span><p><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: verdana;">In the end,
in our society with its imperialist past and racist now, our white privilege is
the privilege of standing on the shoulders of thieves and murderers who conquered the world and fashioned it to our advantage. Our white privilege is the privilege of centuries of accumulated wealth and the multitude of benefits that go with that. Our white privilege is the privilege of not being black.</span></span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: verdana;">And we need
to be utterly ashamed of that fact, and we need to listen to our black sisters
and brothers and collectively and individually work to create a world that is better and happier for all of us, black and white alike, and the identity that we all share - the battered, fragile but ultimately compassionate and loving one called the human race.<br /></span></span></p>Viridis Lumenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08097453038753328641noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5190994177632420720.post-12135692389790134262020-08-16T16:38:00.013-07:002020-08-17T05:09:03.329-07:00Class Hatred<p></p><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjmAN8h8yQ4pdVWDNaKnMLyGAgnCmthrFUcZdcTDJ_9w19onFClDUG8D71IjG5DMEwZXXdYUftnuNQmuonpguLy3Q9p_stAE0vuhdwN_5-wxzqpNcJtgokTjtz4qbsxDaBO70Uv6lW-hgR9/s720/117769572_333235191386128_1885077098293804176_n.jpg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="480" data-original-width="720" height="341" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjmAN8h8yQ4pdVWDNaKnMLyGAgnCmthrFUcZdcTDJ_9w19onFClDUG8D71IjG5DMEwZXXdYUftnuNQmuonpguLy3Q9p_stAE0vuhdwN_5-wxzqpNcJtgokTjtz4qbsxDaBO70Uv6lW-hgR9/w640-h429/117769572_333235191386128_1885077098293804176_n.jpg" width="509" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i>Classroom war</i><br /></td></tr></tbody></table><p>The class war came into the classroom last week with the appalling skewing of the English A-level results to favour private schools over the state sector, potentially locking masses of 18 year olds into the ossified, servile social class positions our elitist Masters deem them fit for. </p><p>Many students predicted to achieve A-results have often seen these reduced to Bs or Cs or even Ds,often resulting in the loss of university places for the coming academic year. Perhaps particularly perniciously, the algorithms applied by the regulator Ofqal, using previous school statistics, have decided that some of those due to sit exams would not have turned up in any case and so have applied "Uncertificated" results - as good as simply not having an A level at all. In all, 40% of pupils - about 300,000 people - received lower than predicted grades, with those attending state schools and colleges badly hit.<br /></p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjVDLx6hWVQ4AaOVcZBLMl1kBJ2gO-g1Z5VL_0kW3Dfuf8e1dFLlnNtkLwBVDopdi8bb-W5lXRjR1iChUK2USyyyAdkYFPX3PMqGsZojU2wNHP035ltRH5XUasAzdhJ19PRqqkLDQaodrji/s621/117444665_216820336402526_4663906698071820939_n.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="422" data-original-width="621" height="272" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjVDLx6hWVQ4AaOVcZBLMl1kBJ2gO-g1Z5VL_0kW3Dfuf8e1dFLlnNtkLwBVDopdi8bb-W5lXRjR1iChUK2USyyyAdkYFPX3PMqGsZojU2wNHP035ltRH5XUasAzdhJ19PRqqkLDQaodrji/w400-h272/117444665_216820336402526_4663906698071820939_n.jpg" width="400" /></a></div></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj7CQw9JqnHBcrdzaNcK1m6vpA0Xvv610F9hVujvViHmqyD2lQ56xTGZsV-v59CtcZccHJ0xnAz49p1RVhpjVJ74zGYY-Pm7KokZuuHZsyziKjN18kTvyjDiLbnkl-0f5on2Wg23-t3YWsN/s829/117612889_1648210312021761_950007369794034800_n.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="829" data-original-width="821" height="410" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj7CQw9JqnHBcrdzaNcK1m6vpA0Xvv610F9hVujvViHmqyD2lQ56xTGZsV-v59CtcZccHJ0xnAz49p1RVhpjVJ74zGYY-Pm7KokZuuHZsyziKjN18kTvyjDiLbnkl-0f5on2Wg23-t3YWsN/w406-h410/117612889_1648210312021761_950007369794034800_n.jpg" width="406" /></a></div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjBTTG7MZXzbWI2KUNFWa6WV02zzVxJtp1XRxyxgTG0RnNbjeZjIuoYjvACrbhWqucvLb1HWXEFIen7FW3cdaqKfeh7QYvk4WME2Od3ZPq2zSeVZauMR43ynRx0orJm3-nyV_sb9oGGvekr/s515/118057335_2637752936475424_1235225123366245038_n.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"></a></div><p></p><p></p>By contrast, not a single entrant from Eton had a single grade reduced - doubtless on the grounds that none of them would have missed the exams if they were poorly as Nanny would have sat them on their behalf. (This in spite of the fact that many private schools work to the <b><a href="https://www.theguardian.com/education/2018/jul/10/exams-political-decisions-igcse-gcse-universities?fbclid=IwAR2JuQGDbokxu7Q9iqjgQhHHhqt3sdst6lToM2DXNa0eUTESjSsHKbfSBXE">Cambridge International A-Level</a></b>, a course deemed by this Government as too easy to be valid in state schools...)<br /><p></p><p></p><p>With deadlines looming urgently for university admissions, rather than celebrating achivements after years of study and work, life plans are now on hold or being revised drastically downwards for hundreds of thousands of young people, predominantly from poorer backgrounds. The class war waged by the self-entitled rich elite has potentially devastated a generation's life chances .<br /></p><p>Given the covid crisis and the closure of schools from mid-March, this was always going to be a difficult year for resolving the academic results of courses where exams due to take place could not happen. An approach combining logic, common sense and compassion was vital given the impact that the results would have on the long-term prospects of the students involved. In previous years, <a href="https://www.gov.uk/government/news/guide-to-as-and-a-level-results-for-england-2019" target="_blank"><b>the approach taken by the Education Department has been to compare exam outcomes with predictions based on previous assessments </b></a>- with the integrity of the exams based on how closely or not they matched the predictions. With much previous work having been marked in the classroom and mock exam results and teachers' assessments available, it should surely have followed that there would not be any need for any radical revision of predicted outcomes. Any competent Education Secretary would have made the decision to go with these.</p><p>However, our Education Secretary is one <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gavin_Williamson#Early_life_and_career" target="_blank"><b>Gavin Williamson, MP,</b></a> a man who as Defence Secretary backed the Saudi Arabians bombing of Yemen in spite of warnings of war crimes. Then he ridiculously implied that back in the 1980s Jeremy Corbyn was a Czech spy, apparently in an attempt to deflect criticism of his own soliciting of a £30,000 donation from the wife of a former Vladimir Putin Minister. </p><p>So little compassion or common sense there. And as for his competence - before being elected to Parliament, Gavin "ran" a ceramics company that briefly rose to infamy when it produced a range of pottery to celebrate the Royal Wedding of Charles and Camilla - unfortunately firing every last piece with the wrong date!</p><p></p><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgnrR5Wp8YiwbDYJPSadz2Txznq8F8Cnk19cfTVKHwPsiGPLe97LKIN8J2gqQnc_ziZb8_HwXjFpMQeF-2ZcLuo4ujAXLEAZgl1a_mOfFrcM-cJJWcSMSL8Pg7AKpUhbITiH1n00I8zB-Io/s644/70819959_2368468050044586_518035947103715328_n.jpg" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="644" data-original-width="634" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgnrR5Wp8YiwbDYJPSadz2Txznq8F8Cnk19cfTVKHwPsiGPLe97LKIN8J2gqQnc_ziZb8_HwXjFpMQeF-2ZcLuo4ujAXLEAZgl1a_mOfFrcM-cJJWcSMSL8Pg7AKpUhbITiH1n00I8zB-Io/w197-h200/70819959_2368468050044586_518035947103715328_n.jpg" width="197" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i>Nanny will sort it.</i><br /></td></tr></tbody></table>Yet now in his rather inappropriate Education role, this moron saw fit to to declare that the algorithms applied to A level students' classroom assessments, which shoehorned individual results into crudely designed national quotas, were in fact perfectly robust and should be left unchanged. The towering Cabinet intellectual claimed that there would be a grave danger that such pupils would run the risk of over-promotion in the workplace were their results to be reviewed and upgraded.<p></p><p>Williamson and his boss Boris Johnson have of course subsequently been running in circles to try to remedy the chaos they have created. With characteristic world-beating bullshittery, they have set up something called a "Gold Command" to sort out the mess: though after publishing the appeals criteria for students to use, they withdrew it hours later, leaving many bewildered and panicking at the rapidly diminishing time left to resolve their grades. Williamson has to time of writing continued to flap and flounder and say he is "very sorry", while the PM, who promised to take personal charge of the crisis, has..erm... gone on holiday.</p><p>How could we have ever expected better from this Government? This is after all a group effectively coralled by Dominic Cummings, who believes that ability and achievement is down more to genetic breeding (i.e., of his class) than teaching or effort. The last thing they want is people from other classes to partake of that dangerously intoxicating chalice of education. What ideas might they get in their muddled serf-heads? <br /></p><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgejtgqPFfocB2e5VA2L0AWquZpiQefE06tQEKsusZVe71lsfIwA9O4wDFDBsbb1FnHj-fpGbMfR-6Awv7xo9gsy81VR0VWzBDImQXhiV0RhYZa04CE5Qcitpy3bUyVKrS4QYXostKwQRgy/s460/YoungBoris_3069254c.jpg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"> <img border="0" data-original-height="287" data-original-width="460" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgejtgqPFfocB2e5VA2L0AWquZpiQefE06tQEKsusZVe71lsfIwA9O4wDFDBsbb1FnHj-fpGbMfR-6Awv7xo9gsy81VR0VWzBDImQXhiV0RhYZa04CE5Qcitpy3bUyVKrS4QYXostKwQRgy/w320-h200/YoungBoris_3069254c.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i>Johnson - the Eton days</i><br /></td></tr></tbody></table><div class="text_exposed_show"><p>
Kafka has nothing on this elitist regime of lazily smug, sleazy sociopaths - the irony that they are literally the most useless group of people from any party assembled around the Cabinet table is sadly lost on their super-sized egos. And yet even now, in spite of all the
unprecedented deaths, corruption, sleaze, racism, blatant lies, misogyny
and sheer incompetence, the Conservative Party remains pretty much as far ahead as ever in the
opinion polls of the largely silent Labour "opposition".</p><p>But change will come - younger generations are distinctly more left wing in their outlook and aspirations for future society as the current one increasingly fails them in providing decent employment, affordable education or housing, and now can't even get their exam results right. As the banners waved by demonstrating pupils today made clear, the damage done to them at this crucial moment in their young lives will not be soon forgotten by them or by their friends, families and relatives. Boris may fluster and bluster, but some things can't be explained away or made up as they go along. </p><p>It is a crying shame that Starmer is left staring like a rabbit caught in headlights as the government should be on the ropes over its blatant social elitism, but others outside parliament are already taking up the torch of opposition. With over four years of Tory rule to go, it is outside of Westminster that the new struggles are already being shaped. The 18 year olds at the centre of this storm may play a leading part in shifting the paradigm firmly towards deep-seated social change - not only in education, but across society as a whole.<br /></p><p>And as for Gavin, over-promoted and under-performing, perhaps it's time to get back to the pots. Perhaps this time with a calendar.</p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiaeMkyaMdJBQvc2mYEFnD556VnDJaW83Qawq_3nVi1zoC0E0VoPcZfcOUi-TXVkuMf_gGYFX2Nec7Ls4L0o-mK_9FJZU4P8UQSy1jkl1yy1zSSoiKOTsCwgotBrseFgmzUncsYJ8uHgPxp/s960/117917090_2997168913739770_479021551428417997_n.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="960" data-original-width="775" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiaeMkyaMdJBQvc2mYEFnD556VnDJaW83Qawq_3nVi1zoC0E0VoPcZfcOUi-TXVkuMf_gGYFX2Nec7Ls4L0o-mK_9FJZU4P8UQSy1jkl1yy1zSSoiKOTsCwgotBrseFgmzUncsYJ8uHgPxp/s640/117917090_2997168913739770_479021551428417997_n.jpg" /></a></div><p><br /></p></div><p><br /></p>Viridis Lumenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08097453038753328641noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5190994177632420720.post-48350348588535093292020-07-23T16:52:00.001-07:002020-09-28T13:08:34.470-07:00Into The Void<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i>Perpetually worried - Keir Starmer stares into the centrist void...</i></td></tr>
</tbody></table>
Who remembers Bill Rogers?<br />
<br />
He was the quiet one, modestly titling his long lost autobiography <i>Fourth Among Equals </i>- no Caesar Augustus he, one of the joint leaders of the Social Democratic Party, the breakaway from the Labour Party in 1981.<br />
<br />
Headed by heavyweight former Cabinet Ministers Roy Jenkins, Shirley Williams and Dr David Owen, <b><i><a href="https://www.markpack.org.uk/157722/who-is-the-bill-rodgers-of-the-independent-group/">Rodgers, a former Transport Secretary, was the final member of the "Gang of Four" and was seen as the organiser of the SDP</a>, </i></b>which boasted new fangled initiatives like letting members join using credit cards and phone banks.<br />
<br />
Under its collective leadership, the party initially pitched itself as a left of centre alternative to the overtly socialist leadership of Labour under Michael Foot from 1980 to 1983. Later, however, it shifted during the sole leadership of Owen to a more rightwards "<i>tough but tender</i>" approach where the emphasis was much more technocratic, with the Doctor loftily holding forth his diagnoses of rampant incompetence on the part of the increasingly creaky Thatcher administrations. Often causing ructions among his Liberal Allies, Owen's pitch was firmly on the Tories' own terms - his "social market" was a conscious decision to operate on their ground, implying, ultimately, that he could be a better Conservative than the slavering followers of the wild-eyed Thatcher as she moved into full Caligula mode.<br />
<br />
Ultimately, of course, the Liberal-SDP Alliance ended in utter rancour. After a disappointing result in the 1987 election left the SDP with just 5 MPs, a majority of the membership voted to merge with the Liberals. Owen refused to have anything to do with it and briefly created a "<i>continuing SDP</i>" which was wound up after polling behind the Monster Raving Looney party in a Merseyside by-election in early 1990. The Doctor exited elected politics and ended up aptly as a cross-bencher in the Lords, while Rodgers followed his other Gang members into what became the Liberal Democrats, leading them in the Lords for several years and happily backing the 2010 to 2015 coalition of austerity with the Conservatives.<br />
<br />
His relevance today stems from his comments on a BBC "reunion" programme a little while before the European referendum in 2016. Interviewed with Williams and Owen about their reasons for their 1981 adventure (which had been dramatised as a successful London stage play) the now Lord Rodgers of Quarry Bank opined that British politics had been "broken" then as it was again but, crucially, in spite of the surging UKIP and previous upswings for the BNP and street demos by the EDL, "<i>politics will get back to normal soon enough</i>."<br />
<br />
His Lordship was perhaps expressing hope as much as prediction, but his complacency is readily explicable and not without some merit. For, while the SDP itself collapsed after barely six years' existence, its purpose - to stop an overtly socialist Labour Party being elected to office, was powerfully and successfully achieved.<br />
<br />
First under the former leftwing firebrand Neil Kinnock and ultimately under the narcissism of the Blair leadership, Labour reacted to the SDP's brief but damaging insurgency and the accompanying four terms of Conservative governments by shedding its socialism, jettisoning commitments to large scale public ownership and wealth redistribution. In their place came an almost fervent advocacy of market economics, public services outsourced to the supposedly efficient private sector and a relentless focus on courting centrist voters.<br />
<br />
By the late 90s "New Labour" Chancellor Gordon Brown was making a virtue of following Tory spending plans and deregulating the financial sector, while Peter Mandelson smooched with the rich and not-so-beautiful, whispering seductively that he was "<i>intensely relaxed</i>" about their being filthy rich. Unions were cowed into partnership agreements with no strike clauses while academics like Anthony Giddens lauded Blair's "Third Way", a faux centrist philosophy of a supposedly conflict-free society.<br />
<br />
It was the emergence of inequality on a scale unknown in a century as well as Labour's strategy of taking working class voters for granted during these years that led to a slow but steady leakage of support away from the party and directly into the arms of far right populists like the neofascist BNP and later the revanchist UKIP. For the truth was that it was under these conditions that the working class became detatched from the Labour Party.<br />
<br />
Many may have switched to not voting at all, but, alienated from the economic boom sucked up by the wealthy through the first decade of the 21st century and forced to compete with immigrant labour, the lure of xenophobic memes well and truly nurtured by the media was to lead in time to the Brexit vote. "<i>Taking back control</i>" wasn't only about asserting British independence from the EU; it was, perhaps ironically given some of the Leave leadership, a full-on rebuke to the liberal Establishment - which, too late, semi-awoke to the patronsingly labelled "<i>left behind</i>".<br />
<br />
Yet the period that saw British politics slide into chaos from the Expenses scandal of 2008, the recession of the same year and the austerity of the following years, fostered not only a revolt on the right of politics - the Left was on the march too, a process that culminated in the breathtaking rise of Jeremy Corbyn to the Labour leadership in the autumn of 2015. Simultaneously the party saw its membership rocket to well over half a million members, becoming the largest political organisation in Europe. In spite of two attempts to remove him by recalcitrant rightwing Labour MPs, who remained the majority of the parliamentary group, Corbyn endured through the now-revealed sabotage of party staffers in the 2017 general election to deliver the party's best result in almost two decades, depriving the Tories of their majority at the same time.<br />
<br />
Lord Rodgers' hope of a return to normal seemed remote indeed. But, facing the rise of powerfully ideological forces on both their flanks, the Political Class rallied around a protracted campaign undermining Corbyn again and again, while ceding the Tory Party to the rightist populism of Boris Johnson, which ultimately saw off UKIP and its briefly popular successor, the Brexit Party. That Labour still turned in a 32% vote share last December - higher than Brown or Miliband achieved during their leaderships and, in vote terms, better than Blair himself achieved when he won in 2005 - is little short of a miracle, and proof perhaps that, however devastating the outcome was in terms of seats (a relatively moot point given that our electoral system is as rational as a turn on the roulette wheel), a large movement remains for genuine socialism.<br />
<br />
But, just as they made the anti-Corbyn narrative before the election, the Labour right have happily fashioned a new one post-polls. In this, Brexit had nothing to do with the sharp decline in the party's showing after their <a href="https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/brexit/7880002/labour-brexit-second-referendum-jeremy-corbyn/"><b>Brexit speaker, Keir Starmer, persuaded the NEC to over-rule Corbyn and campaign for a second vote on EU membership. </b></a>In spite of the clear evidence on the doorsteps and in the results that Farage's Brexit Party drew enough support from Labour to deliver dozens of seats to Johnson, especially along the so-called Red Wall, the outcome is blamed entirely on Corbyn. Anything from anti-Semitism to "h<i>aving too much in the manifesto</i>" (Starmer's argument) has been deployed to explain the outcome. Almost surreally, former leader Ed Miliband has been commissioned to analyse and report on why Labour lost, in spite of the party polling almost a million more votes and a larger vote share than it achieved under his tenure.<br />
<br />
In spite of his relatively comfortable victory in the leadership contest, three months in Starmer appears to have lost none of the Labour right's long-brewed vitriol. While his challenges to Boris Johnson during the covid crisis have hit home a few times over the chaotic handling of initiatives like track and trace and the late care homes lockdown, such passion as he has managed to muster has seemed far more focussed on the Left of the party and on Corbyn's legacy in particular.<br />
<br />
Still light on any detail, Starmer has backslid on Labour's promises of wealth redistribution, signalled a likley retreat on the groundbreaking Green New Deal and proclaimed the party to be under new management. His Corbynite leadership rival, Rebecca Long Bailey, was ostensibly sacked from her Shadow Education role over an allegedly anti-Semitic tweet (in which she disseminated an Independent newspaper's interview with actor Maxine Peak). B<a href="https://skwawkbox.org/2020/06/25/excl-long-bailey-sacked-after-massive-row-over-schools-return-as-news-emerges-that-starmers-support-for-return-has-seen-infection-rate-double/"><b>ut by many accounts the real rift was over her wish to support the teachers' unions opposition to Government attempts to force them back into the classroom while the pandemic was still raging -</b></a> Starmer, fearful of not being "constructive" wanted to support the government instead.<br />
<br />
This week has seen the purge of Corbynism reach new depths with a legal settlement the party's lawyers advised against and now rumours that Starmer plans to expel the former leader himself from the parliamentary party.<br />
<br />
Lord Rodgers may yet, it seems, have his wish of a return to "normal". Two parties, two sides of the same capitalist coin, endlessly rotating around a status quo, shoving it first a little one way and then the other to contain and neutralise those on both sides of the divide they straddle.<br />
<br />
Containment - but for how long?<br />
<br />
The notion that some centrist settlement - the polite comfortable certainties of the Major and Blair years - can be brought back and that, somehow, as if by magic, the very policies and even some of the people who fostered the crises of Britain will yet provide the solution - is beyond risible. Indeed, it is insulting to the victims of a decade of austerity and poverty, lost life-chances and premature death.<br />
<br />
The risk of course is this - if there is no vehicle like the Labour Party to provide hope for a fairer society, for a tomorrow that achieves social justice and effectively tackles the environmental crisis, the currents of disillusion will not dissipate: like any tide, they will still gather and push until they find a new direction, one which, as past flirtations with the hard right have shown, will decidely not provide in any way a happy outcome.<br />
<br />
Many on the Left fear Keir Starmer is a reincarnation of Tony Blair. Yet in truth he is far more akin the SDP's Dr Owen - almost delighting in a lack of any underpinning vision or ideology, but instead "forensically" scoring points over the contents of Government briefings - as if, this time, the modern Social Democrats rather than breaking away, have stayed and seized control of the Labour machine. An almost Stockholm syndrome-like atmosphere prevails - don't challenge this appalling Government's sociopathic behaviour over covid, its nepotistic dishing out of public contracts to its mates and shameless lack of values. Instead, tell Johnson and Co how you welcome what they're trying to do - just show them how to do it a bit better. <br />
<br />
Where is the anger at tens of thousands of needless deaths and the failure to plan for the economic catastrophe that seems to loom ahead? How can we mobilise to campaign for public services when the Leader of the Opposition can't even rouse himself to condemn Tory legislation that, as Corbyn predicted, has now opened the NHS up to overseas ownership and control? Where is the will to fight racism when Starmer's immediate reaction to the toppling of the Bristol slaver's statue was to castigate demonstrators for being inappropriate? What is there to get out on the doorsteps about when the promise is of a pruning of "<i>too many</i>" policies seeking justice in a country where "normal" means 25,000 rough sleepers on the streets each and every night?<br />
<br />
Little wonder that the party is reportedly losing many of its members, particularly among the crucial younger and BME demographics - where it overwhelmingly led the Tories last December. Many others seem to be following suit and Labour languishes 4% behind the Tories in recent polls - the mirror image of Corbyn's lead at the equivalent stage in the last parliament.<br />
<br />
Starmer has been gushingly praised by the liberal press for his technocratic Question Time inquisitions of the increasingly truculent and lazily out-of-his-depth Johnson. Maybe so, yet as he stares with his seemingly perpetual look of worry across the despatch box, this strangely bloodless Labour leader would do well to check that he is not in truth simply gazing into a great big, gaping centrist void.<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEijZupof_9sxKNYHzWnm8xjYiS3b8qNBYOClKQGfADlL7gjQZ3qt3_7iNodYMa0LGN9lM1w4lE18H882ZWjR8mzyWiX0dlwnFAYh1FGgLfLf2LPVW9QQWQhRk4NJ5n_uCqLXzBlikiRPEwP/s1600/rodgers.jpg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="405" data-original-width="634" height="255" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEijZupof_9sxKNYHzWnm8xjYiS3b8qNBYOClKQGfADlL7gjQZ3qt3_7iNodYMa0LGN9lM1w4lE18H882ZWjR8mzyWiX0dlwnFAYh1FGgLfLf2LPVW9QQWQhRk4NJ5n_uCqLXzBlikiRPEwP/s400/rodgers.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Contemplating Normal - Bill Rodgers (left) breakfasts with David Owen and Roy Jenkins.</td></tr>
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Viridis Lumenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08097453038753328641noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5190994177632420720.post-41112598673920183962020-07-04T04:30:00.000-07:002020-07-04T04:49:13.652-07:00Cold Blue Eyes: Make It One for Covid...<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<i>Drinking in pubs resumed at 6 a.m. this morning in England as Prime Minister Boris Johnson rushed back to "normality" in spite of the UK death toll from Covid19 remains stubbornly higher than the combined European Union members. The Tories have been accused of pushing the country back to "normality" to satisfy the profits of their funders ahead of the safety of the public.</i><br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhn-Z9MP2_Y7v32o0IgIVkBFSwy-2yFf5FlU3mBMojABBBo13699mUX_-dLPJiXvK7NPv0jHRvMDhn_aiiEN0ENQF6LG-ZzQjc4_UBoZOvrl32kQjN7RUn77B8io0VKEDdhn6_-yMPsVPK0/s1600/1817635.main_image.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="450" data-original-width="300" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhn-Z9MP2_Y7v32o0IgIVkBFSwy-2yFf5FlU3mBMojABBBo13699mUX_-dLPJiXvK7NPv0jHRvMDhn_aiiEN0ENQF6LG-ZzQjc4_UBoZOvrl32kQjN7RUn77B8io0VKEDdhn6_-yMPsVPK0/s320/1817635.main_image.jpg" width="213" /></a></div>
It's quarter to breakfast</div>
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Everyone's in the place</div>
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Including you and me.<br />
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So set 'em up Gove </div>
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You obsequious bell-end</div>
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I think you should know</div>
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That you're not my friend, </div>
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At the end of this dire episode</div>
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So make it one for blue Boris and one more</div>
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For covid. </div>
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I've got the routine<br />
Put more fake news in the machine<br />
I'm feeling so bad<br />
Can't you make the stats easy... less sad???<br />
I could tell you a lot<br />
But none of it true, you old toad<br />
Just make it one for blue Boris, and one more<br />
For covid...<br />
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You know I talk shit,<br />
but Mikey we're a great fit<br />
And hid all these deaths we kept off TV.<br />
So when I get boozed, won't you listen to me<br />
'Til I've snoozed away<br />
For my doze on the commode?</div>
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Make it one for blue Boris and one more<br />
For covid.<br />
<br />
Well that's how it goes<br />
And Mike, I know you're gettin' anxious to close...<br />
In on wasted old me,<br />
So hope you didn't mind my not paying the fee<br />
But this truth that I found,<br />
It's gotta be drowned<br />
Or the voters might explode.<br />
So make it one more for blue Boris and one more<br />
For covid...<br />
<br />
The long, it's so long, the long, very long...<i>. Oh God...</i><br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i>Johnson with ally Tim Martin, owner of Weatherspoons, who initially refused to pay his staff during lockdown and angrily told them to get other jobs. He also briefly tried to stay open during lockdown.</i></td></tr>
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Viridis Lumenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08097453038753328641noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5190994177632420720.post-42009950672160567332020-06-29T15:52:00.001-07:002020-06-30T00:39:43.455-07:00The CovidWealth<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<br />
I watched a program about coronavirus in Italy last night. So sad, seeing an 18 year old guy on a ventilator and a teenage daughter sobbing with fear over the safety of her two doctor parents. While here we have Bournemouth and in the USA people coughing over others to proclaim their right to not wear masks.<br />
<br />
I remember the start of the Aids pandemic. It was new. It touched gay men especially, at a time when they were stigmatized even more than now, some even having been to jail for their sexuality in the not so distant past.<br />
<br />
And I remember the panic, the fear and discrimination. I remember the plastic gloves put on the board in the staffroom where I worked in Liverpool for us to wear in case a customer bled on some of the building society's money. I remember the obscure iceberg adverts and the prejudicial bile smeared over tabloid front pages. The horror when Diana touched "these people".<br />
<br />
And I remember the dead. So very many of them. <br />
<br />
There was prejudice aplenty and alongside that discrimination and lack of care. But one thing stands out - no one doubted Aids was real. No one said it was invented or caused by TV ariels or whatever. No one said it was made up. No one said it didn't pose a danger, although admittedly there was plenty of misunderstanding and exaggeration, a good dollop of it the product of homophobia.<br />
<br />
But now, 30 to 35 years on, as covid spreads, what has happened to us? Tens, hundreds of thousands die while millions have been on ventilators or at death's door, yet tens of millions more ignore simple safety measures, demand the right to have a haircut or get to a pub. They've not been sick. They don't personally know any corpses. They want a f***ing burger and they want it now.<br />
<br />
We shouldn't be surprised. For 30, 40 years, our rulers have told people to look after themselves. No such thing as society, community is the nostalgically misplaced wetdream of smug liberals' imaginations. If you have a hard time, it's the fault of migrants, shirkers, malingerers and thieves. <br />
<br />
The private has replaced the public. The individual trumps the collective. <br />
<br />
So if you've not been sick.... Or maybe even if you have been, mildly... Other people's problems aren't yours, though maybe they are inconveniences, problems in themselves. Why should you stay at home, or wear a mask, or miss a pint or haircut or the sales...?<br />
<br />
It's actually wildly against human nature not to care, not to help. The folk who claim otherwise are misguided or signed up sociopaths. Our nature is to pull together, to hold each other up. The archaelogical table, historical records, psychology, even faith... All speak to the essence of homo sapiens being our social nature, our compassion and empathy, our ability to see ourselves reflected in the eyes of others.<br />
<br />
Apart of course from when we've been subjected ceaselessly to propaganda saying we don't, that we are inherently selfish and need to look after ourselves as otherwise no one will. When we have been excluded, stigmatized, fed a diet of hate by supposedly responsible media and with ultimately anti-social "social media" amplifying rumour, innuendo, conspiracy, threat and downright falsehood multiple times over, the common breaks down and the individual stands, and falls, alone. Thatcher's legacy comes finally to its toxic fruition in a bleak, terrifying wasteland.<br />
<br />
But set aside our inherently good Nature, our compassion and empathy. Atomise our society, look inwards and destroy the solidarity and deny the common good, and one day the problem, the barrier bayed at by the Angry, the scapegoat driven into the Wilderness...<br />
Today it may seem a ridiculous thought, but it could so very easily be you.<br />
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Viridis Lumenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08097453038753328641noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5190994177632420720.post-4950719908773182272020-06-08T01:26:00.001-07:002020-06-08T04:14:04.432-07:00The Merchant<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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A crowd in Bristol yesterday tore down a statue of the 18th century slaver Edward Colston</div>
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and threw it into the River Avon. Colston founded many public buildings and institutions in</div>
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they city on the money he made from trading nearly 90,000 African slaves and from goods </div>
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laboured on by them. The statue had been the subject of controversy for some time, with </div>
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arguing even now that he should be remembered as a great philanthropist. Supporting the</div>
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Black Lives Matter protests in the USA, the crowd took matters into their own hands.</div>
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THE MERCHANT<br />
<br />
In he goes, into the water, <br />
Into the Sea<br />
This Merchant Of Death<br />
Touting slavery.<br />
<br />
Commemorated, celebrated <br />
O'er three hundred years<br />
For a legacy of Empire's<br />
Bloody Ocean of Tears.<br />
<br />
Built on black backs<br />
This memorial scar<br />
An idol of vain Self<br />
In dirty copper.<br />
<br />
In he goes, into the water,<br />
Into the Sea.<br />
And history's unchained,<br />
Unbound. And free.</div>
Viridis Lumenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08097453038753328641noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5190994177632420720.post-10651136962420613292020-06-04T13:48:00.003-07:002020-06-04T14:27:04.475-07:00Sarajevo On The Potomac<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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The Obama Presidency sadly masked the enduring nature of US empire with a purely symbolic change - the wars, racism, inequality and poverty continued largely as before. Yet the appalling carnage of the last week points up how completely Trump has shifted the narrative from one of hope for a better future, however vague, to a grim fascination with division, oppression and violence.<br />
<br />
When he held up a Bible the other day, his sneering face with its narrowed eyes somehow told you that he'd be far more likely to beat you on the head with it than actually read its contents. This display was the epitome of what his craven mate Nigel Farage refers to as "muscular Christianity" - nothing to do with the Gospels' messages of love and justice, but everything to do with sanctifying a cultural mindset of White Power. A monoculture, exclusionist, racist to the core, even if so many of those fronting and following this barren, joyless concept somehow typify the unhealthy mundanity of the stupid white men they usually are.<br />
<br />
Trump even now is not Hitler - he is not as coherent or planned or darkly intelligent. Rather, he is the Milosevic or, yet worse, the Radovan Karadzic of our time, but with far more firepower and no imaginable UN peacekeeping force on the horizon. Bathed in the flames he has fired, Washington D.C. so easily morphs into today's Sarajevo while Minneapolis teeters towards a future Srebernica.<br />
<br />
The savage Bosnian war in the mid-90s, sparked as the federal state of Yuogoslavia unravelled in a matter of weeks, is as apt a comparison as any, however chilling the prospect. For, with its suborning of Christian symbols to promote racial supremacy, its "ethnic cleansing" of Muslims, its massacres in Visegrad, Prijedor, Foca, Srebrenica and scores of other once peaceful Balkan valleys, its tinpot warlords and its narcissistic, psychopathic President - this was always the canary in the coalmine, screaming out where the post-Soviet neoliberal "New World Order", as Bush senior lauded it, was always going to end up. <br />
<br />
Well, destination reached, and it has long been in view. This is the tomorrow these men promised and many others enabled, whether by collusion or indifference.<br />
<br />
You are here.<br />
<br />
Now. <br />
<br />
What will you do about it?</div>
Viridis Lumenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08097453038753328641noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5190994177632420720.post-24626321812837154082020-05-23T04:11:00.003-07:002020-05-23T10:48:20.987-07:00Travels In Time And Space: Cummings to be new Dr Who!<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"> Who?</td></tr>
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Dominic Cummings, adviser to Boris Johnson, has landed the prestigious part of the new <i>Doctor Who</i>.<br />
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BBC producers insist that this is not to mollify <a href="https://www.independent.co.uk/voices/eugenics-andrew-sabisky-boris-johnson-downing-street-racism-dominic-cummings-a9341051.html">the eugenics advocate </a>and former night club manager's plans to castrate the corporation, but is rather down to his ability to be physically present in two spaces at the same time, as well as his astonishing power to cure covid without so much as a twist of his sonic screwdriver.<br />
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Who could have failed to be moved to tears just four weeks ago, as the <a href="https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8256551/Fury-Dominic-Cummings-wife-using-BBC-Radio-4s-Thought-Day.html">BBC gave his wife, Spectator journalist Mary Wakefield, a special slot to talk about how she had fallen to her knees and begged the Timelords to spare her gravely ill partner? </a>Who wouldn't have had to stifle a sob as she recounted how, after rushing home and bravely nursing her, he struggled breathlessly with the apparent insolence of the covid virus in daring to infect a genetically superior body like his ripped torso? As the presenters choked back their grief, she compellingy described his existential battle, seemingly confined in their London home, something she later wrote more about in her rightwing magazine.<br />
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Yet at the same time, neighbours of Dom's parents were peering over their hedge 260 miles away on Teeside to observe the Master Race's mightiest hoofer <a href="https://www.chroniclelive.co.uk/news/north-east-news/dominic-cummings-travelled-durham-during-18299781">bopping to a high volume outdoors rendition of Abba's Dancing Queen in his age-vulnerabl</a>e Mum and Dad's garden. Given that he had until then been apparently hovering between this world and the next, some have speculated if he may have been undergoing some form of regeneration process.<br />
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It was this astonishing ability of Cummings to alter the very fabric of truth and reality, while also dispersing any traces of shame or hypocrisy at a sub-atomic level, that apparently swung him the part. "And he comes complete with eccentric clothing," a BBC spokesperson enthused, though adding wistfully, "At least, when he actually wears some."<br />
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She did go on to admit though that scriptwriters are in crisis conference trying to work out how to explain to Cummings that "exterminate!" is in fact the catchphrase of his dalek enemies and that it would not be a good plot twist for the new Doctor to put them in charge of managing care homes.<br />
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Viridis Lumenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08097453038753328641noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5190994177632420720.post-36332211416514704532020-05-12T05:00:00.004-07:002021-01-01T06:56:17.799-08:00A World Made Small<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<span class="oi732d6d ik7dh3pa d2edcug0 qv66sw1b c1et5uql a8c37x1j muag1w35 ew0dbk1b jq4qci2q a3bd9o3v knj5qynh oo9gr5id" dir="auto"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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</span><span class="oi732d6d ik7dh3pa d2edcug0 qv66sw1b c1et5uql a8c37x1j muag1w35 ew0dbk1b jq4qci2q a3bd9o3v knj5qynh oo9gr5id" dir="auto"></span><span class="oi732d6d ik7dh3pa d2edcug0 qv66sw1b c1et5uql a8c37x1j muag1w35 ew0dbk1b jq4qci2q a3bd9o3v knj5qynh oo9gr5id" dir="auto">Once I dreamt<br />Of galaxies of fire<br />Streaming stars of possibility <br />And supernovas of desire.<br /><br />A future potent <br />with hope of a dawn <br />that would never set<br />Never darken again.<br /><br />But you with golden locks<br />And loafing, languid mind<br />In oak-dark boardrooms<br />Spun while all declined<br /><br />Exhaling tyrant breath<br />In dreadful mirth<br />At fate's misfortune - <br />Your accident of birth.<br /><br />Bumbling and fumbling<br />Like an adolescent in the dark,<br />In a world made small<br />By your jolly jape, your prefect's lark,<br /><br />Like a cuckoo in straw,<br />You might bluster and fluster<br />And wheeze and deny<br />With all the deceit you can muster.<br /><br />But the lyre is broken,<br />Curtains torn in Empire's hall,<br />Your days draw late<br />Whispers echo in coming Fall.<br /><br />With empty heart and hollow eyes<br />What spectres you must flee,<br />In this once-sceptred Isle<br />Set on a septic sea.<br /><br />But no Antony, only Brutus<br />Shall the tin throne attend,<br />A kindless, covid kiss<br />Thy final, foolish, bloody end.</span></div>
Viridis Lumenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08097453038753328641noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5190994177632420720.post-49792798146854174432020-05-12T03:49:00.001-07:002020-05-12T03:49:38.226-07:00Lockdown: Humanity On Notice<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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Empty city. </div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhrejR0MpuleADJWvbmNQelpOcbaBYZrWXLnY341rj2baCYFqUyggWrVZQI5NmgWGZRBjivcLsUSU018q-y_P8l2z2n_VyI9h3-b9kRDIIJZanQAVCp8ioOL_HGG64u_k8sQc0L8kKQe1GT/s1600/york+3.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1440" data-original-width="1072" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhrejR0MpuleADJWvbmNQelpOcbaBYZrWXLnY341rj2baCYFqUyggWrVZQI5NmgWGZRBjivcLsUSU018q-y_P8l2z2n_VyI9h3-b9kRDIIJZanQAVCp8ioOL_HGG64u_k8sQc0L8kKQe1GT/s320/york+3.jpg" width="238" /></a>As we stumble about wondering what we are allowed to do and where we can go, here are some scenes from York in simpler times of total lockdown a couple of weekends ago. Normally packed streets devoid of all but the occasional passing jogger or cyclist. And a little gargoyle waiting at the Minster for work to resume one day.</div>
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I am fortunate indeed to have this beautiful environment easily in range of a walk for my permitted daily exercise, doubly so to experience it so deserted. It speaks to how well people are continuing to respond to the need to protect not just ourselves but our vulnerable fellow-citizens from the coronavirus. </div>
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And also, as I could hear pigeons rather than people as I walked along Parliament Street, it points up how quickly nature will fill any vacuum left by humans.</div>
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Perhaps we are on notice. </div>
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Viridis Lumenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08097453038753328641noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5190994177632420720.post-43820463290591643712020-05-02T17:17:00.000-07:002020-05-03T04:37:19.944-07:00At Tyrants' Fall<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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Who were you?<br />
What did you do?<br />
And what did you see<br />
With those haunting, haunted eyes<br />
That plead even now with me?<br />
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Perhaps it was just a big boys' game<br />
Or you longed so much to be the same<br />
As the Neu-Men in dark blue<br />
Their jutting jaws and snarling teeth<br />
Calling out to you.<br />
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Mephisto's deadly bargain dies<br />
With Night-time's wilfull lies.<br />
Eir asks for the soldier-boy<br />
And begs the gods tender mercy<br />
To the Monster's chosen toy.<br />
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Who were you?<br />
And what did you know<br />
At the bitter end of it all?<br />
A thousand years not to be<br />
And still-life to live, at tyrants' fall.<br />
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<i>75 years ago, the Battle of Berlin had just ended and in less than a week the war in Europe would be over. But for many of all nations, their personal struggles to comprehend themselves and their past were just beginning. </i><br />
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<i>From January 1945, the Nazis had stripped the schools of all boys and some girls aged 13 and above to fight alongside elderly conscripts in the Volksstrum, the People's Army. In the previous year, a special 10,000 strong SS Division had been created of 16 and 17 year olds and, deployed to Normandy, became infamous for its particularly cruel treatment of prisoners. </i><br />
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A<i>s many as 25,000 German children took part in the defence of Berlin with casualty rates in many units as high as 80%. Elsewhere, a million school age troops were deployed with little training and often few weapons against far superior Soviet soldiers. Raised in Nazi schools and steeped in its mythology, they often fought to the bitter, fatal end. </i><br />
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<i>But many also survived. The Americans even took the surrender of an 8 year old boy. Their bewildered mixture of anger, fear and confusion is evident in their Prisoner of War photographs. Yet these children made old before their time were far from unique to the Second World War or to the Nazis: even today, there are around</i><a href="https://theirworld.org/explainers/child-soldiers#section-7"><b> 250,000 child soldiers,</b></a><i> 40% of them female and all of them frequently subjected to a wide range of physical and psychological abuse. Although declared a crime in international law after 1949, using children in war remains to this day a frequent stain on all humanity.</i><br />
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Viridis Lumenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08097453038753328641noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5190994177632420720.post-35425208431152708542020-04-24T16:43:00.001-07:002020-04-26T02:51:38.133-07:00Jonestown, USA: The Death Cult of Donald Trump<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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"<i>I could stand on the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn't lose any voters.</i>"</div>
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So Donald Trump lauded his supporters for their blind loyalty ahead of the 2016 Presidential election. His comments typically divided opinion - his detractors saying he was fomenting violence, his supporters claiming it was a joke.</div>
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Both rather missed his point: his voters, his "<i>base</i>", were and remain so loyal that any normal contract of mutuality between a political leader and their supporters has been pretty much suspended in these days of populist farce with the coronavirus crisis somehow the surreal icing on the most amazingly beautiful cake. Ever.<br />
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As Trump's already crowded tableau of the grotesque has expanded exponentially, many have asked how such a character has come to lead what remains in destructive terms at any rate the most powerful nation on the planet. He has comprehensively failed to deliver any of his promises to his disenchanted base, instead delivering tax cuts to the rich like himself, and plundering the White House budgets and sinecures with an unparalleled nepotistic largesse. His behaviour ranges from the bullying to the bizarre and back again, his own loyalty to his staffers as thin as his thin skinned ego.<br />
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And yet still he remains a not unlikely victor in the November elections, assuming he allows them to take place (not as frivolous a conjecture as a few short weeks ago). While many Americans are clearly terrified and embarrassed by him, just as many love him and hang on his every word, rebutting his many lies as either the Deep State forcing him to do its evil bidding or alternatively denouncing the reportage of his comments as biased "<i>fake news</i>", even when the man is broadcast mouthing his verbiage.</div>
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We may have thought he had reached his nadir last week when amidst his latest of many ramblings on the covid pandemic, he encouraged armed groups to go onto the streets to "<i>liberate</i>" themselves in States that were following the lvirus lockdown rules set his own Federal government. With the President effectively calling for an act of treason by his followers, it has to remain an open question as to what these same groups of nascent fascist militia will do with their heavily armed arsenals if Trump does lose the election, the so-called "<a href="https://m.huffingtonpost.co.uk/entry/boogaloo-facebook-pages-coronavirus-militia-group-extremists_n_5ea3072bc5b6d376358eba98?ri18n=true&guccounter=1&guce_referrer=aHR0cHM6Ly9jb25zZW50LnlhaG9vLmNvbS8&guce_referrer_sig=AQAAAFmmzgKwFhpPb1wCVuH7mmTv3Nf8O84W_LS31HY1QtRPpgJ8FK_3BJhs3-VoX2ryz6r7aCBPCJPDPJh1nszeGWedLe3mAxeJee16D9ihUQIt1kjqvmQocqvfCGNC11zW2qA8A8DLbgXCNZuIh6tGprEFqx_CGnTLxHAEemyrMxU1"><b>boogaloo" insurrection</b></a> fostered enthusiastically on social media by the US far right. But, incredibly, there was worse yet to come.</div>
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Recently, the medically ignorant President waxed on TV about hydroxychloroquine, an anti-malarial drug that a rogue French doctor briefly claimed could help cure Covid-19 based on a very limited trial. Later research has in fact indicated that it actually leads to <a href="https://www.theroot.com/trump-and-fox-news-now-acting-like-they-weren-t-out-her-1843001772"><b>a higher than average death rate among covid patients treated with it.</b></a><b> </b>But this was too late for one elderly Arizona couple who were scared of contracting the virus. They watched the President speaking on the alleged "<i>game-changing</i>" virtues of chloroquine and took it in the form of a treatment for fish parasites that contained the drug. <a href="https://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-news/man-dies-after-ingesting-chloroquine-attempt-prevent-coronavirus-n1167166"><b>The man died and his wife was hospitalised. </b></a></div>
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At least chloroquine is a drug, approved for treating some conditions even if Covid-19 virus is not among them. But yesterday, in what must surely become a moment of infamy for the USA, <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/apr/24/trump-disinfectant-bleach-coronavirus-claims-reaction"><b>Trump mused in yet another eclectically self-centred press conference on the merits of intravenous administration of disinfectant and ultraviolet light into human bodies to kill coronavirus</b></a>. Dismissing the objections of a reporter as fake news, he "consulted" with a rather awkward looking, but criminally silent, White House doctor on whether she had heard of such treatments and suggested she was going to experiment on them.<br />
<br />
"<i>I am not a doctor,</i>" he candidly admitted. "<i>I am a person who has a good... you know what...</i>" - he gestured to his head.</div>
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The reaction across the world has range from humorous disbelief to frustrated anger but Trump's supporters have rallied to him, predictably denouncing the scientists and reporters who highlighted his shocking statements as misrepresenting him or not sharing his genius-level insight, or both. Some claim he was referring to ozone therapy, an as yet unproven treatment touted by some as a potential response to the virus. <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/apr/24/revealed-leader-group-peddling-bleach-cure-lobbied-trump-coronavirus"><b> Much more likely, he was thinking of the intensive lobbying by Mark Grenon, who has been marketing a form of industrial bleach, chlorine dioxide, as a cure for cancer, autism and, now, surprise, surprise, coronavirus. </b></a>Like Trump's monologue suggested, Grenon, who manufactures chlorine dioxide and sells it to be taken orally in water, apparently believes that if disinfectant kills something outside the human body, it can be taken internally as well.</div>
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Consequently, in the hours following his diatribe, government officials and cleaning manufacturers have had to scurry anxiously to the airwaves to warn people not to drink or inhale bleach or other disinfectants given the potentially fatal consequences. And yet, the very pleadings of these "<i>experts</i>" may well be like a red rag to some raging Trumpites to believe in their President's self-proclaimed genius and damn the advice. There must be a high chance indeed that some, out of faith or confusion or both, will be mixing dettol with their beer right now with possibly fatal consequences.</div>
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Liberals may sneer at the seemingly moronic nature of Trump's base. Social media is awash with jokes about Darwinism and faked pictures of rednecks demanding their right to die. But snake oil peddler Trump is very much a product of the society liberals created, a reaction to the bloodless pseudo-meritocracy of the Clintons, Obamas and Bidens of this world. They it was who presided over the destruction of swathes of US industry and the communities associated with it through their imposition of the free trade NAFTA framework over the 25 years up to Trump's election. As industry after industry folded, lives were ruined as liberals proclaimed a place called Hope, a comfortable Nirvana for some, but for many a distant, unreachable mirage. </div>
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It is not lack of intelligence nor some form of inherent misanthropy that drives most Trump supporters to lionise and pump up the ego of this narcissist. It is the desperation of decay, of the decline and fall of the American Dream and its transformation for many into a Nightmare of impoverishment. It is the hope of a quick and simple solution that will bring instant results - as with most forms of populism, there is no patience or planning, just a visceral desire. Trump may peddle lies, but so did Democrat after Democrat, from Clinton
to Obama, and Trump's falsehoods are at least ones that chime with their
sense of loss and anger. That his claims are incredulous matter little -
for in this context incredulity is synonymous with hope.<br />
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It is not an isolated phenomenon in a state of social collapse, which is effectively what the USA has been in for two decades or more. History has repeatedly shown how tenuous any society is and how quickly the veneer that marks civilisation can fall away.<br />
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In the fifth century, as the Roman Empire collapsed, the astonishing logic of philosophers accurately calculated the distance of the Moon from the Earth to within a few thousand miles. Yet this triumph of rational enquiry fell away in barely two generations to a dislocated world filled with levitating saints and talking serpents. This destruction of reason in favour of the fantastic was driven by the religious dogma of Church and Emperors who closed down the classical schools of philosophy and science on the grounds that it was heretical to seek to understand or explain the God-given world. Rather it was simply to be accepted.<br />
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This has distinctly uncomfortable echoes over fifteen centuries later in <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/jan/03/trump-florida-evangelical-rally-king-jesus"><b>the growing power of evangelical Christians within American government</b></a> , which has fervently dismissed science as worthless or even malign in the covid crisis. Pastors and preachers excuse Trump's self-evident abundance of sins on the grounds that he has been sent from God Himself and publicly bless the Orange Prophet. And while Trump's definition of monotheism is almost certainly intimately concerned with placing an idol named Donald at its centre, he obviously does nothing to deter the fawning adulation of the evangelical priesthood.<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i>Heaven sent, allegedly.</i></td></tr>
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So unsurprisingly, wrapped up in a combination of existential despair and millenarian fantasy, like so many religious zealots throughout history, Trump's base in no small numbers would seemingly contemplate giving their own lives for the President. When some of his elected supporters suggested older Americans would be willing to die to save the economy from the impact of the covid lockdowns, they found an abundance of apparently willing victims. And similarly, when Trump ruminated on opening the churches for Easter in spite of the virus, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/27/opinion/coronavirus-trump-evangelicals.html"><b>plenty of pastors were happily jangling their temple keys.</b></a> <br />
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Yet while his opponents detest him with a vengeance, there is a little festering Trump curled up inside every centrist: Hillary Clinton's disparaging characterisation of his supporters as "<i>a basket of deplorables</i>" in 2016 wasn't a one-off accidental comment. It simply illustrated how contemptuously removed from ordinary Americans the US elite has become with the same remote Political Class that plagues the pseudo-democracies in much of the rich world. They may sarcastically dismiss the demands of protesters for an end to the lockdown, but seem relatively impervious to the fact that without their next pay cheque, many of them are financially ruined in a nation with little welfare support. Work or starve: it is even today an all too familiar choice for the US poor.<br />
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And so while they will emphatically deny it, for liberals, Trump is a necessary evil, distasteful but hypocritically serving the purpose of focussing discontent on ethnic minorities, Muslims and migrants. However shrill, however embarrassingly stupid he may be to them, he keeps the line of sight well away from the real thieves of hope and helps them neutralise any true insurgency, such as Bernie Sanders' now kettled socialist movement.<br />
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Trump may or may not win at the polls this autumn, but either way, post-pandemic, the social dislocation will accentuate rapidly and new movements and leaders will emerge. A younger generation is rising which will inevitably have to face the increasingly sharp choice to be made: co-operation or conflict, Utopia or Bartertown.<br />
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But for now, the USA is hostage to a cult, one led by a man whose phraseology and thinking have become increasingly infantilised. He has no plan beyond the next cowardly boast, the next demand for praise, the next incredible, simple solution to our complex world, revealed to it by He Himself. In this insatiable quest for his personal aggrandisement, he may not shoot anyone on Fifth Avenue, but like a latter day Jim Jones with the USA as his very own Jonestown, he will happily take sacrifices in honour of the divinity he deep down believes himself to be. <br />
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The only difference, of course, is that at least Jim Jones took the poison himself.<br />
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Viridis Lumenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08097453038753328641noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5190994177632420720.post-26665051660081846672020-04-08T16:05:00.001-07:002020-04-09T04:22:13.228-07:00Bernie Sanders and the Revolution to Come<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><b>Passing the Progressive Torch: Ocasio-Cortez and Sanders</b></td></tr>
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<a href="https://www.politico.com/news/2020/04/08/bernie-sanders-suspends-his-presidential-campaign-175137"><b>And so democratic socialist standard-bearer Senator Bernie Sanders has suspended his campaign for the Democratic Party nomination for US President. </b></a><br />
<br />
With around half the primaries contested, he trailed former Vice-President Joe Biden by over 300 delegates and with surveys giving Biden a roughly 2:1 advantage in forthcoming contests, Sanders could not see a realistic way to win. Coupled with the hobbling of his campaign, which had thrived <a href="https://www.commondreams.org/news/2019/10/19/alexandria-ocasio-cortez-backs-bernie-sanders-packed-nyc-rally"><b>on mass rallies and town hall events</b></a>, by the coronavirus crisis, the institutional barriers thrown up by the Democratic Party establishment in the form of the Democrat National Committee have yet again stopped any progressive traction within the party.<br />
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There is some evidence of ballot tampering - notably, on Super Tuesday, when Biden's campaign decisively pulled ahead after a dreadful start, <a href="https://tdmsresearch.com/"><b>data indicated something amiss</b></a> in states where Sanders won the exit polls but lost the actual vote, but with extraordinary differences well beyond the normal margin of error. And from the outset the mess in Iowa stymied Sanders' momentum, although it did get moving afterwards for a short period until the sudden turnaround in favour of the previously badly flailing Biden in South Carolina. The withdrawal of all the centrist candidates in favour of the clearly ailing former VP, coupled with Elizabeth Warren's refusal to back Sanders when she withdrew, effectively handed the nomination to Biden and his vague, liberal platform.<br />
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And so, just as Corbyn was crucified by a range of tactical manoeuvring by his centrist opponents and their corporate media paymasters in the UK, so in the USA once again the Establishment has spiked and neutralised a major challenge. They may be popping the champagne in the DNC tonight, but in truth the path ahead for them is infinitely harder than the typically pompously naive centrists can imagine.<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Joe Biden - <a href="https://townhall.com/tipsheet/bronsonstocking/2020/03/07/biden-incoherent-n2563829"><b>confused</b></a></td></tr>
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For Joe Biden has to be arguably one of the worst, if not <i>the</i> worst, candidates the Democrats have ever nominated. Aside from <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/03/12/its-fair-speculate-whether-biden-is-mentally-fit-be-president/"><b>his self-evident health issues, which appear to be some form of dementia or Alzheimers,</b></a> his <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-mtmhZA2QFc"><b>provenance is poisonous</b></a>.<br />
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While faced with the mercurial Trump some may still fondly remember the Obama years, when Biden served as the President's loyal deputy, many aspects of his career raise serious questions - his civil rights record, contrary to his propaganda, is poor going back decades, as has been his approval of wars and welfare cuts. <a href="https://www.commondreams.org/views/2020/04/07/inconvenient-truth-rape"><b>A rape allegation from a Democrat activist and former staffer of Biden has gone uninvestigated </b></a>alongside a myriad of other issues about his invasion of women's personal space and unwelcome touching. And while Democrats may have invoked legal process to try to impeach Trump as ineffectually as Don Quixote tilting at windmills, the incumbent President was in fact worrying a very real sore when he tried to induce the Ukrainians to investigate <a href="https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-biden-son-ukraine/white-house-says-no-issue-with-bidens-son-ukraine-gas-company-idUSBREA4C0YU20140514"><b>Biden's son Hunter over his lucrative involvement in the energy sector in their country</b></a>.<br />
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Senior Democrats seem to acknowledge this and blatantly, having rid themselves of Sanders' challenge, rumour is rife that Biden will, in fact, not become their final candidate for President. New York Governor Andrew Cuomo, whose profile has been substantially boosted by his very visible leadership of the state's response to the Covid-19 epidemic, or even former 2016 candidate Hillary Clinton, are both touted as possible replacements, in spite of neither having won a single delegate to the Democrat Convention. Taking the democracy, such as it is, finally and irrevocably out of the Democratic Party.<br />
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So what now for the progressive and socialist movement? Sanders' relentless advocacy for fully-funded public health has been completely and dreadfully validated as tens of thousands of US lives succumb to coronavirus, with poorer and ethnic minority communities disproportionately affected. His huge movement, which has effectively mobilised tens of thousands of younger people and others towards a socialist or at least social democratic platform, remains intact and vibrant, hungering for change and social justice. And with the pandemic set to utterly transform politics around the globe, the USA will be no exception. <br />
<br />
All the inequality, the underinvestment in crisis preparation and lack of effective public health facilities and staff, as well as the low level of welfare in the USA, has never been more poignantly and powerfully evident than now. While President Trump has enjoyed, inevitably, a miniature boost in the polls as he heads up the government response to the national crisis, his veering backwards and forwards around how to respond to a threat he ignored for weeks, then played down for weeks and for which even now he declares all manner of wild and unproven solutions that never turn out leave him vulnerable to attack.<br />
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Just as Cameron and Osborne's prominent involvement in the Remain campaign handed the UK Euro-referendum to the Brexiteers, so the DNC's eagerness to put up Biden or Clinton or even Cuomo against Trump plays directly into his hands in the November poll. It is unsurprising that a <a href="https://www.newsweek.com/donald-trump-said-it-wouldve-been-tougher-win-2016-if-clinton-had-picked-bernie-sanders-vp-1484074"><b>leaked recording showed that he feared Sanders above all other potential Democrats </b></a>- for Sanders' stance on issues like opposing free trade deals like the job-thieving NAFTA, or on tackling the influence of political lobbying in "the swamp" posed a direct threat to Trump's tried and tested card, even as the incumbent, of being in Washington but not of it. While centrists fantastically claim that Biden can reach out to supposed "moderate" Republicans who nevertheless backed Trump in 2016, in truth, it is Sanders' agenda of radical change that is far more likely to cut into the President's base of the alienated and oppressed working class and turn their anger into something more positive.<br />
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By contrast, Biden or Clinton could not appeal to such voters in a century of trying - it is precisely because of them and their betrayal of the decades' old New Deal Coalition that Trump and other populists have been able to rise and harness voters' disillusion into racism and xenophobia rather than challenging the gross wealth of the tiny elite.<br />
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With a clearly misplaced loyalty, Sanders has already lauded Biden in a show of unity, while stating he will stay on the remaining primary ballots, though inactively, in order to influence the final party policy platform in the autumn. But that is almost certainly a forlorn hope. Biden and his ringmasters have made clear that they will stick with the same unimaginative, business-as-usual Democrat agenda that left Trump catapulted into the Oval Office four years ago.<br />
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Sanders' socialist torch will now pass on, skipping a generation from him to much younger politicians like <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexandria_Ocasio-Cortez"><b>Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez</b></a>, <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ilhan_Omar"><b>Ilhan Omar</b></a> and their colleagues in the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Congressional_Progressive_Caucus"><b>Progressive Caucus</b></a> within Congress and <a href="https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/2020-election/progressive-youth-groups-issue-list-demands-joe-biden-n1179401?fbclid=IwAR23DhYbsiJW3p-3T82u77egs9ts14tfIiKaVc_cRI1sIF2V21u-dhX_vFs"><b>others outside the legislature</b></a>. The <a href="https://berniesanders.com/issues/green-new-deal/"><b>Green New Deal</b></a>, central to Sanders' movement, will continue to inspire and attract millions of younger voters as the climate crisis eclipses by far the current virus pandemic, but it will also increasingly raise the question of how long, and why, they should persist with the institutionally totalitarian, pro-corporate, corrupt Democratic Party - or go their own way. With <a href="https://news.gallup.com/poll/268766/socialism-popular-capitalism-among-young-adults.aspx"><b>socialism as popular as capitalism among young US adults even before the current crisis,</b></a> new routes to change will inevitably be mapped out and taken. If ever there was a time for a third party/ independent run by a credible progressive candidate, it is now.<br />
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Third parties are effectively barred from competing in the USA, a fact missed by much of a world still dazzled by the propaganda that it is supposedly the "land of the free". While not formally banned, they frequently have to find much higher, often prohibitive thresholds of sometimes tens of thousands of electors to nominate their candidates while Democrats and Republicans enjoy automatic ballot access and even then remain excluded from the public funds handed over to the two main parties. With the media stitched up to advocate the <i>status quo</i>, like much of the rest of the world, voters are powerfully corralled into voting for the "right" candidates, who, contrary to myth, are distinctly not the best of the USA.<br />
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Yet the Republicans themselves once replaced the Whigs almost overnight, and strong third candidate Presidential runs have occurred as recently as 1992 when<a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/09/us/politics/ross-perot-death.html"><b> Ross Perot polled nearly one in five votes running as an independent on an anti-free trade platform.</b></a> With Biden or any replacement distinctly flaky and Trump vulnerable over the Covid-19 crisis and the economic one to follow, could there be a better time? Wouldn't a Sanders-Cortez ticket, perhaps in conjunction with existing radical third parties such as the Greens, have a uniquely powerful chance of delivering the revolution he and his supporters have worked so hard to prepare for?<br />
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It sadly remains an unlikely outcome, but in a world of social lockdown, viral pandemic and economic dislocation, this may be the best and possibly last chance to effect real change to the USA, and the rest of the world, before the gathering storms of global warming, resource depletion and societal collapse hit our fragile Earth.<br />
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And while an independent candidacy is remote, the challenge will endure - the ideas and the movement Bernie Sanders shaped, harnessed and energised will go on. As the crises facing the planet and our species become clearer, its cry will become sharper, and as the vested interests threatening our survival are ultimately forced break cover, its demands will become ever more radical.<br />
<a href="https://berniesanders.com/"><b><i>"Not me. Us."</i></b></a><br />
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Viridis Lumenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08097453038753328641noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5190994177632420720.post-66872442360526553352020-03-25T14:33:00.000-07:002020-03-25T14:33:24.373-07:00Pandemic<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<div style="background-color: white; color: #1c1e21; font-family: Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; margin-bottom: 6px;">
PANDEMIC</div>
<div style="background-color: white; color: #1c1e21; font-family: Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; margin-bottom: 6px; margin-top: 6px;">
The streets are empty<br />
The hospitals full.<br />
The last bread gone<span class="text_exposed_show" style="display: inline; font-family: inherit;"><br />The final bell tolled in school.</span></div>
<div class="text_exposed_show" style="background-color: white; color: #1c1e21; display: inline; font-family: Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px;">
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Stop the trains<br />
Then shut your gate<br />
To this land of silence<br />
And quiet isolate.</div>
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But in space so sudden so small<br />
Behind such fearful fences,<br />
Our minds become the Universe,<br />
Awakened realms of senses</div>
<div style="font-family: inherit; margin-bottom: 6px; margin-top: 6px;">
Where technicolour dreams might fashion<br />
The world that we can have<br />
Of sharing, and of caring<br />
And always, always, of love.</div>
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#StayAtHome</div>
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Viridis Lumenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08097453038753328641noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5190994177632420720.post-62004006710143813072020-03-02T16:28:00.001-08:002020-03-02T16:41:09.875-08:00Super Choice on Super Tuesday<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><b>Sanders and Warren</b></td></tr>
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SUPER-TUESDAY, the only second working day of the week to lay claim to such a dubious titĺe, is about to dawn<br />
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Democrats in 16 states across the USA will be voting for the party's
Presidential candidate. In today's opinion polls, Socialist Senator Bernie
Sanders leads centrist Joe Biden in the three largest states -
California (35 to 14%), Texas (31 to 26%) and North Carolina (28 to 14%
with billionaire Mike Bloomberg on 20%).<br />
<br />
But with Amy Klobucher
endorsing Biden and Pete Buttigieg out of the contest, the liberal vote
may begin to coalesce against Sanders as the divided Democrat Establishment rally around either former Vice-President Biden or, perhaps less likely now, former New York Mayor Mike Bloomberg.<br />
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While the centrists fall like nine-pins, progressive Senator Elizabeth Warren, now
touted by some as a perhaps still unlikely VP candidate for Sanders, continues to run as high
as 17% nationally. As the race tightens, she will now be ever more critical to how
the party's existential contest turns out and with it the long-term
future of democracy in what remains perhaps the most powerful and
certainly the most destructive nation on Earth.<br />
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It is to be hoped that personal ambition does not cloud out the reality that the nomination is far beyond her grasp now. While she and Sanders retain significant policy and perspective differences, they have worked together many times over the years and the progressive wing of a party still stitched up by the Clintonite Democratic National Committee needs to unite to have any chance of overcoming the myriad of obstacles about to be chucked at them on the path to the Presidency.<br />
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Barring any last-minute upsets, by Wednesday morning, Warren will have a crucial decision to make - one that anyone hoping to see a first glimmer of a reversal of the populist right's surge across the globe must hope she calls correctly, stands down and backs Bernie.<br />
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Viridis Lumenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08097453038753328641noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5190994177632420720.post-80114215391623052142020-01-19T16:33:00.000-08:002020-01-19T16:44:01.262-08:00Film Review: JO JO RABBIT - or "Mein Kampf for CBeebies"<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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After viewing this film, currently doing the rounds, the overhwelming reaction has to be to ponder how it has been received with so
much approval. It succeeds as neither tragedy (it is dramatically
anodyne) nor comedy (there are about 6 or 7 funny lines, all shoe-horned
into the trailer) and it bafflingly promotes masses of hate jokes and
really crude Nazi-era stereotypes against Jews in a weirdly sanitised way.<br />
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Set in the closing weeks of the war in the cleanest and cheeriest Nazi town you could imagine, the story centres on Johannes Betzler, an enthusiastic member of the Hitler Youth, creditably played by Roman Griffin Davies, who discovers that his mother (Scarlett Johansen in a dialled-in performance) has been hiding a Jewish girl, Elsa Korr (Thomasin Mckenzie), in their attic.<br />
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"Jo" Johannes has an imaginary friend in
the form of "Adolf", (portrayed by the writer-director Taika Waititi), who
is both a good-humoured and, apart from a final tantrum, thoroughly
unthreatening Fuhrer. And just as there are Jewish stereotypes, so too
we are bombarded "<i>mit ze stock German vee-haf-vayz</i>" accents from actors
like Sam Rockwell who should just know better.<br />
<br />
There are also suitably sinister SS agents a-plenty, with Stephen Merchant blatantly taking off Herr Flick from <i>'Allo 'Allo</i>, but anythi<span class="text_exposed_show">ng
unpleasant happens off-screen and pretty much everyone, even the Jewish
fugitive hiding in the attic, has a fairly good time until the Soviets
turn up and spoil things by butchering the happy-go-lucky Hitler
Youths(again off-screen). </span><br />
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It's a sort of
smug "<i>Mein Kampf for CBeebies</i>", and of deeply questionable provenance.
To my mind, it lazily diminishes the horrific genocidal truth of the
Holocaust and of life in Hitler's Germany. There is an absence of fear, and even of restriction - Johannes' mother very openly and casually posts anti-war leaflets round the town and although there are awful consequences, somehow there is a bloodless quality to it all. The war is referenced, but life seems impossibly well-fed and relaxed to the point that, beyond their immature snickering at the crude drawings of Jews in Johannes school jotter, anyone without a fairly full pre-existing understanding of the reality would be forgiven for wondering what was actually wrong with Nazis.<br />
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It is not a patch on the films Waititi perhaps imagines he is
emulating, such as <i>Life Is Beautiful </i>or possibly even parts of<i> The
Pianist</i>. However well-intentioned, it ends up more like an uncomfortably
poor but accidentally real tribute to "<i>Springtime for Hitler</i>" the fictitious Nazi musical in
Mel Brooks 70's classic, <i>The Producers.</i><br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i>Run rabbit run.</i></td></tr>
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Coming out the cinema, I
could only wonder what the point of it all was. I could only conclude that whatever Waititi's intentions were, the film is a mistake<br />
<br />
If it was to show things from a child's perspective, it makes its lead character neither sufficiently credulous nor fanatical, nor, well, <i>childlike</i> even. Veering towards slapstick via attempts at satire and thoughtful interlude produce an uneven and meaningless mish-mash.<br />
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It is all done from a painfully knowing perspective, perhaps dangerously presuming that its audiences will be as clued up about and hostile to Nazi Germany as its creators. It presents prejudice and racism in a misguidedly whimsical way, supposedly to highlight the innocence of Johannes, but it would not be far-fetched to imagine anti-Semites turning this into something of a cult movie for themselves, displaying as it does all their prejudiced thoughts about Jews and doing absolutely nothing to challenge them beyond the painfully obvious foil of having an adolscent boy fall for a slightly older and oddly calm refugee.<br />
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And if Labour MP Naz
Shah was suspended for anti-Semitism because she tweeted a fairly
unremarkable joke about the Israeli-Palestinian divide from <i>The Big Bang
Theory</i>, written by Orthodox Jewish scriptwriters, (and thus kicking off
the whole Labour crisis which has now crossed the Atlantic to target socialist Presidential insurgent Bernie Sanders), how on Earth does a film showing unchallenged
pictures of Jews as bats, vampires, worms and much worse end up being
lauded and nominated for prestigious industry awards by the squealingly
mindless media glitterati?<br />
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The David Bowie track doesn't help. Save your ticket money for something else.<br />
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Viridis Lumenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08097453038753328641noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5190994177632420720.post-48196650765631792682019-12-11T15:18:00.003-08:002019-12-11T15:18:29.269-08:00Beating Boris - YOU can do it!<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjeSbHhHf0k8fHVDFfAVY3G46UsMnqcyByd0ntyV5-lfLaLrRg2F6HffkOjWDt28ZQigSuvTC-OuwQfb0gF9YffOApKH8L6jIMEHp8UHuQJKmc5xyv0FmP05KscfEuxuLqtEZ4NLFA3gjIg/s1600/FB_IMG_1575284416310.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1484" data-original-width="1080" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjeSbHhHf0k8fHVDFfAVY3G46UsMnqcyByd0ntyV5-lfLaLrRg2F6HffkOjWDt28ZQigSuvTC-OuwQfb0gF9YffOApKH8L6jIMEHp8UHuQJKmc5xyv0FmP05KscfEuxuLqtEZ4NLFA3gjIg/s400/FB_IMG_1575284416310.jpg" width="290" /></a>Tomorrow I will vote Labour.<br />In our constituency, it is the only way to stop the Tories - we have an excellent Labour MP, but with a small majority. I'm not a Green member now, but green issues are still central to my concerns and Labour's Green Industrial Revolution is a good, but imperfect, step forward. <br /><br />
We have a great Green candidate standing too, and it is really conflicting to not be voting for him. If Labour would commit to electoral reform, this dilemma would of course be gone - and Tory governments with it. Conservatives last won a majority of votes in 1931, but have governed for 58 out of the 88 years since.<br /><br />
But for now, stopping Johnson has to come first. Please read and share the brilliant piece below from a Labour activist, Jasmine Kennedy.<br />Kick the Tories out!!<br />
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My nana died two months ago and I'm utterly bereft.<br /><br />What's the point in all of this really? Why should I try to do or achieve anything if she's not here to tell me how proud she is? Will anything I do really make me feel happy ever again?<br /><br />And, of course, I'm angry.<br /><br />At times, my nana was mistreated in a country with a private healthcare system that prioritises profit over people. She was sold expensive medicines that worsened her condition. It took moments from us. Chats we should've had, nights at the bingo, that holiday we were going to go on together. Things that don't seem all that significant until you realise they'll never happen again.<br /><br />But I'm also grateful.<br /><br />The NHS saved her life more than once. It gave us moments we otherwise would've lost. The day I drove her to Scarborough (the long way round so she could see all the green of the countryside that she loved), the time I showed her a photo of the crowd I’d played to at a festival and she beamed with pride, the day she took me to see the point where the Atlantic Ocean meets the Caribbean Sea. Things that I'll always remember. Things that will never happen again.<br /><br />In a way I'm lucky. Aged 26, this is the first loss that has really hit me in this way. One that's had me crying at least once every day since the 15th October. One that's had me thinking endlessly about how we only get this one, short, precious life and how we deserve so much better. So much better than what we've been given over the past 9 years.<br /><br />So this election isn't a joke to me. It's not an inconvenience. It's not an aside. It's not something to analyse or speculate on. It's not about memes or stats or video clips.<br />
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<br /><br />It's about the moments we stand to lose, and the ones we could gain.<br /><br />It's about this one, short, precious life that we get and how we want to live it. How we deserve to live it. How we believe others deserve to live it.<br /><br />It's about hope. I believe that a better life is possible for many of us. We can and should be living happier lives. It shouldn't be a battle. We shouldn't have to beg to be treated fairly. Kindness and compassion shouldn't be considered radical. We should be living not surviving. And there's more than enough resources in this country to make that so. We have the opportunity to vote for a government that wants to make that so.<br /><br />My nana spent so much of her life trying to make this world a better place. A committed activist, the first black woman to receive a TUC gold badge for her services to the trade union movement, despite every card that was stacked against her she fought to protect and improve the lives of others and to live her own free from injustice. I would betray her memory if I didn't commit to doing the same.<br /><br />For all these reasons and more I'll be voting Labour with all of my broken, hopeful heart on 12th December and encouraging everyone I know, and many I don't, to do the same.<br />
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Viridis Lumenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08097453038753328641noreply@blogger.com1