Free Shaker Aamer

Posted on by
Reply

Eleven years ago, a British resident, Shaker Aamer, was working in a school in Afghanistan when he was kidnapped. Since then, he has been illegally imprisoned and repeatedly tortured at the illegal US detention facility in Guantanamo Bay. The British government has requested his return, and he has been cleared for release – but is still there. He is reported to be one of the majority of Guantanamo detainees who are on hunger strike, and are being illegally and painfully force-fed.

Anyone who wonders why innocent people are being held and tortured by the US has not been paying attention for the past decade. Neo-cons wanted endless war, and in the absence of a real enemy, they had to create one: “Terrorism”. When they invaded Afghanistan in 2001, they offered generous bounties for “terrorists”, with the inevitable result that gangs of thugs kidnapped and sold people, at random, to US forces.

The people thrown into Guantanamo Bay, and other US “dark” prisons, were described by the Bush Administration as the most dangerous people on Earth. This helped frighten ordinary Americans, as well as whip up a climate of Islamophobia. It allowed both the Bush and Obama administrations to attack civil liberties in the US, and carry out a series of illegal wars and assassinations abroad. Shaker Aamer, and thousands of people like him, had their lives destroyed as a “necessary” part of this campaign. Almost all of these “most dangerous people on Earth” have been quietly released without charge; Shaker is the last remaining British victim of Guantanamo.

You can read more about Shaker Aamer here, or watch the video from his campaign below.

Ann Coulter and the Return of the Bell Curve

Posted on by
5

Before 9/11, when Muslims suddenly became to blame for everything, there were still morons; it’s just that they believed different myths back then. Right-wing Americans, who hadn’t yet been fed the “Islam is evil” myth, needed somebody to hate; and in general they chose to hate black people. White Supremacy, which went quieter after 9/11, and quieter still after Obama’s election, was the right-wing American moron’s prejudice of choice.

I spent a lot of time online in debate with some of these people. They had rehearsed their arguments well, but once the cracks in their reasoning were exposed, the whole edifice crumbled quickly. Their fundamental claim was that black people were genetically inferior to whites. This was old orthodoxy that had survived unchanged since the same argument was used to justify the slave trade, centuries earlier.

The racists made good use of a 1994 book called The Bell Curve, which examined both genetic and environmental factors in intelligence. However, noticing that intelligence is partly dependent on genes isn’t the same as noticing significant differences between races – something the authors themselves made clear, although the racist morons chose to ignore this point. They also made use of IQ test scores which showed black populations in America significantly under-performing whites. Claims of “white supremacy”, however, were dented by the fact that Chinese and Indian IQ scores were above those of whites. The poor supremacists were forced to accept Asians as their intellectual superiors, as the price of “proving” that blacks were their inferiors.

The argument was fairly easy to dismantle. IQ scores have been steadily rising since the tests were invented over a century ago, demonstrating that education is a major factor in IQ. In fact, the gap between today’s white people and whites a century ago is far wider than the gap between any two racial groups today; to claim that modern whites are genetically much different from their great-great-grandparents would be nonsensical. Additionally, black IQ scores are rising faster than white ones. Again, this rules out a genetic factor.

The race-based arguments are further undermined by breaking the racial groups into smaller subgroups. For example, in the UK, black immigrants from Africa educationally outperform those from the West Indies; and Indians do better than those from Bangladesh.  The arguments are old and thoroughly discredited.

So imagine my surprise when I was informed this morning that racist far-right American nut-job Ann Coulter was tweeting about a study about Hispanic “inferiority”.

This claim just happens to come at a time when a debate about amnesty for illegal Hispanic immigrants is raging. Which is convenient.

Ann is a genuine moron, but falls into the small group of morons who are just smart enough to make a good living from scaring those even dumber than themselves. She regularly pops up in the right-wing media to make racist and otherwise stupid comments that are calculated to get morons all hot and excited. The fact that she is blonde, and could be described as attractive (externally, rather than in her dark soul), if you like that sort of thing, certainly helps her win TV appearances and viewers. No doubt, Kleenex sales rise in Bible Belt states whenever she appears and calls for some country to be nuked, or calls Arabs “ragheads”. Or whatever.

I wish Ann was a little more considerate. Now she’s sent those tweets, my timeline will be filled by morons repeating the claims for the rest of the day. Sigh… and I was hoping for a quiet Friday.

UKIP: Playing Nazi Bingo

Posted on by
17

Fascism became a little bit discredited after the whole holocaust thing. Britain’s fascist movement had never got off to a great start, but after the second world war, Oswald Moseley’s attempt to come back (with blacks rather than Jews as a new, improved scapegoat), was never likely to succeed.

But the far-right has had a long time to evolve since the 1940s. It has regularly reappeared in new configurations. Most people tend to associate fascism with street thuggery, but these gangs are only the most visible part of the far-right (and the section most likely to cause panic among the middle classes). Hitler came to power with the support of the conservative middle classes, and corporate finance. If fascism is ever to be respectable again, its core constituency won’t consist of angry young white working class men, but the conservative middle classes.

Real British fascism is corporate power cloaked in ultra-conservative values designed to lure the most middle of middle Englanders. It attracts those who don’t think too much about politics, but when they do, they think society has changed too much, too quickly. They yearn for the Britain that their parents told them about when they were growing up; a largely mythical Christian Britain; where naughty youngsters were given a clip round the ear by the local bobby; where gays didn’t exist; and of course, where everyone spoke English, and everybody was white.

A real fascist party has two layers of policies: one set designed to recruit votes from the bigoted, social conservative, and another designed to raise finance from wealthy individuals and companies. The British National Party (BNP) looked, for a while, like it may be the first “respectable” fascist party in the UK. In 1993, it caused shock by winning the first ever far-right council seat, in East London. For over a decade, it looked like a genuine threat, but it has faded in recent years, and few people think of it as a mainstream party.

The English Defence League (EDL) attempted to fill the far-right vacuum, but it manifested as a working class street movement, so alienated middle class conservatives, and could never be taken seriously by corporate backers. Now, the vacuum has instead been filled by the UK Independence Party (UKIP) – and this time, for the first time since Mosley, far-right politics seem to have found a place in the mainstream.

Many low-information voters (to borrow an American term for morons) get a thrill from UKIP’s populist positions: leaving the European Union (because it costs money, doesn’t it?), cutting immigration (because we’re “full”, right?) and attacking benefits (lazy scroungers…) are all designed to appeal to the Daily Mail’s core, nasty, constituency of people who worry that somehow, somewhere, someone is having a better life than they are.

The problem for any fascist organisation trying to present itself as mainstream is that it becomes increasingly hard to keep candidates “on message”. UKIP has attracted fascists to its membership, and this is reflected in a number of extreme outbursts from its candidates. Their anti-immigrant line has somehow morphed to include attacks on British Muslims – to the extent that the EDL are backing UKIP in elections, and are clearly pitching to become their thuggish wing, just as the SA “Brownshirts” became the street enforcers for the Nazi party.

I recently played a game of “fascist bingo” on Twitter when I was encouraged to see if candidates ticked all the standard far-right boxes. Anti-immigration (standard fare to attract racists-who-aren’t-racist)? Check! Muslim-baiting? Check! Gays? The party is opposed to gay marriage (it’s hard to see what that has to do with opposing the European Union) and on cue, UKIP candidate John Sullivan was recently caught applauding Russian attacks on gay rights, and calling for more physical exercise in schools as a cure for gayness. Check!

To win a fascist bingo game though, we need evidence of hatred for Jews and the disabled. On cue, here comes UKIP candidate Anne-Marie Crampton with an anti-Semitic outburst that any Nazi would be proud of, raking up the anti-Semitic hoax “Protocols of the Elders of Zion”, and blaming Zionists for the second world war and the Holocaust (rather than those poor, misunderstood, European Christians who tend to get blamed for it). Check! And the disabled? Google came to my aid and found me Geoffrey Clark, who called for compulsory abortions of disabled foetuses. HOUSE!

UKIP’s leader Nigel Farage has succeeded in presenting far-right politics as palatable, to a greater extent than anyone since the second world war. He has attracted support from the racist right of the Tory party – those people who see David Cameron as a dangerous leftie. UKIP reaped a protest vote in last week’s local elections, largely from people who had little idea what they actually stood for. What is lacking from British politics is an active opposition to fascist ideologies; Labour’s capitulation by “accepting the immigration problem” leaves a landscape devoid of an anti-fascist force, and plays into the hands of the far-right.

With the BNP and EDL approaching the status of “laughing-stock”, UKIP are the ones to watch; their strong showing in the elections may be a flash in the pan, but they have cleverly divided the Conservative Party, and if the Tories panic, they may shift rightwards. In the long-term, that way lies irrelevancy, as demonstrated by the US Republicans, who embraced a racist electoral strategy in a nation where racism was in slow decline.

Put in perspective, the local election results demonstrated that a quarter of voters in the most conservative parts of the country will respond to a bigoted, populist message. The whitest parts of the nation are the most afraid of immigration. That’s not so surprising, though it is disappointing. The UKIP result gives little reason to panic, but it’s a reminder that “British tolerance” is not a given. Tolerance had to be fought for and won, but no battle ever stays won; victories need to be defended. Now which political party will take a stand against the rise of fascist values?

British Terrorists: the Dumbest of Them All?

Posted on by
4
The Moron Six

The Moron Six

An old, racist stereotype, popular in Britain, slurs the Irish as unintelligent. Yet, over a period of three decades, Irish terrorist groups successfully planted bomb after bomb in Northern Ireland and the British mainland, running rings around British police and intelligence services.

It was the British response that truly made records for ineptitude: racist policing of the Irish migrant community, banning IRA spokesmen from speaking on TV, shooting civilians and making martyrs of IRA leaders; all of which helped bolster support for the IRA and other Republican groups.

Anyone who remembers the power of the IRA bombing campaign will smirk when the current “Islamist threat” is described as a global movement. Britain was never a target for Islamist extremists until our ludicrous invasion of Iraq in 2003, and in the decade since, there has only been a single serious attack, in London in 2005.

Other attacks by British would-be jihadis have been notable only for their ineptitude – my personal favourite being the Shoe Bomber, Richard Reid, who successfully boarded an aircraft with explosives in his shoes, but failed to ignite them because they had become damp.

In general, British Muslims who have become “radicalised” have tended to be small groups young Pakistani men with limited education, lacking detailed knowledge of either their own religion or the complex politics of the “war on terror”. They are more British than Pakistani, confused about their identities at a time of increased racism and police harassment, and – being nice about it – tend not to be the sharpest tools in the box.

These radicalised morons were beautifully portrayed in the Christopher Morris comedy film Four Lions, about four inept young British-Pakistani men and their attempt to commit a terrorist act.

In an example of life imitating art, six young British “jihadi” morons have pleaded guilty of trying to bomb an English Defence League rally in Dewsbury, West Yorkshire, last year. The story makes an even funnier plot than the Four Lions one: the six set out, with explosives, for the rally; fortunately, the EDL (also a group renowned for its low intelligence) had run out of speakers and adjourned to the pub. The moronic six arrived late, were pulled over by police and found to have no car insurance; this resulted in the detection of their plot and their arrest.

The British people can breath a sigh of relief at the stupidity of the would-be martyrs. No doubt, British Muslims are experiencing the greatest relief of all, knowing that an act like this would have resulted in bloodshed, blame being placed on all Muslims as a group, and a rise in EDL credibility. The EDL’s status is little above “laughing stock” – a bomb blast at an EDL rally would have changed that.

A Muslim community organisation issued a statement saying: ”The Muslim community in Birmingham wishes to make one thing absolutely clear: These acts are not carried out in our name.” Doubtless, Muslim groups are sick and tired of having to disown small groups of idiots, and more than happy to see the Moronic Six sent to prison for a long time.

But if there’s a silver lining, it’s that British jihadis appear to be very British indeed, in their half-arsed approach to terrorism. We British have a strange pride in doing things ineptly, from roadworks that take months to complete, to failed Mars missions. What could be more British than screwing up a terrorist attack with such style?

Maggie: A Nation Mourns

Posted on by
4

Britain ground to a halt today as crowds of ordinary people thronged the streets to say goodbye to a dear leader, Margaret Thatcher. Thatcher, who single-handedly killed Stalin as well as ending child poverty here at home, was probably the most loved Briton of the 20th century, even surpassing the popularity of Winston Churchill.

Alf Grimes, a former coal miner from South Yorkshire, couldn’t stop the tears from rolling down his grubby face. “It were ‘orrible in t’ pit”, he sobbed. “Only Maggie understood, and put an end to our suffering”.

A delegation of West Indians from South London also turned up and sang Negro spirituals as the procession passed. Winston Green, one of their number, reminisced: “I was only a teenager then”, he said, “and Maggie made sure we went home and did our homework, by sending in the police to swamp the streets at sunset. Yes, the truncheon blows hurt, and I still experience the occasional headache, but if it wasn’t for her, I wouldn’t be the CEO of a major international corporation now.” (At least I think that’s what he said – his accent was a bit strong).

But a picture tells a thousand words. Our correspondents in London and Leeds submitted the photos below which really capture the raw emotion of the day. Rarely has the British public experienced such unity. Maggie may be gone, but as these images show, she will never be forgotten.

London (photo courtesy @IveMetJoeBlack on Twitter)

London (photo courtesy @IveMetJoeBlack on Twitter)

IanWhiteNews

Leeds (photo courtesy @IanWhiteNews on Twitter)

Who Bombed Boston?

Posted on by
8

Something HUGE happened on Monday. A multiple bombing, resulting in fatalities and many injuries, which received saturation-level media coverage. The bombs in Nasariyah, Kirkuk and Baghdad killed at least 31 people and injured over 200.

Only joking. Monday was, of course, the date of the biggest bomb attack on US soil since 9/11. Some moron (or morons) planted home-made bombs, killing three innocent people and causing many serious injuries to others who were simply taking part in a marathon for charity. On Twitter, I was accused of a “lack of empathy” for even daring to raise deaths in Iraq or Pakistan, on the day that Americans were killed. Americans! Somebody doesn’t know the meaning of empathy, obviously.

We learned, again, that three is greater than 31. Or than 300. Or than 3000. There is huge empathy around the world for the people who were killed and injured on Monday in Boston, but also huge frustration at the total lack of empathy for the deaths occurring around the world – deaths for which Americans have blood on their hands. While Pakistanis have to suck up the fact that 50 civilians die for every “terrorist” killed in drone strikes - perhaps over 4,000 deaths so far.

Because Americans are real people, and Pakistanis… well, they’re not really, are they? Except they are. You have our empathy, America. Where is yours?

Now, of course, the predictable Muslim-baiting begins. The hate dollar is big, and Americans are the world’s greatest entrepreneurs. Hate sells in America. You may have killed hundreds of thousands of innocent people in the last decade, but playing the victim is way more fun than feeling, somewhere deep down, a little bit guilty. The usual suspects – those people and businesses who know how to play morons for the hate dollar – are out in force; and morons are buying.

So far, Fox News guest hater Erik Rush wins the top moron award for wanting to kill all Muslims in response to Boston. Generalising hate towards a quarter of the planet’s population at least means you avoid mistakes – like bombing Afghanistan, Iraq and Yemen when you are attacked by a small group of Saudi militants on 9/11.

But who bombed Boston? Fascists on both sides of the Atlantic think they know, and have wasted no time in telling us “it was Muslims”. Never mind that they have repeatedly called it wrong; they know that morons will forgive them getting it wrong repeatedly, if they only get right once. Who remembers now all the morons that blamed the Oslo bombing on Muslims? It was done, of course, by a right-wing “patriot”. Was there a witch-hunt of blond, right-wing patriots? No – acts of individuals are only blamed on groups when they’re brown-skinned.

I don’t know who bombed Boston, but I’ll stick my neck out – and unlike the fascists, I’ll use facts to make my best guess.

We know that from 1980 to 2005, 6% of terror attacks in America were carried out by Islamic extremists. We also know that extremism among far-right Christians is on the rise. The Oklahoma bombing was not a one-off: the Southern Poverty Law Center provides a long list of far-right and Christian plots that have taken place since. It’s easier to be scared of brown-skinned, Arabic- or Urdu-speaking foreigners than it is of the white “loner” who lives down the road, but statistically, the Boston bombing is far more likely to be the work of a Christian than a Muslim.

There’s a good chance that I’m wrong; there are Islamic terror groups that would no doubt like to target Americans (in fact, there are a lot more such groups than there were when the “war on terror” began in 2001). We’ll have to wait and see.

[UPDATE: as you probably noticed, the bombs were not planted by far-right Americans. I called it wrong. However, I called it less wrong than many media pundits are calling it, even now. The two Chechen murderers are variously described as anything from a "cell" to a full-blown Islamic plot to destroy humanity. The reaction has been breathtakingly moronic, even to a seasoned moron watcher. More to come shortly.]

One prediction that I’m sure of: morons always win from violence. Fear will grow; Obama will get more support for his attacks on US civil liberties; the military machine will thrive on the fear, get increased funding, and kill more brown people; the NRA will sell more guns; Glenn Beck and Pamela Geller will sell more of whatever they sell to morons. This cycle will keep on turning until Americans finally spot the pattern, and decide enough is enough. That’s all it needs.

Why Maggie Won’t Have a Respectful Send-Off

Posted on by
12

Perhaps the United States once really was “the land of the free” – but I see no historical evidence that it deserves this label (unless it refers simply to the freedom of white people to grab land, in the early, pioneer days). An illustration of the power of US corporate propaganda is the way in which Ronald Reagan, a global terrorist and domestic criminal, who redistributed large chunks of the US economy to the super-rich, is today seen by many Americans as a hero; or at least, a nice old man. He even has a provincial airport named after him. This Stalinist-style rewrite of history is an American speciality. The truth is dead – long live the propaganda.

Reagan’s loyal sidekick, Margaret Thatcher, died last week, and the right immediately tried to begin another rewrite of history; the media has pushed a largely establishment view, and the old lady has been given a state-funded funeral, with military escort, to take place this Wednesday. The British establishment is trying to airbrush one unfortunate fact out of history: Thatcher is widely loathed by much of the British public – probably by more people than ever supported her. Unfortunately for the Conservative party, right-wing media and wider establishment, the British people have less of a tendency towards amnesia than our American cousins, and, it appears, less of a tendency to lie down and let the state roll over us.

Thatcher, I commented on Twitter, was the most hated Briton of the 20th Century. I only received one dissenting reply, which suggested Ian Huntley (the murderer of two young girls) as an alternative. Perhaps he was right – but reaching for a child killer underlines my point rather than destroying it.

The point of most of the protests, blogging and anger is deadly serious: to prevent Thatcher from getting the Reagan treatment. It’s important that the long series of tragedies that marked the Thatcher era is kept in the public memory. Even the combined might of the right-wing media has failed to hide that Thatcher is hated by millions of people.

Some clever person thought up a way to reveal the extent of Thatcher-hate: by suggesting that people buy the Wizard of Oz song, Ding Dong the Witch is Dead. The single rocketed up the iTunes chart to number one (before mysteriously settling back to second place in the hour before the count closed on Saturday night); the right, still failing to comprehend the truly mass nature of the anti-Thatcher feeling, tried to replace it with a pro-Thatcher song, “I Love Margaret Thatcher” (which was actually satirical – there are no known pro-Thatcher songs). This effort was promoted by the right-wing media – and still flopped dismally, reaching a pathetic 35th position. Despite what the media was telling us, there was no groundswell of pro-Thatcher feeling to rival the anti-Thatcher feeling.

The BBC and Capital Radio both decided to censor the charts. You see, it’s fine for the mass media to tell people what tunes to buy, but when the public choose the top single for themselves, to make a statement? That’s dangerous sedition. We now have an established precedent: when a fact (in this case, the extent of hatred for Margaret Thatcher) is inconvenient to the British establishment, the media can and will impose censorship.

Anti-Thatcher banners were displayed at football matches. Plans for a minute’s silence at stadiums were shelved, because football fans would have refused to stay silent. Every attempt to paint a picture of a nation in mourning failed.

The right resorted to snivelling: “An old lady has died… Think of her family.” But then why is such a hated woman awarded a state-funded funeral that is bound to generate anger and protest? Why is there a military presence, and why are the chimes of Big Ben to be silenced? Because then future generations can be taught that she was a national heroine; that her vindictive and deliberate destruction of Britain’s social fabric was actually done in the national interest. The fact of the funeral itself can be used to write history – how different is this from the state-sanctioned worship of North Korean leaders? These tyrants can prove how “loved” they are by showing videos of cheering, flag-waving crowds. Tomorrow’s event is made-for-TV. The pictures will show the burial of a loved woman, not a hated one. Millions can express their hatred for Thatcher on the streets, online, at football matches, by buying singles; but the final story that the establishment wants to tell is a different one altogether.

This is why the protests this week have been important. This is a battle for memes: a struggle to control which version of history goes into the history books. Because for all the praise over Thatcher’s legacy, the British people have not forgotten:

  • Thatcher’s “economic miracle” never happened: British GDP has grown in line with Germany and France - and this happened at the time of a North Sea oil boom in the UK.
  • Thatcher therefore didn’t create wealth with her policies – she merely redistributed it, from poor to rich, as shown by the Gini coefficient.
  • And the long-term economic legacy? According to Thatcher fans, we now have a country of opportunity for hard workers. Yet Thatcher actually made it harder to succeed – social mobility fell, and is among the worst in Europe, with only Portugal lagging behind us. This fact, more than any other, destroys the central myth of Thatcherism.
  • Thatcher’s one true economic achievement was to turn London into a global financial centre; but this happened at the cost of losing Britain’s position as a manufacturer, leaving Germany to soar ahead; and the 2008 crash showed that the City boom was far less valuable to the nation than had been previously assumed. It had been built on sand.
  • Some “libertarians” have declared Thatcher a fighter for individual liberty – these people clearly don’t remember the most authoritarian regime of the post-war era, probably even beating New Labour’s control-freakery after 9/11. The police were given a blank cheque by the Thatcherites: as a result, police corruption and violence soared. Deaths in custody were ignored. When young people turned away from politics and embraced rave culture, the police were even there to stop them dancing in fields. Thatcherism did not approve of dancing. “Free” people must consume, not dance.
  • Despite the rise in brutal policing (or more likely, because of it) violent crime rose throughout the 1980s, peaking in the mid-90s before starting to fall again (see “Trends in Crime” graph in this BBC article).
  • Thatcherites spread the myth that privilege is now about hard work, not birthright; yet when Thatcher’s moron son Mark attempted to engineer a coup in Equatorial Guinea and was arrested, strings were pulled on his behalf, and he was fined and released.

So Thatcher’s death is being used by conservatives to reinvent her life. Don’t these people have any respect for a frail old lady who has died, or for her family? Despite a torrent of media lies and censorship; despite the police acting to prevent peaceful protest; despite the tabloid wailing about “leftie extremists”, the British people have acted to stop history from being rewritten. The British love of free speech wasn’t given to us from above; it’s deep in our culture, and it’s the people who claim to defend it who most want to take it away.