The acceptable face of paranoia

Spy

 Howls of anguish and anger have greeted the latest revelations in the unfolding internet surveillance scandal; Outraged (foreign) politicians and the chattering classes are up in arms that Britain's GCHQ is intercepting and holding internet traffic into and out of the country for up to 30 days in a way that is apparently legal. Even worse from their point of view is that GCHQ has boasted that they're doing better than the NSA in gathering data and one of the formers' legal advisers' is quoted as saying "They [the UK Parliamentary intelligence and security committee supposed to oversee GCHQ] have always been exceptionally good at understanding the need to keep our work secret". You don't say...

Sean Bonney

I've just added Sean Bonney's blog Abandoned Buildings to my fellow travellers list. If you haven't read any of his poetry, it's really worth a look. He's a really intelligent writer who has a real grasp of the absurdities of the world.

This is his latest post,

Monday, June 10, 2013

Letter Against Sickness

Couldn't sleep again last night. Someone had paid for a couple of nights in a hotel, down by the coast, I've no idea why, or who, for that matter. I sat there for hours, nervous, watched the rolling news with the sound down, inventing my own dialogue like I used to do when I was a kid. Anyway, George Osborne came up, his little mouth moving at unpleasant angles and, weirdly, it occurred to me that I couldn't remember what his voice sounded like. Not sure why, I mean I've heard it often enough. So I thought I'd better plug this somewhat embarrassing hole in the centre of my knowledge: I turned the volume up and just as I did he was saying the words “our NHS”. The weight that pronoun carried was unbearable. Because Osborne, who presumably doesn't actually use the NHS, who probably has never sat in a waiting room in, say, the Whips Cross Hospital, was claiming some kind of possession that was entirely stolen, and claiming to share it with some kind of absolutely occupied “us”. It changed everything: the bland hotel room, the banal beating of the sea, all of it congealed into Osborne's pronunciation of “our”. There was a sickness to it that hung far outside the radius of any hospital. A vacant pestilence, or, if you like, a bricked up pestilence, and the “us”, which itself was some kind of shattered twitching mass left over from Osborne's thrusting invasion of “our”, this “us” was in hopeless distant orbit around this pestilence, some kind of arrangement of speckles in the night sky, a more or less orderly glyph, a surgical fracture in celestial time and, well, I guess you know what I mean. It did my head in. I changed channels and watched some kind of documentary about monsters fighting muscular people holding guns. But it was pretty boring, and the sun was starting to come up, so I thought I'd go out for a walk. And the first thing I saw, when I walked out the hotel door, was a seagull eating a pigeon. Serious. Right there in the middle of the road, tearing it to strips, swallowing the motherfucking thing. There was nobody around. Just the sea, some pebbles. And this peculiar compressed violence I was staring at. I couldn't move. I just stood there, staring, wishing I could reduce it down to some kind of metaphor, or analogy, or starting point for a bit of bourgeois literary criticism, something to add to my CV, anything, rabies, anything. The gull, the pebbles, pronouns, the rolling news, the sea, the muscular people, the dead thing, all of them forming into some kind of knot or eclipse. I thought about you at this point. I wondered which of them you would identify with. Which part would you take in this little horrorshow, which would be the marker of your position, which would be your representative on earth, which would be your signature. I ask because I really don't know which one I would be. I mean, if George Osborne was lying there in tatters in the middle of the road, right in front of the ridiculous sea, would I eat him? I'm sort of serious. If I walked out of the hotel and he was lying there, whimpering like a burning dog, what would I do? Shit, I was sweating by this point. I was no longer even a human being, just some glowing monster of anxieties and vicious isotopes, storms and circles. Revenge. Law. Decency. I think I puked. I felt I had become a tiny fissure in the decay chain set off by George Osborne's voice. One among countless disinterested scalpels, hanging there, in the grains of his voice. And those scalpels are us. Well, obviously not. But that's what he wants. That's what he thinks about each morning as he grimaces into his mirror. Anyway, I couldn't take it. I crossed the road and went down to the beach. I'm still here. I wrote you this letter, but I probably won't send it. If I do, do not answer it

The child and its enemies by Emma Goldman

I came across this article by Emma Goldman on disinformation. It was one of those synchronistic moments as I had thought about putting it up last week as it is a a very good article that deals with the perpetual problem of how we teach, and relate to our children. There are many other articles by different writers which cover similar ground, both from the past, as with Goldman's and from now. What is depressing is how little has changed for the better.

The Child and its enemies

by Emma Goldman. From the Anarchist Library

Emma Goldman

Is the child to be considered as an individuality, or as an object to be moulded according to the whims and fancies of those about it? This seems to me to be the most important question to be answered by parents and educators. And whether the child is to grow from within, whether all that craves expression will be permitted to come forth toward the light of day; or whether it is to be kneaded like dough through external forces, depends upon the proper answer to this vital question.
The longing of the best and noblest of our times makes for the strongest individualities. Every sensitive being abhors the idea of being treated as a mere machine or as a mere parrot of conventionality and respectability, the human being craves recognition of his kind.

View from a darkened room (iii)

I spy...

Spook balls

My first thought about the whole NSA/GCSB internet spying business it was that I would have been more surprised if they weren't spying on people. That the GCSB in both the Urewa 8 and Dotcom cases had either eavesdropped on its own citizens or received copies of material collected by another country made perfect sense. After all, what's the point in having all this luvverly technology if you don't use it. However, there's a difference in the two cases; New Zealand had no interest in the Dotcom affair apart from its role as an ally of the USA and conversely, no one without access to the fevered imagination of New Zealand's secret cops, or who weren't lawyers, could have had any purpose in paying the remotest attention to a small group of people with zero influence who were no threat to anything.

The Deeper Meaning of Mass Spying in America: Political and Economic Consequences of “The Spy State” by James Petras

As seems to be the case with me, I haven't found time to write anything over the last week. One of the things I was going to write about was the furore over the NSA's internet spying and its ramifications for NZ. I may well still do that but I came across this interesting article by James Petras which I thought I would repost here.

The Deeper Meaning of Mass Spying in America: Political and Economic Consequences of “The Spy State”

Introduction

            The exposure of the Obama regime’s use of the National Security Agency to secretly spy on the communications of hundreds of millions of US and overseas citizens has provoked world-wide denunciations.  In the United States , despite widespread mass media coverage and the opposition of civil liberties organizations, there has not been any mass protest.   Congressional leaders from both the Republican and Democratic Parties, as well as top judges, approved of the unprecedented domestic spy program..  Even worse, when the pervasive spy operations were revealed, top Senate and Congressional leaders repeated their endorsement of each and every intrusion into all electronic and written communication involving American citizens.  President Obama and his Attorney General Holder openly and forcefully defended the NSA’s  the universal spy operations.

Groveling pimp in the service of Stalinist betrayal-Georg Lukacs

Lukacs

The above  title is just one of the many excellent lines in the pamphlet, Chicago Surrealists: In memory of Georg Lukacs. I've always been mystified by the cult of Georg Lukacs, especially in the context of his capitulation to Stalinism. This pamphlet, first published in 1971 on Lukacs's death and lifted from the Unkant website is an often amusing correction to the view that Lukacs is an important element in re-energising a revolutionary left.

I happened to look at the Counterfeit website and noticed that John and Lindsey's stooge Chris Nineham has a written a book on Lukacs which claims that the Hungarian fraud 'was the great theorist of revolution in the 20th century'. All of the articles in this pamphlet and in particular, Franklin Rosemont's Contribution to the Critique of an Insipid Legend serve as a sparkling antidote to such idiocy.
Enjoy.

Pamphlet issued by the Chicago Surrealist group on the event of Lukács' death in 1971

Franklin Rosemont: Contribution to the Critique of an Insipid Legend

Hegel wrote, in 1796, in the diary of his sojourn through the Bernese Alps, that "...the Christian imagination bas produced nothing but an insipid legend."¹ It is not acci­dental that the images associated with Christianity - ser­vility, sickness, corruption, weakness, degradation, maso­chism, cowardice, prostration - are the very images that define the life and work of Georg Lukács, who recently did us the long-overdue courtesy of dropping dead. Uniting the mystic's propensity for sudden conversion and the most obsequious realism since Aquinas, Lukács, for more than fifty years, specialized in adapting himself to, and justifying, the given reality in which he found himself. Thus his philosophical erudition and 'classicism' were put in the service of the reality of forced labor camps, the Moscow trials, 'socialist' realism, Stalin's destruction of the Bolshevik Party and the degeneration of the Commu­nist International.

The slow fix

I forgot to repost this article when it was published on the Independent Working Class Association (IWCA) website last month. The results in the British May local elections which saw an incredible swing towards the UK Independence Party (UKIP) bear out the analysis in this piece which locates part of the rise in UKIP's fortunes in the decline of the British National Party (BNP).

The Slow Fix

The decline of the BNP has given UKIP the chance to fill the yawning gap that exists in working class political representation. By way of contrast, the current incarnations of the left are failing, yet again, to make any impression. This is repeating the pattern of recent decades, where the right have consistently out-thought the left in terms of strategy. The ongoing capitalist crisis offers real opportunities for our side, but it also presents great dangers. If the left continues to shirk its responsibility by failing to fully engage with the working class, it leaves the path clear for the continued growth of right-wing nationalism.

View from a darkened room (ii)

Exercises in futility

 



Alam Halfa exercise soldier

 

One of the more interesting pieces of news I came across this week was about Alam Halfa, a military exercise in the North Island, involving 1000 troops from NZ, Canada, Britain and the USA.
The exercise lasted for over a month and has been heavily publicised by the NZDF, including a video released on youtube, Ready for any terrain. The local news reports have emphasised the important help the army have received from people living in the areas where  it's taken place. As the report in the Manawatu Standard explained the main part was the '...counter-insurgency field exercise throughout Tararua and Wairarapa, which began on Monday.  
The week-long exercise sees soldiers integrated into the local community where they will work with civilian volunteers to remove insurgent forces from "Alpira", the name given to Tararua and Wairarapa.''

Whilst military exercises take place regularly, it is interesting that the key component of this one was counter insurgency, especially as the US military and Marine Forces were also involved. According to Colonel Parsons, the key focus in the training was how to separate insurgents from the communities in which they are '...interwined and co-ercing the population'.