I am indebted to AVPS for reminding me about the Justice for the Shrewsbury Pickets campaign.
For far too long have we taken for granted those limited rights that we have to picket and take part in industrial action, and the case of the Shrewsbury 24 just shows what lengths a Tory government will go to in its battle to defeat trade unionism.
Britain might well have another Tory government within the space of a year, and if not, be left with a weak anti-Union set of New Labour flunkies, either way, not good for trade unionism.
AVPS explains the issue:
“Ricky Tomlinson talked about the recent attempts made to clear his name and described his correspondence with Jack Straw, the so-called justice minister. After much wrangling and petitions for the relevant files to be released under the 30 year rule (requests denied by Straw on grounds of ‘national security’!) Ricky was finally allowed to see some pertaining to the case. He sat down in a room with a keeper of the records and began turning the pages … only to find huge junks of the reports redacted. If these don’t suggest a cover up, he didn’t know what does. He also described the appalling treatment he and especially Dessie received inside, a treatment that saw Dessie serve his three years in no less than 17 prisons.”
Update: Human Rights TV has coverage with Ricky Tomlinson.
They are available as downloads too.
Conservatives come in many shapes and sizes, and are not always found on the political right. If you hunt around your acquaintances, friends and relatives then you will probably have a few, small c, conservatives amongst them.
They might be those people who often look back to the past to some almost mythological golden age, or seek guidance from worthy but irrelevant tombs. They are far easier to spot when modern technology enters the frame, they may be the last people to discover the Internet, have a mobile phone or even use Facebook.
The latter innovation almost caused a breach of security at MI6.
The mandarins in Westminster hadn’t thought to check the Facebook pages of its senior staff for potential security leaks, or information that would have compromised the security of their operatives.
The wife of the new MI6 Director, Lady Sawer had included many personal details in her entry, and although it has been scrubbed by now I wonder if they will have learnt any lessons from their rather conservative attitude towards technology.
The Guardian reports an interesting snippet for all antifascists and scrutineers of the Far right:
“The Mail on Sunday had claimed its story – which also revealed that Shelley Sawers’s half-brother is a researcher for the Holocaust-denying historian David Irving – showed that Sawers had left himself open to a potentially catastrophic security failure.”
Hugo Haig-Thomas, apparently is a former diplomat, anyone say Maxwell Knight?
Like most people I was curious about what really happened in Honduras and the background to it. I was pointed towards this piece in Red Pepper, and it rings true:
Honduras is a deeply unequal country, with the richest 10 per cent of the population taking home 43.7 per cent of the national income. In contrast, the poorest 30 per cent take just 7.4 per cent, and just under 40 per cent of the population live in poverty (defined as earning less than double the cost of the basic food basket). Only 4.7 per cent of Hondurans have access to the internet, which might go some way to explaining the social background of Honduran coup cheerleaders on English-language websites such as the BBC.
Since coming to power in 2006 president Zelaya has gradually moved to the left, and at the time of the coup was taking steps to address Honduras’ gross levels of inequality. Predictably, these moves earned him the enmity of much of congress, whose ties to the country’s traditional elites run deep. Zelaya also angered these elites by pursuing a leftist foreign policy, joining the Bolivarian Alternative for the Americas (ALBA), an alternative regional trade group composed of nine left-leaning Latin American and Caribbean countries. The arrival of Cuban doctors to provide healthcare to the poorest sectors of Honduran society was met with particular hostility by Zelaya’s opponents. Honduras’ leftward turn also undoubtedly caused significant discomfort among some in Washington, especially at a time when much of Latin America has seemed to move beyond the reach of US political influence.”
But a wider question occurred to me, where are the best on-line political discussions in Latin America?
It is easy enough to find English language ones, but I wanted to read what Latin Americans were saying about the coup d’etat.
I hunted around rather lazily but couldn’t see much apart from this, which sadly seems filled with semi-crazy right-wingers.
So the question for my readers is, do you know of any half decent on-line forums that discuss Latin America in an intelligent way?
I can read Spanish (poorly) and am interested in hearing the views of people actually living in the region now.
A bit of a cheat, various items that caught my eye, second failure in three years:
“When the Department for Transport boasts that a company has agreed to pay £1 billion or more over the life of a franchise, it neglects to point out that only a tiny fraction of that amount is guaranteed in the small print. Companies can walk away from their franchises and only have to surrender a “performance bond”, which in National Express’s case is £32 million.”
17 Web Browsers for Linux, Chrome for Linux is the one to watch, Firefox is still rather buggy, awaiting a patch kit, when it works they found it was faster, the best stability tip I can suggest is to turn off all video plug-ins.
Forty years ago, almost, Apollo 11 landed on the moon, listen to the take off. The Apollo 11 home at NASA. The BBC’s Sky at Night and the Apollo landings. Apollo 11 images.
Shuggy on understanding Ben White and racism.
In Darfur: “Fears are growing that an Irish aid worker kidnapped near Darfur was seized by an Islamist militia linked to the Sudanese regime, Irish government sources said last night.”
The Iranian regime and journalists. Azarmehr looks at PressTV and its Western mouthpieces.
Martin on UCU: “On Saturday UCU general secretary Sally Hunt represented the union at a protest outside the Iranian embassy, as part of the Justice for Iranian Workers campaign.”
Bob’s got some good questions.
Wine coming along a pace.
Finally, Antix Linux, one of my favourite distros is out on public test and it even has autologon now, great.
I remember reading Wright’s Spycatcher about 25 years back, having purchased it in Paris. The British Government, under Thatcher had banned publication on British soil, but it didn’t stop people obtaining a copy. It wasn’t a bad read, not too controversial, as far as I can remember.
Now does history repeat itself, second time around as farce?
HMG has just stopped the publication of Andy Hayman’s book, he’s a retired assistant commissioner of the Met Police and knows a fair bit about 7/7 and counter-terrorism.
It seems a bit of a cackhanded attempt to limit whatever critical information the book contains, thus ensuring that it will get a wider audience and the secret eventually leaked on the Internet, outside of HMG’s jurisdiction.
Silly really, when will governments learn?
Spittoon has a piece on those BNP leaflets:
“It is a pernicious piece of race-hatred and anti-Muslim bigotry that has been around for years and has long required some form of legal action taken against it. The good news is that senior prosecutors are calling for laws on race hate crimes to be strenghtened which will counter the distribution of leaflets like this by the British National Party.”
Update for commenters:
Please, don’t even bother to post excuses for the BNP, deflections or reasons why you like them, I don’t like neo-fascists. Period. If you wish to make excuses for them go else where, I am not interested.
Update 2: Some time ago, I made things pretty clear, but here’s a snippet for those that missed it:
Additionally, I’d like to make something clear, I don’t get many commenters (there are many better blogs) but recently some rather dim witted and nasty fans of David Duke have found my blog. These would-be Adolf’s are surprised that their poorly written, unintelligent racist comments are spammed by WordPress and deleted.
That’s the way it is.
I shouldn’t have to explain it, but I don’t have any time for mindless neo-Nazis, Aryan Nation creeps, White Power freaks, BNPers or apologists for David Duke’s vile views.
The problem is, that Jew haters and Jew baiters by their very nature are a bit twisted in the head and largely incapable of understanding why no one shares their obnoxious views.
Such comments will be deleted without a moment’s regret. I don’t believe in giving neo-Nazis or their friends any free publicity.”
I am a bit knackered at the moment, and even less coherent than normal but following Jim and Bob’s example I am going to do a quick round up of various blogs that I read, some you’ll like and some not.
Over at a very public sociologist, Phil looks at conspiracy theories and 7/7.
Pastor porn at Bartholomew’s notes and a lot more.
Bob, himself is good, in particular this bit:
“In contrast, MRZine seems to play towards what I call the ZLeft. The ZLeft takes an outwardly libertarian anti-establishment form, but lacks any political analysis apart from hatred of America and the West, and is therefore easily seduced by any authoritarian thugs who “defy” America.”
I was hoping for some lucid academic insights into the situation in Iran at Crooked Timber, but can’t find any, still at least they don’t neglect popular culture with the clip of Michael Jackson.
Dave looks at the YouGov survey on BNP voters, not nice reading. He wonders about the ‘male beauty crisis’ and rightly has a dig at politicians pontificating.
Jim on tennis and plenty of Green thingies.
There are no messiahs considers Alan Woods and An Introduction to Trotsky’s Writings on Art, whilst thinking about democratic centralism. I am almost weeping with despair.
The Revolutionary Flowerpot Society has a piece on a demonstrator, previously kept in a secret prison in Iran.
Yaba Yaba describes the sit-in at Cairo airport of blogger and journalist, Wael Abbas.
Gerry Burke at the Irish Left Review looks at Obama and the socializing of the Health Care system in the US.
John Gray loves it when the SWP and the Socialist Party slag each other off. Whereas Seismic shows us Billy Graham’s darker side.
The Contentious Centrist in a more serious mode looks at the Mumbai killers, then reminds us of Pogroms and Death Camps.
Finally, the CST has details of a report into the BNP’s performance in the recent local and European elections, and later on argues that “people who want to criticise or campaign against Israel should exercise care that their activities do not invoke or allude to traditional antisemitic imagery or language.”
You’d think they were stating the bleeding obvious, but when you look at Cif or the Guardian it becomes clear that many just sleep walk into nihilistic anti-Jewish racism without a moment’s thought.
Steve Cohen’s friends, comrades, including those in No-one is Illegal, Engage, JSG and various campaigns that Steve was involved in, have organised a celebration of Steve Cohen’s life which will take place this Sunday, 5th July 2009.
Engage has more details.
Update:
There is an excellent collection dedicated to Steve Cohen at the Archives Hub.
Update 2:
Steve’s pamphlet, That’s Funny, You Don’t Look Anti-Semitic, An anti-racist analysis of left anti-semitism has been placed on on-line by Libby Lawson and Erica Bunnan.
Timothy M. O’Brien has a very relevant article on TOR over at O’Reilly’s:
“Anonymous proxies are in the news this week as Iranians are using proxies outside of Iran to communicate information about ongoing protests to others within the country. I’ve received several queries this week from non-technical colleagues about proxy servers. Is it legal to run a proxy server? Does running a proxy server violate my agreement with my broadband provider? I decided to track down some experts and get some perspective on different proxy servers and the laws surrounding them. In this entry, I speak with Andrew Lewman, the Executive Directory of the Tor Project about Tor and I also get some legal guidance from Peter Eckersley of the Electronic Frontier Foundation.
In this interview I ask Andrew to briefly introduce Tor and talk about some interesting useage statistics that show adoption of this anti-surveillance technology from within Iran. He answers a question about whether Tor is “unstoppable” and comments on the legality of running a Tor node. For the full interview, listen here. ”
Also see Measuring Tor and Iran.
And Tor bridges.
No surprise really:
“Iran confirmed Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as president and said a row over his June 12 re-election was over, leaving opponents who cried foul with few options.
Iran’s top legislative body, the Guardian Council, said a partial recount on Monday had disproved complaints of irregularities by pro-reform opponents, who said the count was inadequate and that only annulling the election would do.”
Else where in Iran journalists are being locked up, as the Guardian reports:
“Iran’s media crackdown since protests over the disputed election earlier this month means more journalists are in jail there than in any other country, including China or Cuba, according to Reporters Sans Frontières.
The press freedom campaigning body said that more than 33 journalists were in jail in Iran, up from just a handful before 14 June, when protests over the re-election of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad began. Iran has leapfrogged China and Cuba, according to RSF.
At least 25 journalists arrested since the disputed election remain in prison, the Paris-based organisation said on Friday.
This clampdown has also seen Iran jump above Burma, which RSF claims has 14 journalists in jail, Eritrea, which has 17 jailed reporters, Cuba with 24 and even China, where 30 reporters – out of the 166 that RSF claims are imprisoned worldwide – are jailed. China was previously the biggest international jailer of reporters, according to RSF.”
Read more at RSF, What is going on in the silence of Evin prison?
Matt over at ignoblus reminds us that it is the anniversary of Stonewall, June 28, 1969. Here’s a Beeb program on it.
I also recommend reading several of his posts, On Left and Right and Antisemitism.
“this is meaningful because people often mistake all revolutionary tendencies for Left revolutions:
Here’s the trick about spotting the transformation into a white revolutionary movement: The piece that makes them the most revolutionary is anti-Semitism, because it creates for them a ruling class. The invention of a fake ruling class transformed a reform-oriented conservative movement into a revolutionary movement. Jared Taylor [editor of the white nationalist journal American Renaissance], for example, does not embrace the anti-Semitic theories that William Pierce [late leader of the neo-Nazi National Alliance] did. Taylor apparently worked in international finance at one point, and he doesn’t see himself as separate from that, despite the people railing at the banks and the Federal Reserve. It would be a mistake to call vanguardists and mainstreamers factions; they’re ideological tendencies, and they can both exist within a single organization.”
Leonard Zeskind looks at the white supremacist movement over the last 30-plus years, and the politics of the disparate groups that make up the movement–from neo-Nazi skinheads and Holocaust deniers to Christian Identity churches and David Duke. His book is Blood and Politics: The History of the White Nationalist Movement from the Margins to the Mainstream.
Hegemonic whiteness and anti-racist antisemitism:
“Matthew Hughey writes at RacismReview.com:
Moreover, in my doctoral work, “White Guise: The Common Trajectory of the White Antiracist & Racist Movement,”
I found that white male racists and white male anti-racists relied on strikingly similar racist worldviews. (For example, both groups relied upon and often accepted views of blacks and Latin@s as culturally or biologically dysfunctional and dangerous, while simultaneously treating racial “otherness” as a kind of “epidermal capital” which served as a temporary alleviation of their collectively-shared understanding of whiteness as “bland,” “boring,” and “meaningless.”) These shared dimensions of what I call “hegemonic whiteness” were solidified in the nation’s founding as a white male supremacist state. And while these racialized and gendered violent foundations may be invisible to most, their influence is continuously present among varied contexts of predominantly white male groups like white supremacists, American Legion outposts, and even some “white antiracists.”
Customers who bought this also bought:
So the USHMM shooter was apparently influenced by a book called Iron Curtain Over America. I hadn’t heard of this book, so it drew my attention.
On the Amazon page, customers who bought this book also bought an interesting list:
o The Synagogue of Satan probably needs no explanation
o James Petras’s antisemitic Rulers and Ruled in the US Empire
o Koestler’s bizarre The Thirteenth Tribe
o The Revolution: A Manifesto by Ron Paul
o Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid by Jimmy Carter
o And something called The Transparent Cabal”
Matt often finds stuff that the rest of us would miss, well worth a second read, finally on Sean Wallis’s racist “joke”.
The Iranian State used the security machinery, militia and bullets to put down the recent protests and in some ways they succeeded, in the short term.
However, the situation in the medium to longer term is not so rosy, the very legitimacy of Iran’s theocracy has been shown to be a sham, only held together by the use of force.
So we should expect more protests and more revolutions in the Middle East, when conditions permit.
These protests were just the first step in overthrowing the brutal regime in Tehran, and that must be the work of the people of Iran, and only they can truly succeeded.
Marg bar coupe d’état.
Update: The BBC has a more considered and rather conservative view.
UPI see Ahmadinejad faces post-protest troubles.
Reuters highlights Iran bans Mousavi ally from leaving the country.
AP finds the dictatorship true to form, Dozens of journalists among jailed in Iran
This blog is on strike for the whole of the 26th June 2009 in support of Iranians facing a brutal crackdown by the theocracy over there.
Please read more at The Poor Mouth.
Semi-normal service will be resumed on the 27th.
Update: More at Justice for Iranian workers
Update:
See Seismic for the case of Iason Athanasiadis.
Bernard-Henri Lévy puts some strong arguments at Huff Post:
“Whatever happens, young people, who were believed to be enthralled by the principles of political Islam and who a month ago, upon Ahmadinejad’s return from Geneva, had supposedly planned a triumphal reception for the president-non-elect, will have said, loud and proud, with an audacity matched only by their political intelligence, that this president shamed them.
Whatever happens, there will be in Tehran, Tabriz, Ispahan, Zahedan, and Ardebil, millions of young people who in a matter of a few days will have become, like the timid Mousavi, in a sense larger than themselves–and will have understood that they could, with their bare hands, without provocation or violence, keep a power at bay.
Whatever happens, this extraordinary event–which is a miracle, as a popular uprising always is, and which was endowed under this circumstance with the blind mimetism and un-self-consciousness that is peculiar to the Angel of History when it thinks it is going forward, but is actually looking backward–will seem to have reproduced topsy-turvy the very scene in the same streets, surrounding the same barracks and the same shops, that was described thirty years ago by Michel Foucault, who never imagined that the real revolution was still to come, and that it would be the exact opposite of what he described.
Whatever happens, the people know, from this point on, that they are the people and that there is not a regime on earth that can remain in power against the people.”
