The Virtual Stoa

Guy Debord, b.28 December 19831, d.30 November 1994.

My friend Andy Sabl explains why he’s supporting Wesley Clark for President over at Open Source Politics. [Via Calpundit.]

Here’s an exceptionally interesting and very, very long post from John Holbo on the Bad Academic Writing kerfuffle.

Chris Lightfoot is sceptical about the Big Conversation and the journalists who write about it.

While on the subject of politicians’ verse (see below, and the comments board for my poetic opinions about Mr Marsden), and political verse more generally (over at Harry’s Place), I thought I’d post this fine song, which has not, I think, appeared anywhere in cyberspace. It’s sung to the tune of “Keep the Home Fires Burning“, and the fourth line in particular is quite moving.

Put the thing through quickly,
Wage the class war slickly,
Hang the rich from lampposts
But don’t hang me…
Stick to Marx, my hearty,
Damn the Labour Party!
Keep the hellfires burning
For the bourgeoisie.

Someone once told me that it was first sung many years ago during a rent dispute at Ruskin College, though I don’t know whether that’s really true or not.

If you haven’t already, do go and read Lib Dem MP Paul Marsden’s poetry before he sees sense and takes the page down. The one about Gladstone is quite McGonagallesque; the sex poetry is just grim.

But this time they’ve gone further than any civilised government should go. Earlier this week we read in our newspapers that the Government proposes to use the children of asylum seekers as pawns to cover up their failure to get a grip on their asylum chaos. Children of asylum seekers are to be taken into care in order to force their parents to leave the country. The Prime Minister and the Home Secretary should be ashamed of themselves. We shall oppose any legislative provision that seeks to give effect to this despicable provision. And I have no doubt that when we do so we shall be joined in the lobbies by the many Honourable Members on the Government benches who, unlike the Prime Minister and the Home Secretary, still retain their self-respect.

– Mr Howard, responding to the Queen’s Speech earlier today.

Here’s a press release from Bill Morris, former General Secretary of the T&G:

Sir Bill Morris said today: “It would appear that yet again we see the Government thrashing around seeking to appease Middle England by attacking some of the weakest people on our shores.

“Asylum seekers with children receive meagre benefits which take away their ability to properly feed their children; they have already lost their right to earn money to feed and clothe their children; now it is apparently being threatened that their children will be taken from them if they don’t conform to the Government’s wishes and go home.

“Using children to blackmail their parents is plumbing the depths of morality. If this does appear in the Queen’s Speech, then asylum seeking children have become the victims of a game that is impractical and goes against the International Convention on the Rights of the Child and the Human Rights Act.

“What does the Children’s Minister have to say on such a policy — I seem to remember the appointment was warmly applauded in last year’s Queen’s Speech.

“What has always been needed is calm legislation which addresses the real issues of managed migration, sharing the burden on a European basis. The Home Secretary’s recent announcements on plans for economic migrants to fill much needed jobs is to be welcomed.� Please can we have more quiet announcements rather than this hysterical nonsense which encourages asylum seekers to be seen as the cause of all our problems. They are not the cause, they are the victims.

“With these announcements, the BNP stands ready to reap the rich reward of anti-asylum seekers’ votes.

“Many of the asylum seekers whom we now threaten with the removal of their children and the removal of legal assistance to enable them to state their case, have fled tyranny in their own country; they can do without that tyranny here.”

Bill Morris will be speaking on behalf of asylum seekers held in Campsfield Detention Centre on Saturday 29 November 2003. He will be joining a demonstration organised by the Campaign to close Campsfield at the Campsfield main gates 12noon-2.30pm. (Details Bill MacKeith: 01865 558145).

Reading the details of Ian Huntley’s defence in the Soham murder trial, am I the only person to be reminded of Monty Python’s Prawn Salad sketch?

Norm’s Alternative Big Read is out — and here’s a handful of interesting things. It turns out that I’ve only read 25 of the BBC’s top 100 in the Big Read, which is a bit scandalous, since, the faddish overrepresentation of Harry Potter and the mere presence of Jeffrey Archer aside, it seems a pretty good list. But of the 25 that I have read, fifteen of them are here among Norm’s top twenty, and, within that list, all five of the ones I haven’t read fall into his poll’s top ten (it’s shameful confession time: Pride and Prejudice, The Great Gatsby, Middlemarch, The Grapes of Wrath and Anna Karenina).

So of this top ten, I’ve read half; of the second half of this top twenty, I’ve read all; and of the bottom eighty, I’ve read only one eighth. That’s a curious distribution, though quite what the chief mechanisms are that generate it aren’t really clear.

Laura Marx, born 26 September 1945, died 26 November 1911; Paul Lafargue, born 15 January 1842, died 26 November 1911.

There doesn’t seem to be much material on Laura Marx on the web, and I’m a little distressed to see that lauramarx.com is a site advertising, um, Hair Free Gel, Rash Free, Ingrow Free and Cold Wax (though there isn’t a separate page devoted to this product).

Here’s a very useful online archive of Soviet Anti-Alcohol posters.

Earlier today someone visited the Virtual Stoa while googlig for “Rosa Luxemburg internet scam“. Is this a reference to Josh Cherniss’s recent poll?

I think we should be told.

Michael Jackson has a new official website on which to put out information relating to his trial. It’s here, and supplements his rather peculiar Neverland Valley site.

Since it will, no doubt, be worth visiting and revisiting in the months ahead, I’m going to add the new site to the “In the Bin” column on the sidebar. Not that I’m presuming guilt, or anything like that. Michael Jackson is, of course, to be considered innocent of all charges — until proved guilty in a court of law.

People who haven’t been following this case over at thesmokinggun.com should start now.

From the Melbourne Age:

New Zealand Prime Minister Helen Clark was frisked at Sydney Airport for explosives in an incident that has embarrassed the Australian Government.Despite having a NZ security officer with her, Miss Clark was pulled out of a queue on October 28 and given a body scan with a new explosives detection device to make sure she was not a bomb-carrying terrorist, The Age has learned.

Senior Australian Government sources said the incident was an embarrassment. It was not regarded as the right way to treat the leader of Australia’s close ally, they said

“You won’t be surprised to hear the New Zealand Prime Minister was not found to be carrying any explosives,” a spokesman for Transport Minister John Anderson said.

One of the odder political organisations I’ve ever belonged to is the London branch of the New Zealand Labour Party, which was basically run out of Austin Mitchell’s office at the House of Commons, and its infrequent meetings usually took place to coincide with Helen Clark’s visits to London.Happily, she didn’t blow us up on those occasions, either.

Diego Rivera, born 13 December 1886, died 24 November 1957.

If the story being reported in the Observer and the BBC is true, about Home Office plans to break up the families of asylum seekers whose claims are rejected by the authorities but who do not jump on the first available flight home by forcing their children into care homes, my contempt for Government ministers will soar to Olympian altitudes.

It just seems unspeakably stupid and offensive.

To support the work of the Refugee Council, ever more important in these harsh times, click here to find out about the different ways in which you can make a donation.

And for VS readers in the Oxford area, don’t forget that 29 November is the 10 Years Too Long demonstration outside Campsfield House, with Bill Morris, Evan Harris MP and others speaking, with music from the Oxford Sol Samba Band supported by Rhythms of Resistance. Full details from the Campaign to Close Campsfield webpage.

Only Jonny Wilkinson can beat The Curse of the Stoa.

But what a peculiar second half.

Caroline Benn, born 13 October 1926, died 22 November 2000.

Over at Au Currant, Jackie D approvingly quotes Salam Pax quoting his friend G, who talks about himself in the 3rd person:

[T]ell your friends in London that G in Baghdad would have appreciated them much more if they had demonstrated against the atrocities of saddam.

And over at Crooked Timber, Chris Bertram is asking and answering a similar question:

At the same time, liberal hawks are asking rhetorically why there were no demonstrations against Saddam Hussein, or against other tyrannies.(I think that last question is pretty easy to answer: people usually demonstrate because they are angry at their own government (or its associates) rather than at someone else�s. Even anger at yesterday�s bombings in Turkey wouldn�t translate into demonstrations because there would be no point in marching against Al Quaida.)

And, to take the third text for today, an early commenter, John S, wrote this in reply [scroll down]:

Oh come off it Chris!
I went on loads of well-attended anti-apartheid marches in London in the 1980s. They were clearly demonstrations against the South African government. If you’re outraged you will demonstrate. Clearly Saddam’s activities didn’t outrage Britons enough.

Two extended comments directed at no-one in particular follow:Comment One.

As far as I can tell (from a fairly quick glance at the 1988 volume of Hansard — sadly the online Hansard only goes back to November 1988), the two MPs who made a decent amount of noise about Halabja in the House of Commons in 1988 were Jeremy Corbyn and Ann Clwyd, as they hassled David Mellor, then the junior minister responsible for maintaining smooth relations with the Baathists. Fifteen years later, of course, Corbyn was ardently against the war, and Clwyd a key supporter. That suggests, in its obviously crude way, that there’s not a clear correlation between campaigning about Iraqi atrocities in the 1980s and either supporting or opposing the war today.

(My guess is that this absence of a correlation carries through to wider public protest: I don’t know who stood outside the Iraqi Embassy in protest, but my guess is that it was a mixture of Kurds and Trots, and that some of the former and none of the latter — except, perhaps, for those who became ex-Trots in the interim — supported the war. The only person I know personally — to drop into anecdotal mode — who ever helped to organise memorials for the victims of Halabja before the Americans began to talk about invading Iraq and lots of people rediscovered their outrage at Baathist atrocities is a Trotskyist friend and antiwar activist, who was involved with the commemorations in Liverpool and Manchester a few years ago.)

But if I’m right about the lack of a clear correlation between those who protested against Saddam’s atrocities at the time and their opinions about the legitimacy of the war in 2003, then that raises a question about whether it’s terribly sensible for liberal hawks in the US and the UK now to ask questions about who did what to protest against Saddam over the years — especially since I don’t think anyone has any record of Rumsfeld, Cheney, Blair, Straw, Hoon, and so on, doing much to either protest or memorialise Halabja and the other crimes of the regime before the invasion of Kuwait transformed elite attitudes to Iraq in 1990.

Comment Two.

Surely the key point about “outrage” and demonstrations is that big demonstrations are not (or, rather, almost never) spontaneous public displays of outrage at all, but the product of great investment of time and energy on the parts of event organisers.

Why were anti-apartheid demonstrations in the UK so big and so frequent? Lots of reasons: many ANC activists and exiles had spent time in the UK, the Anglican church (think Tutu and Huddleston) played a prominent role in the struggle, South Africa House provided a very visible central focus for protest in London, the “rebel tours” and sporting connections between England and South Africa kept the issue in the newspapers, as did periodic Commonwealth summits, egregious Tory wankers like John Carlisle would remind ordinary citizens that the enemy lived at home as well as in Pretoria, lots of people in the UK, whatever their citizenship, had personal ties to people in South Africa owing to a shared imperial past, another focal point was provided by the captivity of Nelson Mandela, and, also importantly, the protestors thought they had a realistic chance of achieving something through their protests, and as it turned out they were right to think so. (There are no doubt other reasons, I’m sure: these are just off the top of my head.)

Saddam Hussein’s atrocities didn’t spark mass mobilisations in large part because public levels of awareness (again, for all kinds of reasons) were much lower, and because there weren’t these various networks, political and cultural resources and pre-existing campaigns, for anti-Saddam campaigners to draw upon in order to mobilise mass protest. Nor would it have been clear what, if anything, mass protest at the Iraqi Embassy in 1988 might have achieved.

But to say these things isn’t to say that people in the UK thought that gassing Kurds was just fine whereas apartheid wasn’t — just to say that there’s a much more complicated passage from the fact of moral opposition or outrage to widespread public protest than some people seem to think.

UPDATES [23.11.2003]: This post is being discussed over at Harry’s Place, and on the Normblog. [24.11.2003] Marc Mulholland has joined in, too.

Melanie Phillips on gay marriage.

Back in January I encouraged readers of the Virtual Stoa to use the easy-peasy facility provided by stand.org.uk to tell the Home Office just what they thought about the proposed ID card scheme during its official consultation period. In today’s Guardian I read that my own and 5,025 other people’s responses were disregarded by HMG for being part of an “organised campaign”.

And, surprise surprise, having binned 5,026 reasoned objections to their insane proposals, the Government has declared that 61% of the people who opined on the matter came out in favour of ID cards…

Robert Simpson, composer and socialist, born 2 March 1921, died 21 November 1997.

Deepening the trend whereby Guardian journalists reproduce material from blogs they do not properly acknowledge, Simon’s excellent blog has been spotted by the Guardian pop writers:

A reverie on the latest ragga choons might be interrupted with an aside that begins: “For those of you interested in contemporary political philosophy… “

Yes, Google confirms that that’s definitely the silverdollarcircle.[Via the, um, silverdollarcircle]