The Virtual Stoa

Tessa Jowell doesn’t want the Stop the War coalition to hold its next big rally in London in Hyde Park. (It’ll be bad for the grass, apparently). How wrong she is.

Here’s Karl Marx, writing in the Neue Oder Zeitung of 28 June 1855:

We were spectators from beginning to end and do not think we are exaggerating in saying that the English Revolution began yesterday in Hyde Park. The latest news from the Crimea acted as an effective ferment upon this “unparliamentary,” “extra-parliamentary” and “anti-parliamentary” demonstration… At three o’clock approximately 50,000 people had gathered at the spot announced on the right bank of the Serpentine in Hyde Park’s immense meadows. Gradually the assembled multitude swelled to a total of at least 200,000 due to additions from the other bank. Milling groups of people could be seen shoved about from place to place. The police, who were present in force, were obviously endeavouring to deprive the organizers of the meeting of what Archimedes had asked for to move the earth, namely, a place to stand upon. Finally a rather large crowd made a firm stand and Bligh the Chartist constituted himself chairman on a small eminence in the midst of the throng. No sooner had he begun his harangue than Police Inspector Banks at the head of 40 truncheon-swinging constables explained to him that the Park was the private property of the Crown and that no meeting might be held in it. After some pourparlers in which Bligh sought to demonstrate to him that parks were public property and in which Banks rejoined he had strict orders to arrest him if he should insist on carrying out his intention, Bligh shouted amidst the bellowing of the masses surrounding him:

“Her Majesty’s police declare that Hyde Park is private property of the Crown and that Her Majesty is unwilling to let her land be used by the people for their meetings. So let’s move to Oxford Market.”

With the ironical cry: “God save the Queen!” the throng broke up to journey to Oxford Market…

There were riots there in 1866 over franchise reform, and battles with suffragettes in 1914. So it’s a terribly suitable venue for this kind of thing, and it’s ridiculous that the minister for what used to be called national heritage should even think of trying to interrupt this vital radical tradition.

Update! [5.2.2003]: Jowell backs down!

My friend and comrade Leo Zeilig has had the criminal charges against him dropped. As you may know or remember, he was picked up by police recently for being the man with the megaphone on an antiwar demonstration in London, and had up to five years in prison dangled in front of him on a charge of incitement to violent disorder, or somesuch. He writes:

Comrades and friends,

We fought and we won! At 4pm today my solicitor received a fax from the Crown Prosecution Service that stated, “all charges against your client have been dropped”. While no reasons were given we can feel confident that the message of our campaign — the Right to Protest — the anti-war movement and the show of support at the court on 31 December, the work we did raising the profile of the campaign and the absurdity of the charges against a peaceful demonstrator forced their hand. That they didn’t have the confidence to pursue charges against me with all the evidence they claimed to have amassed on the day is proof of the great strength of the anti-war movement. The cost they have wasted in the last three months runs into thousands. We must make sure that demonstration in London on the 15 February will ring out across the world with the message that we can stop the war and we are RIGHT TO PROTEST!

The support of my comrades and friends in the campaign has ensured this victory. We must make sure that Right to Protest organised by the Stop the War Coalition continues to exist, providing support and solidarity to the others still facing charges and anti-war activists that the police will undoubtedly arrest in the protests and demonstrations against the war in the coming weeks and months.

Excellent news: and many thanks to those who were a bit better than me at managing to make it along to the court hearing.

Last year the BBC World Service authoritatively determined that “A Nation Once Again” was the World’s Favourite Song. Now Time magazine is asking the readers of its website to answer the question, “Which country poses the greatest danger to world peace in 2003?”, giving them a rather limited menu of Iraq, North Korea or the United States.

Voting has been going on for a while now, and with almost 57,000 votes cast, the US is in the lead by 70.3% to Iraq’s 18.9% to North Korea’s 10.8%. And the polls are still open…

Nick provides an update [16.1.2003]: The US now leads with over 80% of the vote; Iraq and North Korea have under 10% apiece.

To be sung to the tune of “If you’re happy and you know it, clap your hands”:

If we cannot find Osama, bomb Iraq.
If the markets hurt your Mama, bomb Iraq.
If the terrorists are Saudi
And the bank takes back your Audi
And the TV shows are bawdy,
Bomb Iraq.

If the corporate scandals growin’, bomb Iraq.
And your ties to them are showin’, bomb Iraq.
If the smoking gun ain’t smokin’
We don’t care, and we’re not jokin’.
That Saddam will soon be croakin’,
Bomb Iraq.

Even if we have no allies, bomb Iraq.
From the sand dunes to the valleys, bomb Iraq.
So to hell with the inspections;
Let’s look tough for the elections,
Close your mind and take directions,
Bomb Iraq.

While the globe is slowly warming, bomb Iraq.
Yay! the clouds of war are storming, bomb Iraq.
If the ozone hole is growing,
Some things we prefer not knowing.
(Though our ignorance is showing),
Bomb Iraq.

So here’s one for dear old daddy, bomb Iraq,
From his favorite little laddy, bomb Iraq.
Saying no would look like treason.
It’s the Hussein hunting season.
Even if we have no reason,
Bomb Iraq.

I’ve no idea who first wrote this: Raj passed it on to me through the electronic ether.

Hilary wrote to the Virtual Stoa the other day [1.11.2002]:

Up till now I’ve been a passive reader of the Virtual Stoa (can’t rememebr how I stumbled upon it in the first place!), but thought this might interest you.

Appended to her message is a a summary of Gore Vidal’s essay on the war against terrorism, published in last Sunday’s Observer. (The Observer hasn’t published the article on its website, saying that it is “exclusive to the print edition”, but last time I looked there was a copy of the full text posted here). And attached to this summary was a link to the page at emperors-clothes.com, Jared Israel’s website which peddles an awful lot of conspiracism.It’s always nice to get letters from readers of the Stoa - but on this occasion I’m not very interested in this kind of material. Insofar as Vidal’s argument is about grand Republican strategies for dominating Eurasia, it’s quite interesting (though there are better treatments of the topic elsehwere). Insofar as it just repeats the staple claims of 911 conspiracy theories, with their minute-by-minute analyses of who knew what, when, and what they then did about it, or did not do about it, on the day itself, it doesn’t seem to me to be very interesting at all.

Chip Berlet’s page on post-911 conspiracizing is useful, and well-documented, and the rest of the Political Research Associates website has a ton of material on Conspiracy Theories and What is Wrong with Them. Another nice discussion of War against Terror conspiracies is this article from In These Times.

As Max Sawicky notes in a post to the new No War Blog banning conspiracizing discussions on the site, “everything you need to criticize the U.S. government or the capitalist system is right out in the open. The same goes for this war”.

Nick writes to the weblog [25.3.2002]: Two things. First, www.gagpipe.com is a Good Thing which I commend to you. Second, it helped me find this piece, from urbanreflex.com:

British Troops Sent To Afghanistan “Will Inevitably Be Shot By The Americans” Warns Minister

UK Defence Minister Geoff Hoon has told the British public to brace itself and expect casualties in Afghanistan as a result of British soldiers being shot by American troops.

“No government sends its troops to fight alongside the Americans without a great deal of consideration,” Mr. Hoon told reporters today. “It is not a decision that is ever taken lightly. We know there will be casualties.”

Around 1,700 Royal Marine commandos are on their way to Afghanistan to join the 1,500 troops already stationed in the country.

“We know for a fact that the Americans have highly sophisticated weapons easily capable of wiping out an entire squadron in a matter of seconds,” Hoon told MPs in the Commons. “We cannot underestimate the capacity of the Americans to kill people on their own side by mistake. They are ruthlessly efficient in that respect.”

But he warned that the potential risks should not divert attention away from the operation’s goals.

“Let us not lose sight of the aims and objectives of this very dangerous mission,” he said. “I do not know what those objectives are at this moment in time, but I will let you know what they are just as soon as I have received them from my counterpart in America.”

Al-Qaeda were unavailable for comment.

A friend also forwarded me the entertaining Hunt the Boeing link, which I hadn’t seen before; the rebuttal is here.

From the Newshour with Jim Lehrer:

JIM LEHRER: Before 9/11, you talked much about reforming the military, changing the way things work, changing the culture. Does this budget reflect any of that?

DONALD RUMSFELD: Oh, indeed, it does. The 2003 budget, which was part of the President’s budget announced today, has a great deal of transformation in it. There’s some who define transformation one way, would say that there’s some $20 billion worth of transformational activities; another way of defining it would say $50 billion. I think it’s almost inappropriate to look at dollars. I think that - that transformation is not an event; it is a process. It is something that involves a mind set, an attitude, a culture. It is something that, for example, might not even involve a new weapons system. It might just be the connectivity among existing weapons systems. It might be a different way of organizing or fighting, as we found in Afghanistan. So I think the transformation - the word - needs to think about it and understand that it’s more of a process than an event.

Got that?This part of the interview is gibberish –but it gets a little more sinister when Mr. Rumsfeld immediately goes on to analogise the US military to the Nazi Blitzkrieg units.

Here’s the excellent Bob Marshall-Andrews, Labour MP for Medway, in his Camp X-Ray clothes: “This is the new outfit for New Labour backbenchers”, he told the audience at the Parliamentary Variety Show. From yesterday’s Guardian.

On Monday, W. spoke to reporters about the crisis in South Asia. Here’s what he said:

I don’t believe the situation is defused yet, but I do believe there is a way to do so, and we are working hard to convince both the Indians and the Pakis there’s a way to deal with their problems without going to war.

Not all the news reports mentioned his use of the word “Pakis”. The Reuters report has “Pakistanis”; the BBC dropped the offending clause altogether; and the later report in Newsday conceded that the President had used a “slang term” which it described, in unexplained, unsourced quotation marks, as “definitely a derogatory term for Pakistanis”. W.’s spokesperson later denied he meant to be disrespectful; and on the strength of a statement from a spokesperson at the Pakistani embassy that “he did not consider what Bush said to be an insult”, the people at Opinion Journal decided that
“the whole ‘controversy’ in other words, seems to have been an invention of the White House press corps”. Some useful discussion is over at monkeyfish.com.

From today’s New Zealand Herald:

New Zealand’s greatest rock band, Shihad, are changing their name because of its similarity to jihad - the Islamic term for holy war - fearing a backlash as they try to make their mark in America.Osama bin Laden has called a jihad against the United States following the September 11 attacks.

A new name is yet to be decided on. Shihad drummer Tom Larkin said the decision was a tough one to make given the 13 years they had spent under the banner. It had been devastating to consider the implications of changing their name, he said.

“We’ve just spent four months in the US and every news item talks of the ‘Jihad against America’. As far as 99.9 per cent of Americans are concerned, ‘jihad’ means fundamentalist terrorist war against all Americans’.

“We wouldn’t get played on radio, we wouldn’t get tours and what would be the point?”

The name Shihad comes from the misspelling of the word jihad the band lifted from the novel Dune.

The group aim to have the new name in place before playing the Australasian Big Day Out tour, which starts in Auckland next Friday.

Thanks to Aziz, for drawing it to the attention of the weblog.

“To those … who scare peace-loving people with phantoms of lost liberty, my message is this: your tactics only aid ___, for they erode our national unity and diminish our resolve. They give ammunition to America’s enemies and pause to America’s friends”.

Take the test at morons.org. (I scored 9 out of 14, which isn’t bad).

Alec wrote [12.12.2001]: I achieved exactly the same score! … Looking at one or two of the mistakes I made, I feel like a bit of a moron myself. Ah well. Here is my own ‘favourite’ McCarthy moment, from one of his earlier speeches:

“The great difference between our Western Christian world and the atheistic Communist world is not political, ladies and gentlemen. It is moral. There are other differences, of course, but those could be reconciled. For instance, the Marxian idea of confiscating the land and factories and running the entire economy as a single enterprise is momentous. Likewise, Lenin’s invention of the one-party police state as a way to make Marx’s idea work is hardly less momentous. Stalin’s resolute putting across of these two ideas, of course, did much to divide the world. With only those differences, however, the East and the West could most certainly still live in peace.

“The real, basic difference, however, lies in the religion of immoralism - invented by Marx, preached feverishly by Lenin, and carried to unimaginable extremes by Stalin. This religion of immoralism, if the Red half of the world wins, … will more deeply wound and damage mankind than any conceivable economic or political system.”

Nick wrote [13.12.2001]: OK, then, who wrote this:

“There is a concern that the Internet could be used to commit crimes and that advanced encryption could disguise such activity. However, we do not provide the government with phone jacks outside our homes for unlimited wiretaps. Why, then, should we grant government the Orwellian capability to listen at will and in real time to our communications across the Web?

“The protections of the Fourth Amendment are clear. The right to protection from unlawful searches is an indivisible American value. Two-hundred-years of court decisions have stood in defense of this fundamental right. The state’s interest in effective crime-fighting should never vitiate the citizens’ Bill of Rights.

“The President has proposed that American software companies supply the government with decryption keys to high level encryption programs. Yet, European software producers are free to produce computer encryption codes of all levels of security without providing keys to any government authority. Purchasers of encryption software value security above all else. These buyers will ultimately choose airtight encryption programs that will not be American-made programs to which the U.S. government maintains keys.”

Answer: John Ashcroft, in 1997. Gosh, that was a long time ago…

PS: I got 12 out of 14 at morons.org! Thanks for the link.

Michaele wrote to the weblog the other day [3.12.2001]:

I just want to rant for a little while about how the Bush administration’s attitude about terrorism is currently being deployed to justify some horrendously incoherent foreign policy and the failure to take a morally brave and politically urgent stand on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Warning: this may be mildly incoherent, as I am a bit tired and angry.

We’ve all known since the W. administration first started talking about a “War on Terrorism” that the definition of terrorism and the list of terrorist organizations and their state sponsors was not based in any principled understanding of what counts as terror (versus, say, freedom fighting or legitimate acts of self-defense), but rather was based in political expediency: a combination of what our “allies” would tolerate, what was necessary to make “allies” of those governments in the first place, and what would justify only the sorts of military action that W. and his more hawkish advisors wanted to pursue anyway (that is, attacks on the Taliban and al Qaeda, and the Gulf War Redux, which is by all reports just around the corner). But until the past twenty-four hours, this peculiar understanding of who the enemy was did not seem to be wholly morally bankrupt (and has therefore had shocking credence among many of my friends and family, despite their varying degrees of distaste with the talk of war and revenge). Whatever objections one might have to war, however much W.’s frequent use of the term “evildoers” in public speeches made one think of a bad Saturday morning cartoon, it made some sense that people who have the capability and the desire to attack civilians across state borders need to be dealt with _in some manner_ because of the unpredictable threat that they pose to the security and stability of those who would be their intended targets.

Yet after W.’s speech in which he extended the moral authority of the U.S. to respond to the Taliban/al-Qaeda to Israel responding to yesterday’s horrific attacks, whatever slight moral promise that his administration’s understanding of terrorism held was completely betrayed. The administration has been flip-flopping since�January on its policy towards Israel, which has to make you wonder whether it is a matter of the much publicized conflicts between Powell and Rumsfeld/Cheney, or simply that no one with any authority in the W. administration has a clear idea of what to do in the Middle East (in part because they thought back in January that they could get away with a policy of selective American isolationism). Sometimes, the administration has condemned Israel’s ‘retaliatory’ attacks on Palestinians as going too far; sometimes it has justified Israel’s attacks. If you look carefully, there seems to be _some_ rhyme and reason to when the administration condemns Israel: when the attacks seem to be on Palestinians in general, involve a disproportionate use of military force, and result in Israeli occupation of�a particular area for some time. When the administration supports Israel, it is typically because the Israeli military has sought out specific targets and isolated them for attack (such as the Hamas leaders traveling by car a few weeks back).

However, last night’s speech by W. in essence authorizing Israel to respond forcefully to the “terrorist” attacks (in quotes because I recognize that who counts as a terrorist really does seem to be a matter of who those with the really big guns think is a terrorist, not because I do not personally condemn the attacks), combined with today’s utter _failure_ to condemn Israel’s attacks on the Palestinian Authority (which smack of war, and not war on terrorists) is a clear sign that the administration has finally abdicated any semblance of taking the moral high ground in its war on “terrorism”. One would think that W. would have learned from his father’s mistakes: taking a permissive ‘we support you-and we won’t interfere’ attitude towards how another state treats its minorities or the sovereignty of state boundaries only serves to firm up other states’ resolve in transgressing international norms. Iraq would not have invaded Kuwait without having the impression that the U.S. would not intervene. Sharon’s Israel could not have notched up the violence and the provocativeness of its attacks on Palestinians, Hamas, and now directly the Palestinian Authority without believing firmly that this would in no way jeopardize relations with its one true ally, the U.S. The absurdly self-congratulatory and self-interested definition of terror and terrorists that is sustaining U.S. actions in Afghanistan is now justifying Sharon’s brutal policy of trying to provoke Palestinians to become more and more violent, more and more politically extreme, so that he can sustain the popular support that keeps him in office, and pursue the policy of complete expulsion of the Palestinian people that he has clearly wanted from the beginning.

I don’t mean to downplay here how much we ought to be critical of how the U.S. attack on terrorism has been deployed to justify the specific way that the U.S. has responded to Sept. 11th. (As a U.S. citizen, I am deeply concerned about how the Justice Department and the executive branch are trying to increase their authority and the secrecy in which they might carry out their war). However, I think that the events of the past 24 hours call on us to be even more vigilant about how the justification of a war on terror is and can be deployed to justify the pursuit of violence over the pursuit of peace, the pursuit of relative homogeneity over the pursuit of pluralist political arrangements that aim at justice for all people living in and sharing a particular space. I originally was concerned about how the war on terror would justify the W. administration’s policies. It is clear that we also need to be concerned about how it divests the U.S. of any moral authority to condemn the clearly objectionable treatment of peoples like the Palestinians in the name of a war on terror.

I think that’s enough for now. Let the criticisms begin!

Thanks for this, and apologies for the delay in posting it on this page.

This cartoon and others by Kirk Anderson are available through the ZNet Cartoons Page.

A lot of the warmongers have been gloating over the last few days, not so much over the fall of Kabul to the Northern Alliance but at the peaceniks who opposed US-UK involvement. Having a good gloat is one of life’s most underrated pleasures, of course. As gloating goes, however, this has been pretty feeble stuff, and it is sad to report that the single most stupid column in this tradition was written by the once-admirable Christopher Hitchens in the Guardian.

It is true that many opposed the war because they feared that millions in Afghanistan would starve during the winter if the supply routes were cut off. If food convoys are able to enter the country safely again - and it is a big if - then this is marvellous news, for which we should be thankful. But the major reasons for opposing the British and the American participation in the war in Afghanistan remain as valid as they ever were, and in the midst of the mindless jubilation of the cheerleaders’ chorus, it is worth reminding ourselves what some of these are.

We oppose the clampdown on civil liberties licensed by Mr Bush’s “war on terror”, which has already led to the absurdities of the Patriot Act and to an executive order permitting extraordinary military tribunals in the US, and to Mr Blunkett’s proposals to allow indefinite detention without trial of terrorist suspects in the UK. We fear the open-ended nature of the Orwellian “War against Terror”, which permits the State Department to open and close hostilities against Iraq, Iran, Syria, Pakistan and various other regimes in the region as the mood takes them. We hate the double standards of US policy in the Middle East (and elsewhere), which underwrites the criminal regime in Saudi Arabia, supports the criminal behaviour of Israel in the Occupied Territories, and sponsors the crime of the UN sanctions regime against the people of Iraq. We have always thought, and continue to think, that the hunt for the perpetrators of the September 11 atrocities should be an international police operation, and that to insist on conceptualising the current crisis in military terms is to hand an important victory to the terrorists themselves. And we have never thought that destroying still more lives from the air - with the detestable use of “cluster bombs” and the inevitable civilian “collateral damage” - is any kind of appropriate response to the abominable destruction of the World Trade Center.

The record of the Northern Alliance in power, of course, is grim. It is not quite as grim as the record of the Taliban in power, but it is close. Since it is possible that the US will find ways to restrain these allies of theirs this time around, there is some reason, though not nearly as much reason as the mainstream press has managed to find, to think that things might have changed for the better in Kabul and Northern Afghanistan. In these times we do well to study the statements put out by Amnesty International or Oxfam, which sound important notes of caution; to continue to read the careful reports from Robert Fisk in the Independent; and to reflect on whether the sudden “collapse” of the Taliban may be no more than a prudent decision to fight from Afghanistan’s hills rather than attempt to defend fixed positions against relentless US bombardment.

When the military campaign brings peace and self-determination to the peoples of the Middle East, then the gloating at people like me can begin in earnest. But, please, not till then.

Here.

From The Onion:

LEXINGTON, KY.  According to friends and colleagues, for nearly two months now, Michael Schloegel has been acting like he was interested in Afghanistan long before Sept. 11.

“Ever since the attacks, he’s been making like he’s been a Central Asia expert for years,” said Lisa Reames, a longtime friend of the 30-year-old University of Kentucky graduate student. “Like, the other day, he was saying how after the Soviets left Afghanistan, an alliance of mujahideen set up a new government. Then, he said he remembers when the Soviet-backed government replaced President Barbrak Karmal with Muhammad Najibullah in ‘86. Yeah, fucking right. I’m sure he was aware of that when he was 15.”

Friends concede that the intelligent and well-read Schloegel may well have known something about Afghanistan prior to the crisis, but they say he is exaggerating the depth of this knowledge.

“I’m sure Mike knew more about [Afghanistan] than I do,” roommate Ben Ware said. “He probably knew what the capital was and maybe some real basic stuff about the Taliban. But I lived with him over the summer, and I don’t recall him ever going off about the history of the Northern Alliance like he does these days.”

Ware said Schloegel is often seen carrying books related to the crisis, including such current bestsellers as Karen Armstrong’s Islam: A Short History and Ahmed Rashid’s Taliban. Ware said he is “99.9 percent sure” that Schloegel purchased the books in recent weeks. …

One of the picture captions reads: “Above: A receipt shows an Oct. 30 purchase date for a book Schloegel claims to have bought three years ago.”

It’s time to address the issues that matter. From Online Pravda:

ISLAMIC BEARD SPECIALIST ANALYSES BIN LADEN
by Timothy Bancroft-Hinchey

“You can say a lot about a person from an analysis of his beard”, according to barber Nazirullah, in Peshawar, Pakistan.

Barber Nazirullah declares that “Osama Bin Laden is a leader and a fighter. He does not need luxury or comfort. He is a man who can lead a hard life for a long time. He is not worried about anything else”.

Barber Nazirullah says that a man’s beard, in his culture, can speak volumes about his character. “You can say a lot about someone from the way they grow their beard. Cuts depend on tribal custom and personal preference”. He states that his family have been barbers for three generations and that he understands intrinsically the psyche behind the beard.

“All Afghans have a beard. It is very important. You can only shave it off to go to a funeral or maybe for the first night with your wife”. Regarding Osama Bin Laden, barber Nazirullah is certain that “he is not worried about his beard like a young man. He lets it grow strongly and naturally. He is also greying, which shows a certain degree of wisdom”.

Concerning Taleban leader Mullah Omar, barber Nazirullah declares that “I have heard that he has a good beard. Some say that it grows a lot over his nose. Normally, religious people let it grow below the nose”.

Do you think that you understand — intrinsically or otherwise — the “psyche behind the beard”? There might, of course, be another reason as to why all Afghan men have a beard. Ahmed Rashid, in the fine book that Tony Blair’s supposed to be reading at the moment, Taliban: Militant Islam, Oil and Fundamentalism in Central Asia reminds us (pp.114-5) that:

“The plight of Afghanistan’s women often hid the fact that urban males did not fare much better under the Taliban, especially non-Pashtuns. All Kabul males were give just six weeks to grow a full beard, even though some of the ethnic groups such as the Hazaras have very limited beard growth. Beards could not be trimmed shorter than a man’s fist, leading to jokes that Afghanistan’s biggest import-export business was male facial hair and that men did not need visas to travel to Afghanistan, they just needed a beard. The religious police stood at street corners cutting off long hair and often beating culprits…”

If the reindeer is the counter-giraffe (see below), is the eponymous hero of the magnificent Njal’s Saga, a wise Icelander, famous for his inability to grow a beard - and mocked on that account by his enemies, best understood as the counter-Osama-bin-Laden? It’s a fascinating thought.

This, from the AP wire at Salon.com:

A judge ruled Thursday that a 15-year-old sophomore cannot form an anarchy club or wear T-shirts opposing the U.S. bombing of Afghanistan because it would disrupt school. Katie Sierra was suspended from Sissonville High School for three days for promoting the club. She was also told she could not wear T-shirts with messages such as: “When I saw the dead and dying Afghani children on TV, I felt a newly recovered sense of national security. God Bless America.” In a complaint filed with her mother, Sierra argued her right to free speech was being denied. Circuit Court Judge James Stucky agreed that free speech is “sacred” but he found that such rights are “tempered by the limitations that they … not disrupt the educational process.” Sierra said she’ll pursue the dispute.

Thanks to Naunihal for sending this my way.

Be careful! You can now be arrested at airports for travelling armed with copies of books by Karl Marx. Tariq Ali explains how, in yesterday’s Independent.

The peace movement is coming together all around me, except on “govchat”, my graduate department’s email chatlist. So I’ve just sent it a message. I’ve suppressed the identities of other participants in the conversation, since I don’t think it’s a public group, and I don’t mention aspects of US foreign policy in the Middle East not because I don’t think these are very important, but because one participant in the conversation who used to serve in the US military said he didn’t like reading “email diatribe after email diatribe condemning the evil imperialistic policies of America while my friends are overseas in harm’s way defending American lives”. So I’ve spared his feelings on this occasion at least.

“FIRST, the moral objection. All of us can construct arguments in our heads for why intervention in Afghanistan might be the “right thing to do”, all things considered, thinking especially of the issues which address our particular ethical concerns. All of us can (if we like to do this kind of thing) crunch the numbers in our own moral calculators and decide for ourselves how many civilian casualties are reasonable, defensible, inevitable or legitimate “collateral damage”. XX and YY have both mentioned, for example, the importance of “minimizing” civilian casualties. But this is a vague aspiration, like being “against sin” or “opposed to terrorism” — it’s one we all share. And it is a sad fact that the kind of war which _genuinely_ minimises civilian casualties is almost certainly not on offer. NATO spoke of the importance of minimizing civilian casualties during the Kosovo intervention, yet five hundred Yugoslav civilians were killed (this is the Human Rights Watch estimate), and Amnesty International’s report into the bombing concluded unambiguously that “civilian deaths could have been significantly reduced if NATO forces had fully adhered to the laws of war”. The NATO powers did not adhere to those laws during those eleven weeks (though they said they did), and I don’t think we have good reason to be confident that the Bush administration will during the present conflict, either. Those who think war is OK if civilian casualties are minimized should ask themselves whether they think the mechanisms are in place to secure this goal and whether they trust the US/NATO leaders to incorporate the strictest concern for civilian life into their military decisionmaking. Otherwise it will be a matter for _chance_ as to whether they get the kind of war they’d like to see, and this is obviously too important a matter to leave to this kind of chance. Six thousand-plus innocent people were blown to bits in last week’s atrocity; I don’t believe that any of us have enough assurance that the coming conflict won’t blow a few more to bits, and while I’m perfectly able to draw a distinction between the intended, foreseeable victims of terrorist attack and unintended, foreseeable victims of governmental response, this distinction doesn’t make me feel happy enough to sanction the blowing to bits of those who fall into the latter category. “SECOND, the political objection. We should be immensely suspicious of giving our backing to a war with such ill-defined parameters as this one. WW2 came to have clear war aims: Germany’s unconditional surrender; so did the Gulf War: the expulsion of Iraq from Kuwait; so did the Kosovo intervention: the removal of Serb military forces from Kosovo. When our governments announce their “war on terrorism” it is entirely unclear as to quite what it is that we are being asked to support. This is, in fact, where we get very close to “1984″ territory: Pakistan is our ally this week for putting pressure on the Taliban; next week it might become our enemy if the US administration chooses to remember that it was considered by Jane’s in 1997 as the “world’s leader in hosting international terrorist organisations”. Eastasia this week, Eurasia the next. Every move the administration makes on this front will be justified with reference to intelligence reports to which citizens don’t have access. Thus the governments say, and the media repeats, that OBL is the “prime suspect” for the 9/11 atrocity. Indeed, it may very well have been carried out on his instruction or by his minions — but we haven’t seen nearly enough evidence presented in the public sphere to persuade a sceptical citizen that this in fact is the case. Many of us much of the time are not wholly confident in the truth of the knowledge which national security organisations like the CIA, FBI, MI5 and MI6 help to generate — yet if this “war on terrorism” is allowed to get going and to escalate, we will repeatedly be asked to agree that acts of violence should be carried out in our names against up to sixty foreign regimes based on the selective leaking of state intelligence which will be almost impossible to verify. Our governments will almost certainly restrict our civil liberties and increase their surveillance over us as a part of this “war” which we are being told may go on for years. In short, we are being asked to put far too much of our trust in the most secretive, least accountable branches of government than is warranted as part of a war which the authorities are so far refusing to define with any precision, and which will therefore be defined as it unfolds entirely in accordance with their own short-term interests, which may very well not be ours.

“THIRD, the practical objections. XX is obviously right that “organized elite groups are [not] mere reflections of mass experiences or attitudes”, but do people who favour “war” think that they will be able to break the terrorist networks apart irrevocably and reduce over the long term the likelihood of terrorist attacks on Western civilian targets? Remember that the British state failed to defeat the Provisional IRA in a twenty-year plus conflict despite being able (i) to keep Belfast and Derry under permanent military occupation, (ii) having a rather small local population counted at most in the low hundreds of thousands even passively supportive of the IRA’s activities and (iii) perpetrating a number of severe human rights abuses. Perhaps the Brits were just incompetent, but it seems to me that it is wildly optimistic to think that US military activity in the Middle East will secure the defeat over the long term of fundamentalist terror groups, especially since the specifically anti-US stance of such groups turns on their ability to exploit an already-existing distrust and dislike of US interference in the region, which is likely to increase. Sometimes the media discourse about this crisis focuses on the so-called “rogue” regimes of Afghanistan, Iraq and Iran, as if they are the chief problem and the major culprits but it’s a very striking fact that most of the hijackers named by the US authorities were citizens of Egypt, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. For those who preach “jihad” against America it can only be music to their ears when Mr. Bush announces a “crusade” in return. And to pursue the IRA analogy a little further, the British made the biggest inroads into the IRA in the late 1970s period when it treated IRA activity as chiefly _criminal_ rather than military in nature. This was a period when the death toll of the Northern Irish troubles fell sharply and when the number of terrorists being jailed rose substantially. The IRA was under a great deal of pressure, and in the end it was only something as drastic as the self-slaughter of the hunger strikers which enabled it to rally republican support for the armed struggle in the 1980s. I don’t think we’ve yet had a sensible debate as to whether the effort against terrorism should be treated primarily as a matter for international policing rather than military sabre-rattling and intervention: President Bush pre-empted that debate when he immediately branded this crisis a “war against America” and got Mr Blair to make equally foolish public declarations. Of course there would be problems in organising such an international investigation — the Taliban wouldn’t have handed OBL over if a request for extradition had come from a UN body, either — but in general this seems to me an immensely preferable route to go down in formulating anti-terrorist strategy. Strengthen the institutions for international policing, strengthen the International Criminal Court. Build genuinely multilateral institutions. And introduce better airline security and — crucially — a more transparent international banking system.

“Each of these three sets of objections seems to me convincing. Together they are overwhelming.

“FINALLY: I’m sure that a part of the reason why I feel so strongly opposed to war in Afghanistan this time around is that I made the mistake of thinking the NATO intervention in Kosovo was a reasonable one at the time, yet the arguments for that war still seem to me to be more persuasive than the arguments for this one. Back in 1999 I believed too much of what I was reading in the US/UK press and hearing from the politicians, and I judged there was more merit in the arguments of the various liberal humanitarian interventionists than I do now. Reflecting on and reading about that episode subsequently changed my opinion, and I now feel ashamed for having argued a pro-war position with friends and colleagues. (Relevant factors which changed my mind included my shifting evaluation of the West’s disregard for international law, NATO’s use of cluster bombs and depleted uranium weapons, the avoidable killing of civilians, the course of NATO diplomacy in the period of Rambouillet and the demands placed on Yugoslavia, together with my persistent disinclination to believe that the Chinese Embassy was attacked owing to out-of-date maps being used by US planners.) So some of you may feel that I am overcompensating this time around in confidently rejecting a conflict which I fear is about to start and throwing myself into the peace movement here in Britain, which is now, I am pleased to report, growing fast. I feel more scared about what Mr Bush’s war is going to do to the citizens of the Western democracies and to the peoples of the Middle East than I feel threatened by international terrorists (and yes, growing up in London, bomb scares were part of everyday life). There are a lot of us who share the same feeling. Given that this is supposed to be a war on terror, that’s not good.

“The War on Terrorism is like the War on Drugs: the US Government isn’t going to win it, and it has the potential to do a vast amount of harm at home and abroad on the way to not being won.”

Reactions?

Michaele writes [23.9.01]: I rather enjoyed reading this. I am hoping that the peace movement here in Seattle receives a well-needed boost when students get back to the UW [University of Washington] in a week. In the meantime, I have been rabble-rousing in email form, and pleasantly surprised that so far my friend Peter is the only one who thinks war is a sensible idea. (Of course, there’s also the parents - but I have long since�given up on trying to persuade them to change their politics). Thanks for speaking for peace on govchat - from previous email conversations I’ve participated in, I can imagine that your voice was well-needed!

* If you’d like to receive occasional email messages from me collating information about anti-war vigils, protests, rallies and other activities in London and Oxford, tell me. The first listings went out today.

* Utah Senator Orrin Hatch has been writing a song about the events of the last week, called “Americans United”. I don’t think it has been recorded yet, but you can follow Orrin’s career in patriotic song and listen to examples of his work on two valuable webpages here and here. Thanks to Michaele for sending me this important information, and to Raj for the URLs. (Raj says: “Best thing is if you play it backwards, very slowly, you can hear a ghostly voice intoning all eleven Theses on Feuerbach“.)

* And do go and admire MIT’s homepage, now festooned with CND logos. (Thanks to Rob for this).

At times of political crisis it is usually a good idea to reread George Orwell’s 1946 essay on “Politics and the English Language”. It is full of good advice, most of which I try to follow most of the time, although Orwell would no doubt dislike the number of foreign phrases I contrive to slip into my prose, and the length of some of my sentences. What a joy it is, then, on this occasion to come across these particular words:

“When one watches some tired hack on the platform mechanically repeating the familiar phrases — bestial, atrocities, iron heel, bloodstained tyranny, free peoples of the world, stand shoulder to shoulder — one often has a curious feeling that one is not watching a live human being but some kind of dummy: a feeling which suddenly becomes stronger at moments when the light catches the speaker’s spectacles and turns them into blank discs which seem to have no eyes behind them. And this is not altogether fanciful. A speaker who uses that kind of phraseology has gone some distance toward turning himself into a machine. The appropriate noises are coming out of his larynx, but his brain is not involved as it would be if he were choosing his words for himself. If the speech he is making is one that he is accustomed to make over and over again, he may be almost unconscious of what he is saying, as one is when one utters the responses in church. And this reduced state of consciousness, if not indispensable, is at any rate favorable to political conformity.”

It is marvellous to find the clich� of the hour, “stand shoulder to shoulder”, in Orwell’s list, but the description that follows also speaks to the present moment. There are good reasons why W. sometimes comes across as a dummy rather than as a live human being, or why we feel that he might not be choosing his own words for himself, but I suspect that it is Mr Blair who is further along the path to transforming himself into a machine. (W. by contrast will always remain a cipher, a middle initial, or perhaps just an uncomplicated tool). Whereas W. needs to concentrate hard in order to get his words out at all, Blair can effortlessly disengage his thinking from his speaking parts, and is able to appear oblivious to the fact that his conversation in filmed interviews in quite inane. (While he does not sound as if he is “uttering the responses”, he always sounds as if he is in church, which is why he is the vicar of St Albion parish). Neither man is very good with verbs, the one because he cannot really talk, the other because he found it politically astute to dispense with them a long time ago.

Bob wrote [20.9.01]: “Am I the only one who finds this deeply problematic? I can understand that being a Sikh is a tough (and dangerous) deal right now in America, and a little education never hurts. The problem that I have with this is that this poster seems to imply that it is fine to beat up other turban-wearing folks who aren’t Sikhs.”

David Hare’s 1993 play The Absence of War was in large part about the inability of the Labour Party to win elections. It’s a more interesting and enduring piece of writing than the critics generally took it to be, and I might return to it in future weblog entries. But I thought of it the other day. There’s a scene in the play where George Jones, the fictional leader of the Labour Party (played by John Thaw in the National Theatre’s production) is describing the Conservative Prime Minister, Charles Kendrick.

“I’ve watched him. ‘Massive troop movements’. That’s another favourite of his. He’ll comment on any war. Anywhere. However obscure. I think, why’s he making a statement about some piddling little country ten thousand miles away? And then he’ll say, ‘Overnight there have been massive troop movements.’ He loves them. (He laughs, happy.) After a while, you notice these things.”

It’s not too hard to spot when politicians and journalists are getting a similar frisson of pleasure out of their oh-so-brave words in the current crisis. W. yesterday said he wanted Bin Laden “dead or alive”, and TV reporters in Britain seem to get excited when they talk about secret top-level meetings of the “Cobra group”. I haven’t heard of any “massive troop movements”. But it can only be a matter of time.