Local and global

Posted on May 4, 2012 by Antigone1984.com

Editorial note: If you have not yet read our mission statement above, please do so in order that you can put our blogs in context. 

 4 May 2012

Do countries exist in a globalised word?

This is the question posed by Dutch commentator Joris Luyendijk in the UK’s Guardian newspaper today.

Is there “such a thing as a country anyway in a globalised world?” he asks.

Luyendijk has been travelling the length and breadth of the UK to find out how ordinary people view the local election campaign, which ended yesterday.

“In Wick, in the far north of Scotland, a woman described how she used to take out car insurance from a local agent. He would come to her house every month to collect payments and that is how it worked for decades. These days, she said: “I have to ring a call centre in India and they make you listen to music as you are put you on hold and then you have to deal with somebody you don’t know, and every time you call it’s somebody different.” After losing his job, she continued, the insurance agent had found a new one at Tesco, the retail group that had put so many local shops out of business. “You can’t help going there,” she said with what sounded like guilt. “It’s too … too convenient.” She paused for a moment, then added with a firmness that struck me as peculiarly British: “But I have never stopped the milkman.”

And Luyvendijk’s basic finding as regards the reaction of local people to the elections? Surprise, surprise, the local elections have stirred up a great deal of apathy throughout the land. Ordinary people don’t think that they will make any difference to their lives.

Antigone1984:

As often happens, the verdict of ordinary people is spot on. As usual, they will gain diddly-squat from these elections. The elections are exclusively about reshuffling relatively lucrative local government positions among the local micro-elites of the political parties. They have zilch to do with benefiting the electorate.

The election campaign ended yesterday with voters going to the polls yesterday. The poll involves a patchwork of local authorities of all sorts. However, not all local authorities are up for election on this occasion.

As we go to press, the votes have not yet been fully counted but it looks as if the worse-than-useless policy-free opposition Labour Party – simply as a result of being out of government and hence not being tainted by the putrefaction of office –  has scored huge gains at the expense of the ruling coalition of Tories and Liberal Democrats, who have paid the cost of the austerity they have imposed on the population at large while finding room to introduced tax cuts for the mega-rich.

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 You might perhaps care to view some of our earlier posts.  For instance:

 1. Why? or How? That is the question (3 Jan 2012)

2. Das Vierte Reich/The Fourth Reich (6 Feb 2012)

3. The shoddiest possible goods at the highest possible prices (2 Feb 2012)

4. Where’s the beef? Ontology and tinned meat (31 Jan 2012)

5. What would Gandhi have said? (30 Jan 2012)

Every so often we shall change this sample of previously published posts.

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Posted in UK | Tagged , , , | Leave a comment

International law = imperialism

Posted on May 3, 2012 by Antigone1984.com

Editorial note: If you have not yet read our mission statement above, please do so in order that you can put our blogs in context. 

 3 May 2012

“Imperialism didn’t end. Now we call it international law.”

This is the headline over an article by commentator George Monbiot in the UK’s Guardian newspaper on 1 May 2012.

 “A one-sided justice seeks weaker states punished as rich nations and giant corporations project their power across the world.”

According to Monbiot, “decolonisation did not did not take place until the former colonial powers and the empires of capital on whose behalf they operated had established other means of retaining control.”

He argues that global institutions such as the IMF, the World Bank and the International Criminal Court were specifically designed in such a way as to promote the particular interests of the great powers.

“If you run a small, weak nation, you may be subject to the full force of international law; if you run a powerful nation, you have nothing to fear.”

Alongside these nominally international but in reality pro-western institutions, the great powers have appropriated an additional global military and policing role that does not stop short of rendition (delivering opponents into the hands of brutal dictators so that they can be tortured with impunity).

Monbiot points out: “The bid for power, oil and spheres of influence that Bush and Blair launched in Mesopotamia, using the traditional camouflage of the civilising mission; the colonial war still being fought in Afghanistan, 199 years after the Great Game began; the global policing functions the great powers have arrogated to themselves; the one-sided justice dispensed by international law. All these suggest that imperialism never ended, but merely mutated into new forms.”

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 You might perhaps care to view some of our earlier posts.  For instance:

 1. Why? or How? That is the question (3 Jan 2012)

2. Das Vierte Reich/The Fourth Reich (6 Feb 2012)

3. The shoddiest possible goods at the highest possible prices (2 Feb 2012)

4. Where’s the beef? Ontology and tinned meat (31 Jan 2012)

5. What would Gandhi have said? (30 Jan 2012)

Every so often we shall change this sample of previously published posts.

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Posted in Politics, Torture, UK, UN, USA | Tagged , , , | Leave a comment

Parsnips

Posted on May 2, 2012 by Antigone1984.com

Editorial note: If you have not yet read our mission statement above, please do so in order that you can put our blogs in context. 

 

2 May 2012

Fine words butter no parsnips.

This is the contemporary version of a an epigram first recorded in 1639: “Faire words butter noe parsnips”.

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 You might perhaps care to view some of our earlier posts.  For instance:

 1. Why? or How? That is the question (3 Jan 2012)

2. Das Vierte Reich/The Fourth Reich (6 Feb 2012)

3. The shoddiest possible goods at the highest possible prices (2 Feb 2012)

4. Where’s the beef? Ontology and tinned meat (31 Jan 2012)

5. What would Gandhi have said? (30 Jan 2012)

Every so often we shall change this sample of previously published posts.

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Posted in Literature | Tagged | Leave a comment

Not a happy bunny

Posted on May 1, 2012 by Antigone1984.com

Editorial note: If you have not yet read our mission statement above, please do so in order that you can put our blogs in context. 

 1 Μay 2012

῾Εξηκοντούτης  Διονύσιος  ἐνθάδε  κεῖμαι

Ταρσεύς ,  οὐ γήμας .  αἴθε δὲ μήδ᾽ ὁ πατήρ .

Here I lie, Dionysius of Tarsus, sixty years old. I never married and I wish my father had not either.

Epitaph from the Greek Anthology

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 You might perhaps care to view some of our earlier posts.  For instance:

 1. Why? or How? That is the question (3 Jan 2012)

2. Das Vierte Reich/The Fourth Reich (6 Feb 2012)

3. The shoddiest possible goods at the highest possible prices (2 Feb 2012)

4. Where’s the beef? Ontology and tinned meat (31 Jan 2012)

5. What would Gandhi have said? (30 Jan 2012)

Every so often we shall change this sample of previously published posts.

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Posted in Greece, Literature | Tagged | Leave a comment

Flower blossom

Posted on April 30, 2012 by Antigone1984.com

Editorial note: If you have not yet read our mission statement above, please do so in order that you can put our blogs in context. 

 30 April 2012

Letting a hundred flowers blossom and a hundred schools of thought contend is the policy for promoting the progress of the arts and the sciences and a flourishing socialist culture in our land. Different forms and styles in art should develop freely and different schools in science should contend freely. We think that it is harmful to the growth of art and science if administrative measures are used to impose one particular style of art or school of thought and to ban another. Questions of right and wrong in the arts and sciences should be settled through free discussion in artistic and scientific fields. They should not be settled in summary fashion.

Mao Tse-tung (1893-1976).  Extract from “On the Correct Handling of Contradictions Among the People” (27 February 1957). 1st pocket edition, pp. 49-50.

Antigone1984:

A beautiful theory.

You don’t have to be a Communist to subscribe to it.

But in practice?

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 You might perhaps care to view some of our earlier posts.  For instance:

 1. Why? or How? That is the question (3 Jan 2012)

2. Das Vierte Reich/The Fourth Reich (6 Feb 2012)

3. The shoddiest possible goods at the highest possible prices (2 Feb 2012)

4. Where’s the beef? Ontology and tinned meat (31 Jan 2012)

5. What would Gandhi have said? (30 Jan 2012)

Every so often we shall change this sample of previously published posts.

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Posted in China, Literature | Tagged , , | Leave a comment

All the president’s men

Posted on April 29, 2012 by Antigone1984.com

Editorial note: If you have not yet read our mission statement above, please do so in order that you can put our blogs in context. 

 29 April 2012

FROM THE YACOUBIAN BUILDING TO TAHRIR SQUARE AND BACK

You can tell the revolution is in trouble in Egypt when the henchmen of the ousted dictator Hosni Mubarak are hurtling back into the limelight. Candidates for the forthcoming presidential election include Mubarak’s Prime Minister, Ahmed Shafiq, and Mubarak’s onetime Foreign Minister, Amr Moussa, who later became Secretary-General of the feckless Arab League. Even Mubarak’s old spymaster Omar Suleiman threw his hat into the ring before being disqualified for not having obtained the requisite number of supporter signatures. However, it is widely thought that Suleiman’s candidature was simple a ruse to enable the Election Commission to parade its neutrality by banning Suleiman at the same time that it vetoed the candidatures of two much more serious Islamist contenders,  Khairat El-Shater of the Muslim Brotherhood and salafist preacher Hazem Abu Ismail. It is more than likely that the Election Commission is under the thumb of the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces, which has replaced Mubarak as the body which pulls all the strings in Egypt. Unsurprisingly, the head of the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces is Field Marshal Mohamed Hussein Tantawi, Mubarak’s Defence Minister. The remit given to the Election Commission by the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces can hardly be other than to weed out any strong candidate for president who might pose a threat to the political supremacy of the armed forces and to the mega-rich military-industrial complex which they control.

So Mubarak has gone – at least for now. But he is being replaced – by Mubarak’s men! Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose. So much for the revolution and the Arab Spring. Goodbye Tahrir Square, welcome back to the Yacoubian Building.

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 You might perhaps care to view some of our earlier posts.  For instance:

 1. Why? or How? That is the question (3 Jan 2012)

2. Das Vierte Reich/The Fourth Reich (6 Feb 2012)

3. The shoddiest possible goods at the highest possible prices (2 Feb 2012)

4. Where’s the beef? Ontology and tinned meat (31 Jan 2012)

5. What would Gandhi have said? (30 Jan 2012)

Every so often we shall change this sample of previously published posts.

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Posted in Egypt | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Newton and Lennon

Posted on April 28, 2012 by Antigone1984.com

Editorial note: If you have not yet read our mission statement above, please do so in order that you can put our blogs in context. 

 28 April 2012

Any two bodies in the universe attract each other with a force that is directly proportional to their masses and inversely proportional to the square of their distance apart.

Law of Gravitation. Formulated by Isaac Newton (1642-1727), English physicist, mathematician and astronomer. Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge.

Those whose physics is not up to speed can rest easy. We are not about to expatiate any further on the physics of gravitation.

We have cited Newton in order to contrive a – some might say far-fetched – comparison between the law of gravitation and what is currently happening on the military front in East Asia.

The drums of war are beating.

Two mighty economic and nuclear powers are currently coming closer and closer to each other in the eastern Pacific area and their increasing proximity is not at all pacific.

This week the USA and China held their annual “Balikatan” military exercise in the waters of the South China Sea. Balikatan means “shoulder to shoulder” in the standardized Tagalog that is the Filipino language.

Sovereignty between most of the islands in the South China Sea is disputed between the various states that encircle the sea, namely Taiwan, the Philippines, Vietnam, Malaya and China. Although all the islands in question are tiny, some are situated close to valuable oil and gas deposits to which those with sovereignty can claim extraction rights.

One Balikatan exercise involved an amphibious assault by American and Filipino troops to recapture an island supposedly taken by “militants”. Another involved the mock recapture of a Filipino oil rig that had, for the purposes of the exercise, fallen into “hostile” hands off the coast of Palawan island.

Commenting on the exercise, Lieutenant General Juancho Sabban is reported to have said: “Never was China mentioned in our planning and execution.”

There you have it. I have stopped beating my wife.

It was also reported this week that China has approved the construction of a supply ship dock in the Paracel Islands, an archipelago which is occupied by China but whose sovereignty is disputed with Vietnam.

Meanwhile, America is stationing troops at a new base in northern Australia. Diplomatically, the USA is rushing post-haste to forge military or diplomatic alliances with all the states that surround China.

If you corner a rat, you know what it does. Even a worm turns.

Really, you couldn’t make it up.

We have no brief for the Chinese. A brutal dictatorship at home, an increasingly belligerent self-seeking Bismarckian Realpolitik abroad.

However, given their experiences in recent history, the Americans should know better.

Unfortunately, as US-Spanish philosopher George Santayana (1863-1952) said, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”

The Americans were defeated in Vietnam, were kicked out of Iraq and are now on the cusp of retreating from Afghanistan.

So what do they do?  They move their guns elsewhere. This is a nation that cannot exist without war.

We say that not with any intrinsic feeling of enmity to the United States but with an immense feeling of regret and sadness. This is the nation, above all nations, that had the power to do so much good in the world but which fluffed its chance.

John Lennon, the Beatle murdered at the entrance to his apartment building, The Dakota, next to Central Park in Manhattan’s Upper West Side, sang that we should all “Give peace a chance”.

Forget it.

The pessimistic George Santayana has the last word : “Only the dead have seen the end of war.”

Amen to that.

To conclude, as we started, with Newton. There is only a finite distance and time before a clash occurs between bodies which come closer and closer to each other.

WELCOME TO THE THIRD WORLD WAR.

We reproduce below the post we published on 11 January 2012.

Obama shoots from the hip: no more wars

11 January 2012

The least convincing forecast in the history of politico-military predictions appeared in an editorial in the UK Guardian newspaper on 6 January 2012.

The editorial began: “There were two unmistakable messages in the defence review outlined yesterday by Barack Obama in his appearance at the Pentagon briefing room.The first was that America is never going to fight wars like Iraq or Afghanistan again.”

Among political predictions of all time, this must surely be the least credible.

Believe that and you will believe anything.

This message is being put about by America as the nine-year US occupation of Iraq is just ending, the Afghan and Somali wars are in full swing, the US war in Pakistan is just beginning, America’s undercover operations in Yemen show no let-up, and the  US/Israeli attack on Iran is about to begin. As if that were not enough, the US is shifting its focus from Europe (see * below) to China, as it cosies up to the dictatorship in Burma, stations troops at a new base in northern Australia and beefs up its presence in the Philippines.

And did the Americans learn anything from the earlier defeat in their nine-year war in Vietnam (1964-1973)?

Zilch.

As if recognizing the untrustworthiness of Obama’s defence message, the  Guardian editorialist adds: “Turning the page on a decade of war (the president’s words) may not be an entirely accurate description of a power that will spend more on its forces than the next ten countries combined.”

Correct.

However, the editorial goes on to say that “the signal that the US will not fight another expensive, troop-intensive counter-insurgency campaign is clear enough”.

Really?

Words fail us.

Good night.

* The editorial defines the second message of Obama’s defence review as follows: “…the message is that Europe’s collective defence is up to Europe, and its forces have to stand alone.”

—————–

 You might perhaps care to view some of our earlier posts.  For instance:

 1. Why? or How? That is the question (3 Jan 2012)

2. Das Vierte Reich/The Fourth Reich (6 Feb 2012)

3. The shoddiest possible goods at the highest possible prices (2 Feb 2012)

4. Where’s the beef? Ontology and tinned meat (31 Jan 2012)

5. What would Gandhi have said? (30 Jan 2012)

Every so often we shall change this sample of previously published posts.

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Posted in China, Military, USA | Tagged , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Calling MPs to account

Posted on April 27, 2012 by Antigone1984.com

Editorial note: If you have not yet read our mission statement above, please do so in order that you can put our blogs in context. 

27 April 2012

Today, at the request of UK political activist and former Green Party member Dave Bradney, we are publishing details of a campaign to improve the local accountability of UK Members of Parliament.

UK citizens or residents who want to sign the accompanying petition can click on the hyperlink at the bottom.

The two parties in the UK’s current coalition government are the Conservatives, the dominant partner, and the Liberal Democrats. Hence it is sometimes referred to, not without irony, as the “ConDem” coalition. These parties have shared power since parliamentary elections in May 2010 on the basis of an agreement cobbled together between themselves shortly after the electorate had denied either party an overall majority in parliament.

PETITION TO IMPROVE ACCOUNTABILITY OF UK MEMBERS OF PARLIAMENT

The Coalition Government’s “junior partners”, who put the “Dem” in ConDem, are arguing that reform of the House of Lords should go ahead, without recourse to a referendum, because it was part of the original Coalition Agreement.

 

If this argument is valid, they should also be held to account for a further provision of the Coalition Agreement of May 2010, which stated: “The parties will bring forward early legislation to introduce a power of recall, allowing voters to force a by-election where an MP was found to have engaged in serious wrongdoing and having had a petition calling for a by-election signed by 10% of his or her constituents.”

 

This interesting provision, dreamt up perhaps unwisely two years ago when MPs’ expenses scandals such as residence “flipping” and duckhouses were much fresher in the public consciousness, should definitely not be allowed to wither on the vine, as I daresay the Con-spirators would prefer.

 

It is being suggested that there will be little fresh parliamentary business for the next couple of years, because the government has got on with its mayhem so swiftly and no further Coalition Agreement can be created, as the two partners try to look more distinctive in the buildup to the next election. So there should be no shortage of parliamentary time to implement the remaining Coalition commitments, such as this one.

 

I have created an HM Government e-petition calling on the Coalition Government to legislate so that its proposals for MP recall can come into force before the end of this administration. I would be very pleased if any UK citizen or resident reading this would follow the link below and sign up. Also, please feel free to publicise this initiative in any way that seems appropriate.

 http://epetitions.direct.gov.uk/petitions/33163

Dave Bradney

davebradney@headweb.co.uk

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 You might perhaps care to view some of our earlier posts.  For instance:

 1. Why? or How? That is the question (3 Jan 2012)

2. Das Vierte Reich/The Fourth Reich (6 Feb 2012)

3. The shoddiest possible goods at the highest possible prices (2 Feb 2012)

4. Where’s the beef? Ontology and tinned meat (31 Jan 2012)

5. What would Gandhi have said? (30 Jan 2012)

Every so often we shall change this sample of previously published posts.

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Posted in Politics, UK | Tagged , , , | Leave a comment

Posh boys

Posted on April 26, 2012 by Antigone1984.com

Editorial note: If you have not yet read our mission statement above, please do so in order that you can put our blogs in context. 

26 April 2012

THE PRICE OF MILK

The British Tory Prime Minister David Cameron must be used by now to being taunted by his opponents as an upper-class toff whose wealth and background cut him off from the everyday concerns of the ordinary citizens whose lives he regulates.

But this week, together with his treasury secretary (chancellor of the exchequer) George Osborne, Cameron was the butt of a full-frontal attack by a member of his own back bench, Tory MP Nadine Dorries, who said:

“Unfortunately, I think that not only are Cameron and Osborne two posh boys who don’t know the price of milk, but they are two arrogant posh boys who show no remorse, no contrition and no passion to want to understand the lives of others – and that is their real crime.”

David Cameron (46), son of a stockbroker, is a direct descendant of King William IV, who reigned from 1830 to 1837. After Eton College, the most prestigious public (ie private) school in Britain, he completed his education at Brasenose College at Oxford University, where he belonged to the upper-crust Bullingdon Club ( the “Buller”) whose members hold lavish banquets tricked out in swanky formal attire and then traditionally trash the establishment in which they are eating.

George Osborne (40) is the son of Sir Peter Osborne, who co-founded the fabric and wallpaper firm of Osborne & Little.  George attended St Paul’s public (ie private) school at Barnes in London and then went up to Magdalen College at Oxford University, where he too belonged to the Bullingdon Club.

Footnote: Nadine Dorries launched her attack on David  Cameron and George Osborne on Monday 23 April (St George’s Day, as it happened). By Tuesday she had disappeared.  Dorries was supposed to be attending Treasury Question Time in the House of Commons on that day to hear Osborne answer a question from her on interest rates. She failed to show up. According to Guardian parliamentary sketch writer Simon Hoggart, “Nadine had become a non-person”.

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 You might perhaps care to view some of our earlier posts.  For instance:

 1. Why? or How? That is the question (3 Jan 2012)

2. Das Vierte Reich/The Fourth Reich (6 Feb 2012)

3. The shoddiest possible goods at the highest possible prices (2 Feb 2012)

4. Where’s the beef? Ontology and tinned meat (31 Jan 2012)

5. What would Gandhi have said? (30 Jan 2012)

Every so often we shall change this sample of previously published posts.

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Posted in Politics, UK | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Arbeit macht frei

Posted on April 26, 2012 by Antigone1984.com

Editorial note: If you have not yet read our mission statement above, please do so in order that you can put our blogs in context. 

25 April 2012

Sign over the entrance to British internment camp in Kenya in the 1950s: Labour and freedom. Almost 1½ millon men, women and children belonging to the Kikuyu tribe were interned in these camps, thousands of them being beaten to death, tortured or hanged as the British army stamped out the Kikuyu-supported Mau Mau rebellion against Britain’s imperialist colonial rule.

Sign over the entrances to the Nazi concentration camps at Dachau in Bavaria and Auschwitz (Oświęcim) in Poland: Arbeit macht frei (Work liberates).  Huge numbers of victims of the Nazis, particularly Jews, were used as slave labour in such camps, vast numbers also being gassed to death in a programme of officially approved genocide. This blog believes that the systematic slaughter of 6 million Jews by the Nazis in World War II was the greatest crime in the history of humanity.

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 You might perhaps care to view some of our earlier posts.  For instance:

 1. Why? or How? That is the question (3 Jan 2012)

2. Das Vierte Reich/The Fourth Reich (6 Feb 2012)

3. The shoddiest possible goods at the highest possible prices (2 Feb 2012)

4. Where’s the beef? Ontology and tinned meat (31 Jan 2012)

5. What would Gandhi have said? (30 Jan 2012)

Every so often we shall change this sample of previously published posts.

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Posted in Germany, Israel, UK | Tagged , , , , , , | Leave a comment