Goodbye, for now

Thanks to everyone who commented on my previous post. Your comments make sense. However, I find I have absolutely no interest in maintaining this blog.

I have created another blog, at redstarcoven.com. I am not sure whether I will maintain it or not - it's more of a sandbox than a finished product.

However, if you're interested, you're welcome to subscribe to the feed.

Time to retire this blog?

I started this blog five years ago, as a first excited foray into creating content online. I had high hopes for it: I saw the potential of web 2.0, and wanted to be part of it. I imagined using the blog to explore ideas - I would write something that occurred to me, and the conversation would continue in the comments and in other blogs.

As you may have noticed, I haven't updated it for a while.

This is largely because it doesn't pay. I never expected to make money from it, but I did hope to be repaid in discourse, in feeling like I was part of a conversation with others who were prepared to think critically about the world and develop ideas.

With a few notable exceptions, this hasn't really happened. As Stephen Fry and others have noted, being able to comment online brings out the worst in people. Most of the comments I have had tend to be abusive. I have also had threats of violence emailed to me. There are slanderous posts about me on a number of other blogs, set up by anonymous right wingers.

I am not too concerned by this per se, but blogging is time consuming and hard work, and if all I get for it is abuse from stupid, lazy and cowardly people I am not really interested.

I am sure it's my own fault as well - I have probably blogged my way into a corner by writing about the subjects that get the most hits, instead of ignoring the stats and writing what I like. I found it disappointing that well-constructed, properly researched and detailed analysis always got the least interest. Angry posts banged out in 20 minutes attracted the most attention. There seems to not be much of an appetite for nuance on the Internet.

Another factor in my lack of interest in the blog is that I am having my need for discourse fulfilled elsewhere. For the first time, I am studying - I am doing a Masters in industrial relations - so I am able to develop ideas and get valuable feedback on them there.

What it comes down to is that I no longer feel this blog, as an online presence, expresses very much about me. Maybe I need a relaunch. Maybe I need to start again with another blog. Or maybe I should give up on the whole thing.

Comments and ideas welcome.

Why I will not wear a poppy

This an an excellent article by Ian Bell, and one I wholeheartedly agree with.

When they marched the soldiers of France to the front after the slaughter at Verdun, country boys managed a country joke.

A slaughter beyond anything in Britain’s history had just taken place. Young men, rank upon rank, had been put to a wall of cauterising defensive fire, like so much daub stuck to a fracture in a theory.

And one young poilu, dragging his blue coat and his cheap boots through the sucking mud, said this: “Baaa!” Then all the yokels, with all their instinctual back-country meadow loyalty, began to say it, just for a last laugh. “Baaa!” they sang. Thousands then joined in, up and down the lines. The French troops knew, knew precisely, what their sacrifice really meant on the chopping board of policy and patriotism. Peasants are like that.

Remembrance Day started after the carnage and slaughter of World War One. The best way to honour the dead - including those dying today in Afghanistan - is to end wars and bring soldiers home. The current poppy appeal fetishises martyrdom. If you want to remember the dead, wear a white poppy.

in reference to: Why I will not wear a poppy - Herald Scotland | Comment | Ian Bell (view on Google Sidewiki)

Twitter comes into its own at the G20

What is twitter for?

I have always been perplexed by twitter. I have had an account for sometime, but only recently started using it. After all, what's it for, really? What do you post? Why would anyone care? Who do you follow?

This morning, though, I am really beginning to understand its utility. There are massive protests and demonstrations planned in London for the G20, today and over the next few days. Organisers are expecting the biggest turnout since the protests against the Iraq war, police have been warning of chaos, bank workers are dressing down and Lloyds and HBOS are closing their branches for the day.

And a whole lot of the righteaous folks I follow on twitter are on the demonstration. I am getting blow by blow updates, with pictures, like this:

ageofstupid: It transpires that the tube isn't designed for carrying 2 metre giant countdown clocks to climate justice rallies.

RedPeppermag:Spotted: "Polite Notice: Elderly peaceful protester. Please handle with care

RedPeppermag: Walking with Belgian steelworkers on Emankment. Union workers from all over Europe here. G20 week has begun

I am clearly not the only one:

taghioff: This is the first time I have followed a demonstration as it unfolds via Twitter. And from the other side of the world, on a train... #G20

This is raw news, unmediated, as it happens - and this is important, given the state of the media as pointed out in Nick Davies' excellent Flat Earth News.

The fact that I can pick up these messages on my BlackBerry makes me feel involved, where ever I am, and on my laptop I have twitter integrated into Gnome Do (on Linux) so that I get notifications flashed on the screen as they come in. It's really quite exciting! Twitter has never been this busy for me.

As for twitter, you can follow me here, if you're interested.

Changing political perspectives

Yesterday I had a conversation with some one who has been reading my blog for some time. He says that I have 'mellowed out', that I am not as radical as I used to be.

Am I just getting old?

After all, my first ever post was a rant against structure and organised politics in favour of inchoate rage.

I don't think my politics has really changed: essentially, I am still a libertarian communist, though I am not mad about labels. But what has changed is the way I apply my politics.

Firstly, I am a lot more strategic: I have decided that small victories are better than glorious defeats. Victory builds confidence and political skill. Glorious defeat produces narcissistic martyrdom cults.

One definite change is that, unlike my younger self, I now believe very strongly in accountable structures. As Jo Freeman famously points out, if you don't make political structures explicit, implicit ones form, and these are very difficult to challenge. So while meetings might be 'boring', as I argued in Gnostic Liberation Theology, we are unlikely to change the world without them.

I don't discount the importance of magick in politics, but I have realised that there is a lot of hard work that needs to be done too.

Also, I am learning to Open Source my political engagement, and overcome the sectarianism that is so often a feature of the Left. I think libertarian communists ideas are good, but there are plenty of people who don't - many of them passionate, very knowledgeable and committed to social change. I am a democrat, after all, and most people disagree with me.

Maybe I am wrong, and they are right.

But I think we are both right. This might be screamingly obvious to the rest of you, but I have only just noticed that progressive politics is a continuum, rather than an absolute. Anything that pulls the centre towards the Left should be encouraged, so that the hegemony becomes more progressive. An Obama victory is good, because it opens a lot of progressive political space in the US, but its not the end. Anarchist riots on the streets of Athens are good too, though they are unlikely to change anything permanently unless they are able to build coalitions with people less radical than themselves and push a political platform that a majority would find acceptable.

Another change is that I find myself (in my job for a union) actively working with politicians. Some politicians are the absolute scum of the earth, many are mediocrities, but there are a few who are genuine, committed people trying to make things better for their constituents. They are in all parties, and it seems sensible to work with them, especially where there is an ideological or strategic overlap.

A few years ago, I thought that anything that didn't happen on the street or in the workplace was irrelevant, and that voting was a waste of time. I still feel that getting sucked into the electoral circus, as the three big parties triangulate around the same positions, is a distraction from real politics, but I now think that voting is important.

Voting changes the context that other political struggle happens in.

It's not a substitute for hard political work, but it can make a difference, particularly if you actively engage with politicians and remind them that they have a mandate to push progressive policies.

I particularly think European elections are important. I think that a Social Europe is a great Enlightenment project worth fighting for, something that, if achieved, will set a powerful benchmark for the whole world.

It's not glamorous stuff, and there's a lot of boring back room horsetrading that needs to be done, coalitions to be built between trade unions and various political groups. It is important, though, and can improve the lives of millions of people.

Unfortunately not many people vote in EU elections, because they seem so distant, which means that wreckers like UKIP, the BNP (and to be frank, the Tories) gain disproportionate power.

All the above has made me a lot less interested in ideology. I certainly don't think it's that useful for basing a political platform on: if politics is the art of the possible, it needs to be kept practical. This has left me with absolutely no patience for ultra-Leftism, for Judean People's Front stuff, for the squabbling Left sects fighting over Lenin's legacy, for groups too 'pure' to move beyond the margins who call every compromise a sell out.

So what do you think? Have I grown old and soft, and sold out? Has the delicate aroma of petrol bombs finally faded and been replaced with the stale air of boardrooms?

Long absence

I haven't written anything for a while.

There are a lot of reasons for this, to do with my perception of the value of this blog (there are plenty of people blogging similar stuff, and they seem to have more time than me), as well as feeling this blog is pretty old now, and no longer as satisfying as it used to be.

The main reason, though, is time: I started a Masters degree in September, in addition to working full time, so I just have less time to blog.

But yesterday I was accosted by my army of regular readers (Hello Brian), who demanded that I start posting again. So here I am - I promise I will make an effort.

If anyone is interested, I am also on twitter.

Israelis believe their own propaganda

According to a prominent speaker at a World Holocaust Conference in Jerusalem, "The operation in Gaza put an end to the European taboo on equating Jews to Nazis."

Haaretz reports that one of the subjects discussed at the conference held for International Holocaust Remembrance Day was that the Gaza offensive has "legitimized equating Jews with Nazis".

According the Professor Dina Porat - apparently an international authority on anti-Semitism - the comparison is prevalent among leftist Europeans for two reasons:

a) a coordinated propaganda campaign by Muslims - according to Porat, Muslims had

"prepared in advance a public campaign against Jews and Israel, which they see as one and the same. [Muslims] were waiting for a signal or a pretext to launch this campaign and the Nazism comparison."

b) European leftists wanting to displace their own Holocaust guilt:

"Europeans are burdened by the Holocaust, and accusing the victims of being like the Nazis helps distribute some of the burden and guilt."

Since this is a message intended for internal consumption within Zionist circles, it really seems like they believe their own bullshit.

They are paranoid and see an anti-Semite under every bush.They appear to believe that anti-Semitism is the only possible motive for criticising Israel. This isn't just spin - they actually believe it.

I don't see anti-Semitism as different from any other kind of racism. It has its particular characteristics, due to the fact that the Jews were - along with the Roma - a significant minority in Europe for such a long time, but I reject Jewish exceptionalism - the idea that racism against Jews is worse than racism against anyone else.

As for Porat's argument, the conspiracy theory of a coordinated PR offensive by Muslims is just rubbish. Only Israel has that kind of coordinated PR.

More offensive is the suggestion that European leftists are the dupes of Muslim terrorist sympathisers, making the comparison to assuage their own guilt at the Holocaust.

Guilt? For the Holocaust? You've got to be joking.

I certainly don't feel any guilt. I never dunnit, guv. If anything, most European leftists would feel pride in their role in ending the Holocaust. While the behaviour of the Allied governments was hardly exemplary, Allied soldiers were generally much more left wing than their leaders, and many of them saw the war as explicitly a fight against fascism.

Aside from this, the generation implicated in the Holocaust has been replaced by one which is much more sensitised to human rights and the need to prevent suffering elsewhere. In fact, this is probably why Palestinian suffering is such an issue.

Largely because of Israel, we are brought up to associate the Holocaust with Jews (and forget the Roma and everyone else who died). Is it any surprise, then, when we see images that remind us of the Holocaust - of actions taken by the Jewish state - that we see a certain strange irony that is worth drawing attention to?

Look at these images comparing Germany in 1940 to Israel today. The fact that it is even possible to take these pictures and make the comparison is the problem.

How can Gaza not remind us of the Warsaw Ghetto, and Hamas of the Ghetto Fighters? (And remember that the Ghetto Fighters were also brutal with Jewish collaborators, as Hamas are with Fatah).

Clearly, Israel is not Nazi Germany, and nothing on the scale of the Holocaust is happening. But there are a substantial number of people in Israel who are fascist, who do want to see a Final Solution to the Palestinian Question, who openly call for the murder or expulsion of Arabs. The state of Israel is committed to the slow ethnic cleansing of Palestinians.

We need to draw attention to this fact. Holocaust analogies are crude, but rather obvious: "Look, Israel, you're behaving like Nazis. Is this what you intended?" Instead of accusing us of anti-Semitism, Israel should look at its behaviour, and ask "is that really how we come across?"

Fortunately some Israelis appear to be waking up to the fact that there are other perspectives on Israel's. Here it dawns on a former media adviser to the prime minister that

The narrative shown in the Western media, especially in Europe, is based on a different world of cultural references than Israel's. It says the era of wars is over, that military force is not the way to solve disputes and that there is a direct link between occupation and violence. The challenge facing Israeli hasbara is not simple - certainly as long as the Palestinians' tragedy is shown to the world. The Western media scrupulously present the Israeli side, but does not accept its narrative."

Well done for noticing.