New Designer Nihilism and Creedal Politics.

It is often thought that the viewpoints of deracinated and firebrand radicals on the far left who rant on anti-imperialist platforms do not really matter. Clearly, extra-parliamentary organisations such as the Socialist Workers Party are not that important.

Yet should not be forgotten, however, that George Galloway's Respect Party did win a seat in East London in the elections of 2005 as a coalition between SWP Trotskists and Islamists, one that broke up in 2007.

Recently, I was watching speeches being made at the meeting of a new group termed 'The Equality Movement’, a group including Jody MacIntyre, the disabled activist who was dragged out of his wheelchair by the police during the student demonstrations in December 2010.

An interesting series of speakers from the militant Marxist-Leninist Left as well as Islamists turned up , all united by their shared loathing of the USA and Israel and the Little Satanic minion that is Britain, to talk on the subject of "What is Imperialism ?".

Introduced by a rapper called "Logic", the 5 principles of the Equality Movement were drawn up in big block capital letters,

1. WE BELIEVE IN THE EQUALITY OF ALL PEOPLE; IRRESPECTIVE OF RACE, RELIGION, GENDER OR PHYSICAL ABILITY.

2. WE BELIEVE IN AN EQUAL EDUCATION FOR ALL PEOPLE, REGARDLESS OF FINANCIAL WEALTH OR FAMILY BACKGROUND.

3. WE OPPOSE THE IDEOLOGY OF CAPITALISM, WHICH STEALS FROM THE POOR AND GIVES TO THE RICH, THEREBY NEGATING ANY POSSIBILITY OF EQUALITY IN OUR SOCIETY.

4. WE OPPOSE THE IDEOLOGY OF IMPERIALISM IN ALL CONTEXTS*, AND SUPPORT THE RIGHT OF OPPRESSED PEOPLES TO STRUGGLE AGAINST IT.

5. WE BELIEVE THAT THE CURRENT BRITISH GOVERNMENT DOES NOT REPRESENT THE VIEWS OF THE PEOPLE, AND THAT THE ACHIEVEMENT OF SUCH A GOVERNMENT IS IMPOSSIBLE UNDER THE CURRENT, UNDEMOCRATIC POLITICAL SYSTEM IN THIS COUNTRY.

* INCLUDING, BUT NOT LIMITED TO, THE ISRAELI COLONISATION OF PALESTINE, AND THE BRITISH AND UNITED STATES LED OCCUPATIONS OF AFGHANISTAN AND IRAQ

The aim seems to be to intensify discontent through a propaganda that stimulates outrage, over diverse issues from the conflict between Palestine and Israel to student anger over tuition fees and 'inequality, all rolled into one anti-capitalist and anti-imperial cause.

Yet curiously the anti-imperialists are not always that anti-imperialist if the power bloc of their fantasies is held to be ranged against the USA.

Take the first speaker Seumas Milne. Milne remains in many respects an ardent admirer of the USSR which up until 1991 was the largest and last European Empire. Like Ken Livingstone, he now sees China's superpower as a positive check on US power in a multipolar world.



Another speaker was Tariq Ali, a Trotskyist who supports anti-imperialist Islamists but has forgotten his hero Trotsky's contempt for Islamist movements after Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 when opined that "the putrescent tissue of Islam will vanish at the first puff".

Sharing a platform with them was Dr. Hanan Chehata is a leading contributor to MEMO of which Dr Daud Abdullah is also a leading contributor, the man who claimed in the Istanbul Declaration of 2009 that any perceived collaboration with Zionists should be resisted with violence.

"The obligation of the Islamic Nation to regard everyone standing with the Zionist entity, whether countries, institutions or individuals, as providing a substantial contribution to the crimes and brutality of this entity; the position towards him is the same as towards this usurping entity"

The wording is important as it points towards Islamism of the kind that Hamas represents as part of a global movement that can take out those it defines as "standing" with the "Zionist entity" through violence.

That clearly goes further than with Israel as a nation state: it is a jihad that can transcend boundaries, one that ties in with the attempts by other British based militant Islamists to create global politico-religious movements against Western nations from within.

For those who resent and detest the West in its entirety, and not specific foreign and domestic policies, the Israel-Palestine conflict is but one that can exploited to ratchet up hatred and help to create an Islamic hyper identity.

The Istanbul Declaration was signed by those considered "respectable" tribunes of Islamism in Britain including Mohammed Sawalha, an organiser of Islam Expo, the huge annual gathering of Muslims in east London.

It was signed also by Sheikh Rashid al-Ghannoushi of the Tunisian an-Nahdhah party whose daughter Soumaya Ghannoushi writes for The Guardian and claims mendaciously that the party is liberal and democratic.

Essentially, such activists want to use propaganda to create resistance to "imperialism" from within Britain by using the veiled threat of violence to persuade the British government that it needs to listen to such "community leaders" or else face violence from those resisting imperialism both at home and abroad.

That is welcomed by those radicals who think Islamism is usefully anti-imperialist to regenerate their hard left political agenda. As Lizzie Cocker stated,

“Unprecedented numbers of largely Arab and Muslim youth flooded into the streets...and were met by brutal suppression by the state. The government tried to portray these people as thugs and louts, just as they had criminalised the people of Gaza. Just as Israel’s leaders thought they could bomb the people of Gaza into submission, the British government believed they could bully and intimidate an increasingly angry Muslim youth into submission, at a time when our imperialist wars are escalating and spreading into other countries.”

Clearly Cocker is trying to maintain that British police policing demonstrations are paralleled by the IDF in order to ramp up hatred in a way that could breed violence and terrorism. For if the British state is considered equally as repressive towards Muslims as Israel, then perhaps the only way to redress that is violence, even terrorism.

Which, as in Palestine, would mean suicide bombing. It would never be justified, of course, but merely a response to intolerable oppression caused by the British state. This is playing politics in a way that could prove lethal on the streets of Britain as well as rationalising such violence with pseudo-moral zeal.

The concept of a seamless ideology of rapacious imperialism from Gaza to London being imposed is potentially inflammatory and psychopathological. Yoking together student demos with Hamas as "resistance" is both silly and sinister. But, even if silly, it needs to be challenged instead of written off merely as cranky left wing sectarian politics.

For increasingly, as university entrance has grown exponentially, without there being an improvement in quality, then there will be increasing number of semi educated people who hold to these paranoid and shrill and intolerant world views.

Partly this is to give excitement to mundane lives in a stultifyingly boring consumer society in the manner satirised by J G Ballard in his novels. But it also reveals what Ballard called new emerging psychopathologies whereby global struggles are sought to give purpose and identity in a Britain increasingly bereft of it.

Indeed, the issue of Israel and Palestine is not connected to the student demonstrations unless the aim of Leninist vanguard elites is to build up a revolutionary momentum by exploiting ethnic and religious tensions within "the Muslim Community" and others deemed to be "alienated".

The irony is that certain Islamist movements do not much care for atheist Leninists or SWP hacktivists and others on the fringe left wanting to hijack just any sign of discontent to "build the party" or diminish Western power.

Which is what Islamist movements want and to that extent the secular atheist revolutionaries such as Milne and Ali et al act as "useful idiots" in performing that role as Islamists in practice detest them in the Middle East but need prominent names such as Milne, a big figure at the Guardian, to push the anti-imperialist line for them.

Though Islamists despise Marxism, whilst appropriating certain concepts and propaganda tropes from Third World anti-colonial movements that claimed to be based on Marxism-Leninism during the Cold War, they have something in common: the hunger for apocalyptic politics, messianism and hatred for "so-called" Western civilisation.

With the end of the Cold War , those such as Milne had to cast around for another power bloc capable of thwarting the USA, seen as negative embodiment of the Wild West in all its decadent extremity, no matter whether these power's own stance on freedom and human rights has been even worse than the USA ( as was the Soviet Union's )

Milne and those such as George Galloway have found these in Islamist movements which, because against Israel and the USA, are then considered to be united in some global way when they reflect very different regional power struggles.

Ironically, anti-imperialist war activists often accept the neoconservative world view that Islamist movements in the Middle East and secular revolutionary organisations are fighting one common cause.

As with Michael Gove in Celsius 7/7 who absurdly characterised Islamist movements within Britain and the Middle East as "one seamless totalitarian threat", radicals see it as one seamless global justice movement with various tendencies and soft peddle the ideological connections between terrorism and Islamism.

Both positions are absurd and merely serve power political agendas. George Galloway sees Islamist movements as a heroic internationalist cause in so far as they serve Iranian national interests in the Middle East.

Galloway, of course, works for Iran's Press TV . Hence Iranian regional imperialism is not considered in accordance with the Orwellian principle of doublethink. For Iran effectively has an interest in keeping the Israel-Palestine conflict going, one reason Hizbollah has acted as a proxy force in Iranian realpolitik in the Middle East.

Nor is China's Imperialism which, despite Milne wafting it aside in his Equality Movement speech as tedious anf hypothetical at this moment, is real enough in Africa for those living there, in places such as Zimbabwe, where China is backing the dictator in order to get access to natural resources.

The difference between the USA and China is that China does not operate according to double standards. It merely offers technology and economic aid to kleptocrats and dictators without the hypocritical concern for human rights.

This is a fact the anti-war or anti-imperialist ideologues never consider: the pathological struggle over access to the resources that fuel economic growth and wealth is not only pursued by the USA but by a number of powers.

The Iraq War was about Western democracy as well as oil in so far as democratic nations must please their citizens and that can be best done through high octane consumerism that people expect as a right.

Imperialism in the case of Iraq was not about profit beyond that which can be made from exchange: the explanation Milne gives for the drive behind imperialism in the Middle East. In fact, it was about geopolitical advantage, control of oil against the growing influence of China, and fears about diminishing global reserves of oil.

The mantra about Iraq being a war for profiting oil corporations is convenient for those living in the West who want to blame governments for securing the oil supplies that underpin their lifestyles.

Yet the question is how many consumers would willingly give up their current level of car use, EasyJet flights and supermarket choices in order to preserve oil and gas and thereby contribute towards the lessening of conflicts over it.

Presumably some of those consumers would have included those who bussed their way down to the anti-war protests in London in March 2003.

That would also include those students protesting against tuition fees, which was also a protest in reality against the increased meaninglessness of education. To pay in full for an education that will not lead to job security or status and, at best, work in a corporation.

The Iraq War for oil was at bottom a resource war to maintain Western living standards for the majority of the people. It was not some rapacious imperialist war disconnected from the citizens of the West simply to benefit an evil elite.

Militant Islamists know that which is why they seek to exploit this contradiction and seldom condemn terrorism without attaching conditions to it, For as horrible as it is, it might be the last tactic left to accelerate tensions within Europe sufficient for radical change to come.

Loners, Terrorists and Sting Operations.

Mehdi Hasan writes in comparing the media response to the shooting of a Democratic politician Gabrielle Gifford and her entourage,

Did you know that Jared Lee Loughner, the suspect in the Arizona shooting spree that left six dead and 14 wounded, including the US congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords, had speculated beforehand on YouTube whether he would be labelled a "terrorist"? He needn't have worried. Loughner has yet to be described in such terms by the authorities or the media. "Loner"? Yes. "Extremist"? Yes. Terrorist? No.

Is it fair, then, to assume or pretend that terrorism is the sole or exclusive preserve of Muslims? Let's be clear: it would be foolish and dangerous to dismiss or downplay the threat from Islamist terrorism, to Europe or the US. There is a real and present danger from al-Qaida, its affiliates and self-radicalised fellow travellers such as Choudhry. And Islamist terrorists, unlike their separatist, far-right or anarchist counterparts, are bent on high-profile, mass-casualty "spectaculars".

But terrorism is a tactic and, as such, is agnostic: those who murder civilians to make a political point are called Joseph as well as Muhammad

.Hasan raises some important points here but the accusation of "double standards" does not really hold in comparing Loughners's case to Islamist terrorists.

There is no evidence that Loughner has been part of a terrorist network or was acting in accordance with furthering political goals through killing Democratic politicians. Nor was the Arizona killing designed to get a radical police clampdown on a "community" so as to radicalise them further.

The BBC carries and article on his profile that Loughner had,

....a deep distrust of the government and religion, describing US laws as "treasonous" and speaking repeatedly of his wish to create a new currency.

"The government is implying mind control and brainwash on the people by controlling grammar," he wrote.

"No! I won't pay debt with a currency that's not backed by gold and silver! No! I won't trust in God!"

In a video dated 15 December, Mr Loughner describes himself as a "military recruit". The US Army has confirmed that Mr Loughner attempted to enlist but said he was rejected because he failed a drug.

There are a number of paranoid militia "patriots" in the USA who think the central government is a conspiracy against them by a usurping regime. Had a Muslim carried out such an outrage as gunning down a politician, the media courage might have tried to exploit it to suggest an Islamist threat.

But media coverage itself should not be taken as any necessary indication of the reality, not least in the USA given the way mainstream media acts too often as crude propaganda. But the description of Loughner as a "loner would appear to be borne out by the facts.

In any case, the propaganda that would portray a Muslim as part of a seamless threat is not to do with mere double standards, if that is meant as some indicator of hypocrisy or prejudice against Muslims.

It is due to the fact that the US media tends to support narratives such as the Global War on Terror in order to give legitimacy to any foreign policy or war that the USA embarks on in "the Muslim World". It is not about double standards but the manipulation of public sentiment.

In other words, the decision to portray attacks by Muslims as terrorist and attacks by loners as such is not even due to lazy stereotyping. It is more concerned with the way loners plotting Islamist terror acts are seen as acting in a cause even when not receiving higher direct orders.

The problem is that with Al Qaida and the proliferation of the Internet, any psychopath can tap into the world view and claim he is fighting for a global war. As a franchise operation, Al Qaida does not have a hierarchical structure with orders given by Bin Laden or his henchmen.

But what is also somewhat sinister is the way that the FBI have been ensnaring US Muslims into sting operations by faciliating what could be terrorist attacks by those who are given dummy bombs and detonators to carry out what the would be Islamist terrorist thinks are real bombs.

The most recent example was Faisal Shahzad who was convicted in October 2010 of an attempted car bomb attack in New York's Times Square and sentenced to life in prison without parole.

A BBC article states,

The motive for the failed attack remains unclear. The Pakistani Taliban appeared to claim responsibility in three videos, monitoring groups said. But New York police commissioner, Ray Kelly, and city mayor, Michael Bloomberg, have said there was "no evidence" to support that claim.

The vehicle was parked near offices of Viacom, which owns Comedy Central. The network recently aired an episode of the animated TV show South Park that the militant group Revolution Muslim had complained insulted the prophet Muhammad by depicting him in a bear costume.

There is something deeply amiss about the FBI using these sting operations on a regular basis.

Criminals to Get the Vote as a Human Right

The European Court of Human Rights has decided that a blanket ban on giving prisoners the vote is a denial of their human rights,

More than 28,000 prisoners are to win the right to vote, new figures showed yesterday, as David Cameron faces a growing revolt from the Tory right against the lifting of the 140-year-old ban on inmates voting in British elections.

Crispin Blunt, the justice minister, announced that 28,770 prisoners serving sentences of up to four years will be given the right to vote. The figures include 5,991 prisoners convicted of violent offences and 1,753 inmates convicted of sexual offences.

The government revealed the change last year in response to a ruling by the European Court of Human Rights at Strasbourg six years ago that a blanket voting ban on convicted prisoners in British jails was unlawful.

Immediately as Cameron decided this, the issue became one of national sovereignty and why the European Court should enforce what Norman Tebbit today called, in the Guardian of all places, an affront to democracy and "judicial imperialism" by the EU.

But the other issue is even if the ECHR has decreed against banning prisoners voting, that still does not necessarily make it right and that people in Britain should simply accept it and not challenge the nature of the ruling.

The question of votes for convicted criminals in British jails has never been put to the British people. There was originally no need for legislation: as prisoners were not normally resident at a home address when the electoral lists were made up, they were not eligible to vote, nor could they have got to the polls and they did not qualify for postal votes.

Tebbit simply juxtaposes national sovereignty and the wishes of the British people against the EU. But Dianne Abbot then piped in with this,

The logic of Norman Tebbit's argument is that governement could take away the vote of anyone the ruling party happened not to like.

Criminals have human rights too, and logically that involves the right to vote. There is a debate to be had about how exactly that right is extended. For instance, if every prisoner on the Isle of Wight was enabled to vote in that single constituency, it would have a distorting effect on the franchise. But the principle seems straightforward enough.

Furthermore it is precisely the Norman Tebbit style narrative, which implies that all prisoners are subhuman, which makes it so hard to argue for genuine prison reform and effort around mental health issues (a substantial proportion of prisoners have mental health problems which go untreated) which might give us a chance of genuinely rehabilitating the people who pass through our prison system.

Tebbit nowhere implies that. Criminals have the right not to be beaten or tortured as well as the right to appeal. They already have such rights and nobody in their right mind would think of depriving them of these rights. But obviously criminals do not have the right to live with a family, to be at liberty and so on.

Why Abbot should think that criminals having rights means they "logically"should have the right to vote does not at all follow. Lunatics cannot vote. Nor can children, despite politicians using arguments that could just as well appeal to them such is their level of condescension and puerile public relations speak and soundbites.

Prisoners should not be able to vote for as long as they are in prison because they are criminals. By committing crime they have broken the rule of law upon which society depends for security and liberty and should have no say in how it is governed until released.

Rights are not abstract things to be laid down by decree but they are exercised within a social setting and found through reference to case law and precedents decided upon by judges.For society to operate, rights must come with with the responsibility to honour the rights of others.

This a criminal necessarily forfeits on being found guilty of committing a crime as he breaks the social contract either by disregarding the rights of other individuals or by attacking the social compact agreed by consent through the rule of law, decided upon by courts and Parliament.

By committing a crime, the right to vote MP's into Parliament that makes those laws is suspended until the prisoner comes out of prison and is no longer serving a criminal sentence. This is also connected to the idea the idea of punishment, of losing something that was once had as the consequence of doing something harmful and bad to others.

The reason is partly an ideology in which liberals feel squeamish about the notion of punishment at all, as if this were itself barbaric . The aim of punishment should be atonement, the working through from guilt to a new life by being made to understand the bad and harm they have caused.

That means not inflicting pain on the convict which is mere vengeance and retribution . But it means taking away certain rights, such as the right to vote, that others who play by the rule of law and do not commit crime should have by right. This is in accordance with natural rules of fairness.

The notion of rehabilitation divorced from punishment, that criminals have simply broken 'social norms' and need to be made to function normally again by being given the necessary skills to cope with society is part of a crude utilitarian creed in which questions of good or evil are extruded completely.

This inability to accept the notion of wrong doing or evil is one reason why crime levels are high.

If committing crime merely means a person goes to a different place where they are restricted in order to protect the public, without there being a substantial deprivation of the rights inside that others enjoy outside beyond liberty, then the sense that person is being punished for doing wrong is taken away. It makes prison a security detainment centre.

Abbott also claims,

...it is precisely the Norman Tebbit style narrative, which implies that all prisoners are subhuman, which makes it so hard to argue for genuine prison reform and effort around mental health issues (a substantial proportion of prisoners have mental health problems which go untreated) which might give us a chance of genuinely rehabilitating the people who pass through our prison system.

The question of which human rights prisoners i.e convicted criminals have, is avoided by Abbot, as the intent is to score cheap political points as opposed to engaging at any intelligent way with arguments over which rights can be legitimately abrogated on having been found guilty of committing a crime

Tebbit nowhere states that prisoners can be bullied or attacked at will ( though they are by other prisoners ).

As is evident from here concerns for the disproportionate result of a prisoner vote on the Isle of Wight, Abbot thinks that prisoners have the human right to vote only in so far as they do not affect the outcome of voting. Perhaps voting does not really matter that much anyway if it cannot yield the correct results so there is no real point in depriving criminals of the vote

If criminals on the Isle of Wight have as much of a human right to vote than those outside prison it is irrelevant whether that would "distort" voting patters. Why "distort" ? After all, by her logic prisoners are no different from those who do not break the law in all respects with regards human rights and are just living in another place

...............................

Denis Joe offers a good assessment.

It would be more purposeful to look at the this question in the wider context of how society has changed, especially under the NuLabour government.

Today’s Britain resembles, more, an open prison than an actual free society. The constant surveillance of the population, compounded by petty local laws, that dictate where and when we can drink alcohol, smoke cigarettes walk our dogs, etc. The constant demand that we should justify ourselves whether having to show ID at the supermarket when buying alcohol or having to have CRB checks before we can even be considered for a (paid or voluntary) job.

The constant hectoring from TV celebs, Charities and Government departments on what we should eat or how we should bring up our children. All this has contributed toward a society that is unfree.

So, in effect, the blurring between society and an institution like prisons, is understandable.

But that is not to excuse it.

The other side of the coins illustrates the contempt that the establishment holds its citizen in. The need to justify ourselves means that we are all criminals until some (unaccountable) agency says otherwise. The idea that prisoner should vote diminishes the importance of the act of voting. It seems to suggest that voting is simply a mechanical process and not the illustration of a free and open society.

Prisoners have broken the rules of society, and therefore their rights are taken away from them for a period of time. That not only means the right of free movement (even though that cannot be said to exist within society) but also other rights, such as the right to vote. Once a person is released and is back into society then those rights are restored.

To allow prisoners the right to vote makes a mockery of democracy. the fact that this ‘right’ exists in other European countries, does not make it correct.

John Gray on the Quest for Eternal Life.

John Gray has a new book out The Immortalization Commission: Science and the Strange Quest to Cheat Death. In an article for the Guardian,( On humanity's quest for immortality, January 8 2011 ), Gray writes with his usual mordant way of dissecting the hubris and arrogance of progressive cults and creeds from Bolshevik god-builders and techno-futurists,

Kurzweil tells us in Transcend: Nine Steps to Living Well Forever, we can prepare for immortality through a programme of vitamin supplementation, diet, exercise and preventive medical care, which will enhance longevity until it becomes possible for us to leave the flesh behind. For all its hi-tech novelty this is as incredible as the idea that dead scientists are at work to save the living, or a cryogenically preserved Lenin waiting to return to life and revolutionise the world.

The fantasies that possessed the psychical researchers and the god-builders still have us in their grip today. Freezing our bodies or uploading our minds into a supercomputer will not deliver us from ourselves. Wars and revolutions will disturb our frozen remains, while death will stalk us in cyberspace – also a realm of mortal conflict. Science enlarges what humans can do. It cannot reprieve them from being what they are.

The rest can be read here.

Neoliberalism In Practice-Portugal.

Joana Gorjão Henriques writes on the 10.9% unemployment rate in Portugal and the fact that 6.5% of the 10 million population have left the country between 1998 and 2008 mostly young Portuguese. (The Guardian, Young people are fleeing Portugal in droves. But is this a bad thing? Saturday 8 January 2011),

And yet, it's worth asking if emigration on this scale is always necessarily a bad thing. Consider, for one, that one traditional reason behind Portugal's economic weaknesses has been our laissez-faire attitude to work. Statistics portray a youth that is averse to risk-taking, values comfort and longs for security. The Portuguese social structure is shaped by dependent children or married people.

Telling a Portuguese son or a daughter to find his or her own apartment at 18 would be unthinkable, the equivalent of abandoning a child in the wild. There is no tradition of flatsharing; when middle-class twentysomethings get out of their parents' house, it's usually to get married.

The high number of young people leaving the country might indicate that something is changing in the Portuguese mindset. It might just herald the emergence of a more self-sufficient, curious, and less spoiled generation.

More inhuman neoliberal rationalisation for callous and incompetent government and IMF policies. If we want to create an atomised world of individualist consumers devoid of any attachment to a place called home many nations and cultures will simply wither away.

The process has happened and continues to in Poland. Perhaps Henriques wants the EU and entire nations to be deracinated economic zones where nobody really feel they belong and where the family and children are considered less important than hedonistic consumerism .

For in all nations in Europe, people already crave 'comfort' and 'security' but are driven by the absurdity of a rather sinister neoliberal economic and social model that requires "the individual" to work harder and harder to make more and more money to spend on more goods made in China funded by Chinese capital.

If this is the future, it looks pretty bleak. Does Henriques think that social reproduction is responsible for the "lack of individualism" ? And why would people want freedom is freedom means being torn away from the family, presumably forced to take out huge mortgages and get into debt fuelled consumerism.

The results in Britain are evident already. A growth in selfish narcissistic individualism devoid of social responsibility and 'affluenza', the failure to engage with one's own life, a sick society where 'social contact' and interpersonal relationships are reduced to Facebook.

Diary,

"Bidisha" as an Nu-Establishment media brand....

"Bidisha is a regular contributor to Newsnight Review, Front Row and Saturday Review as well as guest presenting for The World Service books show, The Word, and various other TV and radio assignments. She is also a regular contributor to the Guardian and the Observer. Her third book, the travel memoir Venetian Masters is published by Summersdale"

Viewspapers with commentary by those who espouse self opinionated lifestyle radicalism is annoying. One of the worst offenders is the boring and arrogant "Bidisha".

Why the hell this total nonentity is elevated to comment on art or "life" is curious. Supposedly a novelist, she cannot write well but in articles for the Guardian "Bidisha" has been given a column entitled a Thought for the Day.

Today she looked at a US survey in Utah couples who abstain from sex before marriage rate their marriages as more rewarding than those who don't. She opines,

What if, on the wedding night, the other party turns out to be selfish, clueless, oafish and lazy? What if they've learned everything from porn? Porn is not sex but in fact a very elaborate and ritualised form of avant garde performance art.

Yeah, like, what if ? The immediate reaction by any sane person is no "porn is not what she says it is". Porn is simulated sex or actual sex designed to market it to people who want to fantasise. Some porn can be radical avant garde. Some is just the kind of writing and pictures in Paul Desmond publications.

Subjecting media tattle about "optimum marriages" to criticism to make sarcastic comments is more media tattle and does not rise above the presumed stupidity of the subject matter which is being criticised. Attacking the idea of fantasy about a future perfect sex life, "Bidisha" groans,

Anyway, all this talk about optimal wedlock baffles me. I'd rather eat broken glass. Indeed that's probably how I'll spend my middle years: munching fistfuls of shattered windscreen in blissful solitude...

Well, don't talk about it then. As for the broken glass idea.....

Meanwhile ordinary people struggle on with the process of trying to find work. "Bidisha" probably gets paid for this. Which is why bloggers get annoyed when they stumble across this and rant at it. One reason to just ignore this kind of drivel. Many people are bitter in our society. Bitterness is one of its main qualities. They know they could be like Bidisha. Like any pop star or "celeb". After all, she's useless.

What is important is that this chicken brained bint really is an Establishment media figure whom the BBC wastes money on promoting this self promoting and boring person no less than The Guardian. She's promoted by the British Council. Yet she has no talent and no discernible concern with other humans.Nothing of interest to say about Britain or the world. Nothing. She just represents it.

The Coalition is not Greatly Different to New Labour.

Polly Toynbee claims that the Tories are destroying New Labour's achievements with regards the youth of Britain. With the claim in the Guardian,

Economically we face a neoliberal experiment threatening an era of low growth, no lessons learned from the 30s.

The only question is whether voters believe David Cameron's new year's message: "We're tackling the deficit because we have to – not out of some ideological zeal. This is a government led by people with a practical desire to sort out this country's problems, not by ideology. When we talk of building a bigger, stronger society, we mean it." Or will they believe Ed Miliband's view that the "irresponsible pace and scale" of the cuts is a "political choice by those in power, not necessity"?

Actually, we have faced the neoliberal experiment at an accelerated pace since 1997 when New Labour came to power and based "growth" on unsustainable debt fuelled consumerism. The coalition is using the highly predictable crash of 2008 to impose a yet more extreme doctrinaire version of the same dogmas.

New Labour and those such as Toynbee are simply reacting to a government whose fanaticism follows on from New Labour but having inherited a mess. Instead of reining in the banking system and making reforms of that and profligate borrowing, the idea is to return to the 1990s through shock therapy.

Nothing has been done to remedy the underlying weakness of Britain: the decimation of the industrial manufacturing base, the guff about a "Creative Economy", the over reliance on services and being a pure consumer economy that does nothing particularly useful other than service global economic activity.

There are whole swathes of Britain where no new job creation is going to be forthcoming. Toynbee, at least, did criticise the colossal speed and scale of immigration encouraged and permitted by New Labour. But she did not see it as an inherent part of the short termist nature of that regime.

Inflating and bigging up consumerism through cheap money provided from China whilst bigging up migration to keep labour costs low in those jobs servicing the British consumer economy from within was what "New " Labour stood for. This was the meaning of a "global economy" in Britain.

It was easier to import labour from other countries and maintain some welfare for those in the UK who did not want to take the jobs that no Briton supposedly wanted to do at that price than reform the education system. To create one where vocational subjects and training predominated.

Instead, New Labour was intent on simply getting more students to "university" in third rate ex-polytechnics than training people to do valuable things such as plumbing and all those jobs now done by Polish migrants because of the delusion that doing media studies or other mickey mouse degrees was better.

The bubblegum economy has gone snap in Britain harder than elsewhere because of the structural weaknesses and deficiencies of Britain's economy as well as the absurdly huge expenditure on the armed forces and trident. All that panders to the notion of Britain spreading its values across the globe whilst it cannot even remedy its own deficiencies within.

Diary,

New Years Eve 2010

I will be sober in seeing this one in. It's a good excuse for boozing but it has in recent years become more difficult and increasingly pointless to go out as pubs now rip off people by demanding tickets in advance. The fact is people's hearts are no longer really in celebrating but more the fear that someone somewhere else is "having a better time".

As the aim of consumer life is to cram in enough pleasure to stave off thoughts of death. Not make a celebration a spontaneous part of life or one determined by tradition. NYE has to be booked, planned and geared for extravaganza months in advance to make a profit and for people to think if they spend money on it, they are entitled to a certain happiness.

Those wishing to profit from that anxiety will do so. And in that sense NYE is no different from any other commodified experience that can be sold and marketed. It's best just to spend it at home with your family and friends. A New Year is just another year.

Those young enough might see it as full of future potential but many obsessed with being young simply fear it as a another year closer to death or getting older and less attractive. That sense of underlying panic accounts for why some simply have to go out and do something to distract themselves.

"The sole cause of man’s unhappiness is that he does not know how to stay quietly in his room."-Blaise Pascal.

Diary.

I haven't read any blithe rationalisations yet as to why the latest plotters arrested on 21st December 2010 tried to blow up targets in London.

The idiots who plotted the Christmas Terror attacks on London didn't seem to see any contradiction between their targeting of the London Eye and the Church of Scientology and finishing a reconnaissance mission with... a McDonald's meal. So they hate consumerism and "meaningless freedom" enough to pay cash for junk food whilst plotting to kill consumers.

Another terror plot was foiled in Copenhagen yesterday. I await the latest attempt to blame the attacks on foreign policy, as merely a desperate reaction against "our" injustices in "the Muslim world" being the cause of it. Yet I'm still waiting for the Serb terrorist attack on the UK in revenge for Kosovo...Though Jill Dando was cited at the time as a murder committed by Serbs without much evidence.

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The developed world is now dominated by the forces of money and those peddling delusions to too many people locked into a meaningless system of total consumerism, one brought through Chinese labour and capital and, in the UK, through servicing their supereconomy so as to fund the purchase of increasingly banal packaged pleasures that bring barely any additional happiness.

I felt ill when I looked at the sales yesterday. More and more junk. Endless circulations of junk....Junk culture, jobs flogging junk, all contributing the more to the junking the earth which is itself encircled in space by satellites beaming down messages to sell more....junk. Junk that nobody needs being shifted from one warehouse in a floodlit wasteland to another distribution depot and to large out of town retail centres. That look like depots.

It's impossible to know what can be done and yet more and more people know we cannot keep going on like this.

"The system" preys on people's every little set of weaknesses to turn them into profit for themselves. The job of PR reps, advertisers and so on is no longer just to make a set of goods attractive and to inform the public. Instead the aim is in creating new beings, kitschenmensh unable to see their lives beyond the fantasy world the ad men create for them.

Every facet of public life has become driven by profit targets and relentless marketing so that few feel secure any more and we know the true value of nothing beyond consumption. It is increasingly difficult to survive without comprimising personal integrity. The whore and the beast rule without control.

The most depressing thing is that this is an oppression colluded in by people who act only as consumers and no longer as citizens. Much of the tedious search for "identity" is about trying to find oneself in a world that externally means nothing, that is a deracinated legoland of supermarkets, brands, mini-roundabouts, boxy housing, motorways and "heritage".

Lonely people plugged into a virtual reality through the box whilst living in a box and driving bubbly cars or hulking SUV's to assert their being in the world.....

There seems to be no way this system could ever be changed from within. It's a period of total torpor induced by consumerism which is the only reality left and that is one based on a series of fictions. Including the idea the recent student protests over the privatisation of further education funding could actually achieve anything.

For a start nobody is actually that sure what the exact purpose of university is any longer other than offering three years where people "network", get drunk, "have sex", get depressed, sometimes care about their subjects. You then end up with a piece of paper that acts as a potential signal in the labour market in which the degree is valuable to prove generic skills of data analysis, communication etc in addition to psychometric tests, gap year experience etc etc.

It seems most of these protests were just pure kitsch, just a way for young people to express themselves "creatively" before the "real world" hits them and they drop it all. There were no constructive proposal, no noticeable leaders, few who had thought hard about the society they have lived in at all.

After all, it is kitsch. Protest and 'uni' life as a mere rite of passage into the eternal world of infantile consumerism when the slogans are ability to mint a phrase are use to coin in the money in PR jobs. And if so is Ballard right that the only way to escape this fix might be out and out psychopathological violence ?

TAPI is a New Silk Road.

The Hindu Times carried an interesting and candid opinion piece today by M. K. Bhadrakumar,

TAPI is in actuality a Silk Road project connecting Central Asia to the West via Gwadar, which will make Pakistan the U.S.'s gateway to Central Asia.

The significance of the signing of the intergovernmental agreement on the Turkmenistan-Afghanistan-Pakistan-India gas pipeline project (TAPI) on December 11 in Ashgabat cannot be overstated. It can only be captured if one says with a touch of swagger that TAPI has been the most significant happening in the geopolitics of the region in almost a decade since America invaded Afghanistan.

The heart of the matter is that TAPI is a Silk Road project, which holds the key to modulating many complicated issues in the region. It signifies a breakthrough in the longstanding U.S. efforts to access the fabulous mineral wealth of the Caspian and the Central Asian region. Afghanistan forms a revolving door for TAPI and its stabilisation becomes the leitmotif of the project. TAPI can meet the energy needs of Pakistan and India. The U.S. says TAPI holds the potential to kindle Pakistan-India amity, which could be a terrific thing to happen. It is a milestone in the U.S.' “Greater Central Asia” strategy, which aims at consolidating American influence in the region.

Washington has been the patron saint of the TAPI concept since the early 1990s when the Taliban was conceived as its Afghan charioteer. The concept became moribund when the Taliban was driven away from Kabul. Now the wheel has come full circle with the incremental resuscitation of the project since 2005 running parallel to the Taliban's fantastic return to the Afghan chessboard. The proposed commissioning of TAPI coincides with the 2014 timeline for ending the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation's “combat mission” in Afghanistan. The U.S. “surge” is concentrating on the Helmand and Kandahar provinces, through which TAPI will eventually run. What stunning coincidences!

In sum, TAPI is the finished product of the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan. Its primary drive is to consolidate the U.S. political, military and economic influence in the strategic high plateau that overlooks Russia, Iran, India, Pakistan and China.On the map, the TAPI pipeline deceptively shows India as its final destination. What is overlooked, however, is that it can easily be extended to the Pakistani port of Gwadar and connected with European markets, which is the core objective.

The geopolitics of TAPI is rather obvious. Pipeline security is going to be a major regional concern. The onus is on each of the transit countries. Part of the Afghan stretch will be buried underground as a safeguard against attacks and local communities will be paid to guard it. But then, it goes without saying Kabul will expect the U.S. and NATO to provide security cover, which, in turn, necessitates a long-term western military presence in Afghanistan.

Without doubt, the project will lead to a strengthening of the U.S. politico-military influence in South Asia.The U.S. brought heavy pressure on New Delhi and Islamabad to spurn the Iran-Pakistan-India pipeline project. The Indian leadership buckled under American pressure while dissimulating freedom of choice. Pakistan did show some defiance for a while.

Anyhow, the U.S. expects that once Pakistanis and Indians begin to chew the TAPI bone, they will cast the IPI into the dustbin. Pakistan has strong reasons to pitch for TAPI as it can stave off an impending energy crisis.

TAPI is in actuality a Silk Road project connecting Central Asia to the West via Gwadar, which will make Pakistan the U.S. gateway to Central Asia. Pakistan rightly estimates that alongside this enhanced status in the U.S. regional strategy comes the American commitment to help its economy develop and buttress its security needs in the long-term.

Anyone who does not get the geopolitics of the war in Afghanistan and still thinks it is primarily about an invasion based on a "humanitarian intervention " for human rights, a GWOT ( global war on terror ) is now is indulging in a form of wishful thinking that ignores the reality.

Droning On in Afghanistan and Pakistan.

As the futile war in Afghanistan has fanned across into Pakistan, Mehdi Hasan has emphasised the human cost of drone attacks in The Guardian ( US drone attacks are no laughing matter, Mr Obama, 28 December 2010 )

Speaking at the White House Correspondents' Association dinner in May, Barack Obama spotted teen pop band the Jonas Brothers in the audience. "Sasha and Malia are huge fans, but, boys, don't get any ideas," deadpanned the president, referring to his daughters. "Two words for you: predator drones. You will never see it coming." The crowd laughed, Obama smiled, the dinner continued. Few questioned the wisdom of making such a tasteless joke; of the US commander-in-chief showing such casual disregard for the countless lives lost abroad through US drone attacks.

From the moment he stepped foot inside the White House, Obama set about expanding and escalating a covert CIA programme of "targeted killings" inside Pakistan, using Predator and Reaper drones armed with Hellfire missiles (who comes up with these names?) that had been started by the Bush administration in 2004....

.....According to the New America Foundation thinktank in Washington DC, the number of US drone strikes in Pakistan more than doubled in 2010, to 115. That is an astonishing rate of around one bombing every three days inside a country with which the US is not at war.

Hasan continues,

These attacks by unmanned aircraft may have succeeded in eliminating hundreds of dangerous militants, but the truth is that they also kill innocent civilians indiscriminately and in large numbers.

True, but the blood price is considered "worth it" as the main geopolitical aim of the Afghan War is to gain hegemony in Central Asia and to that end the construction of the TAPI pipeline is a central objective in defeating those who Taliban insurgents who threaten that plan in both Afghanistan and Pakistan.

The evident facts are seldom emphasised in the mainstream media. But TAPI is a fact.

The latest from Pakistan's Daily Times reports,

US welcomes TAPI gas pipeline agreement

WASHINGTON: The United States has welcomed an agreement by regional countries on building a $7.6 billion pipeline that will transport natural gas from Turkmenistan through Afghanistan for onward supply to major South Asian economies Pakistan and India.“We are pleased with the initial agreements that have been signed on the TAPI (Turkmenistan-Afghanistan-Pakistan-India) project,” the State Department said on Saturday.

Spokesman Philip J Crowley said in response to a taken question that it is important to remember that pipelines are “long-term projects with long-term horizons and that the immense effort involved could produce long-term benefits for Turkmenistan and the region.”

“TAPI’s route may serve as a stabilising corridor, linking neighbours together in economic growth and prosperity,” the spokesman added

The TAPI pipeline is essential to diversify control of gas which can be in LNG form southwards away from Russian control ( benefittng the EU ) and to rival China's already existing pipeline to Turkmenistan. That way it can drive a wedge between China and Iran, blocking the rival IPI pipeline.

Whilst all this looks like shoddy realpolitik, it is a fact few want to face: the energy intensive consumption of fossil fuels in the US and EU ( rising especially in Central European states such as Poland which are developing rapidly ) means the New Great Game is inevitable.

As are the deaths of people caught in the middle. The real unmentioned "big issue" is how Western nations are going to wean themselves off fossil fuels and reduce the geostrategic imperatives driving Western nations into being bogged down in quagmires such as Afghanistan.

Otherwise there will be much more in future of this, as reported by Hasan,

....figures compiled by the Pakistani authorities suggest US strikes killed 701 people between January 2006 and April 2009, of which 14 were al-Qaida militants and 687 were civilians. That produces a hit rate of just 2% – or 50 civilians dead for every militant killed.

Even more disturbing will be the radicalisation of Pakistanis with migrant links to Britain who will attempt to redress the balance of terror and repay the blood price by bringing terror home. Not least as they see how Pakistan's regime genuflects to the UK whose war for a pipeline is a known fact.

The majority of Pakistanis are against the use of drones in the tribal areas on the Afghan border. Their own government, however, despite public opposition to the bombings, has in private expressed support for America's drones. "I don't care if they do it as long as they get the right people," Pakistani Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani is quoted as saying, in a 2008 cable released by WikiLeaks. "We'll protest in the National Assembly and then ignore it."

The reason for that is because the Pakistani elites believe the construction of TAPI will bring great economic benefits. As Pakistan's International The News reports,

The TAPI gas pipeline deal is extremely essential for Pakistan’s energy needs as Sui gas reserves are estimated to reach their verge of exhaustion by the year 2016. Keeping this in mind, new possibilities and ventures ought to be tried and this deal could not have come at any better time than now. It aims to supply 1,325 million cubic feet per day to Pakistan alone. Considering the current power crisis with load-shedding becoming a regular feature of our energy-starved lives, if professionally handled, this pipeline will give a direct boost to the slow and staggering economy of Pakistan by injecting the required energy into the industry that suffers shutdowns and closures due to lack of gas and electricity supplies.

Intractable conflicts look increasingly likely to be looming ahead.

Students and "The Never Ending Party".

The recent "demos" over the decision of the coalition government to make tuition fees all privately funded has seen lots of hyperbole and the usual idiots trying to claim that its time for a real revolution.

In response to a piece of rad right on journalism by Laurie Penny about the student rebellion in London, Alex Callinicos has been getting cross that he and his Trotskyist acolytes are not getting a fair share of the coverage.

The potty prof, a leading figure in the "Socialist Workers Party" wrote,

....the first real social movement Britain has seen since the early 1990s exploded in the dying weeks of 2010. It took the student protests – largely organised outside any official structures – to expose the deep fractures in a Conservative-Liberal coalition that had previously carried all before it.....

The student protests do not represent a "social movement" irrespective of the rightness or not of their cause. There is no broad backing from most of society and unlike 1968 the trade unions have not posited a general strike or unions seriously considered strikes in solidarity with the students.

The only chance direct action would have is if a broad swathe of society were prepared to go beyond individual and material self interest and act on a large scale in strike action which looks very unlikely to happen. The students have thrown up no eloquent leaders. Agree with the protests or not, these are the facts.

More importantly, many in the adult world cannot see why students should not pay for their own education if it is they who will benefit from it. The way students have acted makes the carnival style atmosphere of the protests just look like what students enjoy doing. And cancels out any serious points they could have made. It looks like they just want attention-"look at us we're having a revolution".

And much of it is the Grand March of Kitsch, to use Kundera's attempt to explain why radical movements tended to either to be either dangerous, in a context of totalitarianism, or simply ineffectual in free societies.

Education ought to equip citizens for life, to promote what is referred to as civil society and the interests that go beyond mere consumerism. Yet the frustration with society students complain about looks like boredom with the unwillingness to pay for an education in a university sector itself greatly expanded.

The quality of that education has gone down with expansion and it was used by New Labour to get more young people into university where many will do little work of a truly academic or serious nature. Fewer people believe that many students are not just "going to uni" because its a good time.

Penny's polemic was uncharacteristically ungenerous, picking out "sour-faced sellers of the Socialist Worker" as symbols of "the traditional hierarchies of the left", and comparing them to cockroaches. In fact, Socialist Worker has simply been where it has always been, in the thick of the struggle – with the students in 2010, as it was with the dockers in 1972, the miners in 1984, the Genoa protestors in 2001, and the anti-war marchers in 2003.

This is drivel. The SWP has simply tried to hijack protests and direct it towards a neo-Leninist and Trotskyist agenda that has little relevance to Britain in 2010 and which led to totalitarianism in the Soviet Union. The SWP has never ignited protest but has sought to co-ordinate them into "building the party" ready for "the revolution".

Callinicos has just seen an opening to try and convert the young to this cargo cult form of "socialism",which "seriously" talks of a revolution on the Leninist model, and does not want to be left behind by the new anarchical styles of struggle created by students. But, of course, it will merely end up with rich university students going into corporate work and poorer ones not.

The reason is that the 'neoliberal capitalist order' is what it is and the university system is now about training the young for a world of material gratification instead of getting people to think intelligently about how the country or the world could be improved as individuals. Those who do think just join think tanks to advance power agenda with unquestioning conformism.

Not "The Party".

The kitsch of Laurie Penny is here,

"This isn't just a student protest. It's a children's crusade: Those too young to vote, yet with their futures at stake, have organically come together to be heard".

What hell does it mean to "come together organically" ? Perhaps, spontaneously through twitter and so on. But that makes a flash mob. Not some "organic unity" of those organised to say a great no to a future of corporate work and consumerism. And still seen as "counterculture". Which often means just 'no culture'.

"Outside Downing Street, in front of a line of riot police, I am sitting beside a makeshift campfire. It's cold, and the schoolchildren who have skipped classes gather around as a student with a three-string guitar strikes up the chords to Tracy Chapman's Talkin Bout a Revolution."

'The diversity of the protest is extraordinary: white, black and Asian, rich and poor. Uniformed state-school girls in too-short skirts pose by a plundered police van as their friends take pictures, while behind them a boy in a mask holds a placard reading "Burn Eton".'

Diary.

Pondering on terrorism this morning on Facebook.

The original just has to be read to understand why Henning Mankell represents those who rationalise terror attacks in order to overcome their terror of them as opposed to understanding that some people are, in fact, evil and crazy. The "western world" had not humiliated Muslim countries. How did Sweden do that ?

Perhaps that's not so generous. As a crime writer he is obliged to plunge into the darker recesses of the human psyche. But he did not distinguish between the idea that these are the thoughts that can be thought and "this is what I think".

With these sorts of issues it's necessary to be careful in the language you use. Yoking together Afghanistan with the reason why this "lone wolf" terrorist tried to blow himself up is unnecessary.

I don't like the Afghanistan War either but it's bad form to try and use the potential threat of terrorism to register opposition to the war, as if Swedish presence was the clear motivating factor, or a crucial one. In which case there would have to be an explanation as to why no Serb has tried to kill people after the NATO intervention in Kosovo in 1999.

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The fact is that it should be possible to criticise the war in Afghanistan without being seen to be siding "objectively" with fanatics. A position made difficult by neoconservative rhetoric-"you're either for us or against us" .But that hardly applies to Sweden which is in Afghanistan to help with the humanitarian operations. In reality, the war is about a pipeline, regional reconstruction and geopolitical control in Eurasia.

It might be that 'some' Muslims perceive Afghanistan as a war against fellow Muslims in intention. If so then this shows an ideology and form of identity politics at work and a refusal to look at facts. But its one reason why "humanitarian wars" are pointless and in Afghanistan's case it was never going to be won quickly, in fact never.

The problem with this new form of terror might be that it is just the reflection of a society in the higher realms of boredom.

For those confronted with a society based on total consumerism, the loss of identity, felt hard by those from religious backgrounds and where there is still an affinity for the lost "Muslim World", then out and out violence is one way of punishing docile consumers and society that reduces people to mere 'economic animals'. Not least if that consumerism is based on the car economy that derives from oil, most of which comes from lands living under dictatorships or repressive regimes that are dysfunctional e.g Saudi Arabia. A way of making consumers pay a blood price in this deranged scheme of things?

The mistake being made is that Al Qaida style violence is not organised by some hierarchy or chain of command. It is carried out by those who willingly buy into the psychopathology or accept the one I've outlined here. There are too many rationalisations of this violence by those trying to make partisan political points about aspects of "the system" they dislike. Mankell is somewhat like Sartre in this sense who used the terrorist protests of the Baader Meinhof to make points about the alienation under capitalism. Because he did not like capitalism and the USA's global power.

As for Mankell, his ability to "understand" the motives of the suicide bomber was not made clear because he linked it to Afghanistan. As a crime writer he was trying to probe the psychopathology of those who commit such acts.

The danger comes with rationalising terror in order to express one's own political viewpoints. Understanding criminal minds is one thing, using that to express a dislike of foreign policy ignores the fact that a new hyper identity has been created throughout Europe is about a power game. "We" are here and "we" will make you change this foreign policy.

Only the problem is that the foreign policy is based on easy supplies of cheap oil which are procured only through collusion with repressive regimes. With Western nations seen as complicit in that, only bringing terror into the belly of the beast is seen to provide the will force some change.

Notes on Islamism.

It has often been claimed that radical Islamists in Europe are petty fringe groups most not even anywhere near as popular nor as organised in Europe as Le Pen, BNP, Northern League, and the far right who win votes and are household names supported by hundreds of thousands of white Europeans.

The BNP have not had one MP. Respect had one MP called George Galloway and that was a part made up from and supported by those in the Muslim Association of Britain, those such as Anas Altikriti and Soumaya Ghannoushi who offered ideological rationalisations for Islamist revolutionary violence.

The mass mobilisation of Muslims based on agitation and propaganda has been far more effective than the BNP as it was backed by useful idiots on the so-called "anti-war" left who claimed to oppose "state terrorism" only to then go on to call those in Iraq murdering others as "resistance".

The fact that the US government along with the UK in Iraq ordered their forces to collude with Shia groups in killing other sectarian insurgents is the promotion of a dirty war and terror as well hardly justifies trying to rationalise bringing home that violence to the West.

There has as yet been no anti-war movement capable of making a case against these bad wars that has not been hijacked by ideological fanatics. Ghannoushi's shrill, sinister and militant position made it quite clear that Islamism entailed that Islam was a hyper identity that transcended borders.

Ghannoushi wrote in the Guardian ( Driving the world to insanity, Friday 11 August 2006 )

In this globalised age dominated by the power of the image, the notion of geography has almost been stripped of content. Tragedies in Lebanon, Palestine, Iraq, Afghanistan and other faraway lands enter our homes and settle into the fabric of our daily lives. They can no longer be kept away, to rage in distant lands and devour obscure nations. They inevitably spill over our shores, cities and villages, lay bare our vulnerability and put an end to our sense of immunity.

There is is nothing ' inevitable' about the terrorism or carnage in the Middle East being visited upon the West unless one is prepared to ascribe all forms of Islamist militancy and terrorism as a reflex action to "racism" and "imperialism" within Europe, with Muslims posited as some new 'wretched of the earth'.

The more fringe radical Islamist sects of Hizb ut Tahrir have been less important in that sense than those Islamo-Bolsheviks who attempted to penetrate the mainstream and who have continued to try and gain political influence through presuming to speak up for the ummah as a politic-religious entity.

Movements such as the MAB and Respect used the language of the Western anti-imperial left to regenerate militancy and play on the spectre of a revolt of Muslims against imperialism to force a change in foreign policy and make strident demands upon the basis of group rights in a dangerously divisive way.

Respect was never simply a coalition of "reactionary" Islamists, though many were just that. Those like Salma Yaqoob were progressives and turned to Islamism as it offered a way of making sense of the world. The 7/7 bombings were thus "reprisal attacks" for the invasion of Iraq.

What was important was to mobilise Muslims as a political force by explaining away terror attacks as merely a reaction to imperialism that just would not have happened had "the West" not oppressed the "Muslim World" as it had since the decline of the Ottoman Empire from the eighteenth century.

By using the veiled threat of further violence which was never justified but always by some lofty metaphysical process merely "explained" or "understandable" , that could be used to ratchet up tensions in such a way as to advance Islamist agendas and "community" spokesmen to power.

This remained the problem. Having agitated for Muslims to identify with the global ummah, grievances can be universally transferred from the Muslim World to the West and from nation to nation within a Western Europe that had rejected and trashed its own enduring cultural inheritance and civilisation.

Exposing and dissecting the psychopathology behind Islamo-Bolshevism is both what is needed in the battle of ideas no less than to prevent terrorism through finding alternatives to oil and gas, the backing of despotic regimes such as Saudi Arabia, foolish interventionist policies and curtailing mass immigration.

All of these factors are interrelated but never discussed as such as its too painful to admit the real and potentially intractable nature of conflicts that have grown up primarily due to the West being dangerously dependent upon the oil that fuels consumer growth at the expense of those living in the "Muslim World".

Reflections on the Stockholm Suicide Bombing.

Following the botched suicide bomb attack in Stockholm on 11 December 2010, when two bombs exploded killing the bomber and injuring two people, there have been the usual efforts at "damage limitation" by those offering spurious explanations as to the reason for such attacks.

This is the first suicide bomber in Scandinavia and I am surprised that so many are – surprised. It reminds me of when the passenger jets crashed into the towers in New York. I never understood the surprise that followed. Wasn't this exactly what we had expected?

A situation where the extreme, the desperate and the furious attacked the western world that for so long had humiliated Muslim countries. An attack that would be understandable but nevertheless wrong and worthy of condemnation.

For a start the Al Qaida terrorists that attacked the Twin Towers on 9/11 were those like Mohammed Atta who was a privileged architecture student who was from a relatively well to do family in Egypt who has spent much time in Europe after studying at Hamburg University. He was not the 'wretched of the earth'.

The absurdity of Henning Mankell's position, in The Guardian todayis in his contorted attempts to "understand" why the Stockholm Bomber, Taimour Abdulwahab, could have wanted to murder so many people when it would be far better to concentrate on the 'how' and call for better police methods to stop such lunatics.

The Swedish artist Lars Vilks, for example, has ridiculed Islam and the Prophet in some of his work. It was well known that some people wanted to kill him, but no one really believed that the threat would mean something even more serious.

However, many people in Sweden seem unable to grasp that by having troops in Afghanistan we are now the enemies of the extremists. Our troops should never have been sent there. I am not saying that I am afraid of extremists. But I do not want Swedish soldiers to fight a war that is not ours, but that of the United States'.

The bomber's motives remain that of a man with a "transferable grievance" . In a deracinated and atomised society in the West, the Iraqi-born Islamist could have found any number of pretexts to blow himself up. Mankell is simply trying to rationalise terrorism here to assuage the sense of fear.

This is what Christopher Caldwell referred to in his Reflections on the Revolution in Europe as 'fear masquerading as tolerance'. For Swedish liberals it is simply incomprehensible that ideological fanatics might well want to murder Swedish citizens as Sweden has been so nice the developing world.

As a result he believes that Swedish troops should not be in Afghanistan as it is not "their war" and effectively makes Sweden a target no less than the USA was on 9/11. But obviously the bomber explicitly mentioned Lars Vilks as a reason to kill those who "insult Islam" before throwing in Afghanistan for good measure.

Mentioning Afghanistan was necessary as part of "the propaganda of the deed", to give mass murder in Stockholm more credence amongst other Muslims in Sweden, stimulate a disproportionate response, ramp up hatred and entrench fault lines between Swedish Muslims and the rest of the population.
If Abdulwahab's deed could have achieved that, it is partly due to the immigration policies of the Swedish government in encouraging it throughout the 1990s on such a huge scale without thought for how such numbers could be assimilated to do the jobs a cosseted populace no longer wanted to do at the going rate of payment.

In Sweden the policy of mass migration was followed by the ghettoisation of poorer Muslims on estates in ugly concrete blocks in Stockholm, Malmo and Gothenburg throughout that decade, at a time when the Swedish economy was losing jobs in manufacturing and shipbuilding, was hardly a wise policy.

In 2008 there were riots in the Rosengard district of Malmo, which led sociologist Aje Carlbom to warn that such "enclavisation" provided fertile ground for Islamists and that "Swedish society doesn't understand what's going on because of the climate of tolerance". Tolerance meaning fear, indifference or distance from reality.

As regards Afghanistan, it is true that this struggle necessarily involves NATO states contributing to a war that kills Muslims which can potentially radicalise those for whom migration is a form of compensation for the Muslim world whose harmony has been destroyed by greedy energy intensive Western states.

The contours of the new psychopathological conflicts that seem set to lead to intractable problems in the 21st century are emerging. Afghanistan is part of a struggle to get the TAPI pipeline built, part of a geopolitical strategy to integrate the economies of the region and ensure diversity of gas supplies.

In that sense, Sweden has as much interest in supporting the War in Afghanistan as any other state in the West increasingly dependent upon diminishing supplies to shore up economies reliant on fossil fuels to keep the consumer hyper-economy going. Islamists have been prepared to make the connections that secular progressives have not.

No matter what good intentions Sweden had in joining the effort by the West to ensure development in Afghanistan, it is sure to be resented by those who rationalise their loss of identity and hatred for the consumerist decadence of the West that is all around with pornography and 'sexual freedom' into violence.

Yet Swedish presence in Afghanistan is merely but one pretext in a wider collection of grievances, so calling for withdrawal from Afghanistan simply to appease Islamist violence is imprudent. Withdrawal could be justified simply because the war is futile, cannot be won and adds to anti-Western feeling. But it does not cause it.

The mixture of greed and guilt that drives much of what states such as Sweden and other European liberal states is assisting in the potential for conflict. Permitting thousands of immigrants from Iraq and "the Muslim World" to settle is not necessarily any guarantee that Sweden will be loved for such gestures after its ally smashed Iraq in the first place.

With 'liberal' immigration policies connected with granting asylum to refugees from Iran, Iraq, Somalia, Eastern Turkey ( Kurdistan ) and Bosnia and Kosovo, Sweden had a Muslim population between 20,000 and 400,000 by 2000 before the additional influx due to the US invasion of Iraq.

In itself that is no reason to assume "clash of civilisations" is inevitable. Yet the way that Muslims in Sweden are classified as "ethnic Muslims", in such a way as to conflate race with religion and contribute towards the construction on of Islam as a hyper-identity that goes beyond mere religious affiliation and practice.

At the same time unless the West weans itself off oil and gas from dangerous lands in the Middle East and finds alternatives it is going to be dragged into intractable conflicts that will get worse as competition for ever scarcer fossil fuels leads to more meddling in the Middle East and Central Asia.

Muslim organisations need to put together a plan of action for how to work in schools and in study circles to be able to deal with the growing Islamophobia that we face in Sweden and many other western countries. And for this they should have the full support of the Swedish government.

Reflexive waffle about "Islamophobia" without even understanding the reason why the West is hated so viscerally in the first place has led only to more assertions of Western guilt, whilst the continuing call for harmonious multicultural togetherness in a rootless consumer society fuelled by oil from Muslim lands looks increasingly a recipe for division and strife.

Those like Mankell ought to avoid rationalisations for terrorism, not least with regards what seems at this moment to be a "lone wolf attack", that provide windy "explanations" for why Sweden might have been a target because of it being in Afghanistan. The driving forces of Islamist terrorism are more complicated and more disturbing.

For nothing is more reassuring than the believe that only if "we" in the West did more to prevent war and conflict or did the right thing, then it would cease to be a target. Avoiding being bogged down in conflicts in Muslim lands is only one part of staving off domestic discontent but Islamism in the West has its own history and development.

Why are 100,000 US Troops Fighting in Afghanistan ? It's All In the Pipeline.

The reason Obama will not explain why US troops are coming home in coffins and so much blood and treasure has been sunk in Afghanistan is obvious: the Afghanistan War is being fought to build the TAPI pipeline and this is not seen as the correct narrative to market as "public diplomacy"

Simon Tisdall writing for The Guardian today merely confirms the fact that the task of those in the media is to frame the debate in accordance with the narrow confines set by the powerful which never encompasses the real reasons why Afghanistan has now dragged on for almost a decade since Bush's invasion in late 2001

Veteran foreign policy analyst Leslie Gelb, writing in the Daily Beast, said Obama can no longer persuasively answer the basic question: why are 100,000 American troops in Afghanistan, at an annual cost of $113bn?".

Afghanistan is no longer a vital interest of the United States but continuing the war there tears at our own nation's very vitals," Gelb said, arguing that international terrorism now has many bases, including Stockholm and London, and is no longer centred in the Hindu Kush...

Given the war has not been about the Global War on Terror ( GWOT ) for some time, the remaining reason for "staying the course" is to defeat the Taliban in Helmland through which the TAPI pipeline will run through. When British troops were coming home in body bags, no attempt was made to tell the truth about this.

In previous months the governments of Turkmenistan, Afghanistan, Pakistan and India have been negotiating the finalised pipeline deal. The BBC reported on December 11 2010 ( Turkmen natural gas pipeline Tapi to cross Afghanistan )

A deal has been struck on building a 1,700km (1,050m) pipeline to carry Turkmen natural gas across Afghanistan to Pakistan and India. The Tapi project aims to feed energy-deprived South Asian markets and transit fees may benefit Afghanistan.

The transit fees are intended to benefit Afghanistan and transform it into an energy bridge. This has been obvious for long.

Less obvious is why the media has been so unwilling to discuss the pipeline which was a key objective from the outset of the war after Hamid Karzai, a former advisor to Unocal whose minister for reconstruction, Amin Farhang was candid about the West's backing for the pipeline.

Lutz Kleveman's The New Great Game: Blood and Oil in Central Asia, written back in 2003, reported that Farhang said,

"the pipeline project is a done deal. Some big oil companies want to get into business with us. ...Finally, after years of waiting Afghanistan will become an important transit country in Central Asia"

TAPI was posited back then as a means of generating 12,000 jobs and up to $300m in transit fees per year. As transport routes through the south Caucasus remained risky and Iran was considered an implacable opponent, the pipeline offered what was believed to be a viable alternative.

This was as true under Bill Clinton as under George Bush, whose Special Envoy to Afghanistan, Zalmay Khalilzad as Kleveman emphasised "had previously worked for Unocal on a an elaborate risk analysis for the Afghan pipeline".

The continuities in US foreign policy since the 1990s to 2010 are more striking than any real change which has lain more in the nature of the tactics. Despite what pipeline deniers argue, the USA could not have done a deal with the Taliban as it did harbour Al Qaida.

Yet the Taliban and Al Qaida were never the same. When Unocal placed its plans on hold, right wing think tanks such as the Rand Corporation condemned the Taliban. The 9/11 attacks in 2001 gave the necessary pretext to destroy Al Qaida and get the pipeline built.

Shortly before 9/11 a US Department of Energy Report cited "Afghanistan's significance from an energy standpoint stems from its geographical position as a potential transit route for oil and natural gas exports from central Asia to the Arabian Sea"

These vital energy interests were never going to be rejected by Obama. An important foreign policy advisor has been Zbigniew Brzezinski who played an instrumental part in energy politics and who has always seen the geostrategic imperative of US foreign policy to be dominating Central Asia.

The need to secure this route explains why NATO troops are still there. As EurasiaNet reported,

Gran Hewad, a political researcher with the Afghan Analysts Network, said the security challenge would be significant, but added that Kabul might have the political will and a powerful economic incentive to keep the Taliban away from TAPI.

“The route through Herat and Kandahar is not so difficulty for the Afghan National Security Forces to control,” Hewad claimed. “US military progress will likely improve along the route, it's a very strategic interest, and support from the local population population can also increase.”

On December 18 2010 the US formally came out in support of the TAPI deal, as reported in Business Journal ( US says pleased with TAPI agreement )

The US has said it is pleased with a recent agreement on an ambitious four-nation gas pipeline involving India, Pakistan, Afghanistan and Turkmenistan, hoping that the multi-billion-dollar project would change the face of the economic condition of the region.

"We are pleased with the initial agreements that have been signed on the TAPI (Turkmenistan, Afghanistan, Pakistan and India) project," the State Department said.

"It is important to remember that pipelines are long-term projects with long-term horizons, and that the immense effort involved could produce long-term benefits for Turkmenistan and the region," it said.

TAPI's route may serve as a stabilising corridor, linking neighbours together in economic growth and prosperity, it said.

"The road ahead is long for this project, but the benefits could be tremendous," the State Department said in response to a question.