Welcome to Westway. It takes the driver West but only out of London. From Westfields Shopping Mall the driver drives East. The whole area is a blighted one. One passes through this zone of transience which defines the nature of the horrid area of Shepherd's Bush and the home of the BBC Television Centre.
Then again when alighting from the Shepherd's Bush Tube Station, it must be remembered that IKEA, the kind of store where riots break out as frantic consumers battle to get in first to grab the best bargains during their sales, has an advert on the Oyster Card reading "Travel is a means to an end. Home".
The most prescient of British novelists J G Ballard was correct to see Crash a dystopian version of the future in the 1970s when he used Westway, the inner city motorway which zooms into central London from Hammersmith to Paddington as an example of the 'Death of Affect'. By this Ballard meant the deconstruction of cities and the settled life they once contained as leading to pathological reactions amongst a deracinated citizenry in which the car would become seen as a liberating means people use to overcome their sense of being detached from the city.
In Concrete Island ( 1974 ), the driver's crash off Westway into a Traffic Island he cannot escape from and who is ignored by the cars zooming their way towards Central London was a satire based on the retelling of the myth of Robinson Crusoe. Crusoe was a man on an Island, a metaphor Daniel Defoe used to describe as Merlin Coverley puts it in Psychogeography,
' ( that ) with its twin leitmotifs of the imaginary voyage and isolation, provides a broad outline of a character who encapsulates the freedom and detachment of the wanderer, the resourcefulness of the adventurer and amorality of the survivor'.
Merlin Coverley emphasises the Robinson, a man cast adrift in an oceanic and unknowable place with all the fear that entails comes back into Ballard thus,
"Ballard describes modern life in advanced industrialised societies as characterised by a lack of emotional sensitivity. Amidst the barrage of media imagery to which we are subjected, our emotional response is blunted and we become unable to engage directly with our surroundings.
When walking along Westway from Westfields in Shepherd's Bush, a meaningless and weird zone of alienation and spiritual poverty, the reaction of the White Van men, known to drive manically through London, was one of total hostility to my decision to walk there. Pedestrians are subversive in a city dictated to by the demands of the automobile.
With St George's Flags fluttering, White Van Men screamed abuse, though the little pathway alongside it is just wide enough to allow one to pass without getting in the way. One driver screamed 'nutter' and another 'wanker'. A curious form of Road Rage. Aggressive banality was omnipresent in this zone.
Naturally, a lot of this aggression is a reaction to the sheer boredom and banality of London's descent into a large conduit for Capital, hot money and cars coursing through its veins and arteries, a City State that has become a law unto itself detached from England as a territorial nation.
Asserting one's" identity", the desire to feel radical and transgressive is not just connected with cocky attitudes and the empowerment of having an SUV, those "Gated Communities on wheels" but also in pseudo-libertarian proponents of the Great Car Economy such as the BBC's populist presenter on Top Gear, Jeremy Clarkson, who advocated knocking down cyclists.
The fact that this mutton headed dolt has books are best sellers shows the need to tap into the aggressive and liberating aspects of the car from the world surrounding atomised individuals. It appeals to those for who the banalisation of everyday life requires aggression as a marketing tool. Including stunts like ramming an SUV into a tree to show "toughness".
Indeed outside Westfields, there were utterly moronic adverts with an underlying mood of implicit aggression. Gym Box, soon to open at Westfields, seemed to advertise aggression as the only way of maintaining one's freedom. As only losers could think that being on the straight and narrow was the way forward.
Yet even weirder was the advert that shows the "drivenness" of contemporary Britain in 2010 where the same Gym Box, informs Westfields consumers that they have a human right given them by God to be absolutely beautiful, something again which gives credence to Ballard's notion in Kingdom Come about a similar Mall where it is seen as a religious experience.
Bibliography
Merlin Coverly. Psychogeography. J G Ballard, Concrete Island. J G Ballard, Kingdom Come
One of the worst features of the banal celebrity infested and suffocating media wastescape that Britain is immured in is both the obsession itself but also the idea that Andy Warhol's "prophecy" that everybody would be famous for fifteen minutes has turned out to be something that has become true: as a talentless purveyor of dreck he was well placed to know .
Last year I just could not stand the self-indulgent media bollocks with regards the death of Jade Goody. Have you heard anything about her since ? No, she is totally forgotten. At the time things were very different as when I wrote the following......
Following the death of reality telly star Jade Goody, the BBC has made this item the top news story. Goody was famous for being having her terminal illness filmed on camera no less than her 24 hour day on the Big Brother series.
As with Princess Diana, there will be oodles of collective grief by those who thought they knew her. Those who resist the 'emotional correctness' and mention the fact that she did not acheive much with her life will be attacked with self righteous zeal.
The grief over Goody is narcissistic: partly it reflects the inability of many people in Britain to deal with death or to draw lessons from it with regards the way they are living their own lives now and the way they have lived them and will live them.
It's grief for the consumer age in which nothing is of lasting value beyond the money that will buy the pleasures that divert one from having to reconsider their shallow celebrity, sex and shopping obsessed lifestyle choices. People fear death because they aren't really living a full emotional life.
Plugged into reality through whar Bernard Levin called "the idiot's lantern" in the corner of their 'living room', millions of Britons are living surrogate lives when they are not trying to force themselves to feel something because Britain has become such a deracinated, atomised and eerily denatured society.
People often fear death because they really fear they have not lived yet. When someone famous dies, not least someone who could have been them like Goody, there is a curious relief more that 'Thank God it isn't me' rather than any genuine consideration as to the achievement of that person.
If Goody's death from cervical cancer saves others by getting more young women to get tests that can offer some rationalisation for a largely pathetic and meaningless life that Goody lived. Yet the number who will die from it is hardly equal to those who will die from their current sex, drug and booze binges.
Goody's premature death will not make her life seem any better than it really was and it was not particularly good. The celebrity obsessed lifestyle is not a good one and had she lived it out beyond it's natural duration she would not have been able to get the retrospective good gloss it has been given.
Such criticisms will seem callous. The point is that it is what we do with our lives when the threat of death is not immediately there that has to matter. Otherwise any life, no matter how tawdry or squalid, can be glorified as better than it really was as long as that person is famous for anything.
What matters is that people respond to the knowledge of an early death by realising that we all live on borrowed time and that as we only die our own deaths alone the way we deal with others when we still have our life potential before us is the most important thing.
When Goody believed she had all her life in front of her she was as shallow, vulgar, foolish and narcissistic as those who watch Big Brother. Young people today are more so than ever because they think the world belongs to them and that the old are boring and worthless.
Then when faced with their own deaths they become terrified because death only is supposed to happen to those who are pushed out from conscious view-from the old to the one million dead Iraqis who have died so that people in the UK can continue to drive their cars on cheap petrol.
Elsewhere death is a normal part of life. In Britain it is not supposed to happen which is why, in an age of spectacle, Islamist terrorists are seething to punish Western consumers for not caring about the death of fellow Muslims just so they can maintain their vulgar and trivial pleasures.
It is no good thinking about helping others, or even thinking of them, just when you personally are threatened by the prospect of death or because one sees one dying person on TV. It might mean that the way you have chosen to live is wrong.
This last decade has arguably seen the most serious split within the left since the Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956. The term "decent left" was coined by the American social theorist Michael Walzer in 2002 to describe those who argued that Islamism constituted a greater threat than George Bush and that the "anti-imperialist" left were camouflaging a fascistic and oppressive Islamic fundamentalism.
Many of the "decents" went on to be supporters of the invasion of Iraq, justifying it as a noble attempt to rid the world of a repulsive dictator.
In the UK, the split within the left was crystallised in 2006 with the Euston Manifesto which attempted to place what it saw as pro-democratic action at the centre of leftist activity. Euston signatories such as Norman Geras have fought a continuous and often bitter battle against what they see as leftist apologists for tyranny, "Islamo-fasism" and anti-semitism disguised as anti-Zionism.
That was Keith Kahn Harris's take on the split within the left over the Afghanistan and Iraq War. something which can be seen as an epochal division within the left, a turning point in history instead of what is a largely tedious spat amongst 'leftists'
The very word 'leftist' is one that indicates a proclivity towards certain attitudes that can be defined as left as opposed to right wing and conservative but often adds up to little in the end but an argument over the direction global progress ought to take.
This is not to say there are not real issues at stake with regards the conflict within the West between the rival value systems posed between radical Islamism and the secular left with the rise of glabal Islamism as a 'revolutionary rival'.
But most of the controversy over Islam in the West has been refracted through the lens of foreign policy and claims of the West to represent universal values as against what is considered an irrevocably backward religion that has no place in 'progressive' politics.
The problem with this artificial dichotomy between the "decent left" and "anti-imperialists" is that few see what both have in common: a tendency to regard global politics according to an almost theological interpretation over the essential nature of rival empires.
The irony is that most "decent left" and anti-imperialists in Britain & the USA tend to look towards George Orwell as a prophet and inspiration, replacing the Soviet Union with the USA as the evil empire of choice or else the threat of 'theocratic fascism'.
For example both Christopher Hitchens and Pilger see Orwell as fighting against fascism and the collusion of supposed 'leftists' with it: both see Stalinism as corrupting some 'authentic' or real left wing radical politics and global projects of emancipation.
Much of this tedious debate rest less on fact but on interpreting facts in accordance with the prescriptions of their particular progressive creed. Both decents and some, though not all, "anti-imperialists" do so for a number of reasons.
Firstly, they suspend sceptical enquiry in favour of an almost theological obsession with being 'justified'. By that I mean 'being on the right side of History' and using that as proof of their righteousness. Gloating about how Hitchens was obviously wrong about Iraq proves nothing.
Mostly it consists of hack propagandists taking pro and anti war positions to gain the upper hand over one another, parly to bolster their 'credibility' as commentators but also to vent spleen in such a way that draws media attention to them. and advances their careers.
As with Hitchens and Galloway proving their critics were all craven and morally stunted grotesques or 'renegades' from the 'true cause' excites and etertains jaded Westerners who crave some kind of cause to fight for to escape the teduim of the banal consumerism of Blair's Britain.
In short, when it comes down to it, it is all about them, about what Freud termed rationalisation, a trend increased by the obvious powerlessness felt by leftists in the West following the perceived triumph, temporary or otherwise , of global capitalism
It's curious that Hitchens wrote about the tendency of anti-war activists to rationalise Islamist terrorism.
Some of them, in my view do, and Hitchens had a point about them as did Francis Wheen in his polemic How Mumbo Jumbo Conquered the World, especially with regards Seumas Milne's article after 9/11 ( They just can't see why they are hated ).
However, using the rationalisation of terrorism by those who opposed war to prove a pro-war case that has, in practice backed up criminal and illegal actions such as the war in Iraq is stupid and failed to engage with the obvious fact it was about energy security.
It's no better than those Orwell criticised in Notes on Nationalism who refuse to look at facts first, those cocksure partisans who want to tell you the way the world process is inexorably working towards the ultimate triumph of their own worldview.
It isn't that the 'decent left or Hitchens unconditionally apologise for US or UK power unconditionally. It is that US or Uk power is judged according to whether it advances causes they think worthy. Ultimately it boils down to a rationalisation of their own powerlessness over events.
The same is true of crowing ideologues in the Stop the War Coalition who spout slogans to ramp up outrage, upgrade their own media profile and carrers folling the demise of their own favoured power unit in the Soviet Union. eg George Galloway & Andrew Murray.
Many people get pleasure from detesting hypocrisy and double standards of Western statesmen because ultimately it acts as a convenient way of avoiding the fact that their own living standards are propped up by the control over oil. Contructive alternatives are seldom advanced because it is a bit boring.
It is much better to pretend Afghanistan and Iraq are issues somewhat akin to the Spanish Civil war and to fake Orwell's moral stance without possesing his ability to grapple with inconvenient facts or to understand that not every conflict is a simplistic rerun of the 1930s and 1940s.
Much of this has to do with the parochial nature of global progressive politics that still takes it for granted that the West, for good or ill, has the ability to determine world politics. That leads 'decents' to fall in with the USA as the least worst choice for global hegemon.
In the case of Chomsky or Pilger it leads them to see any power that opposes the USA to be necessarily on the side of freedom, no matter whether such liberation movements from the NLF to Hizbollah contain a propensity towards repression and illiberalism through their faith in Rousseau's 'general will.'
None of this has been brought out by Kahn-Harris's article because it just passes on a superficial precis of the divisions between these polemicists who' lets face it, are going to be largely forgotten in the coming decades because they failed to understand the times they lived in.
Written in Krakow Poland on Monday, 19 October 2009
On the subject of politicians being part of the 'entertainment economy', and being very shoddy players within it on the whole, it is interesting that on occasions a TV comedian can actually be more serious than those who are supposed not to be 'trivial' but dealing with weighty matters of state.
One article that caught my eye last yearonMonday, 19 October 2009 in The Observer was one by David Michell calledOil wheels the Hypocracy of Politicians and the Public . On Iraq, Mitchell said,
....this kind of cynical foreign affairs wheeler-dealing gets a terrible press and causes public handwringing...."We only went into Iraq because of oil, you know." "We only appease Saudi Arabia because of oil, you know." To hear people talk sometimes, you'd think they never used oil.
Oil is vital and Britain hasn't got much of it. I hope it won't be vital forever but it certainly still is. There are worse reasons to fight or appease than the procurement of a necessity. If we went to war for food, I doubt anyone would blame us.
.I completely agree that this sort of cynicism is immoral. What I don't like is people claiming it's all the work of a few malevolent patricians – a self-serving ruling class getting off on their own acquisitive misanthropy – rather than a political community responding obediently to our loudly expressed democratic will.
Oil, trade, employment and money are important to us – and, by us, I mean we the people, not just they the politicians or business interests.
When there's a controversial war, some nice, middle-class people go on an organised weekend stroll. When petrol is too expensive, lorry drivers blockade the major roads and the country grinds to a halt. Our leaders would have to be fools to take the former more seriously than the latter.
But they're so craven, so much the creatures of our favour, that they'll let us hide from our own self-interest.
They indulge us in our belief that they're hypocrites, when in fact it's us. We live in comparative luxury, squeal like a stuck pig at the first sign of its diminution and blame the world's problems on politicians.
there are millions of us in .. being told we can have it both ways – reduced carbon emissions and cheap air travel, an enlightened policy towards the Middle East and affordable petrol, cuts in spending but not services – because we won't vote for anyone who doesn't
It's depressing that such a vital point has been made by a comedian, David Mitchell, whilst most serious journalists and activists, including John Pilger, never have the guts to confront the fact that protesting against wars and realpolitik for control of oil supplies is the only way to give 'The People' what they really think they want.
Democracy has been hollowed out in the West : without the consumer economy a significant number of Britons would demand Fascism if it meant the human right to drive a petrol guzzling SUV or fly to Prague to puke their guts up on Stag Night parties in Krakow, Prague, Riga, Bratislava and Tallinn.
This is partly because people are denied the information that would allow them to understand the world but not entirely. It's that when people are mollified by consumerism and entertainment divertions they need not thnk too deeply, not least if the reality is so frightening that it goes against the hedonistic pleasure ethos that drives the economy and society.
The 'Make Tea Not War' pseuds who protested against the Iraq War in February 2003 did so through their desire for collective narcissism, the hunger of bored consumers for something to stimulate their adrenals, to state 'I Was There' and not through any real belief that the political system must be changed.
Mitchell is an 'ironist' of the trendy 'alternative comedy scene but he's really touched a raw nerve here. Where are the George Orwell's who want to tell people that liberty is telling people what they do not want to hear ? That the quest for diminishing oil will lead to greater terrorist threat and the growth of a national security state.
Writers like Pilger and Chomsky blame the wars for oil on 'rapacious foreign policy' in such a way that is not challenging people to 'think differently' about the world's problems. It encourages the cosy view that only our governments are to blame and if 'we' change them the entire world will be better.
This is a stupefying myth,a parochial remnant of the Eurocentric revolutionary progressive tradition that fails to grasp with intractable problems like overpopulation, resource shortage, and global heating-for progressives these problems can be solved by human mastery and willpower, in overcoming global inequality rather than global numbers.
Mentioning that conflicts over oil are caused by every single person who demands an energy intensive lifestyle is usually written off by those who lack the courage to confront this threat to civilisation. Especially by the kind of doltish Jeremy Clarkson figure whose gung ho defence of the Great Car Economy is environmental imbecility. But he's just doing his job, I suppose.
For inequality to diminish economic growth must proceed apace. Poor people in Third World nations are not more inherently virtuous because poor. They are just poor and history shows that such people will be far more "materialistic" and demand to have a chance at becoming like the West.
More generally the moralistic outrage over conflicts over oil reflects guilt and bad faith, an inability to confront the true driving force behind the rising terror threat-that the West needs falling or stable prices for oil, the Middle East needs rising prices to feed its growing populace. This is going to be a source of war and instability in the 21st century.
Cocooned in wealth and consumerism with corrupt governments supported by the West ,its hardly surprising that Islamists will be intoxicated with hatred because Muslims have died in order that 'we' in the West might live better. If no amount of protest can change it, then only raising the blood price will.
Such are the emerging psychopathologies behind terrorism and the resentment which is the result of being overdependent upon oil in dangerously unstable regions in the Middle East and Central Asia. Revealing the hypocrisy of governments that prate human rights but practice realpolitik.
Oil like sex in Victorian times is the great unmentionable in polite political circles and shattering the taboo by doing the dirty on politics through suggesting 'they' are all corporate stooges rolling around in oil wealth is a projection on to them of the greed that the vast majority of Westerners demonstrate; hence the vitriol directed against Them.
The capacity of "think tanks" to deliver utter reams of drivel is most certainly a main driving for of Bullshit Britain.
It could even be a major part of the "creative economy" they espouse, those like Tony Giddens whose speciality in gobbledegook is a speciality of his and all those who supported "rebranding Britain" in 1997.
One of the most odious examples is the pathetic Charles Leadbetter, he of the proposterous neoliberal tract Living on Thin Air about how Britain would live in a post-modern knowledge economy and who wrote late last year of how the X Factor talent show could rejuvenate politics.
Its interesting, as the X Factor is considered more important by many Britons than global heating, resource wars, Peak Oil or any cultural pursuit that involves having some form of inner life, that Leadbetter fails to understand that it applies precisely to democracy under New Labour.
But , of course, being praised by the slimy spin doctor Peter Mandelson as a visionary thinker, rather than a purveyor of fly-by-night pseudo-philosphies akin to New Age and "Third Way" crap, meant not criticising New Labour.
The X Factor recipe is known to political scientists as "authoritarian deliberation" ? the public deliberate on a set of options decided by a dictator. Whatever the public ends up choosing, the dictator always wins, just as whatever act we choose as the X Factor winner Cowell's record label is bound to win.
And this is now what passes for serious political analysis in The Guardian.
The point this half wit does not get is that in the UK we have a similar choice with "NuLab" and "NewCon" which genuflect to the money markets and offer slightly different consumer packages instead of allowing 'the electorate' to choose different policies.
"Cowellism carries strong echoes of Margaret Thatcher's authoritarian populism. Vladimir Putin skilfully deployed authoritarian deliberation to legitimise dictatorial rule".
Well, Putin is actually not a 'dictator' but a market authoritarian and populist who runs a nationalist government that is termed a sovereign democracy. Anyone who thinks Putin is Stalin or a 'dictator' lacks basic knowledge. Or is just a feeble propagandist.
And why hark back to Thatcher ?
The X Factor represents the 'entertainment economy' and it's epitomised by Tony Blair's tawdry Cool Britannia, the erosion of civil liberties and give the plebs their doltish drivel so they do not question what their rapacious manipulators are doing in their name.
Anyway, apart from that, the article raised interesting question posed by the late JG Ballard: could consumerism lead to a new form of Fascism ?
On reflection we can only be thankful that most politicians do not watch X Factor and still fewer understand its appeal.
Politicians do know about these kinds of things. That's what creepy little shits like Derek Draper are there to do: depth psychologise the national mood and script some balmy medoicre platitudes about Great Progressive Britain, the "feelgood factor" etc etc.
Politicians have aides who tell them to spout banalities, as William Hague did when he commented on the nation's mood concerning the seriousness of the death of Deidre Barlow's husband in the cliche ridden and mind rotting Orwellian prolefeed that is the soap opera Coronation Street.
In any case part of the problem is that politicians as politicians today do not matter that much. They are interchangeable and expendable as they reflect nothing more than corporate interests and the rule of money. As Ballard wrote, elections are nothing more than a folkloric ritual.
The real power of choice has gravitated to the shopping mall where the most important choice is what brand of sweatshirt the wholly empowered consumer is entitled to buy to consolidate his being.
Higher levels of consumer satiety breed a lethal boredom from which only the promise of voyeurism, cruelty, sensation and even violence can deliver them-hence the attraction of the Stag Nights, noisy pubs with telescreens, G 20 "Protests" and other ways of working up a sweat.
First writtenon Friday, 11 December 2009 and rewritten today.
It is slightly weird that there are still some Trotskyists in Britain who still hero worship Leon Trotsky after the reams of evidence that have come from archives in Moscow in recent years that have confirmed that Trotsky was a brave bad man, though with certain qualities, such as charisma and the ability to write rather well.
More than any other leading Bolshevik, Trotskyists have been fulminating at Service's supposed "hatchet job" on Service's excellent Trotsky: A Biography. In turn each of these ideologues will be dealt with for their cheap invective, cherry picking of quotes and blatant distortion of what Service has written about this mass murdering ideologue.
To begin with here are some hack propagandists I intend to precision skewer for their utter bitterness and outraged self-righteousness and misplaced faith in this supposed revolutionary hero. Most of which seems to pun rather childishly on the name "Service" as merely assert faith in Trotsky rather than deal with the facts.
This rather tedious and unintelligent man does nothing to engage with the substance of Service's biography other than express common places that re-iterate the mythology of Trotsky as well as moaning about how long the book is, as if that was somehow in itself an argument against it.
"This book is very thick - running to 600 pages - but is very thin when it comes to an honest political examination and analysis of the ideas of Leon Trotsky, the subject of Service's tome".
The only thing which is very thick is Taafe who seems to think that anything Service writes should be treated with scepticism simply because he conducted a debate with Christopher Hitchens at the Hoover Institute which is considered parts of the US Establishment and hence necessarily invalidates anything he has to say.
To this fool, debating Trotsky at the Hoover Institute means he must be a tool of "the ruling classes" to smear Trotsky and thereby deny hope to those yearning working masses for whom Trotsky was a beacon of working class militant struggle. Yet as Service points out, Trotsky regarded the proletariat as a means to his ideological ends of destroying the system.
Taafe whines pitifully that,
"This is a mild example of the epithets Service flings at Trotsky. He presented "serious inaccuracies" in his writings, he was an "intellectual bully"; he was "vain and self-centred". Two lines after making this charge Service says that Trotsky "disliked boasting"!"
Well , that quite possibly because it was true of Trotsky. A person who feels no reason to boast can feel so arrogant that he feels no compunction to engage with tedious politicking. Like Verkhovensky in Dostoevsky's The Devils, Trotsky used to sit out boring committee meetings in silence.
Trotsky would usually doodle on bits of scrap paper, yawn, read newspapers ostensibly in front of dull speakers. Had the slow witted Taafe been alive then at committee meetings then , Trotsky would have treated him no doubt as an elephantine bore. The fact is Trotsky was not a pleasant man and very condescending to those of lower intellect than he.
Service is revealing his self centred arrogance and to do so by quoting primary historical sources is not "boasting". It just means Taafe lacks the intellectual capacity to engage with Service who has obviously riled him into making highly embarrassing You Tube videos that reveal his own lack of capacity for critical thought.
"He is accused of base motives in allegedly "abandoning his first wife" and his two daughters, who Service nevertheless concedes urged him to escape from Siberia in order to link up with Lenin and the RSDLP leaders who were producing Iskra (The Spark), the revolutionary paper of the time. On virtually every page there is at least one distortion, and often more, of Trotsky's ideas, his personal life, etc."
If Trotsky is accused of such behaviour, as fully documented by Service, then it is no use ignoring what Service says with regards Trotsky being a charming egotist who was always willing to put ideological imperatives before basic care and concern for his first wife, with women seen as subordinate to his world historical mission.
Unwilling or more likely incapable of challenging Service, Taafe reacts with scorn and sarcasm typical of those motivated by idolatry for the man and not concerned with all those people he betrayed in his rather unpleasant way, whether they were personal relations of the Kronstadt Sailors,
"There is not one relevant new fact which adds to our picture of Trotsky in this book... apart from learning that Trotsky's children acquired a "Viennese accent", surprise, surprise, when they were living in that city".
So they did and how does that detract from Service's biography? Answer: it does not. If Taafe is so fundamentally unwilling to react intelligently, it is hardly surprising Service has refused to debate with him any more than one would bother with a cranky religious fundamentalist standing on Hyde Park Corner.
Taafe deliberately distorts and cherry picks his way through Service's biography to find things he finds offensive and objectionable. For example,
" Incredibly, we learn, for instance, that prior to 1914, Trotsky was not a "Marxist theoretician"! Unfortunately for Service's "self-serving" account, there is the small, 'unfortunate' detail of Trotsky as the chairman of the Petrograd soviet during the 1905 revolution !"
In fact Service mentions the period "before 1914" prior to 1905, when Trotsky had converted to Marxism, when he was more a narodnik or more in tune with the Social Revolutionaries in the 1890s before he became involved with the leading Marxist grandees like Martov and Plekhanov.
Taafe's comment shows he has not even bothered to read the book at all but has just scented someone who calls Trotsky somewhat of an opportunist and so projects that sin back on to Service in some desperate struggle to prove Service is "lying". Trotskyists and Marxist-Leninists are known for believing that opposition to their worldview is proof they are right.
This is proved by Taafe quoting Trotsky to prove Trotsky was right and Service must be wrong.
"Service goes on to argue that Trotsky was "not original"; this theory was really the intellectual property of Alexander Helfand, better known as Parvus, who collaborated with Trotsky. Unfortunately for Service, we have the admission by Trotsky himself that Parvus contributed the "lion's share" of this theory. But Parvus stopped short of drawing the bold revolutionary conclusion advanced by Trotsky".
Again this is tedious. An admission by Trotsky is just an admission by Trotsky who would have every reason to think he was an especially original theorist which he was not: Trotsky picked up those ideas he believed would be of Service in furthering his status and image as a unifier and unique leader of the revolutionary masses.
Which is why Taafe rationalises Trotsky's own justification for the suppression of the Kronstadt revolt of 1921 without providing historical evidence to the contrary to the established fact that Trotsky ordered the repression of the sailors and that they were the same sailors.
And even if they had not, having disposed of the democracy of the Constituent Assembly in January 1918, there was by then no means of redress against forced grain rquisitioning, repression of a free press, lack of pay and conditions. Taafe pathetically repeats again Trotsky's self serving justification as a matter of faith and truth by authority.
"Trotsky, for instance, is accused of "omitting" in My Life any mention of the Kronstadt revolt of 1921. Trotsky himself explained when he replied to the "hue and cry over Kronstadt" in the 1930s that this was for the simple reason that this was not considered to be a major event until resurrected by latter-day critics such as anarchists and, unfortunately, by Victor Serge in the 1930s".
Why it was unfortunate for Serge to keep reminding Trotsky of it has nothing to do with his being an "anarchist", as Serge has become a Bolshevik by 1918 and had subsequently developed an independent mind of the sort Taafe lacks entirely as he parrots out the ideological line as Pure True Gospel.
"Trotsky was accused of "suppressing" the Kronstadt sailors", the "same ones" who participated in the October revolution. In a forensic analysis, he showed that this was not the case - he played no direct role in the suppression of the Kronstadt revolt but accepted full "moral responsibility" for the actions that were taken".
Trotsky did not take full "moral responsibility" for crushing the Kronstadt Mutiny. He lied about it consistently or used casuistry and sophistry to conceal his crime.
"The Kronstadt 'rebels' demanded "soviets without the Bolsheviks", which was applauded by the counter-revolutionaries in Russian and worldwide.Service just repeats falsehoods - without any evidence whatsoever - to try and convince us that the sailors of 1921 were the same as the heroic insurrectionists of the October revolution, which they were not. The vast majority of Petrograd workers supported the action taken against them".
Which "counter revolutionaries" supported the Kronstadt rebels is not supported by evidence. The method of argumentation is using what Orwell knew in Politics and the English Language as a term used meaninglessly to mean that those who did not support the Bolsheviks were all part of a seamless and sinister imperialist plot.
Moreover, the pathetic reference to putting the Kronstadt rebels in scare quotes is a feeble line of argument designed to presuppose in advance, without evidence, that they were in league with the Imperialists, a claim later made by Stalin who claimed they were receiving money from Washington.
A claim which precisely was facilitated by the kind of paranoid conspiracy theory Taafe wheels out in defence of this act of brutality for which Trotsky was responsible
"Using independent sources Trotsky showed that the leaders of the revolt, for their own selfish ends - during the civil war - demanded special privileges. They even threatened to take over the Red Fleet which, with the thawing of the ice between Russia and Finland, would have opened the gates to an imperialist attack at the very heart of the Russian state. Reluctantly, therefore, the Russian workers' government, after the mutineers refused to negotiate and withdraw, quelled the revolt".
Again Taafe provides no evidence Petrograd workers supported its crushing.
The evidence is copious that most Petrograd workers were fed up with the Bolsheviks repression by 1920 as many were rebelling, going on strike and demanding an end to the appalling way they were being treated under the Bolshevik regime. Maybe they were the 'wrong kind of workers'.
After all Taafe conflates the Bolshevik elite with "the workers government" , so naturally those who dissented were not real workers but enemies of the people.
If this dull ideologue had anything that could pass for analytical skill, he would be able to cut a swathe through the murderous verbal fictions used by the Bolsheviks and unclog the drivel clogging his own brain from thinking constructively and objectively.
If they had not been 'real workers' valued by the workers, there would have been no need for regular Red Army conscripts to be shadowed by blocking detachments ordering those who retreated to be shot. And even if these sailors were not "the same" but mere peasants as Trotsky claimed, it was hardly ethical to demand they be "shot like partridges"
Paul Hampton
"Robert Service has long advocated the "continuity thesis" - the claim made by cold-war historians and by Stalinist apologists that Lenin (and Trotsky) led to Stalin"
This is the most stupid conflation, as if Stalinists and those who regard Communism in the Soviet Union as a catastrophe are two peas from the same pod. Hampton blethers on that Service,
"...is explicit about this in the book, but with an added twist. He makes Trotsky an even greater villain than Stalin or Lenin. Trotsky "lived for a dream that many people found a nightmare", claims Service".
This is, of course, absolutely true as all Utopian zealots assume that some abstract Historical entity, in Trotsky or Stalin's case the proletariat, represent a mathematical X in History which is unified in one singular movement towards a single vision of Paradise on Earth.
In that sense Service is entirely correct that such visions can only but polarise opinion as no one person, be it a commissar such as Trotsky nor the eventual dictator Stalin, can have a monopoly of what this illusory vision at the End of History would look like.
All societies contain millions of people with their own individual dreams, hopes and aspirations and any God Society allows for a pluralism in which people are best left alone to their own devices subject to some amount of necessary state power and government.
Hampton warbles on that Service is just wrong to maintain that,
"[Trotsky’s] ideas and practices laid several foundation stones for the erection of the Stalinist political, economic, social and even cultural edifice. Stalin, Trotsky and Lenin shared more than they disagreed about".
This is true as all of them from the outset of the Revolution sought policies of mass collectivisation and breakneck industrialisation in which the peasantry were going to be forced to work on collective farms whether they liked it or not,
"If ever Trotsky had been the paramount leader instead of Stalin, the risks of a bloodbath in Europe would have been drastically increased... The point is that whoever governed the USSR effectively stood in need of deeply authoritarian methods to conserve communist power"
This is true as after 1918 there was going to be no open democracy after the Constituent Assembly was dissolved. No free press, apart from continuous polemics from Trotsky, and no liberty for individual thought outside The Party. That's what totalitarianism means.
Hence those workers and peasants who did not understand this would be in need of large doses of re-education.
It did not matter that most of them voted for the Socialist Revolutionaries, When they did Trotsky was a key figure in dissolving it and saying they had been consigned to the "dustbin of History". So true, as Service puts it,
"[Trotsky’s] lust for dictatorship and terror was barely disguised in the civil war. He trampled on the civil rights of millions of people including the industrial workers"
Hampton, rather like Taafe, is trying to rally the faithful in defence of Trotsky as he distorts, misinterprets what he writes and muddles up the whole point of history which in the hands of professionals depends crucially on chronology
"For Service, Trotsky’s role in the flowering of working-class democracy in 1917 scarcely figures. He omits important matters such as the democratic votes in Duma elections and in the Petrograd Soviet itself in the autumn, when the most democratic bodies in Russian history voted overwhelmingly for Bolshevik representatives and for Bolshevik resolutions calling on the Soviets to take power from the highly undemocratic, warmongering, pro-landlord and anti-working class Provisional Government".
But that came before the workers stated chafing at what Trotsky was later in 1921 to offer-"militarised labour armies" and the obsession against the Workers Opposition. even in the Bolshevik Party, that Trade Unions were no longer necessary as the Bolshevik regime was a 'workers state'. All this is comprehensively documented by Service.
Hampton then states,
"Service can barely bring himself to recount the threat present by the right-wing general Kornilov, who attempted a proto-fascist coup in August 1917. He suggests that if only the Bolsheviks had left alone, Russia would have evolved smoothly towards a bourgeois democratic republic".
The use of the word "hardly bring" is a venomous pathetic little snipe that suggests Service is "concealing" key facts and id, naturally wholly unlike the witless and banal Hampton, a mere propagandist. It was the leader of the Provisional Government Kerensky who called on the SRs and Bolsheviks to defend it against Kornilov's action.
Skipping merrily across the repressive measures and introduction of the Red Terror, Hampton then spews out this nugget of utter wisdom,
Rather than explain the terrible circumstances of the civil war, and register that Trotsky’s intervention was critical in winning it against 21 armies from 14 countries, Service focuses on Trotsky's decision to have the Bolshevik Panteleev shot after the battle of Kazan in August-September 1918.A scandal previously suppressed? Not at all. There was a Politburo enquiry in April 1919. It found that Panteleev was shot as a deserter.
If by 'desertion' Hampton means this previously erstwhile Bolshevik decided to take a steamboat up the Volga to avoid the civil war between the SR's and the Bolsheviks, then that is a curious way of putting it.
And ,of course, a Politburo enquiry in a non-democratic regime was really going to go against what Trotsky had decided when he had those on board summarily executed. With no separation of powers, no independent judiciary. A Politburo was hardly going to be objective.
But it only suffices to crawl cravenly back to the sacred texts to find a rationalisation for Trotsky's cruelty. Ignoring what Service maintains all along about how selective Trotsky was in his memoirs, as all politicians are, with the exception of the secular saint Trotsky, Hampton opines,
'The incident was recounted by Trotsky in his autobiography My Life in 1930 and discussed by Isaac Deutscher in his biography published in 1954. As Trotsky put it: "I appointed a field-tribunal which passed death-sentences on the commander, the commissary, and several privates – to a gangrenous wound a red-hot iron was applied. I explained the situation to the regiment without hiding or softening anything."
That's nice of him. If that is what "socialism" is, then it would difficult to see how Fascism could be much different, only that it was only after Trotsky's suppression of the Kronstadt revolt in 1921 Fascism did come to power and self consciously emulated Bolshevik theory and practice.
As for the rest of Hampton's feeble rationalisation, there is no point going on with it when he states,
Deutscher, who saw Stalinism as (unfortunately) the only way for progress in Russia at the time, presented Trotsky's call for the "militarisation of labour" in 1920 as a prescient foreshadowing of what Stalin did in the 1930s.
Only a somewhat pitiful crank clinging on to a dogmatic pseudo-religious form of faith could think Isaac Deutscher was somehow a heretic for writing about Trotsky in this way whilst writing a generally favourable three volume Prophet series of books on the man and his Revolution.
If this is not clear from this quote I cannot think what possibly could be,
Trotsky used the term "militarisation" in the interests of honest dealing within the workers' state, and not because he rejoiced in repression. "Of course, it is only an analogy, but one that is very rich in content."
This is Westfields Shopping Mall in Shepherds' Bush, one of the largest, if not the largest, in London. I had passed it several times on the overland train down from Willesden Junction down to West Brompton, where I alight to then to get the District Line Tube Train to Putney Bridge where I work. I had it on my mind to see what it was all about.
On this hot summer day in July 2010 I finally got off the train from Clapham Junction after seeing the immense magnitude of the new Westfields shopping Centre in Shepherd's Bush. This horrible temple of mass consumerism might as well have been the inspiration for J G Ballard's Kingdom Come.
One of the greatest chroniclers of our age wrote in the last years of his life about the idea that consumerism could lead to Fascism.
I entered this vacuous shopping Utopia and took at least 30 pictures before a black female security guard rushed up to me. She said "You cannot take photographs here in Westfields".
I replied "Um, er...Why not, it's a free country isn't it ? And this is a kind of public space I suppose where people would surely want to take photographs of their wonderful day out in Westfields"
"Not taking photos in Westfields is Westfieldspolicy"? she said emphatically
Yes, but why ? I'm not harming anybody. I find the architecture and the design most intriguing as it looks like a vision of Heaven to me. I really love it here." I said with an airy indifference, as consumers shot glances at me with hostility.
"Yes. Westfield's policy is quite clear. No photos".
"Does Westfields then have different laws from the rest of England ?
"No, this is Westfield own private policy."
"So I can't bring my wife here to enjoy a lovely day out here. It's just so airy and bright here that I wanted to show here what it really looks like so we could make a trip here".
"I'm not going to repeat myself again sir, Westfield's does not allow photos without people. So yeah, you can take photos of your wife here"
Um, ok but what's the difference as she'd be in a picture with Wesfiel's clealy shown in the photo, I just don't understand".
"It's Westfield's policy sir. I'm just doing my job. Please I'm busy".
"Ok, now just really I understand everything".
" Thanks sir".
At least she did not actually grab the camera off me.
But after leaving Westfields I walked up the road to the BBC Television Centre. There was more bad news. No cameras were allowed there either, which a curious position for a TV channel to maintain-if this indeed BBC Policy these days.
Just further up the road the old 1950s BBC Television Centre were the new wierd "post modern" steel metallic buildings to the north of it . It had flagpoles blowing in the soft breeze. I started snapping when, after five minutes, a security guard aggressively rushed up into my face and snapped at me angrily,
" You can't take photos here Sir!"
"Why not , it's not gated. I like the steel metallic architecture ?. It very futuristic you see".
"No, put your camera away now. No photos of the BBC". He glared at me with anger but, even more disturbingly with agonised hatred mingled with pure incomprehension. This man though it was almost insane to take photos of the BBC.
I just somewhat wearily and sarcastically looked him directly in the eyes and said in my drollest fashion "Now I understand. But I just love the BBC for representing the best of British liberal culture that we promote worldwide. I was just admiring the BBC. Don't you ?".
"Can you just go away please"?
"Don't worry. I've been in Eastern Europe too long and didn't realise the situation had changed so much in the UK. In Moscow I was allowed to take photos of the Kremlin, a really sinister place that was a bastion of totalitarianism in the USSR. That's why Kenny Everett of the BBC in the 1980s wanted to bomb Russia".
"I've just told you to get away from the buildings and go away. Will you just do that immediately I won't ask you again Sir?" as he looked with hostility at the digital camera.
"Yes.....Ok then....Sir".
The heat was blazing down on me. I was giddy and feeling deeply estranged, so I then tried to head West of Westfields along the Westway heading towards Paddington. Drivers in white vans honked at me as I walked along the narrow path without any exits.
Someone in a white van whizzed past and loudly shouted "nutter". Pedestrians are subversive when they walk along Westway somehow. They clearly though that this was a place where I should not be walking. But I was.
I had not done anything wrong but the fact that someone would walk along Westway must have seemed insane for them. But again, I was taking pictures and glaring at the high rise blocks and the hideous Trellick Tower in Notting Hill.
The Guardian operates a website called "Comment is Free" But repeatedly when I mention in contradistinction to mainstream journalists by citing intelligent sources of expertise and that Afghanistan is really about, my comments are removed. How can advancing a debate in this way be classified as verboten ?
Anyway, Ivo Petkovski today gets it about right in Friday's The Guardian when in'National security' Afghan justification doesn't hold. He asserts,
.......just last week, defence secretary Liam Fox declared that our engagement in Afghanistan is "a national security imperative", wheeling out once again the time-worn argument that military actions in Afghanistan can reduce the terrorist threat in the west. This issue is proving to be a gift-wrapped package for any politician in opposition – Bob Ainsworth had to hold the same line in the face of mounting Tory derision when he was defence secretary for Labour, and now it's Labour's turn to point and laugh at Fox when he's forced to do the same.
I can understand why Ainsworth felt the need to cleave to the idea that our domestic security depends on a stable Afghanistan, since it was his party leaders that committed us to the invasion. Any admission of doubt would have been politically disastrous for Labour. To a lesser degree, I can understand why Fox cleaves to it too – in for a penny, and all that. But it seems that there's only so far an argument can stand in complete opposition to an increasingly obvious reality, and this one is now stretched to breaking point.
The 'national security' issue is one of the most mendacious lie in Britain's culture in what Peter Oborne calls "The Rise of Political Lying" and its rise in Britain where the real facts pertaining to why the UK is actually in Afghanistan. To induce fear in Britons is an easy pretext to justify a resource war.
But why Petkovkski does not mention the TAPI pipeline is another form of unfreedom or censorship by omission For as John Foster made plain in the Toronto Star in 2009, Afghanistan is part of what Zbigniew Brzezinski calls The Grand Chessboard. Foster wrote,
Why is Afghanistan so important?
A glance at a map and a little knowledge of the region suggest that the real reasons for Western military involvement may be largely hidden.
Afghanistan is adjacent to Middle Eastern countries that are rich in oil and natural gas. And though Afghanistan may have little petroleum itself, it borders both Iran and Turkmenistan, countries with the second and third largest natural gas reserves in the world. (Russia is first.)
Turkmenistan is the country nobody talks about. Its huge reserves of natural gas can only get to market through pipelines. Until 1991, it was part of the Soviet Union and its gas flowed only north through Soviet pipelines. Now the Russians plan a new pipeline north. The Chinese are building a new pipeline east. The U.S. is pushing for "multiple oil and gas export routes." High-level Russian, Chinese and American delegations visit Turkmenistan frequently to discuss energy. The U.S. even has a special envoy for Eurasian energy diplomacy.
Rivalry for pipeline routes and energy resources reflects competition for power and control in the region. Pipelines are important today in the same way that railway building was important in the 19th century. They connect trading partners and influence the regional balance of power. Afghanistan is a strategic piece of real estate in the geopolitical struggle for power and dominance in the region.
Since the 1990s, Washington has promoted a natural gas pipeline south through Afghanistan. The route would pass through Kandahar province. In 2007, Richard Boucher, U.S. assistant secretary of state, said: "One of our goals is to stabilize Afghanistan," and to link South and Central Asia "so that energy can flow to the south." Oil and gas have motivated U.S. involvement in the Middle East for decades.
When these simple facts are mentioned there might be a chance that public intellectuals will start to discuss the hidden realities behind the Afghanistan War. As neither Liam Fox nor Cameron nor Gordon Brown can use "public diplomacy" to good effect by claiming that it is about "national security.
It is but it is about national energy security and no longer about Al Qaida which has long fled Afghanistan. The shifting pretexts alone ought to have made people interrogate and scrutinise what the real motives are, what the cost is to our security and whether this futile war is worth the sacrifice.
As for the idiocy of censoring my comments in what is supposedly liberal newspaper, this is despicable and pathetically craven. My comments on Sir Simon Jenkin's case against the Afghanistan war were removed for, presumably, being "off topic". But as I consistently keep saying commentary can not be advanced if such vital information is suppressed.
I am trying to advance the discussion on "Comment is Free" and to mention the unmentionable role of Turkmenistani oil and gas is doing so in liberal newspaper . It is not "off topic" but of seminal importance in making Afghanistan unstable as transit pipeline states are inherently insecure as we saw with Georgia in 2008.
Marxism 2010 continues in London and ideologues without a clue are nothing new. Last year the pathetic "anti-capitalist" G 20 protests achieved nothing, apart from expressing inchoate anger at the "system": a justified response to the financial collapse brought about by New Labour adding up to nothing but a designer protest.
After the madness of the central London crowds of thousands and clashes with riot police, a small number of scholars and demonstrators met at the University of East London campus Wednesday afternoon to hold an alternative G20 summit, the dream of G20 meltdown organiser Chris Knight.
Organiser Chris Knight, still costumed as a dead banker from the rallies at the Bank of England earlier in the day, professed that he felt this summit was already superior to the bankers' summit Thursday because although not many had gathered, those that did did so to discuss an alternative, whereas those meeting tomorrow were not, and "as we've seen today the whole of London has no confidence in them".
This smacks of utter desperation.
The pretence this was an 'alternative summit' was futile and flawed and would fail to mobilise people and thus end in total failure.
A significant number of protesters only care about their 'counter cultural credentials': being seen to be radically transgressive and against 'the system' no less than the lifestyle revolutionaries of 1968.
They will make a smooth transition into corporate market structures later on. For radical gestures, street theatre, choreography, coining slogans and so on are 'transferable skills' that can be absorbed by corporate capitalism.
Knight's own stand was pitiful: it meant to radicalise and he had the position of professor from which to try and do so. Unfortunately, it was East London and he is grey, old and has bad teeth. Not sexy. Not handsome. Not Tariq Ali. Not Vanessa Redgrave. A failure even in kitsch terms.
Like many 68ers such people are fit for the contemptible dustbin of history into which those whom the 68ers rebelled against were flung. It's difficult to complain about that when radical movements have lauded youth over experience.
Ultimately, Professor Knights defiance is a defiance against his own death, which will happen a lot sooner than the deaths of the campus rebels he feels will carry the cause forward when many of them simply won't because they are fake.
The protest in pretending to be a dead banker will do nothing to nothing to offset that he is an irrelevant idiot.
The point about radical mythologies, in this case 1968, is that they can still act as a spur to change the world now even if the past 'radical moment' no longer in retrospect seems to be as promising or as liberating as once it did.
That does not seem like a rejection of the idea that students can act as a liberating vanguard force in society by pushing for social change when such an idea is very much flawed-more so today than in 1968.
For let's face it; what do those of 18 to 21 really know of life beyond often scouring texts for trendy theories that they do not often fully understand and cling on to in order to provide ego security.
Politics becomes a form of salvationist creed that can make sense of the senseless drift of life in meaningless consumer society,that is supposed to give direction and purpose whilst rejecting doubt, uncertainty, and scepticism.
So whilst every institution in Britain is repudiated and called into question, the aim is to suspend all that when it comes to lauding some 'systemic alternative' which can just anything that promises the work of destruction.
The destruction of Western civilisation in its entirety as nothing but a hypocritical mask concealing the fact that our liberal democracy is based reducing people to economic animals and appropriating Arab oil. Much of which is true.
Yet now that high culture has been junked and merely intelligent people without wisdom brought up on a diet of consumerism and media induced spectacles, the feeling in some will be inchoate rage: everything is a sham. Let's get acting then.
The irony is that the 1968 generation participated in the work of destruction of a society in which communal ties and bonds meant something were relentlessly eradicated by this mediocre generation of politicos and activists.
At this moment in our history that has led and will continue as many in this generation to have no real sense in which anything can go beyond the tired out antinomian postures of ultimate revolution for "self-autonomy" .
It will not matter how this is done; economic sabotage, blowing up TV transmission networks, Islamist terror-only violence will derail the gormless apathy of the masses that prevents them from rejecting their consumerist daydreams.
Nothing can change unless the situation in which most people in too comfortable Western nations like Britain is radically changed-if that means anarchy, bricking the bankers windows, smashing up cars, etc it will happen.
So there is a certain continuity between 1968 and the radical groups agitating for change on a global basis now in 2009-Professor Knights comments are very similar to sentiments expressed by students in 1968.
In the post-war liberal Britain of 1968 the sense of alienation led in the direction of supporting anti-capitalism, 'the system' and any radical force capable of defeating US Imperialism ( Mao, the NLF, Ho Chi Minh etc etc ).
In 2009 many on the anti-imperialist left were not "anti-war" but "anti-imperialist war"-they tend to see Hizbollah or Hamas as liberating forces that will carry out first and foremost the work of destroying Israel and Western power in the Middle East, the prime site for imperialism today.
Not south-east Asia or Latin America as it was back in 1968. This in itself has divided the left today between those student radicals who later went on to support 'liberal interventionism' ( many in New Labour like Charles Clarke, Mandelson , et al )and those who stuck to the supposed purity of the creed of 1968.
The present brewing up of discontent amongst students incited to action by professional pedants like Chris Knight might not lead, however, in a particularly tolerant direction.
For in the 1930s in Germany it led to most students supporting Nazism and burning books. Many 'Old Left ' academics and thinkers were very wary of the hysterical and intolerant dogmatism of some radical students.
One post-studenty style radical named Huq opined in response to the G 20 protesters,
Straitened economic circumstances are breeding palpable anger across the board – witness the attack on Sir Fred Goodwin's house this week. Forget the mythologised moment of 1968: higher education has the potential to be a flashpoint during this recession.
As a prediction, that's about right. But it does not portend towards a new enlightened generation, who will necessarily change the world for the better, not least in the light of the very dumbed down standards and 'instrumentalised knowledge' in the 'polyversities'.
Economic privation, the absence of security and the futility of being deluded that their degrees are anything more important than 'a diploma in origami' ( JG Ballard ), might push lots of half educated people into nihilistic anger.
I have predicted since New Labour came to power, the inevitable economic slump it's debt fuelled fake consumer boom will lead, in an atomised society, to the rise of ethnic tensions, Islamist militancy and enfevered pedants of Respect calling for 'direct action'.
After 1968, the failure of the 'mythologised moment' led a minority of student radicals to actually join or be sympathetic with the RAF or the Baader Meinhof Gang.
The failure of the 'Anti-War' movement and to prevent Iraq, the lack of any real political alternative with two parliamentary parties offering the same neoliberal dogmas and the rise of campus Islamism is an even more potentially "revolutionary moment"
And this time it is not going to be very pretty at all.
Rick Muir ( Last Orders at the Bar ) wrote in the in the Guardian in 2009 about the destruction of the English public house. It is one of the many depressing aspects of the degradation of public life in England that even as a child I took for granted and are now in the process of vanishing forever.
Few institutions are so central to England's culture and way of life as the local pub. Outside the home, the public house is the most popular place for English people of all ages and classes to relax and socialise. And yet pubs are under pressure.
The destruction of the British Pub is a great loss to British culture. When I returned to England from Poland briefly in 2009 it was disturbing to have witnessed how eerily listless and denatured the country has become. I left in 1998 just a year after the New Labour regime came to power.
Across Tamworth, pubs I once knew, grew up with and took for granted stand dilapidated with 'For Sale' signs on them. Those that survive exist only as boring and soulless Eateries with generic interiors. The once elegant Wolferston Arms in Shuttington is one such casualty, a unique pub that now has pseudo-chalk dish of the days and no wooden partitions.
The old names have gone. The Prince of Wales in Gungate has some zany name that sounds like an alchopop brand ( POW ) and throughout the streets stand tall poles with mounted CCTV cameras with the police monitoring potential outbreaks of violence. None of this is surprising at all.
Huge beer halls without character or historical association with bouncers there and music booming out to encourage lack of conversation and binge drinking inhabit old public service buildings like the Post Office now in Tamworth. It is now a repellant Yates' Bar with omnipresent telescreens belting out Murdoch's banal propagandistic Sky TV.
The reasons for this are not just about mysterious new "economic pressures":
......many pubs are closing, having been caught in a dangerous crossfire between changing consumer tastes, cut-price supermarket competition and the current recession. Some is due to a policy framework that makes no distinction, in terms of tax or regulation, between small community pubs and large city centre bars selling large volumes on a Friday and Saturday night.
Much is to do with New Labour's blanket smoking ban: pubs, are 'mutual tolerance centres' as the dramatist John Osborne once called them and for that reason hated by this repellent and utterly sinister regime.
New Labour has introduced legislation of a nature that reflects a morbid obsession with health and hygiene that sanitises everything it touches: every shop, pub that is small, individual and with unique character will be eradicated.
Instead the 'consumer' will be socially re-engineered to adopt the habits and tastes of the admen who can manipulate them to spend wads of cash in large shopping malls where memory and personal reflection are killed off. Pub names, as Peter Hitchens correctly emphasises in The Abolition of Britain, had names resonating with British history.
Too many British people are sleepwalking through what Henry Miller once referred to as 'The Air Conditioned Nightmare' : New Labour has created a country in which it has become increasingly impossible to live, to feel consoled, happy and at home. Tacky chain retail JD Wetherspoon Pubs are horrid places often full of only alcoholics and students.
It was not necessary to introduce the smoking ban: pubs should have been required by law to divide pubs into smoking and non-smoking sections. It was one of the last blows that has closed pubs, destroyed livelihoods and damaged English culture irrevocably. And makes England a nation an authoritarian nanny state treating adults as infantile.
One commenter defended New Labour by stating.
Those who whinge about the nanny state and the encroachment on liberty which they see as typical of the current government, and to which they attribute the decline of the pub are both sad and pathetic. This is the very same government that decided that pubs could open and close whenever they chose, and drinkers could be treated as adults.
Only New Labour wanted to maximise the profits of the large pub companies: this government tends to favour large scale corporate capitalism and it's domination over all aspects of everyday life from pubs to schools and retail outlets. Blandness and homogeneity are the rule. New Labour embraces both the nanny state and neoliberal anarchy: they re-inforce power and diminish English liberties
New Labour have benefitted the large supermarkets whose profits and dominance continue to grow. That's not some stale argument just peddled out by reactionary old codgers but by many avant garde critics of New Labour like George Monbiot in The Captive State.
Secondly giving one anecdotal example of changes in village life in the post war period is irrelevant: it's the usual shallow bleat of the trendy liberal left that all changes happen for good and progressive reasons because they are too cowardly to confront the reality.
It's true that the constant chorus of whining about England's decline can be annoying. Yet any smug progressive can try to rationalise it as the bleating of people incapable of dealing with the necessity of what just must always be "progress" and that those who demur aremerely ignorant and blinkered.
In fact, those who laud social changes as necessarily for the better more doltish than those who think nothing good has happened since 1945 at all. The stale idea that because people have always moaned about a 'Lost England' that it it can be dismissed is a very New Labour position.
With regards pubs, obviously not all pubs being lost now are great social institutions but neither are the places to which large numbers of people go to in order to neck as many drinks as possible before going on to nightclubs, the bleakest and brutal places in small market towns.
New Labour's legislation taken together has encouraged this kind of behaviour which is precisely why Rick Muir is coming up with ideas to save smaller pubs-the IPPR is actually a think tank that is progressive and close to New Labour's worldview.
That's perhaps why Rick Muir Muir omitted to mention the smoking ban: it did not only cause the decline of the English pub but it has been a factor which has driven the final nail into the coffin for so many that have now redesigned themselves as bland imitations of Beefeater Restaurants.
Liberty is different to license-only a halfwit could fail to see the difference between exercising free choice and having it to a freedom to loose control, to subordinate oneself to a mind numbing imperative of consuming colossal amounts of alcohol to forget how unsatisfying life is.
All of which has been intensified by the social and cultural changes accelerated by New Labour. Clearly, those who cannot see the connection do not want to see it and so, in typical New Labour fashion, there must be something wrong with the people who oppose it. As one person said when he opined,
These are the very same people who want nannyish rules and regulations on the sale of alcohol by supermarkets. Who want the state to cosset their favoured business with special tax breaks. Who seek government protected smoking dens. They are, in short, talking the kind of illogical nonsense which is typical of the opinions spouted in English pubs.
There is nothing 'nannyish' about having regulations on the sale of alcohol: the neoliberal market does not automatically guarantee freedom of choice. That has nothing to do with a nanny state for the greater interference of the State is made possible by the disorders created by rigged neoliberal markets.
Then there comes another specious argument,
No-one's mentioned bar staff. Why should they have to breathe other people's smoke for 8 hours a day to earn a crust?
They can work elsewhere then. The continual rotation of staff in retail chain pubs makes this argument worttless in any case.
And why should a person who does not drive and so uses the local pub have to breathe your filthy car exhaust fumes ? I have no choice but to breathe car fumes, though I do not drive. But I must use the streets. Without creating what economists refer to as "negative externalities".
Now replacing the petrol fuelled car with an environmentally friendly car is as good a goal as is getting people to stop smoking. But trying to ban car use is not going to happen because it would be economically ruinous to do so overnight.
Banning smoking in pubs was an easy target but the timing of it and set against cheap supermarket alcohol etc has killed off so many pubs. That cannot be a social good: it encourages people to get into their cars and go further afield, binge drink in the house or get smashed before going to a nightclub.
People who want a civilised evening out to talk and drink are finding it more impossible to do so: loud banal pop music, SKY telescreens with hordes of silly histrionic dolts screeching at football matches they could just as well watch at home. Is this the only social solidarity rituals these consumers actually now have ?
Britain has become a dysfunctional society: bleak, deracinated, and presided over by 'happy face fascists' who think that boxy housing estates, business parks, and shopping malls are Heaven. The places where there are no darkness.
Because people 'can't get no satisfaction' they will go mad and turn to acts of mass violence.
The need to yell at the telescreens when England play,the blub fest over Diana, the running up of English flagpoles in back gardens all testify to the strange absence of genuine communal life in Britain and some strange collective unease.
Welcome to Westway. It takes the driver West but only out of London. From Westfields Shopping Mall the driver drives East. The whole area is a blighted one. One passes through this zone of transience which defines the nature of the horrid area of Shepherd's Bush and the home of the BBC Television Centre.
By this Ballard meant the deconstruction of cities and the settled life they once contained as leading to pathological reactions amongst a deracinated citizenry in which the car would become seen as a liberating means people use to overcome their sense of being detached from the city.
In Concrete Island ( 1974 ), the driver's crash off Westway into a Traffic Island he cannot escape from and who is ignored by the cars zooming their way towards Central London was a satire based on the retelling of the myth of Robinson Crusoe. Crusoe was a man on an Island, a metaphor Daniel Defoe used to describe as Merlin Coverley puts it in Psychogeography,
With St George's Flags fluttering, White Van Men screamed abuse, though the little pathway alongside it is just wide enough to allow one to pass without getting in the way. One driver screamed 'nutter' and another 'wanker'. A curious form of Road Rage. Aggressive banality was omnipresent in this zone.
The fact that this mutton headed dolt has books are best sellers shows the need to tap into the aggressive and liberating aspects of the car from the world surrounding atomised individuals. It appeals to those for who the banalisation of everyday life requires aggression as a marketing tool. Including stunts like ramming an SUV into a tree to show "toughness".
Indeed outside Westfields, there were utterly moronic adverts with an underlying mood of implicit aggression. Gym Box, soon to open at Westfields, seemed to advertise aggression as the only way of maintaining one's freedom. As only losers could think that being on the straight and narrow was the way forward.
Anyway, Ivo Petkovski today gets it about right in Friday's The Guardian when in 'National security' Afghan justification doesn't hold. He asserts,
The 'national security' issue is one of the most mendacious lie in Britain's culture in what Peter Oborne calls "The Rise of Political Lying" and its rise in Britain where the real facts pertaining to why the UK is actually in Afghanistan. To induce fear in Britons is an easy pretext to justify a resource war.
But why Petkovkski does not mention the TAPI pipeline is another form of unfreedom or censorship by omission For as John Foster made plain in the Toronto Star in 2009, Afghanistan is part of what Zbigniew Brzezinski calls The Grand Chessboard. Foster wrote,
When these simple facts are mentioned there might be a chance that public intellectuals will start to discuss the hidden realities behind the Afghanistan War. As neither Liam Fox nor Cameron nor Gordon Brown can use "public diplomacy" to good effect by claiming that it is about "national security.
It is but it is about national energy security and no longer about Al Qaida which has long fled Afghanistan. The shifting pretexts alone ought to have made people interrogate and scrutinise what the real motives are, what the cost is to our security and whether this futile war is worth the sacrifice.
As for the idiocy of censoring my comments in what is supposedly liberal newspaper, this is despicable and pathetically craven. My comments on Sir Simon Jenkin's case against the Afghanistan war were removed for, presumably, being "off topic". But as I consistently keep saying commentary can not be advanced if such vital information is suppressed.
I am trying to advance the discussion on "Comment is Free" and to mention the unmentionable role of Turkmenistani oil and gas is doing so in liberal newspaper . It is not "off topic" but of seminal importance in making Afghanistan unstable as transit pipeline states are inherently insecure as we saw with Georgia in 2008.