I am very sorry for the lack of posts recently - a problem that looks set to continue for some time yet - as I have suffered a major computer failure, resulting in large data loss and difficulty accessing the internet. This, as I'm sure you can imagine, is playing havoc with any attempt to blog on a regular basis. I am working to find a solution to this latest hurdle but until then I ask for your patience and continuing support.
All the best and in the words of Curtis Mayfield...
I just saw an incredible interview on the Daily Show! A fantastic piece of journalism that should be repeated over and over again until the message sinks in... it should win every gong going. Although I must state the obvious and point out that we are in a really rough place when a comedy show has to take responsibility for tough financial journalism. The inevitable Republican/ Democrat blame game misses the very point that Stewart touched upon – that the game of 'more more more' is bound to stumble as we all become obsessed with getting rich and dismissive of actual work. Promises of perpetual double digit ROI are inherently false – but when CNBC/ FBN/ BloombergTV [a lesser offender] all seem to encourage that perception then how can we as a society maintain our collective reason?
The talking heads on finance TV aren't permitted to own individual equities [outside of their own employers] – but may hold indices – and long only, no shorts. The market goes up and they make money - perhaps a reason to hype the markets?
This video combines stunning visuals with a simple but effective message. However, simplicity is the wrong word - perhaps clarity is better suited - as the video also contains some fascinating statistics that provide a new perspective on this frequently misunderstood nation. I discovered this video whilst reading the Fearless Blogger's site. In a post about it she writes:
Half of Iran’s 70 million people are under the age of 25 - members of a generation that is opposed to the current regime. To express their views, many young Iranians have turned to blogging.
As a result,Iran is the third largest country of bloggers.
In 2005, there were over 700,000 blogs in Iran (100,000 actively maintained).
Despite the risks involved and strong government opposition, the number of Iranian bloggers continues to grow.
In my world, blogging is a means to become fearless.
This movie puts that in perspective. In their world, taking the plunge merely to attach their own name to the opinions they express means Iranian bloggers risk imprisonment or death.
This is just a very quick post to give a hat-tip to the BBC's Today program. I just read this article on their website that asks whether blogs are a legitimate and worthy form of political writing. The page also provides an audio clip where Hopi Sen discusses blogs with Orwell Prize Director John Seaton. Well worth a look...
The Orwell Prize Blog Longlist (the main focus of the article) is as follows:
So here we are again, another installment of my video highlights from various inspiring political speeches. I was very tempted to include a real classic political speech - perhaps JFK, Jesse Jackson, Winston Churchill or even the text of Anna Eleanor Roosevelt's "The Struggle for Human Rights" - I then considered including the famous Obama "Yes We Can" speech which still makes me want to jump up and campaign until my pop-socks... (pop?). However, I believe I have discovered the next great leader - someone to help steer us through these troubled times. This incredible speech that literally left me breathless:
I'm just returning the blog to normal after the 24 blackout in protest against the proposed removal of the presumption of innocence in copyright cases. See the Creative Freedom website for more info. I should be back to normal soon, I just need to spend some time tweaking the blog roll... However, I am burning the midnight oil and will have the site in tip-top shape by the morning. All for a good cause though, right?
Thank you for your continuing support. As ever, if you have any comments of questions, please don't hesitate to let me know.
All the best. And in the words of Curtis Mayfield:
I received a panicked email from a reader yesterday. It contained an expression of horror that wasrecently photographed for a national newspaper and in the frame was Nick Cohen's book 'What's Left: How Liberals Lost Their Way.' The reader wondered how I could reconcile Cohen's "bilge" with my "loofty-lefty" ideals and sought reassurance that the inclusion of the book was a "post-modern ironic gesture" of some kind. I am afraid to say that my answer was a disappointment. As I explained in a personal email, and now in more detail here, there are a number of very useful lessons to be learned from Cohen's polemic but its inclusion was not a subtle statement - merely a coincidence (the photographer wanted to have books in the shot and it was close at hand. Sorry.)
But whilst I'm on the subject of Cohen and the future of the 'left' in a post-‘Blairite’, Obama scented era...
Let's get one thing very clear from the start - I am in no way a Cohen apologist, but I will not got so far as this reviewer who said: "Nick Cohen’s book takes its place with the autobiographies of Robert Kilroy Silk and Derek Hatton as one of the worst books I have ever been asked to review." However, despite a very clear stance on the book as a whole, they did make a rather interesting point that I feel is a useful springboard for further discussion:
"Cohen makes some legitimate criticisms of the anti-war movement, of its self-hating moral relativism, of its crass anti-Americanism, of its self-absorbed fears of terrorist retribution, of its indulgence of anti-Semitism and Islamic reaction. Yet even these pointed observations are drowned in a torrent of self-exculpatory bile. Everything comes back to Cohen’s inner turmoil, and the ongoing battle for his soul, between the former Blair-baiting journalist and the new Cohen, Blair apologist and laptop bombardier."
N.B. For a more balanced overview, this article from the Guardian (including a broad spectrum of opinion) should give you the gist of the book's successes and failings.
Obviously, there are some elements of Cohen’s politics I find detestable – especially in his new found role as best friend of neo-cons. Many examples of this new attitude can be found in a recent article he wrote:
"It is undeniable that the best way to have avoided complicity in the horrors of the last century would have been to have adopted the politics of Jonah Goldberg [a man in the same hysterical, reactionary vein as Melanie Phillips]. Much can be said against moderate conservatives, but it has to be admitted that their wariness of grand designs and their willingness to place limits on the over-mighty state give them a clean record others cannot share...
'Liberal Fascism' [Goldberg's book] is not a clean blow to the jaw, but a multiple rocket launcher of a book that targets just about every liberal American hero and ideal...
Goldberg certainly leaves them little left to be proud of as he provides an alternative history of an America that Simon Schama lacks the intellectual courage to confront...
Beginning with the Black Panthers, multiculturalism [Melanie Phillips territory again] has also placed racial and religious identity above all else and beyond the reach of rational argument. Fascism was a pagan movement, whose mystic tropes are repeated by new age healers, vegetarians and greens...
Hillary Clinton's admittedly sinister desire for the state to take the place of the family..."
etc
Each of the above statements is ridiculous in the extreme. However, we must not allow our immediate distaste for his odd mix of hawk and hammer politics to justify ignoring some essential messages contained within Cohen's pages. The basic thesis of the book is that the 'Left' have always had a strong set of guiding principles and objectives that, with varying success, have given them a clearly defined cause. However, since the collapse of socialism in the 1980s the 'Left' have been in malaise and have resorted to blind anti-Americanism and a dangerous spiral of 'my enemy's enemy' alliance identification. For obvious reasons, I am painting in broad strokes but so does Cohen. One of my principle criticisms of his work is his tendency to use rather limited and obscure examples to tar an entire movement (of almost unparalleled diversity) with the same brush.
Peter Oborne, in the Guardian's summary article referred to previously, argues that - "The section on how the Socialist Workers Party (a marginal organisation taken with perplexing seriousness by Cohen) evolved from a half-baked Marxist sub-group into a repository for Muslim grievance is very nicely done." However, one group with extremely limited influence (and integrity) does not a movement in crisis make. Of course Cohen cites other examples - "Chomsky's erratic public career, including a brief spell as apologist for Pol Pot, gets the treatment it probably deserves." - but the book's main argument is that the Left's opposition to the 2003 Iraqi invasion was inspired by intense anti-Americanism (motivated by residual resentment of the free market after the fall of interventionary, statist Socialism?) and thus contradicted its previous vow to oppose fascism whenever, wherever it is found (i.e. Hitchen's Islamofascism.) This 'my enemy's enemy' criticism is repeated so often throughout the book that it dulls to such an extent it enters the realms of lounge music - incessant and inappropriate.
The charge that the 'Left' lost sight of its real target - intolerant, violent and repressive groups or individuals - as it fell over itself to find a common cause in attacking 'the Great Satan' is reasonably valid and must be levied against many 'so called' advocates of the left. However, to argue that this was the reason that most on the 'Left' campaigned against the 2003 invasion (myself 11 year old self included) is frankly ridiculous and where Cohen's analysis falls down. Whilst Chomsky and Said can be accused (even if not in a particularly sophisticated way) of blind anti-Americanism, the same cannot be said for Robin Cook or Tony Benn.
Cohen has often been accused by his critics as having little link to the 'Left' beyond his mother's ethical grapefruit purchases and so his attacks can be classed as another spasm of the 'Right'. Such a disownment lessens the betrayal as Cohen desperately lunges (not unsuccessfully) at a number of highly respected and influential figures within the widest possible definition of the 'Left'. Admittedly, whilst still writing for the decidedly liberal Observer, his recent articles suggest an ever increasing shift to the right. But not only does such a move prevent some very useful criticisms sinking in, there is also very little need to disown Cohen for his attacks - his targets are too insignificant. In a chapter entitled 'The Disgrace of the Anti-War Movement', Cohen admits: "A theme of this book is that ideas on the fringe are worth examining." This really is a central theme (and problem) with his work - the targets of his most stinging rebukes are much maligned "hangers on" to the broadly defined left.
Cohen takes the easy pickings of the movement's loonies - for example, the Respect Party's George Galloway gets beaten to an intellectual pulp and not one welcome in the ever popular fashionistas' ethical smoothies (as if we didn't know he was an egocentric, fascistic regime apologist). However, the best he can throw at the wider "good and well meaning" people of the left, the Liberals he refers to in his title, is that they attended marches organised by Galloway as leader of the Stop the War Coalition. But Cohen himself undermines this point almost within the next paragraph. He speculates about the euphoria that Galloway and his fellow far left crackpots must have experienced when addressing "not hundreds but hundred of thousands" at the largest political demonstration in British history - against the proposed 2003 invasion of Iraq. He then reflects that only a week or so later, at the local council elections, far left parties only won a single seat in the entire country (out of thousands of potential seats) in Preston (Town Centre) ward.
George Galloway's exploding ego and bad judgment is exemplified by his appearance on Celebrity Big Brother 2006
So obviously the vast majority of liberals had enough sense to attend a march in solidarity with a cause (that Cohen claims, in one of his most mendacious moments, was "against the overthrow of a fascist regime") but easily ignored the speeches of crack pot loonies from platforms along the way. Surely that's a positive? Cohen doesn't seem to think so. He examines over a century of the 'Left' highlighting misguided individuals and bad decisions but he has to spread their political blood so thinly in order to stain an entire movement that there is relatively no effect. Still, his criticism of Chomsky and Galloway is well deserved (but far from original) and he cogently argues against the assumption of an "Israeli root cause" to all Middle East issues:
"Sexist judges used to say that women who went out in mini-skirts were 'asking for it'. Their provocative dress was the 'root cause' of their rape. So it was with the intellectual left after 9/11. We 'had it coming'; we were the root cause of our own murder. Just as judges once removed responsibility from rapists... so intellectual leftists made mass murder a natural response to external provocation."
'What's Left?' contains a great deal of lucid and cogent argument but its premise is too large and its victims are too minor. At one point Cohen even admits that:
A complaint about my argument could be that 'you can always do this.' You can always discredit decent people by isolating the malevolant hangers-on who join them in upsurges of radicalism.
Faces along the bar Cling to their average day: The lights must never go out, The music must always play, All the conventions conspire To make this fort assume The furniture of home; Lest we should see where we are, Lost in a haunted wood, Children afraid of the night Who have never been happy or good.
I can hear the same being said about today's radical generation and I feel sorry for the poor dears. For when their fury passes, what will they have left?
But Cohen fails to mention another (admittedly less successful) stanza in the same Auden poem:
All I have is a voice
To undo the folded lie,
The romantic lie in the brain
Of the sensual man-in-the-street
And the lie of Authority
Whose buildings grope the sky:
There is no such thing as the State
And no one exists alone;
Hunger allows no choice
To the citizen or the police;
We must love each other or die.
Of course, this is a rather sorry state of affairs to find yourself (and your 'movement') - and I'm sure that the 'Left' isn't there yet - but here's where I really differ from Cohen. Until this point I find it very difficult to disagree with anything he says. Of course I take objection to his over generalisations and suspect framing of analysis to try and stain everyone with the political blood of the looney fringe. However, almost without exception his analysis is sound - selective and hardly representative - and true. But when he tries to argue that the entire 'Left' is in disarray - drowning in soy latte (but never from Starbucks) - I fear he really has lost the plot. I cannot and do not pretend to speak for the 'Left' or even a minority of it, I speak only for myself and my experience, but this is enough to clearly attest that Cohen is talking utter nonsense. So George Galloway dresses in lycra and purrs like a cat in a desperate lunge for popular appeal, but social democrats the world over are as passionate, committed and principled as ever.
By all means go out and read Cohen's book, by all means get angry at every other page and throw it against the wall at the end, by all means don't buy so many Chomsky essays but don't lose heart or extrapolate a crisis from crackpot cases. Then sit down, have a cup of tea and snuggle up with 'The Audacity of Hope'.
Very interesting. Conservative MSNBC host, Joe Scarborough's rather candid assessment (below) of the right-wing news media and Republican caucus' action in relation to the recently passed ARRA, is telling of the mess that the American Right now finds itself in. After a pummeling defeat at the Presidential polls the Republicans look like headless chickens - desperately clinging to the failed economic policies of the last 8 years. (But not like this headless chicken...) How many depressions will they cause before they realise that laissez-faire will inevitably lead to disaster (...eventually - whatever the short-term benefits)?
As I posted yesterday, Obama has ridden this beast as well as can be expected. And his popularity remains at an impressive high... in the eyes of so many he can do no wrong: "So where does Obama sit on our completely unrealistic expectation-ometer... well it looks as if he's... ahh! Somewhere in between Gandalf and Wizard FDR!" - Jon Stewart
I have grown rather tired of this blog's current layout and have decided to overhaul the design somewhat. I am still trying to get to grips with html coding and css editing so this transition stage could be a little awkward and the blog could go down for a short period of time. Please bear with me whilst I do this and when I have competed the first stage of the process I would really appreciate your feedback. Anyhoos... in the words of Curtis Mayfield:
As a 17 year old British citizen, currently living in NZ, I am an atypical English political blogger but I have a real passion for social justice and the UK so blogging combines both perfectly.
I wish I could say I was an astronaut or a hard partying musician who was thrown out of a rock band for bad behaviour but I'd be lying. I'd hate for the distinguished reputation of the internet for providing only the truth to be sullied by my minor inconsistencies.
If you would like to know more please browse the archived blog posts on this site and check back for updates. I would also strongly encourage you to watch the video above as it contains one of the best cases for social democratic values that I have heard in a long time.
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The site author is neither responsible for, nor does he necessarily endorse, the content of any website linked from here. Efforts have been made to contact the copyright holders of all material used on this site and to acknowledge them fully, however, in some cases it has not been possible to do so. The site author will gladly amend any element of this site if legitimate objections are brought to his attention.
I am very sorry for the lack of posts recently - a problem that looks set to continue for some time yet - as I have suffered a major computer failure, resulting in large data loss and difficulty accessing the internet. This, as I'm sure you can imagine, is playing havoc with any attempt to blog on a regular basis. I am working to find a solution to this latest hurdle but until then I ask for your patience and continuing support.
I received a panicked email from a reader yesterday. It contained an expression of horror that was
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