Wednesday, November 23, 2005

late licensing; bourgeois and proleterians

Grauniad: 'the licensing minister, James Purnell, argued that the 11pm "curfew" on drinking - which has existed since the beginning of the 20th century - was inappropriate in a time of changing lifestyles.

"It is time people were treated as grown-ups so they can go for a glass of wine after the cinema or a pint of beer when they come off their work shift," he said.'

Compare the recent decision not to outlaw drinking on trains, as it would deprive commuters of their after-work G&T.
We laugh rather more easily at the Petrograd workers who in the wake of the October Revolution went about attacking anyone wearing glasses...

Sunday, November 20, 2005

Paris riots and the return of the proleteriat

The following is a commentary sent to 'sustainers' of Znet this morning. For a small subscription fee, 'sustainers' get one 'premium' commentary like this that does not appear elsewhere on the site sent to them daily, as well as access to the Sustainer forums. More info at http://www.zmag.org


ZNet Commentary
A Return of the Proletariat November 20, 2005
By Boris Kagarlitsky

On November 7th at a demonstration commemorating an anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution, there was a group of radical kids from AKM - Vanguard of Red Youth, Russian equivalent of Western black Bloc. They were surrounded by the police an strictly controlled. To express their anger young radical started shouting: "We will turn Moscow into Paris!"

Two years ago who could even imagine that this would be a threat!

For more than two weeks now, France has been rocked by street violence and arson. Riots gradually diminish, but not racist hysteria of Russian press. For more than two weeks, Russian commentators have held forth about the "Muslim factor" and "ethnic conflicts."

It's easier to spout cliches than to figure out what's really happening, of course. But if our talking heads had taken the time to watch the television news more attentively, they would have realized that at least a third of the rampaging youths in France are not Arabs but the children of black African immigrants. And if a few of these wise men and women had bothered to stray from the usual tourist spots or to talk with the locals on their trips to Paris, they would have discovered that the Arab teenagers living in the working-class suburbs not only speak no language other than French, but they also have no clue about Islam. This is doubly true of young French blacks.

It goes without saying that there are plenty of orthodox Muslims in France who observe Ramadan, never let alcohol pass their lips and forbid their daughters from appearing in public with their heads uncovered. But these people have absolutely nothing to do with the current unrest. Conservative French Muslims keep their distance from the rest of society. They do not allow their children to adopt depraved local mores and attempt to shield them from contact with Christians.
Such orthodox Muslims present no problem for the authorities. Like any other conservative community, they seek to avoid contact with the outside world. By attempting to bar Muslim girls from attending school in headscarves, the authorities did much to provoke a conflict, but this is another matter. There is a big difference between the complaints of religious conservatives and teenagers rioting in the streets.

Russian analysts love a good conspiracy theory. It is generally assumed that someone has instigated, ordered and/or bankrolled every major crisis that comes along. Strangely enough, however, they didn't take this line with regard to the events in France, although The International Herald Tribune noted on Nov. 3 that "like everything else that happens in France these days, the rioting has become embroiled in the political succession war between the prime minister, Dominique de Villepin, and the interior minister, Nicolas Sarkozy, both of whom canceled foreign trips to deal with the crisis." The riots have proven disastrous for the prime minister, while they have given Sarkozy grounds for demanding additional powers. This may explain the strange ineffectiveness of the police during the early days of the uprising.

In fact, the causes of the crisis must be sought not in the areas of religion, culture or backroom political maneuvering. Around 150 years ago Europe was shaken by riots very similar to those we're seeing today. In France the unrest occurred in the very same suburbs, the same streets. No cars were torched back then because they didn't yet exist, of course. And police, not yet constrained by any concern for humane conduct, opened fire on the unruly crowds without much warning.

Fashionable sociologists have long been discussing the "disappearance of the proletariat" in Western countries. What they seem not to have noticed is that the proletariat has returned to these countries in its original form and has inhabited the same depressed suburbs in which the current middle class began its rise up the social ladder. Just like the proletariat of the mid-19th century, today's working poor have few rights, no native country and nothing to lose but their chains. This huge group of people doomed to labor in low-paying jobs when they can find work at all are naturally not distinguished by any particular loyalty to the state or respect for the law.

Benjamin Disraeli described the rich and the poor as two separate nations. Today, this is quite literally true, since the proletariat and the bourgeoisie generally belong to different ethnic groups. As a result, liberal society can close its eyes to social conflict by attributing all of the problems that arise to religious and cultural differences and the difficulties of assimilation. No one wants to see that the teenagers in the streets of France today are fully assimilated. They have broken with their cultural and religious roots and become part of European society, but they have not gained equal rights, and this is why they are rioting.

A shift in social policy to the left or the right will change nothing at this point. The only way to solve the problems of the proletariat is to change society, a point made more than a century ago by an immigrant living in London: Karl Marx.

Boris Kagarlitsky is director of the Institute for Globalization Studies.

Tuesday, November 15, 2005

Rogue States

Occasionally, I criticise George Monbiot a bit for the kinds of failings that probably every journalist succumbs to at one time or another - mostly, for talking about things he doesn't know enough about. I don't do this because I have anything against him, though - in fact it's precisely because when he sticks to what he's good at, he's among the best journalists Britain currently has.
Today's Guardian piece ends with an absolutely phenomenal paragraph. Read it a couple of times, then think about it for a while, and then read it again. Because getting to grips with what it says, and the implications of what it says, is an exercise which other perceptive writers have spent volumes and volumes trying to do. This is what an opinion column should look like. How better to sum up the whole despicable, shameful affair of the Iraq invasion than this?

"Saddam Hussein, facing a possible death sentence, is accused of mass murder, torture, false imprisonment, the embezzlement of billions and the use of chemical weapons. He is certainly guilty on all counts. So, it now seems, are the people who overthrew him."

Friday, November 11, 2005

Time to get a digital camera...

I don't know which is scarier. The idea of being stalked by Robin Williams, or this.

Sunday, November 06, 2005

Do NYT reporters read BBC press releases?

There's a story in today's Sunday Times about the director of the new 11-part Rome epic Michael Apter being pissed off with the BBC, saying it was "sexed up" by the BBC editors - in particular, they edited the first 3 episodes of the series down to two.

"He said he had not been told the BBC was squeezing the first three episodes — the ones he directed — down to two. They were shown at full length in America by HBO, the BBC’s partner in the production.

The corporation maintained that the cut scenes were unnecessary because British audiences “already knew” the historical background of the struggle between Julius Caesar and Pompey and did not need as much information as Americans."


Hmmmm... I wonder if the American papers will pick up on it, and how much the thousands who have been flocking to BBC America (especially for news etc) in the last few years in despair of the major US networks will appreciate the presumption that without the 'backstory' being carefully explained, some would be entertaining the notion that Caesar was the guy who built the big Vegas casino....

It'd be healthy to bear in mind how seriously history is taken in this country these days. Charles Clarke's Home Office - no longer in a position to antagonise medievalists directly - gave two reasons for not including any history on their preposterous 'Britishness' test. First, tehre's "a lot of it," and second, "It's about looking forward, rather than an assessment of their ability to understand history."
At least Americans generally recognise bullshitter when they see one...

Thursday, November 03, 2005

Secret Prisons

On Wednesday, the Washington Post (free registration required) ran a lengthy and reasonably prominent story about a network of secret prisons set up by the CIA since 2001 to hold "terror suspects," and the unease within the agency about it. The Washington Post reported that the prison network has "at various times has included sites in eight countries, including Thailand, Afghanistan and several democracies in Eastern Europe." Of course, "The CIA and the White House, citing national security concerns and the value of the program, have dissuaded Congress from demanding that the agency answer questions in open testimony about the conditions under which captives are held."
"CIA interrogators in the overseas sites are permitted to use the CIA's approved "Enhanced Interrogation Techniques," some of which are prohibited by the U.N. convention and by U.S. military law. They include tactics such as "waterboarding," in which a prisoner is made to believe he or she is drowning."

Today, the FT reports that "Human Rights Watch, a US lobby group, on Wednesday said there was strong evidence - including the flight records of CIA aircraft transporting prisoners out of Afghanistan - that Poland and Romania were among countries allowing the agency to operate secret detention centres on their soil."

Reaction to this story appears to have been quite scarce. The New York Times have not got a staff writer to produce a story - the website carries wire reports from Reuters and Associated Press on the story, accessible only if you know what you're searching for; I havn't checked whether these appeared in today's print edition.

What all of this seems to make clear is that Guantanamo is a kind of side-show, somewhere public and international concern about the way detainees are treated can be directed, while the real "interrogation" can be done elsewhere, without scrutiny. I would guess that the CIA are a little reticent about having to carry out these operations themselves - perhaps high officials fear they will take the fall if there's a scandel about them - and would prefer to revert to the model of the first 'War against Terrorism' of the 1980s, during which these kinds of operations were outsourced to foreign clients, with the CIA providing some funding.

The likely destination of this particular story is the dustbin, but one must wonder how long this extreme neoconservative manner of dealing with things can continue before so much of the American establishment becomes so dissatisfied that co-operation ceases completely. Agencies like the CIA are in a bit of a quandry, because they know the Democrats won't maintain the kind of commitment to 'Defence' spending the Republicans have. But will the Bush 41 government push things too far, and leave the whole thing unravelling, handing the next 2 White House terms to the Democrats?? Predictions are generally rather unwise, but I'd say it's basically contingent on public scrutiny, and how much of a big deal is made of stories like this.