On the Collapse of the talks

I heard a bit of inside goss about the situation at Stormont. The source of which I'll not divulge but I will say comes from the inside and I personally trust the veracity of. Basically with the demand that Arlene step down pending investigation over RHI off the table from the Sinner's end the DUP negotiations team, i.e. most of the leadership, were happy to go back into government. This had been one of the key demands that Sinn Fein had been sticking to, but with the recent knock on Sinn Fein's public image over the whole Barry McElduff thing and Gerry Kelly's handywork with a set of bolt cutters, they've not been feeling as smug or confident in themselves.

What's fucked things up is that the first whiff the party organisation and wider membership had of a climb down over Acht Na Gaelige they were ready to throw the proverbial dummy out of the pram. Hence the DUP were hamstrung from doing what no doubt they've been itching to do since the collapse and get back to business (or at least the petty corruption that has become synonymous with the way the DUP actually do business).

Now if that's to be believed (doesn't seem unreasonable and fits with what's been made public as well as Michelle O'Neill's statement) then once again we find ourselves in a position where the possibilities of progressive change have been held back by the leadership of mainstream unionism's failure to sell their own electorate on very basic, timely and democratically mandated reforms, the sort of thing that wouldn't be remotely controversial in any right thinking part of the world. I suppose that when you make your career on being an intractable force of conservatism, having to make even an elementary compromise becomes impossible.

There's a section of the Unionist people, hard liners who had been convinced by Big Ian that they were in the right, god was on their side and eventually they would see justice done against the forces of Nationalism, the IRA would be smashed, its leaders dragged through the streets in sack cloth and ashes, those (hopefully few) taken alive jailed and order restored, and those brave men on their side whose only real crime was loyalty would be left to go about their business and everything would be fine. So it was written, so it would be and any conciliation was nothing less than a betrayal of Ulster. On such illusions did the DUP build the rack upon which they broke the mighty UUP party organisation and become the biggest of the four main political parties in Northern Ireland. However fostering such illusions in your voter base is great crack when you're the maverick outsider and its good for beating up the people who have to make the hard choices and show some conciliation every now and again by calling. Its less fun when you're in the driving seat and have to make the hard choices yourself.

Whether the bit of gossip I've tripped over this evening is true or not: here we are, the DUP fulfilling their promise at the beginning of this experiment to make the GFA unworkable. Hard to see where things go from here, short term back to direct rule but then considering the continuing crisis in British politics who knows how long the current situ over there is going to last, we've been waiting for the other shoe to drop on Theresa May's head since the last election, it may do so by the end of the year but whether it falls from the left or right remains to be seen (congratulations to anyone who followed that last sentence through at least three tortuously mixed metaphors btw). Personally I'd love it if the whole shebang came down over brexit or the NHS crisis or something, like the government is at its most precarious any UK government has been since Ted Heath in the early 1970s, which could potentially lead to an election and a Labour administration under Corbyn, possibly in coalition with the SNP with enough of a majority to be able to force through a progressive mandate. Its not out of the question as things stand. Just as easily we could see a Palace coup from the right and Gove, Rees-Mogg or even BoJo replacing May, though how long that would last would be another question.

As ever the people of Northern Ireland will just have to shoulder the burden of our dysfunctional little shithole of a political system and get on without a functioning government or the long overdue equality legislation and live with the various petty annoyances and inconveniences as well as the major ongoing injustices that it is continues to inflict on us.

 Happy Valentines Day

Update 15/02/18:

This article by Eammon Mallie corroborates what I've alluded to and goes a lot deeper, specifically to say that the deal was agreed to on Friday, that Theresa May and Leo Varadkar were in town to announce that Stormont was back on the understanding that it was settled. It also outlines the proposal, a stand alone Irish Language Act, a seperate one for Ulster Scots and some sort of "Britishness" cultural act which sounds like a bile of boak but reflects a sop to petty bourgeois Unionism. It doesn't mention marraige equality so presumably the Sinners have fudged that for the time being. So basically the DUP negotiating team had one, they'd got Gay Marriage off the table as a key demand and retained and Arlene's head, the Sinners would get the Acht but they could have two Achts of their own to sell to their side. They couldn't even manage to deliver on that.

On the Eve of the EU referrendum

In 2014 when the Scottish referendum happened what could have been a typical politically empty, nationalistic / jingoistic (from both sides) shitty spectacle actually became something more than it was intended to be. The Scottish left and activist spectrum turned it into a real debate, one centered around Austerity and the real fight happening within contemporary society beyond the circus side-show that is political discourse in the UK.


This year we're voting on the UK's continued membership of the EU, and nothing of the sort has happened. The focus of the debate has been skewed from reality of what the EU is and what the member states will be facing in the near future to a lot of petty squabbling and wars of position for hegemony within the Tory party being presented as the breath of the debate. The British left has shown no leadership in terms of getting the word out that, and I know this may surprise a lot of people, there are actually plenty of good reasons for wanting to leave the EU and that you don't have to be a slathering xenophobe to want out. and actually a lot of the arguments for staying are on extremely shaky foundations. The Left-Exit argument has been so marginalised and the Leave position so thoroughly dominated by the right that I am genuinely embarrassed to be voting to leave tomorrow, though that isn't actually going to stop me - it just pisses me off.


I can see that there are plenty of arguments for voting to remain, from the personal fear of what might happen with regards to their pensions, because they do benefit from the EU's internal migration policy, out of spite at the loyalist thugs merrily shouting 'vote leave' as they beat up random people they presume to be catholics (this is literally what happened to people I know) - the fear of a resurgent right capitalising on a Brexit vote is a legitimate one The EU at least recognises Palestine and is its biggest provider of international aid and is at least critical of Israel, though that aid is channeled through the PA and is in no small part responsible for the maintenance of the corrupt PLO leadership over the PA and consequently the continuing divisions within the movement. There's a certain validity to the argument that the EU has provided an amelioration of the excesses of the British political establishment, consensus politics in Europe does tack slightly to the Left of consensus politics in the UK (though even with the Human Rights Act, it didn't stop Section 28, or what what was going on over here during the Troubles). They're right that the Exit camp haven't really put forwards a viable or inspiring vision for an alternative outside the EU, they're right, that would have been the job of the British organised left and they fucked that one up. I honestly wouldn't think less of anyone who voted to stay in tomorrow.


Personally though I can't justify it to myself. I can't not think of Alan Kurdi, and all the other people murdered by the EU's immigration policies. I look at Greece and see the Troika doing to the Greeks what the English did to us during the Great Potato Blight of the 1840s, killing people with the ruthless application of Free market economics to ineptly fix a problem created by free market. Seriously, what they've done in Greece is disgusting, its imperialism pure and simple and I've no wish to be a part of it. That hasn't quite gone down here but at some point should we ever attempt to break in earnest with austerity, it will.


You can say that my position with regards to Brexit is abstract or idealistic but I don't see reforming the EU from within as a viable option, Syriza tried that one and got kurb-stomped for their efforts.


So, stay / go, either way its not a great choice and either way the real fights are still to be had. It didn't have to be like this, it could have been a party. Again getting back to my initial point in this post, looking at the way the debate around the Scottish referendum went I can't help but think of how different it might have been. Anyway, in spite of the class-baiting scare mongering in the popular press, its been a foregone conclusion since the start, we're definitely not leaving the EU, the vote will go to the Stay option, though probably by a slimmer margin than expected at the outset of the campaign. None of this bodes particularly well for the future.

Review: The Steven Nolan Show 09/10/2013

The Nolan Show is occasionally capable of some of the worst examples of local journalism.  The episode earlier this year where they covered the flag protest should live in infamy.  Inviting a crowd of sectarian bigots who had actually scared off a lot of the people who had ordered their tickets because you don't want an empty studio was ill considered at best and calculated irresponsible sensationalism at worst.  The show does from time to time throw up the odd surprise.

Tonights episode was something else.

They took on the abortion issue and the ambiguities in the law here by talking to the family of a woman who found out that the foetus she was carrying basically didn't have a head and wouldn't live long after the birth and the amount of shit that she and her family have been through. He had the Womans mother on the panel, Rosie Ward from the Christian Medical Centre on the other chair towing the fundamentalist Christian party line, Bernie Smith of anti choice group Precious Life in the audience, Goretti Horgan from Alliance For Choice and Breedagh Hughes from the royal college of midwives making an appearance by satellite. Nolan himself, who was definitely on the right side of this one, was chairing the whole thing as usual and let the facts speak for themselves without letting his ego get in the way of the debate, which made a nice change.

It made the family's dilemma quite clear and it also exposed the inhuman hateful attitudes of Precious Life to a T. Some of it was brutal, both in good and bad ways. Smith got a complete rinsing from Nolan and the mother of the woman, she was basically made to admit that she would force a woman against her will to carry a foetus that was going to die to full term and when presented with the Womans account of being harassed outside a FPA centre by her own activists she refused to condemn their behaviour. Its that sort of thing that has the potential to actually shift people on this issue.

I also noticed that That last chap to speak from the floor on tonights Nolan Show IS actually one of those creepy anti-choice people that stand outside the FPA on Shaftsbury square. I pass there going to work all the time and I recognise his face. The pictures they use of "aborted Fetus" as part of their scare tactics aren't taken from abortions at all, they are actually miscarriages.  Precious Life seem to have clocked that this one didn't go at all well for them and seem to be shitting themselves, and are actually calling for a campaign against the Nolan Show on twitter now.  Good.  Picketing people who are emotionally distressed isn't cool, even people I know who would be quite anti abortion are disgusted by their actions, something Nolan seemed happy to call Smith on.  Seeing the mother of the victim of that behaviour confronting Bernie Smith is probably going to be my TV highlight of the year.

Goretti played an absolute blinder explaining the political realities of the situation but wasn't on it for long enough.  The woman who was on representing the Royal College of midwives called the current legislative guidance from the NI assembly around abortion and the legalities of the women who travel to Britain to get it done "intimidatory and threatening".

There were a few niggles, but it was extremely well done. If you haven't seen it catch it on iPlayer

http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b03cc1jz/The_Nolan_Show_Series_3_Episode_10/

What I did during the war

A bit late for the ten year anniversary of the beginning of the Iraq War but ah well, better late than never.  This seems somewhat timely giving whats going on in Syria and the Tory-Lib Dem coalitions response to it.  Last week Cameron lost a major vote on mobilising for a British component to the inevitable American intervention was stopped.  We never got that far with Iraq, lets hope that we can actually Stop The War this time.

This was an interview by correspondence I conducted with an old friend from the University of Essex student movement, Gawain Williams for his dissertation.  It details the very small part I played in the anti-war movement.

What I Did During The War

Me at the demo against the labour party conference in 2006

What class, if any would you consider yourself to be a part of?  And what do you consider to be a class?

I think that the Marxist class categories reflect the reality of class better than the traditional British way of dividing things into Upper, Middle and lower/working class.  That said the British way reflects an ’Identity’ in terms of how people define themselves, which despite a more tenuous basis in social reality has a reality of its own.  Personally I find it very complicated to pin down a class for myself.  My Parents are from working class backgrounds but made good, my Dad is a classic baby Boomer, born 1947 and was among the first generation to benefit from free education.  Him and my Mum I’d argue are intelligensia, i.e. proletarian in regards to their relationship with the means of production but with their intellectual labour power being exploited rather than physical.  Aside from being a student I’ve only really had fairly menial jobs, white collar but essentially proletarian in terms of my relationship to what I produce and the means of production.

Anyway, you could make a good case for Middle or Working class depending on your definition, and if you really want to push it, Lower middle or Upper working class etc.

Are you a member of a Party or where you during you involvement in the anti war movement?

I have been in the Irish and British SWP.

Were you involved in any Anti War / Peace movements before the 2001 War on Terror began?

No.

Were you involved in any other political activity before participating in anti war demonstrations?

I was at some of the earliest of the current crop of Anti-Capitalist demonstrations in Belfast back in 2000.  I also demonstrated over student issues when I was at the Belfast tech around the same time.

How were you involved in the Anti War Movement?

I attended and helped leaflet for protests in Ireland before I went to Colchester, George bush’s visit to Dublin in 2005, Shannon Airport protest in September the same year etc.  When I moved to Essex university campus to begin my masters degree I made it a priority to get involved with the Anti-War movement on Campus.  Along with Dominic Kevakeb I helped start the STWC branch on campus, I was involved in the stall and postering for the March 18^th 2006 demonstration, which I also attended.

What motivated you to join the movement?

The feeling that something unutterably wrong was happening.  By the time of the war in Iraq I was a fairly well-versed Anti-Capitalist Marxist and I felt that it was the sort of thing I should have been involved in if I was serious about my beliefs.

Why did you attend speeches on the War? I.e. personal learning or meeting other activists?

 I wanted to learn the arguments so I could argue in my own right to convince other people we were right.  I wanted facts and data I could quote.  I try to talk to people that aren’t engaged and there are a lot of myths and misconceptions that are perpetrated through the media.  I don’t think in terms of conspiracy so much as institutional bias, though there is some deliberate misinformation floating about I would agree with Nick Davies assessment that it accounts for only about 5-10% of the bullshit.  Anyway, there is a wide barrier of crap between the average punters idea of whats happening and what is actually going on and I like to hear from the experts so I can build a few wrecking balls for that barrier.

Did / Do you Believe your actions would/ Will help end the War?

Not in the immediate short term but eventually, yes.

Do you think the anti war movement could have been more successful?

In the abstract sense that anything can always be better because there’s no such thing in reality as perfection, yes it could have been.  I mean we haven’t ended the war yet have we?  A prolonged general strike back in 2003 could have done it but the unions were in no shape for a fight like that.  I think the objective conditions have moved on and an industrial action in the event of an attack on Iran is looking lige a possibility.  Still you have to remember that the working class movement had had the last 20 years of having the shit kicked out of it.  That we achieved what we did was fantastic.

What were the most successful, and least successful activates you took part in?

Hard to quantify that sort of thing.  Most Successful was probably the stormont demo in 2007.  We took over the stand that was set up for the press and absolutely scared the bejesus out of the Stormont security people.  Least, well there were a couple of meetings that weren’t very well attended and ended up with just the usual suspects preaching to the converted.

Do you think that Colchester having a large military presence helped or hindered your actions in anyway?

I didn’t really do a lot of activism off campus in Colchester itself, so it wasn’t really an issue for me.

Do you see you involvement in the stop the war movement as distinctly separate from other political activates you’re involved in?

Well, yes and no.  Considering that when me and Dom (Dominic Kavakeb) arrived the SWSS branch was moribund, there wasn’t a STWC Soc. on campus and that was the first year of Student Respect, we more or less had to get everything up and running ourselves.  In my recollection everything did kind of blur into everything else.  That said, we were all aware that that isn’t how it was supposed to be, I remember Dom talking about getting different people to chair the different meetings because it was him doing a lot of the work.  Also, at any given time when we were actually doing stuff it was always a particular thing we were doing it for.  EG. If there was a stall there was always a load of stuff on the stall to say what the stall was about.  There were people who were involved in the Respect and STWC stuff who were from outside the party and wouldn’t have done anything for SWSS but would leaflet and poster with us for Anti-War stuff.  Alys wasn’t in the party at this point and would have done a lot of stuff with us for STWC, bringing materials up from London, and being with us on the stall.  Erkhan was another.  Adam used to confuse me, he was in the SP, allegedly he ran the SP in Campus, but he went to all the STWC meetings and seemed to be around a lot, I was actually under the mistaken impression that the SP were in Respect.

Do you discuss your involvement in the anti war movement with your family?

Yes a lot actually.  My Dad was politically engaged when he was my age, he’s still technically a member of the Workers Party, or so he says.  My Mum’s never been very political but it’s a big part of my life so its something we’d talk about.  Each of them have been on Anti-War marches in Belfast largely thanks to myself.

Are there any newspaper headlines concerning the war that you remember?

Nah, I don’t read the papers.

Did you find that social aspects of the anti war movement made involvement easier?

It was nice and all but I was never into the whole social side of it.  I suppose the best way to put it is that even if everyone else in the movement were a bunch of anti-social dicks I’d have done it anyway, so the social aspect was pure gravy.

Did the war effect your voting?

Not  really.

Did you attend anti war events on the campus?

Attended and helped run a few.

Did you attend any events outside of Colchester?

Yes, Colchester was one full year within an involvement over the last couple of years.

Did you carry out any political actions with people from the anti war moment that did not relate directly to the war/ i.e. anti racism / elections?

Yes, election work and work around local issues in Belfast

Would you still have been involved in / attended anti war meetings, lecture, and protests if the war had been carried out by the UN or NATO?

Yes.  In fact I expected at the time that the UN would go along with the Americans, that they didn’t just compounded my take on things, not swayed it.

Do you see the 1990-91 gulf war as distinctively different from the current occupation of Iraq?

Yes and no.  It’s all a part of the great game of America extending its global hegemony, however I see the two invasions as representing different stages in the project.

Were you involved in any protests against the 1990-91 Gulf war?

I remember shouting “Up Sadam” at a couple of Brits and running away when I was a kid.  Does that count?  LOL.  I remember my P6 teacher being very Gung-Ho and explaining the war to us.  I think I said something like “Aye but what about Isreal, they’ve done all sorts and America doesn’t go after them cause they’re all mates”.  I knew absolutely nothing about it, I think I’d heard that on TV and it sounded good, but it did the trick, his face went black and he started making half-arsed excuses and just not explaining things very well.

Stop the war coalition uses the term ‘war’ to encompass a number of issue such as the military campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan , torture in Guantanamo Bay detention camp, the occupation of Palestine , the Israeli military operation in Lebanon and government reactions to Iran.   What do you see as the main aims of the anti war movement?

To engage people.  The specific aims are to get the troops out of Iraq and Afghanistan and prevent any future wars with Iran.  Gitmo is obviously related to this.  Palestine and the Lebanon situation involve Israel, which is the central cause of instability in the Middle East and the central prop of American imperialism, on the basis of pure tactics you can’t have a lasting peace in the Middle East while the issue of Israel-Palestine is unresolved, so its definitely in there.

Religion was depicted as being important in the war on terror with George Bush even claiming to be on a mission from god. Did this interpretation of religion differ from you own and did it effect your involvement in the anti war movement?           

The notion of religion and how much religion itself is a problem or just the way conflict is expressed is a major question in how you approach the situation we had back home in Northern Ireland.  I had it fairly straight in my head that religion doesn’t create problems on it’s own well before the war.

Do you think technology played an important role in your participation?

Nah, if anything the internet is a distraction for activists IMO.  The fight is on the streets, sitting at home arguing with idiots online is fun but you never really win.

Did you continue working in the Anti war movement once you left Colchester?

Yes.

Is there anything at all you would like to say about your involvement the campaigns?

Just that while we weren't able to Stop the War and the Respect Party, which came out of the Anti-War movement has hit some serious problems in the last year, I think it was all worth while.  If we hadn't done what we did I have no doubt that they would be in Iran now and threatening god only knows who else.

And that was the end of that.  Looking back on it there are not many answers to those questions that I would have changed, except that my cynicism of the Left and its flaws is better informed by experience, yet I do not consider my time around the movements to have been wasted, nor do I let cynicism over-rule my natural romantic/optimistic streak, and god knows I have had plenty of excuses to do so.

In retrospect the Iraq War was part of the testing process for our post-information technological revolution generation.  It was one we failed to some extent however to quote Finn The Human, failing is just the first step to getting really good at something.  I did a little for the movement, more than most but not as much as I should have.

Cartoons that all revolutionary socialists should make their kids watch, Part I an Introduction and Avatar: The Last Air-Bender

No two ways about it, indoctrinating your kids isn’t cool. Using your parental authority to shape the psychological makeup of your offspring in a very specific direction is, some would argue, an abuse of that authority. If you truly have the courage of your political convictions then you should also have the confidence that if you instil values and basic decency into your offspring they’ll come around on their own without specific prompting from yourself.

There’s also the possibility that they’ll have picked up your bolshie streak and if you lay it on too thick they’ll become reactionary little bastards just to spite you. Just look at Ralph Milliband FFS. It's natural that teenagers lash out against their parents and they will at times do things just because it’s the very thing in the whole world that would piss you off the most. Drinking, doing hard drugs, becoming Emos or joining the BNP (or Fainna Fail or even the SDLP), nothing should be considered beneath them.

So, politically indoctrinating your offspring, morally dubious and liable to backfire. That said, there is nothing wrong with some gentle nudging in the right direction. This is where the Cartoons come in. As we know, all cultural artefacts are loaded with layers of meaning and the cumulative effect is a subtle form of programming that inputs the cultural and social mores into the individual. If this process is a part of socialisation and going to happen anyway, one might as well have a bit of a hand in it.

It is to this end that I direct friends and comrades towards this occasional series on this Blog relating to some of the animated features and TV shows that I feel will have a positive impact on their young minds and as well as being good entertainment in their own right, the sort of thing that any adults reading this might actually enjoy watching along with their brood, because lets face it, some of the stuff you are going to be obliged to watch is going to be pure gack. Also, it is important that these are good shows from the kids POV because if you melt their little heads with a cartoon diet of hard East-German Socialist realism or those weird depressing Soviet Russian cartoons that used to show up on TV every now and again they will grow up to hate you and your politics, become reactionary enemies of the movement and the people in general and will certainly have to be shot, and we don't want to see that happen now do we?

For each cartoon I will be have a little section explaining what it is about and why it's good before delving into the meaning and messages of the show.

With this in mind we'll start with a personal favourite from not too long ago, or at least recent enough that I was in my 20s when I saw it and managed to really enjoy it.

Avatar: The Legend of Aang The Last Airbender (TV Series, Nickelodeon 2006-8)

What it’s about:

Aang is an adolescent boy, gifted with the power of Air-Bending and destined to become the Avatar, master of the 4 elements (Earth, Air, Fire and Water). After spending 100 years encased in an iceberg, he finds that a war has been launched by the imperialistic Fire Nation to conquer the whole world, and that his own people, the Air Nomads, have been wiped out. He and his small band of companions travel the length and breath of their world (based very loosely on mythic China) so he can learn the ways of the other 3 elements and hopefully stop the Lord of the Fire Nation’s plans for world domination.

Why it's good:

Its works very well in its own right as a cartoon. The animation is extremely well done, it’s a perfect fusion of the expertise of American and Asian animators. The world of Avatar is well constructed, the attention to detail in every aspect of which makes the complete whole something marvellous. A good example would be the different elemental magics which are based on real-world Chinese martial arts which the series writers feel capture the essence of the elements, the smooth flowing Tai Chi style is water bending, the sharp and explosive Northern Shaolin style represents fire bending and so on. It’s obvious that the animators have spent a lot of time studying how the human body moves when performing the various moves.

The story is well told too. There is a good mixture of personal stories relating to each of the well constructed, believable characters and the epic quest with a huge back story in the best traditions of fantasy against a background of war that makes up the story arc. The stories can be by turns, funny, heroic, emotional, exciting, human and in a couple of episodes, really really dark (the story from the third season about the Water-Bender who could use her power over water to control people by manipulating the water in their body seriously creeped me out). The voice cast (mostly quite young themselves, no middle aged women playing adolescent boys here which is usually the case in animation) do a fantastic job, particular props have to go to the, sadly deceased, Asian-American actor Mako for his turn as Uncle Iroh who in some ways provides the emotional and philosophica; heart of the show.

What the young ’uns will hopefully take from it:

Well, the basic thing of exposing small children to concepts and ideas from different culture is, I believe, always generally beneficial to creating open minded and well rounded individuals. The story setting has a definite anti-war theme to it, the degradation of war and the effects on civilian populations are well handled. The main character is the last survivor of what is essentially a holocaust.

There are also a lot of strong female roles in it. For example, the Earth-Bender Toph (pictured), who joins the show in the second season, is both female and disabled (blind) and manages to be a very strong role-model for both in a nicely un-forced way.

So it’s a popular American TV show that is well made and enjoyable, has some good action, well drawn characters (in all senses of the term) and some nice anti-war, pro-diversity and feminist themes that are all handled with a deft touch, i.e. they don’t beat you round the head with “the message”. The only mild criticism I have is that the humour is sometimes a little forced and it doesn’t quite go far enough, but I think that that’s a reasonable trade off.

Next blog I'll be doing at least a small report back from this weekends up coming Revolution 2012 conference in the QUB Student Union. There will be more of these to follow over the coming months and theres a lot happening in and around Belfast.

Update on Norman Finklestien

With reference to my previous post, read it now if you haven't already.

Well, he's since done another talk at Imperial college London and gone a lot further than he did in Belfast, including this interview where he gets stuck into the BDS movement in a way that he didn't in Belfast. He's saying the same thing but he's removing any ambiguity or nuance about tactics and strategy. 2-state solution is the only way to go and that way lies through the enforcement of international law.

I would go for a lengthy rebuttal now myself but Richard Seymour has actually done the job already. I can't help but get my 2 cents in now about one thing he said though.

I notice at the end how he mentions coming to Northern Ireland but not any of the things that were said to him by any of us. And for gods sake, this constant trotting out of the "peace process" / Good Friday Agreement as a model for Israel / Palestine. We're just as dysfunctional and messed up as we ever were, sectarianism has gotten worse since 1998, none of the paramilitary groups have ever actually gone away, some of them have just shifted gears into organised crime and are thriving. They don't go to war with each other but theres still plenty of violence and intimidation in their own communities (which was mostly the case in the troubles anyway) and the murder rate hasn't even really changed that much since the early 90s, or at least nothing to far out of line with the rest of the UK. Nothing is being done about poverty, in fact the neo-liberal line of the Assembly, which even Sinn Fein have colluded in, is just making things on the ground worse. Could people please stop making us the poster child of their descent into capitulation-ism? Even Chomsky's known to do it on occasion.

Are the Lannisters the real 'goodies' in A Song Of Ice And Fire?

Tonight I did an introduction for the branch meeting of the Socialist Workers Party on the subject of Mark Fishers book Capitalist realism. I had intended to use the talk as the basis for a blog post about extending Mark Fishers analysis of 21st century capitalist ideology, possibly extending the general thrust of the book by looking at the peculiarities of Capitalist Realism in the context of Northern Ireland. Unfortunately I got a bit over enthusiastic and lent my copy of the book out to someone after the meeting forgetting that i had this in mind to do so I no longer have a copy of the book to quote from and without it my loose notes don't make much sense. I will do this when I get the book back so for now I'm going to repost a note I posted to my facebook ages ago which should probably have been a blog entry anyway.

Are the Lannisters the real goodies in A Song Of Ice and Fire?

Yes, that might sound a bit strange. They are incestuous, they kill people and start wars and the fact that one of them is Charles Dance is a bit of a give-away, but hear me out. In the context of Westeros, the Lannisters are on the side of history and progress, which is supposed to be a good thing, isn't it?

According to all available sources and GRRM himself, the events of ASOIAF are the product of the years he spent researching the 'Early Modern' period (historians term meaning roughly 1500s to the late 18th century, late modernism being occasioned by industrialisation, the enlightenment etc.) and the Wars of the Roses in Britain in particular. Speaking as someone who has had the pleasure of studying the economic and social history of Britain at undergraduate level I can say that the research was time well spent. The world of Westeros is well thought out and feels real enough. As a social historian I get the same thrill from the series as a natural scientist must feel when she reads a good bit of well thought out hard sci-fi where the science element is real and no-one contradicts the laws of physics. Looking for a moment at this time period as a historian of the long dureé what is it that characterises this period in history of kings, Royal successions and wars just before the reformation and the first wave of European imperialism? It is the crisis of feudalism and the shift to a mercantile capitalist economy.

Essentially, Feudalism was the organising principle of societies across Europe since European civilisation re-emerged from the Dark ages (which weren’t actually that dark tbh, but that’s a discussion for another time). Under Feudalism wealth in society was expressed in terms of land and social status and class largely depended on how much land you had, the resources it could produce and the number of people on it you could compel to fight for you. Lords, Barons, knights, kings etc, these titles were all measures of what level you were at under this system. Co-existing within this system was the nascent form of Capitalism, i.e. wealth expressed as an abstract in terms of gold and coin. This wasn’t the whole of the economy, it started out small but as the years progressed this form of wealth holding would prove more productive and eventually it would draw more power towards the social classes that were associated with it, who at the time were called by some “the middling sort of people” . Eventually this class would come to surpass then absorb and replace the land-holding ruling classes of the previous epoch.

Historical change like this does not happen without a fight. The first stage of this fight was the transformation from early feudalism into Market feudalism. This change wasn’t necessarily a revolutionary change that would bring about an immediate improvement to peoples lives. Anyone who really studies history should know better than to see everything as a unstoppable chain of progress and improvement. What happened in practice was that the cannier lords and kings began to consolidate power into a centralised state with themselves at the top. It is in this period that many of the nation-states that we know today first began to take form, Britain, France and Spain being some of the more prominent examples. With this period of consolidation came political absolutism and repression. But it was also the period of the renaissance, the rise of humanism as an alternative to Christianity and it was a necessary stage that society would have to go through to get to where we are today.

Which brings us to Game of Thrones.

Game of thrones and the Song Of ice and fire series of books it’s based on are, I believe, the imaginative recreation of this historical process against a background of a different biosphere to the one we know. The Baratheon and Stark dynasties represent the early feudal order. They are land owner – War lords whose personal power is built on military prowess and whose moral code is based on the feudal notions of tradition and fealty. The Lannisters in the other hand represent the passage into Feudal Capitalism. They are known for their wealth and their outlook is distinctly more modern. They prefer realpolitik to airy notions of duty and honour. Tyrion Lannister, in his own way, represents the progressive intellectual revolution that was as much a part of that process as the political repression that came with it, this time period in our world gave us the foundations of modern philosophy and the beginnings of the sciences. As such, the Lannisters are the ones on the side of history. They aren’t exactly nice, Joeffry is obviously a little shit and there’s the whole incest thing, but George RR Martin seems to have the historians’ eye for these things. We may personally prefer the Starks or even the Baratheons but they were warriors, paternalistic savages who maybe aren’t the best people to be running Westeros. The point is made in the series and books, Robert was running the kingdom into the ground and the state would fall apart without the Lannisters money holding it together. They put a lot of their own capital into the state coffers, do they not in some sense deserve to run things, or are they not at least more deserving than those who are merely good at beating other people up?

Well, my answer is no. The other plot line in the concerning Dothraki is a mirror to the events that unfolded in our world around the Mongols. These Barbarian societies were the chaotic yin to the yang of civilisation. It’s also here that you get the strongest fantasy element in GOT, the dragons. Yes, there will be Dragons.

That is why I for one welcome our new Dothraki overlords and wish the one true ruler of Westeros, Daenerys Targaryen a long and fruitful reign as god-empress.

Unless a John Ball type leader emerges later in the series who decides to agitate for turning the War of 5 Kings into a revolutionary war. I haven’t read the books yet so here’s hoping.

Only two months in and already resorting to filler and reposts. Next time it should be something more interesting.

Report from the Norman Finklestein meeting at Queens University Belfast 6/2/12

For those of you reading this blog who don’t know who Norman Finklestein is exactly it is worth saying a few things by way of introduction.

The son of two Holocaust Survivors, a thorough academic debunker of the Zionist creation myths, someone who has been described by his enemies as a “self hating jew” and who lost his tenured position at a top American university because of his principled stance on the Palestinian issue, Prof. Norman Finklestien is one of the most important critics of Israel and the Zionist project working today. He is a fiery and fearless public speaker who doesn’t take any shit from his critics on the right (as you will see from this clip) who utterly hate him for his work against their favoured beat stick against their critics, the conflation of anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism. When Alan Dershowitz lies about your mother being a Nazi collaborator, you must be doing something right.

So, when I heard he was speaking in Belfast I was naturally quite excited and managed to score a ticket to what was a packed event, the best attended political lecture I’ve seen since Chomsky spoke at the Belfast festival. You can imagine my surprise then when I left the lecture feeling somewhat disgruntled at what I’d just heard.

The subject of the talk was that of solving the conflict. This was somewhat off the topic of Prof. Finklestiens’ usual public speeches about the nature of Zionism and the Zionist state, assuming (quite correctly) that since the talk was co-hosted by the Queens PSC he would be speaking to a crowd of pro-Palestinian activists and therefore preaching the converted. So instead of that what he did was make a really hard argument for the tactical necessity of the international Palestinian solidarity movement adopting a two state solution as the stated aim and end goal of the Palestinian liberation struggle in order to win popular support from the masses.

He did this in two ways. The first was to make a legalist argument, that if you are going to argue against Israel based on the illegality of the settlements and their complete disregard for international law in their numerous military escapades one the one hand, then on the other hand you can’t deny the legitimacy of some sort of Israeli state on the other hand, which means that some sort of two-state solution is the only option. To support this he pointed out, quite correctly, that the two state solution is what has come out of the process of negotiations between the Palestinian leadership and the Israelis, that it is the solution officially supported by every country in the world except Israel and America when it gets put to the vote in the UN (including Iran and the other Arab states) and cited the very detailed and hard-fought land swap deal as the basis for an honourable settlement, which would mean that 63% the Israeli settlers could stay on the west bank, in exchange for the same amount of land in Israel to be given to the Palestinian Authority on the west bank and the settlement block system (i.e the way the roads and highways between the settlements are used to control the movements of Palestinians) would be dismantled.

Secondly, the way in which he did this, the theoretical justification for the specific arguments, was by evoking the spectre of Ghandi and using the parallels between the life and political practice of the Ghandi’s INC and the Palestinian liberation struggle to drive each of his points home. Again in all fairness to Prof. Finklestein he goes beyond the usual bourgeois liberal stock use of Ghandi to criticise proponents of armed liberation struggles and he does defend the right of an oppressed people to take up arms, as you’d expect from someone both of whose parents fought in the Warsaw Ghetto uprising against the Nazis, and he’s actually quite critical of that sort of nonsense.

In my opinion the main point of this was where he drew a distinction between the two lives of Ghandi, as a leader of the Indian national liberation movement and as the head of an Ashram. As the leader of the Ashram, Ghandi was a hard core ascetic, no drugs, no alcohol, no idle joking and no sex even between married couples. As the head of the national liberation movement on the other hand he was happy to work alongside Muslims, Sikhs, other Hindus who weren’t quite as hard core as himself etc. In doing so I think we reach the crux of the argument he was trying to make, that he is equating support for a one state solution, with personal morality, i.e. it may be a deeply held personal conviction and you may even be right, for whatever that’s worth, but since the legalistic argument against Israel seems to be making headway in the international community you need to put it aside and for tactical reasons go with what will appeal to the broadest mass of people as your stated end for the Palestinian struggle.

As I see it there are two major things wrong with the whole argument. One of these things he actually hit on himself at one point in the talk. When he was making the point about Ghandi he said that Ghandi was always against the partition of India, but he eventually came round to accepting the existence of Pakistan as a fact, even if he didn’t accept its legitimacy. The thing about that is, wasn’t Ghandi quite correct in not accepting partition. The partition of India was a catastrophe in human and political terms. Surely the fact that Ghandi, against his better judgement, was forced to accept the existence of the Pakistani state is something we should be mourning rather than replicating?

The other point is the unproblematized appeal to a legalistic argument. There is a very important question here about what the law actually is and how international law operates. China Mieville, when he’s not being a multi award winning Fantasy fiction author, is an expert on the subject of international law and in his book he makes the point that the reason why the law functions in the context of a bourgeois democratic state is that the state exists as the final arbiter of the law. It’s not necessarily a good arbiter or an unbiased one (far from it) but because it exists as a higher power to be appealed to between competing interests the law works to the extent to which it does. In the context of international law there exists no such final arbiter. What international law amounts to is, to put it as crudely as it actually is, “might makes right”.

There are few examples of this more blatant than the Israel Palestine conflict. Frankly, I think that this is where Finklesteins argument for the two state solution, even as a tactical position, falls down. Israel uses international law and uses these negotiations with whatever section of the Palestinian leadership it fancies talking to at any given time in a cynical way to prop up its own legitimacy. It’s a game that only one side are playing for real. It’s a game that the Palestinians are winning in its own limited terms, to the extent that all those votes going through the UN and being blocked only by Israel the US and whoever they can corral into their side count for anything. He seems to believe that this game can through international public pressure be transubstantiated into something real that the Israelis will have to abide by.

Contrary to this I would posit the old Marxist theoretical position on treaties and settlements (which I believe may come from Lenin but I’m happy to be corrected) that any negotiated settlement only represents the balance of forces as they exist on the day the treaty is signed and by extension that they only matter as long as the facts on the ground remain. Within the context of the current balance of forces between the Zionist project and its supporters and the Palestinians a two state solution may well be the limit of what is achievable in the immediate short term. But that doesn’t mean that the balance of forces will remain as they are forever or that we should abandon hope in a single secular democratic state.

Basically this is the old argument that has existed forever on the left between ‘Reform’ (i.e. achieving what is ostensibly theoretically possible through the current system) and ‘Revolution’ (i.e. realising that the current system is temporal and temporary and looking beyond it towards what should be rather than what is). Not out of some sense of moral or theoretical absolutism either, but because we know and we have seen countless times across a myriad of issues that the system of bourgeois parliamentary democracy relies on the myth of its own fairness in order to survive and in actuality many things that are theoretically achievable under this system are actually impossible for reasons that are deeply rooted in the nature of the system. Most of those involved in the Palestinian solidarity movement are various shades of radical Left and it is in our nature to look to what should be rather than to just go for whatever bad compromise can be extracted from the current system. It is for this reason that asking us to abandon the idea of the only good solution to the Palestinian issue is never going to work.

At the end of the talk I went up to Professor Finklestien and tried to put some of this to him in a nice way while I was getting my copy of his book signed. I made the point about international law that in Irish history we had a situation with regards to our national question where by the middle of the nineteenth century the case for an Irish home rule parliament had been won in Ireland and to a large extent in Britain too. It was a contentious issue among the imperial ruling class but the majority of polite society were on the side of what was called “home rule” with the first bill being put to the British parliament in 1886 and while it was narrowly defeated most people knew that some form of self government for Ireland was an inevitability. And yet Ireland did not achieve any form of self government until four decades later and that was after a revolution and the entire world being turned upside down by the First World War. I asked him that considering that we are living through a time when the entire edifice of American capitalism is hitting the wall to the extent that they may well no longer be able to afford to keep subsidising Israel and the middle east is being turned upside down by the Arab Spring, why accept a deal based on yesterdays realities when who knows where we’ll be in six months time?

He smiled sadly and said that he thought that even to get a two state solution would take a revolution.

Personally I’m not so hopeless for the situation in Palestine. I believe that there is a future where Israel goes the way of other racist imperialist colonies, from the first Crusader kingdom in the holy lands in the middle ages to the European colonies in Africa and be wiped off the map, its institutions dismantled and replaced with something not based on racism and the god given right of some of its citizens to the land. To paraphrase Haile Selasie (via Bob Marley), until that philosophy that holds one people superior and another inferior is finally and permanently discredited and abandoned then everywhere is war. Until there are no longer first or second class citizens, until the basic human rights are equally guaranteed this is a war. And until that day, the dream of lasting peace, world citizenship and the rule of international morality will remain but a dream, a fleeting illusion to be pursued but never achieved.

This isn’t an ideological shibboleth, it’s just a self evident fact. A state based on Zionist principles will never be a good home for its Muslim and Christian Arab populations and conflict will be inevitable. As an activist though, if ending Zionism means working alongside people who are for a two state solution either as a short term solution or a final settlement then I am happy enough to do so and organise on the basis of mutual respect. I will be prepared to argue the case for a one state solution with them but it should not be a pre condition for joint action. It is sad that in Palestine itself there are few looking towards that future but things are tough out there. That debate has to take place somewhere though and if it is here among the international solidarity movement that it has to happen then so be it, maybe that’s what our job is now, to be the imagination of the struggle and to hang onto the idea that another world is possible and maybe the road to it lies through Tahir Square, through the occupy movement and whatever may come out of that.