Back Towards The Locus

The Fall Of Troy – F.C.P.R.E.M.I.X

I Would Set Myself On Fire For You – So This Is Our Home

The steady shower of back pats meted out to David Aaronovitch following Voodoo Histories shows little sign of abating. Nick Cohen’s attack on “paranoid politics” is a particular classic of the psuedo-sceptic genre: I’ve been there myself, and I can tell you that there’s no point in denouncing the “comforting” delusions of others while oozing the sort of smugness that only the truly ignorant can possess.

Max Dunbar, who – in contrast – I can disagree with while going “hmm…” rather than “ackackackackack” also seems a bit muddled in his brief review…

Talk like this and someone will leap up saying: Aaaah, but, what about all the true government conspiracies, like Iran/Contra, and Iraq’s WMD (which Aaronovitch himself believed). But there is a difference between the actions of corrupt governments, which are exposed by serious investigators, and theories of conspiracies which not only didn’t happen but could not have happened.

So, there’s a difference between theories of conspiracies that did take place and theories of conspiracies that didn’t. Well, of course! The former are right and the latter are wrong.

However, when Dunbar writes of “theories of conspiracies which not only didn’t happen but could not have happened“, he doesn’t seem to be referring to, say, logical evaluation or the analysis of evidence, but a priori prejudices..

How many people, exactly, would have had to be involved in the 9/11 demolition, and how could they all be kept quiet?

That does, indeed, seem very unlikely. However, leaping from that apparent unlikelihood to a position of certainty is, as any good sceptic will tell you, an argument from incredulity. As Julian Baggini puts it (because, let’s face it, very few of us are good sceptics)…

An argument from incredulity essentially works by taking the fact that one can’t believe or imagine that something is true (or false) to be a good reason for thinking it isn’t true (or false).

Thus, it could - if it were demonstrated empirically – be true. So, why create this ambiguous, pejorative pen of “conspiracy theories“? Why can’t we just analyse theories to see, well, whether they’re right or wrong?

Dunbar doesn’t go into the evidence or arguments for any theories of conspiracy. Indeed, his only reference that’s even vaguely substantial betrays an unfamiliarity with the subject…

Arriving at the twenty-first century, Aaronovitch provides a forensic debunking of the 9/11 truth movement: this subject really deserves a whole book in itself, a point-by-point refutation along the lines of the Popular Mechanics article. (It would not cause even a modest rethink on Truth websites, but still…)

A book along the lines of the Popular Mechanics article, eh? Would “Debunking 9/11 Myths” by the, er, editors of Popular Mechanics suffice?

Shorter Stephen Glover:

“Diminutive egomaniac, Nazi collaboration and why the French can’t forgive us for saving them in the War“

• We saved your arse in World War 2.

Shorter Robert Hardman:

“This insult to the Queen – the only living head of state who actually served in the war“

• We saved more arses than they did in World War 2.

Shorter Harry Phibbs:

“Capitulation, collaboration and the cheese-eating surrender monkeys“

• We saved your arses in World War 2, you poncey, frog-eating faggots.

Bonus! Harry Phibbs De-Arsing below the fold…

(more…)

Consider this offering from the DPRK’s reliable belcher of swill…

The Network of Civic and Public Organizations for Defending Democracy and Checking Suppression under the Pretext of “Security” in south Korea released a statement on May 21 in which it strongly denounced the Lee Myung Bak group of traitors’ fascist repressive action to totally disallow rallies and demonstrations.

The statement charged that the step taken by the “government” this time to disallow the just rallies and demonstrations of people of different circles under the pretext of “blocking illegal and violent demonstrations” clearly revealed once again the true colors of the dictatorial politics pursued by the Lee Myung Bak regime.

Kim Jong-il criticising others for restricting the right to protest – grimly ironic, huh?

Now, I’m not comparing the US to North Korea, as the latter is clearly one of the most internally repressive states that’s ever existed. However, doesn’t that make it all the more disturbing that their propaganda is equally, even identically, duplicitous?

When considered, for any length of time, the audacity of Ibrahim Jassam’s detainment is stunning.

The man’s an Iraqi journalist, and an Iraqi court found him innocent…

…and yet an occupying force continues to hold him as a “threat to Iraq['s] security“…

…and yet, they won’t even do so much as present their “intelligence“…

…and yet, they criticise other nations for – wait for it – their “nontransparent” detainment of journalists!

There are so many rich seams of irony fissuring beneath America’s political system. Grasping them all, I’m sure, would be like being beaten to death with a solid gold copy of the Collected Dorothy Parker.

Cross posted at Liberal Conspiracy

Here’s an interesting picture. On the right is Markus Beisicht of the Pro Köln movement, in the centre is Petra Edelmannova of the Czech Národní Strana and on the left is Fillip Dewinter of Belgian’s Vlaams Belang party. They’re at the Anti-Islamisation Congress, demonstrating unity against the fearsome Mosque-constructing hordes…

The Národní Strana (or, National Party) have been in the news recently, issuing a promotional ad that’s luridly blunt in its bigotry…

The camera panned over dishevelled and dirty-looking Roma women and children, before a voice-over said ‘we call for final solution to the gipsy issue’.

There were also slogans on screen such as ‘Stop black racism’, ‘No favouring of gipsies’ and ‘We don’t want black racists among us’.

Their “final solution” ultimately aims to deport Romanis to India. That message is portrayed in campaign materials that demonstrate, among other things, a lusty disdain for subtlety…

As the Mail notes, the National Party have predictable friends. Last August, Edelmannova was invited to speak at the BNP’s Red, White and Bleaurgh festival, and later in the year Nick Griffin addressed a party rally in Prague. His targets, unsurprisingly, were those “who seek a union of North Africa and Europe into Eurabia“.

Pro Köln is a German campaigning organisation, which opposes the apparent “Islamisation” of Europe. Formed from a clutch of hard-right activists, it enjoys a firm relationship with the National Party, sharing a confidential meeting to discuss “forms of the direct cooperation“. They’re also on friendly terms with the BNP: inviting Richard Barnbrook to address one of their periodic demonstrations.

The Anti-Islamisation Congress was convened this year by Cities Against Islamisation, which includes representatives from Pro Köln, the National Party, Vlaams Belang and numerous others. This unity of the hard-right showed, rather conveniently, the lengths to which they’ve folded xenophobia into the debate regarding Islamism.

Consider these words, with which Dewinter closed his speech…

We are tired of the Arabic and Turkish writing on the front of shops, windows, and products.

We are disgusted by the ritual slaughter of animals.

We do not want any Islamic symbols or food or hijabs in our schools.

We want the Islamisation of our towns and districts to stop

Europe, my dear friends and comrades, is indeed a continent of castles and cathedrals, and not of minarets and mosques.

That’s his stirring climax? That Europe is a continent of some buildings, not other buildings? Fucking hell, that’ll get ‘em rushing to the gates of Vienna.

What this petulant drivel reveals is not a defender of liberty, boldly struggling against those who’d constrain it, but a stale, bigoted monoculturalist. We’ve seen this before with Geert Wilders, whose “appreciation of our many liberties” quickly descended into “binding pledge[s] of allegiance“, “national identity” lessons and “legally binding contract[s] of assimilation” for “every member of a non-Western minority“. We can see it with Dewinters’s attacks on a mythical, monolithic “Islam”…

Islam is like a cuckoo which lays its eggs in the European nest, and multiculturalism forces us to nurture these Islam-eggs…

Islam wants to dominate all of Europe, and it uses mass immigration as a terrifying weapon…

“Charles Martel forced Islam back at Poitiers in 732 , and in 1683 near Vienna, Islam was again forced out.

“And if it is necessary, then for a third time we should also force Islam back to the place it belongs, namely the far side of the Mediterranean Sea.”

This barrage of assertion doesn’t come from someone who wants to understand people or ideas, they come from a dogmatist who, instead, lumps them together. Not only that, he imbues his monolith with a grand, imperial consciousness that’s patently untrue (false, in contravention with the facts). “Islam” is represented by Muslims, and they have very diverse ideas and allegiances. To claim otherwise shows one to be a demagogue, and Dewinters et al. are certainly demagogues, more keen on the “strong, clear and aggressive” response that they envisage than understanding, either of others or of the situation that they claim to be drawing attention to. Obviously, that’s also true for Griffin and Edelmannova, whose stated political concerns are just coy, winking performances.

That they and others have so successfully adopted these ostentations is a measure of how poorly mainstream debate regarding Islam – if, indeed, it can be dignified thusly – has been conducted: generalising, fearmongering and exclusionist. Indeed, that debate has found it far harder to integrate Muslims than most Muslims have found it to integrate into society.

Reuters cameraman Ibrahim Jassam has been held since September. The U.S. military rejected a court order to release him, saying he is a ‘high security threat.’ No evidence has been presented.

…

No formal accusations have been made against Jassam, and an Iraqi court ordered in November that he be released for lack of evidence. But the U.S. military continues to hold him…

…

The Obama administration harshly criticized Iran for its imprisonment of Roxana Saberi, the U.S.-Iranian journalist who was convicted of espionage and sentenced to eight years in prison before being freed two weeks ago. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton criticized Iran’s treatment of Saberi as “non-transparent, unpredictable and arbitrary.”

Former Vice President Cheney says that President Obama’s reversal of Bush-era terrorism policies endangers American security. The Obama administration, he charges, has “moved to take down a lot of those policies we put in place that kept the nation safe for nearly eight years from a follow-on terrorist attack like 9/11.” Many people think Cheney is scare-mongering and owes President Obama his support or at least his silence. But there is a different problem with Cheney’s criticisms: his premise that the Obama administration has reversed Bush-era policies is largely wrong. The truth is closer to the opposite: The new administration has copied most of the Bush program, has expanded some of it, and has narrowed only a bit. Almost all of the Obama changes have been at the level of packaging, argumentation, symbol, and rhetoric. This does not mean that the Obama changes are unimportant. Packaging, argumentation, symbol, and rhetoric, it turns out, are vitally important to the legitimacy of terrorism policies.

Jack Goldsmith is far more forgiving than I’d like – and, in his musings related to motives, appears to assume the powers of ESP -  but his dry analysis of the, shall we say, continuity between Bush and Obama is fascinating.

Elsewhere in Michael Burleigh’s pitiful little cheer over the Sri Lankan “victory“, he accuses the government of “glossing over…truly hideous terrorist outrages“. Burleigh need have no such fears: as Matt Foot – yes, one of Mel’s human rights “surrender monkeys” – points out in the Socialist Worker, the government ain’t gonna gloss over those particular terrorist outrages…

It is ironic that Browne is now accused of trying to “interfere” in Sri Lankan internal affairs. When he was minister of defence, between 2006 and 2008, £12 million worth of British arms were sold to Sri Lanka. This included components for military aircraft and machine guns.

Not for the first time, our intrepid columnist also offers only the most precisely chosen outrage…

In the past few weeks, the Sri Lankan government held its nerve in the face of international outcry over the fate of the civilian human shields the Tigers sheltered behind in their coastal jungle redoubt.

At this point, Burleigh’s column is creaking under the weight of unsupported assertion: in fact, concerns have been raised over incidents such as the bombing of no fire zones and the shelling of a hospital. Since the fighting ended, they’ve been expressed over, say, the displacement of hundreds of thousands or the mysterious abductions of doctors and children.

Burleigh knocks these concerns aside with a sympathetic sweep of his hand…

Although any decent person should sympathise with innocent civilians caught up in the mayhem, we should not be misty-eyed about the Tigers.

Who was? I – like, I suspect, the columnist – don’t know enough about the cause of the Tamils to offer a considered (and luridly irrelevant) opinion, but I can recognise the hideous acts that the LTTE have perpetrated. Where Burleigh wanders off the path of reason, however, is where he lets his disgust towards those acts form a prism through which he sees the whole conflict. From that moment on it’s bye bye to nuance, farewell to understanding and welcome to machismo and selective outrage.

Michael Burleigh, elated by the apparent defeat of the Tamil Tigers, “salute[s] a victory in the war against terrorism“. How were the Tigers part of this “war“? Well, y’know, they were all terroristy and stuff – like many other groups and states that Burleigh would be far less willing to clip from context and wedge into a narrative.

Anyway, the hearty hawk’s essential message is that the – apparent – “victory…proves that you CAN beat terror“. When he says “beat“, he means beat; as if with a mallet…

Better trained armies might even fight counter-insurgency wars with greater finesse than the Sri Lankans.

The governments of Afghanistan and Pakistan could achieve victory in this way with Al Qaeda if they had the political will, the resources and suitable training.

Ooh, a nice, blunt assault, eh? Where hundreds of thousands are displaced, and flee into cramped, disease-ridden refuge; where bewildered families are slain by their own armed forces; where officials hush up civilian deaths to maintain public feeling. Oh, hang about, that is happening in Pakistan! Burleigh must be thrilled with Zardari’s “political will“. I’m sure he’s socking it to Al Qaeda, er, whoever and wherever it is.

As for Afghanistan; the US recently gave us – well, the Afghans – a taste of what a bludgeoning assault would mean for their lives…

Piercing wails rose into the antiseptic-scented air where four blistered and bandaged little girls lay in side-by-side hospital beds. One of them, 5-year-old Ferishteh, writhed and cried almost continuously, unable to find a position that did not cause her pain from the burns that covered her arms, legs and torso.

Amazing what “resources” can do.

Michael, don’t write when you’re on feeling celebratory; you scramble, generalise and look high on testosterone. As for Melanie Phillips – currently wielding her sword against “the surrender monkeys of human rights lawyers, NGOs and the media” – well, to quote her namesake, Emo, give her a bayonet and put her on the front lines, ready to defend the nation against that first preemptive nuclear strike.