EVERYBODY TALKS ABOUT THE WEATHER... WE DON'T.

Ulrike Meinhof was a journalist and radical political activist in West Germany during the 1960s and '70s. She was a founding member of the Red Army Faction . She killed herself in prison before her trial, charged with numerous murders. Her cult status and subversive journalism is such that many believed and still believe that she was murdered by the authorities. The West German media held her in such contempt that she was continually labelled as insane and her medical history was used as explanation for her actions; her advocacy of and active terrorism was blamed on prior brain surgery to remove a tumour.


"Because women in this society do not need to be expelled in order to be rendered politically impotent. The social work they do raising their children goes on in the isolation of their private lives, though not in response to their own needs or those of the children. It goes on behind closed doors and in response to the norms of an achievement-oriented society whose demands hit children at school [...]. (Women) are interchangeable as workers - given what women's work is - and as consumers. In this sociey, women are not perceived as unique, irreplaceable beings. Things would be different if the Left had functioning women's organizations; such organizations could and probably would point out that the apolitical aspects of the protests about Bahman Nirumand's wife are in and of themselves an example of the oppression of women, based on the failure to recognize their needs, and on the difficulty for women to see their private trials and tribulations as social problems and to organize them accordingly. It is apolitical to protest about women, because women's issues are human, humanitarian issues. There! Everybody's talking about the weather again! What they view as apolitical is the almost completely internalized oppression of women, an oppression that is still quite beyond comprehension."
-Ulrike Meinhof

"The law that gets broken when department stores are set on fire is not a law that protects people. It is a law that protects property. [...] It protects those to whom the law in a capitalist state assigns the right to amass wealth."
-Ulrike Meinhof

"Capitalism may well produce wealth; it does not produce happiness or freedom for all."
-Herbert Marcuse

This article on the Prison Photography blog caught my attention. Institutionalised murder is, apparently, green.
Particularly looking forward to seeing Donovan Wylie's photography of the Maze Prison (formerly Long Kesh, informally H-Blocks) at the Photographers' Gallery.

song for sunday.

i'm sinking in the quicksand of my thought.


Tussi loma, tussi loma
(Like falling autumn leaves, the leaves of time)

Sylvia

We shall by morning
Inherit the earth.
Our foot's in the door.

Slippery slope

Besides flogging his new novel and memoirs of his time as Tony Blair's Communications Secretary, Alastair Campbell is trying hard to defend his evasiveness on the Andrew Marr show yesterday morning (his evasiveness at a judicial inquiry is clearly less shocking than on a BBC1 talk show).

The clip here shows Alastair Campbell avoiding answering a tricky question by having a mini emotional breakdown. Breakdown or fakedown, he still should have been forced to answer the important query posed by Andrew Marr: if the intelligence shows that there was not unequivocal evidence - evidence "beyond reasonable doubt" - that Iraq was in possession of weapons of mass destruction, does that mean Tony Blair misled the House of Commons when he repeated this as fact?

The answer is obviously yes. The heavy breathing and fury was Campbell buying time trying to think of how to avoid giving a 'yes' or 'no' answer. A 'yes' answer means that the ex-PM has to change his name to Bliar by deed poll when it emerges that there was no evidence "beyond reasonable doubt" of WMD. A 'no' answer posits the question: how? How is it not a lie to say you have seen evidence stating X when evidence stating X does not even exist?

What seems most frustrating about Alastair Campbell's discomfort with Andrew Marr's line of questioning (expressed here in his blog, paragraph 14 onwards) is his accusation of BBC bias against the government's decision to go to war. The BBC was sickeningly supportive of the invasion of Iraq, as the media almost always is of governments going into war. Journalists' proximity to action - and first-hand reporting - is reliant on a positive relationship with the armed forces. This is known as embedded journalism. The excellent book Tell Me Lies edited by David Miller about the media distortion in the run-up and opening weeks of the Iraqi invasion describes how BBC journalist Gavin Hewitt became so embedded within the army that he began to pick off targets to shoot and bomb. The use of language - liberation, not invasion - is systematic of the media's role in presenting war and bloodshed as democratic and peaceful.

In the opening few weeks of the war, Andrew Marr himself claimed that Blair's decision to invade had been vindicated by the toppling of the statue of Saddam Hussein in Baghdad, which many saw as getting far too carried away by victory and jingoism and forgetting his journalistic integrity.

His most famous quote, that has undoubtedly come back to haunt him, that Blair “said they would be able to take Baghdad without a bloodbath, and that in the end the Iraqis would be celebrating. And on both of those points he has been proved conclusively right.” (see John Pilger's article)

To accuse the BBC and Andrew Marr especially of anti-war bias is an attempt to paint himself as a victim. The victims here are the hundreds of thousands of dead and injured Iraqis, coalition soldiers and the citizens of the warmongerng nations. We are the ones with no voice as the media and politicians scream at each other in a mutual love-in/hate-in.

Only good thing to come out of the Hutton Inquiry saga:
(Don't ask me ask the ministry)