JULY

WEDNESDAY JULY 26th 2006

see: www.medialens.org “Demolishing Lebanon” (parts 1 and 2)


WEDNESDAY JULY 19th 2006

Art and blog by Mazen Kerbaj, from inside Beriut, a city under siege at:

http://mazenkerblog.blogspot.com


MONDAY JULY 17th 2006

In case you missed it, the truth behind the ‘special relationship’ …

GEORGE BUSH: “Thanks for sweater it's awfully thoughtful of you.”
TONY BLAIR: “It's a pleasure.”
GEORGE BUSH: “I know you picked it out yourself.”
TONY BLAIR: “Oh, absolutely, in fact I knitted it.” [Laughter] …


SUNDAY JULY 16th 2006

For the four years of the first George W. Bush term, I wrote an ongoing series of articles and pasted up pertinent news articles which featured on the "This Just In" page of chumba.com, and on the "Axis of Dissent" page of the now defunct chumba.org. What began as an online continuation of the very very occasional 'pamphleteering' I had engaged in all my adult life, became a permanent fixture as the world convulsed in the wake of 9-11. Instead of reaching for my pipe and slippers as I hit my forties, I found myself sucked into the vortex like never before.

In the late summer of 2003 I began an attempt to edit my online writings into book form, but this very quickly took on a life of it's own. I soon found myself in the catch 22 situation of feeling that in order to be heard, I needed to understand more, and suddenly the scope of the book expands exponentially back through history, and the amount and breadth of research needed increased to the power ten. Coupled with the facts that when one looks there is simply too much historical information to be able to digest and with regard to the present that one is always has at least one foot in the shifting sand of day to day machinations.

When electric Chumbawamba went into 'deep freeze', at the end of 2004 my intention was (and remains) to concentrate full time on writing what had become a history/current affairs book, (present working title "Smart Lies, Secret Wars and Climate Revolt."). For this reason I stopped doing related online writings, shortly after George W. Bush got re-elected. Sometimes circumstances such as the London 7/7 bombings demanded the immediacy of an online outlet, and though I wrote stuff throughout July 2005 none of it eended up being posted at the time. I will post these writings as part of the archive section of this page soon.

Between then and now, not suprisingly, I got side-tracked into writing songs, playing solo gigs and making a record in May 2006 (link The Library Book of The World) which in the case of the latter, had I not been doing the historical research a) may never have happened and b) would certainly not have taken the shape it did. To resurrect something like the Axis of Dissent as an outlet for my own online writings is something I always thought I would do at some point, but in effect has been determined by the fact that the record of the (half completed) book, in itself demands a web-site, not least to help try and secure the release of the record. I cannot actually juggle with three balls, but suddenly I have three balls in the air in terms of my channels of expression

In broad terms the premise — of the record, the book, and the new online writings — is to explore some of the ways in which history and language are continually being hijacked and edited by our governments and their friends in corporate business, to suit their own exclusive and mutually beneficial current agendas.

Exhibit A of course has been the build up and execution of the ongoing war on Iraq, not least because of the bald fact that so many around the world opposed the invasion before it (officially) was launched, but Blair and Bush were able to garner just enough support, in just the right high places to go ahead and do it anyway. And in the aftermath despite the plethora of revelations exposing their wholesale deceit in invading Iraq and mis-managing the aftermath, they continue to get away with it.

As soon as one starts digging beyond the surface layers of the history of the twentieth century it very quickly becomes evident that the current chaos in Iraq is simply the latest sordid chapter in the geopolitics of how western power seeks to maintain its over-riding dominance in the world. Worse still, we do not have to dig much deeper than that to hit the solid bedrock of that dominance, the fatally obsolete mechanics of the corporate economy. And here we are sleepwalking past the point of no return, regarding runaway global warming, if we do not force the issue and effectively stop the juggernaut in its tracks.

As an anarchist for all my adult life, I retain the general bullshit detector, perhaps best summarised by I.F. Stone in his words of advice to would-be journalists, imploring them to simply remember the two words, that "governments lie." And yet, given the firewall of utterly routine pro-government, pro-corporate propaganda in mainstream US and British culture, it becomes easy to be worn down and despite our better judgement to let the daily lie pass or even to fall for it. This is the whole point. Every government department has its own in-house press and pr corps or like the corporations the simply buy in the best pr companies, with the precise purpose of securing preferential media treatment of a particular government-corporate line, and in so doing to secure the benefit of the doubt on their masters' behalf. Such a vast amount of energy is devoted to this 'perception management' because it works, and it works because our buckling under the utter relentlessness of it, is more or less guaranteed so long as we remain ignorant, too distracted or simply too weary of how the process works.

The trick then for us is to remember that all the linguistic somersaults, all the manipulations of language, and all the broad and varied attempts to manage our general perceptions are constant and ongoing. In short, it was not as if Bush and Blair suddenly stopped lying when the tanks rolled from Kuwait into Iraq in March 2003.

When Blair goes on record — as he did today July 16th 2006 — at the G8 summit in St Petersburg and says that Iran and Syria are behind the Hizbollah rocket attacks on Israel, he is true to form pushing a hidden agenda, and as ever acting as the terrier on behalf of George W. Bush who finds himself having to be more 'diplomatic' in his calls to war. Of course Tony 'five war' Blair makes no mention of the great disparity between dominant powers and usual suspects, whereby throughout the second intifada the Israelis have killed a minimum of three times as many Palestinian civilians as the Palestinians have killed Israeli civilians. Ditto the relative death tolls from current rocket exchanges between Israel and Hizbollah. Indeed the fact that we are five days in to a deteriorating state of war in the middle east also pushes me towards a more immediate form of response than a record or a book. As long as this gaping disparity remains there will always be those when forced to choose, who will choose to fight.

Sometimes I feel the knot in my stomach that the world is going down the pan and we cannot mobilise fast enough to try and avert this. In 2006 there are few people who still seriously question the fact that global warming is happening and that it is man-made. David Attenborough, after long years of umming and aaahhhing, came out in May 2006 in two hour long programmes (not quite prime time) BBC to say exactly that . And yet the scandal of under-reporting and lack of investigation of the role of the fossil fuel companies and their friends in government dictating the framework of the climate debate persists. Indeed, Blair's scale of lying regarding Iraq is replicated many times over in his public pretence to be the crusader at the head of the fight against global warming, when measured against his actions during his nine years in office, which have seen British greenhouse emissions rise.

Beginning from a point in the late 1980's it was precisely the fact that the science that global warming was man made had become widely established, which prompted Exxon Mobil and the like into action. Rather than see their fossil fuel monopolies irrevocably challenged they consciously chose to pour hundreds of millions of dollars into third party PR companies and bogus pressure groups to rubbish climate science, and in so doing fairly successfully sowed the seeds of doubt in the wider public mind, and not least that of David Attenborough. Having bought and extra fifteen years of ever expanding license to push fossil fuel without serious restraint — and this surely ranks as a consciously perpetrated crime vastly more far reaching than the current chaos in Iraq, if indeed it did not bequeath the situation in Iraq in the first place — simply because the pendulum of public opinion seems to have swung back against them in the past year or two, don't expect Exxon Mobil et al to give up on their black propaganda campaigns to boost our reliance on oil, any time soon.

I may go off at tangents, disappear down some complex warren of rabbit holes trying to peg a historical detail, and provide a highly intermittent service as a would be blogger, but I will be back as time and discovery dictates, hopefully with some grenades of knowledge which may be of use in the ongoing daily information wars


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