Posted 7:20 PM by Ken

Later I'll put in some links in the post below.

Posted 7:03 PM by Ken

This is a kind of update, of a couple of recent demos.

Contrary to the impression I might be giving here, I don't spend all, or even much, of my life on demonstrations, and in a later post I hope to talk through some criticisms and impressions I have of the ones I've been on recently. But for now, this is how it felt at the time.

I remember the very first purely political demo I ever went on, about 25 years ago: a small column of Kurdish nationalists and Iraqi
radicals and their left-wing British allies. The Kurds and Iraqis were chanting 'Ba'athist! Fascist! Out! Out! Out!' They've got that now, but I hope they get something of what they wanted in, too, and I don't think they'll get it from the US, the UK, the UN or anybody but themselves.

29 March

On that day's demo I picked up an SSP placard and walked beside the local Communist Party branch banner, because I wanted to talk to the CP people. The annoying thing is that the SSP is big and growing and the CP is tiny, but on two issues I have with the SSP - calling for Scottish independence and for the unions to break with Labour - the CP has the same position as I have (i.e. not calling for either).

Two young women came to the demo in wedding dresses, with a sign saying 'Newly wed, newly dead' - an idea they'd had after reading of a woman married six days who was killed in the Shaab district blast and named by Robert Fisk. They were genuinely outraged and grieved by it. Maybe the idea will take off and we'll get Women in White as well as Women in Black? I congratulated them on the creativity of their protest, but forgot to ask them to join the Coalition, which could do with more people like them.

I made up for this oversight by selling lots of new badges and raising a lot of money going around the crowd with a bucket. The speeches afterwards were actually quite good, and I left the demo feeling we'd done something.

12 April

I drove to Linlithgow, left the car in the Tesco car park and got the 11.02 to Glasgow. First carriage I looked in had sitting in it a vaguely-familiar woman with an antiwar badge, and a guy from the SSP, so I sat down with them. The woman kept on reading and the guy didn't say much, but we both knew we knew each other and after a while I recognised him as Kevin Williamson: publisher (Rebel Inc), columnist and author of 'Drugs and the Party Line', an excellent left-libertarian book.

When I walked towards Blythswood Square, where it was due to set off, the first thing I saw was the police, lots of them. At the corner of the square there were two guys, one middle-aged and one quite old, handing out SPGB leaflets. The leaflets argued that the war was a consequence of the capitalisat system, and that if you opposed it without opposing capitalism, all you could expect would be to be out protesting at the next war. I'd read the articles already in this month's Socialist Standard, and said so, but that I still thought it was worth protesting the war. The old guy said there were a lot of disappointed people here today, turning up and saying 'is this it?' And indeed it was a lot smaller than previous demos, and down to the hard core: the left and the peace movement. I argued a bit with the old guy, who was quite unfazed. 'This is our protest,' he said, as he handed out more leaflets. 'If people don't agree with them, that's our problem. And theirs.'

I wandered around flogging badges and joined a random contingent as the march set off. As we walked down West George St I saw Kevin Williamson again, standing beside the woman who'd done the wedding dress stunt two weeks earlier. She was taking a video of the demo, so I stood there too until she and Kevin started walking. It turned out she knew Kevin. I said what I'd forgotten to say last time - that she should join the Coalition, because it needed people like her. She apparently already has some connection, so that was fine, and she rushed off to video elsewhere.

Kevin and I talked a lot on the way to the park. Kevin has recently argued for Scottish independence, which I'm quite dubious about - and also about how the SSP had come to adopt the most enlightened and libertarian drugs policy of any party in Britain.

At Glasgow Green I sold more badges and bought a couple of papers, Kevin's drugs book (printed on hemp paper), and the SSP election manifesto. Having read it I can say I have some problems with it, but that's for another time.

Posted 3:55 PM by Ken

I've updated my earlier, and bad-tempered, post on Americans.

Posted 12:52 PM by Ken

My views on the war:

I opposed it before it started and will continue to do so even if WMD are found and/or the US and UK troops are welcomed into Baghdad by cheering crowds. WMD and the iniquitous and unpopular nature of the Ba'athist regime (which I've opposed as long as I've been politically active, i.e. since 1976) are not the real issues in the war. The real issues are the attempt to set up a regime which is compliant with the US; that is, to secure US control over the second largest oil reserves in the world, and to have forces in place for when the welcome day when the House of Saud is in Switzerland or on the lamp-posts of Riyadh. Control of oil, and strategic interest: that's what it's about, and that's imperialism.

Now that the war has started, there is huge pressure to 'back our boys' and hope for a quick and relatively bloodless victory. While that is indeed possible, if not probable, I don't share that hope. I do want the war over as quickly as possible and with the minimum casualties on all sides, and I don't wish any ill on the people doing the actual fighting, but the peaceful end I want to see is the immediate stopping of the war by mass opposition in the invading states, including the one in which I live.

The quicker and easier this war of naked imperialist aggression is for the US and UK, the more probability there is of more and worse wars to come. The US regime and its contemptible British and other accomplices would be encouraged to bomb their way down the target list, all the way to China and beyond. The rulers of the world should be regarded and resisted as if they were giant lizards from another star, which as far as humanity is concerned they might as well be.

I oppose this war regardless of its course, conduct, and outcome. The only support I give to the UK and US troops is to agitate for their immediate and unconditional return home.

Posted 12:39 PM by Ken

I went on the Edinburgh antiwar demo yesterday, excellently covered here by Charlie Stross .

Posted 12:02 AM by Ken

America: a country where ridiculous proportions of the population believe they were created by god, abducted by aliens, and attacked by Iraq. Also where some people believe that someone who burns a paper drawing of a US flag is as good as asking to be crushed under a bulldozer. It's not just the Right. Every political persuasion in the US contains many more stupid people than it or its equivalent does in Europe. On the Left Bank of the Seine you see poststructuralists smoking, flirting, and eating veal. Poststructuralism in America gave us La-La Land liberal toytown totalitarianism. French Maoism gave us Sartre and Althusser. American Maoism gave us Klonsky and Avakian. (I could go on.)

I know, like, and respect lots of Americans. Most of the weblogs I follow are written by Americans. Many of the books I read are written by Americans. But this particular distribution curve has a long tail at the low end. Why? The answer I've come up with, after some agonising over that question, is this:

Not because Americans are more stupid than anyone else, but because there is no American party of the Left. There is no labour (labor) party. There is no liberal party. (On any scale that registers, I mean. There are Liberal and Labor parties here and there.) The Democratic Party isn't a liberal party. It has liberals within it, which is a different thing. Nor is it a labour party, though it gets support from organised labour.

This means that the American Right can indulge in lying and character assassination with almost as much impunity as if it dominated a one-party state. And it means that the American Left either buries itself in the Democratic Party, where it's treated as an embarrassment, or spins its wheels with a complete lack of social traction (in academia or in tiny irrelevant sects) and embarrasses itself.