Posted 3:57 pm by Ken

Another coalition of the willing

A few weeks ago, we were told that Israeli forces had been ordered to be ready by the end of March 2006 for an attack on Iran. Yesterday, it was reported that Israeli chief of staff General Dan Halutz had insisted that no such attack was necessary in the short term; that the time for Israel to worry about Iranian nuclear weapons was if and when Iran actually had any; and that by then, perhaps five years from now, more powers than Israel would have an interest in deterring any aggressive use of nuclear weapons by Iran.

Today, UPI reports that some mainstream German media have backed up an earlier Turkish media claim that top US officials have been trying to get Ankara and other allies and clients on board for 'a possible military strike against suspected nuclear sites in Iran in the New Year'. Kurt Nimmo (via Gary Leupp, who has more) highlights the negligible impact of the Turkish story in the US.

For some months now Jorge Hirsch, a nuclear physicist, has been warning that a US attack on Iran is imminent. The attack would be mainly from the air, with some involvement of special forces and local proxies on the ground. It would include the use of at least tactical nuclear weapons. Hirsch argues that such a use of nukes is a major object of the exercise: to demonstrate US willingness to pre-emptively go nuclear, and thus put beyond doubt its nuclear credibility.

Professor Hirsch's fellow antiwar.com columnist, Gordon Prather, has been running a longer track of articles arguing that the US and EU case that Iran is in any kind of serious breach of the NPT is a bum rap, and that Iran is being set up. On the evidence presented, maybe - but Israel, India and Pakistan all developed nuclear weapons in secret, as former CIA analysts Bill and Kathleen Christison point out, arguing that the anti-war case should in no way rest on the proposition that Iran isn't doing the same. They also urge:

"The peace movements of the entire world should be in crisis mode right now, working non-stop to prevent the U.S. and Israel from starting a war against Iran."

Needless to say, the peace movements are in no such crisis mode. One reason may that, learning from past mistakes, the US and UK haven't advertised any forthcoming attack on Iran. Instead, it has been stealth marketed. The assumptions and justifications that will be widely used after the fact have already been insinuated into public consciousness: Iran is in breach of the NPT, Iranian nuclear weapons are a threat to Israel and the West, Iran is aiding terrorists, etc. (Hirsch is good on this.) Another reason is that everyone's first response to the suggestion is that 'They're not that crazy! And don't they have their hands full already in Iraq?'

One answer to that objection was argued last September (i.e. before the recent Iraqi elections, which seem only to bear out its assessment of the US/UK predicament in Iraq, and also before the current trickle of revelations and speculations) by Mike Macnair, a British Marxist, in the middle of a long and complicated think-piece on antiwar movement strategy:

It may seem insane for the US to rattle sabres at Iran when the US's current allies in Iraq are the pro-Iranian islamist parties. But the internal logic of the situation in Iraq means precisely that the US needs to reduce the political autonomy of these parties in order to get a deal which will not look like a US defeat and a jihadi or islamic-revolutionary victory: and this means bringing Iran itself under control.

It may also seem insane for the US to rattle sabres at Iran when 140,000 US troops are 'bogged down' in Iraq. But the nature of the threat seems to be radically different to the threats and ultimate invasion of Iraq. The US is not threatening to invade Iran. Through indirect means (and perhaps also in private diplomatic communications), the US administration is threatening to use nuclear weapons against Iran.

It was leaked in July to a US conservative website that "The Pentagon, acting under instructions from vice-president Dick Cheney’s office, has tasked the United States Strategic Command (STRATCOM) with drawing up a contingency plan to be employed in response to another 9/11-type terrorist attack on the United States. The plan includes a large-scale air assault on Iran employing both conventional and tactical nuclear weapons" (The American Conservative, August 1). The claim has not been denied. More recently, there was a leak of a draft Pentagon document containing a more general account of plans for first use of nuclear weapons in a pre-emptive strike - not merely in response to a terrorist attack, but to 'threats' like the Iranian nuclear fuel enrichment programme (see New York Times September 11). The document has been confirmed as genuine.

From the point of view of the interests of the human species, for the US to nuke Iran would be almost the ultimate insanity. From the point of view of the Bush administration, however, the threat and if necessary use of nuclear weapons against Iran looks like a win-win strategy.

Iraq is beginning to look like a disaster not merely for the neocons' policy but also for the global authority of the US military. It is the global authority of the US military which backs the status of the dollar as the ultimate reserve currency and hence the elaborate financial manipulations of neoliberal 'globalisation'. There are thus very big stakes in the question as to whether a US pull-back from Iraq looks like a US defeat.

If the threat to nuke Iran produces an Iranian back-down and a diplomatic deal, that deal could extend to leverage over the Iraqi shia islamist parties, which would allow a form of withdrawal from Iraq which looked less like US defeat.

If the Iranians do not back down and the US actually drops the bomb on Iran, a moral and political line will be crossed which has held since 1945. The US will be able to hold the threat of nuclear attack over every country which does not already have strategic nuclear weapons targeted on the US. The authority of the US military will be reasserted, and what happens in Iraq will become unimportant to world politics.

As a relative incidental, the administration might calculate that dropping the bomb on Iran - or even making a credible threat to do so - might precipitate the overthrow of the clerical regime in some sort of coup. In this case, too, the Iraqi shia islamist parties would be deprived of their backer.

A serious and believable threat to make a nuclear attack on Iran, with a real willingness to do so if the Iranian regime does not back down, is therefore rational politics from the point of view of the US administration and potentially of the US state. It would be a gamble: maybe dropping the bomb on Iran would provoke not fear but a global backlash against the US. But the Bush administration has already, in Iraq, shown itself willing to gamble on a large scale, and Bush is no longer seeking re-election.

If Bush leaves office as the president who got the US into an Iraqi quagmire which was seen in the end as a US defeat, his memory will be damned on all sides. If he leaves office as the president who 'freed America’s hands' to use nuclear blackmail, and 'dealt with Iran', US big capital and its supporters may adopt the old motto, oderint, dum metuant: 'Let them hate me, so long as they fear me.' He would then certainly have left his mark on history.

[...]

If the US and its allies had been successful in their plan to remake Iraq as a neoliberal regime, its neighbours would have been targeted next. The occupation has in fact led to an ongoing and destructive guerrilla war. But military victory in the invasion and threatened political defeat in the occupation is also leading to new threats: right now to bomb Iran. The best way to stop US-British aggression is for it to be politically defeated at home. If it is not politically defeated at home, it will go on until it eventually creates a coalition of major powers willing to fight the US in a general world war.

Cheerful cove, that Mike, eh? Always was. (I knew him, Horatio.)

Happy New Year.

Posted 11:40 am by Ken

Tomb thing roams free

My warnings below have been unaccountably ignored - the information is now splattered across the net. Today's Morning Star, a daily paper that editorially supports the Communist Party of Britain but whose readership and input is a lot wider than that, has splashed one of these documents on its front page, and referred readers to Lenin's Tomb for the rest. It has on the same page defied a government D-notice (gag order with no legal force) by publishing details of alleged MI6 involvement in the alleged abduction and torture of suspected terrorists in Greece.

Posted 12:10 pm by Ken

Leaking Tomb

Lenin's Tomb has published some letters which the Foreign Office is trying to suppress. The letters appear to document former UK ambassador Craig Murray's persistent attempts to persuade the Foreign Office of the futility and wickedness of relying on information possibly obtained under torture; and the FO's interesting response. In drawing my readers' attention to these links I do not, of course, intend in any way that anyone should actually click on them and look at the documents, let alone link to them far and wide, and I join all right-thinking people in unreservedly condemning the dastardly actions of the aforementioned sepulchre's inhabitant, a notorious Trotskyist wrecker, splitter, and underestimator of the peasantry.

Posted 1:25 pm by Ken

Boys and Girls and Books

At Novacon a couple of weekends ago there was a panel on the best books with which to introduce young readers to SF. Peter Weston, Farah Mendlesohn, Claire Brialey and Julia Daly came up with a wide variety of suggestions. From the floor, I questioned why anyone would want to introduce young readers to SF in the first place. I recounted meeting Lois McMaster Bujold at Minicon a few years ago, and being starstruck to the point of gibbering fannishness. When she asked if my kids read SF, I blurted: 'Good grief, no! I would be very worried if my kids read SF.'

Because, I went on, when I started reading SF as an adolescent it was because I was miserable and alienated, and I wouldn't wish that on anyone.

'Yes, Ken,' said Peter Weston, 'but you've improved.'

And, he went on, he too had been miserable and alienated as a teenager, but reading SF had helped him to overcome it, and had made him a better person. Peter Weston is a very good person indeed, so this is quite a testimony. My daughter now reads a lot of SF - she started by reading in quick succession all of Bujold's Vorkosigan books, as it happens - and it seems to be doing her nothing but good. But then, she started when she was twenty or so ...

It has recently been reported that adolescents temporarily lose some of the social abilities they had as children - they find it more difficult to infer emotions from facial expressions, for instance. They become, one might almost say, a little autistic. The difference in brain function is detectable. This casts some light, I think, on why people usually discover SF in their early teens, and usually discard it as adults. It also lays to rest my disquiet about the morality of encouraging young people to read SF. It won't make them go blind, or make them any more gauche than they would be anyway. The real question - and the real marketing problem - may be why people stop reading SF. Is it because they don't find their way from the kind of SF they enjoyed in their teens to the kind of SF that offers more adult satisfactions? I would have been delighted to discover Bujold when I was twenty. Her books would have provided exactly what I was missing, by that time, in SF: subtlety, emotion, colour, warmth, depth.

I remember exactly when I first read a story for myself. I was lying in bed on a Saturday morning leafing through a volume of Newnes Pictorial Knowledge, looking at the pictures, when I came across the story of Robin Hood. I read it, and when I put it down, I knew that a door had opened on a new world. I don't think this memory is falsified in retrospect - the sense of discovery and excitement was vivid, and very like how I had felt when I realised that 'kih-ah-tih spells CAT' could be generalised.

Yes, these memories are vivid. What I'd forgotten, or never thought about until now, was what I went on to read between, say, the ages of six and twelve. I read from all the volumes of Newnes, with especial pleasure in the sections on history, on science, and on 'Fable, Myth and Legend'. I read the Daily Express every day and Reader's Digest every month, and two Reader's Digest compilations: one a collection for children, the other a two-volume set titled Secrets and Stories of the War. National Geographic, lots. Missionary and martyr biographies: David Livingstone, Mary Slessor, Judson of Burma, Gladys Aylward, the Covenanters. Bible stories. Ladybird books of every kind. The Jungle Doctor books. War and POW memoirs: Escape or Die, The Wooden Horse, Eggs on my Plate, The Spycatcher Omnibus. A few classics: Treasure Island, Little Men, Good Wives. The comic-strip versions of Lorna Doone and Ivanhoe. Everything I could find by Enid Blyton. The Biggles books. Willard Price's adventure books. Lots of boys' adventure books, mostly sea stories. Angus MacVicar's books. Gavin Maxwell's Ring of Bright Water, about otters. The William books. The Jennings books. Some SF, from the laughable Kemlo books to more serious, if still far-fetched, tales of British boys in space and British special agents. (I remember one, in a series about the same hero, about a space probe that had returned from Venus and crashed in the Australian outback - and the Venusians on board, aquatic and intelligent, had escaped to underground rivers. It wasn't set in the future, or pitched as SF. In the sixties it was taken for granted that this sort of thing could happen any day.) The children's magazines Look and Learn, Eagle, Ranger. These had not only comic strips but serialised novels - there was a superbly illustrated serial of the Borrowers. One of these comics had a series about a resourceful industrial spy, like James Bond without the torture, that I read avidly and I wish I could read again. I read all the girls' books in the house where my mother grew up: girls' school and adventure stories, mostly. There were also books crafted for older children of both sexes: The Lone Pine books, the Young Warrenders books. These kinds of books shaded off into what I think must have been very mild teen romances. I read them without a blush, just as I read the love stories in the stacks of women's magazines that sometimes appeared in the house (given to my mother by friendly neighbours, I think - she wouldn't have bought them for herself).

In short I read every story I could get my hands on, fiction or non-fiction, with no regard to genre or the age or sex of the presumed reader. I've by no means listed everything, or even every kind of thing, I read. In my father's study in the manse in Lewis there were, literally, drifts of books and tracts, which I clambered and slid about on and explored with interest but little understanding. Personal Magnetism. Representative Men. What? Later, when we moved to Greenock, my father used to buy old books by the lot at auctions, retrieve whatever volume of theology he'd been after, and consign the rest to the attic. Into these heaps I burrowed too. The Fall of the Romanoffs. Ireland in Insurrection. Should a Girl Smoke?

Then, at twelve or thirteen or so, I found Alan E. Nourse's Rocket to Limbo in the library, and that was it as far as voluntarily reading any other kind of fiction was concerned, for the next seven or so years. (Apart from thrillers and naval adventures - I read lots of Alasdair Maclean, Hammond Innes, and Helen ... um, the lady who wrote North from Rome.) I went on reading staggering amounts of non-fiction. A typical high school Saturday began with meeting a pal at the Central Library, and taking out a stack of SF. Then we'd take a bus to the swimming pool, and after our swim walk over to the nearby branch library, and take out another stack of SF. After a mid-day dinner at our respective homes we'd meet again, or go our separate ways, down town again to the two second-hand bookshops and the bookstalls at the Saturday market and stock up on second-hand SF paperbacks and war memoirs: The Desert Rats, Popski's Private Army, that sort of thing. And that was the following week's reading sorted.

Nobody thought us odd. Or if they did, we couldn't read their expressions.

Posted 12:25 pm by Ken

The plane

Forty miles from where I write, a man sits. His eyes and ears are covered, his wrists and ankles manacled. He has been drugged. He may not know he is aboard a Lockheed Gulfstream jet, refuelling on the tarmac at Glasgow International Airport. He may not know where he's going.

He is going to be tortured. With beatings. With a scalpel. With a broken bottle. He will sign a confession. He will say he knows people whose names have been given to him. Some of the people he names may, some day, be on that plane. He may be on that plane himself because somebody else has, in the same position, named him.

At some moment, in the past year or two, this has been the case. It may be the case at this moment.

The confession he gives may be true. The confession that named him may be true. But that is how it was obtained. We know what such confessions are worth. The British government wants to make them admissible evidence in British courts.

This man's story may be a tissue of lies. It may be exaggerated. I rather hope it is. The man's laywer, Clive Stafford Smith, OBE, doesn't think so. He's suing the British government over it. There is no dispute, really, that all of this goes on. Craig Murray, former British Ambassador to Uzbekistan, describes the process:

"In Uzbekistan, it works like this," he says. "Person X is tortured and signs a statement saying he’s going to crash planes into buildings, or that he’s linked to Osama bin Laden. He’s also asked if he knows persons X, Y and Z in the UK who are involved in terrorism. He’ll be tortured until he agrees, though he’s never met them."

The confession is sent to the CIA where, according to Murray, it is "sanitised". Before sanitisation the report "will have the guy’s name on it, the date of the interrogation, where it took place - and might still be bloodstained.

"The CIA then issues a debriefing document, which does not name the individual. It does not say he was tortured. It only says that it is a detainee debriefing from a friendly overseas security service.

"This will set out the brief facts, such as "we now know person X in London is in Islamic Jihad and plans to blow up Canary Wharf". This goes to MI6 - the British and Americans share everything - and then it goes to MI6’s customers: the Prime Minister, the defence secretary, the home secretary, the foreign secretary, and other key ministers and officials. I was one of these customers too because I was the ambassador to Tashkent.

The jet has finished refuelling. The hoses are disconnected. Through the seat, a man feels the vibration as the engines start. Through silent headphones the rising sound comes through, like a scream. He's on his way.

Posted 2:26 pm by Ken

A bucket of Sunshine for Sunni Iran

Britain's most popular newspaper says Britain's to all intents and purposes at war with 'Sunni' Iran.

'It may still be a war of words - and worried Western leaders will do their best to keep it like that.

But if oil-hungry Teheran has its way, this is doomed to turn to bloody conflict.

It has been clear almost from the start that Iran is not just fanning the flames of the insurgency in Iraq, but providing the fuel and the ammunition.'

Oil-hungry Teheran, fuelling the insurgency all along? There's more:

'It also strikes fear into the hearts of Iran's Arab neighbours who are convinced they are pawns in a power grab which will establish Sunni Iran as the dominant Islamic force in the Gulf.'

Who knew? I'll say this for The Sun, it gives you information won't find anywhere else.

Posted 2:21 pm by Ken

A view from the Middle Kingdom

Via a commentator at Lenin's Tomb, we find Hong Kong commentator and politician Lau Nai-keung casting a cold eye on the prospect of a US-led global recession in the next year or two. His economic analysis will be familiar (here's a similar one, via TPM, from James J. Kramer, NYT stock tipster) - deficits, debts, trade imbalance, you've heard it before - and he gets at least one big number wrong (the cost of the Iraq war so far has been $200 billion dollars, not $700 billion) but in the context that's a nitpick. What I find interesting is his staunchly Sinocentric take on it all:

The US is now clearly in huge trouble, economically, socially, politically, and internationally. The Bush Administration bungled big in cyclone Katrina's aftermath in New Orleans, and then a minor rerun from Rita in Houston, and this will trigger the general outburst of people's dissatisfaction with the government, leading to great internal turmoil lasting for many years.

[...]

To us, the good news is that when the country is in deep trouble, the US will not have the energy to pick on China. Even when it is necessary to start another war to divert people's attention, it would pick one much smaller in size and weaker in strength, like Iran. This will provide a much more amicable environment for China to make good use of its "period of strategic opportunity" till 2020 for the country to pass through a turbulent zone between per capita income of US$1,000-3,000.

Do it to Julia! But as US-China tensions rise, looking on complacently while Iran is picked on may not be an option even for China. Our only hope really is that great internal turmoil lasting for many years.

Posted 10:55 am by Ken

The Big Bag Never Opened

Some time in the 1980s The Guardian, then so notorious for misprints that it was nicknamed The Grauniad, published an article that referred to 'the big bag theory' of the origin of the universe. A letter pointing out this mistake was sportingly illustrated with a cartoon of the Greek goddess Cornucopia, shaking the stars and galaxies out of a big bag.

There is in fact a connection between the Big Bang theory and cornucopia, but it's an entirely negative one. Such at any rate is the claim made by Eric J. Lerner, in his book The Big Bang Never Happened, which I recently rediscovered while tidying the workroom.

I first read Lerner's book several years ago. It didn't convince me, but it stimulated me to pay more attention to New Scientist's cosmology articles, which I had hitherto skimmed. Re-reading it after a few years of thus paying (more) attention, it made a lot more sense than it did the first time. Some of it is dated - Lerner was sceptical of galactic black holes, which have now been observed. It's been criticised, defended by its author and others, and I have no competence to comment. However, the technical back-and-forth is becoming increasingly beside the point. Problems with the Big Bang are now so mainstream that Lerner is cited, as a minority viewpoint but by no means a crackpot, in New Scientist itself, which recently devoted an issue to the subject. Even the plasma cosmology, developed by the Swedish physicist and Nobel Laureate Hannes Alfvén, seems to make more sense these days, with observations of obvious plasma flows and vast electromagnetic phenomena.

While there's little doubt that the observable universe is expanding, and that that expansion had a beginning in some kind of big bang, this does not necessarily imply the full eldritch pantheon of the Big Bang theory. That the entire universe emerged literally from nothing for completely unknown reasons, was inflated in an instant to a much larger size by a completely unknown force, is still accelerating outward under the influence of another completely unknown force, and that nine-tenths of it consists of a completely unknown form of matter, might seem at first glance an odd conclusion for a scientific deduction. If the name hadn't already been taken, the Big Bang theory would be known as scientific creationism.

And, like an earlier creationism, it has increasing difficulty in dealing with the evidence from the past. A cursory search turns up reports of: bafflingly early large-scale structures, old-looking early galaxies and even speculation that the most sacred relic of the Big Bang, the cosmic background radiation, is local in origin:

The most contentious possibility is that the background radiation itself isn't a remnant of the big bang but was created by a different process, a "local" process so close to Earth that the radiation wouldn't go near any gravitational lenses before reaching our telescopes.

The article continues with a brisk summary of the Big Bang's problems:

Although widely accepted by astrophysicists and cosmologists as the best theory for the creation of the universe, the big bang model has come under increasingly vocal criticism from scientists concerned about inconsistencies between the theory and astronomical observations, or by concepts that have been used to "fix" the theory so it agrees with those observations.

These fixes include theories which say the nascent universe expanded at speeds faster than the speed of light for an unknown period of time after the big bang; dark matter, which was used to explain how galaxies and clusters of galaxies keep from flying apart even though there seems to be too little matter to provide the gravity needed to hold them together; and dark energy, an unseen, unmeasured and unexplained force that is apparently causing the universe not only to expand, but to accelerate as it goes.

In research published April 10 in the "Astrophysical Journal, Letters," Lieu and Mittaz found that evidence provided by WMAP point to a slightly "super critical" universe, where there is more matter (and gravity) than what the standard interpretation of the WMAP data says. This posed serious problems to the inflationary paradigm.

Recent observations by NASA's new Spitzer space telescope found "old" stars and galaxies so far away that the light we are seeing now left those stars when (according to big bang theory) the universe was between 600 million and one billion years old -- much too young to have galaxies with red giant stars that have burned off all of their hydrogen.

Other observations found clusters and super clusters of galaxies at those great distances, when the universe was supposed to have been so young that there had not been enough time for those monstrous intergalactic structures to form.

No doubt a suitable fix for these will be in shortly, if it isn't already. To the making of epicycles there is no end.

What's really intriguing, though, is that Lerner has not been content with theory. In fact, contentment with theory is for him the root of the problem. Like Alfvén, he affirms that the best way to understand cosmic processes is through hands-on experimental work with similar processes in the laboratory. As director of Lawrenceville Plasma Physics, he has conducted extensive research into plasma physics, particularly the plasma focus device, with the ultimate aim of developing cheap fusion power. He has some US government support and private investment, and a step-by-step business plan.

And Cornucopia? Well, Lerner's thesis is that there's a tight connection between technological devlopment, our understanding of the universe, and the general condition of society. The Big Bang cosmology has an immense ideological appeal in a society without any hopeful vision of the future. The shift from experiment and observation to increasingly arcane theory and the multiplication of epicycles is a further malign twist, digging us deeper into the hole. Fundamental technological developments are slowed down. Apart from biotech, in which great advances in both theory and practice have gone together, the rest of our technology - even the Internet - is an elaboration, refinement and diffusion of developments made half a century or more ago.

And that's why the big bag never opened.

Posted 8:42 am by Ken

Gigs, etc

I'm speaking and reading at the Edinburgh University SF Soc's Freshers' Week event on Wednesday around about 8 p.m., in the Pentland Room at the Pleasance. On Thursday, 7.30 to 9.30, I'm doing a joint event with another local author, Jenni Calder, at the Priory Church, Hopetoun Road, South Queensferry (opposite the police station stop on the 43 bus rout, if anyone's coming in from Edinburgh). This is part of the Queensferry Arts Festival, which is running all week, mostly at the church.

Daniel Coysh has an interview/profile of me up at the Morning Star, Britain's only socialist daily (in fact, the only English-language socialist daily paper). It's on one of the free pages, so click right through.

Learning the World, published by Orbit last month and due to be published by Tor in November, has had a good response so far. Nova Scotia, the anthology of new Scottish speculative fiction edited by Neil Williamson and Andrew J. Wilson and published by Mercat Press, was launched in August from sites on the east and west coasts and has already sold more than half its print run. Part of a strong recent surge of Scottish SF and fantasy, this superbly-produced book contains many fine stories and my own 'A Case of Consilience', which is without a doubt the best story of Scottish Presbyterian xeno-evangelism yet published in the present millennium.

Posted 8:19 pm by Ken

Where were the black helicopters?

Caligula made his horse a Senator, but he didn't put the stable boy in charge of the aqueducts. The local, state and federal lack of preparation, the gutting of FEMA (previously capable, even under Bush, of acting with rather more despatch) as it was integrated, if that's the word, into Homeland Security present a record for which Michael Brown's replacement on the scene (not even sacking!) is not even the first installment of retribution.

A proper accounting must investigate FEMA's and Homeland Security's part in the sinister seige of New Orleans, in excluding the Red Cross and other volunteers, while allowing in Blackwater mercenaries.

[Added Saturday 10 Sept.]

Like I said before, the best blogging coverage is going on at Making Light and Lenin's Tomb. I found most of the above links there. The World Socialist Web Site are not my kind of socialists, but their daily analyses and reports have been sharp. Some commentary on the libertarian side can also make you think.

What's happened is a disaster all right, but to say that it's a failure presupposes that the plan was to use all available civil and military forces to deliver relief, and that this plan failed. Evidently there was no such plan. Nor, contrary to what some on the left have argued, was the situation left to the market and other forms of voluntary organization. Time and again, volunteer help from outside and self-help and mutual aid within have been blocked.

What the US authorities at every level appear to have settled on by accident or design is a method with wider application. The priority is to control the population. In the event of disaster, seal off the city until a sufficient military force is in place to take it. Exaggerate the degree of disorder within, relying on racism and rumour. Evacuate the city at gunpoint and don't let people back. Disperse the evacuees, humanely it may be, but firmly, with as much of the burden as possible taken by charity. Turn over the reconstruction to Haliburton and favoured real-estate developers. This is the future of Homeland Security. This is what to expect in the event of another natural disaster or mass-casualty attack.

There's no reason to expect anything substantially different in Britain. Civil disaster management and civil defence are very likely just as riddled with private consultancies, workshopping scenarios to their hearts' content, while the real preparation is for military and police occupation.

The time to prepare citizen self-organization from below is now. Some individual self-preparation wouldn't go amiss either.

Posted 6:38 pm by Ken

Why Didn't They Walk?


The now famous account by Larry Bradshaw and Lorrie Beth Slonsky of their experiences in New Orleans makes two points very clear. One is that much of the 'looting', including armed 'looting', was entirely legitimate and necessary salvage of food, water, and other supplies. The other is that people were forcibly prevented from walking out of the city:

As we approached the bridge, armed Gretna sheriffs formed a line across the foot of the bridge. Before we were close enough to speak, they began firing their weapons over our heads.

[...]

We questioned why we couldn’t cross the bridge anyway, especially as there was little traffic on the six-lane highway. They responded that the West Bank was not going to become New Orleans and there would be no Superdomes in their city.

Other groups, time and again, got the same response.

Here's another account, again from a generally not-making-shit-up left-wing paper, of what went on in and around the Convention Center. It corroborates these two points, and seems interesting enough to quote at length. Lisa Moore is telling the story of her cousin Denise:

From what she told me, her mother, a licensed practical nurse, was called into work on Sunday night at Memorial Hospital (historically known as Baptist Hospital to those of us from NO). Denise decided to stay with her mother, her niece and grandniece; she figured they’d be safe at the hospital.

[...] Tuesday the levees broke, and water began rising. They moved patients upstairs, saw boats pass by on what used to be streets. They were told that they would be evacuated, that buses were coming. Then they were told they would have to walk to the nearest intersection, Napoleon and South Claiborne, to await the buses. They waded out in hip-deep water, only to stand at the intersection, on the neutral ground (what y’all call the median) for three and a half hours. The buses came and took them to the Ernest Morial Convention Center (yes, the one you’ve all seen on TV).

Denise said she thought she was in hell. They were there for two days, with no water, no food, no shelter - Denise, her mother (63 years old), her niece (21 years old), and two-year-old grandniece. When they arrived, there were already thousands of people there. They were told that buses were coming. Police drove by, windows rolled up, thumbs-up signs. National guard trucks rolled by, completely empty, soldiers with guns cocked and aimed at them. Nobody stopped to drop off water. A helicopter did, but all the bottles exploded on impact due to the height of the helicopter.

The first day (Wednesday) four people died next to her. The second day (Thursday) six people died next to her. Again, nobody stopped. The only buses that came were full; they dropped off more and more people, but nobody was being picked up and taken away. They found out that those being dropped off had been rescued from rooftops and attics; they got off the buses delirious from lack of water and food. Completely dehydrated. the crowd tried to keep them all in one area. Denise said the new arrivals had mostly lost their minds. They had gone crazy.

Inside the convention centre, the place was one huge bathroom. In order to shit, you had to stand in other people’s shit. the floors were black and slick with shit. most people stayed outside because the smell was so bad. But outside wasn’t much better: between the heat, the humidity, the lack of water, the old and very young dying from dehydration... and there was no place to lay down, not even room on the sidewalk. they slept outside Wednesday night, under an overpass.

Denise said, yes, there were young men with guns there. But they organised the crowd. They went to Canal Street and ‘looted’, and brought back food and water for the old people and the babies, because nobody had eaten in days. When the police rolled down windows and yelled out, 'The buses are coming', the young men with guns organised the crowd in order: old people in front, women and children next, men in the back. Just so that when the buses came, there would be priorities of who got out first.

Denise said the fights she saw between the young men with guns were fist fights. She saw them put their guns down and fight rather than shoot up the crowd. But she said that there were a handful of people shot in the convention centre: their bodies were left inside, along with other dead babies and old people.

Denise said the people thought they were being sent there to die. Lots of people being dropped off, nobody being picked up. Cops passing by, speeding off. National guard rolling by with guns aimed at them. And, yes, a few men shot at the police, because at a certain point all the people thought the cops were coming to hurt them, to kill them all. She saw a young man who had stolen a car speed past, cops in pursuit; he crashed the car, got out and ran, and the cops shot him in the back, in front of the whole crowd. She saw many groups of people decide that they were going to walk across the bridge to the west bank, and those same groups would return, saying that they were met at the top of the bridge by armed police ordering them to turn around, that they weren’t allowed to leave.

This added to the belief they were sent there to die. Denise’s niece found a pay phone, and kept trying to call her mother’s boyfriend in Baton Rouge, and finally got through and told him where they were. The boyfriend, and Denise’s brother, drove down from Baton Rouge and came and got them. They had to bribe a few cops, and talk a few into letting them into the city ('Come on, man, my two-year-old niece is at the convention centre'), then they took back roads to get to them.

After arriving at my other cousin’s apartment in Baton Rouge, they saw the images on TV, and couldn’t believe how the media were portraying the people of New Orleans. She kept repeating to me on the phone last night: make sure you tell everybody that they left us there to die. Nobody came. Those young men with guns were protecting us. If it wasn’t for them, we wouldn’t have had the little water and food they had found.

That’s Denise Moore’s story.

Posted 2:07 pm by Ken

Katrina Comments

I'm belatedly posting some comments on my previous post. I apologise for the belatedness, because these correspondents were ahead of the curve.

Erudite American Marxist Jim Farmelant wrote, back on Wednesday 31 August:

I think we are seeing in the Gulf states, especially Louisiana, the results of some massive incompetence, starting from the Federal level (read Bush Administration) down to the state and local levels.  The Bush Administration had taken away Federal funds that had been slated to pay for New Orleans disaster funds and used them pay for the Iraq war and for tax cuts.  As a result, New Orleans was not able to get its levees in shape to withstand a major storm of the sort just experienced.  Louisiana has found itself shorthanded in terms of manpower in its National Guard, since so much of the Louisiana National Guard is, you guessed it, over in Iraq. Indeed, even much of the equipment that the National Guard uses in flood relief is over in Iraq, just in case that country should suffer a flood.
 
And things are not too much better at the state and local levels. While almost all major American cities suffer greatly from corruption, New Orleans is especially notorious on that score.  No doubt when the billions of Federal dollars being to flow in to rebuild the city, a lot of well connected people are going to become fabulously wealthy. Whether any of that will trickle down
to the rest of the people in New Orleans is anyone's guess. Meanwhile, watching television one got to see the consequences of lax building codes, as one got to see buildings that probably
would have had trouble standing up to a 75 mph wind, get whacked with 175 mph winds.  Naturally, a lot of these buildings simply collapsed.  Since, New Orleans is a city that normally gets hit with a hurricane or major tropical storm every few years, one might have thought that the city's building codes would have taken that into account.  Yes, one might have thought that.
 
Yes, this is going to be a major national disaster.

British SF fan Alison wrote, the same day:

Lots of things about the US become easier to understand if you consider it as a very rich third world country... Not just now, but generally. Like enormously high and rising inequity (including reducing real-terms median income over the last 30 years!), lack of adequate healthcare, housing, education for the poor, and a belief that richer states have no responsibility to improve the living conditions of poorer ones, diversion of national wealth into warfare rather than welfare. That sort of thing.

Lots of examples at the moment; eg general notion that Texas helping out refugees from Louisiana is a 'stunningly generous offer' rather than you know, standard operating practice, or the proportion of US military strength being used to sort out Katrina cleanup (and you know, they could have been shipping in troops to safe nearby areas over the weekend), or just a general 'oh well, of course it's individuals' responsibility to look after themselves and their property', or the Red Cross explaining that it's their largest aid effort ever (because, you know, American Red Cross is the world).

Not to mention police and other rescue personnel actively looting (apparently this happened after 9/11 as well), something which I think we can safely say Would Not Happen Here.

 
Today, David Moles wrote:

This part of America didn't just fall off and drop into the Third World; it was left there, a long time ago. (One of our great national shames, though
there's plenty of competition.) There's a good summary here[.]

Of course, this sort of thing doesn't happen in at least one actual Third World country.

Star blogging coverage (practical as well as argumentative) can be found at Making Light. China Mieville has done some sterling online investigative journalism at Lenin's Tomb (as has the tomb's titular inhabitant).

Posted 3:17 pm by Ken

Katrina

Excuse me, but did part of America just fall off and drop into the Third World?

Maybe I'm missing something, but from here there seems to be a gulf between the news reports and the framing of them. What it looks like is an ever-expanding disaster that could eventually have a body count in the thousands. Lack of clean water and electricity could do that on their own. The rescue efforts look awfully piecemeal, brave though each one is. In New Orleans the water is still rising. Thousands are still stranded. Tens or hundreds of thousands in the Gulf coast states are homeless and without electricity or communications. The news networks are maintaining a remarkable calm. The reporters sound stressed, the anchors sombre but unfazed. It's unreal.

To stop this from turning into major national catastrophe would seem to require a massive mobilization of ... oh, never mind.

Posted 10:09 pm by Ken

1688 and all that

Nicholas Whyte has replied to my reply. To take this further would, pending further research, be likely to descend to nit-picking or ascend to a contest of grand narratives. (At least, that's how I would be inclined to go, to nobody's profit or pleasure.) This not being Usenet I'm happy to leave the historical question to the judgement of the wide and discerning body of enlightened opinion that undoubtedly makes up the readership of both our blogs.

The question this all started as an aside to is something neither of us has pursued, and it's this: if you are going to limit free speech at all, is it more illiberal to do so by making the proclamation of certain specific and narrowly defined doctrines illegal, or by making administrative decisions based on broad and vague provisions? Which - if pressed to choose - would you prefer as a precedent in the hands of your political opponents, whoever they may be, who are of course much less wise and just than you and your friends? Which, for that matter, would you trust your side to use wisely? That too I leave as an exercise for the reader.

Posted 8:47 pm by Ken

Glorious Indeed

In the previous post I referred to the Iraq-based Iranian MEK and the KLA as 'jihadists'. A couple of emails have flooded in to call me on this. And yes, in this instance I can only put my hands up and say this was unjust and I retract it. Thre is plenty to be said against both organizations but calling them jihadists only confuses things.

Nicholas Whyte, a very intelligent guy and so influential that his name has been mentioned in conspiracy theories, has kindly overlooked my trespasses on his own patch and taken me to task for my historical references below:

I'm going to detach this completely from the context of present day argument because I think Ken's history is wrong (or, perhaps, I have failed to see the joke). I'm frankly surprised by his blithe acceptance of a) the 1688-92 revolution being a Good Thing and b) the "international conspiracy of religious and feudal reaction" which lasted "for centuries". I realise that this is because I come at this from an Irish Catholic perspective, from which the Penal Laws appear as a crucial instrument of suppression of the rights and powers of the majority of Ireland's inhabitants in order to entrench the power of a minority, with assistance from England. (And that's the moderate version; the more hard-line version would deny that there was any "real" Irish person who benefited from the Penal Laws at all.) I don't know much about Scotland at this period, so it may just be that Ken and I are talking past each other. But I've met enough otherwise sensible people from across the water who don't, for example, realise that Cromwell was a Bad Thing, that I think it's worth expanding on why I think Ken's history is wrong.

Let's indulge in a little counterfactual speculation. What if James II had not been overthrown? I carry no particular brief for him; he was obviously not the greatest king England (or Scotland, or Ireland) ever had, and was largely the architect of his own downfall; but before you start to rejoice at his overthrow, just bear in mind that the straw that broke the camel's back was his enactment of the Declaration of Indulgence - ie that Catholics and Dissenters should have the same civil rights as Anglicans. Shocking, eh? The argument at the time was that this was part of the slippery slope to a Catholic absolute monarchy, but really, any leftist should find this about as convincing as Pinochet's justification for overthrowing Allende in Chile in 1973. In fact, it's difficult to believe that a continuing Jacobite regime would have done anything other than summon a new Parliament, which would this time have had significant Catholic and Dissenter membership, ie been more representative of the people, and come to a modus vivendi between the three groups based on rights rather than repression. (See for a supporting argument the Catholic Encyclopedia's interesting nuances on the Revolution.)

Sure, under my scenario James would probably have continued to mismanage his politics, and may very well have ended up forced to abdicate later rather than sooner, if he didn't die first. But it is absurd to argue that that he could have reversed the Reformation, and I don't believe that was ever his plan. (if it had been, he certainly could not have kept the loyalty of invaluable aides like Samuel Pepys, who was a conforming Anglican and whose wife was a Huguenot refugee.)

I realise that part of the reason I don't see much worth celebrating in the events of 1689-92 is that the people who I did see celebrating it as I grew up gave me every reason to believe that I personally had lost rather than gained as a result. I think my views have now moderated, to the point where I can relatively calmly argue that it didn't make much difference, rather than that it was an actively Bad Thing. (My views on Cromwell, however, have not moderated.)

As for the "international conspiracy" lasting for centuries - well, when James lost the Battle of the Boyne in 1690, a Te Deum in thanks for William's victory was sung in Vienna and the Vatican was lit up in celebration, so it looks to me as if the agents of the international Catholic conspiracy won rather than lost the war! Especially since the French recognised James' overthrow as early as 1697; and I'll bow to any Scot's superior knowledge of the events of 1715 and 1745, but would be surprised to learn that an international conspiracy of feudal and religious reaction was the sole cause of conflict in either case. Certainly the British government doesn't seem to have thought so; the Penal Laws as applied - especially in England - were clearly designed more to entrench the monopoly on legitimacy of the Church of England than to root out loyalists of foreign powers.

No fair-minded person could dispute that in England the various laws against Catholics and Dissenters were prolonged by popular prejudice and Anglican interest well beyond any point where they could be justified by reasons of state; nor that they were an instrument of oppression against the majority population of Ireland. To say that they 'worked' in England wasn't on my part any considered historical judgement, merely to note that the auto-da-fe never became one of the crowd-pulling entertainments of London. Maybe they weren't needed. The Jacobite conspiracies were real and produced two uprisings. Possibly with a less severe repression against Catholicism the uprisings would have met with more success.

Nicholas makes two points which I hope he won't take offence if I call debating points. The first is that the immediate occasion of James II's overthrow was his Declaration of Indulgence. The second is that the Pope was on the same side as William of Orange. Now nobody, from Macaulay to the author of the Catholic Encyclopaedia article cited, allows that James was a sincere convert to toleration. He had been, right up until that point, a relentless persecutor of Presbyterians and other Dissenters. The Declaration of Indulgence was indisputably unconstitutional. James had no authority to annul laws, however odious, that had been passed by Parliament and accepted by the courts. It didn't take long for the Dissenters to be persuaded that the risks to them from an arbitrary Catholic monarchy far outweighed whatever temporary relief it might bestow. The Revocation of the Edict of Nantes was hot in the memory. (If, to take up the Allende analogy, the (counter-factual) constitutional Marxist president of a neighbouring state, say Argentina, had withdrawn previous solemn guarantees and used great violence against the Argentine middle classes, and Allende was in the meantime busy promoting hard-line revolutionaries to positions of power, Pinochet would have been even more widely hailed than he was.) Indulgence was a tactical manouevre, and as Macaulay shows it was recognised as such in widespread debate at the time.

My counter-factual speculation is this: If James II had succeeded in drawing Catholic and Dissenter into a pincer movement against the Established Church and the limits placed on the monarchy, it is doubtful to say the least that he would have established religious pluralism. (And, let me say again, the Catholic Encyclopaedia produces no supporting argument for this.) More likely there would have been a Catholic monarchy (now with a guaranteed succession) and a immense increase in Catholic power in the state. That after all had been his consistent course and aim. He had used his limited prerogative to place Catholics in every key position he could. What he would have done with an unlimited prerogative was expected to be more of the same. He might not have reversed the Reformation or even aimed to but there is no doubt at all that most of the population would have suspected him, with good reason, of such a design. James might well have had to rely on aid from France to hold power. A second Civil War seems a likely consequence. Defeat for the Protestant majority would have meant national subjugation; victory, a massacre and expulsion of Catholics. It is as well for England that it was spared either.

That the Pope celebrated William's victory at the Boyne may for a moment nonplus an opponent who has never heard of this (and we've all met them), but it won't wash as a serious historical argument. The Pope was allied with the other European powers, Catholic and Protestant, against the overweening ambition of France. That does not at all affect the point that William's victory advanced the Protestant interest, and that his defeat would have favoured the Catholic interest. The Orangemen are no more deluded on that than the Irish Catholics were who supported James.

Was the Glorious Revolution a Good Thing? I'll try to emulate Nicholas's candour and admit that I come to it from a perspective of having heard from childhood of the sufferings of the Covenanter martyrs, and later finding the same martyrs extolled in Marxist and Liberal histories. All the same, I find that I agree with the final 'nuance' of the Catholic Encyclopaedia:

But on the other hand we can now realize that the Revolution had the advantage of finally closing the long struggle between king and Parliament that had lasted for nearly a century, and of establishing general principles of religious toleration in which Catholics were bound sooner or later to be included.

These achievements seem glorious enough.

Posted 11:24 pm by Ken

Send them to Guantanamo then give it back to Cuba

'They're thinking of using the treason laws against seditious clerics,' I said over breakfast last Monday, catching up with the news. Then I had one of those mind-catching-up-with-my-mouth moments: how very seventeenth century that sounded! As it turns out, it was just another Blairite trial balloon. (From 'joined-up government' to 'Post-It Note government' in eight years. Another first for New Labour.)

Some post-Revolution precedents for dealing with seditious clerics are suggested by Mike Macnair, an erudite Marxist who reminds us how the anti-Catholic Penal Laws successfully defended Britain's bourgeois revolution against an international conspiracy of religious and feudal reaction for centuries. He holds overt but strictly delimited religious persecution and public trial a superior alternative to secret administrative decision. It's not entirely clear whether he's speculating how our once and future republic might defend itself, or giving tips to the present state. Either way, he might be onto something. The Penal Laws worked against the Jesuits, but will something like them work against jihadists? It's an interesting suggestion. Not Mill or Milton would have rejected it out of hand.

A war on Islamist terrorists, jihadists, or whatever the hell we are supposed to call them this week would be a very good idea. The war we actually have, an open-ended imperialist war, the forever war, tends to undermine this in two ways. The first is that it gives the jihadists plenty of legitimate gripes to flourish before potential recruits. The second is that the US and its allies keep on backing on-side jihadists: the Iranian MEK, the KLA, the Chechen freedom fighters (the beasts of Beslan). These good on-side terrorists have a way of popping up elsewhere. It's like pumping oil into a pipeline. The US and its allies must know this. Why do they do it? Islamism originated in wars against movements and regimes of the left, and it remains too useful a weapon to drop, as does terrorism in general. Any government that acts as an impediment to the free flow of investment - nationalist, socialist, or ex-socialist-but-not-yet-willing-to-roll-over - can expect terrorist attack, and can expect its offers of intelligence and military assistance against anti-Western terrorists to be, as in the Cuban case, rebuffed.

Meanwhile, as all the online world has reason to suspect by now, Iran may be being set up for attack following a mass-casualty terrorist outrage in the US. One or more of these is expected very soon. I have a bad feeling about this.

Update, Monday 15 Aug: The now-famous American Conservative article by ex-CIA man Philip Giraldi on the Iran contingency plans is here. Svein Olav Nyberg has reminded me of a good summary of the war on terror's origins in US-backed terrorist wars, by Juan Cole, who in turn directs us to some online excerpts from Steve Coll's book on the secret history of the Afghan counter-revolution, its aftermath and blowback, Ghost Wars.

Posted 8:39 pm by Ken

Is Serious the New Fannish?

Last weekend I was at Interaction, the 63rd World Science Fiction Convention (the Worldcon) in Glasgow. The venue was the Scottish Exhibition and Conference Centre with its associated hotels. Constructed on a formerly derelict stretch of Clyde shore, the SEC and the Science Park across the water from it look some spaceport of the future.

If you want links to blogs by people who were there, Cheryl is rounding them up. (If you're reading this much after it was written, go here and scroll down.) My own impressions are limited by the fact that I was on thirteen programme items from Thursday through Sunday, and had neither time nor energy to go to any others apart from the opening ceremony and Christopher Priest's Guest of Honour talk.

The opening ceremony was fun and I was pleased to see that it used part of a greeting to the con by Edwin Morgan, the poet laureate of Scotland, which I and Ron Butlin had recorded some months ago. (The rest of that DVD, including two readings and an interview, may be available to any serious fannish or academic panel that may want it. Ask me sometime.)

Almost every panel was packed out. The SEC concourse looked a lot quieter than it had ten years ago at Intrsection, the previous Glasgow Worldcon. This was almost certainly because most of the con was at panels. The programming had a strong backbone, and the discussions were mostly sensible, though I had a qualm at one point when I found myself citing SF stories in evidence. Is serious the new fannish? There seemed to be fewer people in the sort of costumes that the media like to equate with SF fandom. This may well be because I've grown blase about them in the last decade.

Also in the past decade I've made a number of friends in fandom. I met quite a few of them there, and I hope I made some new ones. Carol and I thoroughly enjoyed the various bid and fandom parties that swirled around the balcony of the Hilton stairwell. Patrick Neilsen Hayden took us out to dinner. Orbit threw a fine party. I talked to my editors and agent about the next book. Charlie won a Hugo, as did Edward James and Farah Mendlesohn. Farah and Edward wangled an invite to the Hugo nominees' party for contributors to their winning volume, The Cambridge Companion to Science Fiction. So Carol and I got in. For that and all other hospitality, much thanks.

The Dealer's Room trade seemed steady rather than busy. The NESFA people were pleased to see me, and I them. They gave me a book and discussed my forthcoming NESFA collection (for Boskone in February 2006). I bought Parietal Games, the new collection of essays by and about M. John Harrison, from the Science Fiction Foundation stall. It looks good and I will no doubt blog about it later. Ever the sucker for space movement memorabilia, I bought badges of Gagarin, Koralev, and a pioneer cadre of cosmonauts from the Russian fans' table (manned by the same guys as ten years ago, selling the same commie kitsch). Their Worldcon bid is for Moscow 2017. I wouldn't rule it out.

Posted 8:52 pm by Ken

Comment on Monod

Jim Farmelant writes:

I found it curious that you devoted a post on your blog to Jacques Monod's Chance and Necessity, with particular emphasis on Monod's critique of dialectical materialism and Marxism.  Monod's critique of dialectical materialism, and especially of the dialectics of nature, is, as you note, hardly unprecedented in the history of Marxism.  Various Marxists, including Georg Lukacs, Sidney Hook, Lucio Coletti, and G.A. Cohen, amongst others, representing a variety of schools within the Marxist tradition, all presented rather similar critiques of diamat.  Whether the abandonment of the dialectics of nature necessarily entails the abandonment of the materialist conception of history, as Monod seemed to think, seems quite a different matter.  Cohen, for instance, while rejecting the dialectics of nature, back in 1978, seemed to think that historical materialism was quite defensible on its own.  And even while since then, he has seriously qualified his endorsement of historical materialism, I think that he would still maintain that the merits or demerits of the materialist conception of history can be assessed quite independently of those of the dialectics of nature.
 
It is also interesting to note that some of the logical empiricists, especially Otto Neurath and Philipp Frank were rather sympathetic towards Marxism. And even Rudolf Carnap, in discussing the matter in the Schilpp volume, The Philosophy of Rudolf Carnap, gave his endorsement to the materialist conception of history. See:
 
http://archives.econ.utah.edu/archives/marxism/2005w19/msg00331.htm
http://lists.econ.utah.edu/pipermail/marxism-thaxis/2005-May/018541.html
http://www.opensubscriber.com/message/marxism-thaxis@lists.econ.utah.edu/1656779.html
http://archives.econ.utah.edu/archives/marxism/2005w28/msg00228.htm
 
BTW you might be interested in Althusser's evaluation of Monod, which can be found at:

http://www.marx2mao.com/Other/PSPS90ii.html#App
 
[P.S.] BTW, I forgot to mention that a little while back I picked up a recent edition of Monod's book which featured an introductory essay by the late John Maynard Smith, who endorsed
Monod's thesis concerning Marxism, while making mention of the fact, that he (Maynard Smith) was an ex-Marxist and an ex-Communist.

More on the dialectics of nature some other time, but for now I'd like to thank Jim for his comment.

Posted 1:12 pm by Ken

The Party Line

Every so often in Macaulay's History of England he'll be talking about some gallant soldier on one side or the other of various wars, and he'll say something like 'and then he went off for a few years to fight the Turks'. Catholics and Protestants, Roundheads and Cavaliers, soldiers of the House of Stuart or the House of Orange, took advantage of occasional interruptions in mutual massacre to fight side by side against 'the enemy of all Christendom'. I think these days we would look somewhat askance at a young gentleman taking a year or two out to finish his education in the Russian Army or the Bosnian Serb militia.

Most Christians no longer feel like our illustrious ancestors did, but it seems that quite a lot of Muslims do. The Ummah is a much more live idea than Christendom. When the Prime Minister of Australia was deriding the idea that the bomb attacks in London might have something to do with Iraq, he pointed out that the attack on Australians in Bali was linked by the perpetrators, and I think he said by Osama Bin Laden too, to Australia's intervention in Timor. Should we have repudiated saving the Timorese because of that? he asked.

Well, indeed not - and even the far left was divided about the intervention itself - but I don't think Mr Howard was quite reinforcing his point. When Jack Straw, John Reid and others recite the mantra of 'Kenya, Tanzania, Indonesia, Yemen' as countries that had nothing to do with the war in Iraq that were attacked by al Qaeda, they are not being stupid. Nor are they being stupid in conspicuously missing out the obvious country from the list: Russia. Russia, they might well say, has been attacked over and over again by Islamist terrorists and suicide bombers, and it opposed the Iraq war! So what do you say to that, Mr Galloway? They of course say no such thing.

No, they are not being stupid. They are sticking to the party line. Sticking to a party line is something that Messrs Straw and Reid know all about.

Scott Horton provides a useful round-up of the evidence and arguments against the party line here.

There are no excuses for terrorism, but sometimes there are explanations. There's a nasty meme going around that to seek (non-party-line) explanations is to condone. A good antidote to it is in the words of Alec Nove:

To understand is not to forgive. It is simply better than the alternative, which is not to understand.

Posted 8:03 pm by Ken

Is Marxism a theism?

Jacques Monod won the 1965 Nobel Prize for Chemistry for his work in molecular biology. In Chance and Necessity (1970, translated 1971) he looks at the philosophical implications of molecular biology. They are, for Monod, rigorously atheistic. In nature, 'invariance precedes teleonomy'. This is his way of saying that purpose is a product of natural selection. Belief in God, gods and spirits is what Monod calls animism: the projection into nature of the purposive properties of the human central nervous system. Discarding animism is the first principle of science, which Monod calls the principle of objectivity.

'All religions, nearly all philosophies, and even a part of science testify to the unwearying, heroic effort of mankind desperately denying its own contingency'. One of the philosophies most strenuous in this effort is Marxism. Monod's argument here is straightforward.

Dialectical materialism is a contradiction in terms, because dialectic is a mental process, and the only way a mental process can be inherent in matter is if there is a mind inherent in matter. Hegel called it Spirit. But Hegel's Spirit is God. Without Spirit, there is absolutely no basis for a dialectic of nature or of history. Dialectic of nature -> Spirit in Nature -> animism.

Providence is thus smuggled back into a supposedly scientific view, with disastrous results, because if you think you are an atheist but are unconciously counting on Providence (the cunning of Reason, the logic of history, and other such avatars) to make it all come out right in the end, you are going to make catastrophic mistakes which you have no way to recognise, let alone correct. Historical messianism is the inevitable consequence of dialectical materialism. This is in addition to a long trail of intellectual embarrassments. (With some tact, Monod cites only those handed down to us by Engels and Lenin.)

There have been Marxists who rejected the dialectic, for much these reasons. But Marxism without the dialectic is just a set of economic, historical and sociological analyses, any of which you can take or leave. Without the deep conviction of having uncovered the laws of motion of nature, society and thought, it loses much of its zeal. Not a revision of Marxism, but a complete abandonment of it, is socialism's only hope.

With fact and value radically disjunct, and no destiny or duty written in nature, the only basis for reuniting our values with our knowledge is the recognition that the principle of objectivity is itself a free, and thus ethical, choice. A like recognition is, for Monod, the only basis for a scientific socialist humanism. We can choose to build a kingdom of knowledge and freedom, or we can choose the darkness.

[Added 14 July, with slight edits above to clarify]

But let Monod speak for himself:

'Perhaps more than the other animisms, historical materialism is based on a total confusion of the categories of value and knowledge. This very confusion permits it, in a travesty of authentic discourse, to proclaim that it has 'scientifically' established the laws of history, which man has no choice or duty but to obey if he does not wish to sink into oblivion.

This illusion, which is merely puerile when it is not fatal, must be given up once and for all. How can an authentic socialism ever be built on an essentially inauthentic ideology, a caricature of that very science whose support it claims (most sincerely, in the minds of its followers)? Socialism's one hope is not in a 'revision' of the ideology that has been dominating it for over a century, but in completely abandoning that ideology.

Where then shall we find the source of truth and the moral inspiration for a really scientific socialist humanism? Only, we suggest, in the sources of science itself, in the ethic upon which knowledge is founded, and which by free choice makes knowledge the supreme value - the measure and guarantee of all other values. An ethic which bases moral responsibility upon the very freedom of that axiomatic choice. Accepted as the foundation for social and political institutions, and as the measure of their authenticity and their value, only the ethic of knowledge can lead to socialism. It prescribes institutions dedicated to the defence, the extension, the enrichment of the transcendent kingdom of ideas, of knowledge, and of creation - a kingdom which is within man, where progressively freed both from material constraints and from the misleading servitudes of animism, man could at last live authentically; where he would be protected by institutions which, seeing him as both the subject of the kingdom and its creator, would serve him in his unique and precious essence.

This is perhaps a utopia. But it is not an incoherent dream. It is an idea that owes its strength to its logical coherence alone. It is the conclusion to which the search for authenticity necessarily leads. The ancient covenant is in pieces; man at last knows that he is alone in the unfeeling immensity of the universe, out of which he emerged only by chance. Neither his destiny nor his duty have been written down. The kingdom above or the darkness below: it is for him to choose.'

Posted 8:33 am by Ken

Britain's own

All that the police are saying at the moment is that the terrorists died in the explosions. We still can't be certain that they intended or expected to. It does seem, from last night's news reports of interviews with shocked neighbours, that some at least of the suspects weren't exactly moody loners or bitter nerds. I was wrong about that.

I can't say strongly enough that verbally or physically attacking the communities the suspects came from is exactly the wrong way to go. The police and politicians have held that line. It's too much to hope that all sections of the press will. That line must hold. Otherwise we are looking into the abyss, and the abyss is looking right back.

Posted 7:56 pm by Ken

Yes, Where Have All the Intellectuals Gone?

Yesterday in a shop near the Hawes Inn I came across a copy of the mass-market paperback of Understanding Media by Marshall McLuhan. I've never read it, and (for now) I didn't buy it. But it made me think of how things were different back when I were a lad, in the late sixties and early seventies. McLuhan was one of the thinkers of whom everyone with the slightest intellectual pretensions (e.g. moi) had at least heard. Others: Herbert Marcuse, Buckminster Fuller, Claude Levi-Strauss, Jean-Paul Sartre, Frantz Fanon, Albert Camus, Simone de Beauvoir, Teilhard de Chardin, Harvey Cox, Paul Tillich, Karl Popper, Arthur Koestler, J.K. Galbraith. My high-school English teacher, who was by no means pretentious, had well-thumbed copies of books by almost all of these on her living-room shelf. Turning to the public library, I could find the counter-culture ably if optimistically surveyed by Theodore Roszak and Charles Reich; the new women's liberation movement by Germaine Greer; Black nationalism by Malcolm X. Nor was Marxism without champions in the paperback lists: I hadn't then come across Isaac Deutscher or Ernest Mandel, and the lonely hour of Althusser was still to come, but Paul A. Baran and Paul Sweezy were in print in Penguin and referred to off-hand in the semi-anarchist alternative press as sound on capitalism but soft on state capitalism.

Most of these thinkers were of the Left - even Popper was a social democrat, though the most established critic of Marx - but Koestler and Robert Conquest fought their corner, and the great conservatives and classical liberals - Burke, Spencer, Smith, Hume, Mill - were well served by Penguin Classic editions. The novels of Pasternak and Solzhenitsyn, the memoirs of Ginzburg and Djilas, the testimony of Marchenko were all in Penguin or Fontana. Soldiers, diplomats, dissidents, exiles and historians who excoriated Communism shared the same popular imprints.

The quality and lasting relevance of the then-living thinkers listed (and plenty of others from the time, as you can see if you happen across the old Fontana Modern Masters series) of course varies a lot. The point is that they were all read, and not just for show. And to reiterate, I came across practically all of them in Greenock - in my teacher's bookcase, or in the local library or the local mainstream commercial bookshop.

At the time, of course, I thought Greenock was something of an intellectual backwater. It was for sure no hotbed of the sixties counterculture or the far left. It had one Maoist, two International Socialists, one hippie, and one very old Communist. All these serious mass-market paperbacks can't have been bought by them and my English teacher. And who, I wonder, are the present-day equivalents of these paperback writers - and their readers?

Yes, Where Have All the Intellectuals Gone?

Posted 9:47 pm by Ken

Music and stuff

If we don't blog about trivia then the terrorists have won.

Fantasy author Mike Cobley and SF fan Michael J. Lowrey have picked up the musical baton.

Sound libertarian Arthur Silber says he has finally figured out what is really wrong with Ayn Rand. But he is being a bit of tease about it, and keeps talking about other things. The other things are worth reading, but I'd pay to read what he has to say about Rand. In fact, I have. Go throw him a few bucks and plead.

Posted 11:24 am by Ken

Revenge of the nerds

It's cold comfort, but the London bombings could have been much worse. With exactly the same resources, far more people could have been killed and more lasting structural damage done. The opportunity of a Madrid-scale massacre was dissipated in a headline-grabbing bid for 'Al-Qaeda attacks across London'. The lesson is that the war against jihadist terrorism is being won. Respect is owed to the emergency services, to the people of London, and to unknown spooks and cops; solidarity and support to the victims; and to the perpetrators of the atrocity, contempt. We spit on their manifestos, their deluded boasts, their claims to be Muslims, and their pathetic inadequacies.

Imagine creationist electrical engineers taking up abortion-clinic bombing. That's the level of people we're dealing with here. The Sekrit Jihad Organization of Al Qaeda in Europe most likely consists of speccy, spotty nerds whose sole reading is the Koran and computer manuals, whose only chance of getting laid is an arranged marriage, and who don't even allow themselves a wank to ease their zits. In a better life they would have found science-fiction fandom.

One area where the self-professed followers of the Carpenter have shown some superiority over those who abuse the name of the Prophet is in the creativity of their terrorism. Christian terrorists have invented or perfected the car bomb, the no-warning bomb, the false warning bomb, the secondary bomb, the proxy bomb, the VCR-timer bomb, the dump-truck bomb, the fertiliser bomb, the litter-bin bomb, and the on-camera hacksaw beheading. Even the airliner hijack was invented by (presumably Papist) Cubans. The world record for suicide bombing was until quite recently held by the Tamil Tigers, who are godless communists raised as Episcopalians. In terms of bang-for-a-buck and political effectiveness, the Christian fascist terrorist McVeigh accomplished more at OKC than Osama achieved at the World Trade Centre.

Osama, who fancies himself the Che Guevara of the counter-revolution, must be turning in his cave at the incompetence of his European admirers. Admittedly, the haiku elegance of fly airliners into skyscrapers was a hard act to follow, but, you know, come on. We're talking London here - multicultural melting pot, global capitalist centre, imperialist metropolis, Babylon incarnate - the ultimate target-rich soft target.

And they blow up the fucking Tube?

They can go to hell.

Posted 8:07 pm by Ken

The musical baton

1. The person who passed the baton to you.

Ellis Sharp.

2. Total volume of music files on your computer.

None, except for a fake folk-song I wrote for Dark Light, which was arranged and performed by a couple who liked it and are real folk singers. It sounds just like I imagined it. Eerie.

3. The title and artist of the last CD you bought.

'Funeral' by Arcade Fire. We heard them on Jools and bought the album the next day.

4. Song playing at the moment of writing

None. I've occasionally blogged while listening to Warren Zevon, with sometimes regretable results. I've done better with music while writing fiction. The soundtrack for Newton's Wake was The Eagles''Desperado'. Other novels have been soundtracked by Karen Matheson's 'The Dreaming Sea' and The Chieftains' 'The Long Black Veil'; space battles scored by Warren Zevon ...

5. Five songs you have been listening to of late (or all-time favourites, or particularly personally meaningful songs)

'Roland the Headless Thompson Gunner' Warren Zevon
'Mo Ghile Mear' (trad) The Chieftains (with Sting)
'Why Walk when You can Fly' Mary Chapin Carpenter
'There's Always Sunday' Karen Matheson
'Be Good to Yourself' Frankie Miller

6. The five people to whom you will 'pass the musical baton.'

I've decided to stop being a meme vector. If anyone wants to pick up the baton, however, let me know and I'll link to your post.

Posted 11:57 am by Ken

Play Up, Play Up, and Play the Game!

Ellis Sharp has responded to my book-tagging. His response is well worth a visit, and reminds me by example that part of the game of book tag is telling why certain books mean a lot to you. I skipped that part, and make amends now. The books were:

On the Nature of Things by Titus Lucretius Carus, translated and introduced by Martin Ferguson Smith, Sphere Books, London, 1969 (Rome, circa 59 B.C.)

This is a long poem giving an impassioned defence and exposition of the ancient doctrine of materialism and of the ethical teachings derived from it by Epicurus. Much of the science in it is speculative, but it's speculation grounded in the appearances of things. These appearances are vividly described. Not all of the ethical doctrines have endured, but enough have to make it an inspiring as well as interesting book. As a young materialist it mattered to me that we too have our ancient texts, our saints and sages, wise men and good news. After reading it I conceived the mad project of writing a modern version. The few lines I wrote of that (and other scraps of Epicurean paraphrase) ended up in my novels Cosmonaut Keep and Dark Light.

Don't fear that philosophy's an impious way
- superstition's more likely to lead folk astray.

The Origin of Species, by Charles Darwin, sixth edition (1872), with a foreword by George Gaylord Simpson, Collier Books, NY, 1962, 1967.

With this book materialism moved from a speculation to an explanation. As Richard Dawkins puts it, for billions of years organisms lived and died without ever knowing why, until, in 1843, one of them figured it out. His name was Charles Darwin. I already understood the explanation. What I learned from the book was how much I had been lied to about it.

History of England by Lord Macaulay.

When my folks talked about the Revolution, they meant 1688. When I read this book a couple of years ago I at last understood what they meant. It's a terrific read. It has a villain, James the Second of England, and a hero, William of Orange. It was perhaps the first respectable work in centuries to put in a good word for Cromwell. It's bourgeois, patrician, and complacent; conservative and liberal; the Whig interpretation of history, saturated with what E. P. Thompson called 'the immense condescension of posterity' towards the radicals and sectaries and lower orders who fought the Revolution's battles. Its faults are easy to list; its strengths are best discovered by reading it, which is itself a joy from beginning to end. It has the best last line of any work of history.

Discovering the Scottish Revolution by Neil Davidson.

This is the most recent book on my list. It explains how Scotland became capitalist. It was written by a Marxist civil servant in his spare time. The equivalent work for Ireland was written by a bolshevik bus-conductor in Belfast. (Brendan Clifford. Neil, I'm sure, would disagree with the parallel, but that's life.) Why these things happen is explained by the next book on the list.

The Poverty of Theory and other Essays by E. P. Thompson.

The two essays that matter here are 'The Peculiarities of the English' and 'The Poverty of Theory'. They explain and exemplify why radical thought in Britain has developed without the benefit of a radical intelligentsia. England is not best understood by invidious comparison with France. The British bourgeoisie is not subaltern to an effete but tenacious aristocracy. The British working class is not a 'placid urban peasantry'. In the history of materialism, Darwin matters more than Diderot. Thompson makes these points seem obvious, in the course of polemics with theoreticians who thought them outrageous.

But this isn't why the book means a lot to me. In fact, I don't know why I pick it up and get lost in it (as I just have) for hours. Maybe it's just that old Revolution thing, the pleasure of polemic; the ready ear for the long sermon, the pamphlet, the rant.

Posted 12:32 pm by Ken

To Boldly Stay

Like a flu pandemic, a new movement in SF has been overdue and anxiously awaited for some time. It's not yet clear whether Mundane SF is the Big One that's destined to devastate the globe, but already the scientifictional experts are on the case, shaking their heads over the chicken-coops where the virus spreads.

What Mundane SF has in common with two notable previous outbreaks - New Wave in the 60s, cyberpunk in the 80s - is a vehement turning away from what most people outside of SF identify as SF (rockets and rayguns and talking squids in outer space and all that) and towards the scientifictionality of the real world. Forget about shiny starships and galactic empires! Look at the present! Vietnam! Sex! Drugs! (New Wave.) Japan!! Sex!! Drugs!! (Cyberpunk.) America. Sex. Drugs. (Mundane.)

Through both of its previous returns to Earth, SF renewed itself, and turned again to the stars. New Wave was followed by a new Hard SF; cyberpunk, by New Space Opera. Each of these reactions took with them the lasting gains of the preceding revolutions. Mundane SF, if it takes off, can likewise expect to end up as a wisp in the wake of a better warp-drive.

Posted 10:30 pm by Ken

Meme infection

I've been book-tagged by Thomas Knapp. Here goes:

1. Total number of books I own: At least a thousand.

2. The last book I bought: Portraits and Pamphlets, by Karl Radek, (London, 1935). I picked this up in a second-hand bookshop a couple of days ago for four pounds. Soviet journalist and soon-to-be Moscow Trial victim Radek on Stalin, intellectuals, wreckers etc. Irony of history - no, the bitter and twisted sarcasm of history.

3. The last book I read: Russia's War by Richard Overy.

4. Five books that mean a lot to me:

On the Nature of Things by Titus Lucretius Carus, translated and introduced by Martin Ferguson Smith, Sphere Books, London, 1969 (Rome, circa 59 B.C.)

The Origin of Species, by Charles Darwin, sixth edition (1872), with a foreword by George Gaylord Simpson, Collier Books, NY, 1962, 1967.

(As with the Lucretius, it's the only edition I've read.)

History of England by Lord Macaulay.

Discovering the Scottish Revolution by Neil Davidson.

The Poverty of Theory and other Essays by E. P. Thompson.

5. Tag five people and have them do this on their blogs:

Charlie Stross (Declined.)
Farah Mendlesohn
Kevin Carson (Responded.)
Ellis Sharp Responded.
Cheryl Morgan (Declined.)

Posted 9:53 am by Ken

Cold Fury of Reason

Special mention of a new addition to my blogroll: Arthur Silber. He's one of the good (i.e. real) libertarians. You may not agree with everything he writes, but he's always worth reading, and often surprising. He's also consistent, and persistent.

Posted 8:40 pm by Ken

The Scientist's Apprentice

The Jurassic marine crocodile Metriorhynchus was a lithe and elegant beast. We know a fair bit about it, including that it sometimes suffered from arthritis. You can see the fossilised femora, one of which has a rough knob at the end, where there should be a smooth one. I've held these stone bones, or a pair very like them, and grimaced at that ancient agony myself. For a few months in 1976 I knew almost all there is to know about Metriorhynchus; I had read the textbook references, looked up the articles on which they were based, and looked at many of the specimens on which the articles were based; I saw the original display-drawer of laid-out bones of the beast's hind foot in the very arrangement that I'd seen drawn in a dozen places. And I found, or thought I found, that the standard drawing was wrong, and with it much that we think we know about the Jurassic marine crocodile.

The question I was trying to answer, for a final year Zoology undergraduate dissertation, was this. Crocodiles spend most of their time in water but can walk, indeed run, on land. Turtles have a laborious trek up the beach. Most marine reptiles couldn't manage even that. A Mososaur or an Ichthyosaur is as marine-adapted as a dolphin. And like a dolphin, they gave birth to live young. They still laid eggs, but the eggs hatched inside. One famous fossil is of an ichthyosaur at moment of giving birth.

Now, your Jurassic marine crocodile, right, is sort of betwixt and between. Its legs look like flimsy flippers, very unlike the sturdy hind leg of a modern croc. On the other hand, or leg, their foot bones aren't the almost undifferentiated platter of tarsals that you see in the old ichthyosaur. You can tell them apart and fit them together. They articulate, but (you might think) a bit pointlessly, because the whole palm or foot was completely flat. And, and, there is no evidence at all that Metriorhynchus laid its eggs anywhere but on land. But looking at that floppy foot, you fancy Metriorhychus mums-to-be had a hard time of it up on the mud-flat.

So, with the telling vagueness that's the dead give-away of a bad extinction story, a just-was story you might say, this amphibious condition was hand-waved to as their fatal flaw. Perhaps because my tutor had a doubt about this, and certainly because the Hunterian Museum contained a good few specimens, I chose to investigate just how far the marine adaptations of Metriorhynchus had actually gone. In particular, I looked at whether there might be more to the articulation of the foot than met the eye.

The Hunterian Museum is quiet, with the sort of hum that might be an aural hallucination. The smell is of locusts and wild honey, like John the Baptist's menu. The windows are like in a church. There is armour and parchment. There are vases and mummies. Every length and lath of wood is polished to a force-field sheen. Around the hall are galleries where minerals and fossils lie under sloping glass. And under these displays are drawers that glide out, in memory, as if on wheels. They are full of detritus and shards labelled in india ink and held together with varnish and Sellotape.

In a corner of one of these galleries I had a table and a chair, and on that table I laid out bones taken from the drawers, and looked at them and puzzled over them, and doodled them, and fiddled with suspending them from bits of thread, and read all about Metriorhynchus when I wasn't skiving off and reading about something more exciting, like the Portuguese Revolution or The Outcasts of Foolgarah (by Frank Hardy. It's a great book.) I took more than one girlfriend to see that table. Come up and see my fossils. It wasn't much, but it hardened them for the experience of seeing my bedsit. (Mouse footprints in the frying pan lard. Trace fossils! No, they weren't impressed either.)

Anyway, I checked all the specimens I could find, including in the basement of the Natural History Museum where they keep the stuff not on public view: the dragon's egg, the Woking Martian, the Piltdown skull; and, more excitingly, the above mentioned bones of the arthritic crocodile and the original reconstruction of the hind foot, in a little tray lined with indented baize. I drew it and made notes. All the bones were flat, and the foot was a flat paddle.

Then, back at the Hunterian, I started pulling out the drawers and rummaging through the bits. Ribs mostly, teeth, bits of jaw. In among all the rubbish I found a calcaneus - a heel-bone. It wasn't flat, like every other Metriorhynchus calcaneus. It was the same shape as the calcaneus of a modern crocodile. I think I may have found an astragalus as well - the next bone down - but that doesn't matter, because ...

The heel-bone is connected to the foot bone, and these bones lived. Because they weren't flattened, you could see the planes where they articulated, like facets. And when I looked again at the other bones, I could see that they were all flatter than they should have been, and they all had lots of tiny cracks, just as if ... just as if ... they'd all been crushed under tons and tons of mud.

The Jurassic marine crocodile hadn't had a flat foot after all. It's just that the bones of the standard specimens had all been flattened.

So, with black thread, black cards, and Blu-Tac, I and the Museum supervisor (who was keen, and helpful, and a fine photographer) I put together a new reconstruction of the hind foot and photographed it. The new view of the foot was of a proper foot, not a paddle. It was a foot that could push, not just flap. And in the nick of time I typed the whole thing up and got it to the office on the dot of five on the final day. And my dissertation passed, and was filed in the vaults of the Zoology Department, where it probably remains.

Every picture of Metriorhynchus is still wrong.