Posted 4:03 pm by Ken

Season's Greetings

I remember how much we enjoyed Christmas Day when we were children. It was the only day of the year when all the other kids went to church and we got to play in the street. Ignoring Christmas was a religious observance. On New Year's Day, however, we did go to church. We listened to a discourse on the history of our denomination, and afterwards, outside, everyone shook hands and wished each other a Happy New Year. Then we went home for a dinner of turkey, roast potatoes, and brussels sprouts, followed by a rich dark steamed bowl-shaped fruit pudding. We pulled crackers and put on paper hats, and opened our New Year presents.

Every year, I still go to the sale of charity Christmas cards at St John's to make sure I get at least one set of cards that say Season's Greetings and that don't have any symbols of the Christian or of the old religion, such as Nativity scenes, angels, holly leaves and/or berries, significant trees and/or stars, carol-singers or Santa Claus. These are for those of my relatives who still feel that Christmas is pagan.

This is why the now traditional annual war-on-the-war-on-Christmas leaves me unimpressed. We did it so much better when I was a lad.

Merry Christmas, everyone!

Posted 8:39 am by Ken

'A Popular Front in arms'

Home Guard Socialism: A vision of a People's Army

by Stephen Cullen

Copyright, Allotment Hut Booklets

Price £3.00. Available for cash, UK stamps, or sterling cheque made out to the author at 76 Hanworth Road, Warwick, CV34 5DX

The BBC comedy series Dad's Army has probably done more to shape the popular memory of the Home Guard, Britain's WW2 volunteer defence force, than any other source. Good though the laughs are, this is a shame, because the Home Guard was a serious organization whose history has some significance today and may have more in the future. Stephen Cullen, an anti-militarist with a sound knowledge of military history, here provides a clear, well-documented and non-sectarian introduction to one aspect of the Home Guard's history that deserves to be better known: the key role of a small group of socialists and Spanish Civil War veterans in its initial organization, in the training of thousands of its members, and in the popularization of its ideas and methods to a readership that extended well beyond the Home Guard itself. Tom Wintringham's New Ways of War (1940), and 'Yank' Levy's Guerrilla Warfare (1941), both Penguin Specials, provided their readers with the political rationale and the military tactics of guerrilla warfare as a method of national and popular resistance to mechanized warfare and fascist occupation. Guerrilla Warfare is a severely practical manual: Levy's personal experience ranged from the Royal Fusiliers through the Mexican Revolution and Sandino's struggle in Nicaragua to the British battalion of the International Brigades. He drew also on the contemporary experiences of the Soviet and Chinese partisans. It's a long way from Captain Mainwaring's comical crew.

Stephen Cullen's pamphlet provides a wealth of fascinating information about Wintringham, Levy and their comrades, the 'Osterley Park socialists', and their vision of a People's Army. It leaves its readers to reflect on the curious and unsettling fact that in the national and social crisis of 1940, the one moment in the twentieth century in Britain when an armed people led by socialists was an urgent necessity and was rapidly becoming a practical reality, the great majority of Britain's radical socialists were otherwise engaged.

Posted 10:17 pm by Ken

More Marx

Dave Osler has picked up on my post below about Marxist intellectuals. (Soi-disant does not mean what you think it means, Dave.) One of his commentators takes a more appreciative view of Althusser, and (having done actual research on the matter) tears into Kolakowski's response to E. P. Thompson. I had no idea that Kolakowski was personally well acquainted with Thompson: what had seemed to me an understandable misunderstanding of Thompson by Kolakowski now looks more like a hatchet job. Last week I came across in two widely separate places - Jamie Whyte's excellent Crimes Against Logic, and a 1970s or 80s kids' book on the Victorians that I flicked through in a charity shop - a clear and definite statement that I've read or heard countless times before. It is that Karl Marx predicted that the first socialist revolution would be in advanced capitalist England, but instead it happened in backward feudal Russia. (Let's leave aside the odd idea that Russia in 1917 was feudal.) A glance at the Communist Manifesto shows that Marx and Engels expected, in 1847, that the first proletarian revolution would take place in Germany - the bourgeois revolution in Germany is imminent, and they expect a proletarian revolution to immediately follow it. Turning back a few pages, we find them proclaim in the 1882 preface to the Russian edition that 'Russia is in the vanguard of revolutionary action in Europe' and conclude: 'If the Russian Revolution becomes the signal for a proletarian revolution in the West, so that both complement each other, the present Russian common ownership of land may serve as the starting point of a communist development.' Not quite how things worked out, of course, but a shrewd sentence for all that! My point here, though, is not to show that the commonly-repeated statement is false. What I'm curious about is how it arose and persists. Marx and Engels made many over-optimistic predictions, and it wouldn't surprise me to find such a pronouncement among them. But, as far as I know, it doesn't exist. I've never seen an actual citation by anyone who repeats the common, confident statement that 'Marx predicted that the revolution would come first in England, and would have been very surprised that it happened first in Russia.' T. A. Jackson, writing about this same canard in the 1930s, blamed it on H. M. Hyndman, whose Marxism was often the cause of great exasperation to Marx. But Hyndman's influence has surely faded. I suspect we're dealing here with a meme. It's not alone. Bertram D. Wolfe wrote that Marx had updated all the statistical tables in Capital with each new edition, except for the table showing real wages - because that table showed real wages increasing instead of declining. This idiocy has been guilelessly repeated by Professor Anthony Flew more than once. Its force in turn rests on another oft-repeated canard, that Marx held that real wages under capitalism must decline. The evidence that Marx held no such theory was compiled [PDF; link updated 16/6/2021] by the English Stalinist Bill Bland (quite accurately and conscientiously, whatever one may think of Bland's view of how the theory came to be foisted on Marx, or Bland's views on anything else). The good and great Professor Flew is also fond of repeating Wittfogel's claim that Marx silently dropped the notion of an 'Asiatic mode of production' or 'Oriental despotism' because the idea of a bureaucratic ruling class not based on private property was theoretically unthinkable and/or politically embarrassing to Marx. This is an accusation whose utter mind-boggling gormlessness is glaring to anyone at all familiar with Marx's and Engels's writings on pre-capitalist and non-capitalist societies, and has been exposed as such at great length in Hal Draper's Karl Marx's Theory of Revolution, Vol 1: State and Bureaucracy. The possibility of exploitation based on state or communal property has never been denied by anyone other than servants of the ideological state apparatuses of communist states (curiously enough). It's surprisingly rare to come across a critique of Marx that doesn't attack a straw man: I've read three, those by Thomas Sowell, David Conway and David Ramsay Steele. Most of the others are almost as unscrupulous with Marx as the creationists are with Darwin.

Posted 4:17 pm by Ken

Fame

I might be on television this evening, in part two of the three-part series The Martians and Us, BBC 4 at 9 p.m. (If not, then maybe in part three, next week.) Last week all the talking heads were interviewed in their book-lined homes. I was interviewed sitting on a camp-bed in an army barracks. (Thought I'd mention that just in case anyone thinks that's where I live.) The interview was mainly about the British SF themes of catastrophe and dystopia, so it's likewise far removed from my usual scientifictional interests - which are, as is known, all about space habitats and world ships upon whose vast beautiful interior landscapes hop myriads of cute fluffy bunnies, which get eaten.

Posted 4:02 pm by Ken

Lighter Notes

Vlatko has kindly hosted an extract from my Locus interview, including a link through which you can receive that issue postage free (a $2.00 savings) or completely free with
subscription. 

Elsewhere, some six-word stories have appeared in Wired.

Posted 2:20 pm by Ken

The lonely hour of the last instance

The only people to learn anything from the collapse of the Soviet bloc have been the Communists. Everyone else was merely proved right.

Tony Judt reviews three books on Marxism: two by Leszek Kolakowski and one by Jacques Attali. Attali hopes, and Judt fears, that Marxism might yet revive. Kolakowski has long since escaped its orbit, after writing a three-volume survey (its reissue in one volume is one of the books reviewed) that is, Judt thinks, unlikely to be bettered. Judt shares with Kolakowski a roster of who the important and influential recent Marxist intellectuals were, even if all they deserve is Kolakowski's brisk dismissals. Gramsci, Lukacs: interesting. Ernst Bloch: weird. Goldmann, Marcuse: even less interesting than they were back in the day.

My copy of The Breakdown is under the shifting stacks or on the shelf of a charity shop, but that's more or less how I recall it. I forget if he mentioned Althusser, but Judt does, here and in his latest book, Postwar. E. P. Thompson gets a well-deserved thrashing for his ill-judged 'Open Letter to Leszek Kolakowski', which provoked Kolakowski's stinging reply 'My Correct Views on Everything'. Judt is right to say the 'Open Letter' was Thompson at his worst. He's wrong to say that no one who reads Kolakowski's reply (pdf) will ever take Thompson seriously again. First, because by picking a few burrs from Thompson's wool-gathering ramble, Kolakowski (understandably) misunderstands him. Second - what about Thompson at his best?

E. P. Thompson's influence didn't come from his political interventions (apart from his surprise bestseller, the pamphlet Protest and Survive) but from his historical writings, centrally The Making of the English Working Class, and from polemics that arose out of his understanding of history as a discipline. 'The Peculiarities of the English' and 'The Poverty of Theory' can be read and re-read, and are worth it. (I've just checked. Yep.) The 'Open Letter' is a pain to read once. (Yep, again.)

Who were the really influential Marxist intellectuals? This is a question that non-Marxist intellectuals nearly always get wrong. (Roger Scruton, in his venomous but scintillating Thinkers of the New Left, got it right. His shafts are somewhat blunted by his targets' biographies at the back, which show that almost every man jack of them who was adult at the time of the Second World War was a patriot when it mattered, but never mind.) I've never read more than a few pages of Marcuse or Althusser, or any of the famous 'Western Marxists', apart from (not enough) Gramsci and Lukacs. You know why? Because they're very difficult to read. Gramsci and Lukacs had excuses for obscurity. The rest didn't.

No, the really influential Marxist intellectuals are those wrote well and clearly. They weren't philosophers or Critical Theorists but historians and economists - and Trotsky. A lot of Trotsky's influence can be attributed quite simply to the fact that he couldn't write a dull page. It was Trotsky's History of the Russian Revolution that first interested Paul Sweezy in Marxism; likewise C.L.R. James, who went on to write one of the greatest Marxist histories, The Black Jacobins. (Not a dull page, and not a careless or undocumented word.) Paul A. Baran was a pupil of the Left Opposition economist Preobrazhensky, another lucid writer. (It's just struck me that Preobrazhensky might be a key to the whole Monthly Review school. Hmm.) When you add up the influence of Paul Sweezy, Paul A. Baran, Leo Huberman, Harry Magdoff, Maurice Dobb, Ernest Mandel; Isaac Deutscher's biographies; C.L.R. James, Eric Hobsbawm, Christopher Hill, and, yes, E.P. Thompson; Gordon Childe; J.B.S. Haldane and J. Bernal - you've gone a long way to account for the intellectual influence of Marxism in at least the English-reading world. All of them wrote for readers who weren't Marxists. And non-Marxist, indeed anti-Marxist, readers have profited from their work ever since. Some who weren't Marxists when they opened a book by any of these guys were at least half-way to being Marxists when they closed it. Who ever became a Marxist as a result of reading Althusser?

One of the few pages I read of Gramsci, from his prison letters, was the one in which he relates how he was able to learn even from the rubbishy novels and fascist tracts which were all his jailers allowed him. Anything was raw material for historical materialism. I was stuck with very limited reading material at the time, and I determined to put Gramsci's claim to the test. I picked up, almost at random, a book on the Great Disruption of 1843: the great split in the Church of Scotland, which resulted in the founding of the Free Church. Amid all the theological differences between moderates and evangelicals, the issue turned on patronage: should the minister be chosen by the congregation, or by their landlord? Being more spiritually minded and less careerist, the evangelical ministers tended to be closer to their parishioners than to the landlord, and therefore less inclined than the landlord would like to preach submission to the Clearances.

The 'relative autonomy' of spiritual and intellectual life, and (nevertheless) its 'determination in the last instance' by 'the economic movement' was one of the points of clarification insisted upon by Engels, in an old man's dismay at younger men's follies. Althusser, in a vivid but vacuous pronouncement, claimed that 'the lonely hour of the last instance never comes.' In that study of the Great Disruption, I felt I had found one of those moments when, as Thompson puts it, the lonely hour of the last instance actually came.

Posted 10:13 am by Ken

Sheep, slaughter; slaughter, sheep

Right on schedule, the USS Eisenhower Carrier Strike Group has sailed for the Persian Gulf. Arthur Silber and Billmon can't quite believe this means what the sources cited by Lindorff suspect: that an attack on Iran is only weeks away. Retired Air Force Colonel Sam Gardiner has argued that the summer of diplomacy (PDF) is over; the decision for war has been made. That it seems a somewhat risky and counter-productive venture is not, he insists, an objection to its likelihood: 'The "making sense" filter was not applied over the past four years for Iraq, and it is unlikely to be applied in evaluating whether to atttack Iran.' One takes his point, and the timing to this very month - an October surprise - has been predicted for over a year, but can it really be possible that we are this close to the abyss and the market isn't screaming?

Petrol in the UK is down from 96 pence a litre to about 85 pence a litre. Oil prices are down and still falling. Oil futures are at a ten-month low. It's hard to believe this would be so if a new Middle East war was seriously expected. You'd think at least speculators would be pushing the price up. Maybe they are, and price would otherwise be even lower! Speaking of speculation, Joe Kay of the World Socialist Web site wonders whether oil companies and energy investors are deliberately keeping the price down to take the price of gasoline off the minds of American voters. Is this kind of market manipulation even possible? If it was, would it be enough to over-ride the prospect of an oil spike? I don't know, but I doubt it. So, while I think an air attack on Iran is more or less a done deal before Bush leaves office, I'm not so sure it's coming before the elections.

But that line of thinking reminds me of one of those stories that are too good to check.

The story goes that in early summer 1941, Stalin, worried about intelligence warnings of an imminent German attack, told his man in Berlin to keep an eye on the price of mutton. He reckoned that if the Germans were planning an invasion, they'd need lots of wool for winter clothing, so mutton would be dear. (Or was it sheepskin, and mutton cheap? Whatever.) The answer reassured Stalin. The mutton market was steady. Which meant that all the incoming warnings were disinformation ...

Little did Stalin guess that the Wehrmacht expected to be in Moscow that summer, so it hadn't ordered any winter woolies at all.

Posted 8:56 pm by Ken

'The Essential Thing is to See Clearly'

(From Discourse on Colonialism by Aimé Césaire.)

Via.

In dealing with this subject, the commonest curse is to be the dupe in good faith of a collective hypocrisy that cleverly misrepresents problems, the better to legitimize the hateful solutions provided for them.

In other words, the essential thing is to see clearly, to think clearly - that is, dangerously - and to answer clearly the innocent first question: what, fundamentally, is colonization? To agree on what it is not: neither evangelization, nor a philanthropic enterprise, nor a desire to push back the frontiers of ignorance, disease, and tyranny, nor a project undertaken for the greater glory of God, nor an attempt to extend the rule of law. To admit, once and for all, without flinching at the consequences, that the decisive actors are the adventurer and the pirate, the wholesale grocer and the ship owner, the gold digger and the merchant, appetite and force, and behind them, the baleful projected shadow of a form of civilization which, at a certain point in its history, finds itself obliged, for internal reasons, to extent to a world scale the competition of its antagonistic economies.

Pursuing my analysis, I find that hypocrisy is of recent date; that neither Cortez discovering Mexico from the top of the great teocalli, nor Pizarro before Cuzco (much less Marco Polo before Cambuluc), claims that he is the harbinger of a superior order; that they kill; that they plunder; that they have helmets, lancets, cupidities; that the slavering apologists came later; that the chief culprit in this domain is Christian pedantry, which laid down the dishonest equations Christianity = civilization, paganism = savagery, from which there could not but ensue abominable colonialist and racist consequences, whose victims were to be the Indians, the Yellow peoples, and the Negroes.

[...]

First we must study how colonization works to decivilize the colonizer, to brutalize him in the true sense of the word, to degrade him, to awaken him to buried instincts, to covetousness, violence, race hatred, and moral relativism; and we must show that each time a head is cut off or an eye put out in Vietnam and in France they accept the fact, each time a little girl is raped and in France they accept the fact, each time a Madagascan is tortured and in France they accept the fact, civilization acquires another dead weight, a universal regression takes place, a gangrene sets in, a centre of infection begins to spread; and that at the end of all these treaties that have been violated, all these lies that have been propagated, all these punitive expeditions that have been tolerated, all these prisoners who have been tied up and "interrogated", all these patriots who have been tortured, at the end of all the racial pride that has been encouraged, all the boastfulness that has been displayed, a poison has been distilled into the veins of Europe and, slowly but surely, the continent proceeds toward savagery.

And then one fine day the bourgeoisie is awakened by a terrific boomerang effect: the gestapos are busy, the prisons fill up, the torturers standing around the racks invent, refine, discuss.

People are surprised, they become indignant. They say: "How strange! But never mind - it's Nazism, it will pass!" And they wait, and they hope; and they hide the truth from themselves, that it is barbarism, the supreme barbarism, the crowning barbarism that sums up the daily barbarisms; that it is Nazism, yes, but that before they were its victims, they were its accomplices; that they tolerated that Nazism before it was inflicted on them, that they absolved it, shut their eyes to it, legitimized it, because, until then, it had been applied only to non-European peoples; that they have cultivated that Nazism, that they are responsible for it, and that before engulfing the whole edifice of Western, Christian civilization in its reddened waters, it oozes, seeps and trickles from every crack.

Posted 8:00 pm by Ken

John M. Ford

John M. Ford has died. That's been a hard sentence to add anything to. My heart goes out to those who loved him and whom he loved. I only knew him as as one of the best poets I've ever read, and the sharpest wit I ever met. And I am lost for words, as he was not.

Posted 9:41 pm by Ken

Against Civilised Warfare

Nothing has done more to corrupt humanity than the attempt to civilise warfare. Just War Theory is an utter perversion of the moral sense, a doctrine of literally mediaeval barbarism, invented by clerics to regulate wars between Christian kings. Its finest moral discrimination to date is that it's legitimate to kill a munitions worker on his way to work, but a crime to kill him on his way home. It tells us that to aim a bomb at an enemy soldier and kill a hundred civilians is - if the necessity is there - legitimate collateral damage, but to deliberately aim one bullet at one enemy civilian is murder. In its pedantic, casuistic jesuitry it still stinks of the cringing, quibbling fusspots who invented it, and retains too its usefulness to a useless and barbaric ruling class. It does nothing whatsoever to restrain their behaviour. Its only function is to befuddle those who oppose, protest and fight them. It justifies every horrific, predictable consequence of imperialist assault as an unintended consequence, and condemns every horrific, predictable consequence of resistance to that assault as an intended consequence. Their violence against civilians is mass murder, ours is collateral damage. When John Bolton stands up in the UN and says that there is no moral equivalence between the deaths of civilians in Israel and in Lebanon, because in the one case the civilians are deliberately targeted and in the other they are not, it is to this iniquitous doctrine that he appeals.
So does Israel itself:

Israel regrets the loss of innocent lives. Israel does not target civilians, yet is forced to take decisive action against Hizbullah, a ruthless terrorist organization which has over 12,000 missiles pointing towards its cities. Israel, like any other country, must protect its citizens, and has no choice but to remove this grave threat to the lives of millions of innocent civilians. Had Hizbullah not established such a missile force, Israel would have no need to take action, and had Hizbullah chosen to set up its arsenal away from populated areas, no civilians would have been hurt when Israel does what it obviously must do. The responsibility for the tragic situation lies solely with the Hizbullah.
Information and Internet Department
Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Jerusalem

The doctrine is quite unshaken by the fact that Hizbollah's actions so far have killed a far higher proportion of the enemy in arms than the IDF's laser-guided precision bombs have managed, but that isn't the point I want to make. The doctrine itself is false. Its preaching should be regarded as a crime against humanity. We are responsible for the foreseeable consequences of our wilful acts. These include the consequences of restraint, of pity, of not hurting the enemy in any way you can. They also include the consequences of attempting to make war an accepted part of civilised life, which is to institutionalise war and thus to perpetuate it.
War is not civilized, but a regression to the state of nature, and in the state of nature there is no sin. In the state of nature there are, however, necessary and unnecessary evils, and in that respect we still have to make judgements. 'All things are lawful unto me, but all things are not expedient.' If I were to criticise Hizbollah's rocketing of Israel, which in the present circumstances I will not, it would only be on the grounds of its futility, if that could be shown.

In The Execution Channel, the novel I've just finished, I imagined a terrorist campaign to destroy a country, to set its sects at each other's throats, to drive it backward towards barbarism; a campaign that targeted motorway junctions, oil refineries and fuel depots, conducted by '[a] network with some strategic thought behind it, that could hit at the most vulnerable points of an industrial society, that could sever blood-vessel and nerve-centre and tendon and take it apart limb by limb.' I didn't imagine that I would see just such a campaign so soon. It makes no difference that it's being done by an air force. Terrorism is not a matter of altitude.

The argument that Israel has a right to self-defence but that its present actions are disproportionate leads nowhere. Sometimes disproportionate response is exactly right, and for the state of Israel disproportionate response will always seem right. What is wrong is the existence of a state that can exist in no other way. Its only hope of survival, spelled out clearly enough by Jabotinsky, is to reduce the millions of people it has wronged to utter despair:

Every indigenous people will resist alien settlers as long as they see any hope of ridding themselves of the danger of foreign settlement.
That is what the Arabs in Palestine are doing, and what they will persist in doing as long as there remains a solitary spark of hope that they will be able to prevent the transformation of 'Palestine' into the 'Land of Israel'. [...] As long as there is a spark of hope that they can get rid of us, they will not sell these hopes, not for any kind of sweet words or tasty morsels, because they are not a rabble but a nation, perhaps somewhat tattered, but still living. A living people makes such enormous concessions on such fateful questions only when there is no hope left.

Israel's assault on Lebanon is rooted in that same precept, and in Israel's past assaults on the Palestinians in Lebanon and on their Lebanese allies.

Protest this Saturday.

Posted 3:18 pm by Ken This is a test. If this was not a test ...

Ah, sunshine and exercise. It's been a while since I went for a long walk. The cruise liner Crystal Serenity is in the Firth, and the Hawes Pier has its own customs and security post. American tourists are discussing Harleys with two Scottish bikers, both of whom are bald, bearded and beer-bellied, in honour of American tradition.

Blogging from the local library, by way of test.

Posted 2:48 pm by Ken

Where I've been

'There is that in youth that will not fly,' said Bernadette McAliskey. It took me a moment to click to the usage. She said other memorable simple things. 'We thought we would change the world and then get back to our lives. Years later we found that this was our lives.'

'You have fewer rights than we had when we began the struggle. If I was young and lived here, my ass would be on the street.'

Over the past couple of months I haven't been blogging, because almost all my writing energy was going into finishing The Execution Channel. 'Easy writing makes damned hard reading,' said Dr Johnson. I like to hope that hard writing makes easy reading. Writing near-future is hard when the future changes by the day. A nuclear war can ruin your whole outline. Speaking of which, it may be a little early to be painting your nails for Armageddon, but as Billmon puts it, I could be wrong about that, in which case it's been nice knowing you.

A week last Thursday I delivered the book, which was just as well because I had a long-standing engagement to give a talk on science fiction at Marxism, the Socialist Workers Party's annual big public event. I attended a lot of programme items, such as the above one with Bernadette McAliskey, talked to people, and I have to say I left with a very favourable impression of the event and of the party that organised it. I've sneered at the SWP in the past, and jeered at its political project, RESPECT, so let me take this opportunity to eat crow. The SWP has many good people in it, some of whom I've known and respected for years - decades, in some cases - what finally dawned on me that weekend was that this is not inexplicable.

I came back with a few books, which I may review, but just as I was getting into them, the latest issue of Foundation hit the doormat. Half the articles in it are about Heinlein, and one of them makes the challenging point that Heinlein's late long books give no trouble to readers outside the traditional SF readership, and are worth taking seriously.

Maybe my next project should be a big bad book.

Posted 8:49 pm by Ken

Reviews of The Highway Men

The Highway Men is reviewed here, here, and here. The publisher, Sandstone Press, is very pleased with all of them, as am I.

Posted 8:40 pm by Ken

Iran

What with Ahmedinejad's letter to Bush and the more specific Hassan Rohani open letter,
Jim Henley first thought a deal between the US and Iran might be in the offing, then last Sunday had second thoughts on reading the news that the carriers are heading for the Gulf. (The significance or otherwise of the carriers is discussed in comments to Henley's second post.) I don't know either. But here are a few links.

We start, of course, with the Hersh article that dragged discussion of the war plans into the mainstream. Professor Paul Rogers of the Oxford Research group has produced a detailed study of the likely causes, course, and consequences of a war, available in print and PDF formats and online here.

On the Left, Immanuel Wallerstein doesn't think an attack is likely. The editors of Monthly Review think it's a definite possibility, as does MRzine writer Pham Binh. Michele Brand looks at how the the European powers have stoked the crisis. From the other side of the antiwar spectrum, a British conservative weighs in, as do Brian Cloughley and military historian Martin Van Creveld. Arthur Silber has been on his usual eloquent form, Billmon likewise, also the World Socialist Web Site. See also Juan Cole here and here.

Has Ahmedinejad threatened to destroy Israel? No, but the endlessly repeated assertion that he has is likely to be even more dangerous than 'Saddam threw out the weapons inspectors'. When it was claimed that Ahmedinejad had called for Israel to be 'wiped off the map' my first reaction was that several states have recently been wiped off the map - the USSR, the GDR, Yugoslavia - in a way that did not involve the massacre of their populations. Every proponent of the one-state solution wants to see Israel 'wiped off the map' in this sense. Several sources now argue that Ahmedinejad didn't say that in the first place, and the argument between Christopher Hitchens and Juan Cole over the import of what he did say hasn't disputed that. Gary Leupp sums it up nicely.

Posted 8:50 pm by Ken

Live from Nepal

The general strike and demonstrations are being blogged, and (just as inevitably) photo-blogged. The new first draft of history, with comments.

Posted 9:55 pm by Ken

The Highway Men

Next Wednesday 5th April sees the launch of three short books at the Brockville Suite, Falkirk FC, 5:30-8:00pm. There will be a pay bar. (This is Falkirk, Scotland, in case you hadn't guessed.) Scottish footballer Brian Irvine will be there, with his engaging autobiography Winning Through; and Janet Paisley, with her witty short novel Wicked!. And I'll be there with The Highway Men, a short SF novel set in a future Scotland (typical MacLeod stuff: climate change, imperialist war, libertarian grouch, Highland romance and insurrectionary violence). All of the books are part of a fine publishing venture called Vistas, by Sandstone Press, which are written specifically for adults who are beginning to read or who prefer a short read. The great thing about them is that you would never know this from reading them, or from looking at their covers. I can heartily recommend all of them, including my own.

Posted 8:01 pm by Ken

2006 Hugo Awards Nominations

Best Novel
(430 ballots cast)

Learning the World, Ken MacLeod (Orbit; Tor)
A Feast for Crows, George R.R. Martin (Voyager; Bantam Spectra)
Old Man's War, John Scalzi (Tor)
Accelerando, Charles Stross (Ace; Orbit)
Spin, Robert Charles Wilson (Tor)

Posted 11:46 am by Ken

Chris R. Tame, 1949 - 2006

Chris Tame, founder and director of the Libertarian Alliance, died yesterday. He will be sorely missed and long remembered. Avedon and Kevin have said it better than I can. I didn't know him a fraction as well as they did but it was a privilege and an inspiration to know him at all.

Posted 12:19 am by Ken

Where I get my other ideas from

(A couple of weekends ago I was a Guest of Honor at Boskone. I had a great time, and I would like to thank all the good folks at NESFA who made it possible. I haven't yet had time to write a con report, though I may yet. Meanwhile, here is my GoH talk, more or less as delivered.)

According to the programme here I'm a Trotskyist libertarian cyberpunk. I'm getting as bored with talking about all three of these subjects as you no doubt are with hearing me talk about them. So what I'm going to talk about today is other stuff that has gone into my writing. I'm going to talk about places and landscapes, religions and philosophies, and a little bit about real science and technology, and it's all going to be mixed up together because that's how they are. If you've read my books you can make the cross-references yourself and if you haven't you needn't worry, the talk will make sense without them. And along the way it may become clear why I'm completely bored with talking about Trotskyism, libertarianism and cyberpunk.

When I was a little kid I lived on the island of Lewis, which is about fifty miles long and about thirty miles across. It's a lump of eroded metamorphic rock with a thin covering of soil here and there and long sandy beaches on its Atlantic coast. It's a sad, sad, cynical place that has been the graveyard of many schemes of improvement. Like in Louis MacNeice's poem 'Bagpipe Music': It's no go the Herring Board, it's no go the Bible, all we want is a packet of fags when our hands are idle. (In British English 'fags' means cigarettes, by the way.) You can understand its being sad. Just a couple of generations back, hundreds of young men returning from the First World War drowned within sight of the harbour at Stornoway. That is the sort of luck it has. As you might expect Lewis is - or was - totally dominated by Presbyterianism and drink and because the Presbyterian ministers make sure most of it is 'dry' young lads drive drunk for miles and miles on bad roads at night and get killed or crippled in car crashes. The boys who survive go to sea and the girls go to Glasgow to become nurses and the only population growth is ageing hippie New Age settlers and entrepreneurs who become suspects in Satanic abuse witch-hunts.

(That is a very slight exaggeration.)

For the summer holidays we used to go to Lochcarron, on the west coast of Scotland, which is a very different place. There are trees and people burn coal instead of peat and the grocery is a shop and not a van that comes around once a week, that sort of thing. And the hills are Torridonian sandstone rather than Lewissian gneiss. Also it rains even more than on Lewis. It's a few miles north of an area that has the highest rainfall in western Europe and not surprisingly that area is almost uninhabited. As far as we know, that is. There could be entire civilizations growing rice on terraced hillsides over there between Strathcarron and Kintail.

Now you might expect that coming from a place like that I had a really grim childhood. Not a bit of it! I had a very happy childhood and I still have the scars to prove it. They're on my shins where I banged them on rocks while I was running about on the hills. Downhill, mostly. One of the other things I used to do both in Lewis and Lochcarron was go off on wee expeditions that would have had my mother absolutely frantic with worry had she ever known about them which I made very sure she didn't. Our house was just outside the end of Glen Valtos, which is basically a ravine. Black cliffs facing each other across a wee river and a road. The wee river was tidal in its lower reaches and it had a rock-dam - a fish-trap - which we were told had been built by the Vikings. I remember my dad, who was a minister, chatting with some quarry workers, one of whom speculated that Glen Valtos was formed at the Passion, when the rocks were torn apart. My father's opinion was that it was formed at the creation. That shows you the the sort of place that glen was, or at least that's how I remember it.

So from when I was about eight or nine years old I used to go off and wander up the glen and scramble up the sides of it to a sort of nook where I could sit behind a rock and aim an imaginary machine-gun at cars on the roads for miles around. And on a particularly hot, silent afternoon - well, silent except for the distant din of the crusher at the quarry - I remember stopping in my scramble up the cliff with an odd feeling of presence, like when you're in a room that seemed empty and you feel that someone else has come in, or has been there all the time. I later recognised the same feeling on a likewise hot, silent afternoon in the gully of a river in Lochcarron. I don't have any mystical interpretations of it, I can think of several testable hypotheses for it off the top of my head, but I can understand why our ancestors found a significance in lonely rocky places.

In Lewis our ancestors' ruins were all around us, from the half-buried walls of abandoned crofts to the cattle-droving roads in the hills to the brochs - the hill-forts - and standing stones. G. K. Chesterton remarks somewhere how in Europe Roman ruins are all around us like the bones of a buried giant - well, these are older than Rome. And every time I come across some Stone Age place like that I get this sense of a connection with our ancestors, with my ancestors, which is a very tenuous form of the feeling I had a few years ago when I visited my father's grave in the cemetery at Lochcarron between the loch and the hills, and being, you know, a materialist I found myself having this strange reflection that bones, built by the same genes that were right that second building mine, were under that grass.

Now that maybe illustrates the sort of connection that place and landscape have in my mind with religion and philosophy. Once again you might expect that - given that my father was one of these Presbyterian ministers - I grew up with strong religious feelings and convictions and once again I have to say, not a bit of it. I heard every word of the Bible and I believed every word of it but it had no spiritual effect whatsoever. I learned all the theology from the Westminster Confession and the Shorter Catechism and I believed it to be true but I couldn't see any reason why anyone would want it to be true. In my late teens I remember reading lots of bad apologetics put out by the Inter-Varsity Press and other evangelical publishers and they would argue that the only alternative to Christianity was some sort of brutal free-for-all - you know, the three bad N's, Nietzsche, Nihilism and Nazism - and it suddenly struck me that the Greeks and Romans and Chinese had managed perfectly well in that respect of values and morals and so on without Christianity. And the fever left me. Now I should say in courtesy to those of you who are Christians that I now well recognise the intellectual and emotional appeal of the Christian religion but I have to say the version of it that I was taught may be a little different from the one you believe in. I should also say that this rather uncompromising version of the religion produces some truly admirable people and I am not one of them.

The first book I ever read that really made me see the point and appeal of any religion was Thomas Paine's The Age of Reason. By the time I read it I was already an atheist and the demolition of biblical literalism and the contradictions in the narratives and the moral atrocities of Joshua and all that were all stuff I had worked through already, mainly from a wonderful little book called The Bible Handbook by G. W. Foote and W. P. Ball which is a cut and paste job on King James. It's like shooting coelacanths in a barrel, really. So what struck me most forcibly about Paine was not his biblical criticism but his Deism. He said: I believe in one God, and no more; and I hope for happiness beyond this life. My country is the world, to do good is my religion. My own mind is my own church. The word of God is the creation we behold. You read this, well I read this, and you think wow! that's some powerful religion, and you look around for Deists and you don't find any or hardly any and you sort of wonder where it all went in terms of an effect on the world and then you look around and realise it's all around you, it's America. That's what the Deists gave us. It's their creation we behold. And yes, in a Deistic sense I am very happy to say, God bless America. There's a little problem there which I'll come back to.

So ever since then I've had some affection for the rationalistic religions, the Deists and pantheists and Unitarians, and you can see some of that in my books. The feeling I got as a child on the side of the glen made these kind of religions emotionally as well as intellectually understandable. The book where that comes out most strongly is The Sky Road, where in a far-future and largely rural society the people believe in what they call the natural and rational religion. This is not impossible. In Transylvania there are peasants who have been Unitarians since the Reformation. They have their own churches and clergy and colleges and everything. No amount of persecution by Catholics and Protestants, nationalists and communists has shaken them in their conviction that God is One. Anyway, in The Sky Road the narrator at one point is walking alone in the great glen of Lochcarron and looking at the ancient Torridonian hills, which he sees as older than life on earth, older than the light from the visible stars, and he feels isolated from everything except God's terrible love. That experience of presence in emptiness is also quite significant, not for the plot but for the character who has it, in The Star Fraction, where Moh Kohn finds it in a virtual reality. It isn't emphasised at all but it is part of the reason why he goes on to do what he does. Jon Wilde in The Stone Canal refers to an odd experience he had when long ago he stuffed his face with magic mushrooms. He has a vision where he sees three goddesses, Mother Nature, Lady Luck and Miss Liberty, and interprets them as necessity, chance and freedom. I'm not going to say who I saw when I did the same thing. I had a very odd moment when I saw the window of the room I was in as if it was stained glass, blue and white. And then, believe it or not I saw a radio telescope transmitting the codes for the molecules in the mushrooms. So I guess I had a materialist vision after all.

I became a big enthusiast for the Stoics and Epicureans. In my early twenties I read Lucretius On the Nature of the Universe and was blown away, and later I read bits and pieces of Epicurus and Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius and they confirmed my earlier notion that the Romans really didn't need revealed religion to tell them the difference between right and wrong. By the way there's a lively new translation by Gregory Hays of Marcus Aurelius's Meditations. The British poet Blake Morrison reviewed it in the Guardian: 'The translation doesn't shrink from anachronism (there's talk of atoms)'. Just as well he wasn't reviewing Lucretius. When I got around to writing Cosmonaut Keep I had great fun inventing the rites and mores of a religion based on the ancient materialists. This was partly inspired by J. B. S. Haldane's essay on religious liberty, where he discusses the imaginary republic of Krassnia. In Krassnia the official religion is dialectical materialism, but there are still traces of the old religion, mechanical materialism. When the chief commissar is inaugurated he is anointed with oil by the chief materialist philosopher, and this is widely understood to be a relic of the belief that man is a machine, and needs oiling.

One of the things the Epicureans had was a sort of relaxed view of sex as such but they rather frowned upon falling in love. So in the book I had a society where erotica was sold openly above the counter, and furtively under the counter in plain covers you had romance novels. Contrary to what some people think I don't usually advocate the policies adopted in the societies I imagine but in that instance I might make an exception.

Another philosopher who is arguably in the materialist and rationalist tradition is Spinoza. Spinoza was I think the first person to publicly point out in print the sort of things that Thomas Paine did about the Bible. He rather cleverly said they must have been foisted on the sacred text by impious hands. This didn't fool the Dutch Calvinist ministers or his own community's Amsterdam rabbis for a minute. Spinoza's philosophy was a sort of rationalist monism that identified God with Nature, although not just the nature we see, a notion he indignantly repudiated but which for some reason the rabbis and the ministers yet again, well ... you know how it goes. I don't claim to understand Spinoza - he's a very lucid but very difficult philosopher - but I put a lot of whatever it was I took from him into Newton's Wake, and not just in the bit where Lucinda says: 'God, or Nature, aye.'

Spinoza made some interesting contributions to political philosophy, one of which was when he argued, in effect, that Thomas Hobbes was a bit of a woolly-minded idealist. Hobbes is usually credited with tough-minded realism. As one of Ted Hondereich's students wrote in an essay, 'Hobbes tells us that life in the state of nature is poor, solitary, nasty, British and short.' But what Hobbes came up with to get us out of the state of nature was the social contract. We secure ourselves by turning over our power to the sovereign, who can then do no wrong. Very hard-headed. Especially by comparison with that other great political philosopher of his day, Sir Robert Filmer, who explained in Patriarchia how monarchy was justified because all the kings of the world were the legitimate descendants in the male line, according to the rules of primogeniture, from Adam, who was given dominion over the world by God, and therefore ... I'm sure you can see some problems with that and John Locke did too and had great fun pulling it apart in his First Treatise on Government. Locke, like Hobbes, based legitimacy on the notion of an original or maybe implicit contract.

But what Spinoza saw was that making this contract, whether it was real or imaginary, the basis of legitimate authority was both destabilising and unnecessary, as well as untrue. You all know the words: to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed. Here in Boston you can hear them read out from the balcony of the Old State House every Fourth of July. They are inspiring words but unfortunately they are not true. Governments do not originate in any kind of contract or consent, but in conquest. David Hume got it precisely right when he wrote: Into how many shapes have political reasonings been turned, in order to avoid an obvious, but, it seems, too homely a truth? The patriarchal scheme is nonsense. The original contract is opposed by experience. Men are unwilling to confess, that all government is derived from violence, usurpation or injustice, sanctified by time, and sometimes by a seeming imperfect consent.

Now scholars have argued about what Hume's politics actually were but none have ever accused him of being an anarchist. For Hume the unjust and violent origins are not an argument against government. The powers of government can be just and can be exercised justly with or without the consent of the governed. They are justified because they keep the peace, and only if they keep the peace. The imagined rational beings who signed the imagined social contract wouldn't need a government in the first place, but we do. Spinoza has a very precise and realistic view of human psychology, and it is not one of rational calculation of advantage and disadvantage. One interesting consequence of this is that libertarianism is mistaken in so far as it is based on the idea of a social contract, as in Robert Nozick; or in the idea that there is no social contract and therefore all authority is illegitimate - which is the same idea from the other end - or that if there isn't a social contract there bloody well ought to be. Why should I do this, I never signed up for it, where is this social contract, etc. It all sounds very teenage. Spinoza moved political philosophy away from this sort of petulance and towards something a bit more realistic. I'm not claiming he would have thought it probable that the galaxy could be ruled not entirely unjustly by a Glasgow crime family.

Now we come to the science bit. One of the things you might expect from what I've said about my upbringing is that I had a lot of scientific creationist nonsense shoved down my throat in my early years and that discovering the truth about biology and geology and evolution would be a shocking revelation and that I would be very bitter and twisted about how I had been misled. You would be absolutely right. I think I got as far as first year at university still thinking that even if creationism wasn't true there might be something in its criticisms of biology. That lasted all the way into my reading of the first chapter of the standard textbook, Keeton's Biological Science. As usual in such matters it was something trivial that tipped the balance. In this case it was Keeton's pointing out an obviously vestigial organ, the dew-claws of pigs. 'Why,' Keeton asked, 'would the Creator have given pigs, which walk on only two toes per foot, two other toes that dangle uselessly well above the ground?' I had no answer to that but I'm sure the Institute for Creation Science has several. Some time later I went on to read The Origin of Species and found how badly it had been misrepresented, and also and more seriously how strong Darwin's argument was.

The reason by the way why I was studying biology in the first place is that reading SF had given me the ambition of being a scientist, and despite getting to the level of first year physics at university I was really bad at maths. I was good at arithmetic but didn't understand mathematical reasoning at all. At some level I thought of maths as something empirical, sort like the molecular equations in chemistry. I do in fact remember when I was a little kid thinking that the rule of carry one, take away one must have been discovered by some very clever person in ancient times, probably Socrates. It was literally when studying over the summer to resit my university first year physics exam - which I did pass eventually - that I grasped the fact that what was on one side of an equals sign was a re-arrangement of what was on the other. I had just read A. J. Ayer's Language, Truth and Logic and been much seized of his point that logic is tautology, and that is the sole reason I eventually figured out what was going on in equations. I went around for days telling people that the terms on both sides were the same but stated differently. I'd have got fewer funny looks if I'd had an albatross around my neck. I'm still making discoveries like that. Last year I started re-reading Mathematics for the Million by Lancelot Hogben, and I got to the proof that the sum of the angles in a triangle is equal to two right angles, and I followed it through and I understood it. Yes! This is one of those eternal truths in the mind of God that Spinoza was on about! I swear that up until then I must have vaguely imagined that this had been discovered empirically. 'O Pythagoras, do your measurements of this triangle's angles add up to 180 degrees?' 'Indeed they do, O Socrates, plus or minus oh point one percent.' 'We have now measured four hundred and eighty-six triangles with the same result. That is statistically significant, O Pythagoras.' 'Indeed it is, O Socrates, you are right again as usual.' Once again I went around for days telling people about it and drawing lines on the backs of envelopes and in beer-slops on pub tables.

As a student of biology I had a fantastic time, particularly with palaeontology and marine biology. I did a practical course in marine biology at Millport on the Clyde. My own project was an investigation of something that I'd noticed that summer, which was how exposed barnacles react to the slightest splash of salt water but ignore rain water. All I could do was study their behaviour, using beakers and pipettes, so I called it 'the psychology of barnacles'. We collected specimens on the shore and went out on a research vessel and collected more from the sea and sorted them all out. You can find specimens of almost every phylum between the high and the low tide marks. It's amazing how they got sorted into separate strata in the Flood. All of that went into the Engines of Light books like seafood into chowder. And so, in a different way, did the hot-blooded dinosaurs. I heard one of the first public presentations of the argument that dinosaurs were hot-blooded and I heard the intake of breath and the nervous laughter when Alan Charig or whoever it was put up a slide showing the new classification that followed from that. Instead of birds, mammals and reptiles you had mammals, reptiles, and dinosaurs, with the birds in class Dinosauria, subclass Aves. In 1975 saying that birds are dinosaurs was really going out on a limb. Since then we have found the limb and it has feathers.

I went on to research the biomechanics of bones and eventually got a research degree so much later that my wife and two kids are in the photo. By then I had found my own ecological niche as a computer programmer, having discovered that programming is not at all like mathematics and is much more like the sort of empirical practice that I had mistakenly imagined mathematics to be. At least it is the way I practiced it. A few months ago I was talking to my friend Tony who works in IT and who used to work with Charlie Stross. He asked me how my latest novel was coming along and I said that for me writing was a lot like programming. You start by spending days on end staring miserably at a blank screen and at a few pathetic scrawls on an otherwise blank sheet of paper. So Tony said, yeah, it's like that for me too, but I remember when Charlie worked with us he would just look at the spec then start coding like a man possessed. Well, for me writing is different, it sometimes feels like the Great Work in Cosmonaut Keep, a book that has a lot more of my experiences in IT strung through it. Come to think of it, it has Charlie and Tony in it. Tony is the character who says: 'Karl H. Marx on a bicycle, Charlie, aren't aliens enough?' I worked in the IT industry for ten years and I could still do that if I had to, but I hope I don't. I like being a science fiction writer and I like the fact that you can shove all your experiences into it. Thank you.

Posted 3:57 pm by Ken

On first looking into Hays' Aurelius

'The translation doesn't shrink from anachronism (there's talk of atoms)' - Blake Morrison reviews the Meditations, translated by Gregory Hays.

Posted 9:08 am by Ken

Progressive Rage

Did you know that Darwinism is propagated by an international Jewish conspiracy? Me neither, until The Protocols of the Elders of Zion set me straight. It's the only thing I remember from it. Even skimming it is like listening to a saloon-bar bore in hell. As a forbidden book the Protocols are a disappointment. More people must have got to the end of Mein Kampf.

Anti-semitism, said Bebel and Engels, is the socialism of fools. The rage of the small property holder - the peasant, the artisan, the stall-keeper - against his inexorable ruin by the competition of bigger capital is given a face and a race to hate: a physical particularity that stands in thought for the abstractions of 'finance' and 'the market' and 'the banks'. 'The Jew' becomes the concrete embodiment (in fantasy) of exchange value. So goes the Marxist tale, anyway, though it has many more subtle twists than that.

Is there another hatred that might be called 'the liberalism of fools'? The progressivism of fools? The libertarianism of fools? If anti-semitism is, in an important aspect, a rage against the machine, against progress, is there an opposite rage: a rage against reaction, a fury at the recalcitrance of the concrete and the stubbornness of tradition? A rage against what is sacred and refuses to be profaned, against what is solid and doesn't melt into air, against ways of life that resist commodification, against use-value that refuses to become exchange-value? And might that rage too need a fantasy object?

In the 1930s and 40s, a number of progressive intellectuals found that object in the Roman Catholic Church. Granted all the good reasons there were, in that age of the dictators, for identifying the RC Church with militant reaction, the fury seems oddly disproportionate. H. G. Wells's wartime Penguin Special Crux Ansata starts with the cry 'Bomb Rome!' and goes on from there. Another, more measured, is Avro Manhattan's The Catholic Church Against the Twentieth Century - a title that, if you saw it on the cover of a book published now, might lead you to expect a paen to the papacy.

Some of the staunchest and stubbornest admirers of Stalin weren't Communists or fellow-travellers, but liberal rationalists. The immensely influential and prolific Joseph McCabe was a genuine liberal, now unjustly neglected, and he had no truck with Communism, but for him Stalin as an anti-clerical atheist was a comrade. McCabe had a warm regard for the anti-Communist and secularising dictator Kemal Ataturk for similar reasons. McCabe's enthusiasm for the grandeurs of classical Islam and the splendour of Moorish Spain was in part to compare and contrast them with what he considered - and documented - as the wretched record of Christianity. McCabe might be caustic about the later Caliphate, but his fiercest ire was reserved for Rome.

Rationalist anti-Catholicism wasn't equivalent to anti-Semitism. The rationalists whose works fill a shelf or two of Thinker's Library hardbacks behind me were no bigots. In their scope and verve they were true heirs of the Encyclopaedists. They delighted in controversy with their (likewise intellectually substantial) Catholic and other Christian opponents, and their contributions still confound and fortify today. Their works await rediscovery in dusty second-hand bookshops and forgotten library stacks.

But still, there it was: a religion identified with reaction, and progressives with a blind spot about a powerful state that they saw as that religion's most formidable foe. The pro-Soviet because anti-Catholic position lost ground after the Twentieth Congress and Vatican II, but persisted here and there. Most consequently in Official Sinn Fein, which in its later incarnation as the Workers Party managed to be more pro-Soviet and more anti-clerical than the Irish Communists; and most frivolously in the 1980s rants of Julie Burchill about the virtues of the Russians and the iniquities of the Papists. Avro Manhattan in the 1970s was still writing books such as Catholic Terror Today and Catholic Terror in Ireland, the burden of which was that the Provos were a new Ustashe, and that Ireland's Protestants faced a future Jasenovac. He may have been the only militant atheist the Rev. Ian Paisley ever smiled at. (The photo graces the book.)

But aside from such quaint spectacles, anti-Catholicism is gone as a burning-glass of progressive rage.

One wonders what new lens might focus that rage now. Is there some religion or people that has come to represent all that is backward in the world, and in need of a sound and salutary thrashing from the forces of progress? Orthodoxy, perhaps? Zoroastrianism? Tibetan Buddhism? Hinduism? None of them seem to quite fit the bill. There must be one out there somewhere. Because the rage still burns.

Posted 7:17 pm by Ken

Learning the World

I've just had the very good news that Learning the World, published in the UK by Orbit and in the US by Tor, has been shortlisted for the Arthur C. Clarke Award. The full shortlist is:

NEVER LET ME GO - Kazuo Ishiguro (Faber)
LEARNING THE WORLD - Ken MacLeod (Orbit)
PUSHING ICE - Alastair Reynolds (Gollancz)
AIR - Geoff Ryman (Gollancz)
ACCELERANDO - Charles Stross (Orbit)
BANNER OF SOULS - Liz Williams (Tor)


The book has also been shortlisted in the novel category of the BSFA Award:

9TAIL FOX -- Jon Courtenay Grimwood (Gollancz)
ACCELERANDO -- Charles Stross (Orbit) (Free ebook edition)
AIR -- Geoff Ryman (Gollancz)
LEARNING THE WORLD -- Ken MacLeod (Orbit)
LIVING NEXT DOOR TO THE GOD OF LOVE -- Justina Robson (Macmillan)

Posted 12:24 pm by Ken

That Nineteen-Fourteen Feeling

In his latest tape Osama bin Laden quotes the introduction to Rogue State by William Blum:

And if Bush decides to carry on with his lies and oppression, then it would be useful for you to read the book "Rogue State," which states in its introduction: "If I were president, I would stop the attacks on the United States: First I would give an apology to all the widows and orphans and those who were tortured. Then I would announce that American interference in the nations of the world has ended once and for all."

I can't find the quote in the online version of the book's introduction, but I do recall seeing it in print. I wonder if he's also read chapter 53 of Blum's Killing Hope, which documents in considerable detail how massively the US backed the mujahedin while they bled the Soviet Union in Afghanistan. But of course, he knows that already.

He must also know that if his threatened terrorist attack inside the US is carried out it will revive popular support for expanding or escalating the war, including a pre-emptive attack on Iran. According to the widely cited and still undenied Philip Geraldi article in The American Conservative, contingency plans have been prepared for just that. [Added, for the benefit of anyone determined not to understand: This doesn't mean I think bin Laden is acting as a covert agent of the US, or that an attack will somehow be staged, or anything like that.] A US attack on Iran may happen anyway, in which case all bets are off. I don't think, yet, that it would lead to an armed clash with Russia and/or China, but even short of that the consequences are incalculable. That doesn't mean it won't happen.

'There is a feeling of 1914 in the air,' Denis MacShane remarked the other day, about Iran. That feeling is of watching as the machinery grinds towards a war that future historians will look upon with horrified amazement. The Trotskyite-Benthamites of the decent left will no doubt whip out their moral calculators and demonstrate to each other's satisfaction a net gain in QALYs (Quality Adjusted Life Years, the unit used by the NHS in deciding when it's time to hang the NTBR (Not To Be Resuscitated) tag on your toe) from a pre-emptive nuclear attack on Iran. The rest of us may perhaps wish to anticipate the future historians while there is still time to prevent their books being written.

Posted 12:54 pm by Ken

The flight forward

Avedon cites the English version of the Der Spiegel article referred to in the UPI piece cited below. Worth reading in full.

According to The Times today, British diplomatic and military officials have withdrawn earlier claims that infrared-triggered IEDs used by Iraqi insurgents are supplied by Iran. It never seemed very plausible that the technology of the shaped charge was a mystery to Iraqi army officers, not to mention that of the television remote control or the burglar alarm. (That story always had the fingerprint of Brit disinfo, which is that anything smart done by natives is evidence of a hidden hand: Jews and Bolsheviks in the good old days; more recently, and I must say a personal favourite, the tale in the early 70s that the violence in Northern Ireland was in part a People's War organised by Peking through a network of Chinese restaurants.)

In yesterday's Sunday Herald, Iain MacWhirter mentions that Blair sounded so chipper at a pre-Christmas press briefing that hacks were left wondering if he knows something they don't. Given what the man is capable of, that should send a shiver down the spine. I once argued that Blair couldn't talk us into another war, but that was based on the mistaken assumption that he would have to. A sudden attack, no doubt after some casus belli whose real story might come out in 2030 or so, would skip 'stop the war' and fast-forward to 'support our boys', whose genuine peril would keep us glued to the box.

An attack on Iran seems feasible just because it would be destabilising. Neoconservatism, as has often been pointed out, is not conservative but revolutionary. What's stability worth when nothing has really been resolved? A Shia sectarian state, sullen about occupation and aligned with Iran, must seem a disappointing outcome for the global democratic struggle against Islamofascism. It might be possible to spin this as the result of Iranian interference, which has unfortunately given the Sunnis a legitimate grievance that unfairly but understandably also burns against the occupiers. So Blair could blame Iran for Sunni resistance as well as Shia resentment.

Iran has everything Saddam's Iraq didn't: effective armed forces, mass militias, long-range missiles, and a terror network non-state clients happy to help. The aftermath of an attack on Iran would feel like a real war, with bombs and queues and everything. It would do wonders for moral clarity on the home front, for a while.