The Exile

I remember that as a young man in Manchester a conversation would often come up, usually as the evening drew to a close, which in those days was at 11.00pm, as that was when the pubs chucked out. What would be done under socialism with capitalism's refuse, the middle classes?

One man always pointed out that Stalin had basically had them all shot. At the time this seemed a little drastic to me, but when you consider how in eastern Europe those same creatures were allowed to join the local Communist Party and how many of them went on to become the management in the state enterprises, I can see that he had a point. One of the reasons why capitalism was able to return in that part of the world is that the socialists had not fully dealt with these creatures. Thus they were able to arse lick their way into senior positions - the middle class are any country's greatest sycophants - and once the systems became wobbly they could emerge once again under their true colours. Shit always floats to the surface, I suppose, but at least in Russia capìtalism is not having a free run, thanks to the late Joe Stalin.

My feeling then was that these people were not a problem. High inflation kept their numbers down and strong trades' unions stopped them from getting too lippy. My views have not changed all that much: the first task for an incoming socialist government should be to repeal all the anti working class legislation that went through in the 1980s and let the inflation rate climb. The working class has nothing to fear from inflation, thanks to our unions. The middle class will get squashed, and that is the aim.

In the medium term these creatures can be further corralled with high taxation. Hopefully, as the years go by, their descendents will come to accept the permanence of the situation. If they don't then that's a problem for the police, who will, it is hoped, be keeping a close watch on their activities. To be candid, beyond taxation and inflation, I don't have a long term solution to this problem. If anybody does, please let them send it along.

Yesterday I posted some memories of the Oxford Union and a certain Joe Blob that took place in its garden. I have received quite a few e-mails on the topic, several of which count as obscene even by my dubious standards. What can I say? Keep up the good work.

They can be divided into two themes. The writers of the first tranche were determined to demonstrate that the girl on her knees could not have been Sally; rather it was Sarah, or Susan or even Caroline. For the record, all I did was pick a name out of thin air. . . I'm not so sure that I even remember a Sally at Oxford in those days. I do remember a Caroline, though, and agree that "she went like a steam engine," so maybe my correspondent's memory is better than mine. However, she was at the Ox & Cow, and most of them did clatter like Stephenson's Rocket when their fires had been suitably poked.

The second group wanted to prove that I was rehashing a tale from their day - some even provided names, colleges and dates to prove their thesis. Gentlemen, it may very well have happened in Trinity 1970, but that does not prove that it did not also happen in Hilary 1984. Truth be told, I suspect that if all the Oxford Union's hackettes were laid end to end, nobody would be in the least bit surprised.

And now for something completely different. . . Ollie Kamm reports that he was in the audience for the Weinberger show. I don't remember him from those days, and judging from his published photograph the bugger still hasn't reached puberty, so I reckon that it's a safe bet that he has never leaned against an Oxford Union wall. That said, amid all the verbiage, I was reminded that the late E.P. Thompson was one of the speakers.

What I remember most about him was that he wore an ordinary tweed jacket instead of the more usual black tie. He explained, rather movingly I thought, that after returning from the Second World War, he and his surviving friends had vowed never to wear black tie again in memory of all of all the friends that they had lost. I was reminded as he spoke of Harold Macmillan, a man who left Oxford to serve in the Great War, and who could not face returning to the university to finish his degree after it ended. His aching memories of so many who had died simply precluded it.

I think that we should listen to the fading voices of men like these, rather than the strident tones of prepubescent oinks who want to send my sons off to die, while they sit at home, wanking dementedly over the carnage.

Shall we have a little stroll down memory lane? Caspar Weinberger has cashed in his chips, which reminds me of the one and only time that I actually met the man. This was in the Oxford Union in early 1984, when he had come along to debate the motion that "This House believes that there is no moral difference between the foreign policies of the USA and the USSR," or something like that.

The debate should have taken place about a year earlier when a certain Andrew Sullivan had been President, but Michael Heseltine had pursuaded the Americans to postpone it for some reason or other. If I remember Sullivan's account correctly, the first he knew about this was when Heseltine got on the telephone to him and began by saying, "Mr. President, you are not going to enjoy this conversation. . ." Anyway, when the debate finally was allowed to go ahead, Malcom Bull, the then president, invited Sullivan back to present the motion. I don't think that Sullivan was anti-American, I just think that he was cheesed off that the debate had not taken place during his term and wanted to stick the boot in.

The chamber was packed and the left for once turned out in force. Put another way, Ruskin College had about twenty people there, which for the Oxford Union meant a large left-wing presence, because we were all that they had. None of the Ruskin men spoke in the debate. We tended to prefer the bar, anyway, but on this night we did leave our principles behind and went into the chamber. The funny thing was that Ruskin is not a university college, but its people have matriculated status in the university. This meant that we could join university societies, but were never answerable to the proctors. Power without responsiblity is a wonderful thing and the situation provided a memorable chat-up line to one ex-steelworker who had a thing about St. Hilda's women. He would invite them back to his room with a leg-over in mind using the immortal words: "Don't worry, love, 'cos nobody will know - we're not fully matriculated". The total number of Hildabeasts who ended up on their backs is not recorded, but he got a few shags that way.

I cannot remember much about the debate. A young man named Lawrence Grafstein led for the defence, as it were, and gave a speech that pretty much won the crowd over. He was cheered to the rafters and the bar-brigade decided to mark his card there and then. His later term as president was made a misery, largely because the bar takes an exception to clever buggers who spoil the fun. We, that is High-Tory Christ Church and very low Ruskin, were eagerly anticipating the beagles getting to the bunnie, as one Houseman remarked. Cheated of the sight of blood we returned to the bar, but Grafstein was going to be in for it.

The debate ended and most people left the building. I was dragooned out of the bar and marched up to the president's office by a rather nice young lady who explained that I was needed for drinkies and to meet Caspar. I did the decent thing, and then scampered back downstairs as soon as possible.

While I was upstairs the most memorable event of the evening took place in the garden. It is reported - indeed it has entered Oxford lore - that a rather sweet young thing took it upon herself to provide a memorable blow job for a friend of mine out in the garden. By all accounts they were sheltered by the large tree that grows there, and he just leaned against a wall. The story is told that he uttered the imortal line, "No, Sally, you have to suck - blow is just a figure of speech," at some point during the proceedings. Needless to say, since this fellow went on to work for GCHQ, he has consistently refused to either confirm or deny the tale.

Other than that the evening was hardly memorable. Weinberger left, as did the TV crews. The Union closed at 11.00pm and my bar brigade platoon went off to somewhere or other to eat a curry. The blow job recipient probably wandered off to the river to smoke a cigarette and ponder the meaning of life. I like to think that he gave the girl her taxi fare back to her rooms, but someone told me that all she got was a slap on the rear and her bus fare.

Update: Those of you who are following links to this post may like to know that it continues one stop above. Or you can click on this link.

I know that I shouldn't get cheap laughs like this, but since every bugger else seems to be laughing at the warmongers, I feel obliged to go with the flow.

One of my favourite 'mongers has finally commented on the case of Abdul Rahman, the Afghani convert to Christianity who faced the death penalty for his apostay. This is a case that I mentioned all of four days ago, by the way. It is possible that he was trying to save face by not commenting earlier - let's face it, this is hardly the outcome that these gawps expected when they began wanking for war, is it? The problem is that if he was trying to save face he has only managed to bollock things up for himself still further. Thus we get to chuckle twice: once for the silence, then for the up fuck when he finally does post.

Right, here's the thing: the silly sod has claimed that the case has been dropped because it is ultra vires - that means that the body trying the matter lacks the competency so to do. That is just wrong.

Afghan law is based on the Sharia code. The constitution states that "no law can be contrary to the sacred religion of Islam". The country has also signed up to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and they get around the freedom of religion clauses by allowing Christianity, but not conversion from Islam to Christianity.

The reason why he has been released is a lack of clear evidence, according to the authorities. It may also be that he is not actually an Afghan national and, oh yes, he has been declared mentally unfit to stand trial. Put another way, the Afghans have bowed to western pressure, but not in the way that this 'monger wants us to believe. The prosecution was never unconstitutional and no Afghan body has claimed that it was. What they have done is allowed this bod to leave prison so that they can keep the western butties flowing; they have not accepted that their original decision was wrong in any way.

What exactly is wrong with Belarus? It is a landlocked country of about 10 million souls that most people had probably never heard of until recently. Now the USA and its supporters are screaming that the end of civilisation is nigh just because the good people of that country turned out to return President Alexander Lukashenko to office with over 80% of the votes cast. It seems like only yesterday when they were praising the 97% that Mikhail Saakashvili scored in the Georgian elections. Now they claim that 80% is evidence of a fix.

It could be of course. However, it could also be that the people of Belarus have seen what happened in their neighbouring countries and have decided that the old soviet system had its good points after all. The economy is growing, wages are not only paid on time, but they have risen by almost a quarter during the past year. The opposition candidate in the election promised that he would end the supplies of Russian subsidised gas and oil into Belarus. In other words he told people that their heating bills were going to rise by about 70%. Given a choice like that it is a wonder that Lukashenko didn't manage a complete clean sweep and get 100% of the vote.

So why all the complaints? The only answer that I can come up with is that the Belarusians are trying their best to keeep out of the clutches of the New World Order. The country does not have a parasitic middle class that relies on low inflation and cheap credit to finance its lifestyle at the expense of the rest of the population. The government controls the economy and makes sure that there is a reasonable buttie for everyone. It may not be paradise, but it is better than quite a few other places that I can think of.

Perhaps this is why it has to be demonised? The issue seems to be that here is a country where ordinary people have a decent standard of living, especially when compared to capitalist puppets like Poland: a country that seems to be exported a sizable chunk of its unemployed labour force to Britain, where they are cheerfully engaged in helping to keep the wages down.

Belarus is not a shining light on a hill, but it is is an example of a country that can make its own way without adopting the Classical Liberal model. If people come to believe that full employment is possible once again, then they might just reject the system at home. The whole point about the Thatcher-Blair continuum is to remove that option from people's minds. Belarus, in her own small way, has shown that there are other paths to take.

More reports are emerging of massacres in Iraq carried out by imperialist forces. The first concerns an atrocity in Haditha last November when the Americans slaughtered 23 civilians, and the second is in the Abu Siga area where they butchered 11. The latter death toll ranged from a 75 year old to a 6 month old baby.

It is rare for the perpetrators of these war crimes to be prosecuted and, when they are, the accused are either freed, or given a light sentence, and there is little evidence to suggest that anything will be different in these new incidents. Furthermore, atrocities like this have been reported ever since the war against Iraq began, so there is nothing that is actually new about the latest batch.

What is new is that the Americans seem to be using actions like this as retaliation for nationalist attacks on their troops. Both incidents occurred immediately after Iraqi forces launched roadside bomb attacks on occupation patrols, and the Americans then charged off and killed the first Iraqis that they could find. One incident could suggest a brutal, but unofficial, act of retaliation. However, the two together suggest a deliberate policy of terrorising the civilian population into submission.

When imperialism gets to this stage it usually means that they know that they have lost the war. Terror only breeds more fighters, but that is a problem for the future. If the soldiers do not plan to be around in the future, then it is a reasonable strategy for those imperialist troops to follow.

Probably the only good news to come out of Iraq these days is that we are clearly in the end game. The occupiers are hanging on and waiting for the order to evacuate. Nobody even pretends to care anymore about hearts and minds, because they are just trying to stay alive in a country that hates them.

The British have fought three wars against the tribes of Afghanistan. The first ended in disaster during the 1842 retreat from Kabul. The second and third both ended because trying to hold that God-forsaken country was more trouble than it was worth.

So why are the British about to return for a fourth round? The plan is to send some 6,000 troops to a country that nobody else has ever managed to subjugate. Needless to say the Afghans are just waiting for them to arrive.

The wheeze seems to be that Britain's troops will act as an enducement to other countries - principally Germany and France - who will also then send troops to Afghanistan. The problem is that neither country shows any signs of putting the combat boots on the ground.

The Americans want to leave, so who is going to fight the Afghans? Get ready for the Fourth Afghan War, folks, because it looks like it is going to be Britain.

Information Clearing House is offering The Road To Guantanamo as a free download. By all accounts the links will only remain active until the 26th of this month, so grab it while its hot.

A couple of interesting news items have come my way. The first relates to some poor sod in Afghanistan who converted to Christianity 16 years ago and who now faces the death penalty for his apostasy. My favourite quote comes from Abdul Raoulf, a mullah who was thrice-imprisoned under Taliban rule: "Rejecting Islam is insulting God. We will not allow God to be humiliated. This man must die," he opined. He is considered a moderate, by the way. The real hardliners want him to die slowly, presumably so that he can repent just as the last bit of him is torn into two.

The second concerns a fatwah that Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani issued back in October of last year. In it he called for homosexuals to be killed in the "worst, most severe way."

The thing that I like about this is just how it tells against the whole published reason for the two wars. Afghanistan and Iraq were going to be model showcases for democracy. What the warmongers expected was a bit of North London liberalism. What they have got are two primitive societies where the lid has been lifted and everyone gets to see the maggots crawling around inside.

This is the reality of life in primitive countries, I'm afraid. Maybe if they had been left to their own devices they would - probably centuries down the road - change and evolve into something that a North Londoner would want to support. As things stand, the occupations freeze everything in amber. Nobody can even think about change, even glacial change, until those foreign troops are removed. To do so is to colaborate: and we all know what happens to collaboraters when occupations end.

Update, 25th March 2006, 12.15am: a full 24 hours have now gone by since I posted the above. For some reason not a single wanking for war site has commented on the fact that the people of Afghanistan have democratically elected a government that wants to kill apostates from Islam. Why is that I wonder? The Afghan people have spoken through their elected representatives, so why the silence from those valiant lads of the 101st Fighting Keyboarders?

This is good sport: Ollie Kamm nibbling at Crooked Timber's ankle like some deranged King Charles Spaniel that has just been kicked.

We have to go back to 2004 for the real laughs. That was when Ollie announced that he was deleting Crooked Timber from his blogroll. Since Crooked Timber had never actually linked to him - they had probably never even heard of him - Ollie felt able to explain that he was "at liberty to explain the excision with no risk of causing the distress that my strictures ought properly to elicit".

Now, let's just pause here for a moment, shall we? If some wazzock with a photo that makes him look like a lobotomised hamster suddenly decided to nibble my ankle in this way, what in the name of God's left testicle makes him think that my reaction would be anything less than sheer indifference?

Blogging is fun, but it's unimportant fun. Most people do not read blogs, as I found out back in January when I returned to the UK. Of all the old friends that I met up with only one actually read weblogs, and about half had never even heard of the damned things. In Britain people meet up in the swill shops and set the world to rights that way - they don't do it via a computer screen.

I blog because I live in what used to be a village on the far outskirts of Mexico City. To get from my house to the city centre is rather like travelling from Manchester to Liverpool. I am bored shitless in other words, so to prove that I still exist, I blog. What is the influence of this blog? About nil I should think, and that is true of all the others.

Ollie, aside from being a humourless git, is clearly one who thinks that his drivel is meaningful. I hate to disabuse him but it is not. My advice to him is to get back with Stan as quickly as possible - the laughs that way would be better.

I have always had a basic rule of thumb that has served me well for almost half a century. If the management filth tell you that the sun is shining, then you grab your damned unbrella.

This served me well six years ago when imperialism first flexed it muscles in Kosovo. We were told that the province has become a killing field, but when the aggression ended only 2,788 bodies were found it mass graves. Some had been killed by the NATO airstrikes, others by the Kosovo Liberation Front. The rest, probably, in fighting between the Yugoslav army and the rebels. It was all a lie.

At the time I helped the Yugoslavian Embassy in Mexico City set up meetings to try and rally support for their defence. I did not need to be told that Blair was telling lies: I just knew he was everytime he opened that pretty little mouth of his. He is a representative of the boss class and we know that the boss class always lie. We take in this truism with our mother's milk.

A lot of people forgot that basic truth and believed the lies in those days. God knows why, but they did. Fewer were prepared to swallow the guff when it came to Iraq, but a lot still bought into it for a time.

As moves are afoot to start a war against Iran, the question has to be asked: are you still so stupid as to believe the bosses' lies?

The American death rate in Iraq has been falling over recent weeks. If I were a warmonger I might be tempted to gloat at this and put it forward as evidence that the rag-heads were finally learning to bow low and spread 'em for the almighty USA - not forgetting the little poodle that comes yapping along as well.

Thankfully I'm not a `monger, but that's not the point: the casualty figures are dropping, aren't they?

Actually, they are not. Only the death toll has dropped; the overall casualty rate has climbed dramatically during the course of this year. Put another way, we are talking about the difference between dead dogs and winged dogs.

The number of American soldiers who have been so seriously wounded that they are unable to return to duty is now running at over seven per day. Why they are being wounded and not killed is anyone's guess. It could be that they are skulking in their bases, or that their armour has improved.

One thing is obvious, or should be to anyone who is not blind to reality: the inter-communal violence that is shaking Iraq has not damaged the nationalist's ability to wage war against the main enemy, which is the USA. If fighting a civil war had degraded the nationalists' abilities, then we wouild expect these casualty figures to be falling. Instead the reverse is true.

Let's put it in simple English: the Iraqi guerrillas are able to fight both the Americans and the Americans' puppets.

Now that takes bottle. The kind of bottle that wins wars.

"Our goal in Iraq is victory," said the chimp. Good, because that means that he does not plan to withdraw the occupation forces any time soon. Which means that the withdrawal, when it comes, will be even more humiliating for the forces of imperialism than they would be if they scuttled out now.

One of the charges that is levelled against the socialist wing of the anti-imperialism movement is that we are collaborating with Islamofascists - or whatever the latest playground term of abuse is for the Iraqi resistence. A quick reply is that at least we are not collaborating with the class enemy at home, but I have never been a great fan of the one liner. I will leave that to the hand shandyists for war who are capable of nothing better.

Leaving the Iraqi resistance to one side for the moment, can militant Islam and secular socialism work together? Our paths are different, but they do lead to the same point: the destruction of globalised capitalism. After that the paths diverge again; the Islamists wish to create a Muslim Caliphate that would encompose the whole of Arabia, at the very least, and we wish to have a secular state with an economy that is managed co-operatively. Viewed in this light, surely the aims of the two are incompatible?

In the long term obviously they are, but that long term is so far in the future that worrying about it now strikes this writer as rather silly. Especially when the beast that we both face is the beast that answers to the name of capitalism. It makes no sense at all to try and fight both Islamism and capitalism at the same time. We must decide which is the greater enemy. Islamism may very well pose a long-term threat to socialism, but the problem of capitalism is immediate and pressing.

So one war at a time, comrades, because the most pressing conflict is the class war at home. Fighting Islamism when its adherents are fighting the same enemy as us is a bit like saying that the USSR should not have allied herself with the UK and USA during the Second World War: the argument is fucking insane!

I don't normally reprint whole articles, but this one is so seriously funny that I am breaking my rule. It refers to an event that took place during the great Miners' Strike of 1984-85:

The Miners of Silverwood, having been told they were confined to six pickets only, built themselves a seventh comrade in the shape of a large snowman,wearing for good measure a plastic policeman's helmet.

Next morning, Chief Inspector Nesbitt appears on the scene and seeing the jeering miners and their steely eyed companion, ordered the constables to knock it down . This order brought rebellion to the police ranks as PCs declined to, "look so fucking stupid knocking down a snowman". "Very well," shouts the irate Nesbitt, jumping in his Range Rover and charging off to demolish the snowman, as pickets ran laughing for cover.

Tiny Tony Blair was forced to rely on the support of the Tories yesterday after 52 Labour MPs voted against the Education Bill, with a further 23 abstaining. In theory the Labour majority is 69 over all the other parties, but that is looking increasingly threadbare.

Athough Blair sounds like an Englishman, he is actually Scottish. Funnily enough the last Scottish Prime Minister that the Labour Party had was Ramsay MacDonald, a man rightly held in contempt in the party because he preferred the company of Tories. At least Macdonald had to be seduced by the Tories: Blair has always seemed quite at home in their company.

I mention this not to insult the Scots, but to ask how much longer will it be before the Tories offer little Tony a nice deal along the lines of the Macdonald betrayal all those years ago? He could remain as Prime Minister, heading a largely Tory government, and bring with him as many NewLab MPs as he can persuade to jump ship. For the deal to work he would have to bring quite a few MPs along, because Macdonald headed a minority government. However, there are bound to be a couple of dozen Blairites who, like their pretty leader, find the air of the Labour Party a bit too sweaty and lower class for their tastes.

First things first, I'm not a reader of Melanie Phillips' blog and was only drawn to it by a rather nice sarcastic comment from Neil Clark. However, it is amusing to see the warmongers fight amongst themselves; and it's even nicer when one - la Phillips - mangles the words of another - in this case Francis Fukuyama. Here is what Melanie Phillips has to say:

Has there ever been a more ridiculous public intellectual than Francis Fukuyama? First, he famously pronounced the ‘end of history’ and that democracy was now happily spreading across the entire planet. Then he decided that, far from history having ended, civilisation was in mortal danger and he became a prominent neo-conservative.

Well, no, and on all counts. Fukuyama did not talk about the end of history, his work was originally called The End of History? which is not quite the same thing. He never claimed that democracy was spreading across the globe, and he did warn from the start that the Iraq agression could end in tears.

The Labour Movement owes a debt to places like Grimthorpe. The people who live there are our people. During the 1980s Grimthorpe poked two defiant fingers up to Thatcher and the vermin that she represented. They stayed loyal to their class. This is their reward after almost a decade of New Labour:

The grim facts of commercial life here are that just 37 per cent of Grimethorpe's adult population is economically active, the average household income is £8,000 compared with a national average of £20,000, nearly 46 per cent of locals are on housing benefit and 33 per cent are unemployed.

This is Blairism in a nutshell. Can anybody tell me why any working man should vote for these creatures?

Socialist disagree on many things, but I don't think that many would argue with the notion that the Labour Party has historically been the vehicle for working class aspirations in Great Britain.

Unfortunately that vehicle has been taken over, not by the left or the right, but by the middle class. It is our fault, since we allowed these creatures to move in and take control, but I do detect that their days are numbered. As the war against Iraq goes from bad to hilarious the credibility of these entryists declines at a rate of knots. With defeat comes disgrace and soon - please let it be soon - we should be in a position to retake our party and restore its constitution and values.

This being so, why the devil are people who are clearly anti-Newlab helping its adherents? Let's take just one case as an example. A seriously funny article was published in The Guardian which tried to defend the war against Iraq. I took the piss out of this load of old wank in my last posting - just scroll down if you want to read it. However, over 200 people have now written to the author to point out his errors. People, we do not debate with cockroaches! By doing so we legitimise their position within our movement. This is the whole point of the matter: their views are not legitimate and neither are they. They are worse than Militant or any other Trot sect, because at least Militant's argument was legitimate within the context of a working class party. These NewLab creatures are not of our tribe, they do not stand inside our laager and we will not dignify their arguments with a reply.

The only debate that needs to take place within the labour movement is about how to remove them. In the meantime, if people feel the need to write to these maggots, why not do it by laughing at them? They could be invited tell us how the cakewalk is coming along, or when they think that the Iraqi ambassador will be sent to Tel Aviv. Thus anyone who feels an urgent need to write to any of these creatures can do so, but without validating their views in any way.

Let's stop playing silly buggers with them, in other words.

Marcus over at Little Green Soccer Balls is up early this morning. I wonder if he shit the bed? I sort of have visions of him tucked up in his jim-jams, little Teddy cuddled to his breast. He feels a spasm in his tummy - it's a fart! He lets rip and giggles to Teddie. In his mind Teddie giggles back. Then he feels another spasm - so he lets rip again! Oops, big mistake. Yes, well, you can tell that I am the father of young sons I suppose.

Anyway, all nice and clean, with Teddy still by his side, he has booted up the computer and, well, dropped some more shit. He offers us the sight of Oliver Kamm's article in The Guardian. Ollie wants us to believe that invading Iraq was a good idea; probably in the same way that young Marcus thought that letting rip was a good idea. It wasn't, Ollie, believe me it wasn't.

Ollie, it's another fine mess, but this time you can't blame Stan. You got yourself into this one. Trying post-facto justification for a lost war is not going to work. No bugger is listening to you, Ollie, we all all too busy mocking you.

When this war is finally over, NewLab will vanish as National Labour did before it. You and people like you were the cheerleaders for the aggression that led to defeat and you will be jeered by the left for the former and the right for the latter. Get used to it: it means nobody will take you seriously again. How can they? Many of the loudest jeers will come from people who have their arses hanging hanging in the wind! They have to cover those arses and hope people will forget that they were warmongers once as well. They will do it by joining in the mockery of those tossers who still seek to justify the unjustifiable.

Now then, Ollie, I have two slices of stale bread and some rancid butter. The filling is a large turd. Here is your shit sarnie. Bite down hard and get used to eating this delicacy.

Quite a few soldiers now seem to be speaking out against the war. Fusilier Lawrence Buckley (19), from Newhey, which is just outside Manchester, has spoken to the Manchester Evening News about serving in that occupied country:

We are supposed to be out there training the Iraqis to take over the situation, but nine-tenths of them don't want to know and the police force they have got is corrupt.

It is quite understandable that the Iraqis "don't want to know," of course, because they realise that sooner or later the occupation will end and they don't want their neighbours to see them getting too close to the occupiers. Nasty things have a habit of hapening to collaborators when occupiers leave. . .

Ben Griffin (28), was an SAS trooper who told his commanding officer that he was no longer willing to fight alongside the Americans. He cited the "dozens of illegal acts" that he has seen the Americans carry out, and claimed that the Americans regarded the Iraqis as "untermenschen."

"I did not join the British army to conduct American foreign policy," he said, and expected to be court martialled for his refusal to serve any further tours in Iraq. Instead he has been discharged from the army with a testimonial that describes him as a "balanced, honest, loyal and determined individual who possesses the strength of character to have the courage of his convictions".

These are not lone voices. Max Hastings quotes from a new book written by another former SAS man that says pretty much the same thing: Iraq is a mess that has been made worse by the Americans.

The interesting thing about all of this is the way in which soldiers are chatting freely to the press and other soldiers are being quietly allowed to leave the service with glowing references, even though they have refused orders to serve in Iraq. I can think of only one serving officer who is being court martialled for refusing to serve; he is Flt Lt Malcolm Kendall-Smith, whose trial proceeds slowly.

Could the armed forces be sending a message that they have had enough of America's war? Will the politicians listen to them?

Late last month I wrote about some possible fallback positions for imperialism in the event of civil war breaking out in Iraq. I said that such a position could involve encouraging Iraq to collapse, thus to grab the oil-rich bits. I had no evidence to back this idea up; it just seemed logical.

Now, gobby neocons are giving weight to this idea. Daniel Pipes who was one of the chief proponents of the aggression against Iraq has claimed that civil war in that country could have three benefits. The first is that if the Muslims are killing each other, than are not killing non-Muslims:

Will the bulk of the imperialists support it? The oil lobby might if they are promised the black gold. What about the mugs - the wankers for war that I use as electronic toilet paper on this blog? I suppose if they were fool enough to believe that the war against Iraq was a liberation, then they should be cunt enough to believe in this as well. On the other hand, who cares what they think? They were useful idiots for the imperialists; another set of useful idiots will no doubt come along to take their places.

Will it work? That is a tricky one. A basic rule of history is that creole states only survive if they can either swamp the locals with newcomers, drive them away or kill them off. However, if the natives stubbornly remain, then the future of a creole state is nil. Where is Rhodesia today? French Algeria? Portugese Mozambique? Gone, all gone.

The issue is not that the Europeans occupy the West Bank: the issue is that even within the creole heartland, the area that existed in 1948, the Arabs are still outbreeding the Europeans. Such a state, even within the 1948 lines, is not sustainable in the long run.

Hence chaos in the rest of Arabia is not going to save Israel because the Arabs are winning the battle of the bedroom. So, the logical conclusion must be that a final solution to the problem of the Arabs in Palestine has to be found.

This is where things could get interesting. The Rhodesia lobby was prepared to dump Rhodesia because, at the end of things, flogging arms to Kenya and buying oil from Nigeria was far more important that damaging the British economy to save a fairly sleezy creole population in a shithole named Rhodesia. Will the Israel lobby come to the same conclusion over yet another western-established shithole? They might, if things start to go pear-shaped.

I would like to begin by thanking Neil Clark for his kind words. I really do not know what to say in reply, so a simple thank you will have to suffice.

Neil makes two points in the remainder of his post. The first is that imperialism will continue its onward march and the second that all "patriotic forces of both left and right" must come together to stop this happening. I am not convinced that the first point refers to an immediate danger, but the second one strikes me as basic common sense: we need unity.

I must be candid and say that it strikes me as incredible that the USA and its vassals can mount another attack on another country so soon after the disaster that has been Iraq. On the other hand who would have thought in May 1941 that Germany was going to attack the USSR the following month? You cannot predict what an unstable power will do - you can just hope for the best.