The Exile

Starting tomorrow The Exile will run a series of guest postings by UKSecretCourts, the nom de guerre of a young Welsh agitvideo maker. Most of her postings will involve a video that you will be able to watch here, along with an explanation to ram her message home.

If you tune in tomorrow for the first offering you will find out why UKSecretCourts loathes the social work filth, but why am I providing space for her videos here?

The quick answer is that she is a very good video maker and I want her work to get as wide an exposure as possible. However, that is only part of the answer.

Socialism is built out of the wreckage of capitalism. However, the days when working class people had the economic muscle to hold the capitalist state to ransom have clearly gone, so how can we even irritate the state, given those circumstances? Obviously we need to rethink our strategies.

Capitalism cannot survive without a large parasitic middle class that acts as a buffer between the working class and the owners of capital. This middle class is given rewards by capitalism for its loyalty, and its members enjoy having us to look down on. However, as a class it is weak, and open to attack on many fronts. If that class could be damaged then capitalism itself would be damaged. At the very least, one could envisage a situation where the likes of Rupert Murdoch suddenly decided that it was in their interests to dump that class and seek new arrangements with ours. At best, the sky would be the limit for our class. It all depends on how badly we can degrade those parasitic lumps of shit that go under the generic name of middle class.

As far as those creatures who work in the private sector are concerned, then their time will come, but not yet. We cannot fight a group over whom we have no economic or political leverage. However, that is not the case as far as the middle class scum who are employed by local government is concerned.

This brings me, in a roundabout sort of way to the social work filth. The stories about them are legion - and most working class people loathe, despise and fear them. If those creatures did not exist then they would have to be invented because as targets for working class action they are that perfect.

To make matters even nicer, they are also despised by the middle class proper who tend to work in the private sector. Partly this is due to the fact that the taxes paid by that group help to provide the wages for the highly unproductive social work industry, but it is also due to the sheer effrontery of the industry's members. Just click on this link if you want to know what I mean and consider the number of times that the social work filth who are writing there use the word professional, or one of its derivatives.

The point here is that true professionals don't need to announce their status at every opportunity. However, scabby little slags with their pathetic poly degrees and their equally pathetic demands for status do - and that is another good reason why we might be able to count on allies in this battle.

Obviously the alliance would only be tactical, as our aim is to destroy an entire class. That said, wouldn't it be wonderful if, with just a little prodding from us, the middle class started to fight a civil war? We could just sit in the pub, throw the beer down the necks, and watch the show.

So, having been given this group who consume resources that we as a class need for ourselves, we would be fools if we did not take advantage of the situation by using them to rally our own people to battle.

Let's have the fuckers, in other words.

The Guardian is having a po-faced moan about the British National Party's use of the Daily Telegraph's blogging feature by Cllr Richard Barnbrook, who sits on the Greater London Authority.

Instead of moaning about the blog, the Guardian should be wondering why the right are so much better at using this new, cheap technology than the left. Let's face it, the BNP has its own television station. Well, sort of, what it has is a page on a website where its videos can be freely downloaded, but that is a damn site more than most leftist parties have.

The left still seems to think that all you need is an old printing press that can be used to knock out a paper. Then you get your activists to go and sell the damn thing on street corners. Yeah, just like they did in 1908 - as if nothing has changed in the meantime.

Folks, I have bad news for you: a lot has changed, especially over the past decade or two, and it is time that the left came up to date.

Let's just look at that BNP TV page as a case in point. Technically the videos are first rate. Somebody has obviously worked in television and can pass on the skills needed to the rest of the party's activists. Furthermore, they have got "three broadcast quality camera units" which they use to get their message across. What has the left got? Sweet fuck all in comparison.

The Exile has been banging on about the need for working class activists to start using video as part of their agitprop for quite some time. As usual no bugger has taken any notice, but the right have got in on the act in a big way.

Luckily for the left, in spite of the technical quality of the BNP videos, the content is pretty dreary. What makers of agitvideo need to understand is that anything over a couple of minutes will cause them to lose their audience. The BNP are churning out ten minute epics which may be of interest to their party members, but not to anyone else. As I argued here, what is needed are short, snappy 30 to 120 second videos that grab the attention of the MTV generation. Again, as I have said before, in this day and age less is more - so keep those vids short and snappy, folks.

Given that this is the agitprop future, is anybody even listening on the left?

Let's talk about a topic dear to my heart - agitational video. As regular readers will know, I have long advocated the value of short videos that aim at getting the message out. With that in mind let's consider two propaganda videos that this blog has publicised over the past week. The first is Fitna, the Dutch anti-Islamic video, and the second the work of UKSecretCourts, an example of which we posted about last night.

On the surface, both videos are very similar. Both use clips that have been taken from the web and edited together with a musical soundtrack. However, that is where the similarities end because Fitna is an agitprop work that looks backwards; whereas the UKSecretCourts videos are the forward looking ones.

What does good propaganda achieve? At its best it does two things: it reinforces what people already believe and it turns neutrals into sympathisers. Fitna succeeds with the first, but fails with the second. The UKSecretCourts' videos succeed at both.

Fitna runs for just over 15 minutes, and that is at least ten minutes too long. What Geert Wilders, its creator, doesn't realise is that today's population has the attention span of a lobotomised goldfish. Anything that is over five minutes long will just cause them to switch off, either literally or figuratively. UKSecretCourts realises this, probably because the person behind that monicker is a young, very beautiful young woman who has been brought up watching MTV videos. Geert Wilders is, I am sorry to say, a middle aged bloke who doesn't really get all this new technology stuff. He cannot understand that in today's multi-channel world, less is more.

His video certainly appeals to the already committed. I spoke on the telephone to a good friend of mine who is vehemently anti-Islam and he was raving about Fitna. The problem is that when I spoke to other friends who fall into the "don't give a shit" category, the response was uniformly negative. Too long, too boring, too repetitive was the message that I got back.

With UKSecretCourts' work, the response was very different. Her three to five minute videos capture and hold the imagination of the audience and create just the state of mind that good agitprop should create in the minds of the uninvolved viewers: it makes them angry!

Yesterday I road- tested this lady's work out on some Mexican friends. They all spoke a bit of English, just enough to understand the simple captions that she uses. All of them wanted more information about the social work filth, and one went so far as to say that he thought that Englishmen were putos (poofs) for not shooting a few lumps of social work shit.

I think that the only criticism that I can level at the UKSecretCourts videos is that she aims too much at YouTube and similar sites. Increasingly, that is not how people receive their information. The future of agitprop videos may lie in the world of the mobile 'phone - in the third world it already does, as we can see from this posting that deals with how Iraqi propagandists get their message out.

Many people in the UK have a computer at home, but many more don't. However, the mobile 'phone is now so ubiquitous that all and sundry have them. Children and other young people are used to passing short, 30 seconds to one minute, clips around. Technically it isn't difficult to produce 'phone clips, so if UKSecretCourts can produce videos of that length, videos that capture the imagination as much as her YouTube videos already do, then she could very well become the Leni Riefenstahl of this century.

Following on from my last posting, I can now report that Fitna The Movie is no longer available from LiveLeak.com. If you click on the video all you get is an explanation of why it has been pulled. Live Leak are a Manchester based outfit and have come under threat, probably from the Pakistani denizens of the mill towns which surround Manchester.

You can still watch the film at Daily Motion, which is the version that I have at the top of this posting. Alternatively, you can click over to Google Video and watch it there.

The file sharers have it, but the version that I downloaded had a corrupt soundtrack and would not play.

Fitna The Movie has now been released. If you want to download Fitna, then please wait for a few days until a decent version becomes available. At the moment all we have is this flash movie option.

As we reported a few days ago, the site that should have been running was suspended by its hosting company, but the beauty of the internet means that there are ways to get things seen.

To be honest, watching Fitna The Movie is about as exciting as watching paint dry, but what the hell - this is the film that lots of people don't want you to watch. For that reason alone you might want to click on the button and let the video run.


I have also uploaded the video from Daily Motion, just in case the Live Leak version gets swamped.

Here's a good one - Richard Corbett is one of Nu-Labour's prime stooges in Brussels who decided a few days ago to set up his very own blog. Like many a wankblogger before him he decided not to allow comments, presumably for fear that the anti-EC brigade would arrive in force to make him look a tit.

Not to worry because one such fine brigade member has done just that - by setting up a blog that scrapes Corbett's drivel as soon as it is posted. The only difference between the two blogs is that the copier allows open comments: and what comments they are!

Corbett seems to have rounded up as many creatures as he can find to hit the blog with pompous comments - it reminds me a bit of when Gimlet's mates arrived here giving it lip and providing me with easy laughs. What is it about the Nu-Labour crowd that makes them such humourless, sanctimonious gits?

More importantly, don't they realise that all they do when they scream like prize lapdogs is provide yet more publicity for the people that are out to make them look even more bovine than than they do normally?

Geert Wilders is a Dutch parliamentarian who has made a 15 minute short film attacking Islam. The film is called Fitna, an Arabic word which this site translates as the Islamic call for civil war. Since just about every western TV station has refused to broadcast the film, Geert Wilders decided to register fitnathemovie.com as his domain, and then, foolishly, rented space with the same American internet hosting outfit called Internet Solutions, that held the registration. The idea was the people could download the short from the site and Geert Wilders would get round the television ban that way.

So far so boring, but now the shit has hit the fan as Internet Solutions have decided to suspend the account as you will see if you try to access fitnathemovie.com. (The Daily Telegraph, from whom the original report comes, got the URL wrong, giving it as fitna.com, but that is not Wilders' domain.)

This is not the first time that an internet service provider has pulled the plug for political reasons. It happened to the British political activist Craig Murray last year, but at least that was a British hosting company, so we expect them to be gutless. Internet Solutions are American, so what happened to the freedom of speech malarkey that they enjoy spouting so much?

I hope that Geert Wilders does get a new host very quickly. In the meantime I think it might be a good idea if people read this posting which gives some common sense advice on how to keep a site alive come what may. The short version is that anything controversial should not be hosted by the same company that holds the domain registration.

Had Geert Wilders followed that simple rule, then his site would be up and running right now.

Yet more Al-Qaida videos are now available to download and play on mobile telephones. Big deal you may think, but this is yet more evidence that the Third World is ahead of the First when it comes to the latest agitprop techniques.

This is something that has irritated me for quite some time. The British working class has even easier access to all this technology, and it is a technology that they already use to pass 'phone clips around. So when are community groups and political parties going to take it up? That was the question that I asked back in July of last year and I am still waiting for an answer.

Are we really so bovine as a class that we cannot see opportunities when they jump out in front of us?

When, if ever, will a left press start to get readers? That's the question that Dave's Part asked recently, and your friendly Exile thinks that the answer is never - at least not so long as the left press remains in the hands of boring buggers.

The first problem that the left has is that it tries to preach to people. The Morning Star and Socialist Worker are not in the business of providing news from a working class perspective. What they try to do is present news that they think the working class needs, the aim being to then recruit members to the cause. Unfortunately for them, ordinary people don't want to be preached to by some loon in grannie glasses and a Mao hat, and that is the first reason why the left press loses out to the right.

Secondly, far too much of the socialist press - and socialists in general - take an attitude of po-faced morality to their politics. They want to make the world over again and their socialism has roots in that morality. Working class people just simply want more money for less bastard work, and a healthy degree of control over the work process. This inability to stop moralising about issues that ordinary people are indifferent to means that fewer and fewer people regard socialism as having any relevance to them.

Finally, and here is the rub, most people are not interested in politics. They are interested in sleaze and sport, and if anyone doubts that all they have to do is consider the circulation figures for the various papers.

The trick for any socialist is to give the readers what they want and then slip in a bit of the politics by the back door. The other option, of course, is to continue along the familiar path and only preach to the already converted.

The first option is the one that I have chosen for The Exile. Thanks to the lovely Stephanie I am getting more readers than ever before. Most will only be interested in her - and who can blame them?- but some will stick around and read other things.

That is also why I have been posting a lot on the social work filth and their activities. Working class people just happen to hate them, so here is a chance to make the connection between a parasitic middle class that acts as our colonial rulers, and the world that we now have to endure.

Will the socialist press follow my lead? Almost certainly not and that is why the socialist press will remain unread.

A couple of days ago we looked at how to keep your site on-line when faced by the boss class and their legal threats. Now let's look at how to keep your job as a blogger.

It is quite likely that as a working class blogger you will want to write about your boss, his place and his profits. That's fine, and more power to you. The more people who spill the beans about their bastard work the better. In the long run capitalism can only survive with the consent of the millions of peons who live from wage packet to wage packet every week. So let's encourage our people to blog, but to blog carefully. If the fuckers don't know who is spilling the beans, then we get to enjoy two great belly laughs. Once because the management filth are annoyed, then again because the cockroaches don't know who is doing it to them.

There is one basic rule to blogging about your work: be anonymous. Discretion is so obvious that I am amazed that bloggers get caught and lose their jobs. Just don't tell anybody about your nefarious activities. There is bound to be at least one gaffer's man in the group that you work with, so keep your trap shut.

Leading on from this, you need to blog under a pen-name and the e-mail account should be web based, and not the one that comes with your internet account. People this is just so fucking obvious, but bloggers still get caught, so let's keep things at primary school level. Use a web account and a pen name, OK?

Secondly, don't blog at work. If you do, then the boss might be able to figure out from the times of the postings who was on-line at that particular moment. He can then look at all the computers' hard drives and see who has been writing extra-curricular stuff. Don't think that deleting your private material will work, because it won't. There are programmes that can be used to undelete just about anything, so forget about blogging at work.

Assuming that you are employed by a private firm, then blogging from home should be fine. On the other hand, if you want to be super careful, go to an internet cafe to create your subversive postings.

People, a generation ago I was leaking all sorts of shit to the local press about my then employer. It used to drive the fuckers wild and thinking up new and outrageous leaks killed many a long, boring day at bastard work.

Think how much fun you can have with a blog - just be careful and you should be able to continue in business for many a long year.

Making a political video is easy: you just get a few boring buggers around a table and then send everyone who watches it to sleep. Let's look at some new ideas for political video...

Probably some of the most effective, subversive video has been produced not by politicos, but by bored out of their skulls night workers employed at the Somerfield chain of supermarkets. The point here is not that these are technically well crafted examples of agitprop video. They are not, and most break all the rules of video shooting - cameras wobble, zoom lenses are overused and the sound quality is atrocious.

That said, they are wildly popular amongst the target audience, which consists of young, bored out of their skulls working class people. They encourage others to treat their employer with the same contempt as these Somerfield people do. That's all...These videos will never encourage the revolution, but if they help to engender a little bit more contempt for the boss class they will have served their purpose.

As you can see, agitprop video doesn't have to be dull and boring. You can be having a laugh and a joke while you are filming - so long as the laugh and the joke is at the enemies' expense.

Let's think about some ideas, shall we? The social work filth make good, easy targets because everyone hates them anyway. Can you grab some footage of one fat ugly social worker walking next to a thin ugly social worker? If you can then stick the Laurel and Hardy theme to it and a mocking title at the end. Bingo - you have a clip that people will watch, will pass around, and which will make your local social work filth feel humiliated.

Ridicule is a potent weapon, so use it as much as you can. We don't have to play by their rules, in fact it is much better for us if we don't. Most people who have crossed swords with social work filth will have received a letter at some point that explains just how "well trained" they are. OK, so find some old woman who can remember going to a chimp's tea party at her local zoo. The chances are that the chimp keeper will have used those very words when explaining how the monkeys were persuaded to sit around the table.

Your video could then go:

1. Shot of a person reading from the letter.
2. He asks the camera what "highly trained" means?
3. Interview with old person.
4. Return to original person, who says that he is still baffled. Are social workers more highly trained than chimps?

A video like that could run less than a minute. If an issue with the council is simmering, a video like that could just help it bubble.

The middle class has a low tolerance for mockery and questions about their status, so let's give them plenty of both. In a previous posting I mentioned the matter of Codie Stott, the Salford schoolgirl who was arrested for asking the wrong questions at school. Reading a little bit more into the case, it now turns out that when young Codie asked her question, she was greeted by a teacher who screamed the refrain: "That's racism! You're going to get done by the police"

Come on people, this is too good to miss. A video recreating that scene, shot in someone's kitchen, would be well worth the effort. The comic possibilities are just endless - and that is the whole point - it is about using mockery to undermine the middle class's fragile sense of self worth.

These are just a few ideas, and I am sure that you can come up with a lot more. Use video as part of your community campaign: you know it makes sense!

People, let's forget about the community newsletter - video is what people watch, either on YouTube or via their mobile 'phone or I-pod. Your videos should run for between 30 seconds and about five minutes. Yes, that's right, because anything much over five minutes runs the risk that the viewer will lose interest. Sorry, folks, today's generation have been brought up on music videos and have the attention span of a lobotomised goldfish.

Assuming that you know very little about video making, let's start with the basics. If you don't have a video camera, you might like to buy one that uses the MiniDV system. They are the most popular cameras on the market so go with the flow has always been The Exile's way of thinking.

If you don't have a camera and are unemployed, then a second hand Digital 8 video camera is fine. The cassettes are bigger than the MiniDV's version - so is the camera come to that - but other than that the two systems are virtually the same.

Another option is to use a digital still camera because many of them will also shoot video. Just check that your camera isn't one that only shoots very short clips. Most Sony cameras allow you to shoot so long as there is space on the memory stick. For instance a one gig stick allows for about 45 minutes of recording time.

The disadvantage of using a still camera's video function is that you cannot usually connect an external microphone to the camera. That said, if your subject is close, you can pick up their voice with the camera's internal microphone. It is just not as good, that's all. However, if you are not videoing someone speaking on a noisy street, or if you decide to add a music soundtrack of your own later, using a still camera is very much an option.

All of the above types of camera will do. However, two types will cause problems and should be avoided. The first is the video camera that uses a DVD disk. Editing those videos is such a pain that they are to be avoided at all costs. The second type to give a body swerve to is the camera that has an internal memory and which records the files in MP4 format. Getting editing programmes for this format is expensive; finding a converter so that you can put your video out in the popular MPG or WMV is just as hard. Just don't use them, OK?

Having got your gear, there are two mistakes that people make when they start to shoot video. The first is they waft the camera about like a fart in a breeze. People, keep the fucker still! Your eyes may dart from place to place, but if you do that with the camera you will make your video unviewable. Shoot clear shots with the camera angle set before you press the record button. Once you have pressed it, don't move the camera and hold it very, very steady.

The second mistake the folk make is using the zoom - "Look, my camera has a zoom," they seem to be saying.

Yes, I know it has a fucking zoom, and I'm telling you not to use it. As with waving the camera around it makes the footage unwatchable.

If you must zoom and pan, then do it very, very slowly and not very often. Far better not to use these techniques at all until you become more expert at film making.

You have finished shooting. Now you need to get the raw footage into your computer for editing. If you used a still camera, then the MPG files will load in the same way that photographs do. If you have a video camera, it is a bit more complicated, but not much.

If your computer runs on Windows XP then you have a programme called Windows Movie Maker. Open it, connect your camera to the computer via the cable that came with it and then switch the camera on. WMM will pretty much do the rest. I advise you to switch off the create clips function - record the footage as one file.

Movie Maker will ask you what the settings are for your recording and will offer you a "best quality for playback on my computer" option. Ignore that and go to "other settings". There you should choose "Video for local playback (2.1 Mbps)" as this is the best quality.

Once the footage is on your computer, then you can use Windows Movie Maker to edit it, add titles, stick in a voice-over or add music. You can also add fades and dissolves to make scene changes easier on the eye. Just play around with the programme until you feel happy at using it.

Windows has a special page devoted to Movie Maker which is well worth studying. You can find it here.

Very well, now you have your finished video - how do you distribute it?

The first way is via YouTube and for that you should convert your WMV file into an MP4. This is easy, just download the Videora Converter, which is a free programme. I would suggest that for YouTube you should set the conversion rate at a high quality - it will make for a big file but once YouTube has it they will convert it to Flash Media and it will look better on the computer monitor if your file has been of a high quality to begin with.

What did you say? You can't download YouTube videos? Well, there are programmes out there that allow you to do that, but the quality is crap. Why not make a version for people to watch on their mobiles and I-Pod Videos? Most of these devices use MP4 as their standard, so just run the file through the Videora Converter again, but this time choose a lower rate that will make for a smaller file. Remember, if they are watching the video on a small screen, you don't need a very high quality video.

What about the people who want to watch your epic on a computer? Run the file through Windows Move Maker one more time and set the capture to about 512 KBS. At that rate the video is just about watchable at full screen, but looks much better at half-screen. Play around until you find the best quality for your needs.

Finally, upload your video files to a server - they are plenty of them about that offer free web space. Besides, how can you call yourselves a community group if you don't have your own web page? Geocities gives you 15 meg and Lycos gives you 20 megs.

Up next - some ideas to think about for videos. Meanwhile I have some videos of my own that you might like to see. In all cases, just click over to the page and follow the link at the bottom to get the video.

The first was shot using a digital still camera, and consists of views of a lake in my area. The second is the ruins of Teotihuacan, and was shot using a video camera. Both videos have music soundtracks that I added.

Following on from my last posting, if matters do come to a head on a council estate because the social work filth are attacking our children, then any attempt to prescribe action will fail. It will fail because what is likely to happen is that some father, outraged at the way his family is treated will explode in some way or another. The press will get involved, the TV, and any local political group that is involved with the family will only have to play catch-up to an agenda that will be media led.

In a situation like this, a group needs to understand basic media techniques, and the most basic of all is the press release. If written properly a press release will be used by the local newspapers as is - so make sure that you know how to create them.

The basic format of your press release should always be the same. This is mine:

1. At the top of the page you have the name of your group in headline text and below it, in a slightly smaller font, the words "Press Release". You can call it a news release if you want to because sometimes the TV and radio get a bit twitchy if you don't.

2. Below this on the left side you should have, contact, address, telephone, e-mail. Always issue your press releases under one person's name - that way the local hacks can get in touch with an individual with whom they will build up a relationship over time.

3. Put in a horizontal line at this point. That way the journalist knows that the basic information is over and the release is about to begin.

4. Below the line put in the headline. Use a size 14 font.

5. Next comes the text, in a 12 font. Try to write as if you were the jounalist - you want them to use your text verbatim for the story. Keep it simple, keep it sweet, but remember that you are an agitator, so you can use synonyms to alter the readers' perceptions.

Let me give you an example. Back in 1996 Oldham social work filth were trying to get my late father into a nursing home. I decided that a shot across the bows was in order and sent out a press release to the two local newspapers.

The headline read:

"Oldham social work industry seeks to force war veteran into a workhouse."

Now let's look at the language used here. The first thing we note is my use of "industry" instead of "department". That was deliberate and aimed at undercutting the the social workers sense of self importance. If you look back to the previous posting, you will see that I argue that central to the middle class sense of worth is the notion that what they do is morally good - take that away from them and you have hit their morale. Thus whenever a met a piece of social work filth I would always adopt a matey, jocular tone with them. As if I understood that they were just timeservers and jobsworths, leaching off the public purse. That attitude started with this press release.

Secondly we have the war veteran reference: my father was a veteran, and this aimed at putting him on a higher level than a mere "old man". He was an old man, but he was also a war veteran.

Finally the use of the word workhouse should be considered. It still strikes fear into many old people's hearts and conjurs up images of breaking rocks for a night's bed. That was why I used it: I knew that it would provoke an immediate sympathy for him amongst the elderly.

The first paragraph of the release read:

Charles Bell (81) thought that he had seen the last of conflict the day he stood on Lunebourg Heath in 1945 and watched the German army stream in to surrender. However, he had reckoned without the actions of Oldham social work industry, who are determined to force old soldier Charlie into a workhouse.

Note how Charles Bell became Charlie? The idea was to make him friendly - good old Charlie, nice old Charlie, decent old Charlie. First I used his formal name because I wanted the notion of soldier Charles Bell to be drummed home, but after that it was all about poor, persecuted Charlie.

Note also how language from the headline is repeated in that first paragraph - ram the message home, people!

My press release caused quite a stir. The Oldham Chronicle telephoned me in Mexico and did an interview. They ran the story in their own words, but the free sheet used my exact press release - so after that I mainly sent stories to them and they always ran them.

It got to the stage where I invented "sources close to Oldham Council," and "a social work source" and the social work filth went wild. They started an internal investigation to find out who was leaking information. Nobody was - I made it all up!

So press releases work and they should form to first line of attack for any group seeking to further agitate the waters.

However, and here is the kicker, they only work if they are about matters of public interest. So find the local issue, whatever it is, and use it to your advantage.

Neil Clark is a journalist and blogger who tends to get the little things wrong, but the big things very, very right. He reminds me a bit of Andrew Gilligan, the former BBC reporter, who reported back in 2003 that the Blairite regime had "sexed up" a dossier full of allegations about Iraq, in the run up to the aggression against that country. Gilligan got some of his small details wrong, but the big one, the one that stated that this dossier was seriously dodgy, he got bang to rights.

So it is with Neil Clark. He commented that Bernard Kouchner, the new French Foreign Minister, had supported the war against Iraq. This is not the case, but it is also not the main point that Neil was making. What he was arguing was that Kouchner's appointment reflects a new "alliance of neoconservatives and liberal interventionists that is already entrenched in both the US and Britain".

That Kouchner falls into the latter category is not in question. Indeed, Neil has a rather nice photograph of him shaking hands with various Kosovo Liberation Army types, and he did support the war against Yugoslavia in 1999. So Neil's argument seems to stand: the alliance between liberal- interventionists and neo-cons is up and running.

As with Gilligan, the warwankers are not seeking to deny this fact. Rather they are seeking to discredit Neil's argument by pointing out his minor errors.

Boys, Andrew Gilligan was right about Iraq, just as Neil Clark is right about you.

The warwanking fraternity just love attacking George Galloway, the Respect MP. How their hearts must have beaten just that little bit faster when The Guardian reported that the Serious Fraud Office had recomended that a prosecution be brought against him over his alleged dealings in Iraqi oil.

There is only one problem with the story: it's a complete fabrication.

If any warwanker is reading this, I have a question. What's it like being a loser, time after time?

The Americans are losing the agitprop war because they are too hidebound, according to this Newsweek article. They tend to rely on press releases:

These can take hours to prepare and are often outdated by the time they're issued. Lt. Col. Barry Johnson, director of the military's press operations in Baghdad until this past September, complains that all military-related information has to be processed upward through a laborious and bureaucratic chain of command. "The military wants to control the environment around it, but as we try to [do so], it only slows us down further," he says. "All too often, the easiest decision we made was just not to talk about [the story] at all, and then you absolutely lose your ability to frame what's going on."

The Iraqis, by way of contrast, are issuing Video Compact Disks (VCDs) and sending out mobile telephone video clips, both of which are catching the occupiers on the hop. The article argues that "What the insurgents understand better than the Americans is how Iraqis consume information. Tapes of beheadings are stored on cell phones along with baby pictures and wedding videos.".

This argument is unconvincing. What the Iraqis probably understand is the power of the VCD and the thirty second 'phone clip, which is not quite the same thing.

The VCD has been around for a long time, but never took off in the west. However, that is not the case in the Third World. Basically, a VCD uses CD-Rom technology to produce a disk that has the same quality as a VHS tape. It certainly isn't DVD quality, but that is not the point. The point is that it doesn't need a DVD burner on the computer to copy it: a CD-Rom burner will do. Copies of the latest Hollywood blockbuster are made and sold via the army of street traders that operate in any city. Other traders buy one copy of the latest epic and then run off copies using their own home computer. These are sold and some of the buyers are traders themselves who make additional copies to sell. The whole process is informal and very, very efficient.

Mobile telephone clips are very popular in the west, but probably not with the type of person who writes for Newsweek. This writer can remember a cartoon frog that spoke with a Manchester accent and told its viewers how much it hated "fucking students," or this rather delightful shot of a girl climbing some stairs.

Such clips are downloaded and then passed around freely; it is a small step from there to pass around clips of American tanks being blown up, especially if you happen to be living under their guns.

So what is happening is not a different consumption pattern, rather it is an informal network of people who are willing to distribute disks and pass around 'phone clips, and that we also have in the UK.

The British left needs to play catch-up with this technology. Instead of selling dreary newpapers on street corners, the activists would be much better employed working at a computer producing snappy, witty, 30 second clips that make people laugh.

Will new technology - principally the blogs - ever take over from the old world of television, radio and newspapers? This is a question that many bloggers ask, usually rhetorically, as part of their attacks on the older media.

The answer, says the Exile, is that blogs and internet TV stations will never replace the BBC and the newspapers. The BBC is trusted by the bulk of the population and there is no political groundswell of opinion that demands its replacement. Furthermore, what demand does exist tends to come from the type of Thatcherites that the rest of us would not touch with the proverbial 10' bargepole.

Secondly, the BBC has a plethora of relatively new digital channels which pretty much cover the mainstream spectrum. There will certainly be room on the internet for niche channels - but that is not what is being argued, is it? The notion that these channels will take over from the already crowded mainstream strikes this writer as risible.

As far as the press is concerned, the chances of British blogs taking over are similarly remote. That may not be the case in the USA where newspaper ownership tends to be concentrated, but in the UK it is fair to say that there is a newspaper for almost all shades of political opinion.

Furthermore, what the bloggers don't realise is just how convenient a newspaper is. Unlike a blog that can only be read on a computer, a paper can be folded up, stuck in the back pocket and carried to wherever the reader happens to be going. It may be that when internet browsers and mobile telephones become one and the same thing, then the internet press will come into its own. However, until that day arrives, all talk of the newspapers' replacement is so much pie in the sky.

Two things already exist that have had a profound impact on how the news is diseminated. Neither is as sexy as a blog, but both have a proven track record and bloggers should just go with these flows. The first is e-mail and the second is mobile 'phone texting. The best way for a blogger to get his exclusive out is to encourage readers to sign up for e-mail and telephone-text lists. If the story is hot enough, the punters who get the messages will do the rest.

Take the case of Claire Swire as an example. You may find this oral sex tale a bit hard to swallow, but Claire's e-mail ended up all over the world within 24 hours, thus ensuring that this girl will go down in the history books. In other words, if the tale is yum enough, then a simple e-mail sent to a few people is all it takes. The forward button does the rest.

However, and here is the big caveat, we are still talking about computer terminals and the need to be connected to one. The advantage that 'phone texting has is that everyone carries the wretched things around in their pockets, so communication by them is immediate. In much of the World they are already being used as subversive aids; a situation that has left the British in the curious position of playing catch-up.

Europe started two years ago with the Spanish elections. Demonstrations are banned in the 24 hour period before an election, so organising such events is impossible - at least until 94% of Spaniards started carrying mobile 'phones. On the day before the election, the number of texts sent jumped 20% above the normal figure: on election day itself it rose by 40%. Activists sent out messages calling on people to rally against the government and to vote for the opposition - and it worked!

However, it is in the Third World - or amongst Third Worlders in the West - where texting has proven its worth. Governments have been overthrown, rumours have been spread and demonstrations organised, all through a tiny device that was probably picked up second-hand at a street market.

So what do we have? A very good tool for spreading rumours and creating mayhem, seems to be the answer based on past performances. It is not a means of replacing the existing media, but it does allow us to get our message out quickly. Let everyone make sure that their address books are up to date and get ready to text, seems to be the final conclusion.

Staying on the Cuban theme for a moment, the country does not have much of a tradition of samizdat publishing. This may be because many of the anti-socialist elements have been forced into exile, or it could be because in spite of the popular myth, the country tends not to censor all that much.

A good example of this is Habana Babilonia, by Amir Valle, which was circulating in Havana, either in manuscript form, or on 3.5" disks, last year. The man who told me about it insisted on sending me my copy through via e-mail, since he said that it might be risky to take a paper copy out of the country.

Checking the internet when I got back to Mexico, I could find no trace of this work, and e-mails to various people turned up no further information. Now the manuscript has been published in Argentina under the title Jineteras. Furthermore, it is available as a .pdf download from this site.

The work deals with prostitution in Havana during the Special Period that followed the collapse of the USSR. Like most works in Spanish, it never fails to use ten words when one will do instead, but it is a good read for all that.

If anybody wants a copy of the original samizdat version that circulated in Cuba last year, all they have to do is drop me a line.