Lebedev's other dog and Putin's pooches

It's just struck me (and several million others, no doubt) that there's a very good chance that our Prime Minister, Boris Johnson, may have effectively sold classified information to the Russians by giving the oligarch Evgeny Lebedev a peerage in 2020. (Peerage = seat in the House of Lords. House Of Lords = US Senate)

That's not a snarky sobriquet - that's his official title. Lord of Hampton And Siberia

That isn't the worst of it. The worst of it is that nobody outside of Twitterland gives a flying fuck about it.

Our political system is hopelessly compromised, both the Left and the Right seem to have sold out to the Russians lock, stock and barrel. In fact it reminds me of things I've read about pre-Euromaidan Ukraine.

The only senior person in the system behaving with any kind of honour is the leader of the Opposition, unfortunately he is a bit of a charisma vacuum and he is under attack by the left wing of his own party, who are being suspiciously supportive of the Russians (blaming NATO for everything, etc) and not uttering a peep about the very blatant corruption of the ruling (right wing) party by the Russian oligarchs. They're not demonstrating outside of the many properties owned by them, they're not demonstrating outside the Russian embassy, they're just running around with their dumb placards waving Soviet flags and chanting their stupid, bleating chants.

I'm not kidding! Actual footage shown.

I repeat: The Left in this country are failing to criticize the Right for selling us out to the Russians, which they have done. (For example Brexit was notoriously funded by Russian money).  Is this ideological, or have they also sold us out? (They wouldn't be the first.) The ONLY people telling the truth are a few liberal journalists and the not very popular, incredibly bland opposition leader Sir Kier Starmer, who has as much chance of being elected Prime Minister as I have of being elected Pope.

It is worse than you could possibly imagine. We are basically a Trojan Horse of the Russians, we are talking a good fight but actually giving them time to hide their money before we implement any sanctions. At this point I have to wonder if any of the weapons we're supposedly giving the Ukranians even work.

Speaking of which, we're now officially turning away Ukrainian refugees. I guess it helps that the electorate have been conditioned to see refugees as the enemy by the same right wing politicians that Putin has obviously compromised - in the case of the PM, by literally having him along to a massive party in an oligarch's castle.

Links as and when I can be bothered. I just had to get that out of my system.

Lebedev with his other dog

 

 

Why don't we have dictators?

Maybe the reason that dictatorship never really took off in the Anglo-Saxon world is that our ruling classes don't need to impose a dictatorship - they already have absolute control over the country.

Even Mao-Tse Tung, Stalin and Hitler did not go as far as to make swimming illegal. David Cameron did. (He also passed laws which would see the following activities criminalized: Skateboarding, walking dogs, passing out leaflets, busking, running, cycling, sleeping and sitting down, as well as napping, shouting, climbing trees, and feeding the birds.)

Boating on the boating lake is a serious crime!

 

Comfortably nested and sclerotic, the British ruling class face no external threats and no internal rivals. Unlike Fascists, they don't have to resort to mass murder to preserve the existing order, and unlike Communists, they do not have to purge an existing order themselves. They are the existing order, one which has existed since 1066 and shows no sign of losing power a millennium later. Open warfare, mass genocide, political purges, civil wars? That stuff were all settled centuries ago. We just don't do that anymore.

Literally - our last genocide was over a hundred years ago, and nobody even remembers it. Even the notoriously tenacious IRA have called it a day and quit. (fortunately - I am NOT an apologist for terrorism!)

All our rulers have to deal with these days are a few working class Johnnies, who are for the most part shut up in large cities away from "decent folk" (ie, rich people). If we stray out of our little bantustans a few Bobbies will suffice to herd us back where we belong but otherwise, all's good in the hood for those toffee nosed fuckers.

Remember the Beanfield!

Also, people don't fight for their rights - so they have none. Britain is so depressingly tame; beneath the radical pose, our activists are pussies when it comes right down to it. After all these years, they still don't understand that class conflict takes place in the terrain of everyday life, not the battlefield of the Spectacle. You can have all the riots you like, we'll still have to go to work in the morning, live in overpriced, rabbit-hutch accommodation, play in controlled, contrived corporate nightmares little different to our workplaces.

And we'll be happy. That's their secret. Somehow, for some reason, most people in this country are happy with their lot. The government treats them like shit, but they love it. They enjoy being treated with contempt - unless of course the people dishing it out aren't in power. Then they get pissy - not so much because they feel insulted by how patronizing liberals and socialists can be, but because liberals and socialists are "getting above their station". They're upsetting the "natural order" which my overly-deferential countryfolk worship like a god - constantly and unconsciously.

How fucked up do you have to be to admire these things?

All of which changes our entire problem from a political one to a personal one: How do I exist in such a suffocating society when I'm the only one who actually feels suffocated by it? Drugs suit some people. Others, insanity. Still others play revolutionary, like those role-playing games that are so popular: LARPers, as they say.

But let's deconstruct this problem we have with deferentialness. I think it comes down to the rural mentality. Anglo-Saxons never really urbanized psychologically, even as they were among the first mass urban societies since ancient times. Perhaps it came too early. In Britain they speak with provincial accents even in the middle of big cities, while in the US they do not entirely retain the same rustic mentality, elections there are rigged to ensure their large rural population has enough political power to decide a Presidential election even with three million fewer votes than the "loser". Meanwhile Australia is still actually a predominantly rural society - as is Canada. 

Culturally, Anglo deference shares the same origins: The British peasantry. We have never quite shaken that off. The Russians and French murdered their aristocracy, the German Kaiser abdicated in disgrace, and the other Euro-monarchs have all succumbed to some degree of humility, made some concession to democracy, if not outright Republicanism - but we have always worshipped the royals, the aristocracy, and the rich, and that is our main problem: We have a peasants' worldview.

On the nose. PS: Please don't sue me!

 

Perhaps the greatest irony of modern anti-racism is that, far from considering themselves a master race, the problem with white people is that they are so submissive to those in power that they cannot countenance anyone overthrowing their masters for any reason - and will fight tooth and nail to retain their own chains, let alone those of other people. Of course the bastards are racist - they're even bigoted against themselves!

Until that stops, until we see working class consciousness and working class unity, nothing will ever change. People in Anglo-Saxon societies will continue to be dominated by the same arseholes who have run the show for a thousand years: The rich.

Until then, like the song says: Pray for daylight. Or you could always make it happen!

https://iww.org.uk/

https://www.acorntheunion.org.uk/contact

Colston: Correcting some misunderstandings

 (This is an old Reddit post, with slight edits and a little extra at the start)

It's a year since the Colston statue was toppled, starting a transatlantic iconoclast movement that, some argue, went a bit nuts. (At one point someone even started a petition against a statue of Ghandi ffs!) I would like to set the record straight as to how it all started, because a lot of people now describe this movement as some kind of ultra-woke, cancel culture nonsense, when in fact, it started as a VERY good thing indeed.

In many ways, this was a very local affair. Here in Bristol, England, half the city is named after Colston - streets, schools, even pubs and office towers... And the man was a horrible shit. A mass murderer who ran a corporation called The Royal African Company - a company which trafficked in human misery and made fortunes out of mass murder and slavery, a man whose crimes rival those of any Nazi - but which he gets away with because he did it long ago. OK, he did it long ago, does that mean we have to deify the bastard?

Local businessmen had erected the statue and made him into a city father over a century after his death - and continued to defend him well into the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Year after year you'd hear these bloated borgeous scumbags defending a man who belonged in an unmarked grave following execution, not on a plinth in the centre of town. The council did nothing to address the widely held issues people had with the guy, and eventually, local people took matters into their own hands.

You can't understand the Colston affair without understanding Bristol's local politics. The city has a sizeable black community and a long history of inter-racial solidarity dating back to World War 2, and the powers that be, from the Merchant Venturers (dodgy local freemason types who kept bits of Colstons' corpse around to worship) to our useless centrist council, did sod all about it. To understand what Colston meant to black people, it was as if they'd kept a statue of Eichmann up in the middle of Warsaw "because history".

Bristol was in many ways built on slavery and black people know this. It's part of local black culture to curse our status as a "slave port" - especially Afro-Carribeans, the literal descendants of those enslaved by Colston. There has been the bare minimum of official acknowlegments of the citys' part in this crime against humanity, until recently the only acknowlegements of it were: a tiny plaque in an out of the way part of the Docks, a mural nobody noticed, and a footbridge patronizingly named after some bastards' house slave - this in a country that is obsessed with history!

I backed the toppling of Colston and still do. It was a great moment for my city, where people came together in solidarity to do something that had needed to be done for a long, long time. This wasn't "cancel culture", this was grass roots, democracy at work. People had tried everything, and nobody did anything about it. And then one day... they did.

This isn't America (thank God). Colston wasn't George Washington, he was a grubby, nasty piece of shit who would be hunted down like a dog if he did what he did today. He didn't deserve a statue, he deserves to be used as a toilet. Yeeting him into the docks was the best thing that Bristol did in a long time. Nothing "stupidpol" about it - quite the opposite, that day there was an incredible atmosphere of solidarity and love, I haven't seen anything like it before or since. Please don't assume we're as stupid and ahistorical as Americans - we know exactly what we're doing.

Thank you for coming to my TED talk.

Neoliberals just don't get it.

or which country has the best economy? Britain Vs. Japan

Here's an article that should be called "Mass unemployment and industrial stagnation are A Good Thing 'cos then we'd have slightly better TVs, or something." Have a shufti:

https://origin-www.bloombergview.com/articles/2016-01-20/japan-must-let-zombie-companies-die


It basically argues that the Japanese are stupid, evil and bad because they subsidize some of the biggest companies in the world. What they should do is embrace neoliberal solutions, let everyone go bust and embrace "creative destruction" (an insane slogan that had to have been dreamed up by an economist on the really bad drugs).

This company is Bad and Wrong and A Failure.

Now, imagine that you are a high-ranking government official of a medium-sized, advanced, industrial country. What would you rather have? The possibility of slightly better TVs together with the certainty of mass unemployment, industrial stagnation and social unrest, or the dreaded "OMG zombie companies" and *gasp* public debt! ...together with... high employment, cheap goods, and world-class corporations?

Put it this way: Would you rather be Japan, which has one set of things, or Britain, which has the other - and all of the problems that each of those lead to?

The UK has followed a strict neoliberal prescription since the late 1970s: Tight budgets, slashed social spending, no industrial subsidies, regular bonfires of regulations, freewheeling enterpenerurial capitalism, broken trade unions, corporations can do what they like, the City can do what it likes, and blah, blah, blah, yadda yadda yadda.

Sucessful British factory enjoying fruits of happy times boomtown neoliberal economics 

Japan followed a neo-Keynsian policy since the 1990s when the bubble economy burst and it became obvious to even the most stupid person that capitalism sometimes needs a helping hand and a little cash to grease the wheels, especially when times are hard and orders are thin.

Failing Japanese factory, enduring failed policies that don't work because reasons

Japan makes consumer goods, solar panels, industrial equipment, robots, computers, and cute cartoons. It's an industrial and cultural behemoth. Sure, it has a lot of public sector debt. But this can be managed and kicked down the road, and that debt buys you something: Social stability (which the Japanese prize). After 2011's triple-horror real life disaster movie of an earthquake, tsunami and raging nuclear meltdown all at once, the country bounced back and is still basically functional. It has its problems, but so does every society. The worst? Japanese people work too hard and they live a long time! IT'S CHAOS I TELLS YA!

The UK makes: Crap TV shows, some of the best comics nobody's ever heard of... er... the Raspberry Pi! Er... oh yeah, weapons! We make lots of guns, tanks and bombs... er... um.. ah... I'm sure there's more but that's about it.

Exports are good, though!

And it shows. We have millions on the breadline and hundreds of thousands on actual breadlines living on food handouts. Also mass homelessness- nobody quite knows how many Britons live on the street, but slumped, emaciated figures sleeping rough are a common sight here, as are small but growing shanty towns consisting of tents routinely handed out by charities to the homeless - because there is such a housing shortage, at least anywhere near where the jobs are, that people can't afford to live anywhere.

There is a lot of luxury housing, but that's because housing is considered a luxury.

 As a result of all this human misery and industrial mega-fail there is such social instability that cities periodically erupt into mass rioting - the last time, 2011 - the same year as the tsunami in Japan- involved every city in England and lasted five days.

That creative destruction, working its, er...

traditional neoliberal economic, er... magic. Yes.

Our relationship with our neighbours is poor and deteriorating as public anger is whipped up into a frenzy and channelled into an orgy of xenophobic scapegoating by the newspapers, which all seem to be owned by the same handful of rich, right wing men.

The government seems to actively despise the people while using said scapegoating to leverage even more power; meanwhile Scotland and Northern Ireland are openly talking about secession - raising the possibility of actual Soviet-style national dissolution to go with our Soviet-style stagnation and poverty. Creative destruction indeed!

We don't even make better TVs. In fact, I have no idea when we last made a TV. I know we used to make computers, back in the '80s... you can probably see them in one of our many museums. But perhaps I'm being unfair: I mean, we do have the Rasbperry Pi...

British computer

 Japanese computer

Oh, and about that debt everyone goes on about? We also have massive debt, but it's all either off the books (thanks, PFI and bailouts!) or private - which means that when people can't pay anymore because they need to buy food or pay bills, we're going to get another crash.

So yeah, "Zombie companies" and government bailouts, while indeed lossy and imperfect, are better than the alternative.

It's better to be Japan than Britain. Neoliberals just don't get it.