Murder in Moscow.

As soon as Nemtsov was reported dead I knew the news would take it up as a fresh charge against the Putin regime. People are right to be suspicious given the circumstances, the background and the record of assassination in Vladimir's motherland:

Imagine if armed thugs assassinated John Boehner, the Republican speaker of America’s House of representatives, in front of the White House. Though nowhere near as sympathetic a character as Nemtsov, few would have difficulty pointing their fingers at the White House. That Putin is responsible should thus not be subject to question. But, Russia being what it is, no one can be 100% sure. The authoritarian consensus is that strong. 

It’s probably the most significant killing in the former USSR since Anna Politkovskaya was shot on Putin’s birthday almost a decade ago. Five men have since been convicted of Politkovskaya’s murder, but the questions around who ordered her death predictably remain. It is plausible Politkovskaya was murdered on orders from Ramzan Kadyrov, the thug who keeps Chechnya under Putin’s thumb, especially as three of the convicted are Chechen men. Whether or not Putin had any foreknowledge of the killing has yet to be confirmed or disconfirmed. Undoubtedly, it was convenient for a critic of Russia’s aggression towards Chechnya to be silenced. 

Following Nemtsov’s demise, the Russian government moved quickly to condemn his muder. The authorities have since suggested that the killing was a ‘provocation’ timed to undermine Putin, and are even investigating the possible role of Islamists, as Nemtsov was ethnically Jewish. Never mind that he was a convert to Russian Orthodoxy. The fact that Nemtsov was a critic of Putin has been rightly emphasised by Russian opposition figures, and Western media. Meanwhile RT has been predictably attacking Western media for its coverage of the killing. This is far from over.

Sectarianism be Praised!

The Left has long been prone to sectarianism, and famously so, due to its fissiparous condition and natural inclination to the narcissism of fine distinctions - to borrow Freud's words. Socialism comes in about a thousand different shades of red. The same can be said of anarchism, communism and feminism. It's probable that the sectarian tendency will never be overcome, partly this is because there has to be disagreement and debate. Dissensus rather than consensus. It's clear that there is a need for discussion over serious issues in practice as well as theory. This is true of morality as well as the organisation of government. In such areas there is a need for a lot more dissensus and not less. The same can be said of the refinement of principle and development of theory itself. This isn't to endorse the destructive strain of sectarianism which tears apart groups and grinds away at mass-popular movements. It's this which has helped to further the Left's decline around the world since the end of the Cold War. We can't blame it all on the CIA, I must concede. But it's important to always insist on a subtle distinction.

It's the problem is the shift to an intolerant variety of sectarianism which is so troubling, and with good reason too. The point at which the disagreement becomes a hindrance to a social movement. To borrow the words of the late Alexander Cockburn "The Left's idea of a meeting is to form a circle, point the guns inward and then fire." This is exactly the kind of sectarianism that the majority of people find problematic. It can drive a wedge right into a movement, first causing friction and then leading to schismatic bursts that threaten the whole thrust of the organised efforts. As Noam Chomsky has pointed out, the successes of a movement in its commitment to a cause often in turn produce greater unity and solidarity. The sectarian elements are usually marginalised in this way, as it becomes more important to unify around a cause which is more important than our petty differences of theory. The victories of a movement are self-propelling in this way. This could go against Gramscian sequential schemas about the primacy of politics, in that the material conditions may come before the political - likewise, theory very often struggles to keep up with practice.

Sadly it's also true that the destructive sectarian streak of the Left is a self-fulfilling prophecy. Very often the Left is in a state of paralysis thanks to its own bitter squabbles and petty infighting, which would embarrass the Church of England - it truly does come down to a narcissism of fine distinctions! The inability of some to build alliances within the Left has even been matched by those who find it easier to coalesce with the Right. Alexander Cockburn received no end of criticism for consorting with Pat Buchanan over the Iraq war, yet it was a pragmatic move of a committed anti-imperialist. Though it's worth saying that the left-wing worry of a descent into a state of affairs where we take the side of anyone who is critical of US foreign policy is not an confused one. Many conservatives saw Fascism as a "lesser evil" to socialism, even libertarians thought Mussolini was a "moderate" who had saved private property from the red plague. No such calculation would go uncriticised on the Left. One of the reasons why the Right is not as sectarian, and not in the same way, as the Left is that leftists are better than rightists. It's about questions of action.

The rigorous assessment of principle and practice among leftists is not a reason for despair in every instance. The Left ought to be sectarian in this sense, in its commitment to outmatch liberals and conservatives when it comes to democracy, equality and liberty, as well as art, culture and even tradition. This requires a certain refinement and maintenance of principle. It is often overlooked that the conservative claim to a monopoly over culture and tradition is as ludicrous as the suggestion of a liberal monopoly over freedom. Notably it was Leon Trotsky who said "We Marxists have always lived in tradition." He wasn't speaking as a conservative, because there is an alternative conception of tradition to be found in radicalism. It is a cultural body which is constantly remade, as well as opening itself to the participation of ordinary people. At the same time it's not just conservatives who want to preserve the great canon of literature, whereas radicals are about accessibility and dissensus. But it's a fetishistic tendency of conservatives to take something as good just because it stood the test of time. Quality control is something the Left does better.

Spain's Pain.

Santiago Carrillo just passed at the age of 97, perhaps the last major figure of Spanish leftism to have fought in the Civil War and participate in Spain's transition to democracy. He became a major figure in the rising Eurocommunist movement, which could be understood most fairly as an attempt by the Communist Parties of Europe to take an independent line from the Soviet Union. It took the form of an embrace of the democratic norms and institutions of Western Europe in a bid to differentiate itself from Trotskyism. As the Civil War broke out Carrillo was brought into the orbit of the Soviet Union and he was later complicit in the Paracuellos massacre - in which some 2,000 prisoners were shot. The massacre was taken up as an instance of "red barbarism" by Franco's Nationalists. General Franco claimed that the war he waged on Republicans and the Spanish Left in the 1930s was a crusade for Christian civilisation - and he found common cause with reactionary rightists of all stripes to this end.

Franco's Falangists had finished the Second Republic by 1939 and in its place crafted what would be Europe's longest reigning dictatorship. The anarchist revolutionaries of Spain were crushed by the combined forces of Fascism, Stalinism and Western democracies. For the reactionaries in Spain it meant the end of the social upheaval and rebellious unionism that had threatened the fabric of Spanish society for too long. Francoism in Spain was born out of a negation of radicalism, at first Franco only promised a return to order and an end to the revolution. Yet he endorsed liberty, equality and fraternity in his first proclamation. He was quick to promise the middle-class the reversal of land reform, the banning of trade unions along with the parties of the Popular Front. The General went further to promise the return of the monarchy and defence of Catholicism. Leading conservative intellectual William F Buckley, Jr. described Franco as an 'authentic national hero' and condemned the left-wing government as 'visionaries, ideologues, Marxists and nihilists'.

As noted by Richard Seymour, the priority in rural areas of Spain during the Republican era was land reform and the countryside was subject to high unemployment. This helped the Popular Front government to spring up with the promise of quick land reform. The unemployed peasants couldn't wait for the government to deliver and opted to occupy large estates, starting with 3,000 farms in the province of Badajoz. The government legalised the early occupations given the amount of civil unrest and hundreds of thousands of peasants were resettled. The seizures provided not just land and work, a democratic forum was opened up where arguments were waged over the whole future of how the society would develop from then on. It was this which General Franco conquered and destroyed, the peasants and leftist leaders were swiftly done away with. Franco set out to undercut the Left with promise of nationalisations, even the Falange flag was designed to mimmick the flags of the anarchists they intended to annihilate.

Today the very radicalism that the Spanish Fascists had fought to eradicate has resurfaced in the time of austerity and widespread despair. As Fascism collapsed and Spain became a monarchical democracy Juan Manuel Sánchez Gordillo came to power in Marinaleda in 1979 and, as the rest of the world fell under the spell of neoliberalism, embarked upon the construction of a pocket of what has been described as a 'communist utopia'. There in Marinaleda there is no need for mortgages, while full employment has almost been achieved Sánchez Gordillo has sought to move to a common ownership of land and establish wage equality. Housing is now a right in Marinaleda, taxes are low and the groundwork of a direct democracy laid down. This continues while the rest of Spain suffers an unemployment rate of 25%, even the rest of Andalusia endures a 34% unemployment level. The situation is actually more dire than it is in moribund Greece in this regard. Everywhere there is disaffection and it has taken on living forms in the streets.

The Mayor of Marinaleda has become a prominent figure seen as a surfer on the tall waves of popular anger at the sight of the government handing billions to banks and cutting services to cover the bill. It's obvious he is not a lone-wolf either. The 8 million strong indignados have protested for hundreds of days against the austerity regimes of the established Left and Right of Spain's mainstream politics. The indignados have no faith in the formal institutions of representative democracy anymore. The striking miners of Asturias have taken to firing homemade rocket launchers at riot police and blocking off roads. It was the Asturian miners who were put down by Franco's forces in 1934 only to awaken from their slumber in 1962 and fight valiantly. Franco killed 3,000 miners in 1934 and captured many thousands more, but still they rose up again. Now it's the austerity regime of the Spanish government backed by the Euroconservatives at the heart of the EU that the miners are fighting against.

The egalitarian pocket Marinaleda stands out in Andalusia where around half the arable land is owned by 2% of the land-owners. In the Mayor's own words "The concentration of land ownership in Andalusia is 10% higher than it was in the Second Republic. They tried an agrarian reform. But it was annulled with Franco's coup d'etat... The agrarian reform is still pending." Sánchez Gordillo has been most controversial for orchestrating the looting of supermarkets. It was an act of civil disobedience to grab lentils, oils, beans, chickpeas and milk in order to redistribute the supplies through food banks to the poor. The police have been unable to arrest Sánchez Gordillo given his immunity as the Mayor of Marinaleda. The renegade Mayor has issued calls for other mayors to follow his example and for the occupation of empty buildings owned by the banks. A welcome cry in a country with 800,000 empty homes and millions in need of affordable housing. The death of European social democracy gives many good reason to seek out a more radical solution.

Weakspots of Despotism.

The theorist of non-violent resistance Gene Sharp has been credited as the major intellectual influence on the Arab Spring. It was seminal book From Dictatorship to Democracy that has been cited as the principle inspiration for the grass-roots uprisings all over the Middle East and democratic movements elsewhere. Let's be careful not attribute too much to Sharp, the revolutionary explosion came out of certain socio-economic conditions in the region. We shouldn't exaggerate the role of external sparks, the democratic movements of the Middle East were endogenous. To suggest otherwise risks the reinforcement of Orientalist illusions of a primitive Arab rabble, 'It had to be our revolution really, they couldn't have done it on their own!' But it was interesting to flick through Sharp's book and I recommend it. In regard to political power it cites the following sources:

1. Authority, the belief among the people that the regime is legitimate, and that they have a moral duty to obey it;
2. Human resources, the number and the importance of the persons and groups which are obeying, cooperating, or providing assistance to the rulers;
3. Stills and knowledge, needed by the regime to perform specific actions and supplied by the cooperating persons and groups;
4. Intangible factors, psychological and ideological factors that may induce people to obey and assist the rulers;
5. Material resources, the degree to which the rulers control or have access to property, natural resources, financial resources, the economic system, and means of communication and transportation; and
6. Sanctions, punishments, threatened or applied, against the disobedient and non-cooperative to ensure the submission and cooperation that are needed for the regime to exist and carry out its policies.

Sharp notes that each of these sources in turn presupposes a degree of acceptance of the regime, whether it just be submission or complicity, which is not guaranteed. This is very interesting with regard to the section on the weaknesses of dictatorships, which lists the following weaknesses:

1. The cooperation of a multitude of people, groups, and institutions needed to operate the system may be restricted or withdrawn.

2. The requirements and effects of the regime's past policies will somewhat limit its present ability to adopt and implement conflicting policies.

3. The system may become routine in its operation, less able to adjust quickly to new situations.

4. Personnel and resources already allocated for existing tasks will not be easily available for new needs.

5. Subordinates fearful of displeasing their superiors may not report  accurate or complete information needed by the dictators to make decisions.

6. The ideology may erode, and myths and symbols of the system may become unstable.

7. If a strong ideology is present that influences one's view of reality, firm adherence to it may cause inattention to actual conditions and needs.

8. Deteriorating efficiency and competency of the bureaucracy, or excessive controls and regulations, may make the system's policies and operation ineffective.

9. Internal institutional conflicts and personal rivalries and hostilities may harm, and even disrupt, the operation of the dictatorship.

10. Intellectuals and students may become restless in response to conditions, restrictions, doctrinalism, and repression.

11. The general public may over time become apathetic, skeptical, and even hostile to the regime.

12. Regional, class, cultural, or national differences may become acute.

13. The power hierarchy of the dictatorship is always unstable to some degree, and at times extremely so Individuals do not only remain in the same position in the ranking, but may rise or fall to other ranks or be removed entirely and replaced by new persons.

14. Sections of the police or military forces may act to achieve their own objectives, even against the will of established dictators, including by coup d'etat.

15. If the dictatorship is new, time is required for it to become well established.

16. With so many decisions made by so few peole in the dictatorship, mistakes of judgment, policy, and action are likely to occur.

17. If the regime seeks to avoid these dangers and decentralizes controls and decision making, its control over the central levers of power may be further eroded.

Unwelcome in Putin's Russia.

The conviction of three members of the feminist punk rock group Pussy Riot have drawn sympathy and solidarity from around the world. The crime was ‘hooliganism motivated by religious hatred’ though the performance lasted less than 2 minutes the three singers have received 2 years each. The sentence was excessive by any measure as the standard sentence for ‘hooliganism’ is 15 days. In his usual man-beast posturing Putin claimed that the Pussy Riot singers wouldn’t have survived if they had pulled a similar stunt in a mosque in the Caucasus. It should go without saying that even if this were the case would it mean that Christian countries should stoop to the same level? It has nothing to do with Christianity or offence. Putin has used the Russian Orthodoxy as a rod to beat this feminist punk band because it represents opposition. It demonstrates his ultimate impotence. The father who beats you is not stronger than the father who can instil silence just by looking at you. The obscenity of Putin is close to public view now. This scandal may be a welcome wedge to be driven into an anaemic political discourse.

Putin has long been perched at the apex of ultra-political populism and anti-political despair, it’s inevitable that he will fall rather than relinquish power. Yeltsin did not hold onto his dignity when he gave up the reins of power and neither shall Putin. The impotence of the Kremlin was further demonstrated by the security lockdown that had to be imposed across Moscow in anticipation of protest over the verdict. And there has been plenty of protest, and no doubt there's plenty to come. These events are symptomatic of the authoritarian brand of Russo-capitalism now not even concealed behind democratic institutions. The Kremlin might as well as revert to the old mantra of the Tsars: orthodoxy, authority, nationality. It’s certain that these are the pillars of the superstructure in the Putinian management of Russia's rapacious capitalism. Only in the midst of the chaos inflicted on Russian society by the breakdown of really existing socialism and the turmoil of really existing democracy could Putin take the reins as a self-styled Leviathan.

The exiled oligarch Boris Berezovsky appeared on Newsnight in debate with Putin apologist Alexander Nekrassov over the trial and verdict. Nekrassov insisted that the band should’ve performed elsewhere, as the cathedral has a political resonance in Russia given that it was rebuilt to symbolise the end of Stalinism. He suggests that Pussy Riot should have sung at Lenin’s mausoleum for example. The idea that the band could make a devastating statement against Putin’s rule in this way is farcical.In response, Berezovsky made his standard soap box pose as an enlightened proponent of a people’s capitalism. He made a casual case for religious pluralism, that we all communicate to God in our own way and the particularly free creativity of Pussy Riot poses a threat to tyranny. Then came the usual spiel about Putin’s personal involvement in exiling Berezovsky and poisoning Alexander Litvinenko. No doubt these are major crimes, but Berezovsky’s only real complaint is that the Yeltsin years came to an end. All Berezovsky cares about is stuffing himself with the riches of a vast and beautiful nation.

This simply will not do. We may enjoy the antics of Russian oligarchs in Britain, but there’s a reason these people are over here taking advantage of loopholes in our tax system. The moralisations of Western liberals will not do with this kind of conduct. It's easy for any Russian to see. George Osborne and Peter Mandelson were caught out yachting it with Oleg Deripaska, a Russian oligarch and suspected murderer. That's fine company for the guardians of freedom! And what of this talk of Russia 'immature' democracy? Again, it's a bit rich given that Britain itself is a deformed democracy and the same can be said of its republican neighbours. What about civil liberties and human rights? The former puppet-states of the Soviet Union have done their bit, Uzbekistan have taken prisoners 'renditioned' by Western intelligence agencies to boil them alive. The US government has recently rammed through an act which allows them to legally murder American citizens if they think they are part of the ‘associated forces of al-Qaeda’. Putin can always say "Well, you're no better!" and we walk right into that one on a regular basis.

The juxtaposition between the Kremlin’s whore Nekrassov and the kleptocrat Berezovsky serves as a reminder of the dilemma for the Russian people. The choice for many Russians seems to be a return to the rapacious ‘shock therapy’ after the collapse of the Soviet Union, which plunged over 70 million people into poverty while Moscow became a playground for billionaires and stray dogs. By comparison with the Chinese model the Russian brand of capitalism is particularly inefficient, dysfunctional, cronyistic and unproductive. The Russian state opted to sell-off state industries over night to boldly leap into the developed world. In actuality it just opened up a space for an oligarchy to spring up at the expense of the rest of society. The only major opposition comes from the Communist Party of the Russian Federation. It is more like a far-right party than a socialist party in its bid to criminalise the lives of ‘foreigners’ and ethnic minorities. The choice is Putin or fascism. And all too often we in the West indulge in the illusions of self-love, "Aren't we better than these barbarians?" Meanwhile Russia is no better.

Did you swim here?! Did you swim here?!

I was recently invited to an anarcho-primitivist talk with John Zerzan as speaker by my friend Marmaduke Hutchings. It was packed out with around 120 to 130 people going on my own estimations. It also became apparent that this crowd were already won over and weren’t here to pick a fight with Zerzan. The talk was at Raven’s Row near Spitalfields, there some of his books as well as t-shirt slogans and videos exploring primitivism were on show. After the talk there was food and booze available to the audience. God knows who bankrolls that place. It would be a lively discussion that night. The questions and answers opening featured talk of the ‘proto-fascist’ Batman movie and suggestions that the victims of the recent shooting were really ideologically complicit in the ‘proto-fascistic’ regime. It should be noted that Zerzan didn’t endorse this position. At one point the discussion was derailed over the topic of drug consumption, which culminated with a statement to the effect that “Although koalas are addicted to eucalyptus, they don’t commit genocide.”

 

The height of hilarity was when John recalled the culmination of a questions and answers session that took the form of a man yelling at him "Did you swim here?! Did you swim here?!" The initial emphasis of the talk was on community and its notable absence in our world before making it clear that we don’t want the ‘old hell’ of patriarchal domination and hierarchical control. Rather we want the ‘new hell’ which would be a prelapsarian organic whole of individuals set free from all the old forms of domination and power. The problem here is that there isn’t really a beginning. You can trace these problems to domestication, but then you could trace the roots of domestication back even further. Ultimately you could end up with the view that it is the human race that’s the problem. So we should enjoy the ride and await the end with the knowledge that there will be a great beginning after man. There is nothing that can be done about the fundamental condition of humanity, which we are really just rapacious homonidesand nothing can be made of us.

 

 

You can easily see where the conservative ethos of John Gray would clamber into bed with the nihilistic poetry of Charles Bukowski. Of course, Zerzan stresses that he isn’t a ‘collapsist’ who’ll be singing in a meadow while it all falls down. But it is easier to dream of tearing it all down than overthrowing one system for another. When it got topical as Zerzan took up the Batman shootings as an example. Noting the same old songs, the two primary responses in the narrative around the shooting were that the killer is simply evil or that there are too many guns in America. But the US has always been full of guns and there hasn’t always been these shootings, he notes, the same goes for violent psychos. The almost recreational violence and mass-killing must be a social phenomenon, a symptom of the technological society where there are more shootings than elsewhere. This isn’t particularly insightful, as the most violence can be pinned down to where there is a high concentration of available firearms, political fear and social alienation.

 

It’s the techno-culture stupid! It’s ideological and not neutral in any sense. The rolling back of cultural solidarity comes at the same time that the technological ideology pitches its universal solution. It will connect each of us, but it actually helps to atomise us. It promises us a better world and reduces us to passive appendages of machines. We are increasingly inert in our reliance on GPS systems, the internet and mobile phones. In Japan you can buy bathing machines which close over you like a coffin. In South Korea there is robotic teaching, hugging and even French-kissing. He could’ve included the sex doll craze in Japan, that there are many men who prefer fake women that they can keep in the boot of their car to real women. We’re at the end of sensual experience.In the background of the problems which plague our civilisation Zerzan sees technological domestication at the root of it all: overpopulation and environmental degradation as well as drugs and disease. According to this view industrialisation generates cancer and other diseases.

It’s not just that domestication removes us from what used to be ordinary aspects of human life. He notes that America is an over-drugged society where it has gotten to the point that the drugs can actually be detected in the water supply. There are 80 million Americans with sleeping disorders, tens of millions using drugs to get through the day.In the same vein industrialisation coupled with domestication that the problem of overpopulation came about. The advent of agriculture was the beginning of this. It was the mistake to go from taking what nature gave to us for free to attempts of controlling and engineering nature. When confronted the horrors of pre-civilisation Zerzan maintains that cannibalism, head-hunting and genital mutilation are all products of domestication. He knew Freud’s writing on civilisation in the aftermath of war, that the civilisation is a construct for regulating the suppressed forces of violent sexual urges inside us. Domestication is a wound that never heals, it’s a machine for happiness that creates unhappiness.

According to this view private property emerges from domestication, John Zerzan contrasts himself against the Marxists here. He skips over the materialist reading of history, that the productive modes of exploitation create the pre-conditions for the next stage. In this way slavery and feudalism created the necessary conditions for capitalism to emerge, in turn capitalism may lead to socialism. Zerzan would probably reject this as another notion of technological progress, for him every political project is reducible to this fetish for technology. But it seems as though Zerzan, to some extent, wants technology without technology as he claims that there are other ways of powering respiratory machines than the systems we fall back on today. His example of electricity generated through cycling. At the same time it could be said that the anarcho-primitivism to which Zerzan subscribes really falls into the ease with which we can imagine the collapse of our entire world than it is to foresee a post-capitalist future.

In the same way that Zerzan dismissed the ‘same song’ of the American narrative around shootings to differentiate his position from conservatives and liberals he made time to distinguish himself from the other factions of the Left. Even though Zerzan may not see himself as a man of the Left, it is the case that the anarchist tradition comes out of 18^th Century classical liberalism and developed into libertarian socialism in the 19^th Century. The free-market libertarians are really a 20^th Century phenomenon, another outgrowth of classical liberalism. For him the Left and the Right are both subject to the ideological shibboleths of technological progress, this dynamic is something to overcome and transcend. In a classic display of left-wing sectarianism Zerzan made periodic slights against Noam Chomsky and environmentalists, the main competition to his position at the eco-libertarian end of the radical Left. Really this is where Zerzan comes across as ultra-leftist and as we shall see he’s not adverse to forms of comfortable resistance.

Chomsky is wrong to claim that there isn’t a way of eliminating technology and even if there is we shouldn’t. Yet Zerzan isn’t all that clear about how we can break apart the system and return to that land of ‘Once upon a time…’ where there is no racism, homophobia, misogyny and no more hierarchical authority, no statism and no capitalism. When pushed on this Zerzan seems to opt for a dichotomy of ‘small actions’ such as cycling and ‘big acts’ of violence. He shirked away from any kind of mass-violence in a Khmer Rouge style destruction of society. Though he doesn’t evade the endorsement of political violence, it has to be about the destruction of private property. In such cases Zerzan stands on the side of rioters, the Earth Liberation Front and Animal Liberation Front. He also shirked away from a sudden collapse as that would reap a high body-count, in this sense Zerzan seems like less of an anarchist as it would imply a gradual transition. Rather than simply endorse the coming collapse of Western civilisation as a new hope, he calls for a primitive future.

This is where the ultra-leftist sectarianism converges with comfortable resistance and the nostalgia for a world outside of all our modern problems. Similarly the Greens can be damned if they deny that the system can’t be saved through innovations to eventually replace fossil fuels with sustainable energy. As much as the eco-Right are deluded in their plan to save capitalism through carbon caps, it isn’t the case that the eco-socialists are about the preservation of capitalist society. Really many Greens share Zerzan’s nostalgia for a human community of communities which precedes the horrors of industrial capitalism. In his vision community will instil responsibility in the same way that it is in co-ops as the ‘fuck-ups’ are present at meetings where collective deliberating goes on and everything is discussed democratically. This is where it’s clear that Zerzan is a product of the 60s, when the commune movement hoped to establish an alternate society free of any kind of power structure only to find the old structures were quickly reconstituted.

It seems then that there would be a need for conservatives to hold it all in place once it had been achieved. Actually you could read a conservative nostalgia out of Zerzan's view of the past. Amnesia is for reactionaries, though he isn't guilty of wiping away inconvenient truths it is the case that the anarcho-primitivists are selective about what they want to go back to. It is fitting then that Zerzan stands by autonomous deference within the system, this way we can all do our bit in the resistance. There is a conservative side to this also, as we remain inside our bubbles without televisions and mobile phones reading about the future primitive. The political is not just an individual decision, if we want to change the world we need collective acts and organisation. The wish almost matches the nightmares of many environmentalists: that we could sit still for too long and the world as it is would be gone forever. But this would be a crude anarcho-primitivism. The more civilisation, the more neuroses seems to summarise Zerzan’s position – it’s better to go back than to continue forward, backwards is forward!

The Politics of a Litterateur.

With the campaign slogan "You'll get more with Gore", Gore Vidal ran for Congress in 1960 in a traditionally Republican district of New York. The planks in the platform including recognition of Mao's China, federal aid for education and progressive taxes. He received more votes than any Democrat in five decades, but still lost. Though Gore Vidal has strong links to the Democratic Party through his family as well as his own affiliation in the early 1970s he chaired the People's Party alongside prominent socialists like Benjamin Spock. The Party campaigned for withdrawal from Vietnam, legalisation of cannabis, a higher minimum wage and the introduction of a maximum wage. Ultimately Vidal opted to support McGovern against Nixon, to avoid splitting the anti-war vote and hopefully end the Vietnam war. It would be the last chance for New Deal liberalism to save itself. He ran for the Senate in 1982 and campaigned to tax Church income, nationalisation of natural resources and the replacement of the current system with a Parliamentary democracy.

In 1988 Gore Vidal presented five proposals to improve the American Republic. The first of which was to limit elections to 8 weeks and secondly to ban any candidate or party from buying time on television, radio and newspapers. In Vidal's America the media ought to provide free time and space for the candidates to be interviewed and debate with one another. No more, no less. The growing decay of political language and the system at large was a great worry of Gore's in his later years. The costs of advertising must be eliminated as a necessary step to the removal of money from the political arena. Thirdly, social security should be factored out of fiscal policy in order to expose the bloated military expenditure to the American people. This is all a part of Vidal's isolationist convictions. He goes further to recommend American withdrawal from NATO and all foreign adventures, as well as an end to military aid to foreign countries (e.g. Israel). The line is populist as the cash can be put to better use at home, for infrastructure and public education Vidal stresses.

The fourth proposal was to legalise the use and sale of all drugs because Prohibition only made the Mafia rich while alcoholism sky-rocketed in the 1920s. Addiction cannot be eliminated through criminalisation. This fits into his own commitment to civil liberties and rights pitched since the 1960s when Vidal first moved to the Democratic Left. He later corresponded with Timothy McVeigh and found that he understood the libertarian reasoning for a rebellion against the government. After all the Clinton regime had the FBI incinerate 80 people at Waco with the broad approval of the liberal Left. Vidal remained a scourge of civil authoritarianism when the Bushites stole the election and launched the country into war. The last proposal was to end the Cold War and initiate the beginning of economic integration between America and Russia, justified by self-preservation in a world increasingly centred around China and Japan. It would seem Vidal was internationalist on economics and isolationist on foreign policy.

The propositions are reformist, even conservative, in tone as the recommendations of are about the preservation of the body politic. The ruling-class and prevailing politics had become a drag on the Republic in his mind. The national security state would inevitably threaten the foundations of the United States. Its rapacious growth would eventually devour every chunk of the mountain of revenues from the American tax-payer. It was in this same presentation that Vidal delved into the details of the 1986 US Budget. He breaks it down for us: out of $794 billion in revenue a total of $294 billion goes to social security while $286 billion goes to defence, $12 billion on foreign arms to client states and $8 billion on energy (e.g. nuclear weapons); $27 billion on benefits for war vets and $142 billion on interest payments for loans used to prop up the national security state. Other federal spending came to $177 billion, partly the size of the deficit. Out of the $500 billion left over after social security around $475 billion is spent on the national security state.

 

 

Out of all the Founding Fathers it is Aaron Burr who is most admired by Gore Vidal, not Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson or even Tom Paine. For Vidal it is the man who was never President but served as Vice President under Jefferson who is most important. He notes that Burr introduced a degree of professionalism to American politics. Later, Aaron Burr challenged Alexander Hamilton to a duel before shooting him - a standard maintained by Vice Presidents until Dick Cheney mistook a lawyer for a quail. It's clear that Vidal saw himself as a man of the Jeffersonian revolutionary tradition. He remained concerned that the US was desecrating its republican ideals. The way Vidal portrayed Jefferson in Burr was particularly controversial back in 1973 as it included an account of Jefferson's relationship with Sally Hemings. The historians of the time argued that a gentleman would have never had sex with a slave and since Thomas Jefferson was the consummate gentleman he would've never had an affair with Sally Hemings.

American 'Fascism'.

We shouldn't use the word Fascism lightly. The US certainly isn't fascist today but the crisis has opened the door to political uncertainty. We can't see where things could go and that's worrying enough. That being said Fascism, as it was in the 20th Century, is not simply going to spring up again. It will come in a very different form, don't forget Fascism doesn't really have any universal or coherent set of characteristics (except maybe an extreme reactive tendency of nationalism). The similarities between America and Germany in the 20s are quite worrying because we know what happened in the Wiemar Republic. This isn't unique to America at this time, a poll found that 48% of Brits would vote for a far-right party if it wasn't fascistic in imagery. It's not unusual to see a rise of anti-immigrant nativism and nationalist populism in recessions, but this isn't just another recession. Walter Benjamin seems to have it right when he deemed Fascism to be the product of a failed revolution.

The United States is effectively the only society on earth founded as a federal capitalist republic. There is no monarchical feudal backdrop as there is in Europe and this means that American conservatism tends to be quite different from traditional conservatism in Europe. It's not that the Europeans don't have a long history of extermination, slavery and war (if anything Europe has a longer history) but the Americans have a 'blanking out' point in a much clearer way. You can pin-point the 'beginning' as it were, which is the basis of the American national mythology. This will become a basis of an ideologico-spiritual crisis with American decline, as it was for the British who have yet to fully accept what happened in 1945. There are upsides in American ideology that Europe lacks. Don't forget that Jefferson wanted a revolution every 20 years including a reassessment/revision of the constitution. The idea is of a permanent renovation of 1776.

If we're going to carry out a strict comparison of the US and the Fascist states of the 1930s then there are problems with the analogy. For one thing American nationalism tends not to sever itself from the values of the Enlightenment, it at least has to maintain the pretence of standing for and defending those values. Fascism was always about the destruction of the whole Enlightenment project of rights and freedoms. This is what separates Stalinism from Fascism, can you imagine the Nazis putting Jews on trial before the Holocaust? This is the reason that there were show elections held in Tito's Yugoslavia and Stalinist Russia was officially a 'people's democracy'. Even the erosion of individual rights and liberties in the US has yet to sever the cord to the Enlightenment totally. In fact it's often the case that this encroachment on the individual is accomplished within the same framework, under the umbrella of 'security' and so on.

The promise of an alternate modernity devoid of class struggle is completely missing for one thing. You have to keep in mind that the Fascists promised a 'Third Position' beyond socialism and capitalism. There is no racialised populism rooted in notions of 'blood and soil' that displaces the class struggle into a fight to preserve an organic society from a Jewish-Masonic-Bolshevik cabal. There is definitely scapegoating, racism and red-baiting, but it's not on the same scale at all. The racial myths that the Nazis adhered to came out of England originally and were predominant in the US for a long time. Now it's only the KKK and other fringe lunatics that adhere to the myth of a master race. As for militarism and civil authoritarianism, these things are not unique to Fascism but are not new to America either. The US has possibly killed in excess of 10 million people since the end of WW2, Nazi Germany set out to exterminate about 40 to 50 million Europeans and set off a chain of events that left 60 million dead.

I'm not sure that there is a word which neatly sums up the US situation. It is a business run society devoid of any safety net with an authoritarian state and bloated military. It's clear that really existing democracy is decaying in front of our eyes, but it seems unlikely that there will be a dictatorship in America tomorrow. It's not always easy to sum up an entire political system with one word, luckily Hitler and Mussolini named their system - while in the US there is officially no ideology and no system. The widespread attitude is a suspicion of politicians, parties and the government rather than a worship of any of these things. Even the radical Right in the US seems to be in the grips of an anti-political purism, the theoconservatives and neoconservatives have been marginalised by a libertarian push that the GOP are trying to use to destroy what's left of government programmes. I'm not saying that there aren't things that we should be worried about and that there could never be an American fascism. But let's try not to use the word loosely.

The Death of a Stalinist.

So Kim Jong-il has died at the age of 70, going by Russian records, and the hermit state of North Korea is in transition to another leader and this time the successor seems to be a man who has yet to enter his fourth decade on this planet. The country descended into 10 days of mourning as it had when Kim Il-sung died in 1994. It was out of respect to the wishes of the "Great Leader" that Kim Jong-il was allowed to become the Chairman of the National Defence Commission. But it was not automatic, Kim Jong-il took 3 years to consolidate his power within the bureaucracy of the Workers' Party. It was decided in 1998 that the Eternal President of the Republic would be Kim Il-sung and so Kim Jong-il is technically not the President of the Democratic People's Republic of Korea. So the notion of a President for life has been taken one step further, perhaps we should deem North Korea a "thanatocracy" as Christopher Hitchens suggested.

Now it looks as though Kim Jong-un will takeover the party-state apparatus in a similar manner, there have already been purges to undermine potential rivals for power. This was a surprise to Western commentators who predicted that the military establishment would not continue the Kim dynasty given the horrific state of affairs in the country. The importance of the Kim dynasty to the ruling ideology in North Korea cannot be understated. If the family goes then it is likely that the entire regime will have little to hold itself together. After all it was Kim Il-sung who fought the Japanese and oversaw the reconstruction of the country after the horrors of the Korean war, in which over 2 million were slaughtered. Even though the war was sparked after Kim Il-sung talked Stalin into backing an invasion of South Korea in 1950. But the Korean People's Army consisted of the same forces who had fought the Japanese and to this day the regime relies on this record of anti-colonial struggle.

As with figures such as Tito in Yugoslavia, Hoxha in Albania and Ceaușescu in Romania when Kim Il-sung died in 1994 commentators looked for signs of a coming collapse. It is likely that the military establishment tightened control of the population as Kim Jong-il consolidated his power. No doubt the privileged position of the military comes down to the interdependent relationship it enjoys with the Party. The military cannot rule nakedly and therefore requires some kind of justification and in turn the Kim clan fall back on the military for power. It is worth noting that the most recent amendments to the constitution have removed all references to communism and even Marxism-Leninism, instead old ideas of Juche (self-reliance) and Songun (military first) have become central. The old communist slogans have little appeal to the profoundly conservative establishment, no wonder then that the regime has become staunchly nationalist in character under Kim Jong-il.

As a consequence of the succession from father to son and now to grandson there has yet to be a process of de-Stalinization in North Korea. The personality cult around the family remains elaborate and in full swing as it was started by Kim Il-sung in the 1950s. But the Stalinist model became increasingly isolated as the Soviet Union underwent a brief period of liberalisation under Khrushchev. Then came the mutation of Maoism into a unique form of authoritarian capitalism and the collapse of really existing socialism in Eastern Europe. The mock Stalinism of Albania and Romania melted in the face of popular rage, as goulash communism ran dry in Hungary and the Berlin Wall came down in Germany. Tito’s death gave way to ethnic tensions which would eventually tear apart Yugoslavia in the most horrific manner. No one in the West saw it coming and the US took credit for it all, even though it came about as a result of internal tensions. The fallout left North Korea isolated and dependent on a now rationed flow of resources.

No doubt the power structure of North Korea and the scarcity of oil led to the food crisis of the 1990s. In Cuba the Soviet collapse prompted the decentralisation of agriculture, to prevent the shortage of fuel from creating a food shortage which could in turn create a famine. By contrast, North Korea opted to maintain the old structure of centralised control and even sought to intensify the Songun doctrine as the regime relied even more on the military establishment for its strength. The brutality of the regime apparently reached new heights. The intense militarism which came as Kim Jong-il took power exacerbated the famine, which came out of the centralised control of the state and the decline of ready access to oil. The military and scientific elites were given priority in the allocation of resources. In the consequent famine over 2 million people died as Kim Jong-il retained power and enjoyed a life of excessive indulgence.

The countryside became a source of great shame to the regime, which still seeks to conceal the disgraceful conditions from the outside world. The constraints on farming from a fuel shortage exacerbated by the Songun doctrine have left the countryside picked clean of vegetation as the military is given priority. The preference is to keep its tourists to the cities where the illusion of a workers’ paradise can be maintained. In the midst of the famine came rumours of cannibalism and the sight of people grazing on grass like cows. Since then there have been small openings for market forces in North Korea since the collapse of really existing socialism around the rest of the world. The relations with Russia and China descended into exploitative arrangements, with North Korean workers sold to chop wood in the Russian East as increasing numbers of Chinese entered the country to sell food and clothing. Most recently footage of women picking grass to sell has been smuggled out of the country.

The fears of a power struggle sparking violence on the Korean peninsula are not outlandish as North-South relations are at a low point. There was a power struggle in the 1990s between the old guard and the reformists who wanted to mimic the Chinese model of ‘capitalism with Asian values’. We don’t know the details of the tension, but it is clear that Kim Jong-il had taken over the Workers’ Party with his father elevated to Eternal President. It was clear that the few openings made for markets were the only concessions that would be made as the military establishment formed the base on which Kim Jong-il sat. The principle of Songun made it sure that the military was privileged over the rest of North Korean society. But it is likely that the regime has been preparing for this succession for a while. There have been purges throughout the year and it would likely be a method of securing the succession to Kim Jong-un. Any sign of an uprising against the regime remains to be seen, but when the collapse comes it won't be seen coming from afar.

Despair at American Injustice.

The Time for Rage.

As one of the people who lit candles for Troy Davis outside the US embassy on Thursday night, I feel obligated to write of the sheer obscenity of the case and others like it. Above us the Old Glory rippled in the wind as an armed guard was poised across from us, this is what marked the building apart from the others in Grosvenor Square. The statues of Dwight Eisenhower and Ronald Reagan stand at the opposite ends of the embassy, perhaps to signify the beginning and end of the Cold War. Of course, the statues were not there to celebrate the savagery of the Korean War and the depraved crimes in which the US government indulged throughout the 1980s. The Old Glory had not been raised up above the embassy to take pride in the bloodied foundations of the United States, where the remains of millions of Native Americans and Africans rest in unsettled and unmarked graves. The statues no doubt commemorate "truth, justice and the American way" not to mention America as the "Land of the Free" and "Home of the Brave".

How many Americans will think of Troy Davis when they next pledge allegiance? The details of the Troy Davis case are almost as hideous as Justice Scalia's scrotum. As The Guardian rightly notes: Out of the nine witnesses, seven have since recanted their testimony and some have cited police intimidation. One of the witnesses was illiterate and could not read the statement which they signed at a police station. No murder weapon was ever recovered. There was no DNA evidence at all and the case against Troy Davis was based on the testimony of witnesses. Out of the remaining two witnesses it is possible that one of them is Sylvester Coles, who has been implicated by nine people as a serious suspect in the murder. When he was drunk Coles confessed to a friend that he was the real killer. He has admitted that he owned the same model weapon as that was used to kill Mark MacPhail, supposedly Coles gave away the gun earlier on the day of the shooting. The only reaction of a real human being to all of this is despair.

Bare in mind Rick Perry has signed around 235 death warrants in the last 10 years and it was his predecessor George the Anointed who signed 152 in 4 years as Texan Governor. This is out of 475 executions since 1976 and 413 currently stew on death row in Huntsville. But let's not shirk from criticism of the Democrats and remember it was Bill Clinton who saw to it that Ricky Ray Rector was executed in 1992. Rector had survived shooting himself in the head after he had shot a police officer in the back. He was left "seriously mentally impaired", to say the least, on death row in an Arkansas prison cell for over 10 years. The court had rejected the claim of "grave mental impairment" and gave him the death penalty. Rather than pardon the man Clinton exploited the situation to wipe the press clean of the latest sex scandal - with Gennifer Flowers - to blight his precious campaign. On the night of his execution, Rector saved a slice of pecan pie for later, not understanding his death would come first. It took them 45 minutes to find a vein to shoot full of sodium thiopental and Clinton had dinner with Mary Steenburgen.

The 40th anniversary of the Attica Prison riot passed a week or so ago, it was September 9th 1971 when the hostage situation was crushed at the behest of Governor Nelson Rockefeller with the support of Richard Nixon. Over 2,200 prisoners seized control of the jail and held 39 guards hostage for four days in reaction to the death of activist George Jackson at the hands of prison guards in an escape attempt at San Quentin. The troopers were sent in to the jail and let loose over 2,000 rounds indiscriminately, killing 29 prisoners and 10 guards before going onto beat and torture even more prisoners. Cornel West has a word for the process whereby people become deferential subjects to the Establishment to the extent that they consent to domination and control. West calls this process "niggerization", not just of blacks but of whites as well, and he holds that Attica was a counter-move against this process. For the Establishment the riot had to be brought down in case it spread to other prisons, as was the case with riots which swept across America in the 60s.

In the 1940s there was an opening for black people to enter the workforce as labourers and escape a system of de facto slavery which continued after the American Civil War. The rise of radical sentiments and civil disobedience in the 60s made way for greater progress. But the opening was closed in the 1970s as the economy became finance-based and the role of African-Americans became increasingly superfluous once more. So the need for a huge system of incarceration emerged, which might explain why there are currently over 7 million Americans in some phase of the penal system. Of course, the root problem is the neoliberal model which appears to have finally collapsed into stagnancy. It is clear that the American political system has long been broken, with the opposition as rudderless as the powerful themselves. In the words of Thomas Jefferson "God forbid we should ever be 20 years without such a rebellion." For Jefferson rebellion is not a constant condition, though it does eternally return and the US is long overdue.

Gaddafi's Greatest Hits?

After Gaddafi reaffirmed his position in the mid 1970s the Libyan government continued to embark upon an interventionist path abroad. In the 70s the regime stood shoulder-to-shoulder with Idi Amin in Uganda as it propped up the ANC in South Africa. Repeatedly Gaddafi interfered in the politics of other Arab states, holding that the Arab people are for unity and the rulers stand in the way. A series of plots against leaders in other countries were uncovered, including in Egypt and Tunisia. Gaddafi played the part of a revolutionary looking to liberate the masses of the Arab world and to unite the Arab states carved out in colonial times. The Colonel argued that it is a moral duty to support every movement that stands for the liberation of the exploited and oppressed. This is where Gaddafi comes across as a strange parallel of a liberal interventionist, perhaps one of those self-proclaimed "democratic revolutionaries" who fought to bring American pornography to Russia. Gaddafi has also acted to mediate disputes in African countries such as Mali, specifically between the government and rebels. He has even sent peace keeping missions to countries.

By 1980 it was clear that there was dissent within Libya which the Colonel acted to suppress. There was a mutiny in the Libyan army at Tobruk which Gaddafi crushed. There were numerous assassination attempts over the years and the self-proclaimed "Brother Leader of the Revolution" had survived a coup attempt thanks to the CIA. Rocky times lay ahead as Libya went to war with Chad, with the US, Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Israel supporting Chad. Around the same time the Libyan government was looking to align itself with the Soviet Union as it saw the writing on the wall from the US. Even though just the year before Billy Carter attended the 10th anniversary celebrations of the Gaddafi's ascent to power. By which point the CIA had definitely abandoned its' pragmatic position on the Libyan government. There was soon little tolerance for Gaddafi as he lent support to the Sandinista movement that had deposed the vile Somoza in Nicaragua. The Americans were looking to keep their "backyard" in order.

In 1981 the Reagan administration declared the "War on Terrorism" and shot down two Libyan fighter jets in disputed waters before Reagan ordered US citizens to leave Libya and then refused US passport holders to travel there. Before the year was out the Reaganites were claiming that the Colonel had sent hit-men to assassinate the President and would target senior officials if Reagan couldn't be got. The line was played to deliberately invoke the assassination attempt that Reagan survived. It was a well crafted campaign of fear on the part of the American government and actually originates as a piece of Israeli secret service disinformation. Similarly in Britain The News of the World ran a story that the Libyan government was "masterminding a secret plot to arm black revolutionary murder squads" in the country. The British press has been jingoistically faithful to the cause of bombing Libya for quite some time. The source turned out to be a notorious con artist, who had squeezed £3,000 out of the paper for the story. Around the time that there were meant to be Libyan hit-men hiding under the President's bed a CIA plot to overthrow Gaddafi was leaked to the press.

In 1982 the CIA installed Hissène Habré in Chad as the war still raged with Libya. The aims of this were clear as Alexander Haig wanted to "bloody" Gaddafi's nose and it was the first operation carried out by new CIA chief William Casey. The National Front for the Salvation of Libya received $7 million from the Saudi Royals, as well as support from the CIA and the French. A plan to assassinate Gaddafi and overthrow the government was crushed in May of 1984. For the British the death of police officer Yvonne Fletcher in April of 1984, at the hands of a gunman inside the Libyan embassy, was enough to pin Colonel Gaddafi as the "Mad Dog" leader of a rogue state. There wasn't such fuss over the fate of Musa Sadr, who disappeared mysteriously on a trip to Libya in 1978. The Lebanese Imam had a significant following amongst Shi'ite Muslims, but had a reputation as politically unreliable though it remains a mystery precisely why Gaddafi would have killed him. Then in 1985 came the plan for an Egyptian invasion of Libya aimed at the removal of Gaddafi from power. Mubarak refused to carry out the invasion for Washington.

Finally in 1986 the US bombed Libya on the grounds that the Gaddafi regime was supporting international terrorism. It was the first military assault on a country that was staged for prime time television. No European country, except for Britain, would allow the US to launch the attack from its military bases. Thatcher was looking for a boost in the polls and hoped that the attack on Libya might propel her to victory in '87 as the Falklands war had in '83. The airstrikes failed to hit some major targets, the Colonel survived the attack, even cabinet ministers questioned the bombing and the British public were not impressed. Out of the 18 jets sent to bomb Libya 9 had been given the order to takeout the "Mad Dog". The attack on the compound was a military failure, Gaddafi was in a bunker at the time and only the windows on the administration building where he lived were blown out by the bombs. Though the tennis courts sustained two bombs and it only took one blast on the building where Gaddafi's family lives to injure two of his sons and kill his adopted daughter. Can you imagine the outrage of the commentariat had Reagan's daughter been killed in a Libyan air-raid on the US?

One of the specific charges against the Colonel was that he had sent advisers and arms to the Sandinistas in Nicaragua. Interestingly it would not be acceptable for Libya to bomb the US for the weapons and funds it gave to the Contras to bring down the Sandinista government by any means necessary. This is where Gaddafi acted as a mirror-image of an American neoconservative. He saw the same moral obligation to intervene where necessary on the side of the victim, preferably a victim valuable in some geopolitical sense. So Gaddafi supported the Sandinistas against the US, the Palestinians against the Israelis and the Irish against the British. This is the same reason Gaddafi would use to defend sending Libyan agents to subvert the Sadat government in Egypt. Then came the charges of terrorism, there was the Berlin Disco Bombing in 1986 which was immediately linked to the Libyan regime. The American neoconservatives jumped at the opportunity to "liberate" the Libyan people from the police state Gaddafi had built. Even though there was no evidence, at the time, that the bombing had anything to do with Gaddafi. It had been suggested that the attack might have been orchestrated by Iran or Syria.

After the airstrikes the CIA went on to launch an extensive effort to launch a coup in Libya, a secret army was put together from the Libyans captured in border battles with Chad. Then came the Lockerbie Bombing in December of 1988 which sent Pan Am Flight 103 down in flames, leaving 270 people dead. In August of the same year the USS Vincennes shot down an Iran Air Flight 665 over the Persian Gulf and 290 people were killed. It was written off as an "accident" in the US, though that is disputed by Tehran. It seems plausible that the bombing was orchestrated by a Palestinian group hired by the Iranian regime to take revenge against the US. But this is just a theory which has yet to be proven because of the absence of a serious investigation into the shooting down of Pan Am Flight 103 and Iran Air Flight 665. The indictments for Abdelbaset al-Megrahi and Khalifa Fahimah were handed down after Libya opposed the Gulf War. Fahimah was acquitted but al-Megrahi was convicted on the testimony of two witnesses, who received around $7 million from the Rewards for Justice programme at the Justice Department. One witness testified that he sold clothes to al-Megrahi, which were later recovered from the wreckage, the other (a CIA informant) claimed he saw Fahimah carrying the bomb onto the plane.

By this point sanctions had been deployed against Libya for a number of years. Britain had resorted to funding various opposition groups in Libya. Then MI6 put together a plan to kill Gaddafi in 1996 and saw to it that his motorcade was attacked by Islamists (who had been paid £100,000 to kill the Libyan leader). Gaddafi got away with his life but six bystanders were left dead. No surprise given that the weapons used included Kalashnikovs and rocket-propelled grenades. This was the same year that the Colonel connived to slaughter around 1,200 political prisoners at Abu Salim Prison. The majority of which were Islamist and stood in opposition to the secular model Gaddafi favoured even as he introduced 'purification laws' that were based on Islamic scripture. The relatives of the prisoners were the backbone to the demonstrations held in Benghazi earlier this year. Gaddafi moved to crush the demonstrations and the rebellion was sparked. In the end it was the brutal nature of the regime that led to the uprising and not the decisions made in Washington. Now there are even rumours that the rebels have seized the prison and began releasing prisoners.

Colonel Gaddafi was aligned with Charles Taylor in the late 90s, just as he had backed monsters like Slobodan Milošević. This is the same man who had supported the ANC at a time when the British and the Americans attacked Nelson Mandela as a "terrorist". Gaddafi sought to invest millions in Liberia in order to maintain the stability of the Taylor government that was established through terror. As Liberia became embroiled in the bloodbath in Sierra Leone so did Libya to the extent that there was an attempt to indict Colonel Gaddafi as well as Charles Taylor. The charges amounted to the role Gaddafi had played in the mutilation, maiming and murder of 1.2 million people. The attempt to extend the trial to Gaddafi was blocked by the US and Britain in March of 2011. When asked "Why?" the chief prosecutor David Crane simply said "Welcome to the World of Oil." The support that the British and the Americans lent to Libya was extreme and embarrassing. Even the economic sanctions imposed against Libya specified a convenient exemption for Libyan banks. The aim being to reconstitute the regime along new lines which fit into Western interests in controlling the oil spicket of the region.

Once the Soviet Union had collapsed it was inevitable that the Gaddafi regime would open up to Britain and the US. The terrorist attacks on September 11th 2001 provided an opening for such negotiations with Blair. In the 1980s the economy had began to be deteriorate, as had the welfare state, which the sanctions imposed on the country only exacerbated further in the 1990s. So the Colonel looked for a normal relationship with the West and the regime began to slowly initiate neoliberal reforms. The welfare state and social services began to crumble as a result. At the same time corruption and unemployment spun out of control. Many of the reformists in the Libyan government, including those who have been linked to embezzling and corruption in the past, have since defected to the rebels. Perhaps then we know where the 200 million Libyan Dinars flown in from London will end up. In the meantime the Gaddafis will join the growing list of scum deposed this year and the corporate vultures will finally land to pick the bones clean. The reformists were behind agreements with the West over neoliberal reforms and no doubt we'll see plenty of that in days to come.