Multiple Reagasms.

For a great number of self-proclaimed conservatives Ronald Reagan was a man of great moral integrity. Yet the facts tell a story of a washed up B-movie actor who, while in office, actively vandalised the American economy for the rich to pig-out on the eviscerated entrails of civil society. It wasn't the birth of laissez-faire capitalism out of the death of New Deal liberalism, rather it was accumulation by dispossession. Reaganism only represented a shift in fiscal policy: tax-cuts for the rich combined with greater subsidies for the rich. The covert war that the US had waged against Latin America was stepped up a knotch, leaving tens of thousands of civilians dead. This was at the same time that the US government refused to withdraw support from the Apartheid regime in South Africa and placed Nelson Mandela on the terrorist list where he sat until a couple of years ago. The casual criminality of the US government reached new heights under Ronald Reagan, not least with the convenient failure to impose basic laws to protect workers, which consequently led to a massive increase in illegal firings. It got to the point that the administration was condemned by the UN for the "unlawful use of force" - meaning international terrorism.

Now Seth Rosenfeld exposes Reagan's past as a stoole pigeon in the FBI's McCarthyite campaigns against Hollywood and later the counter-revolution against student radicals and the free-speech movement of the 1960s. As an actor Ronnie was an informer, he snooped on his fellow actors and infiltrated groups that the FBI suspected of "subversive activities". The Hollywood Independent Committee for the Arts, Sciences and Professions was one such group that the FBI had Reagan infiltrate. It was a very broad-based group with many people of different political views and when Reagan proposed a resolution to repudiate Communism it divided the Committee. At the behest of the FBI Reagan went on to drive a wedge in other groups through similar propositions. This included the American Veterans Committee. He also stole the minutes of group meetings, only for the minutes to find themselves in FBI archives. As President of the Screen Actors Guild Reagan acted to oppose a strike of set-builders for the reason that he believed the Communists were behind the strike.

Reagan even had the FBI open a file on an actress who questioned his position on blacklisting alleged leftist radicals. In 1966 Ronald Reagan railed against the Free-Speech movement in California. He began "There is a leadership gap in Sacramento, a morality and decency gap," before sliming against Berkeley as a home for 'beatniks', 'radicals' and what he described as 'filthy speech' advocates. Reagan went on to spew yet more disdain on "the so-called free-speech advocates," who for him "have no appreciation for freedom" instead he thought it more important to rein them in for 'violating' law and order. Apparently the Berkeley campus had become a rallying point for 'Communists' and 'sexual misconduct' by then. To stamp out the left-wing intellectuals Reagan went on to call for the investigation of academics and demanded that the professors sign a code of conduct. He was bashing the student movement and academic Left to undermine Democrat Pat Brown. As Governor of California Reagan maintained good relations with the FBI and procured secret briefings on protests.


The Governor's office was not just interested in information on left-wing students and academics, even liberal intellectuals and Berkeley's Chancellor Clark Kerr. The right-wing campaign eventually forced Kerr out of office, it was coincidental that Kerr had been a great administrator of public education. Under Clark Kerr the university had opened its doors to thousands of people who would have ordinarily not gone on to higher education. He crafted the master-plan for higher education for this purpose. The institution became one of the most successful public universities in history. It was a model that was emulated around the country and the world. Kerr lifted the ban against socialist speakers on the campus on the grounds that the students should be made 'safe' for ideas rather than making ideas 'safe' for students. Later Kerr was not so active in crushing the Free-Speech movement, yet he was not a supporter - he was attacked by the Left and the Right.

The student movement viewed Clark Kerr as an enemy because he refused to lift bans prohibiting  activists from handing out Civil Rights leaflets on campus. Yet at the same time J Edgar Hoover and Reagan were convinced Clark Kerr was a menace because he wasn't acting to break the back of the student radicals. The FBI used background investigations as a pretext to destroy Kerr and relied on false accusations to do so. It was only Pat Brown who protected Clark Kerr from this campaign. Once the FBI had a friend in office, it was easy to force Kerr out. Unsurprisingly Reagan launched a campaign to smash public education in California and imposed tuition fees on the University of California. This was only the beginning of the New Right's counter-revolution. Rosenfeld was most shocked that the FBI was so active in the use of the exceptional laws of wartime against civilians, particularly students and academia. But it should be remembered that the US has much worse incidents of repression in its history.


At the same time that the FBI was acting to destroy Clark Kerr and backing Reagan's bid for Governorship the Bureau was running COINTELPRO. The target of the operations included the Socialist Workers Party, Students for a Democratic Society, the Black Panthers, Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, Jr. It went from surveillance and attempts at subversion to outright assassination. The Black Panther organiser Fred Hampton was murdered Gestapo style by the Chicago Police in collusion with the FBI. This was exposed around the same time as Watergate and yet it is virtually unkown by comparison. The mainstream liberal commentariat was far more concerned by the sight of Richard Nixon trying to destroy the Democratic Party than an active campaign by the Establishment against Civil Rights and the New Left. COINTELPRO went as far back as Eisenhower and ran right up until Nixon. This shouldn't really surprise anyone. The FBI was founded during Wilson's Red Scare, a shameful period in America's history, as a national political police force to crush dissent.

Nevermind 20 years of Nirvana.

"I wouldn't wear a tie-dye-T-shirt unless it was dyed with the urine of Phil Collins and the blood of Jerry Garcia." - Kurt Cobain

It is 20 years since the release of Nirvana's second album Nevermind which soon shot Michael Jackson down from the Number One spot and launched the band from relative obscurity into the mainstream. The band had clearly moved forward from the screeching anger and darkness, the almost metallic sound, of Bleach in 1989. Before the album came out Kurt Cobain filled in NME about his ideas for Nevermind. When asked to explain the title Kurt said "Most people would just as soon forget or say 'never mind' than to take a can of spray paint, or start a band. People just don't do things very often anymore. I'm kind of disturbed by it." This is a desperate complaint typical of Generation X, for whom all great ideas had been diminished in some way as the "End of History" was heralded and pop culture was reduced to just another market. The angst hangs in his words as he goes on to add "It'd be just as easy to spray paint 'Kill George Bush' over and over again. Whether that would have any impact on anything or not, it doesn't matter, it's still fun."

Bare this in mind when you hear the lines in Smells like Teen Spirit "Load up on guns, bring your friends" and "It's fun to lose and to pretend". Cobain later claimed it was a mockery of the thought of "having a revolution" (note not 'starting' a revolution) though it is a "nice thought" the song remains sarcastic. The song itself consists of contradictory sentiments which range from the restless calls "Hello, Hello, Hello..." to the passive demands for "entertainment". We might designate the song as rudderless, for it is without clear direction, but then we will have missed the point. Teen Spirit was an attempt to encapsulate the feeling of angst when confronted with the Absurd - the indifference of the universe - which entails contradictions and in turn can provoke a certain reaction. It is a work of subversion. In the interview with NME Cobain describes the song as "posing as the enemy to infiltrate the mechanics of the system, to slowly start its rot from the inside. It's an inside job, it starts with the custodians and the cheerleaders."

Before Kurt Cobain decided to give up the ghost, and suck on the end of a shotgun, Fred Pfeil noted the potential in the rock masculinity posited by Nirvana. In his preoccupation with white straight masculinity Pfeil contrasted it with the versions of rock masculinity that had come before in the music of Bruce Springsteen and Guns N' Roses. For Pfeil there is a complex message of racial and sexual differentiation in both Bruce's and Axl's version of masculinity. Fred Pfeil argues Springsteen's moral authenticity is in part the nostalgia which contains it; the viciousness and instability of Axil are in bed together. The attitudes of Kurt Cobain might be described as individualist in the profoundly anarchic, anti-masculinist and anti-homophobic vein. It is not that Nirvana presented an alternative masculinity, at least coherently, though it did thoroughly reject and mock what had come before it. So the band goes to the gender breakdown from sexualisation. Rather than a simply refusal to be sexually fetishised (e.g. to cover up and avoid nudity) Nirvana looks to subvert the conventional equation between white male band and white male fan.

The example of choice is the music video of In Bloom in which the band are introduced on an Ed Sullivan-esque TV show as "three fine young men from Seattle" complete with combed hair and matching sports coats. The video is shot in grainy black-and-white to give it the feel of the early 60s, the days before there was such a thing as MTV, Heavy Metal or Punk Rock never mind Grunge.  The effect is a Brechtian distance, the verfremdungseffekt, the point of which was to encourage the audience to take a critical view of the events on stage. So the trio bob about cheerfully as the crowd of pubescent girls get all hysterical as the quiet opening line stands incongruous to the scene "Sell kids for food, weather changes moods". The immediate subject of mockery is the "one" who "knows all our pretty songs", who likes to sing along and shoot his gun but "knows not what it means"; later adding "We can have some more, nature is a whore". The position to be ridiculed is that to comprehend these lyrics is to "shoot a gun", e.g. to possess a phallus.

Suddenly the video jumps to footage of the same band on the same show in quite a different get-up. The long ragged hair is back, the sports coats swapped for dresses. The leap away from the neat and clean-cut Americana which preceded such a wild lurching genderfuck of a performance. A mock duel follows only for Cobain to straddle Novoselic, soon the guitar is discarded by the lead singer as the stage is trashed and he makes it back to the microphone with his hands pressed into his groin as if from some great pain - a kick in the nuts or is it that time of the month? The audience remains enthralled, the screeching of the girls is incessant, as if they're watching a totally different show. As the show comes to a stop the host re-emerges to inform us that these fellows are going to be "really big stars." The break is made with the traditional rock masculinity with its populist appeal to the white working-class market, the hidden haunts of Eric Clapton's racism. Cobain refused to "be a man" in this sense, while Nirvana turned this into a collective refusal. Perhaps if Cobain had lived longer we would have more than just this blue-print that hints at a new masculinity.

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.

All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace.

THE RISE OF THE MACHINES AND THE DREAM OF A STABLE WORLD WITH NOVELISTS, ANIMALS, THE WORLD WIDE WEB, PRESIDENTS, LOVE, CYBERNETIC PROPHETS, A BALANCED ECOSYSTEM AND A SAFE PAIR OF HANDS.

Good news fellow travelers, Adam Curtis is back with a new documentary series called All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace, it's title was borrowed from a poem by Richard Brautigan, it looks to be typical of his style and quality. Apparently the "vertigo-inducing intellectual leaps, choppy archive material and disorienting music" will be included in the package. The central focus of the documentary is the way computers have not liberated us, contrary to popular belief and instead we have lost our vision in a disillusioned age of managerial post-politics. Engrained in computer systems are notions of a perfect balance in ecosystems, ideas which go back to the hippies but have made the leap to Silicon Valley and then onwards to Wall Street. With some contributions from Ayn Rand and Richard Dawkins along the way of course, we know Enron couldn't have done without the selfish gene and free-market fundamentalism.


The pseudo-spiritualism of hippie counter-culture in the 1960s with it's communal living, free love, experimental psychedelia and emphasis on the balance of nature's ecosystems have had a great deal of impact over the trajectory of recent decades. It was a cultural revolution of sorts, the individualism of which has since been harnessed by the system. Some of the hippies went on to be major figures in Silicon Valley, the ideas of a natural equilibrium have been built into technology. Now we have social networks as the sign that we are all free and connected, even in love. The idea of a economic equilibrium is appealing to radical free-marketeers like Ayn Rand with her devotee the Chairman of the FED Alan Greenspan. Once we have made the links between hippies turned soft-ware capitalists, Objectivism and the economy we can easily greet Richard Dawkins with his ideas about the selfish gene. But these are just my thoughts on some of the issues Curtis looks at.

WE LIVE IN A DREAM WORLD CREATED BY THE MACHINES WHERE WE ARE ALL CONNECTED AND WE ARE ALL FREE. EVEN IN LOVE. BUT THE MACHINES BROUGHT WITH THEM ANOTHER IDEA, THAT WE ARE ALL COMPONENTS IN SYSTEMS – NODES IN A GLOBAL NETWORK. WE DREAMED THE SYSTEMS COULD STABILISE THEMSELVES, THROUGH FEEDBACK, AND CREATE A PERFECT BALANCE IN NATURE’S ECOSYSTEMS. AND IN HUMAN SOCIETY. AND IN CAPITALISM. WITHOUT POLITICS AND THE OLD HIERARCHIES OF POWER. BUT POWER HASN’T GONE AWAY. IT NEVER DOES.

Adam Curtis was "inspired" to make this documentary when he watched amateur footage of a mass experiment that took place in 1991 and was hosted by Loren Carpenter. Hundreds of people were given a paddle and told nothing, but when a big screen in front of them projected a game of Pong all of them began to participate. The people had to operate it together, spontaneously and without any preparation, in the end they succeeded in playing a game of Pong. Loren Carpenter saw the experiment as freedom and order manifested. For Curtis the people were not free at all, in the self-organising systems we are expected to be "happy components" in a machine and our only duty is to stabilise the machine. We are all just cogs in the machine, each important in a way though as a mass the individual cogs are irrelevant and only matter in relation to the machine working smoothly.

Katharine Viner was right to emphasise the focus on power in the documentaries Curtis has churned out over the last 20 years. With Pandora's Box (1992) it was the use of science to control society and shape human beings. Similarly The Mayfair Set was about the collapse of political rise and rise of corporate power. The Century of the Self looked at the rise of Freudian psychoanalysis and the appropriation of Freud's theories by the public relations industry to market goods to consumers. My favourite is The Power of Nightmares in which politicised fear is explored as the only way for politicians to mobilise people in a disillusioned age. Now Curtis has moved onto machines and the way that the idea of a self-regulating ecosystem in nature has been torn from the thoughts of hippies and has become engrained in technology. The idea of a natural equilibrium eliminates the reason for the state and automatically writes-off all possibility of state-intervention. In this sense, the commune is a model for social networking as it is self-regulating and non-hierarchical.

Adam Curtis has also worked with Charlie Brooker in the past and has recently written for The Guardian in the aftermath of the death of Osama bin Laden. He argued that the death of bin Laden may herald the end of a grand narrative which has served American politicians, Western journalists and Islamists well in making sense of the world. It is only a question of what kind of narrative will open up to make sense of the world now, Curtis speculates that it may be the rise of China which will give America a reason to reassert itself in the world. This could be true as there has already been a great deal of emphasis on American decline and Chinese ascension in the mainstream discourse. Donald Trump made a big deal about imposing a tariff of 25% on imports from China. He might be right unless the Obama administration finds a way to maintain the current narrative of terror. As I am a fan of Curtis I will be making a post for each episode of his new series and I strongly recommend his work to all reading this article.

Staring into the Abyss.

Tony Blair has scrapped his planned book signing at Waterstones in Piccadilly, London. The stated reason was "to avoid the inconvenience to the public it would have caused". The inconvenience being the costs entailed by travel, as well as rampant egg and shoe-shopping, to show Mr Blair just what we think of him. After the debacle in Dublin Blair quickly realised that the people, who he described as a "demonic rabble" in his book, who supported him as the "lesser evil" against John Major still hate him for the way he betrayed them. Unlike Narcissus Mr Blair decided not to stare at his own reflection until he wastes away. Instead Blair has retreated to avoid confrontation and save the public from an overstretched police force. In doing so, Blair projects his own image over the situation highlighting his "considerate" decision and not his cowardice at the possibility of the "demonic rabble" spoiling his moment in the spotlight.

The Poodle also called for "understanding" for those who were hoping to attend the event. Even though the only moral reason to attend such an event would be to pelt him with shoes and stale food. The most moral reason to even touch a copy of his emetic propaganda is to abduct it from the biography section and leave it in the crime section for a confused Mafiophile to stumble upon. Blair is leaving signed copies for the people to buy, vandalise and displace however we see fit - gee thanks T. Another "considerate" gesture towards the ungrateful herd and ignorant masses who will trample him out of spite, I suppose. Though much of Blair's behaviour is typical of a narcissistic cynicism. Cynicism is corrosive of political idealism and when combined with Blair's brand of reactionary self-love what you have is a source of rot and not just corrosion.

Instead of just leading to compromise in the Labour Party, as the cynics who preceded him had, Blair has "hollowed out" the Labour Party and deprived the British people of a progressive party that truly represents them. The Blairites are not progressives or socialists they are neoconservatives, the most vile kind of Tory. The self-portrayal of Blair as a "moderate" who is considerate to the "rabble" but strong enough to make the right decisions is a joke and not even Blair believes in this facade. The personally signed copies of his books left for consumers are a lot like the minimum wage and the fox-hunting ban, gestures made to buy the public and continue to get away with it all. But Blair showed his colours in claiming that the BNP might turn up and wreck the day, when it was the anti-war movement that were preparing to rally outside Waterstones. To insinuate that the people who opposed the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are "fascists" is typical of Blair's character.

We the people don't fit into Blair's world, if he could go back he would undo passing the Freedom of Information act and he would have never banned fox-hunting, at best we are to be placated but not pleased by our leaders. Blair is not unique in his contempt for the working-class, he is part of a long history of elite contempt for the poor. The patronising manner in which Blair delivers his speeches - slowly, with some forced stuttering - is further evidence of his contempt for the populace. The Founding Fathers of the USA saw flaws in democracy and were opposed to dictatorship, they instead aimed to create a "moderate government", in the words of Alexander Hamilton, which is neither totally democratic nor totalitarian. The threat of democracy is that it could enable the poor to seize the property and wealth of the upper-class. The problem of democracy goes way back and there have been many proposed solutions to the problem.

Many of the Founding Fathers, most notably Madison, thought that the US should avoid the extremes of democracy, so that the rich could keep hold of a large amount of property and wealth. Whereas, Aristotle thought that the way to resolve the problem of democracy is to create a more equal society. If there is a more equal distribution of property and wealth there is less of a chance that the poor would seize the property and wealth of the elites. It could be that the enactment of the minimum wage, and other gestures of good will, were the initial way to deal with the problem of democracy. But the Blairites were also for a national DNA database, ID cards, ASBOs, the surveillance state and greater powers to the police. Not to mention the economic policies which were devoted to a lightly regulated financial system and a tax system which benefited the wealthiest of citizens. These aspects of Blairism are closer to the view that democracy should be avoided in its most "extreme form".

This is the context behind the gestures that Blair thinks make him a "progressive", as well as his displays of narcissism. It is a disgrace that such a person became the leader of the Labour Party, a disgrace to the Party's radical heritage which created the National Health Service. All of the candidates for the leadership are also an embarrassment to the likes of Clement Attlee and Aneurin Bevan. There is no radical candidate, only Blairites and cynics like Diane Abbott, and it seems inevitable that Blair will be succeeded by David Miliband. The contest fails to deliver in meeting the minimal standards of our political system, a party led by any of the candidates would not be a credible "lesser evil" to the Con-Dems. It would seem that the consequence of the leadership bout, no matter who wins, will be to strengthen the coalition and further alienate the public. Unless a truly radical or progressive alternative is presented, its positions properly defended and its arguments disseminated, change is unlikely.