I Dream of Utopia

Petraeus' Surge Report, Afghan War Stories, Secret Squirrels and Wage Discipline for the Revolutionary Masses

2007-09-11T12:27:00.001-07:00

The definition of insanity, it is said, is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result each time.

We have invaded Afghanistan four times, and lost three of those four times. We are losing the fourth. Did we expect it to be any different? Every single nation or empire which has invaded Afghanistan has been defeated with the possible exception of Alexander the Great who simply passed through the north (leaving behind his army's genes) on his way to India. The Soviets tried it, and after ten years and much suffering, left - going home to a collapsing system and a vicious future. Then came September the 11th 2001, which, were it not for the fact that it was the US that was hit, was an unremarkable day in the scheme of things. 2,974 dead is not a large number as these atrocities go; 800,000 Rwandans were killed in the 1994 genocide; 8,000 murders a day, every day, for 100 days. With machetes and clubs, mostly.

However, Al Qaeda's holy warriors hit the US in a masterstroke of PR and military genius; attacking the economic and military centres of the worlds' only real superpower, inflicting casualties of the like not seen before in the 'developed' West (or at least not seen before in the US of A, we in Europe can point to places like Dresden, Lidice, Stalingrad, Leningrad, Warsaw, Verdun...). This, to paraphrase Admiral Yamamoto, awoke a sleeping giant and filled him with a terrible resolve. Which was exactly what the Wahhabi extremists of Al Qaeda and Chums wanted! So, because our leaders are stupid and their thoughts are in the short term, by and large, we fell for it.

The attack on Afghanistan in 2001 led to a war which has now dragged on into its sixth year; a war which shows no signs at all of letting up. Taliban and other insurgents attack the ANA and police, they attack the NATO troops supposedly 'keeping the peace' and they do so with such effectiveness that the British Army is awarding people the VC! Yet, at the same time, the British Army is giving its troops shit weapons, shit equipment1, not enough of either, and our glorious government is supporting them less than any dyed-in-the-wool Maoist supported the US Army in 'Nam.

Young men of 18 - 18, for christ's sake, he should be getting girls to swoon over his cap badge in the local - have died, ostensibly for us, but in reality for US, for the American desire for revenge in a backwater nation that has been at war with itself or invaders since, oh, 1979. That's coming up to 40 years of combat now. Afghanistan is a shattered shell, and in that shell, our army, our fantastic army, the best in the world, full to the brim with patriotic, heroic, irascible, racist, violent, drunken thugs who want to fight and die, is being wasted. I may be an anarchist, but I don't object to our having an army. I object to it being thrown needlessly away in situations like the 'Ghan and Iraq. I object to young men, boys, being killed for no reason other than to pander to the American desire for revenge.

We are in Helmand not to protect the ANG, not to get rid of opium poppies, not to bring peace and stability - we are there to kill, and kill, and kill again until the 2,974 dead of 9/11 are satisfied with the blood of tens of thousands of Afghans.

Afghans! And the hijackers were mostly bloody Saudis anyway!

So, while our army kills and dies in the 'Ghan, the Americans declare that the Surge has worked (which means that either they're lying, or they don't know what's going on) and prepare to pull the 30,000 extra troops out of Iraq because violence has dropped. Well, perhaps it has; yet there are figures (in the Independent and Guardian newspapers) which show that attacks on Coalition forces have gone up since the Surge began! Meanwhile, beauracrats have determined that if you are an Iraqi who is shot dead in the back of the head, you were killed in a sectarian manner. If you were shot in the front, it's just crime. So, the sectarian killings have gone down, the Surge is working, QED.

More madness! What is actually happening is that the Iraqi insurgents are turning on Al Qaeda, organsing themselves, ethnically cleansing their areas to cement their control, and carefully targeting attacks on the Coalition as opposed to Mr and Mrs Ahmed from number 56. Unless, of course, Mr and Mrs Ahmed happen to be Christian/Kurd/Sunni/Shia or indeed anyone we don't particularly like the look of.

In other words, the insurgency is mostly lying low until the new soldiers go home and jockeying for position for the inevitable short and bloody civil war that will erupt when the Coalition finally declares Mission: Really Accomplished, We Mean It This Time, Stop Sniggering At The Back and the last US Marine leaps onto a Blackhawk as it takes off from the roof of the embassy in the Green Zone.

In the meantime, the Secret Squirrels of the SAS, SBS, and the super-mysterious US Special Forces continue to try to infiltrate Iran - or at least that's what it feels like to me. Rumour has it that the RN bods who got nicked by the Revolutionary Guard a while back were party to an SBS job that went wrong (why two officers in 12, for one thing). Certainly, the SAS lost a man in Iraq last week during a "routine" operation, and I will bet pounds to pence that he was killed on the border with Iran. The SAS also had some men arrested by the Iraqi Police some time ago; and you may remember that this caused some ruckus amongst the Army to the extent that we attacked the police station to free them.

Why were they arrested? Because they had IEDs in their car, and were heading to Iran.

All of this is very scary, and that's just on the War Fronts! The Home Front saw our New Dear Leader telling Trade Unionists yesterday that "pay restraint" was necessary to prevent total economic collapse. Or, in reality, the workers can fuck off and die on 3p/hour while the CEOs can happily pull a Brattley K Twatt and award themselves quarter of a billion quid just because they can. Wage discipline is vital for the masses, but the Party can be as liberal as it likes, comrades!

Arrrgh! That's all for now, folks, more as and when I feel like it. Try and stay chilled; I find toy soldiers help...

1: Watch this. At about one minute in, it shows a 3PARA .50 HMG team trying to engage the enemy with suppressive fire... using dud rounds. Hurrah!

Rubaiyat 49, 51

2007-06-29T10:40:00.000-07:00

'Tis all a Chequer-board of Nights and Days,
Where Destiny with Men for Pieces plays,
Hither and thither moves, and mates, and slays,
And one by one back in the Closet lays.

...

The Moving Finger writes; and, having writ,
Moves on: nor all thy Piety nor Wit
Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line,
Nor all thy Tears wash out a Word of it.

~ Omar Khayyam trans. Edward FitzGerald (1859)

It's been some time, but, my dear, there's something you should know

2007-06-29T08:58:00.000-07:00

The last post was January. It's now the end of June, which is some six months since I last scrawled a rant to unleash upon the world and my readership of about one.

High time I made a new one.

First things first, there is a bomb scare in London at the moment, started by a large carbomb (nails and propane gas) which failed to go off outside the Tiger Tiger nightclub in Haymarket; just down the road from the Trocadero. My mates and I used to frequent the Troc, and one of my friends happened to be in the area some hours before the thing didn't go off. Anyway, it spooked me because it was so close to where I've spent a lot of time, and I am extremely glad that whoever put it together was a bungler. I must say that these Islamo-terrorists aren't a patch on the Active Service Units of the IRA, or even the cack-handed lefties of the Angry Brigade.

I mean, sure, one spectacular that kills 52 people? Pfft, big deal, the IRA had long-term violence down pat and the lefties at least targeted property not people. Mind you, the big daddy of all Euro-terrorists has to be the OAS. Look them up sometime. They've an interesting story.

At any rate, that's all I have to say about the bomb(s) in London for now. Doubtless they will be used as a cause de guerre by the new Brown government and our Interior Ministry, who will almost certainly leap on it and demand new, tighter security. Bastards.

Now, onto the real meat of this post...

...politics.

I'm an anarchist, always have been, always will be. I dislike bosses, hate authority, and really would rather just pootle about in a society based on the mutual co-operation of free individuals.

And yet, and yet.

The more I read about the very early Fascists - and the proto-Fascists - such as Marinetti's Futurists, or D'Annunzio's Fiume pirate republicans, and the romantic nationalists of the FE de los JONS, the more I find myself in agreement with a lot of what they have to say.

This isn't too much of a surprise, all of these people were heavily influenced by the anarchists, the Dadaists, and the like. The Red/Black/Red of the Falangist flag is a direct theft from the CNT-FAI.

I suppose what's happening is that I'm becoming what I am tentatively describing as an anarcho-nationalist; I support independence for tiny nations on the grounds of "why the fuck not" - which should underline how well thought out all this is. In essence, then, I envisage small nations - such as Cornwall, for example - being seen as distinct entities, used to create localised anarchist federations which then interact with other federations in a position of equality. I hasten to stress that this is not a racist position, more a geographical one. I'm half-Scots and half-English, roughly, with bits of Welsh, Irish, and Viking knocking around in my genes too in all probability. I live in England, I consider myself English; I speak English and I think English. Much to my Mother's sorrow, I think. Anyway, my - extremely roundabout - point is this; that national identity is chosen, not forced. I have met black Englishmen and asian Scotswomen; I have seen white Egyptians and so on and so forth. Your national identity is picked from where you feel most at home, and thus I call for nationalism based on geography and location, not ethnicity and/or religion.

Fuzzy, isn't it? Like I said, it's not well thought out and at the moment I really am just fumbling around.

I'm still an anarchist, I'm still a loony lefty, it's just that I've been having patriotic stirrings lately and - among other things - I don't see why people can't just have national-self determination. Why can't the Basques and Kurds have a country? Why isn't Kashmir independent? Why must China occupy Tibet? Why is it that we must grasp and claw and demand more land for 'our' nations? I am not a Cornishman, let the Cornish have Cornwall. I applauded the SNP victory, and hope that in the near future England, too, will have its own parliament.

More to come on this as I think more and read more. I could end up throwing the whole thing out of the window, but one thing's for sure: anarchism and fascism are heady ideologies, and a powerful mix.

"Tierra Y Libertad!" ~ Anarchist slogan (Land and Freedom!)
"Espana! Una, Grande, Y Libre!" ~ Spanish Fascist slogan (Spain! One, Great, and Free!)

We Are Losing The Fourth Afghan War

2007-01-17T13:30:00.000-08:00

This isn't a surprise, as we lost the 1st, 2nd and 3rd. Well, arguably we came away with a draw in the 3rd Afghan War, but only because we used the RAF to extensively bomb the natives and we set our Victory Aims as 'driving the Afghans out of India'. We didn't, note, follow them into Afghanistan - we'd learnt from the first two fuck ups.

Why do I say we're losing?

Well, the other day, a Royal Marine Commando was killed in action during an attempt to drive some 'Taliban' (might be Talib, might be Al Qaeda, might be warlord troops, might be anyone) from a fort.

During this operation we used; B1 strategic bombers, 155mm artillery, close air support, Apache helicopter gunships, light tanks - Scimitars, that is - and a company of Royal Marines. Their objective was to seize the fort.

Instead, they lost four WIA and one KIA, fell back, and failed to take the fort from the Taliban.

Couple this with the withdrawal from the Platoon Houses, the failure of several offensives designed to crush the rebels/insurgents/terrorists/enemy Once And For All (again), the abandonment of US bases on the Pakistani border because they came under constant attack, and the big list of other screw-ups, losses, and backward steps and it becomes once again apparent that:

You DO NOT fuck with the Afghans.

We should have LEARNT THIS by now.

Woah, people read this?

2007-01-12T14:40:00.000-08:00

I discovered that people read this today, so I suppose I should update with more ranting against the state of affairs.

Well, Iraq's a good place to start. 21,500 more US troops are going in, to engage the Shia and Sunni militias 'even-handedly' after nearly four years of backing the Shia (apart from trying - and failing - in 2005 to destroy the Mehdi Army of Moqtada al-Sadr). There are two tiny problems with this.

The first is that the Mehdi Army, while not as trained up as the Sunni insurgents, numbers approximately 100,000 armed men. Admittedly, they don't have Interceptor body armour, M1A2 SEP Abrams main battle tanks, LAV-25 AIFVs, Bradley M2s, Apache gunships, Black Hawks, AC-130s, 150mm artillery, rocket batteries, F-16s, B-52s, Predator spy drones, and the might of the US Army ... but they do have a lot of men. Sadr City, in Baghdad, is home to some 2,000,000 people and is the home of the Mehdi Army. If the Americans enter that, all guns blazing, then they're screwed. They'll have to utterly level it. Fallujah '04 will look like a cakewalk.

The second is that the militias are now also the police and the Iraqi Defence Corps. Forget 'infiltration', it's "Are you in the Badr Brigade? Then join the IDC's 207th Brigade!" When the British Army decided to rubbleise the Serious Crimes Unit of the Basra Police last Christmas, they did so because they were admitting what most people already knew - the militia death squads wear police uniforms because they are the police.

It doesn't matter any more that the US Army has brought in its top counter-insurgency (COIN) officer to help co-ordinate their latest Final Offensive Which Guarantees Victory (tm). It's far too late for that. Iraq is now a total hellhole, and it's entirely our fault.

Saddam Hussein, lately hung for killing 150 Iraqis, managed to bump off about a million of his own people during his rule. This isn't including the Iranians, Kuwaitis, etc, of course, but it all adds up to a maximum of about 1,500,000 people.

Now, this is the kicker. The West, e.g. the US and UK, have managed to kill somewhere in the region of 1,800,000 and 2,000,000 Iraqis. We've irradiated Iraq with DU, increasing cancer and birth defects. We admitted killing 500,000 children under five years old because otherwise the nasty, evil, Saddam, would get nukes. Nevermind the fact that we'd sold him all his chemical weapons. Nevermind the fact that the regional superpower, Israel, has more nukes than Britain. Nevermind the fact that he killed a lot of people when he first came to power because we gave him their names. Nevermind the fact that he was Our Man - after Kuwait, he was Evil. He was Hitler mk II. He was so vile that we had to stop him getting nukes at all costs... to the Iraqis, that is, not us. And the way we stopped him was by killing Iraqis left, right and centre, and reducing their nation to rubble. But not Saddam. No, he could stay until we had a cause d'guerre.

And, eventually, we got it. So, for killing 150 people, Hussein is hung.

For killing 1.8-2 million people... er... we send in more troops to kill more people.

I don't deny that Hussein was a bastard. He was a politician and a dictator to boot - the very definition of bastard. What fucks me off is that our lot are worse, yet they don't get hung - lynch mob or no - and they don't care.

So that's Iraq. A total fuck up destined to get worse.

Now for Iran. The Times and the Spectator have both proclaimed that the Israelis might use nuclear weapons against Iran's nuclear power stations and refinement plants. Not now, but soon - in the year Anno Domini 2007.

When I saw the Spectator article I nearly cried. If it's even remotely true, and not just posturing, then we're utterly fucking screwed beyond belief. If the Israelis nuke Iran... the world burns. That simple.

Meanwhile, in Bolivia, unnoticed by the world, Cochabamba province is falling apart as the indigenous, Morales-supporters, fight the anti-Morales lot. It's apparently very complex, as my Bolivian friend keeps telling me, but the way it looks to me is this:

There's one ethnic group, the 'brown' (hispanic/indigenous mix, the beauracrats of the Spanish Empire) who've had power ever since the Spanish left. They were displaced recently by Evo Morales, representative of the campesinos (indigenous) who have never had power since the Spanish came. Then there's the 'whites' (hispanic) who haven't had power since the Spanish left.

The 'brown' lot became insanely corrupt, and hated the 'whites' and the indigenous lot.
The indigenous lot hate the 'browns' and the 'whites' for being oppressors.
The 'whites' hate the 'browns' and indigenous for being usurpers and dirty.

Now they're fighting about whether or not the whites should get autonomous federal government (i.e. clawing back the political power they lost, and retaining the economic power they have).

Upshot is, centuries of racism and violent oppression are boiling over and it looks as though a civil war is on the horizon. What fun! 50 pence says the CIA are involved somehow.

On the Home Front, the Great Leader T.Bliar today decided that Britain needed to keep illegally invading countries in order to ensure that humanitarian disasters don't happen again. His brilliant reasoning gets even better, look:

1) Poverty exists.
2) To get rid of (1), Evil (tm) governments must be removed.
3) To get rid of Evil (tm) governments, you must use WAR.
4) QED

The man is clearly FUCKING INSANE.

Arrrgh. Then there's Chechnya, Abkhazia, Palestine, Burma, etc etc... too much strife and too little time! So that's it for now. More ranting later, illustrious readers!

Mr Gates, Are We Winning The War?

2006-12-05T10:02:00.000-08:00

"No sir" replied the US Secretary of Defence, thus enabling me to write the following:

HA HA HA WE FUCKING TOLD YOU SO, YOU BASTARDS, HA HA HA HA!

Gloating over.

Hey Man - Tune In, Turn On, Drop Out...

2006-12-01T16:14:00.000-08:00

Just finished writing an article for my university's student newspaper - The Beaver - on drug use at the LSE with specific reference to cocaine (now the UK's second most popular illegal narcotic amongst students, and widely known to the Metropolitan police force as the 'middle-class drug'). I finished the article with a snide comparison with alchol, a perfectly legal narcotic which has a much higher profile and a bigger effect on the School.

For example. Last year, the Athletics Union's Barrel Run got somewhat out of hand after several hours of consumption of free alcohol, and around 200 or 300 students went round to King's College (AKA Strand Poly) and smashed the shit out of the English Lit department. Several thousand pounds worth of damage later, the Barrel got banned and the AU got in the shit.

None of those AU members were off their faces on anything more illegal than a badly-designed cocktail.

Yet my friends, who snort coke and drop pills, who smoke pot and generally tune in, turn on, and drop out, have done nothing like that. The drunken fights that occur outside Crush every Friday night are just that - drunken fights. Despite the consumption of cocaine by Crush-goers, no-one's smashed in someone else's face because they had one line too many. I've read an accounts by a journalist who covered Bosnia in the early 1990s that he needed Heroin to function properly when he came back to Britain because Bosnia had fucked him up so badly. He wasn't harming anyone but himself.

It's interesting to note that before 1916, most drugs were widely avaliable at your local chemists'. Cocaine, or opium, laudanum, heroin, hasish, you name it. Why did they make it illegal in 1916? Answer - it was a bad show that the chaps at the front were too fucked by withdrawal or various drugs to fight. So, cut the problem off at source and defeat the Boche!

And, like taxes (Napoleonic Wars) and passports (World War One again), once implemented, the law was never rescinded. As a result, it's now a criminal offence to lie bag and take a drag of the finest weed. Sherlock Holmes shot cocaine and smoked opium. He'd've been arrested for that, never mind the boxer revolver, nowadays, by the good Inspector LeStrade.

Yet everyone knows at least one person who takes drugs, illegally. There's another name for this - it's called a market. And there are plenty of very nasty and unpleasant people (even for capitalists, although most drug dealers are small fry compared to the likes of BAT or BAe) who will happily step in and cater to this market. And they, of course, set the prices. A good quality gram of cocaine can set you back £60 in London, and a friend of mine thought nothing of snorting £180 worth every week for several months.

All of this despite the US War on Drugs (even less successful than their latest war on an adjective, The War Against Terror - hereafter referred to as TWAT), our own government's fear of the media outcry if they relaxed their stance on drugs, and the lessons of the Abolitionary movement. Illegal drugs, as they tell us, fund terror, and more pertinently, contribute massively to petty crime and serious crime. Most shootings are drug-related. Most petty theft (muggings, burglary and the like) is to pay for drugs.

Now, back to our pre-1916 environment. Imagine this, updated, and put on the NHS. Suddenly, the bottom drops out of the criminal market - that gram of cocaine that cost £60? Now we're paying £10 or less at Boots. That heroin that travels from Afghanistan and funds the Taliban (amongst others)? Now we're buying it at source from the poppy farmers, contributing to the Afghan economy, undermining the Taliban and the warlords, and making it availiable over the counter at chemists, dirt cheap, thus screwing over the drug lords.

What we have now is a massive reduction in petty theft (why steal a handbag to raise £60 when you can go to your chemists and get your hit for a fiver?) and criminal gangs with serious holes in their finances. Suddenly, crime really won't pay.

Legal drugs will provide revenue for the (hated) government, which they can then spend on 'defence' and other, more useful things - such as education, social welfare, and healthcare - and a safer route to a better high for the users. After all, that cocaine won't be cut with baking soda. Your ecstacy will be produced in a drugs company's lab, and will meet stringent safety requirements. You'll have a place to leave your needles and get new, clean ones.

Don't think it'll work? Look at Holland and tell me it doesn't work.

The best society is the freest society. Legalising drugs is a tiny baby-step towards that society, but an important one nonetheless!

Another Day, Another Death

2006-11-30T09:04:00.000-08:00

I was looking through a copy of The New Statesman today, and it's got an article in it asking for the readers' selection of the person of 2006. The article was composed of a series of the magazines' writers proposing various people (mostly the usual left-of-centre suspects). Will Self, whom I think is a bit of a pretentious arse, however, had an interesting subject.

The Average Iraqi.

Now, as far as Self's little piece went, he's right. Compared to all the other subjects (whose names I have forgotten), the average Iraqi - "probably a woman ... not an insurgent or in Al Q'aeda" - is indeed the best choice for this typically drivelling magazine poll. But there was a better choice, a more useful choice:

The Oppressed.

Every day, in every country on the planet, the majority of people scrape through their day. They suffer and they labour under laws which criminalise them, which take away what little they have, they struggle against social stigmas, they face death in many cases from death squads, from famine, from poverty, from disease, from a lack of education. They are dealt hands that bring only suffering. They are pissed on from above and ignored by the great and the good. Politicians make a show of aiding them in return for their votes - then promptly forget about them as soon as they enter the halls of power. Soldiers kill them. Militias rape them. Companies enslave them. Gangsters torture them.

And the world turns a blind eye. No-one wants to know, because it's not their child. It's not their mother, father, husband, wife, sibling, uncle or friend. It's someone elses'. In all likelihood, darlings, they don't know their Foucault from their Derrida. They might not even eat vegetarian meals! Even worse, my dears, they're criminals...

Of course, they're not. They're ordinary people trying to live from day to day as best they can with the shittest of circumstances. Generational poverty, drugs, drink, and other scourges blight their lives - and the biggest blight of all is the giant, callous, horrendously cold and uncaring indifference of the capitalist society that has spread from its powerhouses in 'The West' to engulf the world.

We are to blame as much as the ultra-rich and their monkeys. We could and should, no, we must, change the world. It is up to us to decide the future of humanity.

We have a choice, as we always do. We can carry on as we are, or we can dare to dream. We can build a new world. There have been 'experiments' which have, almost without exception, failed or brought about a worse state of affairs than before (Marxist-Leninism and Stalinism for one, Maoism for another, Pol Pot and Hitler for two more).

What is needed now is not another experiment, but an awakening of society. People must be made to know the reality of their world. They must see, with their own eyes, not through the eyes of preaching, ranting lefties like myself, but themselves - and they can then make the choice.

To obey, and march into darkness.

To disobey, and ascend into the light, to the utopia that we can build together.

It's OUR decision. It's not your government's. It's not the decision of BP, of Bechtel, of Nike, of McDonalds, or BAe. It's your decision. My decision. Our decision.

Which will you choose?

It's the end of the world as we know it, and I feel fine

2006-11-27T13:08:00.000-08:00

I may as well start my first blog on an upbeat note: we're all doomed!

Let me expand on this. Global warming (Christian loonies and blinkered capitalists aside) is happening. We're in the middle of a return to the Great Games of the Imperial Age, with the Fourth Afghan War going, as usual, badly, for the British and our masters, Russian spies being assasinated in London and conflicts breaking out on the borders of the world's only hyperpower.

Speaking of the death of Alexander Litvinenko - I don't think anyone's really picked up on this, but his death is the world's first act of nuclear terrorism. And guess what, the main culprit is the FSB (which, incidentally, can trace a direct line back to the Okhrana of the Czars - the Russian secret service has merely changed its name, not its spots or its methods), an arm of the Russian state.

Once again, governments prove that no-one is a bigger terrorist than the man with a defence budget.

So, anyway, as I was saying, we're all doomed. The capitalists didn't bother preparing for global warming, and so are rushing half-baked half-arsed plans into action if they're doing anything at all. Meanwhile, powerless governments produce tons of paper and more of hot air on how they're preparing for stopping something that began in the 18th Century, and we all carry on as normal.

We're doomed. Or, more accurately, the situation is normal; all fucked up.

In the face of such mind-numbingly incredible stupidity on all sides, what can we do? Well, as far as I'm concerned, I'm chilling. To hell with the world. If it dies, it dies, and we're screwed anyway. Us humans are an inventive bunch, and I'm not putting it past some bright spark to save the day and drag us screaming and wailing into the 22nd Century. Meanwhile, I'll be living my life - wargaming, hanging out, reading, doing my degree, and occasionally writing postcards.

And that's the biggest act of rebellion anyone can hope for - to live as we want the world to be, even if it will actually be a bizzare tropical hellhole in the habitable polar regions by 2200...

That's it for now. Cheering thoughts on a range of topics from urban foxes, chaffinches, and good old-fashioned anarchist lunacy will follow irregularly. 'til then, stay chilled!