Israel always had a bit of a problem with Gaza ever since it conquered the territory in 1967. It's one of the most densely populated places in
the world, it houses a lot of people driven out of their homes in 1948, doesn't really have that much going for it and is therefore less of a
prize than the West Bank is. As Christopher Hitchens (!) recounts in his foreword to Edward Said's Peace and its Discontents, Gaza
has always been seen by the Israelis as a trap to spring on the Palestinians; as Moshe Dayn allegedly put it, "a bridge to doublecross". The Israeli
withdrawal from it in 2005 was therefore a bit of p.r. stunt; Israel could do with Gaza much more easily than it can do without its control of the
West Bank. And because they kept control of the borders, airspace and the sea, the Israelis thought they had created more or less the largest open
air prison in the world, a ghetto even, which if the inhabitants got too uppity could always be choked off. As Dov Weisglass, an adviser to
Ehud Olmertput it in 2006 "The idea is to put the Palestinians on a diet, but not to
make them die of hunger". Olmert himself talked of "not allowing a humanitarian crisis in Gaza" but having no intention of "making
their lives easier". Such nice, humanitarian gestures are of course much more easy to pull off if there aren't settlers stuck in the middle of Gaza of
course.
But as we've seen again and again in the years since the Israeli withdrawal, the Gazans have not let themselves be cowed, voting in a Hamas
government despite Israeli, European and American warnings about what would happen if they did, the rockets have continued to be launched
against Sderot (founded in 1951, but once the site of a Palestinian village
called Najd), so talk has been turning in Israel to more extreme measures...
But, as the inhabitants of southern Lebanon found out back when Israel targeted their country in 2006, fleeing does not make you safe. Even
United Nations schools, known to the Israelis to be UN schools, with the UN having provided the IDF with the full details and GPS coordinates
of all their buildings in the Gaza Strip, are not safe: thirty dead
when an Israeli tank shelled it. As per usual the IDF blames their enemy for making them shoot the school, as the troops in question were supposedly
fired upon. Of course, everytime something likes this happens, the IDF trots out the same old story and every time it turns out to be a lie.
So don't put too much faith in all the "diplomatic efforts" being undertaken by the various bigwigs to end this conflict, especially when Tony Blair,
with his usual brilliant prioritising thought the most important question was to stop Hamas getting weapons. This conflict will end when Israel
wants it to end, or is forced to do so. If we don't ratch up the pressure on Israel quickly, this will end with ethnic cleansing. When you have people
like Avedon Carol talking about getting 'a chill up my spine when I heard they were talking
about a "permanent solution" to the Palestinian issue', you know this is going to get much worse before it gets better, if it ever will. But it
only will if we make the Israelis stop.
What more can you say than what the cartoon (found at Permanent Revolution) already expresses?
The idea that Israel's aerial attacks against and subsequent invasion of Gaza are a response to Hamas terrorism doesn't pass the laugh test. We
know this attack has been planned for a long time, we've seen the preparations, we know it fits the Israeli strategy of ratching up the pressure
on Gaza. We've seen it all before, back in 2006, when the Israeli army did the same in their first attempt to topple Hamas. That ended with a
Fatah driven coup against the democratically elected Hamas governement which saw Hamas ousted from power in the West Bank but the opposite happening
in Gaza. With Fatah now powerless or unwilling to take on Hamas again, Israel now has to effect regime change on its own. Hence the ground invasion.
The reason we cannot take Israel at its word about why they moved from economic strangulation and "surgical strikes" to a fullblown airwar and
invasion is shown in the graph above, taken from official Israeli sources. What do you see? That during the ceasefire agreed to between Hamas
and Israel in June last year, attacks from Gaza decreased dramatically, only picking up again after Israel started attacking in force. There's a lot
of manufactured outrage spread by Zionist apologists about these attacks, but what they forget to mention is that during the ceasefire Israel did
not lift its blockade, nor stopped its policy of extrajudicial assasinations, with 22 Palestinians having been killed by Israeli forces during the truce. The number of
Israelis killed? Zero.
Everything about this invasion is cynical and calculated, from the way its being justified to the date it was implemented, two days after Christmas,
when all the lights have gone off in the world's government buildings anyway. It's been so cynical I haven't really been able to write about it so
far, as it has just made me too depressed and outraged. Fortunately, there's Lenin's Tomb, which has
done splendid work reporting on the invasion and its background.
Cry of the Newborn
James Barclay
819 pages
published in 2005
James Barclay is not a writer I had heard of before I got this book out of the library. The backcover blurb sounded interesting and the
frontcover sported a quote by Steven Erikson, one of my favourite fantasy writers, so while the first few pages I sampled were a bit dull
I thought I'd take a chance. The library also had the sequel, but I didn't put that one up as this was big enough already; I could always
get it next time. But I don't think I will. Erikson's blurb said that Cry of the Newborn was "a most extraordinary and
impressively ambitious novel", but in reality it was just a bog standard epic fantasy novel. Not a bad novel by any standards, competently
written certainly, but nothing special.
[...]
The second objection is more fundamental. The world Barclay has created is presented as if the Concord is a force for good, described in terms
which argue that the Estorian hunger for empire is not driven by base motives, but out of a noble desire to create order and stability. Trouble is,
I don't buy it. Looking at it objectively, the Concord is just not that nice, happily waging wars of conquest only to then suck the conquered
countries dry for further conquest, not to mention the enrichment of the Estonian elite. Sure, by author fiat there's little of the cruelity
on display practised by real world empires like the Roman or British Empire and it's even fairly gender neutral, with the current ruler of the
Concord being a woman, and with various viewpoint characters being female soldiers and officers, but this is just window dressing. I just could
not see the Concord as the good guys, or help root for the supposed baddies, who after all only wanted to live in peace in their own country.
Fantasy is a somewhat conservative, some would even say reactionary genre and I can overlook some of the more ...odious... assumptions in a
given novel if the story is right, but not this time.
So we finally come to the grand total of books read this year: 152, or almost three books a week. Yes, I'm quite proud of that.
The Horned Dinosaurs -- Peter Dodson
An excellent overview of what we know about Triceratops and its relatives. Dodson doesn't just tell what we know, but how we got that knowledge and
isn't afraid to show what isn't known or cannot be known about Triceratops.
A Savage War of Peace -- Alistair Horne
George Bush was supposed to have read this. In the unlikely case that he has, he may have noted the resemblance between the French experience in
Algeria and what American troops were dealing with in Iraq.
Psychohistorical Crisis -- Donald Kingsbury
A reworking of/semi-sequel to Isaac Asimov's classic Foundation series that's much better than Asimov's own sequels.
Web of Angels -- John M. Ford
A proto-cyberpunk novel by a vastly underrated author, with a style of storytelling that reminded me in equal parts of Zelazny and Delany.
Candle -- John Barnes
A Barnes novel that actually ends on an optimistic note and with a protagonist that isn't some masochist? Miracles still happen it seems.
War for the Oaks -- Emma Bull
I don't particularly like urban fantasy as a genre, but this is one of the novels that defined the genre.
The Perspective of the World -- Fernand Braudel
The third and last volume in Braudel's Civilisation and Capitalism series, taking a global look at the development of capitalism
between the fifteenth and eighteenth centuries.
The Prince -- Niccolo Macchiavelli
The book which gave us the adjective "macchiavelian", it has a mostly undeserved reputation as an amoral treatise on how to stay in power as
an autocrat.
KV - 1 & 2 -- Steven Zaloga & Jim Kinnear
Another Osprey war nerd volume, on a Soviet World War II tank series not so well known as the T-34, but almost as important in the first
stages of the Great Patriotic War. Heavily armoured and armed with the same 76 mm gun as the T-34, when these tanks first appeared the Germans
had nothing to stop them with...
Bagration 1944 - The Destruction of Army Group Centre -- Steven Zaloga
One of the most important campaigns of World War II, overshadowed by the Anglo-American invasion of Normandy in the same month. The speed and
efficiency with which the Russians destroyed a German force much larger even than that during the battle for Stalingrad was a major reason for
the almost complete collapse of the Eastern Front in 1944.
Anathem -- Neal Stephenson
As is almost always the case with Stephenson, don't read this novel for the plot, but read it for the various ideas he chews through on the way.
The Dutch Republic -- Its Rise, Greatness, and Fall -- Jonathan I. Israel
A very thorough if somewhat exhausting and occasional tedious history of the United Provinces, from its earliest roots in Burgundian times to its
ultimate dissolution by Napoleon. It cost me a year to read this.
The Dragon's Waiting -- John M. Ford
A fantasy novel set ib a world in which Christianity didn't break through, the Byzantium empire managed to restore much of the old Roman empire
and some kinds of magic are real. This reminded me of some of Mary Gentle's stories, especially the White Crow series.
The 2006 Lebanon Campaign -- Stephen Biddle & Jeffrey A. Friedman
A US Army sponsored inquiry into the tactics and strategy employed by Hezbollah in the defence of Lebanon against Israeli attack in 2006. Was
Hezbollah behaving as a typical guerilla movement or more like a proper army and what are the implications for US army policy?
Saturn's Children -- Charlie Stross
The last book I finished in 2008. A typical Stross novel, fastpaced, fun and smart. Awful cover on the American edition, but it is actually
quite faithful to the description of the protagonist, who is in fact a redhaired sexbot whose nipples go spung. Yes, this is Stross doing
Late Heinlein, warts and all, making it work.
The culture secretary, Andy Burnham, says in an interview today that the government is considering the need for "child safe" websites --
registered with cinema-style age warnings -- to curb access to offensive or damaging online material.
He plans to approach US president-elect Barack Obama's incoming administration with proposals for tight international rules on English
language websites, which may include forcing internet service providers, such as BT, Tiscali, Sky and AOL, to provide packages restricting
access to websites without an age rating.
"There is content that should just not be available to be viewed. That's my view. Absolutely categorical," Burnham, the MP for Leigh in
Greater Manchester, told the Daily Telegraph. "If you look back at the people who created the internet, they talked very deliberately
about creating a space that governments couldn't reach. I think we are having to revisit that stuff seriously now."
Apart from the fact that his proposals are just unworkable, naive and done with no understanding of the internet, why the fuck is the culture
minister is proposing these measures? Shouldn't he defend freedom of speech on internet rather than scare monger? Or is he just another lazy
fuck who wants to outsource the raising of his children? It seems to be, since he talks about leaving his children on the internet without
supervision. Typical New Labour, never taking responsibility for their own actions.
...Everytime I see the movie poster of Twilight I can't help but see the smug, self-satisfied faces of the Bush generation (I'm
sure the actors are lovely people really). It's just that there's this whole cohort of kids having come of age during the Bush administration
many of whom wo'll have internalised the ethics of the Bush White House and that poster captures perfectly what I imagine they'll look like:
vain, self absorbed and thick. Unfair perhaps, but Twilight from all I've heard and read about does have that Bush entitlement
syndrome down pat.
Jean Charles de Menezes, murdered by police now more than three years ago is once again denied justice, as the coroner in the inquest to
his death ruled out a verdict of unlawful killing:
The family of Jean Charles de Menezes walked out of his inquest yesterday as the coroner ruled the jury was forbidden from
considering whether he was unlawfully killed.
Sir Michael Wright said he did not believe the testimony justified him allowing them to return a verdict which was tantamount
to accusing police officers of murder or manslaughter.
As the De Menezes family and their supporters walked out the coroner said he knew the jury's hearts would go out to the dead
man's mother, Maria Otone de Menezes. "But these are emotional reactions, ladies and gentlemen, and you are charged with
returning a verdict based on evidence," he said.
And so the establishment once again take care of its own. Can't embarass the police, especially after they have been so obliging to the
government recently. No wonder Craig Murray
is furious, especially about this shitty bit of
reasoning from "sir" Michael wright:
But he urged caution on judging anything they viewed as lying too harshly. "You must decide whether the person has lied or made an
honest mistake. If you can prove that the witness has lied you should bear ... in mind people tell lies for a variety of reasons, not
necessarily to put their own part.
"Do please excuse the police for not just murdering Jean, but lying about it and covering up their murder almost from the moment his
body hit the floor". Disgusting, but it fits in with how this case has been treated from the start. This has never been about getting
justice for Jean, but about exculpating the police for his murder. It's an old, old pattern in British policing, which has a shameful
record of wrongful killings and people dying in its custody and getting away with it. It's the other side of the same coin
that saw antiterrorist police arrest Damien Green MP. Three years ago the government allowed the police their ritual murder to relieve
their frustration, last week we saw the police returning the favour through a nicely staged bit of political intimidation.
Both cases sent a message to the British public. In the de Menezes case it's "we can and will murder you with impunity if we feel like",
in Green's case it's "it doesn't matter how powerful you are, step out of line and we'll squash you". With Green, he himself may "only"
suffer a humiliating and frightening arrest and questioning, but to everbody with less clout than him this message comes through loud
and clear.
Together these two cases are the clearest indication of police state Britain, but they're just the tip of the iceberg. As Jamie said,
talking about the Green case:
People have a crude idea that a police state involves a leader ordering the cops to arrest his enemies. It’s mainly an environment where the
police have expanded powers over the general administration of the state which they can exercise with a large degree of autonomy. Their turf
gets bigger, and is defended and expanded more aggressively.
Which is exactly what has happened under New Labour. From the very beginning they've used the police and the justice system as a political
tool, unleashing a torrent of ill-thought out, unworkable policies to curry favour with the tabloids, an equally large torrent of dodgy
statistics and press releases to show the succes of these policies, all topped with the occasional potemkin showpiece of serious policing.
After September 11 these tendencies only worsened. Remember the tanks at Heathrow the day before Parliament had to vote on the War on Iraq?
Long before the British establishment finally noticed last week therefore the police had been politicised and the murder of Jean charles de
Menezes as well as the arrest of Damien Green are a logical outcome of this. New Labour flacks may not even been lying when they insist Green's
arrest was the police's own idea, but the responsibility is still theirs.
A government short time working scheme set up to help companies that saw their monthly turnover and orders plummet since October reduce
salary costs without redundancies was opened this Sunday and already has 64 companies applying, including the steel manufacturing giant
Corus. Under the scheme a company introduces mandatory worktime reductions for its
staff, with the shortfall in salary paid for by unemployment benefits. For any company hit hard by the growing recession but still viable
it's a good way to cut salary costs without compulsory redundancies of employees it might very well be hardpressed to replace if the crisis
proves to be only temporarily, as economists are predicting for the Netherlands.
Unfortunately however the scheme is strictly limited in both duration and resources. It ends on the first of January and it only has a budget
for 200 million euros. What's more, to be eligible for the scheme a company has to have had a thirty percent loss of turnover for at least
two months, leaving a lot of other struggling companies out in the cold. Compared to the lavish treatment the banks got in the last few months,
billions spent with little oversight, this seems remarkable stingy. Yes, you need banks to keep the rest of the economy in capital, but that
doesn't meanw e can let other parts of the economy go to waste.
This is just a place for me to jot down some random thoughts and reactions to the news so I don't have to yell at the television or radio, or mutter to myself whilst reading the news.
Waffle
In which Reinder Dijkhuis, Adam Cuerden, Timm Brand, Geir Strøm and Jeroen Jager talk about comics, music, politics and the impending apocalypse.
Deltoid
A science orientated weblog by Tim Lambert.
Encyclopedia Astronautica
Incredibly cool site about the history of space travel, with lots of info about
the various space programs. Recommended for all spacenuts.
The Loom
A blog of biology and bioscience, written by Carl Zimmer.
Panda's Thumb
On evolutionary theory and the fight against the intelligent design loons
Pharyngula
Science, politics and the intersection between them. By PZ Myers.
Real Climate
A commentary site on climate science by working climate scientists.
