video

What the fuck was the BBC thinking inviting Starkey?

Manufacturing Consent, UK politics, video
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Good news for everybody who was hoping for a nice, easy, racist explenation for the riots in Britain, “historian” David Starkey has come to your aid. Yes, the rioters were multiracial, Black, white and Muslim, while the victims and defenders of various communities in turn were also multiracial, Black, white, Sikh, Turkish and so on and it seemed that all the simplistic ideas about how those minorities just cannot help their criminal natures were clearly wrong, but Starkey knew the truth. It was the white man that had gone Black, had abandoned its superior nature, that it had been infected by the “gangster culture”, probably through that newfangled hippity-hop music. This is not racist of course, it’s just common sense. And hence Starkey is listened to politely, not interrupted and taken seriously as a commentator even if the other guests disagree with him.



Compare and contrast the treatment of Darcus Howe, who is clearly a dangerous loony who has to be chided and can’t be trusted to be sensible. Howe needs to be handled aggressively, he’s almost a rioter himself and his waffle about root causes to explain the riots need to be attacked immediately as excuse mongering.

As with every unexpected, natural crisis when the news media are caught unawares, the raw edges of approved reality become a bit more visible. On the one hand, the manipulation of news and acceptable opinion becomes more blatant — one very obvious example being the whitewashing of the spontaneous cleanup operations in the days after the first riots, as noted and ripped apart by W. Kasper. On the other hand, even more blatant is how unacceptable opinions like Howe’s are handled, attacked, shouted down. This by and large is not a conscious process, but something journalists and the news media pick up by osmosis. It’s no surprise that it’s the BBC, supposedly independent but in practise always hypersensitive to how the political winds are blowing, that is the most hardline in this. We saw the same thing with the War on Iraq, where it was the commercial news channels that were more skeptical than the BBC, other than you’d expect at first.

Starkey might just well be trying to move the acceptable discourse to the right, to make his racist ideas respectable as Lenny argues, but the BBC is more culpable by giving him a platform and treating him with respect, making his ideas more respectable by that. Howe’s views on the other hand, the idea that some of the responsibility for the riots may just have to lie with the police for their treatment of (young) Black people in general and the murder of Mark Duggan in particular, are still beyond the pale, as shown by how he is treated. In short, the BBC is actively shifting the borders of acceptable, mainstream opinion rightwards.

For Reinder

funny, video
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Reinder Dijkhuis has for most of the year been blogging about Kate Bush covers and posting videos. Here are two he missed.



That was Pamela Stephenson from an early Not the Nine O’Clock News episode. She did a lot of these parodies and was usually brilliant at them.



And that was the real Kate Bush, in duet with Rowan Atkinson for Comic Relief.

Incidently, this year is Reinder’s twentieth anniversary of his webcomic, The Rogues of Clywd Rhan, which makes it one of the oldest existing webcomic still being published and certainly the oldest Dutch one. It was also the first, after Dr Fun, that I followed regularly.

Feel old now!

economic crisis, Music, video
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This is thirty years old now:



unemployment is rife. The political and economic parallels between Britain in 2011 and 1981 may be self-evident, but musical reactions to today’s tempestuous times are conspicuous by their scarcity. Thirty years ago, however, there was one anthem that defined that summer of discontent. On 11 July 1981, the Specials’ “Ghost Town” hit the top of the charts, where it stayed for three weeks – the day before it reached No 1, rioting erupted across Britain. It was an elegiac portrait of the band’s Coventry home town, but its message resonated far beyond the Midlands, chiming with a country feeling the bite of Thatcherite cuts and galvanised into unrest by April’s Brixton riots. “Government leaving the youth on the shelf … No job to be found in this country,” Neville Staple and Terry Hall memorably sang to a backdrop of strident brass, haunted-house organ and loping bass, the groove’s eerie Middle Eastern flavour as unsettling as the lyrics. Meanwhile, to compound the disquiet, the video offered a road trip through post-apocalyptically empty London streets.

Seventy years ago today

history, video, Warfare & Military history
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Hitler made the biggest yet inevitable mistake of the war and started Operation Barbarossa, the invasion of the USSR. Though incredibly succesful at first, it turned out to be far from the cakewalk the Germans had expected. The tenacity and fighting power of the average Soviet fighting man (and woman) was far greater than anybody, including Stalin, had accounted for and the Russian defence might have been in disarray in the first few weeks, it never broke. The Germans needed to deliver a knocout blow and once they failed to do it, the outcome was inevitable.

Three short years later and the Russians launched Operation Bagration, swept the Germans out of their country and inflicted the worst German defeat in the entire war: it was this, rather than the Normandy Landings, that meant the end was near. In the west we have a tendency to airbrush the Soviet contributions to the defeat of Germany out of our history, but without them, we’d all be speaking German stilll..

The version of The Internationale above is sung by SWP activist and folk singer Alistair Hulett (best known for being in Roaring Jack) with backing by Jimmy Gregory. Sadly Alistair Hulett died early last year due to liver cancer.