Obama will bring the revolution

2008 US election, US politics
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Andy Newman is engaging in a bit of wishful thinking today, by arguing that the election of Barack Obama as president of the United States will buy space for the left to grow. In particularly:

If Obama wins, then that is a mass popular endorsement of hope — that things should and can change. The revival of trade unionism in the sit down strikes in the 1930s could not have happened without the confidence given by Roosevelt’s New Deal. The growth of the 1960s civil
rights movement, and the growth of women’s liberation and black power movements were linked to expectations of injustice being ended by Kennedy and LB Johnson.

Barack Obama

I’m skeptical, as it reminds me too much of similar guff heard when New Labour was first elected, back in 1997, as witnessed in such thriumphal books like John O’Farrell’s Things Can Only Get Better (Andy seems to recognise this, considering the title of his post). But more importantly, it seems to me Andy has got the relationship between a strong progressive or leftist mass movement and a left leaning president wrong. The movements he mentions, trade unionism and the civil rights movement, existed and knew success before they got a president on their side. Roosevelt started off a moderate and was largely forced into the New Deal, Kennedy gave lip service to the civil rights movement but it was only with his successor LBJ that civil rights legislation really got going. And in both cases this wouldn’t have happened without pressure from a broadbased, grassroots uprising, didn’t go as far as the movement wanted or extended itself to foreign policy, which was just as reactionary under Roosevelt and Kenndey/LBJ as their under their predecessors.

With Obama we’ve seen that his first instincts certainly aren’t anything but centrist or even rightwing. He got lucky in that he didn’t have to vote for the War on Iraq, but it took a long time for him to take a real stand against it once he was elected. Even now, he only wants to leave Iraq to strengthen Afghanistan and he’s hawkish on the “threat” of nuclear armed Iran, as well as saying all the wrong things about Georgia. He does talk the talk about poverty in America, but also felt the need to urge Black fathers to take their responsibility. As Andy admits himself, he has a lot of support from Wall Street which is despairing of the Republicans bollixing up the economy and his core advisors are not exactly leftist firebrands either…

To come back to Andy’s main argument, that Barack Obama will bring a feeling of hope that has been missing for the past eight years, which will open space on the left, I’m with John Pilger, as quoted by Andy. “ An Obama victory will bring intense pressure on the US anti-war and social justice movements to accept a Democratic administration for all its faults. If that happens, domestic resistance to rapacious America will fall silent.” We’ve seen it happen already, as the various centre left organisations like MoveOn have fallen in line behind the Democrats.

Somalia: another US proxy is losing its war

War on Terror
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Back in 2006, when it looked like the Islamic Court Union was going to emerge as the winner in the country’s decades long civil war, Ethiopia intervened by invading the country and propping up the western friendly “interim government”. Ethopia quickly managed to drive the ICU out of much of Somalia, but at the cost of an ongoing guerilla war. Not a rich country, Ethiopia can’t keep up its occupation of Somalia the way America can do with Iraq and with little to no support given by the west, it’s no wonder the country has threatened to withdraw even if this meants the ICU will win:

Ethiopia is prepared to withdraw troops from Somalia even if the interim government is not stable, Ethiopian Prime Minister Meles Zenawi has said.

Ethiopia invaded its neighbour in 2006 to oust an Islamist militia and re-install the transitional government.

He told the UK’s Financial Times paper that financial pressures had to be taken into account and said the commitment was not open ended.

The withdrawal of Ethiopians is a key demand of the Islamist insurgents.

Al-Shabab, the radical wing of the Islamists who controlled much of Somalia in 2006, has refused to recognise a recent UN-brokered agreement the interim government has signed with an opposition group including a top Islamist leader.

It has demanded that Ethiopian troops leave Somalia before any ceasefire is considered.

Ethiopian interference in Somalia has been a disaster for the country, with aid agencies active in Somalia warning about famine as far back as March this year. It would’ve been much better off if the ICU had been allowed to win the civil war, even if they are the Islamic fanatics western propaganda has made them out to be, but in the framework of The War Against Terror this was never on the cards. The American government would rather wreck a country than let it fall into the hands of “Islamic terrorists”, so they first sponsored the same warlords America fought against back in 1993, then got ethiopia to invade when that wasn’t enough. It’s more than even odds that when Ethiopia withdraws (officially to be replaced with an African Union peaceforce) the Somalian civil war proper will flare up again, but this is of lesser concern to the US and Ethiopia, as long as the ICU doesn’t gain power. As usual in American foreign policy, if they can’t keep a puppet regime in power, a crippled country is a good secondbest scenario.

Books read in August

books and books review, posts interesting only to me
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Here are the books I’ve read last month.

Have His Carcase — Dorothy L. Sayers
The second Harriet Vane novel, which starts when she almost literally stumbles about a body on the beach, its throat cut by a razor. Vane and Wimsey team up to solve the case and see whether it was murder or suicide.

Postsingular — Rudy Rucker
Despite having several of his novels in my bookcases, this is the first of his I’ve read and I got it from the library… As the title gives away, this is a novel trying to deal with the socalled Singularity and succeeding reasonably well. A fair but not brilliant novel, that looks to be written for a young adult audience.

Reporting War — Stuart allan and Barbie Zelizer (editors)
A collection of essays about journalists in wartime, the dangers they face and the possibility of honest reporting as well as the limitations they work under.

Dresden — Frederick Taylor
The frontcover blurb compares this to Anthony Beevor’s Stalingrad, which for once is
a quite good comparison. Like Beevor’s book, Dresden takes an iconic episode of World War II and put it into context, clearing away some of the myths that have grown up around it.

The Mercenary — Jerry Pournelle
One of the novels that set the tone for the milsf subgenre, warts and all. It’s all here: the glorification of military men, the cod-toughness and distrust of democracy

Sand against the Wind — Barbara Tuchman
The usual competent Tuchman history, this time mixing a biography of “Sour” Joe Sitwell with the story of US intervention in China between the wars and during World War II, while America’s strategy for defeating Japan slowly changed.

What We Say Goes — Noam Chomsky
A collection of interviews with Chomsky, talking about current events and explaining their background. Not much new here if you follow the right blogs (ie. mine) but he does have the knack of explaining complex things clearly.

The White Rose — Glen Cook
The third book of the Black Company series of dark fantasy books. The Black Company has been leading the resistance against the Lady, the Evil Overlord ruling most of the north and now after years of waiting things come to a head. What sets this series apart from other fantasy “trilogies” is Cook’s nicely unsentimental attitude towards his characters.

Silencing the Past — Michel-Rolph Trouillot
Trouillot is an Haitian historian, so it’s unsurprising that he would want to investigate the ways in which certain parts of history are routinely silenced, as so much of his country’s history has been, despite its importance not just to Haiti but the wider world.

Shadow Games — Glen Cook
The fourth book of the Black Company, starting a new storyline in which the Company goes in search of its past and

The High Crusade — Poul Anderson
An alien ship lands in Medieval England. The local nobles, too brave or too unimaginative to know fear of the aliens and their weapons storm it, then intend to use it to invade France. Instead they end up at the other end of the galaxy and set about conquering the alien empire that send
the ship…

Tunnel in the Sky — Robert A. Heinlein
A group of students are sent by teleportationt unnel to a distant planet for their solo survival tests. It shouldn’t have take more than two weeks, but something goes wrong and the tunnel doesn’t reappear. Now they have to work together to survive. The hero is as per usual in a Heinlein juvenile brave, goodnatured and a little dim so that his more clever friends and kindly elderly authority figures can explain the ways of the world to him.

Farmer in the Sky — Robert A. Heinlein
A teeneage boy migrates to Gandymedes with his father and his new family and grows up to be a man. They get a bit of a raw deal on the new colony but as usual with Heinlein the solution lies in hard working and no complaining rather than any collective action.

Under an English Heaven — Donald E. Westlake
A lighthearted history of how Anguila was the only British colony ever to rebel against its rulers with the intention to remain a British colony, rather than become independent, and how this led to an invasion compared to which the American invasion of Grenada two decades later looked dangerous.

Modern Christians: martyrdom without inconvenience

Dutch politics, wingnuts
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So the police stopped a Dutch woman during a routine road safety check, asked for her licence and found out it had expired eleven years ago. When questioned, she explained she couldn’t get an extension as the new style licence, brought out in 1997 featured the symbol of the European Union, a circle of twelve stars and it’s against her religion to use this symbol. It’s unknown which bizarre sect this woman is a member of, but Dutch nieuwssite FOK thinks she may be a member of the Vrije Herbvormed Gemeente (Free Reformed Community) in Ijsselmuiden. In any case, it’s a good if extreme example of the modern Christian, who wants to be a martyr for their belief, but doesn’t want the hassle that comes with it.

In this case we have a Christian who refuses to get a new drving licence because of her beliefs, but who also refuses to stop driving. In other, more serious cases we’ve seen Christian civil servants who refused to marry gay couples but expect to keep their job, Christian pharmacists refusing to sell condoms or morning after pills but expect to keep their job, a Christian political party that discriminates against women but expects to keep its state subsidies, and so on and so forth. In all these cases these socalled Christians want to be able to force their morals on us, but not to pay the price for it. It’s the worst aspect of modern Christianity, of feeling victimised without being victimised, of not being able to see that if you make a moral chocie you have to pay the price for it.

You refuse to get a drivers licence because you dislike the symbols on it? Fine, it’s your choice. But if you do so, don’t keep driving.

But what about Fatty Soames?

class war, Tories
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Fatty Soames

Yes, we could respond to the Tories scolding the fatties by pointing out that the link between obesity and health is not at all as clearcut as the moral panics make it out to be, that being fat is not just a question of being greedy, but of having access to good, affordable food, not to mention the time and ability to prepare it, that we’re being sold food that’s slowly killing us by one arm of a multinational company like Mars or Unilever while another arm is selling us dieting panaceas, but really all we need to do is point to Nicholas “Fatty” Soames, the Tory posterboy for self-satisfied gluttony, of whom it has been said having sex with him is like having a wardrobe falling on you with the key sticking out. Fat is good as long as it wears a bespoke suit, not tracky bottoms.