Wis[s]e Words

On horror

Published on December 19, 2003

In a recent discussion on genre in rec.arts.sf.written, someone quoted a post of mine I had written a year or so earlier. Looking at it, I thought it would be interesting enough to share here too.

Horror is a mood, fantasy is a genre.

To explain a bit: horror can be evoked through the mundane (Silence of the Lambs), the science fictional (Who Goes There?) or the fantastic (Dracula).

Horror revolves around evoking a mood of dread, of being scared shitless, a growing sense of unease or discomfort, the sense that something is wrong with the world.

Fantasy revolves around magic in some sense or other, like science fiction revolves around science in some sense or other and mainstream or memitic fiction revolves around “the real world”.

Horror can be evoked in all three of them.

What do you think?

“Dutch racism is a well-intentioned, friendly apartheid”

Published on December 12, 2003

An interesting article on the openDemocracy site about the Dutch and racism

Dutch racism is a well-intentioned, friendly apartheid: white, Christian, and fuelled by feelings of supremacy and superiority which are self evident, although they will be generally denied.

Denial, indeed, appears to be a built-in part of the mix. Both in the form of anti- semitism, and in the various forms of racism, patronising attitudes prevail. In this sense, the anti-racist norm on which we have relied is part of this denial: since racism is seen as barbaric, nobody — except for small fringe groups — will allow themselves to be called racist or anti-semitic for one moment.

This attitude really came out in the open after the twin impact of the September 11 attacks and the rise of Pim Fortuyn. With a charismatic leader of a far right party legitimising what many people felt anyway, the sluicegates of intolerance have been fully opened these past two years. Many Dutch people just don’t seem to want to have to live in a multicultural society, are fed up with the problem ethnicity du-jour and think that integration is a one-way process.

This is not an attitude unique to the Netherlands; it is also on display in some of the interviews in Stud Terkel’s Race, which is about race relations in the USA. It seems to me to be an attitude common to a priviledged people anytime it stands to lose some of its priviledges.

Why Ken MacLeod won’t be in the pro-war left

Published on December 12, 2003

Ken Macleod has a long and interesting post up detailing why he isn’t part of the
pro-war left:

This is why no argument so far presented could convince me to take the position of the pro-war left.
I admit to being one of those boring old ex-Trots whose thinking on war and peace was shaped, not only by the 1960s and 1970s and 1980s and 1990s, but by the oft-invoked historical memory of the 4th of August 1914, when the War to End All Wars began, and a world ended. As my oldest surviving uncle once said: ‘I haven’t believed in God since the First World War.’ Most of the left, Marxist and liberal and anarchist, backed one side or another in that war too.

Invasion of the entrists

Published on December 10, 2003

I’ve sort of been following the group that used to be the Revolutionary Communist Party, then morphed into Living Marxism and is now known as Spiked online/The Institute of Ideas. They’re a classic example of how a group of extreme leftwing nutcases can metamorphose into a group of rightwing nutcases.

Yesterday they turned up on George Monbiot’s radar:

One of strangest aspects of modern politics is the dominance of former left-wingers who have swung to the right. The “neo-cons” pretty well run the White House and the Pentagon, the Labour party and key departments of the British government. But there is a group which has travelled even further, from the most distant fringes of the left to the extremities of the pro-corporate libertarian right. While its politics have swung around 180 degrees, its tactics – entering organisations and taking them over – appear unchanged. Research published for the first time today suggests that the members of this group have colonised a crucial section of the British establishment.

The organisation began in the late 1970s as a Trotskyist splinter called the Revolutionary Communist party. It immediately set out to destroy competing oppositionist movements. When nurses and cleaners marched for better pay, it picketed their demonstrations. It moved into the gay rights group Outrage and sought to shut it down. It tried to disrupt the miners’ strike, undermined the Anti-Nazi League and nearly destroyed the radical Polytechnic of North London. On at least two occasions RCP activists physically attacked members of opposing factions.

When I first started getting interested in socialism and politics in general, Spiked Online looked interesting and modern, but it soon seemed to be more glitz than substance: establishment dogma with a fashionable cyberlibertarian sauce. Plenty of opinions on everything, but few ideas of their own…

Earlier posts on the Spiked crew:
Brendan O’Neill doesn’t get it
one man’s journey into sectarianism

The battle in Samara

Published on December 2, 2003

This, if this is a true account of that battle in Samara, is bad:

A Combat Leader Gives The Inside Skinny Of The Biggest Battle Since The War Ended

[…] most of the casualties were civilians, not insurgents or criminals as being reported. During the
ambushes the tanks, brads and armored HUMVEES hosed down houses, buildings, and cars while using
reflexive fire against the attackers. One of the precepts of “Iron Hammer” is to use an Iron Fist when dealing with the insurgents. As the division spokesman is telling the press, we are responding with overwhelming firepower and are taking the fight to the enemy. The response to these well coordinated
ambushes was as a one would expect. The convoy continued to move, shooting at ANY target that appeared to be a threat. RPG fire from a house, the tank destroys the house with main gun fire and hoses the area down with 7.62 and 50cal MG fire. Rifle fire from an alley, the brads fire up the alley and fire up the surrounding buildings with 7.62mm and 25mm HE rounds. This was actually a rolling firefight through the entire town.

The ROE under “Iron Fist” is such that the US soldiers are to consider buildings, homes, cars to be
hostile if enemy fire is received from them (regardless of who else is inside. It seems too many of us
this is more an act of desperation, rather than a well thought out tactic. We really don’t know if we kill
anyone, because we don’t stick around to find out. Since we armored troops and we are not trained to use counter-insurgency tactics; the logic is to respond to attacks using our superior firepower to kill the rebel insurgents. This is done in many cases knowing that there are people inside these buildings or cars who may not be connected to the insurgents.

The belief in superior firepower as a counter-insurgency tactic is then extended down to the average
Iraqi, with the hope that the Iraqis will not support the guerillas and turn them in to coalition forces,
knowing we will blow the hell out of their homes or towns if they don’t. Of course in too many cases,
if the insurgents bait us and goad us into leveling buildings and homes, the people inside will then hate us (even if they did not before) and we have created more recruits for the guerillas.