Sidewinder

Last night there was a unique coming together of Christian, Jewish and Muslim groups in protest outside the Houses of Parliament. Were they coming together to express their horror at the US-UK instigated bloodbath in Iraq or the torture of the Palestinian people? Of course not, they were united in their hatred of gays and lesbians.

They were protesting to support the attempt by a member of the house of lords (and they call this farce a democracy - who voted for these parasites?) to sabotage a bill to outlaw discrimination against people on the basis of their sexuality. This the "faith" community are keen to tell us is an outrageous assault on their "human rights" - specifically their right to live their life according to their beliefs that gays and lesbians are intolerable.

Of course in the USA this kind of discourse has been taken to it’s (ill)logical extremes long ago. For decades now neo-nazis in the US have exploited the USA’s liberal "you can do anything you like and not pay tax as long as its a church" laws to carry on their tendency. The Church of the Creator is a creation of neo-nazis to set up their party masquerading as a church or religion - they claim that their belief in aryan supremacy, the global zionist conspiracy and the desireability of a final solution to the same is simply part of their religion and is therfore not only legal, but tax-deductable. All of this is simply the taking of an originally liberal-mided initiative to allow people freedom of religion, faith and assembly.

The problem is not one for the lawyers, it is intrinsic in the whole discourse of "rights". To illustrate, let’s contrast a properly secular approach - if the codes of society are for us to make as best they suit us, then let’s talk instead of agreements or pacts.

Let’s re-examine the god-botherer’s protest that toleration of gays and lesbians is an infrigement of their rights. In agreement terms, they are asking us all to agree that they need only accord egality to straight people. That’s not a socially stable solution.

The political ethic of egality is in reality, both conceptually and pratically, a ceasfire line. Ultimately, there are more arguments against egality than there are people to die for them. We take our basic argument for egality and the process of progress through debate and experiment from the no-brainer that no-one will settle permanently for being on the losing side of any other kind of settlement. Further, that peace is more prosperous than the war of all against all.

The concept of "rights" is a historical hangover from the era of theology, let us now talk of reasonable agreements. Let us agree on the right to co-exist. Let us hope that we all we ultimately come to appreciate that when it comes to diversity and "otherness" less is, in actual fact, less… and more is genuinely more.

The devil is always in the detail… Like another blogger I was watching the good news of local Leeds boy Mirza Tahir Hussain having his dodgy death sentance in Pakistan quoshed last night on More4 news when I caught the quick passing mention of the fact that the jail he has been on death row in for the last few years is sponsered by Pepsi. The covering journalists managed to sneak in a quick 3 second flash of the Rawalpindi jail sign with the Pepsi logo and mention it in the voiceover. First off, all power to the journalists for managing to get this into their report, however briefly. It’s certainly more than the beeb or the main Channel4 news managed. There was mention in a Times report last month, but other than that, bugger all. Oddly enough there seems to be no mention of Pepsi’s generous sponsorship of Rawalpindi nick, which incarcerates not only prisoners awaiting death by execution, but also juveniles under 15, in the soft drink and junk food group’s website on corporate citizenship and worth donations - I looked at the "Diversity and Inclusion" section in vain. The image above is from another prison, this time in Trujillo, Mexico - is this a pattern? More digging required…

So farewell then, Donald Rumsfeld. You prick.

So Korea explodes what may or may not be a nuclear device. And the question nobody’s asking is… where’s Donald Rumsfeld? How strange that at this moment where one pole of the "Axis of Evil" is singing "Come and have a go, if you think you’re hard enough…" the high priest warlord of the neo-con crusade is nowhere to be seen. One of our Rumsfelds is missing… Actually that’s not all that’s missing from the neo-con war machine. The official line from the Dubya House is that they are working with the UN to address the issue. This from an administration that appointed an ambassador to the UN previously chiefly known for two things - his outspoken conviction that the UN was an institution best abolished and being the last known public adherent of the Joseph Stalin moustache appreciation society. It appears that the bullish confidence of the neo-cons in the ability of US military power to establish global command unilaterally is faltering somewhat. It seems as if the object lesson of getting their arse kicked in both Iraq and Afghanistan (where it is mainly the loyal brit attack poodles that are taking the brunt of the onslaught) has dampened this administration’s ardour for old-style nation-state based imperialist solutions. We may well be witnessing the spectacle of a transition to more multi-lateral "Empire"-style approach to governmentality by the US. The Commoner’s blog has an interesting piece on this in relation to the US seeking international cooperation in financial counter-measures and the uneasy seeking of a common ground with China. This from an administration that started out rattling sabres against China over a downed spy plane back in early 2001 before, unusually, the voice of sanity from the State Department (presumably backed up by a sober assessment from the Pentagon before Rumsfeld managed to get his "Revolution in Military Affairs" snake oil spin machine in place) put the kibosh on the idea. Where-o, where is our Donald Rumsfeld?

Magyar madness! It’ll never catch on… Short english language article about first night on hungarian indymedia. Good wikipedia coverage. Despite the inherent humour of people rioting against a politician telling the truth for possibly the first time in recorded history : "…we fucked up. Not a little, a lot. No European country has done something as boneheaded as we have. Evidently, we lied throughout the last year-and-a-half, two years. It was totally clear that what we are saying is not true." Gyurcsány Ferenc, Hungarian PM - the situation in Hungary remains volatile. Not a few commentators are accusing Ferenc of being the source of the leak in order to provoke a crisis that will allow him to crack down and impose neo-liberal "reforms". Despite the prevalence of nationalist and right wing elements in the streetplay, the game is about an attempt to impose an IMF agenda on Hungarians. Lest we forget this is what Milosevic was trying to do in 1990 when the resulting virtual collapse of the Serbian state (when the police sent to attack striking unpaid public workers themselves went on strike because they hadn’t been paid either) led into the nationalist turn and war. Watch this space, this could get messy.

…or not, as the case may be. [sound of wind whistling through deserted streets… tumbleweed blowing past… a dark shrouded figure with scythe stands silhouetted in doorway whilst entirety of world leaders gathered at UN examine their fingernails, twiddle thumbs or look up at the ceiling whistling silently]

(with apologies to the Dead Kennedys). I am not in the habit of
reading or paying any attention to papal pronouncements. However the
latest hoo-ha about possible insults to islam in his speech at
Regensburg led me to have a look at the full text.

The theme of the speech is on (christian) faith and reason - not
reason as we know it but reason "liberated" from the narrow
Cartesian/empiricist definition imposed on it by modern science. In
other words it’s utter bollocks and intellectually pretty feeble fare
a that. A further measure of the basic stupidity of this man is that
the offending quote from the long-dead byzantine emperor which has
been the spark for much emoting in the muslim world - "Show me just
what Mohammed brought that was new, and there you will find things
only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the
faith he preached" - is in fact completely irrelevant to the theme of
the speech and yet the man was too brain-dead to realise the political
impact him speaking this phrase would have. Frankly you wouldn’t trust
the guy with the TV remote.

However, despite the immense chutzpah of the Pope denouncing the
unreasonable spreading of religion by fire and sword as something only
those nasty muslims do (the words pot and kettle come to mind). The
deeper agenda of bigotry is perhaps visible in the following quote
from the same speech

"This inner rapprochement between Biblical faith and Greek
philosophical inquiry was an event of decisive importance not only
from the standpoint of the history of religions, but also from that of
world history - it is an event which concerns us even today. Given
this convergence, it is not surprising that Christianity, despite its
origins and some significant developments in the East, finally took on
its historically decisive character in Europe. We can also express
this the other way around: this convergence, with the subsequent
addition of the Roman heritage, created Europe and remains the
foundation of what can rightly be called Europe."

Well we can certainly see where yer man’s opposition to Turkey’s
joining the EU is coming from. Europe and, by extension, "the West" is
based on an intellectual tradition exclusively grounded in
christianity. Let us remind ourselves of the real historical lessons
of El Andalus - the intellectual and technological development of
Western Europe is very much the joint historical product of the
inter-relation of "the Three Cultures" - that is Islamic, Jewish and
Christian (and even this is already an over-simplification). For this
ex-Hitler Jugend, the contributions of the other 2 cultures are to be
removed from history. This is naked historical revisionism on the
level of cultural genocide - at least the muslims are mentioned (in
the mode of being attacked) of the Jewish contribution to European
history though - nothing, nada, zip. It is as if the Pope’s former
fuhrer had been successful in entirely erasing Jewish life, history
and culture from the face of Europe.

In many ways it could be argued there’s no point getting worked up
about what is, after all, fairly traditional church positions. It’s
just that in the decades following the church’s involvement with the
Third Reich’s holocaust, some efforts were made to tone down or cover
up the cultural negationism of some of its positions. However, it now
seems that so long as the church can be seen as engaged on the "right"
side in the current neo-con led anti-Islamic crusade, the fundamental
anti-semitism of these same positions will be blythely overlooked in
the wider cause of muslim-bashing.