Your Party, Party like there’s no tomorrow

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Sunday, 14 September 2025 — Investigating Imperialism

By William Bowles

Your Party is the latest attempt to create a new party of the Left in the UK

Blimey, what a rollercoaster! I’ve never been a fan of Corbyn, even less, Corbynism (whatever that is) and I have never viewed him as a socialist, more of a liberal-lefty type, with his heart no doubt in all the ‘right places’ but above all, Corbyn is a Party Man, the Labour Party being his entire life, or rather, he was, until he was unceremoniously booted out after getting on for fifty years of loyal service. This alone should have taught him something about what the Labour Party is really all about. But has it? Is the nascent Your Party about to repeat the past, only this time as farce? Your Party’s beginnings do not bode well with all the usual suspects scrambling for position in the party’s pecking order. Not a pretty sight. And lurking in plain sight is the dead hand of the Zionist lobby.

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The past returns to haunt us…

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Sunday, 27 April 2025 — Dot Commie

with a vengeance.

By William Bowles

Like a really bad meal and you think, I’m not going to that restaurant again. Yet here we are, eating the same, poisonous food and the same horrific consequences play out all over again. And in an irony of ironies, the victims of the past, return as the persecutors of the present. So I could say, surely, we saw this coming didn’t we? When Israel was created in 1948 on the stolen land of Palestine, Western, racist colonialism drove the entire enterprise and that’s why, we, in the West, never recognised it for what it was. We were too busy doing phony mea culpas for German Fascism–at least that’s how it seemed at the time–to recognise that the racism that played such a central role in the slaughter of WWII, is the same racism that drove the creation of Israel and drives the slaughter of Palestinians. It explains why white, European capitalism, applauds, encourages, finances and arms the Zionist monster, itself a creation of 19th century European imperialism. So really, nothing has changed, not a damn thing!

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Lies! More lies! Nothing but damn lies!

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Tuesday, 22 October 2024 — Dot Commie

The control of information about events that affect our lives has become the main area of struggle between the people and the state-big business. Our minds, our thoughts are now the contested terrain

The corporate/state media, nor the state it represents, has never really been trusted by the public, tolerated maybe, resigned to its lies maybe but trusted? It’s just assumed that the government and its minions, dissemble, massage the facts, lie by omission and ultimately, outright lie to us, pretty much about everything, it’s what they do, such is the nature of the relationship between citizens and the state. So really, it’s not only the lack of trust but crucially, can anything be done about it? Do we, have we, ever had any control over what the government does or says? Thus, fundamentally it’s resignation, a sense of powerlessness, that whatever we do, whatever we think about the state and its media, it will have no effect on the actions of the state. All the surveys tell us this, ‘trust in the media is at an all-time low’, ‘trust in politicians has hit rock bottom’, ‘trust in our institutions is crumbling’. So the prevailing thought is a lethal combination of a resigned powerlessness, which suits the state and its minions just fine, it leaves them to get on with the business of governing without the messy problem of dealing with an unruly electorate, after all, who cares, the government ignores the public’s views, unless of course they concur with the government’s and we ignore the government, it’s the only power we have. But of course, by ignoring, we give the state the space to pursue its objectives.
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Holocaust again or is that antisemitic?

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Sunday, 12 May, 2024 — DotCommie

Is the slaughter in Gaza a step too far for the settler state?

William Bowles

 

How to explain the (apparent) indifference of the populations of the West to the slaughter of Palestinians by USIsrael, aided and abetted by the European satrapies (satrap: a pejorative term that refers to any subordinate or local ruler, with embarrassing connotations of corruption)?

Students, exempt as they are from the burden of earning a living, are free to express themselves in a way the general population are not, well up to a point, the point being where the outrage of the slaughter of innocent Palestinians by Zionist imperialism, starts to impinge on the consciousness of the population. Response? Stamp it out, pronto. Thus the full force of the security state is brought to bear with, I suspect, thousands of young people being stamped on by the jackbooted forces of ‘law and order’, beaten and thrown in jail. Demonise them with accusations of antisemitism.

It’s as if the blame Europeans allegedly feel for the persecution of the Jews has been transferred to the Palestinians. In reality, it’s the very real racism toward Arabs, itself centuries old; the stereotype of the swarthy, hook-nosed Arab, with its sexualised undertones, popularised in so much, especially in English and French, fiction (Biggles and Tin-Tin come to mind, both aimed at children), and note how this parallels the caricature of the Jew, that has formed the basis for this indifferent racism and explains why, the propaganda of the ruling classes have been so effective in inoculating us to the unbelievably horrific slaughter of so many thousands of civilian Palestinian men, women and children, let alone the documented harvesting of organs from the corpses by organised Israeli gangs and the violent theft of Palestinian land.

The term anti-semitism has now been transformed into the image that fits the description pioneered by Joseph Goebbels, back in 1930s Nazi Germany and how ironic is that!

There was no point in seeking to convert the intellectuals. For intellectuals would never be converted and would anyway always yield to the stronger, and this will always be “the man in the street.” Arguments must therefore be crude, clear and forcible, and appeal to emotions and instinct, not the intellect. Truth was unimportant and entirely subordinate to tactics and psychology. – Joseph Goebbels

And this observation is borne out when looking at how the corporate and state media cover the issue of ‘antisemitism’. The ‘man in the street’ however, is rarely asked for his opinion on whether the protests over the Zionist slaughter are antisemitic. Instead, it’s either Zionist Jews, Israelis or a mouthpiece of the state whose views are sought and the word is antisemitism, repeated, as Goebbels says, a thousand times. The ‘man in the street’ is the target. But is it working?

Without brute force to back it up, propaganda has its limits. Yes, the Goebbels quote:

A lie told once remains a lie but a lie told a thousand times becomes the truth

Has been executed by the Empire. But the very fact that the corporate/state media has resorted to mass censorship and the threat of legal action over opposition to the Palestinian holocaust, points to the potential for a very different outcome to this particular struggle.

A bit of personal history here, is I think, relevant to this debate around the word antisemitism. My mother, Vera, named she told me, after a Bolshevik comrade of Lenin, Vera Zazulich, with whom she went into exile in Switzerland, was the daughter of Etty (Ethel) Barofsky (nee Appleson), my grandmother, who was born I think in a shtel near Vilnius, Lithuania in 1882, or thereabouts, which then was in The Pale, part of the Russian Empire, that vast swathe of land that included great chunks of Poland, Belarus, Ukraine, Lithuania and Latvia, the only areas that Jews were allowed to live in permanently.

According to my mother, Etty and her future husband Rafael or Rifel as he was known, were both radicals and members of what was later to become the Bolshevik Party of Russia. It was the time of the Black Hundreds, a Pogrom ordered by the Tsar to exterminate thousands of Jews. Apparently, Etty and Rifel were forced to leave Russia because of their opposition to the Pogroms and in 1901, they both landed in Hull, Yorkshire, with Etty already pregnant, with the oldest of my mother’s brothers and sisters, Isaac and they were married in Bradford a little later that year. The Barofskys (who Anglicised their name to Barry) eventually settled in a Jewish Ghetto in Leeds. My mother, one of eight children, three boys and five girls, was born on 17 June, 1910.

I was born on 23 July, 1945, I grew up in the aftermath of WWII. As a child, my mother told me about the concentration camps and the Soviet Union’s ‘Great Patriotic War’ as WWII was called there and the 25 million people who died. I knew also that my mother’s family in the Soviet Union had been almost totally annihilated by the Nazis, I think she discovered one uncle who had survived, a professor at Kiev University on a visit there in the 1980s. My parents were both atheists and Communists and by around the age 6 or 7, I knew I was also an atheist (I was a precocious child), thus for my mother to tell me I was Jewish, was somewhat confusing. Thus my connection to being Jewish was almost entirely emotional, political and cultural, firstly, through my mother telling me I was Jewish and secondly the events of the Great Patriotic War and its impact on my maternal family (the notion of who is a Jew is passed down through the mother). In many ways, I felt a closer connection to Russia and again it was an emotional-political connection and the horrors Russians and Jews (amongst other, persecuted minorities) suffered at the hands of the Nazis.

I don’t believe there is a Jewish race, as far as I am concerned, there is only one race, the human race and genetics tells us that this is so. Given that I didn’t believe in God (or a god), I had no connection to Judaism. That left cultural-emotional connections, especially to my Russian family and to class through the politics of both sides of my family. As far as I was concerned, I was first and foremost, a Londoner, not even feeling that I was especially British and I didn’t feel particularly English either. I say all this because I’m trying to establish my connection to antisemitism as being exclusively directed at Jews.

First, there is the stereotype of the Jew. Most people who identify themselves as Jewish in Europe, are genetically, mostly white, Europeans. The Nazis identified them by location, name, profession or trade and religion. The stereotype of the Jew was central to Nazi propaganda and concocted fantasies of Jews drinking the blood of babies and so forth or being capitalist bankers.

When I had my DNA analysed, it was 47% Southwest England, and a couple of percent Irish (my dad’s side); a bit of North Africa and 49% ‘Ashkenazi’ Jew (my mother’s side). According to all that I’ve read about the Ashkenazi, they stem from 350 Jews, who were already mostly European, who settled in Germany in the 17th century. They probably came from the Levant. Other Jews in Europe stem from Spain, the Sephardim like my Uncle Joe (Juan), who looked like a North African (as a child, I asked him if he was an African, he got quite upset)! Furthermore, it was their religion, Judaism that identified them as Jews, not their alleged race. To this we have to add how Jews were forced into specific trades and professions by the European ruling classes that set them apart.

This created the context for the invention of Zionism, a secular ideology that identified directly with European imperialist, racist ideology and the alleged superiority of the white ‘race’ and specifically with British imperialism. The new ‘state’ of Israel inherited, lock, stock and barrel, the racist colonial laws of the British, used to repress Palestinian resistance to British occupation.

The intimate relationship between Zionist ideology and British imperialism is well documented, not only by Zionism’s relationship exposed by the 1917 Balfour Declaration but the connection between Zionism and the British Mandate that gave Britain total control over Palestine. When Israel was founded in 1948, it inherited a raft of repressive laws, still in operation today, including the prisons built by the British.

Another tactic Britain used was to force Palestinian civilians to accompany them on patrols. They were made to sit, unprotected, at the front of military convoys while driving through areas with high rebel activity and even to drive over mines to blow them up before British troops proceeded.

This tactic had come from British rule in India and was known as “minesweeping”. Many Palestinians were killed or seriously injured this way.

Britain effectively used Palestinian civilians as human shields, which Israeli forces have been filmed doing repeatedly in both the West Bank and in Gaza for years.
– ‘Israel’s Brutality Draws on British Rule’, Consortium News

Quite clearly, Israel is a settler, colonial state, a literal continuation of British rule, established at a time when its Zionist leadership had the sympathies of the countries of Europe and the USA, following WWII (the Soviet Union was the first country to recognise Israel) and has used this prop ever since to justify its theft of the land of Palestine and the murder and eviction of its population.

But this new generation of young people doesn’t have the same connection to the past and perhaps this explains why so many young people are immune to the propaganda onslaught? And it’s also the sheer bestiality of the Israeli slaughter of innocents, which in spite of the censorship and the lies, has been difficult to hide even with the deliberate targeting of journalists by the IDF with more than 140 killed. My optimistic side says that this could be a turning point in this David and Goliath struggle, let’s hope so. I know my ancestors are on my side and I listen to my ancestors.

Everything we know is a lie

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Thursday, 9 May 2024 — Dot Commie

William Bowles

How can I put this? We live in a gaudy, sometimes, bubble, insulated from the world, fed an illusion that strokes our vanity, our egos, our presumptions but especially our fears. A world, so complete, so walled off from the real world and for so long that it’s impossible to see beyond the Lie. Out of it as if we live in a walled city. It consumes us all, even questions are prepared for us as are the answers.

The Lie feeds our vanities and our fears, our assumptions. Everything we think we know is a lie, so complete, down to the tiniest detail. In every direction when, if, we care to look we see, the Lie, a lie that’s impossible to challenge because it’s impossible to recognise it as a lie. The Lie consumes everything. The Lie is ancient, embedded in the ruins of our memories.

Oh it’s a clever lie, cleverly constructed. It’s deep, it has many levels, many layers like an onion. Peeling back a lie reveals another lie. It’s the Lie that preserves the status quo, that’s stops the questions. That permits no questioning.

The Lie is rooted in privilege and power, power accumulated, stolen over the centuries, sucked from the earth, the sky, the water, our bodies, our minds. Transported, the Lie feeds the privileged. In turn, that privilege is used to perpetuate the Lie.

I’m struck by the history of racism (and its brother, sexism) and the role both have played in creating the Lie. Both are, of course the progeny of a class society, specifically that of European capitalism. One could say that it’s an historical accident, I mean, why Western Europe and white people and specifically, Christianity and its progeny, slavery, the fuel of the industrial revolution and again, its brother patriarchy, the rationale that justified Western industrial capitalism? Paradoxically, it’s the so-called Age of Enlightenment that rationalised the rise of industrial capitalism. It was, after all, the philosopher Hobbes, who described the human body as if it were nothing more than a machine:

“Life is but a motion of limbs… For what is the heart, but a spring; and the nerves, but so many strings; and the joints but so many wheels, giving motion to the whole body.” — Hobbes, Leviathan, 1650)

And in the 17th century, far from being the Age of Enlightenment, Hobbes’ contemporaries described their time as the Iron Century and with good reason. The rise of mercantile capitalism, the suppression of women’s role in the economy and in society that, along with slavery, literally supplied the wealth that powered the Industrial and Scientific Revolution that in turn, made possible the rise of the Royal Navy and we know what that led to, or do we?

It’s during this time we see the conscious suppression/revision of Europe’s organic connection to Africa and Asia and the knowledge those Ancient civilisations bequeathed to Europe, stolen by Europe. This disconnect enabled European capitalism to begin the task of rewriting the history of humanity, supplanting, especially the so-called Middle East and North Africa, with Greece as the source of European civilisation.

By the time of the 19th century, the European colonial powers of England, France, Holland, Spain, Germany and Portugal had, between them, conquered Africa, Asia and the Americas and literally sucked them dry of the resources, both material and human, that built the European industrial powerhouse. So the Lie was built not only on the theft of land and resources but on the appropriation of the knowledge of our collective past by rewriting our history in its entirety.

“If I am right in urging the overthrow of the Aryan Model and its replacement by the Revised Ancient one, it will be necessary to not only rethink the fundamental bases of ‘Western Civilisation’ but also to recognise the penetration of racism and ‘continental chauvinism’ into all our historiography, or philosophy of writing history. The Ancient Model had no major ‘internal’ deficiencies, or weaknesses in explanatory power. It was overthrown for external reasons. For 18th– and 19th century Romantics and racists it was simply intolerable for Greece, which was seen not merely as the epitome of Europe but also as it pure childhood, to have been the result of the mixture of native Europeans and colonizing Africans and Semites. Therefore the Ancient Model had to be overthrown and replaced by something more acceptable.” ‘Black Athena The Afroasiatic roots of European Civilisation Volume 1: The Fabrication of Ancient Greece 1785-1985’, by Martin Bernal

Bernal’s superb history took an age to get published, because, as he says, the idea that Africans and Asians could be the source of European ‘civilisation’ was just too much to swallow, not only for 19th century racists but also for 20th century racist publishers. As is the case today, the role of academics in the revision of history is central to the Lie and what could be further proof of this than the role of universities in the suppression of the revulsion felt by their students (and some staff) over the slaughter of Palestinians by the Zionist imperialists?

Furthermore, the perpetuation of the myth of Zionism as some kind of ‘saviour’ of the Jewish ‘race’ and the role the media plays in promoting this myth, is only possible because the history of Zionism as its perceived by the majority of the public, is a total fabrication and especially the role of British imperialism in the Lie, a role that has been entirely suppressed in the public discourse. This is of course, just the tip of the iceberg. When one digs deeper into this created reality, we find that nothing escapes the Lie and I mean nothing!

But how is this possible? We live in a culture saturated in data, coming at us 24/7, it’s like trying to walk on quicksand, it sucks you in. Perhaps this is why. We’re blinded by information, we’re drowning in data! Discriminating between truth and falsehood becomes virtually impossible, it’s as if our world has been dropped into a giant blender. In the process, critical thinking is homogenised into a soup of non-sense. Everything is everything and everything is nothing.

Is it any wonder therefore, that the ruling class shit a brick when the Worldwide Web came along? The potential of the Web to blow the entire fantasy apart eventually sank into the power-crazed brains of the ruling class, they had to repossess it! Such power in the hands of the ‘Great Unwashed’ was unthinkable. Today, I came across this:

“During a vitriolic rant about university demonstrators at the Ash Carter Exchange on Innovation and National Security on Tuesday, Palantir CEO Alex Karp came right out and said that if those on the side of the protesters win the debate on this issue, the west will lose the ability to wage wars.” – ‘Empire Managers Explain Why This New Protest Movement Scares Them’ – Caitlin Johnstone, 9 May, 2024

Karp didn’t mince his words:

“We think these things that are happening across college campuses are a sideshow. No, they are the show.”

“If we lose the intellectual debate, you will not be able to deploy any army in the West, ever.”#Palantir CEO Alex Karp at #SCSPAIExpo2024 pic.twitter.com/MwQoDlSMFw

— Palantir (@PalantirTech) May 8, 2024

Note Karp’s reference to “los[ing the] intellectual debate”, the ruling class always speak the truth (as they see it) when talking amongst themselves. It’s the difference between reading the Financial Times and reading the Daily Mail, or in the US between the Wall Street Journal and the Daily News. One of the central objectives of neoliberalism has been to transform education into a tool, not only to supply the brains to run their Empire for them but to ensure that real, critical thinking is snuffed out. Clearly, at least in the US, they have failed dismally in achieving the latter. In turn it explains the vicious crackdown by the Security State, not only in the US but across the entire ‘Collective West’ on all opposition to its wars of conquest disguised as ‘defending human rights’. It seems that the proxy war launched against Russia in the Ukraine and the genocidal holocaust launched against the Palestinian people, has exposed the vulnerable underbelly of the Empire. It reveals that the ruling class of the West doesn’t have it all its own way. That change is possible. The Lie does have its limits.

One species, two realities

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Saturday, 27 January 2024 — Dot Commie

Given that the realm of politics, in fact pretty much everything is largely, if not completely, a male thing, is it any wonder that men who claim to be progressive, you know, enlightened and liberated, for the most part are absolutely clueless about 50% of the human race? In fact, judging by appearances, it would seem that females are a different species, let alone judged by their behaviour!

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Living In the Age of Ironies By William Bowles

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Monday, 3 October 2022 — Investigating Imperialism

Irony #1

What we may be witnessing is not just the end of the Cold War, or the passing of a particular period of postwar history, but the end of history as such: that is, the end point of mankind’s ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government.

— Francis Fukuyama, “The End of History?”, The National Interest, No.16 (Summer 1989)

Hmmm… so much for predictions.

The Russians have surely put the cat amongst the pigeons and put paid to “the end of history” nonsense, big time! All our traditional yardsticks, the way we evaluate events and ideas in this post-Soviet space, have we to jettison them all because of Russia’s ‘Special Military Operation’ (SMO) in the Ukraine? Even the much-vaunted contest between left and right, a contest all of us have grown up within, has been cut adrift from its moorings, but these alone don’t identify the key elements of the transition to a neoliberal planet, however brief its reign may be. But of course, it’s not just the Russian SMO, it’s the entire trajectory of events since the US’s regime change operation that overthrew the Soviet Union in 1989, that have been leading up to this denouement. What is depressing, is that so few in the West recognise it for what it is, and of course this is intimately connected to what has happened to politics in the West. Or rather the disappearance of politics, which in its way, explains in part, why the left has been rendered impotent. If you like the SMO is a wakeup call as it signals a new epoch in the making for both left and right to chew on. So far however, the left has shown that it’s not up to the task.

And of course, underneath it all, propelling it along, like some demented, out-of-control train, is the capitalist system, hidden yet in plain sight and desperate to hold on to ill-gotten gains, even if it risks the ending of humanity.

Irony #2

My second irony and it’s not (yet) about left and right, events have overtaken both the left and the right and found both wanting. And this is not the first time by any means, that this has happened. But what makes this time different is that unless the crisis is dealt with correctly and promptly, it’ll probably be the last time we have the luxury of decision-making about anything. The irony lies in the fact that whilst the left, in all its various iterations, seems content to count the number of capitalists there are on the head of a pin, can’t seem to figure out what the SMO is all about or indeed what the ‘Pandemic’ was really all about. This is first and foremost about the crisis of capitalism, perhaps the final crisis.

Most of the Western left faces a real quandary over Russia’s SMO but not so our compañeros in the Global South. They’re all pretty much of one mind about the real objectives of the Collective West as it is now known or, to give it its ‘classical’ name, “Imperialism” and events, not just in the Ukraine but the entire neocolonial project since the 1960s, headed by the US and executed by NATO. Why is this? What is it about the politics of the Left in the West that leaves them so confused and so easily misled about events and their causes? Does it not call into question as to what their true intentions are, especially when it comes to their relationships with the Global South. Or perhaps, they are simply clueless about things but I don’t buy this. I can say this from my own, direct experience of working with solidarity groups connected to Central America and Southern Africa. I call it (generously) the ‘We know best’ syndrome. Left or right, we are always telling everybody else, not only what to do but how to do it. Lenin was more direct; he called it ‘social imperialism’ where imperialist views are masked by socialist rhetoric.

The Western left has a kind of schizophrenia about Russia/Soviet Union but of two types: type 1 are those, with whatever provisos they had, who supported the Soviet Union and 20th century socialism; type 2 are those who never supported the Soviet Union, they considered that the Russian Communist Party had sold out, reneged on its principles, had a abandoned the Revolution or never had that as an objective in the first place. Russia’s Special Military Operation has either confirmed these longstanding views of Russia – whether the socialist or capitalist version – that Russia is an imperialist state bent on conquering the planet. Or, that Russia has legitimate concerns over where USNATO’s march East is going to end up and after having its security concerns ignored by the ‘Collective West’, it acted, quite rightly in my view, to defend its  legitimate national interests.

Irony #3

Why shouldn’t it be Putin who leads the challenge to Western hegemony? Wasn’t it the Egyptian leader Gamal Abdal Nasser who challenged the hegemony of the European imperialists, France and England but he was, like Putin a nationalist, a patriot if you like, not a Communist (he locked them up). Thus there is no contradiction between Putin’s politics and his right to defend his homeland.

Multi-polarity, which importantly, didn’t originate in the West or with the left. No wonder the Western left is confused but then the Left never did have a sense of irony. And isn’t it ironic that the first, viable challenge to 500 years of Western hegemony should come from an anti-communist and deeply religious government. I mean it’s wild! All the old relationships have disappeared overnight! All of a sudden, Russia has rediscovered its Mojo but in an entirely new setting, a setting that nobody in the West saw coming. And as if to reinforce this new reality, we now see the reinvention of the Non-Aligned Movement but now including Russia and China and it’s called Multi-polarity. Who wudda thunk it?

It proves that the last century’s sparring between the West and the rest never ended with the end of the Soviet Union but instead of being a triumphalist West celebrating the end of history, it finds itself being that end.

Irony #4

Isn’t it also ironic that Russia should once more be the liberator of Europe (by default), though of course, to most it doesn’t seem like that right now because most of Europe has no idea what’s really going on, the censorship, the rewriting of history, is now virtually complete. A handful of US Marines won WWII and the Russians had the winter to defeat the Nazis, at least, in a nutshell,  that’s how the ‘Collective West’ projects the past.

We have been imprisoned inside a bubble, a fantasy, the invention of the servants of capital, where everything is reversed; good is bad, day is night, right is wrong.

So, what exactly is going on? Why has Russia, a capitalist country, found itself the enemy of the ‘Collective West’ which seems intent on destroying the Russian Federation? Before, that is to say, when the Soviet Union existed, the rationale for confrontation and war was those evil, Godless communists, out to destroy the God-fearing Democrats of the West. So what’s the excuse now? It would appear that the only reason the Collective West can offer, is that they’re Russian, no other justification is needed after 100 years of rabid, racist Russophobia. What is it they call Russians in the Collective West? White Niggers, which says it all. Yet of course, whether capitalist or communist, Russia is a competitor and it possesses vast natural resources, probably the most educated population on the planet and of course vast markets for US products. This is what it’s really all about and it always has been.

Irony #5

Multi-polarity?

So, is this the ‘next step’ in the evolution of our global civilisation? What is it, this ‘multi-polarity’? Well it’s not (yet) about socialism, it’s as Lenin so succinctly put it over 120 years ago; it’s about Imperialism (versus the Planet), the highest, or perhaps the last stage of capitalism. Yet of course, ultimately, it has to be about socialism or it’s as we see, right now, it’s Barbarism and planetary death. And 87% of the planet have realised this, that’s what multi-polarity is all about. What is it Putin calls us in the Collective West? The Golden Billion, that for five hundred years has sucked the planet dry; it’s earth, it’s water, it’s air, it’s plants, it’s animals, even it’s insects and of course its populations. Nothing is sacred to Capital.

Collectively, that is, Russia and China and the Global South, now have the economic and military power to challenge the hegemony of the USA. So I think it’s no exaggeration to say that this is a ‘do or die’ moment, literally for us all. Multi-polarity is our tipping point. It’s Multi-polarity’s historic mission to repair the planet’s ecology.

Nostalgia?

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Friday, 11 March 2022 — Investigating Imperialism

By William Bowles

The power of symbols

Ukrainian Neo-Nazis (note the Flags of nATO and the Azov Battalion and of course, the Swastika)

No, I don’t think it’s nostalgia and it’s not Andrei Tarkovsky’s stunning movie, ‘Nostalghia‘ either, it’s the image below, one of the 100s of Russian military vehicles in Ukraine, they are after all, One People and somehow, it makes sense. I view it as a tribute, or perhaps acknowledgement of the 27 million Russians who died in the Great Patriotic War (WWII to you and me), including virtually all of the Russian side of my family, made all the more hurtful by the presence of these Neo-fascists, openly celebrating the Ukrainians who sided with Hitler’s Germany and exterminated 100s of thousands of Jews, Roma and Slavs in Ukraine during the war. Perhaps I should have called this, ‘Lest we Forget’ instead because clearly we have forgotten or been made to forget.

V tank ussrRussian armoured vehicle flying the Soviet Hammer & Sickle
Babi yarThe Ravine  of Babiy Yar

Perhaps Yevgeni Yevtushenko’s poem on the slaughter by the Nazis (both German and Ukrainian) of thousands of men, women and children, will give you some idea of the depth of feeling involved. It’s reckoned that 100,000 Jews, Roma and Slavs were executed and dumped in the ravine called Babiy Yar in Ukraine. And how apt his poem is, as if it were written yesterday for precisely, now.

Babiy Yar

Over Babiy Yar
There are no memorials,
The steep hillside like a rough inscription,
I am frightened.
Today I am as old as the Jewish race.
I seem to myself a Jew at this moment.
I, wandering in Egypt.
I, crucified. I perishing.
Even today the mark of the nails.
I think also of Dreyfus. I am he.
The Philistine my judge and my accuser.
Cut off by bars and cornered,
Ringed round, spat at, lied about;
the screaming ladies with the Brussels lace
poke me in the face with parasols.
I am also a boy in the Belostok,
the dropping blood spreads across the floor,
the public-bar heroes are rioting
in an equal stench of garlic and of drink.
I have no strength, go spinning from a boot,
shriek useless prayers that they don’t listen to;
with a cackle of ‘Thrash the kikes and save Russia!’
the corn chandler is beating up my mother.
I seem to myself like Anna Frank
to be transparent as an April twig
and am in love, I have no need for words,
I need for us to look at one another.
How little we have to see or to smell
separated from foliage and the sky,
how much, how much in the dark room
gently embracing each other.
They’re coming. Don’t be afraid.
The booming and the banging of the spring.
It’s coming this way. Come to me.
Quickly, give me your lips.
They’re battering in the door. Roar of the ice.

Over Babiy Yar
rustle of the wild grass.
The trees look threatening, look like judges.
And everything is one silent cry.
Taking my hat off
I feel myself slowly going grey.
And I am one silent cry
over the the many thousands of the buried;
am every old man killed here,
every child killed here,
O my Russian people, I know you.
Your nature is international.
Foul hands rattle your clean name.
I know the goodness of my country.
How horrible it is that pompous title
the anti-semites calmly call themselves,
Society of the Russian People.
No part of me can ever forget it.
When the last anti-semite on earth
is buried forever
let the International ring out.
No Jewish blood runs among my blood,
but I am as bitterly and hardly hated
by every anti-semite
as if I were a Jew. By this
I am a Russian.

And somehow Yevtushenko’s poem, written in 1960 or thereabouts, hits the same nerve, of Russians bearing the same pain, even if of a different name or as they are called in the West, ‘White Niggers’.

Since the Russian invasion of Ukraine began on February 24, thousands of images showing Russian soldiers and vehicles have emerged online. Some of these images shocked viewers when they saw the flag of the Soviet Union waving on some Russian military equipment. For residents of Ukraine, a former part of the Soviet Union, the flag may represent “an expression of a desire to repress them”, according to a post-Soviet politics specialist who spoke to the FRANCE 24 Observers team.- France 24 (my emph. WB)

Hmmmm…another ‘expert’. The racism of the Anglo-Saxons, 400 years or 76 Years and not a damn thing has changed!

The dreaded lurgi strikes By William Bowles

5 Comments

24 December 2020 — Investigating Imperialism

Stop the world I want to get off! – Anthony Newly

Update 3: 24 December 2020

Officially Covid

24 December 2020

So I’m now officially Covid Positive. After my trauma of taking a shower on Monday, yesterday, I got transported to my local hospital’s A&E department to get checked out where I discovered that it wasn’t a heart attack but this bloody Virus wot done it!

I had a wonderful doctor take care of me, bloods done, x-ray, the works and an hour so later, the result; covid positive and pneumonia in one lung. So five days of penicillin and it should be over. And I was discharged, well kind of. I waited, in vain, for six hours for transport that never came, so finally, getting toward midnight, I walked out and caught a cab home (I live 10 minutes away).

So why all the scare tactics? It’s got to the point where people glance at you suspiciously on the street if you get ‘too close’. An atmosphere of paranoia pervades this (formerly) green and pleasant land (was it ever?), to be replaced by a very unpleasant sense of fear and alienation.

Yet, when you phone up the Covid-19 ‘hotline’, 119, the first thing you hear is a recorded message telling you that for the great majority, the Virus is not dangerous (a rerun of CMO  of England Chris Whitty’s May message). No wonder people are confused and hence scared, they don’t know what to believe! The upshot of this, is that many no longer believe ANYTHING, or alternately believe EVERYTHING they’re told. An extremely dangerous and volatile situation.

And as I go into 10 days of enforced isolation (quarantine), vast swathes of the country is being locked down! It’s as if the government really does want destroy millions of working peoples’ lives. But is this what it’s about? The so-called Great Reset?

I don’t think so. Our gangster government, loaded with incompetent crooks, that have, so far, handed out at least £100 BILLION of our money to the aforementioned crooks (half the annual NHS budget), has not slowed up (see this and this) but it goes far deeper than even the billions siphoned off the public account reveal.

When this, the latest disaster created by neoliberal capitalism took off, back in January 2020, the Tory government admitted 18, yes 18 million people into the UK (I didn’t believe the number either) and as the government had no idea who was carrying the virus, nor where they went, it was inevitable that the disease would explode, effectively at random wherever it found itself, and then spread, especially when winter arrived and all respiratory diseases have a field day. So, new mutation, or simply Winter? Or no effective track and trace. Well it’s too late for that anyway.

But this was the entire purpose of admitting so many millions, they called it ’herd immunity’ and just how big a disaster called ‘herd immunity’ was/is, is now readily apparent. But try finding big mouth corporate/state media investigating the disaster of herd immunity (any more than the disaster of multi-billion pound contracts handed out in exchange for crap). It’s yet another important news event going completely unreported. Instead, the capitalist press would rather frighten the living daylights out of everybody with fake news (eg the ‘new’ covid mutation or is it simply Winter or maybe it’s that removing Lockdowns allows the Virus to spread once more?) Who knows? ‘News’ is no longer News, it’s entered the realm of total fantasy.

So now, having initiated the destruction of most small businesses (the backbone of every high street in the country), the destruction of millions of jobs, the latest lockdown will finish off what’s left! And having further immiserated the working class and thrust an additional 800,000 children into Victorian penury, aside from the 1% (who are not touched and don’t give a fuck anyway), what does anybody in this miserable fucking dump have to look forward to in 2021?

This is why the scaremongering campaign; it’s to cover up the government’s criminal conduct and everything I wrote in my first two essays (here and here) on the Virus of Capitalism have come to pass!

Disaster Capitalism

There is NO 2nd, or 3rd, or 4th, Wave. What there is, is the Virus held in check by lockdowns, only to reemerge when the lockdown is lifted because we don’t know WHERE the Virus is and hence can’t block it. And we see the same pattern in the rest of the ‘advanced’ world. And in the meantime, they mutate. There are at least 6 variations of SARS-COV-2 doing the rounds.

Why do you think Wuhan as the single source (at the time) of the Virus was locked down and immediately? But in order for the Chinese govt to lockdown 11 million people, meant that not only had they to feed 11 million people every day, they had to have a health system that could respond without falling apart. Can you imagine this useless, corrupt and incompetent government, feeding 8 million Londoners EVERY day, let alone an NHS short of 20,000 doctors, 40,000 nurses and with only 50% of the hospital beds it had a decade ago.

So, as far as the UK govt is concerned, ‘Herd Immunity’ was an unqualified success. They’ve managed to make sure that wherever you live, you’ll NEVER escape the Virus. So it will be endless lockdowns until they’ve sold enough vaccines to claim that the unfortunate Virus has been beaten into submission. Until the next capitalist created disaster. But don’t worry corporate capitalism will have a ‘solution’ for that one as well.

And in the meantime, secret talks with mostly giant US corporations about the dismembering of the NHS, selling off the profitable chunks and have the state, sorry, the public, foot the bill for whatever’s left over.

It also explains the corporate/state desire for a Vaccine; it’s not to protect our health but to protect the vast profits that Big Pharma is making out of this crisis. If our (and other govts) were so sure of a vaccine, why has Big Pharma been legally indemnified against lawsuits? And it has the further advantage to the state of binding the population to the corporate-security state (eg ‘health’ passports).

Update 2:  21 December 2020

Well still waiting for my test result (and still waiting for my GP to call me), apparently now the wait is 6 days. Meanwhile, I’m under no misapprehension about the fact that I caught virus (I dont need a test to tell me).

So, got my smell and taste back this morning, took a shower but after getting out of the shower, I didn’t have the energy to make it to my bedroom! Instead I had to lay down on the floor instead. So this is the second stage of the virus, stealing my oxygen! So, not sure where this is heading as elsewise I feel okay. So I phoned the 111 number, told them what had happened and they suggested that I phone my GP who shouldn’t take more than 3 days to contact me! And am still waiting…

I’m now convinced I had a heart attack yesterday (20/12/20), I just didn’t recognise it for what it was, the bloody Virus threw me and my GP didn’t believe me, I think she thought I was faking it.

Update 1: 20 December 2020

I lost my sense of taste and smell on Thursday morning and  I’m not feeling particularly bright today, though no other symptoms as yet. Is it the Virus? Well hopefully it’s nothing worse than the flu (though I haven’t had the flu in 45 years!), and hopefully, the RT-PCR test is being administered correctly and I’ll find out, hopefully by Monday whether I’ve been struck down or not.

Talking of tests, my local testing station, ‘managed’ by G4S, was a bit of a rinky-dink setup. You get ‘guided’ to a cubical (in fact, I was left standing until someone directed me to a completely open-sided cubical, so no privacy then). On the wall, is quite a complicated diagram in 12 or so stages, from preparing yourself, the test, and then getting it all packed up. The entire process came across as amateurish and half-baked, but then again, the government has given all the cash to their corrupt business cronies, so this is what we get.

Today, Sunday, I still don’t have a high temperature or a cough but I can’t say I’m feeling particularly bright. Apparently, there’s a new variant of the virus doing the rounds that is meant to be extremely infectious. Food tastes awful. Friends have recommended the following: Cloves and Lemongrass infused in boiling water and the steam inhaled. We’ll see.

As to updating the site, well I think I’ll give it a raincheck for a few days and see how this infection goes.

The Great Scampede or The Iron Heel Revisited

17 Comments

16 September 2020 – Investigating Imperialism

By William Bowles

Virus stats

Source: https://twitter.com/JohnDStats

[T]he great majority of people will not die from this [virus] and I’ll just repeat something I said right at the beginning because I think it’s worth reinforcing:

Most people, a significant proportion of people, will not get this virus at all, at any point of the epidemic which is going to go on for a long period of time.

Of those who do, some of them will get the virus without even knowing it, they will have the virus with no symptoms at all, asymptomatic carriage, and we know that happens. – Chris Whitty, Chief Medical Officer for England, 11 May, 2020

But this is not what the British public have had been told (as well as a host of other countries who have been railroaded into joining the Great Scampede). The government and the mainstream media have presented the Virus to us as something akin to the Bubonic Plague, and of course the public have responded by behaving as though it is the Bubonic Plague. This is why the government changed the name of the virus from SARS-COV-2 (its correct designation) to COVID-19 in order to sever the connection to the Influenza virus, its possible ancestor. The state (and of course, big Pharma) had to present this virus to us as ‘novel’ and infinitely more dangerous than the Flu, which it’s not, it has about the same death rate as seasonal Flu, although it is especially dangerous to a vulnerable minority, average age 85 with multiple health issues, who should be protected and by-and-large, aren’t, itself a entirely preventable crime of vast proportions. (Each year, about 1 Billion people come down with the Flu globally and up to a 1 million die from it but still less than those who die from another highly infectious disease, Tuberculosis which in 2017 killed nearly 1.5 million).

But why has the world been shut down? Why destroy most of the world’s economies in order to quell (conquer, defeat?) a virus which is not dangerous to the great majority of us, perhaps 95% or more? Has some kind of mass psychosis taken hold of the political classes of the major (read imperialist) economies of the world who kicked this off? You really have to ask, ‘what’s in it for the ruling class’ that would lead them to deliberately inflict such mayhem on hundreds of millions of people and appear to destroy the economies of the leading capitalist states? What is it that the rest of us are not seeing or being prevented from seeing?

…The financial crash of 2020 was not only anticipated but planned and pushed forward with clear understanding of its instrumental role in the Great Reset sought by self-appointed protagonists of creative destruction. The advocates of this interpretation place significant weight on the importance of the lockdowns as an effective means of obliterating in a single act a host of old economic relationships. – ‘Was COVID-19 a Cover for an Anticipated or Planned Financial Crisis?’ By Prof. Anthony Hall

Whatever it is, it’s being presented to us as the ‘New Normal’, without however, telling us what this ‘New Normal’ actually consists of. But let me hazard a guess that whatever the ‘New Normal’ is it wont be nice for a great percentage of the world’s population. Already, it’s estimated that at least 1 billion people are in great danger of dying from starvation and disease caused directly by the lockdown, not the Virus.

Too late did the socialist movement of the early twentieth century divine the coming of the Oligarchy. Even as it was divined, the Oligarchy was there—a fact established in blood, a stupendous and awful reality. Nor even then, as the Everhard Manuscript well shows, was any permanence attributed to the Iron Heel. Its overthrow was a matter of a few short years, was the judgment of the revolutionists. – The Iron Heel, Jack London, 1910.

It would appear that the major capitalist classes of the world have waged total war on the planet’s people without firing a shot and at the same time set up the infrastructure needed to enslave us, and all in order to preserve the rule of a bankrupt Capitalism. The ‘New Normal’ really is Jack London’s The Iron Heel made real.The Virus is all about saving capitalism from itself.

How ironic then, that the catalyst for this global coup d’etat was China and one has to ask the question, why China? Could it be that China is a major obstacle to the establishment of the ‘New Normal’ and if so, it gives us an insight into what this ‘New Normal’ is really all about.

What the government knew (and planned for)

These are just some of the UK government’s documents prepared for the ‘New Normal’. Most deal with the ‘security’ aspects of an alleged pandemic rather than the health issues, except of course when it comes to considering vaccines. So aside from the clampdown on our civil liberties in the name of fighting the Virus, the goverment failed to deliver on every other key issue!

So what is the ‘New Normal’?

“Australian Police Go FULL NAZI, Smashing in Windows of Civilian Cars Just Because Passengers Wouldn’t Give Details About Where They Were Going.” – Sky News, August 13, 2020

Undoubtedly, capitalism is in crisis, perhaps its final crisis, though what might follow may be even worse (a new form of Fascism?), at least judging by how the state has responded to ‘rule breakers’. But what does shutting down the global economy achieve (aside from much pain and death for the vast majority) and what is the objective once you dismiss the idea of ‘defeating’ the virus as the rationale behind it? After all, it’s already clear that the global shutdown is causing many more deaths than the Virus has, or will ever do.

But why?

Some talk of a global conspiracy, the imposition of a world government (engineered by George Soros and co.) and no doubt somewhere, there’s talk of the Illuminati being involved. But undoubtedly, there is a conspiracy and at the very highest levels of the ruling political classes. Others have compared the Virus to 9/11 and look what that did to us! Is it really our health and well-being that occupies the minds of the elite any more than the War on Terror was about protecting us from terrorists.

Jump to 2020. Let me start in reverse while color-coded designs are fresh in our minds. As the COVID-19 lockdowns were under way, a funny thing happened as people were wishing that life could return to normal and they could be let out of their cages. Similar color-coded designs popped up everywhere at the same time. They showed the step-by-step schedule of possible loosening of government controls if things went according to plan. Red to yellow to green. Eye catching. Red orange yellow blue green. As with the terrorist warnings following September 11, 2001. In Massachusetts, a so-called blue state where I live, it’s color chart ends in blue, not green, with Phase 4 blue termed “the new normal: Development of vaccines and/or treatments enable the resumption of ‘the new normal.’” Interesting wording. A resumption that takes us back to the future. – ‘From Terrorists to Viruses: Dystopian Progress‘ by Ed Curtin, 7 September 2020

It’s clear now, that the only way to sell the ‘New Normal’ (or the ‘Great Reset’), was to create an abject fear of our existing life. Thus social distancing, the compulsive hand-washing, masks and of course the Lockdown, all serve, not as health aids but to destroy the old order. It’s now reached the point where rather than ‘seeking our permission’ via the government’s ‘nudge unit’, force is now needed. To that end a new kind of ASBO (Anti-Social Behaviour Order) has been created:

To help enforce the new measures, [Boris] Johnson…announced that he would be recruiting thousands of new ‘COVID Marshalls‘. The first group of England’s newly deputised Marshalls could be seen on Monday enforcing meticulous social distancing orders, one-way system on pavements, and telling people to wear masks in shops and at takeaways venues. They will also be handing out masks and hand sanitizer in order to “keep everyone safe.” – ‘UK ‘Coronaphobia’ is Pushing the Country Towards a Stasi-like State’, 21st Century Wire, 15 September 2020

The objective being the undermining of the existing social and economic relations but critically, without replacing capitalism with something better. In other words, these new and enforced conditions of existence have nothing to do with health or with the virus and its spread but everything to do with Capitalism attempting to reinvent itself. The Virus is simply a convenient and very useful excuse, assuming you can convince the world of its danger to life, which explains the censorship and suppression of any views that challenge this fictional narrative, called COVID-19 or, as BBC News, the Guardian, the Australian government and a host of others now call, that “deadly virus”.

That the rest of the world went along with it, is simply testament to the power of the Imperialist states to cajole and threaten any country that resists. Sweden for example, was made to look like some kind of mass murderer of its population, simply because it refused to implement a Total Lockdown (instead, it relied on obedience).

So what do the ‘masters of the universe’ have planned for us?

Well, they know where they want to go, the question is, can they get there?

The Great Reset is immensely ambitious, spanning over 50 fields of knowledge and practice. It interconnects everything from economy recovery recommendations to “sustainable business models”, from restoration of the environment to the redesign of social contracts.

The beating heart of this matrix is  – what else – the Strategic Intelligence Platform, encompassing, literally, everything: “sustainable development”, “global governance”, capital markets, climate change, biodiversity, human rights, gender parity, LGBTI, systemic racism, international trade and investment, the – wobbly – future of the travel and tourism industries, food, air pollution, digital identity, blockchain, 5G, robotics, artificial intelligence (AI).

In the end, only an all-in-one Plan A applies for making these systems interact seamlessly: the Great Reset – shorthand for a New World Order that has always been glowingly evoked, but never implemented. There is no Plan B. – ‘From 9/11 to the Great Reset. From Al Qaeda to Covid The Virus…’ By Pepe Escobar, Asia Times

As I’ve stated before, there will be a massive shakeup of corporations; bankruptcies, mergers, new governments and new social orders and of course the further destruction and reformation of working and middle class life. Critically, and of great importance to the imperialist states, will be ‘The Great Reset’s’ devastating impact on the Global South, the consequences of which we are already witnessing. The Great Reset implements the objectives of the Club of Rome (COR) initiated in 1965, that saw one, if not its major objective, a vast reduction in the populations of the Global South, a process that has reached its apotheosis in the Global Lockdown.

“We believe in fact that the need will quickly become evident for social innovation to match technical change, for radical reform of the institutions and political processes at all levels, including the highest, that of world polity. And since intellectual enlightenment is without effect if it is not also political, The Club of Rome also will encourage the creation of a world forum where statesmen, policy-makers, and scientists can discuss the dangers and hopes for the future global system without the constraints of formal intergovernmental negotiation.” – The Limits of Growth.

This was from the COR’s first publication in 1972. It sold 12 million copies. Many of COR’S executive members were drawn from NATO, that should give you a good idea where COR stands in the scheme of things.

It’s been calculated that the capitalist economies in the so-called developed world, can survive with perhaps 20% of the working population, the managerial class, kept in work to maintain the capitalist order for its masters. As for the rest? Well it will be a vastly enlarged ‘precariat’, thus the ‘experiments’ with so-called universal basic income (rather than letting great chunks of the formerly employed starve to death, keep them alive on a subsistence ‘wage’).

And what of our putative left?

What I do find really depressing (though not at all surprising), is the degree to which the left and organised labour have been sucked into this nightmare but then again, they’ve been bitten by the fear bug as well. Organised labour of course, has a vested interest in maintaining the existing order, most of its members work directly or indirectly (via privatisation) for the corporate, capitalist state, hence their (assumed) interests coincide. The term ‘labour aristocracy’ has never rung so true.

The left, such as it is, has bought the ‘Great Reset’, hook, line and sinker. All rational thinking appears to have fled, as the Great Scampede wreaks its havoc.

The omens are not good. Without a coherent and organised opposition to this insanity, it looks like what we should really should call the The Iron Heel will succeed in reshaping the world according to its own desires while the rest of us look on, powerless to stop it and simultaineously grappling with the ravages of climate change, also caused by a rampant capitalism.