Ya Bass

A comment by Taziq posted on The Guardian election weblog.

The British press make me laugh. The War in Iraq (my own country I shall add) is not a game, it is not a question of whether or not Mr Blair saw the linesman waving his flag or not! Whatever the rules may say - however he and President Bush interpreted them - they have gotten rid of a man who murdered my fellow countrymen (and countrywomen) on an almost daily basis.

Please, would some of you who think that the war was such a bad idea, and who now debate whether or not it was or was not legal, tell me, were it not legal, should we still then have to suffer Hussein?

This is great, The Uncredibles. Prudent Rays....Must resist!

hat tip: The Salmon of Doubt

So it seems the Attorney General's advice had finally been leaked to the media.

The leak, coming when it has just a week before the election and the day after the Tories shifted their campaign focus from the pretty vile anti-immigrant discourse to a Blair lied one, meant my first thought was about fifth columnist Tory bastards in the civil service allied with a hostile media are seeking to destroy a Labour government (it wouldn't be the first time). The rational me would say that's unfair, but then gut reactions are not exactly rational thoughts. They are not always wrong either.

However on the subject of the Iraq war i'm pretty sure most people's minds are already made up one way or another and both sides have dug in to their position. At least from a personal perspective the legality (or otherwise) of the war was pretty low down on my list of considerations when thinking whether going to war was justified or not. That was the case in 2003 and it is still the case in 2005.

It's important not to forget either that the leak of the Attorney General's advice is not a smoking gun either. Lawyers often interpret the law and write proposition papers exploring the arguments against a policy that was to be followed. It's just exploring what the different legal opinions may be, playing Devil's Advocate.

Nice piece by Eric the Unred: A fairy tale on trust

From the rather good a General Theory of Rubbish blog, which I have just discoveredMore reasons to vote Labour.

for the muddle-classes and assorted nitwit liberals and professional gobshites who like to play the sophisticate, voting doesn't really matter and who you vote for is all a game.

This is one of the reasons why I'm becoming such a fan of blogs. With my friends and with much of the media (with only a few exceptions) I often feel very isolated in my politics, that I'm the only one who holds particular viewpoints on certain issues or see things in a particular way. It's like my teenage years as a Manic Street Preachers fan all over again! Apart from a period in the mid to late 90's, I was the only fan I knew and felt like the only person listening to their music - then i'd go to one of their gigs and it would be full of thousands of people like me, knowing all the words of all the songs that I had spent so many hours of my life listening to and obsessing over.

Labour, like the Manics, may not be quite what they used to be, but the feeling they are capable of good things above what their contemporaries are capable of still exists strongly. I may well be misguided, but I still believe. I may have bought their records or voted for them in the past but I could never believe in a Coldplay or a Liberal Democrats.

Or as a General Theory of Rubbish, puts it much better.

Ill-considered 'radicalism' leads to a reactionary position. To defend or support the Labour Party against the attacks of its enemies does not mean to defend each and every action of its leadership or each and every action of the government which is the instrument of the leadership. A 'totalitarian' concept of a defence or support of the Party is absurd. The distinction to make is that between actions that promote the interests of the working-class and those that are harmful, while nothing should ever be surrendered until it is irrevocably lost.

The Labour Party (despite everything) retains its character as a labour organisation. The other parties do not. The pathetic Liberals are nothing but Tories without their kicking boots on and act as Tories whenever they gain any power. Their potential for any radicalism is non-existent.

A topical piece today in the Slate magazine by Christopher Hitchens on the British General Election and Why He's For Tony Blair.

On May 5, 40 years after I first took out a membership card, it will be possible, for the first time since the 1945 Labor victory that threw out the Churchill Tories, to vote Labor on a point of principle. Sixty years is a long time to wait, but the struggle for Iraq has decided the matter.

He then recognises the work of those on the pro-liberation Left in the UK like John Lloyd, Nick Cohen, David Aaronovitch and Ann Clwyd who have stayed true to their principles and supported regime change and democratisation.

Then he goes onto to make the valuable point that Tony Blair is an ally, and not the poodle of George W. Bush, like his sneering critics would have us believe.

The commonest liberal and Tory jeer against Tony Blair—that he is George Bush's "poodle"—is self-evidently false. Far from being a ditto to Washington, it was Blair who leaned on Clinton and Albright to intervene in the Balkans, putting an end to the long and disgusting Tory appeasement of Slobodan Milosevic. Without asking for any American approval, Blair also decided to stand by Britain's treaty with Sierra Leone and to send troops to put down the barbaric invasion of the hand-loppers and diamond-dealers, based in Charles Taylor's Liberia, who were among other things the regional allies of al-Qaida. In 1999, when Bush was still an isolationist governor of Texas, Blair made a speech in Chicago pointing out that Saddam Hussein's defiance of international law made a future confrontation with him inevitable. After Sept. 11, 2001, Blair told Bush that he would send ground troops to Afghanistan even if the United States would not.

Following on from the Johann Hari report from Bethnal Green (I asked Galloway how many Muslims had been murdered by his friend Tari Aziz. The correct answer: even more than have been slaughtered by Ariel Sharon, or by Israel in 38 years of occupying Gaza and the West Bank. Galloway said, "Why don't you go and take some more drugs, you druggie?" ) , Nick Cohen's excellent piece on Galloway and the Respect coalition in last weekens Observer, Following Mosley's East End footsteps and the disagreement between the Baghdad Blogger Salam Pax and George Galloway here is an open letter from Kurdo's World addressed to the sleazy fascist apologist from Dundee.

An Open Letter to George Galloway: Re Salam Pax

Dear Mr. Galloway,

I know that you are campaigning hard to win the hearts and minds of the British public, and I wish you good luck in failing. I and many other people from Iraq, just like the father of the Iraqi blogs, Salam Pax, will never forget the scenes in which you were sitting and joking with Saddam Hussein on the screens of the Iraqi television.
We were wondering what you were laughing about. Were the jokes of the dictator who filled the lands and the rivers with mass graves, who terminated birds and rivers, who did not differentiate between a killing baby and a soldier, were his jokes too funny? Or were you laughing at the Iraqi people for having a leader like Saddam Hussein?!

I know that your Christmas wish was the return of Father Saddam to power, so that you can visit Baghdad again and laugh at our expenses, but I got good news for you, Father Saddam will never see daylight again nor your dreams.

The people of Iraq regardless of our ethnic and sectarian differences are happy about the removal of Saddam Hussein and are working hard to bring back peace and stability to our new baby democracy.
I know that many people in the world can not understand this and your harsh comment to Salam Pax that your country's troops have nothing to do with Saddam Hussein's removal and should not have intervened, are only adding more salt to our deep wounds.
I know you now will regard me as a Kurdish collaborator and accuse me, just like you accuse any freedom-loving and Saddam-hating person of Iraq of "selling your country".
We are not related to anyone in power in Iraq. We are just ordinary people loving freedom and democracy and want to live free just like anyone else in the world. We do not appreciate you stealing our cause and using it to steal the hearts and minds of the British public for your own benefits.

You traded with our cause when your friend, Saddam the killer, who you described as "calm, very calm indeed" ,was in power and now when he's locked up in jail, you continue to trade with our blood for your own benefits.

We are thankful for the forces of United States and United Kingdom and the rest of the world for getting rid of a dictator like Saddam Hussein. Many of us died and didn't live to see their long dream of a world-without Saddam, but those who are living today in that dream-come-true world, are not appreciating your works.

Warmest Regards
p.s. Tell me your birthday date I will send you a series of terror-DVDs filmed by Saddam' s men of killing and torturing innocent civilians including the most popular one "The Lion" in which Uday, the dead son of your friend, is giving a man to a lion for loving a girl Uday liked.

I don't think anyone can say for certain that Joseph Ratzinge or Pope Benedict XVI was an enthusiastic Nazi or anything close. What he did was similiar to what millions of other Germans (and lets not forget other Europeans) were to do during the period.

However, as far as I know, he has not commented on his time in the Hitler Youth, his service at the anti-aircraft battery guarding a factory staffed by slave labour except to say he was forced and never fired a shot because his dog ate his Luger or that he had a sore finger (to give this some perspective - only about 20% of soldiers involved in frontline battles during world war 2 actually fired their guns so not firing a shot was not unusual). But did he actually do anything for his supposed opposition to the Nazis? Did he resist on behalf of the Jews and the Poles and the Russians getting worked to death inside the place he was guarding? No.

There are of course very valid reasons why he didn't do anything positive to resist -indeed as i mentioned early his situation was little different to what many other Germans faced - they were never enthusiastic Nazis, but were governed by fear and could have faced terrible consequences had they had resisted actively. So they didn't do anything and just kept their head down. Of course they could still have followed the example of others and resisted but they didn't, however on the other hand they were not supportive of the Nazis either. That's a huge grey area of people not directly guilty of the worst Nazi crimes - but then not quite innocent either.

You would think that Ratzinger given his life experience, being brought up in a fascist state, being "forced" to join the Hitler Youth, being "forced" to man an anti-aircraft gun (etc) would demonstrate to him the fact that in many cases morality is not an absolute and that people's moral actions are shaped by the options available to them and their social circumstances and the historical position they find themselves in.

But according to Ratzinger himself such relativism and it's shades of grey between two absolutes is one of the greatest evils on the planet. So going on that basis and the logic with which he judges others on: Ratzinger didn't resist, he didn't do anything to prevent slave labour being worked to death in the BMW factory he was stationed at, so then does that mean he is complicit in the worst crimes of the Nazis and any shade of grey or extenuating circumstances should be dismissed?
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Conservative parliamentary candidate Ed Matts has been caught altering a photograph put on his election material to ensure he was fully in line with the party's hardline stance on immigration.



Reminscent of an early time:

I'm not new to this weblog thing. I had an account with blogger about 6 or 7 years ago and for the last 3 years i've had a livejournal. In that time i've rambled incoherently on film, literature, football, cycling and general day to day nonsense and used various forums as my "political space" on the internet to debate and argue various issues.

I intend this blog (Politics, ya bass* ) to be an extension of this political space. If anyone happens to read what I write, then that is a bonus - but it doesn't matter that much because my aim is mainly just to gather a few thoughts that I have.

For those outwith the West of Scotland 'ya bass' is generally an abusive term partially associated with gang culture in Glasgow - It's either short of "you bastard" or is a corruption of an ancient Gaelic expression for "battle and die". I prefer the 2nd explanation and because it also sounds similiar to Ya Basta (an Italian co-operative/leftist movement) I thought this name would be appropriate. More honestly that explanation gives meaning to a name that I never intended to use - I must have tried over 100 different options before I could get one that hadn't already been registered on blogspot!