Hot Planet, Cool Media E-Book

Stephen Harper

• Herausgeber: Clairview Books
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023

Seitenzahl: 353

Beschreibung

From the Arab Spring and London riots through the era of Brexit and Trump, the Covid-19 pandemic and war in Europe, this volume collects eleven years of lively, informative and entertaining essays and polemics, focusing on media treatment of major world events, political entanglements and culture-war squabbles. Taking aim at the distortions and omissions of news reports and cultural narratives in the Western world, Stephen Harper highlights the dislocation between humanity's existential crisis and the failure of the corporate media to register its underlying causes – or even to entertain any real discussion of its solution. Instead, he argues, the media blithely serve the narrow interests of a global elite that is subjecting the planet to a reign of fire in the form of endless wars and ecological destruction. Harper reviews contemporary journalistic, cinematic and televisual coverage, engaging with broad cultural topics such as 'cancel culture', the incel phenomenon and Covid conspiracy theories, as well as key events like the debate between Jordan Peterson and Slavoj Žižek. For all its eclecticism, Hot Planet, Cool Media has an ideological cohesiveness, rejecting popular left and right political positions and advocating the cause of socialism or communism in the Marxian sense of a classless, leaderless, moneyless society.

Leseprobe

HOT PLANET, COOL MEDIA

Socialist Polemics on Propagandaand Popular Culture (2011-2022)

Stephen Harper

Clairview Books Ltd.,

Russet, Sandy Lane,

West Hoathly,

W. Sussex RH19 4QQ

www.clairviewbooks.com

Published by Clairview Books 2023

© Stephen Harper 2023

This book is copyright under the Berne Convention. All rights reserved. Apart from any fair dealing for the purpose of private study, research, criticism or review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, electrical, chemical, mechanical, optical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the copyright owner. Inquiries should be addressed to the Publishers

The right of Stephen Harper to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 978 1 912992 51 5

Cover by Morgan Creative

Typeset by Symbiosys Technologies, Visakhapatnam, India

Printed and bound by 4Edge Ltd, Essex

Contents

Preface

2011

Tunisia and Egypt: New Media ‘Revolutions’? (2/2/2011)

Sophisticated Sinophobia? (20/2/2011)

‘Humanitarian Intervention’ in Libya: Pull the Other One (25/3/2011)

‘Very Clear, Very Clean’: Killing Bin Laden (6/5/2011)

One Less Obama-Maniac (25/5/2011)

Justice is Serbed (1/6/2011)

Bigmouth Strikes Again (27/6/2011)

Hackgate: Recuperating the Crisis (9/7/2011)

Islamist Terror Strikes Norway! (25/7/2011)

UK Riots: Echo of the Past, Glimpse of the Future (13/8/2011)

The Deaths of Others (22/9/2011)

Return of the Poppy-Burning Scum (5/11/2011)

Christopher Hitchens, Pro-Imperialist Bully (16/12/2011)

2012

Lady Bountiful (17/1/2012)

No True Scotsman (29/3/2012)

‘Terrible Things Happen’: On The BBC’s Occupation (30/4/2012)

Neither Hollywood Nor Belgrade! (6/6/2012)

Rihanna ‘Is A Satanist!’ (19/8/2012)

Stephanie Flounders (8/10/2012)

Whoever You Vote For The Government Gets In (4/11/2012)

Peter Kosminsky’s The Promise (Channel 4, 2011) (12/12/2012)

2013

Bigelow’s Back (19/1/2013)

Our Girls And Theirs (31/3/2013)

Doing Whatever It Takes (3/4/2013)

Mental Illness And The Media (25/5/2013)

Back To Iraq (17/6/2013)

Brand/Paxman (18/11/2013)

2014

The War According To Jeremy (5/2/2014)

Did Somebody Say ‘Radicalization’? (29/6/2014)

Israel, Gaza And ‘Balance’ (17/7/2014)

Scottish Separatism: Is The Subaltern Speaking? (2/9/2014)

War Is Peace: Malala, Our Girl And ‘Feminist’ Imperialism (11/10/2014)

2015

Two Ways Not To Respond To The Charlie Hebdo Massacre (20/1/2015)

Disoriented: Adam Curtis’s Bitter Lake (1/2/2015)

Oblique Strategies (15/6/2015)

Srebrenica Revisited, BBC-Style (9/7/2015)

On The Ashley Madison Hack (25/8/2015)

This Is What An Influx Looks Like (3/9/2015)

On Jeremy Corbyn (13/10/2015)

2016

The EU Referendum: Not Our Fight (21/6/2016)

From Obama To Trump: An Orange Thermidor? (13/11/2016)

2017

Jolie Jingo (6/3/2017)

Shame And The Soldier Of Conscience (30/4/2017)

Oklahoma City And The Denial Of History (30/4/2017)

From Bosnia To Syria; ‘Fake News’, Imperialist Agendas (4/5/2017)

Evacuated: Christopher Nolan’s Dunkirk (30/7/2017)

Inside The State Of Hate (1/9/2017)

2018

Getting Real About Depression (30/1/2018)

Syria And The Media: Neither RT Nor The BBC (3/3/2018)

Talk: The Media And Capitalism (6/6/2018)

The Lady Vanishes (28/8/2018)

9/11: What Happened And Who (Still) Cares? (11/9/2018)

2019

Christchurch: Media And Politicians Respond (21/3/2019)

Peterson-Žižek: Debate Of The Century? (1/5/2019)

Election Reflection (28/5/2019)

A Sense Of An Ending (28/6/2019)

People Power In Hong Kong (2/8/2019)

Communism Or Corbynism? That Is The Question (19/11/2019)

2020

Hot Planet, Cool Media (3/1/2020)

Cancel Culture: The Loony Left Lives (4/4/2020)

Covid And The Media: Myths And Mystifications (1/5/20)

The Return Of Black Lives Matter (5.7.20)

Making A Conspiracy Out Of A Crisis (2.8.20)

2021

Portrait Of The Incel As A Young-Girl (20/07/2021)

Entschlossenheit, Pet (29/12/21)

Postscript

Ukraine (5/3/2022)

Select Bibliography

Preface

From the Arab Spring, Hackgate and the London riots, through the era of Brexit and Trump, to our present time of pandemic and the return of war in Europe, this volume collects eleven years of short essays and philippics on the journalistic, cinematic and television treatment of major world events, media spectacles, political imbroglios and culture-war contretemps.

The broadsides in this collection are written in an accessible but dyspeptic style (as P. G. Wodehouse quipped, ‘it is never difficult to distinguish a Scotsman with a grievance from a ray of sunshine’). They mostly take aim at the distortions and omissions of Western news reports and other cultural narratives about war, terrorism, protest and geopolitics. The title of the collection, adopted from one of the essays within it, is intended to highlight the disjunction between humanity’s current existential crisis and the almost complete failure of the Media System either to register the underlying cause of this crisis (capitalism) or to entertain any discussion of the solution to it (socialism). In the era of what Jim McGuigan has called ‘cool capitalism’, today’s media organizations mostly strike an open, liberal and progressive pose. Nevertheless, they overwhelmingly serve the narrow interests of a global elite that is subjecting the planet to a reign of fire in the form of endless wars and relentless ecological destruction.

This collection was written in fits and starts and has no pretensions to comprehensiveness. Most of the pieces focus on news reports or fictional representations of the violent events and international tensions that have made the global headlines over the last ten years, particularly in the UK and US. Other items engage with broader cultural topics—such as so-called ‘cancel culture’, the incel phenomenon and Covid conspiracy theories—that have recently come to prominence in public discourse. In the interests of thematic variety, I’ve also included an assortment of occasional items, such as my observations on the 2015 hacking of the Ashley Madison dating site and a short salvo on the 2019 mega-debate between Jordan B. Peterson and Slavoj Žižek.

For all its eclecticism, the collection does, I hope, have a certain ideological cohesiveness. The pieces herein share a sceptical attitude towards the double standards and mystifications of today’s mainstream, liberal media. These include, in no particular order: the Panglossian claims made for the radical democratic potential of the Internet; the fatuous hyping of social-democratic saviour-figures, from Barack Obama to Jeremy Corbyn and Aung San Suu Kyi; phoney ‘humanitarian’ defences of war in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and Syria; the false promises of ‘national independence’ movements; the sham radicalism of groups like Extinction Rebellion; and the widespread acceptance of a narrow, de-socialized conception of ‘mental illness’. The myths and often outright lies peddled by the right-wing political and media establishments are not ignored in the pages that follow, but I’ve assumed that the types of readers likely to pick up this book will be well enough aware of them. The ideas and assumptions of the left wing of capitalism, on the other hand, exert a powerful hold over people who would otherwise be open to radical ideas and must therefore be challenged vigorously. Consequently, as the reader will see, the following polemics mostly reject both left- and right-wing political positions and espouse something else entirely, namely, the cause of socialism or communism in the Marxian sense of a classless, leaderless, moneyless society.

These notes were written between 2011 and 2022—an historical period whose essential characteristics are hard to pin down. Perhaps the era will come to be seen as embodying a particular mode of politics (populism), an economic paradigm (austerity), or a technology (the smartphone). But as yet the decade, or not-quite-decade, suffers from something of an identity crisis as compared with its predecessors. In the capitalist heartlands, at least, the 1990s was a decade of relative social calm and political ‘Restoration’, as the philosopher Alain Badiou puts it. While Francis Fukuyama’s infamous claim that the 90s represented the end of history was overturned by global events, it did capture something of the cultural greyness and political quiescence that prevailed in most Western societies at that time.

The first decade of the present century, of course, disturbed this complacent centrist settlement, delivering seismic shocks to Western public consciousness in the shape of the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001 and the economic crash of 2008. The end of history had well and truly ended. And in the next decade, as the items in this volume attest, the morbid symptoms of a decrepit social system and the corresponding expressions of public anger and despair became more acute.

The 2010s could be said to have begun in 2011—Slavoj Žižek’s ‘year of dreaming dangerously’—with the social revolts in North Africa and the Middle East and the Occupy movement; perhaps the London riots of August 2011 should also be included in this sequence. A reaction to deepening austerity across the world, the geopolitical ruptures of 2011 were interpreted by some as the start of a global fightback against poverty, alienation and oppression; but they were hardly unambiguous expressions of class consciousness and the global mood of the subsequent decade has been informed less by revolutionary conviction than by anxiety and fear. The climate crisis has loomed more menacingly than ever. And even for many workers who considered themselves materially secure a decade ago, conditions of life and work have worsened. At the same time, many states seem to be reverting to atavistic nationalism and authoritarianism. When discussing the manifestations of this trend in the Western world, it has become a cliché among Anglo-American commentators to cite the oft-twinned examples of Trump and Brexit. I myself have singularly failed to avoid these well-worn subjects, although I hope that my comments on them at least steer clear of the worst commonplaces of left- and right-wing punditry.

Over the last ten years, life on the planet has also been blighted by sickening wars—most protractedly and destructively in Syria—and an upsurge of stochastic terrorism of the most barbaric, nihilistic kind: in 2011 in Norway; in 2015 at the Charlie Hebdo office in Paris; in 2016 in Nice; and in 2019 in Christchurch, Aotearoa, as well as many other times and places. Some of the entries in this book take up the political and journalistic responses to these atrocities, which are surely the morbid symptoms of a declining social order. Indeed, to borrow a gloomy phrase from Christopher Caudwell, what follows in this book are notes on a dying culture. As the tension between the planet’s enormous productive potential and the cruelty and alienation experienced by most people in their daily lives becomes more difficult to disguise, the view of society as a death-world is more and more openly expressed in a variety of contexts, from the lexicon of academic critical theory (‘necrocapitalism’, ‘necropolitics’, ‘thanatopolitics’, ‘deading life’) to the figures of the zombie and the corpse that had been moving stage centre in global popular culture, even before the coronavirus pandemic hit.

The spectacular public outrages of war, drone bombing, terrorism and so on have their psychic corollaries, of course, and several of the entries here address the mediation of mental suffering—a subject I have written about elsewhere. In a time of proliferating traumas, alienation and overwork, mental distress is an increasingly salient subject, albeit one which, I argue here, is all too often depoliticized and stripped of context in the major media. The ‘privatisation of stress’, as the late cultural critic Mark Fisher called it, is everywhere in evidence. Moreover, mental distress is characteristically framed in Western media commentary today as an ‘issue’ best ‘tackled’ via awareness campaigns and stigma-busting disclosures by celebrities, politicians and trendy royals that seem designed above all else to foster affective identification with the rich and powerful. Even where such campaigns are not cynically self-serving PR manoeuvres, the now ubiquitous message that ‘anybody can suffer from mental illness’ serves, I argue, to obscure the socio-political roots of mental pain.

Needless to say, over the period spanned by this book, the media landscape has been dramatically reshaped, shifting more and more from a nationally-focused broadcasting environment to the globalized, distributed network model epitomized by so-called social media. In our brave new, likeable, shareable world, the values of transparency, spontaneity, self-expression and disinhibition are increasingly trumpeted. All the same, as one of the lengthier entries here from 2018 suggests, the mainstream media, whose dominion now extends over the more and more corporatized and bowdlerized social platforms such as YouTube, Twitter and Facebook as well as the legacy media, continue to serve their time-honoured function as the mouthpieces of the ruling class. Their primary business, of course, is the pursuit of profit. But their content, as indicated by most of the dispatches in this book, also serves the more general ideological purpose of legitimizing the buying-and-selling system. Almost without fail, the big media prioritize the opinions of businesspeople, political leaders and senior military figures and marginalize critics of capitalism. Yet as some of the more sanguine entries in this collection suggest, dissenting voices still resound across this bleak landscape, suggesting that the possibility of a world without war, poverty and wage slavery isn’t quite yet foreclosed.

Stephen Harper, Portsmouth

October 2022

2011

TUNISIA AND EGYPT: NEW MEDIA ‘REVOLUTIONS’?(2/2/2011)

The recent protests in Tunisia have obviously surprised and shaken the dominant faction of the country’s ruling class and such an upsurge of angry activism was hardly predicted by outside observers either. It was Rosa Luxemburg who said it: ‘before a revolution happens, it is perceived as impossible; after it happens, it is seen as having been inevitable’.

Then again, revolution might be a rather inflated word for what is happening in North Africa. The overthrow of Ben Ali’s regime may be welcomed by many of Tunisia’s poorest workers and there is no doubt that this is an inspirational moment; if nothing else, it shows that things can change quickly when people bravely rise up against their masters in large numbers. That said, the uprising doesn’t necessarily represent a long-term political gain for the working class. Tunisians have got rid of a brutal dictator; but all of the organs of the capitalist state in Tunisia remain intact. And although undoubtedly driven along by a strong working class protest against poverty and unemployment, the Tunisian movement has also contained reformist and outright nationalist elements. Tunisia has certainly not undergone a revolution in the strict Marxist sense of a fundamental change in the class structure and it remains to be seen how significant the regime change will be; ultimately, it may prove to be nothing more than the imposition of a capitalist settlement better able to manage the country’s increasingly violent manifestations of social unrest by adopting a democratic facade.

Indeed, as a recent International Communist Current article points out (‘Campaigns about the Fall of Ben Ali in Tunisia’, January 2011), the mainstream news organizations in many countries—having almost stopped all news of the uprising for weeks—have now begun to show footage of the demonstrations and to praise the dawning of a new democratic era (although in authoritarian China there has been a complete news blackout). At the same time, we are hearing some suspiciously celebratory accounts of the role of the new media platforms in the uprising.

Revolutions in politics and technology have always been intertwined. In 1848, for example, the telegraph network played an important role in helping to spread news about the uprisings sweeping across Europe. In fact, the telegraph accelerated human communication more than any other technology before or since. As Ha-Joon Chang calculates in his recent book 23 Things They Don’t Tell You About Capitalism, the introduction of telegraphy in the nineteenth century sped up the transmission of a 300-word message across the Atlantic by a factor of 2,500; contrast this with the Internet, which is only five times faster at the same task than its technological predecessor, the fax machine.

This hasn’t stopped a certain degree of hype from emerging around the communications platforms used by participants in the recent uprisings. Just a few years ago, during Iran’s so-called Green Revolution, the conservative blogger Andrew Sullivan wrote breathlessly: ‘You cannot stop people any longer. You cannot control them any longer. They can bypass your established media; they can broadcast to one another; they can organize as never before. It’s increasingly clear that Ahmadinejad and the old guard mullahs were caught off-guard by this technology and how it helped galvanize the opposition movement in the last few weeks.’ ‘The revolution will be twittered’, wrote Sullivan, launching the notion of the ‘Twitter/Facebook revolution’—despite the fact that SMS messaging via mobile phones played a greater role than social media and microblogs for the organizers of the Green Revolution.

The uprisings in Tunisia and now Egypt resurrect the question of the role of the so-called ‘new media’ (already a somewhat quaint phrase) in creating counterpublics and facilitating large-scale social and political change. In a recent interview, the philosopher Mehdi Belhaj Kasem suggested that during the Tunisian events: ‘When the official media told a lie, within the next half hour it was disproved by civil society on the Internet: a thousand people, ten thousand, a hundred thousand saw the real images, the state’s manipulation, the deceptions, etc. In short, for the first time in history it was the media—television, radio or newspapers—that played catch-up to a new kind of popular, democratic information. And the same thing is going to happen everywhere. It’s even possible that journalism as such will end up being unnecessary.’

A tantalizing prospect! A recent Al Jazeera article by Noureddine Miladi gives an equally optimistic account of the role of new media in political change. Miladi argues that citizen journalism played a key role in helping to bring about a democratic ‘second republic’ in Tunisia, circumventing the strict state censorship of the mainstream media. He also compares the new media’s role in the Tunisian events to the part it played in securing the election of the US president Barack Obama in 2008.

The growing ubiquity of mobile phones and social media heralds the age of what the academic Alfred Hermida has called ‘ambient journalism’ and this certainly does present serious headaches for capitalist states the world over. But there can be no doubt that the ruling class is hiring the best brains it can find to regain control of the digital domain. Moreover, access to new media technologies is very limited in many parts of the world. While the demonstrators in Tunisia certainly used a variety of new media technologies and platforms—mobile phones, Twitter, Facebook, etc.—to organize themselves, no more than a quarter of Tunisians are Facebook users (the figure is much lower for Egypt). For that matter, only around 34% of the world’s population currently has Internet access. Use of the Internet is carefully monitored in most states and many of the Big Tech platforms have deep links with the security apparatus; state actors can, in extremis, interfere with Internet services. As Miladi himself notes, the Tunisian state disrupted certain social networking services such as Facebook during the unrest and public Internet access has recently been withdrawn in Egypt (although demonstrations have continued regardless). What you can be sure of is that the big social media companies will spin themselves, from the safety of Silicon Valley, as the heroic facilitators of democratic rebellion.

There are, however, signs that the techno-optimism of many early commentaries on the Internet—which was always more about investor-friendly boosterism than sober analysis—may have run its course. A slew of recent books, including Matthew Hindman’s The Myth of Digital Democracy and Evgeny Morozov’s The Net Delusion, have expressed a need for caution about the potential of new media to precipitate radical social change. As Morozov shows, new media have the potential to be manipulated in the service of state propaganda to a far greater extent than many cyber-utopians have been prepared to acknowledge. And we mustn’t overlook the propaganda value of the figure of the ‘netizen’, particularly for Western politicians. The image of plucky digital crusaders using social networking sites for democratic ends has enormous propaganda potential and is readily exploited by representatives of the state when it suits their interests. Commenting in a BBC Radio 4 lunchtime news bulletin (27 January 2011) on the Egyptian demonstrations that followed the Tunisian events, the British Foreign Secretary William Hague warned that it would be ‘futile’ for the Mubarak regime to try to prevent the free expression of public opinion via the Internet; but you can be quite sure that British authorities are keeping an eye on the activist use of social media here in the UK, where Twitter and Facebook were both used by organizers of the anti-fees protests last year. What’s happening in the Middle East shows the formidable organizing potential of social media; but we should be wary of the self-congratulatory cyber-optimism now emanating from the technology giants and politicians.

SOPHISTICATED SINOPHOBIA?(20/2/2011)

In recent years, the Western media’s treatment of China and the Chinese has often been less than friendly and BBC2’s recent two-part documentary The Chinese Are Coming! (8 and 15 February 2011) seemed at times to be yet another exercise in China-bashing as it charted China’s economic expansion in Africa (episode one) and the Americas (episode two). The first episode began in upbeat mode with presenter Justin Rowlatt acknowledging China’s stupendous economic growth and claiming that China’s production of cheap goods is ‘raising standards of living for us all’. The second episode offered some comic relief when Rowlatt met a group of rather animated American libertarians who objected to the teaching of Mandarin in a Californian school on the grounds that China is a totalitarian state (Rowlatt channelled Louis Theroux at this point, remaining deadpan as he quizzed the China-haters about their fears). But overall, The Chinese Are Coming! painted a highly unfavourable picture of the global influence of China that at times bordered on Sinophobia: while Rowlatt managed to avoid any reference to ‘yellow peril’ or ‘Fu Manchu’, ‘threat’ was one of the most prominent words in his voiceover.

China, we were told, is devastating the African environment. China opposed the British sanctions against Zimbabwe. China has a ‘dubious’ human rights record. And as Rowlatt reported in the documentary’s final section, China is developing weapons whose capabilities exceed what is required for its defence (as Rowlatt’s interviewee, the US Under Secretary of Defense for Policy, Michèle Flournoy, warned, China must abide by ‘international law’ and respect ‘the rules of the road’). All of this, it must be acknowledged, is true; but it seems like what Slavoj Žižek calls ‘lying in the guise of truth’. For one thing, environmental destruction is endemic to capitalism, not just China; the Western sanctions against Zimbabwe, meanwhile, have had appalling consequences for that country’s population; and as for China’s record on human rights and military aggression, well, the scale of the US operations in Iraq and Afghanistan make China’s military manoeuvrings look tame by comparison. Indeed, as the geographer Emma Mawdsley has recently written in an article in the journal Political Geography, the West is ‘a most unsatisfactory arbiter of what “responsible power” should look like’. In many parts of the world today, the question is not so much when are the Chinese coming, but when is the US leaving.

The Chinese Are Coming! could be read as an expression of British ‘soft power’ in the context of the new Cold War between China and the West, as China becomes the main trading partner of more and more countries in the world. It illustrates how British mainstream media, not least the so-called ‘public service’ BBC, are beholden to a nationalist logic that generates plenty of criticism of powerful competitor states, but elides both Britain’s imperialist past and the systemic roots of today’s geopolitical tensions.

‘HUMANITARIAN INTERVENTION’ IN LIBYA: PULL THE OTHER ONE (25/3/2011)

‘The urge to save humanity is almost always only a false front for the urge to rule it.’—H. L. Mencken

According to the dominant narrative of the Western news media, coalition forces have bombed Libya in order to protect the people of that country. A BBC online story today (25 March 2011), for instance, quotes only establishment opinions on the Libya situation, including David Cameron’s assertion that ‘military action should continue until people are safe and secure’. To paraphrase Oscar Wilde, you’d need to have a heart of stone to read such reports without laughing.

Even if many Libyans had not already been killed by coalition bombing (and they have been, according to Libyan television news), it is hard to accept the claims of Western politicians to be concerned about Gaddafi’s slaughter of ‘his own people’. For one thing, Gaddafi has been brutally oppressing Libyan workers for decades: the 1996 prison massacre at Abu Salim is only the most egregious example. Moreover, the US, French and British states have been keen supporters of Gaddafi since the latter’s pro-Western conversion in 2003, using Libya for the extraordinary rendition of potential ‘terror suspects’, who were tortured by Libyan intelligence operatives. And needless to say, the Atlanticist powers themselves have never shown the slightest compunction about killing civilians—albeit mostly foreigners rather than their own citizens. Why, then, the sudden outpouring of humanitarian concern and moral outrage by Western politicians over the actions of a dictator who until recently they had backed to the hilt?

The answer lies in a consideration of recent geopolitical manoeuvres and the material interests at stake in Libya. In recent years, Gaddafi had been making life difficult for foreign oil companies with high taxes and other demands. At the same time, certain Western states have been anxious to protect their trade in oil and arms with Libya, while furthering their geo-strategic aims in the region. The intervention also provides a valuable showcase for Western weapons companies and governments eager to boost employment with a bit of military Keynesianism.

Seeking to exert its influence in the region, France appears to have led the drive for a no-fly zone, closely followed by Britain. They must have ascertained that they could rely on the support of the US, which has now been dragged into the fray. Like Slobodan Milošević or Saddam Hussein, Gaddafi has outlived his usefulness to the US and can be disposed of with relative ease. After all, compared to Iran and Syria, Libya is the weakest of the anti-US/Israeli states in the Middle East and is therefore a soft target for intervention, just as it was when Reagan attacked the country in the 1980s. Had Libya possessed nuclear weapons, military intervention would have been far less likely (for the same reason, don’t expect an invasion of North Korea any time soon).

The attack on Libya also provides a convenient diversion for the beleaguered Western powers. For one thing, if militarily successful, the assault could produce a sort of Falklands Effect, directing public attention from the current domestic strife over cuts to jobs, wages, public services and pensions. It might also serve to deflect from the brutal state repression of the uprisings happening in other parts of North Africa and the Middle East—repression that is funded and supported by the Western powers (if Craig Murray’s usually reliable blog is to be believed, for example, Hillary Clinton may have authorized the Saudis to help put down the pro-democracy protests in Bahrain in return for Arab League support for the attack on Libya).

Like the revolts comprising what the news media are calling the ‘Arab Spring’, the imposition of a no-fly zone over Libya was unanticipated just a few months ago. But now the game is afoot and the various national gangs involved have a lot to play for. This isn’t humanitarian intervention; it’s a routine exercise in imperialist realpolitik.

‘VERY CLEAR, VERY CLEAN’: KILLING BIN LADEN(6/5/2011)

Few sensible people will shed a tear on hearing that Osama bin Laden has been killed by US special forces in Abbottabad in an operation that must surely have been sanctioned by the Pakistani ISI. Although some journalists are referring somewhat coyly to the ‘death’ of bin Laden, this was of course an assassination; after all, the guy did not pass away peacefully watching re-runs of Two and a Half Men. Dumping OBL’s body at sea, meanwhile, is an inspired method of dispatch, ensuring that not too many queries can be raised about exactly how the badman died (it will also fuel the widespread suspicions that Osama was already dead and that the recent operation was in key respects a hoax). Nor can there now be a trial, which might have raised awkward questions about Osama’s links with the CIA. It’s all history now: the bogeyman is gone. And to borrow a line from Starship Troopers, the only good bug is a dead bug.

There has been much self-congratulation and backslapping among Western politicians and patriotic members of the public. In the USA, there has even been dancing in the streets and other eruptions of infantilism. An American friend tells me that on the night when the news broke, his college campus erupted into a frenzy of chest-bumping and high-fiving, with brave cries of ‘U-S-A!’ echoing through the night. Wrestling with a formidable combination of syllables, WWE musclehead John Cena even interrupted one of his fights to crow that bin Laden had been ‘caught and compromised to a permanent end’, prompting jingoistic whooping from the crowd.

Nor has the British media missed this opportunity to fan the flames of nationalism. On BBC Radio 4’s The World Tonight (2 May 2011), the BBC’s North America correspondent Mark Mardell noted with barely disguised relish that in contrast to the bothersome uncertainties over the rights and wrongs of recent military interventions, the assassination of bin Laden had provided a much longed-for clarity. ‘Killing a bad person’, chirped Mardell, conveniently ignoring the others killed in the firefight, ‘is very clear, very simple and very clean’ and would prove ‘cathartic’ among ‘patriotic Americans’ after ten years during which the US state had been unable to ‘get ‘im’ (yes, that really is how he said it).

But what is clear, simple or clean about the assassination of OBL? Certainly not the details of the murder, which have changed almost by the hour. Nor is the moral case for the killing especially transparent: like bin Laden, George W. Bush and Barack Obama are responsible for premeditated mass murder, but it seems unlikely that Mardell would approve quite so breezily of any plan to murder a US president. And another thing I am a little unclear about: why are Western troops apparently set to remain in Afghanistan, now that OBL has been dispatched?

Even if the US state were not the world’s chief exporter of terrorism, the US president’s assurance that we live in a safer world as a result of this assassination would be unconvincing. After all, al-Qaeda has already vowed to carry out revenge attacks against the US. The death of bin Laden may give a temporary boost to Obama’s domestic approval ratings, rather as, at an earlier stage of the War on Terror, the death sentence passed on Saddam Hussein two days before the 2006 US mid-terms was surely calculated to reverse George W. Bush’s fall in popularity at that time. But it can only exacerbate the tensions between the US state and its jihadist antagonists, making the world an even more dangerous place for everybody.

ONE LESS OBAMA-MANIAC(25/5/2011)

‘Hope is the leash of submission.’—Raoul Vaneigem

According to recent reports, the moral philosopher Cornel West, having supported Barack Obama’s electoral campaign in 2008, has now been snubbed by his onetime hero. In response to this jilting and to what the West sees as the Obama administration’s betrayal of its political ideals, the academic’s fawning has turned to fury. Thankfully, however, West has now rediscovered his critical faculties, launching an ill-tempered but entirely justified attack on the Obama administration for doing what many of us knew it would do—continuing to run capitalism in the interests of the rich and powerful.

That a figure of West’s calibre could ever have been taken in by Obama’s progressive promises is a tad disturbing. But his volte-face goes to show that it’s never too late to learn. Indeed, amid the media feeding frenzy surrounding Barack and Michelle’s British tour, now is as good a time as any to remind ourselves of what the Obama administration has really meant for the world and of just how completely left-wing ‘progressives’ were sucked in by the president’s hopey-changey schtick. For West was not alone. In 2008, many liberals who had reviled George W. Bush warmly welcomed Bush’s supposedly progressive Democratic successor. At least one Cultural Studies academic even wrote of their ‘love’ for Obama. Such effusions echoed throughout the liberal media. In a 2009 advertisement for the BBC News channel, a handsome young father holds a new-born baby as he watches the election of the new president on the television—and a tender smile spreads across his face. Change at last!

A leader article published in The Guardian (5 June 2008) before Obama’s election victory expressed the hope that Obama would ‘use US power more wisely and effectively than Mr Bush for the world’s urgent causes’. But if ‘urgent causes’ have been pursued by the Obama regime, they have been those of the US ruling class. At home, the Obama administration has arguably proved to be even more of an enemy of the working class than its forerunner, driving through a healthcare ‘reform’ that required tens of millions of working class Americans to take out private cover while boosting profits for the insurance and pharmaceutical industries; as even the liberal film-maker Michael Moore has pointed out, the measure amounted to a ‘victory for capitalism’.

Overseas, meanwhile, the Obama administration intensified conflict in the Middle East by bombing Pakistan, enormously increased troop numbers in Afghanistan, invaded Haiti after a devastating earthquake in that country, and vetoed a UN Security Council resolution on ending Israeli settlement expansion—to say nothing of the US involvement in the brutal suppression of the recent uprisings in the Middle East. The Washington Post (5 June 2010) reported a dramatic increase in Special Operations under the Obama administration, while in his 2010 article ‘The Iranian threat’, Noam Chomsky noted that the Obama administration had accelerated its predecessors’ plans to acquire heavy ordnance, citing academic Dan Plesch’s view that the US is ‘gearing up totally for the destruction of Iran’. All of this lends a truly Orwellian quality to the award of the Nobel Peace Prize to Obama.

Like the election of America’s first black president, David Palmer, in the Fox television drama 24, Obama’s accession to the presidency appealed powerfully to the liberal imagination; no doubt the feminist left will hail the election of the first female US president—a scenario anticipated in the ABC television drama Commander in Chief—as an equally ‘historic’ moment. But it’s little more than window dressing. Neither the ethnicity, nor the personal charisma, nor the gender of a president alters her institutional status as an agent of the ruling class. Despite the progressive gloss, the Obama administration presides over the oppression of workers at home and orchestrates deadly violence abroad in pursuit of the US’s geopolitical objectives.

JUSTICE IS SERBED(1/6/2011)

While loudly celebrated by mainstream commentators, the recent killing of Osama bin Laden also provoked a certain amount of criticism among liberal, left-wing and radical commentators, who rightly pointed to Osama’s value to the Western powers as a scapegoat and all-round bogeyman. This is not surprising, since the US-led War on Terror proved controversial with the public and lacked widespread diplomatic support within the EU. By contrast, there has been a far broader international consensus about the meaning of the war in the former Yugoslavia. Consequently, neither the events surrounding Ratko Mladić’s recent arrest, nor its problematic media reporting, have elicited many expressions of concern from ‘progressive’ commentators.

On The Guardian’s Comment Is Free blog (27 May 2011), Misha Glenny (whose book The Fall of Yugoslavia lays the blame for the break-up of the country wholly, but in my view unfairly, at the door of Serb nationalists) praises the Serbian president Boris Tadić for the part he played in capturing the Butcher of Srebrenica. But as Glenny himself acknowledges, bringing Serb war criminals to justice has been a key condition of Serbia’s EU membership; for this reason alone, the president’s deliverance of Mladić might be seen as having more to do with political expediency than a heroic determination to right past wrongs.

As well as smoothing Serbia’s passage to EU membership, much of the recent media reporting of Mladić’s arrest reinforces longstanding Western propaganda about the Bosnian war. Like Glenny’s article, Henry Porter’s recent piece in The Guardian (‘Mladić’s crimes have shaped the world we live in’, 29 May 2011), for example, implies that the war in Bosnia between 1992 and 1995 was instigated solely by the Serbs and that the war’s only victims were Muslims. By focusing on Serb atrocities and omitting any mention of the role of the European nations in the devastation of Yugoslavia, the Western news media continues to present the great powers’ manifold economic, political and military manoeuvres in the region—including the brutal Operation Storm in 1995 and the deadly bombing of Yugoslavia in 1999—as so many noble interventions in the fight against virulent Serb revanchism.

The absence of almost any challenge to the media’s recurrent presentation of the Bosnian war as a Manichean struggle between good (‘the West’) and evil (the Serbs) shows just how deeply the dominant narrative of that war has penetrated public consciousness—and just how far down the memory hole anything resembling an adequate account of the Balkan wars has been shoved. We can have no sympathy for Mladić, who surely now faces severe punishment for his heinous crimes. But to celebrate his arrest, as the slippery centrist Timothy Garton Ash does in another Guardian Comment Is Free contribution (1 June 2011), as evidence of ‘a global movement towards accountability’ is to ignore the fact that international justice operates systematically in the interests of the powerful. That is why Mladić is now languishing in The Hague—and why Bill Clinton and Madeleine Albright are not.

BIGMOUTH STRIKES AGAIN(27/6/2011)

Since its earliest days, the BBC has quite consistently sought to undermine strike action. Its first Director General, John Reith, infamously supported the government during the 1926 General Strike. The BBC also stands accused of manipulating footage from the police-picket conflict at the Orgreave Coking Works during the Miners’ Strike and more recently it effectively smeared the Lindsey oil refinery strikers as racist xenophobes in 2009. But allowing a reality television star to bad-jacket strikers is a novel tactic in the never-ending media war against the working class.

The BBC’s The One Show tonight wheeled on Katie Hopkins as an anti-strike mouthpiece. Hopkins was, you will recall, a contestant on the British version of the reality show The Apprentice in 2007, where she spewed bitchy platitudes about her co-contestants. Later, she was sacked as a columnist at Exeter’s Express and Echo newspaper after an unfavourable readers’ poll. She seems now to be embarking on a new phase of her career as a professional reactionary in the Anne Coulter mould. She appeared on the BBC’s Question Time earlier this year, issuing a laughable defence of sexist comments made by former footballer and sports commentator Andy Gray. Tonight’s One Show appearance gave her another opportunity to play the pantomime villain. This time she took aim at public sector workers, opining that while private sector workers are ‘working hard’ in these times of austerity, their public sector counterparts are ‘throwing their dummies out of the pram’ by participating in Thursday’s strike, which, she reminded us, is ‘just another day out of the office’ for Britain’s ‘dull’ and pampered public servants. But as any nurse or teacher will tell you, public sector workers are hardly privileged: in the wage freezes that followed the 2007 crash, they have actually suffered bigger pay cuts than their private sector counterparts. In any case, the argument that public sector workers should meekly accept the degradation of their pay and conditions because private sector employees have done so is a patent non sequitur.

Warming to her theme, Hopkins went on to claim that many people abhor the prospect of the public sector strikes planned for Thursday, but that she is one of the brave few who is ‘prepared to say so’. But Hopkins’s attacks on the strike plans are hardly unique: in recent days, politicians and mainstream media have relentlessly attacked ‘comfortable’ public sector workers in a bid to prevent wider solidarity with the industrial action. Far from being a straight-talking maverick, Hopkins is reiterating widespread and well-worn anti-strike rhetoric. Her contribution is distinguished only by the casual viciousness of her middle-class disdain for the revolting poor.

The One Show presenters were at pains to stress that the views expressed by Hopkins were not those of the BBC, just as they pretended to be scandalized when, back in May, Hopkins had popped onto The One Show sofa to deliver a daring attack on lazy new mothers who take more than three weeks of maternity leave. But the BBC made the decision to devote substantial time to Hopkins’s opinions in their programme and must take responsibility for it. In any case, Hopkins’s opinions will likely be well received by her target demographic: the dim-witted denizens of Middle England.

HACKGATE: RECUPERATING THE CRISIS(9/7/2011)

‘It’s useless to react to the news of the day; instead we should understand each report as a maneuver in a hostile field of strategies to be decoded, operations designed to provoke a specific reaction.’—The Invisible Committee, The Coming Insurrection

The phone hacking scandal at The News of the World has thrown a spotlight on a murky culture of collusion and corruption among politicians, the press and the police, whose existence is unlikely to surprise anybody. Hundreds of News of the World workers will now lose their jobs for the crimes and mistakes of News International managers, as the newspaper is closed down. This may be just fine as far as Murdoch is concerned, for while the scandal represents a reputational set-back for the Sun King, it at least allows him to rationalize his newspaper business as the profitability of tabloid newspapers declines. For the non-Murdoch media, such as the BBC, The Guardian and The Daily Mail, and the anti-Murdoch factions of the British state, meanwhile, this scandal is surely good news.

Predictably, the deep politics of the phone hacking affair have been largely ignored in the mainstream media, even by ‘investigative’ journalists. In a Spectator article entitled ‘What the papers won’t say’, Peter Oborne asks what he sees as a neglected question, namely, ‘whether the owner of News International is any longer a “fit and proper” person to occupy such a dominant position in the British media’. Oborne is pushing at an open door here. The question of Murdoch’s moral fitness for mega-moguldom certainly is being raised in those parts of the mainstream media not owned by him—such as The Spectator. But Oborne also rightly castigates politicians and the British media in general for failing to link the scandal to Murdoch’s ambitions for BSkyB. This is a rather more pertinent point. After all, it now looks likely that the decision on Murdoch’s BSkyB bid will be deferred, at the very least.