Andrew Hickey

The new Steven Spielberg film Lincoln has no scenes set in Lancashire. Perhaps it should have.

As the BBC’s Paul Mason points out, Lancashire’s cotton workers, urged on by Liberal MP John Bright, expressed solidarity with the Union’s fight against slavery and its blockade of the south, despite losing work from the resulting loss of cotton supplies.

Lincoln is commemorated by a statue in a square named after him in Manchester:

At a mass meeting in Manchester’s Free Trade Hall, on New Year's Eve 1862, attended by a mixture of cotton workers, and the Manchester middle class, they passed a motion urging Lincoln to prosecute the war, abolish slavery and supporting the blockade – despite the fact that it was by now causing them to starve. The meeting convened despite an editorial in the Manchester Guardian advising people not to attend.

Mr Lincoln, in a letter dated 19 January 1863, 150 years ago... replied with the words that are inscribed on his statue:

“I cannot but regard your decisive utterances on the question as an instance of sublime Christian heroism which has not been surpassed in any age or in any country.

“It is indeed an energetic and re-inspiring assurance of the inherent truth and of the ultimate and universal triumph of justice, humanity and freedom… Whatever misfortune may befall your country or my own, the peace and friendship which now exists between the two nations will be, as it shall be my desire to make them, perpetual.”

Interesting to read Iain Dale's post on how he's falling out of love with politics, along with a couple of equally thought-provoking responses.  My own take on why apathy seems to have become the default response to politics is similar to Paul's, in that it leads back not to Thatcher, but rather to the surrender to the markets of the late 70s, exemplified by Denis Healey's going to the IMF and James Callaghan's statement that Keynesianism was no longer an option.  With that surrender has come the failure of politicians to offer anything approaching a vision of a better society: all they promise now is either shallow aspiration, a belief in the fallacy of meritocracy, or more simply, that they'll do a better job of managing the country than the other lot.

Let's face it: the main political battle since the sub-prime crisis has been over who will cut what and when.  The choice on offer has been either cuts now, or slightly less deep cuts over a longer term period.  In fact, such has been the coalition's success that their programme for deficit reduction is now practically indistinguishable from that of Labour's, albeit Miliband 'n' Balls would do things slightly differently, whether through their jobs guarantee or cut in VAT etc.  The only real resistance to this inexorable narrative has been from the Occupy movement, who in this country at least seemed determined to ensure their own irrelevance from the outset.  No leaders, no real suggestion as to what the alternative should be, just that corporations aren't people, bankers aren't very nice and that everyone should pay their fair share of tax.  Inspiring it wasn't.

When politicians won't even provide the merest outline of how they want to make things better, or won't in terms that aren't technocratic, you can't be surprised that so many switch off.  Which brings me to another explanation that is far more prosaic: there's never been so much to distract yourself with as there is today.  When in 1976 there were only 3 television channels, extremely primitive video games and VHS systems still a couple of years away, politics was something to involve yourself in even if you weren't particularly vehement in your views.  Today if you so wish you can avoid hearing almost anything of the news let alone politics, and you can't really blame those who choose to do so.

The West is worried about the rise of Islamism in Africa. There are two big fears - one is that there is a new international terror network that will come and attack Europe and America. The other is that sneaky Islamist groups like the Muslim Brotherhood will get themselves elected - and then promptly abolish democracy.

But behind these fears is an incredibly simplified - almost fictional - vision of the world. It possesses the minds of many western politicians, journalists and associated think tank "experts". And at its heart is a kind of filter that wipes away anything complex about power and the struggles for power in African countries - and replaces that with a simple picture of the world as divided between goodies (us in the west) and dangerous frightening baddies who are out to destroy us.

It's both blind and arrogant. And it's terribly dangerous.

To try and bring it into focus I want to go back twenty years and tell two dramatic stories. In them lie many of the roots of today's western fears - but also, in the details of both stories are keys to understanding two crucial things that we ignore today at our peril. One is the complex local power struggles that have helped the rise of Islamism in Africa, and the second is the way past western interventions have fuelled a hatred and distrust of Europe and America - that has in turn massively helped the Islamist cause.

One is the story of what happened in Somalia between 1990 and 1993 - the real events that led to Black Hawk Down or, to give it its proper name, "Operation Gothic Serpent". The second is the story of the weird and horrific events that happened in Algeria between 1992 and 1996 after the Islamist party called FIS was stopped from winning an election by an armed coup. A coup that had the implicit backing of the west.

There is an odd ghost that haunts not only Somalia's history, but has also lodged itself in the western imagination. He was called Mohammed Abdullah Hassan - and a hundred years ago he set out to try and unite all the Somali people in an Islamic state. The British called him The Mad Mullah and they battled against him for twenty years until they found a new way of getting rid of him. They bombed him from the air.

These are the forgotten ruins of the place that was going to be the capital of his Islamic state - he called it The Dervish state

For the next forty years the Somali people remained divided - ruled by the British and the Italians as part of their empires. Then, in 1960, Somalia was finally given its independence. But, like so many of the other former European colonies, all sorts of powerful remnants of colonial rule remained. Not just the arbitrary lines drawn on maps to make the new countries - but in the minds and imaginations of millions of newly liberated people.

Here is a film made in 1961 which captures this brilliantly. It's from a series called Africa Now, subtitled First Hand Reports from a Changing Continent and it is about life and politics and the new forces of power in independent Somalia.

The capital, Mogadishu, had been part of Italian Somaliland - and the film shows how strongly the Italian presence remains. Not just in the grand buildings that had been part of Mussolini's dream of a Second Roman Empire, but in the language. Not only is there no written Somali language - which means the Somalis use Italian - but they don't even have a word for "independence", so they use the Italian word - "indipendenza". I also really like the attempt to create a written Somali language. It was called "Osmania", and it wasn't a success.

The film also shows how Mogadishu has already become "the cockpit in the propaganda struggle in the Cold War". The film captures the ambassadors from all the different players - the Soviets, the Americans, the communist Chinese and the West Germans - going hither and thither in their gleaming cars in Mogadishu, all snuffling around trying to gain influence over the new President, Abdullah Osman Daar.

And the key to that influence is foreign aid. The film shows how the Soviets are offering to build a proper harbour, while fascinatingly the Chinese are already building a road system for Somalia. The Americans don't seem to be doing very well - but the West German ambassador is very keen, he spends his time walking around the desert looking for possible places for development projects.

But you can see who's going to win out. The Russian ambassador who is described as "a carefree agitator with boyish charm".

But in 1969 democracy in Somalia ended. There was a military coup led by Major-General Siad Barre who set up what he called The Somali Democratic Republic. But in reality it was a centralised communist state modelled on General Barre's interpretations of Marx and Lenin and Mao.

Siad Barre promised to wipe away the ghosts of the past that were holding Somalis back from being truly independent. And that meant not just the old colonial remains, but the crucial thing that was holding Somalia back, Barre said, was the clan structure.

Somali society was permeated by a complex clan structure. Somalis defined themselves and understood their relationship to each other in great part through this system of clans and sub-clans. Siad Barre said that it was the clans - or "clanism" - that had undermined democracy in the new Somalia - so he was going to wipe out this destructive and outmoded "tribalism" and replace it with a new, centralised society run by The Supreme Revolutionary Council.

In 1974 the Council published a book about the new society they were building. It has great images of revolutionary displays.

It also contained lovely colour pictures, like this one of modern Somalis dancing at the discotheque in the new Juba hotel in Mogadishu.

And it also summed up this glorious new revolutionary world and its beautiful future like this:

Algeria didn't get its independence quite as easily as Somalia. Between 1954 and 1962 revolutionary groups - the main one was called the FLN - fought a vicious terrorist war against the French who ruled Algeria. The FLN bombed French civilians in cafes and the streets, while they also killed many Algerians in the French controlled Algerian army. In response the French killed the guerrillas and also used widespread torture.

In 1962 the French gave up and Algeria became independent. Its first President was one of the leaders of the FLN - Ben Bella. But in 1965 he was deposed by a military coup led by one of his close friends from the revolutionary times - Houari Boumediene - who, of course, like Somalia, turned Algeria in the a copy of the Soviet Union.

It all worked fine for a while because Algeria had oil - and as oil prices rose the FLN used the money to subsidise their state socialism. But underneath everyone knew that power was really concentrated in a small elite group that came from the east of the country and excluded everyone else.

There was growing resentment, but no real coherent opposition. But then, in November 1982, there were a series of battles on the campus of the University of Algiers between a group of Marxist students and a group of Islamists who killed one of the Marxists. The Islamists were protesting about the fact that the Marxists, who all spoke French, would get all the best paid jobs. While anyone who just spoke Arabic would find it nearly impossible to get a professional career. This meant that they were excluded from power in Algerian society.

The protests were immediately repressed - the Islamists were all arrested. But it was an important moment because it was the first public demonstration by an Islamist opposition, breaking cover and coming into the open in a country where all opposition was banned. The protests were led by a teacher called Abbasi Madani who had once been in the FLN. He was put in prison for two years - but he will turn up later in this story playing a very important role.

 

They key thing in the protests was the fact that the Marxists spoke French - and that was the route to power. Again it was a powerful example of how the remnants of French colonial times still exercised a powerful grip on the destinies of those who were supposed to be free and independent of that past. And it was that frustration that was a powerful fuel for the growing Islamist movement.

The most dramatic example of how the French Empire still possessed the minds and behaviour of Africans was in the Central African Republic. It too had got independence from France in 1960 - but in 1965 there was, of course, a military coup and Colonel Jean Bedel Bokassa took power. In 1972 he made himself President for Life, but then, in 1977, he decided to crown himself Emperor of the Central African Empire.

It was a weird and grotesque demonstration of how the European mind set still controlled Africans in a distorted way. Because Bokassa was directly modelling himself on the French emperor Napoleon - and his coronation was supposed to be an exact copy of Napoleon's coronation as emperor in Paris in 1804.

Here is a great film made about Bokassa as he prepares for his coronation. It's a wonderful picture of what happens when a mad dictator decides to spend lots of money - clutches of European designers and planners and "facilitators" flock around all taking it very seriously. While Bokassa spends his time in his palace watching film of other royal coronations and the British Queen's Silver Jubilee in order to get inspiration.

Bokassa is also interviewed. He explains why he cuts peoples' ears off - he says it's a lot less barbarous than the death penalty, which France still had at that time. I suppose he has a point. And then he tries to explain why he is establishing an Empire when in fact he hasn't got an Empire. It's a very odd explanation - and it's very funny.

 

To the Islamists in Algeria, a figure like Bokassa was a dramatic example of what their fundamental theory predicted. Modern Islamist ideas said that European and Western ideas of democracy were always going to lead to corruption. However well-intentioned at the beginning, the system gave enormous power to individuals and that always corrupted them.

It was a very pessimistic theory because it saw human beings as always being fallible and corruptible. Bokassa was an extreme example, but the Islamists believed that the same thing had happened in Algeria. The idealistic Marxist revolutionaries had morphed into a corrupt and repressive clique. The only solution was to an impose a rigid, incorruptible system of moral and political guidance on the politicians which they had to follow. And that should be drawn from Islam.

The Algerian Islamists’ chance came in 1988. Two years before - in 1986 - oil prices had collapsed and the effect on Algeria had been catastrophic. Half of the country's budget was wiped out and the whole socialist "experiment" collapsed. Out of the disaster came widespread corruption and soaring prices.

On October the 4th 1988 the dam burst and the young, angry urban poor started to riot in Algiers. The centre of the rioting was in the shopping mall called Riad al Fath, the Victory Gardens. It symbolized the elite that ruled Algeria and the rioters smashed it up. In the next days the rioting spread spontaneously. And the only organisation ready and able to ride the wave of fury were the Islamists.

And on March 10th 1989 the Islamic Salvation Front FIS was formed - with the aim of bonding together the chaotic rebellion and using it to create an Islamist state. The founders of FIS had different approaches, but the two key ones were Abassi Madani and Ali Belhadj. Madani had led the protests back in 1982 and he believed that it would be possible to Islamize Algeria without changing the fabric of the state, while Belhadj was more radical - he believed in armed struggle to create a new kind of state.

Here are the first reports of the rioting in the "Days of October" - followed by the meeting that announced the founding of FIS.

Meanwhile in Somalia things were also going very badly for the "Victorious Leader" - Siad Barre.

His problems had begun back in 1977 when he had decided to try and create what he called Greater Somalia. Barre started by invading an area of neighbouring Ethiopia called the Ogaden. Millions of Somalis lived there - but back in the late 1940s the British, under US pressure, had decided it was part of Ethiopia. But now Siad Barre decided Somalia wanted it back.

To begin with the invasion went well. But then the Soviet Union, who had been backing Siad Barre, suddenly decided to switch sides and back Ethiopia. Almost overnight they pulled out their advisers and troops, along with a bunch of Cubans who had also been helping Somalia.

The reason the Soviets switched sides was because there was a new dictator running Ethiopia who was more Marxist-Leninist than Siad Barre - and even more ruthless. This made the Soviets feel that he was more worth backing and they poured weapons, money and men into Ethiopia to help defeat Siad Barre, their previous friend. This included airlifting thousands of Cuban troops into Ethiopia.

Here is Siad Barre saying everything is going swimmingly with the Russians - followed by news footage of the Soviet Advisers leaving Mogadishu a few days later.

And here is film of the weird, frightening world of Colonel Mengistu in Ethiopia that the Soviets went off to help. It was shot just after Mengistu had taken power in 1977. He had just started what he called The Red Terror. It was the mass execution of what Mengistu called "counterrevolutionary elements" - otherwise known as the Ethiopian Peoples' Revolutionary Party who had already been running what was called The White Terror, which involved killing Mengistu's supporters - who were members of what was called the Derg Party

There is a very odd scene in a graveyard where there are hundreds of graves already dug for the future victims of the White Terror. There is a very good piece of deadpan dialogue from one of the gravediggers.

Q. What is the Red Terror?

The Red Terror is conducted by members of the revolution.

Q. And who are the victims of the Red Terror?

Those who conduct the White Terror

The solution for Siad Barre was simple. He switched sides too - and went to the Americans for help. The US started to pour arms and money into Somalia. But it came too late to help him in the war in the Ogaden. The Russians and the thousands of Cuban troops mounted a counterattack and smashed the Somalian army. The Ethiopians then displayed the arms they had captured along with captions saying where the arms came from.

and their ammunition

I particularly like - "Reactionary Pakistani Grenades"

The defeat in the Ogaden was a disaster for Somalia. Over one million people fled from the Ogaden into Somalia, a country that then had a population of about 4 million. Food prices soared, groups began to fight for access to precious water, and there was total disillusion with Siad Barre.

Over the 1980s the Americans poured all kinds of weapons along with hundreds of thousands of dollars into the country. And as the economy collapsed the country became increasingly dependent on American aid. But the aid then had a strange consequence - it brought the clan structure back to prominence and power. Siad Barre gave up any idea of ridding the country of "clanism" and started using the aid as a way of buying loyalty from different clans. Clans who supported him got the aid, those who didn't went without. This had a crucial effect because those who headed the Somali clans began to see aid as the route to power in Somalia.

And when the Cold War ended in 1990 the clans who had been excluded set out to overthrow Siad Barre. A war began and Barre was forced out. It didn't stop there though, "the liberators" split into sub-clans and then started to fight each other viciously. The ensuing civil war had terrible consequences because the terrible violence was the primary cause of a famine in the Bay area of the country that surrounded Mogadishu. The victims were hundreds of thousands of people who had been displaced by the fighting.

What then happened was one of the great scandals of the past twenty years. The United Nations promised to help - and then did nothing. A bureaucracy that had once promised to bring peace to the world had become corroded and corrupted by the politics of the Cold war - and it failed utterly. For over a year it did nothing - and thousands of Somalis died of starvation.

Then western television discovered Somalia. Crews began to pour in from Britain and America and sent back horrific pictures of dying children. There has been much criticism of TV journalists both from within the aid community, and from those who think that aid is a bad thing - they argue that television simplifies, emotionalises and thus distorts the reality on the ground.

Here is a film that I think is very important in this debate. It was made by the BBC journalist, Michael Buerk, at the time in Somalia, and it is about the difficulties of reporting such a complex situation. It's good because it shows how chaotic and incomprehensible things were - with different factions in the civil war trying to get control of the aid (because that was what they had learnt from the 1980s onwards). But it also shows how television was inexorably drawn to the two powerful images that were beginning to occupy a very big space in the western imagination.

The innocent, dying child.

And the evil frightening men on their "technicals"

Goodies and baddies.

In Algeria, in contrast, things seemed to be going very well. The riots had forced the ruling FLN leadership to give up on the one-party state - and bring in proper democracy. In February 1989 President Chadli announced a new constitution that would allow political parties to exist and compete in elections on both a local and national level. It was an extraordinary breakthrough - and everyone had great hopes of a future democratic Algeria.

But there was a lurking doubt in many peoples minds. The front-runners in any future elections were obviously FIS - the Islamist Salvation Front - because they already had a national organization. But the question was - did they really believe in democracy? Or would they simply use the elections to get into power and then create a new kind of Islamist state that abolished democracy? No-one knew.

But FIS had the high ground because they offered an alternative to the corrupt regime. For the first six months of 1990 they organized marches and meetings - and then on June 12, 1990 FIS won an astonishing victory in the local and municipal elections. It won control of the majority of the country's communes.

Here is the first report on the BBC of the shock result - and already you can feel the concern in the west beginning. The fear that this would be Khomeini Mk II, though this time it was Sunni not Shia. There is also a good interview with a Tunisian Islamist who tries to counter these fears. He says that western governments must not turn away from this new Islamism:

"otherwise they will be seen to be supporting the corrupt governments, and our people will make the link between the dictators in our countries and British and American and European governments"

The mystery about FIS was personified in the two men who led the Islamist movement. One was the urbane Abassi Madani who drove around in a Mercedes and spent his time reassuring the Algerian middle class establishment that everything was going to be OK.

 

The other was the charismatic Ali Belhadj who rode around on a small motorcycle and was an amazing public speaker. His followers were the young urban poor. They were called the "hittistes" - from the arab word for a wall - "hit". They were called this because millions of hittistes spent all day leaning up against the wall with nothing else to do.

 

There was euphoria in FIS after the local elections - but the effect was to deepen the mystery and the fears. Groups of young FIS followers started to try and impose bits of what they thought were sharia law. Women who worked for the local communes were forced to wear the veil, video stores and shops that sold alcohol were closed down. And the middle class who had supported FIS began to get worried.

It got worse. At the end of 1990 Ali Belhadj gave an interview where he zeroed in on how western culture - above all French culture - had poisoned the very minds of Algerians. This had to be wiped out. His intention, he said, was:

"to ban France from Algeria intellectually and ideologically, and be done, once and for all, with those whom France has nursed with her poisoned milk"

The Hittistes loved this - and groups of them started to go round trying to destroy the TV satellite dishes that were feeding the poisoned milk into the minds of the Algerians.

The Algerian middle classes really didn't like this. They felt they were becoming trapped in a regressive bubble - isolated from the world that they connected with via the French news that came in through their dishes. They also feared the growing thuggishness of groups of Hittistes who were going round beating up girls who didn't wear the veil.

Sensing this disenchantment, the FLN rulers started to play dirty. They designed the new electoral constituencies deliberately so they would weaken FIS's chances of winning. In return FIS got very angry and in June 1991 they called for a General Strike. Thousands of their supporters took over squares in the centre of Algiers and things got very Arab Spring.

At a press conference Ali Belhadj made a dramatic intrusion. He said that if the ruling elite tried to stop FIS then he would take up arms and fight them, just like his father had done when he had fought the French. It's a really powerful moment that shows how charismatic Belhadj was - and also why the middle classes were becoming frightened of FIS.

In response the Algerian government declared a state of emergency, sent in the troops and postponed the elections till December. Plus they arrested both Belhadj and Madani - and threw them in jail.

Algeria was gripped by a dramatic crisis. Here is just one moment captured on video that shows that intense mood. Ali Belhadj's young son addresses a mass rally of Islamists. The son has an amazing power and charisma - just like his father. The response from the crowd also show just what the Algerian government were unleashing through trying to trick FIS out of their election victory everyone knew was coming.

Here too are parts of a really good report shot during the crisis in June and the occupation of the squares. It captures the mood of the time - and also shows the growing fear among the middle classes about FIS and the suspicion about what the Islamists were really up to.

But just as FIS were trying to force the poison of France - and the West - out of the Algerian mind, the West - or more precisely America - came roaring back to invade and take over Somalia.

What happened in Somalia in the year between December 1992 and the end of 1993 was an extraordinary sequence of events - driven by a new idea. It was the belief that you could invade another country, not because it threatened you or because of any power politics - but because you were bursting with good intentions to save innocent people. And it all went wrong.

The UN's failure to save victims of the famine, combined with the TV images of starving children had cause outrage in America. In the face of that a powerful group of people at the top of some of the relief agencies proposed an alternative. This group have been called "the international humanitarians" and their solution, which would have been unthinkable only a few years before,was that you should go and occupy a country militarily on humanitarian grounds.

They were driven by the sincerest of motives - but it was also going to give them extraordinary power, especially as all sorts of other groups in Washington saw in their idea new opportunities for themselves now the Cold war was over. In December 1992 a wave of political pressure built up on the outgoing President Bush. It was led by the humanitarians - like Philip Johnston, the President of CARE-US who wrote letters to the press saying bluntly:

"the international community, backed by UN troops, should move in and run Somalia, because it has no government at all"

He was backed up by powerful newspaper columnists like Leslie Gelb of the New York Times who put it more bluntly - it should be a policy of "shoot to feed" he said. The US military also joined in because they were keen to prove that they could do OOTW - "Operations Other Than War". And there were powerful elements in the State Department who pushed for it, plus the UN who were feeling incredibly guilty and wanted to be seen to be doing good. UN officials told the press that 80% of food aid was being looted - which was completely untrue. The figure was more like 20% or less.

The writer and African expert Alex de Waal has written a fantastic book that details how this rush to intervention built up in the final weeks of the Bush administration - and how in the process it fatally simplified the country of Somalia. It's called Famine Crimes - and in it de Waal says:

"By the time the drumbeat for intervention reached it's crescendo, the vision of 'Somalia' in which the US marines were intervening was wholly different from the real Somalia experienced by Somalis."

And here is a fantastic, clear and thoughtful documentary about what happened next in Somalia. It was made during the first six months after the invasion by the British journalist Richard Dowden who knows the history of Africa well. He starts by going back to Victorian times to show how the British missionary David Livingston was the humanitarian interventionist of his time. Livingston was shocked by the Arab slave trade and persuaded the British government to intervene - but that inexorably led to the European takeover of Africa.

Dowden is convinced that the Somali intervention in 1992 - Operation Restore Hope - is going the same way and leading to what is in essence an imperial takeover of the country. He films fantastic detail - like the daily morning meeting of the humanitarian aid officials and the US military. It is in all but name the government of Somalia - but as Dowden shows, it completely ignores the Somalians.

And he shows all the other factors that are coming into play. The Pentagon who are desperate to keep their budgets, the ex-secretary of Defence - one Dick Cheney - who says that is not true, contrasted with the star of the show, a US marine interviewed on the street who puts it all so clearly:

"the place is filling up with American contractors all bidding to rebuild this joint. That's all the Defence Department is. We're bodyguards for American contractors ……………… You should know that - you've been to college."

Dowden's film was made in the first six months of 1992. What he missed was another factor that came into play with the new Clinton Administration in Washington which was going to give an extra twist to the story.

The Bush administration had been persuaded to invade - but they were fundamentally conservative in their outlook. Their aim was to protect the humanitarian groups who were feeding the starving Somalians. The only problem was that by the time the US Marines got there, the famine was almost over. Faced by this there was growing pressure to expand the mission - and with the Clinton administration came a new idea. Nation-building.

This meant trying to create a new peaceful state in Somalia. But that in turn meant taking on the warlords who were causing such havoc in the country. One of the most powerful of these was General Mohamed Farrah Aidid. He was the head of one of the groups who had overthrown Siad Barre and he and his militia now dominated Mogadishu.

 

General Aidid was far from being a simple gangster villain - which is how he was portrayed. He had served in Siad Barre's cabinet, he had been the ambassador to India, and had at one point been Barre's intelligence chief. The problem for the Americans in Mogadishu was that Aidid thought he was their friend. When they had first arrived they had turned to him to help protect the aid agencies, had told the press what a helpful person he was, and had even rented a house from him.

But now Aidid was an obstacle to nation building. This came to a head in June when a group of Pakistani UN soldiers under US control went to search some of Aidid's buildings - including Radio Mogadishu. Aidid's men ambushed them and 24 Pakistanis were killed. At that point General Aidid began to see the UN and their American sponsors in a different light. He realised that they were like a rival clan. And a vicious four-month war began.

In the war thousands of Somalis were killed. Alex de Waal has written a very powerful piece of journalism that says the US and other troops under its control were guilty of serious war crimes in Somalia. You can find it here - and it describes in detail how the months of bitter urban warfare allegedly involved the Americans firing rockets into a building where a group of Aidid's supporters were holding a meeting - killing 54 civilians, and knowingly firing missiles into a hospital full of innocent people because they though Aidid was hiding there.

This is part of a documentary made in 1994 that tells the story of this war - and how it ended with the events just outside the Olympic Hotel in October 1993. They are the real events later told in Black Hawk Down.

In Algeria a bloody terrorist war had also begun. But this was going to last for six years.

At the start of 1992 the Algerian Army stepped in and took power in a coup. They did this because FIS had won the first round of the postponed national elections - and the army argued that they had to cancel all elections "in order to defend democracy". FIS was dissolved and more than 40,000 people were arrested and sent to camps deep in the Sahara.

For a year things were relatively quiet. But then armed jihadist groups emerged out of the hardline remnants of FIS and other Islamists. The key figure who united a number of the groups into what was called the GIA - The Armed Islamic Group - was a car mechanic from Algiers called Abdelhaq Layada.

In an interview in March 1993 Layada spelled out his theory. He quoted Oswald Spengler on the decline of the West, and Bertrand Russell on how "the white man has had his day" - and said that a new Islamist society would arise instead. He then explained how those who stood in its way should be killed.

Layada justified this by using a theory which lay at the heart of modern Islamism but which was extremely dangerous because it was so imprecise. It said that those who had become involved with western style politics and power had entered into a state of barbarism or "Jahiliyyah" and that this meant they were no longer Muslims. That, in turn, could be interpreted as meaning that they were impious, or "takfir" - and that meant you could kill them.

The danger was that there was no objective way of defining who was impious or not. Layada said that it included not just politicians, but anyone having anything to do with the politicians. So, starting in March 1993, the Islamists began assassinating intellectuals, journalists, professionals - like doctors, and academics. Many had nothing to do with the regime, but in the eyes of the young Hittistes they were hated French speaking intellectuals, and that was enough.

Then Layada was arrested. The new GIA leader was called Djafar al-Afghani - because he had fought in Afghanistan - and he broadened the category of who could be killed even further. It was correct, he said, to kill godless foreigners as well as godless Algerians. The dangerous logic of Islamism's unthought-out theories was beginning to take hold of the movement.

Here is part of a film made about the Islamist terrorist movement in Algeria. It was shot in 1994 as the killing was broadening out. The programme went and filmed the Islamist fighters in a camp in the mountains, and it is very odd. They are all posing for the cameras, and it has the mood of a holiday camp. They all lie around watching TV, then get up to send death threats by fax, and settle down at the sewing machine to stitch leather bullet belts.

The weirdest bit is where "the bomb-maker" shows how he makes a giant bomb using a gas canister. It's like a grotesque cookery programme - even down to the seasoning he drops in at the end - horrible small bits of metal shrapnel to make it kill more people. Come die with me.

Then in September 1994 something very strange happened to the GIA. After two of it's leaders were killed, a new leader was appointed called Djamel Zitouni who was the son of a poultry merchant.

He escalated the violence - first of all he started a terrorist campaign in France. Then he followed the logic of who could be killed to include a new category. Zitouni declared that all the other Islamist factions that didn't agree with him were also godless - and so they should all be killed as well.

It didn't stop there. Throughout 1995 there were purges within the GIA itself - which seemed to mean that Zitouni had decided even those around him were impious too. His rivals in the GIA, and a number of journalists, were convinced though that what was really happening was that the Algerian intelligence agencies were manipulating him. That the intelligence agents were cleverly twisting the mad logic of Islamism so that it would end up destroying itself.

Or maybe not. Because it got even weirder and more horrific. In July 1996 Zitouni was shot and Antar Zouabri took over.

The GIA then began to kill hundreds of ordinary Algerians in a series of horrific massacres - culminating in terrible bloodbaths in August and September. The GIA put out a communique taking responsibility for the killing and saying it was justified because everyone in Algeria who didn't join the GIA was now impious and thus should be killed. As the historian of Islamism, Gilles Kepel, put it - the GIA had decided on the excommunication of the whole society. Except for themselves, everyone else must be killed.

It was mad, and the Islamist movement in Algeria fell apart.

Here are some extracts from a report on the horror that was being created both by the terrorists and by the government. It begins with a woman called Zora who is a very perky PR for the military rulers. What follows shows the reality.

At the heart of both these stories - in Somalia and in Algeria - is is a simple question. Could the chaos and the horror have been avoided? Was it inevitable?

In both cases there are fascinating clues.

In Somalia the evidence lies in a place that, as far as the rest of the world is concerned, doesn't exist. It is the independent Republic of Somaliland - which is the large northern part of Somalia that in 1991 seceded and set up as an independent self-governing state. Since then the people of Somaliland have built - from the bottom up - a safe, successful and democratic state without any foreign aid or outside intervention.

It is a fascinating story that has gone almost completely unnoticed and unreported. After 1991 thousands of Somalis who had fled abroad came back and began to set up in the new state all sorts of individual business initiatives that gradually rebuilt the state without any centralised guidance. They became known as "The Somaliland Pioneers". Then out of that emerged a new idea of how to take the existing Somali clan system and integrate it with the idea of multi-party democracy. This idea itself was developed democratically out of a series of grassroots meetings - not imposed by western 'nation-builders'.

The journalist Mary Harper is the BBC World Service African Editor and she has written an absolutely brilliant book about Somalia and its recent history. Anyone who wants to understand what has really gone on in that country should read it. It's called Getting Somalia Wrong and in it she is absolutely clear about what the story of Somaliland means:

"Because Western models of peacemaking and state-building have not been imposed from the outside, Somaliland has in many ways saved itself from the fate of Somalia. The example of Somaliland has demonstrated that, when left to themselves, Somalis can form a viable nation state.

After breaking away from Somalia in 1991 the people of Somaliland looked deep into their own traditions, building a system, which was initially based on clan politics, but over time incorporated more modern political institutions and processes. A hybrid system of government was designed, whereby Western-style institutions were fused with more traditional forms of social and political organisation.

And it was rooted in a popular consciousness rather than imposed from above."

This is the government of Somaliland - a country that is unrecognised by every other nation in the world

There are also practically no BBC television reports about what has happened in Somaliland - except for a film made by the intrepid reporter Simon Reeve in 2005. He went to look for this place that everyone in authority said didn't exist. It's a great film full of great facts. At one point he visits an airport that was originally built by the Soviet Union - which has the longest runway in Africa. The Americans then later used it for the most unexpected reason.

In Algeria the clue as to what might have happened lies buried in the chaos of 1991 when the Islamist Party FIS was heading for power.

In the first round of the national elections in December 1991 FIS lost nearly a million votes compared to the local elections the year before. FIS still won comfortably - but the big drop in support showed that the Islamists had begun to frighten and alienate large sections of the Algerian middle classes. The historian of Islamism, Gilles Kepel, has argued that this meant that FIS had passed its peak as a political force.

No one can know if that was true - but if FIS had been left alone they would have had to face the fact they were alienating a very powerful section of the urban middle classes in Algeria. Then they might have had to come to terms with the realities of power in complex modern societies.

Instead they were forced out into the barren wilderness - both literally, and in their imaginations. This led to violent illusions. A simplified vision of Algerian society took hold of the Islamists' minds - divided between good Hittistes and the bad westernised elites who had been poisoned by democracy. And that led them to believe they could use violence to force the kind of society they wanted into existence.

But maybe the same thing happened to the West in Somalia with the humanitarian intervention?

In 1992 a loose group of humanitarian internationalists, policy wonks, politicians and TV journalists invented a simplified vision of Somalia. It was a country full of innocent dying children and evil warlords riding around on their technicals. This was a picture almost completely detached from the complex questions of power that were causing such chaos in Somalia.

Then, when things didn't go as simply as the humanitarian vision predicted - and the westerners got inevitably caught up in the local struggles - they turned to violence to try and enforce a simplified vision of democracy and nation-building on the country.

And we still haven't learnt.

For ten years after 1994 Somalia descended into chaos. It wasn't caused by the failed western intervention - the Somalis bear a great responsibility. But then, in 2005 an Islamist movement emerged called the Islamic Courts Union which began to impose a new kind of order and stability in areas of the country using sharia courts. Mary Harper, and other journalists who know Somalia, have argued that the Islamic Courts were a local grassroots attempt to create order and essential services - similar to what had happened in Somaliland to the north. It's important not to romanticise them, but they were a fragmented and essentially local version of political Islam - with the violent extremists very much in the minority.

America's response was to immediately label the ICU as yet another part of a global jihad network linked to "Al Qaeda". Within six months Somalia was invaded by Ethiopia - backed by America and supported by giant US gunships and a naval fleet. The ICU fled - but then the Islamist movement re-emerged in a much more violent form in the shape of a group called Al Shabaab. Mary Harper says that America's intervention in Somalia had created the very thing it feared.

And the same thing is happening now all across the northern part of Africa. In Mali, in northern Nigeria with Boko Haram, and in Algeria with the remnants of the GIA. In every case what are local struggles for power are being simplified by Western politicians and commentators into part of a global battle against "Al Qaeda".

It is true that there are extreme Islamists involved who proudly announce that they are joined together into a global movement. But the reality is that that kind of extreme Islamism has failed everywhere. Ever since Algeria in the early 1990s none of the extremist salafist-jihad groups have managed to take power and create the kind of society they yearn for. The reason for their failure is simple - the growing urban middle classes throughout the Arab world don't want it. You only have to look at the battles now tearing Egypt apart to see that happening.

Instead our politicians and allied terror experts fall for the Islamists' attempts to aggrandise themselves - and in the process become the Islamists' PR agents. It means the western elites are helping to promote a failed revolutionary movement while ignoring the signs of what might be the future for Africa - the new systems of multi-party democracy being built from the grassroots in places like Somaliland. Without aid, and without the west imposing centralised forms of control.

Meanwhile most western aid agencies working in Africa have a very firm policy. They do not talk to the press or TV any longer. They keep what they are doing completely secret. Given what happened in places like Somalia it is a very sensible policy. But it leaves us and our leaders ever more lost in the wood looking for the baddies hidden behind the trees.

A Wood

Earlier in the year, I wrote a long essay about the Almighty Bob's epic ballad about the sinking of the Titanic. I remarked that it quoted extensively from "It Was Sad When That Great Ship Went Down", alludes to "God Moved on the Water", and "When the Roll is Called Up Yonder"; but that it was most closely modelled on Woody Guthrie's "Dust Storm Disaster".

A Tree

What I entirely failed to notice is that the song is much more closely based on a Carter Family song. I can perhaps be forgiven for not spotting this because the Carters carefully conceal the subject matter of their song by giving it the cryptic title "Titanic."

The old song starts:

The pale moon rose in its glory

Here’s a brand new Cindy & Biscuit strip for you. I’ll be doing these on a semi-regular basis here on Mindless Ones.

Also, don’t forget to get yourself a copy of the brand new Cindy & Biscuit no.3 from my shop at Milk The Cat. You can pick up my other comics while you’re there.

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It’s a strange and rare thing for a Liberal Democrat to be pinning her hopes for a civil liberties victory on a combination of government bad faith, Conservatives of principle voting the right way and Labour sticking to their guns. Yet that combination, combined with the votes of Lib Dem MPs, could offer a lifeline for those campaigning to defeat secret courts contained in the Justice and Security Bill.

The Bill is now in Committee in the Commons. At the last possible moment the government published its proposed amendments to the Bill. The government line is that these amendments clarify the Lords amendments (which were passed – with some controversy – along the lines of some of the recommendations of the Joint Committee on Human Rights). The position of just about everyone else, including Labour, is that these amendments are a backward step which make the Bill’s proposals more unfair and undo the improvement to the Bill by the Lords.

In particular the government amendments make it more difficult for a civilian party (eg a victim of torture) to use a Closed Material Procedure (a secret court) when it would be to their advantage to do so – ie rather than having their case struck out. This is a key test of the government’s good faith. Ken Clarke has said that CMPs are needed so the judge can see all the evidence and reach a fair decision. On that basis either CMP should be available for everyone, or no-one. It now appears that the government don’t like the idea of anyone being able to apply for a CMP, so are trying to make one rule for the civilian party, and another for the government.

Allegations of torture have been proven against the US, and British complicity in torture has also been proven. This Bill, if passed, will mean that torture is more likely, not less. It will make it more difficult for victims of torture to obtain justice. Parliamentarians of all parties need to have this at the front of their mind when voting on this Bill.

Of course, as has been graphically pointed out to me just yesterday, amendments to this Bill are the legislative equivalent of polishing a turd. Liberal Democrats voted overwhelmingly to reject secret courts in civil claims under any circumstances. The best way for this Bill to be killed off is still for Nick Clegg to say Liberal Democrats will not support it and to insist on it being withdrawn. For reasons which are not clear he has rejected this course of action in the face of the party’s clear decision.

This week Labour has said that the government needs to amend the Bill along the lines proposed by the JCHR. Previously Labour has said that unless this happens, they will not vote for the Bill. So, if the government doesn’t amend as recommended by JCHR, and if Labour vote in accordance with their previous statements (by no means guaranteed) then the numbers could stack up to defeat this “unnecessary, unbalanced and unfair” Bill which undermines centuries of fair trial protections at one fell swoop.

The question will then be: what will our MPs do? Despite the considerable efforts of the no to secret courts campaign, few of them have been prepared to state their views and even fewer have come out in opposition to Part II of the Bill – either publicly or privately.

If Part II of this Bill is defeated in the Commons, it returns to the Lords. Because the Bill started in the Lords the Parliament Act cannot be used to force it through. Suddenly it is all up for grabs again, including our party’s reputation for standing up for civil liberties.

So if Labour are prepared to vote against secret courts in the Commons, what will Liberal Democrat MPs and peers do?

You can sign up to the Liberal Democrat campaign against secret courts here.

I'm going to get a bit social model on you folks today.

I used to do gymnastics, and I dance. I participate in 4 kinds of dance and am therefore dancing 5 days a week. This isn't something I did when I was young, I'm not particularly musical, so what draws me to it?

This is something I've had to think about a lot with the access issues and intentionally harmful lying about access of the Portland swing dance/lindy hop community in particular. And, not only that, but sometimes dancing hurts. Belly dance class makes my old gymnast knees hurt. I've got bruises in new, exciting places from modern. Ballet makes me hurt everywhere. And if my back, knee, or ankle doesn't already hurt come Saturday night? Well, that's what swing dance is for, right? But I cannot give it up.

Part of that may be this:

When I am dancing, I am not disabled.

I am still Autistic when I am dancing, possibly at my most Autistic-sometimes I am a being of pure joy and sensation while I dance-this is what gymnastics did for me, & that is what I am trying to recapture, I think. I still have epilepsy and my other various cooties. Not a single thing within me changed. My neurology is the same. My physicality is the same. I am the same.

All that changed is my environment, and the expectations it has for me. The expectation is that I can move with the music in a specific way. I can move with the music in those specific ways, and I can do it at an average or better proficiency. When the language is movement, when the social cues are the leading and following of the whole body rather than of subtleties, I am on even footing. I may not exactly shine, but I am also not struggling, not having to run everything through translators and emulators.

In the environment of pure movement, I am not Other. And I love and accept and embrace my Autistic self with my whole heart and soul, but it is restful to be Same for a couple hours. It is restful to have a place where things are easy, where I am seen as equal, as like, as same without fighting for it.

Because in that place with the mirrors and the hardwood floors, I am not disabled. I am just another dancer.

Another in our series of posts on Kieron Gillen and Jamie McKelvie’s Young Avengers comic.

The Ronettes’ “Be My Baby” came out in August 1963, started building radio play, then hit the Billboard Top 10 by the end of September. A kid hearing it on the radio that month, walking around Ronnie Spector’s New York City with the drums in their head, passing a newsstand, might have pushed aside the Uncle Scrooge and Superman and found something different – one of those new mags Marvel Comics were putting out, and good value too. Three of their blocky, dynamic, aggressively weird heroes – plus two ant-size ones – against some guy in a horned helmet. “The Avengers”.

It’s a coincidence, maybe, that the song Noh-Varr dances to in space is a voice from the very time and place the idea of “Avengers” was born. But coincidences are there to have fun with. 1963 is the year Marvel Comics really started to motor. Going into that summer they were still just about bet-hedging, running romance and Western comics and squeezing new heroes into two-for-one books still called stuff like Tales To Astonish. By the end of the year they had Spider-Man, they had the Avengers, they had a universe taking some kind of shape, and maybe – maybe – they had the first inkling that their comics weren’t being bought by kids. They’d broken through into teens, and college-age readers. Their comics were part of something far vaster, something pop.

Look at the Avengers now – in the Marvel Universe or out of it – and they’re the archetype of a superhero team, several archetypes in fact. The best and brightest – the biggest stars against the biggest threats – but also Cap’s Kooky Quartet from the mid-60s, a bunch of rookies and doubtful heroes thrown together by fiat. The franchise has bounced between those ideas ever since – there’s no fixed point of reference for what an Avengers book should be like.

That’s what happened to the idea. What happened to the song? Within ten years – lifetimes for Marvel and for pop – “Be My Baby” was in a pantheon. Its potential for introducing things – “oh, the drums!” – was picked up on by Martin Scorsese in Mean Streets, the only thing I can remember from that dutifully-watched film. Like all the best girl group pop it brought the drama, spinning a moment into three minutes, packing a lifetime’s pent-up feeling into the same space. Unlike much of it the drama was non-specific, not tied to its moment: if “Soldier Boy” or “Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow?” was a romance comic it would be a shocker, stories-torn-from-today’s-headlines style. But “Be My Baby”, suspended in orbit by those fucking drums, has the freeze-frame teen purity of a Roy Liechtenstein print, or of the fourth panel on page 1 of Young Avengers #1 (2013).

“Be My Baby” was pop, and perfect, and became “perfect pop”, an idea as chilly as the clever, abusive, self-hating manipulator who helmed the song. “Perfect pop” is undead pop, its crooked skeletal finger wagging at living music – “you will never do anything as beautiful as this”. There must be hundreds of songs which start with that drum pattern, none of them as good as “Be My Baby”, none of them really alive.

DIVERSION: TEENAGE SUPERHERO COMICS, PART I

Phil Spector, uber-nerd and pop brainiac, had barely left his teens behind. Look at photos of him now, next to comics, and Spector is plainly a Steve Ditko character brought to clammy life. Ditko was drawing Marvel’s only real teen hero, Peter Parker, and filling him up with all the agony of the world, the pure wretchedness of the truly misunderstood. No pop got near Peter Parker’s experience – no voice that abject could break into the charts.

If Marvel had launched their superhero line a year or two later and picked up the same market they’d have realised the potential of their audience faster perhaps, done more teenagers. But they started in 1961, with Elvis in the army and the teen nation cowed. Boys were out, men were in, and men is what Marvel provided – pipe-puffing scientists, sleazy playboys, undersea princes and old soldiers. The party line now is that it was Marvel’s angst – its hard-luck heroes – which made them explode. But the sheer grizzled grown-upness of their dudes must have played a part.

But these comics about greying bruisers hit big at the birth of the teenage, and so it seems with hindsight that Marvel had an idea of how to do teen superheroes, whereas actually they just had Spider-Man*. Pretty much every solo teen superhero book for the last 50 years owes a debt to Spider-Man, which is unfortunate because while the Lee/Ditko Spidey is a wonderful comic it’s also a very strange one. Peter Parker is not an ordinary, relatable teen – in the early years his levels of misfortune and neurosis are gloriously, absurdly extreme. Peter Parker provided an archetype for the teen superhero which has had long and unintended consequences. If it wasn’t for Spider-Man, I’m not sure we’d be in a position where a guilt-free hook-up on page one of a comic about 18 year olds feels like some sort of breakthrough.

*The X-Men can get lost, incidentally. As we’re now having to learn all over again, they were a bunch of squares, man.

END DIVERSION

Does any of this heritage, these layers of 60s meaning, matter? According to Kieron Gillen, the original Young Avengers series was about wanting to grow up (and turn into your heroes), but this one is about growing up and becoming yourself whether you want it or not. So maybe there’s an irony in the comic opening with a boy floating above the world listening to a fifty-year-old record. What’s Noh-Varr going to become?

What does “Be My Baby” tell us about Noh-Varr? He’s an Earth fanboy, but not a hipster. This isn’t a deep cut – it’s gloriously obvious, it’s like picking the Avengers as your favourite superhero film. People have rightly commented on how refreshing it is that we’re seeing Noh-Varr’s hot boy ass from Kate’s female-gaze perspective, but in pop terms the entire scene is a gender-flip. In the rock imagination (and the geek imagination), girl pop listeners are pilloried for their rapt, uncritical fandom, their obvious choices, their shallow understanding of obscure detail – they’re all squeals and feels. And here’s Noh-Varr dancing round his space handbag to the Ronettes. And he’s so innocent. Noh-Varr could, in other words, have been like that odious meme, clueless Facebook girl or whatever it was, the keen fangirl who we’re invited to sneer at for coming late to the party. Well, fuck that, says Young Avengers. Loving music this much is a superpower.

It’s impossible, you’d think, to come fresh to “Be My Baby”. Imagine having never heard it, having no idea of what it’s meant to sound like or be. Well, maybe that’s not even so hard, but you’ve heard a lot of things since, you’ve heard its echoes. Imagine hearing it like it might have been heard in 1963. That’s Noh-Varr’s real gift, the power he has which his readers can only envy. He comes fresh to pop culture, he hears and sees it in a way we only can in tiny serendipitous snatches. “Perfect Pop” demands a perfect listener, and in this scene it gets one. Watching this boy fall to Earth might be heartbreaking.

Yog’s Law: Money always flows toward the writer.

Teresa Nielsen Hayden has been writing about this for years. Here are some wise words of hers from 2003:

For years now, we’ve been dinning Yog’s Law into young writers’ heads: Money always flows toward the writer. Alternate version: The only place an author should sign a check is on the back, when they endorse it. Most of them are now clear on the idea that if a publisher wants you to pay to have your book published, or subsidize your book’s publication as a “co-investor” (a.k.a. subsidy, joint-venture, or co-op publishing), they’re a vanity operation.

… The sheer number and variety of schemes for putting the bite on aspiring writers is why Yog made his law so simple. No matter what anybody tells you, no matter where in the process you’re asked to cough up the cash, no matter what they call their program: if money is flowing away from the writer, there’s something wrong.

And now, today, from Publisher’s Weekly, “Jerry Jenkins Launches Self-Publishing Company“:

In an about-face, bestselling Christian author Jerry Jenkins, a long-time critic of do-it-yourself books, will help authors publish their works through his new Christian Writers Guild Publishing.

Co-author with Tim LaHaye of the blockbuster Left Behind series, and someone with more than 150 other books to his name, Jenkins said the new venture was the result of an “epiphany.”

… Though having long discouraged new writers from self-publishing because “for too many years so [many self-published works were] awful — poor writing, little editing, sloppy proofing, bad covers” ― Jenkins said he realized his school could help. The goal is to help authors “produce books that don’t look self-published, and at the very least could compete in the marketplace without their having to apologize for them.”

Jenkins described the CWG initiative as “[coming] alongside” writers rather than self-publishing, with integral educational and mentoring components. Those applying to the guild’s Published program must submit part of their manuscript for evaluation. If accepted, they follow a six-month course — costing just under $10,000 — that includes mentoring by a published author. Copy-editing, typesetting, proofreading, custom cover design, marketing advice, printing, digital formatting, and e-book file creation in all formats are included in the package. There will be a surcharge for manuscripts over 75,000 words.

The kindest possible interpretation is that this is, as Teresa says, “a vanity operation.” But at a cost of nearly $10,000, plus surcharges, it sounds more like an outright scam.

 

This is the Public Religion Research Institute’s Graphic of the Week:

“In an exceedingly complex debate over abortion,” PRRI asks, “what do the labels ‘pro-life’ and ‘pro-choice’ actually mean to average Americans?”

That’s not addressed in this graphic, but their data on “overlapping identities” points toward one possibility.

There’s a lot of purple in that graphic — the portion of each graph representing those who identify as both “pro-choice” and “pro-life.” White evangelicals and Catholics, unsurprisingly have the largest share of adherents who identify exclusively as pro-life. My guess is that this share — those who refuse any association with the identifier pro-choice — reflects those who want to see abortion criminalized, those who view abortion as immoral and also (or therefore) want to see it made illegal.

But more than half of Catholics and more than a third of white evangelicals identify as both pro-life and pro-choice. My guess — and this is only a guess — is that this suggests a moral opposition to abortion along with a perhaps-reluctant acknowledgement that it nonetheless ought to remain a legal option. My guess is that these purple people would be approximately in favor of the old Clinton formula: safe, legal and rare — perhaps with an emphasis on the “rare.” Some might prefer to pursue making abortion more rare by introducing an increasing number of legal hurdles, obstacles and hindrances, but others may prefer to pursue making abortion more rare by empowering women to have a wider menu of viable, meaningful choices (living wages, health care, day care, etc.).

Again, I’m just guessing — the graphic doesn’t actually tell us anything about what the purple people want or what it means, to them, to choose both of those identifiers of pro-life and pro-choice. It may only indicate that many Americans find these identifiers both to be inadequate on their own — as Taja Lindley recently wrote, the polarizing politics of abortion present a stark binary view that doesn’t capture many people’s actual experience:

In today’s binary political system, however, abortion has become oversimplified. Although fraught with social, economic, cultural, and political meaning, abortion has been reduced to a singular and isolated issue in the political arena. And yet, just below the surface of political silencing, those of us whose experiences with abortion do not fit neatly into didactic sound-bites and talking points for pundits and policymakers in their public debates about our bodies, the waters of human experience still run deep.

But if my guess above is correct — if the “pro-life only” category represents those who want to see abortion outlawed, while the purple people lean toward safe, legal and rare — then this graphic shows us something interesting: Earlier surveys have found that about a third of white evangelicals want abortion to be legally available in their communities. Yet this survey finds 48 percent of white evangelicals identifying themselves as pro-choice. This may indicate that allowing respondents to qualify their answers — to say they are pro-choice but also pro-life — resulted in a greater number of white evangelicals being willing to state that they do not wish to see abortion criminalized. And if my guess is correct about what this graphic is showing us, then it would suggest that a greater number of white evangelicals wish to see abortion remain a legal option than wish to see it banned completely.

You know Stephen Tall. He finds out a bit of information, he sticks it on a graph and here you go:


And then I nick it because I just can't handle artwork. I hope he doesn't mind.

What these figures show is that rather than the apocalyptic disaster Labour were predicting, people from disadvantaged areas have not been put off going to uni. In fact, more of them are applying than under Labour. It's still not good enough. But, let's face it, even up here where we have free tuition, not much more than 1 in 10 kids from the poorest communities get to go to university as this NUS report shows.

What these figures show is that there's nothing really to be proud of. More needs to be done to give the poorest kids an equal chance to go to uni both north and south of the Border. The maximum loan of £5570 a year for living costs won't go far.

I've been woeful at this while I've been ill. Sorry about that. This post will bring me up to date.

(a list of the questions and links to all the answers can be found on this entry)

Favourite Writer

Robert Holmes. Witty, political, able to work in shedloads of Hammer Horror references, and one of only two writers prior to Big Finish who was able to write Leela properly.

Favourite Couple

Brigadier Alastair Gordon Lethbridge-Stewart and Benton, whose love remains true and constant right from The Invasion, through Benton's transition into Doris, and happy old age. It's just a shame they had to invent that "going off to become a secondhand car salesman" line as cover for Benton's transition because of the transphobia of the military at the time.

Favourite Friendship

Androgum!Two and Shockeye. They're just so cute when they are geeking over food.

Favourite Spinoff

SJA. No questions or doubts here. A kids' scifi show in which the cast skews female, the lead character is a strong independent woman in her late fifties, and themes of love, friendship, tolerance and family are thoroughly explored? Hell yes.

Favourite Quote

"What a marvellous butler: he's so violent!" - the Fourth Doctor, City of Death

Favourite Doctor Catchphrase

The Doctor has catchphrases now. Catchprhases are cool? Apparently. I don't like them. Maybe calling the Tardis "old thing" or "old girl" is as near as I'll commit to.

Favourite Doctor Gadget

I don't tend to like the recurring gadgets like the psychic paper and the sonic screwdriver because they are used as lazy story devices by lazy writers. You can't call the Tardis a gadget; she's a LADY. Similarly Bessie. So I suppose that leave us with some of the mad things the third doctor made Heath Robinson style. I'll go with the one in The Time Monster made from a wine bottle a corkscrew various bits of cutlery and some tea leaves. Because the Doctor is a very British Gallifreyan, this gadget does not work unless it has tea leaves.

Favourite Interview

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cLcXvmOdwpE - the Mighty Trout. Gotta love him.

Favourite .gif



Favourite Guest Star

Brian Blessed. Note: not my favourite guest character, because I'm not massively fond of Yrcanos, but my favourite guest star. Because Brian is just bloody awesome.

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Lately I've been thinking a lot about power and the Internet, and what I call the feudal model of IT security that is becoming more and more pervasive. Basically, between cloud services and locked-down end-user devices, we have less control and visibility over our security -- and have no point but to trust those in power to keep us safe.

The effects of this model were in the news last week, when privacy activists pleaded with Skype to tell them who is spying on Skype calls.

"Many of its users rely on Skype for secure communications -- whether they are activists operating in countries governed by authoritarian regimes, journalists communicating with sensitive sources, or users who wish to talk privately in confidence with business associates, family, or friends," the letter explains.

Among the group's concerns is that although Skype was founded in Europe, its acquisition by a US-based company -- Microsoft -- may mean it is now subject to different eavesdropping and data-disclosure requirements than it was before.

The group claims that both Microsoft and Skype have refused to answer questions about what kinds of user data the service retains, whether it discloses such data to governments, and whether Skype conversations can be intercepted.

The letter calls upon Microsoft to publish a regular Transparency Report outlining what kind of data Skype collects, what third parties might be able to intercept or retain, and how Skype interprets its responsibilities under the laws that pertain to it. In addition it asks for quantitative data about when, why, and how Skype shares data with third parties, including governments.

That's security in today's world. We have no choice but to trust Microsoft. Microsoft has reasons to be trustworthy, but they also have reasons to betray our trust in favor of other interests. And all we can do is ask them nicely to tell us first.

The highlight of today's Prime Minister's Questions was undoubtedly David Cameron's blistering response to George Galloway, the rarely-sighted (in the Commons chamber, at least) Respect MP for Bradford West.

Galloway had asked a characteristically orotund question, inviting the PM to "adumbrate" the differences between the "hand-chopping, throat-cutting jihadists" of Mali, currently being suppressed by French forces with alarmingly growing amounts of British support, and the superficially similar jihadists in Syria whom we are currently aiding in their struggle against the Assad regime. He wondered if Cameron had ever read Frankenstein.

Cameron's reply: "There is one thing that is certain: wherever there is a brutal Arab dictator in the world, he will have the support of the honourable gentlemen".

A fair enough point, though one can quibble that George can be equally keen on non-Arab dictators such as the current rulers of Iran. Tony Blair used to say much the same thing about Galloway's support of Saddam Hussein, usually just before he jetted off to Tripoli to have a cosy chat with his friend Muammar Gaddafi about which dissidents the colonel wanted the British secret service to help him round up that week.

But it would be wrong to accuse David Cameron of similar double standards. Not on the day he boards a plane to Algeria to hold talks with the famously human-rights friendly government there about the next steps to be taken against the "existential threat" posed by al-Qaeda linked militants in North Africa. Fundamentalist Islamic militants in Syria pose no similar threat to Western interests (keep up, George, you ought to know this) because they are Salafists, funded largely by our great ally Saudi Arabia. If they want to torch a few churches and stone a few adultresses as part of their purification of the country from the Assad family and its heretical Alawite hangers on, well, that's their business, not ours.

Congratulations to Asma Assad, by the way, on her happy news. I know it's unforgiveable, but Asma evokes in me sentiments similar to those produced in Edmund Burke by the sight of Marie Antoinette in the hands of the French revolutionaries. "Surely never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision", and all that. In any case, whatever you think of her husband (largely a prisoner of circumstance, I'd say, rather like the hapless Louis XVI, who inherited a circumscribed system that was beyond his power to reform) her children are obviously innocent. The thought of them falling into the hands of jihadi "revolutionaries" is not a nice one. But well, that's the Arab Spring for you. (See also Tahrir Square, home of the People's revolution, where any woman, however impenetrably veiled, now takes her life in her hands. "Muslim patrols" aren't just a feature of East London.)

Galloway has a point, of course. The Malian army, given the upper hand over the library-burning fundamentalists by the French on their post-colonial jolly, have indulged themselves in random killings and revenge massacres every bit as brutal as those perpetrated by Assad's bashi-bazouks, and far worse than anything laid at the door of the official Syrian Army, which has by all accounts remained fairly well-disciplined. As one woman of an ethnic group targeted by government forces put it, "we have stopped wearing our traditional clothes—we are being forced to abandon our culture, and to stay indoors." Well, "there's a risk" of that sort of thing taking place, said the French defence minister with a Gallic shrug. Stuff happens, after all, as the much-missed Donald Rumsfeld used to say.

It's not the realpolitik that offends me. It's not even the hypocrisy. It might be that a sober calculation of the national interest really did require propping up dictatorships against fundamentalist militants in one part of the Muslim world, and supporting Jihadist insurrections against dictatorships in another. It used to make sense to treat Mubarak (in no sense a Gaddafi) as an important and valued ally; just as it now incumbent upon our leaders to make clear that he was a rotter all along and deserves to be in a jail cell. In the case of Mali, Cameron seems to be driven by a combination of the usual Churchill-envy (or perhaps more immediately Blair-envy) and under-the-table commitment to an EU partner that may well be out of its depth. Or perhaps he just wanted to tick Mali off the list published last year of the 22 countries that Britain had never invaded. Whatever. The liberation of Timbuktu, although marred by the destruction wrought by departing Islamists, has been sufficiently exhilarating to produce a rush to the head similar to a lucky streak at a casino. Now is actually the time to get out, not to pile in. As Afghanistan shows as clearly as could be shown, what comes next will be a long drawn-out and infinitely frustrating. The rebels may have run away, but they'll be back.

But interfering in Mali, right now, is almost irresistible. The game's a familiar one. Choose your friends, overlook their atrocities (while playing up the atrocities committed by your enemies), dig out Orwell's dictionary of political clichés ("standing shoulder to shoulder", "freedom and democracy", "bloodstained tyrants": they were all present and correct in 1946) and make out that while the Western world is engaged in an "existential, decades-long struggle against" against this group of extremists, that group of similarly-motivated extremists are freedom fighters. Sometimes it's the exact same people, as when a "terrorist" handed over to Gaddafi for torture turns out to be a key figure in the emergent democratic regime. Oops.

Galloway is right about Frankenstein. The point isn't just that Al-Qaeda, or the Arab dictatorships that the West used to support (or in Algeria's case, still do) are to some extent our creatures, bound to turn against us in the end. The trouble with Victor Frankenstein was that, intoxicated with his own brilliance, he was unable to see that anything could possibly go wrong.

Our kids' comic, Snowflakes, has finally reached its conclusion. Much love to you who followed along with the adventures. You can now read the whole thing here.

Today the Liberal Democrats voted with Labour to scupper Conservative hopes of a redrawing of constituency boundaries before the next election. This is widely thought to have greatly reduced the likelihood of a Conservative majority at that election.

This Lib Dem move was a response to the Conservatives' refusal to support progress towards reform of the House of Lords.

When you recall that Lords reform was in the Conservative manifesto at the last election, you realise just how foolish they have been.

Stephen Tall helpfully pulled out the relevant quotes in a Lib Dem Voice post from April of last year:

We will work to build a consensus for a mainly-elected second chamber to replace the current house of Lords, recognising that an efficient and effective second chamber should play an important role in our democracy and requires both legitimacy and public confidence.

And as Stephen points out, reform of the Lords was also in the Coalition Agreement.

I blogged as follows at the time Lords reform was blocked:

The Conservatives' willingness to throw away the redrawing of constituency boundaries, and thus greatly diminish their chances of a majority at the next election, is odd to say the least. 

It strengthens my belief that their backbenches are simply ungovernable. As I have argued before, One of the Coalition parties is not up to government - and it's not the Lib Dems and David Cameron is the new John Major. 

Some Conservatives have principled objections to reform of the Lords - or at least the reforms currently proposed. (They are, after all, Conservatives.) Others have no wish to lose the probability of an agreeable retirement job if things go wrong at the next election. 

But the argument I heard most often was that the Tory backbenches were furious that the Liberal Democrats had not supported Jeremy Hunt in the Commons vote of no confidence over his conduct during News Corporation's takeover of BSkyB. 

It is not so long since a man who let a young subordinate take the rap for his own misconduct would have aroused the ire of the knights of the shires. Now the Tory backbenches hero is a silly man with a silly haircut. And they are prepared to sacrifice their chances at the next election to support him.

I would add now that David Cameron showed an abysmal lack of leadership over Lords reform, obliging Nick Clegg to make all the running on the issue. So the proposals that came forward were Lib Dem proposals - I remember approving them, or something very like them, when I was on the party's Federal Policy Committee a decade ago.

No doubt the Conservatives had rather different Lords reforms in mind. So David Cameron should have negotiated with the Lib Dems over them, arrived at proposals that both parties could support and then led on them himself.

But he lacked the courage to take on his own party, hid behind the Liberal Democrats and as a result now finds it much less likely that he will win (or survive as Conservative leader) the next election.

Noah Smith points us to “the derpiest thing ever posted on the internet” — a reflection on the history of empires and the Second Law of Thermodynamics. Strictly speaking, probably not the derpiest thing ever posted; the internet is old, and vast, and strewn with some truly derpy things. But even under a charitable reading: yeah, pretty derpy.

The Second Law — the entropy of isolated systems either remains constant or increases over time — offers an irresistible temptation to the kind of person who might want to take Grand Ideas of Science and apply them to complex social phenomena. (I’m totally that kind of person, so I know how they think.) Entropy is roughly “disorder,” and all we have to do is look out the window/internet to see disorder running rampant all around us. So people from Henry Adams and Oswald Spengler to Thomas Pynchon and Norbert Wiener have suggested (with different degrees of seriousness) that maybe the social chaos around us is merely the inevitable outcome of some grand dynamical principle.

The post in question, at a blog called finem respice that is fond of referring to itself in the third person, takes a slightly different angle than usual. The insight is not that things fall apart and the centre cannot hold, but that things are falling apart faster and faster.

Sadly, long-term, the battle against entropy appears to be a losing one. In weaker moments the always philosophical finem respice reader might be reduced to despondency when realizing that while reading this piece the heat radiated by the brain creates more entropy than the reading creates order. In effect, and with apologies to Jim Morrison, “No one gets out of here cohesively.”

To finem respice‘s way of thinking, there is good reason to believe in “social entropy” as well. Not only this, but its rate of growth seems to be increasing. Of the 50-70 empires that dominate the study of history, it is suddenly striking to realize that, generally speaking, the more modern the empire, the shorter its lifespan.

Sweeping ideas from physics offer wonderful metaphorical inspiration, and even occasional precise insight, into the kinds of messy situations one typically cares about in the humanities and social sciences. Still, a little care is called for, and what we have here is kind of an absence of much care.

The biggest problem is the one that creationists always make: neither the biosphere nor our social environment is anything like a closed system. Yes, the entropy you are generating while reading this blog post is greater than the hoped-for order created by your comprehension of a new text. But that’s true of the universe, not of your brain all by itself. The Earth radiates lots of high-entropy radiation into space, but its own entropy can easily decrease. It’s not just allowed — it happens quite readily. Order is spontaneously generated in subsystems as the larger world increases in entropy. The plain evidence of history would seem to imply that this kind of tendency is especially prominent in the social context. The Roman/Persian/Chinese empires were not actually preceded by even earlier empires that lasted ten times as long. Even aside from the limitations of borrowing ideas from physics and applying them outside their circumscribed domains, this kind of idea would seem to be flatly contradicted by the evidence.

Which is a shame, because there might very well be something interesting to say about the changing cohesiveness of nation-sized institutions over time, and there may even be ideas from physics that could help. It does seem sensible to claim that the pace of all sorts of changes has picked up over the last few hundred years, even if “entropy” isn’t at all the right concept to reach for here. It’s the self-organization part, as well as ideas from complexity and network theory, that can be really helpful. This is the kind of thing that reformed physicist Geoffrey West has been studying with (seemingly) great success.

So it’s not at all derpy to take ideas from physics (or any other field) and let them prod you into new insights in other fields. It’s just doing it in a sloppy way that grates. Derpiness, like entropy, tends to increase, but that doesn’t mean we can’t resist.

The other day I found myself in a very peculiar position. I agreed with Iain Dale. His blog post: "FORGET GAY MARRIAGE, IT MUST BE EQUAL MARRIAGE, AND THIS BILL IS DEEPLY FLAWED" was quite right to point out that what is being offered is not equal marriage but gay marriage.

Then this morning I almost fell off my chair. I was agreeing with tweets from Nadine Dorries on equal marriage. LGBT.co.uk summarises these well (even if they come at it from a different angle to me!).

I've written about the issues before, most recently here. And Cllr. Sarah Brown comes at it from a more trans issues focused angle here.

So whilst most marriage equality supporters have been telling Dale and Dorries off for daring to be negative about our beloved subject, I'm willing to be generous and give them the benefit of the doubt. There are two minor reservations on this, of course. I'm not completely naive, despite appearances to the contrary and my often idealistic hopes.

1) Neither of the two of them have been the most vigorously supportive of marriage equality in the past. I very well remember the "well-meaning" Tory amendments to the Civil Partnership Bill which were simply attempts to wreck it and stop its progress. I'm not quite ready to believe that these suddenly sensible thoughts on marriage equality aren't simply attempts to wreck the bill completely.

2) Dorries also proposes seeking the right for a registrar to refuse to conduct same-sex marriages. On the face of this, it would seem to be something someone like me (who loves individual freedom) would support. But I have two major issues with it. i) who pays their wages? ME! I'm not very happy to accept that public servants have the right to decide who they can and can't serve based on their personal beliefs when everyone pays for them. ii) why just same-sex marriages? If we accept public servants should be able to decide who to serve based on their personal beliefs can this extend to other groups based on race, religion, attitude etc? If not, why not?

I have, in my various jobs, had to serve people who were racist, extremely and unnecessarily rude, sexist, dangerous (I've been stalked once by a customer), etc. etc. Do I have the right to just decide that those people didn't need some rather serious problems sorted out straight away just because I didn't agree with their personal beliefs? You take the public's money and, unless they are extremely bad (like my stalker), you have to serve them. Simple. Don't like it? Get a job in the private sector. Become a priest for example!

So yes, I will support Dorries in some of her proposed amendments. I'm pleased with the progress the Government has made, but I'm not going to dismiss any criticism of it just because I really, really want marriage equality (as I've seen many do). I want equal marriage. I want it done right. And I want it for everyone.

I have nothing against Halloween customs, but I dislike bobbing for apples. That’s my name for a habit that makes classroom discussion more difficult and less productive than it should be. A student who bobs for apples might offer the following observations in discussion:

The speaker in T. S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” is asking someone he loves to go for a walk: “Let us go then, you and I.”

The father in Robert Hayden’s poem “Those Winter Sundays” works in an office.

The poet in Sappho’s fragment 31 sees the man she loves talking with another woman.

In each case the bobber, largely or wholly unprepared, has bent down and come up with something. Someone who had read these works (and accompanying assignment pages, full of guidance) would not — could not — make the bobber’s mistakes. The possibility that Prufrock can speak to anyone but himself (much less that he is in love) is one that the poem belies at every moment; the “overwhelming question,” whatever form it might take, is one that never gets asked. The father in Hayden’s poem has “cracked hands that ached / from labor in the weekday weather”; the poem’s “offices” are the lonely rites the father performs for the members of his household: building fires, shining shoes. And in Sappho’s poem, pronouns make clear the object of the poet’s desire: the man is seated next to “you,” and it’s the sound of “your” delightful laughter and one glance at “you” that leaves the poet unable to speak.

Bobbing for apples makes things difficult in several ways. It impedes the give and take of discussion by requiring a teacher to function as an arbiter of interpretive truth, one who must take up the unpleasant task of saying no — or let any old absurdity fly. There’s little point in asking about the basis for the student’s response when no reasonable evidence could be forthcoming: to ask would yield only embarrassment. (What, for instance, could be the evidence that the father works in an office, aside from the glanced-at, not-looked-up word offices?) Another problem: bobbing for apples fosters the notion, especially among students who might not recognize bobbing as such, that literary interpretation is an arbitrary, haphazard affair: to vary the metaphor, a Rorschach test. You see something (or think you do); you say something. Who’s to say whether it’s right or wrong?

One good answer to that question: literary study is typically not about right and wrong. There are many plausible things one might say about a poem, some of which will contradict others. Another answer: every reader of a work of literature — anyone who really reads it — has a say. And to read, really read, one must do much more than bob. Repeated immersions, to the limit of one’s ability to remain underwater: that’s what will let you come up with something worthwhile.

A related post
Zadie Smith on reading

[The examples in this post are from my imagination, not from life.]
You’re reading a post from Michael Leddy’s blog Orange Crate Art. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons 3.0 License.

From liv on Dreamwidth:

The gateway into this life is a PhD, and the PhD system is deeply, deeply fucked up when it isn’t actively abusive. Doing a PhD will break you. It’s pretty much designed to break you. Yes, even you, you who are brilliant (that almost goes without saying; it’s because you’re brilliant that you’re contemplating doing a PhD in the first place). You who are resilient and have survived several kinds of shit that life has thrown at you just to get to the point where you’re about to graduate with a brilliant degree. You who have the unconditional support of your family and friends and partners. If you have every admirable personal quality you can think of, if you have every advantage in life, still, getting through a PhD will grind you down, will come terrifyingly close to killing your soul and might well succeed. It will do horrible things to your mental and physical health and test to breaking point every significant relationship in your life.

At this point in reading it, I had to put the computer down and go off and do something else for five minutes, because I had to process my own feelings.

Here’s the thing: The process of doing a PhD (Liv is talking about the UK, and I am talking about the UK) broke me fairly horribly. I went into it a young recent graduate with no masters degree, no work ethic, and also undiagnosed ADHD and an anxiety disorder (probably). I thought I had some sort of depression, but had never seen anyone about it. I still only have self-diagnosed ADHD/Anxiety, but I’m pretty confident about the symptoms right now, and I’m only where I am because I learned coping mechanisms. When I was 23, I didn’t even have the motivation to rein in my wondering mind.

The PhD system in the UK is relatively simple: three years to write a thesis. That is: learn the science, do the research, write it up. Many people take four years, and that’s socially acceptable, but funding only lasts for four years. The funding bodies often provide universities an extra funding pool to support students who are still writing up after three years, but my university (UCL) decided instead to use this money to reward people who completed in three years. In other words: they gave the money to the very students it wasn’t intended for in the first place.

PhD students get supervisors, and mine were amazing and supportive and the best supervisors I could ask for. Given the colleagues I’ve had that have had their supervisors retire, leave the country, or have sexually abused their students, I have nothing to complain about. But they can only ‘supervise’ so much – thesis writing depends on being self-motivated. And I had none of that. I procrastinated most of my first year, and then ran head on into hard, sudden, anxiety. And guess what happens when I’m anxious about something? I procrastinate some more!

I believe I may have had a breakdown around my 4th year, when I was working a job I hated, in a living situation that wasn’t ideal, and dealing with the kind of social situation with my online friends that was designed to hit me in all my social-anxiety weak spots.

A PhD is “supposed” to take 3 years. I took 6.

Do I regret doing it? Not really. I loved the actual data collection. I love dinosaurs and think paleontology is the greatest thing. When I got to grips with the science, it was a rush like – well, let’s just say that the only thing that compares is watching my students get to grips with difficult ideas. I learned, and the learning process is my favorite thing.

But I still advise people to think again before going into a doctorate fresh from an undergraduate or even a masters. And I definitely advise people never to see a PhD as a means to an end. Know yourself. Know your subject, and ibe prepared to make your life your work for as long as it takes.

Maybe warm up by doing something easy first, like writing a novel.

 

This post can also be found at Thagomizer.net. Feel free to join in the conversation wherever you feel most comfortable.

High-speed railways have spread throughout Europe over the past thirty years, starting with the opening of the first TGV line in France in 1981. Today, there are substantial networks of these lines throughout France, Spain, Italy, Belgium, the Netherlands and Germany, with more lines under construction or planned.

In all cases, high-speed trains can operate both on dedicated high-speed track and at reduced speeds on conventional railway lines, enabling many destinations beyond the high-speed lines to be served.

The result has been not only faster journey times but also significant transfers of journeys away from other, less environmentally-friendly modes of transport (road and air).

So if there is a criticism to be made of yesterday’s government announcement about the route of the high-speed line, it is that these decisions should have been made at least thirty years ago. Blame Margaret Thatcher.

Instead of that criticism, we were treated to assorted Tory backbenchers from constituencies along the proposed route moaning about the effects on the environment. This new-found concern for the environment is dubious, since most of these Tory MPs are also climate change sceptics who hate wind farms and never complained about motorways being driven through their constituencies.

Other critics have depicted high-speed rail as “a train for the rich” or a service exclusively for business travellers. This will come as news to passengers in the rest of Europe, who can (and do) travel on high-speed trains at bargain fares. It will also be news to British passengers with cut-price tickets boarding Eurostar at London St Pancras.

But what the criticism reveals most is a very English whinge, from a world where the glass is always half empty and every technological advance is seen in terms of its downsides. The industrial revolution began in Britain and our country remains at the forefront of scientific discovery and technological advance – hell, we even invented railways! Yet the media coverage suggests that, rather than embrace visionary ideas or practical success, we prefer to wallow in stories of risks and failure. If the Daily Mail were to run a story claiming that high-speed trains cause cancer, that would find the G-spot of this pessimistic culture.

This sentiment can be traced to William Morris and the back-to-the-land movement, the late-nineteenth century backlash against industrialisation and urbanisation. It has led most English people to want to live in a house that looks like a country cottage, even though they actually live in a suburb. The irony is that this desire has done enormous environmental damage. The more that people want to go back to the land, the less land there is left to go back to. Detached houses and bungalows with gardens use up far more land space than the flats and town houses that most continental city dwellers inhabit. The resulting suburban sprawl also lengthens travel distances and increases people’s reliance on cars.

Most of the objections to high-speed rail are consequently part and parcel of a delusional need to maintain England as some sort of bucolic idyll, despite the fact that more than 80% of English people live in cities.

On the other hand, it could just be that southerners are soft. Up north, they see things differently. In Leeds, they are celebrating news of a planned high-speed rail station in the city centre, while in Nottingham and Sheffield they are complaining that the new stations won’t be closer to where they live. That’s more like it!

In fairness to the folks at the Logitech company, what I went through with their Tech Support folks is fairly typical these days. In way too many companies, they now look on the need to provide Customer Service as a burdensome expense. I don’t know how many times lately, I’ve found myself talking to someone who clearly is not on the same continent as the company or me…and there’d be nothing wrong with that if they were well-trained and had the power to do more than read answers off computer screens. In most cases, they don’t have the knowledge. They have extensive FAQs on their computers and they look up what I’m calling about and parrot what’s there. That is, if it’s there.

I blame Ray Kroc for this trend. One of the things he pushed when he was establishing the McDonald’s empire was the notion of utterly interchangeable, don’t-have-to-know-a-lot employees. I heard him speak once and he bragged about how he’d designed his restaurants so they could take any kid off the street and train him a few hours to output burgers and fries exactly like the burgers and fries in every other McDonald’s. It’s hard work, I’m sure…but it’s all paint-by-the-numbers. And it’s why they can get away with not paying very well. It’s hard to get decent wages in this world if there’s an endless stream of people out there who can and will do your job just as well for bad money.

And now we see so many companies trying to do the same thing with Customer Service personnel. A few years ago, I had a horrendous experience with United Airlines where I couldn’t reach anyone who knew anything or had the power to do anything. Dialing Customer Service got me a guy in India who didn’t have the answer to my problem on his screen and wasn’t empowered to refer me to anyone who could help me. At least the Logitech folks have this Level Two department of wiser technicians who can take over when the lower level fails. The problems I had with them, apart from being on hold for a long time and getting dumped off the line a few times, were that their Lower Level people spent a long time with me to not solve my problem and it was hard to get Level Two on the line. But at least when I did, they solved my dilemma.

All of this is a trend I don’t like and one I think is bad for business. As I’ve written here before, I’ve seen a lot of technogically-oriented businesses go under in the last few years — Good Guys, CompUSA, Egghead Software, others — and all I think for the same reason. This may just be anecdotal but in every case, I found that they had salesfolks who didn’t have the foggiest understanding of what they sold or how most of it worked. I’d ask questions and get back tabula rasa stares.

I don’t get why companies do this. I understand that the employees that know more cost more…or can cost more. But if I’m going to be buying computers or TVs or anything from employees who don’t know anything, I might as well order on the Internet and save money. The one advantage a brick-and-mortar store might have is if they have staffers there you could talk to and get personal attention and info. But the last time I was in a Best Buy, none of their salesfolks could tell me which of their external hard drivers had eSATA ports. None of them knew what eSATA ports were. That can’t be good for sales. It may be that companies can get away with this because everyone’s doing it and they figure you won’t be able to get better service anywhere else.

Monday:


Today is the Twenty-Seventh Anniversary of the Challenger Space Shuttle disaster; it is Two Hundred years since the publication of Pride and Prejudice (no Zombies); and Daddy is One Hundred and Forty-Seven Billion, No Millions, Fifteen Thousand and Sixty years old. (Adding up on my flappy feet, I MAY have lost count.)

Better bung on "The Happiness Patrol"!

Given the set-up, the only way "The Happiness Patrol" could end is with Margaret Thatcher-analogue (certainly in the performance if not necessarily in the script) Helen A in tears.

But do we want to see the Doctor make the villain cry?

And only a few years later, the real world would see virtually the same woman in tears as she left Downing Street. Did we gloat? Did we "dance on her grave"? Or did we feel sympathy for the monster?


This isn't a question of whether Helen A deserves to be overthrown and punished for her acts. She is clearly depicted as responsible for murder, both indirectly as the one giving orders to the Happiness Patrol and directly when she pushes the button for the fondant surprise. Her government's policies kill people for being sad and twist the lives of everyone else by enforcing false happiness.

It's important that we recognise that, in spite of Sheila Hancock's gleeful caricature, this is a very standard Doctor Who Nazi allegory: the uniforms may be pink rather than black but the M.O. is identical, from the "othering" of a minority (with the "smile" badges to reward conformity, so reminiscent of yellow stars and pink triangles), through the keeping of lists and records, to the state control of economic assets. Even the expressionist sets are making us think of 1930's Germany, and all the face-paint is very "Cabaret".

The simple conflation of Mrs Thatcher's Conservative governments of the 1980s and Nazism was an easy cliché of the decade (much as the "more right wing than Thatcher" smear is the cry of the current generation against the Coalition, to which one is inclined to say: "you should have tried living in the '80s"). But were they really Nazis?

Is it legitimate, even in exaggerated satire, to equate the Thatcher governments of the 'Eighties with the Nazis? The evidence is mixed (and it's troubling that there's even the possibility of a "yes").

Of course we recognise that "Nazi" and "Commie" are debased terms, used as insults and as opposites by the sort of people who assume that Communism and organised Labour and "left wing" are virtual synonyms and therefore by extension "Nazi" must be the right wing equivalent, when in fact (read your Orwell) there is very little difference between the two apart from some emphasis on the cult of personality, and identification of who is to blame for the economic condition of the workers. Communism and Nationalism are both working-class based mass-movements prone to violent collective action against the perceived "other" and, like any human organisation, subject to subversion from within by a ruling elite with their own agenda.

(Note on Orwell: our set-top-box is set to record every Saturday play, because we're very Radio 4 and every now and again there are ones we actually want (James Bond). But of course this week it didn't record one we really wanted, a rather good adaptation of "Animal Farm"… Because, obviously, for this one week the EPG read "The Real George Orwell" rather than "Saturday Drama". Humbug. Time to try the iPlayer.)

In contrast, the Thatcher governments sought to disperse economic (although not social) power as widely as possible, through programmes of privatisation, council house sales, tax cuts and market liberalisation.

Certainly, it was a brutal and unforgiving period – far more so than the Coalition have been – with large tranches of British industry forced out of public ownership and allowed to go bankrupt with little or no safety net for the communities left scarred and blighted as a result. Economically, though, this de-nationalisation is the exact opposite of National Socialism. Thatcherism as a theory supposedly venerated the individual as opposed to the fascist ideal of stronger together. The Lady was both more complicated and more simple – I think she venerated both, but only “together” in terms of nationalism (remember, she made Britain the most centralised state in Europe). Ultimately she replaced her worship of "the market" with frothing Europhobia, the jingoistic last resort, as it were. The same tension between atomised markets and protective nationalism tears at the Tories today.

The Falklands War, while easily classified as Imperial – and the signature engagement, the sinking of the Belgrano, was a war crime under Britain's own rules – but was also unsought and in defence of self-determination against an invading dictatorship. Not that Lady T was ideologically opposed to all dictators, as testified by her closeness to General Pinochet (tying herself to "routine disappearances" as in the show; nor should we forget the "shoot-to-kill" allegations of "Death on the Rock" and other rumours.)

There was a definite use of "othering" by the Conservatives of the 'Eighties, but their principal target was the Trade Union movement, infamously described as "the enemy within" by Mrs Thatcher, and subject to brutal repression whether by proxy at Wapping (1986) or in the year-long miners' strike. (1984-5).

Her government's treatment of gay people – ostensibly the metaphor of "The Happiness Patrol"; happy = gay, geddit – was more mixed, ranging from the robust response to the emerging AIDS crisis to riding the anti-Sixties backlash and moral panic that culminated in Section 28. The '80s were when the gays suddenly became a major political issue (used to bash left and liberals, and simply bash gays). But at the same time Thatcher's rhetoric of individual freedom was being taken seriously by some people – even when her actions showed it as empty words. It was an era of transition, when gay rights had to be fought for, but when the groundwork was laid for the rights being won in the 'Nineties and 'Noughties and still today. When stereotypes were still seen all over the TV, but new and positive portrayals were just starting to emerge. Then (as now) the loudest anti-equality voices were religious and small-c conservative fringe, the James Andertons and Mary Whitehouses, and a vocal minority on the Conservative backbenches. That's not to excuse a government that went along with it.

I started off this section assuming that it would be easy to disprove, but I find more and more that the Conservatives were all too willing to use the techniques of the Nazis to protect their rule through "divide and conquer". It seems more that it was the British people who were becoming more liberal through the 'Eighties and that the government (of the minority) was reactionary against that.

And I wonder what I'll think looking back on the Coalition years from a similar perspective when Twenty-Forty comes around. That "othering", that scapegoating rears its ugly head once more, whether it is the culture of blame the bankers (all too reminiscent of the "Zionist conspiracy" accusation) or the Prime Minister's recent speech on Europe raising the old Tory xenophobia. Or the way both Labour's Liam Byrne and the Conservative's George Osborne have picked on benefits claimants (whether your language is "workers v shirkers" or "strivers v skivers", it's equally objectionable).

Most of the time, "Nazis = bad" goes as an unchallenged assertion in Doctor Who. The Daleks, for example, are virtually evil by definition because they are the Space Nazis. In fact, by deconstructing the Nazi iconography, "The Happiness Patrol" makes one of the better cases for why Nazis actually are bad.

Almost every Doctor Who story – almost every melodrama, in fact – contains a cathartic moment (cathartic for the audience anyway) where the villain gets dealt their – usually-fatal – just deserts. This can be horrific, or occasionally comic, and often with a sense of poetic justice.

"Monsters" tend to be exploded (Daleks, Cybermen, Sontarans), melted (Ice Warriors, Giant Robot, Terileptils, Haemovores), buried (Silurians, Sea Devils, the other Silurians) or just plain deactivated (Yeti); while the human or humanoid "villains" are more likely to either have their allies turn on them (especially if played by Kevin Stoney or Roger Delgado!) or the Avengers stand-by "killed with their own weapon" (Harrison Chase and his fertiliser machine; Styggron and his virus; in this very story, the Kandy-Man is melted by his own boiling sucrose). Arguably Davros achieves both at once.

What we don't often get is the sense that it is traumatic for the losing villain, that they are hurt, upset. Death – ironically – makes it easier by never giving the baddies the chance to react to their own defeat; by never expecting us to have to empathise with them.

Empathy is terribly important in "The Happiness Patrol". It is empathy that enables us to feel sad when sad things happen to other people. We understand Susan Q's despair because we can share Ace's empathy for her. Even when it is clear Ace doesn't understand her friend's thoughts and feelings she can still share the pain they cause. In contrast, it is the lack of empathy that allows Helen A to do terrible things.

What, then, are we to make of the Doctor, who can reduce a woman to abject weeping and just look on?

And bear in mind, this comes in a story between one where the Doctor talks an intelligent alien into suicide and another where he pushes another woman over the edge into madness and self-immolation.

The Doctor in this story is not human, barely even a life-form, more a force like Nemesis (see also the subsequent story). That makes him powerful, but it makes him cold. He breezes through the story, quite casually taking everyone's world apart – whether it's playing mindgames with the Happiness Patrol or gluing the Kandy-Man to the floor of his own Kandy Kitchen (though imagine if the Doctor had kneecapped Priscilla P with her own fun-gun instead of similarly incapacitating the Kandy-Man with his own lemonade...)

Ironically, his most famous line from this story "Look me in the eye; end my life" is about as bald a statement of the power of human empathy as you can get.

Here, he's like a djinn, answering Ace's wishes. Ace, remember, started this story wanting to make the Happiness Patrol, and Helen A's regime "very unhappy". It's almost as though he's taking her to face these things and using her response to judge whether or not to topple this week's empire. Telling, if that's so, that he got rid of the more mature (!) Melanie and took the black-and-white opinions of the teenager instead.

At the end, Ace confronted by Helen A in grief actually asks the question on the audience's behalf: "isn't there something we should do?"

The Doctor's reply is up there with the end of "The Family of Blood" for his most wrath-of-god harshness: "'Tis done".

Ace has got what she – and we the audience – wished for, but, being very human, she's not happy about it.

Of course, that empathy with Helen A's grief is what makes Ace a better person. And we, the audience, are being asked to be like Ace, not the Doctor.


Next Time... going backwards... It's Melanie Bush. Played by Kate O'Mara. I'd say you have to see it to believe it, but frankly credibility doesn't really come into it. It's time to mount a defence of the indefensible and the strange matter that is "Time and the Rani". Shut your Tetrap! I only arsked!

One of the reasons guys harass women is that they can. Their actions get excused as harmless flirting, or simply, “Bob being Bob.” The target of their aggression, whether it’s unwanted physical contact, stalking them around a convention, focusing unwanted attention and commentary on her body, or whatever, has generally been conditioned to not raise a fuss. If she does say something, she’s told she’s overreacting, or looking for reasons to be offended, or simply to lighten up.

So much of the time, the harassment appears to go unchecked.

But you know what? Fandom is a fairly small, interlinked community. People in fandom tend to know each other. Take a purely hypothetical situation where you, a random writer, were harassing a woman at a convention. Maybe she didn’t say anything to you. But–hypothetically speaking–she might have said something to a friend later, warning that friend about you. They might have started keeping an eye out for you, watching each others’ backs and passing the word.

They might even have mentioned what happened to someone like me.

I admit, I sometimes have to fight my own White Knight syndrome, the desire to charge out on my horse and smite creeps like you from our ranks. But of course, I didn’t witness what happened. And this was told to me in confidence. The only reason I’m talking about it here is that it happens so often that there’s no way to identify the specific person–the specific people–I’m talking about. Heck, just at ConFusion, I’m aware of at least three different instances of this kind of crap happening to people, and unfortunately, that’s not unusual.

If you’re worried that the creeper I’m talking about might be you, well, that seems like something you really need to sit down and think about.

I won’t get the rapier out of storage and go on a smiting spree. Nor will I call down the Wrath of the Internet to publicly shame you.

On the other hand, I get a fair number of review copies from various publishers. And what do you know, I recently noticed that you were the author of one of those review copies. Yes you, the same dude who was creeping on a friend of mine. What a fascinating coincidence, eh?

Guess which book will never get reviewed on my blog.

Guess which author will never get a retweet, a linkback, or any kind of promotion from me whatsoever.

I may not have the biggest following on the internet, but I’ve built up a pretty good readership over the years, and your actions toward this woman–actions you probably didn’t even think about…actions you assumed would have no consequence–have cost you the chance to have your book plugged to thousands of SF/F readers.

It’s a shame, really. And I can’t help but wonder how many potential readers you lost, all because you couldn’t treat a woman with more respect…

Hypothetically speaking, of course.