Brendan O’Neill

Free Tibet from Beijing’s authoritarianism - and from Western pity, too

Fri, 30 Jul 2010 17:37:00 +0100

Christian Science Monitor, 29 July 2010

Here in the West, we often hear the rallying cry “Free Tibet!,” especially from students and latte-sipping liberals, for whom Tibet has become a personality-defining issue.

Step on to any trendy, politicized campus in the US or Western Europe, and you’ll see at least one student wearing a “Free Tibet” T-shirt, accessorised with traditional Tibetan bangles and maybe a cloth shoulder bag made by Tibetan nomads.

Yet having recently returned from a sojourn to “Shangri-La,” as some people call it, I can confirm that Tibet needs to be freed twice over. Firstly from the authoritarian Chinese Stalinists who rule there, and who deny Tibetans basic liberties such as freedom of speech and the right to protest. And secondly from the Western “Free Tibet” lobby itself, whose shallow solidarity seems to be keeping Tibet in a pre-modern, underdeveloped state for the benefit of eco-conscious Westerners.

Stuck between a rock and a hard place

Somewhat appropriately, given that it is such a mountainous region, modern Tibet is stuck between a rock and a hard place – between the rock of authoritarian government, and the hard place of a patronizing Western pity, which treats Tibetans, in the stinging words of one leading Tibetologist, as “the baby seals of the human rights movement.”

When you first arrive in Tibet, you can’t help but be impressed by how much religious freedom there seems to be. Having heard activists from Free Tibet UK argue that the Chinese authorities are seeking to “wipe out Tibetan identity and culture,” I find myself pleasantly surprised, and relieved, that in fact Tibetans can go about their daily religious business largely unmolested.

My guides, two Chinese officials and one Tibetan official, take me to Jokhang Temple in the capital of Lhasa, Tibetan Buddhism’s holiest site. We watch old women in traditional Tibetan dress spin prayer wheels, young boys prostrate themselves before the Buddha on the unforgiving, bruising earth, and monks and nuns in saffron robes give potted histories of Tibetan Buddhism to wide-eyed Western tourists.

I’m handed over to a smiling, excitable monk who takes me on a fascinated guided tour of the temple, explaining its history and its mysteries in pidgin English.

Yet Tibetans’ basic right to worship Buddha, which my official guides are so keen to show off, cannot disguise the fact that they are denied other important freedoms.

They’re not allowed, for example, to put up pictures of the 14th Dalai Lama, who currently lives in exile in northern India, or to say anything positive about him. Earlier this month, a Tibetan environmentalist called Rinchen Samdrup was imprisoned for five years for posting a “pro-Dalai Lama article” on his website.

Tibetans don’t have full freedom

Tibetans might be allowed to pray and to prostrate themselves to their hearts’ content – but the fact that they are forbidden from singing the praises or looking at images of the 14th Dalai Lama means they do not have full religious freedom.

They are deprived of political freedoms, too. Like other Chinese people, they have no right to set up a newspaper or magazine without state approval and they do not enjoy the right to protest, that key freedom that allows people to express their angst and aspirations and to hold their rulers to account.

The Lhasa-shaking unrest of March 2008, when thousands of Tibetans rioted and attacked the property of what they see as the privileged Han Chinese immigrants, was sparked by the local police’s assault on a small march by monks and nuns to commemorate a failed Tibetan uprising of 1959. For the Chinese rulers of Tibet, even a peaceful protest by robe-wearing religious people is an affront to the state and must be squished.

So, yes, Tibet needs to be freed from the iron grip of Communist officials who have little respect for people’s right to speak, protest, politically organise themselves, and live their lives as they see fit.

Liberation from Western cheerleaders

Yet Tibet needs to be liberated from its cheerleaders in the West, too.

The problem with the Free Tibet lobby over here is that it hates Chinese governance of Tibet for all the wrong reasons – not so much for its authoritarianism and its denial of democratic rights, but for its modernising zeal and its temerity in trying to turn this apparently ancient, mystical land into a bustling part of the 21st-century universe.

Contemporary, hippyish Free Tibet activism is less about liberating Tibetans from authoritarian government than liberating the entity of Tibet itself – the landscape, the skyscape, the mountains – from smoggy, smelly Chinese industrialization.

So Free Tibet UK campaigns against what it calls “large-scale infrastructure projects” in Tibet, including China’s construction of the vast Gormo-Lhasa railway which means riders in Beijing can take the train all the way to the Tibetan capital. It says such projects “increase environmental pressure on Tibet’s fragile high-altitude ecosystem.”

It’s hard to avoid the conclusion that some Free Tibet activists are motivated by a desire to keep Tibet in a cultural timewarp, to preserve it as a kind of permanent, unspoiled paradise in our swiftly modernising world. As the late Oxford-based anthropologist Graham E. Clarke once argued: “In the West, traditional Tibet at times is almost beatified, and becomes a spiritual emblem of all that is lost to industrial civilization.”

Many Tibetans take offense at the idea that they should live harsh, archaic lives simply because some activists in the West don’t like the idea of Tibet being propelled toward modernity.

A Tibetan worker at the China-Tibetology Research Center in Beijing told me: “It’s always the people who live most comfortably who would like Tibet to remain stuck in the Middle Ages.” In Lhasa I see numerous young Tibetans enthusiastically embracing the trappings of modernity: they drink beer, party, shop in Nike stores, ride motorbikes (but not necessarily in that order).

Speaking to Tibetans – sometimes openly in bazaars and bars, other times in whispered conversations in the corners of temples – I get the impression that they are not happy about being bossed around by Beijjing or about being patronized by Westerners. I am confident that things will improve in Tibet once Tibetans have shaken off both of these external pressures.

Republished by Yahoo! News and the Tibetan-exile websites Phayul and Dhasa.

Read more of my articles for the Christian Science Monitor and other publications here.

The truth about Tibetan Buddhism

Wed, 28 Jul 2010 23:08:10 +0100

Reason, 28 July 2010

Many Westerners before me have visited Tibet, popped into some monastery on a mountainside, and decided to stay there forever, won over by the brutally frugal existence eked out by Tibetan Buddhists.

I have exactly the opposite reaction. I couldn’t wait to leave the temples and monasteries I visited during my recent sojourn to Shangri-La, with their garish statues of dancing demons, fat golden Buddhas surrounded by wads of cash, walls and ceilings painted in super-lavish colours, and such a stench of incense that it’s like being in a hippy student’s dorm room.

I know I’m not supposed to say this, but Tibetan Buddhism really freaked me out.

The most striking thing is how different real Tibetan Buddhism is from the re-branded, part-time version imported over here by the Dalai Lama’s army of celebrities.

Listening to Richard Gere, the first incarnation of the Hollywood Lama, you could be forgiven for thinking that Tibetan Buddhism involves sitting in the lotus position for 20 hours a day and thinking Bambi-style thoughts. Tibetan Buddhism has a “resonance and a sense of mystery,” says Gere, through which you can find “beingness” (whatever that means).

Watching Jennifer Aniston’s character Rachel read a collection of the Dalai Lama’s teachings in Central Perk on Friends a few years ago, you might also think that Tibetan Buddhism is something you can ingest while sipping on a skinny-milk, no-cream, hazelnut latte.

Or consider the answer given by one of Frank J. Korom’s students at Boston University when he asked her why she was wearing a Tibetan Buddhist necklace. “It keeps me healthy and happy,” she said, reducing Tibetan Buddhism, as so many Dalai Lama-loving undergrads do, to the religious equivalent of knocking back a vitamin pill.

The reality couldn’t be more different. The first devout Buddhists I encountered looked neither healthy nor happy. They were walking from their villages in southern Tibet to Jokhang Temple in Lhasa, Tibetan Buddhism’s holiest site, and the journey had taken them nearly three months. Which isn’t surprising considering that with every third or fourth step they took, they got down on their knees and then fully prostrated themselves on the ground, lying flat on their bellies and burying their faces in the dirt, before getting back up, taking a few more steps, and doing the painful prostration thing again.

It looked life-zappingly exhausting. They moved at a snail’s pace. Their foreheads were stained grey from such frequent, unforgiving contact with the bruising earth. They wore wooden planks on their hands, which made a deathly clatter every time they hurled themselves downwards. I’d like to see Jennifer Aniston try this. Tibetan Buddhism sans latte.

You soon realize that no Tibetan Buddhist sits cross-legged on cushions all day long while staring into space and thinking about the universe. No, worshipping Buddha is a full-on physical workout. At the Lamaling Temple on a hillside in Nyingchi County in south-east Tibet, I saw women in their 50s doing the prostration thing, like an archaic version of a Jane Fonda workout.

The temple itself is packed with weird statues. Red demons with contorted faces. Smug-looking Buddhas smiling patronizingly at the poor, exhausted worshippers. There’s a statue of the “Living Buddha” (now deceased) who administered this temple in the 1950s and 60s and it is wearing sunglasses. Terrifyingly, it looks like a cross between the Buddha and Bono.

The Lamaling Temple, like others I visited, is painted in the most obscene colors. No inch of wall or centimeter of roof beam has been left untouched by the possibly colorblind decorators of Tibetan Buddhism’s sites of worship. Everywhere you look there’s a lashing of red or green or bright blue paint, a weirdly fitting backdrop to the frequently violent imagery of this religion: the statues of sword-wielding demons, the fiery paintings, the images of androgynous Buddhas, some with breasts, others with balls. “Peace” and “calm” are the last words that come to mind when you’re inside one of these senses-assaulting places.

The Lamaling Temple also brings home the fact that Tibetan Buddhism, like every other religion on Earth, is made up of various, sometimes horn-locking sects.  I excitedly lined up an interview with one of the monks and asked if he’s looking forward to the day when the Dalai Lama returns from exile in northern India. He patiently told me—dumb Westerner that I am—that he doesn’t worship the Dalai Lama, because he is a member of the Nyingma school of Tibetan Buddhism while the Dalai Lama is head of the Gelug school. Then there’s the Kagyu school and the Sakya school—making four in total—which have hot-headed disagreements and have even come to blows in recent years over which deities should be worshipped and which should not. Religion of peace? Yeah, right.

Tibetan Buddhism has a whole lotta hang-ups about gays and girls, too. It says gay sex is “unnatural.” The Dalai Lama declared in a talk in Seattle in 1993, during one of his whistle stop, U2-style world tours, that “nature arranged male and female organs in such a manner that is very suitable… same-sex organs cannot manage well.” (Someone needs to explain to His Holiness how gay people get it on.)

And as Bernard Faure of Columbia University says: “Like most clerical discourses, Buddhism is… relentlessly misogynist.” So while Tibetan women can become nuns, they can’t advance nearly as far as men. Because according to Buddhist teachings it is impossible for women to become “the perfectly rightfully Enlightened One,” “the Universal Monarch,” “the King of Gods,” “the King of Death,” or “Brahmaa”—the five highest, holiest positions in Buddhism.

Of course, this only means that Tibetan Buddhism is the same as loads of other religions. Yet it is striking how much the backward elements of Tibetan Buddhism are forgiven or glossed over by its hippyish, celebrity, and middle-class followers over here. So if you’re a Catholic in Hollywood it is immediately assumed you’re a grumpy old git with demented views, but if you’re a “Tibetan” Buddhist you are looked upon as a super-cool, enlightened creature of good manners and taste. (Admittedly, Mel Gibson doesn’t help in this regard.)

I am well aware of the fact that I am not the first Westerner to be thrown by Tibet’s religious quirkiness. A snobby British visitor in 1895 denounced Tibetan Buddhism as “deep-rooted devil-worship and sorcery.” It’s no such thing. But what is striking, and what caused me to be so startled by the weirdness, is the way in which this religion has come to be viewed in Western New Age circles as a peaceful, pure, happy-clappy cult of softly-smiling, Buddha-like beings. Again, it’s no such thing. The modern view of Tibetan Buddhism as wondrous is at least as patronizingly reductive as the older view of Tibetan Buddhism as devil-worship.

Frank J. Korom describes it as “New Age orientalism,” where Westerners in search of some cheap and easy purpose in their empty lives “appropriate Tibet and portions of its religious culture for their own purposes.” They treat a very old, complex religion as a kind of buffet of ideas that they can pick morsels from, jettisoning the stranger, more demanding stuff—like the dancing demons and the prostration workout—but picking up the shiny things, like the sacred necklaces and bracelets and the BS about reincarnation.

It is all about them. They have bent and warped a religion to suit their own needs. As the Tibetan lama Dagyab Kyabgon Rinpoche puts it, “The concept of ‘Tibet’ becomes a symbol for all those qualities that Westerners feel lacking: joie de vivre, harmony, warmth and spirituality… Tibet thus becomes a utopia, and Tibetans become noble savages.” Western losers have ransacked Tibetan Buddhism in search of the holy grail of self-meaning.

Read more of my articles for Reason and other publications here.

The Afghan War leaks don’t tell us The Truth

Tue, 27 Jul 2010 21:30:32 +0100

spiked, 27 July 2010

So we finally know the truth about the Afghan War, do we, courtesy of the 90,000 leaked military documents simultaneously revealed by the UK Guardian, the New York Times and Der Spiegel? Rubbish. Truth is not something that is handed to us on a silver platter by know-it-all whistleblowers. It is something we discover for ourselves through a process of critical investigation and by quizzing and querying received wisdoms. The media’s pant-wetting excitement about these leaked documents only shows what a parlous state journalism is in, and how much journalists have become the passive recipients of information rather than active seekers of the truth.

The 90,000 American military records, covering everything from the deaths of Afghan civilians to the possible involvement of Pakistan and Iran in sponsoring the Taliban, were given to, and then published by, the leak-loving website Wikileaks. The site gave advance access to the records to the Guardian, the NYT and Der Spiegel. You can tell that the leak is considered a Major Event, not only because the revelation of this so-called scoop was coordinated with three major international publications, but also because almost as much space has been given over to analysing the importance of the leak itself as to what is contained within the documents. So the Guardian website’s headline for most of yesterday was ‘REACTION TO THE WAR DOCUMENTS LEAK’, where it provided a timetabled breakdown of every politician, editor and commentator’s angry/impressed/congratulatory response to the Guardian’s role in ‘one of the biggest leaks in US history’.

Yet before the tripartite of American-British-German leak-revealers give themselves repetitive strain injury from patting themselves on the back, it’s worth noting that the documents reveal little that we didn’t already know, or couldn’t have guessed was happening. So the documents claiming that some civilian deaths at the hands of NATO forces have gone unreported will come as little surprise to those of us, like spiked, who have already analysed why there was such a high number of civilian casualties in the early days of the war (because NATO missions were informed more by jittery fear than hard intelligence) and who have argued that NATO’s war was driven more by PR concerns than traditional imperial considerations, thus making NATO more likely to gloss over ‘PR mistakes’. The claims (disputed by Pakistan) that elements of the Pakistani and Iranian intelligence forces backed the Taliban during the war also won’t shock those of us, again like spiked, who argued against the invasion of Afghanistan precisely on the basis that it would internationalise and inflame local tensions, by implicitly inviting external powers to vie for influence in a destabilised, wartorn territory.

The lack of any ‘Wow!’ revelations in the 90,000 records was unwittingly confirmed by Julian Assange, the founder of Wikileaks. In London for a special press conference and Guardian video-making session as part of the Respectable International Media’s revelation of ‘the truth’ about Afghanistan, Assange said ‘the real story of this material is that it’s war. It’s one damn thing after another. It is the continuous small events, the continuous deaths of children, insurgents, allied forces, the maimed people. Search for the word “amputation” in this material, or “amputee”, and there are dozens and dozens of references.’ So there you have it; that is the truth about Afghanistan – ‘it’s war’. And as in all wars, there are deaths and amputations and other ‘continuous small events’. This is a description of the Afghan War that a bright 10-year-old could have given you without the benefit of yesterday’s 90,000 leaked documents.

In Alan Bennett’s The History Boys, one of the students is looked upon as a philistine for saying ‘How do I define history? It’s just one fucking thing after another’, a phrase originally uttered by the historian Herbert Butterfield, though Butterfield said ‘bloody’ rather than ‘fucking’. Yet now we have the founder of Wikileaks winning garlands of praise from the serious media for revealing – presumably to those metaphorical Martians who don’t know what war is – that war is ‘one damn thing after another’. The discussion of the Afghan War as a collection of lots of ‘small events’ – deaths, maiming, amputations – shows that information is nowhere near the same thing as Truth (capital T intended). No doubt some of the facts and claims in the 90,000 documents can be useful, but only as part of a broader understanding of the causes, dynamics and impact of the Afghan War. And that kind of understanding can only come from asking questions and thinking hard, not waiting around for a disgruntled suit at one of the institutions that launched and executed the war to hand over some internal documents. Torn from any critical narrative, ‘the truth’ of the Afghan War is simply – drum roll – that ‘it’s war’. This is truth as tautology. The Pentagon Papers it ain’t.

One of the more sensible criticisms of the overexcitement about the leak came from Adam Weinstein of Mother Jones magazine, who argued that: ‘Most of this information is tactical nuts and bolts, devoid of context, and largely useless for a war narrative.’ Yet Weinstein then makes the mistake of saying that what we really need is better information from on high: ‘What would be far more valuable than this stuff is the strategic/political data: military info that’s TOP SECRET or above, which I haven’t seen yet, or stuff from the State Department or provincial reconstruction teams (PRTs).’ In other words, we need a better class of leak; higher-up leakers with sexier info. This misses what is the main problem with the reliance-upon-leaking and enthrallment-to-whistleblowers that is now widespread in the mainstream media – which is that it changes what it means to be a journalist, turning hacks into mere vessels for internal political disagreements, and it changes the meaning of Truth, too.

Today’s information incontinence amongst the powers-that-be in much of the Western world – which is now so bad that a couple of years ago an internal US government document about the problem of leaking was later leaked – springs from political disarray and institutional incoherence amongst the political class. Their lack of any ideological anchor, or even clear, strong strategies, means they have little to be loyal to and little sense of being a group of people on a mission. In such circumstances, the lines of responsibility become blurred and personal disgruntlement can easily come to the fore, as one section of the military or political elite uses the media to score points against another section. By embracing these leakers, these whistleblowers, the media unwittingly (sometimes wittingly) make themselves into pawns for power spats, being bought off by some isolated, angst-ridden bit of the authorities as surely as other media outlets are bought off by PR bumf or the corporate promise of goodies and freebies. The widespread cult of leaking implicitly makes journalists into passive creatures who wait for, or sometimes agitate for, internal info, rather than being active agents who are part of an awkward squad asking difficult questions of the powers-that-be and the status quo. In relying so heavily upon leaked information, journalists are not so much ‘speaking truth to power’ as speaking power against power. They become the compliant messengers in an elite stand-off.

Even worse, today’s promiscuous leaking, and the media’s unquestioning acceptance of it, does GBH to the idea of Truth. In equating Truth with exposure – so that Truth becomes something which is revealed to us by a supposedly heroic individual in the corridors of powers – journalists and editors are compliant in the denigration of the meaning of Truth. Truth becomes, not something we find out through critical study and investigation, but something we are handed by external forces who apparently have always pure, unimpeachable motives. This is Truth as a religious-style revelation rather than Truth as the endpoint of thought, interrogation, question-asking, analysis. In reality, it is only through actively engaging with the world and its problems, through gathering facts and objectively analysing and organising them, that we can arrive at any Truth worth its name. It is through the very process of investigation that the Truth is uncovered and formulated, revealed by the critical act of discovering and thinking rather than by some mythical, external ‘Truth-holder’.

Waiting for the Truth to be revealed is always a fool’s errand – whether you’re waiting for God to reveal it, or, even worse, some sap in a suit in the Pentagon who one morning has a very belated pang of guilt about his role in the destruction of Afghanistan.

Read more of my articles for spiked and other publications here.

Tibet Notebook

Fri, 23 Jul 2010 12:52:51 +0100

The Spectator, 23 July 2010

LHASA — I experience an electrifying culture shock upon arrival in Lhasa. Not because it is so different to what I’m used to in London, but because it is so similar. Having been raised on a diet of Tintin in Tibet and other tall tales of a snowcapped mountainous land inhabited by a mystical people, I was expecting a paranormal experience, monks in snowboots, maybe even a yeti or two. So imagine my surprise when I notice that the Tibetan man driving me from Lhasa airport to my hotel is wearing a Playboy jacket. Which he might have bought at the Playboy shop that I later see in central Lhasa, near the Nike shop, the Tibet Steak House, and a casino in which young Tibetan men in leather jackets, hair spiked skywards, try their luck at the slot machines.

Far from being possessed of a super- human serenity, the capital of Tibet bumps and grinds to the same sounds heard in cities around the world: the honking of car horns, the screeching of motorbike tyres, the loud flirtations of young men and women. The guys wear Kappa tops and jeans, the girls short skirts and pink T-shirts. Because that’s another thing about Tibet — it’s not even cold, never mind snowy, at least not in July. More than 3,600 metres above sea level, I find myself oxygen-deprived and short of breath and suffer a severe dizzy spell after ascending a flight of stairs too quickly — yet it’s so warm that I get sunburnt. Reading Tintin books prepared me for a lot in life, but not this.

We all know that the Chinese rulers of Tibet rain misleading propaganda upon us. They refer to their invasion of Tibet in 1950-51 as ‘The Peaceful Liberation’ and their instalment of a Stalinist regime in the following decade as ‘The Democratic Reform’. They have labelled the Lhasa riots of 2008 — during which angry young Tibetans attacked the property of what they see as the privileged Han Chinese immigrants — as ‘The March 14th Incident’, failing to account for what fuels the fury of a significant number of Lhasaites. Yet western Tibetophiles, those largely posh lovers of all things Tibetan, mysterious and Dalai Lama-related, have also sown a whole lot of BS about Tibet. Their depiction of Tibet as a unique paradise packed with softly smiling monks and childlike men and women is as skewed — and patronising — as any piece of Chinese misinformation.

Right from the publication of James Hilton’s novel Lost Horizon in 1933, which invented the idea of Tibet as ‘Shangri-La’, to the pro-Tibet fawning of modern celebs such as Richard Gere, Sharon Stone and our own Prince Charles, the popular image of Tibet is, in the words of one academic Tibetologist, as ‘somehow outside the rest of the world’. Gere, who follows the Tibetan Buddhist religion, says Tibetan culture has a ‘resonance and a sense of mystery’ and says you can find ‘beingness’ in Tibet (apparently you can’t really ‘be’ anywhere else).

The American writer Donald S. Lopez Jr, a stinging critic of the narcissistic ramblings of western Tibetophiles, says they have ended up depicting the Tibetan people as ‘super-humans’ (and the Chinese as ‘subhuman’) who live in a ‘peaceful land devoted only to ethereal pursuits’. It’s balls. Ethereal pursuits? One of the first places I visit is the Tibet Green Barley Brewery just outside Lhasa, the highest brewery in the world, where they churn out 470,000 cans of delicious beer a day. Tibetans lap it up. Sorry, Mr Gere, but they do. And over the past month they’ve lapped it up while watching the World Cup. The young bespectacled Tibetan showing me around the brewery says Tibetans ‘love beer and football’, which might come as a shock to those who think they only love meditating and spinning prayer wheels.

Of course Tibet has some striking cultural traditions and its fair share of religious devotion. Out of a population of 2.9 million, 46,000 — around 1.5 per cent — are Buddhist monks and nuns. When I visit Jokhang Temple in central Lhasa, Tibetan Buddhism’s holiest site, I see more and more of these saffron-clad monks and nuns and also ordinary Tibetans, very poor-looking ones, fully prostrating themselves on the ground in devotion to the Buddha, their heads stained with mud and their faces red and raw as a result. But most inhabitants of Lhasa are not like that. At a bazaar near the temple a handsome young Tibetan in an Italia football top and jeans is telling two wide-eyed British women in pidgin English why they should buy his ‘very sacred, very special beads, bracelets’. You can’t help feeling that he is exploiting the naive western middle-class thirst for a bit of Tibetan magic in order to make a quick buck. Good on him.

The problem with the Tibet-patronising activists of the West is that they hate Chinese rule in Tibet for all the wrong reasons. They hate it not so much for its authoritarianism or its deprivation of democracy, but because they don’t like the fact that it is modernising what they fantasise to be a perfect eco-garden of calm and stillness. So Free Tibet UK slams China’s ‘large-scale infrastructure projects’ in Tibet, including its construction of the vast Gormo–Lhasa railway which connects the Qinghai province of China to the Tibetan capital, despite the fact that it created thousands of jobs for Tibetans and has improved trade. Such projects, complain Free Tibet UK, ‘erase existing socio-cultural differences between China [and Tibet]’ — in short, they harm Tibetan culture, which should be always pure and innocent, not dirty and modern. Patronisingly, Richard Gere says that as a result of Chinese intervention in Tibet, the Tibetan people have ‘lost their focus’. Yes, they’re drinking beer and buying Nike products instead of sitting in the lotus position for 20 hours a day.

Tibetans are furious at the implication that they should live simply and frugally for the benefit of wealthy westerners who would like to be able to visit an unspoiled Shangri-La once every couple of years. ‘Do they expect us to keep riding our yaks while they drive cars and fly in planes?’ demands Suo Lin, director-general of the Information Office of the Tibetan Autonomous Region, which runs Tibet under the guidance of Beijing. A Tibetan museum worker tells me: ‘It’s always the people who live most comfortably who would like Tibet to remain stuck in the Middle Ages.’ Tibetophilia has always been about well-to-do westerners trying to escape what they see as soulless modernity by running off to a fantasy paradise. They want to keep Tibet as their own personal museum, to preserve it in cultural formaldehyde, to freeze it in time. As Philip Rawson said in his 1991 book Sacred Tibet, ‘Tibetan culture offers powerful, untarnished and coherent alternatives to western egotistical lifestyles, our short attention span, our gradually more pointless pursuit of material satisfactions…’.

Well, leaving Lhasa and driving to the city of Linzhi in south-east Tibet, I see some of this real Tibetan culture — and it isn’t pretty. Here in the countryside, people are much poorer than they are in Lhasa. The vast majority of them work in agriculture or animal husbandry. Most look exhausted. I am introduced to a 47-year-old herdsman, who looks at least 60, who works thankless hours on the land and still pumps water from a well. Is this the natural, sacred, at-one-with-nature kind of existence that the rich Tibetophiles would like Tibetans to continue ‘enjoying’? The herdsman’s ten-year-old son, Gamagongbu, wearing a Puma cap, tells me he definitely doesn’t want to be a herdsman; he wants to work in Lhasa city. Has this simple child of Tibetan tradition ‘lost his focus’ or achieved enlightenment?

Read more of my articles for the Spectator and other publications here.

A ‘cycling revolution’? On your bike, Boris

Thu, 22 Jul 2010 15:10:00 +0100

spiked, 22 July 2010

Anything that makes London a bit more like Paris is a good idea in my books. So I’m quite excited about mayor Boris Johnson’s cycle-hire scheme. Having tried out Paris’s bikes-for-hire during recent trips there, I can confirm that they’re perfect for people who enjoy cycling but not so much that we would ever fork out £1,000 for two wheels or transmogrify into a Jon Snow Cyclist (people who imagine that riding a bike makes them morally superior beings and who bull-twitter all day long about their cycling escapades).

However, I’m not so keen on Boris’s use of the term ‘cycling revolution’. Not because I’m an R-word purist (that word lost its clout years ago, as summed up by the Channel 4 food show Willie’s Chocolate Revolution), but because, while cycling is fun, the politics of cycling is not. The reason why the cyclist is now celebrated by the powers-that-be as a Decent, Responsible and Caring human being – when, let’s face it, a lot of them are annoying pricks – is because our rulers have lost any sense of how they might improve or overhaul the transport system and the cityscape. They promote the cult of the cyclist in place of a serious debate about the future of our cities.

It’s clear that Boris’s cycling initiatives are about more than practically providing bikes and spaces to ride them in. They are loaded with moralism. As part of his ‘revolution’, he’s not only launching the Barclays Cycle Hire scheme, through which 10,000 bikes at 400 docking stations will be available to Londoners for a fairly small fee – he’s also organising the painting of two bright-blue ‘Cycle Super Highways’ across the city and plans to launch a new cycling police unit and to ‘embed cycling in transport policy’.

For Boris, bike-riding is not merely a transport choice – it’s a moral choice. It can help to ‘improve air quality, cut carbon emissions and reduce congestion on the transport network’, he trills. And that is why he plans to take ‘radical’ measures (‘revolutionary’, ‘radical’ – now I am starting to get annoyed) to make ‘cycling the first choice for many thousands of Londoners’. Because when you foreswear the filthy motor-car or packed buses, and instead get in the saddle, you are not only going from A to B – you are helping to make London a cleaner, greener, happier, healthier place. Your pedalling is political.

In investing cyclists with super moral purpose, Boris is following in the footsteps of other recent initiatives. In 2007, the New Labour government gave a £295,000 grant to the Cyclists’ Touring Club, Britain’s largest cyclists’ organisation, for something called CycleHero Week. In a blockbuster-style cinema ad, we were told that ‘a menace is spreading… silently, invisibly, moving across the planet. A new breed of hero is needed.’ The menace was climate change (isn’t it always?) and the hero was the cyclist. CycleHero Week managed massively to overblow the problem of climate change and the egos of cyclists in a single piece of cinematic jibber-jabber.

Before Boris, the previous London mayor, Ken Livingstone, invested £400million into improving the cycling infrastructure in London, in order to demonstrate that ‘cycling is now associated with a modern cosmopolitan city that is in control and at ease with itself’, whatever that means. This might be bona fide bollocks, but you get the gist: cycling is modern, cosmo, good, pure, etc. Two years ago, the New Labour government announced a £47million funding pool for any city that willingly turned itself into a ‘cycling city’, where walking and cycling take precedence over driving and destroying the environment. Getting people into the saddle can make a ‘real difference to congestion and pollution in local communities’, said a minister.

The first notable thing about the beatification of the bicyclist is that it explains why some of them – not all, I know! – are insufferably arrogant. I can’t be the only walker who has encountered sneering cyclists who, when you try to cross the road, look at you as if you are a grubby-haired chimney sweep who has just stepped on to the manicured lawns at Balmoral. As a contributor to Time Out argues, the cyclist ‘ascribes to himself the most unassailable moral superiority’. He looks at cars not as ‘vehicles conveying humans about their business but as robot killing-machines without a conscience’. Well, when they’re constantly told that they are heroes – superheroes – whose preferred mode of transport is saving humankind from doom, is it any surprise that some of them think they’re better than you and me? The authorities’ cynical promotion of cycling as a morally pure form of getting about town has energised an army of what I call ‘wankers’, creating unnecessary, morally loaded conflict between cyclists and motorists and between cyclists and pedestrians.

And the second notable thing about the promotion of the cult of cycling is how much it is about avoiding having a big debate about how our cities might be reshaped and remade to accommodate growing numbers of motorists and people in general. There’s a serious roads crisis in Britain. In 1964, there were seven million licensed private cars that covered 95 billion miles per year; by the late 2000s, that had risen to 26million cars travelling a total of 306 billion miles per year. And yet over that 40-year period, total road length in Britain increased by a mere 20 per cent – from 200,000 miles in 1964 to 245,000 miles in 2004/2005.

And how do the authorities deal with this practical problem of more cars and same-ish amount of road? Not by building more infrastructure or rethinking the transport system, but by unleashing a combination of punitive and moralistic measures designed to price or embarrass motorists off the roads and on to bikes/Shanks’s Pony instead. London has introduced the congestion charge as a quickfix solution to the problem of ‘too many cars’ (which is in fact a problem of ‘not enough road space’) and other cities want to follow suit, and the powers-that-be cynically elevate the cyclist as a sainted saddler whom we should all aspire to be like. The sanctification of the cyclist is built on the political, moral and technological failure of our rulers to rethink city life, city habits and city travel.

Look, we’re never going to have ‘cycling cities’. Why not? Because people have children whom they don’t want to transport to school on a tandem thanks very much; because we do weekly shops which won’t fit into a wicker basket; because workmen need to deliver big things to businesses and building sites and that can’t be done on a BMX; and because some people like the speed and wind-through-the-hair feeling that comes with driving a Ferrari but not a Chopper. More cars and fewer bikes is a sign of progress, which is why 80 per cent of Beijingers used to slog through that vast city on bikes and now only 19.7 per cent do. Our rulers need to deal with this fact, and find ways to accommodate it, rather than pushing forward the cyclist to do their dirty work of making drivers feel so guilt-ridden that they sell their hatchbacks and pedal like it was 1939.

Read more of my articles for spiked and other publications here.

A prejudice in search of a scientific disguise

Mon, 19 Jul 2010 18:15:34 +0100

spiked, 19 July 2010

The Royal Society in London, the prestigious, 350-year-old scientific institution, is launching a major study into the alleged problem of overpopulation. It will spend two years and thousands of pounds employing a working group to find out what is likely to be the impact of the twentieth century’s unprecedented growth in human numbers on politics, economics and the pursuit of ‘sustainable development’.

RS, take a tip from me, a friendly critic: in this era of belt-tightening, save yourselves loads of time and oodles of cash by simply writing down and press-releasing the following words: ‘Overpopulation is NOT the cause of social or economic problems.’

I’m not being a philistine. I’m not opposed to having big, deep, profound studies into the issues that impact, or don’t impact, on society. But when it comes to evidence for the fact that overpopulation is not the driving force for social disarray, there is already an embarrassment of riches.

There’s the fact that life has improved for the vast majority of humanity even as population has grown exponentially. When the original population scaremonger Thomas Malthus (a member of the Royal Society, funnily enough) predicted in the 1790s that if people didn’t stop breeding then ‘premature death would visit mankind’ - that there would be ‘food shortages, epidemics, pestilence and plagues’ which would ‘sweep off tens of thousands [of people]’ - there were a mere 980million human beings on Earth. Today, there are nearly seven times that number – 6.7 billion – and while there are still problems of poverty and hunger, especially in parts of the Third World, for most of us living standards and life expectancy have leapt forward.

In China, for example, there are now more people than there were on the entire planet in the era of Malthus, and yet their lot is better than it was for most of the unfortunate souls alive in the 1790s. In 1949, the population of China was 540million and average life expectancy was 36.5 years; today the population of China is 1.3 billion and average life expectancy is 73.4 years. And there are now six times as many cities in China (655) as there were five decades ago and around 235million Chinese have been lifted out of poverty in the past 15 years alone. All in the most populous nation on Earth. Where there are more ‘mouths to feed’ on a daily basis than there were across the entire globe in the period of Malthus’s food-shortage panicmongering. Clearly there is something other than human numbers which determines people’s fortunes.

There is also the fact that it is often people in the most overpopulated parts of the planet who have the nicest lives. Take Manhattan. There are 1.7million people crammed on to that tiny island and their lifestyles are the envy of millions of people around the world (including me). Yet in Africa, which is far more sparsely populated than some would have us believe, there are still major problems of poverty and malnutrition. Despite the claims of cranky outfits like the Optimum Population Trust (OPT) – which has argued that in order ‘for the whole planet to avoid the fate of Rwanda, Malthusian thinking needs rehabilitation’ (nice) – Africa actually contains 11 of the world’s 20 least densely populated nations. And some of these not-very-densely populated African countries have severe social problems. It’s not human numbers that cause them; it’s something else, something social and therefore eminently fixable.

Unfortunately, however, despite the rich factual, anecdotal and theoretical evidence that human numbers do not determine human beings’ fortunes, it seems unlikely that the Royal Society’s ‘comprehensive study’ will come to this conclusion. Because this smells a lot like advocacy research rather than actual research – that is, it’s an already-existing conclusion in search of supporting facts, rather than an exploration of facts in the name of reaching some open-ended, enlightening conclusion.

So the RS working group contains not one, but two leading members of the OPT: Jonathon Porritt, who has sung the praises of China’s one-child policy because without it ‘there would now have been 400million additional Chinese citizens’; and David Attenborough, who says he has ‘never seen a problem that wouldn’t be easier to solve with fewer people and which doesn’t become harder to solve when more people are involved’. (Er, what about building dams? Or launching revolutions? Or building gleaming new cities? All those things are better done with more people rather than fewer. These Malthusians seem ignorant of the fact that human society has advanced more in the past 200 years than it did in the previous 20,000, precisely when there was an ‘explosion’ of people. That sweeping progress both created the scope for having more people, while at the same time being facilitated by those increased numbers of people.)

Even the supposedly sedate and objective chair of the working group – Sir John Sulston of human genome fame – said at the launch of the study that if we don’t get to grips with ‘where we are going in relation to population’, then ‘we may survive but we won’t flourish’. The difficulty of being properly objective on this issue in our era of widespread, unquestioned, utterly conformist neo-Malthusianism was captured in the media coverage of the RS’s announcement. ‘Population explosion scrutinised as scientists urge politicians to act’, screamed the Independent, next to a picture of lots of people on a crowded high street. ‘The human population is far higher than any other primate at any time in history’, said the BBC, next to a picture of thousands of people at a rock gig (hard evidence, surely, that the planet is overpopulated).

Given the Malthusian affiliations of some of the members of the working group, the scary-sounding pronouncements of its chairman, and the pre-emptive expectation of the media that this study will find that there has been an ‘explosion’ of human primates who are causing all manner of ecological disasters, it’s hard to avoid the conclusion that this is an exercise in dressing up the trendy prejudice that the planet is swarming with too many people in some pseudo-scientific garb. It’s a search for serious-sounding Facts, with a capital F, with which the Malthusians marauding through the corridors of power and influence might make their prejudices sound a bit more profound and a little less prejudiced. I hope I’m wrong. But the signs aren’t good.

The rise and rise of neo-Malthusianism is one of the most depressing trends of our age. It captures, above all, the severe lack of social and cultural and political imagination today. In essence, influential people’s inability to imagine new ways of organising society, or new ways of delivering affluence and plenty to humankind, leads them to view all problems as a consequence of there being limited, finite resources and too many bloody human beings hoovering them up. Miserabilist mathematics takes the place of social experimentation and debate. In truth, the real problem today is the limits that have been imposed on human thinking and ambition, the sustainability-obsessed straitjacket we have all been forced in to. Once we wriggle free from these intellectual handcuffs, who knows, we might find that there is no limit to how many people we can have on this planet, or to how full and free and satisfying their lives can be.

Read more of my articles for spiked and other publications here.

Return to austerity?

Tue, 06 Jul 2010 07:05:35 +0100

Big Issue, 6 July 2010

The most extraordinary thing about George Osborne’s emergency budget – even more extraordinary than the sight of posh Tories and yellowish Lib Dems standing shoulder-to-shoulder as the chancellor held up the battered red box – is the idea that austerity is unavoidable.

The u-word has been used again and again by Osborne and his party leader David Cameron.

“This is an unavoidable budget because of the mess we have to clear up”, said Cameron. Osborne labelled it “the unavoidable budget”. The press fell into line with headlines such as “Government unveils unavoidable austerity budget”.

Yet the truth is, there’s nothing unavoidable about responding to the current economic crisis by ushering in an age of austerity. Rather the Lib-Con government’s focus on making cuts in the public sector and hiking up taxes – especially VAT – reveals their utter lack of anything approaching an economic policy or industrial policy.

They only cut because they cannot envisage a way to generate new economic growth. They desperately try to make savings because they have no vision for creating new wealth.

With no serious policies for building a better economy, they are reduced to firefighting the current economic crisis.

There were many curiosities in the first budget of the Lib-Con government. First, it exposed underlying tensions in the coalition.

Many believed that the coming together of Cameron and Clegg, most notably in that gushing, Richard Curtis-style press conference in the Downing Street garden, would spell the end of political tensions and “yah-boo politics”.

Yet the budget has revealed that the post-election, born-of necessity marriage of the Tories and the Lib Dems did not put paid to the political and personality differences between those two parties.

Lib Dem backbenchers are rebelling against (well, complaining about at least) the plan to raise VAT to 20%. And well they might complain: their party went into the election arguing that they would never raise what is considered by many people to be a “regressive tax” because it hits poor people harder than rich.

One expert estimates that the richest 10% of people spend £1 in every £25 of their income on VAT, while the poorest 10% of people spend £1 in every £7 of their income on VAT.

On 8 April, Clegg assured Lib Dem voters and prospective voters that, “We will not have to raise VAT to deliver our promises… Let me repeat that: our plans do not require a rise in VAT.” The Lib Dems unveiled a poster warning of the “Tory VAT bombshell”, telling us we would “pay £389 more a year in VAT under the Conservatives”. Now we’ll be paying more under the Conservative-Liberals.

Many have concluded that this is a fundamentally Tory budget, made to appear “nicer” by being fronted by a few soft-spoken Liberal Democrats. It is likely to damage the Lib Dems’ reputation, badly.

The second and more serious curious thing about the budget is its insistence that austerity is the “only solution” to the economic crisis.

This reveals that while the government might be fairly competent – pushing through a relatively tough budget without too much blowback – it is seriously lacking in ambition, vision and Big Policy nous.

The Lib-Cons’ focus on cutting free swimming lessons for less well-off children, reining in free school meals, reassessing housing benefit and so on is the modern equivalent of fiddling while Rome burns.

These things will save money here and there and reduce the public debt by a certain amount, but they will do nothing to address the underlying lack of serious innovation and output at the heart of the UK economy.

As Daniel Ben-Ami of the financial magazine Fund Strategy pointed out, “If Britain’s productive base is not rejuvenated, then the chronically weak economy will not be able to survive without extensive state intervention.” In short, a failure to get to grips with the real problems of the economy will at best keep things plodding along.

The truth is that Cameron’s age of austerity is avoidable. We could respond to the economic crisis, not simply by rearranging the economic furniture, but by getting serious about innovation; by investing in massive job-creating, energy-producing programmes such as building nuclear power stations; by challenging the fashionable idea that an economy which produces actual things rather than shifting money around is old-fashioned and polluting; by asking, seriously, whether we want to have an economy that is kept on life-support by the state or one which is dynamic, daring, different, productive.

Britain would be a better place if some of these big ideas were scribbled down on the papers stuffed in Osborne’s red box, rather than just his small-minded instinct to trim and hike.

Read more of my articles for the Big Issue and other publications here.

Dying for a PR win from the Afghan War

Wed, 30 Jun 2010 16:41:29 +0100

The Australian, 30 June 2010

RECENT events confirm that the Western powers’ main motivation in Afghanistan is not to “save the Afghan people”, but to save face. From President Barack Obama’s handling of the General Stanley McChrystal debacle to Prime Minister David Cameron’s promise that Britain’s “brave troops” will be home by 2015, it’s becoming increasingly clear that the NATO forces remain in Afghanistan primarily to avoid admitting defeat.

They are not there to achieve any tangible goals, but rather to project a PR image of Western steadfastness and commitment as a disguise for the profound political and military defeatism afflicting their Afghan mission.

This PR imperative, this mission to save face, is giving rise to a new and dangerous kind of war: one driven not by any Western need for resources or any desire to boost the West’s political clout in foreign fields, but by a desperation to spin disarray as determination and to make defeat look something like victory. Men are being sent into war, and Afghan positions attacked, primarily as an exercise in PR rather than in imperial expansion.

Everyone now admits the war cannot be won. They actually say this openly. Departing Afghanistan in October 2008, Brigadier Mark Carleton-Smith, the commander of British forces, said NATO should not expect to win a “decisive military victory”. Brigadier-General Richard Blanchette, spokesman for the International Security Assistance Force that oversees NATO’s mission in Afghanistan, has said there can be “no military solution”.

The US Secretary of State for Defence, Robert Gates, denounced this kind of comment as “defeatist” at the end of 2008. Yet a year later Obama announced that American forces would start to withdraw from Afghanistan in July 2011 - while simultaneously announcing that 30,000 additional American troops would be sent there in the meantime.

It was an announcement of war and withdrawal in the same breath for purely PR purposes: to make America look “still committed” at the same time as it effectively announces an end to its mission.

The internal clash in NATO, the very public spat between the “no-victory” British brigadiers and the “anti-defeatist” American defence men, is not a substantive conflict over the direction of the war or how to defeat the Taliban - rather it’s a disagreement over public relations.

While European politicians’ commitment to the face-saving mission only extends to saying “let’s focus on political engagement rather than military victory”, Obama’s commitment to the face-saving mission extends to sending 30,000 more troops, actual real men and women who could come to fatal harm yet whose presence will have the upside of taking the edge off America’s announcement of withdrawal.

The same imperative to save face drove Obama’s response to McChrystal’s interview with Rolling Stone. The interview demonstrated alarming levels of disarray in America’s political and military elites.

Yet, again, there’s no huge difference of opinion between McChrystal and Obama over the war: both think it’s going badly (one of McChrystal’s aides said the war cannot be won) and both think it needs some kind of satisfying closure. Their war of words was entirely over how a reality that they both agree on - that Afghanistan is a mess - should be presented.

As The Washington Post said, McChrystal’s crime was to mess with Obama’s mission of “projecting a united front of seriousness to the public”. Obama has now sent General David Petraeus, who oversaw the surge in Iraq, to take over McChrystal’s position in Afghanistan -yet this should be seen, not as confirmation of Washington’s militaristic or political determination, but as a PR stunt. The dispatching of Petraeus is not about deepening the mission in Afghanistan but is once more about projecting a “front of seriousness”.

The Washington Post cites White House insiders saying that the attractive thing about Petraeus is that he has a “clear understanding of how Washington and the media work and how to cultivate an image that increases your political leverage”, demonstrating again the extent to which Afghan deployments are now driven more by media concerns than military ones.

Likewise, Cameron announced at the weekend that Britain will be out of Afghanistan by 2015 while presenting this as the end result of having helped to “train their troops and their civil society”. Self-congratulating while retreating.

But more fundamentally it was the lack of any clear mission, the constantly changing justifications for the war, the crises of basic equipment (in the British military), the intervention of modern ideas about post-traumatic stress disorder and the vulnerability of soldiers, the adherence to a risk-averse strategy that elevated dumb drone-led missions over the gathering of human intelligence, and the general lack of political will and direction - in short the very crisis of Western politics which our leaders hoped this war would help to resolve - which led to self-defeat in Afghanistan.

And the announcement of timetables for withdrawal by both Obama and Cameron gives the Taliban an incentive to hold out for a few more years, with a fairly low-level guerilla war, before launching what even some Western officials now acknowledge to be a likelihood: a stab for power post-NATO against a Karzai regime sullied by its association with the defeatist forces of occupation.

The face-saving mission in Afghanistan, and London and Washington’s attempts to stave off their political crises by projecting a “front of seriousness” in Afghanistan, is generating a dangerous kind of warfare, one in which serious strategy is demoted in favour of spin, long-term thinking takes second place to short-term PR, and life-and-death missions are launched to “cultivate an image that increases your political leverage”.

This gives rise to wars which can be even more unstable and unpredictable than the imperial missions of yesteryear, and in which blood is spilled well, for nothing really.

Read more of my articles for the Australian and other publications here.

Afghanistan: the politics of PR by other means

Wed, 30 Jun 2010 16:37:46 +0100

spiked, 28 June 2010

Recent events confirm that the Western powers’ main motivation in Afghanistan is not to ‘save the Afghan people’, but to save face. From President Obama’s handling of the General McChrystal debacle to UK prime minister David Cameron’s promise that Britain’s ‘brave troops’ will be home by 2015, it’s becoming increasingly clear that the NATO forces, led by America and Britain, remain in Afghanistan primarily to avoid admitting defeat.

They are not there to achieve any tangible goals, far less for oil or minerals as some cranky anti-war activists claim, but rather to project a PR image of Western steadfastness and commitment as a disguise for the profound political and military defeatism afflicting their Afghan mission. This PR imperative, this mission to save face, is giving rise to a new and dangerous kind of war: one driven not by any Western need for resources or any desire to boost the West’s political clout in foreign fields, but by a desperation to spin disarray as determination and to make defeat look something like victory. Men are being sent into war, and Afghan positions attacked, primarily as an exercise in PR rather than in imperial expansion.

Everyone now admits the war cannot be won. They actually say this openly. Departing Afghanistan in October 2008, Brigadier Mark Carleton-Smith, the commander of British forces, said NATO should not expect to win a ‘decisive military victory’. The UN special representative in Afghanistan, Kai Eide, has said: ‘We all know that we cannot win it militarily. It has to be won through political means.’ Brigadier-General Richard Blanchette, spokesman for the International Security Assistance Force that oversees NATO’s mission in Afghanistan, has said there can be ‘no military solution’.

The US secretary of state for defence, Robert Gates, denounced this kind of comment as ‘defeatist’ at the end of 2008. Yet a year later, his president, Barack Obama, announced that American forces would start to withdraw from Afghanistan in July 2011 - while simultaneously announcing that 30,000 additional American troops would be sent there in the meantime. It was an announcement of war and withdrawal in the same breath, ‘escalating while retreating’, as one American journalist aptly called it. This demonstrated that, for all their attacks on the ‘defeatism’ of their British and UN allies, the Washington elite also believes the war cannot be won and that a withdrawal, in a year from now, must be instigated. Only they prefer to sex up their announcement of withdrawal with a simultaneous surge, the sending of 30,000 troops to Afghanistan for purely PR purposes: to make America look ‘still committed’ at the same time as it effectively announces an end to its mission.

The internal clash in NATO, the very public spat between the ‘no-victory’ British brigadiers and the ‘anti-defeatist’ American defence men, is not a substantive conflict over the direction of the war or how to defeat the Taliban - rather it’s a disagreement over public relations. All sides in NATO agree the war is unwinnable and ought to be wrapped up, but disagree over whether this should be presented in terms of difficulty or victory, as a consequence of how hard getting rid of the Taliban turned out to be or as the always-planned endpoint to a war that always had the fairly limited aim of weakening the Taliban, stabilising the north of Afghanistan, and creating a relatively strong Afghan security force (as some US officials now claim).

When Obama announced those additional 30,000 troops, it was not, as some commentators claimed, evidence that he was more committed than Brits and UN types to Afghanistan - it was evidence that he was more committed than them to the reputation-rescuing PR war. While European politicians’ commitment to the face-saving mission only extends to saying ‘let’s focus on political engagement rather than military victory’, Obama’s commitment to the face-saving mission extends to sending 30,000 more troops, actual real men and women who could come to serious and even fatal harm yet whose presence will have the upside of taking the edge off America’s announcement of withdrawal. Some in NATO are only prepared to issue duplicitously well-worded press releases in an attempt to save Western face in Afghanistan - Obama is prepared to risk people’s lives to save Western face.

The same imperative to save face drove Obama’s response to General Stanley McChrystal’s interview with Rolling Stone. This was an extraordinary affair. Brought about both by the Icelandic volcano (which meant McChrystal and his team were stuck in Paris where Rolling Stone could grill them while they were irritable) and alcohol (they consumed a lot), the interview demonstrated alarming levels of disarray in America’s political and military elites. Yet, again, there’s no huge difference of opinion between McChrystal and Obama over the war: both think it’s going badly (one of McChrystal’s aides said the war cannot be won) and both think it needs some kind of satisfying closure. Their stand-off was no old-style substantive clash between a president and a military man with utterly different visions for how to conquer some foreign quarter; no, their war of words was entirely over how a reality that they both agree on - that Afghanistan is a mess - should be presented.

As the Washington Post said, McChrystal’s crime was to mess with Obama’s mission of ‘projecting a united front of seriousness to the public’. Obama has now sent General David H Petraeus, who oversaw the surge in Iraq, to take over McChrystal’s position in Afghanistan - yet this should be seen, not as confirmation of Washington’s militaristic or political determination, but, like the announcement of those 30,000 extra troops at the end of 2009, as a PR stunt. The dispatching of Petraeus is not about deepening the mission in Afghanistan but is once more about projecting a ‘front of seriousness’. The Washington Post cites White House insiders saying that the attractive thing about Petraeus is that he has a ‘clear understanding of how Washington and the media work and how to cultivate an image that increases your political leverage’, demonstrating again the extent to which Afghan deployments are now driven more by media concerns than military ones, by the desire to project an image rather than to achieve an aim. Likewise, British PM David Cameron announced at the weekend that Britain will be out of Afghanistan by 2015 - ‘make no mistake about it’ he said breathlessly - while presenting this as the end result of having helped to ‘train their troops and their civil society’. Self-congratulating while retreating.

It is important to recognise what it was that defeated NATO forces in Afghanistan. It was not an external enemy, but internal incoherence. Indeed, this isn’t a defeat as such - it really is defeatism. Military commanders talk about the toughness of Afghanistan’s terrain and the grittiness of the Taliban, and no doubt these were practical factors in the wearing down of the NATO mission (larger and more focused imperial armies than the contemporary NATO machine have been exhausted by the Afghan experience). But more fundamentally it was the lack of any clear mission, the constantly changing justifications for the war, the crises of basic equipment (in the British military), the intervention of modern ideas about post-traumatic stress disorder and the vulnerability of soldiers, the adherence to a risk-averse strategy that elevated dumb drone-led missions over the gathering of human intelligence, and the general lack of political will and direction - in short the very crisis of Western politics which our leaders hoped this war would help to resolve - which led to self-defeat in Afghanistan.

To argue that the Taliban defeated the West is to get things completely the wrong way around. In fact the Taliban has been largely sustained, both morally and militarily, by the defeatism of the NATO forces. As one report put it, Taliban leaders ‘have seized on the “defeatist” comments made by Western officials to score a propaganda victory’; they have, according to some accounts, recruited new fighters and enthused existing ones on the back of Western defeatism. And the announcement of timetables for withdrawal by both Obama and Cameron, their advertisement of the fact that they are not staying for very much longer, gives the Taliban an incentive to hold out for a few more years, with a fairly low-level guerrilla war, before launching what even some Western officials now acknowledge to be a likelihood: a stab for power post-NATO against a Karzai regime sullied by its association with the defeatist forces of occupation.

If, like spiked, you opposed this war from the start, you might be asking yourself: so what? We didn’t want NATO forces in Afghanistan in the first place, so why shouldn’t we celebrate their collapse into disarray? Because defeatism is a very destructive force indeed in international affairs. The face-saving mission in Afghanistan – London and Washington’s attempts to stave off their political crises more broadly by projecting a ‘front of seriousness’ in Afghanistan – is generating a dangerous kind of warfare, one in which serious strategy is demoted in favour of spin, long-term thinking takes second place to short-term PR, and life-and-death missions are launched to ‘cultivate an image that increases your political leverage’. This gives rise to wars which can be even more unstable and unpredictable than the imperial missions of yesteryear, and in which blood is spilled… well, for nothing really.

Read more of my articles for spiked and other publications here.

The shallow socialism of hating Michael O’Leary

Fri, 25 Jun 2010 22:09:41 +0100

spiked, 25 June 2010

‘For years flying has been the preserve of rich fuckers. Now everyone can afford to fly.’ At a time when capitalists have had every drop of character wrung out of them by being forced to learn managementspeak and to rebrand themselves as ‘socially responsible’ in order not to upset the likes of Naomi Klein, Michael O’Leary, CEO of Ryanair, sticks out like a turd in a punch bowl. Or like a pope on a Ryanair flight. (O’Leary dressed up as the pope to preach about the wondrousness of low air fares on Ryanair’s first flight from Dublin to Rome.)

In recent decades CEOs around the world have been forced to wash their gobs out with the soap of corporate responsibility, giving rise to a generation of fat capitalist bosses who are not fat, not openly capitalistic, and not particularly bossy. Yet O’Leary, as evidenced in this new collection of his ‘wit and wisdom’, talks openly about wanting to make as much moolah as possible as quickly as possible. ‘If the drink sales are falling off, we get the pilots to engineer a bit of air turbulence. That usually spikes up the drink sales’, he says. And that’s the thing with leery O’Leary – you don’t know if he’s joking or not.

I feel torn about O’Leary, not knowing whether to like him or loathe him, mainly because I’m a Marxist. But – and this is absolutely true – I first felt the tingling of Marxist thought in the nerve endings of my brain while on one of those vomit-inducing, wailing-baby-packed ferry crossings between Britain and Ireland. I was 18 and sailing from Dublin to Holyhead, devouring Lenin’s State and Revolution in one of the ship’s corridors (because it was the only place on the godforsaken vessel where there wasn’t a drunk person singing ‘The Fields of Athenrye’) in preparation for a discussion about the book back in London. ‘The working class must break up, smash the “readymade state machinery”, and not confine itself merely to laying hold of it’, Lenin said, making me wish the ship would hurry up so that I could get back to London and start rousing for a revolution.

Yet now, courtesy of O’Leary’s exploitation of airline workers, I can get to Ireland, puke-free and feeling fresh, in two hours rather than twenty and for a tenner (if I’m lucky) rather than £100. As O’Leary himself says: ‘The alternative to progress is Thomas Hardy’s Wessex: horse-drawn carts, people living below the poverty line, and only the very rich going on Italian tours. Now we make it possible for everybody to go on Italian tours.’ What’s a modern Marxist to do?

It’s easy to see why O’Leary, who since 1985 has turned Ryanair from a tiny Irish airline with one plane flying between Gatwick and Waterford into the largest airline in Europe, winds people up. He irritates his fellow capitalists because he refuses to follow the PC rules of the new Caring Capitalism and thus exists as a constant reminder (a constant reminder known to dress as Santa for press conferences) of what capitalists are primarily motivated by: maximising profit. And he annoys the hell out of what passes for radical anti-capitalists these days because he refuses to play their game: to be meek, to apologise for making money, to make ads featuring black kids and white kids running through deserts to a soundtrack of Kiri Te Kanawa (he prefers ads featuring sexy women dressed as schoolgirls under the banner ‘HOTTEST back-to-school air fares’).

What other CEO could have a collection of his quotations published? O’Leary is un-PC. ‘Germans will crawl bollock-naked over broken glass to get low fares’, he says. He’s confrontational. On greens he says: ‘We want to annoy the fuckers whenever we can. The best thing to do with environmentalists is shoot them.’ He’s unapologetic. On Ryanair’s ‘No Refund’ policy, he has said: ‘You are not getting a refund so fuck off.’ And: ‘We are not interested in your sob stories.’ And: ‘People will say, “As the Founding Fathers wrote down in the American Constitution, we have the inalienable right to bear arms and send in our complaints by email.” No you bloody don’t. So go away.’ And: ‘We don’t fall over ourselves if you say “My granny fell ill”. What part of “No Refund” don’t you understand?’

Unlike Lord Alan Sugar, he doesn’t cosy up to politicians. ‘If I were David Cameron I would stop competing over who is better at riding a bicycle and call for a serious debate on the next generation of nuclear power stations. Sticking a windmill on top of your house is not the answer.’ He hates the EU oligarchy. ‘Sometimes it’s good to show Brussels the two fingers’, he has said. ‘Yes I have read the Lisbon Treaty. It’s a fucking pain-in-the-arse document. I nearly died of boredom’, he said in the run-up to the first Irish referendum on Lisbon in 2008, before telling Irish voters that they should say ‘Yes’ to it anyway because that would be in his – ie, a European-based capitalist’s – interests. In a recent newspaper interview he said: ‘I’m disrespectful towards what is perceived to be authority. Like, I think the prime minister of Ireland is a gobshite.’

He saves his hottest ire for environmentalists. There is not a businessman on Earth (well, none that I know of) who isn’t currently bending over backwards to appease his green critics by drafting emission-reduction strategies etczzz – except, that is, O’Leary. ‘The BBC runs green week, ITV runs greener week, Sky runs even greener week, Channel 4 runs even bloody greener week, and each time they use a picture of aircraft taking off’, he complains (quite accurately as it happens). When the Bishop of London, Richard Chartres, said in 2006 that flying is a sin, O’Leary accused the man of God of spouting the ‘usual cliched horseshit that he obviously heard at some dinner party with the chatterati’. Most eco-criminally of all, O’Leary has said: ‘The fact that our tea and coffee supplier is a Fairtrade brand is a welcome bonus, but the decision was based on lowering costs. We’d change to a non-Fairtrade brand in the morning if it was cheaper.’ And his vision for the future? ‘Let’s go nuclear… and then watch the eco-nuts go crazy.’

O’Leary’s verbal assaults on the sandal-wearing brigade (as he refers to them) captures why he is so hated, why some greens and anti-capitalists are more agitated by his capitalist company than by almost any other (apart, of course, from BP). Ours is an age of capitalism-in-denial, when capitalists are encouraged to present themselves as ethical actors rather than profit-makers and to hold back from doing too much R&D in case it leads to the further dirtying of the planet by mankind’s greedy, grubby hand. Indeed, there has been a wacky meeting of minds between capitalists and anti-capitalists in recent years, as both have reoriented themselves around the project of Making Capitalism Nicer – the bosses by investing billions into corporate social responsibility projects, and their critics by staging carnivalesque protests whose main demand can be summed up as: ‘You need to be even more corporately socially responsible and stuff!’ This bizarre political union between the fat cats and the skinny anti-caps is best captured by the fact that, in the words of Reason magazine, Naomi Klein’s anti-capitalist bible No Logo has ‘inadvertently served as the most influential marketing manual of the decade’, as big companies have incorporated its anti-branding, pro-caring message into the big consensual mission to make capitalism less fat, ugly and cocky.

And the problem with O’Leary – ‘jumped-up Paddy’ that he is (his words) – is that he’s pissing on the parade. His refusal to bend the knee to the social and responsible and green agendas serves to remind us that, actually, capitalism is still about exploitation, division, conflict. Asked how he keeps his staff motivated and happy, he said: ‘Fear.’ He doesn’t play the ‘I love my staff’ game played by other bosses (who then think nothing of sacking people), instead saying: ‘MBA students come out with, “My staff is my most important asset.” Bullshit. Staff is usually your biggest cost.’ He reminds us that the relationship between state regulation and capitalist enterprise is still often a fraught one. On the European Commission’s introduction of new rules in relation to low-fare airlines, he said: ‘There are fucking Kim Il-Jungs in the Commission. You cannot have civil servants trying to design rules that make everything a level playing field. That’s called North fucking Korea and everybody is starving there.’ And his loudmouthness reminds us that capitalists are more than happy to fuck (to use O’Learyspeak) the workers when they need to: ‘I don’t give a damn about labour laws in France. We’ll break the laws in France if that’s what needs to be done.’

With his unguarded utterances, O’Leary reveals that capitalism is not – and never will be – a hunky-dory arena in which floppy-haired bosses and their ping-pong-playing workforce gather together to make the world a better place. Instead there’s tension, there’s competition, there’s self-interest, there’s fear, there’s conflict, there’s angst. The capitalists hate him for this because he is giving voice to the kind of deep-seated issues that they have worked hard to rebrand. And because - with his undoubted impact of changing many people’s lives for the better by opening up virtually the whole of Europe to the less well-off - he reminds today’s undynamic, conservative, regulation-inviting capitalists what their class used to do as a byproduct of their drive to maximise profits: break down barriers and drive the economy and society into new areas. And the ‘anti-capitalists’ hate O’Leary’s outspokenness because for them – obsessed as they are with the surface of capitalism rather than its inner workings and relations – there is nothing worse than an arrogant, foul-mouthed, money-making man. Indeed, the anti-O’Leary outlook in radical circles captures how shallow contemporary anti-capitalism is. Today’s rads are less concerned with the exploitation of workers and the hampering of human progress than they are with the logos and wording and cockiness levels of contemporary capitalism. Which is why they hate Ryanair but love Whole Foods.

Indeed, such is the backward-looking nature of ‘anti-capitalism’ today that O’Leary, simply by being an anti-green blusterer and wind-up merchant of epic proportions, can come across as more progressive than his anti-capitalist critics. Where they want to ground flights, or at least make them more expensive in order to make them less frequent and thus help ‘save the planet’, O’Leary says: ‘[In the past], nobody moved more than three miles from where they were born. Young people now want to go to Ibiza on bonking holidays. Let them. Ask them in downtown Afghanistan if they would like the M25 and they would bite your hand off.’ At the very least, the rise of Ryanair has allowed me and millions of others to get off those bloody ferries and into the skies, which gives us far more free time to do other things – even to continue reading Lenin and to dream of that revolution.

Read more of my articles for spiked and other publications here.

The rise and rise of the Champagne Malthusians

Tue, 15 Jun 2010 07:11:30 +0100

spiked, 14 June 2010

In March 1933, the International Birth Control Movement held a Malthusian Ball in London. In the opulent surroundings of the five-star Dorchester Hotel, the great and the good gathered to discuss the problem of poor people’s breeding, the ‘Negro issue’, the best way to promote ‘family planning’, and other burning Malthusian dilemmas. All while decked out in diamonds, gowns and tuxedos, doing the foxtrot and clinking their champagne glasses as they mulled over how best to stop the lower specimens of humanity from getting knocked up with such dumb abandon.

Last week I attended a modern-day equivalent of the Malthusian Ball. It was in the luxurious crypt of St Pancras Church in Euston rather than at the Dorchester and there was no dancing this time. But we were invited to drink ‘luxury Belgian beer from champagne flutes’ and to peruse £1,500 paintings depicting ‘teeming crowds’ as we debated the ‘population problem’. The attendees were more casually dressed than their 1933 forebears - no floor-draping dresses - but once again, in between sips from champagne glasses, men and women with pronunciation far more received than mine gathered to fret over how humankind is spreading like a ‘cancer’ (their word).

Sponsored by Deus, ‘the luxury Belgian beer’, and supported by the Optimum Population Trust (OPT), the posh population-control lobby, the Malthusian knees-up kicked off with a ‘debate’ inside St Pancras Church itself. It felt entirely fitting to be plonked in a pew surrounded by Christian paraphernalia while listening to angry men say things like ‘we’re doomed’ (Roger Martin of the OPT) and ‘I am disgusted and sickened’ (Aubrey Manning OBE). Just as the original population scaremonger, the Reverend Thomas Malthus (1766-1834), issued warnings about sex and procreation and too many dirt-poor people from a pulpit, so these modern-day Malthusians described human beings as ‘environment trashers’ in hallowed surroundings, too. Same shit, different church.

Of course when I say it started with a ‘debate’, I don’t mean a debate. The only disagreement between the six panellists was whether the ‘population bomb’ is still ticking or has been temporarily defused. All agreed that there is a thing called a ‘population bomb’ - such a swell of sweaty human beings that everything might one day explode and cause environmental apocalypse on a Mad Maxian scale. When the chairman asked if anyone in the audience (about 200 people) thought population growth wasn’t a problem, only two people put their hands up. One was me. And the other one, when he spoke, turned out to be quite concerned about population growth after all. So it was just me then, hand aloft, being stared at by a churchful of Malthusians, a bit like if a chimney sweep had wandered into that 1933 Ball.

The similarities and differences between the Malthusian Ball 80 years ago and last week’s luxury beer-drenched ‘debate’ are striking. The key similarity is that both the old tiara-wearing Malthusians and the tiara-less ones today can only understand humanity’s problems in biological terms. Lacking any grasp of how society works - or more to the point how it doesn’t work sometimes - they instead see all crises as the fault of individual licentiousness and breeding. And possessed of such a deep pessimism that they can only conceive of mankind as pillager of the Earth rather than creator of things and ideas, they have a childlike view of the planet as a larder of limited resources that we are greedily hoovering up.

Then and now, the fatal flaw of Malthusianism is that it views social problems, like poverty and unemployment, as failings on the part of the individual. So it’s not because economic affairs are badly organised that some people are unemployed – it’s because some dozy women 18 years ago had too many children and now their newly adult sons and daughters are competing for jobs in an overcrowded market. It’s not because society has skewed priorities that some people around the world go hungry – it’s because very poor African women have too many kids (five-ish, compared to 1.9 in the UK) and these little black babies’ demand for food outstrips how much food exists.

Obsessed with the idea of limited resources and the insatiable greed of men, Malthusians’ only solution is to save resources by reducing the number of men. A progressive possessed of a social outlook looks at the problems facing mankind and says (in a nutshell) ‘we need more stuff’ – a Malthusian looks at them and says ‘we need fewer people’. Their belief that all the world’s problems are caused by there being Too Many People has not only been proved unfounded again and again (we have continually discovered new and improved ways to make and distribute resources), but it also inevitably makes them misanthropic. Those who think human numbers can continue rising should remember that ‘unremitting growth is the doctrine of the cancer cell’, said Professor John Guillebaud in St Pancras Church, capturing well the Malthusians’ view of humanity as a virus on Gaia’s person.

Yet there are differences, too, between yesteryear’s Malthusians and today’s. For a start they no longer refer to themselves as Malthusians. The only person who used the M-word during last week’s debate was me, much to the irritation of the 200, er, Malthusians. They’re extremely careful about what they say. Where the May 1933 edition of Birth Control Review, which reported on that year’s Malthusian Ball, openly said that ‘to get a strong and healthy nation it is essential that we breed from the right stocks’ (1), today’s Malthusians won’t even utter the phrase ‘population control’. ‘Can we all agree not to use those two words’, said Professor Guillebaud. ‘Because this is not about control.’

‘Helping the poor’, ‘female empowerment’, ‘choice’ – today’s Malthusians sound more like feminists than imperialists. Yet there’s something creepily disingenuous in their use of the language of rights. The Malthusians’ adoption of a PC lingo is a cynical attempt to overcome some massive historic embarrassments. Late nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century Malthusianism was tightly tied up with Empire, eugenics, even with Nazism. The discrediting of those racist projects dealt a heavy blow to the population-control lobby and its ideas about superior races and inferior over-breeders (the Malthusian Ball was designed to raise funds to help ‘develop interest in birth control in the Far East, especially India’) (2). In the mid- to late twentieth century, redfaced Malthusians desperate to distance themselves from their super-shady past started to talk about ‘family planning’ rather than ‘population control’ and ‘female empowerment in the developing world’ rather than ‘spreading the propaganda and practice of birth control among the nations that most need it’ (as the 1933 Birth Control Review more honestly put it).

Yet beneath the PC veneer, there lurk many of the same ideas, and much of the same disingenuousness. I absolutely support the right of women in the developed and developing worlds to have as many or as few children as they choose, and to have access to contraception and abortion services as and when they need them. Yet what the Malthusians are offering women has nothing to do with rights or choice. Already they were starting to use this language in 1933, when the Birth Control Review argued that the funds from the Malthusian Ball would guarantee ‘the rights of the millions of poor and struggling women’ (2), and now things have come full circle with Professor Guillebaud saying last week that it is ‘plain wrong to coerce people [in the Third World]’.

Yet when you promote ‘family planning’ on the basis that too many children will ‘destroy biodiversity’, on the basis that women are spawning ‘environment trashers’, on the basis that ‘we are doomed’ if women keep on breeding irresponsibly, on the basis that our offspring, little more than a species of ‘ape’, will do ‘sick and disgusting’ things to the Earth (all direct quotations from last week’s Malthusian get-together), then you’re not giving women a choice – you’re giving them an ultimatum: ‘Stop breeding or the planet gets it.’ You are polluting their decision-making universe with your own prejudices, using the politics of fear to get them to make the ‘right choices’. That is coercion. And whether you’re doing it in order to create a ‘strong and healthy nation’, as in 1933, or to ‘protect biodiversity’, as in 2010, the result is the same: women’s freedom of choice is undermined, and ordinary people are branded with the blame for what are in fact social problems.

‘Eros has triumphed [and] Gaia is exhausted’, said the programme for last week’s suicidal shindig in London. Who could possibly think that was a bad thing, the triumph of the god of sex and beauty over the green god Gaia and its constant demands for sacrifice and self-denial? Only a Malthusian, the kind of person who fears the masses enjoying a little bit of Eros because it might just create another mouth to feed, another body to clothe, another arse to wipe.

Read more of my articles for spiked and other publications here.

Glastonbury is for middle-aged masochists

Sat, 12 Jun 2010 20:35:00 +0100

Spectator, 12 June 2010

Europe’s biggest musical festival is now just a massive authoritarian pigpen, says Brendan O’Neill. No wonder the young are staying away.

Most people, when they hear the word Glastonbury, think of mud, drugs, drunkenness, moshing, free love, the lighting up of spliffs, and generally harmless experimentation in a field. Well, they’re right about the mud. Yet far from being a site of hippyish self-exploration, the Glastonbury music festival has become a tightly regimented gathering of middle-class masochists who don’t mind being bossed around by nosey cops and kill-joy greens for three long days.

Glastonbury now resembles a countercultural concentration camp, complete with CCTV cameras and ‘watchtowers’ (their word, not mine), rather than a Woodstock-style attempt to escape ‘The Man’.

This month Glastonbury turns 40. Like all 40-year-olds, it’s having an identity crisis. Run by hippy-cum-businessman Michael Eavis, on his aptly named Worthy Farm, the first Glastonbury festival took place in 1970 and attracted 1,500 hippies. The headline act was Marc Bolan and there was free milk for all. Men with beards and women without bras swayed to and fro in the open air in a desperate bid to preserve the spirit of the Sixties into the 1970s.

This year, starting on 23 June, ‘Glasto’, as some people annoyingly call it, will attract 175,000 people and nothing will be free, not even the milk. The headline acts are Gorillaz, Muse and Stevie Wonder. This represents an ageing Mojo editor’s view of what Good Music is. The line-up is designed to satisfy the thirtysomething, fortysomething, and even geriatric attendees. (As of 2007, Saga Insurance, the insurance firm for older people, has been offering over-50s who have Saga Motorhome Insurance a refund on the money they pay for a motorhome pitch at ‘Glasto’.)

Michael Eavis has admitted that Glastonbury has become too middle-aged and middle-class. ‘We have to try to get the youngsters back, the 16-, 17- and 18-year-olds,’ he said. ‘The 30- and 40-year-olds who now swarm the festival like overgrown teens desperately seeking kicks are too well-mannered and polite and respectable… which changes the character of it.’

Some say the yoof abandoned Glasto because it became too expensive, because the acts consist of boring, bloated World Music types, because there are other, smaller festivals — V, Reading — where they can watch bands their dads do not like. No doubt these things have contributed to the greying of Glastonbury. But there’s another, underexplored reason: over the years, Europe’s biggest festival has turned into a massive authoritarian pigpen. Attendees are monitored, filmed and lectured — and young people don’t like being hectored by has-been hippies. (Cont’d below.)

Hippyish music festivals used to be no-go zones for the police, and most people accepted that certain things that are not acceptable in everyday life would take place: clothes-shedding, dope-smoking, bed-hopping, stage-diving. Now, the police are invited into Glastonbury with open arms. In 2007, Glastonbury even became the test site for a new kind of policing: cops with cameras attached to the shoulders of their jackets were sent around Glasto’s campsites, and their footage — of revellers having fun and potentially misbehaving — was beamed ‘live’ to a control room. If the police in the control room spotted anything untoward, such as someone sucking on something that looked too fat to be a normal cigarette, they’d rush to the scene, guided by global-positioning system devices sewn into the camp-watching coppers’ jackets. The cops, from the Avon and Somerset Constabulary, were delighted to use Glasto to test out new forms of camera-based policing, but festival attendees were less impressed. ‘Glastonbury is the one place you would expect not to have to worry about being watched,’ said one.

In recent years, the police have also erected ‘covert capture tents’ at Glasto — tents that are left tantalisingly open, with various desired products visible to passers-by — toilet roll, perhaps, or wellington boots. Inside are tiny CCTV cameras, so if anyone does venture inside to nab the booty they will be caught on camera and arrested. I call this entrapment. The Glasto-police say it is an initiative to put ‘the fear of crime back in the criminal’.

According to the festival organisers’ turgid, nine-page Crime Reduction Strategy (I bet they didn’t have one of those in 1970), the reason festoon lighting is used to illuminate the main campsite areas is to reduce those ‘dark spots, where crime is more likely to take place’. The old hippies might have considered a ‘dark spot’ — an unlit, unmonitored, unpoliced area — a potential site for a bit of nookie or some bong-sharing. Today’s hippies see it as a crime hotspot.

The Crime Reduction Strategy also boasts of Glasto’s ‘watchtowers’, which are not staffed by armed guards (at least not yet), but are used to ‘monitor criminal activity and act as a deterrent’. The festival organisers encourage attendees to set up ‘local “neighbourhood watch” agreements with fellow campers’.

When Glasto attendees are not being spied on or entrapped, they’re being lectured about everything from safe sex to health and safety. The official festival guide tells revellers to ‘Practise Safe Sex’, warning them that ‘if you have sex without a condom you risk catching diseases such as gonorrhoea, syphilis or chlamydia’. This new morality of ‘safe sex’, based on the idea that other people are probably diseased, is the polar opposite of ‘free love’, which was based on the idea that exploring other people’s bodies and minds is a fun and uplifting thing to do. The festival guide warns against stage-diving, too, because it ‘may look like fun, but would you like to be dropped and trampled? Don’t put yourself at unnecessary risk.’

Meanwhile, busybody groups such as Greenpeace, Oxfam and the Samaritans can be seen everywhere at Glasto, lecturing attendees about their role in destroying the planet, their ignorance of African poverty, and the importance of good mental health.

Is it really any wonder teens don’t bother with it anymore? They get enough of this health-obsessed, risk-averse, sex-suspicious, crime-fearin’ propaganda in their Personal, Social and Health Education classes at school. The old hippies initiated music festivals because they believed, perhaps a little self-indulgently, that young people were capable of setting up arenas for communion and self-exploration separate from the pieties and obsessions of everyday life. Now older, greyer and more money-minded, they think that the young are not trustworthy or sensible after all, and therefore must be prodded and goaded like cattle.

The rejection of the new, over-policed, anti-risk Glastonbury by young people is an act of principled rebellion on a par with Michael Eavis’s decision to set up a small, hippyish music festival in the first place in 1970. Today, he’s The Man.

Read more of my articles for the Spectator and other publications here.

What the Israel-bashers learned from Bush

Tue, 08 Jun 2010 16:19:00 +0100

spiked, 7 June 2010

As the British Gaza-flotilla activists deported from Israel arrive back in the UK, to a fawning media welcome not seen since ‘Our Boys’ returned from killing Argentineans in 1982, the true meaning of anti-Israel activism is becoming clear. Behind the keffiyehs, behind the claims of being a peace movement, there lurks an ugly Western chauvinism aimed at what has been branded an insane, uncivilised, genocidal, rogue state ‘over there’. The great irony of today’s supposedly radical anti-Israel posturing is that it borrows so heavily from the language of contemporary Western imperialism, and pushes it even further than George W Bush ever dared.

The people who have thrown their lot in with what poses as a political movement but is in fact more like a Two Minutes Hate against Israel – liberal commentators, left-wing activists, Islamists – are the same people who criticised the Bush regime for dividing the world into Us and Them, Good and Evil, Decent and Rogue. Yet the anti-Israel lobby does the same thing, only its pet rogue is Israel rather than Iraq, and it has won the backing of academics, the serious media and the liberal bourgeoisie rather than colonels and the white-haired right. Fundamentally, the anti-Israel spasm in respectable Western circles is driven by the same urges that underpinned the Bushites’ clumsy interventions into foreign affairs: a desire to escape political stasis at home by seeking the super moral clarity of a fantasy apocalyptic stand-off on the world stage.

Anti-Israel activists’ reliance on the template vocabulary of the Western foreign-policy establishment is striking. They recycle the kind of language that actually should be ruthlessly critiqued and studiously avoided. Left-wing journalist John Pilger says the flotilla incident confirms that Israel is a ‘rogue state’, echoing various other respectable writers that also have branded Israel a ‘rogue’ (Pilger goes on to say: ‘“Rogue” is too soft. Israel is a criminal state.’)

The term ‘rogue state’ originated in that beating heart of Western imperialism – Washington – as a way of branding certain nations with a modern-day mark of Cain. The US State Department first started drawing up lists of ‘problematic’ states in 1979: Libya, Syria, North Korea, Cuba, Iran, Iraq, Sudan, and so on. In 1994, under the Clinton administration, the term ‘rogue states’ was first introduced to describe these effectively blacklisted nations (‘black’ being the operative word), though even Washington eventually became uncomfortable with the inflammatory, criminalising connotations of the word ‘rogue’ – in 2000, secretary of state Madeleine Albright announced that ‘rogue states’ would be replaced with the more neutral ‘states of concern’ (1).

But the liberals and lefties of the anti-Israel lobby are keen to resuscitate the term ‘rogue state’, with its powerful implication that there is a Respectable World (where ‘We’ live) and an Unrespectable World (where ‘They’ live), and apply it to Israel. They are shamelessly claiming as their own a phrase that was devised by American imperialism effectively as a modern, slightly more PC way of writing off swathes of the Third World as parts of a ‘Dark Continent’ inhabited by criminals and maniacs. In his 2005 book on North Korea, Rogue Regime, Jasper Becker, a supporter of Washington’s anti-rogue policies, aptly described how being labelled a ‘rogue state’ was a ‘certificate of dangerous insanity in the diplomatic world’ (2). And in anti-Israel commentary, too, Israel is frequently denounced as mad. It is a ‘state of insanity’, says one radical writer. ‘Insanity, Israel-style’, says the headline to a newspaper editorial. An American journalist describes Israel as ‘increasingly paranoid’ and ‘dangerously erratic’. Here, anti-Israel activists, incapable of producing a serious or nuanced political critique, simply reproduce the Western foreign policy establishment’s kneejerk habit of branding certain states as psychological basket cases, driven more by weird pathology than anything resembling a political concern. Is this disdainful, degraded view of Others really any more radical when it is applied to the Jewish State rather than to parts of allegedly bestial Africa or irrational Arabia?

Much of the anti-Israel movement seems to be aimed at convincing the powerful institutions of the West to turn their attentions away from less threatening ‘rogue states’ (like North Korea and Iran) and towards the ‘real rogue state’ (Israel). In other words, far from challenging the authority of the ‘international community’ to divide the world into Right and Rogue, the anti-Israel lobby simply wants to harness this Western prejudice to its own cause. One American radical exploits all of the fears pushed into the international arena by the Bush regime – fundamentalism, WMD, roguishness – in his case against Israel, arguing that Israel is ‘increasingly paranoid and isolated, dominated by fundamentalists, and armed with over 200 nukes’. Israel is ‘becoming like North Korea’, he says, ‘except qualitatively more dangerous because it has an advanced nuclear arsenal and sits in a more strategic part of the world’. Here, the prejudices of the Bush regime are reproduced under the radical guise of opposing the Zionist state.

And just like the Bush regime in relation to Iraq, anti-Israel activists are most outraged that a nation ‘over there’ has dared to defy the United Nations and even Washington itself. Israel is accused of having a terrible ‘record of lawlessness’ and of ‘defying the will of the international community’ (the anti-Israel lobby’s unthinking acceptance of the term ‘international community’ is almost as bizarre as their embrace of ‘rogue state’). An American left-wing journalist cites as evidence of Israel’s ‘dangerous erratic behaviour’ the fact that it has been ‘dismissive towards President Barack Obama’s peace initiatives, particularly his demand that Israel stop building Jewish housing in traditionally Arab areas’. But why should Obama have the authority to tell Israel, or any other foreign state for that matter, what to do? Again and again, in its outrage over Israel’s ‘defiance of international institutions’, the anti-Israel lobby exposes its Bush-style anger at the uppitiness of a little state in some backwater of the non-Western world.

Also echoing the Bush regime, anti-Israel activists exploit the moral authority of the Holocaust. Many criticised Bush when he compared Saddam to Hitler, yet radical anti-Israel agitators frequently refer to Israel as a ‘genocidal state’ which is carrying out a ‘Holocaust’ in Gaza. Such spectacular historical idiocy is designed to achieve what the Bush administration also wanted to achieve: a warm, self-satisfying sense of a gaping, unbridgeable divide between Good and Evil, only where Bush believed the divide was between his White House and the ‘Axis of Evil’ (Iraq, Iran, North Korea), the anti-Israel lobby believes it is between them, with their superior, cosmopolitan, caring values, and today’s No.1 ‘pariah state’ (another Washington-invented term they love to use): Israel. One writer accuses Israel of crossing the ‘boundary of civilisation’; another says the Gaza flotilla represents ‘sheer human decency’ against ‘medieval’ Israel. This is the childish ‘with us or against us’ politics of the Bush era given an ostensibly radical twist.

The flotilla incident and its aftermath show that there have been enormous changes in recent years in how Israel is understood and discussed in the West. In the past, Israel was effectively the West’s, and particularly Washington’s, policeman in the Middle East, representing Western interests in a major stand-off with Soviet-backed Arab nationalism. Post-Cold War, however, Israel became less and less important to the West, and has slowly but surely gone from being considered a ‘friend’ to a ‘pariah’. Things have gone almost full circle, reaching a situation where, now, Western imperialist sentiment – as shabby and incoherent as it is today – is expressed more clearly through criticism of Israel rather than through support for Israel. It is now the attacks on Israel that most clearly articulate Western institutions’, politicians’ and activists’ snobby disdain for out-of-control foreign states and their desire to prove their own moral untouchability through contrasting themselves with barbarians in foreign fields. And as an anti-imperialist publication, spiked is no more prepared to see Western intervention and domination – which are far bigger problems than any ‘rogue’ – justified by Israel-bashing than by Iraq-scapegoating.

European politicians, UN officials, left-wing activists, radical Islamists: all are increasingly defining their identities through their antagonism towards Israel. Like Bush, they want to escape messy, confusing domestic politics by creating a black-and-white piece of end-of-days theatre in the international arena. They want Israel reprimanded, sanctioned and possibly even invaded, not because they really care for Palestinian freedom, but in order to have their identities validated and their moral convictions ratified. The narcissism is astounding. For them, the war in the Middle East is the continuation of their politics of identity by other means.

Read more of my articles for spiked and other publications here.

Hypocrisy makes life worse in the Middle East

Thu, 03 Jun 2010 16:49:59 +0100

The Australian, 4 June 2010

MANY people are understandably concerned about the siege of Gaza by Israel. But the flotilla incident this week confirms that there’s a more pressing, profound and almost completely unquestioned problem today: the intellectual, moral siege of Israel by the Respectable World.

There is nothing remotely progressive, far less radical, in the transformation of Israel into the whipping boy of a motley crew of Western moral entrepreneurs, radical Islamists and momentum-seeking left-wing activists.

In fact, it is fuelled by a quite intense hypocrisy and political opportunism, and is warping the political dynamic in the Middle East, making life worse for Israelis and Palestinians.

Of course the invasion of the flotilla by Israel defence forces, during which at least nine people were killed, was a deplorable and foolish act of violence. But few people have asked what is the real purpose of this “humanitarian flotilla”. The activists claim they’re interested only in delivering essentials to beleaguered Gazans. Critics describe the flotilla as an “armada of hate”, delivering materials, and possibly even weaponry, to Hamas.

Both sides are wrong. These boats, which have been sailing to Gaza for the past two years, are best understood as a pompous, moralistic armada, fuelled by the self-righteousness of Western and Islamist activists keen to advertise their superiority over the new pariah state of the chattering classes: Israel.

The moralistic armada is a physical manifestation of the shallow Israel-bashing that has become utterly unexceptional and uniform in respectable Western circles in recent years.

These ships combine the narcissism, self-promotion, pro-interventionism and, ultimately, the pro-imperialist bent to the anti-Zionism that is now widespread in polite society.

The pro-Western, pro-militaristic thirst behind modern-day anti-Israel sentiment is clear from the fact that many of the flotilla activists and their supporters are calling for the “international community” to punish Israel. Because Israel has crossed a “boundary of civilisation”, says one writer, it must have sanctions imposed upon it by the UN.

These are fundamentally hostile boats because they represent, fundamentally, the existential anti-Israel outlook that has manifested itself in the West in recent years. There is no nation on Earth that would not be at least concerned about the arrival of an intervention-demanding force near its shores.

In Europe in particular, shallow pro-Palestinian pity/anti-Israel sentiment is widespread, for various but always self-serving reasons. It unites the far Left and the far Right, with the Left hoping to conjure up some profound feeling of anti-imperialist rage and the Right trotting out the usual old rubbish about “evil Jews”.

It unites radical Islamists and mainstream politicians, where Islamists sustain virtually their entire off-the-peg victim identity by noting Israel’s “genocide” of a section of the Muslim community, and politicians score some easy points by denouncing Israel.

And as demonstrated by the UN’s unusually speedy condemnation of the flotilla incident and the British government’s expressions of outrage, anti-Israel sentiment is extremely useful for Western governments and international bodies, too.

It allows them to take the moral high ground on the international stage at a time when, post-Iraq, it is increasingly difficult for them to do so. It allows them to brush over their own acts of aggression by going along with the idea that Israel is a uniquely colonialist, belligerent nation whom they, being whiter than white, have the right to lecture and hector.

When Israel is continually said to have crossed a “boundary of civilisation”, governments can conveniently pose as civilised by posturing against it.

This opportunity to recover some Western authority, to rehabilitate the say-so of powerful governments over “pariah states”, has been handed to the international community by the supposed peace activists of the anti-Israel lobby.

Most dangerously of all, this rise of respectable anti-Zionism is having a detrimental impact on the ground in the Middle East, causing Israel to become increasingly isolated and its relations with surrounding Palestinian territories to become increasingly tense. When you treat a state as a pariah, it is more likely to think and act like one, to become insecure, unpredictable, to lash out.

These flotilla activists fancy themselves as a modern-day version of the individuals who went to Spain during the Civil War to join international brigades in fighting for a Spanish republic.

Yet those individuals were driven by a thirst for freedom, by positive visions of the future, by a willingness to take serious personal risks, and above all by a belief that people alone and not powerful, self-serving institutions could change mankind’s destiny for the better. Not a single one of those admirable traits was present on the ship of fools sailing to Gaza.

Read more of my articles for The Australian and other publications here.

Gaza flotilla: invasion of the moral armada

Wed, 02 Jun 2010 14:30:45 +0100

spiked, 2 June 2010

Many people are understandably concerned about the siege of Gaza by Israel. But the flotilla incident this week confirms that there’s a more pressing, profound and almost completely unquestioned problem today: the intellectual, moral siege of Israel by the Respectable World. There is nothing remotely progressive, far less radical, in the transformation of Israel into the whipping boy of a motley crew of Western moral entrepreneurs, radical Islamists and momentum-seeking left-wing activists. In fact it is fuelled by a quite intense hypocrisy and political opportunism, and it is warping the political dynamic in the Middle East, making life worse for Israelis and Palestinians.

Of course the invasion of the flotilla by the Israel Defense Forces, during which at least nine people were killed, was a deplorable and foolish act of violence. But few people have asked what is the real purpose of this ‘humanitarian flotilla’. The activists claim they’re only interested in delivering essentials to beleaguered Gazans. Critics describe the flotilla as an ‘armada of hate’, which is delivering materials, and possibly even weaponry, to Hamas. Both sides are wrong. These boats, which have been sailing to Gaza for the past two years, are best understood as a pompous, moralistic armada, fuelled by the self-righteousness of Western and Islamist activists keen to advertise their superiority over the new pariah state of the chattering classes: Israel.

The moralistic armada is a physical manifestation of the shallow Israel-bashing that has become utterly unexceptional and uniform in respectable Western circles in recent years. These ships combine the narcissism, self-promotion, pro-interventionism and, ultimately, the pro-imperialist bent to the anti-Zionism that is now widespread in polite society. The narcissism is captured in the fact that one of the ships is called the MV Rachel Corrie, named after the 23-year-old American activist who became a hero of the Western liberal media after she was crushed to death by an Israeli bulldozer during a Palestinian-pity trip to the West Bank in 2003.

The self-promotion is captured in the fact that some of the great and the good have sailed on these boats, including writers, thinkers and Nobel Peace Prize Laureates. Bizarrely, Swedish writer Henning Mankell, creator of the popular Wallander detective series, was on the flotilla invaded by the IDF. So was a Swedish MP. There were 28 Britons on board the ships. Earlier ships have featured such luminaries as Lauren Booth (who built a career in journalism on the back of being the sister-in-law of Tony Blair), European MPs and a former US colonel. Does Gaza really need writers and celebs to offload food at its ports? This is naked self-promotion, the cynical depiction of oneself as a superior, humane, international-law-abiding citizen by standing, Kate Winslet-style, on the deck of a ship that is Against Israel. (The respectability of contemporary anti-Israel rage is demonstrated by the fact that the flotilla violence means Mankell will now miss his appointment to discuss the ‘Palestinian humanitarian odyssey’ with Jon Snow at the Guardian Hay Festival.)

And the pro-Western, pro-militaristic thirst behind modern-day anti-Israel sentiment is clear from the fact that many of the flotilla activists and their supporters are now calling for the ‘international community’ to punish Israel. Because Israel has crossed a ‘boundary of civilisation’, says one writer, it must have sanctions imposed upon it by the United Nations. Others are calling for Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu to be put on trial for committing a ‘war crime’. A Guardian editorial says NATO should be sent to Israel.

These demands that the powerful institutions of the West reprimand, isolate and possibly even attack Israel give the lie to the idea that anti-Israel sentiment is a form of peace activism. It is better understood as a ramshackle, informal campaign for the assertion of Western might over a disobedient state, where no weapon in the ‘international community’s’ armoury – from sanctions to military invasion – is considered beyond the pale in the need to punish the Israelis. The response to the flotilla incident shows that some are extremely keen that their fashionable disgust with Israel be backed up by brute sanction or physical force. They are effectively demanding the punishment of Israel to satisfy their own puffed-up moral outrage against what they have decreed to be the World’s No.1 Pariah State.

The fact that the flotilla to Gaza, with its weird mix of hippy, Islamist and imperialist sentiment, was powered by an underlying desire for Western punishment of Israel does not, of course, justify the IDF’s reckless actions. But it does help to explain why Israel did what it did. These are fundamentally hostile boats – no, not because they purportedly harbour weaponry for Hamas or are packed with wannabe suicide bombers (though some on the boats have expressed their desire for martyrdom), but because they represent, fundamentally, the existential anti-Israel outlook that has manifested itself in the West in recent years. There is no nation on Earth that would not be at least concerned about the arrival of an intervention-demanding force near its shores.

The flotilla incident confirms that for many bereft and confused politicians and activists over here, supporting Palestinians has become a shortcut to discovering a sense of urgent purpose and moral meaning. Palestinians are turned into the playthings of moral charlatans, some of whom even wear the keffiyeh, in a PC version of blacking up, or go to live with Palestinians and act as ‘human shields’. In Europe in particular, shallow pro-Palestinian pity / anti-Israel sentiment is widespread, for various but always self-serving reasons. It unites the far left and the far right, with the left hoping to conjure up some profound feeling of anti-imperialist rage and the right trotting out the usual old rubbish about ‘evil Jews’. It unites radical Islamists and mainstream politicians, where Islamists sustain virtually their entire off-the-peg victim identity by pointing to Israel’s ‘genocide’ of a section of the ummah and politicians can score some easy points, especially with the influential liberal classes, by denouncing Israel.

And, as demonstrated by the UN’s unusually speedy condemnation of the flotilla incident and the Lib-Con government’s expressions of outrage, anti-Israel sentiment is extremely useful for Western governments and international bodies, too. It allows them to take the moral highground on the international stage at a time when, post-Iraq, it is increasingly difficult for them to do so. It allows them to brush over their own acts of aggression, both in the past and in the present, by going along with the idea that Israel is a uniquely colonialist, belligerent nation whom they, being whiter than white, have the right to lecture and hector. When Israel is continually said to have crossed a ‘boundary of civilisation’, governments can conveniently pose as civilised by posturing against it. This opportunity to recover some Western authority, to rehabilitate the say-so of powerful governments over ‘pariah states’, has been handed to the international community by the supposed peace activists of the anti-Israel lobby.

I don’t support Israel. I think Palestinians ought to enjoy full national independence. But I want nothing to do with the orgy of moralism directed at Israel today by a mish-mash of dinner-party liberals, radical Islamists and clapped-out left-wingers. Most dangerously of all, this rise of respectable anti-Zionism is having a detrimental impact on the ground in the Middle East, causing Israel to become increasingly isolated and its relations with surrounding Palestinian territories to become increasingly tense. When you treat a state as a pariah, it is more likely to think and act like one, to become insecure, unpredictable, to lash out violently.

These flotilla activists fancy themselves as a modern-day version of the individuals who went to Spain during the Civil War to join international brigades in fighting for a Spanish republic. Yet those individuals were driven by a thirst for freedom, by positive visions of the future, by a willingness to take serious personal risks, and above all by a belief that people alone – and not powerful, self-serving institutions – could change mankind’s destiny for the better. Not a single one of those admirable traits was present on the ship of fools sailing to Gaza.

Read more of my articles for spiked and other publications here.

Why “BNP teachers” shouldn’t be banned

Fri, 28 May 2010 13:38:00 +0100

Index on Censorship, 28 May 2010

A campaign for a BNP teacher ban smacks of the thought police; people should not be punished for their private thoughts, however repugnant, argues Brendan O’Neill.

One of the central pillars of a free, democratic society is that people should never be penalised or discriminated against on the basis of their beliefs. The state and society have the right to demand that all of us obey the law and perform our public duties to a high standard, but they have no right to tell us what to think; they have no right to invade our minds or to exclude us from the public realm on the basis that we have the “wrong beliefs”.

Yet today, trade union officials and apparently liberal commentators seem determined to demolish this pillar of democracy. They want members of the British National Party to be denied the right to teach in schools, not because they are professionally unfit, or lack the right qualifications, or have been recorded making racist speeches to their pupils, but because their private thoughts, their personal belief systems, are deemed to be unacceptable. This is a new kind of McCarthyism, aimed at the far right rather than the far left.

On Tuesday, the General Teaching Council cleared Adam Walker, a former teacher and BNP activist, of racial and religious intolerance. While he was a teacher in Sunderland in 2007, Walker had used a school laptop to post vile comments in an online forum. He described immigrants as “savage animals” and said Britain had become a “dumping ground for the filth of the third world”. It was nasty stuff, yet the GTC said its main concern is the fact that Walker had used school property during school times for personal reasons — which it has every right to be concerned about — rather than the idea that he is unfit to teach because he is racially intolerant.

Some commentators are outraged. Joseph Harker at the Guardian scoffs at the idea that “it is okay to have BNP members teaching our kids” and hopes that our new prime minister, David Cameron, will sort this problem out. After all, Cameron once said: “Any good headteacher would not have a member of the BNP within a hundred miles of a school. They should be able to fire someone for that reason.” This echoes last year’s claim by a group of GTC members that “it is not possible, in our view, for a BNP member to be a registered teacher”.

The extraordinary intolerance and illiberalism of these arguments seems to have passed people by. Discriminating against individuals on the basis of their beliefs is no better than discriminating against them on the basis of their religion or sexuality. Commentators are calling for “BNP teachers” to be banned from teaching in schools not on the basis that they are failing to stick to the curriculum or have attempted to indoctrinate students with racist thinking —which would indeed call into question their professional capabilities — but simply because, in everyday life, outside of the classroom, they adhere to a political belief system that many of us find obnoxious.

Bizarrely, many of the anti-“BNP teacher” campaigners justify their arguments in the language of “rights” and “diversity”. Harker says every parent has the “fundamental right” to know that their child is not being taught by a racist, while some GTC members justify their opposition to “BNP teachers” on the basis that their presence in schools is “fundamentally inconsistent with the ethos [of diversity]”.

This is a warped and Orwellian use of language. In the name of “parents’ rights”, the real rights of adults to believe what they want and to not be punished for it by the state is being undermined. For all their talk about “celebrating diversity”, teaching officials are sending the clear message that there are limits to diversity— it cannot possibly include, for example, allowing individuals whose views are judged to be beyond the pale to work in the education sector.

However much these commentators and activists try to hide behind the language of rights and tolerance, there’s no disguising the fact that they are explicitly arguing for the policing of people’s thoughts and the state-enforced exclusion of people from the public sector if their thoughts are deemed unpalatable. Treating individuals as sub-citizens simply because they support a certain political party is far more anti-democratic than anything the BNP has yet come up with.

Read more of my articles for Index on Censorship and other publications here.

Radical snobbery

Fri, 28 May 2010 13:35:56 +0100

spiked, 28 May 2010

The funniest election result on 6 May probably passed most of you by. It wasn’t Esther Rantzen losing her deposit (and what meagre shred of respectability she had left) in Luton South. It wasn’t the ousting of cheeky cheeky Lembit Opik in Montgomeryshire. It wasn’t even the fact that under Nick Clegg – who had been appointed by the chattering classes as the High Representative of liberal, cosmopolitan, Waitrosean values – the Lib Dems actually lost seats. No, the most grin-inducing result was in Bristol West, where an independent called Danny Kushlick came sixth with 343 votes.

Normally there wouldn’t be anything especially chucklesome about an independent candidate doing badly. But Kushlick was standing on a ticket of ‘The People’s Manifesto’, no less, a document drawn up by left-wing comedian Mark Thomas (I say comedian. I say left-wing) and modestly described as ‘the ultimate political manifesto’. For all its radical pretensions, Thomas’s intolerant document actually highlights the sneeriness and cynicism of what remains of the radical left. It is a work of high radical snobbery, jam-packed with disdain for, rather than faith in, the toiling masses.

Throughout history a lot of dodgy individuals have claimed to speak on behalf of ‘The People’, but Thomas’s might just be the most dubious claim yet. By ‘The People’ he actually means members of his audiences, who were asked, during his recent stand-up tour, to come up with policies for a manifesto. The idea that the kind of people who attend Mark Thomas gigs represent the people really is funny. Simply the fact that they enjoy being bombarded with radical-liberal prejudices camouflaged badly as gags – Coca-Cola is evil! Rupert Murdoch is Satan! – should be evidence enough that they aren’t like normal folk. If you need further evidence, take a look at their collected policy proposals.

They’re obsessed with dog shit, in that way that miserable, moaning tossers tend to be. Loads of Thomas’s audience members suggested instituting new laws to punish people who allow their dogs to take a dump on the streets. ‘If a dog owner lets their dog shit on your doorstep, you should be able to shit on theirs’, says one. ‘[I]f someone allows their dog to shit on your doorstep, then you should be able to shit upon their head’, says another. Two audience members said the government should keep a DNA sample of every dog’s shit and then set up a ‘multimillion-pound dog-turd database so that police could work backwards to track down the offenders’.

In the end – spoilt for choice on the burning question of how to get dog shit off the streets – Thomas opted to include the following proposal in his People’s Manifesto: ‘People who allow their dog to shit on the pavement without cleaning it up should be forced to wear it as a moustache.’ It’s Esther Rantzen’s That’s Life meets Dirty Sanchez, where the blue-haired, Mary Whitehouse-style conservativism of being obsessed with what disgusting people allow their disgusting dogs to do on my doorstep is sexed-up with some talk of shit-moustaches to give it a radical gloss.

The manifesto continually adds a dash of surrealism to its miserabilist proposals in an attempt to make them appear funny ha ha rather than funny authoritarian. One proposal is that ‘There should be an age of consent for religion’, which would aim to ‘balance the rights of religious freedom and the rights of the child by setting an age limit on religion’. That is, mums and dads should be prevented by law from bringing up children under the age of 14 in a religious faith.

Never has there been a more graphic illustration of what ‘children’s rights’ really represent: the watering down of the real rights of adults, in this case the right of adults to have the freedom of belief to bring up their children in whatever moral fashion they see fit. To take the edge off this proposal to invite the filth into the most intimate relations of ordinary families, Thomas says: ‘This policy will prevent children entering mosques, temples, synagogues and churches until they are 14 and will be enforced with a height bar, just like those at funfairs and adventure parks.’ See? It’s funny to increase the power of the state over families!

With yawning predictability, Thomas’s audience members proposed enforcing sanctions against 4x4 drivers. ‘4x4 drivers should be forced to drive everywhere off-road, even to Sainsbury’s’; ‘4x4 drivers should be forced to drive their vehicle sitting on the roof in a deckchair with a long steering column’, etczzz. No one went quite as far as an artist who attended the Guardian’s launch of its climate-change initiative last year – who suggested that 4x4 drivers should ‘spend a night in the cells’ – but the Two Minutes Hate against 4x4 drivers in Thomas’s manifesto confirms what they have become in the mean, envious, thrifty imaginations of the agitated middle classes: symbols of unacceptable ambition, affronts to the top-down ideological demand that we should all live as meekly (and naturally) as sheep. ‘4x4 driver’ is effectively code for ‘nouveau riche’ – people with ideas above their station (wagon).

And there are two policy proposals on the Daily Mail in The People’s Manifesto, out of 40 proposals in total, such is its alleged threat to the reading public’s mental health. ‘The Daily Mail should be forced to print on the front page of every edition the words: “This is a fictionalised account of the news and any resemblance to the truth is entirely coincidental”’, says the first; ‘The Daily Mail should be forced to print the words “The paper that supported Hitler” on its masthead’, says the second. The operative word in both instances is ‘forced’. In the feverish Mail-fearin’ minds of contemporary radicals nothing is more attractive than the idea of the British state – which of course never distorts the truth or had any dodgy dealings with Hitler prior to the war – forcing a newspaper effectively to brand itself with a modern-day mark of Cain, singling it out as Completely And Utterly Beyond The Pale (As Decided By Guardian Readers).

Thomas says these proposals are not born from a ‘desire to stigmatise the paper’. Yes they are. What drives Mail-bashing is the rather mad idea that it’s the only paper with a penchant for sensationalism and the censorious idea that its words translate directly into prejudicial public behaviour, as if its readers are sponges waiting to soak up whatever nonsense the Rothermere clan is spouting. And who are these readers? Thomas favourably quotes Stephen Fry describing the Mail as ‘a paper that no one of any decency would be seen dead with’. Ah, so its readers are the indecent, Them, the fickle, suggestible mob. This is a modern-day, ‘humour’-tinged version of the anti-newspaper snobbery of earlier elitists, who, as John Carey documented in The Intellectuals and the Masses, said ‘the rabble vomit their bile and call it a newspaper’ (1).

Thomas’s proposals on politics are so dripping in cynicism that you could almost scoop it up, bottle it, and sell it to students. He suggests ‘Politicians should have to wear tabards displaying the names and logos of the companies with whom they have a financial relationship, like a racing driver’. Most strikingly, for someone who claims to be a fan of the Chartists, and even their political heir (another brilliant joke), he proposes: ‘MPs should not be paid wages but loans…because they get highly paid jobs after they graduate from Westminster’.

One of the nineteenth-century Chartists’ great democratic demands was that members of parliament should be paid a wage, so that even a man without a pot or a window but with some political convictions could choose to run for office, alongside those moneyed lords and barons. Thomas’s loan proposal would rewind history and make parliament once more the preserve of those with no financial headaches.

For a true taste of why Thomas’s audience members are not ‘The People’, consider the following policy proposed during a gig in Darlington: ‘Institute the “Sky test” on benefit claimants, so if you suck on the teat of Murdoch, no benefits for you.’ In other words, explains Thomas, ‘if you are unemployed and have Sky, you get your benefits cut’. What a cast-iron confirmation of the spite that lurks behind apparently radical, anti-capitalistic Murdoch-bashing. What presents itself as a critique of a massive media mogul is in fact a profound discomfort with the dumb automatons who lap up the media mogul’s produce, whether it’s Sky, the Sun or whatever.

Most manifestos put forward ideas for creating a better world – this one only moans about a world apparently smeared in dog turd and peopled by parents who religiously brainwash their kids and lazy spongers who suck Rupert’s nips all day long. It confirms that the most poisonous snobbery leaks from those sections of society most cut off from the masses, in this case the remnants of the disappointed, disgruntled, radical left. The wonder is that even 343 people voted for this steaming pile of dog dirt.

Read more of my articles for spiked and other publications here.

Don’t arrest Brian Haw, but don’t idolise him either

Wed, 26 May 2010 16:53:59 +0100

spiked, 26 May 2010

As a supporter of the right to protest, I am opposed to yesterday’s arrest of Brian Haw, the peace campaigner in the badge-covered hat who has been plonked outside Parliament since June 2001 making incoherent statements about baby-killing in Iraq and Afghanistan. But supporting Haw’s right to protest doesn’t mean supporting his protest. Indeed, if there’s anything more backward than the police sweeping Haw off the street to make way for the Queen’s arrival at the State Opening of Parliament, it’s the celebration of Haw by other sections of the political elite as a ‘hero’, the ‘most inspiring political figure in Britain’, and a ‘brilliant man’ who is standing up to Britain’s ‘war machine’.

In many ways, the gathering of homeless-looking conspiracy theorists on Parliament Square isn’t a protest at all – it’s the peace movement having a public nervous breakdown. For nine years Haw has been displaying photographs of dead or injured babies, loudly accusing Britain of carrying out ‘genocides’, and sporting so many badges on his head that he could probably single-handedly deflect all of the sun’s harmful rays. Over the years he has been joined by conspiracy theorists (on Saturdays) who carry placards listing the names of people ‘Murdered By The Freemasons’, and more recently by a sprawling eyesore of a peace camp made up of cranky 9/11 truthers and a homeless ‘King and Queen’ called Tarquin and Tracey who drink booze from Starbucks cups and make speeches about war.

The camp perfectly captures what it means today to be ‘anti-war’: it’s not about being politically driven towards the tangible goals of freedom and equality, but about making a long drawn out yelp of general and inchoate rage against the powers-that-be and stuff. Haw’s camp and its offshoots are physical manifestations of the powerful feeling of impotence and anti-political cynicism that underpins ‘anti-war’ agitation these days. As Haw said when picking up one of the numerous awards he has won: ‘Stop committing this genocide this slaughter of the nations looting the nations it’s about the oil folks it’s about the arms industry.’ That’s less a political statement of intent than an expression of personal exasperation dolled up as campaigning against genocide.

Some people mistake the longevity of Haw’s protest as a sign of gritty political determination; in fact it demonstrates the opposite. A fawning American civil rights outfit describes Haw as an ‘icon of the British peace movement’ and hails his camp as ‘the longest-running individual protest’. Yet the never-ending nature of Haw’s camp only highlights the absence of will, clarity and political coherence in the peace movement. Most normal protests come to a natural end because they have clear (or clear-ish) goals which are either met or compromised on, often unfortunately, when the protesters realise there has been an unfavourable shift in the balance of forces. Lacking anything like a literate demand or a desirable endpoint – that is, lacking the politics and language of traditional radical protest – Haw’s camp can just trundle on forever, like a permanent, slow-motion, on-a-loop standoff between disorientated peace activists and the equally disorientated authorities.

The Westminster police and the New Labour government made numerous efforts to force Haw to move on. In 2005 New Labour even passed a piece of legislation specifically designed to shift Haw, only to realise later that it could not be enforced retrospectively and therefore Haw had the right to stay. D’oh! No doubt these were illiberal attempts to shut up a protest just because it was giving parliamentarians (and every normal person who has walked through Parliament Square over the past nine years) a severe headache. But I am just as worried about the motives of those members of the political and media elite who have beatified Haw, who seem selfishly keen to preserve his camp as symbol of radicalism in order to satiate their own guilt about no longer being radical and in fact having turned into pompous suits.

Sections of the establishment love Haw. In 2007 artist Mark Wallinger won the prestigious Turner Prize for recreating Haw’s camp inside the Tate. Some MPs regularly visit Haw. A couple of years ago the viewers of Channel 4 News – who of course, in the image of their idol Jon Snow, are the most liberal, pinko, anti-Clarkson news viewers of all – voted Haw the ‘most inspiring political figure of the year’ (he even beat that other hero of the Channel 4 classes – John Sentamu, the parachuting bishop and self-publicist – who came second). Yet what really drives this radical/establishment worship of Haw is the belief that if Haw’s camp stays in Parliament Square, if Haw lives there forever eking out an existence on free sandwiches from Tony Benn, then it shows that ‘we’ haven’t given into Blairism and war and bad things in general. Haw’s camp is used as a kind of balm for soothing the consciences of the liberal elite.

That is why Jenny Jones of the Green Party says ‘Brian is doing us all an amazing service’. She describes him as ‘the visible presence of widespread opposition to the aggression on Iraq’ and a ‘constant reminder [that the government] is out of touch with the people’. If Haw is moved, she says, ‘it will diminish the whole of society’. Here Haw is cynically turned into a substitute for any real or principled antiwar movement. The movement that emerged in 2003 may have faded into a mess of dodgy politics and intra-left rivalry, having failed to inspire or galvanise the mass of the population, but so long as Haw stays put he can be a one-man symbol, the ‘visible presence’, of an apparently ‘widespread opposition to war’. Haw is turned into a performing monkey of anti-Iraq War activists who will suffer personal crises of convictions and doubt if he ever leaves and goes back to normal living.

Even worse, some leading politicians support Haw’s protest not because they actually believe in real freedom of protest and speech (we know that they don’t) but because the continuing existence of Haw’s camp is for them a convenient symbol of the traditions of freedom and openness. Leading Lib Dems Susan Kramer and Vince Cable have described Haw’s camp as ‘a reminder that we live in a democracy’, arguing that its removal would be a ‘sad day for freedom of speech’. So the democratic spirit and the lust for freedom might be dead inside parliament, but at least some MPs can glimpse it on the lawn outside. Haw’s camp is super-cynically defended by some politicians as one tiny piece of evidence that Britain is still, despite the obliteration of liberties over the past 15 years, a freedom-loving country at heart. Unable to put an inspiring case for freedom and democracy either inside or outside the parliamentary chamber, politicians point to Haw’s mess on the lawn and say: ‘See? We ARE still a tolerant nation. We let this bloke stay here for years.’

It really is time that Haw’s mad, pointless, shrill protest was wrapped up and moved out of Parliament Square, by the man himself, of course, rather than by the state. If Haw has any sense he will use the fact of his being arrested to announce a ‘rethink’ of his camp. After all, he is clearly stuck in a rut – a rut surrounded by posters of dead babies and drunk conspiracy theorists – and could probably do with a way out. Brian, liberate Parliament Square, liberate the debate about freedom of speech and antiwar politics, liberate mine and everyone else’s ear drums, liberate yourself – go home.

Read more of my articles for spiked and other publications here.

It isn’t heroic to assault a child

Tue, 25 May 2010 18:27:28 +0100

The First Post, 25 May 2010

Since when has it been acceptable for a 50-year-old man to beat a 14-year-old boy around the head with a dumbbell while yelling, “Die, die, die”?

Reading the coverage of the Peter Harvey case – the stressed-out teacher who lashed out at one of his tearaway pupils in July last year – you get the distinct impression that some commentators and teaching union officials consider Harvey’s behaviour to have been perfectly acceptable, if not positively laudable.

In a complete inversion of moral norms, Harvey has been hailed as a heroic, dumbbell-wielding vigilante who stood up to a mob of “feral, underclass children”, and treated as a hapless victim of the modern classroom who cannot be held responsible for his behaviour.

Why is this on-the-edge teacher being treated to such an outpouring of sympathy?

On Monday Harvey, who attacked the 14-year-old pupil at All Saints Roman Catholic School in Mansfield, was given a two-year community order for the crime of grievous bodily harm. This follows his trial at Nottingham Crown Court last month, where a jury decided he was not guilty of the more serious offence of attempted murder.

Harvey has apologised for his actions. The judge described him as a “thoroughly decent man” who had been a “dedicated and successful school teacher” for 20 years. There is no reason to doubt that assessment. But the kid-glove treatment of Harvey by sections of the press has been deeply creepy, bordering on psychotic.

Harvey has been congratulated for standing up to “worthless scum”, as one journalist summed them up. Simon Heffer at the Daily Telegraph said the “revolting offender” in Harvey’s classroom probably had “parents who are little better than animals” – a remarkable judgment to make considering we don’t even know the 14-year-old pupil’s name, far less anything about his family.

In Peter Hitchens’ view, Harvey’s classroom was a microcosm of Broken Britain, full of “feral savages”, “mercilessly violent teenagers” and “yelling, sneering louts”, who are the “products of our rich, indulgent, post-marriage, post-Christian society” and who will grow up to be “well qualified to act as concentration camp guards”.

Rough translation? Little Nazis, dirty animals… getting pounded on the head with a dumbbell is the least that they deserve.

In online discussion threads, Harvey has been transformed into a halo-wearing saint. “Peter Harvey is a hero,” says one blogger. “Maybe a good old fashioned coma will teach [students] a lesson or two about respect.”

Harvey has been promoted to “Heroes Corner” on the popular website HolyMoly, where one fan says: “Every teacher should have a ‘break in case of emergency’ dumbbell mounted on the wall over their desk.” A contributor to the Guardian’s discussion threads wrote: “What a hero. That’ll will teach the little punk.”

Meanwhile, union officials have presented Harvey as a hapless victim, a symbol of the unspeakable stresses that teachers labour under these days. Echoing Heffer’s and Hitchens’ “I blame the parents” shtick, one teaching union says it is the failure of parents to act as “good role models” that drives deteriorating behaviour in classrooms.

During the Harvey trial, classrooms were described as “extremely daunting” places where some teachers tread with great trepidation. You could be forgiven for thinking that they were venturing into Helmand every morning rather than into a roomful of 14-year-olds. Every day, teachers face a “version of Hell”, said Hitchens, who clearly hasn’t been reading his Dante.

Of course there is a severe crisis of discipline in schools today. And, yes, the kids in Harvey’s classroom were behaving very badly indeed. But it helps no one to present the dumbbell incident either as beautiful vengeance against the scum spawn of single mums or as the inevitable consequence of teachers being stressed out. The truth is that most teachers cope fairly well, without recourse to metal weaponry.

Indeed, the spinning of the Harvey beating from an unfortunate incident into something understandable, possibly even celebratory, could end up making the crisis of discipline in classrooms even worse.

Fundamentally, the driving force behind the demise of discipline in school is the collapsing authority of teachers themselves, where their moral and professional authority over their charges has been eroded by a creeping culture of relativism and today’s broader cultural disdain for the idea that adults know better than children.

How will the post-Harvey depiction of children as inexplicable marauders and teachers as weepy victims do anything to reinstitute teachers’ authority over kids?

Read more of my articles for The First Post and other publications here.

China’s parents have begun to rebel

Sat, 22 May 2010 10:20:47 +0100

Spectator, 21 May 2010

Brendan O’Neill says that the state’s cruel and antiquated one-child policy is being propped up by British environmentalists with an agenda — but the Chinese are striking back.

Professor Yang Zhizhu is a brave man. In flagrant defiance of China’s womb-policing one-child policy, he and his wife have chosen to become outlaws by having two children and flat out refusing to pay the second-child fine (around £18,000). ‘Why should I pay money for having my own kid?’ asked Professor Yang in an interview last month. ‘It’s our right as citizens.’ For the crime of starting a two-child family, Professor Yang was fired from his job at the Beijing Youth Politics College and now faces an uncertain future.

Yet at the same time as this Beijing-based academic is taking huge risks to become, in his words, ‘a nail in the coffin of China’s one-child policy’, some British academics — of the miserabilist, misanthropic variety — are providing the Chinese state with new arguments for keeping the one-child policy. A Chinese teacher is trying to topple it, while British researchers are helping to prop it up.

It all started when Yang’s wife, Chen Hong, gave birth to their second child on 21 December last year. They were immediately slapped with the hefty state fine. After Professor Yang refused to pay — not, he says, because he couldn’t afford it, but because the one-child policy is ‘ridiculous’ — he was turfed out of his cushy job last month and will now live on ‘subsistence allowances’. As an illegal second child, his daughter, Ruonan, will not get the Beijing hukou, the permanent residency document that recognises her as a citizen. This means she won’t have access to public services such as education, medical facilities and, later in life, Beijing-based jobs. ‘I only pray that she doesn’t come down with some drastic illness,’ says Professor Yang.

Yang has become a hero across China — testament to the extent to which Chinese people hate the National Population and Family Planning Commission (NPFPC), the vast state body which employs an eye-popping 509,000 public servants to police and punish people’s reproductive habits. In a survey of 75,300 people carried out by a popular Chinese website, 91 per cent of respondents said they supported Yang. His university colleagues have written a letter demanding his reinstatement, arguing ‘it is time to adjust the existing family planning policy’. Even China Daily, the English-language state newspaper, admits Yang has won ‘tens of thousands of hearts across the country’.

Before Yang, tycoons and celebs had been infuriating the regime by simply stumping up the cash for the second-child fine in order that they could expand their families. One wealthy couple waltzed into their local birth control office, slammed some money on the table and said: ‘Here is 200,000 yuan [£18,000]. Please do not come to disturb us.’ Poorer families, who can’t afford the fines, are having second children as secretively as possible. Meanwhile, experts argue that the one-child policy is giving rise to a demographic nightmare: China has a growing population of old people but not enough youngsters to provide for them. So some cities, including Shanghai, are starting to relax the one-child policy.

In response, the NPFPC is desperately scrabbling around for new moral justifications for its barbaric bureaucracy. And who is it turning to? Increasingly to green-leaning British Malthusians, in particular to the Optimum Population Trust (OPT), a weird outfit which counts Sir David Attenborough and Jonathon Porritt among its backers and whose anti-human arguments for population reduction are like manna from heaven for China’s beleaguered population police.

Last December, as Professor Yang’s wife was preparing for her rebellious labour, Zhao Baige, vice-minister of the NPFPC, gave a speech at the Copenhagen summit on climate change. To a creepily sympathetic audience of green-leaning officials and activists, she presented the one-child policy as a ‘climate-friendly’ initiative, in the sense that population reduction limits the number of ‘polluters’ (formerly known as human beings) marauding around the planet. To back up her perverse claims, she enthusiastically cited research carried out by Thomas Wire at the London School of Economics, published in August last year, which claimed that ‘promoting family planning’ — that is, curbing human numbers — is the cheapest way to tackle climate change. According to Wire, ‘Each $7 spent on basic family planning would reduce CO2 emissions by more than one tonne.’

Wire’s report — titled ‘Fewer Emitters, Lower Emissions, Less Cost’ — was carried out under the Operational Research Unit at the LSE, but was commissioned and published by the Optimum Population Trust. Now it has become the principal reference document for China’s one-child enforcers, who are desperate to dress up their population authoritarianism as an eco-initiative. Porritt, former green adviser to the New Labour government and Prince Charles, has openly boasted about his contribution to the Chinese regime’s population propaganda. Porritt seems to be a big fan of the one-child policy. ‘Had there been no one-child policy in China there would now have been 400 million additional Chinese citizens’, he breathlessly told the Guardian recently.

In February 2007, Porritt suggested that China should face down those who say it isn’t doing enough to tackle climate change by pointing to ‘the billions of tonnes of CO2 not emitted into the atmosphere because of China’s one-child policy’. To his delight, this is exactly what Chinese officials have begun to do. Two years ago, a spokesman defended the regime’s ‘strict family planning policies’ on the basis that they had saved ‘330 billion tonnes in emissions’. At Copenhagen last year, Zhao Baige said the one-child policy ‘resulted in 18 million fewer tonnes of CO2 emissions every year’. Porritt is chuffed with his impact on Chinese thinking, describing it as ‘a major, major step forward for [those] seeking to influence governmental negotiating positions’.

The truth is that China’s one-child policy has long been supported and assisted by Western officials and campaigners. The United Nations Population Fund part-funded the one-child policy for years, and according to the 2005 book Governing China’s Population by Susan Greenhalgh, numerous population-reduction and family-planning outfits in the West provided China with the material and moral resources it needed to keep the policy chugging along. ‘Foreign non-governmental organisations and private foundations… were crucial sources for ideas and arguments, technical resources and political support,’ argues Greenhalgh.

It is gobsmackingly inhumane that Mr Porritt and others can only see China’s one-child policy in terms of how much CO2 it has allegedly saved. Behind the jumped-up stats purportedly demonstrating that China is a good green nation for controlling population growth, there lurks immeasurable suffering, where people have been severely punished for wanting to do that most basic of things: start a family. No amount of pollution reduction can justify that.

Read more of my articles for the Spectator and other publications here.