Syrian air strikes

There was an interesting point made on Twitter a few days after the failed coup in Turkey; that since the accused instigator Fethullah Gülen is exiled in the genteel suburbs of Pennsylvania, would it be acceptable for Turkey to send drones to execute him before he can provoke further unrest in his homeland?

Gulen is the former ally of Prime Minister Erdogan and supporter of the ruling AKP party, which is now spreading its despotic arms across the whole state apparatus, smothering all and any embers of dissent, illusory or real.

The absurdity of the above proposition is a simplistic indicator of the American exceptionalism that continues to pirouette so deftly across the world stage. It is 'acceptable' for America to send drones to execute perceived enemies on foreign soil, but would be unthinkable for anyone else to do the same.

As Michelle Obama pontificates at the Democratic National Convention about America still being "the greatest nation in the world", like someone with an inferiority complex talking to themselves in the mirror, I'd like to draw attention to a shocking news story from last week that was met with predictable silence.

US-led air strikes targeting ISIL in the northern Syria city of Manbij killed at least 56 civilians including 11 children, bringing the collateral damage total since the end of May to 167.

With a fresh terrorist attack hitting Europe at what seems to be an almost weekly rate, it is this sort of atrocity-in-error that can only serve to enflame local anger, despair and, for a minority, radicalisation.

These and other atrocities like them simply don't resonate in our consciousness because of the perceived complexity and hopelessness of the situation. The horror of the US firebombing the Afghan MSF hospital in 2015, in which 22 people burned to death, is now a distant memory with apparently few lessons learned.

When it is said that Jeremy Corbyn offers little effective opposition to the Tory government, it is perhaps worth bearing in mind that the Labour MPs who have sought to undermine him and forced a leadership contest, were predominantly the same MPs who voted with the Tories for the UK's commencement of Syrian airstrikes.

Last week's atrocity plays into the hands of ISIL, who use local populations as human shields, and is precisely the reason so many stood in opposition to the idea that you tackle a problem as complex as the one in Syria only by dropping bombs.

Trump! Trump! Trump! Trump!

So it's official, Donald Trump is the Republican nominee for the 2016 Presidential election. I'll be writing plenty more about Trump in the weeks to come, but essentially my view is that it's time for people to stop dismissing him as an unelectable joke. Clearly, the ground rules on what is and isn't 'electable' are more malleable than ever at present, and he has to be taken seriously, regardless of the fact that he looks like an overgrown teabag with a yellow duster wig.

I would find it easier to rationalise Trump's popularity were he a ranting oaf like the US 'shock jock' Alex Jones, or a charismatic and occasionally witty racist like Nigel Farage; but the fact is that Trump is staggeringly inarticulate, so much so that he almost makes George W. Bush seem as eloquent a rhetorician as Obama.

Trump may have hijacked the Republican party, much to their evident dismay, but he is a monster entirely of their own making. When you poison the well of political discourse with such committed toxicity, with the Tea Party faction et al, and grind Congress to a halt on numerous occasions, don't be surprised when an odious carp like Trump breaches the surface of the noxious water and grows fatter from the poisonous minnows in his way.

Watching his convention speech, there was an interesting parallel to be made with current world politics elsewhere.

A centrepiece of Trump's threadbare policy tapestry was his pledge that "the crime and violence that today afflicts our nation will soon come to an end." How might he go about achieving such a feat?

Perhaps he has been modelling his policy strategy on that of President Rodrigo Duterte of the Philippines who was elected in May on a swollen wave of anti-crime rhetoric. In his short time in office so far, Duterte has advocated the murder of drug dealers and addicts, and has galvanised his police force to kill some 30 suspected 'drug lords'.

Such incendiary attitudes to law enforcement may begin to spread closer to home. New Prime Minister Theresa May - she of the 'Immigrants Go Home' van - is nothing if not a tad authoritarian. As Home Secretary she has pushed hard for the Counter-Extremism and Safeguarding Bill - the 'snooper's charter' - which essentially empowers everyone to keep a suspicious eye on everyone else in an effort at rooting out early signs of extremism.

She has also passed the Psychoactive Substances Act; a ridiculously regressive piece of legislation which bans as an 'illegal drug' substances on a definition so broad as to potentially include incense sticks and wax candles.

This is not only wrong-headed, anti-scientific law but also grossly unfair of our Dear Leaders. After all, in a world that can present Donald Trump as a possible 'leader of the free world', we'll need all the psychoactive substances we can gobble down just to stay sane.

More on The Donald soon...

Corbyn leadership

Almost one year ago, on a humid Wednesday evening, I made the trip after work to Ealing, where I had a ticket to a sold-out event with the Labour leader candidate, Jeremy Corbyn.

I had been following his steady ascendancy onto the grassroots pedestal for some weeks, and like many was buoyed by this man who, for all his lack of obvious style and charisma, or perhaps because of it, appeared to be the representative of a new kind of politics that might be possible.

Across Europe, left wing movements were reaching office in Greece and gaining traction in Spain, while reports were starting to emerge of a guy called Bernie Sanders who was making promising ripples in the stagnant reservoir of American politics.

I had seen Corbyn speak a year or so before, at a Stop the War conference in Central London. Although I'd been there predominantly to get a chance to see the late great Tony Benn speak, I remember being impressed and faintly surprised that the Labour party still possessed, on its ragged fringes, an MP of Corbyn's conviction and moral principles.

In Ealing Town Hall the atmosphere was of that kinetic level of excitement normally only experienced at a gig before the main act takes to the stage. Corbyn was almost an hour late, as he had spontaneously addressed the crowd still outside without tickets, then going to an overflow room, before finally arriving in the main hall full of around 1,500 people to a standing ovation.

I remember what a diverse and eclectic crowd it was in attendance, the demographic sweep appeared to have been uniquely comprehensive. I recall recognising the journalist Seamus Milne lurking off to one side of the hall; at that time not yet appointed as Corbyn's communications guru, but there to survey the lay of the land nonetheless.

My overriding feeling of the event was one of genuine enthusiasm, cautious optimism and tangible hope; feelings that my perhaps overly cynical self had not expected to find being aroused by a political rally for a Labour leader.

One year on, and the UK has voted to leave the EU, Theresa May as the new PM has appointed the most right wing cabinet in years, Sanders has endorsed Hillary Clinton as Democratic nominee, and Jeremy Corbyn is having to restand for the leadership again. Yes, it is turbulent times for Labour, who have done their utmost to discredit and destabilise Corbyn since his election, and have descended into petulant mutiny since the referendum.

At time of writing, Labour had just received 183,000 new members in 48 hours, a staggering and surely unprecedented achievement. The opportunity for Labour to harness the passion, energy and enthusiasm that I felt pulsing through Ealing Town Hall has never been more pressing or possible. Time will tell whether it flourishes or wilts on the poisonous vine of the Labour party machine.

Ark 2.0

With all the gloom and despondency shrouding America at present, what with a borderline civil war being played out on the streets between blacks and the police, and the electorate facing perhaps the most hair-tearingly dreadful Presidential candidates, it is reassuring to see evidence that the nation that brought Cheez Wizz and Scientology to the world hasn't lost its penchant for the spectacularly bizarre.

This week saw the grand opening of Ark Encounter, a Bible-themed park in Northern Kentucky. The centrepiece of this 800-acre attraction is a colossal replica Ark, built by Amish craftsmen to biblical dimensions, which is now the largest freestanding timber structure in the world.

This monumental act of hubris is the work of Australian multi-millionaire Ken Ham, the CEO of Answers in Genesis, a creationist group that asserts the literal truth of the Book of Genesis.

Accordingly, they believe that the Earth is only 6,000 years old and that, to counter-claim Bill Hicks, humans co-existed with dinosaurs. (Although surely even they must think it a little odd that absolutely no scholars of the time saw dinosaurs as being worthy of even the slightest mention...?)

It is easy to be incensed and appalled at the idea that this is being fostered and promoted to American children as gospel truth, not to mention the fact that the park developers were gifted $18m in tax incentives from the state of Kentucky. Instead, it's best to applaud the blind ambition and wanton commitment to realise a Jean Baudrillard-esque simulacra of a myth.

In this age of grand confusion and schizophrenic certainties, it is somewhat comforting to see the persistence of some of the oldest myths in their most reductive and literal form.

Just as the flood of Gilgamesh may well have formed the basis for the Old Testament flood, in a future world blighted by devastating climate change and resource wars, this post-modern 21st century ark may well be discovered by AI-archaeologists and used to inform retrospective myths about our own ambitious, but ultimately very very strange, time.

The only way that America will get over guns

It does not really bear repeating the fact that America has a deep-rooting philosophical problem with guns. A frontier nation which won its freedom due to the bearing of arms is now enslaved to them, and it seems no atrocity can possibly burn with an intensity strong enough to melt away the intransigence.

Not 20 schoolchildren in Sandy Hook, not 49 gays in Florida, not 5 police officers in Dallas. Even after all these atrocities and countless others, the political will for even a modicum of restrictive change - such as the refusal of firearm sales to those on the FBI's terrorist watch-list - is diluted by the liquid flow of dollars from the arms lobbyists.

Even the supposed radical Bernie Sanders shied away on his Democrat nominee campaigning from any form of substantive proposal, himself having voted against the 1993 Brady Bill that mandated federal background checks on firearm purchasers.

By deferring to the Constitutional right to bear arms like a sacred text, the US demonstrates the same fundamentalist mindset that corrupts the religious extremists against which they wage war.

It seems there is only one way that America has a chance of freeing itself from this arms enslavement, which shackles them to a septic root of paranoia and anxiety. It will require something far broader than the Black Lives Matter movement. It will require something on the scale of the civil rights movement if enough pressure is to be brought to bear on the political system.

But more importantly and more fundamentally than this, it will require an entire shift in attitude. Even if Congress passed anti-gun legislation overnight, there would still persist the reality of an estimated 300 million guns in circulation. These will continue to circulate on the black market, perhaps with the added cachet of being an 'illegal' item.

Therefore, it will be necessary to create a taboo of owning a gun. It will need to become something embarrassing, something you wouldn't readily admit to others, something that reflects badly on the individual's character.

This can start right away with individuals making a powerful statement about refusing to bear arms. Only by rejecting the hyper-security narrative that perpetuates the gun industry's power and influence, only by making a defiant pledge that guns are not needed for safety or defence, only by choosing to adopt and promote a gun-free lifestyle, can people really take power into their own hands.

Waiting for political change is futile, with a head of state who is straitjacketed by the myopia of Washington and who can only stand at a lectern after each new atrocity with a tear rolling down his cheek.

The Referendum fallout

With everyone becoming a psephological expert over the last few weeks, I thought it best to wait a couple of weeks to digest the result of the EU referendum.

When I went to bed at around 10 on the night of the 23rd, Nigel Farage was being quoted as saying "Remain have edged it". When I got up at nearly 4am to watch the results come in, he was giving a premature victory speech, pontificating about "decent, real people" having won the day "without a shot being fired". (This despite the fact that an MP had been shot and killed less than a week earlier as campaigning reached its frayed apex.)

Having not been enamoured by either of the options on the table - a largely unreformed EU or a Tory party given free reign to complete their Thatcherite mission - but having voted Remain on the day, I have subsequently arrived at a handful of general thoughts:

1.
The dominance of immigration in deciding the vote reveals a depressing but unsurprising reality. As I wrote on this blog a few days before the vote, the ghosts of prejudices-past that were supposed to have been exorcised by globalisation have been awoken; an indictment of both the left and right to adequately address them.

However, while many voted Leave in the hope that immigration would be curtailed or reversed, with trade deals almost certain to include free movement of people (it being a fundamental tenet of the capitalist consensus) they will likely be sorely disappointed when those high street mosques and Polish delis go exactly no where.

2.
While not everyone who voted Leave will have been xenophobic or racist, they did nonetheless take the decision to ignore almost the entire weight of the establishment as well as experts from economics, science, law amongst other fields, in favour of those who clearly are.

Throughout the campaign, people were crying that no one was "giving us any facts"... when we live in a hyper-real world suffused with accessible information this is an absurdity. Indeed never in the history of civilisation has the banquet of facts and opinions been so glutinous. The reality being that so many chose to disregard facts and reason should give considerable cause for concern.

3.
The result may prove to be the touch-paper on which generational discontent begins to burn.

After all, the older generations who benefitted the most from the successes of globalisation - affordable property, free education, 'jobs for life', golden pensions, large-scale peace - have now decided in large part to rebel against its failures, at the same time risking the future of many millions of young people.

With a greying society that affords baby boomers such power and influence, it would not be a surprise if the younger generation, and especially millenials, started to exhibit increasing signs of resentment towards them.

4.
The Leave result was a real hammer blow to the neoliberal consensus. Whether they may have realised it or not, so many voted as a rebellion against the influence and might of a global capitalist system that impoverishes and disenfranchises whole sections of society. It is a crumbling edifice of socio-economic orthodoxy that, as the political centre-ground subsides across Europe and America, means late-capitalism is well and truly upon us, and real change of one sort or another is just around the corner.

5.
Indeed, there is the real potential for Britain, free from the overbearing rules of the EU, to divert from the fixed-gear trajectory towards market capitalism and privatisation that serves to widen societal inequalities ever further and foster disharmony.

However, I remain convinced that on issues such as the environment, climate change, cyber security, tax avoidance, and disruptive technologies, national borders are arcane and irrelevant concepts for which broader collaboration and mutual cooperation is the only way to ensure decisive and substantial steps are taken.

6.
The petulant and reactionary response of those on the Remain side and the Labour party (with what must surely be one of the worst coup attempts of all time) has shone a harsh light on the parlous regard many hold the democratic process. Where were the masses with their 'I heart EU' placards before the 23rd?!

And if we really want to 'take back control' from the undemocratic elites, how about dismantling the House of Lords, pushing for electoral reform away from a voting system that places the balance of power in a handful of marginal market towns, oh and abolishing the monarchy while we're at it....