Dear Readers

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This is a redraft of Nigel Farage’s letter to readers to make it a bit more honest.

Welcome to the first edition of the Deformer – the newspaper of Deform UK.

We’ve had enough of just being given an outsize platform by the mainstream media, and having that amplified on steroids by GB News and Talk TV; so instead we want to send our distorted version of reality to you directly, so you can get our twisted message straight from us.

Here’s an undated graph showing Deform UK ahead in the polls, when we have actually been third, even behind the failed Conservative Party that we get so many of our MPs from, for over a month, and behind the failed Labour Party since the Summer, and have been dropping for over a year. This shows you how successful we are being. We give it to you straight.

The choice at the next general election is clear.

Do you want to live in a country that allows at least some people to come here to make a contribution, taxes the rich more than we would, has declining crime (as it does at the moment) has cheaper, cleaner energy instead of expensive, dirty fossil fuels, and where people who need support, from pensioners to people with disabilities, get some, instead of being told to pull themselves up by their own bootstraps; whether they have got boots or not?

Or would you rather have us in power, letting people drown in the channel, enforcing hard work because we don’t want you to have rights that affect the profits of the people who fund us, where the streets are crawling with UK ICE agents making them as frightening and dangerous as they are in Trump’s USA (which we are very keen to copy when it comes to the Health Service too)? We will put the British people first by making you pay for your treatment when you get ill. As you will. And where there is no one to look after you when you need elderly care because we’ve blocked them coming. And where we enjoy wildfires and floods, instead of whinging about them like losers. Because we’re British dammit and we know how to go down with the ship!

Britain is breaking, and nothing seems to be working any more. I still believe in Britain – which is good of me really, as I’d rather hang out in Mar-a-Lago than Clacton. Our crypto billionaire donors and supporters who have financed this paper also believe in Britain, and many of them show how patriotic they are by living in Thailand or Dubai.

We can be sure that Britain won’t be fixed by the old failed politicians; except the many, many Tory retreads we have been so keen to recruit in recent months who, now they are with us, will fix the country by doing exactly the same things as they did to break it in the first place.

We pledge to you that we will turn the country around and send it steaming firmly backwards into the past. Whatever you imagine that was. We will not look to the future, because with us in power there isn’t one. We won’t let you down. But when the floods come, we might let you drown.

And remember, when you make your choice, nothing says “anti establishment” more than being funded by £72 million worth of donations from just two billionaires.

North Sea Smoke and Mirrors, through the eyes of a Jackdaw

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hedera.baltica from Wrocław, Poland, CC BY-SA 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

This was my unpublished letter to Labour List this week.

When James Tibbits says, in suggesting that approving the Jackdaw gas field will relieve pressure on the cost of living: “while arguments are made that it is just not that simple, when dealing with the politics of perception,(my emphasis) this choice may help to relieve some of pressure the Labour government has been facing” he gives the game away that this capitulation to, as he puts it “sustained pressure from right wing parties in the UK, alongside US President Donald Trump, to approve Jackdaw, as well as the oilfield Rosebank” isn’t about reality, its about optics.

Its not about relieving pressure on the actual cost of living, but about relieving pressure on the government by making a gesture that doesn’t actually cut costs or reduce anyone’s bills, and will cost 17 times more in climate impacts than any economic benefits it generates, but simply attempt to appease a fake right wing narrative.

In doing so, it only throws more fuel on the fire, in more ways than one, as playing along with right wing smoke and mirrors will generate more smoke, probably in the form of pyro cumulonimbus clouds. We should all redouble our efforts to make sure that this dreadful decision is not repeated for the Rosebank oilfield.

And when Antonia Bance argues that putting tariffs on Chinese EVs will help the UK reindustrialise she misses the point that reindustrialisation here requires exactly what China has done there: putting state resources into the development of the technologies that we need to make the green transition. This is not “unfair competition”, it produces the EVs and Solar Panels the world needs in a way that “the West” has failed to do.

The UK, and the EU and US, have left this to the market; with the result that we have a fossil fuel legacy vehicle sector that is now outmoded and outcompeted and likely, without either state investment and/or joint arrangements with Chinese companies, like the one Chery is proposing with Nissan in Sunderland, to go the way of British Leyland all too soon, tariffs or no tariffs, delayed EV mandate or no delayed EV mandate.

Averting this needs pre-emptive planning for all the threatened sectors, as well as nurturing the “green economy” that is currently growing at 9% a year while the rest of the economy flatlines. It is long past time that England and Wales had Just Transition Commissions on the Scottish model, but with more teeth, and switching the proposed £35 billion a year expansion in war spending to retooling the whole of our economy and society so we have good, solid jobs making it sustainable; rather than preparing to blow ourselves up.

Another note to Wes Streeting – The Russians aren’t coming! The Russians aren’t coming!

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Wes Streeting is back on the front page of the Sunday Telegraph this morning claiming that “we” have to be ready for war with Russia in “1000 days”. A 1000 has an epochal ring to it. As in “1000 year Reich”. Or “1001 cleans a big, big carpet”. But, doing the sums, that means that he is envisaging a war with the Russian Federation by roughly this time in 2029.

This is despite acknowledgement, on the quiet, by senior NATO figures that there is no actual threat of a Russian invasion of the rest of Europe. Russia has neither the intention nor the capacity to do so.

An attack on the rest of Europe would mean that they would have to fight through existing militaries that are more than twice their size. And occupy countries, with hostile populations more than five times the size of their own, and sustain that with an economy that is about the same size as Italy’s.

How credible does that look?

The retired Rear Admirals and the like who pop up on Radio 4 with lurid warnings of Russian troops marching down the street, with or without snow on their boots, are bullshitting – and they know it. So do the journalists who interview them. But none of them pops the bubble of this fantasy; because fake nightmares don’t have to be true to be motivating.

The argument from the same people that hybrid warfare is already going on tends to play up common or garden routine cyber attacks and political influence interventions from the Russian end while ignoring the fact that UK made missiles are actually hitting Russian territory. Imagine if that were the other way round.

Even if you buy the line- from NATO countries that have been responsible for launching or sustaining devastating wars to maintain their global dominance, the attack on Iran just the latest – that Russia is irrationally aggressive, unlike them, or that President Putin, as cautious and calculated a leader as any and more than most, is a reckless gambler, like Hitler, or perhaps Donald Trump, consider one other thing.

It has taken the Russian armed forces 56 months to occupy 20% of Ukraine on its 1991 borders. And that is mostly the 20% of Ukraine that rebelled against the overthrow of a President they had voted for in 2014 and sought incorporation into the Russian Federation. In the case of Crimea, UN polls from 2008-10 indicated substantial majority support for this course even before the Maidan movement redefined Ukraine as Ukrainian nationalist, downgrading the status of the third of then citizens who were/are primarily Russian speaking. During 2014 50 -55,000 people joined the Donbass militia to resist the attempts of the new regime in Kyiv to retake control of them by military force. So, its fair to say that, in these areas, Russia has substantial support.

This is not the case in Western Ukraine, so occupying it would not be viable. Even the most sophisticated and powerful military cannot hold a land where the population is hostile. As the US and UK found out in Iraq. And the IDF can only control the parts of Gaza that it has occupied by expelling the Palestinian population into a tiny rump of an already tiny enclave. That sort of thing is only possible with relatively small populations in small areas.

But, even ignoring all that, and imagine that Russia goes on the offensive and, even though outnumbered 2 to 1 and outgunned 3 to 1, made the same sort of progress they have made in eastern Ukraine since February 2022; now holding about 44,000 square miles. At that rate it would take them another 22 and a half years to make it to the Western Ukrainian border; and to keep going across the full million square mile area of the European NATO countries up to the French border and the English Channel, would take another 112 years. So, they’d arrive at some time in Summer 2160.

When you consider that most of the territory now occupied by Russia was taken in the first few weeks, while other large swathes also taken early, particularly around Kyiv, were abandoned almost as quickly, it underlines the point that consolidated occupation has had to rest on significant enough local support to sustain it. Viable in Donbass. Not around Kyiv. So, advancing at the average rate since those first few weeks would be even slower, possibly taking as long as 500 years to make it to the channel!

This is, of course, absurd.

More plausible, and more dangerous, is the threat of European NATO countries, having doubled their military expenditure in the next decade, preparing to launch a war themselves – which would be “defensive” in the same way that supporting US air strikes on Iran, or Saudi air strikes on Yemen, is “defensive”. We should note that Germany aims to make the Bundeswehr the strongest army in Europe by 2039. There’s something about that date…

Streeting, trivial figure though he is, is contributing to psyching us up for a possible apocalypse.

Chansons Francaise

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Plus ca change, le plus c’est le meme chose. Poster from the Ateliers Populaires from Mai 68 in France accusing the CRS (riot police) of being fascist. According to opinion polls 75% of French police vote for the Rassemblement Nationale (Marine Le Pen’s Party) and even more of the CRS do. Their brutality in 1968 was evident. As it is now.

The Czech writer Milan Kundera once remarked, after living in France for a few years in the 1980s, that he liked it because nothing significant ever happened there. May you live in uninteresting places. Which I suppose shows how wrong you can be.

In my fifth, and probably final, attempt to learn French, I just spent a month in a 30 day French challenge on Geraldine Lepere’s site, learning through the history of French songs of the last 100 years. Highly recommended course btw.

The one version of La Marseillaise that came up was Serge Gainsborough’s reggae spoof version from the 80s, aux armes etcetera! that had a lot of Right Wingers aux armes – with former paratroopers turning up to smash up one of his concerts in 1980 which he neatly subverted by asking them to sing it straight while he spoke the lyrics in English, underlining its character as a revolutionary song.

Contre nous de la Tyrannie L’étendard sanglant est levé ! Against us tyranny’s bloody flag is raised.

How unlike the home lyrics of our own dear national anthem. That piece of Hanoverian stodge, a tugged forelock in dirge form, still containing, tucked away in its final verse, a celebration of raising just such a bloody flag.

May he sedition hush,
And like a torrent rush,
Rebellious Scots to crush.
God save the King!

Not a popular verse North of the Border of course, but, the British ruling class, like all people whose lives are lived in a nostalgia for past glories, have never been willing to actually chuck it out. You never know when it might come in handy after all.

The revolutionary quality of La Marseillaise allows it to have been merged by members of La Parti de Gauche, the core group of La France Insommise, with L’Internationale into one song, L’Intermarseillaise.

Its hard to watch the school students scratch orchestra playing La Marseillaise outside L’Hotel de Ville in Paris last week, closely followed by L’Internationale, without getting a lump in your throat, because its sounds and looks like a generation that has been denied hope seizing some for itself in a collective festival of the oppressed.

And L’Internationale itself is a French song. Born of the Paris Commune.

And with lyrics that lose quite a bit in translation.

Dans la lutte finale, gruppons nous et demain, L’internationale sera le genre humaine is usually rendered in English as then comrades come rally and the last fight let us face, the internationale unites the human race which doesn’t quite get it. Sera means will be, which is a lot more transformative than unites; which implies everyone just stands together, rather than is transformed into something transcendent by the struggle to do so.

Final song. Possibly the most terrifying song, scarily sung, is Edith Piaf’s version of the ca ira. Another popular song from the first wave of the Revolution of the 1790s, its lyrics are pretty direct. It was sung by the massed columns of the levee en masse as they smashed through the brittle ranks of the European Ancien Regime armies sent in to crush them.

Ah! Ça ira! Ça ira! Ça ira! Les aristocrates à la lanterne ! Ah! Its ok its ok its ok! Aristocrats to the lamp posts!

When she gets to the end of this, Piaf is a long way from La vie en rose. As is France now.

PET Sounds…of Silence – Topic of Cancer 2

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“Its a crazy idea captain…but it might just work…!

Having a PET scan sounds quite cosy. It conjures up an image of a cat curled up by the fire with a cup of hot chocolate. But PET actually stands for Positron Emission Tomography; which doesn’t conjure comforting images at all.

It works by injecting the patient with a radioactive material that will light up any cancer cells like glow in the dark warning signs once you’re in the scanner. So, this is to make sure that the low to intermediate risk cancer I have in my prostate is confined to it, or if there is some elsewhere – which would be a different ballgame altogether.

In my case, the scan was carried out in the also slightly alarmingly titled “Nuclear Medicine Department” at the Royal Free. This is at the end of a very, very long windowless grey corridor in the deep interior of the hospital. As you turn into this, the door immediately on the left has a bright black and yellow sign on it warning of a “sheer drop” in case anyone opens it to go in. This is because they are replacing a floor slab, so sensible enough to warn people they’d pay a rapid and unexpected visit to the basement if they went in, but the sense of a hazardous bottomless pit, possibly with a Balrog at the bottom, is inevitable.

There is a strict demarcation in the waiting room between the room itself, tucked away to the left of reception, and the area where soon to be radioactive patients hang out for the duration. This extends to the toilet, which is out of bounds to anyone who’s had a radioactive jab or taken some radioactive tablets. I suppose this is to keep us separate from the people just waiting and keep them a bit safer.

But its slightly odd, because part of the procedure is that you get injected with a diuretic, and given a glass of water, to clear you well and truly out before having the scan. As you have to wait for an hour while the radioactive stuff gets itself all round your system; so you might as well be having a purge at the same time. So, with several of us on the go at any one time there must be quite a bit of vaguely luminous wee heading for the sewers. Not concentrated enough to be much of a problem though And I don’t think there are any mutant ninja turtles down there. I was thinking, on my fourth or fifth toilet trip, however, that a large cappuccino would have done the trick just as well, and been a bit more pleasurable.

The radioactive jab went in with a slightly nicking sensation at the catheter, but hardly any sensation at all in the body – which I hadn’t expected.

The scan itself is quick and silent. The images it picks up are radiating from the patient, so it doesn’t use the magnets, and there’s no whirrs and thunks. You don’t even have to take off anything metal. Standard MRIs must be a real pain for anyone with piercings, especially if they miss one.

So, just a quick look to check for a fly, just in case, then lie down flat and still and you’re elevated up backwards and in, a bit like Virgil heading for Thunderbird 2, but not going anywhere.

It takes ten minutes. In the absence of noises to focus on and try to make into some sort of musical pattern, I spent the time counting. This is because the one distraction I did have was that the diuretic was still working and I wanted to know how long I had to hold out for. They give you an incontinence pad just in case – first time for everything but unlikely to be the last – but even so. Ten lots of 60s and another 15 before I was hummed back out and down. “Don’t get up yet”…they had no idea.

In the follow up meeting at Maggie’s, I got the all clear for everywhere outside the prostate, so now its just a matter of picking the best fit treatment. I was so elated by this that it made me realise that what I’d thought of as a philosophically detached objectivity about the state of things was covering a lot more anxiety than I was prepared to acknowledge. We celebrated with coffee and cheesecake.

A disappointing absence of glow in the dark gonads – Topic of Cancer 1

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On the front page of the Daily Mail on Saturday, a teaser line for an article inside. “After his diagnosis, my husband became a cancer bore, so I left him” . What a wonderful publication the Mail is, always reflecting the best of humanity in its mission to help us all become less selfish, wiser, kinder, more open minded.

At the risk of being boring, I recently had to attend an MRI scan – half an hour in a noisy scanner that was a bit like being in a rather dull Steve Reich concert – “dig that crazy rhythm”, as the King might say – then an undignified half an hour having a prostate biopsy – not the most enjoyable thing you can do in Hampstead, even on a Tuesday lunchtime – I’ve been given a diagnosis of low to intermediate risk prostate cancer.

Prostate cancer is one of the generically less aggressive sorts, and its been caught fairly early, so treatment can resolve it relatively straightforwardly. So, its just as well that I decided to stop treating the imperative to get up several times in the night to go wee as just one of the Oil of Uley’s seven signs of ageing, and mention it at my annual check up. Anyone reading this with similar symptoms should get them checked out.

I’ve got to have a further total body MRI can next week, to rule out the possibility that its spread anywhere else. So, fingers crossed for that one. This involves being injected with a radioactive substance which will light up anything cancerous – so I’m hoping the result won’t look like a Christmas Tree. The notes for this say that this is quite safe AND that for six hours afterwards I should avoid being within a metre of small children and pregnant women. Bit of a mixed message there, but means I will have to be extra alert on the tube.

After that, there’s a discussion on treatment. One of which is to chop the prostate out – the short sharp shock approach – the other is a mix of hormone treatment and Radiotherapy (which is about radiation, not listening to a lot of soothing music). The hormone treatment suppresses testosterone – which I don’t think I have a lot of left these days – but J assures me that that will probably be good for my complexion, so its an ill wind…

The radiotherapy zaps the cancer with localised radiation – a sort of selective death ray requiring a daily weekday appointment for two to seven weeks. The notes attached reassure that this means I won’t get radioactive genitalia – which is a shame really. With glow in the dark gonads there’d be no need to switch the light on during nocturnal loo visits.

Hey ho. More to follow as things develop because, as Nora Ephron so rightly said “everything is copy” and, beyond a certain point of original creativity, everything is copied.

China’s role in saving the world

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This is the text of a talk I gave at the October 3rd Friends of Socialist China Conference marking the 75th anniversary of the founding of the People Republic in 1949.

I’m speaking in a personal capacity, because both the organisations I help to lead have a range of views – these are mine – but others are available.

There’s a tendency to put climate change in a separate box – in a way that downplays the enormity of its threat – largely because the consequences of dealing with it have to be transformative and mobilise society at all levels.

Becoming one item amongst others on a list allows it to drop off the radar in response to immediate pressures.

But an understanding that the climactic conditions for the survival of any kind of viable human civilisation are being actively destroyed by the way that civilisation functions at the moment should the framework into which everything else is put.

And the struggle for socialism in the 21st Century is best understood as the attempt by the global working class to salvage human society from the death wish, wars and ecological self destruction now openly on display – and being mobilised for – in the imperialist countries.

States that are already attempting to construct socialism – China above all – are crucial in this struggle.

I’d like to deal with three things in this talk

  1. The scale of the crisis
  2. The imperial path to self destruction
  3. What China is doing

The UNs Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) projects different futures depending on how much greenhouse gas emissions we generate from here on.

All projections have us over, at or close to a 2C increase above pre industrial averages by 2050.

The most optimistic projection gets us back down to 1.5C by 2100 – but that depends on a reduction in atmospheric GHGs for which, at the moment, there is no viable mechanism.

They also project a world in which the population has risen to 10 billion by 2070 and in which people will be – on average – 10 – 25% poorer.

The UK Met Office projects the chances of exceeding 1.5C by 2030 at 70%.

A report by the Faculty and Institute of Actuaries – the thinking wing of the insurance industry – and Exeter University, based on notions of “climate solvency”, adds in the social and economic costs of these projections.

At 2C up by 2050 that means a drop in global GDP of 10 -25% and 2 billion people dead. At 3C up by 2070, a 50% drop in global GDP and 4 billion dead.

That’s in under 50 years from now.

That this is even possible should concentrate minds of the urgency of doing everything we can to avoid it.

Climate impacts are already costly. The cost of climate related “natural disasters” in the US last year was $1 trillion. And we are already seeing increased deaths from heat, wildfires, floods. There are 100,000 glacial melt lakes forming in the Himalayas like the one that flooded in Nepal last month.

The tipping point in all this is when the costs of the accumulating and intensifying climate disasters overwhelms our capacity to cope with an recover from them.

The response of the dominant fraction of the ruling class to this – given political expression by the Trump administration (and its domestic mini-mes here) is to pretend that its not happening, or to brass it out.

“The world is getting cooler”. That was Trump at the UN. We’ve all noticed that this summer, haven’t we?

“We’re not afraid of climate change”. That was Marco Rubio beating his hairy little chest recently.

This may be because they believe their own nonsense

Many of them are, after all, “End of Times” evangelicals who interpret everything as a manifestation of the Book of Revelations.

Or they have a strategy of dealing with it by impoverishing the Global South, China included, so that its carbon footprint is pushed down far enough to let them, carry on as they are.

Or, as in a recent article in The Tablet, they interpret everything through the lens of a zero sum competition with China, in which China’s investment in electrification is a dastardly plot to over come the USA’s natural – possibly God given – advantages in having huge hydrocarbon reserves – which allows them to pose the domestic ” net zero movement” as a pro Chinese fifth column. We will be facing this sort of framing a lot more I suspect.

Or, they have just given up. As revealed by a tell all talk given at Davos by a high end sex worker – I read about this, I wasn’t there – who said that most of her clients were “resigned” to climate collapse and just “want to enjoy the here and now”. A sort of last days of Nazi Berlin approach.

Whatever they think, the bottom line on this is that the pursuit of US global energy dominance, with everything that flows from it – the intervention in Venezuela, siege of Cuba, turning Greenland into a military Protectorate, driving the Gaza genocide, NATO adventurism in Ukraine, the attack on Iran – is suicidal, especially if they succeed.

If the world were to burn “every last drop” of known fossil fuel reserves, overall planetary temperatures would rise by 16C – but society would have collapsed long before that.

So, was China right to say about the recent Xi-Trump summit that the world needs China and the US to cooperate to solve global issues like climate change. Well, yes, because the world would benefit enormously if the US were cooperate instead of sabotaging the transition. Its equally obvious that it won’t do it, and China doesn’t expect it to – as it wasn’t discussed at the summit.

There’s been a number of articles in the Chinese Press recently hinting at a more proactive role in shaping global climate governance, including a bid to host COP33 in 2028. that would be a huge step forward – probably send the global Right into a frenzy – and help push US unipolarity into a smaller sphere of dominance.

Until relatively recently – and still sometimes – arguments for more serious action on climate here were met with ” Yeah, but what about China?”

So, what about China?

China’s greenhouse gas emissions are now peaking. The only question is how fast they will come down.

Solar power now generates more electricity than coal.

In 2024 China was responsible for a third of global investment in renewables and more for the last two years twice as many wind turbines and solar panels were installed in China as in the rest of the world put together.

As this is state led investment in both physical kit and R&D this has led to denunciations from the G20 opposing “non market mechanisms”, possibly because they are working so well.

A result of that investment is that the costs of solar, wind, batteries have dropped so far that they are now the cheapest option for new power generation in 86% of cases globally and renewable energy is now attracting twice as much investment globally than fossil fuels, even though the latter are more profitable.

As a result of that, a majority of countries have passed peak fossil fuel use.

China’s exports of green tech last year displaced greenhouse gas emissions equivalent to the UKs entire output.

In many areas, like EVs and batteries, China’s technology is now world leading.

All this is leading to surreal accusations from the US and EU that China is “overproducing” EVs, Solar Panels, Batteries..as if we need fewer of them. A more apposite question than “why is China producing so much? might be “why are the imperialist countries producing so little?”

The effect of electrification is to reduce fossil fuel import bills – a paradox of Trump’s war on Iran is that this is increasing the demand for EVs, solar panels and batteries globally – including in places where they are clamping down on Universities teaching about climate change, like Texas.

All this adds up to a crucial global tipping point, which gives us what hope we have.

China’s domestic approach in the 15th Five Year Plan is an instructive bit of joined up government.

75% of the 72 5YP documents produced this year have targets/policies with a climate dimension.

Overarching commitments by 2030 are:

  • peaking GHG emissions and a 7-10% reduction by 2035
  • cut the carbon intensity of every product by 17%
  • non fossil fuel energy to be 25% of the total and 50% of electricity
  • Forest cover up to 25.8%
  • green travel in central cities to be 75% of all journeys.

I could have spent the entire 10 minutes of this talk with a blizzard of statistics like this. Carbon Brief has a very useful breakdown of all the climate targets and policies in the 15th 5YP if you want to dig into it.

Its important to note that headline targets tend to be understated – sometimes hugely.

  • The last wind and solar targets for 2030 were met by 2024
  • The target for New Energy trucks is 20% of the total by 2030. Current projections are that they will be 50% by 2028.
  • The overall target for EVs for 3030 is 70% of the total. they are already at 65%.

Just to finish on how comprehensive this is – sectors with plans and policies include, not only the obvious Renewable Energy, Fossil Fuels, power system and Transport, but also Monitoring, including for extreme weather (a contrast with the US, where Trump is cutting all the world leading work being done by scientists there – presumably on the principle that what you don’t know can’t hurt you) energy conservation in public buildings, construction, farming and forestry, ports, traditional Chinese medicine, recycling, consumption, tourism and crucially promotion to “thoroughly and vigorously” publicise these laws, codes and regulations.

This implies the kind of education campaign that is essential for the social mobilisation needed for these massive shifts – an implementation of Article 12 of the Paris Agreement that could be a model for other countries to follow.

A note to Wes Streeting on Ukraine.

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When I see a Ukrainian woman begging an army press gang not to forcibly enlist her husband and drag him off to the front, I know whose side I’m on.

Hers.

This is a still from a video on this site: busification.org/en. It has nearly 10,000 clips just like it, including many of people fighting back and, often, with support from neighbours and other people in the street, getting away.

Questions for supporters of USC: do you oppose forcible conscription in Ukraine? And the proposals now being discussed to reduce the call up age to 18, conscript women and forcibly return Ukrainian refugees in Western Europe so that they too can be called up, alongside the men trapped in the country, who are not allowed to leave?

If so, don’t you think that your campaign should too?

The campaign for peace and against the war preparations being ramped up across Europe is building, with big demonstrations against conscription by young people across Germany at the weekend under the slogan Die Reichen wollen Krieg. Die Jugend will eine Zukunft” (The rich want war. The Youth want a Future).

This will be the focus for an International Youth Strike Against War on 20th November across Europe in particular, and a weekend of action against conscription on the following two days, which will begin to kick back against the war psychosis being consciously hyped up across Europe.

War and Peace in Ukraine and beyond

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This was my letter to Labour List last week, which they were kind enough to publish as their lead letter.

In your note on the pressures to suspend the whip from Diane Abbott you quite rightly said that contentious issues should be dealt with as debates, not disciplinary matters; particularly matters of enormous importance, like the war in Ukraine. That is particularly urgent now, as the war shows signs of escalating into a wider European conflict which, if it escalates far enough, will lead to a nuclear war; which poses the need to step back and take a long hard look at the course we are on – which has no other conceivable result.

In so far as there is any debate at all on the war in Ukraine and relations with Russia in this country, it is between those who favour a slow escalation of the war and those who want it faster based on two delusions. 1 that the war in Ukraine can be “won” and 2 that Russia has the capacity and intention to launch a war with the rest of Europe. If you think about it, neither of these are anything other than fantasies. The 19% of the pre war Ukrainian population who primarily identified as Russian, and who live in the areas currently occupied by the Russian army, would hardly welcome reconquest by Kyiv, even if it were possible. How possible do those arguing that the Russians are itching to launch columns of tanks Westward think it would be for those forces to get through European NATO armies that are already twice as big and, if they did, make a successful occupation of large countries like Western Ukraine or Poland? The whole notion is absurd.

The alternative option that – to 1 avoid nuclear war 2 to allow Europe to recover from the war’s economic blowback and avoid the burden of greater military spending – 3 to relieve the burden on the Ukrainian population, which now includes forced conscription – Europe itself should have peace negotiations with Russia to de escalate towards a continental modus vivendi, is systematically deplatformed. Hence the kneejerk reaction to anyone prominent, like Diane, who steps out of line and asks awkward questions.

In this context, you argue for an open debate, on the presumption that the merits of “international defence cooperation” are self evident, without specifying what the purpose of that cooperation is and, linked to it, with whom. At present the UK “cooperates” primarily with the United States. As

  • the US is perceived by popular majorities in every country in the world, bar about a dozen of its allies, as the country that is the greatest threat to world peace, an opinion based on what it has done in the past and is doing now.
  • and any military risks that the UK now faces result from blowback from that cooperation, 

that debate is long overdue. I should add that the view that the US is the greatest threat to world peace is also the majority view in the UK and…the United States.

Odysseus! Odysseus! All Fall Down!

Posted on by urbanramblings19687496

“The Adventures of Odysseus” was the first book that I got out from the local library at least five times in succession – being nudged that way by a sixties sword and sandals film called “The Wooden Horse of Troy” which was the first story to obsess me as much as dinosaurs already did.

Image from M Hodder Handbook of Archeology 1867 Wikicommons

I got them out so often, not because I was finding much new in it, but because I didn’t want to read about anything else. I also got out “The Adventures of Ulysses”, which I’d hoped would be a similar set of different stories about another hero of the same type, but turned out to be exactly the same book but with Roman names instead of Greek. But I got it out several times anyway. Some of the attraction was the illustrations, which were stark, black and white, based on Greek vases and felt like a different world. The power of this sense of immersion in something recognisable but more vivid than actual life is something I’ve only ever felt since with Lord of the Rings – another totally absorbed five in succession repeated reads when I was a teenager – and another, more richly, lately – and Gormenghast – which I’ve enjoyed three times so far, and I’m sure I’ll read it again.

A lot of people die in the Odyssey. Probably not as many as in the Iliad, where whole passages list who was slain by whom in as relentless a poetic metre as the list of who beget whom in the Old Testament.

One of the mysteries of Christopher Nolan’s film is how it is that no matter how many of Odysseus’s crew get munched to death by the Cyclops, slaughtered by armoured giants, snatched into the air by Scylla, somehow there’s always a more or less full crew until the final shipwreck.

This is a very loud and violent film. A lot of the messages are carried by the images, and some of them are spectacular.

  • The shot of the Trojan patrol riding along the beach towards the wooden horse, sunk in the sand at an angle comparable to the Statue of Liberty in Planet of the Apes, on horses so white that they look other worldly; like a posse of doomed angels.
  • Agamemnon standing in front of the fatally opened city gate with his army massed behind him like a black armoured personification of death.
  • The Trojans all in immaculate white, slightly overdressed, with faceless helmets, not very numerous, pampered, well equipped but mown down by the greasy, grimy, black clad Greeks pouring through the gates like an enraged uprising. The sort of Eloi consumed by the Molochs nightmare that must haunt every billionaire on the planet.
  • The looming, glum misery of the Cyclops, even before he has his eye put out.
  • Calypso’s bleached out, hazed out, druggy dreamy beach, scattered with the driftwood of lost memories.

As with a lot of US war films post Vietnam, the notion that a home coming is impossible because the things that the veterans have seen and done means that it is changed, changed utterly to them, even if it is much the same as it was when they left, runs through this one and provides what moral arc it has.

Leaving Troy, having been the author of its destruction through trickery, Odysseus, “the man of twists and turns”, as Homer puts it, heads away from the main fleet to chart his own course through unknown waters telling the crew, and himself, that with a bit of luck and a following wind they’ll be home in no time, but actually because he can’t live with himself for what he’s seen and done. This is posed in the film as breaking Zeus’s law – that demands straight and decent treatment of strangers; essentially “do as you would be done by”. Not a commandment much respected by Zeus Himself of course. But perhaps its too much to expect consistency from gods, any more than it is from mortals with too much power.

In Odysseus’s case this is partly a revulsion at the scale of the destruction of Troy, partly at his cynical sacrifice of a boy soldier in his care, left to tell the Trojans the Horse was a gift with no knowledge of who was in it. This makes no difference to his first landfall to seek provisions, during which his troops steal what they need and burn down the homes of the islanders who have fled before them. There is a weird conversation in which one of his officers asks an old man they have captured “why did everyone run away?” The burning houses behind him might have given a clue to that.

From then on, its a series of ordeals.

  • Outwitting the Cyclops, but inviting disaster by vengefully firing an arrow into its injured eye, goading it to crash in blind pursuit, throwing rocks by sense of smell, crushing men and ships in its rage.
  • Not being led into temptation by Circe’s enchanted, but admittedly not enchanting looking, pig swill of a stew; so rescuing his hungry landing party from a short future as prospective bacon and getting an “I wouldn’t start from here if I was you” steer from Circe that the only way back to Ithaca (as a state of mind as much as a place) would be to sail West to Hades to learn what he can learn there.
  • Subjecting himself to the hard truths of the Sirens song, who put him through the wringer by laying his soul bare for him about everything he wants and can’t have, as he’s lashed to the mast with his crew rowing flat out with wax in their ears.
  • Sailing to Hades and back, a twilight zone of the miserable shades of the dead, where Sinon reproaches him for having left him to die on the beach, which Odysseus tries to deflect by saying that he was just a plank away so was “with him” – not much consolation for Sinon but an aspect of Odysseus’s PTSD. Agamemnon warns him of the perils of hubris, of going home thinking everyone is going to welcome you as a conquering hero when, in his case, his enraged wife Clytemnestra had had the ten years of the war to nurse her grief and fury at his sacrifice of their daughter to get the gods to provide a wind to Troy for his ships, and sharpen her plans to stab him to death in his homecoming bath. The blind prophet Tiresias warns him that the route back has to pass between the whirlpool of Charybdis and the monster Scylla and past the isle of Thrinacia, where it would be certain death to kill and eat Apollo’s cattle of the Sun and from which he is chased by all the dead members of his crew that he’d left behind unburied which, to be fair, would have been rather difficult in the circumstances.
  • Avoiding a suicidal decision to take his ship down with him into the vortex of Charybdis, when his crew revolt and make the inadvertent trolley problem decision to steer closer to Scylla, who, surprise, surprise, they don’t know is lurking in the rocks above and seizes six men in her tentacles.
  • Blown by one of those god willed winds onto Thrinacia, the stranded crew decides it would rather drown than starve, leaving Odysseus as the only one who doesn’t eat some of Apollo’s butchered beef, and therefore the only survivor when they put back to sea and the ship is wrecked by a vengeful divine storm.
  • Seven years of lonely amnesia as a drugged out beach bum with a rather bemused Calypso, eased by the mind numbing Lotus flower, but without the intense sexual relationship that would have undermined his uxorious fixation on his wife Penelope. As Emily Wilson notes in her acidic review in LRB, Calypso in this film is not an embodiment of desire so much as a therapist. At the end of this he is eventually mended enough to try to confront his demons, which surface as nightmares.

The end of the film includes a number of classic US cinema tropes – all the bad guys are righteously killed, just like in the Magnificent Seven – but starts with a rather new agey conceit that the way to get to where you want to is to stop trying to control things and submit to the will of a higher power (which carries with it the presumption common in the US, especially among the wealthy, that if you have got where you want it must be the result of deserving to in the cosmic order and possibly the result of divine favour). Putting out to sea in an open raft, he drifts at the will of the gods, before the raft breaks up, he sinks and is born again brothers and sisters; before washing up on the beach at Ithaca, where no one recognises him, even though he looks exactly the same as he did when he left, albeit a bit greyer.

In the meantime his son, Telemachos, has gone in search of him, or news of him, to try to put off the evil hour when his mother is forced to choose among the 105 brawling abusive lowlifes that have occupied his palace and demanding she accept that he’s dead and marry one of them and make them King – at which point Telemachos’s life expectancy would be short. He goes to Sparta to witness the unhappy reunion of King Menelaus with Helen, who’s flight to Troy with Prince Paris was the pretext for a war on the Trojans that earlier dialogue had made clear was more about control of the sea routes for trade with points further East. Menelaus bears a striking resemblance to Andrew Tate and is played as a mysogenist thug, forcing Helen to show Telemachus the scars he’d slashed into the left side of her face as punishment for leaving him. Paris makes no appearance in the film, but given what Menelaus is like, its understandable why Helen might have seen him as a better bet. Helen herself, like most of the women in the film apart from Penelope, has few lines, but she whispers in Telemachus’s ear in genuine anguish before he leaves that if he sees his father again to apologise to him for her part in all the pain and suffering caused by the war; which shows more self awareness and responsibility than any of the male characters.

And, in the end, the suitors are massacred by Odysseus, starting with the immortal line from one of the nastier of them “You’re Odyssieeeergh!” Unlike in the original poem, the slave women who served and consorted with them were not. Even when Penelope’s handmaiden, having betrayed Telemachus’s journey to Sparta to lead suitor Antoninus, is locked out of the safety of the women’s quarters by Penelope with a hard stare and the words “you belong in there” – if she comes to a sticky end, it isn’t shown. Murderous patriarchal slaughter being guaranteed to turn a twenty first century audience right off Odysseus if he did it in the film. Having violated the laws of hospitality by killing all of his unwelcome guests, apart from those who bent the knee as the slaughter went on around them, the final scene leaves a rather callow Telemachus as King. This doesn’t feel secure, as he’s a lamb among wolves: the phrase “Oh sweet child of Summer” comes to mind. Odysseus and Penelope embrace exile, as punishment in form and escape in content, by sailing into the sunset like characters do in so many Westerns, except on a boat not a horse, “chasing the setting sun”. Go West old man. Possibly forgetting that, in their world, and in this legend, where you get to when you go far enough West is Hades. There is also some echo of the other great US cinematic tradition of redemption by road trip in this.

So, full of sound and fury, but signifying what? Any treatment of an old story is a dialogue determined, or at least strongly influenced, by the concerns of the present. A theme running through the film is awareness that “our Age of Bronze is collapsing”. As is America’s unipolar moment. Leaving aside the quibble that no one in the Bronze Age would have called it “the Age of Bronze” the Homeric epics were set at a time, around 1200 BC, that the interlocking civilisations of Mycenaean Greece, Crete, Egypt, the Hittites in Anatolia and Mesopotamia collapsed and regressed, primarily under the impact of a series of earthquakes, a shift in weather patterns that led to drought and failed harvests, then hunger, social dislocation, strife and mass migrations. The film uses the notion of “the People from the Sea” as the external threat that everyone is worried about, that turns out to be a description of the Greeks themselves, arriving at Troy, as they did, on their 1,000 ships. So the civilisational collapse is attributed to a breakdown of internal moral order, symbolised when the Greek soldiers sacking Troy behead the priestess of the temple of Athene, and the head of the goddess’s statue falls off with hers. From then on, whenever Athene manifests herself to Odysseus, it is always in the form of the executed priestess, who looks rather reproachfully at him, as well she might. When Odysseus complains to her that the gods don’t talk to humans in a way we can understand, she says “who doesn’t understand thunder, and fire and floods?”

In the Gotterdamerung of Fossil Fuel Imperialism that we are currently living in, very obviously Donald Trump, Nigel Farage, Kemi Badenoch…I could go on.