Or, BOSH!
All sound great delivered from the bottom of the chest via the top of the throat.
Now, since so many of you have been emailing about this, I should just clear it up - I don’t think Tony Blair bombed London.
That is dumbness.
I think Tony Blair, maybe against his Christian Will, maybe not, allowed it to happen, for the same reasons he allowed himself, and therefore we all, to be dragged into the Iraq War, as it is known.
And no, I don’t believe everything Alex Jones says - he believes in the Christian Skygod, he’s a gun nut, anti-immigration, a Tory… and he shouts an awful lot. But to denounce his every thought is a silly as saying everything that comes out of Tony Blair’s mouth is fabrication because we all know he lied about Iraq.
I will quote from The Sun, from Greg Palast, and Noel Gallagher. Amidst all of this, there is something bearing a small relation to the actuality of Things.
As it is, I have no clue about most Things.
But I am learning, slowly, to look at things in a historical context, and, whenever the shit goes down, to ask - who benefits?
In the case of this recent attack on we all, extremist Muslims do not stand to benefit.
The international war machine does. The Bankers do. Bush does.
You and I do not.
I laughed out loud noting Mr Blair’s intention to pass new laws to combat “those that cause terrorism”. Said he:
“I do think we need to look very carefully at those who are inciting such hatred in our community. That’s one of the things we should look at over the next few months.” Well he need look no further than the mirror, obviously. Because if barging into a country and butchering its people isn’t going to upset people, I have no idea what is.
From New Statesman, by John Pilger:
The ghost at Gleneagles
In the orgy of summit coverage something has been overlooked: the two men at the heart of it, telling us how the world should be run, are the men responsible for Fallujah and Abu Ghraib.
Over the past two weeks, the contrast between two related “global” events has been salutary. The first was the World Tribunal on Iraq, held in Istanbul; the second the G8 meeting in Scotland and the Make Poverty History campaign. Reading the papers and watching television in Britain, you would know nothing about the Istanbul meetings, which produced the most searing evidence to date of the greatest political scandal of modern times: the attack on a defenceless Iraq by America and Britain.
The tribunal is a serious international public inquiry into the invasion and occupation, the kind governments dare not hold. “We are here,” said the author Arundhati Roy in Istanbul, “to examine a vast spectrum of evidence [about the war] that has been deliberately marginalised and suppressed - its legality, the role of international institutions and major corporations in the occupation; the role of the media, the impact of weapons such as depleted-uranium munitions, napalm and cluster bombs, the use and legitimation of torture . . . This tribunal is an attempt to correct the record: to document the history of the war not from the point of view of the victors but of the temporarily vanquished.”
“Temporarily vanquished” implies that, even faced with such rampant power, the Iraqi people will recover. You certainly need this sense of hope when reading the eyewitness testimonies, which demonstrate, as Roy pointed out, “that even those of us who have tried to follow the war closely are not aware of a fraction of the horrors that have been unleashed in Iraq”.
The most shocking was given by Dahr Jamail. Unless you read the internet, you will not know who Dahr Jamail is. He is not an amusing Baghdad blogger. For me, he is the finest reporter working in Iraq. Together with Robert Fisk, Patrick Cockburn and a few others, mostly freelancers, he shames the flak-jacketed, cliche-crunching camp followers known as “embeds”. A Lebanese with US citizenship, Jamail has been almost everywhere the camp followers have not. He has reported from the besieged city of Fallujah, whose destruction and atrocities have been suppressed, notably by the BBC. (See www.medialens.org/alerts).
In Istanbul, Jamail bore his independent reporter’s witness to the thousands of Iraqis tortured in Abu Ghraib and other US-run prisons. His account of what had happened to a civil servant in Baghdad was typical. This man, Ali Abbas, had gone to a US base to inquire about his missing neighbours. On his fourth visit, he was arrested without charge, stripped naked, hooded and forced to simulate sex with other prisoners. This was standard procedure. He was beaten on his genitals, electrocuted in the anus, denied water and forced to watch as his food was thrown away. A loaded gun was held to his head to prevent him from screaming in pain as his wrists were bound so tightly that the blood drained from his hands. He was doused in cold water while a fan was held to his body.
“They put on a loudspeaker,” he told Jamail, “put the speakers on my ears and said, ‘Shut up, fuck, fuck, fuck!’” He was refused sleep. Excrement was wiped on him and dogs were used on him. “Sometimes at night when he would read his Koran,” said Jamail, “[he] had to hold it in the hallway for light. ‘Soldiers would walk by and kick the Holy Koran, and sometimes they would try to piss on it or wipe shit on it,’ [Abbas] said.” A female soldier told him, “Our aim is to put you in hell . . . These are the orders we have from our superiors, to turn your lives into hell.”
Jamail described how Fallujah’s hospitals have been subjected to an American tactic of collective punishment, with US marines assaulting staff and stopping the wounded entering, and American snipers firing at the doors and windows, and medicines and emergency blood prevented from reaching the hospitals. Children were shot dead in front of their families, in cold blood.
The two men ultimately responsible for this, George W Bush and Tony Blair, attended the G8 meeting at Gleneagles. Unlike for the Iraq tribunal, there was saturation coverage, yet no one in the “mainstream” - from the embedded media to the Make Poverty History organisers and the accredited, acceptable celebrities - made the obvious connection with Bush’s and Blair’s enduring crime in Iraq. No one stood and said that Blair’s smoke-and-mirrors “debt cancellation” at best amounted to less than the money the government spent in a week on brutalising Iraq, where British and American violence was the cause of the doubling of child poverty and malnutrition since Saddam Hussein was overthrown.
In Edinburgh, a shameless invitation-only meeting of Christian Aid supporters and church leaders was addressed by Gordon Brown, a paymaster of this carnage. Only one person asked him, “When will you stop the rape of the poor’s resources? Why are there so many conditions on aid?” This lone protester was not referring specifically to Iraq, but to most of the world. He was thrown out, to cheers from among the assembled Christians.
That set the theme for the G8 week: the silencing and pacifying and co-option of real dissent and truth. It was Frantz Fanon, the great pan-Africanist intellectual/activist, who exposed colonial greed and violence dressed up as polite do-goodery, and nothing has changed, in Africa as in Iraq. The mawkish images on giant screens behind the pop stars in Hyde Park beckoned a wilful, self-satisfied ignorance. There were none of the images that television refuses to show: of murdered Iraqi doctors with the blood streaming from their heads, cut down by Bush’s snipers.
On the front page of the Guardian, the Age of Irony was celebrated as real life became more satirical than satire could ever be. There was Bob Geldof, resting his smiling face on smiling Blair’s shoulder, the war criminal and his jester. Elsewhere, there was a heroically silhouetted Bono, who celebrates men like Jeffrey Sachs as saviours of the world’s poor while lauding “compassionate” Bush’s “war on terror” as one of his generation’s greatest achievements; and there again was Brown, the enforcer of unfair rules of trade, saying incredibly that “unfair rules of trade shackle poor people”; and Paul Wolfowitz, beaming next to the Archbishop of Canterbury: this is the man who, before he was handed control of the World Bank, devised much of Bush’s so-called neoconservative putsch, the mendacious justification for the bloodfest in Iraq and the notion of “endless war”. And if you missed all that, there is a downloadable PDF kit from a “ONE Campaign” e-mail to “help you organise your very own ongoing Live 8 party”. The suppression of African singers and bands, parked where Geldof decreed, in an environmental theme park in Cornwall far from the vaunted global audience, was described correctly by Andy Kershaw as “musical apartheid”.
Has there ever been a censorship as complete and insidious and ingenious as this? Even when Stalin airbrushed his purged comrades from the annual photograph on top of Lenin’s mausoleum, the Russian people could fill in the gaps. Media and cultural hype provide infinitely more powerful propaganda weapons in the age of Blair.
With Diana, there was grief by media. With Iraq, there was war by media. Now there is mass distraction by media, a normalising of the unmentionable that “the state has lost its mind and is punishing so many innocent people”, as Arthur Miller wrote, “and so the evidence has to be internally denied”. Deploying the unction of Bono, Madonna, Paul McCartney, a pop-up Andrew Marr and of course Geldof, whose Live Aid 20 years ago achieved nothing for the people of Africa, the contemporary plunderers and pawnbrokers of that continent have pulled off an unprecedented scam: the antithesis of 15 February 2003, when two million people brought both hearts and brains to the streets of London.
“[Ours] is not a march in the sense of a demonstration, but more of a walk, ” said Bruce Whitehead of Make Poverty History. “The emphasis is on fun in the sun. The intention is to welcome the G8 leaders to Scotland and ask them to deliver trade justice, debt cancellation and increased aid to developing countries.”
Really?
In Lewis Carroll’s classic, Alice asked the Cheshire Cat and the Mad Hatter to show her the way out of wonderland. They did, over and again, this way, that way, until she lost her temper and brought down her dream-world, waking her up. The people killed and maimed in Iraq and the people wilfully impoverished in Africa by our governments and our institutions, in our name, demand that we wake up.
What was the first thing you thought about when you awoke today?
So, my alarm just went off. I was (am am) sat outside in the garden with my battered laptop at the time, as I couldn’t sleep, but it was 5:30 when I gave up trying and now I am tired.
I forgot to mention the warnings yesterday. I got two. Two warnings! One was from a crop headed white dude working in a pub in Islington. We were the last out, Luke and I, and he came over, all conspirational la, saying he had this contact, really reliable, high up in the police, and we should stay away from tubes tomorrow. Tomorrow then being today. Actually, its gone midnight, so yesterday. But you get what I mean. “Serious, it’s a reliable contact,” he said. I asked him if he ever saw that episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm where that happens to Larry, and he hadn’t. Well, they were having a party, and Alanis Morrisette was going to play, then that got out so nobody came, I said. The dude looked a bit weirded, I think. But what did he expect? What a weird thing to do! How many people did he tell? How many people did they tell? How many people stayed away from the tubes?
So Luke and I went to see War Of The Worlds last night. Gwil said it had a terrible script but it was a brilliant Spielberg movie. Gwil’s eyeballs have been replaced with nuggest of SHIT, it transpires, as the movie is AWFUL, and removes everything good about the Wells and Wayne versions I love so well.
“If the eight went out naked, the cops couldn’t claim that they thought the Panthers had guns or that they shot in self-defense. The other Panthers agreed that nakedness might be their only chance, and in the besieged basement, their eyes streaming from the tear gas, seven of them took off their clothes.”
“The individual is handicapped by coming face to face with a conspiracy so monstrous he cannot believe it exists.”
Hello. I am playing the Port Elliot Literary Festival today. Well, tonight. Jeres and I are on at midnight so we might see you there, eh? Failing that, I will be on Eddy Temple Morris’ radio show tommorrow night, talking about, well, some crap or other. Bon, um, stuff.
Dear baby
Mary, Mary quite contrary…… says:
I had a proper weekend, you will be glad to hear, free of any kind of darkness at all. Friday’s gig was easily the best I have done, thanks to my band, my rap chums, and my attendant peoples, (BOOF) blowing off the roof. I would like to thank Mr ETM for having us, and Greg the soundman. And to note that the Young Knives are dope.
I was fucking very happy thank you, after an tremedous rehearsal with my ace peoples for 
Wow, I got my equipmentworking and recorded a BRILLIANT SONG in my bedroom. Wade and Sebastian assisted on the chorus you know. It is called Thanks For All The AIDS. Those of you on my mailing list will know this. You can come see us play it at our super special gig at Cargo this Friday, and you can get disscount guest list 
Peace peoples.
I was like, shit dude, they’re taking the piss out of us.
“It is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy, or a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship. Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in any country”
OK, first off, I’m playing a gig for Love Music Hate Racism in central London tonight. Click 
Dear Anthony Blair
Somebody is fucking with me.
Once again there is no hot water in my so-called house. I went out last night, but at least I didn’t smoke a bunch of cigarettes, so I am not too unfresh.
So, I have been making songs, and feeling poorly, and watching films, and that has been pretty good. I am going to have to start writing about cheerier things though, all this AIDS and Bankery might be getting to me a bit.
I forgot to tell you the other night I met a guy who offered me his socks, out of kindness. On a train. He was drunk, and his fiance was resigned, in that was they are.
I read an interview with a band called The Killers the other day.