Big Merla

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/pQ1EjNRFsZw

To Tackle Climate Heating International Socialism is Needed

We have recently lived through a period in France (where I live) of repeated heatwaves with daytime temperatures sometimes exceeding 40C and nighttime temperatures offering little respite, and with associated droughts. In the Gironde region and the Var massive wildfires occurred, with thousands evacuated and many people losing their homes to the flames. The ‘megafire’ in Gironde threatened the city of Bordeaux. Today as I write there are or have recently been wildfires in Greece, France, Croatia and the UK, as well as in the USA, Spokane, and Canada, British Columbia, and workers are having to labour in unbearable heat extremes because most nations do not have upper temperature limits for work. It is probably the case that these so called heatwaves are the new normal, and if they join up, summer will become hell unless something is done urgently, but it has to be said, now, no matter how urgently we act, stopping fossil fuel burning abruptly, while it is absolutely sensible and needed, will not be able to immediately prevent or reverse the impact that past energy use will have, unfortunately.

40C is hard to deal with. In our home we used a fan constantly. Some of our upstairs rooms were too hot to stay in, and going outside was not advisable. And we have modern insulation and double glazing. It was quite a scary experience going to get our shopping in the car because of what might happen if you broke down in that heat. Supermarkets with car parks without shelter we tried to avoid because they made your car ridiculously, dangerously, hot. We live in the Morvan, and the direct sunshine was impossible to survive in during these periods. At one point we thought we might have to escape down to the cave, which being part buried in the solid rock stayed cool. Only the old stone part of our house remained OK with the shutters permanently closed. Many of our plants in the garden died, as if burnt to a crisp by the rays of the sun even though I had tried to put them in at least partial shade for most of the day. At one point, rather late on, President Macron came on the news to give us an address about the crisis, specifically in the Gironde. For most of his speech you could not hear him because of some humming machine, the TV station eventually switched to another report that had already been aired, then later came back to his speech, the audio was a bit better now but that was the end of it anyway. 

I caught that he mentioned a few times that the crisis was ‘unprecedented’. This phrase is used a lot these days by politicians concerning the climate disaster. Yes, it was perhaps surprising that it has arrived so soon, but the crisis has been foretold by scientists repeatedly, and we have had many previous forest fires in France, even one in 1949 in the Gironde that was bigger.

The current ruling classes and their politicians are obviously incapable of facing up to the climate catastrophe facing all of us, called human induced global warming caused by fossil fuel burning for energy and industry, and which has led recently to such deadly heatwaves and fires. This demonstrates to us very clearly that what is needed is an international plan for energy, implemented concretely over the years ahead. 

But what does this mean? It means what is needed is socialism, - in other words, it means we need (at least) nationalized, socially owned energy and transport industries in the biggest capitalist nations, so that these industries can be made to work in cooperation and coordination with each other instead of competing, so as to end the use of fossil fuels, so that we can all move to renewable energy infrastructure. 

But unfortunately, this is what the scientists that constantly warn us about global warming avoid saying or are not allowed to say, for reasons that are perhaps understandable but are unsettling; socialism is a political economic system that capitalism and its champions of the free market and its politicians are vehemently opposed to, and these capitalists generally hold to the idea that the free market will provide the solutions to this crisis, in the end. 

This has not happened so far of course, and does not look like it will ever occur, and we are already out of time.

Certainly, the technology for renewable energy has been invented and already implemented in instances, but this has been in a piecemeal, slow, and reluctant manner, as well as also in a fake way, such as to signal virtue and sell more products to expand and increase capitalist growth, for example electric cars stop emissions at the car, but still rely on the production of electricity usually by fossil fuel burning, and they produce more emissions in their manufacture process. So, while the proof of concept has shown us that renewable energy, such as solar, wind, hydro, geothermal, etc, does work, the political will to make the transition has not been sufficient and has failed. 

Why? This is because the politicians are not really in full charge of our destiny, even while elected, their class determines what can be done, and their class leadezrs are the big capitalists who make their wealth out of fossil fuels. Clearly there are too many vested interests in continuing the use of fossil fuels, too many jobs involved in these industries as well as too many secondary jobs that rely on these jobs. Capitalists, big businesses, corporations, cannot, even if they wanted to, just discard their profitable industries because of this.

What must we do therefore? Only economies that can command their most essential industries and resources can cope with the necessary task of planning and implementing this future. Only these, socialist, economies will be capable of cooperating internationally rather than competing and, as is often the case, going to war with each other over energy. This is why it is the most urgent task in each advanced capitalist nation that the political parties of the progressive sides understand this and begin to hurriedly work towards socialism.

I say this knowing of course how this will sound to many like a throwback to an earlier stage of history that the media led us to believe was over, and that capitalist democracy is victorious and the ‘only game in town’. But we now know imperialist competition is not over, and thus war is not over. However, the will to resist imperialism seems to have been sapped, I suggest by the media. But previously, during periods of war we, such as in the UK, have successfully implemented socialist policies when needed, even in our capitalist economy, and we should indeed think of ourselves as on a war footing regarding the climate emergency.

For us, the climate must now be understood as an essential part of carrying forward the class struggle, because the bourgeois class will, as has become obvious, fight against this movement tooth and nail and with all of their ruses and clever media. They will make this task seem unpopular, unfashionable, and seem to be untenable, or will divert this movement onto fake paths that seem superficially to be progress but which are not and which will still support the use of fossil fuel. If we do not enter this struggle, we will be shirking our responsibility and shrugging our shoulders at the terrible catastrophes that will inevitably, and sooner than later, befall our species.

I write this with quite a lot of pessimism, given the current state of things, not really expecting this to happen anytime soon, but I have at least spoken and thus saved my soul.

See also:

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2026/aug/14/why-is-andy-burnham-so-reluctant-to-talk-about-climate-crisis

Review of the film The Odyssey, 2026

by Gary Tedman

Homer apparently wrote, or compiled (from songs), The Odyssey as a follow up to The Iliad, which is the story of the sack of Troy (Ilion was another name for Troy). Parts of this epic story are recounted in the film, but the Iliad does not begin with the preparation for or the start of the war, it begins with the hundreds of ships of the Achaeans (you could say this was the term for the ancient Greeks, but Greece is a relatively modern nation state which did not exist at this time, in which there were only city states like Athens) pulled up on the beach, and the siege of Troy having already begun some time ago. The Odyssey film also begins in a similar kind of way, with the war having been already won, at some cost, chiefly by the famous subterfuge of the wooden horse. There now seems to be only two ships on the beach, the one of Odysseus, and Agamemnon’s, and the plot concerns Odysseus’ trials as he tries to lead those Achaeans still under his command to home and safety after being away for years.

The doings of the gods feature quite a bit in The Iliad, Zeus, Apollo, Athena, Thetis, Hera, and so on, an extended family you might say. Achilles is for instance a demi-god. And this brings a problem for the film and Christopher Nolan, who opted for a treatment of the subject in a similar realist-like way to his other war film, Dunkirk.

Maybe Homer was even aware of this problem all that time ago. In The Iliad the author narrator tells us about the problem of not being able to make the reader aware of the simultaneous events in the battle at different gates of the beach encampment protecting the boats of the Achaean myrmidons from the Trojans, who have come out of the city, a problem of down-to-earth human beings acting in consort in a war. However, he evidently has no trouble knowing and telling us about what the gods are doing, in a very specific sense, and how they interfere in the lives of these fighters and who they manifest as, which seems contradictory (but perhaps this was standard practice).

Is it a timely film? It is anti-war. The aftermath of the horrors of war figure here in indirect ways, revealing guilt and an unclear search for redemption. The viewer or the reader does not really find out why Troy was being attacked, there are hints in the film about an economic struggle over trading routes to the east. Historic Troy, which was not long ago discovered, was on this sea route, at the Dardanelles, near the entrance to the Sea of Marmara, which itself connected to the Black Sea by what is now the strait of the Bosphorus (Thracian Bosporus). But the reason given in the epic account is Helen, the most beautiful mortal woman, possibly taken forcibly (or removed willingly from her husband), by Paris back to Troy. This involves the intrigues of the gods, but it seems to us a too feeble an excuse to launch the thousand ships. Possibly it is allegorical, symbolizing the Trojans unfairly stealing their trade and obtaining beautiful booty. Homer does not dwell on Helen much, although she seems wise and a little regretful.

The book is full of the top commanders wearing resplendent armour, which they fight over and strip from each other in combat, with bronze, silver, and gold decorations worn by the heroes, and amazingly wrought weaponry, but the film shows little of this splendour, it seems deliberately grubby, gritty, and dark, and no make-up is evident, the pores of the actors can even be seen, which is quite shocking really. Probably the ordinary soldiers, not professionals in the modern sense, in reality had to make do with their more humble gear and were modestly attired and evidently even needed to be cajoled and corralled into battle, but I suspect the leaders and nobility looked pretty impressive even in the mundane real world of the Bronze age, but not so this Odysseus. Otherwise, Matt Damon achieves all that is needed of him in the role, he is good at this sort of thing, if perhaps too recognisable, Jason Bourne in a Greek helmet.

Nolan does not show us the gods, but he does hint at them sometimes, a little, by some camera techniques if I am not mistaken, but also when he does have to show us the mythical manifestations and appearances, given they are a mainstay of the story, like the one eyed giant or the sirens, he does it in a realist manner, which is peculiar: the giant has a twisted face, malformed, disabled, rather than a central alien-like eye. I found myself wanting some CGI for once (maybe there was some, I don’t know, but I wanted it more obvious). If ever there was a justification for some extravagant special effects, this was it, it required a spectacle. But the opportunity was not taken up. I found myself pining a bit for Ray Harryhausen’s stop motion animation such as in Jason and the Argonauts. Nevertheless, the movie was gripping enough even without attaining the epic quality that Dunkirk did sometimes succeed in.

A few translator’s observations on The Selected Writings of Marc Bloch

Essays from the Annales School 1914-1944

Bloomsbury Academic 2025

Translated and edited by Iona Singh

Sick of thinking my own thoughts and writing them down, the possibility of trying to get into someone else’s thoughts and writing them down instead interested me. I knew Lucien Febvre’s work and his subtle approach to the role of feelings from A new kind of history, Sensibility and history and History and psychology (RKP 1973). These are fantastic essays, unique in their field, the kind you dream about when trying to understand the social and political affects of art and design, for example, and they can be applied way beyond the realms of historical studies. And Febvre, in these essays kept mentioning this person Bloch, he died in the war, shot by the Germans, and was a great loss.

When I first began as a French to English translator, some years before, I had the naive idea that some of the ‘Frenchness’ of the original language should be maintained in the translation, if possible, even if this was not quite correct English. A slight miscommunication with the editor of a Publisher I was translating several books for convinced me they wanted a literal translation of the tenses used in French. English and French are different in this way, the imperfect tense, for example, is used more frequently in French. I’m embarrassed to say this now, but I followed this through and the translation read like the events were ongoing and in the present, like the editorial of Hello magazine. Luckily, the misunderstanding was soon straightened out, forgiven, and I never did that again!

This is one set of innumerable choices that the translator must make to determine not just how to interpret the meaning of the original writing but also the way it is expressed, I would call this the politics of translation. Is a text to be translated formally or officiously or is it casual, should I use slang words or stick to polite terms, middle class or aristocratic phrases and how literal do you need to be in the translation in order to really convey what the writer wants.

They were all questions I needed to mull, especially when translating the writings of Marc Bloch. In the beginning it still seemed charming to retain a little of his French expressions and grammar, but by the time I had finished, over years, I ended up understanding that I only needed to convey what Bloch actually MEANT and that alone. And often these charming Frenchisms got in the way and definitely had to GO.

Translating a work awards a great deal of power, leverage and responsibility to an interpreter. For me the best way to honour that was to grasp the sentiment of what Bloch wanted to say, the feeling, as well as the language. I decided it needed to be like Bloch chatting out loud and explaining it. His writing has a chatty element and by the end of the process, every time I read it, I could hear him saying the words out to me in English (with an English accent)?!

It helps a translator to understand what they can about the personality of the translated. When I began stumbling through Bloch’s long sinuous sentences (even his biographer Carole Fink mentioned these as difficult) and pairing them with the stiff war time photos of a middle-aged Bloch and his grand position in French education, I was intimidated into reading and translating his texts literally and formally, which came across as a bit boring and slightly pompous. But with perseverance the nuances emerged and I realised it was in fact ME reading these things into the work. If his writing is a bit polite and formal at times it needs to be adjusted against the politeness and formality of the epoch which is finally therefore negated to reveal that Bloch, who was mainly addressing young people, students, and academics from outside the mainstream discipline of history, was trying to convey things on their level. From then on, the sentiment of what Bloch actually MEANT and how he meant to say it was much clearer.

And how did he mean to say it? After Bloch’s death in the war Lucien Febvre recalls him recounting an argument wearing ‘that slightly amused look on his face’. And that image clicked with me, because on removing those barriers whether from Bloch’s own pages or from inside my head, it dovetailed with the texts to reveal that Bloch was funny. That the contradictions he points out are befuddling puzzles he’s trying to solve, and they often quite amuse him.

The difficulty of trying to get to this as a translator, to facilitate his words as if he is enunciating them, (some of the chapters in the book are transcriptions of lectures) and informally speaking to his class, became the main challenge. When translating from French, the words chosen from the available English are not, of course, to be translated on their own, they are part of a line of words, and sentences of words, and each of these, adjusts the others. The meaning, starts as a fluid dynamic, moving through the intellectual variables of space and time, but gradually in view of the wider text, this is homed in and any inexactitudes whittled away until the meanings are contained within their correct limits and the spirit, irony, and humour finally comes clean.

I’ve enjoyed listening to Marc Bloch chatting to me over many afternoons while the thread of his language was checked and rechecked, even if I couldn’t get a word in. Sometimes little paragraphs that caused so much trouble at the time come back to me out of the blue. Ancient words in French I did not know but now will never forget, and I’ve talked about them so much to my husband that he won’t forget them either. And now the book is published it's a bit of a shame to leave my talkative old mate behind.

A reviewer of the book mentioned that Bloch’s voice ‘shines through’ from within the edition but made no reference to the role of translation in this. Bloch’s voice does shine through, but not of its own accord as some transcendental force that asserts itself under any circumstances, it shines through by the material mechanics of translation, the processes of understanding what that voice is and of eventually ridding it of anything that stifles it.  

Iona Singh

The paperback edition of The Selected Writings of Marc Bloch: Essays from the Annales School 1914-1944 with be available from 20 August 2026 from Bloomsbury Academic https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/selected-writings-of-marc-bloch-9781350513433/ and Amazon.

Iran War Notes

Netanyahu, the leader of Israel, sounds reasonable in his speech and his answers to the press questions, he has a nice voice, and is always composed. This is 19/03/2026 during the war on Iran by the US and Israel. The war was started by these powers without warning during negotiations with Iran. The justification has varied for the US and Trump, flipping between the apparent nuclear threat, to the killing of protesters by the Iranian authorities, to regime change.  Now, as Netanyahu speaks, he refers to Iran’s conventional weapons that it has developed, describing them as a way for Iran to develop and protect nuclear weapons. So now, also, Iran may not even develop conventional weapons, as far as these powers are concerned. In effect this means that Iran may not have a state, be a state, an authority with power.

The argument that these allied powers were encouraging an uprising by the Iranian people rings hollow, now, because the bombing, such as of needed infrastructure and the oil storage facilities around Tehran, which affects Iranians badly, does not engender sympathy even from the rebels.

On a news programme, Trump expressed surprise that Iran closed the Strait of Hormuz as part of its retaliation. The strait is a narrow point in the vital global trade route for shipping, especially of fossil fuels. This in itself is surprising, both that he did not expect it, and that he would admit to not expecting it. But Trump is hard to pin down, he sows confusion and appears to operate on whims. The attack on the giant gas field shared between Iran and Quatar. Was this known by Trump or not? Who knows. Trump seems to deny knowing it, perhaps because it would not be liked too much by Quatar, a supposed ally.

It seems incredible that the leaders of Iran especially, after all this time, do not seem to realize that the US and Israel work together, they are a ‘double act’ so to speak. Or maybe they just go along with the illusion. Israel manages to assassinate Iran’s leaders almost at will, but still Iran seems to be capable of defending itself with its missiles and drones.

The question is, does Israel and the US really want to degrade Iran to the extent that it represents no threat? Do they not need a good excuse for war every now and then? And what do they really expect from regime change if it were to happen? Not a progressive revolution of course, they do not want a competing progressive democracy or socialism in this fossil fuel rich location, they would prefer the return of the Shah type of aristocracy, it is easier for them to make deals with and exploit.

None of the ‘analysts’ of this war drawn on by the western media bring into the account of this conflict the role of class. The US military bases strewn throughout the region exist because the regional royalty, their ruling classes want them, because they help them control their own working classes. Iran is the different one, the exception, it had a revolution but went one step forwards and two steps backwards, it ejected western interests and deposed the Shah but installed the clerics and absolute religious authority. But it does not have the US bases and is unfriendly to US regional influence, and Israel. It is therefore not entirely untrue that Iran does not represent a threat to the world if it develops nuclear weapons.

But it is also true that we are always threatened by the nuclear weapons in the hands of people like Trump and Netanyahu, and Hitlerism grew out of a democracy, so what is different about Iran? Iran must not have nuclear weapons according to the western powers for a hidden reason, because it is near all the oil and the main trade route for it. For this reason, the Middle East in general must be kept virtually medieval, and it must be reduced into this condition periodically by the imperial powers. It must be made and kept barbaric. This is simple capitalist imperialist competition at work.

What, in any case, is the specific difference with Iran having nuclear weapons to other countries that have them? Aside from the argument that they are crazy, Netanyahu claimed in his speech that if they had nuclear weapons, they would blackmail the world. Is this true? Apart from trying to know what is in the psychology of the future Iranian regime if it had nuclear weapons, what would be their actual, material, advantage? After all, they would only be in the same position as every other nuclear power. If they were to use the bomb, there would be mutually assured destruction, and no winners. Clearly the only real difference would be that other nuclear powers would not be able to sway them with threats so easily, the nuclear powers would lose influence in this region, which in the end is to lose profits.

Regarding the accusation of craziness, Iran has Islam as a state religion, unlike for instance Judaism in the state of Israel. The west implies that this state religion is especially unhinged. History does not prove this, yet every religion has its extreme evangelists who can become state terrorists. At this moment it is the democratic west led by Trump and Netanyahu that is being terrorist, but on a grand crusading imperialist scale that makes the label seem weak and inappropriate. Religion is dangerous because it is faith, and faith knows no bounds.

Coming back to earth, by missing out class in their analysis, the leaders of the west also miss out the thorny issue of their own workers not being able to afford to buy fuel for their cars to get to work and the cost of living is rising again. These are ostensibly at least democracies, which have public opinion, which in the US is opposed to this war. In the Middle East what the working classes think and feel is a mystery to them, at least as far as they let us see. Iran attacks the neighbouring Middle Eastern countries that host US military bases from which they are being attacked, as they obviously would. These attacks must affect the class relations in these countries, causing some wobbles. Thus, it is not only Iran that could develop regime change given this war and its unsettling conditions.

Generally western leaders, in an amazing show of brazen hypocrisy, denounce Iran for attacking these countries (i.e. defending itself) and remain quiet about the unlawful surprise attack by Israel and the US on Iran, which started this war. Brazen hypocrisy is clearly the name of the game these days, it is presumably a rather strange way to try to hang onto a vestige of moral high ground, but they cannot refer to international law anymore, which died with Gaza. This might be seen as the law of the jungle, but in the jungle it is simpler, there is less connivance, subterfuge, espionage, backstabbing, etc., all the hallmarks of human economic contradictions and struggle.

And all this fighting is over fossil fuels, all this extra pollution, at a time when we least need it, when the planet is warming alarmingly due to the burning of these fuels. Truly the global bourgeois classes seem to want to cement their reputation as totally unfit to rule.

 

The western Bourgeois classes flummoxed by Trump’s Imperialism

 So Trump, the US president, jealous at Putin’s imperialism, starts his own adventure in his own ‘back yard’ (as the press call it) in South America, as US armed forces kidnap president Maduro of socialist Venezuela, strangely meeting little resistance, according to reports. After this, we again find the US president threatening to take over Greenland, possibly even forcibly. This now has a new significance for other western leaders. They were generally quiet or supportive on Trump’s illegal action in Venezuela, but the Greenland threat got them worked up a bit more. Greenland, belonging to Denmark, a Nato member. Nato, a military alliance, has a pledge to defend any member against external threats, but now the threat is the biggest member of Nato, its de facto ruler. What would they say now?

Well, at least a few half-hearted comments about Greenland meant they did not have to remark all that much about Venezuela. But now of course Putin in Ukraine is not so morally different to Trump in South America. Clearly the liberal western press was having an awkward moment finding its ethical high ground. Still, the bottom line, the standard frame, was to support the US, the leader of the Free World. They look for excuses for the leader of the Free World to be so obviously outright authoritarian and imperialist.

Putin in fact has more and better excuses for imperialism in Ukraine, given what happened in WWII and the millions of Russians who were killed by the German Nazis, the invasions of Russia usually being via Ukraine with assistance from some Ukrainians. So, we see that what interests the bourgeois classes and its western media is not really some special democratically based morality, but the interests of its bourgeois class owned corporations who are helped to global success by the force of the US military. In a sense what this means is a return to the capitalist normality of imperial competition, which was only interrupted a little bit by the post world war consensus that such wars should never happen again.

And so, what does this mean? It means we are heading towards another world war; this is always where imperialism ends up, as we should know by now. However, knowing this and doing something real about it are two different things. Our politicians act as if they are living on a different astral plane, their morality and arguments are from an earlier time, outdated as soon as they utter their well-worn phrases, and otherwise quite bizarre, they do not face up to what is happening. But they cannot, not because they do not have this knowledge, but because they are embedded in a system where they depend on the corporations and the military who are pushers of imperialist conquest. They are not in fact our elected representatives, even though of course they act out this role, they are really members of the media state apparatus of the bourgeois class, their job is to perform for this class, to play the role of democratic freedom, a kind of covering up of imperialism with a sugar coating.

 

Ukraine Russia War – Fascist Corruption

Recently some of the Ukrainian president’s closest friends, confidantes, and advisers, as well as people in his political party, have been strongly suspected of corruption by the internal agency, called Nabu, that not so long ago Zelenskyy tried to prevent from doing its job through legislation in Ukraine’s parliament, only to be made to reverse this by massive protests. The corruption involves alleged kickbacks from contracts for the big Ukrainian energy company, Energoatom. One of the suspects fled the country, allegedly to Israel, just hours before his home was raided in the investigation, apparently being tipped off. This was Timur Mindich, the old friend of Zelenskyy and former business partner in his media production company, Kvartal 95, which helped Zelensky get elected and gain power, as well as providing a team of close advisers afterwards, all helped by money and political encouragement from the west.  Another close friend, adviser, and Zelenskyy’s chief of staff, who was inseparable from Zelenskyy until now and was the key figure in the so-called peace negotiations with foreign governments, was Andriy Yermak. Yermak also worked for Zelenskyy’s media production company, as a lawyer at first, from 2011. Other figures involved are Ukraine’s ex deputy prime minister Oleksiy Chernishov, who was also under suspicion in another case of corruption, the justice minister Herman Halushchenko, and the energy minister Svetlana Hrynchuk, plus a good number of other less well-known individuals. All of these were members of Zelenskyy’s Servant of the People political party. Yes, the name seems somewhat ironic to say the least.

The western media state apparatus does not dwell much on these matters, although they report it, the person who appears to be the focal point of the corruption, president Zelenskyy himself, completely evades their suspicion, even their speculation, when you might have expected otherwise. So much money and praise has been heaped upon this fascist leader, now no longer elected in Ukraine but essential to the western media, that they cannot easily retrace their steps. It was similar with Aung San Suu Kyi, you may recall. But that moment when the Canadian parliament, with Zelenskyy in attendance, gave an actual old Nazi two standing ovations, was obviously highly emblematic.  

The bourgeois state media spin on this is that it demonstrates that Ukraine is a society with a democracy on the right path to solving its enormous corruption problem, as if this were just a fly in the ointment, it is after all the only way to paint it positively for them. It is a standard response that excuses everything. If they lose a conflict, they will also say it was due to the mass peace campaigns, which "show how vibrant our democracy is." 

We will not dwell on how western workers might feel about their money and weapons being gifted to a foreign fascist leadership while they are deprived in the cost of living crisis, but ask how must the poor Ukrainian workers feel being sent to the front and risking their lives, and often dying, for these people. They are suffering in the energy blackouts caused by Russian bombing, but having their money and energy siphoned off to fill the pockets of their own corrupt leaders, in the midst of this war, rather than support the effort, must be extremely galling. This again is not mentioned, even speculated on, by the western media state apparatuses, who dutifully follow their bourgeois class’s imperialist aims.

https://www.aljazeera.com/features/2020/4/17/why-is-a-heroine-of-ukraines-revolution-charged-with-murder

https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2025/12/2/what-will-the-sacking-of-zelenskyys-no-2-change-for-ukraine

"Several months later, NABU published tapes exposing large-scale corruption within the president’s inner circle. Although, initially, the chief of staff was not directly implicated in the scandal, reports were soon leaked that the “Ali Baba” mentioned in the tapes was none other than Yermak. The recordings also suggested that it was Yermak who may have ordered the security services to launch the attack on the anti-corruption agencies back in the summer, though no formal charges have been brought against him.

Even after not only the opposition, but also some of the president’s allies began demanding Yermak’s resignation, Zelensky fought to the bitter end for his chief of staff. "

https://left.eu/ukraine-government-turning-blind-eye-to-fascism-in-its-ranks/

"As Mr Korotkykh's case demonstrates, the ultra-nationalists have proven to be effective and dedicated fighters in the brutal war in the east against Russian-backed separatists and Russian forces, whose numbers also include a large contingent from Russia's far right.

As a result, they have achieved a level of acceptance, even though most Ukrainians are unfamiliar with their actual beliefs.

The volunteer Azov Battalion is a case in point."  *

* The idea expressed in this article by the BBC writer that Ukrainians are somehow more unaware of what Nazis are is somewhat ridiculous, given the history of their country, and its invasion by Nazi Germany. They would have at least as good an understanding as UK citizens, except it would be likely influenced by the years of imperialist imposition by the late Russian Soviet Union and later Russia.

The Brechtian element of radical Pop

There is an unheralded modernist Brechtian aspect to some pop music. By Brechtian I mean a technique used by Bertolt Brecht, the famous playwright, in his theatre. This technique was sometimes called the 'alienation effect'. It was a way to distance the audience from too close an identification with the characters being played in the performance, so that they were not, in a sense, hypnotised by the narrative but relatively distanced. This technique is not to be confused with alienation in the more usual usage, such as by Marx or Durkheim, where it describes a negative state of mind or feelings. In fact, Brecht"s effect could be regarded as a kind of antidote to alienation in the ttraditional sense.

When I was young I found myself liking certain types of popular music across the genres that they belonged to, and this made some things a little awkward, given it involved transgressing specific fashions that went with the genres and different peer groups. There was a time when I liked Ska and some reggae of the Trojan records type, but also Jimi Hendrix and Cream. The fashions that went with these two kinds of music were completely different, the former being generally skinhead and the latter hippie. I had this way of being more of a skinhead at my school, a secondary modern mixed comprehensive, but out of school I could be more of a hippie (this sounds difficult especially with the hair but we had feathered haircuts that could be long). But the two fashions were more than just that, of course they were ways of acting and living. The media was critical of both but the more working class skinhead fashion and the music was often framed in the media of the time as racist, even though it was obvious we liked black music. In my school there was a black skinhead girl, she was tough.  Most of the free images of skinheads are of more recent origin, I don't remember seeing any swastikas on skinheads in the 1970s, later this was a punk thing and I suppose there was some crossover in styles then. Ironically the most white music was 'cock rock' with their anthems.

The attitude of the skinheads was, at least superficially, completely opposite to the hippies, skinheads embraced violence or at least did not shy away from it, and were cynical about liberal attitudes. The hippies were into peace and love and flower power, although of course they protested. My skinhead style was not the full on crew cut hair, red braces, whiteT-shirt, Levi 501s and boots, but the variant that was more common at school, Levi Sta-Prest trousers, loafers or brogues, Ben Sherman shirts, maybe a tank top jumper. It may seem, because of the media, that skinheads were right-wing in politics, but I was not aware of this personally, some were right wing, others were not, like myself, I was a socialist, my Dad was a shop steward, but skinheads were more from the working class, while hippies seemed to be more bourgeois.

So what about the music? You can see that the difference in these so called sub-cultures made it difficult to like music across this divide, but I did, because I found something similar in certain artists. For instance, I liked the sound of early Bob Dylan records, and I liked the sound of some of Ken Boothe, and Prince Buster. To just jump around a bit (probably in time as well as across these boundaries), Jimi Hendrix sometimes reminded me of Ska. The feature that made the similarities was, I would now say, the Brechtian effect, the rather raw, obviously also electronically mediated, 'mistake' filled, sound that 'revealed the transaction' between the techniques producing the sound and the listener. The Beach Boys had partially developed this sound, and so had others, the Shangri-Las, the Phil Spector wall of sound, it goes back to Leadbelly (Huddie Leadbetter) maybe. Ok, it is not just a sound, it is the arrangement, so partly also a studio product. Some of it merges into blues with Janis Joplin's band Big Brother and the Holding Company. 

Clearly, wI am not talking about such pop music being radical in what it says in its lyrics, its stories, the 1960s 'protest songs' for instance, but more its form, and this form was not specific to a particular genre. 

When I finally became an art student it was easier to negotiate these differences. Art students have their own weirdness and did not fit into anything very obviously, but it still bothered me, or to be more accurate saddened me, that my new peer group was generally more hippie and more embracing of that cultural position, because they were more bourgeois. In the meantime I was becoming more bourgeois, leaving behind my now proscribed skinhead past, and in a sense also my family. This made me want to understand what was going on with these categories into which I did not easily fit. It seemed to me that something was being censored by the media frame, not to put it too finely, and we were being channeled away from this Brechtian formal aspect of radicalism that crossed over these dividing lines.         

Reflections on the Killing of Charlie Kirk

Charlie Kirk, the far-right youth influencer and supporter of Donald Trump, was shot and killed at a college campus in Utah. Such an escalation was foolish and is to be regretted. The suspect, Tyler Robinson, a young man, has been held for trial. This has been in the news now for a few days.

Of course, the killing has provoked a lot of reaction in the US and beyond, and has had some heavy repercussions. – One is, just recently Jimmy Kimmel’s popular late-night show was suspended. In his comedic monologue criticising the Trump administration he mentions vice-president JD Vance as exploiting the assassination to attack political opponents of Trump. In this response to the killing, JD Vance said that the majority of violent acts such as this were by ‘lunatics’ on the left. This is not the case, in fact most political violence in the US has been by the right-wing, and it has been the right-wing that, through provocations and trolling, has primarily used hate speech to inflame the political climate, Vance was, even at this time, inappropriate by his own measure, just adding to this.

The shooter, Tyler Robinson, if the reports about him are accurate, appears to come from a Republican family, but his own politics are according to the reports more leftward, while also influenced by internet subcultures, and gender politics.  However, the case has not yet gone to trial, and we do not yet know the real motives, yet Vance and Trump have already blamed the ‘far left’ for this violence, jumping to their desired conclusion.

One of the outcomes of Trump’s democratic election has been the obvious triumph of the press and media over traditional politics in which its role has been kept in the background. Although Trump’s regime has regularly attacked the press and blamed the media for its coverage, it is clearly straining to appear to be an alternative rebellious force  while holding the executive power, and has meanwhile consolidated its power over these corporations and debunked the standard traditional ‘balance’ between left and right sides. It has also by doing this deflected attention from Trump’s own roots in the media, as well as his friendly relations with Epstein.

Hitherto the appearance of a balance, and the supposed checks on unbridled power that it defends against, has served the bourgeois class well as an image of fairness, but Trump now openly eschews this. The question is, where will this lead for the US? We can see the aim is to keep Trump in power as a dictator, but why would the bourgeois class of the US want such a dictatorship at this stage, and why would it be so willing to ditch this well-honed mechanism of managing its class power now?

The answers lie in the continuation of imperialist projects that never actually entirely left the room. Post WWII, we have lived through a time when the liberals of the bourgeois cultural elite, and its media, put a lot of faith in what they termed the rules based order and the universal values typified by the spirit of the UN at its pinnacle, despite the obvious flies in the ointment at the time. The continuing aims of the imperialist capitalists were put in the background and tended to be ignored while reconstruction after the war went ahead. But this could not last forever. What we see now is imperialism refreshed.

But it is imperialism dressed up in new clothes. In the old days, imperialist conquest and colonization for expansion and profit was mediated by the divine right of kings and queens, with missionaries projecting Christianity onto savages ‘for their own good’, for the salvation of their souls. This was the ultimate justification for the massacres, enslavement, and ethnic cleansing that it carried out, while undoubtedly bringing scientific advances to the world. But today this ideology and aesthetic can no longer hold water, it looks like what it is, a bunch of anti-scientific prejudices and bigotry. So, what can take the place of these old excuses for extreme violence in the modern world, when imperialist capitalist expansion is again rampant and obvious?

Curiously, we only need to look at a product of modern science, the internet, and social media, to see it. The troll is there to inflame debate towards the fascist perspective on everything. If Trump or JD Vance lie and go against reason and science, they are trolling, if they complain against things that they are simultaneously guilty of doing themselves, they are trolling. When they talk against the state apparatus while acting as the state apparatus they are trolling. When they rail against censorship but simultaneously blatantly censor their rivals, they are trolling, when they gush with sentiment over the tragedy of Charlie Kirk’s shooting, but are cold and callous about the killings of Democrats, they are trolling.

And this strategy is the same as Israel’s, the proxy of the US, when it tells Gaza Palestinians whom it is bombing where to move to and then also bombs these ‘safe areas’. This is also trolling, on a different level, indeed, but it is the same kind of thing. And what is it for? It is for the capitalist imperialist expansion of white western power into the Middle East where the oil and the trade routes are. It is to use Israel and Jews as its advanced guard, its missionary force, for this project. Does it care in any real sense about Charlie Kirk or the Jews of Israel? Is any of this for moral reasons? No. The US leadership is complicit in the genocide of Palestinian people in Gaza. It is trolling everyone when it claims to be interested in peace, it even bombs an ally while it holds peace talks that it takes part in. Again, this is trolling.

And it is clear that as a strategy, trolling is what the US ruling class has opted for in the modern age, it is its media position. Yes, this is added to by certain evangelical Christian religious motives, and spiced up with a simple lust for violence, tainted by a strong desire for vengeance and retribution for perceived injustices. But it is trolling, writ large.

And yet trolling is inherently weak. It cannot really match the old ideologies and aesthetic practices. It cannot be consistent. It cannot be sustained, it is anti-science but must use science, it is anti-rational but cannot ignore, at least for long, the economy. It is doomed to failure, to implode. So, in this sense it, MAGA etc, is a kind of death cult that wants to take everyone with it, down. If President Donald Trump cannot succeed in his project, and he cannot, he cannot be seen to fail, so he must become a martyr, he must become a kind of deity that avoids all culpability. He is trapped in this loop. As many commentators have said already, the US is heading towards a very dangerous place, but we are all in this place.

On the Kimmel furore (we quote here from the Guardian online): 

"...The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression has said that the ABC network “caved” to pressure from the US government.

The timing of ABC’s decision, on the heels of the FCC chairman’s pledge to the network to “do this the easy way or the hard way,” tells the whole story. Another media outlet withered under government pressure, ensuring that the administration will continue to extort and exact retribution on broadcasters and publishers who criticize it.”

In a statement, the advocacy group went on to say that the US “cannot be a country where late night talk show hosts serve at the pleasure of the president. But until institutions grow a backbone and learn to resist government pressure, that is the country we are.”

From:

<https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/live/2025/sep/18/jimmy-kimmel-charlie-kirk-comments-show-cancelled-suspended-monologue-trump-us-politics-live> 

- Note how this is a peculiar statement because in it it is seen as the responsibility of 'institutions' to grow a backbone themselves, when obviously the institutions have an existing backbone (in other words it is institutional) which is currently being used  to quell dissent and censor, so, according to this institution (the Foundation for individual Rights and Expression) the institution that censors has the merely moral responsibility to stop itself from doing what it is doing, and it is, kind of, a bit sad that this is not happening. 

Peter Mandelson finally sacked over Epstein

Peter Mandelson, the long time seemingly irrepressible political figure implicated in some aspect of British government, has been sacked today, which would be the third time in his political career, by the British Prime Minister Kier Starmer, after further revelations about his relationship with Jeffrey Epstein, the very rich convicted paedophile sex offender who died in prison while awaiting trial. 

Apparently, according to Starmer, Mandelson was subject to a full vetting process before his appintment as British ambassador to the US. So they either knew all this and did not care, liked it, just hoped it would not come up, or they are just incompetent. Incompetence is the usual escape clause.

Mandelson wrote to his 'pal' who was facing prosecution, in June 2008, for soliciting a child for prostitution:

“I can still barely understand it. It just could not happen in Britain. You have to be incredibly resilient, fight for early release and be philosophical about it as much as you can.”

One of the most striking and disturbing aspects of this is the statement that it 'just could not happen in Britain', as if he would have been able to protect him, or that Britain was more amenable to these things.

Only recently, this September, the deputy PM, minister, and leader of the Labour Party Angela Rayner had to resign due to impropriety over not paying the correct tax on a property. The government has been reportedly preparing for tax increases on property.

Charlie Kirk, 31, MAGA ally of President Trump and youth agitator shot dead

Charlie Kirk, 31, the US right-wing influencer and strong MAGA ally and supporter of President Donald Trump shot dead on a Utah University campus during a debate, 10 September 2025, when he was answering questions on gun control. 

Cross party commenters condemned the shooting as does Trump, but Trump sites only previous attacks on right-wing Republican supporters and fails to mention Democrat victims.

Today the hunt for the perpetrator is still ongoing. Many students dived then scattered as the shot rang out, which hit him in the neck. Kirk was on his America Comeback Tour, as part of the student group Turning Point USA.

Kirk had openly stated bigoted views and used homophobic and Islamophobic slurs, he recently tweeted “Islam is the sword the left is using to slit the throat of America.”

Affective Practices and Politics, a schematic Marxist analysis

Gary Tedman

What my research work is mostly about, as in my book Aesthetics & Alienation, is the way aesthetics fits into politics.

A short, materialist, definition of aesthetics is the opposite of anaesthetics.

So, what is the opposite of anaesthetics? Anaesthetics are normally understood to be drugs that dull our senses, which make us less aware of our surroundings. They are of course important in medicine, but if we treat the term more broadly, we can see that it could mean anything that reduces your general awareness of reality. So, when it comes to aesthetics, by contrast it is anything that increases your awareness of things, which heightens your sensory capacities.

However, aesthetics has a long history of being a fairly minor ‘tributary’, of philosophy, where it includes or blends into such things as the philosophy of art; it also surfaces in art theory and criticism, and it even appears as a more everyday term for getting your nails done in a shop. We can ignore these aspects for the moment.

I cannot repeat here what I have already gone over in my book. I merely want to point out what I think is an important aesthetic factor in current politics.

The bourgeois class has always been aware of the usage of aesthetics, mainly because for this class it firstly became important for selling things and for marketing and branding in capitalism. Over the many years of their class rule they have built up this knowledge, partly by default, because it is instrumentally useful, but also in the knowledge that it is something that is influential and beneficial in their class struggle against the working class, in other words, it helps them to succeed in their exploitation of the working class.

How does it do this? In my book I explain the role of aesthetics and the ‘aesthetic level of practice’, as well as ‘aesthetic state apparatuses’ in the process of sublimating the alienation from labour of the working class (alienation as per Marx ,1844, and it makes some references to the Marxist philosopher Louis Althusser’s work). This is not easy to grasp in simple terms, and it requires some foreknowledge of Marx’s work, but there are other less significant but more everyday examples of how aesthetics is a part of politics, but which are ‘hidden’ by the ruling class, or they are rendered morally taboo to draw attention to.

My current work, a new book, is about the bourgeois media and the role it plays in the aesthetic class struggle, and I want to put forward a few ideas drawn from this here. I will state them without much evidence and rather baldly.

The media uses aesthetics, perhaps this is obvious: for instance, politicians are groomed by the media, and with their expertise the media presents them in the way they want, while taking into account the needs of their class’s class struggle. Of course, the aesthetic struggle extends way beyond this aspect, into all forms of entertainment and escapism too, but we will concentrate on just this.

We are supposed, obviously, to understand the media as ‘free’, but we reject this.

For us, the media is a state apparatus.

Now, considering ‘the media’ as a unitary thing, as in ‘media state apparatus’, even though this is what the term ‘the media’ (in English English) already implies, might seem a stretch, I know. A lot of the media is obviously privately owned. However, this ownership does not change things drastically, these corporations are either owned by the bourgeois class, or directed by the bourgeois class through their state (it is therefore much like bourgeois education being private and ‘non state’, but also being the most state state education). If there are small independent creative, media start-ups which do well and become popular (it happens!), these will soon be gobbled up by the bigger media state apparatuses and in any case are always governed by state laws.

Thus, we do not accept that there is any really ‘free’ media. It is always, or almost always, in the control of the bourgeois state.

A lot of people already feel this is true, but now we come to the most interesting aspect of the media considered as a state apparatus. The elected government and parliament is also a part of the overall media state apparatus.

It is not something separate, independent from the media. It is also not ‘free’ and ‘of the people’. - Because this apparatus only deals with appearing to govern in an emotional, affective, or aesthetic sense.

To understand this fully we need to delve into bourgeois democracy and how it functions, which has to be left out of this account for the most part, unfortunately.

We can just note that democracy was not elected, it had to be won in the class struggle by the bourgeois class against the old aristocracy, with its divine right to rule. In the history of its origin and development class struggle has continued. Voting democracy tries to hold this struggle within certain boundaries suitable to the bourgeois ruling class. It has to appear to be rule by consensus. Democracy is the political superstructure that it normally prefers because of its appearance of consensus, ‘everyone has a say’.

Being a system fundamentally based on popularity, however, means that it is not politically scientific, and the vote is always directed by which class holds the media state apparatus, which decides what is popular - it is always push rather than pull, just as class struggle came before democracy. We only know what happens in our democracy via the media state apparatus. The election itself is already a performance played in the media, governed by the media state apparatus. There is no such thing as ‘spontaneously popular’, or at least it is extremely rare.

Voting democracy must always elect a parliament that must have a certain structure, which remains rigid and which is repeatable, and its performance is played out, and can only be played out, as a media performance in the media state apparatus. The structure is always a false dialectic: a to-ing and fro-ing between two sides which constantly balance and repair what the other does wrong. It is the ‘nice cop versus nasty cop’ routine writ large, with the voter as the interrogated subject.

‘The media’ schools the elected politicians in how to appear in the media. Essentially this shows the power relation, these elected politicians are the employees of this state apparatus.

If parliament is a media state apparatus, then what apparatus really does the work of governing the country, we might well ask.

We already know that the real mechanism of governing exists and operates in the background, in the UK it is Whitehall, and permanent under secretaries of state which run the different departments, who are appointed, not voted for. This is also where the echelons of government blend quietly with the military and military intelligence, who of course are also not voted for.

In other words when you vote you are voting for a performance, perhaps, at best, a better performance, but this is all you can vote for.

President Trump of the US is perhaps one of the first big bourgeois politicians to be so obviously from the media state apparatus, so obviously a performer, although there have been others. As we know he always rails against the media and pretends to be against it (he would!), despite him being its most obvious product, a sort of pinnacle of the breed.

One thing that led to the writing of this short piece was noticing that certain affective practices, which can be defined as emotional ways of being, your aesthetic, are set in stone by the bourgeois media state apparatus as preordained slots into which the various figures in politics must fit.

For instance, the typical left-wing politician is almost always shown as a ‘firebrand’, a bit shouty, always admonishing people and vigorously trying to persuade us of his (usually his) moral truth, in other words he is a puritan and a humanist, always. This happens across national boundaries, for instance in France Jean Luc Melenchon performs as this figure. In the past in the UK both Neil Kinnock and the union boss Arthur Scargill performed in this vein. These figures always have a religious-like fervour which is reactionary, despite what they may say which may be rational.

Does this performative aspect mean these figures always act insincerely? It does not necessarily follow. But they will be rewarded for how well they adhere to their roles in the false dialectical contest, and insofar as they ‘like’ these rewards and do as they are directed, it seems likely that they would be swayed, and so they become bourgeois agents, specifically of the bourgeois media state apparatus.

 

 

What Happened to Muesli?

 I don’t normally eat muesli for every breakfast, but I like a change, and I thought I would get some. 

There are things that are so emblematic of the capitalist system that we live in that it is even quite comforting, in a way. 

For a Saturday, the shop seemed strangely empty, maybe it was the inflation. Anyway, every brand of muesli (or ‘muesli), of about six or seven, including even Jordans, had chocolate chips in them, and all of them were some abomination called (here in France) ‘croustillant’, which apparently means they wrap blobs of oat flakes in caramelized sugar, so they end up like little flapjacks I guess. I quite like flapjacks, but If I want one, I will get one, or make one, given I have never seen one for sale in France.

- Now, I do not like sugary things, and do not eat chocolate all that much and do not want it in my breakfast cereal, but there seemed to be no choice. I went for the only one that had no chocolate in it, it was a ‘bio’ product and looked sober. I did not read the packet that closely and was, the next morning, disappointed to find it was also ‘croustillant’. It also had very few nuts or seeds in it than these gummed up oats and was much too sweet for me. The nuts that were in it were like concrete. If I had gone to the smaller ‘bio’ supermarket I think I could have got some actual ordinary muesli out of the VRAC (the hopper things), but that was out of the way and a bit of a pain, and the staff were often snobby, and your bank balance much worse off afterwards if you ever wandered off-piste.

So, yes, it is sort of comforting, I’m in this familiar setting, just that, I suppose, inflation has just affected things in a slightly more extreme capitalist way, - even humble muesli. I cannot be bothered to work out why. Someone please tell me. Perhaps they can save on the dried fruit and nuts and seeds and just use cheap oats, maybe they get the sugar cheap, and the chocolate, and maybe because the sugariness is kind of addictive they can sell more of it, obviously they are all copying each other in the competition, which is supposed to produce democratic variety but does not. It is probably a form of shrinkflation but instead of shrinking the size they shrink the quality. It can’t be great for your teeth, for kids especially, and isn’t it fattening? One reason I started eating muesli was for its extolled health benefits, a source of fibre, and I like nuts and seeds, and you used to be able to get no added sugar. The original brand was Alpen, which was very good, but I can’t find this in France. Jordans used to be a second choice. But all this health emphasis is evidently out the window now.

If I complained I know what they will say, “it’s the market, people want it”.

The Plant Based Alternative and Modern Puritanism

Almost all food for humans is ulmtimately based in plants, even if we eat meat. For instance, the meat we eat is usually produced by a creature that eats plants, like the cow eats grass. We cannot avoid the fact that as part of the food chain we as living things die and get eaten, somewhere along the line. Evolution even relies on this. It is a circulating spiral.

One of the big problems with, say, the vegan alternative to meat eating is the illusion that you are virtuous and avoid harming animals. The growing of vegetable crops in the current way is a massive cause of loss of biodiversity, so kills creatures. Modern farming, not just for meat products like cattle, but also for crops, change the landscape on an enormous scale and make it an inhospitable environment for countless animals and insects, and this includes of course the use of pesticides.

And no, we cannot suddenly change all this to nice organic smallholdings that do no harm, or masses of people will starve. Modern farming might be bad in the way it has ended up, but it has been able to feed billions of people, and this must be acknowledged.

Still, one of the ways our bourgeois class tries to market new versions of its commodities to us is by extolling how it is more virtuous, so that the customer can get a warm glow of satisfaction that not only is she or he a part of the wealthy who can afford such things, but also at the forefront of ethicality, a ‘good person’. So, you are also buying this image.

With electric cars, for instance, this has recently turned sour: not only because of the antics of Elon Musk in support of fascistic Trump, but we have found (from scientific research by the University of Aukland, Australia) that the production of electric cars has made more harmful emissions in those countries that have championed electric car technology the most. This is partly because of the manufacturing process of these vehicles, which leads to more emissions, but also the lifetimes of the vehicles, which rarely get to ‘pay back’ what they owe in these emissions. And, of course, unless they fully run on renewables, they also use fossil fuel generated electricity.

The marketing, in the media, of vegetarianism and veganism often seems like a version of political correctness, something mainly for liberals. This is not the fault of vegans or vegetarians of course. It is a problem with the market, mass production, and capitalism. Do we really still need to say it? That the way that farming is performed as a massive agribusiness, for profit, whether for meat or crops, is the problem, and you cannot change this by simply altering your diet as an individual.

But even if you suppose that this puritanism might make some difference, on the other hand it stands as a kind of moral signpost that the problem is people, individuals and their choices, their behaviour, what they want to purchase as consumers, and it ignores and let's off the hook the industry. It is a way of accepting the blame and the guilt not just for yourself, the person who takes this position, but for every ordinary person, it says you are guilty, not capitalism. 

But we are not guilty. We simply need to eat, sleep, and get to work so we can be exploited by this same market. We are like the animals and vegetables being farmed.

Genocide is the New Misdemeanour

Well, maybe it is more than that, genocide is now the new black, and in fact it is mostly forbidden by our ruling classes to actively oppose it, or you will be jailed, or bombed. They have bent the stick in the other direction. Our dear bourgeoisie can now be called the class of Palestine Inaction, and they are very relaxed about war crimes. Not in relation to ‘Putin’ though. As far as ‘Putin’ is concerned he is evil beyond words, it is always ‘Putin’s War’ in Ukraine, but not ‘Netanyahu’s War’ in Palestine.

This, rather obvious flaw in their new logic does not raise much of an eyebrow for them though, - by ‘them’ I mean in their media. Their media carries on, business as usual. Oh, how they criticize those times when they were silent about the holocaust, about the genocide of Jews in Germany. Now, they are silent again, in another direction, making the same ‘mistake’.

But they cannot these days just be silent, can they? There is too much technology to make us aware of what is going on in every part of the world if you want to know. So, instead we get a strange stubborn forcing of the argument, something like, you must behave this way whatever the rationality of it, whatever the morality, because this is what we think, this is how we feel. They want their profits, this is what matters to them. It has all become exposed to the light of day.

They obviously do not give a fig anymore about international law, the rules-based order, universal values, humanitarian morality, - or perhaps we should say they no longer care about appearing to give a fig about these things. They will keep on prosecuting ordinary people for, say, shoplifting, though, very severely. But logically the whole edifice of law has collapsed, it cannot continue as if things have not changed, at least without fascism becoming prominent. And this is why we see the rise in nationalism and fascism, egged on by the media which is obsessed with it.

Now our leaders are almost all war criminals, in one way or another complicit in what is happening in Gaza, including people, children, being starved to death, it is such a new reality that many of us are just gobsmacked unable to do or say anything about it.

We are well beyond the stage when this slaughter has anything to do with Hamas and terrorism.

But the US are only using Israel as their policeman and agent provocateur in the Middle East, and for expansion into this vital global oil and sea trading territory.

What does this mean? It means at some point in the future, medium to long term, the Israeli ruling class will come into conflict with their current US overlords and seek true independence. At the moment, Israel is like another state of the US, where things military can be experimented upon. It is a frontier, a wild west. This is something that not every Israeli will want for their children. So, support the protests of Israelis against the Israeli state apparatus.

Meanwhile the Palestinian people, if they continue to be led by a resistance made up of mainly religious fervour, engaging in adventurist terrorism and doing exactly what their opponents want, are doomed to a slow and torturous death, fated by western imperialism, and its media.