Andy Wastling's Response to Chris Draper's Post

Response to Chris Drapers recent and extremely timely article on Northern Voices , Guess Who Is Reading Your Census ? by Andrew Wastling

IN response to Chris Drapers recent and extremely timely article on Northern Voices 'Guess Who Is Reading Your Census?'

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Readers might also like to have a read of 'Demilitarise the 2021 census' in Peace News: Demilitarise the 2021 census Peace News

There is also an extremely helpful template PRESS RELEASE for campaigners to send to their local media to explain why they are taking such action - though as we know unfortunately the likelihood of such a letter being published locally is indeed slim!

Milan Rai, editor of Peace News, which is circulating a guide to creative resistance to the census, commented: ‘Lots of British people are likely to feel uncomfortable adding to the profits of a giant US arms company developing weapons of death and providing IT services to those who’ve been waging war in Afghanistan and around the world for decades.’

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GUESS WHO IS READING YOUR CENSUS? by Christopher Draper

YOU are legally compelled to complete a census form this Sunday 21 March 2021. According to the form and advice booklet this information gathering is conducted by the “Office for National Statistics” but it’s been privatised with the 2021 contract run by “LEIDOS” (HQ Reston, Virginia, USA). LEIDOS is listed by the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute as the 19th biggest arms and military services company in the world.

LEIDOS Who?

In 2019 the military IT and support service contracts operated by LEIDOS were worth $5.3bn. Last year LEIDOS spent $1.65bn of their profits acquiring Dynetics - a military hardware company. Dynetics is a developer of “future defence technologies” for the US military, including long-range hypersonic missiles, ground-based laser weapons and the Gunsmoke battlefield intelligence microsatellite.

Assisting Warmongers

If you don’t accurately complete your census form you can be fined £1,000 and given a criminal record but some peace-loving hippy types aren’t keen to assist LEIDOS in maximising their profits and have devised an imaginative response.

Completing the census online saves LEIDOS the time and trouble of processing the paper alternative. The more LEIDOS is able to use machines to open, scan, read and record information from paper census forms the more profit it makes on the contract. The more you frustrate this process, the more LEIDOS have to employ and pay people to manually record information, cutting into its profits and minimising its ability to develop ever more deadly weapons of war.

Unfortunate Errors

Courageous individuals might simply refuse to complete any census form and suffer the legal consequences but many more might wish to minimise LEIDOS profits whilst complying with the law. Of course, even those of us anxious to complete the form with the utmost accuracy might inadvertently make mistakes and regrettably such errors might cost LEIDOS time and money to rectify, for example you might;

a) Phone 0800-328-2021 and demand a paper form “as I can’t cope with this modern technology”.

b) Perhaps you might inadvertently enter some answers upside down making the information unreadable by machine.

c) Or fail to properly locate answers in the boxes provided.

d) You might even correct a serious error by stapling an amended version onto the form.

e) Perhaps a page might accidentally get torn and you clumsily mismatch the writing as you sellotape it together again

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f) If like me, you’re addicted to doodling you might casually fill in some of the white gaps in the bar-codes that make each page uniquely identifiable to electronic scanners.

g) Finally, when you put your completed form into the census envelope be careful that you don’t get it back-to-front because if the return address isn’t clearly visible in the little window you might cause unnecessary delay and expense.

h) NB Under no circumstances should you indicate on the outside of the envelope that;

THE BRITISH GOVERNMENT IS PAYING LEIDOS – AN AMERICAN MILITARY CONTRACTOR £65.1m TO PROCESS THESE CENSUS FORMS!

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Sky News: Russia hit with sanctions over attempted murder & jailing of Alexei Navalny

Ian Collier, news reporter 1 hour ago

THE United States and the European Union have imposed sanctions targeting a number of senior Russian officials and businesses over the attempted murder and jailing of opposition leader Alexei Navalny.

The 27-nation bloc and the US imposed bans on travel and froze the assets of a number of members of Vladimir Putin's inner circle. They are:

• Alexander Bastrykin, head of the Investigative Committee of the Russian Federation

• Igor Krasnov, the prosecutor general

• Viktor Zolotov, head of the National Guard

• Alexander Kalashnikov, head of the Federal Prison Service

• Aleksandr Bortnikov, director of the Federal Security Service (FSB)

• Andrei Yarin, chief of the Presidential Policy Directorate

• Sergei Kiriyenko, first deputy chief of staff of the Presidential Executive Office

• Aleksey Krivoruchko, deputy minister of defense

• Pavel Popov, deputy minister of defense

An EU statement said the four were listed "over their roles in the arbitrary arrest, prosecution and sentencing of Mr Navalny, as well as the repression of peaceful protests in connection with his unlawful treatment".

US secretary of the treasury Janet Yellen, said: "The Kremlin's use of chemical weapons to silence a political opponent and intimidate others demonstrates its flagrant disregard for international norms.

"We join the EU in condemning Alexei Navalny's poisoning as well as his arrest and imprisonment by the Russian government."

Meanwhile, the US announced 14 businesses, most of which it said were involved in production of biological and chemical agents, have also been targeted.

Senior members of president did not immediately identify the Russian officials named in them.

One official, who briefed reporters on condition of anonymity, said the sanctions would be the first of several steps by Joe Biden's administration to "respond to a number of destabilising actions".

Mr Biden has pledged to confront Mr Putin for alleged attacks on Russian opposition figures and hacking abroad, including of US government agencies and US businesses.

Mr Navalny, an anti-corruption investigator, was arrested in Moscow in January upon returning from Germany, where he spent five months recovering from a nerve-agent poisoning that he blames on the Kremlin.

Russian authorities have rejected the accusation.

In February, a court sentenced the 44-year-old to two years and eight months in prison for violating the terms of his probation while recuperating in Germany.

The sentence stems from a 2014 embezzlement conviction that Mr Navalny has rejected as fabricated.

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NORTHERN ANARCHIST on Death Row Part 2

by CHRISTOPHER DRAPER

CONDEMNED to death, in November 1897 anarchist Samuel Fielden of Todmorden sat alone in a Chicago prison cell awaiting execution on the 11th of the month. On 2 November the United States Supreme Court ruled there were no federal issues involved and it would not intervene. Only an act of clemency by State Governor Robert Oglesby might stay the executioner’s hand.

LIBERTY or DEATH?

THE political prosecution of Fielden and his comrades disabused radicals around the world of any lingering belief in the United States as the embodiment of liberty. The socialist historian Edward Thompson judged this state-sponsored prosecution the decisive factor in turning Britain’s Socialist League (SL) in an anarchist direction. William Morris (founder of the SL) excoriated the USA as “a society corrupt to the core and at this moment suppressing freedom with just the same reckless brutality and blind ignorance as the Czar of all the Russias.”

OGLESBY DECIDES

AT 9am on the eve of execution one of Fielden’s comrades cheated the hangman, ignited an explosive cartridge in his mouth and blew himself to pieces. Eight hours later Governor Oglesby intervened, commuting Fielden’s death sentence to life imprisonment but four of Sam’s five condemned comrades would still be hanged the following morning.

On Saturday 12 November Fielden was taken from Cooke County Jail to serve his sentence at Joliet, 30 miles south-west of the city of Chicago. At Joliet, Sam could leave his cell, exercise in the open air and resume his old work, labouring in the prison’s stone yard. Visits from family continued although little Alice no longer searched Sam’s cell as she initially did at Cooke County, looking for the candies her father, in happier days, hid around the house for her to triumphantly discover.

In 1890 a recently released prisoner, Thomas Broderick, claimed Sam was being singled out for harsh treatment, “Fielden, the English anarchist, shows the most marked fortitude and faces his dreary fate with wonderful patience and resignation. This has called down upon him the hatred of his guards. I have frequently seen the unfortunate man treated with great cruelty. Once I saw him chained to the wall for several hours and during that time all sorts of epithets were directed towards him by one of the guards and he was abused as though he had been the worst convict in the prison instead of one of the best.”

UNFOGOTTEN

“HAYMARKET MARTYRs” commemorations were organised around the world every eleventh of November and campaigning continued everywhere to secure the release of the remaining prisoners. After enduring seven years long years in jail hopes were raised in January 1893 with the inauguration of a new liberal State Governor, John Peter Altgeld who agreed to review the original prosecution. Confidence in Chicago’s police and judiciary had been severely eroded in the intervening years by a series of shocking discoveries. In January 1889, it was revealed that Inspector Bonfield, who’d led the police assault on the Haymarket meeting, “had for some time been receiving payments from saloon-keepers, prostitutes and thieves and had been trafficking in stolen goods”. Personal items stolen from one of the dead anarchists were subsequently found at the home of Detective Jacob Loewenstein.

On 25 June 1893 a magnificent “Haymarket Martyrs” monument was unveiled at Chicago’s Waldheim Cemetery, where years before Sam, the teamster, had regularly delivered decorative stonework. On 26 June Governor Altgeld formally ended Sam’s imprisonment with a report that rubbished the entire prosecution process that had in 1886 condemned him and his comrades to death. Altgeld emphasised this was no merciful pardon but a public declaration that Sam and his fellow Haymarket anarchists were falsely convicted and entirely innocent.

RELEASE

AT 4.20pm on 26 June 1893 Samuel Fielden, wearing a striped uniform distinguished only by his prison number, “8526”, was summoned to the office of Joliet’s Chief Warder. A special messenger, “Mr Dreyer”, handed Sam an engrossed document authorising his release. “Fielden took his pardon and folding it up carefully placed it under the brown and white striped jacket, worn black with long service, and without saying a word he reached out and grasped Mr Dreyer by the hand and then turning shook the warden’s hand fervidly.” The warden advised Sam, “If you call on Stewart Leland he will fit you out with the best suit of clothes that can be purchased outside of the World’s Fair City…Governor Altgeld has pardoned you and I can congratulate you and feel glad for I believe it is only your just dues.”

HOMECOMING

ARMED only with a rail permit and some pocket money, Sam, smoking a big cigar, left Joliet by the 6.15pm train for Chicago. He reached home, 117 West Polk Street, at 8.45pm where he was received by a large crowd. “His wife had been at the windows of their apartment on the second floor every few minutes on the lookout for him. Their little children, Alice who is 8 years of age and Harry who is nearly 7 were on the steps of the house ready to welcome their father while beside them were many of their father’s old associates…The meeting between the long separated husband and wife was tender though not demonstrative. They embraced each other for a moment and kissed each other for a moment and kissed each other tenderly. The wife murmured a welcome but the husband remained silent. He evidently desired to be stoical and did not want to give any indication of deeper feelings than a quiet sort of pleasure in returning home.”

POSTMAN BEN

THAT summer the Fieldens met old acquaintance, Benjamin Butterworth, the Walsden postman who’d come to Chicago to see the World’s Fair. In fact Butterworth made two visits, arriving first on Sunday 20 August, he returned the following Tuesday. “Glad that he had been permitted to shake hands with an old school fellow so far away from Todmorden, he heartily congratulated Mr Fielden on regaining his liberty after seven long years in Joliet.” For his part, Sam presented Benjamin with two “Haymarket” books, a sympathetic account compiled by lawyer Matthew Trumbull who’d been a Chartist in his youth in England, the other volume was Governor Altgeld’s justification for quashing Sam’s prosecution.

WORK

FIELDEN resumed his stone-hauling business, occasionally supplemented by driving a beer wagon. When he hadn’t returned to rabble rousing, after a year or so he was briefly pursued by reporters keen to depict a disillusioned anarchist but Sam wouldn’t oblige. “I will not change my mind on economic and social questions but I have not spoken at a public meeting for a long time and do not expect to.” When pressed on the matter Samuel revealed himself to be older and wiser. In the heady days of 1886 Chicago’s anarchists had convinced themselves they stood on the rim of a revolutionary cauldron; one more fiery speech and the workforce would erupt, overwhelm the plutocracy and wrest control. In reality the anarchists’ driving class consciousness ran far ahead of the everyday concerns of their fellow labourers. The anarchists provoked the tiger without the means to strike it dead. Now, on Sam’s release “He thinks the people too patient to effect any great reform in his lifetime”. He hadn’t abandoned his former aims or values but had emerged from prison with a more mature, considered anarchist philosophy which involved reconnecting with his family, nature and the land. He informed reporters he’d saved a bit of money and was looking for a farm.

SHOESTRING RANCH

IN April 1895 the Fieldens bought a small ranch situated high up in Colorado’s Rocky Mountains, fifty miles south-west of Denver and a thousand miles away from the mean streets of Chicago. City newspapers lost interest in Sam although his arrival in the Rockies was warmly received by local reporters, with this particular October 1895 account republished in Todmorden:

“Up towards the western extremity of the beautiful La Veta valley where the ground begins to rise to form the might range of which La Veta pass is a gateway lies a lonely ranch…It stretches along the winding, tumbling, sparkling stream called Indian Creek… and in the vernacular of the western is called a 'shoestring ranch'. Great, graceful trees border the creek and lofty hills rise clothed in the richest verdure on either side. Westwards the huge mountains themselves tower above it. It is a romantic spot, looking secluded and peaceful enough to satisfy the most weary soul imaginable. It is the home of a man whose name has probably been spoken in every civilised country in the world and whose existence cannot but hold some interest for every working man the class whose cause he zealously advocated and risked his life for.

“He looks the typical ranchman already with his sunburned face, flowing beard, unclipped hair, wide hat and dusty farmer’s suit. He seems perfectly at home holding the halters of his horses and expiating on the good points of the meek brown cow which he had just purchased…He feels the wrongs of the people as deeply as ever but as a public figure his part has been acted…Only those who seek him with sympathetic hearts and congenial minds will hear his thoughts expressed. He keeps in touch with the radical world by reading the papers and pamphlets printed by the workers…His bright children whom he takes to their country school nearly three miles away; his faithful wife…his picturesque home, his domestic animals, the state of his crops and the prevailing market prices will now occupy all his energies.”

FRIENDS & NEIGHBOURS

FAR from the madding crowd the Fieldens were widely respected throughout this scattered, self-sufficient but close knit community. When Mr Butler, a neighbour, dropped by in June 1897 he expressed admiration for Sam’s agricultural achievements; his recently completed system for irrigating crop fields, his select herd of eighteen cattle, plus a few hogs and when Butler departed he was accompanied by several choice pigs he’d purchased to stock his own ranch.

In 1898 a few Colorado friends, led by the radical Rev. Myron W Reed, who chaired the event, organised a Denver “Haymarket Commemoration”. At this now rare public expression of his sustained solidarity, Sam “seemed imbued with much of his old-time spirit and fire… his body swayed with emotion, he gesticulated freely and his voice rang with indignation against the robbers and oppressors of the poor.” The event drew an unexpectedly hostile response from the Salida Mail, which doubted the validity of the Governor’s pardon; “Samuel Fielden, one of the anarchists who escaped the noose and was given a life sentence was present. It will be recalled that the arch sympathiser with anarchy, Governor Altgeld pardoned this man…sentenced for the awful murder at Haymarket square.”

William Holmes, a fellow Englishman and fellow anarchist, who visited the Fieldens’ the same year, reflected the other side of the Governor’s action, “(Sam) is happily in possession of good health and spirits and looks back upon his long years of imprisonment as upon a frightful dream…his soul is filled with eternal gratitude for his brave deliverer – John P Altgeld”.

Another old anarchist buddy, William J Lloyd dropped by in 1903 and as they talked, Lloyd observed that despite his rocky isolation Sam was “up to date on all passing questions”. One evening after dinner, reminiscing as they rode together along Indian Creek, Sam confided, “there was no conspiracy and none of the leaders knew of the bomb thrower or his intentions and so little did they anticipate violence that they brought their wives and little children to the meeting.”

LIFE ALONG INDIAN CREEK

IN 1905 when “little Alice” turned twenty-one she was struck down by typhoid but after eight weeks at death’s door made a full recovery. The four Fieldens lived, worked and prospered together and in 1909 added Benton Vories’ ranch to their holding, after paying him $4,200 so he could take up an appointment as the local District Water Commissioner. Sadly Sam’s wife Sarah didn’t have much opportunity to enjoy their newly acquired land as she passed away two years later. As Sam’s labouring life began to take its toll, Harry made more of the major decisions on the farm, assisted by his invalid father.

In January 1915, the local paper reported that the area’s farmers had collectively shipped 16 carloads of cattle from La Veta for sale at Denver, and was impressed by prices achieved by Harry Fielden’s 66 calves. Investing for the future, in 1916 the Huefano County News reported that “the Fielden ranch has been improved with the erection of a 20 by 100 foot barn.” As the years slipped by along Indian Creek, Sam’s children remained on the ranch, unmarried, until Harry died 2nd July 1972 followed by Alice on 11th March 1975. Samuel Fielden had passed away half a century earlier on 7th February 1922, just a couple of weeks short of his 75th birthday. All four Fieldens lie together in the simple, small, enclosed La Veta cemetery.

(Part one of this story along with many other fascinating episodes of radical history are archived and easily accessible on this NV website – CD 2021)

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A Comment On the Sukuta Project by Les May

THE most striking thing about the recent piece by John Walker on the Sukuta Project which intends to renovate the Gambia’s largest primary school is the relatively small amount of money, £60,000, which will be needed to accomplish a project which will benefit 2,000 children immediately and go on benefiting similar sized cohorts for many years to come.

In July 2020, I wrote an article for NV with the title ‘Why Black Lives Matter Will Fail’. Something I wrote at the end of that piece seems pertinent here.

In the article I mentioned a disclaimer which read ‘We are not affiliated with either Black Lives Matter USA or the political arm of the Black Lives Matter (Activist Coalition) UK who are purported to be affiliated with BLM USA.’

If you check out the website https://uk.gofundme.com/f/ukblm-fund which appears to be the group referred to in the disclaimer, you will find passages like ‘a commitment to dismantle imperialism, capitalism, white-supremacy, patriarchy and the state structures that disproportionately harm black people’ and ‘we lift up the experiences of the most marginalised in our communities, including but not limited to working class queer, trans, undocumented, disabled, Muslim, sex workers, women/non-binary, HIV+ people.’

You’ll also find the group have been given £1.2 million by 35,000 donors. At the risk of being tedious I will mention that this sum would change the lives of almost 7500 black children in Africa who were born with a cleft palate and face a lifetime of ridicule and social isolation, or pay for nearly 75,000 ingrowing eye lash operations or nearly seven and a half million doses of a drug to cure trachoma and prevent this many black people going blind.

Clearly all those donors have different priorities to mine.

£1.2 million would fund 20 similar projects in Africa meaning that 40,000 black children would benefit immediately and would be followed by the same number of children benefiting long into the future.

As someone recently wrote to me, ‘organisations like BLM are more concerned about displaying sentiments rather than addressing issues.’

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Russia’s Vladimir Putin denies he owns opulent Black Sea palace

AS OPPOSITION URGE MORE PROTESTS

Russian President Vladimir Putin dismissed claims by opposition leader Alexei Navalny that he owns a luxury property on the Black Sea worth US$1.35 billion, as the opposition urged fresh nationwide demonstrations. Courts around Russia started handing down short jail sentences to demonstrators arrested during nationwide opposition rallies last weekend, while the foreign ministry accused US diplomats of encouraging Russians to join the protests.

Navalny’s aides urged his supporters to take to the streets again next Sunday ahead of a court case that could see Russia’s most prominent Kremlin critic put behind bars for more than three years.

The 44-year-old campaigner was detained just over a week ago when he returned to Moscow from Germany, where he had been recuperating from exposure to a Soviet-designed toxin.

He called on his supporters in dozens of cities to rally last weekend and released a two-hour investigation into the palatial seaside property to spur allies to demonstrate.

The rallies saw a record number of arrests, and Putin on Monday denied having anything to do with the property in Navalny’s video, which has now been watched 86 million times.

“Nothing that is listed there as my property belongs to me or my close relatives, and never did,” Putin said during a video call with Russian students.

Navalny’s report - his most-watched anti-corruption probe by far - claims the property is worth US$1.35 billion and features everything from an underground ice rink to a casino.

Leonid Volkov, a key aide to the Kremlin critic, urged Russians to take to the streets again on January 31 “or fNavalny’s freedom, for freedom for all, and for justice”.

Saturday’s rallies saw clashes between police and protesters, 3,700 of whom were detained according to the OVD-Info monitoring group.

Putin said on Monday that Russian citizens have the right to express themselves but that they must do so “within the framework of the law”.

Putin also said minors should not be encouraged to join the rallies, referring to a claim repeated by authorities that the opposition had encouraged young people to protest.

“That’s what terrorists do. They put women and children in front of themselves,” Putin said.

Political analyst Alexei Zakharov, who cited polls conducted at Moscow’s rally, said on Facebook that demonstrators were on average 31-years-old, while only 10 per cent of participants were 18 or younger.

The Russian foreign ministry on Monday repeated claims that US diplomats had encouraged Russians to participate in the rallies, and said it had lodged a “strong protest” with the American ambassador.

That allegation followed earlier claims by the Kremlin that the US embassy was interfering in Russian affairs by publishing protest routes ahead of the rallies.

An embassy spokeswoman said that it was “routine practice” for diplomatic missions to issue safety messages to their citizens abroad.

Russian foreign ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said Moscow would probe American tech companies over “interference” related to the demonstrations.

Ahead of the rallies, Russia’s media watchdog Roskomnadzor ordered social media platforms including YouTube and Instagram to delete calls for demonstrations posted on their platforms.

Navalny’s arrest was met with widespread condemnation in the West, with the European Union saying it was considering new sanctions on Russia - although EU ministers decided at a meeting Monday that this was “premature”, according to one European diplomat.

That allegation followed earlier claims by the Kremlin that the US embassy was interfering in Russian affairs by publishing protest routes ahead of the rallies.

An embassy spokeswoman said that it was “routine practice” for diplomatic missions to issue safety messages to their citizens abroad.

Russian foreign ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said Moscow would probe American tech companies over “interference” related to the demonstrations.

Ahead of the rallies, Russia’s media watchdog Roskomnadzor ordered social media platforms including YouTube and Instagram to delete calls for demonstrations posted on their platforms.

Navalny’s arrest was met with widespread condemnation in the West, with the European Union saying it was considering new sanctions on Russia - although EU ministers decided at a meeting Monday that this was “premature”, according to one European diplomat.

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'Free speech for presidents' by Philip Dickens

by Philip Dickens Comment, on the FREEDOM PRESS WEBSITE Jan 12th

Editorial Note: We are publishing below a post by Philip Dickens from the anarchist Freedom Website. In it Phil Dickens mocks the blog 'Spiked' edited by Brendan O'Neill as representing the 'reactionary fringes of the mainstream discourse'. It is worth noting that not only the American Civil Liberties Union has warned about the unchecked power of platforms like Twitter and Facebook to remove people from the forum of everyday discourse. I say 'everday discourse', but of course many people, including me, do not use either.

It shouldn't surprise anyone that Mr. Dickens sneeringly jumps up and down announcing: 'Predictably, this led to #thisis1984 trending on Twitter, with the right decrying the ban as Orwellian.'

And yet Dickens is right to argue that there is a 'legitimate debate about the impact of corporations on freedom of speech and expression, but it doesn’t rest on the right of a US President to Tweet'.

Nor is this a novel problem of the internet era. Indeed, Orwell noted in 1946 in his essay 'The Prevention of Literature' that: 'Any writer or journalist who wants to retain his [sic] integrity finds himself thwarted by the general drift of society rather than by active persecution. The sort of things that are working against him are the conceration of the press in the hands of a few rich men, the grip of monopoly on radio and the films, the unwillingness of the public to spend money on books, making it necessary for nealy every writer to earn part of his living by hack work, the encroachment of official bodies like the Ministry of Information and the British Council, which help the writer to keep alive but also waste his time and dictate his opinions... Everything in our age conspires to turn the writer, and every other kind of artist as well, into a minor official, working on themes handed to him from above and never telling the whole of the truth.'

Dickens knows all of this, as he himself suffers from earning his living as a tax inspector. At one time the left were the main advocates of free speech, but because of the cancel culture campaigns etc. this ground as the novelist Margaret Atwood has recently argued, has been largely surrendered to the right. The FREEDOM WEBSITE despite its anarchist pretentions has in the last two decades fallen short as a defender of liberty or free speech; its current editor in 2016 even put up a blacklist of four people he didn't like who had the audacity to apply for positions on the FRIENDS of FREEDOM PRESS committee. Dickes approach suffers from being too simplistic as shown were he writes that 'private ownership by the capitalist class is protected from dissent by the state and its monopoly on violence.' Dividing politics into a left / right dichotomy is of questionable application today, especially in relation to Trump who was generally recognised to be an unconventional president.

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'FREE SPEECH for PRESIDENTS' by Philip Dickens

FOLLOWING the short-lived occupation of the US Capitol building, Twitter and a number of other social media platforms have banned US President Donald Trump.

Predictably, this led to #thisis1984 trending on Twitter, with the right decrying the ban as Orwellian. Brendan O’Neill of Sp!ked – the publication which leads the advance of terrible opinions from the reactionary fringes into the mainstream discourse – declared this “a chilling sign of tyranny to come.” This is, he says, “a very significant turning point in the politics and culture of the Western world” as it sees “exceptionally wealthy and aloof elites determining which elected politicians may engage in online discussion.”

This isn’t a position confined to the right, however. A member of the American Civil Liberties Union’s legislative counsel has said that “it should concern everyone when companies like Facebook and Twitter wield the unchecked power to remove people from platforms that have become indispensable for the speech of billions — especially when political realities make those decisions easier.”

There’s a legitimate debate about the impact of corporations on freedom of speech and expression, but it doesn’t rest on the right of a US President to Tweet.

Yes, a few companies in Silicon Valley control the whole social media landscape and have undue influence as a result. That’s not a unique or historically unprecedented phenomenon though: it reflects the balance of power and ownership in both the traditional media and physical spaces.

What O’Neill calls the “powerful, unaccountable oligarchies of the internet era” are mirrors of the media barons who dominate print and broadcast news. However, the almost unmoderated right of reply that exists in social media is absent, and instead the discourse both reflects and directs the ‘Overton Window’ of acceptable opinion – with what is acceptable defined not by popular or democratic will but by who owns the press and by the fact that it doesn’t sell news to an audience but an audience to advertisers. In other words, just as O’Neill says tech companies are doing, media owners and advertisers have long been “exploiting their monopolistic power to dictate what political opinions it is acceptable to hold and express.”

In physical spaces, from the workplace to the public square, private ownership by the capitalist class is protected from dissent by the state and its monopoly on violence. Anti-strike legislation limits the extent to which workers can stand up to their bosses, whilst a tangle of laws serve to restrict the conduct of protests and criminalise protesters in a myriad of ways.

The media commentators who see unprecedented totalitarianism in Trump’s Twitter ban have no qualms over any of the above. Instead, they view any kickback against that monopolisation of discourse as the real threat to free speech. This is why they have been vocal in opposition to the Stop Funding Hate campaign, which seeks to redirect advertising influence towards making (for example) media demonisation of migrants unprofitable. It is why all of the furore around ‘cancel culture’ is centred on the defence of those with a considerable platform and privilege from any consequences for their words yet they will say nothing when Julia Hartley-Brewer, a member of the Free Speech Union’s PR/Media advisory council, threatening to get a man sacked for challenging her Covid-denying propaganda against the NHS.

In other words, they’re concerned about defending the free speech of the powerful from efforts by the powerless to resist that through free association and action.

So it is with Twitter. The platform is genuinely guilty of arbitrary and questionable banning decisions – more often than not against small voices who challenge the powerful or the genuinely dangerous. That, under immense pressure, it is occasionally forced to follow its own rules and look at safeguarding and risks of incitement isn’t the problem. Rather, the fact that under other circumstances the power and influence those accounts hold would protect it and see instead the less influential who challenge them banned is the problem here.

Private monopolisation of what should be public spaces is the key issue. Within that, the fact that (just like in real life) the powerful are protected from the consequences of their actions except in the most extreme circumstances is the crucial point.

Anarchists recognise that genuine liberty and equality go hand in hand, and that we cannot have either if we fail to address questions of power.

Alongside formal hierarchies, such as those embedded in the institutions of the state and capital, this includes invisible hierarchies that inevitably grow out of supposedly ‘structureless’ environs. In a group without a formal leadership, those with the most confidence and the loudest voices dominate with no democracy to rein them in. In a meeting without a chairperson, the most brash can speak unhindered – but the consequence is that others in turn are silenced.

That’s why our primary concern isn’t the right of US President to a massive platform and untold influence, including the ability to incite (amateurish, incompetent) coup attempts.

Those whose only demand is that those already with a platform and influence are never deprived of that do not stand for free speech. They stand in defence of a fundamentally unjust status quo in which free expression is directly linked to power.

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The Managerial Revolution & Trump's evolution

Editorial Comment:

EIGHTY YEARS AGO James Burnham published his book The Managerial Revolution, which in 1941 caused a stir both in the USA and in this country. It recently occured to me as I struggled to make sense of what was going on now, that what was happening in the United States with Trump had something to do with the phenomena of managerialism. In this book Burnham took the view that capitalism was on the way out, but that Socialism was not replacing it, and that what was emerging was a kind of planned, centralized society which would be neither capitalist nor, in any accepted sense of the word, democratic.

In such a society what may be called the new boss class was arising, and was to be composed of, in Burnham's view; business executives, technicians, bureaucrats, and soldiers, lumped together as 'managers'. What it gave us in 1945 with in the UK, under the Labour government, was nationalisation and the NHS, and the New Deal in the USA.

Below is an account by Timothy Shenk on what lies behind the developments which have led to what has now come to be called 'Trumpism'.

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The Dark History Behind Donald Trump

'The Republican intellectual establishment (in the USA) is united against Trump – but his message of cultural and racial resentment has deep roots in the American right' so wrote Timothy Shenk, in an article in The Guardian (Tue 16 Aug 2016) entitled 'The dark history of Donald Trump's rightwing revolt'.

And he added: 'Trump is a unique character, but the principles he defends and the passions he inflames have been part of the modern American right since its formation in the aftermath of the second world war. Most conservative thinkers have forgotten or repressed this part of their history, which is why they are undergoing a collective nervous breakdown today. Like addicts the morning after a bender, they are baffled at the face they see in the mirror.'

Conservatives tend to portray their cause as the child of a revolt against the liberal status quo that began in the aftermath of the second world war, gained momentum in the 1950s when a cohort of intellectuals supplied the right with its philosophical underpinning, attained political consciousness in Barry Goldwater’s 1964 presidential campaign, and won vindication with Ronald Reagan’s election to the White House. Ideas have consequences, they proclaimed. Just look at us.

But there is another way of interpreting the history of the American right, one that puts less emphasis on the power of ideas and more on power itself – a history of white voters fighting to defend their place in the social hierarchy, politicians appealing to the prejudices of their constituents so they can satisfy the wishes of their donors, and the industry that has turned conservatism into a billion-dollar business.

This is the explanation preferred by leftwing critics, who typically regard the Republican party as a coalition fuelled by white nationalism and funded by billionaires. But this line of attack also has a long history on the right, where a dissenting minority has been waging a guerrilla war against the conservative establishment for three decades. Now the unlikely figure of Donald Trump has brought in a wave of reinforcements – over 13 million in the primaries alone. Their target is the managerial elite, and their history begins in the run-up to the second world war, when a forgotten founder of modern American conservatism became a public sensation with a book that announced the dawning of a civilisation ruled by experts.

'The Managerial Revolution: What Is Happening in the World' was the most unlikely bestseller of 1941. The author, James Burnham, was a philosophy professor at New York University who until the previous year had been one of Leon Trotsky’s most trusted counsellors in the US. Time called Burnham’s work a grim outline of “the totalitarian world soon to come” that was “as morbidly fascinating as a textbook vivisection”.

The son of a wealthy railway executive, Burnham graduated near the top of his class in Princeton in 1927 before studying at Oxford and then securing his post at NYU. But the Great Depression radicalised him, and he began a double life, lecturing on Aquinas by day and polemicising against capital by night. By 1940, Burnham had lost his faith in the revolution of the proletariat. While Trotsky denounced his erstwhile disciple as an “educated witch doctor”, Burnham started work on the book that would justify his apostasy.

According to Burnham, Marxists were right to anticipate capitalism’s imminent demise but wrong about what would come next. Around the turn of the 20th century, he claimed, the scale of life had changed. Population growth surged, immense corporations gobbled up smaller rivals, and government officials struggled to expand their powers to match the growing size of the challenges they faced.

These structural changes fundamentally altered the distribution of power in society. In the 18th century, authority had rested with aristocrats; in the 19th century with capitalists; in the 20th century it had passed on to the managers, whose authority derived from their unique ability to operate the complex institutions that now dominated mass society.

Technocrats had become the new ruling class. According to Burnham, fascism, Stalinism and Franklin D Roosevelt’s New Deal were all products of this transformation, and there was no use struggling against the world that was coming into being – a world where state ownership of the means of production had become the norm, where sovereignty had shifted to a bureaucratic elite, and where the globe was divided into rival superstates.

Burnham was not the first to foresee a society run by managers, but the arguments he borrowed from others took on a different meaning when brought together in this form. His sweep was global, his narrative reached back centuries, and he almost seemed to welcome a totalitarian future. For Burnham, the only sensible response to the managerial revolution was to recognise that it had occurred and accept there was no point in trying to bring back a world that was already lost. This bleak forecast captured the public imagination. Fortune called it “the most debated book published so far this year” and it went on to sell more than 200,000 copies.

But Burnham quickly moved on to new territory. His true subject, he concluded, was power, and to understand power he needed a theory of politics. Marx had been his guiding influence in The Managerial Revolution; now he turned to Machiavelli, constructing the genealogy of a political theory that began with the author of The Prince and continued into the present.

For a Machiavellian, Burnham wrote, politics was an unending war for dominance: democracy was a myth, and all ideologies were thinly veiled rationalisations for self-interest. The great mass of humanity, in Burnham’s dark vision, would never have any control over their own lives. They could only hope that clashes between rival elites might weaken the power of the ruling class and open up small spaces of freedom.

Burnham’s new found zeal for defending freedom led him, in 1955, to a conservative magazine called National Review, and to the magazine’s charismatic young founder, William F Buckley Jr. Buckley’s goal was to turn a scattered collection of reactionaries into the seeds of a movement. His journal set out to make the right intellectually respectable, stripping it of the associations with kooks and cranks that allowed liberals to depict it as a politics for cave-dwellers who had not reconciled themselves to modernity. Burnham was there at the start, one of five senior editors on the masthead of the first issue.

Soon Burnham was Buckley’s ranking deputy. But in an editorial staff riven by abstract debates between ardent libertarians and devout Christians, Burnham was the pragmatist who urged his colleagues not to ask politicians for more than the electorate would accept. For the right to win over working-class voters, Burnham argued, the movement had to embrace a more populist economic policy – contrary to the wishes of his anti-statist colleagues and their corporate backers, who wanted to lower taxes on the rich and roll back the welfare state. “Much of conservative doctrine,” Burnham wrote in 1972, “is, if not quite bankrupt, more and more obviously obsolescent.” Less than a decade later, Ronald Reagan was president, and it was Burnham who seemed like a relic of the past.

For a long time, the only major study of Burnham’s work was a slim volume published in 1984 by a minor academic press under the title Power and History. The book’s author, Samuel Francis, seemed a typical product of the insurgent conservative movement Burnham had helped to create – though by the late 1990s, when Francis published an updated version of Power and History, it made more sense to speak of a new conservative establishment. Outsiders who arrived at the White House with Reagan had become senior executives in Conservatism Inc. With the end of the cold war, the right had lost the glue that had bound its coalition, but there were still battles to be waged, and the money was better than ever.

Francis was never going to become a star in the emerging rightwing infotainment complex. Shy and overweight, with teeth stained from smoking, he had difficulty making it through cocktail parties. After completing a PhD in British history at the University of North Carolina, Francis left academia for Washington – first working at a rightwing thinktank, then serving as an aide to a Republican senator, and finally joining the editorial staff of the capital’s influential conservative daily newspaper, the Washington Times.

Francis retained his academic interests while he ascended into the ranks of the conservative establishment. He published six books in his lifetime, but he worked in private on one massive volume that he hoped would bring together all the disparate strands of his thought. Finished in 1995 but not discovered until after his death a decade later, the result was published earlier this year under the title Leviathan and Its Enemies. It is a sprawling text, more than 700 pages long, digressive, repetitive and in desperate need of an editor.

It is also one of the most impressive books to come out of the American right in a generation – and the most frightening. It is a searching diagnosis of managerial society, written by an author looking for a strategy that could break it apart.

Like much of Francis’s writing, Leviathan and Its Enemies began with Burnham – in this case, quite literally. “This book,” Francis announced in the first sentence, “is an effort to revise and reformulate the theory of the managerial revolution as advanced by James Burnham in 1941.”

Francis agreed that society had been taken over by managers, but he believed the new ruling class was far more vulnerable than Burnham had realised. Not everyone had benefited from the rise of the experts – and Francis saw this unequal distribution of rewards as the managerial regime’s greatest weakness.

For reasons he never quite explained, he insisted that the cosmopolitan elite threatened the traditional values cherished by most Americans: “morality and religion, family, nation, local community, and at times racial integrity and identity”. These were sacred principles for members of a new “post-bourgeois proletariat” drawn from the working class and the lower ranks of the middle class. Lacking the skills prized by technocrats, but not far enough down the social ladder to win the attention of reformers, these white voters considered themselves victims of a coalition between the top and bottom against the middle.

According to Francis, this cohort had supplied the animating spirit of rightwing politics since the death of Franklin Roosevelt in 1945. They had supported Goldwater – but Francis regarded Goldwater’s programme, like the “movement conservatism” of the National Review, as a “quaintly bourgeois” throwback to the oligarchic politics of the 19th century, with nothing to offer the modern working man. Their tribune was not Goldwater but George Wallace, the notorious segregationist and Democratic governor of Alabama – who won five southern states as an anti-civil rights third-party candidate in the 1968 presidential election. Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan had appealed to this group, too, but neglected their interests after taking office. Despite having elected multiple presidents, the post-bourgeois proletariat had yet to find a voice.

But not all of the right’s intellectuals have been so blind. While keepers of the conservative flame in Washington and New York repeatedly proclaimed that Trump could never win the Republican nomination, in February a small group of anonymous writers from inside the conservative movement launched a blog that championed “Trumpism” – and attacked their former allies on the right, who were determined to halt its ascent. In recognition of the man who inspired it, they called their site the Journal of American Greatness.

Yet Francis had difficulty explaining why managerial society would generate so much opposition in the first place. In Leviathan and Its Enemies, he argued that resistance to the cosmopolitan elite would be driven by “immutable elements of human nature” that “necessitate attachment to the concrete and historical roots of moral values and meaning”.

He was more candid in a speech he gave while working on the book. “What we as whites must do,” he declared, “is reassert our identity and our solidarity, and we must do so in explicitly racial terms through the articulation of a racial consciousness as whites.” Where mainstream conservatives depicted the US as a nation whose diverse population was linked by devotion to its founding principles, Francis viewed it as a racial project inextricably bound up with white rule. The managerial revolution jeopardised this racial hierarchy, and so it must be overthrown.

Francis delivered his remarks on racial consciousness at a conference organised by American Renaissance, an obscure journal devoted to promoting white nationalism. Years earlier, Francis had struck up a friendship with Jared Taylor, who went on to found the magazine with Francis’s encouragement. From their first encounter, Taylor recalled, he and Francis “understood each other immediately”.

Francis’s employers at the Washington Times were not as sympathetic. The paper fired him after his comments were released, a move that was part of his larger expulsion from the respectable right. Buckley himself dismissed Francis as “spokesman” for a group that had “earned their exclusion from thoughtful conservative ranks”.

Yet Francis would not be so easily purged. For years he had cultivated a relationship with Pat Buchanan, a one-time Nixon protege who had become one of the country’s most recognisable conservatives thanks to his role as co-host of CNN’s popular debating programme Crossfire. In 1992, Buchanan launched a long-shot campaign against incumbent president George HW Bush that, against all expectations, garnered almost 3m votes in the primaries. While all this was going on, Buchanan was growing closer to Francis, whom he later called “perhaps the brightest and best thinker on the right”.

Francis and Buchanan were linked by their association with a breakaway faction on the right known as paleoconservatism. While mainstream conservatives had taken advantage of cushy gigs in New York and Washington, paleocons depicted themselves as spokesmen for the forgotten residents of flyover country. Francis urged Buchanan to make another run for the White House in 1996, this time as the candidate of the post-bourgeois resistance. That campaign would be based on three issues: protectionism, opposition to immigration and an “America First” foreign policy that repudiated global commitments and foreign interventions in order to focus on defending the national interest.

Buchanan listened, and he went on to a surprise win in New Hampshire’s pivotal early primary, convincing Francis that the managerial elite was more vulnerable than at any point in his lifetime. While mainstream Republicans and Democrats celebrated forecasts that the US population was on track to become less than 50% white as a sign of America’s capacity to adapt and grow, Francis believed that the members of his post-bourgeois proletariat regarded these shifting demographics as another reminder of their dwindling power.

Buchanan’s campaign fizzled after New Hampshire, but Francis had a ready explanation for the collapse: Buchanan was too loyal to the Republican party to seize the opportunity he had been granted. “Don’t even use the word ‘conservative,’” Francis told Buchanan. “It doesn’t mean anything any more.” The managerial class had absorbed Buckley and his followers. They, too, were the enemy.

After Buchanan’s defeat and his own exile from mainstream conservatism, Francis devoted himself to what he called “racialpolitik”. He was a regular contributor to outlets promoting white racial consciousness – becoming, in Jared Taylor’s words, “the intellectual leader of a small but growing movement”. Francis denied that he was a white supremacist, but he condemned interracial sex, warned of “incipient race war” and drafted a manifesto for a white nationalist group arguing: “The American people and government should remain European in their composition and character.”

When he looked ahead, Francis was especially concerned with the threat that one rising political star posed to his vision of the future. Barack Obama, he remarked in 2004, was “the model of what the New American is supposed to be”. Ivy League-educated, effortlessly cosmopolitan, promising to transcend barriers of race – Obama was the embodiment of the managerial elite. He represented everything Francis loathed about the contemporary United States.

The fact that Obama, Francis’s symbol for American decadence, became one of the most popular figures in the country brought the great contradiction of his thought into relief. The 19th century belonged to the bourgeoisie and the 20th century to the managers, he argued, because these rising classes had performed necessary social functions. His post-bourgeois proletariat, by contrast, were on the decline.

So was Francis. The supposed realist who cast hunger for power as the driving force of world history spent most of his time writing for journals with subscribers in the low five figures. In his last years, he was a lonely man. Before his sudden death from a cardiac aneurism in 2005, he had begun a study of conservatism and race. His masterpiece, Leviathan and Its Enemies, was still tucked away in a box of floppy disks; when it was published 11 years later, it would be under the auspices of a white-nationalist press. The right-leaning Washington Examiner ran one of his few obituaries. “Sam Francis,” it said, “was merely a racist and doesn’t deserve to be remembered as anything less.” It seemed just as likely that Francis would not be remembered at all.

"You want you to really listen to this,” Rush Limbaugh told his listeners in January this year. The king of rightwing talk radio was lecturing his audience, which averages around 13 million people a week, on Samuel Francis. Prompted by a magazine article casting Francis as the prophet of Trumpism, Limbaugh read aloud from one of Francis’s post-mortems on the Buchanan campaign. “What’s interesting,” Limbaugh said, “is how right on it is in foretelling Trump.” Before abandoning the subject, he added one point. Francis, Limbaugh noted, “later in life suffered the – acquired the – reputation of being a white supremacist”, a reputation Limbaugh insisted was undeserved.

The white nationalists who rallied to Francis in the last decade of his life disagree on that point, but they also see Trump as a vindication of their longtime inspiration. “Sam would have said that Trump is doing exactly what he advised Patrick Buchanan to do,” maintains Jared Taylor, who made news in the primary season when it was revealed that he had recorded automated phone messages endorsing Trump. (“White Supremacist Robocall Heartily Urges Iowa Voters to Support Trump,” reported a headline in the conservative Daily Caller.) According to Taylor’s American Renaissance, “Francis would be very pleased to see the GOP and conservative establishments mocked and destroyed.”

Even liberal commentators are looking back at Francis – whose prediction of a white working-class backlash against a globalist ruling elite seems to be coming true not just in the US but across Europe. “If you just drop the white nationalism a lot of Francis makes sense,” says Michael Lind, who once worked as an assistant to Buckley but now describes himself as a “radical centrist”. According to Lind, conservatives have been “spurning their natural constituency – the mostly white working class”, creating space for the rise of Trump.

Francis was also an inspiration for the team at the Journal of American Greatness, who called him “the closest thing to what could be described as the source of Trumpian thought” in their very first post. They admitted that Francis’s writing “overtly indulges various Southern nostalgias”, but insisted that his “deservedly criticised statements on race” could be separated from the core of his analysis. The managerial class was still the enemy, and only Trump seemed even dimly aware of what it would take to mount an effective challenge.

Trump the candidate, they admitted, was at best an imperfect messenger. But it was the message that counted: “The American regime – like nearly all its cousins in the west – has devolved into an oligarchy.” JAG was not just arguing that Trump’s campaign had a coherent agenda – a controversial assertion, given that many on both the left and right have dismissed Trump as an unhinged demagogue jabbing randomly at pressure points in the electorate. It was arguing that Trump succeeded because of his platform. Without those ideas, he would have been just another novelty candidate. Armed with them, any of Trump’s more disciplined rivals might have stolen the nomination from him – but instead they opted for recycled bromides from the Reagan era.

The site could be fiery in its defence of Trump, but the best moments came when its targets were the grandees of the right. There are plenty of scathing articles about rightwing thinktanks written from the left, but none of their authors could write a sentence such as “Seeing conservatives court billionaires – which I have had occasion to do dozens, if not hundreds, of times – is like watching dorks tell cheerleaders how pretty they are.”

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Insurrection Or Farce? by Les May

THE events of the last couple of days in Washington can be taken as a convenient précis of the four years of Trump in the White House. On Wednesday he uses flattery to incite his followers to march to the Capitol building, thousands mill around outside, inside a few windows and doors get smashed, a few offices are ransacked and someone is immortalised by having his photo taken in Nancy Pelosi’s chair. Having eventually been evicted from the Capitol they all went home to tea.

The day after Trump denounces them and tells the world the miscreants will be punished. Elizabeth from Knoxville is amazed that whilst in her words ‘trying to storm the Capitol‘ she finds herself on the wrong end of a police pepper spray. If this was an insurrection it wasn’t very well organised; if a rioter had not been shot and a police officer died of his injuries, it would rank as a farce. As one Twitterer put it, ‘I think my brain just exploded'. She talks about a revolution like it's a tour of Disneyland. "I came to burn the place to the ground and they pushed me! Where are my rights? This is the worst revolution I've ever been to! I wanna talk to the manager!"

Having got his followers marching to the Capitol to prevent the Congress certifying the result of the Electoral College vote, it seems that whether they succeeded or failed, Trump had no idea what to do next. Ditto pulling out of the Iran Nuclear Deal, cosying up to Putin and Kim Jong-un and the Covid 19 pandemic. Nothing about Trump gives the impression that he ever has a plan before he opens his mouth. It’s difficult to discern anything that can be called a political philosophy or a consistent policy that has guided him during the last four years.

Trump’s only loyalty is to himself as those deluded followers who find themselves facing a court will find out

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PEACE NEWS & THE TRUMP COUP?

Where was the activist army when it was needed, Milan?

MILAN RAI in PEACE NEWS (December 2020 - January 2021) wrote an editorial entitled 'Countering Trump's Coup':

'As we went to press, Donald Trump had just sent a tweet which was the closest thing to conceeding that he lost the US presidential election that we're probably going to get.'

There had been speculation for some time that Trump would not accept the election result, and well before the US election Milan Rai's friend, Noam Chomsky, had been predicting that Trump supporters would stage a 'Coup' in the event that he lost the election.

Thus in last month's editorial Mr. Rai suggested investigative journalist Alan Nairn put it well on Democracy Now!:

'...in the crucial hours after late election night, when Trump went into his tent and started sulking like a bully who had been thwarted, I think he may have missed his moment, because that was the key moment to call his people on to the streets and start stopping and trashing the votes, and he failed to do that.'

Milan Rai then felt it necessary to claim: 'If Trump had seized his moment for creating chaos, his forces would have been met by a national nonviolent mobilisation against the coup attempt. Tens of thousands of US activists had been preparing for that exact situation. They had been organised by dozens of groups specifically to opose a Trump coup.'

Indeed Mr Rai argued: 'Choose Democracy, one of the new groups, held online anti-coup trainings with over 1,000 participants at a time' and that '(o)ver 37,000 people signed the Choose Democracy pledge of resistance, committing themselves to civil disobedience in event of an attempted coup.'

However, when the coup attempt actually came on Wednesday I may have overlooked their manifestaion of resistance, but I didn't see much of the non-violent resistance in evidence on Capitol Hill. Perhaps despite all their earlier forcasts and predictions, they were genuinely taken by surprise?

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Judge Rejects Extradition of Julian Assange

A JUDGE today has refused to extradite WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange to the US.

In a hearing at Westminster Magistrates’ Court this morning, Judge Vanessa Baraitser denied the extradition on grounds that Assange is a suicide risk and extradition to the US prison system would be oppressive, given the likely impact on his fragile mental health.

The US, which has been seeking to bring Assange to the country to put him on trial for conspiracy to hack as well as a number of charges under the controversial Espionage Act, has said it will appeal.

Assange, she said, is "a depressed and sometimes despairing man genuinely fearful about his future," and if extradited, would be "housed in conditions of significant isolation," hampering contact with family.

There was evidence of a risk to Assange's health if he were to face trial in the United States, Baraitser said, adding that the 49-year-old activist's risk of committing suicide appeared to be "substantial."

Lawyers for the United States immediately said they would appeal the ruling.

Assange was arrested in April 2019 and has since been held in a high-security prison. He had been living in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London since 2012, where he sought asylum to dodge sexual assault charges in Sweden.

Assange was arrested after Ecuador withdrew its offer of asylum. Ecuador's President Lenin Moreno said the country's patience for Assange had "reached its limit" after "repeated violations to international conventions and daily life."

Assange was indicted on 17 new charges of violating the Espionage Act in 2019 and already faced a charge from March 2018 of conspiring to commit unlawful computer intrusion, which carried a maximum five years in prison.

He was accused of working with former intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning to obtain and publicly release classified information. The new charges brought his total charges to 18 counts with each violation of the Espionage Act carrying a maximum 10-year sentence.

Assange has consistently claimed he was acting as a journalist but Baraitser said earlier in extradition hearing that his receipt of thousands of classified files went beyond investigative journalism.

In her ruling, the judge dismissed arguments from Assange's legal team that he couldn't be afforded protections under the U.S. Constitution, but agreed that he could not be extradited on health grounds.

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Is Trump Expendable? by Les May

I’VE never bought into the idea that Labour losing last year’s General Election was because a Corbyn led government’s policies made it ‘unelectable’. I think a more plausible explanation is that Labour’s so called ‘Red Wall’ crumbled because those voters wanted ‘Brexit’ and knew that Johnson would deliver it, but Corbyn couldn’t be guaranteed to. The intervention of a Brexit party candidate in my constituency effectively helped to defeat Labour.

Those who voted Tory at the last election came from two ‘tribes’, each of which spoke their own language, had their own values and were incomprehensible to each other. One was the tribe which always voted Tory; the other was the tribe made up of those who usually voted Labour, or not at all, but who for their own reasons simply wanted to leave the EU.

Britain will leave the EU on the last day of the year. Job done! Why vote Tory next time? Boris Johnson knows this, that’s why he is so eager to push his ‘levelling up’ agenda which seems to me no more than a rebranding of the old ‘trickle down’ economics of Margaret Thatcher.

Donald Trump’s sojourn at the White House came about because two ‘tribes’, incomprehensible to each other, put him there in 2016. One tribe was drawn from Americans whose livelihoods were threatened because the industries they worked for were losing ground to cheaper foreign imports or were simply past their sell by dates like coal production, the inhabitants of the so called ‘rust bucket states’. The other tribe was composed of socially conservative, for which read abhors homosexuals, same sex marriage and abortion, devout, Bible immersed, fundamentalist Christians. Trump knew exactly what he was doing selecting Mike Pence to be his Vice-President. Pence is the real deal. At the end of the first meeting between the two he suggested they hold hands for a short prayer.

Trump now faces the same problem as Boris Johnson. He’s delivered a Supreme Court bench with a built in conservative majority which could last for the next thirty or forty years which his Bible bashing supporters can reasonably expect to deliver the sort of socially conservative rulings they want to hear. Job done! Why vote for an ersatz vulgarian like Donald Trump when you can have the real deal in the shape of someone like Pence in four years time?

The smart money is on Trump still being a major force in the Republican party in the next four years. I’m not so sure.

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Charles - The Real News:

BY now most of you will know: Donald Trump has been defeated in the 2020 election. For a lot of the people celebrating in front of the White House, in Philadelphia and around the country, it's a sweet moment of relief after a lengthy and stressful wait.

For those of us working at The Real News Network, it's a reminder that standing up to a neoliberal Biden administration poses a challenge in some ways more complicated than standing up to Trump. But we're here for it, advancing a critical understanding of politics and the world. If you're out there celebrating, enjoy it. When you're done, recommit to standing up to unjust power, no matter who is wielding it.

— Charles Lenchner, Digital Director

Nigel Farage: 'Is Bleach a Disinfective?'

JUST now Nigel Farage refused to say if bleach was disinfective. He was responding to Piers Morgan on Breakfast TV. Piers had made the mistake of saying that Donald Trump had recommended that people take 'Disinfective or Bleach' to treat Covid-19.

Piers Morgan then asked him if bleach was an 'disinfective'! Nigel then accused him of playing games.

They were commenting on the US election as counting was taking place. Watch this space.

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Orwell's Politics and the English Language

From THE LANCETT:

Richard Horton

ALSO ON THE THE ORWELL Facebook:

https://www.facebook.com/TheOrwellSociety

The Orwell Society - Home | Facebook The Orwell Society. 1.4K likes. The Orwell Society aims to promote the understanding and appreciation of the life and work of George Orwell. Join here:... www.facebook.com

GEORGE ORWELL, in his 1945 essay Politics and the English Language, wrote that “to think clearly is a necessary first step towards political regeneration”.

The Moscow press briefing held last week on the Russian COVID-19 vaccine quickly turned into a platform for national rivalry. The research, led by scientists at the N F Gamaleya National Research Centre for Epidemiology and Microbiology, found encouraging evidence of an immune response using their prime boost strategy of a two-component, human recombinant adenovirus vector-based vaccine. The study was small, non-randomised, uncontrolled, and did not include those most at risk of severe disease. The Russian team recognise these limitations and are proceeding with large randomised trials. The first results were released by Russian President Vladimir Putin on Aug 13. “I know that it works quite effectively”, he said, “forms strong immunity, and I repeat, it has passed all the needed checks”. At last week's event, more big claims were made. The “poorly researched approaches” by “western” nations were criticised, and one speaker challenged western governments to respond to these alleged concerns—“would you please show your citizens” evidence about the safety of western vaccine candidates given the “poorly developed platforms” you are using, he said. “It doesn't make any sense to use poorly researched approaches”, he argued. His view was that a human adenovirus vector was safer than a chimpanzee adenovirus vector (the basis for the Oxford COVID-19 vaccine, for example). A press conference to present the results of a scientific study became the venue for renewed Cold War conflict.

Russia isn't the only country to use COVID-19 as a tool to fight perceived adversaries. US President Donald Trump routinely refers to SARS-CoV-2 as the “China virus”. He is seeking to amplify the American public's fear of China to wound his opponent in the current presidential campaign. In Latrobe, PA, on Sept 3, President Trump suggested that, “Joe Biden wants to surrender your jobs to China”. The message is clear—China is America's enemy, it is the cause of a pandemic that has destroyed the US economy, and the policies of the Democrat candidate will only strengthen America's chief international competitor. There is not one shred of evidence to support these claims. The twisting of language in public discussion of the pandemic is now standard fare. “Thanks to the efforts of Operation Warp Speed”, said President Trump in Wilmington, NC, on Sept 2, “we remain on track to deliver a vaccine very rapidly, in record time”. He has suggested a vaccine might be available by the end of October—an important claim given that the US election will take place on Nov 3. Yet there is no possibility that a COVID-19 vaccine will be ready for public use before the US election. Orwell's reflection that language is used “with intent to deceive” in “the sordid processes of international politics” could not be more apposite.

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Time to prevent our UK police service morphing into a US-style police force

by Ex-Superintendent Victor Olisa

POLICING by consent is the foundation on which a ‘service’ style of policing dominates over an ‘enforcement’ style.   In the United Kingdom, the police are praised around the world for its service style of policing.  Yet evolving changes in the language and style of UK policing are shifting that style towards more ‘enforcement’ than ‘service’ for Black people.

The heart-wrenching images of the killing of George Floyd on 25^th May 2020 in Minneapolis, United States of America, has become a powerful driver for change in the way Black people are treated by the police around the world. In the UK, some people console themselves that such a barbaric act would not happen here because of the checks and balances in place to prevent that level of police misbehaviour, such as inspections by Her Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabulary Fire & Rescue Services.

However, the words ‘police culture’, often evokes negative mental images of police misbehaviour and indiscipline.  The criminologist Robert Reiner argues that the ‘core’ characteristics of police culture, such as ‘mission’ and ‘action’, engender in officers the belief that policing is not just a job but a way of life.   It is the reason why officers rush towards danger when others run away.

The Canadian criminologist John Lee described a characteristic of police culture that he termed police ‘property’.   He explained that “modern police forces emerged out of the need to protect dominant communities from dangerous classes” and as a consequence police soon learned to distinguish the ‘public’ they were supposed to serve and protect and the ‘public’ they were supposed to control and punish (i.e. blacks, women, Indians, and others)”.   Police ‘property’ are “low status, powerless groups whom the dominant majority see as problematic or distasteful and are prepared to let the police deal with their ‘property’ and turn a blind eye to the way this is done.”

Today, the concept has become a powerful reality in the wake of the killing of George Floyd, because of the callous way it was done by the officer: hands in his pocket as he surveyed all around him in triumphant nonchalance.

As a police officer for 35 years who has worked in forces in the UK and with police organisations across the world in my experience the majority of officers are professional and committed people who uphold the ideals of public service.

So, the question is, how has such a powerful and respected social institution allowed some of its officers to police with unimaginable brutality, and engage in irrational activity?

In the sense of irrational activity, the misuse of ‘stop and search’ exemplifies the notion of police ‘property’

The negative impact of stop and search has been well documented, for example, the conclusion of a 2013 Her Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabulary inspection on stop and search states:

“…with a few exceptions, forces were not able to demonstrate an approach to using stop and search powers that was based upon a foundation of evidence of what works best to fight crime…”

Today there is a growing practice (as often posted on social media and according to anecdotal information I hear from accounts of police training) of officers handcuffing young Black boys who have not been arrested and are not resisting or showing any signs of aggression, before they start searching them. This happens whilst white friends that are with them are searched without being handcuffed.

This is a worrying development of a practice that seem to reinforce the stereotype that conflates Blackness with dangerousness:  Black boys are considered ‘dangerous’ and so have to be treated differently (restrained), and in a way that is humiliating and degrading, without a rational justification.  Black boys are treated as police ‘property’ whilst their white friends that are with them are treated very differently, with courtesy and respect.

An often-articulated statement by police officers is that people from BAME background do not want to join the police.  True, not all BAME people want to join the police but enough do. My plea to senior officers is work to reduce the rate of attrition for those that do join:  For example, Home Office data (March 2019) suggests that 23% of recruits to MPS were people from BAME backgrounds, so joining at a higher rate BUT the same document shows that voluntary resignation is 26% BAME and 17% white officers.  Additionally, 2.6% of BAME officers are dismissed compared to 1.2% white officers.

The journey for many Black officers (in my experience the BAME category fair better collectively) is comparable to them running a 400 metres stable chase alongside their white colleagues who are running a 4x1 400 metres sprint relay.  Consequently, Black officers never realise their potential, because the hurdles they must overcome grinds them down and saps away their energy.

When Government take an active role to understand the reasons why Black people face structural racism by public bodies, they would receive confidence in their commitment by not appointing a lead for a commission who is on record doubting the existence of institutional racism.

Whatever our colour, race or social standing, society needs the police. If we are genuinely going to address racism and its destructive effects, every one of us need to look at ourselves and ask:

What do I need to do to take Black people off the list of police ‘property’?

• The answer is to stop stereotyping Black people as low status, unintelligent, aggressive, dangerous, self-destructive, and sub-human, and recognise the privilege and comfort that comes from remaining ‘silent’.

Every senior police leader advocating for change must make a commitment to empty the police ‘property’ list so that Black people and others subject by the majority to negative stereotyping as ‘low status’ are not treated contemptuous and with excessive force and they don’t end up as a death in custody. 

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Why 'Black Lives Matter' Will Fail!

by Les May

THE proximate factor in the murder of George Floyd is that the USA has militarised police forces; the notion of ‘policing by consent’ is absent. Trump does not want any international legal oversight of the actions of the the US military with regard to possible ‘war crimes’; should we be surprised that strong legal oversight of US police officers is resisted?

As of 30 June 2020 a total of 506 civilians were shot in the US, 105 of whom were black. In 2018, there were 996 fatal police shootings, and in 2019 this figure increased to 1,004.  For comparison the rate of shootings per million of the population was: black 31, hispanic, 23, white 13, other 4.  These figures speak for themselves.   By comparison the average number of fatal police shootings per year in England and Wales in the 15 year period 2004/5 to 2018/9 was less than 3 in a population of about 60,000,000, that is about 0.05 per million.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/585152/people-shot-to-death-by-us-police-by-race/

https://www.statista.com/statistics/319246/police-fatal-shootings-england-wales/

Faced with a fatality rate from police shooting which is 200 to 600 times higher than in the UK one might have thought that saving lives, black, brown and white, by demilitarising US police forces, would be central to any widespread response to the murder of George Floyd. Seemingly it isn’t.

Instead of attempting to attain measurable objectives like improving police training and making officers accountable every time they use a firearm, the emphasis is on ‘racism’, something for which there is no objective measure and having all the explanatory power of asking ‘how long is a piece of string?’ It’s a popular badge to display because it allows the wearer to get a warm glow of satisfaction from ‘calling out’ racists. If by chance the murder of George Floyd causes anyone to remember their humanity and dare to say they think all lives matter, you can call that racist too!

https://eu.usatoday.com/story/news/nation-now/2016/07/13/why-saying-all-lives-matter-opposite-black-lives-matter/87025190/

And if you have any time left over from combating racism you can always spend it ‘dismantling cisgender privilege and uplifting Black trans folk’ or ‘disrupting the Western-prescribed nuclear family structure’ or you could ‘dismantle patriarchal practice’ or even ‘foster a queer‐affirming network’. You will find the quotes by scrolling down the page at:

https://blacklivesmatter.com/what-we-believe/

But if all this is too much for you then why not buy the tee-shirt for a mere $25* and get back to denouncing someone on Twitter?

https://blacklivesmatter.com/

Things are not much better in the UK. Check out the website at https://www.blacklivesmatter.uk/ and you will find the disclaimer, ‘We are not affiliated with either Black Lives Matter USA or the political arm of the Black Lives Matter (Activist Coalition) UK who are purported to be affiliated with BLM USA.’

In the UK the response to the murder of George Floyd has been to facilitate the rise of groups of ‘activists’ who think that symbolic gestures like tearing down statues actually achieves something which will improve the lives of real people, and the energising of self promoting academics.

The media are for now superficially supportive, but this is all too reminiscent of the #MeToo movement. Dr David Starkey has unwittingly managed to contribute a couple of ways of keeping BLM in the news, but eventually the media will move on to another story.  Unfortunately it won’t be the one about inequality in the UK and the US. Getting a few black faces in the boardroom won’t solve that.

*$25 would pay for one sixth of an operation to correct cleft palate, or all of an operation to correct ingrowing eyelashes plus 40 doses of antibiotic to treat an eye infection of children and adults in Africa.

https://smiletrain.org.uk/sightsavers uksmile train

https://www.sightsavers.org/

AUTHOR'S FOOTNOTE:

In the article I mentioned a disclaimer which read ‘We are not affiliated with either Black Lives Matter USA or the political arm of the Black Lives Matter (Activist Coalition) UK who are purported to be affiliated with BLM USA.’

If you check out the website https://uk.gofundme.com/f/ukblm-fund which appears to be the group referred to in the disclaimer, you will find passages like ‘a commitment to dismantle imperialism, capitalism, white-supremacy, patriarchy and the state structures that disproportionately harm black people’ and ‘we lift up the experiences of the most marginalised in our communities, including but not limited to working class queer, trans, undocumented, disabled, Muslim, sex workers, women/non-binary, HIV+ people.’

You’ll also find the group have been given £1.2 million by 35,000 donors. At the risk of being tedious I will mention that this sum would change the lives of almost 7500 black children in Africa who were born with a cleft palate and face a lifetime of ridicule and social isolation, or pay for nearly 75,000 ingrowing eye lash operations or nearly seven and a half million doses of a drug to cure trachoma and prevent this many black people going blind.

Clearly all those donors have different priorities to mine.

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