Who's a Useful Idiot Now?

You may have noticed in my last posting that I was a bit pissed off that "Irish" and "Muslim" terrorists were being tarred with the same brush by the right-wing press and media in the UK, not to mention a not-unsubstantial section of the so-called "liberal" press.

After thinking about it for a while, I think maybe it's not such a bad thing as it might convince the likes of Al-Queda that we hate the British just as much as they do, though if any of them were to get a flight to Dublin or Shannon and saw all the copies of FHM on sale they'd hardly know that they'd left the UK at all.

Over the last few days I've seen the fear pervading the streets of London the same way the smell of roasted hops and barley pervades the street where I live (I live near a brewery) from a safe distance and wonder if the people there can stand back from the situation and ask why this is happening to them.

When Britain was a target for IRA bombs in the '70s and '80s, most people in the UK didn't have the foggiest idea what their motivation was, unsurprisingly, as the British government was only too happy for the rest of the world to think that they owned all of Ireland against the will of the country's pugnacious natives. If the people there understood that what they were really dying for, which was the right of fascistic descendents of fanatical Scottish mountain thugs to continue bullying the Catholic minority in their little sectarian statelet, they might have thought differently about the situation.

Likewise, today, if people could make the link between the current bombings and the war in Iraq there might be some pressure on Tony Blair to reconsider his policy of helping the fanatical junta that currently leads the US to seize control of the oil of the middle east.

Maybe this is why there was an article in the Guardian, a paper becoming increasingly to Tony Blair what Fox News is to George Bush, dismissing opponents of the war as know-it-alls, who have no proof of the link between the war and the terrorist attacks.

Believe it or not, I met a girl who claims she knows Bush's former Homeland defence secretary Tom Ridge, whose constant terror alerts kept the US population living in fear in the months leading up to George Bush's reelection. When I told her that I thought the war in Iraq was all about Oil, she insisted that it was a "coincidence" that the biggest consumer of oil in the world was invading the second biggest producer at a time when it's governement was led almost entirely by former oil industry executives.

Maybe the author of the that piece in the Guardian thinks that it's a coincidence that Britain, Spain, Australia and Qatar, all of which nations supported the war in Iraq were attacked in onwe way or another while France and Germany, both of which have massive muslim populations have just been lucky so far. Maybe it's the fact that Osama bin Laden has repeatedly said that he wants to split Europe from the US that leads the we-told-you-so brigade, as he vulgarly calls us, to think that there may be a hint of a connection between the two.

Unfortunately Tony Blair hasn't got a reverse gear so there isn't going to be any shift in policy from him. At least our own government over hear will be able to take comfort in the fact that no-one knows that our country exists and therefore won't be interested in bombing us, in spite of the fact that by lending our air-space to the US, the blood of 25,000 Iraqis is as much on our hands as those of the Brits.

Ireland becomes victim of Terror - At last!

I read with some bewilderment in the last few days that Ireland had finally become the victim of terror and that the harsh reality was that we weren't as immune as we thought we were before now.

I don't know where we got the idea that we were. I would have thought that if we had some sort of immunity to terror then that person who was bludgeoned to death with his own wooden leg by Cromwell's troops would have survived the incident which would have mafe for a few good fireside stories. Likwise the man who was waving a white handkerchief at British troops on Bloody Sunday. He'd probably still be alive today, appearing on talk shows telling the world how the bullets just bounced off him. Or the people who were killed in the Dublin and Monaghan bombings in 1974. I could go on and on, yet there would still be people who would argue that what they meant by terror was islamic terror.

In a perceptive critique of the media coverage of the Oklahoma city bombings in 1995, Robert Fisk noted how the bombers were referred to as "terrorists" when it was assumed they were muslims and then suddenly morphed into "extremists" when it turned out they were white Americans.

White Protestants don't do terror. They do Final solutions, collateral damage, strategic limitation and a whole load of other euphemisms. Terror is something that only Paddies and Arabs get up to.

To an outsider, the representation of the facts by the Anglo-Saxon media can seem bizzare but if you understand the puritan ethos that underpins Anglo-Saxon societies, especially the US, it makes a little more sense. When puritans first landed in the US, they believed they were on a mission from God to kill the Native Americans whom they regarded as savages. In the same epoch, Cromwell also cited some historical passages from the Bible as justification for his use of State terror against Ireland. When the famine struck Ireland many in the British government believed it was a gift from God, who they believed to be a big fan of Anglican hymns.

I was a bit digusted to find out that the person who first came up with the phrase "manifest destiny", the belief that Americans are so much better than anyone else that it's their right to impose their way of life on the rest of the world was one John O Sullivan, somebody with a very Irish-sounding name.

I'm sure there were many in Ireland who were shocked by the attacks in London, believing that as we speak the same language and share so much common popular culture that they can empathise. Yet I've seen one article after another in the British press over the last 10 days that tars "Irish" and "Islamic" terrorists with the same brush, even though the journalists writing these pieces know as well as I do that only a tiny proportion of the population of Ireland and the Islamic world supported either the IRA or Al_Queda, though many of their readers won't.

The sad truth is that no matter how we think we are just the same as the English, most of them have a superiority complex that leads them to see us as pugnacious leprechauns.

The fact that the Waterford teenager who died in Turkey wasn't the first Irish person to die in violent circumstances won't provide much consolation for her family or friends. The papers are full of encomia which present her as a bubbly, evervescent young girl which I've got no reason to disbelieve. The question has to be asked, what was a nice girl like her doing in a place like Turkey?

I have to admit, to my shame, that everyone in my family other than myself has funded the coffers of the brutal junta of this this state with their tourist euros. It's easy to see why they might, as the brutailty of the conflict in Kurdistan is so far away from the tourist beaches of the Aegean. It's shameful that tourist agencies encourage package tours to places like Turkey which normalise what's in reality of the most violent, repressive countries on Earth. To put it in some perspective, one of the key reasons Bush and Blair invaded Iraq was that he had allegedly killed 100,000 Kurds. Yet the Turkish junta has killed at least 30,000 kurds, and the US and Britain arm them to the teeth and encourage the EU to accept them as a member.

As people who've suffered a long history of exploitation our sympathies ought to be with the kurds who want nothing more than their own autonomus state. But until now, we've seen the situation there much as Chamberlain saw Czechoslovakia: A country far away about which we know nothing.

Sadly, instead of engaging with the PKK and asking ourselves if it's morally right to visit Turkey, we'll probably all dismiss the "terrorists" as evildoers to whom it would be cowardly to cave into. Which would be great news for the Turkish government and the American and British arms firms who get so much of their money.

Seamus' G8

It's been a pretty insane few days for me. On Tuesday night I arrived in Prestwick airport outside Glasgow which had a heavy security presence as George W Bush was to arrive there the following day. I'm a little confused as to why this was the case, perhaps, like Tony Blair he was flying with Ryanir to show how man-of-the-people he is.

Over the years I've read so mush bush-hating literature that I feel I've gotten to know the man quite well and even found out that we have the odd thing in common, like liking the thrills and disliking tidying the house, but this week we did have one common objective, and that was to reach the G8 summit, even if some police officers suffered in the process.

It seems he accomplished that Goal a little better than I did, although it seems to be me and the peoople I'm sharing the eco-village here outside Stirling that are being victimised. Yesterday, we were blockaded in here by the police as we tried to reach a vigil for those arrested the day before, even those who were trying to get to the airport and brandishing airline tickets, which seems harsh and according to legal advisors is illegal.

It didn't actually bother me all that much, as I kind of like it in here. I was lucky to reach this place, arriving on Glasgow with nothing other than an out-of-date printout from G8 Alternatives, I met 1 Kiwi and 2 Austrian girls who told me of this place, a self-contained commune where protestors from all over the world are gathered.

There's a part of me that would love to live like this all the time, the only difference between this and a proper hippie commune is that most of the food has to be brought in, though it is all vegan so I'm happy. I love that all the meetings are consenual in contrast to the stiff formality of the G8 negotiations. I love the way that it's mostly women that are in charge, like in Brehon or Amazon times or some Hellenic Thesmophorae.

Yet I hadn't been here for more then a few hours, exhusted from a long air and ferry journey from Patras in Greece, before I was on the road again, with a large group trying to blockade the motorway where the G8 cavalcades would be passing. We left at 3 in the morning, when I really should have been asleep, like a mob of witchunting peasants from a Frankenstein movie, except the monster that global capitalism has created is far more terrifying than anything that Bram Stoker concieved.

At first our endeavour seemed doomed as there was a massive police presence outside, granite faced Scottish coppers dressed up in jackboots and protected by petrochemical shields, backed up from the air by helicopters, one of which is still hovering around as I write this.

It seemed at first that they were pushing us back, though masked members of the black block launched a scorched-earth strategy against the outposts of global capital, thrashing a Burger King and Shell station. There's a part of me that admires their willingness to risk imprisoment for their beliefs and nearly all of me believes that it's corpartions like Shell that should be indicted for their crimes against humanity and the Earth, though there's another part that wonders what any of the destruction really accomplishes.

After we'd got through the industrial estate, I started to become paranoid and thought that the police were leading us into a trap, which was exactly their plan, and I was almost certain that I was going to be arrested at one stage. But we found a narrow path that led to a small village where there was only a minor police presence. It was like Fallujah without guns when we got there, masked protestors breaking through the police cordon with nothing more than sticks and stones.

From the village we could see the motorway to which we made our way through a golf course and a couple of muddy fields, followed all the while by the boys in blue overhead.

I'm still amazed, giving the overwhelming odds, that we made it to the motorway at all, or that I had the courage to stand with only three or four others and block articulated lorries from passing through a link road, or to try to block the cops from trying to get down another road and break up the main blockade. It was at that point that I got seperated from the main group and had to take part in a tactical retreat through the muddy fields, though thankfully I wasn't one of those pushed over a barbed wire fence by the cops.

I was so tired and wet by that time that I decided to make my way back to the campsite with a few others. On the way back I was passed by half a dozen copcars who made didn't seem to bat an eyelid when they passed which lulled me into a false sense of security, though I've heard that there are still arrests being made and there's a possibility that I might still be arrested, but I'm not wearing any black so I should be OK.

I hope I've accomplished something other than just annoying a few motorists and getting a blurry picture of myself into the Scottish Sun. Most of the people in here are people who really want to change the way the world works in favour of people rather than corporations, the ecosystem rather than money, but how far we've advanced those goals remains to be seen. At least I know that if in 50 years time if all the world's resources have been used up, which they will if present trends continue, that I fought as much as I could to prevent that happening.