‘K’ Metamorphoses into ‘G’ By William Bowles

19 February 2019 — Investigating Imperialism

[I think it’s time to republish a piece I wrote 15 years ago, in 2004, though clearly very few took notice of it then, will it be any different this time? I doubt it, it’s probably already too late to do anything about it. What the Labour government initiated in 2004 has now reached, not only fruition but is now sweeping the ‘democratic’ West as the crisis of capital intensifies and opposition to neoliberalism intensifies. I call it what it is, Fascism. Maybe not the Fascism of Hitler or Mussolini, there are no jackboots, they don’t need them this time, they have built the corporate-security state, a state that has us all on file, a state that records our movements, a state that knows what we read, who we see,  a state that now works in tandem with its corporate masters just as Mussolini’s Fascism did, a state that makes Orwell’s 1984 amateurish by comparison.  Reading through it, I don’t think I need to alter one word. WB.]

24 April 2004

“Someone must have slandered Joseph K., for one morning, without having done anything truly wrong, he was arrested.” – Franz Kafka, ‘The Trial’

The Bush Family Saga – Airbrushed out of history By William Bowles

24 June 2005

[This essay is an updated version of my original piece, ‘Frauds-R-US‘, and written for ‘Devastating Society’, edited by Bernd Hamm, Pluto Press, 2005. Due to space restrictions, I had cut down the size of this essay for the print version. WB]

INTRODUCTION

Neil

Jeb

George Snr

George Jnr

Marvin

That a family with so many skeletons in its collective closet could have produced two presidents of the world’s most powerful nation should have every last one of us wondering whether the world has gone completely mad. Perhaps it has. This may be the lesson we need to learn from the Bush Family Saga, that far from being an exception to the rule, it is the rule because they and the class and “race” they represent write the rules. Most important of all is the fact that the Bush family is not an aberration, but symbolic of the nature of US imperialism and how it came to be.

Sleepwalking into fascism By William Bowles

2 January 2012

“[W]hen dealing with more old-fashioned kinds of states outside the postmodern continent of Europe, we need to revert to the rougher methods of an earlier era – force, pre-emptive attack, deception, whatever is necessary to deal with those who still live in the nineteenth century world of every state for itself. Among ourselves, we keep the law but when we are operating in the jungle, we must also use the laws of the jungle.” — The new liberal imperialism by Robert Cooper (Cooper by the way was a former civil service adviser to Tony Blair)[1]

Israel: The not-so-new Fascism – Palestinians, the not-so-new Unter-Menschen By William Bowles

13 May, 2010

The parallels are obvious to see, unless of course you don’t want to see the ‘victims’ turn into the victimizers. Such is the case with Israel, which quite properly should be described as a white racist, settler colonial state. But this is a description that is ‘beyond the Pale’ for the ‘civilized’ nations to accept.

For decades the Zionist entity has played the victim card, even appropriating the term ‘Holocaust’ as its own, this in spite of the fact that millions of Roma, Slavs, Russians, Homosexuals, the ‘mentally feeble’ and other ‘undesirables’ (‘Unter-Menschen’ or under-people) were exterminated in Nazi concentration camps. In fact collectively, a far greater number than that of the European Jews, amongst which I might add are my own relatives.

Apologists for Israel talk of ‘never again’ which roughly translated means never again for white people as once more the ‘race card’ becomes the rationalization for Genocide. The ‘civilized’ nations once again avert their eyes from the unfolding tragedy that is Palestine, now sixty-two years in the making.

Not fit for purpose? By William Bowles

25 April 20008

The word Socialism is unfortunately, much-discredited yet and still the idea lives on regardless, as events in the Southern Americas reveal. But what of us in the so-called developed world?

Revolution I hear you cry? In the West? Not likely is it? In fact, both Marx and Lenin, when asked about revolution in the UK were a little more than disparaging about the idea. And what goes for the UK probably goes for the rest of the West.

Wakey-Wakey! By William Bowles

7 April 2006

I’m tempted to say that the British have, with Tony Blair’s corporatist, security state, gotten no better than they deserve. After all, though deeply in debt, by and large they live in a kind of comfort zone albeit one that insulates them from the realities of a world gone totally insane.

Yet, a (pathetically) tiny number of us have realised that one step at a time, a fascist state (by a new name) is being erected around us and it would seem that short of an uprising (an extremely unlikely event) the final bricks of the cell that imprisons us are being firmly mortared into place.

After all, for the great majority of us, politics is something that produces nothing but snorts of derision or a fatalistic acceptance of the inevitability of being ‘protected from ourselves’ by a government and a state that is in a terminal state of denial.

It is a fact that Blair’s ‘New Labour’ has pulled off a coup d’etat right under our very noses and done it all in the name of ‘democracy’ or the right to vote every five years, a largely pointless exercise as it has brought us to exactly where we are now, with a government that does exactly as it pleases, in the ‘name of my vote’ albeit an actual minority of the electorate.

Thus the entire process of ‘parliamentary democracy’ is a complete sham, all done with smoke and mirrors.

I draw your attention to the bill currently going through its second reading without a word of protest apart from a handful of academics, which if/when passed, as the learned jurists of Cambridge University put it, effectively abolishes Parliamentary democracy (such as it is).

Perhaps it’s worth presenting for your edification [sic], the core of the eminent jurists’ concerns re the innocuous sounding ‘Legislative and Regulatory Reform Bill’ (February 2005):

[Which] has been presented as a simple measure “streamlining” the Regulatory Reform Act 2001, by which, to help industry, the Government can reduce red tape by amending the Acts of Parliament that wove it. But it goes much further: if passed, the Government could rewrite almost any Act and, in some cases, enact new laws that at present only Parliament can make.

The Bill subjects this drastic power to limits, but these are few and weak. If enacted as it stands, we believe the Bill would make it possible for the Government, by delegated legislation, to do (inter alia) the following:

create a new offence of incitement to religious hatred, punishable with two years’ imprisonment;

curtail or abolish jury trial;

permit the Home Secretary to place citizens under house arrest;

allow the Prime Minister to sack judges;

rewrite the law on nationality and immigration;

“reform” Magna Carta (or what remains of it).

It would, in short, create a major shift of power within the state, which in other countries would require an amendment to the constitution; and one in which the winner would be the executive, and the loser Parliament. – See www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,59-2042165,00.html for the full text of the letter

Yet of course, the UK is a deeply conservative country, one that has barely completed a capitalist revolution let alone anything beyond. We are still ruled by a handful of nameless individuals who pull the strings of a cabal of narrow-minded and essentially reactionary individuals who, judging by the evidence to hand, would sell their own grandmothers for a pittance.

This Act would appear to be the final nail in the coffin of what passes for democracy for when added to the raft of other repressive measures that this ‘Labour’ government has passed, effectively seals our fate. Yet perhaps it’s no better than we deserve? We have after all, benefited from the wealth of empire, albeit an empire that rather than residing in the far-flung network of colonial administration, is now ruled by a handful of investment corporations, banks and insurance companies, that between them control the key industries that make imperialism possible; oil, weapons, media and a global trading and financial system that steals the wealth that makes it all possible, and finances the debt trap that has many of us in its vice-like grip.

But those of you interested in how we got to be where we are now, what we are witnessing is nothing more than the culmination of a process more than one hundred years in the making, namely the creation of a complex illusion, one that has all the appearance of USS Enterprise’s ‘Holodeck’, complete in all the details that make up a ‘reality’ invented in the offices of innumerable government ministries and constructed by the PR industry and an army of expert propagandists who deliver the final product directly into our living rooms.

Without an effective voice, alienated from one another, we retreat into our private nightmares. Yet it is a fact that underneath the façade of comfort there lurks a deep dissatisfaction with things as they are. Perhaps it’s because we know, deep in our hearts that our days are numbered if we continue to buy into the Big Lie?

A comment piece in one of the Guardian’s ‘blogs’ under the title ‘Blair’s inner circle and its ferocious grab for power’ contains the following:

From forcing through ID cards to the erosion of parliamentary scrutiny, a determined clique is hijacking our democracy

Piece by piece, month by month, Tony Blair’s administration is removing the safeguards that protect all of us from the whims of a government and the intrusions of a powerful state. It is engaged in a ferocious power-grab. Yet this story has not seized the imagination of the media or the public. In our failure to respond, the government must be reading a tacit acceptance that it can do what it chooses, because we either don’t notice or don’t care. www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/story/0,,1747771,00.html [my emph. WB]

The problem however is not that a ‘determined clique’ is ‘hijacking our democracy’ but that we’ve never had a real democracy in the first place. All that is happening now is what might be called the ‘end game’, a final tying of the knot.

As to ‘seizing the imagination’ of the media, I’m sorry to disabuse the writer of her illusions concerning the media but they are intrinsic to the process, they, after all, are amongst the chief benefactors of Blair’s ‘grab for power’.

And it’s going to take more than a few letters to the Guardian or a bunch of old farts at Cambridge Uni to bring about the changes we have to make if we are to save ourselves from ourselves.

And herein lies the central dilemma of our times for having renounced our belief in any kind of alternative to capitalism, we are left with nothing but our individual rantings and whinges and an ever-increasing retreat into a fictitious past or an equally fictitious present.

Thus it would seem that at least for a start, we have to free ourselves before even attempting free each other or will an ‘Earth in Revolt’ do it for us?

Sleepwalking into Slavery? By William Bowles

13 October 2005

The lie can be maintained only for such time as the State can shield the people from the political, economic and/or military consequences of the lie. It thus becomes vitally important for the State to use all of its powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth becomes the greatest enemy of the State. – Dr. Joseph M. Goebbels, Nazi minister of propaganda

The great British public, apparently don’t think that home secretary’s Clarke’s proposed additions to the anti-terror legislation including the 90-day detention without trial, apply to them, at least as far as we know, as nobody has actually asked them. Perhaps they need to be reminded that almost identical laws were passed by the Apartheid regime of South Africa. Commonly known as the ‘90-day law’, it was first used to imprison ‘terrorist’ Ruth First, later murdered by a South African assassination squad in Maputo, Mozambique.

Mantra politics By William Bowles

1 October 2005

All propaganda must be so popular and on such an intellectual level, that even the most stupid of those toward whom it is directed will understand it… Through clever and constant application of propaganda, people can be made to see paradise as hell, and also the other way around, to consider the most wretched sort of life as paradise. – Adolf Hitler

It is well worth asking the following question: Why, specifically, was the phrase ‘war on terror’ adopted as a slogan by the US/UK authorities? This may seem a somewhat redundant question, after all, it describes in theory a response to the actions of ‘terrorists’, who are, we are told over and over again, bent on firstly, destroying Western ‘civilisation’ and then replacing it with a fundamentalist version of Islam.

Eat your heart out Mussolini By William Bowles

15 October 2004

“We control political forces, we control moral forces we control economic forces, therefore we are a full-blown Corporative state.”
– Benito Mussolini [1]

The database state
Six million video surveillance cameras, biometric ID cards, transnational data interception laws and ‘joined up’ government. Add to this the privatisation of key state functions, all mediated by global IT corporations that are also the indispensable link in the weapons, media, pharmaceuticals and global financial networks and you have the corporate, security state 21st century style.

More, or rather, less on the ‘Civil Contingencies Bill’ By William Bowles

27 November 2003

Amazing isn’t it, a bill which if passed, that along with the 2000 Terrorism Act, pretty well entrenches total state control over the citizen, barely gets a mention in the media. The BBC in its News at One programme yesterday (25/11/03) didn’t even mention it as being included in Queenie’s speech. Later, on PM News at 5, it got a passing mention as something that might be of concern to civil liberties groups, but that was about it. Talk about the sin of omission!