This Week, I 'ave Been Mostly Reading ...
As rubbish old Tripod, my site's host, does not allow me to update my links, I'm listing here a few of my regular reads.

I tends to follow a website quite avidly, and then get suddenly fed up and drop it altogether. This happened with Christopher Hitchen's page, for example. I think his combination of smugness and pretension finally overwhelmed the general good sense of what he had to argue. So these websites are current favourites, not best for all time.

My preferred reading tends to be well to the left of my own opinion for some reason. Though I was pro-war war on the Iraq issue, for example, I tend to find anti-war writings more congenial (as long as they are not produced by some awful sect). I'm not sure why. Maybe it's because I like my own views to be challenged. More likely, it's because of some dark head / heart divide within me.

Anything on the internet seems curiously unserious, so I think I like reading material here that strikes me as interesting for atavistic rather than profound reasons.

To form my own views, I tend toward books or newspapers; the old prejudice in favour of paper.

Anyway, here are some sites I enjoy that are not to be found on my blogroll.

This site is decidedly pro-war. If it really is, as it claims, marxist, then it is very definitely in the social-imperialist tradition. A lot of their writing reminds me of William Walker, of Connolly-Walker debate fame. They have a most interesting side-specialism in Japan. SIAW is unremittingly harsh on those they disagree with, such as me, but can be strangely kind to a few blogs that are anti-war. Here they are: Socialism in an Age of Waiting. Well worth the read.

An anti-war writer from Scotland is Ken MacLeod at Early Days of a Better Nation. Ken is also a sci-fi writer. He wrote the single best summary of the pro and anti war positions from a left wing perspective that I have read. He is an unusually good writer.

An Irish ex-pat writes this strenuously nationalist website: The Shamrockshire Eagle. I'm aware that many Northern Ireland readers will find it shocking, perhaps even offensive. But Paul is a clever and amusing writer who digs out a good deal of subversive material on all-comers in Ireland, as well as info on various arcane subjects. His discussions of IT are impenetrable to me, but no doubt of much use to others. Good fun and informative on an area largely ignored by the 'UK' blogosphere.

Lenin's Tomb is run by a member of the SWP, not normally much of a recommendation. But Lenin's is a vigorous, polemical and funny writer who churns out a great deal to provoke and entertain. He's one of those few who can make swearing funny.

My mate Michael Fisher runs a blog, Fisherblog, that not only claims to be marxist, but most unusually actually is so. Michael is an elegant writer who has the ability to make the reader feel cleverer than he or she is.

That's all for now.

The Weather Underground
Some time ago, over at Fisherblog, Michael wrote about a film on the Weathermen, a militant faction of the 1960s US organisation, Students for a Democratic Society, which engaged in bombings etc against symbolic targets in the 1970s. I saw the same film a couple of nights ago on BBC 4, and very good it was too. Here it is summarised over at Slate.

The film rather fairly outlined the Weather Underground's terrorist logic: the US was engaged in a vast and criminal war against the peoples of Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia, itself only part of a much wider project to subdue Third World Revolution (of which the Black Power movement in America seemed to be an honoury part). To do nothing to stop this slaughter was not neutrailty, but collaboration.

The continuation of war after 1968 seemed to indicate that the US government was not moved by peaceful mass demonstrations. At first the Weathermen expected the police riot outside the Chicago Democratic Convention in 1968 to to initiate a new insurrectionary or revolutionary form of mass protest. The projected Days of Rage, however, brought only a cadre of a few hundred onto the streets to smash a handful of shops and get arrested.

This was a turning point. The Weather Underground emerged and, after flirting with the idea of attacking personnel with little concern for collateral damage (white America was thought to be complicit with the crimes of its government) they turned to bomb attacks on targets such as the Capitol and the Pentagon. These were amazingly successful. No-one was killed or even, it seems, injured, and the Underground resisted all attempts at FBI penetration. Members only began to surrender piecemeal in the years after the fall of the Southern Vietnamese regime.

The Weathermen (many were women) were well-educated, had access to money and were charismatic. There sincerity cannot be doubted, but their politics seemed primitive.

One striking thing about the film was the footage shown - a vietnames corpse being dragged by US soldiers, it's head reduced to minemeat, a GI's thigh pulsing blood, and so on. It seems that TV footage in those days was a good deal more visceral than now. The shovelling of human remains into binbags after the IRA's Bloody Friday attacks in 1972 was also broadcast at the time. Now, despite the general vulgarisation of popular culture, we never see the bloody consequenes of war or terrorism on prime time television.

See the film if it comes up again.

St Patrick's Day
So good cheer to all those who wish at all to indentify with whatever version of particle of Ireland inspires you. However, the following comment from Patrick Maume's excellent The Long Gestation: Irish Nationalist Life 1891 - 1918 cautions me from excessive celebration. Speaking of court culture in the last days of the Union in southern Ireland, Maume has this to say:

Spectacle designed to surround the functionings of the state with awe was visible to a degree only dimly appreciable by later generations under a republic whose neglect of public ceremonial was a concious reaction against the conspicious displays of Viceroyalty.

The republic of Daily Moiders will thus eschew grandiloquence for a single austere injunction: Have a pint for Paddy's!

Spanish Election
Well, the Spanish government's rush to limit any anti-war fall-out and atack Eta by swatting away the obvious possibility of Islamicist involvement in the Madrid atrocity has backfired rather badly.

I'm struck by the evident popular distate for the Government's spin. Blair does not seem similarly affected by his shoddy and heavily politicised presentation of intelligence in the run up to the war. It may be that Spanish democracy is rather less inclined to give its government the benefit of the doubt (a legacy of Franco?). Afterall, while state orchestrated counter-terror groups in the war against Eta (GAL) were brought to book, the incipient scandals of British State involvement in illegal killings in Northern Ireland remain obscured and of little interest, certainly, to most people (including bloggers) this side of the Irish Sea.

It seems to me that the election should have been delayed for a month to ward against the reality and / or perception of extraordinary short-term distortion. However, I am generally cheered by the result. Despite concerns, foolish would be any Spanish government to go soft on terrorism now. Even if Spain does withdraw from Iraq after June, I would not interpret this as moral collapse, anymore than US withdrawal from Saudi Arabia should be considered as such. It is for a national sovereign government to decide how best to protect its own people. Its first reponsibility lies there, not to the Pentagon's Grand Strategy. Spain should, and no doubt will, particpate in international efforts to contain and suppress fundamentalist terrorism on its own terms.

And it's a lesson to governments - when your people are traumatised by horror they are not thus made fools.

Silence
If anyone reads this in time, remember the three minute silence for victims of the terrorist wave. It starts at 11.

End of Term
Whoo-Hoo, term is over (more orless). I might now put a bit more effort into this blog. It's standard is lamentably lower than all other blogs I read.

Other good news, Socialism in an Age of Waiting have decided to break their 'not linking to Moiders rule'. Inspired by their ruminations, 'Differentiating between terrorists' might be an interestring and profitable task for next time I blog. Till then, have a good weekend.

Bombs
There has been an atrocious bomb attack on railway stations in Madrid - some 170 counted dead so far. The Spanish government is blaming ETA, but at first sight Islamic Fundamentalism seems more likely.

An addition

The Spanish Government seem pretty convinced that ETA were the culprits. This was a multiple attack (13 bombs, 10 detonations) against civilian targets with no warning. Though ETA have carried out some spectacularly cold-blooded attacks, this suggests a new level of callousness. One wonders if it is an attempt to provoke violent reaction and the visiting of mass repression on the Basque country.

An alternative view is that the government is blaming ETA, rather than Al Quada or such apparently likely suspects, to further de-legitimise seperatist terrorism and to manage the electoral fall-out in Sunday's election. They may figure that the administration will cop some of the blame for the horror, if it is believed to have been carried out by Islamicists, because the government committed Spain to vigorous support for the assault on Saddam's Iraq. This is a very disturbing thought as it would be a nasty piece of psy-ops, though I suppose one might argue that Islamic Fundamentalists must be denied the victory of successfully dissauding a democracy from following a foreign policy offensive to them.

Nevertheless, it's still a appalling idea that a national government would insult its assaulted people in this way. Surely, then, the culprits must be ETA, or some maniac faction.

PS

Well here's a theory I didn't think of: "[The perpertrators] could just as easily have been “animal rights” activists upset about bullfighting"! I'm surprised the Waiters didn't try to finger Tariq Ali.

1960s America
I'm rather busy today, so just a short plug here for an excellent survey book I have just read: Maurice Isserman and Michael Kazin, America Divided: The Civil War of the 1960s (Oxford, 2000). Though written by two veterans of the New Left, it gives good coverage also to the rise of conservatism in that decade. It's stuffed with good things. This passage, on Nixon's declining position in 1974, for example:

... there were fears in Washington that in desperation, Nixon might resort to military force to stave off his removal from office, either by provoking war abroad or by staging a military coup at home. Secretary of Defence James Schlesinger went so far as to instruct the U.S. military commanders not to respond to a call the president for military action from without first clearing it with him.

Blimey!

Wilde on Socialism
Over at the Virtual Stoa Chris Brooke is re-producing Oscar Wilde's essay on The Soul of Man Under Socialism, not a canonical piece, but rather interesting. This 'lover of the poor' dimension of Wilde has become increasingly trendy, and indeed the film in which Stephen Fry plays Wilde, the opening scene has him addressing US mine workers. It brings to my mind The Simpson's recurrent joke about the queering of US steel-workers and hard-hats.

Ulster and Upper Silesia
Tim Wilson, a talented Oxford DPhil student studying comparatively Ulster and Upper Silesia in the aftermath of World War One, has published an article in electronic issue i of the Journal of the Oxford University History Society.

Entitled Ritual and Violence in Upper Silesia and Ulster, 1920, it "builds upon the seminal work of Frank Wright, who located Ulster within a group of ‘ethnic frontier’ societies, including the German borderlands, which were characterized by deep internal divisions. It attempts to address questions of why these conflicts developed at the grassroots level in the way, and where, and with the varying intensity, that they did. ... Key questions revolve around the relationship of protagonists in popular violence to notions of legitimacy and community. The violence connected to two major community festivals is therefore scrutinized as a ‘text’ to be read for clues regarding popular behaviour and attitudes."

Go and read it!