My Log 486 Sept 21 2015: British army generals promise a mutiny against Corbyn --- revealing the real basis of our so-called democracies --- an army to keep the people down

The seat of power: The British  Musket, used from 1722 to 1838, and used by both the British Army and United States Army. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Plaque recording the location of the formation of the British Labour Party in 1900. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

English: Distribution of powers between member states of NATO and Warsaw Pact in 1973  (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Jeremy Corbyn (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

The news being trumpeted today that generals of the British Army are threatening mutiny if Jeremy Corbyn, the elected leader of the British Labour Party, should ever become Prime Minister, is amazingly revelatory of where the power lies within what are generally called western democracies. I feel outraged by this because, so far as I understand Corbyn’s views, most of them I warmly share. Mind you, I never heard of him until a few months ago, when a young reporter with The Guardian of London, Owen Jones, on a weekly discussion programme of the BBC, Dateline London, welcomed the fact that Corbyn, who he said was a friend of his, had decided, under some pressure, to stand for the Labour leadership. Jones welcomed it because his very presence in the race would enable many of the important issues in British politics that are normally swept under the rug, to be debated seriously for the first time in ages.

I have a warm regard still for the British Labour Party (in spite of its years of Blairite apostasy) because I can honestly say that the only really democratic debate I have ever heard in politics --- that is, a debate, unlike those in Parliament, in which the outcome is not known beforehand --- took place at a Labour Party conference in the 1960s, when they debated, and approved of the idea of nuclear disarmament. In other words, they accepted the ideas of the vigorous Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament which organized huge marches every Easter between 1958 and 1963 from Aldermaston, site of the government-owned Atomic Weapons Research Establishment, to London. These were great occasions of leftist politics, organized by a remarkable little woman called Peggy Duff, and I will never forget the passion, pride and excitement they generated for everyone on the Left.  Many brilliant musicians and artists rallied to the call, and they became the occasion for stirring new songs written by the superb Scottish folklorist, dramatist and poet, Ewan MacColl and his wife Peggy Seeger, sister to the redoubtable American singer Pete. Lindsay Anderson, a great Leftist filmmaker and dramatist, weighed in with a documentary film. and, inevitably, when the Labour Party came to power in 1964 under Harold Wilson, they ignored the decision of their annual conference, and kept the useless American-made nuclear weapons that have cost Britain millions  since then that could have been better spent on equalizing the opportunities in Britain’s classically class-organized society.
To write the above seems to me to be not the slightest bit extraordinary: I have always assumed that politics should be only about one thing, which is to improve the lives of citizens, and essentially to equalize opportunities available to them, through education, income distribution, and providing the basic needs of shelter, clothing, food, and a living wage to everyone. Everything else is decoration.

That a politician who has devoted his life to those very ideals should be regarded as such a threat to the basic values of British society as to warrant an Army mutiny really tells me more than I want to know about the realities of British life. The generals are up in arms because at some stage in his life Corbyn has said Britain doesn’t need an army, and should get rid of its nuclear deterrent.

The question of whether Canada needs an army or not is a very open one. We don't appear to be in danger of being attacked by any other country, but our army has been useful in the past because of its peacekeeping operations in various trouble spots around the world. Its more recent use as a minor appendage to United States imperialism has been very much in question, and appears to have caused a serious decline in Canada’s stature around the world.

 I should say that Costa Rica, a small country in a war and revolution-torn part of the world, Central America (an area that, collectively, is very much under the control of the United States) in 1949 became the first country in the world to abolish its army, a decision to which they have stuck ever since, with no deleterious results that are apparent.  The idea that Britain would be in some way weakened if they gave the Americans back their nuclear missiles is ludicrous.  The missiles are housed in submarines that are kept in Scotland.  Many years ago New Zealand, a staunchly British country by origin and outlook, decided that United States ships equipped or powered by nuclear weapons were unwelcome in NZ ports, and so far the sky hasn’t fallen on their heads.

Today, surely, the question of the continuing value of NATO must be lively in the minds of more than just convinced Leftists: NATO was an anti-Soviet alliance that could arguably have been considered necessary during the Cold War. After being refused entry to NATO, the Soviet Union established the Warsaw Pact and allowed East Germany to rearm in response to the rearmament of West Germany… .thus the two sides faced each other across middle Europe until, with the fall of the Soviet Union, the Warsaw Pact was disbanded.  Unfortunately, the nations led by the nose by the United States have proven to be more militaristic, and NATO has  not only continued, but been used in many questionable actions such as the invasion of Yugoslavia, the bombing of Libya and so on. The results in both of those actions cited have been disastrous --- widespread ethnic cleansing in Yugoslavia, societal breakdown in Libya --- and if Jeremy Corbyn is challenging the wisdom of Britain’s continuing membership, one might be excused for thinking it is not before time. Even more relevant would be his questioning the very continued existence of NATO.

None of what I have written is really revolutionary politics: it is just a discussion about the realities of present-day world affairs. And that the army in Britain should be threatening mutiny proves, surely, that that particular army, like most others I guess, is dedicated to the untrammelled continuation of a capitalist economic structure the simple questioning of which can be regarded as treason. This is not news, of course. The ruthlessness with which the established powers of the European Community have demolished the anti-austerity threat posed by the Syriza left-wing government of Greece, surely already reveals that only orthodox capitalism is to be allowed to flourish under the American umbrella, anywhere in the world.

I have one amusing personal anecdote bearing on the British army and mutiny.  By accident, when I was on my way to Britain by steamship in 1960 to take up a post as correspondent in London for The Montreal Star,  I made the acquaintance of a British Lieutenant-General, Sir Michael West, well-known to Canadians for having been the commander of the Commonwealth troops who were engaged in the Korean War in the early 1950s. When I met him he was on his way back from Washington, where he had been Britain’s representative in the NATO military establishment. He came, of course, from the British upper class, was equipped with the customary toff’s education, had the accent and all the attitudes of his class, which, as I discovered through a long friendship with him, included an almost anarchistic, thumb-your-nose attitude towards the attitudes of the Establishment to which he belonged. He made a small flat he owned in London available to me for a year while he went to his new post, as Commander of Britain’s Northern Command. This required him to live in a stone-heap of a dreary castle in the countryside near York. He took one look at it and immediately ordered its interior be revamped and equipped with central heating, and its exterior be painted, top to toe, a dazzling pink. That was Mike West all over.

On one occasion after I had been writing about the possibility of the French army rebelling against the leadership of De Gaulle, I asked him why the British army never threatened such a rebellion.  He thought for a moment and said, “We have talked about it from time to time, but by the second brandy we were all in hoots of laughter. I think it’s just that if I stood up and said, ‘On to Whitehall, chaps,’ nobody would follow.”

If that were  a tradition in the British Army, could it be that the Generals would find themselves marching to Whitehall before  a phantom army, to stage a phantom coup d’état? 

Let’s hope so.

My Log 485 Sept 10 2015: Some random thoughts on our personal insignificance in face of what Dorothy Parker in the 1930s called “days of despair, horror and world change”

English: President Barack Obama talks with German Chancellor Angela Merkel and British Prime Minister David Cameron before the start of the working G8 dinner at Le Ciro’s Barriere Restaurant in Deauville, France, May 25, 2011. (Official White House Photo) (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

American writer Dorothy Parker (1893-1967) (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

G8 leaders caricatures 20110523 (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

English: Logo of The Goldman Sachs Group, Inc. Category:Goldman Sachs (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

English: World leaders walk to the first working session at the G8 summit in Deauville, France, May 26, 2011. Pictured, from left are: European Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso; United States President Barack Obama; French President Nicolas Sarkozy; Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper; Japanese Prime Minister Naoto Kan; German Chancellor Angela Merkel; and British Prime Minister David Cameron. May 26, 2011. (Official White House Photo by Official White House Photo by Lawrence Jackson) (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

English: US President Barack Obama and British Prime Minister David Cameron trade bottles of beer to settle a bet they made on the U.S. vs. England World Cup Soccer game (which ended in a tie), during a bilateral meeting at the G20 Summit in Toronto, Canada, Saturday, June 26, 2010. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I am beginning to feel ashamed of myself. I started this web site, as we called it then, Boyce’s Paper, in 1996, long before blogs had ever been heard of, at a time when it had become obvious to me that anyone I might wish to write for had no money to pay me. Therefore, when since asked am I retired, I answer, “Well, I suppose so. They’ve stopped paying me, so I have stopped writing. You could call it being retired.”

My purpose was simply to have a sounding off place, somewhere to express my opinion without fear or favour, and originally I thought maybe I could do it every day.

Any readers I still have --- you are few, believe me --- will have noticed that I have not written much in the last three months, and will perhaps have been surprised that lots of world-shaking events have been occurring about which I have had not a word to say. I have blamed my lack of mobility following the fracturing of my Achilles tendon. But that is not the real reason.

The real reason is that world events seem so confusing, so tumultuous, and so unfavourable to the ideals for an improved world that I used to hold, that I have begun to wonder whether it is all worth it. I have always known that anything I have to say is insignificant, but I have always previously thought it was worth putting in my two cents worth of opinion and letting the chips fall where they may. Now, like my fifty-ish, sons, I find myself asking, “What’s it all about? What does it all mean? Is it worth the effort?”

I decided from the first that if they wouldn’t pay me to write any more, I could not afford to spend money on my web site, so today I can say I have never spent a penny on it, nor earned a penny from it, thus consigning myself to my own oblivion. Never mind, I still find it therapeutic. In fact, after being at it since at least 1942 --- before I left high school --- I have to admit that writing has become almost like a reflex action for me. I can’t stop doing it, come what may. In fact, writing is certainly number one in the list of professions from which it is impossible to retire. It gets its grip on you, and you are pulled along helplessly by it, kicking and screaming.

But I have only to contemplate the possibility that Stephen Harper might conceivably be re-elected to realize that I am not so indifferent as I have recently begun to feel. Don't ask me about that, you will probably stop a stream of invective: we have to get rid of this guy with his whole coterie of half-witted ministers and backward -thinking acolytes, and their antediluvian ultra-capitalistic ideas.

Part of my feeling of impotence comes from my long recognition that no journalist individually has any significance in the broad spectrum of society, its ideas and its purposes. Although I have always known this, it has become even more clear in recent years as the mainstream press has fallen into the ownership of huge companies whose only interest is to guard the existing economic system in which they have gained their obscene success. The impotence of the North American press in face of the huge economic crisis that was manufactured by the ultra-conservative capitalist class, their supine acquiescence as the Goldman Sachs boys moved into positions of power throughout the Western world and began to issue their marching orders, and their unquestioning acceptance that the State should provide unheard of  welfare payments to the staggering companies and banks that were said to be “too big to fail”, all these blew the pretensions about the freedom of the press into smithereens.

Well, okay: given all that, what follows are some simple thoughts that occurred to me watching from the sidelines as world events have marched across the page in recent months:

1. On the refugee crisis in Europe: Some perspective is needed. Europe was freaking out even when the numbers involved were small, like 6000 or so a month. Europe’s population is hitting the 300 million, right? And they are freaking out at the prospect of absorbing 160,000 incoming people, evidently, most of them people with reasonable educations, well-dressed, and most of whom have had enough money to pay the people smugglers to get them out of their home countries as they burn. By contrast, Canada has 34 million, and for years we have absorbed anything from 160,000 to 250,000 incoming people a year, year after year.  Even given the differences between Canada and Europe, culturally, economically and socially, it has to be admitted surely that the numbers in themselves are not the problem. The people “swarming” in, to use British Prime Minister David Cameron’s scaremongering word, can be successfully absorbed into Europe. All they have to do is to set aside their prejudices, ingrained for generations, against outsiders, against non-white people, against foreign religionists, and against incoming poor people.

That might seem a big demand, but Chancellor Angela Merkel, for one, seems to have got the point. And it is no coincidence that her pronouncements on the many tens, even hundreds of thousands that Germany can absorb coincide with a Guardian Weekly front page of August 28, headlined: “Europe in Need of a Baby Boom; Birthrate fall is a threat to economic prosperity; Immigration could avert population disaster."  

2. The “success” of capitalist economics: Anyone who believes that capitalism is serving the interests of everyone need only look at the link I put on this web site yesterday. Dealing with the United States (and Canada cannot surely be so different) it shows that since 1973, productivity has risen by 72 per cent, but “the typical worker received little if any benefit from their contribution to increased net output.  Said differently, they suffered from wage stagnation despite a growing economy.” The conclusion of this study by the Economic Policy Institute was that “there has been a change in power relations between owners of capital and workers, which has enabled the former to shift the distribution of national income to their favor at the expense of the latter. In other words, corporations are now keeping a larger share of national income for their own use, increasingly to fund mergers, stock buy-backs, and dividend payments.”

Nuff sed!

3. The hidden factor: insane population increases:  here it is time for me to trot out a story I have told many times, about Bangladesh. In 1975, when I was living back in New Zealand, I attended an international conference of the Human Ecology movement, and I heard an expert from Bangladesh say that by the end of the century his country would have a population of 125 million, if birthrates continued at their present level.  I began to think what this could have meant in social terms: I discovered Bangladesh’s area (143,000 square kilometres) was roughly comparable to the South Island of New Zealand (151,000 sq kms), where I was born. So I tried to project 125 million people over the South Island, and discovered that every settlement of 1,000 or more would have to have a million people. In other words it was unimaginable. By the end of the century, the population of Bangladesh was already outstripping the projected 125 million, and today it is estimated at 160 million. In other words, it is unthinkable; but yet, it exists. Similar figures can be shown for African countries. Kenya now has 45 million; 100 years ago it had 2.9 million. Nigeria, which in 1932 had 30 million people, now has 178 million. To get back to the European immigration crisis, an evident conclusion from these rates of growth is that people are going to have to be more equally shared around the world. Such crises are inevitable.

Okay, that’ll do for the day.

In the next month my attention --- I am a dedicated watcher of world events, remember --- is going to be entirely concentrated on the Rugby World Cup, opening in London next week, and ending at the end of October.

With, inevitably, a victory by the All Blacks of New Zealand….

Bread and circuses!

Link of the day, Sept 8 2015:  This article has the kind of information that makes one wonder why the North American workers are not in a state of revolt. It shows conclusively that since 1973, the owners of capital have snaffled the overwhelming percentage of the profits earned by the harder work of their employees, while the take of the employees who have created this additional wealth, has stayed more or less static.  Read this online Report from the Economic Front by Marty Hart-Landsberg here, and weep.

My Log 484 August 22 2015: A tune playing in my head this week recalls my very first months in Canada, 60 years ago, and some very strange experiences

Indian Tepee, Kenora, Ontario. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Quay of Kenora, Ontario. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Main street in Kirkland Lake, Ontario, Canada (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Map of Ontario, Canada, showing city of Kenora. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Unchained Melody (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

The other day I noticed I was unconsciously humming in my head a dreadful tune called Unchained Melody.  That really took me back, with a wrench, to my first days in Canada.

I arrived in September 1954, just over four years after my wife and I left our native country, New Zealand, with the objective of taking a little look at the world, and maybe doing something to improve it.  We had lived and worked briefly in Australia, India, England and Scotland before deciding to make our way home through Canada. Of all the countries we had lived in, in any of which, as Commonwealth citizens, we could have stayed for the rest of our lives, Canada was the first to require any immigration procedure.

We had no trouble being accepted since we conformed with what were the basic requirements in those days: we were white, of good health, employable and had $50 between us.

After a couple of weeks in Toronto looking for a job as a journalist (“no, you have no Canadian experience”) I was finally offered a job by the execrable Thomson Newspapers  in their execrable  Northern Daily News, in Kirkland Lake, just across the border from Rouyn in Quebec. It says something about what you could buy with a Canadian dollar in those days that after paying for a month’s rent on a small apartment, we had $11 left, and the prospect of earning $45 a week in future. The fact was, Thomsons would give a job to anybody who was willing to take the money. Everything was run from the Toronto offie, and for the first time I found myself working for an organization whose hatred of unions was so intense that they had invented a mechanical system of putting the news on to teletype machines so that they wouldn't have to hire actual printers. Our team of journalists who had ended up there was varied and interesting. Under two people who were loyal long-term employees of the company (one of them a recovering drunk), we had an Englishman who was a descendant of William Wordsworth and a typical upper-crust British character, educated in the best private schools,  a Jamaican who kept his house at 85 degrees all winter long, a South African refugee from apartheid who was married to a New Zealand girl, and the photographer was a Latvian who later became famous in Canada for his many books about the life of the Inuit, Fred Breummer. Fred, incidentally, was one of the two people on that makeshift, peripatetic journalistic staff who was eventually awarded the Order of Canada.

It was not a particularly rewarding job for any journalist, and after three months I had put together enough money to enable us to travel across to the other side of Ontario, to Kenora, where my wife had obtained a teaching job with the nearby Rabbit Lake school district, who were ready to pay her $1,500 for a year’s work. Meantime I sat down to write the great New Zealand novel as we confronted our first Canadian winter. This provided us with some very surprising experiences. For example, as I sat looking out from the house I rented on the edge of the Lake of The Woods (a lake unimaginably huge by New Zealand standards, with 14,522 islands dotted around in it), I began to see huge trucks running over the lake, borne by what must have been immensely thick ice, an event that I would never in my previous life have even thought was remotely possible. People kept coming in from across the lake on those whirlygig machines (the name of which I have forgotten, but they are now referred to as flat-bottomed airboats), propelled by a noisy  propeller, which could carry the vehicle over snow, ice or water.

Another experience we had never had before occurred every Saturday morning after we had bought two large paper bags full of groceries which we had to carry home around the lakeshore, at the end of which we always had icicles growing out of our noses.

It was in Kenora that I first made the acquaintance of the most popular hit of the moment, a dreadful song called Unchained Melody, which the local Kradio station kept playing repeatedly, to the point that it seemed to be playing every time I turned on the radio. I remember the name of the disc jockey, Jim Kidd, and I had several fruitless  conversations with him each time I phoned to complain about their obsession with this one song. I had never before struck this North American phenomenon, the hit parade, and had no conception that the most popular radio stations of the day were more than ready to keep repeating the same half dozen tunes throughout the day.

I have never forgotten Kenora, however, and especially I have never forgotten the little Swedish man from whom I rented the house by the lake. I was standing at a bus stop on my return from looking at possible houses to rent when this little man came up and started talking to me. When I said I was looking for a place to live, he said, “Maybe you would like my house,” and he took me to look at it immediately, offered it to me for a very reasonable price, and then he went back up the lake, where he lived and worked as a trader with the local Indians. He was an amazing little man. According to his daughter (a rather severe, religiously-inclined woman), who lived in the next door house, he would “give the shirt off his back to any Indian,” and that might well have been true. What I did discover of him that was astonishing, however, was that he would take a bottle of Scotch up the lake with him, and bring it back when he next came to town three months later. However, while in town, he would go on a bender of such wholesome intensity that after a few days his wife and family would have to put out a search party for him. They always found him, usually in the street, drunk as a lord, and took him home to clean him up for his return uplake. Years later, when I returned to Kenora and was in contact with the local Ojibways, I discovered that quite a few of the local status Indians bore his name.

I quit Kenora after six months, abandoned my novel-writing career, and took a job offered to me in the Winnipeg Free Press.

But one thing I would never have expected from my experiences in Kenora was that  more than half a century later the accursed Unchained Melody would be considered a sort of undying popular music classic. Shows how much I know!