‘As further evidence that The Guardian chose activism over journalism, The Jerusalem Post reports that in a letter The Guardian sent out to blog and Web site owners, calling for them to support its work, the paper said the Gaza film clips were meant to “add weight to calls this week for a full inquiry into the events surrounding Operation Cast Lead, which was aimed at Hamas, but which left over 1,400 Palestinians dead – around 300 known to be children.” Guardian Films then asked the bloggers to link to their “Gaza War Crimes” page.

The appeal, sent by Mustafa Khalili, who is one of those credited by The Guardian for the Gaza content, was inadvertently received by the ZioNation blog, which blew the whistle on The Guardian’s partisan political activism.

The Guardian is carrying out a blatant and systematic campaign of demonization against Israel that goes well beyond journalistic norms. JPost blogger Edwin Bennatan even points out how the paper has apparently been selective in its willingness to publish responses from supporters of Israel criticizing what they say is The Guardian’s extreme lack of balance and proportion. Bennatan publishes a very eloquent response to The Guardian that was removed from the paper’s Comment is Free blog site.’

As an aside I wonder just how many of Guardian readers go along with its views in their entirety? In truth it is now passing into history, as together with other newspapers it is facing terminal decline and the tiny niche it occupies is going to be as quaint as an ‘Olde English Tea Shoppe” in California before very long.

social republican

Yes, perfection is sterile, but our societies could be doing a lot better. You can’t stop people from desiring the fulfilment of joy. It would be like asking a flower whether it desired sun and water.

Have hope, comrade. In much darker and more brutal times, humanity continued to be the constant and aggresive opponent of any grand narrative, any totalising dream. Life will out. It’s attritional half victories might not seem worthy of the terrible, obscene cost but ut always wins. I personally hope that such dreamers of the day might one day learn not to bother with that ludicrious notion of perfection. But dreams can be perfect, we cannot.

WTF are you on about? Hitler is “acceptable”? To whom?
Lenin was as big a mad mass-murderer as Hitler, certainly in evilness if not in exact numbers (but not all that far off).

Before even starting to discuss, don’t most of you find the the word ‘bourgeois’ sounds dated? When I say the bourgeois no longer exist, I mean that we are in the hands of a mostly cultureless , fat cat power-mongering proletariat who exercise power with money.

The 19th century bourgeois still had some substance. Despite its own tyranny it produced artists and thinkers of substance, who had a great capacity for self-criticism, even where this was not overtly intended. It produced Schumann, Chopin, Brahms and many others; it produced Marx, John Ruskin (on political economy) and Rosa Luxemburg. Even if Marx got things wrong his philosophy deserves much more than his being put aside as a bogeyman. He had a great admiration for the achievements of the bourgeois, and expected culture to burgeon even more than before after his revolution

As for the masses in Germany, they may not originally have suppoerted Hitler but the soon came round to doing so, no doubt due to a mixture of fear and indoctrination, as is the case in much of the Muslim World. Go into a pub or Trattoria in Verona, and you will hear the supporters (workers) of Berlusconi vociferating and saying, “What we need is another Mussolini.”

I detest the people who go beserk if you mention the names of Marx,
Lenin. They are an essential part of our history – even if for the worse – and should be studied. Hitler is more acceptable on this blog.

AS for how I conceive of a transformation of society – we need another socio-political genius for whom the Marxian kaleidoscope has turned around completely, with the pieces falling in different places. I think about it all the time and have some ideas. But this blog moves fast, I have to teach in a moment.

Provisionally I think change should come from inside, rather than from a group of people who become the new tryrants. Determinate, not blind negation.Maybe capitalism is imploding. Goivernments, including Berlusconi’s are being forced by circumstances to contribute to wellfare for their own survival. I believe with Ruskin that capital should prodice humanity and not multiply senselessly. Very hurried notes, these.

I would have followed Rosa Luxemburg unto death – precisely – if she hadn’t been murdered in Germany, she would have been in Russia

We live within the division of labour and I try to do what I can with music and poetry to follow the paths of transformation.

Fuck the thread. I am trying to answer letters that have been written.

I haven’t looked at the slippery path post. I’m on it already, despairing of the future of humanity. But despair is one stage closer to hope than acquiescence.

But they have only recently (in historical terms) ousted the former world leaders.

But Muslims certainly do produce kick-ass whines.

They are also, by some margin, the world’s greatest producers of that most valuable commodity, anti-Semitism.

One thing, by the Nazi-Soviet pact, both the SPD and the KPD were fragments of their past selves. After the popular front stage in the mid thirties, the Soviets went back to name calling but this time it was ‘trots’ for those on the left and good ol’ ‘capitalist’ for those on the right