Byron Clark

Had clubs day at university today, I of course helped out on the Workers Party on Campus table. That morning the first T-shirt I grabbed off my drying rack was my MetalSoc (heavy metal society) one, I decided against it least people get the tables mixed up. The next one I picked up was my "Mummy, what were the arts?" t-shirt, that was part of a students association campaign against the university's cuts to the College of Arts. Again, this could be confusing, so I grabbed a third T-shirt, it happened to be one baring the image of Che Guevara. I grinned at the student-radical cliche it would be, but thought what the hell, and wore that one. Which is where my story begins...

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The Workers Party hosted our monthly forum tonight, on Afganistan and Iraq. With New Zealand troops returning to Afghanistan its important to build up some oposition.

In the case of Iraq, theres an organisation which workers here should lend support too, the Iraq Freedom Congress "Working For a Democratic, Secular and Progressive Alternative to both the US Occupation and Political Islam in Iraq" and has done a lot of great work with Iraqi trade unions as well as promoting rights for women, while the mainstream media shows the only resistance as the Islamic fundementalists there are progressives in Iraq, this is something that needs to be promoted and supported by progressives in the west.

In other news, Byron has writers block while thinking of a post title, anyway...

From M&C news " With the war in Iraq poised to enter its fifth year, tens of thousands of demonstrators Saturday flooded the streets of Washington, Hungary, Spain, Australia, Greece, Turkey, Cyprus, South Korea, Chile, Sweden, Iraq and elsewhere in protest.
The protests were timed to coincide with the fourth anniversary on Tuesday of the Iraq war, which has claimed the lives of at least 70,000 civilians and nearly 10,000 soldiers and police officers from Iraq, the US and eight coalition countries."

I went to the Christchurch protest yesterday, I would estimate around 80 people there, give or take, and although the protests are getting smaller, rather than larger (in Christchurch anyway), I thought this one was good, along with people all over the world, we made our voices heard.

From Labourstart:

"On 23 February 2007, US and Iraqi forces raided the head offices of the General Federation of Iraqi Workers (GFIW), the country's national trade union center. They arrested one of the union's security staff (later released unharmed), destroyed furniture, and confiscated a computer and fax machine. And then they did it again two days later, causing further damage to the union headquarters.
The union is condemning the attacks as unprovoked. It is calling on the occupation forces to issue a written apology, to return all the seized property, and to pay compensation for damages caused. Please show your support by sending off the message below."

I recall something like this happening a year or two ago as well, take a moment to go to the website and send a (pre-written) message of protest to the US government and their puppet government in Iraq.

Withdraw 1,100 troops. Replace with Prince Harry..

Seriously though, the UK's (and also Denmark's) anouncements of troop withdrawls is something to be pleased about, although the USA's surge of 21,100 troops with mean more, not less, boots-on-the-ground overall, Bush's "coalition of the willing" is becoming somewhat less so, and the Bush administation is closer to having to go it alone.

But theres a little more to be happy about in the EU than the south Pacific, Australia is considering sending more troops to Afganistan. At least Dick Cheneys visit was met with protests.

Its an exageration to call New Zealand a police state, there are other times in history that the term would fit a lot better, but the slogan makes a good title, and seriously, thats a lot of police.

From Indymedia: Australian Prime Minister John Howard was harassed throughout today[The 16th] in Wellington, by protesters primarily opposed to his involvement in the Iraq war.

According to todays Press Wellington now has a "trained anti-protester squad" of police (the article seems to have disappeared from Stuff, but heres a link to the Google cache)

There is some good footage of the protest on the TV3 website

I don't read This Listener much anymore, every other week the feature article is about house prices, yet every now and again there is some excellent journalism, like this article by Matt Nippert;

The tax money collected for your retirement is being used by fund managers, acting on behalf of the government, to profit from the war in Iraq, nuclear-weapon production and the building of the Guantanamo Bay prison.

Among the places our pension money is being invested:

Shares in eight out of the 10 largest defence and armaments companies, including the infamous Halliburton, the largest contractor for the US Army in Iraq and builder of the notorious Guantanamo Bay military prison in Cuba. In total, investments in defence firms amount to more than $100 million.

Many of these investments in companies that make nuclear weapons- such as the most ironicly named missile ever, the "MX Peacekeeper" could even be illegal under the countries nuclear free legislation

I've been reading a lot of the news about the war lately (yeah, I don't blog about every news article I read) I'm pleased, and not really surprised, to see that 80% of New Zealanders agree with Jim Andertons recent comments comparing the Iraq war to Vietnam.

I liked this sentence in a recent Nelson Mail article "Mr Bush's new strategy is his last chance to salvage something from the disaster that history will remember him by. Ineligible to stand again and with his party's hopes of regaining power at the next elections slim, he appears to have little to lose, politically, by adopting a course that enjoys little domestic support."

There's very little denial of the US failure in Iraq anymore, looking at the past few years with so many deaths, possibly more 650,000, the one glimer of hope seems to be that the war will be over soon. This thought occured to me while I was reading an article in last Octobers Wired (just got it out of the library this week) about webcomic Shooting War. Shooting War is set in 2011 and follows a video-blogger who becomes famous for his coverage of "an endlessly occupied Iraq" upon reading that line I suddenly thought "the war will be over by 2011" that was the first time in 4 years I'd actually thought like that. There is a worry in my mind though, that it could get worse before it gets better.

Duty minister Jim Anderton speaking this morning on Iraq: "It is hard to see how an additional 20,000-25,000 troops are going to be capable of making any real difference and this has an eerie Vietnam revisited element to it. One wonders whether the lessons I would have expected to be learnt from that fiasco have been learnt in any way at all. It is literally years since Mr Bush landed on an aircraft carrier and announced the war was over. I don't know whether he remembers that"

And Foreign Minister Winston Peters speaking this afternoon on Iraq, "Peters says his ministerial colleague's attack on President Bush was ill-informed and regrettable. He says Anderton is entitled to his own thoughts on world events, but his comments do not reflect the government's views"

Bryce Edwards makes some good comments on this: "Anderton's comments were relatively mild and probably in line with majority opinion, and so it's informative to see Clark and Peters' reactions. Even though Anderton had been specifically asked to make a comment as Duty Minister during the holiday period, Helen Clark later said that he was speaking on behalf of his own party rather than the Government. Peters went further to say his comments were 'ill-informed and regrettable'. This is clearly a government that is divided on the issue, but led by those determined not to have the US criticised for Iraq."

From The Globe and Mail: "Admitting that he got it wrong and that the Iraqi war was threatening to spin out of control, U.S. President George W. Bush ordered more troops to Baghdad and attempted to shore up a collapsing home front in an unusually contrite speech to the nation Wednesday.
“Where mistakes have been made, the responsibility rests with me,” Mr. Bush said, an admission in stark contrast to the claims of triumph and impending victory that have been recurring themes in his previous speeches about Iraq. Yet he insisted that the war remained “noble and necessary” and that defeat would imperil the safety of Americans at home and pitch the entire Middle East into war...
...“I have committed more than 20,000 more American troops to Iraq. The vast majority of them, five brigades, will be deployed to Baghdad.”

Well at least he admits he fucked up- but troop deployments speak louder than speech writers. There's some good commentary on Blairwatch and The Galloping Beaver (some people give their blogs odd names...)

Yes, yes we've all know that for about a week, but I haven't said anything about it yet. I don't particulary have anything to say, at this time of a Friday I'm almost ready to go to sleep (shift worker) and don't have the energy to do a lot of thinking, however I thought this paragraph from the latest Weekly Worker was worth quoting:

"There is a sense in which Saddam Hussein’s death sums up his life. He died as he had lived, an Iraqi nationalist and an Arab nationalist. But that very nationalism made him, for most of his career, an instrument of US imperialism. He was still an instrument of US imperialism as its straw-man enemy between 1991 and 2003, and the timing of his death was no doubt calculated to serve US imperialism’s interests."

No arguments there.

From the World Socialist Website: "Four US Marines were charged Thursday with multiple counts of murder in connection with the massacre of 24 Iraqi civilians in the town of Haditha on November 19, 2005. Military officials also charged four officers with dereliction of duty and other counts relating to the cover-up of the rampage. The killings in the predominately Sunni town, 200 kilometers northwest of Baghdad, were carried out after a roadside bomb struck a convoy, claiming the life of one marine."

The US death count is approaching 3,000, while the Iraqi death count could be as high as 650,000, doesn't seem to stop Bush wanting to send 20,000 more troops, and hey, Condi Rice says its all worth it

Theres an article on Stuff that seems to show ordinary Fijins support the coup, with comments such as "Indo-Fijian taxi drivers parked under a tree also support the Commodore's quiet coup. They say he is ousting a corrupt, money-sucking old boy's network and low-income Fijians will benefit." I don't feel like I have enough information to really form an opinion on the new government, I've heard that in this case the military was actually more progressive than the outgoing government, yet at the same time, I'm always suspicious of coups; if they people support you, why a coup and not a revolution?

One thing I know that I don't support however, is the sanctions imposed on Fiji, it seems that the EU has now joined in with the USA, Australia and New Zealand: Sugar accounts for about 35 per cent of Fiji's gross domestic product and keeps about 40,000 families in work. It is heavily subsidised by the European Union but that is about to end. The Europeans were to provide a lifesaving F$350 million (NZ$300 million) investment and loan package to modernise the 100-year-old mills and infrastructure. Within hours of the coup, the EU was warning it would review the package.

That same article also has this:
Ride a convoy on Iraq's main highway from Kuwait and chances are the mercenaries riding shotgun will be Fijian.
In Afghanistan, Fijians are fighting the Taleban while wearing British Army uniforms. And, in a slow trickle, increasing numbers of them are returning home in body bags.
Men still go, though.
For every family across the archipelago the choice is simple: deep poverty versus potential riches from putting the body of a son or two on the line.

These things seem to be common trends among western imperialism, use the poor of the oppressed countries to fight your wars, and when theres political unrest, starve the people into submission.

On November 3rd Malachi Ritscher, a 52 year old anti-war activist doused himself in petrol and set himself alight on the side of the Kennedy Expressway in Chicago, as a final protest against the war in Iraq. His self written obituary is possibly the sadest thing you will read today.

My actions should be self-explanatory, and since in our self-obsessed culture words seldom match the deed, writing a mission statement would seem questionable. So judge me by my actions. Maybe some will be scared enough to wake from their walking dream state - am I therefore a martyr or terrorist? I would prefer to be thought of as a 'spiritual warrior'. Our so-called leaders are the real terrorists in the world today, responsible for more deaths than Osama bin Laden.

I have had a wonderful life, both full and full of wonder. I have experienced love and the joy and heartache of raising a child. I have jumped out of an airplane, and escaped a burning building. I have spent the night in jail, and dropped acid during the sixties. I have been privileged to have met many supremely talented musicians and writers, most of whom were extremely generous and gracious. Even during the hard times, I felt charmed. Even the difficult lessons have been like blessed gifts. When I hear about our young men and women who are sent off to war in the name of God and Country, and who give up their lives for no rational cause at all, my heart is crushed. What has happened to my country? we have become worse than the imagined enemy - killing civilians and calling it 'collateral damage', torturing and trampling human rights inside and outside our own borders, violating our own Constitution whenever it seems convenient, lying and stealing right and left, more concerned with sports on television and ring-tones on cell-phones than the future of the world.... half the population is taking medication because they cannot face the daily stress of living in the richest nation in the world.

The war in Iraq has affected a lot of people all over the world, obviously its affected the lives of every person in Iraq, every American soldier, and every member of their family. But its also had an effect on people like Malachi Ritscher, people who are so moved by the tragety that is this war, that they're driven to something like this. In 2003, before the war had even started, the largest anti-war demonstration in the histroy of the planet took place, 3 and a half years later the war is still going on, hundreds of thousands are dead, and the media has all but started ignoring it. Sometimes people feel like they need to do something big to draw attention to the war, sometimes its impossible to think of anything.

Is Malachis suicide going to have an effect on the world? on the anti-war movement? on the war itself?

I can honestly say, I don't know, but I hope so.

From Yahoo news: It took five days for the Cook County medical examiner to identify the charred-beyond-recognition corpse. Meanwhile, Ritscher's suicide went largely unnoticed. It wasn't until a reporter for an alternative weekly, the Chicago Reader, pieced the facts together that word began to spread.
Soon, tributes — and questions — poured in to the paper's blogs.
Was this a man consumed by mental illness? Or was Ritscher a martyr driven by rage over what he saw as an unjust war? Was he a convenient symbol for an anti-war movement or was there more to his message?
"This man killed himself in such a painful way, specifically to get our attention on these things," said Jennifer Diaz, a 28-year-old graduate student who never met him but has been researching his life. Now, she is organizing protests and vigils in his name. "I'm not going to sit by and I can't sit by and let this go unheard."

I've mentioned once or twice before that at the time of the invasion of Iraq I became a bit of a media junkie, I remember one night I was babysitting my cousins and trying to watch about 4 news channels at once, before that I would have been crawling the web for info and flicking through publications I brought at anti-war demonstrations.

Today I consume a lot less media, just as entertainment for me has became a series of blogs, podcasts, bit torrent downloads and youtube clips, media has became, well, a series of blogs, podcasts, bit torrent downloads and youtube clips. With my media being so personalized I get all the news that interests me, but worry I'll miss out on something important, so I usually make an effort to flick though the Press and watch the 6 o'clock news, if theres anything important or interesting between commercials, I can do a Google News search.

I watched the new episode of Eating Media Lunch possibly the best New Zealand telivision of the decade, and the first time I'd used a VCR since the last season (being a shift worker I'm asleep when its on) the episode was 'most shocking moments of 2006' and I knew about (almost) everything that was on it, so I guess my approach to media consumption is working. When I heard about the new season I wondered, would EML be a commentary on the media? or actually the media for me? It reminded me of a comment I heard Jon Stewart say on Crossfire about a year ago (the clip may be on Youtube somewhere) when questioned about the fact that young people get most of their news from his show, he replied that that wasn't the case, as his show satireizes (is that a word?) the media, people need to know the news before watching his show to understand it, the comment that stuck out from that interview was that "young people learn by osmosis" somehow we get the important stories without even trying.

That was my incredibly long lead in to a blog post about Saddam being hung, I first heard about this on a radio sound bite while I was at work, and upon checking my Netvibes page found blog posts talking about it, heres some highlights:

From Joe Hendren I wish Saddam had been sent to the International Criminal Court (ICC) instead, along with a few western significant others also to blame for numerous Iraqi deaths. If gassing the Kurds is such a terrible crime (which it is), why not also charge the people who gave Saddam the gas? Unfortunately the citizenship of these alleged criminals would give them refuge in the United States, a country which refuses to recognise the ICC.

And from Monuments are for Pigeons When it comes to brutal dictatorship, it doesn't really matter who holds the gun. Hussein will be executed by people who have killed more Iraqis than he has, which is another tragedy to add to the long list - that a tyrant ends up looking good by comparison with the occupiers.
Rather convenient, the Americans 'getting their man' two days before the mid-term elections, too. I forget the source, but a pundit I read predicted this months ago. Funny how such a difficult trial, fraught with disruption, in an occupied land, just happens to end while the Republican Party is fighting a rearguard battle. You don't have to believe in conspiracy theories to believe in good timing.

Reading both these posts will give you some good comentary and analysis on this news story, a lot better than that radio sounds bite I mentioned anyway.

I'm going to use todays journal entry to pay tribute to the people who died on this day as a result of capitalism. The first case is an exmple of a capitalist state using force to crush a rebellion of workers. The second, an example of they way people in this society are alienated from each other to the point that they will actually shoot eachother, and the third an example of what happens in imperialist war.

April 20 1914 The Colorado National Guard attacks a tent colony of 1200 striking coal miners and thier famillies in Ludlow. 20 people died in what has became known as the ludlow massacre, half of the the children of striking miners.

April 20 1999 Another massacre occurs in Colorado, this time at Columbine High School. Students Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris kill 12 people, and then themselves. This event inspired Michael Moores film Bowling for Columbine

April 20 2004 In occupied Iraq, insurgents fire 12 mortars on Abu Garaib prison, known for being the site of torture of Iraqi detainees by US soldiers. 22 were killed and a further 92 injured.

From The Guardian:
An RAF doctor who refused to go to Iraq on the grounds that the war was illegal was jailed for eight months yesterday in what the judge described as a message to the armed forces about the consequences of rejecting "the policy of Her Majesty's government".

Flight Lieutenant Malcolm Kendall-Smith, 37, of dual British and New Zealand citizenship, was found guilty on five counts of disobeying orders after a trial marked by bitter exchanges, in which he compared the actions of US forces to those of Nazi Germany.

Kendall-Smiths 'crime' is disobeying the orders of an imperialist state, I ask, where is the trial for George Bush, Tony Blair, John Howard and the other imperialist leaders who took part in the invasion of Iraq, which at least 34,139 people have died as a result of? (source)