Confusionism in Brockley: A cautionary tale

Note: some updates in the comments 30.11.2016

Ideas for Change?
The "Brockley Festival of Ideas for Change" was advertised some time ago, with an odd, eclectic collection of mainly left-wing speakers, and sponsored by the local civic amenity association, the Brockley Society and with some kind of affiliation from the local university, Goldsmiths. The excellent Goldsmiths exhibition on the Battle of Lewisham was to be shown, and there were talks by interesting local activists.

Ivo Mosley, the grandson of fascist leader Oswald, was a committee member, along with his wife Xanthe, and there seemed to be a strong emphasis on the evils of the money economy.

For some local people, the first alarm bell was that one of the billed speakers was Jackie Walker, the Labour left activist with local links who has stirred considerable controversy in the past year with a series of comments on social media and in public interpreted by many as antisemitic or at least legitimating antisemitic conspiracy theories (see e.g. Andy Newman, Joe Mulhall, Padraig Reidy).

Slightly louder alarm bells started to ring around 9 November when the main organiser, Anthony Russell of a group called "The Chandos" (not to be confused with the Brockey Rise pub of the same name), tweeted the odd combination of Julian Assange, George Galloway and Russell Brand to invite them to the festival.

When I commented on this on Twitter, Anthony Russell responded with an odd series of comments, which unfortunately I didn't screenshot and are now deleted. He said something to the effect that he what he thought I took to be "racism" was in fact people "pigeon-holing" themselves by race. I clumsily replied that I hadn't used the word racism but that Walker, Assange and Galloway have all said things which sit uncomfortably for many Jews. He replied that there are plenty of things that sit uncomfortably for him "as a white man", and then stopped tweeting.

Things hotting up
Then louder still alarm bells rang when it was noticed that Russell had posted a rather strange Facebook post about the event:

Two of the classics of coded antisemitic themes jump out: the "official" (whatever that means) media is "captured" (by whom?); politicians are in thrall to "higher powers" (which higher powers?). And then the modern classic: the 9/11 attacks (given scare quotes) were apparently "unexplained and highly suspect" - a claim made by conspiracy theorists of the left and right, often linked to antisemitic paranoia. And also one of the staples of the contemporary generation of conspiracy theorists: the idea that there is no civil war in Syria (apparently the popular uprising against a dictatorship simply didn't happen) but rather it was "invaded" (presumably by some combination of the US, Mossad and the Gulf states). 

In the last day or two before the festival - really too late for anyone to do anything about it - a few people started looking more closely at Anthony Russell. What they found wasn't pretty.

"Controversial"

There were two sets of posts that were worrying. First, there were some that implied Holocaust denialism. Here he is, on Twitter (now deleted) and on his website, meeting David Irving in late 2013:

David Irving is described as "distinguished" but "controversial". Well, the second of those terms is true: he is famous as a Holocaust denier. In fact, as Wikipedia puts it: 

Irving's reputation as a historian was discredited[4] when, in the course of an unsuccessful libel case he filed against the American historian Deborah Lipstadt and Penguin Books, he was shown to have deliberately misrepresented historical evidence to promote Holocaust denial.[5] The English court found that Irving was an active Holocaust denier, antisemite, and racist,[6] who "for his own ideological reasons persistently and deliberately misrepresented and manipulated historical evidence".[6][7] In addition, the court found that Irving's books had distorted the history of Adolf Hitler's role in the Holocaust to depict Hitler in a favourable light.

What is more interesting, perhaps, is the way he phrases it in his tweet: that study of WWII took him to Irving. What study of WWII would lead you towards, rather than away from, Irving? Not a study of actual facts or historiography, but perhaps spending too much time in the conpiratorial corners of the internet.

Here are two more:

The first of those is a link to a perfectly legitimate article, but it is interesting what he chooses to quote from it in the tweet. Here is the full extract:

President Roosevelt told French military leaders at the Casablanca Conference in 1943 that “the number of Jews engaged in the practice of the professions” in liberated North Africa “should be definitely limited,” lest there be a recurrence of “the understandable complaints which the Germans bore towards the Jews in Germany…”

In other words, it is FDR's antisemitism he chooses to disseminate. 

The second one is a little different. It implies that Ken Livingstone's claims about Hitler being a Zionist are true. And it implies that speaking this truth is somehow an act of bravery, presumably because of Zionist power in our society. More alarming still is where Russell takes the article from: an actual Nazi website. Here it is:

"Jimmy Saville is innocent"

As well as these few examples of Russell's interest in Holocaust denialism, there are also a couple of examples of disturbing sexual politics:

@bobfrombrockley pic.twitter.com/fJeagSDNRd

— Rosalind Hardie (@adinnieken) November 19, 2016

@bobfrombrockley no words. Invitation to Assange and Galloway in context. pic.twitter.com/Rba2rbMgm9

— Rosalind Hardie (@adinnieken) November 19, 2016

@bobfrombrockley @Otto_English He proclaims "Jimmy #Saville is innocent!" along with every other man accused of sexual violence. pic.twitter.com/M8JX51l3Xo

— Rosalind Hardie (@adinnieken) November 20, 2016

All's well that ends well? [Section amended 30/11/2016]

All of the social media activity - on Twitter and on local Facebook pages and so on - meant that the other committee members were in a slightly embarrassing position, and rather late in the day to do anything about it. Wisely, Jackie Walker on Facebook has said that she withdrew when she learned about Russell's background - see this comment. It seems the organisers were as shocked as we were, and he agreed not to speak at the event. I sympathise with them, as there was really little else they could do so late on, and nobody in Brockley is likely to want to have anything to do with him again. 

I guess there's a lesson here about due diligence, and a lesson that an apparent "gentle buddhist persona" is no guarantee of moral decency. 

But I think there are also lessons about the nature of fascism in today's post-truth digital age. 

Buddhist Confusionism
US anti-fascist activist and researcher Spencer Sunshine gave a couple of talks last week in which he explored what he calls "unorthodox fascism", the mutations of classical fascism which enable it to reach out to engage non-traditional constituencies, whether through apparently left-wing or ecological movements, libertarianism or music subcultures - from Occupy Wall Street to neo-folk to the Rock Against Communism skinhead scene. Although most of these spaces might in themselves be fairly insignificant, it is striking how many possible vectors there are for fascism's toxin to enter the mainstream.

German anti-fascists talk about the concept of the querfront, cross-front, a conscious project of left-right crossover. As Elise Hendrick puts it:

Craving the legitimacy that an alliance with progressive forces can provide, reactionaries seize on ostensibly shared positions, chief amongst them opposition to corrupt élites, to create the impression that progressives could benefit from making common cause with them.

Andrew Coates introduces English-speaking readers to the French term confusionism, the blurring of left and right, and usually of the worst of both.  

The Festival of Ideas fits into this mould, I think: an apparently "progressive" organisation, stressing peace and spirituality, but some disturbing fascist-aligned ideas when you scratch the surface.

Post-truth
One of the things that strikes me about the affair is the way that Russell positions himself as a seeker after truth. He claims it is research that took him to David Irving. He talks about Ken Livingstone daring to speak the truth about Zionism. The intense distrust so many people feel towards "official" or "mainstream" sources of truth, combined with the easy click of a finger digital access to such an enormous excess of (real and fake) information, breeds this esoteric approach to the truth.

The truths told by experts - by historians about the Holocaust or the slave trade, by scientists about the climate, by economists about the effects of Brexit - are simply not trusted, and people opt instead for "truths" they imagine to be somehow deeper. The authority of charisma replaces the authority of scholarship.

Because anyone can "do the research" (i.e. google, and click on a couple of links), the craft skills involved in pursuing genuine knowledge are de-valued. The fractal, hyperlinked geometry of  internet seareching breeds a conspiratorial worldview, which invests unwarranted significance in often quite arbitrary connections. I don't know how we counter this, but we urgently need to work out that out.

***

1930s Paris comes to South London

The folks who brought us the Brockley Jack Film Club and Piccadilly are returning to South London with a night of surreal cabaret: Revue ZouZou.



It's on February 8 at the Ivy House. Gypsy jazz, performance, magic and more.  It'll be a good night. Tickets here, Twitter here, Facebook here.

The Ivy House, incidentally, is London's first co-operatively owned pub, the first pub to be listed as an
Asset of Community Value, and the first building in the UK to be bought for the community under the provisions of the Localism Act. The whole story - of how local people came together to save a local pub - is here. Well worth supporting!

The Ivy House is a fifteen-twenty minute walk from Nunhead and Brockley train stations. Brockley is also on the Overground. (Links are to station info and local maps.)

Here's Django Reinhardt, whose songs Belleville Rendezvous play, with a South London song:

Films, libraries, pizzas, Jew-haters - you know the sort of thing to expect here by now

Bloggery: I don’t know how I missed the fact that my friend Tom Henri has a blog, “Unsettling Social Work”, aimed at “developing a critical sociology of social work”. The latest entry, from September, is the full text of his Guardian article on the summer riots in Lewisham, my corner of London. Moving to a totally different topic, have I recommended Critical Kabbalist before? The tin says "Reflections on studying Kabbalah and its relation to questions of spirituality, art, music and politics." But that doesn't really capture the interesting intersection of negative theology and communist theory.

A local blog for local people:  I've been meaning to write about the campaign against Domino's Pizza in Honor Oak Park. I hope to do so soon, but in the meantime, go sign the petition (and read a little there about the issue). Also, local readers, go and watch A Screaming Man, which is supposed to be awesome, at the Brockley Jack Film Club on Monday night (the image above is from the film). Also of interest to both my local and non-local readers, here's Principia Dialectica on a Marxist showdown in the Brockley Barge: Urban rides: Potholing in south London. Meanwhile, rigorous academic research says Brockley Central is good for you.


Libraries:Talking of Crofton Park, it is incredibly depressing these days to go into our "social enterprise"-run "community library", slowing dying away in the shell of our wonderful old municipal neighbourhood library. I was incredibly irritated to read this Torygraph article by Peckham resident New Labor ex-librarian John McTernan, whose columns I normally like. The sub-editors, presumably, are responsible for the header and strapline: "Liberal whingers are wrong – we should shut our libraries: Middle-class liberals are fighting to keep libraries open out of condescension for the less fortunate and guilt that they, like everyone else, no longer use them." But McTernan is responsible for the nonsense that follows: "When did you last go to a public library? No, really, when? It’s probably a good few years – and if so, you’re not alone. From one year to the next, nearly 60 per cent of us don’t go to libraries at all. In fact, fewer than one in five adults in England go more than once a month." For a start, this misses out the children who go to libraries, in much higher numbers than adults, and surely the real core users. Even so, and accepting that these numbers are accurate (he doesn't say where they come from), aren't the 40% of the adult population who are library users, and the 20% who are regular users, important? And the additional few percent who'd also be users if the libraries weren't being emptied out and closed down? He claims that we don't need a gateway to international literature when you can buy from Abebooks, which is like saying we don't need the BBC because you can buy DVDs on-line. He claims that "every kid has a desk at home", which is not the case in Crofton Park and surely not the case in Peckham either. Lewisham and Southwark libraries are heavily used by teenagers (mainly black, as it happens) using the desks and computers to do schoolwork, and closing the libraries is a real insult to them. North London and Oxford libraries that get celebrity endorsements might be the concern of liberal whingers, but down here where fewer authors come we really need our libraries.

Anti-capitalism/RCPWatch: My last post on the Occupy movement mainly included positive commentary, but I have enjoyed reading Spiked's more jaundiced view. (Tim Black: V for Vacuous; Brendan O’Neill: Occupy London: a ragbag of political conformists; Nathalie Rothschild: The rage of hip consumers; Nathalie Rothschild: Is this Monty Python’s Occupy Wall Street?) They obsessively point out (e.g. here) that the movement can't really be radical because it is endorsed by Ben and Jerry, the president of the US, and Anglican priests. A very fair comment indeed. However, makes me wonder about Spiked's own empty claim to radicalism, given its writers are so widely disseminated by the super-establishment Daily Telegraph and the BBC, given sinecures by the Tory mayor of London and so on. They also reveal something of their esoteric Leninism in this article, where they attack the movement for its leaderlessness.

Real political leadership represents the embodiment of an ideal, a goal, which people subscribe to and are willing to fight for. In eschewing leadership, or rather in celebrating the objective reality of a lack of decent leaders, the occupiers are actually turning their noses up at idealism and political purpose, at the very basic idea of having a goal and a strategy for achieving it.[...] Here, we can glimpse what the celebration of leaderlessness really represents: an accommodation to the dearth of visionary thinking on the modern left.

True, visionary thinking is sorely lacking on the modern left, but this is not an argument for throwing our hats in with a Leninist cult run by the "visionary" Frank Furedi, which is Spiked's underlying if rarely spoken agenda.

Zionism/anti-Zionism... and the British labour movement: Nick Cohen on the foul smell of Britain's anti-Israel trade unions. Alan Johnson on Labour Friends of Israel.

Zionism/anti-Zionism... and Gilad Atzmon: Joseph W on Atzmonism as this century's Protocols. Lucy Lips on the nadir of the anti-Zionist Jews. Ben Cohen on John Mearsheimer And The Scandal That Wasn’t.

Fascism and anti-fascism: Alan Johnson on Matthew Collins' Hate.


Non-progressive socialism: Interesting post on Jon Cruddas, Blue Labour and BNP economics from Paul up North.

Conspirationism: At the weekend I was disappointed to see the latest Ziocentric conspiracy theory emerging from a source I expected better of: the claim that Liam Fox was a useful idiot for Mossad, pushed by Ian Bone of all people.

I've had a busy week: I might have blogged a little too much this week. If you missed them, go back back and read my posts on when anti-Zionism isn't antisemitism, Occupying Wall Street and London, the English Defence League and its Jewish Division, and Gilad Atzmon. Contested Terrain also took up the anti-Zionism/anti-imperialism/antisemitism issue, and I cross-posted part of my Occupy post there too.

Music: Finally, here's the late Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan singing "Mast Nazron Se".

Slowly catching up 1: Flames lambent in Britain

Riots in Lewisham: Image from Guardian

Note: I have been writing this post since Monday, and keep seeing more stuff to add to it, so it has swollen quite a bit, and some of the stuff I have extracted from has been extracted from elsewhere before I got a chance to publish. Not my best blogging moment, but I hope you find something of interest here!

I was out of the country and away from the TV screen and internet during the week that apparently shook Britain. I’m still digesting the news and analysis, and the Bobist party line has not yet taken shape. A Demos bean-counting exercise found a huge gap between the language of left-wing commentators, blaming political and social structures, and right-wing commentators, stressing moral responsibility and the breakdown of community.  Thankfully, however, there is a third line, which attempts to show the complexity and ambivalence of the riots. Exemplary here would be Steve Hanson. Some choice quotes from his “The riots”:

The riots were a kind of consumerist individualization gone loco, the ultimate ‘me’ of the looter, not the ‘us’ of a wider social fabric. I don’t condone the riots, the destruction was immense and the trauma for those affected will be profound, nor do I think they were in some way a political cry, but I cannot bring myself to express admiration for the parents who shopped their son over a packet of chewing gum picked from an already smashed shop window either.

Other analysis which captures the complexity comes from Waterloo Sunset, Weggis, James Bloodworth, George Szirtes, Francis Sedgemore, Dave Broder in the Commune, North London Solidarity Federation, Hari Kunzru, Mick Hartley, Owen Jones, Harriet Sergeant, and Paul Thompson. Two good posts from Flesh is Grass: “Generation terrorists” and “Travels in Nihilon”. And another from Little Richardjohn:

Terrible damage is being done to the language. 'Excuse' 'understand' and 'explain' are under attack. To understand is now to excuse. This is a disturbing political development. As embodied in the words of David Davies MP/ Special Constable: "Anyone who ever blamed the police for kettling or brutality [is] to blame." If that isn't a latter day Angry Brigade invitation to a police state, I don't know what is. The abuse of the word 'community' has been particularly interesting. Diane Abbot especially allowing herself to be trapped by retrospective community disease, inventing 'communities' which hadn't existed for 20 years. Burning Western Union is not burning 'The Community'. Communities don't create mobs who burn the high street. Communities create order and consensus. What they mean by community is a row of identikit corporate outlets, defining what we respect and aspire to.

Property defines our culture, morals, and politics, the destruction of property is therefore by definition a political act, conscious or not. Crime is political. And law and order only fails when political trust has failed. When the social contract breaks down, laws and morals are meaningless. And they are only the product of our value-system, anyway. Last night was what No Such Thing as Society looks like.

There have been a number of interesting reports on the riots in my corner of South London. Transpontine reported on riots and rumours of riots in New Cross and Deptford and sums up some of the local coverage. Lia Gilardi reported from Brixton. Brockley Central, of course, have huge amounts of coverage from the area, including the faint echoes here in Brockley itself, and published an interesting anatomy of the riots in Lewisham. There was a carrotmob in Lewisham, to support local businesses, organised by Councillor Mike Harris (an occasional guest poster here), and Lifetime Barbers soldiered on. Francis also reports from Lewisham. Crosswhatfields from Deptford. Little Richardjohn reports from Peckham. Heather Wakefield analyses the causes in Lewisham as a borough. 853 has a series of reports on Woolwich, one of the worst hit London town centres but more or less ignored (along with Bromley, Walworth and to a lesser extent Catford) by the mainstream media: for example looking at  the Woolwich wall, and the aftermath and the media coverage.

Raven reported from Eltham and Malatesta pithily sum up the English Defence League rioters there:

Big lunch in the rain

This post is for Brockley Dave.

I had a wonderful Brockley weekend. In Saturday's glorious sunshine, I was on Hillyfields at the Brockley Max festival. Some galleries here. Thankfully, no Gilad Atzmon playing this year, and I didn't manage to lose any of the kids I was in charge of this year. Didn't realise that excellent new local business Hills and Parkes would have a food stall, so bought a Turkish picnic from the TFC in Lewisham. Brockley Max is now in its 11th year, and testament to the level of communal and creative energy down here.

Then Sunday was Big Lunch day. Lewisham is the world capital of big lunches, apparently. There were several in my area. In what estate agents are now calling "Crofton Park Village", Peter the butcher (a local hero) had a busy day supplying meat to the barbecues, and there were bouncy castles across Honor Oak Park.

Unfortunately, the weather was not so good. (I blame David Cameron for corrupting the word "big".) The street I was on we had a cake competition, rum punch, a pub quiz, a salsa lesson, a raffle and some gorgeous food. It all got a bit British by the end, sheltering under the gazebo, but wonderful nonetheless.

If you have a Big Lunch story you'd like to share, please do in the comment thread.

Here's Marlin Chops, who headlined at Brockley Dave's big lunch ("despite gazeebo galore the equipment and band was in danger from water getting in"), doing a not bad version of one of my favourite songs, all too apt given the weather.



And here's my ruminations and second thoughts about the big lunch and the big society.

FILM IN LEWISHAM IN THE AGE OF THE BIG SOCIETY: A Prophet in Crofton Park/Campaigns for a local cinema

First, the Brockley Jack Film Club is screening A Prophet on Monday night. Everything I have heard about it is really good and I'm sad to be missing it.

Sentenced to six years in jail for attacking police officers, Malik is an illiterate young man who can read people. A young Frenchman of North African descent, he inhabits the border between two different peoples – the living and the dead. In a brutal prison where he has to kill or be killed, he makes the obvious choice and ends up surprising everyone. From the first scenes, it’s apparent why this film won 29 major awards around the world. Tahar Rahim was named Actor of the Year by London Critics only because there was no category for Actor of the Decade.

You can watch the trailer here.

The Film Club, who you can also follow on Twitter, is run by local people in their own time, for no profit, and shows a film once a month at the Brockley Jack Theatre, which is also run by the local Southside Arts and can also be followed on Twitter. 

The Brockley Jack Film Club is just one of many fantastic self-managed film clubs in South East London, all both deserving of your support and between them offering a great selection of films. 

Like the large number of Big Lunches in this neck of the woods, this is a testament to the strong spirit of voluntary action and civic engagement around here, and a sense of community which I think is much stronger than in many parts of London, as well as to the odd mix of high cultural capital and low financial capital that characterises the area.

On the other hand, it is also a testament to the fact that Lewisham is the one of the only boroughs in London with no cinema. Our last one, in Catford, was eaten up by the very suspicious Brazilian-based evangelical church, UCKOG. Lewisham once had a thriving cinema culture, as documented beautifully here, but this is gone.

There is very little the local authority can do about this, short of opening a municipal cinema, so it is unlikely that the various campaigns for a cinema in the area - see here and here- will come to much, unless one of the cinema chains recognises the market potential.

I've been thinking, as Lewisham closes its libraries and replaces them with "community libraries" run by "social enterprises", about the Big Society. In lots of ways, the Film Club, the Big Lunch and possibly even a community library are wonderful examples of local civil society and its potential to bring people together and create something positive: something we own because we made it, something totally outside the state. But when this sort of thing does the job the state should be doing and actually does better (e.g. when it replaces a municipal library), that's surely not such a good thing.

Anyway, go and see A Prophet. And Slumdog Millionaire open air tomorrow, and Gerry at the Roxy next week, and Enter the Void at the Amersham the day after, and the Brockley Max festival at the end of the month, and start setting up a Big Lunch on your street if there isn't one already planned. (I'm pasting my 33 nearest ones below the fold; I'll be at no.2.) But also let's keep up the fight against the brutal cuts...

See also: Cinematic; BigSoc, faith and cohesion.

Related: Andrew Coates' film reviews; Transpontine on film.

Eyes Wide Open in Brockley

This is slightly late in the day, but the Brockley Jack Film Club is screening Eyes Wide Open on Monday night. Details are here.

Aaron a married orthodox Jew in his thirties gives an enigmatic young man (Ezri) a job in his Jerusalem butcher’s shop.   Working alongside Ezri unlocks long repressed desires and the two men embark on a sexual relationship.  Slowly the community begins to suspect what is happening, and so begins Aaron’s conflict between his faith, community and desire.  With a restrained pace and muted colours Tabakman’s film captures the  oppressive atmosphere of a closed society and the cost of breaking a great taboo.

“‘A gripping tale of a man fighting with himself, his community and religion’
Time Out
“Tabakman manages to break taboos without resorting to a heavy-handed attack on religion. His film is sparse, sombre and curiously compelling.” ****
Sunday Times
Watch the trailer
Haim Tabakman / Israel 2009 / 90 min / Hebrew & Yiddish with subtitles / Cert: 12

Queer haredim on screen in SE4! I am told this is one of the real gems of the current Israeli cinema, under-going something of a renaissance with films like Samuel Maoz's Lebanon, Eran Riklis' The Lemon Tree, Ari Folman's awesome Waltz With Bashir, Tatia Rosenthal's $9.99, Joseph Cedar's Beaufort, Eran Kolirin's The Band's Visit and Scandar Copti and Yaron Shani's Ajami.

Austerity bites

I've already included some of these links in previous posts, but want to highlight them a little more. They are about some of the first casualties of the new regime of austerity in my neck of the woods, the borough of Lewisham. The specifics are primarily of local interest, but the generalities are the same across the UK, and below the fold I have some comments that relate to the more general issues.

Transpontine sums up the cuts here, along with details of some of the campaigns against the cuts, in Lewisham and Southwark. Deptford Visions and Hangbitch report on the protests in Lewisham. Jim reports the obscene contempt our directly elected mayor, Sir Steve Bullock, has for the protestors. 853 reports from neighbouring Greenwich.

Although not the most important of the cuts, one closest to my heart is the possible closure of Crofton Park Library. The library, built in 1905 and designed by the LCC's Emanuel Vincent Harris with money from by philanthropist Andrew Carnegie, who donated it to the people in perpetuity, is one of the architectural gems of SE4, as well as a wonderful resource for families, older people, unemployed people, and school students. Brockley Central reports here.

There are "consultation" meetings over the summer (when many parents, a key user group, are away). There is a petition here. Locally based children's author Andy Cullen makes the case well:

My wife and I use Crofton Park library regularly with our children. Often we take books home; sometimes we just stay for an hour in the lovely children's library and explore and read together. This beautiful local library continues to be a valued resource for local residents and schools. After many decades of service it still has a vital role as a people's university catering to all ages and types.

 Other libraries are under threat too, including Blackheath. Five altogether might close, out of 12.

Before I move on to the general issues, two local links for my local readers: Why are South Londoners the best bloggers? and Get a free glass of wine at the final screening in the Brockley Jack Film Club season. (The film club website, by the way, also features nice pics of lovely local folk at Blythe Hill and Brockley Max.)

There are three more general points I want to make about these things.

More flotilla, more EDL, more Londonism, etc

Gaza and the flotilla
More links to add to the ones here: Engage, Kellie, Greens Engage, Roland, Workrep, Darren Red Star Commando, Nick Cohen, Jim Denham, Linda Grant, Natalie Rothschild, Brendan O'Neill, WAC-MAAN, Lorna Fitzsimons (replying to Mehdi Hasan replying to her), Sean Matgamna, Yacov Ben Efrat, .

Also worth noting, the IDF attack has stirred considerable outrage in Israel itself. This in turn has provoked a right-wing backlash. Octogenarian Uri Avnery was attacked by right-wingers. The right-wards drift in Israeli politics (mirroring the rise of various forms of populist and ultra-nationalist right-wing politics across Europe and in the US), it seems to me, is part of the context for the IDF actions.

The Workrep post linked to above is just one that points out the imbalance between the hysterical indignation around these deaths and the utter silence from the left about several other human rights and labour issues elsewhere. David Osler notes that there "is a certain irony in hearing the head of the Turkish government condemn acts of state terrorism and rail against breaches of international law" given the grimness of the situation in Turkish Kurdistan. Contentious Centrist also notes some situations that get a little less attention, here and here. As Mr Osler says, these comparisons and contrasts do not exonerate Israel's stupid and deadly policies, but they provide some welcome context.

With a few exceptions, such as World War 4 Report and LabourStart, reading the UK or US left and liberal press one would get the impression that Gaza is one of the few places in the world where hardship or brutal repression is taking place. What about the Niger Delta, where villagers experience oil spills equivalent to the Exxon Valdez disaster every single day? What about Gujerat, where Muslims live in fear, de facto denied their political rights by communalist violence? What about Colombia, where the army attacks striking workers with impunity?

Meanwhile, what is life like in Gaza itself? Ask the Palestinian Centre for Human Rights there. The Hamas Internal Security Services are closing NGOs for political reasons and harassing and detaining Fatah activists; the Hamas Ministry of the Interior is clamping down on freedom of association; Hamas-linked armed gangs terrorise a children's summer games camp with impunity... For those, like Mehdi Hasan, who accuse Israel's friends of "No proper acknowledgement of the heartbreaking humanitarian catastrophe inside Gaza", it'd be good to hear an acknowledgement of this sort of thing.

The English Defence League and the British National Party
Libcom on the EDL's "Jewish Division". The Commune on Who votes for the BNP. Pete Radcliffe of the AWL against Unite Against Fascism.

Meanwhile, I was thinking about the EDL when I read this post by Lady Poverty.

Paul Krugman, New York Times:

The mood on the right may be populist, but it’s a kind of populism that’s remarkably sympathetic to big corporations.

Fair enough -- but at least it's populist, which means taking the concerns of ordinary people as your starting point, and reconcilingthem to whatever political program you want. That is fundamentally different than making high-minded appeals to capital in the hope of electoral gain, only to engage the recalcitrant through the force of the state.

It's worth reminding ourselves that, if "neither capital nor the state," populism is an objective. This means we have to be better at populism than those elements that are succeeding at it now -- unless, of course, we like the picture that is emerging!

UK Politricks from a Brockley perspective: immigration, Londonism, Labourism, etc
Apparently, John Cruddas is Labour's most popular politician. This is ammunition for those (like me) who are very worried at Labour appearing to re-brand itself as the anti-immigration party, as Cruddas has a very good take on this issue. Meanwhile, the anti-immigrant dog whistle politics continue to be sustained by the lies of the Daily Mail and other media outlets, which published an utterly false briefing from the pernicious MigrationWatch.

I'm a fan of the Guardian's Dave Hill and his Metropolitan Lines dispatch. So I was very pleased to read this, tucked beneath a report on Ken Livingstone's campaign re-launch.

Bob From Brockley is a learned, witty and prolific political blogger. He devotes only some of his attention to specifically London matters, but he does it extremely well. Browse his categories on "Sarf London" in general, Lewisham in particular and Brockley in, ah, very particular, and you'll be stuck with having to agree with me.

Talking of which, I had a wonderful time at the Brockley Max Hacienda on the Hill on Saturday. Among other things, I had a chat with Transpontine in the sun (who I should tip my baseball cap to for some of the links above), and managed not to heckle Gilad Atzmon as he accompanied local songstress Sarah Gillespie.

Rudolf Rocker, Nietzsche and Yiddish London
As I've mentioned before, the German anarchist Rudolf Rocker is one of my personal heroes, so I was glad to see him getting an outing at Radical Archives, which featured his translation of Nietzsche into Yiddish while he was in London. In fact, I think, his Yiddish was not great, and it's more that he transliterated it into Hebrew characters, but that's not unimpressive in itself!  RA links to Russian-language blogger Laplandian, who I presume is the same person as one of my favourite Wikipedia editors of the same name. This post, on the song "Bella Ciao", requires no Russian language skills! More on that here. (The Gypsy klezmer artist involved, Miskha Ziganoff, also recorded this wonderful doyne, that's the Romanian/Bessarabian song form that is hidden in Gershwin's "Rhapsody in Blue".

Theme tunes
I don't think I've noted that Graeme and TNC have added their sounds to the theme tune meme. Go listen.

La Zona

[This post is a last minute plug for La Zona at the Brockley Jack Film Club tomorrow (Sunday) evening.]

The ward I live in is apparently statistically one of the safest in the the borough of Lewisham, which I think is still the statistically safest borough in inner London. However, it  doesn't feel like that sometimes. As part of an epidemic of gun and knife crime sweeping young London, we have had a shooting at Brockley Cross this week, a stabbing there the week before, a stabbing at Catford a few weeks ago, one on Brockley Rise and one on Brockley Road days before that. And a horrific knife attack at a party in Bellingham down the road a couple of days ago.

Given this, I sometimes feel a desire to retreat into gated safety. The Mexican film, La Zona, showing tomorrow at the Brockley Jack Film Club, set in a dystopian near-future, is about what happens when people withdraw behind security walls.

Watch the trailer. Read a 4* review from the Guardian here.

Note: the Film Club has sold out the last few screenings, but I'm told this one has plenty of tickets left, so get booking,.

Brockley goings on - what to think?

Thanks to an anonymous commenter for pointing out that Gilad Atzmon is playing in my manor, as noted at the excellent local blog, Brockley Central: Brockley's latest music venue aims for sell-out opening night.

The singer Jane Siberry is doing something lovely: a "salon tour", playing in people's sitting rooms across the world. (She also operates a "self-pricing" policy at her music downloads store.) She is performing a forthcoming gig in the front room of local singer-songwriter Sarah Gillespie.

Gilliespie has a great voice, and her songs are good. Sarah will support Siberry at the Brockley salon, along with our old friend Gilad Atzmon. Now, Atzmon is a very talented musician. Having seen him perform a fair few times some years back, I can tell you is a dynamic live presence.

But... Atzmon has truly horrible views. If you don't believe me, ask jazz critic David Adler, or Greens Engage, an anti-racist campaign within the Green Party, or veteran hardcore anti-Zionist Tony Greenstein, or leftie poet Michael Rosen. Here's Greens Engage summing him up:

Gilad Atzmon is a jazz saxophonist and racist campaigner who has repeated (http://bit.ly/4EuvyN) the old libel that “the Jews were responsible for the killing of Jesus”. He talks about a “Jewish lobby” and calls for Britain to “de-Zionise” itself. He calls for “de-judaisation”. He is frankly and comfortably antisemitic, and fights for anti-Jewish politics in the Palestine solidarity movement.

He is critical of those who compare the current Israel with Nazi Germany because he says Israel is a more radical evil: “Israel is nothing but evilness for the sake of evilness. It is wickedness with no comparison.”

Gilad Atzmon pushes classic anti-semitic Jewish conspiracy libel (http://bit.ly/4EuvyN):

“American Jewry makes any debate on whether the “Protocols of the elder of Zion” are an authentic document or rather a forgery irrelevant. American Jews (in fact Zionists) do control the world.”

I wonder if Jane Siberry knows?

I notice that Sarah Gillespie is at least tangentially part of this slimy milieu. She has written a piece for Palestine Thinktank blog, a site which among other things promotes Holocaust denial. The peice is about the BBC's supposed pro-Israel partiality. She writes:

Perhaps the most menacing aspect of this tragic debacle is Mark Thomson himself. A quick bit of research online ploughs up a surfeit of information proving the man is far from 'impartial'. His Jewish wife, the scholar Jane Blumfeild, hails from an American family that attends Yeshivas. Evidence suggests that she recently signed a petition campaigning against the anti-Israeli content of the Washington Post. In 2005 she traveled together with her husband to Jerusalem to engage in talks with Ariel Sharon in an attempt to build bridges between the BBC and Israel.

This is awful. Thomson's wife is actually called Jane Blumberg. The fact she comes from a family that "attends Yeshivas" (she went to a Jewish school) means nothing other than that she comes from a Jewish family; to say this in itself means she has some dual loyalty to Israel is an old antisemitic trope, akin to saying if your dad is Irish you must support the IRA. The "evidence suggests" is someone sharing her name, and hailing from somewhere entirely different, as far as I can make out, signing a petition. And I have googled in vain for a credible report that Blumburg accompanied Thompson on his trip to Israel - a trip, incidentally, where he met with Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas too.

Another piece at Palestine Thinktank concludes thus:

On 9th April 2007 Blair, a man who, among his many sins, incarcerates Muslims for months on end without charge, dubbed Iran a ‘cruel and callous’ nation. So complicit are we in the demonisation of an entire civilization, we knowingly consume this fantasy of cruelty rather than consider the real possibility of humanity.

I would like her to read that out to, for example, the family of Mohammad-Amin Valian, the twenty-year-old (Muslim) Iranian facing execution for throwing rocks.

By the way, minor point. The Brockley Central comment thread mentions he was once a Blockhead. Indeed, he still is, but he only joined in 1998, at the very end of Ian Dury's life.

Previous: all posts mainly about Atzmon; all posts mentioning Atzmon.

Local blog for local people 2

Max has been blogging incredibly prolifically late, and any Lewishamites among my readers should check it out: crazy golf in Hither Green, Mayor Bullock's school place idiocy, sentimental attachment to un-regenerated Lewisham, the possible imminent death of another great local pub, it's all there folks.

And a little newer in the localsphere, Green Crofton Park, whose main author's other blog is already on my roll. Topics include: fear of crime, ghost trains, Brockley as a transition town. Hat tip: Sue.

(Nice and ecumenical me: that's one Lib Dem and one Green. For balance, there is the People Before Profit party standing for Lewisham Mayor, and the Socialist Party campaigning in Telegraph Hill. Still, I'll be voting Labour this year.)

I already linked to this tirade against "tedious trade union turncoats" by Julie Burchill. I forgot, though, to mention her mention of the battle of Lewisham:

I suppose I haven’t really moved on, intellectually, from when I was 17 and broke ranks to run at the National Front, as they were marching through Lewisham, screaming: “You hate Jews, you will die!” and coming this close to being crushed by a police horse.

But then I have not changed sides, either, unlike a lot of other so-called left-wing people who certainly have — by becoming the kind of antisemitic fascist who has driven so many good socialists out of the UCU.*

Less politically, I have added the Brockley Jack Film Club to the blogroll. Here's why.

(Image: Malpas Road, c/o Nick Barron, from here.)
*Hyperlinks added. -B.

[Previously.]

Soul Power!

Talking of the southeastern corner of Greater Brockley, the Brockley Jack Film Club will be screening Soul Power on Monday 8 February:

While the eyes of the world were on the Rumble in the Jungle, the ears of the world were on Zaire ‘74, a legendary music festival to accompany the epic boxing match between Mohammed Ali and George Foreman. Using spectacular archive footage, this exhilarating documentary conveys all the colours, styles and sounds of a bygone age. People who lived through the 1970s won’t forget it; people who didn’t, won’t believe it. Roll up, roll up, come see the flamboyant costumes, extreme personalities, and melodramatic performances. And that’s just offstage. Onstage we see and hear music legends at the peak of their talent - including James Brown, B.B. King, Miriam Makeba, Manu Dibango, Bill Withers and many more - all giving the performances of their lives to a mammoth Zairian audience. Soul Power packs a bigger punch than Ali or Foreman. This was one of the definitive music events of the 20th Century. Luckily, someone filmed it.

Watch the trailer

If you've seen the wonderful When We Were Kings, Leon Gast's awesome documentary about the Rumble in the Jungle, some of the most compelling scenes are of the Zaire '74 concert, especially Miriam Makeba at her absolute best, so Soul Power should be a real treat.

Here is one of my personal gods, BB King, performing his best song, "The Thrill is Gone", at Zaire 74.



Now go and book your tickets!

A local blog for local people

As I have "Brockley" in the title of my blog, I feel duty bound to direct you all to the Guardian's "Let's all move to South East London" feature ("a pocket of niceness with decent boozers, villagey bits, parks everywhere and good neighbour­liness"). My friends at Brockley Central are boiling over, as their property prices go up. Having said that, living in the southeast corner of what I call Greater Brockley, I was glad to see Ewhurst Rd getting a good airing at Brockley Central.

Meanwhile, Transpontine welcomes some new local bloggers to the fold, and mourns some of our lost friends. (Also some local radical history: Lewisham Communists and Emile Zola in Norwood.)

Hunger/Piccadilly

The Brockley Jack Film Club, I am belatedly announcing, now has its own website. The next event is Steve McQueen's Hunger on the Troubles, plus Lewisham artist Dryden Goodwin in conversation. However, the real treat of the season will be the screening of the rare London silent movie from 1929, Piccadilly, with live accompaniment. The film moves between the low life and high life, the club scene of Soho and Limehouse's Chinatown, and features prostitution, drug addiction and gangsterism. It is based on some of the true stories told in this post at the wonderful Another Nickel: The Cafe de Paris, the Trial of Elvira Barney and the death of Snakehips Johnson.

The Five Word Meme

Jim has given me five words to say something about. Anti-fascism, Brockley, secularism, immigration and iconoclast

Anti-fascism
Anti-fascism is at the core of my political being. The first political activism I was involved in, as a 15 year old, was action against the NF. Almost everything else about my politics has changed, but that has remained constant. What has changed, of course, is fascism. The classic Nazi-style fascism of the NF is no longer much of an issue (although extreme right violence remains a threat in the US and UK, and classic neo-Nazis are a major issue in parts of Central and Eastern Europe). The two mutations of fascism that are most important to combat now are, first, the rising forms of Euro-nationalist populism that are predicated on a generalised anti-immigrant racism as well as anti-Muslim racism, a movement that has been growing electorally across Western Europe, and, second, the rising forms of Islamist fascism which have had such a destructive effect on so many parts of the world.

Brockley
Contrary to the “from” in my blogonym, I am not native to London SE4. I came here first to visit a friend when the Breakspears Arms was still open, and still reportedly the hub of drug-related crimes that gave the area a less than safe reputation. However, I immediately liked the laid-back, unpretentious, live-and-let-live bohemian feel. I moved here a year or so after that, and have lived in a few different parts of the manor. I think of Brockley as a microcosm of London itself in that it is made up of a series of micro-villages (Brockley Cross, the conservation area, Honor Oak, Crofton Park, and so on), each shading almost imperceptibly into the townships that surround it (Nunhead, St Johns, Ladywell, and so on). That is, I have a conception of a Greater Brockley, rather than the narrow Hillyfields-centric view of the posh types. But an inclusive confederalist Greater Brockley, in the tradition of the Austro-Marxists or Tito, rather than an irredentist Milosevic style Greater Brockley. Good things in Greater Brockley: the wealth of parks and green spaces, the Brockley leyline (ask Transpontine), the standing stones, the paint shop, the Babur, the open studio day every summer...

Secularism
I am very much a secularist, in that I believe in a public sphere in which no one faith has privileged access, in which all faiths and none are tolerated. The cleresy, in its various forms, has been the primary enemy of freedom in most of the eras of history, because fundamental to freedom in general is the freedom to imagine, to think and above all to doubt, secular values I hold dear. At the same time, I do not have time for the fossilised nineteenth century forms of secularism which have been so fashionable again of late as a backlash against the apparent halt of our society’s modern secular drift, forms of secularism particularly popular amongst the bloggers to whom I am in most ways the closest. This sort of secularism – secularism as anti-religion – misses, it seems to me, what faith has to offer our world. This offering is exemplified by language of the King James Bible which permeates the speeches of Martin Luther King and the writings of WEB Du Bois. It is exemplified by the music of Mehdi Hassan and Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan and Sam Cooke. It is exemplified in the sanctuary movement in the US and by the Strangers into Citizens and Living Wage movements in the UK. I could go on... Or maybe, as Will puts it, I’m soft on god.

Immigration
I come from immigrant stock. On my father’s side, Irish labour migrants to the UK (according to my non-Irish grandmother, I have her mother-in-law’s blue Irish eyes). On my mother’s side, Jewish immigrants to the US, occupying that blurry line between “economic migrant” and “refugee” that makes the two terms unstable, as “economic migrant” does not do justice to the need to escape an unbearable life, while “refugee” has not generally been recognised as including the likes of them by the states who shape its meaning. This may be partly why I am so passionately part of the pro-immigration lobby, but then all humans are ultimately of migrant stock and I think to be truly a humanist is to be pro-immigration.

Iconoclast
I can’t remember if it was in an interview, or told to me by a friend who used to hang out in the Sniffing Glue/Bromley Contingent scene, but apparently when Elvis died in 1977, Danny Baker got very upset at his fellow punks’ wilful delight in this tragedy. I think I have something of Danny Baker’s (probably unhealthy) aversion to iconoclasm. As well as being soft on god, I am soft on places of worship and soft on those considered (by me) to be “great”, like Elvis, or BB King, say, or Hank Williams.


I didn’t mean to write as much as that. Don’t feel you have to if you want to play this game. The rules (at least as Jim and Stroppy played) is that you just ask in the comments below, and I’ll give you five words of your own. If you’re not a blogger, feel free to ask and put your paras in the comments. If you’re one of my regular blog acquaintances, I’ve already thought up some of your words.

Bloggertry

First, local news for local people. Sue Luxton's Blog Bits at the Daily Maybe. An extract:

Lewisham seems to have a very healthy online community - how come?

It's true, that Lewisham (with a few Greenwich interlopers such as 853.com and Tory Troll) has a pretty lively blogosphere. Even Time Out acknowledged this recently and they normally ignore south of the river entirely, unless they want to do smthg on gangs or a feature on where the next Dalston/Shoreditch is.

Maybe it is some kind of gritty south-east London determination in the face of snide remarks from north Londoners and sectors of the media that spurs us on to prove there's more to south-east London than not having many tube lines!

Back in March 2006, when I started Green Ladywell, the number of local bloggers was fairly small, with Transpontine, (former) Labour councillor Andrew Brown, Bob from Brockley, Lib Dem councillor Andrew Milton and the Man from Catford being the stalwarts of the (male-dominated) blogosphere. Things definitely took off when Brockley Central joined the foray in February 2007 and it seemed to develop a huge online community around it within a few weeks. A few other women bloggers such as Deptford Dame and Brockley Kate (part of the Brockley Central team) came along, although women are still notably in the minority amongst bloggers.

The other thing that was good were the occasional Lewisham bloggers meet ups (initiated by Andrew Brown) and then the Brockley Central drinks, which were a great opportunity to put faces and names to previously anonymous bloggers.

Second, I see from David Semple that the polling for the Total Politics top blogs have opened. You can vote by emailing toptenblogs@totalpolitics.com with your top ten: rules can be found here. Dave comes close to endorsing me.

Third, coming soon, a paragraph on each of the following: Anti-fascism, Brockley, secularism, immigration and iconoclast

Cous-cous in Brockley

The Brockley Jack Film Club is screening Couscous on Monday night.

Monday 15 June 2009 at 7.30PM

COUSCOUS (La graine et le mulet)
Abdel Kechiche / France 2008 / 147 min / French with English subtitles / cert: 15

Set in the North African community of Sète on the Mediterranean Sea, Couscous follows the trials and tribulations of Slimane, a sixty-something dock worker who decides to pursue his lifelong ambition of opening a couscous restaurant when he is laid off by his shipyard employer.

However, in order to make his dream a reality, Slimane will have to call in favours from an eclectic extended family, which include his children, an ex-wife, a mistress and her daughter. With tempers simmering, the warring family must unite to overcome adversity and ultimately risk everything in order to make the Slimane's project a success.

“Remarkable and thought-provoking” Time Out

Internet Movie Database link

Booking Information
Ticket prices £6 non-members, £3 members
Box office: 020 8699 6685

(French title: La graine et le mulet, US title: The Secret of the Grain.)


Bonus links: Claudia Roden, one of my personal goddesses, with some tips on Middle Eastern cooking; Ha'aretz peice on Morroccan Jewish cooking in Israel; a highly inauthentic but tasty-looking couscous and red mullet recipe.