Iron Fists and Velvet Gloves

This post was inspired by concern expressed by a friend about why a left-wing women’s rights group should focus on the effects on women and children of the Israeli genocide in Gaza, when so many other horrors go uncommented upon, including the alleged genocide of the Uyghur people by the Chinese government. 

That made me think about the various strands of contemporary anti-Islamic feeling which have been fuelled by real and imagined Muslim extremism, and in the way of these mad things, fuel a counter extremism.

Islamic extremism manifests as a violent misogyny which is certainly not confined to Muslims. It can also manifest as acts of extreme violence which are also not confined to Muslims, and which can be aimed at other Muslims.

The former raises real and faux concerns over its impact on women, for example, western outrage over women's rights in Iran. If Iran was as much a US ally as Saudi Arabia, for example, any words spoken about the effects of fundamentalist Islam on women there would be far more measured in tone. 

Incidents of the latter justified the USA's so-called “War on Terror” with its decades of military overkill which, like all modern warfare waged or led by the US, primarily kills and maims non-combatants, the majority of whom are women and children, the elderly, and the infirm.

There is no doubt that Muslim extremism was deliberately fomented by the US and its allies to combat communist/socialist and national liberation movements inside the Muslim majority Soviet republics and autonomous regions, and in countries adjacent to the USSR, and/or strategic to the US and key NATO countries.

At that stage, the US and its allies did not see China as being as much of a threat as the USSR, possibly stemming from the same sort of deep-seated prejudice that JD Vance demonstrated when he sneeringly referred to "Chinese peasants”.

Post WW2, Iran had been moving towards becoming a secular, westernised democracy with massive wealth in its oil reserves. When Mossadegh nationalised the oil industry that was controlled by US, UK and Dutch oil companies, the CIA and MI6 staged a coup and installed the Shah – a western-approved dictator who killed, imprisoned or drove into exile the left and intelligentsia. 

When Ayatollah Khomeini returned to Iran in 1979 as an almost messianic figure, the scene was set for the rise of a fundamentalist Islamic theocracy whose anti-US stance soon made the country one of the USA's main enemies. 

Fourteen years earlier in Indonesia, the US had helped stage a military coup to overthrow President Sukarno who had maintained power via a balance between the communists, political Islam, and the military. The murder of a number of army generals was presented by the military as a communist coup. The PKI, the largest per capita communist party in the world at the time, stringently denied any involvement but were ignored by the national and international media. 

The CIA was in possession of information which supported the PKI's denial and they knew the confessions made by communists were fabricated but chose to back General Suharto who was later described as one of the most corrupt leaders in modern history, having embezzled $30bn from his country during throughout his 31 year rule.

The army and Islamists began a purge of communists, other left-wingers, women's rights activists, ethnic Chinese and Javanese, and atheists. The atrocities left at least 1 million people dead with some estimates as high as 3 million. The worst massacres were in Java and Bali where the PKI was very strong.

The overthrow of Sukarno and the slaughter also impacted the emergent Non-Aligned Movement which the US saw as a major threat to its Neo-colonialist expansion. 

As Khomeini was preparing to return to Iran in triumph, having convinced the US that he was not anti-American, the CIA, via a covert programme named Operation Cyclone, and MI6 via separate covert operations, were arming the rebel groups that wanted to overthrow secular, socialist government in Afghanistan. 

Both countries sold the rebel forces to gullible people in the west as “resistance fighters”, and demonised the USSR's invasion and installation of a pro-Soviet government. (1)

The US, aided by the UK, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, poured billions of dollars into the war. After the Soviets withdrew in1988, the US continued to back the rebels until the fall of the Democratic Republic of Afghanistan in 1992, the same year as the formal dissolution of the USSR and the Warsaw Pact.

Having helped to overthrow a secular government, the US and its allies proceeded to wreck the country and eventually abandoned it and its people to the insanely misogynistic theocratic regime they had created.  

The cynicism and hypocrisy go off the charts when the west clutches its pearls over the erosion of women’s rights in Iran and Afghanistan. Our masters don't give a toss about Muslim women but they want to continue to pull the ideological wool over liberals’ eyes and prepare them for collusion with yet another war.

The dissolution of the USSR ushered in an era of obscene plunder of state-owned assets, and massive social disruption and hardship as Russia was reconfigured into a neo-liberal, US-NATO ally.

Instead of NATO disbanding as had happened with the Warsaw Pact (which was formed after and in reaction to NATO) it immediately began expanding eastwards, and the outcomes of that are seen today in the war in Ukraine.

When Putin – the arch nationalist – stopped the west’s corporate plunder, he and Russia became the arch enemy once again, and the funding and fomenting of discontent within Muslim majority states inside the Russian Federation recommenced.

China was seen initially through racist eyes as merely a source of cheap labour to make the stuff for the wave of hyper-commodification that neoliberal capitalism was creating, and which not only made vast profits for the elite but also bought off all those in the west who were in receipt of the little that trickled down from the top. 

Being racist (and also rather stupid in all things other than making virtual money), the NL architects underestimated the Chinese. They failed to recognise that the CCP was using them, and they saw too late that China would become their biggest threat – not just militarily, but technologically and ideologically. 

The US and its allies have attempted to deploy their trusty weapon, the fomenting of Islamic extremism which in China means among the Uyghurs – a Turkic speaking people who are mostly Muslim and are one of the 55 distinct ethnic minority groups acknowledged by the Chinese state. (2)

The internet is full of stories of an effective genocide against the Uyghur via forced sterilisation and forced marriage, torture, brainwashing and forced labour in concentration camps but it’s always wise to dig beneath the surface to the sources of those horror stories.  Any sources that are conservative think tanks which act as fronts for western propaganda, and/or are heavily indebted to US corporate interests via funding should be treated with a healthy amount of scepticism. (3) 

The Chinese government claims it is combatting forms of Islamist extremism fomented by its enemies, a claim that could well be true, given US Inc's form in other countries.

I don’t doubt the Chinese government is capable of behaving repressively in defence of what it sees as its national interests, but everything in modern China points more to the use of the velvet glove of such things as national pride, full employment, cheap food and housing, free education and health care, than it does to the iron fist that is still on display in for example, the country's large number of capital offences and use of execution. (4)

The bottom line of this is, all countries use propaganda to enhance their national image by overstating positives and understating negatives, none more so than the USA. 

While projecting the image of global peacekeeper, the USA acts like a global thug. It is notorious for interfering in the internal affairs of other countries; it leads the world in the number of unprovoked attacks on other countries, and in the numbers of non-combatants that its direct and proxy wars kill and maim. 

It engages in domestic and international acts which, were they to be carried out by Russia or China, would be decried as state terrorism, such as the kidnap and illegal detention of foreign nationals and the use of torture. "Rendition" and "enhanced interrogation" compete with "collateral damage" in the most obscene euphemism stakes. 

Mass incarceration has long been a running sore on the face of the USA but is now being eclipsed by the human rights abuses inherent in the deportation without due process of presumed "illegal aliens" to hellish prisons in El Salvador. 

When it comes to US Inc it is always best to view all its claims of its own righteousness and its enemies' nefariousness with a healthy level of scepticism.

Notes:

1) Wikipedia entries about the Afghan-Soviet war repeat a lot contemporary western propaganda claims about Red Army actions. There is no doubt it was a brutal war and as in all wars, many innocent people died, and no doubt women were raped but the Wikipedia entries are so one-sided as to be risible to anyone with any knowledge of the Cold War and the Afghan war.

(2) Modern Uyghurs are thought to be descendants of a number of different peoples, including the ancient Mongolian Uyghurs who migrated into the Tarim Basin after the fall of the Uyghur Khaganate, eastern Iranians and other Indo-European peoples who had inhabited the Tarim Basin before the arrival of Turkic Uyghurs.

 

(3) As an example, one of the most prominent sources of data about these alleged abuses is Human Rights Watch, a US-based NGO which was originally formed as Helsinki Watch to monitor the USSR’s adherence to the Helsinki agreement. A number of other watch groups merged with HRW in 1988. The organisation has been criticised for its failure to adequately challenge human rights abuses by the US and its allies and almost always reaching conclusions that are consistent with US and wider western foreign policy positions and interests.

(4) China executes more people than any other country but per capita its execution rate is comparable to Singapore and Vietnam, and lower than Saudi Arabia, Iraq and Iran. It is also moving towards a more liberal approach. The Chinese government has admitted to utilising organs from executed prisoners but is moving to stop the practice. Claims by Falun Gong that China harvested organs without consent from death row prisoners and from FG members for commercial organ trafficking have not stood up to scrutiny by independent investigators including the Laogai Research Foundation and Australian Refugee Review Tribunal. They concluded that the stories were fabricated although if you read Wikipedia entries on the Falun Gong claims you could be forgiven for not knowing that. 

 

 

What is a Woman?

Oh yes, it is that issue again. This was inspired by a Facebook post by a woman whose feminist scholarship I admire who was expressing her concerns about the recent UK supreme court judgement on what constitutes a woman for the purposes of the UK Equality Act (2010).

It’s a pretty narrow and forensic judgement about the meaning of "woman" as stated in an omnibus law, which is being hailed by the various women’s rights groups as a huge victory, and by trans rights groups as the latest salvo in a fascistic, Trumpist style attack on pretty much everyone who isn’t right, white and heterosexual.

The trans rights advocates and allies seldom address the fact that gender identity theory and praxis was embraced initially by global corporations, by centre-right, corporate-enabling governments all over the west, by state organisations and enterprises, NGOs, Trade Unions, the media…. 

It was the Tories in the UK who threw the “dead cat” of Gender Recognition Act reform into the political arena. Gender identity was wholeheartedly supported by the US Democrats whose liberal wing is only left in the context of the right-wing mess that is US electoral politics. While Biden was enabling Israel’s genocide in Gaza, his administration wholly embraced GI.

In unstable, unnerving conditions many socially conservative people will cleave to the known and to leaders who appear to be strong. 

The same conditions may encourage socially transgressive people to push boundaries beyond sustainable limits, i.e. to the point where the moderating influence of the centre on both extremes is weakened and popular opinion starts to slide towards the conservative pole.

Anyone who knows anything about the politics of diversion and division could see how much utility this could have for the right. It was obvious, or it should have been, that the way the trans rights movement developed would be weaponised by the far right and by religious and secular ultra conservatives. It was never a case of if, but when and in what ways. 

This isn’t a criticism of the cause, but it is a criticism of the air-headed, myopic strategies deployed by some trans-activists. That air-headedness may have been inevitable when you consider how individualistic and individualising an ideology it is, and how fragmented it quickly became as a political movement – made more so by how rapidly the trans umbrella grew to provide cover for a mass of gender identities, not to mention how reliant it was and is on media that can easily be manipulated by malign or vexatious agents.

For me, the clearest warning signal about the direction it was likely to take came in 2015 when an influential INCEL posted a video on his You Tube channel calling on his supporters to claim to be “transgender lesbians” online to mess with feminists and the left.

Trans rights also had and has utility for those liberals and leftists who’ve done nicely out of neo-liberal capitalism’s hyper-commodification and who have a place in its well remunerated, high status buffer class.  

It's a cause which:

- Supports a tiny minority whose demands pose no threat to the economic status quo and which even contain some market opportunities. 

- Doesn’t put your job at risk because your bosses support it also. 

- Assuages guilt about relative privilege and the abandonment or continued disregard of the great unifying theories and praxis centred around class, race and sex.

- Lets you believe you are on the right side of history without having to actually confront the social and natural chaos that’s looming because of the very socio-economic system from which you are benefiting. 

- Allows you to forget for a time, the child slaves in the Congo, Israel’s genocide in Gaza, the proxy war in Ukraine, the heating up of the new Cold War against China, the accelerating and mutually reinforcing global issues of climate change, species extinctions/habitat loss, chemical and particulate pollution.

- Allows you to self-soothe, secure in the knowledge that you're fighting the good fight on at least one narrow front. 

What worries me is the GI issue being stretched beyond breaking point between, a) the notion that being a woman is an essentially subjective, empirically unprovable state of mind, and/or a costume drawn from stereotypes that feminists fought to break; and, b) the narrowly deterministic notion that “a woman is an adult human being with no Y chromosome”.

I get worried when people haul intersex issues into the debate around trans rights with no regard for the fact that those with any form of DSD are a hugely diverse population many of whom don’t want to be used as political pawns. 

I get worried when those who use intersex issues as political pawns have no regard for the very real possibility that DSDs (in number, type and severity) are increasing because of the chemical soup we’re being forced to live in by the same corporate and state drivers that have supported the GI orthodoxy.

I get worried when the World Health Organisation publishes information about intersex issues and makes the claim that there’s such a thing as a “Y monosomy”, and that ludicrous claim is repeated by influential people in defence of GI rights. 

I get worried when no one asks whether there is a political-commercial imperative behind the current emphasis on the idea of “sex being on a spectrum”, and whether this process of normalising these deviations from the reproductive norm into something natural and therefore palatable is because, like the global epidemic of obesity, there is something that needs to be hidden. Something like the vast number of endocrine disrupting, DNA damaging chemicals in the environment, perhaps. (1) 

I get worried when I see trans activists demanding the right to medically transition with apparently no regard for the implications of becoming one of the most medically surveilled and pharmacologically dependent groups on a politically and ecologically unstable planet – let alone considering the hellish nightmare of the interactions of pharmaceuticals with the mass of chemicals we cannot avoid ingesting, inhaling, absorbing.

All this and much more is why I dislike and distrust both extremes of this argument. It has yet again diverted the time and political energies of those best placed to demand and get positive change in respect of the constellation of horrors facing us. 

In the time it has taken me to type this  … how many innocents have died or been maimed and/or traumatised?  

As to looking back on this in five years, as one commenter on the post said she planned to do, the planet is in a state of accelerating social and natural disequilibrium; it may already be at the point where equilibrium cannot be restored, in which case all bets are off because chaos will ensue. 

That’s what worries me most.

(1) When researchers were looking for an endocrine disrupting chemical that might be implicated in the global increase in precocious puberty, they tested 10k before finding a likely culprit… a cheap synthetic scent. 10k sounds a lot but that’s a tiny percentage of the total released into the environment in various ways over the last half century. Endocrine disrupting, DNA damaging, carcinogenic chemicals that we cannot avoid; the adverse effects of any given one on any given organism at any given stage of its development is hard enough to determine; their interactions, as I’ve said repeatedly, are a nightmarish unknown.

Going Around in Circles

A post inspired by yet another person blaming the entire Left for what they see as the transgender debacle.

People need to stop doing the Right’s job for it by using gender issues as a stick to beat the entire Left with. Americans need to realise that the Left elsewhere in the world is a very different thing from the modern, liberal wing of an essentially Right-wing party of empire.  

In very broad (and simplistic) terms, Neo-liberal capitalism’s (NLC) ideologues and commentariat attacked Red Left theory and praxis. The resulting dominance of NLC ideology had the effect of pulling the political fulcrum point to the right, making centrism appear to be “leftist”.

The left of NLC,  the White Left, abandoned the old Red Left’s class-based theory and praxis.

Many of the White Left did so nicely out of NLC’s hyper-commodification and its creation of a well-remunerated “buffer class”, they either didn’t notice, or chose to ignore the fact that identity politics in general and the transgender orthodoxy in particular, are essentially individualistic and individualising. 

As such they pose/d no threat to NLC, and in fact they created a load of ideological and market opportunities.  

As NLC economic policies pushed a lot of the western working class into forms and degrees of economic and social “precarity” that they’d never experienced, but with which their ancestors were well acquainted, some of them were easily persuaded by the Right into blaming it all on some designated “other”, and to cleave to apparently “powerful” leaders, etc etc.  

While the majority of people did not drift to the Far Right, in the absence of any sort of unifying political-economic theory and accompanying forms of mass organisation on the broad Left, they remained easily diverted and divided.

The utility to the Right-wing of identity-focussed politics and praxis in general, and the transgender orthodoxy in particular, lies in its capacity to both divert and to divide. 

For the Left-liberals who remain/ed attached to the idea of some sort of opposition to capitalism or to the “establishment”, IP provided a theoretical focus and a rallying point – with a load of slogans, tropes, mantras and memes to put in place of solid theory and action. 

It made them feel that they were doing something tangible even though, as I have said elsewhere, it’s like a bunch of people on a train with a maniac at the controls driving it towards a cliff, arguing about who gets to sit in first class. 

It’s all complicated by some, on what we used to call the Ultra-Left, having gone full circle to meet up with the Far Right. 

Identity politics, and its most divisive manifestation, transgenderism, was possibly not created by the Right other than in the sense of someone rolling an ideological snowball down a steep mountainside, but the Right has been quick to take full advantage of the ensuing social, political avalanche, which now puts a mass of wider social advances at risk of being swept away.

If we can’t agree on anything at least let’s agree on the utility to those who hold the reins of power, of the old maxim, “divide and rule”. Just as with older forms of left sectarianism, splits and divisions among any oppressed sector only ever benefit the powerful.

Distract, deflect, divide and demonise

This post was prompted by the current witch hunt being conducted by the right against a Green Party list MP in New Zealand. 

All this at a time when the right's use of covert domination has never been more apparent, but nor has its politics of overt domination.

The men in suits who run the world largely prefer the use of the ideological cosh and chains, but they know they have to periodically remind the actual and the immanently oppressed of the real cosh and chains, the production of which also has the benefit of yielding immense profits, largely out of the public purse. "Sanction the scroungers; protect the taxpayer" the ranting right wails as the state pours $billions of taxes into the pockets of the corporate military-industrial complex.

The reminders take various forms. There are the forever and the periodic wars; the raining of bombs on refugees living in tents; the snatching of families off the street to be imprisoned and deported; the blatant theft of lands and homes; the assassination of leaders and/or the destruction of any and all collectives which pose a threat ... 

How the hell have we ended up in a world teetering on the edge of several coalescing, mutually escalating social and natural disasters? 

What has any of this to do with a Green Party list MP in New Zealand who has become the target of a right-wing dirty politics campaign which, with typical disregard for logic let alone ethics, howls about “child safety” while using photos of a child in its unhinged attack on the child’s parent?

What part has the essentially individualistic and individualising politics of identity played in getting us here?

I’ve said all this before for many years but it bears repeating.

With the rise of Neo-liberalism, the political fulcrum point was shifted rightwards and what was once centrist was framed as left-wing. We will call this the white left which I’ve described elsewhere as the “politically and theoretically exsanguinated left”. 

The old red left, with its emphases on the class struggle, on internationalism and peace, on women's and national liberation and civil liberties was easily routed in the west during the initial Neo-liberal offensive. 

This was due in no small part to the effects of left sectarianism (always a gift to the right and often purposefully fomented by it), and the global power shift created by the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact. 

While some people benefitted considerably from the neo-liberal surge, in the form of increased social mobility and in greater employment opportunities and levels of remuneration and status, the mass saw the small windows of opportunity that had opened up after WW2 slammed shut.

Key working-class and liberation collectives were demonised or dismantled, with many of their hard-won advances eradicated. 

As Marxist political and social theory was undermined, distorted or discredited, and academia shifted rightward and back towards an emphasis on preparation for the forms of labour demanded by the new corporate capitalism, those movements lost much of their theoretical foundation.

At the same time as the great combinatory movements and the socio-economic theories that informed them were under attack, new movements and theories emerged in the form of the politics of interest and latterly of identity.

These were apparently progressive and liberatory but in reality were a distraction from the bigger picture, a side show to the main event which rapidly moved out of rehearsal into a full-scale production.

The politics of individual or small group interests or identity, fills several important functions for the men in suits.

It gives the appearance of a political-social opposition which is essential to the maintenance of the myth of capitalist democracy. 

Some of those groups’ demands can be accepted or even promoted, providing a diversion in the form of the appearance of liberality.

The movements can be divided into ever smaller and specifically focussed groups which can be made to compete with, or even to turn on and fight each other which allows the power-holders to deflect attention away from their increasingly exploitative and oppressive actions.

And they can be demonised once it suits the suits to shift into overt forms of authoritarianism, and/or to slip the leash on the attack dogs of the far right, the threat of which was obscured both by the fulcrum shift and by the white left’s acceptance of (even obsession with) individualism and identity.

The red left's job is, as always, to strip off the layers of appearance, expose the essence of what is an ineluctably exploitative and oppressive system, and form powerful combinations in order to change it – foundationally.

Given the might and the viciousness of those who hold the real reins of economic, political and martial power, that was always the hardest thing; it is also the most important thing given the consequences for the entire planet of leaving a quintessentially unsustainable, and socially and ecologically destructive system intact.

 

 

 

 

On Propaganda

I just had a conversation on Facebook in which some people were trotting out Israeli propaganda in its most undiluted – almost self-parodying form – in which the harm done to Israelis is amplified and magnified, whilst the harm done to Palestinians and others is denied, or minimised, or justified as necessary and proportionate.

In fact, such is the breadth of the Israelis' denial of harm, where it is acknowledged at all it is excused as unavoidable collateral damage caused by the actions of the enemy “other”. 

By means of the argument that by having forced "the world's most moral army" to be killers of tens of thousands of non-combatants, the enemy has inflicted psychological harm on them, the slaughter is then added to the harm done to Israelis. 

In both the style of warfare it wages, and in the type of propagandising about it, Israel follows the US.

I was accused by one of the people in the conversation of claiming that "Muslim extremism" is “Israel’s fault”, which actually occurs because Islam is an "expansionist, supremacist, colonising, settler religion". As proof of that she claims Islamic terrorists have committed 40,000 acts of terror across the globe in the last decade alone, and cites several especially horrible examples.

This is classic Israeli spin. Israel's critics describe it as an "expansionist, supremacist, colonising, settler state" so the Israeli spin doctors turn that back on Islam which, like Christianity still is, was the religion of empires. 

Only an ideologue or an idiot would claim that Israel alone has caused terrorism committed by people who are Muslim or in the name of Islam, although the right in Israel has played a major role in its genesis and growth. 

The Israeli state itself was rooted in terror; it always was and still is an “expansionist supremacist colonising settler” state that has cynically weaponised the holocaust, and promoted anti-Arab racism and wider anti-Muslim feeling to ensure enough support for its expansionist, supremacist, colonising tactics. 

Leaving aside the antisemitism implicit in the idea that it is Jews wagging the US or wider West’s tail, the originator and main beneficiary of Islamic terrorism is the USA which has the biggest stake in its creation and perpetuation. 

It's very hard to justify a global, on-going "War on Terror", with all the pouring of $trillions into the military-industrial complex, without the public seeing an obvious and terrifying terrorist enemy.

Trump’s ritual self-anointment (dick-waving) as US president was to bomb Somalia, one of the least developed countries in the world, allegedly in pursuit of Islamic State. 

People surely cannot ignore the global manoeuvres of US Inc which have contributed to the genesis of Islamic militancy.

Surely all these pro-Israelis admit how odd it was for an estimated 6000 Hamas fighters inside a geographically tiny and heavily surveilled region to have been able to plan and train for an attack on a vastly more powerful neighbour without that neighbour’s much-vaunted military and civilian intelligence apparatus knowing a thing about it.  

We’re expected to believe that an intelligence apparatus which later could plan what, if it was carried out by an Islamic country or group would be called a "terror attack", on a mass of individual Hezbollah operatives living in a sovereign state, did not know an attack involving upwards of 6000 fighters was being planned by Hamas in an open-air prison? 

Israel is governed by a far right coalition which is being held to ransom by a gang of fascists who’d happily carry out their own “final solution” against Palestinians, and some of them are lunatic enough to use the nuclear weapons they’re not supposed to have on the basis that, “if we can’t have it, no one will”.

Exposing the lies that are pumped out to obscure the truth, is not being antisemitic; in fact, it’s antisemitic to not call the liars and warmongers to account because, however powerful the Zionists think they are, it’s power by proxy. 

If it is expedient to do so, the real power holders will pull the military aid plug and do deals with compliant Arab regimes because this is all about US Inc and control of trade routes, oil, rare minerals and fresh water. 

You could cite endless examples – historical and contemporaneous – of acts of group and individual terror committed by people motivated by some form of religious bigotry / zealotry, and keep ignoring the wider context of the extent to which some states have been and are complicit in those acts of individual/group terror whilst using them as justification for committing vastly greater acts of state terror.

Israel’s primary ally and role model terror-bombed Japanese and German cities at the end of WW2, including using nuclear weapons against civilian targets, and it planned to use them against the USSR. 

It then bombed North Korea into oblivion in a proxy war against the USSR and China, killing upwards of 20% of the total population.

To protect western oil interests, the US toppled a secular government in Iran, installed a brutal tyrant whose repression of the left and intelligentsia opened the door to the current Islamic theocracy which the US now wants to wage on.

It blanket bombed Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos, poisoning the land and water with carcinogenic  and DNA damaging chemical defoliants. It used the same tired old excuse that they were not to blame for the mass civilian casualties because the “enemy” hid among them. 

It fomented Islamic extremism in Indonesia to topple the leader of the emergent Non-Aligned Movement, and to destroy the world’s largest per capita communist party, anywhere up to a million of whom were killed.

It armed anti-government rebels in Afghanistan and convinced a load of western liberals that the muhjaheddin were "freedom fighters" against the “Soviet-backed” socialist government. 

Now it lies about who armed the mujahheddin and thus provoked Soviet intervention, and blames it on the new target of its war-mongering, Islamic terror group, Al Qaeda.

It told blatant lies (remember the Kuwaiti babies hauled out of incubators?) to swing public opinion behind its appalling acts of state terror in Iraq. 

After using the twin towers attacks (carried out by nationals of its ally, Saudi Arabia) as the justification to intensify the “War on Terror”,  it invaded and heavily bombed Afghanistan before stealing Afghani state assets and abandoning the place to the Taliban, of which it now stands in pious judgement.

In alliance with NATO it destroyed Africa's richest nation, Libya. Trump’s self-anointment as US president was to bomb Somalia, one of the poorest countries in the world, under the guise of attacking Islamic State.

And then there are US Inc's maladventures across Central and South America, Europe , the Caribbean …. and on and on and on…. 

The defining characteristic of US Inc, of which Israel is a key part, is that in pursuit of the right to carry on exploiting, they lie, and they lie, and they lie ....

With “friends” like that, Israelis should not be surprised when they make enemies of pretty much everyone else and most people do not believe a word they say.

Fragile Masculinity Syndrome

I recently had an altercation on a local community Facebook page with a person who, contrary to FB rules, uses a pseudonym. He posted something which sought to lay the blame for the smelly and sometimes toxic algal blooms that are now a feature of the region’s rivers in summer, on “council contractors” digging holes. The aim of these “council engineered ponds”, according to him, is so the smell and toxins can then be blamed on farmers to justify further environmental regulation.

I posted a mildly worded reply pointing out that responsibility for issuing licenses to commercial companies to extract gravel lies with the regional authority, Environment Canterbury. I also said that reduced river flows, and the increased use of nitrate and phosphate fertilisers combined with heavy irrigation are factors in the now yearly algal blooms.

Articulate women, especially older women, are anathema to men who suffer from fragile masculinity syndrome (FMS). Another man can call them a dick, thick as shit, a clown, etc but let a woman sound smarter than them, and their emotional fuses start to blow. 

I was soon to find out that this particular FMS sufferer is a misogynist of the first water; a wanna-be patriarch who believes that men should rule, and women should submit; that a woman’s place is serving her husband and looking after kids, and as for old women, they should do the world of men a favour, acknowledge their uselessness, and die.

He began the process of consigning me to the ranks of what eventually became a cabal of screeching-feminist-hippy-climate-change-doomsday-cultist-leftie-vaccine-promoting-authoritarians who, in his view are intent upon destroying the NZ economy. 

That combination of extreme ignorance and arrogance is like a red rag to an earnest pedagog like me, so I tried to explain more about why ECAN licenses gravel extraction, and the part played in the blooms by increased use of artificial fertilisers and heavy irrigation.

My explanations about reducing riverbed elevation to maintain capacity between the stopbanks and thereby reduce flood risk, were clearly not comprehensible to someone so deeply mired in confirmation bias. He was clearly ignorant, even of what stopbanks are, why they were created in the first place and are carefully maintained. 

A tongue in cheek reply advising him to calm his amygdala and engage his frontal lobes was a step too far for his FMS, and he fixed me firmly in his misogynistic sights. 

(Spelling and grammar original; my emphasis in bold.)

HOW is THIS thing going to stop any flooding if there is a few banks ACROSS the river bed???if you think what you wrote made you sound smart, it didn't. The world doesn't revolve around you and that might be very hard thing to comprehend for old woman that's well past her expiry date. it doesn't mater if I say 1 + 1 =2 or if I say you are dumb if you don't know 1+1 = 2. It's still correct statement and it's nothing hyperbolic about it. This hippie attitude that it's bad to point out stupidity rather than the stupidity itself is going out of fashion and more and more people are starting to catch up. NZ is too ruined, economy is destroyed and the whole country was run to the ground while hippes were cheering about progression of feminism and environmentalism instead of making sure things are run responsibly, by competent men and in a way that would make tomorrow better than yesterday. So far the only result of this current madness is the fact that median income of $65 000 in 2025 is the equivalent of $8 000 in 2000 and everything is worse than 25 years ago...”

Unwilling to engage on his post any longer but wanting to clarify issues for others, I posted something myself. 

As someone who grew up in Canterbury, I know the streams on our region's shingle riverbeds have always grown algae as the flow decreases and the temperature of the water increases. I know also that there has been an increased use of nitrate and phosphate fertilisers on the plains' thin alluvial soils, along with an increase in heavy irrigation which accelerates the leaching of nutrients into waterways.

As a result of that, when the rivers experience low flow, and/or water gets trapped in either naturally or artificially formed depressions, there is now a greater likelihood that the algae will proliferate and form "blooms".

Each alga is short-lived and as they die off, the resulting high concentration of dead organic matter in the water has the effect of reducing dissolved oxygen. The reduction in oxygen kills freshwater organisms which adds to the organic "soup" and to the unpleasant smell. Some algae also secrete toxins which, in high concentration, can harm mammals.

District Councils do not employ contractors to "engineer ponds" that form algal blooms in order to either deliberately or opportunistically blame it on farmers to justify an increase in environmental regulation of waterways. The responsibility for granting licenses to remove shingle from the region's riverbeds (to help slow bed elevation) lies with the regional authority, ECAN. 

It may be the case that the way shingle is being extracted needs to be more closely monitored.

It is certainly the case that the social and environmental costs of the impact on our region's waterways of an increased reliance on artificial fertilisers and heavy irrigation to force grass and legume growth on thin alluvial soils, need to be addressed.

There are science-based facts and there are opinions. As noted by a pseudonymous poster on this page, it's a science-based fact that I'm part of the older demographic. His depiction of my age making me, "an old woman who is well past her expiry date", is opinion. We are all entitled to our opinions but when they are ill-informed, ideological, or stray into expressions of bigotry, best be prepared to be challenged.

Mr FMS soon made his noxious presence felt on my post. (Spelling etc as per original)

You sound like someone involved in the scam or devout fanatic of the doomsday cult of climate change. any conflicts of interst you wanna disclose?

Stagnant water is ideal for growing algae and that's a fact. 

Making ponds like that will supercharge algae blooms - fact.  

making banks across river bed doesn't help prevent floods - fact. 

NZ doesn't use liquid manure PITS so leaching nitrogen (aka liquid manure) leaching into rivers is no concern.

Fish, ducks gulls and so shits into the water and that's the main source of nitrogen in the water, not a cow peeing into grass 1km away.

Farmers were blamed for the stink because very few people know about cyanobacteria and how it stinks when the bloom dies off and decays - fact

Kids and families were exposed to the toxins - fact 

FIY: you know how to gaslight and BS and yes you are well past your expiry date but you still think people will treat you like if you were 20 when you had some value. you should be busy taking care of your husband, kids and grandkids insted of trying to mess things up.

On another post, he made the extraordinary statement that “99.999% of science is wrong” which made me chuckle given he’d taken exception to me calling him out for hyperbole. Presumably in his world all the means by which he forms and communicates his views and earns a living are created by magic.

I wanted to address his points, but others weighed in and challenged him which made his final fuse blow and served to increase his obsessive focus on me. He went into a full-throated rant against pretty much everyone who is not a middle-aged, white man with misogynistic, ageist, anti-authority, conspiracist political views. 

Had I been able to address his post, I would have pointed out that I specifically referred to nitrate and phosphate fertilisers in conjunction with heavy irrigation on the Canterbury plains’ largely thin alluvial soils which lie over deep layers of porous gravels containing vast amounts of water, interspersed with impermeable finer sediments. 

When functioning properly the rivers feed water into the aquifers which drain towards the sea. With heavy irrigation on land adjacent to the rivers, the surface flow of nutrient-laden water may be towards them. The amount of liquid cow dung and urine on intensive dairy pasture is undoubtedly an added factor.

A lot of our region’s once pristine bore water is now contaminated with nitrates, and other water sources are contaminated with coliforms and require chlorination.

Our rivers have always had trees dropping leaf into them, and arguably way more fish and birds pooed into them in the past given the populations of both have dropped in recent years. They have also always had naturally formed depressions which trapped water as flow decreased and in which grew mats of algae. Those natural depressions are now added to by gravel extraction, and it may well be that ECAN needs to monitor that extraction more carefully.

Gravel extraction aside, there is no question that the scale of algal blooms, and especially toxic blooms, is connected to changes in land use, away from predominantly dry land sheep and arable farming into intensive dairying that is dependent on artificial fertilisers and heavy irrigation. 

Eventually I closed the comments and blocked him, and the page admins then removed his post and most of the comments under my post which is a shame as I wanted to screenshot them as evidence in the event that his abuse took a physical form.

This man, who seems to think it’s 1825 not 2025, and doesn't care that his ageism and misogyny will offend a lot of people, has clearly not factored in how easily identifiable he is given the internet and NZ's famous two degrees of separation which, in North Canterbury, is more like 1.25 degrees. 

Anyway, all this brouhaha diverted attention away from the pertinent issues – as it was intended to do. The strategy used by these people is, if you cannot address an argument, you troll the person making it. It's a despicable tactic when the issues are so critically important. 

 

The Slippery Slope Into Barbarism

A Facebook "friend" keeps posting stuff about transgenderism and how right people like her were/are to have been supportive of the likes of Trump because he is rolling back those "trans rights" which impact on women's rights.

I look at this way; prior to and concomitant with the rise of neoliberal (global corporate) capitalism, there was a radical shift of political theory and praxis to the right which meant that the popular perception of a “centre ground” – the fulcrum point if you will – shifted significantly to the right. 

Accompanying, and in fact aiding that was the rise, first of interest group, and then identity politics.

Instead of great national and international movements aimed at achieving and sustaining systemic change, there was a proliferation of smaller “issue”, latterly “identity” based movements. 

The old "red left" which aimed for foundational socio-economic change – not just accommodations within capitalism –  lost ground, especially with the demise of the USSR and the Eastern Bloc.

Social democrats and socially liberal people shifted rightwards with the fulcrum point, adjusting their ideas and expectations of what being "left-wing” meant. 

For many of them it was simply not being “right-wing”. In the weird world of US politics, it was the patent absurdity of the Democratic Party being "left”.

For socially and politically liberal centrists – having abandoned all hope of socialism (if they ever had any) and with that class-based theory and praxis –  the focus on interest group, and then identity politics, was palliative. 

Attachment to movements that merely sought accommodations from Neo-liberal compliant states – but which in no way threatened the economic status quo – soothed their liberal hearts and minds as they benefited materially from neoliberal capitalism’s intensification of economic exploitation which was accompanied by an increased oppression of workers – somewhere.

For me, the big issue with transgenderism as political theory and praxis is that it is both individualistic and individualising. As such it dovetails perfectly with the right’s aim of breaking all great political-social combinations which challenge capitalism – not just into competing interest groups, but right down to the level of the “aspirational individual”. 

In the transgenderist orthodoxy that takes the form of a focus on the right to a bespoke sex/gender social and legal “identity” with an accompanying bespoke physical appearance.

Anyone who supports/promotes “Trumpism” because of the political right’s and ultra-conservatives’ opportunistic coat-tailing of feminist opposition to the transgenderist orthodoxy, is either a rightwing ideologue or some variety of useful idiot.

What annoys me about both extremes of this debate is the level of social and political myopia and a self-centredness that risks tipping into full-blown narcissism. It’s maybe why both extremes are drawn to Trump .. like attracts like. 

The social and natural worlds are in states of intense and worsening disequilibrium. Fact.

Marx warned that there was no inevitable progression of the social world beyond capitalism and into socialism / communism; if the hands of the hyper-exploiters and oppressors are not wrested off the controls, we could see the social world tip into barbarism. 

Women who are cheerleading for the likes of Trump need to look outside the imperial bubble and the smaller bubbles of relative privilege which bounce around inside it, and place all their hyperbole about the threat to women of transgenderism, against what is objectively threatening women in the rest of the world – and who and what is behind those threats. 

More to point; they need to stop exaggerating and catastrophising as much and as risibly as the most ardent of transactivists ever did, and ask who and what can stop the slide into barbarism?