.........................

THE BARBARIC COMEDY PLAYS ON…

.............(a wild drunken spoof from October 2004)

	'You terrorists there, stop retaliating!' 'Who are you calling terrorists? Wasn't it you who terrorised our Capital and then our country? Wasn't it you who have blown to pieces thousands of our children, together with women and old people, and maimed many thousands more? Wasn't it you who razed our homes to rubble, decimated our society, took our children and women hostage so that we, as resistance fighters, would give ourselves up in return for their release? And wasn't it you who imprisoned, tortured and humiliated thousands of our people? Isn't it you who starve to desperation our young men so you can bribe them to become turncoats and slaughter their own countrymen who resist your military terror?' 'We are liberators. We will crush you. Submit to our superiority. Resistance is useless. God is on our side. We, with our weapons, are invincible. Capitulate now. Our patience is running out. We will smash your resistance.' 'Why don't you just leave us alone?' 'Not until we've installed the kind of democracy we've long enjoyed in the US, the UK and Austrailia. Then with our compliant representatives installed we can leave, safe in the knowledge that the people will never have power.'
	HI THERE! My name is Hector Facto and for most of the last 2 years I've been high on metaphoric mescalin. How else can one keep a clear head these days? One of my chief activities, for one of those years, has been weighing how to promote my habit. For the last three months I've been dream peddler for a small academy project inside a large dysfunctional all-inclusive society, and also a facilitator for the society's whole social reform efforts. Not only am I a self-confessed social reform addict, but I've spent a good part of my life in meetings about social reform, a significant portion of that with my friends at 'Reform the World' (R W). Now as a reform addict, I know that I'm here addressing friends. I know what slogging through a heap of jabber means to most people, and for so many of you to offer up a few minutes to think about reform - the good, the bad, and, in the case of the government(s) I'm about to discuss, the very ugly - you have to be a little addicted too. I bet you're the kind of people who know what LSD used to stand for, and that some of you get a crazed look in your eyes when you hear the words "Sod off you junky bastard." And some of you probably still have to grit your teeth to utter a suitably outrageous reply like "Sod off yourself!" I don't propose to make further suggestions here on how to oppose enlightened absconders. I'm sure I don't need to amidst all you astute conformers - if you can stomach the euphemism. Unfortunately, the government, which is currently wreaking havoc in the world from Afghanistan to Iraq, is no laughing matter. The rabble of rubber-stamp pricks at Westminster was demented from well before those events of 9/11 which we now know to have been self-inflicted, at least effectively so; how else to create a pretext for the ensuing plunder and genocide? Few people were paying close attention to the government's aberrant erstwhile activities. Now there are many. Does that make a difference? Not a speck. While our leaders go on maiming and slaughtering Iraqi kids, quartering their mums and dads, and pulverising their homes, it makes not a whit of difference that us reformists jump up and down with rage, demonstrate in our millions and thrust the internet into a new dimension of significance. The rabble of pricks, like their opponents in the Iraqi resistance, become ever more resolute - the West has a long history of arrogance, greed and barbarism, and has an inbuilt immunity from awareness of their victims' suffering and fate. Listen to us? Do they hell! You may as well shout 'Hiroshima!' at the moon. This may be the worst government we've ever had, demented or otherwise - (grab that Norris and stick it in ya Guinness); indeed, there are so many things wrong with it, so many things that are inappropriate and hostile to the welfare of the public and the world, that I can only begin to tackle a few of them here. Reasons Why New Labour is a Fraud Now I'm not a big Michael Moore fan - how could I be? Just look at the trousers: they have a life of their own, from behind at any rate. Besides, I'm usually well high long before he tells his first joke. But I want to borrow some of his observations today and offer up my "Reasons Why New Labour is a Fraud," - and why the government cannot be allowed to deliver further on its implicit promises to forever support Dubya and the corporate neocon plunderers who placed him there and whose resolve to dominate the world is so puerile and self-defeating that even Hitler would have puked. It hardly needs saying that the academic achievement gaps among the neocons is about as extensive as King Blair's juvenile conceit - what a match! - and the only way to bring these low performing megalomaniacs to their knees is for Mike Moore, trousers and all, to jump on them…bbbrrrr…squelch! Ug! Or send them to Baghdad - where a stalwart Iraqi resistance would just love to throttle them as we in the UK would have throttled Hitler's mob had they successfully invaded. Now let me say at the outset that these are all worthy assertions. Who would oppose a reformer's pledge to make the bastards "Sod off to another universe"? Who would oppose the idea that all UK cabinet ministers should be granted extermination status and be dished up to a well-prepared resistance fighter; and that we, us, you - and me - should be accountable for dispatching war-lusting politicians to the most active and lethal battle-zones where they would get their just deserts? One of the problems we have in responding to the spin is that it comes couched in high-sounding rhetoric that appeals to everyone who cares about corporate wealth. And if you raise your voice and say, "wait a minute this sounds all very nice, but the real impact this spin is going to have in the world will not achieve any of these wonderful goals but instead is going to seriously damage one of the most important fantasies of democracy we have," then you need to be prepared to do a lot of explaining…and I'm going to try to do some of that here. And maybe we need to start these explanations by reminding people that this is not the first time we've heard high-sounding rhetoric from Washington or London that's used to cover up an agenda very different from the one we're hearing about: Do you remember hearing that we were going to bring freedom - by which is meant (as we all know): freedom to be made destitute, to be ripped-off, enslaved, trodden-on, ordered about and generally crushed both politically and in the end literally - that we were going to bring this 'freedom' to the Iraqi people who would welcome U.S./U.K. invaders with their MOABs for the teenage conscripts, uranium cluster bombs for the kids, and round-the-clock shock 'n awes for everyone else, to be followed up with tanks and helicopters bristling with missiles and the murder so far of about 15,000 civilians and 40,000 others? We were going to bring all this as liberators! Generosity knows no limits, folks! As for those Figments of Mass Destruction..? Do you remember hearing that all we needed to get the war going was seven billion quid (by depleting services to the poor, at least in the US: see www.costofwar.com) all for the big corporations, most notably arms manufacturers and security outfits? Do you remember hearing that Al Gore lost Florida? Do you remember King Blair being cleared by Hutton? Do you remember that unelected porn-writing psychopath who grabbed the BBC by the throat for exercising its constitutional mandate, and shook it into compliance? (And AC said: 'Let there be lies, let there be war, let there be HELL !' - then scarpered like a frightened rat). [cf: the final words in Asimov's 'The Last Question' - And AC said, 'Let there be light.'] So it's not like we don't have a lot of experience to remind us that we need to look behind the rhetoric we hear from the political jerks, elected and otherwise, and the information we get from the corporate/government-controlled media to discover the real agendas at work in our country's public policy and political life. If you do look behind the rhetoric, you'll find many reasons why New Labour is a fraud, reasons that will leave many children in Iraq dead or crippled (scarcely to mention Afghanistan) and may in fact leave no one standing. I'm going to lay out all of my reasons first, just to give an indication of the many issues the situation with New Labour raises, most of them crucial, and then focus on a couple of what I think are the most important and hopefully come back to others later. I also intend to mention some ways people are responding to New Labour around the country and what the prospects are for transforming it into an utterly depleted and discredited force whose demise can really help our country and our world - that is OUR world, the one they've virtually kicked senseless after filching it from right under our noses. Here's why I think New Labour is a con (or neocon): 1. New Labour is part of a larger political and ideological effort to privatise social programs, reduce the public sector, and ultimately replace local control of institutions with marketplace reforms that substitute commercial relations between customers for pseudo-democratic relations between citizens. But to channel public funds to private companies for ideological and political reasons is the primary objective. 2. New Labour moves control from where it should be, and puts it in the hands of bureaucracies and corporate bignuts. It represents the single biggest assault in the history of policy. 3. The policies of New Labour will ultimately create chaos and produce greater inequality without increasing the capacity to deliver better services. 4. The mandate that New Labour imposes on us to eliminate the effectiveness of our 'reformer' opposition is a mandate that is placed on no other social institution, and reflects the hypocrisy at their heart. With New Labour and Tories working together, two thirds of MPs caved-in to the threats and bribes of their whips, and voted for the catastrophe of invasion. (Alternatively, they could only have been either brainless or barbaric). But, most of them are wimps, feeble avaricious frightened little crawlers, but worse: many well knew their compliance provided London and Washington with a clear consent to commit genocide in Iraq. This, surprise surprise, fulfilled precisely the corporate world's hopes: that its insatiable desire to rule the world advances. 5. The increase in killing that New Labour will continue to impose on the world will hurt the UK's reputation as much as theirs. Their legacy will resound for decades, and the ultimate cost will be untold: in retaliations, shame, and a whole gamut of enforced concessions and reparations, the consequences will take long to subside. 6. The funding for New Labour does not come anywhere near the low levels that would be needed to reach even the narrow and auspicious goal of producing 100% annihilation by 2005. Dissenting MPs should group themselves or switch to an appropriate alternative party. 7. That the neocon fascists - headed by Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Cheyney, Perle, Armitage et al, and toady New Labour - live in each other's pockets is signal enough to instigate a monumental reformer uprising. 8. The tacit support New Labour and their fascist neocon buddies grant Israel has no precedent. This is the very source of the horror. Israel is right now re-arming itself with bunkerbusters from their 'coalition' flunkeys, with which to threaten Iran - who must be damn quick with a nuclear deterrent to counter that threat, or else: WW3? 9. The double standards of New Labour in keep sending people like Jerk Straw to Iran instead of Israel, implies a further step towards WW3. 10. The supplemental agenda of New Labour to make a grab at some of the $4-trillion worth of oil under Iraq are now not in dispute. Nor are the consequences for the biosphere when all that oil is burned. OK, that's ten: But frankly this is so bad, I needed 11, so here's No11 on my top ten list of reasons why New Labour is a fraud: 11. New Labour, along with their neocon conspirators, includes provisions to push military ventures such as hostile invasions to a new height, while crushing multiculturalism, innovation, and creative development. Where did New Labour come From? Now obviously I can only take up some of these issues here. But it's also important to ask where New Labour came from. This is a key part of the Bush Administration's international policy, and will play a prominent role in its re-election campaign. (If that sentence loses you, then bear with me). We need to remember that New Labour is very much a Tory monstrosity. Which is why the Tory party slumbers so contentedly and innocuously in the background. The Bush Administration is using New Labour in its plan to promote an aggressive agenda of war and privatisation across the globe, including attempts to revive a movement that has been defeated in every referendum (ie, frequently in Central and South America, most recently in Venezuela) where ordinary people had a chance to vote and be heard. For Bush, election reform is an immense issue. He came into office as an un-elected prat with historically low levels of support among African Americans, and a well-deserved anti-poor, pro-corporate image. But what really gave birth to New Labour was our old friend infiltration - and manipulation from within. This traces back to the first Labour government. The heinous strategy now enshrined in New Labour, and which raised it to new absurd heights by the formulas imposed on New Labour MPs, was made possible by a decade of surreptitious promotions of the Right and the poaching of its apparently ambiguous proponents. Over the past ten years, virtually every other New Labour MP has adopted new standards of subservience. These standards are of widely varying quality and relevance to what takes place in real political scheming. These imbeciles dance to King imbecile Blair's every tune, supporting him and consolidating his madness. The only possible outcome is an almighty cataclysm, which will be the greater, the longer it is in coming. One of the more amazing things about New Labour is how the most intrusive subversion in the history of policy, which now has Washington mandating targets for every action in this country, and many others too, is being enacted by an administration that regularly presents itself as a deregulating enemy of big government (which is the same as saying: friend of big business). New Labour and its neocon 'advisors' in Washington represents a virtual privatisation of control over governments, and its highly prescriptive and punitive sanctions on all and sundry except corporate monsters are the kind of wrongheaded social engineering by Washington that political leaders like the President have supported for years. One of the biggest challenges we face in responding to this is explaining to the public what's wrong with the overuse and misuse of corporate control of military power, and that opposing it does not mean opposing accountability. We need to remember that defending public credibility from the kind of attacks that New Labour attempts, does not mean defending what now exists. We need to recognise that section of the civil rights lobby supported by us precisely because it is a powerful step toward ensuring that governments address long-ignored omissions that have led to the current disastrous situation: namely, to identify and apprehend all potential corporate bignuts, together with existing ones, and to nationalise, or seize the assets of, all corporate enterprise having a turnover that exceeds, say, for the sake of argument, £1-million. We need to address these concerns and to develop new and credible processes for accountability and improvement. But we also have to make clear why the current regime holds out no hope of solving the problems it pretends to document. Many of us know that governments offer a kind of counterfeit accountability. Fake mandating is a substitute for the much more difficult and costly process of real improvement. Externally imposed power does virtually nothing to increase the capacity of governments to deliver better services. They also generally impose high-stakes consequences on the victims of failure rather than on those responsible for it. For all the talk about "accountability," there is no accountability in this New Labour disaster for the politicians who are imposing large measures of ill-conceived and counterproductive administrative and budgetary chaos on the world - nor, most especially of all, even an ounce of accountability for the heinous and wanton havoc they have foisted on Afghanistan, and in particular Iraq. Still we do need to find more effective ways to show the public and communities how the narrow misuse of mandates and accountability can make things worse instead of better for everyone. When mandates from Washington are used to make high stakes decisions about whether MPs get promoted or graduate to the cabinet, or whether departments lose funding, or bogus researchers are recruited while genuine ones lose their jobs, they narrow the focus and limit the ability of governments to serve the broader needs of the country and the world. And this is done quite deliberately, so that we, you and me, take our eye off the ball. Senior politicians have several times acknowledged that the UK defence department is actually controlled from the Pentagon. This is just the kind of 'high-stakes' push that drives dissenting politicians out of office, elevates obsequious ones, and encourages the government to adopt a diverse range of inappropriate habits: overuse of power, scandals, corrupt practices involving those with commercial interests, for instance, all of which makes us and our country vulnerable to descent into repression and on towards tyranny. Already, many see super-con-artist Blair and his grovelling coterie as an elected dictatorship. Who could have believed in 2001 that 'charmer' Blair and his little mob would share the bed of the most reactionary US president ever, who besides all else seized office by ballot manipulation and legal manoeuvring? Who would have believed that the very person (King Bliar) who is supposed to represent, first of all, the ordinary citizen in the UK, would sell them short by opting out of EU laws made expressly for the protection of those citizens? And so the ruthless exploitation by the corporate blackguards who control this New Labour sham of a government rein supreme - so what's new? Ultimately, of course, and as we all know well enough, the entire charade resides in the hands of stupendously voracious corporate billionaires (primarily: Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Cheyney, Perle, Armitage etc, and their bosses in Tel Aviv whose Zionist plan to control the world is well documented: ie www.nexus.com). NEW Labour and Terrorism Now, when you saw on your television screens the bombing of Baghdad, that horrific bombardment the aggressors called 'shock and awe' which persisted for days on end; an attack that even shook people here in the UK as they watched in disbelief at what the US - AND New Labour (those B-52s flew from Gloucestershire) - were doing in their name, then who did you think were the terrorists? When every day you see missiles rain down from US helicopter gunships onto densely populated civilian areas of Iraqi cities, time and again, month in month out, and the row upon row of smashed bodies afterwards (frequently of women and kids), all blood and body-parts, who do you regard as the terrorists? It couldn't be clearer that King maniac Blair probably has a lower capacity for compassion than arch-Nazi Hitler himself. (Only such obsessives ever make it to high office, of course, as a rule). And if you were an average Iraqi, how would you like to respond to this military invasion and military occupation, which uses torture and massacre in an attempt to terrify and subdue, and shows not the slightest compassion or concern for Iraqi lives? What about the many, many thousands of injured Iraqis, permanently disabled? What a legacy! And more are being murdered every day. Each has friends and loved ones - as do we. And we, you and me, are partly to blame. The least we could do would be storm our wayward politicians' offices and homes. They should have been arrested long before they began their latest terror game - during the lead-up to that unprecedented, monumental Feb 2003 demonstration. We will stay till the job is done, our representatives pompously declare. Hitler would probably have said the same had he occupied the UK. As resistance fighters, we would have endeavoured to frustrate every move. We would have sniped and bombed and subverted. And eventually, the Nazis would have had to leave - or kill us all (except the feeble and compliant). The same will eventually happen in Iraq. Many times I've read reports, several recently, by leading commentators, even military analysts, who openly and unequivocally declare that the chaos in Iraq cannot cease until the occupying forces leave - because, they acknowledge, their presence is precisely its cause. This is so obvious that I wonder anyone bothered to pronounce it. Whereas King war-fanatic Blair and the neocons say the opposite; yes, your supreme majesty, black most certainly is white! (Have you noticed how King Blair always, always sounds like an ignorant big-headed 18-year old? Just listen to his words, and the way he speaks. Probably he still thinks he's taking part in some pseudo-intellectual student debate of no consequence. To him, it's mere entertainment. (I've heard it said by those who have known him that he is a compulsive liar). But, I repeat, all that King Blair can utter is: We will stay till the job is done. Job? What Job? Install a submissive sham government? Plunder the oil? Appease Israel's desire to rule the Arab world? But all they do is to keep on killing - which is exactly all they can do. And then - what supreme hypocrisy! - they accuse resistance fighters of lacking compassion when they capture and kill mercenaries, westerners who are there to build more military camps and then run with the loot they get for doing so - made for life, at the expense of… well, take another look at www.costofwar.com. So what about democracy in the UK (yes, it wouldn't be a bad idea, never mind the US who currently rules us, and has since the late 70s)? While there are whips to enforce government will, MPs cannot represent their electors without risking their job. This is the nub of the fraud. We don't even have a pseudo-democracy. Any suggestion to the contrary is blatant deception. And since this is our predicament, we have only the recourse to partake in civil disobedience, to revolt. Demonstrations, as we know, are ineffective in the face of King Blair style arrogance. Can the Lib Dems be trusted? Well, they can't be less trustworthy than their main adversaries, and at least their leader CK gives the impression of having a considerably greater IQ than his two principal rivals. Or how about that new party, Respect? But their long-in-power opponents can't be trusted an inch, that's for sure. The question is, at the next election, do we abstain en-mass and thereby voice our dissatisfaction with the unrepresentative outfit we presently endure, or do we try out a new bunch? THE end of New Labour In the past two decades, the shift has been in the direction of even more privatisation schemes and to manoeuvre power away from MPs and local districts, and put it in the hands of state and national conformist politicians. If this continues, corporate power will increase its stranglehold to the point where something approaching Armageddon appears on the horizon - as now for the US, which drags the UK and Australia with it. As I said before, the New Labour regime holds out no hope of solving the problems it unwittingly puts under the spotlight. The key to improvement is termination. And while an alternative needs a complicated mix of support, resources, motivation, pressure, fellowship and professional skills to succeed, the idea that this mixture can be provided by traditional government is simply wrong, and is not supported by any research or real world experience. The existing formulas for government are an example of just how uncertain this approach can be. Former and existing systems simply set honest MPs up to fail, including ostensibly successful ones: Chris Smith, Michael Meacher, Robin Cook… to name but three. They seem designed to demoralise electors and create a widespread public perception of systemic failure that erodes the common ground that a universal system of public administration needs to genuinely serve. So, folks, I reckon that about sums-up the extent of gobbledegook and sham we meagre, powerless Joe Public are constantly dished up with by the monsters and idiots who we allow to take the reins of our complacent, smug little society we have here in the UK - and I've only begun to touch on US brutality (which only the most practised Nazi SS officer could match). Well - incomplete, I know - but that's about all there's space for today. So long, and remember, unless you spontaneously agree with some directive: 'Never Obey' - after all, who are THEY to tell you to do or not do anything? Who do THEY think they are? In fact, who the hell are THEY anyway? Oh yes, representatives of the THEY that good old Mike Moore examined so closely in his nicely titled 'Fahrenheit 9/11'. Just yesterday, 30th Sept 2004, almost 70 Arabs were killed in Iraq and Palestine. Today it is reported that 100 have been murdered in Iraq by US attacks. What have they ever done to us, I'd like to know? (I'm no historian, so maybe they have done something appalling to the US/UK or their citizens at some time in the past - but it would have to have been pretty atrocious to warrant what the invaders are doing now).