Splintered Sunrise

On returning from my short break, it is a matter of extreme pleasure to your humble scribe to get a nice plug from the estimable Mick Fealty over on Slugger. This has meant my site traffic going through the roof over the last day or so, so I’d like to take this opportunity to welcome new readers. I hope you enjoy the commentary here and decide to stick around.

The obvious story to go with is the restoration of the Executive, but this is going to run and run, and the major theme of this blog – the GUBU nature of Northern politics – will I’m sure get ample fuel from the new devolved dispensation. So I’m going to fulfil a long-standing promise to regular readers, and begin looking at Nick Cohen’s What’s Left? Nick’s book being the disjointed ramble it is, and owing to the fact that it’s difficult to read more than three pages at a go, this will be a serialised review.

The most obvious place to start is on Nick’s sources. A good deal of Nick’s authority comes from his reputation as an investigative journalist, which leads the casual reader to assume that Nick is basing his polemic on reliable information. Of course, a journo is only as good as his sources – as the late Paul Foot used to say, while the journalist may get the byline he is pretty much reliant on his network of informants. Nick, as someone identified with the left, tended to get a lot of his stories from lefty informants. For example, his exposés on education owed not a little to information provided by SWP teachers. Apart from Nick’s gifts as a stylist, this is one of the major reasons for the bite that his early demolitions of Blairism possessed.

A major aspect of Nick’s evolution since 2002 is that he no longer talks to the sort of people who fed him his stories. He has relied ever more heavily on a relatively small circle of friends and colleagues who all think alike, who are preoccupied with foreign policy (always Nick’s weak point) and who, whatever their feelings about the man himself, have done rather well under the Blair regime. It is no surprise, then, that What’s Left? relies to an unconscionable extent on the writings of Nick’s pals, as well as on cutting and pasting from congenial blogs and websites.

Nick is pretty open about this in his rogues’ gallery of acknowledgements, but this is something you notice throughout the book. One of the least attractive features of the Decent Left is their incestuous tendency to cite each other as authorities, and this gives What’s Left? something of the quality of a Normblog post stretched out to enormous length. This wouldn’t be quite so bad if Nick was relying on genuinely distinguished authorities, but…

Nick’s writing on the Balkans derives almost entirely from Marko Attila Hoare, the Nigel Irritable of the Decent Left and a swivel-eyed Serbophobe. The sections on postmodernism (which Nick clearly doesn’t understand) and Chomsky (ditto) are lifted almost verbatim from the relevant chapters of Francis Wheen’s Mumbo-Jumbo. Nick’s authority on Trotskyism is veteran icepick-wielder Paul Anderson. Nick’s big mate Oliver Kampf not only contributes the stuff on George Lansbury but also, as a full-spectrum idiot, seems to have chipped in with dubious factoids on virtually every subject Nick covers.

A critique of Nick will therefore enable, nay require, an examination of his dodgy sources, which he has regurgitated and embellished with scant regard for any independent research or checking of facts. Nick has a breathless style that may carry you along with his logical leaps, if you assume that the premises those leaps are based on are fairly sound. But they aren’t.

Update 5.4.07: Eagle-eyed readers will note that the image on this post has been changed. The original image was the result of my enthusiasm for a rather puerile punchline running away with me. I have reconsidered on receiving representations from readers who felt my humour was in poor taste, could be construed as misogynistic, and anyway I should have known better than to try and get away with boob jokes on a socialist blog.

The judgement of the International Court of Justice in the case of Bosnia and Herzegovina vs. Serbia and Montenegro is interesting in a number of respects, not least in how it knocks holes in the arguments of the cruise missile left and puts question marks over the approved history of the Balkan wars of the 1990s. It also dents the increasing tendency for the activist school of law to get mixed up in international affairs.

The case, alleging that the Serbian government of the late Slobodan Milošević was responsible for waging a campaign of genocide against non-Serbs, was brought by the Izetbegović government in Sarajevo in the early stages of the Bosnian war. This, it should be noted, was long before the Srebrenica massacre, which was added to the case later. Thus, the ICJ has thrown out the original case – except for a few riders relating to Srebrenica – and implicitly recognised that the very real atrocities which took place in Bosnia, although definitely war crimes deserving of punishment, were not the replay of the Holocaust alleged by the media coverage of the time; and that the myth of the evil genius in Belgrade directing everything was just that.

The Srebrenica riders are there, of course. These represent the basic legal genuflection necessary to the ICTY (the US-NATO Inquisition in The Hague, no relation to the ICJ down the road). Although the ICTY is of dubious legal standing and has a tendency to make up the rules as it goes along, the ICJ was not asked to review its operations. The riders flow from the conviction of General Radislav Krstić on charges of genocide for his role in the Srebrenica massacre. This verdict falls within the letter of the Genocide Convention, and I will say no more about it except that the ICTY is adopting a rather broad definition of genocide which could lead to all sorts of other atrocities being considered genocide – I prefer a narrow definition, on the grounds that throwing around concepts like “genocide” or “fascism” promiscuously removes their power.

Under the ICTY system, the Krstić verdict is the bottom layer of a house of cards. The charge of genocide is extended to Ratko Mladić, on the assumption that Krstić must have been acting under orders; likewise to then Republika Srpska president Karadžić, according to the doctrine of “command responsibility” which the ICTY applies only to crimes committed by Serbs; and an unsuccessful attempt was made to pin it on Milošević, on the general principle that the leader of the officially designated Evil Nation must have been responsible. Thus the ICJ condemns Belgrade for failing to use its influence to prevent Srebrenica (although that is itself a notable retraction from the assumption that Belgrade had direct control over the Republika Srpska army) and for failing to hand over Mladić to the ICTY (assuming Mladić is in Serbia, and not say Bosnia or Montenegro). But this is thin gruel for the Milošević = Hitler school of thought.

There are a lot of people for whom this verdict will be unwelcome. The neocon-Wahhabi alliance who were the main outside protagonists will be annoyed, but they have other fish to fry now and will go on their merry way. More severely put out will be the Bosnian Muslim leadership, who had hoped to get an official designation of Serbian collective guilt and impose a Versailles-style settlement that would have propped up their failed statelet with reparations imposed on Serbia’s already ruined economy. But then, they don’t run Bosnia anyway.

What is interesting in this is the effect the verdict has on the liberal hawks, whether the hardcore neocons of the soi-disant Decent Left or the more woolly Guardian tendency. For both Bosnia has a huge significance – either justifying Iraq in the former case, or in the latter by contrasting the Iraqi disaster with the Good Intervention led by the Holy Clintons. It is also worth noting, as Conor Foley points out, that the liberal hawks like to ignore the UN Charter, Nuremberg judgements and the entire corpus of international law according to which “humanitarian intervention” is extremely illegal. Rather, they prefer to give imaginative interpretations of the Genocide Convention and extrapolate from that a “duty to protect” the citizens of enemy states from their own governments, whether or not those citizens actually want to be invaded.

So it was predictable that the Grauniad’s long-time Balkan correspondent Ian Traynor should turn in a report headlined “Serbia condemned for Srebrenica despite acquittal on genocide charge” while referring in a subheading to a “damning verdict”. Traynor skates lightly over the bulk of the verdict, while focussing almost entirely on the Srebrenica clauses. He also bellyaches about how ethnic cleansing carried out by Bosnian Serbs in 1992 was not condemned as genocide. (Traynor makes no mention of atrocities carried out against Serbs, which is par for the course for him.) As if to underline that Traynor is no loose cannon, a leader in the same day’s paper alleged that “an entire nation has been held to judicial account for genocide”.

This sort of thing is what might be expected from the Grauniad. Let’s recap what happened in the September 2006 Bosnian elections. In the Republika Srpska the nationalists – Karadžić’s SDS and the Radicals – were heavily defeated by the Independent Social Democrats, under the leadership of Milorad Dodik, long the pet moderate of the “international community”, which is how he got to be prime minister in 1998 when his party only held two seats out of 83 in the People’s Assembly. Dodik’s election platform was to uphold the Dayton Accords and make the governmental structures work. In Croat districts the Tudjmanite HDZ was not defeated by the Social Democrats, but was run relatively close. Meanwhile the Muslim community was divided between mad chauvinists and even madder chauvinists, who competed with each other on a platform of who was most enthusiastic about ripping up the federal Dayton constitution and establishing a Muslim-dominated unitary state – exactly the demand that got them into the 1992-95 war in the first place.

How did Traynor report this election? With an article entitled “Serb move may trigger new war”, based on a remark by Dodik that, if Kosovo was entitled to a referendum on independence, so too was Republika Srpska. For Traynor’s fertile imagination, this signalled that “Serbia may be plotting to annex large tracts of Bosnia”, although Dodik had said no such thing. This is to be explained not by any deliberate dishonesty on Traynor’s part – I can’t read his mind – but by his attempts to make sense of inconvenient facts within a rigid ideological framework. If Traynor regards the anti-nationalist Dodik as a “hardline nationalist”, this is only to be expected from one who regards virtually all Serbs, except for Sonja Biserko and her little clique of Imperial caddies, as “hardline nationalists”.

Turning to the more hawkish wing, I notice this load of gobbledegook from the egregious Oliver Kamm. Our boy huffs and puffs a bit about the Guardian’s coverage; argues that it doesn’t matter that the evidence was not legally sufficient to convict Serbia, because he (Kamm) was convinced by the circumstantial evidence; and maunders about the judgement of history. Generally, one could say that Kamm is not writing about the judgement the ICJ actually delivered, but about the judgement it would have delivered if the panel of judges had included great minds of our time such as Norm Geras, Dave Aaronovitch, Francis Wheen, Marko Attila Hoare, Martin Bell and, er, Oliver Kamm.

It will come as no surprise to regular readers of Kamm that he manages to drag this round to a discussion of his bête noire Chomsky, and specifically yet another defence of Emma Brockes’ notorious hoax interview in the Guardian. (At this point, I actually feel really sorry for Emma. With the Grauniad brass who set up the Chomsky hatchet-job having piled all the blame onto her, it will take years for her to live the episode down. Her task is made no easier by Kamm and Cohen offering unsolicited defences of an article she doesn’t defend herself.) In that case, despite both the Readers’ Editor and External Ombudsman giving short shrift to the Francis Kammovitch letter in Brockes’ defence, Kamm blustered about deficiencies in the Graun’s appellate procedures. The chief of these being that Kamm et al were not allowed indefinite appeals until such time as they got the right result. Even Alex Ferguson might look askance at that.

If Kamm’s article doesn’t appear to make much sense, there is a reason for that which, despite Kamm’s style giving this impression, has nothing to do with a lack of intelligence on the part of the reader. Roger Ebert says that the first rule of movie criticism is: A film is not about what it is about, but how it is about it. Applied to literature, the Iliad is not about the Trojan War, but about the wrath of Achilles. Kamm is no Homer, but the same rule applies. When Kamm writes about the Middle East, the Balkans, George Lansbury or Reinhold Niebuhr, these articles are not about what they appear to be about – their real subject is what a clever clogs Oliver Kamm is. This goes in spades for Kamm’s slightly disturbing cyber-stalking of Chomsky, which for some reason puts me in mind of a teenage boy obsessed with his older brother’s penis.

PS. I also notice in the Grauniad a letter from an old mucker of mine, Prof Martin Shaw, taking issue with the ICJ’s “perverse” judgement. Martin’s logic seems to be that Slobo must have been guilty of genocide because he (Martin) has said so in a book, and so have several other people he respects. Well, I’m certainly convinced by that. This is an obvious trick the eminent judges missed in their 10-month deliberations. After all, if the judges had had the benefit of reading Martin Shaw or Branka Magaš, there would be no question of reasonable doubt.

Update 6.3.07: For more on the ICJ judgement and its reception, this typically excellent article by Nebojša Malić is well worth a look.

Well, I have held my nose and procured Nick’s little book. From first impressions, it’s even worse than I feared. This is sad in a way, because a lot of Nick’s latter-day comrades are people I would expect no better from. Nick, on the other hand, has quite an illustrious history and used to be downright brilliant on domestic politics – Cruel Britannia was probably the best analysis of Blair’s Britain, and Pretty Straight Guys was a good read too, although the incongruous chapter on Iraq, which gave all the signs of having been added at the last moment, pointed the way to his current position. Foreign policy was always Nick’s weak point, so it was probably inevitable that his downfall would come from that quarter.

So, what are we to make of What’s Left? Well, as I say, there are people from whom nothing better could have been expected. Kamm’s book was utter bilge, but then we all knew what Kamm was like. To find Nick, sometime one of my favourite journalists, writing something like What’s Left? is deeply depressing, and it gives me no pleasure to say that he has been digging ever more frenziedly since publication, probably encouraged by good notices. It seems to me that Nick is completely losing his grip, and one thing we don’t need is a lefty Britney Spears (or, perhaps more accurately, David Icke) on our hands.

The best way to approach this book is in chunks. Nick’s previous books were after all collections of his journalism, and What’s Left? carries this on by being a series of disjointed little essays – and the essays are bad enough singly without Nick’s desperate attempts to make them fit an overarching thesis. So, when Norn Iron commitments allow, I will be blogging a review of Nick in instalments. Since the good folks over at Aaro Watch are finding the book too depressing to cover in much depth, the Sunrise will step into the breach.

Reviewing What’s Left? will also give us an opportunity to look at the phenomenon of the Decent Left as a whole. Since most of the book, those bits not recycled by Nick from his old columns or springing out of his fertile imagination, is lifted from his mates’ books and articles, and sympathetic blogs and websites, some examination of Nick’s sources will be in order. Just look at the rogues’ gallery in the acknowledgments at the back for a veritable Who’s Who of Decentism.

So, readers may expect to be regaled with occasional looks at Nick. Feedback will as always be welcome; and, unlike Nick’s composition of his dire screed, the reviewing process will involve some homework and concern for factuality.

PS. This rather intemperate review by my old friend Ian Birchall in Socialist Worker may be of interest. Not that I am likely to be more temperate, but Ian does have the advantage of concision.

If you haven’t already seen it, I urge you to read this article by Stuart over at Indecent Left. This is, by far, the best review I’ve yet seen of Nick Cohen’s What’s Left? – it really obviates the need for me to write one, although I probably will by and by. Nick is too tempting a target to miss, and from the look of it his book has enough howlers, tendentious assertions and jarring logical jumps to keep a critical reader busy for months.

While on the subject of the Euston Manifesto crowd, I note this precious little piece from Norman Geras favourably quoting his pal Oliver Kamm on the question of whether blogging is good for democracy. Norm and Ollie conclude that it is indeed a good thing to let a thousand flowers bloom, but unfortunately “blogging debate… includes a lot that isn't conducive to deliberation, in a good meaning of that word, or to open-minded consideration of the views of others”. Norm argues that what is needed is “to improve the culture of Internet discussion”.

I need hardly point out that Norm and Ollie promote open discussion by running blogs that don’t allow comments. Physician, heal thyself, I think is the phrase.

Update 21.02.07: For another cracking review of Cohen, check this out.

A wee while back I did a review of the republican press. Eagle-eyed readers will have noticed that I left one journal out, and deliberately so. That’s because it isn’t strictly speaking a republican journal – in fact, it’s exceedingly difficult to categorise. I am of course referring to the Hibernian, the monthly magazine edited by Gerry McGeough, which I find compulsive reading for all the wrong reasons.

A glance over the back issues of the Hibernian, which are conveniently available online, will confirm that this is hair-raising stuff. The magazine manages to be wildly eclectic while at the same time having a consistent worldview. A lot of this is related to the personality of McGeough, who is a fascinating character. He’s a long-standing and very tough republican, and one of the most articulate critics of the Grizzlyite peace strategy, while at the same time being an extreme Catholic traditionalist, of the sort that Seán Sabhat might have recognised.

So to read the Hibernian is almost to be transported back to 1942 and the heyday of Ailtirí na hAiséirighe. There is trenchant commentary on the peace process, combined with historical articles on past republican struggles and martyrs, plus a rather worrying – due to its sectarian overtones – fixation on native struggles against the Plantation. One also finds the usual clericalist bugbears of abortion and homosexuality. It’s interesting that the February issue describes the Sexual Orientation Regulations as an anti-Catholic measure, while the Orange Order, as noted below, thinks them an anti-Protestant measure. The only charitable thing I can say about this stuff is, anyone who can call SDLP and PSF Assembly members “rapscallions” can’t be all bad.

But it gets odder still. The Hibernian goes big on Masonic conspiracies – the latest issue has a lengthy piece on the Bavarian Illuminati and the Bilderberg Group. This feeds into the regular denunciations of the “Liberal/Masonic Agenda”. You will find acres of stuff on the arcane socio-political philosophy of Fr Denis Fahey, which would appear to provide the Hibernian’s programmatic basis. The February Hibernian also has quite an interesting essay on TV as a mind control device, so I’m hoping that future issues will carry some bizarre pseudo-science as a regular feature.

What’s interesting here is that we have the development of a kind of ultra-Catholic nationalism, without any encouragement whatsoever from the hierarchy – on the contrary, the magazine is full of digs at the “useless” bishops, as well as puffs for the dangerous idea of reintroducing the Latin Mass. The genesis of this is a source of bafflement to me. Maybe McGeough shares the same literary interests as Mel Gibson. Or maybe he’s listened to some of Kieran Allen’s speeches on “Catholic nationalism”, and decided it sounds like a good idea.

The other interesting point is McGeough’s candidacy for Fermanagh/South Tyrone at the upcoming Stormont elections. Word from the area is that he might poll quite well. I would guess, or at least I would hope, that this has more to do with his stance on policing than a public approval of his more esoteric interests. The key question is, will he run a republican campaign or will he rant and rave about the nefarious influence of the Jewmen and Freemasons? If his speech at the dissident conference in Derry is any guide, probably a bit of both.

So there you have it – the most articulate standard-bearer for dissidence is a howling Ultramontanist reactionary. I am depressed.

I don’t intend to make a habit of bigging up the Daily Mail, but I think readers may well enjoy this excellent article by Geoffrey Wheatcroft on Blair’s faith-based premiership. On this evidence, I would guess that Geoffrey’s forthcoming book, Yo Blair!, will be quite the read, and certainly a lot more fun than Nick Cohen’s What’s Left? Of which you can read much informed comment over at Aaro Watch.

Many thanks to the White Queen for helping to plug a bit of a gap. I promise, the O’Loan report is coming soon.

As part of this blog’s self-appointed brief is to look at debates among Irish radicals, I thought an overview of the republican press would be in order. This will help us orient ourselves a little and may be of interest to readers outside the republican milieu. At some later point I’ll probably take a look at the Irish left press to balance things out.

It’s important to realise that things have changed in recent years in terms of the republican media. It used to be, maybe 15 or 20 years ago, that you just had to pick up Republican News every week and you’d get an overview of what the Provos were saying. There was no other journal of significance, indeed hardly any political tendency of any significance. In the days before the peace process, when republicans didn’t have much access to the mainstream media, a weekly read of what was effectively the Voice of Grizzly was invaluable for knowing what the boys were up to.

Not so these days. Readers outside Belfast may not realise this, but it’s much more important to read the Andersonstown News, which, together with its local satellites, fulfils a very specific function. Now, I know that the Andytown News is not formally a Provo paper. That’s the beauty of it. Máirtín Ó Muilleoir and his little media empire are able to fly kites over sensitive issues, thus giving Gerry some plausible deniability while at the same time campaigning among the base for the route Gerry wants to take. It could therefore best be described as the Ghost of Grizzlyism Future. It has, for example, been pushing for the best part of a year for endorsement of policing, which, given that Máirtín wouldn’t wipe his bum without permission, gives the lie to Gerry’s claim that he only made up his mind two months ago. I don’t like the Andytown News – it tends to remind me of the Sunday Sport without the tits – but it’s worth a look for that reason alone.

Republican News, on the other hand, I tend to read on and off – you don’t see it that much in the North. It too has a specific function, being aimed at the PSF cadre, and in particular the southern cadre. That explains why it is usually quite militant in its language, having a more strongly republican and leftist coloration. That would reflect the Provos’ southern base better – while the Andytown News perfectly fits the consciousness of the cynical ward-heelers in Belfast, the PSF membership in Dublin contains not a few people who think of themselves as radicals, even revolutionaries. I often think that being a radical in Sinn Féin Nua must cause a body a severe case of cognitive dissonance, but you can see what Republican News does for these people. It reassures people who thought they were joining a radical movement that they are indeed in one. Therefore, if the Andytown News forges ahead, Republican News tends to lag behind what the leadership are actually doing.

Actually, I prefer Republican Sinn Féin’s Saoirse, and, as I hear it now has a bigger circulation than Republican News, so too seemingly do quite a few others. I’m not a supporter of RSF, and it’s a very long time since I would have been a republican in the sense that RSF comrades would understand it, but I find Saoirse comfortingly familiar. There is never any doubt you’re reading a republican paper, and, if you ignore the improved graphics, you could almost be reading a copy of An Phoblacht circa 1975. You won’t read stimulating new ideas here – not that you’ll find them in Republican News either – but that’s not the point. This is good old-fashioned principled republicanism, just like the politics we used to know, to warm the cockles.

Now we turn to the Starry Plough – which only appears sporadically and can be hard to track down – and I’m sorry to say that, after thirty-plus years to get it right, the IRSP still haven’t mastered the art of producing a readable paper. It has varied down the years, though, and more recently there has been noticeably less of the Shining Path and Kim Il Sung stuff the Irps were so keen on in the 90s. Strange to say, you can actually find reasonably intelligent articles in the Starry Plough, though I have serious doubts, based on the entire history of the Irps, of their ability to translate a good paper position into operative politics.

It is at least a better read than the Sovereign Nation, organ of the Real Republicans. This paper’s content can best be summed up as follows: Down with Gerry! Armed struggle – yo! Punishment beatings – yo! Apart from the occasional nod to “sovereignty” in the Wilsonian sense, you will be hard pushed to find any political content. This is militarism pure and simple, and it’s more than a little wearying.

Finally, it’s worth taking a look at two more open publications. Fourthwrite, which emerged from the “republican recomposition” discussions following the 1994 ceasefire, has wide recognition and a stable circulation, and manages to provide an arena where opponents of the Gerryite strategy can debate. The magazine is patchy – generally there will be a couple of excellent articles, a couple of really awful ones, and a couple that leave you scratching your head – but is essential reading nonetheless. Fourthwrite’s strength, I would say, is its weakness – while its openness is to be commended, its lack of a well-defined line means it has trouble really taking the lead in a “recomposition” project, with contributions varying between strident opposition to the Good Friday process and willingness to remain within the Big Tent, and a consequent lack of focus.

The same could be said of Forum, publication of the Dundalk-based New Republican Forum group. Forum has a less attractive style than Fourthwrite, but makes up for it with rather heavier articles. Like Fourthwrite, the politics are basically republican, vaguely leftist, undogmatic and showing a welcome willingness to think about alternative strategies. There is indeed some political thinking going on amongst republicans, it’s just that you have to dig a little to find it.

From time to time, it will be the pleasure of the Sunrise to bring you brief snippets from Norn Iron, stories that probably don’t merit a post in their own right but, taken together, give you some idea of what’s going on in God’s Wee Ulster. Today we will cast our jaundiced eye over the local press, which has understandably been preoccupied with policing, the conjunction of the O’Loan report and the Provo Ard Fheis being too good to ignore.

The News Letter, the voice of bigotry, was as usual almost unbearable unless you’re in the mood for unionist paranoia. The universal line was to forget about collusion or having serial killers on the state payroll – the important thing was to remember the sacrifices of the gallant Royal Ulster Constabulary GC, and protect its hallowed memory from the facts – sorry, slurs – contained in a report authored by an uppity Catholic woman. Say what you like about the News Letter, at least it’s comfortingly predictable.

I’ve never really taken to the Irish News since it discovered “lifestyle” – the old Vatican Times format had a certain olde-worlde charm to it – but it still remains compulsive reading. Not only for fully reporting stories that the News Letter and Telegraph tend to bury, but also for its inimitable letters page and its array of columnists. The latter have been in good form this week, with the focus firmly on O’Loan.

Susan McKay was wonderful as always, and Newton Emerson quite excellent. In fact, the Thursday Irish News has quite a surreal cast to it, with the humorist Newt writing hard-hitting and thoughtful pieces, while Grizzly’s messenger boy Jim Gibney is often unintentionally hilarious. Though Jim is a skilled enough practitioner of Gerryspeak to give Bangers Morrison a run for his money, even he is finding the policing debate tough going, and this week’s offering – a convoluted claim that the Provos had been right not to join the Policing Board in 2001 but were right to do so in 2007 because of the massive concessions their brilliant negotiators had won – was really pisspoor. Even better, though, was Wednesday’s offering from Brian Feeney, the Humeite hatchet-man turned Gerryite hatchet-man. Brian wrote a blistering piece about how the O’Loan report exposed the rottenness of the Northern state – which makes it all the more curious that his column the previous week had excoriated any republicans who didn’t want to join the cops.

Popping over to the op-ed pages of the Belfast Telegraph, things look pretty bad. There was a typically hateful and ignorant rant from imperialist lickspittle Kevin Myers. Keep at it, Kevin, the knighthood can’t be far off. Plus a more than usually idiotic piece from Lindy McDowell, who asked us to consider the thousands of lives saved by informers. Either Lindy didn’t read O’Loan or she was deliberately blowing smoke – in any case, I fail to see how the cops using the Mount Vernon UVF as proxy killers actually saved lives. Either way, we have a fine example of unionist “see no evil” politics.

Tele columnist Eamonn McCann found himself in the news this week, not only opening the Free Derry Museum, but addressing the proletariat of Derry along with Anthony McIntyre (now there’s a bad sign) on the subject of policing. Eamonn’s tack was the usual SWP pseudo-radicalism of claiming the cops are the same all over the world – which is how the Socialist Worker lead editorial on policing could maunder about strike-breaking in South Africa without once using the word “sectarianism”. The funny thing is that the Concerned Republicans are dying to get Eamonn to be the anti-policing candidate in Foyle – Eamonn, however, is adamant that he’ll be the anti-water charges candidate.

With all this going on, you might have expected Eamonn’s column in Thursday’s Telegraph to be on policing. But no – Eamonn laid into the Provos over, er, the National Graves Association’s plan to restored the decapitated statue of Seán Russell. Eamonn huffed and puffed about this atrocity on the eve of Holocaust Memorial Day, and just to make things a bit racier, included a thinly-veiled incitement to vandalise the statue again were it ever to be restored. But even Eamonn seems to have sensed this was a bit thin, so he padded the column out with a denunciation of the Medjugorje hoax and the Catholic Church’s historic links to Croatian fascism. No wonder the Prodocracy love Eamonn.

A small story you may have missed – Norn Iron’s voluntary sector, under the umbrella of the Northern Ireland Council for Voluntary Action, called for the restoration of Stormont. Maybe it’s worth explaining that we don’t have a voluntary sector here in the sense that it exists in Britain or the South – what we have in the North is a funded community sector floating on a sea of peace grants. This corrupt setup, employing 30,000 people, is what Newton Emerson calls the “peace industry”, and it’s the biggest employer in the North, bigger even than the civil service. So the headlines should have read, “Peace industry calls for continuation of peace process”.

Also this week, I note from the court reports that nationalist councillors have failed in their bid to get Stroke City’s name officially changed to Derry. Yeah, we’re really on the road to the Republic.

Dawn Purvis was elected leader of the PUP and appointed to the Transitional Assembly in succession to the late David Ervine. She instantly got off to a flying start by refusing to meet Raymond McCord, just as her predecessor had done. Dawn also issued a statement about how the community of Mount Vernon were being victimised. Well yes, they are, by the UVF, but I suspect what Dawn meant is that the UVF are being victimised. Dawn Purvis, by the way, is a member of the Policing Board.

Finally, in view of Lord Maginnis’s fine Deep Southern performance on the news this week, we will be running a readers’ poll. Surely “Ken” is too modest a name for a man like this. So I invite readers’ comments on whether he should be named:

a) Stonewall
b) Scoop
c) Bullrun, or
d) Roscoe.

Cast your votes now!

If there’s one thing that annoys my brain on a regular basis, it’s Fortnight magazine. Actually, it’s been annoying lots of people for donkey’s years. How this journal has got away with pissing down our backs for so long is a source of wonderment.

Let me explain. Fortnight is really a magazine of two halves. The arty-farty Pseuds Corner half, full of poetry and reviews of Belfast’s architecture, caters to Norn Iron’s thin layer of luvvies, who use the magazine to backslap each other. Nobody actually reads that half apart from the luvvies themselves. What the punters read is the political half.

Now, the thing about the political half of Fortnight is that in days of yore, when I started reading it, the mag used to be the voice of liberal unionism and was worth a look for that reason. These days, under the stewardship of Malachi O’Doherty, it’s a very strange creature indeed, the nearest thing Ireland has to a neoconservative journal. And this is despite Fortnight having grand pretensions to being pluralistic and tolerant and letting a thousand flowers bloom. This is perhaps best illustrated by looking at a few of the charmed circle who write for Fortnight regularly and set its tone.

First we have Malachi himself. Malachi has a well-worn argument for how the North can be saved from the apocalyptic forces of Provodom, and the rather less apocalyptic forces of Paisleyism. That is, the unionist middle class should get up off their arse and wrest back political leadership from the plebs. In essence, we should go back to 1966 and have a Captain Terence O’Neill figure in charge, somebody with a bit of class who can lead the great unwashed by the nose, and accept the South Down and Londonderry Party as a respectable junior partner. And Malachi is supposed to be a great progressive thinker.

Then we have the odious Henry McDonald, a man best known for his splenetic attacks on the anti-war movement and the “Provo fascists”. Henry is a signatory to the neocon Euston Manifesto, which he endorsed with the statement “I signed because I know there is a rational, tolerant left out there in Britain and hopefully also Ireland. A left beyond the 21st century version of the Hitler/Stalin pact, the alliance of the silly and the sinister, the toxic fusion of medieval reactionary bigots and totalitarian epigones. And I signed it because I saw this before - in the opportunistic alliance between ultra leftists in Britain and terrorists in Ireland whose armed campaign almost pushed my country to the edge of sectarian civil war.” I quote this in full simply to point out that Henry cut his political teeth in the Workers Party of Ireland, an ultra-Stalinist organisation which maintained an active armed wing for the whole time he was in it, and moreover an outfit that thought Saddam Hussein was the bee’s knees.

Another exemplar of progressive thought often to be found in Fortnight is Dr Anthony McIntyre, proprietor of the Blanket gossip site. Tony, for those who don’t know him, resigned from the Provos when they signed the Good Friday Agreement, and has spent much of his time since demanding that the Provos should declare their formal surrender rather than keep on pretending they have achieved anything. Tony is also an inveterate red-baiter, who never misses an opportunity to shoehorn a denunciation of the “Trots” into the most incongruous articles, and has laboured mightily over the past year to promote the anti-Muslim Danish cartoons and Irshad Manji’s dopey manifesto declaring the defence of the yuppie racists in Denmark to be the Greatest Intellectual Struggle of Our Times. Tony has also of late struck up a cosy relationship with the neoconservative Henry “Scoop” Jackson Society, where he finds himself in the company of well-known radicals like the vainglorious Chomsky-hating derivatives trader Oliver Kamm and the frothing Croat nationalist Marko Attila Hoare.

These neocon farmhands are of only morbid interest in themselves. But they do demonstrate that the main qualification for being a Fortnight bigwig is to be an ex-socialist or ex-republican willing to pen scurrilous attacks on those who still are republicans or socialists. What is, in fact, a pretty nasty neocon rag still manages, amazingly, to pass itself off as a forum for Norn Iron’s leading forward-thinking intellectuals. Personally, I find the Phoenix magazine, which has no political line and no intellectual pretensions, to be a much more stimulating read. I guess Fortnight’s continued existence is proof that nobody ever went broke underestimating the gullibility of the chattering classes.