Craig Murray's Blog, page 154

BBC Propaganda

Please read and consider very carefully this brilliant dissection of the BBC’s propaganda blitz on Syria, at the time when the security establishment were trying to propel us into war against Assad, before they decided it was just as profitable to have a war against Assad’s enemies. For the security establishment and arms industry, any dream will do.

I do not agree with every single point made, but I do think every single point is worth considering and agree with a lot of it. My own opinion is that there was a genuine attack, but that the coverage of it was deliberately enhanced and exaggerated to a very large degree. The smoking gun remains the two versions of the soundtrack of Dr Hallam’s “live” interview. The failure to acknowledge that the “charity” featured is directly linked to one of the fighting rebel factions is less spectacular than some of the other possible fabrications, but in itself an appalling dereliction of journalistic integrity.

It is vital to remember the context. This massive propaganda broadcast, entitled “Saving Syria’s Children”, was put out by the BBC just before the crucial vote by the Commons on the government’s request to go to war with Syria, in order to “save Syrian civilians”.

Please do read the main page and I do urge you to follow all the links through because this is very, very important. Particularly in Scotland, millions of people have awoken to the fact that the BBC is purely an organ of state propaganda. The important next step is to acknowledge that the BBC’s dishonesty extends well beyond the subject of Scottish Independence.

Polly Toynbee, Counter-Revolutionary

It is amusing that Polly Toynbee attacks Russell Brand on the grounds there is a real difference between Labour and the Conservatives, on the day Ed Balls argues immigrants must be kept out by amending the EU treaties – in the same paper!

I have never been a great fan of Russell Brand’s media persona, and for a revolutionary to be shacked up with Jemima Khan’s millions is perhaps some kind of extended exercise in post-modern irony as performance art. But Brand’s perception that the neo-con political parties are all the same is absolutely correct, and his is almost the only voice the media will broadcast saying it. When I have been saying precisely the same thing for a decade it is not news. News, apparently, lies not in what is said, but whether or not it is a celebrity who says it.

Not voting is a perfectly reasonable choice. I would prefer that people voted Green, or independent, or SNP in Scotland or Plaid Cymru in Wales. But Brand’s option of not voting is also valid – the entire system of corporations, media and politicians is designed to block real change.

Polly Toynbee is a very rich woman compared to the rest of us, with a great deal of inherited wealth and a Guardian salary well into six figures, for writing a constant stream of tribal pro-Labour drivel. She quotes with approval John Lydon’s observation:

it’s clear, if you’ve got a pile of money in the bank, you vote for people with piles of money in the bank

Which is absolutely true, and why Polly Toynbee votes Labour. Another irony which flies over the head of the humourless old moneybag-toting harridan.

Toynbee is delighted to discover that the rambling Lydon is not really a revolutionary. The rest of the world had known it was only a money-spinning pose for forty years, and he is pretty right wing.

Extraordinary that Toynbee points out the strangeness of treating Russell Brand as a political guru, and then sets up John Lydon instead. The silly old bat really, really doesn’t get irony, does she? Or is Polly Toynbee in fact herself some kind of monumental performance art installation, designed on every level to project the futility and hypocrisy of New Labour?

The Blog That Reaches the Parts…

No other blog can do this

There is a one minute cut in the middle. This may have been an accident, but it excludes the bit where I say that the Labour Party in Dundee was telling people not to vote Independence or the SNP would let all the black people in. If this was cut deliberately as it repeats a racist comment, I think that is a mistake. To fight racism you need to face it squarely, and the extreme shame of Labour should be exposed as widely in possible.

Neo-Con Speed Dating

The TV debates for the Westminster election will offer you a dazzling range of neo-con policies from right wing to very right wing. Conservative, Labour, Liberal or UKIP, any flavour of corporate neo-con control that you like. It is a kind of weird speed dating circle between Cameron, Clegg, Miliband and Farage.

If it had been UKIP with thousands of supporters on George Square yesterday, does anybody doubt the rally would have received much more coverage. The decision about the election debates could not offer starker proof of my thesis that UKIP is an antibody produced by the establishment in response to voter disillusion with the lack of real policy difference between mainstream parties. Protest is to be diverted into a right wing channel that really offers no difference at all.

The fact that UKIP and the Lib Dems are to participate in the electoral debates, whereas the Greens, Plaid Cymru and the SNP – all of which offer genuine alternatives to the neo-con narrative – are not, is indefensible. The SNP will win more MPs than the Liberal Democrats and the Greens will have more votes. UKIP have just won their first ever elected MP – which means they have finally caught up with the Greens. Given equal media access, I expect the Green vote would exceed the UKIP vote too – which is precisely the outcome the broadcasters are desperate to avoid.

The voters must not be shown that other choices, other visions, other policies are possible. You can choose any neo-con you wish.

Naomi Wolf

Here is Naomi Wolf speaking yesterday in Glasgow.

According to Statcounter, so far at least 1,956 people have watched the youtube of my own speech from this website alone – yet the Youtube webcounter is currently showing 288. Can anyone explain this?

With thanks to Node, this is the transcript of my speech:

Thank you very much. It’s great to be here. It’s fantastic to be following Pat. What a speech. You know, we had Jim Murphy and Dougie Alexander saying that Nationalists are all violent and intimidating, whereas actually we’re sitting down to Pat, talking about medieval history and Noam Chomsky.

We have not lost. We are still here and we are still fighting for independence, and we have built with 1.6 million people the biggest social movement in Scottish history, and it’s going forward.

Two weeks before the vote, the Financial Times published that for the first time ever in the United Kingdom, there were now one hundred billionaires, and the Financial Times seemed to be proud of that. It is a disgrace that there are one hundred billionaires in the country where we have food banks because children are going hungry. We are here because we want to create a country which has no hungry children and no billionaires.

The reaction to the referendum result has been for politics at the Westminster level to move still further to the right. We have seen Ukip make advances in the last few days and when you see Ukip campaign on the ground, their strategy, their entire propaganda, is purely based on racism, and it is appalling that they are getting elected in England in bye-elections, and the response to that at Westminster has been to say that everybody should move further to the right and onto the same ground. We’ve got the Labour party saying they’re going to be tougher on immigration, everybody striving to be more racist than the next person. I was in Dundee campaigning and I was told by an old lady she’d been told do not vote for Independence because the SNP will let all the black people in, and that was the Labour party who were saying that.

We have got to recover the moral ground. We have got to build an ethical country, a country we can be proud of – in its politics, in its multi-culturalism, in its inclusion, in its social provision for those more needy, we have got to change.

I’m not interested anyway, frankly, in a few more powers for the Scottish parliament. For me it makes no difference at all if they can change income tax a penny this way, a penny that way, if they’re still sending our children to fight and die in illegal wars.

We have to move towards a future, a future of independence. I don’t just have hope, I have certainty that we’re going to get there, and next time as we campaign as a country, it goes forward, we’re going for full and true independence.

We are saying “No to Trident“, but we are also saying “No to Nato“. We are also saying “No to the pound sterling,” we’ll have our own currency. And we are saying “No to the queen“, we don’t need her. And I’ll tell you this, when the queen was purring down the telephone to David Cameron, that was not purring, that was the death rattle of the monarchy in Scotland.

We are moving forward. We are going to win, and we are going to be a free and independent nation. Thank you.

As regulars here know, my forte is the one hour talk. You can’t develop an argument in five minutes. But my basic thinking, which I tried to get across to people, is that the Tory leaning SNP supporters of Broughty Ferry and their ilk voted No anyway. A genuine argument for the Scotland we want, promoted with real passion, is more appropriate now than Independence Lite, or the “don’t worry nothing will change” approach.

No Nato, No Pound Sterling, No Monarch should be the motto.

Hope Over Fear Rally

That was not purring – that was the death rattle of the monarchy in Scotland.

I was rather proud of that one. A fantastic day in George Square yesterday. I am grateful to whoever in the crowd took this video.

I do not know whether the organisers were taking any closer video or if it will appear. The sound quality was actually rather poor in the square itself. If you went further back than this, you could not hear the speakers at all.

There were 8,000 in the Square most of the time, but attendance over the seven hour period was much higher than that. I met a great many people, particularly in the pub last night, who had missed my speech because they had either left before it or arrived after it. But the atmosphere throughout the day was electric and extremely positive.

I am wondering whether a permanent occupation camp in George Square – right through to Independence – might be a useful initiative. I am looking for somewhere to live in Scotland anyway….

An Ugly Mood

In Heywood and Middleton, a classic Labour northern English seat, UKIP and the Tories combined got 51% of the vote. In Clacton – a deprived coastal area – the Conservatives and UKIP got 83% of the vote.

It is not that Labour and the Lib Dems offer an alternative that is in any significant way less devoted to corporate interests and serving the economic needs of the super-rich. The large majority of voters, and especially those who do not bother to vote, have by now worked out that the difference in their lives is negligible if they have a different member of the political class with his or her nose in the trough at their expense.

But everybody who has seen an actual UKIP campaign knows that their grassroots appeal is simply racist – they promote the idea that it is not the billionaires and ultra-wealthy who are sucking the resources from society, but rather the poor of a different colour. The Conservatives are striving, particularly through rampant Islamophobia, to compete for the atavistic vote.

UKIP is an antibody produced by the political establishment and their paymasters, to counter public disillusion with a dreadful and worsening unequal society. UKIP’s task is to divert public anger away from their exploiters towards specific groups of the poor. It does so very effectively. UKIP’s success yesterday will lead to a race among the mainstream parties to scapegoat vulnerable social groups – immigrants, benefit claimants, unemployed – and to compete in external xenophobia. The next government of the United Kingdom will be right wing to a degree which would have seemed unthinkable for the majority of my life.

Progress On All Fronts

Many thanks to everybody who sent me advice, texts and illustrations on reformatting The Catholic Orangemen of Togo. Apologies I was unwell again so could not respond for a couple of days – and more than 100 emails were received, including several from people who have done substantial work. It will take me some time to work through. I will send individual replies but please be patient. I am however feeling very much better now and seem to have my energy back!

I am going to speak at the Hope Over Fear rally at George Square, Glasgow on Sunday.

The Catholic Orangemen – Help Wanted

I want to bring out a paperback version of The Catholic Orangemen of Togo. It remains available free online in various places. Unfortunately I cannot find an electronic version of the original text, it being somewhere on what has become a large collection of dead laptops.

I therefore subscribed to Adobe Professional and tried to convert one of the online PDFs, but the result was gobbledegook. Can anyone help me with this, and provide a version I can work on in Word or any other programme which works with Open Office Writer? I need to make a couple of corrections and reformat.

If anybody is really clever and can change the text on the cover artwork to a flame orange that can be read, that would be great too.

The contact button at the top of the page works to get me.

Thanks x

The Purpose of Politics

A stark example of the entire purpose of modern politics; careers for the political class. Lib Dems may agree to a referendum on EU membership because it “reflects the thinking of English Lib Dem MPs in seats where they face Eurosceptic pressure”. That is, nothing to do with their beliefs, just trying to save their jobs. Exactly like the Westminster Labour establishment in Scotland.