C.J. Stone's Blog, page 15

Am I an Anti-Semite?

“An anti-Semite used to be a person who disliked Jews; now it is a person who Jews dislike.” – Dr Hajo Meyer, physicist, anti-Zionist campaigner and holocaust survivor.

Sniper fire

I can’t be the only one who has noticed the similarity between the recent video of an Israeli sniper picking off an unarmed Palestinian on the Gaza border, and that scene from Schindler’s List, where the camp commandant, Amon Goeth, takes pot shots from his balcony at the Jewish internees below.

The video, which looks like mobile phone footage, was shot in December 2017, and is accompanied by a commentary by the sniper’s colleagues, who are obviously enjoying the scene.

“Wow, what a video! Yes!” one of them screams, after the body has dropped to the floor, with a note of vicious triumphalism at the death of a complete stranger.

“Son of a bitch,” says another.

“Somebody was hit in the head”; “look, look, wow”; “what a fabulous video”; “I didn’t see it bro’,” they continue, bantering amongst themselves.

“He flew in the air, like with his leg,” says another, laughing.

“Take that you sons of bitches,” is the cool, almost whispered, final comment, probably from the sniper himself.

It’s not clear how many voices there are or how many people are taking part in the conversation, but it must be three, at least, including the sniper, probably more.

It’s like they are playing shoot-’em-up video games, and the people down below are mere avatars on a screen, rather than people with families who might mourn them.

It’s obvious that the Israeli soldiers, at least the ones who took part in this video, do not view their Palestinian neighbours as human beings at all.

Balcony scene

The scene in Schinder’s List is very similar. Ralph Fiennes, who plays SS-Hauptsturmführer Amon Goeth, a real character, is standing, shirtless on his balcony overlooking the concentration camp, with a rifle. We see him aiming the rifle, then a scene through the viewfinder, moving about erratically, as if targeting the people below.

He pauses, takes a drag on his cigarette, aims and focusses once more, finally picking out a single individual, a woman in the centre of the screen, who falls limply to the floor as the rifle cracks, accompanied by an explosion several yards behind.

This bit is exaggerated for cinematic effect, of course, since a normal bullet wouldn’t cause such an explosion. Later shots show him simply picking off random workers without any incendiary accompaniment. People are running about. Others, who are working, pick up the pace of their work. There is a random scream of horror, otherwise the camp just goes on with its daily routine.

We are meant to understand that this is mere sport to the commandant, that he views the people in his charge as little more than animals.

Land Day

Israel has responded to the release of the video by disciplining some of the people who took part. Not the sniper who killed an unarmed Palestinian, of course, but the one who took the film – for “unauthorized filming” and “distribution” of the video – and the others who were adding the commentary. The words on the recording, the army said, “do not suit the degree of restraint expected of IDF soldiers and will be dealt [with] by commanders accordingly.”

That film was taken late last year, but there’s been more footage recently, of Israel Defence Force (IDF) snipers killing Palestinians involved in the Land Day protests on the Gaza border, also using live ammunition. So far 31 have been killed and several hundred injured.

Perhaps this should put into context the row over anti-Semitism in the Labour Party.

Jeremy Corbyn was quick to condemn the killings. This is what he said, in a message read out at a demonstration outside Downing Street:

“The killing and wounding of yet more unarmed Palestinian protesters yesterday by Israeli forces in Gaza is an outrage.

“The majority of the people of the Gaza Strip are stateless refugees, subject to a decade-long blockade and the denial of basic human and political rights.

“More than two thirds are reliant on humanitarian assistance, with limited access to the most basic amenities, such as water and electricity.

“They have a right to protest against their appalling conditions and the continuing blockade and occupation of Palestinian land, and in support of their right to return to their homes and their right to self-determination.”

He added that “firing live ammunition into crowds of unarmed civilians is illegal and inhumane and cannot be tolerated”.

Is it too much like conspiracy theory to suggest that the Israeli government knew that Land Day was coming up, that they had already given the go-ahead for the use of live ammunition, that they knew how Corbyn, a life-long supporter of Palestinian rights, would react, and that the anti-Semitism row was drummed up in the media in anticipation of this? After all, if he’s an anti-Semite, his condemnation of the IDF killings – portrayed as self-defence – isn’t going to carry very much weight is it?

Trope

Of course, the identification of Israel with Nazi Germany is considered an anti-Semitic “trope” by supporters of the Jewish state, and comes into the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance definition of anti-Semitism, which has been adopted by the British government.

“Anti-Semitism is a certain perception of Jews, which may be expressed as hatred toward Jews,” it says. It then goes on to give a list of examples.

This “might include the targeting of the State of Israel, conceived as a Jewish collectivity”; “claiming that the existence of a State of Israel is a racist endeavour”; “applying double standards by requiring of it [Israel] a behaviour not expected or demanded of any other democratic nation”; “comparing Israel to Nazi Germany”; and “accusing the Jews as a people, or Israel as a state, of inventing or exaggerating the Holocaust.”

Spreading conspiracy theories about Jews is also included as one of the examples.

That makes me doubly an anti-Semite then: firstly for making the comparison between a Nazi concentration camp commander and an Israeli sniper, and then for suggesting that members of the Board of Deputies of British Jews – who, along with the Jewish Leadership Council and the Jewish Labour Movement were behind the demonstrations against Corbyn – might have been taking instructions from the Israeli embassy.

What better way of taking the focus away from the Land Day killings?

Jew-hater

I should also add that I do also consider the State of Israel to be a racist endeavour. How else would you describe a country which some people want to make “the nation-state of the Jewish people”, and which allows Jews from anywhere in the world the right to become Israeli citizens, even if they’ve never been to Israel, and have no connection to the land whatsoever, while, simultaneously, allowing Palestinians, who may still hold the keys to property in their former country, and who can trace their ancestry back for several generations, no right of return?

That seems like the very exemplification of racism to me.

Any time you make any comments critical of Israel, you will almost instantaneously find yourself being labelled an anti-Semite; or, even more viscerally, a “Jew-hater”.

But you soon find that there is an inherent racism in the tone of those people accusing you of anti-Semitism. It’s often the same people who are putting up violent, hysterical posts about Muslims, who are also posting about anti-Semitism in the Labour Party; and defence of Israel very often boils down to some form of racism against Arabs: accusing all Palestinians of being terrorists or jihadists, saying they want to die, or that they are paid to die, saying that Palestinian Mother’s allow their children to be killed in order to become Martyrs, and other such Islamophobic tropes. Such language applied to Jews would very rightly be considered the most extreme form of anti-Semitism, and yet this goes unnoticed in the media.

It’s easy to fall into the trap of conflating the Jewish State with the Jewish people. The line between them is made even more slippery by the State of Israel itself, which very deliberately, and almost continuously, attempts to blur the lines between the two.

Zionism is weaponised Judaism. It is not the same as Judaism. Zionism is a 100 year old political project, while Judaism is a 3,000 year old religion. Not every Zionist is a Jew, and many non-Jewish Zionists are themselves anti-Semites. Meanwhile significant numbers of Jews are opposed to Zionism.

But it serves Zionist interests to want to increase anti-Semitism, to want to make Jews uncomfortable in their own country, because this increases support for their project.

Who better to attack than Jeremy Corbyn, a renowned anti-racist campaigner, and the leader of Britain’s historic anti-racist party? What more effective way to muddy the waters?

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Sceptical about Skripal

Is the Novichok story just another Iraqi WMD scam?

Is anyone else sceptical about the latest John le Carré novel being played out on our nightly news?

I’m talking about the Skripal affair, of course, and the idea that a foreign power is attempting to murder people on the streets of our historic cities.

Strangely convenient that it took place in Salisbury: only 8 miles from Porton Down, Britain’s premier microbiological and chemical weapons research facility.

It was Craig Murray, ex British Ambassador to Uzbekistan, who first sounded the alarm on the fact that there was something suspicious about the way the affair was being reported.

In a piece entitled “The Novichok Story Is Indeed Another Iraqi WMD Scam” he pointed out a number of inconsistencies in the government line.

Until that point, he told us, Porton Down had acknowledged that it had never seen any Russian novichoks. Neither had the Organisation for the Prevention of Chemical Weapons (OPCW).

The only witness to the existence of this range of nerve agents was a guy called Mirzayanov, who had actually published the information in a book more than 20 years ago. In it he said that “the chemical components or precursors of… novichok-5 are ordinary organophosphates that can be made at commercial chemical companies that manufacture such products as fertilizers and pesticides.”

In other words Theresa May’s assertion, that it could only be made in certain military installations, was entirely false.

Finally, Murray tells us, the old Soviet chemical weapons plant, which had been doing the work on the novichoks, was actually situated in Uzbekistan, not in Russia, and it was the Americans, not the Russians, who had dismantled the site.

Later Murray pointed out the peculiar phrasing the government used in all its pronouncements about the alleged substance. It was always described as “of a type developed by Russia”.

Look back on all the official statements, including those by the European Union, and by the United States, Germany, France and the UK in their joint statement, and you will see the same set of words being used, over and over again.

“I have a bottle of vodka of a type developed by Russia,” he said in one interview. “It was actually made in Warrington.”

He said that the formula was agreed after pressure was put on Porton Down, who had refused to certify that it was definitely made in Russia. The phrase “of a type developed by Russia” was the diplomatic compromise.

Of course none of this is to say that the attack WASN’T carried out by Russia – and Russia certainly has form in this regard – just that we should really follow Corbyn’s sage advice and refrain from a rush to judgement in these dangerous times… for which lack of loyalty he was immediately condemned as a Kremlin stooge.

But it seems to me he is right, and that any rush to judgement is foolhardy, not to say, exceedingly dangerous.

Russia and the USA are facing off in Syria. Both are heavily armed and poised to defend their interests. Meanwhile the White House has a new national security advisor, in the form of John Bolton: a man renowned for his visceral hatred of Iran, Russia’s close ally and the main supplier of arms to Hezbollah. The dangers of a multi-state flashpoint in the region are urging ever closer.

Are we being prepared, I wonder, for an imminent conflict with Russia? Certainly, if you judge by the news, Putin is at least as bad as Saddam Hussein, if not worse. But no matter how bad you consider Saddam to have been, may I remind you: he never did have those WMDs.

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From The Whitstable Gazette 29/03/18

The editor welcomes letters on any topical subject, but reserves the right to edit them. Letters must include your name and address even when emailed and a daytime telephone number.

Send letters to: The Editor, Room B119 Canterbury College, New Dover Road, Canterbury CT1 3AJ

fax: 01227 762415

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Canterbury Con: car parking charges at Lidl, Sturry Road

Whitstable Views

Lidl won’t be getting a penny more off me after ticket fiasco

I had a wonderful Christmas present from Lidl last year. They charged me £90 for the use of their car park.

This came as a bit of a surprise to me. I’ve been using their car park, on Sturry Road, Canterbury, on and off, for about six years now.

I used it for work as the delivery office is just around the corner, on Military Road.

It’s a bit cheeky, I know, but I always used to make a point of shopping there on my way home. Last financial year, 2016-2017, I spent a total of £732.81 in Lidl, so they were reasonably well compensated for their loss.

I’d stopped using it recently as I’d found another place to park, but on this particular day, in the run up to Christmas, with all the extra staff and the…

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Whitstable Campaign: Carnall Farrar take millions from NHS England

Whitstable Views

Scandal’s implications

Many thanks to Diane Langford and Julie Wassmer, two Whitstable activists who, through hard work and persistence, were able to expose a regional scandal in NHS spending with distinct national implications.

What they discovered was the use of NHS funds to pay consultancy firm, Carnall Farrar, over £6 million for barely 18 months work.

Add to this the fact that Dame Ruth Carnall, a former NHS executive, and partner in Carnall Farrar, was, at the same time, also the Independent Chair of the Programme Board of the local Sustainability & Transformation Plan (STP) – one of 44 regional bodies put in place by NHS England to implement cuts within the NHS – and you can see that there is a conflict of interest here.

If £6 million has gone to just this one firm in just one region, how much more is disappearing in the…

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What is our future under Brexit?

The most significant news item of 2017 was the same one that broke in 2016, and which continues to dominate the headlines to this day. I’m talking about Brexit.

Has there ever been a more divisive subject? It splits the country right down the middle, but not along the usual partisan lines. It divides left from left and right from right.

Personally, I voted to leave, as some of you may remember. I didn’t vote this way because I hate foreigners, or because I prefer a blue passport to a burgundy one. I voted to leave because the EU is itself a reactionary organisation, committed to austerity and the neoliberal agenda.

It destroyed the Greek economy in order to prop up European banks. If that doesn’t make you question its priorities, then nothing will.

That’s what is so strange about the whole Brexit debate. Most of the issues are never talked about. Instead we have a form of megaphone politics, in which different factions of the Conservative Party shout slogans at each other over the airwaves, while the rest of us are excluded.

If anything shows the failure of our media in the 21st Century, it is Brexit.

It has also made for some peculiar bed fellows. So we have Michael Heseltine suggesting that it would be better to have Jeremy Corbyn in Downing Street than to continue with Brexit, while Tony Blair is saying the opposite: that stopping Brexit is more important than electing Labour.

Of course, now that we have finished phase one of the negotiations, everyone can see just how traumatic the process is going to be. Britain will certainly be a poorer country for a while than it was before.

This was inevitable really. The EU can’t afford to make our exit easy as this might start an avalanche of other countries wanting to leave.

The question now is, what kind of future do we see for ourselves?

Is it the deregulated, off-shore tax haven for the super rich that the current Tory government are attempting to create, or a Britain of worker’s rights and public services of the kind that Jeremy Corbyn would prefer?

I suspect that decision might come sooner than you think.

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From The Canterbury Gazette 04/01 /18

The editor welcomes letters on any topical subject, but reserves the right to edit them. Letters must include your name and address even when emailed and a daytime telephone number.

Send letters to: The Editor, Room B119 Canterbury College, New Dover Road, Canterbury CT1 3AJ

fax: 01227 762415

email: kentishgazette@thekmgroup.co.uk

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Bring back the Christmas spirit

But lay off the tat…

So let’s remind ourselves of the real meaning of Christmas, shall we? Hasn’t it always been about the birth of Jesus?

Well no. The early Christians did not celebrate Christmas. Their ritual celebration took place at Easter.

Christmas – December the 25th – was marked in the ancient world as the birthday of a variety of gods, including Attis, Osiris, Dionysus and Sol Invictus, the Invincible Sun.

Early Christians disagreed about the date of Jesus’ birth, suggesting April, May, November and January as possible months, while some early Church Fathers even considered the celebration of birthdays themselves as a pagan habit.

The first known Christmas celebrations took place in Rome in 336 CE. Later, when Christianity became the official religion of Rome, the old religions were suppressed, and many of the popular practices associated with them became incorporated into the Christian year.

What is obvious is that it is about the return of the light in the depths of Midwinter. Christmas Day marks the first point after the solstice when the Sun visibly moves on the horizon and the days get longer.

That, surely, is a good enough reason to celebrate, whoever’s name you do it in. It marks the return of hope to our cold and inhospitable world.

It was always seen as a day of feasting and gift-giving, of lights and greenery and ritual fire. Trouble is, in our modern age, it has also become associated with a mass spending spree of almost mythic proportions.

Just as the worship of Attis and Osiris was supplanted by Christianity over a millennium and a half ago, so the worship of Christ has now become replaced by the worship of brands.

These days Christmas is as much associated with the return of the Coca Cola lorry, or the soft-focus sentimentality of the M&S adverts, as it is with any of its more traditional images.

I’ve found this particularly tiresome this year: the endless display of shiny new products meant to lead us all into temptation. As if the world isn’t already groaning under the weight of our endless demands.

Bring back the spirit of Old Christmas, I say, whichever gods you worship, but lay off the consumer tat.

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From The Whitstable Gazette 21 /12/17

The editor welcomes letters on any topical subject, but reserves the right to edit them. Letters must include your name and address even when emailed and a daytime telephone number.

Send letters to: The Editor, Room B119 Canterbury College, New Dover Road, Canterbury CT1 3AJ

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Riding With Lady Luck: A journey across Europe in a Grand Cherokee Jeep

It was at a toilet-stop somewhere in Hungary that the song came to me. This drear place of nothing by the side of the road, just a pull-off with a scrubby bit of grass bordered by a fence, with a grey toilet block in the middle, two metal doors, one for the Ladies and one for the Gents, but the same filthy, smeared toilets inside. In the end I decided to go against the fence. Then I got back in the car and sat down, exhausted.

There were several cars lined up beside the road. A couple of lorries. Almost everyone was asleep.

A lorry pulled up about 50 yards ahead. The driver got out and went to look in the toilet block. He looked in the Gents and he looked in the Ladies. Then he went back to his cab and got some toilet paper. He saw me clocking him. We both knew what the situation was. These disgusting toilets. But he had no choice. He disappeared into the Ladies and came out several minutes later feeling a whole lot better I expect. He washed his hands with bottled water, got into his cab, then he drove off.

I was so tired. I’d been travelling now for nearly a whole day, with just a short break in some service station somewhere in Germany. All those miles of ravelling road from Calais to wherever I am now. The whine and hiss of the traffic. This world of ceaseless movement, of ceaseless distraction, of cars, of lorries, roaring and racing in either direction, from somewhere to somewhere else. No one wanted to be here. A kind of dead world, dusty grey and full of danger, always moving, always raging, always screaming, like a terrified monster in its death agony.

You have to keep your wits about you all the time, especially in Germany where there is no speed limit and they’re driving these vicious machines that rush up from behind at 140 miles an hours, lights flashing, and you have to get out of the way quick. You’re watching all the time, checking your mirrors, staying alert, focussed, concentrating on the road ahead.

Every so often I’d find myself drifting off into a thought and I’d have to stop it. You can’t afford time off in that lethal world. There’s only you, the road, and the other cars. Everything else is superfluous. It’s a kind of moving meditation on mortality. One slip and you could be dead.

I’d driven through the night, through the darkness and through the rain, hearing the squeak of the wind shield wipers rubbing back and forth sluicing diamonds from the glass, watching the lights from in front and from behind, mile after mile of road in this great arc across a continent, sweeping though invisible landscapes and the shadows of mountains, like dark, unseen presences, through Germany and through Austria, through unknown borders between sleeping nations, through dreams and night time stirrings, through the first flickers of light on the horizon, the rising dawn, to this place – not even a name on a map – a toilet-stop in Hungary…

Read more here.

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Power Trumps Identity

I had a sudden urge to get all controversial on Facebook the other day. This is what I wrote:

“Ruling class women self-identify by class rather than by gender, and then pose as victims. Discuss.”

What I mean by it is that women from the wealthiest families are more concerned with maintaining their wealth than they are with the plight of other women. When they espouse feminist values, I’m suggesting, it is generally as a smokescreen.

Amongst other things, I was thinking of Hillary Clinton and the recent media blitz around her book, What Happened.

She was all over the place: including on Woman’s Hour on Radio 4.

The presenter, Jane Garvey, was almost breathless with excitement. “Honestly, she’s on today,” she said: “the first woman in American history to become the presidential nominee of a major political party.”

The whole thing was slanted as an appeal to women. Hillary Clinton on a woman’s programme, as a woman, asking other women to identify with her.

This was the same woman who, as Secretary of State, had sided with ISIS in Libya, and turned a secure, prosperous, secular country into a basket-case of rival factions, all espousing fundamentalist ideas.

The same woman who, as presidential candidate, had argued for a No Fly Zone over Syria: something which would almost certainly have led to confrontation with Russia and the deaths of millions of women and children.

Clearly, in these two cases, the plight of North African and Middle Eastern women was of much less concern to her than American foreign policy objectives to do with access to oil.

During the election campaign Madeleine Albright, herself an ex-Secretary of State, said there was a “special place in Hell” for women who didn’t support other women. She meant, by not voting for Hillary Clinton.

It was Madeleine Albright who, on hearing that sanctions on Iraq had killed half a million children, had said: “this is a very hard choice, but I think… the price is worth it.”

So beware when hearing very wealthy women trying to come on all progressive with their feminist agenda: greed and lust for power trumps gender identity every time.

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From The Whitstable Gazette 23 /11/17

The editor welcomes letters on any topical subject, but reserves the right to edit them. Letters must include your name and address even when emailed and a daytime telephone number.

Send letters to: The Editor, Room B119 Canterbury College, New Dover Road, Canterbury CT1 3AJ

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In memory of Geoff Gilbertson, 2nd May 1950 – 24th October 2017

[image error]Geoff Gilbertson, co-author, with Anthony Roberts, of the seminal 1980s conspiracy book, The Dark Gods, has died, age 67.

I hardly knew him. I met him once, in the 90s, when we went out to the pub and got drunk together, and then again about four years ago, when he helped me find a website designer. After that I would see him maybe two or three times a year, although he rang me up several times a week. The conversations were always brief and often bizarre. I have to admit that I didn’t always answer the calls.

Nevertheless I think I have an important part to play in Geoff Gilbertson’s story. He told me that the night we went to the pub was the last time he remembered being happy.

Geoff was born on the 2nd May 1950 in Pembury, Kent. His father, John C. Gilbertson, had spied on the Nazis in Bonne, in 1936. He was a linguist and spoke over 30 German dialects. After that he served in Bletchley Park.

John died early and Geoff and his two older sisters, Isolde and Mary, and his twin sister, Jill, were brought up by their mother, Nanette, who struggled with a debilitating physical condition. This became a bone of contention in later years, when Geoff “dropped out” and became a hippy. He was considered to be the black sheep of the family.

Nevertheless he made a strong impression on his young nephews, Mark & Paul Duffield. To them Uncle Geoff was the living embodiment of an alternative lifestyle, doing things on his own terms.

He once took them out in a car that was so rusted that there was no floor in the back. They could see the road skimming by underneath as he drove. He had a house in Glastonbury that was leaning so much with subsidence that the furniture had to be nailed to the floor, and he once swapped a car for a loaf of bread. Such things made a strong impression on their young minds. He was their favourite uncle. If you needed money, he would give it to you, even to the detriment of himself.

[image error] “He travelled through life like a holy fool, making everyone fall in love with him, and he turned many heads along the way…”

He was always in love with someone, although it was usually unrequited. He gave his money away. He travelled through life like a holy fool, making everyone fall in love with him, and he turned many heads along the way. Wherever he found himself he would find a new friend.

According to everyone I spoke to, he blamed the illness that dogged his later years on the writing of the Dark Gods.

It was the ultimate conspiracy book, predating David Icke and Dan Brown by more than a decade. The basic contention was that there was a malignant force in the Universe, undermining humanity at every turn, which the authors attempted to delineate using a variety of sources: from myth, from fiction, from folk story and from history. It was said that the Dark Gods influenced the Stranglers in the making of their 1981 concept album, The Gospel According to the Meninblack.

Geoff told friends that he came under sustained psychic attack after its publication. He had a minor breakdown, and spent some time recuperating in a Monastery. Later he told people he no longer believed many of the things he had written.

In the 90s he became a website designer, and was named website designer of the year by the Guardian. He was very computer savvy and ahead of the curve when it came to tech stuff. Meanwhile he was researching for a new book to counterbalance the Dark Gods hypothesis. He used to walk around with a plastic lizard in his pocket. He said he wanted to reclaim the lizards from David Icke.

This was at Megatripolis, the legendary underground London nightclub which flourished at the height of the Rave era. Geoff took an active part in this. He was known as “Cyber Geoff”, and brought his enthusiasm and his encyclopedic knowledge to the mix, hosting talks, compering on stage and lecturing at the “Parallel Youniversity”, the Megatripolis educational project.

One of his friends from this time, Lucy Wills, thought that Geoff might have had Asperger’s Syndrome.

She said, “Many of the things that made him so special, and also made his life so difficult at times, very much fit in with the new, emerging understanding of this condition.”

It was possibly this that made him neglectful of his health. He didn’t eat properly. He wasn’t grounded. His head was so full of esoteric and occult things, and he could talk for hours on UFOs, but he was lost on Planet Earth, living off junk food and snacks. As his friend, Wayne Sturgeon, put it: “He was so heavenly minded, he was of no earthly use.”

[image error] Barrow Mump by Tom Eveson, pencil on paper early 1980’s, an illustration for the “Dark Gods” by Anthony Roberts and Geoff Gilbertson

According to Tom Eveson, who illustrated the Dark Gods, he was not like your generic, straight-out-of-the-factory human. He had no protective armour. He was incredibly – impossibly – sensitive. He was this very big guy, Tom said, but with a lot of feminine characteristics. There was none of that male ego competitiveness you get with most men. He meant the best for everyone.

Tom met Geoff when they were both attempting to sell prints to the same cafe owner at the same time. This was in Bristol. Later Tom took some prints round to Geoff’s house. It was this large Georgian property in Hotwells, a hippy commune. There was a cafe downstairs which was open all night, and Geoff went down to work behind the counter, leaving Tom in his room. After awhile Tom noticed this strange smell emanating from a cupboard. It was foul: “a demon smell, like it had come from the bowels of hell,” Tom said. He opened the cupboard and there was a sudden rush of oxygen into the cupboard and an intense ball of flame, which set light to everything. Tom rushed downstairs to alert everyone and the fire brigade was called. This must have been in 1977, because there was a Fire Fighter’s strike on, and it was the Army in their Green Goddesses who turned up. The house burnt down and Tom lost all his prints.

He read the Dark Gods three times to get an idea of what it meant, so he could do the illustrations. It chimed with thoughts of his own about the possibility of some malign force governing everything. Later he changed his mind about this. “We don’t need any help fucking ourselves,” he said.

Geoff travelled a lot and it could be years between one meeting and the next.

There had always been an edge of paranoia about him. He talked a lot about UFOs, past lives and conspiracy theory, and other fringe stuff. But in 2008 Wayne Sturgeon met him again and Geoff told him he was being abducted by aliens and having sex with Diana Ross on an alien spaceship. He became agitated and defensive when Wayne expressed reserve. “You’re one of them!” he said.

[image error]After that he disappeared. There were rumours that he had died. He was found vagrant in France and deported and ended up in a mental hospital near the Quaker Centre near Euston. Wayne used to go and visit him. He was in an awful state. He could hardly talk. He’d become infantilised, and spoke in a strange, high-pitched voice. He would come to visit Wayne at his house and Wayne said that even his seven year old daughter was more mature than Geoff. She would lead him around by the hand and help him to do things.

Ah yes: that voice! It was unlike anything you’ve ever heard. When I first heard him speak, on the phone, I had no idea who I was talking to. I thought it was some mad woman ringing me up. It was like this high-pitched twitter. Other people have described it as demented, even sinister. James Hamilton, for whom Geoff had designed a website in the 90s, said it sounded like he was trying to talk to angels.

It went along with his walk, waddling along like a wooden toy, with his palms turned out, and this look of startled bemusement on his face. He was probably on a lot of psychiatric drugs by this time.

James says he blamed his later paralytic psychosis on a skunk joint he took at the Rainbow Centre in Notting Hill in the early 2000s. He said Geoff spiralled inward after that and became very withdrawn, although the inward mood was interspersed by spontaneous bubbles of absurd optimism, equally worrying in its own way.

He said that Geoff never told him he had cancer.

Not that it was a secret. He used to say, “I’ve got cancer but it’s OK because I’ve got good friends.” He was supposed to be going into hospital for an operation, but then declined the treatment. He said, “well I’ve got to go sometime!”

This was the reason that his death came as a surprise. People knew he was ill, but were expecting him to go into hospital soon. But it’s a measure of his essential good nature that even then, when he knew he was going to die, he remained cheerful, coming to friends house just a few days before and offering to help her carry her bags up the stairs.

He died on the 24th October 2017. The cause of death was “malignant neoplasm of the sigmoid colon and ulcerative colitis.” Cancer of the colon, in layman’s terms.

His last words to Wayne, sent via text message, were: “Father healed me.” Just those three words, without any explanation.

You could say that Geoff’s life was a failure. He was immensely talented, almost a genius, but none of it ever came to anything. He was an excellent guitarist, an accomplished artist, a decent writer, a great researcher and a voracious consumer of obscure facts. Later he was a successful web-designer, way ahead of his time. He could have had a brilliant career, had he been better supported with his health issues, and the psychosis not allowed to take over.

But while it’s true to say that he never achieved any personal success, he was definitely an inspirational figure, and a catalyst for many other people’s creativity.

More than anything there was an incredible sweetness about him, a real generosity of spirit. He believed that the world was a beautiful place, and he helped others see it that way.

I wish I could take just one last phone call from him, so I could wish him goodbye.

He is survived by his sister, Isolde.

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http://www.cjstone.co.uk/

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We need PR to heal the nation’s wounds

In my more paranoid moments I’m inclined to think that the Brexit vote last year was a front for another, more sinister, agenda.

It split the country right down the middle. In this age of the polarisation of wealth and austerity, what better way to secure a continuation of the same destructive, neoliberal policies, than by having the nation at war itself?

I’m also starting to wonder if our electoral system isn’t also designed to create conflict.

This occurred to me after a squabble I had with an old friend. She’s a very committed Green Party activist who stood as a candidate in the last election.

I was very upset by this, as it seemed to me that all she could hope to achieve would be to take votes from the Labour Party; which, if you remember, looked all set to suffer a major electoral defeat at the time.

I sent her an angry letter accusing her of party tribalism. Later, after the election, she came to visit me, and we had another squabble: or “a passionate debate” as she prefers to call it.

I told her that the Green Party is basically self-righteous and middle-class. It is self indulgent to support it as it has no social base and is incapable of changing anything. She snapped back that, until we have no-growth policies and electoral reform, the world is doomed to destruction.

The argument went on like this for maybe half an hour or more and, although we parted in a friendly manner, I’ve been thinking about it ever since.

It’s true that the Green Party has very little social base: unlike the Labour Party, which was created by the working class and still retains a large measure of working class loyalty.

But therein lies the Labour Party’s weakness. Being a working class party, the most important thing for Labour voters is jobs, and it doesn’t really matter what kind of jobs those are. Jobs in the arms industry, or in the nuclear industry, say, are just as good as jobs in the NHS.

We need the Green Party to act as a counter-balance to this: to speak for the environment.

We also need all the other parties as well. We need communists and socialists and anarchists, anarcho-communists and anarcho-syndicalists. We need the SNP and Plaid Cymru, the DUP and Sinn Fein. We need the Lib Dems, the Women’s Equality Party and the National Health Party. We even need Ukip, which, despite it’s Little Englander mentality, still represents a distinct strand of opinion within the British electorate. We need all of these parties because we need a Parliament which can speak for the whole of the British people, and not just the neoliberal elites who are currently in control. That means we need proportional representation (PR), so that every vote counts and every individual can feel personally involved in the democratic process.

It’s the first past the post system that leads to this endless to-ing and fro-ing between what are essentially variations of the same neoliberal policies. The ruling elites have all the newspapers and the media, the lawyers and the spin-doctors, the social weaponry, the gadgets, the resources, the time, the expertise, the hackers and software developers, the neoliberal infiltrators, to undermine any future Labour government.

The party of the ruling class, the Conservative Party has all the resources it needs but an ageing and fast declining social base. The electorate, meanwhile, is bitterly divided. Only PR can hope to bring us back together.

But it will still take a Labour government to deliver it.

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