When the enemy vanishes - kill civilians!

Afghan refugees - BBC News

Nato's current offensive in the town of Marjah is being portrayed as a low casualty mission in the "good war" to get rid of the Taliban.
If you were to believe the news broadcasts, it's already a success.

Since the assault was always intended to be as much a publicity stunt as serving any military objective, Barack Obama and Gordon Brown will certainly be pleased at how the media have snapped into line and acted as stenographers for Nato press releases.
The truth is, most of the few hundred Taliban fighters in Marjah vanished well before the much touted offensive began, not being stupid enough to face up to 15,000 of the most heavily armed troops on the planet.

Much of what we've seen on the TV screens looks like random firing into empty space to give the cameras footage for the evening news bulletins.
But with very few enemy to engage it wasn't long -- two days in fact-- before tragedy struck when a missile attack looking for Taliban to kill managed to slaughter 12 civilians, five of them children -- the very people this war was supposedly tailored to keep out of harm's way.

The attack on Marjah is no different from the numerous other Nato "clear, hold and build" missions -- except in the amount of media ballyhoo.
And there's no reason why this should be different in the outcome, with the Taliban withdrawing tactically and biding its time, before infiltrating back into the town, once the overblown Operation Moshtarak, and its accompanying media circus, has moved on to some other flashpoint of resistance to foreign occupation.

The only reason the invading armies continue fighting a war that cannot be won is in the hope that some escape route can be found, from Obama and Brown's "war of necessity", which
will leave intact the credibility of the Western powers' ability to invade other countries with impunity.

The deaths of the 12 civilians this weekend is a brutal reminder of the heavy price many Afghans will pay in the months and years to come to save the face of those responsible
for prosecuting a futile and unjustifiable war.


[The current fuss about twelve civilians being killed is obviously a PR stunt, weighed against, for instance, the previous wiping-out of an entire wedding party and a delegation of churchmen and politicians en route to a peace conference.]

First published by Stop The War Coalition, 15 February 2010

Theatre of Cruelty

THE THEATRE AND ITS DOUBLE
ANTONIN ARTAUD
Translated by VICTOR CORTI

The very phrase, 'Theatre of Cruelty', has passed into such common currency that few of us bother much to give a lot of consideration to what its creator Antonin Artaud, who died in 1948, was really (literally, sometimes) banging on about. Artaud, an actor, director, playwright and poet, was tangentially linked to the surrealists although what he admired most in drama, and what he strove for, was a kind of ultra-realism. Susan Sontag has said that ‘the course of all recent serious theatre in Western Europe and the Americas can be said to divide into two periods - before Artaud and after Artaud’.

The breadth of Artaud’s thinking allowed him to sweep across arguments and counter-arguments while he studied the theatre and pragmatically looked for the Great Answer to its then stagnation. This revised translation of Artaud’s Theatre of Cruelty Manifestos and related essays can be read two ways: first, from beginning to end, and second, to be thrown on the floor so that parts of it will surface randomly like I-Ching advice.

“We must believe in life’s meaning renewed by theatre, where man fearlessly makes himself master of the unborn, gives birth to it. And everything unborn can still be brought to life, provided we are not satisfied with remaining simple recording instruments.”

In his essay, Theatre and the Plague, Artaud refers to The City of God, where St Augustine points to the similarity between the plague, which kills without destroying any organs, and theatre, “which, without killing, induces the most mysterious changes not only in the minds of indviduals but in a whole nation... The mind believes what it sees and does what it believes, that is the secret of fascination. And in his book, St Augustine does not doubt the reality of this fascination for one moment. Yet conditions must be found to give birth to a spectacle that can fascinate the mind. It is not just a matter of art... And finally from a human point of view we can see that the effect of theatre is as beneficial as the plague, impelling us to see ourselves as we are, making the masks fall and divulging our world’s lies, aimlessness, meanness and even two-facedness.”

In Production and Metaphysics, the beginnings of a seeking after a non-verbal theatre and a look towards Symbolism and the metaphorical world, Artaud points to what he saw as over-literalised drama: “Given theatre as we see it here, one would imagine there was nothing more to know than whether we will have a good fuck, whether we will go to war or be cowardly enough to sue for peace”
He admired Balinese theatre for the “absolute superiority of the producer whose creative ability does away with words.” -and wondered, in Oriental and Western Theatre, if we could strip theatre away from The Words, as everything in theatre outside the script appeared to be subservient to it or merely part of the staging.

Artaud writes like a poet, although he picks at the meaning of meaning like a scientist splitting airs. He felt that current theatre was in decline because it had lost any feeling for seriousness and on the other hand, for laughter. It had “broken away from solemnity, from direct, harmful effectiveness - in a word, from Danger.”
Underlying his dissatisfaction and iconoclastic attitude was a romantic belief in “the profoundly anarchic spirit at the basis of all poetry.” For all his desire to do away with stilted old speech-driven and subjective drama, he yearned after a new kind of grandiosity. Why not? It’s all about spectacle, in the end taking us out of ourselves.

In No More Masterpieces, Artaud looks back at the sources of the Old Grandiosity, to Shakespeare and his ‘followers’. Guilty of instilling a concept of art for art’s sake, art on the one hand and life on the other. “We might rely on this lazy, ineffective idea as long as life outside held good, but there are too many signs that everything which used to sustain our lives no longer does so and we are all mad, desperate and sick. And I urge us to react.”

This probably says much more about the state of French theatre in the early twentieth century than anything. The French were not unique in their long established tradition of declamatory tragic theatre, so risible now. There is a wonderfully stilted, mannered, almost Dalek-voiced John Geilgud recording of Hamlet’s soliliquy, made in the mid Thirties. He would have been pelted with worse than vegetables if he had tried that in The Globe.

...“And bringing two impassioned revelations together on stage, two living fires, two nervous magnetisms, is just as complete, as true, even as decisive as bringing together two bodies in short-lived debauchery is in life.
For this reason I suggest a Theatre of Cruelty.
With this mania we all have today for belittling everything, as soon as I said ‘cruelty’ everyone took it to mean ‘blood’. But a ‘theatre of cruelty’ means theatre that is difficult and cruel for myself first of all.”

Above all a pragmatist, Artaud proposed among other things a theatre where the audience would be hypnotised by violent, pulverising images, “mesmerising the audience’s sensibilities, caught in the drama as if in a vortex of higher forces.”

After the publication of his First Manifesto, he discussed its implications with a few friends and associates, and this book includes some of his letters on the subject, devoted to clarifying the meaning of the manifesto or taking up other theorists on their ideas about staging; which led to the Second Manifesto, which emphasised the importance, as Artaud saw it, of creating transcendence in the audience and of replacing quotidian narrative drama with timeless primal forces.
Quite grandiose, as aspirations go. But the inheritors of the Theatre of Cruelty are everywhere: Second City in the US, 7:84 in Scotland; In England, the Cornwall-based Kneehigh Company, for instance; and appropriately in the vanguard are the French troupes Archaos and Cirque du Soliel.

The extensive appendix to this book is worth a random dip in itself, from the author’s ‘notes in the margin’ to the THEATRE OF CRUELTY Company Limited document.

The Theatre and Its Double is published by Oneworld Classics £7.99

Gaza interview by Tom Bigwood, BCfm

On the 18th January 2010, just a few days after The Flight Out Of Egypt, I was interviewed on BCfm Radio, and it sounded like this:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FWQ9Hmn1O74

Egypt and Viva Palestina: an act of state piracy

After the Viva Palestina 3 Convoy members were forced to leave Gaza after only 24 hours, to buy visas clearing them to be held illegally in Cairo Airport, missing their pre-booked flights home and being blackmailed into buying new Egyptair flights, one of our team leaders gave this resume of the restrictions imposed on the captives, and of their likely prospects:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TgD_QsZz5Cw

My most recent memories of the 3rd siege-lifting Convoy to Gaza are of incarceration.
Having forced the convoy members to leave Gaza prematurely, the Egyptian Authorities made us pay for yet another Entry Visa, our second in one week. But this was only to allow us to be taken straight, not to hotels in Cairo to await our booked flights home; it was to Cairo Airport, where we were held, in an act of state piracy, as prisoners, our movements curtailed to the extent of (at first) denying access to food and water.
Although we were later assured that we could book flights home on airlines of choice, as we were denied access to all but the offices of Egyptair, this was not a practicable option. We were being blackmailed into using Egypt's own airline to leave the country at our own considerable expense as deportees, many of us having cancelled two consecutive flights home because of the changes to our schedule being forced on us.
If we had not been able to use our mobile phones and laptop computers to find alternatives, most of us would still be, as I write on Monday 11th, prisoners in Cairo. Two of our number made a principled stand and demanded the right to be able to travel home on their earlier booked flights. They are still in the airport, and are not the only ones we left behind.
Although we were made very much aware of how much the people of Egypt supported us and the beleagured people of Palestine, we have to admit that their president, Mr Mubarak, remains in power only by kow-towing to the US/UK/Israeli axis.

The lowest point in our struggle came on the first, long, night we were held at al-Arish Port, negotiating with the Egyptian authorities to be allowed in our entirety into Gaza. We were attacked by riot police with water cannon, tear gas and rubber bullets, and a battalion of hired thugs throwing rocks.

See: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gObPx_3NOWA&feature=player_embedded

Our all-too brief time in Gaza was fired by the overwhelming hospitality and inspiring activity, intellectual, artistic and social, of the Gazans - especially, for me, the chance to meet leading political caricaturist Majed Badra. Throughout the long journey south we were energised by the welcomes and support, from individuals in the street to ministerial levels,in the countries through which we passed, - difficult to single out the best of so many positive experiences, but especially Syria, which turned into a great big love-in, and both the people and government of Turkey. This is not the end of our connection with Gaza: many of us will be keeping in regular touch with the people we were able to meet. And we hope one day soon to be able to welcome them to our country, too, as free people.

Tinpot tyrant aint seen nothin yet

By George Galloway on Jan 11, 10 07:01 AM

I have been in a few dangerous places in my life. In the mid 80s along with an ITN news crew I was bombed by the Ethiopian air force.

My face pressing into the dirt, with no cover around, I saw the shrapnel tear and kill small children and watched others die on a wooden table in a grass hut after the bombers had gone.
I have been bombed by Israel in Beirut and held with an Israeli machine gun at my chest in Nablus during the first Iraq war.
Involuntarily, I put my hands up and the blue-eyed blonde "Israeli" said that if I didn't put my hands down he would kill me.

I've never, however, been in a more dangerous situation than last week in the tiny Sinai port of Al Arish to which the Egyptian dictatorship had insisted we bring our convoy.

Five hundred foreigners from 17 different nationalities with 200 vehicles were crammed into a compound without water, food or toilet facilities. They included 10 Turkish MPs one of whom was the chairman of Turkey's foreign relations committee.

We captured on film from a third floor office the thugs of the Mukhabarat (Intelligence) piling stones and sharpening their sticks behind the backs of several ranks of riot police with helmets, batons and shields. Then mayhem.

We may have complaints about our police, but I tell you, when you see policemen hurling half-bricks into a crowd of women and men who'd come to deliver medicine to desperate people under siege, you thank your lucky stars we don't live in such a state. Fifty five of our 500 were wounded and, but for the shocking effect on Arab public opinion (our own media didn't give a damn) of the live footage (all on Youtube now), we might still be there yet.

Next day, the dictatorship wanted us on our way. We refused to leave without our wounded comrades and the seven of our number who had been taken prisoner. After another stand-off our demands were met and we proceeded to a tumultuous welcome in Gaza our numbers complete. Word came to me from inside the Egyptian tyranny that I was to be arrested when we came out. Had that happened while I was surrounded by 500 pumped up convoy members there would have been serious trouble.

So I sent them the message that I would come out in the dead of the night before and face the music alone but for my old friend Scots journalist Ron McKay. McKay is a thriller writer these days but what happened next would have taxed even his imagination. We emerged into the hands of a grim phalanx of mainly plain clothed secret policemen, none of whom could speak English. They tried to keep our passports but we refused to budge without them - even though there was menace in the air, or perhaps because of it.

They bundled us into an unmarked van which they refused to let us climb out of, at one stage man-handling us. An Egyptian gumshoe journalist from the Daily News tried to interview us but he was battered away. We were driven off at speed. I knew we were not going to be killed as we were able to make the necessary calls - well at least the call to the Press Association which makes all the difference in these situations. We made the formal call to the British Foreign Office but it wasn't worth the money. During the five-hour journey to Cairo the British diplomats did nothing but tell us to co-operate. That co-operation was difficult as the police could speak no English and were saying nothing. Word came from London that Nile News, a mouthpiece of the dictatorship, were reporting in the morning the seven convoy prisoners we had released at al Arish were to be re-arrested on emerging from Gaza. Thus the bloodbath we sought to avoid now looked inevitable. We demanded to return to the Gaza-Egypt border but were refused. At Cairo airport we refused to enter the terminal and tried to hail a taxi to take us back.

Security forces goons pushed us physically into the airport building and gave close quarter attention to both of us, even in the toilet. They followed us everywhere and when McKay took a picture there was nearly a serious incident. They ushered us up to the entrance of the BA plane and the first English speaker of the night stepped forward to declare me persona non grata in Egypt. I made my own declaration to him which was that he and his fellow torturers would one day face the wrath of the Egyptian people, who had queued up at the airport in full view of the goons, to shake hands with us. Later, his department stated I had been banned from Egypt because I was "a trouble-maker". Mr Tinpot tyrant 99.99 of the vote Mubarak, you ain't seen nothing yet.

Source:http://blogs.dailyrecord.co.uk/georgegalloway/2010/01/tinpot-tyrant-aint-seen-nothin.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+TheDailyRecord%2FGeorgeGalloway+%28The+Daily+Record+-+George+Galloway%29

Celebrity war criminal Clinton interferes in Palestine

Palestinians risk "irking" the international community by refusing to re-open 'peace' talks with the Zionists, says veteran war-criminal Bill Clinton, ex US President.
"This is the first time that any Israeli government has said we will not issue any new permits and not have any new settlements and that should be enough to open the door and start talking," said Clinton, as yet more palestinian homes were bulldozed all over the West Bank and the 'Judaising' of Jerusalem proceeded by leaps and bounds. His position has always been that the US base known by the invaders as Israel must come well before any consideration of the rights of its inhabitants. Any interventions he makes in world affairs must be judged against his first major act of international diplomacy: the bombing of Bagdhad in June 1993, killing 60 innocent God-fearing citizens, including artist Leila al Attar, in retaliation for an alleged plot to assassinate the previous president, George Bush Senior.
The attack "was essential to send a message to those who engage in state-sponsored terrorism".

Bill Clinton: US settlements policy has changed
Former US president Bill Clinton urged the Palestinians on Sunday to accept America's modification of its anti-settlement policy and return to the bargaining table. "Take where we are and the reformulation of the settlement issue and find a way [to move forward]," Clinton told a Jerusalem gathering of high level American and Israeli policy makers at the Saban Forum in Jerusalem.
http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?cid=1258027297193&pagename=JPost%2FJPArticle%2FShowFull

The Public Liability Scam

Art Fairs have always been a seriously expensive risk for the participants. And no matter how hard they try to keep the wall prices down, from the public's point of view everything on offer seems terribly costly, even at the 'affordable' fairs. This is because the overheads are gigantic: hiring the venue, raising and striking the stalls, paying the staff and advertising, no matter what the style of show may be.
I took part in one such fair, The Big Art Fair, in London's Alexandra Palace, 1994. The expense wasn't too great as we were allowed to enter a fixed number of paintings and they would be hung wherever there was room. The fact that the organisers forgot to insist on a maximum size, resulting in a certain chaos, is another story.
There is something about the Aly Paly that seems to attract artists and businessmen with grandiosity problems the way flames attract moths. Another such fair, the Great Art Show, took place there in 2006. I know all about that because again, dear readers, I could not resist.

Having paid a large fee to hire a stall, I found there had been a 'sea change'. During the intervening years, the creep of litigation culture had engulfed the art world; Public Liability Cover was now mandatory for all exhibitors - another expense to eat into our tiny earnings.
I took part in what I swear will have been my last art fair ever, in the sweltering summer of '09, Chelsea Old Town Hall. Before, during and after forking out our hire fees, we the artists were continually reminded by the organiser that we Must Have Public Liability Cover - checks would be made, and if we were found to be without our figleaf we would be out on the street.
In the event, no such checks were made, but it all made it look so obvious that the litigation industry has everyone by the balls. Even little local art trails now expect all artists to have Cover.
A friend of mine who has set up an erstwhile empty shop in South Bristol as a low-rent artspace also has to have a certificate of cover - her landlord insists. And I'll bet the Council are doing the same to him.

It was not so when I took over a Marylebone High Street shop for a month under the wing of Alternative Arts, back in 1995.
I have spoken to the Government Department for Business, Innovations and Skills (http://www.direct.gov.uk/) and they could tell me nothing about the reason for this new and onerous demand, but the Health and Safety Executive (http://www.hse.gov.uk/) were able to tell me "This is not a health-and-safety matter in law. It is only optional."
The Citizens' Advice Bureau was able to assure me that "There is no known single original source of this necessity, just a general move towards the requirement by companies."
As the country grows more litigous?
"Yes, as the country grows more litigous."
This can only get bigger and more invasive; it has not reached some kind of plateau, that is certain. As long as law firms recognise the chance of turning a profit and the American culture of blame smothers any sense of our personal responsibility it can only get worse. Artists who have no material possessions (most of them) have nothing to lose by risking a court appearance over some brat's stubbed toe, and they should stand against this. Unfortunately it tends to be those with their own car, computer or even house who find themselves in this position; they do have something to lose if a stranger suffers a broken high heel or bangs a head on a low ceiling and is incapable of simply communicating, asking for an apology, as we used to do ten years ago.

Egyptian authorities destroying Gaza aid

By Iqbal Tamimi

The headlines came in some newspapers two days ago screaming ‘ The poor of Sinai are looting the aid of the poor of Gaza’...this is alarming I thought, the aid was there for a very long time, no one from AlAreesh’s poor ever touched a grain of rice before, what was happening?

It was found that at the early hours of dawn, a few boys ran towards the sport stadium in AlAreesh where tons of humanitarian aid for Gaza was piling up, they have started to loot whatever their hands could reach, and then tens of grownups followed them to take what remained of the food and other urgently needed aid for Gaza.

Is this possible I thought? Why there were no security forces to guard those tons of aid in food and other consumer goods especially that they were supposed to reach the orphans and the needy in Gaza who suffered the Israeli bombardment and the siege?

It has been reported that one of the witnesses said that ‘the poor kids were able to loot a large amount of food aid which has been lying there in the sun since last January’...But then he burst to tears.

I guess he was crying because both the ones on the Egyptian side who committed the looting and the people of Gaza on the other side who are supposed to get the aid are extremely poor. At least one of them should have benefited from the food.

Other witnesses said that there were some Egyptian police security present but the children threw some stones at them and kept them away; others said that they have phoned the police and reported that there is looting going on, but the police never responded.

One wonders, why this aid that was laying there since January has not been looted before or delivered. The answer came from the poor of AlAreesh themselves. One boy carrying a bag of rice on his shoulders in a hurry said: ‘we are not thieves, we are only poor. We came to take whatever we can benefit from because the authorities piled everything here to burn it; we are taking rice, flour, tinned food, oil, cheese, and blankets’.

The Egyptian police refused to comment on the looting, but confirmed that the tons piling there were gathered to be burned down because all of it was inedible any more; all expired and no more safe for human consumption.....WHY on Earth has such a thing been allowed to happen? Why were tons of food aid to starving people not allowed to go through to Gaza? Why feed the fire instead of feeding the people on either side? Why did the North Sinai Governor Mohamed Shousha and the Red Crescent official fail to respond to all the attempts to call them? Why burn all this effort that has been a collaborative effort of millions of people and charity donors around the world? Why has Egypt stooped so low?

It was found that the authorities in Egypt have already burned down in May more than 250 tons of food aid that came originally last January as a donation from the Libyan people, after months exposure to the heat of the sun and finding out that it was no longer edible or fit for human consumption.

Why would Egypt not facilitate the delivery of the food to the starving poor in Gaza? Through the sea...through the crossings...through the air...or even through the tunnels that were gassed by the Egyptian authorities to deter any hungry soul from reaching out for a loaf of bread.....why Egypt are you frightened of being caught red-handed while trying to feed the hungry orphans? Why Egypt? WHY????