Lies of Our Times

Ezra LeRant and the Big Lie

Colour of conflict-Rule of law separates Israel from Palestinians-By Ezra Levant -- Calgary Sun, Mon, July 18, 2005

How did I miss this hmm, must have been overwhelmed with the historical revisionism being spouted off in the Calgary Sun by that other right wing columnist; Dink Byfield.

And low and behold here is another case of historical revisionism, the big lie of Zionism being blathered about by LeRant. It's the lie we all grew up with after the 1948 annexation and occupation of Palestine. That the Arab section was a desert and the Zionists brought agriculture, irrigation and productivity to the land.

What they did was actually take over olive groves and orange groves that has been the source of Palistines wealth for hundreds of years. Agriculture in Palestine 1948

Learning their lessons from Goebbels the Zionists created the 'big lie' to justify their 'Anschluss' of Palestine from the British protectorate because they needed 'Lebensraum'. And this 'big lie' is repeated again in LeRant's cloumn.

'Most of Israel is a desert. But half of Israel is lush green. It wasn't always this way. When Zionists a century ago set about building modern Israel, they had to build irrigation projects. Millions of trees were planted. Now Israel is a large agricultural exporter; in the words of its former prime minister, David Ben Gurion, the desert was made to bloom. But the land is only green in the Jewish areas of the country; Arab villages, especially those areas under control of the Palestinian Authority, are brown and dead. It is possible to spot the border between Israel and Lebanon or Syria by looking to see where the green ends and the brown begins. It's the reason why the pre-1967 border between Israel and Jordan was known as the Green Line. Why is this? Many explanations, no doubt -- the Zionist ideology was rooted in the land. The Jews invested in developing irrigation and other agricultural technology. But the real reason is the same reason why Israel is a success and Arab nations -- and the would-be nation of Arab Palestine -- are failures. '

Gee, LeRant what could that be?

"The Arab world doesn't have rule of law, while the Jewish state does.".

Gee Ezra would that be Talamudic law? Since Isreal is a religious state. And gee Ezra thats a broad brush stroke to paint all Arabs with, including peoples of the Middle East who are not Jews but are also not Arabs.

Some are Muslims so they adhere to Muslim Shira law. Some are Christians and they abide by the Old and New Testament laws, some rooted in Judaism. Some are communists, and they follow the Labour Theory of Value, a law of economics. Some have gone to Oxford and Harvard and follow common law of English origin. Some follow Napoleanic Law. Some are Druze and have their own community laws they have followed for centuries.

Nope not to racist zionist Ezra, the "Arabs" are all primitive lawless peoples, despite many of them being of the same semitic root cultures as the Jews.

Some of the Palestinians are not even Arabs, just as Kurds are not Arabs, but with the broad racist brush of the Zionist apologists like LeRant, they all get lumped together.

There is a simple reason, to deny the real history of the Zionist State in Isreal.

That it was founded by Zionist terrorists who so terrified the British and the UN that they succumbed to them, allowing them territory in Palestine.

The Zionist state and its military machine then spent twenty years pushing the Palestinian and Isreali Arab community out. As they are doing today destroying Palestinatian villages, olive groves and orange groves, in order to build their new Berlin Wall, err security wall.

Irrigation was not a Zionist invention, contrary to LeRant, it was adapted by them for use in Palestine. Until then irrigation was based on artisian wells and troughing used by the Palistinians. The introduction of large scale irrigation coincided with the development of capitalist agribusiness, that is large scale farming for export. While the Palestinians were farming on a village basis.

The types of agriculture which take place in Palestine are annual and seasonal agricultures such as grains and vegetables, or lasting agricultures such as fruitful trees. Grain plantation was flourished in Marj ben Amer, Gaza Plain, Bier Sheba and some of the inside plains; and vegetable plantation was flourished in the coastal plain around Java and Ramlah and in the Jordan Valley. The most important kind of fruitful trees is the citrus trees which were planted by modern manner of plantation. At the beginning, only the Arabs planted this kind of trees which increased in the period between 1895 and 1915; the Planted area increased from (6.600) donums to (30.000) donums, and the production increased from (18.199) tons to (64.000) tons. Citrus trees concentrated in the coastal plain between Haifa and Gaza and in the Jordan River. The Java orange is one of the best kinds of the Palestinian orange due to the thickness of its peal, its nice aroma and to its relative freedom from seeds. This kind of orange was being exported to Damascus, East of Jordan, Saudi Arabia, England and France. The exported orange in the years 1913/1914 reached about (1.553.861) boxes. Agriculture in Palestine during the British Mandate

Until the Isreali invasion of 1967 both Palestinian and Isreali agriculture were on par. It was the direct result of the annexation and occupation of the Gaza Strip and West Bank by the Zionist State that destroyed their economic competitors. The destruction continues today with occupation troops, settlers , and Sharon's Berlin Wall being built through the agricultural lands of the Palestinians.

So congratulations for repeating the 'Big Lie' of Zionism and embellishing it with a racist generaliztion of the non-Zionist people of the middle east. You win the Goebbels award for journalism.

Impacts of Water and Export Market Restrictions on Palestinian Agriculture
Agriculture remains a dominant sector of the Palestinian economy. It represents a major component of the economy’s GDP, and employs a large fraction of the population. Furthermore, the agricultural sector is a major earner of foreign exchange and supplies the basic needs of the majority of the local population. In times of difficulty, the agricultural sector has acted as a buffer that absorbs large scores of unemployed people who lost their jobs in Israel or other local sectors of the economy. Palestinian agriculture is constrained by available land and water, as well as access to markets. These constraints have been the object of political conflict, as Israeli authorities have limited available land, water and markets.

In 1967, Palestinian agricultural production was almost identical to Israel's: tomatoes, cucumbers and melons were roughly half of Israel's crop; plums and grape production were equal to Israel's; and Palestinian production of olives, dates and almonds was higher. At that time, the West Bank exported 80% of the entire vegetable crop it produced, and 45% of total fruit production (Hazboun, S., 1986).

The agricultural sector was hit hard after Israel occupied the West Bank and Gaza Strip. Thereafter the sector’s contribution to Gross Domestic Product (GDP) in the Palestinian Occupied Territories declined. Between 1968/1970 and 1983/1985 the percentage of agricultural contribution to the overall GDP in the West Bank fell from 37.4-53.5% to 18.5-25.4% (UNCTAD, 1990). The labour force employed in this sector has also declined. Between 1969 and 1985, the agricultural labour force, as a percentage of the total labour force, fell from 46 to 27.4% (Kahan, D., 1987).

Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Harper

Stephen Harper defends his cowboy get-up, saying he can't please everyone

To see the funny picture of Harper go to: Harpers Tarnished Image

Sure he defends looking stupid, and as quick as he does his media flacks try instant makeover. They do this photo op and dress him up like a construction worker this weekend on the BBQ circuit in Ontario. But when it came to the walk about Reaction to the conservative leader Saturday appeared muted. Few people recognized him as he walked around the festivities in a blue dress shirt and dark grey slacks.

Opps maybe he should have worn his funny Stampede outfit.

Since we have a shortage of construction workers in Alberta and B.C. whats the subtext to this do ya think?


"Wot me Worry?
If they boot me out as party leader....
.... I can always get work up in Fort McMurray....
.....or maybe as a spokesman for Rona"

And still this hasn't helped the Harper or his party.

This poll has been on Canoe News for the past three days. And it shows what legitimate polls showed over the past two weeks, Harper is the albatross around the neck of the Conservative Party at best. Or a cartoon politcal characture;Wiley E. Harper, at worst.

What can the Tories do to close the popularity gap with the Liberals?

Elect a new leader. 47%
Alter political stances. 19%
Extreme makeover: Harper edition. 9%
Form a new party. 4%
Absolutely nothing. 21%

Total Votes for this Question: 10132

This is a non scientific poll.

I love the 21% who say do nothing, they must be from Calgary.

Like the nice Calgary folks now living in Ontario that want the Klein revolution for the rest of Canada and see the Harper as the Calgarian who can deliver it.

Kathie and Allan Anderson, who lived in Calgary for seven years, are rhyming off the glories of Alberta: charter schools, private liquor stores, private kiosks to dispense driver's licences. Mr. Harper, dressed in a golf shirt and dress slacks, approaches.

"I have to tell this story," Mr. Harper says.

"When I was 17, I worked at the Liquor Control Board of Ontario at Yonge and Eglinton. A woman walked up with a bottle of Baby Duck and asked: 'Sir, is there anything in this price range that tastes a bit better?' 'Yes, Ma'am,' the manager replied. 'Turpentine.'"

The guests laugh. Mr. Harper chuckles and adds: "Customer service."

This anecdote neatly packs in everything the leader of the Opposition wants to get across about himself while zipping around southern Ontario in a bright blue Chevy van emblazoned with "Stephen Harper Summer Tour 2005": (a) He's an Ontario boy, born and bred; (b) he's an ordinary guy who worked at the liquor store as a kid; (c) he likes to kick back and tell funny stories; and (d) having moved to Alberta in 1978, he wants to export that province's model, where government is minimal and private enterprise, that prerequisite for good customer service, is king.

'Real' Harper takes it on the road

To know him is to love him, his fans insist

But to other Canadians, those who live outside of Calgary, Mr. Harpers make over as social conservative has missed the boat.

"But among those who did, ( recognize Mr. Harper [ep] ) the response was as polarized as views on same-sex marriage. "He walked right past me and that's just fine,'' said Lori Mallory with a laugh. Another man, who would only identify himself as Daniel, shook his head and glared at Harper as the politician passed. He called Harper's same-sex marriage stance "offensive and divisive.His stance on the whole same-sex thing is problematic and not representative of a truly democratic society where you support all minorities,'' he said.

Harper is talking himself out of electoral success says Ottawa Sun columnist.

Ike Awgu Friday July 22, 2005

This man and his party desperately need a wake-up call -- someone needs to remind them that this is the 21st century and legislating like we still use horse-drawn chariots will not endear them to voters. I don't want to be overly critical, but I'm angry only because I care. How many nights however, have you spent awake at night wondering if you'll be able to pay your mortgage? Or your next month's rent? How about tuition for your kids? What on Earth ever happened to the Conservative Party talking about a serious decrease in taxes?

Gee, funny that, I just said the same thing here the other day.

In a book review of William Johnson's new political bio of Harper, Stephen Harper and the Future of Canada,William Watson a conservative reviews the book for the right wing Financial Post.

While Johnson tries to make Harper into PET2 in his bio, Watson points out the difference between the Old Harper and the New Harper, is classic Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.

Is Harper our next Trudeau? William Watson, Financial Post
Friday, July 22, 2005

Johnson argues the old Stephen Harper still exists. But does he? The old Stephen Harper once voted with just 13% of Reformers who didn't want the party to take a position on the definition of marriage, arguing that such decisions should be personal, not partisan. But now the big plank in his platform seems to be same-sex marriage. (As explained by Johnson, Harper's current position is more subtle than he's usually given credit for: Although the courts knocked down a definition of marriage that had in fact been judge-created, they might show greater deference to a definition Parliament had provided.) The old Stephen Harper opposed business subsidies and wanted all provinces treated equally. But in our Gomery spring, as the Liberals pandered shamelessly, there seemed no pander the Harper conservatives wouldn't cover. They condemned the practice of bribing citizens with their own money but committed to carrying through on all the Liberal promises."

Oh and speaking of bribery how's this for justifying the unjustifiable?

Harper says bribery OK, Anne Dawson - Windsor Star - June 21, 2005
Conservative Leader Stephen Harper continued on Monday to defend the actions of his MP Gurmant Grewal in the tape scandal, saying it is OK if someone attempts bribery but it is wrong for someone to take a bribe.

Not very Trudeau like, he would have just flipped them the bird and told them Fuddle Duddle.

Instead Harper construes that offering a bribe is less of an offense than accepting it. Hmmm that's NOT what the Criminal Code says:


119. (1) Every one who

(a) being the holder of a judicial office, or being a member of Parliament or of the legislature of a province, corruptly

(i) accepts or obtains,

(ii) agrees to accept, or

(iii) attempts to obtain,

any money, valuable consideration, office, place or employment for himself or another person in respect of anything done or omitted or to be done or omitted by him in his official capacity, or

(b) gives or offers, corruptly, to a person mentioned in paragraph (a) any money, valuable consideration, office, place or employment in respect of anything done or omitted or to be done or omitted by him in his official capacity for himself or another person,

is guilty of an indictable offence and liable to imprisonment for a term not exceeding fourteen years.

Consent of Attorney General


(2) No proceedings against a person who holds a judicial office shall be instituted under this section without the consent in writing of the Attorney General of Canada.

R.S., c. C-34, s. 108.


Another Harper foot in mouth opps. While it may be common practice or accepted political practice in Grewal's former country of residence; Liberia, in Canada bribery is still against the law. And Harper, being Mr. Law and Order, should not have countenanced this no matter what. But that's the difference between the old Harper, Dr. Jekyl, and the new Mr. Harper.

Mr. Harper who defends breaking the law by his rogue MP then turns around and attacks Canadians of unnamed 'ethnic backgrounds' as terrorists. He does this in the U.S. to announce that he wants to create a joint Homealnd Security program with the Americans. A FireWall North America like he once proposed for Alberta.

The Grewal affair occured in an ethnic community, and while it's a criminal affair of bribery, well thats excusable to Mr.Harper and he doesn't say that all Indo Canadians are criminals because of the Grewal affair.

But in the U.S. away from home he announces that some generic 'ethnic' community is full of terrorists and thats bad.

In Canada our experince of terrorist actions recently has been around Air India bombings, And this occured because of political conflicts in India that imapacted on a specific ethnic community in Vancouver, the same one that is now embroiled in the Grewal affair.

So what the hell is Harper really saying? That he wants security checks and ethnic profiling of Indo Canadians? No of course not, in his own inimical racist way he was refering to Muslim Canadians, aw shucks lets be clear he means anyone who isn't white. The term 'ethnic copmmunities' is right wing talk for communities of poeple of colour. Or as the right has always called them, coloured people.

Except he forgets that their are white muslims, and when he says 'ethnic communities' I don't think he is refering to Boznians.

Harper wants to be PM. William Johnson thinks he is the second coming of P. E. Trudeau, I think not.

Even his biographer admits Mr. Harper, is well a bit of a cold fish.

"Canadians," writes Montreal journalist William Johnson in in an otherwise flattering biography released this month, Stephen Harper and the Future of Canada, "sense in him the absence of a common touch, of humanity, and for that reason they have not warmed to him or developed trust, despite all his impressive qualities. He is someone you can admire without really liking."

Yeah if you are a conservative from Calgary. The once policy wonk Harper is a fish out of water, when it comes to populist politics he has become the hardliner Mr. Harper.

Poor Mr. Harper like Mr. Hyde is currently the bull in the china shop of Canadian politics and no makeover will help him out of this dellima. Mr. Harper suffers from being a born again social conservative,with a proclivity for putting his foot in his mouth a meglomaniac need to control the party, and poor photo ops.

Let US Prey

Pray: Canada's social conservatives are anxious to have their voices heard where it really counts in a democracy A Vancouver Sun Exclusive, July 23, 2005

Actually they should have spelled it 'Prey'.

And they aren't Canadian they are an American Religious Corporation.

Vancouver Sun -- The gay marriage debate is helping Canada's social conservative movement expand its reach and influence, although the so-called "sleeping giant" of Canadian politics has internal conflicts and is still at the toddler stage compared to the powerful U.S. religious right movement.

Good let's put them in public day care where they belong and teach them about the important values of pluralistic civil society that allows them their religious rights. A society that they hate and are attempting to return to a Medieval theocracy,or a mythical Puritan American society.

Welcome to the national headquarters of Focus on the Family Canada, an affiliate of the Colorado-based Focus on the Family, perhaps the most powerful social conservative group in the U.S. The office of Focus Canada is far more modest than the American headquarters presided over by Dr. James Dobson, who since he began his folksy flagship radio show in 1977 has built a $150-million-a-year family values empire so influential that he has been called the religious right's new kingmaker and the pope of evangelical America.

That's because in the U.S. anyone can form a 'church" or religious organisation under their income tax act. Its the greatest single source of shysters and rip off artists pretending to be charities, when they are political lobbies. Remember the Jim and Tammy Faye Baker scandal, and all the other evangelical scandals of the late eighties.

Not that Focus Canada officials here mind: While the group is increasingly active in Canadian public policy debate -- it helped head the campaign against same-sex marriage legislation and is setting up an Ottawa-based family values policy think -ank -- Focus Canada prefers a low profile.

Low profile indeed, they are a secretive underground organization that threatens Canadian values. Sounds suspicous to me, wonder if CSIS is looking into them yet?

Focus Canada is wary of being depicted as the branch plant of a powerful American Christian right-wing group out to shape Canadian public policy. "We get a little discouraged when we see Focus Canada being portrayed as if Americans are attempting to bring their agenda into Canada," said Anna Marie White, the group's family policy director. "There is no agenda here. We have a group of very well-meaning Canadians here who have been working for over 20 years to bring good resources to Canadian parents and families."

That's because they are a branch plant of the extreme right in the U.S. (including people who kill doctors who perform abortions and condone gay bashing) and yes they have an agenda and it is to change Canadian pulbic policy.

Boy what hypocrites, let's see we are forming a public policy institute but we don't want to influence public policy. Do they think we are stupid or just American.

After all they are from the US home of right wing media that never challenge the right or its assumptions and PR.

And they are of course the kind of people that Monte Solberg, Conservative MP loves and defends. Being the 'America Good'/ 'Canada Bad' kinda guy he is.

Oh yes and the money to do all this political lobbying comes from where? From being a church that collects funds for charitable purposes. Much of this money is coming from their U.S. HQ of course. Supplemented by 'prayer offerings' from Canadian TV watchers. This is another of those TV/Radio evangelical churches that has no real estate, except that which it buys to sell for a profit.

As I have said before its time to tax the churches when they want to play in the area of politics and public policy. It's an idea whose time has come.

But what about free speech you ask.

This isn't free speech this is speech where money talks, cause its income tax free - speech. It's paid for by you and me cause our government allows them to exist tax free. It means they can dominate the discussion beyond the economic means of those they oppose. Nothing free about it.

Money Talks and this movement of the right walks, all over the rights of those they oppose by dominating the media.

They are of course 'shy' about actually talking to a reporter, cause they don't care about the media perse. They buy their media time to promote the message of their theology of intolerance.

Link Byfield Historical Revisionist

Link Byfield, son of Ted and Virgina Byfield, former Editor Publisher of the now bankrupt (fiscally as well as politically) Alberta Report, scion of the Right in Canada has a column in todays Sun, Calgary, blasting the Sun, Toronto, for belittiling Harpers Tarnished Image.

No problem with that. Let the right wing regionalists fight amongst themselves about Wiley E. Harper, who is also a White Wascist like the missing-Link.

What I have a problem with is his historical revisionism where he blames the victim and extolls the virtues of colonial expansion into Western Canada.

Link says: "The historical fact is that after Ottawa stood by and let the Natives wipe out the last remaining Canadian buffalo in the Cypress Hills in 1879, the empty western plains soon filled up with unfenced cattle ranches bigger than present-day Toronto. These were owned and operated by newcomers from Britain, Canada and the U.S. -- the Waldron, the Cochrane, the Oxley, the Northwest Cattle Co., the Beresford, the Bar U. "

Excuse me, Natives wiped out the last remaining buffalo? Sure the Natives hunted buffalo, but they were not responsible for wiping them out, that was already done by the Western Expansion of American and Canadian railway barons, mercantilists and settlers.

Tell that to Poundmaker, Old Crow, and the rest who testified to the destruction of the buffalo with the coming of the white man. And Ottawa didn't stand by it encouraged the destruction of the plains buffalo in order to expand the CPR which opened the west to the Big Ranchers.

"After the whites came, the buffalo became fewer and fewer. We all know that. We began to hate the white persons. They were robbing us of our birthright. We became very poor. We wandered to the south. The buffalo were not coming back. We were told, "the land is not yours anymore. We were to stay only on our small patches of land that were leftover (iskonikana). Our grandfathers travelled on these great plains and called it their own." Poundmaker's last speech.

See my Rebel Yell for the history of the Northwest Rebellion. Yep Link is being a deliberately provacative Dink, so typical of the historical revisionism of the Byfield clan. Well read a book you twit. And not one your dad wrote and you edited. And get your facts straight.

Actually you know your facts you just like to twist them to justify the white mans colonialization of the so called 'empty western plains".

Like we argued on Medicine Hat radio during the Federal Election, yours are the politics of Alberta First, mine are the politics of Alberta in Canada. You still have to anwser my point I made then that since most of the Oil in Alberta is on Native land then following your provincial rights arguement, it is logical to cede control of resources back to those who were here first.

Clever now to argue that the plains were empty.

More Praise For My Blogs

Grandinite has created a list of 12 blogs that readers should check for daily news. And in no particluar order he has listed my daily blog #10.

He says that Red Between the Lines is "The best daily dose of left-wingery in Canada. It is the moonbat-free zone that Rabble.ca isn’t." Aw Shucks.

Capitalism’s vampires

I thought this post from the Vancouver weekly The Republic made an excellent point about the Vampire motif in popular culture that made up for it's abscence from my article Gothic Capitalism. So I thought I would post an excerpt here.

The Vampire who preyed on peasants such as the historical Elizabeth Bathory and Vlad Tepes, the impaler, gave rise to these legends among the peasants and rising bourgoise of Europe. The subtext was always the same, and of course had some truth in it. The aristocracy were living off the peasants, some became literal bloodsuckers in the declining period of fudealism and the rise of capitalism.

But the aristocracy was always bloodsuckers which is why fudealism declined. Now capital itself has become the bloodsucker of our time and labour, and it lives on eternally in the commodification of our lives.

Nobles are confronted by ample evidence of their fundamental identity with the people they oppress. Try though they might, they can't escape the human condition, a condition marked by suffering, decay, and death.

In the transition from complex societies to modern states, the taste for exploitation was retained

by Michael Nenonen

I used to be one of Anne Rice's most committed fans. Interview With A Vampire (1976) hooked me, and for years thereafter I let Rice's imagination mould my own. By the time I finished reading Lasher (1993), though, I'd had my fill. Her cuisine remained the same, but my palate hadn't. After reading Eli Sagan's At the Dawn of Tyranny: The Origin of Individualism, Political Oppression, and the State (Knopf, 1985), I understand why.

Before discussing Sagan's work, I should offer some idea of what Rice's novels are about—or at least the thirteen I've read. Until 1993, at any rate, Rice was writing about beautiful vampires even when she was supposedly writing about witches and mummies, upper-class nymphettes and sadomasochistic aristocrats. Vampirism isn't restricted to literal bloodsucking; it occurs whenever we steal another person's vitality, regardless of how the theft is carried out. This theft was the centerpiece of Rice's fiction.

Her protagonists were typically talented and gorgeous, wealthy and amoral. Some were superhuman. By the early 90s the vampire Lestat could fly and lift many tonnes; he might as well have been from Krypton. Whether they were drinking blood or enjoying fine art, her characters' tastes were invariably expensive. The plight of the characters forced to feed those tastes was paid little heed; the poor and ugly were regularly exploited, humiliated, and literally devoured. Her protagonists' virtue was highlighted by the material, intellectual, aesthetic, and psychological poverty of the people beneath their feet.

Rice's influence upon the S&M and Goth subcultures has been remarkable. Much like Gene Roddenberry's Star Trek, her fiction inspires a way of life, though few of her fans seem to understand the classism underlying that fiction. Though she certainly celebrates the power of beauty, Rice also promotes the beauty of power.

Let's turn to Sagan's work, which explores the psychosocial transformations that accompanied the rise of complex societies. These are transitional societies, existing between early tribal societies on the one side and literate state societies on the other. Complex societies are marked by kingship and aristocracy, phenomena unknown in previous stages of social development. Whereas tribal societies maintain order through the informal pressures of kinship networks, in complex societies the nobility escapes the bonds of collective existence.

The most vicious feature of complex societies, and one that's particularly relevant for Anne Rice's work, is their nearly universal practice of human sacrifice, a practice that's rare in tribal societies and that dies out as complex societies give way to literate states.

Ritually sacrificing the powerless reinforces the class structure of complex societies and makes it easier for the nobility to psychologically dissociate itself from kinship ties. Nobles must, after all, believe they have qualities that set them apart from base commoners. To be "noble" is to be superhuman, with all the privileges due to such an elevated condition and without any of the moral fetters binding the inferior classes. Nobles define themselves in contrast to commoners. Commoners are ugly, while nobles are beautiful; commoners are stupid, while nobles are wise; commoners are poor, while nobles are rich; commoners are weak, while nobles are mighty. Human sacrifice enshrines this division between the lordly and the contemptible. Vampires like Lestat are perfect embodiments of noble fantasy.

Corruption, nationalism and capitalism

I found this interesting article by a comrade in Quebec that I thought I would share excerpts from

Corruption, nationalism and capitalism
by Steve Tremblay

Nothing new under the sun

Canadian history is in its entirety branded by affairs of political corruption. To underline the hypocrisy of the comments about the Liberal’s particular corruption made by the leader of the Conservative Party, Stephen Harper, we have only used examples of when the Conservatives were in power. But we just as well could have referred to as many incidents from the history of Liberal governments or even from the NDP (do you remember the bingo scandal in British Columbia?).

Capitalism itself is corrupt

All the fuss raised by the Conservative profiteers, the Bloc nationalistic demagogues and the NDP bureaucrats aims to make us believe that the sponsorship scandal and the Liberal’s moral turpitude constitute a hijacking of parliamentarianism, a debasement of bourgeois democracy. However, as we have seen, not only has corruption been an important factor through the whole history of Québec and Canadian governments, but our analysis is that our country is no exception. It would be too easy here to list a multitude of examples of corruption in the countries of the periphery of capitalism. It would be also quite easy to bring up all kinds of cases from China or Russia. But we think it is more useful to remind our readers how governmental corruption reigns within the historical heart of capitalism itself, inside the great centres of capital.

The importance of this crisis and what it’s all about

This new scandal and the political crisis it has created is the product of many factors. It feeds on the general disgust of a huge part of the population and the working class in particular, for political practices that appear more-and-more unacceptable in an economic context where the state increasingly uses arguments of austerity and rigor against us. It also feeds on the constitutional crisis that divides the majority of the Québec bourgeoisie from the majority of the Canadian ruling class, over the issue of a new division of responsibilities between the different levels of government. It is for this reason but under other pretexts (nation, language and distinct society) that they will soon have us marching again, either under the folds of the blue and white of the fleurdelisé or the red and white of the maple leaf. As long as we stand divided, the reign of exploitation, corruption and oppression shall remain secure. One must also not forget the role played by the important fracture existing inside the Liberal Party itself, the main historical party of capital’s domination in Canada.

The Internationalist Workers Group, Canadian section of the International Bureau for the Revolutionary Party, Montreal, May 20th 2005. Contact: R.S., P.O. Box 173, Station “C”, Montreal, Canada, H2L 4K1 or canada@ibrp.org

100 years of the Avante-Garde 1905-2005

One hundred years ago in Zurich; Lenin, Tristan Tzara and James Joyce were in exile, drinking coffee in cafes, and writing.

Einstein published his General Theory of Relativity, workers in Russia called a General Strike and organized workers councils for the first time.

It was the birth of Modernism.

And I celebrate this movement with a cut and paste of the avante-garde manifestos that have influenced the 20th century.

Dada, Surrealism and Situationism, and their children the post modernists, were not just "Art" movements but movements that embraced revolution and revolutionary aims in Art and Society.

Since it is to long to blog you can download it at:
100 years of the Avante-Garde 1905-2005.doc

You will also find both a word doc and pdf
of Gothic Capitalism my six part essay originally posted here.

Both these files are large; Avante-Garde and Goth Capitalism are 2mb.

Tyrant Time-Tempus Fug'it

The creation of the clock is a defining moment in the history of capitalism. It allowed for the regimintation of work, and for the development of industrialization as clock works were applied to steam power.

The proletariat was created to work by the time of the clock. Prior to that the artisan and farmer who worked by hours of daylight. With the advent of the factory system in the late 18th Century, workers could be forced to work in the darkness with the help of kerosene lamps, and by the use of clocks to tell the time of the working day. Literally the working day as we know it today began back then. (EP Thompson, Past and Present (1967). Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism )

For generations, there has been no better illustration of the collective idiocy of the crowd than the story of the English calendar riots of 1752. At the trial of Henry Hunt and others for treason in 1820, James Scarlett, the prosecuting counsel, had this to say:
The ridiculous folly of a mob had been exemplified in a most humorous manner by that eminent painter, Mr. Hogarth. It was found necessary many years ago, in order to prevent a confusion in the reckoning of time, to knock eleven days out of the calendar, and it was supposed by ignorant persons that the legislature had actually deprived them of eleven days of their existence. This ridiculous idea was finely exposed in Mr. Hogarth's picture, where the mob were painted throwing up their hats, and crying out "Give us back our eleven days". Thus it was at the present time; that many individuals, who could not distinguish words from things, were making an outcry for that of which they could not well explain the nature. 'Give us our eleven days!': calendar reform in eighteenth-century England

The time of the clock is the historical moment when capitalism begins to supercede fuedalism. Clockworks were literally the mechanization of feudal society, hinting at the capitalism time to come. A vision of the future workers of Gothic Capitalism were first introduced with the creation of mechanical men, automatons, in the 17th century. As described in the Tales of Hoffman by Offenbach. They would presage the future proletariat of the machine age of the factories of the late 19th and early 20th century, where workers would become cogs in the machine.

But in the history of “clocks and culture” what is new in the development of Western horology is the application of mechanics in a system of economic production. Prior to their remarkable development in the course of the Renaissance, clocks were products of art and science.More than coincidence, a causal relationship can be seen in the invention of the mechanical clock in the period of early capitalism. The Renaissance Discovery of Time.

With the advent of further mechinization of work in the 20th Century skilled craft work was abolished in favour of the factory where work could be proportioned according to units of time, as developed by Fredrick Taylor. Hence the famous phrase 'Time is money" has been the essence of capitalism since the its inception with the development of the first mechanical clocks.

Representations of Capital interconnect with representations of space and time. E.P. Thompson, in his famous essay on the "Industrialization of Clock Time," showed how the transition from peasantry to wage labor -- from a feudal economy to a capitalist society -- entailed dramatic changes in the experience of time. Clock time was essential if industrialists were to measure output per a generalizable unit of labor. The capitalist organization of work made hours the constant variable needed to measure work and wages.

Today, the relationship between clock time and Capital is cast in terms of Investors. In this Fidelity ad, where the images are choreographed to the fast-paced rock pulse of the Rolling Stone's song, "Time," the focus is on the consumer or the retail investor who races against time.

As Marx observed, workers formally exchanged their labor-time for a wage -- hence the requirement for punching a time clock. Today, we still recognize the relative freedom offered by professionalized occupations where one sells a product or a service (rather than the hours that went into making it) -- the distinction between a salary and a wage

MAPPING GLOBAL CAPITAL

To this day native peoples who do not live in industrialized society do not live by the tyranny of the clock, which is why you will find in farmer and artisan cultures the idea of 'manyana' timelessness, as in 'later', we will do that later, or as it is known here in Canada as native time. Aboriginal peoples do not keep time the same way as those of us enslaved to the tyranny of the clock.

While the clock marks the time of capitalism in Europe its truimph was in the creation of the American nation. No other nation was so defined by the clock. A nation of shop keepers, artisans, and even the farmers, who lived worked and died by the clock. In particular by the pocket watch. Accounting practices were set by the clock, as were business deals, farmers no longered worked to the pace of the sun but to the time of the clock. And even in the darkest interiors of the east coast mills during the civil war, time was told by the hands of the clock, which ticked away the minutes of the newly industrialized proletariat lives.

England was the prototype for industrialization. The rest of the world could look to that country as an example of what to emulate and what to avoid. Some saw a land of power and prosperity and wondered aloud whether God might after all be an Englishman; others saw "dark, Satanic mills" and the "specter of Manchester" with its filthy slums and human misery. Americans in particular thought hard about industry and whether it could be reconciled with the republican virtues seemingly rooted in an agrarian order. "Let our workshops remain in Europe," urged Jefferson in his Notes on Virginia in 1785, and he was no happier for being wiser about the feasibility of that policy after the War of 1812. Nor did all his fellow countrymen agree in principle. Some saw vast opportunities for industry in a land rich in natural resources, including seemingly endless supplies of wood and of waterpower. The debate between the two views became a continuing theme of American literature, characterized by Leo Marx as The Machine in the Garden (NY, 1964).

The combination of abundant resources and scarce labor meant that industrialization in America would depend on the use of machinery, and from the outset American inventors strove to translate manual tasks into mechanical action. For reasons that so far elude scholarly consensus, Americans' fascination with machines informed their approach to manufacturing to such an extent that British observers in the mid-19th century characterized machine-based production as the "American System". Precisely what was meant by that at the time is not clear, but by the end of the century it came to mean mass production by means of interchangeable parts. The origins of that system lay in the new nation's armories, in particular at Harpers Ferry, where John H. Hall first devised techniques for serial machining of parts within given tolerances.The Machine in the Garden, John H. Hall and the Origins of the "American System"

All automation is clock driven and has been in conflict with human time, our subjective sense of being. With the advent of machining automation, as David Noble discusses in his book Progress Without People, in the late fities, a further step was taken in moving the factory towards a robotic assembly line requiring less workers and more engineers.

And today as you read this in cyberspace, your time is created by clockworks, whether in your computer, look down in the right hand corner, there is the clock.
And it's time has now become autonomous from our time. In fact as you read this your computer has it's own time that it operates under, while you read your geographical time, whether it is MST, CST, or EST or Grenwich Mean Time.

Scientists had long realized that atoms (and molecules) have resonances; each chemical element and compound absorbs and emits electromagnetic radiation at its own characteristic frequencies. These resonances are inherently stable over time and space. An atom of hydrogen or cesium here today is (so far as we know) exactly like one a million years ago or in another galaxy. Thus atoms constitute a potential "pendulum" with a reproducible rate that can form the basis for more accurate clocks.

The development of radar and extremely high frequency radio communications in the 1930s and 1940s made possible the generation of the kind of electromagnetic waves (microwaves) needed to interact with atoms. Research aimed at developing an atomic clock focused first on microwave resonances in the ammonia molecule. In 1949, NIST built the first atomic clock, which was based on ammonia. However, its performance wasn't much better than the existing standards, and attention shifted almost immediately to more promising atomic-beam devices based on cesium.
The "Atomic Age" of Time Standards

In fact the Y2k crsis was all about the pending apocalyptic failure of the clockworks of millions of computers around the world, and it was a vision of the collapse of capitalism as we know it. That it did not come to pass, does not lessen its social impact for that historical moment five years ago when the hands of clockwork of capitalism touched 12 midnight ending one millinieum and begining another. For in that moment in space and time, humanity held its breathe waiting for the clocks to stop. And had they, capitalism itself would have stopped.

Far from being a mere hoax, or urban myth, it was a vision of a future without clocks or capitalism. For some it was the fear of the ensuing chaos of living in a distopia without the tyranny of the clock, just as those feared living in a society without kings, rulers or bosses. For others it was a hope for a different future, a utopian moment that allowed us to imagine living in our own time rather than the rule of the clock.

That it affected America more than anywhere else, and was driven by American fears, shows the power of the clock in America. America is literally a clockwork nation, whose existance is identified with the clock and clockworks.
For American capitalism Y2k was as fearful as Bolshevism had been at the turn of last century. But the moment passed, and all was well once again. Or was it.

The reason American capitalism cannot concieve of the importance of Global Warming, or any long term disaster scenario is that due to its internal clockworks it can only think in terms of quarters of time, the time it takes for the market to make a short term profit. Wall Street is driven by its own clock works, which determine that it cannot think in long waves or over long periods of time.

Global Warming is an issue that takes in decades, if not hundreds of years to imagine. And the clockwork nation of America can only think in terms of 24/7, the ever present moment.

The Luddite movement was all about challenging work time, the tyranny of the clock and its machinery. As the situationists said; "The only difference between my free time and my work time is that I don't get paid for my free time."

Today modern capitalism is all about the speed up, whether its in the factory, or on the farm (feedlots are a form of speeding up of the fattening of cattle for the market, chemical fertilizers to enhance the growth of crops in a shorter time, the green revolution, genetic modification of crops, etc.). It's about having no time for ourselves as we are forced to work two jobs to make ends meet. In the last decade work time across Canada has increased. The average hours of work in Alberta is a 44 hour work week before overtime is considered to apply. Gone is the eight hour day for most of us.

Yet we know that if we all worked less more of us would work. The Canadian Auto Workers (CAW) has successfully challenged the big three auto companies to reduce forced overtime in favour of hiring more workers.

One hundred years ago the IWW called for the 4 hour day. And we are no closer to that achievment today then we were then. But if it seemed impossible then, it is an even more utopian vision today to most people. Just as they cannot concieve of ending wage slavery and abolishing the wages system, which is not based on our labour but our 'time' at work.

The revolutionary struggle of the proletariat has never been about 'abolishing work' nor has it been about embracing the 'revolutionary worker who gives her all for the party and state'. It has been about challenging work time, challenging the tyranny of the clock, of the regimination of life, work and play, free time and work time , have no meaning without King Clock.

That is the revolutionary struggle, to end the tyranny of time as we know it.


It is the secret of the childrens rhyme about Humpty Dumpty, who was not an egg but a clockwork machine.

`When I use a word,' Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, `it means just what I choose it to mean -- neither more nor less.'

`The question is,' said Alice, `whether you can make words mean so many different things.'

`The question is,' said Humpty Dumpty, `which is to be master -- that's all.'

Humpty Dumpty is a historically important pinball machine released by Gottlieb in October 1947. It is considered to be the first true pinball machine ever produced, distinguishing it from earlier bagatelle game machines. Humpty Dumpty had six flippers, but, unlike modern pinball tables, they faced outward instead of inward and were not placed at the bottom of the table near the main outhole. Like all early pinball tables, Humpty Dumpty was constructed with wood and had backlit scoring in preset units of scoring rather than mechanical reel or electronic LED scoring.

THE TYRANNY OF THE CLOCK
Now the movement of the clock sets the tempo men's lives - they become the servant of the concept of time which they themselves have made, and are held in fear, like Frankenstein by his own monster. In a sane and free society such an arbitrary domination of man's functions by either clock or machine would obviously be out of the question. The domination of man by the creation of man is even more ridiculous than the domination of man by man. Mechanical time would be relegated to its true function of a means of reference and co-ordination, and men would return again to a balance view of life no longer dominated by the worship of the clock. Complete liberty implies freedom from the tyranny of abstractions as well as from the rule of men.
George Woodcock
First published in War Commentary - For Anarchism mid-march 1944.


A Revolution in Timekeeping

In Europe during most of the Middle Ages (roughly 500 CE to 1500 CE), technological advancement virtually ceased. Sundial styles evolved, but didn't move far from ancient Egyptian principles.

During these times, simple sundials placed above doorways were used to identify midday and four "tides" (important times or periods) of the sunlit day. By the 10th century, several types of pocket sundials were used. One English model even compensated for seasonal changes of the Sun's altitude.

Then, in the first half of the 14th century, large mechanical clocks began to appear in the towers of several large Italian cities. We have no evidence or record of the working models preceding these public clocks, which were weight-driven and regulated by a verge-and-foliot escapement. Variations of the verge-and-foliot mechanism reigned for more than 300 years, but all had the same basic problem: the period of oscillation of the escapement depended heavily on the amount of driving force and the amount of friction in the drive. Like water flow, the rate was difficult to regulate.

Another advance was the invention of spring-powered clocks between 1500 and 1510 by Peter Henlein of Nuremberg. Replacing the heavy drive weights permitted smaller (and portable) clocks and watches. Although they ran slower as the mainspring unwound, they were popular among wealthy individuals due to their small size and the fact that they could be put on a shelf or table instead of hanging on the wall or being housed in tall cases. These advances in design were precursors to truly accurate timekeeping.

Accurate Mechanical Clocks
In 1656, Christiaan Huygens, a Dutch scientist, made the first pendulum clock, regulated by a mechanism with a "natural" period of oscillation. (Galileo Galilei is credited with inventing the pendulum-clock concept, and he studied the motion of the pendulum as early as 1582. He even sketched out a design for a pendulum clock, but he never actually constructed one before his death in 1642.) Huygens' early pendulum clock had an error of less than 1 minute a day, the first time such accuracy had been achieved. His later refinements reduced his clock's error to less than 10 seconds a day.

Around 1675, Huygens developed the balance wheel and spring assembly, still found in some of today's wristwatches. This improvement allowed portable 17th century watches to keep time to 10 minutes a day. And in London in 1671, William Clement began building clocks with the new "anchor" or "recoil" escapement, a substantial improvement over the verge because it interferes less with the motion of the pendulum.

clock

The clock is a particularly emblematic piece of technology.The invention of the mechanical clock in the thirteenth century inaugurated a new representation of time. For the West, the clock symbolized regularity, predictibility, and control. A clock serves to produce a correspondence between events and vertices of time moments.

The disciplining of labor and of social relations through time is another profound function of the clock. Monasticism asserted the originally Jewish thesis that work is an essential kind of worship, that God's command to labor six days of the week was as binding as that to rest on the seventh. The regulation of the day, which started in the ringing of the bells in the monastery, was extended to society at large through the tyranny of the clock. cf orrery. Lewis Mumford described the relation between the clock and the monastery in Technics and Civilization. For Mumford, "The clock, not the steam-engine, is the key machine of the modern industrial age." Mumford notes that the clock changes our perception of time as quantity. Deleuze and Guattari describe this process as striation. The model for an analysis of the clock would be Foucault's examination of the Panopticon in Discipline and Punish. (see diagram.)

It is important to keep in mind the socially coercive function of the clock. (see E.P. Thompson, "Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism" in Giddens and Held, Classes, Power, and Conflict.) Thompson distinguishes between the "natural" rhythms of "task time" and "clock time," in which time becomes currency that in not passed but spent, which is marked by "time thrift" and a clear demarcation between work and life. Time obedience can be distiguished from time discipline: an internalization of social discipline, away from public spectacle (the clocktower) in favor of the personal (the pocket watch.)
Contents Under Pressure - A Hypertext in Progress by Christian Hubert


On Time
by Carlene E. Stephens and The Smithsonian Institution

Increasingly, after about 1820, the cadences of the ticking clock echoing in industry, railroads, and cities grew more insistent. Very much in demand, clocks and watches began to spill from American factories. More people found themselves governed by the mechanical regularity and pace of the clock.

By about 1880, the American railroads had knit together a national economy, and late in 1883 they abandoned the fifty-some regional operating times to voluntarily impose five time zones on their routes across the continent. Clocks, no longer set to the sun overhead, were instead synchronized to the new system. Some people enjoyed the conveniences of the new national standard time, but others resisted the change.

As the twentieth century dawned, the country became obsessed with using time efficiently. Like it or not, people found themselves pressured by the clock, especially in the form of factory time clocks and stopwatches. Experts in "scientific management" segmented, streamlined, and standardized both factory and office work to increase productivity. They advocated timesaving efficiencies for nearly every aspect of American life, including the home. Even leisure - time off - became defined by the clock. It was divided up, measured out, not to be wasted.

Alexis McCrossen

Current Research
Between the Civil War and the Great Depression civic and business interests across the nation erected thousands of public timepieces. Using an array of sources, including local histories, the papers of the Seth Thomas and E. Howard Clock companies, and the Historic Engineering and Buildings Surveys, I am at once assessing when, where and under what circumstances public timepieces were installed and considering what life was like under them.
The second part of the project considers the distribution and ownership of pocket watches during the transition to widespread watch ownership (1870s and 1880s). I am using the watch register of David Edwards Hoxie, who repaired watches in Northampton, Massachusetts between 1863 and 1884. By using census schedules, tax records, city directories, and other demographic data I can construct a picture of watch ownership during a critical moment in the “reformation of time consciousness.” (Michael O’Malley Keeping Watch: A History of American Time 1990)

"A Republic in Time: History, Modernity,
and Social Imagination in Nineteenth-Century America"

My research project, a book-length study entitled “A Republic in Time: History, Modernity, and Social Imagination in Nineteenth-Century America,” investigates how transformations in the perception of time shaped American conceptions of democratic society and modern nationhood. The fundamental premise of the study is that time is not a transhistorical phenomenon, an aspect of nature existing outside of human society, but rather a historical artifact produced by human beings acting within specific historical circumstances. I focus upon the central role that time played in the nineteenth-century United States in linking the economic transformations wrought by developing capitalism with the political imperative to define American national identity. New technologies and scientific discoveries made it possible to imagine new forms of time, including clock time and geological “deep time,” but it was American writers, pundits, and political thinkers who gave these new temporalities their significance. Theories of American nationality emphasized how the United States, as a revolutionary “modern” nation, represented a rupture with all past examples of nationhood. But despite the widespread consensus that America was different from older nations, the precise nature of America’s modernity remained to be defined. This question was a historical one, and hence it is appropriate that time itself became the most important medium through which American thinkers debated this crucial issue. Industrial capitalism and market-oriented forms of commerce seemed to demand that Americans adjust their perception to the time of the clock. Clockwork rationality became a compelling way of defining a modern way of life, but Americans critical of capitalism and those less closely linked to the market proposed other possible versions of modernity based on other modes of temporality. It is only retrospectively that clockwork rationality has come to seem an inevitable foundation of modernity. Recovering alternate ways of defining America as a modern nation helps us to avoid imposing an artificial teleology upon our national history, and reveals instead a history created by human beings in response to the contingencies of circumstance.

Reading Hamilton's Clocks: Time Consciousness in Early National and Antebellum Urban Commercial Culture

Julia Ott
Department of History
Yale University

Historians of early American labor and time consciousness have largely ignored these social and cultural consequences of an accelerating credit clock. Inspired by E.P. Thompson's seminal essay, scholars have extensively analyzed the transition from task-orientation to time-discipline, as well as the tensions between a notion of divinely originating natural time and clock time. [3] According to Thompson, "mature industrial societies of all varieties are marked by time-thrift and by a clear demarcation between 'work' and 'life'." [4] The advent of industrialism "entailed a severe restructuring of working habits," including alterations "in the inward notation of time." [5] Where men controlled "their own working lives . . .alternate bouts of intense labor and idleness" characterized labor.

[6] In contrast, factory organization of labor demanded synchronization through internalization of the mechanical clock. "Time-sense" represented "technological conditioning" while "time-measurement" embodied "a means of labor exploitation." [7] Herbert Gutman's "Work, Culture, and Society in Industrializing America" initiated the application of Thompsonian analysis to labor relations and work culture in the United States. Gutman posited "a recurrent tension" throughout the course of the nineteenth century between the "diverse pre-modern native and foreign peoples" entering the factory system "and the demands placed upon them by the regularities and disciplines of factory labor," particularly clock-discipline. [8] Building on Gutman, subsequent scholarship noted clock-regulation's mitigation by the retention of piece-work and family systems of labor in early American factories and mills, as well as the clock's use as an instrument of planter hegemony in the South. [9]

But to fully understand capitalism's central temporal conflict, we need to know more about the origins of capitalists' "modern time/money calculus." [10] What implanted this underlying temporal logic? The answer lies in the escalating exigencies of credit in the early national period. Certainly the profit motive contributed to capitalist desires to discipline and control workers, but the credit clock provided the model for the specific selection of the time-discipline solution. Some historians have correctly accredited capitalist temporality to a legacy of mercantile notions of time-thrift and recognized both its continuity and its intensification during the course of the nineteenth century. [11] Yet the ascendancy of the credit value of time over the labor value of time and the associated development of commercial temporal anxiety remain unexamined. Historians generally prefer to see long continuities in mercantile temporality, originating in the Middle Ages with an urban, commercial break from seasonal, cyclical, natural notions of time. [12] But the recognition of the credit value of time represented an crucial step for capitalists, for it ascribed a market value to time independent of labor performed and the exploited worker performing the labor.

Blog of the Week

Well this blog has gotten the coveted rabble.ca blog of the week for July 8. Thanks rabble rousers.