William Bowles – Essays
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Wandsworth Council issues eviction notice to alleged rioter’s father
13 August 2011 Well it had to happen. Wandsworth Council have started eviction proceedings against the father of the man charged and note charged not convicted (yet). ‘And yea – the sins of the son shall be visited on the father and yea – his father’s father’, and so on and so forth… all the… Continue reading
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Ten reasons to riot By William Bowles
What is fascinating about the ten headings is that taken collectively they spell capitalism, but broken down as they are, they are reduced to fragments of the whole and subsequently dealt with accordingly, as fragments of largely cliched and predictable knee-jerk reactions, rolled glibly off the tongue of the assembled ‘experts’. Continue reading
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Who is the sick one here? By William Bowles
Yesterday, 10 August our vainglorious pm announced that the communities from which it is alleged the ‘rioters and looters’ emanated from were “sick”. But more on who is really sick in our society later. In the meantime I’d like to pick up on an aspect of the state’s response (or apparent lack of) to the… Continue reading
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Things fall apart By William Bowles
It’s fashionable to call them the ‘underclass’ that the state has buried away, out of sight–out of mind on ‘sink estates’ or trapped in the poorest neighborhoods of our cities. Demonized and/or sentimentalized by the state/corporate media (‘Shameless’ and ‘East Enders’ for example), just as with our Victorian counterparts, an entire section of the working… Continue reading
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Back to the future By William Bowles
Exactly thirty years ago Brixton exploded with rage against the de facto occupation of Brixton by the Met police. And, as I write this, all kinds of madness is going down in various parts of London and elsewhere. Continue reading
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Welcome to the world of terrorist television By William Bowles
I venture to say that the timing of the attempt to silence Libya’s electronic media is in part a response to the rebels assassination of its own military leader Younes and the excellent PR it gave the Libyan state. Continue reading
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Covering the Somali famine- of news By William Bowles
Far from being a ‘natural disaster’ events in Somalia can be traced directly to Western intervention, an intervention carried out in at least one hundred indebted economies the world over in the name of ‘structural adjustment’. Continue reading
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The Left has lost its way over Libya By William Bowles
I think it’s time to take a look at the timeline of the latest barbarian attack on the defenceless of the world. I think it reveals far more about how the left in the West operates, what are its motivations, than it does about the aims of the Empire (which should surely by now be… Continue reading
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Outsourcing power (and its consequences) By William Bowles
In a sense the corporate press and the state have been hoisted by their own petard: by outsourcing propaganda to the corporate media it has exposed the media as an integral component of state/corporate control but one no longer under the direct control of the Establishment. Ergo, the arrogant bastards who run News Corp. Continue reading
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What did he know and when did he know it? Cameron, Coulson and those pesky emails By William Bowles
The political/corporate class must be ruing the day email arrived, it is proving to be the undoing of many a powerful individual and perhaps even the downfall of the government? But only if the media do the job they claim to be doing, investigating malfeasance at every level. Continue reading
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Gobsmacked by the media By William Bowles
Y’know, sometimes you have to admire the nerve of the BBC and the corporate press, they have no shame, none whatsoever as they crow loudly that now the Big Bad Wolf has been defanged, they can all pat themselves on the back for what a good job they’ve done in exposing the malfeasance of News… Continue reading
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The Fourth Estate is bankrupt By William Bowles
How can such a press be considered free or independent in any real sense of the word? Controlled either by the state or three large corporations, the MSM plays an intrinsic role in maintaining the status quo and it does it quite openly. Until now that is… Continue reading
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Russia Today: A new kind of media? By William Bowles
A global, digital media cuts both ways or as they say ‘what’s good for the goose is also good for the gander’. The arrival of The Real News Network, Democracy Now! and grtv for example demonstrates what can be done, even on a shoestring budget. But to get onto the global media circuit still requires… Continue reading
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Syria/Libya versus Bahrain: A BBC factoid By William Bowles
The BBC which makes much of its ‘objective’ and ‘balanced’ news coverage, when challenged by the facts of its biased coverage of events in the Middle East and elsewhere, cites examples of where it has given voice to all sides of the issue. This is debatable, but let’s assume that the BBC does present all… Continue reading
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This is what empires do By William Bowles
Surely it must be obvious that it’s the act of being there that counts? Occupation, as they say, is nine tenths of the imperial law. Wherever in the world the Empire has gone to ‘install democracy’ or whatever the excuse used to invade, it has stayed, every single time and built bases, hundreds of them… Continue reading
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William Hague: Following in Churchill’s footsteps By William Bowles
Now let me get this straight: In order to save civilian lives (the infamous ‘Right to Protect’), the Empire, through its Rottweiller NATO, not only deindustrializes Libya but it also causes a mass exodus of refugees hundreds of whom drowned and many thousands more were left stranded, attacked and abused. Continue reading
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Empire Games – but who writes the rules? By William Bowles
The Western left’s abdication, nay abandonment of principles that go to the heart of the socialist liberation project has been long in the making, centuries even and made all the more obvious by the left’s take on events in Libya and now Syria. Critiques of the ‘humanitarian, socialist interventionists’ came thick and thin but for… Continue reading
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Wiki wha? By William Bowles
Every day I receive hundreds of stories and of course I can’t read but a small fraction of them but still I get a sense of the story from the title and the description as to whether it warrants further investigation. One thing is apparent from the process of scanning so many stories is that… Continue reading
The New Dark Age 