William Bowles – Essays
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Does a leopard change its spots? By William Bowles
The US government is talking with Iran, so what’s the catch? The simple answer is the November election. The move is clearly aimed at associating McCain/Republican Party with a new, kinder, softer Bush cabal although the Washington Post sees it somewhat differently. Continue reading
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Deep in the capitalist doo-doo By William Bowles
18 July 2008 “The current market jitters are centred on disturbances in the world’s credit markets. Worries about the viability of sub-prime mortgage lending have spread around the financial system, and the central banks have been forced to pump in billions of dollars to oil the wheels of lending.” ‘Financial crises: Lessons from history‘, Analysis… Continue reading
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War, war, war or jaw, jaw, jaw? By William Bowles
It’s amazing isn’t it how the media, given the appropriate cues from the state, so readily slips into a warring state of mind. I’m talking of course about Iran. Continue reading
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High Culture — Low Values By William Bowles
The Britain I grew up in was saturated with class: your accent (acquired via your education), dress and address defined who you were, even how intelligent it was assumed you were, what paths in life were open to you, your ambitions, in fact the whole nine yards were laid out for you from the day… Continue reading
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Five Years On By William Bowles
7 July 2008 It’s over five years since I started publishing InI (and not coincidentally, since the illegal and disastrous invasion of Iraq) and it’s been a struggle to keep it going not only because of the cost of maintaining it but also because I’ve kept it going single-handed throughout this entire period. Not that… Continue reading
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Robert Mugabe, yet another man the West loves to hate By William Bowles
And as long as Mugabe left Britain’s ‘kith and kin’ alone (the settler farmers), it was quite happy to let Zanu-PF spout all kinds of socialist rhetoric, as long as he didn’t actually implement any of it. Thus all the statements out of the West about the ‘miracle’ of Zimbabwe, the ‘bread basket’ of Southern… Continue reading
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Conflating inflation – when is a crisis not a crisis? When the BBC says it’s a ‘slowdown’ By William Bowles
20 June 2008 — Investigating Imperialism Commenting on the pay deal struck between Shell’s tanker drivers totaling 14% over two years, a BBC ‘reporter’ during an interview with UK government minister John Hutton (BBC World News, 18 June 2008) made the following statement (not exactly verbatim but accurate as to content): BBC: “But when other workers… Continue reading
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Book Review: Why the Left doesn’t get it By William Bowles
15 June 2008 Book Review: ‘Deer Hunting With Jesus – Dispatches from America’s Class War’ By Joe Bageant “Never experiencing the life of the mind scars entire families for generations.” This is the hardest review I have ever had to write. Who am I writing it for seems to be at the heart of my… Continue reading
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On being different and why it’s important By William Bowles
Being ‘different’ is not something tolerated in our society. Of course there are outlets for those who don’t ‘fit’ but always within strictly defined circumstances. The arts come to mind and especially the theatre but in the mainstream of society, being ‘different’ takes on an ideological significance and especially if, like myself you came from… Continue reading
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I’m overwhelmed by the horror of it all By William Bowles
4 June 2008 I’ll be honest, the reason I haven’t been at all productive of late is because I felt so utterly depressed about the state of the world that I simply felt inadequate and overwhelmed by the task of writing. The fact that the world is controlled by a gang of psychopaths so utterly… Continue reading
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The world is run by sleazy creeps with a license to print money By William Bowles
The UK is the world’s numero uno conduit for money, in all its varied and wonderful guises and, as far as the financial sector is concerned, it’s a question of how many ways are there of skinning a cat through devizing all kinds of financial ‘products’ that can be bought and sold (at a profit)… Continue reading
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Food – the ultimate weapon of the ruling elite By William Bowles
McNamara’s thinly veiled genocidal utterances took place over thirty years ago, echoing the wealthy and the privileged’s fear of the ‘great unwashed’ when ‘over-population’ was the buzzword. So not much has changed has it, we’re hearing the same, tired old messages being rolled out once again by the ruling elites and their spin doctors. McNamara’s… Continue reading
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Sink or Swim in the capitalist ocean? By William Bowles
When a group of so-called Aboriginals from I believe Borneo (or maybe it was Papua New Guinea) visited the UK recently they were gob-smacked to find homeless people on the streets of London. The concept ‘homelessness’ simply didn’t exist in their vocabulary and reinforced by the vast wealth that surrounded them (the ‘Aboriginal and the… Continue reading
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Trapped on Planet Bail-out — Bad Science Fiction By William Bowles
4 April 2008 “Britain, a touchstone for democracies around the world.” – BBC ‘reporter’ commentating on the state visit by president Sarkozy of France to the UK, BBC1 6pm news, 26 March, 2008 The great Polish writer, Stanislaw Lem (he wrote the novel ‘Solaris’) developed a theory of fiction writing based upon the idea that… Continue reading
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Rumours of War by William Bowles
21 March 2008 Destabilisation is the name of the ‘game’ “We are not in Iraq to engage in nation-building — our mission is to help Iraqis so that they can build their own nation.” — Donald H. Rumsfeld, Washington Post, September 25 2003. It seems to be a common—but in my view, mistaken—assumption by the… Continue reading
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Can the Clintons Clinch it? Who cares By William Bowles
It’s pretty obvious, at least to me anyway, that the ‘democratic process’ has run its course, at least as it’s presently constituted in the so-called developed countries. Not that I’m advocating a dictatorship, in any case we already have a de facto dictatorship by default by virtue of the total non participation by the ‘people’… Continue reading
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There’s a kind of madness in the air By William Bowles
16 February, 2008 Note: sorry about the story being out of sequence but all attempts at posting it failed. Had to wait until my return. February 2, 2008 — For the first time in a long time I’m taking a trip to NYC, my old ‘home town’. The airport (I use this term advisedly) I’m… Continue reading
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Observations from the Front Line: The US State of Denial By William Bowles
16 February, 2008 Observations from the Front Line Manhattan, 13 February, 2008 — For the first time, almost exactly thirty years ago, I sat where I’m sitting now, writing this, in the Broome Street Bar, corner of Broome and West Broadway. I was building the Cayman Gallery a couple of hundred yards away further up… Continue reading
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The Alien Amongst Us By William Bowles
The use of fear as an instrument of the state’s control of the population is probably as old as the central state itself, whether of invasion, internal ‘subversion’ or the ‘alien’ and records show that in Europe, it’s been used as and when convenient, for at least the past one thousand years. Continue reading
The New Dark Age 