William Bowles – Essays
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Pulling corpses out of the hat By William Bowles
There can be no doubt that the ‘death’ of ‘Abu Musab al-Zarqawi’ is part of a carefully planned disinformation campaign designed to divert attention away from the slaughter of Haditha (and elsewhere), a campaign that the corporate and state media have gleefully participated in. Indeed, ‘al-Zarqawi’ is itself a psy-ops programme in its own right,… Continue reading
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And now for something completely (in)different By William Bowles
Okay, okay, I know there’s all kind of shit going down. This morning for example BBC Radio 4 News ran a long piece on the reported death of ‘Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, how he was “leader of al-Qu’eda in Iraq” and how, with his alleged death, things would now be different in Iraq. The report by… Continue reading
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It’s down to Fundamentals By William Bowles
Under the cover of the ‘terrorist threat’, even the vaguest accusation becomes the basis for terrorising entire communities, truly a witch-hunt. Judging by this event, we can expect more of the same over the coming weeks and months, with other, almost exclusively Muslim communities the target of massive swoops by hundreds of police and security… Continue reading
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Independence Day By William Bowles
There could be no better exemplar of the mindset of the servants of capital than yesterday’s (3/6/06) editorial in the London Independent. Titled ‘A protracted and messy conflict, with its myriad dark corners’, at first reading it would seem to be a condemnation of the invasion and occupation of Iraq, but a closer examination reveals… Continue reading
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Climate of Fear By William Bowles
So finally, the reality of global climate change hits the media? The BBC for example, is blasting the public with blood-curdling doccies with titles like ‘Climate Chaos’, the series, and they’ve roped in the venerable David Attenborough to host, along with the predictable line-up of ‘experts’ suitably equipped with charts and computer predictions of impending… Continue reading
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Sitting in the house that Capital built By William Bowles
What an irony therefore, that with the ‘triumph’ of Capital, everything ends up being identical, from the rural backwater of Braga to the malls of Porto. Pizzahut Rules, Okay! Continue reading
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Dig a deep hole and then lie out of it By William Bowles
Guimarães used to be a centre of the Portuguese textile industry but like many other industrial areas of Europe the manufacturing got relocated to sweatshops in Asia or Latin America, so with the help of lavish EU funding, the place has been transformed into yet another ‘heritage’ site and the neighbourhood in which I found… Continue reading
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Tony Blair’s Pet Bulldog? The Curious Case of Colonel Tim Spicer By William Bowles
20 May 2006 Tim Spicer (right) is an ex-soldier from the Scots Guards, an elite unit of the British Army, a veteran of Northern Ireland (where he got his OBE) and the Falklands, and he also served in Bosnia-Herzegovina in the 1990s. Spicer’s (defunct) company, Sandline International took over from Executive Outcomes (EO) which was… Continue reading
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Oh my, how things haven’t changed By William Bowles
For those readers old enough (or well up on history) what strikes one about the current situation is just how nothing has actually changed when it comes to how the media covers events of importance, especially when it’s ‘us’ versus ‘them’, the ‘us’ being white, European/American ‘civilisation’ and the ‘them’—well pretty much the rest of… Continue reading
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Alienated Masses, Alienated Media By William Bowles
The dilemma the independent media confronts is as follows: setting up shop is easy, almost too easy but unlike corporate media websites which not only have the resources to market their online presence along the length of the high street, because they also own and control traditional media; print, radio and tv, they are able… Continue reading
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Crunch time for capitalism or how the past returns to haunt the present By William Bowles
Computers are wonderful tools—sometimes. A couple of days ago I almost got through writing this piece and inadvertently tossed the damn thing away, back-ups and all! Not having a photographic memory, I was forced to try and reconstruct my original essay which is frankly an impossibility and in any case, it seemed pointless trying to… Continue reading
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Iraq Body Count – The acceptable face of slaughter? By William Bowles
The IBC’s John Sloboda inexcusable slur on Medialens and others such as John Pilger in the BBC interview (news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/newsnight/4950254.stm) follows a well-established line by the so-called liberal intelligentsia who, whilst claiming to be progressive, are actually having the opposite effect; to reduce the debate to an argument over numbers rather than principle, an issue the… Continue reading
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Mixed(up) Messages By William Bowles
The hysteria being generated around Iran’s alleged nuclear ‘ambitions’ (the media’s favourite newspeak word these days) serves several purposes; one, it conveniently diverts attention away from the situation in Iraq; two, it acts as a warning to any other country challenging US imperialism’s increasingly desperate bid for global domination and, it also serves to divert… Continue reading
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In the Clutches of Capital By William Bowles
19 April 2006 It strikes me that the citizens of the capitalist world are in so deep with the ‘life style’ that like all addicts it is virtually impossible for them to escape the clutches of capital. Once on the conveyor belt of consumption there is no turning back. Chief among the addictions is the… Continue reading
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From the Cold War to the Long War – only the name has been changed to protect the guilty By William Bowles
This past 10 April the Guardian published an extremely misleading article that is worth addressing for everything that it doesn’t say concerning US plans for the future and its so-called ‘long war’ against ‘international terrorism’ and it sums up the corporate media’s treatment of the continuation of the Cold War by another name. Continue reading
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States of denial – states of terror By William Bowles
For those of you who still bother to read/listen to/watch the mainstream news, you might be forgiven for thinking that the events of the past couple of decades have been proof of the overwhelming success/superiority of ‘Western civilisation’ in the battle with the heathen hordes hammering at the gates of Eden. Continue reading
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Wakey-Wakey! By William Bowles
I’m tempted to say that the British have, with Tony Blair’s corporatist, security state, gotten no better than they deserve. After all, though deeply in debt, by and large they live in a kind of comfort zone albeit one that insulates them from the realities of a world gone totally insane. Continue reading
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Breaking News – UK Govt hurls BBC into alternate universe! By William Bowles
Then it was back to Downing Street, no doubt to plan how to sell us Phase II of the PNAC, taking out Iran and pushing the ‘final’ frontier further Eastward. Not that you’d know it from BBC ‘news’ reports as it seems that the BBC was reporting from what appears to be an almost identical… Continue reading
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A Plague on Plagiarism – but there’s a lot more at stake here than rip-offs By William Bowles
31 March 2006 Like a lot of other independent journalists I’ve seen my work published on corporate Websites without my permission (or without being paid) including al-Jazeera and Yahoo. The terms of my copyright are clearly laid out in my Creative Commons license (see below). But worse still, mainstream publications seem to think that work… Continue reading
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Beware the Ides of March By William Bowles
Unlike many of my brethren (and not for the first time), I am seem to be out of step about the apocalyptic visions that are currently populating the Webosphere concerning an immanent invasion of Iran. Continue reading
The New Dark Age 