William Bowles – Essays
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Book Review: Can’t see the wood for the trees? by William Bowles
Within the pages of this book lie the reasons that explain why men and women now inhabit different worlds, for the reasons are not biologically determined but most definitely ideological in origin but because their roots are buried in the hidden history of the rise of capitalism some five hundred years ago, the reality of… Continue reading
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400 Years of Blogging By William Bowles
If nothing else, the explosion of electronic ‘Penny Dreadfuls’ or the ‘Blog’ has at long last enabled us to challenge the long-held assumption that to be a journalist you need to have some special dispensation from some higher power that enables one to stand aside from the human race and cast an ‘objective’ eye over… Continue reading
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Blair’s ‘Morality’ gone mad By William Bowles
One of the arguments used by the government in its attempt to justify preventive detention is that the sources cannot be revealed for fear of ‘compromising’ them. The truth however, is a lot grimmer as Straw’s defence of torture reveals. For what Straw’s comment exposes is a totally morally bankrupt ruling elite, getting more desperate… Continue reading
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Update on the terror ‘Debate’ – the BBC version By William Bowles
The fundamental idea namely that the state can imprison people for what they might do (or think) has conveniently vanished. Convenient because tackling the issue of preventive detention – because that’s what the law is all about – is entirely missing from the debate. Continue reading
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Information Clearing House Archive Part 2 March 8-11 2005
11 March 2005 — Information Clearing House [I’ve been archiving ICH digests since early 2003. Unfortunately, an unknown number of the links are now dead, so I can’t guarantee that the link will take you where you want to go. WB] Information Clearing House Digest March 8-11 2005 Date:Fri, 12 Mar 2005 The Rendering U.S. knowingly… Continue reading
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Re “Terrorist Related Activity” By William Bowles
What is amazing about the Zarqawi saga is how, over time, Western governments (with the able assistance of the media) have managed to keep the pot boiling regarding a man whose existence is far from actually being established as fact (although of late, he, along with Osama seems to have fallen off the front page,… Continue reading
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The BBC Photoshop’s the news By William Bowles
I have been following BBC coverage on both the World Service and BBC Radio 4 as well as the BBC Website over the past few days of the shooting death of the Italian secret serviceman and the wounding of the freed Italian journalist Giuliana Sgrena. The discrepancy between eyewitness accounts of the event and the… Continue reading
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Privatising Propaganda By William Bowles
The use of PR companies and ‘NGOs’ by the US government to ‘sell’ its foreign policy goes back a long way but it was the invasion of Grenada under Reagan when we witnessed a ‘test run’ of the idea and the technique really came into its own during Gulf War 2 in 1991 when the… Continue reading
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From Word Play to Gun Play:The legitimacy of the state’s right to rule By William Bowles
Many on the ‘left’ may dismiss the arguments surrounding the ‘legal’ basis that underpins the obviously (to me and most of the planet) illegal invasion and occupation of Iraq as no more than a lot of hot air and obfuscation, preferring to take the ‘political’ road to judgement. But it is the ability of the… Continue reading
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US Enterprise: Lost in (cyber) space? By William Bowles
Do I get a sense that the ‘enterprise’ is unravelling or is it merely wishful thinking on my part? Judging by the media’s (mis)handling of for example, the situation in Iraq as well as the ‘war on terror’, it would seem so. On many fronts, the corporate/state-run media is under concerted assault from the so-called… Continue reading
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Who are these guys anyway (and other ‘neo-con’ nonsense)? By William Bowles
For the past couple of years a goodly section of the ‘left’ has obsessed over the ‘neo-con’ guys as if they suddenly crawled out from under a rock but as I have observed in many past essays, these guys, far from crawling out from under a rock are the long-time managers of imperialism. Their ‘pedigree’,… Continue reading
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First stop Damascus – next stop Tehran? al-Hariri assassination followed by character assassination
Recent utterances by the Bush administration about Syria have a predictably ominous ring to them that when coupled to the massive car bomb that killed the former Lebanese prime minister Rafiq al-Hariri, fit a pattern that prepares the ground for more aggressive actions, more than likely to be carried out by its proxy in the… Continue reading
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The BBC: premier propagandist for the imperium By William Bowles
So whilst all 299 BBC stories (over 300,000 words in total) that mention Zarqawi hold not a single piece of evidence as to his real as opposed to alleged role in Iraq (or anywhere else for that matter), the overall impression created by the BBC’s coverage forms an integral part of an intensive state-led propaganda… Continue reading
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The Alien Amongst Us By William Bowles
In the run-up to WWII, the same racist propaganda was rolled out designed to pit people against people (”Why the little yellow bastards!” Time Magazine 1941, following the attack on Pearl Harbour) and so too with the Cold War rhetoric whether it was the “yellow hordes” of China or those “commie bastards” or indeed “Islamic… Continue reading
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Enraptured By William Bowles
7 February 2005 In an essay by Bill Moyers (’There is no tomorrow’)[1], ‘doyen’ of what passes for the ‘liberal’ media in the US, we read the following: In this past election several million good and decent citizens went to the polls believing in the rapture index. That’s right – the rapture index. Google it… Continue reading
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‘Little boxes, little boxes … they’re all made out of ticky-tack’ By William Bowles
Without endless ‘innovation’, that is the creation of ‘new’ products, capitalist production stagnates, or more precisely, markets get saturated and the rate of profit falls, production stagnates except for a diminishing demand for replacement. Hence the need to create ‘new’ products, more often than not essentially the same product but with ‘additions’, what we euphemistically… Continue reading
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Iraq: One ‘Election’, Two Different Stories By William Bowles
Over the past week, we have not heard a single dissenting voice on the issue of the legitimacy of the ‘election’. In fact it’s been wall-to-wall praise with words like “miracle” and “a dream made a reality” occurring almost every day and on every BBC ‘news’ programme. A veritable litany of government propaganda spewed out… Continue reading
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Angst, Anger and Aliens By William Bowles
Sometimes, writing about politics gets to be a real pain. Now I rarely indulge myself (is this the right term?) but let’s face it, we live in a completely fucked up society, yes fucked up capitalism and its fucked up ‘values’ – self-indulgent, smug and self-satisfied, insulated from a world it has systematically raped for… Continue reading
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The Massage is the Message By William Bowles
A previous alert from MediaLens on Iran serves to remind us of the role of the intelligentsia in creating the ‘right kind’ of space for further imperial adventures as the innocuous-sounding quotes above aptly illustrate. But just who are they talking to? After all, if one is to judge by the surveys of the BBC’s… Continue reading
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What Goes Around, Comes Around By William Bowles
An awful lot of energy was expended in 2004 on the ‘Anybody But Bush’ debate, with the ABB brigade predicting really dire consequences if Bush got reelected (as opposed to just dire consequences if Kerry got the job). I tried to present the various for and against arguments here although my own opinion was (and… Continue reading
The New Dark Age 