William Bowles – Essays
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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
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AIDing and abetting death in Falluja By William Bowles
14 January 2005 The comedian, writer and actor Terry Jones wrote a letter to the Guardian asking why there had been no move to send aid to the survivors of the USUK destruction of Iraq? The letter ends by posing the questions: Why aren’t our TV companies and newspapers running fundraisers to help Iraqis whose lives have… Continue reading
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Warming to the subject of oil By William Bowles
In spite of all my efforts to show that ‘peak oil’ is an invention, it seems to fall on deaf ears with immense tomes landing with a thump on my virtual desktop that attempt to show that the Huppert ‘peak oil’ hypothesis is the only true and righteous path and anyone who dares challenge it… Continue reading
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Full circle? Well almost by William Bowles
This is the time of year when you are meant to engage in retrospection, look back on the events of the past year and pass ‘learned’ judgements, the lessons we hav(en’t) learned and so on and so forth. However, it strikes me that the events of the past year have more in common with those… Continue reading
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Book Review: A Century of War – Anglo-American Oil Politics and the New World Order by William Engdahl By William Bowles
By the 1870s the Empire had reached its high point and England began the longest economic depression in its history, one that it was not to recover from until the 1890s. And in the meantime its European competitors, chiefly Germany, now outstripping Britain in industrial production and technological innovation, by the 1890s also had a… Continue reading
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Where were you when the lights went out? By William Bowles
23 December 2004 It’s estimated that within the first couple of decades after the Europeans ‘discovered’ the Americas, they exterminated around fifteen million people in a frenzy of bloodletting that has no precedent in history. Of course it’s not called a Holocaust, in fact it’s not even mentioned in the white man’s history books, but… Continue reading
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Well Oiled By William Bowles
13 December 2004 — InvestigatingImperialism I had another piece ready for publication but I got a lot of feedback (50/50 in support and against) on the ‘Peak Oil’ piece that I thought needed to be addressed first. I’ll try and summarise the various views as briefly as possible. Continue reading
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The truth about ‘Peak Oil’ – The future revisited from a past that never happened By William Bowles
6 December 2004 ‘Control energy and you control nations’ – Henry Kissinger Continue reading
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The Blair Fear Project By William Bowles
23 November 2004 W A R N I N G Continue reading
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Iraq=Vietnam: Misinterpreting the Metaphor By William Bowles
Of course Iraq is not Vietnam and it’s not 1965 either and neither is Iraq a nation of tropical rain forests. If one were to make comparisons based purely on geography, then Algeria would be a better one. But geography only determines the form of the struggle, not what drives it. Continue reading
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Weasel words by the dogs of straw By William Bowles
We have yet to discover the true scale of the slaughter that the US wrought on Fallujah but one thing is clear, if we rely on the British government for the numbers we’ll never know the truth. Continue reading
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The more things change the more they stay the same By William Bowles
Coincidence? The surfacing of a videotape that allegedly shows the execution of Margaret Hassan coming as it does fresh on the heels of the video of the execution of a wounded Iraqi resistance fighter by US Marines seems to be part of a pattern of diverting attention away from embarrassing revelations for the occupiers. Continue reading
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Guilt or Guilty? By William Bowles
Without doubt, the Israeli propaganda machine has been a resounding ‘success’ in that it has been able to instil in many of us such feelings of guilt about the Holocaust that few dare even mention the word Jew without surrounding it with a plethora of qualifications lest anyone think that it contains even a hint… Continue reading
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Fallujah: Unpacking the press destroying the myths By William Bowles
Western press coverage of the horror that is Fallujah has with the odd exception been nothing short of outrageous in its distortions and blatant propagandising. Even where it purports to be critical of the US in its destruction of Fallujah and its inhabitants, the sub-text continues to push the Western line of ‘foreign militants’, ‘mistakes’… Continue reading
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Weakness Through Strength By William Bowles
As Fallujah burns and scores of civilians die at the hands of the Bush/Blair criminal action, BBC Radio Orwell talks glibly of “mopping up operations”. No one doubts the ability of the US and its handmaiden, the UK to turn Fallujah into a pile of rubble, destroying is the one proven ability of imperialism that… Continue reading
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On the Road to Fallujah By William Bowles
6 November 2004 Ship me somewhere east of Suez, where the best is like the worst, Where there ar’n’t no Ten Commandments an’ a man can raise a thirst. Mandalay. Rudyard Kipling In days of ‘yore’ when the Brits had an empire they used to justify their colonial ‘adventures’ with talk of a ‘civilising mission’… Continue reading
The New Dark Age 