William Bowles – Essays
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Information Clearing House Archive Part 5 July 27 2004
July 2004 — 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 July 22-27 2004 Date: 27 Jul 2004 1 YEAR & 108 DAYS… Continue reading
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A very constitutional coup d’état? By William Bowles
20 July 2004 The Labour government in a ruthless bid to hold on to power has achieved what many would have thought impossible, namely to hijack Tory policy almost in its entirety with its latest ploy of adopting a ‘law and order’ agenda as part of its programme of creating a police state. Continue reading
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Remnants of Empire By William Bowles
The media’s response to the Butler ‘report’ has been tediously predictable, with most of the press pundits seeming to emit a collective sigh of relief as if, more even than the government, they can’t wait to see the back of Iraq and get on with what they know best – hobnobbing with their pals in… Continue reading
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Separate but Synonymous: The Media and the State By William Bowles
There could be no clearer admission of the incestuous relationship between the media and the state than the subtext within this apparently ‘objective’ reportage on the impending release of the Butler report on the government‘s justification for the invasion of Iraq. Continue reading
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A Failure of Policy Not of Intelligence By William Bowles
Anybody who has read Agee’s book on his time in the CIA will laugh at today’s ‘report’ on the CIA’s failures to correctly assess the ‘dangers’ from Saddam Hussein’s fabled WMD. In the CIA Diary Agee reveals that the primary objective of the CIA is not the gathering of intelligence (most of which appears to… Continue reading
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al-Zarqawi or al-Invention? By William Bowles
Today’s Independent (06/7/04) has a front page story titled “A video nasty: Terror chief shows off his deadly work” and is about yet another “foreign-led” group of “militants” purportedly headed by the one-legged Jordanian and ‘right-hand man’ of Osama bin Laden, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. Yet the story presents not a single shred of evidence to… Continue reading
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Book Review: Nada for Nader? By William Bowles
For less than one hundred years, most of us who live in the so-called democracies have had the universal franchise – the vote. Every four or five years we cast our ballot (those who bother that is). Being able to vote is seen as the bedrock of democracy. Indeed, the vote has been peddled very… Continue reading
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Information Clearing House Archive Part 5 24-30 June 2004
June 2004 — 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 June 24-30 2004 Date: 30 Jun 2004 1 YEAR & 82 DAYS… Continue reading
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A Conspiracy of Capital By William Bowles
29 June 2004 A series of events have occurred over the past months/years that surely should have even those amongst us most reluctant to question US and UK policies, wondering about the real nature of the USUK, their objectives and the means they use to achieve them. Continue reading
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Left of What? Toward a Platform for Change By William Bowles
This is the 250th essay (give or take a few) that I’ve written since initiating I‘n’I in August 2003 and I’ve written well over a quarter of a million words. Buckminster Fuller said the he believed that the human race was a success as long as it continued to exist and although something of a… Continue reading
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Coup D’etats and all that stuff By William Bowles
Is it conceivable that a core group of people within the US Establishment led by the CIA could, over a period of years, engineer what amounts to a coup d’etat to remove the Bush Gang from the White House? The motivation being that the Bush administration’s policies were threatening the very basis of US capitalism… Continue reading
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21st Century Time Machine By William Bowles
To continue my sojourn into the Victorian era it’s also worth looking at the raft of regurgitated Victorian ‘scientific solutions’ that have accompanied the right wing agenda pursued by both the US and UK governments for a decade or more Continue reading
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The new imperialism or picking up where they left off? By William Bowles
9 June 2004 My previous essay (‘Queen Victoria in Drag‘) prompted some further thoughts on our present predicament and foremost was the reality that the 20th century consisted almost entirely of a war between two ideologies – capitalism and socialism. And although the examples, the Soviet Union, China and so forth were not exactly what… Continue reading
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Queen Victoria in Drag? By William Bowles
So 24-hour drinking will be with us shortly which means that people will be able to forget how unhappy they are 24/7. Predictably, the killjoys amongst us are whinging about binging but like everything else under overdue capitalism, rather than deal with causes, it’s easier to dump on the effects. Taken collectively, with every passing… Continue reading
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CSI Baghdad By William Bowles
The George Tenet affair illustrates the ‘wheels within wheels’ strategy of the propaganda war being waged over the abject failure that is the invasion and occupation of Iraq. And it’s a failure on two fronts: the failure of the invasion itself to establish a secure beachhead in the Middle East and the imperium’s failure to… Continue reading
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Englan’ is a bitch By William Bowles
Perhaps it’s because England’s slaves were in the colonies or maybe it’s just the sheer length of time (centuries) but whatever the reason, the nature of racism in the UK has its own peculiarities that sets it apart. One could go into an extensive analysis of the history of the ideology of racism in English… Continue reading
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Information Clearing House Archive Part 6 30-31 May 2004
May 2004 — 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 May 30-31 2004 Date: 31 May 2004 === 1 YEAR & 52… Continue reading
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Knowing who we are and why it matters By William Bowles
29 May 2004 Awhile back I wrote a piece called “Listen to your ancestors” that in part was based upon my experiences of living in Africa for ten years (before being unceremoniously booted out by my former ‘comrades’). In part (although unstated) it was on reflection also about my immigrant roots here in the UK… Continue reading
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A Damn Fine Mess By William Bowles
27 May 2004 So where is the demand from the so-called Left of the Labour government for the complete and unconditional withdrawal from Iraq? Are they too hiding behind the fig leaf of the UN? A UN that is reluctant to takeover the minefield created by the occupation and one complicated by the juggling of… Continue reading
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Where is the Left? By William Bowles
25 May 2004 “The paralysis of the US leftist intellectuals, their inability to express solidarity with the Iraqi resistance is a disease which afflicts all “leftist” intellectuals in the colonial countries. They are fearful of the problem (the colonial war) and fearful of the resolution (national liberation). In the end, the comforts and freedoms they… Continue reading
The New Dark Age 