William Bowles – Essays
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(non)Sense & sensibility By William Bowles
9 September 2004 My folks cut their left-wing political teeth so-to-speak in the 1930s – the anti-fascist movement, the Spanish Civil War, the unemployed struggles and of course, defence of the Soviet Union was the stuff of their lives. I say of course because in the 1930s, much like today in some respects, the world… Continue reading
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Plus câ Change? By William Bowles
31 August 2004 Being incapacitated for the past couple of weeks has had one positive effect, namely, I’ve been able to think and read without being constantly pressured to produce and edit for the site at my usual frenetic pace. And indeed, as I lie here, propped up in bed, my shoulder nagging away in… Continue reading
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Crunch Time in Caracas By William Bowles
This coming Sunday 15 August, the infamous Recall Referendum takes place in Venezuela. For those of you not familiar with the situation in Venezuela – fifth largest producer of oil on the planet and 10% of it going to that insatiable guzzler of the stuff, El Norté, the US – in 1998, the country voted… Continue reading
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Iraq: Illusion and Reality – Media coverage reveals the Imperial Mindset By William Bowles
The Western media made a great play of the ‘sovereignty’ that Iraq allegedly achieved a little over a month ago when CIA/MI5 ‘asset’ Allawi was installed ‘Diem-style’ by his US paymasters. And indeed, ever since then, the media in direct collusion with the state has tried to foist on an extremely sceptical public the illusion… Continue reading
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Depoliticising Death By William Bowles
9 August 2004 Today’s (9/8/04) Independent has the headline: “A race against time “Darfur is the world’s worst humanitarian crisis. Read the statistics, and then find out how to help” With of course, the obligatory photograph of an emaciated baby, followed by the also obligatory round-up of ‘statistics’ on the plight of the Sudanese. Strange… Continue reading
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Flirting with Terror By William Bowles
7 August 2004 Hi There Suckers! If you enter the keywords “terror” into Google, you’ll get over 6.5 million hits. Enter the word “terrorism” and you’ll get almost 5.5 million and “terror” will return almost 5 million. “Terrorist” will get you 4.3 million and the “war on terror” returns a little over a 500,000. A… Continue reading
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It’s a Girl’s World By William Bowles
3 August 2004 Anybody who has been reading my serialised novel ‘XX‘ will know that I have an abiding interest in issues surrounding gender. There are lots of reasons for this, not the least my own experience of being a man in a man’s world. It occurred to me that I rarely write about issues… Continue reading
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Book Review: Bush on the Couch: Inside the Mind of the President By William Bowles
One thing is for sure, at least according to Justin Frank M.D. the inside of George W’s head is pretty messed up. The question is, which came first, a messed up policy or a messed up president or do the two go hand in hand? And I suppose, this is where I find it difficult… Continue reading
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Making Sense of Sudan By William Bowles
The build-up in the press coverage of Sudan to its present hysterical fever pitch must surely come as no surprise to most knowledgeable Africa watchers but the reality is that the present situation in Sudan is well over a quarter of a century old and much longer in the making. And of course it’s also… Continue reading
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Why I’m a closet Anarchist By William Bowles
Last night there was a TV doccie on a man who had been falsely accused of murder and had spent 25 years in jail, 13 of them because he refused to admit that he was guilty. He finally won his appeal against wrongful conviction last year. But in a sense winning his appeal resulted in… Continue reading
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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
The New Dark Age 