William Bowles – Essays
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Bush in the Bush William Bowles
Today, Bush arrives in Senegal where he’ll visit Goree Island, one of the locations from which an estimated 20 million slaves started their long journey to the Americas. Half of the 20 million never made it. And no doubt, Bush will make a speech about America’s commitment to ‘freedom’ and to Africa, blah-blah-blah…. Continue reading
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Remembering Vietnam William Bowles
As with the ‘war on terror’, the ‘war on (godless) communism’ (or, if you prefer, fanatical Islamic fundamentalists) relied on a vast disinformation campaign based on fear and paranoia using the conception of the ‘other’ to put the fear of God into the population. So for example, many of the sci-fi movies that were made… Continue reading
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Blairspeak By William Bowles
Nowhere, in any of the evidence I’ve reviewed has anybody ever said that Blair personally invented the evidence, but that is what Blair says he’s been accused of doing. So now the argument will spin down a different road, leaving the essential issues behind obscured in a cloud of dust and small stones. Continue reading
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Manufacturing Terror By William Bowles
The vast and overwhelming propaganda onslaught that we’ve been subjected to since 911, is indicative of the lengths to which the ruling elites are prepared to go to in order to gain our consent for their actions. Indeed, the nature and scope of the propaganda war indicates just how insecure they feel. Continue reading
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From Burgers to Baghdad By William Bowles
For over fifty years , the West has carried on a campaign that pushes the idea that the superiority of the ‘Western way of life’ based upon unlimited ‘choice’ and the ‘free market’ as opposed to the drab and conformist communist world, is the best of all possible worlds. They sold us the idea, that… Continue reading
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Iraq: Desperate measures for desperate times
Is there no end to the government’s duplicity? Apparently not. On this morning’s (30/06/03) BBC Today programme, the Foreign Minister Jack Straw rolled out yet another ‘reason’, stating that the agreement between the Palestinians and the Israelis (the ‘road map’) would almost certainly have not gone ahead, indeed it would have been ‘sabotaged’ by Saddam… Continue reading
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The never-ending story: 45 minutes from Niger By William Bowles
The dossiers of September 2002 and February 2003 are revealing for a number of reasons. Firstly, they illustrate just how unsure the government was about its ability to convince an extremely skeptical public and the lengths it was prepared to go to in order win us over. Continue reading
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Red Herring Day By William Bowles
Straw’s statement is indeed a clever (but not clever enough) sleight of hand, because if challenged, as the letter says, he can say, ‘Yes, what I said was true because at the time of writing, there was no imminent (immediate, current, impending) threat.’ Continue reading
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Incredible! By William Bowles
Surely, the entire point of lying to us and using fabricated evidence is because the government had already made up its mind that it was going to invade Iraq. It lied because it knew it didn’t have the support of the British public because it didn’t have the evidence to convince us with, so it… Continue reading
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Spinning out of control By William Bowles
Wonderful! Alistair Campbell accuses the BBC of ‘lying’ because, he asserts, the BBC accused the government of lying over the ’45 minute’ scenario. Is this a desert storm in a teacup? Whilst the two monopolies go at each other, the essential issues simply don’t enter into the discussion at all, from either side. Whilst they… Continue reading
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Exaggeration By William Bowles
The farce of an ‘investigation’ into the ‘rush to war’ continues in the UK as does the media’s complicity in presenting the reasons entirely divorced from the context and history of the trajectory of Western imperialism. The main argument being advanced by ‘critics’ of the war in Parliament, is that the government ‘exaggerated’ the threat… Continue reading
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Through a glass objectively By William Bowles
The idea that there is some kind of ‘objective’ ground from which to view events, particularly of the political variety, is a long-held fantasy, especially of British journalism. It’s still taught in British universities would you believe, that out there, somewhere, there’s a space that the journalist can occupy, which sits perfectly in the middle,… Continue reading
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Palestine: US plays the shell game By William Bowles
Statements by secretary of state Colin Powell would seem to represent a change of heart on the part of the US over the Israeli position on the future of a Palestinian state. But does a call for the establishment of a Palestinian state and the removal of a few shacks (some not even occupied) erected… Continue reading
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May the force be with you? By William Bowles
Messianism seems to be the thing with the Bush government. A God-given mission to cleanse the world of evil, or ‘creative destruction’ as Michael Ledeen puts it. There are those who are making dark comparisons with the Third Reich but perhaps because of my background, upbringing or whatever you want to call one’s past, I… Continue reading
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Iran: First it was ‘October Surprise’ – now it’s No Surprise By William Bowles
It’s a complicated story that requires an understanding of broader US and Israeli strategic objectives, as well as a recognition that many people, especially Americans, may find it difficult to swallow the fact that the leaders of the US were and are, quite prepared to sacrifice the lives of their own citizens, subvert the Constitution,… Continue reading
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Instant Replay By William Bowles
As the war drums beat with ever greater insistence in Washington DC, once more we see the UN being used as a pawn in the USUK’s grand imperialist strategies to commandeer the key resources of the planet and to crush any and all opposition to its rule. We cannot allow an ‘instant replay’ of Iraq… Continue reading
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Book Review: Consenting Adults? By William Bowles
Capital which is global in scope, is able to move across national borders without let or hindrance, but that ‘democracy’ (where it exists) stops at national borders. And in an age of global capital, the nation state is incapable of dealing with issues that affect the entire planet. And nation states, driven by parochial interests,… Continue reading
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Iranies of Iran William Bowles
The role of the ‘secret team’ headed by ‘Ollie’ North and the involvement of guns for drugs; guns for the Nicaraguan Contras, the drugs for the youth of US cities, also involved a failed Saving and Loans bank used for money laundering, CIA ‘proprietaries’, assassinations and bombings, Ronald Reagan, the head of the CIA and… Continue reading
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While the US crows, Iraq resists By William Bowles
As with all the other US military adventures across the world over the past decades, the US operates on the premise that people fight US invasions because they’re forced to. Yet time and again, this view has proved to be self-delusionary and follows from the imperialist elite confusing their own largely domestically targeted propaganda with… Continue reading
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Spooking the Spooks By William Bowles
Having spooked the entire population with tales of terror as part of its programme to win over the population to its policies, the Bush administration is faced with the reality of being hoisted by its own petard as the saying goes. As more and more information comes out about the real nature of the repressive… Continue reading
The New Dark Age 