Daily archives: June 7, 2010
The 4.45pm Link
Iain Dale deserves applause and support for taking on the appalling rich man’s thugs, Schillings, and publishing John Sweeney’s Rooney’s Gold.
http://iaindale.blogspot.com/2010/06/rooneys-gold-publishing-tale.html
You will recall it was Schillings who had this blog – and several others – taken down temporarily (permanently if they had their way) at the behest of convicted gangster and racketeer Alisher Usmanov.
Just as Schillings had Rooney’s Gold cancelled by Random House on behalf of Wayne Rooney, so they had The Catholic Orangemen of Togo cancelled by Mainstream (50% owned by Random House) on behalf of mercenary killer Tim Spicer. Yet not a word of libel appears in either book.
https://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2009/01/buy_the_catholi.html
Rooney’s Gold is written by my mate John Sweeney. It should be a good read – the extraordinary things he was telling me about the relationship between football agents and organised crime were a real revelation.
I am going to contact other bloggers to see if we can’t organise a day of campaigning by all major British bloggers against the UK’s notoriously oppressive libel laws, which put nil value on freedom of speech – literally – and are designed for the express purpose of protecting the rich from the revelation of truth.
US Kills 35 Women and Children in the Yemen
I remain grateful to emptywheel for the perception that the US defence of the Israeli killings is of a piece with its own claim to the right to murder anybody, anytime, anywhere.
This is starkly illustrated by the news that the US killed 35 women and children in a cluster bomb attack on the Yemen.
This policy is the apogee of what I named in “The Catholic Orangemen of Togo” the “Good Guy, Bad Guy” school of foreign policy analysis. In this view, conflicts are not born out of competition for resources or present or historical injustices, but simply by evil “bad guys”. Eliminate them, and the conflict goes away.
The tragedy is, of course, that the continued US massacre of civilians by these “targeted” attacks in Yemen, Pakistan and elsewhere will only make conflict more bitter, intense and of course longer. But then, that is good news if you are an arms manufacturer, mercenary, part of the security apparatus or a right wing politician. All of those people’s access to funds, resources and power is increased by continuing conflict.