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360 thoughts on “Back in Ghana”

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  • Suhayl Saadi

    Yes, I agree with Vronsky at 5:32pm. I mean, we knew at the time, did we not, that US Secretary of State, Colin Powell got up and lied to the UN Security Council.

    I suspect that anyone who is profoundly surprised by the material so far leaked (from what one can gather) is likely to have belonged to that part of the population which it is possible to fool “all of the time”, as opposed to most of the people, who can be fooled only “some of the time”.

    Nonetheless, even if, in context of the contemporary rightly skeptical public environment, in the main the leaks are embarrassing (‘Emperor Loses Clothes!), rather than destabilising, it is still important that proof has been demonstrated and that we now have 2.5 million photographs of the emperor’s nudity.

    I’d rather have 2.5 million ‘dog-eat-dog’ bites than George W. Bush’s, Anthony Blair’s and Alastair Campbell’s triple tear-soaked memoirs of mendacity and blood.

    The Moody Blues’-style maxim for today?

    A little bite (of truth) is better than the biggest pie of lies.

    Cue the mellotron.

  • Vronksy

    I think I should apologise for linking to climateaudit.org – in the context, it was ironically intended.

    I’m sure we all already have shortcuts to places like http://www.realclimate.org. Other recommendations welcome.

    I was once obliged to study the mellotron in a most unwelcome degree degree of detail. It wasn’t pleasant, and I’m afraid I can’t thank you for that memory poke, Suhayl.

  • Suhayl Saadi

    What was wrong with it, Vronsky? The mellotron, I mean. It’s always seemed to me to be a deeply mellow instrument: mellow mellotron. But I never had to engage in intimate study of it. Do tell.

    Alan, I’m not sure whether you’re being ironic or ‘situationist’ at 8:37pm, but if you’re interested in things Israeli, check out Ariel Sabar’s excellent book, ‘My Father’s Paradise’:

    http://www.arielsabar.com/book.html

  • Apostate

    This schmuck Campbell hasn’t worked out that Israel is an ethno-supremacist state that discriminates against its Orthodox, Sephardi and Arab citizens and commits genocidal acts of terror against the Palestinians and its neighbours.

    Israel and the Family of Nations is an utterly oxymoronic concept.

    Moreover just who is going to run the risk of landing within a square mile of its coast or airspace to compete in a soccer tournament?

    Get real you dumb arse shill!

  • Vronksy

    “What was wrong with it….I never had to engage in intimate study of it”

    Nothing wrong with it. Just, any magical thing can be de-magicked (nearly) by analysing it. I just got myself into that crossfire – music technology. Techie interested in music = accident waiting to happen, I suppose. I recall some stuff about unweaving rainbows. Have you encountered the telharmonium?

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telharmonium

  • Suhayl Saadi

    The telharmonium: brilliant! I hadn’t heard of it. It has to be the heaviest invented musical instrument of all time: 7 tons or 200 tons! But also ahead of its time. The technological hadn’t attained the level necessary. I love the idea of strange electronic music breaking into telephone conversations! If that happened now, we’d probably think the secret services were screwing with our minds!

    This chap, Zahir Ebrahim, clearly thinks that Wikileaks is more Wurlitzer than mellotron:

    http://www.veteranstoday.com/2010/12/01/zahir-ebrahim-wikileaks-and-imperial-mobilization/

    If one reads the Ariel Sabar book, one will discover, among many other interesting things, that Ashkenazi-dominated Israel did indeed discriminate against, and even experiment on, the Mizrahim (Jews from Arab countries). The book is not a paean to Israel; it’s a moving human story of migration from Kurdistan (where people of three or more religions had co-existed peacefully for centuries, until the 1940s and the rise of Zionism). The author describes Israel as “a European solution to a European problem”. Which puts it very well, I think. Sabar is an American from LA.

  • somebody

    Suhayl Most of the reviews of ‘My Father’s Paradise’ I have seen are by American Jews who praise the book and the author and include support for the creation of the Zionist state of Israel which was created when Palestine was cruelly occupied – Al Nakba. If these reviews are correct, I would not want to read a propaganda tract. What is your view of these opinions?

  • Vronksy

    “Ashkenazi-dominated Israel”

    I’m not awfully well informed but I have a Jewish partner and Jewish friends (some, formerly in Scotland, now in Israel). I hear recurring complaints of discrimination – not of Jew against Arab, but Jew against Jew. It’s sadly reminiscent of our Scottish Catholic/Protestant thing (but all are Christians).

    Staying with music, Joaquin Rodrigo (whose concerto everyone knows) was well acquainted with these conflicting cultural strands. Perhaps in Spain cultural history is geologically twisted and forced upward, so that we can see the strata. Rodrigo has a piece (which I have never heard performed) called Ecos de Sefara, Sefara being Iberia, and clearly related to ‘Sephardic’. It’s a little musical protest. And celebration. Modal and moody.

  • Vronksy

    For anyone checking up, sefara should maybe be sefarad. But where I learned my (primitive) Spanish you wouldn’t pronounce that final ‘d’ anyway. And I’m not going to rummage round the shelves tonight to see how Rodrigo spelled it. Bedtime.

  • Suhayl Saadi

    Thanks, Vronsky. I know some of Rodrigo’s excellent work, but I’d not heard of that one – I must listen to it!

    Somebody, sometimes it’s best not to read reviews. When I went to (or should I say, stumbled upon) the author’s reading in Washington DC two years ago, the event had already begun and so, a little awkwardly (as is the case when one is late and in a foreign country, etc.) I sat down among the crowd because it sounded interesting.

    This bookshop – ‘Politics and Prose’ is in an affluent area of the city. The audience (as is often the case with readings anywhere in the world) seemed affluent, highly educated, upper-middle/professional-middle class and I sensed that they were probably nearly all Jewish.

    What the author was saying was immensely interesting. Here was a guy whose grandfather (and father) migrated from Iraq (Kurdistan) to Israel in 1951 and whose father later (j the early 1950s) moved to the USA. Sabar made it very clear that until the 1940s, relations in Iraq b/w Muslims, Jews and Eastern Christians were excellent (and esp. compared to the situation in Europe, essentially had been so for centuries) and that animosity began only subsequent to the intrusions of Zionist agents into Iraq and of Zionism in general in the Levant during the 1940s and that it reached a head with the Arab-Israeli War of 1948.

    I sensed, from their questions, that this was not really a narrative which many in the audience had heard before. It didn’t fit the historical amnesia/ propaganda to which they may have been accustomed. But I was impressed.

    When I read the book, it was clear there while Sabar is not in any sense denying his Israeli component and while there are things I’d definitely argue with in it, what one comes away with is not a propaganda tract but a human story, a sense of the family’s affection and longing for Kurdistan/ Kurds and a deeply ambivalent and, I sensed, somewhat resentful, attitude towards the role which Israel (one of the supposed ‘paradises’; the other two are the town in Kurdistan and the glitz of LA in the USA) played in his family’s journey.

    No, you’re not going to get a ‘pro-Palestinian’ book here. I tend to read things which do not always accord with all my views. But what you do get is a subtle but definite alteration in the quiddity – he ‘gets away’ with it because it’s cleverly done, because of his provenance and because he doesn’t enter into a direct confrontation in the Palestine/Israel dynamic.

    His father is a Prof. of Aramaic at UCLA – a native speaker, indeed. These people work with Arabs, Iranians, etc. in their studies. I think the Prof. who gave his father a job in the USA was an Iranian.

    It’s worth reading because of all the above and of course because it’s very well-written – a good story – and because it adds to one’s knowledge of the human condition. The storytellers of Zakho, Kurdistan are fascinating, for example. I guess that’s why I’ve spent this amount of time on it.

  • Mark Golding - Children of Iraq

    Nick Glegg is near being able to announce the coalition’s plans for ending child detention.

    Clegg told Citizens UK on Wednesday, via a videolink from Kazakhstan where he is representing the UK at a meeting of the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe.

    “There were 1,085 children detained last year, with more than 100 detained between April and June this year. In July Clegg described it as a “moral outrage”. The immigration minister, Damian Green, has pledged to dress up as Father Christmas if children are detained this Christmas in the Yarl’s Wood detention centre in Bedfordshire.”

    http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2010/dec/01/nick-clegg-announce-timetable-ending-child-detentions

  • anno

    Last night I was working in a shop where you couldn’t turn off the sound. Two TVs next to eachother with different tunes making it really difficult for any of us to work or think straight. One of the tracks was endlessly repeated Beatles which might have had a Guantanamo torture effect. But there was also some horrible, virtual, computer-synthetic noise.

    In same way you have with Wikileaks, a parallel soundtrack: the old, familiar theme-tunes of media world politics, but also the preposterous, whispering suggestion that we are being revealed inner secrets. As if. Satan often tells the truth. It’s the fact that it pops up as a notion in your head from nowhere that means you have to treat it as the pack of lies.

    Wikileaks is a major piece of deception, even if it may contain bits of truth. Sorry to put the kibosh on it. Also, Suhayl, for as many who migrated from different countries to Israel, many others have merely strengthened their roots in the same place. Kurdistan is still host to many Jewish interests, of the non-ziological brand of course.

  • CheebaCow

    “Former WikiLeaks Activists to Launch New Whistleblowing Site”

    (spiegel.de/international/germany/0,1518,732212,00.html)

    The more the merrier in my opinion. Hydras and all that.

  • Suhayl Saadi

    Thanks, anno, a powerful analogy. Interesting, your point about Kurdistan – please do tell us more. One of the things many people don’t realise actually is that in 1940 one third of the population of Baghdad was Jewish. The Talmud was written there. Much of what now is known as Judaism actually was written in Egypt, Iraq and other Muslim countries by Arabic-speaking Jews. It is this vast and ineluctable historical fact which does not accord with current geopolitical perceived exigencies and agendas, that has been suppressed, in my view, in much mainstream cultural discourse. This needs to be addressed: he who controls the past controls the present…

  • Larry from St. Louis

    Yes, anno, do tell Suhayl more about your anti-Jewish hatred. He thrives on it.

  • Larry from St. Louis

    Suhayl, this Zahir Ebrahim you recommend is a dumbass who didn’t actually write a “book” – he wrote some pages on the Internet rehashing dumb leftist claims and dumb rightist claims.

    He cites Michael Ruppert. Isn’t that enough to know about him? Isn’t that enough to know about you?

    Suhayl, you’re a lefty failed doctor who’s spending the twilight of his years writing bad novels and being manipulated by right-wing American nuts. I would say that you’re also being manipulated by Jew-haters, but then I think you yourself are a Jew-hater.

  • Larry from St. Louis

    “Thanks, anno, a powerful analogy. Interesting, your point about Kurdistan – please do tell us more. One of the things many people don’t realise actually is that in 1940 one third of the population of Baghdad was Jewish. The Talmud was written there. Much of what now is known as Judaism actually was written in Egypt, Iraq and other Muslim countries by Arabic-speaking Jews. It is this vast and ineluctable historical fact which does not accord with current geopolitical perceived exigencies and agendas, that has been suppressed, in my view, in much mainstream cultural discourse. This needs to be addressed: he who controls the past controls the present…”

    Finally, a Muslim acknowledges this.

    When you do your comrades plan on giving the Jews their property back? Or will you keep harping on Palestinian claims (as if you really care about the Palestinians)?

    Suhayl, you do realize that the Jews were expelled from Baghdad, don’t you?

  • Ruth

    If the CIA/MI6/Mossad were behind the WikiLeaks’ revelations then they would have a very good reason for it.

    9/11 ‘legitimatised’ the invasion and theft of resources from lands that did not belong to the US/UK.

    The internet is a very, very powerful influence. People have a far greater insight into the activities of those who govern them. So it is potentially a great danger to our rulers.

    Now WikiLeaks has given the US government the ‘legitimacy’ to censor the web.

    How long before Craig’s site is pulled?

  • Suhayl Saadi

    Well, Ruth, as has been amply demonstrated here, Craig’s site is replete with trolls of varying types, who adopt differing postures and states of revelation. I’ve read the excellent essay on the subject to which I think you kindly linked. Someone ought really to write a thesis on internet trolling. Can we have a whistleblower, please, a ‘reformed senior troll’, who can give us all comprehensive inside information as to precisely how such mechanisms – including payment, outsourcing, etc. – might work? This is an open invitation.

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