Read up, wise up and join in

Next Sunday afternoon I will be at the Isle of Man Freethinkers AGM. This year I have a more than usual interest in proceedings (more on that after the event).
Sadly, though, it means that I will not get over my Britphobia long enough to experience this amazing conference (see https://www.opendemocracy.net/5050/marieme-h%C3%A9lielucas-maryam-namazie/promoting-global-secular-alternative-in-isis-era and the full conference agenda at http://www.secularconference.com/agenda/ ). Still, I can at least urge anyone in the UK who hasn't yet booked to get along to what is - without a shadow of a doubt - the most important meeting of secular minds in the British Isles this year; in fact, given the timeliness of the subject matter and quality of the speakers, possibly this decade.
Maryam Namazie, Houzan Mahmoud, Taslim Nasrin , Gita Saghal and numerous other speakers are people who shatter the myth that secularism is somehow a white or 'Western' project. I am proud to say I have corresponded and worked with a few of them in recent years, and if I have learnt anything about global secularism in the last decade it was directly due to them. While straight, white, male and old “celebrity atheists” are the ones inevitably appearing on TV or pushing flabby abstractions in opportunist pot-boilers passed off as “serious books”, these are the folk at the coalface, squaring up to the mad mullahs and getting chased out of their homelands (or, if born nearer here, their ethnic ghettos) by pitchfork-wielding mobs. As if that was not bad enough, once in supposedly more liberal places they are blacklisted (I know, joke in poor taste, but absolutely correct here) by the kind of pathetic, white and privileged guilt-trippers who make many ”progressive left” organisations a nonsense (check Gita Saghal's experience with Amnesty International as a typical example).
In between the UKIP-lite shite about non-whites being peddled by some “celebrity atheists” and the Stalinist groupies who think it is somehow cooler to hug self-hating to the point of suicidal, religious apologistic bombers than properly deal with the complexities of neo-colonialism, trying to do the right thing without resorting to magic and Imaginary Invisible Friends has never been a tougher gig – and more necessary.
As Maryam concludes: “It is not racist to defend equality or secularism. In fact, it is racist to deny people the same rights and freedoms because they are deemed “different”. Also, secularism is not a western concept but a universal one. It is a demand of people everywhere. Nor is it “progressive” to support Islamism vis-à-vis imperialism. Islamism is our far right. Any progressive person or group must oppose all forms of fascism including the religious right. And they must support and show solidarity with those who have survived and are resisting. This is a fight we need more people to join.”
So read up, wise up, and join in.

Of honours and bombers

An old habit from my full time journo days has just paid off again. Before recycling I routinely check through old local papers and magazines for stories and tip-offs I might have missed. Today I found another to make me laugh, and to offer much more insight into the honours system.
Now, this piece of sycophantic claptrap (see http://www.iomtoday.co.im/news/isle-of-man-news/long-goodbye-for-governor-1-1740566 ) really should have been the last time the nastiest RAF flyboy since Bomber Harris got a mention in a Manx newspaper.
Sadly, not so. Because on 12th August we learnt in the Manx press that he was “surprised” to receive a knighthood.
Not half as surprised as me.
For the benefit of those who take no interest in war crimes against civilians, Macfadyen was the RAF chief of staff during the first Gulf War, i.e. the one that stopped when the survivors amongst Hussein's untrained conscripts from the foreign labour force left a wealthy neighbouring country we do loads of business with and his full time army emerged from their British built nuclear bunkers to gas the Kurds.
The latter, apparently, was none of our business. It was also none of our business that the much famed and filmed carpet bombing of Iraq hit almost no military targets but did kill around 350,000 civilians. By contrast, I would hazard a guess that some reconstruction contracts also fell the way of UK businesses via a long chain of offshore middle parties - in the UAE for example.
So another thing that does not surprise me is that, when Macfadyen's part in both this and the early Al -Yamamah arms deals became too awkward for the RAF and he was offered the governorship of the Isle of Man instead, he notoriously admitted to having to look the place up on a map. Frankly, given his poor map-reading skills I'm more surprised he found it.
By the way, if you know little about Al-Yamamah this (see http://www.corpwatch.org/article.php?id=9008 ) may help put things in context.
By chance, years ago, I was putting on an event in a Manx venue when Mrs M showed up with some American ladies. With a little sly probing I was able to find that El Guv was deep in hospitality with old US war chums, so the memsahibs had been sent out to see quaint local sights while the boys got down to business.
And it was nasty business too. Because with a little more sly probing I found that old US warhorses were regular guests at Dunbombin and interestingly, like him, their retirement interests revolved rather a lot around arms companies consultancies.
This was a period in UK business history when the OECD and FATF were causing a clean-up of the offshore finance industry, and organisations like Campaign Against the Arms Trade were taking so much interest in a civil service unit attached to the UK Department of International Development that it had to close down. The unit, in a nutshell, had for years employed around 100 civil servants to advise and assist the UK arms trade in efficient use of offshore entities in order to avoid public scrutiny, not to mention hassle with end user certificates (which by international treaty are required to prevent arms sales by “respectable” countries to the uglier type of dictatorship, such as the ones Lockheed and BAE might find very profitable).
This use of the governor's quarters (politically a bit of a grey area because not strictly under control of either Tynwald or Whitehall) for quiet chats about arms deals via cosy third country offshoots of major arms companies was, I feel sure, continued by Mcfadyen's successor and may not have tailed off until we got a civilian governor (though again one with extensive business experience of Africa).
Also note that (1) at least one former employee at the shadowy DID outfit went on to work in the Isle of Man public sector and that (2) a scheme which on paper helps Manx finance sector “experts” to help small nations develop more honest international trading practices and stamp out corruption (and was sold as such to FATF to help us clean up our own reputation) is substantially a creation of the Said Business School in Oxford and was originally based at the Isle of Man Business School.
That's the Said Business School started with a £23 Million donation from Saudi-Syrian businessman Wafic Said at around the time Blair & Co were shutting down a government enquiry into Al-Yamamah and the Isle of Man Business School which went belly-up because....... well, many wonder if the faculty and management knew much about basic business or accounting practices.
My wife sometime wonders why I laugh so much when I read Manx newspapers.

Ethics Boy

As we all know, Manx klingons like to trade on their insider political status, and the worst are those who leech off Tynwald Day.

So, no surprise that a coalition of the island’s most right wing godbotherers like to hold a 'prayer breakfast' close to the Colonial Clown Show and cut their costs by filching a government guest as the speaker.

Previous offenders have included an Oxford scientist with a sideline in squaring science and creationism, and a general who sent ordinary troops into recent conflicts with duff equipment and no flak jackets but increased the number of military chaplains.

Possibly topping both of these was the UK peer who likes to pose as a mover and shaker on the international aid scene but behind the scenes pushes the ideas of crackpots who, for example, would like to see Israel collapse in order to bring on The Rapture. It beggars belief that a key figure in the House of Lords can one night be a guest at a government reception and days later be addressing friends of the ‘revisionist historian’ (some still prefer the term ‘Holocaust denier’) David Irving. The lecture, I’m told, can still be found on a notorious neo-Nazi website you cannot look at without being blacklisted by the security services of several nations.

This year’s ‘guest of honour’ is a former banker, but also an ordained priest in the Church of England. He is also the author of a book entitled "Serving God? Serving Mammon?”

I’m not sure if the book makes it clear whose servant he eventually is, but his career gives a few clues.

Between 2004 and 2010 he presided over HSBC during possibly the dodgiest period in that bank’s history. A US investigation (see http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2012/dec/11/banking-libor-fine-hsbc and

http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/davidhughes/100171357/hsbc-money-laundering-scandal-casts-a-cloud-over-lord-green-the-trade-minister/ for example) later found HSBC managing to somehow not notice money laundering on a massive scale from the Colombian drug trade, or sanctions busting in Iran and other proscribed countries. When the US slapped a then record fine on the bank it emerged that it would actually have been much larger, and that banning the bank from doing any business within the US banking system should also have followed, but that this could not happen because of the risk to international banking and that massive staff cutbacks would follow.

The staff cuts followed anyway, with – for example - major layoffs in the offshore jurisdictions through which much of this cash would have passed and indeed the closure of at least one jurisdiction’s operation entirely - handily enough before further investigations might have revealed much worse goings on. Not that this poster boy for contemporary religious morality suffered as a result.

Unlike thousands of his lower ranking staff, he did not lose his job as a side-effect of the massive fines. Unlike millions of ordinary and innocent workers whose pension schemes were major shareholders his retirement plans would not be dashed when share prices tumbled.

Because by that point he had a new job in the LibCon pact, as Minister for Trade and Industry. Since when that department has cut deals with the largest tax-avoiding corporations, failed to curb the outrageous bonuses paid to senior bank executives (who – not to put too fine a point on it –were pretty rubbish at their job anyway) and nursemaided the UK arms trade towards subtler use of offshore structures to avoid public scrutiny of their deals with some of the world’s ugliest despots.

All I can conclude is that if Jesus is still saving then he’s got his pension tucked away in scams that would make any smack dealer blush.

Who is helping who?

Last week when this (see http://www.gov.im/lib/news/cso/overseasaidcommi4.xml) appeared on the Manx government website I was sure we would read it in the columns of a ‘Manx’ newspaper in the next few days. Curiously, it has not appeared.

It certainly had all the right ingredients, i.e. a story involving a supposedly senior Westminster politician visiting a Manx government committee which purports to help poorer nations. The fact that Cox is actually a pariah even within Westminster Tory circles, and that Manx ‘overseas aid’ is far too often money gifted uncritically to neo-colonial dabblers (or  faith-based simpletons who only interfere in other countries because they are unemployable here) would not normally bother a docile local media which likes to be spoon-fed titbits from those whose advertising keep it going.

I remember our not-so-distinguished visitor as one of the main participants in a Rupert Murdoch funded campaign to curb local educational authorities in the early 1990’s. More particularly it sought to stop the better ones ignoring Section 28 – which prevented schools educating children about homosexuality (rather than presenting it as a disease or undesirable lifestyle). More recently she became involved in the Christian Institute, which even its politest critics view as the British evangelical right’s version of the Monster Raving Loony Party.

Further afield is her involvement in something known as the ‘One Jerusalem’ project, which seeks to deny Palestinian claims on the Temple Mount in favour of the current set-up, where a handful of the world’s most flat-earth Christian cults squabble amongst themselves over a square mile or so of mystic hoo-ha while the Israelis look on with gritted teeth and Muslim interests are handily ignored. Her overseas ‘charitable activities’ are similarly suspect, tending to perpetuate crude stereotypes of people from poorer countries which resist the ‘help’ (i.e. undemocratic control) of Western governments and evangelical charities as well as excusing some pretty inhuman UK government decisions, such as one where money is being, on the one hand, cut from women’s groups which genuinely help women escaping forced marriage and, on the other, given to a religious ‘charity’ to ‘help’ (i.e. repatriate back to their abusers) women allegedly ‘trafficked’ to the UK.

‘Trafficking’is one of those emotive terms played on by both evangelical panhandlers and racist civil servants.

We think we know of ‘thousands’ of poor foreign women smuggled into the West under false pretences by criminal gangs and then forced to work in the sex trade because we’ve read stories about them, not only in the gutter press but the women’s pages of supposedly liberal and objective papers. The problem is that when academics and serious journalists look closer they find that firstly all the stories were based on just two police raids, secondly the stories were coming from evangelical groups who saw that reviving Victorian myths about the ‘white slave trade’ could generate some handy government grants running ‘support groups’ and thirdly that neither figures nor sources could be substantiated. They were - to be absolutely blunt - plucked out of thin air, made up, bogus….(insert any term you prefer here).

In addition to the panhandling godbotherers, the other party to benefit is an immigration service which finds it easier to stereotype all women from certain countries who came here to work or have been held back by culturally conservative families as victims and tarts. This avoids awkward questions concerning their future employability and allows them to be forcibly returned on the next plane, under the supervision of Anglo-Saxon missionaries, while letting both sweatshop employers and misogynistic religious leaders with a power base in minority ethnic communities off the hook.

As knowing any of this involves research I doubt that it explains why the story was not used. Perhaps it was simply elbowed out by other ‘news’ beneficent to more immediate religious interest and privilege, though it would be interesting to know why Cox really came.

I suspect that a fellow evangelical on the far right of the picture might know the full story. If so, he will not be telling it.

Another year, another colonial clown show

We’re just back from the Tynwald Fair, and, as I suspected, it was another washout.
As we never bother with the colonial clown show on the hill anyway, I couldn’t even tell you which royal inbreed (if any) was guest of honour. Instead, it was straight to what I think is now officially designated the charities field.
Originally, this was a fairly open space for any community group that wanted to come along – you just lined up with everyone else at a government office, put your name down and had a spot allocated according to how early you got there.
Then, the year Madge herself was booked and there was an excuse to change the security arrangements, this changed and (mysteriously) groups with a slight political edge (e.g. Amnesty International) found their pitch uprooted overnight and moved out of sight of either royalty or roving TV cameras, then subsequent years found their application was simply ‘overlooked’.
So, the only serious community political activity at this year’s fair was Mec Vannin, the Positive Action Group and….well, sadly that was it. There really isn’t any other evidence of any Manx group who are even half-awake and taking a serious interest in Manx affairs from the presence on the Tynwald Field. The other stalls on the field – a random selection of British paramilitary organisations, right wing ‘heritage’ groups, cuddly bunny charities and braindead evangelical outfits – could safely all collapse tomorrow and there wouldn’t be the slightest damage to Manx life. If anything, it might improve considerably.
If this is the sum total of ‘community’ activity on the island, we’re dead already. And if the organisations able to set up on the fair field are the sum total of political interest, we’re a nonsensical colony stuck in the middle of the Irish Sea, run from somewhere else.
Oh, I forgot. We are anyway. It’s just our colonial Quislings run a pathetic sideshow with a lot of flag-waving, singing of an absolutely vacuous ‘national anthem’, folk-dancing and loons in homemade costumes proclaiming twaddle in a language nobody actually uses for any practical, everyday purpose to try and distract the peasants.
Which works depressingly well, by the looks of things.
One brighter note, as it is most years, was the Tynwald Day edition of Yn Pabyr Seyr ('The Free Paper) by Mec Vannin. To see this little gem, go to http://www.mecvannin.im/pabyr/yps45.pdf and download the whole paper.
It is always guaranteed to show the whole island hasn’t quite gone to sleep, and always takes a few pops at government incompetence. Some past editions are collectors items. If they aren't stored in the Manx Museum's library (and I suspect they are not) then there is no national record of the only significant political literature on the island in the last couple of decades.
This year the piece that caught my eye was Mec Vannin’s objections to the truly obnoxious 'Armed Forces Day' and the inevitable show of British military incompetence at Tynwald Day itself. In addition, there’s the matter of inviting these colonial enforcers into Manx schools – under the pretence of running ‘physical fitness’ sessions which are curiously combined with crude recruiting films. As Mec Vannin say, instead of renaming our Department of (mis)Education the Department of Education and Children they could be honest and call it the Department of Indoctrination and Recruitment.
Considering my own worries over the once insidious, now quite blatant, entry of borderline fascist Christian organisations into schools (and as someone who has actually studied the phenomena academically, I do mean fascist) it appears things are going from bad to worse at the Department of Education. Thankfully, it also appears I am not the only one remarking on it.

From Peel to Cheltenham and Nigeria the hate song remains the same

It seems the gap between moderate Christians and the New Christofascism is showing in the most unexpected places.
Greenbelt is, I suppose, the Christian equivalent of Glastonbury and is held in Cheltenham in late August annually. It’s run by decent enough folk whose views on most moral issues are on the same planet as anyone else with an education who reads the odd newspaper, just that they feel the need to run those views past a collection of fairy tales and a fictitious invisible friend first.
But this year they have brought down the wrath of their conservative pewmates by inviting along Gene Robinson, the openly gay Bishop. Apparently that meant that all sorts of dullards whose misogyny and cretinism is allegedly excused through such fairy tales planned to boycott the event.
Logically, you’d think any good time would be improved by the absence of such chuckleheads. Unfortunately their arrogance exceeds their ignorance, so they’ve insisted on turning up anyway and having facilities put aside for them to put everybody straight (if you’ll excuse the pun) on Christianity and sexuality. You can read more at http://www.religiousintelligence.co.uk/news/?NewsID=4851 .
The main culprits are the Church Mission Society. This raises alarm bells locally.
The thing is, these jokers were brought in last year by local godbotherers to run ‘workshops’ on slavery in Manx schools. At the time I thought it hilarious that an outfit formed by slave-owning churches (so that, after the official abolition of the slave trade, churches could just brainwash natives throughout a developing empire instead) should think itself capable of taking a moral view on any topic. One look at hellholes of religious hatred like Nigeria and their chums in the Fellowship of Confessing Anglicans proves where all of that led.
That fiasco demonstrated the CMS and their local sponsors were either dishonest or simply incapable of understanding their role in past and present racism and colonialism. It also proved the Education Department doesn’t care how our kids learn about morality as long as the pondlife running the workshops ask less than the going rate.
We should watch out in case this bunch of racist, neo-colonial and homophobic know-nothings are ever let loose on our schools again. There are enough problems with the homegrown variety skulking around school corridors without importing them.