Weekending

Website of the week

Things Anarchists Don’t Like (via Andy).

Localism

I never realised that the great Cuban anarchist Tarrida Del Marmol is buried less than a mile from my house in Brockley and Ladywell cemetery. How did I miss that? On the other hand, I did know about Toulouse Lautrec in Catford.

On engagement

I missed this post by Keith Kahn-Harris on “engaging” with extremists and others, as well as on Engage and iEngage. Food for thought.

Down 'the rabbit hole of conspiracism'
Jonathan Kay, author of Among the Truthers: A Journey Through America's Growing Conspiracist Underground, on the Today programme this week (h/t Gregor). Conspiracy theories cannot be refuted, he argues, because the response to counterfacts is simply to expand the scope of the conspiracy theory claim. He also suggests that the "basic structure" was laid down in the Protocols of the Elders, although antisemitic theories are now in the minority.

Wingnuts on the right

I was fascinated to read this piece from Canada’s “Stop Racism and Hate” collective about Gaddafi’s supporters in Canada. I’ve covered some of Gaddafi’s leftist friends, both the oddball Healeyite Trotskyists of yesteryear and the “anti-imperialists” of today, but less his right-wing friends. Here’s an extract:

Libyan agents began forging ties with the leaders of Canada’s extreme right in the late 1980s. Twice, the Gaddafi regime brought delegations of Canadian “white nationalists” to Tripoli, where they were feted and given cash. “The common ground was the hatred of Jews,” said Grant Bristow, who went on one of the trips in his capacity as an undercover Canadian Security Intelligence Service agent. “That was the basis of the relationship.”

The far right folk in question are Don Andrews of the Nationalist Party and his friend Wolfgang Droege, the co-founder of the Canadian Ku Klux Klan. There is an amusing bit when they discover Gaddafi is also funding the ANC...

Sticking with the reconfiguration of the far right, Coatesy has an interesting summary of caroline Fourest on Marine Le Pen.

Genocide and its denial
Marko writes that the trial of Ratko Mladic will not bring justice.

at the time of writing, not a single official of Serbia, Montenegro or the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia – i.e. of the regime that organised the war – nor any officer of the JNA (excluding officers of the Bosnian Serb army who had previously served in the JNA) has been convicted by the ICTY of war crimes in Bosnia. The weight of ICTY punishment has, so far, fallen exclusively on the Bosnian Serbs, while the regime of Milosevic in Belgrade and the leadership of the JNA have been mostly let off the hook.[...] As for Mladic, he was merely a middle-ranking agent in the planning and launching of this enterprise – more than a pawn, but not more than a knight or a bishop. So while his arrest and trial should be celebrated, and while we have much to expect from it, let us not pretend that justice is being served.

Mladic has some strange supporters, including Pamela Geller, who claims only a couple of hundred were killed at Srebrenica.

Also interesting is Henry Theriault on the Armenian genocide.

Chomskywatch
Genocide denial leads us logically to Noam Chomsky. Slightly out of date now, but worth reading: Talking Squid on the perfidy of the professor.

Histories
Paul Stott asks about the Red Anchor youth resistance to Nazism. And, from the archive, here's the young Robert Kennedy in Palestine in 1948, something that would have fitted well in this post about The Promise, as would these footnotes on the Farhud. (Lots more on the Farhud via Point of No Return.)

Prejudice on the left
A fascinating personal account by Falastin of the bizarre flora and fauna on the white middle-class British left.

Ziocentrism and the media
Carmel Gould on the re-balancing of Middle Eastern news coverage (in CiF of all places!). And Ron Radosh on how "leftist" (I would say "liberal") groupthink about Israel is created (using the New Yorker as an example).

Mir zaynen do: choose life

A nice talk by Deborah Lipstadt on Jews as subject rather than object.

The cities that nobody sings
The music at the top, courtesy of Brockley Dave, is by nick nicely. Wikipedia sez:

nick nicely (always spelled with lower case n) is a British musician. His music can be categorized as psychedelic rock. nicely was born in 1959 in Greenland during a transatlantic stopover by his parents, but he grew up in Hitchin, Hertfordshire, England, as Nickolas Laurien. [...] "Hilly Fields (1892)", released by EMI in 1982, is regarded by many as nicely's masterpiece and in spite of, or due to, its obscurity is considered in some circles as "legendary".[1] "Hilly Fields" took almost a year to complete, and the track features an obvious 1960s pychedelic influence, cello playing, the 1980s synth-pop sound and what may have been the first ever example of scratching on a non-hiphop recording. The title is inspired byHilly Fields park in Brockley, southeast London.

And according to an unofficial site, 2006's 'London South' is on Terrascope compilation 2. More from The London Nobody Sings.

Hitchin keeps cropping up in my life, most recently in relation to George Szirtes. Talking of George, who I am reading in anticipation of my first trip to Budapest, read him on Liszt and Gypsy music and on photographers exiled from Hungary.