by William Bowles
Featured Writer
Dandelion Salad
williambowles.info
crossposted on Strategic Culture Foundation
10 August, 2011
Exactly thirty years ago Brixton exploded with rage against the de facto occupation of Brixton by the Met police. And, as I write this, all kinds of madness is going down in various parts of London and elsewhere. Continue reading
by William Bowles
Featured Writer
Dandelion Salad
williambowles.info
4 August, 2011
Image by Mohammad A. Hamama, A reflected version! via Flickr
“Nato has attacked a Libyan state broadcaster in the capital, bombing three satellite dishes in Tripoli, saying the channel instils hatred.” — ‘Libya unrest: Nato bombs state broadcaster‘, BBC News 30 July 2011
At first when I heard this I couldn’t believe my ears. What a pathetic excuse for killing people but then desperate times demand desperate measures. The Empire is in disarray!
by William Bowles
Featured Writer
Dandelion Salad
williambowles.info
crossposted on Strategic Culture Foundation
4 August, 2011
Image by frankkeillor via Flickr
Over the past days BBC news coverage of the famine in Somalia has been saturating the airwaves and it’s always like this whenever ‘natural disasters’ strike. Fundamentally it’s little more than a fund-raising promo paid for with our taxes as endlessly repeated shots of emaciated babies and dying people serves no informative purpose except to tug covetously at our purse strings. And of course it has the added benefit of distracting us from our own condition – until the next crisis comes our way.
by William Bowles
Featured Writer
Dandelion Salad
williambowles.info
26 July, 2011
Image by Jacob Anikulapo via Flickr
In an essentially excellent piece Sarah Flounders’ ‘Libya: Demonization and Self-determination‘, near the beginning under the sub-head ‘What should be the response to this terror?’ she writes: Continue reading
by William Bowles
Featured Writer
Dandelion Salad
williambowles.info
23 July, 2011
For well over a century the British state has relied on its professional civil service (known as the Establishment and for reasons I hope that become apparent) to maintain the status quo and whilst the state has had to make concessions over time (eg, universal suffrage, legalize trade unions and eventually establish the ‘welfare state’) the Establishment’s primary function is to preserve the rule of Capital, regardless of the party in power. Thus continuity is preserved through the role of a permanent and unelected elite run by the ‘Whitehall Mandarins’.
by William Bowles
Featured Writer
Dandelion Salad
williambowles.info
12 July, 2011
From the middle of the nineteenth century to the middle of the twentieth imperialism was the dominant national ideology, transcending class and party divisions. Britain was saturated in the ethos and attitudes of empire. They infused plays and books and, later, films. They informed school textbooks. They inspired paintings, prints and engravings. They filled newspapers and magazines. They figured in advertisements and packaging. The impact was arguably greater than that of any previous dominant ideology because its pre-eminence coincided with the rise of the mass market and the mass media. — ‘Imperialism and juvenile literature’ edited By Jeffrey Richards. Manchester University Press, 1989
by William Bowles
Featured Writer
Dandelion Salad
williambowles.info
2 July, 2011
Image by Martin Beek via Flickr
Is Russia Today a sign of things to come in the world media order?
A global, digital media cuts both ways or as they say ‘what’s good for the goose is also good for the gander’. The arrival of The Real News Network, Democracy Now! and grtv for example demonstrates what can be done, even on a shoestring budget. But to get onto the global media circuit still requires big bucks in spite of all the talk about ‘convergence’ and ‘citizen journalism’.
by William Bowles
Featured Writer
Dandelion Salad
williambowles.info
crossposted on Strategic Culture Foundation
23 June, 2011
Image by señor mi ley via Flickr
I’m sure that somewhere, in a university or institute, researchers have produced an analysis that measures the rise in the number of armed conflicts as a ratio of the increase in economic instability as capitalism goes into one of its periodic meltdowns. Meltdowns that almost invariably end in large-scale war/s as a means of consuming surplus capital, taking out competitors, getting rid of surplus labour, grabbing new markets, extending the sphere of empire… yada, yada, yada…
by William Bowles
Featured Writer
Dandelion Salad
williambowles.info
22 June, 2011
Image by malyousif via Flickr
Facts are wonderful things, ignore them at all cost
“Was the decision taken [by NATO] that killing civilians here would save others elsewhere?” — ‘Libya: Funerals fuel controversy over Nato airstrikes‘, Jeremy Bowen, BBC News Website, 22 June 2011
The BBC which makes much of its ‘objective’ and ‘balanced’ news coverage, when challenged by the facts of its biased coverage of events in the Middle East and elsewhere, cites examples of where it has given voice to all sides of the issue. Continue reading
by William Bowles
Featured Writer
Dandelion Salad
williambowles.info
16 June, 2011
Image by harry harris via Flickr
“I do not understand this sqeamishness about the use of gas. I am strongly in favour of using poison gas against uncivilised tribes.” — Winston Churchill 1920
Now let me get this straight: In order to save civilian lives (the infamous ‘Right to Protect’), the Empire, through its Rottweiller NATO, not only deindustrializes Libya but it also causes a mass exodus of refugees hundreds of whom drowned Continue reading
by William Bowles
Featured Writer
Dandelion Salad
williambowles.info
12 June, 2011
Image by quisnovus via Flickr
The Western left’s abdication, nay abandonment of principles that go to the heart of the socialist liberation project has been long in the making, centuries even and made all the more obvious by the left’s take on events in Libya and now Syria. Critiques of the ‘humanitarian, socialist interventionists’ came thick and thin but for the most part the fundamental question of why the left had abandoned its historic mission has not been asked.
Continue reading
by William Bowles
Featured Writer
Dandelion Salad
williambowles.info
10 June, 2011
Image by Steve Rhodes via Flickr
The monopolization and digitization of the media has industrialized the production process. This has resulted in virtually identical output regardless of its source. Not only the nature of the ‘news’ but also what is considered to be worthy of our attention comes at us in lockstep regardless of where we are or the medium, blanketing out any alternate views on the subject.
by William Bowles
Featured Writer
Dandelion Salad
williambowles.info
crossposted on Strategic Culture Foundation
26 May, 2011
Facebook transforms who you are, your likes, dislikes, beliefs and fantasies, all of it into a commodity that it alone owns, 600 million intimate profiles of people like you and me
Many moons ago, when the Web was still in its infancy I wrote that the way the Web was evolving led inevitably to the emergence of monopolies, whether of content or access to information. In the early days it was Portals, or the ‘place’ where you entered the Web eg, Netscape, Microsoft, CNN or whatever, that commanded ‘value’. Continue reading
by William Bowles
Featured Writer
Dandelion Salad
williambowles.info
20 May, 2011
Image by ЯAFIK ♋ BERLIN via Flickr
“The media rush to glorify Obama the ‘warrior president’ is symptomatic of a Western society that has come to view war as entirely normal… It is by now almost impossible to imagine that the West would not always be attacking, or targeting for attack, some defenceless nation or other.”— ‘You Cannot Kill An Ideology With A Gun‘ By Media Lens
All things being equal, which undoubtedly they are not, and surely that’s point, the long overdue arrival of a truly socialized, globalized planet would have been able to tackle the mess capitalism has made of things. After all, our disasters are now planetary in scale and thus can now only be handled by the planet as a whole. That means all of us, not just a privileged few.
by William Bowles
Featured Writer
Dandelion Salad
williambowles.info
17 May, 2011
“What about giving Gaddafi an exit strategy?”— Channel 4 News presenter to somebody or other, 16 May, 2011
This is what it comes down to: A TV ‘news’ presenter reveals in all its starkness, how the Empire corrupts totally. Here we have an apparently intelligent and educated person dismissing the leader of a country as if he’s just another expendable piece of the Empire’s junk. ‘Yeah, why you don’t just get rid of him, make him go away’. It’s absolutely outrageous that we accept this kind of rubbish and it’s echoed right across the MSM (see below).
Dandelion Salad 