A very British M-15
MARKETING consultants nowadays offer a more incisive guide to contemporary radicalism then leftist theoreticians of the more traditional variety, and the prediction seems to be that we will soon see a lot more of the youth protests now sweeping Spain and other European countries. Gerald Celente, seemingly something of a celebrity in the US trend forecasting [...]
Ratko Mladic and Srebrenica revisionism
THANKS to DNA analysis, the International Commission on Missing Persons has been able to put names on over 6,000 of the corpses found in mass graves in Srebrenica. While the exact number of Bosnians slaughtered there in July 1995 will never be established, there seems little reason to doubt that what happened there marks the [...]
Ryan Giggs, Imogen Thomas: the class politics of celebrity culture
THERE were a few years in my life in which I was vaguely interested in the private lives of rock and movie stars. Broadly speaking, I had grown out of that kind of stuff by the time I made it to college. Sometimes I hear tell that friends of mine participate in clandestine relationships with [...]
WTF is MySQL4?
I HAVE just had this email from the company that hosts this website: You are receiving this notification because you still have a MySQL4 database on your account for the domain davidosler.com. This message is to inform you that as of May 30 we are launching a campaign to change the default MySQL server from MySQL4 [...]
Blue Labour: more Old Labour than it thinks
I HAVE not been able to track down the origin of the slogan ‘family, faith and flag’. But it does have the ominous ring of a motto that could have been advanced by an obscure Croatian proto-fascist splinter group in the 1930s. Given Blue Labour’s patently puerile desire to secure column inches by the adoption of a [...]
Marxists and the rapture
IF HAROLD Camping has got his sums right and you are reading this anytime after May 21, you are probably in a spot of trouble. The octogenarian Christian radio entrepreneur insists that this Saturday will go down in what little remains of history as the day of ‘the rapture’. Christians will be airlifted into the [...]
Rwanda: test case for absolute anti-imperialism
MAJOR General Augustin Bizimungu was among the key architects of the Rwanda genocide of 1994, and the 30 year prison sentence handed to him by a United Nations court this week was, if anything, rather too lenient. Paramilitary police chief Augustin Ndindiliyimana effectively gets off for time spent on remand, and I would certainly be [...]
Assange, Strauss-Kahn: don’t rush to judgement
NOBODY in their right mind should come to strident conclusions about rape allegations on the basis of preliminary newspaper reports. That does not stop some people doing just that. When Sweden began extradition proceedings against WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange for alleged sexual offences last year, the default assumption of many of his political backers was that [...]
The need for a reality-based left
CRITICS often accuse revolutionary socialists of being ‘out of touch with reality’. Usually, what they mean is something like well to the left of Brendan Barber’. But let me offer a sobering thought to anybody who locates themselves in the Marxist political tradition: the claim isn’t always wrong, is it? Some of the more celebrated idiocies [...]
Bin Laden: the ethics of state assassination
BOTH Johann Hari and I were in the United States when the news broke that Osama bin Laden had finally obtained his wish to secure shaheed status. The well-known Independent columnist tells of mingling with jubilant crowds in New York’s Times Square. This obscure blogger can confirm that the announcement detracted attention from the country [...]
