Culture and Life

by Rob Gowland

Forbidden research

Remember Iraq's supposed "weapons of mass destruction"? 
According to Bush, Blair and Howard at the time of the Iraq war, 
Iraq's cellars (not to mention its streets and alleyways) were 
apparently littered with stockpiled WMDs.

As we all know, none were in fact found despite 18 months of 
frantic searching. The quest to find them has in fact been 
officially called off.

So why are the US occupation forces still holding a number of 
Iraqi scientists in prison for allegedly working on those same 
fictitious weapons of mass destruction? If the weapons don't 
exist (indeed, never existed), surely the people accused of 
making them should be released.

Britain's New Worker suggests there may be another reason 
for holding them in custody. Some, at least, of the scientists 
were researching the adverse effects of Anglo-US use of depleted 
uranium (DU) weapons in the Gulf War and the Iraq War.

In both wars in the Gulf, the US and Britain treated the 
territory (and people) of Iraq like a giant weapons-testing 
range, using an unimaginable number of armour-piercing shells and 
tank-smashing (and bunker-busting) bombs and rockets, all of them 
tipped with or encased in the extra-hard depleted uranium.

On impact, DU atomises, producing a fine powder of radioactive 
dust particles. Ever since the first Gulf War Iraq has suffered a 
catastrophic rise in the number of cancer patients, especially 
among children.

Apparently the leaders of the "free world" however, would rather 
the environmental and public health impact of these weapons 
remained under wraps. Hence the continued incarceration of the 
Iraqi scientists accused of working on non-existent WMDs.

And we all know who really researches — and not only researches 
but builds and uses — all sorts of weapons of mass destruction, 
don't we?

Drawn from life — still

In one episode of the brilliant British TV cop show Foyle's 
War, set on the south coast of England during the early days 
of WW2, Foyle had to deal with a clever, sophisticated home-grown 
fascist. This well-bred smoothy contended that Germany was the 
wrong enemy: "our enemy — and Germany's — is the Bolshevik and 
the Jew", he told a public meeting.

Lest you think that that sort of thinking went out with the 
Second World War, or even that it was a bit of dramatic licence 
to put such sentiments into the mouths of the English, consider 
the following recent incident.

British Labour MP Gerald Kaufman was a delegate to the just-
concluded Labour Party Conference in Blackpool. The Conference 
always includes a number of "fringe meetings", and Kaufman was 
due to speak at one of them organised by the Palestinian 
Solidarity Campaign.

To get to the Palestinian meeting, Kaufman had to walk along the 
seafront past a noisy demonstration by the horsey set protesting 
against the ban on fox-hunting. I quote The New Worker 
once again: "One of the demonstrators — a stout middle-aged 
man in checked tweeds — recognised Kaufman and yelled out: 'You 
Jewish bigot'.

"The MP was then attacked by a mob of toffs, screaming anti-
Semitic abuse, tearing at his clothing and ripping open his brief 
case."

Not that it would have made any difference to these terribly 
pukka fascists had they known — I am sure they would not have 
cared a jot — but, far from being a "Jewish bigot", Kaufman was 
on his way to the Palestinian meeting to speak against the 
Israeli wall.

Japanese capitalism

Capitalism is such a rotten system that the corruption within it 
is fast becoming an everyday part of life, or if not life, then 
certainly popular entertainment. Where would television "drama" 
be without the scheming, conniving, back-stabbing corruption and 
murderous money-grubbing of capitalism to give it plots, motives 
and characterisation?

I picked up at a second hand shop the other day one of Guy 
Stanley's thriller's, A Death in Tokyo, containing a 
succinct description of at least one aspect of the reality of 
capitalism.

Stanley's thrillers are set in Japan, where he presumably still 
lives with his Japanese wife Kayoko. Certainly his knowledge of 
contemporary Japanese custom and practice smacks of the long time 
resident.

His hero, Araki, is a somewhat disreputable journalist, whose 
probing around the case of a small-time thug found washed up on 
the bank of the Tama River leads to an opportunity to expose the 
widespread practice of using organised crime gangs to "maintain 
order" at corporation shareholder meetings.

I was struck by Stanley's description of the underside of 
Japanese business: "The world Araki and his colleagues observed 
was outside the fortified and sterilised environs in which the 
protected populace lived:

"Where the housewife saw a pinball parlour, a massage house or an 
all-night gay bar, Araki saw an underworld struggle for 
territorial supremacy with police payoffs and protectionism;

"When the childish pranks of the drunken salarymen had ended and 
the hostess clubs were closed Araki found the pimps and their 
stables of women, the blackmail and the drugs;

"When the politician appeared on television displaying an 
impassive fagade of immense propriety, Araki already had a file 
on his corrupt manipulations of Japan's fragile democratic 
processes, his pay-offs and his mistresses;

"And when the president of Mitsu-this or Sumi-that pontificated 
with unbearable sincerity on the policy of social responsibility 
being pursued by his company, Araki saw the cartels, the rebates 
and the unprincipled, opportunistic strategies of a market 
dominated by greed."

But like almost all journalists on capitalist newspapers, he 
finds it almost impossible to write about these things, because 
the owners of the media want scandal, not analysis, they want 
sensation, because that sells.

Who knows where serious reporting might lead?