k-punk

November 30, 2011

Balanced and Objective

Jack Graham bbc, imperialism, iran, islamophobia, k-punk, manufacturing consent, propaganda, racism, winston churchill 0

The BBC doing what it does best: “In Iran’s iconography of villainy, Britain holds a special place. The UK is seen as the mastermind behind the overthrow of previous Iranian governments. Conservative hardliners believe Britain has in its blood the desire to decide who rules Iran.” Textbook stuff from James Reynolds “BBC Iran correspondent”.

Make it all a matter of opinion: “is seen as”. Put it down to someone at the so-called ‘extreme’: “hardliners”. Pathologise the unacceptable view, make it sound like childish paranoia, sneer at it under your hand: “Iran’s iconography of villainy”.

Fact is, if people in Iran feel that way about us, they are justified. The British government, lead by Winston Churchill, were the original movers in the plot to overthrow the democratically elected government of Mossadegh, because he wanted to nationalise the Anglo-Persian Oil Company, which funnelled oil profits out of Iran to Britain (in other words, he had the temerity to think that Iranians should benefit from Iranian resources). Churchill put up the money. The CIA took over the plot. They hired mobsters and Nazi collaborators in Iran. CIA agents started riots. They started a coup which lead to the ascension of the Shah’s dictatorship and the reign of the SAVAK secret police, described by Amnesty as the worst human rights violators in the world. Murder, terror, torture, tyranny. But Western oil companies kept their revenue, so that’s okay (though the Americans elbowed Anglo-Persian – now BP – out somewhat in favour of an international consortium in which they had hegemony).

Now we and the Americans are once again gearing up to attack this country that we have already harmed so badly. For the hegemony of the American empire and the desperate, clawing need of the tottering neoliberal system. I don’t know what shenanigans have lead to our closure of the British Embassy in Tehran and the expulsion of Iranian diplomats from the UK… but you can be sure it’s got less to do with outrage at Iranian protestors and more to do with imperialist scheming.

And why? Because Iran has a nuke program? Well, maybe. But why, precisely, are we allowed to have nukes, the Americans are allowed to have nukes (they’re the only people who’ve ever used them on another nation, remember) and Israel (a brutal, racist, apartheid state) is allowed to have nukes… but we mustn’t let barbarians like Iran have them… because they’d impinge on Western imperial domination. Why are we the ones who can be trusted? Because we’re the good guys. We – the ones who nuked Hiroshima, organised that coup I was just talking about and have bankrolled the horrific treatment of the Palestinians – we are the civilised people. This is the objective and balanced assumption underlying the BBC’s coverage.

Well, truth is not balanced or objective.…

November 15, 2011

Skulltopus

Jack Graham anti-war, china mieville, ghosts, gothic, h g wells, hauntology, horror, k-punk, lovecraft, m r james, monsters, octopus, propaganda, skulltopus, tentacular revolution, theory, weird 1

In his fascinating essay ‘M.R. James and the Quantum Vampire’ (the link is to a PDF), the author and theorist China Miéville wrote:

The spread of the tentacle – a limb-type with no Gothic or traditional precedents (in ‘Western’ aesthetics) – from a situation of near total absence in Euro-American teratoculture up to the nineteenth century, to one of being the default monstrous appendage of today, signals the epochal shift to a Weird culture.

Miéville charts the way that the cephalopodic suddenly erupts into late 19th-early 20th century “teratology” (monsterology), with conflicted foreshadowings and pre-disavowals (Verne, for example, and Victor Hugo) leading up to a story called ‘The Sea Raiders’ by H. G. Wells, in which previously unknown squidular monsters suddenly surface and go on an inexplicable rampage off the British coast, and on to the “haute Weird” of William Hope Hodgson and, especially, H. P. Lovecraft.

In this Weird tentacular, Miéville sees much significance. His argument, as I’ve gathered from the essay mentioned above (and from listening to various talks he’s given), is that the squidular, tentacular and cephalopodic, but especially the octopoidal, arises as a teratological metaphor to supply a need felt by those writers travelling through the crises of modernity at the turn of the 19th-20th century and after. In their formless and protean nature – many octopuses and squid have developed natural camouflage abilities, making them capable of astonishing feats of transformation – the octopoda seemed to be the shape to use in order to convey shapelessness. Moreover, the very “novum” or newness of the tentacular (in the West) as a symbol was attractive to those seeking to convey something that had not been conveyed before, that perhaps cannot be coherently conveyed at all.

The octopus – as I’ve mentioned on this blog and in Panic Moon, following my reading of Miéville – suddenly appears in and conquers the 20th century political propaganda poster (you can see an amazing array of such political octopus propaganda at this blog… to which I have contributed myself). I’ve suggested (rather obviously and, I’m sure, unoriginally) that the many arms of the octopus, radiating outwards from the central hub of the body, make it a perfect graphic figure for representing the putative multifarious global reach and manipulative ability of centralised power, whether that power is military, commercial, ideological, whatever. Exactly the kind of centralised but increasingly global power that was arising in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The octopus poster tends to show the creature reaching to many places at once. Miéville himself has spoken of the octopus as suggesting manipulation. He has noted how, in these propaganda representations, the octopus is used to signify just about everything from “perfidious Jews” and “perfidious Bolsheviks” to “capitalists”, “unrestrained railroad building” and “landlords”. In other words, it means everything… hence it means nothing. The octopus became immensely “symbolically fecund” in the early decades of the 20th century, but with no set cultural consensus about what it probably meant (unlike vampires and werewolves, say, which had – and still have – very well established, longstanding semiotic baggage). …