John Simkin
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An excellent directory that enables the visitor to find paintings being exhibited in 650 museums and art galleries. The Art Guide is organized by artist, by museum and geographical area. The artists are listed in alphabetical order and once you reach their home page, you will be provided with a list of their paintings and the places where they can be seen. Each of the art museums has a list of the main paintings in their collection, contact details and links to other museums in the region.
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The BBC is now providing a series of short online learning courses on French. This includes French Fix (motivational language learning which takes whatever knowledge of French you have and challenges you to improve it on the spot); French Steps (earn how to converse, order in a restaurant and ask for directions in French with this online beginners course that's easy-to-use); Language Gauge (this tool will let you find out how much you know and what's best for you to take your it further; Talk French (a language course for absolute beginners, with video and audio clips and activities to help you learn); The French Experience (a series of multimedia activities for beginners, building on the absolute basics of Talk French, but can be used on its own to learn and practise the language).
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Tornado Project Online is a company that gathers, compiles, and makes tornado information available to weather enthusiasts, the meteorological community and emergency management officials. The company is using its website to share some of this information with the general public. This material appears under several headings including: 'Recent Tornadoes', 'Tornadoes in the Past', 'Storm Chasing', ''Top Tens About Tornadoes', 'Tornado Oddities', 'Tornado Stories', 'Tornado Safety' and 'Myths about Tornado'.
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This section of the Energy Conservation Enhancement Project was originally created for the vocational technical schools in Louisiana. Much of the material contained within is generic in content and may be applied and used by many people throughout the world. Topics include The Pluses and the Minuses, What is Algebra? Algebra: Intergers and Operations, Fractions: The 4 Basic Mathematical Functions, Ratios & Proportions, Perimeter, Volume and Thinking Graphically.
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A website for image makers and those who teach image making. It offers free seminars on several photographers including Henri Cartier-Bresson, Edward Weston, Eugene Atget, Matthew Brady, Robert Capa, Imogen Cunningham, W. Eugene Smith, Irving Penn, Lisette Model and Margaret Bourke-White. There are also sixteen workshops on subjects such as Photojournalism and Travel Photography.
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This website provides free classical & traditional sheet music, popular and jazz riffs, music lessons and music resources. The material can be accessed by instrument: Guitar (291), Piano (1034), Violin (117), Cello (64), Trumpet (48), Clarinet (76), Saxophone (54), Flute (95), Recorder (47), Oboe (37), Trombone (24). The material is also organized under genres: Classical (1,895), Rock & Pop (113), Film & TV Themes (16), Jazz (24), World (43) and Traditional (201).
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Dresden a war crime? Probably but isn't war a crime in itself?
Ever since the establishment of the Geneva Convention in 1864 attempts have been made to make warfare more "humane". This has focused on issues concerning the way you treat captured soldiers and the relationship between the combatants and the civilian population.
The development of weapon carrying aircraft has caused particular problems. Governments have always justified this by insisting that these weapons are only used against military targets. In recent wars governments have tried to give the impression that new technology enables us to be so precise in our targeting that civilians are rarely killed. This is why there was such a fuss about the use of cluster bombs during the recent Iraq War. These are weapons that targets civilians. As a result I believe that the people who authorized the use of such weapons are war criminals.
In the early stages of the Second World War the Luftwaffe used bombing raids to terrorise civilian populations into surrender. At this time the British government considered this strategy to be a war crime and insisted on following a policy of attacking military targets only. However, night-time raids dramatically reduced accuracy and it became impossible for pilots to concentrate on bombing military targets.
In 1941 Charles Portal, head of RAF Bomber Command, argued for a change of policy. He advocated that entire cities and towns should be bombed. Portal claimed that this would quickly bring about the collapse of civilian morale in Germany. When Air Marshall Arthur Harris became head of RAF Bomber Command in February 1942, he introduced a policy of area bombing (known in Germany as terror bombing) where entire cities and towns were targeted.
In the later stages of the war the Royal Air Force and the United States Army Air Force developed a new strategy that involved the creation of firestorms. This was achieved by dropping incendiary bombs, filled with highly combustible chemicals such as magnesium, phosphorus or petroleum jelly (napalm), in clusters over a specific target. After the area caught fire, the air above the bombed area, become extremely hot and rose rapidly. Cold air then rushed in at ground level from the outside and people were sucked into the fire. The most notable examples of this tactic being used was in Hamburg (August, 1943), Dresden (February, 1945) and Tokyo (March 1945).
In my opinion the creation of firestorms is a war crime. The whole idea of this strategy is to terrorize and kill civilians. It is my strong belief that the people responsible for ordering such raids should have been charged with war crimes.
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Suicide bombers are an islamic phenomenon.
From New York, Morocco, Sudan, Algeria, Egypt, Israel, Lebanon, Saudi, Iraq, Afganistan, Pakistan, India, Phillipines, Bali, Russia and Chechnya and some others I left out.
I don't recall any non-muslim suicide bombers...but maybe you can remind me..
Probably the first example of suicide bombers was the non-Muslim Japanese. During the Second World War kamikaze pilots acted as "human missiles" by flying their planes, heavily laden with explosives, directly into enemy warships.
It could be argued that the Jewish terrorist, Aharon Abramovitch, was also a suicide bomber. He was one of the Jewish terrorists who blew up the King David Hotel in Jerusalem in 1946. However, it is possible he was just an ordinary terrorist and was killed trying to escape from the building. Anyway, he was one of the 91 people (28 Britons, 41 Arabs, 17 Jews and 5 others) who was found in the rubble afterwards.
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I have always considered the bombing of Dresden on 13th February 1945, a war crime. For example, here is an internal RAF memo circulated in January, 1945.
“Dresden, the seventh largest city in Germany and not much smaller than Manchester, is also far the largest unbombed built-up the enemy has got. In the midst of winter with refugees pouring westwards and troops to be rested, roofs are at a premium. The intentions of the attack are to hit the enemy where he will feel it most, behind an already partially collapsed front, to prevent the use of the city in the way of further advance, and incidentally to show the Russians when they arrive what Bomber Command can do.”
The main reason for the destruction of this medieval city was as a warning to the advancing Red Army (also one of the main motivations behind the dropping of the atom bombs on Japan). To their credit, some RAF aircrews did not follow instructions during the raid.
Churchill, being an historian, became concerned about how these firestorms would be seen during the post-war period. On 28th March, 1945, Churchill wrote to Bomber Harris: “It seems to me that the moment has come when the question of bombing of German cities simply for the sake of increasing the terror, should be reviewed. Otherwise we shall come into control of an utterly ruined land. We shall not, for instance, be able to get housing material out of Germany for our own needs because some temporary provision would have to be made for the Germans themselves. I feel the need for more precise concentration upon military objectives, such as oil and communications behind the immediate battle-zone, rather than on mere acts of terror and wanton destruction.”
After the war some British historians were highly critical of the attack on Dresden. As it was clearly a terror attack on a civilian population some have described it as a war crime. Although terror bombing was Churchill’s policy, Harris took the blame and was not given the honours that men of equivalent rank were given. Harris was so bitter about this he emigrated to South Africa.
A couple of years ago I produced a web page on the bombing of Dresden. In fact, if you type in the word “bombing of Dresden” in Google it come up 1st out of 27,400 pages.
http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/2WWdresden.htm
I have not passed moral judgment on the bombing in the narrative. However, I have received several hostile emails for my choice of documents to illustrate the event.
In recent years there has been attempts to defend the terror bombing of Germany. This has culminated in a new book by Frederick Taylor. This is part of a review that appeared in Saturday’s Guardian by Michael Burleigh, one of a new generation of right-wing, nationalistic British historians.
Attempts to treat the bombing of Dresden as a war crime perpetrated against the innocent inhabitants of a historical cultural centre of no industrial or military significance began two days after the attack. This was the handiwork of the Nazi propaganda supremo Goebbels, whose "spin doctors" exaggerated the city's population by a factor of four to support the wild claim that two million refugees from the east had been caught by the raids, and who doctored the number of corpses publicly burned (with the help of the SS who had some experience of these tasks) by adding an extra nought to the actual figure of 6,856....
Frederick Taylor's well-researched and unpretentious book is a robust defence of the Dresden raids that counters recent attempts to recast the nation that gave the world Auschwitz as the second world war's principal victims, attempts that stretch back to the time of Goebbels. They continue in the form of criminalizing RAF Bomber Command's supremo Bert "Bomber" Harris for a high-level strategy that was largely designed to show Stalin that his western allies were actually fighting if not in, then at least above, Nazi Germany...
Taylor skilfully interweaves various personal accounts of the impact of the raids on the permanent or temporary population of Dresden, including its slave-labour force. But the main thrust of his book is to defend a mission that was merely successful rather than exceptional. It came at the conclusion of a long war that, while generally brutalizing and dulling moral sensitivities, also had clear enough justification in the fight between good and evil.
What do people think? Was it a war crime or have we been victims of Nazi propaganda?
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I am disappointed that neither of these characters were able to put their views across without resort to racist slur or personal insult. I also note that their favoured extreme right wing weblog links to this site and features highly in our statistics for referrals.
This is a common tactic employed by extremist groups. It is a way of organizing attacks on those who seek to bring an end to racial conflict. For several years my website on Black Civil Rights has been targeted by America’s white racist community. Their main strategy is to post details of your work on sympathetic websites. This results in an avalanche of vicious emails. Ironically, these links help your ranking in second-generation search-engines such as Google. For example, my page on the Ku Klux Klan appears higher than that the official KKK website. They complain that Google is part of a left-wing conspiracy, not realising that it is there own tactics that has contributed to this situation.
For those who would like to read an objective history of the Palestinian Question I would suggest this United Nations website.
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People with ”bleeding heart” for their cause argue often in an inpatient way. I know, I sometimes fail to the same trap myself. Nevertheless these same peoples can’t be disregarded in the debates.
How many of us, sitting comfortably in the chairs by a nicely warming fire woods knows about their plights? When reading through different debates I do feel that for many of us the debates are just “playing with words”. On the other hand for people like Austen it’s a matter of the truth. Matter of life and death.
The nation of Israel is clearly fighting for a survival. And this nation had done it for the last 60 consecutive years. Which other nation would have done better in such deadly fight?
The conflict in Palestine had to be viewed in the historic perspective of the last 100 years. I think that Austin, better than others, in the debate succeeded in seeing it in this way.
I assume this is a criticism of those who opposed Austen’s ideas. I am surprised you are so supportive of his racist views on the Arab race. If that is what you think, argue your case. I am sure several us will only be too willing to counteract your arguments.
You are wrong to suggest that Austen was speaking from firsthand experience: “When reading through different debates I do feel that for many of us the debates are just “playing with words”. On the other hand for people like Austen it’s a matter of the truth. Matter of life and death.” Austen actually lives in the United States.
It is true that Austen was well informed about the historical and legal rights of the Jews in the Middle East. What he completely lacked was any sense of empathy for the plight of the Arabs.
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Has anyone noticed that all the contribution to this section on 'First Lines' are from men.
What does this say?
Is this just a second hand way of expressing our emotions?
I started a strand on another forum of my top 20 albums. Once again only men contributed. At the time I thought it was something to do with men’s interest in lists.
I am surprised by this one. From my experience, women are always better at remembering the words of songs.
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The following was written by Janis Ian when she was in her late teens. Unfortunately, her creativity went into decline after this bright start.
I learned the truth at seventeen: that love was meant for beauty queens and high school girls with clear skinned smiles who married young and then retired. (At Seventeen)
You might be interested in the rest of the song. Could be used in the classroom.
I LEARNED THE TRUTH AT SEVENTEEN
THAT LOVE WAS MEANT FOR BEAUTY QUEENS
AND HIGH SCHOOL GIRLS WITH CLEAR SKINNED SMILES
WHO MARRIED YOUNG AND THEN RETIRED
THE VALENTINES I NEVER KNEW
THE FRIDAY NIGHT CHARADES OF YOUTH
WERE SPENT ON ONE MORE BEAUTIFUL
AT SEVENTEEN I LEARNED THE TRUTH
AND THOSE OF US WITH RAVAGED FACES
LACKING IN THE SOCIAL GRACES
DESPERATELY REMAINED AT HOME
INVENTING LOVERS ON THE PHONE
WHO CALLED TO SAY - COME DANCE WITH ME
AND MURMURED VAGUE OBSCENITIES
IT ISN'T ALL IT SEEMS AT SEVENTEEN
A BROWN EYED GIRL IN HAND ME DOWNS
WHOSE NAME I NEVER COULD PRONOUNCE
SAID - PITY PLEASE THE ONES WHO SERVE
THEY ONLY GET WHAT THEY DESERVE
THE RICH RELATIONED HOMETOWN QUEEN
MARRIES INTO WHAT SHE NEEDS
WITH A GUARANTEE OF COMPANY
AND HAVEN FOR THE ELDERLY
SO REMEMBER THOSE WHO WIN THE GAME
LOSE THE LOVE THEY SOUGHT TO GAIN
IN DEBENTURES OF QUALITY AND DUBIOUS INTEGRITY
THEIR SMALL-TOWN EYES WILL GAPE AT YOU
IN DULL SURPRISE WHEN PAYMENT DUE
EXCEEDS ACCOUNTS RECEIVED AT SEVENTEEN
TO THOSE OF US WHO KNEW THE PAIN
OF VALENTINES THAT NEVER CAME
AND THOSE WHOSE NAMES WERE NEVER CALLED
WHEN CHOOSING SIDES FOR BASKETBALL
IT WAS LONG AGO AND FAR AWAY
THE WORLD WAS YOUNGER THAN TODAY
WHEN DREAMS WERE ALL THEY GAVE FOR FREE
TO UGLY DUCKLING GIRLS LIKE ME
WE ALL PLAY THE GAME, AND WHEN WE DARE
WE CHEAT OURSELVES AT SOLITAIRE
INVENTING LOVERS ON THE PHONE
REPENTING OTHER LIVES UNKNOWN
THAT CALL AND SAY - COME ON, DANCE WITH ME
AND MURMUR VAGUE OBSCENITIES
AT UGLY GIRLS LIKE ME, AT SEVENTEEN
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Here are some good first lines from Don Mclean, one of the best songwriters over the last 30 years. I have chosen these because of what follows these excellent introductions:
It started out quite simply, as complex things can do, a set of sad transparencies till no one could see through (The Pride Parade)
A long, long time ago I can still remember how that music used to make me smile (American Pie)
No days you can borrow, no time you can buy. No trust in tomorrow. It's a lie. (Dreidel)
I coulda been almost anything I put my mind to be but a cowboy’s life was the only life for me. (Bronco Bill’s Lament)
I feel the trembling tingle of a sleepless night (Empty Chairs)
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Newsletter 5
Membership
We now have 376 members. Reading the biographies section it seems we now have members from Britain (65), France (11), Spain (7), USA (7), Sweden (5), Netherlands (5), Canada (4), Australia (4), Greece (3), Italy (3), Finland (2), China (1), Brazil (1), Denmark (1), Belgium (1), Germany (1), Poland (1), Serbia (1), Belarus (1), Israel (1), South Korea (1), Sudan (1), Ireland (1) and Austria (1).
If you have not done so, please post your biography on the forum. This enables us to find out where our members are coming from.
http://educationforum.ipbhost.com/index.php?showtopic=189
Attack on Education Forum
You might have had difficulty getting onto the website on Thursday. Apparently an individual was using software to bring our website down. This resulted in this person using 98% of our current bandwidth usage (approx 9GB so far this month) and was causing excessive loads on our server. Andy Walker was able to track this down to a secondary school. This information has been supplied to the head teacher concerned and hopefully he will find the person who has taken a dislike to our forum.
Email Notification
The Education Forum can notify you when a new reply is added to a topic. Many users find this useful to keep up to date on topics without the need to view the board to check for new messages. The best way to do this is to click the ‘Track This Topic’ link at the top of the topic that you wish to track. Another possibility is from the E-Mail settings section of your User CP (My Controls) check the 'Enable Email Notification by default?' option, this will automatically subscribe you to any topic that you make a reply to.
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Debates
At the moment, the following issues provide opportunities for good debate. I would welcome your contributions to these and other debates taking place on the forum.
What is the Value of Homework?
http://educationforum.ipbhost.com/index.php?showtopic=330
Government E-Learning Strategy
http://educationforum.ipbhost.com/index.php?showtopic=115
New Methods of Assessment
http://educationforum.ipbhost.com/index.php?showtopic=193
Secondary Cover Supervisors
http://educationforum.ipbhost.com/index.php?showtopic=346
Biased Reporting on the Hutton Report
http://educationforum.ipbhost.com/index.php?showtopic=341
BBC in Crisis
http://educationforum.ipbhost.com/index.php?showtopic=315
Best First Line in Popular Music?
http://educationforum.ipbhost.com/index.php?showtopic=325
Holocaust: A Different Perspective
http://educationforum.ipbhost.com/index.php?showtopic=311
Nationalism and History Teaching
http://educationforum.ipbhost.com/index.php?showtopic=44
Do Politicians Still Resign?
http://educationforum.ipbhost.com/index.php?showtopic=283
Blended Learning
http://educationforum.ipbhost.com/index.php?showtopic=246
Do We Live in a Democracy?
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Reading the biographies section it seems we now have members from Britain (65), France (11), USA (8), Spain (7), Sweden (5), Netherlands (5), Canada (4), Australia (4), Greece (3), Italy (3), Finland (2), Brazil (2), China (1), Denmark (1), Belgium (1), Germany (1), Poland (1), Serbia (1), Belarus (1), Israel (1), South Korea (1), Sudan (1), Ireland (1) and Austria (1).
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John
For those of us who are isolated in the USA and as a result are exposed to "FOX News like" reporting from all angles, would you be kind enough to decipher (in 100 words or less!) the Hutton report from a BBC perspective? That is, tell me where FOX is going wrong, and explain why you consider their reporting of this matter to be bogus. Thanks. (This is not a sarcastic request - I would genuinely like to hear a counter point).
No offence taken. I will try to explain my by analysing the article in detail.
(1) The British Broadcasting Corporation was forced to pay up for its blatant anti-Americanism before and during the Iraq war. A frothing at the mouth anti-Americanism that was obsessive, irrational and dishonest.
The British government did try to portray those who were opposed to the war as being anti-American. It is based on the idea that when you criticise the policy decision of the Bush administration you are really expressing an anti-American view. This is not an argument that many people in Britain take seriously. Although, many, including myself, would argue that many people who took an anti-war view were partly influenced by their perceptions of Bush. Many people who have watched Bush over the last couple of years have been concerned about the intellectual capability of the man. In Britain, we always insist of being governed by intelligent people. It makes us feel a little bit safer.
As far as I am aware the government (or anyone else for that matter) did not accuse the BBC of being anti-American. However, the government did try to give the idea that those who were against the war were pro-German and pro-French. I found this the most repulsive of all the methods employed by the government and the Sun newspaper. It is a worrying trend that the party with a long tradition of internationalism should have leaders willing to exploit the deep-seated prejudices of its people. It is just further evidence that Britain is currently being governed by a group of unprincipled people.
(2) The BBC - the "Beeb" - was one of the worst offenders in the British press because it felt entitled to not only pillory Americans and George W Bush, but it felt entitled to lie. And when caught lying, it felt entitled to defend its lying reporters and executives.
To start with the BBC is not part of the press as it does not publish newspapers.
The BBC or its journalists were not caught lying. In fact, Hutton did not accuse anyone of lying. What he did was to judge that one part of one broadcast could not be backed up by the evidence. Nor could it because it was based on speculation about what someone knew. What Gilligan was criticised for was his comment that Blair/Campbell included the 45 minute claim in the dossier knowing it was untrue. We now know it was untrue but it has been impossible to discover that it was known to be untrue. (In fact, according to a comment made by Blair in the House of Commons it seems he did not know enough about the 45 minute claim to know whether it was true or not. As a result he is now being described as either a xxxx or an incompetent prime minister.)
We know the rest of the story was true and that this information came from David Kelly. The reason for this is that Kelly also spoke to another BBC journalist, Susan Watts. She taped the interview and this shows that Kelly did say these things to her, although some aspects of his comments she did not use in her broadcast.
One of the key points of the story was that the 45 minute claim was based on a single source. Not only do we now know that it was not only a single source, it was a highly unreliable source. Even the person who gave the information to the security services admitted they did not whether it was true and expected that the information to be checked out. It is this kind of information that has persuaded a large percentage of the population that the claim was inserted knowing it was untrue. However, as the government did not keep minutes of these meetings, it is impossible to prove. It of course raises questions about why minutes were not made during these meetings. Blair of course has learnt from history. We would not know about how Johnson organised the cover-up of the Kennedy assassination or how Nixon lied about Watergate, if it was not for them taping their conversations. Blair, like all modern political leaders, is very careful about the evidence he leaves behind.
Ironically, Gilligan was criticised for using a single-source (Kelly) for his story. Yet, the story was itself about a single-source. It seems that it is acceptable for a government to use a single-source to justify an invasion of another country, but it is not acceptable to use a single-source to criticise that decision.
(3) The incident involved the reporter Andrew Gilligan who made a fool of himself in Baghdad when the American invasion actually arrived in the Iraqi capital. Gilligan, pro-Iraqi and anti-American, insisted on the air that the Iraqi army was heroically repulsing an incompetent American military. Video from our own Greg Kelly of the American army moving through Baghdad at will put the light to that.
I know nothing about this story. It was definitely not mentioned in the Hutton Inquiry. However, there is no evidence that Gilligan is pro-Iraqi. However, he is anti-Blair. Blair is usually attacked by those considered to be left of centre. Gilligan attacks Blair from the right. In reality, he is anti-European and pro-American. In this case, in order to get at Blair, he had to attack his pro-Americanism.
(4) After the war, back in London, Gilligan got a guy named David Kelly to tell him a few things about pre-war assessments on Iraq's weapons programmes. And Gilligan exaggerated about what Kelly had told him.
As I have said earlier, we do not know whether he exaggerated the evidence provided by Kelly. Hutton believed the government rather than Gilligan. However, polls show the vast majority of the British public think the report was a whitewash (one poll suggests 91% think it was a whitewash). They might not believe Gilligan, but they definitely don’t believe Blair. (The Hutton Report has proved to be disastrous for Blair’s own poll-ratings).
(5) Kelly committed suicide over the story and the BBC, far from blaming itself, insisted its reporter had a right to lie and exaggerate, because, well, the BBC knew the war was wrong and anything it could say to underscore that point had to be right.
We do not know why Kelly committed suicide. The BBC story may well have played its part. So also would have the means that the government used to out his name. Probably the most important factor was that he was under pressure to tell a story before a parliamentary committee that was untrue. That pressure took the form of threats about prosecution and the loss of pension rights. It could be argued that the government was right to do this. However, it definitely had a bearing on his decision to take his own life.
(6) The British government investigation slammed the BBC on Wednesday and a Beeb exec resigned to show they got it.
But they don't.
So the next time you hear the BBC bragging about how much superior the Brits are at delivering the news than Americans who wear flags in their lapels, remember it was the Beeb caught lying.
The style of this journalism is completely alien to television broadcasting in Britain. It is very similar to something you would read in the Sun newspaper. That is not surprising as both organizations are owned by the same man: Rupert Murdoch.
Murdoch was the world’s main cheerleader for the Iraq war. Every one of his 239 newspapers argued for the war. He even gave an interview explaining his policy. His view was the war would result in lower oil prices. This would then stimulate the economy and cause an increase in share-prices. He was right of course about the economic benefits of the war.
The Sun is Britain’s most popular newspaper. For many years it was a fervent supporter of the Conservative Party. This is not surprising considering the right-wing views of its owner. On several occasions the Sun boasted that it was a major factor in deciding these elections. After one election it had the headline “The Sun Won It”.
Just before the 1997 General Election a meeting took place between Blair and Murdoch. After this date the Sun switched to being a New Labour supporter. We do not know what was said at this meeting (no minutes were taken). What we do know is that for the last six years the newspaper has provided loyal support to the party. It was of course the only newspaper that believed the Hutton Report. In fact, the newspaper’s political editor said it was the report he would have written.
It was quite a surprise that an apparently pro-European should be supported by a leading anti-European. It does not seem to caused any problems. Although Blair still makes pro-European speeches, he does not take any actions to support these views.
Murdoch has been very happy with the government’s tax policies. For years he has paid very little tax in Britain. He is strongly opposed to any policies that would change this situation. This is a key issue for Murdoch. Two weeks ago the Murdoch owned, Sunday Times, included a article about a list of right-wing industrialists who are the main financiers of the New Labour Party. It claimed that these men would withdraw their support of the party if Gordon Brown became the leader. This was based on the idea that Brown was really a supporter of progressive taxation. At the moment he is being controlled by Blair, but if he left, Brown would return to his original socialist beliefs.
Murdoch’s main concern is about government regulation of the media industry. It is very important that the government does not do anything to interfere with his business interests. His primary concern is with his ability to make money from subscription television stations. This is being put at threat by the decision of the BBC to provide free digital stations. He sees this development as a serious threat to his long-term business plan. Murdoch therefore wants the BBC to be privatised. As he rightly points out, he cannot compete with a free service. At the moment the only area he wins in is in areas where the BBC is excluded (for example, live Premiership football games). His ultimate nightmare is that taxpayers money will be used to buy up the rights of Premiership games for showing on the BBC.
Will Blair give Murdoch what he wants? Will he privatise the BBC and C4. I am fairly confident that he will in time privatise C4 (probably to help pay for higher education). However, the BBC is another matter. It is considered a national treasure. What is significant is that the three BBC governors who insisted on the resignation of Greg Dyke are also the three governors in favour of privatisation. Blair will obviously use the Hutton Report to strengthen the position of those in support of this policy. I doubt very much if he will be willing to take on his party and public opinion in order to privatise the BBC. But that is what I thought about Top Up Fees.
For an article about Fox Television see the following:
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You might be interested in how the America's Fox News channel reported the Hutton Report:
The British Broadcasting Corporation was forced to pay up for its blatant anti-Americanism before and during the Iraq war. A frothing at the mouth anti-Americanism that was obsessive, irrational and dishonest.
The BBC - the "Beeb" - was one of the worst offenders in the British press because it felt entitled to not only pillory Americans and George W Bush, but it felt entitled to lie. And when caught lying, it felt entitled to defend its lying reporters and executives.
The incident involved the reporter Andrew Gilligan who made a fool of himself in Baghdad when the American invasion actually arrived in the Iraqi capital. Gilligan, pro-Iraqi and anti-American, insisted on the air that the Iraqi army was heroically repulsing an incompetent American military. Video from our own Greg Kelly of the American army moving through Baghdad at will put the light to that.
After the war, back in London, Gilligan got a guy named David Kelly to tell him a few things about pre-war assessments on Iraq's weapons programmes. And Gilligan exaggerated about what Kelly had told him.
Kelly committed suicide over the story and the BBC, far from blaming itself, insisted its reporter had a right to lie and exaggerate, because, well, the BBC knew the war was wrong and anything it could say to underscore that point had to be right.
The British government investigation slammed the BBC on Wednesday and a Beeb exec resigned to show they got it.
But they don't.
So the next time you hear the BBC bragging about how much superior the Brits are at delivering the news than Americans who wear flags in their lapels, remember it was the Beeb caught lying.
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I believe Britain is one of the most defective democracies in the western world. The main problem we have is that the vast majority of the population refuse to accept we have a problem. A major reason for this is that we are brought up to believe we pioneered the idea of democracy and that somehow the rest of the world followed our example.
I have already mentioned the problems with our first past the post system. However, this is not the major reason why our democracy is so flawed. The real problem is that over the last 200 years we have allowed the prime minister to obtain too much power. Unlike in many European countries, our prime minister does not have to share power with a president. We do have a monarch, but all her power is handed over to the prime minister.
We do not have an elected second chamber. At one time the House of Lords had a permanent Conservative majority. Blair promised to give the British people an elected second chamber. However, it is another promise he has broken. He has reduced it in size and increased the importance of new peers. He of course, has tremendous power over deciding who goes to the Lords. A recent leak revealed the types of people he wants in the House of Lords. Blair is particularly opposed to “controversial” figures (in other words people who are likely to criticise him).
A prime minister’s main power comes from his party. In theory, they have the ability to remove him from power. In reality, this is highly unlikely to happen. The reason is that the prime minister has total control over MPs political career’s. He decides who will fill the hundreds of jobs to be filled in government. In previous times, Prime Ministers attempted to create governments that represented all opinions within the party. Tony Blair has abandoned this policy. Ministers know that if they imply criticism of their leader they will be demoted. Unless a young MP shows complete loyalty to the prime minister’s policies, they will not even reach junior ranks in the ladder of success. If someone criticises him too much, such as George Galloway, he will be removed from the party.
The main abuse of power concerns his control over the information that the public receives. Several journalists have pointed out that the government have developed very sophisticated methods of controlling the media coverage they receive. The BBC case is just one extreme cases of this. Journalists claim the only way they can counteract this is by relying on “unauthorized sources”. These whistleblowers, once identified, are sacked, and sometimes, prosecuted.
Despite all this power, the Prime Minister is still vulnerable to the journalist who has decided he/she has no desire for a knighthood or some other honour given out by the government. Of course, recently, some journalists have been able to show that Blair misled the British public about the most important issue possible: the reasons why the government had decided to break international law by invading another country.
However, this does not mean instant dismissal. Instead the Prime Minister has the power to decide on who is going to be his judge and jury. He can also decide on the offence he has been charged with (known as the inquiry remit). What is more, he can even decide that he can decide the charge is not even against him but some other individual or group of individuals (in the latest case, the Security Services).
I am interested in hearing from people living in other countries about what would have happened if your prime minister/president, had misled the population about such an important issue. Do you have the mechanism to get rid of them? Or do you have to wait until the next election?
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We now know more about the two inquiries. The most important thing for Bush is to make sure his report is not published until after the election in November. This he guaranteed by making it a very wide-ranging inquiry. It will no doubt end up with a report on how Bush’s government manipulated intelligence data for their own political ends, but by this time he will either be a defeated candidate or into his last term as president.
Although America has a political system that gives far too much power to those with money, it does have two things that are vitally important in a democracy: a freedom of information act and the willingness to use television to give the public as much information as possible about the actions of government officials.
Compare what has come out of the Senate Intelligence Committee in America with our own Parliamentary Security and Intelligence Committee (PSIC). It is only because the American committee was televised that the American public have been able to discover that the raw intelligence data had been manipulated by Bush for political ends. It does not have to wait for the committee to report these findings in March, they have seen it with their own eyes.
In Britain we had to accept the judgement of the PSIC, a small group of MPs selected by the party whips and therefore excluding any independent thinking politician. We now know they got it nearly completely wrong (evidence from the public Hutton Inquiry). Why did they get it so wrong? Why for example, did the government not explain to the British public that the 45 minute claim was about battlefield weapons and not long-range weapons? For some reason the PSIC were not interested in telling the British public about this. Yet nothing could be more important. Under international law, unless a country can show it is in imminent attack, it can not make a pre-emptive strike on another country. That is what we did. The only way that Blair could convince his Labour MPs to vote for the war, was by given the impression that Iraq could deliver WMD against our people. The Parliamentary Security and Intelligence Committee knew that Blair mislead the House of Commons and the British public about this issue, but decided to withhold this information. Under our system they can do that. Under the American system that kind of information is revealed on television. I know which system I prefer.
Blair has of course not only refused a public inquiry, but confined it to the investigation of intelligence on WMD in Iraq and debarred the inquiry from examining the political and diplomatic decision to wage war, and the legal basis for doing so. Blair is right to think that the inquiry will find it very difficult to publish a report that will be critical of the government. The trouble is, so does the British public, and so it will not restore faith in his honesty.
Blair has also selected his committee very carefully. Lord Butler has a proven reputation for believing politicians who lie to him. This is the man who investigated Jonathan Aitkin and Nigel Hamilton and told the public they had been telling the truth. He also came to the same conclusions about the Tory ministers involved in providing arms for Iraq in the 1980s. In every case he got it wrong (as discovered by the court cases that followed his pathetic inquiries).
When he retired it was pointed out to him by a journalist that he had proven to have been a lousy detective. He defended himself by saying he had not been trained as a policeman and it was the fault of the politicians for lying to him about what they had been doing.
His lousy investigative work was rightly criticised by the Scott Report. His defence is interesting. He caused quite a stir when he said that governments are justified about being “selective about the facts”… He went on to say that by doing this you are not actually telling lies, you are just misleading the public by not telling the whole truth. As you can see, he is the ideal man to carry out this kind of investigation.
Blair is also safe with Ann Taylor and Michael Mates as they have already been involved in one failed investigation into the government’s role in the build up to the war (one of the reasons why the Liberal Democrats refused to take part in the inquiry was that their representative would have been Alan Beith, a fellow member of the same Parliamentary Security and Intelligence Committee).
Mates is another man who has already shown he is a person who is willing to be influenced if he is given the right sort of rewards. Remember how he was forced to resign as Northern Ireland minister in 1993 for using his position in government to lobby for Asil Nadir. Note also the Northern Ireland connection with these inquiries (Hutton, Mates, Chilcott), no coincidence I can assure you.
One of the things that Blair and Bush have been keen to say over the last few days is that all the world’s security services got it wrong about WMD in Iraq. On the surface this might appear to have been true. There is no doubt that spies in Iraq have been sending out similar information about WMD. Kenneth Pollack, a CIA analyst, attended a meeting on this issue in the Spring of 2002 in Washington. The intelligences agencies of the United States, Britain, China, Russia, Israel, Germany and France had all received information that Iraq was producing WMD. The most remarkable information came from the German Federal Intelligence Service. They had received information that Iraq was only three years away from building a nuclear weapon. Pollack was so convinced by what he heard at this secret meeting that he went away and wrote a book called Threatening Storm: The Case for Invading Iraq.
However, it would be wrong to believe that all these intelligence agencies reported to their respective governments that Iraq had WMD. They rarely make such judgements. This is especially true when they are relying on information being provided by members of the intelligence services in the country they are spying on. The reason being that they may in reality be working on behalf of their own government. Western intelligence agencies discovered this after the collapse of communism in the late 1980s. They realised they had completely over-estimated the military capability of the Soviet Union. The reason being was that they had been relying on the information being supplied by agents working within Soviet intelligence. In reality they were doing the work of the Soviet regime. By exaggerating Soviet military capability, they were helping to prevent their country being attacked by the United States.
Saddam was playing the same game. He was actually controlling the agents supplying information to the western intelligence agencies. He did it because he thought it would help stop his country being invaded by Israel or Iran.
This is not to say that Saddam fooled the various intelligence agencies. After their experiences with the Soviets they were fully aware of this tactic. It is never the role of intelligence agencies to say how this information should be used. The real question to be asked is why of all the countries that received this information, it was only the United States and Britain who decided that it warranted a pre-emptive strike. France, Germany, China and Russia had similar sort of information and yet they took the opposite view.
According to Blair we are not able to ask this question in Britain. However, the Senate Intelligence Committee is allowed to ask this question. They are even allowed to ask it in public. We even have some answers. In 2002 the Office of Special Plans (a group with an interesting history, for example, the organizers of Executive Action) set up a unit inside the Pentagon. The role of this group was to sift through all intelligence arriving from Iraq. From this they selected the information that supported the view that Iraq had WMD and passed it onto Bush. This included information that experienced intelligence officers had already classified as being unreliable or false. This is what Edward Kennedy meant last week when he talked about having overwhelming evidence that intelligence reports were being manipulated for political reasons. Did the same thing happen in Britain? Maybe, but Blair is making a good effort to try and make sure we will never find out.
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What about the best last lines:
'She cut her hair and I stopped loving her.'
Billy Bragg - Walk Away Renee
Did Billy Bragg actually write that?
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What about the best last lines:
Diving for dear life
When we could be diving for pearls
Elvis Costello (Shipbuilding)
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Sadly, the most victimized in this cruel system are not just the poor and disadvantaged, but also the American middle class that lives under the illusion that their kids might someday be able to live like sports professionals and vulgar celebrities that flash across our TV and movie screens. Even if not that starry-eyed, they presume their children will have all the advantages they enjoyed – low cost college education, two vehicles (one a SUV) in the garage, and a yearly trip to Disneyland.
You have provided a great analysis of democracy in the United States. Much of what you say is also true of Britain and other countries in Europe. The most depressing factor in the changes that have taken place is the growth of political apathy. I suspect that the average 19th century industrial worker had a greater understanding of politics than a person in a similar situation today. You are right to say that the decline in trade unionism is partly to blame for this. The control of the mass media is another major factor in this.
However, I am still optimistic for the future. The reason being that the wealthy and powerful members of society have an insatiable desire for even more power and wealth. For example, take the way media moguls use their power to persuade governments to maintain low tax rates on high incomes. Governments have gone along with this over the last 25 years. It is now causing serious problems for governments as a lack of revenue is causing a dramatic decline in the public services.
As you rightly pointed out, the middle classes are also suffering now. They have reached the stage where they (and the state) cannot provide their children with what they enjoyed themselves when they were young. This decline in the standard of living will hopefully create a new interest in politics. Maybe, at the same time, it will see the emergence of new political parties, fully committed to changing the system. Or are all political parties, like our Labour Party, corruptible?
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I'm actually helping to build a database for potential speakers and atendees at a conference to be held in Lucknow, India in November of this year.
The goal of the conference is "to completely review and revise the goals of education in the 21st century as distinct from its 19th century goals, and to discuss ways to make education more meaningful for our children and youth. The fundamental questions, "what education is for," will be discussed during the event."
Sounds very interesting. Have you considered having an online conference at the same time? This is something the Education Forum could organize for you.
BUBL Sociology Reference Library
in Social Sciences:Resources
Posted
BUBL Information Service, based at Strathclyde University Library, is a searchable database of Internet resources of academic relevance. The websites are organized by Dewey Decimal Classification and is browsable by subject or class number. The Sociology main page has eleven main categories: Sociology: General Resources, Societies, Social Interaction, Social Processes, Social Change, Population, Young People, Women, Social Classes, Racial and Ethnic Groups and Culture and Institutions. Each website listed has a brief review with information on the people and organizations that have created the website.
http://link.bubl.ac.uk/sociology