Luke the Nuke rides again.

Cold warriors never die, they just hibernate, and wait for the moment to begin their deluded blood thirsty cries of antagonism, opposition and rearmament.

Luke the Nuke is back

Well, it seems that the Russian stakes are rising:

According to the BBC :

Two new RAF Typhoon jets shadowed a Russian bomber heading for Britain, the Ministry of Defence has said.
The jets were scrambled on Friday 17 August to identify the Russian aircraft, which turned back before it reached UK skies.

and:

The old firm say

Last Thursday a Russian mini-submarine descended to the seabed two-and-a-half miles under the North Pole. But this was not just a scientific expedition and achievement. The main aim was to plant a Russia flag there. In other words, to claim the sovereignty of the Russian State over the area.

Other recent stories include the Czechs discovering that their pipeline to Norway is actually pumping them Russian oil (so they are totally dependent on Russia), and of course the recent spate of murder campaigns by Russia in cutting off oil during the middle fo winters.

Cold warriors are wetting themselves about a return to the good old days, and the continuing justification it gives to massive military budgets. Of course, the fact taht NATO has continued to harrass and encircle Russia - the clear intent is to have Western military domination over former Rsussian spheres of influence.

What with the recent Radio 4 series about China's military build up: Shadow of the Dragon it does seem that the so-called peace dividend is coming to an end - that is, if we listen to, and let the cold war dingbat hawks get their way. Now is the time to start talking serious disarmament in order to put a stop to a nasty cycle - after all, if the stock market correction continues, we'll all be hearing how the Great Depression led to WWII...

In Offence of Orwell

Very quickly, then.
Mick Hartly writes on Chomsky, specifically: "For Chomsky, one of whose favourite terms is "Orwellian", we already live in the world of Big Brother. But to spell this out is immediately to see how fatuous it is, and what an insult it is to everything that Orwell stood for. To pretend that we in the West are living in an Orwellian state is simply grotesque while Kim Jong Il still rules in North Korea."

Quick points on this:
1) 1984 was famously 1948 transposed, a time of continued rationing in peacetime, a time shortly after Orwell's experiences (down the road from here) at the Ministry of Information at Senate House, after Orwell had nearly had his book Animal Farm spiked by friends of Stalinist tyranny in high places.
2) IIRC, and I may be wrong here, Orwell was influenced by Trotskyite apostate Burnham and his Managerial Revolution, with the idea that technocratic élites on both sides of the Cold War were converging in practise.
3) Orwell wrote compellingly on propaganda in Homage to Catalonia on the way in which the British press distorted the Spanish Revolution.

Orwell's strength and power comes from his critique of the totalitarianism iminent in liberal society, otherwise 1984 and Animal Farm are pretty much irrelevent - Koestler's Darkness at Noon offers a better insight into the Stalinist state.

I'd add, though, that Orwell would probably have derided Chomsky for his attacks on his own country. Orwell was, after all, a Nationalist Tosser - 'One family with the wrong members in charge' my Fat Hairy Arse.

As for the Cold War - Chomsky never denied that Cold War ideology existed, after all, his critique of Vietnam was based on the Domino Theory being the motivation for US strategists. We can, however, evince some idea of the non-existence of the Cold War from two discernable facts.
1) US planner knew the USSR to be militarilly inferior wholst at the same time bleating about missile gaps, weapon gaps, etc.
2) That US foriegn policy and intervention did not change significantly from ante-Cold War to During to Post.

The problem is that Chomsky is critiquing the world cultural hegemon, and many people read it as a specific attack on the US without bothering to see the broader critique that it is nation states that are like mafia families, that many other countries behave, or would behave given the chance, in the same way. It's also worth noting that Chomsky regularly lauds the freedoms America affords, and points to them as bringing responsibilities to prevent the government organised sluaghter that is the policy of the American ruling class.

I'm no lackey of Chomsky, I think his politics, whilst he may occaisionally mention past desires to abolish the wages system, is fundamentally an extreme liberalism and heavilly reformist - influence IMNSHO by the American pragmatic philosophical tradition. What I will say, though, is that his propaganda model has withstood the test, though it needs tweaking for the UK.