Reason Magazine - Contributors

2007: The Year in Videos

Tue, 01 Jan 2008 12:06:00 EST

It's the first day of 2008, and outside of Iowa and Pakistan there's not much news and not much to worry about. Kick back and click the "play" button as reason editors and friends of the magazine remember the most striking, funny, historic, stupid, or impactful videos of 2007.

Update on January 2: Due to an editing error, some video picks were not included in the original posting of the article. Submitted for your viewing pleasure are three new selections:

Radley Balko
reason senior editor

I'm nominating the lot of police brutality and taser videos. The most popular this year were probably the "Don't Tase Me, Bro" video from a John Kerry event in Florida (see below) and a Missouri teenager's recording of an abusive police officer who had pulled him over. The genre as a whole is the result of the mass democratization of technology, and represents an important shift toward transparency and accountability in law enforcement. More than a few abusive police officers have lost their jobs after a video went viral, which likely wouldn't have happened were we still in the pre-Internet age. Mass watching of the watchers is a good thing, and we ought to be encouraging more of it, both to weed out bad cops and to protect the good ones from frivolous claims of abuse.

Ronald Bailey
reason science correspondent

Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez' weekly television talk show, Alo Presidente, infamously runs on for hours. In September, 2007 viewers were treated to more than eight hours of presidential bloviation. Chavez' hero, the notoriously long-winded Fidel Castro, has never even gotten close to that record.

In November at the Ibero-American Summit, Spain's King Juan Carlos told Chavez, "Why don't you just shut up!" Juan Carlos' words have been turned into a popular ring tone. I nominate it as the "best" video of 2007 because it was way past time that someone told Chavez to just zip it.

Nick Gillespie
reason editor-in-chief

I continue to laugh every time I watch the meeting of minds between singer-songwriter John Mayer and Justin Long (the Apple Computer guy) outside an L.A. nightclub. Mayer--drunk on booze or maybe just strict construction of the Constitution?--goes on a pro-Ron Paul rant that is magical not just for its intensity and heartfeltness but for its very existence in the first place. Years ago in reason, we excerpted Tyler Cowen's What Price Fame?, a study in how contemporary celebrities are impotent puppets we pay astronomical amounts to entertain us (Cowen's piece is not, alas, online). This is true, even when we agree with them. It's a great world where this sort of footage is widely available.

Katherine Mangu-Ward
reason associate editor

This mashup of the classic Apple 1984 ad and Hillary campaign footage ends with Obama's website address but wasn't approved by his campaign. When the maker's identity was feretted out by the Huffington Post, he said: "This ad was not the first citizen ad, and it will not be the last. The game has changed." Ne'er were truer words spoken in 2007.

Jeff Taylor
reason online columnist

A perfect creation of ad hoc media -- found it via Fark.com, builds on a previous YouTube upload of Hubble telescope images set to the Tool song Lateralus -- and adds immense value, meaning, and insight, all because some guy -- philriehl -- decided to do it. The 9:24 vid -- that number is important -- illustrates and explains a Fibonacci number sequence clearly enough for everyone to feel their inner gnostic stir. Beautiful, powerful, and inspiring.

Jesse Walker
reason managing editor

Who is the YouTube candidate? It might be Ron Paul, thanks to his ability to inspire hundreds of homemade videos, some of them gloriously weird. But Mike Gravel is the guy who makes weird videos, or at least sends them out with his stamp of approval. My favorite is this Lennonist rap featuring psychedelic animation and clips from Duck and Cover.

Matt Welch
incoming editor-in-chief of reason

I can never tell whether this surrealist attack on/celebration of John "Walnuts" McCain was based on any particular knowledge or point of view, or whether it was just a one-time burst of inspired guesswork, but I do know that it only gets better -- and creepier -- on the 200th viewing. "I want to help people... in their lives" may yet go down as one of the most chilling predictions of the 2008 presidential campaign.

Tyler Cowen
author of Discover Your Inner Economist

The best video clip I saw this year was John McLaughlin playing "Cherokee."

David Harsanyi
author of Nanny State

My favorite video of the year:

Markos Moulitsas
netroots paterfamilias

The Huckabee parody ad. Nothing captured better the absurdity of the GOP's entire field.

Brendan O'Neill
editor of Spiked Online

Mia Farrow in Second Life talking about Darfur: It's not my favourite video of the year. But in capturing the naked narcissism of celebrity activism, it's one of the most startling. Mia Farrow's young-looking, sexy avatar addresses a virtual audience of students, activists and lizards in Second Life. Like most Save Darfur activists Farrow says precisely nothing about the politics driving the conflict in Sudan; instead she describes horrific occurrences and shows photos of distressed Darfurians. As Mahmood Mamdani wrote in the London Review of Books (Essay of the Year), activists like Farrow "obscure the politics of the violence and position [themselves] as a virtuous, not just a concerned observer." It's fitting that Farrow's speech takes place in the cartoon world of Second Life, since the aim of Darfur activists is not to get to grips with the reality on the ground in Sudan but to create a virtual plane of moral superiority that they can occupy. Darfur is a "defining moment for the human family," says Farrow. She's so vain she thinks somebody else's war is about her. Watch this vid to glimpse Kipling's colonialism updated: the Web Surfer's Burden.

Rant: Tony the Nanny

info@reason.com (Brendan O'Neill) — Wed, 01 Aug 2007 23:08:00 EDT

In a teary-eyed press conference more becoming of an emotionally incontinent Hollywood starlet than a prime minister on his way out, Tony Blair announced that he would leave Downing Street. His resignation could not come a moment too soon. Leave aside Iraq. Forget for a moment the accusations that he was a modern Machiavelli. Blair's true legacy is the erosion of civil liberty in Britain.

Consider public surveillance. When New Labour came to power there were a few thousand closed-circuit television (CCTV) cameras in the United Kingdom. Today there are 5 million, one spycam for every 12 citizens. The U.K. has more than 20 per cent of the world's CCTV cameras, which, considering that our tiny island occupies just 0.2 per cent of the world's inhabitable land, is a quite remarkable achievement.

The cameras are everywhere, and they are getting cleverer all the time. Some come with automatic number plate recognition, facial recognition, even suspicious behavior recognition-internal software that analyzes clusters and movements of pixels in CCTV footage in search of "behavioral oddities." British scientists, backed by a £500,000 government grant, are currently developing cameras with "gait recognition." These are supposed to alert a human operator when people are walking suspiciously. Think of it as a Ministry of Unsilly Walks.

Cameras now speak as well as listen. In April, Blair's home secretary, John Reid, announced that the government would spend close to £1 million fitting loudspeakers onto cameras in 20 areas around Britain. Faceless operators based in CCTV bunkers will use microphones to bark orders at those of us who litter or loiter. Who will provide the voices for Britain's surveillance state? Officials are scouring schools for well-behaved, "socially conscious" children fit for the job.

Blair's reach extends even to the hallowed British pub. Public houses were traditionally free from the regulations of everyday life; you could smoke there, get drunk, shout, swear, and flirt. Not anymore.

As of July 1, the smoky drinking den is a thing of history: Smoking will be banned in all pubs, clubs, and workplaces across England. It's not just what you can't do in bars; it's what you're forced to stare at. Some beer coasters now come with government messages, covering everything from domestic violence (don't do it) to cancer (be aware of it). Pub toilets are plastered with public health posters warning of the dangers of sex, drugs, and alcohol.

The Blairites have conducted increasingly crazy experiments on errant youth. In an effort to disperse groups of young people at bus stops or on park benches, some local authorities have installed an "anti-youth gadget" called the Mosquito, which emits a noise that is unbearably high-pitched to people under the age of 20 but sounds like a faint buzz to the rest of us. Other local authorities choose to blast easy-listening music, a strategy known as "the Manilow method" for ridding the area of adolescents.

These schemes are part of the government's drive against "anti-social behavior." Eight years ago New Labour introduced Anti-Social Behavior Orders (ASBOs), written decrees which tell specific individuals how they must behave. A local authority can issue an ASBO forbidding an individual from walking down a certain street, using bad language in public, or even wearing a hooded sweatshirt, without having to prove in a court of law that the individual is guilty of anything. ASBOs are
dished out on the whim of local officials and on the basis of hearsay rather than hard evidence of misdemeanor.

So in Blair's Britain our cameras berated us, our beer coasters harangued us, and the government deployed noisy gadgets to drive us from public spaces. That is Blair's legacy: life in a permanent state of parole, where we must walk, talk, and act a certain way or risk having our collars felt by a CCTV spy, a cop, or a council official.

Brendan O'Neill is the editor of the London-based webzine Spiked.

Tony the Nanny

info@reason.com (Brendan O'Neill) — Thu, 17 May 2007 12:05:00 EDT

In a teary-eyed press conference, more becoming of an emotionally incontinent Hollywood starlet who has won an Oscar than a prime minister who has been in power for 10 years, Tony Blair announced last week that he will pack his bags and leave Downing Street on 27 June.

For a libertarian like me, his resignation cannot come a moment too soon. Leave aside Iraq; forget for a moment the accusations that he was a modern Machiavelli. Blair’s true legacy is the wholesale erosion of freedom in Britain.

Blair’s New Labour party transformed Britain into an open prison. Virtually no area of life is free from the party’s prying eyes and super-nannyism. Prior to the party’s victory in the General Election in 1997 you could walk through your local town or city without worrying about being filmed by the authorities. You could pop into a local pub for a relaxing drink and a smoke, pubs having long been considered a haven from the pressures of everyday life. At the weekend you could unwind by cheering on your favourite football team in one of Britain’s many soccer stadiums.

No longer. Everyday life has now been colonized by the Blairites.

When New Labour came to power there were a few thousand CCTV cameras in the UK. Today there are five million. That’s one spycam for every 12 citizens. Britain has more than 20 per cent of the world’s CCTV cameras, which, considering that our tiny island occupies just 0.2 per cent of the world’s inhabitable landmass, is a quite remarkable achievement. The average Londoner going about his or her business should expect to be picked up on 300 CCTV cameras a day.

The cameras are getting cleverer all the time. Some cams come with automatic number-plate recognition, facial recognition and even suspicious behaviour recognition—that is, internal software which analyses clusters and movements of pixels in CCTV footage in search of “behavioral oddities.” British scientists, backed by a £500,000 government grant, are currently developing cameras with “gait recognition.” These will recognise whether people are walking suspiciously and then alert a human operator. Think of it as a Ministry of Unfunny Walks.

The government recently introduced speaking CCTV cameras. In April, Blair’s home secretary, John Reid, announced that the government would spend close to £1 million on fitting loudspeakers on to cameras in 20 areas around Britain. Faceless operators based in CCTV bunkers will use microphones to bark orders at those of us who litter or loiter or commit crimes.

Worse, government officials are recruiting children to provide the voices for these new cams when they “go live” later this month. A competition has been launched in schools to find well-behaved and “socially conscious” children who will be co-opted by the government to “remind adults to act responsibly on our streets,” as a Home Office press release put it.

Turning children into instruments of government policy is reminiscent of totalitarian regimes. Indeed, by coating Britain with cameras and effectively recruiting child spies, the Blairites have gone some way to making George Orwell’s dystopian nightmare of 1984 a reality. Winston Smith was tormented by the telescreen which monitored his every movement and also spoke to him; he hated the “horrible children” who spied on everyone, and the fact that “it was almost normal for people over 30 to be frightened of their own children.” When sanctimonious 12-year-olds start telling off we Britons over loudspeakers later this month, I think we’ll know how Smith felt.

The Blairites have taken over our pubs, too. Public houses were traditionally free from the restraints and regulations of everyday life. In pubs you could smoke, get drunk, shout, swear and flirt with members of the opposite sex (or the same sex). Not anymore. New Labour has transformed the British pub into another outlet for its hectoring nannyism.

As of July 1, smoking will be banned in all pubs, clubs and workplaces across England. The smoky drinking den will be a thing of history. Around the country pub toilets are now plastered with public health posters warning of the dangers of sexually transmitted diseases, drug-taking and the overconsumption of alcohol.

The government’s Department of Health, for example, has put up obnoxious anti-smoking posters in pubs. In women’s toilets the posters say: “If you smoke, you stink.” In men’s toilets the posters focus on—what else?—penises. With a picture of a man’s legs with a limp cigarette where his penis should be, one poster says: “Bad news: smoking causes impotence. More bad news: these ads are in the ladies’ toilets, too.” That poster in particular sums up the killjoy, contemptible nature of the New Labour government: it both lectures smokers and sneeringly promises to ruin their chances of getting laid at the end of the night. Even beermats now have government messages printed on them, covering everything from domestic violence (don’t do it) to cancer (be aware of it).

Soccer stadiums, too, have been invaded by the beak-nosed Blairites. Hundreds of thousands of men (and some women) head to stadiums every Saturday to cheer their team—and the government looks upon these mass gatherings as an opportunity for mass social engineering.

In 2005 officials kickstarted the “Football and Health” initiative, which is aimed at “harnessing the mass appeal [of football] to help reinforce and promote healthy living.” “Football is an important part of many people’s lives, [so] it provides great opportunities to get across key messages about healthy, active lives,” said one government minister. Football fans are now bombarded with leaflets about sexual health, the dangers of smoking, how much fruit they should eat, and how to check their testicles for strange lumps and bumps. A stress-free fun day at the footie? Forget about it.

The Blairites have carried out increasingly crazy experiments for how to deal with errant youth. The flipside of the government’s recruitment of children to lecture adults has been its demonization of young people as a threat to the nation. In an effort to disperse groups of youth gathering at bus-stops or on park benches, some local authorities have installed an “anti-youth gadget” called the Mosquito which emits a noise that is unbearably high-pitched to people under the age of 20 (but which sounds like a faint buzz to the rest of us). Other local authorities prefer the “Manilow method”: they publicly play easy listening music, including Barry Manilow, in an effort to force youth to return home.

These schemes are part of the government’s drive against “anti-social behaviour.” New Labour introduced Anti-Social Behaviour Orders (ASBOs) in 1999, written decrees which tell individuals how they must behave. A local authority can issue an ASBO forbidding an individual from walking down a certain street, using bad language in public or even wearing a certain item of clothing, without having to prove in a court of law that the individual is guilty of anything.

ASBOs are like feudal rulings: they are dished out on the whim of local officials and on the basis of hearsay rather than hard evidence of misdemeanor. They’re a shocking affront to liberty and to the rule of law.

So in Blair’s Britain we are spied on constantly; we’re nannied everywhere from the pub to the soccer stadium; we can be reprimanded and have our freedom of movement and association restricted on the say-so of a local official. Dear reader, we Britons are no longer free. Instead we live in a permanent state of parole, where we must walk, talk and act in a certain way or risk having our collars felt by a CCTV spy, a cop or a council official.

That is Blair’s legacy: the transformation of Britain into one big holding cell, and British citizens into constant objects of suspicion.

Brendan O’Neill is editor of spiked in London. His journalism is collated at BrendanONeill.net.

Discuss this article online.

The Shocking Truth About Osama bin Laden

info@reason.com (Brendan O'Neill) — Fri, 05 May 2006 00:00:00 EDT

When Al Jazeera broadcast Osama bin Laden’s latest audiotape in January, it provoked the same sense of déjà vu as Messages to the World: The Statements of Osama bin Laden, recently published by the leftist publishing house Verso.

The book is a collection of every public utterance made by the Al Qaeda leader from 1994 to 2004. According to The Observer’s excitable reviewer, it shows that he is a “charismatic man of action, an eloquent preacher, a teacher of literature and a resilient, cunning, wonderfully briefed politician.” To me, however, there was something irritatingly familiar rather than surprisingly eloquent about his tone and turns of phrase.

Then it struck me: Bin Laden is a blogger. Not literally, of course, but he certainly speaks the language of the blogosphere. He references Robert Fisk and Michael Moore, those darlings of the anti-war Web. His latest statement recommends that people read Rogue State by William Blum, whose e-mail newsletter, Anti-Empire Report, is frequently republished and discussed in the left-wing blogosphere. Bin Laden repeats criticisms of Bush and conspiracy theories about 9/11 that I have read a thousand times on a thousand blogs.

It is often said that the blogging explosion was a by-product of the September 11 attacks, as people launched online diaries to try to make sense of those shocking events. Here’s a thought: Perhaps bin Laden himself turned to the blogosphere after 9/11, in search of theories and arguments with which he might justify his murderous assault.

The latest statement reveals the extent to which bin Laden borrows from Western discussions of the Middle East. He seems less a man with a clear religious or political agenda than a parasite feeding off the fear and loathing of his enemies. Indeed, bin Laden has scolded President Bush for ignoring “U.S. opinion polls which [indicate] that the overwhelming majority of you want the withdrawal of the forces from Iraq.” He seems a little obsessed by opinion polls. Shortly after the Madrid train bombings in March 2004, he cited “opinion polls showing that most people in Europe want peace.” What kind of warrior for God needs to conjure up the authority of opinion polls—rather than, say, the authority of Allah—to justify himself?

This latest message also talks about the “psychological pressure” on U.S. soldiers in Iraq, criticizes the news media for not showing the truth about the war, and cites humanitarian reports on conditions at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay. It contains very little about religious or political first principles; instead bin Laden leaps on Western doubts about Bush’s venture in Iraq and makes them his own.

Bin Laden’s reliance on Western theorizing about the reasons for Al Qaeda’s existence and actions is clear in Messages to the World. Reading his statements from 1994 to 2004, one can see clearly that he transforms himself from a religious crank obsessed by Saudi Arabia (circa 1994) to a self-described warrior for Palestine (around 2001–02) to a full-fledged Bush basher (from 2004 onward). His campaign is shaped less by his own program of ideas or aims than it is by the West’s interpretation of that campaign.

In 1994 bin Laden’s big concern was that his birthplace, Saudi Arabia, wasn’t chokingly religious enough for his liking. By 2001, however, he was defining himself as a fighter for Palestine. When a quick-witted Al Jazeera journalist challenged him about that shift, Bin Laden explained, “Some of the events of recent times might foreground a certain issue, so we move in that direction.”

Here’s a more plausible account: Numerous commentators in the West presumed that 9/11 was payback for American policy in the Middle East, and especially its support for Israel against Palestine, so bin Laden, previously a Saudi obsessive, adopted those arguments as his own. Even before 9/11, Al Qaeda’s occasional nods to Palestine were at best a cynical attempt to connect with the Arab masses through the Arab media.

Bin Laden’s justifications for 9/11 also changed in tune with Western theories. At first, in September 2001, he disavowed responsibility for 9/11, instead pinning the blame on some dastardly conspiracy within America itself. He talked about “a government within the government in the United States” that may have facilitated the attacks because “there are intelligence agencies in the U.S. which require billions of dollars of funds from the Congress and the government every year.” Such theories will sound familiar to anyone who happened upon conspiracy theory Web sites or some of the wackier blogs in the immediate aftermath of 9/11.

By October 2001, bin Laden was celebrating 9/11’s impact on America’s economy and sense of resolve, talking about “the psychological shock of the attack” and how it cost the Americans an estimated “$140 billion” and led to 170,000 employees being “fired or liquidated” from airline companies. Here he cherry-picked from reports of job losses and predictions of doom that were widespread in the Western media after 9/11 and claimed ownership of them, as if they were part of his plot.

Bin Laden’s parasitical relationship with Western debate really came into its own from 2004 onward. During this period he has sounded almost indistinguishable from various left-wing blogs. In April 2004 he ranted about “big media,” describing them as “agents of deception and exploitation.” He said the war in Iraq “is making billions of dollars for the big corporations, whether it be those who manufacture weapons or reconstruction firms like Halliburton and its offshoot sister companies.” (Halliburton is, of course, the bête noir of anti-war bloggers.)

Bin Laden also said, “It is all too clear, then, who benefits most from stirring up this war and bloodshed: the merchants of war who direct world policy from behind the scenes.” This is also a popular idea in the blogosphere: that a wicked cabal led by Paul Wolfowitz and Dick Cheney (both of whom have big business links) is leading America to war. In his latest statement bin Laden spells out who these “merchants of war” are, describing Iraq as “the ill-omened plan of the four—Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz.” He has also adopted the “war for oil” argument of various anti-war bloggers, arguing that the “black gold blinded” Bush.

Bin Laden frequently drops the names of the anti-war blogosphere’s favorite authors and activists. In October 2004 he advised the White House to read “Robert Fisk, who is a fellow [Westerner] and a co-religionist of yours, but one whom I consider unbiased.” In the same statement bin Laden chastised Bush for leaving “50,000 of his citizens in the two towers” because he considered “a little girl’s story about a goat and its butting [to be] more important than dealing with airplanes and their butting into skyscrapers.” This reads like a reference to Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11, which opens with footage of Bush reading The Pet Goat to a classroom of children on the morning of 9/11. Did bin Laden watch a pirate DVD of Fahrenheit 9/11? Or did he read about the Pet Goat incident on the Web, where images of Bush’s uncomfortable classroom performance were widely available even before Moore’s film was released?

Now he has suggested that Bush and company read William Blum’s Rogue State. Funny how this Islamist warrior never recommends that we read the Koran.

Who knows whether bin Laden has access to the Web? Who knows whether he reads blogs, or if he hears such arguments from supportive visitors from Pakistan or Afghanistan or Wherever-istan? One thing is clear: His arguments sound remarkably familiar. Like bloggers on both the left and right, he seems obsessed by media coverage of the Iraq war (and of himself) rather than by the substance of the war. He certainly speaks in the shrill tones of some of the crankier left-wing bloggers.

Bin Laden, it seems to me, is regurgitating the arguments of Western commentators and using them to justify his crimes. He is less the armed wing of a clear or coherent Islamist worldview than he is the armed wing of the West’s own fearful and tortured debates about war and terrorism today.

Is Our Empathy Killing Us?

info@reason.com (Brendan O'Neill) — Fri, 09 Dec 2005 00:00:00 EST

All of us, if we're honest, are perplexed by the insurgents in Iraq. Yes, America and Britain launched an invasion that was—in my and many other people's views—a bloody disaster. But why hasn't it given rise to a national liberation movement that targets the occupying forces and makes the case for Iraqi independence, instead of these faceless killers who incinerate worshippers or blow up kids taking sweets from a U.S. soldier?

Radical leftists argue this is the price of war and occupation. Tariq Ali even compared the insurgents to the French resistance against the fascist Vichy regime; yet those noble resistors never filmed themselves cutting people's throats. The pro-war right can only say the insurgents are "pure evil." That is no rational explanation, either.

Both sides try to force the insurgency into categories where it doesn't fit, in a bid to render explicable what seems like inexplicable behaviour. At times, though, they will admit to being "baffled" by the rebels. In a New York Times article headlined "Iraq Insurgency Displaying Little Rhyme, Reason," counterinsurgency experts said they were thrown by the "wanton violence."

Why do these rebels revel in killing civilians? I think they are exploiting a cultural obsession with death that has its origins very much in the West. Indeed, they seem to define themselves in direct opposition to what they perceive as a cowardly Coalition. The Coalition tries to avoid risky operations; the insurgents take outrageous risks. The Coalition promises to avoid taking casualties; the insurgents kill as many as they can. The Coalition suppresses images of the dead; the insurgents kill their victims for the cameras.

This insurgency is best understood, not as a band of freedom fighters or evil incarnate, but as a movement with an intuitive grasp of the West's fearful psychology.

Insurgents who pay attention to our debates about the war will notice one thing: We are terrified by death. The authors of the war promised this would be a "clean" invasion in which few would die, while their anti-war opponents obsess over numbers of dead and images of the dead. Both sides have helped to turn death into the defining issue, so it is not surprising that the insurgents should focus on that same issue.

From the beginning, Coalition officials advertised their fear of spilling blood, whether Iraqis' or their own. Their unrealistic desire for a bloodless battle was summed up by one journalist as follows: "We want to have a clean, crisp, sanitary war in which we suffer few casualties. We want the unfortunate deaths of civilians removed from the process completely.... And, by the way, we want the entire thing wrapped up by next Thursday." Through their trepidation, officials guaranteed that deaths, when they inevitably occurred, would be taken as evidence that the war had gone horribly wrong.

When large numbers started dying, the Coalition became defensive. The Pentagon's ban on photographing returning military coffins suggested it was mortified by its dead, seeking to sneak them in the backdoor and hurry them into the earth without anybody noticing. Bush stopped attending military funerals, reportedly because he did not want to bring attention to the number of dead Americans. Last year officials revealed that he spent Easter "praying for American casualties to ebb."

In turning shamefaced from their dead, embarrassed by their sacrifice and unable to justify it, American leaders sent a clear message to the insurgents: "If you want to get one over on us, kill people. We cannot bear this burden." Indeed, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the most notorious insurgent, seemed to taunt America over its inability to deal with death. A couple of weeks after the controversy over photographing military coffins hit the headlines in April last year, Zarqawi's group decapitated American civilian Nick Berg, as Zarqawi said: "As for you, Bush, you will only get shroud after shroud and coffin after coffin slaughtered in this manner." Here, he seemed explicitly to exploit America's embarrassment about returning coffins by promising more of them.

Of course, "body-bag syndrome"—where people tire of the sacrifices being made by their friends or fellow countrymen—is a side-effect of many wars, especially unpopular ones. But the war in Iraq seemed to come with a top-down body-bag syndrome built in. This suggested a crisis of conviction among the makers of the war; in other times, our leaders have been willing to send young men to die if it is for something they truly believe in, but here they promised few deaths from the very outset. And by raising this issue of casualties even before the war had begun, they ensured that numbers of deaths would become a major focus.

Now, we have terrorists and insurgents who constitute themselves in direct contrast to officialdom's seeming squeamishness. This is summed up in the slogan "You love life, we love death," now used by both al-Qaeda associates and Iraqi insurgents.

The anti-war movement has, unfortunately, made things worse. It has morbidly fixated on the dead. Visit any anti-war website and you will see an Iraq Body Count counter with a ticking toll of civilians killed; it was an anti-war website—The Memory Hole—that challenged the Pentagon to release photos of American coffins.

Anti-war journalists call for more scenes of death on our TV screens. British columnist Michela Wrong wrote in the New Statesman that she is "sickened and disgusted by the outrageous lack of graphic violence on our screens today," and called for more "blood and guts" because "we are literal-minded creatures. To believe something we need to see it." The insurgents have been only too happy to provide this blood and guts. Anti-war activists have pushed the moms and dads of dead U.S. soldiers to the forefront of their campaigns, and demand body counts of Iraqis.

These may seem like radical demands. They can also be seen as a failure of political conviction. In place of a hard debate about new forms of Western intervention and why they're a problem, we get shock-horror snapshots of dead kids and mangled body parts. This is an attempt to emotionally blackmail the public, rather than politically convince us, into opposing the war. Anti-war activists hope the gore will make us anti-war.

And they, too, send a powerful message to the insurgents: "Blood and guts changes minds. Give us more of it."

The war was an unmitigated disaster, but here's a scary thought: This ongoing death-obsessed debate about the war is also proving disastrous for Iraqis. Through our fevered debates about risk, fear, injury and death, we have shown the insurgents how to hit us where it hurts—by killing people. We have made injury and fatality into the currency of the conflict, and effectively given a green light to the insurgents to continue killing civilians if they want to make a big impact on the our frail and risk-averse consciousness. Our bombs killed; now our humanity kills.

Brendan O'Neill is deputy editor of spiked in London. His journalism is archived at
www.BrendanONeill.net.

Fur Flies in PETA Paroxysm

info@reason.com (Brendan O'Neill) — Mon, 10 Oct 2005 00:00:00 EDT

The fashion industry is famously fickle. Ten years ago, supermodels were getting their kits off and tits out for anti-fur adverts, declaring "We Would Rather Go Naked" than wear the pelt of some unfortunate beast clubbed to death by a nasty foreigner. Today some of the very same models wear dead foxes, tail and all, slung over their shoulders, or the fur of aborted lamb fetuses (seriously) as a super-soft winter hat.

Meanwhile, those who foolishly thought that the earlier anti-fur stance was more than a fad are furious. People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA), the ferocious animal lib organization, is hunting down the fur-wearers. PETA has denounced Jennifer Lopez as "Fur Scum" for including rabbit-trimmed jackets in her Sweetface clothing line, and scolded Elizabeth Jagger (Mick's model daughter) for wearing a fox in a Julien Macdonald show at London Fashion Week earlier this year. "Bunnies killed for fur scream as they are skinned alive!" screamed PETA. Today, for the second time in a year, PETA activists assaulted Vogue editor Anna Wintour with a dietetically correct pie.

I am no fan of fur, or the fur industry. But in this unseemly clash between self-obsessed fashionistas and animal rights activists who seriously think that a mink should have the same rights as a man, I'll defend the fur-makers every time. The anti-fur movement is motivated by a base anthropomorphism, by a belief that animals ought to be human's equals. And to that, humanists should say: There is no greater privilege for an animal, which otherwise would scurry around, eat, shit, breed and then die, than to be made into a fur coat, which can be worn and admired for generations.

Animal rights activists say the fur industry is cruel, causing pain, distress and death to innocent animals. "How would you like it?" they ask, as captured in an anti-fur TV ad which showed a woman in a fancy fur being accosted by burly men, clubbed around the head, and stripped of her coat. The implication is that a mink experiences being hunted exactly as the sexy broad who ends up wearing said mink would experience it.

Yet according to Stuart Derbyshire, an expert in the neurophysiology of pain at the University of Pittsburgh, the fact that an animal might scream or recoil when trapped doesn't show that it has an appreciation of pain, much less a conscious thought process. "Chop the head off a chicken and it will continue to run around. If you catch the headless chicken—quickly!—and stick a pin in its foot, it will STILL flinch, despite no longer having a head or a brain," he says. "These reflex responses are coordinated by a spinal-motor loop and do not involve the brain or require conscious experience."

It is different for humans—and profoundly so. A beast runs away out of an instinct for survival, bestowed on it by the evolutionary process. A human, with his self-awareness, meaningful relationships with others, and consciousness, would leg it from a knife-wielding hunter from a dire appreciation of what being skinned alive and killed would entail—for himself, his future, his family and friends. A hunted human might think to himself "I could die today," and what a terrifying thought that would be! An animal is incapable even of thinking "I could die today," as Derbyshire explains: "Animals do not understand the concept of 'today', unless we think foxes use calendars and keep diaries; or 'die', unless we think that mink have funeral rites; or 'could', because they have no sense of probabilistic inference; or even 'I', because they also have no sense of self." Such concepts, says Derbyshire, are "uniquely human."

So while the physical responses of a human and an animal to being hunted would look similar, they could not be more different. The difference is in the screaming. PETA's bunnies that "scream" at the prospect of being made into a jacket for Ms Lopez, apart perhaps from having an elevated sense of fashion, do so only instinctively to grab the attention of a parent or other member of the group. A human scream in similar circumstances would be infinitely more deathly, expressing fear, angst, and a horrible appreciation of what is about to occur. PETA might not be able to tell the difference, but most of us can: If we hear a cat wailing at an ungodly hour, we throw something at it; if we hear a woman scream, we investigate or call the cops. We distinguish between the frankly irritating cry of a distressed beast and the holler of a threatened human.

Of course, the majority of us treat animals humanely, and we should expect the fur industry to do likewise; only weirdos torture cats, dogs or rabbits for kicks. But the animal libbers want more than humane treatment—they want animals to be treated as if they themselves were human, and argue that they deserve equal rights to human beings. They project human characteristics on to beasts, imagining they can smile and scream and perhaps say things like, "Run, Bambi, run!"

This childish attitude toward animals is no longer the preserve of radical vegans who shout abuse at J-Lo; it increasingly informs public debate on important matters of scientific endeavor and even liberty. A Working Party of the British Nuffield Council on Bioethics, a serious scientific body, said in a report on the ethics of animal research published in May that it rejected the idea of "categorical human superiority" over animals. Much of the opposition to fox hunting in the UK is motivated by a Disneyfied view of foxes, so that the practice of this sport, which is mostly the preserve of toffs but which was once described even by Friedrich Engels as "the most magnificent physical pleasure I know," is now severely restricted in England and Wales.

The idea that we are morally superior to animals is not some pose; it is the foundation of human civilization. And the attack on that idea of superiority today, by the anti-fur movement, the anti-hunting lobby and anti-vivisectionists, and the distaste for it even at the highest levels of government and science, represents an attack on our civilization.

In such circumstances, we should defend even Lopez and Lizzie Jagger from the anti-fur lot, and point to the humanizing side of the fur industry. To turn an animal into a fur coat is to ennoble it. As a fashion item, an animal acquires a significance far beyond its own natural existence. Indeed, the only true "purpose" in the life of a mink or rabbit is that bestowed on it by the hunter, skinner and fur-maker: Through their efforts, an animal is elevated from an instinct-driven bundle of reflex responses to an item worthy of being displayed in Paris, London and New York. Through human endeavor and labor an animal is given a use and meaning nature could never have designed for it. What is a fox but a wild dog scrabbling for food on the forest floor, destined to die and rot in a dirthole? The fox worn by Jagger was spared this fate and made into something memorably beautiful.

No finer fate can befall an animal than to be caught by the fur-hunter. And if they "scream" it's only because they are too dumb to realise that.

Is Entertainment Objectively Pro-Terrorist?

info@reason.com (Brendan O'Neill) — Fri, 12 Aug 2005 00:00:00 EDT

How eerie is this? On the morning of Thursday, July 7, as three young men from Leeds and a fourth from Huddersfield were making their way to London trussed up as human bombs, shortly to become Europe's first-ever suicide bombers, the publishing house Chatto & Windus was preparing to publish a novel about suicide bombers attacking London. Posters advertising the novel—Incendiary by first-time novelist Chris Cleave—had been put up in 150 London Underground stations the day before, on July 6. They showed a bomb floating ominously above the London skyline, parts of which were consumed by fire and smoke, under the chilling tagline "WHAT IF?" A mere 24 hours later, on the morning of publication, the four terrorists detonated their bombs at three Underground stations and on a London bus, killing themselves and 52 of their fellow citizens. That's "WHAT IF," they seemed to say.

Incendiary tells the story of a working-class family from the East End of London ripped apart when 11 suicide bombers target the home ground of Arsenal, one of London's biggest soccer teams, killing 1,003 people. It is written in the form of a letter to Osama bin Laden by a widow whose husband and four-year-old boy are killed in the explosions. "Dear Osama," it goes, "...I'm going to write so you can look into my empty life and see what a human boy really is from the shape of the hole he leaves behind." The pre-publication buzz in London's literary circles was quite something: Chatto & Windus ran off 100,000 copies, not at all bad for a first novel. The film rights were snapped up by Film Four in association with Archer Street Films, and Sharon Maguire (director of Bridget Jones's Diary, no less) was hired to shoot it. Waterstone's, the biggest bookstore chain in the UK, was planning in-store posters and outta-store adverts, in national newspapers and magazines, to advertise the novel. All the indicators were that Chris Cleave was about to become, like Martin Amis or Zadie Smith in earlier eras, The Most Famous Young Novelist in Britain.

But 7/7 changed everything. Chatto & Windus delayed publication and decided to pull the "WHAT IF?" posters from the Underground, though not quickly enough to prevent scores of people from complaining. Waterstone's all but hid Incendiary from public view in its stores, and put Dan Brown's Da Vinci Code in the window displays where Incendiary was supposed to go. (As if Brown hasn't shifted more than enough copies already.) There's no word on whether the film version of the book is going ahead. Everyone, it seems, is handling what was supposed to be this summer's hottest novel (seriously, no pun intended) as if it were itself a bomb, liable to explode and cause offence to fragile post-7/7 Londoners.

Talking to Cleave at a bar in the Barbican Arts Centre—which is about halfway between King's Cross, where 21 people died on 7/7, and Liverpool Street, where seven died—I can tell he's still a little peeved about this controlled explosion that has been carried out on his first novel. It's not selling very well, he admits. He's hopeful that it will fare better in the United States, where it was published last week by Knopf, and where people might not feel quite so sensitive about a tale of suicide bombers striking in London (the dust-jacket illustration showing a fiery London skyline has been replaced by a simple yellow strip with the word "Incendiary" on it for the US version.) It's already had a rave review in Newsweek, which called the book "a haunting work of art" and "the strangest epistolary novel ever written"

Cleave is remarkably calm about the eerie coincidence that greeted the publication of his novel. At one level, he says, it's not a coincidence at all. "I think their act and my book have a common causality," he says. "Both the bombers and I were probably responding to the same kind of events. I started writing this novel after the Madrid bombings of March 2004. For me, that was such a shocking event that I abandoned the novel I had been working on and decided to become a more engaged novelist, to write about the times we live in. And while I was writing, two equally shocking things occurred—one was the execution of Nick Berg in Iraq and the other was the revelation of terrible torture and degradation by American soldiers in Abu Ghraib. I imagine that the London bombers were also reacting to Iraq, Abu Ghraib, to the terribly offensive things that were done to Muslims there.

"It turns out that a novel, if you do it very fast, takes about 18 months to write and be published. That is about the same length of time it takes to organize a bomb plot. So, at some level, it is not so eerie that my response to those events and theirs should appear around the same time. But they are opposite reactions: My novel is, I hope, a plea for peace. Their response was an act of war, in their eyes at least."

This unholy marriage of the peace-loving novelist and the peace-hating bombers meant that Cleave did not become the new Zadie Smith, feted and photographed at literary soirees. Instead he was propelled headfirst into a tortured debate about the murky relationship between culture and terror. Was he irresponsible to write so gruesomely about a terrorist act (those given to squeamishness are advised to avoid pages 40 to 51) at a time when terrorism remains a real threat? Was the publication of his novel in the wake of 7/7 not only "insensitive" but also an "insult" to Londoners, one newspaper asked? Had Cleave, or more realistically his publishers, "deliberately set out to exploit a threat that was ever real"? Some reporters started referring to him as the "terror author," as if he were inextricably linked with the terrible events in London. Cleave dealt admirably with this barrage of queries and accusations, even setting up a website that puts the case for and against his novel and includes links to both rave and rotten reviews.

If Cleave has, as some of his critics claim, "exploited" the terror threat, then he isn't alone. In the four years since 9/11, British culture has seemed rather ghoulishly obsessed by terrorism, and by the possibility—no, likelihood—of some terrible atrocity being visited upon us. There are more eerie coincidences than the fact that Incendiary was published on the morning of 7/7. Consider this: Last year the BBC, Britain's state broadcaster, showed two fictional films about Liverpool Street Station being attacked by suicide terrorists. In London Under Attack, shown in May 2004, a truck containing chlorine gas was blown up just north of Liverpool Street, killing 3,000 people. In Dirty War, shown on BBC TV in September 2004, a suicide terrorist detonated a dirty bomb outside Liverpool Street Station, killing 200 people and making the area uninhabitable for 30 years. A novel called Dark Winter, by former soldier Andy McNab, was also published last year: It told the tale of a terrorist plot to unleash pneumonic plague in Britain and again featured Liverpool Street Station as a target. On 7/7 this year, Liverpool Street Station really did become a terror target, when 22-year-old Shehzad Tanweer blew himself up on a train approaching the station, killing himself and six others and injuring 100 more.

We've also had a TV film about smallpox being unleashed on an unsuspecting public, and another about how Britain might (or might not) cope if a terrorist gang crashed a jumbo jet into a nuclear installation. It was recently reported that some foreign al-Qaeda associate might have visited Britain prior to 7/7 and decided that the London Underground would be the best target for four young willing British "martyrs." He could probably have found that out from wherever he's based, by tuning into one of the BBC's scary dramas about a terror attack on the Tube or by listening to British officials. They warned on numerous occasions post-9/11 that the Undergound was a "likely terrorist target" and even seemed to advertise the idea in September 2003 when they launched their own "mock terror attack" on Bank Underground station to test the preparedness of the emergency services.

My turn to interrogate Cleave—the "terror author"—on the murky relationship between culture and terror: Is it possible that by obsessing over terrorism for four years, we effectively invited the terrorists to fulfill our worst fears and fantasies? By advertising how petrified we are—on primetime TV, in novels and in statements made by politicians and policemen—did we inadvertently encourage the terrorists to have a go, to come and scare us some more? Jean Baudrillard, the peculiar French philosopher of "the Gulf War didn't really happen" fame, wrote an essay after 9/11 entitled "The Spirit of Terrorism," arguing that the West had fantasized about being attacked—in those "countless disaster movies," for example—and then was attacked. "At a pinch, we can say that they did it, but we wished for it," wrote Baudrillard.

That might sound obscurantist (and typically Baudrillardian), but are we seeing something similar in Britain? We have fantasized endlessly about being attacked, especially on our self-perceived weak spots such as the London Underground, and now—bang!—those fantasies have become fact. "That's an interesting philosophical question," says Cleave. "I hope we are not doing that." Certainly Cleave thinks we need to put the terror threat in perspective, to separate the fact of terrorism from the voluminous fiction about it, and to throw water on hysterical estimations of al-Qaeda's power.

"It's almost as if people want there to be something called al-Qaeda, something they can externalize and consider the enemy. They would be more comfortable if al-Qaeda really was some organizational specter, as if you could just target the center—destroy bin Laden at the nucleus—and everything would be okay. But it isn't like that. The London bombs show us it isn't like that: These were four young men from within our own society, not some great foreign threat.

"So far, the evidence is that this thing we call al-Qaeda will kill far fewer people than drunk drivers or lung cancer. The risks of being killed by an al-Qaeda associate are probably the same as the risks of being struck by lightning, or less. And who would organize their life around the probability of being struck by lightning? We need to relativize the risks and think carefully about whether we want to change our whole culture in response to this."

Blogger, Bush-Basher, Bin Laden

info@reason.com (Brendan O'Neill) — Tue, 25 Jan 2005 00:00:00 EST

Osama bin Laden's latest message to the world, broadcast by al-Jazeera last Thursday, provoked the same sense of déjà vu as has Messages to the World: the Statements of Osama bin Laden, recently published by the left-leaning literary publishing house Verso. The book is a collection of every public utterance made by the al-Qaeda leader between 1994 and 2004, and according to one excitable reviewer it shows that he is a "charismatic man of action, an eloquent preacher, a teacher of literature and a resilient, cunning, wonderfully briefed politician." To me, however, there was something irritatingly familiar rather than surprisingly eloquent about his tone and turns of phrase.

Then it struck me: Bin Laden is a blogger. Not literally, of course, but he certainly speaks in the language of the blogosphere. He references Robert Fisk and Michael Moore, those darlings of the anti-war Web. In his latest statement, he recommends that people read Rogue State by leftist author William Blum, another favorite of the leftwing blogosphere whose email newsletter, "Anti-Empire Report," is frequently republished and discussed. Bin Laden also repeats conspiracy theories about 9/11 and lines of attack against Bush that I have read a thousand times on a thousand blogs.

It is often said that the blogging explosion was a byproduct of the 9/11 attacks, as people launched online diaries to try to make sense of those shocking events. Here's a thought: Perhaps bin Laden himself turned to the blogosphere after 9/11, in search of theories and arguments with which he might justify his murderous assault.

The latest statement reveals the extent to which bin Laden borrows from Western discussions of the Middle East. This seems less a man with a clear religious or political agenda than someone who is parasitical on the fear and loathing of his enemies. Indeed, bin Laden has scolded President Bush for ignoring "U.S. opinion polls which [indicate] that the overwhelming majority of you want the withdrawal of the forces from Iraq." He seems a little obsessed by opinion polls. Shortly after the Madrid train bombings in March 2004, he cited "opinion polls showing that most people in Europe want peace." What kind of warrior for God needs to conjure up the authority of opinion polls—rather than, say, the authority of Allah—to justify himself?

This latest message also talks about the "psychological pressure" on U.S. soldiers in Iraq, criticizes the news media for not showing the truth about the war, and cites humanitarian reports on conditions at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay. It contains very little about religious or political first principles; instead bin Laden leaps upon Western doubts about Bush's venture in Iraq and makes them his own.

Bin Laden's reliance on Western theorizing about the reasons for al-Qaeda's existence and actions is clear in Messages to the World. Reading his statements from 1994 to 2004 one can see clearly that he transforms himself from a religious crank obsessed by Saudi Arabia (circa 1994) to a self-described warrior for Palestine (around 2001 and 2002) to finally a fully-fledged Bush-basher (2004 onwards). His campaign is shaped less by his own program of ideas or aims than it is by the West's interpretation of that campaign.

In 1994 bin Laden's big concern was that his birthplace, Saudi Arabia, wasn't chokingly religious enough for his liking. By 2001, however, he was defining himself as a fighter for Palestine. When a quick-witted al-Jazeera journalist challenged him about that shift, bin Laden explained: "Some of the events of recent times might foreground a certain issue, so we move in that direction…." Here's a more plausible account: Numerous commentators in the West presumed (with little evidence) that 9/11 was payback for American policy in the Middle East, and especially its support for Israel against Palestine, and bin Laden, previously a Saudi obsessive, adopted those arguments as his own.

His justifications for 9/11 also changed in tune with Western theories. At first, in September 2001, he disavowed responsibility for 9/11, instead pinning the blame on some dastardly conspiracy within America itself. He talked about "a government within the government in the United States" which may have facilitated the attacks because "there are intelligence agencies in the US which require billions of dollars of funds from the Congress and the government every year." Such theories will sound familiar to anyone who happened upon conspiracy-theory websites or some of the wackier blogs in the immediate aftermath of 9/11. By October, bin Laden was celebrating 9/11's impact on America's economy and sense of resolve, talking about "the psychological shock of the attack," and how it cost the Americans an estimated "$140 billion" and led to 170,000 employees being "fired or liquidated" from airline companies. Here, he cherry-picked from reports of job losses and predictions of doom that were widespread in the Western media after 9/11 and claimed ownership of them, as if they were part of his plot.

Bin Laden's parasitical relationship with Western debate really came into its own from 2004 onwards. During this period he has sounded almost indistinguishable from various Bush-bashing blogs. In April 2004 he ranted about "big media," describing them as "agents of deception and exploitation." He said the war in Iraq "is making billions of dollars for the big corporations, whether it be those who manufacture weapons or reconstruction firms like Halliburton and its offshoot sister companies." Halliburton has, of course, become the bête noir of anti-war bloggers. Bin Laden also said, "It is all too clear, then, who benefits most from stirring up this war and bloodshed: the merchants of war who direct world policy from behind the scenes." This is also a popular idea in the blogosphere: that a wicked cabal led by Paul Wolfowitz and Dick Cheney (both of whom have big business links) is leading America to war. Indeed, in his latest statement bin Laden spells out who these "merchants of war" are, describing Iraq as "the ill-omened plan of the four—Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz." He has also adopted the "war for oil" argument of various anti-war bloggers, arguing that the "black gold blinded [Bush]."

Bin Laden frequently namedrops the anti-war blogosphere's favorite authors and activists. In October 2004 he advised the White House to read "Robert Fisk, who is a fellow [Westerner] and a co-religionist of yours, but one whom I consider unbiased." In the same statement bin Laden chastised Bush for leaving "50,000 of his citizens in the two towers" because he considered "a little girl's story about a goat and its butting [to be] more important than dealing with airplanes and their butting into skyscrapers."—a clear reference to Michael Moore's film Fahrenheit 9/11, which opens with footage of Bush reading My Pet Goat to a classroom of children on the morning of 9/11. Did bin Laden watch a pirate DVD of Fahrenheit 9/11, or did he read about it on the Web? And now he has recommended that Bush and Co. read Blum's Rogue State. Funny how this Islamist warrior never recommends that we read the Koran.

Who knows whether bin Laden has access to the Web? Who knows whether he reads blogs, or rather hears such arguments from supportive visitors from Pakistan or Afghanistan or Wherever-istan. But one thing is clear: His arguments sound remarkably familiar. Like bloggers he seems obsessed by media coverage of the Iraq war (and of himself) rather than by the substance of the war itself; and he certainly speaks in the shrill tones of some of the crankier left-wing bloggers. Bin Laden, it seems to me, is regurgitating the arguments of Western commentators and using them to justify his crimes. He is less the armed wing of a clear or coherent Islamist-imperialism or Islamo-fascism than he is the armed wing of the blogosphere, of the West's own fearful and tortured debates about war and terrorism today.

Uncritical Masses

info@reason.com (Brendan O'Neill) — Thu, 01 Jan 2004 00:00:00 EST