Genoa's over. Some of my friends might wonder why I have spent so much time on the jockeying of the Tories in these posts. One reason is because - I wonder if I've said this before? - the remaining left in the Anglo world (the US and the UK) has almost completely died out. Being a leftist in Britain, now, is like being a monarchist in Paris in 1840. It gives you a unique point of view (witness Balzac), but it is a point of view sharpened by the impossibility of the political success of one's views. In the UK, right now, there is only one real ideology - Thatcherism. As Hegel once said, or perhaps didn't, the first time around in history is tragedy, the second time is farce. Tony Blair is the farcical Thatcher - Thatcherism absorbed in a cup of cocoa to make it go down better. But it is still a rabid ideology. Here's what Mr. Blair said about the police in Genoa:

'To criticise the Italian police and the Italian authorities for working to make sure the security of the summit is right is, to me, to turn the world upside down,' Blair said yesterday.

'Of course, it is a tragedy that someone has lost their life. But it's very difficult for the police when they are faced with people throwing petrol bombs and using extreme forms of violence.'

The only thing the police can do, in the face of such violence, is, I suppose, go raid the hq of the non-violent organizers of the protests. And, while they are about it, club some heads. Even Mayor Daley was more sensitive to the situation, in 68.
And this is the man who is the head of the so-called Labor party.
It has fallen to the socialist parties in Europe to play the undertaker for socialism. This has been their role since the Mitterand days - it didn't start with Tony Blair. It is just coming to its comic and shameful end with him, as he privatizes the rest of the transport system and cracks down on civil rights. Of course, anybody with any sense can predict that the transport system will eventually have to be re-nationalized, or junked altogether in favor of the American system - which is to have no system. When that time comes, don't be surprised if it is a conservative government that does the nationalizing - just as it might well be conservative Republicans from the West Coast that bring a halt to privatizing power.

But enough of that. Yesterday I read Sven Lindqvist's History of Bombing. I read it because I am writing a review of Body of Secrets and Suspect Identities for the Austin Chronicle, and I am researching. Also, I read it because I'm procrastinating writing up this profile article I have to finish pretty soon. The important thing is, I read it, and found it, in a grisly way, quite fascinating. I went to two reviews of it, one in the Financial Times, and both of them said essentially the same thing: the problem with the book was that it made our boming morally equivalent to their bombing.
Which comes down to saying this: it isn't as bad to burn the flesh off of a four year old German girl, or to boil out her eyes, or to crush her ribs and skull, or to let her die in a burning building, as it is to burn the flesh off an English or American girl. It's odd - Lindqvist is attacked for moral relativism, for not distinguishing between one side and the other, when the moral relativists are actually those who can distinguish one use of a petrol bomb from another, one slaugher of civilians from another.
Ah, but there is more to say about this book. Maybe I'll get to it in another post.
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