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If the above link takes you away from the page, it’s dorsetbookfair [at] riseup [dot] net
Philosophers including Gramsci, Marx, Orwell, Russell and Wittgenstein noted that language shapes thought. Authoritarians from Lenin onwards built their dictatorships on this principle.
Anarchist blogger and linguistic pedant Mal Content, author of runaway bestseller The Authority of the Boot-Maker, has noted that when people fail to communicate effectively they are apt to stab one another. His glossary of current usage explores the deliberate blurring of meaning driven by the media and political class, with a little help from A.I.
“He who knows, does not speak. He who speaks, does not know.”
– Lao Tzu.
“Lao Tzu didn’t know, or he wouldn’t have spoken.”
– Kenneth Roy Park.
I am, quite obviously, to anyone who meets me in person a cisgender man. I am also a gay man and I like to paint my nails. This is not controversial and men augmenting themselves with makeup has a long history from the farcical trends for pale skin amongst the French elite at Versailles in the late 18th Century to, perhaps more appropriately for this blog, the androgynous styles of the nightclub scene of the 1970s and 1980s both here and in the USA. It is also worth mentioning that the emo subculture of the early-mid 2000s that coincided with my adolescence was noted for men wearing heavy foundation, thick eyeliner (rather cringeworthily dubbed “guyliner”) and painting their nails black.
As well as being a gay, cisgender man with a penchant for painted nails and perfumes that often come from the women’s ranges I am a man with a neurological condition and now that I am approaching the end of my early 30s, my walking is not what it once was and I need a cane to walk most of the time at the moment. Of course, I use a stylish and elegant cane. I’m not going to let my neurological problems stop me from caring about my style!
This past Saturday, I had gone out into Glasgow to enjoy the first sunny Spring Saturday of the year and I wore a red jacket with red shoes and painted my nails to match. I had a fantastic day, I got my hair cut by my friend, I bumped into some friends I hadn’t seen for a while and I had a wee picnic in Kelvingrove Park and a walk around the Botanics before rounding out my day seeing a film. I then boarded a train home at 22:45, a time when there are plenty of people on the train going home after a day of drinking. I sat down at a table with three other seats which were quickly occupied by other passengers, two older men and a middle-aged woman. As I was ensuring my cane was out of the way for my fellow passengers to sit comfortably I knocked it and it fell on the woman’s toes, and she was visibly upset with this and I was incredibly apologetic.
She then started to sarcastically thank me for causing her pain to which I responded, “I apologised but there’s no need to be sarcastic with me.” This woman then began to lecture me about how I’d caused her pain and I responded that I was in pain every day. The woman then began to swear and shout at me about how I didn’t know pain because I’d never birthed children and when the men defended me we got accused of “mansplaining”, this altercation continued until I eventually told her to “fuck off” which, I believe, I was well within my rights to do so considering she swore at me first. She was utterly appalled that she’d been sworn at and when I responded that she’d sworn at me first she pretended to cry and went “diddums” at me. She continued to shout and be generally unpleasant and abusive and the group of women on the other side of the carriage defended me at this point too. I left my seat and flipped this woman the finger and did the wanker sign at her. I admit that this was not my finest hour but I was tired and this woman had behaved in an utterly repugnant way towards me. I should not have done the hand gestures. The “travel safe” team then got involved and stood between myself and this woman before I alighted the train. As I was about to get off the train, the woman went up to one of these “travel safe” guys and commented about the situation and he responded with something like “just leave it, the guy’s getting off in a minute” to which she loudly responded “you’re identifying THAT as a guy, really, you’re identifying THAT as a guy?”. She also tried to take my picture and a picture of the travel safe guys before we alighted. I went home annoyed and thought it was just another story of repugnant drunk behaviour (she stank of booze and horrible perfume) but I didn’t sleep very well after it and it’s bothered me more than I thought it had done.
I was talking to a group of people about this incident on the Sunday and one of these people is a trans woman who does legal advocacy work and she explained that it is a common transphobic tactic to default to the pain of childbirth to minimise someone they perceive as a trans woman’s womanhood. I was quite shocked by this because I was quite shocked that anyone would think I was a trans woman for having painted nails. It’s a sad and pathetic indictment of the moral panic we find ourselves in, I suppose.
I have also found myself reflecting on my position in the world and I have found myself empathising with trans women and butch lesbians on a deeper level. No wonder they are so exhausted if this the reality of their daily lives- I believe in a world without gods, governments and masters and bodily autonomy for all and that includes radicalised women who want to police gender based on strict, essentialist view of biological sex. The radicalisation of predominantly middle class and middle aged women by the gender critical cult is just as harmful for society as the radicalisation of young men and boys by the likes of Andrew Tate. We’ve had a Netflix documentary about the latter, when are we getting one about the former?
I now find myself in a position where I now question how safe I feel around women above the age of 45. I was sexually harassed by an older woman a few years ago at the outdoor pool in Gourock where she rubbed her breasts at me and tried to make a seductive face. At university, I worked in Primark and I was sexually harassed by women who would wave underwear they were purchasing in my face whilst asking me if I thought the underwear was sexy. As a child even, I had to endure sexualised language from women. I’m a softly spoken, gentle person and I wonder if it’s just because I’m perceived as an easy target. I don’t know whether I’ll come to any conclusions on that one.
The sex essentialism that infects the entire world currently is the natural outcome of a world where patriarchy is embedded into its foundations. Misogyny can be internalised, just like every other form of bigotry and it leads those who have internalised it to lash out at others who challenge their perceptions of what it means to be male or female in this world. This is mostly directed at the trans women and butch lesbians I talked about earlier but seemingly it’s now targeted at softly spoken gay men with red nails too. This experience has radicalised me further and I will do everything I can to dismantle sex essentialism and patriarchy and build a world without masters who police our gender expression.
– The Pink Panther.
Underground, 560 Christchurch Rd, Boscombe, Bournemouth BH1 4BH (Opposite the TARDIS) 3 p.m. to 2 a.m. £12 advance or cash on the door.
Featuring:
Running order to be announced.
We have assembled a crew who not only passionately believe in revolution, but are actively, individually and collectively working to bring it about.
Here’s a true English rebel song from the Luddite days, when our illustrious leaderless army tied up sixteen thousand troops for three years. Let’s make the Working Class great again!
On 25th November we celebrate Class Warrior John Hardy, killed in action on that day in 1830 near his home in Tisbury, Wiltshire. Four hundred quarrymen and labourers confronted the landowner and local M.P. John Bennett to demand two shillings per day. Bennett was knocked unconscious and his threshing machines broken.
The starving workers were attacked by the infamous Yeoman Cavalry, a petty bourgeois militia modelled on such as the Carolina slave patrols, French Gendarmerie and the Dublin Constabulary, the ancestors of modern law enforcement. Fighting with a crowbar and an axe, Hardy put up ferocious resistance, slaying two cavalrymen and unhorsing another, as he took aim with a captured musket he was shot dead.
Come and see Spanner with other rebel musicians at the Boscombe Underground on 17th January, a benefit for Dorset Radical Bookfair.
We’re having a stall, come and see us!
Swansea Radical Community Festival
Calling all activists, accomplices and the curious to Swansea’s Radical Community Festival!
The 2022 and 2023 events were joyful celebrations of the diversity of views and tactics that are used to challenge all forms of oppression, exploitation and authoritarianism. We had a range of workshops on the Welsh-language campaigning, Palestine solidarity, community organising and environmental direct action.
We invite you to another day of conversations, workshops, ideas and sharing materials and resources. Gŵyl y Gwrthsafiad will be held at Elysium on the 22nd of November, 2025. Come make this space!
Saturday 22nd November 11am – 5pm
Afterparty 7pm – Late
Just over two years ago I wrote this: Events in Israel-Palestine, October 2023
“By pushing Israeli casualties into four figures, Hamas have made it impossible for the IDF to maintain its customary sixty-to-one kill ratio without committing an act of inarguable genocide.”
Like most healthy observers, I watched with horror and growing incredulity as they did just that. At least a hundred thousand civilians have perished in Gaza, the West Bank and neighbouring territories struck by Israeli munitions. Sixty for each Israeli life lost, of whom sixty percent must be children, a little higher than could be accounted for by random collateral damage. The IDF are claiming a third of them were combatants, but I’m sure if Hamas ever had that many, the state of Israel would be a distant memory by now.
The charge of genocide has been laid, but not taken up by the major neo-colonial powers. Whole families have been wiped out, their names lost forever. Amid the carnage it has often gone unnoticed that the state of Israel not only targets schools and hospitals but archaeological sites and buildings containing collections of antiquities. Their intent is not only to annihilate Palestinians but to erase their history and culture, which goes back over 3000 years. They always use the same crappy excuse and no-one believes a word of it, you can describe anything lobbed over the fence as aimed at terrorists. The Turkish state did much the same thing in Kurdistan. Western discourse has become accustomed to ethnic cleansing; it happened in Rwanda, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Xinjiang and Myanmar, and is still going on in Yemen and Sudan. We all know it when we see it.
The received wisdom is that it is simply antisemitic to suggest that a Palestinian life is equivalent to an Israeli one. Israel has the right to defend itself, but against what? The inhabitants of a territory it overran in 1967, that had fled to Egypt in 1948. The six-day war, which destroyed the air forces of Egypt and Syria and cost around twenty-thousand lives, established Israel as the dominant player in conventional warfare of the Middle East, leaving only guerrilla tactics to its Arab neighbours and over a million displaced people who found themselves de-facto hostages in the occupied territories.
It would be antisemitic to talk about numbers. The most serious attack on Jewish people since the Nazi Holocaust killed significantly fewer humans than the IDF’s last major incursion into Gaza, “operation cast lead” in 2014. More perished in the bogus humanitarian aid distros than on 7th October 2023. There are precedents for waging total war on a lightly armed civil insurrection. The British state did it in Kenya, with carpet-bombing, mass displacement, concentration camps and torture. Russia did it in Chechnya, which at least was within its recognised borders, against Islamists, so no one bothered about it that much.
As I type, a ceasefire is in effect, alongside a hostage exchange between the Israeli government and Hamas, brokered by the onomatopoeic flatulence in the White House with other regional interests. He acheived this by engaging Netanyahu in a megalomania-off. Of the two demagogues, Trump believes his own bullshit, but Netanyahu? He’s not even a convincing liar. With the eloquence of a primary-school bully he will have reminded the self-appointed leader of the Jews who is keeping his little racket going, and why, something no other US president ever had the bad taste to do.
The IDF’s boss was then ritually humiliated by being made to read out a dictated apology to the Qatari royal family, with the president on the other line to make sure he didn’t miss anything out. President Guff’s relentless self-aggrandisement is presently accompanied by a chorus of sycophancy inflating his ego to the point where it may well explode and blow his syrup off. He mistakenly thinks he can nominate himself for a Nobel Peace Prize – these days as relevant as a Jim’ll Fix it badge – like Napoleon putting the crown on his own head. He was too late this time and those philistines of the Nobel committee wouldn’t change the rules to accommodate his exceptionality so they kicked the can down the road by giving it to one of his mates.
Will it last? Of course not; the IDF interprets ceasefire as only shooting half a dozen civilians per day as opposed to hundreds, Hamas interprets it as only shooting its political rivals. The great orange arse-bugle hopes to oversee the reconstruction of Gaza, assisted by the region’s dictators and kings, and mendacious war-criminal Tony Blair, who has been responsible for more civilian deaths than Netanyahu, Trump, and Hamas put together.
As in Iraq, no-one is going to lift a finger unless they see a profit, and no one will represent the people of Gaza. Hamas may be defeated militarily, but the views they hold are still current. The demand for Palestinian independence will not go away and has been repeatedly endorsed by the international community. So long as the Israeli state refuses, they will be enemies. Remember when PIRA turned their arms over to that Canadian geezer and he poured concrete on them? They retained enough firepower to shut down the self-styled Real IRA after the Omagh bombing. A terrorist action closely overlooked by the security services of two countries, which saved the Good Friday Agreement. History shows that any movement with wide popular support can quickly establish a military force.
The “peace deal” is predicated on two independent states but neither belligerent supports them. Hamas would like Jews to live in a majority Islamic Palestinian state, alongside returning refugees, whereas the Netanyahu government do not accept Palestinian statehood at all, or their right to return. So this is going nowhere. If Hamas must be excluded from the politics of the region then so must the Israeli Likud and their ilk, for precisely the same reasons – times sixty. On the one hand a movement that fetishises martyrdom, on the other, one that values the rotting corpses of its citizens over the lives of starving children. Necrophilia is no basis for peace.
Liberal democracies have a love-hate relationship with terrorism; arguably they could not function without it. It gives them an excuse to break their own rules, and may frighten their subjects into accepting extraordinary repression providing they manage to contain it. If they are seen to fail, a change of leadership usually follows.
As part of the cold war Western alliance, the state of Israel will have been informed by the counter-insurgency theory and practice of its allies, much of it inherited from the Bolsheviks and the Third Reich: Kitson’s manuals, Cointelpro and so forth. The relationship between Israel and apartheid South Africa is well documented. Kitson believed any political outcome could be sustained as long as the government controlled the propaganda narrative and crucially, that this was the task of the army.
In counter-terrorist operations, nothing is out of bounds, and that includes pitting one terrorist outfit against another. Those who have studied the Irish conflict are familiar with collusion, and the practice of assassinating non-combatants peripheral to the conflict, to exacerbate community tensions.
I have unanswered questions: we know the IDF chose to ignore their own reports of military build-up across the border. Their low-ranking spotters were told to shut up about it and even threatened with disciplinary action. This was reported by many mainstream media outlets. The choice of targets was odd; kibbutzim in Southern Israel were mostly sympathetic to Palestine, unlike the fanatical West bank settlers. A music festival with mostly young people, not Netanyahu’s constituency either. Lastly, why film your own war crimes? I don’t doubt that Hamas were behind the action, with support from Palestine Islamic Jihad, but there may have been collusion through agents provocateurs, there are other armed groups in Gaza, some are controlled by the IDF, others are just in it for the money.
The last two years have done Netanyahu no harm at all, he couldn’t get any more unpopular. By frequent changes of direction, double-dealing, playing his fellow politicians against each other and prolonging the conflict he has swerved jail for corruption, bribery and fraud. The outcome of the 21st Century Holocaust is the celebration of two pantomime villains in their second childhoods, two constipated* old men blowing toxic smoke out of their arses.
* Diagnosis based entirely on their facial expressions, I’m not a doctor.
Aotearoa Workers Solidarity Movement
The world is entering an era where identity is no longer a matter of personal relationships, lived experience, or even paperwork. Increasingly, it is reduced to biometric scans, algorithmic verification, and digital tokens. Across the globe, governments and corporations are rolling out digital identification systems, facial recognition passports, biometric driver’s licences, app-based vaccine passes, QR-coded welfare access, and unified digital wallets. The language that accompanies these projects is familiar – efficiency, convenience, modernisation, inclusion. We are told that digital ID will make life easier, reduce fraud, and open new opportunities.
The reality, however, is far more sinister. Identification has never been neutral,
The deadliest terrorist attacks of 20th Century were perpetrated by the OAS in Algeria during 1961-1962; a wave of bombings and assassinations which took over 2000 lives. During March 1962 an average of 120 bombs per day were detonated. One car bomb in May killed 62 people. This death toll was only surpassed by the attacks on New York in 2001.
On 17 October 1961, police opened fire on a peaceful demonstration of Algerians in Paris killing several hundred, and threw their bodies into the River Seine. French press did not report the incident under government censorship, and Parisians never speak of it, despite the fact that all witnessed the bloated corpses floating past their windows. A total of 110 bodies washed up over the following days and weeks. The youngest victim was Fatima Beda aged 15, her body was found on 31 October in a canal near the Seine.
The Organisation armée secrete was formed in fascist Spain by a cabal of far-right former French army officers dedicated to retaining France’s colonial possessions. Their terrorist campaign was intended to break the ceasefire between the Algerian National Liberation Front (FLN) and the colonial administration after French voters overwhelmingly approved a motion for self-determination following a bloody war of independence. The French military employed many tactics pioneered by Nazi Germany including the “block warden” surveillance system, concentration camps and electrocution of suspects.
Although the OAS collapsed in 1963 after taking on the French government it left its mark on the European right shifting it from simple nationalism to “Westernism” a more original form of white supremacy characterised by anticommunism, Islamophobia and colonialism which recognised the U.S. and by proxy, Israel as bulwarks against the Third World.
OAS members theorised counter-insurgency tactics including systematic use of internment, torture, and throwing suspects out of aeroplanes. They contributed several manuals on counter-insurgency and gave lectures for military personnel. They sit alongside Frank Kitson’s work for the British and the FBI’s Cointel Programme. They have worked with Israeli secret services.
Wessex Solidarity