OCTOBER LETTER FROM LONDON 10TH OCTOBER 2012


I don’t know so much about the season of mists and mellow fruitfulness, at the moment it feels more like the season of slate grey skies and drizzly rain, though that may just be my current state of mind.

So much is happening, all of it depressing, that I feel I should write about, that I end up writing nothing. Indeed I have also now joined a writers group at the City Lit in Holborn and paradoxically this has also led to a lessening in my will to set pen to paper, or more accurately tap the QWERTY keyboard. I blame my self, on the first meeting I rather cavalierly boasted of my rate of productivity and of course since have dried up. Today I take into the group a rather experimental piece to read, though do so with a rather gloomy expectation of its reception.
I have just finished reading Wikileaks, Julian Assange’s War on Secrecy, David Leigh and Luke Harding.[1] I had already decided if it contained any new information on Assange that changed my opinion of him I was honour bound to report it here. I have to say it did not do so, if anything it demonstrated that he is even more of a Prima Dona and a misogynous shit than I previously thought. It would be churlish to deny that he has some courage and is unquestionably brilliant at IT; but whatever virtues contained therein are overshadowed by his betrayal of comrades[2] and his link up with the sinister anti-Semite and holocaust denier Israel Shamir. [3] As to his attitude to women I think the best summary of his conduct comes from one of the women who alledges assualt against him “….a man who has a warped attitude to women and a problem with taking ‘no’ for an answer.”
One of the quotes produced in the book comes from Assange’s lawyer Mark Stephens, who compares the Swedish prosecutor seeking his extradition to Sweden to face serious charges of rape and sexual assault with Stalin’s head of secret police, Lavrenty Beria! When people make this kind of stupid analogy I am filled with an overwhelming desire to box their ears and lock them in a library until they are fully apprised of reality, in Mr Stephens case perhaps a thorough grounding in the realities of Stalinist Russia.
Here it is the Political party conference season, once a forum for engagement with serious debate and policy making they are now just another branch of reality TV. Of course it was ever thus with the Conservatives, who love to wallow in this annual right wing foam bath, a Disneyland where criminals are still hung, the plebs know their place and everyone on the planet secretly admires Margaret Thatcher. This year the pathological liar Chris Grayling has been hailed as a sort of crime Tsar, as he sublimely holds forth the possibility of beating burglars to death with impunity.

But now the sun has risen, with the sky a surprising shade of blue, I must seize the day, onwards and upwards. I must then to my bath.

 

 


[1] Guardian Books 2011.
[2] Most recently in depriving those who put up cash, in some cases that they could ill afford, to guarantee he would not skip bail. He is not a man of much honour.
[3] Shamir is a self hated Jew, he is Wikileaks representative in Russia with an extraordinarily close relationship with the disgusting dictatorship in Belarus, see http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/andrewbrown/2010/dec/17/wikileaks-israel-shamir-russia-scandinavia
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