The war on drugs – the bodies continue to pile up

Almost 40 years ago, on 28 January 1972, United States President Richard Nixon signed his war on drugs into law. Drugs are “public enemy number one”, said Nixon, and drug addiction had “assumed the dimensions of a national emergency”.

In the 40 intervening years, the US government has spent some £2.5 trillion attempting to destroy the illegal drugs trade at a horrendous human cost – both at home and abroad.

In Mexico 34,612 people have been killed since December 2006 when President Philip Calderon initiated the country’s war against the drug cartels. According to the BBC, the US/Mexico cross-border drugs trade is worth an estimated $13bn (£9bn) a year. A US state department report estimated that as much as 90% of all cocaine consumed in the US comes via Mexico.

Around the world a “clampdown” on drugs continues unabated - from Russia to the US to Columbia to Afghanistan. The same failed policies are being repeated time and again, flying in the face of all the evidence and leaving behind a trail of devastation and a pile of bodies.

In Britain, Professor David Nutt was sacked in 2009 as chief drugs advisor by Home Secretary Alan Johnson for scientifically challenging the hysterical culture of current drugs debate. In the US, the discourse around prohibition is equally mired in falsehood, with attitudes unlikely to change unless there is a spread of the violence that plagues Mexico across the border and into the US.

In June of this year, a report by the Global Commission on Drug Policy argued that the “global war on drugs has failed, with devastating consequences for individuals and societies around the world”. Previously a 2006 report by the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) noted that, “the total number of drug users in the world is now estimated at some 200 million people, equivalent to about 5 per cent of the global population age 15-64.” The report went on to say that “In…North America [and] Western Europe, abuse levels remained constant for opiates…In Europe…cocaine use continues to expand.”

Globally, the illegal drug trade supports a worldwide crime empire second only in value to oil. Yet while Latin America functions as a violent narcotics sweatshop for the nouveau riche of London and New York, more visible consequences of prohibition in Britain can be seen on the pallid faces trying to catch the eyes of shoppers on many of London’s most famous streets. Brushing them aside as they ask for spare change is easy enough of course, but you won’t get rid of them that easily. Nick Davies, in his excellent book Flat Earth News cites a confidential Downing Street report which was leaked to the press in 2005 claiming that black market drug users were responsible for 85% of shoplifting, between 70 and 80% of burglaries and 54% of robberies.

Many of Britain’s 300,000 heroin users suffer health problems such as septicaemia, hepatitis, ruptured veins and, occasionally, overdose. What much of the public discourse around drug addiction ignores, however, is that almost all of the harmful effects of heroin are caused not by the drug itself, but by toxic contaminants which are added by unregulated and unscrupulous street sellers. In the respected Merck health journal they are clear about the effect prohibition has on drug content and quality:

"Long-term effects of the opioids themselves are minimal; even decades of methadone use appear to be well tolerated physiologically, although some long-term opioid users experience chronic constipation, excessive sweating, peripheral edema, drowsiness, and decreased libido. However, many long-term users who inject opioids have adverse effects from contaminants (eg, talc) and adulterants (eg, non-prescription stimulant drugs); cardiac, pulmonary, and hepatic damage from infections such as HIV infection and hepatitis B or C, which are spread by needle sharing and nonsterile injection techniques."

Opponents of legalisation will evoke the possibility of increased drug use as a consequence of the legal availability of hard drugs. The likelihood of this happening, however, must be set against a backdrop of worsening drug conflict in the developing world and increasingly dangerous substances being peddled on British streets; not to mention the fact that drug-fuelled crime shows little sign of abating any time soon.

Legalisation is not necessarily the solution, but may be the least bad option. The other option, if you can call it that, is to let the bodies continue to pile up for another 40 years.

Can atheists believe in ghosts?

Last Sunday at around two o'clock in the morning, me and my girlfriend were watching television in my grandmother’s house when we decided we would go outside to smoke a cigarette. It was somewhat cold so we decided that we would go out to the car and smoke our cigarettes there.

In the car I drove about half a mile down the road to a car park just off the village church. The church itself (pictured above) is fairly small and dates back to the thirteenth century. On its grounds there is a graveyard of a little more than 40 square meters in size.

We got out of the car and stood around smoking our cigarettes when, looking over the wall of the car park and into the graveyard, I noticed a pale blue light glowing gently from behind one of the large gravestones at the back of the cemetery. I pointed this out to my girlfriend who then noticed the light herself. We assumed at first that it was some sort of graveyard light which was on the blink. There was no rhyme or reason to the flicker of the light - it would glow for a few seconds before fading away almost to nothing. Then the glow would reappear, the brighter it got the stronger the colour blue was within the light itself. It would continue glowing for a time before fading to nothing – sometimes going straight out, other times slowly fading away. It was coming from a spot about 25 meters away from where we where standing.

After what was probably several minutes the light went out and didn’t reappear. We didn’t stick around as we were both somewhat unnerved. We had also finished our cigarettes and it was turning into quite a cold night.

I visited the church and its burial ground this afternoon to try and get an idea as to what we might have seen. I thought it may have been a light on a tombstone; perhaps a lamp that was on its last legs, the resulting inconsistent glow being the bulb in its death throes.

Looking around, however, I saw nothing apart from headstones in varying degrees of ruin. I came to the conclusion that the light had been coming from behind a group of gravestones in the newer part of the cemetery where the graves are fairly recent – from the year 2000 onwards.

As I looked around the area where we had seen the light, however, there was no sign of anything that might have omitted a glowing blue light. (I would also add that these were normal, run of the mill cigarettes we were smoking).

As a proud sceptic when it comes to all things "supernatural", I'm completely baffled as to what we saw.

CUBA: A 'paradise of sexual tourism'*

***Disclaimer: If you've accidentally stumbled across this website in a grubby search for prostitutes, please do the decent thing and remove yourself from the computer, walk briskly to the bathroom, place the toaster in the bath and hop on in. Yes, I mean that. ***
 


There are no women forced to sell themselves to a man, to a foreigner, to a tourist. Those who do so do it on their own, voluntarily, and without any need for it. We can say that they are highly educated hookers and quite healthy, because we are the country with the lowest numbers of AIDS cases…Therefore, there is truly no prostitution healthier than Cuba’s”.

- Fidel Castro in a speech to the Cuban National Assembly, 1992.


Since the early years of the Cuban revolution, the government claimed as one of its shining achievements the elimination of prostitution. In reality of course, it lingered on; but through the provision of job opportunities and training for former prostitutes, the revolution did go a substantial way to eliminating the sex trade relative to its documented abundance during the pre-revolutionary era.

Spending time in Cuba in 2011, one cannot but be alarmed by the frequency one notices young Cubans, often no more than 14 or 15 years old, fraternising with European and Canadian tourists of a certain age. Disturbingly, this hustling or "jineterismo" of foreigners often camouflages a more basic sex-for-cash transaction.

Some of these "relationships" turn into longer-lasting affairs, going all the way from the bedroom to the Consultaria Juridica (the Cuban Registry Office). Back in Britain, a quick internet search is all it takes to find the sprawling Internet forums, filled with those who have had their hearts broken by Cuban spouses. A frequent poster on one of the largest sites, a Canadian based web-forum called Cuba Amor, described to me how he fell for a Cuban woman only to have his heart broken five years down the line. “What you have to understand is that when a Cuban gets involved with a foreigner he/she will first and foremost see it as an opportunity to leave Cuba and make life better for themselves and their family in Cuba…I have some great friends in Cuba, people who have never done me wrong, but even they will tell you the same”.



Tonight I am in Havana, and as I sip my weak Havana Club Mojito (Bacardi moved out long ago), I'm surrounded by budding Western sugar daddies, footing the bar-tab and dolling out spending money to their Cuban "girlfriends". The latter for their part appear to be dressed as caricatures of what they think capitalism might look like - all smutty disco garb and gold chains.

Many middle-aged western men, and increasingly women, are travelling to destinations such as Cuba in search of affordable liasons with exotic, dark-skinned young men and women. Jeannette Belliveau, author of the book Romance On The Road, says that since the 1990s, hundreds of thousands of western women have had affairs with much younger foreign men in places including Cuba, Jamaica and Gambia. "These are respectable women. Not all of them are unwitting victims to these sexual conmen", she says. "I have spoken to many women who fly to the Gambia or Jamaica specifically for the purpose of recreational sex".

In a play called Stuff, Latina artists Coco Fusco and Nao Bustamante dramatised the way in which first-world travellers have taken to viewing their third-world counterparts as exotic products there to be “consumed”. Cuba, so long discouraging of tourism, today actively welcomes those from the capitalist countries out of economic necessity; and the line between promotion of the country as a holiday destination and as a haven for sex tourists has become increasingly blurred. Cuban tourist materials in the 1990s would often picture scantily clad women fraternising with first-world tourists (a taste of what to expect should one visit, perhaps?);and author Michael Clancy, in his book, The Globalization of Sex Tourism and Cuba, remarked that the Cuban government's attitude towards the “consumers” of this “profession” was "to send a message to the global sex tourist community that Cuba was open for business”.

The Cuban Federation of Communist Women predictably tries to downplay the issue, arguing that “jineteras” - a term used to denote everything from flat-out prostitution to a “friendship” struck-up for material gain - engage in sex work simply out of materialistic impulse and a desire for luxury items, with no mention of Cuba’s economic failure playing it’s part.

The government’s response on the street has been to veer erratically between toleration and repression. Many young girls are stopped by the police when accompanied by a foreign tourist and asked to produce their identity cards; should the police discover that the girl in question has been stopped with another tourist at a different time, she will be arrested; the first arrest as a warning, subsequent arrests resulting in a possible prison sentence. This policy, however, is accompanied by one of toleration for those who solicit for prostitutes, reminiscent of the traditional harshness towards women involved in this type of interaction throughout the world.

Young Cubans are not the only victims in all of this. Nor is the dynamic simply one of westerners travelling to poorer countries in order to exploit the economic position of the locals. As David from Cuba Amor put it to me: “I’ve spent thousands of dollars on trips to Cuba, gifts for my ex-wife’s family and getting married. Since then I’ve been through hell. It’s hard to think you have this life, and then all of a sudden — was it a lie? You’re struggling because it wasn’t real. But I survived. It was hard, but it didn’t kill me”.

While Western holidayers continue flocking to Cuba, so stories of broken hearts and financial ruin go on dominating the internet forums at Cuba Amor, with several new posters joining every week. David has decided not to return to Cuba since his divorce in 2010, due in part to too many painful memories. “It’s just the casual deceit of it all. You understand why it can happen, because the people there are poor, but that doesn’t stop it hurting”.

Back in Havana, a newly-wed tourist/Cubana couple are entering the lobby of the Hotel National as I saunter into the bar for a pre-lunch drink. Despite the chaotic manner in which they make their entrance (the bride’s dress appears to snag on the revolving door on the way in), they look a picture of happiness. I managed to catch the groom and offer him my congratulations later that afternoon, as he came into the bar. He was a Canadian engineer, and met his wife, 25 years his junior, while she was working as a waitress in the resort of Varadero. “I’ve been very careful”, he told me, “but at the same time, I’m getting on for 50; I’ve got to take the risk. It’s now or never”.

It was at this point that I thought about warning my companion that love in Cuba is a game where the stakes are high and the house often wins, if you can forgive the dreadful metaphor. Instead though, I decided to slip back to the crowded bar and observe the happy couple from a distance. My flight was in four hours, and I was about to order another drink when I noticed a Cuban girl of around 18 or 19 making her way towards me. Better for everybody, I thought, if I saved the next one for the flight home.




*In 1995, Italian travel magazine Viaggiare awarded Cuba five stars for its “general erotic level”, calling it a “paradise of sexual tourism”.

The Daily Mail wants your stories - unless you're black.

While reading Nick Davies's Flat Earth News, which I have reviewed here, I came across several paragraphs about the Daily Mail which I found particularly interesting (and of course disgusting):

I spoke to a man who had worked for the Daily Mail for some years as a senior news reporter. He said: 'They phoned me early one morning and told me to drive about three hundred miles to cover a murder. It was a woman and her two children who'd been killed. I got an hour and a half into the journey, and the news desk called me on my mobile and said, "Come back." "I said, "Why's that?" They said, "They're black."'

I talked to another journalist who has spent many years working for the Mail. She said: 'I did a thing about an American couple who were living as crofters in Scotland...They were white, but the woman had got children from a former marriage, and they were mixed race, so that story was dropped by the features editor. It happens once or twice - you write a story and it doesn't go in because the people are black, then you realise.'

A district reporter told me he would call up from Manchester to tell the news desk a story, 'and they would always ask: "Are they our kind of people?" i.e. "Are they white, middle class?" 'Or more often it would be: "Are they of a dusky hue?" And if they were of a dusky hue, then they didn't want the story.'

The feature writer who had had the problem with the homeless person's vet told me she had heard a very senior, rather famous Mail journalist on the phone to the West Indies...She said he was having trouble booking a hotel room and resorted to addressing the receptionist as a slave, shouting down the phone: 'Who's your owner?' Yet another Mail reporter, a young man who worked there for a year, told me he had been amazed at the openness of the racism in the office: 'You'd often hear people using the word "nigger" or "nig-nog" - really shocking...There is definitely a racist environment.'

Book review: Flat Earth News by Nick Davies

Nick Davies’s last book, Dark Heart, offered a brilliant exposé of the impact of Thatcherism on the lives of working people and their communities across Britain. Researching the book, Davies spent time with those whose lives were ravaged by the 1980s privatisation drive; people who, for all the aspirational rhetoric of the Thatcher-era, were brutally pushed aside by the culture of “greed is good” and thrown on the scrapheap.

In his latest book, which was actually first published in 2008, Davies has taken on another cosy consensus – that of his own profession, journalism. Important and necessary in light of the on-going hacking scandal, Flat Earth News is scathing over the way changing media ownership patterns have led to the news-media becoming little more than a cash-cow for ruthless, free-market capitalists. The result of this change has, according to Davies, seen a once proud profession descend into banal ‘churnalism,' where the regurgitation of press releases supplants the search for real stories by dedicated and passionate reporters. As journalists attempt to turnover as much material as possible at minimal cost to their new bosses, the quality of their output is invariably suffering to the point where much of what we read is little more than Flat Earth news. In other words, it is a largely fictional account of reality.

From a critical perspective, Davies is somewhat apt to romanticise the journalistic profession of old. Rather than proposing genuinely democratic solutions, he harks back to an imaginary golden-era when the media was owned by those who were interested in little more than quality reporting in the name of the public interest. This is of course naive, not to mention ahistorical. The press barons of old may have been more concerned with the principles of good copy than today’s crop of capitalist proprietors, whose only interest is the bottom line, but as Hannen Swaffer, one of the early 20th-century pioneers of British tabloid journalism put it long-before the era of Murdoch and Co, ‘freedom of the press in Britain is the freedom to print such of the proprietor’s prejudices as the advertisers don’t object to.’ In other words, the capitalist press has long had other things in mind than straightforward truth telling, aristocratic or free-market proprietors notwithstanding.

It is a simplification, of course, to assume that media barons set the political agenda and journalists jump into line; and Davies correctly points this out. For a start, there are many journalists who would refuse to do such a thing, however handsomely they were paid to do so. What newspapers and television stations do very effectively, however, is reinforce orthodoxy organically through the reproduction of their own economic interests. Should the media accurately report voices of dissent, it may in theory cannibalize itself through a transformation in society’s economic structure. A genuine plurality of ideas is simply not in the economic interests of a heavily concentrated mass media. The subsequent narrowing of political debate to the ‘centre ground,’ with most other ideas portrayed not simply as illegitimate, but as disorderly and threatening, reflects economic trends that have become increasingly concentrated in the West over the past 30 years . The resulting ‘common sense’ assumptions of the media can be understood using a metaphor of a plant: the news may tell you when the first sprout breaks through the surface, but it does not tell you how the seed is germinating in the ground. It may tell you what somebody says is happening to the seed underground. It does not, however, serve to explain the germination process of the seed itself.

Davies does touch on the influence of ‘common sense’ assumptions in his critique of supposedly ‘impartial’ media outlets:

‘The great blockbuster myth of modern journalism is objectivity, the idea that a good newspaper or broadcaster simply collects and reproduces objective truth. It is a classic Flat Earth tale, widely believed and devoid of reality. It has never happened and never will happen because it cannot happen. Reality exists objectively, but any attempt to record the truth about it always and everywhere necessarily involves selection.’

The point here is that there is a difference between, say, Fox News and the BBC; but the idea that a ‘neutral’ media provides a completely unvarnished picture of the world is itself problematic.

While for socialists Davies’s book may seem relatively timid in proposing democratic solutions to the crisis of journalism, he nonetheless produces an enjoyable and enlightening read. The book is worth a look for anyone interested in a competent critique of the modern media, even if, at times, it makes you want to grab Davies by the shoulders and shake him out of his nostalgia for a bygone-era that never really existed.

Because slavery is sexy

Vogue Slave Earrings

'Jewellery has always flirted with circular shapes, especially for use in making earrings. The most classic models are the slave and creole styles in gold hoops.

If the name brings to the mind the decorative traditions of the women of colour who were brought to the southern Unites States during the slave trade, the latest interpretation is pure freedom. Colored stones, symbolic pendants and multiple spheres. And the evolution goes on.'

The Cult of Che Guevara

It's like he is alive and with us, like a friend. He is kind of like a Virgin Mary for us. We say, 'Che, help us with our work or with this planting,' and it always goes well.

- Manuel Cortez, a campesino who lives next to the schoolhouse where Ernesto Guevara was executed.

I am not Christ or a philanthropist, old lady, I am all the contrary of a Christ...I fight for the things I believe in, with all the weapons at my disposal and try to leave the other man dead so that I don’t get nailed to a cross or any other place.

- Ernesto “Che” Guevara

Each wrong idea we follow is a crime committed against future generations. Therefore we have to punish wrong ideas as we punish other crimes.

- Extract from the diary of N.S. Rubashov, on the fifth day of imprisonment, Arthur Koestler, Darkness at Noon (1940)


The face of Ernesto “Che” Guevara adorns student bedrooms the world over as a symbol of justice and non-conformity. The famous image, the Guerrillero Heroica, is supposed to represent the possibility of a better world, free from injustice, racism and poverty. At the end of a decade of forceful American imperialism, the handsome face of Che stands as a timeless reminder of a new, selfless human being; the man willing to fight and die for the cause.

In the post-Cold War age, the image of the man who, in another era, called for “one, two, many Vietnams”, has also become the acceptable face of subversion, co-opted by the mainstream to sell everything from vodka to zippo lighters. At times, the idealism wrapped up in the myth of Che can seem completely at odds with his posthumous persona - a lock of hair that was cut from Guevara’s head shortly before his execution in 1967 was recently sold at auction for $100,000.

Ernesto Guevara was born into a radical yet middle-class family in Rosario, Argentina on June 14, 1928. The word Che itself is a Guarani word that Argentinians use, which translates as “Hey, you”; but it was the Cubans who gave Ernesto his recognisable nickname. Today it is the island of Cuba where his image has been adopted most enthusiastically. Children are taught from an early age to “be like Che”; and rather than being a symbol of rebellion, the Christ-like photograph taken by Alberto Korda in 1960 is a symbol of authority, the establishment and the repression.

Che’s enduring legacy also feeds on the cult of defeat. This he shares with the memory of another 20th-century revolutionary, Leon Trotsky, although with none of Trotsky’s enduring contribution to revolutionary thought. In his introduction to a re-publication of Trotsky’s Terrorism and Communism, Slavoj Zizek contrasts the fortunes of Fidel Castro and Che Guevara - one, the ageing leader of a decaying bureaucracy whom history has left behind rather than absolved; the other, the eternally young and handsome revolutionary for whom a single country was never enough – with those of Stalin and Trotsky:

“Imagine if, in the middle of the 1920s, Trotsky had emigrated and renounced Soviet citizenship in order to instigate permanent revolution around the world, and then died soon afterwards – after his death, Stalin would have dutifully elevated him into a cult.”

After Stalin’s death, a copy of Terrorism and Communism was found among his private papers, full of handwritten notes, apparently signalling Stalin’s wholehearted approval. Anti-communists opportunistically jumped on this, of course, as final proof that Trotsky was the precursor of Stalin and the totalitarian dystopia he built. With the troublemaker Guevara lying dead in Bolivia, Castro dutifully elevated the cult of Che to new heights in an attempt to re-assert his own revolutionary authority.

Ernesto Guevara was 26 years-old when the US backed a coup to the overthrow Guatemalan president Jacabo Arbenz, whose government was attempting to implement a modest program of nationalisation in Washington’s backyard. A covert Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) program, codenamed “Operation Success”, was hatched to crush Guatemala’s brief flirtation with social democracy. Spearheaded by an ex-army colonel and furniture salesman named Castillo Armas, the paramilitary force was armed and trained in Nicaragua, and along with the CIA, planned to create a climate of tension inside Guatemala, weakening Arbenz’s resolve and provoking a coup d’etat.

Having travelled there with two friends, Gualo Garcia and Andro Herrero, Guevara wished to see at first-hand the fledgling Guatemalan revolution. However, witnessing the failure of the Arbenz regime to secure itself against US intervention, Guevara concluded that the only way to break free from the United States was through violent struggle. “The subject [of debate] was always the same,” wrote Hilda Gadea, Guevara’s future wife and a companion in Guatemala, “The only way, said Ernesto, was a violent revolution; the struggle had to be against Yankee imperialism and any other solutions…were betrayals.”

It was here that Guevara, in his own words, became a communist, or more specifically, a believer in the quasi-religious doctrine of Stalinism: “At which moment I left the path of reason and took on something akin to faith I can’t tell you even approximately because the path was very long and with a lot of backward steps.” Jorge Castañeda, in Compañero: The Life and Death of Che Guevara, describes how Che, writing to his aunt back in Argentina, had "sworn before a picture of our old, much lamented comrade Stalin that I will not rest until I see these capitalist octopuses annihilated," signing-off his letters as "Stalin II."

Soon after Guevara’s death, a large, stylised outline of his face with the phrase “Hasta la Victoria Siempre” (English): “Until Everlasting Victory Always” written underneath, was added to the front of the building of the Cuban Ministry of the Interior in Havana. As if marking the transition from defiant revolutionary to cult of personality, Che’s image was fitted to the ugly obelisk just as the current of Sovietisation was engulfing Cuban society. In the year after Che’s death, while non-conformity and rebellion were breaking out across Western Europe, Castro went on television to give a long-winded speech defending the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia. During the same year, the revolution summarily banned all small businesses, including the paladares, Havana’s bustling bars and restaurants.

Cuban poet Heberto Padilla, well known for his biting irony, captured the mood of the late 1960s in a piece called “Instructions for Joining a New Society:”

One: Be optimistic.
Two: Be well turned out, courteous, obedient.
(Must have made the grade in sports.)
And finally, walk
As every member does;
One step forward
and two or three back:
but always applauding, applauding.

The type of functionaries who prospered in the Cuba of the late 1960s, according to comrades from the Eastern bloc, reported for duty with the words: “Commandante en Jefe, ordene!” (Commander-in-chief, give us your orders!).

The myth of Che Guevara’s virtue set against the decline of the Cuban revolution, however, is false. The romanticism surrounding Che skirts over the unpalatable truths about the revolutionary’s life and conduct. Upon the victory of Fidel Castro’s 26 July movement and the overthrow of Fulgencia Batista, Che’s entourage took charge of the La Cabaña fortress in Havana. In the foreign press, Che was the feared “international communist;” and away from the limelight at La Cabaña Guevara was given the responsibility of dealing with the henchmen of the former regime. The walls of the fortress rang out most nights with the sound of the firing squads. According to the journalist and associate of Che, Luis Ortega, Guevara sent 1,897 men to their deaths in the early years of the Cuban revolution, and is widely reported to have pronounced at the time that "To send men to the firing squad, judicial proof is unnecessary. These procedures are an archaic bourgeois detail. This is a revolution! And a revolutionary must become a cold killing machine motivated by pure hate." Despite the number of summary executions presided over by Guevara, the most notorious incident of the time occurred in Santiago de Cuba at the hands of Raul Castro. Soon after occupying the city, Raul presided over the mass execution of 70 captured soldiers by “bulldozing a trench, standing the condemned men in front of it, and mowing them down with machine guns." (Anderson, 1997)

When it came to Guevara’s big idea, that of the “New Man,” he was among those who held the belief that gay Cubans be excluded. Viewing them as the “the scum of society,” Guevara founded the forced-labour camp system that held homosexuals, dissidents and later, in the ‘80s and ‘90s, those with Aids. As Castro himself chillingly put it several years later: “We would never come to believe that a homosexual could embody the conditions and requirements of conduct that would enable us to consider him a true revolutionary, a true communist militant. A deviation of that nature clashes with the concept we have of what a militant communist must be.”

In an article Guevara wrote during the Cuban Missile Crisis but published posthumously, he revealed his indignation at Nikita Khrushchev for his “treachery” in refusing to start a thermo-nuclear war over the presence of a military base: “What we affirm is that we must proceed along the path of liberation even if this costs millions of atomic victims.” Castro had also been prepared to avenge the destruction of his revolution with the end of the world. It was the veteran of the Second World War, Nikita Khrushchev, who recoiled in the face of Castro’s demands, writing: “In your telex message, you suggested that we should be the first to carry out a nuclear strike against the enemy’s country. Naturally you must realise what that would have led to. It would have been not just a strike but a prelude to a thermonuclear world war...”

In the aftermath of the crisis, Guevara played a leading role as Cuban anarchists and anarcho-syndicalists had their printing presses closed down and militants thrown in prison. Cuban Trotskyists, who had argued for freedom of expression and an alliance of all revolutionary, working class tendencies, were also persecuted, their printing press smashed and their newspapers driven underground. In a letter to Armando Hart, Che wrote later that "Trotsky, along with Khrushchev, belongs to the category of the great revisionists." Towards the end of his life, Trotsky had begun to move towards the proposition that the USSR was itself a new form of oppression, the bureaucracy usurping the Russian working-class and ruling in its place – in the process creating a new form of tyranny, neither capitalist nor socialist. Guevara’s disillusionment with the Soviet Union led him instead to embrace a more hardline stance – that of Maoism, which he interpreted as truer to the legacy of Stalin.

Considering all of this material is widely available, Che Guevara’s enduring popularity on the left appears both shallow and disturbing. Oscar Wilde said somewhere that a map of the world without a Utopia on it isn't worth looking at; and that perhaps explains Che's longevity to some extent. Undoubtedly his charisma and willingness to live out his idealism are part of the attraction; as is his death at a relatively young age – would an elderly Che working in one of Castro’s grim bureaucracies attract such uncritical devotion?

The fanaticism embodied by the man, however, is ultimately the same fanaticism that has, at other times and in other places, led to those who have sought to remould humanity burning large proportions of it. Despite his continued popularity in consumer culture, the left should really know better by now.

That need not mean, of course, that hope is lost entirely. Basil Davidson, a former British officer and a leftist who fought in the Second World War with the European resistance in the Balkans, once wrote that having seen what had happened in Europe under the Nazis, he no longer believed the old argument that you couldn’t change human nature. From what he had seen with his own eyes, you could change it for the worse quite easily. He concluded that if you could change it for the worse, why then, do we give up on the idea you can change it for the better?

The posibility remains, as it always has; but only if we drop the idea that millions need to perish in the process. Oh, and can we please leave Che Guevara in his grave.

The 'liberal' response to rioting

Few of the British commentariat predicted last week’s riots. Some even dismissed the prospect of unrest the very day Tottenham and Enfield kicked-off.

Politicians and journalists ceased paying attention to those living in Britain’s inner-cities some time ago. They were not “Middle England”, after all, nor did they possess even a single newspaper or television station to sing their tune – or to browbeat politicians who threatened their interests.

For several decades now an attempt has been made in Britain to pretend that a significant proportion of people do not really exist. When the existence of the so-called underclass has been acknowledged, it has served primarily to allow moralising authority figures to demand they “sort themselves out”. The only time they have been allowed on our television screens has been in the form of comedy sketches where uncouth mannerisms and clothes visibly purchased on a tight budget provided laughs for those with substantially thicker wallets.

For all the classless rhetoric espoused by politicians wishing to emphasise “aspiration” over solidarity – itself a form of exclusion in that cleaners and street-sweepers will always be with us, - the underclass in recent years has been firmly placed in the role of society’s invisible bogeyman, lurking in the shadows and ready, should we let our guard down, to jump out and turn “decent” society on its head.

In the aftermath of last week’s unrest, there has been a predictable clammer to explain the riots in terms of morality. Journalists have turned-up en-masse in poorer areas of London in an attempt to "understand” the unrest in the language of “good” and “bad” people, or comforting simplifications of right and wrong.

One thing which has provoked little comment, however, is the extent to which so-called liberals scampered behind the arms of the state when it all kicked-off, with 33% of Brits apparently ready to embrace what can only be described as proto-fascist authoritarianism in defence of their property rights.

Fascism is of course a term which should not be used lightly, and while I do not suppose the 33% who called for live ammunition to be used on rioters are adherents of all the doctrinal specifities of Il Duce, they are essentially calling for the mass murder of what in other circumstances could conceivably be political protesters.

In the same poll, three-quarters of those quizzed said troops should be called in, curfews were backed by 82 per cent, using tear gas got 78 per cent and Tasers 72 per cent.

Friends of mine who would normally describe themselves as liberals and social democrats were in many instances the most bloodthirsty, repeatedly Tweeting and updating Facebook with their own calls for the use of "any means necessary" to "restore the social order".

If taken at their word, this would have meant the use of any means necessary to disperse what in many instances were children.

The zoological obsession with calling subversives vermin’s names: rats, worms, cockroaches, also resurfaced. Many rioters did not warrant even that, however, and instead were simply referred to comfortingly as “scum”.

This week of course, things have calmed down somewhat, and the armchair generals have put away their toy soldiers and again left the execution of subversives to the Syrian and Libyan dictatorships. It has indeed become almost impossible to find anybody who was calling for the most extreme measures this time last week.

I don’t often quote Slavoj Zizek, although I think he makes a valid point when he says: “While democracy can more or less eliminate constituted violence, it still has to rely continuously on constitutive violence.” In other words, despite the self-questioning way in which liberal democracy likes to portray itself, even the most "free" citizens cannot put into question the very structures that legitimize and organize them.

We’ve seen what can happen when relatively small-scale, albeit terrifying, rioting breaks out in London and other major cities for several days. A much bigger question remains: what would the public reaction be in the face of social unrest on a much larger scale?

As Hari Kunzru points out in his excellent article:

“The smug sense of disconnection (this is nothing to do with me, or my comfortable middle-class life – it is an affair of the poor, in places I choose not to go) was soon replaced by panic. "WHERE IS THE ARMY?" Screw civil liberties, time to declare martial law. How easy it would be to install fascism in this creaky little country! No need to torch the Reichstag – all you'd have to do would be to burn a few more sports shops.”

The establishment thought they could go on laughing at the poor on Jeremy Kyle forever. It turns out they couldn't.

The political reaction to the riots has already begun, with Cameron flying back from his holidays amidst increasingly enthusiastic talk of the military being deployed on British streets. Last night the rioting spread out of London and erupted in Birmingham, Nottingham, and if reports are to be believed, Bradford. The reaction of the media and politicians thus far has been a demonstrable sense of not knowing how to react. As one Tweeter put it: “Simply repeating that the looting is ‘pure criminality’ is like telling us the sky's blue. We know that. Why are our youngsters pure criminals?”.

It is a thoroughly dispiriting sight to see large swathes of London engulfed in flames. Widespread looting is taking place and the police everywhere appear overwhelmed by the sheer numbers involved. To make a slightly fatuous comparison, it brings back memories of the school playground on those once-a-year occasions when a sort of mass disobedience erupted, the very psychological stability of the crowd disintegrating as events unfolded.

Jody McIntyre has been sacked from his position on the Independent for allegedly “inciting violence,” after a Tweet encouraging the rioters; calls are being made to shut down London’s mobile phone networks and target those using social networking sites to plan more unrest; and the Etonions leading the country have been forced to fly back from their European villas. I think I failed to mention that the stock market is in freefall, too.

The response of the establishment thus far has been to close ranks. Both Labour and the Conservatives are speaking in a unified voice in a desire to attach themselves to the groundswell of reaction that is surely on its way. Old Labourites who have accepted the “inevitability” of the free-market can be heard dismissing the grievances of the rioters as “not genuine,” rendering true the cliché that what was in the past "a response to injustice" is always in the present "totally unacceptable".

The reaction of most comfortably-off people has been to dismiss the violent scenes as the result of an over-indulged poor, giddy on benefits, feral and spoiling for violence. This impression of the underclass, if you wish to call it that, is acquired from television shows such as Jeremy Kyle and the reactionary press. In reality, most people rarely come in to contact with those languishing on Britain’s inner city estates.

One ex-police officer on television today remarked that the rioters appeared to be motivated by, not so much a cause, as sheer, naked greed. The “greed is good” mantra is about the only thing that has trickled down to the very bottom of society in recent years. As Sean Matgamma points out:

“The deprived young people...have come out on the streets to fight those they see as their enemy, the police, and to grab a little instant prosperity...They live in a society where great robbers and swindlers are admired whether or not they are legal, semi-legal or downright criminal. Where they enrich themselves without any regard for other people.”

It seems quite likely that within a few days the talk will move from reaction to offensive, spurred on, if I can say it without causing confusion, by the forces of reaction. The law-and-order brigade is already making itself visible in the guise of talking heads on the evening news. The rioting will give them the excuse to offer simplistic yet satisfying solutions to the more complex problems of widespread poverty and the resulting hopelessness. There are already reports of black people in London who are wearing new trainers being stopped and asked for receipts, with the threat of arrest hanging over their heads if they don’t provide them.

There is a lot of class hatred swilling around right now; and however unpleasant the looting and destruction of livelihoods is, the truth is that the hatred and spite directed for many years at the underclass is being reflected back at so-called civilised society in the crooked mirror of deprived estates up and down the country.

And therein lies the establishment’s mistake: They thought they could simply write-off the poor and laugh at them on Jeremy Kyle and Little Britain indefinitely. It turns out they couldn't.

Working class uprising or rampant consumerism?

Some on the Left are interpreting the riots in Tottenham and Enfield as a sort of awakening. After the student protests and anti-cuts marches, the underclass has entered the arena, bringing to the television screens of Middle England the realities of life in Britain’s inner cities they had up to now forgotten or ignored.

Indeed, until a few days ago, the only time those rioting would have made it onto television was as comedy material for the sketch writers of Little Britain or as fodder for patronising reality shows.

It is true of course that if governments refuse to distribute wealth it will be done using force. After all, the rich have been "looting" the country for years in the guise of clever accounting, only to be given knighthoods and lionised by the media in the process. When disenfranchised youth do the same, the mainstream predictably sound-off like a Telegraph editorial about “violent thugs” and “feral youth,” ignoring the underlying deprivation at the heart of the matter.

What seems to have passed some by, however, is that disenfranchised youth burning and looting sports gear has far more in common with the "greed is good” mantra than it does with the cooperative control of the means of production; and when the cameras are switched off, it is the lives of the poor which will be blighted by these riots, not the gated communities of Kensington and Chelsea.

What large-scale looting demonstrates is that it is the battle of ideas where the Left is playing catch-up in Britain’s poorest areas. While middle class universities are hotbeds of youth radicalism, for the poor it is often the language of neo-liberalism that motivates. Aspirational rhetoric sounds different on the council estates of Woolwich or Peckham, but it is widespread and accepted all the same. Popular hip-hop music promotes not solidarity, but a desire to escape “the ghetto” – often by any means necessary. “Get rich or die tryin” was how American rapper 50 cent put it; and while “Fiddy” is very much out of fashion these days, the narrative of getting rich at all costs is still conspicuous, to say the least.

If you live in one of the above mentioned areas, the only realistic way to achieve celebrity or get rich – what actually matters if you watch television or turn on the radio – is to “loot” in one way or another. If that means breaking into shops, burning houses or selling drugs then so be it. The difference between this and those who deny funds to services through tax evasion is that when young black men “loot” the BBC will call it "totally unacceptable"; in the case of the former it will be put down to an individual becoming "tax efficient".

What someone does in a business suit however does not become ok simply because it is repeated by a person wearing a tracksuit. Neither is to be celebrated; and unthinkingly doing so does little to help those living in Enfield and Tottenham who aren't rioting, such as the elderly, terrified and barricaded inside their homes. Forgetting such people is one of the luxuries of the academic left, who can at times cling on to trendy terms such as “uprising” and “revolt” in a desire to attach themselves to youth and their attractive and dangerous anger.

In this vein, the riots demonstrate not only the consequences of the rampant free market, but the retreat of the Left from the council estate to the ivory tower.

Death requires no advocates

Once described by a High Court judge as a man who "plays fast and loose" with the truth, Paul Staines has gained prominence in recent years writing under the pseudonym of Guido Fawkes, becoming in the process “one of the most feared and influential forces in British public life.”

Inspired by Kelvin Mackenzie’s Sun of the 1980s, his blog uses the moniker of his hero, “the only man to enter Parliament with honest intentions," and adopts tabloid news-values and a distinctly “anti-politics” tone.

A self-proclaimed admirer of the Tea Party and long-time associate of the Libertarian Alliance, Staines is a former member of the Committee for a Free Britain (CFB,) a shadowy 1980s right-wing organisation which was funded by Sir James Goldsmith, Rupert Murdoch and David Hart. CFB leaders spent the Thatcher years campaigning for the Poll Tax, inviting members of the Nicaraguan Contras to Britain and speaking against talks with Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, which they branded “appeasement”.

Nowadays portraying himself as a respectable libertarian, one would assume Staines harboured a wish to roll-back the state and strip-away much of its power. The libertarian or "classical liberal" perspective is, after all, that individual well-being, prosperity, and social harmony are fostered by "as much liberty as possible" and "as little government as necessary”.

In reality, however, Staines would like to see the state exercise the ultimate right – that of life and death - over its citizens. His latest campaign is to bring back hanging, which he claims a majority of British people support.

The last time a person was executed by the state in Britain was 1964. There were originally some 220 crimes punishable by death, most reflecting a desire to protect private property (although there were others of a more eccentric nature, such as a law against "being in the company of Gypsies for one month"). A working gallows remained at HMP Wandsworth until 1994, a macabre reminder of a bygone era, rolled out and tested every six months until 1992.

Retribution, however, is a big thing in tabloid Britain; and as Staines readily admits, he deliberately adopted tabloid values to increase the popularity of his blog.

When it comes to criminal justice, tabloid values also increasingly hold sway, browbeating politicians into letting the victim decide when dealing with lawbreakers. We are in a "feeling" epoch, after all, and those in a raw emotional state understandably emote the loudest.

Whether penal policy is best served by emotion or cold, hard logic is another matter entirely of course, and a debate which probably wouldn't sell nearly as much copy as the shrill demand to "get tough." Contemptuously dismissing public opinion is one thing; but automatically conferring moral status upon something for no other reason than popularity is quite another; and not simply frivolous, but demagogic and dangerous. Being a self-proclaimed libertarian, Staines should know this.

While writing little on capital punishment herself, libertarian icon Ayn Rand did publish a brief article by Nathaniel Branden in response to the question "What is the Objectivist stand on capital punishment?":

“If it were possible to by fully and irrevocably certain, beyond any possibility of error, that a man were guilty, then capital punishment for murder would be appropriate and just. But men are not infallible; juries make mistakes; that is the problem. There have been instances recorded where all the available evidence pointed overwhelmingly to a man's guilt, and the man was convicted, and then subsequently discovered to be innocent. It is the possibility of executing an innocent man that raises doubts about the legal advisability of capital punishment. It is preferable to sentence ten murderers to life imprisonment, rather than sentence one innocent man to death.”

A notorious case in this mould was that of Dereck Bentley, a British teenager who had what today would be described as severe learning difficulties. Bentley was executed on the 28 January, 1953.

During a botched robbery, Police Constable Sidney Miles was killed by Bentley’s friend, Christopher Craig. Due to the fact that he was only 16 at the time, Craig was detained at Her Majesty’s Pleasure (he was released in 1963). Bentley, however, was convicted and sentenced to death, not for shooting dead a policeman, but for being party to murder under the English law principle of “joint enterprise”. A psychiatrist at Bentley’s trial stated that Bentley was illiterate, of low intelligence and borderline retarded.

Notwithstanding the dubious nature of putting someone to death for being an “accomplice” (a term open to wide interpretation,) it came to light years later that there had been defects in the original trial process and Dereck Bentley was pardoned. Bentley’s joy was diminished however by the fact that it came 45 years after he had already been hanged.

Christopher Hitchens’s 1998 essay, Scenes from an Execution, noted how in the US politicians are apt to play politics with the “ultimate sanction” in execution-hungry states. It also drew attention to the large number of those on death row suffering from mental health problems:

“I can’t help recalling Rick Ray Rector, the man executed by Governor Clinton during the 1992 New Hampshire primary. So gravely impaired and lobotomized was he that, when they came to take him away, he explained that he was leaving a wedge of pecan pie ‘for later.’ Laid upon the gurney, he helped them find a vein for the IV because he thought they were doctors come at last to cure him...”

In spite of it being one of the few “advanced” countries to still employ the death penalty, the United States has by far-and-away the greatest number of murders of any comparable country. The South, which accounts for 80% of U.S. executions, also has the highest regional murder rate.

I don’t, in actual fact, think Staines really is a libertarian, or really sees himself as such. What he is is a very affective rabble-rouser in the mould of the very gutter journalism so recently discredited in its printed form. That being said, one need not be a libertarian to recognise that capital punishment really is big government at its worst.