THERE WILL BE BLOOD

16/09/2009

A new AIDS awareness campaign is due to launch in Germany. Controversially it depicts various dictators having sex, pointing out that "AIDS is a Mass Murderer". Several issues must be raised in response to this: firstly, although it is supposed to equate the disease with mass murder, could it not slightly stigmatise those with AIDS, or at least implicate those with AIDS a little unfairly in genocide? Secondly, how do we know the film of Hitler "making love" (not war) will even be interpreted as intended? How will Nick Griffin and his supporters react? Will the European Right take the correct message away?

On a topic absolutely unrelated to the Hitler-sex-tape, Max Mosley settled his court case with a German publisher.

In another topic unrelated to fascism, it seems God has been playing tricks on planet earth again: planting fossils to confuse us about the 8000 year history of the world. Remains dating back 1.8 million years have been discovered in Georgia which imply the out-of-Africa theory happened earlier than expected. Professor David Lordkipanidze of the National Georgia Museum points out that these finds are probably the earliest discovered ancestors of Europeans, whereas previously they were thought to descend from the more sophisticated Homo habilis -a species already possessed of stone tools. Controversially, Lordkipanidze suggests that the new find implies the European ancestry of all modern man...

Fossils generally have been doing some interesting things this summer, or possibly more correctly: people have been doing some interesting things to fossils. In particular BP has been having a very busy time. At the end of June it won the contract to develop Iraq's largest oil field. Closer to BP's normal stomping (drilling) grounds, it has apparently made a major oil strike in the Gulf of Mexico (no photographs have surfaced to confirm whether whether Daniel Day-Lewis had anything to do with the find). And BP are not the only ones desperately trying to stave off the low-carbon-economy or ("lobonomy"); PetroChina has bought a $1.9 billion stake in two Canadian oil sands ventures. Greenpeace suggests the Candian oil sands are buried under an area roughly the size of Florida, and their use involves a fairly wholesale destruction of the locality. In addition, the exploitation of oil sands are estimated to be inordinately more polluting than normal oil exploitation. This surely gives the lie to both China's "greening" economy and Canada's assumed progressivism.

The American people have an interesting opportunity in all this environmentalism-cum-social change: they do, after all, own 61% of General Motors, 8% of Chrysler and the respective portions of all the factories and infrastructure these two Goliaths have. In the case of GM the State could have used their new purchase to do some amazing things: build trains, electric cars, wind turbines or any of the other things America desperately needs to break out of the sub-prime/sub-urban landscape. Instead Obama declared the State would be a hands off investor, and it is now looking to sell its stock. To add insult to injury, the Congressional Oversight Panel overseeing the car companies points out that the American people will probably lose around $20 billion in this venture. If Obama was the socialist the American Right wishes he were, he'd be doing much more interesting things than propping up business with huge wads of cash (then selling it for a loss) and trying to entice America towards a healthcare system Europe has already proven to be absolutely complimentary (foundational?) to capitalism.

So if fascism is implicated in AIDS, and capitalism is going through various spasms, what of the real (non-Obama) socialists? What have they been up to? According to the New York attorney Robert Morgenthau, Hugo Chavez is strengthening ties with Iran due to their shared "anti-American animus". Could a certain proximity bias blind American government apparatchiks with regards to socialists? Actually the problem lies not in the evidence of trade and investment between the countries (after all, $ billions flow between most countries of the world and Iran and Venezuala), but the "axis of evil" logic extrapolated therefrom. This is (hopefully) a classic case of correlation being mistaken for cause. Still, the warning is more for Chavez than the White House: many across the world are sympathetic to Chavez'z goals, but this sympathy would surely be stretched by over-familiarity with President Ahmedinijad. An enemy of your enemy is not necessarily a friend.

John Gullick