The Pre-Raphaelites at Tate Britain

Photograph: Guy Bell for the Guardian

There's a new exhibit opening at the Tate in the UK featuring the pre Raphaelites which tries to place them, historically, as a Victorian avant-garde. Jonathan Jones has written an excellent essay in the Guardian reviewing the show. You've gotta love the opening paragraph:

Tate Britain's new Pre-Raphaelites exhibition is a steam-punk triumph, a raw and rollicking resurrection of the attitudes, ideas and passions of our engineering, imperialist, industrialist, capitalist and novel-writing ancestors. The pistons are pounding, the steam is hissing, cigars are being lit and secret lives once more being concealed. The Victorians are back in town. This is as much a costume drama as a show, jam-packed with heroes and villains and innocent victims, holding up a lurid mirror to the age that built Britain.

Hmm. Who To Believe...

The Guardian (and others) are reporting on a new report from Human Rights Watch, alleging:

Human Rights Watch (HRW) has accused the US government of covering up the extent of waterboarding at secret CIA prisons, alleging that Libyan opponents of Muammar Gaddafi were subjected to the torture before being handed over to the former dictator's security police.
The New York-based human rights group has cast "serious doubt" on Washington's claim that only three people, all members of al-Qaida, were waterboarded in American custody, claiming in a new report to have fresh evidence that the CIA used the technique to simulate drowning on Libyans snatched from countries in Africa and Asia.
The report, Delivered into Enemy Hands: US-Led Abuse and Rendition of Opponents to Gaddafi's Libya, also says that the CIA, Britain's MI6 and other western intelligence services were responsible for "delivering Gaddafi his enemies on a silver platter" by sending the captured men to Tripoli for further abuse after the American interrogations.

"only three people, all members of al-Qaida, were waterboarded in American custody" Now, two things spring to mind. First, the acknowledgement that three people were waterboarded opens up members of the Bush administration to charges of torture at the International Criminal Court. Now that it's been acknowledged, this should make arrest easier in any country other than the US.
Second, do I believe them that they only tortured three people? I certainly can't think of any other country that has restricted its use of torture so strictly. By the time you've begun torturing, you've pretty much abandoned "civilized" behaviour. So no, I don't believe them. Do I think that HRW might make a few mistakes, be mislead by others for their own political ends? Of course. Which is why I think members of the Bush administration should be standing trial. Courts may be imperfect, but they are the best venue we currently have for determining were the truth lies when we're faced with a Rashomon situation.

Agent Provocateur

No, not the lingerie company. Rather the infiltration of civic groups (typically radical or interested in progressive causes) by police or other security organizations in order to incite violent or illegal actions. Like Mark Kennedy, recently outed in Britain as having spent years undercover in the UK environmental movement. And now the Guardian is reporting on three major energy firms that have employed private security firms to carry out covert intelligence-gathering operations on environmental activists and groups.
Governments in the UK have viewed environmental protest as potentially violent terrorism since at least the rule of Margret Thatcher. Infiltration with agent provocateurs in the US environmental movement go back to the monkeywrenchers of the 80s and even earlier (Nixon's enemy list shows that paranoia has long been a feature of the ruling class south of the border). In Canada, RCMP agent provocateurs were responsible for much of the paranoia around the French-Canadian separatist movement in the 1970s.
George Monbiot reports that he could not find "a single proven instance of a planned attempt in the UK to harm people in the cause of defending the environment". This jibes with reports from the mid-1980s here in the Pacific Northwest when a tremendous panic was being whipped up against "tree spiking," where large nails, it was claimed, were being pounded into trees in order to damage mill machinery. Despite the hysteria whipped up by the local media and public pronouncements from various logging companies, only one incident of possible tree spiking was reported when, in 1987, California mill worker George Alexander was seriously injured when the bandsaw he was operating was shattered by either an old nail or a tree spike. One unproven case of possible spiking became the basis for tree spiking being declared a federal felony in the United States in 1988.
The agent provocateur is an excellent tactic for keeping track of a group while simultaneously discrediting it. Which, of course is why it's used. But there are some actions that such agents really cannot guard against. Like the new Greenpeace ad.

Who Said Things Were Crap?

Not the wealthy of the U.K., that's for sure. According to The Guardian, the wealthiest 1000 of them managed a 30% increase last year. To quote the article:

There may have been a recession, but the combined fortunes of the richest people in Britain still managed to rise by nearly 30% last year, the biggest increase for more than two decades, according to annual ratings published today.
The Sunday Times Rich List suggests that the combined wealth of Britain's 1,000 richest people rose by more than £77bn to £333.5bn, with the number of billionaires up from 43 to 53. That still leaves the list relatively poorer than at its peak in 2008, when the combined total was nearly £413bn and there were said to be 75 billionaires. But it still means that the richest 1,000 people are more than three times richer than when Labour came to power in 1997, when their combined wealth was less than £100bn.

Yeah, three hundred percent increase in combined wealth in 13 years. In Capitalism: A Love Story, Michael Moore points out that in the U.S. the top 1% now own more than the bottom 95%. Madness.