Thus has temporarily relocated to the heart and heat of the Arab world’s oldest medieval medina. I’ve been to Fez before, and I absolutely love this city, so I’m avoiding the clichéd tourist highlights; the tannery where they cure leather for bags and jackets with pigeon guano and human piss; the curly slippers; the New Age Frenchies. I’m staying in the eclectic, Thuslike Riad Damia with its vast vestibule and TWO 1940s stereograms on the edge of the oldest part of town, focused, as you’d expect, on the spiritual side. The Fez Sacred Music Festival, now in its 17th year,  started last night with a visit from royalty and a quarantaine of musicians recounting the miserable tale of Layla and Majnun – un amour fou et mystique. You can say that again.

The legend of the sloe-eyed Layla and bedouin shepherd poet, Mulawwah, who went mad (Majnun means bonkers) is a universal tale of true love thwarted by the barriers of class, cousinhood and family opposition, set in the 7th Century Arabia of the Umayyad era, only 69 years after the Hejira. It also has mystical connotations of a journey through the seven stages of emotions, desire, conquest, detachment, spiritual solitude, unity, perplexity and rebirth.

Are you with me so far?

Armand Amar composed this oratorio mundi to open the 17th Fez Festival, which has morphed from its Sufi music origins through ‘world music’ in general to become a largely Francophone celebration of the search for the spiritual through music. The 9th Century Bab Makina, a vast natural auditorium with magnificent acoustics, demands spectacle and that’s what we got. M. Amar’s fine talents as a film music composer were in evidence from the opening shimmering, evocative western and Arab strings followed by an extraordinary tympani high on the ramparts by a slip of a girl knocking seven mighty shades out of a colossal tambour. She could have gone ten rounds with Amir Khan and whupped his skinny arse. I was hooked from that moment on.

We were not in Kansas any more. The incredibly talented, beautiful Mongolian diva, Gombodorj Byambajargal, took us to the steppes with a number warbled in indescribably sweet, sour, edge of atonal, edge of space, soaring, fluting tones. Plus, she appeared to be wearing a chandelier. I’m now her newest fan, so much so that it is predicted that Ms Byambajargal may even enter the Thus Quality Hall of Fame. (Check out what has to be the strangest Tantric Tibetan/Mongol Buddhist girl group pop video you will ever see).

After a brilliant solo from what sounded like a didgeridoo – but almost certainly wasn’t – the first act concluded with an equally startling aria at the other end of the scale from Mongolian throat singing legend Enkjargal Dandarvaanchig (seen here in Jamiroquai hat playing a three stringed thingy and singing a few bars in). From the tone, I think he was Majnun’s dad, telling him in no uncertain terms to pull himself together, stop with the poetry, get a job and find a nice girl – preferably not a blood relative – with a huge dowry.  And keep a eye on the sheep. I was in the zone, as one with the plot. The subtitles helped, to be sure.

The next few acts ebbed and flowed like the Sirocco caressing the desert sands, blowing up the skirts of the Bedouin and making the camels skittish. The extensive VIP section of the crowd remained entranced as Persian, Hindi and Arab chanteurs and chanteuses sang their side of the story. The arrangements reminded me at times of House of the Flying Daggers (Thus title but a disappointing movie – you spend all your time waiting for the flying cutlery and when it comes it’s nothing like as cutting as you’d imagined). There were epic reminders of the Maurice Jarre score for Lawrence of Arabia and a tiny hint of the Fry’s Turkish Delight ads of my youth (slogan: ‘Full of Eastern Promise’) which for all I know were inspired by the tale of Layla and Majnun from the POV of confectionery. There was an excellent Turkish librettist: perhaps that’s what set that particular hare racing in my monkey mind.

The oud was oud of this world.

The seven stages of love’s passion, pain, calamity and general arsiness culminated in a glorious spiritual awakening achieved by submission to the will of, and oneness with, Allah, signified by prolonged joyful chanting from the entire cast, a bit like the end of The Sound of Music. Enlightened and uplifted, I made my way through the throng into the dark, narrow, winding streets of the mysterious medina, in completely the wrong direction, as usual.

The Fez Festival, and Fez itself, is a uniquely Thus Happening. File under ‘you had to be there.’ And make a note to do exactly that next year.

John J Kelly.

• PS. The title of this piece, in case you didn’t know, derives from Layla, by Derek and the Dominoes, aka Eric Clapton. This song of fou d’amour  concerns one guitar hero agonising about the ethics of taking the wife of an even bigger hero, his best friend, Beatle George Harrison. The coda, by Jim Gordon, is magnificent. Patti Boyd left George after five years of Eric’s attentions,  wasn’t entirely thrilled when he wrote the song, but confirms it alludes to the story of Layla, as told  in the 12th Century Persian poem by Nizami. So there you go. Who says Paddy’s thick?

50 years ago today, the first man in space, now commemorated with a plastic table lamp. The House of Thus also has some Gagarin pencils and keyrings, but we're not selling any of them because we like Yuri and always have. He was one of us.

50 years to the day after orbiting the earth for 89 minutes in a tiny capsule jettisoned from the mighty Vostok 2 rocket, Hero of the Soviet Union Yuri Alexeyevich Gagarin was awarded another gong. A plastic table lamp constructed in his honour has been inducted into ThusMagazine’s Quality Hall of Fame. The event, widely leaked on the Brick Lane Robot Shop’s secretive Facebook page, has thus far attracted no comment from Russian officials, nor has it featured on BBC Radio, seemingly obsessed with Gagarin chitter chatter on this momentous day. The award judges, long time Gagarin admirers, as opposed to Yuri-come-lately bandwagoners, have stated that both the timing and the bestowing of this honour are entirely coincidental.

Yuri Gagarin table lamp - another quality object from the House of Thus. Note the Vostok 1 scale model at its apex.

The Yuri Gagarin plastic table lamp has been chosen for its unique aesthetics, its ingenious use of a 240 volt AC/DC currency transformer to power a tiny flashlight bulb and the incomprehensible but mystical symbols surrounding its base. The lamp, imported by the Brick Lane Robot Shop from a source in the Ukraine, possibly survived Chernobyl and certainly survived Parcelforce, the brutal UK shipping company which subjected it to six weeks in orbit around various depots. The lamp, which glows in an unusual combination of red and green, often buzzes when left on for more than a few minutes, suggesting preparation for lift off. In short, the Gagarin lamp fulfills most if not all of the Thus Quality Hall of Fame criteria: it is what it is because it is Thus.

I first became interested in Yuri Gagarin as a young man when a Leeds traffic cop pulled me up for allegedly speeding on my motorbike, with the words: ‘Who the fxxx do you think you are? Yuri Gagarin?’ Wearing a helmet and sharing the same physical appearance as Yuri – short, stocky, clearly highly intelligent but wearing the tragic demeanour of somehow missing out on life after displaying early promise – I could see how the policeman might have been mistaken.

I have always empathised with the first man to see the earth from space but was never given another chance to check out the details he no doubt missed on the first, all-too-brief  recce. Some say it was because he put on too much weight on his constant round of victory tour banquets and couldn’t fit in the capsule a second time round. Others say the risk of his dying in space on a second trip was simply too great for a Soviet Deputy of immense public stature and PR value. I tend to believe the latter.

Yuri visited Manchester three months after his triumphant flight – and, like me, survived the experience. He came from a poor background in Siberia, was a modest family man to the end who liked his pint and was a great fan of tinny space hardware. Apart from Siberia, we are also alike in these respects. The enduring popularity of Yuri Gagarin, apart from his brilliant name, is that he was a man of the people: everyman and superman. His achievement lit the blue touch paper under the space race, which gave us non stick pans, pens which wrote upside down and Bowie’s Space Oddity, amongst other priceless cultural adjuncts. (Incidentally, while NASA spent millions developing upside down space biros, the Soviets simply used pencils).

Yuri Gagarin hologram keyring, another life-enhancing gem you missed because you were too lazy to visit the Brick Lane Robot Shop

In celebrating Yuri’s life and achievements, we should not forget that the youth of today take space and its oddities for granted. I recently gave away a priceless holographic Yuri Gagarin keyring to my robot shop neighbour, brilliant wedding photographer Nick White, in exchange for a hideous 1960s side table used for the Robot Shop Day of the Dead skeleton Christmas Tree pageant. ‘It’s great, mate, but who the xxxx is Yuri Gagarin?”He’s the inspiration behind the Yuri Gagarin Chernobyl table lamp. That’s who. Without him, there’d be no satellite TV,’ I replied, with a heavy heart. Nastrovye, you crazy diamond.

John J Kelly

I stayed in this roundy cottage in Portmerion and was given a whole lot of stuff to think about

Back from the Clough Ellis vision of Italianate Arcadia, setting for the surreal 1970s spy series, ‘The Prisoner,’ I struggled to synthesise what I heard, present it as a General Theory of Universal Knowledge, flog it to a New Age business publisher, save the planet, buy myself a converted trawler with a bikini bird crew and bother Japanese whalers (with the bikini bird crew pole dancing round the mizzen mast).

Frankly, I was plaiting sawdust until this morning, stuck at the general theory of universal knowledge bit, and not for the first time. The whole save the planet/get some cash/buy a trawler/bother the whalers with pole dancing sirens scheme looked as dead in the water as my chances of becoming foreign policy advisor after telling Shadow Foreign Secretary Douglas Alexander, another Portmerion guest, that the UN resembled a second rate, more corrupt, version of FIFA. Then I awoke to the epiphany that we are names, not numbers. Every life form on the planet  has a unique individual identity, dignity and purpose. Nature indiscriminately abhors entropy. Humans, the last, lunkheaded twirl of the evolutionary dice, persist in the deadly fallacy that they are above, not a part of, creation. Their high-handed, cack-handed interventions, based on mathematically impossible attempts to exclude uncertainty and randomness from the infinite possibilities afforded by an ever-expanding series of variable circumstances will, by nature, always generate unforeseen, counter-intuitive consequences. The more binary data we collect, the greater the hubristic illusion of control in a quantum universe. We are the deadly meddlers, psychopathic intellectual delinquents with yottabytes of information but no understanding of the tendency of exosystems to deliquesce. Or something along those lines.

Just then another thought hit, me like a great wave biffing a Japanese nuclear plant: ‘Jesus, it’s 8-30 already. I need to walk the whippet. I’ll park this stuff until I’ve seen what the others have written and knock something off tomorrow after I’ve bought a few robots and done Waitrose.’

Firing up my ecologically incorrect 1972 Beetle convertible, partly compensated by its unique interior rainforest microclimate of continual damp and lichens, I was soon yomping round Hampstead Heath, London’s last great wilderness, with no sighting of any other native species apart from George Michael and packs of exotic dogs and their walkers, dressed for the mild weather in North Face Arctic survival parkas. Coffee beaker in one hand, dogpoo bag in the other – careful which one you lift to your lips – I relegated the Mission to Explain to an internal rant about Arsenal’s inability to grasp the essential notion that the purpose of football was not to create the perfect balance sheet but to win the occasional trophy. I was considering whether a latter day Christopher Marlowe would have substituted the tale of Arsene Wenger’s Icarean 49 match unbeaten run followed by six years of no silverware for Tamburlaine the Great when I thought I saw a huge white airbag, bouncing at great speed across the manicured blasted wasteland. As everyone who wasted time in front of the TV in the 1970s instead of revising knows, whenever he tried to escape Portmerion, the Prisoner was engulfed then herded back by a giant chewing gum bubble. The genius of the series was the ambivalence as to whether the village, its inhabitants and the sheepdog bubble itself (called Rover) were real/partially real or whether we were observing the Prisoner’s dream state, induced by his captors to find out how much he knew. Was this why I had been transported to Portmerion?

This will happen if you can't remember what you learned at Portmerion

Hardly. I didn’t put my hand up once to ask a clever question, fearing the bubble would drag me out as soon as I brought tin robots or whippets into the Big Conversation but nobody noticed, much less dragged me off in an airbag. My engulfing bubble on the Heath was the dread of explaining to Julia that despite inviting me to the most stimulating and sometimes surreal weekend I have spent for a very long time, in the company of some of the most stellar minds in this or any other chiliocosm, my tendency for transference activity was once again getting the better of me. For example, revelations from Nassim Taleb that the best laid plans of mice and men always conform to SNAFU were merely reinforcing my resolve to arse around in life and achieve little. My new best friend Sylvia Earle’s plangent exposition of the wanton destruction of our oceans moved me almost to tears but didn’t stop me from discussing 1950s American nudist postcards and the vanishing folk art of ice cream vans when I sat next to the great lady at dinner.

I walked on the beach with Frieda Hughes, daughter of Ted and Sylvia Plath, two of my favourite poets, an original bard herself and a painter of profound physical and psychological depth, discussing big motorbikes (Frieda rides one, in mitigation). At breakfast with Human Rights diva Baroness Helena Kennedy I turned the conversation to Glasgow hardmen. I simply frolicked in the anarchic slipstream of my heroine, Miriam Margolyes. But I was one of the lads, to all intents and purposes. The genius of Portmerion is partly the geniuses but also the Thusness of the whole shebang. We’re all names, not numbers, individuals with collective responsibility to do the best we can. Julia’s genius is her understanding of the palette of personalities.

The overarching message, if there was one, was probably wasted on me, like the time I met the Dalai Lama and spent the few seconds in the presence of a Realised Being wondering if he was wearing a Casio or a Rolex. But if you get the chance, go to the Editorial Intelligence Names Not Numbers Symposium. For a taste of the Portmerion conversation, listen to The Forum on the BBC World Service. Make an effort to see Beeban Kidron’s documentary on the Devadasi. iPod the EI podcasts. Read anything by Frieda Hughes and Sylvia Earle’s ‘The World is Blue.’ Imagine Simon Schama having a bloody good knees up in the bar at 2 am then delivering a multidimensional summary of all the big ideas of the past 2500 years six hours later. Try to understand Nassim Taleb’s Black Swan then imagine he was sitting next to you on the bus, which, by the way, was one of those executive football team coaches with leather seats and a big round sofa at the back with loads of snacks and Sky TV  . . .  Jesus, is that the bubble again? Be seeing you.

John J Kelly

PS. Here’s a handy link to all the videos and podcasts from Portmerion

Sex on legs: Venus, a rare ladybot, with telltale tin boobies and paperclip earrings

If my previous post gave the impression that any fool with an unhealthy knowledge of vintage robots and space toys, brightly coloured tin, Mexican death symbolism, a penchant for loud, obscure, smoking rhythm and blues, religious kitsch and clockwork automata could become a retail czar, then I apologise. Robot shopkeeping is no sinecure.  I recall dark days when the only customers to cross the threshold were shoplifters, Belgians or the middle classes – more about them later. There were days when the rain fell relentlessly, the robots refused to walk, when my closing pitch to a shop full of robot fanatic oligarchs was nuked by a leery Red-Stripe- toting transient crashing into the pecking chicken display. Pay days were terminated by the dreaded collectors – loud bearded middle aged know-it-alls declaiming the value of their collection ‘vintage’ robots – ‘not like this cheap Chinese crap.’ In my darkest hour Tower Hamlets’ Trading Standards Thought Police threatened to close the shop down on the grounds that the robots were a potential danger to small children, despite labels declaring ‘for adult collectors only’ on each and every box: ‘doesn’t matter – they look bright and shiny. Kids might try and play with them’.

Balanced against this were strokes of retail genius such as the brief but spectacular run on luminous rosaries, sparked by a single purchase by an exotic beauty, later joined by her sinuous posse. The rosaries were used, allegedly, not to amass afterlife novena credits but as props for a naughty nun turn in the dark recessess of a steamy Shoreditch strip club (of which there are legion). The lapdancers returned to buy robots for unspecified purposes, always paying cash and often hanging around at closing time prior to the early shift. The fact that I was left with a gross of unsold re-orders and no further visits from religious pole dancers is heavenly retribution, I suppose. Anyway, enough already with the sex part.

Terror, leaving aside Belgians and the middle classes, took the form of a visit from a representative of the local Bhangla boys who swaggered into the shop and asked if the robots worked on petrol. I answered what I thought to be a reasonable technical enquiry by telling him that no, virtually all the robots were clockwork, apart from a few battery-powered Japanese examples. He looked nonplussed, flashed the Manson Lamps and muttered something about the possibility of petrol bombs. I told him with no hint of irony that we didn’t sell petrol bombs – for all I knew, he might have been another undercover Tower Hamlets trading standards gumshoe – but that I’d get back to him if our policies changed. Then the penny dropped and I advised him that however slim the pickings might be in the protection racket industry, shaking down the local robot shop was at best a tangential strategy and that he was on CCTV. He didn’t return: probably a nutter, almost certainly the most incompetent gangster ever to strut his stuff on Cheshire St.

Far more trying were middle class rubber-neckers, fresh from holidays in the souks of Marrakech or Istanbul, who thought it infra-dig to haggle over the price of a £2.50 jumping frog or a holographic bleeding heart of Jesus postcard which morphed into the Virgin Mary. Worse were the Belgians, who would not only attempt to barter but would justify their parsimony by asking ‘but what is the point of this object?’ Belgians, of all people, should recognise the logic of charging surreal prices for a pointless service.

So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past . . . selling religion to sinners and hopping frogs to Philistines, sidestepping petrol bombers, council jobsworths and Brussels on the street of dreams . . .

On the other hand, Jarvis Cocker has just bought a string of plastic skeletons and a tin heart pierced by an arrow for his bird for six quid. Life is sweet.

John J Kelly

The second, more potent reason for my unusual verbal continence is that my recession started earlier than most, forcing me to become a retail tycoon. For the last 18 months, amongst other things, I’ve been been selling tin toys, robots and Day of the Dead stuff in a shop near London’s raffish Brick Lane. For a while I was also living in the shop: no, not above, but actually inside, among the robots, Mexican skeletons and tin ducks on trikes. At night, suspended on a platform bed, inches from the ceiling, huddled under my John Lewis Egyptian cotton duck down duvet – got to keep up standards somehow – I listened as carousing Shoreditchers stabbed the shop window and drunkenly promised to buy each other ‘one o them fucking cool robots.’ I even heard people claiming that they had actually met ‘the robot bloke’ – my opening hours, dictated by fate and other expediencies, boasted a sign which said ‘often open at random.’

The Brick Lane Robot shop at night, guarded by a savage devil dog - alright, my whippet, William

Entombed in my fortress of solitude, besieged by revelling 2 am window shoppers, I mused on wiring up a robot, programmed to start marching and  beckoning while a loudspeaker intoned ‘buy me, then, you twat’  in a Dalek monotone (not dissimilar to the Shoreditch accent). I got as far as briefing my new friend Ben, a Fabricator – more about these Brave New jobs later – to work out the mechanics of such an automaton, which has precedents in the scary mannekin midget shoemakers (sometimes monkeys) occasionally seen eternally hammering soles in the windows of old-fashioned cobblers. But like many of my schemes, cost and effort got the better of me so I endured enforced insomnia sustained by only the imagined prospect of revenge. Plus, by day, these middle class sans culottes were my customers. And the customer is always right.

Brick Lane Robot shop, Christmas 2010

The shop started out under the name of Thus, but unsurprisingly, everybody knew it as the Robot Shop. As a shopkeeper, I became an Illuminatus of the Brick Lane pageant. Aloof from the paddling hoi poloi whose role was to wander aimlessly, gawping at less-than-worthless multicultural tat, gobbling Ethiopian vegan lemongrass burgers, served by Cambodians from trestle stalls, I was a baron, a seigneur, a bloke with a shopfront and stock. People were drawn like moths to the flame by my George Wallace ‘Stand up for President’ 1968 election campaign buttons, plastic prison rosaries designed to stop religious perps strangling themselves and others, elephants on Lambrettas balancing beach balls, Colin Powell GI Joe figures. The list was endless, and I haven’t even got to the robots – I probably will, later.

Like Microsoft, Apple and the Body Shop, the Robot Shop was an accidental empire. Thrown out of home, I rented the storefront premises from an eccentric friend who had bought cheap land in a desolate area of Sweden to pursue his dream of living in a 10 foot hut in the style of Hojoki. In true English middle class fashion, this required 25 acres and a large house, but was entirely consistent with living in a shop – but not trading – for the past 12 years starting at a time when the street vied for the title of London’s most dangerous – certainly most seedy – thoroughfare. (The opening shot of ‘Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels was filmed on Cheshire St). My retail odyssey began on my first lonely weekend at the shop, in the dog days of a hot August, when I lined up a few tin robots and a couple of Turkish Iznik plates in the shop window for decoration only and left the door open to dispel the stifling heat. I was affronted when a couple of scarecrows wandered in and started browsing my stuff. Two hours later I had sold the robots, some books and refused offers on my dog. I sourced more robots from the internet, put up shelves, bought a credit card machine, carrier bags, an open/closed sign and a till. The rest is history.

Actually, it will soon be history, for success breeds failure in enterprise Britain. Although the robot shop, like most of Cheshire St, traded to subsistence levels on the crumbs of the footfall from the Sunday Brick Lane market and echoed to the cries of midnight drunks returning from student shebeens the rest of the time, the landlord’s response to the recession has been to double the rent on my expiring lease. So London’ only robot shop will soon cease to trade and I will be obliged to think about doing something serious about my Micawberish situation.

I’ve been thinking of opening a branch in Bloomsbury, where I now live, and extending the franchise to include counter-cultural artefacts, bottle gardens, bonzai trees and coral reef aquariums. But it’s still at the planning stage. As a retail guru, I need to check out whether the 30 Minute Fancy Dress Hire premises which I have the option of acquiring failed because the idea was completely and ingloriously hatstand, the shop was painted fluorescent puke green with a strange golden throne as its centre piece and the owner and staff could not speak English.  The USP was possibly flawed: I guess that too few of the baffled tourist punters wished to wander in and around the British Museum dressed as March Hares, Beefeaters, Batman, gorillas, vicars, tarts or the Queen of Hearts, especially in the teeth of the worst British weather for 100 years, even if the security blokes had let them in. If I were New Labour, I’d employ consultants and focus groups to give me the answer. But since I’m not, I think I’ll go with my instincts. Expect robots in Bloomsbury some time soon, unless I get a better offer.

John J Kelly

The Free and Fair Elections Foundation of Afghanistan put 7000 monitors in the field and confirmed the BBC reports of widespread ballot box stuffing, fraud, bribery and corruption. Today a spokesman tantalisingly stated that it could hardly be deemed free and fair when ‘two candidates’ had extensively employed these tactics. Which two? Let’s hazard a wild guess. Hamid Karzai’s running mate is Muhammad Qasim Fahim, a Tajik warlord with less than democratic credentials, while his other Tajik ‘supporters’ include ex-General Abdul Rashid Dostum (Thus passim) and a crew of narco warlords, allegedly marshalled by his brother and ‘campaign manager’ Walid.  There are plenty of ‘suspects’ to be the ‘other’ overtly corrupt candidate, but since third place contender  Ashraf Ghani (Thus passim) is campaigning on the anti-corruption/anti warlord ticket, likewise fourth place Ramazan Bashardost, they are unlikely candidates. Theconfident demeanours of both Karzai and his leading challenger, Abdullah Abdullah (both declared themselves early victors) suggests  an inside track on the result. Now indeed, Abdullah himself is now saying that the polls were rigged. Another triumphant use of $250 million by the UN, I don’t think.

The election will probably go to a second round, since neither warlord will secure more than 50% of a turnout well below 50% of the population in the first place (free,fair?). Extreme factions of the Taliban did just enough tactical murdering and muttering to drastically reduce the turnout in the Pashtun South, but apathy did the rest. Many ethnic Pashtuns were sufficiently disillusioned with Karzai to sit on their hands rather than get them inky and liable to to chopped off – although the UN ‘incredible’ indelible ink turned out to be as wishy-washy as their election arrangements, thus allowing for multiple voting in areas outside the South where, for example, Abdullah’s faction held sway.

Despite avowals on the part of the two main challengers that they will encourage their supporters to refrain from violence during the runoff, it is entirely possible, and consistent with insurgency tactics, that the Taliban see this whole process as a bear trap which will expose the chimaera of democracy.  They will continue to apply sufficient pressure – a few spectaculars added to the regular intimidation outside the mosques, not dissimilar, in fact, to IRA tactics in Northern Ireland – to discredit the election process (not that they need to try too hard, given the provenance of the protagonists).

We need a hard, impartial look at the evidence of corruption, fraud, bribery, intimidation and the contacts and affilations of the ‘leading’ candidates. It’s ultimately up to the Afghani people as to whether they want these guys to govern them, but if we expect US, British and Canadian soldiers to continue to fight and die in the name of ‘democracy’ then we need to know what form it is taking.  The EU and UNAMA couldn’t monitor an episode of American Idol, never mind an election, so it’s no use asking for their opinion. But it’s pretty obvious that whatever this was, the election was neither free nor fair. Thus, no good will come of it. Mark my words.

John J Kelly

President Karzai failed to turn up for the ‘historic’ first live TV election debate last month, lauded as a sign of Afghanistan’s political maturity, leaving his two main challengers at the time, former foreign minister Abdullah Abdullah and Ashraf Ghani, former finance minister, to largely agree that corruption and extreme lack of governance were the root cause of the country’s problems, not to mention over 30 years of foreign occupation, civil war and insurgency. Yesterday, Karzai attended a TV debate, sponsored by Radio Free Europe. This time, leading contender Abdullah was a no-show, leaving Ghani and former planning minister and popular underdog Ramazan Bashardost to belabour the incumbent with allegations of corruption. Karzai repeated his claims that he had ‘saved Afghanistan’ and blamed its problems on the Taliban and the presence of occupying forces, while claiming that, once re-elected, he would convene ‘a grand council, or loyal jirga and other militant islamic groups, to try and negotiate a peace deal.’ (Washington Post).

Welcome back, General Dostum. Not much has changed since we sent you into exile for war crimes

His ace card is the ‘surprise’ return from exile in Turkey of ‘ex-warlord’ General Abdul Rashid Dostum. The former Soviet communist won 10 per cent of the 2004 vote, and leads the Uzbeck minority in the north, where much of Abdullah’s (Tajik) support emanates. In return for a position in the next Karzai administration, he has urged his followers to vote for Karzai and ‘avoid a runoff at all costs.’ His endorsement could neutralise the threat from Abdullah, whom some polls have given as much as a 25% share compared to Karzai’s 40%. (In passing, the ‘polls’ are about as reliable as the election process, in a country where the Taliban have threatened death to voters). The reappearance of Dostum, who changed sides several times in the tribal wars of the 1990s prior to the Taliban government, emphasises the danger and inherent instability of Karzai’s dependence on dark forces to ensure his victory. ‘Aleem Siddique, a U.N. spokesman in Kabul, said Afghanistan “needs more competent politicians and fewer warlords.” A U.S. official said Washington had made its concerns clear to the Afghan government, and Dostum’s reputation “raised questions of his culpability for massive human rights violations.” (Reuters).

As another Kabul car bomb killed 5, including two members of the United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan and rockets were allegedly fired at the presidential palace, NATO occupying forces and the UN have conceded that ‘more than 10%’ of polling stations will be unable to function because of the security threat. Ballot papers are on sale, in bulk, to the highest bidder, dangerous criminals have been released from gaol in return for their votes and just about the only thing all parties, Taliban included, are agreed upon is that they want the freedom of Afghan self-determination. A version of ‘democracy,’ imposed by occupying foreign military forces stands no logical chance of halting the cycle of violence, corruption and tribal and ethnic conflict. Yet only yesterday US President Obama repeated his pledge to increase the number of troops on the ground in a conflict which has now cost over 25% of the Iraq war, and stands even less chance of resolution by belligerent occupation.

The recent elections in Iran were clearly riddled with voting irregularities, fraud and intimidation, leading to street protests and several deaths. They were widely and rightly condemned by ‘The West’ as illegal and ‘undemocratic.’ Before a vote has been cast in Afghanistan, we have already seen more deaths, undeniable evidence of outrageous corruption and yet our politicians and the UN are craving the indulgence that ‘any election is better than no election.’ No it’s not. Afghanistan, Obama’s ‘War of Necessity‘ has already become his Vietnam. This horror show election should not be taking place on these flawed terms and allowing to be used as a vehicle to give Hamid Karzai a mandate to plunge the country further into klepocracy and anarchy is giving the Taliban and the Four Horsemen a mandate for a second term.

John J Kelly

Mandy is worried about wonky cross dressing.

Yesterday, unlike ‘Lord’ Mandelson, I saw George Osborne deliver his case for the Tories as the party of ‘Progressive Politics” at centre-left Demos think tank HQ. The hounhymns were confounded. Phil Collins – no, not the former drummer of progressive rock group Genesis but the former speechwriter for failed prog rock singer, Tony (Ugly Rumours) Blair – introduced Osborne’s speech as the latest attempt at Tory ‘wordgrab.’ He concluded by thanking Boy George and telling him that he’d be pleased to relay his advice on policy to the Labour war room. Later, on national TV news, a rattled ‘Lord’ Mandelson, snidely referring to Osborne as his ‘old friend,’ accused him of ‘political cross dressing’ and called the whole schtick a ‘sick joke.’ Today, the ever-loyal Guardian published Mandelson’s ‘withering’ response as its lead story, but not the Osborne speech, together with a shrill, biased commentary from a Guardianista (middle) class warrior called Allegra Stratton. Outside wonkworld, nobody cares much about who ‘owns’ the right to be called ‘progressive,’ so why was Mandy so outraged? Surely political stereotype identity theft can’t bother an unelected peer, returning to run the country after a subsidised holiday as a guest of the Rothschilds  - don’t worry, citizens, the Business Secretary didn’t talk business, he and his fellow guests apparently sat around talking about the ‘celebrities they knew.’ Besides, we all know that his week-long stay on the Russian oligarch’s yacht last year had absolutely nothing to do with Deripaska’s purchase, then dumping, of LDV Vans. He’s bigger than that, as his contempt for democratic process clearly demonstrates.

Mandelson would never resort to cross dressing for political or any other purpose. After all, he's Gordon's willy.

No, Mandy was pissed off because Boy George has had the temerity to come back from the dead. As the architect, with Blair, of the highly effective vote winning strategy of stealing the middle class centre from the Tories with pinkwashed versions of Thatcherite ideology, he has every reason to fear its use as a weapon of mass destruction against his own beleaguered, corrupt and morally bankrupt regime. It was doubly galling that the latest body blow was delivered by the whippersnapper to whom he gave a lesson in realpolitik in the Deripaska ‘Yachtgate’ incident (Thus passim) almost exactly a year ago. Many observers, including myself, saw Osborne as the weakest link in the Cameron front line. Yesterday he gave a credible account of himself and pulled off a tricky piece of wonky jiggerypokery with aplomb. Besides, the Tories are the stupid party. This was all too . . . .freaky, man . . . .

Demos, home of much of the New Labour “Third Way” malarky, deserves much of the credit for the New Tory legerdemain. Under its latest director, liberal Blairite Richard Reeves, it  launched the Progressive Conservatism Project in January this year. Osborne’s ‘Third Way’ proposes a ‘progressive’ review of the role of government in the funding and delivery of education, healthcare and other costly social services. He argued that the choice facing the next UK government, faced with public sector spending of between 56-60% of GDP and rising, lies with cutting services and/or dramatically improving efficiencies. Labour claim they will not cut public spending, and neither will they reform their statist intervention in just about everything. The Tory solution involves identifying large savings by further privatisations, this time of the education sector, and proposing that alternative private sector or  ’third sector’ social entrepreneurs will thus be able to maintain or improve existing standards, which have fallen under Labour despite huge financial outlay, at lower cost.

A third way love-in before Tony became a neocon hag and Bill discovered girls and cigars.

Osborne cited Bill Clinton, Jean Crétien and Paul Martin (Canadian Liberals) and Göran Persson (Sweden) as examples of left-leaning centrists whose reforms transformed public finance deficits, whilst (allegedly) improving the state provision of public services. He correctly pointed to the fact that Labour has tried (with mixed success) to introduce a mixed economy in the provision of state education through its Academy schools (favoured by Tory shadow education secretary, Michael Gove, also present yesterday). The New Tory wonks thus turned the tables on (Old) New Labour: if they criticise the part-privatisation/academy opt out choice in education, they stymie some of their own policy. Likewise if they object to private finance initiatives. Moreover, Clinton, Martin and the saintly Swedes were and are poster boys of liberal centrist Blairites. Were it not for Mandy’s pantomime hissiness, conspiracy theorists might conclude that the New Tories were natural inheritors of the Blair project and that they were in this thing together.

While it is hardly progressive for the Tories to advocate prising away the dead hand of the state and to advocate more privatisation, by Tory standards, it is progressive to do so under the banner of an ideological duty of care to society and preservation of the welfare state (in contrast to Thatcher’s ‘there is no such thing as society’). Osborne is right about one thing: under Labour, state spending has recklessly ballooned out of control. We hear nothing about Gordon Brown’s celebrated ‘golden mean,’ whereby balanced expenditure would deliver prosperity allied to economic progress. But it would be truly progressive to question whether privatisation has indeed delivered real benefits to the population at large, as opposed to getting large items of capital expenditure off the treasury balance sheets. Thatcher and Reagan, whom Osborne cited as true progressives at the end of his speech, left legacies of huge budget deficits and social carnage in the form of institutionalised unemployment. Whoever inherits the record deficit left by Brown and his crossdressing puppetmaster will not only inherit a mountain of unemployment, but will also exacerbate the problem by taking a scythe to the bloated public sector. During Persson’s reforms Swedish unemployment soared to 16%, for example.

All of which leaves Demos wonks with plenty of work to do over the next few months. Make sure they aren’t passing your ideas over the fence, though, boy George.

John J Kelly

Despite the glaring evidence that Afghanistan is a failed state whose conditions have significantly worsened under the Karzai regime, and his abysmal popularity ratings, apathy abroad may assure his victory. There is an undeniable imbalance in the reporting of the campaign. According to the Ghani campaigners: “While the international community considers the race for president to be wide open, even bringing top officials to meet individually with leading candidates, the international media relies on weak tools to support its conclusion that Hamid Karzai will win. This is the first election where an incumbent is being challenged an election in Afghanistan. “Statistical” data is weak. The voting “behavior” of Afghans is not parallel to other countries. Polling is notoriously difficult and unreliable. Yet still many in the media are taking Hamid Karzai and his bought-off “analysts” at their word that he is certain to win.”

There is genuine reason to fear that after over 30 years of occupation by foreign forces intent on imposing overweening ideologies – Soviet Totalitarianism and the tragically-tainted version of US Democracy – by military might, to the despair and radicalisation of the suffering population, Afghanistan is too far gone and that occupation worsens the situation. This view was eloquently argued by Rory Stewart, on a BBC Newsnight special last Monday. Stewart, a patrician Old Etonian, follows the time-honoured English patrician penchant of wearing flowing robes at every possible opportunity and mucking in with the natives. For this reason he has acquired the title “Lawrence of Belgravia.” He now lectures at Harvard, but lived in Kabul for several years and thus speaks from experience – something which I for one don’t possess. He argued earlier this year that the Afghan military surge ‘option’ would fail (as it failed in Iraq, unless the definition of success is cementing the position of the militias). The Russians, arguably masters of ‘surging’ – throwing vast amounts of troops and armament into hopeless situations with scant regard for civilians – lost in excess of 35,000 soldiers in Afghanistan by their own (understated) reckoning. Yet they trounced Georgia in a week, despite the US-appointed ‘strongman’ Saakashvili’s supporting cast of Israeli advisors and US arms and subdued Chechnya in a vicious attritional campaign (where they installed their own bonkers warlord strongman). I’m certainly not endorsing Russian aggression in Georgia, much less Chechnya – another failed state. My point is that the Russians aren’t dummies and they certainly fought dirtier than the Nato forces, yet they failed in Afghanistan. The current occupiers will fare no better.

‘Imposing’ democracy on Afghanistan through the military might of an occupying force can only make a bad situation worse. Ashraf Ghani is right to assert that supporting an endemically corrupt regime in the name of ‘democracy’ is criminally counter-productive. Until and unless the foundations of a civil society are put in place, democracy stands no chance. Neither do the supporting cast in the Afghan elections if the international media persists in reporting the election as if the choice of Leader is a side issue on a chessboard where warring rooks, knights and bishops play centre stage, the pawns are sacrificed and the king is a cypher. That’s OK as a representation of Medieval feudal statesmanship, but no model of democracy.

John J Kelly

I’m angry because nobody read my post last November and if they did, it didn’t change a thing (so what’s new). So is Sarah Brown, Gordon’s wife, as well she might be, living with a tripehead. But we’re both angry today because yet another miscarriage of justice is poised to be committed in the name of the ‘War on Terror.’ By John J Kelly

In November 2008, Thus helped draw attention to the long-running battle against the extradition of Gary McKinnon to the US. Today, the government will decide whether to hand him over to the US authorities on dubious, if not outright illegal grounds, or see justice done and tell the US to grow up. So far, in thrall to an extradition treaty covertly passed in 2004 by Tony Blair and signed by David Blunkett (who now admits it was a bad idea), the UK government and House of Lords have done nothing to protect a UK citizen’s rights. With the utmost respect for Mr McKinnon and his mother, who enlisted Sarah Brown, wife of Gordon, in her campaign amongst others, this case is bigger than the illegal and grossly disproportionate detention of an Asberger’s sufferer. If McKinnon’s extradition proceeds, no UK citizen is safe from the predatory ravings of publicity-seeking US neocon nutters. Blair is possibly a loony and certainly has much to answer for. McKinnon is an exopolitics nut who was looking for evidence of UFOs and anti-gravity machines when he stumbled into Pentagon computers (which were inadequately password-protected). One of the above was and is a power-crazed sociopath whose legacy should be extradition and trial before the International Criminal Court in the Hague. The other is a harmless guy with mental health issues who has already suffered enough.

McKinnon hacked in to US military sites looking for evidence of UFOs nearly 7 years ago. He never denied that his hacking was extensive, acknowledged its criminality, but vehemently denied that it was motivated by malice. The US authorities claim his antics caused widespread damage to their defence networks. McKinnon asserts that he was not even a professional hacker – if anything, he alerted the Strangeloves to the frightening inadequacies of their technology and thus deserves a congressional medal. He was arrested by the UK High Tech Crimes Unit in 2002, who told him he would get a community service sentence, but things took a bizarre turn for the worse when the US authorities demanded extradition and trial in the US, which could lead to up to 70 years in a Supermax prison. Incarceration will almost certainly exacerbate McKinnon’s Asperger’s Syndrome, which in his case manifests itself as an ‘honesty compulsion’ that will get him into terrible trouble with fellow inmates. (It also means that he will not plea bargain to reduce the sentence for something he is certain he didn’t do).

The chances of either a fair trial or leniency have been thrown into doubt by reports that US authorities have said they want to see him “fry”. It bodes ill for the much-touted lenient and caring US approach – has anyone seen any evidence thus far? – that the Obama regime have not intervened. Never mind Thus, when the ultra right wing Daily Mail is openly campaigning against the one-sided extradition law in general and the McKinnon case in particular, and the Prime Minister’s wife is onside, even an American should be able to work out that pursuing this vendetta will not win friends abroad. The US is happy to allow Britons to lose their lives fighting its stupid wars. They have no right to demand unilateral rendition of our citizens. Allow McKinnon to be tried here, where he committed his alleged crimes, or tell us to our faces that you don’t trust our legal system. Anything less is anal rape – another thing that Gary will need to watch out for in a US prison. ]]> http://thusmagazine.com/2009/07/stop-the-extradition-of-gary-mckinnon-to-the-us-its-undemocratic-heinous-downright-stupid-and-illegal/feed/ 0