Serving four months in a military prison for refusing to fight in Afghanistan is "a badge of honour", the former British army lance corporal Joe Glenton said in his first public appearance since being released from prison.




The peace soldier, said: "It’s been a year since I spoke - it’s amazing to be back this year has been the most challenging of my life having served a prison sentence. I would serve the sentence again. In the present climate, I consider it badge of honour to serve a prison sentence.

"I...

‘At times, he claimed he himself had leaked the material, suggesting that he had taken in blank CDs, labelled as Lady Gaga’s music, slotted them into his high-security laptop and lip-synched to nonexistent music to cover his downloading: "I want people to see the truth," he said.’ From the Guardian report on the Wikileaks Afghanistan story. Furthermore, Iceland’s role in permitting the free-flow of information through their deliciously lunar landscape makes them once more my favourite country in the...

Interview: Chris Nineham
Edit: Ady Cousins

Also see HERE.

Share

Buried inside Policing in the 21st Century: Reconnecting Police and the People, the Home Office consultation on planned cuts, is the following:

3.13 By the end of this year, we will scrap the national requirement for the ‘stop’ form in its entirety and reduce dramatically the burden of the stop and search procedures. We will also maximise the use of available technology to further reduce the paperwork in policing so that, for example, an officer will only need to record manually three pieces of...

The Sauce is taking a week’s holiday and normal service will resume on Wednesday, August 5 but in the mean time please do vote for Counterfire in the Total Politics blog poll by emailing your top ten blogs (or top five if you only read a few) across to the magazine.

Interesting to see that Will Hutton regards the BBC as a paternalist safeguard against ‘mob rule’, or rather against "populist government by the mob". He really takes seriously the idea that advertising-driven broadcasters merely give people what they want, and that to do so is dangerous. To give people what they ask for is to invite a debasement of public life, a degeneration of culture and - ironically - a degradation of democracy.

I don’t much care for Hutton’s Eurocentric liberalism, and no more do I...

There’s a good selection of ‘summer reading’ recommendations at New Left Project. Like John Newsinger, one of the contributors, I loved Stieg Larsson’s ‘The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo’, part one in Larsson’s magnificent Millennium trilogy.

I recently finished the final installment in the Swedish crime trilogy, and am happy to add parts 2 and 3 to the recommended list. The whole compelling saga is a remarkable achievement - do believe the hype. Both critically lauded and commercially successful,...

Via Stop the War circular:

RALLY: Afghanistan - Time To Go  
Monday 26 July, 7pm 
Conway Hall, 25 Red Lion Square, London, WC1R 4RL

SPEAKERS: Lance Corporal JOE GLENTON, just released from prison following court martial for refusing to fight in Afghanistan, CAROLINE LUCAS MP, JEREMY CORBYN MP, MARK STEEL, comedian and columnist, LINDSEY GERMAN, Stop the War Coalition, YASMIN KHAN, War On Want.

‘The 90,000 US secret documents leaked today confirm everything the anti-war movement has said for years. The...

Capital represents itself to us principally through its advertising. Its presence is rendered in strictly non-materialist terms. Idealist, magical, or even downright theological thinking is at the heart of capitalist ideology - Smith’s ‘hidden hand’, the religious mandate for ‘improvement’ of the earth in Lockean property theory, the ‘reward-for-abstinence’ theory of profits, and the ‘golden egg’ theory of investments and savings. So when capital represents itself to us, it is not as a set of material...

Photos from today’s Buwan Kothi Challlenge cycle ride, starting and finishing in Leamington Spa. More here.

What lesson might the working classes of the global North take from what’s happening in China? Canadian journalist Paul Jay spells it out in plain English.

I’ve just re-read Tony Cliff’s little book on Rosa Luxemburg (pictured) - it’s contained in Cliff’s 3-volume selected writings - and was particularly impressed by the force of a couple of passages from Luxemburg quoted in the section on the mass strike. Cliff’s short book, first published in 1959, is online HERE.

‘In former bourgeois revolutions where, on the one hand, the political education and leadership of the revolutionary masses was undertaken by the bourgeois parties, and, on the other hand, the...

Research confirms the patently frigging obvious, namely that insurgent attacks in Afghanistan are motivated by NATO violence:

The authors of the report by the Massachusetts-based National Bureau of Economic Research say they analysed 15 months of data on military clashes and incidents totalling more than 4,000 civilian deaths in a number of Afghan regions in the period ending on 1 April. They say that in areas where two civilians were killed or injured by Nato’s International Security Assistance Force...

A friend sent me this artist’s impression of what Israel might look like in ten years time:

State-wide censorship of sexually explicit material on the internet. Laws prohibiting driving vehicles on the Sabbath and Jewish holidays. Women allowed to bathe in the Mediterranean only a few hours a week. The face of Baruch Goldstein on the 20 shekel bill. A national holiday celebrating our spiritual founding father, Rabbi Meir Kahane.

Ian Tomlinson’s family have now established a fighting fund in the wake of the decision of the Crown Prosecution Service not to prosecute anyone over the death of Ian Tomlinson. Now read on…

I found this on the New Left Project site first but it is a site in its own right: