My one biggest regret in relation to Christopher Hitchens is that I only became familiar with his writing and polemics so late in life, a little more than a decade ago. I'm still catching up.

The man was a lion. He will be remembered for his principled defense of human freedom in the face of villains, theocrats and self-righteous moral pygmies.

From his memoriam in Vanity Fair:

Christopher Hitchens—the incomparable critic, masterful rhetorician, fiery wit, and fearless bon vivant—died today at the age of 62. Hitchens was diagnosed with esophageal cancer in the spring of 2010, just after the publication of his memoir, Hitch-22, and began chemotherapy soon after. His matchless prose has appeared in Vanity Fair since 1992, when he was named contributing editor.

The hard-hitting investigative journalists at the Hollywood Reporter dig throroughly into a scandal first discovered by the even more hardworking pundits at Fox News:

THR: You can refuse to answer this question if you like, but it has to be asked: Are the Muppets communists?

Bobin: [Laughs] It's a very strange turn of events to hear a question like that. Cable news is 24 hours long so you have to fill it up with something. No, the Muppets are not communist. And the character of Tex Richman is not an allegory for capitalism in any way. The character is called Tex Richman. It's a joke. Clearly he is a classic, old school bad guy. He's bad not because he works for an oil company but because he's evil. No, it's not a communist movie in any way.

Thanks for clearing that up. It was really something I've been worried about.

If the people at Fox News had only done their research beforehand, they would have realized that while Kermit the Frog has often complained about the trials and tribulations of being green, neither he nor any other Muppet has ever mentioned anything at all about being red.

Because when the only alternative available to the poor is to overthrow the regime, that's exactly what the poor will attempt. 

In Syria: "The grossly uneven distribution of the national income has concentrated incomes and capital in the hands of a limited few. The share of wages from the national income was less than 33 percent in 2008-2009, compared to nearly 40.5 per cent in 2004, meaning that profits and rents command more than 67 percent of the GDP. This measure does not exceed 50 percent in the most liberal capitalist states. . . Young people have transformed their personal agony into collective anger and rejection of the present situation and future prospects that offer them no hope of decent living standards. They have made the conscious connection between the regime’s repressive governance mechanism, corruption, and the difficult living conditions they endure."

In democracies, you can vote the bastards out. In police states, you can't. There is a pathetic tendency in the chattering classes of the NATO capitals to ignore the real distinctions and differences among and between what is apprehended as an undifferentiated mass of "Arabs." In the world's democracies, much is made of the Islamist threat. It is very real, but Islamism is a far greater threat to the Arab Spring: the Islamists do not articulate the aspirations of ordinary working people in any Muslim-majority society, and where they are not running the show directly, Islamists tend to be the best-organized and best-financed. One should not have to come from the "left" to notice that jihadists, who are merely Islamists in a hurry, are the spoiled children of the Muslim bourgeoisie. Anne Applebaum puts it this way: 

"These people are not the wretched of the Earth. Nor do they have much in common, sociologically speaking, with the illiterate warlords of Waziristan. They haven't emerged from repressive Islamic societies such as Iran, or been forced to live under extreme forms of sharia law, as in Saudi Arabia. On the contrary, they are children of ambitious, "Westernized" parents who sacrificed for their education -- though they are often people who, for one reason or another, didn't "make it," or didn't feel comfortable, in their respective societies. Perhaps it sounds strange, but they remind me of the early Bolsheviks, who were also educated, multinational and ambitious, and who also often lacked the social cachet to be successful. Lenin's family, for example, clung desperately to its status on the lowest rung of the czarist aristocracy." 

During the 30 years preceding September 11, 2001, while the manifestos of millionaires like Osama bin Laden contained endlessly grisly bromides about Jews and crusaders and Freemasons and such - and while the spoiled children of the Western bourgeoisie raved on about the crimes of the Zionists - overall economic growth in Arab countries during those three decades was negative. In the Gulf states, real GDP per capita shrank 2.8% every year. Although they try to hide it, Qatar, Oman and Egypt show Gini coefficients (which measure inequalities between rich and poor) that are among the highest levels in the world. Stack all that sort of thing together with the brutality of military-industrial complexes like the corporate octopus known as the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps, or Egypt's military apparatus - now a major corporate player in the olive oil, cement, construction, hotel and gasoline industries that rivals the industrial-monopoly penetration that Pakistan's ISI has secured for itself in Pakistan - and there's nothing left for anyone else to do except submit to the savage corruption of it all or plot the tyranny's overthrow.  Read more

One would think that suppressing a mass uprising that just won't seem to go away would keep Iran's theocrats awfully busy, but the ayatollahs have been more focused lately on skirt hems and hair-dos. Perhaps it's proscrastination, a make-work project to avoid having to get through all those tedious sham trials for the thousands of dissidents recently rounded up and imprisoned in these heady times. Whatever it is, there has been a steady output of late of new rules and updated regulations concerning personal attire in the Islamic Republic.

In June this year, the republic's "moral police" fanned out in a force of 70,000 to snuff out the fires of what the mullahs-on-high perceive to be a "western cultural invasion". New problems the police force have to deal with in this particular seasonal crackdown include men wearing necklaces, mullets and ponytails. The latter two are not found on the government's list of approved hairstyles (oh yes, there's a list). Long nails, tattoos, tooth gems (whatever those are), and body piercings are also now needing to be banned. This is on top of the perennial problem that Iranian women miraculously and persistently manage to make the shroud-look still come off sexily by wearing close-fitting overcoats and loose headscarves (think Grace Kelly). Then there are the dogs:

...the Iranian parliament proposed a bill to criminalise dog ownership, on the grounds that it "poses a cultural problem, a blind imitation of the vulgar culture of the west. ...

...Under Islamic customs, dogs are deemed to be "unclean". Iranians, in general, avoid keeping them at home, but still a minority, especially in north Tehran's upper-class districts, enjoy keeping pets. Last year Ayatollah Makarem Shirazi, a prominent hardline cleric, issued a fatwa against keeping dogs and said the trend must stop.

The Propagandist takes a lot of flack from some circles for being perceived as more of a right-wing rag than it ought to be.

The truth is that many of our contributing writers defy simple ideological classifications. For instance, publicizing the atrocities of Arab despots, London-based jihad preachers or Serbian war criminals is hardly limited either to political conservatives or true progressives. If you have a conscience, you have a dog in this fight.

We began this enterprise with the idea of bringing together those from the left and right side of the political continuum. We were united in a project to confuse, disarm and ultimately help destroy a reactionary and tyrranical enemy. Our method is the relentless production and distribution of propaganda.

This aim and method are still as true today as when we began. We remain a motley crew of thinking conservatives as well as brass-knuckles socialists who remain true to Orwell's vision of leftists on the front lines against the fascists.

Solidarity. And confusion to our enemies. Read more

South African photographer Jodi Bieber has won the World Press Photo of the Year for her photo of Bibi Aisha, the 18-year-old Afghan woman who was mutilated by her husband by order of the Taliban. Aisha's photo appeared on the cover of Time Magazine in August 2010, igniting controversy.

Many felt that the photo courageously confronted who the Taliban really are and what the consequences of another western abandonment of Afghanistan may look like, with its headline, "What Happens If We Leave Afghanistan". The same headline infuriated stoppists, who accused the magazine of "emotional blackmail," and coined rather ridiculous terms such as "mutilation chic". Read more

Does the socialist vanguard of the proletariat really need to publish a newspaper or would they be better served building an online presence to mobilize the masses? Putting it another way, are socialist newspaper publishers immune to the decline affecting the bourgeois capitalist printed media industry?

At Shiraz Socialist, they make a compelling case for the left to ditch the old ways:

A standard method for recruitment, one that has remained unchanged since prior to the Russian Revolution in 1917, is that of publishing a newspaper and selling it. The acceptance for the need of the newspaper to spread ideas about the party and the revolution is unquestioned. The party is as wedded to the newspaper as a heroin addict to a syringe. Arguably more so: heroin addicts have been known to break their addiction.
 

Despite the fact that sales of national newspapers have been in a substantial decline, AWL have made the flabbergasting decision to increase the frequency of distribution.
 

Last night it appeared accepted by the majority that the revolution could not happen by anarchists on Twitter, those dubbed “Anarcho-Tweeters” by Laurie Penny. A vanguard party was needed for, if nothing else, to produce placards for demonstrations. I do not wish to discuss the need for a vanguard party, but simply whether the vanguard party needs a newspaper.

Over the last week, as per the usual tradition, the news media are doing their reflective segments on the year during those days between Christmas and New Year’s Day. The personalities and pundits ask pensively what kind of a year we’ve had and what lies ahead.

The practice stretches back a long way. I have a copy of The Province newspaper published on December 31, 1937. New Year's Eve fell on a Friday that year and the newspaper cost 10 cents. The front page’s headline is “Britain and France Guardians Against Conflict”. Europe was on the brink of war, watching nervously the aggressive and unabashed expansion of fascist movements in Germany, Italy, Spain and Japan.

The article’s author, a one Pertinax, noted as a “Famous French Commentator on World Affairs” opens with the following musings on the now yellowed pages:

With the New Year’s almost here, let us pause for a moment for an accounting. In what condition do we find the world today? What progress toward peace or war has been made during the last twelve months?

One of the most outstanding tendencies we must note is the growing disregard for international law. All kinds of infringements of the code of nations have been committed in both Europe and Asia. In times past, such deeds would almost certainly have led to a general conflict. Today, however, there exists, nearly everywhere, a tacit determination to call by the name of peace what is, in fact, a state of war.

As Julian Assange secures $1.5 million in book deals, supposedly to help pay his legal fees to fight the sexual assault charges against him in Sweden, Wikileaks has brought a major blow to the prospects for democracy in Zimbabwe, a country that has been on a painfully slow climb towards democratic government under the drawn out tyranny of Robert Mugabe. Like other tyrants, Wikileaks plays right into the sinister agenda of a clinging dictator like Mugabe, as detailed by Christopher Albon today in The Atlantic:

The topic of the meeting was the sanctions imposed on Zimbabwe by a collection of western countries, including the U.S. and E.U. Tsvangirai told the western officials that, while there had been some progress in the last year, Mugabe and his supporters were dragging their feet on delivering political reforms. To overcome this, he said that the sanctions on Zimbabwe "must be kept in place" to induce Mugabe into giving up some political power. The prime minister openly admitted the incongruity between his private support for the sanctions and his public statements in opposition. If his political adversaries knew Tsvangirai secretly supported the sanctions, deeply unpopular with Zimbabweans, they would have a powerful weapon to attack and discredit the democratic reformer.

Later that day, the U.S. embassy in Zimbabwe dutifully reported the details of the meeting to Washington in a confidential U.S. State Department diplomatic cable. And slightly less than one year later, WikiLeaks released it to the world.

The reaction in Zimbabwe was swift. Zimbabwe's Mugabe-appointed attorney general announced he was investigating the Prime Minister on treason charges based exclusively on the contents of the leaked cable. While it's unlikely Tsvangirai could be convicted on the contents of the cable alone, the political damage has already been done. The cable provides Mugabe the opportunity to portray Tsvangirai as an agent of foreign governments working against the people of Zimbabwe. Furthermore, it could provide Mugabe with the pretense to abandon the coalition government that allowed Tsvangirai to become prime minister in 2009.

Read the full story here.

Lauryn Oates is a Contributing Writer for The Propagandist. 

It’s as curious as it is concerning that the London Review of Books should be considered staple reading for anyone wishing to get anywhere in intellectual or academic circles, but with its almost 50,000 per edition readership making it Europe’s most widely circulated literary magazine, it undoubtably has become just that. However radical the publication’s rhetoric it is of course quite entitled to write whatever it likes, that’s something I don’t think anyone would want to see taken away. 

What I object to however is that I or indeed anyone else in the country should be having to bankroll this kind extremism through their taxes.  Research recently undertaken by Just Journalism has exposed that throughout its 30 year long history the London Review of Books has been funded by uncomprehendibly generous levels of public money.

Just Journalism has exposed that starting in 1981, shortly after its establishment, the London Review of Books has received no less than £767,679 from the Arts Council England, all public money.  Money that rather than going towards public services well and truly went towards all of our disservice; a glance over the lengthy diatribes against America and the West make that abundantly apparent.  

Read more