RosieBell

Pedal on Parliament - April 28th

Pedal on Parliament: a mass ride on Holyrood
Gather at the Meadows on April 28th
(2pm for a 3pm start)

Pedal on Parliament will be gathering cyclists from across the nation to cycle on Holyrood to tell our politicians that cycling matters, to show our need for safer cycling and cities fit for people. Please join us and help make a Scotland fit for cycling!

Background

In February, up to 2000 cyclists gathered in London to cycle on the Westminster Parliament in support of safer cycling and cities fit for people. On April 28th, to coincide with a follow-up ride in London, Pedal on Parliament will be gathering cyclists from across the nation to cycle on Holyrood. We’re asking everyone who cycles in Scotland – or who would like to cycle, or would like their families to cycle, but who doesn’t feel safe – to join us for a big ride of our own – and a big picnic. Young and old, keen commuter or weekend pedaller, fit or not – you don’t even need to be on a bike. You just need to show up and add your voice to help make Scotland safe for cycling.

What do we want?

We have created an eight point manifesto to help Scotland’s devolved government reach its target of 10% of journeys by bike by 2020, a target which is now also embedded in its low carbon and obesity strategies. The government’s present Cycling Action Plan [CAPS] is far too limited to achieve the target, whilst the proportion of the transport budget allocated to cycling remains wholly inadequate at under 1%. Our manifesto covers:

•     Proper funding for cycling.
•     Design cycling into Scotland’s roads.
•     Slower speeds where people live, work and play
•     Integrate cycling into local transport strategies
•     Improved road traffic law and enforcement
•     Reduce the risk of HGVs to cyclists and pedestrians
•     A strategic and joined-up programme of road user training
•     Improved statistics supporting decision-making and policy

More info here.

Just when you thought it was safe to get back into the water

What a horrible night Thursday was.  I had vaguely expected to hear of another humiliation for George Galloway on the electoral trail, and with that, and Press TV being shut down I thought he would disappear from sight and hearing.  But he comes screaming back.  I have  to give him a grudging salute for his strength and indefatigability.  He certainly wrecked my sleep.

Socialist Unity were crowing over his triumph.   I made a couple of comments on the victory evening:-

"How utterly wretched.  Shameless pandering to religious prejudices wins an election in mainland Britain. I suppose if there had been an appropriate seat up for grabs in Belfast he could have pushed the Catholic buttons - gone on about being anti-abortion, say. 

And even more wretchedly, a bunch of activists and politicos who regard themselves as progressive cheer him on."

"That little hint that his opponent wasn’t a good Muslim because he had had a drink in the past – how would he have managed a similar ploy if he had been chasing a Catholic vote? Once, in stricter times, he could have suggested:-

My opponent has eaten meat on Friday;
My opponent has used a condom; or
My opponent has considered divorce

but Catholics are far more liberal these days.

What would be a clever hint to make about your opponent’s impurity of religion in order to chase Catholic votes rather than Muslim ones?

After all, if politics are going to be conducted through communalism, we should start thinking of the tactical advantage of comparative religious observance. That Ed Miliband guy’s an atheist, isn’t he?"

Those comments were deleted of course.

I was disgusted at the religious communalism that ran through this election.  I thought that was what the Yanks did, out-godding each other as they chase the Presidency.

But Galloway -  all praise to Allah at his victory and that he's on a mission from God, and those that don't vote for him will go to hell.   Saying of his rival,

"When I hear Imran Hussein say, you should vote for him because he's a Pakistani, because he is a quote, unquote "Muslim" I don't know whether to laugh or cry. On the question of Islam, God knows who is a Muslim or who is not. . . Everybody knows he's never out of the pub. 

Rather missing the chance of saying, "Let's drop religion from this election.  It shouldn't matter."

Politics as expression of religious tribalism is poison whether in Glasgow or Cairo. I added Bradford to the list of B's that Christopher Hitchens spoke of when asked about the peace-making aspect of religion:-

“I was to imagine myself in a strange city as the evening was coming on. Toward me I was to imagine that I saw a large group of men approaching. Now-would I feel safer, or less safe, if I was to learn that they were just coming from a prayer meeting? […] Just to stay within the letter ‘B,’ I have actually had that experience in Belfast, Beirut, Bombay, Belgrade, Bethlehem, and Baghdad. In each case I can say absolutely, and can give my reasons, why I would feel immediately threatened if I thought that the group of men approaching me in the dusk were coming from a religious observance.”

Galloway is coy about whether he has converted or will convert to Islam.  A couple of theories:-

1.    If he converts and then after losing Bradford West he needs a seat where he can play communalist Catholic politics e.g. Belfast or the west of Scotland, he would have to be received into Catholicism again.  That might just make him look opportunistic and inconsistent.

2.  If he converts and then unconverts, it could make it inconvenient for him in some countries he will no doubt be visiting eg Iran where apostasy is illegal. 

Since my initial outrage I have read some analysis - that West Bradford is a peculiar seat; that the politics there were corrupt and clan-driven; that Labour has played communalist politics there for years themselves and this was now biting them in the bum ; that the voters are kicking all the main parties, as they often do in by-elections; that only a rock-star politician like Galloway could have pulled it off.  So it is unlikely to be the trend towards communalist politics that I feared.  You can only be communalist in constituencies which will accept it.

 I am though pissed off with the Bradfordian for electing him.  Galloway's over-blown rhetoric turns my stomach but a lot of them, especially the young ones, lapped it up.  Bradford spring! for Chrissake.  Who does he think he is?  Answers own question - a kind of cross between Saladin on a white horse with a train of Saracens fighting the Crusaders and Lenin leading the masses.   He really does see himself as a man of destiny, with God on his side. 

When he says things like " From the Punjab to Palestine, from Bagdhad to Bradford, everyone will sit up and take notice  for by the Grace of God . . .I have a strong voice." he believes in his own fantasies and gets his followers to believe in it as well.   

 

By the way, note in this video that when addressing people in Bradford he doesn't adopt a cod Yorkshire accent, though when addressing Arabs for some reason he puts on a weird Arab accent eg in this one where he extols Assad and Syria's democracy and human rights record. 

Well, he's got MP written after his name now, which will make him a more acceptable courtier to whatever particularly bloody, repressive despot whose hand he wants to kiss.  Saddam is gone, Assad, the man who upholds the dignity of  Arabs and Muslims*, will no doubt be gone soon.  There's Ahmadinejad and sadly there will  be some ugly Islamist regime established in at least one of the countries that have gone through the Arab Spring.  He'll be at its leader's court, discussing "Zionism" and saluting this new lion with many Your Excellencies and that serious, respectful look and understanding nods. 

Update:-

The newspapers are gleeful that Galloway tweeted "Shattered but happy after the Blackburn triumph.

Well, he is a rock star after all.  There are times when the lead singer greets the crowd "Hullo Liverpool," when  in Manchester, and "Hullo Madrid," when in Lisbon.   (I know this has happened but "rock star" "wrong city" "hullo" isn't turning me up actual instances of this).

Being Galloway, he couldn't just say, sorry, stupid mistake.  No, someone has to have hacked into his twitter account.  I can't do the technology but it seems that is unlikely.   But being Galloway he has to lie about it.  No doubt it was an American and Zionist propaganda plot against him.

(*If you can bear it, read Amnesty's report on what  Assad's security forces visit do to the regime's opponents)

Slippery Slyboots

This is an addition to Jim Denham's excellent post over at Shiraz Socialist.

Why doesn't Terry Eagleton come out as a Catholic?  It's not like coming out as a Jehovah's Witness or a Scientologist or even a Mormon. Roman Catholicism is an ancient religion which has spread throughout the world, and so is not seen as weird or cultish.   Also, a literary critic like Eagleton could consider the twentieth century writers in English who were Catholics – Graham Greene, Evelyn Waugh and Muriel Spark just for starters.  It's a creditable list of talents.  And although Catholics have historically been in the majority in Western Europe – and an oppressive majority at that – in Britain post Reformation they were a minority and often persecuted.  So he would have all the pleasures of being anti-establishment, and none of the dangers of earlier ages, which should satisfy a revolutionary spirit like his.

When I came across his piece ridiculing Alain de Botton's ideas of a genteel atheism I was firmly on Eagleton's side. It is a repulsive idea, that the elite should promote religion because it's good for the masses. Honest Christians don't think like that. C S Lewis frequently expressed his disgust at the idea that an educated caste of priests would keep one set of beliefs for themselves and another for their flock.  Lewis himself went the whole supernatural hog.

I hate being on Eagleton's side, as he's a slippery slyboots, so like Jim I pounced on this paragraph:-

Liberal-capitalist societies, being by their nature divided, contentious places, are forever in search of a judicious dose of communitarianism to pin themselves together, and a secularised religion has long been one bogus solution on offer. The late Christopher Hitchens, who some people think is now discovering that his broadside God Is Not Great was slightly off the mark, would have scorned any such project. He did not consider that religion was a convenient fiction. He thought it was disgusting. Now there’s something believers can get their teeth into …

As Jim, and de Botton himself pointed out, this really is a hint at the sympathies of the writer and where his beliefs are heading.  Imagine a sentence like this:-

The late Osama Bin Laden, who some people think is now enjoying 72 virgins. . .

The "some people" aren't the credulous or superstitious that are being ridiculed. Though Eagleton isn't straight enough to say, "I believe in an afterlife where souls are judged" - he has to do the jokey wiggle that shimmers through his writing and makes it both dishonest and irritating- you can guess he'd like there to be such a place for his adversaries to admit how very wrong their wrongness was.

(As an aside, Eagleton obliquely and George Galloway openly do show relish at the thought Hitchens may be burning in hell for eternity.  I don't like either of them, but if I wouldn't them to suffer that fate for– not more than a week, anyway. )

The other Eagleton-trope in that quoted paragraph is:- Liberal-capitalist societies, being by their nature divided, contentious places, are forever in search of a judicious dose of communitarianism to pin themselves together, and a secularised religion has long been one bogus solution on offer.

Shame we're still not united by an enforced Christendom complete with burnings of heretics or a cult of the Great Leader Stalin.   Also, is this being divided and contentious a distinction of "liberal-capitalist societies"?   Ancient Rome, say, could be very divided and contentious, including a plethora of religions and peoples, but it kept itself together for quite a long time with an idea of Roman citizenship, which I suppose can be called "communitarian".   But "liberal-capitalist" would not describe it in the slightest.

However this is typical Eagleton rhetoric.  Do a diatribe against atheism or what have you and then garnish it with something vaguely Marxist sounding, so it appears as weighty analysis and not a run of the mill critique. You can see it here in after a incoherent and dodgy piece about multi-culturalism (we're all the same really and isn't that great! no we're not, and isn't that great!!) 

Multiculturalism is not a threat because it might breed suicide bombers. It is a threat because the kind of political state we have depends upon a tight cultural consensus in order to implant its materially divisive policies.

That is a dubious statement, but it sounds like political analysis so gives more gravity to what could be instead mere cultural observation.

I don't know why Eagleton won't come clean vis-a-vis  his own Catholicism.  Is it because among the British academics and intellectuals who are his peers atheism and liberalism are the norm and religion a little backward (he would be better off in the USA)? Is it because, for all the talk of revolutionary priests "and the gospel of a preacher who was tortured and executed for speaking up for justice", it's associated with social conservatism?  Does he fear seeming less like the impartial analyst and more the partisan on religious matters?   Perhaps he doesn't really know himself - but if religion is attacked he reacts to the "twitch upon the thread"  and arises, thrashing and gasping. 

Making headway

Cyclists getting effectively political - even militantly so.  Bloggers uniting, getting picked up by the MSM and influencing policy.  The Times launching a cycle safety campaign.  This is heady news.

 Report on the BBC:-

Cycling safety seems to be moving up the political agenda with The Times newspaper launching its campaign on Thursday.

When the Thunderer gets behind an issue then politicians usually take note.

What the paper's also done very well is to capture the zeitgeist amongst cyclists especially in London.

I've tried to cover cycling issues in the capital for a number of years.

What I've noticed is anger amongst cyclists has increased as the popularity of cycling has increased, but the message has in the last year or so become politicised and targeted.

That's perhaps in part due to the campaigning cyclist bloggers who have given a focal point to the anger.

A notoriously broad, individualistic and diverse church, does the web finally give cyclists a universal voice?

Most cyclists are very web savvy and these bloggers use social media like Twitter and their blogs to unite the message.

This is London based but I suppose it must be happening elsewhere.  Cycling matters may even influence elections!  That is progress.  One day London may look like Copenhagen.

The Celluloid Lady

When Margaret Thatcher saw the film The Iron Lady she wept for the painful memories of her time in office, and not for her dead husband, and her own confused old age, which are what the film deals with to the nth degree. Thatcher's being was that of an ideological politician and we saw her instead as a wife to the funny, supportive Dennis (especially endearing when young and played by Harry Lloyd with his charming smile).  It was as if they had done a film about, say,  Muhammad Ali and after a quick run through his rise to fame and a lot on his marriage and Parkinson's disease had touched briefly on his boxing matches.  There was another twentieth century British prime minister who had a vision of how Britain should be reformed, and whose policies changed Britain considerably.  He was also happily married - but if anyone was inspired (unlikely I know) to make a film about Clement Attlee, there would be ten minutes or so of his relationship with his devoted wife. 

The film became a love story - an Everyman's love story, for those of the population who grow old together, until one dies and the other is left to decay alone.  As a love story and a picture of the body and mind fading and falling, it was mildly touching.  Olivia Coleman was brilliant as Carol Thatcher.  With one slight expression she can look concerned and hurt - the look of the dutiful daughter always passed over for the negligent brother in her mother's affections.

Everyone agrees that Meryl Streep was stupendous in the role of the former PM and she will be buckling under the weight of the awards she will receive for her performance.  She did do a great feat of physical acting as Thatcher the shuffling aged lady and of mimicry as the politician in her prime ministership but I didn't feel I was getting a sense of what Thatcher was like.  What drove Thatcher was really portrayed by Alexandra Roach as the young Thatcher, the gawky grocer's daughter, earnest and single-minded, with notions that the economy is a chain of self-reliant families and small businesses.  (The shop-keeping self-employed class loathe the striking wage earning class).  How she enacted these ideas in policies was hardly touched on. 

That may be something that this kind of biopic drama can't deal with unless it is done totally differently i.e. leave out a half hour or so of Thatcher meandering round her flat sorting through Dennis's things and have some scenes with people who weren't Thatcher, or Dennis, or cabinet ministers - people who were in fact affected by her policies, not the angry rioters and bombers who appeared as a back drop.   That though would have been making quite a different kind of film, without the chance of a great central performance.  Biopics do this - everything becomes a set of planets orbiting the sun of the subject. 

The portrayal of the woman in a man's world part was pedestrian.  It was much better fun in The Long Walk to Finchley. For a tighter and more dramatic film on Thatcher I would go for the BBC's Margaret.   Lindsay Duncan played Thatcher, not doing a tour de force of acting dazzle but perfectly fine as the regal lady whose arrogance brought her down.  Margaret, dealing only with Thatcher's ousting,  had a dramatic tension and shape.  The effect was of a killer whale barrelling through the sea unexpectedly being mauled by Tory sharks and stung by Tory jellyfish until she sank.    The Iron Lady is a shapeless film although it's not dull or unwatchable.  Anyone interested in recent British history, or who lived through the eighties, can be curious about how certain events and people are portrayed.

Meryl Streep said she was a little awed at performing with a gang of Britain's character actors, who appeared as the politicians of Thatcher's day.  It was enjoyable seeing who would play which cabinet minister or leader of the opposition.  When Richard E Grant appeared as Michael Heseltine I, and no doubt 90% of the audience, immediately thought Withnail and I.  Heseltine always seemed a little louche and Richard E Grant was a pleasure as a long-legged high foreheaded take of him. 

In this modern world film actors are far more highly regarded than politicians. The reaction of the British media is to be overwhelmed at the honour that one of Hollywood's queens plays our former Prime Minister. 

Friends and Enemies

I am the enemy you killed, my friend.
I knew you in this dark: for so you frowned
Yesterday through me as you jabbed and killed.
I parried; but my hands were loath and cold.
Let us sleep now...

Those of course are the last lines of Wilfred Owen's Strange Meeting.  The dead soldier tells what his life could have been to the soldier who killed him.  

This poem was brought to my mind by an item on the Today programme the other morning. 

During the Falklands War an anti-aircraft gunner shot down a fighter jet and thought he had killed the pilot.  He then found out that the pilot had survived.  The gunner went to meet him, now a retired Commodore and living in a village in Argentina.  The Commodore had no hard feelings and said:-"Each one of us had to fulfil our duties". 

It's common enough for soldiers to return from wars with admiration for the enemy's fighting prowess and bravery.   Soldiers, sailors and airmen who once tried to kill each other can meet, shake hands and say that was what they had to do. However, the torture victim cannot greet his torturer with such easy feelings.  He may agree to forgive, after something like a truth and reconciliation process, but this is not the meeting of equals.  Nor would the women of Berlin in 1945 be ready to say, it was your duty, to the Soviet soldiers who raped them.  The aftermath for them was horror and shame and suicide.  You can be shot at by an impersonal force, but not deliberately humiliated, tortured or raped.  You are in some kind of relationship between human beings that has gone grossly awry. 

So further to Robert Fisk's reaction to the Marines urinating over the dead Taliban,:-

If war were not about the total failure of the human spirit, there would be something grotesquely funny about the American reaction to the pissing pictures.

For note, it was not the killing of these men that worried the Marine Corps in the US – it was the pissing. Nothing wrong in killing amid the "core values" of the Marine Corps; you just shouldn't urinate on the corpses. And even more to the point: YOU MUSTN'T DO IT ON CAMERA! Too late. It comes to this. Armies are horrible creatures and soldiers do wicked things but when we accept all these lies about "bad apples" and the exceptionalism of crime in war – "there may have been some excesses" is the usual dictator-speak – we are accepting war and going along with the dishonesty of it and we are making it more possible and easier and the killings and rapes more excusable and more frequent.

There is a reasonable aspect to this argument. If atrocities are run of the mill, that should be known.  The public like to think that there can be such a thing as a clean war, not many hurt, everything sorted out.  With any war in the offing they should realise that it's not just the killing and maiming, destruction and mayhem but the chance for humiliation, rape and torture.  Also, remember that humiliation, rape and torture are a great pleasure for some men and that the taste for them can spread among a platoon or a regiment. Giving a man a gun is giving him brief and petty power - and some will become Caligulas and Uday Husseins.   So if bringing to mind the horrors of war can prevent more wars, all to the good. 

However I don't think "war is the total failure of the human spirit "- Auschwitz is, and Hiroshima is, and rape and torture and atrocities are.  But war?  All wars, for whatever reason?  

"For note, it was not the killing of these men that worried the Marine Corps in the US – it was the pissing. Nothing wrong in killing amid the "core values" of the Marine Corps; you just shouldn't urinate on the corpses."

It's the Marine Corps' job to kill these men.  You can call it a terrible job, you can say they're involved in an unjust war, but that is how wars are conducted.  You kill or disable the enemy.  You don't inflict gratuitous humiliation on him, even after death.  Wars happen, and they are horrible.  It is better though that there are things like Geneva conventions and political leaders who are embarrassed when they are conducted with unnecessary cruelty (see Normblog on this). 

Pacifists say "war is murder".  But that is not generally accepted.   We don't do the dulce et decorum thing any more - Wilfred Owen was one who taught us not to - but we acknowledge the necessity of war in certain circumstances, carried out for certain ends.  Those fighting it will at their best regard those they are fighting against as caught up in something larger - duty perhaps, or professional pride or patriotism.  So they can meet afterwards without personal animosity.    They can say, I am the enemy you killed, or tried to kill, my friend. (Wilfred Owen was a soldier as well as a poet.)

But you can't say:-

I am the enemy you raped, my friend
I am the enemy you tortured, my friend
I am the enemy you pissed over, my friend

On Motives

"It is a frequent vice of radical polemic to assert, and even to believe, that once you have found the lowest motive for an antagonist, you have identified the correct one."

Christopher Hitchens from his essay Edmund Burke: Reactionary Prophet

Some of what was said about the author of that aphorism after his death backs up that statement.

Press TV

I haven't watched Press TV myself except for the odd clip but what I hear about it is that it is a propaganda channel run from Tehran, and that to appear on it you have to be highly uncritical of the Iranian government.  According to the journalist Dave Osler (comment 12):-

I am generally of the ‘bus company’ theory when it comes to media outlets. Who cares who runs the bus, so long as the route takes you where you want to go?

That is why I have in the past written for the Daily Express, and happily appear on rightwing TV and radio shows (Richard Littlejohn, Nick Ferrari etc) if they want a leftie on to spark debate.

If the media offers you a platform, take it, on the sole condition that you get your message across.

But the point is that Press TV doesn’t offer that kind of platform, It carefully selects Brit lefties that will say the sort of thing that complies with its editorial line. That sort of exposure isn’t worth having.

So it's no surprise that Press TV employs islamist and theocracy pimps like the well-known hijabbed sister-in-law Lauren Booth, Yvonne Ridley and, of course, George Galloway.

Radio 4 ran a programme about Press TV on Thursday evening, which is well worth listening to. 

I would have liked to have heard more about Press TV's audience.  I would guess that it would mostly be islamist sympathisers, and the kind of member of the far left who a few decades ago would have listened to Radio Moscow as their in-depth unbiassed news source.  For example, here's a thicko who comments at Shiraz Socialist  (comment 5):-

Many Marxists with decades long experience in the movement have contributed to press tv, which in content and form, beats the superficial news churned out by media that Hitchens whored himself to.

George Galloway was invited to appear on the programme but did not take this chance to defend his employer.  He's not usually shy about appearing on the BBC. However he might have been asked impertinent questions which is not the kind of thing his heroes eg Stalin, Saddam Hussein and Bashar al-Assad, would have put up with for a minute.

Good and bad hoaxes

I love a good hoax.  A hoax is a scam and a con job, but not the sort when a low-life flogs off expensive energy deals to pensioners.  Although some hoaxes have made money, that should not be what a hoax is designed for. Its object should be to make the pretentious and pompous look stupid, to expose the vanity of those in high places.   The Emperor's New Clothes is a satisfying story, but there would be little point to The Peasant's New Clothes. Hoaxees are gulled for believing what they want to believe, usually something flattering.   A hoax is cruel but its victims are not pathetic innocents.  You see them as being humiliated as they deserve.   Also, a good hoax confirms the prejudices of the on-lookers.  They have always known that the hoaxee had it coming to them for their superior airs and crackpot ideas. 

Some hoaxes:-

The Sokal Affair.  Alan Sokal submitted a paper called "Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity", to the cultural studies journal Social Text.  The journal in all seriousness published this paper which among other things stated that "quantum gravity is a social and linguistic construct".  The dupes were a bunch of post-modernist pseuds and academics.  They looked like posturing idiots and those who had suspected post-modernism was a shack of jargon were full of glee to see this eyesore get trashed.

The Hitler Diaries. This was more of a forgery for gain than pure mischief, but the egg faced and out of pocket were Rupert Murdoch, the editors of The Times, The Sunday Times, Newsweek and the German magazine Stern, and the journalist who "discovered" the diaries, the Nazi-obsessive Gerd Heidemann.  The Deputy Editor of the Sunday Times said later: " When such a scoop is offered, you don't really want to hear anything that would cast doubt on its veracity."   Those of us who regard Rupert Murdoch as being a disgrace to truth and decency were justified by the greedy old despot saying about the affair "After all, we are in the entertainment business.” As a bonus, potential readers, the sort who are creepily fascinated about anything to do with Nazism, were cock-teased as well. 

The poems of Ern Malley. A hoax by a couple of Australian litterateurs on the editors of an avant-garde poetry magazine.  They concocted an unknown poet called Ern Malley and sent in his poems, which they had written deliberately badly.   The poetry magazine ran a special issue celebrating this new important voice in poetry.  The victims in this case were those who are overly impressed by literature that is obscure and difficult.

(Kingsley Amis wrote a story on a similar theme called Dear Illusion, about a poet who knowingly writes inept poetry that is lauded by the critics.)  

The Dreadnought Hoax.   Virginia Woolf and her Bloomsbury mates pretended to be Abyssinian royalty and were entertained by the Royal Navy on HMS Dreadnought.  I don't think it was that amusing, because I suppose the Navy officers had no choice but to be civil to foreign guests, but the fact that Virginia Woolf did this blacked up, bearded and in drag makes it stand out among hoaxes.  The Navy chaps gave the instigator, a poet and constant prankster called Horace de Vere Cole,  a token smack with a cane afterwards to satisfy their honour.

Virginia Woolf is at the far left

These days our armed forces have dwindled in size and power so a hoax on them would be silly childishness, whereas a successful hoax on, say, the Daily Mail or Simon Cowell, would delight a chunk of the British public.

The Conquest Letter.  I can't find a link for this but Kingsley Amis recounts it in his Memoirs. 

Robert Conquest, another poet and prankster and a distinguished Sovietologist, sent a letter to Philip Larkin marked HMG and stating that Larkin's collection of  pornography was to be investigated by officialdom.  Larkin dashed off to his solicitor's office and spent the whole day hiding there.  He later billed Conquest for the solicitor's time.   This event didn't spoil their friendship.   Conquest is a prolific writer and has been married four times.  He must have a lot of excess energy.

Philip Larkin wrote (bad) pornography himself, so there seems to be some justice in this hoax. 

My sister L. This was not a pure hoax, more of a wind up but L took a snapshot to school of a heart-throb pop-star, sitting right up close and smiling at her.  In fact, she had got a picture from a magazine, pinned it up on the garage wall and photographed that.  It did look very convincing for those who hadn't seen her other snaps, where she was inclined to cut off people's heads, or catch them as blurs in the corner.  This was funny and harmless.  If she had gone to school and said, for instance, that our mother had cancer, that would have been more in line with the Muchausen syndrome school of hoaxing, that is, unhealthily seeking attention.

Myself.  Once as art critic for a kind of Time Out magazine I did a piece of deliberate pretentious nonsense about an exhibition I'd seen - no-one spotted it but then I think no-one read it.   The magazine's editors thought they should cover exhibitions and as everyone else had snaffled the music side they gave that spot to me.  I should say I was, and am, fairly indifferent to painting and sculpture.  Those who like them should enjoy the Van Meergen hoax.  He faked a Vermeer which met an art critic's theory that Vermeer had been influenced by Italian painting.  Van Meegeren was happy with this result which confirmed what he had come to think about the Dutch art establishment and then found he could sell a phony Vermeer for a fortune so carried on faking.

The televisual hoaxer Ali G.  I can't stand the unfunny little arse and when he interviewed people who were very polite to him no matter how stupid and crass his questions, I was on their side.  I think the real dupes of his hoax were the idiots who found him entertaining.

The Protocols of the Elders of Zion - all right, drop the jokey tone.  The fact that this fraud is taken seriously still as a view of how the world works makes me howl.

So - a good hoax fulfils a victim's wishful thinking.  It's easy to see why Hamas loves the Protocols, why the Sokal hoaxees believed a real proper physicist endorsed their views about science and why the Australian avant-garde grabbed hold of their very own Dylan Thomas.  

The Gay Girl in Damascus is not a classic hoax since it was not created to show up the main dupes, the well-meaning progressives who sympathise with Syrian protesters.  The hoaxer Tom MacMaster is pleased with himself for adopting a persona that was so convincing it fooled his readers, but there's no sense that he's laughing at them for setting up and signing petitions demanding Amina's release from a Syrian jail.   MacMaster's  idea of wit is sarcastic jeering (common among activists).  One thing he does say is that his false blog exposed the "liberal Orientalism" of the west. 

Heresy Corner interprets :-

The clue to what he was playing at lies in the phrase "liberal Orientalism". It's not clear what liberal orientalism he thought he was exposing - perhaps it was the concern some (but not all) western liberals display for the plight of gay people and women in repressive Islamic societies. A perception which, of course, made "Amina" such a brave and representative heroine. It's even possible that he was deliberately creating a character who would prove irresistible to Western liberals, someone around whom they could unite - as indeed, for a time, they did.

MacMaster's own brand of liberal Orientalism, however, seems to have been of a different order - the celebration of an idealised Islamic society characterised above all by tolerance, pluralism and freedom. A picture entirely at odds with the burkhas and beheadings image perpetuated by that other sort of "orientalism" that sees Islam as irredeemably backward and savage. [The whole article is worth reading].

The "liberal orientalism" motive looks like an afterthought.  What the Gay Girl resembles is another literary counterfeit, the poems of Ossian.   A writer who cannot advance his works by their own merits passes them off as having been written by a more romantic figure.  MacMaster used the  beautiful lesbian rebel Amina, James MacPherson a druidlike bard called Ossian.  Both met the taste of their times. Amina's protest, authenticity and identity politics are much admired in modern culture. Macpherson's eighteenth century had developed a new interest in an ancient and native literature.  In Scotland this was "heightened by post-1745 nostalgic romanticisation of all things relating to the Highlands," (the progenitor of today's tourist industry).  Many contemporary Scots passionately wanted to believe in Scotland's antique literary heritage.   

Ossian receiving the Ghosts of the French Heroes

The Gay Girl is a writer's hoax - of wanting to be taken seriously as a writer, because MacMaster does believe that his own work is of high quality that just needs a publishing break.  He also has strong sympathies with the Syrian uprising and so he coupled a writer's vanity with the unscrupulousness of a politico who feels justified in lying and forgery for a good cause.   

Samuel Johnson was famously sceptical about the Ossian poems which he called "an imposture" and what he said about  MacPherson goes for MacMaster, going by this interview:-

stubborn audacity is the last refuge of guilt.

Fact and Fiction

The Staggers, as in "staggering ever faster down an intellectual and moral slope", has this piece by Stephen Baxter about the Damascus Gay Girl blog, now known to be a hoax perpetrated by an American called Tom MacMaster.

The piece is sub-headed with one of those annoying questions:-

The "Gay Girl in Damascus" blog was a product of an American man's imagination. But does it matter?

YES IT ******** DOES!!!!   There's all the difference in the world between a real life Syrian activist being taken off by the security forces and some bloke wanking in Edinburgh as he knocks out lesbian porn scenes.  

MacMaster's blog may have been fictional, but he says it was rooted in fact. He wasn't there in Syria, seeing and experiencing the things his blogging persona claimed to be seeing and experiencing. He didn't have those feelings; he didn't have those thoughts. It must have taken a brilliant imagination to get Amina's story across. Does it matter that it was just that, a story, rather than a real first-hand account?

Well yes it ***** does again.  Stephen Baxter answers his question that on the whole, it was bad because of the difficulty that this will cause to genuine anonymous bloggers in repressive regimes.   But he has to go through this path of questioning to take you where a 10 year old child could point you to at once – the difference between fact and fiction, between stories and lies, especially lies which bring other people to grief.

The sadness is that MacMaster is, to my mind at least, a talented writer. I think part of the reason why Amina's story garnered so much interest was the brilliance of the realistic detail, the humanity of the story, the tenderness and empathy with which Amina's life was depicted. Look back through Amina's blogposts and you can find poetry, political posts and perfectly paced stories about emotional issues like coming out. See it for what it is - fiction - and you can admire the literary creation of MacMaster. If only he had presented it that way in the first place. If only he had.

The blog's gone off the air so I can't provide links.   But here's some of the poetry:-

Beyond the sea I watch her roam
The distant place where is her home
Upon the surf itself she walks
And like a nightingale she talks
She is gentle clean and pure
She is one with the azure
Coming towards me with the Tide
Across the waters I watch her glide

For her, I know, I’d lay down my life
If that, someday, would make her my wife
For all my sickness, she is the cure
If only she could come ashore;
Too close to her and I would drown
Before ever I could touch her radiant crown
I cry because I understand
She’s the Sea and I the Land

MacMaster says that when he writes poetry in Arabic it is stilted, but he is less embarrassed by it in English.  However, he is not a man who is easily embarrassed.  
 
MacMaster's blog started off as a place to publish his extracts from a supposedly autobiographical novel about a gay Syrian Muslim brought up in the USA.  This work has evidently been influenced by Rubyfruit Jungle, a well known lesbian novel of the 1970s.  The protagonist's girlfriends are shadowy,  the dialogue lacks snap and point, and there are scenes of tenderly smiling sentimentality but there's enough exotic background, both Syrian and American, to make it quite readable.  The protagonist, Amina, is a bit too marvellous - ever beautiful, ever courageous, ever sexy, ever seductive, ever sensitive, aware, right on, full of attitude.  A novel with such a piece of perfection as its central character reads like a conceited piece of wish fulfilment – which is what this blog was. 

 In fiction, including some of the best (eg Jane Eyre), the author will take as a hero someone they themselves are in the eye of God – braver, more resourceful, their virtue acknowledged and rewarded.  There is a close relation between fiction and day dreaming.  A work of fiction can tell embarrassing tales about how the author imagines himself – in schlock fiction the guy who can do everything and who gets the girl. 

So MacMaster created his magnificent woman Amina who then wrote what was supposedly non-fiction, about what was happening in Syria.   Through her he could voice his opinions about the ignorance of the West about Islam and his thoughts on Syrian history, politics and sectarianism.   She was his mouthpiece and mask that gave him the chance to talk quite dirty, calling Israelis "The Chosen" and so on.

He got carried away, and his fantasy interacted with the real world – a world where less glamorous and outstandingly brave people are dragged away by real security forces to have real and horrible things done to them.  That is what stops this story from being hilarious farce.