England's England

The sad Radio Caroline legacy

Recently, the excellent film ‘The Boat that Rocked’ “based on ‘Radio Caroline’” rocketed the name ‘Radio Caroline’ back out into the public eye after 20, 30, or is it 40 years of complete obscurity. Unfortunately for the merry band of pensioners who have carried on a ‘Radio Caroline’ via the internet and satellite they have a few minor hurdles to leap if they are to truly capitalise from the publicity.

The first, and probably most important one being that the phrase ‘Radio Caroline’, like the word ‘Hoover’, ‘Sky’ or even ‘Google’, no longer means ‘a radio station called Radio Caroline’ but means ‘all the long gone jolly offshore pirates of the 1960s’. Watching the inaccurate media reports about the real life history surrounding the fictional film, or even doing a search on Twitter chatter has confirmed this a hundred times. People just don’t know that any remnant of the offshore era exists.

Those that recall the pirate ships are confused as to when it all ended. For the overwhelming majority of folk it was the 60s. A few others will recall a Radio Caroline ship sinking. Even less recall the replacement ship, and the drama surrounding its boarding by authorities and finally the abandoning of caretaker crew to await helicopter rescue.

For those that then hear that there actually is a Radio Caroline to tune into today and then finally find the internet site and audio stream, there’s a big shock. This version of Radio Caroline sounds nothing like the version they recall, which, like the pirate station depicted in the film, was more fun and upbeat than the boring drone available to today’s internet listeners.

This final hurdle for this version of Radio Caroline is why it can only boast a few hundred listeners despite all the relentless and unrivalled free publicity. Unfortunately it is staffed by ageing volunteers who in the main are enthusiasts of the concept of offshore radio, primarily the boats that were once used as a platform for the broadcasters. Like steam engine enthusiasts, they have little to no interest in running an actual passenger railway, but just want to play with the engine. They are happy to drive their steam engine up and down a tiny bit of spare track at random times and speeds and maybe pretend they are doing the London to Scotland express run. This by its very nature automatically excludes providing an actual passenger railway for today’s passengers. Likewise the current version of Radio Caroline excludes all but a very few of today’s listeners. Its programming is a carbon copy of what the station was doing offshore after its hey day of the 1960s.

Not many ordinary radio listeners were aware of Radio Caroline’s return or intermittent continuance during the 1970s. It became the preserve of loners and misfits sitting in their bedrooms who also liked the more specialist diet of rock music it opted to play rather than the pop it had been more famous for in the previous decade. So, Radio Caroline quickly became a mainly forgotten secret cult for the few dedicated followers who would hang on every word uttered by the mainly stoned hippies that broadcast from it. Meanwhile, the vast majority of potential listeners were getting their musical choice catered for by the growing network of licensed stations.

The dedicated followers from the 1970s grew up and when offshore radio died, they came forward to grab and lovingly preserve the artefacts that were left. This they do to this day with a rabid obsession. Having preserved the equipment it made sense to them to produce radio programming. Again, this programming had to emulate the era of Radio Caroline most precious to them rather than move with the times, update itself or provide a unique service for radio consumers as had once been the case.

It is true to say that they will be some new stumblers finding this carbon copy of the 1970s Radio Caroline for the first time after 35 years who will find it completely agreeable. However, after an initial curiosity the overwhelming majority will disappear leaving it to play out the same old and getting older records to the same old and getting older faithful.

The true listeners to the original Radio Caroline remember if for being fun, for cocking a snook at authority, for being daring and taking a chance, even if in truth it never did any of those things. They imagine that The Boat That Rocks somehow truly represents in pictures what was going on in the background to get them the music and entertainment they remember. Then they listen to the modern day version of Radio Caroline. Then they go away very disappointed, leaving the old fellas to play with their train set on their own, rather than capitalise on the upsurge in interest in a type of Radio Caroline that actually rocks today’s boat.

Surely that’s got to be the saddest part of the legacy of offshore radio?

Israel can't speak of its own violent actions

It’s interesting watching the official spokespersons for Israel making their pronouncements and spouting their propaganda about what they did and continue to do in Gaza. Have you noticed they never actually address any direct question, but spit back the equivalent of “Well Hamas did this, we have to defend our people who are living in fear”. They say this and quote 13 Israelis as having died during the invasion and massacre of 2,000 Gazans. When quoting the ‘13’ as their own death toll they forget to point out that half of those were killed by their own IDF unable to properly use the deadly war toys America had given them to play with, shooting at other IDF soldiers. And yet, their propaganda tells the world that their military campaign was conducted with extreme precision. I guess the grieving families of IDF soldiers killed by other IDF soldiers would disagree. But I digress.

Turning back to the genocidal massacre of Gazans, never ever will the Israelis say a ‘yea’ or a ‘neigh’ when asked about the severity of what they’ve actually done. Instantly, it’s the verbal deflection technique to try to get the questioner to discuss and condemn Hamas rather than talk about the thousands of children and babies Israel has slaughtered or maimed.

To understand more what’s going on here, let’s look to a different but equally depressing scenario.

Imagine this: A 3 year old child is not allowed by its parent to sleep. Whenever the child tries, the parent wakes them up and moves them about. When the child wants to go in a particular direction the parent blocks them. There is nothing the child is allowed to do. The parent is constantly pushing and shoving or not allowing the child to do anything. Even when the child is sleep deprived and crying the parent doesn’t care. So, ultimately, as with many young 3 year old children, the child maybe slaps out at the parent. In return for this the parent punches and kicks the child with the full force that an adult has available, spending days constantly pummelling the tiny fragile child breaking all its ribs, causing untold internal damages, and ultimately leading to the child’s slow and painful death.

When the parent is asked by the shocked police questioner “Why?” the response is “Well, he started it. He was slapping me. We adults won’t tolerate children slapping us.” When pressed about what they’ve done to the poor child, the parent will refuse to address anything at all, but instead try to get the questioner to condemn the child for slapping the parent saying, “Are you not going to say the child slapping me was wrong?”

Well, we all know that what the ‘adult’ has done in this sad scenerio is very very wrong. Evil, in fact. But, for some reason the adult doesn’t see this. They are fixated with trying to get the questioner to focus only on what the child had done, using it as some kind of justification for their unacceptable over-the-top response. The more the questioner tries to address the issues of what the parent did, the more the parent won’t go any further without the questioner condemning the initial action of the child.

Now, to the untrained unsuspecting questioner, this can deflect them away from the actual issue at hand and even lead them into the corner the adult is trying to manouvre them to; having to respond and opine about the child’s initial actions. In truth, the child’s actions can never warrant the extreme beating they received, and that’s what needs to be addressed.

If Israel is supposed to comprise a people whose very religion indoctrinates them to believe they are superior and chosen ones, then, like the adult they should have a duty of care and responsibility to the (as Jews call them) “Goyim” (which is the name they give to cattle and non-Jews), because, like the child, they (the Goyim) know no better. With superiority comes responsibility towards those you’ve decided you are superior to, otherwise all you are is a vicious and callas bully using spiteful, completely over the top unreasonable force to hold your inferiors in check. Does anybody in this world respect a bully? Nope. That’s why Israel has lost its respect from almost everywhere except those who feed its war machine.

The other thing any normal right thinking parent will know is that in order to allow their child to develop properly and safely, and indeed to learn to love and trust the parent, the child doesn’t need to be poked, woken, stopped, interfered with and mentally suffocated, otherwise it will continue to get angry and frustrated and will want to hurt its parent/guardian. Israel needs to live up to its responsibilities before other parents step in to stop it hurting the human children it keeps herded in to its cattle-pen area called Gaza. There’s no place for bullies in our world, no matter how superior they consider they are.

New media wins the facts war

Things have moved on since the last time Israel was bombing Palestinians, even though it still controls its own people and its propaganda with mantras.

According to the mantras, which pro-Israelis passionately believe with religious conviction, every single civilian casualty in Gaza is not their fault. Mantras will include “snipers firing at them from the same building” they just killed women and children in. The phosphorus burns came from “weapons Hamas was storing in the same buildings”. The hospitals targeted had “Hamas sheltering in the basement” and so on. When women were waving white flags and trying to carry children out of buildings just blown apart, they were shot in the head because “Hamas snipers were in the vicinity”. When the Israelis tried to bury sheltering families alive in rubble using bulldozers it was because the houses were “storing Hamas weapons”. The UN buildings and the Media tower were all attacked because of “snipers” or was it “storing Hamas weapons”. In fact it doesn’t matter which mantra the Israeli propaganda machine used, they all blur into one and are repeated as if they are ‘fact’ without any evidence to corroborate them.

In other words, there was never a single acceptance that Israel was ever at fault at any time. Indeed, anybody putting the mantras under scrutiny becomes subjected to the mantra “anti-semite” in an attempt to silence them.

An illustration of just how strong the belief in the mantras is, can be seen from the footage of a Gazan doctor (who worked to save lives in Israel) being shown on Israeli TV completely distraught from having just that moment had his home blown to pieces and three of his daughters heads crushed in the rubble. The poor poor man, instead of sympathy, pity or respect, got an Israeli woman screaming, shouting and spitting in his face that he must have been storing weapons and how terrible it was that her own son (who was alive) had had to join the IDF and go into Gaza. I personally found the pictures of this woman screaming in this doctor’s face some of the most disgusting and vile I have ever seen. They will haunt me.

However, and this is my main point, I was able to see the pictures. Despite Israel not allowing international media into Gaza in their attempt to control and censor the flow of information out from the region, pictures are getting out. So is information. There are Twitter users and bloggers saying what they see, taking short videos and zapping them round the world free from sanitisation. Yes, there are now real witnesses to what’s happening in Gaza. Us.

Conventional media struggles to abide by the reporting restrictions which are in force even for reporters stuck in Israel and not allowed into the war zone, and can only file summaries of what it’s being told. In the case of the pro-Israeli Western media (most of American privately owned TV) this will of course be slanted with the propaganda angle that Israel requires, including the many mantras we’ve already discussed. Meanwhile, ordinary people are filing their reports, usually just from a humanitarian perspective, using new media. Youtube carries the graphic raw pictures, not subjected to an editor’s eraser. Voices and accounts are ‘out there’ faster than the controlled media. Yes, in amongst this constant huge stream there are the opinions and rants both pro and con. Some are using the Israeli mantras and of course, some are using pro-Palestinian mantras. This means having to dig out what’s really there from all the ‘noise’, but it’s there. And even with the Israeli censors chasing after posters trying to get the information removed it’s too late; it’s replicated, copied, and redistributed and kept alive virally.

I suspect that Israel will have lost this war and retreated as it has under its unilateral ‘ceasefire’ because the truth had a conduit and an audience they couldn’t control. Maybe next time they will work out how to control and stop it, but for now the world has real access and therefore eyes and ears able to see, thanks to new media, the truth conventional media won’t tell us.