Rubbing their noses in their own mess. posted by lenin

Here is a helpful reminder. Last year, Amnesty International declined to support the war on Iraq on account of what they considered the likely human cost. The following appeared on the front page of their magazine in March/April 2003:

"Iraq: The Human Cost Of War
50,000 civilian deaths?
500,000 civilians injured?
2,000,000 refugees and displaced people?
10,000,000 in need of humanitarian assistance?"

These and similar predictions were widely mocked at the time.

The Weekly Standard, in a brief, post-bellicus moment of euphoria, retorted that these and similar predictions had been "voodoo science" :

And on almost any street in Oxford, one can see the posters passed out by the British chapter of Amnesty International, entitled "Iraq: The Human Costs of War." The poster, which is careful to cover itself by using a lot of question marks, reads in part: "50,000 Civilian Deaths? 500,000 Civilians Injured?" Not quite, thank God.

The author of that article reserved most of his fire for Iraq Body Count , which he considered the worst of the bunch - he may now wish to eat his words and plant himself firmly in Marc Herold's lap, in the same way that many British commentators and politicians suddenly find themselves eagerly perusing and waving the statistics produced on the site.

Andrew Marr of the BBC was on similar form on the of the Saddam-statue-falling psyops:

"Well, I think this does one thing - it draws a line under what, before the war, had been a period of... well, a faint air of pointlessness, almost, was hanging over Downing Street. There were all these slightly tawdry arguments and scandals. That is now history. Mr Blair is well aware that all his critics out there in the party and beyond aren't going to thank him - because they're only human - for being right when they've been wrong. And he knows that there might be trouble ahead, as I said. But I think this is very, very important for him. It gives him a new freedom and a new self-confidence. He confronted many critics.

"I don't think anybody after this is going to be able to say of Tony Blair that he's somebody who is driven by the drift of public opinion, or focus groups, or opinion polls. He took all of those on. He said that they would be able to take Baghdad without a bloodbath, and that in the end the Iraqis would be celebrating. And on both of those points he has been proved conclusively right. And it would be entirely ungracious, even for his critics, not to acknowledge that tonight he stands as a larger man and a stronger prime minister as a result." (Marr, BBC 1, News At Ten, April 9, 2003)

Opportunities for a good nose-rubbing never cease to present themselves on that one, yet this is as good a time as any.

The Chicago Tribune also took the opportunity after the 'liberation' to mock "the ridiculous prewar casualty predictions". Martin Woollacott of The Guardian praised Medicin Sans Frontiere for refusing "to join other agencies in what turned out to be inflated predictions about the humanitarian consequences of combat, just as it had earlier refused to accept the huge figures which opponents of sanctions gave for infant deaths."

And so on. Will we ever hear of any of these wise-asses recant? Will Johann Hari ever provide us with a peek at those dodgy documents which allegedly prove that Saddam was planning on knocking off 70,000 Iraqis anyway, so the war 'saved lives'? Or, using his utilitarian logic, will he retract his support for the war? Answer: no.

Reply from author of Lancet report. posted by lenin

The research published in the Lancet claiming a conservative estimate of 100,000 excess deaths as a result of the war on Iraq prompted innumerable 'ah but' replies, claiming that there was something wrong with the research or that it was shoddy or too vague, as well as criticisms of the Lancet from people who have no idea what kind of publication it is and would never in their lives have dreamed of picking up a copy of what is essentially a robustly conservative medical journal. Notable among the former was Fred Kaplan's piece for Slate . It contained many criticisms directed at points already accounted for in the report, but the key issue he raised was as follows:

The report's authors derive this figure by estimating how many Iraqis died in a 14-month period before the U.S. invasion, conducting surveys on how many died in a similar period after the invasion began (more on those surveys later), and subtracting the difference. That difference—the number of "extra" deaths in the post-invasion period—signifies the war's toll. That number is 98,000. But read the passage that cites the calculation more fully:

We estimate there were 98,000 extra deaths (95% CI 8000-194 000) during the post-war period.

Readers who are accustomed to perusing statistical documents know what the set of numbers in the parentheses means. For the other 99.9 percent of you, I'll spell it out in plain English—which, disturbingly, the study never does. It means that the authors are 95 percent confident that the war-caused deaths totaled some number between 8,000 and 194,000. (The number cited in plain language—98,000—is roughly at the halfway point in this absurdly vast range.)

This isn't an estimate. It's a dart board.

This would seem on the face of it to be quite a damning point - research producing conclusions so vague that settling on any one interpretation seems quite arbitrary. Unfortunately, and more or less as I expected, Kaplan did not understand the nature of the research. Correspondence with one of the report's authors has yielded the following:

By Richard Garfield, one of the study's authors.

On page five of the report. second to last paragraph, the authors do
give us
a margin of sampling error. They have not found a hard-and-fast 98,000
additional deaths, but a range from 8,000 to 194,000.


That is correct. Research is more than summarizing data, it is also
interpretation. If we had just visited the 32 neighborhoods without
Falluja and did not look at the data or think about them, we would have
reported 98,000 deaths, and said the measure was so imprecise that there
was a 2.5% chance that there had been less than 8,000 deaths, a 10%
chance that there had been less than about 45,000 deaths,....all of
those assumptions that go with normal distributions. But we had two
other pieces of information. First, violence accounted for only 2% of
deaths before the war and was the main cause of death after the
invasion. That is
something new, consistent with the dramatic rise in mortality and
reduces the likelihood that
the true number was at the lower end of the confidence range. Secondly,
there is the Falluja
data, which imply that there are pockets of Anbar, or other communities
like Falluja, experiencing intense conflict, that have far more deaths
than the rest of the country. We set that aside these data in
statistical analysis because the result in this cluster was such an
outlier, but it tells us that the true death toll is
far more likely to be on the high-side of our point estimate than on the
low side.

Further comment would be superfluous.

100,000 deaths a 'conservative' estimate. posted by lenin

"Here we have a conflict going on in a densely populated urban setting and populations are at risk."


Ordinarily you have to pay for access to this website, but I have cunningly cached it, and so you can access it here . It contains an extensive interview with one of the authors of the report published in the Lancet which estimated 100,000 excess deaths as a result of the war:

IRAQ'D: The number you're citing--100,000 Iraqis dead as a result of the intervention. There have been a number of studies by human rights organizations and other organizations that have put high totals of civilian casualties dramatically lower. The highest total I've seen is 30,000. This is a rather staggeringly high number, and I was wondering if you could explain how your model is a sound and responsible model, methodologically.

BURNHAM: Let me first say that at least in the public health model, we generally have two ways of collecting information. One, we have passive data collection, and that's like doctors turning in their reports, and the hospitals filling out their data sheets and so forth. And then we have active surveillance: You go out in the community and actually find what's going on--how many people have HIV, how many people have TB and so forth. Those numbers [between active and passive collection] are always different. Sometimes they're not so different, sometimes they're dramatically different, because a system just never captures all the things that are happening. That's why we have syntheses and those kinds of things, going out to find where people live and getting data from them directly.

...

Now, you can argue, is this increased mortality rate 70,000? Is it 60,000, is it 150,000, is it 200,000? Our best guess, on a conservative side, is 100,000. But it could be less and it could be more. Because just by the statistical nature of this thing, the kind of zone around this number where we are sure this answer truly lies is fairly broad. It's a national survey, it's a massive survey, but it's not a national census.

...

IRAQ'D: Was this study peer reviewed?

BURNHAM: Oh, my goodness, was it ever. [Laughs] First off, nothing, nothing ever gets in the Lancet without a vigorous peer review. It's heavily peer-reviewed. And in the case of this article, it went through the full editorial review board several times and they sent it out for multiple reviews. I've written a few papers for the Lancet over the years and I've never had anything like the scrutiny that this one had.

...

Here's a conflict situation. Militaries, by their very nature, do not count civilian casualties. You can't blame them for that, because that's just how they operate. Yet here we have a conflict going on in a densely populated urban situation and populations are at risk. Somebody needs to look at what the public health implications are.

This is a study, as the authors note, with many limitations which they have attempted to account for in presenting the results. It has been vigorously peer-reviewed. It has estimated 100,000 excess deaths on account of the war as a 'conservative' figure. Unsurprisingly, Downing Street and many helpful media outlets have already produced a series of accusations and "ah buts" based on limitations which the authors have already acknowledged and discounted for.

Blog wars: Kampf vs Kamm. posted by lenin

Check this out. And this , from Mr Kampf's latest:

Lachrymal troglodytes.
My recent article on Oxfam's disgracefully anti-American campaign on 'fair trade coffee' provoked the following unsolicited & terse response from their press office:

Dear Mr Kampf,

We have so far been unable to deal with your many requests for information as we have been inundated with queries from campaigners and media organisations. Let me take this opportunity to assure you that there was no question of us temporising, or seeking to 'cover' our 'flaccid fundaments' as you put it (and in the future we would prefer any correspondence to adhere to minimal standards of politeness)...

Disgraceful.

Hitchens on Zarqawi posted by lenin

Norman Finkelstein has suggested that Christopher Hitchens saw 9/11 as an opportunity to get out of the Left, a disaffiliation he had apparently been considering for some time. In his interview with Johann Hari , he describes how as early as the mid-1990s he found neoconservatives more inclined to his views on foreign policy than the left. He had also explained some years before 9/11 that the 'game of socialism' was over. If true, this would explain the jaw-dropping hyperbole, slander and fabulation that has characterised Hitchens' writing since.

To illustrate the former, I offer a few highlights from Hitchens' latest from the Mirror, entitled 'The New Enemy of Humanity':

1) "JUST try this thought: what if the battle against Abu Musad [sic] al-Zarqawi is now more significant than the hunt for Osama bin Laden?

Consider: bin Laden hasn't been heard of, even in one of those scratchy and inconclusive audiotapes of his, for many moons."

2) "The last part of that might be the most significant one: a letter carried by a known Zarqawi associate, with the excellent name of Ghul, was intercepted some months ago. It was addressed to bin Laden, and it proposed that the easiest way to destroy any post-war settlement in Iraq was to incite a civil war between Sunni and Shia."

3) "Until recently, it has been surprisingly easily accepted that there is scant evidence for any tie between Saddam and al-Qaeda. But it begins to look rather as if Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, in person and in action, IS that tie."

Several remarks suggest themselves, so I'll deal with them ordinally, as above.

1 Whatever one thinks of the hyping of bin Laden's reputation, the suggestion that the threat from al-Zarqawi is so great as to exceed that posed by Al Qaeda is palpably absurd. One way of expressing this point is to note that the Bush administration knew the whereabouts of Zarqawi's base in Kurdish controlled Iraq, had much greater access to it than anywhere else in Iraq, and chose not to destroy it. Further, of 3000 resistance attacks against occupation forces, only six can be attributed with certainty to Zarqawi . It is even questionable whether al-Zarqawi is actually operating in al-Tawhid wal-Jihad. Noone has claimed to see him alive since 2001. Tawhid wal-Jihad do not even account for the entirety of the 'foreign fighters' alleged to be operating in Iraq, but even those account for only 5-10% of the overall resistance force according to coalition sources. (This estimate was made before the dramatic growth of the domestic resistance in Fallujah, Najaf and elsewhere).

2 The reports of a letter on a CD being kept on or near the person of Hassan Ghul when he was arrested earlier this year have been contradictory, probably for the excellent reason that they are untrue. For instance, while the New York Times reported that the discovery of this document coincided with the arrest of Hassan Ghul, and was located in a suspected Al Qaeda 'safe house' in Baghdad (this was the line from intelligence officials) on its way to be delivered to bin Laden in Afghanistan, the reports :

Hassan Ghul, described as the most senior associate of Osama bin Laden found in Iraq, was picked up last week in the northern part of the country by Kurdish forces, the official said. "He was a senior facilitator who was caught coming into the country," the official said. [Emphasis added]

If he was on his way out of Iraq to deliver the letter, it seems strange that he was also sneaking into the country. This inconsistency, I might add, is replicated across several reports - and all of them cite intelligence officials. Further, for reasons I now come to, the idea that this one-legged, possibly dead Jihadist is serenading Al Qaeda is counterintuitive and highly improbable.

3 Even Donald Rumsfeld has given up on any connection between Hussein and Al Qaeda . The CIA report that they can find no compelling evidence of a link even between Zarqawi and Al Qaeda. But the story of Zarqawi, who is after all supposed to have been Al Qaeda's "ambassador" to Iraq, militates against such a view in any case. The first obstacle is the fact that Zarqawi has always operated independently of bin Laden, and, according to al-Tauhid suspects arrested in Germany in the late 1990s (al Tauhid was a group working under Zarqawi at the time), he is a rival of bin Laden, not an ally. That is, his goal was to provide an alternative to bin Laden's outfit, not to work with it. The most likely ideological difference is that bin Laden's group has disapproved of attacks on co-religionists - they have even gone so far as to issue apologies where their attacks have caused 'Muslim collateral damage'. Zarqawi, by contrast, appears to be profoundly anti-Shi'ite and, if he is indeed associated with Tawhid wal Jihad, could hardly be accused of going soft on his brethren. (Jason Burke, Al Qaeda: The True Story of Radical Islam, 2003, pp 270-1). The second hurdle is that, while Hitchens discusses Zarqawi's alleged activities in the Kurdish controlled North, he does so very much in the manner of Colin Powell in early 2003, ignoring the fact that the group he was then working with - Ansar al-Islam - was an anti-Saddam Islamist faction. Indeed, even Colin Powell has since paused to acknowledge that there was no 'smoking gun' about this alleged collaboration - uncharacteristically, Powell riots in understatement.

Indeed, intelligence experts have ridiculed the claims made in this regard by Bush administration officials, so devoutly echoed by Hitchens:

"Militarily, their statements are almost absurd," said Anthony Cordesman, a national security and military intelligence expert for the Center for Strategic and International Studies. "There is no evidence of activity … by extremist terrorist groups affiliated with al-Qaida."

Administration officials have admitted that there never was any solid evidence of such a connection. Indeed, the 9/11 commission went so far as to suggest that if bin Laden was interested in such an alliance, it was roundly rejected by the Iraqi government.


The only story that obtains here is that so far there is no solid proof that a) Zarqawi is even still alive, b) he operates in Iraq as a leader of Tawhid wal-Jihad, c) that he has ever had any contact with Saddam Hussein much less worked with him, d) that he has ever had any connection with Osama bin Laden. On the contrary, most reliable evidence suggests that a) if Zarqawi is alive and operating in Iraq, he represents a minute anti-Shi'ite bloc of extremist Wahabbis rather than a significant component of the resistance, b) he is bin Laden's rival, not his ally and, c) he worked against Hussein, not on his behalf. That, of course, is in the realm of hard evidence, now foreign territory to the once redoubtable Hitchens. Almost every single story that has emerged as 'final proof' of that ill-starred special relationship between bin Laden and Hussein is demolished in short order. There was no Prague meeting , as Czech intelligence officials confirmed at the time. Numerous other shocking tales have collapsed with similar speed.

It does not require even half an education to guess why Hitchens feels obliged to adduce flimsy evidence and extrapolate fanciful conclusions from it. At all costs, the 'war on terror' must be just, and how could it be more just than if the current war had been initiated by Hussein's perfidy, and if indeed the threat now posed within Iraq by Zarqawi is even greater than the menace of bin Laden. It is deflating to see Hitchens reduced to such lifeless shibboleths and gimcrack foolishness, and the only bright side is that his position as a Washington propagandist is so transparent that only the wilfully purblind could possibly be taken in.

I feel pretty... posted by lenin

I guess I'm just in that kind of mood:

I feel pretty,
Oh so pretty
I feel pretty and witty and bright
And I pity
Any girl
Who isn't me tonight

I feel charming,
Oh so charming
It's alarming how charming I feel
And so pretty
That I hardly
Can believe
I'm real

See the pretty girl in that mirror there
Who can that attractive girl be?
Such a pretty face,
Such a pretty dress,
Such a pretty smile,
Such a pretty me

I feel stunning
And entracing,
Feel like running and dancing for joy
For I'm loved
By a pretty
Wonderful boy!

Have you met my good friend Maria,
The craziest girl on the block
You'll know her
The minute you see her
She's the one
Who is in an advanced state of shock

She thinks she's in love,
She thinks she's in Spain
She isn't in love,
She's merely insane

It must be the heat,
Or some rare disease
Or too much to eat,
Or maybe it's fleas

Keep away from her,
Send for Chino
This is not the Maria we know
Modest and pure,
Polite and refined
Well-bred and mature
And out of her mind!

I feel pretty,
Oh so pretty
That the city
Should give me it's key
A committee should
Be organized
To honor me

I feel dizzy,
I feel sunny
I feel fizzy and funny and fine
And so pretty,
Miss America
Can just
Resign

Leonard Bernstein - Stephen Sondheim

Normal service will be resumed tomorrow.

War kills 100,000 Iraqis. posted by lenin

From Reuters :

Deaths of Iraqis have soared to 100,000 above normal since the Iraq war mainly due violence and many of the victims have been women and children, public health experts from the United States said Thursday.
"Making conservative assumptions, we think that about 100,000 excess deaths, or more have happened since the 2003 invasion of Iraq," researchers from Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in Baltimore, Maryland said in a report published online by The Lancet medical journal.

"Violence accounted for most of the excess death and air strikes from (U.S.-led) coalition forces accounted for the most violent deaths," the report added.

...

"The risk of death from violence in the period after the invasion was 58 times higher than in the period before the war," Les Roberts and his colleagues said in the report which compared Iraqi deaths during 14.6 months before the invasion and the 17.8 months after it.

He added that violent deaths were widespread and were mainly attributed to coalition forces.

"Most individuals reportedly killed by coalition forces were women and children," Roberts added. [Emphasis added]

These deaths don't merely fall into the hands of those who waged the war, of course. Those who legitimised the war on the grounds of 'saving lives' and 'humanitarianism' are also culpable. Culpably culpable, in fact.

Assassinating the President. posted by lenin

This isn't a compendium of helpful pointers. Let's face it, if you wanted to blow Bush's brains out, even from close range, you'd have to be a fucking good shot, and I don't know how to help you with that. I did train in the use of spud-guns for a few years, and my lasting regret when Diana kicked the bucket was that it wasn't as a result of one of my little nuggets of root vegetable. But I'm not here to mope.

No, I'm responding to the humourless, bizarre and utterly futile complaints about this humorous article for The Guardian's weekend Guide section. Dead Men Left has summed up more or less what I think about it, but I just have a few other comments to add.

Normblog doesn't attend the Tomb any more, for understandable reasons, but I still malinger round his place, stalking, sniffing the socks, slurping from milk bottles and so on. It feels homely, if slightly too staid for my liking. And I was dismayed to discover the following :

Except calling for a person's murder isn't OK: not in jest, not in general, and not - in particular - in the times we're living through.

For those not in the know, and too lazy to have pursued the link above, Brooker's article concluded with the words:

On November 2, the entire civilised world will be praying, praying Bush loses. And Sod's law dictates he'll probably win, thereby disproving the existence of God once and for all. The world will endure four more years of idiocy, arrogance and unwarranted bloodshed, with no benevolent deity to watch over and save us. John Wilkes Booth, Lee Harvey Oswald, John Hinckley Jr - where are you now that we need you?

Okay, so what is the thought here? Norm and the commentators he associates himself with (Marcus from Harry's Place among others) think that a) this can't be funny, because it calls for someone to be killed and b) this is particularly so "in the times we're living through". This rather narrow and limited sense of humour isn't for me to waste my time on, but one thought that suggests itself presents itself as follows - get a grip! What? Is some young fundamentalist who happens to read The Guardian going to scan through this article, fail to spot the irony, and think - "hmmm, good idea!"

It's ridiculous, this spew of offense, and I expect it has more to do with the desire in some corners to impute something vile to the "moral universe" of the antiwar Left. Just a thought.

Meantime, why not have a listen to some old Bill Hicks CDs? This guy knew who ought to have been killed. "Isn't it interesting how we kill the good guys and let the demons run amok? Martin Luther King, murdered. John Lennon, murdered. Malcolm X, murdered. Ronald Reagan - wounded."

Update: John Kerry favours the odd assassination joke; so do certain Republican senators . But, it turns out jokes about assassinations just aren't funny . And the following, translated from ancient heiroglyphs on the walls of the Tomb, are just completely out of order and there really is no need for it:

"There should be more US Presidents like Kennedy: dead."

"Bono has urged Tony Blair and Gordon Brown to be the 'Lennon & McCartney' of world politics - which at least gives us a fifty-fifty chance of Blair being shot."

Tsk! I haven't felt such a stab in the heart since Fanny Kaplan stuck a bullet or two in my direction.

Fabian's Hammer posted by lenin

Slavoj Zizek once argued that China was the perfect capitalist state - because it both provided the conditions for investment and development and also used its oppressive apparatus to break working class organisation in advance. As I am presently studying the rise of the modern state and its relationship to capitalism, I'll have more to say on this at another time.

However, I just wanted to draw readers' attention to Fabian's Hammer , a left-wing blog on matters relating to China. Now, I say left-wing - unfortunately, the author is a bit of a fan of the hawkish liberals who favour neoconservative wars. Well, don't let that deter you for a second, just let it inform your reading of what is otherwise an excellent and informative site. There isn't much to be said for the prose style, but it is concise and doesn't piddle around.

Although only a few political amoebas still try to claim that the Left owes the Chinese dictatorship some allegiance, it is good to be kept up to date on the workers' movement and its struggles with the atrocious government. Check it out.

Oh, and apologies to anyone who was angered by my indifference at John Peel's death. But give me a break, here - I live in a Tomb, for Christ's sake! Eh, eh?

Eminem vs Bush. posted by lenin

I got into hip-hop around the time I caught a glimpse of Eminem dressed up as Britney Spears in one of his videos. He just looked so damned inviting that I immediately stormed my local HMV, cursing a furious erection as I did, and picked up all the Eminem material I could find - two vicious, hilarious, misogynistic, drug-fuelled, subversive, hateful albums. I gobbled it up like ropes of milky protein.

All the while I prayed that this one-in-a-lifetime talent would ditch the misogyny and gay jokes and go political. Hence, my delight at this :

Eminem's upcoming album, Encore, due November 16th, features the fierce anti-Bush song "Mosh," which was leaked online today.
In the Dr. Dre-produced track, the rapper denounces the war in Iraq. "Rebel with a rebel yell, raise hell," Eminem raps. "We gonna let him know/Stomp, push, shove, mush, fuck Bush!/Until they bring our troops home." Later in the song, he adds, "Let the president answer on higher anarchy/Strap him with an AK-47, let him go fight his own war/Let him impress daddy that way . . . No more blood for oil."

"[Bush] has been painted to be this hero, and he's got our troops over there dying for no reason," says Eminem in an upcoming Rolling Stone cover story (on stands November 5th). "I think he started a mess . . . He jumped the gun, and he fucked up so bad he doesn't know what to do right now . . . We got young people over there dyin', kids in their teens, early twenties that should have futures ahead of them. And for what? It seems like a Vietnam 2. Bin Laden attacked us, and we attacked Saddam. Explain why that is. Give us some answers."

The thirty-two-year-old rapper says he has registered to vote for the first time -- but stops short of endorsing a candidate. "Whatever my decision is, I would like to see Bush out of office," Eminem says. "I don't wanna see my little brother get drafted -- he just turned eighteen. People think their votes don't count, but people need to get out and vote. Every motherfuckin' vote counts."

Hmmm. While I'm at it, I'd better register my complete lack of concern about this . Oh, shut up. Actually, I'll shut up. As my mother used to tell me "If you can't think of anything nice to say, I'll fucking kill you!"

Update: Watch the video . Doug Ireland is a convert .

The Salubrious Mr Kampf. posted by lenin

Confession time. It's been a few months now, and not much response. I had expected a spot in The Guardian, an interview on BBC Newsnight conducted by a blushing Kirsty Wark. Even a gently mocking segment with Graham Norton in which he might make a few saucy comments. Not a bit of it. Pooter Geek has been nice, as has Dead Men Left and Charlotte Street . Nick Barlow gave it a mention. Squander Two linked to it. Bertram Online couldn't quite tell the difference from the original. The Shamrockshire Eagle gave it a plug. Even Oliver Kamm visited and had a look for about ten minutes, if his IP address provides a reasonable benchmark.

Well, much as it matters now, I am responsible for this . I was briefly ashamed of having taken any time or trouble to malign a fine, conscientious character from the right-wing of the social-democratic movement. Then, however, it occurred to me that at least I am not responsible for this .

About which, Charlotte Street has a few pertinent words .

If anyone out there resembles this character known as Mr Kampf, I am deeply, deeply sorry. I'm not sorry if you're offended, I'm just sorry that you are Oliver Kamm.

Update: For all my efforts, I could never have concocted anything as riproaringly hilarious, as desperately disingenuous, as feebly bourgeois as this . Must try harder.

Stopping the war; ending the occupation. posted by lenin

Let's first of all be clear on what the stakes are. The occupation of Iraq is unpopular with Iraqis, and increasingly so with the populations of the occupying countries. In Britain, 71% of the public want the government to set a date for the withdrawal of troops from Iraq, 'a big swing in public mood since May when 45 per cent of British voters told ICM the troops should remain in Iraq "for as long as necessary".' This is because the failure of the occupation is blazingly apparent except to the wilfully purblind ("give it a few more months, darlings, we'll settle the natives down!"). It is a failure because it is unpopular, because those conducting the war have promulgated policies that have made most Iraqis worst off. The dogmatic insistence on privatising whatever was public, the military suppression of dissidence, the fencing off of entire villages, the house raids, the indiscriminate bombing, the shooting up of cars - the result of all of this has been super-inflating unemployment, crime and instability, the complete erosion of any hope that the occupation might deliver, as a bare minimum, some peace and freedom. It has supplied resistance groups with anything between 20-50,000 active supporters . The news headlines have been dominated by kidnappings, but Iraqi Democrats Against the Occupation report:

The wave of kidnappings in Iraq reflects one small aspect of the deteriorating security situation under occupation. The predominant picture, however, is that of widespread resistance to US-British occupation of Iraq, resulting in more than 87 attacks per day on occupation forces, and of daily bombardment by US forces of Falluja and other areas of Iraq, killings many Iraqi citizens daily. These escalations seem to be in preparation for the next war against the people of Iraq, a war that Tony Blair and the US government have already started talking about.

They cite the left-wing Baghdad newspaper, Al Ghad :

The occupation forces instigated the present round of fighting, according to a plan to end the mass movement of the 'Al Sadr Current' with brute force in order to silence all patriotic opposition and to break the people's will and finally impose a regime which is to the liking of the USA. They used the local police to provoke the fighting, after their failure to rule Iraq directly; they introduced the Interim Governing Council, composed of some political parties, which collaborated with the occupation. These parties lost all credibility with the people. The occupiers presented the Interim Governing Council as a legal entity to the international community and followed that by the current interim regime and the so called interim Parliament, the members of which are chosen from the same parties. The occupiers are still waging war all over Iraq's other cities especially Al Thoura/ Sadr town east of Baghdad, Tell Afar, Fallujah and other southern cities.

Last weekend, up to 100,000 demonstrators rallied through London to demand an end to the occupation - this was a demonstration that had received very little advance publicity and (to my dismay) not a great deal of campaigning either. Many critics of the Stop the War Coalition (STWC) have pointed out that as a successful mass movement, it failed in stopping the war. Well, like the UN inspectors, we could do with a little more time. It was always going to be a difficult task to stop a highly ideological Prime Minister with water-spined backbenchers falling all over him from following through on plans he had long developed with his fundamentalist ally in the Whitehouse. But the STWC clearly still poses a threat to the Prime Minister, to MPs who supported the war and to those who wish to prolong the occupation. It still works, for all that has been said about it, and said against it.

Now, let's turn to the split rumours , which Doug Ireland has provided a compact summary of. Unison have allegedly threatened to quit the coalition, because of claims that it has been seeking to undermine Dave Prentis, the general-secretary. Before I go any further, I think it bears remembering the most Unison members are unlikely to support such a move. Mick Rix, the left-wing former head of Aslef, resigned from the steering committee because the STWC had criticised Abdullah Muhsin's role, as a representative of the Iraqi Federation of Trade Unions (IFTU) in swaying the vote at Labour conference against the resolutions in favour of withdrawing British troops. Unison's deputy general-secretary also complains that:

"It's not for us to tell unions in other countries how to operate. We have to listen to what they want ... We have told the coalition we are considering our position."

He is perfectly aware, of course, that the criticism was directed at activities in this country, which were part of a stitch-up organised by the leadership of the Labour Party.

Muhsin, to his credit, has tried to deny his role in seeking to influence the vote - which at least displays some awareness of what a disgrace his actions were, particularly since his union is nominally opposed to the occupation. Unfortunately, Unison have already published his open letter to delegates, proving that he did. He had previously lobbied on Allawi's behalf - perhaps in part because the IFTU is the only legal workers' organisation in Allawi's Iraq .

Other trade unions in Iraq also sent a letter to the Labour conference , but it was not prepared and handed to delegates by the Labour party machinery:

Our appeal and demand from the TUC conference and the trade unions, and the freedom seekers is to support the other force which stands against the terrorist front by its radical and human banners. It was you who stood against the war on Iraq and it gave people of Iraq a great hope and proved that our world is not only terrorists’ grave yard, and it is not only warmongers’ world. However, there is a radical, human, and strong front operates in the political arena and if we get together and unite, then the world would change to a peaceful, secure, and well-being world. A world free of terror, and terrorism. An egalitarian world, and freedom for all.

We under the leadership of the worker communist party of Iraq, were a part of your movement. Our demand from your conference today is the demand of a movement which sees its destiny from your solidarity for a better world. The worker’s movement, and organisations in Iraq are in more need than any other time for your support. A support to enable the workers to establish a government that recognizes their freedom and workers’ rights and to save them from war, hunger, and unemployment.

I don't know how this can have got by those eager devotees of the Iraqi working class within the Labour Party.

The coalition were not the only ones to criticise the IFTU. Hani Lazim of Iraqi Democrats Against the Occupation explained :

THE IFTU claims that it speaks on behalf of Iraqi trade unions. This is not true. They are self appointed leaders.

There are four trade union movements in Iraq. The first one was a coalition of the left. The US, backed up by the interim president Iyad Allawi and his entourage, went in and smashed it.

Abdullah Muhsin lives in Britain. He is a political refugee and a leading member of the Iraqi Communist Party, a party that is collaborating with the occupation. The Communist Party has ministers in the interim governing council.

These people collaborated with Saddam in the 1970s, using violence against anyone who resisted his rule. They shouted their heads off in support of the Soviet Union in the 1980s. When the Soviet Union went, they jumped to the CIA.

Some trade unionists have officially invited Muhsin here. There is a question mark over some of the people who are promoting him and the sincerity of their stand on the war. The IFTU has to be opposed.

If you are part of a government that allows the US to bomb towns like Fallujah and the al-Sadr area of Baghdad, don’t tell me you oppose the occupation. It has allowed areas like Tal Afar to be emptied, and people are forced to live as refugees. Most parts of Iraq are very angry. People have had one and a half years with no chance of a job.

Now, whatever view you take of the IFTU, there is no reason on earth why their vigorous campaigning on behalf of the continued occupation of Iraq should not be criticised by the anti-occupation Left, particularly since that campaigning has included collusion with those who have been bombing Iraq not only since Spring of 2003, but for over a decade. There seems to be a view solidifying in the leadership of the TUC that the occupation should continue - which is exactly how they voted at Labour conference, despite the positions adopted democratically at their own conferences. As The Guardian reports:

The TUC is trying to raise cash for the federation, and seems to be increasingly supportive of its view that the troops are needed to prevent Iraq breaking up or an Islamic fundamentalist state being formed.

It is tempting to conclude that the union leaders are eager to find a way of breaking from their commitments and betraying the decisions of their members without appearing to do so. Hence, apparently baseless accusations against the STWC of attempting to 'undermine' Dave Prentis (as if he needed any help), and frothy-mouthed assertions about STWC "abuse" of Abdullah Muhsin.

So, my suggestion is this: those union leaders genuinely committed to ending the brutal occupation of Iraq will seek to resolve their differences with the STWC and dedicate themselves to supporting its efforts. Those eager to make a break for opportunistic reasons of their own (perhaps relating to that awesome Warwick agreement ) will continue to bleat about abuse and trump up bogus charges. The red herrings about past support for the Soviet Union will be dragged out (as if many pro-war leftists had not been ardent Stalinists at one time or another).

For the rest of us, there is ample public support to be working with. The arguments against the occupation are rock solid and the time is ripe to hit hard with them. It is time to get the troops out. The outspoken attacks on the Prime Minister by Paul Bigley, and by Rose and Maxine Gentle, have blasted that golden gloriole of his to shreds. Labour MPs who supported the war are fearful for their constituencies now that British troops may be deployed to help the US put down the uprising and take back liberated cities. It is time to end the shameful public displays of bitching and get down to the hard task of not only ending this war and occupation, but also making it nigh on impossible for a future government to secure sufficient consent for future wars. This is no time for more Life of Brian-style splitting.

Update: Dead Men Left has a blazing critique of the IFTU in a statement from Iraqi exile Sami Ramadani . It is quite long, but well worth the read.

New Links. posted by lenin

Just to introduce readers to a few new links on the "New Blog Roll" section (and therefore divert your attention from my recent lethargy).

Doug Ireland is a quare Mick, and this is not the only felicitous personality trait he shares with Oscar Wilde. A friend and foe of Christoper Hitchens, sometime radical journalist and life-long member of the human race (not as statistically probably as it may seem), he is also a witty and erudite commentator on contemporary politics. He calls his blog, DIRELAND, which is not merely a compression of his delightfully proletarian name, but also an allusion to the land-mass on which he subsists. (What? Well, think about it... no, think some more... ah well, fuck off then!)

Bayou Ranter is yet another of those US conservatives I seem to periodically attract. I don't mind as such - in fact, I rather like their attention. Political conservatism is a strange animal, in that one often finds its professed adherents nodding enthusiastically at something espoused by a member of the Far Left. The neocons will often evince a demented concern for human rights (demented, because it usually involves suspending precisely those rights for some unfortunate group of people - Iraqis, Afghans, guests at Guantanamo). Paleoconservatives will mount principled arguments against imperialism and authoritarianism (except when it comes to the refinements of Cold War measures against the commies, at home and abroad). Tory wets will enthuse about social justice and inclusivity like simpering liberals. I don't know how to place the Bayou Ranter in all this, but his/her attention is welcome and you may as well pop in and say hello. It's only polite.


More to follow...

Anti-Americanism & Iraqi Democracy. posted by lenin

Just links this morning. Over at Charlotte Street, there are a couple of excellent posts on America and its discontents. First, on anti-Americanism :

In fact the Anti-Americans and those who casually use the term ‘Anti-American’ are joined by a common error, a common inadmissible conflation. They make some particular object or attitude stand for the empty universality of ‘America’. It is noticeable that only certain things are conflated with “America’, nailed to this ‘master signifier’. Not jazz or the American novel, not the American Trade Union tradition, not New York or Abstract Expressionism and so on and so forth (see Arundhati Roy, below). You can love all these things, but be accused of ‘anti-Americanism’ if you then criticize the actions of a government who failed even to win the popular vote. I recall somebody making the above point, I forget where, but they mentioned the novels of Tony Morrison, James Baldwin; they mentioned Langston Hughes and the Beat poets and a myriad of other things that they loves even as they opposed the war. The reply, quite strikingly, was that non of the things she had mentioned were quintessentially ‘American’ – she had named fringe or oppositional phenomenon. The Republican tradition, on the other hand, was a central part of ‘American tradition’ and if you hated it then it followed that you hated America. This is transparently political of course. Ultimately, we are talking here about hegemony. It is hegemony which attempts to attach some particular content (eg The Republican tradition) to some abstraction, some ‘master signifier’ like America. It is the hegemonic operation which says if you hate x then you hate America (or whatever) or, alternatively, if you hate America you hate Freedom , which tries to make the identification between the master signifier and the particular content indissoluble, self-evident.

Secondly, on the smoldering Bush :

He is designated not by a proper name but by a letter, W., which signifies nothing but the sheer diacritical gap separating him from his Father. He lives in this space, the interstices of the paternal name, like some Lacanian allegory. Puling son of Noboddady, seemingly baffled by his own existence. The earpiece of the Symbolic Order introduces something foreign into his head – it is language. It passes through the refractory medium of his body and exits the mouth – only a few paralogical ripples betray the presence of the suffering body.

The blankness of Bush, his emptyness, the absence of distinctive qualities... these are not to be thought of in contradiction to his status as 'leader'. On the contrary, they are essential components. Bush is nobody and everyone, a template that any American might fill. He can act as a cypher, a mouthpiece for other's voices (and this is of course given an uncannily literal twist).

Meanwhile, the Washington Post reports that the Islamists are likely to win any future election in Iraq, that Allawi's support has plummeted, that more people blame the 'coalition' for violence in Iraq than 'foreign fighters' or even 'terrorists'. This must be quite a blog for the Post, which would rather be publishing CIA propaganda .

Finally, I know I shouldn't, but I had a little chuckle over this: culpable and whingeing , indeed! Anyone who relies on a report by the pitiful Con Coughlin in any context is obviously culpable in some sense, but whingeing? Remember what I said about projection...

BBC: No foreign fighters in Fallujah. posted by lenin

Fallujah is being bombed because... well, we are told that al-Zarqawi is there, there are foreign fighters there, we have to uproot them etc. Apparently not :

I am not aware of any foreign fighters in Falluja.

If there are any foreigners here, they have blended in very well with the locals.

Foreigners used to frequent the city in the past, but many of them were forced to leave under a deal the city's leaders struck with the government.

Ninety-nine percent of the fighters here are Fallujans.

Local clan leaders are broadly opposed to any kind of foreign presence in the city because they fear they may be spies.

It is nice to know, however, that as the bombing continues it will cause even more suffering than might otherwise be anticipated because:

Hospitals have all but run out of supplies and most people know this ...

The Iraqi health ministry has not sent any extra supplies.

Food supplies are also running out. All shops are shut.

Some people who fled the city a few days ago have begun returning because they ran out of food.

The recent controversy over sending British troops to more dangerous parts of Iraq may seem, on the face of it, to be a distraction from the main issue, which is that tens of thousands of Iraqis have been slaughtered and they are continuing to be killed by both British and American troops. Some may see it as simple self-regarding nationalism etc. Now, clearly there are problems of consistency for anyone who supported the war, continues to support the occupation and hopes for its success, but somehow wishes to hold back support on this issue. That said, I think we on the anti-war Left have to be very happy that this has erupted in the way that it has. Because, aside from it manifesting the serious worries that backbench MPs have over their electoral base deserting them as the war goes even more pear-shaped, any moves that will limit the efficacy of 'coalition' operations in Iraq must be considered a good thing.

Troops out, Blair out, me in - I think I could run on that slogan and win.

Racism and Conquest in Palestine: 1. posted by lenin

Early Zionist racism

Plan Dalet, the Zionist plan for the ethnic cleansing of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians from what would become the State of Israel, undercuts the mythology that Haganah and the Irgun were compelled by war to expel the Arabs and commit the massacres that they did. (Uri Milstein, an authoritative Israeli military historian, suggests that "every skirmish" in the 1948 war "ended in a massacre of Arabs"). And the reasons for this are reasonably well known - both Labour and Revisionist wings of Zionism were committed to the Greater Israel which would have fluid, biblical borders rather than be contained in a defined land mass. The Zionists had never any intention of accepting even the unfair division of Palestine proffered by either the Peel Commission or, later, the UN. Ben Gurion explained in 1937 that "Transfer [of Palestinians] is what will make possible a comprehensive Jewish settlement programme. Jewish power will increase our possibilities to carry out the transfer on a large scale." Later, he told the Zionist Congress, "we will abolish partition and spread throughout all of Palestine" (quoted in Benny Morris, Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem, p. 24. See, for more on this, Avi Shlaim's The Iron Wall, particularly pp 16-19, or Ilan Pappe's The Making of the Arab-Israeli conflict, 1947-1951).

What remains to be explained is the ease with which these massacres could be carried out, what Norman Finkelstein calls "the unprecedented facility with violence demonstrated by the Jews who conquered Palestine. There is a particular, condescending kind of racism involved in Labour Zionism, for one. After all, David Ben Gurion had it that the "Hebrew worker [would] stand at the vanguard of the movement of liberation and reawakening of Near Eastern peoples". Elsewhere, he averred that the Arab workers would see the profit in the Zionist enterprise since they would see their lot improve by working with sophisticated European labourers who would teach them skills etc. This was mighty generous of Ben Gurion, for it was he who had also accused the Arabs of "destroying" the Land of Israel, even going so far as to claim that the earth had remained fallow for the entire time of the (mythical) period of Jewish Exile, writing of the "foul miasma" that arose from the earth after being "ploughed for the first time in 2000 years". (See Norman Finkelstein, Image and Reality of the Israel-Palestine Conflict, 1995, p111; John Rose, The Myths of Zionism, 2004, p14).

Of course, the racism on the Revisionist side was always more immediately noxious. Vladimir Jabotinsky, an admirer of Mussolini, believed simply in the superiority of the Jews as a people. The infamous Rabbi Meir Kahane, founder of the Jewish Defense League, once wrote that:

"We are different, we are a chosen one, and a special one, selected for purity and holiness. There is no reason to being a Jew, unless there is something intrinsically different about him. No, we are not equal to Gentiles, we are different. We are higher."

Anti-Arab racism had in fact been evident from the first wave of settlers in 1882, who (Anita Shapira reports) behaved as if "they were the rightful lords and masters of this land", while they believed Arabs "respected strength and that the language of physical force was the only idiom [they] understood". When any of the natives got out of line, the colonial instinct was to reach for the whip. Ahad Ha'am wrote in 1891 that the Zionists behaved "hostilely and cruelly to the Arabs, encroaching on them unjustly, beating them disgracefully for no good reason" - and they did not "hesitate to boast about their deeds". The Arabs were seen as 'sly', 'underhanded', 'cruel', 'cunning', 'immoral', 'lazy' and so forth. Hebrew writer Y H Brenner wrote, upon arriving at Haifa, "there's another sort of alien in the world that one must suffer from. ... Even from that filthy, contaminated lot, you have to suffer." Uri Zvi Greenberg, a Labour Zionist in the 1920s, was also the author of Hebrew hate literature against the Arabs, describing the Arab as "a murderer, knife honed and dipped in poison". Anita Shapira recalls that socialist Zionists like Ben Gurion were "not repelled" by Greenberg's "malevolent description of Arabs" because they "answered to their 'gut perceptions' of reality". Another Labour Zionist, Tabenkin, expatiated frequently on the need for peace, yet managed to pepper his statements with descriptions of Arab barbarism, and the insistence that they "understood one thing only, namely, force".

As the Arab revolt reached its peak, the labour Zionist press denounced the Arabs as "murderers", "bands of robbers", "desert savages", "jackals", "barbarians" and so forth. Eliezer Yaffe, an anarchist, derided the "savages of the desert, who live by the sword, by robbery". Indeed, as the Arab revolt went on, the fabled "purity of arms" (in which the Zionists would allegedly never harm Arab civilians) was quietly dispensed with and young Jewish men were recruited by the British. They inflicted collective punishment on Arab villages deemed to be hiding rebel gangs and were, as recorded in some posts below, quite ruthless in the use of torture and execution. (Norman Finkelstein, op cit, pp 111-4).

One recalls this correlation between anti-Arab racism and the Zionist "facility with violence" when Ehud Barak says that lying is a cultural trait of the Arabs , or when Benny Morris - a supposedly left-wing Israeli historian - finds the time to condemn Ben Gurion for being too soft on the Arabs and not expelling the whole ruddy lot of them from the entire land of Israel. Zionism is a racist ideology and a racist practise. Future posts will talk more about the structural racism of the Israeli state and modern racism against the Palestinians.

Israel is a racist state (redux) posted by lenin

Not only can you not say certain things, it seems, but soon they will be against the law (if you live in France). A report commissioned by the French government, endorsed by Dominique Villepin, has reached some disgraceful conclusions:

Pronounced anti-Zionism amounted to a form of anti-semitism and should be equally reprimanded, [Mr Rufin] said. "Anti-Zionism legitimises the Palestinian armed struggle even when it targets innocent civilians," he said. "Thus it could also legitimise violent acts committed in France. By the same token, accusations of racism, apartheid and nazism against Israel could by extension put France's own Jewish population in danger."

Among possible ways forward, Mr Rufin urged legislation specifically targeting anti-semitic and racist acts. French law generally views racial motivation as an aggravating factor in an attack, not as an offence in itself. The public expression of anti-semitic or racist views or insults is covered only by the highly complex and unwieldy 1881 Press Act. (Via Jews Sans Frontieres

For shame - opposing a racist state will now be considered anti-Semitic!

The nonsense of conflating criticism of Israel with Jew-hatred is not merely shameful because of the implications for free speech - it is a stain on the struggle of anti-racists everywhere who have always opposed all forms of racism, be it against Jew or Arab. For this reason, my next few posts will isolate the specifically racist themes in Zionist ideology and Israeli policy. For now, you can have a read of this .

Nader bashing; Kerry delusions. posted by lenin

Surprisingly, today's Guardian has the usually excellent Gary Younge recycling the Democrats' favourite trope about Ralph Nader taking Republican money:

Many Democrats still loathe Mr Nader, accusing him of handing the election to Mr Bush in 2000 by taking potential votes from Mr Gore. Their contempt has intensified since he decided to run again and took money from prominent Republicans to do so. In the past year they have tried every possible legal means to keep him off the ballot in each state, advising Democrats not to sign his petitions and challenging the signatures he does get.

As my blogging comrade Dead Men Left pointed out when the Observer tried to peddle this nonsense, its a red herring:

[T]hese supposedly Republican backers gave more money to the Democrats: $66,000 for Kerry, $54,000 for Nader. Only 4% of Nader's funding has come from those also funding the Republicans ... And if Republicans have wanted to assist Nader's campaign...? As Lenin didn't say, "the capitalists will sell us the rope with which we will hang them."

Younge also reports a conversation with someone who was interested in voting for Nader, but in the end cast an early ballot for Kerry:

"I liked what he had to say about healthcare, the war and the minimum wage. Nader is my ideal candidate. But Kerry would not appoint justices to the supreme court who would impact on abortion rights, and I decided that was more important to me."

Aside from being a rather miserable reason to vote for deputy dawg, this happens to be completely untrue, as I pointed out some time ago . Kerry has already said and repeated that he "would not hesitate" to appoint anti-abortion judges to the supreme court. Indeed, Kerry goes so far as to stipulate that he has voted for judges who are anti-abortion before. Bush's appointments, by contrast, have so far been impeccably pro-choice.

Younge also turns in a strange in accuracy:

Many of Mr Nader's most prominent supporters, including the film-maker Michael Moore, the academic Noam Chomsky and the campaigning journalist Barbara Ehrenreich, have called on him to stand down.

Moore's actions are a matter of public record, and an unfortunate blemish on a barnstorming radical career. Ehrenreich has attacked Nader's candidacy (suggesting as she did that if Dennis Kucinich failed to become the Democratic presidential candidate that she may have to reconsider her options). But Noam Chomsky has not called on Ralph Nader to stand down. While calling for a vote for Kerry/Edwards in swing states, he has indicated that he himself plans to vote Nader in his safe state and thinks that is "fine".

The fervour with which liberals in the US and UK media have wielded the stick against Nader certainly has something to do with Bush's unforeseen extremism. On the other hand, Kerry has done the old Clinton thang, triangulated, and found a way to repackage almost every element of the Bush gang's agenda in Democrat clothing. It is this latter fact that Kerry's left supporters have so far proven unwilling to confront - and, as it has become more and more obvious just what a dud Kerry is, the attacks on Nader have become more and more hysterical.

Family resemblances and blood relations. posted by lenin

Zionism is not fascism and Ariel Sharon is not Adolf Hitler. That ends my tour of the patently obvious. I would now like to take you through some of the ideological overlaps between Zionism and fascism - simply because it needs bringing attention to. If you don't like it, discount for prejudice, and compare it to something else you find even more offensive:

The full gamut of the Zionist movement made much of what was dubbed the 'historical right' ([Anita] Shapira also refers to it as the 'proprietary right') of the Jews to Palestine. It was a "right that required no proof ... a fundamental component of all Zionist programmes". Steeped in German Romanticism, the claim was that because the forefathers of the Jewish people had originated and been buried in Palestine, Jews could only - and only Jews could - establish an authentic, organic connection with the soil there. Noting the 'German source', Shapira points to the 'recurrent motif' in Zionism of the 'mysticism that links blood and soil', the "cult of heroes, death and graves", the belief that "graves are the source of the vital link with the land, and they generate the loyalty of man to that soil", and that "blood fructifies the soil (in an almost literal sense)", and so on. Even so sober a thinker as Ahad Ha'am could aver that Palestine was "a land to which our historical right is beyond doubt and has no need for far-fetched proofs". The veteran Zionist leader, Mennahem Ussishkin, pushed the logic of the argument to its ultimate, if fantastic, conclusion, stating that "the Arabs recognise unconditionally the historic title of the Jews to the land".

This sort of 'historic right' was also siezed by the Romantic precursors of Nazism and, with a vengeance, by the Nazis themselves, to justify the conquest of the East. Germany was said to have legitimate claims on Slavic territory (especially but not limited to Poland) since it was "already inhabited by the Germans in primeval times", "fertilised by the most noble ancient German blood", "germanic for many centuries and long before a Slav set foot there", "teutonic-German Volksbloden for 3,000 years as far as the Vistula. ... In the 6th and 7th Century after Christ the Slavs pushed outward from their eastern homelands and into the ancient German land... - admittedly only for a few hundred years", etc. The Slavic 'interlopers', by contrast, were seen as 'history's squatters' who merely 'existed' in surroundings that they 'could not master' ... Thus in 1939, the eminent pro-Nazi historian, Albert Brackmann, portrayed Germany as Europe's 'defender' and 'bulwark' against the 'East', and the 'bearers of civilisation' against 'barbarism'. A half century earlier, Theodor Herzl portrayed the prospective Jewish state as Europe's "wall of defense against Asia", and an "outpost of civilisation against barbarism".

...

[T]he claim of Jewish 'homelessness' is founded in a cluster of assumptions that both negates the idea of liberal citizenship and duplicates the anti-Semitic one that the state belongs to the majority ethnic nation. In a word, the Zionist case for a Jewish state is as valid or as invalid as he anti-Semitic case for an ethnic state that marginalizes Jews. (Norman Finkelstein, Image and Reality of the Israel-Palestine Conflict, Verso, 1995, pp 100-1).

Zionism does not merely seek to create a Jewish state on someone else's land - in doing so, it internalises the anti-Semitic view of Jews as being somehow 'foreign' to Europe. Hence, the notoriously shameful behaviour of the Zionist Federation of Germany during the 1930s, and Ben Gurion's interesting thought as Jews were being gassed by the Nazis: "If I knew that it would be possible to save all the children in Germany by bringing them over to England and only half of them by transporting them to Eretz Israel, then I opt for the second alternative." Hence, the President of the World Zionist Organisation telling the world as far back as 1912: “each country can only absorb a limited number of Jews … Germany has already too many Jews”. Interestingly, the above argument often yields the old argumentum ad baculum fallacy - you cannot hold this view because it could easily lead to, or could be interpreted as, and may give succour to... Rarely is it argued against on its factual merits.

"Israel is a racist state". posted by lenin

There are some things you just can't say :

"You say Israel is a democratic state, let me rapidly add that it is also a racist state...The law of return only concerns Jews. What is the basis of Zionism? It is to make a state for the Jews." - Alain Menargues, ex-head of news Radio France International.

One Palestine, Complete. posted by lenin

This posts serves as a prelude to a series of posts I will be writing about why I consider the idea of a 'two-state' solution in Palestine both morally and politically bankrupt. This doesn't involve an argument for any other proposition, but it emphatically also won't involve or allow for any suggestion that the Jews presently living in the state of Israel should be deprived of their right to live on that land in peace and security. My objection is to the polity that is based on ethnic exclusion, and about which I posit a number of theses. These will be, roughly, as follows:

1) Zionism has always been coextensive with colonialism and imperialism.
2) The ethnic cleansing of Palestinians was by design, not a product of war, a logical and necessary result of implementing the Zionist idea.
3) Zionism is in its articulation and practise a racist ideology.
4) Zionism has an inherent expansionary dynamic.

These seem to me to make the persistence of Israel as a state devoted to maintaining a dominative majority of one ethnic group untenable.

What follows is a potted history of the pre-Israel conflict, through which I hope to draw out some of these themes. I have written much of this before and a large amount of the material is drawn from David Hirst's excellent book The Gun and the Olive Branch.

Zionism: The Wonder Years.

In 1899, the Chief Rabbi of France and good friend of Theodor Herzl, Zadoc Khan, received a letter from Yusuf Zia al-Khalidi, urging the Zionist movement to withdraw their claim to Palestine. God knows, he wrote, historically it is indeed your own country. But since Palestine was already inhabited, the Zionists might find an almighty uprising facing them if they tried to make their state there.

When Theodor Herzl, the grand pappy of political Zionism replied to al-Khalidi, it was with reassurances and soothing unction. The Arabs had "nothing to fear" from Jewish immigration. The Jews would bring their civilisation and raise the quality of life for their Arab brothers. They were not backed by some "belligerent Power", and were not of a "warlike nature". (Central Zionist Archives, Jerusalem, H111 d 14, 1st March, 1889)

Herzl, however, was aware that an influx of interlopers into Palestine would "end badly...unless based on assured supremacy", which could only come through statehood. (Theodor Herzl, "The Jewish State", page 29). Herzl told his diaries that to this end, the Zionists would have to acquire the land of their choice by force. He himself was indifferent to where that land should be, but the prevalent opinion among Zionists was that Palestine was the homeland to which centripetal forces would drive the Jewish people. (Herzl, "Besammelte, Zionistiche Schriften", Volume I, page 114). To expedite this process, he sought the assistance of the imperial powers of the age. For instance, in 1901 he travelled to Constantinople seeking the establishment of a Jewish-Ottoman Colonisation Association in Palestine. He sought to agree the rudiments of a draft charter, Article Three of which would have granted the Jews the right to deport the native population. Many of the continuing themes of Zionism are evident here, the latter of which is rendered starkly eloquent by the Sharonist plans to "transfer" Palestinians across the Jordanian and Syrian borders under the cover of war on Iraq, while securing as much of the Occupied Territories for Greater Israel as possible.
(Adolf Bohm, "Die Zionistiche Bewegung", 1935, page 706).

Dissimulation was a crucial part of this project, as it often is when political projects involve the acquiescence or active involvement of people who are sure to lose out from the fulfilment of the ideal. Max Nordau, a close associate of Herzl, wrote that it was he who had coined the term "Heimstatte" (Homeland):

"I did my best to persuade the advocates of the Jewish state in Palestine that we might find a circumlocution... I suggested "Heimstatte" as a synonym for 'state'... to us it signified "Judenstaat" (Jewish state) and it signifies the same now..." (Christopher Sykes, "Two Studies in Virtue", 1953).

The enterprise begins

The Zionist project began in earnest in 1882, with the first 'Aliyah' or wave of immigration. At this time there were already 24,000 Jews in Palestine, mainly elderly indigents seeking expiry in the holy land. The new generation of migrants, while not devotees of the Herzlian grand narrative, were nevertheless "Lovers of Zion", intent on founding agricultural settlements as a refuge from East European and Russian anti-Semitism. From 1882 to 1914, the Jewish population in Palestine rose to 85,000 - dropping again to 56,000 as a result of the Great War. The reaction of Palestinians, of whom 75% were land-bound peasants, was one of apprehension: "Is it true that the Jews want to retake this country?" villagers were said to have asked Albert Antebi, an official of the Jewish Colonial Association. (Sami Hadawi, "Bitter Harvest", 1967; L. Oliphant, "Haifa, or Life in Modern Palestine", 1887; Neville Mandel, "Turks, Arabs and Jewish immigration into Palestine, 1882-1914", St Antony's Papers, "Middle Eastern Affairs", 1965).

Peasants were usually not present when their land was being sold off to the settlers, and often their first inkling of a sale was when the estate agents turned up to have a butchers and stake out the land. Consequently, one of the first examples of Palestinian resistance as when some estate agents observing the land recently purchased from the Sursock family of Beirut suddenly had the shit kicked out of them by angry villagers. Settlements and colonies were frequently attacked, harassed, robbed and viciously made fun of.

As each settlement overcame resistance and established itself as a "fact on the ground", Arabs were willing to reconcile themselves to its presence. (Mandel, op cit.) However, the next wave of immigrants was more ideological, armed with Herzl and Hebrew, spurred by anti-Semitism. The Jewish National Fund, established in 1901, stipulated that all lands bought with its cash were to remain the inalienable property of the Jewish state. According to the migrants, only Jews should own the land and only Jews should work the land. The drive to establish Hebrew-only labour was not always successful. Dr Ruppin, the first head of the Zionist bureau in Palestine, records in his memoirs that he should have liked to build Tel Aviv without Arab involvement, but he soon found their low wages - ahem! - experience invaluable.

The second generation of settlers were also socialists, or at least blended nationalism and socialism at a time when it did not seem such a lethal brew. Agricultural communities were erected in which only Jews were entitled to participate. Histradut, the Hebrew trade union, did not allow non-Jewish members. Indeed, two of their key aims were to protect Jewish labour on the one hand, and Jewish commerce on the other. Arabs were not to be allowed to sell in Jewish areas, or work on Jewish land if avoidable. The reasoning was that Arabs were peasants, only a "potential proletariat" to whom "the international brotherhood of the workers" did not apply. These enlightening sobriquets, combining mutilated Marxism and condescending colonial attitudes, expressed both the noble aspirations and the base goals of the Zionist conquerors. (Ro'i Yaacov, "The Zionist Attitude to the Arabs, 1908-14", Middle Eastern Studies, Vol IV, April 1968). The Arabs, at any rate, would benefit from their presence. So argued these migrants, Herzl before them, and Ben Gurion after.

The genesis of what Uri Avneri calls "gun Zionism" may be the founding of a group called "Hashomer" (The Guardian - a felicitous appellation as it turns out). The aim of this outfit was initially to replace Arab guards with Jewish guards, because after all it was Jewish property, and... In 1909, a secret organisation was founded, among whose luminaries was future President of Israel, Yitzhak Ben Zvi. Ben Gurion was among the first to acknowledge the inevitability of the militarisation of the Zionist presence in Palestine. In this world, he said, only force could win the argument. No argument has determinacy which is between friends. Armed foes settle much more quickly, with the vanquishment or death of one, and victory of the other.

The Palestinian response to this threat was two-fold – the majority of Palestinians looked to the Ottoman state for some kind of succour, while some argued for an organised armed response based around an attainable programme. Najib Nassar, a Christian from Haifa, said that the best response to Zionism was to mirror its purpose, skill and organisational zeal. Herzl, he said, had united a scattered people in just fifteen years, with a purpose, a doctrine and some apparently attainable goals. They had bought the best land in Palestine, and opened banks to finance the farmers on it. The Arabs, he said, could only win if they did likewise. From essentially apolitical eruptions of violence, the Palestinian resistance against the Zionist colonisers grew to become the core political issue in the country by 1914. Not just peasants, but small traders and professionals began to organise against the Zionists. The small traders in particular saw the incoming Zionists as potentially devastating commercial competitors.

Najib Nassar published a paper called Carmel, in which he began to document the genesis and goals of the Zionist movement. He was also instrumental in building a vigilante organisation which would attend ports and harbours, ensuring strict enforcement of immigration restrictions. And while some smaller Arab nationalist parties, such as the Decentralisation Party, sought compromise with the Zionists, the prevalent response was that the settlers should be fought with every energy and vigour available. Even if the moderates had represented the majority, the Zionists wanted no part of it. An agreement with the moderates would have involved the Zionists explaining "as far as possible by producing documentary evidence, the aims and methods of Zionism..." The Zionists were not up for that, since they saw little to negotiate over and were unwilling to lay bare the extent of their aims. They procrastinated and in the end were saved by the First World War.

The war proved a massive opportunity for the Zionists. The Ottoman Empire was collapsing, and lands taken from them would be divided up among the victorious powers. Joseph Trumpeldor and Vladimir Jabotinsky created the Zion Mule Corps, a Jewish fighting unit which served with the British at Gallipoli. Toward the end of the war, Jabotinsky also formed "The Jewish Legion", four battalions of Royal Fusiliers, 5,000-strong, fighting under the Union Jack. In developing the military strength and dexterity of the Zionist foot soldiers, both Jabotinsky and Aaron Aaronsohn hoped to create a military force capable of crushing the Palestinians, while at the same time breaking the sterile Gentile myth about the passive Jew. Jews, they wanted to prove, could be strongmen too. Jabotinsky, one of the most famous 'revisionist' Zionists of the time, was an unabashed reactionary, admirer of Mussolini and anti-Arab racist. He formulated the "Iron Wall" doctrine, in which he recognised that the Palestinians would never accede to the Jewish state unless they were FORCED to. Therefore, the Jews should build a vast, military 'iron wall' that would crush the Palestinian resistance until they HAD to negotiate. (Avi Shlaim, "The Iron Wall", 2001). Alexander Aaronsohn remarked that "[t]he Arab is a cunning fellow whose only respect is for brute force. He exercises it himself for every possible victim and expects the same treatment from his superiors." (Alex Aaronsohn, "With the Turks in Palestine", 1917). These 'revisionist' Zionists were more doctrinaire in their contempt for the Arab population, and also more willing to accept the human cost that would come with their project to seize Palestine.

Official Zionism, exemplified by the skilled diplomat Chaim Weizmann, was contemptuous of the revisionists. For, while Jabotinsky et al prepared for conflict, Weizmann negotiated painstakingly with the imperial powers to achieve what Herzl had been unable to: an international power agreeing the framework for a Jewish state in Palestine.

Two documents emerged in the war years, one in 1916 the other in 1917. The first was the Sykes-Picot agreement, in which Russia, Britain and France agreed to divvy up the Middle East between them. This document was made public by the Bolshevik hell-raisers, causing enormous embarrassment for the British who had made promises to "recognise and support" the independence of the Arabs in the Arabian Peninsula, Palestine, Transjordan, Syria and Iraq. The second document, somewhat of an extension of the first but much more significant, was the Balfour Declaration. 117 words long, the letter composed by Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs Arthur Balfour to Lord Rothschild stands as the most significant piece of literature written on the subject of Palestine before the inception of Israel. It expresses the British government's sympathy with the Zionist goal of establishing a Jewish homeland, provided "nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of the existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine".

Balfour had been Prime Minister at a time when Jewish immigration was restricted by the Aliens Act (not a theatrical production). Jewish refugees had been the apparent target of riots and protest in London. The Declaration was therefore a fruit of both the meticulous diplomacy of the Zionists, who deserve credit for the framing and wording of the document, and also the British desire to get Jews to migrate to Jaffa rather than London. Weizmann was careful to avoid letting this document be interpreted in public as the basis of a Jewish state. Homeland, certainly, but not statehood. And he warned the revisionists that they should not violate "the legitimate rights of Arabs" while assuring the Palestinians that the Zionists had no intention of attempting to wrest control of "the higher policy of the province of Palestine". Nor was it their objective to "turn anyone out of his property". (Speech to 14th Zionist Congress, 1925; Khalidi, op cit).

At the same time, Weizmann told Balfour that "[t]he Arabs... worship one thing, and only thing only - power and success... He screams as often as he can and blackmails as much as he can...". (Does anyone else think it’s at this point that the Zionists started to sound like Bond villains?) The British authorities knew "the treacherous nature of the Arab" and would understand it if they tried to place "misinterpretations and misconceptions" on Balfour's Declaration. In public, Weizmann occasionally let the staat out of the bag. At one speech, he trusted to God that a Jewish state would emerge, and insisted that the Balfour Declaration was "the golden key which unlocks the doors of Palestine" so that such conditions "political, economic and administrative" may be created to enable the influx of "a considerable number of immigrants, and finally establish such a society in Palestine that Palestine shall be as Jewish as England is English and America is American..." (Doreen Ingrams, "Palestine Papers 1917-1922", 1972; "Chaim Weizmann; excerpts from his Historic Statements, Writings and Addresses", The Jewish Agency for Palestine, 1952).

Balfour was sympathetic:

"[I]n Palestine, we do not propose even to go through the form of consulting the wishes of the present inhabitants of the country... The Four Great Powers are committed to Zionism. And Zionism, be it right or wrong, good or bad, is rooted in age-long traditions, in present needs, in future hopes, of far profounder importance than the desires and prejudices of the 700,000 Arabs who now inhabit that ancient land..." (Ingrams, op cit).

The first stirrings

On May 1st, 1921, mass riots and violence erupted across Palestine. Concentrated especially in areas where Jewish immigration was greatest, the trouble appeared initially to emerge from an inter-Jewish clash. The Socialist Revolutionary Party (known as the Mopsi) was a tiny tributary of the Second International, and it had taken to the streets to celebrate May Day in defiance of an official ban. They urged Jews and Arabs to unite and bring down the oppressors from England. As they proceeded, they encountered an officially sanctioned demonstration by Ahdot ha Avodah, a social democratic party, and a fight broke out.

Arabs, normally bemused and put off by shows of Jewish labour disturbance, and certainly too respectful of authority to join in, this time went on a rampage. It seems that a crowd of them had gathered around the quarrelling demonstrators, while the British cops attempted to keep the two sides apart. Sadly, the British police officer had not at that time any lengthy experience dealing with the British football hooligan, so their performance was tragically exiguous.

The feasibility of the Zionist state was rendered problematic. The poetry of the future was starkly contrasted with what Merleau-Ponty called the "prose of the world". Utopia was beginning to resemble the European dystopia. The Mopsi were feared and loathed by conservative Arabs because they imported a European doctrine of revolution and workers power, heralding a future of heretofore unknown industrial strife. Another thing that could be imported from Europe, of course, was anti-Semitism. For many Arabs, insurrection and anarchy were genetically inscribed into the Jew. These "vagabonds and outcasts" came with an alien culture and a tendency to upheaval. Their presence on the streets aggravated the sensibilities of many Arabs, not just those of a conservative disposition.

However, this fact alone was insufficient to explain the riots. The Arabs, it seemed, would have absorbed this 'alien culture' had it not been the aim of the Zionists to make it the only culture. Thomas Haycraft's Commission, set up to investigate the 1921 violence, recognised this fear:

"It is important that it should be realised that what is written on the subject of Zionism by Zionists and their sympathisers is read and discussed by Palestinian Arabs..." The Commission cited many Zionist works and newspapers calling for Palestine to be made "'as Jewish as England is English, or as Canada is Canadian'", the only "feasible meaning of a Jewish National Home". Haycraft et al also cited "Palestine", the official organ of the British Palestine Committee which described "Palestine as a 'deserted, derelict land'. This description hardly tallies with the fact that the density of the present population of Palestine, according to Zionist figures, is something like 75 to the square mile".

Musa Kazim al-Husseini, President of the Arab Executive which represented the Palestine community in their dealings with the British, appealed to his compatriots to place their faith "in the government of Great Britain, which is famous for its justice, its concern for the well-being of the inhabitants, its safeguarding of their rights, and consent to their lawful demands". He really laid the shit on like peanut butter, this guy.

Outlining two broad approaches, al-Husseini indicated that the Palestinians could either take their case directly to the British authorities and work diplomatically for a formal renunciation of Balfour. Failing that, they could work for a representative government in Palestine so that the majority could put a stop to the plans of the Zionist majority. They would have gotten away with it too if it hadn't been for those meddling Brits. Their logic was that Britain had committed itself under the terms of the Mandate to developing self-governing institutions in the areas where it ruled. The more backward areas like Saudi Arabia had already been granted independence - why not Palestine? Churchill, as Colonial Secretary, stubbed both options out with his fat cigar when he paid a visit to the Middle East in 1921 and foreclosed on any notion either of representative of government or revoking the British government's support for Zionism. It was neither in his power nor his wish, he told them, to rescind Balfour and cease Jewish immigration. Although there was to emerge, by degree, a Palestinian parliament, it would come ever so slowly so that "our children's children will have passed away before that is accomplished". (JMN Jeffreys, "Palestine: The Reality", 1939).

Churchill's arrogant and strident refusal to consider the Arab view did give way to a few nugatory concessions. In 1922, he proposed a "legislative council" for Palestine. In a White Paper, whose contents he placed before the consideration of both Arab and Zionist representatives, his government affirmed Balfour, dismissed Arab doubts as based on "exaggerated interpretations" of the Declaration, but insisted that there would be no Jewish State. Chaim Weizmann told Churchill, and was backed by Lloyd George and Lord Balfour, that if these proposals intended equal representation for Arabs and Jews, they would spell an end to any Jewish Homeland in Palestine. So, the proposals intimated that alongside twelve elected members (8 Muslims, 2 Christians and 2 Jews), the council would include eleven appointees.

The Palestinians, sniffing a rather poorly concealed rat, rejected the proposals. Since Zionist policy was presently carried out illegally and against the manifest wishes of the people of Palestine, why should they assent to a constitutional form which would allow the Zionist programme to continue under the guise of legality and consent? (Neville Barbour, "Nisi Dominus", 1946). This is often taken to be a classic example of "Arab rejectionism", which cost more than it was worth. However, when the British government did propose limited self-government in 1935, which was still weighted toward the Zionists, though not quite so much, it was the Zionists and not the Arabs who pushed the 'Reject' button. ("Report on the Conditions in Palestine, 1935", HMSO, 1935).

The Arab Uprising

November 12th, 1935, a group of followers of the Muslim cleric Shaikh Izzedin Qassam gathered secretly in Haifa to plan operations. Within a week, they would be dead or captured, and yet their rebellion proved far more significant than some might have thought it had any right to be. Qassam preached nothing less than dedicated self-sacrifice in the service of ridding one's country of foreign occupiers. His followers, at their peak, must have totalled around 800, with 200 of those trained for military service. At night they trained in stealth, using guns and other weaponry bought by selling prized personal possessions. The plan was to spend the daytime living in caves up on the hills, praying and reading from the Koran. At night, they would mount attacks on the Jews and the British. The Mandate authorities, however, had been informed and swooped in with a force of British and Arab soldiers backed by reconnaissance planes. Qassam urged his followers to "die as martyrs", never to surrender for this was "a jihad for God and country". A few of his companions did knock off early, while the rest were captured. This was the M.O. of the fedayi, "one who sacrifices himself". While the authorities were bemused by this apparently insensible revolt, the Palestinian Arabs lost no time in recognising the significance of the uprising. Huge crowds gathered at Qassam's funeral to mourn and protest against British rule and the Jewish National Homeland. The police were stoned in a brutally hilarious manner. The Cairo-based newspaper al-Ahram said: "Dear friend and martyr, I heard you preaching from pulpits, calling us to arms, but today, preaching from the Bosom of God, you were more eloquent in death than in life." Which is pretty rotten luck. Eloquence does you no good when you're dead.

While the Arab leaders, a collection of chair-moistening pullovers and pushovers, were unmoved by the insurrection, Weizmann regarded it with horror. He saw in it the "barbarism of the desert", nothing more than a fusion of primitive stupidity, clerical fanaticism, and international Fascism. They assumed that the Arab leaders, some of whom praised Hitler's rise in Germany, were leading the masses awry. But, as the British historian John Marlowe points out, "the Arab rebellion was in fact a peasant revolt". He quotes GM Trevelyan: "'[T]he readiness of the rural population to turn out and die for their faith was a new thing... The record of this brief campaign is as the lifting of the curtain; behind it we can see for a moment into the peasant life. In that one glance, we see not rustic torpor, but faith, idealism, vigour, love of liberty, and scorn of death." As Orwell almost said, it would almost be worth being wiped out to have something like that written about you.

A general strike, the burning of settlement crops, and armed insurrection by small, poorly armed, peasant-based groups followed. Finally, come September, the British were sick and tired of having their asses kicked, and announced that they were sending in a division of new troops to quell the mutiny. The citrus season was coming. A continued strike, already showing signs of strain, would deprive Palestine of an enormous source of export profit. The Arab states sent three Magi to tell the Palestinians to cut it out, and finally the Arab Higher Committee asked the people to "put an end to the strike and disorders". This they duly did, and the tally stood at 37 British dead, 69 Jews dead and anything up to a 1000 Arabs in "the Bosom of God". As the promised Royal Commission left for Palestine, the British government decided to announce an unusually generous work schedule for immigrant Jews. The Arabs, in turn, boycotted the commission until its final week in the country. (Hirst, op cit).

The Commission's findings were a negation of everything that had been promised to the Arabs from Balfour onwards. The 'safeguards' which had been highlighted in the Balfour Declaration were valueless, because it was now decided that the best thing for Palestine would be partition, the effective road to a Jewish State. (The Peel Commission, 1936). It did, however, concede much of the arguments that Arabs had been making - namely that the attainment of Zionist ambitions was inherently prejudicial to the rights of Arabs, that the existing order was untenable and only capable of preservation through "the dark path of repression". The partition was not implemented, but all the factors which had caused the initial uprising continued unabated.
The rebellion therefore entered a second phase, with the shooting of a Mr L Y Andrews, who had been made district commissioner for Galilee. The second phase of the rebellion, having thus began, impelled Arab leaders to abandon whatever vestiges of moderation they had maintained. If moderate politics were impossible before, they were now comical. Those who did espouse moderation and pacifism were likely to find themselves on the wrong end of some extremist's gun. The British aggravated the uprising with some outrageous provocation, including the dissolution of the Arab Higher Committee, and the deportation of its members to the Seychelles (the British are forever sending their most hated enemies to lagoons of paradise, like Australia or some Pacific Island).

On October 14th, 1937, disorder erupted across Palestine. The rebellion had acquired greater coordination. Lessons had been learned from the previous uprising, among which was the idea that its best if more people die on the other side. The rebels, at their height numbering 15,000 men, were able to take most of the central mountain area, from Galilee to Hebron, Beersheba to Gaza. They set up their own courts and collected their own taxes. They were able to destroy a thousand acres of orange trees belonging to a settlement in a single night. By controlling the countryside, they conquered the towns. They created a hegemony that encircled several major cities. Hundreds of troops descended on Bethlehem, disarmed the local cops and then swanned off singing patriotic songs. In Nablus, they emptied out the contents of Barclays Bank twice, right under the noses of the British. In Beersheba, they knocked off seventy-five rifles and ten thousand rounds of ammo. Even as far as the coastal town of Jaffa, the Mandate Authority was mainly fictitious. Its 3,000 Jewish citizens were forced to evacuate, as well as Arabs who did not cooperate with the mutiny. Police stations were raided, stores were looted, many hilarious photographs were taken.

Bombs planted in various public places slaughtered many Arabs. Since it was presumed the culprits were Jewish, the rebels descended from Tiberias to kill as many Jews as possible. One October evening, a crowd of rebels attacked the Arab and British police barracks, while others set fire to Jewish houses and synagogues in a quite deliberate massacre which took the lives of nineteen Jews, some of whom were babies. (The Times, October 4th, 1938).

Had the British extricated themselves at this point, it is fairly safe to say that Israel would not exist today. The main guarantor and facilitator of the Zionist project was British rule. But the British were in no mood to take any shit from the backward residents of a "derlict, deserted land". By the autumn of 1938, they had over 20,000 troops in Palestine. They banned the use or public possession of firearms. Military commanders were placed in charge of several districts, while civil authorities acted as advisers. With modern technology including armoured cars and airplanes pitted against muskets, the British began to score hit after palpable hit. One Times article reported that two British soldiers had been killed and, by the way, between 40 and 60 Arabs also died. (The Times, 3rd October, 1938). Military courts enforced emergency regulations. The death penalty was meted out to 112 Arabs and one Jew. Sir Alec Kirkbride, who witnessed the hangings, felt "guilty and mean". (Sir Alec Kirkbride, "A Crackle of Thorns", 1956). Collective fines and demolitions were imposed.

In March 1939, the British murdered the rebellion's commander, Abdul Rahim al-Haj Muhammed. Other commanders began to flee the country. The uprising was effectively over, the Palestinians crushed. The score this time was approximately 5,000 Arabs, 101 British, and 463 Jews dead.

All, however, was not in vain. The British were put off their lunches by having had to pursue a policy that was so harsh and costly. Malcolm McDonald, then Colonial Secretary in the coalition government, reported to the Commons that the Arab resistance was actuated by a militant patriotism, adding that if he were an Arab he would feel the same. And while the Peel Commission had recommended partition, another inquiry headed by Sir John Woodward concluded that partition was as unworkable as the Mandate. After deadlocked meetings involving Zionist leaders and Arab leaders, the British produced their new policy. The McDonald White Paper of 1939 announced that it was no longer government policy that "Palestine should become a Jewish state". 75,000 Jews would be admitted over the next five years, but no more without the approval of Arabs. Land sales would be regulated, and self-governing institutions formed. Palestinians, although put off by some of the provisions, were impressed by the British recognition of their concerns.

The "beginning of the Jewish resistance".

The response of the Zionists was to go absolutely bonkers. The broadcasting station from which the new policy was to be announced was bombed, the transmission lines cut. The headquarters of the Department of Migration were set on fire. Government offices in Haifa and Tel Aviv were ransacked by crowd intent on destroying all files relating to immigration. Arab shops were looted. One British constable was shot dead. A general Jewish strike was declared, and meetings across Palestine promised that this "new and treacherous" policy would be defeated. A campaign of terror and sabotage was initiated. The Rex Cinema in Jerusalem was blown up, killing five Arabs. Five more were murdered in an attack on Adas. David Ben Gurion, the leader of Yishuv, described the violence as "the beginning of Jewish resistance" to the British betrayal. Gun Zionism had come into its own.

The influence of Jabotinsky had been growing in the armed wing of Zionism for some years. Even as mainstream Zionists pretended that Jabotinsky and the revisionists were "the lunatic fringe", their methods were the ones which eventually prevailed. One example of this tendency was the position of Chaim Arlosoroff, the Director of the Political Department of the Jewish Agency who, as early as 1932, had written to Weizmann suggesting that the evolutionary path to a Jewish state was no longer possible. "Under present circumstance Zionism cannot be realised without a transition period during which the Jewish minority would exercise organised revolutionary rule," he wrote. ("Jewish Frontier", October 1948).

Gun Zionism was the tendency and direction of Zionist policy for some time. Even during the Arab uprising, when Yishuv was officially committed to Havlaga, meaning "self restraint, the tendency was for Zionists to react against this. Havlaga was a Jewish tradition based on Jewish ethics. In many ways, Zionism was a reaction against the Jewish tradition. In the Spring of 1938, three young Revisionists fired at an Arab bus on the Acre-Safad highway. The men were caught, and the ringleader, a young Polish Jew named Shlomo ben Yussif, was the first and only Jew to be hung by the British. Jabotinsky ranked Yussif among "the heroes of Israel" and abandoned Havlaga. (Joseph Shechtman, "Fighter and Prophet, the Jabotinsky Story", 1961). In July, 1938, six seperate incidents resulted in the deaths of 100 Arabs. The last of this series of atrocities was a bomb planted in the Arab Melon Market in Haifa at 7am on July 26th, no more than three weeks after a similar bomb had gone off not far away. Fifty three Arabs were killed and one Jew.

Jewish newspapers, such as Davar and Ha'aretz, condemned these actions without equivocation. On the other hand, the condemnation was general, and if a finger of blame was pointed it was liable to be pointed at the Arabs. The Palestine Post could not believe that there would be "a Jew so insane" as to throw a bomb outside a Mosque in a crowded place, thus "spreading the seed of inter-racial war". (Palestine Post, 17th July, 1938) The author of this article rather seems to have missed the point about Zionism. Jabotinsky's biographer points out the "inestimable political and educational value" of these acts. They "taught the Arab terrorist bands a healthy lesson" while generating "a new spirit of militancy and self-sacrafice in the Jewish youth". (Schechtman, op cit).

For some, Haglava had been a means of winning the support of the British for a Jewish militia, and in 1936 it succeeded. The British authorised the formation of a Jewish supernumerary police, 1,240-strong. The British informed the Zionist leadership later that year that an armed special force of Jewish constables could continue to exist provided Haganah disarm. But, as Arab violence raged on, they tacitly dropped this condition. The force was expanded over the next two years so that by 1939, it numbered 14,500 men. The training, increasingly sophisticated, was passed on to thousands of others who were not included in the force. In the Special Night Squads, the Zionists benefitted enormously from collaboration with the British. In particular one British captain named Orde Wingate, who had become a dedicated Zionist, taught them the principles of surprise, offensive daring, deep penetration and high mobility which are the hallmarks of the present Israeli army. Moshe Dayan was among the many talented Israeli officers who had first done battle with the Arabs under Wingate. A British journalist named Leonard Mosley described the brutal methods of Wingate and his men:

"He went up to the four Arabic prisoners. He said in Arabic: 'You have arms in this village. Where have you hidden them?' The Arabs shook their heads and protested innocence. Wingate reached down and took sand and grit from the ground; he thrust it into the mouth of the first Arab and pushed it down his throat until he choked and puked.
"'Now,' he said 'where have you hidden the arms?'
"Still they shook their heads.
"Wingate turned ro one of the Jews and, pointing to the coughing and spluttering Arab, said 'Shoot this man'.
"The Jew lookes at him questioningly and hesitated.
"Wingate said, in a tense voice, 'Did you hear? Shoot him.'
"The Jew shot the Arab. The others stared for a moment, in stupefaction, at the dead body at their feet. The boys from Hanita were watching in silence.
"'Now speak', said Wingate. They spoke." (Leonard Mosley, "Gideon Goes to War", 1951).

Links & Comments. posted by lenin

I'd just like first of all to say hello and thank you to RafahPundits for linking me on their blog. I'll let them explain themselves in their own words:

This website is dedicated to the town and the people of Rafah.

The idea behind the original site was to open a window into - and out of - an area that most of 'The West' perceive to be a terrorist hotbed of Islamic fundamentailsts and perpetual smugglers - which it isn't.

People live there, it's a town with shops and markets (and internet cafes) & ordinary families who desperately wish to live a normal peaceful life.

Contributors/Bloggers to this project/website live there or have lived there and work there or have worked there.

I will be creating a new range of links sections, and one of them will be dedicated to Palestine blogs and websites. I am also readying a post on the 'two-state solution'. I'm just rather proud for the moment to have acquired a readership in Palestine.

Panic attack. posted by lenin

The anti-war movement is on the move with a march yesterday reported as numbering 100,000 to demand the end of the occupation. Maxine and Rose Gentle attended, as did Reginald Keys, as supporters of UK Veterans and Families for Peace. It also received the support of Paul Bigley.

Attendance by delegates to the European Social Forum added an international flavour. The ESF, by the way, looks to have been an outstanding success .

Respect held a very large rally at the event, which apparently went down very well. Must be frustrating for an ex-Stalinist who's gone liberal and pro-war.

The Observer versus the Facts. posted by lenin

Just a minor issue, but here is an extract from a William Pfaff article in the Observer today:

"The intellectual godfather of modern Islamist radicalism is generally taken to have been the 19th-century Egyptian intellectual named Sayyid Qutb. A review of the literature on Islamic radicalism during the past 25 years (cited by John Zimmerman in the journal Terrorism and Political Violence ) shows Qutb routinely mentioned as one of the two most important intellectual influences on these movements and, in particular, as being the main (if indirect) inspiration for Osama bin Laden."

Pfaff is an extremely knowledgable and perceptive critic, so I doubt the error is his - but, if you know about Sayyid Qutb , you know he was an intellectual who gained his reputation as a writer mainly in the 1960s - generally understood to be a decade from the 20th Century.

I expect this could fall into the same category as The Guardian's recent altering of the text of Charles Arthur's article on Haiti which managed to make Aristide out to be a General (as well as chopping away lots of relevant text on what Haitians thought about how their country's disaster could be solved).

Suffice to say, I have written a letter of complaint. Disgusted of Lenin's Tomb.

The Telegraph and British Intelligence. posted by lenin

The Telegraph is fond of delivering splash front pages, usually composed by their enterprising journalist, Con Coughlin. I just wanted to adumbrate a few of the ways in which this illustrates something crucial about the relationship between intelligence and the media. I'll just outline the facts in ordinal fashion:

1) The Telegraph last year produced a shocking expose of the links between Mohammed Atta and Saddam Hussein :

Iraq's coalition government claims that it has uncovered documentary proof that Mohammed Atta, the al-Qaeda mastermind of the September 11 attacks against the US, was trained in Baghdad by Abu Nidal, the notorious Palestinian terrorist.

Details of Atta's visit to the Iraqi capital in the summer of 2001, just weeks before he launched the most devastating terrorist attack in US history, are contained in a top secret memo written to Saddam Hussein, the then Iraqi president, by Tahir Jalil Habbush al-Tikriti, the former head of the Iraqi Intelligence Service.

It turns out that this story was nonsense , an old story backed up by a fraudulent set of documents.

This story was written by Con Coughlin, and he recycled it for Front Page magazine at the same time.

2) Con Coughlin also produced shocking evidence that the 45 minute claim may be accurate, producing an Iraqi colonel who not only said he believed the claim may have come from him, but also suggested that the weapons had been hidden away. Moreover:

"Forget 45 minutes," said Col al-Dabbagh "we could have fired these within half-an-hour."

Colonel al-Dabbagh was, the article notes, a spy for the Iraqi National Accord, an organisation responsible for flooding world media sources with inaccurate and contrived stories on Saddam Hussein's alleged threat to the West. No indication of who provided Coughlin with his source, but it raised some eyebrows among military and intelligence experts at the time, and has subsequently proven to be false . Even though his article proved very swiftly to be more full of holes than Tupac, he persisted in churning out guff with the same claims .

3) Con Coughlin has a history of accepting phoney stories from MI6 and then going on to lard them with falsehood.

His stories collapse almost as soon as they are erected, and it has to be judged that he is one of the worst journalists operating in Britain right now, lacking both critical judgement and integrity. The question that imposes itself with immediate, compulsory force is: why does the Telegraph persist in employing someone so patently incompetent and why does it still use his stories to make splash headlines?

Fill in the blank yourself.

Man's original virtue. posted by lenin

Disobedience, in the eyes of anyone who has read history, is man's original virtue. Oscar Wilde.

As US planes once again pound Fallujah, causing a mass exodus of residents and killing many, it is worth noting that serious disobedience is taking place among some soldiers in Iraq:

A 17-member Army Reserve platoon with troops from Jackson, Miss., and around the Southeast deployed to Iraq is under arrest for refusing a “suicide mission” to deliver fuel, the troops’ relatives said Thursday.
The soldiers refused an order on Wednesday to go to Taji, Iraq — north of Baghdad — because their vehicles were considered “deadlined” or extremely unsafe, said Patricia McCook of Jackson, wife of Sgt. Larry O. McCook.

This isn't a principled stand against the violence of occupation, but it is an eminently sane stance against being sent to one's own death. It may not spread, but such refusal to die for one's masters helped bring about America's defeat in a previous war. It could happen again.

While I'm at it, I'll just note that the absurd reason given for launching this savage attack on Fallujah is that the city didn't "hand over" Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. MSNBC have cheerfully described this as "City leaders refuse to turn over al-Zarqawi" . They then go on to mention that this is because the city leaders don't actually believe al-Zarqawi is in Fallujah. They also quite reasonably remark that it is an "impossible condition" since even the Americans cannot catch al-Zarqawi. Given that the primary locus of Tawhid wal Jihad activity seems to be in Baghdad, the suggestion that Fallujah is 'sheltering' al-Zarqawi reeks of a dimly conceived excuse for another attempt to obliterate reistance among ordinary Iraqis. Zarqawi, if he is actually in Iraq and associated with Tawhid wal Jihad, is a red herring, a minor figure in the resistance and opposed by other resistance groups. He is a convenient, demonic face that can be put on the resistance in order to justify its bloody destruction. Suffice to say, those same city leaders aren't very happy and are calling on other Iraqis to show solidarity by initiating a campaign of civil disobedience against the occupation:

In a statement read at sermons in mosques in Baghdad and elsewhere, Fallujah’s clerics called for civil disobedience across Iraq if the Americans try to overrun the insurgent bastion. And if that doesn’t halt an offensive, the clerics said they would proclaim a jihad, or holy war, against multinational forces “as well as those collaborating with them.”

The last time Fallujah was attacked, ordinary Sunnis and Shi'ites rallied from across the country to give assistance to their fellow Iraqis. As Ken McLeod wryly noted at the time, this sort of national solidarity in struggle proves conclusively that Bush is "A Uniter and Not a Divider" .

Derrida's Critics. posted by lenin

I haven't had the time, as I hoped to, to attempt to deal with some of the more idiotic obituaries written on the occasion of Derrida's death (or, ho ho ho, 'deconstruction'). I say "written on the occasion", although there is often little evidence of that. Some of the criticisms are so old that I had forgotten all the answers to them.

There are many reasoned criticisms to be made of Derrida's work (to select one, I would question the priority assigned to text over speech, but that's a point too easily misunderstood). Unfortunately, little of what has been written of late has been anything but hackworthy hatchet jobs. Here are some examples:

Spiked Online, banging on about 'unreason' .
The Wall Street Journal misunderstanding the lack of fixity of words to meaning - being as interested as they are in the shifting values of shares and currencies, you would think they'd have an innate grasp of this .
Johann Hari on how the bad man tried to hack apart language and reason .

And here are some people who know what they're talking about:

Bat presciently expecting philistines to stick the boot in .
The Guardian doing a decent burial .
Spike Magazine featuring Derrida replying to some of his critics. .
Spurious remembering Derrida's insurmountable patience in interviews with dimwits .
Blood and Treasure wishing he'd paid more attention in class.
Charlotte Street carries a riposte to some of Derrida's critics.
And also some ruminations in his inimitably stylish parole .

Suffice to say, most of the whining is emerging from naive liberals and fog-brained conservatives clinging desperately to Johnson's bloody rock . How difficult his theories are! And how terrible for our bourgeois, totalising apparatus, with its strenuous capitalisation of the abstract and its Humean certainty that these ideas derive from impressions and therefore from the real world. If he goes so far as to deconstruct the word "terrorism", as the Telegraph complains, how shall we wage wars for Liberty? Well, ignoramus carping posing as a rationalist critique gets you zilch in my book and, if you don't like that, I'll deconstruct your head from your neck - Jacobin style.

Update: Terry Eagleton launches a scathing attack on the philistine response to Derrida's death today:

English philistinism continues to flourish, not least when the words "French philosopher" are uttered. This week in the Guardian our home-grown intelligentsia gave a set of bemused, bone-headed responses to the death of Jacques Derrida. Either they hadn't read him, or they believed his work was to do with words not meaning what you think they do. Or it was just a pile of garbage...

And now, Mark Kaplan has produced yet another scintillating demolition job, this time on Johann Hari's pig-ignorant review of Derrida's work:

Once again, Hari has waded in, far beyond the cordon of his competence or knowledge, his shrill journalistic head bobbing above the water, repeating prefabricated banalities and in general gauchely and gormlessly exhibiting his own intellectual illiteracy. The fact that he cites, in his defense, a first class degree from Cambridge ‘specializing in philosophy’ only makes more indefensible his howlers and misconceptions. All of what he says about Derrida’s thought is, without exception, false. The nearest he gets to the truth is about ten rumours away. He cites not a single work, nor is there any direct quotation. His article is a disgrace...

Jonathan Derbyshire also has some thoughts.

Empiricism vs Truth. posted by lenin

Having expatiated before on the irrationalist roots of the Enlightenment, I am wary of banging on about it. However, there does seem to me to be something distinctly naive about the modern, classically English faith in empiricism. Noam Chomsky characterised empiricism as a kind of superstition, a cult which had overcome rational discussion of systems, structures and so on. We don't know much, but we knows what we sees.

This tendency to trust only what we can directly perceive with our senses is, of course, rooted in the 'scientific revolution' (1500-1700) in which the Aristotelian system was displaced by a new system, a sort of amalgam between neoplatonism, Hermeticism, Paracelsianism and, finally, Cartesianism. First, the geocentric and geostatic view of the universe was displaced by Copernicus, and Galileo. Then the 'four elements' view of nature, in which like was, apparently, attracted to like, was displaced by the mechanistic view in which two 'elements' - motion and matter - combined in various configurations, weights, colours etc to make the material world. With this came a change in intellectual authority - because the Aristotelians had favoured intellectual coherence over empirical validation, often at the cost of the latter, it became - in a scientistic era - a simple matter to scoff at system-building, structuralism and so forth. Proof, from the Book of Nature, was the order of the day. Somehow, Aristotelian texts Popper's attack on the
'enemies' of the 'open society' falls precisely into this supersitious empiricist mould.

Here's the punchline. The direct impact of this naive empiricism on our day to day lives is that the class war is more likely to be ideologically lost because we lack a way of conceptualising and articulating the way in which the ruling class operate. To that end, I offer Seumus Milne on "The Secret War Against the Miners", (republished in John Pilger ed., Tell Me No Lies: Invesigative Journalism and its Triumphs, pp 311-2, London, 2004):

In a resolutely empiricist country like Britain's - where 'practical men' prefer to shun the bigger picture and eminent historians can take delight in claiming that world wars break out because of the requirements of railway timetables - it is hardly surprising that many people feel unhappy with any suggestion of behind-the-scenes collusion and manipulation of events. To suggest anything else is regarded as somehow naive and insufficiently worldly. Among journalists in particular, it is an article of faith to insist on the 'cock-up theory' rather than the 'conspiracy theory' of history. Real life is, of course, a mixture of the two. One side-effect of this dogmatic insistence that events are largely the product of an arbitrary and contingent muddle has been the chronic refusal by the mainstream media in Britain - and most opposition politicians - to probe or question hidden agendas and unaccountable, secret power structures at the heart of government. This is in striking contrast to North American journalism, which, for all its failings, does at least maintain some tradition of investigation and scepticism about the activities of its country's rulers. As Stephen Dorril and Robin Ramsay, two authors who have attempted to unearth some of Whitehall's dirtier secrets, have commented: "For the most part the areas which the British state does not want examined are still left alone by our serious papers."

The result is that an entire dimension of politics and the exercise of power in Britain is habitually left out of standard reporting and analysis. And by refusing to acknowledge that dimension, it is often impossible to make sense of what is actually going on. Worse, it lets off the hook those whose abuse of state authority is most flagrant. The security services in Britain, as elsewhere, exercise unaccountable power through the control and manipulation of privileged information. It is a world of what one American writer describes as 'parapolitics': of "the conduct of public affairs not by rational debate and responsible decision-making, but by indirection, collusion and deceit ... the political exploitation of irresponsible agencies or parastructures, such as intelligence agencies".

We will, we will cost you!! posted by lenin

Don't ask me by what unholy means I found out about this, but it turns out you can spend up to £70 to go see

Ben Elton's penultimate wedgette of musical-style shite

. Now before you start, fuck off. I don't care if it's just a bit of fun, you're spending up to £70 for one person to have your mind rotted by Ben Elton and Andrew Lloyd-Webber, a team as creative as your average cardboard box.

I'd rather spend that much for a night in prison. I'd sooner convert to Catholicism. I'd sooner wake up next to Ariel Sharon. I'd sooner spend the next seven days trussed up and forced, like Malcolm in Clockwork Orange, to watch endless video play of Tony Blair's greatest speeches. I'd sooner trade sentences with George W. Bush, even if the only sentence he could ever handle was the death penalty.

But that's just me. You want to waste your money on this shit? Go nuts.

Abdullah Muhsin & Iraq's Working Class. posted by lenin

The intervention of Abdullah Muhsin of the Iraqi Federation of Trade Unions (IFTU) at the Labour Party conference helped to persuade union leaders to defy their own policies and to vote in favour of a resolution in support of continuing the occupation, indefinitely. He also lobbied to get Allawi, a thug, former Ba'athist , and former terrorist , access to the Labour conference.

These activities raised the ire of the Stop the War Coalition and also, apparently, George Galloway.

Muhsin has responded in an article published by the Morning Star, and I'll draw your attention to this classic:

Mr Galloway's assertion that I offered voting advice to trade unions on the Iraq motions is also untrue. The big four trade unions made their own decisions and, for my part, if and when asked, I confined my remarks to urging solidarity with Iraqi workers.

Well, I would definitely suggest that this consitutes some kind of voting advice to trade unionists at the Labour conference:

You have two options before you this week:

One would give hope to all those in Iraq who want to see free trade unions and political organisation grow and thrive. In line with UN Security Council resolution 1546, it says that the multinational force is there to help our democracy.

The alternative asks for an early date for withdrawal which would be bad for my country, bad for the emerging progressive forces, a terrible blow for free trade unionism, and would play into the hands of extremists and terrorists.

Harry isn't very happy that the antiwar Left have criticised Muhsin for undertaking activities that he now absurdly denies undertaking. Says he:

The key point to me, is that it is not the job of those of outside Iraq, either pro or anti war, to lecture Iraqi trade unions about what is the 'correct' position to take.

The key point is to support the democratic representatives of Iraqi workers, who make their own decisions.

Tautology and absurdity are never far apart in Harry's spiels, but this one takes some beating. Iraqi trade unionists "make their own decisisons". Really? Who would have thought that? Still, accepting that as a perfectly reasonable proposition in the absence of counterfactual evidence, we are still left wondering how this bars us from criticising those trade union leaders who collaborate with the occupation and undermine the work of those opposing it - especially if their stated position is that they are against the occupation. The "key point", for me, is that I couldn't give a flying fuck about Harry's stupid prohibition on criticism . For instance, the Worker Communist Party of Iraq says:

IFTU is this era’s version of state-made, anti-labour Ba’athist unions. They should be denied any kind of support. Workers in Europe should refuse to ally with them, for their opposition to worker rights in complicity with the interim government.

IFTU enjoys the backing of the US/UK governments, as well the recognition and support of Allawi’s interim government. Any support or recognition offered to them will be a direct support for the government of Allawi and against the interests of the workers and people of Iraq.

There are many trade union movements in Iraq, as Hani Lazim from Iraqi Democrats Against the Occupation (IDAO) explains :

THE IFTU claims that it speaks on behalf of Iraqi trade unions. This is not true. They are self appointed leaders.

There are four trade union movements in Iraq. The first one was a coalition of the left. The US, backed up by the interim president Iyad Allawi and his entourage, went in and smashed it.

Abdullah Muhsin lives in Britain. He is a political refugee and a leading member of the Iraqi Communist Party, a party that is collaborating with the occupation. The Communist Party has ministers in the interim governing council.

These people collaborated with Saddam in the 1970s, using violence against anyone who resisted his rule. They shouted their heads off in support of the Soviet Union in the 1980s. When the Soviet Union went, they jumped to the CIA.

Some trade unionists have officially invited Muhsin here. There is a question mark over some of the people who are promoting him and the sincerity of their stand on the war. The IFTU has to be opposed.

If you are part of a government that allows the US to bomb towns like Fallujah and the al-Sadr area of Baghdad, don’t tell me you oppose the occupation.

The occupatiers have coopted , and suppressed Iraq's labour movement, even going so far as to arrest leaders of the IFTU in the past. It whiffs of opportunism and sell-out, to put it mildly, that the IFTU is working so vigorously on behalf of the Allawi puppet regime just because they are now granted legal recognition while no other trade union or workers' organisation in Iraq is .

Tariq Ali vs Christopher Hitchens. posted by lenin

Democracy Now has hosted another debate between Tariq Ali and Christopher Hitchens on the occupation of Iraq and the resistance to it. I just want to tease out one aspect of it for consideration. Having explained that he was a supporter of Paul Wolfowitz in response to a question about whether he is now a neocon, he went on to explain why he felt Wolfowitz was fundamentally, and not merely incidentally, different from Kissinger:

Can I recommend a book by James Mann, Jim Mann of the Los Angeles Times written a very good book. It's got the rather vulgar title of The Rise of the Vulcans. It's an examination of the neo-conservative tendency in Washington and within the Republican party. And actually it takes on the question of Wolfowitz versus Kissinger very well. It's the only book I know of that properly does do it. Wolfowitz and Kissinger disliked each other and disagreed very strongly with each other for a long time. I think the origin of the disagreement and the origin of Wolfowitz's political career is that he argued it was important to dump the Marcos dictatorship in the Philippines. Base or no base, let it go and take the chances that this would have a ripple effect in the rest of Asia, which was just what Kissinger didn't want. As a result, there were outbreaks of democratic insurgency, starting with the Aquino election, in South Korea, in Taiwan, eventuating in Tiananmen Square, in fact, in 1989, which of course, Kissinger also opposed and took the side of the Chinese Stalinists.

Well, even if one knew nothing about Wolfowitz's attitude to the Phillipines, past and present, one would have to think something was up with that statement given the way Wolfowitz skilfully administered Reagan's support for the Indonesian junta, especially on East Timor. However, there are one or two things we are entitled to know and remember about Wolfowitz in South East Asia :

East Timor ... was invaded and occupied in 1975 by Indonesia with US weapons - a security policy backed and partly shaped by Holbrooke and Wolfowitz. "Paul and I," he said, "have been in frequent touch to make sure that we keep [East Timor] out of the presidential campaign, where it would do no good to American or Indonesian interests."

...

During his tenure in the Reagan and Bush administrations, Wolfowitz played a key role in defining US policy toward South Korea and the Philippines at a time of intense repression and growing opposition to authoritarian rule. In a speech last year to the right-wing Heritage Foundation, he castigated those who criticized Reagan for embracing Chun and Marcos, and defended Reagan's policies as the best hope for Asian democracy.

During a 1983 visit to South Korea, he recalled, the Korean government jailed many dissidents, requiring Wolfowitz to become a "poor hapless administration official sent out to brief the travelling press corps on what was going on and to explain what was our human rights policy". That policy, he insisted, was to quietly advise Chun, who was later held responsible for the murders of at least 200 people during the 1980 Kwangju rebellion, to "honor the South Korean constitution and to step down after one term as president". Chun's decision in 1986 not to run again, he argued, "has indeed been far more important in resolving human rights problems in Korea than any number of lists of political prisoners that the American president might have taken to him".

...

In his Heritage speech, Wolfowitz also took credit for the downfall of Marcos. The "private and public pressure on Marcos to reform", he asserted, "contributed in no small measure to emboldening the Philippine people to take their fate in their own hands and to produce what eventually became the first great democratic transformation in Asia in the 1980s". Once again, Wolfowitz was rewriting history, implying that the Filipino people, like the South Koreans, ignored two decades of massive US military and financial support for Marcos. In both countries, US policy toward these dictators (which in Korea would include Park Chung-hee, Chun's assassinated predecessor) only began to weaken when US officials decided that their continued hold on power would lead to further instability, thus threatening US "interests".


...


As late as May 1997, he was telling Congress that "any balanced judgment of the situation in Indonesia today, including the very important and sensitive issue of human rights, needs to take account of the significant progress that Indonesia has already made and needs to acknowledge that much of this progress has to be credited to the strong and remarkable leadership of president Suharto".

Three years later, Suharto had been swept out of office and replaced by an uneasy coalition of reformists, led by President Abdurrahman Wahid. Standing alongside Wahid was the Indonesian army, led by General Wiranto, who for years was a key ally of Suharto and who maintained extremely close relations with the US military. But that coalition was deeply split when Wiranto's military supported the death squads that murdered hundreds of people and laid waste to much of the territory of East Timor in 1999. In February 2000, Wiranto was forced to step down after being accused by international observers and his own government of masterminding the rampage.

A few days later, Wolfowitz appeared on the PBS Newshour with Jim Lehrer. In the opening segment, reporter Gwen Ifill ran a clip of Holbrooke, then the UN ambassador, calling the struggle in Indonesia one between "the forces of democracy and the forces that look backward". Asked to comment, Wolfowitz quickly agreed with Holbrooke's characterization, saying "the stakes [in Indonesia] are huge ... it's very, very important to the United States". Then Wolfowitz commented on the credentials of General Wiranto - a man he knows well.

"You asked is Wiranto a reformer or anti-reform," Wolfowitz said, "I think the truth is he is history, whichever he was ... Wiranto was the general who commanded the army during the first elections in Indonesian history... where the army genuinely played a neutral role. He may have done bad things in East Timor or failed to stop bad things in East Timor, but that's what makes it so tricky is this president [Wahid] is a reformer. The old president [Suharto] without any question was fighting reform every step of the way ... Wiranto, we don't know. And I think he should be given a fair trial on these charges in East Timor."

Perhaps not, then, the sainted ideologue of democratic revolution.

The disappeared. posted by lenin

According to Human Rights Watch , at least 11 al-Qaida suspects have "disappeared" in U.S. custody, and some may have been tortured:

The prisoners are probably being held outside the United States without access to the Red Cross or any oversight of their treatment, the human rights group said. In some cases, the United States will not even acknowledge the prisoners are in custody.

The report said the prisoners include the alleged architect of the Sept. 11 attacks, Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, as well as Abu Zubaydah, who is believed to be a close aide to Osama bin Laden.

In refusing to disclose the prisoners' whereabouts or acknowledge the detentions, Human Rights Watch said, the U.S. government has violated international law, international treaties and the Geneva Convention. The group called on the government to bring all the prisoners "under the protection of the law."

"I think the U.S. demeans itself when it adopts the philosophy that the ends justify the means in the fight against terror," said Reed Brody, special counsel with Human Rights Watch.

Remember, before you simply get angry at the Bush administration, that it was the pussilanimity and hypocrisy of American liberalism that prepared the ideological ground for this, as Slavoj Zizek pointed out :

Exemplary here is Jonathan Alter's Newsweek article 'Time to Think about Torture' (5 November 2001), with the ominous subheading: 'It's a new world, and survival may well require old techniques that seemed out of the question.' After flirting with the Israeli idea of legitimising physical and psychological torture in cases of extreme urgency (when we know a terrorist prisoner possesses information which may save hundreds of lives), and 'neutral' statements like 'Some torture clearly works,' it concludes:

"We can't legalise torture; it's contrary to American values. But even as we continue to speak out against human-rights abuses around the world, we need to keep an open mind about certain measures to fight terrorism, like court-sanctioned psychological interrogation. And we'll have to think about transferring some suspects to our less squeamish allies, even if that's hypocritical. Nobody said this was going to be pretty."

The obscenity of such statements is blatant. First, why single out the WTC attack as justification? Have there not been more horrible crimes in other parts of the world in recent years? Secondly, what is new about this idea? The CIA has been instructing its Latin American and Third World military allies in the practice of torture for decades. Even the 'liberal' argument cited by Alan Dershowitz is suspect: 'I'm not in favour of torture, but if you're going to have it, it should damn well have court approval.' When, taking this line a step further, Dershowitz suggests that torture in the 'ticking clock' situation is not directed at the prisoner's rights as an accused person (the information obtained will not be used in the trial against him, and the torture itself would not formally count as punishment), the underlying premise is even more disturbing, implying as it does that one should be allowed to torture people not as part of a deserved punishment, but simply because they know something. Why not go further still and legalise the torture of prisoners of war who may have information which could save the lives of hundreds of our soldiers? If the choice is between Dershowitz's liberal 'honesty' and old-fashioned 'hypocrisy', we'd be better off sticking with 'hypocrisy'. I can well imagine that, in a particular situation, confronted with the proverbial 'prisoner who knows', whose words can save thousands, I might decide in favour of torture; however, even (or, rather, precisely) in a case such as this, it is absolutely crucial that one does not elevate this desperate choice into a universal principle: given the unavoidable and brutal urgency of the moment, one should simply do it. Only in this way, in the very prohibition against elevating what we have done into a universal principle, do we retain a sense of guilt, an awareness of the inadmissibility of what we have done.

Anti-semitism "infects sections of the Left." posted by lenin

Marc Mulholland isn't wrong to believe that some of the left has been infected by anti-semitism in relation to Israel. Harry's favourite source of anti-SWP gossip (invariably inaccurate and often made up completely), is the Weekly Worker .

As Mark Elf could inform him, it will also provide ample testimony against "Jewish interests" if he ever decides to take against them. Royston Bull, the author of the anti-semitic rant published by Weekly Worker as a letter, also managed to describe the WTC attacks as a "blow against imperialism". He is, suffice to say, an ex-Stalinist. Most of his type have shifted their support from Stalin's tanks to Bush's airforce, but he prefers Osama's airforce. Nice.

Of course, Weekly Worker is the same stout organ that once rallied in defense of David Irving , adducing "the principle of free speech". This was after they had published an article denying that Irving was a holocaust-denier (holocaust-denial-denial?), promoting his books' historical virtues and commending the "very readable" two-volume set on Churchill's war, referring to Irving's "life-long mission to upset and offend what he perceives to be official or received opinion on the Third Reich". Again, their defense is the principle of "free speech". But, as Harry's Place are well aware, "Liberty, if it means anything, is the right to tell people what they don't want to hear".

Socialism in an age of stockbroking. posted by lenin

Socialism in an Age of Waiting . The very words alone are enough to inspire dread among the pseudo-Left, to which I proudly adhere. It isn't because of the eloquence and didactic beauty of their posts, and it isn't even that they sling mud. No. They're much more like monkeys in a zoo, throwing shit at bemused audiences.

I suggested a while ago that all of the incessant and increasingly tedious attempts by pro-war Leftists to assassinate the reputations of their opponents were motivated by panic about the utterly disastrous failure of their war and occupation. But in SIAW's case, there seems to be another factor, and that is an unwillingness to face up to their own flaws. So, when they appear in the comments thread at this post by a Debsian Socialist and bestow on the author the charming epithet "wanker", then follow it up by accusing the author of "playground name-calling" and advise him to "Get back to us when you've grown up a bit", a suspicious eyebrow might twitch. Add to that the history of playground name-calling at their site and elsewhere (in which another blogger is a "wanker", Marc Mulholland is a "fearless proletarian hero" and I am a devotee of the Rev Ian Paisley and Josef Geobbels) and you really might be on to something.

Mark the sequel. In the same comments thread, these dissertation-producing, blogging, idle-minded fantasists attempt to mock the antiwar-Left thus: "with your blogs and your dissertations, and your infantile fantasies, you can make a new world!" Hmmm. "Projection", I whispered. The riposte was crushing. I had resorted to a "stupid misuse of a term from bourgeois pyschology" (by which they mean Freudian psychiatry - a radically anti-bourgeois system of thought for those in the know). There are different definitions of the term, but one of them refers to a defense mechanism in which one projects one's undesirable qualities onto someone else. The following sentence, from their savage attack on International Rooksbyism (savage in the Monty Python sense: "I'll bite yer leg off!"), is not, of course, a "stupid misuse of a term from bourgeois psychology":

"Like Serge, some of us happen to be a lot more interested in the majority of human beings, and what they want, need, believe, etc., than in the cognitive dissonance of the majority/plurality of the left, which in the 1930s favoured, or failed to oppose, Stalinism..." [Emphasis added]

I wouldn't actually bore you with the entire sentence. What they mean by cognitive dissonance is for you to guess (the only way that sentence would make sense would be if they replaced the term with something like "confusion" or "apologetics"), but for anyone really interested in the term, it refers to the tension between what one already knows and a new cognition that threatens that existing knowledge.

I'll whisper it again: projection.

There may also be something to be said about a collection of individuals who describe themselves as "non-sectarian" but who seem embarrassingly interested in dispensing feckless insults at the expense of their opponents while remaining stoically impervious to argument. Or, indeed, who expend large amounts of intellectual effort (if I may speak loosely) describing their opponents as "pseudo-Left" while they are not totally free from the cogs of capital. Their site is registered to a Dr Graham Field who runs a firm called AQ Research , which gives advice to stockbroking and investment banking firms. He could, of course, merely have registered the site and have nothing else to do with it. I couldn't possibly comment.

Update: To my delight, SIAW have churned out this wonderful effort at self-satire. I am glad to say that they have not wasted their time with feeble, low-grade invective, dilute rhetorical jibes or half-arsed smears based on deliberate misrepresentation. Or I should say, they haven't wasted much time. However long it took was too long, though, and I certainly won't shift off my lazy arse to vend any considered reply. It would be like smashing a fly with a nuclear weapon.

The Media and the War. posted by lenin

Although it goes without saying that the right-wing press will malevolently spin and weave to make every piece of information emerging about the Iraq war look like a cruel indictment of its opponents, there has been an increasing attempt to gauge the quality of reporting and analysis emerging from the antiwar media. In that regard, a few snippets from the latest issue of the media journal Mediactive might prove useful. First of all because it features a transcript of a “Reporting the World” panel discussion with London based journalists affiliated either to ‘neutral’ television news programmes or to antiwar newspapers. I want to first draw your attention to Ed Pilkington of The Guardian, confessing to his paper’s inadequate pre-war coverage:

“[H]ow did we allow Tony Blair to get away with telling us that he had his own special intelligence and we must trust him? And he knew the truth? And we now know that in fact he didn’t have his own special intelligence and in fact virtually the entire lot of it was at least four years old and pre-1998, and we let him get away with that.”

Quite how this sits with that paper’s reluctance to describe Blair as a liar or a fantasist, I leave to your judgment. Here is Kim Sengupta of the Independent:

“I think there was a view that anything the Iraqis said or did was not to be believed and that the US and Britain basically told the truth. I remember being in Baghdad and watching a Pentagon press conference on television, when Donald Rumsfeld talked about how the Iraqis were flouting the UN by firing at American and British aircraft in the no-fly zone.
Now, we all know the no-fly zones were not set up by the UN…
Then, when I got back to London in November, I remember Jack Straw said the same thing, and again, no one actually said no, it’s nothing to do with the UN, it is an illegal no fly zone set up by America, so the Iraqis had the right under international law to fire back.”

Richard Sambrook:

“Well I think that hindsight is a fantastic thing … On the threat, we probably didn’t go into that for the reason that we were not able to pursue it at that stage, and I’m glad that we haven’t let it go and that we’re still pursuing it.”

And later on the question of whether fair coverage was given to the antiwar voice:

“[I]t was the first time, certainly in my professional life, that Britain has gone to war with the country so deeply divided, so how do you achieve some impartiality and some fairness?”

Bill Hayton of BBC World Service adds:

“The stuff that was going on in [RAF] Fairford was staggering. The bombs were on one side of the road and they had to be taken across a public highway and into the airfield and they were being driven along at five miles an hour and people would chain themselves on … this is a fantastic story but we didn’t cover it … People on the buses rang the BBC newsroom and were told they were lying this couldn’t possibly be happening. These stories were not getting out because we weren’t reaching out to these protesters and non-traditional voices to get them in.”

David Seymour, Group Political Editor of the Mirror, explains the late turn to lighter reporting taken by his paper:

“[T]he paper was unremittingly negative … we were all consistent in saying the thing is going completely wrong. Rumsfeld has only sent a quarter of the number of troops he should have sent in there and it is all going wrong … and that was the stage where you were trying to say well do you really want to do that? Is what you are doing to your readers so depressing them?”

Tony Maddox, Senior Vice President of CNN International, explains how the news media tried to sift propaganda from fact:

“I think what was difficult, for 24 hour news specifically, was that this was one of those stories where there were lots of sources of information that were very difficult to check … well, do we sit on this until we check it out, in which case others are going to run with it and we’ll get the blame if it proves to be true, or alternatively we pump it out there and we reserve the right to pull it back afterwards.”

Tenner to anyone who finds more than one instance where CNN retracted a story initially published but later proven to be false. Seriously, I’ll send you a cheque (well, give me a break, I’m a student).

Sambrook also blames 24 hour broadcasting, but has this to say about using senior military sources:

“You get a better flavour but you are now further up the information chain in the field, so that is why you get news like Umm Qasr has fallen and there’s an uprising in Basra, because you are hearing from the military before they have worked out what is really happening…”

The possibility that the military could be lying to the media for some obscure reasons of their own seems to have eluded Mr Sambrook, and I don’t know how to point it out to him without making him feel foolish.

Mr Sambrook later explains how “embedding” emerged:

“After Kosovo Jamie Shea did a speech in Bosnia where he basically said that their frustration had been that it didn’t matter whatever happened, if there were pictures of a civilian tractor being hit that became the narrative of the day. And I think the embedded policy came out of that because he said they would have to grab the pictures of the day to day to grab the narrative. I wonder whether we reflected on that when actually we had no pictures of the Republican Guard, we had no pictures of the western desert – was embedding simply a means of capturing the narrative of the day in a controlled way.”

Phillip Knightley endorses this historical view, but points out a significant problem:

“The main danger I can see with that is … the psychological identification that grows between the embedded correspondent and the soldiers he is with, the use of ‘we’, ‘we’re doing this and we’re doing that’. And it was frankly admitted by on BBC correspondent that he got involved in the action because the soldiers around him said, ‘what are you doing here? Help us!’ so he helped them.”

Audrey Gillan, of The Guardian, talks about censorship during her embedment:

“Censorship was an issue, for some of these discussions I have been involved in; it has not been so much of an issue for other people but certainly I know a lot of journalists who were censored; I was censored, sometimes quite rightly where I was in breach of security and could have brought us into great danger … Certain elements of what was perceived to be anti-Americanism was removed…”

On reporting “unilaterally” (ie: independently), Richard Sambrook avers that it “was more difficult than in any conflict in the last few years, certainly on safety grounds. We were inhibited from being able to work independently to the extent that we would have liked”. Tony Maddox agrees that “The death toll amongst the journalistic community was, and continues to be, disgraceful. It’s appalling the amount of casualties”. Phillip Knightley adds that:

“It is an undisputed fact that fifteen journalists died in this war, more than in any other war with such duration in history. To put it in perspective, in the second World War BBC reporters covered the war in Europe from the time of the Normandy invasion until the surrender of Germany, and lost only two journalists. Fifteen lost in less than a month is a disgraceful state of affairs.
“And we have to remind ourselves that the largest single group of those were killed by American fire … I think the American government is now adopting the attitude towards unilaterals which is simply this: ‘we think it intolerable that any red-blooded American or any coalition journalist should want t report the war with the enemy side and if they do and they get in our way we will fire at them.’ I can’t prove that but I think that is a very, very likely scenario.”

Now, to review some of the reasons offered for the media’s poor performance before, during and after the war: competition with rivals; ideological acceptance of military and political leaders and their statements; ignorance; an obscure inability to “pursue it at that time”; censorship; danger of being killed by US fire; 24 hour news; the use of military sources; the desire to accentuate the positive and thereby avoid depressing readers; and psychological identification with the troops.

The conference produced a number of recommendations which are well worth looking at.

1) “Do not report a ‘line’ from an official source without obtaining and citing independent evidence as to its likely reliability. If, once evidence has been obtained, the reliability seems questionable, STOP repeating the line, or, if you do repeat it, always remind readers or audiences that independent evidence casts doubt on it.”

2) “Acknowledge that the important job of testing arguments is best done if they are juxtaposed with, and weighed against, alternative, countervailing arguments. If these do not issue from traditional sources, be on the lookout for opportunities to explore them by going to non-traditional sources.”

3) “All newsrooms genuinely interested in offering a service to the public must think long and hard about ‘conduit’ journalism and, in particular, whether their Political Correspondents are being used in this way. In covering speeches, statements or news conferences by politicians, precautions should be taken in advance to have reporters and commentators standing by, ready to point out omissions from what is being said, or elisions of key questions. They should not just be put on television automatically as an update.”

4) Fire Andrew Marr.

Okay, I made the last one up, but it would be interesting to see a news organisation seriously attempt to adhere to those very modest recommendations. I couldn’t see it lasting a day. On these ‘conduit’ journalists, one recommendation they might have added would be for them to stop saying things like “Well, what the Prime Minister would say is”, or “Downing Street is eager to”, or “Ariel Sharon is very determined to” etc. If they report like they’re reading the mind of the Prime Minister or President or Foreign Secretary, that is probably because that is precisely where what they are reading emerged from.

For your information... posted by lenin

Every now and again, from the penumbra of the blogging world, something disturbing and niggling will grab at your leg and, yes, possibly bite. This is a faithful report of my experience with the Bat , whom I have managed to cajole into returning to blogging. He is a bit shy, our Bat, but once bitten you'll be forever smitten. I spent a pleasant hour or so at the World's End in Camden probing his insubordinate brain on such matters as postmodernism, Lacan, Zizek and revolutionary socialism on the internet. He's a charming, fascinating guy, and I urge you to charm the bat from the darkness of his hiding places by depositing a juicy comment, or even just visiting the link provided above. He won't disappoint.

On other, similar, matters I have to inform you of the sensation that is Ed Rooksby. Only a few days old, and he's already ratching up considerable comments and controversy at his site, International Rooksbyism . He too is a lovely geezer, who occasionally posts here as "Debsian socialist". He's had his Christening in the form of a hilariously ill-conceived bitch-slap at the hands of Socialism in an Age of Waiting. Have a look and marvel that such a man can outstrip my comments boxes in a matter of days (what's the matter with you fuckers? Cat got your tongue?)

Finally, check out Respect's letter to the Greens and its response. Cautious though the reply is, I'd suggest that it leaves considerable room for maneouvre. Respect and the Greens ought to work together, and this is a step in that direction.

Right. As SIAW seem to think I'm a Paisleyite, I'm away off to have a sip of the devil's buttermilk. Enjoy your evening.

Desperately seeking the moral high ground. posted by lenin

Normblog will have his little snipes. Today, he compares the words of some angry trade union delegates who complain that the big four unions - in voting down a motion to withdraw troops early from Iraq - have violated their own stated policies and failed to represent the will of their members. A transparent case of contempt for union democracy, but not really surprising - after all, we wouldn't want to scupper that almighty Warwick deal, would we?

But here's the part of Norm's post that interests me:

This is Dromey speaking for solidarity, and Healey and Macedo speaking the same language of denial as much (most?) of the anti-war movement has done since turning its back on the people of Iraq.

To clarify, right-winger Dromey defended the union decision, while Healey and Macedo attacked it. Okay? Now, since Norm doesn't begin to advance an argument in defense of his latter assertion, I don't feel compelled to counter it with argument. Nevertheless, a few comments suggest themselves.

1) The "language of denial" could just as well apply to those who still insist the war on Iraq was really about overthrowing a tyrant, who still believe that the Prime Minister acted and spoke in good faith, who still believe that the occupation has anything going for it at all.

2) The calumnious assertion that much or most of the antiwar movement has "turned its back on the people of Iraq" hardly merits discussion, but it does point to something I have suggested before: the pro-war Left are absolutely desperate to retain the moral high ground. Every single other argument for the war lies in bloody ruins in Fallujah and Najaf. As most Iraqis have long since turned against the occupiers, as coalition troops commit war crimes day after day, as bodies pile up, what is left but the purity of our intent (and, following the ISG, the malignity of Saddam's)?

I repeat and underline my claim that this constant repetition of outrageous, stupid slurs on the antiwar movement is motivated by panic, because when the argument is lost, nothing remains but the moral high ground.

Fisherblog has some thoughts on this too.

Update: Some of the comments that have appeared in response to this post have been unpleasant and could be interpreted as being racist. KB has invited all kinds of shame on himself for the comments he has made. I myself believe that KB did not mean any specific harm in what he has said, but I will be deleting it. I have been very, very lax about posting until now. However, there are more than reasonable grounds for offense and, as lethargic and cold-ridden as I have been over the last few days, I haven't attended to this matter.

I wish to ask all contributors to avoid obviously baleful and offensive commentary. In most cases, I will not be inclined to delete comments, but I specifically do not wish to offend another reader (blogger or otherwise) by allowing comments that refer derogatively to their race or religion. Geras, as much as I disagree with him, has a right to be confronted on his arguments, not on his genealogy.

I ought to make it clear that the above has been prompted by this post at Normblog. Since this post is about "the moral high ground", the subsequent trajectory of debate is crushingly ironic. Let me therefore state a principle that I will be adhering to in comments policy from now on. Though I hesitate to delete comments, this blog cannot be a platform for racism, sexism, homophobia or other, similar kinds of abuse. As the content of comments boxes reflects on me, I will take an interest in making sure that, if they don't cover me in glory, they at least don't leave me drenched in ignominy. Racist and abusive comments will be deleted.

One last thing. I have written to Norm to apologise profusely for this, and explained my negligence in this case. I have also accepted much flak in the comments boxes for the lack of vigour in my response to KB, which is fair enough. I don't expect the discussion will end there, but I do hope that visitors can refrain from implying that I "condone" racism in any way. A great deal of energy has been expended at the Tomb to challenging racism, and that will continue.

American Psycho: The Corporation. posted by lenin

Review of Joel Bakan, The Corporation: The Patholigical Pursuit of Money and Power, Constable, 2004.

Beginning with the merest whisper, this book builds into a storm of critique, analysis and witty apercus. It is breath-taking and ground-breaking. A mark of how well it has done its job is the fact that it can describe corporate rule as "the pathological pursuit of money and power" and have The Economist describe it as "a surprisingly rational and coherent attack on capitalism's most important institution". Bakan negotiates the history, theory and practise of corporations with considerable verve and he always wins.

And in what does his victory consist? He proves, with considerable economy and rigour, that the corporation is a psychopath. (You'll regret that raised eyebrow and cynical smirk.) What Brett Easton Ellis could only describe metaphorically in fiction, Bakan sets out with brutal clarity. To summarise briefly, the corporation is, in law, a person endowed with all the rights and protection of any human being. In 1886, the Supreme Court of the United States declared as much, insisting that the corporation had as much right as any human being to the protection of the Fourth Amendment. Constitutional rights designed to protect freed slaves became the safeguard of corporate power.

But the corporate personality sucks. It is grandiose, manipulative, asocial, irresponsible, lacks empathy and is unable to feel remorse. According to Dr Robert Hare, interviewed for this book, these are the hallmarks of a psychopath. Psychopaths are also given to using their immense resources of charm to hide dangerously self-obsessed personalities, which is exactly how companies relate to the public in advertising (Ronald McDonald, the Michelin Man, Tony Tiger etc). With their immense power, they understand that they need to be seen as humane creatures, sources of social value, embodiments of this or that virtue (family values, sexual charisma etc).

But Bakan does not begin with this cutting anthropomorphism. His first task is to establish how the corporation developed, and this he does by tracing its "inauspicious beginnings" in London's Exchange Alley. The initial attraction of the corporate form was that it combined large amounts of capital into one enterprise, enabling large-scale works such as mining and shipping. But there were several major scandals in the late 1600s as fraudsters sold shares in fictitious companies. These early corporations had raised suspicion because they separated management from ownership, prompting Adam Smith's concern (in 1776) that managers being entrusted with other people's money would encourage "negligence and profusion". When Smith wrote this, the corporation had been banned in England for fifty years following the collapse of the fraudulent South Sea Company which soared on a wave of confidence until investors realised that it was a con and bailed out. Its infamous decline led to the Bubble Act being passed by parliament in 1720, banning corporate bodies. That Act was repealed in 1825, allowing for a proliferation of corporations. Similar processes were at work in America after the revolution, and especially after the civil war. The new railway systems being constructed required vast combined efforts and capital, but the effect of this was to contribute to the development of "a national market in company securities" as the historian M C Reed observed. The middle class began to own shares for the first time - especially after new laws were introduced restricting the individual shareholder's liability for company debts.

The Select Committee on Partnerships reported in 1851 that the spread of share ownership would provide additional motive to "preserve order and respect for the laws of property", while in 1853 the Edingburgh Journal hoped that workers could be brought into the shareowning democracy, because:

Working men, once enabled to act together as owners of a joint capital, will soon find their whole view of the relations between capital and labour undergo a radical alteration.

However, although the limitation of liability enabled more people of limited means to access shares, it had its detractors. It was held by many to undermine one of the elementary principles of economic life - that every person is bound to pay debts contracted insofar as this is possible. The consequences, they said, would leave the owners of capital without responsibility for the actions of their company. Executives could easily escape the noose, since decisions rarely emanated from a single individual but rather tended to result from collective thinking.

The very scale of the corporation, which was its productive strength, came to be seen as a dehumanising factor. One Vice-President of AT&T complained that "bigness" tended to squeeze out "human understanding" and "human sympathy". And it was AT&T who in 1908 launched the first major advertising campaign of modern history, attempting to put a human face on their company by featuring employees and shareholders, promoting a "new democracy of public service ownership", ""controlled by all". By the end of WWI, a great fad had developed among corporations for what has become known as "corporate social responsibility" with companies like Goodyear Tire and General Electric feting a "New Capitalism". Paul Litchfield, president of Goodyear for some 32 years, pioneered this idea - and, indeed, he took it seriously, making inroads into promoting the health and education of his workforce, and giving them a greater say in the production process. He even developed a workers' Senate and House of Representatives, which had jurisdiction over wages and employment issues. This movement experienced a resurgence in the 1930s with the Great Depression, as corporations were increasingly held in popular contempt. Gerard Swope, President of General Electric, urged organised industry to take the lead in social responsibility rather than allowing "democratic society" to "act through its government".

This did not convince many, and Roosevelt's New Deal package of regulatory measures was popularly received, even if despised by most corporate leaders. Its legacy was to have a profound impact on the postwar scene, preserving social benefits for workers and affording unions protections they had not previously enjoyed. However, with the OPEC crisis of 1973, a new ideology began to take hold. Neoliberalism was the right's answer to runaway inflation, unemployment and stagnation. Privatising, deregulating and overturning many of the achievements made by working people previously, the axis of Reagan and Thatcher heralded a new era in which corporate callousness acquired the kind of glamour that put "Chainsaw" Al Dunlap on the front page of a magazine, brandishing a machine-gun to symbolise how ruthless he was. Such images would have evoked general disgust and hilarity in the 1990s, even as corporate power continued to expand through such institutions as the World Trade Organisation, and the Enron scandal with all of its associated casualties dealt a fatal blow to the corporate halo. So far, so familiar.

But it is precisely the questions around the latest bout of corporate scandal that this book seeks to deal with. Is it systemic, or is it just a few rotten apples? Well, not least among the many astonishing revelations in this book is the one that "Corporate social responsibility is illegal - unless it is insincere". You did not misread.

Corporate social responsibility is illegal because the sole responsibility of the executive, established through legal rulings, is to the shareholders. The duty of the executive, whatever his personal feelings, is to maximise shareholder value. This part of the book is opened with some feel-good rhetoric from "socially aware" companies like BP, who wish it to be known that they are "Beyond Petroleum", and tobacco giant ABT who donate millions of dollars to the creation of centres for the study of corporate social responsibility at universities. For all the world, one would think that millions of protesters across the world had been pushing at an open door, and corporations were all too ready to go out of their way to deal with the challenges of the environment, workers' rights and so on. Then, to the ground with a thud. The author meets a dapper, tart little intellectual known as Milton Friedman. Corporate social responsibility, Friedman assures him, is a nonsense - not just illegal, but immoral. It is self-indulgence on the part of some sappy executive to pay workers higher wages when he could be maximising shareholder value by finding cheaper labour elsewhere. Peter Drucker, the modern expert on corporations, has a similar take. If you have an executive who wants to take on social responsibility - "fire him. Fast." Noam Chomsky's arguments mirror those of his ideological nemeses, only reversing the value significations.

So, how did this legal state of affairs become clear? Henry Ford first discovered these limits when he attempted to reduce prices for customers. He did not believe that companies should make "such awful profits" - a "reasonable profit ... but not too much". However, when he tried to reduce prices by cutting shareholder returns - specifically returns to his ex-partners, the Dodge brothers - he was told by the court that a company should be run "primarily for the profit of the stockholders" not "for the primary purpose of benefiting others". Dodge vs Ford, and similar decisions in England and elsewhere, stand to this day as the legal expression of the corporation's "pathological pursuit of profit and power". Bakan speaks to former corporate lawyer Robert Hinkley who quit his job when he discovered what the law was all about. The law as it stands, he avers, actually inhibits corporate social responsibility.

And so it proves, in case after case. Bakan speaks to the head of BP, Sir John Browne, who created a stir in the energy industry by announcing that his company did accept that hydrocarbon fuels were potentially dangerous and that it would not only meet the Kyoto protocols but beat them. He advocates the "precautionary principle" in which corporations must acknowledge risks to people and planet and seek to minimise harm - even where the evidence is unclear. Unfortunately for the Gwich'in people of Yukon village, 20 miles north of the arctic circle, Browne doesn't allow his precautionary principle to apply to drilling in that region even though scientific evidence suggests that it would have a devastating impact on the village by driving away the caribou herds, forcing them into starvation and depriving the Gwich'in of their calorie intake. Indeed, as Bakan observes, it could not be otherwise - the benefits to shareholders of BP are too obvious. Meanwhile the actual costs of BP's environmental initiatives to date have been nugatory, while the effect of improving its relations with the public has been invaluable. Similarly, Pfizer have their own brand of corporate social responsibility - they provide drugs to Third World countries to help them treat the trachoma illness. Luckily enough, the drugs cost them next to zero, they can write all costs off as charitable donations when the taxman comes, and the benefits in terms of public trust and relations with prescription-happy doctors are priceless.

Anita Roddick. There is a name that evokes some well-justified suspicion, but in Bakan's book she comes through as a well-meaning but ultimately thwarted individual. She started the Body Shop as a means of merging her business practise with her social ideals, defending workers' rights, opposing nuclear proliferation and working to preserve the environment. Soon, however, she found that in order to survive as a business she would require money from public trading of shares. This, apparently, was the opening that admitted the poltergeist into the words. "You go into the stock market", she explains, "and the imperative is to grow - and by a small group of people's standards, financial investors who are gamblers". It came to a head with the protests agains the World Trade Organisation in Seattle, which Roddick attended. She wanted every Body Shop branch to publicise the facts about the WTO and to campaign against it. "I wanted every shop to challenge the WTO", she said. "And they won't do that." Roddick and her husband have a 24% stake in the company, while Anita herself has been downgraded to a consultant on a 2-year contract. The new executive chairman Adrian Bellamy explains that "We believe in social responsibility, but we are very hard-nosed about profit. We know that success is measured by the bottom line."

But, not only does the corporate structure frustrate attempts at doing good deeds, it allows for and nurtures bad ones. Meet Marc Barry. After a hard day's work, he likes nothing better than to go on a wine date with a nice lady. He thinks he's a decent guy - honest, sincere, intelligent. In his day job, however, he is a corporate crook. He gets paid by corporations to imbibe information about opponents by means fair and foul. Among his many schemes is the phoney recruitment centre he once set up - he would invite executives along and pretend to interview them while in reality debriefing them on behalf of his clients. Another great scoop of his was posing as a venture capitalist, on behalf of a multinational corporation, in order to steal an inventor's technology for transmitting video over a wireless phone. Moral ruin by day, sweatheart by night. How does he do it?

The philosopher Alisdair MacIntyre is brought in to explain how corporate executives and managers compartmentalise their lives. Their working lives, they can dissociate from their values. This is where Dr Robert Hare intervenes, with his extemporising on schizophrenia. Corporate bosses should be thankful, he says, for the ability to thus compartmentalise, for if they didn't have that they would be psychopaths just like the corporations they work for. And what of that immense charm that psychopaths are capable of - the kind that we have all seen salesmen exude? One company used to espouse social responsibility with a passion, such that each year it produced a Corporate Responsibility Annual Report, vowing to cut greenhouse gas emissions, support indigenous rights, look after workers and maintain rigorous safety standards. It's name is Enron, and the rest is history.

The corporation is an "externalising machine". It is in its genes, in its design to externalise costs - to consumers, workers, the environment, the government, whomever. Milton Friedman describes externalities as "the effect of a transaction ... on a third party who has not consented to or played any role in the carrying out of that transaction." He offers a mundane example, but acknowledges that the effects can be and are much greater. Patricia Anderson could tell him a thing or two. Her kids suffered burns on 60% of their bodies, and one had his hand amputated following a crash in which a car slammed into the back of hers, causing it to explode into flames. The fuel tank had been placed behind the axle by the manufacturers, GM, in the knowledge that this would involve significant dangers. A court case found that this had been done to maximise profits. GM analysts had predicted that fuel-fed fires would occur with their cars - but when designing their new model (around 1973) they asked an engineer from the company's Advance Design department to investigate the risks and costs of fuel-fed fires. The formula he produced is now infamous. He estimated that each year there would be five hundred fatalities as a result of fuel-fed fires, which would cost the company about $200,000 in legal settlements each. As there were 41 million GM motors on the highway, he simply multiplied 500 by 200,000, then divided it by 41 million. The cost to GM of sticking with its design was $2.40 per car. It would cost $8.59 per car to ensure that the car was safe. So, by going with the more dangerous design, the company saved $6.19 per car.

There are many more examples of this sort of callous indifference - from sweatshops (the incidence of which in the US is astonishing) to corporate crime. The well-respected General Electric has a corporate crime slate that would literally leave you saucer-eyed. Year after year there are successful complaints against the company for pollution, poor safety, illegal arms sales... The list is literally breathtaking. They are not alone, of course. Another example cited is BP, whose crimes against workers and the environment proved to be very cost-effective and thus are compulsively repeated.

Another theme of the book is the corporation's attempts to work around - even overthrow - democracy. It is true that in the 1930s, a group of corporate leaders concocted a serious plot to overthrow Roosevelt and install a military dictatorship based on some ideas circulating around Europe at the time. While Roosevelt was accused by Hoover of "preaching class-hatred", Mussolini and Hitler had driven down wages, slashed the public debt and broken the working class movement. Gerald Maguire, a WWI veteran, began his pitch for power when he met with former Marine General Smedley Butler and explained that he had been sent by a group of business leaders to raise an army, seize the Whitehouse and install himself as a fascist dictator. The two men had met before, when Maquire, claiming to be representing a veterans groups, implored Butler to deliver a speech against the decision to abandon the gold standard. On the second occasion, he brought several thousand-dollar bills with him. Butler politely declined. On the fateful coup meeting, Maguire claimed to represent Anaconda Copper, Goodyear Tire and Bethlehem Steel among others. He explained that he intended to found a soldiers’ organisation based on the French Croix de Feu, which Butler would head. Butler could then demand that Roosevelt appoint him in a new role as secretary for general affairs – a sort of shadow President – and from there he would assume real power on the pretext of Roosevelt’s failing health. If Roosevelt refused to acquiesce, the army would take power.

Three weeks later, the American Liberty League was founded to “combat radicalism” and “teach the necessity of respect for the rights of person and property”. Its treasurer, Grayson Murphy, was Maguire’s boss while one of his backers, Robert Clark, was a major contributor. Men from JP Morgan and DuPont became executives. Unfortunately for them, they had selected the wrong man, for Butler had now come to believe that “war is a racket”, fuelled mainly by corporate greed and that he had been, in his youth, a “racketeer for capitalism”. He told the government what was up, and the plot was dead.

Clearly, this is not typical, but it is revealing. Trotsky asserted that, just as an earthquake revealed the layers of earth and rock beneath the surface, so a social upheaval would uncover the layers of society and its myriad forms. And it is this submerged but constant struggle against democratic control that Bakan unpicks. It is the usual fare – lobbying, campaign contributions and so on to overturn unfriendly legislation. The successful lobbying for deregulation of the electricity supply in California has had baleful consequences that hardly merit repeating. Enron’s story is “the story of a corporation that used its political influence to remove government restrictions on its operations”, while the coal industry has been heavily funding Republican election campaigns resulting in concerted efforts by Bush to cut the budget of the Mine Safety and Health Administration (MHSA), which is already having difficulty carrying out its necessary tasks on its present budget. There are many other instances, of course, and Bakan provides a concise history of the growth in the lobbying industry, but what adds to its impact is the ingenious heuristic. Corporations are psychopaths; they can do no good that is not self-interested; they cause immense harm to people and planet; they break the law. And now, on top of that, they will work to curtail democracy where it doesn’t act in their interests.

Bakan’s work is packed with a wealth of analysis, and supporting detail. It is, to my knowledge, the first of its kind – an attempt to critically understand the central institution in modern capitalism, as well as a well-aimed ideological blast against it. Read this book, pass it on to friends and teach its message to your children:

“[T]he corporations that surround us are not our friends. Charming and plausible though they are, they can only ever see us as resources to be used. This is the real world, not science fiction, and it really is us or them.”

A film based on this book will shortly be released in the UK. In the meantime, visit the website.

Cynicism and innocence: on the pro-war Left. posted by lenin

Yesterday's post by H.U.H.? provides me with another opportunity to riff on the cynicism-innocence theme. Tim, who writes at said blog, suggested that for substituting moralism for substantive political analysis, "the pro-war Left are romantics in the most teenaged sense". No, no, no, I thought - these guys are jaded cynics, fully aware of the kind of people they are expecting to be "liberators". However, since many of them are Marxists or ex-Marxists, they neither have any illusions in the UN nor see the international working class as having the kind of muscle that is capable of delivering emancipation. Hence, we are left with the problem of what to do with all these killers in the world. To which the obvious reply is to harness the might of the American state.

True, the US has its faults, isn't a perfectly secular democracy, has plutocratic tendencies, may even organise alliances to defend oil and profit from its wars - but it isn't a fascist regime. As corrupt and venal as the American state may be, there is nothing supererogatory about it. There is no excess of violence, nothing that is not rooted in the perceived interests of the state or the interests it defends. Therefore, we may not be unreasonable in hoping for some confluence between the interests of the imperialists and those suffering under autocracy - it worked in World War Two, no? The US has every reason to want some form of democracy to work in Iraq, and since this is the bare minimum we owe to Iraqis after years of collusion in their oppression, shouldn't we tactically support the war?

Now, if the above resembles something like the argument of pro-war leftists, then one might expect some humility with it, some acknowledgment that there is a gamble involved, a very considerable gamble and one that involves thousands of lives overseas at that. Not a bit of it. The pro-war Left has been redoubtably aggressive, adamant, strident in its arguments. In fact, those who opposed the war have been accused of all sorts of ill motives, wrongdoing and stupidity. In fact, some members of the pro-war Left seem rather more comfortable having an argument with Saddam or France than with, say, Noam Chomsky. And now that the war is over, and the outcome has indeed proven disastrous, the pro-war Left would prefer it if we moved on, stopped living in the past and supported "Iraqi democrats" in Iraq now (not the ones who oppose the occupation, for obvious reasons), even if they themselves have not quite "moved on".

My suggestion, therefore, is that the more sophisticated pro-war Left know full well what kind of ruthless bastards they have been placing their money on, and are even cognisant of the scale with which they can deal in death just in the course of ordinary business. They know of the hugely dangerous nature of the trajectory being taken by US neoconservative, that it is in the history and nature of the state the neoconservatives now control to prioritise political hegemony over human survival. They know all this - they just disavow it. This accounts for the apparent combination of worldliness and innocent faith in the arguments of the pro-war Left. The innocence itself is sustained by a core of deep cynicism.

Cynicism and innocence were seperated at birth, but in the spectacle of political radicals stoutly defending imperialism they are rejoined.

Huh? on 9/11 posted by lenin

In a piece entitled The Lessons of September 11th , H.U.H.? suggests that:

September 11th was not a wake-up call to the mortal danger of Islamic fundamentalist terrorism facing the west; on the contrary, what the WTC attacks showed is that Al Qaeda is not a threat at all.

...

Flying two planes into the World Trade Center is the most gruesome demonstration of the truth of the old cliché that terrorism is the weapon of the weak. It’s a terrifying illustration of the strength of the forces arrayed against humanity that even the powerless can kill 3000 people: but that’s how it is, and, if we want to be able to change this, we need to understand these forces.

...

The pro-war Left like to accuse anti-war forces of an immature, knee-jerk oppositionism, but we should be clear about this: with their subsititution of emotional moralism for a serious political analysis, the pro-war Left are romantics in the most teenaged sense.

I'm with him up to the last phrase. Hordes of spotty young warniks dashing toward the barricades with flags flying, banners afloat and guns aloft screaming "Viva Dick Cheney!!"? Can't see it.

BBC on "Gaza violence". posted by lenin

If a suicide bomb went off in a cafe in Haifa, I doubt it would be referred to as "Haifa violence".

Nevertheless :

Gaza violence claims more lives

At least nine Palestinians were killed in the Gaza Strip on the seventh day of a major Israeli operation which has raised concern at the UN.
An air strike on Jabaliya refugee camp killed four militants planting a bomb and a gunman was killed near a Jewish settlement in the south of the strip.

Oh, four militants were "planting a bomb" in their own refugee camp were they? How did the BBC come upon this inside knowledge? I think you can guess the source of that particular piece of information...

Here's a bit more:

Israel mounted its operation after rockets hit one of its towns last week in an attack which killed two toddlers.

About 70 Palestinians and three Israelis have been killed in violence since.

I shall remember that. Next time a car bomb goes off in Tel Aviv, I'll say "twenty eight Israelis and one Palestinian died in violence in the Israeli capital today. Hamas said they were determined to stop Israeli helicopter attacks on Palestine. The leadership of the PFLP vowed to put an end to Israeli terror for good."

Trying the genocidaires. posted by lenin

According to the BBC , the Cambodians are finally to get a chance to try the perpetrators of mass murder in their country. Not Henry Kissinger, dears, but the "leaders of the murderous Khmer Rouge regime". This is excellent news, tempered by only one piece of information that the BBC provides but does not explain:

It still needs to be approved by the Senate and King Norodom Sihanouk, although these are expected to be formalities.

King Norodum Sihanouk? Wasn't he at one time a Prince ? The same Prince, in fact, who both collaborated with the Khmer Rouge in power, and when they were fighting - backed by the United States - to regain power?

When Sihanouk was overthrown by the CIA and replaced with the even more brutal General Lon Nol, he called on his "children" to join Pol Pot's maquis. While he was alleged to be the "prisoner" of the Khmer Rouge in Phnom Penh when they took power, he was able as prisoner to catch a plane to New York and address himself to the UN General Assembly as Pol Pot's head of state. He told the UN that "a genuinely popular democracy" had been born in Cambodia, "a society without exploitation of man by man". (Official Records, UN General Assembly, 13th Session, 6th October 1975).

As an extra favour to the world's most loved mass murderers, he knocked out a few precious encomiasms in press conferences:

"The whole country is well fed... And they are very gay... I confess that the people seem to be quite happy with Pol Pot." (Press Conference, 7th January, 1979, cited in Ben Kiernan, "The Cambodian Genocide..." op cit.)

When the Vietnamese invasion ousted the Khmer Rouge regime, the US moved to back the Khmer Rouge (KR) and what was called the "non-communist resistance" (NCR). The argument from Washington has been that the aid went to Sihanouk et al, and that there was no evidence of any collaboration between the KR and the NCR.

It is, however, impossible to take this seriously. According to James Pringle of the Far Eastern Economic Review, "[b]oth Sihanouk's army and Son Sann's KPNLF are completely discounted in Phnom Penh... 'All they do is sit drinking coca-cola on the border' said one well-informed Soviet-bloc dissident."

Meanwhile,

"[t]rucks loaded with men and boys, 150 or 200 at a time, pull away from settlements controlled by the Khmer Rouge and rumble into Cambodia". Supplies were "brought into the Cambodian interior to stockpile supplies for the Khmer Rouge".

Holbrooke was certain that US aid would "end up going to Pol Pot and his people".

According to two US relief workers, Linda Mason and Roger Brown,

"[t]he United States government insisted the Khmer Rouge be fed ... the US preferred that the Khmer Rouge operation benefit from the credibility of an internationally known relief organisation". (Linda Mason and Roger Brown, "Rice, Rivalry and Politics: Managing Cambodian Relief", 1983).

In 1980, Dr Ray Cline, a former deputy director of the CIA and then foreign-policy adviser to president-elect Ronald Reagan, secretly visited Khmer Rouge bases in Thailand. Within a year, 50 CIA agents were in Thailand running the Cambodian operation. The connection between "relief efforts" and support for the Khmer Rouge was "made plain" at a meeting with staff members of the US Senate Intelligence Committee on February 10th, 1990, according to a former British Foreign Office official who had been there. Specifically, it was revealed that a Defense Intelligence Agency colonel, who functioned as a "security liaison officer" between the UN Border Relief Operation and the Displaced Persons Protection Unit, was a key link between the US government and the Khmer Rouge.

Dith Pran, upon whom "The Killing Fields" was based, protested that US policy was "like putting gasoline on a fire", while the State Department insisted that the Khmer Rouge coalition had to be supported because of its "continuity" with the Pol Pot regime. (Pringle, FEER, 25th February, 1988; Barbara Crossette, New York Times, 2nd April 1988; Elizabeth Becker, Washington Post, 22nd May 1983; see also David Hawk's letter to the FEER, 2nd August 1984, which is accompanied by a picture of Alexander Haig "meeting, drink in hand, a smiling Ieng Sang" in New York; John Holdridge, State Department, Hearing before the Subcommittee on Asian and Pacific Affairs of the Committee on Foreign Affairs, House of Representatives, 97th Congress, 2nd session, 14th September 1982).

Apart from the above, we have film evidence showing Sihanoukists and Khmer Rouge troops attacking a village, looting it, and even filming themselves doing it. (John Pilger, "Cambodia, Year Ten", Central Television, 1989).

John Pedler, a UK Foreign Office official, swore an affidavit in Rome, 14th June 1991, which told anyone interested that:

"Sihanouk's forces carry out joint operations with the Khmer Rouge, as I was personally able to confirm when I visited Kompong Thom in central Cambodia. I was in that province when the last remnant of the Sihanoukist forces involved in a joint operation with the Khmer Rouge..."

On 28th February, 1991, the Whitehouse dropped the egg. Bush admitted to Congress that theree had been "tactical military cooperation" between "non-communist" Cambodian forces and Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge. (Washington Post, 28th February, 1991).


In 1990, Sihanouk assured US viewers that "[t]he Khmer Rouge are not criminals. They are patriots." (Peter Jennings Reporting, ABC News, 26th April, 1990). He was also kind enough to inform his journalist friend TD Smallman that he personally was not opposed to genocide. (Vanity Fair, April 1990).

And indeed, the Khmer Rouge were very grateful for this support for "the non-communist resistance". Flushed, Khien Samphan wrote two letters to Douglas Hurd congratulating him on his government's policy toward Cambodia. (Letter from J. Wilkins, South East Asia Department, Foreign Office, to C. Preece, 9th July 1991).

Prince Sihanouk, similarly overjoyed, told the press that "Cambodians were forced by the five permanent members of the UN Security Council ... to accept the return of the Khmer Rouge" who "in their hearts ... remain very cruel ... " (Reuter, 16th November, 1991; The Guardian, 20th November, 1991).

The reaction of the Cambodians to the "accords" which allowed for the return of Prince Sihanouk and the Khmer Rouge is exemplified in the fate of Khiem Samphan. Samphan, returning to Cambodia, was beseiged at the top floor of his villa by a mob of angry Cambodians, some of whom had lost relatives to his regime's genocidal policies. They inflicted a head wound upon him, which sent him scampering to the bottom of a cupboard where he crouched, pouring blood on the floor, as they tore up his house chanting "Kill him! Kill him!".

How overjoyed the Cambodians must be to have this preening autocrat as their King, and to have him decide who is to be tried for complicity in mass murder. They may as well have had Hitler's remaining henchmen put to trial by Goebbels.

Iraqis blame occupation. posted by lenin

From the Boston Globe :

Families of the 35 children who died in a string of bombings in Baghdad blamed American troops for the tragedy, accusing them of attracting insurgents to a ceremony where the attacks occurred.

...

Residents said that before the start of the celebration, U.S. soldiers called upon the children through loudspeakers to join the crowd, promising them sweets. There were an unusually large number around because the long school holidays were nearing an end.

''I blame the Americans for this tragedy. They wanted to make human shields out of our children. They should have kept the children away from danger,'' said Abdel-Hadi al-Badri, a cleric a the al-Mubashroun al-Ashra mosque, breaking down in tears during Friday prayers.

Al-Badri's son lost his right leg in the explosion after he ignored his father's warnings to stay away from the U.S. troops.

''The Americans are the first terrorists and the people who carried out the attack are the second terrorists,'' he added. It was the largest number of children killed in any single insurgent attack since the conflict erupted 17 months ago. [Emphasis added].

The ceremony in question was to celebrate the opening of a sewage plant that was already partially operating. I don't accept the conspiratorial side of the views reported here, but I draw two important lessons:

1) The occupiers are losing big time. If every time a series of suicide bombings is carried out, Iraqis blame the Americans, then you can forget hearts and minds. You can forget stomachs too, come to that.

2) In the circumstances, the occupiers are prepared to celebrate absolutely anything.

Snouts and entrails. posted by lenin

Simona Touretta, the kidnapped Italian aid worker who was freed last week, has spoken out on the resistance to the occupation:

"I said it before the kidnapping and I repeat it today," she told Corriere della Sera newspaper in an interview published on Friday.

"You have to distinguish between terrorism and resistance. The guerrilla war is justified, but I am against the kidnapping of civilians."

Paul Bigley tells Socialist Worker :

“It is the actions of the family and those who have rallied to our support that give rise to that hope,” said Paul.

“The Foreign Office and Blair did nothing useful.

“While our efforts secured a call from Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat for Ken’s release, all Blair did was phone my brother in Liverpool and my mum.

“He has sent no communique to the hostage takers, nor has he made a direct intervention. Instead we have a total silence. Silence is a death warrant for Ken.”

...

"...I have called for the government to set a firm date for the withdrawal of British troops from Iraq.

“The government says it will not negotiate with terrorists. But I’m not talking about negotiation. I’m talking about communication.”

The dignity and courage of Paul Bigley and his family shame Blair and his government. While New

Labour “fixers” scrabbled around this week desperately trying to avoid being held to account for the disaster of Iraq. Paul was spending every hour trying to secure his brother’s release.

He said, “It was utterly disgraceful that Peter Hain, a Labour minister, referred to Iraq as a ‘fringe issue’ as he tried to stop discussion on it.”

...

For Ken’s sake and for the sake of everyone in Iraq I ask you to make your feelings known to our government, to protest and to join the demonstration on 17 October.”

And Michael Berg, whose son Nick was executed in Iraq, told Socialist Worker that Blair can immediately withdraw all British troops from Iraq and join other nations in rejecting George Bush’s war on terror.

“Bush and Blair say the hostage taking means foreign troops should stay in Iraq. But it is that kind of thinking that has led to the loss of over 21,000 lives.

“The people of the Middle East want what we all want—sovereignty, self determination, freedom from abuse.”

He also has an article on the occupation in the same paper. There may not be much more of that now that the Dutch government have nicked his computer, so read closely.

The US is losing the war in Iraq "slowly but steadily" , and if we think we've seen some serious murder now, wait until after the elections.

Finally, someone asked me to comment on Respect's result in Hartlepool. A vote of 572 doesn't inspire me with thoughts of revolution, but there's no need to sit around giggling to yourself if you happen to be a pro-war Labour supporter. We still kicked your ass in Millwall. The Respect website have put a brave face on it , but I doubt there were any conga-lines formed behind the "nicest man in Hartlepool" John Bloom that night. On the other hand, there is one thing I would say for those concerned about making the left alternative to New Labour as powerful as possible. The Green vote was 255, approximately half that of Respect. This suggests that the Greens' strategy of refusing any electoral pact (and indulging in stupid vitriolic attacks on Respect) hasn't really paid off. Dr Caroline Lucas' chief justification for not forming a pact was that the Greens were doing very well, had experienced their best results in years and saw no reason to allow that trajectory to falter. Well, the answer is that the Greens have a different constituency to Respect even though there is some overlap. They can no longer hope to be the main party of the non-Labour left, but if they are interested in building an electoral challenge based on the anticapitalist and antiwar movements then the answer must be to combine the powers. Respect and the Greens ought to form an electoral pact. If nothing else, it'll piss the AWL off.

Jaw hits floor. posted by lenin

This should cheer you up:

Armed intelligence officers yesterday raided the Amsterdam home of Paul Bigley, the brother of British hostage Ken Bigley, in the hunt for Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the leader of the Arab terrorist group which is believed to be holding him.

Read the rest , it's classic. And no, it isn't a joke.

Moazzam Begg Tortured in Guantanamo posted by lenin

There appears to have been some kind of mistake. A letter has emerged uncensored from Guantanamo Bay, a testimony from Moazzam Begg describing the inhumane treatment to which he has been subjected. Here is the letter (there isn't a digital version elsewhere as yet):

12 July 2004

US Forces Administration
JTF/JDCG, Guantanamo Bay, Cuba

To Whom It May Concern

Re: Supplementary Exposition (of statement elected 5 July 2004)

I, Moazzam Begg, citizen of the United Kingdom of Great Britain, attributed the number 00558 (Camp Echo), have felt it necessary to augment and further clarify the above noted statement and to accentuate my grievances and intentions.

After over two and a half years in the custody of the US military without charge, and by extension, without jurisdiction, I have yet to be afforded basic rights normally granted under the constitution of the USA and international law. I therefore demand, unconditionally and irrevocably, that I be released immediately and returned to my family and domicile in the UK, together with all possessions, including all items and monies confiscated by US/Pakistani “agents” from my residence in Pakistan on 31 January 2002.

In the likely event that these demands are outrightly rejected, or unnecessarily procrastinated, I demand the following rights under US law:

1. A thorough and peremptory explanation of all statutory rights available within US legislature, particularly with respect to foreign nationals.

2. Any and all charges/allegations be presented unambiguously and written.

3. Full access to international phone calls in order to communicate with family and lawyers.

4. Full access to legal representatives of my own choice and appointment.

5. A fully inventoried list detailing all property seized (as mentioned above).

6. Regular and timely access to postal communication with family and a halt to the obscuring and withholding of mail from home.

In addition to the aforementioned rights, I make it known that I expect logical and reasonable answers for the following violations and abuses, and intend to seek justice and accountability:

(i) The exact purpose for my abduction, kidnapping and false imprisonment on 31 January 2002, under the auspices of US intelligence and law enforcement.

(ii) Subsequently, what legal jurisdiction they had for taking me forcibly to Afghanistan.

(iii) By what legal authority was property and money confiscated, leaving my wife and young children destitute and penniless in their wake.

(iv) Why I was brought into a designated war zone and my life put at risk.

(v) Why I was physically abused and degradingly stripped by force, then paraded in front of several cameras toted by US personnel.

(vi) The reason for being held in Bagram detention facility for over a year and consequently being denied natural light and fresh food for the duration.

(vii) The exact purpose for my incarceration in solitary confinement since 8 February 2003.

(viii) Why all news pertaining to my situation has been barred from me.

(ix) The justification for withholding most of my family mail, and incongruent obscurance of what little amounts have trickled through - even from eight year olds.

(x) Why phone calls and legal representation have been continually denied, despite several reassurances to the contrary.

(xi) Why, despite copious requests, I have yet to meet with a chaplain during all this time.

(xii) What was the legality and purpose of extracting my signature on a statement, in early February 2003, by FBI and CITF agents, under threats of long term imprisonment, summary trials and execution - all without legal represenation.

I state here, unequivocally and for the record, that any documents presented to me by US law enforcement agents were signed and initialled under duress, thus rendered legally contested in validity. During several interviews, particularly - though unexclusively - in Afghanistan, I was subjected to pernicious threats of torture, actual vindictive torture and death threats - amongst other coercively employed interrogation techniques. Neither was the presence of legal counsel ever produced or made available.

The said interviews were conducted in an environment of generated fear, resonant with terrifying screams of fellow detainees facing similar methods. In this atmosphere of severe antipathy towards detainees was the compounded use of racially and religiously prejudiced taunts. This culminated, in my opinion, with the deaths of two fellow detainees, at the hands of US military personnel, to which I myself was partially witness.

In spite of all the aforementioned cruel and unusual treatment meted out, I have maintained a compliant and amicable manner with my captors and a cooperative attitude. My behavioural record is impeccable, yet contrasts immensely to what I have experienced, as stated.

I am a law abiding citizen of the UK and attest vehemently to my innocence, before God and the law, of any crime - though none has ever been alleged. I have neither ever met Osama bin Laden, nor been a member of Al Qaida - or any synonymous paramilitary organisation. Neither have I engaged in hostile acts against the USA nor assisted such groups in the same - though the opportunity has availed itself many a time, and motive.

Regardless of the outcome of all my appeals to sanity and protestations over the years, I reiterate my intention to seek justice at every possible level available to me. It is with that intent that I have prepared duplicates of this statement, for the information and use of the authorities and courts of justice.

I have requested this document to be perused by the camp NCO, the generality of its contents be recorded in the camp log and forwarded to the appropriate intended recipient.

Moazzam Begg (00558)

Dated this twelfth day of July, 2004

And here is the press release about it:

FIRST UNCENSORED DOCUMENTATION TO COME OUT OF GUANTANAMO BAY DEMONSTRATES THAT MOAZZAM BEGG, BRITISH NATIONAL, HAS BEEN TORTURED

US lawyers seek to prevent further inhumane treatment in Guantanamo Bay

London, 1 October 2004: Attached is a letter written by Moazzam Begg from his prison cell in Guantanamo Bay.

This letter has been declassified by the US Department of Defence, the first time that the rigid rules concerning censorship have let something like this through. The document demonstrates that Mr Begg has been abused and tortured by the US both in Afghanistan (where he was taken by American personnel) and Guantanamo Bay. The evidence provides details of the horrific treatment he has endured for two years, and evidence that the US continues to hold him under inhumane conditions.

The letter was written on 12 July 2004, after the DoD had finally agreed to tell Mr Begg that lawyers were trying to represent him, but six weeks before Mr Begg first met with a lawyer. It is written in his own words, without any prompting. Mr Begg is finally able to tell his counsel and his government (the government of the UK), the following:

Mr Begg was never an “enemy combatant” in Afghanistan. Rather, he was abducted from Pakistan and forcibly removed to Afghanistan by US agents on 31 January 2002. (This took place in front of his wife and child, who can corroborate his letter.) “I am a law abiding citizen of the UK,” he states, “and attest vehemently to my innocence, before God and the law, of any crime - though none has ever been alleged [against me].”

For the year he was held without ever seeing daylight in Afghanistan, he was tortured and witnessed the murder of two other detainees by American forces. He tells how he “was subjected to pernicious threats of torture, actual vindictive torture, and death threats - amongst other coercive interrogation techniques”. This abuse happened in both Afghanistan and Guantanamo Bay.

He was interrogated to the echoes of other prisoners’ screams: “The … interviews were conducted in an environment of generated fear, with terrifying screams of fellow detainees facing similar methods.”

He writes how, in Guantanamo Bay in February 2003, FBI agents forced him to sign statements under threat of this torture and of “long term imprisonment, summary trials and execution - all without legal representation”. These statements are the basis for his continued indefinite detention, without charges and without trial.

Since being taken, hooded, across the world to Guantanamo, Mr Begg has been in isolation for almost 600 days - since 8 February 2003. He is being held in a small cell in Camp Echo. There are bars and an almost opaque mesh that divide it from a second half of the same cell, which is where interrogations are to be conducted. There is a monitoring camera above the toilet in his cell that watches him 24 hours a day. The cell is sealed off from the other prisoners, as well as the outside world, under a regime that keeps him in isolation from humanity. Even the very rare Red Cross letters he has received from his eight year old child have been censored.

He has apparently been held in isolation because he was a witness to the two murders (by American service personnel) in Bagram Airforce Base. Thus, he could not reveal the information to any other prisoner, including those who might subsequently be released. While defence counsel cannot reveal the classified information concerning who the victims of murder were, or who the US personnel were who committed these crimes, we do know from the public record at least two prisoners were killed there. The two detainees died at Bagram within a week of each other in December 2002. It must be stressed, however, that the prisoners are not necessarily these two. In the event that the evidence is declassified, it is possible that Mr Begg’s testimony would identify one or more new murders of prisoners in custody, by American military personnel.

Because Gitanjali Gutierrez, one of the US counsel, met with Mr Begg over four days, all of the details of these homicides and of Mr Begg’s torture and abuse are now known to the lawyers who have a security clearance. However, these extensive details remain classified and cannot be revealed.

Mr Begg’s lawyers will respond urgently to this appalling situation in several ways:

First, they will file a legal demand on Monday that the inhumane treatment of Mr Begg cease immediately.

Second, they will demand that the detailed evidence of Mr Begg’s torture be declassified and made public. The Bush administration cannot sanction torture and then create a rule that makes the details of his abuse “classified”, with criminal sanctions if it is not kept secret. How can the torturer claim the right to suppress evidence of the torture?

Third, they will demand that the evidence of two murders by US personnel be declassified and that the perpetrators be brought to account.

Fourth, they will demand that the statements forced from Mr Begg under torture and duress not be used to justify his ongoing detention. As Lord Goldsmith, the British attorney general, has said: “There will always be measures which are not open to governments. Certain rights - for example, the right to life, the prohibition on torture, on slavery - are simply non-negotiable.”

Additionally, they will call for the British government to demand Mr Begg’s immediate repatriation.

Gareth Peirce, counsel for Mr Begg in the UK
Clive Stafford Smith, US counsel for Mr Begg, now in the UK