Massive vote-fraud in Tower Hamlets. posted by lenin

I'm surprised I missed this and this. The latter is a report by Andrew Gilligan explaining that: "A handwriting expert who analysed a sample of postal votes and applications for the forms in Tower Hamlets found almost 13 per cent were forged". What's more: "In addition, the council's deputy returning officer, Pat Parker, says nearly 3,000 applications came in by hand less than four hours before the deadline, some "delivered in person by council members". In a court witness statement, she also reveals more than 300 residents, including three election candidates and a Tory MP, complained their votes had been stolen."

Strike! posted by lenin

There is rolling coverage from the picket lines of the civil servants strike at Socialist Worker today. If you have pictures or a report from your picket line, why not send it in?

The massacre of Najaf. posted by lenin

Recently, you will have heard reports of extraordinary 'gunfights' in Najaf, between US-led forces and 'messanic cult' called the 'Soldiers of Heaven', which led to the deaths of 300 'insurgents'. This was the story articulated by the 'Iraqi government' spokesperson, former Baathist Colonel Ali al-Dabbagh. Patrick Cockburn reports today that independent accounts say it was a pre-meditated massacre, and that the 'Soldiers of Heaven' were not involved. Its presence was rather used by America's allies, the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, to launch a massacre against locals hostile to SCIRI's predominance. Having fired on a crowd of pilgrims celebrating Ashura, SCIRI supporters in the Iraqi army killed the chief of a hostile tribe as he led the procession. Receiving return fire, they called in the cavalry and shortly US helicopters was dropping leaflets threatening to bomb the area. One helicopter was shot down, and the remaining aircraft proceeded to wipe out the crowd with "intense aerial bombardment".

A couple of things. Colonel Ali al-Dabaagh was, when working as a spy for the Iraqi National Accord, the man behind the '45-minutes' claim. He later told Con Couglin of the Sunday Telegraph: "Forget forty-five minutes. We could have fired these within half an hour". So, he is both an experienced servant of two ruthless states, and an experienced liar on behalf of the US government. Second, even if the US was 'duped' into this atrocity by their SCIRI allies, one has to assume they thought this was part of their 'surge' tactic. More of this to look forward to.

The Muslims are (still) coming. posted by lenin

Built that panic room in the attic, have you? Purchased a dog of illegal viciousness, and equipped every family member over the age of five with a gun? You'd better, folks, because once again, the Muslim threat looms. And the fruit of this loom is terror. That woke you up, didn't it? Hardly a day goes by when some commentator, usually American, does not try to persuade us that Europe is becoming a Muslim continent due to the flip lack of concern and bohemian decadence of Christians who don't believe in their own values and won't stand up for them.

In this vein, most of you will have seen or heard of the results of a study by the Policy Exchange thinktank, 'independent' and that, which claimed to show among other things that 34% of Muslim youths (16-24 year olds) want Shari'a law, 31% support the death penalty for apostasy, and 13% 'admire' organisations 'like Al Qaeda' who are prepared to take the fight to the West. These were the headline grabbing findings, and it's important to distinguish the devious and racist way in which the report seeks to galvanise press attention, and the devious and racist way that the report itself seeks to blame Muslims, exonerate racism and still affect a complacent 'liberal' attitude toward British society, whose virtues are constantly extolled.

The 1990 Trust first raised a few problems with the report yesterday, when it pointed out that the think-tank is actually a neoconservative outfit run by former Telegraph editor Charles Moore, and is 'independent' in the sense that 'Migration Watch' is independent. Munira Mirza, the report's lead author, is a Furedite, which almost automatically means that she is obsessed with 'multiculturalism', specifically with proving its failure, and is equally obsessed with 'free speech', specifically free speech for racists. She has written a great deal on both topics, and is admired by the far right for doing so. Secondly, the 1990 Trust has done its own research, the results of which suggest we're a long way from cultural armageddon. For instance, so far from masses of Al Qaeda supporting Muslims, they could not find more than one percent who supported the 7/7 attacks, which is probably about the same proportion of non-Muslims who would say they support it. Thirdly, the 1990 Trust points out that the Policy Exchange findings include a great deal of spin, not least from the report's chief author, which as usual relies on popular misunderstanding of the word 'sharia' (it's something evildoers practise among themselves), and so on. In fact, the poll findings themselves are merely there to provide a frontispiece of original research for what is otherwise a lengthy commentary that is highly derivative of a limited number of sources, most of them connected - as Mirza is - to the right-wing libertarian cult formerly known as the Revolutionary Communist Party. Every finding in the 'report' is mediated through dense layers of rhetorical banality and didactic dogmatism. You trust them at your own peril.

While the bulk of its findings are to do with growing religiosity, these are integrated into a narrative of disintegration, in which Muslims identifying themselves as Muslim is treated as a problem. Mirza, in the Policy Exchange press release, conflates religiosity with political radicalism, and the absence of religiosity as a sign of accomodation to the 'norms of Western democracy' - this no less than to claim that Islam is incompatible with 'Western democracy', that it is as such, as a cultural essence, responsible for division, political radicalisation and ultimately terror. Therefore, the condition of admission is cultural submission. Mirza complains in the report of Britishness being undermined, decries a culture of 'self-loathing', denounces local councils who 'ban' Christmas as this somehow encourages the "Islamists" and so on. The report tries to undermine claims of anti-Muslim racism, pointing to a finding that "84% of Muslims believe they have been treated fairly in this society". It is a curious way to proceed this: they omit in both their press release and introduction the qualifier "on the whole", then omit their other claims about actual discrimination. For instance, they elsewhere mention research showing that one third of UK employers discriminate against blacks and Asians - but again, this is only mentioned as if it undermined claims of Islamophobia. Indeed, when they come to the discrimination faced by Muslims, the report's attitude appears to be that it's somehow vitiated by the fact that non-white people in general face discrimination. As if different forms of racism were competing rather than contiguous. I might as well mention that similar research presented on the BBC suggested a couple of years ago that the problem may be even more severe than that, indicating that a quarter of applications to employers by candidates with traditionally English sounding names were successful in securing an interview, compared with 13% for the applicants with Black African names and only 9% of applicants with Muslim names. The Islamic Human Rights Commission did some research on this alongside the Joseph Rowntree Foundation and found that 80 percent of Muslims felt they had been discriminated against because of their faith, although the majority (55%) felt this was only on some occasions. Anyway, having so speciously dismissed claims of Islamophobia, the report goes on to imply that the remaining 16% who do feel that 'on the whole' they have not been treated fairly, are suffering from a 'victimhood mentality'. Despite "concerted efforts" by Britain to "make Muslims feel included and protected" (Belmarsh and torture flights obviously the most 'concerted efforts' of the lot), young Muslims "continue to feel vulnerable, isolated and anxious about experiencing Islamophobia". It gleefully wields statements from some Muslims that claims of Islamophobia have been exaggerated, drawing on Kenan Malik's widely published claims (Malik is another Furedite), and claims that this is what is making Muslims feel fearful.

It also cites the usual array of Spiked Online contributors and liberal Islam-baiters (like Martin Bright). Curiously, while referencing the Runnymede Trust's account of Islamophobia, it does nothing to address any of its findings, and provides no evidence that Islamophobia is in fact being exaggerated. It's an intuition that they have, one supported with anecdote and the spurious authority of Furedite references. It defends Straw's brave stance against the niqab and complains about the 'recurrent demands for respect' that Muslims keep making, which they claim stifles criticism. If it did this, there wouldn't have been acres of news print supporting Straw - nor, by the way, would there have been widespread coverage of this contrived study led by and relying on some ex-RCP sectarians turned right-wing libertarians, the conclusions of which were evidently written long before any 'research' had begun. It further accuses Muslim women who wish to dress how they see fit of 'narcissistic self-aggrandisement'. It insists that not all cultures are equal, which supposes: a) that such things discrete cultures exist, and can be isolated, studied, compared and found wanting, and b) that 'Western' culture is superior. That is, it is both culturalist, even where it claims to be attacking cultural essentialism, and supremacist.

Finally, it complains about those who argue that British foreign policy is partially responsible for the emergence of minority currents in political Islam that wish to target the UK, asserting that it is simplistic (which it only is if the case is made simplistically) and that it is "pathetic" to oppose foreign policy purely on such grounds (which it only is if the policy is opposed purely on such grounds). And so on and on: everything in this report is a sustained reactionary complaint about the evils of political correctness, and about the trouble with Islam. Exonerating British policy at every level, except where it claims that the government has been too soft on Muslims, it provides the intellectual basis for a future David Cameron-led government.

This morning, 'Breaking News' has it that eight people have been arrested on terror charges following investigations by police in MI5. The fact that this has been publicised bears no relation to the actual threat level: we don't have to search our memories that much to think of innocent people who have been arrested, detained and then released without charge, some of them without even having been shot at. Nor is it too hard to think of a plot with hardcore weaponry involved that was specifically shunned by the media. This raises the question of how many of those who are arrested on the basis of such investigations are charged and convicted. Well, a Freedom of Information Act request by Olly Kendal produced some interesting statistics (which he reproduces in his Comment is Free piece, and elaborates in the comments). In 2005, 266 people were arrested under the Terrorism Act 2000 and Terrorism Act 2006, and 11 for terrorism-related offenses not under these acts. Of these, only 30 were charged under Terrorism Act offenses, and only 8 have been convicted. In 2006, 143 people were arrested under the Terrorism Act 2000 and Terrorism Act 2006 until September. A further 16 arrests were made for terrorism-related offenses, not covered by either act. Of these, 52 were charged under Terrorism Act offenses, and 4 have been convicted. So, out of a total of 436 arrests for terrorism, only 12 people were found guilty of a terrorist offense. This doesn't include any suspects who had their brains destroyed instantly utterly. Further, one suspects that a number of these convictions result from charges that are to do with activities (such as support for Kurdish groups) that have been banned by the government under Terrorism Acts, yet which don't have a great deal to do with terrorism.

However, the point is that however many are arrested, and however few are convicted, the background noise of facetious, strident, intellectually bankrupt, yet widely covered 'reports' such as this one provide a coherent cover story. It reassures people that Muslims are to blame for their own victimisation, which at any rate is imaginary, or if not imaginary then surely no worse than that faced by other minorities. It confirms reactionaries in their conviction that they are being unfairly silenced, even where their voices are the most frequently heard. It raises a threat to 'Western democracy', which it says originates from Islam itself. It provides a spurious academic respectability for ignorant bluster, parochialism and non-sequitur: you wouldn't put up with one percent of this crap for five seconds if you heard it in a pub, or read in a column. It throws the spotlight on non-problems (can Shabina wear her preferred clothing without undermining Britishness?), denies real ones, and actively obscures the role of the 'war on terror' and its repressive apparatus. It offers supremacism as a serious intellectual outlook, and does so in the name of overcoming division. But it is far from unique on any of these points.

The workers, united. posted by lenin

Tomorrow, 300,000 civil servants go on strike to defend over 100,000 jobs, now at risk under Gordon Brown's plans. They'll need it to be solid enough to sustain momentum for future action, since the best that can be expected from the current level of action is that it would prompt the government to make a temporising offer which it could later withdraw. The union has made it clear that this one-day strike and two-week overtime ban is the start of action: if they want to win it, they'll need to escalate dramatically and rapidly.

The reason why the government says it is cutting the civil service jobs is because it says it expects to save £20bn over four years to make up public spending shortfalls. Curious how this happens: we have NHS deficits, which they're planning to remedy by making cuts. This is an extremely rich country, which can usually afford to do what it thinks is important. If the government wishes to invade Yugoslavia, Afghanistan and Iraq, it does so and there is no question of expense. If they wish to invest £76bn in a revamped nuclear weapons system, they do so, and congratulate themselves on their foresight. If they wish to maintain the arms industry, they plough investment into it, negotiate with state leaders on its behalf, offer Export Credit, underwrite it with guarantees etc etc. And this is, moreover, a government that has been able to, and has seen fit to, pour billions of pounds into extremely wasteful, inefficient, profiteering Private Finance Initiatives. So, it's a lie that this has anything to do with 'efficiency', and public services are run down enough without the government making further cuts.

A good start to this week was the huge climbdown by notorious union-bashing BA boss Willie Walsh, in the face of a strike threat backed by 96% of workers. BA made big concessions on pay and sick leave - however, as I suspected, the door has been left open for acceptance of BA's pension proposals, which involves later retirement and increased employee contributions. Nevertheless, the concessions that have abolished a two-tier pay-structure, significantly raising pay for large numbers of staff, and the withdrawal of sickness procedures that made staff frightened of taking a day off if they needed to get well, constitute a success. BA workers have shown what solidarity, even before a single picket line is raised, can do. Hopefully civil servants can do the same.

"American forces are deployed globally - we can move fast. I think that's a lesson for everybody". posted by lenin

Those were the words of the US Deputy Assistant Secretary for African Affairs on tonight's Channel 4 News, following some polite questioning from Jon Snow about a leaked UN document that suggests Ethiopia could not have mounted an invasion of Somalia on the basis of their present capacity. Abdullah Yusuf, the warlord they stuck in charge of Somalia, smiled charmingly as he explained that indeed the US had given his Ethiopian backers a 'green light'. Zenawi denied this, again in the face of some arse-lickingly respectful questions from Snow, but acknowledged that the US had been "very helpful" with intelligence-sharing and so on. Well, of course they were.

I might as well mention that there have been repeated reports of new strikes by US bombers, and fighting continues. The US think they've got the Islamic Courts more or less licked, although they threaten continued strikes against so-called 'terrorist' targets. As usual, the UN is sweeping up after the empire, begging the 'international community' to 'sieze a window of opportunity' to consolidate the rule of the 'government' because people may well be war-weary enough to submit to American proxy rule.

So, anyway, if you were wondering why the US has an iron curtain of military bases stretching from Greenland through Europe, the Middle East and South Asia, the Deputy Assistant Secretary for African Affairs has given you your answers.

"We the American Holy Warriors Have Arrived". posted by lenin

The GWB administration has none of the charms of the FDR one and is packed with people who regret much of Roosevelt's legacy, and yet I expect this appeal, from FDR in Arabic, raises a wistful sigh in the White House:

Praise be unto the only God. In the name of God,
the Compassionate, the Merciful. O ye Moslems.
O ye beloved sons of the Maghreb. May the
blessing of God be upon you.

This is a great day for you and us, for all the sons
of Adam who love freedom. Our numbers are as
the leaves on the forest tress and as the grains of
sand in the sea.

Behold. We the American Holy Warriors have arrived.
We have come here to fight the great Jihad of Freedom.

We have come to set you free. We have sailed across
the great sea in many ships, on many beaches we are
landing, and our fighters swarm across the sands and
into the city streets, and into the wide country sides,
and along the highways.

Light fires on the hilltops; shout from your housetops,
and from the high places, and say the sound of the
drum be heard in the land, and the ululation of the
women, and the voices even of small children.

Assemble along the highways to welcome your brothers.

We have come to set you free.

Speak with our fighting men and you will find them
pleasing to the eye and gladdening to the heart.
We are not as some other Christians whom ye have
known, and who trample you under foot. Our soldiers
consider you as their brothers, for we have been reared
in the way of free men. Our soldiers have been told
about your country and about their Moslem brothers
and they will treat you with respect and with a friendly
spirit in the eyes of God.

Look in their eyes and smiling faces, for they are Holy
Warriors happy in their holy work. Greet us therefore
as brothers as we will greet you, and help us.

If we are thirsty, show us the way to water. If we lose
our way, lead us back to our camping places. Show us
the paths over the mountains if need be, and if you see
our enemies, the Germans or Italians, making trouble
for us, kill them with knives or with stones or with
any other weapon that you may have set your hands upon.

Help us as we have come to help you, and rich will be
the reward unto us all who love justice and righteousness
and freedom.

Pray for our success in battle, and help us, and God
will help us both.

Lo, the day of freedom hath come.

May God grant his blessing upon you and upon us.

-- Roosevelt

Choosing Sarkozy. posted by lenin

You remember Sarkozy: the guy who wanted to "karsheriser" the ghettos; the hard right free-marketeer who opportunistically tried to distance himself from the government's neoliberal reforms when the going got tough; the man whom The Economist elected to slaver over as an exponent of smart solutions the "post-ideological age".

Guess who's voting for Sarkozy? André Glucksmann, philosopher, writer and 'personality' of the French left. He doesn't agree with Sarkozy on many things, understand, but he is moist about the "murmur of innocent hearts" that Sarkozy said he heard when he visited Yad Vashem. Moreover, of course, he is unimpressed by the PS candidate, Ségolène Royal. Of course, this has nothing to do with the bulk of Royal's policies, which happen to involve a Blairite combination of neoliberal economics and pandering to reactionary attitudes on 'law and order' and 'family values'. Royal was, alongside the former PS leader Hollande, ardently in favour of the EU Treaty Constitution. Her answer to the riots last year was the reintroduction of military conscription. She has, as Minister for the Family, campaigned against sex education in schools and AIDS prevention ads on television. Glucksmann can have no difference of principle with most of this, at least no more than he has with Sarkozy's attitude to immigrants. His problem appears to be that Royal is not an Atlanticist: he dreamed that Bernard Kouchner, the former proconsul in Kosovo, would win the PS leadership bid. Better yet, he fantasises about a Sarkozy-Kouchner candidacy, because Sarkozy has said bad things about the Sudanese government and good things about the Chechen struggle. He doesn't like dictatorships either. He is the "American neoconservative with a French passport". Hating the left, despising working class politics, and being no particular friend of Muslims in France or anywhere else, Glucksmann's decision is entirely logical.

I've been reading some of the archive of his material, and if you think British pro-war liberals are bad, you want to check this guy out. How outraged he was at the outrage over the invasion of Lebanon. How disgusted he was that the French government didn't participate in bombing Iraq. How shocked he was at the failure of the French to say 'Yes' to the EU Constitutional Treaty. Glucksmann, of course, had been a soixant-huitard attracted to libertarian forms of communism before becoming one of the 'antitotalitarian' nouveau philosophes of the late 1970s - that wonderful time when Paris became, in Perry Anderson's phrase, "the capital of European reaction", having only recently discovered the existence of the gulag. For some reason, Glucksmann was able to benefit in particular from the mystifying benedictions of the inestimably superior Foucault. That is one reason why, without being as handsome or rich as Bernard Henri-Levy, he was able to become a media darling too. Glucksmann has been championing the expansion of the American empire at least since the fall of the Berlin Wall, (now invade Yugoslavia! now Afghanistan! now Iraq! now Sudan!) and is now in the position of preferring a radically xenophobic authoritarian neoliberal to a dimwitted centre-left opportunist.

Neocon Cold Warrior Booed in Warsaw. posted by lenin

Guest post by Andy Zebrowski:

Neocon godfather Norman Podhoretz was jeered and heckled at Warsaw University last Friday (January 26).

Students against the War organized a picket of Podhoretz’s meeting on “world leadership”. The protest was backed by the “Stop the War Initiative” (comprising left wingers, greens and the unaffiliated). Just before the meeting was due to start the picket ended and the protesters went inside to challenge the pro-war panel.

The other speakers apart from Podhoretz were two Polish conservatives – extremist hawk and defence minister Radoslaw Sikorski and academic/politician Ryszard Legutko.

Sikorski is a member of the American Enterprise Institute which includes such luminaries of the right as Richard Perle and Newt Gingrich.

As the meeting started there was an attempt by the organizers to prevent people displaying sheets of paper on which were printed slogans such as “Podhoretz liar for empire OUT!”, “George W. Bush – terrorist no. 1”, “Down with US. Imperial terror”, “Troops out of Iraq and Afghanistan” and “No anti-missile shield in Poland”.

Six people were ejected from the meeting, three of them were dragged along the floor. Their crime? The odd shouted protest – for instance, “Abu Ghraib”, “Terrorist” and “Shame!”.

After the speakers had finished people were not allowed to speak from the floor. Instead they had to write questions on pieces of paper and pass them up to the platform for the chair to read out. A fantastic example of neocon democracy in action! Many people walked out in disgust.

Podhoretz had argued for attacking Iran, denied there had been torture at Abu Ghraib and praised Bush. None of the speakers mentioned the word “oil”.

You can see a short film of the protest here:



The day before the meeting opinion poll results were published about whether the US plays a negative or positive role in the world. The poll covered twenty-five countries. The Polish result showed the biggest drop in those seeing the US role as positive – it fell from 62 to 38 percent a huge fall of 24 percentage points. Whilst still the highest of the European results it shows a marked downward trend which is probably set to continue.

This is because the current Polish right-wing government is continuing and intensifying its postcommunist predecessors ultraloyalist stance towards Washington. When other states are reducing their presence in Iraq Poland is maintaining its troop levels – currently about 900. In Afghanistan Poland is in the process of upping its soldier numbers from 180 to 1200 by April. This was why it recently received fulsome praise from NATO secretary general Jaap de Hoop Scheffer. Poland's rulers love such praise - they hope to strengthen their international position by being included among Bush’s most faithful allies.

But ordinary people in this country don’t support Bush’s wars. Poland was among the first four invading states alongside the US, Britain and Australia. However, opinion surveys have consistently shown opposition to the occupation of Iraq at between 70 an 75 percent. Sending extra troops to Afghanistan is also opposed by a majority of the population as is the siting part of Bush’s "anti-missile shield" in Poland.

Today the illusions of many people in US presidents have been dispelled thanks to their government’s servility, Bush and the global anti-war movement.

Andy Zebrowski is a member of Pracownicza Demokracja (Workers' Democracy).

Lecturers: why your strike was sold out. posted by lenin

Last year, Lenin's Tomb posted a bit on the ongoing lecturers' dispute, including a guest post from one of the strikers. When a settlement was reached by the union leadership, it was widely regarded as a sell-out. They accepted a deal that had already been rejected only a week before, breaking terms that had been clearly agreed on by the union membership, thus outraging and disappointing thousands of people, and surprising many commentators. Some incendiary new research explains why.

Attacks on pay and conditions
The background is this: it was widely acknowledged by government and opposition politicians alike that lecturers' pay was ridiculously low. Even the Prime Minister said that "everyone agrees that the status quo — the huge backlog of repairs to infrastructure and university lecturers' pay increasing by only 5 per cent in the past 20 years, when the figure for the rest of the economy is 45 per cent — is not an option". However, the employers, despite pledges to the contrary, were engaging in a sustained attempt to suppress the compensatory pay increases required. It had been agreed that at least a third of tuition-fee income would be used to make up the shortfall in lectuerers' pay, but instead the employers had been exploiting the organisational weakness of the two unions engaged in the dispute - AUT and Natfhe - to diminish both pay and conditions. In past years, the AUT and Natfhe had represented clearly distinct groups of educational workers, with the former representing lecturers in independent universities and the latter representing polytechnic workers. But the polytechnics were recognised as universities in 1992. Not only that, but the distinction between further and higher education was being eroded as well. In the circumstances, and given their common problem and their inability to resist the employers' offensive, it made sense to merge the two unions, which is what they set out to do. The merger, which resulted in the University and College Union (UCU) was completed one week before the dispute was controversially ended.

Culture clashes
New research by the TUC-funded Union Ideas Network describes what happened. Through interviews with leading organisers from both Natfhe and the AUT, and with the use of documentary evidence and some background theoretical discussion on union organisation, it elaborates how the respective unions approached the merger and what they expected to come out of it. The AUT, so the report argues, dominated in the decision to cut a deal out of a desire to be seen as the 'wing' within the new union that had secured an unprecedented pay increased. The AUT leadership are seen as having run national policy without any real accountability or democracy. Cultural and organisational clashes include the AUT's hostility to Natfhe's 'political' tendencies (whereas the AUT saw itself as more of a professional association). They distrusted the system of regional committees, seeing them as being run by militants. The AUT are seen by Natfhe activists as approaching the merger as if it were a 'take-over', which was essentially the approach that the AUT developed in the early 1990s when it attempted to recruit Natfhe members. "By contrast, in the AUT the National Executive was elected directly by members on the basis of candidates’ short electoral statements. As elected members had no defined constituency in the AUT there was little day-to-day accountability (AUT EMP) and this was not acceptable to Natfhe lay activists."

The Pay Dispute
"The very formation of the pay claim in Autumn 2005 gave early indications that despite the agreement to merge relations between the two unions would be fraught in the ensuing period", the report says. The AUT's draft proposal for a pay claim was very simple, outlined on one sheet of paper because it was felt that employers ignored the usual charts and figures supplied alongside it. Natfhe's Higher Education Committee were unimpressed, and so were the other unions party to the dispute. One AUT organiser explained that people were ringing up, saying "we’ve got the cover sheet can we have the rest?"

The claim was nevertheless submitted, and when employers did not offer a positive response fairly quickly, the AUT declared a dispute, which Natfhe officials say they weren't consulted about. Further, it was felt that the fact that the claim itself stipulated no figure, simply asking for an "adequate proportion of new income derived from top up fees and other sources" to be used for pay improvement, which must involve "substantial percentage increases". Some AUT officials are unhappy, since it relied on fees income and "there was no discussion about how that would work out in different places" - it could result in uneven local settlements. There were also doubts from Natfhe members about the basis of the claim since both unions had opposed the introduction of tuition fees in the first place. Sally Hunt, then leader of the AUT, did not succeed in explaining to Natfhe's Higher Education Committee why there should be no figure to aim for. "Following Natfhe pressure a figure of ‘over 20%’ was added". Unfortunately, "the initial focus on student top-up fees allowed the employers to dwell on this aspect alone and to argue that with the bursaries and other improvements that were expected to be financed from this source, the amount for salaries fell well short of the aspirations of the unions." This had the effect of dividing activists since many were convinced that the money wasn't available from the stated source.

When it came to tactics, "because there was no proper joint discussion the assessment boycott did not have the same meaning for the unions". Natfhe's approach was that there should not be an exams boycott, since this would alienate students, but they should boycott marking. AUT members, on the other hand, were persuaded to mount an examinations boycott, which had little effect in the end, since most of the exams had been set well in advance. "The AUT envisaged a short, sharp dispute with the use of the maximum pressure of not setting examinations resulting in a quick victory for which it would be largely responsible. The AUT General Secretary told the Natfhe NEC that the dispute would be over if not by Christmas than February ... This account was endorsed by AUT sources, with one NEC member stating that: ‘We always saw it, particularly the General Secretary, as a short dispute’". This would explain why the AUT did not warn their members, or the NUS who supported their action and argued on their behalf, of a potentially prolonged dispute with pay docking, but it doesn't explain why they refused to meet with Natfhe to discuss tactics, deeming it "inappropriate". "The failure to consult and coordinate was to be a feature during the entire dispute." Aside from anything else, there was very little internal consultation in the AUT so it may have seemed inapposite if Sally Hunt had to explain to Natfhe members what was not explained to AUT members. "In contrast, Natfhe had an elected action committee made up from members of the NEC with additional members elected via national conferences and national negotiators." One AUT regional officer confirms that: "‘Every initiative from both sides, with lay people saying we must get lay activists together that’s how you build a new union, was blocked. I know they were blocked from AUT side through officials and some key lay people’". The reason for this, according to the officer? Positioning: "Key AUT officials thought that the way to preserve their territory was to be the initiators – so the press release comes out before it’s been through AUT let alone Natfhe".

Inauspicious start, bungled conclusion
The tactic of pressing an unspecific claim, and then of declaring a dispute before negotiations had started, resulted in an inauspicious start to the campaign. Natfhe felt that doing so gave the employers reasons to resist and too much time to elaborate their response. Eventually, however, a one-day strike was called on 7 March 2006, whose effect was described as "patchy". The employers' response to the boycotts and the strike was to dock pay and make offers well below what had been demanded. The AUT were nevertheless bullish, expecting a shift to come very soon. In late May, a somewhat better offer than previous ones was made during ACAS talks which, had it not been withdrawn, could have been voted on at the Natfhe Higher Education Conference which was due to take place. The reason for the withdrawal is unclear, but: "One opinion was that the employers did not want to hand UCU anything that looked like a victory ... It might also be that vice chancellors thought the offer simply too generous given that an earlier circular had revealed that ‘Sally Hunt has previously signalled to Ministers and other senior figures that something in double figures or in the range 11-14% “should do it”". If Hunt had conveyed these expectations, Natfhe had not been consulted.

Both the AUT and Natfhe were committed by decision of conference to continue the dispute, with Natfhe demanding no less than 5% a year over each of the three years of the agreement. Natfhe suspected that the AUT wanted to simply end the dispute without a substantial improvement in pay, as soon as possible, and that the involvement of Brendan Barber in the dispute was to achieve that end. One Natfhe officer who was at the subsequent meeting says that when employers returned with a smaller offer than had previously been mooted, "Sally Hunt announces it’s a wonderful offer and that we can do business on this ... The AUT President then went over the top in praise of the offer and how it could easily be sold. We were astounded."

Not all AUT members were happy about this, but the view of the executive was that employers would go no further, the action was fizzling out and they would be isolated nationally if they continued. Some of Natfhe's leaders were extremely unhappy about the deal and he manner of the suspension, but given the weakness of Natfhe's higher education sector, it would have been extremely difficult for them to continue alone. Internal reports of theirs suggest that if the AUT pulled out, then "it could lead to individual branches and groups of members becoming isolated". Therefore Natfhe withdrew and the resulting deal did not end the erosion of pay. One AUT official explains: "People complained that it did not deal with the erosion, but the claim was not about that it was for a third of the top-up fees and when the figures are added up I think we’ll be quite close to this." But 'third of top-up fees' was understood by most, including employers, to be a means to reversing the erosion of pay.

The future of education
Sometime after the suspension of the action, members were asked to vote and endorsed the deal. "The ex-AUT leadership interpreted this as an endorsement of their strategy." This is unlikely: it was their strategy that had, after all, produced the poor deal. But given that the action had been suspended, and given that a continuation of the action would potentially expose members to punitive action, it would have been difficult for many to contemplate continuing. Further, since many marks had already been released and students had gone for the summer, a vital pressure point had been passed.

The report concludes that the actions of the AUT leadership were about manoeuvring for power within the new merged union. It adds that there are traditions of organisation and accountability at stake, not merely the careers of particular leaders. Of course, it also about the broader approach to organising and to political engagement. One way to test whether UCU members have accepted the ex-AUT leaders' strategy avails itself: elections for the UCU leadership are coming up. Candidates include Sally Hunt, who aside from backing her own failed strategy is feted by supporters of Israel for promising to oppose the Israeli boycott campaign. UCU Left, for their part, are backing Roger Kline, former Natfhe activist who was intensively involved in organising for the dispute, but also stands in opposition to New Labour's twin policies of war and privatisation. This research should be shown to every UCU member, and should be widely publicised.

Marcuse's plea for intolerance. posted by lenin

I came across something interesting while reading up a bit on the correspondence between Theodor Adorno and Herbert Marcuse, the famous correspondence over the Vietnam War and that over the German students movement. Adorno had moved sharply to the right, having embraced Zionism (calling Nasser the "fascist chieftain"), and was supporting the United States in Vietnam. It is a logical step in a way since, if you think that a bourgeois nationalist like Nasser can be construed as a fascist enemy, the Viet Cong could seem insupportably worse. Further, although he had by no means become a reactionary, his critique of capitalism was blunted by his conviction that it had acquired the capacity to liquidate the revolutionary subject. The alternative to capitalist democracy was, then, probably something worse. He grew increasingly hostile to the student movement before his death in 1969, seeing in some of its more adventurist elements, those who disrupted his lectures with puerile stunts, the seed of a new totalitarianism ("China on the Rhine"). Even if Adorno was criticised unfairly, it is hard not to prefer the student movement which characterised the Frankfurt School as ‘critical in theory, conformist in practice’.

Marcuse was also sympathetic to Zionism (although there are hints in various placed that he became more critical after the mid-1960s), and he was no longer convinced of the inevitability of capitalist crisis and thus of the revolutionary role of the working class. In his defense, capitalism did not look particularly crisis-prone at the time: rather, the threat appeared to be an all-encompassing administrative society with rising wealth underpinning a deeply conservative consensus, at least in the United States, with intolerable barbarism at the expansive margins of the system. But he was in no way reconciled to capitalism, looking to the emerging civil rights, antiwar, feminist and student movements, as well as Third World insurgencies, to act as catalysts for an attack on the core of the system. Given that the conservative critique of these movements (smugly described by Nixon as the 'moral majority') often took aim at what was described as their "intolerance", which encompasses everything from noisome extravagance, to the shouting down of authority figures, to sit-ins, blockades, and finally armed insurrection, Marcuse took on the problematic of what he called Repressive Tolerance. I don't think Zizek acknowledged a debt to Marcuse in his 'Leninist Plea for Intolerance', one of his better pieces, but it's hard to see how doesn't owe it.

Marcuse argues that "the realization of the objective of tolerance would call for intolerance toward prevailing policies, attitudes, opinions, and the extension of tolerance to policies, attitudes, and opinions which are outlawed or suppressed". Tolerance is a "partisan goal", whose method is intolerance of "policies, conditions, and modes of behavior which should not be tolerated because they are impeding, if not destroying, the chances of creating an existence without fear and misery". Putting up with the irrationalities of capitalist production (he names 'planned obsolescence', of which Microsoft is a notable exponent), "moronization" through propaganda, the recruitment of young men for barbarism and so on is "the essence of a system which fosters tolerance as a means for perpetuating the struggle for existence and suppressing the alternatives". In a society in which democratic forms have been largely hollowed out, "even progressive movements threaten to turn into their opposite to the degree to which they accept the rules of the game". Participating in the 'democratic process' - letter-writing, peaceful protest - under such circumstances can strengthen social repression by testifying to its democratic, representative nature. In fact, "freedom (of opinion, of assembly, of speech) becomes an instrument for absolving servitude", since "the conditions of tolerance are 'loaded'". They are determined by the existing class structure and by the existence of legalised violence by the state. Over forty years on, and the role of 'tolerance' as a conservative nostrum has far from vanished.

Resourcefully, Marcuse calls upon the liberal tradition itself when legitimising intolerance, particularly of those who would not be disposed to reciprocate (for example, the far right), or of conditions that are actively harmful to liberty. Further, he shows that oppressed minorities are not obliged to seek the permission of society as a whole, to accomodate themselves to and tolerate something that is intolerable. Most interesting, I think, is the riposte to moralistic pacifism: "[T]o refrain from violence in the face of vastly superior violence is one thing, to renounce a priori violence against violence, on ethical or psychological grounds (because it may antagonize sympathizers) is another. Non-violence is normally not only preached to but exacted from the weak - it is a necessity rather than a virtue, and normally it does not seriously harm the case of the strong." Toleration in this sense involves agreeing to be coerced. I think of Iraq here: it was expected that they would tolerate being occupied, that if they weren't grateful, they would at least not put up any meaningful resistance. Given what the occupation entailed, the expected commitment to non-violence on the part of Iraqis would simply have been capitulation to the stronger force. Marcuse, while not celebrating the use of violence, insists on historicising the significance of violence, particularly on the difference between revolutionary and reactionary violence; between the violence of the oppressed and that of their oppressors. And he also makes short work of the claim that capitalist democracy is in itself the antithesis of dictatorship (and is therefore legitimate in its violent repression of what can only be a totalitarian challenge): "The only authentic alternative and negation of dictatorship (with respect to this question) would be a society in which 'the people' have become autonomous individuals, freed from the repressive requirements of a struggle for existence in the interest of domination, and as such human beings choosing their government and determining their life. Such a society does not yet exist anywhere."

Marcuse introduces important qualifications. While critiquing the strategies of accomodation to the system, he notes that "these liberties remain a precondition for the restoration of their original oppositional function": he critiques the society, but does not devalue the limited forms of democracy permitted. There is a problem, however, with the explicit focus on oppressed minorities, whose predicament and status as minorities precisely demands intolerance of the society; and also on students, the radicalised minority which sometimes out of frustration produced impotent violent acting out against the system, as per the adventurist antics of the Weathermen. The opposition to tactics in which the 'rules of the game' are formally assented to is certainly preferrable to liberal piety, but perhaps also implicit here is his doubt about the insurrectionary possibilities of the working class. As he explains in his correspondence with Adorno over the German SDS, Marcuse understands the ultra-left outbursts of some of the students, since the existing state of affairs is increasingly, almost physically, unbearable (and he rightly points out that between angry students and the state, he is with the students). Yet a focus on working class politics would involve the recognition that breaking the 'rules of the game' can potentially be as demobilising and inadequate as dogmatically adhering to them. There is no substitute for the organised power of the working class. As Lukacs points out in History and Class Consciousness, the revolutionary attitude to legality is purely tactical: we recognise it as a material force, but beyond that it has no mystique for us. We neither cleave to it remorselessly nor seek to confront it out of bravado when we have not the strength to do so. Formally accepting 'the rules of the game' can be the right thing to do and the more revolutionary thing to do.

Anyway, here's a documentary about Marcuse, his support for the radical movements of the 1960s, and his clash with Governor Ronald Reagan. It features some students of his, including Angela Davis:

Washington Antiwar Protests posted by lenin

There are demonstrations taking place all over the United States today, and the main one in Washington is reported by the Washington Post to be attracting up to 100,000 people. The WaPo is undoubtedly playing down the numbers, relying as it does on nebulous "authorities". Active duty troops are said to be taking part. It's also somewhat cheering to note that hate figures of the American Right such as Susan Sarandon, Danny Glover, Tim Robbins and Jesse Jackson are going to be there. The Victoria Times Colonist, of all papers, reports that one of the slogans is Hip Hop Not War. Well, it's about time someone said that.

"We have installed a gang of warlords in power in Baghdad" - George Galloway's speech to Parliament posted by tony collins

The government almost never allows debate about Iraq. This week saw one of the only Parliamentary debates that have been allowed since the invasion almost 4 years ago.

Of course, it was no surprise that not only did Blair not bother attending, government business managers wouldn't even allow a vote on the subject.

Fortunately, at least some truths were spoken during the debate:



Read the speech in full here and see more speeches by Galloway here

Empire and social-democracy. posted by lenin

I mentioned before, without elaborating, the impact that the experience of empire had on European consciousness, particularly alluding to the way in which procolonial attitudes manifested themselves in the social-democratic tradition. Take the German SPD. In German South West Africa, what is now Namibia, there was a particularly brutal form of colonialism, permeated by an elite military culture, described in Isabel V Hilton's Absolute Destruction, as not only being brutal and racist in the conventional sense, but as comprising in-built, structural capacities for perpetual annihilation that extended well beyond its ends. There the first genocide of the century was perpetrated, against the Herero, in that colony. Atrocity piled upon atrocity, and the German state repeatedly proved itself at least as prepared for barbarism as the British state. In such circumstances, it would seem logical for socialists to articulate the most forceful opposition to the extension of such a state's authority over another people, regardless of the fanciful reasoning offered to excuse this.

On the other hand, Eduard Bernstein argued that the SPD should adopt a "humane" and "nonaggressive" colonialism, to promote democratisation and the evolution of capitalism. Offering no argument against imperial domination, Bernstein did thnk that inter-imperial conflict could be ironed out through the internationalisation of colonial management. Perhaps some sort of 'United Nations' or 'League of Nations'. Manfred Steger's sympathetic biography of Bernstein describes the impact of his family's liberal background, and of his years in London being surrounded by social-liberals and Fabians. It is hard to miss the impact of this on his wider political philosophy, particularly his preference for a ethical socialism and his gradualism, his conviction that capitalism was developing slowly, under growing working class pressure, into a welfare state that would facilitate the transition to socialist democracy, and his belief that the labour movement could impact on the colonial state to humanise its policies. Bernstein therefore argued, in The Struggle of Social Democracy and the Social Revolution, that: "the subjection of natives to the authority of European administration does not always entail a worsening of their condition, but often means the opposite." He adds: "under direct European rule, savages are without exception better off than they were before." (Quoted here).

At the International Socialist Conference in Stuttgart, August 1907, the colonial question was raised directly. It was suggested by most of the leaderships represented on the Congress Commission, that after all not all colonialism was bad, and it might even continue to play a civilising role under socialist governments. Bernstein, allied with Van Kol of Holland, argued for a "socialist colonial policy" rather than a socialist anti-colonial policy. Lenin's response:

This vote on the colonial question is of very great importance. First? it strikingly showed up socialist opportunism, which succumbs to bourgeois blandishments. Secondly, it revealed a negative feature in the European labour movement, one that can do no little harm to the proletarian cause, and for that reason should receive serious attention. Marx frequently quoted a very significant saying of Sismondi. The proletarians of the ancient world, this saying runs, lived at the expense of society; modern society lives at the expense of the proletarians.

The non-propertied, but non-working, class is incapable of overthrowing the exploiters. Only the proletarian class, which maintains the whole of society, can bring about the social revolution. However, as a result of the extensive colonial policy, the European proletarian partly finds himself in a position when it is not his labour, but the labour of the practically enslaved natives in the colonies, that maintains the whole of society. The British bourgeoisie, for example, derives more profit from the many millions of the population of India and other colonies than from the British workers. In certain countries this provides the material and economic basis for infecting the proletariat with colonial chauvinism. Of course, this may be only a temporary phenomenon, but the evil must nonetheless be clearly realised and its causes understood in order to be able to rally the proletariat of all countries for the struggle against such opportunism. This struggle is bound to be victorious, since the “privileged” nations are a diminishing faction of the capitalist nations.

Nor was Bernstein unprecedented in this. Kautsky had commented in a letter to Engels in 1882, two years before Germany started its protectorate in South West Africa, that "In so far as they cannot be assimilated by modern culture, the wild peoples will have to disappear from the surface of the earth."

Actually, if you want to get serious about it, some of the earliest left-wing apologetics for empire came from the near descendants of the French Revolution. There was enthusiastic support for the colonisation of Algeria in the 1830s. The Saint-Simonian Philip Buchez argued that France should take the opportunity to dominate the Mediterranean as it would provide a holding base for "direct communications with the interior of Africa". Charles Fourier had hopes that the communal societies he was proposing for Europe could be imported into Africa, a move certain to civilise the local population. One Fourierist paper declared that France's motto should be "colonise everywhere and always". The Fourierists in Algeria declared in 1848 that the colonisation of Africa was "the providential destiny of France in the nineteenth century". Proudhon argued that it was Europe's role to teach non-European peoples the need for work and, in the case of Africans, "it is our right to compel them to do so". Another Saint-Simonian was, of course, Ferdinand de Lesseps, who oversaw the construction of the Suez Canal as a means by which French and European imperialism more generally could radiate through the region. He specifically called for the partition of Africa among the great powers. Victor Hugo's newspaper, L'Evenement, urged that France conquest Madagascar so that a two-pronged French assault could be mounted on Africa from there and Algeria. Even when a strong communist party emerged under the influence of the October Revolution (which, let's not forget, was a revolt against imperialism as well as against capitalism) with a serious commitment to anticolonialism, it went on to participate in the left-wing Popular Front government which, while delivering many serious reforms, refused to grant independence to the colonies. You might remember that one of those most disappointed by the failure was Michel Aflaq, the intellectual founder of Ba'athism. Another set of disappointed people might have been the inhabitants of Morocco, ruled by both France and Spain since 1912 under the Treaty of Fez. The cruel irony here is that when Franco wanted to smash the Spanish left and, by creating a decisive foothold of fascism in Europe, set back the whole European left, he was able to mobilise thousands of Moroccan troops under Spanish command. Franco had, after all, emerged through the ranks of the Spanish Foreign Legion in Morocco, and had learned his methods of 'pacification' there.

What about the British? I don't know if people are surprised any more that the Labour Party in government is every bit as bellicose and grotesque in its foreign policy as past Tory administrations. But the legacy of support for empire among admired left-wing figures is substantial, and before getting into it, I simply want to illustrate Lenin's point with some examples of what we're talking about. Mike Davis pointed out in Late Victorian Holocausts that when the sans cullotes were storming the Bastille, the largest manufacturing districts in the world were the Yangzi Delta and Bengal, with Lingan and Madras not far behind. Further, he added that India contributed about 25% of global economic growth compared to Britain's measly 3%. With extraordinary speed, the British Empire succeeded in deflating these societies, at first imposing an opiate society in China then carving it up with the rival imperialist powers, while enforcing an agrarian despotism based on the rule of a Brahmanic caste in India (that was called 'Indian Tradition'). This period of domination, lasting until the middle of the twentieth century, saw Britain's ruling class immeasurably enriched while the Indian subcontinent and China experienced holocaustal famines as a result. Well, this is all uncontroversial, and the brutality of the empire combined with growing class consciousness in Britain itself stimulated a germinal tradition, embraced by a number of the Chartists, of anti-colonialism. Ernest Jones, for instance, urged Britons to support the 1857 uprising in India with an internationalist conscience that recalled the abolitionist movement and the Atlantic tradition of motley crews and revolution. It was this tradition that would re-emerge in the Movement for Colonial Freedom under Fenner Brockway with a large intake from the Bevanite Left, and the anti-apartheid movement that developed from it.

Still, at the time that Jones was taking this position, Chartism had by and large lost its mass base, and his views did not resonate very widely. Even the most Radical Liberals were not eager to give Ireland Home Rule, never mind give up the Jewel in the imperial crown, as India was described. In 1902, a sort of precursor of the Eustonites, the pro-empire Coefficients Club, was organised by those famous middle-Fabians, the Webbs. It included, alongside colonial governors and traditional conservatives, such surprising figures as Bertrand Russell. The Histomatist discusses them here. It was the middle-class Fabian left and the radical-liberals, who were to go on to formulate Labour's earliest attempts at a colonial policy.

Where they offered a critique, it was not that empire was essentially wrong, but that British rule had not sufficiently protected the colonised populations from the inroads of capitalism. The historian Paul Kelemen describes the policy as a paternalistic defense of "merrie Africa", an Africa of communal land and tribal authority, the natural state as they had it. This conception, though offered as a critique of capitalism, was steeped in racism, and it certainly did not provide any basis from which to oppose the empire in principle. Again and again, despite their critique, despite seeing the iniquities of the settler societies, they urged that the colonial system be retained and tinkered with. Indeed, the Fabian colonial experts impressed upon Labour the necessity of turning the empire into an exercise in propagating the kind of welfare capitalism they supported domestically. The Colonial Office also found the TUC leadership very congenial, prepared in principle and practise to defend the British empire against both anticolonial nationalism and communism. Neither were Labour governments necessarily inclined to be more conciliatory to anticolonial movements: whether in suppressing the Indian national movement, or the insurrection in Malaya, or even cleansing the island of Diego Garcia so that the Americans could have a military base, there never was a moment when a British Labour government took a principled anti-imperialist stance.

I outline these points to illustrate a few things. The first is that whether we are witnessing former soixant-huitards clamouring for 'humanitarian intervention', or seeing lifelong Atlanticists demand unconditional support for Bush, these arguments and alignments are not new, although the situation in which they unfold clearly is. Secondly, support for imperialism is directly rooted in support for capitalism. I'm not talking about the tacit consent expressed by the acquiescence of people who are simply doing their best with what's available. I refer to the explicit ideological claims made about it, whether they amount to a positive assessment of its capacity for gradual reform toward socialism, or a negative of assessment of every alternative. The latter case is what is most evident these days, and what is being offered as 'left-wing' imperialism is therefore not left in any meaningful sense: it advertises a profoundly reactionary subjectivity, one whose range of perception is that provided by the ruling class itself. Thirdly, that imperialism extends back into our own societies in very clear and ominous ways, some of which we are now seeing in the way that America's elaborate and secretive national security state has been cracking down on civil liberties and on unionism (although, in the latter case, direct repression is usually moot since Bush can rely on a manufacturing crisis to cut the rate of unionised labour by one or two percent every year now), and in the way that ostentatiously democratic governments are hosting Stasi prisons and torture flights, rolling back basic legal rights such as habeus corpus, enforcing internment, and raising the wall to migrants.

Not only in those ways, however: when ruling classes turn imperialist, they have always sought a bargain with the working class, depending on its relative strength. In seeking to create a hegemony behind the imperial mission, they rely on doctrines which are obnoxiously anti-democratic and racist. Anti-democratic in the sense that absurd and irrational attitudes of obedience to the state are encouraged, and racist in the sense that absurd and irrational attitudes of superiority to the targets of imperial aggression are encouraged. Imperialist culture is a potent competitor with the left for hegemony, even if its most vocal advocates are often those who claim to represent a decent left, a chastened left, a serious left, a sensible and tolerant left, a left that has been mugged by reality and much else besides. Indeed, in referring to 'advocates' - which in another context would refer to someone who is paid to argue a case whether she agrees with it or not - I want to convey that people like Kouchner, Ignatieff, Glucksmann, Makiya, Berman and all of those who have claimed to argue for empire from within the terrain of the left perform an important role of advocacy for the Bush White House (and its local auxiliaries). Within the organs of establishment liberalism and even the more dissenting outlets, using a language mastered during long past periods of activism, they are consistently hostile to the left, use all means available to redirect its polemical fire, and ritually bolster the ruling mantras (the Muslims are coming). They take the task of threat-exaggeration out of the domain of White House press briefings, where it would be regarded cynically, and remove the business of self-righteous moralising from the Pentagon, where it produce gales of laughter. They make all the necessary noises and obey all the etiquette that is needed for them to be adequate to the task, but the appearance of doctrinal consistency matters less than repetiveness. For it is through repetition that their cruel, barbaric, hateful panaceas acquire the quality of common sense.

Lebanon's brewing civil war. posted by lenin

Busy as I have been, it was remiss of me not to at least mention that the first blow in a civil war was struck in Lebanon the other day when the Hariri gangs fought with the opposition in Beirut during the general strike, and three died. We are not allowed to know who killed who, so far. Nor are we told who the 175 wounded are. But according to Fisk, the violence involved Amal protesters and Sunni forces. Meanwhile, the Lebanese Forces, a far right militia and political movement that played a crucial role in the so-called 'Cedar Revolution', are active on behalf of the government.

There is a curious alignment going on. The supporters of Siniora, as Angry Arab points out, are Christian fascists bearing the stars n stripes, and Sunnis bearing Saddam's portrait. They are now complemented by the Walid Jumblatt militias who are busily carrying out sectarian kidnappings. (Angry Arab notes that they are represented in the Socialist International. One has to wonder why the Democratic Left Movement, splitters from the LCP, left-face of neoliberalism, a promiment participant in the March 14th movement, aren't invited). In opposition to these forces are Hezbollah, the Lebanese Communist Party, the trade unions and the Free Patriotic Movement. On the one side, those who by and large collaborated with the US-backed Israeli invasion, and on the other, those who fought to defend the country (and won).

It is hard to forget the hand of the CIA and Mossad in this, especially since Bush administration chose to tell the newspapers that it was planning 'covert' action against Hezbollah. But one shouldn't miss the sense in which the imperialist dimension of this conflict is continuous with the class dimension. The general strike is in part motivated by widespread hostility to Siniora's programme of savage economic 'reform', which includes massive cuts in social security and privatisation of key utilities. The IMF, recognising an ally in despair, are rushing to help the government, with grants to help debt repayments. Israel and the United States are propping up a ruling class based on a narrow and often bitterly reactionary segment of Lebanese society. The reason they miss Hariri so much is not that he was put in power by the Syrian government or that he eventually came to some friction with them, but that he was a billionaire neoliberal who worked Lebanon into a state of massive international debt, thus making the state highly dependent on American support.

Of course, because the Shiite Muslim population tends to be the poorest, class-driven conflict could easily find sectarian expression. This is exactly what the Siniora government is attempting to accomplish with its use of far right Christian gangs to break the strike. The other thing is, the political system of Lebanon is designed in an undemocratic fashion that gives Christians a disproportionate representation even under provisions of the Document for National Reconciliation (the Taif Accord). Aoun was outraged even by the Taif agreement for allowing Syrian troops to remain in Lebanon indefinitely, and was instrumental in organising anti-Syrian protests. Since Hezbollah were the beneficiaries of Syria's presence at the expense of Aoun's army, and since what Hezbollah demands is a rebalancing of the political structure to end the disproportionate Christian hegemony in Lebanese politics, it is remarkable that Hezbollah and Aoun have been able to work together. As was widely remarked at the time, Israel's attempted invasion produced massive solidarity across Lebanon, such that clear majorities of every sect in Lebanon supported Hezbollah's fight. Sectarian political movements were massively damaged - yet, they are operating again with the connivance of the state.

The Battle of Haifa Street. posted by lenin

CBS recorded this, but apparently refused to show it, apparently because amid the usual propaganda (the battle is described as one between "Sunni gunmen" and "Iraqi forces", which precisely reverses the dimensions of the contest), it contains some reality:

Tortured liberals. posted by lenin

Advertising his fascist impulses, Martin Amis had this to say a while ago:

There’s a definite urge—don’t you have it?—to say, “The Muslim community will have to suffer until it gets its house in order.” What sort of suffering? Not letting them travel. Deportation—further down the road. Curtailing of freedoms. Strip-searching people who look like they’re from the Middle East or from Pakistan. . . . Discriminatory stuff, until it hurts the whole community and they start getting tough with their children. . . . They hate us for letting our children have sex and take drugs—well, they’ve got to stop their children killing people.

You see I wasn't exaggerating when I said 'fascist impulses'. This was quoted in a friendly review by Hitchens of neocon Mark Steyn's new book, which outlines the latter's view of the 'Muslim threat'. The trouble according to Steyn is that the Muslims are breeding furiously, rapidly taking over Europe with litters of progeny even as we all lapse into a sullen anti-American slumber. Hitchens gives credence to this theory, dressing it up in the usual trashy self-exculpatio, and also quotes Sam Harris on his claim that only European fascists have the correct attitude to the Islamic threat, later adding "Not while I'm alive, they won't." Okay, now look at this:

As Martin Amis said in the essay that prompted Steyn’s contempt: “What is one to do with thoughts like these?” How does one respond, in other words, when an enemy challenges not just your cherished values but additionally forces you to examine the very assumptions that have heretofore seemed to underpin those values?

I could be persuaded to live with the idea that some viciously reactionary polemicists can espouse a chemically pure distillation of modern fascism, and still be called liberals. But it's a bit much to hear that they have been coerced into it by the "enemy". And it's altogether too much to hear these arseholes whine about it, as if they're traumatised by their own disgusting racism, as if it is merely another burden that whitey has to bear. Perhaps if these moments of introspection and narcissism actually produced a moment of self-revelation, it would be worth it.

This smoothe transition from humanitarian motives to barbaric ones reminds me of Kurtz, the vainglorious Belgian colonialist who, in Conrad's Heart of Darkness, is set to work on a report for the International Society for Suppressing Savage Customs. He at first commends a noble mission: "By the simple exercise of our will, we can exert a power for good practically unbounded" etc., etc. Marlow, reading the report, comments that the "magnificent" peroration made him "tingle with enthusiasm" right until "the end of that moving appeal to every altruistic sentiment" when "it blazed at you, luminous and terrifying, like a flash of lightning in a serene sky: 'Exterminate all the brutes!'"

The 'surge' is on. posted by lenin

High rise in Haifa Street bombed, thirty killed, all 'insurgents'. Same raid, thirty-seven reported wounded, including women and children. Meanwhile, 600 Mahdi Army men have been arrested, which is either an audatious attempt to stimulate a combined Sunni-Shiite rebellion which can be put down with overwhelming destructive force, or a sign that US forces have taken Sadr's return to the government as a sign of political weakness.

What is curious is that Bush and his cabinet must be fully aware that the escalation policy has already failed. Last year, Operation Together Forward saw a boost in troop numbers by 14,000 in an effort to combat the Mujahideen Shura Council in Baghdad, a Sunni umbrella group that now describes itself grandly as 'the Islamic State of Iraq'. The MSC (or ISI if you like) are reported by coalition sources to have lost hundreds of fighters to superior firepower or capture. Even if this were true, and I expect there is serious inflation involved in the figures of fighters killed, the result was a drastic escalation in violence across the city. The White House announced that it would review operations, and on 24th October the operation was brought to an end. So, what are the odds that this escalation will do anything other than tear up Iraqi cities and residents a bit more?

The conscience of the ex-liberal-leftist. posted by lenin

Infinite Thought is very funny on the narcissism of Cohen and his latest cri de coeur. Narcissism isn't the end of it, of course: it is packed with stupid questions, non-sequiturs, fallacies and falsehoods. I'm only talking about the small portion presented in The Observer, since I have no intention of actually buying and reading the whole book. In the interests of good sense and my own personal dignity, I shall invest the requisite sum in an Ordinary Boys CD and a t-shirt featuring the cast of Home & Away.

It can't be a disappointment, exactly, but it is underwhelming. The prose miscarries, the irony is leaden, even the calumny and scorn can leave no lasting impression. In the old days, Isaac Deutscher was able to compare, however mockingly, the ex-communists to the disappointed adherents of the French Revolution. The essay, on 'The conscience of the ex-communist', is worth quoting at length:

Our ex-Communist now bitterly denounces the betrayal of his hopes. This appears to him to have had almost no prece­dent. Yet as he eloquently describes his early expectations and illusions, we detect a strangely familiar tone. Exactly so did the disillusioned Wordsworth and his contemporaries look back upon their first youthful enthusiasm for the French revolution:

Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive,

But to be young was very heaven!

The intellectual Communist who breaks away emotion­ally from his party can claim some noble ancestry. Beethoven tore to pieces the title page of his Eroica, on which he had dedicated the symphony to Napoleon, as soon as he learned that the First Consul was about to ascend a throne. Words­worth called the crowning of Napoleon "a sad reverse for all mankind." All over Europe the enthusiasts of the French revolution were stunned by their discovery that the Corsican liberator of the peoples and enemy of tyrants was himself a tyrant and an oppressor.

In the same way the Wordsworths of our days were shocked at the sight of Stalin fraternizing with Hitler and Ribbentrop. If no new Eroicas have been created in our days, at least the dedicatory pages of unwritten symphonies have been torn with great flourishes.

In The God That Failed, Louis Fischer tries to explain somewhat remorsefully and not quite convincingly why he adhered to the Stalin cult for so long. He analyzes the variety of motives, some working slowly and some rapidly, which determine the moment at which people recover from the in­fatuation with Stalinism. The force of the European disillu­sionment with Napoleon was almost equally uneven and capricious. A great Italian poet, Ugo Foscolo, who had been Napoleon's soldier and composed an Ode to Bonaparte the Liberator, turned against his idol after the Peace of Campo­formio--this must have stunned a "Jacobin" from Venice as the Nazi-Soviet Pact stunned a Polish Communist. But a man like Beethoven remained under the spell of Bonaparte for seven years more, until he saw the despot drop his republi­can mask. This was an "eye-opener" comparable to Stalin's purge trials of the 1930's.

There can be no greater tragedy than that of a great revo­lution's succumbing to the mailed fist that was to defend it from its enemies. There can be no spectacle as disgusting as that of a post-revolutionary tyranny dressed up in the ban­ners of liberty. The ex-Communist is morally as justified as was the ex-Jacobin in revealing and revolting against that spectacle.

Koestler, Spender, the Partisan Review and New Leader crowd, for all their immense flaws, revealed and were revolted by the spectacle of Stalinism. Cohen reveals and is revolted by the details of his own dreary political biography. Still, one does recognise something of the current belligerati in this:

Worse still is the ex-Communist's characteristic incapac­ity for detachment. His emotional reaction against his for­mer environment keeps him in its deadly grip and prevents him from understanding the drama in which he was in­volved or half-involved. The picture of communism and Stalinism he draws is that of a gigantic chamber of intellec­tual and moral horrors. Viewing it, the uninitiated are trans­ferred from politics to pure demonology. Sometimes the artistic effect may be strong--horrors and demons do enter into many a poetic masterpiece; but it is politically unrelia­ble and even dangerous. Of course, the story of Stalinism abounds in horror. But this is only one of its elements; and even this, the demonic, has to be translated into terms of human motives and interests. The ex-Communist does not even attempt the translation.

In a rare flash of genuine self-criticism, Koestler makes this admission: "As a rule, our memories romanticize the past. But when one has renounced a creed or been betrayed by a friend, the opposite mechanism sets to work. In the light of that later knowledge, the original experience loses its innocence, be­comes tainted and rancid in recollection. I have tried in these pages to recapture the mood in which the experi­ences [in the Communist Party] related were originally lived--and I know that I have failed. Irony, anger, and shame kept intruding; the passions of that time seem trans­formed into perversions, its inner certitude into the closed universe of the drug addict; the shadow of barbed wire lies across the condemned playground of memory. Those who were caught by the great illusion of our time, and have lived through its moral and intellectual debauch, either give themselves up to a new addiction of the opposite type, or are condemned to pay with a lifelong hangover."

The Trial of Tony Blair posted by lenin

Belated hat tip to The Couch Tripper for recording and posting this.

World Social Forum, Nairobi 2007. posted by lenin

Massive kudos to Socialist Worker for getting these reports from the World Social Forum in Kenya.

Here's an intro from Charlie Kimber:



Read Charlie's article on Somalia and Ethopia here. And here's Charlie conducting an interview with Stanislaus Alusiola, a resident of Kibara, on why he is attending the WSF:



And here's Wahu Kaara from the Kenya Debt Relief Network, as she opens the World Social Forum 2007:



The last one is especially brilliant. Listen up. And keep checking Socialist Worker for updates.

The only democracy in the Middle East posted by lenin

Only a thought - but what a lie Israel's claim to be the "only democracy in the Middle East" is! What a bald-faced lie. Not only because it is a racist state, an apartheid state, a state founded on ethnic cleansing and the military suppression and attempted destruction of Palestine. It is a lie because Palestine is the only real democracy in the Middle East. Because Israel has arrogantly denied it even the modest accoutrements of statehood doesn't mean that we should ignore the fact that Palestine has been far more meaningfully democratic than Israel has ever been. As I say, only a thought.

Benny Morris on the 'next Holocaust'. posted by lenin

That a primitive accumulation of moral capital has disinherited Jewish people, that it has sought to separate them from any co-determination of the meaning of the Shoah, that it has enclosed the means of representation, and that it has sought to discipline Jews and hold them (whether they will or no) as the legitimate property of the State of Israel - all of that is so obvious that controversy about it is contrived and facile. Take Benny Morris and his latest browbeating on Iran. The chemically pure distillation of the culture of imperialism that Nazism represented, its attempted destruction of the Jews of Europe, is forcefully pressed into the service of Israeli victimhood. Iran, not Israel, is racist toward Arabs. Iran, not Israel, is the aggressive local power. Iran, not Israel, is nuked to the teeth. Israel's geopolitical rivals are fascists, antisemites, plan genocide, flirt with Hitlerian fantasies, want to finish the job. They (the Arabs, the Muslims) soften up Western audiences for this with such combustible claims as: "Israel is a racist oppressor state" and "Israel, in this age of multiculturalism, is an anachronism and superfluous." In other words, the critique of racism and oppression will prepare one morally for a nuclear Final Solution. The endorsement of multicultural polities readies one for religious genocide. This curious logic sanctions only one ethical stance, of course, which is that there must be no serious reckoning of the Palestinian tragedy, certainly no meaningful critique of Zionism, and no suggestion that the oppression of the Palestinians has to be fully terminated since to do so would kill the Jewish State.

Morris has always been a schmuck. From minimising the import of Zionist ethnic cleansing plans in 1947-8, he has proceeded to a more serious acknowledgment of the scale of massacres and rapes, and the 'transferist' ideology underpinning them, only to say that it was necessary to engage in ethnic cleansing and, what is more, that Ben Gurion made a huge mistake in not going much further and completing the expulsion of the Palestinians. There would be more peace, he now argues, had Palestine been wiped entirely off the map: "this place would be quieter and know less suffering if the matter had been resolved once and for all. If Ben Gurion had carried out a large expulsion and cleansed the whole country-the whole land of Israel, as far as the Jordan River. It may yet turn out that this was his fatal mistake." What is more, he legitimises this practise by specifically exempting Palestinians (and Arabs and Muslims more broadly) from the normal sphere of human consideration. "There is a deep problem in Islam. It's a world whose values are different. Human life doesn't have the same value as it does in the West. They are barbarians ... something like a cage has to be built for them. I know that sounds terrible. It is really cruel. But there is no choice. There is a wild animal there that has to be locked up." To criticise this racist ideology and to militate against the reduction of Muslims and Arabs to sub-humans needing to be ghettoised and caged, is to prepare for the next Holocaust.

Given the eliminitionist tendencies of the Iranian regime, as adumbrated with sickly fascination by Benny Morris, how strange is this report from Forward? It says that Iran's Jewish community is refusing to cooperate in attempts to organise their departure from Iran. A few hundred have departed, but most cite economic or family concerns, not discrimination from Iranian regime. A strange situation indeed - HIAS, not the Islamic Republic, wishes to ethnically cleanse Jews from Iran, at the service of Israel's foreign policy! The irony is that if the leadership of Iran was composed of opportunistic pro-imperialist lackeys like Nuri as-Said rather than a nationalist 'Islamic' bourgeoisie, they could have helped HIAS organise a terror campaign against the synagogues and Jewish businesses to precipitate the desired flight to Israel.

"A community of heroes". posted by lenin

I wanted to draw your attention to Dominick Jenkins' book, The Final Frontier. I was stunned by the perspicacity of some of the analysis of America's early empire building (although it is somewhat cursory on the anti-imperialist reflux represented by Mark Twain et al). In particular, I want to highlight a few themes that Jenkins draws out brilliantly. The first is a motivation for empire often overlooked: the need to avert the growing polarisation and class war in American society. This was recognised in the late 19th Century by Theodore Roosevelt, (whom Vidal dubbed the 'American Sissy'), and Henry Cabot Lodge, who - recognising the growing insularity of the Protestant capitalist elite, its increasing tendency to seclude itself from the rest of society in country clubs, boarding schools, fraternities and other sealed spaces, its growing ethnic exclusivity - worried about what excellent fodder this situation presented to anarchists. Industrialisation drew millions of unassimilated migrants, who were not being assimilated, while at the same time the growth of an urbanised working class and the political challenge from black workers and women contributed to the growth of a new left, comprising anarchists, populists and socialists. The populists argued that the state was serving the interests of the East Coast elite, exploiting the financial weakness of farmers and grinding down the poor. The socialists and anarchists argued that since the ruling class was visibly pursuing its own interests, the working class should certainly pursue its own interests, and to hell with purblind patriotism.

Roosevelt et al contended that to save America, a new frontier was needed: by waging wars of expansion, always with the fondest motives, always with civilisation and Christian virtue in mind, Americans would be impressed by their collective power and would "come to see themselves, as they had done in the Civil War, the Indian Wars, and in the colonization of new land, as a community of heroes engaged in a struggle upon which the future of humanity depended." Well, if that isn't American imperialist ideology to a tee. The firefighter, policeman, intrepid reporter, blue-collar bum, incorruptible union activist, brave American soldier - heroism is the supreme imperialist virtue (even if its application is cowardly, corrupt, venal, brutal, and in general as unlikely to inspire admiration as any form of human conduct).

The impression this was supposed to make on popular consciousness was immense: vice, Roosevelt argued, would be blown away like chaff once Americans had "something to think about which isn't material gain" - that is, the vice of class struggle would be whipped if American workers were occupied with fantasies of noble domination, of personal sacrifice and national supremacy. The creation of the Rough Riders when America declared war on Spain in 1898 was an early attempt to galvanise such a national feeling: it was one of three volunteer cavalries sent to fight in Cuba, putatively on the basis of liberating the island from oppressive Spanish rule. The 'classlessness' of the Rough Riders was emphasised: Bucky O'Neil, Roosevelt's "dearest comrade" was twice a Populist candidate for Congress; one sergeant was a leading Gold Democrat (a short-lived formation devoted to classical liberalism); one was a well-known socialist. In doing so, they provided an idealised 'democratic' community, representative and meritocratic, with cowboys and millionaires mingling their blood on the battlefields.

America's frontiers had been bounded to the West by the coast, to the south by the conquest of Texas, and to the north by the 1812 war. If a new frontier was sought, it was a perpetually shifting one: Cuba was taken, and so were the Philippines. In the latter, the Americans had to contend with Emilio Aguinaldo's insurgency, which fought both a convential war (initially, and to its great loss) and a guerilla war (later, and with much success). Given that the methods used to suppress the rebellion could not help but inspire outrage and disgust in an America not yet thoroughly imbued with imperialist doctrine, Roosevelt made the following pitch: "Every expansion of civilisation makes for peace ... The rule of law and order has succeeded to the rule of barbarous and bloody violence. Until the great civilised nations stepped in there was no chance of anything but bloody violence." He noted the Peace Conference at the Hague and the declining frequency of conflict between the European powers as instances of the peaceful lot of civilised nations - the Filipinos, by contrast, weren't even a nation, but a diversity of tribes and clans, and the rebels merely represented one tribe, the Tagalogs. Roosevelt compared them to the Apaches, and Aguinaldo to Sitting Bull. A long period of American rule was in order.

Now, let's take a look at the Nobel Peace Prize. Before Henry Kissinger was able to count satire among his millions of victims, Elihu Root was a recipient of that ignoble award. Under McKinley and Roosevelt, he was the US Secretary of War, then Secretary of State, then a Republican Senator. He worked in the field of international law, and worked in the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. He served the cause of peace in the Rooseveltian sense - as an imperialist warrior - and was emphatically opposed to Wilson's early neutrality on WW1. He maintained a firm Open Door policy (and was happy to kick in a few doors). In 1907, in his role as Secretary of State, he lectured Yale University students, explaining to them their role as a future elite. The trouble afoot, he explained, was that humanity would face multiple catastrophes that only the ruling class could ward off. He explained that they must explain to Americans the absolute necessity of state involvement in civilising each quarter of life, since the "fairest and most fertile" plots had been left as wildnerness for years under no government, while "under good government, industry and comfort flourish on the most sterile soil". They should highlight the progress that modern governance had brought them, and the dependence of every aspect of modern life on good governance. What is more, they should alert fellow Americans to the fact that good governance helps them to govern themselves, providing "self control - organised capacity for the development of the race". They ought to remind people of the tyranny of the mob, that most awesome of despots: look at the Red Terror, the French Revolution, the Wat Tyler rebellion... oh, look gentlemen, and fear. Make the people afraid of themselves, by all means possible. Finally, Americans ought to understand their achievements in light of ancient Rome, which had the virtue of being both an empire and a republic.

Another early endorsement of the new frontier ideology came from Woodrow Wilson, who saw the reforming elite as the best means of cementing Americans to "the best government of the few". He wrote for The Atlantic Monthly, today one of Hitchens' favourite haunts an generally the house magazine of liberal Zionism, on the topic of 'Democracy and Efficiency'. Democracy must prove itself efficient or face "reactionary revolution", he mused. Speaking wistfully of the genocidal campaign against the Indians, he added: "Until 1900 the United States always had a frontier ... There was always space and adventure enough and to spare, to satisfy the feet of our young men ... The whole European world, which gave us our materials, has been moralised and liberalised by the striking and stupendous spectacle". Accentuating the powerful emulative force of Americans past, Wilson goes on to add that "Our interests must march forward, altruists though we are; other nations must stand off, and do not seek to stay us."

In another article, 'The Ideals of America', Wilson argues that the "spirit of the old days is not dead", being "the very principle of life in a nation alive and quick in every fibre". He argued that the 1812 war, in which America sought to expand into Canada, was the true war of independence. And he tried to ward off the ideological offensive of the Anti-Imperialist League, who argued that conquest and colonisation was precisely what the colonists had rebelled against. He urged fellow Americans to understand that their capacity for self-government had been developed under the long subordination to King George, who taught them respect for authority and the common good, obedience to the law and patience with slow change. They could come to understand this "preparatory discipline" again if they experienced the introduction of democracy to the Philippines, whose luckless inhabitants would need years in stars n stripes flecked training diapers before moving on to self-government.

Not only would it be necessary to create a new American public of course - the moulding a new imperial state as crucial. This required, according to Roosevelt: a drastic expansion in the power of the executive; the reduction of representative government to professional administration in support of the executive; the use of political science to perfect technocratic methods; the use of academic institutions to make the system more meritocratic. Wilson was not a democrat in the sense that he thought the common masses should have a say in government (ie, not a democrat in any meaningful sense). He perceived the masses as governed by irrational sentiment, and argued that "Representative government has had its long life and excellent development, not in order that common opinion, the opinion of the street, might prevail, but in order that the best opinion, the opinion generated by the best possible methods of general counsel, might rule in affairs". Indeed, universal suffrage was liable to put an end to republican liberty (capitalism) as far as he was concerned. He didn't like it one bit.

Well, Wilson and the blueblood reformers weren't alone. The drive to empire was propelled by another social group whose status was becoming uncertain: the military elite. The Military Services Institute, formed in 1878, was to represent and coordinate the interests and knowledge disciplines of what Jenkins calls the 'military progressives', those who were persuaded of the need for a professionalised officer corps, a standing army, military academies... the trouble was, they depended on Congress for appropriations but could not point to a single enemy that raised the need for a large standing army. What they sought to do therefore was to offer the state control over warmaking, using the sciences to derive laws akin to those provided by mathematics and mechanics. Far from being dangerous to liberty, they could show with copious example, standing armies were essential to it. What is more, by understanding the mechanics of conflict better, they could minimise the risk of war, as well as the risks of warmaking. It was necessary, of course, to engage in the inflation of threats (or the invention of them), since America's railway system, industry and agricultural surpluses all favoured its rapid defense in the event of an attempted invasion. General Emory Upton advanced some unique arguments: first, that America's military successes were impaired by excessive human and financial waste, a matter which would be remedied through science and professionalisation; and second, that there was a great propensity for internal commotion - Shay's Rebellion, the Whisky Rebellion, the Great Rebellion, the Rail Roads riots of 1877 - which would need to be crushed before it became a nation-wide insurgency so that democracy could prevail. Others wondered how much the immigrant communities really valued American interests, particularly given a conflcit with the societies from which they had emigrated. Further, it was argued that America's growing transportation and commerce internationally would make it more vulnerable to attack, and that to assert her rights as a trading nation, it would be essential to have the military werewithal to resist rival intimidation. And they offered the instance of China, a great civilisation, plundered and humbled by a cluster of imperial locusts. New York's growing financial prominence might well surrender to foreign conquest as the Yangzi Delta's manufacturing dominance once had.

While the patrician reformers converged with the military progressives in their empire-building tendencies, the crucial gulf between them was how they perceived military service itself. The reformers tended toward a romanticised view of volunteer warriors, and of the army as a place to emulate American heroes past. The military progressives knew that it could never be thus. They sought an army capable of defeating a large European or Asian power, which meant conscription - men would be forced to fight by drill, propaganda and the threat of the firing squad. What is more, the military leadership knew as well as the reformers did that the main examples of heroism past were less salutary than anyone would publicly admit: the war against the south having been won through the prodigious use of terror against the civilian population. There was one way, and one way alone, to get around this: if the ordinary soldier could not be a hero, the commander could. The future of romantic combat lay in the charismatic power of commanding officers.

I think in all of this, you have the essential ingredients for the transition from an increasingly challenged, polarised and crisis-ridden republic to an empire. There was a sustained resistance to this transition, and the coordination of sectional and class interests was not an easy or harmonious one. It was pulled off in the end by the skilful manipulation of Europe's endemic and fatal crises by FDR. The resistance of the Anti Imperialist League that saw the Democratic Party adopt Filipino independence as part of its programme in 1900 was continued in various forms by the American left at least until World War II. This is to its immense credit: European social democracy never knew anything like this, and is still imbued with imperial habits of thinking. There was not, contrary to popular mythology, ubiquitous hostility to the Vietnam War on the British left. The Suez affair did generate opposition, but not only on the Left. Indeed, the main source of opposition on the Left came from Atlanticists like Hugh Gaitskell, who insisted that it was unthinkable that a British government would again embarrass its new American overlords. It might have seemed that the final victory of the imperial state over the American left had been accomplished during the anticommunists crusades of the 1950s, following which Kennedy's 'New Frontier' successfully welded imperialist expansion with mild social democracy. But the racial oppressiveness of American society, the returning crisis of capitalism and growing hostility to aggression against Vietnam, opened a new generation to the arguments of Third World anti-imperialist movements. It forced at least a section of the American public to begin to understand non-white freedom fighters as brothers and sisters. In the prolonged interval of defeat since then there has been plenty of resuscitation, refinement and fortification of imperial ideology. Plenty of heroes too. But since the growing rapaciousness of the capitalist system, its immiseration of most American workers over the last thirty years and its declension into a more and more violent and desperate condition, is alienating larger numbers of people from the society, dissuading would-be patriots in large numbers, and since it has not and cannot be displaced through renewed imperialist expansion, it isn't too optimistic to imagine that the imperial state has not run out of challengers.

Resistance grows in Shiite Iraq. posted by lenin

According to Dahr Jamail, "Southern Iraqi Tribes Joining Armed Resistance". Meanwhile, America is doing what it can to bring the Mahdi Army into open combat with the occupiers.

"Fascism" in Serbia, "the Liberation of Krajina", and the "genocides" in Kosovo and Bosnia posted by lenin

A brief comment on the ductility of ethical imperialism.

In The War in Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina 1991-1995, published a couple of months after the twin towers attacks, Marko Atilla Hoare, son of the litigous Branka Magas and Quintin Hoare, saw fit to describe the ethnic cleansing of some 200,000 Serbs from Croatia in 1995 as "the liberation of Krajina". In this, he was in agreement with the Croatian regime, its ambassador, the U.S. Ambassador to Croatia Peter Galbraith (who specifically denied that it was ethnic cleansing), and Croatia's apologists such as Duke Otto von Habsburg of Germany (who referred to the ethnic cleansing as liberation at the European Parliament) and tacitly the bulk of the Western media. I don't claim that Hoare was won over by Croatian nationalism, and I certainly wouldn't imply that his mother was either, since both claims could take me in a dangerous direction. Nevertheless, his printed material tells a sufficient tale in itself. Only a few honourable skeptics like Robert Fisk actually called it for what it was at the time.

By contrast, of course, the war in Bosnia, including especially the massacre of Bosnian Muslims at Srebrenica by Serb forces, are uniformly referred to as "genocide" in the mainstream media, (and Hoare is not one to buck that trend). In fact it was, by most accounts, genocide bearing comparison with the Nazi holocaust. This was not so, and even the death-rates during the conflict were consciously exaggerated, and continue to be so. You are unlikely to meet someone interested in the topic who doesn't know that 260,000 people were killed in Bosnia during the war. It is axiomatic that these figures represent a Serb-driven effort at exterminating the Bosnian Muslim population. The researchers from the ICTY who conducted a study released in 2005 into the matter found something rather different. About 102,622 civilians and soldiers were killed; 55,261 civilians (of which 38,000 were Muslims and Croats, and 16,700 Serbs) and 47,360 soldiers (of which 28,000 were Muslims, 14,000 Serbs and some 6,000 Croats). These figures would be the expected death rates in a civil war, reflecting the balance of power on each side: and indeed, it was a civil war.

Similar language abounded during the Kosovo war, with Milosevic's campaign against the KLA also described as 'genocide' by Western leaders. Jonathan Freedland wrote in April 1999 that "Just as the US scholar Daniel Goldhagen has shown how it was impossible for ordinary Germans to be ignorant of the Final Solution, so today's Serbs can hardly claim to be in the dark." Two weeks later, Goldhagen wrote for the same newspaper that "Serbia's deeds are, in their essence, different from those of Nazi Germany only in scale. Milosevic is not Hitler, but he is a genocidal killer who has caused the mass murder of many tens of thousands of people". The Serbs had "done their best to remind the world of the Holocaust", and like "Germany and Japan, the defeat, occupation and reshaping of the political institutions and prevailing mentality in Serbia is morally and, in the long run, practically necessary." US Secretary of Defense William Cohen told the world that 100,000 men of military age (never mind women and children) were missing and presumed dead. The Mirror noted "Echoes of the Holocaust". There were certainly deaths in Kosovo - perhaps as many as 2,000 - but it goes without saying that for all the crimes of Milosevic's counterinsurgency campaign in Kosovo, there was no genocide there. The ICTY reluctantly acknowledged this, and the ICTY are not known for hostility to Western propaganda.

Finally, it was an article of faith among apologists for Western intervention and secession that the Serbs were fascists. Hitchens, for instance, continues to maintain that Milosevic wished to impose "a wilderness of Serb Orthodox fascism". Yet a state with an elected government, legal opposition parties, independent trade unions, and opposition demonstrations permitted could not be characterised as fascist, for all its brutality. If there was a regime that bore any tincture of fascism at all, it was the Croatian government that apologists for the break-up of Yugoslavia under Western guidance were falling over themselves to excuse. The use of this language, and obviously its apologetic overtone, degrades the very concept of fascism, precisely as the opportunistic use of the term 'genocide' vitiates the impact of that term. Yet we never stop hearing about new forms of 'fascism' from the advocates of empire. Tory MPs rediscovered the pejorative sense of the term during the Falklands War, when they suddenly realised that the former client who had stolen British sheep was a dictator, and since then we have had fascism in Iraq, fascism in Yugoslavia, and 'Islamic fascism' to think about. We have also had Hari explain how there are two opposing left-traditions: anti-fascism and anti-imperialism. This was an update of Fred Halliday's claim during the first Gulf War that he preferred imperialism to fascism. I keep waiting for one of these people to update Rosa Luxemburg's maxim, and tell us that the choices facing humanity are imperialism and barbarism.

The Sun apologises about fake "Muslim attack" story. posted by lenin

The Sun was forced to apologise this week over its lies about the riots in Windsor. This was at the peak of an hysterical Islamophobic frenzy last year when newspapers and media outlets were referring to "no go areas" and "ghettos". Racist thugs had firebombed a Muslim-run dairy centre that week, apparently believing that a mosque (of all wicked things) was going to be built in Her Majesty's back yard. Of course, even that much wasn't true: someone was going to set aside a derelict depot next to the dairy as a community centre for the tiny Muslim community there. When the racists tried to attack the dairy, they ended up in a confrontation with staff members, (and this was described as 'race riots').

Then it was alleged by The Sun, Britain's number one bogroll, that "Muslim yobs" tossed bricks through the windows of a house that four cavalry officers were to move into. They were alleged to have daubed the house with "messages of hate", and made "phone threats" to the four officers. All of this was a pack of lies, and even a close reading of the initial story would have raised suspicion, as indeed it did. There were no threatening calls traced to the barracks, no one from any faith or racial group has been thus far accused of the attack on the house, and no religious or racial motive is suspected. However, the frenzy it stirred up at the time prompted Tory MP Philip Davies to say:

"This is outrageous. If there’s anybody who should f*** off it’s the Muslims who are doing this kind of thing. Police should pull out the stops to track down these vile thugs."

That's one politician who should be out of a job. Besides that, it is high time the editor of The Sun was sacked for incitement to racial hatred, and its owner expropriated and locked up as a tax fraud. One other thing: local papers were making it clear that there was no racial or religious motive suspected in the attack on the house, and that there no threatening phone calls to the barracks months ago when the story was still live. So, The Sun's withdrawal of the story therefore comes long after the damage has already been done, and is obscure enough to ensure as little as possible will be undone.

That glass box, again. posted by lenin

The whole point of Endemol's shit-fest on Channel 4 is to force together personalities so incompatible that normal human comity would be impossible, never mind solidarity under the stress of sensory deprivation and constant surveillance. Getting 'celebrities' on the show (three of whom are only 'celebrities' by dint of a previous connection with the show) therefore guarantees a daily hit of scandal, and therefore mega mega advertising revenues. Further, since C4 controls every condition obtaining in the show, and since their interventions are designed to be humiliating and bizarre, they can always confect a bit of controversy when phone-in rates slump and the tabloids find something else to gyrate over. And what is more, when the bad guy of the hour is evicted, a new balance is created and the recipient of much sympathy the day before can become the latest villain. The infinite malleability and masochism of the characters is one of the dramatic points on a desperately boring programme. So, rancour, humiliation, indignity and daily bullying are part of the mix, and it is entirely hypocritical for people who watch and like this show to complain about it.

On the other hand, even a saucer-eyed More 4 viewer has the right not to be put through a load of racist abuse, and there has to be some satisfaction in the fact that reported racism on the show has drawn record complaints. And I suppose we had better be grateful that the recipient of the abuse was not a Muslim. If she was, we'd be hearing from many quarters that Muslims are far too sensitive about legitimate criticism. "Ah, complaing about being called a 'dog', is she? What do these Muslims have against canines, I wonder?" Had those who burned the effigy in India been Muslim, we would no doubt be hearing about the sinister Islamic threat to free speech. Not that it matters what religion she adheres to inside the 'house', eh? Shilpa Shetty is variously a "dog", a "Paki" (this bit C4 denies, saying the word was "cunt"), someone who - being from India - must be unhygeinic and eat with her hands, thus giving other housemates "the shits", someone who both needs to "go back to the slums" and also visit them for the first time and be "real", someone who is "trying to be white", and someone who should "fuck off home".

The reactions have been, er, interesting: Channel 4 greasily asserting that there has been no overt racism, titter titter (as if we didn't know that they had assessed their candidates down to the last tic, and fully expected outbursts of racism); New Labour politicians covering their already hideously mired flanks by uttering obsequies about tolerance; David Cameron saying that anyone "who doesn't like this racism, there's a great regulator, its called the 'off' button." The latter is a curious response, surely designed to tickle the fancy of racist Tories and those obsessed with whatever is called 'the nanny state' this week. Taken to its logical conclusion, we should bring back 'Love Thy Neighbour', 'Mind Your Language' and all those charming racist comedies from the Seventies, and if anyone doesn't like it, there is the 'off' switch. Actually, why stop there? It is rather unfair, is it not, that the Human Zoos of old are now 'politically incorrect'.

Or are they? Le Colonel Chabert opined last year that the show had an insidious ideological effect which was to prepare people to feel excellent about eviction (because he's an arsehole), to want eviction (because she's stuck-up), to vote for eviction (because it's not fair): in a phrase, Eviction Rocks. I can't help but think of this whole 'Neighbours from Hell' drivel we get in the British press, in which readers are titillated and outraged with daily tales of torment from hideous people next-door or down the road. If it isn't kids spitting and swearing, it's old men flipping the bird, or trimming the hedges from over the fence. If it isn't rowdy couples, it's gyppos settling on the commons, and asylum seekers eloping from the back of a lorry. These are the people New Labour promises to "boot out" and leave to fend for themselves "in a crackdown on yobs". These are the people who are expected to face ASBOs and "welfare disincentives" as part of the government's Respect Action Plan. These are the families the government pledges to put in "Sin Bins", a conceit that could quite easily have been supplied by Endemol. These are the people New Labour pledges to evict from the very country. New Labour's campaign message - vote to evict the arsehole! Let them fend for themselves in the ghetto. The tabloids will feature pictures and descriptions of new arseholes every day and encourage readers to participate in a phone-in poll to demand eviction. A daily diorama of candidates for the Sin Bin will be the topic of quasi-anthropological inspection and curiosity, their fate to be decided by our placebo democracy.

Eight Palestinians abducted; no international outrage. posted by lenin

Oh, the usual:

In Yatta village south of Hebron, Israeli jeeps and troops stormed and searched a number of houses and ransacked them. During the operation the Israeli army abducted five villagers, eyewitnesses reported.

Sources in the village identified the five as: Mohamed Makhamrah, 33, Fahid Awad, 35, Ahmad Makhamrah, 37, Mussa Al Najar, 40, and Mohamed Al Hiranni, 38.

Moreover, in downtown Hebron city, and the nearby village of Halhol, Israeli forces attacked and searched residents' homes, and took three Palestinian men prisoner.

Local sources identified the three as; Abed Al Zama'rah, 23, from Halhol, Rami Al Shahaniet, 19, from Doura, and Mohamed Al Rijbi, 28, form Hebron city. The sources added that soldiers gave military orders for another six men in the city to be interviewed at the secret service office in the Kufar Atzion military post east of the city.

Some of the families of the attacked houses reported that soldiers trashed the houses and fired live rounds and sound bombs inside during their search; residents added that anyone who tried to ask the Israeli soldiers not to damage the house was attacked with rifle butts and batons. (via)

The cost of living (and dying). posted by lenin

Simon Basketter has an interesting report in this week's Socialist Worker on the hidden rate of inflation. Two key facts are juxtaposed: the drastic increase in the cost of essential goods, and the declining share of income for labour. Typically, the government's way of handling inflation is to reduce labour's share further by demanding that public sector workers accept wage increases of a mere 2%, which is a real terms cut - the British state's tacit incomes policy has always been effected through suppressed wages for public sector workers. The other means it uses is to increase the cost of borrowing, another burden for workers surviving on debt. (Incidentally, the banks are making a fortune out of our parlous financial condition, last year picking up £4.5bn on declined direct debits and bounced cheques alone). This inflation isn't driven by those "inflation-busting pay rises" that BBC anchors are always complaining about: rather it is driven by rising global energy prices, the stupendously overvalued housing market, spiralling public transport costs (which result from a variety of factors including privatisation and previous chronic underinvestment), and the increased burden of indirect taxation, the logical corrolary of reducing direct taxation on profits, inheritance and upper income brackets.

Further, as the report describes, pensioners face the worst of this, with real terms inflation as high as 9% in a situation of already dire poverty for many of them. Now, this makes what the government is planning for pensions particularly vile. As you know, we are not only to be asked to work longer (far longer than many of us can expect to live, actually), but we are to rely increasingly on compulsory savings schemes, perhaps floated on the stock market. You have to understand: pensions are by far the largest part of any social security budget, and they are the biggest prize for capital in rolling back the welfare state. In Eastern Europe after the collapse of the Soviet Union, it was pensions that the World Bank pushed hardest on, since a privatised pension system would be the lynchpin of stock market capitalism. In Chile, the world's laboratory for crackpot neoliberal schemes, the Chicago Boys helped General Pinochet to secure precisely this set-up, in which employed workers contribute at least 10% of their incomes to savings schemes (and unemployed workers contribute and receive nothing). This system, by the way, has now been tested by the first generation of workers to retire under this scheme, and the result is a resounding failure - at least it is if you're concerned about the income of the pensioners and not the profits of the pension companies. Which is bad news for us, because New Labour rather admires the Chilean model. As early as 1996, a delegation of New Labour MPs under the despicable "Christian socialist" Frank Field were sent to Santiago to study the system and 'think the unthinkable': the only unthinkable turned out to be whether it would be necessary to have a coup in order to impose these measures.

New Labour's way into this is to set the tone with a decisive victory in local government. Last December, our more than usually vacant local government minister, Phil Woolas, intervened in the ongoing pensions battle with a circular to local governments. In it, he detailed a number of regressive proposals including increasing employees contributions to pension schemes, decreasing employers' contributions (in this case, the employer is the government) and increasing the minimum retirement age. The drive is on to push for an industrial action ballot in the unions, and if you value the contents of your trouser pocket, then you'd better hope it wins big.

Bush: Iraqis should be "grateful" posted by lenin

I missed this one the other day:

US President George W Bush said Iraqi people should be grateful to the US for the 2003 invasion and the removal of Saddam Hussein.

He accepted that the conflict, which has cost tens of thousands of lives, had destabilised Iraq but insisted getting rid of Saddam was essential.

"We liberated that country from a tyrant. I think the Iraqi people owe the American people a huge debt of gratitude," he said.

Does this bastard have any control over how obscene he allows himself to get?

The Rentiers. posted by lenin

Finance capital has a dominance today that even Lenin could not have foreseen. It is the primary form of ownership in the world economy today, and is the dominant part of any ruling class. ITV has this evening presented an hour-long 'documentary' (more of an apologetic tease) about "the city". It had the fake concern of a consumers affairs programme, although it ought to have been a Crimewatch special. Much of it was concerned with interviewing some particularly privileged employees of investment banks and fund managers and so on. The details of their grotesque lives are both celebrated and mocked. They revel in their preposterous sense of entitlement, their willingness to flaunt what they have procured for themselves, and most especially their narcissistic competition with other upper middle class creatures. One or two commentators are allowed to say some mean things about them. The viewer is invited to gasp when someone being offered a £100,000 bonus complains that it is like working for a charity, or when someone sues a bank because they only offered him one million when he thought his market value was seven million. Of course, I'm sure you are aware that there are legal firms in the city whose income is obtained by suing companies who have made bogus redundancies before bonus time - they take it very seriously, because a city bonus is not only a life's income for many people, but also on account of that a tremendous indicator of status. The creeps, of course, are permitted to defend themselves: "Oh yah, it takes a very particular kind of pahson to get to the top and stay there, y'know. It's a lot of hard wahk, but it's maistly abite the pahson." And: "People on the outside don't see us working our butts off, the long hours, the sleepless nights...". And: "Of course my salary is legitimate. I bring money into this institution, and they pay me an income reflecting that contribution."

There's a lot of macho flashing, and chest-puffing from this crowd. Their stupendously large incomes allow luxury expenditure on outrageously priced homes, which drives up the price of housing, and rent, for the rest of us. The reason your average Londoner is liable to end up paying up to sixty per cent of her income on accomodation is precisely because of this disgusting housing market we have (partially fed by the dearth of fit accomodation provided through the council). Each year there are salivating announcements from the big estate agents, bragging of an increase in house prices (which rose overall last year by 18.1%, a sum which will be paid for by anyone trying to get onto the 'property ladder' with a mortgage), especially prime London property for rent (which last year rose by a whopping 11.1%, a sum which will be paid for by the forty percent of Londoners who are neither full homeowners, nor have a mortgage). And as the economy spirals downward, those hundreds of thousands who have been conned into getting an unsustainable mortgage will pay with their houses. Undoubtedly this privileged layer of employees of finance-capital is also partially responsible for the dramatic increase in domestic service labour since 1978. Yet, these people are only the averagely intelligent sociopaths and misfits that capital finds useful.

It's the people they don't interview that are more interesting. The people who have never been employees of anything in their lives, who are doing things like 'eco-tourism' (buying up the Brazilian rain forests, islands in the Seychelles and so on), and who wouldn't dream of actually discussing this with a national television audience. No nouveau-riche vulgarity about this lot - they are the rulers, after all. And they are the ones to watch out for. One commentator on the programme, a modestly liberal writer, pointed out that under Blair, the wealth of the top 1,000 people in the country tripled. Most of this, he said, was 'made' on their behalf by the city, which is to say that the biggest owners in the entire country paid some extremely exclusive companies with fingers in every pie in the world to manage their assets (money or land) for them. These companies in turn secured for them the largest possible share of the surplus generated by people doing actual productive work (that still happens, you know). In other words, the funds are transferred to them through rent paid on ownership, either as massive shareholders or as landowners. Obviously, this is an ideal-type - there is no pure 'rentier class', since these guys will also have involvements in industrial capital, chairmanships, non-executive positions and so on. But you could say that this class of people favours policies that are likely to enhance all forms of rent, and are in a far better position than most to ensure they can achieve it. The financialisation of the world economy under the rubric of neoliberalism has brought some increased risk, but principally it has sped up and amplified the transfer of wealth to the richest.

Keynes warned about the rapacity of the rentiers, particularly the enormous turmoil they were prepared to put societies through to obtain their loot, and he at one point suggested the socialisation of investment, in a Board of National Investment whose role would be to manage aggregate demand and sustain full employment by channeling investment into useful, long-term development. This is a policy with revolutionary implications if taken seriously, and one that he resiled from in practise. For, to socialise investment is to take the profits out of the hands of the capitalist class and dictate to them what will be done with it. To take their profits and direct them into a plan that doesn't even have the virtue of reflecting their interests, that in fact owes itself to some democratic consideration, rather undermines the whole point about them being the ruling class. And even the capitalist class, with its matchless humanitarianism, would think this a high price to pay for full employment, a more equitable distribution of wealth and domestic peace.

Yet, we are living in an era where the rentiers are far more salient than in Keynes' day, and given the paucity of corporatist approaches, it would seem appropriate to take the call for socialising investment to its logical, revolutionary, conclusions. Or you can wait for the system to fall in your heads.

Another front in the 'war on terror'. posted by lenin

I said it a while ago - who dares to doubt me? Well, I hinted anyway that US 'military advisors' operating in the Philippines would probably end up fighting a counterrevolutionary warfare. Their capacity as 'advisors' is due to a clause in the Philippines constitution that foreign soldiers are not allowed to fight there. Could be something to do with centuries of imperial tutelage, a brutal American occupation, and Japanese invasion during World War II, I don't know. Now, Focus on the Global South says in a new report (PDF) that US troops are engaged in fighting against Moro independence fighters. Focus says: "US troops may not only be waging war within the Philippines, they may also established a new form of U.S. bases in the country."

It's worth noting that reports relying on the Associated Press claim that the groups the US are at war with are "linked to Al Qaeda". Well, who isn't these days? I confidently expect to discover that half the remaining competitors on Celebrity Big Brother have a direct line to bin Laden. But, in fact, Focus on the Global South doesn't say that. It in fact describes operations against the full range of resistance forces, most of whom aren't even theoretically tied in Washington's propaganda to Al Qaeda, specifically the Moro National Liberation Front. So, AP is simply lying: I thought you'd like to know that.

Palestinian reservation. posted by lenin

A few years ago, George Galloway told The Guardian that: "I have been with Arafat for 30 years, and I admire him very much. Without him I think Palestinians might now be in the museum, with the Red Indians."

Palestinians demonstrating recently (via):

I'll give you three guesses who got pissed off when Galloway said that.

The ends of obedience. posted by lenin

The servitude of the 'intellectual class' is a theme of media critics that is only partially misleading. I guess some of the force of the point is lost because it is often expressed in ultra-left discourse, in which intellectuals are said to form part of a paternalistic 'coordinator class' (a chimera), and in which media, education and culture more generally are correctly credited with eliciting irrational obedience to authority, but without due attention to how the capitalist work-process, and one's life-experience as determined by class, ingrains habits of subservience (or otherwise).

But let me digress for a bit. I was reading this morning about fascism and particularly the Nazi holocaust, and the usual, inescapable questions come up about the availability of tens of thousands of people for such barbarism, and the passivity and tolerance of many more. The complaint from opponents of the marxist interpretation, which takes capitalism and its imperialist forms as a starting point, is both that we are too specific and too general: that we retreat from broader questions about human nature to the specificities of social formations, and that we obscure the singularity of the Nazi holocaust in our extensive contextualisations, in which we remind people of the horrors of colonial genocides, slavery, imperialist domination, racial hierarchies etc.

About a decade ago, Geras made a similar complaint, and tried to supplement what he represented as the reductive tendencies of historical materialism with considerations of an ethical order, of human psychology, ultimately of something he prefers to call human nature. For, the argument goes, any description of the Nazi holocaust has to describe a degeneration of the human character with aspects for which there is no specifically marxist category. These include the sense of elation and exaltation at exerting merciless power over others. But they also include the specificities of antisemitic hatred, and a thesis that the Nazis were driven in part by a subconscious recognition of "the desirability of the ethical demands embodied in the Jewish tradition". Geras goes on to criticise the "energetic contextualisation" of the Nazi holocaust by people like Ernest Nolte, but goes on to add that the position of many marxists, Ernest Mandel in particular, is structurally similar: he adds that the moral significance is different and that Mandel is animated by "a socialist and in its way Jewish universalism that would not risk belittling the sufferings of others by dwelling too emphatically on the tragedy of the Jews." Further, Trotsky is credited with having been able to detect what was likely to happen to European Jews not only on account of his understanding of capitalism, but also on account of his experience of the pogroms and their maniacal excess. Finally, Geras adds: "A Jewish socialist ought to be able to find some special corner of his or her heart for the tragedy of the Jewish people. A universalist ethic shorn of any special concern for the sufferings of one’s own would be the less persuasive for such carelessness."

I hardly think it needs stating what I would find problematic in all that, but then Geras' shift to a kind of national as well as ethnic identification is not really the topic here. All that I would say about it is that everything that is wrong with this has metastasized in the years since, so that you eventually find Geras along with people like Shalom Lappin condemning Jews for Justice for Palestinians in the most bilious terms for "unbounded ignorance of Jewish sources", accusing them of "Jewish sycophancy", and directing them to "one of Hillel's central precepts, recorded in Perkei Avoth (Ethics of the Fathers): Do not separate yourself from the community." This was for having condemned Israel's barbaric assault on Lebanon. Combined and uneven theoretical development being what it is, Geras still identifies himself as a socialist. To comment too extensively on the shortcomings of this, political, ethical and psychological, would be superfluous: it is a straightforward ethno-nationalist command to shut up about atrocities being committed in the name of "the community". The appeal to particularist universalism has become an appeal to universal particularism: everyone to their own flag, and don't separate yourself from the community. Like all nationalisms, it demands loyalty and obedience.

The intellectual class, which could loosely be said to include those who write columns for a living, would rarely need to be impressed with such an appeal. For instance, I don't think there was a single Israeli media commentator and only a tiny, tiny cluster of dissident professors who actually opposed on principle the recent invasion of Lebanon, and only slightly more who opposed it on any grounds whatsoever. Something similar was true of the UK and US when the invasion of Kosovo was launched, and other examples aren't hard to come by.

This can't be a surprise. Professionals are susceptible to the same pressures that other employees are: if you wish to get ahead, you put the company's interests first, and where appropriate you internalise the ideology of your employers (which could be nothing more sophisticated than insisting on being 'keen', 'committed' and a 'team player', ie willing to exploit yourself and others as thoroughly as possible, with as little direct instruction as possible). Indeed, if you had no ideological commitments other than a vague overt humanitarianism underwritten by vicious indifference, that would usually be ideal. (In this vein, I can't help but notice that those who ostentatiously collect for charities in workplaces are often the ones with the most ductile morality, and also most easily offended when I tell them that no, actually, I don't need a sticker to inform the world that I am a Good Person). Any contrary propensities are liable to ensure that you do not ascend, since you'll be perceived as a potential pain in the arse, and what's more you're likely to be one. And by contrary propensities, I mean everything from conspicuous awkwardness, an unwillingness to assimilate oneself to capitalist etiquette, the willingness to give offense for humane purposes, to the tendency toward direct conflict with one's managers. As Erich Fromm puts it, "the 'adjusted' person" has made herself into "a commodity, with nothing stable or definite" except for the willingness and need to please, and the "readiness to change roles".

Why should it be different with the intellectual class? Granted, their labour is especially ideological, and requires a certain degree of reflection which could produce unhelpful outbursts. But since it is a relatively privileged occupation, it usually isn't difficult to select for timidity (which often paradoxically manifests itself as extreme stridency). Further, given the rewards that accrue - that is, given the class position that one attains - one's experience is more likely to tend one to the belief that the system is benevolent, and getting better everyday. Thanks in part to this, it is possible for people well within the normal psychological range not only to bear the knowledge of massive atrocities, but also to applaud those responsible for them. Further, given positions of responsibility, it is also possible for them to collaborate in them. Simply because this behaviour does not require the shedding of one's civilised integument, because it does not require one to relish the death of another human being (although one can do that, as Hitchens continually insists), because it can involve the most exacting moral calculations and internal unrest, because it can involve conviction, doesn't make it less obedient, and less deadly.

However, if it is important to contextualise obedience against the background of one's position in capitalism and the work-process, there is also the matter of the condition of dissent and the forms of solidarity that exist more broadly within the society. It isn't an accident that the most rebellious intelligentsia can be found where there are strong traditions of socialist and working class activism, and at times when there has been the strongest public dissent. By contrast, they have tended to their most despicable, crawling, servile output during periods of defeat for the working class. That's why I say it's only a partially misleading picture: lacking political independence, they can sometimes be shaken out of their complacency by popular unrest.

An Imperial Transition. posted by lenin

This is John Pilger's documentary, 'The New Rulers of the World':



And this is an earlier one, 'Death of a Nation':



The first one talks at some length about how Indonesia was first destroyed by a coup supported by Britain, which perceived a threat in Sukarno's independent nationalism to its massive interests in South East Asia, and the United States. Foreign Office files in 1964 called for the 'defense' of South East Asian interests, which produced "nearly 85 percent of the world's natural rubber, over 45 percent of the tin, 65 percent of the copra and 23 percent of the chromium ore." Harold MacMillan and John F Kennedy had agreed in 1962 to "liquidate President Sukarno, depending on the situation and available opportunities". He had led the nationalist revolt against Japanese occupation, declared independence in 1945, fought a British-backed attempt by the Netherlands army to re-occupy the territories, and was encouraging the development of mass trade unionism and peasant organisations, tolerating the development of a mass communist party (the PKI) which was by far the largest party in Indonesia. So, in 1965, Suharto and a clique of generals raised alarm about an alleged communist plot to take over the government, claimed that six generals had been murdered by the PKI, and launched a wave of terror with lists of dissidents provided by officials in the US and British embassy. The American ambassador, Marshall Green, congratulated Suharto and assured him that the US was "sympathetic with and admiring of" the genocide. The US embassy coordinated a propaganda campaign with the britishy embassy, intended to spread the story of PKI guilt, treachery and brutality. Roland Challis, the BBC's South-East Asia correspondent at the time, tells Pilger of how "there were bodies washing up on the lawns of the British consulate in Surabaya, and British warships escorted a ship full of Indonesian troops down the Malacca Straits so that they could take part in this terrible holocaust". The Australian Ambassador, Harold Holt, chuckled at the time that, with "500,000 to a million communist sympathisers knocked off", it was "safe to assume a reorientation has taken place".

So much you know. What followed was an archetypal instance of imperial transition. A client-regime thus installed, the IMF and World Bank returned to Indonesia, and then there was a conference in Geneva, in which the economy of Indonesia was devised in the fullest detail, with representatives from the new dictatorship working alongside the representatives of the biggest capitalist firms in the world: General Motors, BAT, American Express, Siemens, Goodyear etc etc. The conference took as its starting point a plan devised on behalf of USAID by Harvard economist Dave Cole, who had recently reconfigured South Korea's banking regulations on behalf of Washington. He worked as part of a team sent to Indonesia after the coup by the Ford Foundation. And with that plan in mind, they devised, sector-by-sector, the legal infrastructure for each sector of industry according to the requirements of investors. Bauxite, nickel, copper, the tropical forests of West Papua - all were rich pickings. The basic structure of the economy continued to be determined by Western capital and state in collaboration with Suharto through the Intergovernmental Commission on Indonesia.

Bear with me for a second. The next documentary details the genocidal take-over of East Timor, which had recently declared independence from Portugal. The Portuguese empire was collapsing: African wars of liberation had been draining the oligarchy, whose perpetuation depended upon its strategy of maintaining overseas possessions and growth via export to the colonies. Between 1960 and 1974, its exports to the colonies fell from 34% of all exports to 15%. Trade within the EEC was increasingly important to Portugal, which meant that it was also affected by the global downturn in the early 1970s, and faced staggering rates of inflation. Its version of state corporatism was incompatible with the needs of international investors. At the same time, growing domestic working class revolt was ably harnessed by the Armed Forces Movement in what has been called the Carnation Revolution. Initially, the conservative General Spinola was ceded control by the deposed Caetano. Spinola, who had previously been stridently opposed to nationalist demands, came to articulate the concerns of a growing number of leading capitalist families when he urged that Portugal should not "cast Europe aside". He resigned in disgust at the leftist direction of the revolution, particularly the nationalisation of key industries and the support for decolonisation, and tried to mount a pathetic rightist coup against it. And - well, he lost, and look, what happened next within Portugal is a matter for another post. The point here is that with all that going on, a mass independence movement had developed in what was then Portuguese Timor. By far the largest party in that revolt was the leftist Fretilin.

The big worry for the British, the Australians, and the US, as you'll see in the documentary, was that an independent East Timor with a government of the left would emerge. As in Mozambique and Angola, the US would end up shouldering a big part of the white man's burden that the Portuguese had dropped so inceremoniously. So, they stumped up a huge amount of aid to Suharto so that he could invade, with Kissinger organising a criminal conspiracy within the State Department to continue arming the dictatorship. The TNI wasted no time: they killed about 200,000 people, tortured and mutilated others, carried out repeated massacres and atrocities, and launched a genocidal programme of forced contraception. It was not uncommon to find that people had died by being stripped, hung upside down by the feet, castrated and finally having their genitals shoved into their mouths. It took a long time to die that way, either by bleeding or asphyxiation. As in the insurgent regions of Aceh and West Papua, the TNI never preferred subtlety in its suppression of the East Timorese. And, as with similar regimes in South Korea or Burma, the Western powers stridently defended a policy of sending guns and butter to the murderers.

Well, I expect you know that much too. But what next? Pilger's documentary was made in 1994, before the dramatic revolt by students and workers in 1998. It successfully overthrew Suharto but not the capitalist arrangements that he was there to guarantee, and the TNI remained central to the state apparatus. But the revolt also won a limited form of representative government, and Habibie promised in its wake to allow a referendum in East Timor.

The revolution had compounded growing pressure from international solidarity campaigns to allow independence for East Timor. Jose Ramos-Horta, a rather cool-looking dude in 1975, had become mainstream enough to be awarded the same Nobel peace prize that Henry Kissinger had been awarded. Bespectacled and besuited, the Foreign Minister in exile was making diplomatic overtures to Washington. Xanana Gusmão had become a centrist, and an opponent of Fretilin, which was at any rate moving away from its commitment to socialism. He won the Sydney Peace Prize. (One of the things I like about Dita Sari is that when Nike hypocritically tried to give her a human rights award, she told them where to stick it). Portugal, the former colonist, was on their side too, and Ramos-Horta is careful in the documentary to shower praise on the empire that he had once resisted. The National Council of Timorese Resistance, a coalition of the main political parties, went to great lengths to assure oil and gas interests that they would not suffer from East Timorese self-determination.

Whatever inroads Ramos-Horta made with his approach, it was clear that the world's powers made inroads with him too: East Timor would go into the care and tending of the United Nations. There would be a referendum on independence, and then, if independence commanded support, a UN administration. Of course, the independence vote was won overwhelmingly, and the TNI responded with a terror campaign. And the TNI, whatever else had gone down, were still supported by Washington. The TNI launched what looked like a last-minute attempt at a final, genocidal solution to the East Timorese problem, driving about half of the population out of their homes, killing thousands (with weapons stamped 'Made in the United Kingdom'), and raping with impunity. Hundreds of thousands of people were left starving and dying in squalid refugee camps. You might remember this - it was not long after the West has fought a 'humanitarian' war in Kosovo, the one that so many liberals and former lefties wet their pants over. Eventually, Washington told the Indonesian regime that it should leave East Timor, and threatened it with the suspension of loans and military aid if it did not do so. The TNI duly left, and (mainly Australian) INTERFET forces were sent in to do some reconstruction and launch the UN administration.

Now, if the United States government had decided that an independent East Timor was no longer likely to be a threat, it wasn't particularly enthusiastic about its new strategy either, for it only stumped up a small portion of the cash for the INTERFET forces after considerable delay. Further, senior figures in the US political establishment had been unhappy about the whole idea of East Timor being allowed independence, asserting that it would result in tribal civil war (Paul Wolfowitz was most emphatic on this point).

Nevertheless, any misgivings they might still have had about Fretilin, who were elected with 57% of the vote in the UN-run 2001 ballot for a Constituent Assembly, pressed ahead with a National Development Plan devised in collaboration with USAID, and managed alongside the World Bank through the Transitional Support Programme. That plan involves the usual policy prescriptions of neoliberalism: private sector growth, macroeconomic stability through counterinflationary measures and a balanced budget, and 'independent' financial institutions. Important has been the development of land title and registration laws, designed to instill capitalisation and prevent the widespread development of common ownership. USAID notes with concern that East Timor is failing on "'economic freedom' ... Inflation is reasonable at 4% and fiscal policy prudent, with a
deficit at 2.16% of GDP. However, East Timor clearly fails the indicators for regulatory policy and credit rating and is lacking statistical information for trade policy and days to start a business." Naturally, USAID intends to help.

Further, if there were any lingering doubts, they had Ramos-Horta's slightly equivocal backing for the war. (He at first wrote in the New York Times that the war would liberate Iraqis, then explained that he actually didn't mean quite what he seemed to have meant, then in 2004 berated the Spanish for pulling out of Iraq like chickenshits, and is now a fairly measly apologist).

Finally, there was the coup this year against the elected Prime Minister, a slightly left-leaning 'economic nationalist' named Mari Alkatiri, who was overthrown following riots instigated by one half of the army establishment. It was a clear attempt to prevent the functioning of the government and precipitate its downfall. Alkatiri had engaged the soldiers in negotiations and offered subsidised pay - nevertheless, the riots continued. President Gusmao repeatedly demanded Alkatiri's resignation, while Ramos-Horta insisted he could not work with such a man. Other government ministers suggested that this could not be allowed to happen as it would bring down the government. So, Ramos-Horta 'requested' troops from Australia, who were positioned in the Timor Sea (without the permission of the East Timorese government) awaiting precisely that moment: they launched Operation Astute, siezing the airport and flooding the country with more troops than are in East Timor's tiny army. Just as Australian troops had been said to have been behind some of the protests, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation reported that an Australian army Black Hawk helicopter had accompanied a convoy of anti-Alkatiri protesters. Naturally, the Murdoch press has been delighted by the Australian military's intervention, with The Australian's disgusting foreign editor Greg Sheridan (a long-time apologist for Suharto) accusing Alkatiri of running a quasi-dictatorship with a clique of Marxist-Leninists and so on. Now, Alkatiri was by most standards a centrist, and he had been involved in devising the National Development Plan with its neoliberal policy prescriptions. What earned him this contempt from the Murdoch sewer press may have included his extremely moderate policies, in which he preferred fiscal austerity to World Bank loans, removed fees for school dinners, opposed the privatisation of electricity, and invited Cuban doctors to do some very popular health work in the rural areas. But, perhaps most important was his role in securing better rights for Timor over Australia with regards the very rich oilfields in the Timor Sea.

ABC's reporter referred to the putch as "a very impressive show of people power". Rumours, obviously unsubstantiated, were put about that Alkatiri had planned a hit squad to finish off his political opponents: he'd have needed one that could visit and penetrate every government building in every main Western capital. Several senior government figures, including the Interior Minister and the Defense Minister, resigned. Ramos-Horta took control of the Ministry of Defense, and Gusmao declared an emergency government for one month, with the Prime Minister's powers severely reduced. Eventually, on 22nd June this year, Gusmao declared an ultimatum, eventually forcing Alkatiri to quit. Ramos-Horta was made Prime Minister, and goodbye to 'economic nationalism'. The irony is that Alkatiri was too left-wing for the new Fretilin leadership, the Australian government and the scum press: but one of his big supporters during the crisis was precisely the World Bank, who were very pleased with his cautious to development.

Note the arc of transition: direct colonial rule, replaced by a brutal client-regime, followed by a heavily supervised 'independence' with neoliberal ideology entrenched in the culture of the state, and constant 'remedial' intervention to keep things on the straight and narrow. Hardly a microcosm, but certainly a pattern often repeated.

Scenes from the "war on terror". posted by lenin

I would much rather write about Oscar Wilde or post some entertaining video clips, but the eyes are riveted to scenes like this, in which a hundred civilians have been destroyed in one week; this, in which hundreds of people are routinely tortured and are slowly being driven to insanity; this, in which bodies pile up week after week; this, in which terrified people await a catastrophe; this, in which Haiti's miserable occupation is to be prolonged; this, in which the Zionist occupation continues to grind Palestinians through the shredder...

On "ethical imperialism". posted by lenin

A bit of historical minutiae. The phrase in the title isn't mine, nor is it a reworking of Robin Cook's call for a foreign policy "with an ethical dimension" - it's from 1918, a memorandum by Kurt Hahn that contained the cri de coeur of a group of liberal imperialists around Prince Max von Baden. The liberal imperialists formed an editorial committee who ran the periodicals Deutsche Politik, Hilfe and Preussische Jahrbucher, and who corresponded routinely with the political and military leadership of Germany during the war. They wanted them to abandon the war aims of heavy industry, the Pan German League and the army supreme command who tended to annexationism. They composed several memorandums, variously written by Alfred Weber (brother of Max, the sociologist), Kurt Hahn (a propaganda bureau functionary), and the reputed Swiss military author Hermann Stegemann. These they despatched to General Erich von Ludendorff, or to Chancellor Graf von Hertling, and anyone else they could get to listen. They were worried by the prospect of revolution, by the financial burden of the war, by the daily diminution of Germany's powers. They urged that if Germany's power was to be conserved in a central European customs union (the Mitteleuropa idea), they would have to engage in a peace offensive. This meant guaranteeing Belgium's independence, thus leaving Britain to fight only on the Alsace-Lorraine front, which territory alone they might be unwilling to continue the war over.

The Hahn memorandum itself was addressed to the Kaiser by Prince Max. In it, Germany's "glorious" successes and "mighty trumps" are espoused, the withdrawal of Russia from the war and the end of "encirclement" is celebrated, and it is suggested that in the event of peace negotiations, "people would not understand if we were expected to put up with a peace settlement which ignored our military successes. Even the social democratic masses would oppose the grotesque demands of our enemies with anger and a willingness to fight." It suggests that Germany can achieve peace on its terms by forcing Lloyd George to concede Alsace-Lorraine, since the "English workers" would not be willing to fight for these territories. They could gain the assent of the "French workers" with a declaration of autonomy, it is asserted.

Further, to reach a peace settlement that recognised "Germany's supremacy in the East and in Central Europe and of our international standing regarding the seas", it would be essential to cause one of the biggest military powers to withdraw from Entente - and it would have to be England. This would involve a peace offensive with an implicit appeal to a "new humanitarian movement among English workers", and to those interests worried about England being "hypothecated to America" if the latter directed a peace settlement, and finally to the ruling class fear that a continuation of war would lead to a pure workers' administration. But most of all, it would appeal to the fear that what they do to Germany's property in Alsace-Lorraine may one day happen to British property in India. Further, since he who achieves peace "rules in the aftermath" (a reference here to the Russian Revolution), the German monarch could defend itself from the threat of popular rule and "rescue the leadership principle" by making a creditable peace.

Finally, after prolonged (and quite callous) strategic perorations, the document begins to elaborate the basis for "ethical imperialism". The British Empire, it notes, rules with a "moral claim of acting with the consent or for the protection of the established population or endangered British minorities", so that "in exactly the same way, we must try to bring the newborn peoples on the borders of Russia under German influence." Further, "England has never based its claims in the world solely on use of arms, but has consciously shaped world opinion: England's power stands in the service of justice and freedom." "While England went out pillaging, the opposition preserved its world conscience. While England was committing an injustice, men and groups who were possible heirs to power continually protested loudly in their role as the representatives of a better England, and fought and suffered for their beliefs." "Lord Cromer spoke up for Egypt, as only someone could who loves the country for its own sake. The odd Englishman has often even felt obligated to protect the rights of oppressed peoples, even where his country did not have supremacy
and he did not have any authority."

Finally, this declaration: "England's ethical imperialism has now collapsed during the war. If we operate correctly, it may come to the point where the world bursts into derisive laughter, if England once more gives itself airs as the protector of the small nations ... For the sake of the same necessity of war, England has renounced its historic role as protector of the prestige of the white race ... but up to now we always intended to fight only for our own existence, and not for a better world ... But we are in the happy position of being able sincerely to take up the cause of the idea of justice. We do not need to be unjust, in order
to extend our power."

And so on and on, Germany fighting for justice by smashing the Russian empire and guaranteeing "national freedom" to "the liberated peoples". Germany fighting for justice by laying claim to a colonial empire. Germany fighting for justice by promoting the "abolition of militarism" in Africa. Germany using its naval power to protect freedom of the seas "in the service of this aim of humanity". To advance this outstanding commitment to humanity, justice and the "public cause", Germany must develop an imperium embodying its "national ethos". "If German imperialism is to stand up to the onslaught of democracy with its claim to improve the world, it must be ethically grounded ... we must incorporate general human goals into our national will." Well, they didn't get too far at that point with that "ethical imperialism". But others did.

Your Boss Is Stealing From You. posted by lenin

Dave's Part, whose author has recently made a shabby, doomed peace with the Labour Party (they call it the Osler Accords), draws attention to the increasing rate of exploitation noted in a new report from the IMF, which coolly describes "a decline in labor's share of national income" in advanced capitalist economies. This is because "the distribution of national income between labor and capital adjusted to capital-augmenting technological progress and a more globalized world economy", which is a technical way of saying that they found gadgets that can do what you do cheaper, and people in Indonesia who (thanks to a mass murdering dictatorship helped to power by the West, and in the pocket of Western capital - not only informally, but as a specific matter of policy) are obliged to accept the most derisory wages and conditions possible, while working the longest hours imaginable.

The coming cataclysm in Sadr City. posted by lenin

Surprise: they bombed, but 'Al Qaeda' escaped. posted by lenin

The BBC reports that "A key al-Qaeda suspect was not killed during Monday's air strike in southern Somalia". So, having allegedly bombed to kill a suspect (ie someone who had not been found guilty of a crime), they now tell us that at any rate "it was necessary to defend the US and the international community from further al-Qaeda attacks." It is reported that the air strikes have continued, and last night on Channel 4 news they actually managed to have a reporter based in Somalia who knew what she was talking about (this is dangerously subversive). Not only, she explained, do people in Somalia not believe for a second the stupid excuse about Al Qaeda, but they are not making the Ethiopian troops feel welcome - and the troops themselves are rather sensitive about being filmed, for some reason. They have had rocks thrown at them by angry crowds of protesters for days.

This could be because, as a Times journalist wrote yesterday: "The good news came in June. That is when the courts routed the warlords who had turned Somalia into the world’s most anarchic state during a 15-year civil war that left a million dead ... The Islamists have now been replaced — with Washington’s connivance — by a weak, fragile Government that was created long before the courts won power, that includes the very warlords they defeated and relies for survival on Somalia’s worst enemy." Or as The Washington Post’s Stephanie McCrummen explained: “In a way, people here said, Mogadishu was liberated by the Islamic Courts movement, which managed to rid the city of the militias and roadblocks that had functioned like a hundred Berlin Walls. Movement was so restricted that some residents had not seen friends and relatives in years, and children living only minutes from the crashing Indian Ocean had never laid eyes on the turquoise water.”

Or indeed as Richard Dowden writes today: "The rise of the Union of Islamic Courts was the result of America's previous attempt to get the alleged al-Qa'ida operatives responsible for the embassy bombings. Early last year the CIA paid local warlords to get them. This united Somalis as nothing else has for decades. In their fury at American support for the hated warlords, they rose and drove out the warlords. After years of bloodshed and oppression at the hands of warring politicians, religion unsurprisingly provided the unifying bonds of solidarity, values and a common cause. For a while, southern Somalia had something it had not enjoyed for decades: security. The Courts were a popular uprising, the first viable movement to cut across clan rivalry and unite Somalis since 1991."

The UN, with its distinguished record in Haiti, the former Yugoslavia, the Congo and Sudan, has announced that it will send troops to Somalia in order to support the 'transitional government' that it helped foist on the country. They do not refer to an Ethiopian occupation on the grounds that those troops were invited by the 'transitional government', and so in effect UN troops will be going to augment Zenawi's army until they can persuade them that the 'international community' has it sewn up. It will take a while to subdue the population, if indeed they can subdue it. There are still fights going on in the south of the country, and an American team of 'advisers' is helping the Somali and Ethiopian fighters wage their campaigns. Because the target of these operations has a substantial community of popular support, the war that has already taken so many lives will probably degenerate very quickly into a war on civilians, potentially genocidal in scale. The deliberate bombing of Somali villagers, with contemptuous excuses offered, is a warning of what may come.

Chavez spooks capital. posted by lenin

Predictably, the media - whether centre-left or centre-right - cannot contain their condescension and derision at Chavez's declaration of "Socialism or death!" following his inauguration after being re-elected this December with 63% of the vote. Especially since that declaration comes with a concrete set of policy proposals that are quite radical in their means and ends. Specifically, Chavez proposes to nationalise key industries including electricity and telecommunications, increase state control over four major oil projects, return the central bank to public control, and expand local democracy through community councils. While radical and thoroughly deserving of support from socialists, this does not advance beyond left social democracy, and it is not intended to (despite Chavez referencing Trotsky in what can only be a deliberate fuck-you to the White House).

Yet The Guardian is agog - "ideological time warp", "communist revolutionary", "US-bashing", "dogmatic anti-globalist" etc etc. The BBC reports Chavez's ominous "bid for more state control". As usual, the media routinely tout claims from opposition politicians who claim Chavez is "acting like a despot" and so on. Some have claimed that Chavez's decision not to grant a renewal of RCTV's license is part of a crackdown on media freedom. This is preposterous - any media outlet that helped organise an attempted coup in any other country in the world would have been shut down the day after and its executives put in prison. The more interesting claim from an ideological point of view is that nationalising industry is in itself undemocratic - the precise opposite is true. There is nothing democratic about allowing a country's resources to be controlled by tyrannical, secretive, unelected and unaccountable elites. There is nothing democratic about allowing the central bank's policies (and therefore a crucial mechanism of control over the economy) to be controlled by a dictatorship of capital (usually called 'autonomy' or 'independence'). State ownership, even with a democratically elected government, is not necessarily more democratic, though it tends to be because it is obliged to perform in such a way as to credit the elected government. It also tends to have a countercyclical effect, thus modestly improving the bargaining power of labour, itself a democratising effect.

Sources close to yours truly, however, say that the investment banks are worried, but not panicking. In the short-term, their experts tell them, the stock markets will experience a brief capital flight, but the long-term growth Venezuela offers, particularly in energy, will dampen down the exodus before long. Sure, they complain about the "deteriorating climate for property rights", but they don't expect expropriation. In fact, the business wire services like Bloomberg, while hostile to anything that promises to democratise property, note that Chavez is more likely to purchase the companies he wishes to nationalise, rather than simply take them.

Of course, they're quite happy if the newspapers and television broadcasts focus on the hysterical claims about Chavez's tyranny since it provides a background noise that is conducive to excuses for the next coup if there is to be one, and also forms a kind of persistent, low-level flak for the interests of capital. It stops people getting ideas, assuring them that they wouldn't like what Chavez has to offer. Because that is their biggest fear: the potential popularity of socialism in the advanced capitalist countries.

To blush at speeches rank... posted by lenin

The running dogs of imperialism have me bang to rights. I have been mantled with the dubious honour of Red Face of the Week, for having suggested that Zizek was one of my favourite theorists. This foolish claim on my part is undermined by the fact, you see, that I evidently have not read him. For I can't have read Zizek's recent article in the New York Times which contains support for the idea of a 'global policeman' ("why not?") if I could ever have said, even before the article was a glint in Zizek's eye, that he was someone I liked to have read. Further, I can't have been aware of his position on the bombing of Kosovo, otherwise I should never have recommended him. And what's more, if I haven't read these, I can't have read anything written by him. Through such ruthless, invincible logic, I am unhorsed, unmanned, exposed to the withering ridicule of Harry's Place regulars. Student, poseur and hypocrite, I am at long last revealed.

What Do They Want From Iraq? posted by lenin

I was interviewing a prominent British academic the other day, shan't say who or what for, but one of the topics I broached was Iraq. To many, it looks very much like an almost colonial adventure, whereas the long-term strategy of the US has traditionally been to get client-regimes in power, and then maintain domination through market-transactions. The phrase 'neocolonialism' is frequently associated with the occupation of Iraq, and not only from the radical left. The construction of fourteen permanent bases, the sewing up of the oil contracts, and the 104 acre embassy in Baghdad are pointed to as instances of this. So, had the US ruling class changed its strategy?

The answer was that the administration really believed it would be possible not only to have a client-state, but a pro-American political system with a real social base, the only one of its kind in the Gulf region, and one with a size and potential economic value that would make it a real power in the region. It would be unlike the subterranean dictatorship in Saudi Arabia, because the assumption was that the Shi'ites would be a very potent popular base of support for the occupiers and that people like Chalabi and Allawi could deliver that for them. The fact that Iraq had a long history of secularism, it was assumed, would make it easier. The benefits of doing this successfully hardly need spelling out.

The point about bases and the embassy is a traditional American idea: you protect a regime with the bases, and with the embassy you ensure it does what you want. The ensign of American power all over the world is 'lily-pad', whose implicit promise of forceful intervention guarantees safety to a loyal regime and destruction to a disloyal one. That is not the really new development: what was new was the ambition with which they sought to transform Iraq society, and therefore the whole balance of power in the Middle East. The basis of this conviction was the triumphalism over Eastern Europe, the facility and speed with which they had effected a total transformation of those societies. The US executive is surrounded by experts in social engineering, people who know how to reconfigure a state socialist regime (or so they thought).

Well, that didn't work out too well, and now it's more or less official that they're sending 20,000 extra troops to Iraq. Nouri al-Maliki, recently so despondent about his inability to be "strong", has welcomed the troops and vowed to "crack down" on behalf of the US. The Bush administration will settle at this point for a terror-state, provided there is no chance of General Petraeus being the last man off the roof of the embassy. Because they control hardly any of Iraq, and the strategy now is to control it through targeted applications of extreme force. Indeed, the terror is already picking up inside Iraq: a US-led attack on Haifa Street in Baghdad killed fifty people only yesterday, taking the total toll there since Saturday to 130. The death squads are doing their work, with bodies continuing to appear all over Iraq. However, escalation is a risky strategy for a couple of reasons. For one thing, if the intention is in any way to move against al-Sadr, it could potentially galvanise a rapprochement between the Mahdi Army and the Sunni forces, who have been alienated of late. Secondly - and this is for the first time in ages - the US antiwar movement is being reignited. Mass demonstrations are planned across America within 24 hours of Bush's announcement, and Democrats who really wanted to support the "surge" and concentrate on some centrist domestic issues are under pressure. The American ruling class is split on escalation, some fearing the kind of defeat sustained in Vietnam. The more aggressive wing behind Bush is confident that a sudden cataclysm in Iraq, and perhaps even an expansion of the war into Iran, can recoup those losses. What happens next depends crucially on what the American antiwar movement does: the divisions in the ruling class present a huge opportunity for them. But it also depends to a large extent on the difficulties faced by the British government. I note, for instance, that Gordon Brown has recently made a preposterous, utterly utterly absurd, last ditch attempt to position himself to the left of Blair on foreign policy. There is no mystery here - everytime you look at a poll on this government's popularity, the phrase "new low" comes up, and the words "war", "Iraq" and "Bush" are never far behind. The decision to renew Britain's weapons of mass destruction programme isn't very popular either. So, one thing those of us in the UK can do to help our American brothers and sisters is to turn out en masse for the February 24th demonstration, demanding both the withdrawal of troops and the end of Trident.

US Bombs Somalia, Kills 4-Year Old Al Qaeda Suspect. posted by lenin

They were aiming at "Al Qaeda suspects", honest. The attacks "allegedly targeted Islamists wanted for the 1998 bombings of US embassies in other African countries." The 'transitional government' that the US is backing against the Union of Islamic Courts said the US "has a right to bombard terrorist suspects who attacked its embassies in Kenya and Tanzania". Further, "we understand there were a lot of casualties. Most were Islamic fighters." However, "Witnesses said at least four civilians were killed in the attack, including a small boy. 'My four-year-old boy was killed in the strike,' Mohamed Mahmud Burale said."

Of course they're only going after the baddies who blew up the African embassies. It is inconceivable that the US would bomb the areas where the opposition to the 'transitional government' is strong. Certainly, there will be no suggestion from this quarter that there was a thinly veiled message to Somalis not to fuck with the empire in this attack. The sending of an aircraft carrier to the region to carry out further attacks certainly doesn't mean that the US will carry out terrorist atrocities in Somalia to intimidate the population into accepting an unpopular government. And the EU's suggestion that it will send troops to Somalia doesn't make it a spear-carrier for the empire.

ps: One curious point in The Guardian's article is the suggestion that Abdullah Yusuf "yesterday entered Mogadishu for the first time since his election". Yusuf was not elected, ever. He was appointed by a transitional federal parliament that was formed by warlords in a sports centre in Kenya, with the backing of Western states.

The Polish Bishop, the Commie Spy and the Washington Connection. posted by lenin

Stanislaw Wielgus is not a household name in my house either, but it can't help but be funny that he has resigned as archbishop of Warsaw because it has been revealed that he used to work for the Stalinist secret police. It is particularly funny because the Catholic Church in Poland has recently been collaborating with the ruling twins, the Kaczynski Brothers, on a commie-hunt (and gay-hunt too, despite the outing). The commie-hunt is conducted under the guise of investigating past crimes carried out by the Stalinist regime (they even staged a public reconstruction of the 1981 coup in Warsaw last December). The Kaczynskis, it has to be said, are themselves stridently pro-American, utterly fervid about free markets (within the national setting), but anti-EU. However, they themselves are not the most reactionary individuals in their coalition and in the context of Polish politics have actually come from the centre.

It is in their coalition building with the contemporary heirs of what used to be called the Endecja (National Democrats) that they have allowed the most vicious bigoted filth to come to the centre of politics. The Endecja were, as you might have guessed, the most pro-Nazi Polish movement during the 1930s, and their younger, more radical members took great pride in the antisemitic pogroms. Even when the actual fact of Nazi occupation obliged them to take up arms in exile, they concentrated their fire against the Soviet Union, and hence had little support. The League of Polish Families, an ultra-reactionary nationalist party, is led by Roman Giertych, whose father was a proud member of Endecja prior to World War II. They are embedded in the present Polish cabinet. There is also what is characterised as a 'left-populist' group in the government. Andrzej Lepper (it is, sadly, two ps), who made his name with peasants and farmers by staging 'direct action' and 'civil disobedience' against the EU, leads the Self-Defense of the Republic of Poland. Their primary focus appears to be on economic protectionism and social welfare, but they have no problem governing in a rightist coalition, any more than they chafed at supporting the Democratic Left Alliance in key votes when it was in government. Nevertheless, Lepper gained 15% in the 2005 Presidential elections, and is now the deputy PM. He has rolled back most of his radical proposals and has instead distinguished himself by defending one of his supporters in the European Parliament over allegations of raping a prostitute in Brussels, by saying: "How can you rape a prostitute?" Further, Lepper is reputed to have a past on the far right which he now repudiates. The current government of Poland is therefore slightly to the right of Louis Quatorze, and this revelation about the would-be Primate (yes, you evolutionists should have a giggle about that word) is certainly an embarrassment to them.

However, even more embarrassing will have been that the Polish faithful are apparently unhappy about the resignation. Now, why should that be? Well, it's only a guess, but I should think that Polish Catholics are altogether very familiar with the collaboration between the Catholic Church and the Stalinist regime. The heart of Catholicism in Poland until 1981 was Cardinal Wyszynski, who was Primate until his death in that year. He, like many in the Church, faced repression at the hands of the regime, but seems to have made his peace with them by 1957, when he started to gather votes for the communists. The reason was simple - for the wing of Catholicism that he represented, the trouble hadn't started with communism, but with the Reformation, after which everything was equally shit. Therefore, why be less eager to work with communists than anyone else? And besides, Germany was still seen as a significant threat by both the communists and the Catholics (this was true as late as 1991, when the new national security doctrine in Poland was unveiled, two years after Germany had officially recognised the Western borders). The communists agreed with Wyszynski that the Western territories were Polish and not German, and therefore should have Polish bishops and not German ones as the Vatican wished. Further, the regime did not reprove when Wyszynski led a delegation of Polish bishops to address the Pope, assuring him of the undying loyalty of the Catholic Church in Poland, but warning him not to expect them to implement Vatican II. (Incidentally, the only Polish Catholic the Vatican could find who would declare support for Vatican II was one Cardinal Karol Wojtyla). Cardinal Glemp, who will resume the role of Primate now that Wielgus has resigned, was Wyszynski's closest collaborator. He was also one of the most ardent voices urging the Polish workers not to resist the Jaruzelski coup. You get the picture? It would be hard to find someone in a suitably senior position in the Catholic Church in Poland who had not collaborated in some fashion with the late Stalinist regime.

So, what are twins and their revolting allies doing in government anyway? Over a decade ago, the world was looking on with astonishment as Poland gave a mandate to the postcommunist Democratic Left Alliance, led by Kwasniewski. Lech Walesa, the hero of the West, was ousted. It looked as if the catastrophic consequences of shock therapy had galvanised a massive rebuke for the Washington Consensus, and indeed it had. But then the CC of what had been the Polish United Workers' Party had initiated the transition to private capitalist class power, as a means of preserving their rule in the face of an upsurge of working class resistance in 1988. The parties that subsequently emerged, whether neoliberal or social-democratic, were of the nomenklatura. It was in part because of this that the postcommunist SdRP (which subsequently merged with the Democratic Left Alliance) lost the election, in the summer of 1989, to Solidarity. Solidarity had by this time already shifted substantially to the right, following their 1981 defeat at the hands of Stalinism, and had begun to seriously court Washington long before they were elected. They embraced 'shock therapy', a disastrous programme which led to the bankruptcy and closure for huge numbers of public enterprises. Privatisation was often simply a means by which the ruling elite could snatch some public assets. The most genuinely left-wing social-democrat in the first post-communist government was a real hero of the anti-Stalinist movement, the late Jacek Kuron, and yet he ended up imposing some atrocious neoliberal reforms. (To his credit, he later admitted that he had "fucked up" and was almost totally isolated in his harsh criticism of the Kwasniewski government's decision to send troops to Iraq).

When Kwasniewski defeated Lech Walesa in 1995, he proceeded to carry out most of Walesa's policies, particularly on integration into the EU, and into NATO, and on privatisation. The former ruling class simply decided that the best protection and hope for future growth was to be found under the umbrella of the American empire. This was not an uncontroversial process - while Kwasniewski was personally popular most of the time, his crawling support for the Kosovo war was not, and neither was the alarming alacrity with which he privatised pensions along lines proposed by the World Bank, thus making the largest portion of social security dependent on the movements of the stock market. The privatisations produced significant worker unrest as when miners in Silesia and shipyard workers engaged in strikes and protests in 2002 and 2003. With official unemployment rates going as high as 20%, hardly any of the unemployed were entitled to benefits. However, with the promise of foreign direct investment and economic growth, Kwasniewski did persuade most Poles to accept the EU accession treaty. It is worth noting that Solidarity were given another chance in 1997, when Marian Krzaklewski united with a cluster of small right-wing groups to take the Polish parliament. But their absymsal record ensured that in 2001 they were sent packing, and the Democratic Left Alliance won again with 41% of the vote. However, 41% support sank to a pathetic 5% in the polls because of welfare cuts and a series of corruption scandals. Perhaps the most unpopular decision taken was to follow the empire into Iraq. You'll remember this: it was the sort of thing that was happening across many of the Eastern European countries where ruling elites were haggling for privileges with the US. Rumsfeld called it New Europe. Poland's specific angle was apparently the offer of access to American aircraft markets, promises which have not been kept. More generally, however, as Adam Michnik explained: "Poland is an ally of the United States of America. It is our duty to show that we are a reliable, loyal and predictable ally. America needed our help, and we had to give it." As much as anything else, it was the manner of its spear-carrying, the contemptuous attitude toward public opposition, that did them in. Kwasniewski and Leszek Miller explained to a press conference before any parliamentary vote was taken that Poland had already agreed to commit troops. And parliament approved the measure without a whimper of protest.

When it came to the 2005 Presidential elections, therefore, the Democratic Left Alliance and Solidarity stood no chance. The two chief candidates were Lech Kaczyński, who stood as a protectionist, and Donald Tusk, who stood as a neoliberal. Kaczyński took the second round by a margin of roughly ten per cent, but quickly moved to reassure Washington that Polish troops would remain in Iraq. The administration is an extremely loose coalition, held together by Catholic nationalism, and conservatism on social issues. The discrediting of the main parties of the left, and the decline in union organisation following workers' defeats at the hands of neoliberal governments, has left plenty of fertile soil for populist reactionaries. There is some revival, as this article makes clear, and popular opinion on most issues is well to the left of any of the main political parties or figures. It would certainly be idiotic to write off the Polish working class, which produced one of the most astounding mass movements in history. But their temporary defeat and disorientation has left Poland with a spineless, embezzling political class, parties that slither around in base bigotry where they aren't spinning folk tales about the wonders of privatisation, and a capitalist class rapidly on the make and in Washington's pocket. Like the departed Stalinist regime, it finds the Catholic Church useful in securing consent. Like most US client regimes, the sign and sanction of the empire's protection of the new nomenklatura is the presence of military bases, in this case under the rubric of Nato. Like the bases that used to be dotted around Saudi Arabia, these have nothing to do with any external aggressor. The pledge is implicitly to defend the regime from internal threats, provided it does as its told. And it is, and will continue to do so.

The Bush Gamble. posted by lenin

According to US policymakers, the problem with Iraq is that insurgents are winning the PR battle. Through online videos and cameraphone images, the Iraqi resistance has successfully annihilated a US government PR machine worth billions: one that reaches into every news room, all over the world. The US Embassy in Baghdad complains:

"Without popular support from US population, there is the risk that troops will be pulled back ... Thus there is a vital need to save popular support via message."

And goes on to recommend a series of 'messages' that might succeed with the US public: "vitally important we succeed"; "actively working on new approaches"; "there are no quick or easy answers." Meanwhile, "Inadequate message control in Iraq is feeding the escalating cycle of violence." And so on, the assessment of the strategic communications director in America's embassy in Baghdad. I note: 1) that this involves a more or less open declaration that the executive is determined to remain in Iraq; 2) that it is preparing to wage a PR battle against representative institutions in the US to prevent them from being too representative; 3) the article provides an invaluable PR service in itself, taking US propaganda claims at face value while citing preposterous outfits like the SITE Institute. To be sure, "message control" is the decisive factor in Iraq, provided you understand the daily run of events as a vast information contraflow. Certainly, an air strike on Sadr City is a kind of "message", a piece of information in its fashion. Torture cells and death squads additionally have their own informational content. However, that sort of data is not considered by MSNBC to be part of the "PR battle" (you know, the one for hearts and minds) that the US is losing.

The Bush administration is set, as we know, to embark on a "surge" - an interesting synonym for "escalation" in this context. To this end, some neocons have been resurrected and drafted back into government to help out. I don't quite know what wisdom twits like William Kristol and Fred Kagan will offer, and perhaps their temporary promotion isn't all that important, but at the very least they find themselves positioned to recommend a strategy that Bush is going to attempt anyway, and presumably they will catch the flak if it fails (since the Bush administration is all too aware of the world's obsession with neoconservatives).

At the same time, Bush proposes to sweeten the deal with $1bn in 'aid' and the deployment of Kurdish units in Baghdad. The title of the Guardian's article refers to a plan to "draw Iraqis into fold", a somewhat quaint way of saying that the Bush administration intends to terrorise and bribe Iraqis into acquiescing in their own subjugation. The suggestion that the use of peshmerga in Baghdad will alleviate matters is obviously a conscious giggle at the world's expense, but what about this aid? Weren't we told that Bush had turned off the 'aid' spigot? The Congressional Research Service calculated that the US 'aid' budget to Iraq topped $28.9 billion over three years, and it all went miraculously astray. This is in part because the 'reconstruction' system in Iraq is a technique of patronage and political control on the part of the occupiers, and in part because Cheney's mates were sent in there to extract as much as possible. Another $1bn, however dispersed, will disappear into the corporate coffers very quickly. A billion dollars isn't even real money any more - in London, you'd be lucky to get a house with it. Additionally, Bush is going to send more civilian workers to populate the US embassy in Baghdad which alone, FT notes, covers 104 acres. Add a noose of fourteen permanent military bases dotted around the country, and you have a serious usurpation going on.

The Democrats are blowing hot and cold on this, but as Gary Younge notes, offer no serious opposition. Initially, a lot of leading Democrats were quite chipper about the idea of a 'surge' until they saw the polls, and have since taken to saying they might be opposed to it. Joe Biden insists, for instance, that withdrawing funds from the war effort would be a "hollow threat", but would consider proposing a Congressional resolution informing Bush that Biden and his colleagues don't approve of what he is doing. That'll tell him. Most likely they have cynically calculated that, however many lives are lost, if Bush strings this one out then it can only redound to the benefit of a Democratic presidential candidate.

It seems unlikely that tens of thousands more US troops tearing up Iraqi towns and cities will improve matters for the occupiers. Gen. David H. Petraeus, Bush's man in Baghdad and a co-architect of the escalation, is treated to glowing reviews by the US press. He is eulogised by the Washington Post as a man of 'flinty scepticism' who mistrusted the invasion of Iraq that he participated in, a man who is 'incredibly intelligent and creative', a man who stays up at nights worrying about what will happen to Iraq. He is the man who can save Iraq, despite the fact that the article unwittingly acknowledges Petraeus's responsibility for what has already occurred in Iraq, not least in "overseeing the initial reconstruction of Iraqi security forces" - that is, Petraeus was responsible for the Special Police Commandos, the deaths squads whom he repeatedly praised for their "tremendously aggressive" operations, what with the drilling and the torture and the massacres. So, what do you think a man like this wants with twenty to forty thousand more troops? Given the size of Iraq's insurgency and the popular base behind it, there is no way that such numbers will do anything other than intensify the resistance. Petraeus is practically the only military leader who thinks it will - and he had to be promoted into his role, bumping out the recalcitrant Abizaid who has repeatedly insisted that it will not improve matters.

Yet, what is their alternative? They cannot leave Iraq, and don't intend to, so they may well be desperate enough to hope that a drastic escalation in repression in Iraq will be sufficient to pacify the country and reverse the negative assessment not only of the US public, but increasingly of the American ruling class. And this is based at least partially on a realistic assessment, which is that the main problem for the occupation is not sectarian violence but resistance violence (principally roadside bomb attacks). The effect that this has on US public confidence in the war is striking. Aside from the massive Iraqi casualties, 3,000 US bodybags and tens of thousands of wounded or crippled soldiers have been one of the principal reasons for the war's unpopularity. But it is deeper than that. If Americans really believed that the resistance was the work of a small minority of Iraqis, or some Al Qaeda offshoot, they might see this differently: but the breadth and persistence of the resistance, dramatising the fact that Iraqis don't want to be occupied, and the increasing awareness that Iraqis have good reason to fear and despise the occupation, all contribute to growing dissent. Given that withdrawal is simply out of the question for Bush, a last-ditch effort at colossal demonstrative violence may be all he has left. That is: the 'surge' policy is a bifurcate gamble; a PR war directed against Americans; and a terror war directed against Iraqis by the man who brought you the Salvador Option.

Cultural Learnings For Make Benefit Glorious Empire posted by lenin

Lenin's Tomb is delighted, quivering and damp in the crevices to have received a leaked draft of a script outline for the next Sacha Baron Cohen film, involving a zany new character: Sizlak. A hyperactive, dishevelled, foul-mouthed academic from Slovenia who delights in pushing to the limits of contrarian absurdity, this satiric fancy is certain to test every one of Baron Cohen's legendary 'foreign accent' and 'funny face' skills. Worldwide audiences will be challenged and giggled to bits by the casual racist humour and misogyny.

Cultural ironies abound. In one scene, Sizlak explains to an antiwar demonstration: "What if, you know, the real problem with America is that it is not an empire! Okay, why not, you need an empire, who else is there? But America will precisely not invest itself in a proper colonial adventure because it would have to be a genuine humanitarian operation. No? This is what I call subversive overidentification - you precisely, like The Good Soldier Švejk, follow orders so closely that you end up unmasking the whole enterprise! Have you heard the one about the chocolate laxative?"

This is closely followed by a hilarious skit in which Sizlak tries to book an overnight stay with a gentle family in London - only to discover they're Muslims. "You know," he explains breathlessly to the camera as he cowers in the unlit bedroom he has paid for, "this is not what I meant by traversing the fantasy! I did not see their horns, but they were always present in the Running of the Mohammedan - don't get me wrong, I like them. I like sex too - it's nice. It is simply that I refuse to engage in the patronising strategies of sophisticated, you know, pseudo-understanding that characterise the official liberal racist response to Muslims. We must, to be properly in solidarity, have exactly a ruthless critique of Islam." And with that, he flees.

Sitting astride an enamel toilet in Malet Street, Sizlak cheerfully tells the camera: "The real reason we do not simply crap in public is precisely because the Other's excess of enjoyment is always bothersome. No? And if we want to really disturb the coordinates of liberal-democratic hegemony, you know, we should stop this stupid disavowal and collectively put shit on the road. Would this not precisely dramatise the 'movement of movements' that anticapitalists speak of, but without the Beautiful Soul narcissism? You know, I am almost tempted to reverse the usual dictum, and declare 'All things in excess!'" He adds: "Have you heard the one about the French toilet, the English toilet and the German toilet?"

'Sizlak' is coming soon to a campus near you.

Somalia: invaded by proxy. posted by lenin

So, the last time I wrote about this, Ethiopia was operating 'covertly' in Somalia. Since then it has invaded and helped the 'transitional government' take much of the country. That won't last. The varied pattern of order that the Islamic Courts had brought (with differing degrees of strictness based on local conditions) was replaced fairly swiftly by:

a rising level of chaos, as armed bandits swept the city and fragmented clan militia began to battle each other for the spoils of war. Witnesses said an intense gun battle raged around a former Islamist ammunition dump and that clan warlords had instantly reverted back to setting up roadside checkpoints and shaking down motorists for money. Many terrified residents stayed in their homes behind bolted doors and the few that ventured into the streets carried guns.

The Ethiopian troops are deeply unpopular. The New York Times reports today that Somalis have stormed the capital to hurl rocks at the invading troops. As Charlie Kimber writes, the US-backed invasion will "further destabilise a region which has repeatedly been torn apart by war and famine", but was prosecuted by Zenawi to cash in on being Bush's premiere ally in the region, a strategically important one given its proximity to the Gulf States. However, the superiority of Ethiopia's military will meet the same limitation that the overwhelming force deployed by their American masters in Iraq and Afghanistan has: they are not prepared for a rising crescent of irregular guerilla resistance.

That this also means a potentially catastrophic humanitarian situation if war spills out across the horn of Africa will not unduly worry the Bush administration or any future US executive. But we should recognise it as one more site in the ever-expanding war for total spectrum dominance, and one more front in the struggle against the empire.

Israel threatens to nuke Iran. posted by lenin

Some while ago, Rashid Khalidi suggested that what is loosely referred to as the 'Israel Lobby' was really a means by which the US ruling class maintained internal discipline, over a wide range of issues not strictly limited to foreign policy. It's a curious relationship: the American government pays for Israel to sustain itself as a garrison state based on supremacy over the Arabs, with nuclear weapons and hawk fighters and so on; and in return, Israel takes some of its enormous subsidies and uses it to discipline the Western media and political classes through officially encouraged lobbies, thus allowing this tiny country in the Levant to be seen to be controlling matters. The two responses that take this appearance at face value are reformism, and antisemitism: the former says there's nothing essentially wrong, but some deformities are introduced into the system by extremists with well-funded political agendas; you can guess what the latter says at various registers.

So, when Israel threatens to use nuclear weapons against Iran (mimicking the 'preemptive strike' doctrine), guess how they word it? Well:

Israeli military commanders believe conventional strikes may no longer be enough to annihilate increasingly well-defended enrichment facilities. Several have been built beneath at least 70ft of concrete and rock. However, the nuclear-tipped bunker-busters would be used only if a conventional attack was ruled out and if the United States declined to intervene, senior sources said.

It is presented as a little bit of blackmail: if American politicians respond to public pressure and try to block an attempted attack on Iran, well Israel may step in and do something crazy with those nuclear weapons they pretend not to have. As if. The only circumstances under which this would occur would be if such a strike had been tacitly or secretly endorsed or encouraged by the United States executive in the first place. But this story describes the ludicrous image of the US as a restraining force.

Of course, the Sunday Times performs its mandatory propaganda functions, reminding us of what Ahmadinejad is supposed to have said (but didn't) about wiping Israel off the map, telling us what "Israeli officials believe" (that they're defending themselves against the possibility of a second Holocaust), vividly depicting what kind of terrifying bombs Iran may be able to accrue under certain circumstances etc. It would be too obvious to imagine what the reaction would be if Iran threatened a nuclear strike against Israel (don't even mention the US), based on the repeated threats made against it. And the absurdity of wiping out nuclear facilities with nuclear weapons, not to mention the monstrosity of the action, the potentially huge cost to Iranian lives, is also far too close to one's nose to even notice.

And this is a very specific threat - the details leaked by these "Israeli officials" are deliberately chosen to emphasise that the threat is operative, that training is underway to carry it out, and that it has done so before (Osirak is mentioned). Had a tithe of this been true of Iraq in 2003, there wouldn't have been anywhere near as many people protesting against Bush's 'preemptive' invasion. You wouldn't have been able to escape even for five seconds from the constant barrage of emergency bulletins, cod patriotic declarations, moralising cant, invective against 'pacifists' and alarmist news stories. Blair would have been even more cringeworthy, Bush would have been even more callous, and bombs would have been even more rapidly delivered to every urban centre, including alleged installations. Israel can issue these threats, precisely because it is under no threat itself. It faces no serious prospect of facing a single Iranian bullet unless it actually initiates an aggressive war. Which means that the excuse offered for making the threat in the first place is a pathetic lie.

The US government clearly wants to keep the fires stoked for a potential attack, as Blood and Treasure points out. Take the recent propaganda effort in which an Iranian guest of the Iraqi government (also, once a guest of the US President) was arrested, and accused of bearing documents that demonstrate the intention to bring chaos to Iraq through both Sunni and Shiite insurgent groups. Or take the Iran Syria Policy and Operations Group, whose role is to coordinate an offensive against both countries, particularly Iran, by giving covert support to Washington-friendly dissidents and hyping allegations of an Iranian role in the 1994 attack on a community centre in Argentina. The propaganda may work: a recent poll suggests that about half of Americans still believe there was some connection between Hussein and the 9/11 attacks. The lesson that the US government will take from this must be a mixed one, of course, since it suggests that there are a large number of Americans who think Iraq had something to do with 9/11, yet should not have been invaded. But it also suggests that if you repeat Iran, terrorism and weapons of mass destruction in the same sentence for long enough, you might well get results.

"In the name of decency: the contortions of the pro-war left." posted by lenin

My essay for International Socialism lays out some of the points I've been making on this blog, but with footnotes. The bulk of it was written a few months ago, but it is mostly up to date.

Other articles definitely worth reading (after you have finished mine) are Martin Smith on the shape of the working class, Daniel Bensaid on revolutionary strategy, and Hassan Mahamdallie on Muslim workers' struggles. I suggest you simply get yourself a subscription, as I'm sure you'll want a hard copy to thumb through in the bath.

Says it all... posted by tony collins

Early American Exceptionalism posted by lenin

The theme of American exceptionalism obviously gets a new burst of life when people start openly talking about an American Empire. Thus the 'liberal internationalist' wing of American imperialism. Thus the neocons. Thus Hitchens. Julian Go tackles the theme head-on in a recent scholarly article, which is worth ripping off. (See The Provinciality of American Empire: ‘Liberal Exceptionalism’ and U.S. Colonial Rule, 1898–1912, Comparative Studies in Society and History, 2007:49(1):74–108.) That the empire is no longer a politely kept secret is established early on:

"The phrase 'American empire' appeared in 1,000 news stories over a single six-month period in 2003. That same year, the Atlantic Monthly observed that it had become 'cliche' to state that the United States possesses an 'empire.' In 2000, Richard Haas of the State Department urged Americans to 're-conceive their global role from one of a traditional nation-state to an imperial power.' Two years later, a senior-level advisor to the U.S. President stated: 'We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality.' This proliferation of empire talk would suggest that the denial and displacement by which exceptionalist thought presumably operates may be abating. Even America’s imperial amnesia shows signs of recovery. As admissions of empire have surfaced, so too has new attention to America’s prior imperial experiences. 'Ever since the annexation of Texas and invasion of the Philippines,' declares Niall Ferguson, 'the U.S. has systematically pursued a imperial policy.' Apparently, the United States is no longer an empire that dare not speak its name."

That this goes alongside a set of claims for America as a benign, even meliorative, hegemon that even realists adhere to: "'America’s imperial goals and modus operandi,' claims Ikenberry, 'are much more limited and benign than were those of age-old emperors.' While European empires suppressed liberty, rights, and democracy, America’s empire has been aimed at spreading them. 'American imperialists usually moved much more quickly than their European counterparts to transfer power to democratically elected local rulers—as they are attempting to do in Iraq.'" Or, as Robert Kagan explains in Paradise and Power: America and Europe in the New World Order, (2003),
"The United States is a behemoth with a conscience... Americans do not argue, even to themselves, that their actions may be justified by raison d'etat... [T]o the extent that Americans believe in power, they believe it must be a means of advancing the principles of a liberal civilisation and a liberal world order." Further, "The US-led Coalition's war against Saddam Hussein can be considered a liberal, humanitarian and entirely reasonable war ... The colonial period is over, and colonialism has, in any case, never represented the main trend in US policy." (Mehdi Mozaffari in Thomas Cushman, ed., A Matter of Principle: Humanitarian Arguments for War, 2005). Max Boot: "Compared with the grasping old imperialism of the past, America's "liberal imperialism" pursues far different, and more ambitious, goals. It aims to instill democracy in lands that have known tyranny, in the hope that doing so will short-circuit terrorism, military aggression, and weapons proliferation." And Adam Michnik: "No, we are not in Iraq as part of the empire; we are there for freedom." (‘Antitotalitarianism As A Vocation: An Interview With Adam Michnik’, Thomas Cushman & Adam Michnik, Dissent, Spring 2003). And so on and on, the ubiquitous verdict on America's imperial ambitions: a liberal empire rooted in specifically American virtues.

Go writes that this doctrine was formed during the early part of the 20th Century when America acquired "the unincorporated territories of Philippines, Puerto Rico, Guam, and Samoa". These were distinct from previous territorial expansionism, because: "Unlike previous territories (including even Hawaii), they were declared 'unincorporated' in a series of cases known as the 'insular cases' ruled by the Supreme Court. This meant that the new territories had the possibility for, but not the promise of, eventual statehood in the Union; the U.S. Constitution did not extend to them in whole." "'The Philippines are ours not to exploit,' insisted President McKinley, 'but to civilize, to develop, to civilize, to educate, to train in the science of self-government.' This so-called 'mission' of 'democratic tutelage' is what would distinguish American empire from the 'tyrannical' empires of European powers." Hoover declared at the time that "Our mission was to free people, not to dominate them." There were critics, such as Mark Twain, who insisted that the US did not intend to "free but to subjugate the people of the Philippines", and they had sufficient weight to make anti-imperialism the official position of the Democratic Party, but the ruling class consensus was certainly overwhelmingly pro-imperialist. That being so, to what extent did America's imperial engagements at that time distinguish it from the European empires?

Go notes that the language of Empire at the time was quite widespread, from popular literature to the New York Times. Justice Marshall, who ruled on the legal status of the "insular cases", referred to "American Empire" without a trace of criticism. Woodrow Wilson and Bernard Moses both held that what Moses called "lesser races" were to have "the standards of the West" imposed on them, as a matter of sheer inevitability in a shrinking world. But while Moses condemned the tyrannical nature of Britain's empire, which he claimed resulted from its "monarchical tradition", Wilson saw it as America's role to "moderate" the course of imperialism "in the interests of liberty", and to impart "the habit of law". Elihu Root’s 1899 report as Secretary of War described the doctrinal basis for colonising the Phillipines, in which America's role was to "make the interests of the people over whom we assert sovereignty the first and controlling consideration in all legislation and administration which concerns them, and to give them, to the greatest possible extent, individual freedom, self-government in accordance with their capacity, just and equal laws, and opportunity for education, for profitable industry, and for development in civilization."

Go adds that despite the racism and the many, many atrocities of the occupation, and despite the fact that the interests of American capitalism were deeply implicated in the whole effort, it did at least conform to some of the claims made by apologists (but not for the reasons given by the empire's aplogists, as we will see). He discusses the development of public schools, reprentational institutions, the creation of an indigenous civil service and so on. Asia saw its first national legislature under American occupation. It was a transformative occupation and, according to Go, provides the most favourable exhibit of 'benign' American imperialism. VG Kiernan, in America: The New Imperialism (2005), discusses some of the liberal reactions to the Phillipines in America, which was seen as "more a base for democratic experiment than as a fortified zone".

What's more, it doesn't stand alone. Puerto Rico was also run on the basis of tutelage, with public schools and representative institutions established. So, then, did we have an empire of progress, despite the atrocities and self-interest behind the sanctimonious rhetoric? Well: "Guam and Samoa, however, saw a very different form of rule. In neither colony did authorities endeavor to cast the colonized in metropolitan molds; talk of tutelage was markedly absent. Something of this is evident in the relative lack of public school systems. As late as 1920 there was only one state-funded school in Samoa and, while Guam saw a few more, neither saw the kind of educational program carried out in the Philippines or Puerto Rico." In Guam and Samoa, it was as much as the Americans could do to teach the natives "habits of cleanliness". Both islands were effectively made property of the Navy Department. In Guam, the position of local governors (gobernadorcillos) was bolstered rather than uprooted, and the limited suffrage that had persisted was abolished. In Samoa, the territory was divided into 'ancient' units of rule, and hereditary chiefs answerable to commanders at the naval base were put in charge. The differences, Go argues, are accounted for by two factors, neither with any relationship to peculiar American virtues: one is the need for legitimacy, and the other the need to take account of local conditions. These were not discontinuous with previous empires, as is usually asserted: all empires with perhaps the exception of the Belgians in the Congo have claimed to be representative of the needs of the colonised or occupied.

The first problem the Americans had faced in the Phillipines was opposition from armed revolutionaries, the strength of whose resistance produced concern among American state personnel that the only way to win would be to prove that "our intentions are good". Jacob Schurman, head of the first Philippine Commission, argued that "magnanimity" was America's "safest, cheapest and best policy with the Filipinos". To put it another way, to stop the revolutionaries from creating their own independent, national political structures, the yanks killed a few tens of thousands of them, terrorised the population and then pacified them with political reforms. Indeed, as Go doesn't mention, most of the seats in the new national legislature went to the nationalists who demanded immediate independence in their electoral appeals (they did not, of course, get that, but the 1916 Jones Act in which it was officially promised that the Philippines could be independent as soon as a "stable government" was available, can be seen as one of many attempts to attenuate the nationalist sentiment). In Guam and Samoa, where there was no revolutionary insurgency, the concern was more to conserve and conciliate, maintaining rule by winning "confidence, respect and affection" (or "hearts and minds" as they like to say in the current pseudo-technical shorthand). Further, unlike the other three instances, Samoa had no experience of direct European rule and had therefore not been forcibly inserted into the global capitalist economy. It was important as a fortified military outpost, not as a site for direct extraction. "Compared with Guam and Samoa, both Puerto Rico and the Philippines had been more deeply penetrated by export production for the world market long before American occupation. Land in Puerto Rico had been increasingly taken over by coffee and sugar production in the nineteenth century; in the Philippines land had been increasingly devoted to a wide variety of export crops at the same time." And since the Americans were convinced that their control over the island relied upon them not disturbing the traditional conditions of social life, they instead modified the existing structures in their interests. Pressed by Christian missionaries to promote public education, they replied that this would only make the otherwise contented and docile natives increasingly discontented.

The penetration of capitalist production and international markets into the Philippines and Puerto Rico created European-oriented landowning and merchant elites, whose progeny were often educated in European institutions. Their resistance to colonialism was framed in political discourses acquired in Europe. The United States, aside from spending hundreds of millions conquering these territories, spent a lot of time acquiring the knowledge that would enable them to rule all the more effectively. In the Philippines, the Schurman Committee held hearings, conducted interviews, studied revolutionary documents, collected information on field commanders etc. Further, in Puerto Rico and the Philippines, they had acquired information on the disaffection of substantial parts of the population from the Spanish, their demand for political reforms from Madrid. Investigations in Puerto Rico consulted with the political elite and national ruling classes. On the basis of this, not a special and unique historical destiny or set of commitments deriving from domestic insititutions, they devised their colonial policy.

Examples beyond the remit of Go's study are worth looking at. Take Haiti and Iraq: two instance of a mixed approach, in which the buttressing of feudal structures were made to coexist with modernising practises. In Iraq, of course, the British sponsored a diffuse network of tribal rulers, who together had more power than the central government, while at the same time creating the basis of a liberal state according to commitments forced on them by a combination of rising Arab nationalism and the rising power of the US (which sought to opportunistically support anti-colonial movements where European powers were affected). In Haiti, the Americans built schools, roads and hospitals, but at the same time enforced a feudal form of slave labour (which is to say that Haitians built the schools and roads and hospitals under American rule). It goes without saying that both occupations were marked by callous atrocities on the part of the colonists. But the modes of rule were carefully calibrated and constantly revised to take account of a) the specific interests of the colonisers in the territory; b) the conditions inhering in the territory; c) the need for legitimacy. Of course, when American troops landed in Haiti, as Kiernan points out, there was no shortage of liberal commentary claiming that the US was present "primarily for benevolent reasons".

Today, we have a new lexicon, with "failed" as well as "rogue" states requiring "humanitarian intervention" and "democracy promotion". We have an increasing incidence of direct occupation, mostly under the rubric of the United Nations or Nato. These occupations are also seen as short-term, tending toward independence, but they are now cast in the therapeutic terms of nation-building, state-building and institutional enhancement. The only thing that is exceptional about it is the extraordinarily ambitious scope of the empire, its desire not to rule over any territories for long periods of time, but to intervene repeatedly. Niall Ferguson tells the story in Colossus of the US Ambassador to London's conversation with foreign secretary Sir Edward Grey in 1913, in which he explained that America would not recognise a government in Mexico led by General Huerta, and that if the Mexicans would not "vote and live by their decisions", the United States would be around for 200 years and could "continue to shoot men for that little space till they learn to vote and to rule themselves". Well, you decide for yourself whether the US was more interested in 1,200 million dollars of investment and a huge stake of residential planters, traders and engineers, as well as the interests of Standard Oil, or whether it cared that the "great shambling Indian Republic", as it was contemptuously called, had the right vote for its leaders - Ferguson, ever the apologist, doesn't mention any material interests. But the principle that the US will continue to intervene over and over until people start doing as they are told is neither exceptional nor history. It is the organising principle of the empire of capital.

Jailed: for upsetting a white woman. posted by lenin

Subhaan Younis will face six months in prison for showing a white woman images from a 'beheading' in Iraq. The magistrate described the action as a 'breach of the peace' - because the world is such a peaceable place at the moment, and those images have evidently emerged from the void, bearing no connection to any other recent 'breach of the peace'.

Capital spooked. posted by lenin

The Financial Times is dismayed at the arrival of undead Marxism. Orwell is invoked, the Black Book of Communism is invoked, even the formidable Leszek Kolakowski is invoked, but nothing can halt the relentless march of the restless undead.

IMF and Iraq's Oil posted by lenin

I got this in the post:

The legislative battle for control over Iraq's oil is heating up and oil aid is playing a key role in the conflict. As noted in this article from Spiegel, the US is being accused of leaning on the IMF and the World Bank to "push Iraq into signing oil contracts fast" and Iraqi authorities have promised the IMF a draft petroleum law as a condition of IMF support.

The IMF is also being accused of using its role in managing debt cancellation as leverage to press for reforms in Iraq's oil sector.

According to Spiegel: "The IMF sets the conditions for Iraq's debt relief from the so-called Paris Club countries. Eighty percent of that debt has been wiped clean, and the final 20 percent depends on certain economic reforms. With the final reduction, Iraq's debt would come to 33 percent of its GDP -- but if the reforms are not made, debt would climb to 57 percent of GDP..."

The Iraqi Labor Union Leadership has issued a statement arguing that: "The Iraqi people refuse to allow the future of their oil to be decided behind closed doors," and that "the occupier seeks and wishes to secure themselves energy resources at a time when the Iraqi people are seeking to determine their own future while still under conditions of occupation."

For more see here, here and here.

Kulturkritik posted by lenin

Callinicos, in Theories and Narratives, describes Fukuyama's work as conservative kulturkritik. Conservative kulturkritik is not anti-capitalist: it simply doesn't hold capitalism to be the point. Fukuyama's 'End of History', according to Callinicos the result of an incoherent distillation of Kojeve, Spengler and Nietzche, is an unhappy time in which daring, imagination and human idealism is lost. The thriving life forms of kultur are replaced by the decaying rigidities of zivilisation, a "museum of the human spirit", in which bourgeois democracies would manage an increasingly homogenised culture (paradoxically riven with inner tensions). Fukuyama himself cheered up for a spell during the 1990s, and the Rand Corporation paid him well for his increasingly apologetic output. He participated in the PNAC, and wrote to Clinton to demand the overthrow of Saddam Hussein. He assured his comrades that the Great Disruption of the 1960s was an abberation, an over-exuberant externality resulting from the transition to a now accomplished Information Age. Challenges would still have to be managed, but on the whole it would be smooth sailing. But his neconservative friends did not cheer up. Christopher Hitchens had written with some glee for Harper's in 1990 of how miserable the neocons appeared to be now that the Russian Empire was breaking up - how they insisted that nothing was really changing, that the Russians were playing some filthy game designed to befuddle and bedazzle the President and the American people, the refusal to countenance the 'Earthquake in the East', as Cliff called it at the time. Eugene Rostow, Midge Decter, Jean-Francois Revel, all the Free Worlders terrified that there would be nowhere left to free. How to maintain the military budget?

Corey Robin interviewed a couple of prominent neoconservatives, Irving Kristol and William F Buckley, in 2000, and found them at low ebbs. (These comments were reprinted in 'Rememberance of Empires Past' in Ellen Schrecker, ed., 'Cold War Triumphalism'). Buckley complained of "the emphasis in conservatism on the market" which "becomes rather boring ... like sex". Kristol reviled the "business culture" of conservatism that "lacks any political imagination". For, after all, "What's the point of being the greatest, most powerful nation in the world and not having an imperial role? It's unheard of in human history." The trouble was that America was a capitalist democracy with a strong emphasis on economic growth and prosperity. Anthony Lake, Clinton's National Security advisor, explained the new dispensation which was that America's role in the post-Cold War world was to rule by maintaining an extending economic hegemony. Republican opposition wasn't inspiring the neocons. Kristol thought it "disgusting" that they haggled over such piddling issues as pension entitlements. "It's not Athens. It's not Rome. It's not anything." Not anything except boring, that is.

Robin went on to discuss the reactions to 9/11 among mainstream ideologists, whose rhetoric is rather close to that of Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson that were so widely criticised. Fukuyama noted the unhealthy "preoccupation with one's own petty affairs" that had marked the 1990s, and was among the first to sign a letter indicating that Bush should over throw Hussein, even if there turns out to be no Iraqi connection to 9/11. Frank Rich wrote in the New York Times on September 15th 2001 that "This week’s nightmare, it’s now clear, has awakened us from a frivolous if not decadent decade-long dream". David Brooks wrote for the NYT that Americans in the 1990s had "renovated our kitchens, refurbished our home entertainment systems, invested in patio furniture, Jacuzzis and gas grills" in such a fashion that anyone could have concluded that "America was not an entirely serious country". George Packer, the liberal apologist for war on Iraq, confessed: "What I dread now is a return to the normality we're all supposed to seek." Lewis Libby complained of a lax political culture that made it "easier for someone like Osama bin Laden to rise up and say credibly, 'The Americans don't have the stomach to defend themselves. They won't take casualties to defend their interests. They are morally weak.'" Condoleeza Rice spoke of how the attacks clarified America's role. Herbert London, President of the Hudson Institute, wrote a book entitled 'Decade of Denial: A Snapshot of America in the 1990s', a typically reactionary screed about what went wrong in the 1990s - poststructuralism undermined education with its political correctness and its denial of common cultural bonds (involving Shakespeare, apparently), no one stood for authentic politics, all was spin and polling, there was a general decline in civility etc etc. And Christopher Hitchens said what he said about exhiliaration about a war he would never get bored fighting.

Relief all round, until Iraq. Fukuyama is back in his pessimistic role. The neocons, whom he had allied himseld with until shortly before the war on Iraq (when he recanted, to some dismay), were soon discovered to be 'Leninists', a critique usually associated with the Libertarian right. They are undoubtedly benevolent, as is the President, but they are stuck in an alarmist mode which was appropriate in the Cold War but is not appropriate today. They end up providing a moralistic patina for 'preventive war', and are susceptible to the megalomoniacal tendencies that afflict other so-called 'Leninists'. This mimics his earlier worry that posthistorical societies would be afflicted by megalothymia, the desire to be recognised as superior, rather than equal. Fukuyama has therefore expressed a preference for 'realistic Wilsonianism': a prudent empire that, recognising the limits of martial power, seeks to extend influence primarily through soft power.

He has not entirely broken with the neoconservatives - he is on the steering committee for the trust managing Lewis Libby's defense against charges of obstructing justice and perjury, with whom he remains friends. He still considers Charles Krauthammer a "gifted thinker", or at least is willing to say so in public. He accepts that the cause of the 9/11 attacks was America's tolerance of autocrats, whose opponents took a local struggle global when they decided to attack the imperial protector of Mubarak and the Saudi royal family. He accepts that democratising the Middle East is a worthy project, and something the United States government could and should try to bring about. He doesn't oppose neoconservative assumptions, but wishes they would take their positions a bit more seriously and study the textbooks about democratic transitions and learn more about the societies to be invaded. (They are too flighty by far, for Fukuyama: they had thought that democracy was the default position of humanity and that all that was necessary was to unleash the "amorphous longing for freedom".) He remains an essentialist about 'human nature', and continues to hope that market economies can be "leavened by cultural traditions that arise from non-liberal sources", as he wrote in Trust (1995). His critique of contemporary neoconservatism is that it isn't neoconservative enough. It evangelises, but does not know the gospels.

To the bitterest end. posted by lenin

I am not satisfied with what I wrote about Hussein's killing the other day. Of course, it's right that this is not an appropriate moment for triumph, nor can there be much pity for Hussein himself. There were not glorious celebrations in Baghdad for a staged lynching during Eid, but nor were there mass protests, because of the degraded political stature of Hussein as a mass murderer and comprador leader who was happy to seek the support of whichever imperialist would help him retain power, and because he is almost universally despised and discredited in Iraq. And of course, Hussein's death pales in significance compared to the regime of terror suffered by Iraqis daily.

Yet, the spectacle has been grotesque, and there is no other word for it. There was no point in executing Saddam Hussein, and a specific evil was perpetrated by allowing it to happen under an occupation more murderous than Hussein himself, following a trial so preposterous that even Human Rights Watch had to cry foul. There was certainly no point in staging such a grotesque execution, filming it, disseminating pictures of the corpse, and inciting a funereal parade of pig ignorant, triumphalist commentary. Or was there?

Colonial hangings are traditionally an assertion of rule, an attempt to humiliate the society and intimidate other societies who may attempt to resist. Donald Kagan, father of Robert, wrote a couple of years ago that, while there was much concern about what the "Arab street" might do if America invaded Iraq, "the Arab street has gotten very, very quiet since we started blowing things up." Well, the symbolic humiliation and killing of a leader is designed to have a similar effect. The message is that the leaders of Iran or Venezuela or Haiti or anywhere else could also find themselves being driven from power and into hiding, dragged from a hole, beaten, filmed while being checked for lice, photographed in their underpants, processed through a pathetic trial and then killed in front of the whole world. It's motive nothing to do with the actual or alleged crimes of the leader being hanged.

Of course, the hanging also takes place within a carefully constructed mythical space known as 'American exceptionalism'. As Lila Rajiva points out, within this structure, American violence is either understood as martyrdom and heroism or (when the victims are understood to be innocent) as bureacratic error and anomaly. Since hanging can't be described in the latter terms, the choice of who to lynch takes account of how apt the person is for their execution to sustain that mythology. The trial and execution is inscribed into the mythology of a titanic struggle between good and evil, and indeed the drawn-out 'legal' process was a crucial supporting narrative in that struggle. Hence, the inane babble about how much Americans have 'sacrificed' for Iraqis.

But there is also expiation. Saddam Hussein died in order that we may forget and absolve Western crimes. Not only those that involved supporting and egging on Saddam during his most criminal phase of the 1980s, but the whole damned lot. I mean to say, any information that disrupts the story of America as first innocent guardian of the peace, and then liberator, was to be asphyxiated. American crimes, precisely by being subsumed into the war with evil, are effaced: they are no longer crimes. And so, by spinning this yarn with its strict one-sided morality, and its sharp terminus, the sins of the West were to be redeemed. Sunni insurgents and 'fundemantalists' didn't make Hussein a martyr, nor did any quality he possessed himself do that: Washington did it.

No one is surprised any more that 90% of Iraqis say it was better under Saddam Hussein. It is taken by official ideologists as a reason to escalate the war, as a sign of what kind of shapeshifting evil 'we' are up against. The occupation has: killed hundreds of thousands; destroyed towns and cities and huge portions of the infrastructure; raised for the first time the serious prospect of sectarian civil war; resulted in a drastic rise in rape (by criminals, but also by prison wardens, troops, mercenaries etc) and a huge demotion in the status of women; processed thousands of prisoners through a regime of terror deploying every filthy method of torture from electrocution, to tearing portions of flesh, to 'Palestinian hanging', to sexual humiliation. These are the uncontroversial facts of the occupation, and yet they are somehow to reside within the myth of invading American armies of feminists, democrats and human rights advocates. So, the crimes of the occupiers are awarded to Hussein (whose supporters, after all, are alleged to be behind the resistance), and he is duly tried and punished for them. Hussein died for Western crimes and not his own, taking the burden of all the villainies and tyranny of the occupation, so that yet another 'milestone' could be passed. So that almost four years of matchless brutality could be a 'comma' in Iraqi history, in Bush's pitiless, pious logic. So that American state personnel could speak of a 'surge' in Iraq, to finish off evil, to redeem the martyrdom of 3,000 American troops, to ensure that God's gift to the world thrives first in Iraq.

A prayer for 2007. posted by lenin

An anonymous letter arrived this morning, with the following written in blood:

The New Year Comes
The Watchman shouts
The thaw sets in
The Dead Remain
Wherever life has not died out
It staggers to its feet again.