Israel threatens "holocaust" of Palestinians posted by lenin

Israel's defense minister threatens "holocaust" against Palestinians on Israeli Army Radio:

An Israeli minister today warned of increasingly bitter conflict in the Gaza Strip, saying the Palestinians could bring on themselves what he called a "holocaust".

"The more Qassam [rocket] fire intensifies and the rockets reach a longer range, they will bring upon themselves a bigger shoah because we will use all our might to defend ourselves," Matan Vilnai, Israel's deputy defence minister, told Army Radio.

Shoah is the Hebrew word normally reserved to refer to the Jewish Holocaust. It is rarely used in Israel outside discussions of the Nazi extermination of Jews during the second world war, and many Israelis are loath to countenance its use to describe other events.

The Israeli government are not Nazis. They just do a good impersonation.

Labels: genocide, Israel, palestine, zionism

BBC discovers concern for working class posted by left turn

I was intrigued when watching BBC2 the other day to see a trailer involving a white man being drawn on in a variety of languages by a variety of hands to the music of Billy Bragg's version of 'Jerusalem'. My interest turned to horror as I realised it was advertising a series of programmes entitled 'White' with the tagline: 'is the white working class becoming invisible?'

The implication is unmistakable: Britain is becoming swamped by dark-skinned people to the detriment of others. And why specifically the working class? There are chilling echoes here of Margaret Hodge's two recent bouts of racism in which she said white working class people in Barking in east London would vote BNP because they felt ignored. Actually, people in Barking voted BNP because either (a) they are extremely racist, or (b) because they are sick of New Labour privatising the NHS and the education system; wasting billions of pounds of taxpayers' money killing innocent people in the middle east; and refusing to build council houses. The link between the two is being fuelled by the BNP, New Labour and now, it seems, the BBC.

Why the sudden concern for the white working class now? The BBC have never shown any concern before. During the miners' strike in 1984 the BBC colluded with the government to make an incident where mounted police charged picketing miners look as though the miners had started it.

This series of programmes is being shown at a time when reactionaries in our society are trying to argue multiculturalism hasn't worked, that muslims are all evil and maybe racism isn't that bad after all. It is pandering to the government's agenda and it stinks. This is simple old fashioned divide and rule tactics. The government is trying to divide the working class at a time when the economy is going into recession, Gordon Brown is trying to enforce a 2% wage freeze on the public sector and billions of pounds of taxpayers' money is being used to prop up an ailing bank.

It is the working class that is being ignored regardless of their skin colour, ethnicity or religion and this is a blatant attempt to stir up racism to shift the focus away from class issues onto race issues. This is deplorable and should be condemned by all working class people.

We need to continue to build the left in Britain to fight against all forms of racism as well as the attacks on working people and the war.

left turn

Labels: white; bbc; racism

"Kosovo Madness" posted by lenin

The Exile revisits a classic piece by Mark Ames:

On the south side of the filthy Ibar River, 130,000 Albanians control a near-perfectly ethnically cleansed area; on the North, about 18,000 Serbs, 2,000 Albanians, and another 1,000 gypsies, Turks, Gorani and Bosniaks (the latter two Slavic Muslim people) co-exist uneasily. Only about five or ten Serbs remain on the south Albanian side, half of them priests holed up in a monastery, protected by barbed wire, trip wires, tanks and troops. That's 5-10 Serbs in a population of 130,000 Albanians. That's all they'll tolerate; or rather, that's all that KFOR can manage to protect. South Mitrovica used to have a massive gypsy quarter, at least 7,000 of them. If you walk up to the miners' monument on the high hill on the north Serb side, you can look down and see what happened to Mitrovica's gypsies: an entire section of south Mitrovica, along the south bank of the river, of burned-out white houses, charred white, roofless, blackened beams like burnt ribs. Every last gypsy who wasn't capped or torched had to flee the Albanian pogrom, right under NATO's nose. Some live here in North Mitrovica. Others live in Serb-held Zvecan, most in tents. The remainder are scattered around Serbia.

Labels: albanians, ethnic cleansing, kosovo, roma gypsies, serbia, yugoslavia

Big up the Taliban posted by lenin

Labels: eurotrash, prince harry, royal scum, taliban

America is full of terrorists. posted by lenin

According to the US government, there are 900,000 terrorists in America and that's set to rise to over 1 million in the next few months.

Labels: america, terrorism

Buckley posted by lenin

He's dead. Good. The affection in which this rather unpleasant High Tory sprog of an oil baron is held is unsurprising and rather appropriate to the age. After all, look at his credentials: former CIA agent; a confederate of James Burnham, one of the earliest neoconservatives; a McCarthyite; a Goldwater guy; a defender of segregation who also thought uneducated whites should be denied the vote and, almost as a corollary, an explicit devotee of empire; and a trashy spy novelist on top of it all! With this commixture of white supremacism and white trash, what's not to love?

Labels: imperialism, neoconservatism, segregation, william f buckley jr

Scenes from the new frontier. posted by lenin

The Myth of the Surge. The US overcomes its difficulties by arming all sides of the civil war and letting them have at it.

Resistance in the Korengal Valley. The US encounters an "outpost of regress" in the latest version of the Injun Wars.

Ex-SAS soldier blows apart government denials of involvement in torture. Ben Griffin explains that a joint US/UK task forces has carried out torture since the occupation began.

Palestinian resistance is the "inevitable consequence" of Israeli terror and occupation, according to the UN special rapporteur. John Dugard says in the report that "common sense ... dictates that a distinction must be drawn between acts of mindless terror, such as acts committed by al-Qaida, and acts committed in the course of a war of national liberation against colonialism, apartheid or military occupation."

Bush approves of Turkey's invasion of Iraq. Ever troubled by 'outside intervention' in Iraq (the US invasion is not 'outside intervention' because Iraq belongs to America), the US has no problem with its dear ally mucking in. Shocked, shocked, by Saddam slaughtering Kurds, Turkish slaughter is just fine.

Britain calls for coup in Kenya. Britain's post-colonial domination of Kenya - still trying to 'hold the ring' between uncivilised tribes.

Labels: 'war on terror', afghanistan, empire, iraq, kenya, kurds, new frontier, turkey

Stop and Search posted by lenin

One of the big issues for London youths is the growing use of unaccountable stop and search by the police. Offered as a solution variously to terrorism and crime, there are politicians pushing for it to be extended and for 'red tape' to be removed so that they don't have to keep any records. In the context of gun and knife crime in London, the recourse to an old method of harassment and humiliation, racist in its application, is disturbing. Some of you may recall the BBC's documentary about racism in the police, in which officers openly exulted in selecting motorists for harrassment if they looked Pakistani or if they were black. Imagine removing all accountability from stop and search, and taking away any requirement that the search is based on intelligence or reasonable suspicion. They'd be as happy as pigs in shit. And it's not just racism, it's class as well. It's the poorest who are targeted, white working class kids with no amenities left to socialise on the streets and automatically stigmatised as "teen gangs". In one 12 month period alone, 60,000 people were stopped under section 44 of the Terrorism Act 2000. Now, that's one form of stop and search, in one twelve month period, and those are the official figures. That is certainly an underestimate, because a lot of the time the police don't bother following procedures. And the idea that it has any effect on gun and knife crime at all is just implausible. It isn't just that such policies don't get to the social roots of the problem, although that is important. It is that the chances of actually finding someone with a deadly weapon using this tactic are quite low. The odds of them finding someone completely innocent of any crime and treating them like dirt are by contrast very high. What ends up happening is that young people get aggravated and get nicked, and more young people experience custody and arrest, even if they've done nothing wrong - and they don't need that. Unfortunately, the mayor has backed the stop and search policy, just as he supported the cops over Menezes. Need I even mention that Respect is standing on a very clear platform of opposition.

Ady Cousins has posted videos of last week's Respect meeting on stop and search, and I really hope to see more of these meetings across London, not least because people to know their rights and to hear from lawyers, policemen and others who know the arguments and know why the claims for stop and search are baloney. Anyway, here's a few samples:

Labels: metropolitian police, racism, stop and search

Obama's the man for capital posted by lenin

I actually think that an Obama victory would be substantially better than any of the other main candidates. I do think his antiwar position on Iraq is important, even if I'm not convinced that he is a principled 'antiwar' candidate - one recalls his statements on Iran before the NIE, and notes his various pro-Israel statements, which are kind of obligatory. And actually, yes, of course it does matter that he is the only black candidate and the first one to have had a serious chance of winning. It counts, even if it doesn't count for all that much. And it counts that he isn't an outright neocon, whereas I think the neoconservative faction would actually do very well under both McCain and Clinton, who are the two other serious candidates. His campaign seems to be promising, though he will not deliver, an end to the nightmare. I personally hope Nader's campaign does something more than implode on the first few steps - if nothing else because by raising a serious radical campaign, it will drive the agenda further to the Left. If Democrats want to whinge about this, as they can always be relied upon to do, they have to be able to make a case to would-be Nader voters why should not vote for a radical left-wing campaign, and it should be something better than 'you're ruining it!' But Obama, while he doesn't differ on a lot of principle with Clinton and McCain, is different enough that it matters. A victory for him will be seen around the world as a defeat for the 'war on terror', and that counts.

Still, I think it's worth pointing out that one reason his campaign is in rude health is because capital actually rather likes him. The top campaign donations for Obama, Clinton and McCain are online, respectively here, here and here. It is noticeable that finance-capital, the dominant sector of the US ruling class, appears to be swinging hard behind both Democrats, although Hillary's largest donor is DLA Piper, a huge law firm and lobbyist for various corporate interests. Although both have a very different position on the justice of the invasion of Iraq (Hillary is trying to pose as an opponent, but is one of the most hardline supporters), both are broadly committed to devoting more to the occupation of Afghanistan and less to Iraq. One assumes that the US ruling class is sick and tired of the Bush clique's adventurism and wants to try and consolidate Central Asia.

Yet, Hillary is in bad shape financially and her campaign is losing momentum in a very serious way, which is why in the run up to the key states of Texas and Ohio, she is resorting to the Islamophobic card, just as she has played on racism throughout the campaign. Quite a ruthless team, the Clintons, and I for one am not ready to say they're out of the primaries - far from it. Although I agree with those who say that Clinton probably wouldn't win the presidential race against McCain (and the polls support this), she's tough enough and dirty enough to pull through this first round. And if that happens, you've probably got a an absolute militarist nutcase for President, albeit one given to wearing the humanitarian surplice (along with Bob Dole, if you can believe that). And then it'll be party time.

Labels: barack obama, hillary clinton, john mccain, us politics

"Down With the Velvet Revolution!" posted by lenin

After having been so rude to the Fidelistas on one or two of the blogs and websites, I read this piece in The Guardian, and began to feel penitent. Allow me to quote:

The dearth of suspense [over the selection of Raul Castro for the presidency] underscored the authorities' tight control over the island and its 11 million people, many of whom hanker for relief from poverty harsher than that experienced in eastern Europe before the fall of the Berlin wall.

The Bush administration called on Havana to move towards democracy, an implicit acknowledgment that Cuba retained the initiative despite Washington's economic embargo.

This is not one of the worst articles I've read, to be fair, but it does grate against common sense. Poverty in Eastern Europe before the collapse of the Eastern Bloc? Yes, okay, there was plenty of it, but what about after? Surely one of the more unfortunate metaphors he could have chosen. And what about that economic embargo? Does it have anything to do with poverty in Cuba? Well, this is to be expected. Corporate media is the Land of Forgetting, a constant stream of Shocking Images and headline grabbing events with no context and no connections, just a very random assortment of things. Journos have to work fast and, if sense and context is required, they are under immense pressure to rely on internalised narratives supplied by official ideology.

One of the effects of Washington's economic embargo (and constant warfare) was to make Cuba highly dependent on the Soviet Union and Eastern Bloc, with whom most of its trade was conducted. It was partly for this reason, and the revolution's failure to spread, that Castro adopted the Sovet Union's model of economic development, which entailed strict targets and a highly disciplined labour force. In a way, they didn't have much choice - in order to develop in a highly hostile world system, they had to produce a huge surplus of commodities and try to export them. They couldn't afford to have serious discussion and dissent, otherwise they risked seeing the whole system unravel and get incorporated into the Washington Consensus. The invasion, the nuclear stand-off, the surreptitious guerilla warfare, the terrorism, the hotels blowing up here and there, airline hijackings, 630 assassination attempts and so on, also contributed to making the island state quite a repressive one. Falls in worldwide commodity prices could make the system very vulnerable, and stagnation in the Soviet Union could lead to lower growth in Cuba. For all that, the Cuban economy sometimes did better on average than Latin America as a whole. And, despite the collapse of the Soviet Union and Eastern Bloc, the Cuban revolution survived. You can't explain that simply by reference to the 'tight control' of Fidel Castro and his bureaucratic clique. It has, clearly, a substantial popular base because of the changes it has managed to achieve in extremely difficult circumstances.

What would have happened if the Cuban regime had fallen in 1989 or 1991? Realistically, it would not have become a thriving workers' state. It would not be a rich little Barbados either. What other state in the Carribean would it most closely resemble? Haiti. An American plantation with an exiled ring of death squad mercenaries ready to discipline the population as and when required. I mean, really, if people want to talk about dictatorship and poverty, look no farther, and it can't be more than a few dozen miles from the Cuban mainland. Constant US subventions, the repeated crushing of democratic dreams, virtual slave labour, staggering poverty, horrible inequality, low life expectancy, hardly any public sector, just a disgrace and constant misery. A whole new class of Andy Apaids, bumpkin billionaire oligarchs, gangster capitalists, would have sprang up. Life expectancy would have plummetted and poverty would be far worse than it is.

In Russia, the catastrophe of shock therapy was unleashed on 2nd January 1992. The shock came in two ways – first, the price explosion (food suddenly cost four times what it used to), and second, the massive public expenditure cut-backs. Inflation did drop – from almost 250% in January 1992 to approximately 30% in December 1992. Progress indeed. By 1995, it was estimated that 80% of Russians had suffered a serious decline in their income. Income from work for families had dropped from being about half of all income at the start of the 1990s to just 39% in 2000. From a mortality rate of 11 per thousand in 1990, the death rate soared to 15 per thousand in 2000, peaking in 1994 at almost 16 per thousand. In fact, in this “unprecedented peace time mortality”, we find an alarming underlying truth about Russian society. Between 1990 and 1999, there were 3,353,000 excess deaths in the whole Russian territory. Male life expectancy fell from 63.5 years in 1991 to 57.6 years in 1994. Female life expectancy fell from 74.3 years in 1991 to 71.2 years in 1994.

In Cuba today, the average life expectancy is a bit higher than that for the average American and is among the highest in the world, and that average takes no account of the horrifying nadirs in life expectancy for the poorest in the US. This is just because healthcare is a priority in Cuba, whereas in the United States profit is the only priority. You don't set up systems to look after human beings under capitalism - what about self-reliance and responsibility? - so naturally you just let the workings of the market wipe out the surplus population. Cuba has a slightly lower infant mortality rate than the United States too. Recently, there has been a severe increase in infant mortality in the south-east of the United States, which has reached 17 per thousand live births among black people, a figure comparable to Vietnam and Albania. Cuba, while it is not a socialist paradise, is a functioning state against all odds, and the population has been spared the fate of the poorest Americans. Inequality is rising in Cuba, but it remains one of the least unequal societies on the planet, which is one indicator of social justice. It has overcome a legacy of racist segregation and colonialism and slavery in a way that other states have not been able to. Unfortunately, it looks like Raul Castro is preparing to liberalise the economy further, presumably hoping to see growth on the current Chinese model of mixing neoliberalism with strong political oversight. But China doesn't have the disadvantage of implacable US hostility, which has shut off most sources of US investment and income from multilateral institutions that are effectively controlled by the US. China isn't in the American back yard. China is important to US capital, and can retain a measure of independence. Cuba, to put it crudely, is just going to get fucked.

I would love to see Cuba become a thriving socialist society and overcome its present impoverishment and difficulties. But the only way that can happen is if Latin America and the Carribean is revolutionised, (quite independently of the top-down politics of Castro, I might add), and if the American Empire is defeated. ALBA, (the Bolivarian Alternatives for the Americas, uniting Cuba, Bolivia and Venezuela) is a step forward in that direction. So, just to rile the neoliberal consensus and just to play nice with the Fidelistas, I am toying with a new slogan: "Down With the Velvet Revolution!" Obviously that ain't a cri de coeur.

Labels: capitalism, cuba, development, neoliberalism, socialism, stalinism

Watching a humanitarian imperialist squirm posted by lenin

This debate between Samantha Power and Jeremy Scahill is instructive. Power wriggles and squirms, skewered on her own moralisms and legalisms, utterly incapable of facing well-known facts, and winds up with a rat-a-tat bluster of personal impressions ("I supported ... I didn't see it that way ... I haven't heard") in which she poses as a complete ignoramus. Somehow she just never heard about how rigged the Rambouillet process was. Practically every one of these 'humanitarian' interventionists who remains true to the cause and adores the Democratic Leadership Council is trying to cop some distance from the Iraq catastrophe if at all possible. Power therefore currently poses as an opponent of the war on Iraq, even though she was very much in favour of it when she and Ignatieff and the Harvard human rights circle were debating it in 2002. The trouble is that almost exactly the same reasoning that was deployed to support the prolonged destruction of Yugoslavia applied to Iraq several times over, so there has been some difficulty in explaining exactly why this one was unique. Here she uses the "but for" argument that she offers in one of the interviews appended to 'A Problem from Hell' (an utterly silly book, larded with inaccuracies and omissions). Asked if the war on Iraq was a humanitarian intervention, she says "you know, 'but for' Saddam Hussein's repression of the Iraqi people, would the Bush administration have gone to war? And the answer is yes ... In Kosovo, 'but for' the atrocities against the Albanians, would NATO have bombed? No ... the key ingredient, the 'but for' ingredient, was Milosevic's slaughter and ethnic cleansing." Milosevic certainly repressed the Kosovars harshly and unjustly, although any ethnic cleansing prior to the bombing is entirely fictitious. So, aside from how facile the 'but for' argument is (a cheap soundbite contrived for talk shows, I imagine), it relies on a lie. Actually, her book defends the US government for its claim that Kosovo constituted a 'genocide', although even the ICTY doesn't feel up to defending that ruse any longer. In fact, while Jeremy Scahill rightly points out that the official number of corpses discovered by investigators is 2,700 and ethnicity has not been determined, Power tried to claim in her book that in fact 4,000 bodies had been found, (while on the same page adjusting her claim to 4,000 bodies and body parts) and allows readers to believe that over 11,000 bodies are buried in 529 sites in Kosovo alone. This was the ICTY estimate made during the war, and was repeated by people like Ignatieff. But in fact, Power's book was written in 2003, long after that figure had been dispelled. In short, Power will deploy anything to defend the reputation of the Clinton administration. Her stance is also stunningly hypocritical. For, after all, consider the worst that you can say about Milosevic: he violently repressed the Kosovars and encouraged nationalist resentment toward them; he built up a huge police force especially during the 1990s, to repress the opposition; he censored the media; he invaded Croatia to defend Serbian interests and ended up prosecuting a bloody war; he supported right-wing nationalist scumbags in the Republika Srpska who perpetrated some vile atrocities including the Srebrenica massacre; he was on the take and had ties with an extensive criminal network. On the other hand, hardly a dictator. Elected several times, in a country with independent trade unions, legal opposition parties, demonstrations, and so on, this was not fascism, or even a 'communist dictatorship' as some silly-billies claim. But Saddam's regime. Why, there was certainly an acute mass murder of the Kurds in the late 1980s to punctuate the chronic repression. There was demonstrablly mass torture and rape as policy, no shortage of viciousness, no free trade unions, no independent media at all, no tolerance for opposition demonstrations. Any opposition had to work underground. By Power's logic, she really ought to be one of the most enthusiastic supporters of the occupation of Iraq. After all, you can blame just about everything that happens on the bad guys and feign ignorance when you have to. What's the problem? Essentially, it comes down to this: if the Republicans do it, it is probably for some cheap short-term material benefit, whereas if the Democrats do it, it is for long-sighted compassionate reasons. So, as a great man once asked, what's a "but for"? The answer: for pooping, silly.

Labels: bosnia, genocide, iraq, kosovo, milosevic, samantha power, serbia, yugoslavia

Left Party in Hamburg posted by lenin

"Without us it would be deadly boring in [Hamburg's parliament]," said top Left party politician Gregor Gysi at an election rally in the port city on Wednesday.

Labels: anticapitalism, european left, germany, left party, socialism

Resisting the demonological temptation posted by lenin

Serbian protesters, angry at the secession of Kosovo, certainly picked the right target. There's hardly anywhere in the world where people don't delight in seeing a US embassy go up in flames. Unfortunately, they also managed to burn some poor functionary to death. Inevitably, the old cliches will be drawn upon. The reaction will be put down to simple-minded nationalism, ethnic hatreds, ancient prejudices etc, augmented by an obstinate Serbian administration stirring things up. There's no manipulative demagogue around to help the fantasy this time, since he's kicked the bucket. Further, the pro-Western candidate, Boris Tadic, won the recent elections. Nevertheless, there are ominous murmurings about the Serb regime trying to make it difficult. These myths are entirely unhelpful to understanding what's happening, but they have been cultivated for almost two decades now.

The break-up of Yugoslavia, for all that it involved the instrumentalisation of nationalism, was not fundamentally about that. It was about changes in property forms, a neoliberalisation enforced by the IMF with predictably catastrophic results. Producing waves of strikes and protests, it also led to intense competition among the players in the federation about the political forms in which the changes would take place, who would benefit, and how. The two northernmost republics, Croatia and Slovenia, were also the wealthiest and had reason to resent paying taxes toward the federation, while their political elites were straining at the leash. They took up democratic demands in order to win popular support, but also encouraged reactionary brands of nationalism, especially in Croatia, where Tudjman gave vent to pro-Nazi and anti-semitic politics, not to mention virulent anti-Serb sentiment which would be formalised in state repression and exclusion. Though one cause of resentment was the redistribution of their wealth to the poorest autonomous region, Kosovo, they nonetheless opportunistically backed Kosovan protesters if it would weaken the Serbian republic. It had nothing to do with the legitimate grievances of Kosovan Albanians. Milosevic had successfully used the resentment about Kosovo's autonomy under the 1974 constitution, to put himself in a virtually impregnable position in the Serbian communist party. Many of the accounts melodramatically describe a cold manipulator and demagogue, and he was adept at diverting discontent and protest into nationalist sentiment, outplaying far more doctrinaire rivals such as Vuk Draskovitch. However, trying to get the broadest layer of support on his side and also hoping to rely on the JNA whose elite was concerned about its privileges, took a formally pan-Yugoslav position and kept to it throughout.

While none of the secessionist parties won a majority in the December 1990 elections, and while the IMF and EU initially preferred a federation-wide solution, European states eventually came to the aid of Slovenian and Croatian secessionists, with Germany under Chancellor Kohl taking the lead in recognition. Kohl's quite immovable hostility to the claims of pan-Yugoslav unity and his willingness to break agreements and EC rules, is often put down to domestic pressures from Germany's Catholic constituency and from Croatian emigres. Yet, for a recently reunified German state, the prospect of two wealthy allies in the Balkans was surely very tempting. And while the other EC states blamed Kohl's intransigence and bullying, they were quite happy to go along with secession as long as certain concessions were made. The UK delegation, for example, was mostly concerned about conserving the interests of British capital, by allowing the UK to opt out of the social contract in the Maastricht Treaty. But they all agreed in principle to the partition of Yugoslavia. And the US got in decisively on the action by backing Alija Izetbegovic, arming him with the assistance of Iran, helicoptering mujahideen into the republic and encouraging Izetbegovic to resist compromise settlements. The EC broke its own rules to recognise Bosnia, and so contributed to the centrifugal forces tending to civil war. The JNA's abortive interventions in Slovenia and Croatia were pitched in terms of defending the constitution and, in Croatia's case, an oppressed minority. Certainly, this is how Milosevic presented his case, although he proved a false friend to the Krajina Serbs. As for the Bosnian Serbs, with no guarantee as to their rights or status, they largely rallied to nationalist parties and paramilitaries. A plebiscite held by the nationalists found that most Bosnian Serbs would rather secede from Bosnia in the event of a secession on its part.

The wars of the 1990s resulted from an interaction between class restructuring within Yugoslavia and the intervention of external powers. As Radha Kumar has written, the break of Yugoslavia very closely resembles the classic colonial partition. Such partitions have a lousy record, of course, and the brutality of the ensuing wars show that Yugoslavia was no exception. But as soon as the Western powers opted for partition, the demonology became crucial. Thus, it was all about rabid Serbs being whipped up by a malicious demagogue bent on genocide. As a result, the deaths during the Bosnian war were inflated and the blame placed almost exclusively on the Bosnian Serbs, with the subsidiary insistence that Milosevic was behind it all. Thus, Bosnia became a UN protectorate, a colonial dominion with a light democratic facade overseen by an appointed High Commissioner. Then, as the Kosovan Albanian secessionist movement turned to armed struggle, in light of repression and the lack of any resolution on their behalf in international agreements, Milosevic adopted a classical counterinsurgency strategy. This involved quite severe atrocities, although it bears repetition that in 1998, the year preceding NATO occupation, the KLA were responsible for more deaths than the Serb military. Spying an opportunity, the US led a negotiations process which was intended to fail. When Milosevic didn't agree to the neo-colonial terms set at Rambouillet, once again he was a genocidal maniac. The war was launched with the promise that anythying between ten thousand and a hundred thousand bodies would be recovered in mass graves. Kosovo became another colonial outpost governed by the UN, and hundreds of thousands of Serbs were ethnically cleansed from the province. Today, Serbs in Kosovo are a beleaguered and reviled minority. And while the Serbian working class was strong enough to overthrow Milosevic, it was not strong enough to impose a government that would defend its interests, so we have had a succession of timid, neoliberal administrations. They have all made use of the Kosovo issue, which has been a running sore on account of gangsterism in the Kosovan Albanian political elite, ethnic violence and endless provocations. But they're pretty impotent. Kosovo has now attained 'independence' with colonial oversight - what kind of independence is that? I note that Serbian socialists have argued (scroll down) that they support Kosovo's right to secession on the grounds that only solidarity of this kind can undermine the imperialist stalemate. They also point out that there is a radical element in the independence movement that also calls for an end to colonial rule. Quite. Nationalism in Yugoslavia has been a constant alibi for imperialism, and it can't be otherwise. However, for those Western liberals and even lefties raised on a diet of Serb 'evil', it's rather important to resist the demonological temptation here. The facile dichotomies of ruthless expansionism and genocidal aggression versus multicultural unity and patriotic defense have to be abandoned at long last. Milosevic was thuggish, corrupt and autocratic, but he was not a fascist demagogue as has been claimed, and his farcical trial actually made that rather plain. Izetbegovic was responding to a set of circumstances that he didn't decisively shape, but he was not a democrat fighting the good anti-fascist fight a la the Spanish civil war. The demonisation of Serbia and the overestimation of opposing forces has gone on for long enough. The protesters who have trashed the American embassy have plenty of reason to be angry at Washington. We do too.

Labels: bosnia, demonology, kosovo, serbs, yugoslavia

Another case for nationalisation posted by lenin

The energy companies register record profits and sky-high prices. It's no good complaining about 'profiteering' among private companies. That's what they're supposed to do. The profit motive is supposed to drive improvements in efficiency, sustained investment and - therefore - lower costs. The fact that it doesn't do so is hardly going to dissuade private energy companies from jacking up the prices as far as they can, and even breaking the law if they have to, in order to improve their returns. It would be a quite modest step to simply take these things into public ownership and introduce substantial price reductions or, alternatively, socialise the cost thoroughly through taxation so that it can be free at the point of delivery. In fact, it is probably the only way that the use of carbon-based energy can be slowly phased out - as long as private capital has a vested interest in keeping us using fossil fuels, we will not be able to make the shift to renewables and other forms of sustainable energy.

Labels: nationalisation, respect, socialism

Segregation, apartheid and the interpenetration of race and class. posted by lenin

It is a fairly commonplace myth in liberal historiography about South Africa that apartheid was a result of the triumph of illiberal Afrikaaners over the more liberal southern Cape which had the most British influence. It is actually a mytheme in British culture too, expressed in the joke: "Why is Holland so laid back? Because they sent all their mad bastards to South Africa." Another myth is that part of the reason for the ability of the racist-nationalist power bloc to impose entrenched segregation and then apartheid is the lack of pragmatism on the part of resistance groups such as the ICU, the Communist Party and the AAC, but this is to conflate pragmatism with liberalism and social compromise, itself a fairly commonplace gesture in bourgeois ideology. The marxist revisionists of the 1970s and their slightly pomo challengers in the 1980s provided the tools to take these myths apart, but they also furnished new insights into the ways in which 'race' operated as a regulatory principle and how it interacted with class. I am always intrigued by the way the fiction of race blends in with other social forms - class, ethnicity and gender, most obviously. One can easily think of examples: when I grew up a 'Protestant-looking' household was one that could pass for middle class; class itself is itself often understood as a kind of 'ethnicity'; the ideology of 'race' is usually coextensive with a conception of proper gender relations; and, as we will see later, the stratification within classes based on skills and trade has been susceptible to racial ordering. The racially ordered labour system in South Africa is as good a basis as any for investigating these interconnections

The roots of formal apartheid in South Africa, introduced in a series of measures by the Afrikaaner Nationalist government elected in 1948, were established in a sequence of legal, political, economic and ideological mutations that began with the transformation of the Southern African economy by the rise of mining capital. The principle of white supremacy had been established in various ways before – for example, in the Shepstonian policies of colonial Natal which “provided a ready-made rationalisation” for segregation (John Cell points out that the Natalian expert on the ‘Native Question’, Maurice Evans, also held that Natal and Basuto-land provided some of the fabric for possible segregation). And the constitutions of the Orange Free State and the Transvaal Republic insisted on "no equality between coloured people and the white inhabitants". However, an increasingly stark, and rigid, racial order emerged in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Through the imposition of racially organised restrictions in the labour system in the late 19th Century and the elaboration of legal doctrines pursuant to the subordination of the ‘Native’ after the Boer War, the ascendant capitalist elite sought to integrate African peasants into the labour supply on an affordable basis. The colour-coding of labour legitimised this subordination and helped to frustrate the development of class consciousness among the growing working class. Crucially, it met some of the demands of white workers on terms that could be accommodated by the ruling class.

However, this is not reducible to a ‘cheap labour’ thesis, which strikes me as a reductionist approach. ‘Race’ was not merely a pragmatic auxiliary to the capitalist management of the labour system, a cheap ‘divide and rule’ mechanism. The doctrine produced and imparted its own rationality, affecting the balance of risks for any would-be employer as well as for statesmen pursuing particular policies. The hyperstition of ‘race’ inflected debates about disease, population management and geography. And the relatively short-term goal of profitable mining was situated within broader debates about what constituted self-government (was it a political or cultural state?) and who was fit for it. It also interacted with religion (capitalist labour could be seen as an admirable system of reward and punishment for fallen man) and rationalism (in which segregated labour was eventually seen as the most efficient use of human resources for the improvement of all).

The historical context for this development is obviously one in which white supremacy was an organising principle throughout the colonial world, and in ex-colonies (for example, the post-bellum American Deep South provided much of the experiential input into the doctrine of segregation in the Republic of South Africa). This racial order infused and, to some extent, enabled the global emergence of nation-states and capitalist development. Initially, mining interests did not favour a rigid racial division of labour. Until 1885, the main mineral traded in Southern Africa was diamonds, and for much of the early trade, Griqua, Kora and Tlhaping producers were dominant. But white diggers had sought to impose their own monopoly on claim ownership with some success. For instance, while the British authorities in the Cape were reluctant to endorse overtly discriminatory legislation, diggers were required to have “a certificate of good character” from a justice of the peace or resident magistrate. The historian Paul Maylam notes that this did not prevent de facto white ownership and control of the diamond mining industry, and it may be that the policy was “racially laden” , particularly if one’s ‘race’ impeded a judgment of “good character”.

Even so, it is clear that whatever significant forms of segregation took place were still usually ad interim rather than premeditated and systematic. Indeed, the initiative often came from white workers who, beholden to a doctrine of "free white labour", sought to maintain and entrench their own relatively privileged status. What the mine-owners did want was to depress labour costs, and they did this by recruiting large numbers of African labourers for “unskilled jobs at minimal rates of pay”. This recruitment drive, especially as demand for labour outstripped supply in the 1890s, stimulated one of the many fears entertained by white workers – being ‘flooded’ or ‘swamped’ by cheap African labour.

The regnant ideology in the English-controlled Cape was assimilationist – the British would use what today is known as ‘soft power’ to win Africans “to civilization and Christianity”, as Sir George Grey put it. This assimilationist posture is often referred to in terms of a "Cape liberal tradition", but I question the utility of this phrase – it seems to re-describe rather than explain. After all, from 1875 there was a great deal of de facto segregation in the "liberal" Cape: for example on the railways, where one’s class of carriage was arranged both by class and race. Further, to de facto segregation was added de jure segregation with the National Reserve Location Act of 1902 which forced Bantu-speaking Africans into restricted locations. Parry makes the important point that the overall context of imperial rule had changed dramatically for Britain. If the British Empire in the first half of the nineteenth century had been expansionist, it had also attenuated its aggression with co-option and persuasion. The Indian Revolt of 1857 and the Jamaican Rebellion of 1865 both stimulated high-handed ‘revenge’ and an increasingly shrill assertion that the "lower races" could not be integrated and so would have to "disappear". Racial ideas meshed with Social Darwinist doctrines in official British propaganda. A new attitude to relations with the Africans was entailed, and it is one in which Victorian liberals were deeply implicated.

However, that background alone would not explain the scale, timing and nature of the transformation, much less the duration of employers’ resistance to entrenched segregation. It was the interaction of this transformation of imperial ideology with economic necessity that made was decisive. For example, the first of a series of cumulative transformations leading to entrenched segregation was arguably the 1894 Glen Grey Act, promulgated by Cecil Rhodes, which abolished communal land ownership, taxed those who could not prove they had worked in the last three months, and imposed male primogeniture laws for the inheritance of land, with the intended effect of driving more and more Africans who had hitherto subsisted on collectively owned land into the workforce. The legislation is named after the turbulent colonial territory that Rhodes was made Prime Minister of in 1890. The British had repeatedly considered similar measures to break up the old African social fabric and win the loyalty of some. It was initially conceived of as an adaptation to indigenous resistance, and this preceded the ‘mineral revolution’, never mind the arrival of Cecil Rhodes. However, the Glen Grey Commission that was put to work in 1892 was aware of the region’s hitherto protection from the pressures of the labour market, and hostile to it. And Rhodes was certainly anxious to satisfy his labour shortages. Whether or not the legislation was primarily intended to supply cheap labour, it did so, and provided a model for others who wanted to do so. At first blush, too, the legislation would not seem to advance segregation so much as integration, even if on a highly unequal basis, since its thrust was to drive African workers into capitalist relations alongside white workers. However, while it stimulated the production of a large African proletariat to work in the mines, it also established separate laws with respect to land and taxation. Segregation was not complete separation – it was separation for the purposes of domination and exploitation. The success of this policy inspired much of the legislation later recommended by the South African Native Affairs Commission (SANAC) and legislation enacted post-Union.

The significance of this legislation is not only the precedent it set. Part of its importance is what it says about the racial order that it was acting on. In South Africa, the arguably mundane business of specialisation of skills and class differentiation had been enchanted by its interaction with ‘race’. Just as certain forms of menial labour was seen as being beneath whites, skill was increasingly a cultural achievement rather than a vocational one, a gift of whiteness rather than of training and labour market fluctuations. Such conceits guided future legislation. In 1898, it was deemed that no ‘coloured’ person could hold an engine-drivers’ certificate of competency. And in 1903, the Volksraad in Transvaal adopted a regulation explicitly barring all but competent whites from underground blasting. When Chinese labourers were imported as a temporary stopgap to the labour supply problem in 1904, they were specifically excluded from over fifty separate skilled trades.

The production of the new racial order was a response to various actual and perceived problems for the rulers of South Africa. In the first place, the British were committed to the principle of white supremacy. The British high commissioner to South Africa, Viscount Milner, had explained to Prime Minister Asquith before the Boer War began that the principle of defending the ‘Native’ from oppression at the hands of both Dutch and English in South Africa was at odds with the principle of winning a loyal ally in the Dutch. Secondly, mining magnates had complained Paul Krueger’s administration and its failure to produce a steady supply of the needed labour especially for the Witwatersrand. The solution could not involve coercion of a too obvious kind, since the ‘Native Laws’ of the Boers that resembled slavery had been an issue utilised by the British government in its war propaganda. Yet, if the transformation that took place during and after the Boer War was animated in large part by the desire of central mining interests for cheap labour, the enabling discourses were legal, political, scientific, bureaucratic and cultural as well as economic. It required a vast effort at social engineering, the adoption of a bureaucratic rationality and a form of knowledge about the ‘Native’ that was neither as variegated nor ambiguous as that possessed by missionaries. As Adam Ashforth points out, the ‘Native’ had to be carefully constructed to be the subject of laws. SANAC, appointed by Viscount Milner following the Inter-Colonial Customs Conference of 1903 at which delegates from Britain’s regional colonies were in attendance, was to produce this kind of knowledge. The proper subject of ‘Native’ law was thus defined variously as ‘Kafir’, ‘Bantu’, ‘Native’ or ‘savage’, and this definition itself overlaid with assumptions of cultural inferiority and disability. In particular, he was understood to be bound by feudal political forms and antiquated modes of production that were unproductive. It was therefore necessary to impose restrictions on ‘Native’ land ownership, and undermine their existing social forms with the imposition of primogeniture. If only it were possible to “do away with free land,” one could “strike at the root of much that is most unsatisfactory in Native life”. Further, intermixture between the races should be avoided, and the ruling race’s supremacy should be carefully conserved. Capitalist social-property relations and white supremacy were cosubstantial with civilization.

Other discourses co-produced the new segregated order. The bubonic plague had arrived in South Africa in 1900, with the Boer War in procession. A surfeit of metaphors through which the ‘Native’ was understood as ‘disease-ridden’ came into widespread useage. The description was often used as if it were cognate with ‘lazy’, ‘uncivilized’ and ‘poor’. These metaphors contained a hidden cargo of economic resentment, but they also induced a set of policies designed to reduce the intermixture of African and white populations. In the case of Cape Town, the policy of moving Africans to Uitvlugt was considered a great success. It produced a temporary labour shortage, but this could be managed if the location was used as a source for labour to be funnelled to employers based on ‘pass laws’. Not only was the ‘Native’ considered diseased. He was also the source of viral discontent, especially where there was too great an effort to civilize him and where he had developed expectations beyond his means. He stirred up discontent and was unwilling to perform the manual labour that was required of him.

The SANAC recommendations provided the basis for future segregationist legislation. But as Legassick points out, a large part of the responsibility for disseminating these ideas is borne by those liberals who pressed for self-government for South Africa along the lines of Australia and Canada. Lionel Curtis, an advocate of integrating South Africa into a single Commonwealth state on the basis of self-government, was also one of the earliest explicit advocates of segregation. Other liberals, such as James Bryce, considered the ‘disaster’ of Reconstruction states in the American South an exemplary lesson in the danger of extending self-government to the ‘natives’. While the South Africa Act of 1909 granted self-government for whites, ‘Natives’ were the subject of authoritarian colonial relations. The Natives’ Land Act of 1913 restricted African land rights dramatically. Subsequently, some of the most violent labour disputes in the immediate aftermath of WWI - the South African government actually bombed the workers involved - involved the white working class wanting to avoid the status of 'Kafir'.

I leave the chronology there, although the resistance through the 1920s and 1930s, and what it says about combined an uneven development, is a compelling topic in itself. But let me put together some conclusions. It is obviously not possible to read off the transformation in South Africa’s racial order from economic developments. However, it is possible to say that among other things, the racial order was a particular ordering of labour, a colour-coding of labour’s status. It was increasingly seen as a natural means of managing both labour relations and the labour supply. The reshaping of the racial order did meet economic interests that were clearly expressed through policymaking institutions, and these emerged specifically from the transformation of the South African economy by the discovery of diamonds and gold in particular. It acted to consolidate Britain’s imperial tutelage of and economic position in the mineral-rich territory, by uniting its interests with those of whites in South Africa. Although South Africa’s capitalist class was not always the only or main agent pressing for entrenched segregation, only when that agency shifted from general resistance to aggressive support for such policies did the demand for them become effective. The spread of capitalist social-property relations and the imposition of white supremacy were co-extensive in a way that was possible chiefly because of the way in which capitalist relations were borne by the agency of empire. This is both because of the racist doctrines through which the British Empire came to understand its subjects, but also because it involved a capitalist society in an encounter with pre-capitalist societies which seemed self-evidently ‘backward’.

Labels: apartheid, capitalism, class and race, segregation, south africa

Love Letter to America posted by lenin

You know, Lenin's Tomb is sometimes unfairly accused of being anti-American. Describe Americans in conventionally misanthropic terms (fat lazy greedy pie-eating bastards, that sort of thing), and you're liable to be accused of anti-Americanism. But, and if I may be delicate for a second, the Tomb does not subscribe to this fashionable contempt for America. We fly the stars n stripes proudly and boldly at every opportunity. True, we generally add a few flames beforehand, but it's only a little joke. We enjoy your Seinfeld and your animated shows with racist humour as much as anyone. And so, as a gesture of appreciation, I give you 'America':

Labels: america, special relationship

Afghanistan: accentuating the positive. posted by lenin

Guest post by redbedhead:


Don't worry, everything is rolling along as planned in Afghanistan. Our troops are winning hearts and minds, they¹re rebuilding, they're defeating the insurgency. Well, there¹s the small matter of Canadian soldiers beating the hell out of Afghan detainees, then covering it up and then, once it's discovered, of stalling the investigation for more than a year. And then there¹s those massive bombings. As was noted by Amir Attaran, an Ottawa law professor who blew the whistle on the abuse, "When the military is investigating the military, which is inconvenient for the military, is it any wonder that the military rags the puck?"

In fact the investigation took so long to get started that they can¹t even track down the detainees any longer. And the Afghan they hired to do so was assassinated by insurgents. Probably nobody else will be applying for his job. Nor can they go to the medical records of the detainees, many of whom were treated by Canadian doctors. Why? Oops, it seems that the medical records from that time period, well, they just disappeared. Can you believe these guys?

Well, then, no wonder the Tories don¹t see the big deal in handing detainees over to the Afghan authorities. The Tories don¹t discriminate ­ hell, if torture and abuse are good enough for us, well, it ought to be good enough for the Afghans police. Small problem though, Kandahar¹s head torture master, Governor Asadullah Khaled, just fired somewhere between 100-250 police for corruption. Or, maybe it has something to the assassination attempt on his life and the growing power of the Taliban in and around Kandahar. The firing was done without notice, even to Canadian troops, who found out by surprise. If it was an attempt to eliminate a Taliban base inside the police then it failed to dampen the vigour of the insurgent movement. Within a two day spread two enormous suicide bombs killed a total of perhaps 150 people, including the "auxiliary police commander", ie. warlord, of Kandahar along with 35 of his men who were watching a dog fight. With potentially 125 people dead, this was the largest suicide bomb attack in Afghan history.

The Taliban have been having a lot of success in recent months eliminating important political figures inside Afghanistan, it seems. Then on Monday, insurgents struck again, with a suicide car bomb attack on Canadian troops that killed 35 civilians. The Canadians, it seems, were warned that there was a suicide plot afoot and that they should stay on their base until local police rounded up the attacker. But the Canadians refused to heed the warnings ­ six of them, in fact - and now the governor, Khaled, is none too happy with the Canucks. Tory Defense Minister, Peter MacKay, has responded with the usual Tory line that everything is good and that the Taliban are on the run, saying that the bombings didn't indicate any increase in Taliban activity. He better hope not because last year was already a record year for suicide bombings in Afghanistan.

Labels: 'war on terror', afghanistan, canada, occupation

A Note on Useful Idiots posted by lenin

Lenin did not, in fact, coin the phrase "useful idiots" to describe his supporters in the West. He is not known to have used the phrase at all. The fact that the legend is so widely believed and recited by conservative commentators suggests that it is a form of projection, reflecting their own belief that dissent is treason. It might sometimes be that, and treason is usually perfectly legitimate, but in most cases dissent is just that and no more. The thought that, whatever one’s (implicitly idle) moral claims for doing so, to oppose the government is to be objectively for the other side, was frequently aired after 11 September 2001. The Daily Telegraph even briefly gave space to a semi-regular column charting the statements of various ‘useful idiots’ who opposed military intervention in Afghanistan. Mona Charen, a neoconservative dimwit, has written one of those books in the vein of 'how treasonous liberals give aid and comfort to bin Laden', called Useful Idiots. There are similar books devoted to Fidel Castro and his "useful idiots" in Hollywood or Che Guevara's "useful idiots". Those who supported the Sandinistas were communism's "useful idiots". A popular charge among Islamophobes is that one is a 'Dhimmi', which amounts to pretty much the same thing.

And then there is the use of the term "objectively", which is drawn from the same discursive detritus. Christopher Hitchens, scholar of Orwell on top of everything else, once felt compelled to point out that those who opposed war with Iraq and didn't trust the INC were "objectively" pro-Saddam. Andrew Sullivan, citing Orwell, repeated the charge and still cleaves to it, although he has diluted the force it somewhat by saying that he is objectively pro-Kim Jong Il. This sort of language was once used by Stalinist scribes in thrall to a crude stageist version of historical materialism, in which history is an 'objective' process. The moralising illusions of the petit-bourgeois "Trotskyite" intelligentsia who think they can attack the Five Year Plan without opposing themselves to historical progress were a source of confident scorn back in the day. It is true that George Orwell himself was once caught up in this idiotic logic, when he wrote to the Partisan Review in 1942:

Pacifism is objectively pro-Fascist. This is elementary common sense. If you hamper the war effort of one side you automatically help out that of the other. Nor is there any real way of remaining outside such a war as the present one. In practice, 'he that is not with me is against me.'

He revised his position in 1944, denouncing such a logic as "dishonest" among other things:

We are told that it is only people’s objective actions that matter, and their subjective feelings are of no importance. Thus pacifists, by obstructing the war effort, are ‘objectively’ aiding the Nazis; and therefore the fact that they may be personally hostile to Fascism is irrelevant. I have been guilty of saying this myself more than once. The same argument is applied to Trotskyism. Trotskyists are often credited, at any rate by Communists, with being active and conscious agents of Hitler; but when you point out the many and obvious reasons why this is unlikely to be true, the ‘objectively’ line of talk is brought forward again. To criticize the Soviet Union helps Hitler: therefore ‘Trotskyism is Fascism’. And when this has been established, the accusation of conscious treachery is usually repeated. This is not only dishonest; it also carries a severe penalty with it. If you disregard people’s motives, it becomes much harder to foresee their actions ... To admit that an opponent might be both honest and intelligent is felt to be intolerable. It is more immediately satisfying to shout that he is a fool or a scoundrel, or both, than to find out what he is really like.

A caveat. To even talk about what Orwell said during the war is almost to invite endless rounds of humiliating idolatry and scholasticism. For those who like Orwell the patriot and anti-communist, there is some reactionary drivel written by him in different contexts to support their claim; for those who like Orwell the revolutionary, there is a great deal to support that too. I simply mention him in this context because he is frequently cited as an authority by Cold War liberals who rather fancy the idea that anyone who opposes them is a fool or a scoundrel, and because it puts Hitchens' own claim in an interesting light. Well, anyway, it so happens that the phrase and the conceptual clutter it entails is a cynosure of right-wing discourse, and it has nothing to do with the Left, or with Lenin. The language corresponds to a highly authoritarian political purview. Decoupling one's statements from any social reality that they may refer to, the terminology is usually an attempt to shift the argument from anything to do with truth-claims to one about loyalty and one's entitlement to speak and be taken seriously. It could loftily be described as 'testimonial injustice', since it is an attempt to determine the outcome of a debate according to the priorities of power and since it deflates the validity of certain claims on a basis other than their truth or otherwise. But the usual, and more mundane, term is 'bad faith'.

Labels: 'objectively', cold war, hitchens, lenin, orwell, useful idiots

Hegemony Begins At Home posted by lenin

Labels: aim, america, colonialism, genocide, native americans

Northern Jelly posted by lenin

A friend of mine who works in the City and is knowledgeable about the laws, regulations and internal procedures of investment banking said to me the other day: "Investors are the most pampered people in the world. There are so many laws and regulations designed to protect their rights, it's unbelievable." Laws designed to protect the property rights of the owners. Who would have imagined such a state of affairs? Well, today investors are predictably furious about the temporary nationalisation of Northern Rock. If a neoliberal government like ours undertakes a nationalisation, you know it's serious. But the owners aren't happy. Their shares, their shares! The socialistic government has stolen their money! Somehow they promise to mount a legal challenge, just as the shareholders in Railtrack did when the government allowed the company to go bankrupt rather than bailing it out with yet further billions in public money. The City is also alarmed. The government exists, as far as they are concerned, to defend their interests and as far as they are concerned that means the guarantee of private profits with public money, and private ownership with public risk. This sort of thing gives people ideas.

Nevertheless, there cannot be too much shock. Practically everyone knew that nationalisation was the only option in this case, and it was simply not plausible to continue ploughing in billions - the Bank of England has loaned the company £55bn, which is eleven times its value at its peak last year, and many more times its present value of £380m, while - while the owners floundered and frittered it all away. If anything, it would have been an obvious decision several months ago, long before a single penny of subsidy had been issued. The government has tried desperately to avoid it. And after all, the nationalisation is only a temporary measure designed as much to protect the institution and return to private capital in good condition once the economy gets back into good shape. And it will be run by highly paid individuals from the banking industry, such as Whatever the shareholders say, the rentier class will probably be quite relieved as a whole. Even Martin Wolf of the FT backs the nationalisation and gives a few reasons why the grasping bastards who have run the thing into the ground shouldn't be given any compensation. The Tories are arguing that this decision amounts to a 'humiliation' for Alistair Darling, and are raising the spectre of a return to the 1970s (a much maligned and underestimated decade). On the one hand, it's faintly embarrassing in itself that to change your mind is supposed to be a source of embarrassment, but on the other hand, Darling has sort of brought that on himself by straining so hard to avoid nationalisation. Anatole Kaletsky is predicting catastrophe on the absurd grounds that nationalisation is a form of market 'distortion' and anyway the government is crap at running things. Are there really people who still believe in the free market fairytales? Does he not know how his employer pays the bills?

Nationalization is often a poor substitute for socialisation rather than a synonym for it. It is usually a prophylactic, in fact, against such measures, a manageable half-way house. In this case, it doesn't even go as far as that. It is a temporary stop-gap, without any guarantees as yet for the workers in the bank, which places £100bn of public money on the line, with the company's future co-determined by a small number of experts from the industry, in order to return the business to private ownership as soon as possible. But still, it does give people funny ideas. You know, in a world where Morales is nationalising the gas industry, Chavez nationalised much of the oil industry (and was going to nationalise the whole banking industry), and even the Scottish executive is planning to fully nationalise the railways, the convenient myth that public ownership is 'unrealistic' is starting to look, well, unrealistic. And that raises all sorts of questions. We were told that privatising utilities would bring us more efficient, lower cost services. British Gas has just jacked up the prices and is making record profits, while energy companies like Npower do the same. The privatization of water has been disastrous in many places, and in the UK it has led to exorbitant costs and low maintenance. The privatised airports are uncomfortable and overcrowded because they allot most space to commercial facilities and provide little seating or other amenities. Privatization also led to increased unemployment and diminished bargaining power for labour. In each of the industries privatized by the Tories, employment fell dramatically - in steel by 75%, in railways by two thirds, and in electricity and water by about a half. Right-wing economists complain about over-employment, but the danger was always in the contrary temptation - to cut necessary staff and make the service unsound. And what is the point of having 'competition' in the banking industry when they all provide much the same lousy service and rip you off? Wouldn't a publicly owned and accountable industry be better for customers? And why should we have to pay for their crisis? If a company can't or won't keep its business running to keep people employed, shouldn't the government use its initiative, nationalise, defend jobs and engage in industrial conversion if necessary? Oh, Jesus no, don't start thinking like that! Winter of discontent, remember? You don't want to go back to the bad old days, especially not when everything is so fabulous.

Update: It looks like the unions' fears were right: the government is going to shed thousands of jobs from the bank.

Labels: capitalism, nationalisation, neoliberalism, northern rock, socialism

Oh, what a beautiful mourning. posted by lenin

I could almost have called this post 'How neoconservatives perish' if the title wasn't already spoken for. When Harry and Dave mourn together, you know a warmonger is dead. In this case, it is Tom Lantos, a Henry Jackson Democrat who recently kicked the bucket. I have little interest in Lantos, but since he is the object of post-mortem encomium and praise, it's worth looking at what the warmongers find so loveable.

Lantos is praised by his mourners for having resisted the Nazi death squads in Hungary, which is indeed immensely creditable. However, the sole reason he is really being mourned by these chumps is because he supported US foreign policy with a great deal of pecksniffery about human rights. Of course, he does have a reputation for supporting human rights, but it is entirely undeserved. He supported military appropriations for El Salvador's death squads at a time when the local ruling class was literally inclined toward genocide according to US analysts. He supported America's bombing of Tripoli, that actually killed up to 100 civilians, and in fact regretted that America was not aggressive enough in taking "punitive strikes" of that kind. When the Iran-Contra affair blew up, he told Oliver North that he regarded him with "respect, admiration and affection," and said it would be a privilege to make a financial contribution to a defense fund established by the lieutenant colonel's Naval Academy classmates. He defended the American state's incestuous relationship with the Saudi dictatorship on the grounds that it supplied a great deal of oil. It is true that Lantos co-founded the Congressional Human Rights Foundation, but then this was effectively a front for the PR firm Hill & Knowlton, which is often used to devise 'humanitarian' cover for American wars and pro-US dictators and ethnic cleansers and so on. The same Hill & Knowlton switchboard that forwarded calls for Lantos and chums was also performing the same service for Suharto and the leaders of the FRAPH in Haiti. The foundation received its cash from the NED, and also from that other front organisation, the Committee to Free Kuwait, and on its board was vice-chair of Hill & Knowlton, Frank Mankiewicz (one of Lantos' friends). One of his other concerns, the Congressional Human Rights caucus, was important in disseminating propaganda during the first Gulf War.

It is true that Lantos hadn't liked the idea of supporting either side in the Iran-Iraq war of the 1980s, but then his main concern was Israel (AIPAC loved him for his devotion to the blue and white), and I might add he never wasted a word criticising anything Israel might to do the Palestinians that he so reviled. He did pretend to support the Kurds of Iraq, but he was also a long-time defender of the Turkish state. He was a Holocaust-denier when it came to the Armenian genocide, until such time as Tayyip Erdogan's government made friends with Iran and Syria, at which point he abruptly turned on his heel and voted to censure Turkey's genocide - not, as he made clear, for any principled reason, but just to punish the Turkish government for its political mis-steps. In the end, Lantos was a miserable apologist for Bush's war in Iraq, having promised Colette Avital of the Israeli Labour Party that the US would impose "a pro-Western dictator, who will be good for us and for you". And he rebuked criticism of its scandalous Guantanamo gulag (which latter point made him a hero to the neocons). So, let's drop the pretense that he was a lifelong freedom fighter. Once you've supported death squads and dictators, and sacrificed the truth about one of the biggest extermination campaigns of the twentieth century on the altar of a geopolitical alliance with a racist state, you don't get to call yourself a supporter of human rights and a fierce opponent of genocide any more. In reality, he spent a great deal of time advocating American expansion and the aggressive pursuit of its interests, which often involved criticising the human rights record of opponents of the US while supporting America's worst atrocities. In pursuit of this, he commingled the exact same proportion of bombast, sanctimony and realpolitik with respect to American foreign policy that every neoconservative does. Like other hawkish Democrats, he just didn't share the neoconservative hostility to liberal nostrums such as environmentalism, gay rights or welfare.

Well, doesn't that just sum up the isomorphic relationship between neoconservatism and the 'pro-war Left'? Hitchens would probably be a neoconservative if they weren't hung up on religion and 1950s Americanism. Berman was persuaded of the neoconservative case over Iraq, and explains that he would have loved to be wholly with them, but they regarded his "drippy, left-wing" language about progress and so on with contempt, and he could never understand their domestic agenda in the 'culture wars'. BHL, interviewing William Kristol, was alarmed by the latter's support for the death penalty, but exuberant about a generation of American intellectuals committed to human rights and so on. They are so close, yet not close enough. They network together, dine together, appreciate one another's jokes, sign one another's petitions. Oh, but then some silly issue comes up at the dinner table. A neocon will say that the liberal support for egalitarian permissiveness dilutes the martial values and strong work ethic that America needs to defend itself. A liberal warmonger will reply that the neoconservative hostility to gender equality, gay rights, and social welfare makes a mockery of their support for the humanitarian agenda internationally. Yes, one neocon will reply, but not all neoconservatives oppose gay rights and it isn't as important as ensuring the conditions for freedom in which civil society can fight for such rights. But, the liberal hawk avers, not all neoconservatives supported democracy in Haiti and your record has been spotty to say the least, what with the mass terror in Central America - we have the advantage of consistency, or at least some of us do. Yes, the neocon godfather interrupts from the top of the table, but your 'consistency' is purchased at the price of impotence. If you don't play the game of real politics and aren't prepared to support America's real interests even if it means getting your hands bloody in the short-term, even if it means torture chambers and death squads and a bit of rape, then no one will listen to you and your words amount to nothing. The world isn't a nice place, much as we would like it to be, and we must do what is in America's interests, because those are the interests of democracy. So, one timorous liberal who isn't sure he should be there chips in, are you saying that support for human rights is a rhetorical component of the struggle for American supremacy which will eventually deliver strong liberal capitalist societies for most of the world? Doesn't that actually suck? At which point the rest of the table in one voice tell him to shut up.

Labels: democracy promotion, neocons, neoconservatism, obituary, pro-war 'left'

The danger of raising expectations and the native unwillingness to learn posted by lenin

Kermit Roosevelt opens his account of his involvement of the overthrow of Mossadegh with some remarks on how such a courageous and far-sighted decision turned into the ferment and revolt of 1979. The trouble, he concludes, is that by bringing in a modernising Shah, who did so much good for the country, they raised Iranian expectations well beyond what was reasonable, thus encouraging the rebellion. That's one fairly consistent theme in colonial ideology when it comes to explaining the ingratitude of the colonial subjects: throw the native a bone and he gets rather over-excited and starts clamouring for more than his due. Or, perhaps, as Charles Dickens explained after the Jamaican Rebellion, the native is of a low racial type, naturally indolent and disinclined to master his own very unfortunate circumstances, but forever demanding. Another typical response is to express grave regrets at the inability of the supposed beneficiaries of colonial rule to learn. "Very sadly, the inhabitants of this wilderness demonstrate an obdurate unwillingess to acquire the techniques of good government, sound finance, cultural sophistication and solid gender relations that we have tried to teach them. They are going half-mad, in fact, with fanatical passions that threaten to set them back for several millenia. We had better send in the gunboats." I think that summarises the British response to the Egyptian rebellion in the 1880s.

On this note, here is a headline from yesterday's New York Times: US Struggles to Tutor Iraqis in Rule of Law. You can forget the fact, if you like, that the US actually built up the present Iraqi administration almost from scratch, populated its departments with personnel from sectarian parties and death squads, parcelled out power on a sectarian-cum-patrimonial basis, drove a sectarian constitution, etc etc, and therefore any problems that 'Iraqis' might be having with the 'rule of law' are entirely down to the occupiers. That confounding hypocisy is now so typical, it's stereotypical. But so is the ideological structure into which it fits. I have not the time now, but - knowing the kinds of dreck I've just sighed over and tried to put out of my mind - I am certain that a careful sifting through the American press coverage of Iraq and Afghanistan over the last six years or so would yield dozens, if not hundreds of examples of this kind of colonial ideological pattern. The fact that this ideology is now professionalised through organisations like the NED and IRI, and that it has a professionalised lingo to boot - oh, you can imagine, 'exporting democracy', 'training country x in democratic practises', 'tutoring so-and-so in the rule of law', as if it was all a matter of step-by-step technocratic exercises rather than a pitch for hegemony - means that it has a faintly neutral air, despite its its invidious assumption that self-government is a cultural rather than political state. That is, of course, on purpose - but it shouldn't stop us from noticing the pedigree.

Labels: colonialism, imperialism, iraq, occupation, US imperialism

Nick Davies' Observer Hit posted by lenin

It is, of course, the fifth anniversary of the biggest antiwar march London has ever seen. Since I was there, and since I recall it with great clarity, I feel like making one thing clear. It was not just the cheerful, loud, bouyant event that was depicted in the newspapers - not, as David Aaronovitch angrily put it, one long Coca-Cola advert. It was not just the suspiciously festive occasion depicted in Ian McEwan's snide novel, Saturday (if keeping Saddam and all his evil works is better than removing him, the hero muses, isn't this joyous exuberance out of place?). Oh yes, there were the amusing placards, the amazed suburbanites, the angry young men, the choirs, the celebrities, the nuns and novices, the Buddhist monks, the costumed performers, the steel drums, and stirring oratory. Even that impeccable opportunist Charles Kennedy turned up. There was, really for the first time, some communication between the British Left and Muslims, stalls flogging the Koran and the kefiyeh yards away from stalls with the Communist Manifesto. It had everything rom Greens, CNDers, Labour supporters, trade unionists, anticapitalistas and the SWP (let's face it, you're never likely to miss us on a demonstration), to staid Liberal Democrats, the Muslim Association of Britain, previously apolitical teenagers, even a good portion of Tories. It was exultant, and it was what democracy looks like. But for my money it was also tense. I swear I walked into several angry arguments on the way home. One of them I intervened in, and it developed into an angry shouting match in someone's shop. And everyone knew that however big the march was, they still had the armies, the propaganda machine, the three-line whip, the knuckle-crunchers, most of the media machine, and the intelligence services. It would take something more, such as the collapse of Blair's cabinet, to force a retreat on the war. As we later discovered, we came quite close to that.

Nick Davies, looking back on the catastrophe that unfolded, started to pursue the story of how the media became an echo-chamber for the powerful, particularly with its almost completely uncritical recitation of the lies about weapons of mass destruction. His latest book, Flat Earth News, was borne of that enterprise. The book itself is a scathing critique of the media - not just some of it, all of it. The self-serving myths of media rectitude are taken to pieces. This is not Manufacturing Consent. It doesn't have the same analytical rigour, and it does have an irritating line or two about 'left-wing conspiracy theories', whatever that means. But still, from a journalist who has spent years working in the capitalist press, it turns out to be a genuinely radical and enlightening attack on his profession. Among the best chapters are his investigation of the origins of the propaganda about Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, and his scornful attack on The Observer. It is the latter which I want to talk about. We all remember The Observer's increasingly bilious attacks on the Left, its enthusiastic endorsements of Blair, and its endless stream of pro-war news items. Every Sunday was a new low. Even those of who don't think, as Nick Davies does, that the paper was ever "a flagship of the Left", were horrified by the sudden lurch into the sewer. MediaLens spent some time harrying The Observer's editor and writers over its propaganda, and yielded some shockingly ugly replies from the likes of editor Roger Alton and columnist Nick Cohen. (Alton, Davies confirms to no surprise, "swears when he breathes"). Thanks to Davies, we now have the inside scoop on how this came about.

Davies' most damaging dirt is on Kamal Ahmed, the man who - with no prior experience - was appointed political editor after Patrick Wintour moved to The Guardian. The more obviously qualified Andy McSmith threw in the towel, quit, and now writes for The Independent. He was appointed by the new editor, Roger Alton, whose sympathies were generally right-wing, and whose editorial emphasis was on more sex and sports on the front page. Alton was almost as politically clueless as Ahmed himself, and both were open to endless manipulation by Downing Street. Ahmed, after spending some time being treated with contempt by parliamentarians, made kissy faces at Number Ten, and was eventually recruited as an errand boy by Alastair Campbell. Though the news desk and several colleagues were increasingly pissed off at his regurgitating manifestly untrue stories from Downing Street, Ahmed was strongly defended by Roger Alton. While Ahmed's stories were increasingly laced with hallucinatory enthusiasm for Blair, Alton was forcing through pro-Blair leader columns. And while Ahmed spied on his fellow journalists and let Downing Street know in advance if controversial or critical stories were afoot, Alton regurgitated Blairite press releases as copy. Ahmed, flattered at being included in the New Labour inner circle, put himself at Blair's service by reproducing several false claims, most notably by reproducing uncritically the 'findings' of the 'dodgy dossier'.

The Observer suppressed several explosive stories during the build-up to the war despite uncritically producing flawed pro-war articles. The stories that were suppressed repeatedly include intelligence supplied from a high-placed source in the CIA who was willing to go on record as saying quite firmly that President Bush's line on weapons of mass destruction was a pack of lies. This was not some anonymous spook drip-feeding a gullible hack (we'll come to that in a minute). It was someone who was prepared to name himself, and the reporter in question was the highly experienced hack, Ed Vulliamy. Another was the extraordinary leak by Katherine Gunn of MI6 that was transmitted via Yvonne Ridley to The Observer. The story was that the US had authorised spying operations on key UN Security Council members. It required some work to back the story up, but the reporters working on it soon got the detail they needed. The revelation could, many Observer reporters thought, alter the votes on the UNSC and potentially stop the war. Alton and Ahmed were shit-scared of the story, and repeatedly shut it down. Even when it was clear that the UN Security Council vote would not go in Bush and Blair's favour, The Observer happily repeated Blair's line that all was well after a phone call with the man himself.

Some of the worst pro-war drivel was written by The Observer's now penitent David Rose, who seems to have been hooked into the MI6 matrix back in 1992, when the organisation's existence was first officially acknowledged by the government. In the guise of a new 'openness', MI6 offered to form a direct relationship with one of paper's reporters, and David Rose was just the trick. Unfortunately, his relationship with intel entailed the reproduction of a stream of falsehoods about Saddam's connections to Al Qaeda and his many large and frightening weapons. Rose attacked the antiwar movement and those like Scott Ritter who tried to tell the truth. And he believed, like many of the liberal hawks, in the inviolable integrity of the Iraqi National Congress - which Davies makes clear elsewhere is an astro-turf operation created by the CIA. By early 2004, Rose was seriously embarrassed by what he had been writing. But of course, it all fit neatly into a combative pro-war culture in The Observer, which alienated its antiwar reporters and many of its readers.

It was not enough for the government to have the right-wing press on side. It was not enough to have the tabloids belting out hysterical headlines every other day. As the Mirror showed, even the tabloids could get funny. They had to get the Labour-supporting press to back the war, especially the Sunday paper most widely read by Labour MPs. The Observer was thus a megaphone, right up until the last weeks before shock and awe was unleashed on Baghdad, for the British state. This is not only testament to how shockingly manipulable the media is, but also to how skilled the government is at manipulation. It would be refreshing if anything had been learned from the experience, but there is no evidence that this happened. On the contrary, the ebullient pro-war culture continued, Alton remained editor, Ahmed is only now leaving his job, and the usual stream of pro-war opinion and left-baiting persisted.

Labels: antiwar movement, media, roger alton, stop the war coalition, the observer

We didn't stop the fire. posted by lenin

But we may have stopped the next one.

Labels: 15 February 2003, antiwar movement, iraq, stop the war coalition

Hillary Clinton's latest recruit posted by lenin

I try not to follow these things in too much detail. The primaries are already pretty much dead. McCain is the GOP candidate, without doubt. I notice that some of Obama's supporters are not only moist in every crevice, but actually anticipating victory. His recent wave of victories in some surprising states has added to that, but Hillary is still in the lead in polls and she's probably going to take Texas. There isn't much of a difference of principle either way, and I'm not going to get worked up about choosing between the two. However, I do despise this Clinton couple. Bill in particular has shown what a nasty scumbag he always was - Hitchens was right to notice how adept he was with the race card. (Pity Hitchens is now a ranting fucking Islamophobe, as it sort of takes the force out of his argument).

And I'm particularly intrigued that the Clintons have chosen to highlight the support of the former Senator, Bob Kerrey. Kerrey, who first nominated Clinton in December, is one of those Democrats who can find a democratic or humanitarian rationale for any atrocity, and he remains a fervent apologist for the Iraq war. He was also, of course, the man who first dropped those Muslim-baiting comments on Obama. However, what is staggering about Kerrey is that he is an actual, real-life, open and shut war criminal. I don't mean in the usual sense that he has voted for wars of aggression, or even just that he is a decorated Vietnam Vet, although this does have some bearing on his Bronze Star.

There's a rather lengthy, and disgustingly apologetic story about Kerry's Vietnam exploits in the New York Times, which meditates a great deal on his suffering and conscience. He led a crew in Thanh Phong who, as part of US military policy, deemed a peasant house to be fair game, went inside and killed everyone inside with knives. They murdered an elderly man, a woman and children under twelve, not soldiers. While Kerrey maintains that he stayed outside and let the others go in there and stab up the family, one of his colleagues says he entered and helped murder the old man. Kerrey explains: "Standard operating procedure was to dispose of the people we made contact with ... Kill the people we made contact with or we have to abort the mission". So, the Clinton campaign's message is that it is soft on genocidal war crimes and soft on the causes of genocidal war crimes.

Labels: barack obama, bob kerrey, genocide, hillary clinton, john mccain, primaries, war criminal

Secularism is a chimera: my posish on the Archbish. posted by lenin

I've written a piece about this Sharia bullshit for Socialist Worker. It goes without saying that I oppose the Islamophobic tirades, but I hint at a problem with the Archbishop's position. For although Muslims should absolutely have the same rights as everyone else, the Archbishop's call is for a kind of 'integration' that I think enhances the power of the state to interfere in religious life. To expand a bit, I note that New Labour have been rather happy to try and co-opt a version of Islam that is acceptable to them. To give the state any more authority to determine in matters of religion, by separating an Islam that is compatible with "British values" from one that isn't, is to give it the ability to play 'good Muslim' versus 'bad Muslim'.

The liberal response to this is not only based on a misconception of what Williams said, but actually a misunderstanding of what secularism is. Many think that the reformation was fundamentally about separating religion from politics. It is true that Lutheran morality separates secular from sacred power, but the first legal achievement of the Reformation was the Peace of Augsburg, which formalised the non-separation of religion and politics by giving dictatorial power on confessional matters to local rulers. Really, secularism began with the policies of 'tolerance' pursued by early modern 'Enlightened' despots and liberal states, and it hasn't advanced much beyond that. I think the truth is that a complete separation of church and state is a chimera as long as the two exist as potentially competing sources of authority in the same territory. The state will inevitably seek to control religion, and religion will inevitably seek to gain a niche of authority for itself. The question is to what extent and in what way.

And here it becomes problematic. The capitalist state has no basis for choosing between conceptions of the good. It is like asking the phone company to tell you what's right and wrong. Its processes and hierarchies are completely insulated from the spaces in which conceptions of the good might be elaborated and contested, and it will inevitably subordinate such questions to its own drives. The only way that the state will be enacting a conception of the good that isn't entirely arbitrary or subordinate to its own priorities is if it is responding to popular pressure. In the long run, these dilemmas point to the need to move beyond the state, toward a maximally democratised public life. That is what direct democracy means.

Labels: capitalism, islam, islamophobia, religion, secularism

Only Following Orders posted by lenin

There are two cliches about the Nazis: one is that there wasn't a single one to be found after WWII; the other is that those who were discovered were only following orders. Both are reasonably well-founded. But actually, as Enzo Traverso points out in The Origins of Nazi Violence, the alienation that this implies, the separation between conception and action, was already embedded in the capitalist social pattern. It is normal in the post-Enlightenment era for the execution to take place without an executioner, so to speak. From the factory to the abbatoir to the death camp, the person who pushes the button is not morally responsible, but a part of the machinery. All that occurred to me while reading this piece on the life of Paul Tibbetts Jr, the pilot who dropped the bomb on Hiroshima (and never lost a night's sleep over it):

“I’ve got a standard answer on that. I felt nothing about it….I'm sorry for Takahashi and the others who got burned up down there, but I felt sorry for those who died at Pearl Harbor, too....People get mad when I say this but--it was as impersonal as could be. There wasn’t anything personal as far as I’m concerned, so I had no personal part in it…” "It wasn’t my decision to make morally, one way or another…I did what I was told--I didn't invent the bomb, I just dropped the damn thing. It was a success, and that’s where I’ve left it.…I can assure you that I sleep just as peacefully as anybody can sleep….”

...

Truman invited him to the Oval Office in 1948 and asked him, “What do you think?” Tibbets responded, “Mr. President, I think I did what I was told.” Truman replied, slapping the table, “You’re damn right you did, and I’m the guy who sent you. If anybody gives you a hard time about it, refer them to me.” In The Tibbets Story, however, he relates the conversation a little differently with Truman advising him, “Don’t you ever lose any sleep over the fact that you planned and carried out that mission. It was my decision. You had no choice.”

Labels: 'totalitarianism', capitalism, culture of genocide, hiroshima

Israeli Minister on the case for the levelling Gaza posted by lenin

The Israeli press recognises the rational strategic-defensive motives behind Hamas' use of Qassam rockets. However, the claim that the rocket fire is somehow 'irrational' is an essential part of Israel's propaganda plank. They must decouple the rocket fire from their own far more aggressive attacks on Gaza, or they must reverse the chain of causality so that their crimes are seen as acts of self-defense. Well, a new low has been reached in the annals of Israeli 'collective punishment', if Israeli Army Radio is to be believed.

Mark Elf at Jews Sans Frontieres received a message indicating that the Army Radio had broadcast the following statement: "Eradicate all towns in Gaza from where rockets are fired." Quite reasonably, he checked it out, assuming it was a grotesque exaggeration or something that some Nazi said. Not so. The sentence itself appeared on Haaretz's news ticker, but Ynet quoted Sheetrit explaining in a cabinet session that: "any other country would have already gone in and level the area, which is exactly what I think the IDF should do – decide on a neighborhood in Gaza and level it ... We should let them know 'you have to leave, this area will be taken down tomorrow' and just take it down – that will show them we mean business."

Labels: collective punishment, gaza, idf, Israel, palestine

Another pogrom, chaps? posted by lenin

That's all I can stands, I can't stands no more. I was not about to comment on all this 'Sharia' business, because the controversy is largely manufactured on the basis of what turns out to be a rather conservative and moderate statement by the Archbishop of Canterbury. Of course, there are more interesting ways to respond to such a statement than by either hysterically over-reacting or simply seconding it as a common sense bit of multiculturalism. So, why waste time refuting acres of sensationalist trash when the usual effect is to incite even more while trapping one in a self-defeating binary? But look at the picture to your left. This cover is an attempt by The Independent on Sunday to be cutting edge, by which I mean racist and alarmist. The story that it links to is actually a rather glib piece of work that trivialises domestic violence, and while it does externalise such violence, it doesn't at any point make the explicit equation "Honour Killings = Muslims". But then most communication is not verbal, and the cover says everything. It makes the formula quite explicit through its selected image, and it is inserted into the context of hysterical overreaction to Rowan Williams' musings in such a way as to provoke a chain of further hysterical overreaction. The offended secular liberal would be instantly aflame, seething with a potent and toxic mixture of resentment and sanctimony: "What is the Archbishop thinking, and doesn't he realise that this is what Sharia law will mean, and why must we let them get away with everything, and isn't this just Political Correctness Gone Mad, and why do we always have to apologise for our own culture, it's just not fair, and isn't it about time we just stopped being sorry and said to Muslims enough is enough..."

The reaction to Williams' statement adequately expresses the three basic coordinates of contemporary Islamophobia, veering between burning resentment about Them getting 'special treatment', fear and loathing of the 'Muslim threat', and finally a vague 'humanitarianism' in which whitey rescues Asian Babes from their non-white male captors. The first two being the usual racist discourse, and the latter being a staple of colonial ideology. Incidentally, these reactions are being blended in roughly the same measure in both the crude right-wing tabloids and in the broadsheets. (One outstanding exception, which beats all competition by its single-minded devotion to a daily dose of anti-Muslim racism is the Daily Express, which - like most pets - is coming to resemble its owner: as unadulterated scum). It is clear that honour killings are not to do with Islam, but it is equally clear that liberals who think it does are barely in a state to tell what time of day it is never mind check their facts. The Independent's headline says that there are 17,000 'honour' attacks each year, which is based on the following rumination by Commander Steve Allen of the Association of Chief Police Officers of the 'honour-based violence unit':

"We work on a figure which suggests it is about 500 cases shared between us and the Forced Marriage Unit per year," he said: "If the generally accepted statistic is that a victim will suffer 35 experiences of domestic violence before they report, then I suspect if you multiplied our reporting by 35 times you may be somewhere near where people's experience is at."

I would point out that - as alarming as this is - the story drastically underestimates the scale of domestic violence in the UK. There are also 12 million incidents of domestic violence each year, 89% of which is directed at a female spouse, and this accounts for 16% of all violent crime in the UK. One incidence of domestic abuse is reported to the police every minute. One in four women will experience this in their lifetimes, according to official statistics. On average, two women are killed each week by a current or former partner. So, you could say that's over 100 'honour' killings a year. (These figures from the Home Office and the NHS). If we followed the ACPO method, the figures would be even higher (one report of domestic violence each minute would actually yield more than 18 million incidents per year). By anyone's standards, that is a staggering amount of violence. Only a fraction of it is headline news, however, because only a fraction of it can be spuriously attributed to Islam and Shari'a law.

The three basic elements of Islamophobia mentioned above are all present in the hysteria about what Muslim women wear: resentment (why should you get to hide your face?); fear and loathing (what have you got to hide?); and patronising 'concern' (that veil hides bruises and tears, sister, so kindly allow whitey to liberate you). The latter component is not particular to the centre-left press, but it is essential to the amour-propre of the liberal that liberalism alone is sufficiently attuned to the iniquity of misogynistic violence. Far from being in any sense feminist, however, The Independent's alarmism involves a particular kind of misogyny. In the first instance, by its omissions, it seriously understates the real level of violence against women in this country. Secondly, by its distortions, it transfers the blame for it onto a spotlit minority. Thirdly, in its hateful depiction of Muslim women (especially those wearing the niqab), it contributes to a battery of imagery and claims that has actually resulted in several instances of violence against Muslim women, such as this and this.

I fear we are in for a spell. Every time the media goes on another Muslim-hunt, it is almost inevitable that the politicians will find something to say about it that makes it worse. Gordon Brown has attempted to distinguish his government by attenuating the naked provocations of the Blair era. He will not risk another humiliation in a Labour heartland, if he can avoid it. But he is also an opportunist and it would not be at all out of character for Mr "British Jobs For British Workers" to join the offensive. And if he doesn't, his silence will surely be remarked upon by David Cameron, who is almost as repellent a charlatan as Blair was. The logic of parliamentary politics almost dictates that the two main party leaders have to compete for the lowest common denominator on this question. In Autumn 2006, the Blair government was sputtering to its dismal end, and in its decrepitude launched one attack after another on Muslims. Cameron joined in, and the newspaper editors collectively creamed their pants. Jonathan Freedland wrote: "If this onslaught was about Jews, I would be looking for my passport". A pre-pogrom atmosphere about Muslims is being cultivated in this country. The liberal press bears a great deal of responsibility for that.

Labels: feminism, islam, islamophobia, misogyny, muslims, violence

Tips on the moral resuscitation of imperialism posted by lenin

The last time the American empire shamed itself to thoroughly was in Indochina. After that horrendous sequence of atrocities, which compounded the traditional American support for Third World fascism, few were anxious to have another go. Instead of major theatre wars and mass aerial bombardment, the US returned to its classical technique of 'counterinsurgency' and repression via client-states and movements until more propitious circumstances for more adventurous action availed themselves. But in the meantime, someone had to work hard on burying the ghosts.

So, the moral arbiters of empire directed the spotlight at repression in the post-war states of Vietnam and Cambodia. Noam Chomsky and Ed Herman correctly noted, in After The Cataclysm: Postwar Indochina & The Reconstruction of Imperial Ideology, that this was part of an offensive to reclaim territory lost to the antiwar movement. Forensically, and with a care for detail that is unusual in most political writing, they studied the claims about refugees from Indochina, the 'Boat People', the scale and extent of Khmer Rouge atrocities and so on. They pointed out that accounts in Western media were not merely hysterical, oversimplified and exaggerated - they usually simply ignored the brutalising impact of very recent US assaults on those countries. In a way, the crises were cited as proof that Western imperialism was right all along - these people were unfit for self-government, and the movements they supported were "pathological", "death-obsessed", "totalitarian" cults, to borrow the terminology of Paul Berman. Rather than in part reflecting the recently visited barbarism, it became the reason why that barbarism had been necessary all along, and why it should not have been abandoned.

Of course, we know what that book became famous for: a hysterical chorus of denunciations told the world that Chomsky & Herman were apologists for the Khmer Rouge. You can still read about this today, in the shrill (yet curiously imprecise) censures of Paul Berman and Francis Wheen. They will let anything pass on the part of the American Empire (oh, stop harping on Vietnam, stop blithering about the Contras, so what about the FRAPH, etc), but this thought crime on Chomsky's part will never be forgotten. I do not wish to rehearse that old controversy, however much others wish to - anyone can read the book in question, compare it with the criticisms and convince themselves that the critics were largely charlatans. However, the durability of that slippery critique and particularly its insistent return to prominence in the recent writings of 'anti-totalitarian' liberals points to the pressing need, once more, to restore the moral authority of the empire. Well, they're seriously embattled. The American empire isn't simply violent and venal - it looks it. Something has to be found to reinvigorate the old empire spirit. Something which defuses the ripple of awed disgust when someone mentions American war-making and humanitarianism in the same context. Darfur isn't doing the trick. Iran isn't a popular choice. It remains a staple of imperialist ideology that however much the US tortures Iraq, a post-occupation Iraq will be worse - but this is an increasingly difficult position to sustain.

So, I have some suggestions for the liberal imperialists (call it devil's advocacy). For a start, stop. Instead of insisting that Iraq was the right idea all along, it is time to fall back on the 'pragmatic' critique that it was the 'wrong war' or 'badly executed', or 'doomed to fail' because of 'hubris'. Some of you have already got that message very clearly, and are even now preparing your intellectual rebirth, while cannily relying on the forgetfulness of audiences. But some of you just don't know how to shut up about it. Second, change the subject. Talk about religion, instead. There are those who can be persuaded that attacking religious minorities is a progressive and noble thing to do, and others who are prepared to blame the whole mess, whatever it happens to be, on Sayyid Qutb. The overlap is not perfect, but you will find that attacking Islam is congruent with a whole host of foreign policy priorities - competing with China in Sudan, preparing for an attack to discipline the Iranian leadership, bombing Syria, keeping up the two occupations, supporting the atrocities in Gaza, warning the Pakistani elite to keep them under thumb, and so on. Third, stop frightening people about the wrong things. You think that when you rant and babble about Ahmadinejad and nukes, people are going to get scared of Iran. They aren't - it's you they're worried about. Wipe the foam from the edges of your mouth, sit down, and shut up for a bit. Luckily for you, many people will be more receptive to your message when Hillary or Obama is in the White House. Just take it easy - the world is not short of crises for you to exploit, so just conserve your energies and keep your powder dry for the moment. Fourth, attack Noam Chomsky. Yes, this does force you to fabricate and woof and slabber, but you don't have a choice in the matter. And anyway, no one is going to correct you or point out what a fool you are in the newspapers and magazines that you work for. So, get cracking. In a few years, you can return to slapping one another on the back and feting the humanitarianism of the masters.

Labels: after the cataclysm, chomsky, darfusudan, herman, imperial ideology, iraq, sudan

Putting Gaza Back in the Cage posted by lenin

The all-too-brief moment of liberation for Gaza is over. The cage doors have been slammed shut, elopers shot, and air strikes on the captive population resumed. Israel's collective punishment having been sanctified by the Jerusalem-based Supreme Court last week (the reduction of power to Gaza begins today), and its past war crimes officially denied, the IDF can rampage through its open air prison at liberty. As often as it likes. The IDF are also looking at ways to stop anything like the breach of that wall ever happening again - bad example, you see. What if people starting doing that in the West Bank? And Egypt's coppers are back on the beat, shooting at Gazan protesters. The brief exhiliaration of crossing the border now gives way to a darker reality - the so-called "shopping spree" didn't begin to bring even a fraction of the goods that were needed.

Starvation is afoot. The FAO's last 'Food Security and Vulnerability' assessment, which was carried out in 2006, found that only a third of all Palestinians were food secure. The Gaza Strip is particularly vulnerable, since it cannot produce more than 1% of the wheatflour that makes up 80% of the basic diet. The report notes that "24% of food insecure non-refugees are located in West Bank and 58% are located in the Gaza Strip". (Since we tend to forget about the refugee population, who are given no rights in the 'two state' consensus, it is worth pointing out that they are in the worst condition when it comes to basic nutrition). The last time a survey of Palestinian incomes was taken, to my knowledge, was Oxfam's report in early 2007, which found that poverty had increased by 30% over the previous year. As they note, this is not only because international donors suspended aid upon the election of Hamas. It is because Israel collects Palestinian tax revenue and withholds it. The number of Palestinians living on less than $2.10 a day doubled in 2006. And so, with the economy subject to a blockade, with tax revenues withheld, with aid withdrawn, and with power supplies now cut, Israel is back to its policy of "putting the Palestinians on a diet" (as Dov Weisglass once described it).

Labels: gaza, hamas, Israel, palestine, rafah

Canadian Tories cock up their war posted by lenin

Guest post by redbedhead:

Labels: 'war on terror', afghanistan, canada, NATO

Talking to MPAC posted by lenin

I was invited to give a talk to MPAC activists on Sunday, about combatting Islamophobia in the 'new media'. Well, I thought, you've asked for it. I accepted the invitation, fully intending to be the extremist of the day, which wasn't that difficult given how moderate the other speakers appeared to be. It was a well-attended, professional event, with powerpoint presentations and a few media people in evidence. What to say about a topic like this? Well, MPAC is focussed on lobby-like activity, so much of the discussion that I saw was about how to react to negative press stories, how to compose a good complaint, who to contact - practical advice for specific, determinate interventions to disrupt the propaganda machine. Hopefully, this would have the cumulative effect of reversing the tide somewhat. Aside from the limitations of such an approach (more on that in a minute), I had to wonder how this would apply to the 'new media', the blogosphere, where literally anything goes, where there is even less accountability than the corporate media, where anonymity provides the basis for intensified viciousness and dishonesty? Who to complain to? Would they even be interested? And what do I know about lobbying on the internet? If I knew anything about lobbying, my readership wouldn't have stayed roughly the same for about two years.

So, I decided to keep it as political as possible. I told the audience what they already knew about the scale of the problem, cited some statistics, drew a correlation between violent anti-Muslim rhetoric and the incidence of anti-Muslim violence, and so on. I told them what they already knew about the history of Islamophobia, its origins in the European empires, particularly the British Empire, and the appropriation of its tropes by the American one, especially as it got more involved in the Middle East. I said something about the importance of racism for justifying and maintaining the racial hierarchy in the UK, and the way that anti-Asian racism (manifest in the response to the riots in formerly industrial northern cities) had been commuted into Islamophobia after 9/11. Not merely to justify the attack on Iraq, the arms to Israel, the support for the assault on Lebanon, the torture flights, the crackdowns on civil liberties and so on - but also to frustrate challenges to New Labour's domestic agenda. I said that given that the war on terror is a structural component of the geopolitical landscape for some decades to come now, the problem will get worse. I noted that the stereotypes about Muslims were never far from the mouths of US soldiers who were busy torturing and killing Iraqis. I mean to say, Islamophobia is not just about ugly words - it is a rationale for murder.

But that still left me with five or ten minutes to ruminate on the 'new media', about which I have precious little to say. There has been some research into Islamophobia on the internet - well, actually, one study by a guy named Goran Larsson, but it draws rather obvious conclusions. There are plenty of Islamophobic blogs, across the political spectrum, many of them drawing their prestige from support in the 'old media', but these are rarely susceptible to lobbying. There is definitely a case for activists to use the internet to combat Islamophobia, and it is easy to set up blogs and so on if you have access to the internet. You can have mailing lists set up free of charge. There are a number of useful blogs which combat Islamophobia, including Islamophobia Watch and to some extent Arab Media Watch, which was represented by its president at the meeting (more about him in a minute). And given that this should come out of activity in the day to day world, I feel the same alignments should apply - hook up with the antiwar blogs, the pro-Palestine blogs, alert them to any offensive material, alert them to important information, set up mailing lists and subscribe to the mailing lists of others. Er. That's it, I suppose.

Except, of course, that isn't it. Someone with better technical knowledge than I possess could probably have added a lot more on that front. However, as I say, I think lobbying tactics are self-limiting. They bind you to the processes provided by the news organisations themselves. Yes, they have a complaints procedure. Yes, they have some accountability. Yes, it's worthwhile. Yes, it somestimes gets results. And yet, it's like swimming against a tide of sewage. Despite the best efforts of very committed, knowledgable and articulate groups and individuals, it gets worse. The chap from Arab Media Watch, who is one of those committed and knowledgable types, and a considerably cooler customer than I, was eager to overturn the "conspiratorial, monolithic" view of the media. Well, look at you, Mary Sue! I mean, the nerve. He said that the media is composed of individuals, and that there are lots of good people in it (ie, not all of them are scum, not even in the Murdoch press - I'm giving his speech a liberal dose of interpretation here). And he said that a lot of them are simply pressed for time, so unfortunately groups like Arab Media Watch have to do their job for them. There is some truth in this - but, alas, a lot of truth is also obscured by it. And this leads me to my earlier reasoning. For, to talk about the origins of Islamophobia and Orientalism, and its structural relationship to imperialism - even in a flustered, syncopated fashion that one occasionaly affects in front of an attentive audience - is to at least imply that the media isn't half of your woes. After all, these ideologies are not usually produced in the first instance by the media, and their daily reproduction is not necessarily the result of proprietorial pressure. There are broader ideological formations that are produced and reproduced through a variety of vectors, including universities, think-tanks, various components of the state, and so on. Historically, these formations have been produced through relations of power and domination, and their persistence is a testament to the endurance of those relations beyond the formal colonial system. It seems to me that if this wasn't so, then the over-worked hack would not find it so easy, so automatic, to revert to well-worn types. It would not seem somehow natural for said hacks to conjure with phrases like "Muslim extremism", "Islamic militancy", "Islamic terrorism" and "Muslim plot". Nor would it seem obvious that 'honour killing' was something specific to Islam (which, of course, it is not). Avoiding a monolithic view of the media does not entail the neglect of structure. This has strategic consequences, since it would imply that the way to combat Islamophobia is to produce countervailing ideological poles and alignments - by which I mean, if the main source of Islamophobia at the minute is the 'war on terror', the best riposte is the antiwar movement.

I didn't say all that latter part, actually - somehow my eloquence deserted me at that precise moment. But I definitely thought it very loudly, and in that precise sequence. And of course, I did also use neuro-linguistic programming to convert the audience to revolutionary socialism, but I can't guarantee that my gyratory, spluttering, umming and aaahing delivery would have made this very effective. And I was also interviewed for a radio programme afterwards, during which I managed to impugn the reputation of this Disunited Queendom and many of its inhabitants, who can all considers themselves officially pwned. Anyway, best of luck to MPAC in all of their efforts, and long may they rile the government and its internet claque.

Labels: 'war on terror', antiwar movement, islamophobia, mpac

Sovietology posted by lenin

Intellectual conformity, American style:

A reader unfamiliar with Western scholarly literature on Soviet history would ... reasonably expect to find it full of rival schools and intense debate on this central issue ... All the more astonishing, then, is the fact that until recently the question produced very little dispute in academic Soviet studies. Instead, during the expansion of the field between the late 1940s and 1960s, a remarkable consensus of interpretation formed on the subject of Bolshevism and Stalinism. Surviving the rise and decline of various methodologies and approaches in Sovietology, the consensus posited an uncomplicated conclusion: No meaningful differences or discontinuities existed between Bolshevism and Stalinism, which were fundamentally the same, politically and ideologically ... Stalinism, according to the consensus, was the logical, rightful, triumphant, and inevitable continuation, or outcome, of Bolshevism. For twenty years, this historical interpretation was axiomatic in almost all scholarly works on Soviet history and politics. (Stephen F Cohen, Rethinking the Soviet Experience: Politics and History Since 1917, Oxford University Press, 1984, p 39).

Labels: 'totalitarianism', cold war, sovietology, ussr

"The Saxons are coming, our freedom is nigh!" posted by lenin

Who would have thought that the above line would have been dreamed up by a New York poet? Written on the eve of the Mexican War, this was a concise exposition of the doctrine of humanitarian intervention. The line, put into the mouth of a joyous Mexican, foretold the liberation of Mexico (from Mexico itself, which had achieved independence some decades before) by the United States army, then still unproblematically considered an Anglo-Saxon army, the sort of community of white heroes that would populate the fascist dreamscape in the twentieth century. However, from other quarters, a more deadly intent was expressed. The southern slaveocracy fancied the prospects of expanding the sway of its 'peculiar institution' (you know the one). For others, the solution was obvious. Extermination. Extermination of the "mongrel race", who could by no means be integrated into America's white republic.



All were agreed that the US was engaged in an historic mission of "peopling the New World with a noble race" as Walt Whitman put it. (Don't let me deceive you. Whitman was a brilliant poet, who later shed his youthful imperialism, and who also had the good sense to do it with Oscar Wilde when he got the chance.) There was some dissent, and not only from racists who simply thought that going to war at this time would result in the racial dilution of America. Henry David Thoreau, for example, wrote 'On Civil Disobedience' in part as a polemic against the conquest of Mexico and also against the institution of slavery. Because, though the Saxons were storming under the banner of liberty, they were intent on slavery. The same people would spend much of the decade following Hidalgo-Guadalupe subsidising various filibusters to head into Latin America and set up slavery plantations - William Walker famously made himself the president of Nicaragua for a brief period, and during that time reintroduced the institution of slavery, which had been abolished. (Perhaps the 19th century filibusters have a twentieth century equivalent. After all, didn't Henry Ford try to set up a utopian community on the Amazon called - I shit you not - Fordlandia? Not slavery, but certainly a colonial effort and one that collapsed quite quickly). And they would try, during the Civil War, to form a southern slave alliance with Brazil.

Perhaps only a New York intellectual could have believed that a war conceived by James Polk and the southern Democratic slaveocracy to conquer Mexico was about to deliver freedom. Or, more precisely, only a New York intellectual steeped in romantic nationalism. But then, it isn't altogether uncommon for people to get the strange idea that they, who do not wage it, will determine what a war will be about. Intellectuals, for some reason, have a curious propensity to believe that they author such ventures, ordain ends, discriminate between means, and determine the outcomes. And they have an equal and contrary propensity to believe that, when things go wrong, their words are at any rate without consequence.

Labels: democratic party, genocide, james polk, mexican war, racism, slavery

What's Missing From This Picture? posted by lenin

The Washington Post has created an illustration of the progress of the neocons. As you will see, it includes the usual deliberately confusing mess. It includes William F Buckley, a traditional High Tory intellectual, in the neoconservative estuary, simply because of his connection with James Burnham. It includes Libertarian strangeness from Ayn Rand, which doesn't strictly belong. It includes people who never really became neocons, and it excludes those who did but started as straightforward Cold War Liberals. But it does so all to the purpose of linking it all back to a dead revolutionary, who in all likelihood would have had the neocons taken on a blind date with a firing squad (I like that phrase). As usual, the main vector for this is the Shachtmanites, although most of those neocons who came under the influence of Shacthman did so late in his career, when he had become a leading right-wing social democrat and a supporter of the US in Vietnam. However, there is one very important thing missing from this picture (click on the image below). If anyone can tell me what it is in three syllables or less, they will win a pat on the head.

Labels: cold war, liberals, neoconservatism

A spot of sun worship posted by lenin

Click on the pic if you want to see what London looked like today (usual soul-deadening horror, but sun-bleached):



For some more cheerful, holiday-style snaps from last week, see here.

Labels: london, photographs

The Israel Lobby and its Discontents posted by lenin

Let me see if I can get this straight. In Palestine, there is a state that was created out of the murder and ethnic cleansing of hundreds of thousands of the original inhabitants, which is fuelled by racism and religious fanaticism, and which has consistently murdered Palestinians and imposed forms of segregation on them in lieu of a just settlement. If you criticise this from any prominent position, you're likely to be called an anti-Jewish racist - and there's no Israel Lobby? Conversely, there is in the United States a powerful coalition of energy interests and finance-capital, interlocked with a state which has been engaged in the serious business of empire for over a century. It has built a coalition of popular support involving hard right Christians, racist crackers and militaristic gun nuts, behind a hard-right administration. But if it attacks an oil-rich country in the Middle East, it needs the permission of a small country in the Levant? Only theory can resolve this dreary deadlock. Grey is the tree of life, but theory is plush and radiant in whatever colour.

For its critics, the Israel Lobby thesis is a 'conspiracy theory' whose terms are drawn from the lexicon of the hard right. Such is the case made by the Decentist Alan Johnson in a disreputable attack on Perry Anderson. Johnson is an ex-marxist, a liberal, and an 'antitotalitarian'. He edits Democratiya (the wags call it Decentiya - or, as it gets better with age, Dementiya), a quarterly online magazine which promotes the virtues of such inspiring figures as Tony Blair, Paul Berman, Joshua Muravchik and Kanan Makiya. He has a theory about Anderson that begs for the coherence of the average 'conspiracy theory'. Apparently, Anderson's support for the thesis, which is shared by a number of people on the Left - quite mistakenly in my view - is an indication of his unwillingness to get a life, move on, forget about the failures of communism and embrace the democratic revolution. In persisting with his scathing critique, without the accompanying socialist vision, Anderson has apparently gone all nihilistic. He don't believe in nothing no more. Anderson was never what you would call jolly, and he does appear to have resigned himself to capitalism for the rest of his natural existence - but what has this to do with the 'Israel Lobby'? Further, if Johnson wants to put Anderson's comments into some kind of intellectual context, it is neither charitable nor sensible to invoke Pat Buchanan when Johnson knows of a far more worthy intellectual inspiration - namely, the recent brick-sized book by two realist scholars in International Relations who decry the power of precisely such a Lobby. But the relevance of Buchanan is obviously that is widely regarded as an anti-semite. Johnson is not stupid enough to accuse Perry Anderson of anti-semitism. On the contrary, he asserts that "Anderson is no anti-semite". But he certainly implies that the 'Israel Lobby' thesis is anti-semitic. Is it?

You would have to be an ostrich to miss the peculiar influence and power of that community of organisations and individuals which supports Israel - particularly in the United States, but also in France, for example, where a spate of court cases erupted in 2002, with various respected figures accused of anti-semitism. The hysterical slanders, the concerted attacks on academic institutions, the attempts to regulate what future generations are permitted to think, are serious. This is not a marginal matter of energetic 'lobbying' for a potentially unpopular cause. It is about shoring up a consensus. For example, HR 3077 was not passed by the Senate, but it was passed unanimously by the House of Representatives in October 2003. What, you ask, is HR 3077? Well, following testimony to Congress by Stanley Kurtz of the Hoover Institute, in which Kurtz regaled horrified Congresspersons with tales of Edward Said's evil (based largely on what he had been told by his neoconservative pal Martin Kramer), a law was devised with the specific intention of forcing universities to take a more supportive view of US Middle East policy or risk losing federal funding. It was defeated in the Senate after a massive academic backlash. Clearly, that is not solely about defending the reputation of little Israel, but that fact is germane to my broader argument - the idea that you can separate the influence of pro-Israeli opinion and lobbying from broader US policy designs, particularly those of the hard right, is incoherent. But you get the point - these efforts to discipline expressible opinion are no small beer.

What is less persuasive is the idea that the United States can't do what it wants with the Middle East because of Israel's local Greek Chorus. And that is what is at the heart of the 'Israel Lobby' thesis. Anderson offers one example, that of the failure to provide a state for Palestine, which (so the argument runs) the US could have enforced decades ago to no great strategic loss and some benefit. For Walt and Mearsheimer, there is hardly a mis-step in US Middle East policy whose origins do not lie in the fateful lobby - and practically every step has been a mis-step, in their view. And the pair may have felt vindicated when the very same retinue of neoconservatives and Zionists and reactionaries launched several jets of scalding projectile invective their way, while the ubiquitous 'Lobby' ensured their speeches were cancelled and their names irreparably associated with the word 'anti-Semite'. But still, their case is unpersuasive. One example given by Walt & Mearsheimer is when, in 2002, the Bush administration told Israel to stop re-invading the West Bank and withdraw immediately. "Now," they declared with a force that would never have come from the Clinton administration, "means now." Shortly, Colin Powell - who was sent to Israel to convey this message - was dumped on by every neocon crank in the land. Those furthest to the right in the US spectrum, including Tom Delay and others, harried Bush over his alleged 'betrayal' of Israel. Public rallies, senior flak, newspaper editorials - so much egg-throwing and booing from a disgruntled audience. But the Lobby, resourceful to the end, was also at work pressuring Congressmen and women to support an increased stipend for Israel - an increase that Powell was opposed to, and that he tried to pressure against, to no avail. President Bush thus "reluctantly" signed the legislation.

Part of the trouble with Mearsheimer and Walt is that, where they do not rely on impressionism, they assume what they are supposed to be proving. An obvious question here is exactly what was so "reluctant" about Bush's signature. It isn't as if he generally allows press flak, hostile commentary, public rallies, and even widespread Congressional opposition, to stop him doing what he wants. Just how committed was Bush to taking a more "even-handed" approach? The assumption is that the administration coolly and rationally considered US interests, realised that the 'war on terror' could lose some of its international support if Israel was permitted to ravage the West Bank - but somehow the Lobby carried far greater social power than the Bush administration, and "humiliated" him. This raises questions about what constitutes a 'rational' appreciation of American interests, about what social forces are actually involved, and about the role of ideology. Before considering that, however, it is worth pointing out that Israel was doing exactly what the US was doing in Afghanistan. Similarly, Israel did carry out some assassinations in 2003, but the CIA was already doing the same thing. The 'war on terror' was a gift to every power-system in the world, including Russia, which - though it doesn't have a vocal and efficacious lobby - won Bush's support during and after some bloody moments in Chechnya.

Walt and Mearsheimer's model presupposes the primacy of the state as a unit international relations. I don't just mean that they assume the state to be very important, and more important than other agencies: it is that the state is the global actor, whose essential purposes and drives are the same throughout history. The state, whether it is a Northern Italian city-state or a North American federation, is a power-maximising unit, which deploys such strategies as 'balance of power', and which embodies an elemental psychic drive to dominate. From this purview, ideologies and moralities are superfluous, cognitive scripts, at best enabling devices and at worst dangerous nonsense that tempts one to hubris or constrains one in a moment that demands boldness. Transnational networks are considered relatively unimportant, and where they are important it is usually as a derivative function of one state, or several. They can only carry out the functions of states or obstruct them. And class power is simply invisible. So, the structure of rationality that they assume for a state pursuing its 'national interests' is already a highly bowdlerised, reductionist one. They devote a short passage near the end of their book to defining US national interests: "The overriding goal of US foreign policy is to ensure the safety and prosperity of the American people." On such implausible premises is a whole provocative theory based. We might consider another way of looking at it. The American state, the US one I mean, is one with a deep overlap in personnel between the top Wall Street financial and legal firms. It is one in which the state apparatus is interpenetrated with high-tech manufacturing through the Department of Defense and other similar systems. It is one in which cash circulates from high-profile sectors of US capital, including energy, telecommunications, finance and so on. There are class interests involved here, and these aren't only expressed through various lobbies. But these class interests also contain schisms of their own, with sectional and regional divisons, and corresponding ideological ones. In a way, the US state is redolent of the Italian one after unification, with most of the population excluded, and divisions largely organised around differences within the ruling class rather than ideological programs.

If that's a roughly accurate depiction, then either Israel manages to hypnotise substantial sections of the ruling class, or they strongly identify Israel's long-term interests with their own, and value its continued domination in the Middle East more than the need to 'win over' a bunch of already subservient Arab states. And with that commitment comes an unwillingness to compromise Israel's effectiveness over its rivals, particularly when they are frequently also America's rivals. It also has, as its logical corollary, a commitment to allow Israel to manage its 'demographic' problem. After all, a post-Zionist state wouldn't be half as useful to the United States, since it would not be a military garrison state locked in perpetual enmity with those noisome Arab populations. And it also entails a much more sympathetic attitude to Israel's claims with respect to negotiations, settlements, expansion and so on, than might be the case from a disinterested perspective. It is true that not every shoe-maker or plant owner in America has a deep vested interest in keeping control of the Middle East in that way. But most sectors of American capital have an interest in long-term US hegemony, and the Middle Eastern oil bonanza is one of the greatest prizes in history, permanently threatened by the possible insurgency of local populations. Mearsheimer and Walt argue that the US has three 'national interests' in the Middle East - to frustrate the emergence of a regional hegemon, and ensure world market access to its oil; to stymy the development of weapons of mass destruction; and to reduce anti-American terrorism. It is conceivable that a US government would consider these to be serious priorities and really believe that they are for the benefit of the whole population. However, it is also conceivable that competing priorities - the very real benefits for the ruling class of pursuing policies that generate terrorism, WMD proliferation, and protectionism in the oil market as necessary corollaries - would take precedence. After all, Halliburton has more clout than the average voter, and the average voter can always be persuaded that the consequences of US policy are actually manifestations of Muslim irrationality or Arab fanaticism or something else of the kind.

This brings us to the matter of ideological hegemony. Hegemonic appeals are necessarily universalist, not particularist. Israel doesn't appeal to America in public as "a friend and ally" simply because of shared interests - no, shared values are at stake here. As nebulous as appeals to values usually are, there is nothing mysterious about this appeal. Explicitly, Israel says 'we are a pro-American state, we have women in high-profile positions, we value different religions and cultures, we stand up for democracy against terrorism, and we believe in markets' etc. There is an illicit set of racist and militaristic assumptions attached to this, of course, but the explicit appeal is one that would have great force among intellectuals and educated opinion, particularly those processed through moribund social sciences programmes, with their only slightly updated Cold War orthodoxies. This is a point that Mearsheimer and Walt tacitly acknowledge when they refer to the neoconservative argument that Israel shares "liberal democratic values" with the United States. The 'national interest' is a field of contest, not something that can be deduced from a set of givens. Therefore hegemony matters, which is why there is such an effort to discipline opinion. This is what is so incongruous about Mearsheimer and Walt's contention that Israeli policies militate against "certain core US values", as if America's own policies didn't do the same wherever its influence was felt, whether in Panama or Somalia. State policy is almost always an affront to its declared 'values'. That is half the fun of it. If you can murder and repress in the name of humanitarianism and democracy, you know you're in control.

And if you think that Israel's propagandists could get as far as they have without being adopted by powerful US constituencies, then you have to explain how such a belligerent and forceful state turned out to be so pliable. As Daniel Lazare points out:

If "Israel has earned the respect of the American people," it is because the United States, devastated by its experience in Vietnam and humiliated by the embassy takeover in Tehran, watched with growing envy as Israel racked up stunning military victories in 1967 and 1973 and then sent specially outfitted jets streaking across the desert to bomb Iraq's Osirak reactor in 1981 (a feat the White House would dearly like to emulate in Iran). The Israel Defense Forces were everything that aggressive imperial elements in Washington wanted America's traumatized military to be. Hence, in their bipartisan struggle to overcome "the Vietnam syndrome," the Republicans and Democrats set about remodeling themselves as overseas branches of Israel's hawkish Likud Party. Groups like AIPAC did not grow of their own accord. Instead, the war party in Washington encouraged them to grow to help it win its battles on Capitol Hill.

The American Right has latched onto Israel precisely because it helps them regulate discourse and win hegemonic battles. It facilitates the repackaging of an aggressive programme of imperial domination and extreme global violence as the defense of the ideals of democracy against - what do you know? - anti-Semites. Just as in the case of HR 3077, people who are primarily concerned with stifling internal left-wing dissent, and critical analysis of US policy, have used Israel as a crucial alibi in that struggle. And these lobbies and think-tanks, like the Hoover Institute and the American Enterprise Institute, are recipients of huge amounts of corporate cash. When it comes to corporate America, Israel can't compete in terms either of dollars or ideological reproduction. And this is a problem for Mearsheimer and Walt throughout their book. They list people and institutions as belonging to an 'Israel Lobby', even where their activity isn't really lobbying, even where they aren't funded by Israel, even where their motive has rather little to do with Israel. The neoconservatives support Israel, but the key institutions in which they work are auxiliaries of US capital, not of the Knesset. They are unable to explain anywhere why these pro-Israel neoconservatives have the weight that they do (and why being pro-Israel matters to US capital). This is because they have no conception of class power, a reductionist conception of the 'national interest' and a flimsy account of ideology.

Perhaps the least persuasive of all examples is that of Iraq. Although, Mearsheimer and Walt concede that the US had powerful motives to invade Iraq, they insist that the Israel Lobby was the element without which it would not have happened. It is undoubtedly true that supporters of Israel were also strong supporters of the invasion of Iraq. It is true that Israel has also regarded Iraq as an enemy. It is true that Israeli interests were involved here. It is true that pro-Israel organisations 'lobbied' or simply vocalised hard on behalf of war with Iraq. Yet, if this is supposed to trump - not merely complement - US 'national interests', it is necessary for Mearsheimer and Walt to minimise the benefits of war. Their dismissal of the reasoning that holds control of the oil spigot to be a key goal is roughly as follows: if they wanted oil, they could have invaded Saudi Arabia, and anyway the oil companies would rather have traded with Saddam than overthrow him. This part of the argument is dealt with in a rather perfunctory fashion, but it demands considerably more attention than they are prepared to allot it. For example, it would appear as if the authors did not realise that Saudi Arabia is already subordinate. There is no need for an invasion force to trundle across the Nejd. Actually, one of the problems that Iraq solved was to enable America's troops to move out of Saudi Arabia, where their presence caused some trouble. Saddam Hussein represented, by contrast, the last outpost of Arab nationalism. Successfully conquering Iraq and installing a pro-American client state with a thin veneer of democratic rule, which must have looked incredibly easy after the initial cake-walk in Afghanistan, would have decisively altered the regional balance of power in America's interests. It would also have provided a model for further expansion. The aggressive right-wingers who contrived this policy explained their rationale: in the absence of a serious superpower rival, there was a brief window in which the US could powerfully assert itself as the next century's sole power, demonstrate its ability to fight and win multiple wars, and secure its dominance for the long-term.

And why so glib in the dismissal of oil interests? After all, most leading figures in the administration have long experience in the energy sector up to and including the President. Neoconservatives had argued for some time that the US should take control of Iraq's oil and break up OPEC. Many of the energy companies that have so handsomely funded the GOP were primary beneficiaries of the invasion. Nor were high oil prices bad for them - actually, they're making record profits. The Bush cabinet agreed in April 2001 that "'Iraq remains a destabilizing influence to the flow of oil to international markets from the Middle East' and because this is an unacceptable risk to the US 'military intervention' is necessary". The Times reported in 2002 that: West Sees Glittering Prizes Ahead in Giant Oil Fields. The Ministry of Oil immediately secured upon taking Baghdad. Several US oil companies were immediately involved in negotiations over the future of Iraq's oil industry, and former Shell CEO Philip Carroll was appointed to manage the process of privatisation. When the US oil companies argued that privatization would actually be seriously damaging to US interests and potentially freeze out foreign energy companies, the State Department devised a plan to keep it nationalised with US access assured. It doesn't seem as if the oil industry was a marginalised opponent of Bush's strategy, and the sole basis for this claim by Walt and Mearsheimer is a quote from a column by the pro-war liberal Peter Beinart, who was busy trying to persuade liberal opinion that war with Iraq was anything but a right-wing obsession and an imperialist venture.

Mearsheimer and Walt's book and the whole uproar about the 'Israel Lobby' is a long overdue challenge to a stifling taboo, but it challenges it in the most inefficient way. The authors frequently rely on the impressionistic statements of others (as in "Sharon didn't look like the subordinate today...") to dramatise and pad out what might otherwise be a slender and somewhat messy polemic. The 'Lobby' paradigm cannot begin to cope with the evidence, and as a result demands a very narrow perspective. Of course, contrary to the whining of the pro-Israel commentators, it is not an anti-Semitic book. It lacks even the spurious coherence that an anti-Semitic tract would evince. Nor is it an anti-Israel book, and in general it maintains that the 'Lobby' is unwittingly damaging Israel by tying it into a damaging long-term conflict with Palestine, where settlement would be more profitable in the long-run. The book is essentially a reaction to the shrill efforts to buttress a pro-Israel consensus, and protect it from growing criticism. It is also a reaction to an increasingly extreme and adventurist US policy, and the paucity of serious opposition within the US political class. Theirs is a moderate and reformist account of US foreign policy, which reduces its manifest brutality - there's a disavowed moral revulsion here, dressed up as an appeal to the 'national interest' - to the deviant influence of an atypically powerful interest group. Nothing fundamental need change. We need simply become aware of the 'Lobby', confront it, and cease answering to its siren call. This is a problem with the 'Israel Lobby' thesis that pro-war apologists for Israel, such as Johnson, are not in a position to consider. They share too many of its premises to be effective critics, which is one reason why they cut such a strident figure. The other reason, of course, is that they're part of the Lobby.

Labels: free free palestine, international relations, Israel, israel lobby, mearsheimer and walt, US imperialism, zionism