Strike Day Rally posted by lenin

The Respect Youtube page has just posted this excellent speech by Mark Serwotka on prospects for the Left, from last week's Left List rally on the day of the big strike:

Labels: mark serwotka, new labour, pcs workers, strike, teachers strike

Anti-fascism and the left. posted by lenin

I couldn't make it to the carnival yesterday, otherwise I'd have pics and footage for you, but all reports I've heard indicate two things: 1) it was a massive success, and 2) the Left List rocked. At least 100,000 people turned up for the carnival, some thirty years after the original 'Rock Against Racism'. It is important that this was a success, because it will provide a springboard for the hard anti-fascist campaigning that is going to have to take place, especially given the threat of the BNP getting a seat on the London Assembly. In 2004, the BNP were 6,000 votes short of a representative on the Assembly. This time they may potentially benefit from a lower turnout (thus diminishing the total number of votes they need). A frequent talking point is also the collapse in support for UKIP (after the Kilroy fracas), presumably leading potential UKIP voters to consider the fascists. It looks as if there is little support for other right-wing competition like the 'English Democrats' (a bunch of nobody whiners whose candidate, from 'Fathers 4 Justice', has stepped down) or the 'Christian Choice' (led by a ranting sleazeball who is focusing his campaign against an East London 'mega-mosque'). Suffice to say that with the surge in racism across the UK, particularly against Muslims and Eastern Europeans, it is all too possible that the BNP will end up both with a seat on the Assembly, and with a sizeable new tranch of councillors across the country.

Secondly, it was important for the Left List to make a good showing, because it is the only radical left-wing vote available for both the mayor and the assembly. Ken Livingstone's weakness, resulting from his embrace of New Labour, has given the Tory press confidence to viciously attack him often in Islamophobic terms. The Evening Standard's obsequious support for Boris Johnson is matched only by the daily helping of ordure about Livingstone and his connections with Muslims, trade unionists and others reviled by the right-wing. The Standard doesn't seem to care that its Islamophobic tirades are helping the far right, but Livingstone is in a weak position to counter this because he is trying to mobilise a voting bloc on the narrowest possible grounds - depoliticised multiculturalism, no mention of the war, not enough for housing, privatization of the East London line, pandering to the interests of the City, unqualified defense of the police etc. Realistically, the biggest immediate concerns facing Londoners are the brewing recession, the collapse in available credit, the lack of affordable housing, obscenely high transport costs, the growing poverty and inequality in the city, long working hours and shit pay. The only mayoral candidate to talk seriously about this is Lindsey German. This radical message went down well at the recent Stonewall hustings. New Labour can't effectively challenge the BNP politically, and not only because they are quite often responsible for giving the BNP their best publicity (ie, Margaret Hodge). The reason they can't challenge the BNP politically is because they rule out in advance even the vocabulary that is needed to express the real problems that their policies do so little to attenuate and so much to aggravate. The sole occasion on which many New Labour MPs can be relied upon to talk about class is in the context of a rebarbative formulation about a supposedly marginalised 'white working class', which of course plays straight into the BNP's hands. You didn't see too many New Labour advocates of last week's national strike action.

Mobilising the anti-fascist vote is essential, but there has always been an argument about what that should mean: should anti-fascists act as vote-catchers for the Labour Party, for example? This strategy of backing the main centre-left party has dogged the French anti-racist organisation, SOS Racisme, and undermined its early militancy. Indeed, its core of activists has often been drawn from the Socialist Party (PS), have always been close to its leadership, and its president from 1999-2003 is a leading PS politician who favours immigration quotas. I doubt the efficacy of such a strategy. Similarly, while it is important to 'bash the fash', it is increasingly obvious that just pointing out that the BNP are a Nazi organisation engaged in various levels of subterfuge ("As long as our own cadres understand the full implications of our struggle, then there is no need for us to do anything to give the public cause for concern ... we must at all times present them with an image of moderate reasonableness") doesn't do enough to motivate people to vote against the BNP, especially if the mainstream candidates are an unappealing crop with almost identical policies. Any anti-fascist campaign has to unite, as the UAF website puts it, "the broadest possible spectrum of society" against the far right. The main strength for anti-fascists is that at the moment, fascists of the BNP ilk and their more explicitly Third Reich imitating milieu remain a tiny and largely despised minority. As such, there is obviously no question of such a campaign outlining in any detail a political alternative to the far right. So, there is an unmistakable need for a supplementary strategy by the left. Even in terms of just mobilising voters who might otherwise abstain, a radical left candidacy is important in combatting the far right - for example, more overall votes in London makes it harder for the BNP to get the requisite 5%. But in a much broader sense, of course, the fascists are thriving on social distress and alienation that they have no intention of alleviating, and which only a vibrant grassroots left rooted in the labour movement can begin to address.

The Nazi hardcore is minute, and any strength they obtain is a result of their ability to pull around themselves different strata of voters and passive supporters. By no means should we imagine that their current supporters are just stray left-wing voters who are tempted by the racist message, albeit many BNP voters will be former Labour supporters. The 2006 Rowntree Report on the BNP's electoral appeal found that their main strategy has been to appeal to 'lower middle class' voters, and their success has been not among the poorest wards, but in the slightly wealthier wards - those which you can imagine accruing smug epithets like 'respectable'. However, lower middle class voters are hardly privileged. Their precarious position means that they are exposed to potentially catastrophic changes in their life chances given a crisis of the system. Further, the Nazis would inevitably rely on being able to mobilise a substantial tier of working class voters with 'anticapitalist' rhetoric (this is already a crucial part of their strategy in the post-industrial north). Only if the systemic critique is articulated and the working class movement radicalised is it possible to counteract this. Put it another way - more than a decade of New Labour, and the strategies of accomodation hitherto pursued in much of the labour movement, has done nothing to hinder the far right.

Labels: anti-fascism, bnp scum, left list, london, love music hate racism, nazi

A Model Occupation posted by Yoshie

In the last couple of decades,¹ advocates for war, sanctions, boycotts, and other measures on the human rights and humanitarian grounds have become a politically significant presence on the broadly defined Left in the USA and Western Europe (inflated during the dissolution of Yugoslavia and the final push for independence of East Timor, a little deflated since the Iraq War, but re-flated through Darfur, Tibet, etc.).

This current of thought is not non-existent in Japan. However, it has been a much smaller and much less politically significant current in Japan than in the USA and Western Europe.

There are various reasons for this difference.

1. The atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki: being on the receiving side of atomic bombs has a way of encouraging pacifism and discouraging militarism, at least among leftists.

2. Japanese leftists, unlike American and European leftists, do not have a memory of being on the "right side" of a "Good War" in their "people's history." So, there is no ready-made narrative structure in which would-be pro-war leftists in Japan could easily marry militarism with humanitarianism and human rights advocacy. Besides, Japan is economically of the West but not culturally of the mythical West (whose narrative goes "from the birth of democracy in Athens to the Renaissance, the Reformation, and the Enlightenment to liberal democracy of universal human rights," the narrative that is attractive not just to the Right but also to the Left, which may position itself as the better defender of the Enlightenment than the Right), so leftists in Japan cannot easily see themselves as protagonists in this dominant narrative of humanitarian imperialism.

3. Till very recently, the Liberal Democratic Party had had a de facto one party state in Japan. The Left in Japan being a minor force that has not had a chance of becoming a governing party or a member of a governing coalition, there has also been much less temptation to opportunism for them than those parties and intellectuals in Europe and the USA who could become, and sometimes did become, part of the establishment by joining center-left parties. (This may change sometime in the near future, with the ascendancy of the Democratic Party in Japan.)

4. The Communist Party, albeit no longer Marxist, has remained a mass party in Japan, more or less hegemonic over left-wing political culture in the country, not only directly but also through its numerous affiliate institutions and publications, in a way that Communists in the USA and Western Europe have not been especially since the long Sixties.

5. After WW2, both the Left and the Right of Japan renounced any ambition to develop their own foreign policies: the Left by embracing the "Peace Constitution"; the Right by always deferring to Washington. They embraced the defeat, as John W. Dower says.

This last fact has both positive and negative aspects for leftists in Japan. There is no big constituency for assertive liberal imperialism in Japan, which is good for the Left. However, by accepting what the occupier imposed on the Japanese, the Left in Japan has failed to develop a political culture of republicanism and democracy, which is not only bad for itself but also bad for the rest of the country.

That failure also has had unforeseen consequences for people in the global South. The Japanese Left's acceptance of the occupation -- seeking "to turn the conqueror's democratic revolution peaceably into a socialist one" under the leadership of a "lovable Communist Party" in the early post-war years (John W. Dower, Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II, pp. 255-256) -- has encouraged those on the broadly defined Left in the USA to look back nostalgically upon the occupation of Japan as a model occupation, good for the conscience of the occupier and good for the welfare of the occupied, a model which makes them think, "If we had done it the way it was done in Japan, we could have succeeded in Iraq" (blaming the Bush White House for its "tactical errors"), or "If Iraq had been like Japan, the occupation could have worked" (blaming the Iraqis for their "underdevelopment"). Therefore, no matter how disastrous the occupation of Iraq becomes, it doesn't curb the enthusiasm for other interventions, for the myth of the model occupation tells them seductively: select the right target and employ the right tactics, and you will be a liberator again.

Here's a dialectical irony: humanitarian imperialism has failed to grow on the Left in Japan; but its growth on the Left in the USA and Europe may very well have been copiously fertilized by the post-war choices made by the Japanese Left.

1 To be sure, there had always existed both imperialist and anti-imperialist political currents on the broadly defined Left. Liberalism, social democracy, and socialism all had politico-economic theories that could lend themselves to either current. For imperialist liberals and social democrats, imperialism brings capitalist development, which in turn, especially if it is tempered by reforms, fosters social and cultural development; for imperialist socialists, imperialism, by dissolving feudal barriers and dispossessing peasants, can hasten the day when the gravediggers of capitalism, the proletariat, are born on the world scale. A relatively broad anti-imperialist consensus at the height of anti-colonial struggles in the twentieth century may have been a historical anomaly.

Labels: human rights, humanitarianism, imperial ideology, imperialism, japan

French immigrant workers on strike posted by lenin

If you've been paying attention, you will know that Sarkozy is in a bit of trouble these days, and his big presidential address doesn't seem to have cut any ice. Adored by everyone from George W Bush to Gordon Brown for promising a neo-Thatcherite upheaval, he has repeatedly had to compromise with the unions to avoid catastrophe, as Ian Taylor spells out here. He has constantly relied on dividing the poorest workers from the slightly less poor, as in this obvious gambit, yet he doesn't seem to have had much success. He is at a record low in the polls and rules a divided cabinet. And now some of the immigrants whom he has repeatedly and viciously baited and attacked are in revolt. They work horrendous hours, they pay their taxes, they get businesses running, they do the most difficult and unappealling jobs - and they're still "illegal", so they're on strike. Watch this Al Jazeera video:

Labels: france, immigration, labour, sarkozy, strike

Melting the ice posted by lenin

Just a quick reminder: we could well be finished soon. Yes, the WWF are back with new results that confirm the worst: the arctic ice caps are melting even faster than we thought. As the ice melts and more of the surface is water, the temperatures rises more because the water can absorbe heat that would be reflected by the ice. The climate doesn't change in a linear fashion: it has sudden flips. It can sustain stability, like a canoeist, under immense pressure from different fluctuations. But beyond a certain point, it capsizes. The tipping point as far as arctic ice is concerned is that elusive point when nothing we can do can make any difference at all, and it has just got closer. If the tipping point is reached soon, then the arctic ice is gone for good. It will gradually eliminate many populous islands, of course, but we could handle that. Like most refugees, the residents will be pushed about from country to country and forced to live and die in shit and misery, and hated for the oxygen they waste. And we could presumably live with the destruction of the non-commercial forms of life that thrive in the Queensland Wetlands, the Kilimanjaro and the Amazon basin. And, as the ice melts and the Alps crumble because their sub-zero cohesive has trickled away, we can all expect a hearty laugh as mountaineers and cabin-dwellers are crushed to death under avalanches.

However, we may not be as happy with one third of the planet becoming uninhabitable by 2100. And we may be uncomfortable with hurricanes striking hitherto unprecedented zones, such as the recent one that swept into Brazil. One of the bases for hurricane development is a sea with a surface water temperature of higher than 26.5C, which is why the phenomenon has hitherto been so familiar in the Carribean. Raise global temperatures, increase the total amount of warm water, and you get more hurricanes. The hurricane that barrelled toward Spain only to die out may be the first of a new Mediterranean breed of deadly storm. America will find its fertile crescents turned into dustbowls again, but this time on an unimaginably greater scale. Southern Africa will dry up and, while the Sahel region will get more rainfall, it will come in Monsoons that simply destroy the surface earth and provide little basis for agriculture. You think today's food prices are high? Then, of course, you have to consider the interaction of these scarcities with global markets and the geopolitical structure supporting them. Scarcity and destruction is not only a moneyspinner for a privileged elite that could comfortably fit in a small football stadium. It is a driver of war too. Who, faced with failing crops and desolate land, would not be tempted by Lebensraum? All of that is based on a one degree rise in temperature, the most optimistic scenario, the first circle of hell in Mark Lynas' Six Degrees. Add a couple of degrees, and it gets a lot more grim. This is not about mother earth or the various species of plant and animal life that one may or may not eat. The planet will overcome all this, probably even if we drop the big one. It is our viability as a species that is in question. Perhaps the best solution is to rely on the people who gave us colonialism, the arms race, the arms industry, death squads, aerial bombardment, genocide and nuclear annihilation to come up with a neat market-based solution to our imminent demise. Perhaps we should wait and see if they can develop a technological solution. Bear in mind that, as with pharmaceuticals, they may be more interested in giving us something that can help us live with our horrible condition for a while rather than curing the problem. I don't know if it wouldn't be better to just take over the whole system ourselves and see what we can do about it. If it calls for a reduction in economic output, then I'm sure we can handle it. If Lafargue's 'right to be lazy' becomes a duty, I can't imagine too many complaints. Why not?

Labels: arctic ice, capitalism, disaster politics, environment

Guy Hocquenghem posted by lenin

I just wilt over the thought of French revolutionaries. And, looking at the youthful Guy Hocquenghem - as he was during the tumult of '68 - who could blame me? And what I like about Guy Hocquenghem should be obvious enough. A gay liberationist, a founder of the Front Homosexuel d'Action Revolutionnaire, a leader of French cultural revolution, and - what else? - a scathing critic of those who "traded Maoism for the Rotary Club". The weaknesses and downright absurdities of French Maoism need no rehearsing here, although it is a fuck sight better to have illusions in Mao than to be a corrupt stooge of Mitterrand. At any rate, it isn't clear that Hocquenghem himself was ever a Maoist except in the perverse sense.

Hocquenghem had been expelled from the PCF for his homosexuality, and had then been excluded from the Trotskyist Ligue communiste revolutionnaire (the great LCR which, sadly, is soon to liquidate itself into an anticapitalist party of some sort), because of his fondness for 'direct action' which was seen as a Maoist sin. He had been part of a loose confraternity of the radical and revolutionary left, and was inspired by Huey Newton's support for gay liberation. He rejected a certain class of gay rights as constituting a new normativity that was deadly to desire, and even leftist discourse was susceptible to this normalisation. It was necessary to sustain the culture of marginality and deviance, to resist not only legalism and moralism, but normality itself. You can see how this would be compatible with a certain kind of ultra-left politics, and indeed he became convinced that capitalism should be assailed on all fronts at once, rather on its strategically weak points as the orthodox marxist position insisted. And Hocquenghem operated in a Maoist milieu including his work with the journal Tout!. However, when Maoists of the Gauche proletarienne (GP) tendency started to defend Pakistan's suppression of the Bengali liberation struggle, Hocquenghem was a harsh critic. Ironically, he criticised them and the regime they emulated, for being insufficiently Maoist - la pensee maotsetung was the authentic Maoism that was being betrayed by the CCCP and its supporters.

As for the 'nouveau philosophes' and their milieu, it was not their abandonment of Maoism that Hocquenghem attacked so much as the way in which former street-fighters or would-be street-fighters like Andre Glucksmann, Bernard Kouchner and even Daniel Cohn-Bendit had become bourgois, careerist and conformist. The activists who had co-founded the student publication Action at the Sorbonne with Hocquenghem were, by 1981, part of Mitterrand's Restoration. They defended the French state's imperial intervention in Chad, and its nuclear 'shield' at a time when Mitterrand was abandoning the Gaullist posture of restricting the use of nukes to France's self-defense, and suggesting they might become part of the anti-communist arsenal. They hypocritically denounced the youth for their apathy, yet would deprive them of the excitement that would rouse their passions. They warned of the dangers of a spectral 'totalitarianism', clinging to a normality that was only one or two steps away from Travail, Famille and Patrie. Hocquenghem abused and disabused these courtiers in the style of burlesque satire, but it was a humour that originated in disgust. He never apologised for his gauchisme and, unlike the bell-wether 'contrarians' of today, knew that perversity could come in the form of gallant fidelity.

Hocquenghem, despite his obvious importance in French intellectual and political history, has not really been given the profile he deserves. The most recent attempt to undo that injustice, perhaps resulting in part from the hegemony of his foes, is a documentary entitled La Revolution du Desir. This is an extract:

Labels: cruise missile liberals, gay pride, guy hocquenghem, nouveau philosophes, pro-war 'left'

Ken and Blairbie posted by lenin

So, Ken Livingstone is bragging about receiving advice on his election from Tony Blair and Alistair Campbell. Indeed - why stop at one sleazy, reviled warmonger when you can have his sleazy, reviled, war-flogging propagandist in the same bargain? This is the candidate who has been nicking Boris Johnson's policies and, amid many less bread more circus policy announcements, getting Ed Balls to butter up the City of London. Question: how much help has this strategy been so far? Presumably, Ken Livingstone has drawn the conclusion that is losing popularity because he is insufficiently integrated into the New Labour electoral machine. This is a ludicrous idea, to be sure, but no more ludicrous than the conviction that stealing Boris Johnson's policies is a route to popularity, or the thought that having watched Metronet crash and burn, a PPP deal is just what is required for the extended East London line. One of Livingstone's remaining sources of credibility after he re-joined New Labour was his apparent distance from a hated Prime Minister and his loathed war policies. Now, he's burning bridges faster than the Luftwaffe, and the only constituency left to flip off will soon be the newts. I always knew Ken Livingstone was an opportunist. I never thought he was an idiot.

Labels: elections, ken livingstone, london, mayor, new labour

Fightback Thursday posted by lenin

1 million school students and 8,000 schools are affected by the teachers strike, apparently, which is much higher than was anticipated. According to The Guardian, this is the biggest strike over pay since Labour was elected. Predictably, New Labour are bashing the strikers and pretending that there is no problem. The schools minister has been briefed on his key statistics and sent out to face the newspapers and television studios. Teachers are apparently fat cats whose pay is being curbed in order to rollback their inflation busting pay rises. Of course, the truth is that since 2005 teachers salaries have been effectively cut each year, as pay rises have fallen well below the rate of inflation. Teachers on UPS3 have lost £2,000 due to these cuts. In the same period, the average pay for chief executives has risen by 37%. Such are the priorities of New Labour's Britain. The schools minister is quoted as saying: "The three-year pay award was a recommendation of an independent pay review body... we can’t re-open that process." Oh yes, you can - and you will. Meanwhile, the Liberal Democrats are demanding that a no-stike agreement be imposed on teachers. You might remember that when someone tries to tell you that the Lib Dems are a slightly more left-wing alternative to New Labour. From the picket lines and protest marches, you can probably get all the updates with photos at Socialist Worker, so keep checking in throughout the day.

Update: I was right. Reports and photographs from across the country are being filed regularly on the Socialist Worker website.

Labels: new labour, pay cuts, pcs workers, public sector pay, teachers strike, trade unions

Republicanism, Irish and Iranian posted by Yoshie

Listen to "The Foggy Dew," sung by The Wolfe Tones, in commemoration of the Easter Rising (24 April 1916). The song's lyrics contrasts Irishmen who served on the British side in the Battle of Gallipoli with Irish republicans who fought against the British Empire:

Right proudly high over Dublin Town they flung out the flag of war
'Twas better to die 'neath an Irish sky than at Suvla or Sud-El-Bar . . .
'Twas England bade our wild geese go, that "small nations might be free";
But their lonely graves are by Suvla's waves or the fringe of the great North Sea.
Oh, had they died by Pearse's side or fought with Cathal Brugha
Their graves we'd keep where the Fenians sleep, 'neath the shroud of the foggy dew.

An Irish friend of mine in Belfast, James Daly, told me: "By the way, the Iranians sent a plaque to the family of my friend Patsy O'Hara commemorating his hunger strike to the death."

Intrigued, I looked up more signs of Iranian identification with Irish republicanism. Here's the most eloquent: Iranian revolutionaries renamed "Churchill Street" -- the street behind the British Embassy -- "Bobby Sands Street" (Pedram Moallemian, "Naming Bobby Sands Street," The Blanket, 24 February 2004). Despite the British government's pressures on the Iranians to change the name again, the street remains dedicated to the memory of the Irish revolutionary.


Neither in Iran nor in Ireland have the highest revolutionary goals been achieved yet. But the flames of republicanism are still alive in the finest of their men and women. Tiocfaidh ár lá. Our day will come.

Labels: anti-imperialism, imperialism, iran, northern ireland, solidarity

A tragicomedy in one paragraph. posted by lenin

Labels: 'totalitarianism', cruise missile liberals, islamophobia, liberals, pro-war 'left', the liberal defense of murder

I see the circus... posted by lenin

...but where's the bread?

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

Comments Policy posted by lenin

Labels: comments, lenin's tomb

"Obliterate Them" posted by lenin

Hillary Clinton says:

"I want the Iranians to know that if I'm the president, we will attack Iran," Clinton said. "In the next 10 years, during which they might foolishly consider launching an attack on Israel, we would be able to totally obliterate them."

Labels: annihilism, hillary clinton, imperialism, iran, us elections

Left List for London posted by lenin

From the Left List page, I see they've put up the election broadcast. Thought you all might like to see it, in case you're not in front of the television when it is broadcast tomorrow evening:

Labels: gla elections, left list, lindsey german, london, mayor

Nasser Zarafshan posted by Yoshie

Nasser Zarafshan, shortly after five years of imprisonment on account of having delivered a speech indicting the intelligence services for murdering five intellectuals, published this essay in Aftab on 11 November 2007 and Roshangari on 25 November 2007: "The Third Side Also Exists: Regarding the Likely American Attack on Iran" (Trans. Yoshie Furuhashi).

The essay is Zarafshan's intervention counseling Iranians against looking to America to bring freedom and democracy to Iran. While a majority of Iranians are unlikely to be in need of this counsel, it cannot be denied that there exists a current of opinion in Iran -- held by a minority but magnified by the imperialist media -- that Zarafshan criticizes.

Here's an excerpt from the essay:

Aggression to eliminate the obstacles that stand in the way of spreading the neoliberal order and to remake the world according to it is employed in the name of democracy and human rights. However, freedom and democracy, essentially, can only result from the historical development of a social and economic order and the development of people that accompanies it. Freedom and democracy are not commodities that can be detached from a given social order and imported, let alone brought by force, from abroad. Those who are looking for a freedom "imported" by force have not understood anything about its essential meaning.

Read the rest at <montages.blogspot.com/2008/04/nasser-zarafshan-third-side-also-exists.html> or <mrzine.monthlyreview.org/zarafshan210408.html>.

Labels: class, democracy, human rights, imperial ideology, imperialism, iran, ruling class, working class

Don't Mention It. posted by lenin

This is the Basil Fawlty election. Among the many things missing from most of the campaigning for local councils, and for the London mayor and assembly in particular, is the war. It is not on Ken Livingstone's agenda. Boris Johnson would like to make something of it, despite being pro-war, but is wholly subjoined to the neoconservative wing of the Tory party. The war is not in the Liberal Democrat manifesto at all, despite the fact that the Lib Dems have benefited from the antiwar vote in the past. It is not mentioned anywhere in the Green Party manifesto. Neither is Islamophobia, for that matter, which is a curious ommission. And Sian Berry has recently criticised her party over the Israel boycott, vowing to oppose it. All of this is presumably part and parcel of the deal between New Labour and the Greens at the London level, and it is hardly a surprise. Wherever the Greens have had success in Europe, they have often ended up in coalition with neoliberal, privatizing, warmongering parties of the centre-left. (Perhaps more curious is the weakness on public transport. The Left List manifesto promises quite specific tube fare reductions: a quid per ticket, free travel for students and the elderly, instant reduction of paper ticket fares on overground services to match. There's nothing comparable in the Green manifesto, and nor is there any mention of privatization of the East London line. A strange weakness for an environmental campaigner). This is the city that saw 2 million demonstrators protest against the war before it even started; that experienced 7/7; that has had two police shootings, one fatal, in connection with the so-called 'war on terror'; that has seen protesters nicked under 'war on terror' legislation; and which has experienced a dangerous rise in Islamophobia under the rubric of, well, the 'war on terror'. And no one wants to talk about it, bar the Left List candidate. This is one of the reasons why Lindsey German can boast the support of several key figures in the antiwar movement, including two from different frontlines of the 'war on terror'.

Aside from not mentioning the imperialist war, no one wants to talk about the class war. This Thursday, just one week before the elections, the teachers are having their first national strike for over twenty years. A quarter of a million NUT members will be on strike. Joining them will be 100,000 PCS workers, 30,000 UCU members, and 20,000 Birmingham council workers. On the day of the strike, the Left List will be holding a rally, with Mark Serwotka of the PCS and Jane Loftus of the CWU in attendance. The reason why this issue is important, in case it needs spelling out, is that at a time when food prices are soaring and credit availability is collapsing, the government is attempting to restrict consumption through its incomes policy. That is bad news for all of us, and to it one can add the effect of recent changes in taxation with Gordon Brown hitting the poorest by abolishing the ten pence tax rate. We're facing a recession, with hard times for millions of people, and we have a government that seems fit for any contortion in order to serve the interests of millionaires. Is any other candidate even interested? I don't see it. Ken is more likely to call for people to cross the picket lines than actually join them these days, and may be tempted to do so again as tube workers strike for forty-eight hours before the elections. The Greens are too busy going for the business vote. If there's any curiosity over the position of sad sack Lib Dems, they hate strikes and are cautiously supportive of the government's pay restraints.

Both of these issues cut to the heart of the current neoliberal/pro-war consensus. Taking the latter for a second, public sector workers are at the centre of a battle against both privatization and pay cuts. They are unfortunate in having leaders who, barring a few principled sorts such as Mark Serwotka, are unfailingly loyal to New Labour, putting its position above the interests of their members. They are also in the position of having political funds that pour money into the coffers of New Labour even while the government reduces the amount of money they take home. New Labour's whole strategy relies upon taking trade unionists and working class voters for granted while relying on the AB voters in its electoral coalition. These are the figures I mentioned a while back:

Labour's share of the vote in 2005 was reduced to 36% from 43% in 1997 (in the 2007 local elections, Labour got a mere 27% of the vote), and its overall plurality was less than 2%. Its support among AB voters was relatively well-maintained, down just 2% from its 1997 level, while among C2 voters, DE voters and council tenants, it fell by 9%, 13% and 9% respectively.

It is only because the collapse in support has been in working class areas with mountainous Labour majorities that they have been able to keep a majority, despite being in the clear minority on its central policy flagships: war and privatization. So, the more trade unionists break with New Labour, the better chance there is of building the alternative. At the same time, the major pole of radicalism is still the antiwar movement. Demanding troop withdrawals from all frontiers in the war, and the unconditional defense of civil liberties at home, the movement places all the main parties on the back foot by commanding majority support for policies that few politicians are willing to advocate. It doesn't merely critique and counteract Islamophobia, it connects it to the war and makes it a clear political struggle. One can hardly effectively criticise racism in this day and age without mentioning the imperialist background. In its analysis, it also contains a critique of neoliberalism especially as applied in Iraq, but understood as being inseparable from the global war of American expansion. The anti-war movement is thus a counter-hegemonic force par excellence. This is why none of the main candidates can talk about it. That is why you mustn't mention the war.

Labels: 'war on terror', boris johnson, civil liberties, iraq, islamophobia, ken livingstone, lindsey german, london, sian berry, socialism

What Do Iranians Think of Sharia and Women's Rights? posted by Yoshie

Recently, I ran in MRZine an excerpt from the latest World Public Opinion poll ("Public Opinion in Iran: With Comparisons to American Public Opinion," 7 April 2008) about Iranians' perceptions of their government: "What Do Iranians Think of Their Own Government?" (12 April 2008).

The poll results, which showed a high level of popular support for the government as well as Iranians' desire to make it more democratic, are very much contested by a number of Iranians on the far Left, for whom Iran is a republic of fear whose citizens cannot possibly reveal their true opinions frankly to any pollster. Iranian far leftists would rather believe: "A silent majority exists in Iran and beneath that silence lies a deep hatred for this regime" (Mohammad Alireza, "Are You Prepared for Some Truth?" Iranian.com, 15 March 2008).

Now, capitalism, based on ineradicable contradiction between capital and labor, cannot but breed latent discontent with exploitation and other oppressions that it creates or aggravates, not just in Iran but in all countries, including ones run by socialists. That, however, doesn't mean that such latent discontent is everywhere always close to the surface, about to erupt into an articulate mass opposition to the regime in power but for political repression.

Under all but revolutionary circumstances,¹ discontent doesn't easily crystalize into a feeling as clear, simple, and powerful as "hatred." Rather, popular consciousness is very much complex. If Iranian leftists take a close look at the complexity of popular consciousness, rather than thinking without evidence that most Iranians, albeit silently, already stand where they stand, they can find in it much they can work with.

One of the notable findings of the aforementioned World Public Opinion poll, contradictory as it may seem from a typical leftist point of view, is that Iranians are largely in favor of both sharia (Islamic law) and gender equality (see pp. 24 and 26, excerpted below). The findings suggest that a majority of Iranians interpret Islamic law in a way that is promising for a Left that is not Islamophobic: as a populist ideological weapon against capitalist excesses rather than as a means to rigidly curtail personal freedom -- except in such areas as drinking, gambling, and prostitution, the latter two of which most socialists generally do not favor -- and severely punish social transgressions. Far from a basis to discriminate against women, Islamic law as it is interpreted by most Iranians, men as well as women, may very well be a standard of judgment according to which the government is not doing enough to promote gender equality.

The word sharia brings to the minds of typical Westerners only gender discrimination that exists in the dominant interpretations of it in the area of family law. Hence sensational sharia controversies in such nations as Britain and Canada, on the grounds that sharia is incompatible with liberalism. As a matter of fact, though, historically, liberalism has accommodated sharia, for instance in the name of inter-communal equality, by allowing religious minorities to put sharia into practice in the aspects of social existence such as family law where sharia presents no threat to its material and cultural underpinnings, for example in India, which is nowadays promoted by the empire as a model of Third-World liberal democracy.

If modern religions in many nations often seem more obsessed with sex than social and economic justice (to the chagrin of religious leftists and to the schadenfreude of many secular liberals and leftists), even though many of the texts regarded as sacred by them have much more to say about the latter than the former, that is because capitalist modernity allows religion to flourish only as a guardian of personal morality, abdicating its claim to be a principle that governs a whole way of life, just as it tends to reduce Marxism from a social movement aiming at communist society to a research method in academia.

Sharia ideologically challenges liberalism and materially limits capitalism only if it becomes a principle of Islamic republican liberty and virtue, as it did in justifying sweeping nationalization of private means of production in the early days of Iran's Islamic Revolution (the nationalization that went much further than Venezuela's Bolivarian Revolution has gone and is likely to go -- we live in different times²).

Since then the Islamic Republic has become less and less Islamic, both for better and worse: it has gradually moved away from Islamic republican liberty and virtue, slowly liberalizing culture and society and re-privatizing the means of production, especially since the end of the Iran-Iraq War. Iranian leftists, in Iran as well as in the diaspora, have yet to figure out a coherent response to this Janus-faced tendency of the neoliberal stage of capitalism, which brings social and cultural liberalization in part as a byproduct of economic liberalization, not just as a response to pressures, inside and outside the state, from below. Listening carefully to what ordinary Iranians have to say about Islam, I submit, is the first step in creating an alternative that is conscious of the limits of both populism and liberalism and potentially capable of overcoming them.


1 The intertwined energy and food crises that are rapidly developing on the global scale have the potential to create uprisings that can topple all manner of governments in the Third World, across the ideological spectrum, especially of countries that neither produce oil nor have sought to develop agriculture. See, for instance, Sateh Noureddine, "Food Crises" (As-Safir, 8 April 2008). Inflation in Iran today is a relatively mild symptom of this global malaise. Iran's Islamo-Leninists learned a lesson from what the neglect of agriculture did to the Shah's regime: Iran, once a food exporter, became a food importer under the Shah, and higher world food prices in the 1970s, due to higher energy prices and poor Soviet harvests, aggravated people's discontent (cf. Robert K. Schaeffer, Understanding Globalization: The Social Consequences of Political, Economic, and Environmental Change, Rowman & Littlefield, 2005, p. 258); and they have taken care to develop it as much as they can in an oil state: "Follow-up of the Implementation of the World Food Summit Plan of Action, National Report: Islamic Republic of Iran" (7 May 2006). Iran has achieved self-sufficiency in wheat -- just in time for the world food crisis -- and can now even export surplus, for instance to Egypt: Will Hadfield, "Grain Exports in Iran Set to Double with State Support" (14 March 2008). Whether that, combined with high oil prices, suffices for regime stability remains to be seen.

2 Mark Weisbrot and Luis Sandoval write in "The Venezuelan Economy in the Chávez Years": "As can be seen in Table 1, the private sector has grown faster than the public sector over the last 8 years, and therefore the private sector is a bigger share of the economy in 2007 than it was before President Chávez took office" (July 2007, p. 6). In contrast, one neoliberal critic of Iran put it disapprovingly: "Semi-official estimates put the private-sector share of the national economy at between 15 to 20 percent. This made the Islamic state a mixed capitalist-socialist economy predominantly under clerical control" (Akbar Karbassian, "Islamic Revolution and the Management of the Iranian Economy," Social Research, Summer 2000). That is the aspect of Iran's Islamic Revolution that not only the empire but also Iran's own ruling class, committed to re-privatization of nationalized means of production, has been seeking to undo.

---

What Do Iranians Think of Sharia and Women's Rights?
by WorldPublicOpinion.org

Large majorities of Iranians endorse the principle that women should have equal rights with men and that over the course of their own lifetimes, women have gained greater rights. A large majority says that the government should act to prevent discrimination against women. A modest majority also supports the United Nations working to further women’s rights.

Three out of four Iranians say it is important for "women to have full equality of rights compared to men," with 44 percent saying this is very important. Very few (8%) said this was "not very important" or "not important at all."

Most perceive that women have gained greater rights. Respondents were asked to think back over the course of their own lifetimes and say whether, "compared to the rights men have in this society," women now have more equality or not. Seventy-five percent said they thought women had more equality today (39% "much more," 36% "a little more").

Most Iranians believe that the government has a responsibility to counteract discrimination against women. Asked, "Do you think the government should make an effort to prevent discrimination against women, or that the government should not be involved in this kind of thing?" 70 percent said government should make such an effort, and only 18 percent said government should not be involved.

Those who said that government should make an effort to prevent discrimination against women were then asked, "Do you think the government is doing enough to prevent discrimination…or do you think it should do more?" The larger number (36% of the full sample) said the government should be doing more than it is, while a quarter (of the full sample) thought the government is doing enough.

A modest majority supports the United Nations working to further women's rights -- even when given a counterargument implying that this could be intrusive for Iran. Asked whether "the UN should make efforts to further the rights of women, or do you think this is improper interference in a country’s internal affairs?" Fifty-two percent supported the UN taking such a role, while 36 percent saw it as a form of interference.

Interestingly, differences between men and women on these questions were quite modest. The number of men and women saying that that women should have full equality were statistically the same, though the percentage saying this is very important was higher among women (51%) than men (38%). While men and women are largely the same in perceiving that women have gained greater equality, 46 percent of men as compared to 33 percent of women thought women have gained much greater equality. Thirty-nine percent of women and 33 percent of men thought the government should make greater efforts against discrimination. There was no meaningful difference between men and women in their support for the United Nations playing a role to further women’s rights.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Only a small minority wants to reduce the role of Shari'a in the way Iran is governed, but only one in three favor increasing its role. Only one in three favor punishing an Iranian who converts from Islam to another religion. The highest priorities in the application of Shari’a are preventing usury and providing welfare to the poor. Applying severe physical punishments is a low priority, but still endorsed by half.

When asked whether "Shari'a should play a larger role, a smaller role, or about the same role as it plays today" in the way Iran is governed, only 14 percent wanted Shari’a to play a smaller role. However, only a third wanted it to play a larger role (34%). Nearly half preferred to hold the status quo on Shari’a (45%).

Only one in three Iranians favor punishing an Iranian Muslim who converts to another religion. Asked, "Do you think that the government should or should not punish an Iranian citizen who converts from Islam to a non-Muslim religion?" 32 percent said the government should, while 50 percent said it should not.

Respondents who said, in the question discussed above, that Shari'a should play either the same or a larger role in Iranian governance -- 79 percent of the whole sample -- were presented six aspects of the application of Shari'a' and asked for each, “how important is [this] for the government to do?"

The highest priorities in the application of Shari’a are preventing usury and providing welfare to the poor. A 51 percent majority (of the full sample) called "preventing usury" very important, and another 16 percent said it was somewhat important. Nearly as many (48%) said "providing welfare to the poor" was very important, and another 20 percent said it was somewhat important. Forty-six percent also said "making education and healthcare available to all" was very important in applying Shari'a (somewhat: 22%).

Anti-vice aspects of Shari’a also received high ratings. Highest was "punishing those who consume alcoholic beverages in public" (45% very important, 22% somewhat), followed by "policing moral behavior such as gambling and prostitution" (43% very important, 22% somewhat).

The lowest priority was assigned to "applying severe physical punishments to people convicted of certain crimes." Only 22 percent called this very important (28% somewhat important). Overall, though, severe physical punishments were still endorsed by half.

---

This article is an excerpt (pp. 24 and 26) from "Public Opinion in Iran: With Comparisons to American Public Opinion," a WorldPublicOpinion.org Poll conducted in partnership with Search for Common Ground and Knowledge Networks, 7 April 2008.  "The poll of Iranians was conducted with a randomly selected sample of 710 Iranian adults, from rural as well as urban areas, January 13-February 9, 2008.  The margin of error is +/-3.8 percent.  Interviews were conducted in every province of Iran.  Professional Iranian interviewers conducted face-to-face interviews in Iranian homes.  Within each community, randomly selected for sampling, households were chosen according to international survey methods that are standard for face-to-face interviewing.  In some cases, a respondent did not want to be interviewed because the interviewer was of the opposite sex. Interviewers then offered to either reschedule the interview for a time when the male head of household would be present, or to have an interviewer of the same sex visit.  The poll questionnaire was developed in consultation with experts on Iran as well as the Iranian polling firm.  In addition to the poll, focus groups were conducted in Tehran with representative samples of Iranians" ("Public Opinion in Iran," pp. 3-4). The questionnaire and methodology is available at <worldpublicopinion.org/pipa/pdf/apr08/Iran_Apr08_quaire.pdf>.  See, also, "Iranians Oppose Producing Nuclear Weapons, Saying It Is Contrary to Islam: But Most Insist on Iran Producing Nuclear Fuel," WorldPublicOpinion.org, 7 April 2008; "Iranians Favor Direct Talks with US on Shared Issues, Mutual Access for Journalists, More Trade," WorldPublicOpinion.org, 7 April 2008; Jim Lobe, "Iranian Public Sees Reduced U.S. Threat," Inter Press Service, 7 April 2008.

Labels: class, gender, iran, islam, ruling class, working class

IDF soldiers torture, choke, beat and murder Palestinians posted by lenin

As Israel continues to build new colonies in the West Bank, Israeli soldiers stationed in the West Bank city of Hebron have confessed to numerous atrocities against Palestinian civilians. The full testimonies can be read here. Sometimes, what is striking is the pettiness of the causes that leads Israeli soldiers to beheave like this. For example, one IDF soldier tried to steal an old man's tobacco box during a house raid. The old man protested, calling him a thief, and they all started to beat him up heavily. The thief then took the old man's hand and wrapped barbed wire tightly round it, explaining that "He lifted a hand on me, he'll be punished." That's the deal - if the untermenschen even lift a hand to their oppressors, they get beaten and tortured. Another old man got too close to Israeli soldiers while out walking, so they shot him. "No reason, he just got close". And so on.

However, there are also calculated attacks with intent to kill everyone in sight, regardless of whether they are armed, or defend themselves, or are unarmed non-combatants. For example, there's the testimony about a great "honour" that soldiers were given, by being allowed to swoop on a refugee camp in Tul Karem. The IDF had found that whenever they tried to raid the camp on previous occasions, the residents huddled round campfires fought back, climbing to the rooftops to shoot at the invaders. So, they decided to sneak in:

The four lit campfires we spotted were quite near each other, and near the only two or three vehicle access routes into the camp. We were told to also post sharpshooters…Our firing orders were that each squatter around the campfires should be shot just like during a liquidation operation.

Without pretense? Without arms?

Yes, even unarmed people were to be shot.

Everyone around the campfire?

Yes, everyone present at the campfire during our entry at 2AM or 3AM was to be shot to death. Regardless whether…

Regardless whether or not he was armed?

Even if he was unarmed. That wasn’t considered of any consequence. Intelligence reported that there were about 10-15 people hanging around, regardless of age, regardless of anything, everyone that….

Boom?

Boom.

...

Clearly this mission was not described as an ‘execution’. If it were one, a projectile would have been fired (at the squatters). Rather, it is described a ‘Confrontational, or violent patrol’. (e.g.a patrol aiming to draw fire, or, in this case, to shoot) Let’s say everything went as planned, how would they explain it tomorrow to the press? ‘The IDF encountered a group of armed people, (as probably there were some armed people there), and someone got wounded’, and that’s the whole story. Did you understand? And that’s the end. No mention that we came to execute.

What were you told in the briefing?

It was not described as an execution mission. Absolutely not.

How then was it described?

Like I said. Firing orders for this particular mission: Entrance (into the camp) at 2:30AM. Anyone present in the alley at that time was to be shot. There are no innocent people there. That’s the mission. No one described it as an execution mission.

Another testimony has Israeli soldiers stationed outside the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem and instructed to fire on worshippers as they exited. "We were supposed to shoot whoever came out – doesn’t matter if he’s armed or not." [Curious thing: while I've been writing this, the contents of the online testimonies have disappeared from the original website - literally everything, including text, images and videos, has been deleted. You can of course view some caches of older material here for as long as Google keeps them up, and the booklet can at any rate be read here.] Israel's latest enemy in Hebron is Palestinian orphans.

We are on the brink of the sixtieth anniversary of the Nakba, which Israel will be celebrating with the usual aplomb during Passover. To keep the celebrations safe, they will be keeping out the Arabs - an appropriate tribute, I think, to the garrison state that has emerged from the original purification of the territory. Its systems of segregation, expropriation, blockade, colonisation, airborne occupation, assassinations, demolitions, raids, checkpoint massacres, protest shoot-ups, shellings, curfews and kidnappings, has all been for the purpose of maintaining racial supremacy over the indigenous Palestinian population and eventually eliminating the very possibility of Palestine for good. So this is a logical interlude in the tortuous conquest. Lights out for the natives. Pull up the drawbridges. Man the frontiers. Fire at anything that moves. Nothing can be allowed to disturb the repose of the executioners.

Labels: apartheid, Israel, palestine, zionism

Various Artists. posted by lenin

Friday night gig at Lenin's Tomb:

Labels: dead prez, divine comedy, marvin gaye, talib kweli

Death on the Underground posted by lenin

Via Socialist Worker, we learn that it it gets a year closer with each stop east from Westminster station:

Labels: inequality, left list, london, neoliberalism, socialism

Latest Menezes cover-up posted by lenin

The depressing saga of the Metropolitan Police getting away with murder takes a new twist. The Metropolitan Police Authority, after saving Sir Ian Blair's job last year, has shelved an inquiry into how he handled the crisis following the killing of Jean Charles de Menezes. Ken Livingstone has, of course, sadly decided to throw his political weight behind the Metropolitan Police Commissioner, reciting the New Labour mantra. Clearly, when Livingstone relies upon votes from London's working class, and particularly those most likely to be targeted by the police, it wouldn't do to have another set of revelations or criticisms of the man that he has so forcefully and vigorously defended. Unsurprisingly, when "unaccountable delays" occur, some people are saying that it might be for 'political' reasons (ie, to stop a complete electoral fuck-up). Personally, I wouldn't impugn the purity of Livingstone's motives, but ideologically he seems to have a real affinity for the police. After all, he now wants police cadets in London schools. What's that going to look like? "Right kids, listen up. At the end of the firing range, you see a man: there is his unseasonal clothing, there's the Mongolian eyes, and behind them is the brain which you must destroy, okay?" And I certainly don't want to use any inflammatory language - opportunistic, sordid, furtive, disgusting, all that unnecessarily excitable language. But what does it tell you when even the preposterous Boris Johnson is pretending to be ever-so-slightly more sceptical of Sir Ian Blair? When the sadsacks of the Liberal Democrats are taking a more principled position than - excuse me - Ken socialism-in-one-city Livingstone? What does this mean? I suspect what it means is that these politicians know that voters don't really like it when the police get off scot-free for killing someone, and are put off when politicians prattle obsequiously on their behalf. It means that Livingstone doesn't even have the usual excuse of psepholigical rectitude. He is a party man now, and so shall remain to the bitter end. (Mind you, still give him your second preference vote, because you don't really want that fucking sociopath loser Boris Johnson to be mayor).

Labels: boris johnson, ian blair, Jean Charles De Menezes, ken livingstone, london, mayor, metropolitian police

The Deluge posted by lenin

The global food riots and protests have hit hardest in Haiti. It is to be expected that Haiti, which has struggled for so long to escape the tyranny of external powers and is today struggling under a UN mandate in which civilians are regularly murdered, should suffer the worst of the food crisis - an acute crisis, moreover, obviously created by the markets and not simply by scarcity. (Incidentally, to the extent to which poor harvests were a factor, these cannot be extracted from the intensifying problem of 'climate change'.)

Amid the uninformative and frequently racist pieties of the media when it comes to Haiti, I have been struck by the lucidity and power of Peter Hallward's recent book, Damming the Flood: Haiti, Aristide, and the Politics of Containment. It stands out as the single most informative account of Haiti's politics so far produced, and it will surely become a classic and a key reference. If it is a counterblast to critiques of Aristide as a sell-out whose rule was becoming disastrous and autocratic, that counterblast is aimed at left-wing critiques as well as the conventional right-wing ones. I can think of Alex Dupuy's hostile book, The Prophet and Power, which - while it does not conceal what the Bush administration did to Haiti in 2004 - maintains that Aristide was a sell-out after 1994, having reverted to an authoritarian paradigm that he once condemned with the formation of Fanmi Lavalas as a split from the broader Organisation Politique Lavalas, and was arming Lavalas-supporting gangs to murder opponents. It's not just Dupuy - many former supporters believed that he had refashioned himself in the mould of the Ton Ton Macoutes. Hallward does a sterling job of defending Lavalas and Aristide, and describing the means by which Haitian popular democracy was repeatedly subverted by the United States. (In fact, Hallward's review of Dupuy's book can be read here).





Hallward's argument, based on a surfeit of data, documents and interviews, is roughly as follows (it follows at some length too - you may as well forget this post and just buy the bloody book). Lavalas as it emerged in the 1980s was a movement of unprecedented moment, led by a man hated by the elite as a combination of Castro and Khomeini, the sophisticated liberation theologian Jean-Bertrand Aristide. Hallward makes clear the particular nature of Aristide's theology: "That Aristide prefers to assert this [egalitarian] principle in primarily theological terms is an indication of its unconditional quality, not of its dependence on any sort of supernatural domain. What he calls 'God' is simply a name for an uncompromising commitment to equality and justice. 'There is no force superior to humankind' and 'There is no Messiah other than the people'." It was a grave climacteric for an elite cultivated by the US during its occupation from 1915-1934 during which time it massacred the Cacos rebels, killing up to 30,000 people, and created a plantation state from corvée labour, defended by a violent government militia comparable to the Guardia Nacionale created in Nicaragua. The US has supported that elite to this date, whether its leading spokesman is Duvalier or Apaid. The threat of popular self-government that culminated in a landslide victory for Aristide in the 1990 elections could only be answered by a coup and a wave of CIA-backed death squad violence, which killed some 5,000 people.

Aristide responded to this terror by arguing that there could be no question of confronting this terror with an armed struggle. He set about negotiating a means back to power with the US, accepting some harsh terms and more or less being compelled to take up much of the agenda of his opponent who had lost the previous elections. Critics of Aristide say that he made too many compromises to return to power, and effectively become a wholly bought adjutant of American power. Hallward maintains that Aristide had little choice by 1994, given the balance of power in Haiti, but to cut a deal with the US and adopt a more conciliatory posture. Moreover, the fact that he was able to do so was nothing short of miraculous, given that the Ton Ton Macoutes who were ravaging the country even as the negotiations wore on, were a direct extension of American power in the country. In fact, as the violence of the FRAPH escalated, US negotiators were not shy about reminding Aristide that unless he was a lot more cooperative, those nasty people might end up becoming "the dominant force on the ground". (Aristide's own account of the negotiations can be read in his 1996 book Dignity). It was quite a remarkable turnabout to have Clinton announce in September 1994 - to great disquiet among neocons and nutters of the John McCain variety - that he was going to send in 20,000 marines to remove the "most brutal, most violent" regime in the hemisphere. The solidarity movements in the US undoubtedly had a great deal to do with this, but the main reason is that the Clinton administration now had come by a different means of getting what it wanted. For, what those marines actually did was not to disarm the army, but to ensure the protection of the FRAPH soldiers and extend courtesy to the murderers while key coup leaders were exiled to the US. Many former soldiers were integrated into the new national police force (PNH) which at any rate was an immediate target for assassinations, and that police force rapidly reverted to behaviour redolent of the old army. As the transition was effected, the US was able to exert overbearing control over the reconfiguration of the state, populating it with chosen advisors and consultants. This will be familiar to those who follow such institutions as the NED - the professionalisation of the civilian component of imperialism has been a critical component of American power since the 1980s. It has helped convert quite explicit dictation of the affairs of others into a neutral exercise, a simple fulfillment of a sort of corporate strategy. The best recent guide to this tendency, albeit one that places too much emphasis on former Shachtmanites, is Nicolas Guilhot's The Democracy Makers.

Most US marines remained in Haiti from 1994 to 1996, while a small number remained behind until 2000. America's multilayered presence intensified its grip over the country. But the US could not stop Aristide from doing the one thing that the people demanded above all, which was to disband the army. However, neoliberalism meant conserving the elite, and any attempt to dilute its power was resisted by the US, usually successfully. Lavalas won the 1995 parliamentary elections resoundingly, but the main organ in the Lavalas Front, the Organisation Politique Lavalas no longer supported Aristide. Led by the career politician Gerard Pierre-Charles, the OPL sought to adapt to the new power balance. One of its leading members in the new parliament was the US-imposed conservative Prime Minister Smarck Michel. At the same time, USAID and a Washington-funded body called the Programme Integre pour le Renforcement de la Democratie (PIRED) were organising for the contuination of the business elite's dominance, with the latter using its influence to win over labour and community groups. The International Foundation for Electoral Systems (IFES) was contracted by USAID to organise 'civil society' groups - business leaders in the main - to maintain pressure on the government. Instead of allowing Aristide to continue as President, the OPL opted in 1996 to back his former Prime Minister René Préval, and - although they were swiftly disappointed by the latter's continued loyalty to Aristide's aideas - they did successfully under-sell a series of public utilities. The right-wing drift of OPL politics led to the formation by Aristide and his allies of Famni Lavalas (FL), a grassroots-based party designed to create a link between the Haiti's working population and their representatives. When several Aristide supporters won decisive victories in the 1997 legislative elections, the OPL refused to accept the results and its supporters resigned from the government, refused to accept any nominations from Préval for a Prime Minister and blocked legislation until their terms expired in January 1999. They then acted to delay elections until May 2000, which meant that Préval had to govern by decree for the next 18 months.

What happened next shocked the OPL (now renamed the Organisation du Peuple en Lutte in order to distance itself from the old Lavalas front from which it had emerged) and Haiti's business elites. Aristide won a decisive mandate with the backing of a disciplined political organisation that was far more cohesive than the loose coalition that had backed him in 1990. If Haiti used a first-past-the-post system like that in the UK or US, "Famni Lavalas would have won more than 95% of the seats in both houses of parliament". This, Hallward maintains, made the Lavalas movement more threatening than before. The opposition howled that it was a fix. Both the OPL and the new pro-army, pro-US coalition called Convergence Démocratique (CD) vowed not to accept the results. They were followed in their dismissal of the results by Western politicians and also by media sources such as Reuters and AP - the agenda-setting media, as Chomsky points out. The basis of this is a minor technical complaint by the OAS, which did not dispute the fairness of the vote or the legitimacy of the result. The OAS referred to a mistaken methology used by the independent electoral arbiter, the CEP, which had no Lavalas representatives on it. On this basis, the opposition and the United States undermined the legitimacy of a highly popular elected government and proceeded to sabotage it. The US imposed an embargo on all aid and blocked development loans, cutting the national budget in half and reducing the GDP by over a quarter in the period that followed. The Clinton administration instructed its ambassador to tell the new government that relations would not be normalised until the "problems" with the elections were resolved. The Bush administration continued these policies with even less subtlety, insistent that Aristide had no future. USAID and other organisations poured money into the coffers of his opponents, and IFES was put to work to mobilise various groups under the rubric of professional associations to act against the government.

This is where Hallward's documentation and reportage is essential. Myths abound about this period, with Aristide accused of orchestrating violence against opponents and ruling by decree. This despite the fact that having won so convincingly, he had invited the CD into the government and was met with intransigent hostility. The CD embodied leading US clients, and was quickly adopted for grooming by American PR experts (Hallward notes that James Foley, the US ambassador to Haiti from 2003, had cut his teeth grooming the KLA into a 'respectable' outfit in the late 1990s). IFES and the IRI embraced the Group of 184 (G184), which represented the most reactionary elements of the business sector under the sweatshop owner Andy Apaid junior. But it was not enough to destabilise the government in non-violent ways, so by late 2000, the opposition was trying to recruit some of the armed groups operating in the slums, some of which were simple criminal enterprise. They had no success in this venture until mid-2003. Former army personnel such as Guy Philippe, an admirer of Augusto Pinochet, were organised by the US under the rubric of the Fronte pour la Libération et la Reconstruction Nationale (FLRN). This was an organisation comparable to the Contras in Nicaragua. Other leaders included former FRAPH death squads fighters including Jodel Chamblain and Jean Tatoune. The FLRN organised from the Dominican Republic, and launched its first incursion into Haiti in July 2001, attacking the Haitian National Police Academy and various police stations. The government's subsequent arrests of suspected insurgents included some CD members, and was used as a pretext to call off negotiations between the CD and the government. Then, on 17 December 2001, 30 commandos took over the presidential palace with the help of the national police and announced that Aristide was no longer president. The subsequent popular uprising that thwarted the coup involved a few offices belonging to constituent parties of the CD being attacked. And so it went on, with repeated attacks and destabilisation, and all the while US policymakers and the IRI disavowed its connections to Guy Philippe and his merry band of putschists. (Philippe himself was unhelpful enough to warmly recall his 'good friend Stanley Lucas, scion of a wealthy Haitian family and the IRI programme director whose subsequent starring roles involved him in support for the Venezuelan opposition). The opposition itself abandoned its disavowal by 2004, warmly referring to the insurgent Macoutes as "heroes".




Despite all this pressure, the Préval-Aristide governments managed several remarkable accomplishments - reducing infant mortality from 125 to 110 per thousand live births; bringing illiteracy down from 65% to 45%; slowing the rate of new HIV infections. They did what they could to soften the blow of 'structural adjustment', by maintaining subsidies, implementing some land reforms, and promulgating certain social programmes. However, they were not in a position to implement socialist or even social democratic reforms, and most people suffered from the effects of neoliberalism. Realistically, what Lavalas could do was create a lively popular movement to try to pressure elites for change, to formulate popular demands and try to fulfil them. That movement consists of a national network of ti famnis, groups of neighbourhood militants. Because of its popularity, however, and also because of its relatively informal structure, it has been susceptible to infiltration by criminal or opportunistic elements. Leading Lavalas politicians often ended up showing more in common with the party's opponents than with its base, and did a great deal to enrich themselves and further their own careers. Corruption spread throughout segments of the Lavalas hierarchy, albeit on nothing like the scale of previous administrations, particularly that of Duvalier. Further, when the success of Lavalas showed the difficulty of organising outside it, so many opponents decided to oppose from within. Aristide had to work with hostile elements in the police, particularly the force attached to the presidential palace which - surprise - was composed of large numbers of former army members. Chavez can call upon the loyalty of army cadres in Venezuela; Aristide does not come from a military background and has no experience in fighting wars. He put up with demonstrations calling for a coup d'etat, allowed an unashamedly insurgent opposition to organise, and sought compromise everywhere: far from being a dictator, Aristide was in an extremely weak position. Yet, human rights organisations have tended to depict the Preval-Aristide years as continuous with previous and subsequent administrations in terms of human rights abuses. Hallward comments: "Here we reach the crowning achievement of the disinformation campaign ... Remember the basic numbers: perhaps 50,000 dead under the Duvaliers (1957-86), perhaps 700-1,000 dead under Namphy/Avril (1986-90), 4,000 dead under Cedras (1991-94) and then at least 3,000 killed under Latortue (2004-06). And under Aristide?" Between ten and thirty individuals killed by the PNH "whose political affiliation was often anti-government".

At any rate, given the manifest weakness of the government, and the growing problems faced by the country's poor, it should not have been difficult for the US to start paving the way for a coup and the subsequent UN protectorate. In fact, as Hallward points out, it took quite a long time and was much more difficult than the coup in 1991 - a testament to the resilience of the Lavalas movement. It required massive intervention, with 11,000 people in 1,000 organisations trained within Haiti by USAID. It required repeated incursions and a failed putsch. But perhaps most striking of all, it required elaborate attempts at winning over a diverse array of NGOs and unlikely groups like Batay Ouvriye (BO). Hallward documents who groups like Christian Aid performed a neo-colonial function, advocating CD's preferred version of events and a version of their preferred outcome (the elimination of Lavalas as the dominant force in Haitian politics). Hallward rightly points to the funding that BO received from the NED, as well, and the role it performed in polemicising against Aristide despite the fact that their own aims would be served worst by the overthrow of the government (although he uses the unfortunate term "neo-Trotskyite" to describe them). He suggests that they may have supported the coup, and that they were at least content to see Aristide go. Whatever the case, their sectarian analysis and actions did not see them attempt to hinder the coup in any way. The coup began with the siezure of Raboteau in September 2003, and the emergence of the Cannibal Army as an anti-government gang engaged in attacks on government forces the same year. In February 2004, the death squads and criminal gangs and ex-army men united for the insurgency and were shortly on the march to Port-au-Prince, perhaps even already there with several sympathisers in the presidential palace guards. The myths that were widely repeated in the media - that it was a democratic rebellion, a popular liberation struggle, or perhaps a combination of genuine revolt with initial criminal instigation, which at any rate had nothing to do with any outside powers - are meticulously taken to pieces in Damming the Flood. Essentially, it is clear that despite national and regional efforts at finding a negotiated settlement, and despite the fact that the evident difficulties being experienced by the insurgents, the opposition was determined this time to bring the government down. And it seems it was Assistant Secretary of State Roger Noriega who pulled the plug on final negotiations. The Chirac government was also anxious to get rid of Aristide and his demands for restitution for the systematic extortion of the Haitian treasury by the French state after L'Ouverture's revolution (for the amount the French deemed that they had lost as a result of the overthrow of slavery), and it restored France's longstanding relationship with Haitian elite figures such as G184 supporter Serge Gilles. Finally, Aristide was abducted on 29 September 2004. The US ambassador at the time, James Foley, claimed that it had been a rescue mission, that the US was deeply saddened by what was happening, and that to protect Aristide's endangered life they absconded with him to a safe place. It was claimed that he had resigned voluntary, with an air of passivity and acceptance. Some 36 hours after his 'resignation', as soon as he found a phone, he told every news outlet that would listen that he had been kidnapped by US forces. Hallward does not profess to be a detective, but he does an excellent job here of piecing together what happened and skewering the propaganda.

We know some of what happened next, of course: the revenge of Haiti's ruling class. The mass imprisonment and murder of prominent Aristide supporters. The restoration of convicted genocidaires. A government under a UN protectorate that carried out attacks on pro-Lavalas neighbourhoods (not to mention hospitals). Hallward documents in some detail the Latortue government's repression, as well as the massacres of the UN and anti-Lavalas gangs. However, he is fundamentally optimistic - as is Jean-Bertand Aristide in the closing interview. The coup was difficult to effect, and it could not withstand the popular counter-coup that resulted in another Preval administration. The government is still beholden to neoliberalism, the UN troops continue to commit atrocities, but Lavalas is still a powerful popular movement. Terror has not been able to destroy it in the way that the Sandinistas were destroyed, even if Haiti's position means it will take a global upturn for the left to help shake it free of domination for good. Over 200 years old now, Haiti's liberation struggle could hardly have asked for a better contemporary advocate than Peter Hallward.

Labels: coup, damming the flood, haiti, imperialism, neoliberalism, peter hallward, united nations

Gaza posted by lenin

Labels: gaza, Israel, murdering bastards, palestine, zionism

Stupid, full of shit, and fucking nuts. posted by lenin

Some people, George Carlin once observed, are just stupid. Others aren't stupid, but they are full of shit. And some people, he added, are fucking nuts. "Dan Quayle is all three! All three! Stupid, full of shit, and fuckin nuts!" (Fortunately, you can listen to the routine here rather than relying on my description). It seems to me that John McCain, the current leader of the polls and beneficiary of Clinton's berserker strategy, fulfils this trifecta and more besides.

I don't suppose I have to prove this, but let's quickly review. He promises 100 years in Iraq. McCain wants to "bomb bomb bomb bomb bomb bomb Iran". He was against torture, but then voted for it. He used to castigate Jerry Falwell, then the demented preacher became one of his biggest campaign assets (until he snuffed his lid). He backed election campaign reform legislation, put his name to it, then backed off. He has repeatedly insisted that Iran is supplying Al Qaeda, and when anyone points out how stupid this is, his face goes blank. Eventually, he had to get Joseph Lieberman to whisper the correct script in his ear when he went off focus ("uh, sorry, extremists, not Al Qaeda"). One of his major campaign backers is, of course, the ranting antisemite, misogynist, Islamophobe, homophobe, and supporter of God's punishment in New Orleans, Pastor John Hagee. Everyone is against him, and he's going to kill them. And he's been hanging around with this sleazy crackpot. One could go on.

Well, here is his latest disreputable supporter: rumour has it that Hitchens is supporting McCain in the upcoming elections: "And from what I hear, you're backing McCain, a man you once told me was a bandit that the Vietnamese had every right to shoot down. Now that he wants to kill Arabs and Persians (and God knows who else) for the next 100 years, he's acceptable to you? Any old mercenary in a shit storm? Where the fuck is this going? How does it end?" Answer: it doesn't.

Labels: and fucking nuts, full of shit, hitchens, john mccain, stupid

The quality of their mercy. posted by lenin

It is not unusual for those recanting from Left-Wing or marxist positions to cite among their reasons for doing so that the Left is too dismissive of rights, insufficiently appreciative of the pacifying effect of liberal institutions, and particularly insensitive to the cruelty that rights-regimes try to curtail. This was Kanan Makiya's argument, and of course Alan Johnson recently repeated it in his list of observations about why he is no longer a marxist. The Eustonites - effectively, though not dearly, departed - made a great deal of their support for 'human rights for all', and again it was part of their belabouring of the Left that it had proven insufficiently appreciative of those rights.

So, a very simple question. Does apostasy improve one's commitment to such rights? Does liberalism? We can put this question historically. Were those who rallied round the Wilson administration in 1917-18 more or less concerned with individual liberty than before, especially those who sent up a hue and cry about Bolshevism? Were the Cold War liberals more sensitive to domestic curtailments of individual liberty and rights than their more radical forebears might have been? The ex-Trotskyists among them: were they more or less inclined to oppose McCarthyism, given their understanding of Stalinist repression? Was Camus a better defender of human rights in Algeria than Sartre? Are the 'war on terror' liberals more or less attentive to the issues of cruelty to prisoners, arbitrary detention, torture, evidence-based trials, the rule of law and so on, than their radical opponents? I think the answers to most of the mentioned examples are too obvious to meditate on. And while there is clearly no simple answer to the last one, there are a few relatively simple cases. One of the co-founders of the Euston Manifesto is an apologist for torture and a supporter of internment and/or deportation based on MI5 say-so. Another wants to withdraw from European human rights legislation and set up Diplock courts, after those used in Northern Ireland to try and imprison suspected Republicans. Do we need to rehearse the history of those Diplock courts, or the legacy of internment? Not "human rights for all", then. And this fits into a wider intellectual milieu, with people like Sam Harris defending torture, Michael Ignatieff warning that it may be the 'lesser evil' (retracting his criticism of the Qana massacre too), and Martin Amis flaunting his sinister balls. I can hardly be bothered to reproduce the kind of thing that Christopher Hitchens is likely to come out with these days, and at any rate he seems to have taken too literally Oscar Wilde's aphorism that "the wise contradict themselves."*

Perhaps a more frequent response than outright support for repression is a tactful silence or a drastically curtailed attention span. Yet it is hardly possible for anyone supporting the 'war on terror' and buying its quack ideology not to be an apologist for some atrocities here and some repression there. By contrast, the fiercest critics of the current global torture regime, the secret prisons, the crackdowns on civil liberties, the conscious murder of civilians in Iraq and Palestine and Afghanistan and Haiti and Somalia by our governments, the repression of asylum seekers (particularly of those who are 'detained' in 'decention centres' without having committed any crime), and so on, are indisputably those whose job it is to scorn 'bourgeois rights' and be all, you know, totalitarian. Now why might that be?

* The full epigram is: "The well-bred contradict others. The wise contradict themselves." Hitchens perhaps doesn't realise that by noisily contradicting others and unwittingly contradicting himself, he does not become both well-bred and wise.

Labels: 'war on terror', cruise missile liberals, deportation, detention without trial, eustonites, human rights, humanitarianism, internment, pro-war 'left', torture

Support for 'free market' sinks. posted by lenin

I suppose it is to be expected that the term 'free market' is used as synonymous for capitalism as such. On the basis of the most recent PIPA poll, support for 'free markets' has tumbled since 2002 in most countries. And most of those who do support the 'free market' want it to be strongly regulated (ie, they don't actually support a 'free market'). The results indicated that support for the 'free market' was sliding long before the current banking crisis. Given the current global failure of entitlements, and the growing recession, the crisis of confidence is likely to grow. But grow into what? In some European countries, the Left is growing (Germany and Greece). In Italy, it has just experienced a catastrophic defeat, mainly on account of being chained to a neoliberal administration in the era of manifest neoliberal failure. What did Prodi promise after his election victory in 2006? "Shock therapy". I shit you not. Where was he by early 2007? Up shit creek without a paddle. It is amazing that the left coalition has survived this long, what with the insistence on keeping troops in Afghanistan, driving through, er, 'free market' reforms, and expanding a US base in the country. In the UK, it is very difficult to imagine New Labour winning the next general election - it isn't that the Tories are popular, it is that enough of Labour's voters won't come out (and in London, 22% of them are considering a vote for the shaggy right-wing sociopath from Have I Got News For You). Most Britons have no confidence in Brown's ability to handle the crisis, and the reason is that they know they're just going to get more of the same. Unless the radical left makes some strides quite quickly, not only will there be a Tory government, but the Nazis will have representation in the London Assembly and boost its standing in local councils.

Labels: capitalism, crisis, free markets, hegemony, neoliberalism, recession

UnSaid posted by lenin

Speaking of West versus the rest, Decentiya (or is that 'Descentiya'?) have got an on-going series devoted to pissing on the grave of Edward Said, the latest of which is a review of two critical books by Ibn Warraq and Daniel Martin Varisco. All too predictable is the touting of the superiority of a historically curtailed and asomatous 'West', via Warraq. Predictable also is the representation of actual or alleged flaws in Said's approach as if they exhausted his output. And entirely unsurprising is the casual misrepresentation, about which more in a second. What surprised me was this:

"Varisco also lambastes Said for ignoring Europe's persecution of the Jews and argues that this omission is due to Said's wholesale opposition to Zionism and Israeli policies."

The context makes it clear that the author agrees with Varisco, (although I sense that Varisco may be the subject of some misrepresentation himself here). Edward Said 'ignored' European antisemitism? He 'ignored' the persection of the Jews? I just mention that the reviewer is presumably someone who has read Orientalism, and has probably encountered his interviews and various articles in collected form. He certainly quotes from Orientalism quite a lot, although that is no proof of having read it. Nevertheless, if he has, he will know that the heart of Said's argument is that anti-Semitism and Orientalism are conjoined at the hip and that they share a similar origin. Anti-Semitic and Orientalist statements and actions are authorised by the same discourse. So, for example, when he discusses Schlegel on the Orient, he discusses the anti-Semitic thesis of a philological divide between a superior Indo-European (Aryan) race and an inferior Oriental (Semitic) race. When he discusses Ernest Renan, as he does at some length, he describes his invention of the 'Semite' as an inferior non-European species. Excoriating Edward William Lane on the same theme, he writes: "The Jews and Muslims, as objects of Orientalist study, were readily understandable in view of their primitive origins: this was (and to a certain extent still is) the cornerstone of modern Orientalism ... No Semite advanced in time beyond the development of a 'classical' period; no Semite could ever shake loose the pastoral, desert environment of his tent and tribe." (Edward Said, Orientalism, Penguin Books, 2003: 234). Here are a couple more relevant quotations:

"The study of the Semitic was Renan's first full-length Orientalist and scientific study (finished in 1847, published first in 1855), and was as much a part of his late major works on the origins of Christianity and the history of the Jews as it was a propadeutic for them ... Whenever Renan wished to make a statement about either the Jews or the Muslims, for example, it was always with remarkably harsh (and unfounded, except according to the science he was practising) strictures on the Semites in mind." (Said, 2003, op cit: 140-1)

"One of the things that disappointed me about the reviews of Orientalism was that a lot of the reviews published by Jewish or Zionist journals missed the point that I was trying to make: the roots of European anti-Semitism and Orientalism were really the same. Ernest Renan, for example [some of whose writing are republished with enthusiastic endorsement in Ibn Warraq's The Quest for the Historical Muhammad] was a tremendous anti-Semite and anti-Muslim, and his view of both was essentially the same: that the Semites, whether Muslim or Jew, were not Christians and not Europeans, and therefore had to be excoriated and confined." (Gauri Viswanathan, ed, Power, Politics and Culture: Interviews with Edward Said, Bloomsbury, 2001: 48)

When Said writes about Palestine, he is often at pains to emphasise the persecution of the Jews. Thus, speaking of comparisons between apartheid and Zionism, he writes: "The conflict between Zionism and the Palestinians is admittedly more complex than the battle against apartheid ... [because] the Jews are a people with a tragic history of persecution and genocide." (Edward Said, 'The Only Alternative', Al Hayat, 2 March 2001). Speaking of the powerlessness of the Palestinians, he reminds readers that "Sixty years ago the Jews of Europe were at the lowest point of their collective existence. Herded like cattle into trains, they were transported from the rest of Europe by Nazi soldiers into death camps, where they were systematically exterminated in gas ovens." (Edward Said, 'Low Point of Powerlessness', Al Hayat, 30 September 2002). Far from Said's anti-Zionism conspiring to silence him on the persecution of the Jews, it has made him rather vocal about it, because he regards Orientalism as a particular variety of anti-Semitism.

One could go on, and indeed there would be much more to cite and quote if the facts of the matter were not already obvious. Those facts being that: 1) Edward Said did not ignore the persecution of the Jews; and 2) that to claim that he did is both a ludicrous misrepresentation of his entire project, actually to miss the whole point, and a disgusting political smear. Any critique of Said that doesn't grasp the fact that he was a powerful humanist critic of anti-Semitism and racism in general, that this was in fact his life's work, is poorly placed to grasp much else about his work. I should say that as far as original critique of Said goes, there isn't much to be had in the linked article, and as far as original and coherent critique goes, there is none. Aijaz Ahmad dealt with significant problems in Said's use of Foucauldian concept of 'discourse', pointed to the inconsistent way in which Said deals with the Hellenic connection (which is not exhausted by Said's treatment of Aeschylus, contrary to the linked article's claim), the methodological flitting between high humanism and anti-humanism, the abberant uses of 'representation' and 'misrepresentation' - all this more than fifteen years ago, and without the supererogatory hostility and misrepresentations (although I think some of Ahmad's criticisms are overdone). Before that, Robert Young had pointed to internal inconsistencies in Orientalism, in his 1990 book White Mythologies, again without managing to reduce Said's work to an elaborate set of schoolboy howlers. Even the reactionary carping about 'intellectual terrorism' that Warraq nurtures has been a theme of conservative criticism for years, since he was dubbed the 'professor of terror' by Edward Alexander in 1989. Once again, it would be possible to go on for some time on this theme. The urgency with which the 'decent left' seek, alongside the neoconservative right, to disinter Said and put him on trial on outdated, spent or wholly contrived charges, without any defense lawyer or witnesses if at all possible, is really an artefact of insecurity about the 'West' and its supremacy. For, after all, we live in a time in which pro-war intellectuals - let us be absolutely honest and say pro-empire intellectuals - of different shades are increasingly concerned about the question of Western ascendancy. The demand that we assert the superiority of something called 'Western values' (curiously, including secularism and human rights, but excluding racism, imperialism and Christian fundamentalism) is more forcefully uttered the more dubious that superiority seems. As armies purportedly acting as agents of those values despoil nations, terrorise civilians, rape women and torture prisoners, while using comprador Islamist parties to provide the human base for death squads, some people might be inclined to recall that this sort of thing happens rather a lot. It happens so often that it is hard to recall a time when someone, purportedly a leader of this 'West', was not invading somewhere outside the 'West', not finding some use for death squads, not bombing something somewhere. And when it does happen, it seems to come with a spiel about values that we all share, and wish to extend.

Labels: antisemitism, clash of civilisations, decentiya, edward said, islamophobia, orientalism, pro-war 'left'

A Lonely Outpost of Civilization posted by lenin

This frontiersman holds a lonely vigil. Gazing wistfully across the terrain from a desolate watchtower, he sees the barbarians gather their forces. Illiberal. Despotic. Pre-Enlightened. Irrational. And, most terrible of all, utterly incapable of appreciating the lofty ends to which he has dedicated himself. It is perfectly maddening. In a manly fashion he gathers his nerve, holds his chin aloft, and presses the button marked 'civilization'. In seconds, a cruise missile whizzes noiselessly past the reinforced windows, streaks across the barren land, and slams into the hordes of ingrates. His satisfaction at the pacific effect this has is despoiled, however, by the thought of treachery within. He thinks of those who are "ready to undermine our struggle and support our deadly enemies in all these places". He reaches for the education pamphlet and directs his attention to the 'squared circle'. How, he wonders, could anyone fail to be impressed by its pedagogic simplicity?



In its minimalist beauty it draws out a multitude of relations, distills thousands of concepts into their essentials, and throws the most obscure dimensions of global politics into sharp relief. It bears the magisterial authority of Renan, Spengler, Schmitt, Strauss and Huntington. Who could refuse it? Only cynics, naysayers and nihilists. Only the enemies of reason and Enlightenment! His reverie is interrupted by a ferocious din - some of the more restless natives are being interrogated in a chamber below his station. They can wail like banshees, call down curses, fret, weep, imprecate, invoke the authority of the Almighty - but they usually quieten down as they dangle from the strappado and the pressure gathers on their chest. The agonised howling goes on. He smiles as he hears a familiar crackle: the modern miracle of electricity!

His grin fades as he reflects on what a grim business it all is, and he resumes his meditations on the troubling domestic treachery. The Lord Wellington Society has published several articles of his on this very topic. The problem of active subversion is itself the most manageable problem. Essentially, they can be eliminated in much the same way as the unfortunate captives in the floor below. Even more worrisome are idle critics who, from the comfort of homes protected by he and his Rough Riders Militia, give all manner of comfort to the subversives and, in so doing, provide the best aid to an implacable foe. There will have to be a purge, he resolves. When this territory is at last settled and cultivated with the values of liberal modernity, the Riders will reconquer the homeland. A healthy society cannot long stomach these illiberal, intolerant elements. In the meantime, he spots another battalion of deceptively unarmed Islamofascists sweeping in from the slum quarters of the city, bearing portraits of their riff-raff leader. Some appear to be carrying miniature coffins. "Sorry chaps," he mutters sternly, "but this is an unauthorised manifestation of anti-liberal chauvinism." Within moments, he has called in the helicopters. The ground reddens, the sky blackens, and a depuratory fire consumes the terrorists before discharging them in splendid atramentous pulses into the atmosphere. From all directions the elegant copters converge, circle above in an elegaic dance and discharge round after round of liberal democratic values. Amid the Wagnerian glory of this Gotterdammerung, our frontiersman pauses to transcribe the lapidary thought: "There is No Left or Right; There Is Only Us and Them; If You Are Not With Us, You Are With Them. Exterminate All The Brutes!"

Labels: after the cataclysm, clash of civilisations, friend/enemy distinction, huntington, imperial ideology, leo strauss, neoconservatism, orientalism, renan, schmitt, spengler, west

Just Taking Care of Business posted by lenin

In a press release issued via Fox Business News, the SEIU union leadership has applauded its own actions over the weekend, without going into too much detail about what happened. It seems that several hundred members of the SEIU union (America's biggest organiser of healthcare workers) stormed a Labor Notes conference and attacked participants. According to a press release from the California Nurses Association (CNA), several conference participants were punched and kicked and one woman injured as a result. Some of what happened is described by Labor Notes. What's going on? Several things, apparently. The SEIU leadership is increasingly bent on a model of business unionism, cutting sweet-heart deals with employers that rule out strike action and promise to increase the bottom line. It means imposing such templates from the centre and expecting local affiliates to comply. It also includes loyalty oaths being imposed on members by the leadership. Though anti-democratic and disempowering local workers, it seems to be a vision that inspires some admiration at Business Week. This has produced a rift in the organisation with a layer of workers demanding a more militant and democratic approach. So, it seems that several SEIU members were present at this conference, whose purpose was to establish a viable strategy for effective unionism. Also present were members of the CNA, who have long been in a dispute with the SEIU over its timid politics and strategy, with complaints summarised here. The SEIU, including the dissident faction led by Sal Rosseli, charges that the CNA aggressively undermines SEIU recruitment and organising efforts. Following a negotiated truce in which the two unions agreed to keep to respective geographical areas of strength, the war of attrition has continued, and the SEIU is now engaged in an aggressive campaign against the CNA and its national off-shoot, the NNOC. The SEIU dissidents are refusing to have anything to do with it, considering their tactics a form of union-busting. The SEIU leaders, and several hundred loyal members, clearly saw this weekend's efforts as a defense of the union's interests and long-term strategy. The current SEIU leader, Andy Stern, is adored in much of the media ("charismatic", "firebrand"), but doesn't appear to have much to recommend him. Promises of explosive growth thanks to a brilliant new strategy to one side, he seems to be a leader very much in the mould of his predecessor John Sweeney, and not a great deal different from past advocates of business unionism such as George Meany or Lane Kirkland. A former Shachtmanite of sorts (a much abused term, I admit), he is one of these assholes that talks about the 'American Dream', and getting the country 'back on track', while cuddling the Democratic Party hierarchy. He and his coterie are hardened political fighters, so they know what they're doing when they hammer internal dissent, abolish democratic structures built by the grassroots, and lead aggressive campaigns against other unions. The technical term is 'taking care of business'.

Labels: 'change to win', afl-cio, american labour movement, business unionism, cna, seiu, shachtmanites

It's bad for you. posted by lenin

The warnings about soaring global food prices are just flooding in. From the IMF riot to the food riot. Aside from causing starvation among large swathes of consumers, fluctuations in global commodity prices typically wreak the most havoc for small producers. Multinationals and agricommerce don't have this problem, because they are diversified and have the resources to wait out slumps or spirals. While the chaos resulting from the subordination of basic human requirements to global markets can cause social collapse, an erosion of the moral geography, and intensified social conflict of the kind that has afflicted Sudan and pre-genocide Rwanda, the people who are meant to make money from it keep making money from it. Currently, the emphasis on biofuels and the shift of investors away from bad bets in subprime to staple goods have conspired to drive the prices up. So, although there is more than enough rice to meet every individual's dietary requirements, we are told there is a 'scarcity'. That's capitalism for you: even where's plenty, there ain't enough.

In light of all this, I have some questions. To wit: what is that shit you're eating? Why are you so fat, yet malnourished? Why is it that for the first time the number of obese people (1 billion) exceeds the number of starving people (850 million)? And how are those two facts related? Answer come later. The basic facts of starvation are reasonably well known. In the nineteenth century, the world champions of famine were India and China, both subjects of colonial exploitation. India suffered on average a million famine-related deaths a year in the last quarter of the twentieth century. China suffered several severe bouts of famine, costing between 9.5 million lives and 13 million lives in 1877-8, and a further million lives in 1892-4. In the 1877-8 famine, some prefectures saw 95% of the population die. Mike Davis describes in Late Victorian Holocausts how these were a part of a global wave of synchronised hunger of unprecedented savagery, coterminous with the high point of colonial repression and the subordination of much of the planet to capitalist imperatives for the first time. There had been famines in previous millenia, a combination of natural catastrophe and social failure. But nothing like this had ever occurred before. Both India and China defeated famine due to developmentalist policies since the mid-20th Century, even if the recent introduction of neoliberalism has put this outcome in question. The provisions in India's post-colonial Scarcity Manuals, Alex de Waal points out in Famine Crimes, have prevented the descent to epidemic starvation at several key moments - he cites the 1970-3 drought relief response in Maharashtra, which "stands as a model of effective famine prevention by utilizing the provisions of the Scarcity Manuals to the full".

China did suffer one appalling famine in 1959-61, with mortality estimates ranging from 15 million (the Chinese government's figure) to 43 million (the figure reached by the reformist Chinese economist Chen Yizi). The reasons for this, as one would expect, are as much political and economic as natural. The sudden, drastic changes in property forms and incentives associated with the catastrophic 'Great Leap Forward' dramatically reduced output, while at the same the government was appropriating grain for mass export to pay debts to the Soviet Union. Nonetheless, barring that atrocious failure, China did fundamentally depart from its at least century old status as the 'land of famine'. It raised life expectancy all round as a result of social protection systems. In one comparison Amartya Sen and Jean Dreze noted that "India seems to manage to fill its cupboard with more skeletons every eight years than China put there in its years of shame" because of the former's lack of of social protection. (In connection with this debate, you might wish to check out Mobo Gao, the anthropologist and left-Maoist critic of Dengism, who argues that the 'Great Leap Forward' notwithstanding, the Mao years were beneficial for rural China. His latest book also takes to task Jung Chang and Jon Halliday's sensationalist account of the Mao years with some convincing arguments.) At any rate, in South Asia today, mass famine is not the pervading reality it once was, although it remains a risk in North Korea, Bangladesh and Cambodia for different reasons. This is because starvation is not a naturally occurring phenomenon, but the result of a particular political economy. The fact that 6.6m children starve to death each year is no accident of the weather.

Well, then, given that starvation is a historical and not natural phenomenon, given that struggle has proven that we have the technology and political capacity to prevent it, why is it so persistent? Why should the problem of malnourishment and mortality from starvation be getting worse when the technical means to deal with it are more abundant now than ever before? The best answer to these questions to date has been supplied by the former World Bank employee and UN consultant Raj Patel in his justly praised Stuffed and Starved. First of all, let's go back over obesity for a moment. Obesity is related to a bunch of other health problems, such as cardiovascular disease and diabetes. Both obesity and diabetes among the poorest citizens of advanced capitalist societies are shooting through the roof, while India and China are today the world leaders in cardiovascular disease, and childhood obesity is increasing rapidly in China as the market is opened to Western food producers. New Labour, when it gets in the mood, likes to exhort us to be healthier in our dietary choices. This might even be useful as general advice, but in the government's case it functions as a kind of apologia for its neoliberal policies by placing the emphasis on individual choice, when the individual has precious little of it. To the extent that it is treated as a social issue, it is a means by which the poorest population groups are stigmatised - it becomes the basis for moral panic. Sometimes, it becomes infotainment, the stuff of satirical muck-raking and exposé. But the dietary restructuring of the average human being in late capitalism is not merely the result of poor choices, misleading advertising or the spread of certain corporations. And obesity can no more be the object of moral reproach than starvation. So, here is the answer to questions one and two above: the shit you're eating is likely to be high in sugar and fat, because that is what is most likely to be on offer, especially if you live in a poor area of the developed capitalist countries and especially if you're black in America. The supermarket industry is particularly responsible for this state of affairs, and it mirrors the segregated dimensions of poor health related to malnutrition in the US. Firstly, by freezing out smaller producers of fresh fruit and vegetables, thus depriving consumers of choice beyond those adopted by the supermarket for its own convenience; secondly, by 'red-lining' poor African-American or Hispanic neighbourhoods and refusing to set up branches in them, so that residents are left with a limited range of foods such as corn dogs and frozen pizza, high in saturated fat; thirdly, where they do set up in black neighbourhoods, they systematically stock lower quality foods; and finally, they charge higher prices to poorer urban consumers, so that they can buy less of the shit that is available. The global food industry is structured in such a way that urban workers in rich capitalist societies are more and more likely to be offered an inferior range of high fat, high sugar foods, with more places to consume alcohol and fewer food markets with a poorer range of products. As usual, America's fat can bears a lot of the blame: even if you happen to live near the US (ie, if you're a Mexican family living just south of the border), your chances of suffering from health conditions adjoining obesity with malnourishment are increased. It isn't an accident of geography: if you're working class, this is how you're expected to get by. High-energy food is an important component in the reproduction of labour, and is particularly handy if quick to cook or pre-cooked. Alcohol provides a sort of self-medication for the stress and boredom and growing depression that most people are subject to. The all-too-brief sense of warmth and well-being is also an ideal social lubricant among workmates. All of these factors help produce larger frames with more body fat, even while you get a sub-standard nutritional intake. Among those who manage to avoid piling on adipose layers may be the 35.1 million Americans who don't know where their next meal is coming from because production is organised according to market principles that recognise no human need, but only demand backed up by purchasing power.

Of course, the way in which the extension of these market principles has been encouraged by the IMF among others has added to the ranks of the impoverished in various ways. India's 'Green Revolution', just as much as China's neoliberalism, is responsible for removing social protections for small producers; enclosing the land for capital; ruining whole swathes of the population by pushing them into the red; generating a landless proletariat with few prospects who can flee to overcrowded urban areas or try to eke out an existence in former rural communities; and creating a quite remarkable rise in the rate of rural suicide. Well, actually, rural life is tough all around - suicides are higher among farmers than any other economic group in the UK. Sadly, their main champions are puce-faced right-wing bigots who should have their farms expropriated and nationalised. One of the few challenges to this trend, Brazil's landless workers' movement (the MST) is perceived as a mortal threat by the food industry. Where they succeed, for example, McDonalds may end up having to pay more to its suppliers for the soy beans it uses in the McNuggets that you're stuffing your face and padding your ass with. They will keep more land to work as cooperatives, and those cooperatives won't be producing soy, because it isn't economically viable for them to do so. McDonalds gets less profit if Cargill has to withdraw from its Brazilian plantations, take down its illegal port and find somewhere else to monoculture the fields. That is un-American. Besides, the MST's ecological concerns and socialistic doctrines obstruct capitalist practise - that land should ideally be owned by an oligarchy that extracts maximum profits by providing the cheapest possible labour working on one big export product. Of course, by turning food production into an export-led industry while allowing most of the profits to be siphoned out of the country, you do run the risk of leaving large numbers of people impoverished and malnourished in Brazil. And in Brazil, a body broken by poverty will process fat rather badly and potentially end up obese even without eating a large amount of food. But at least that means that you can have several high-fat, high-sugar meals in your local fast food outlet every day. It doesn't even have to be McDonalds. The smaller the store, the more likely it buys in the cheapest meat with the most additives and the least nutritious value from probably the same people that sell the slightly better quality stuff to the big chains. So, that answers question number three. Sure, people starve. Sure, it's poor quality food. Sure, there's shit in the burger. But isn't that life? No, that's capitalism: it's full of shit and its bad for you.

Labels: capitalism, colonialism, fast food, food industry, food prices, malnutrition, neoliberalism, starvation

What Do Iranians Think of Their Own Government? posted by Yoshie

Contrary to what much of the Western media, leftist as well as capitalist, would have us believe, the Iranian government apparently enjoys a high level of popular support, according to the latest World Public Opinion poll, which also clarifies the class base of support for Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Would-be regime changers ought to take a hint and stop the economic sanctions, covert actions, "democracy assistance," media propaganda, and other measures against Iran, all of which only undermine the Iranian people's attempts to further democratize their government and make it truly reflect the will of the people. The Iranian government, in turn, should take a deep breath and lighten up: the best defense against imperialism is the deepening of democracy, including industrial democracy, and improvement of the economic lot of working people, not the My Uncle Napoleon syndrome.

---

What Do Iranians Think of Their Own Government?
by WorldPublicOpinion.org

Iranians largely express satisfaction with their government.  Two out of three say that Iran is generally going in the right direction, though a plurality is dissatisfied with the Iranian economy.  Half say they trust the government to do what is right most of the time, while another quarter say they trust it at least some of the time.  Two-thirds express satisfaction with Iran's relations with the world as a whole.  Large majorities approve of how President Ahmadinejad is handling his job at home and his dealings with other countries, though this support is considerably lower among more educated and higher-income Iranians.

About two thirds of Iranians make positive assessments of Iran's government and general direction.  Asked, "Generally speaking, do you think things in Iran today are going in the right direction or . . . the wrong direction?" 65 percent say things are moving in the right direction, while 24 percent disagree.

However, Iranians make an exception about the economy.  A 49 percent plurality said they were "mostly dissatisfied with Iran's economy," while 36 percent said they were mostly satisfied.

Three in four Iranians say that they trust the government to do what is right at least some of the time.  Respondents were asked how much of the time they "trust the national government in Tehran to do what is right."  Forty-eight percent said the government could be trusted most of the time, and another 26 percent said it could be trusted some of the time.  Just 14 percent answered "rarely" (11%) or "never" (2%).

In foreign relations, two-thirds (64%) said they are mostly satisfied with Iran's relations with the world as a whole; 28 percent said they were mostly dissatisfied.

Two thirds also approve of how President Ahmadinejad is handling his job at home and his dealings with other countries.  Sixty-six percent approved "of the way President Ahmadinejad is handling his job as president," while 22 percent disapproved.  To probe deeper into these sentiments of support, the study asked questions about "the way President Ahmadinejad has been traveling abroad and speaking about Iran's foreign policy."  Sixty-three percent said the president's activities have made "the overall security of Iran" "mostly better"; only 14 percent said this has made Iran's security mostly worse.  Similarly, 64 percent said Ahmadinejad's activities had made "other countries' views of Iran" mostly better; 16 percent said his work had made these countries' views worse.

Support for Ahmadinejad is stronger among those with low income and low education, and considerably weaker at the upper end of each scale.  Among low-income respondents, 75 percent approved of Ahmadinejad's performance; among high-income respondents, it was 41 percent, with 38 percent disapproving.  Among those with less than a high school education, 80 percent approved of Ahmadinejad; among those with some college or more, it was 49 percent, with 35 percent disapproving.  These differences suggest that the remarks of many observers, to the effect that Ahmadinejad operates as the Iranian version of a "populist," are not far off the mark.

---

This article is an excerpt from "Public Opinion in Iran: With Comparisons to American Public Opinion," a WorldPublicOpinion.org Poll conducted in partnership with Search for Common Ground and Knowledge Networks, 7 April 2008.  "The poll of Iranians was conducted with a randomly selected sample of 710 Iranian adults, from rural as well as urban areas, January 13-February 9, 2008.  The margin of error is +/-3.8 percent.  Interviews were conducted in every province of Iran.  Professional Iranian interviewers conducted face-to-face interviews in Iranian homes.  Within each community, randomly selected for sampling, households were chosen according to international survey methods that are standard for face-to-face interviewing.  In some cases, a respondent did not want to be interviewed because the interviewer was of the opposite sex. Interviewers then offered to either reschedule the interview for a time when the male head of household would be present, or to have an interviewer of the same sex visit.  The poll questionnaire was developed in consultation with experts on Iran as well as the Iranian polling firm.  In addition to the poll, focus groups were conducted in Tehran with representative samples of Iranians" ("Public Opinion in Iran," pp. 3-4). The questionnaire and methodology is available at <worldpublicopinion.org/pipa/pdf/apr08/Iran_Apr08_quaire.pdf>.  See, also, "Iranians Oppose Producing Nuclear Weapons, Saying It Is Contrary to Islam: But Most Insist on Iran Producing Nuclear Fuel," WorldPublicOpinion.org, 7 April 2008; "Iranians Favor Direct Talks with US on Shared Issues, Mutual Access for Journalists, More Trade," WorldPublicOpinion.org, 7 April 2008; Jim Lobe, "Iranian Public Sees Reduced U.S. Threat," Inter Press Service, 7 April 2008.

---

UPDATE

I posted a longer excerpt from the same poll in MRZine, which received a number of comments there as well. The excerpt and comments caught the attention of Clay Ramsay (Research Director, Program on International Policy Attitudes, University of Maryland), who was responsible for the poll. He wrote the zine and offered to answer readers' questions: mrzine.monthlyreview.org/iran140408.html. If you have questions for him, please click on the link above and ask the questions there.

Labels: class, empire, imperial ideology, iran, US imperialism, working class

Bipartisanship posted by lenin

Isn't it beautiful when politicians get beyond petty squabbling and tribalism, and come together to defend British values?

Labels: arms industry, BAE, corruption, ruling class, Saudi Arabia

The KLA's death camp. posted by lenin

It turns out that Carla Del Ponte had credible evidence of the KLA harvesting the organs of Serb prisoners and selling them off. This follows recent reports that the former Kosovan PM, Ramush Haradinaj, ordered the rape, persecution and murder of Serb civilians during the KLA's insurgency in the 1990s (he has, however, been declared 'not guilty' by the ICTY after nine of ten planned witnesses for the prosecution were killed). I must say, the Kosovan Liberation Army become more interesting every time I read about them. One minute they're desperate freedom fighters, next minute they're anti-Serb and anti-Roma racists engaged in pogroms. Then their successors are harrassing Serb minorities and trying to expand into Macedonia. Now they're mutilating prisoners to their death in - what else? - death camps. It seems that "prisoners were aware of the fate that awaited them, and according to the source pleaded, terrified, to be killed immediately". It wasn't just 300 young Serbs who were butchered in this fashion; those killed included Albanians and women trafficked from Russia and Eastern Europe to be pimped. Just so much untermenschen to be processed for the sustenance of the advance army of the NATO protectorate. One question that comes up in the article is why Del Ponte didn't pursue these investigations five years ago. Why should she? After all, she pointedly refused to study NATO crimes. What should compel her to announce to the world that America's local adjunct was engaged in these sorts of crimes? Given the preponderance of themes of fascism and genocide in the justification for war, and given how hysterical the commentariat became on this point, any piece of information that associate America's footsoldiers with death camps had to be delayed for release into a more benign climate. Just as few thought to mention at the time that the guy America paid to help them to victory, Agim Çeku, was a seasoned ethnic cleanser.

We now know, of course, that the KLA was being trained up by the CIA from at least 1998. The KLA had emerged for the first time as a serious force in Kosovan life after the failure of Dayton to address the conflict over Kosovo's status. Launched in Macedonia, they started a series of sabotage campaigns and attacks on Serbian police throughout Kosovo-Metohija in 1996. Within short order they had conquered 30% of Kosovo, declared the goal of a 'Greater Albania', suppressed rival political parties in the areas they controlled (particularly Rugova's DLK) and were en route to making their goal a reality. The Serbian government responded as I suspect most governments would, with a vicious and relentless crackdown. After a series of reprisals that had only intensified support for the KLA, they followed this up in September 1998 by launching a massive counterinsurgency operation, in which villages where the KLA had strength were burned, with about 800 killed and 300,000 forced to flee. By October 1998, just as the war was dying down and OSCE observers sent to help keep the peace, the US had evidently decided on war. This, according to Hashim Thaci, is what the KLA had sought - by provoking attacks on civilians, they believed they stood a greater chance of justifying external intervention. This is a tactic they evidently learned from the Bosnian leadership. NATO had threatened strikes, but unfortunately Milosevic had done the dirtiest deed imaginable - he had launched a negotiations process with Ibrahim Rugova in September that might stand a chance of success. By destroying Rugova's rivals, and empowering his FARK organisation, he could cut a deal that would solve a hitherto intractable problem. For, let's be clear about this: Milosevic may have exploited the problem politically, and he certainly exacerbated it, but he didn't cause it. He did not, for instance, bring about the repression and discrimination against Serbs in Kosovo that he was to tap in his brief for Serbian restoration. He did not cause the failure of the Titoist settlement or the collapse of Yugoslavia, though he milked it. And he did not cause the KLA to choose the means they did, though his means of repression helped them along. Milosevic was a thug, if somewhat less of a thug than Blair or Clinton, but he was essentially an opportunist. So, it was at this point that the CIA started sending its agents to pose as peacekeepers and infiltrated the OSCE. They trained up the KLA in preparation for the war which would inevitably arrive once the US had successfully scuppered the negotiations process by setting "the bar higher than the Serbs could accept", what with the insulting plan for the de facto occupation of the whole FRY and the imposition of 'free market' principles on Kosovo. Having waged war, and conquered, NATO permitted the KLA to edulcorate the territory. Serbs and Roma were expelled en masse, and it seems that it was at this point that they hit upon the happy idea of using Serbs as organ meat. While the US got down to building its own mini-Guantanamo, and UN forces were found to be involved in child prostitution rings, the KLA got down to wiping out its rivals on the grounds that they were "Serb collaborators". They tried expanding into the Serbian region of Preševo and an offshoot started an insurgency in Macedonia. Repeated attacks on the Serb minority, which relies on aid from the Serbian government, has resulted in what are euphemistically described as "ethnic tensions". Even the best tending and care of Dr Bernard Kouchner was unable to alleviate these ailments. And now, free and independent at long last, Kosovo stands tall as the best little lily-pad in the world. The Milky Bar Kid Militia won the day thanks to the yankees. Who says it wasn't worth it?

Labels: kla, kosovo, kouchner, serbia, serbs, yugoslavia

Ego-blogging posted by lenin

A tautology, you say? Absolutely. Anyway, there was a bit of a hoo-haa some months back over some blog-ranking organised by the Tory gossip merchant Iain Dale. Why? Well, people were outraged on my behalf, because I was ranked 206 out of 500 UK blogs despite the fact that a lot of the blogs ranked higher had fewer visits and fewer links. Plus, they were shit. I pity the fool who cares about this sort of ranking, based as it is on the votes of a cluster of nominated bloggers. There are better ranking systems based on links, reach and page visits, none of which are entirely accurate - Alexa, TTLB Ecosystem, and Wikio. If it matters, my position is as follows: Alexa says I'm 471,812 in the whole universe of websites; TTLB says I'm 716 in the whole world of blogs; Wikio says I'm 37 among UK blogs. They're all full of shit, of course, although I'm gratified to note that according to Alexa I beat a number of blogs/websites by journalists, columnists and people who get far more media plugs than I do - like Nick Cohen, Johann Hari, Oliver Kampf and Norman Geras. And according to TTLB, I beat Harry's Place too. I totally rule already, and I haven't even overthrown the ruling class yet. (Realistically, I'm a bit pissed off to be still stuck at approx. 2000 readers a day - some of you bastards must be slacking). Believe it or not, however, this one is not about my insurmountable ego.

This is about the discovery that the much-vaunted and hyped Tory bloggers Iain Dale and the mysterious Paul Staines (Guido Fawkes) have been rigging their stats to make themselves look good. They have been taking their page views to make it look like they're getting hundreds of thousands of visitors every month. The fact is, as I know very well, it's easy to make your page views (ie non-unique visits) bigger. In my case, I discovered it accidentally when I stuck sitemeter in the haloscan comments box to see how much traffic flowed in and out and who was linking to particular comments. Page views soared, unique visits stayed the same. They have been citing page view stats from Google Analytics as if they were unique visits. Dale, for example, claims to have 250,000 visitors a month, whereas it's closer to 50,000. The mysterious Mr Staines awards himself 350,000 visitors a month, whereas it's closer to 75,000. It was presumably on the basis of the inflated statistics that Dale claimed to be among the bloggers with a "mass audience" alongside Fawkes. Well, look chaps. According to my sitemeter, which may be more or less accurate, I have sometimes a bit more and sometimes a bit less than 50,000 unique visits per month. I think this is actually a bit less than my Google Stats, and certainly lower than Statcounter. Does that mean I have a "mass audience"? Obviously not. Fox News has a mass audience. Pop Idol has a mass audience. Al-Manar TV has a mass audience. The circle-jerking quora of Britblogs has curious onlookers.

Labels: bloggery, media, tory scum

The BNP, the far right, and Israel posted by lenin

The Guardian reported yesterday that the BNP is "trying to shed its antisemitic past as part of a drive to pick up votes among London's Jewish community". Plainly, this is misleading. The BNP have no more abandoned antisemitism than they have abandoned their phantasmagoric goal of a 'white Britain'. One example of evidence for The Guardian's claim is that the BNP website is described by a (disapproving) representative of the Board of Deputies as "one of the most Zionist on the web - it goes further than any of the mainstream parties in its support of Israel". More on that in a second. It also cites the BNP's own claim that there is "a growing dialogue between senior members of the Jewish community and the BNP". Supposing this were true, it wouldn't actually mean a great deal. The BNP is anti-trade union, though it says the opposite in some of its literature, and though it has trade unionists as members. It is homophobic, though I am sure that one of their recent candidates was a lesbian (and a trade unionist!). The BNP's London mayoral candidate Richard Barnbrook, though claiming that homosexuality is 'unhealthy', is reported as saying that you can be gay 'behind closed doors'. Of course, that isn't intended to woo gay and lesbian voters, but to soften the BNP's fascist aura for right-wing voters. In reality, BNP candidates regularly try to crack down on gay rights whenever elected. In public its candidates vaunt law and order, and in private they are often criminal scumbags. You could go on and on: subterfuge is structural to fascist politics in a way that it isn't for conventional bourgeois politics.

The current posture of the Nazis is in one sense a result of a few years of re-orientations in BNP propaganda. A few years ago, Searchlight magazine quoted the BNP chairman Nick Griffin addressing a Ku Klux Klan rally. In it, he told the audience that they should learn to speak the language of public relations. The slogan, 'freedom, security, identity, democracy', provided a soft packaging for a set of fascist policies, he explained. And, what is more, "no one can touch you for it". However, there's a lot more going on than that. In a 2005 interview with the right-wing Zionist website, Think-Israel, Griffin averred that the thesis of Bat Ye'Or about Eurabia was correct, and that the real threat was a plot by the French elite to Islamify the European continent. (The article also exulted that the BNP had a Jewish office-holder, namely then councillor Pat Richardson. It did not mention that while Richardson urged her voters to believe that the BNP is not antisemitic, her friend Tony Lecomber had been sentenced to three years in prison for participating in an antisemitic assault by a BNP gang). This tendency came particularly to the fore during the Lebanon war, in which the BNP explicitly backed Israel, I think for the first time. Griffin described the new regime as "moderately and prudently more sympathetic to the Israeli side", albeit the fascists are not inclined to be bewitched by a "Jewish mystique", whatever that is.

As cynical as this is, it is not just a cynical ploy on the fascists' part. It is true that part of Griffin's argument is that fascism will do better electorally if it drops the public ranting about Jews and focuses on Islam. And that is unmistakeably the case: the media are happy to collude in the venomous demonisation of Muslims; politicians from centre-left to hard right find it a convenient talking point; public opinion is much more prepared for an anti-mosque campaign than an anti-synagogue campaign; etc. But it also attests to an ideological shift which has taken hold of far right parties across Europe, a process which began long before 9/11. Pim Fortuyn had railed "Against the Islamicization of Our Culture" in 1997, and in August 2001 declared himself "in favour of a cold war with Islam". Le Pen's campaigns in the 1990s were often directed against Arabs and Muslims, and the supposedly pro-Arab Jacques Chirac, and he is no supporter of France's traditional Gaullist foreign policy. Although Le Pen has often made anti-semitic statements, when asked by Haaretz in 2002 if he understood Israel's plight, he reminisced about the good old days of colonial war, saying:

"Certainly. After all, I got a similar reaction during the war in Algeria, when I served in General Massu's 10th division. We were called upon to fight the terrorism of the FLN (the Algerian nationalist movement that fought against French colonialism). The intelligentsia at home criticized our actions. It's very easy to criticize from the armchair in the living room. I completely understand the State of Israel, which is seeking to defend its citizens."

The Austrian fascist Joerg Haider's campaign against Muslims had started in the early 1990s, not in 1999 when his party received 27% of the vote and was included in the national government, while Swedish NDP leader Ian Wachmeister asserted in 1993 that in his Sweden "there will not be many mosques". The Belgian Vlaams Belang has long been focused on generating anti-Muslim sentiment. In Italy, Gianfranco Fini's Mussolini-venerating fascist bloc are pro-Israel and reserve their most profound contempt for Muslims and gypsies. And in the UK, racism against 'Asians', exploited by the Nazis in the 2000 riots, has easily shaded into racism against Muslims.

This is partially due to the changing composition of Europe's immigrant communities, although in France it is related to the colonial era and the Algerian war of independence during which time the French far right publicly shed anti-semitism for the first time, as the OAS pursued an alliance with Israel and with Jewish residents of French Algeria. In the main, however, I think it is simply to do with a different global polarities. Fascists considered the USSR the culmination of a Jewish plot, or rather the first of many, and Israel could easily be integrated into that conspiratorial framework. The Soviet Union having been decisively finished off as a result of its own entropy, the main geopolitical foes of the fabled 'Anglo-Saxon civilization' to which the fascists cleave are states and movements whose legitimacy is wholly or partially derived from Islam. There is therefore no reason why the far right shouldn't back Israel, especially since Israel knows how to get things done. Why should a fascist find anything obnoxious about the policies of Avigdor Lieberman or Ehud Barak? What should offend them about racial supremacy? Ethnic cleansing? Why, they would understand the efforts to deny it or excuse it better than anyone! They probably empathise with the blood-and-soil nationalism that underpins Zionist ideology. After all, the idea that the Jews are not merely a single biological entity but a single ecological one, a people who belong to a determinate geography suffused with sacred power, is one that every antisemite in the world can appreciate.

The BNP aren't alone in their current manouevering. The Belgian far right is strongly pro-Israel and has been pitching for the Jewish vote. Despite Joerg Haider's long-standing anti-semitism, he and his party are more than happy to court Israel. Le Pen has been trying to use Islamophobia to get a sector of French Jews to back him. Just because this isn't a sudden outburst of philosemitism doesn't mean that the strategy can't work. It doesn't matter if large numbers of Jewish voters don't bite, although some may - reactionary voters who might otherwise be put off by explicitly anti-Israel politics will respond to the message.

Labels: antisemitism, fascism, islamophobia, Israel, racism, zionism

The Sadr City crackdown. posted by lenin

Muqtada al-Sadr's scheduled protest for 9 April (yesterday) was, of course, called off in a hurry, as refugees were fleeing the city under bombardment. The air attacks continue to mount up, the latest reported attack killing ten Iraqis - in a "militia stronghold", of course. Loud explosions are being heard all over Sadr City as violence across Baghdad 'spirals'. It isn't hard to see why this is happening. Sadr City is, as I mentioned, a vast, populous area, larger than Basra or Najaf. It is the key area of Sadrist resistance, the base from which the movement's strengths emanate. But why now? Previously, when Sadr has humiliated the occupiers and their local chumps, there has been a period of backing off and a brief, negotiated peace. This time, having watched Maliki fail, the US is upping the ante.

Well, although Maliki was indeed humiliated, and had to run to Iran for a settlement before begging for fifty of his armoured cars back from the insurgents, he seems to have been told by the US to get back down to it. Gen. Petraeus expects the Basra crackdown to last for another few months. So, as America bombs from a great height, "Iraqi forces" are sent in to do the ground work. Presumably, the reasoning is that if the Sunni north holds, there is no reason to hold back in Baghdad and the south. Of course, there were still hundreds of attacks even in the relatively peaceful months since September 2007, mainly in Baghdad and the northern provinces of Ninewah, Diyala, and Salah-ah-Din. And in fact the number of attacks in Ninewah increased by 17% between November 2007 and March 2008. So, we shouldn't too carried away by the claims for the 'pacification' of Sunni Iraq. Nevertheless, the obvious and quite dramatic decline in the overall reported attacks since the co-optation of 'Awakening Councils' and the Sadrist ceasefire at the end of August 2007 has probably given the US army leadership a shot of confidence. So now they're giving Sadr City a taste of what Fallujah, Tal Afar, al-Qaim, Haditha, Samarra and Ramadi have each got in different measures over the past three or four years. In riposte, the resistance is raising the rate of its assault, as seventeen troops have been killed since Sunday.

With the oil laws still not signed into law, with social forces embroiled in a politico-military struggle for the future control of Iraq, and with intransigent unions resisting US designs, they have no plans of getting out of Iraq any time soon. Indeed, as Seumas Milne revealed, they plan an open-ended military presence in the country. It has to be open-ended, of course. Even McCain's Hundred Year Reich is too limiting. Even the current supine political leadership in Iraq isn't going to completely go along with that, for fear of being swallowed up by an angry revolt. Suppose the Sadrists were to 'arrive' in the next elections, with control of much of southern Iraq and Baghdad? Suppose, then, the 'Awakening Councils' were to start plugging their American overlords again? They clearly intend to take the initiative while they have a window: as the troops selected to speak to embedded NYT reporters insist, this "has got to be done". And the US has lost faith in the capacity of its political allies in Iraq to do the job.

Labels: iraq, iraqi resistance, occupation, sadr city, sadrists, US imperialism

The malleability of 'race' in wartime posted by lenin

Thomas Nast's infamous depiction of 'The Ignorant Vote' is one particularly pungent example of how the metaphysics of 'race' works. Although the Irishman is labelled 'white', the racial morphology deployed makes him darker and ape-like. The cartoon or caricature just happens to be the ideal means of conveying it, because of the liberties you can take with the physical form. You can see clearly that it is a system of similes and allusions, a disorderly complex of metaphors. In the context of war, the visual metaphors of cartoonists are part of the repertoire in the poetastry of genocide. In this case, the fangs and green tinted skin would not be out of place in Nazi anti-semitic propaganda. Of course, it required a labour of revision to manufacture the correct racial stereotypes in the Pacific theatre of WWII, since - as in the Boxer Rebellion, only with the roles reversed - there were good 'Orientals' and bad ones. Take a look at this comparison: "How To Tell Japs from Chinese". In it, the American racial warrior - not a bit different from the Nazi racial warrior in his build, looks and comportment - explains how to distinguish the good 'Asiatic' from the bad one. The good one smiles easily, has European-American eyes, normal feet, evenly set teeth. The bad one scowls, is slanty-eyed, has bucked teeth and weird feet. Of course this deranged bollocks was never intended to be an actual field guide for the befuddled American soldier - it was intended to make it easier to kill and ultimately exterminate those Japanese weirdos.

Racial doctrine therefore proves to be extraordinarily ductile given the exigencies of war. In both subsequent major Asian wars, there were good 'Asiatics' and bad ones. So, during the Korean War, the good pro-American Korean was shown to be under spiritual and racial assault from the quasi-satanic Muscovite-controlled savages from the North. Thus, the old green tint and the claws were out again. The bestiary was put to work again. Suffice to say, the US war was as close to a war of annihilation as anything since Hiroshima and Nagasaki (and the use of nukes was being seriously considered). The Vietnam War, though apparently complicated by the 'good guys' in the south, was increasingly obviously a war against almost the entire Vietnamese population. Hence, the 'dinks' and 'gooks' and 'savages' were relatively straightforward to depict, especially for the children. This war, of course, became increasingly genocidal, as the back room boys devised increasingly intensified anti-civilian warfare. The explicit use of racial caricatures of this kind became a source of embarrassment for the American government following the civil rights struggle, the race riots and the formal abolition of southern segregation, although one remaining respectable form of racism was that directed against Arabs and Muslims, and so it remains. Of course, once again, you can always find some good Arabs, ones who are strangely Americanised, whose skin is lighter, whose eyes are more European, whose values are 'Western'. This is how 'race' works: if you want to 'lighten' or 'darken' someone, you just use your imagination. Hold your breath, make a wish, count to three... There's nothing to it.

One final example. Here is a respected pro-war journalist in a liberal newspaper at the height of the self-congratulatory euphoria over the war in Yugoslavia:

" Do Albanians look like Serbs?

"No. Of course the differences are only approximate but it is often very easy to tell a Serb from an Albanian in Kosovo long before he or she opens his mouth.

"The Serbs often have black or dark brown hair and are generally darker and more heavily built than Albanians. Their appearance is fairly typical of southern Slavs. By contrast, the Kosovars look Celtic to a British eye. They have curly hair, which is often blonde or rust coloured, and their skin tends to be very pale and covered in freckles. Their eyes are often green or blue and their build is much more slender than that of the Serbs. They have longer heads. It is not surprising that they look so different as they belong to different races that have very rarely intermarried." (Marcus Tanner, 'WAR IN THE BALKANS: THE BALKAN QUESTION; KEY ISSUES BEHIND THE WAR EXPLAINED', The Independent, 11 May 1999).

The great war of 1999, then, was a war on behalf of the Milky Bar kid against some squat, Slavic barbarians.

Labels: 'race', imperialism, racism, serbia, war, yugoslavia

Toppling Mubarak posted by lenin

Labels: egypt, general strike, mubarak

What 'antitotalitarianism' is for. posted by lenin

"If this kind of situation had existed for instance in the manner in which China was dealing with Tibet or the Sudanese government was dealing with Darfur, I think there would be no reluctance to make that comparison".

Labels: china, darfur, Israel, sudan, tibet

Blond Bombshell posted by lenin

Labels: boris johnson, homophobia, racism, tory scum

The Sadrist Revolt posted by lenin

A lengthy article by yours truly at MRZine.

Labels: iraqi resistance, mahdi army, muqtada al-sadr, sadrists

Mubarak's police attack strikers, provoke riots. posted by lenin

Amid all the justified talk about Mugabe's repression in the face of rebellion, Mubarak's dictatorship has just passed through another of it's - I hope - terminal convulsions. It comes in the form of an apparently well-planned assault on what might have become a general strike, in part motivated by soaring prices. It turned into a riot, a full-scale intifada, as Egypt's police unleashed hell on Mahalla al-Kobra textile workers yesterday. Hossam el-Hamalawy has full details here, with photos. You can see further images here. Zeinobi at Egyptian Chronicles has ongoing updates. Agence France Presse also has a decent report with photographs.

From the early hours of the morning, it seems, the factory at the centre of the strike was occupied by plain clothes security forces, including figures from the mukhabarat. Tens of known labour activists were prevented from entering the building, and a great deal of pressure was put on union leaders to call off solidarity strikes. It looked as if the strike had 'fizzled out' as one report put it. However, when workers and local residents gathered in the main square to protest, they were met by ranks of armed guards and beaten and attacked with tear gas. With what can only be described as incredible courage, the protesters resisted instead of dispersing, and what ensued was a lengthy battle, with rocks hurled and trucks and cars overturned. Across Egypt there were hundreds of arrests, many of them random, and bloggers were nicked alongside activists and politicians in an effort to prevent the news about what was happening from getting out. At least two people are reported to have been killed by the police, with 100 more injured. In Cairo, it is reported, the traffic was light and schools empty as people responded to the strike call. But where protesters tried to organise, the police attacked them. By 10pm, Mahalla was entirely occupied by security forces, with announcements instructing citizens to stay in their homes and power to the city cut off.

The manner in which the Egyptian state aborted this strike and attacked protesters has prompted the Muslim Brothers to boycott upcoming elections. This is a landmark for the Mubarak state, in the context of a rising wave of rebellion against the government's neoliberal policies. Mahalla workers have been the most militant and effective fighters in the country, and their successes have enlivened the whole society. If this day of carnage and crackdown was supposed to put a stop to that, I doubt that it will be effective. But then I suspect that Mubarak knows that the issues over which people are protesting generalise very rapidly from apparently economic concerns into a critique of the regime and society. And do not forget the paymaster. The United States government has taken risks with its assets in the Middle East by gambling on the invasion of Iraq. Mubarak is significant enough for them that he is the second largest recipient of aid next to Israel. Like Iraq, Egypt has long been one of the major powers in the Middle East, and an obvious candidate to lead a regional insurgency against American hegemony should it fall into the wrong hands.

Labels: egypt, general strike, mahalla, mubarak, police state, repression

Gordon Brown promotes gun crime posted by lenin

Labels: army, children, imperialism, ministry of defence, schools, uk

Wall of Sound posted by lenin

Ady Cousins brings footage from last night's very noisy anti-Blair protest:

Labels: stop the war coalition, tony blair, wall of sound

Election sums. posted by lenin

Guest post by 'christian h':

Those pesky preference votes...

First, the conclusion: A Ken (1st) - Third Party (2nd) vote is mathematically equivalent to a Third Party (1st) - Ken (2nd) vote as far as the eventual outcome is concerned. However, the Third Party (1st) - Ken (2nd) option is preferable as any second preference votes of Third Party won't be counted.

Here's how it works.

It's election time in Londongrad. Running for mayor are Dr. Evil (Boris, to his admirers), Mini Me (aka Ken) and Austin Powers (fusion of left-of-Ken candidates). The voting system is "preference voting", also known as "instant run-off voting." Voter X really prefers Austin Powers, but she absolutely doesn't want Dr. Evil to win. What should she do?

The system works as follows: every voter can assign two votes, a 1st and 2nd preference vote. It is legal to leave the 2nd preference blank, but it isn't possible to only vote for a 2nd preference. The votes have to go to different candidates. After polls close, all 1st preference votes are counted. If one candidate obtains more than 50% of those - that is, more votes than both his opponents together - he is declared the winner. Otherwise, all 1st preference votes of the candidate with the fewest votes are discarded and the corresponding 2nd preference votes counted instead. since only two candidates are left in the race, one of them now is guaranteed to win.

Assume there are 100 eligible voters in Londongrad. On election day, 78 come out to vote - the rest are watching football. Of those 78, 40 vote Dr. Evil 1st preference, 37 vote Mini Me, and one (that's X) votes Austin Powers. The next day, the website socialistsplitters.com accuses X of throwing the vote to Dr. Evil. Are they right? No. If X had voted Mini Me 1st preference, Dr. Evil still had 40 votes - more than half. In formulas, if E, M and A denote 1st preference votes for Dr. Evil, Mini Me and Austin respectively, Dr. Evil wins outright if and only if E > A + M. Only the sum of A and M matters, not the individual totals.

... phew, bad dream! Turns out, Dr. Evil got only 38 of the 1st preference votes, Mini Me 37, and Austin Powers got 3 (one of them cast by X). Now Austin has the fewest 1st preference votes, so they are discarded; instead, the 2nd preference votes on those ballots are now added to the totals of Dr. Evil and Mini Me. If at least two Austin-voters did their duty and voted Mini Me with their 2nd preference, Mini Me has 37+2 = 39 total votes to Dr. Evil's 38, and wins. Only if X and her comrades inexplicably decided to leave 2nd preference blank will Dr. Evil walk away victorious.

In formulas, if e, m and denote second preference votes of the Austin Powers voters, for Dr. Evil and Mini Me respectively, Dr. Evil will now win if E + e > M + m.

To recap, Dr. Evil will win if

(a) either E > M + A

(b) or M + A >= E and E + e > M + m. and E + e > M + m.

Since M + A is at least M + m and no Austin voter will vote Dr. Evil with 2nd preference (that is, e = 0), this simplifies to give that Dr. Evil will win if and only if E > M + m. That is, the only number that matters is M + m - a 2nd preference vote for Mini Me is equally as good as a 1st preference vote.

Labels: gla elections, left list, london, mayor, respect

The Liberal Defense of Murder posted by lenin

Labels: cruise missile liberals, imperial ideology, pro-war 'left', the liberal defense of murder

Maliki rewards the militias posted by lenin

Juan Cole reports:

Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki on Tuesday honored the militias of the parties in the United Iraqi Alliance, i.e. the Da'wa (Islamic Call) Party and the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq. They were singled out for having fought alongside government security forces, and some 10,000 of them were inducted into the latter.

Labels: badr, iraq, mahdi army, maliki, sadr, sciri, siic

NUS Blairites Defeated posted by lenin

Victory to the student activists! If you've been following the debacle in the NUS, you'll know that the Blairite wing of the student union leadership has attempted to abolish the national conference and replace it with an annual "celebration" of NUS success, while doing away with the national elected committee and replacing it with a board. It was an unashamed attack on the Left by the Labour Students group (the President, Gemma Tumelty, stood as an Independent, but is a member of the Labour Party and could presumably expect to work her way up the Labour career structure if she was so inclined - just saying is all). After a hectic day, in which the President claimed at one point to have the majority she needed, the proposals were thrown out. This is fantastic news, so well done to all those who put so much energy into mobilising to defeat this policy.

Update: Following this victory, Respect has reportedly won two seats so far on the block of twelve, Hind Hassan coming first and Rob Owen coming third.

Labels: blairites, democracy, nus, students

Left List for London posted by lenin

Labels: ken livingstone, left list, lindsey german, london, respect

Teachers: first national strike over twenty years. posted by lenin

The teachers voted to join the revolt against Gordon Brown's public sector pay cuts and ballot for strike action at their conference last week. Today, the results of the ballot have come out, and they've voted overwhelmingly for a national strike on April 24th. The UCU union is also balloting members for industrial action on the same day, and it is expected that hundreds of thousands of PCS members in the Department of Work and Pensions will also be out on strike.

Labels: gordon brown, neoliberalism, public sector pay, teachers strike, trade unions