James Dyson, the inventor of that vacuum cleaner, was ono the news again the other day. At least, he was in the Bristol region. Because of his invention’s success, he’s celebrated in the local news here in this part of the West Country as some kind of great scientific hero, leading Britain forward in technological innovation and business acumen. The local news was all over him when he opened a plant to make his vacuums near Bath. They were all over him again when a special site or facility opened down in the old part of the railway station at Temple Meads in Bristol, which was supposed to help bring businessmen together so that they could make deals. He was one of the businessmen, who was called upon to say how wonderful and good for the city it all was.
And then last night, or the night before, he was on the news again. He has decided to open his own, private university specialising in engineering. Boris Johnson’s brother, who’s as blond as Boris is, but slimmer and possibly not as thick, appeared to tell the world how wonderful this was going to be also.
I’m not impressed. Not by Dyson, and certainly not by his grotty political beliefs and sordid profiteering.
Dyson is not someone I feel anyone should look up to. His support for his home country, and the Bristol-Bath region, merely seems to be one of convenience. After he had set up the factory near Bath, he closed it down and moved it to Indonesia. He then declared that he did so because there wasn’t enough space at the existing site to expand, and the council was deliberately blocking him from doing so.
I find that unconvincing. It might be that the council were stopping him from expanding on that site, but that should not stop him going elsewhere in the region or the country. There are other suitable sites, if not around Bath, then certainly in the rest of England and Britain. There are places in the north of England, for example, which are crying out for entrepreneurs to come there and set up plants.
But Dyson didn’t want that. The simple truth is, he moved his plant to Indonesia because he could pay the workers there much less than those in Britain.
And he doesn’t even bother hiding his contempt for Britain’s workers. Mike put up a piece a little while ago commenting on a speech Dyson made, in which he looked forward to British workers having more of their rights in the workplace stripped away after Brexit. This would be good for British firms, and make us more competitive.
On it’s own, it most certainly won’t. Despite destroying workers’ rights and reducing the mass of employees in Britain to poverty, productivity has very definitely not risen under the Tories, and we’ve just been knocked out of the five richest countries in the world. But Dyson, and the rest of the extremely rich, are going to love those policies anyway, because it gives them more power to intimidate, bully and exploit their workforce.
As for him setting up his wretched engineering university, I fail to see the need. Both Bristol Uni and the University of the West of England have excellent engineering departments. In fact, UWE is a world leader in robotics. One of their great inventions, which was on the news a little while ago, was a new type of artificial hand for use by children. It was superb engineering, which, unlike the driverless car, will actually improve people’s lives.
As for business acumen and entrepreneurial ability, I got the distinct impression that Bath was trying very hard to cover that. Walking through Temple Meads station you go past a number of adverts for the MBA at one of Bath’s unis.
Of course, there’s nothing wrong with any of these institutions. It’s just that, like the various businessmen, who decide they’d quite like to run an academy school, Dyson has decided that they’re not running things quite how he thinks they should be run. Hence he’s decided to set up this wretched engineering university.
Not only is it a vanity project on his behalf, it’s also another attack on state education. Ever since Maggie Thatcher, the Tories and then Blair’s New Labour have been privatising education, including the universities. This isn’t the first private centre of higher education. That came a few years ago with a new College of the Humanities, or some such, set up with the aid of the philosopher A.C. Grayling.
I’m also profoundly unimpressed by the underlying attitude to the state held by businessmen like Dyson. They usually appear launching some grand new commercial venture, loudly declaring how very much better private enterprise is over the state. Then, when everything goes wrong, they come crying and whining back to the taxpayer demanding a bail-out. And when they get that, they still don’t shut up, but continue moaning that their great, new business vision failed because the government was insufficiently pro-business. They also hate the welfare state, because it actually helps the poor. Not only do businessmen like Dyson moan that current labour laws and wages make business in Britain uneconomical, they also tend to believe that things should be made harder for the poor, in order to encourage them to find a job and ‘do well’. You used to hear a lot about this from the Tories under Thatcher. It’s still the policy in the DWP. It’s why benefit claimants, who are actually in work, are harassed by the ‘job coaches’ in the Job Centres. This is to motivate them to get another, better paying job. Even though there aren’t any around, and aren’t likely to be, given the government’s policies of freezing pay.
In short, James Dyson is certainly not my idea of a hero, either of science or industry. He’s a bog-standard, exploitative businessman, of the same stripe that gets in the news for paying his workers less than the minimum wage while he makes a colossal profit. And I’m heartily sick and tired of the news in my part of the West Country fawning over him.
I’ve never bought one of his vacuum cleaners, and really don’t intend to. Because I don’t think Britain, including my little bit of it, can afford the cost.
This comes from The Hollywood Reporter, and discusses an interview in the Groaniad on the 27th November 2017 with the actress Susan Sarandon. Sarandon’s no fan of Hillary Clinton, and very publicly said on interviews and talk shows that they she preferred Bernie Sanders. She criticised Killary for not backing the $15 minimum wage, for taking money from the fracking companies, and for supporting the privatisation and the wars, the costs of which have been used to deny Americans proper, affordable healthcare.
In the interview with the Guardian, she states that, had Hillary won, we would probably be at war now, and points to all the highly dodgy stuff Obama did, that people are only just finding out about.
She also talked about how she suffered terrible, misogynistic abuse from people on the left, who personally blamed her for Killary losing to the orange Fascist. She said that she had people telling her that they hoped she had her crotch grabbed, or that she was raped, as well as other abuse and death threats.
I think actually Sarandon may well be right, and that had Killary won she may well have pitched us all into another war. She’s a die-hard Russophobe, and was ramping up tensions with Putin and China before she decided that the best way to divert attention from her corruption and that of the DNC was to blame Russian hackers for WikiLeaks getting hold of the incriminating documents.
What also makes this interesting is the misogynistic abuse she received for not backing Hillary. Hillary was trying to position herself as a feminist everywoman, and that somehow a victory for her would somehow be a victory for every woman in America. If not on planet Earth. This was despite the fact that she stood for the very policies that hurt the poor, and particularly women. Like the lack of free healthcare. Women tend to work in the lowest-paid jobs, and so are particularly affected by the neoliberal policies enthusiastically embraced by the Clintons, which have made poverty worse.
However, anyone, who refused to vote for Clinton was automatically vilified as ‘sexist’ and ‘misogynist’ by Killary and her supporters. They falsely claimed that there was a group of Bernie’s supporters, the Bernie Bros, who were subjecting Killary and her gang to sexist abuse. That was a lie. And the New Labour gang over here tried to do the same with our version of Bernie Sanders, Jeremy Corbyn. There were endless articles in the Guardian and the I trying to claim that it would be sexist to vote for Corbyn, because he was Old Labour. And so represented the return of male-dominated trade unions. There was even one ludicrous letter published in one of the papers, which tried to claim that Corbyn and Bernie had to be sexist and homophobic, because they dressed in old fashioned, baggy-style clothes. That one got into ‘Pseud’s Corner’ in Private Eye. The pundits of the Graon and the I were bitterly disappointed by the lack of a female candidate in the Labour leadership elections, who stood any chance of winning. Their favourites were women like Rachel Reed, neoliberal entryists, who stood four-square behind Blair’s policies of privatisation and destroying the welfare state. These are policies that, like those in Clinton’s America, have made conditions much worse for the poor and women in particular, for exactly the same reasons. But that didn’t matter, because they were women, and so somehow voting for them was supposed to be a great feminist victory. Even if they did nothing for ordinary women, and everything for big business.
The stories about misogyny and sexist abuse from Sanders’ and Corbyn’s supporters were just lies. But I’ve no doubt that the sexist and misogynist abuse Sarandon got from Killary’s was very real. And I doubt she was the only one. Abby Martin, the very professional, incisive presenter of the Empire Files on TeleSur English, has also said in an interview that she was called a ‘traitor’ by Killary’s supporters, because she refused to vote for her. I think like Sarandon she ended up voting for Jill Stein, the Green Party candidate. The Killary camp also tried to explain away Hillary not winning the votes of masses of America’s women by saying that they were told not to vote for her by their boyfriends. Which Martin points out also denies women their agency. I also think it’s massively unlikely. There may well be women, who vote according to the wishes of their husbands or boyfriends. But there are also an awful lot of independent women, who won’t and don’t. And my guess is that the latter are in the majority. Also, there’s another sexist slur in there: that men were opposed to Hillary simply because of her gender, and not because of the issues. That’s true of some, no doubt, especially in the more Conservative parts of America. But I’ve also no doubt that many men didn’t vote for Killary because of her corrupt policies and her personal greed and sense of entitlement.
This piece therefore shows another dimension to Hillary and her supporters. Not only are they corrupt warmongers, who favour the rich against the poor, but they’re also hypocrites, subjecting their own opponents to the very misogynist abuse they falsely claim that they have been subject to.
Over the past few days I’ve put up pieces reporting and commenting on the demonstrations against the slave auctions in Libya in Paris, Rome and London. These auctions are being held by the Islamist savages, who were helped into power as Britain and America’s proxies in the West’s campaign to overthrow Colonel Gaddafi. Gaddafi was a brutal dictator, but under his rule Libya became the most prosperous country on the African continent, its people had free healthcare and education. And, as this report shows, Gaddafi was no racist and made great efforts to benefit the entire African continent.
And the Islamists not only despise him, but are doing their very best to destroy the modern, relatively tolerant nation he created.
And the situation has been made worse by the silence of the mainstream media over the massacres committed against Black Libyans and migrants from sub-Saharan Africa, and their enslavement. And as this report shows, the media, or at least CNN, has kept silent for a very long time.
In this piece from the Baltimore-based Real News Network, anchor Eddie Conway talks to Glen Ford, one of the editors of the Black Agenda Report. Ford tells how CNN was aware of the atrocities against Blacks in Libya as far back as 2011. The Islamists despised Blacks, and so lynched and massacred them. These atrocities included the destruction of whole towns, such as Tawergha. This was a Black town with a population of 40,000. The Islamists destroyed it, butchered its people, and those, who survived were either enslaved or dispersed elsewhere in Libya. And Ford makes it clear that this was not done in secret. The Islamists put up flyers and notices announcing what they intended to do.
CNN did not report on this, and the other horrors, because it had reporters embedded in the Islamist terror gangs that were responsible for the ethnic cleansing and enslavement. The news got out thanks to that beacon of capitalism, the Wall Street Journal.
Ford also gives the reasons why the Islamists are targeting Blacks. He states that the Islamists hated Gaddafi because he came out of Arab socialism, and like many Arab socialist leaders was influenced by Egypt’s Nasser. They also hated him because he was pro-African, and their attacks on Blacks from further south in the continent is part of their venomous rejection of Gaddafi and his policies.
Conway and Ford also talk about how another African dictator, the ruler of Rwanda, is also exploiting the humanitarian crisis in the Libya. He’s promised to take in refugees, if the UN will pay for them. However, Ford points out that Rwanda’s ruler is responsible for the deaths of 6 million people in one of the largest genocides, and thousands more have been forced to flee into exile. He also says that once the money is paid, the refugees are not allowed to settle in Rwanda, but are then moved somewhere else.
The programme concludes that the ultimate responsibility for this carnage lies with the Western powers, America, Britain and their allies in Libya, who supported the Islamists, and the French in Rwanda, who are supporting the dictator there as part of a policy of recolonization all over the Continent.
I’m not surprised that Gaddafi was part of the tradition of Arab Socialism. It explains how it is that Libya had free healthcare and education. And it also explains part of the sheer animosity towards him by America and the West. True, Gaddafi himself was confrontational, and was certainly not averse to using terror and assassination when it suited him. But American foreign policy has always been against secular, nationalist Arab governments, including socialist administrations, as the next thing to Communism. He was overthrown because his government, simply by its nature, defied American imperialism. Quite apart from the fact that he was planning to reject the petrodollar for the Gold Dinar, and thus undermine America’s economic dominance through control of the main currency used in the oil industry.
As for the use of Islamist rebels, the US has been doing that ever since Ronald Reagan and Thatcher sponsored the Mujahideen in the Afghan War against the Soviets. And the Americans were warned by the Russian ambassador that once the Islamists had finished with the Russians, they would come for America. Thus the Russians knew that America would suffer an attack like 9/11. But Reagan and Thatcher had already decided these monsters were the forces of good and freedom, and so didn’t bother listening. They even heaped praised on Osama bin Laden.
This piece is also important for showing up the lies, omissions and distortions in the western media. These barbarities have been going on for the past six years, but it is only now that a mainstream newspaper has covered them. Conway and Ford state that it was due to the fact that CNN had its reporters embedded with the Islamists. That’s certainly a powerful factor. And it’s not used by the Islamists to control the media. The editors of Counterpunch, in their book End Times: The Death of the Fourth Estate, have several chapters on the way the American military is manipulating the media to promote its version of events in the Middle East. And this includes embedding journalists within army units. Once inside, the journos share a common bond with the soldiers around them, who are also responsible for their lives. So there’s a bias, as well as a vested interested, in presenting them in a positive light.
This story shows how much we really need alternative news networks, like RT, the Real News, Al-Jazeera, and alternative news shows like The Young Turks, the David Pakman Show, the Jimmy Dore Show and Sam Seder’s Majority Report and Secular Talk. These are the only shows and networks that are reporting and discussing the horror committed by western imperialism abroad, and the poverty and exploitation of working people in the west itself. All to boost those big, big profits.
They’re reporting what you’re not going to see on CNN, Fox, MSNBC or the Beeb over here. And it shows. More people are becoming aware of this, which is why Google and Facebook are trying to close them down, and the republicans and Democrats are screaming ‘Fake news!’ and ‘Russian propaganda!’ at RT.
This is another piece of music I found on YouTube sending up the Tories, like the Iain Duncan Smiths and their ‘All I want for Christmas is Universal Credit’. It’s by somebody called Blackstreet Phil, and with the title ‘No Unemployed’ it’s clearly an attack on Philip Hammond and his claim on the Andrew Marr Show that there weren’t any jobless in Britain.
As well as sending up that claim, it also attacks the Tory policy of not making work pay by expanding the low wage economy and zero-hours contracts, and the general poverty created by the Tories.
This is a very brief clip from RT about a protest against the Libyan slave markets, which was held outside the Libyan embassy in London yesterday, Sunday 27th November 2017. The protesters were mostly Black Africans, and held signs reading ‘Blacks Are Not For Sale’ and ‘White Silence Is Violence’. The captions for the clip state that the protesters linked the re-emergence of the slave markets in Libya with European slavery.
A spokesman states that they’re trying to call attention to the past, as well as what’s happening now. He notes that people have commented that Blacks have enslaved each other, and observes that they’re embarrassed about slavery. Backing their campaign against the Libyan slave markets is a way they can help now.
The attempt to link the slave markets in Libya with European slavery is too glib, and simply wrong. The Arab states of the Maghreb, such as Morocco, Algeria and the Ottoman Empire also enslaved Blacks from Sub-Saharan Africa. Just as they also enslaved White Europeans. Over the centuries it’s been estimated that 1.25 million White Europeans were enslaved in raids on European shipping and coastal communities. It was to put an end to this that a British warship shelled the palace of the Dey of Algiers in the 1820s. The British actually tried to stamp out slavery and the slave trade through diplomatic pressure on the Ottoman Empire, and then directly after we and the French took control of Egypt.
The slave trade in Morocco survived until 1910, however, because we successfully defended that nation’s independence against a planned European invasion.
It’s natural that the protesters should link the re-emergence of slavery in Libya with European slavery, as this is an important topic that still casts a very long shadow over race relations. However, it does show the need for including non-European forms of slavery, including Islamic, in discussing and educating people about the issue, and not just concentrating on enslavement by Europeans and White Americans.
However, there is also a sense in which the protesters are right. This barbarism has re-emerged because of imperialist actions by America and Britain as part of the proxy war to overthrow Colonel Gaddafi.
On Saturday I put up pieces from RT reporting the demonstrations outside the Libyan embassies in Paris and Rome against the slave markets that have opened in Libya, where the Islamist savages are selling Black migrants from sub-Saharan Africa.
‘Eric Seven’ in France has launched an internet petition on Change.Org to get the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Zeid Ra’ad al-Hussein to close the markets.
His description of the petition and its purposes states
Currently, in Libya, migrants are being sold on “slave markets”.
Thousands of West African men, women and children passing through Libya are sold on “slave markets” before being subjected to forced labor or sexual exploitation (rape, forced prostitution). These people are sold for between $200 and $500 as property.
Originally from Nigeria, Senegal or Gambia, the migrants are captured as they travel to northern Libya, from where they intend to reach Europe by crossing the Mediterranean. Throughout this journey, they fall prey to armed groups and networks of smugglers who sometimes try to extort money from them.
This crime, this human trafficking must STOP immediately!
Please sign this petition to ask the Foreign Secretary, Boris Johnson, the UN and the African Union to take immediate and concrete measures to stop this human trafficking.
I’ve already signed it. If you want to as well, the petition is at:
I wish Eric Seven all the best for his petition, but I really don’t have much faith in the ability, or even the willingness, of the international authorities to close the slave markets down. Boris is incompetent braggart, whose colossal ineptitude for the job as Foreign Secretary has left Nazanin Zeighari-Ratcliffe looking at a further 16 years in an Iranian jail on trumped up charges of trying to ‘soft-topple’ the Iranian regime. He is interested in Libya, but only in so far as Sirte can become another Dubai. As soon as they’ve cleared all the bodies of the hundreds of people, who were killed in a gun battle between the police and Islamists away, that happen to be inconveniently lying there. And I doubt if the Americans will be willing to do anything. The groups currently enslaving Black Africans are the same people, or the same kind of people, that Obama, Hillary Clinton and Dave Cameron supported as their proxies to overthrow Colonel Gaddafi. Apart from which, I think there’s too much anarchy in the country, which is torn by civil war and now has two parliaments, for any central authority to crack down on these criminal gangs.
Libya has been destroyed, and this barbarism has re-emerged, simply because Gaddafi defied American imperialism and was threatening to reject the petrodollar in favour of the Gold Dinar, to be used throughout the Middle East and Africa. The neocons and big business profit again, and the peoples of the Middle East and Africa pay the price.
This is another interesting little piece from Jason Unruhe at Maoist Rebel News. Unruhe, sporting a black and orange Mohican, reports that amongst the other recently declassified documents relating to JFK, there were details of a false flag operation planned by the CIA to start a war with Russia. The agency wanted to convert a couple of American planes so that they resembled, at least from a distance, Soviet MIG fighters. Or alternatively, they would use real MIGs purchased from countries outside the Warsaw Pact. The planes would be used to stage an attack on America, which would then be blamed on the Russians.
Fortunately, the plan was never put into action. The costs of converting the American planes was much too high, at over a million dollars for each plane. Technical experts stated that it would be impossible, and the results would not be convincing except from a distance.
Unruhe points out that this shows how far the American military was prepared to go – to start a war that would easily have ended up in a nuclear inferno – in order to attack a nation that had defied American imperialism.
In fairness, American imperialism wasn’t the only issue involved here. The Communist states established by the Soviet Union were dictatorships, and alternative, competing political parties and organisations had been suppressed by force. But it’s also fair to say that what also terrified the Americans, and other, western leaders, was that an aggressive alternative to capitalism had emerged. In the 1950s under Khrushchev standards of living in the USSR rose to such an extent, and the economy prospered, that the Americans were seriously afraid that the USSR would overtake America as the richer, more affluent society. Hence the determination to find any means of discrediting Communism and destroying the USSR.
And this appears to be just one of a number of false flag attacks that the CIA dreamed up to blame on America’s enemies elsewhere in the world. A little while ago I remember posting up a piece about how the CIA also planned a series of bomb attacks in Miami and other cities in Florida, which they hoped to blame on Castro’s Cuba. All in order to start a war there, and restore the brutal Bautista regime, which Castro had overthrown.
There is now a section of the American population which really, really doesn’t trust their government. At it’s most extreme, this milieu is represented by people like Alex Jones, who rants about how the globalist elites are somehow in a weird alliance with evil aliens, or demons, and planning to destroy the world and turn the survivors into genderless transhuman cyborgs. All through socialism and feminism and with the use of FEMA camps. Many others simply don’t believe that Islamist terrorists were responsible for 9/11, and instead think that it was a false flag attack conducted by their own government with the intention of starting a war.
In fact, the line that attempted to connect Saddam Hussein to the 9/11 attack was a lie. Saddam Hussein had nothing to do with it, and Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda hated Hussein’s secular Iraq as much as they hated America. The ultimate responsibility for 9/11 lies with the Saudis. 17 out of the 19 hijackers were Saudi, and the operation was planned and funded by people very high up in the Saudi political hierarchy. But this was far too inconvenient for Bush and later Obama to reveal to the American public, and so they suppressed those pages of the report into the attack.
Given the numerous false flag attacks that the American military has planned and carried out against its own people, including the Gulf of Tonkin incident which provided the pretext for the Vietnam War, it isn’t even remotely surprising that so many Americans are highly sceptical of the official stories about 9/11.
Friday’s Counterpunch also carried an important article by Brian Cloughley on secret Israeli influence on the British government. He begins by discussing the massive influence of the Israeli lobbying organisation, AIPAC, on American foreign policy, citing two journals the Foreign Policy Journal and Global Research, before turning to Britain and Priti Patel’s meeting with high-level Israeli officials. All while she was on holiday, of course. As you do. She was accompanied on her visit by Lord Polak, a member of the House of Lords. Polak was there with her when she met Netanyahu and when she went to New York. His trip over the Pond was paid for by the Israeli consulting firm, ISHRA. and before she went, Patel also had a meeting with the Israeli Minister for Public Security in the House of Commons. Which went undisclosed.
Cloughley also criticises the House of Lords, which is unelected, and very definitely undemocratic, serving to cap social mobility. At over 800 members, it’s the biggest governmental assembly in the world, with the exception of China. But it lumbers on, because there’s a lot of money there, and it serves as a way to honour failed politicians and political donors. Before he joined the House of Lords, Polak was the head of the Conservative Friends of Israel. The CFI, according to the Financial Times, 80 per cent of the parliamentary Tory party are members. It has given £377,994 to the Tories since 2004. The CFI holds an annual dinner in London. At the last one in December, Theresa May spoke about how she was very pleased that there were 200 legislators present, and that the CFI had taken 34 of the 75 Conservative MPs elected in 2015 to Israel.
Polak is chair of TWC Associates, another lobbying firm, whose clients include Israeli defence companies, including Elbit Systems, which specialises in defence electronics. TWC and Elbit were caught in a political scandal in 2012 when Lieutenant-General Richard Applegate boasted to two undercover Sunday Times reporters of its enormous influence through the Conservative Friends of Israel. He also makes the point that Theresa May has jumped on Hillary Clinton’s tactic of attacking Russia as a way of deflecting attention away from her failures and scandals. In this case, it was the embarrassing revelations about Priti Patel and her visit to Israel.
The article concludes
The British public will never know what Patel, Polak and all the other agents of influence were scheming to achieve, or what sinister fandangos they may get up to in the future, but we can be certain that the Britain-Israel alliance will continue to prosper. The United States has “the best Congress AIPAC can buy,” and Britain’s legislators are right up there with their transatlantic colleagues. They have no scruples and no shame, but seem to have plenty of cash.
Thursday’s Counterpunch carried a long piece by Jonathan Cook reporting on an important piece of investigative journalism by Gareth Porter. In 2007 Israel bombed a plant they claimed was a secret nuclear reactor, constructed by Assad. Recent evidence strongly suggests that the building was no such thing, and that the International Atomic Energy Agency knew it wasn’t at the time. Nevertheless, they went ahead with the lie as part of the strategy by the Americans and Israelis, who were hoping to use the incident to bring down Assad and draw Iran into the conflict, so they could conquer that nation too.
The article also goes on to criticise the Guardian’s George Monbiot. Monbiot has, according to Cook, taken it upon himself to be a ‘Witchfinder General’, attacking figures on the left, like Noam Chomsky and John Pilger, who are cautious about accepting claims of atrocities by Assad. Like the recent gas attack in Khan Sheikhoun, which appears to have been faked by al-Qaeda themselves. He also states that Human Rights Watch has also falsified information about the war between Israel and Hizbollah. Insiders lower down the organisation knew that what it said was untrue, but were silenced by their superiors.
He also states that now the attempt to unseat Assad has failed, or is failing, the Israelis and Saudis are trying to start a war in Lebanon -again- in order to draw Iran into a war they hope they can use to overthrow them.
I’ve no doubt that this is true, and while I like much of what Monbiot says, it does show how far the Guardian has fallen as a supposedly ‘left-wing’ paper. Tony Greenstein has written several articles attacking the Groan for its blatant anti-Corbyn bias, and its willingness to spread the anti-Semitism smears on behalf of the Israel lobby. And I’m not surprised. The Groaniad backed the SDP and the Liberals in several elections, and its staff seems to be full of Blairites and Neocons. So no surprise that Monbiot is also uncritically spreading disinformation about non-existent nuclear reactors, and attacking anyone he thinks is too pro-Assad.
Counterpunch published a very interesting article by Jonathan Power on the first day of this month, November 2017, on their website. He argued that it was high time the West stopped trying to bully Iran and overthrow their government. He made the point that if you asked most Iranians privately how they felt about America, they would quietly state that they were favourably disposed towards them.
Now America risks this goodwill through Trump throwing out the peace deal that Obama had brokered with the Mullahs. Power notes that the experience of the Iran-Iraq war and its horrors has left deep scars on everyone in the country over forty. Saddam Hussein was used as a proxy for America to avenge its deep humiliation felt by the overthrow of Shah and the hostage crisis during the Islamic Revolution. But Power goes onto make the point that the Iranian regime is very dubious about the morality of nuclear weapons and other, equally immoral forms of warfare. For example, one of the first things the Ayatollah Khomeini did was to stop the Shah’s nuclear programme. They only took it up recently because of the threat of American/ Saudi invasion. And the current ‘Supreme Leader’, Ayatollah Khameini, has said that nuclear weapons are immoral and un-Islamic.
He also states that while Saddam Hussein used chemical weapons, the Iranians themselves never did. He acknowledges that the Iranians’ foreign policy is destabilising, and in many cases destructive, but it essentially one of self-defence. They are also keen to protect the Shi’a minority in Iraq, who were oppressed by the Sunnis to which the secular Saddam Hussein nominally belonged.
He writes
Trump knows no Iranian history. When the Iranian revolution happened in 1979, the Shah was overthrown and the fundamentalist Islamic Shi’a regime of Ayatollah Khomeini came to power, one of the first things the new regime did was to close down the Shah’s nuclear weapons’ research program. (Ironically, it had had technical help from the US.) It was only after Iraq attacked Iran that the program was resuscitated.
Underneath the Iranian skin of anyone over 40 lies the memory of the Iran-Iraq war.
Whatever warm feelings the Iranian man and woman in the street might have for the West today can easily be undercut by any suggestion that the US and UK, in particular, might be reverting to those confrontational days when they covertly aided with sophisticated weapons President Saddam Hussein’s eight-year war with Iran. (It lasted from 1980 until 1988.)
The Reagan Administration escorted Kuwaiti oil tankers through the Persian Gulf to Iraq. It also initiated an arms embargo against Iran.
It was a terrible war, more akin to the trench warfare of World War 1 than any other, with opposing troops bogged down for years on end, fighting over a few hundred metres of ground. Iraq used chemical weapons on a large scale. The death toll was horrendous – estimates range from 170,000 to 750,000.
For its part, Iran refused to use chemical weapons in retaliation.
Its present-day Supreme Ruler, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, has made a point of reminding us of this, explaining that using such a weapon of mass destruction would have gone against Islamic teaching. At the same time, he has long pointed out that this is the key reason for Iran not building nuclear weapons.
It is this war that has determined the larger part if not most of Iran’s foreign policy. “What Gulf Arab officials term ‘Iran meddling in Arab affairs’ is to Iran an essential part of an ‘aggressive defence’ of its national security”, write professors Ariane Tabatabai of Georgetown University and Annie Samuel of the University Tennessee in a recent article in Harvard’s quarterly, “International Security”.
He concludes that if the hostility with Iran continues to increase, we will lose any goodwill the Iranian may have towards us. It’s time to make peace with them.
America and Israel want another war with Iran. This won’t be about protecting the West, curbing ruthless dictators and freeing their people. This is just going to be ‘Iraq II’ – Western capitalist looting and pillage redux. It’s going to be because Israel wants to destroy a hostile nation, and the Neocons and American and Saudi oil interests want to seize their oil fields, privatise their state industries, and sell them off to American multinationals.
And the result will be more carnage, homelessness, refugees and ethnic and sectarian warfare.
Brought to you by Trump. And aided, no doubt, by that giggling warmonger, Hillary Clinton, who never met a war she didn’t like.
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