Video on the Africans Who Sold Africans into Slavery

This comes from the SOE TV channel on YouTube. It’s a series of potted biographies of various African slavers though two of them were actually of mixed African-Portuguese extraction. Among them are King Guezo of Dahomey and Efunroye Tinobu, the notorious Nigerian female slaver who has a square and statue erected to her. The first person shown in the video, however, is an African prince, who was sent to Britain for his education in the 18th century. During the journey to the West Indies, however, he was enslaved, but word was managed to be passed to his father, who arranged for him to be freed and come to Britain. Once here, he studied in libraries before taking up slaving himself. To us in the 21st century, it’s almost incomprehensible how someone, who had been enslaved themselves, could go on to inflict this on others. But it was part, unfortunately, of the common mindset of slave societies. From the ancient world to the 19th century, slavery was so much a part of the contemporary cultural mindset that even those enslaved themselves saw nothing wrong with the institution. They just hated the fact that they personally were enslaved. The British colonial authorities at Sierra Leone several times had to launch searches to arrest ‘liberated Africans’, that is, former slaves who had been freed by the British navy and transported to the colony, who had seized other Africans to sell into slavery further south. I’m putting this up because, apart from being an important part of the slave trade, it’s an aspect I feel is being played down in order to put the blame for slavery solely on White Europeans and Americans.

Simon Webb Gets Upset About Children’s Book on Black Lesbian Pirate Queen

Well, it’s a Bank Holiday Monday, and so to spoil your fun here’s another post about about History Debunked has put up on the Net. Yesterday or the day before he put up a post urging people to be aware of the anti-racist, pro-gay, ‘woke’ propaganda now being published as children’s literature.

He’s particularly concerned about the colonisation of British history by Blacks and their insertion into historical epics like Bridgerton. He has a point about this TV series. This is the British past remade in the image of the multicultural present as modern liberals would have liked it to have been, rather than as it was. One of the arguments Major Moody used in his Second Report of the 1820s, which argued that Blacks weren’t ready for their emancipation and that Blacks and Whites were fundamentally incompatible is that there were very few marriages in aristocratic society between them. This was despite Moody’s own wife being Black. There were odd members of the nobility, who were Black. One was the son of a Caribbean planter who had a glittering political career in the 1820s, ending up as the Lord Lieutenant of Flintshire in Wales. But most of the Black population in Britain would, I suspect, either have been sailors, servants or other working people.

There are problems with these programmes, although they’re not an issue, provided people realise that they are watching fiction. The problems come if people believe them, as this makes understanding historic British racism and the Black community’s struggle against difficult to understand. If there were so many Blacks, and they were so easily accepted as equals by Whites back then, then why did it take so long to ban the slave trade and slavery itself, quite apart from explaining the rise of vicious racist groups like the National Front and the BNP?

As an example of this attitude now getting into children’s books, he produced a recent one about a Black lesbian girl becoming a pirate chief. Now this does sound unlikely. There were Black pirates, of course, and it’s respectable, mainstream historical fact that they received the same share of the plunder as Whites, and likewise received the same rates of compensation for the loss of limbs. There were also female pirates, like Anne Bonney. One set were discovered when the British navy took a pirate ship. Most of the men gave up, but three pirates fought like devils. On examination, it was found that they were women, and that one of them was pregnant. I think Bonney was one of them. And some of these women were bisexual. When Channel 4 started back in the 1980s, there was a five minute slot in the evening between programmes where somebody could give some kind of talk. One of these, I remember, was by an American woman, who talked about one of these swashbuckling women, who had relations both with men and other women.

And some of the pirates had genuinely revolutionary views about social equality. Years ago, when I was an ickle sprog, I was a member of the Puffin Club, set up for children who read Puffin Books. This had its own magazine, the Puffin Post. In the Puffin annual one year there was a piece about the ‘White Pirates’. This wasn’t because of their skin colour, but because of their extremely progressive political views. They believed in the radical, democratic ideals emerging in the 18th century and so rejected aristocratic rule. They were also internationalists, consisting of people from a number of nations, all of whom were to be treated equally. This was shown by them having their own international language or lingua franca, spoken in their base on Madagascar. And that’s all I can remember about them, I’m afraid. They’re obviously a group it would be great to know more about.

From all this about women and politically revolutionary pirates, it’s not such a stretch to Black lesbian pirate queens, although I doubt there were any. As the subject of a children’s book, it’s no more improbable than one I’ve seen, where the captain’s mother or grandmother takes over the ship, forcing them to do exercises and become a bit more literate and educated, which is clearly a piece of fun fiction. The only bit aspect of the book which would stop me from giving it to a child is the lesbianism. Depending on the age of the children the book is aimed at, I think this might be giving children too much sexual knowledge too early. But as a story about a Black girl becoming a pirate chief, I really don’t see any harm in it at all.

Liz Truss Co-Author of a Report Which Demanded Savage Cuts and a £10 Charge to See the Doctor

This is another piece from the Mirror which reveals precisely what a prize right-wing scumbag Liz Truss is. According to the article, ‘Liz Truss report demanded vast cuts and £10 fee to see GP – ‘true colours’ in full’ by the paper’s political editor Dan Bloom, the Tory leadership contender was the joint author of a 2009 report published by the think tank, Reform, calling for massive cuts to public spending. This included cutting pensioners’ benefits, doctors’ pay by ten per cent, and imposing a £10 charge for seeing the doctor.

The article begins:

‘Liz Truss is accused of showing her “true colours” in a paper that called for vast spending cuts and a £10 fee to see your GP.

The runaway favourite to be Prime Minister was one of seven people who wrote a 44-page slash-and-burn policy document for the 2009 Budget.

The ‘Back to Black’ paper for the Reform think tank recommended cutting £28bn in a year by introducing “user charges for GPs” and whittling 10% off doctors’ pay.

It also demanded ministers “remove pensioner gimmicks” to save £3.2bn, force civil servants onto a four-day week with a 20% pay cut, and hike the pension age at the last moment.

And it called for major military projects to be axed – including the Royal Navy’s planned aircraft carriers HMS Queen Elizabeth and HMS Prince of Wales.

Despite her being Deputy Director of Reform at the time, Ms Truss’ campaign bizarrely claimed: “Co-authoring a document does not mean that someone supports every proposal put forward.”

Despite saying it shouldn’t be in 2009, a Truss ally insisted the likely Prime Minister does believe in an NHS free at the point of use – and she’ll not cut GPs’ pay or defence spending as PM.

Ahead of tonight’s Tory hustings in Manchester, an ally argued: “The purpose of a think tank is to put forward bold, radical ideas in the hope the government will pick up one or two.”

A campaign spokesman added of the document written 13 years ago: “This is a nearly two decade old document written against the backdrop of Labour bankrupting the economy.”

But Labour deputy leader Angela Rayner said: “Liz Truss’s track record shows her true colours. She is out of touch and out of step with the public.’

The article can be read at: https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/politics/liz-truss-report-demanded-vast-27781979

Ah, we’re back to the old ‘high spending Labour’ refrain, in which Labour is accused of bankrupting the economy and that savage cuts to public spending, meaning primarily the NHS and the welfare state, are needed. Do I believe that somehow, in the past thirteen years, she’s had some kind of conversion to Nye Bevan’s vision of an NHS that provides everyone with care, free at the point of use?

No. Because she’s a liar in a party of liars.

Remember the last election when an independent fact checking organisation found that while Labour had made no untrue statements, the number of lies the Tories told was off the scale in the thousands?

And the Tories don’t believe in the NHS. Not since Maggie Thatcher wanted to privatise it, but was only prevented by a massive cabinet revolt. Since then they’ve privatised everything they could, starting with the ancillary services and progressing to the medical services, as these have been contracted out to private medical companies and hospitals. And the other year various Tory scumbags were demanding an expansion of the list of services for which fees could be charged.

If she doesn’t believe in these cuts now, it’s only because that they’re a political liability. It looks to me very much that she strongly believed in them when Cameron was in power and Gideon, sorry, George Osborne was chancellor.

You cannot trust her with the NHS.

You cannot trust her to look after the elderly.

And you cannot trust her on defence.

Get her out, and her foul party with her.

Rightwingers Outraged at Acquittal of the Four Who Toppled Colston’s Statue

As a Bristolian with long personal roots in the city, I feel I’ve got to tackle this. The four people responsible for pulling the down the statue of the 18th century slave trader and philanthropist in a massive Black Lives Matter protest last year were on trial for it this week. They were charged with criminal damage, and yesterday were found ‘not guilty’ by the jury. And the right has been predictably incensed. The story’s on the front page of the Daily Mail, which reports that the jury may have been placed under pressure to acquit by the defence, which urged them ‘not to be on the wrong side of history’. The prosecution is therefore planning to appeal the decision. Nigel Farage has released a video on YouTube about it. Mixed-race Tory commenter Calvin Robinson has appeared on GB News talking about it. And inevitably the Lotus Eaters have also released a video about it, with Callum and one of Sargon’s other mates expressing their poor opinion of the whole thing. The message from the right has been the same: this decision imperils every statue in Britain, because it legitimises attacks on them through an appeal to the emotions of the attacker regardless of the letter of the law. Calvin Robinson in his interview on GB News agreed with the two journalists, one Black, one White, that you had to be very careful about limiting people’s freedom of expression. However the decision to acquit was, he explained, based on a legal loophole in the criminal damage law. This permits such damage, if the property damaged or destroyed itself serves to promote a crime. The argument made by the accused in a feature about them in the Groan was that the statue constituted a hate crime against Black Bristolians. The right-wing critics of the decision have therefore argued that this makes every statue unsafe, as an emotional reason could be found for any attack on them. The person, who vandalised Churchill’s statue last year could get off because, despite defeating Fascism, Churchill was a racist and imperialist. They have also made the point that the decision also means that Conservatives also have a right to tear down Marx’s bust in London, as he was also racist and anti-Semitic, quite apart from the millions murdered under Communism. Darren Grimes, the repulsive spawn of the Guido Fawkes site, said that he could also therefore tear down the statue of Friedrich Engels in Manchester.

Jury Freedom and the Historic Acquittal of Guilty Murderers

Yesterday Simon Webb of History Debunked also joined the debate, comparing the decision to the jury’s acquittal of the attackers of three policemen during a riot in 1820s London. The cops had been stabbed, and one killed, but the jury acquitted their attackers because the cops had attacked in a particularly aggressive and provocative manner. Webb stated that back in the 17th and 18th centuries judges could and did send juries back to reconsider their verdict, and even imprison them if they didn’t give the right verdict as directed. It was, of course, a great improvement to allow the juries the freedom to judge themselves rather than according to the opinion of the beak. But this did raise problems in cases like this. Indeed. Juries won the right to judge freely according to their own judgement following arguments for such free trials by the Levellers and particularly when William Penn, a Quaker and the founder of Pennsylvania, was put on trial for preaching his radical views in Bristol. The jury repeatedly refused the judge’s order to find guilty, and were even imprisoned. They eventually won out, and the trial helped established true British justice.

Allegations of Bias against Witness David Olasuga

One of the other objections to the trial was that one of the witnesses was the historian, David Olasuga. whom the Lotus Eaters describe as a Black activist and who admitted that, had he been able, he would have joined the mob in toppling the status. There is indeed a problem with Olasuga as some of his historical interpretations are questionable. For example, he and Reni Edo-Lodge turned up in video by the Beeb laying a plaque in Liverpool to a victim of racist lynching. Except that Wootton, the lynched man, had been part of a gang of West Indians, who had launched an attack on a group of Swedes and Russians. When a cop intervened, the West Indians repeated stabbed and tried to slash his throat. They retreated to a house where someone, probably Wootton, shot three policemen, before he was chased down to the docks trying to escape. He was hardly an innocent victim. Olasuga has been one of the Black historians claiming that historically, Britain had a much larger Black community than it probably did. He claims that there were Blacks in Roman Britain. History Debunked has shown that this largely comes from one of the legions at Hadrian’s Wall coming from the Roman province of Mauretania. This has been confused with the present day country in West Africa. However, the Roman province of Mauretania was further north in Morocco. I think there are perfectly reasonable questions of bias in Olasuga’s testimony.

Political Bias in Prosecution of Vandals

And then have come the various commenters sneering and deriding Bristol. I’ve seen the usual rants about how it’s a ‘Communist’ or ‘left-wing’ shithole; it’s a lefty university town, and as terrible as Liverpool or London. Rather more interesting was one comment from a working class Bristolian, who had been having a meal at a cafe in the city, whose customers were largely Black West Indians. These people had all been solidly against the decision. I can well believe it. I don’t think the Black community Bristol or elsewhere in our great nation is a monolithic bloc. Just like other racial groups, like Whites, Asians or Jews aren’t either. As for the four defendants, they were White middle class liberal kids, who most likely didn’t come from Bristol. There was also speculation about what would happen if someone vandalised a statue to a Black personality, like Nelson Mandela. Would this be treated the same way? Not if the example of the vandalism done to a mural of Marcus Rashford was an example. Although the messages sprayed on it weren’t racist, it was nevertheless treated as a racist hate crime. Actually, you don’t have to look that far for a similar example. After Colston’s statue was torn down, a bust in one of Bristol’s parks of a Black writer and dramatist was vandalised and the cops were after those responsible.

Some Black Bristolians Genuinely Upset at Statue

As for the feelings of fear or outrage that the defendants claimed justified the attack, the Black interviewer on GB News and Robinson both questioned whether Black people are so emotional fragile that they would be upset simply walking past Colston’s statue. Some may well not be, but others definitely were. Asher Craig, Bristol’s deputy elected mayor, head of equalities and city councillor for St. George’s, was on Radio 4 last year giving her opinion about the statue and Bristol’s historic connection to the slave trade. The programme also talked to others about it, including one ordinary Black woman. She said that she felt physically sick having to walk past it on the way to work every morning. I understand and sympathise. I think her example was far better and more persuasive than the various political activists angrily demanding that it should be torn down. It was the voice of an ordinary, working-class woman, about how the statue affected her.

Arguments for the Preservation of the Statue

It also has to be stated that Black Lives Matter’s attack was deliberately against the wishes of Bristolians themselves. There had been several polls in the past about whether the statue should be taken down or not. The majority of people voted against it. Paul Stephenson, one of the organisers of the Bristol bus boycott in the 1960s against the bus company’s refusal to employ Blacks, gave his opinion on the issue in an interview with Philippa Gregory in the 1990s. Gregory had just had her novel, A Respectable Trade, about the Bristol slave trade adapted for television and there was an exhibition about the city and slavery then at the City Museum and Art Gallery. It has since been moved and is now on display, sans title, at the city’s excellent M Shed Museum. Stephenson has something of a mixed reputation. To some he’s a respected civil rights activists, while others regard him more a deliberate troublemaker. He declared to Gregory that Colston was a bloody mass murderer responsible for a ‘Holocaust in Africa’. This follows the statement of W.E.B. DuBois, the pioneering American Black rights activist, that slavery and the slave trade were a Black Holocaust. It sounds like hyperbole, a deliberately emotional exaggeration, but I believe it’s based on the accounts of 19th century anti-slavery activists about the fierce tribal violence generated by the slave trade, and the devastation of whole regions as a result. But Stephenson also said that he didn’t think the statue should be torn down. He believed it should remain standing with an additional note to remind people of his crimes. A similar argument was made by the Lotus Eaters, who felt that statues should be left standing, even though they may be to terrible people, because they’re history. And we need to learn from history if we are to move on.

It’s a perfectly good argument, and one advanced in the ’90s by radical anarchist band The Levellers. They took their name from the radical, proto-democrat, proto-socialist sect during the British Civil War. They also believed in ‘Godly reformation’ and so, along with the other merchandising at their concerts were copies of the Bible and Christopher Hill’s Marxist study of the British Civil War, The World Turned Upside Down. I particularly remember one of their songs that had the lines ‘I believe in justice, I believe in vengeance, I believe in getting the bastard’. But they also released a song protesting about the decision by Manchester’s Labour council to rename the town’s historic Free Trade Hall. They objected to it because it was the destruction of history and an attempt to rewrite the past. It’s strange and rather disconcerting that they should have the same view on this issue from a libertarian left perspective, as the Tories.

Lastly, it needs to be remembered that Colston was not honoured for enslaving Blacks. The statue was put up long after that was over. Rather it was because he was a great philanthropist, who gave much of his fortune away in charity. There were schools named after him and funded by his largesse. My old school used to celebrate Colston Day in his honour, when the children were given a few days off. A few were specially honoured and went to a special service at Redcliffe Church, where they were given a Colston bun.

Bristol Great City

Now for a few remarks on the decision and the views of the various right-winger, who have sounded off about it. Firstly, Bristol isn’t a shithole. It’s a large, great city with a proud history of trade, exploration, industry and invention with excellent museums and theatres. The Bristol Old Vic and its theatre school have a particularly excellent reputation and have produced some of the country’s great thesps. It has it’s problems. I believe that the Bristol’s Black community is one of the three largest in the country, along with Birmingham and London. It has its problems with marginalisation, lack of educational achievement, unemployment, drugs and violent crime, though this is by no means confined simply to Blacks. But it’s not particularly left-wing. Some areas, like Stokes Croft, have a reputation for radical politics. I’ve heard local people refer to it as ‘the people’s republic of Stokes Croft’. Other areas are Conservative, and all the shades of political opinion in between.

Academic Freedom and Marxist Indoctrination at Universities

As for the universities, the comment blaming them for the decision comes from the standard right-wing attitude that the unis are full of Marxists indoctrinating students. In fact, universities, courses and individual lecturers vary immensely. Some universities had a reputation, even in my day, for being hotbeds of left-wing activism, others were more Conservative. It also varies with the course you’re on. There hasn’t, traditionally, been much opportunity for far left-wing indoctrination in maths, science, medicine and engineering courses because of the nature of those subjects. Although it’s creeping in now in the form of ethnomathematics and the demands that the achievements of Black scientists and mathematicians should be particularly taught, it’s mostly been confined to the humanities. There have always been Marxist historians. These include the very well respected Christopher Hill, Eric Hobsbawm and E.P. Saunders, and there is a specific Marxist view of history. You are taught about this on the historiography courses in history at University, along with other forms of history, such as women’s history, social history, what Butterfield called the ‘Whig view of history’ and more conservative and Conservative views. I’ve been taught by lecturers with feminist or left-wing views. I’ve also been taught by people with far more traditional views. I also know lecturer who determined to keep their political views out of the classroom. University is supposed to be a place of free speech and debate, and it’s important that this is maintained. Students should be encouraged to read sources and the historical literature critically, and make up their own views. This means an engagement with Marxism as well as other ideologies. I think Bristol university has particularly come under fire because it’s rather more conservative and traditional compared to the newer universities. It received funding from the Colston charities when it was established early in the last century. Hence I believe the granting of a chair in the history of slavery to a Black woman. It also has relatively few Black students, which contrasts with the population of the city as a whole. This is partly because it has very high standards, and as a rule Blacks generally have poorer grades than other racial groups. It is also no doubt because when I was young, going away was seen as part of university education and so you were discouraged from applying to the local university. Hence the university is now trying to give greater opportunities to study to more Blacks and ethnic minorities.

Queer Theory, Critical Race Theory and the Marxist Attack on Western Culture

Now I largely agree that the acquittal of the four defendants has set a dangerous precedent because it allows people to attack public monuments they dislike or which are controversial. James Lindsay, one of the group with Peter Boghossian and Helen Pluckrose that has attacked postmodernist Critical Theory, has argued that ideologies like Queer Theory and Critical Race Theory are deliberate attacks on traditional western culture and Enlightenment values. They are aimed at destroying the past to create a Marxist future, just as Chairman Mao did during the horrors of the Cultural Revolution. One of the ancient monuments the Red cadres smashed as part of the campaign against the ‘Four Olds’ was the tomb of Confucius! This sounds like an idea straight out of loony right-wing paranoids and conspiracists like Alex Jones and the John Birch Society, until he backs it up by reading chapter and verse from the founders of such postmodernist Marxism, like Marcuse, Horkheimer and others. And yes, I can quite believe that vandalism to a monument to a Black politico or celebrity, like Nelson Mandela, would be treated far differently and as a terrible hate crime than the attack on Colston.

But regardless of the defence’s plea to the jury to ‘be on the right side of history’, I think there would always have been pressure on the jury to acquit. Colston was a slave trader and had been controversial for decades. They naturally wouldn’t have wanted to acquit people who attacked a monument on that score, rather than the philanthropy the statue commemorated. And the defendants make a good point when they say that ‘he no longer speaks for Bristol’. There were others in the city who opposed the slave trade. As well as the slavers and the West Indian planters, Bristol also had a large abolitionist movement. If you go a little way from the centre of Bristol into Redcliffe, you’ll find the Georgian church where Jeremiah Clarkson, one of the leading 18th century abolitionists, collected the testimony of Bristol’s slavers as part of his evidence against the trade.

Other Statues Not Vandalised

As for other statues, none of those in the surrounding area were touched. Not the statue to Edmund Burke, the politician and founder of modern Conservatism through his book, Reflections on the Revolution in France. The Lotus Eaters are offering it, or reading through it, as their ‘book of the month’. I wonder if they’ll mention that Burke’s statue was signally left untouched by the rioters. As was the statue of a monk in Lewin’s Mead, which had before the Reformation been a monastic complex. They also failed to destroy the statue of Neptune and a sailor on the docks. Queen Victoria was left untouched on nearby College Green. They also didn’t destroy the statue of John Cabot outside the Council House, sorry, ‘City Hall’ and the Central Library. This was despite various ‘spokesmen’ for the Black community claiming that the City’s celebration of his discovery of Newfoundland and America, following Columbus, was a celebration of slavery. There may well be similar defences used on similar attacks on other statues, but I think such attacks will be far more difficult to defend. Churchill was indeed a racist and an imperialist, as well as personally responsible for sending troops to gun down striking miners in Wales. But to the vast majority of severely normal Brits he was also the man, who helped save Europe and the world from Nazism and the Axis. And that would also count powerfully in the case against anyone who vandalised his monument.

Historians also Successfully Defend Controversial Statues

As for testimony from historians, this can work against the iconoclasts. The BLM fanatics trying to get the statue of Cecil Rhodes torn down at Oxford university claimed that he was somehow ‘South Africa’s Adolf Hitler’. Now Rhodes was a grotty character and an imperialist, but this goes too far. Rhodes’ biographer tackled this claim on social media, at which the BLM protesters making it went quiet. They couldn’t refute it, and so went silent.

I therefore do not feel that other statues are necessarily in a greater danger than previously because of the acquittal.

Then there’s the question of any possible statue to replace it. There are rumours that it could be a Black person. Well, if there is, it should be of a Black person, who actually had contact and lived in the city. One of Bristol’s sporting heroes way back was a Black boxer. One of my aunts was friends with his daughter. I’d say this gentleman would be a good candidate for such a statue, because as a sports hero he united everyone from left and right, as well as being a citizen of Bristol.

Nigel Farage has suggested a memorial to the British navy. Absolutely. The British West India squadron did excellent work patrolling the seas for slavers. And they were by no means all racist. Captain Denman, giving evidence on a massacre of 300 unsold slaves by one of the West African slaving states to parliament, made the point that ‘it is remarkable given the advances they have made in the arts of civilisation’. He clearly believe European civilisation was superior, but had been particularly shocked because the African peoples responsible for the massacre were also comparatively civilised. Africans serving or aiding the British navy were also given the compensation payments awarded to British tars when they suffered injury and loss of limbs.

We also patrolled the waters between east Africa and India to stop western and Arab slavers, and one antipodean historian has written that in the Pacific, the royal navy was the chief protector of its indigenous peoples against enslavement.

It also needs to be remembered that one of the reasons for the British invasion of Africa was to stamp out slavery and the slave trade. I’ve no doubt that the main, if not the real reasons were simple hunger for territory and resources, and to stop those areas falling into the hands of our European imperial rivals – France, Germany, Italy and Portugal. But some of the officer involved took their duty extremely serious, such as Samuel Baker and Gordon of Khartoum. The Mahdi, against whom Gordon fought, and his followers were slavers outraged at the British government’s ban on it and the enslavement of Black Sudanese. There are therefore excellent reasons for putting up a memorial to the British navy and armed forces.

And I would also support a statue to Jeremiah Clarkson for his work in the city bringing the horrors of the trade to light.

In the meantime, despite the right-wing outrage at this act of vandalism, I think we should view the attack on Colston’s statue as a special case.

Claims of a general threat to British history because of it may well be exaggerated.

Hunt Wrong, Corbyn Right Not to Trust Intelligence Services on Iran

Yesterday I put up a piece stating that the Labour leader, Jeremy Corbyn, was quite right to demand evidence that Iran was responsible for the explosions that have destroyed several tankers in the Persian Gulf. This is against the accusations that Trump and the Tory government have hurled against the Iranians, who protest their innocence.

Iran is a very authoritarian theocracy with an abysmal record of human rights abuses. The Iranian secret services are capable of organising terror attacks. In the 1980s they bombed a cafe in Berlin used by Kurdish separatists. More recently they sent out naval vessels to seize the crew of a British warship in the Gulf, whom they eventually released. And there are hardliners in the Iranian government, theocracy and military who would wish to start a war with the West.

The False Claims about Iraq and 9/11

But against this, there is the long history of the American Neocons manufacturing pretexts for attacks on and invasions of countries for no other reason than that they are obstacles to American and Western geopolitical and commercial imperialism. The Iraq invasion is a case in point. George W. Bush and Blair accused Saddam Hussein of supporting Osama Bin Laden 9/11 attack. The Blair creature, as Peter Hitchens calls him, told us all that we had to go and support the American-led invasion of Iraq, because the Iraqi dictator could launch weapons of mass destruction within 45 minutes. It was a lie. All of it. Saddam Hussein had zilch to do with 9/11, and there were no weapons of mass destruction. 17 of the 19 attackers in 9/11 were Saudis. None were Iraqis. The American intelligence agencies were aware that the Saudi spy agencies were involved with the attack, and the evidence pointed that involvement in it went all the way to the top, though direct evidence was lacking as the threads petered out. The American intelligence services were also acutely aware that after their invasion of Iraq, Saudi intelligence was supplying arms and collaborating with al-Qaeda and ISIS in their attacks in Iraq and Syria. Since then, records have been discovered that show that the Iraqis were interested in working with bin Laden against the West. But al-Qaeda overwhelmingly hated and despised Hussein and the Ba’athists because they were secular Arab socialists.

Real Reasons for Iraq Invasion

The real reason the Neocons wanted to oust Hussein was entirely down to western imperial ambitions. The Americans and the Saudis wanted the Iraqi oil industry and its reserves, as the latter is the largest outside Saudi Arabia. American multinationals also wanted to take over Iraqi state enterprises. And the Neocons also hoped to turn the country into the low-tax, free trade economy that they’d like to foist on America itself. And they and the Israelis also wanted Hussein overthrown because he supported the Palestinians.

Neocon and Multinationals’ Motives for Possible Invasion of Iran

I have no doubt that similar reasons are behind the latest accusations against Iran by Trump. I don’t think the American right has quite recovered from the Islamic Revolution of 1979 and the overthrow of the Shah, one of America’s and Israel’s allies in the region. After the Revolution, the Iranians nationalised the oil industry, taking it out of the hands of private, foreign companies. This was exactly like Mohammed Mossadeq, the country’s democratically elected prime minister, had done in the 1950s. The Iranian oil industry at the time was controlled by Anglo-Persian Oil, the British company that became BP. We joined the Americans in a CIA operation which overthrew Mossadeq, a coup which eventually led to the Shah assuming absolute power as a ruthless autocrat. I don’t doubt that American and British oil interests dearly want to grab the Iranian oil industry back. I also don’t doubt that American and western multinationals would also like to get their corporate mitts on the 51 per cent or so of the Iranian economy dominated by the state enterprises and the bonyads, the Islamic charitable foundations also managed by the state theocracy. The Neocons also want the current theocracy overthrown, not because they are genuinely interested in the wellbeing of the average Iranian, but because Iran is a fierce opponent of Israel. The dominant religion of Iran is Twelver Shi’ism, and since the overthrow of Hussein Iran has become increasingly influential amongst Iraqi Shi’a. The Saudis and other Gulf states are Sunni Muslims, who fear and oppress their own Shi’a population. A few years ago one of the leading Saudi clerics declared that the Shi’a were ‘enemies of the faith’ and ‘worthy of death’. They would like to see Iran conquered, I don’t doubt, as part of their religious campaign against Shi’a Islam.

Jeremy Hunt was in the news today as it’s reported he’s trying to calm the situation down and de-escalate tensions before it does come to violence. But he’s still criticising Corbyn for not automatically accepting Iranian responsibility for the attacks. Corbyn has committed the unforgivable sin of demanding evidence. And so he’s been grossly misrepresented as siding with the Iranians against Britain. Hunt has also attacked the Labour leader for not automatically accepting the word of the British intelligence agencies that Iran’s responsible.

But Corbyn’s quite right, and the British spy agencies can’t be trusted. 

There’s ample evidence of this. Let’s go back to the Iraq invasion. Hussein didn’t have weapons of mass destruction, but Blair insisted that they did so he could have an excuse for joining George Dubya’s invasion. And so, under government pressure, the ‘dodgy dossier’ was concocted by the spy agencies, which purported to show that Hussein did.

And British Intelligence has a very long record of publishing disinformation, propaganda and sheer lies against the British Left.

There’s the case of the Zinoviev letter in the 1920s. This was supposedly a letter written by the Russian head of the Comintern to the Labour party encouraging them to start a revolution and turn Britain into a Communist satellite, and it was published by the British press just before a general election. It’s believed that the letter was a major cause of Labour losing it to the Tories. The letter was an utter fabrication, created by MI 5 to discredit Labour. And British intelligence have kept doing it. In the 1970s MI 5 was behind various rumours and attempts to overthrow the Labour leader and Prime Minister, Harold Wilson, because he was a KGB spy. This was part of a wider campaign of disinformation during the Cold War, designed to combat the spread of Communism. The agency responsible for this, the Information Research Department, and the other agencies also manufactured stories claiming that the IRA were collaborating with the Soviet Union, and that high profile members of the Labour left were also either Communist agents or sympathisers or members of the IRA. This has continued to today. Just a year or so ago, the Institute for Statecraft, a propaganda outfit churning out online pieces attacking politicians and other public figures, whom they thought were too close to Putin, was revealed as being funded by the British government. And although it’s a private organisation, it has links to the British intelligence agencies and the section of the SAS responsible for cyberwarfare. It’s no surprise that Jeremy Corbyn was one of those smeared as a supporter or agent of Putin.

And this is quite apart from the agencies’ grubby record rigging elections and doing other dirty tricks in Britain’s former colonies, in order to make sure that they remained loyal to Britain. This is extensively described in a recent book published by a mainstream historian.

And aside from producing propaganda, disinformation and outright lies, British intelligence at one time was also notorious for its incompetence.

Apparently Margaret Thatcher was the only Prime Minister, so it was claimed in the 1990s, who regularly read their reports. Other Prime Ministers didn’t bother for the simple reason that they were rubbish. Among the failures of the western intelligence agencies was the fact that they didn’t predict the Islamic Revolution in 1979. The only organisation that knew that a revolution was coming were the Tudeh, the Iranian Communist party. And they made the mistake of assuming it would be a Communist uprising. The CIA also thought that the Ayatollah Khomeini would be a leader in the mould of Gandhi, preaching non-violent opposition, instead of the radical firebrand he actually was.

Now British intelligence might be right about Iranian responsibility for these bombings, but they need to offer evidence. Evidence that can be subjected to proper scrutiny and independent analysis. If that is not forthcoming, then the long history of the British intelligence agencies in publishing lies and propaganda, including against the Labour party and other elements of the domestic Left, means that their word cannot be trusted.

Corbyn is quite right not to trust the word of the spy agencies automatically, and demand proper evidence. Until that is produced, it seems clear to me that the British and American right-wing political and media elite, and their secret states, are merely producing more smears to prepare for Iran’s invasion. And this is being driven not by anything the Iranians are doing, but simply for the same geopolitical and corporate imperialism behind the invasion of Iraq.

Without America, Israel Would Be A Liberia for Jews

Israel is very strongly supported financially by America. I don’t know the precise figures, but annually tens, if not hundreds of millions of US dollars goes in aid to it. And the Iron Dome anti-missile shield was actually given to the Israelis by Obama’s regime. But the Israel lobby in America, AIPAC and the other organisations, continually press for more money and continued financial support. And I have heard of incidents where the suggestion that aid money to Israel must be scaled down is greeted within Israel by angry protests and cries of ‘anti-Semitism!’

But Israel isn’t the first colonial state founded as a refuge for persecuted minorities in the West. The first modern such states were Liberia and Sierra Leone. Sierra Leone was established in the late 18th century by British abolitionists as a homeland from freed slaves. Like Israel, there was also a utopian element in the scheme. Sierra Leone was to be self-governing, and non-feudal, based on contemporary liberal English historians’ conception of Anglo-Saxon English society and government before the Norman Conquest. Many of the Black colonists sent there were literate, and they were joined by a number of poor Whites, who also wanted to set up a new home in the Continent.

In fact, the colony was troubled almost from the outset. It was beset with agricultural problems, disease and sickness were rife, and there was conflict with the indigenous peoples, from whom the Abolitionists had purchased or leased the land. It eventually passed under the control of a colonial company and thence became a British colonial possession. Due to friction with the colonial authorities, the Black colonists rebelled. This was quashed with the arrival of a number of Maroon – free Black – soldiers from Jamaica.

After the abolition of the slave trade in the British Empire in 1807, Sierra Leone became the centre of one of the naval courts in West Africa, that judged whether or not captured ships were slavers. The enslaved people in these vessels were also settled there, after they were given their freedom. It also became a major centre of Creole – Western Black – learning and culture. Much of what we know about the culture and languages of West Africa comes from Sierra Leonean travellers and missionaries. It was through working in Sierra Leone that two non-conformist missionaries presented evidence to British parliamentary committees that Black African children were not just as intelligent as White European kids, but at certain stages seemed to be more advanced. This is obviously very controversial, but it is true that Black babies tend to be more alert earlier than Whites. There is also a connection to the world of British classical music. The father of the 19th century British composer, Samuel Coleridge-Taylor (not to be confused with the poet of almost the same name) came from Sierra Leone. Coleridge-Taylor was the composer, amongst other things, of a Clarinet Quintet, and a cantata based on Longfellow’s Hiawatha. This is still performed today by British choral societies.

America also founded a similar colony for its freed slaves in the same part of West Africa. This was Liberia. The American abolitionists, who founded the colony, were proud of the achievements of the Black colonists, their political involvement and the colonies’ economic development. They praised, for example, the growth of craft and artisan industries and the colonists’ manufactures, and predicted it would be a major centre of civilisation in Africa.

Sadly, this has not been the case, either in Sierra Leon or Liberia. Both remain impoverished developing nations, dominated by kleptocratic elites. Sierra Leone was rent by a devastating civil war in the 1990s over control of its vast diamond reserves. In Liberia, the descendants of the Western Black Colonists dominate and oppress the indigenous peoples. When one of the Afro-American presidents deigned to make a tour of the indigenous peoples and their lands in the 1960s, this was hailed as a major democratic move.

Western settlers dominating the indigenous people, in a country founded so that the settlers could be free from persecution in the West – that also sounds very much like Israel.

Critics of Zionism have pointed out that many of the gentile supporters of Zionism were anti-Semites with their own reasons for supporting a Jewish homeland. Quite simply, many of them simply wanted to clear Jews out of Britain, and dump them somewhere else in the world. Jewish Zionism was also predated by Christian Zionism, which wanted to re-establish the ancient kingdom of Israel in preparation for the End Times predicted in the Book of Revelation.

And one of the reasons for the foundation of Sierra Leone and Liberia was the belief that Whites and Blacks would never mix in Europe and America. There would always be prejudice against Blacks. And many of the supporters of the scheme, at least for Sierra Leone, also wanted a place to put British Blacks and clear them out of England.

Israel is a prosperous country, and is now supporting itself through its arms trade. But recently it has been hit with a massive corruption scandal surrounding Binyamin Netanyahu. It therefore seems to me that, for all the promotion of Israel and its undoubted achievements in the West, if it wasn’t so heavily supported by America and the Europeans, it would decline very swiftly to the same level as Sierra Leone and Liberia: dominated by kleptocrats and brutal, corrupt dictators, which oppressing the indigenous peoples. Which the Israelis are doing already to the Palestinians.

The Zionist Persecution of the Indigenous Arabs in Palestine under the British Mandate

I found this description of the apartheid and maltreatment inflicted on the Palestinian Arabs by the Zionist settlers in History of the World: The Last Five Hundred Years, general editor Esmond Wright (Feltham: Hamlyn/W.H. Smith 1984), page 629.

The most serious long-term problem bequeathed by Britain’s devious wartime diplomacy in the Middle East arose from its promise to the Jews. The terms of Britain’s mandate in Palestine made it responsible for putting this promise into effect by the establishment in Palestine of a ‘national home from the Jewish people.’ The Arabs, who made up more than ninety percent of the Palestinian population, were at once assured by Britain that the Jewish national home would not become a Jewish national state and that their ‘civil and religious rights’ would be respected. A national state, however, was precisely what the Zionist movement (which was responsible for the idea of a ‘national home’ in Palestine) intended to achieve – a state which, in the words of Dr. Weizmann, its leader, would be ‘as Jewish and England is English’.

As a first step towards this goal, Zionists insisted on the strict separation of Arab and Jewish communities. Jewish parents refused to send their children to mixed government schools. Arab tenants and farm workers were evicted from all land bought by the Jewish National Fund. David Ben-Gurion, later the first prime minister of the state of Israel, organised a series of strikes against Jewish employers of Arab labour. The Jewish Agency, which coordinated Jewish settlement in Palestine, sought, with some success, to make itself a state within a state. Until the First World War the Arabs had been the only people living in contact with the Jews who had never persecuted them. The birth of Arab anti-Semitism between the wars was the work not of Adolf Hitler but of the Zionists.

This last statement has to be revised somewhat, as the Nazis sought to exploit Arab resentment against the Zionist settler through the creation of a vicious conspiracy theory tailored towards Islam similar to their own monstrous delusions about the Jews being responsible for the exploitation and enslavement of White Aryans. In their spurious history, the Jews had been conspiring against Islam and the Arab people since the days of Mohammed. It’s completely bogus, but because of the establishment of the state of Israel and its seven-decades long persecution of its indigenous Arabs, has understandably become widespread in the Arab and Muslim worlds.

This page also mentions the way the British tried to contain some of the pressures by limiting Jewish immigration to Palestine by imposing a quota and turning away emigrant boats. This meant returning Jews fleeing Nazi persecution back to their deaths in Germany and occupied Europe. Apparently the policy was to take any illegal prospective settlers to Jerusalem, so they could see it, before returning them to their boats and sending them away. I’ve known elderly members of my church, who were young sailors in the British navy at this time, and they very much did not like what they had been ordered in turn to do to the Jewish immigrants. And in particular this was the use of tear gas against refugees from the Nazi gas chambers. This left them very upset as they spoke about it nearly seventy or so years later.

This whole, shabby affair is another blot on the history of the British Empire.

But the Zionist lobby automatically smears and reviles anyone, who suggests that Israel is an apartheid, racist state which persecutes the Arabs as anti-Semitic. So I’ll guess they’re going to have to smear W.H. Smith now, for what they rightly published back in the 1980s.

Counterpunch Demolishes Some Churchillian Myths

There’s a very interesting piece by Louis Proyect over at this weekend’s Counterpunch, The Churchillian Myths of 1940, where he takes a well-observed aim at two of the recent films about the Second World War. One is Christopher Nolan’s Dunkirk, the other is the forthcoming biopic about Winston Churchill’s battle against the appeasers in the British cabinet in 1940, The Darkest Hour. This hasn’t been released yet, and is set to come out on December 21st (2017). It stars Gary Oldman as Churchill, and is directed by Joe Wright.

Dunkirk’s already attracted much criticism because of its historical inaccuracies. I think it’s been accused of racism, because it ignores the large numbers of the British forces, who were Black and Asian. But Proyect also draws on a critique of the film by Max Hastings of the Telegraph to show how the film presents a very mythical view of Dunkirk. The film has it that the British troops are under constant shooting and bombardment by the Germans, and that they are saved by the flotilla of small vessels that went over there to rescue them. In fact, according to Hastings, the Germans largely left the retreating British alone. As for being saved by the small ships, 2/3 of the troops were rescued by the fleet of big ships that were sent by the navy. There were 37 of these, but six were sunk. Proyect also criticises a scene where the sailors aboard a sinking ship discuss how they are going to get to the surface without being mown down by the Germans. He compares this unfavourably to the Poseidon Adventure, producing the quotes by the critics to show that this is actually a far superior film.

More serious is the way the film deliberately omits atrocities committed on the civilian population by the retreating British. Proyect states that at the time the British squaddies were under immense physical and psychological stress. They responded by shooting anyone that moved, including old women and nuns. This is historical fact. Proyect cites and describes one of these incidents. The trooper had been told to take no prisoners, except for interrogation, and so blazed away accordingly.

As for the Darkest Hour, Proyect draws on an article by Clive Ponting on the Churchill Myth. Older readers of this blog will remember that Ponting was the civil servant Maggie tried to prosecute under the Official Secrets Act because he leaked two documents about the sinking of the Belgrano to the Labour MP Tam Dalyell. Ponting was acquitted, because the jury weren’t about to be told what to do by Maggie.

He points out that in fact the difference of opinion between Churchill and the appeasers, like Lord Halifax and Neville Chamberlain, was actually much smaller than most people realised. At the time, Churchill was in favour of making peace with Germany, and had sent feelers out to see what their terms were. Where he differed from Halifax and Chamberlain was that they were in favour of making an immediate peace, while he wanted to fight on for a few more months.

The film does show Churchill hesitating at one point, and Proyect states that this would have been unthinkable a few years ago, as the official archives were still closed and the only source material available were Churchill’s own self-aggrandising writings. In which he portrayed himself as the resolute warrior.

But this ignores just how pro-Nazi Churchill had been, as well as anti-Semitic. What! Churchill pro-Nazi? The very idea! But he was. In 1937 Churchill wrote of Hitler

Those who have met Herr Hitler face to face in public business or on social terms,” he said, “have found a highly competent, cool, well-informed functionary with an agreeable manner, a disarming smile, and few have been unaffected by a subtle personal magnetism.” Despite the arming of Germany and the hounding of the Jews, “we may yet live to see Hitler a gentler figure in a happier age,” Churchill wrote. He was doubtful, though.

As for Leon Trotsky, Churchill reviled him with all manner abuse, not just because he was a Bolshevik, but also because Trotsky was Jewish. He quotes Nicholson Baker’s Human Smoke, a revision history attacking the notion of World War II as ‘the good war’, from which he also took the above quote about Hitler from Churchill. Baker writes

Churchill also included a short piece on Leon Trotsky, king in exile of international bolshevism. Trotsky was a usurper and tyrant, Churchill said. He was a cancer bacillus, he was a “skin of malice,” washed up on the shores of Mexico. Trotsky possessed, said Churchill, “the organizing command of a Carnot, the cold detached intelligence of a Machiavelli, the mob oratory of a Cleon, the ferocity of Jack the Ripper, the toughness of Titus Oates.”

And in the end what was Trotsky? Who was he? “He was a Jew,” wrote Churchill with finality. “He was still a Jew. Nothing could get over that.” He called his article “Leon Trotsky, Alias Bronstein.”

https://www.counterpunch.org/2017/12/08/the-churchillian-myths-of-1940/

I am not surprised by Proyect’s description of Churchill’s highly equivocal attitude to Nazi Germany. Churchill himself was very authoritarian. He had visited Mussolini’s Italy, though he had not been impressed when the Duce compared the Blackshirts to the Black and Tans, and privately remarked that Musso was ‘a swine’. But he did like General Franco. The historian Martin Pugh, in his book on British Fascism between the Wars, states that Churchill’s opposition to Nazi Germany did not come from any deep ideological view, but simply because he was bitterly suspicious of Germany and believed that it would block British interests in the North Sea. Pugh points out that he didn’t seem concerned that a bloc of Fascist states in southern Europe could do the same to British interests in the Mediterranean.

It would be interesting to know what Peter Hitchens thinks of all this. Hitchens is deeply Conservative, but he is a fierce critic of the Second World War as ‘the good war’, and has absolutely no love of Churchill. Indeed, in his book taking aim at New Atheism a few years ago, The Rage Against God, he attacked the cult of Churchill as a kind of ersatz religion, put in place of Christianity. It’s a bit of stretch, as it wasn’t quite an exercising in God-building that the Soviets tried. In the former USSR there was a brief movement after the Revolution to create a kind of atheistic religion, centred around great revolutionary heroes, to harness religious sentiments for the cause of Communism. The cult around Churchill isn’t quite like that. But nevertheless, to some Churchill is almost a sacrosanct figure, against whom you must not utter a single word. You can’t, after all, imagine Dan Snow on the One Show, striding around what remains of Churchill’s office and papers, telling the world how ‘Winnie’ at one time looked approvingly on Hitler and was very nearly ready to make peace. Or that, when it suited him, he was viciously anti-Semitic.

Media Attacks on Anti-Nuclear Protests: The Same Now as in the ’80s

Some things never change. The current attacks on Jeremy Corbyn, with the Blairites doing their level best to engineer expulsions or a split in the Labour party, in many ways are almost like a re-run of the attacks on the Labour party under Michael Foot in the 1980s, and the mass defection of the Labour Right to form the SDP. On Friday I managed to pick up a copy of another book published in the 1980s, which critically examined the media bias against a variety of left-wing issues and causes, in one of the secondhand shops in Cheltenham. This was Bending Reality: The State of the Media, edited by James Curran, Jake Ecclestone, Giles Oakley and Alan Richardson (London: Pluto Press and the Campaign for Press and Broadcasting Freedom 1986). The has the following chapters in its three sections devoted to ‘Whose Reality?’, ‘The Politics of the Media’ and ‘Campaigning for Press Freedom’. They are

1. Media power and class power;
2. In whose image?
3. Sexual stereotyping in the media?
4. Racism in broadcasting
5. Portraying the peace movement
6. British broadcasting and Ireland
7. Living with the media – A landscape of lies, and Union World
8. The media and the state.
9. The different approaches to media reform
10. Selling the paper? Socialism and cultural diversity
11. Reconstructing broadcasting
12. Pornography annoys.
13. Campaigning against pornography.
14. The new communications revolution.
15. Media freedom and the CPBF
16. The aims of the campaign
17. Right of Reply
18. Freedom of information.
19. Media bias and future policy. This last chapter is particularly interesting, as it’s by Tony Benn.

I was particular struck by how little difference there is between the today’s attacks on Corbyn and those against the Left in the 1980s by the chapter on the campaign against the peace movement, written by Richard Kebble. Kebble amongst his other points, Kebble points out how scepticism towards nuclear weapons was widespread throughout society, including a sizable chunk of the Tories. It wasn’t confined to Labour, but the media and Tory leadership nevertheless acted as though it were. He also argued that the difference between multilateralism and unilateral disarmament was actually blurred but this was also ignored by the media in its campaign to present a simplified message to the public. The media also presented Michael Foot’s decision to abandon nuclear weapons as a policy that would leave Britain defenceless. He also states very clearly that a quote, used by the Navy as part of its recruiting campaign about the threat of the Russian Navy was a lie.

All this is being repeated with Corbyn stance against Trident. Some of the verbiage used has changed a little, but the overall stance and argument is so close that you could easily believe that the last thirty years have been merely a dream, and that Corbyn and Foot are the same person, despite the difference in appearance and name. Corbyn is being hysterically attacked for not supporting Trident. The Groaniad accused him of not being willing to defend a NATO partner, if it was attacked by Russia – a lie which Mike exposed on his blog. And the media lied to use about weapons of mass destruction in Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, and the political establishment now seems to be sabre-rattling once more about a renewed threat from Russia. It’s almost as though the Fall of Communism and the Soviet Empire never happened. We were lied to then. We’re being lied to now. This screams that the mendacity of the British press and media hasn’t changed one bit in the last thirty years.

Counterpunch Article on the History of British Imperial Domination in Iraq

This is a bit of background information to the current political situation in Iraq, and the report of the Chilcot inquiry damning Tony Blair for taking us into war with that country.

Garikai Chengu’s article in Counterpunch discusses the century or so of British domination of Iraq following the 1912 Cairo conference, convened by Britain and France to define their territories in the Middle East following the dismantlement of the Ottoman Empire. Britain took over what is now Jordan, and Iraq. He notes that the pattern of ethnic violence in the country was set when Britain merged the three separate Ottoman provinces for the Kurds, Sunni and Shia. He describes the brutal methods employed by us to suppress the rebellion against British rule that broke out in 1920. To force Iraq’s Sunnis and Shias into submission, Churchill destroyed whole villages, targeting both civilians, including women and children, as well as soldiers and using poisoned gas. He describes the way Britain saw air power as the decisive instrument for securing their dominance, which prefigured the use of drones in Afghanistan in this century. British continued to hold power in Iraq until long after the Second World War and the formal grant of independence in 1932. He also discusses the establishment of British Petroleum, BP, the British oil company, and its strategic importance exploiting Iraqi oil to fuel the British navy. Despite a revolution in 1958, we and the Americans aided Saddam Hussein’s ascent to power in 1963, and continued backing him both militarily and with intelligence during the Iran-Iraq War in the 1980s. Part of this aid included covert British funding for a chemical plant that the British government knew would be used to manufacture chemical weapons against the wishes and cognizance of the Americans. He also discusses the half a million Iraqis, who perished due to the sanctions imposed by Britain and America, many of them children.

Chengu also remarks on the similarities between the British occupation of Iraq in 1917 and the 2003 invasion, and the way the latter was sold to the public on the basis of non-existent threats. In both invasions, the British posed as liberators, not invaders. He also remarks on the mushrooming of suicide bombings in a nation that previously had none. He also discusses Robin Cook’s explanation of the term al-Qaeda in his resignation speech. It is an Arabic abbreviation of the term for ‘the database’, and refers to the database of Islamist radicals funded and supported by the Americans as mujahidin in the proxy war in Afghanistan with the Russians.

The article concludes with Chengu’s judgement that this may be Britain’s greatest longstanding foreign policy failure.

From Churchill to Blair: How British Leaders Have Destroyed Iraq for Over a Century