Vox Political on Tory Claim that He Was Approached by 3 Anti-Corbyn Plotters

Mike’s also put up another piece commenting on an article in today’s Torygraph by Kate McCann. This reports the claim by the Tory MP, Andrew Bridgen, that he was approached by three Labour MPs, who support his demand for a snap general election. They hope that Labour will lose the election, and this will give them they excuse they need to oust Corbyn as leader. Mike reports that none of the MPs are named, so the article could well be the product of McCann’s fevered imagination. As for Bridgen, Mike’s article has a picture of him, which was clearly taken at some posh function. It shows him in a dinner suit with another, similarly dressed young man in the background, standing in the kind of pose politicians adopt when they’re trying to be a Churchillian ‘man of destiny’. It’s the kind of posture Jim Hacker used to adopt in Yes, Minister, when he was consciously trying to be a statesman of similar Churchillian proportions. It looks pompous, and Bridgen himself appears in the photo to be, er, ‘tired and emotional’, as Private Eye put it to avoid libel suits.

Mike states

The possibility that any Labour MP would stoop so low as to try to sabotage their own party – and doom the UK to another five long years under Conservative rule – to rid themselves of a leader who stands for Labour values is nothing short of an abomination.

Perhaps it would be best to try to kill it before it can be put into operation.

If you have a Labour MP, please contact them (preferably by Twitter so their answers are public) and ask if they would rather have Labour “wiped out” in an election than accept him as democratically-elected leader.

The rest of the article also claims that around 6,000 Labour party members have been reported to the NEC for on-line abuse, anti-Semitism and supporting other political parties. This quotes an unnamed ‘senior source’, claiming that the party is no longer safe for women or Jews. Mike notes that the source isn’t named, and the official investigation concluded that the Labour party was no better or worse in that regard than the Tories or even, for that matter, the Torygraph. He also makes the very good point that the article does not say from which section of the party these 6,000 come from. If they even exist. As the Eye might say, ‘Perhaps we should be told!’

See Mike’s article at http://voxpoliticalonline.com/2016/08/21/how-can-anyone-try-to-have-labour-wiped-out-at-an-election-and-still-claim-to-be-acting-in-labours-interests/

This clearly comes after three Lambeth councillors were caught in the week writing emails to Tories and Lib Dems, trying to get them to join the party to oust Corbyn. This gives Bridgen’s claim some verisimilitude. Or it could simply be that it supplied the basis for a deliberately destabilising lie. This is, after all, the Torygraph, the newspaper that told its Tory readers to join the Labour party and vote for Corbyn, in order to render the party unelectable. Now they’re claiming that unnamed Labour MPs are approaching
Tories to make the party unelectable, and so oust Corbyn. There’s a variation on a theme here.

As for the anti-Semitism claims, so many of them have been made against Jews and avowed anti-racists – Jackie Walker, Tony Greenstein, Red Ken Livingstone, Rachel Nesbitt, to name only a few, that many of them lack any validity. It’s just the boy crying ‘wolf!’ by the Israel lobby, in order to smear and destroy its opponents. Israel’s founders, Chaim Herzog, David Ben Gurion and others had absolute contempt for the Jews, who preferred to stay in their traditional European homelands, and adopt a highly racist policy of segregation against the Mizrahim, Arab Jews. They were European cultural supremacists, who were afraid that their superior western culture would be diluted by contact with these culturally inferior orientals. And so Arab Jews were kept away from European Jews, given the lowest, worst jobs. And there’s also a scandal currently unfolding in Israel about the theft of Mizrahi babies after Israel’s establishment, who were given to childless European Jewish couples to raise, in order to make sure the children had the approved cultural upbringing. As Counterpunch pointed out, this is exactly what was done to indigenous children in America, Canada and Australia. It was also done to the children of political prisoners during Argentina’s ‘Dirty War’, and to the Poles by the Nazis. The Israel lobby has absolutely no business accusing anyone of racism.

Counterpunch on the Israeli Theft of Arab Jewish Babies

This is another episode of Israeli history that will leave you feeling sick. Counterpunch today carried an article by Jonathan Cook, ‘The Dark Secret of Israel’s Stolen Babies’. This is about the emerging scandal that in the years following Israel’s founding in 1948, the hospitals and other institutions had stolen hundreds of Arab Jewish babies away from their mothers. It’s been a secret for decades, but last month the head of national security, Tzachi Hanegbi, finally admitted it had occurred. In actual fact, the numbers of children stolen from their parents is likely to be an underestimate. The real figure is probably in the thousands. Campaigners in Israel believe that as many as 8,000 children were taken in this way. The children were given to childless Jewish couples. The parents were told that their babies had died. In some cases, the nurses simply snatched them away, telling the mothers that they were wrong for having more children than they could look after.

Hanegbi, who was given the task of looking into the scandal by Netanyahu, remains unclear whether there was official involvement. Testimonies from those involved suggest that staff from the health ministry, judges and lawmakers were aware of what was going on. The papers relating to these poor children have been sealed until 2071, which certain suggests the Israeli state was involved, and that the government is trying to keep a lid on the scandal.

Cook’s article places the theft of these children in the context of the establishment of Israel as a colonial settler state. Israel was colonised by mainly eastern European Jews. The Zionist organisations, and its first president, David Ben Gurion, fully accepted the racist belief that European culture was innately superior to that of the Arabs and the Middle East. The children belonged to Arab families, who had immigrated to Israel, in the hope of finding sanctuary there from persecution. Ben Gurion and his fellows were afraid their Arab culture would contaminate and spoil that of the European settlers. The children were stolen in order to be raised by European Jewish colonists, who would bring them up in this supposedly superior culture.

Cook notes that Israel’s treatment of its indigenous population follows the pattern of other settler states in their persecution of their indigenous peoples, through genocide – such as of the Amerindians in America and the Aborigines in Australia, and apartheid and segregation, as in South Africa. He also notes that the theft of children was also used against Native American and Aboriginal Australian children. He also describes how campaigners in Israel have observed that the forcible transfer of children from one ethnic group to another constitutes genocide under international law. Cook concludes from the article that the lesson to be learned from this isn’t that the European Jewish establishment in Israeli hasn’t changed, but that it is resolutely opposed to living in peace with the peoples of the region, including its indigenous Jews as well as other Arabs.

See: http://www.counterpunch.org/2016/08/15/the-dark-secret-of-israels-stolen-babies/

The number of genocidal regimes and states that have stolen children is a longer than just the few described in Cook’s article, although they’re probably the best known. During the Second World War, the Nazis stole blond, ‘Aryan’ babies from Polish families. They were taken to be raised by German families, on the grounds that the Reich was rescuing supposedly lost ‘Aryan’ bloodlines. During the Dirty War in Argentina, the children of dissidents imprisoned by the Fascist state were also taken away from their mothers to be raised by respectable families. And there’s also been a scandal in Britain about babies from poor, working class mothers, who were also stolen, to be sent to Australia to aid in its colonisation.

Reading this, I also wondered if this scandal may also have been a contributory cause of Michael Foster throwing around renewed accusations about anti-Semitism in the Labour party. Reading between the lines, it looks very much like Foster is part of the Zionist lobby, which has come under fire from Corbyn, and which is very strongly linked to the Blairites. The best form of defence, as Clausewitz said, is attack, and it looks to me like Foster’s attack may have been partly to divert attention away from this latest scandal erupting in Israel.

The Aboriginal Writer on Release of Documents about America and Argentina’s ‘Dirty War’

Back in March, the Aboriginal Writer over at La Moderna Epoko put up a grim piece about the release of official papers, which may cast light on America’s role in the ‘Dirty War’ unleashed by the Argentinian junta against not just domestic guerrillas, but also dissidents and suspected Socialists. The article consists of several excerpted pieces from press articles. One of these, from the Nation, states that

A special declassification project of still-secret CIA, Defense Department, and FBI records not only would reveal concrete evidence regarding unresolved atrocities in Argentina, but also offer a long-overdue acknowledgment of US support for the ensuing repression in the months following the military takeover. “This anniversary and beyond,” Rice said, “we’re determined to do our part as Argentina continues to heal and move forward as one nation.”

It’s almost needless to say that this outbreak of right-wing state terror was supported by Hillary’s good friend, Henry Kissinger. The editorial board of the NY Times wrote:

A few months after a military junta overthrew President Isabel Perón of Argentina in 1976, the country’s new foreign minister, Adm. Cesar Guzzetti, told Henry Kissinger, America’s secretary of state, that the military was aggressively cracking down on “the terrorists.” Mr. Kissinger responded, “If there are things that have to be done, you should do them quickly,” an apparent warning that a new American Congress might cut off aid if it thought the Argentine government was engaging in systemic human rights abuses. The American ambassador in Buenos Aires soon reported to Washington that the Argentine government had interpreted Mr. Kissinger’s words as a “green light” to continue its brutal tactics against leftist guerrillas, political dissidents and suspected socialists.

Another excerpt quotes Kissinger as saying that Nixon’s administration was eager to show the Argentinians they supported them. And the piece also quotes the present Pope Francis, then head of the Jesuit order in Argentina, as stating that he has many regrets over his own response to the regime. Pope Francis has been criticised because when he was a priest in Argentina, he did little to criticise the regime’s attacks. That particularly snippet states that Francis, then simply Jorge Mario Bergoglio, was an opponent of Liberation Theology. This is a form of Christian theology, which is strongly influenced by Marxism to stress the Christian commitment to the poor. This suggests that at the time, Bergoglio shared the regime’s hostility towards Communism, even if he was not a supporter of the regime’s wider attacks on the Left and civil society.

Other snippets cover the continuing efforts of the mothers and grandmothers to reunite the Disappeared – children who were stolen from their biological parents and given up to be raised by Fascists – with their surviving relatives.

For more information, go to: https://aboriginalwriter.wordpress.com/2016/03/24/what-was-the-united-states-role-in-argentinas-dirty-war/

The other year, Britain declassified documents going back to the Mao-Mao rebellion in Kenya, revealing the atrocities the British committed in their attempts to suppress the rebellion. The release of the documents also allowed a group of Kenyans, who had been the victims of war crimes committed by the British, to win a lawsuit against the British government. There’s a book out about the atrocities, entitled Britain’s Secret Gulags. Lobster’s long-term contributor, John Newsinger, has also written a book about atrocities committed by the British Empire, The Blood Never Dried. The article states that the documents on America’s role in the Argentinian ‘Dirty War’ were released after legal decisions by judges and following FOIA requests. Over here, the Tories and their New Labour collaborators, like Jack Straw, have been trying to water down the British Freedom Of Information Act. This has now stopped, but they still have the view that you should only request government documents to understand how official decisions were made, not to challenge them. Apart from being a deliberate attempt to stop people like Mike and the other disability campaigners trying to use it to challenge the DWP’s appalling maltreatment of the disabled, it also makes you wonder what terrible atrocities our government is hiding from us.

Secular Talk on the Utter Barbarity of Henry Kissinger

Yesterday I put a piece from The Young Turks about the point in the PBS debate between Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton where the two argued about the Henry Kissinger. Clinton had been flattered by Kissinger complimenting her on how well she ran the state department. Sanders was justifiably affronted, reminded the audience of how Kissinger’s bombing of Cambodia had paved the way for the seizure of power by the Khmer Rouge and the massacres that followed. He stated very firmly that not only was Kissinger not his friend, he was proud Kissinger was not his friend.

From this Englishman, ‘Well said, Sir!’

The Turks’ video went on to describe some of the horrors for which Kissinger had been responsible. Not just in Laos, but mass death across continents, including the Fascist coup in Chile that brought General Pinochet to power. And what many people would find most chilling was Kissinger’s frank admission that he had no interest in stopping a holocaust of the Jews by the Soviets. It was not an American problem. Not even if they stuffed them into the gas chambers. ‘Perhaps a humanitarian [problem]’, he finally conceded. The West and its self-confidence has been profoundly shaken by the experience of the Holocaust, and the orchestrated massacre of the Jews, and other racial undesirables on an industrial scale with all the technical ingenuity of the Nazi military-industrial complex. Many Americans are deeply disgusted and scandalised by the fact that American industrialists continued to trade with and provide financial aid to Nazi Germany when they were implementing the ‘Final Solution’. Some of those industrialists were Jewish, and there have been several books by Jewish Americans exposing these industrialists, who chose profit over humanity and simple fellow feeling for the other members of their ethnicity and faith. I’ve got a feeling Kissinger’s Jewish. If so, he stands indicted by his own words of the same callous and monstrous attitude.

In the video below, Kyle Kulinski of Secular Talk shows a bit more of the exchange between Sanders and Hillary. Hillary defends herself, saying that she’s taken advice from several sources. Kissinger was important for opening up trade with China, a trade that has benefited the US, and so she feels it was justified to take his advice, even if it came from what many people would feel was an unpleasant source. Bernie’s response was to state that Kissinger’s rationale for all the bombing and atrocities he committed in Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia was on the ground that it was all a house of cards. If one fell, they would all fall to the great enemy, China. And then he opened trade with China, a trade that has seen American jobs outsourced there, and Americans unemployed.

Again, absolutely right.

Kulinski adds a few more details to some of the atrocities which Kissinger assisted, or at best did nothing to stop. Kulinski quotes a Vox article on Kissinger’s carpet bombing of Cambodia and Laos, a bombing that indiscriminately hit civilian centres. Kissinger claimed it was to destroy Vietcong bases in those countries. It wasn’t. It was to strengthen the American position preparatory to a negotiated withdrawal. American bombs in Cambodia killed between 150,000 and half a million people. This created the instability that led to the rise of Pol Pot. The Khmer Rouge were swept to power in 1975 on a wave of public outrage against the bombings. They then proceeded to kill and massacre hundreds of thousands of people, starving the rest until ultimately a million people, 1/7th of Cambodia’s population were killed.

Kulinski points out the obvious parallels with ISIS today in Syria, and the threat that similar bombing of the country will drive their people to support the terrorists, who will then repeat the murderous horrors of Cambodia.

Kulinski also describes how in 1971, the President of Pakistan, Aga Mohammed Yahya Khan, launched a bombing campaign against Bangladesh when that nation, then simply ‘East Pakistan’, wanted independence. Not only did Kissinger not stop him, he actually sent him weapons, a policy that was illegal under US law. And it’s actually illegal under international law. When questioned about his supplying arms to the Pakistanis, Kissinger said, ‘Well, they’re anti-Communist’. He recalled the American consul in Bangladesh, Archer Blood, because he had questioned the policy, and quelled attempts to stop the slaughter. In the end the bloodshed was stopped when India intervened. God bless India! The death toll from this conflict ranges from 300,000 to 3 million.

In 2014 declassified documents suggested that Kissinger had informed the Argentinian government that they would not intervene if they too cracked down on dissidents. This was the 1976 ‘dirty war’ in which 30,000 people were rounded up and killed. Kulinski states that part of the strategy of the war involved ‘rape rooms’. He then challenges Hillary to explain how she supports women’s rights, when her friend was responsible for atrocities like that.

Kulinski states many times that Kissinger is a war criminal, who should be behind bars. His bombing of Cambodia is not something that suits anybody who fancies herself as a progressive. Rather, it’s an atrocity like those advocated by Ted Cruz. He describes Kissinger as a ‘savage’, who is exactly like ISIS.

It’s the horrors perpetrated around the globe by monsters like Kissinger, and his successors in the Reagan administration, like Oliver North, that have led to so much hatred of America around the globe. It was outrage at these barbarities that fuelled so much of Harold Pinter’s protests and criticisms of American foreign policy. And there are scattered around the world people with first hand experience of the horrors committed by Kissinger and his allies.

One of the lecturers at my old college, where I got my first degree, was Bangladeshi. He was in Bangladeshi during the war of independence, and witnessed first hand the Pakistani bombing. I can remember speaking to some of the professors, his friends, who were shocked at the horrors he must have seen.

As for the use of rape by the South American Fascist dictatorships, if you want to see a good, fictional treatment of the psychological trauma of such treatment, try the film Death and the Maiden, based on the play by Ariel Dorfman, and starring Sigourney Weaver and Ben Kingsley. This is about a woman (Weaver), who was imprisoned and raped repeatedly by a Fascist officer, (Kingsley). The film’s title comes from the fact that the woman was always blindfolded, but she recognised her captor because he used to put on Schubert’s piece, Death and the Maiden. Released to live her life with her husband after the eventual fall of the dictatorship, the plot of the movie follows the events of one evening when a man, who may be the same thug, turns up unexpectedly at her house after his car breaks down. Dorfman is, I believe, one of the great radical voices in contemporary South American literature, and it’s a powerful, moving piece, clearly based very much on very recent Latin American history. Also, it shows how versatile these two thesps are. Weaver’s best known from her role as Ripley in the Alien films, and Kingsley will forever be connected with his starring role in Gandhi. It’s particularly strange seeing Kingsley as a Fascist thug, the complete opposite from Gandhi and his doctrine of ahimsa.

Sanders has said he wants to end the American Empire. He has attacked the various coups and military interventions America launched across the globe, naming each one individually. To my mind, he deserves to be the next president of the US, rather than Clinton, and certainly much more than the Republicans. Clinton represents establishment corporate interests. She’d be better than the Republicans, but it would still be a continuation of the same old attitudes and much the same policies. Sanders represents the opportunity for a new, better America.