Yesterday we had the unedifying spectacle of Labour leader Keir Starmer and MP David Lammy having to be protected by the rozzers, who bundled them hurriedly into their waiting cars. Stalin and Lammy were surrounded by a group of angry paranoiacs, who seemed to believe that the Labour leader was involved in some nasty conspiracies. Some shouted questions about Covid, suggesting they came from that part of the population that thinks that the lockdown is unnecessary, or, worse, that the pandemic is a ruse devised by the globalists to seize absolute totalitarian power through the imposition of the lockdown. I also heard someone shout at Starmer a question about him being a member of the New World Order. This is a conspiracy theory that’s been around for decades. It holds that there is some kind of Masonic/ Satanic plot to create a one-world totalitarian state. This has been going on for centuries and the American Revolution was one part of it. Washington DC is supposed to have been laid out in Masonic symbolism, and the occult, Masonic nature of the new American republic is shown in the design on the back of the dollar bill. This shows the eye in the pyramid as the slogan ‘Novo Ordo Saeculorum’ – ‘New World Order’. This theory became particularly widespread in the 1990s following George Bush senior’s comments during Gulf War I about creating a ‘new world order’. These were the same words Hitler used to describe the new international and political order he was going to build. And while some versions of the theory claim that the conspirators are just Freemasons and Satanists, I’ve got a feeling that others also blame the Jews, or at least the big Jewish banking families like the Rothschilds.
But the main accusation being thrown at Starmer was that he deliberately avoided prosecuting Jimmy Savile. But Starmer didn’t. He was unaware at the time that there were three witnesses willing to testify, and assumed there was only one. And I think she may have been unwilling to bring charges in the absence of other, supporting testimony. Hence he was advised that the prosecution would not succeed. It’s for that reason, I believe, that Starmer didn’t prosecute. And very definitely not because he had any ulterior motive or connection to Savile.
But that’s the allegation that’s been made by our utterly unprincipled liar of a Prime Minister. Members of his own party have condemned it, and cabinet officers have resigned. Yet Johnson refuses to retract or apologise.
Some particularly unscrupulous politicians have done this before. Lyndon Johnson, discussing what tactics they were going to use against a rival politician with his campaign team, is supposed to have said that they would accuse the man, a farmer, of f***ing his pigs. HIs team were shocked, and told LBJ that he couldn’t say that. To which Johnson is supposed to have replied ‘Let him prove it’.
But the tactic was used further back by another, totally malign politico and his supporters: Adolf Hitler. In addition to the usual lies and propaganda about Jews and the ‘November criminals’ who signed the Treaty of Versailles and formed the governing coalition of the doomed Weimar Republic, the Nazis also spread lies and vitriol about individual politicians and officials. This included declaring that one of the republic’s police chiefs was Jewish as part of his anti-Semitic smears, even though the man was a gentile. And the Nazis accompanied their lies and smears with grotesque violence, not just through coup attempts and the savagery of the ‘Night of the Long Knives’, but also in paramilitary street gangs attacking and fighting Jews and ‘Marxists’. One of them used to sing a repulsive little ditty about fighting ‘until the Jew lies bleeding at our feet’.
As far as I know, the paranoiacs who mobbed Starmer and Lammy aren’t members of the Tory party or any paramilitary organisation. Nor do I believe that they have any personal connection with Johnson. But they are clearly acting in his favour by believing his lies and seeking to intimidate Stalin and Lammy accordingly. It’s not quite the same as the Nazis’ tactics, but it’s not far off.
And it shows that Johnson is an active threat to this country’s democracy by following the Nazi tactic of lies and smears intended to provoke mob violence.
This kind of follows on from the post I put up on Thursday, criticising a piece in Private Eye by their correspondent ‘Ratbiter’ celebrating Stop Funding Fake News and its attempts to cut off funding from what it considers to be extremist websites. Stop Funding Fake News has been the subject of a series of posts by Zelo Street, which has shown how the organisation is itself deeply suspect. For all its avowed concern to stop fake news, SFFN itself is less than transparent. It won’t tell you who its members are for one thing. And while it has attacked right-wing sites, like Breitbart and Tommy Robinson’s wretched website, as described in Ratbiter’s article, it’s also gone after those on the Left, like the Canary. They’re also supposed to be extremists sites peddling fake news, but as I pointed out, the Canary’s politics are those of the old social democratic consensus. The consensus that Corbyn wishes to bring back, of a mixed economy, strong welfare state, proper, effective trade unions, a nationalised and properly funded NHS, and proper rights for working people. You know, proper, constructive policies that will save this country and its people from poverty, starvation and exploitation. But Thatcherites, whether in the Tory party, or the Lib Dems and Blairites in Labour, can’t stand any of this. They can’t bear the thought that Thatcher is a goddess who failed, and that neoliberalism has run its course and been found threadbare. So Corbyn and his supporters have been accused of being Trots, Commies, Stalinists and other epithets by the papers and right-wing Labour MPs like Jess Philips.
Israel Lobby Using Anti-Semitism Smears to Suppress Criticism
But these policies are actually popular with the British public, and so the Right has taken to trying to discredit Corbyn and his followers, and more broadly the Labour party, with accusations of anti-Semitism. As I’ve blogged about endlessly, the actual incidence of genuine anti-Semitism in the Labour party is low. Very low. What riles the witch hunters is that Corbyn and his supporters are critics of Israel’s policy of oppression, apartheid and the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians. The Israel lobby’s only defence against these entirely justifiable criticisms is to scream ‘anti-Semitism!’ and demand that their critics should be removed from office, silenced and even prosecuted for hate crimes. And ‘Ratbiter’ and Private Eye itself has been pushing this as strenuously as the rest of the media. In his article about Stop Funding Fake News, ‘Ratbiter’s’ praise for SFFN’s attack on the Canary claimed that not only was the Canary pushing fake news, but it was also anti-Semitic and pushing conspiracy theories about Jews. None of which is true. There is a concerted campaign by the Conservative Jewish establishment in this country to close down debate about Israel in line with the demands of the Israeli government. The Israeli state even as a special government office for promoting this hasbara. This is substantiated fact. But it’s suppressed by the British establishment and media, which wants you to believe that when the Board of Deputies of British Jews and the Jewish Leadership Council scream at Corbyn for supporting speeches by Holocaust survivors and anti-Nazi activists, like Hajo Meyer, attacking the maltreatment of the Palestinians, these right-wing organisations speak for all British Jews. They don’t, as is very clear by the number of Jews involved in the Palestinian rights movement, the BDS campaign and who support Corbyn in the Labour party. Still, why bother about awkward facts when you’re the media, eh?
Private Eye Part of Press Smears of Anti-Semitism
I’m particular dismayed and frustrated that Private Eye has joined in with this vilification and smearing. I’m not surprised by the right-wing press – the Fail, Scum, Depress, Times and Sunset Times, as they’ve always lied about and slandered the Labour party and left-wing activists. You only have to go back two years to when the Sunset Times smeared Mike as an anti-Semite and Holocaust denier. Or how it tried to tell the world that Michael Foot was a KGB agent, against all evidence. I’m disappointed that the Absurder, Groaniad and the Mirror have joined in with these accusation. But the Groan is in dire financial straits and has supported the Liberals in several elections. Kath Viner, the new editor, would like to make it a general political newspaper, not tied to the Left. And the Absurder and Mirror look like they’re run by Blairites.
Private Eye’s Liberal Stance and Challenge to Authority
But Private Eye’s support for the smears I find more puzzling and exasperating. OK, I realise that despite its attacks on NHS privatisation, Tory housing policy, the attacks on the disabled, the failings of the privatised water companies, probation service, and outsourcing companies like Capita and Serco, the magazine’s not actually left-wing. Its founders – Peter Cook, Richard Ingrams, Willie Rushton and Auberon Waugh were all thoroughly middle class public school boys. John Wells was the headmaster at Eton. But the magazine does have a proud tradition of standing up for those wrongly accused and questioning the actions of the security services. Paul Foot was a staunch advocate for people he believed were wrongly accused of murder. The magazine is still covering the Deepcut scandal, and what looks very much like an attempt to hide the evidence and protect the guilty by the army and the police. They’ve also covered deaths in police custody and other cases of official incompetence, corruption and wrongdoing. They even published several pieces and then a final report in the mid-90s questioning the official assertion that the Libyans were responsible for the Lockerbie bombing. They believed instead that Syria was responsible, and that blame was placed on the Libyans for political reasons: Major and George Bush senior needed Syria to join their coalition against Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait. It has also defended asylum seekers, both collectively and individually, from racist discrimination, incarceration, beatings and abuse, and the threat of deportation. It is because the magazine has this proud tradition of questioning authority that I find its current support for the anti-Semitism smears infuriating.
Private Eye also Repeating British Intelligence Propaganda?
I am also aware that, as well as probing some of the actions of the British intelligence agencies, like when they have leaned on journalists to reveal their sources, they’ve also acted to promote them. There is ample evidence that the Maidan Revolution in Ukraine in 2012, which overthrew the pro-Russian president, was anything but popular. It was instead a staged coup overseen by the US statement and the National Endowment for Democracy. But from reading the ‘Letter from…’ column in Private Eye dealing with events in that country, you are told that it is all the fault of the Russians and their supporters. It also appears that the magazine does, or at least, did, have connections to MI5. Auberon Waugh was related to one of its directors or senior officials, and Lobster a decade or so ago ran a piece, ‘5 at Eye’, speculating the magazine and particularly Waugh were responsible for running the smear stories about Harold Wilson being a KGB spy. I am also aware that as a magazine that is unaligned to any political party, and which criticises and satirises all of them, it’s going to attack Labour. Corbyn, as head of the party, is fair game. And those attacks are going to come from his opponents. Which include ‘Ratbiter’, real name Nick Cohen, and whichever Blairites used to run the ‘Focus on Fact’ cartoon attacking the Labour leader.
Private Eye Shares Journalists with Other Papers
But nevertheless, I am extremely annoyed at the way it has joined in with the smearing of decent, anti-racist, Jewish and gentile people as anti-Semites. Like the rest of the press and media, they largely haven’t contacted them for their opinion, or given them space to explain how they were smeared. When a letter has been published in Private Eye rebutting their claim that anti-Semitism is rife in Labour, they’ve replied by quoting Jon Lansman, the founder of Momentum, who believes it is. And who has been roundly criticised for this by Tony Greenstein. Part of this might just be standard press groupthink. Private Eye, for all its attacks on the press and media in its ‘Street of Shame’ and television columns, is part of it, and some of its anonymous correspondents are no doubt journalists working for other papers. Nick ‘Ratbiter’ Cohen is a hack for the Graon and Absurder, while one of the editors and probably a reviewer for their books page was Francis Wheen, another Guardian journo. The press seem to have decided en masse that Corbyn is an anti-Semite, and for all its professed independence and criticism of the fourth estate, the Eye really doesn’t seem to want to break ranks with them in that regard.
And I also suspect that they don’t want to counter that narrative for geopolitical reasons. Israel’s one of the pillars of our foreign policy in the Middle East, and although the paper has criticised it for its treatment of the Palestinians, its attack on Corbyn and his supporters as anti-Semites show that there are limits to how far the magazine will go in challenging foreign policy.
Private Eye also Afraid of Being Smeared as Anti-Semitic?
I also wonder if there are more selfish reasons. As Peter Oborne showed in his documentary on the Israel Lobby for Channel 4’s Despatches eleven years ago, the Conservative Jewish establishment and the Israel lobby will smear any and all newspapers and media organisations as anti-Semitic if they criticise Israel. Even, and perhaps especially, when that criticism is justified, as when the Guardian and BBC reported on the massacre of Palestinians in the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps in Lebanon by the Christian Phalange, who were allied to Israel. The Groan’s former editor, Alan Rusbridger, described how the president of the Board used to troop into his office, with his pet lawyer, demanding the withdrawal of articles critical of Israel on the grounds that they would incite the general public to hate Jews.
The Beeb’s respected Middle East correspondents Jeremy Bowen and Orla Guerin were also accused of anti-Semitism when they covered the above massacres. When senior Beeb officials like Sir David Attenborough defended them, they too were ridiculously accused. That should have destroyed the Board’s credibility. Instead it seems to have succeeded in emboldening the Israel lobby. Since then Israel has also denounced and lied about the Beeb’s coverage of the blockade of Gaza and the bombing campaign against Palestinians, claiming that journalists were anti-Semitic and expelling them. This does seem to have had a chilling effect at the Beeb. And not just at the Beeb – the Groan and the Absurder have also fallen in line. And I think Private Eye’s determined promotion of the anti-Semitism smears may also be part of this. They’re also, I suspect, afraid of the Board turning up in their offices to accuse them of anti-Semitism. Back in the ’60s and ’70s when the magazine appeared more louche and subversive than it is now, some newsagents refused to stock it. In the 1990s WH Smith withdrew one edition from its shelves because of a joke on the cover about the prurient public interest in the death of Princess Di. I think the magazine is still terrified of some kind of boycott by distributors, which may well be the result if the Board did decide to start accusations of anti-Semitism against them.
What Can Be Done?
So there are a variety of reasons why Private Eye is pushing the anti-Semitism smears. But speculating on their motives doesn’t make it any less infuriating that they’re doing it. I’ve thought in the past of writing letters of complaint to the Eye, explaining that the accused aren’t anti-Semites, and asking for an explanation. But what’s the point? The letter would either be ignored, or a short, edited version would appear in the magazine, which would allow them to reply quoting Lansman or someone else that anti-Semitism is rife, etc. And I might be unfair here to the magazine, but I don’t want to find myself smeared as an anti-Semite in turn and have my name or address passed onto the trolls that appear online to howl abuse at Mike, Jackie Walker and Tony Greenstein.
And so there doesn’t seem to be much hope of challenging the Eye in its pages. The only option left is to carry on critiquing its lies and those of the rest of the media in the hope that more and more people will realise that it and they are smearing decent people simply for political advantage and to keep a vicious, corrupt government installed.
One of the papers pushing the smear that Labour is infested with anti-Semites is the I. Their columnist, Simon Kelner, was accusing the Corbyn and the Labour party of being anti-Semitic way back last summer, because the party hadn’t adopted the I.H.R.C. definition of anti-Semitism. Or it had, but hadn’t adopted all the examples. There was a very good reason for that, which has not been repeated by the lying mainstream media: most of the examples are not about the real meaning of anti-Semitism, which is simply hatred of Jews simply as Jews, but attempts to define criticism of Israel, or at least some criticisms of Israel, as anti-Semitic. Kenneth Stern, a Zionist and one of the formulators of the definition, has spoken out against it in Congress for the way it is being used to prevent criticism of Israel.
In Friday’s issue, for 8th March 2019, the paper took the occasion of the EHRC’s statement that it might investigate Labour for anti-Semite to publish a piece by Richard Verber in its ‘My View’ column, entitled ‘How Anti-Semitism Poisons Labour’, subtitled ‘The party needs to tackle these conspiracy theories’. This claimed that ‘at the heart of the accusations against figures in the party are a series of conspiracy theories about Jews which are so ingrained that even good people (people who consider themselves to be anti-racism campaigners) can believe them.’ Verber goes on to say that in his article he explains the three most dominant.
Alarm bells about the bias and distortions in the article should go off with the statement at the end of the article that Verber was the communications director at the United Synagogue. As Israel-critical Jews have pointed out, this is the constituency of the Board of Deputies of British Jews, one of the organisations making the accusations of anti-Semitism against Corbyn and the Labour party. The Board explicitly defines itself as a Zionist organisation, which presumably reflects the bias of the United Synagogue. It does not represent Orthodox Jews, nor the third of the Jewish community that’s secular. And by definition, the Board doesn’t represent non- or anti-Zionist Jews. This is important, as several of the ‘examples’ of anti-Semitism Verber discusses are actually attempts to prohibit criticism of Israel, and discussion of possible Israeli interference in British politics as anti-Semitic.
Verber starts with the usual anti-Semitic conspiracy theory, which he defines as ‘there is a ‘new world order’, run by Jews, to control global finance and governments’. This conspiracy theory he traces from the publication of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. He stated that the ‘New World Order’ was originally a call for peace following the collapse of Communism. However, the conspiracy version was all about Jews infiltrating the American government from the late 1940s onwards. He states that at its heart was the belief that Jews and the Illuminati were plotting to have Communism take over the world. He then argues that this later morphed into the ‘globalists’ of modern far-right propaganda, international bankers is code for Jews, as is the name ‘Rothschilds’.
Now there is a considerable amount of truth in this article. The notion of a global Jewish conspiracy does indeed go all the way back to the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, and that Nazi and contemporary Fascist ideology does see the world as controlled by Jewish bankers. But it’s also a gross oversimplification. The Illuminati at the centre of modern conspiracy theories were a group of radical freethinkers, founded by Adam Weishaupt, who attempted to infiltrate the Freemasons in late 18th century Bavaria, resulting in their suppression by the Roman Catholic authorities. The Freemasons were subsequently blamed for the outbreak of the American and French Revolutions. The term ‘New World Order’ is taken from the motto of the American dollar bill, ‘Novo Ordo Secularum’, which also featured the Masonic symbol of the Eye in the Pyramid. It also gained notoriety in the 1990s after George Bush senior, the former head of the CIA, referred to a ‘new world order’ after the Collapse of Communism, at the same time as the first Gulf War. To many people, it seemed that there really was a secret conspiracy controlling the world. However some of those who believed this nonsense simply thought that the conspirators were the historical Illuminati, Freemasons and Satanists. They did not accuse the Jews. Of course the identification of the Illuminati with the Jews came shortly after the publication of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, and was introduced into British Fascism by either Nesta Webster or Rotha Orne Linton. One of these ladies was an alcoholic and a spiritualist, who had been told by the Duc D’Orleans, communicating from the Other Side, that the Illuminati had been responsible for the French Revolution and all the others since. Michael Pipes, a Conservative American political theorist, traces the evolution of the conspiracy theory that the world is being run by a secret cabal from fears about the Freemasons to the Jews in his 1990s book, Conspiracy Theories.
The historical dimension to the development of this conspiracy theory needs to be taken into account, as there may still be versions that place the blame solely on Freemasons, the historical Illuminati and Satanists, rather than the Jews. And while Bush’s use of the term ‘New World Order’ might have been peaceful in intent, it came at a time when many people were rightly fearful of the massive growth of American power and the first war with Iraq. This was supposed to be about the liberation of Kuwait after its annexation by its northern neighbour. However, by its critics at the time it was seen as a ‘resource war’. Greg Palast discusses the invasion in his book, Armed Madhouse, and concludes that the war was fought for geopolitical reasons in which oil was a main factor. Another factor why the phrase ‘New World Order’ is also notorious is that it’s similar to Hitler’s pronouncement about the Nazis creating a New Order. One of the banned Nazi organisations in post-War Italy was L’Ordine Nuovo. Which means, well, guess what?
Verber gives as an example of this conspiracy theory in the Labour party Corbyn objecting to the removal of the mural by Mear One in 2012, This showed, according to Verber, ‘hooked-nosed Jewish bankers playing a board game on the backs of poor people. notes that Corbyn’s objection to the mural’s removal was revealed in 2018 by Luciana Berger, and quotes a spokesman for the Labour leader stating that he was simply responding to a freedom of speech issue, but that the mural was offensive, did include anti-Semitic imagery and should be removed’. And to prove it was anti-Semitic, Verber states that the artist admitted some of the figures were Jewish.
Some. The operative word here is ‘some’. In fact the mural depicts five bankers, three of whom are gentiles. While they look like anti-Semitic caricatures, they are portraits of real people. And if the mural was anti-Semitic, why did it take Berger till last year to accuse Corbyn of anti-Semitism for objecting to its removal? The mural does depict the bonkers conspiracy theory about bankers, but there is little overt in it which specifically targets the Jews as the main conspirators. The whole incident was another manufactured smear against Corbyn.
The Friday before last, former president George H.W. Bush, the father of former president George ‘Dubya’ Bush, finally fell off his perch at the age of 94. Like Monty Python’s parrot, he had shuffled off this mortal coil and joined the choir invisible. He was an ex-president, and well and truly. He was buried with due state honours last Wednesday.
And the press and media fell over themselves to praise him to the rafters. If you believed them, you would have thought that America had lost a statesman of the stature of the ancient Athenian politico, Pericles. Or that he combined in himself the wisdom of Thomas Jefferson, Maddison and the rest of the Founding Fathers.
He wasn’t. He was the successor to Ronald Reagan and a former head of the CIA, and had been involved with shady dealings, dirty, proxy wars and invasions in Latin America and Iraq, that had cost thousands their lives, while thousands others were tortured by the dictators he supported. And domestically he was responsible for racist electioneering and a highly discriminatory drugs policy that has resulted in the massive disproportionate incarceration of Black American men.
Mehdi Hasan on George Bush Senior
He was a disgusting creature, and Mehdi Hasan wrote a piece in the Intercept describing just how disgusting and reprehensible he was. In the piece below, he also appeared on Democracy Now! to talk to host Amy Goodman about Bush senior and his legacy of corruption, murder and terror.
Bush was elected president in 1990. He was a former director of the CIA, and served from 1981-89 as Reagan’s vice-president. Despite calling for a kinder, gentler politics when he was vice-president, Bush refused to tackle climate change, saying that the American way of life was not up for negotiation, defended future supreme court justice Clarence Thomas even after he was accused of sexual harassment. He was responsible for launching the first Gulf War in Iraq in 1991. During the War, the US air force deliberately bombed an air raid shelter in Baghdad killing 408 civilians. The relatives of some of those killed tried to sue Bush and his deputy, Dick Cheney, for war crimes. The attack on Iraq continued after the end of the war with a devastating sanctions regime imposed by Bush, and then his son’s invasion in 2003.
The Invasion of Panama
In 1990 Bush sent troops into Panama to arrest the country’s dictator, General Manuel Noriega on charges of drug trafficking. Noriega had previously been a close ally, and had been on the CIA’s payroll. 24,000 troops were sent into the country to topple Noriega against Panama’s own military, which was smaller than the New York police department. 3,000 Panamanians died in the attack. In November 2018, the inter-American Commission on Human Rights called on Washington to pay reparations for what they considered to be an illegal invasion.
Pardoning the Iran-Contra Conspirators
As one of his last acts in office, Bush also gave pardons to six officials involved in the Iran-Contra scandal. This was a secret operation in which Reagan sold arms to Iran in order to fund the Contras in Nicaragua, despite Congress banning the administration from funding them. Bush was never called to account for his part in it, claiming he was ‘out of the loop’, despite the testimony of others and a mass of documents suggesting otherwise.
The Collapse of Communism and Neoliberalism
Bush’s period in office coincided with the collapse of Communism. In the period afterwards, which Bush termed the New World Order, he was instrumental in spreading neoliberalism and the establishment of the NAFTO WTO treaties for international trade.
Hasan not only wrote for the Intercept, he also hosted their Deconstructed podcast, as well as a show, Up Front, on Al-Jazeera English.
The Media’s Praise of Bush
Goodman and Hasan state that there is a natural reluctance against speaking ill of the dead. But they aren’t going to speak ill of Bush, just critically examine his career and legacy. Hasan states that as a Brit living in Washington he’s amazed at the media hagiography of Bush. He recognizes that Bush had many creditable achievements, like standing up to the NRA and AIPAC, but condemns the way the media ignored the rest of Bush’s legacy, especially when it involves the deaths of thousands of people as absurd, a dereliction of duty. He states that Bush is being described as the ‘anti-Trump’, but he did many things that were similar to the Orange Buffoon. Such as the pardoning of Caspar Weinberger on the eve of his trial, which the independent special counsel at the time said was misconduct and that it covered up the crime. And everyone’s upset when Trump says he might pardon Paul Manafort. Bush should be held to the same account. It doesn’t matter that he was nicer than Trump, and less aggressive than his son, he still has a lot to answer for.
The Iran-Contra Scandal
Goodman gets Hasan to explain about the Iran-Contra scandal, in which Reagan sold arms to Iran, then an enemy state, to fund a proxy war against a ‘Communist’ state in South America despite a congressional ban. He states that it was a huge scandal. Reagan left office without being punished for it, there was a Special Council charged with looking into it, led by Lawrence Walsh, a deputy attorney general under Eisenhower. When he looked into it, he was met with resistance by Reagan’s successor, Bush. And now we’re being told how honest he was. But at the time Bush refused to hand over his diary, cooperate with the Special Counsel, give interviews, and pardoned the six top neocons responsible. The Special Counsel’s report is online, it can be read, and it says that Bush did not cooperate, and that this was the first time the president pardoned someone in a trial in which he himself would have to testify. He states that Bush and Trump were more similar in their obstruction of justice than some of the media would have us believe.
Iraq Invasion
They then move on to the Iraq invasion, and play the speech in which Bush states that he has begun bombing to remove Saddam Hussein’s nuclear bomb potential. It was done now, because ‘the world could wait no longer’. Because of Bush’s attack on Iraq, his death was marked by flags at half-mast in Kuwait as well as Washington. Hasan states that Hussein invaded Kuwait illegally, and it was a brutal occupation. But Hasan also says that Bush told the country that it came without any warning or provocation. But this came after the American ambassador to Iraq, April Glaspie, told Hussein that American had no opinion on any border dispute with Kuwait. This was interpreted, and many historians believe, that this was a green light to Hussein to invade.
Bush also told the world that America needed to go into Iraq to protect Saudi Arabia, as there were Iraqi troops massing on the border of that nation. This was another lie. One reporter bought satellite photographs of the border and found there were no troops there. It was lie, just as his son lied when he invaded twelve years later. As for the bombing of the Amariyya air raid shelter, which was condemned by Human Rights Watch, this was a crime because the Americans had been told it contained civilians. Bush also bombed the civilian infrastructure, like power stations, food processing plants, flour mills. This was done deliberately. Bush’s administration told the Washington Post that it was done so that after the war they would have leverage over the Iraqi government, which would have to go begging for international assistance. And this was succeeded by punitive sanctions that killed hundreds of thousands of Iraqi children. It all began on Bush’s watch.
Racism, Willie Horton and Bush’s Election Campaign
They then discuss his 1988 election campaign, and his advert attacking his opponent, Michael Dukakis. Dukakis was attacked for having given a weekend pass from prison to Willie Horton, a Black con serving time for murder, who then went and kidnapped a young couple, stabbing the man and repeatedly raping the woman. This was contrasted with Bush, who wanted the death penalty for first degree murder. The advert was created by Lee Atwater and Roger Ailes, who later apologized for it on his deathbed. This advert is still studied in journalism classes, and until Trump’s ad featuring the migrant caravan appeared it was considered the most racist advert in modern American political history. Atwater said that they were going to talk about Horton so much, people would think he was Dukakis’ running mate. Bush approved of this, and talked about Horton at press conferences. And unlike Atwater, he never apologized. Roger Stone, whom Hasan describes as one of the most vile political operatives of our time, an advisor to Donald Trump and Nixon, actually walked up to Atwater and told him he would regret it, as it was clearly a racist ad. When even Roger Stone says that it’s a bad idea, you know you’ve gone too far. But the press has been saying how decent Bush was. Hasan states he has only two words for that: Willie Horton.
In fact, weekend passes for prison inmates was a policy in many states, including California, where Ronald Reagan had signed one. Hasan calls the policy what it was: an attempt to stoke up racial fears and division by telling the public that Dukakis was about to unleash a horde of Black murderers, who would kill and rape them. And ironically the people who were praising Bush after his death were the same people attacking Trump a week earlier for the migrant caravan fearmongering. It reminded everyone of the Willie Horton campaign, but for some reason people didn’t make the connection between the two.
Racism and the War on Drugs
Hasan also makes the point that just as Bush senior had no problem creating a racist advert so he had no problem creating a racist drug war. They then move on to discussing Bush’s election advert, in which he waved a bag of crack cocaine he claimed had been bought in a park just a few metres from the White House. But the Washington Post later found out that it had all been staged. A drug dealer had been caught selling crack in Lafayette Square, but he had been lured there by undercover Federal agents, who told him to sell it there. The drug dealer even had to be told the address of the White House, so he could find it. It was a nasty, cynical stunt, which let to an increase in spending of $1 1/2 billion on more jails, and prosecutors to combat the drugs problem. And this led to the mass incarceration of young Black men, and thousands of innocent lives lost at home and abroad in the drug wars. And today Republican senators like Chris Christie will state that this is a failed and racist drug war.
This was the first in a series of programmes honouring the dead – which meant those killed by Bush, not Bush himself. The next programme in the series was on what Bush did in Panama.
Dark Rock and Bush: The Sisters of Mercy’s ‘Vision Thing’
I’ve a suspicion that the track ‘Vision Thing’ by the Sisters of Mercy is at least partly about George Bush senior. The Sisters are a dark rock band. Many of front man Andrew Eldritch’s lyrics are highly political, bitterly attacking American imperialism. Dominion/Mother Russia was about acid rain, the fall of Communism, and American imperialism and its idiocy. Eldritch also wanted one of their pop videos to feature two American servicemen in a cage being taunted by Arabs, but this was naturally rejected about the bombing of American servicemen in Lebanon. Another song in the same album, ‘Dr Jeep’, is about the Vietnam War.
‘Vision Thing’ seems to take its title from one of Bush’s lines, where he said, if I remember correctly, ‘I don’t have the vision thing.’ The song talks about ‘another black hole in the killing zone’, and ‘one million points of light’. It also has lines about ‘the prettiest s**t in Panama’ and ‘Take back what I paid/ to another M*****f****r in a motorcade’. These are vicious, bitter, angry lyrics. And if they are about Bush senior, then it’s no wonder.
Last year I started work on a book about current western imperialism. How the US has interfered across the world to bring down democratically elected left-wing governments when they threatened American corporate power and put in place vicious, murderous right-wing dictatorships. All done in the name of protecting the world from the Communist threat, of course. The latest phase of this imperialism is George W. Bush’s and Tony Blair’s ‘War on Terror’, under which they invaded a country that was absolutely no threat to us – Iraq – just to loot its oilfields and state industries, all for the benefit of American multinationals, western big business and the Saudi oil industry. And the list goes on, through the continued occupation of Afghanistan, the funding of Islamist forces against Assad in Syria, and Obama’s and Killary’s staged, fake democratic revolution in Ukraine, which launched a government with real Nazis goose-stepping through the streets of Kiev, killing real leftists and chanting their very real hatred of Jews.
The book was suggested by ‘Florence’, one of the many great commenters on this blog, who was afraid of the lack of the understanding of the anti-imperial dimension to Socialist/ Labour party activism. She remembered the 1970s when many people became active in left-wing politics through campaigns against General Pinochet in Chile, for example. He was another real Fascist thug, who seized power in a CIA sponsored coup that overthrew the democratically elected Marxist president, Salvador Allende. The result was decades of Fascist terror, including horrific torture and rape, the internment and murder of radicals, and mass executions. Oh yes, and they stole left-wing activists’ children, to be brought up instead by good Fascist families. Pinochet was strongly influenced by the Chicago school of Milton Friedman and von Miles. The latter had explicitly turned away from democracy, because the masses would never accept his destruction of the welfare state, and state schooling, healthcare et. Pinochet was in power until the late 80s. And he ended up fleeing from justice to Britain, where he had a good friend in Maggie Thatcher. Pinochet is exactly the type of monster left-wingers in the ’70s and ’80s fought very had against, the memory of which might be lost unless more is done to show that monsters like Pinochet are still being installed and supported.
I’ve a few more things to do on the book before I send it off to Lulu. But I’ve worked out the chapters and their contents. Here’s the list:
Introduction and Florence’s request
General US/Western Interference
Abby Martin on the Jimmy Dore Show Talks about US Crimes of Empire: Part 1:
Abby Martin on the Jimmy Dore Show Talks about US Crimes of Empire: Part 2
Abby Martin on the Jimmy Dore Show Talks about the US Crimes of Empire: Part 3
Secular Talk on Seven Fascist Regimes supported by America
The Young Turks: CIA Overthrows Democracies, But Can’t Get Rid of Dictators
William Blum’s List of American Foreign Interventions: Part 1
William Blum’s List of American Foreign Inrterventions: Part 2
Blum’s List of Countries In which US Has Interfered with their Elections
Lee Camp: New Docs Show America Knew about Indonesia Genocide
American State Censored TV Programme on American Nerve Gas Atrocity in Laos.
William Blum on the naïve Trust of Countries invaded by US
William Blum on Right-Wing Coups in Greece
Democracy Now on Hillary Clinton and the Right-Wing Coup in Honduras
Bernie Sanders, Hillary Clinton and Henry Kissinger
Democratic Socialist on the Von Mises’ Institutes Lies About the Pinochet Coup
RT’s Lee Camp on What the US Military Is Doing in Niger
TeleSur English: CIA Planned False Flag Attacks in Miami
Telsur English: US Planned to Use Biological Warfare Against Cuba
Telesur English: Venezuela Drops Petrodollars, Threatens US Global Power
Jimmy Dore: Taliban Have Surrendered Several Times, Each Time Refused by America
Jimmy Dore Show: Obama Rejected North Korea Nuclear Peace Deal in 2015
Jimmy Dore Show: US Begins Bombing in Somalia Again, Because Oil Found
William Blum on the Abortive Prosecution of NATO Leaders for War Crimes in Yugoslavia
Jimmy Dore on the Church Committee Hearings of 1975 into CIA Corruption
Jimmy Dore: Hillary Wanted to Rig Palestinian Elections
Alan Moore on CIA Atrocities in Central America: Brought to Light Financial Times Review of Book on Origins of American Financial Imperialism
Michael Moore’s New Film against US Miltitarism and Imperialism
Bernie Sanders’ Speech Attacking US Coups of Foreign Governments
Iran
The Pro-Israel Billionaires Pushing Trump towards Confrontation with Iran
Telesur English on the Similarities between Trump’s Action on Venezuela and the 1953 Coup in Iran
Redacted Tonight on How Trump Is Lying to Us About Iran and North Korea
American Comedian Lee Camp on the Real Reason Iran’s Been Put ‘On Notice’
William Blum on the Demonisation of Iran,
The Israel Lobby, Liam Fox and the Planned Bombing of Iran
Jimmy Dore: NBC Attacks Obama, Clinton, Silent about Reagan’s Treachery with Iran
Secular Talk: Candidate for Trump’s Secretary of State Wants War with Iran
Real Reasons for Iraq War
Comedian Bill Hicks on Gulf War I and George Bush Senior
The Case for Prosecuting Blair as War Criminal for Iraq Invasion
Spokesman Pamphlets on Blair, the ‘Dodgy Dossier’ and the Iraq Invasion
George Galloway and Peter Hitchens on Blair and the Iraq War
Vox Political: Youssef El-Gingihy on Western Imperialism in Iraq
An Iraqi Woman Describes the State of her Country before Bush and Blair’s Invasion
Counterpunch Article on the History of British Imperial Domination in Iraq.
Owen Jones on the Chilcot Report, the Iraq War and Tony Blair
Vox Political on Those, Who Believed Blair’s Lies about Iraq
1920s Iraqi Poem on the New Constitution and Order Imposed by and for Britain, Not Iraqis Private Eye on the Western Firms Seeking to Grasp the Iraqi Oil Fields
The Young Turks on Report Showing Iraq Invasion Based on Lies
Brainwash Update on Lawlessness, Murder and Assassination by American Mercenaries Blackwater in Iraq
Young Turks’ Item on Pentagon Censoring Internal Reports Showing War Not Working in Iraq and Syria
Gaddafi and Libya
Telesur English on the Chaos Caused by the Death of Gaddafy
Colonel Gaddafy Predicted He Would Be Killed for his Opposition to Capitalism
The Death Toll from Italian Colonialism: Why Johnson’s Comments about Libyan Corpses Is Not Funny
Russia and Ukraine
HIGNFY Spreads More Lies about Russian Interference in American Election
BBC 2 Programme Next Week on British Forces in Ukraine and Estonia
Despite the Jokes, HIGNFY Is Fake News
Putin and Trump, and Bill Clinton’s Interference in Russian Elections for Yeltsin
Counterpunch Article Claiming US Spy Agencies Trying to Engineer War with Russia
Have I Got News For You and the Bias in BBC News Satire
William Blum on American Preparations for Nuclear War with Russia
More Military Tension between NATO and Russia; Pat Mills Right in ABC Warriors
Seamas Milne on the Dangers of Conservative Propaganda in the History of Communism
Counterpunch on Putin’s Non-Existent Threat to the Baltic States
Counterpunch on NATO’s Preparations for War with Russia
Syria
Syrian Uprising Directed by Saudi Prince and Other Foreign Governments
RT on House of Lord’s Opposition to £200 million Going to Syrian Opposition
Counterpunch on Saudi Arabia’s Influence on British Foreign Affairs
Jimmy Dore: Pentagon-Backed Rebels Fight CIA-Backed Rebels in Syria
Jimmy Dore Show: Putin Refutes Western Media Lies about Syrian Gas Attack
Secular Talk on Lack of Media Outrage for Syrian Rebels Massacring 126 Civilians
Jimmy Dore on Media Censorship of the War in Syria
Canadian Journalist Exposes BBC Lies over Syria
Boris Johnson Slapped Down By May for Telling Truth about Saudi Militarism
Deep State Lies about Terrorist Threat Produced Syria and Russia
Why Are the Tories Demanding Assad’s Overthrow?
More on the Real Reason behind Western Intervention in Syria
Jimmy Dore on the Real Reason for the Civil War and Western Military Attacks on Syria
Counterpunch on American Foreign Policy and Regime Change in Syria
More on US Military Funding of al-Qaeda and Islamist Militants
Syria Chemical Weapons Attacks Were ‘False Flag’ Operations Intended to Draw America into Civil War
Counterpunch on British Spies’ Recruitment of Islamist Fighters against Syria
What’s the Real Reason We’re Bombing Syria?
ISIS Is the Saudis’ Private Army for Control of the Oil Fields
Peter Hitchens Spearing BBC Anti-Russian Propaganda over Syria
Redacted Tonight: Mainstream Media Pushing War in Syria Hiding Connections to Arms Companies
Ukraine
BBC 2 Programme Next Week on British Forces in Ukraine and Estonia
America and the Manufactured Revolution in Ukraine
Global Research on US and EU Sponsored Fascist Regime in Ukraine
Counterpunch on the Washington Post’s Journalist Blacklist and the CIA, Eugenicist Nazis and Ukrainian Fascists
US State Department Supporting Fascism and Puppet Government in Ukraine Private Eye on Britain’s Arms Sales to both Russia and Ukraine Lobster on the Ukraine as Monsanto Trojan Horse
NATO and the Economic Exploitation of Eastern Europe
As you can see, it’s really a collection of articles from this blog, but I hope it will give people an idea of what’s really going on in the world in the name of democracy and freedom, and help get a few more people on to the streets, writing to their MPs or otherwise involved in combatting western corporate militarism and imperialism.
Jeremy Corbyn was one of the guests at the Glastonbury Festival last week, introduced on stage by no less a man than Michael Eavis himself. Corbyn gave a roaring, impassioned speech, inveighing against the Tories’ attack on the welfare state, their privatisation of the NHS, and their forcing of millions into poverty. If I recall correctly, he also mentioned how the Grenfell Tower fire was a direct result of decades of Tory policies dismantling health and safety legislation for the benefit of private landlords. He ended with a rousing passage from Shelley’s The Mask of Anarchy, urging the British people to rise up ‘like lions’ ‘for ye are many, they are few.’
And the crowd loved it. They cheered, and there were spontaneous chants of ‘Oh, Jeremy Corbyn!’ This graphically showed the popularity of the Labour leader, at least with a section of the young and not-so young people, who can afford to go to Glastonbury.
Needless to say, the Tory press hated it. The I newspaper yesterday carried a quote from the Telegraph, in which they moaned that it was ‘the day that Glastonbury died’, Eavis was going to lose tens of thousands of visitors and supporters of his festival by inviting Jeremy Corbyn on, and what did it say about the Labour party anyway, when it’s leader was cheered by metropolitan liberals able to afford the exorbitant entrance and camping fees.
Actually, it says that the countercultural spirit of Glastonbury is alive and well, that Eavis has always been against at least some of the policies the Tories espouse, and that the Tories contemplating the spectacle of the young and hip supporting Labour are nervous about their own future.
Michael Eavis was awarded an honorary doctorate or degree by Bristol university at their graduation ceremony a few years ago. Bristol uni is rather peculiar in the conduct of these ceremonies. While other universities and colleges allow the person awarded the degree to make a speech themselves, at Bristol it’s done a special orator. The orator describes their life and career, while the person being so honoured stands by, smilingly politely, until they are finally given the scroll, when they say ‘thank you’. The orator in his speech for Eavis said that he was basically conservative, who shared the work ethic.
Well, perhaps, but I can remember the 80s, when the local Tories down in Glastonbury hated him, the hippies and the other denizens of Britain’s counter and alternative cultures, who turned up to the pop festival with a passion. They were trying to get the festival banned at one point, citing the nuisance and frequent drugs violations.
As for Eavis himself, I can remember him appearing in an edition of the Bristol Evening Post, in which he made it very clear what he thought about Reagan and Thatcher’s new cold war, and the horrors committed in Nicaragua by Fascist death squads trained, equipped and backed by Reagan’s administration. Accompanying the article was a picture of him wearing a T-shirt with the slogan ‘How Can I Relax with Ray-Gun on the Button?’, which mixed a reference to Frankie Goes to Hollywood’s notorious disc, which had been banned by the Beeb, with the American president’s ‘Star Wars’ programme for a space-based anti-missile system.
As for the hip young dudes cheering Corbyn on, whom the Torygraph sneered at as ‘metropolitan liberals’, this is the crowd the Tories, and Tory organs like the Telegraph, would desperately like to appeal to. These are wealthy people with the kind of disposable incomes newspaper advertisers salivate over. These people also tend to be tech-savvy, which is why the Torygraph imported an American technology guru a few years ago to try and make the rag appeal more to a generation increasingly turning to the Internet for their news and views.
It didn’t work. Sales continued to decline, along with the quality of the newspaper as a whole as cuts were made to provide the savings needed to fund the guru’s wild and fanciful ideas. The young and the hip are out there, but they ain’t reading the Torygraph.
And their also increasingly not joining or supporting the Tory party. Recent polls have shown that the majority of young people favour Labour, while the Tories are strongest amongst the over fifties. For any party or other social group to survive, it has to appeal to young people as well as those of more mature years. And the Tories aren’t.
Lobster a little while ago carried a piece on the current state of the Tory party, which reported that a very large number of local constituency parties really exist in name only or have very, very few members. The membership is increasingly elderly, and several local parties responded to inquiries by saying that they were closed to new members. In short, the Tory party, which was at one time easily Britain’s largest party with a membership of 2 1/2 million, is dying as a mass party. Lobster concluded that it was being kept alive, and given millions in funding, mainly by American hedge fund managers in London. It should be said here that the party is also benefiting from extremely wealthy donors elsewhere in industry, and the very vocal support of press barons like Murdoch, Rothermere, and the weirdo Barclay Twins.
The Telegraph’s attitude also seems somewhat hypocritical considering the attitude of the press to the appointment of a Conservative editor of Rolling Stone magazine way back in the 1990s. This young woman praised George Bush senior, stating that he ‘really rocks’. This caused a murmur of astonishment amongst the media, amazed at how a countercultural pop icon could embrace one of the very people the founders of the magazine would have been marching against back in the ’60s and ’70s. The magazine was accused of selling out. It responded by replying that it hadn’t, it had ‘merely won the revolution’.
Nah. It had sold out. As one of the French philosophers – Guy Debord? – wrote in The Society of the Spectacle, capitalism survives by taking over radical protest movements, and cutting out any genuinely radical content or meaning they had, and then turning them into mere spectacles. This is what had happened to Rolling Stone. And as Glastonbury became increasingly respectable and expensive in the 1990s, there were fears that it was going to go the same way too, at least amongst some of the people writing in the small press culture that thrived before the advent of the internet.
I don’t remember the Torygraph saying that Rolling Stone had ‘died’ by appointing a deep-dyed Republican as its editor. And I imagine that it would have been highly excited if Eavis had called on Theresa May to appear on stage. Now that would have killed Glastonbury. But the appearance of Corbyn on stage shows that Glastonbury hasn’t yet become a cosy item of bourgeois entertainment.
Corbyn is one of the most genuinely countercultural politicians in decades. He stands for policies which the political establishment, including the Blairites in the Labour party itself, loathe and despise. Until a few weeks before the election, all the papers were running very negative stories about him, as well as much of the TV news, including the Beeb. Corbyn is a threat to the free trade policies that the Thatcherite political establishment and media heartily support, and so they attack him every way they can.
But as the mainstream media attacks him, ordinary people support him. Much of the support for Jeremy Corbyn came from ordinary people on blogs and vlogs outside corporate control. Counterpunch a week or so ago carried an interview with one of the ladies behind Corbyn’s campaign in London. She described how they set up apps for mobile phones, to show volunteers for his election campaign which wards were marginal so they could canvas for him in those vital areas. She said that they had so many people volunteering that they had to turn some away.
And youth culture was part of this mass movement. Kids were mixing his speeches in with the music they listened to on their ipods, so that there were movements like ‘Grime4Corbyn’. Again, this was being done spontaneously, outside party and corporate control, by ordinary kids responding to his inspiring message.
Glastonbury is now very expensive, and unaffordable to very many of the people that Corbyn represents. But this does not mean that it is only wealthy metropolitan liberals who support him, or that the well-heeled souls, who sang his praises at Glastonbury at the weekend were somehow fake for doing so ‘champagne socialists’, in Thatcher’s hackneyed phrase. Corbyn also has solid working class backing and the support of the young. He is genuinely countercultural, and so had every right to stand on stage.
And he certainly does share some of the ideals of Michael Eavis himself, at least in the ’80s. As I said, Eavis made his opposition to American imperialism and war-mongering very plain. Corbyn has said that he intends to keep Trident, but in other respects he is a profound voice for peace. There is a minister for peace and disarmament in his shadow cabinet, and he has said that he intends to make this a proper ministerial position.
And so Corbyn stood in Glastonbury, with the support of the crowd. A crowd which the Tory party hoped would support them. They didn’t, and it’s frightened them. So all they can do now is moan and sneer.
A few days ago I posted up a list of the nations in William Blum’s Rogue State: A Guide to the World’s Only Superpower where the US had interfered in its politics to block the election of a left-wing or liberal candidate, have them overthrown, or colluding and gave material assistance to a Fascist dictator and their death squads. As well as outright invasions, such as that of Grenada and Panama under Reagan and Bush in the 1980s, and the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq under George Dubya.
Blum also has a list of countries, where the US has interfered with their domestic politics to pervert their elections. These include
The Philippines 1950s
Setting up by the CIA of a front organisation, the National Movement for Free Elections to promote its favoured politicians and policies, giving finance and other assistance to those candidates, disinformation, and drugging and plotting to assassinate their opponents.
Italy 1948-1970s
Long-running campaigns against the Communist party and to assist the conservative Christian Democrats.
Lebanon 1950s
CIA funding of President Camille Chamoun and other pro-American politicians; sabotaging of campaigns of politicos sceptical of American interference in their country.
Indonesia 1955
CIA donated a million dollars to Centrist Coalition to attack the electoral chances of President Sukarno and the Communist party.
British Guiana/Guyana 1953-64
Campaign to oust prime minister Cheddi Jagan, using general strikes, terrorism, disinformation and legal challenges by Britain.
Japan 1958-1970s
CIA funding of conservative Liberal Democratic Party against the Japanese Socialist Party, allowing the Liberal Democrats to stay in power continuously for 38 years.
Nepal 1959
CIA operation to help B.P. Koirala’s Nepali Congress Party to win the country’s first ever election.
Laos 1960
CIA arranged for massive fraudulent voting to ensure electoral victor of local dictator Phoumi Nosavan.
Brazil 1962
CIA and Agency for International Development funded politicos opposed to President Joao Goulart, as well as other dirty tricks against various other candidates.
Dominican Republic 1962
US ambassador John Bartlow Martin instructs the heads of the two major parties before general election that the loser would call on his supporters to support the winner, and that the winner would offer seats to the loser’s party. Also worked with the government to deport 125 people, including supporters of previous dictator Trujillo and Cuba.
Guatemala 1963
Overthrow of General Miguel Ydigoras, as they feared he was about to step down and call a general election, which would be won by previous reforming president and opponent of American foreign policy, Juan Jose Arevalo.
Bolivia 1966
Funding by CIA and Gulf Oil of campaign of president Rene Barrientos. The CIA also funded other rightwing parties.
Chile 1964-70
Interference in the 1964 and 1970s elections to prevent the election of Salvador Allende, democratic Marxist, to the presidency.
Portugal 1974-5
CIA funded moderates, including Mario Soares and the Socialist Party, and persuaded the other democratic socialist parties of Europe to fund them in order to block radical programme of generals, who had overthrown Fascist dictator Salazar.
Australia 1974-5
CIA funding of opposition parties and use of legal methods to arrange overthrow of prime minister Gough Whitlam because he opposed Vietnam War.
Jamaica 1976
Long CIA campaign, including economic destabilisation, industrial unrest, supplying armaments to his opponent and attempted assassination to prevent re-election of Prime Minister Michael Manley.
Panama 1984, 1989
CIA-funded campaigns first of all to support Noriega, and then against him in 1989, when the CIA also used secret radio and TV broadcasts.
Nicaragua 1984, 1990
1984: Attempt to discredit the Sandinista government by CIA. The opposition coalition was persuaded not to take part in the elections. Other opposition parties also encouraged to drop out; attempts to split Sandinistas once in power.
1990: Funding and partial organisation of opposition coalition, UNO, and its constituent groups by National Endowment for Democracy to prevent election of Sandinistas under Daniel Ortega; Nicaraguans also made aware that US intended to continue proxy war waged by Contras if they elected him.
Haiti 1987-88
CIA supported for selected candidates after end of Duvalier dictatorship. Country’s main trade union leader claimed US aid organisations were smearing left-wing candidates as Communists and trying to persuade rural people not to vote for them.
Bulgaria 1990-1, Albania 1991-2
Interference in both countries election to prevent re-election of Communists.
Russia 1996
Extensive backing and support to Yeltsin to defeat Communists.
Mongolia 1996
National Endowment for Democracy funded and helped form the opposition National Democratic Union, and drafted its platform, a Contract with the Mongolian Voter, based Newt Gingrich’s Contract with America. The goal here was to accelerate the regime’s privatisation programme and create government favourable to the establishment of American corporations and intelligence agencies in the country.
Bosnia 1998
US turns country into ‘American protectorate’ by appointing Carlos Westendorp as high representative in 1995 Dayton Peace Accords. Before 1998 elections Westendorp removed 14 Bosnian Croatian candidates, claiming reporting by Croatian television biased. After election removes president of Bosnia Serb republic on grounds that he was causing instability.
In 2001 and 2005 high representative also removed one of the three joint presidents of the country. In 2005 high representative Paddy Ashdown, who sacked Dragan Covic.
Nicaragua 2001
US smears against Sandinista leader, Daniel Ortega, accused of human rights violations and terrorism. US ambassador openly campaigned for Ortega’s opponent, Enrique Bolanos. US also pressurised Conservative party to withdraw from the elections so as not to split right-wing vote. There were also adds in the papers signed by Jeb Bush, claiming that Dubya supported Bolanos. Bolanos himself also stated that the Americans had told him that if Ortega won, they would cease all aid to the country.
Bolivia 2002
Extensive campaign against socialist candidate Evo Morales because he was against neoliberalism and big business, as well as the attempts to eradicate the coca plant, the source of cocaine.
US ambassador smeared him with accusations of connections to drug cartels and terrorism. US Assistant Secretary of State for Western Hemisphere also said America could cut off aid if Morales elected. Meetings between US ambassador and officials and leading figures in rival parties to support Morales’ rival, Sanchez de Lozada.
Slovakia 2002
Warnings by US ambassador to the country and the US ambassador to NATO that if they elected Vladimir Meciar, former president running on anti-globalisation campaign, this would damage chances of their country entering EU and NATO. Also interference by National Endowment for Democracy against Meciar.
El Salvador 2004
Campaigning by US ambassador and three US Republican members of congress, including Thomas Tancredo of California, threatening cessations of aid and work permits for the countries’ people to work in America, in order to prevent election of FMLN candidate Schafik Handal and win victory of Tony Saca of the Arena party. FMLN former guerilla group. Handal stated he would withdraw Salvadorean troops from Iraq, re-examination privatisations and renew diplomatic contacts with Cuba. Arena extreme rightwing party, pro-US, free market, responsible for death squads and the murder of Archbishop Oscar Romero.
Afghanistan 2004
Pressure placed by US ambassador, Zalmay Khalilzad, on political candidates to withdraw in favour of Washington’s preferred candidate, Hamid Karzai.
Palestine 2005-6
Massive pressure by the Americans to prevent the election of Hamas, including funding of the Palestinian Authority by the National Endowment for Democracy.
This last country is my own suggestion, not Blum’s.
Great Britain?
Go and read various articles in Lobster, which describe the way the US and its various front organisations collaborated with the right-wing of the Labour party to stop possible Communist influence. In the 1980s Reagan also created the British-American Project for the Successor Generation, alias BAP, to cultivate rising politicians of both the left and the right, and make them more favourable towards America and the Atlantic alliance. These included Tony Blair and Ed Balls, but you won’t read about it in the Times, because it’s editor was also a BAP alumnus.
On Wednesday I put up a documentary by Reichwing Watch, which carefully showed the corporatist powers behind the rise of modern Libertarianism, and how it represents the interests of big business instead of ordinary people despite its claims to the contrary. The documentary quoted Henry Wallace, F.D.R.’s vice-president in 1944, who wrote an op-ed piece in the New York Times about the threat of Fascism in America, and how this would arise through the same powerful corporate interests, who would claim to be super-patriots, but would attempt to use their political and economic power to enslave ordinary Americans.
In this clip from Thom Hartmann’s internet show, Hartmann also discusses how Fascism is based on the power of big corporations, and further quotes Wallace’s New York Times article. Hartmann begins by defining Fascism as the merger of corporate and government interests, with a bit of nationalism and racism to keep the masses distracted by hating a terrible ‘other’. He notes that Mussolini dissolved the Italian parliament in favour of a chamber of Fasci and corporations, and that Giovanni Gentile, the Italian philosopher, stated that Fascism should more properly be described as corporatism.
He then goes to quote Henry Wallace’s article in the New York Times. Wallace wrote
Fascism is a worldwide disease. Its greatest threat to the US will come after the War in the US itself. Another Fascist danger is represented by those, who paying lip service to national service and the common welfare, in their insatiable greet for money and the power which money gives, do not hesitate surreptitiously to evade the laws which protect the public from monopolistic extortion.
Hartmann goes on to explain that Wallace nevertheless believed that the American system was strong enough to avoid Fascism. At that time, it was rare for a C.E.O. to enter politics, and politicians knew that they had to represent ‘we, the people’. And so Wallace continues
Happily, it can be said that Fascism has not captured a place in mainstream America. It can be found in Wall Street, Main Street and Tobacco Road, and traces of it can be seen along the Potomac, but if we put our trust in the common sense of common men and with malice towards none and charity for all, and continue building political, economic and social democracy, we shall prevail.
American Fascism will not be really dangerous until there is a purposeful coalition among the cartelists, the poisoners of public information and those who stand for the KKK-type of demagoguery.
Hartmann makes the point that this has happened today through the alliance of right-wing news channels, the corporatists, and the White House. Wallace goes on
They claim to be super-patriots, but they would destroy every liberty, they claim to support free enterprise, but the represent monopolies and vested interests. Their final objective, to which all their deceit is directed, it to capture political power so that using the power of the state and the market simultaneously they can keep the common man in eternal subjection.
The American Fascists are most easily recognised by their perversion of truth and Fact. Their propaganda cultivates every fissure in the common front, and they consistently criticise democracy.
Hartmann here discusses how this accurately describes the purveyors of hate in the corporatist media, like Fox News, and how they are composed of the Islamophobes, the anti-gay religious leaders, and the corporatists determined to put worker against worker, trade unionists against the non-unionised employees, men against women, in a strategy of divide and conquer. He goes on to say that we should all be concerned about the next few years, and states that it is the most high stakes struggle since the foundation of the Republic, though not the biggest – that was the Civil War. But, Harmann asks rhetorically, can anyone remember a time when Americans were so polarised? He concludes that the struggle against Fascism begins today – and you need to get involved. Movement politics are what is needed. It simply isn’t enough just to vote.
There are a couple of things wrong with Hartmann’s analysis of Fascism. The Fascist ‘corporations’ he mentions weren’t commercial companies, but industrial associations combining both the trade unions and the employers’ organisations. Furthermore, nationalism and racism was central to Fascism, not something merely added to their foul intellectual stew in order to keep the masses distracted. Hitler and his fellow mass murderers genuinely hated the Jews, and ant-Semitism and the doctrine of Aryan racial superiority was central to Nazi ideology from the very beginning. Similarly, Italian Fascism was originally a movement of ultra-patriots intensely dissatisfied with Italy’s failure to get what they believed was its rightful territorial gains after the First World War. Mussolini sincerely wanted the Italians to be a militaristic people and to create a new, Roman Empire.
But he’s write about the importance of corporate power. Both Mussolini and then Hitler got into power because they posed as the defenders of capitalism and business against the threat of organised labour, socialism, and the trade unions. Mussolini’s Fascist absorbed the Italian Nationalists, who were right-wing businessmen. Just as the Fascists attacked the trade unions in urban areas, in the countryside they represented the big landowners, and went around trying to smash the peasant organisations, cooperatives and collectives.
Wallace’s description of the threat of a home-grown Fascism in America really does describe the coalition of power that has brought Trump to the White House: the powerful, right-wing news organisations like Fox, Breitbart and scores of local and national talk radio stations. And Trump is a corporatist, representing elite big business. But this also applies to his predecessors, both Democrat and Republican, right back to Reagan. This includes the Clintons, both Bill and Hillary, and Barack Obama, as well as the Bush family.
And it also applies over here, to Maggie Thatcher, John Major, and then Tony Blair, Gordon Brown and New Labour, to David Cameron and now Theresa May. It was Maggie Thatcher, who began the process of permitting the concentration of the British media in a few, very limited hands, including that of Murdoch. And the Tories have always maintained that they are the party of business as a rhetorical defence, whenever the purging of corporate influence from parliament is mentioned. They argue that since Labour represents the trade unions, the Tories are right to represent business. They do not, by this admission, represent ‘hard-working people’, except in the sense that they are keen to stress how hard the millionaires they represent work. 78 per cent of MPs are millionaires, and the majority hold multiple directorships. And New Labour was, in Mandelson’s words, ‘intensely laid back about getting rich’, expanded Peter Lilley’s vile PFI initiative, and promoted business to parliament and parliamentary committees, initiatives and quangos.
Trump’s a Fascist, but the rot goes deep, all the way back to the foundations of the neoliberal world order in Reagan and Thatcher, who both supported real Fascists in the death squads of south American dictators like Samosa and Pinochet.
We need to fight back. And we need to do more than that – we need to purge parliament of the very corporate interests that have wormed their way into power, in order to make our countries true democracies again, and not merely elective oligarchies providing a veneer of popular approval for corrupt, corporate rule.
Mike’s also put up an excellent piece by Youssef El-Gingihy, ‘Business as Usual in Iraq’. I think Mr Gingihy is a medical doctor. He’s certainly a very firm opponent of the privatisation of the NHS, and has written a book against it, How to Dismantle the NHS in 10 Easy Steps, published by Zero Books. I found a copy of this in the Cheltenham branch of Waterstones.
El-Gingihy makes the point that the Iraq invasion was not an aberration, but merely the continuation of American and British global imperialism. This isn’t about making the world safe for democracy, but in the forcible acquisition of other nation’s industries and resources. He points out that Tony Blair wasn’t Bush’s poodle, but took part in the invasion of Iraq perfectly willingly as part of the Atlantic Alliance. George Bush senior and Maggie Thatcher armed Hussein in the Iran-Iraq War, and his gassing of the Kurds in 1988 aroused no condemnation from us. The US military-industrial complex was determined to invade Iraq, because its acquisition was estimated to be worth $100 billion to the American economy. This was only the latest in a series of coups that have overthrown popular elected leaders in countries around the world, so that America can get its hands on their countries’ valuable economic assets. This goes back to the overthrow of Mossadeq in Iran in the 1953, who had the audacity to nationalise the Persian oil industry, and Salvador Allende in Chile in 1975, who was ousted because he was a Marxist and wanted to break up the great estates to give land to the peasants.
He also sees Bush’s decision to disband the Ba’athist army, whose troops then joined the jihadists fighting against the occupation and the Shi’a and other factions, which supported or benefited from it, as part of the imperial tactics of divide et conquera. As a result of the invasion, Iraq has been transformed from a secular dictatorship into a breeding ground for terrorists. There were only a few thousand globally at the time of 9/11. Now that number has increased to about 100,000. The number of Iraqis, who’ve been killed may be as high as 600,000 +. America maintains its global dominance through a network of 800 bases worldwide. At the time of 9/11, the Americans drew up plans to invade seven countries, and El-Gingihy notes how the wars and destabilisation have spread to other countries, like Yemen. He makes the point that if we really wanted to stop terror, we should stop supporting countries that are funding and supporting it, like Saudi Arabia. But that isn’t going to happen, because Saudi Arabia is our ally.
He concludes
Tony Blair famously called on history to be his judge. That judgement will be one of eternal damnation. He has already attempted a spirited defence but, as with Lady Macbeth, not all the perfumes of Arabia can relieve the stench of blood on his hands.
Everything Dr El-Gingihy has said is correct. The Iraq invasion was all about stealing the country’s oil and state industries. Iraq has the largest oil reserves after Saudi Arabia, and Aramco, the American-Saudi oil company, and the other oil magnates, desperately wanted to get their hands on it. The Americans also drafted legislation declaring that any rare crops still grown in Iraq were also automatically owned by American biotech companies. Iraq and the Fertile Crescent is the area where western agriculture started at the dawn of civilisation nearly 6,000 years ago. Then, Neolithic farmers began cultivating varieties of wheat, which have largely been superseded in the west, like emmer. These varieties may, however, have properties which have been lost in later varieties, and so are of intense interest to the biotechnology companies and agribusiness. A year or so ago there was even a feature about the renewed interest in emmer in farming in Britain on the Beeb’s farming interest show, Countryfile. The legislation cannot practically be enforced, but it means Iraqi peasant farmers in theory have to pay American biotech companies for the privilege of rearing crops they’ve been raising since literally the dawn of civilisation.
And the same goes with other parts of the economy, like industry. Halliburton and the rest of the big businesses pressing for war had Bush, who was deeply involved with them, pass legislation allowing them to acquire Iraqi businesses in recompense for possible damages they had sustained, even if, in fact, they had not suffered any damage. It’s a deeply iniquitous piece of legislation. Both of these laws were revealed in articles in Private Eye years ago. And it bears out what the Joseph Bronowski, the great scientist, broadcaster and Fabian Socialist said in The Descent of Man way back in the ’70s: War is theft by other means.
And the number of coups promoted by America is a long one, and getting longer all the time. William Blum in an edition of his Anti-Empire Report links to a complete list of them, since the 19th century, which stretches on and on. it includes the overthrow of Alfredo Benz’ regime in Guatemala in the 1950s, because Benz nationalised the estates of the American United Fruit Company, which, along with the other landlords, treated their peasant workers as slaves. Benz was a threat to American business, and dared pass legislation giving greater welfare rights and power to the peasants. So he had to go. And Shrillary Clinton has followed. A few years ago she made sure that the coup that toppled a democratically elected socialist president in Honduras was not called a ‘military coup’, so that Obama could keep funding the country’s new, military overlords. These are, as you can imagine, the usual right-wing tyrants ruling through terror, violence, assassination and imprisonment. But they have the support of Obama and Shrillary, who no doubt claim the coup was in America’s best interest.
And so we continue to see the agony of the world’s weaker nations, all for the profit of western, chiefly American, multinationals.
Remember the chanting of the anti-war protesters during Gulf War 1 back in 1990? ‘Gosh, no, we won’t go. We won’t die for Texaco’? It’s even more relevant now.
Here’s another video from The Young Turks, discussing another step in the downward path of American politics towards authoritarianism and repression. After the horrific terror attack in Nice on Friday, Newt Gingrich, the former Speaker of the House of Representative under George Bush senior and Clinton, and Trump’s possible Vice President, has finally decided that the First Amendment shouldn’t apply to Muslims. He made a speech declaring that Muslims, who believe in sharia law should not be allowed into the country. Those who do, madrassas that teach it, and Muslims, who look up jihadist websites, should be expelled.
John Iadarola, Bill Mankiewicz and Jimmy Dore talk about how undemocratic this is. They point out that this is thought-crime, like the absolute control by the state of people’s opinions and ideas in Orwell’s 1984. Gingrich also stated that this should apply not only to Muslims, but to people with Muslim backgrounds. They also point out he want to criminalise people, who go to hardline Islamic websites no matter how much time they spend there. Cenk Uygur, one of the other anchors, is from a Turkish Muslim background, and they have all looked at hardline Islamist websites while doing research for news stories. Therefore, Cenk and they would be expelled under Gingrich’s legislation. They also point out that America is should be in no danger of having a theocratic government, as the Constitution stipulates that America is a secular state. Furthermore, that looseness with which that part of the legislation is framed would permit anyone, to have someone they disliked deported simply by hacking into their computer or sending them a link on their email. If someone wanted to get rid of a noisy neighbour, they could rickroll them with a link to an Islamist website, and whoa! The next thing that person’s on the plane.
Muslims themselves constitute less than three per cent of the American population. They also point out that if you ask immigrating Muslims if they believe in sharia government, they will deny it simply to get in, even if they do believe it. Furthermore, he points out that many American Christians also want a Christian theocratic government. They also state that a Muslim spokesman for one of the American thinktanks has stated that there are too many people, who know nothing about Islam, telling Muslims what their faith should be. Dore compares the Islamic sharia to Roman Catholic canon law, the body of religious law that governs the Roman Catholic church and its believers faith and practice. He claims that canon law in effect sanctions the abuse of children, because the church claimed that all the priests guilty of the crime would be punished according to canon law, when they were let off. Dore also wonders how many Muslims know about sharia law, considering very few Roman Catholics in practice know about canon law. The Turks also cite an unnamed atheist, who said that he considered American Muslims westernised, and so not the threat that the Right believes they are.
After coming out with this very hardline attack on American Muslims’ civil rights, Gingrich gave another interview backtracking somewhat, and claiming that he had a been misrepresented in the media storm that followed. He then claimed that devout Muslims, who were loyal to America, should have their rights absolutely protected, along with those of their children and other relatives.
Here’s the video.
In fairness to those, who do fear the imposition of sharia law, there have been instances in recent American history where a cult has tried to take over a community and turn it into a theocracy. The last time this occurred was in the 70’s and 80s, when one of the Indian gurus tried to take over a town in Oregon and turn it into a theocracy, ruled by his cult and followers. It failed, because the traditional townspeople resisted and invoked the Constitution. This was, however, one of the New Religious Movements based on Hinduism, rather than Islam, and I haven’t heard of Muslims, or mainstream Hindus either, for that matter, trying to anything like that.
The German counter-terrorism legislation did provide for the immigration authorities to question Muslim migrants if they believed in theocratic government. This is because the German system has government as the Basic Law as its fundamental article of state. This was introduced as part of the denazification programme after the War, and bans any party or organisation that does not recognise democracy. It was invoked in the 1970s to ban the National Democrats, a Neo-Nazi outfit, and then in the 1990s to ban an Anarchist review and a range of Anarchist organisations. However, a few years ago, the Week reported that the Germans were considering removing questions about support for sharia government from the immigration forms, because Muslim immigrants would lie about their support. Quite simply, it didn’t stop terrorists entering the country. I also think they were going to drop it because the question was itself anti-democratic, and they were afraid that heavy-handed policing tactics like this were alienating German Muslims, and driving them towards the Islamists.
As for the question of Roman Catholic canon law and Islamic sharia law, this has been an issue in parts of Canada. I think there was a movement up there in certain provinces, which recognised Roman Catholic canon law and Jewish Beth Din courts as legally recognised authorities governing the faith and practice of those religious communities. This became intensely controversial when a Canadian Muslim wanted sharia law and courts also recognised. He was challenged by a number of organisations, including associations of female former Muslims, who were deeply concerned about the treatment of women under Islamic religious law. I don’t know, but I think the situation may have ended with the Canadian government repealing the legislation granting secular legal authority to all religious courts, regardless of which religion, they belonged to.
I have to say that Gingrich’s comments simply look to me like another embittered, racist Republican trying to compete with Trump, whom The Turks point out is the master of stupid racism. They point out that the Republicans now appear to be a stupid, cartoonish party, and that the only thing they have going for them is that they are competing against Shrillary. All this is true, but displays of prejudice like Gingrich’s and Trump’s are serving to chip away further at the American traditions of free speech and tolerance. They are acting as an endorsement to the increasing racism, and there is a real danger that such intolerance will turn more Muslims towards militant, intolerant forms of Islam as a response to the hostility shown to them by mainstream society.
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