More Selective Anti-Semitism as Blairites Persecute Left-Wing Jews

Starmer’s attempts to purge the Labour party of its left-wing members, who support Jeremy Corbyn, continues. All under the false pretext of fighting anti-Semitism, of course. This time the two victims are Moshe Machover and Naomi Wimborne-Idrissi, and the very notion that either of these two are any kind of real anti-Semites is a grotesque joke. Machover is a highly respected Israeli mathematician and philosopher, as well as a Marxist philosopher. Which I would imagine already really winds up his Blairite enemies, as it shows he’s almost certainly more intelligent than they are. Naomi Wimborne-Idrissi is the leader, or one of the leaders, of Jewish Voice for Labour. You know, that terrible Jewish group that supported Jeremy Corbyn, which only admitted Jews as full members and actually had a membership in hundreds. As opposed to their opponents in the Jewish Labour Movement, who had a membership that was just barely over a hundred, and most of them were gentiles. And while you also had to be a member of the Labour Party to be part of Jewish Voice for Labour, you don’t in the Jewish Labour Movement. Everything about the Jewish Labour Movement is fake or a half-truth, but the British political and media establishment decided that they really represent the Jews in the Labour Party.

Machover and Wimborne-Idrissi have been targeted because they’re anti-Zionist activists. They’ve been gunning for Machover for several years now. They tried suspending him a few years ago for a piece he wrote in the magazine of the Labour Marxists group. However, the outcry from Labour members was such that they had to reinstate him. Clearly they were just biding their time until they could try it again. This time the reason is that he appeared on Resistance TV with Chris Williamson and Tony Greenstein. Greenstein’s another Jewish critic of Zionism, who was thrown of the Labour party after a kangaroo court trial. Like Machover and Wimborne-Idrissi, he’s no kind of anti-Semite. He’s a passionate opponent of all kinds of racism and Fascism, and while he’s a secular Jew, he is very definitely not ‘self-hating’. Apart from very detailed, and minutely historically-informed criticisms of Zionism and Israeli policy towards the Palestinians, he’s also attacked domestic Fascists like Oswald Mosley and the BUF. He’s published a book on the struggle against Fascism on the south coast, as well as several articles on his blog about how the good, left-wing peeps of his home town of Brighton gave Mosley and his storm troopers a dam’ good hiding when they tried recruiting there. Which is clearly a source of pride to him, as it should.

Naomi Wimborne-Idrissi was, I feel, targeted this time because she dared to put her head above the barricades and made a video for Double Down News about how she and others like her, were ‘the wrong kind of Jew’. She was first called this when she was 19 at an exclusively Jewish meeting when she presented the case for the Palestinians. The Jewish Telegraph was there, and stuck her and that insult on their front page. Which shows just what a despicable rag it is. In the video for DDN, she talks about the other insults that are flung at Jewish critics of Israel – that they’re self-hating, or are ‘kapos’. The last is especially obnoxious, as the kapos were the collaborators with the Nazis in the extermination camps. It’s very clear from the DDN video that she is anything but self-hating. She says at one point that her people’s history contains much that is ‘wonderful and magical’ as well as horrendous persecution. Those, who hate themselves and their people generally don’t describe their people’s history in such positive terms, nor lament their persecution.

There are anti-Semites and self-hating Jews, though I’ve only read about the latter. From what I’ve seen, they’re deeply messed up individuals. One of them was the leader of a group of American Nazis, who shot himself when he was outed to his fellow storm troopers. He might be an extreme case, but he’s clearly poles apart from Machover, Greenstein, Wimborne-Idrissi and the many other Jews, who’ve been smeared as self-hating and purged by the Blairites. None of the above have ever tried to hide their Jewish identity, they’re not ashamed of it, and rather than join any kind of racist outfit, they’ve been active campaigners against racism.

They are only self-hating because, like so many other Jews, they dare to defy the demands of the self-proclaimed British Jewish establishment that Jews give their unqualified support to Israel. It’s ridiculous. Jews have been saying ‘Next year in Jerusalem’ as part of the Passover meal probably since the destruction of the Temple in AD 72 and then their forcible removal from the city by the Romans. But political Zionism was, as David Rosenberg and Tony Greenstein have both amply shown on their blogs, and Naomi Wimborne-Idrissi clearly shows in her video, a minority movement amongst modern Jews. The Jewish socialist party, the Bund, campaigned for Jews to be equal citizens of the countries in which they currently lived. American Jews were very comfortable with their lives over the other side of the Pond, though they had to work extremely hard to make their new lives there. As late as 1969 American Jewish Zionist magazines were lamenting the fact that there was no interest amongst them for returning to Israel. Wimborne-Idrissi’s video shows footage and photos from huge Jewish political meetings rejecting Zionism. But if adherence to Zionism is taken as the defining feature of Jewish identity, then according to the Board of Deputies, Chief Rabbinate and the rest, historically there have been an awful lot of self-hating Jews. Some of whom were obviously so self-hating that they actually fought against the Nazis, like Marek Edelman, one of the heroes of the Warsaw Ghetto. Which clearly makes the accusation utter twaddle.

This is selective anti-Semitism. Left-wing Jews are being targeted for abuse and purging from the party because they’re Jews, and their idea of Jewish identity conflicts with the British establishment’s. I’ve said very many times that the British establishment supports Israel because its a locus of western imperial influence in the Middle East. Hence it ain’t just the Jewish establishment that is determined to smear as anti-Semitic Jewish critics of Israel. Which means that we’re now treated to the grotesque spectacle of gentiles smearing decent, self-respecting Jews as anti-Semites. When Corbyn was leader, there was much hoo-ha in the press about the supposed ‘hurt’ and ‘pain’ suffered by Zionist Jews in the party, and by its supposed anti-Semitism. Well, the level of anti-Semitism has been shown by the E.H.R.C. report and previous studies to be grossly over exaggerated. But what is never discussed is the immense pain and hurt suffered by left-wing Jews. Mira Bar Hillel, a Jewish journalist, has said that there are many Jews afraid to speak out because they’re afraid of the terrible vilification they’ll suffer. And you can see how vile that abuse is when you think of the abuse and threats another self-respecting Jew, Jackie Walker, has received. She’s received messages telling her that she should be lynched, her body burnt and dumped in bin bags, and that she can’t be a proper Jews because she’s a woman of colour. Tony Greenstein has had irate Zionist Jews telling him that they wish he and his family had died in the Holocaust. But the media ignores the suffering of Jewish critics of Israel. They don’t exist, according to the establishment.

They’re the wrong kind of Jews.

Mike in his article about these latest suspensions has tweets from members of the public naturally condemning them. The peeps making them including Jews, people of Jewish heritage and Jewish organisations like Just Jews, Glenn Greenwald, Shlomo and Tom London, as well as left-wing, anti-racist gentile allies like Chris Williamson, Rachel Swindon, Kerry-Ann Mendoza, James Foster, and Cornish Damo. These are the peeps the Blairites and the ultra-Zionists despise and wish to purge and silence, because they actively demonstrate what a politically motivated lie the fake accusations of anti-Semitism are.

And the fake accusations against decent, anti-racist, Israel-critical Jews are actively harming the fight against real anti-Semitism. Naomi Wimborne-Idrissi states this clearly in her video as others have said before her. These accusations cheapen the charge of anti-Semitism by reducing it to a piece of cynical rhetoric. But at the same time real anti-Semitism and racism is on the rise. But the organisations that pose as Jews protectors, like the Campaign Against Anti-Semitism, are largely uninterested. They were set up to attack Labour and left-wing criticism of Israel, not the real storm troopers like National Action, who scream anti-Semitic abuse and mouth stupid conspiracy theories about Jews plotting to destroy the White race. Nazis and anti-Semites, who hate Jews simply for being Jews, and mean them real harm.

These purges are an utter disgrace. They’re the product of sectarian anti-Semitism against left-wing Jews and their supporters. All of those smeared as anti-Semites, both gentile and Jewish, should be immediately reinstated with copious apologies.

And it should be their accusers instead who should be suspended and investigated for anti-Semitism and bringing Labour into disrepute. Even if that means suspending the General Secretary, David Evans, and the party leader himself, Keir Starmer.

See: Starmer’s purge of so-called Labour antisemites is now persecuting left-wing Jews | Vox Political (voxpoliticalonline.com)

Manifesto for a Truly Democratic, Socialist America

Bhaskar Sunkara, The Socialist Manifesto: The Case for Radical Politics in an Era of Extreme Inequality (London: Verso 2019).

Introduction

This is a superb book, though conditions have changed since the book was published last year through Labour’s election defeat and the fall of Corbyn, that the new age of socialist activism and success Sunkara looks forward to is now far more doubtful. Sunkara is an American radical journalist, and the founder and editor of the left-wing magazine, Jacobin. Originally from Trinidade, he immigrated to the USA with his family when he was young. Growing up in New York, he read extensively in the Big Apple’s public library, where he came to realise the country’s dependence on services provided by the state. He immersed himself in the history and literature of socialism, finally joining the Democratic Socialists of America. He is also a registered Democrat.

The book comes praised by Glenn Greenwald of The Intercept, Naomi Klein and Owen Jones. The book was partly inspired by the success of Jeremy Corbyn over here and Bernie Sanders in America in bringing socialism back into the political arena after decades of neoliberalism. This is made clear by the blurb on the dust jacket’s inside flap. This states

Socialism was pronounced dead when the Soviet Union collapsed. But with the success of Jeremy Corbyn’s left-led Labour party and increasing economic inequality, the politics of class struggle and wealth redistribution is back on the agenda. In The Socialist Manifesto Bhaskar Sunkara offers a primer on socialism for the twenty-first century, outlining where it came from, what it is, and what a socialist political system might look like.

Tracing the history of some of socialism’s highs and lows – from the creation of Germany’s Social Democratic Party through bloody communist revolutions to the predicaments of midcentury social democracy – Sunkara contends that, in our global age, socialism is still the only way forward. Drawing on history and his own experience in left-wing activism, Sunkara explains how socialists can win better wages and housing and create democratic institutions in workplaces and communities.

In showing how and why socialism can work today, The Socialist Manifesto is for anyone seeking a real solution to the vast inequalities of our age.

The Way to Socialism in America

The book begins with a ‘Day in the Life of a Socialist Citizen’, which maps out one possible path for the transformation of America into a socialist state. Sunkara asks the reader to imagine himself as a worker at Jon Bongiovi’s pasta sauce business in Texas to show that, even under a benign and paternalistic employer, the capitalist system still leaves the workers poor and powerless. In order to compete, the firm must not only make a profit, but invest in machinery while at the same time either cutting wages or laying people off. However, the workers are empowered by a new wave of strikes and left-wing activism that sees the election of President Springsteen. Springsteen establishes a welfare state, which allows the workers to devote more of their time and energy to pressing for their demands without having to fear for their livelihood. The worker’s movement continues making gains until the economy has become nationalised. Individual firms still exist, and are run by the workers themselves rather than the state. Some of them fail. But there are also government banking schemes to help workers set up their own businesses, though still state-owned and collectively managed, when they have a good idea and are fed up with their present job. Like bottling pasta sauce. America is still a vibrant democracy, and there are a number of other parties, including a capitalist party, though that is waning in popularity. It’s not utopia, but it is a system where workers are genuinely valued.

The Rise and Transformation of Socialism from Marxism to Reformism

The socialism, whose history the book tells and advocates, is that the Marxist and Marxist derived parties, Communism and social democracy, rather than the Utopian socialism of the generation before Marx and the more extreme versions of anarchist communism and syndicalism. The book naturally describes the career of Marx and Engels, and the formation of the German SDP. This moved away from revolutionary Marxism to reformism under the influences of Eduard Bernstein and Karl Kautsky, who believed that capitalism’s survival and the growing prosperity of industrial workers had disproven crucial aspects of Marxist doctrine. Initially pacifist, like the other European socialist parties, the SDP voted for war credits at the outbreak of the First World War. This caused a split, with a minority forming the Independent Socialists (USPD) and the Communist Party. When the 1919 revolution broke out, the majority SDP under President Ebert moved to crush it using right-wing Freikorps brigades. Although the SDP was one prop of the Weimar coalition, it was never able to establish socialism in Germany, and so fell with the other parties in the collapse of the Republic to the Nazis.

Russian Communism

Sunkara’s account of the rise of Russian communism is interesting for his argument that the Bolsheviks originally weren’t any more dictatorial than their rivals, the Mensheviks. Even Kautsky recognised the need for a strong, centralised party. But Lenin originally was no dictator. Pravda rejected 44 of his articles, and the were other voices as strong or stronger within the party. What pushed it towards first authoritarianism and then totalitarianism was the stubborn opposition of the rival socialist parties, the Mensheviks and the Socialist Revolutionaries. They were invited to join a government coalition with the Bolsheviks, but walked out and began active opposition. The Revolution was then threatened by the revolt of the Whites, leading to the Civil War, in which Britain and other western countries sent troops in order to overthrow the Bolshevik regime. This, and the chaotic conditions created by the Revolution itself led to the Bolshevik party assuming a monopoly of state power, partly as the only means available of restoring order. This began the party’s journey towards the murderously repressive state it became, though interparty democracy was still alive in the 1920s before the rise of Stalin.

Mao and China

The emergence of communism in China, its seizure of power and the reign of Chairman Mao is also covered as an example of socialism in the Third World. The nations of the Developing World, like China, took over revolutionary socialism – communism – rather than reformism, because conditions in Russia more closely resembled those in their nations. Russian had been a largely agricultural country, in which the majority of its citizens were peasants. Industrial workers’ similarly represented only a minuscule fraction of the Chinese population, and so Mao turned to the peasants instead as a revolutionary force. This chapter concludes that Chinese communism was less about empowering and liberating the workers than as a movement for national modernisation.

Sweden and the Rise and Fall of Social Democracy

The book also examines the rise and progress of Swedish social democracy. The Swedish socialist party took power early through alliances with the Agrarians and the Liberals. This allowed them to introduce generous welfare legislation and transform the country from one of the most socially backward, feudal and patriarchal states in Europe to the progressive nation it is today. But there were also losses as well as gains. The Swedes compromised their commitment to all-out socialism by preserving private industry – only 5 per cent of the Swedish economy was nationalised – and acting to regulate the economy in alliance with the trade unions and industrialists. This corporative system collapsed during the oil crisis of the 1970s. This caused inflation. The government tried to resist wage rises, which the unions resisted. The industrialists resented the growth of working class activism and began measures to counteract them. Olof Palme, the country’s prime minister, then moved in a left-ward direction through establishing funds that would allow the trade unions gradually to buy up companies. The industrialists recognised an existential threat, and succeeded in overthrowing the government.

The Swedish model, meanwhile, had been highly influential through Labour party MP Anthony Crosland’s The Future of Socialism, which in turn led to Tony Blair’s ‘Third Way’ as the Labour government in Britain moved from social democracy to a more left-wing alternative to neoliberalism. Other European socialist parties followed, such as the German SDP. France’s President Mitterand in the 1980s tried to break this pattern in the 1980s, but his government was also overthrown through capital flight, the industrialists taking their money out of the French economy. Mitterand tried to hang on by promising to safeguard industry and govern responsibly, but it was no use.

Socialism and America

The chapter on socialism in America is particularly interesting, as it shows, contrary to the impression given by America’s two-party system, that the country has a very strong history and tradition of working class parties and socialism, from combative unions like the IWW to organised parties like the Knights of Labor, Democratic Socialists of America, and the Socialist Labor, Populist, Progressive and Communist Parties. However, socialism has never gained power there, as it has in Britain and Europe, because of a variety of factors. These include the extreme violence of the state and private industry, the latter hiring gunmen, to put down strikes; factional infighting between socialist groups, partly caused by the extreme range of socialist opinions and the restriction of some socialist groups to particular ethnicities, and the anti-Communist hysteria of the Cold War.

A strategy for Success

Thechapter ‘How We Win’ contains Sunakara’s own observations and recommendations for socialist campaigning and the construction of genuine socialism in America. These are

1. Class-struggle social democracy does not close down avenues for radicals; it opens them.

2. Class-struggle social democracy has the potential to win a major national election today.

3. Winning an election isn’t the same as winning power.

4. They’ll do everything to stop us.

5. Our immediate demands are very much achievable.

6. We must move quickly from social democracy to democratic socialism.

7. We need socialists.

8. The working class had changed over the past hundred and fifty years, but not as much we think.

9. Socialists must embed themselves in working class struggles.

10. It is not enough to work with unions for progressive change. We must wage democratic battles within them.

11. A loose network of leftists and rank-and-file activists isn’t enough. We need a political party.

12. We need to take into account American particularities.

13. We need to democratise our political institutions.

14. Our politics must be universalist.

15. History matters.

Conclusion

This is the clarion call for genuinely radical activism. It will almost certainly start right-wing alarm bells ringing, as Sunkara calls for left-wing activists to join main parties like the Democrats in the US and Labour in Britain. They are not to be infiltrators, but as people genuinely committed to these parties and working peoples’ causes and issues. The claims that the working class has somehow died out or no longer has radical potential is overstated. It has changed, but 60 per cent of the population are still employees drawing wages or a salary, and who have no money of their own. And the book shows very clearly that the transformation to a genuinely socialist economy is needed. Social democracy has won considerable gains for working people, gains that still persist despite constant right-wing attack. But these aren’t enough, and if left unchallenged, capital will always try to destroy them.

The book’s angled towards the US, but its lessons and many of its recommendations still apply of this side of the pond. The resurgence of genuine socialist activism in Britain is now far less certain in Britain. But hopefully this book will help show to more people why it’s still possible and needed. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Maria the Witch on the Rise of Bolsonaro, Brazil’s Fascist Candidate

This is a mirror on Kevin Logan’s channel of a piece by Maria the Witch warning and explaining about the rise of Jair Bolsonaro, the Far-Right, Fascist candidate in the Brazilian elections. From what she says about herself at the beginning of the video, Maria is a Brazilian who studied in the US. However, Bolsonaro’s dangerous ascent to power has pushed her into making this video so that when the time came, she ‘wouldn’t be laughing like an Anglo’.

At the moment, Bolsonaro is only a few votes away from the Brazilian presidency, at 46 per cent he’s just shy of the 50% + 1 required for him to take power. At a 49 per cent approval rating, he’s way ahead in the polls.

As for who he is, the video has a clip of Democracy Now’s Amy Goodman explaining that he’s a former army officer, who has openly praised the country’s military dictatorship, which last from 1964 to ’85. He has a long history of making racist, misogynistic and homophobic comments, and encouraging police to kill suspected drug dealers.

Glenn Greenwalt of the Intercept explains that he’s been called Brazil’s Donald Trump, which radically understates the case. He’s much closer to Duterte in the Philippines or General Sisi in Egypt. He is far more dangerous than Trump, as democracy in Brazil is far more fragile. It lacks the political infrastructure that America and the UK have to limit the power of the president. He is likely to win against Lula’s successor – Lula da Silva was Brazil’s previous, left-wing president – because of the animus built up by the media and the business class against PT, the Workers’ Party.

As for his bigoted comments, he once said in an interview that he’d rather hear that his son died in a car accident than was gay. He defended torture and rape during the dictatorship, and when a member of Brazil’s lower house confronted him about it he told her she needn’t worry, because she didn’t deserve to be raped by him – meaning that she was too ugly for him to rape her. He’s made a whole slew of similar comments about Blacks and the indigenous peoples. More worrying are his models for dealing with crime. They’re taken from the world’s worst dictators like Pinochet. As in the Philippines, he wants to send in the army and police to slaughter indiscriminately anyone they consider to be a drug dealer or criminal without trial. He believes in military rule. He does not regard the military coup of 1964 as a coup, and wishes to replicate it. And he has the entire top level of the military supporting him.

The institutions that would constrain Bolsonaro or somebody like him in the US – a strong supreme court, the CIA or the FBI, and other political parties, don’t exist. Due to his popularity, there is a sizable part of the Brazilian population that fears he will bring back the worse elements of dictatorships, such as the summary execution of dissidents, shut down media outlets, and closed congresses.

Maria then asks how this is possible in a country that has been ruled for 14 years by the centre left PT. Back to Greenwald.

Greenwald explains that it’s similar to what is happening in America, the UK and Europe where this kind of extremism is spreading, and the media outlets that have aided its rise refuse to take any responsibility for it. The media is very oligarchical, and in the hands of a small number of very rich families. The journalists themselves are afraid of Bolsonaro and don’t support him, but continue to create the narrative that supports him: that Bolsonaro and PT are simply two sides of the same coin. PT are a left-wing dictatorship, like Bolsonaro represents a rightwing dictatorship, and both are equally bad. Greenwald makes the point that during the 14 years PT governed the country, there was a very free and open press that constantly attacked them. they impeached one of their presidents and put the other in prison, so the idea that it’s a dictatorship like that to which Bolsonaro aspires is grotesque. But this is what is normalizing Bolsonaro.

As for Lula da Silva, he was thrown in prison just as he was leading in the polls and banned all of the media from interviewing him. The Intercept/em> has tried, as have others, but there are prevented by a prior restraint order issued by the Supreme Court. He states that Brazilian institutions carry much of the blame for the rise of Bolsonaro, just as American institutions do for Trump and British for Brexit, and European globalization policies for the rise of the extreme Right on the continent.

Maria also explains that there have also been a series of events that have weakened Brazilian democracy, aimed not just at PT but also at other left-wing parties. Earlier this year councilwoman Marielly Franco was murdered, PT president Dilma Rousseff was impeached and then Lula was arrested.

There is then a segment from a report by Amy Goodman explaining that Franco was a member of Rio de Janeiro’s council, a human rights activist. She and her driver were assassinated as they returned from an event on empowering Black women. Franco was a Black lesbian, who was fiercely critical of the police’s killing of people in the favela neighbourhoods. The night before her death she had Tweeted ‘How many more must die before this war ends?’ In January alone 154 people were killed by the cops in Rio State. Goodman goes on to say that last month President Temer ordered the military to assume control of police duties in Rio. Dilma Rousseff was impeached three years ago by the Brazilian senate in a move she denounced as a coup. Lula was leading in the polls, but had been convicted of corruption and money-laundering, charges many believe were trumped up. Rousseff stated that this was the second part of the coup, after her impeachment.

The British human rights lawyer, Geoffrey Robertson, told The New Internationalist ‘Extraordinarily aggressive measures are being taken to put Lula in jail by the judiciary, by the media, by the great sinews of wealth and power in Brazil’.

Maria then goes to a Brazilian academic at King’s College, London, Anthony Pereira, the professor and director of the Brazil institute there, who explains that this is nothing new but a relapse into Brazil’s ‘fashy disease’ from the 1960s, which was never properly cured.

Pereira explains that the transition from dictatorship to democracy was unique in that it was very slow and gradual, and unlike the Chilean transition, informal. It was managed by the regime itself, which changed the rules when it feared instability, dividing the opposition and making a lot of deals. Tancredo Hernandez was the first civilian candidate to win the presidency indirectly in 1985. After he won the election, Hernandez talked to the military and many other politicians and promised that there would be no revenge, no trials for human rights abuses, and that he would make sure that the political elite could make a smooth transition from the military to the civilian. There was a church report organized by the diocese of Sao Paolo on the human rights abuses, and people knew there had been torture, but these revelations were not state policy. This informal transition kept things very much as they had been. This explains why Bolsonaro’s discourse – his rhetoric – sounds very much like what was said in 1964, talking about the unity of the Brazilian family, how the left cannot divide the country, it cannot allow women to be against men, Afro-Brazilians to be against Whites, for homosexuals to be against heterosexuals. It’s a bit like One Nation Conservatism in Britain where there is a view of an organic, hierarchical society, patriarchal, dominated by the social elite. It has a place for everyone, but it rejects what it calls ‘activism’, associated with subversion and not being really Brazilian. And it rejects the Left, because of its association with Communism, Socialism and Venezuela. It’s a unity which excludes an awful lot of people.

Maria goes on to recommend that people watch the full pieces by Pereira and Greenwald explaining the country’s relationship with the workers’ party, PT. She also recommends that people look at the videos by the Intercept and Democracy Now. She states that people should be interested in this, not just because one of the world’s largest countries is going full Fascist, not just because the US and Britain have both had a hand in Brazil’s dictatorship, but also if they don’t want her to be silence or, worse, hunted down. She also recommends another female left-wing YouTuber from Brazil for those of her viewers who speak Portuguese. The videos and links to them are shown at the end of Maria’s video.

I’ve put this up as it seems that every Fascism in one guise or another is on the rise again. And the Fascist in one part of the world embolden and strengthen the stormtroopers in others. It’s also important to know that Britain also was involved in supporting the Brazilian dictatorship.

And Greenwald is right in that the forces that are enabling the rise of Bolsonaro are the same as those aiding the rise of the extreme right over here: globalism – not just confined to the Continent, but also a part of British economic policy – and an oligarchic media that is heavily biased against the Left.

And I was talking a few weeks ago to a left-wing minister at my local church, who wondered if Corbyn would ever be allowed to take power if he was elected. If his fears are justified, then what has happened to Lula da Silva will be repeated over here to stop Jeremy Corbyn and a genuine reforming, Socialist Labour government.

Max Blumenthal on the Real News Talking about the Nutters, Frauds and Fascists behind ‘Russiagate’

This is another example of the quality investigative journalism coming out of the alternative news media, which shows up the extremely biased reporting of the mainstream news.

In this clip, presenter Aaron Mate of the Real News Network talks to the author and journalist Max Blumenthal of AlterNet about a new, two-part series he’s made for the channel investigating the very shady figures behind the allegations that Russia has influenced a variety of left-wing movements in America through the use of bots in social media. Blumenthal states that most of these allegations overwhelmingly come from the Alliance for Securing Democracy. This outfit has claimed that Russia has influenced Black Lives Matter and the Take The Knee protests by NFL players following the lead of Colin Kaepernick. This organisation is responsible for the Hamilton 68 tracking software, which is used to trace the Russian bots. However, it won’t name or release the details of any of the websites that it supposedly tracks. Nevertheless, this organisation influenced Senator James Lankford to claim that the Take The Knee protests were the result of Russian propaganda. Blumenthal states that this is more or less the same allegation that was made against the Civil Rights Movements in the 1960s. Despite the complete absence of proof, the organisation has been uncritically cited as a reliable source by the mainstream news, including Scott Shane at the New York Times and Craig Tinberg at the Washington Post, as well as the Daily Beast. One of the main figures at the Alliance for Securing Democracy is Clint Watts, who has called for the government to quell ‘on-line rebellion’ and wants ‘nutritional labels’ put on websites to warn prospective browsers what their politics and links are. The Alliance for Securing Democracy is partly funded by the German Marshal Fund, which is one of the most respected think-tanks in Washington, and which is itself partly funded by the German government. The organisations and individuals now promoting ‘Russia-gate’ are also strongly funded by the Neocons.

Another major figure in these allegations is Aaron Weisburd. Weisburd has no training in Russia, and absolutely no expertise there either. He started his career as a self-declared defender of internet democracy by setting up the website, the Online Haaganah. This doxed – released the personal details – of Muslim and Palestinian web sites Weisburd decided was Islamist or anti-American. Along with the details of the webmasters, he’d also post the details of the websites’ IP providers, who would then come under attack by his fans. Blumenthal states that they are the same type of people as the Jewish Defence League, the violent wing of the Jewish anti-Islam movement. Weisburd has also put up on his site the writings of Daniel Pipes, another virulently anti-Islamic author.

But it hasn’t just been Muslims and Palestinians, who have been attacked by Weisburd and his slavering hordes. He’s also attacked other, left-wing sites, sometimes for the most trivial reasons. Like they showed the American flag upside down, or they dared to criticise George Bush.

Since setting up the website, Weisburd has gone on to take up a position at the George Washington Centre for Cyber and Homeland Security. It was Weisburd, who was brought in to design the Hamilton 68 software, which is being used as an effective blacklist of left-wing and dissenting websites. As well as doxing those he thinks are insufficiently patriotic, Weisburd has also posted up his own, violent fantasies about killing Glenn Greenwald, the editor of the Intercept. He also claimed that the Intercept was a vehicle for Russian propaganda, which Blumenthal states is just pure McCarthyism. Blumenthal also states that among the others pushing the story that Russia is attempting to distort American democracy through the Net are members of Hillary Clinton’s campaign team, including Laura Rosenberger and the former CIA director Michael Morell.

Returning to Clint Watts, Blumenthal states that he was formerly at an obscure and marginal think tank in Florida, the Foreign Policy Research Centre. This organisation was set up by a group of Austrian Fascists, who published eugenicist tracts and claimed that the peoples of the Developing World and non-Whites had lower IQs. They were fiercely in favour of the Cold War, and at one point denounced Stanley Kubrick’s satirical masterpiece, Dr. Strangelove, as Russian propaganda. Watts has also written a series of articles on his organisation’s cite and elsewhere urging the American government to spend taxpayers’ dollars to get Salafist Islamist terrorists to attack Russia and Iran. He also claimed that he had personally been attacked on-line by Russian bots. He has also spuriously claimed that RT and Sputnik were responsible for causing riots in Turkey. He has testified about this to Congress. When he released a transcript of this, which listed his sources, Blumenthal checked them. He states that in every single case it was either a lie, or a distortion or half-truth. As for Watts himself, he can’t speak Russian and has never produced any academic work on Russia. He’s simply not remotely a credible source.

I think some of this has been covered before by Counterpunch, or one of the other radical online news organisations. I can remember reading about how the allegations of Russian hacking and on-line interference was being promoted by the Clinton team, and promoted uncritically by the hacks at the New York Times and Washington Post. The same article also described how the allegations were also being produced and promoted by the Austrian eugenicists and Cold War Fascists.

It’s clear that these allegations are almost entirely insubstantial, and come from the extreme Right, as well as Hillary Clinton’s team in the Democrat Party. The last is trying to use Russia as a diversion and scapegoat for Killary losing the presidential election to Donald Trump. However, Hillary herself when she was in Obama’s cabinet showed every sign of wishing to increase tension with Russia and China. Her involvement in these allegations suggests that she’s genuinely hostile to Russia, and that she isn’t just making them because they just happen to be a convenient way of deflecting criticism from her.

What is disturbing is how seriously these allegations are being taken, including by people over this side of the Atlantic. When RT asked people outside Hillary’s book-signing event at the South Bank Centre ‘what went wrong?’, many of them answered that it was the Russians. And we’ve also seen Theresa May and the Tories criticise RT in Britain.

These allegations are simply another McCarthyite tactic designed to close down alternative news sources, and those websites that attack and criticise the neoliberal, corporatist establishment. This needs to be better known and called out. But I doubt very much that the mainstream media will do that, and certainly not the BBC over here.

The Young Turks: We Love Louise Mensch because She Is a Batsh*t Crazy Conspiracy Theorist

Remember Louise Mensch? She was a Tory MP over here, who appeared several times on TV before giving it all up to move to America. She was one of those, who regularly spouted outrageously stupid, uninformed, bigoted drivel. I’ve reblogged a number of articles from other left-wing bloggers taking apart her opinions to show them for the nonsense they are. One of the funniest critiques had a rough diagram of her face with an open mouth with an ‘X’ across in red, surrounded by a red border and captioned ‘Gobsh*te’ as an appropriate warning.

In this clip from TYT Politics, The Young Turks’ Michael Tracey talks about how he loves Mensch, because she has effectively abandoned reasoned political commentary to drone on about her weird conspiracy theories, and so is effectively discrediting the Republicans and the establishment media from within. He states that she had begun her political career as a propagandist for Marco Rubio. I think Rubio’s a Republican politico of the stripe that went into vapours about how Obamacare was a depraved Marxist plot to destroy American healthcare and thought that conditions should be made even worse for the unemployed and those on welfare. Which shows just how unpleasant Mensch’s own Conservative opinions must have been when she was an MP in Britain.

Now she’s given up trying to talk up Rubio, and has instead appeared on various chat shows telling America that just about everything and anyone she doesn’t like is part of a nefarious conspiracy by Putin. According to her, Andrew Breitbart, the head of the news agency that bears his name, was assassinated by Putin because the Russian president wanted his company to be taken over by Steve Bannon. She accused Glenn Greenwald, the respected left-wing journalist, of working for Putin and smeared his paper, the Intercept, as the Ivancept. She even accused Bernie Sanders of working for the Russians. This is nonsense, of course, but somehow she’s being taken seriously by a number of mainstream TV shows. She appeared on Bill Maher’s show the other night, when the comedian and news commenter gave her a very credulous reception.

Taylor loves her, because she is so bonkers that she’s unintentionally discrediting that part of the American political spectrum, just as the warm welcome she’s been given on TV shows by hosts, who really should know better, is also unintentionally discrediting their shows. The lesson here is: the mainstream media just broadcast paranoid bilge, like Louise Mensch. Go to the Internet and The Young Turks and other sites like them for proper, informed news and opinion.

Mensch has clearly taken over the massive Russophobia of the corporate Democrats, and their obsession with blaming the leaks about their own corruption on Russian intelligence. There isn’t much proof of this, and WikiLeaks themselves said they got the information from a disgruntled insider, not from Putin’s minions in Russian intelligence. I’ve put up a piece on here commenting on an article in Counterpunch, which reported how the Corporatist Democrats, the Washington Post and a very unpleasant group of racists and eugenicists accused a series of left-wing reporters and news organisations of being Russian propagandists in receipt of this information, without any proof whatsoever. It seems Mensch has simply taken this lies and expanded them until it seems she thinks that Putin is responsible for everything she thinks is wrong about American politics.

Now that she’s finally joined the ranks of the conspiracy theorists, we can start speculating how long it will be before she ends up like Alex Jones, babbling about how the global elites that control the world a really extradimensional satanic reptoid aliens, and that Hillary Clinton is a demonically possessed cyborg, who is part of a vast paedophile conspiracy. It’s the next step in this kind of madness.

And perhaps we also owe America an apology for exporting her over there, and thus wrecking American politics just that little bit more. Sorry, America.

Democracy Now! On the Failings of Media ‘Terrorism’ Pundits

This is a very relevant and serious piece from Democracy Now! In it, the two anchors talk to Glenn Greenwald and Lisa Stampnitzky, a social studies professor at Harvard and author of the book, Disciplining Terror, about how those, who appear on Fox News and the rest of the media claiming to be experts on terrorism actually aren’t. Greenwald and Stampnitzky point out that there is considerable academic disagreement about what constitutes ‘terror’ and ‘terrorism’, and that often the people credited with being experts are only called such because other media pundits have so called them.

They talk about some of the ludicrous statements made about Muslim terrorists, such as by Emerson, the Fox News pundit, who appeared on the Janine Pirro show talking about how Europe was riddled with Muslim no-go zones. He became notorious, and just about universally ridiculed over this side of the Pond as he claimed that Birmingham was one such Muslim state-within-a-state, and that non-Muslims didn’t go in there. To make this guy’s humiliation complete, they also play the section of the interview he gave on the Beeb, in which he had to admit he didn’t know what he was talking about, and that the interviewer asked him if he knew that David Cameron had called him ‘an idiot’.

There’s another, similar incident, where an American news anchor, talking to the director, Kohlmann, about his movie, The Al-Qaeda Plan, asks him if, after he talks about how al-Qaeda isn’t really understood, because it emerged in a part of the world with which most Americans are not familiar, and whose language they don’t speak, he’s now going to go to some of the places that he’s featured in his movie and learn Arabic. Kohlmann’s reply is to state that he has a degree in Islam, and speaks some Arabic, though he’s not fluent. He also says that it’s very, very difficult now to get into Pakistan.

Greenwald also points out that throughout history there’s been much debate over what constitutes ‘terrorism’. He cites the work of a French academic, who pointed out that the term really only came into widespread use in the late 60s and 70s, when it was used by the Israelis to universalise Arab attacks on them. They used to term to present their anti-terror campaign as part of a wider defence of the West against the threat of Islam. Greenwald also states that there has also been many, many attempts by the Western military and politicians to define terrorism in such a way, that they can use it to delegitimise the use of violence by their enemies, without having it applied to their own violence, or that of their allies. These definitions have also failed. He states controversially that at the moment, ‘terrorism’ simply means any act of violence committed by a Muslim.

The Democracy Now! anchors and Greenwald also discuss how the term really is only applied to Muslims, and that when terrorist acts are committed by White Christians, they are described in other terms – the perpetrators are insane, or loners, or whatever. An example of this was Timothy McVeigh’s terrible attack on the federal building in Oklahoma in the 1990s. Before it was discovered precisely who did it, it was briefly described as a ‘terrorist’ attack. Two of the suspects had Arab names, though it turned out these were just taxi drivers, who had gone there to have their licences renewed. When it was discovered that McVeigh, a White Christian, had committed the atrocity, the ‘terrorism’ label was dropped.

Similarly, Louis Stark, an extreme right-wing anti-tax nut also flew a plane into a government building. Again, when it was believed that this might be the work of Muslims, the attack was described as ‘terrorism’. When it was again found out that it was a White, Christian American, who was responsible, it again stopped being described as terrorism.

Here’s the video:

In Britain, the use of the term ‘terrorism’ is rather broader. It was used, for instance, to describe the atrocities committed by the paramilitaries in Northern Ireland. I also think it’s been used to describe the violence committed by the Basque separatist group, ETA, and in the 1970s to describe bombings and other attacks by Leftist extremist groups, like the French Action Direct and the Baader-Meinhof Gang in Germany. But nevertheless, the central point – that it’s only terrorism if it’s been committed by a Muslim – has been made by others as well as Democracy Now! I think the liberals over at The Young Turks have also discussed this issue.

Now, the violent attacks by al-Qaeda, ISIS, and other Islamist groups, like Boko Haram in Nigeria, are horrendous and truly deserve to be described as terrorism. But the term can also be applied to attacks by the West and its allies in the Middle East. The Young Turks have commented many times on the illegality of Obama’s drone strikes, and pointed out that they would be greeted with howls of outrage if a Muslim or foreign government carried them out against, say the KKK on American soil. Similarly, the Saudis’ targeting of Shi’a civilians in their attacks on supposed ‘terrorists’ in Yemen are another example of a type of terrorism, that isn’t described as such. And the Democracy Now! programme points out how the term terrorism was not used to describe the Contras and the other South American death squads supported by Ronald Reagan in the 1980s.

Terrorism, as they point out, is a highly emotive, value-laden term, and the people appearing as experts on it on the news by and large, according to the programme, just recycle American government propaganda. The lesson is that you have to be careful, not just about how trustworthy the experts are, but also about the way the term ‘terrorism’ is being deliberately used in a way to stigmatize America’s enemies, while avoiding what’s committed by America, and its allies, including us in Britain.

More on US Military Funding of al-Qaeda and Islamist Militants

I’ve received a couple more extremely interesting comments from Michelle Thomasson about the wars in the Middle East and the US funding of Islamist militants. She writes

You probably already have this info… but just in case it is also relevant here. One of the three most important military officials re the war on terror, General Flynn (was head of the Defence Intelligence Agency), is caught admitting on video what the U.S. government already knew in 2012 about the establishment of a caliphate by Islamic extremists and then still supplying them the arms (though not mentioning they may have been supplying some clapped out weaponry). Clip from Democracy Now, https://youtu.be/MQDRGrA9I7A?t=3m17s

If people really understood!

and

The information is out there, yet still most of our mainstream media peddle devastating misinformation for the war mongers!!

Here is a very telling clip from Joe Biden talking to people at Harvard. I can imagine he thought they were too smart to try and fool hence the honesty to appear ‘informed’ but he has tried to withdraw comments since his admission. The clip is just over 2mins and the Biden mishap comes in at 1 min:

Interestingly, Qatar mentioned in the link above was involved in paying a very large ransom to IS for UN peacekeepers under the scrutiny of the Israelis, it is a rather unusual way to openly give militants a big wad of money: https://youtu.be/PMDc_NBsfi0

And with Israel that brings up a conundrum, as ISIS/IS (Daesh) is just an extension of Wahhabism why have these recent medieval-like slaughterers not included Israel in their target sights? Wahhabism was always against Zionist goals…

And for your records here is Hilary Clinton admitting how they used the “Wahhabi brand of Islam to go beat the Soviet Union” makes it sound like a baseball match! This information is so terrible, when are they going to wake up to what they are doing re the havoc, desperation and destruction they have designed for millions of people?

I also have some short notes I wrote up on the roots of Wahhabism if you want them with an interesting quote re Zionism from John McHugo the author of ‘A Concise History of the Arabs'(2014)

I’d be very interested in the notes on the origins of Wahhabism, as well as the quote about Zionism from John McHugo. And it is very strange that Israel has not been attacked by ISIS or al-Qaeda, when so much Arab and Islamic politics is fiercely hostile to the Jewish state. If you look on Youtube, there are a number of pieces on there claiming that ISIS is the creation of the Israelis and funded by Mossad. I haven’t looked at them, because it’s too much like some of the stupid, genocidal conspiracy theories about Jews and Zionism that influence and motivate the Neo-Nazis, ever since the Protocols of the Elders of Zion.

And the mainstream media is silent about nearly all of this. The award-winning American journalist, Glenn Greenwald, speaking on one of the clips, explains why mainstream American journalists are hostile to blowing the lid off this particular can of worms. He states that journalists are just as susceptible to the hyper-patriotism as the rest of society; that many of them come from the same socio-economic groups as the politicians, generals and business leaders they interview. They’re dependent on them for stories, and so don’t press them or criticise them, for fear of losing leads or stories. He also adds that much of it is motivated by professional jealousy after the Snowden revelations. They were angry at the way they were excluded from the material Snowden revealed, and bitter about the way he received journalism awards while they didn’t. So they’re personally hostile against him, and against the journalism he represents.

Lobster, the parapolitics magazine, has also been discussing the issue, and the reason why mainstream historians by and large are hostile to taking into account the role of clandestine groups in politics. Any mention of conspiracies is excluded from respectable academic discussion as it recalls all the murderous and stupid fantasies about vast, global conspiracies by Jews and Freemasons, fantasies that have resulted in the deaths of millions. But real conspiracies – by corporations, secret political groups and the secret state, do exist. You only have to look at the way the CIA orchestrated coups in Latin America and the Middle East. Or simply at the way the CIA again funded much radical art and movements in the 1950s through to the 1970s, in order to present the West as much more culturally pluralistic and democratic, in contrast to the monolithic, totalitarian East.

Some of this reluctance to concede the role of clandestine groups is probably due to academic inertia. Doctoral students are placed under the supervision of academic supervisors, who made demand major changes to their work if they don’t agree with it. Doctoral students are required to show they can make an original contribution to research, and while students obviously do need advice and guidance, it also puts limits on how original or radical an academic dissertation can be. Also, some of the academic institutions are in receipt of monies from the intelligence services. Lobster also published a list of these some time ago.

I also think part of the problem is that the whole notion of the role of powerful, secret interest groups controlling politics is unacceptable because it problematizes vast areas of contemporary politics. The dominant ideal of the democratic West is that our rulers are essentially benign, and however beneficial or detrimental their particular party politics may be, the foundation of their power is that of the sovereign individual, as established by liberal political theorists going back to John Locke. It is also tacitly assumed that government and corporations will also work for the public good, despite obvious scandals involving political corruption.

Genuine parapolitics raises profound question marks about all this, by showing how secret groups or factions within political parties, in concert with allies in the media and the military-industrial complex, can and do manipulate public opinion, and world affairs without reference to any kind of democratic mandate. Instead of the Whig view of history, which sees it as the gradual march of progress, culminating in the establishment of liberal democracy, or the Marxist view, which sees history as produced by impersonal economic forces producing inevitable changes to the social fabric, and hence the ruling ideologies, it shows history to be made by big business and political factions, with the sovereign people there only to provide a democratic façade for decisions that have already been made by their social superiors for their own class political and economic benefit. It explicitly raises the problem that you can’t trust what politicians and big business tell you. And not just in the superficial, cynical sense, but right to the core of the political process and the nature of the democratic state itself.

And that’s unacceptable to large parts of the media and the academic establishment, embedded and nurtured as they are by the status quo.