Having looked at the Art Newspaper’s report on the withdrawal of the ‘Medicine Man’ gallery at the Wellcome Museum and its replacement with shamanistic performances by Grace Ndiritu, along with her biography on Wikipedia, I think I now understand what’s happened there. One of the names that leapt out at me reading the Art Newspaper article was Dan Hicks. He was one of the lecturers in the Archaeology and Anthropology Department at Bristol University when I was there. This is going back over a decade, and when I saw him, he was young and hip. I think his speciality is Historical Archaeology, and from what I remember he has co-edited a series of papers about it. Over here, Historical Archaeology is merely that branch of archaeology concerned with monuments and artefacts from historical times, rather than prehistory. Over the Pond, however, it is very definitely ideologically loaded, and concerns itself with colonialism, the oppression of the indigenous peoples, slavery and the emergence of capitalism. And this focus can be very clear in the work of some lecturers and academics. It’s not all like this – some of the historical archaeological research is less left-wing. While doing my Ph.D., one of the papers I consulted was about the building of 18th century Annapolis and how it conformed to 18th century ideas about architecture and society. For example, the buildings were deliberately constructed with large windows so that outsiders could look in. This came from the view that business should be conducted as far as possible in public view, so that public scrutiny would make sure that everything was correct, orderly and legal. Hicks’ doctoral student studied the archaeology of Long Kesh, the Maze Prison, in Ulster. She gave a seminar one lunchtime about her research, and she was very, very good. She presented an excellent case for its preservation and exhibition from a non-sectarian perspective as somewhere that was vital to the heritage of the people of Northern Ireland.
Archaeology has also expanded its scope in recent decades. When most of us think of archaeology, I’m pretty sure it’s of prehistory and ancient civilisations like Egypt, Greece and Rome. But it can also be much more recent, taking in not just the Middle Ages but also recent history up to the Second World War and beyond. One of the lads I knew was studying World War II tank defences around Bristol and Somerset. There was even a pillbox study group, which catalogued and documented the various WWII pillboxes left along the country’s coasts and beaches to protect us from invasion. There has, like Ndiritu at the Wellcome Museum, also been artistic events performed or staged around pieces of archaeology. In one of these in America an historic barn or house was allowed to decay, with photographs taken and finally displayed showing its gradual destruction. When I was there, the archaeology department had been part of a similar project concerning the various objects at Severn Beach, a holiday resort near Bristol. From what I dimly recall, this photographed and decorated such historic monuments as the public benches and decaying boats. This was too ‘arty’ in the pejorative sense for some of the people at the seminar on it I attended. They saw themselves very definitely as scientists. It was too arty for me, and I see myself much more as coming from the arts rather than the sciences.
There was, at the time, a general movement towards drawing different disciplines together, and especially the arts and sciences. Interdisciplinary subjects were in vogue, and there was much talk about overcoming C.P. Snow’s ‘two cultures’ arts and science, in which people from one side of the cultural divide had no knowledge or interest in the other. One such artistic project based in science I read about in New Scientist featured genetically modified organisms. One of these was a cactus, whose DNA had been tinkered with so that instead of prickles, it grew hair. Ndiritu’s performances at the Wellcome Collection come from archaeology and anthropology, rather than genetic engineering, but they are part of the same project of mixing science and art.
Her Wikipedia entries also mentions work at the AfricaMuseum in Belgium. Way back when I was at the Empire and Commonwealth Museum I got material from Belgium about some of their museums looking at their countries imperial history. One of these was a series of artistic projects and performances in the country’s museum about the Belgian Congo. As I’m sure readers are well aware, King Leopold’s personal rule in the Congo is one of the bloodiest holocausts in African history. About 8 million people are supposed to have been murdered by his Force Publique in order to produce rubber for export. I’ve been told that the country tried to forget about it all, until the first years of the 21st century when these events were staged at the museum as part of the confrontation with this infamous period in Belgian history.
There have also been other archaeological and anthropological events and displays in which indigenous peoples have performed their religious rituals. A few years ago, if I recall correctly, there was one where Amerindian shamans performed their people’s rites. When the exhibit is of those peoples, then it is only fair to include the people themselves. I think this is what was going on in the Wellcome Museum with Ndiritu and her shamanism. It looks like it’s an attempt by indigenous African culture to claim a proper place in the exhibit as a counterpoint to western rationalism.
This does not mean, however, that it should be free from criticism or that such criticism is right-wing. The decolonisation movement does indeed have as its goal the decentring of western science and historiography. It goes far beyond the usual explanation about including overlooked non-western and indigenous perspectives. The ‘Science Must Fall’ movement really existed. And some of the critical of modern postcolonial theory are left-wing feminists. Asian feminists, for example, have complained that they are given no support by western postmodern feminists in their struggle against their cultures’ own restrictions on women, because postcolonialism is only interested in such problems if they are caused by the West. This is described by Bricmont and Sokal in their 90’s attack on Postmodernism, Intellectual Impostures. And Sokal is, or was, very much a man of the left. He was a physicist who gave up his career to teach maths in Nicaragua under the left-wing Sandinista regime.
I also wonder how this all fits with Edward Said’s critique of western views of the east, Orientalism. His book was a polemic arguing that the west since ancient Greece had regarded the east as the Other, and produced images to justify its conquest and domination. Western travellers and explorers had therefore presented it as backward, irrational and feminine and somehow unchanging. But Nditiru’s performances are based on the non-scientific irrational and traditional, which are now presented as positive. This is indeed a challenge to the view of magic in indigenous cultures that I remember from my childhood. I can remember watching a BBC documentary about African shamanism when I was in my early teens, in which the voiceover concluded that while western science had succeeded in discovering so much about the world and made so many advances, while magic had reached an end and could produce no such advances. The great British scientist and broadcaster, Jacob Bronowski, said something similar in his TV series and book, The Ascent of Man. He looked at the traditional culture of one of Iran’s nomadic people, and considered that it similarly locked them in a stifling, unchanging world. Bronowski was no man of the right. He was a member of the Fabian Society at a time when that actually meant something, before it was taken over by the Blairites.
I am also very much aware of the crisis that has affected many indigenous society with the collapse of their world of meaning through contact with western modernity and the legacy of colonialism and imperialism. But there are also dangers in idealising indigenous societies. I mentioned in my previous article that in Nigeria, priests from one of the country’s pagan religions had been involved in the acquisition of slaves, and that a South African anthropologist had attempted to defend muti human sacrifice at a convention in this country, as well as witchcraft and witch hunting in Africa. Those aspects of indigenous religion and spirituality shouldn’t be ignored. I am not saying they should be stressed to restore the old image of Africa as a backward continent needing western civilisation, but not all the continent’s ills should be ascribed to western rationalism either. Hence it should be perfectly legitimate to question this latest policy by the Wellcome Museum, regardless of whether one is politically right or left.
Mike today put up a piece about the two candidates the government is considering sticking on the back of the fifty pound note. They are Alan Turing, the wartime mathematical genius, who broke the enigma code and helped shorten the war. One of the machines Turing designed, or helped design to break the code was programmable, and Turing is respected as one of the founders of modern computing.
He was, however, gay at a time when it was very much against the law. He was convicted of gross indecency, and chemically castrated, which led to him taking his own life.
Thatcher, on the other hand, is the woman whose policies have inflicted nothing but misery on this planet for nearly forty years. She started the Tories’ and New Labour’s privatization programme, including that of the NHS, the destruction of the welfare state and deliberately made signing on for unemployment benefit as humiliating as possible, in order to deter the poor from doing so. She was also determined to break the unions, manufacturing a strike by the NUM through the gutting of British coalmining, purely to break the union that had brought down Heath’s government years before. And she used the police has her army to attack and beat the miners, aided by a complicit media, including the Beeb. These ran the footage of the strike at Orgreave colliery backwards to make it appear that the miners were attacking the police, while it was the other way round.
Exactly as the great peeps on Twitter, whose comments Mike quotes in his piece about it.
Ah, but Thatcher was a chemist! She worked for Walls, inventing the process that injects air into ice cream to make it appear that there’s more of it than there is.
Well, if the government wants to put scientists, and especially women scientists, on the fifty pound note, I’ve got a few suggestions of my own. Female scientists they could choose include:
Dorothy Hodgkin. She’s the woman who should have got the prize for discovering the structure of DNA, as Crick and Watson were looking completely in the wrong direction until they walked past the door of her lab, and heard her talking about her work. She lost the Nobel to them, but did get another prize for another great discovery she made. If she hasn’t been already, it’s the right time to have her commemorated on our folding stuff.
Jocelyn Bell Purnell. She was the astronomer, who discovered pulsars. These are tiny, dense stars at the end of their lives, which send out a radio signal. They spin very quickly, so that the signal sweeps across the sky, so that they appear as a regular beat. At first it was believed that they might be signals from an extraterrestrial civilization. Some astronomers also believe that, while they’re natural, space-traveling aliens could use them as lighthouses to navigate their way across the Galaxy.
Helen Sharman. She’s another chemist, though at Mars, rather than Walls. But she is know for being the first Brit into space when she joined the British-Russian space mission to Mir in the 1980s. Since then, she’s been something of a science educator, appearing at events to encourage children to take up science.
Caroline Herschel. She’s the brother of John Herschel, and daughter of William. She and her brother were astronomers in 18th century Bath, making telescopes and discovering new stars.
I’m sure there are many others. These are all astronomy and space related, because that’s the area I’m interested in and know most about. All of these ladies have a better claim to be on the Fifty pound note than Thatcher.
But if you want another bloke, how about Dr. Jacob Bronowski. He was another mathematician working during the War. He was also the presenter of the 1970s Beeb science blockbuster, The Ascent of Man. He was also a Fabian socialist with a hatred of war. In The Ascent of Man he makes his view of armed conflict very clear by saying: ‘War is theft by other means’. It’s parody of Clausewitz’s famous phrase ‘War is politics by other means’. Bronowski’s description of war is very true, especially now when we’ve seen that the humanitarian interventions in the Middle East have all been about conquering them in order to despoil their oil reserves, loot their state industries and stop any kind of Arab and Islamic support for Israel. And Iran appears to be next on the hit list.
However, I do like the suggestion of Raab C. Brexit that it should be the sage of Govan, Rab C. Nesbitt on the notes. Having his mug staring out at them might just put a few of the really filthy rich off when they get it out to pay for their bottle of Krug.
Remember, it was Nesbitt who predicted that there’d be a war between the Toffs and the Scum. The Toffs would win initially, because they’ve got the army. But the Scum would be the victors, because they have all the Rottweilers.
This is an extremely important piece from Jimmy Dore, the American comedian, who sometimes appears as a guest on the left-wing internet news show, The Young Turks. Dore is a consistent critic of American imperialism and its long history of overthrowing and destabilising the governments of poor nations around the globe, when they don’t bow down and surrender to American and Western political and corporate interests.
In this video, he comments on a piece published by John F. Kennedy jnr in EcoWatch and Politics magazines. This article provides damning, point for point proof that the reason for the civil war and calls in the West for military intervention in Syria has nothing to do with humanitarian concerns. John Kerry, one of the main movers in this, isn’t interested or concerned by how many children have been killed or hospitals bombed by Assad. The real reason is what you might expect it to be, given the similar circumstances that were used to justify the invasion of Iraq.
It’s all about the petrochemical industry. And in this case, it’s a natural gas pipeline, proposed in 2000 by Qatar. This would cost $10 billion and run for 1,500 km from Qatar, through Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Syria and Turkey. Another gas pipeline has also been proposed, which would run from Iran, through Iraq to Syria. These are both opposed by Russia. But they are most opposed to the Qatar to Turkey pipeline. Russia sells 70 per cent of its oil exports to Europe. Putin therefore regards this pipeline as an ‘existential threat’, a NATO plot to change the existing political and economic situation, deprive Russia of its only foothold in the Middle East, strangle the Russian economy and deny it leverage in the European energy market.
Syria also opposes the pipeline. In 2009 Assad refused to sign the agreement allowing the pipeline to pass through his country in order to protect the interests of the Russians, who are his allies. The moment he made this decision, military and intelligence planners formulated a plan to start a Sunni uprising in Syria.
Fore quotes another commenter, Cy Hersh, who states that before the war, Assad was actually beginning to liberalise the country. He gave thousands of files on jihadi radicals to the CIA after 9/11, as he viewed the jihadis as his and America’s mutual enemies.
On September 13th, 2013, the American Secretary of State, John Kerry, told congress that the Sunni kingdoms in the Middle East – that is, countries like Qata and Saudi Arabia – had offered to pay for an American invasion of Syria to overthrow Assad. He repeated this statement to Representative Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, a Republican congresswoman for Florida.
Two years before this, the US had joined France, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Turkey and England to form the ‘Friends of Syria Coalition’, which demanded the removal of Assad. The CIA also paid $6 million to Barada, a TV company in Britain, to run pieces demanding Assad’s overthrow. Files from Saudi Intelligence released by WikiLeaks also show that by 2012 Turkey, Qatar and Saudi Arabia were training, arming and funding Sunni jihadists from Syria, Iraq and elsewhere.
Dore makes the point that the decision to use a civil war between Sunnis and Shi’as isn’t a new policy. In 2008 a report by the Rand Corporation, funded by the Pentagon, provided the blueprint for the strategy. This stated that the control of the petrochemical resources in the Persian Gulf was a strategic priority for America, and that this would ‘intersect strongly with that of prosecuting the long war.’
He also points out that this is the same policy America has adopted against nations the world over when they have refused to serve American interests. It’s particularly similar to the overthrow of the Iranian prime minister, Mossadeq, in the 1950s. Iran at that time was a secular democracy, just as Syria is a secular state. However, America was afraid of Arab nationalism, linking it with Communism. Mossadeq nationalised the Iran oil industry, which was previously in the hands of the West. So the CIA arranged a coup, which led to the Shah eventually ruling as the country’s absolute monarch. Until he was toppled in 1979 by the Islamic Revolution, which produced the Ayatollah Khomeini and the current Iranian regime that has been a bitter opponent of America ever since.
Dore also states that it was known long before this that American intervention in the Middle East and elsewhere was turning the world’s peoples against America. He cites a report by Bruce Lovett in the 1950s which condemned American military interventions around the world as ‘antithetical to American leadership’ and moral authority, and noting that this occurred without Americans knowledge. In other words, as Dore points out, they don’t hate the US because America enjoys freedoms that they don’t possess. They hate America because America bombs and kills them. The people in those countries are well aware of what is occurring, but this is carefully kept from America’s own people.
This is all too plausible. Dore’s own producers off-camera state that they’re not conspiracy theorists, but there’s nothing in this that is implausible given America’s foreign policy record.
This is the real reason we have people in our own parliament, like Bomber Benn, demanding military action against Assad in Syria. It also shows, on a more philosophical level, how right Jacob Bronowski, the scientist and member of the Fabian Society, when he decried war as ‘theft by other means’.
None of this makes Putin any less of a thug and a bully domestically. And Assad is also guilty of horrific human rights abuses. But those are not the reasons we’re being led into another war in the Middle East, and possibly with Russia.
I can remember back in 1990 when Gulf War 1 broke out. There were protesters chanting, ‘Gosh, no, we won’t go. We won’t die for Texaco’. The Green Party denounced it as a ‘resource war’. They were right then, and I’ve no doubt whatsoever they’re right now.
Our courageous young men and women should not be sent to die just to despoil another nation of its natural resources, and inflate the already bloated wealth of more petrochemical industry executives and oil sheikhs. And we definitely shouldn’t be doing anything to assist the Saudis, the very people who are giving lavish material aid to al-Qaeda and ISIS in order to export a viciously intolerant and brutal Islamism around the world through military force.
And a little while ago I mentioned how the veteran British comics writer, Pat Mills, had put in a few satirical comments about the Gulf War in the ABC Warriors strip in 2000 AD. In the stories about the Volgan War, the robot soldiers recount how they fought in a war against the Russians, the real cause of which was to steal the Russians’ oil reserves after the world had past the tipping point. This was called by the Volgans/Russians the ‘Fourth Oil War’.
Russia has indeed vast resources of oil and other minerals, which it exports around the world. And again, NATO forces are building up in eastern Europe, with NATO generals predicting that by May next year, we will be at war with Russia. It seems to me that Mills is right, probably more than he knew when he wrote the strip, and that the West really is pushing for a war to seize their oil.
This may lead us all into nuclear Armageddon. Quite apart from being grossly immoral.
We have to stop it.
As Hammerstein and his metal comrades say: ‘Increase the peace’.
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.
Yesterday Gloria de Piero, one of the Blairites, published a piece in the Scum calling on ‘moderate’ Labour supporters to join the party to vote out Jeremy Corbyn. Mike over at Vox Political has put up a piece today quoting a piece by one of those, who has, and asking if the person, who wrote it is really as left-leaning as they seem, and do people want someone like that in the Labour party?
The author of the piece seems to have been taken in by all the vile Blairite spin and propaganda. Jeremy Corbyn and his supporters are racist, anti-Semitic and misogynistic, and have no interest in doing anything positive for the people of this country. They also state that they joined the party because they supported the invasion of Iraq and the consequent overthrow of Saddam Hussein. Curiously, they seem to believe that Iraq is now a genuinely functioning democracy. The invasion, they declare, is one of the UK’s finest achievements since World War II. And then they proudly announce that they’re deliberately rejoining the Labour party on the 4th July, stating that the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, should also be our aspiration.
Blairite Atlanticism and the Worship of the American Constitution
Looking at the piece, it’s so over the top that I genuinely wonder if whoever wrote really is an ordinary member of the public. Blair and his cronies, including Broon, Ed Balls and so on, were fervent supporters of America. Blair himself was a product of the Reaganite British-American Project for the Successor Generation, or BAP. This was set up by the Gipper in the 1980s to train the next generation of British politicians to support the Atlantic Alliance. Its alumni went on courses in America to study the country’s political traditions. Before Blair went on one of these jaunts, he was a supporter of CND. After he came back, he was very definitely in favour of Britain keeping its nuclear deterrence. Broon and Balls also studied at American universities. And in government, Blair was so keen to emulate JFK or Roosevelt, I forget quite which, that he and Mandelson called each other by the names of those politicos.
There are many people, who would like Britain to have a written constitution, so that we can hold our rulers to account when they break it, or traduce reasonable standards of democracy. But the idealisation of the American Constitution and the Declaration of Independence tends to be far more characteristic of the American Right, who love the idea of limited government, the defence of private property and gun rights. Cameron’s statement that he wants to repeal European human rights legislation and replace it with a British Bill of Rights looks like an attempt to introduce that aspect of American political culture over here. Especially as very many of the Conservatives also have business and political connections in America, and admire the American tradition of laissez-faire capitalism and minimal worker’s rights and welfare state.
The Undemocratic Invasion of Iraq
Then there’s that rubbish about Blair’s invasion of Iraq being the greatest of this country’s achievements since the Second World War. This is quite preposterous. I can think of many better achievements: the setting up of the welfare state, decolonisation and the transformation of the Empire into the Commonwealth (with caveats), the abolition of the death penalty and the launch of the Black Knight British-Australian space rocket, which put a British-built satellite in orbit in 1975. Other greater British achievements I would argue include Jodrell Bank, Jocelyn Bell-Purnell’s discovery of Pulsars, Crick and Watson’s discovery of the structure of DNA and the Mini. Oh yes, and the Beatles, Rolling Stones, Led Zeppelin and the sheer fact that Ozzie Osborne is still with us. In fact, just about everything peaceful Britain has done after World War II, which hasn’t involved us invading anyone or stealing their industries and resources.
Which is what happened in the invasion of Iraq.
Of course, there were and presumably still are people, who’ve been taken in by Blair’s lies. That he had weapons of mass destruction. Which he didn’t. That he was ready to invade at 45 minutes notice. He wasn’t. That he aided Osama bin Laden. A really grotesque lie – Hussein was a secular nationalist. Bin Laden hated his regime and everything it stood for.
And the greatest lie of all: that the war was fought for democracy. This one, the worst of them all, had some plausibility because Hussein was indeed a brutal dictator. He gassed the Kurds when they rose up, and massacred the Shi’a minority. He was a brutal thug. And he had started out as our thug. He was on the American’s payroll to assassinate leading Iraqi politicians in the 1950s, but was never able to carry it off, and escaped back into Syria. See the book A Brutal Friendship on how bloody the relationship between Britain and the comprador elites in the Arab nations really is. The invasion of Iraq also formed part of a narrative in which Britain unselfishly sends her troops all over the world to give evil foreign dictators a good kicking and liberate their grateful peoples. That was the way Gladstone sold the Empire to us in the 19th century, even when members of his cabinet were writing ‘a love of empire is a love of war’. It was the rationale behind Britain sending troops to Bosnia and Kosovo to fight the Serbs and protect the local Muslim populations. Many liberals no doubt supported the invasion because they genuinely believed it was, for all its faults, another humanitarian police action. There was even a book, reviewed in Lobster, which aimed to present a Socialist case for the Neocons’ foreign policy.
But it was never about democracy. It was simply about oil. And Israel, and pure economic imperialism.
The Republicans in America and Israel’s Likud party had put together joint plans for the invasion of Iraq way back in the 1990s. Hussein was arming and supporting the Palestinians. The oil barons wanted him out the way, as his erratic policy on oil exports was causing massive fluctuations in price. And both the Americans and the Saudis wanted to get their mitts on the Iraqi oil industry and its reserves, which are the largest outside Saudi Arabia itself. And the Neocons wanted to privatise the Iraqi economy so that American multinationals could loot all the profitable Iraqi state enterprises, and they could play at real politicians by creating their low tax, free trade state.
The result has been sheer, unmitigated chaos. The results of the American economic policy has been that the Iraqi unemployment rate shot up to 60%. Community relations between the various tribes and sects in Iraq has been destroyed. There are peace walls – barricades – between the Sunni and Shi’a quarters of Baghdad, which didn’t exist before. Members of the American armed forces, who are supposed to be paragons and democratic virtue, instead behave as Nazis. The real-life soldier, who formed the basis for the hero in Clint Eastwood’s Sniper, was a racist butcher. The mess he ate and drank in was festooned with Nazi insignia, and the army, to the shock of one of Obama’s diplomats, is permeated with a deep, visceral hatred and contempt for the Iraqi people. This goes far beyond hating the remnants of Hussein’s army, or the Islamist terrorists that have expanded into the power vacuum. It includes ordinary Iraqi civilians. The Sniper mentioned above claims to have shot ordinary Iraqis. One very senior American officer in charge of the occupying forces provided American aid to Sunni death squads, which murdered and terrorised the Shi’a. American squaddies and private military contractors – what in the old days we called ‘mercenaries’ – have been found running everything from prostitution rings. They’ve even gone on shooting sprees, committing drive-by killings of ordinary Iraqis just for fun.
And the country is less than a functioning democracy. It is effectively a US client state. Much of it has been taken over by the ISIS’ thugs, while the Iranians are also seeking to expand their influence with the country’s Shi’a. Some of this mess comes from the fact that George W. Bush, Blair’s Best Friend and the rest of the Neocons had no clue about Arab and Middle Eastern politics and culture, beyond their own crappy ideology. And they believed the lies spouted by one Ahmed Chalabi, who claimed that he led the Iraqi resistance, and they would be welcomed as liberators when they invaded.
The invasion has not created a stable democracy. It has instead produced little beyond misery and carnage. It also amply demonstrates something Jacob Bronowski said in his blockbusting popular science series, The Ascent of Man. Clausewitz famously coined the phrase, ‘War is politics by other means’. Bronowski was a Fabian Socialist as well as a scientist, and had a much bleaker, colder view of armed conflict: ‘War is theft by other means’. In Iraq’s case, he was right.
A Blairite PR Piece?
Looking at the piece, it seems less to me to be a genuine statement by an ordinary member of the public, and more like another piece of PR guff from the Blairites. New Labour was notorious for spin and lies. After all, they ‘sexed up’ the ‘dodgy dossier’ with falsehoods in order to justify the invasion. And just because they’re out of power hasn’t stopped them carrying on. Jack Straw’s son’s PR outfit, Portland Communications, was behind the staged heckling of Jeremy Corbyn at a gay pride rally, and a T-shirt demanding the eradication of ‘Blairite vermin’ was the product of the fetid little mind of another Blairite, Anna Philips, and her pet ‘Creative Consultant and Media Guru’. One of Corbyn’s promises is that he intends to prosecute Blair for war crimes. Blair was on TV recently claiming he wasn’t worried, and trying to justify the debacle. But as this piece shows, clearly he and very many of his followers are worried.
This is another photograph of the poor, this time from the countryside. It’s of a farm labourer and his family from Jacob Bronowski’s book accompanying and with the same title as his blockbuster science series, The Ascent of Man (London: BBC 1973) pp. 260-1. In that part of the book, dealing with the Industrial Revolution, Bronowski shows what the reality of life was like for most of the people in the British countryside during the 18th and 19th centuries. The caption for the photo reads:
‘The Labourer lived in poverty and darkness. The first photographs of rural life come as a shock. They belie any idyll of rusticity.’
In the main body of the text, he writes
‘We dream that the country was idyllic in the eighteenth century, a lost paradise like The Deserted Village that Oliver Goldsmith described in 1770:
Sweet Auburn, loveliest village of the plain,
Where health and plenty cheared the labouring swain.
How blest is he who crowns in shades like these,
A youth of labour with an age of ease.
That is a fable, and George Crabbe, who was a country parson and knew the villager’s life at first hand, was so enraged by it that he wrote an acid, realistic poem in reply.
Yes, thus the Muses sing of happy Swains,
Because the Muses never knew their pains.
O’ercome by labour and bow’d down by time,
Feel you the barren flattery of a rhyme?
The country was a place where men worked from dawn to dark, and the labourer lived not in in the sun, but in poverty and darkness.’ (p. 260).
In addition to being a brilliant scientist and science populariser, Bronowski was also a member of the Fabian Society. He wrote one of their pamphlets on ‘Socialism and Science’. Conservatism relies very much on an highly selective, idealised past. This is particularly true now as the Tories attempt to remove or minimise the institutions of the welfare state. One of the Times’ blue-blooded reviewers talked about a new ‘social restoration’ of the aristocracy under Thatcher, harking back to the ancient aristocratic order of lords and peasants. This was what it was really like for most people in the countryside in the 19th century, in stark contrast to the fantasies of the upper classes. And it’s what Osborne and co. are trying to bring back.
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