New Series Next Tuesday on African Civilisations

Next Tuesday, 29th May 2018, at 10.00 pm there’s a new series beginning on BBC4 entitled Africa’s Great Civilisations. It’s a six part series, with the first part on ‘origins’. The blurb for it on page 77 of the Radio Times reads

Henry Louis Gates jnr. takes a new look at the history of Africa, from the birth of humankind to the dawn of the 20th century. he takes in the city of Great Zimbabwe, the pyramids of Meroe and the rock-hewn churches of Lalibela in Ethiopia.

The little piece about it on page 75 by Gill Crawford also gives the following description of the show:

Celebrated African-American literary scholar Henry Louis Gates Jr presents this wide-ranging, grand-scale six-part history of the African continent, originally shown by the PBS network in the US.

In this first episode, we start in the heart of Ethiopia, where the story of humanity began. And while we now that many African peoples migrated away from the continent to create other societies, others stayed to form great civilisations in Egypt, Sudan and Nigeria, culminating in the Queen of Meroe who stood up to the might of the Roman Empire.

It’s a fest of splendours, and Gates is an eloquent guide.

There have been a number of series on African history over the years. Back in the 1980s the Black African historian, Dr. Ali Mazrui, and the White Afro-centrist historian, Basil Davidson, both presented series on Africa. Eight years ago in 2010 the Black art historian, Gus Casely-Hayford also presented a splendid four-part series on BBC 4, The Lost Kingdoms of Africa, on the continent’s pre-colonial civilisations. I also seem to recall a BBC4 programme, which I thought was presented by Aminatta Forna, but I might be wrong, on the great Islamic civilisation of medieval Timbuktu.

Africa has been the centre of some very advanced civilisations, such as Benin and its superb bronzes, Nubia and the Swahili of what is now Tanganyika. The Swahilis built their cities from coral, and covered them with a limewash made by burning the same material.

Ancient Meroe, however, remains a mystery. It was a literate civilisation, using Egyptian hieroglyphs, and they left inscriptions on their monuments, like their pyramids. However, their language is unrelated to any spoken today, and no parallel texts in known languages, like the Rosetta Stone for ancient Egyptian, have been found. So although we can read their tests, we’ve no idea what they mean. Who knows what wealth of information is in there? It’s all very frustrating. Grrr!

TYT: Bernie TV Exploding, But You Won’t See This on Mainstream News

Except when they decide that this radical upstart needs to be given a metaphorical good kicking, of course.

In this clip from The Young Turks, anchor Cenk Uygur talks about the massive growth in popularity of Bernie Sanders on the internet. The progressive senator from Vermont uses Twitter and has his own Facebook page, where he posts videos of himself discussing issues with other leading academics, writers, people of faith, scientists and broadcasters.

The figures of the number of people following him and viewing his page are impressive. He has 4.7 million followers on Twitter, and his Facebook page has so far garnered 7 million likes. This is more than double his nearest Congressional rivals Elizabeth Warren and Cory Booker. His Facebook page has also had 164 million video views since the beginning of the year. Last week, 1.8 million people were talking about his Facebook page. This was more than the New York Times, MTV, Vice and some network news outlets. Even a 40 second video of Sanders standing next to a ficus plant talking into a phone got 14 million views. This is beyond the figures for anyone on cable news, including Fox News’ Bill O’Reilly.

So who does he get on his show as guests? They’ve included Rev. William Binder, the leader of the ‘Moral Monday’ movement, Josh Fox, the anti-fracking film-maker, and Bill Nye, the former ‘Science Guy’. Sanders’ discussion with Nye about climate change got 25,000 shares.

Uygur points out that this is part of Sanders’ concern to get his message out to as many people as possible. When he was in Vermont, he started his own PBS show. Since then, he’s also started his own TV and radio shows.

However, no matter how good these viewing figures are, you won’t have heard about it from the mainstream media. Uygur states that he only found out about Bernie TV last week through reading a hostile article about it from a right-wing journo. He contrasts this with the massive amount of publicity Trump was given by the mainstream media, who were falling over themselves to tell everyone how this orange atavistic disaster was going to set up ‘Trump TV’ if he didn’t win the presidency. Trump tried, and failed. It’s gone the way of so many of the great entrepreneurs other massive flops. Like Trump steaks and vodka, which he tried selling to the Russians. If there’s one thing the Russian Federation does not need, it’s more booze.

Uygur also comments on the excuses a mainstream media company would give for not showing any of his programmes. For example, in one segment, shown in the clip, Bernie talks about the role of various right-wing think tanks in setting up a fear about ‘voter fraud’, thus enabling the Republicans to pass legislation preventing the poor, people of colour, the young and the elderly from voting. These parts of the American populace tend to favour the Democrats, so the Republicans definitely want to exclude them from the ballot box.

Watching the video, a mainstream executive would complain that it was too boring to get people to watch. It’s just Bernie in a room talking to an academic, who has researched this. That’s it. No frills, just 25 minutes of conversation in a businesslike studio. But those 25 minutes have got millions of people watching and listening, against the received wisdom of the mainstream media.

Uygur states that the real reason why the mainstream networks don’t want to give Bernie any coverage whatsoever, is because they themselves are heavily influenced by the same right-wing groups, like the outfit that produced that steaming pile of effluent about the danger of voter fraud. They want something nicely prepared by a thinktank that they can present on their programme and so give a false impression of neutrality. The Democrats say one thing, but the Republicans say another. All done without mentioning where the information comes from or how trustworthy it is.

Uygur also remarks on how the article questions how ‘competitive’ Sanders’ TV show is. One of those the hack asked was one of the workers on The Young Turks. He replied that this question simply didn’t apply. They weren’t concerned about how ‘competitive’ it was, because unlike the mainstream network, Bernie and his co-workers believed in their message.

Jimmy Dore: NBC Attacks Obama, Clinton, Silent about Reagan’s Treachery with Iran

This is another piece from The Young Turks’ Jimmy Dore. It’s another piece of news from America, but I’m reblogging it because it’s also relevant of here. Obama the other day released over $400 million of Iranian money, which had been frozen in American accounts following the Islamic Revolution in 1979. At the same time, Iran released four American prisoners or hostages, depending on how you looked at it. NBC, one of the main American broadcasting networks, decided that Obama had effectively caved in to Iranian demands, and had paid a ransom for their release. They then brought on various foreign policy experts and military officers to explain why you shouldn’t give in to terrorists.

In this piece, Jimmy Dore explains the background to the frozen money, and what the mainstream media isn’t telling you about the background to these events, such as the CIA sponsored coup that overthrew the Iranian prime minister, Mossadeq, and resulted in the absolute rule of the Shah, which was ended in turn by the Islamic revolution. How most Iranian revolutionaries didn’t want to take hostages in 1979, and how Ronald Reagan, that great patriot, treacherously struck a deal with the Ayatollah Khomeini over them, against official negotiations by President Jimmy Carter and the Iranian premier, Bani-Sadr.

Mossadeq was overthrown in the late 1950s by another CIA sponsored coup because he dared to nationalise the Iranian oil industry, then dominated by foreign companies, including Anglo-Persian Oil, which later became BP. This led to the White Revolution of the Shah, whose absolute and brutal rule increasing alienated Iranians until in 1979, they finally rebelled and overthrew him. Dore in this piece sarcastically remarks on how Americans can’t understand why they’re so unpopular in the Middle East, after bombing its peoples, overthrowing its governments, including that of the country next door, Iraq, putting its peoples under the rule of brutal tyrants. ‘I guess’, he goes on, ‘it must be due to their religion.’ This is another poke at the simplistic assumption of the Islamophobic right that the peoples of the Islamic world hate America, simply because they’re Muslims, rather than the fact that America has repeatedly intervened militarily and covertly in their own affairs, to their disadvantage and exploitation.

He points out that at the time, most of the Iranian revolutionaries with the exception of the faction around the Ayatollah were opposed to taking hostages. Dore quotes some of the figures to show how over three quarters of the Revolutionary leadership didn’t want this to happen. Bani-Sadr, the president, who was elected with over 75 per cent of the vote, also didn’t want the Americans taken hostages. Dore makes the point that this is what Americans have not been told, because they wanted to turn Iran into an international bogeyman to frighten the American people.

Then he gets to the ‘October Surprise’. Here he draws on reports by PBS, the American public broadcasting network. This is what the mainstream media really won’t tell you, because it reflects extremely badly on the Right’s hero, Ronald Reagan. Reagan decided it would be a good idea to pay the ransom the Iranians, well, really the Khomeini youth wing, were demanding as a way of increasing American influence in Iran, and exerting some form of control over Lebanon, whose Shi’a factions were strongly influenced and connected to Iran. However, he arranged for the ransom to be paid and the hostages released after the American elections that October. It’s therefore no surprise that Carter was made to look weak by having not secured their release, and so lost the election. Dore makes the point that this is treason under the explicit meaning of the act. The only people, who are supposed to make deals with foreign governments, is the government of the USA. In other words, the president. He remarks on the instant denunciations that would have occurred from the Right if the Democrats had done something similar. As it is, they’re already denouncing Obama as a traitor, and tried to connect to Clinton, although she hasn’t been involved.

Dore also makes the point that this shows how American television journalism has degenerated, as the NBC reporters refuse to take sides, and just repeat Republican talking points – and their rebuttals from the Democrats – without doing any deep investigation of their own to establish the truth.

As for Bani-Sadr, the Iranian Revolutionary president at the time of the crisis, he had some very strange and interesting views of Islam and democracy. He had been a student in Paris, and drawing on contemporary post-colonial political theory, amongst other radical doctrines, developed a revolutionary ideology that was, in its way, far more libertarian than the Ayatollah’s. He wanted to create a kind of Islamic democracy, where the communities of ordinary believers in the mosques would exercise control over their imams, and hence achieve through them political power. In the event, Bani-Sadr was also ousted as the Ayatollah Khomeini and his supporters assumed absolute control.

Heres the video:

I’ve decided to reblog this piece, as it shows how the radical parts of the internet news services are picking up on genuine conspiracies, which previously have been confined to the pages of specialist magazines like Lobster, Counterpunch and the conspiracy fringe. Britain tends to follow the American foreign policy line, with horrendous and disastrous consequences, as we’ve seen. Britain was also strongly involved in the coup that overthrew Mossadeq. See the relevant article in Lobster about this for the full story. However, we’re not told any of this either, and so the Neocons, Blairites and right-wing historians like Niall Ferguson, can continue promoting the line that somehow American military intervention abroad has created a freer, safer world, when the truth is that for millions of people, it has done the opposite.

American Labour History: Film about the ‘Wobblies’

This is a fascinating film by the Women’s Film Preservation Unit about the I.W.W. The International Workers of the World, or ‘Wobblies’, as they were called, were a radical American Syndicalist trade union formed at the beginning of the 20th century. They were called ‘Wobblies’ apparently because some of the Chinese workers couldn’t pronounce the ‘R’ sound, and so when they tried saying the Union’s name, it came out sounding something like ‘Wobblies’. And the name stuck.

The film traces the union’s history, from its origins to eventual demise about the time of the First World War through the memories of a group of senior citizens – old blue collar workers – who had joined it and taken part in its struggles. The Wobblies believed in the eventual ownership and management of the means of production by the workers, and the abolition of the wage system. Beyond that, as one of these elders says, they weren’t sure. They were, however, inclusive in a way that the mainstream unions, founded by Samuel Gompers, weren’t. The American Federation of Labor was a craft union that wouldn’t take unskilled labourers. Following the racial bigotry of the time, they didn’t take Blacks either. But the Wobblies did. One of the speakers is a Black man, who tells how he joined the Union because they were the only union would take and defend Black people like himself. They also took and fought for women and immigrants. Another speaker is an elderly lady, who talks about how she joined the union, and the strikes she took part in. The Wobblies allowed their women members considerable freedom, and were pilloried for it. The lady recalls how one of the accusations was that the Wobblies pushed women to the front of the demonstrations and picket lines. She replied that they didn’t. They just didn’t keep them at the back. It was up to the women themselves where they went.

They also recruited the immigrant workers that were then flooding into America as its population expanded massively to provide labour for its expanding economy. This was the period when logging began in the great wood and the railways were still being laid down across America. Workers were needed in factories, mills and docks. And so the Wobblies recruited Italians, Poles and other nationalities. These men and women too suffered tremendous prejudice and persecution for their membership of the union during the First World War, and particularly after the Russian Revolution. The Wobblies were persecuted as a revolutionary, ‘Communist’ organisation. There was a wave of xenophobia resulting in the ‘Palmer raids’, anti-immigrant police raids in which foreign workers were rounded up and deported. This was directed at the I.W.W., but the authorities frequently couldn’t find enough of them, and so just picked up foreign workers at random. It should come as no surprise that the Fascist Right in Britain in the interwar years also wanted similar raids against suspected foreign revolutionaries, or just plain foreigners, over here.

These were men and women, who had extremely rough lives, working immensely hard for poverty wages. The Black speaker describes what it was like to be a dock worker. Further on in the film, one of the other surviving workers, a White guy, was a lumberjack. He describes the appalling conditions he and the other men worked in. They were lodged in bunkhouses with no washing facilities and no mattresses on the bunks. The result was that they were riddled with lice and bedbugs. He also says that there was saying that you could smell a lumberjack before you could hear him, and you could hear him before you could see him. And the work itself was tough and dangerous. The same guy talks about the various bones he broke in accidents, including when he was crushed by a log and his entrails ‘were pushed out my tail-end’. He also shows the stump of one of his fingers, which he lost in another accident. At the camp, the dinner plates weren’t washed properly. They were nailed to the tables to stop them being stolen by bindlestiffs – migrant workers, who preyed on other tramps. They were simply hosed down after the meals were finished. Many of the workers were also farm labourers, picking fruit.

And in addition to the work, there was brutal repression by the police and management. The speakers describe armed police coming into break up the strikes, and the extreme violence used against picketing workers. Any excuse would do to get a striker into court. One of the ladies describes how she was arrested on a charge of using obscene language against one of the cops. Fortunately, she was acquitted when she told the judge, ‘You’re honour, I don’t use such language’. A week later the same cop asked her out. She turned him down, not surprisingly.

In addition to the violence from the police, there was the threat of the scab labourers recruited by management. These also came in with guns and police protection. As a result, strikes could explode into extreme violence, including gun fights. In one strike involving the dock workers, 127 people were shot to death or otherwise killed. In another incident, striking workers, who got on a boat to get to their workplace were fired upon by the management, leading to four deaths. The government became involved in many strikes, using tactics that would now be considered ‘Fascistic’. Or should be. The army were frequently called in to shoot and arrest them. During the First World War, the union left it a matter of individual conscience whether to oppose the War or not. Many did, including one who was sent to France. The reason presented for American intervention was that Europe – France and England – owed America money. So the Wobbly went down the line of American doughboys in the trenches asking them if the Europeans owed ’em anything personally. Of course they didn’t, though he describes some of the younger, more patriotic men getting angry. When the union went on strike, they were accused by the government of being collaborators with the Kaiser and the enemy. And when the Russian Revolution broke out in October 1917, they were accused of working for the Russians to bring America down. One of the ladies describes how striking men, including her husband, were rounded up by the army, and then taken to what seems like an internment camp out in the desert, loaded into freight cars with no food or water.

Much of the Wobblies’ membership came from migrant workers. In order to get to new jobs, these frequently travelled by freight train across the country looking for work. It was extremely hazardous. One of the workers describes the sadness of passing lit homes, while himself hungry. The train crew operated a racket, in which they’d charge the workers for their journey. This stopped when the union put in its own strong arm gang, who dealt out their own rough justice to them. Then there were the hijackers, who get on to a train to rob its passengers. These particularly targeted union organisers, as they frequently carried thousands of dollars worth of union fees with them. One of the tactics used against the trade unionists was to thrown them off the train, so that they fell under the wheels of the car. Again, the union was also capable of defending its members against them. When of these guys describes how they cut the letters I.W.W. onto the forehead and cheeks of a hijacker with a razor as a lesson.

One of the workers also describes how they managed to get a free ride at management’s expense. The company hired a whole load of scab workers and was paying for them to travel by train. So the Wobblies got on too and began busily recruiting them. Those that didn’t, were thrown off, so that by the time they all arrived, nearly everyone on the train was a Wobbly. Which naturally made the management furious. The lumberjack also describes the ‘stand-up’ strikes that frequently did more harm to the company than the sit-down strikes. These were basically go-slows, or work to rules, where the workers went into the forests for work, but either vanished, or did as little as possible. And the former dockworkers describe how the union supported starving workers with soup kitchens, and that after they won the dispute, the leaders organised a banquet for the workers.

The Wobblies declined after the War as a result of police and state repression, and from ideological divisions in the union itself between Communists and Anarchists after the Russian Revolution. Many members felt that they ought to be trying to start a revolution in America. They were sympathetic to the Russian Revolution, and argued that the Russians had finally done it while they talked about it. The former lumberjack describes how the debates between the revolutionary and anti-revolutionary factions got so heated, that debates would frequently end in fist fights.

Although the memories of the former workers are at the heart of this movie, this isn’t simply a staid film of rather boring talking heads. Along with the speakers themselves are contemporary archive footage, newspaper headlines, and anti-Wobblie propaganda cartoons, including an animated sequence which I think may well have been from them, rather than being a contemporary film, though I might be wrong. It also includes dramatic recitation of some of the words of the Wobblies themselves. It begins with the voice of Wobblies being questioned about their country of origin, all giving various answers which avoided ‘America’, but in line with their belief that they were all indeed the Industrial Workers of the World. It also includes some of the words of the American capitalists against whom the I.W.W. were pitched in battle, and these are very ugly. One industrialists stated that the man who did not pay his workers below the minimum wage level, robbed his shareholders. Forget Dave Cameron’s and his Republican counterparts’ in America smooth words about the Tories being ‘for hardworking people’: this is the true, brutal face of capitalism.

The film’s also enlivened considerably by the songs of the Wobblies themselves. The Union was known for its songs, and many of the workers interviewed describe keeping their song books with them, or singing during the strike to keep their spirits up. Some of these are beautiful pieces of American folk song, often with a wry humour, like ‘Hooray, I’m a Bum’. I don’t agree with some of the anti-religious sentiment in a couple of these, though I can see why they were written. They were produced at a time when many towns passed laws against street orators, with the exception of the Salvation Army. The Wobblies themselves used to set up meetings in the streets to recruit new members, with the speaker himself standing on a soapbox. The police would arrest them while leaving the Sally Ann speakers alone. And so there developed a vicious rivalry between the two organisations for speaking pitches. Looking through the music credits, I saw that one of the arrangements was sung by Peggy Seeger and England’s own Ewan MacColl, the father of British pop singer Kirsty, and writer of the classic ‘Dirty Old Town’.

It also uses paintings of some of the strikes, presumably created by the workers themselves. These are naturally naïve in style, but nevertheless constitute valuable pieces of folk art from one of America’s most notorious outsider groups.

This is a fascinating, harrowing, exuberant movie about a labour group that is little known over this side of the Atlantic. Looking down the list of comments on the Youtube page, one of the commenters remarked that this is the type of history that’s been removed from the official version. Indeed it is. It’s the type of history that at one time would have made it onto Channel 4 or possibly PBS in the Land of the Free. Now you’re only likely to see it either on BBC 4, or at your local arts cinema.

Understanding Trump’s American Fascism

Okay, I’ve tried for about a week not writing about Donald Trump. I know some of you feel that I’ve given too much attention to this moron, and that this country has enough on its plate with the thugs who are in power over here. Including the one that left office late Thursday evening, the fall-out of which is still continuing. The problem is, Trump’s too big, too slow moving and the parallels with real Fascism too glaringly overt. You can compile a list of all the elements in Fascism, which are present in Trump’s campaign or the general background of right-wing anxiety and hysteria, which has contributed to it.

And if Trump gains power, he will be a problem over here. Not just personally, in that his decisions on the economy and policies of the world’s only surviving superpower will have direct consequences for Britain and the rest of the world, but also in the malign political influence his election over there will have on domestic politics. Events in America and elsewhere in the world have a legitimising effect on similar developments over here. Blair and the New Labour clique took their queue from Bill Clinton and his New Democrats. These aren’t to be compared to the Canadian New Democrat party, which is the Canadian equivalent of the Labour party. Clinton’s ‘New Democrats’ were a revision of the Democrat party, which took over much of the ideology of Reagan’s Republicans, especially financial deregulation, curbs on welfare spending and workfare. Clinton was almost certainly better than the alternative, but nevertheless he continued Reagan’s squalid political legacy. And over here, Blair copied him, introducing workfare, and pursuing Thatcher’s policies of deregulating the economy, including the financial sector, and cutting down on welfare spending. And then you can go further back, to the 1920s and ’30s, when Fascist parties sprang up all over Europe in imitation of Mussolini’s squadristi and later the Nazis in Germany. The British Union of Fascists was just one of them. They also included such groups and political cults in this country as the British Fascisti – actually extreme Right-wing Tories and Arnold Leese’s The Britons. If, heaven help us, Trump ever gets into power, his occupation of the White House will mean that European politicians will start aping him. Which means more racism, more misogyny, further restrictions on personal freedom, and domestic politics marked and supported by brutality and violence. So, here’s a bit on Trump’s ideological precursors and the similarity of his campaign to Fascist and proto-Fascist movements.

As I said, you can make a list out of the similarities between Trump’s campaign and personal style of politics, and those of real Fascists. Let’s begin with

Violence

Trump’s campaigns have been marked by his supporters striking and beating protestors. Trump himself has stood on his platform fondly looking back on the old days when those who dared to disrupt political campaigns like his would be taken out on stretchers. He’s even offered to pay his supporters’ legal fees if they assault someone. And at the weekend his scheduled rally in Chicago descended into a near riot when Trump cancelled and refused to show up.

One liberal female newsreader commenting on the violence at Trump’s rallies said that when she was growing up in California in the 1980s, you never saw it except on the extreme right-wing fringe, at was barely politics – Skinhead concerts. Marinetti in his Founding and Manifesto of Futurism, an avant-garde artistic movement that became briefly aligned with Fascism, declared

We will sing of great crowds excited by work, by pleasure and by riot; we will sing of the multi-coloured polyphonic tides of revolution in the modern capitals.

Georges Sorel, a revolutionary Syndicalist, who later became involved with extreme right-wing French royalist and anti-Semitic movements, proclaimed in his Reflexions sur la Violence that it was only in violent revolution that men were truly free, and were able to make a new man inside themselves. He was published by a French artistic group, the Compagnons de l’Action d’Art, who declared ‘Long live violence against all that makes life ugly’.

Marinetti went on to further declare ‘We today separate the idea of the Fatherland from that of reactionary, clerical Monarchy. We unite the idea of Fatherland with that of daring Progress and of anti-police revolutionary democracy’.

It could almost describe exactly Trump’s ideological background. Much of extreme right-wing politics in America is predicated on a profound opposition to monarchy dating from the Revolution. You can see it in such extremist political movements as Lyndon LaRouche’s ‘Democrats’ back in the late 1980s and 1990s, who believed that the Queen and the Vatican were locked in a deadly covert battle for world domination, with Her Maj running the world’s drug trade from the back of Buck House. Alex Jones’ Infowars internet set has been heavily backing Trump as ‘the only anti-globalist candidate’. He’s also paranoid about the British monarchy. There’s a hilarious segment on his show where he talks about Britain’s secret police picking up anybody who failed to show due respect to Brenda during some royal occasion a few years ago. He roundly declared that ‘they (the British) have no freedom’.

Well, I must have been out when that happened. I don’t doubt that the rozzers did pick up a few troublemakers back then. But that last time I looked, you were still free in this country to say what you liked about the Royal Family. A few years ago the Queen turned up in my home town of Bristol to present the Maundy Money at a ceremony in the city’s cathedral. Apart from those due to receive it, and the crowd of royalists and general rubberneckers, there was a demonstration from MAM – the Movement Against the Monarchy. A lot of the pensioners and other members of the public were annoyed at their demonstration, but I don’t recall there being mass arrests.

Trump also retweeted one of Mussolini’s sayings ‘It is better to live one day as a lion that one hundred years as a sheep.’ Trump said he just liked it because it’s a good quote. And so it is. What makes it suspicious is that it comes from Musso, who advocated a similar cult of violence. When he was still a revolutionary Socialist, the future Duce wrote an essay on Nietzsche, published in the magazine La Voce. He announced

We must envisage a new race of “free spirits”, strengthened in war, in solitude, in great danger … spirits endowed with a kind of sublime perversity, Spirits which liberate us from the love of our neighbour.

Misogyny

Trump has an extremely reactionary attitude towards women. When a female journalist at Fox News dared to ask him a difficult question, he sneering responded that she did so ‘because she was bleeding’. This too, is par for the course for the Fascist Weltanschauung. ‘We advocate scorn for women’, declared the Futurists, who celebrated ‘youth, speed, virility.’ This later became ‘Youth, Speed, Violence’, as women joined the movement. This was coupled to the cult of the charismatic leader. Adolf Hitler said, ‘the masses are like women. They want a strong man to lead them.’ Il Duce in Italy was also opposed to women skiing, riding or cycling, as this was supposed to make them infertile and prevent them from their ‘natural and fundamental mission in life’, of having babies.

On this matter, the general attitude of the Republican party and the American Right is very similar to that of Mussolini’s Italy. Musso was also worried about the declining Italian birth rate. In 1927 he made a speech stating that he aimed to increase the Italian population from 40 million to 60 million over the next 25 years. Contraception and abortion were both banned. In Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany women’s role was defined as very traditional and domestic. Instead of going out to work, they were to stay at home and raise families.

The Republican party and the Right today is similarly worried about the fall in the birth rate of the White race, and there are websites and discussions on Right-wing internet sites devoted to the demographic decline of the West. The American religious Right is also strongly opposed to abortion and there is similar opposition to women taking up positions of economic or political leadership. I can remember way back in the 1990s one Republican pastor hysterically declaring that Hillary Clinton was ‘the type of woman who leaves her husband, turns to lesbianism, practices witchcraft and sacrifices her children.’ There, and I thought that she was just a bog-standard, rather boring corporate type. Who could have guessed she led such an exciting, subversive life?

But this leads on to and is part of another feature of the Fascist Weltanschauung, that is also part and parcel of the GOP worldview:

The Decline of the West

Italian Fascism and Nazism also grew out of the 19th century feeling that Europe was threatened by decadence, and racial and cultural degeneration. It was threatened by democracy, organised labour, feminism, all of which were making Europe enfeebled. Hans Nordung described this supposed decline in his book, Degeneration, as did Oswald Spengler in his The Decline of the West. It’s an attitude that similarly pervades the Right today, alarmed by the challenge posed by militant Islam, the rise of China as a world power, and mass immigration from the Developing World. Various Republican and Right-wing leaders today in America scream about the threat of Socialism, by which they mean any kind of collectivism or state intervention, as well as feminism, which is also held to weaken America. Mussolini declared at one time that he supported women’s demands for the vote in England, as one women became politically enfranchised they would spread pacifism, leading to Britain’s decline as an imperial world power.

Exceptionalism

Right-wing American politics still has the belief that America is different from and superior to all other nations. It’s more moral, and hence America demands the absolute right not to be bound by the international treaties and conventions it imposes on others. Kyle Kulinski over at Secular Talk commented on the outrage that would occur if, say, one of the Muslim countries launched drone attacks on known White supremacists in America. Drone attacks on Muslim terrorists in countries like Yemen, with whom America is not actually at war, is nevertheless perfectly acceptable. And way back under Clinton, the Americans were keen to set up the International War Crimes Tribunal at the Hague, and that the other nations around the world should sign the treaties binding them to it and outlawing such crimes. Except for America. It was felt that America did not need to be so bound, and indeed that this would only be an impediment to the ability of the Land of the Free to export that freedom around the globe.

The Italian nationalist poet, Gabriele D’Annunzio, whose own later excursion to Fiume set up all the political institutions that were taken over into Musso’s Fascist Italy, made the same claim for Italy and her imperialist adventures in Africa. In his ‘Augural Song for the Chosen Nation’ he proclaimed

So you will yet behold the Latin Sea
covered
with massacres in your war … Italy, Italy
sacred to the new dawn
with the plough and the prow.

Racism

Fascism is, for most people, synonymous with racism. In this, Italian Fascism was originally rather different from Nazism. The Italian Fascists, while extremely nationalistic, weren’t originally racists. About 80 per cent of Italy’s Jews managed to survive the War, because many Jews had been extremely patriotic and supported the new Italian state which had been brought into being by Mazzini and the other Italian revolutionaries in the 19th century. A number of them had joined the Fascist movement. One of the leading Italian generals, Ovato, was Jewish, and he was buried with military honours and a headstone ‘For Family, Faith and Fatherland’ at the same time his compatriots elsewhere in Italy were being rounded up and butchered. The Nazis were bitterly anti-Semitic, as is notorious, and took over the scientific racism that originated in the 19th century with Count Gobineau in France, amongst others. Apart from Jews, the Nazis also hated Gypsies and Slavs, as well as non-Whites. Once in power, they organised a campaign to sterilise the mixed-race children of German women and Black American soldiers, who had been part of the army of occupation after the First World War. Mussolini also passed a series of anti-Semitic legislation in imitation of Hitler’s.

Although not initially racist, they also sterilised and butchered the indigenous African peoples in the parts of Africa they conquered. Their nationalism also led them to launch campaigns to force Italian language and culture on the other ethnicities that found themselves within Italy’s borders, like ethnic Germans and Slavs.

Trump’s popular because he has announced that he will build a wall to prevent further immigration from Mexico. At rallies his supporters have also racially abused Black and Muslim protestors. The Young Turks interviewed a group of three young guys protesting against Trump at a rally in West Chester, Ohio. One of them was a substitute teacher. He was worried by White pupils on schools in which he taught coming in, and saying to their Black and Asian classmates that ‘once Trump gets in, you’ll be deported.’ There have also been instances of racist abuse at College sports events. In one instance, the supporters of a basketball team from an all-White area chanted ‘Trump, Trump, Trump!’ when playing a mixed-raced team from a much more ethnically diverse part of the same state. Among his supporters Trump has attracted various card-carrying Nazis and White supremacists. He’s even been endorsed by the Klan. There has also been a recent documentary in America by PBS television, which covered the way one southern family had been brought together by Trump. Many of them had not voted for decades, and the family had been divided between Republican and Democrat supporters. But they had all been brought together by Trump. This was fine, until you saw the tattoos on the wife’s arms. These included the type of Celtic cross used by the Neo-Nazi right, and the numbers 88, which in Nazi circles stand for Heil Hitler.

Trump has also announced that he wishes to place a ban on Muslims entering America. Those Muslims permitted to remain will have to carry badges and identity documents. These has naturally alarmed Jewish and civil rights groups, who have noted the obvious parallels with the treatment of Jews in the Third Reich in the years preceding the Holocaust. Mussolini too was an opponent of Islam. In the 1920s he prevented a mosque from opening in Rome.

Militarism

Trump’s actually ambiguous on this. Both the Nazis and the Italian Fascists had at their core radicalised, extremely nationalistic corps of ex-servicemen from the First World War. These former the Brownshirts of the SA in the Nazi party, and the Blackshirts, the squadristi and arditi, the latter elite Italian soldiers in Mussolini’s Fascists. The American Right has also thrown up in past decades various paramilitary movements. The survivalists stockpiling food and guns for the end of the world in the 1980s were succeeded by the Militia movement, who were similarly arming themselves for an invasion. Amongst the loonier theories was the idea that the Russians had left secret tank battalions in Mexico and Canada, ready to roll into the American heartland. A few days ago after one rally, one group appeared on the Net declaring themselves willing to serve as the ‘Trump militia’, working as bodyguards. They called themselves the Lion Militia, and debated online which uniform to wear. One was a lion costume, the other was that of the Brownshirts. I’m fairly certainly these were jokes, but nevertheless, there is something more seriously Fascistic underneath.

On foreign policy, Trump has been vague, issuing blatantly contradictory statements about his intentions in the war in the Middle East. At times he’s said that America should keep out of it, and leave it to Putin to sort out. At other times he’s announced that he intends to go in much harder than the previous presidents, killing not only the terrorists themselves, but also their families. He has also stated that he’s in favour using torture, ‘even if it doesn’t work’.

Mussolini similarly had a contradictory attitude to war. His regime was always strongly militaristic. He demanded that Italians should live in a permanent state of war. He wanted an army of five million men with a forest of bayonets, an air force so vast it would blot out the sun and a navy that other nations would fear as a threat to their security. And yet he also saw himself as a great peacemaker, and was genuinely affronted that he did not win the Nobel Peace Prize for the Locarno Settlement.

Historians of the rise of totalitarian regimes in Europe noted that they generally arose in countries, where the military was accorded a very high respect, and which had been united through military action. This included Germany, which was united through Bismarck’s conquests of the individual German states, and Cavour and Garibaldi, who did the same in Italy. It also applies to America, which was created through violent revolution and expanded westwards through military conquest.

The Activist Style of Politics

Conservative critics of Fascism have suggested that Fascism owes its basis partly to the development of the activist style of politics, which arose with liberalism and democracy. Before the French Revolution, politics had been strictly confined to the governing elites. After the French Revolution, all citizens were required to be politically involved. This expansion of direct political activism also involved the definition of those who were outside the new nations. In the case of the French Revolution, this was the aristocracy. In the case of Fascism, it revised the activist style so that those outside the new national community were the regime’s political opponents and ethnic minorities.

America was one of the world’s first modern democracies. It emerged from a Revolution against British government and perceived tyranny. That liberal tradition of democratic political activism is also revised on the American extreme Right. Trump’s backed by Alex Jones’, the motto of whose Infowars internet programme is ‘1776 Worldwide’. Jones, Trump and the other right-wing demagogues believe that democracy is under threat, and can only be defended through strong and sustained action against powerful internal and external threats.

Conspiracies

The Nazi Right has always been characterised by bizarre conspiracy theories. In the case of the Nazis in Germany and their successors, these were anti-Semitic theories, some derived from the infamous Tsarist forgery, the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. The Nazis believed that Germany and the West was under attack from a Jewish conspiracy linking financial capital to the Communists. Germany had not been defeated in the First World War, but had been ‘stabbed in the back’ by the Jews. These stupid and vile theories have continued on the Nazi fringe. In the 1990s various members of the American Nazi fringe and Militia movement, like Timothy McVeigh, believed that their government was secretly ruled by ZOG – the Zionist Occupation Government, dedicated to exterminating the White race through racial mixing. There have also been all manner of bizarre conspiracies about the Bilderberg Group and Trilateral Commission. Jones, Trump’s supporter, is one of those who believes in these, though I think he’s Jewish. Whatever his religious background, he’s very definitely not anti-Semitic. Nevertheless, he is part of the same conspiracy fringe. These have reached bizarre extremes. Jones and his predecessors, for example, believe that the FEMA legislation passed in the 1990s is in preparation for an act of emergency, which will see Christians and other political opponents rounded up by the regime and placed in concentration camps. 20 years ago, back in the 1990s, the coloured dots on road signs in Philadelphia which marked when they were painted so that the highways authorities knew when to give them their next lick of paint were also the subject of a bizarre rumour. Those dots were supposed to show the location of the secret concentration camps which were going to be set up.

Contempt for Parliamentary Democracy

Both Nazism and Fascism were motivated by opposition to liberal, parliamentary documentary. The Nazis overthrew German democracy through a series of emergency decrees following the Reichstag fire. Mussolini led his Fascists on a March on Rome. Trump has similarly said that there will be riots if his opponents in the Republican party conspire to deprive him of the nomination to be the candidate for the presidency in a brokered convention. In the 1990s there was briefly a call for the Militias to march on Washington, though this was turned down as some of their members feared that it was an attempt to provoke them so that they could be banned by the government. More recently there has been a march in Washington held by the militant supporters of gun rights, though they did not attempt to overthrow the government.

Elitism

Both the Nazis and Italian Fascists believed that only elites had the right to rule, taken from writers like Ortega y Gasset and Vilfredo Pareto in the case of the Fascists. For the Nazis, this was based in Social Darwinism. Businessmen, provided they were Aryans, had the right to enjoy their prominent social positions and economic leadership because they had shown their superior talent and genetic worth through competition in the world of business. It’s an attitude that can still be found in the mainstream Right, both in America and Britain. Trump is the most outspoken in his embrace of this attitude. A businessman from an extremely wealthy family, he has made sneering reference to the poor, and how those from poor families should not have the right to rule because their family background shows that they don’t have the necessary biological inheritance to have made their way to the top earlier. And he has absolute contempt for the poor.

Charismatic Leadership

At the heart of Fascism was the cult of the strong, charismatic leader, whose unique qualities made him supremely fitted to govern. They alone possessed the ability to govern according to the popular will, even if the people themselves didn’t know it was. Furthermore, as men of exceptional ability operating in times of crisis, they were not bound by the judicial constraints placed on others. Carl Schmidt, a jurist, who worked briefly for the Nazis before falling out with them, established this principle in his piece, ‘The Fuehrer Protects Justice’, defending Hitler’s action in the mass killing of the SA by the SS in the Night of the Long Knives. Trump has not gone so far as to advocate the mass killing of his political opponents. But he has made it very clear that his supporters will use force if his claim to power is denied, and that he will revise the laws to permit torture. And at the core of his appeal is his claim to be able to provide America with strong leadership. And that’s always been synonymous with authoritarian rule.

Conclusion: Trump’s Political Inheritance of American Fascism

From this it’s clear that Trump is not an isolated phenomenon. He’s the culmination of a growing sense of threat and militaristic political movements that have been growing since the 1980s. Many of these qualities – the xenophobia, anti-Feminism and hatred of organised labour is actually fairly commonplace and characteristic of right-wing politics in America. But with Trump they’ve became particularly extreme. Some of this is a reaction to Barack Obama’s presidency. The presence of a Black man in the White House, whose background is Islamic though he himself isn’t, has created a profound alienation amongst the more hysterical elements in the Republican party. He’s been denounced as a secret Muslim, Nazi and Communist. In the case of the latter, it’s because of Obamacare, which was in origin a Republican idea. But it’s held to be too close to socialised medicine, and thus to Nazism and Communism. Because both are varieties of Socialism. Or at least, they are to right-wing pundits like Jonah Goldberg.

And the result has been the rise of Donald Trump.

Now I don’t think that once in power, Trump will overthrow democracy, force all Americans into uniform and start opening extermination camps. I do think, however, that American will become a much more intolerant place, and that Muslims and illegal immigrants will stand a far greater chance of losing any kind of political rights. And I can certainly see him interning Muslims, or at least some of them, like the Japanese, Germans and Italians were also interned as enemy aliens in the Second World War.

But his presidency will be a nightmare, and it will weaken democracy and genuinely liberal institutions in the Land of the Free. And that will be a disaster in a world where the forces of Right authoritarianism is growing.

Secular Talk on the Utter Barbarity of Henry Kissinger

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

From this Englishman, ‘Well said, Sir!’

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

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

Again, absolutely right.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Young Turks, the Democrat Primaries, and the War Crimes of Henry Kissinger

Oh Henry Kissinger,
Oh How we’re missing yer!

Monty Python’s Henry Kissinger song.

The hideous political ghost of Henry Kissinger reared its head the other day in the Democrat debate between Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders on PBS. Hillary was proud that Kissinger complimented her on the way she had run her department, and basked in the old politico’s compliment. Bernie Sanders, however, made it very clear what he thought of this pillar of the Nixon administration, and said he was proud that Kissinger was not his friend.

In this clip from The Young Turks, John Iadarola presents the argument that Kissinger is a war criminal, exactly as his detractors allege. Actually, on this issue, there isn’t much to ponder: the old bastard’s actions and statements speak for themselves, and indict Kissinger as one of the great monsters of the late 20th century. Iadarola sums it up by saying that he is a man no-one should want to have as a friend, and especially not someone who wants to be a presidential candidate.

Among the facts against Kissinger are the following:

* When he was in the State Department, Kissigner worked to prolong the Vietnam War as long as possible.

* He encouraged Nixon to bug and intimidate his political enemies.

* He supported the secret bombing of Cambodia and Laos, which killed untold thousands of people and destabilised the country, leading to the rise of a murderous regime that butchered millions.

* He also engineered the 1973 Chilean coup, and similar military interventions in Rhodesia, East Timor and Argentina.

Iadarola also gives some damning quotations from Kissinger’s own mouth. These range from the simply cynical – such as his belief that intelligence isn’t necessary for the use of power, and is sometimes an impediment, to the truly monstrous. He stated that military men were dumb, stupid animals to be used as pawns in foreign policy, which possibly explained why he was so massively unconcerned about their deaths in the Vietnam War. In 2000 he said approvingly that he could think of no better way to unite America than behind an terrorist attack an American overseas target, and that George Dubya was the man to do this. He also asked during the Vietnam War why Americans should ‘flagellate’ themselves for what the Cambodians were doing to each other. He was also quite prepared to work with the Khmer Rouge regime, despite the fact that he knew they were massacring ten of thousands of their own people. Indeed, he himself called them ‘murderous thugs’.

During the 1991 race riots on the West Coast, he stated that although Americans weren’t prepared to accept UN troops there today, they would tomorrow if they promised to restore order. He said people feared the unknown, and to protect themselves from it the peoples of the world would willing plead for their leaders to take power, so that individual rights would wither before the world government. He also stated that the emigration of Jews from the Soviet Union was not an American concern. And if the Soviets stuffed them into gas chambers, that wasn’t an American concern either. He did, however, concede that ‘perhaps [it was] a humanitarian concern.’ This is particularly cynical, considering that Kissinger was himself Jewish. The 1970’s were the decade that saw an increasing interest in the Holocaust, including a TV series of the same name. This is particularly shocking because of the profound horror the Holocaust justifiably still evokes for Europeans and Americans.

I began this article with a quote from Monty Python’s Henry Kissinger song. And the correct answer to those lines should be ‘No. We are not ‘missing yer”. It was Kissinger winning the Nobel Peace prize after the bombing of Hanoi that made Tom Lehrer, the great satirical song writer, to give up. After all, what’s left to lampoon if reality does something that grotesque.