The Corporate, Geopolitical Reasons Dragging Us to War in Syria

Now May and the other western leaders are clamouring for air strikes against Assad in Syria following a chemical weapons attack in Douma, which has been blamed on the Syrian president. The dangers of such strikes are immense. Russia has said it will shoot down any American missiles launched against its military. There’s a very real danger that this could flare up into a full-scale confrontation with Russia.

Which may be what our leaders want. After all, various NATO generals were predicting that by May last year, we’d be at war with Russia. One even wrote a book about it with that as the title.

I’m not even sure Assad was responsible for the poison gas attack. I don’t doubt he’s capable of it – he is a thug, and ruthless dictator. But I’ve written several times about false flag attacks involving chemical weapons, which have been staged by the Syrian rebels in order to bring America into the war on their side. And let’s not forget who the Syrian rebels are: the al-Nusra Front, which is the Syrian branch of al-Qaeda, and ISIS. They aren’t democrats, or people who have any respect for western notions like ‘human rights’. They’re Islamists, of the type responsible for 9/11 and who have, with western armed forces, turned Iraq into a bloodbath.

And whatever humanitarian reasons are being piously spouted by May, Boris, Trump and the others, the real motives are very definitely coldly economic and geopolitical. The Neocons and Israelis have wanted Assad’s overthrow since the beginning of this century. They put together a list of the countries they wanted to invade, which included Iraq, Libya, Somalia and Iran. The Israelis hate Syria because they see it as a threat to their national security, while the Neocons want to do the same to the country as they did to Iraq – seize its oilfields and loot its state industries for the benefit of American multinationals.

And then there’s the Arabs. There’s a coalition of Arab states, led by Qatar, who want to build a gas pipeline up from the Arabian peninsula, through Syria and into Turkey. But Assad’s an ally of Russia, and this would hurt their oil pipeline coming from the east. And so Assad has blocked it. Hence the Arab states have demanded Assad’s overthrow. They even offered to pay the Americans the expenses of going in.

This is a confrontation purely for corporate profit. It has nothing to do with humanitarianism, especially as the rebels have shown themselves more than capable of butchering civilians themselves.

And it is already becoming a real threat to domestic democracy. Theresa May has declared that she wants to declare war unilaterally, without consulting parliament. Mike and the Tweeters, whose opinions he reblogs, have already discussed this and made the obvious point. Kanjin Tor has made a graphic, reblogged by Mike, stating that if May succeeds, then it will be the end of British democracy. We will then become an authoritarian dictatorship exactly like every other.

And I have no illusion that some in the British military will be highly delighted. Going through the history and politics shelves in the Cheltenham branch of Waterstone’s a year or so ago, I found a book by another British general arguing that we needed to give our prime ministers the authority to launch an immediate military response without being burdened with the need for parliamentary debate and scrutiny. Because, you know, national security, and the need for swift action to protect Britain. And so on.

Which, in these circumstances, starts to sound like the kind of things the Nazis said following the Reichstag Fire and Hitler’s declaration of a state of emergency.

Which also raises the awkward question: if she does unilaterally declare war, does that mean that, like the Nazis, she’s going to round up and have protesters interned, as a threat to ‘national security?’

This is all about corporate profit, and in May’s case, trying to turn her into a great warleader like Thatcher and the Falklands. She’s risking a global nuclear holocaust purely for her own electoral advantage and the profits of the multinationals. She’s also a menace to British democracy.

Stop the war, before May and the corporatists kill us all.

Vox Political on Clem Atlee’s Great Nephew’s Suspension for Satirical Cameron Meme

Mike over at Vox Political has posted a piece commenting on the real reason behind the suspension of John MacDonald, Clement Atlee’s great-nephew, by the ‘Compliance Unit’. They told MacDonald that he’d been suspended because of a piece he put up on the 8th August. The trouble is, he hadn’t put up any post on social media on the 8th of August this year. He had, however, posted up a piece on the 9th, with Cath Atlee, urging everyone to vote for Corbyn as the only surviving relatives of Labour’s greatest prime minister, and one of the very greatest premiers this country has ever produced.

Now it appears that the real reason Mr MacDonald was purged was because of a meme he put up of Cameron as Adolf Hitler, along with a quote from the Fuhrer stating that the way you deprive a people of their freedoms is to take it away a little at a time, so that they don’t know you’re doing it. The New Labour apparatchiks in the Compliance Unit claimed that the meme was ‘abusive’. Mike puts them right by showing that it isn’t. It’s satire. It makes a very strong point, but in a humorous manner. He also points out that it doesn’t attack other members of the Labour party, and that the Tories are fair game for such comments, otherwise noted enemies of the Tories, like Dennis Skinner, would have been purged a long time ago. He also points out that rummaging around social media to support punishing someone for breaking a rule that is only a month old is insupportable. Mike concludes

The best outcome Labour’s NEC – in charge of the ‘compliance unit’ – can hope for is to restore Mr Macdonald’s vote to the count and issue an apology so grovelingly abject that we’ll all become so distracted by it that we won’t remember what it’s for. Good luck with that, folks!

Meanwhile, the rest of us can look forward to the day – not far away – when an inquiry is launched into the activities of this ‘compliance unit’, and action taken over the behaviour of its absurdly-overpaid members.

The article can be read at: http://voxpoliticalonline.com/2016/09/14/suspension-of-attlees-nephew-proves-labours-compliance-team-does-not-understand-satire/

There’s a lot more that can be said about this. Firstly, the meme makes a fair point. It isn’t abusive. If you want a real example of abuse, one of the instances that comes to mind was way back when William Hague was leader of the Tory party, and one of the Labour MPs sneered at him and compared him to a fetus. This shocked many people, and the MP had to apology. That’s abuse.

But Cameron has taken away people’s freedoms, gradually, all the while claiming to be protecting democracy, in a manner very much like that recommended by Hitler. Cameron and Nick Clegg passed legislation providing for secret courts from which the press and public are excluded in cases involving national security. In these cases, the accused may not know who his accuser is, or the evidence on which he is being tried, nor even what his crime is. These are all breaches of the fundamental principles of justice laid down in Magna Carta. Even in the Middle Ages, a criminal could only be tried if someone actually stood up in open court to accuse them. There were known malefactors, who the sheriffs, as the crown’s administrator and agent in the shires, had to arrest. Once they had them under lock and key in their dungeons, they then frequently appealed to a member of the public to accuse them of a crime so that they could be properly tried. It’s a peculiar situation when the Middle Ages starts to appear far more just than a piece of modern legislation passed by a supposedly democratic regime.

On a related point, one of the fundament principles of justice is that legislation cannot act retrospectively. You cannot arrest someone for doing something before it was made a crime. But this is what the Compliance Unit have done in this case, as in so many others. As Mike has pointed out.

Cameron, as part of the Tories’ ongoing attempts to destroy the unions, also wanted to pass legislation compelling strikers on a picket line to give their names to the rozzers. This was condemned as ‘Francoist’ by David Davis, one of the most right-wing of the Tories. Not that it’s particularly different from legislation the Tories briefly passed to stop strike action in the 1970s. Ted Heath also passed a law that would have banned strikes and seen wage claims passed to an industrial court. This was similar to legislation proposed a few years earlier by Barbara Castle in her paper, In Place of Strife. Heath went further, however, and included a clause, that would have allowed the authorities to identify who was responsible for calling the strike. As for the system of labour courts, that was introduced by Mussolini as part of his ‘Charter of Labour’ in Fascist Italy. The revival of similar legislation in supposedly democratic Britain convinced many political theorists that we were seeing the appearance of ‘Fascism with a human face’. That meant, Fascism without the strutting militarism and brutality of the archetypal right-wing dictatorships.

And Cameron was also very keen on expanding state surveillance, to keep us all safe from Muslim terrorists, or whoever. Again, very similar to the massive secret police and surveillance in Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy and Franco’s Spain. Nazi Germany justified itself constitutionally as a response to political crisis, such as the attack on Germany by leftists in acts like the Reichstag fire. Every four years or so, Adolf Hitler had to go back to the Reichstag and pass a law stating that the crisis was not over, thus allowing him the constitutional power to go on ruling without the Reichstag for another four years. Again, like Cameron, the Fascist leaders claimed they were doing so to protect the public.

So the meme, while undoubtedly emotive, was perfectly justified. Cameron was, and Theresa May is, extremely authoritarian, and determined to chip away hard-won British freedoms in the manner described by Adolf. He’s also like another Nazi in his former profession. Cameron worked in PR, a profession not known for objective truth. Goebbels, Hitler’s ‘Minister for Public Enlightenment’ was a former adman, if I recall correctly.

The meme’s fair comment. Also, it’s pretty much to be expected that a politician, who is perceived to be dictatorial will be compared to Adolf Hitler. Just like they were compared to Napoleon before he arose. Such comparisons are so common, that unless they’re very unfair and say something monstrously untrue, they’re hardly worth censure. Those who do tend to make themselves look ridiculous, and furthermore seem to bear out the comparison.

And Mike’s right about other members of the Labour party having made similar comparisons. The classic example of such invective was Nye Bevan’s comment that ‘Tories are vermin’. It’s been used against the Labour party from time to time ever since. But that didn’t mean that Bevan didn’t have a right to say it. Bevan was Welsh coalminer, when there was grinding poverty in the Welsh coalfields. The Conservative government under Baldwin called in the British army to shoot strikers during one of the disputes in the 1920s. It might even have been during the 1926 General Strike. Accounts of the strike say that many of the miners were dressed in rags. In a situation like that, when men, who are starving are being shot down for daring to demand a higher wage, Bevan had an absolute right to hate the party that impoverished and killed them with all the venom that he did. Especially as the Tories in the First World War had demanded legislation that, in the words of one right-wing, would allow them to beat the unions like jelly.

I also wonder why the Compliance Unit should be so upset about a meme attacking David Cameron. Surely any decent opposition party should be attacking Cameron’s government for its assault on precious British freedoms. But not so those Blairites in the Compliance Unit. Perhaps they’re afraid it’ll bring back memories of similar legislation, also providing for secret courts, introduced by Blair and Jack Straw. Or perhaps they’re afraid it’ll offend all the Tory voters, whose votes they hope to steal by copying everything the Tories do, but promising New Labour will do it all better.

Either way, Mike’s right. It’s time the Compliance Unit and its bloated apparatchiks were wound up and investigated for their role in disrupting Labour party democracy and bringing the party into disrepute.

Vox Political: Cameron Planning Internment Camp for British Radicals

This is a really scary piece Mike’s reblogged from the Canary. Apparently, Cameron and Gove are planning to isolate Muslim extremists in special secure unit to stop Muslim radicalisation in prison. This has been compared to Guantanamo Bay in America. Mike instead in his comments asks the extremely pertinent question of whether it’s actually instead something like a Nazi concentration camp, especially with the government’s establishment of secret courts. See http://voxpoliticalonline.com/2016/02/17/cameron-wants-to-lock-radicals-in-a-single-place-like-a-nazi-concentration-camp/

Mike and so many, many others, like the Angry Yorkshireman, have blogged about the serious dangers these iniquitous courts pose to British justice and liberty. Under this system of, for want of a better term, special justice, the established standards of legal process may waived in the interests of ‘national security’. You may not see the evidence against you, nor know who your accuser is. Indeed, you may not be told what offence you have been charged. It tramples all over Magna Carta, and is exactly like something straight out of Kafka’s novels, The Trial and The Castle.

The motivation here appears to be the very rapid spread of Islam through the prison system through what looks like a very aggressive strategy of dawah, Islamic evangelisation. However alarmed some might feel about the spread of Islam in prisons, this proposal is should be more alarming. Firstly, there is difference between Islam and Islamism, and conversion to Islam does not necessarily lead to converts being set on an automatic path to extremism, at the end of which is ISIS or al-Qaeda. Indeed, the piece Mike’s reproduced from the Canary article states that the idea behind this special prison seems to be that Islamism is like an infectious disease, which isn’t the case.

The model for this special prison seems to be Camp X-Ray at Guantanamo Bay. This was extensively criticised because of the illegality of the vast majority of the incarcerations their. The majority of those imprisoned would simply not have been convicted in ordinary courts of law because of the lack of evidence against them. With the addition of the Patriot Act, which provided for the arrest of anybody George Dubya and his cronies thought wasn’t sufficiently patriotic as a potential terrorist, the system’s critics saw Gitmo very much as the thin end of a totalitarian, Nazi wedge. Conservatives, like the right-wing Canadian cable/web TV host, Michael Koren and the British/Irish journalist Mark Steyn, resident in New Hampshire, have tried to justify Gitmo by arguing that normal standards of justice cannot apply in war. The conditions of battle are just too confused, they argue, for the same standards of reasonable proof to apply when assessing whether or not a suspect is guilty. The men and women interned at Gitmo are nevertheless extremely dangerous, and present a real threat to the public security if they are released. Hence their incarceration of what may be inadequate or flimsy legal grounds is justified. Despite this argument, the majority of those imprisoned at Gitmo have been released, and those still remaining seem to be there out of sheer bloody-mindedness by the authorities rather than any convincing legal reason.

I’m also worried about this, because it points to a long tradition of authoritarianism in the Tory Right. I’ve got a feeling Lobster ran pieces in the 1980s about Tory plans for internment camps in Northern Ireland, to be used against the IRA, modelled on the system of concentration camps the French had used in their campaigns against the indigenous peoples fighting for their freedom in what used to be Indo-China, out of which came the Vietnam War. These were dropped because whatever the threat of paramilitary violence in Ulster, it was felt that the British people would not tolerate other White Brits being rounded up and herded into concentration camps like Black Kenyans during the Mao Mao rebellion.

And the Tory need to incarcerate political and social ‘deviants’ raised its hideous physiognomy again when AIDS appeared in the 1980s. At the time there was a real fear that AIDS was so infectious and deadly, that it would wipe out the world’s population exactly as the population of Europe and Muslim North Africa had been decimated by the Black Death in the 14th century. In five years, that disease killed perhaps somewhere between a third and quarter of the European population, and a similar proportion North Africans in what is now the countries of Egypt, Morocco, Tunisia, Libya and Algeria. Radical measures were being mooted to combat the disease. And this included the isolation of its victims. I can remember being chilled by an article in the Sunday Express that announced that the Swedes were considering building an ‘AIDS Island’ to isolate and treat the victims of the disease. British ministers were looking into the possibility of doing the same. Gay sex between men had only been legal since 1969, and much of society was extremely prejudiced against homosexuals, particularly the Tory party and the police. James Anderton, the extremely right-wing head of Manchester police force, stated that he believed that AIDS was God’s punishment for gays, and described homosexuality as a cesspool, or something similarly offensive. Margaret Thatcher passed legislation intended to ban the teaching that homosexuality was at all normal or acceptable in schools. In this environment, even at the time I wondered if this was an attempt to construct a secure medical facility, like the leper hospitals that were deliberately built on islands to isolate the victims of that terrible disease. Or if instead it was a prison camp to lock up gays, just as the Nazis had done during the Third Reich. Homosexuals were then sent to the concentration camps, and identified by pink triangles placed on their prison pyjamas. This part of the persecution of gays by the Nazis was portrayed in the harrowing play, Bent, starring one of the great gay British thesps. I’ve got a feeling it was Sir Ian Mackellan in the title role, but I could be mistaken.

This strikes me as being pretty much the same squalid, authoritarian instincts rising to the Tory surface yet again. If, indeed, it ever really went away. And the danger here is that once the Tories do it to once section of the community and get away with it, they’ll do it to all of us. Muslim radicals will be the first. Then it could be others suspected of terrorism, like radical nationalists – Irish Republican splinter groups, say. And then it’ll be extended to illegal asylum-seekers, trade unionists, Socialists, Anarchists and Communists. Same as it always has been. Just like Trump in America similarly threatens to introduce real Fascism if he wins the election. This has got to be very carefully watched indeed, if not banned altogether before it even begins.

And if they are considering a round-up of Islamist radicals and other suspects, when should we expect them to stage their own fake attack on parliament to justify it all, like the Reichstag fire?